Friday Ravels in Review

Image via Wooster Collective

For a weekly recap, I'll start with the best: the video I made about Whole in the Wall, a street art exhibit, although I did have to correct something I said in the video by noting some great street art blogs. In second place, inspired by a discussion about Francis Bacon, I was excited to see and write about his retrospective at the Met. Then yesterday I tried to explain why the film The Queen put me off with it mix of fact and fiction.

And then a long time ago, when it was May, we touched on some Vermeer forgeries via Errol Morris's series of articles Bamboozling Ourselves. All 7 are now published, if you want to check out the full tale. I also got on my high horse about a poetry scandal in Britain. But that was long ago in May.

Now it's June, and so I expect the weather will cease and desist with this dreary, cold rain. I keep giving it stern glances out the window.

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Meaty Topics: Bacon Retrospective at the Met

Head III, 1949

After some anticipation and debate about whether he was that good, I went to see the Frances Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. First answer, yes! He's that good. What he does in terms of color and composition in his better works is great.

Three Figures in a Room, 1964

All Bacon's paintings are visually arresting, and tend to remain interesting beyond any initial shock value. Maybe one's value range for horror shrinks when you go into room after room of screaming popes, carcasses, and melting face portraits because I ceased thinking about the subject matter with revulsion. Well, a few still jolted me. Some of the pictures (often his more well-known pieces) left me flat. Perhaps it's something about the nature of his paintings: that when one works, it really gets you, but when it fails and leaves you flat, you have to struggle to see why those flat planes of garish color, those undrawn fragments whose only lines entrap people, and that vacuous, repetitive sense of horror could ever move someone.

Head VI, 1949

In the middle of the exhibition, I wondered if Francis Bacon could paint. The obvious answer is yes, but it's also a less obvious answer when you look at his beginnings. Bacon was self-taught, and he worked with a lot of art historical images. Taking images like Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon ripped apart and painted these images again and again. And he kept doing 'studies' as if he was merely practicing. I rather think he was. He said later in his life that he wished he hadn't wasted so much of his youth in gaming and drinking because it had kept him from his painting. When I got to the last room of the chronological exhibition, I saw what he meant. Here were some beautiful works. Paintings that made me stop in my tracks.

Jet of Water, 1988

In his later paintings, done when the artist was in his 80s, you still see the amazing use of color with no fear and more balance that you might suspect. His composition, which for the most part had always been sophisticated--if only because he was aping the greats to get it--becomes sparser, apparently influenced by Modernism. In some ways, Bacon was both an early and a late bloomer. He was talented and always created stunning works in a visual vocabulary distinctly his own (perhaps his distinctiveness came not only from a unique outlook but a self-created technique) yet later he grew into a really accomplished painter as well.

Blood on Pavement, 1988

Ravels in Review Memorial Day Weekend

Ubi Roi, Hernan Bas at Lehmann Maupin

Yes, it has been a week already, and luckily things have calmed down since the fire on my block last week. In fact, they have slowed to a crawl, which is about the pace my sinuses can handle right now.

• Despite the fog in my brain, or perhaps because of, I tried to explain the greatness of Erasmus based on the fact he named himself 'Desire Desire.' He did some other things too.

• I questioned whether Francis Bacon could qualify as the greatest painter of the 20th twentieth, and got at least a few votes for greatness, if not greatest painter ever. I'm hanging out on a limb until I see the retrospective up at the Met now.

• The oldest sculpture ever was discovered, and there is some very scientific discussion about how sex-obsessed early humans were.

• Dr. Seuss made taxidermic sculptures. Who knew?

• A note on public art at the Lever House, Richard Woods is giving it a Tudor-style makeover.

All in all, a good week. Some things to look forward to in the art world, like Francis Bacon at the Met and promising-sounding Hernan Bas exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Lehmann Maupin, and a long Memorial Day weekend ahead.

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Francis Bacon at the Met

Painting

Francis Bacon, the British painter (not Renaissance thinker Sir Francis Bacon), has always stuck out like a sore thumb in the history of painting. A sore gangrened thumb at that. When everyone else was painting abstractly, he remained resolutely figurative. Where people went to art school, he taught himself by going to museums. And when most people shy away from the sheer horror and grotesqueness of his jailed male figures surrounded by meat, he delved into it.

