Observations on Art 3.3

Have I mentioned yet that this is Art Week? It's another sure sign that spring isn't too far off. Among other things this year's edition brings the 100^th anniversary of the original Armory Show, the 25^th anniversary of the ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, the 15^th anniversary of the current Armory Show on Piers 92 and 94, and the 5^th anniversary of the Salon Zürcher. It's going to be a very busy week and one of the few times of the year I decide to write about art and little else.

Because of the centennial of the original show I think a bit of history and a trivia lesson are called for. Known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art the 1913 Armory Show ran in New York from February 17^th until March 15^th. From there it traveled to Chicago where it was at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 24^th until April 16^th. It became known as the Armory show because in New York it was housed in the 69^th Regiment Armory. Attendance in Chicago was actually twice what it was in New York but, New York being New York, the name stuck.

One of the organizers of the show was Lille P. Bliss who was one of the major art collectors of the day. Bliss, who was never married, devoted her life to bringing modern art to the U.S. and her collection eventually included works by Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and Pablo Picasso. Not only was Bliss one of the show's organizers she also became one its largest buyers. In May 1929 Bliss had lunch with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and the result was that the Bliss and Rockefeller collections became the foundations of the Museum Of Modern Art which opened later that year.

Not to be outdone Chicago has its own claim to Armory Show fame. Because of the show The Art Institute of Chicago became the first American art museum to show the work of Pablo Picasso, because technically the Regiment Armory wasn't an art museum, but at the time the seven works were labeled with the Americanized Paul Picasso. The Chicago stop is also remembered because AIC students burned Henri Matisse in effigy as the Midwest didn't seem ready for modern art, not that it is now. The Institute is currently running the show "Picasso and Chicago" which includes over 200 of his works. It should be noted that Pablo Picasso himself never set foot in the United States.

After seeing the modern art show photographer Alfred Stieglitz said it was made up of "painters and sculptors who decline to go on doing what the camera does better. You’ll go back to your habitual worship of eternal repetitions of mere externals of people and things that cram all the museums and galleries, but you won’t feel happy. The mere outside of things won’t satisfy you as it used to."

The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia has a huge site devoted to the 1913 show which includes works, vintage reviews and criticism along with current opinions and essays. It's work a look or an afternoon.

Observations on Art 10.18

Yes I know, yet another art heist post. The whole affair just intrigues me so I was reading what I could find about it and came across something I wanted to share. it's an opinion piece from The National which is the English publication of the Abu Dhabi Media Group. I know, now you are wondering what the hell I am doing reading a newspaper from the Emirates and I'll get to that after the opinion. I wanted to share this in its entirety because it says a lot of what I was trying to say and maybe says it better.

Painted Into A Corner
National Editorial
Oct 18, 2012

"Art heists capture the imagination like few other crimes do. Is there some secret cabal of art aficionados willing to pay millions for stolen masterpieces? It might make a good movie, but in real life, probably not. In fact, the thieves who lifted seven works, including paintings by Picasso, Gauguin, Monet and Matisse, from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam this week may well have been amateurs who knew their supposed value - in the tens of millions of dollars - but had no understanding of the art market.

While it's possible the paintings were stolen to order, either to pay off a debt or to satisfy somebody's personal whim, FBI art crime team founder Robert Wittman told The Atlantic magazine that even black-market buyers wouldn't touch such high-profile stolen goods - because their value resides to a great extent in ownership of legal title. If the works are offered for sale, the "buyer" could well be an undercover cop. More likely, Wittman says, they will sit in storage, for years or even decades, and will eventually be recovered. Or possibly destroyed.

This will be cold comfort to the Triton Foundation, which owns the paintings, but it will illustrate the chestnut that crime doesn't pay."

