In 1930, the same year that Victor Brauner moved to Paris from Romania and painted Suicide at Dawn, a fairly recent addition to the Lacma Modern collection, Max Ernst was beginning a new collage novel, and Bunuel and Dali showed their film L'Age D'Or which provoked a violent riot where ink was thrown at the screen, seats were destroyed and the Surrealist paintings in the entrance hall to the Studio 28 were destroyed. The film was banned.
Brauner's second trip to the city (he would eventually end up living there) was eye opening. He befriended Brancusi (a compatriot), Giancometti and Tanguy. But his imagery, though foundational to the mystical precepts and juxtapositions of Surrealism, was particularly violent. Some scholars consider him the most talented recruit of the middle thirties, though his name is not as well known as his confreres.
During WW 2, he was in hiding in Switzerland and unable to get materials so he used candle wax.
This disturbing image of suicide provokes many questions and made me wonder if this transition to Paris was not as smooth as it may have appeared. The factions of the Surrealists who prized poetry and myth bordered on gang warfare at times, so passionate were its adherents. In fact Brauner did not really enter fully into their group until 1933, so this image well predates that time. His work influenced Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.
One of the first things he worked on with the Surrealists was a booklet which commemorated the Trial of Violette Nozieres who had murdered her father (and tried to also poison her mother, though she survived) because he had been raping her for the past six years. He had his first solo show in Paris in 1934 which contained, prophetically, images of figures with mutilated eyes; he lost his own eye when he got in the middle of a fight between the Spanish surrealists in 1938. Artists!
An Homage to Janet Malcolm
When I first became a "Janet Malcolm person", I was a producer, and her multi-part New Yorker saga about The Journalist and The Murderer became the point de depart for a film project about a journalist who betrays her subject. I even lured Costa Gavras to direct. We sat for months parsing her story and its implications.
The movie didn't get made (too long a story for this post) but Malcolm and all her take-no-prisoners investigations always managed to find a certain application to my life (by then as a journalist).
Her two-year long series of interviews with painter David Salle in which she examined him refracted in what she called Forty-one False Starts, became a totem. The subject is a famous artist conscious of the slope and presentation of his career and a journalist, ever more cognizant of the shifting sands of the 'truth".
A couple of Malcolm gems from that New Yorker piece:
"He [Salle] is the most authoritative exemplar of the movement [post modernism], which has made a kind of mockery of art history, treating the canon of world art as if it were a gigantic, dog-eared catalogue crammed with tempting buys and equipped with a helpful twenty-four-hour-a-day 800 number."
"To the writer, the painter is a fortunate alter ego, an embodiment of the sensuality and exteriority that he has abjured to pursue his invisible, odorless calling. The writer comes to the places where traces of making can actually be seen and smelled and touched expecting to be inspired and enabled, possibly even cured."
In the perfect coda, Salle has gone on to become a very good writer about art himself. Malcolm rubbed off. Her unique take on the world will be very missed.
Tiny in the Air” (1989), one of David Salle’s tapestry paintings illustrated that piece.
Rome Bucket List, Part 1
Bucket list: Rome
The Maxxi Museum, home to some of my favorite architecture and design exhibitions over the years, has a double whammy in store. Today they open the Giacomo Balla house in Rome, Casa Balla, with an ancillary exhibition curated by Domitilla Dardi on its importance at the museum itself.
For those who are fans of Futurism (and few aren't), this is a red letter day.
I’m always taken with artist’s homes (see my recent posts on Lee Miller, Barbara Hepworth and forthcoming on Leonora Carrington) which are generally my go-to sites when traveling. They tell tales about artists that exhibitions cannot: the cup and saucer by the sink, the books in the library, the bedroom where the late nights or early mornings brought inspiration or, sometimes, despair.
Balla was surrounded by talented women: his wife Elisa, his two daughters Luce and Elica. Their spirit is also present. Like Charleston House in England, the home to the Bloomsbury group, the house is a 'gesamtkunstwerk", a deep, family, dive into all aspects of Balla's futurist theories and artifacts. These ideas about the future are made solid in collaborations with tapestry, drawings, sketches, furniture and furnishings. Of course a Balla painting for me is still the ultimate, but now we have a way of understanding the application to the decorative and domestic arts.
