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.
A Look Into Louise Bourgeois' Thoughts
The thought of our innermost dreams and secrets revealed to the world even if we are long dead is petrifying. Diaries and letters however, are the stuff of biography.
Louise Bourgeois, currently the subject of a fascinating deposit of her lifelong hand-written and typed journal entries and other loose sheets of tormented musings at the Jewish Museum in the exhibition Freud's Daughter, transformed her dreams and fears into concrete objects, also on view. Curator Philip Larratt-Smith writes in a dense essay that these two efforts of the talented 33 year long (!) analysand were parallel but came from the same wellspring of despair over her tortured relation to her father, her lack of artistic production (she stopped working entirely for 5 years), her jealousies of her husband's career, her inept feelings of motherhood, and consequent suicidal tendencies.
In English (her psychoanalysis was in NY) and in French, often within the same sentence, Bourgeois parses her life, a "dangerous passage", trying to give form to what we all know to be formless: fear, despair, at 2:30 am , with "no plans, no hope, no interests, as oscillating as a feuille de mimosa". Her convoluted stacks and cratered circles, pendulous balls and tetraploid spiders find their home in the writing. But these terrorized, depressed writings are also shown themselves to be works of art.
Previous retrospectives of Bourgeois's work did not tackle head-on this darker but defining aspect of her career. It's tough stuff but riveting. I have only read the catalog, but the reveal of such personal material is often startling.
Hysterical , 2001, The Easton Foundation, (ARS) Photo: Christopher Burke
Artists as Icons
The undisputed star of The Jewish Museum’s exhibition Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine, a discursive look at the influence of emigres and outsiders on the commercial design and graphics world of the 30s-50's, is Helen Frankenthaler in this vibrant image by Gordon Parks. Though images of beautiful Vogue models and actors like Gloria Swanson and Marlene Dietrich are also displayed, it is Frankenthaler amidst her canvases who steals the show. Frankenthaler will also be part of a new series for Amazon based on the wonderful history Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel shepherded by lauded show-runner Amy Sherman-Palladino. Who said artists couldn't also be icons?