And why was I reading The National today? Because the United Arab Emirates, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai, probably have one of the largest concentrations of mega art collectors in the world. In the next few years branches of both the Guggenheim and the Louvre will open in Abu Dhabi and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a Gagosian Gallery spring up somewhere in the region. Last November Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the daughter of the Emir of Qatar and head of the Qatar Museum Board, was named the most powerful person in the art world by Art & Auction magazine. At about the same time that same board paid $250 million for Paul Cézanne's The Card Players from a group that included a secret partner rumored to be, that is correct, Larry Gagosian. So maybe now you can see why I check The National art section from time to time.

As for crime not paying, I'm not so sure I agree with that line in this situation. Personally I think there is more 'commissioned' art theft than anybody in the market wants to admit. There is just too damn much money involved for there not to be.

Observations on Art 10.16

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge

I don't think I have ever written about an art heist before but last night's was a major topic of conversation today. I want to say from the start that, contrary to a twitter rumor spreading from Sweden, I had nothing to do with it. Around 3 AM thieves broke into Rotterdam's Kunsthal Museum and made off with seven paintings worth in excess of $100 million. They entered through the back of the museum, swiped the paintings, and were gone when police arrived just five minutes after the alarm sounded. This was one of the topics discussed, the growing trend of museums using just electronic security. It may save money but in the long run it just isn't enough as last night proved.

The Kunsthal may have state of the art electronic surveillance and alarms but it has no "down time" security officers. In contrast over half of The Louvre's staff of 2,000 are security related and the Museum of Modern Art just completed a huge security upgrade in anticipation of showing Edward Munch's The Scream beginning next week.
The Scream was sold in May for $120 million. Granted these two museums are in a league all their own but is one guard too much to ask?

Whatever the case the thieves had exceptionally good taste. The haul was made up of Picasso's Harlequin Head (1971), Monet's Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge (both 1901), Matisse's Reading Girl in White and Yellow (1919), Paul Gauguin's Girl in Front of Open Window (1898), Meyer de Haan's Self-Portrait (1890), and Lucian Freud's Woman with Eyes Closed (2002). I don't understand the final one but than I had nothing to do with it. The Kunsthal has no collection of its own, all the paintings were on loan from the collection of the Cordia family.

When I write about art I like to try and teach something and here is the lesson for any budding art thieves out there. As I said the seven paintings are worth over $100 million but that is an auction/insurance figure. As far as the current 'owners' of the works are concerned they are all but worthless unless they have some totally immoral collector already lined up. That is always a possibility but more in the realm of Hollywood than in the real art world. Also unlikely, but still possible, is that the thieves will try and ransom the paintings through the insurers. One thing is certain, they wont be turning up at a flea market.

If not recovered quickly the paintings may not be seen for generations if ever. Over twenty years ago 13 paintings, including two Rembrandts, at the time worth $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. The museum offered a reward of $5 million for the paintings safe return, as always worded so that the thieves themselves aren't eligible to collect. None have ever been recovered in what is still the largest art heist in history.

And no, I was only 10 years old at the time.

10/17 update - There is a good article in today's New York Times that includes this; "Marc Masurovsky, a historian and an expert on plundered art in Washington, noted the possibility that the theft was "a contract job," adding: "These works were picked out. Could it be they had been targeted well before the theft, and the exhibit was the opportunity to strike?"'

Observations from the Window 8.1

I love to fly and I always have but its been a long time since I flew anywhere let alone a flight the length of JFK to Paris. I thought this would set some kind of record for me but the close to 8 hour flight time to Paris is still an hour short of the 9 hours from Chicago to Honolulu. When I think back that trip seems like an entirely different life but it did land me on Kee Beach on Kauai, still what I think is the closest this planet gets to perfect. Getting back to this life, due to the crazed world of time zones this flight is still going to be something totally new to me. As of now I'll be leaving JFK around 10PM and arriving at Charles de Gaulle around 10AM the next day. According to the Air France website "hot and cold drinks, with or without alcohol, are served."
Without alcohol? Seriously? Why?

I'll be staying in the Montparnasse area of Paris close to where Ernst Hemingway rented an apartment on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine and about a thirty minute walk to The Louvre. I'm going to load A Movable Feast on my netbook and maybe see if I can find some of the spots. I don't expect to run into Hemingway's ghost but if I should I have plenty of questions to ask him about his years in Paris but also about his third wife the journalist Martha Gellhorn. Still if I don't see him I'd be perfectly happy to run into his very much living great-granddaughter Dree, that would work for me too.