Contemporary artists are also in dialogue with Balla at at the museum but I am especially looking forward to seeing the companion film of Beka and Lemoine which investigates the house from their own perspective. You can get info at the Maxxi site www.maxxi.art - info (please, Italy, open!)
Image courtesy Maxxi Museum
Mamma Andersson Makes Women the Focus
The Louisiana Museum--one of my favorites, outside Copenhagen--focuses an annual exhibition on a painter. Many have been women, and many have made work that is not just timely but beautiful.
Is it old-hat to make classic and beautiful pictures? Certainly not with Mamma Andersson, a Swedish born-painter, who paints largely from black and white photos, and historical documents, much like Cecily Brown, another painter the Louisiana has featured. The images are often cinematic and like the best mysteries: we take a breath and wait for the next frame.
Because there was another student with the same name in her art school class, she was given the nickname "Mamma". Even as a young painter she did not shy away from this designation and kept it as her nom de guerre--she thinks of paintings as weapons. Yet they are stealth weapons-- disguised as treasures. Her landscapes and dolls are not threatening even though they often derive from crime scenes and woodcuts. The still lifes and genre scenes often appear Japanese inflected, but with a noir twist. She cites the Met Breuer Gerhard Richter as a recent influence. She loves the materiality of textiles but she's also interested in magic and wizards.
She often paints women, she says, because 'We don't always have it easy." I would love to be able to be sitting at this table, the coziest, least socially distant group imaginable, I can almost hear their conversation.
She's been exhibited internationally(in Aspen and at the Venice Biennale etc) but I did not know her work very well.
Since we can't yet get to Denmark, take a look at the beautiful catalog which has many more sublime images, and their two videos on her on their Louisiana Channel.
About a girl, 2005, Mamma Andersson
Idyllic Summer Through The Eyes of Picasso
As summer comes along and I get a few minutes on a beach, invariably I think back to Picasso. For a while I was so immersed in his life and family working on a documentary, I wasn't able to fully sort out my feelings about the many women in his life whom he had tortured to one extent or another.
In 1920, he found the Villa Sables in Juan-les-Pins near Antibes, then a backwater, and he brought his very pregnant wife Olga with him to spend the summer. He took a lot of photographs of the two of them, mostly naked. Picasso found in the combination of sun and sand an aphrodisiac both for life and for painting for the next 50 years.
The nudes found their way into this contre-plaque (oil on wood) with its bathing beauties and odd perspectives. (PS Picasso could not swim! You always see him wading in the many photographs on the beach over the years)
This idyllic summer seems to have been a high point of his relationship with Olga. (Picasso loved his women most when they were pregnant. It proved his virility.) According to his biographer John Richardson, just before they went down south, he was likely visiting whorehouses in Paris (we can always tell by the art, he gave himself away over and over again). And when they returned to Paris, he completely neglected her and hid away many of the [works] he had done during the summer, almost as if to obliterate them from his memory. Olga was blindsided a few years later after the birth of their son Paulo by the advent of Marie-Therese (Picasso’s women are so famous they are known diminutively by their first names. He, of course, is always Picasso)
Baigneuses regardant un avion, 1920, Musee Picasso, Paris
Britain Bucket List, Part 3
Bucket list: Britain 3. Eileen Agar is another one of the women being featured as under represented by history. Her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London shows similarities with many of the avant-garde women artists working at the time: Collage, surrealism, photography and documents, and a certain eccentricity.
She was Argentinian born to a Scottish father and American mother, both with family enterprises. Growing up in England, she was exposed to Surrealism in particular and became part of that movement (the Whitechapel show contains other "Phantoms of Surrealism" women artists though I wouldn't call Claude Cahun a phantom). Agar was one of few to synthesize surrealism with cubism.
In 1930 she began to work with found objects especially marine life, shells, bones and plants. (in this she reminded me of Charlotte Perriand). She was part of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held London.
Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape , 1942
Britain Bucket List, Part 2
Bucket list: Britain 2
I first delved into the Lee Miller archive when producing a film on Picasso. Miller intrigued me-the precocious muse of her father (his infamous shot of her in the bathtub), then of Man Ray, then of art historian and writer Roland Penrose, but also very much her own person--a serious war photographer (she captured Hitler's bunker after his death).
