{"id":797,"date":"2018-02-27T15:44:31","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T15:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/?page_id=797"},"modified":"2018-12-23T00:11:41","modified_gmt":"2018-12-23T00:11:41","slug":"eye-on-art-2018","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/?page_id=797","title":{"rendered":"Eye on Art – 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

My \u201cEye On Art\u201d column appears monthly in the\u00a0Sag Harbor Express<\/em><\/h3>\n

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\u201cMonsters and Myths\u201d in Hartford\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

12-27-18<\/p>\n

Salvador Dal\u00ed once remarked that, \u201caccording to Nostradamus the apparition of monsters presages the outbreak of war.\u201d For Dal\u00ed and his fellow Surrealists, however, the demons they conjured were not only premonitions but also reflections of past and present horrors. Arising in the aftermath of World War I, the movement expressed the resulting social and political upheaval, reacted to the rise of Fascism in Europe in the interwar period, and both foreshadowed and responded to the renewed conflict of World War II. Those themes are explored in \u201cMonsters and Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s,\u201d on view through January 13 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., after which it will travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art and on to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tenn.<\/p>\n

The Wadsworth and Baltimore were early collectors of Surrealist art, and the show draws heavily on their holdings, supplemented by loans from other museums and private collections. Unfortunately, for logistical reasons, not all the works are going to all three venues, so a few key things are missing from the Wadsworth, including major canvases by Arshile Gorky and Yves Tanguy, both of whom lived in Connecticut, as did Andr\u00e9 Masson. Tanguy and his wife, the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage, settled in Woodbury; Gorky committed suicide on his property in Sherman in 1948.<\/p>\n

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Joan Mir\u00f3, Still Life with Old Shoe,<\/em> 1937. Oil on canvas, 32 x 46 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Masson, who left France in 1941 and sat out the war in New Preston, is well represented by several paintings, heavy on both mythological and monstrous imagery, made before and during his American sojourn. So is Max Ernst, who also emigrated in 1941; Dal\u00ed, who had come to the U.S. a year earlier; and his fellow Catalonian, Joan Mir\u00f3, whose garishly sinister 1937 canvas, Still Life with Old Shoe,<\/em> is among the show\u2019s responses to the Spanish Civil War. In contrast to Picasso\u2019s The Dream and Lie of Franco<\/em> etchings, which grotesquely caricature the Nationalist general as a grinning polyp-head, and Dal\u00ed\u2019s bizarre Soft Construction with Boiled Beans,<\/em> in which a mutilated figure claws at itself and writhes in agony, Mir\u00f3\u2019s symbolism is not explicitly anti-war. Like pathetic artifacts in a smoldering, bombed-out building, the abandoned shoe and the remnants of a meal poignantly convey the conflict\u2019s human toll.<\/p>\n

When World War II broke out, many of the artists were subject to persecution, displacement, and exile. Those labeled by the Nazis as degenerate or otherwise undesirable were forced to flee. Ernst, a German who had been living illegally in France for years, was interned as an enemy alien, but escaped and was brought to the U.S. by Peggy Guggenheim. Remarkably, a major painting from that period, Europe After the Rain II,<\/em> started while Ernst was on the run, was shipped to him in care of the Museum of Modern Art (where his son, Jimmy, was working) and was finished in New York. A sequel to his 1933 depiction of the continent devastated by the earlier war, it is a complex allegory based on the Greek myth of Europa\u2019s abduction by Zeus in the form of a bull.<\/p>\n

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Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain II,<\/em> 1940-42. Oil on canvas, 21 9\/16 x 58 3\/16 in. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Ernst\u2019s ghastly panorama, the creature and its human cargo are ossified within the ruins of a temple-like structure, an allusion to European civilization destroyed by the \u201crain\u201d of bombardment. The surroundings, derived in part from the fantastic rock formations Ernst saw in Sedona, Arizona, are equally ravaged. This masterpiece, with its echoes of hellscapes by Gr\u00fcnewald and Bosch, was acquired early on by the Wadsworth, as was Roberto Matta\u2019s Prescience,<\/em> 1939, a collection of fragmented forms in an acidic landscape, and Dal\u00ed\u2019s Apparition of<\/em> Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach,<\/em> 1938, a trompe l\u2019oeil memorial to the Spanish poet Garc\u00eda Lorca, who was executed by Nationalists in the early days of the civil war.<\/p>\n

Among the Americans associated with Surrealism, in addition to Sage, are Robert Motherwell, Dorothea Tanning, Jackson Pollock, David Hare, Mark Rothko and Alexander Calder, and examples of their work are included. Not all were card-carrying members of the group, but each felt the influence of its precepts, especially spontaneous inspiration arising in the unconscious. In practice, however, as the exhibition illustrates, the Surrealists\u2019 imagery was often based on conscious awareness and actual experience. Their nightmares had come true, and their monsters were real.<\/p>\n

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Nature\u2019s Nation<\/strong><\/p>\n

11-29-18<\/p>\n

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Valerie Hegarty, Fallen Bierstadt,<\/em> 2007. Mixed media, 70 x 50 x 16 3\/4 in. Lent by the Brooklyn Museum.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

America\u2019s attitude toward the natural world, at once reverential and adversarial, is the subject of “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,” a wide-ranging exhibition, on view through January 6, at the Princeton University Art Museum. Its title is taken from an essay by the late historian Perry Miller, who traced the development of American identity as fundamentally determined by our relationship to nature, and the inherent conflict between the need to conquer the wilderness and respect for the land\u2019s wonders and bounty.<\/p>\n

Using more than 120 examples of art, decorative arts, and artifacts spanning four centuries, the show illustrates creative responses to the environment from different cultural perspectives. This soup-to-nuts approach allows for the inclusion of everything from antique household goods to contemporary video, organized in three epochs: Colonization and Empire, Industrialization and Conservation, and Ecology and Environmentalism.<\/p>\n

The introductory display contrasts Albert Bierstadt\u2019s painting, Bridal Veil Falls,<\/em> an early 1870s celebration of Yosemite\u2019s magnificent cascade, with Valerie Hegarty\u2019s Fallen Bierstadt,<\/em> an ironic revision that has the painting literally disintegrating, as if damaged by a fire or flood, or eaten by insects. Is it nature\u2019s revenge on man-made beauty, or conversely, a comment on humankind\u2019s destructive impact on the environment? Paintings by Bierstadt and Thomas Moran helped convince Congress to create the national park system, yet these natural treasures are constantly under threat from commercial development and incursion.<\/p>\n

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Walton Ford, Dying Words,<\/em> 2005. Etching with aquatint and drypoint, 22 1\/2 x 30 in. Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Seen through the lens of what\u2019s billed as \u201cecocriticism,\u201d even celebratory images and useful objects appear in a new light. Exquisite 18th<\/sup> century items made of silver are shown to be products of slave labor in hellish conditions. The manicured formal garden backdrop for a Colonial portrait testifies to the desire to tame nature\u2019s unruliness. An 1820s Audubon rendering memorializes the colorful Carolina parakeet, the only U.S. native parrot, later killed off by the clear-cutting of its habitat. Walton Ford recalls that loss in Dying Words,<\/em> a 2005 etching based on The Death of General Wolfe<\/a>,<\/em> Benjamin West\u2019s 1771 requiem for a fatally wounded British general surrounded by his troops. In Ford\u2019s clever re-conception, the extinct birds replace the soldiers.<\/p>\n