At the turn and early part of the 20^th century the Montparnasse was the heart and soul of artistic Paris. A list of its more famous inhabitants includes not only Hemingway but Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Montparnasse and its cafes was also the social center of the large American expatriate community in Paris of which Hemingway wrote so much. Marc Chagall said he had gone to Montparnasse because at the time "The sun of Art then shone only on Paris." Living in the Village it may seem strange but at times I think the same thing.

For now beyond that I haven't made any major plans. Work, walk, shop, walk to the Louvre, and try not to look too out of my element doing it. The shopping may be a major plan because I'm not quite sure how I'm going to get anything. I toyed with the idea of taking an empty bag but with the Paris weather all over the place, 60° one day and 75° the next, I have no idea what to pack.

Finally, a friend sent me this video, totally gets me in the mood ....

Paris In Motion (Part I) from Mayeul Akpovi on Vimeo.

Soundtrack: Angel - Massive Attack, Mezzanine (awesome tune)
Mayeul Akpovi Photographies - facebook
© July 2012

Observations on Art 3.5

(Originally posted on March 3, 2011 during last year's Armory Show.)

The Modern Art era is said to have begun during the American Civil War period, the 1860s, even more precisely in 1863 with the work of Manet. Modern art is characterized by the attempt to capture the essence of a subject rather than the resemblance of it. For just this reason it moved more and more towards abstract as time went by.

The major painters of the early modern period include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet, or the Impressionists and Post-impressionists. The early 20th century was dominated by the rivalry between the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and the Fauvism of Henri Matisse. The interwar period saw the rise of Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall, and the Bauhaus of Wassily Kandinsky.

Finally the post war years saw the birth of Abstract Expressionism which the first American movement to dominate art worldwide. For the first time New York City, and not Paris, was the center of the art world. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, James Brooks, and many others define this period.

My personal opinion is that the Modern Art period began to end with the death of Jackson Pollock who pioneered the 'drip painting' method in which he laid a canvas on the floor and threw paint on it. But technically the period was extended into the 1960s and even the 70s by the rise of Lyrical Abstraction which was a movement once again dominated by Europeans as the United States struggled with the Vietnam War and it's aftermath.

Either way the era had ended before I ever set eyes on my first brush.

The idea here was to explain the difference between the Modern and Contemporary eras but I seem to have gotten a little carried away so I think I'll make two posts out of this. Hope this was easy enough to understand.

Observations on Art, The Muse

The muses of the ancients were divinities. In Greek mythology Apollonis, Cephisso, and Borysthenis were known as the three muses, the goddesses who were said to inspire works of art and literature. The word museum finds its root in the Greek word mouseion which was a place where these daughters of Apollo were worshiped. The mythological muses met their end in Dante's Devine Comedy which was inspired by his very earthly muse Beatrice Portinari who he claimed to have met when they were both 9 years old. From than on the muse has come to be known as an artist's source of inspiration, whether real or imaginary, and generally refers to a person who inspires an artist.

During the Renaissance the model for two of Raphael's most famous Madonnas was a Sienese baker's daughter named Margharita di Luti, who was probably Raphael's lover. In one of my favorite stories the painter Fra Filippo Lippi went in for a riskier muse relationship when he seduced a young nun named Lucrezia Buti and went on to live with her, using her as the model for several portraits including one of the Holy Mother. Renaissance muses were subordinate to their artists, bound to their sexual needs while the artists were free to do as they pleased.

Modern muses seem to be powerful and creative women in their own right like Georgia O'Keeffe who didn't just inspire photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but influenced the direction of his art as well. I could write all day about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, mutual muses and collaborators. They were in and out of each others lives and art for over two decades until Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989. People will debate till the end of time on whether Yoko Ono was good for John Lennon's music but nobody will ever debate the effect she had on him.

