Violin Stories: I first saw this lovely painting Girl with Violin from 1928. by Antonietta Raphael in Lucia Re's Magazzino Museum lecture on Italian art couples (see yesterday's post).
Raphael had been a serious student of music by way of London and Paris, but she returned to Rome to attend art school and met her lifelong partner Mario Mafai with whom she had three talented daughters. She was a sculptor and painter, and the center of a free spirited group which prized naturalism.
Then last night, in harmonic convergence I stumbled on two films via Kanopy (if you don't know this free film service from your local library now you do) which had music and love at their centers.
Un Coeur En Hiver (A Heart in Winter) is the story of the love triangle between a young and beautiful violinist (Emmanuelle Beart), her older lover, and his business partner (Daniel Auteuil) in a violin fabrication and repair shop. But that is not really the subject. The subject is love and freedom.
Then I saw Pure, with a very young Alicia Vikander in her film debut playing a n'er do well, violent young woman who falls in love with Mozart, then procures a job as a receptionist at the symphony. She has a wild affair with the married conductor who then abandons her. Much trouble and many reversals ensue.
All this against the backdrop of live music returning to the Hollywood Bowl this week, where Gustavo Dudamel is conducting a series for front line workers. Gustavo is leaving at least partially for Paris--I don't blame him. The news today that Europe is reopening very soon has lifted my heart.
Italian Art Under The Radar
What may have slipped under the radar is a splendid four part lecture series, Arte Povera: Art of Collaboration, from Magazzino Italian Art Museum just up the Hudson River from NYC which continues to provide fascinating behind-the-scenes scholarship about known and lesser known Italian artists, writers and thinkers.
The first quiet effort by Lucia Re, a professor at UCLA who made me want to go back to school, focused on creative couples (mostly Italian) who fed off each others work (not just Arte Povera) I did not know of some of these enduring partnerships, many of which did not follow the mold of mentor and muse, but where the two lovers seem equally obsessed and reverent.
Included were Eleanor Duse and Gabriele D'Annunzio, Marta Abba and Luigi Pirandello, Benedetta and Marinetti, Antonietta Raphael and Mario Mafai, Lucia and William Demby, among others. Re makes sure to note that some of these women have been more obscured.
Pictured are Futurists Benedetta and Marinetti. More on them and on the Magazzino series in coming days.
Liz Larner Brings Awareness
Liz Larner is also very good at making us notice things. Her new piece Meerschaum Drift at Regen Projects as part of her When Stars and Seas Collide show reminded me of a beach I once visited at the vortex of the Gulf of Mexico and ocean waters. Almost like a magnet, the shoreline seemed to pull every piece of plastic detritus that was in a 50 mile radius. Discarded plastic containers of all kinds, tires, flotsam and jetsam were not well organized the way Larner’s plastic bottles are, and the lurching sensation I had in my stomach lasted all day. The owners apparently never bothered to clean it up because tons would just reappear the next day. Every time I use anything in plastic now—which is seemingly everything sold— I feel guilty. I’ve begun looking for only glass or paper storage. But hardly anything is now stored that way. Remember The Graduate and Mr Robinson’s famous advice for Benjamin-the Dustin Hoffman character- to go into ‘plastics’ ? That was only in 1967.
Judy Chicago and Feminist Art
Judy Chicago was a leader and a forerunner of feminist art in the US. Searching through the Archives of American Art this week for something else, I stumbled upon this 1977 manifesto she wrote as part of the programming she devised for the Los Angeles Women's Building (largely the subject of the historic exhibition WACK at MoCA some years back).
It's hard to wrap our minds around anything today but the looming civil war in the middle east or the CDC's no mask or Columbia's resurgence of violence or the premiere of Barry Jenkins adaptation of The Underground Railroad.
But Chicago's posit "that the basis of our culture is grounded in a pernicious fallacy which causes us to believe that alienation is the human condition and real human contact unattainable..."sounded like it could apply to all of the above and is not a truism in any way relegated only to feminist art.
