Domenico Gnoli certainly slipped under my radar until now though I’m reminded that there was a small show at Luxembourg Dayan. There are so many aspects to his career. Here this diminutive painting reminded me of De Chirico but Gnoli’s career spanned multiple artistic domains and he cannot be pigeonholed. There is a whiff of a craggy Burri but also Toulouse Lautrec, Paul Klee, Fornasetti and even a bit of Where’s Waldo.
The utterly flat canvases with meticulous painterly stripes and patterns present unbelievable detail and belie the diminutive sandy paint and mini impasto. They are not at all cold though despite their technical perfection and instead as if lurking there under the tie or the cuff or the blanket or the zipper or collar there is something waiting to be undone, the restrained, refined exterior masking passion. Hyper realism but not as you traditionally think of it in the marks for the frets of a zipper or the wale of corduroy or fake fur
The architectural motifs and and scenic designs are whimsical like Bemelmans but something else again. All in all a feast for the eyes.
A Juxtaposition That Doesn't Quite Work
Normally, Antonio Canova’s sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte as Venus is flanked by some diminutive Roman sculptures behind her. Not now. For some inexplicable reason- or the latest misbegotten attempt to bring in a wider population—the Galleria Borghese in Rome has invited Damien Hirst to put his work throughout the galleries in a counterpoint. Who ever thought that the ever and already fabulous Galleria Borghese needed updating? Hirst is the Emperor’s Old Clothes, and here instead we have some real Emperors of art and history. What?!!! There is already hardly a ticket booking to be had at the Galleria and Covid isn’t even over. Sometimes the interspersion of modern arts into antiquity can work ( the nearby Galleria Nazionale d’arte Moderna does a splendid job of a likeminded juxtaposition). Save us from this plague of impoverished confidence in your collections museum curators and directors.
The Italian First Feminists
Though they are not as well known, the Italian first wave feminists were busy fighting the repression of Mussolini and the restrictive, male society of pre war Italy. As usual ahead of the pack were the artists. This rousing declaration by Marinetti who had penned so many of the Futurist tracts only one of many efforts. If you were going to be as fast as a train or a car you better have a woman be out front. Benedetta Cappa an artist and his wife who resented the misogyny of even the fellow futurists said, “I am too free and rebellious…I do not want to be restricted. I only want to be me”.
Rest in Peace, Manuel Neri
Very sad news: Manuel Neri, the essential and only sculptor of the Bay Area figurative movement, son of Mexican farm workers, influenced by Gen 1 ( Park, Diebenkorn, Oliviera, Bischoff, Weeks) but his own man, husband ( of Joan Brown in early years), roommates with Jay de Feo even earlier, father ( of Ruby Neri) later, has died at 91.
A student of Peter Voulkos, Neri traveled throughout the US with Billy Al Bengston ( what a trip that must have been), was the first person to organize a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, was into Funk art, antiquity and color. He left the figure for a while, explored anew abstraction, got into minimalism, returned to the figure. He mostly devoted himself to the female figure. “I wanted an image that expressed all of mankind and for me the female does that.”
This is a rare painting, Nude Model with Bischoff Painting , 1958, before he had fully given over to sculpture. Don’t you agree he could have gone either way?
A Stolen Self-Portrait
A friend of Manet’s, Henri Fantin-Latour, painted himself in 1861 as an unchained melody, a wild boho getting into scrapes. He looks even downright dishonorable.
Despite the subject’s raffish quality, the work was appropriated aka stolen by the Nazis from the David-Weill collection in France along with others but made its way back post war only after stops in Austrian and Munich Nazi collection points.
The Jewish Museum tracks the long and winding road to repatriation for this and other beautiful works.
Yet the most haunting element in the exhibition Afterlives was a series of photographs of the collection points with thousands of stolen works and then the veritable factories of refugees who painstakingly pieced the objects and their histories back together.
The Original Model
Not long after Edouard Manet painted this portrait of Victorine Meurent (1866), a favored model who had also inhabited the bold Olympia and the alluring woman in Luncheon on the Grass, it was purchased for the Met in 1889. (Sorry for the slight crop)
Here, though in a chaste white dressing gown and elegant upright pose, she still emits a sense of mystery.
The Met notes recent scholars have interpreted it as an allegory of the 5 senses:
Parrot =hearing
Nosegay=smell
Orange=taste
Monocle=sight and touch
But even without that deeper dive, we see that this is a woman who is self aware and comfortable in her own skin, naked or clothed. In her case, the famous male gaze is met in kind.
Melding Fantasy into the Everyday
I love this image from the series La Divina, 1968, by Cecila Porras and Enrique Grau, discoveries for me in the Met's comprehensive Surrealism Without Borders.
This pair grazed in film and experimental photography only to eventually retreat separately back into painting and sculpture. But while they were together, they put a Columbian version of Surrealism on the map.
Porras was an outlier--a female among the very macho scene in Cartagena in the 50s. She too began in self-portraiture like Maya Deren and Claude Cahun. She was daring, wearing wigs and dressing up, melding "fantasy with the everyday". The film stills on view are like Godard's Le Mepris, sophisticated, but alienated, as women in white climb a set of ancient stairs.