Than again artists and muses seem to traditionally take a toll on each other. Salvador Dalí's wife Gala shrewdly tortured her sex-averse and masochistic husband with her affairs and the dancer Suzanne Farrell, George Balanchine's astonishingly beautiful muse, married another dancer the day his divorce was finalized. Pablo Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter in Paris when she was 17 and immediately made her his mistress, sometimes having his chauffeur wait outside her school to pick her up and take her to the artist's studio where she modeled for countless paintings. Walter later bore him a daughter though he refused to marry her, and killed herself in 1977, four years after Picasso died.

So what do I think a muse is? Somewhere in the past or present is a person that comes back to you again and again in your thoughts and dreams. You may have barely known them or you may know them well but either way they left an indelible impression on you. I had a professor who used Carl Jung's animus when she described her muse and the idea works for me too. Jung described the animus as the unconscious male dominated part of the female psyche. In my professors description this core part of your being, part of your very soul, is projected to the other person and when you look at them you see its reflection. You want desperately to speak to it but find it impossible and so turn to the only language that works, your art.

In an LA Times article on the death of the muse UCLA sociology professor David Halle wrote, "The concept of the muse is part of the Romantic tradition and this is just not a romantic age.” I don't agree at all and I'll finish with the words that best sum it up for me.

Everything I did I did for you.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 8.4

Some random thoughts....

I have been back in the Village for only a couple days but I'm ready to go back to the shore. I wouldn't need much in the form of entertainment because I still have half my tequila, this has to be the first time I didn’t finish the bottle, and I only read one of the three books I took along. The sad thing is the one I read I already had before, "Just Kids" by Patti Smith. That leaves Maggie Nelson's "The Art of Cruelty" and Joel Sternfeld's "Walking The High Line" for a return trip. The latter is a big photo book I wanted to study and see if it gave me any ideas.

Guy told me just yesterday that I have no ass and I don't shake what I have enough. Guy doesn't know how close he came to being laid out but this time I just thanked him and walked away. Sadly this isn't the first time I've been told this, I rather like my ass tyvm. I'm thinking he must have been a Republican and speaking of Republicans, no I'm not ready to go there yet. I'm still feeling too good from the shore visit.

Why do some artists return to the same subject over and over? Watteau’s works often feature lovers in the last light of the day. Picasso was obsessed with the Minotaur whom he painted as a beast, a poet, a murderer, a murder victim, and others. Than there is German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder who liked nothing better than painting beheadings or more precisely pretty women carrying severed heads. Try doing that today and you'll find yourself in a padded room at Bellvue.

I read an article in the Times last week that said women are more likely to sext than men. My thought is it's because women have a much more active erotic imagination than men who are too busy imagining minotaurs and severed heads.

The Phillies, 31 games over .500 and 8 games ahead of the Braves. Need I say more?

Ladytron - White Elephant

Observations on Art 7.12

Artists, particularly painters, as a group can be self-centered, arrogant, vain, egotistical, and in some instances simply brilliant. But hiding beneath that favorable surface lays a secret. A great many of them are just insane and I'm not even talking about myself. Of my own favorite painters Van Gogh and Picasso were debatably insane while Goya and Pollock suffered from depression. There is even a term for it, outsider art or art brut was first used by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created in an insane asylum.

The idea of a 'mad genius' actually goes as far back as ancient Greece, where Socrates dismissed any poet "untouched by the madness of the muses." Socrates warned that such poets are doomed to find their "sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the inspired madman." In Phaedrus Plato wrote that artists were bestowed with a divine madness, and Aristotle was in all probability the first to connect creativity with depression.

In 1991 Dr. Arnold M. Ludwig, a psychiatrist at the University of Kentucky, did survey of 1,000 famous 20th-century artists and writers, comparing their mental health with those of normal professions. Ludwig discovered that artists and writers had two to three times the rate of psychosis, suicide attempts, mood disorders, and substance abuse than did successful people in business or science. Freudian psychiatry offers an explanation in the theory that people who are creative are much more in touch with their unconscious which makes them more creative which makes them think in crazier ways which makes them more creative. God, no wonder we all need therapy.