Dreams of Ghost Forest
Very much missing Ghost Forest, Maya Lin's new installation of 49 at risk trees from the Pine Barrens installed in Madison Square Park. Lin has a longstanding practice capturing the evanescence of things from her Vietnam War Memorial to her rolling hills in Storm King to her website whatismissing.org which tracks global climate events. Though her practice is theoretically subdivided into art/architecture/memory, to me, her projects all speak to the fleeting nature of life. She helps us to notice things
Lin has just opened her new library at Smith College after a rocky year suddenly losing her very talented husband Daniel Wolf so this theme has particular personal resonance right now. There are many Maya's Ghosts. The trees are there for 6 months so I hope to catch them before they too slip into the climate ether.
Here in California, you only have to drive a slight way out of any city to see the effects of climate change in situ. The blackened glades and forests and the devastation of our recent wildfires-even with new growth peeking out from under-is a constant reminder of what peril we are in.
Image by Andy Romer courtesy Madison Square Park Conservancy
Max Ernst, Francis Bacon and The Femme Fatale
In a Zoom offered by the Peggy Guggenheim collection this week on The Femme Fatale--first of three in a series on Myths, Muses and Models--this painting by Max Ernst was discussed, especially as an echo of a da Vinci at the Louvre, the Madonna and Saint Anne, and around its sexual implications (pre-Dorothea Tanning, first marriage). This is early Ernst, the Surrealist Ernst, before he came into his own, later more craggy style.
But to me, this work jumped out as a precursor to Francis Bacon. The erotic imagery felt so much like one of Bacon's central, torqued, tortured figures in a brilliant, empty background. I look forward to reading the new Bacon biography to see if he actually had the chance to see this work.
Max Ernst, The Kiss, 1927, Peggy Guggenheim Collection
A Dreamy Hannah Hoch Goes Up For Auction
This beautiful photomontage In the Desert (1927-9) by Hannah Hoch popped up from Christies this morning in an online auction from Amsterdam. I wish I had the 40-60 thousand Euros to bid as it's very special. Hoch was originally part of the Berlin Dada movement but then went her own more dreamy way.
These two big phallic looking things: they are meant to be Zeppelins! The horse slash dinosaur thing and the scarab scrambling around the parched earth are endearing. It's been exhibited at MoMA and other museums (just recently I saw another striking Hoch online at MoMA which is not on exhibit).
Hoch was a feminist and a lesbian at a time when that was rugged and she was apparently marginalized by her Berlin colleagues. At the time of this work, she was living more openly in Holland with a woman, and able to be freer, more expressive and indeed surrealist. She was part of the New Woman movement and wished to explore a deeper connection to her own ethnographic concerns.
In der Wuste, part of the Dr. Abigail von Maur collection, online auction at Christies.
Lucian Freud's Haunting Self-Portrait
This 1946 painting by Lucian Freud from the Tate was on view at the Getty when I saw it as part of their marvelous London Calling show in 2016. Now that I am deep into Vol 2 of William Feaver’s exhaustive—and sometimes exhausting—life of Freud, I realize that although he is known for his craggy, let-it-all-hang-out later work of nudes of all shapes and sizes, it is the early work that has the most resonance for me. Look at the suspicious, unsettling glance in this self portrait and the surrealist thistle that only enhances the prickly nature of the ensemble. I’m feeling a bit like this. Though Covid precautions are waning, I’m wary of the next months. I long to travel to see this again in London in its permanent home.
Waitress Breasts from the Getty
In an entirely different, more empowering, and certainly more amusing take on the Breast, the Getty has showcased Anne Gauldin's latex molds of thirteen breasts sewn into a pink 50's style waitress uniform.
Gauldin was apparently en route to grad school in New York when she hooked up with the Woman's Building in LA (this archive is at the Getty, and was the partial subject of WACK, a wonderful show at MoCA some years back), the Judy Chicago and sisters project which was the epicenter of rebellion against the male dominated art world.