Porras as La Divina reminds me of Ana Mendieta, scooped up in dirt and leaves and driftwood on the beach, grounded but soaring. Porras doesn’t even have a hashtag so to see the mansplaining spread of surrealism turned on its head is welcome.
Claude Cahun Was Ahead of Her Time
Claude Cahun was a 'they' before there existed such a term. Fluid both in her sexuality and her art practice (photography, sculpture, writing, theater), she was a precursor to those like Maya Deren who refused to pinned down by labels. Like Cindy Sherman and the Countess de Castiglione, she adopted self portraiture as a method for getting at gender and desire, the female gaze and the role of the viewer.
She was also a political activist and resistance worker during the war. She and her lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe a/k/a Marcel Moore found their own way of shaking up the system.
This self portrait, Kneeling Naked, with Mask, 1928, was in the vein of the many classical avatars she adopted like pierrot, vamp or dandy. Cahun wasn't really recognized for her work until the 80s (she died in 1945) and today, it feels even more prescient.
Maya Deren Carved Her Own Path
This is Maya Deren, the artist who transcended boundaries, friends with Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, but who very much went her own way. Born in the Ukraine, she lived in the US as a child and teenager when her parents emigrated, then went to Smith, NY and LA. She danced (for Katherine Dunham), she made films (which were very influential), she wrote, she was very much a part of the avant garde.
This still from her 1944 film, At Land, part of the Met's Surrealism Without Borders exhibition, captures some of her moxie. It was filmed in Amagansett. It's subtext drifts with the sand and sea around the notion of depaysement, or homelessness. She did not like to be lumped in with the Surrealists but she understood she shared some of their concerns around poetic and dream states.
Deren died at 44 in 1961 from a brain hemorrhage. She became addicted to the infamous Dr. Max Jacobson's speed and had more or less stopped eating.
Lee Krasner's Life Went On
Detail, The Seasons, 1957, Lee Krasner. This painting is the one I always used to visit in its hideaway nook behind the convoluted first addition to the Whitney Breuer. I would make my way down the confusing split level stairway to commune with it. Somehow it’s punch was even more affecting in this smaller space than it is on a more expansive wall in Renzo Piano’s Whitney 2.0. Though Krasner was technically an Abstractionist, in this work I saw figures and elements of nature, even a woman confronting the death of her husband Jackson Pollock’s death a year after he died in the auto crash. She seemed to be trying to get on with it with its brilliant shoots of green and pink and renewed life bursting everywhere . I think of it as a happy painting. She said, “The question came up whether one would continue painting at all and I guess this was my answer.”
Thick As Handsome Thieves
This is Jasper Johns as photographed by Robert Rauschenberg in 1958 when they were thick as young handsome thieves. The early Target painting is just behind. The Johns show is vast at the Whitney and the idea that there is much more at the Philadelphia museum is daunting. He has been prolific, cycled through many investigations of paint and subject - to call them styles would be reductive. It’s impressive and gave me a very expanded view of his career.
An Artistic Trip To Krakow
Don’t know where to begin to describe revelatory exhibit of Erna Rosenstein’s debut at Hauser & Wirth uptown. The Polish artist who was born in 1913 became an ardent radical, survived the murder of her parents during the war ( how did she escape death?) and went on to participate in the rise of the Krakow Group artists collective, making luscious both abstract and figurative work. Juxtaposing her works of alchemy, fairy tales and magic cabinets, this rich show is transporting.
Joan Brown Was Inspired By Her Personal Life
This painting of Joan Brown’s, Noel in the Kitchen from 1964 shows her early concentration on subjects more domestic and personal than her other Bay Area figurative colleagues and mentors. This is her son Noel reaching toward the counter as his pjs slip away surrounded by two dogs as big as he is. Brown and Manuel Neri were in the midst of family life and the excitement of their work which in Brown’s case extended to thick impasto. “I loved what happened when I was using the trowel…the physical exuberance of just whipping through it with a giant brush”
Joan Mitchell Stood Out Even As A Young Artist
I had written about two shows at SF MoMA that I hadn’t been able to see due to pandemic. Finally I got to see them. Though I had been deep into the Joan Mitchell archive and bio this summer, I was still unprepared for the riotous color and wild abandon of the work and its very emotional effect. One photo of Mitchell (far right) with other members of the Saddle and Cycle club in Chicago of 1935 when she was only 10 years old reminded me that even as she declared for poetry or painting at an early age, her autocratic father, though determined she should be exposed to art, had pushed her towards more socially acceptable pursuits like riding and ice skating. In this colorized photo that appeared in the local paper, Mitchell already stands out with her slouchy pose and ubiquitous glasses. All eyes are on her.