Once again I have taken forever to get to my point of writing this. I have been in a very artistic mood this week to the point that I was thinking about painting something. Always my dark guardian angel Ash took it upon herself to remind me of what I'm like when I paint. Pretty much it involves days of isolation and copious quantities of tequila, nicotine, and caffeine with very little or no food at all. Totally immersed I will paint until that moment comes when I stand back and realize that one way or another it's finished. Hopefully what I saw in my head is on the canvas because one time I did take a scissors to a painting and I have been known to burn others.

So those thoughts led to all the insanity thoughts which led to this post. I started to write a post about art and my thinking of painting again but I finished this post first so when it seems I'm out of order here, well, just another sign of my insanity.

Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds

(Love the coloring of that vid.)

Observations on the Art Market

There has to be something inherently wrong with a country where a major party wants to cut programs and services for the poor and elderly yet a Warhol or Picasso can be sold for 40, 50, or even $100 million. Just this past Wednesday Christie's New York took in $301 million at its Contemporary Art Sale a day after Sotheby’s New York did $128 million and Phillips de Pury $95 million. Math was never my best field but I think that makes $524 million in a matter of days. I know this is all supposedly private money but one has to wonder how collectors can amass such fortunes in the first place. CEOs ruin companies, ship jobs overseas, than pocket the profits before retiring to a life of leisure in their art filled mansions.

Personally I just think it is somehow wrong but at times that is a minority view in some circles. I have gotten into more than one argument over this with people whose thinking is basically that you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds. Many in the market don't support increased taxes on the wealthy because this would take away from a collector's ability to support museums, artists, and the like. It is as if the market has become addicted to the flow of money, bought and sold by the "New Medicis" of the Bush era. As government funding for the arts dwindles these so called 'patrons' dominate the art world today in a new pseudo Renaissance. They seem to call all the shots at major museums, art fairs, and even some major university art programs.

At same time the divide between the haves and have nots of the artist community mirrors the divide in our society in general. A smaller and smaller proportion of artists receive more and more of the funding and support. It sometimes seems being connected to the 'right' gallery is more important than an artist's talent. The artists themselves become of secondary importance to the gallery expérience.

While writing about the avant-garde movement over sixty years ago Clement Greenberg wrote that the movement was attached to the ruling class by “an umbilical cord of gold.” Ten years ago a professor of mine gave me a passage from a T. J. Clark essay titled "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art" in which he wrote "Capital may be uncertain of its values, but it is not weary; the bourgeoisie may have no beliefs worth the name, but they will not admit as much: they are hypocrites, not skeptics." I could write a book about what I think either quote means but for now I'll leave it for you to think about. I will say that I think the umbilical cord is stronger today than it was sixty years ago.

If a post of mine ever caused me any grief this could be it but it is how I feel and contains nothing I haven't said at some time to one person or another. I just have never put all these loose thoughts of mine together before.

Rebellious to the end.

Links:
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" by Clement Greenberg
"Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art" by T. J. Clark

5/17 update - and the big get bigger, "LONDON.- Christie’s announced Multiplied – an exciting new fair in the field of contemporary art. The fair will be held during the week of the Frieze Art Fair, 15-18th October ...."

Observations from Armory Week 3.3

Today the big Armory Show/Fair itself opens to the public on the two 12th street docks, divided between the modern show and the contemporary show. So what actually is the difference between Modern and Contemporary art?

The Modern Art era is said to have begun during the American Civil War period, the 1860s, even more precisely in 1863 with the work of Manet. Modern art is characterized by the attempt to capture the essence of a subject rather than the resemblance of it. For just this reason it moved more and more towards abstract as time went by.

The major painters of the early modern period include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet, or the Impressionists and Post-impressionists. The early 20th century was dominated by the rivalry between the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and the Fauvism of Henri Matisse. The interwar period saw the rise of Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall, and the Bauhaus of Wassily Kandinsky.