The exhibition would be a hodgepodge without extensive interpretive material. Numerous text panels and long labels explain each item\u2019s critical context. This makes for slow going through the galleries, but patience is rewarded by many revelations. For example, Jervis McEntee\u2019s 1858 painting of the barren terrain that became New York City\u2019s Central Park is paired with a large plan of the park\u2019s roadways, water features, and other amenities. What neither view shows is the African-American community that was displaced by Vaux and Olmsted\u2019s picturesque improvements\u2014you need the label to give you that information.<\/p>\n

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Alexis Rockman, Aviary,<\/em> 1992. Oil on wood, 80 x 68 in. Private collection.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Human impact on nature, for better or worse (mostly worse, as the show has it), accelerates in the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> centuries as a consequence of Westward expansion, urbanization and industrialization, symbolized by John Gast\u2019s American Progress,<\/em> an 1872 allegory of Manifest Destiny. As so-called civilization advances, it seems the quality of life declines. For every idyllic forest, majestic mountain and glorious sunset, there\u2019s a burning oil well, polluted river, urban wasteland and ugly open-pit mine. The near extinction of the buffalo is well represented as a cautionary tale, contrasting indigenous people\u2019s respect for the creatures, both as sustenance and as spiritual beings, with their wholesale slaughter by settlers. The impact of armed conflict, unchecked exploitation, and disasters brought on by bad management practices echoes down the generations, from the Civil War to the Dust Bowl and beyond, but are we listening today?<\/p>\n

The consequences of not listening are suggested by Alexis Rockman\u2019s Aviary,<\/em> a dystopian vision of perverted evolution. With more than a passing nod to Hieronymus Bosch, Rockman imagines the tree of life as an open sewer pipe, its dead branches colonized by invasive plants and populated by grotesque hybrid birds. An eerily intense glow pervades the scene, as if the sky itself were toxic. This may be an illustration of what we can expect if we don\u2019t pay attention to the just-released climate change report, which only makes the message of \u201cNature\u2019s Nation\u201d all the more timely.<\/p>\n

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Jack Whitten, Secret Sculptor<\/strong><\/p>\n

11-1-18<\/p>\n

Shortly before his death this past January, Jack Whitten agreed to an exhibition primarily devoted to his sculpture, a body of work known only to his family and close friends. After its premier at the Baltimore Museum of Art in the spring, \u201cOdyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017\u201d is now on view through December 2 at the Met Breuer. We\u2019re fortunate that, near the end of his life, Whitten invited us to visit his secret garden of earthly delights.<\/p>\n

An abstract painter who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the art world was dominated by Minimalism and Conceptualism, Whitten persisted in the subjective, improvisational spirit of the Abstract Expressionists. Far from following in their footsteps, however, he developed his own vocabulary of sensuous forms and tactile materials, including dragged pigment and acrylic-chip mosaics. According to ARTnews, his \u201cprocess-based canvases pushed abstraction into new territory.\u201d But while his paintings have been widely exhibited, his sculptures remained sequestered in his New York studio and on his property on Crete, where he began summering with his Greek-American wife, Mary, in 1969. Like Odysseus, the voyager invoked in the exhibition\u2019s title, his artistic journey took him far from home.<\/p>\n

Whitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, a steel town near Birmingham. To escape the South\u2019s racism, which he referred to as \u201cAmerican apartheid,\u201d at age 21 he moved to New York City and graduated from The Cooper Union in 1964. While still a student, he began experimenting with sculpture inspired by his African-American heritage. In the current show, his two \u201cJug Head\u201d carvings reference both African masks and the grotesque 19th<\/sup> century face jugs made by enslaved potters in the rural South. Examples from the Met\u2019s collection, well know to the artist, are included for comparison.<\/p>\n

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Jack Whitten, Homage To Malcolm, 1965.<\/em> American elm partly stained, coiled wire, nails, mixed media, 80 x 18 x 14 in. \u00a9 The Estate of Jack Whitten.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, the show is rich in such juxtapositions, illustrating Whitten\u2019s adaptations of indigenous African and Mediterranean precedents. Several of his wood pieces are studded with nails, wire, razor blades and other sharp metal objects, paraphrasing Congolese nkisi power fetishes, one of which is also on view. Homage to Malcolm, 1965,<\/em> for example, memorializes Malcolm X following his assassination. More than six feet long, constructed of wood and found objects, the sculpture\u2019s head end is encrusted with nkisi-like elements, clearly linking the subject to his African forebears. At the other end, a curving shape suggests a blade, or perhaps the sharpness of the slain activist\u2019s rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Several of Whitten\u2019s \u201cBlack Monolith\u201d abstract mosaic portraits, including those of the authors Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, and the musicians Ornette Coleman and Chuck Berry, are also in the show. Like them, his nkisi-inspired carvings pay respects to figures he admired, from John Lennon to his Aunt Surlina. Among other droll touches, his tribute to the kri-kri, a type of wild goat native to Crete, prominently features his expired American Express credit card. A series of reliquaries contain bones from the island\u2019s fish and birds; in one, a lock of his wife Mary\u2019s hair is tenderly preserved. Two carvings are dedicated to his daughter, Mirsini. Effigies, totems, masks and weapons from other cultures and eras are mined for their potent symbolism and adapted to serve the artist\u2019s fruitful imagination.<\/p>\n

Considering how personal such works were to Whitten, and that he kept them from public view for decades, it\u2019s no exaggeration to describe his sculptural practice as a labor of love: love for the materials themselves, and love of the physical act of transforming them from their natural state into works of art. Much of the wood comes from the area around his studio in Agia Galini, the Cretan village where he built a summer home in the mid 1980s. Using only hand tools, skillfully blending historical references with contemporary themes\u2014sometimes whimsical, sometimes confrontational, and sometimes deeply spiritual\u2014he fashioned what amounts to a multi-faceted monument to his experience of the places and the people he cherished.<\/p>\n

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Davis and Krasner Together\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

10-4-18<\/p>\n

Apart from resting peacefully near each other in Green River Cemetery in Springs, what do the painters Stuart Davis and Lee Krasner have in common? Judging by their best known works\u2014his geometric, hers gestural\u2014not much. Yet there was a time when they were both aiming toward similar artistic goals. Their point of confluence was during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when they were employed by the WPA Federal Art Project and designed murals for WNYC, New York\u2019s municipal radio station, and other public buildings. Both were then strong adherents of Cubism, Davis having absorbed it first-hand in Paris and Krasner having come to it as transplanted to New York by her teacher, Hans Hofmann. But while Davis stuck with it, adapting it to his own, singularly American, point of view, Krasner veered off in a more subjective direction, becoming one of the foremost abstract expressionist painters of her generation.<\/p>\n