The Waitresses became a performance art group which eventually had 14 members. Cofounder Jerri Allyn remembers the art school biases against women and says, ", nobody wanted to hear that I was waitressing my way through art school and that I felt like a piece of meat.”
This terrific dress tells a different tale--not just your little black dress. The team at Getty is working on conserving the fragile item--just as in real life, the breasts are sagging, discolored, and has traces of the women who wore it. I love that about it. It tells a story about us, one that we are telling ourselves.
Ready to Order? 1978, The Waitresses. Photo: Maria Karras. The Getty Research Institute, 2017.M.45. Gift of Jerri Allyn and Anne Gauldin, The Waitresses
The Idol of Perversity
I did not know of the work of Jean Delville. I first saw this image, The Idol of Perversity of 1891, from a private collection, in a show at the Guggenheim some years back. It's Women's History Month, and in the wake of new turmoil in the wake of Allen v Farrow and Cuomo et al, it's worth tracing some of the history of why the stories of women might be devalued.
Delville, a Belgian painter seems to have cycled through numerous painting styles, theories, and groups as he transformed from a rigorous believer in the Beaux Arts tradition of classicism to Symbolism, spiritualism and Theosophy.
The femme fatale, according to the Guggenheim wall label, "incarnated the misogynistic, pseudoscientific views of the late nineteenth century that women were lower beings on the evolutionary scale." Women were closer to animals then men, and so the fatale was more of a beast--and an aggressively sexual one at that-- than a human. Check out the snake that slithers between her pointy breasts. This was no woman but rather a temptress, all the way back to Eve, who served to corrupt and defile.
Think about it: Manet had already painted the Olympia and the Dejeuner sur L'Herbe where women were set off as powerful objects of desire, yet the great 19th century authors, Balzac, Hugo, Zola had already thoroughly demolished the notion of women only being objects of desire and instead often poor, trod upon laborers who had no other way out. Gauguin was leaving for Tahiti but Ibsen had written Hedda Gabler. This duality of the perception of women-- the carnal v spiritual, and alas, virgin v whore--has carried forward to today.
Jean Delville, The Idol of Perversity, 1891,
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?
The Inside World of Alice Neel
Though I had seen many images from the Alice Neel show at the Met, I was not prepared for the breadth and depth of the actual exhibition. Fair warning: even with a ticket, in mid week, in the morning, the line was at least 30-45 minutes to enter. It is beyond worth it.
The exhibition provokes questions about her biography. If you go to aliceneel.com, you will be able to see marvelous photographs of her and her world and also learn the more granular details.
Though we are often warned not to conflate the life and the work, with Neel, it's impossible not to be struck by the number of marriages she tore apart, and the number of relationships of her own that seemed fungible. Neel felt free to pursue her passions, be they artistic or romantic. Some blew up on her. Her relationship with Carlos Enriquez ended in abandonment along with the death of one daughter and the hijacking of another and her subsequent hospitalization for a nervous breakdown. Hot tempered seaman Kenneth Doolittle burned and destroyed a large archive of her art. John Rothschild left his wife for her, but she did not commit to him. Perhaps he reminded her too much of her more conventional Pennsylvania background. Jose Negron, a salsa band leader, pictured here in 1936, left his wife for Neel but interestingly, she ended up using her as a subject.
Not long after they got together, they moved to Spanish Harlem and she began the prolific, clear eyed rendering of her friends and neighbors that is such an important part of the exhibition. They had a child, Richard, together (originally called Neel!) but Negron moved on a few years later to another woman.
The libertinage of the age went along with the politics, and the artistic milieu. Inevitably, there was collateral damage. But at the Met, we see the affection she once bore for her lovers in her indelible portraits. West coasters take heart: the show comes to the deYoung in 2022.