Finally the post war years saw the birth of Abstract Expressionism which the first American movement to dominate art worldwide. For the first time New York City, and not Paris, was the center of the art world. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, James Brooks, and many others define this period.

My personal opinion is that the Modern Art period began to end with the death of Jackson Pollock who pioneered the 'drip painting' method in which he laid a canvas on the floor and threw paint on it. But technically the period was extended into the 1960s and even the 70s by the rise of Lyrical Abstraction which was a movement once again dominated by Europeans as the United States struggled with the Vietnam War and it's aftermath.

Either way the era had ended before I ever set eyes on my first brush.

The idea here was to explain the difference between the Modern and Contemporary eras but I seem to have gotten a little carried away so I think I'll make two posts out of this. Hope this was easy enough to understand.

*I tried not to turn this into a masters thesis but keep in mind there at least a dozen major movements in the Modern era and each can be broken down into three or four sub-movements.

Observations on Art 12.19

One of the things that I think separates the arts from some other fields, such as science and law, is how emotionally based it can be. So much art is created because of emotions, real or maybe imagined but still emotions. Take the emotion out of painting, acting, and even photography and most of the great performances or works of history wouldn't exist. Sometimes we create to teach, sometimes to purely shock, and sometimes just to vent those emotions.

I think this has totally been true all through time. Before the Renaissance most, if not all, western art was commissioned by the church and it mostly shows religious scenes. With the Renaissance came the first depictions of non-religious or even anti-religious things, the first time art had drifted away from the church in almost 500 years. And so shock and awe in the art world was born.

Jacques-Louis David's "The Death of Marat", Goya's "Executions of the Third of May, 1808", and Picasso's "Guernica" all tried to shock the public into an awareness of events of the times. And today we have the storm over the removal of David Wojnarowicz's film "A Fire in My Belly" from the Smithsonian's 'Hide/Seek' exhibit. The film was created after Wojnarowicz's lover died of AIDS and he himself was diagnosed with the disease. His response was anger and he used the anger to create the film.

This has been a way too long way for my art history brain to get to the point. Even though I hide it well I know my brain is fueled by emotion. I tend to act on them before the much smaller thinking part of my brain has a chance to override those emotions. I see something in my mind and create what I see before stopping to think how I might be making another person feel in the process. Not that I care how most people feel about what I do but there are a few people out there in the world that I do care about. Recently I did just that, and hurt the feelings of somebody I do care about.

And I am so sorry.

I really need to think sometimes but it so does my head hurt ....

Observations on Art 5.13

Two recent articles from the ‘Times’ have me thinking yet again. Both, at least in my mind, ask a question. Neither of which I have an answer for and, quite honestly, I don’t know if there is an answer for either. I just though I would throw the links out there and make you think about it so I can stop. I have other things to do!

The first was about a work by the artist Caleb Larsen titled 'A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter'. It contains a program that will relist it on ebay every week in perpetuity. You could own it for a week, a month, or forever. But is it art if it can ‘think’? Maybe not think in a literal sense but think just the same. Can anything be called ‘art’ just because the person making it is artist and has a degree that says so?

The other was an article, more an essay, on anonymous bidding on art auctions. An anonymous telephone bidder recently paid 106.5 million dollars for Picasso’s 'Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,' a painting he did in just one day in 1964. This is now the most ever paid for a painting. Anonymous bidding was a pet peeve of an ethics professor I once had. He tried to make us think about the morality of it. His though being that it is a crime against ‘art’ to pay tens of millions, and now a hundred million, on a painting to hang on your wall, maybe never to be seen in public again. "At least tell us your name" he would say. As the article itself says “I wished someone like that would give $100 million to the New York Public Library and just let it go at that.”

Links:

Art That Sells Itself
The Coy Art of the Mystery Bidder
ebay, 'A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter'

(The ebay link is just search for the work because, as i write this, there are only three hours left on the current auction. There is one bid for $6858. *shrugs.)

tuneage, The Kills - Black Balloon