Miller has walked the precarious walk of the muse who was subsumed for a while as just that. As Man Ray's lover and disciple she wasn't recognized for the talent she herself was for a long time. An exhibition on her fashion photography in a new industrial space across from her home in Sussex, Farleys House (which, like the Bloomsbury Charleston House, looks to be a splendid 'worth a detour")shows that she was even able to incorporate the Surrealist 'Rayograph" techniques she had developed with Man in her fashion work for British Vogue. This image Corsetry, from 1942, just one example.
The last Miller show at the Legion of Honor in SF in 2012 was revelatory as well but it was about Man and Miller; this will add to the solo scholarship about this beautiful, alluring woman who was able to transcend that beauty.
Copyright Lee Miller Archives, Solarised photographs, London
Hepworth Makes Britain a Bucket List Destination
Bucket list: Britain.
Poised to hit the 'reserve' button on my airline app, I am still bombarded with variant messages despite Britain's overall declining rate.
A tenth anniversary exhibition of Barbara Hepworth's work at the Hepworth-Wakefield Museum in Yorkshire is on the list. An eccentric aunt owned a small Hepworth which I did not alas inherit. But even the 'small' evoked a feeling of grace and importance. (There is another Hepworth museum and studio at her home in St Ives on the bucket)
Unlike many of the women artists manque rediscovered today (see Jillian Steinhauer’s excellent piece on this phenomenon in Believer Magazine), Hepworth had a strong career during her lifetime, as the exhibit shows. Her exposure to the Parisians (Brancusi, Arp, Zadkine et al) and friendly rivalry with contemporary Henry Moore made an early difference.
But like the Jenny-come-lately artists, (see Hurtado, etc) she had to juggle the house and children (triplets !) and a child from her first marriage and her second husband, artist Ben Nicholson had a thriving career of his own and was often gone missing. (They divorced also in 1951.)
She managed. “I’ve slowly discovered how to create for 30 mins, cook for 40 mins, create for another 30 and look after children for 50 and so on through the day,” (they once all had measles at the same time) she wrote in a 1939 letter excerpted in The Guardian. “It’s a sort of miracle.
Hepworth died from smoking in bed.
Barbara Hepworth with plaster for Figure for Landscape and Figure Archaean, 1964. Photo:Lucien Myers.
Made in LA, A Christina Forrer Tapestry Draws Eyes at the Festival
This is not a painting. It is an incredibly intricate tapestry woven in 2020 titled Gebunden II or 'bound'--by Christina Forrer, born in Zurich but part of this year's Made in LA at the Hammer Museum (she has a companion piece at the Huntington). Known for her work that features conflict and debate, she still actually gives the impression of people being inextricably connected to each other.
The startled, wide-eyed reactions of the multi-generational participants--it seems like a great, big sprawling 21st century modern, mixed family--made me think of how our notion of 'nuclear' family today means something quite different from the two parents and two adults that was once the more common definition.
Forrer also paints, but the execution of any tapestry always has confounded me, and I admire the craft as much as the imagery.
My Piece of Richard Neutra
When Dion Neutra closed his father, modernist architect Richard Neutra's office in Silver Lake in the 90's, there was a kind of thrift sale of leftover items open to the public. I hurried to see the iconic space and found a few bibelots--a map that had once hung on the wall, a scrap of an unsigned drawing, and this radio.
I imagined it had once played the compositions of Neutra's fellow emigres to LA (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Heifetz et al) from Europe, as he and his staff listened while they worked. Neutra had opened the studio, now on the National Register, preserved by Dion, in 1950. By then, many of his most iconic works had been built, but other landmark buildings were designed there.
The vintage radio still works, albeit badly, but I turn it on from time to time hoping to channel the creative energies that once surrounded it.
Thom and Jones Meet USC
USC has archived architectural photographer Wayne Thom's vast collection of a decades-long career as the go to photographer for many California late modernist architecture and other international projects. Thom fell into architectural photography via his brother, an architect, and documented the late wave of glass and white brutality that became the aesthetic during the 70s.
The Annenberg School of Communications by A. Quincy Jones (1974-9) now houses other student services and there's a new building for the Communications school. But it's a fabulous building as seen here via Thom in its vintage iteration. I still haven't gotten down to Sunnylands, Jones's other masterpiece for Walter Annenberg, his home in Palm Springs.
Jones was a brilliant, particularly Southern Californian architect but who made that specific design aesthetic ethic every bit as international as his confreres in modernist Europe.