Jose1936, Estate of Alice Neel
Dana Schutz's First Show at Zwirner
There is nothing I anticipate more in contemporary art than seeing a new drop of work by artist Dana Schutz. I have followed her career and written about her. But nothing replaces the explosion of delight, intrigue and emotion that seeing the works in person evokes. This painting is so complex and filled with allusions and references that it is something worth studying up close. Alas I could not extend my stay in NY to see the new works at Frieze New York, but I am happy to be able to share this one with you and get your reactions. Entitled The Arts and rife with collectors with pearls and baseball bats scrambling over each other to get at the works of art, critics, dealers ( this is Dana’s first show with her new mega gallery Zwirner) and a general melee, perhaps this is Dana’s wry take on what the scene at the first art fair to emerge during Covid will be.
Dana Schutz, The Arts, 2021 © Dana Schutz. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
An exhibition about life in America
New York is awash in museums and galleries grappling with not just the past year but many years of suffering by black citizens. Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at The New Museum makes those experiences both plain and exalted. So many moving, vibrant works are in the show it’s best just to push you along to see it if you can and discover its endless examples of the obstacles of just trying to live a normal life, to get through the day. One arresting image from Arthur Jafa’s ground floor video “Love is the Message; the Message is Death” is of a mother after she is pulled over by the police, backing up with her hands up and asking “what did I do wrong>” as one of her young terrified children slowly exits the car. Her fear for them, her incomprehension, the sheer brutality of it will stay with me forever.
Deluge IIs Painting Holds Truth Today
In all the turmoil about Philip Guston’s Klan paintings and the radical decision to postpone his retrospective I had forgotten this marvelous painting at MoMA which stands out there even among all the other standouts and classics. Deluge II painted it in 1975 at another point of inflection in the world (war /AIDS/drugs et al) felt so spot on for today’s pandemic deluge with its disembodied, muted heads, floating shoe and leg debris, and violent reddish hues. It reminded me of another famous painting which once hung at MoMA in the 70’s which also bespoke the horrors of war but in the end represented a wholly uncontrollable force visited upon an unsuspecting population, Picasso’s cry of rage and pain, Guernica.
Salon 94 Shows Early Saint Phalle
I made it to the stunning new gallery space for Salon 94 just as the Niki de Saint Phalle pieces were being prepared for their crates. What a joyful and rich display of this talented artist’s work. It felt like the gallery had met the moment joining these pieces in a long overdue tribute which showed the enormous energy and serious craftsmanship that even her mini Nanas demanded. Saint Phalle launched her own production line to fund her art- dreading ceding power to any funders or committees. While she was reviled for this in her lifetime, considered too crass and commercial, she took control of her output as a way to make more art. And they look spritely and gay and much like Calder’s circus, they were a path to other opportunities.
Lygia Pape Finds Inspiration in Brazil
I thought this image from the upcoming Lygia Pape show at Hauser & Wirth LA opening this weekend was apt for Earth Day.
Like Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, more or less her contemporary, Lygia Pape found in the indigenous populations of Brazil a new way of aligning her practice. Though a member of the Concrete and then Neo Concrete movements in Brazil which favored the primacy of the viewer and interaction with a work of art, there is some Surrealism and even Pop in Pape's work. The body and its intersection with geometry is apparent in her later, more three dimensional work.
The Tumpinamba tribe which used red feathers in tribal ceremonies, apparently devoured their captives not for sustenance but to absorb the spiritual capacities of the "other". Pape seems to have absorbed other cultures in the same way, digesting them to see how others interpreted the world.
This red-feathered ball with the hand reaching out from inside, reminded me somehow of the old Negro Spiritual, "He's got the whole world in his hands." Only this time, SHES got the whole world in her hands. I look forward to seeing the show.
Memoria Tupinamba 2000 courtesy Projeto Lydia Pape and Hauser & Wirth
Memories of Charlotte Perriand
I love this photograph of Charlotte Perriand, French designer and architect who broke the mold as a modernist disciple of Le Corbusier and his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, who was second in command at their studio in Paris where Charlotte brought "the brisk mountain air".