Their brief period of agreement is illustrated in a pair of complementary shows at Kasmin Gallery\u2019s two showcases in Chelsea, which represents both artists\u2019 estates\u2014a coincidental commonality that allows the gallery to present them in tandem. \u201cLee Krasner Mural Studies\u201d is at the 297 Tenth Avenue space, while across 27th<\/sup> Street is \u201cLines Thicken: Stuart Davis in Black and White,\u201d at 293 Tenth Avenue. The Davis show is on through Dec. 22. The Krasner show closes on Oct. 27, the 110th<\/sup> anniversary of her birth.<\/p>\n

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Lee Krasner, Untitled Mural Study, 1940, gouache on paper, 17 x 22 in. \u00a9 2018 Pollock- Krasner Foundation \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last year, Kasmin\u2019s show of Krasner\u2019s so-called Umber series concentrated on the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she delved into deep emotional territory in large canvases that fairly boiled with painterly energy. They were highly personal statements, whereas twenty years earlier, her ambition, which she shared with Davis, had been to paint wall-filling works for a mass audience, and to do it in a flat, neo-Cubist style. As a WPA muralist, she was assigned to decorate buildings, first as an assistant to more experienced artists and finally, in 1940, on her own. Kasmin is showing eight gouache studies she made that year for a specific, though unknown, location\u2014probably a school, library or hospital\u2014identified only by blank areas indicating the architectural elements she had to work around.<\/p>\n

Krasner\u2019s approach to this assignment ranges from exuberant to restrained. The influence of predecessors like Matisse, Arp and Mir\u00f3 is evident, but, like Davis, she has internalized and adapted their lessons. In some examples, brightly colored biomorphic shapes cavort across the wall, jostling one another playfully, as if inviting spectators to join in the dance. In one, however, the mood is cool and formal. Carefully balanced rectangles structure the space, but a kidney-shaped loop relieves the design\u2019s geometric purity. Sadly, none of these concepts made it to the wall for which they were intended. Nor did her 1941 proposal for the WNYC Studio A mural, though many sketches and studies survive.<\/p>\n

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Stuart Davis, (Study for “Men Without Women”), 1932, ink and pencil on paper, 11 1\/2 x 17 1\/2 in. \u00a9 Estate of Stuart Davis\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Davis, on the other hand, did complete various mural projects in the 1930s, including two for the WPA: \u201cSwing Landscape,\u201d intended for a housing project but later acquired by the Indiana University Art Museum; and one for WNYC\u2019s Studio B, which was removed and donated to the Met. A study for his first mural is a highlight of the Kasmin show. \u201cMen Without Women,\u201d a pre-WPA commission, was painted in 1932 for the Radio City Music Hall\u2019s men\u2019s lounge. The linear ink and pencil version lacks several of the male attributes in the finished work, which now lives at MoMA, but three dominant motifs\u2014a tobacco pipe, sailboats and a horse\u2014are present in skeletal form. The drawing shows how meticulously Davis planned his compositions, shifting and adjusting elements until he achieved the ideal balance. He was a brilliant colorist, and when that chromatic richness is stripped away his mastery of structure becomes all the more evident.<\/p>\n

From the show\u2019s largest works on canvas to the smallest drawings, Davis was endlessly inventive, even as he played variations on themes and reprised many of his subjects. Nautical scenes and maritime paraphernalia, observed in New York harbor or in the seaside port of Gloucester where he summered, gave him plenty of raw material, as seen in several of the works on view. And a charming drawing that pays homage to the jazz drummer George Wettling represents another of his long-term inspirations. That\u2019s another thing Davis and Krasner had in common\u2014they both loved jazz.<\/p>\n

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Brancusi\u2019s Reality at MoMA\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

9-6-18<\/p>\n

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Constantin Brancusi (1876\u20131957). Endless Column, version I,<\/em> 1918. Oak, 90 x 9 7\/8 x 9 5\/8 in.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

According to Constantin Brancusi, \u201cWhat is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.\u201d That attitude is fundamentally modernist, and Brancusi was at the forefront of such thinking in the early 20th<\/sup> century. His remarkable personal and artistic journey from rural Romania to avant-garde Paris is encapsulated in a small but captivating exhibition on view through February 18 at the Museum of Modern Art. It includes all 11 of MoMA\u2019s Brancusi sculptures, shown together for the first time, as well as photographs of his studio and documents related to the collection. Only one piece is on loan from an outside source.<\/p>\n

This is not the largest holding of Brancusi\u2019s work in the United States. That distinction belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns 19 sculptures and many vintage photographs of the artist and his studio. Nor is it comprehensive, lacking examples of such iconic works as The Kiss<\/em> and Princess X,<\/em> of which he made multiple versions. That said, the show is a focused, intensive look at Brancusi\u2019s visionary approach to three-dimensional form\u2014an imagination so radical that in 1926 the U.S. Customs Service famously refused to classify one of his sculptures as art. Two bronze versions of that piece, Bird in Space,<\/em> are in the current show. The problem for customs officials was that it didn\u2019t look like any bird they\u2019d ever seen. That was the point. It\u2019s meant to convey the spirit of flight. They also held that it appeared to be industrially produced rather than hand made. Brancusi successfully argued that each piece was hand crafted and unique. Indeed, though there are nine bronze versions of this form, no two are identical, as the examples on view prove. Like many of his works, they are variations on a theme.<\/p>\n

A master of direct carving in wood and stone, Brancusi is best known for his Endless Column,<\/em> a vertical stack of four-sided pyramids, arranged point-to-point and base-to-base. MoMA owns the earliest surviving example, a 1918 oak piece just under seven feet tall. Originally the artist used the pyramid module as a pedestal for other works, but at some point he saw it as a form in its own right, capable of perpetual repetition. Its most ambitious adaptation is a 98-foot steel tower, erected in 1938 in a sculpture park in T\u00e2rgu Jiu, Romania, to honor the soldiers who defended the city against a German force during World War I. By contrast, MoMA\u2019s piece is intimately scaled but no less monumental in concept. Its chiseled surface has a tactile quality that attests to the sculptor\u2019s hands at work.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s earliest example of Brancusi\u2019s carving prowess is Maiastra,<\/em> and it\u2019s singular in a couple of ways. The top section, dated 1910-12, is his first sculpture of a bird, inspired by a creature in Romanian folklore. Its sleek, stylized marble form sits atop a limestone cube supported by an earlier, roughly hewn carving of two caryatids, which in turn rests on a boxy limestone pedestal. Caryatids\u2014supporting figures in Greek classical architecture\u2014are usually female, but here their sex is uncertain and their bodies struggle to emerge from the stone. This section dates from about 1908, and it\u2019s the first time Brancusi used one sculpture as the support for another. He would continue that practice throughout his career, and considered the pedestals to be integral parts of the sculpture, often combining different materials and treatments to create complementary ensembles. In Blond Negress II,<\/em> for example, the polished bronze head sits on a four-part base made of wood, limestone, and marble, incorporating all four of his most commonly used materials.<\/p>\n