Diego Rivera's Art in Action
The WPA was not the only entity commissioning work. The Art in Action program hosted by the 1940 season of the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in the SF Bay invited Diego Rivera to design a mural for the SF City College. As in his mural for Rockefeller Center, Rivera’s politics got in the way until 1961 when it was finally installed in the college’s performing arts center. Now it is newly installed SF MoMA and though I had seen the install in progress the wow factor is all the more thrilling as it’s now complete. It is in impeccable condition and it takes the handy guide they have prepared to really dial in on the many referents to the topic of unity. Frieda Kahlo is front and center. She was with Rivera in SF while he was working finding her way in her own work. It is a masterpiece-a marriage of art and life. (That’s Paulette Goddard wife of Chaplin holding hands with Rivera practically under Frieda’s nose in the third panel. Pan American unity he said👀)
Pino Janni Finds Beauty in the Trades
The Venetian artist Pino Janni came to the US and worked under the WPA program as so many artists did when times were tough. It was a wildly successful enterprise and accepted immigrants along with native born citizens. Artists were workers and their trades were art and architecture, theater, writing. They were encouraged to portray the American scene. Much of their work was destined for federal buildings like post offices. More than 5000 artists created 225,000 works of art many of which are still extant. (Alice Neel’s early work was part of this program) They found beauty in the everyday.
Manet's Dance in Spain
In the late 19th century in Paris, Spain and dancing became two subjects that fascinated artists and especially the work of Velasquez, which they began to see at the Louvre. His lights and darks and rendering of real characters captivated them.
This work, Lola de Valence, now in the Musee d'Orsay, was painted in Manet's Spanish Year, 1862, when all of his favorite models were rendered a l'espagnole. (The Luncheon on the Grass, soon after, was to take it all off!)
Manet did not visit Spain until 1965. And then his work became even more imbued with Velasquez. But Victor Hugo had written Hernani, set in Spain. Delacroix had already been. When Manet finally got to Spain, to the Prado, his obsession with Velasquez was confirmed. He wrote to Baudelaire telling him he thought he was the 'greatest artist there had ever been...I discovered in his work the fulfillment of my own ideals....and the sight of these masterpieces gave me enormous courage and hope. " Baudelaire, in turn, wrote this:
Lola de Valence
Entre tant de beautés que partout on peut voir, Je contemple bien, amis, que le désir balance; Mais on voit scintiller en Lola de Valence Le charme inattendu d’un bijou rose et noir.
— Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (1868)
Among such beauties as one can see everywhere I understand, my friends, that desire hesitates; But one sees sparkling in Lola of Valencia The unexpected charm of a black and rose jewel.
John Singer Sargent Inspires Fire With la Carmencita
Though she is not on view at the Met right now, La Carmencita, another enchanting flamenca from John Singer Sargent in 1890, sits in a postcard on my desk, daring me each morning to greet the day with fiery resolve. In my view she is infinitely more elegant and compelling than most on the red carpet last night
The Met says Sargent may have encountered her at the 1899 Expo in Paris, which was so important to art and to engineering. He apparently was utterly captivated and called her a "bewildering superb creature". She came to NY the following year and 'took New York by storm’".
She was a 'restless and demanding sitter' which makes sense: flamenco dancers are happiest when they are dancing a solea or buleria. He made many studies of her dancing, but then opted to portray her in a stationary pose.
It seems that critics were divided-how dare he represent "a common music hall performer in such a monumental way."
Though her face is rendered quite white, she is not as blanched as Madame X, who was to come a few years later, but her arrogant, frontal look is more daring than Madame X’s who although was upper class and dressed more revealingly is turned away from the artist as if to hedge his, and her, bets.
Gardner Chases After Sargent
This painting by John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882, launches a week of dance images-specifically flamenco-just because I study it and have been missing the esprit de corps of the classroom.
Isabella Stewart Gardner had been introduced to Sargent by Henry James (talk about networking). She loved his work and he even painted for a time in the museum. They were fierce correspondents and when he was in Boston they took in culture together.
Sargent was passionate about Spain, and about music-he was a talented musician himself-and about flamenco in particular. He revered Velasquez. Sargent gave Gardner a series of flamenco albums which she rated. (I need to find out if she also danced!)
As soon as she saw this painting, she wanted it. In remodeling her museum in 1914, she built a Moorish niche and when her in-law by marriage, T Jefferson Coolidge, who owned the painting, saw the space he gave her the painting on the spot.
Sargent captured the vibrant, complex interchange between the dancer and singers--el jaleo. It is very tricky to learn this art of clapping and call and response. Two years later he would paint Madame X.
Pipilotti Brings Big Heartedness
Hold on tight! Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor is (a bit belatedly but so what) arriving in LA. Perfect timing I’d say. Not your much more chaste MoMA show of a few years back. This MOCA/Geffen Contemporary joyride is the non-Van Gogh immersive experience a/k/a the real show-stopping funkadelic- psychedelic deal. Also not quite the Mr Rogers hood. The Geffen couldn’t be better, the installs of videos, supersized furniture, domesticity-gone-wild in an ideal setting. Here’s Pippi herself at the check in to her version of home- the very space we need right now to get out of our own cocoon to hers -a dizzying dissolution of boundaries. She’s seeking “the semi private semi public spaces, the weeds and cracks” according to curator Anna Katz. MOCA has been in a very tough place with its directors and curators coming and going but let’s give them a cheer for bringing Pipilotti and a grin.