Triptych, 1974-77

The artist broke a record for contemporary art sales when a triptych of his sold for $86 million dollars last year, and he was the subject of two retrospectives at the Tate during his lifetime, and another last year. (He died in 1992.) Now the retrospective is moving to the Met (of all places). It opens tomorrow--and I look forward to seeing it. Jerry Saltz wrote an excellent article on Bacon in this week's New York Magazine because of the new exhibition, asking the question "Was Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of the twentieth century, or just a fascinating mess?" "Greatest painter of the twentieth century" is quite a title, and not one I'm sure I'd grant Bacon, although he was a good painter who created resonant, interesting works of great color. (If you want to see what a fascinating mess he was, Saltz touches on his life history.)

Figure with Meat

Bacon is a tough artist to understand: His paintings create such a visceral reaction in the viewer that I think it can be difficult to look beyond the subject matter. Margaret Thatcher famously described him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures." People commonly assume that such repetitive grotesque angst can't be real, that he's hamming it up. (Excuse the pun--and just be glad I haven't tried my cleverness on his last name yet.) Saltz feels it becomes gimmicky, and so did quite a few people I was talking to the past Sunday. Yet the artist is at his best with these bruised mutants encased in flat rooms of color.

So what do you think, a yay or a nay for Bacon?

See Two Coats of Paint for more information on the exhibition itself.

Housing prices are inflated? Let's discuss art prices

An artist, a recognized artist who sells his works, offered to pay my boyfriend in paintings. A little unorthodox, yes, but I was psyched. Then he told me he did not take it. A year ago I would have argued it was a great economic investment, not just a way for me to get art on the wall. But now, was his choice the wisest economically?

Even a year ago people considered he unprecedented demand and prices for fine art might be a bit of a bubble. Articles have been popping up left and right to debate that theory now. Here's a selection, from The New York Times, The Business Times, The Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Note that there's not an art rag among them.

Catherine Rampell wrote a blog for the New York Times entitled, dismally enough, The Art of Recession. Despite it being a dismal science, Rampell prognosticated on behalf of collectors, pointing to "the failure of a number of large banks may put their corporate art collections back on the market on the cheap" as an example of cheaper prices to come. Makes things a little insecure for the art investor though, with the prediction that "the market for contemporary art assets may soon plummet.”

On behalf of art as an alternate "passion" investment, The Business Times points to "Proponents of the segment argue that art, being a real asset and devoid of the mind-numbing complexity of derivatives, should retain its sheen as a 'passion' investment." They have an interesting quote from auction house Christie's president (Asia) Andrew Foster: "Art is a very real and tangible thing. Clients agree that art has inherent value....That doesn't mean prices don't fluctuate, but value is agreed upon and inherent, and it springs from cultural and global trends more than trading multiples." Is that true, though?

Also of note, the article mentions the Mei Moses Fine Art Index. According to which, all art for 2007 rose 20 per cent, a performance only surpassed by some of the annual returns achieved in the art bubble years of 1984 to 1990--more than the 5.5 per cent achieved by the S&P. Yet art, too, "has its boom and bust cycles, as Michael Moses, the creator of the index, told Reuters earlier this year."

But let's consider results of some recent big auctions. A headline from the Times on October 20, 2008 is 'Growing signs of art slump as Freud's portrait of Bacon fails to fetch £7m' and the IHT reports 'At contemporary art sales, market stumbles on.' These are not chipper reports on the auction front. Christies and Sotheby's have their big auction in November, so that will prove the true bellwether. Yet buyers in the art sector, like every other, seem to be skittish. Souren Melikian writes for the IHT that "The short message is that there is life left in the contemporary art market at 25 to 30 percent below current ambitions. That is very good in the current circumstances. Auction houses and their consigners had better heed the lesson."

That's why she's saying. These do not herald good times ahead for people who count their worth in paintings. On the other hand, if you're a buyer of impervious fortune, times are great. Less competition for cheaper prices on works you love. What I'm saying: yippee! A Lucian Freud of Francis Bacon for £5.42 million! Andy Warhol's "Nine Multicolored Marilyns" for a song! If prices keep going down at this rate, I'll be able to buy something in 10 years.

Until then, all you art investors out there, you have my deepest sympathy. You poor souls, locked in your worthless mansions, staring across your foyer in your silk bathrobe looking at the now moderately-priced Picasso.