Although the Negress\u2019 head was inspired by an African woman Brancusi saw at a colonial fair in Marseilles in 1922, it\u2019s not a literal portrait. Always striving for the essential reality beneath superficial appearance, he has abstracted her features and eliminated details. This is also true of Mlle. Pogany,<\/em> his study of a young Hungarian artist who became the subject of several variations. In MoMA\u2019s bronze version, a dark patina defines her hair, but there are few other clues to her individuality. Her tilted head rests on her hands in a dreamy pose, and it\u2019s hard to tell if her huge almond-shaped eyes are open or closed. This kind of ambiguity is a hallmark of Brancusi\u2019s approach, which invites the viewer to share his vision of a deeper, more universal truth.<\/p>\n

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Witness Creativity at Artists\u2019 Homes<\/strong><\/p>\n

8-9-18<\/p>\n

The beautifully restored Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran home and studio in East Hampton, recently opened under the aegis of the East Hampton Historical Society, is a tangible reminder of the important role a specific environment can play in the creative process. Both Thomas and Mary looked out the window for inspiration. She made many etchings of local scenery, and while he\u2019s best known for his paintings of the Yellowstone, he also pictured the bucolic charm of the village and its surroundings. Some of those images are on view in the museum\u2019s inaugural exhibition, which also interprets the two artists\u2019 lives and careers.<\/p>\n

The Moran studio isn\u2019t the only property where you can get a sense of the artists\u2019 relationship to the places they inhabited. There are 36 of them in the Historic Artists\u2019 Homes and Studios coalition of sites across the country, from Ukiah, CA to Portland, ME. You\u2019ll find them on the group\u2019s website, artistshomes.org<\/a>. The northeast is especially rich, with several sites within a day\u2019s drive from Sag Harbor and one, the Pollock-Krasner House, just down the road in Springs.<\/p>\n

\"\" A ferry ride to the Connecticut coast and a short hop west to Old Lyme will take you to the Florence Griswold Museum, billed as the home of American Impressionism. When the Griswold mansion became a boarding house in the late 19th<\/sup> century, it attracted plein-air painters who set up their easels on the spacious grounds and decorated the dining room wall panels with colorful souvenirs of their stays. In addition to the original 1817 house, there\u2019s a modern museum building with changing exhibitions and an impressive permanent collection of work by Lyme Art Colony notables, including Childe Hassam, whose East Hampton home and studio, Willow Bend, is privately owned and not open to the public.<\/p>\n

For immersion in America\u2019s take on Impressionism, travel west to Cos Cob, where another former boarding house, the Bush-Holley House, was a destination for landscape painters, including Hassam and J. Alden Weir, in the early 20th<\/sup> century. Then go north to Weir Farm National Historic Site in Wilton, one of two national parks devoted to artists. (The other is the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH.) In addition to Weir\u2019s home and studio, it includes the studio of sculptor Mahonri Young, Weir\u2019s son-in-law. The ubiquitous Hassam was a frequent visitor, as was Albert Pinkham Ryder, who painted the local scenery. Contemporary artists are invited to work on the 60-acre property and apply for month-long residencies.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Hudson River valley also boasts a cluster of artists\u2019 homes, crowned by Olana, a 250-acre estate with a Persian-inspired mansion overlooking the river in Hudson, NY. This magnificent setting, the creation of Frederic Edwin Church, inspired some of his most famous landscape paintings, several of which are on permanent display inside the house. The place is remarkably preserved, with its original furnishings and d\u00e9cor, encapsulating the artist\u2019s world with complete authenticity. Nearby, in Catskill, is the home of Church\u2019s mentor, Thomas Cole, dean of the Hudson River School. Although not as intact as Olana, it nevertheless conveys Cole\u2019s relationship to the terrain that provided the subject matter for his most renowned paintings.<\/p>\n

Just across the New York-Massachusetts border are two major sites, which, like Olana, were purpose-built to the artists\u2019 specifications. The Frelinghuysen-Morris House and Studio in Lenox, MA, is a classic modernist design, built in 1941 for the abstract painters Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L.K. Morris. While neither of them was inspired directly by the surrounding landscape, their home is a testament to their aesthetic outlook. With its original furniture, interior and exterior murals, and the couple\u2019s collection of modern art, it\u2019s an outstanding example of a domestic setting that\u2019s a work of art in its own right.<\/p>\n

\"\"Similarly, at Chesterwood, Daniel Chester French\u2019s property in nearby Stockbridge, you\u2019ll find the custom-built studio where French crafted many of his prominent public sculptures, including the statue of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, DC\u2019s Lincoln Memorial. Inside the studio, the artist\u2019s tools, maquettes, and scale models illustrate the creative process at first hand. This is the real thing, not a Disneyfied re-creation.<\/p>\n

These sites, and the 27 others in the Historic Artists\u2019 Homes and Studios coalition, offer extraordinary opportunities to experience the special character of the artists\u2019 workplaces and gain insights into their personal and professional lives. As the group\u2019s slogan has it, \u201ccome, witness creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Giacometti\u2019s Singular Vision\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

7-12-18<\/p>\n

\"\"
Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man I (Homme qui marche I),<\/em> 1960 (cast 1982). Bronze, 71 x 10 \u00bd x 38 in. Fondation Giacometti, Paris. \u00a9 2018 Alberto Giacometti Estate\/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alberto Giacometti was, by all accounts, a driven man, one devoted to making art even as he considered it a discouraging enterprise. As he told his friend James Lord, who posed for him in 1964, \u201cI\u2019ve been wasting my time for thirty years.\u201d Such self-deprecation goes way beyond modesty to the very core of Giacometti\u2019s dilemma. He wanted to capture the truth of his observations, but that goal remained elusive. \u201cAll I can do,\u201d he once complained, \u201cwill only ever be a faint image of what I see.\u201d<\/p>\n

The current Giacometti retrospective exhibition, on view through September 12 at the Guggenheim, makes me grateful to the artist for having failed so magnificently. He may have perpetually disappointed himself, but his paintings, drawings and sculptures never disappoint the spectator willing to engage with them. They convey a profound sensitivity to the human condition, as well as distinctive means of expressing that empathy.<\/p>\n

The show\u2014the first such overview in New York since MoMA\u2019s in 2001-02\u2014includes works on loan from the Fondation Giacometti that have never before been shown in the US. It traces the evolution of his singular vision with true inclusiveness, from a naturalistic oil portrait of his brother Diego and early carvings influenced by Oceanic and Cycladic sculptures to the iconic figures of his last two decades, topped off by a film of the artist at work in his Paris studio in 1966, the year of his death, still striving to resolve his own self-imposed contradictions.<\/p>\n

