Ryan Pickart's Portraits

Ingrid, Ryan Pickart

I came across oil painter Ryan Pickart's work over on Escape Into Life here. It's a bit like a modern Klimt, in pastel oils rather than gilt, but still with those big languid eyes, no? They just jump out of the flat, decorative background.

The artist has more work, including some lovely sketches, on his blog.

Alina, Ryan Pickart

Art as Posession: From the Hearst Castle to Cleansed Bills

Hearst Castle

"The prime aim of these wild Xanadus (as of every Xanadu) is not so much to live there, but to make posterity think how exceptional the people who did live there must have been." (Eco, p. 27).

Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hypperreality, asserts that America's wax museums/Hearst Castle/Marilyn Motel etc. arise out of a "horror vacui" since we exist outside of a European, historical past and therefore we need to take fake possession of the real. This is similar to previous function of oil paintings in society. Berger in Ways of Seeing (see previous post) asserts that oil painting was a way of owning property in lieu of the real thing or as a demonstration of what one owned for society and posterity. Basically, its all about possession and value. How capitalist.

So I guess we Americans are left with a simulacrum of the real as a roads to possession. Eco continues that people seem to think if its a good enough simulacrum, such as the Hearst Castle, its almost better than the 'real' thing.

"Cleansed" bill in Draw your Money project.

Roland Farkas, a Slovakian artist in Hungary, gets at this notion with his 2011 project, Draw your Money, where he takes something literally capitalist, a banknote, and turns it into art. Draw Your Money involves cleansing banknotes of the ink markings that give them value. The artist removes the ink from paper money to create blank slates for drawings: "In this way the ink and paper of bills are recycled as materials for an original artwork, the value of which is greater than that of the denominated note from which it was created."

Via Rising Tensions

In trying to thing of something intelligent to say, I poked around the internet and found this. Which kind of sums it all up if you were to throw in some dollar bills.

Hey, I went to Philadelphia! (Medieval style)

Yep, this is Philadelphia. I went to see the Van Gogh exhibition - completely sold out - and ended up browsing the Medieval section of the museum. Atmospheric, no?

I made a friend a few inches tall carved in ivory. She seems nice and devout. I quite like her.

But there's another side to her - a darker side reminding one of death as much Medieval art does. 

There were some extraordinary works of art. There were also sea monsters.

Of course the sea monster here is a woman. Just like blaming Eve for that whole apple incident. I feel sure that there are an equal number of male and female seamonsters, but when do you ever see the male portrayed?

This picture depicts a typical angel crowning going on in the main room (you know how it is). 

However, who is the mystery man in boxer shorts at the door? Why is he included in this picture of St. Veronica and her husband being crowned by angels when he seems to be delivering wood? That's what I like about these Medieval artists: You know they are going be absolute fanatics about details, so you get a sense of what it was truly like the day Veronica was crowned.

Dragon.

I also enjoyed the portraits of highly unattractive people.

Outside the museum, a fog hung low over the city.

Cy Twombley: Selected Examples

Originally published Sunday, March 1 2009 and reblogged in honor of the artist's death today at 83.

A Progression Into Chaos

Beautiful images for your Sunday morning. Twombly's work is something I never tire of, even if seeing these images on a screen really takes away from their painterly quality and large size. Cy Twombly is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and if they would bring Le Quattro Stagione, his quartet of paintings, back to the atrium of MoMA, I would be quite happy.

"Why do we want these works to turn out to be by Velázquez and Michelangelo? After all, the art is the same either way."

The Wine of St. Martin’s Day, a previously ignored painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

 

"In the end we want another celebrity attribution like this one because we want to get things straight. History tries to make sense out of chaos, toward which the world inevitably inclines. Art historians create hierarchies, categories and movements; they attribute causes and effects to conjure an appearance of logic. Attributing a picture to a household deity like Bruegel or Michelangelo affirms our sense of control, our ability to get a grip on our affairs, at least for the moment. We take comfort in mooring some grimy, forgotten canvas, another example of life’s flotsam and, implicitly, of our own fate, to one of the pillars of art history." - Via the NYTimes

Maybe that's the reason; we're so excited by the discovery of a masterpiece we forget we never thought it was great before. Maybe its the thrill of discovery. But I think we could all just be a tad foolish.

Right up my alley: Parisian flat containing €2.1 million painting lay untouched for 70 years

As my friend put it when he emailed me this article, this seems right up your alley. Dead on.

