Standing In: Me and Pistoletto's Standing Couple

Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Standing Man, Standing Woman with Hat, 1980

The contagion of self-portraiture carried on, from the mirrors of the Kiki Smith exhibition (reviewed here) to the mirrors of the contemporary art galleries at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Pistoletto's two figures on mirror seem to be facing me and the red wall installation behind me. It looks like we are carrying on an awkward conversation, perhaps because I am in color while they are stuck in black and white.

If one is going to look at art, and think about art, and write about art, after a bit shouldn't that person join the art? Oscar Wilde said that “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art." Surely with a little smoke and mirrors, or maybe just mirrors, I can get past this silly division of art and life and do both.

"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life." -Oscar Wilde 

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...

Maybe, just maybe, I spent a little too much time on this...

But the mirrors in Kiki Smith: Sojourn exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art were just calling to me.

In a way, it's rather appropriate to insert another women in her work,

even if I couldn't quite capture the perfect self-portrait I had imagined.

Cecilia Paredes's Faces in the Wallpaper

Art Noveau, 2009 and left, Chrysanthemum, 2009

These photographs by Cecilia Paredes trick the eye by seeming to be floral wallpaper, then encourage a deeper look when you realize a person is there. The Peruvian artist paints and photographs herself to blend into her linen backdrops. Paredes states,

“I wrap, cover or paint my body with the same pattern of the material and ‘re–present’ myself as part of that landscape. Through this act, I am working on the theme of building my own identification with the entourage or part of the world where I live or where I feel I can call home. My bio has been described as nomadic so maybe this is also a need of addressing the process of constant relocation. There is also the factor in my mind that flora as we know it, is coming to be endangered so with all these preoccupations, I think that in these works, aesthetics bind with the anthropologic in order to register fragments of personal and social memory.”

To me, it speaks of women's decorative role in society, their being told to be quiet and blend in, and here the artist blends with disquieting force.

Nocturne, 2009

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

A Visit to the Eccentric Gardner Museum

The first thing I gravitated toward after paying the entrance fee at the door of the Venetian-style palazzo was the flowering inner courtyard that rises four stories up. Around the courtyard on the first level and from the windows above, people were all poking their heads out to view the Spring-like garden. After all, this was Boston in the Fall rather than Autumn in Italy. Perhaps Isabella Stewart Gardner intended to provoke such wonder when she left her art collection to be displayed almost exactly as she left it when she died in 1924.

A willful widow in a prim Victorian era, Mrs. Gardner was an avid art collector, who left a lovely but idiosyncratic collection in this house museum. Medieval Gothic carvings and Chinese screens hang on the walls alongside tapestries and late 19th C. paintings. On one had, this is a fascinating place to explore. On the other, the way the objects are displayed--behind staricases sometimes--can make them seem merely decorative. The museum motto is "C'est mon plaisir," (It's my pleasure) appropriately enough. Be warned there are some Draconian rules in place--no photography of any kind (the courtyard image above was posted to Flickr from a postcard) and you must not hold your coat. I was asked to either wear it or tie it around my waist.


However, there are some stunning pieces in this strange, eclectic house. Mrs. Gardner had a close relationship with John Singer Sargent, whose large El Jaleo hangs prominently in the Spanish Cloister and who did the portrait of Mrs. Gardner above right. We followed the stairs up and wandered through some Victorian rooms filled with distinctly un-Victorian Renaissance paintings and Chinese bulls and mock altars of devotional paintings. Then we happened upon a small room with large racks of drawings by Impressionist masters to Matisse. It feels like a treasure trove flipping through rack after rack of them.

By far my favorite room was the Dutch room on the second floor. There was this stunning early self-portrait of Rembrandt hung high on the wall, diagonally across the room from Ruben's Earl of Arundel , and a lovely portrait of a woman by Van Dyck. Not to mention a strange silver ostrich built around a ostrich egg. At that point, I didn't mind wearing my coat or the little ropes.

Visiting is an immersing, fascinating experience. Only with such a polyglot, unlabelled collection could you have such fun playing 'guess the painting.' It's incredible to realize a fantasy as closely as Isabella Stewart Gardner did with this museum.

Can you spot a forgery?

Most people can't, probably because art forgers can be damnably clever and bold. I've been reading The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick, a book full of intrigue and intriguing personalities, over part of my vacation.

In addition to tales of Hitler and his second-in-command Hermann Goering's race to collect a Vermeer while ravaging Europe, Dolnick includes the fascinating story of Abraham Kuffner. Kuffner was a painter in the early 19th C. who realized the importance of using old materials when creating a fake as well as maintaining a impressive provenance. In 1799, the city of Nuremberg graciously (foolishly...) agreed to lend him it's prized Albrecht Durer self portrait for the artist to copy.

Kuffner did more than copy the work. This painting was done on a wood panel an inch thick, and the back of it was spangled with seals and marks of past owners. Kuffner simply sawed it into two halves; one half contains Durer's self-portrait and the other half the seals. He produces his copy onto the original wood panel, and sends his fake back to the city on the original board it came. Nobody noticed the difference, and Kuffner had his very own Durer.

Nuremberg did eventually find out that it's famous Durer was simultaneously on display in Munich--6 years later Kuffner had sold the real Durer.

condron.us alphainventions.com

Albrecht Durer

Self-portrait of 1493, artist aged 22

Albrecht Durer (1471 - 1528) doesn't get the attention those great Renaissance Italians do, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello. Yet Durer did more that just woodcuts; he reinvented what was possible with woodcuts, but was also a remarkable draftsman and painter.

Self-Portrait of 1498, artist aged 26

Although traditional in style, Durer brought a tirelessly innovativion to his work, and is known for merging the Italian style with the German. Born in soon-to-be Protestant Nuremburg, Durer was a humanist in the vein of Martin Luther and was one of it's first artist-gentleman, so to speak (rather than artist-craftsman).

Self-Portrait of 1500, artist aged 28 (and yes, he knew he looked like Jesus)

Durer's woodcuts were widely disseminated and successful. He also produced some very modern watercolors (at a time when other artists used crayon and paper). Durer was among the first to sign his sketches rather than consider them so much wastepaper. He also painted portraits, like the ones of himself above, but also of other individuals, large religious scenes, and some singularly beautiful works of pieces of turf and animals. More and more Durer tried to capture the secret of natural beauty. Interestingly, he disliked painting commissions because they paid so little compared to the amount of work involved.

Durer's paintings were work-intensive. He had a painstaking method of going over the colors again and again so that they have the luminosity of tempura, and the really pure colors he used highlight this. He insisted upon revarnishing the canvases himself when they got dry, because he used a special good wax that didn't yellow as it aged. He painted for things to last forever. While his painting method changed as he grew more successful and had assistants help him with his larger compositions, it remains exemplary of the enormous amount of attention he devoted to his craft.

Adam and Eve, 1507

Durer's placement of the couple as nudes facing each other on a dark background become a popular style of depicting Adam and Eve (and the ideal human proportions) was later used by Cranach, among others.