Born in 1901 into a Swiss family of artists, Giacometti moved to Paris in 1922 and spent most of his career there. His early sculpture reflects the impact of Cubism, and of vanguard sculptors like Brancusi, Lipchitz and Picasso, who also looked to tribal and ancient art for inspiration. Working from memory rather than from observation allowed his imagination free rein and brought him to the attention of the Surrealists, with whom he became associated in the early 1930s. Examples like \u201cWoman with Her Throat Cut,\u201d \u201cDisagreeable Object\u201d and \u201cThe Palace at 4 a.m.\u201d (the actual sculpture is at MoMA, but a fine sketch is included) show the combination of whimsy and menace found in so many Surrealist works. But he soon abandoned Surrealism\u2019s reliance on dreams and the unconscious and returned to working from live models, especially Diego, whose studio was adjacent to his.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Alberto Giacometti painting in his Paris studio, 1958. Photo: Ernst Scheidegger \u00a9 2018 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger\u2013Archiv, Z\u00fcrich.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During World War II Giacometti lived in Geneva, where he made tiny plaster figures, so small and fragile that, he said, they actually frightened him. It\u2019s also where he met Annette Arm, who would become his wife and frequent model. After returning to Paris in late 1945, his response to the war\u2019s aftermath was to attenuate his figures, using a combination of modeling and carving in the three-dimensional works. It\u2019s hard not to see echoes of concentration camp victims in the skeletal bodies, many of which are trapped in boxes or cages, harking back to his Surrealist works, or mounted on isolating plinths. He once likened his slender figures to trees in a forest, but they look more like the remains of a forest fire than like living trees. In the painted portraits, his obsessive revisions scar the features of his solitary subjects, which are usually rendered in greys and blacks and enclosed in claustrophobic spaces.<\/p>\n

Giacometti was far from the only artist to respond to the postwar malaise by depicting humanity as damaged and alienated\u2014among sculptors, Germaine Richier and Zoltan Kemeny come to mind\u2014but his own statements don\u2019t address such intentions. Instead he spoke of wanting to distill the essence of his observations of actual people in contemporary settings, either encountered in the street or posing for him in the studio. But as strongly as he expressed his need to capture what he saw in the world around him, his view was deeply personal. In fact it appears that the angst his subjects embody so effectively is not theirs, but his. Their rootedness\u2014those huge feet anchored to the earth, unable to propel even the walkers\u2014symbolizes his own inability to progress creatively, at least as he perceived it. I believe it was his inner life that dictated the compulsive reductionism that strikes such a responsive chord in our present age of anxiety.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chaim Soutine: Flesh<\/strong><\/p>\n

6-14-18<\/p>\n

\u201cFlesh,\u201d Willem de Kooning famously declared, \u201cwas the reason why oil paint was invented.\u201d Besides de Kooning himself, no one bears out that contention more convincingly than Chaim Soutine, whose voluptuous studies of dead animals are the centerpiece of a small but stellar exhibition on view at the Jewish Museum through September 16.<\/p>\n

By 1949, when de Kooning made his pronouncement, Soutine\u2019s work was represented in important American museums, most extensively at the Barnes Collection in Merion, PA, to which many artists made pilgrimages. The following year a major retrospective was presented in New York at MoMA. From portraits and still lifes to landscapes and tableaux of meat, fish and fowl, Soutine\u2019s subjects, no matter how static, seem to writhe on the canvas. A younger generation of painters, de Kooning included, responded to the painterly exuberance and emotive power of his brushwork, which invests even lifeless forms with vital energy.<\/p>\n

Soutine was born in a Jewish village in Lithuania in 1893. The area was routinely subject to anti-Semitic violence during his childhood, when he also witnessed the ritual slaughter of animals according to Jewish dietary laws. These formative experiences are said to have decisively influenced his artistic development. Somehow\u2014not explained in the exhibition\u2014he managed to study art for three years at the academy in Vilnius, after which he moved to Paris and into a coterie of Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 artists who befriended and encouraged him. His association with other figurative painters, especially Modigliani, no doubt reinforced his devotion to representation, albeit with his own singular approach to traditional subjects. One of the show\u2019s earliest works, from about 1916, is a study of Cit\u00e9 Falgui\u00e8re, the ramshackle studio building they shared. He had already adopted the energized brushstrokes and flattened perspective that became hallmarks of his mature style.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), Still Life with Rayfish,<\/em> ca. 1924. Oil on canvas, 32 \u00d7 39 3\/8 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Turning from that modest canvas, one is confronted by Still Life with Rayfish,<\/em> and confronted is the word. The composition is based on a painting of the same subject by Chardin that Soutine saw in the Louvre, where he studied the Old Masters intensively. Compared to the 18th<\/sup> century painter\u2019s restrained, matter-of-fact approach, Soutine\u2019s treatment is shockingly dramatic. Hanging from a hook, the dead fish, its beady eyes and gaping mouth emphasized, is splayed out like a huge livid fan. Its entrails spill onto a table, where they mingle with a pile of blood-red tomatoes. The whole arrangement seems to tilt forward and down, as if about to land at your feet. Like many of Soutine\u2019s portraits of dead creatures, it\u2019s both repulsive and fascinating, drawing you in with its remarkable subtlety and formal sophistication while grossing you out with its literally visceral directness.<\/p>\n

By the time Soutine painted the ray, around 1924, he no longer had to worry about money. After years of grinding poverty, when meager arrangements of fruit and dried fish doubled as the artist\u2019s meals, Albert Barnes had set him up for life by buying more than 50 of his paintings all at once in 1922. One of them is in the exhibition. The usual still-life motifs\u2014a bottle, a plate of vegetables, etc.\u2014include a bizarre piece of green pottery in the shape of a duck, placed upside down, with its neck broken. This symbolism foreshadows the images of plucked chickens and turkeys in the next gallery, where Soutine takes the time-honored dead-game genre into uncharted emotional territory. This leads to a group of his iconic paintings of beef carcasses, inspired by Rembrandt\u2019s The Flayed Ox<\/em> but far more gory and grotesque. Rembrandt left out the blood and guts. Soutine did not.<\/p>\n

Of course it was then common to see plucked fowl, skinned rabbits, and sides of beef hanging in butcher shops, but Soutine invested such subjects with a kind of grisly pathos. The tactility of the paint, as well as its dynamic application, emphasizes the material itself, dissolving the forms sometimes to the point of illegibility. Then they stubbornly reassert themselves with alarming frankness.<\/p>\n

One kind of flesh notably absent is the human variety. Soutine painted many portraits, but none are included here. You can see some on the Barnes Collection\u2019s website<\/a><\/span>. They round out a picture of the artist as an inspiration for generations of figurative expressionists, from de Kooning and Francis Bacon to Alice Neel, Lucien Freud and Cecily Brown. Like Soutine\u2019s, their interpretations of flesh uphold de Kooning\u2019s premise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cAnything Goes\u201d at the Nassau County Museum\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

5-17-18<\/p>\n

In his 1971 book, Living Well is the Best Revenge<\/a><\/em>, Calvin Tomkins tells the story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, expatriate Americans living in France in the 1920s. In many ways the Murphys\u2014who later lived on Sara\u2019s family estate, Dunes, in East Hampton\u2014personify the Jazz Age, as chronicled in \u201cAnything Goes,\u201d the current exhibition at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor. There\u2019s a lot to take in, so be sure to allow yourself ample time to savor the show\u2019s many gems. Among them\u2014not counting the exquisite Art Deco jewelry by Tiffany and others\u2014is a delicate 1923 ink portrait of Sara by Picasso.<\/p>\n

The Murphy circle, a who\u2019s-who of the avant-garde, included Picasso, L\u00e9ger, Cocteau, Goncharova and Stravinsky among the Europeans, as well as Hemingway, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Fitzgerald and other Americans who gravitated to the artistic ferment of interwar Paris. This confluence of talent in various artistic disciplines, from the visual and literary arts to music, theater, dance and fashion, sparked collaborations and encouraged experimentation. The exhibition\u2019s curator, Charles A. Riley II, has woven these creative strands together, illustrating the interrelationships among them.<\/p>\n