An apartment kept although never visited. An exquisite Boldini portrait and old Mickey Mouse toys found. All discovered after the owner's death under a thick layer of dust. More from the Telegraph here.

The portrait discovered there has since been attributed to Giovanni Boldini and went for a nice 2.1M Euro at auction, spurred on by the discovery that the never-before seen piece had been painted of the artist's muse, actress Marthe de Florian.  Boldoni (1842–931) was an Italian genre and portrait painter who was known as the "Master of Swish," because of his flowing style of painting. He painted many high society people.

Portrait of the dandy Robert de Montesquiou

Traces of glamor come through even under dust an inch thick.

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It's September!

And I'm so surprised I'm a day late noticing. Ooops!

From Hyperallergic's dead on calendar above (click for details)

So this means its that lovely time of year to make a Fall list so that you can hope to cram in all the great,and less of the not so great, art. I've got a lot to catch up on. Anything I should definitely pencil in for the New York area?

I love her spiders: Louise Bourgeois

I do love her spiders and I love the personality that worked right up to all of 98 years old. May we all be inspired to keep working for so long. It had me digging through the archives for my trip to Dia:Beacon last year.

Louise Bourgeois' Spiders

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

"My work has always been a recording of my emotions. It’s not a concept that I’m after, but an emotion that I want to keep or destroy. All of my sculptures have the sense of vulnerability and fragility. Sexuality is one theme tied to those two states of being." --Bourgeois, 2006 interview

Continued here.

Naked And Nude

Artists, listen up. Don't change your art--just show a little skin. The nude has a long history in art as being provocative, symbolic, realistic, and many other things. Go one better, and use naked people not as some prettified, distant nude in a painting, but as naked people. Articles are still pouring out about Abromovic and MoMA, but now they are mostly about the use of two naked models in a doorway- a genre begun by Jerry Saltz, picked up by the NY Times, and now hawked by any widely-read publication for a general audience.

Abramovic herself is all but forgotten sitting there in her chair below. Don't worry though, this could work if you aren't (yet) an internationally known artist with a decades long career. Case in point: work by Brian Reed at Chair and the Maiden Gallery in February. The show got plenty of street attention, and even made the NY Times when a model in the window, wearing only something between a mobile and a spiderweb on her head, was asked by police to step down.

In terms of attention-getting, naked is the way to go. It is an amazingly effective and simple technique to get more people, some who don't even like art, to look at your work. Or is it nude? Whatever it is, it can still raise people's, ahem, hackles.

Post-Minimal Museums: Reprehensible?

"After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.

The goal in organizing museum exhibitions, as in collecting, running a gallery and — to cite the most obvious example — being an artist, should be individuation and difference, finding a voice of your own. Instead we’re getting example after example of squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous takes on that unruly early ’70s mix of Conceptual, Process, Performance, installation and language-based art that is most associated with the label Post-Minimalism."

Thus Roberta Smith, in New York Times article Post Minimal to the Max, begins to delve into what she would like to see the museums of New York begin doing in their shows. Hint: the key word is differentiation. The recent shows of Gabriel Orozco at MoMA, Tino Sehgal at the Guggenhiem, and Urs Fischer at the New Museum might be zeitgeist in action rather than reprehensible, but Smith argues that focusing on one thing creates a simplified art history by that very action. She points to artists, often those whose work is hand made or seems personally driven, who might merit a show that would be more than blank walls.


These recent exhibitions have much the same feel, and Smith's point that it is at the expense of other aesthetics and styles. Ben Wadler at Artcards describes the situation as "reminiscent of one recently put forth by the White House, attributing the success of Fox News to the simple fact that it is selling the clearest narrative for people to follow. So too in the Art world do we want clarity, and the more others are following something, the less likely will it be a waste of our time to do the same." I'm not sure exactly what the solution is, but I agree that something is wrong when Smith could write that;

"the idea of seeing a survey of contemporary painting at the Modern makes me squirm. It would look — I don’t know — too messy and emotional, too flat, too un-MoMA."

Certainly the image we have of a museum ought to be one that reflects all the art in its mission. I would enjoy it if museums presented smaller, more intimate exhibitions for two reasons. It would allow for more, different work to be seen. Big exhibitions often have a big wow! factor, but not as much depth--or perhaps I am simply too overwhelmed and distracted to appreciate the nuances. However, change could be even simpler: as Smith asks, and obviously I'm biased, but why hasn't a NY museum arranged to take on the new Chris Ofili retrospective currently in London?