Not enough has been written--except by Perriand herself in her lovely and detailed memoir--about the importance of this relationship in her life. Pierre was her boon companion in the outdoors she so loved. Hiking, backpacking with their tents, Quaker Oats and sardines, collecting rocks and shells together, they forged a relationship that went far beyond the design of the famous lounge chair. In Normandy, in Greece, in the Savoie, they foraged, filled their backpacks with pebbles, lay on the beaches nude in the sun. They communed together with the earth and the sky.
On his boat they went to Yugoslavia. A priest was on board, and she was afraid she couldn't sunbathe nude as was her custom. At a conference of famous architects they escaped and went mountain climbing.
The cousins were very close, but Corbu became jealous of Pierre. He was supremely competitive even though he had been the one to suggest the relationship. Corbu as a matchmaker: it's not something generally put on his CV. Charlotte described Pierre as warmhearted, understanding, modest, self-effacing, like a brother to everyone. Everything that Corbu was not. One Christmas, spending it with Pierre's welcoming family, she borrowed a dress from his sister.
He gave her the wood for her first free form table design. They designed furniture for Knoll together even after their split as a couple. Though Charlotte eventually moved on, she never forgot her old lovers, gathering up people as she gathered up objects, holding them close. She is the kind of guiding spirit we need during Earth Week, one who understood that nature was as important as the built environment and that they must be welded together.
Berthe Morisot and Manet
Image credit: @clevelandmuseumofart
There are so many affecting things about Manet’s portrait of his sister-in-law, painter Berthe Morisot, begun in 1869. It's winter. Morisot is wearing a fur coat and muff and a violet hat of velvet trimmed with grey plumes. Manet painted her 11 times over many seasons and with many hats. He was fashionable and so was she. He was famously popular with the ladies and is the one who introduced her to his brother.
She was a supposed great-niece of Fragonard's so painting was already in the family. They met copying paintings at the Louvre. But Morisot in fact was the one who introduced Manet to Degas, Monet, Renoir and Cezanne among others in her circle. Her plein air painting had a great influence on him.
At the time of the portrait, Morisot was still mostly working in watercolors. But at the age of 23 she was accepted at the career defining Salon in 1864. Yet there is a certain tentativeness, an almost nervous energy one can still see five years later. Morisot had trouble convincing her parents to let her pursue a serious career.
Violet was a color Manet associated with her. The touches of violet become still more pronounced in a well loved later painting he did of her with a bouquet of violets after her father had died. Though this portrait is a lot tamer than the Dejeuner sur L'Herbe or the Olympia which had made his reputation, it still has the intensity of that work. It has a dynamic, fleeting quality that was certainly impressionistic, yet had hallmarks of his signature style where figures emerged from the black. He kept this portrait throughout his life.
Remembering David Park
Yesterday, via @janet_bishop and the @sfmoma, a talk about David Park, the Bay Area figurative painter, gave new insights into his beautiful body of work (cut short by cancer). But: the most amazing part was that his daughter Helen, and Gretchen, the daughter of Richard Diebenkorn, his student, mentee and eventual best friend, also participated with first hand memories.
Like the fact that Helen called her parents by their first names, David and DeeDee (her name was Lydia). And the fact that a head of Lydia once had a self portrait of Park underneath.
The @kalamazooinstituteofarts, one stop on the Park exhibition tour, held a conference showing how much Park had influenced a number of important Black artists.
Because the artist died so young, his career has been in something of an eclipse. But if you ask any figurative painter (like Dana Schutz), often they will extoll his painting. He abandoned abstract expressionism when it was all the rage and went his own way, finding color, lush brushwork, impasto and humans more to his taste.
He painted from memory, not from photographs however. So there is something haunting and so very personal in each rendering.
Park himself was most famously photographed by his friend and renowned San Francisco portraitist Imogen Cunningham, with whom he traded a lovely portrait that captures her whimsical appearance.
The other thrill was that artist Wayne Thiebaud, now 100 years old, appeared live and spoke about how much he admired Park's work. You can perhaps see him up in the corner there as he spoke.