While the American artists were picking up on Cubism, Orphism, Syncromism and other assorted isms pioneered in France, Europeans audiences were taking to jazz in a big way. On the literary front, Sylvia Beach, an expat from New Jersey, ran Shakespeare & Company, a Paris bookstore that promoted the latest in vanguard poetry and fiction, famously including works like Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em> and Ulysses<\/em> that were banned in America. Examples of such publishing milestones are on display.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Francis Cugat (1893-1981), book jacket design for \u201cThe Great Gatsby,\u201d ca. 1925. Gouache. Lent by the Rare Books & Special Collections, Princeton University Library.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Portraits by the American photographer Man Ray depict several members of the international circle, from Gertrude Stein and James Joyce to Coco Chanel, Kiki of Montparnasse and members of the Ballets Russes, for which Gerald and Sara Murphy once painted scenery. Individual galleries are devoted to Gaston Lachaise, the French-born sculptor who immortalized his American wife Isabel in idealized monumental nudes, and the British-American painter Anna Walinska, who sketched Picasso in Paris in 1928. Collages by the German artist Kurt Schwitters have their counterparts in works by Americans Charles Green Shaw, Gertrude Greene and her husband Balcomb Greene. In the visual arts at least, who influenced whom is not really in question, since it\u2019s obvious that the Europeans were the innovators. Yet Americans like Shaw, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Albert E. Gallatin, Arthur Dove, Betty Parsons and Stuart Davis acquit themselves admirably, building on the foundation laid by Picasso, L\u00e9ger, Mir\u00f3 and other European modernists.<\/p>\n

In other areas, however, the Americans stand head to head with their European counterparts. Hemingway and Fitzgerald in particular represent a new wave of writers whose voice is distinctively American. Another of the show\u2019s highlights is the original 1925 cover art for Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/em>, a midnight blue fantasy by Francis Cugat (brother of bandleader Xavier Cugat), in which a pair of disembodied eyes floats above a glittering carnival scene. A nude female form is curled within each eye\u2019s iris, suggesting a bared soul reflected in the haunting gaze. Fitzgerald saw this design while he was still at work on the book, prompting him to use it as the basis for Nick Carraway\u2019s image of Daisy Buchanan\u2014another example of literary-visual art cross pollination.<\/p>\n

\"\"In music, too, the Americans established a singular beachhead among the European vanguard while benefiting from interaction with trendsetters like Satie and Stravinsky. George Gershwin and Cole Porter both worked jazz syncopation into their compositions, marrying popular and classical forms to create new contemporary music, epitomized by Gershwin\u2019s Rhapsody in Blue<\/em> and An American in Paris.<\/em> Porter wrote music for Within the Quota,<\/em> a 1923 Ballets Su\u00e9dois production with sets and costumes by Murphy and a character, the Jazz Baby, based on Zelda Fitzgerald.<\/p>\n

The most striking visual souvenirs of jazz\u2019s impact on European culture are the posters by Paul Colin for various Paris cabaret acts, most sensationally those of the African-American expat Josephine Baker, who danced nude except for a miniskirt made of bananas. Shamelessly exploiting the appeal of \u201cprimitive\u201d and \u201cexotic\u201d jazz rhythms, Baker\u2019s Revue Negre took Paris by storm. Some of these graphics are decidedly racist by today\u2019s standards, an issue that the show addresses head-on with an invitation to consider the art in its period context. That period is beautifully evoked in this wide-ranging exhibition, for which the title of Porter\u2019s 1934 musical, \u201cAnything Goes,\u201d is the perfect description.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Antonakos\u2019s Art of Light<\/strong><\/p>\n

4-19-18<\/p>\n

When residents of this village think of neon lighting, the iconic fa\u00e7ade of the Sag Harbor Cinema is the first image that comes to mind. While we wait for that glow to illuminate Main Street once again, let\u2019s remember another link between neon and Sag Harbor: the artist Stephen Antonakos, whose use of gas-filled glass tubing as a medium is being celebrated at the Neuberger Museum, on the campus of SUNY\u2019s Purchase College, which commissioned his Proscenium<\/em> light sculpture in 2000.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Stephen Antonakos (1926-2013)
<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Antonakos, who for many years had a home on Hempstead Street and is buried in Oakland Cemetery, was born in Greece and came to New York with his family when he was four. After working as a commercial illustrator, he turned to fine art in the early 1960s. In those days his artwork was collages, assemblages, and a series of pillows that he modified in various ways, including adding lighted elements to them. The last pillow in the series featured the word DREAM in neon and led Antonakos to explore the possibilities of using illumination as a medium in its own right.<\/p>\n

Unlike artists such as Tracey Emin and Glenn Ligon\u2014whose word-based works are featured in the Neuberger\u2019s current show, \u201cBending Light: Neon Art 1965 to Now,\u201d Antonakos used neon tubes as a means of expressing intangible concepts. Although early on he prowled Times Square at night for inspiration, he was not interested in neon as signage. As he once wrote, \u201cI simply thought so much more could be done with it abstractly than with words and images.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the mid 1960s Antonakos\u2019s neons were being included in group exhibitions around the country, and he had his first solo show at the Fishbach Gallery in New York in 1967. It was a time when experimental media were breaking down traditional barriers between fine and applied art, and Antonakos wasn\u2019t the only artist working with light. Neon pieces by Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Keith Sonnier and Antonakos\u2019s fellow Greek-American Chryssa, as well as fluorescent light installations by Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin and argon-lighted panels by Mary Corse were regular features of contemporary gallery and museum shows.<\/p>\n

Neon\u2019s viability for outdoor signage was well established, and from the early 1970s on Antonakos adapted it for exterior commissions in the United States and abroad. For many years his Neon for 42nd<\/sup> Street,<\/em> a series of sweeping red arcs with blue backlighting, completed in 1981, could be seen on New York\u2019s West Side, and his 1990 Neon for the 59th<\/sup> Street Marine Transfer Station<\/em> is still in situ. There are also outdoor and indoor installations of his light works in cities around the United States and in Greece, France, Israel, Italy, Germany and Japan.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Stephen Antonakos, Proscenium<\/em>, 2000. Neon and painted raceways, overall 20\u20196\u201d x 189\u2019. Collection Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Museum purchase with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Stefan D. Abrams.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Antonakos\u2019s first commission for the Purchase campus was Neon Lintel<\/em> (1997), which is\u00a0suspended at the end of the covered walkway leading to the Performing Arts Center. Three years later, the college offered him a much more ambitious project, a site-specific installation for its Theater Gallery. Named for the stage area of a classical Greek theater, Proscenium<\/em> frames the gallery on three sides. It comprises several individual elements, with both front and back illumination, totaling 189 feet in length, starting and ending with red and green arcs. They complement each other in both form and color, with red complementing green and the upturned arc complementing the downturned one. In between are straight and wavy neon tubes set in painted channels called raceways that contain and concentrate the light within them. Behind them, the backlighting makes the forms appear to float along the gallery walls.<\/p>\n