Curators are under pressure to make sure their exhibitions succeed, and the exhibitions listed are certainly popular. More than that, they are good in their own right. So how do you ask a museum to change its curatorial program? Do the collective museums of New York have a duty to present a comprehensive view of art?


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Imitation of Picasso

The end of my neighbor's wall was puzzling me. The edged bit seemed quasi-human. I couldn't figure out quite what it reminded me off, then I thought it rather had the same sense as this view from Picasso's villa in Antibes.


Now I think it was something else I was trying to remember-- a white face formed rather like PacMan, facing left?-- but I can't put my finger on the title or artist of this imagined painting. Of course, if you look hard enough, you can see anything in a bit of wall. The island is having its effect on me; perhaps the glaring sun is creating mirages.

Do you know what I'm thinking of, or has this anthropomorphic bit of wall played tricks on my imagination?


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Gauguin's Romantic Notion of the Noble Savage

"Out there at least, with winerless skies overhead and wonderfully fertile ground underfoot, Tahaitains have only to lift their arms to gather their food; therefore, they never work.Whereas in Europe men and women satisfy their needs only after ceaseless toil..." -Gauguin, Letter to Williamson, late 1890


Where did Gauguin's idealization of the savage come from? He believed that life was better or more moral during the early stages of mankind or among primitive peoples, like the Tahitians. This Romantic conception opposed Hobbes's famous statement the life was "nasty, brutish, and short," insisting instead that civilization ruined everything.

Romantic Notions: the Nobel Savage

The phrase 'nobel savage,' expressing the concept of natural man unencumbered by civilization and divine revelation, has often been ascribed erroneously to Rousseau (Jean-Jaques, not Henri). In English, 'noble savage' first appeared in John Dryden's play The Conquest of Granada in 1672:

I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

More than a few people found this idea ridiculous; Dickens, for example, put the term nobel savage to sarcastic effect in 1851, when he used it as a title for a satirical essay. Dickens states his position quite clearly:

"To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous superstition. ... I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth."

Dickens was strongly disassociating himself from 19th century Romantic Primitivism, long before it influenced Gauguin's thinking or developed into a branch of Modern Art.

"Having lost all their savagery, having run out of instinct and, you might say, imagination, artists have wandered down all sorts of paths, looking for the productive elements that they themselves do not have the strength to create..." Gauguin, Racontars de Rapin, April 1903


Gauguin
Gauguin in Tahiti arrived in 1901 with delightful notions of what savages were--he hoped himself to develop that part of himself. His Utopian views of unspoiled paradises are apparent from his earliest travels; sic:

"For the time being we are living in a Negro shack, and it is paradise compared to the ithmus [of Panama]. Below us, the sea, fringed with coconut palms; above, fruit trees of every variety, and all 25 minutes from town. Negro men and women mill about all day long with their Creole songs and ceaseless chatter. ... Nature is at its lushest, a warm climate but with cool spells." -Letter to his wife Mette June 20 1887

In addition, he admired savages who were untouched by the false morality and the paralyzing effects of civilization. Did Tahiti live up to his expectations of unspoiled paradise?

Yes and no. Upon arriving in June 1891, he found Tahiti more civilized that he would have liked, with Christian churches and colonial offices. He moved to a more remote province and began good work, only to find himself penniless and begging to repatriated (granted in June 1893).

Back in Paris, Gauguin was as eager to explain the nuances of Tahiti as a zealot, despite the fact he had never managed to learn the language and his knowledge of their religion came from a French travelogue. He turned his studio into a wild, Polynesian style bordello and took up a biracial mistress with a monkey. This, combined with an unusual costume, made quite a stir in Paris. He wanted to return as soon as possible, explaining in an interview with L'Echo de Paris in March 1895:

"I had once been fascinated by this idyllic island and its primitive and simple people. That is why I returned and why I am going back there again. In order to achieve something new, you have to go back to the sources, to childhood. My Eve is almost an animal. That is why she is chaste for all her nakedness. But all the Venuses in the Salon are indecent and disgracefully lewd."

Unfortunately, this last passage can't help but bring to mind the string of Tahitian wives, all around the age of puberty, that Gauguin took. While his statements about paradise and savages signify more than a desire for young island girls, certainly knowledge of the artist's life influences how one understands his Romantic notions of Primitivism.