Sitting in the darkened space, surrounded by the neon glow playing off the walls and reflective floor, is an intensely visual experience. According to the artist, that was his intention\u2014to \u201cconnect with people in real, immediate, kinetic and spatial ways.\u201d There is no message, other than the realization of a sensory response to the luminous surroundings. In other words, Proscenium<\/em> is not a neon sign but an optical signal that stimulates inner awareness of what Antonakos called \u201ca more intense, heightened kind of experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Proscenium<\/em> and its companion show of neon works by eleven other artists, including Ligon, Chryssa, Emin and Sonnier, will be on view through June 24.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joseph Cornell\u2019s Obsession<\/strong><\/p>\n

3-22-18<\/p>\n

\"\"
Juan Gris (1887\u20131927), The Man at the Caf\u00e9,<\/em> 1914. Oil and newsprint collage on canvas 39 \u00d7 28 1\/4 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection.\u00a0<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In October 1953, Joseph Cornell went to see an exhibition of modern paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery on 57th<\/sup> Street. One painting in particular caught his eye. He was so entranced by The Man at the Caf\u00e9,<\/em> a 1914 canvas by Juan Gris, that over the next thirteen years he made twenty-one homages to it\u2014eighteen of his famous boxes, two collages, and one sand tray. (His sand trays are shallow boxes containing loose sand, shells and other objects, displayed flat. One wonders whether he got the idea for such constructions on his frequent visits to his sister in Westhampton, where he often walked along the shore.) According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the Gris painting and twelve of Cornell\u2019s related boxes are on view through April 15, this is the largest number of works he dedicated to any of the luminaries he admired, including notable figures in the literary, performing and visual arts, from long-dead French poets to glamorous movie stars.<\/p>\n

Cornell recorded his wide-ranging enthusiasms in diaries and correspondence with friends, selections of which were published in 1993. Several entries note his continuing obsession with the Gris, which depicts a faceted dissection of a man, wearing a brimmed hat, seated at a table and reading a newspaper, who casts his shadow on the wall behind him. It includes a collaged piece of real newspaper and faux wood graining on the wall and tabletop, as well as impastoed white paint pock-marked to indicate the foam on the man\u2019s beer. The painting is part of Leonard A. Lauder\u2019s treasure trove of Cubist masterworks, a promised gift to the Met, and it\u2019s included to show just what it was that inspired Cornell.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Joseph Cornell (1903\u20131972) Grand H\u00f4tel Bon Port<\/em>, late 1950s. Box construction, 17 1\/2 \u00d7 10 1\/4 \u00d7 4 inches. Private collection \u00a9 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation\/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The earliest Gris-themed boxes date immediately after Cornell\u2019s encounter with the painting and incorporate direct references to some of its essential elements. The shadow cast by the man\u2019s figure, the faux wood-grain surfaces, and the newspaper\u2019s headline in French are all echoed in one of the first, Homage to Juan Gris,<\/em> 1953-54. Instead of a man, however, the central figure is a perching cockatoo, referencing Cornell\u2019s longstanding fascination with birds. His aviary boxes are like taxidermy display cases\u2014though the birds are cutout reproductions, not stuffed specimens\u2014in which each is given a unique habitat filled with clues to its symbolic meaning. The backgrounds are often papered with pages from French textbooks, hotel stationery, and other printed matter that reflects Gris\u2019 residency in Paris. The use of letterhead from L\u2019H\u00f4tel d\u2019Etoile could also be a way of acknowledging Gris\u2019s status as the star of the show, and the bird itself may represent the creative freedom that Cornell perceived in the Spanish artist\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

That Cornell considered Gris a kindred spirit is evident, both in his statements and his efforts to express his admiration through these miniature enchanted environments. Some were made right away, others were started, then set aside and revisited years later. Le D\u00e9juner de Kakatous,<\/em> for example, was begun in 1959 and finished in 1966. It incorporates collaged fragments of a Gris painting cut from one of Cornell\u2019s art books, which are displayed in a separate case. These artifacts are just a small sampling of the myriad of raw material he collected for his art, the way a magpie picks up odds and ends for its nest. He wasn\u2019t a hoarder, but rather a sorcerer who could transform the most mundane objects into intriguing tableaux by working his magic on them.<\/p>\n

After several years\u2019 hiatus from his Gris obsession, on December 19, 1959 Cornell wrote in his diary of a renewed interest, perhaps due in part to the major Gris retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the previous year but more directly sparked by reading John Golding\u2019s book on Cubism. \u201cWhat an unfoldment\u2014the new color<\/u> of Juan Gris,\u201d he wrote, \u201cplus box just this week lifted from doldrums with new blues (cloud shape of cockatoo).\u201d Could this be Grand H\u00f4tel Bon Port,<\/em> dated to the late 1950s and notable for its silhouette of the white bird against a collage of a cloud-flecked blue sky? This diary snippet illustrates the artist\u2019s love of wordplay\u2014\u201cblues\u201d meaning both doldrums and colors\u2014and its visual analogy, in which the bird becomes a cloud-like floating form. Or perhaps, per a later diary note, Grand H\u00f4tel Bon Port<\/em> is the \u201cnew Gris done on Xmas day especially as related to day after Xmas\u2014early morning experience,\u201d since the entry also mentions \u201cthe touch of orange\u201d that we see in the French postage stamp. As with all of Cornell\u2019s work, the viewer is invited to follow the clues wherever they may lead.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tennessee Williams, Troubled Genius<\/strong><\/p>\n

2-22-18<\/p>\n

Sunday will be the 35th<\/sup> anniversary of the death, in 1983, of Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams, one of America\u2019s greatest 20th<\/sup> century dramatists. His career is being celebrated in a revealing exhibition, \u201cTennessee Williams: No Refuge but Writing,\u201d on view through May 13 at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan. It takes its title from a 1981 statement by the author, who wrote almost compulsively, as if it protected him from his demons. \u201cI try to work every day,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause you have no refuge but writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Tennessee Williams, Self-Portrait,<\/em> undated (ca.1939). Oil on canvas. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Used with permission of George Borchardt, Inc.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In addition to his full-length and one-act plays, Williams wrote short stories, poetry, essays, screenplays, novels and a memoir, and kept a journal that he mined for ideas. As the exhibition shows, he often re-worked material, transferring characters and situations from one genre to another. He was also a visual artist, though his oil paintings and watercolors are, to put it generously, not up to the level of his writing, as you can see in his self-portrait from about 1939. The following year, his first staged production, \u201cBattle of Angels,\u201d closed in Boston after being panned by the critics. Four years later, however, \u201cThe Glass Menagerie,\u201d with characters based on Williams\u2019 controlling mother and schizophrenic sister, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the season and his career was launched. For the next 20 years his plays dominated Broadway, earning him rave reviews, two Pulitzer Prizes, and a Tony Award.<\/p>\n