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Paul Gauguin: Martinique Travels and Savage Ideals

Picking Mangos in Martinique

Learning about Caribbean art, I've mentioned a few times how some artists espoused European Primitivism in order to better express their own cultural background. Yes, the irony abounds. Paul Gauguin, who paved the way for the later Primitivism of Picasso and co., is better known for paintings of Tahitian women than of Caribbean subjects, yet the artist had ties to the Caribbean and South America that fostered his later desire to escape to a savage land.

Martinique

Tropical Vegetation

This painting earned Gauguin the beginnings of critical interest and accolades when he exhibited it in Paris in 1888. He had just returned from a trip to Panama and Martinique. The circumstances around its creation were haphazard. Although born in Paris, Gauguin was in many ways impressed by his Peruvian ancestry and childhood memories of Lima. He became dissatisfied with his small start painting in Breton, and wrote to his wife in 1887, "I am off to Panama to live like a savage." Unfortunately Panama for Gauguin turned into forced labor on the Panama canal rather than a cushy paradise with help from relatives. Gauguin eventually made his way to a "native hut" on Martinique and was ready to begin painting. It was here he produced his first exotic landscapes and here he began to break away from the Impressionism of his mentor Pisarro. Unfortunately, he grew ill and had to be repatriated.


Savage Tendencies

Self-Portrait

Back in Paris, Gauguin sold some paintings, including Picking Mangos to Theo VanGogh. This provided him with enough money to began painting in Brittany, a place that represented to Gauguin something inherently pre-academic. He took on the Breton's traditional dress down to wooden clogs. His works became freer, bolder in color and more imaginative. In the self portrait above, he positions himself between two recent pieces, his painting The Yellow Christ and a ceramic mug. Over the next three years, his critical reputation grew, at least among the avant garde, but he become obsessed with traveling somewhere wilder and more primitive. As he wrote to his friend Emile Bernard, "Terrible itching for the unknown makes me do things I shouldn't."

Gauguin was intent on leaving behind a land made 'rotten' by civilization. In a letter to Bernard in 1890, he describes how "I feel I can revitalize myself out there. The West is effete at present, and even a man with the strength of Hercules can, like Anteaus, gain new vigour jst by touching the ground of the Orient. A year or two later you come back robust." But Gaugiun was now planning to stay much longer than that. He wrote to Odilon Redon in September 1890,

"I will got to Tahiti and I hope to finish out my life there. I believe that my art, which you love, is but a seed, and in Tahiti I hope to cultivate it for myself in its primitive and savage state."

The Spirit of the Dead

If good knitting meant macabre...

Lump of Meat on a Stool, 1999

then we would have a winner.

Yesterday Beautiful Decay featured interesting work from a Swedish artist that I can't seem to dig up much information on. Leif Holmstrand’s creates crocheted and knitted sculptures and performance pieces that at their best combine simplicity and clear color with a darker underlying significance.

Cover for Matthew Barneys Cremaster Cycle, 2006

Prams, 2006

No Arms, No Legs, 1999-2004

Hector Hippolyte

Henry Christophe

Hippolyte's paintings and life are in many ways indicative of primitive Haitian art. They combine voodoo and Christian symbols, and are noted for creating an iconography for laos, or spirits, of the voodoo tradition. As a third generation priest, Hippolyte (1894-1948) worked in his community and eked out a living painting houses. Then DeWitt Peters, an American from the Centre d'Art in Porte au Prince, saw a pair of doors with intricate floral patterns that he had painted on a bar. He tracked Hippolyte down and asked him to come work in the city.

Papa Zaca

Hippolyte immediately accepted. He believed it was his destiny to become a painter, and he had been waiting for it to unfold. He moved to a cottage outside Port au Prince in 1945. His work was an immediate commercial success and made it big internationally when it was collected and shown by French surrealist Andre Breton. Hippolyte thus also represents the highly commercialized side of "naive" or primitive Haitian artists which has continued to this day. Hippolyte was highly prolific for the next 3 years, until he suddenly died. It is reported to have been a heart attack, although some think the division between his voodoo duties and his artistic ones overwhelmed him as he began painting more and more.

Saint Francis and Christ Child

Above is Hippolyte's painting of Saint Francis, and below is his depiction of Mistress Erzulie, the voodoo spirit of courtesy. In depicting both the Christian and voodoo persona, Hippolyte treats the subject in the same manner. The focus is on the strong central figure surrounded by a lush, brightly colored natural world. It's fascinating learning about his life and his art, especially how voodoo influenced his art, but there are few online resources. More information about his life and his works here.

Maitresse Erzulie