The show focuses on several of Williams\u2019 most famous theatrical works, but it ranges widely across the literary and personal history of a complicated, driven, self-destructive genius whose own conflicts supplied his dramatic material. While he denied using specific autobiographical events, he acknowledged that his work reflected his emotional currents. Elia Kazan, who directed several of his plays, once remarked that \u201ceverything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example close to home. In 1957 Williams visited Larry Rivers in Southampton, and they went out to dinner at the Tucker Mill Inn, the former Claflin mansion on what is now the Stony Brook Southampton campus. The windmill on the grounds was used as a guesthouse, and Williams decided to rent it for the summer. While there, he began work on a one-act play, \u201cThe Day On Which A Man Dies,\u201d loosely based on the character of Jackson Pollock, whom he knew from summers in Provincetown in the early 1940s. Pollock\u2014another troubled, self-destructive genius\u2014had died in a car crash the previous summer, and Williams, who had once tried to kill himself that way, considered the artist\u2019s death to be a suicide. Using his own experience and psychic state as springboards, he eventually created a highly stylized drama about a suicidal painter, based on Noh form, a tradition to which he was introduced on a trip to Japan in 1959.<\/p>\n

The play was set aside and remained unknown for decades, though Williams adapted some of the material for his 1969 production, \u201cIn the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,\u201d which flopped on Broadway. After his death it was discovered among his literary effects, and was first staged in Chicago in 2008, after which the Pollock-Krasner House presented it at the Ross School, in conjunction with our 2009 Japanese Gutai exhibition. Its action, which includes full-body painting and the penetration of a paper wall, echoes the Gutai practices that were illustrated in the exhibition.<\/p>\n

But \u201cThe Day On Which A Man Dies\u201d is not one of the Williams works featured in the Morgan show, so why am I writing about it? The reason is the current production of \u201cPollock,\u201d a one-acter by the French playwright Fabrice Melquiot, on through Sunday at the Henry Street Settlement\u2019s Abrons Arts Center. Having seen \u201cPollock\u201d immediately after the Morgan show, I couldn\u2019t help but compare it to Williams\u2019 daring experimental drama, which supplements incisive dialogue with creatively manipulated color and movement to explore complex emotional territory. \u201cPollock,\u201d on the other hand, is a clich\u00e9-ridden, one-dimensional portrait of his marriage to Lee Krasner, ninety minutes of foul-mouthed conflict with no nuances or ultimate resolution. Entire sections of dialogue are lifted almost verbatim, and without credit, from Naifeh and Smith\u2019s Pollock biography. To sum it up, as a playwright Melquiot is to Williams as Williams the self-portrait painter is to Rembrandt.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Hockney\u2019s Progress\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

1-25-18<\/p>\n

To say that David Hockney has been around is putting it mildly. His peripatetic life and personal experiences in Europe, Asia, and the United States, where he has lived on an off for half a century, have been the sum and substance of his work since his days at London\u2019s Royal College of Art. The chronicles of those public and private journeys are now on display in \u201cDavid Hockney,\u201d an exhibition that commemorates the artist\u2019s 80th<\/sup> birthday, on view through February 25 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

Misleadingly described in the Met\u2019s media release as a major retrospective, the exhibition is far from a complete survey of Hockney\u2019s long and illustrious career. It neglects his illustrated books and prints, such as A Rake\u2019s Progress,<\/em> his suite of 16 autobiographical etchings inspired by William Hogarth, which made a great stir in the early 1960s with its faux na\u00efve style and explicit homoerotic content. It also ignores his theater d\u00e9cor. Nevertheless, it spans the full six decades of his work, from 1960-2017, and shows both his versatility and his virtuosity as a painter, draftsman, photographer and experimenter with visual technology.<\/p>\n

\"\"
David Hockney, A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden,<\/em> 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 96″ (shaped). \u00a9 David Hockney<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Looking at Hockney\u2019s colorful, decorative canvases of the past 20 years, especially his homages to the lush tropical garden and brightly painted woodwork of his home in the Hollywood Hills, it\u2019s easy to forget how transgressive his early work was. The first gallery offers a sampling of paintings from his student days that illustrate his precocious sophistication. They include motifs from popular culture\u2014proto Pop art, if you like\u2014and graffiti, expressed in an idiom that synthesizes gestural abstraction and cartoon-like stylization. Witty renderings of consumer products, from a packet of his mum\u2019s favorite Ty-Phoo tea, incongruously inhabited by a nude male figure, to Colgate toothpaste tubes as phallic symbols, the imaginative flights of fancy delve deep into the artist\u2019s gay psyche. Homosexuality was not decriminalized in Britain until 1967, so such imagery was daring, not to say shocking, outside the hidden world of the gay subculture.<\/p>\n

Hockney\u2019s frank depictions of homosexual themes were to some degree made more palatable by the deliberately primitive way he rendered them. Simplified forms, flattened perspective and a crude drawing style made them seem somehow guileless, like the honesty of a child blurting out uncomfortable truths in public. In his California paintings from the following decade, for example, this approach gives his pictures of naked men showering or displaying themselves provocatively an emotional distance, a coolness that blunts their eroticism. Many of the later 1960s and \u201970s canvases further explore this idea of detachment, especially the double portraits of intimates, who seem more apart than together. Others are literally composed of detached motifs, like Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians,<\/em> a montage of images\u2014or maybe imaginings is a better term\u2014inspired by trips to the American Southwest and Switzerland.<\/p>\n

If anyone thinks that Hockney\u2019s reductive draftsmanship indicates a lack of skill, a wall of his drawings dispels that notion. He could draw like Ingres if he chose to, as we see in his sensitive character studies from life, including W.H. Auden, Andy Warhol, John Kasmin and the artist\u2019s parents. Three of the drawings were made in 1999 with the aid of a camera lucida<\/a><\/span>, an apparatus that reflects an image onto the surface on which the artist works. Hockney\u2019s fascination with mechanical visual aids is well known. His admirable open-mindedness and curiosity has led to interesting experiments with various devices, such as the Polaroid camera and the iPad, both of which are represented here by successful examples. The camera lucida drawings, however, are failures, lacking the vitality and immediacy of his earlier, more spontaneous works on paper.<\/p>\n

Unlike the titular character in Hogarth\u2019s A Rake\u2019s Progress,<\/em> Hockney has gone from strength to strength. From his early success as a leader of the generation of British artists whose brash irreverence was the visual-art counterpart of the Beatles, to his recent iPad drawings, shown as a three-panel animation that channels Matisse in the digital age, his powers of invention and adaptation seem inexhaustible. If some of his detours, like the silly so-called \u201cV.N.\u201d paintings and garish 1990s landscapes, have led him off course, he quickly gets back on track by returning to the California of his dreams and his reality. Yes, it\u2019s eye candy, but how sweet it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My \u201cEye On Art\u201d column appears monthly in the\u00a0Sag Harbor Express   \u201cMonsters and Myths\u201d in Hartford\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 12-27-18 Salvador Dal\u00ed once remarked that, \u201caccording to Nostradamus the apparition of monsters presages the outbreak of war.\u201d For Dal\u00ed and his fellow Surrealists, however, the demons they conjured were not only premonitions but also reflections of past … Continue reading Eye on Art – 2018<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":12,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page_1_column_wide.php","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-797","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/797\/revisions\/861"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}