Image by Wayne Thom courtesy USC Digital Archives.
Reclaiming the (Imaginary) Land
An exhibition that visionary collectors Dominique and Jean de Menil never quite pulled off is now in full flower at the Menil Drawing Institute. Maybe, however, it is now meeting the moment. Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960's and 1970's comes at a time when monuments of all kinds have been questioned. (The de Menils were inspired by another show they did realize about Visionary Architects including LeDoux. When France opens, his museum is a must see. In a remote corner of southeastern France not far from Basel...).
This show "presents artworks that challenge the conventional idea of the monument as a permanent, grand or commemorative structure." Just yesterday I read that Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty-perhaps the most famous of completed earthworks in the US—has been exposed since 2004 because of drought and that there are so many hundreds of people trying to see it, they are building a visitor center and facilities.
These drawings instead present imaginary projects for large tracts of land. There are Michael Heizer's and Christo's and De Maria's. There is Claes Oldenburg's whimsical proposal for a Park Avenue bowling alley (love this. They are working on a new scheme for the median now.)
But there is also this lesser known work by Mary Beth Edelson, a first wave feminist artist, who had made visits to caves and other sites where female rituals were known to have taken place. ( she just died in April at 88) Her idea in this piece was to take mounds-aka breasts-and cap uranium mines in Wyoming. Now that Biden has rolled back Trump era desecrations of the land, why not think about it?
Mary Beth Edelson, Earth Works: Reclaiming the Land, 1976. Courtesy of David Lewis, New York. © Mary Beth Edelson. Photo: Ben Heyer
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
A Painting Ahead of Its Time
If you had to guess, I am sure you would not say that this painting was made in 1932 because it is so contemporary in its bold colors and design. The artist is not that well known in the US. He is Flavio de Carvalho, a Brazilian polymath disrupter who was also an architect, a writer, an early proponent of performance and conceptual art and transgender culture.
His moment could be right now. Although he represented Brazil at the 1950 Venice Biennale, he did not get many projects built. But walls were not his thing in any event. He pursued the connections between art, architecture, literature and religion and fashion, once parading in downtown Sao Paulo in a puff skirt and blouse, towering over the crowd. Resolute, like Lina Bo Bardi, about the indigenous cultures of Brazil and Latin America, he incorporated their motifs into his designs and made cross culture and well as cross gender an ongoing theme.
The Definitive Ascension of Christ, 1932, Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo
SF MoMA's Mona Lisa
I think of this wonderful Matisse portrait of Sarah Stein at SF MoMA as their Mona Lisa. Though small in size, the rendering by Matisse of his devoted patron shows her half smile in an exotic triangular framing of her arms. Stein and her husband Michael were painted by the artist in 1916 and these works eventually came to SF MoMA separately in a deal brokered between two important patrons, Elise Haas and Nathan Cummings. Only Sarah is on view now. As the sister in law of Gertrude, Sarah is less known but had an important role in supporting and encouraging Matisse when he was destitute. She helped him found a school in Paris which gave him the means to do more work of his own. We think of Matisse as the perennial star but in his early career this was not the case. Stein was a devotee of Christian Science and rigorous physical activity to help clear the mind. Matisse may have suggested this physicality in Stein’s arms-up pose. She also commissioned a house from Le Corbusier in the Parisian banlieu, at that time the largest private home he designed. That the portrait came to San Francisco is only fitting since that was where Sarah had grown up.
Sedona In Tanning's Eyes
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst found in Sedona a place they had visited in 1943 a "camera sharp place where planetary upheaval had left its signature." Sedona, the place of reddish rocks and wide open spaces was so different from the European haunts of the two lovers.
She painted this Self Portrait in 1944 before they returned to live there. Tanning remembered, "I would undertake--dare would be a truer word--to paint the unpaintable....in the studio alone with my dream I would record it like a diary entry..."
Standing before the wide reaches of northern California this week I saw new growth under swathes of burned out forest— a small sign of renewal and hope. Planetary upheaval is alas ongoing.
Paik's Interconnectedness Transcends the Art World
The Nam June Paik exhibition at SF MoMA is a revelation. Paik hovered around the edges of my much more conventional time producing visual arts docs at WNET but this show made me feel I had really missed his important groundbreaking connections between media and global interconnectedness which we now know to be the attributes of the internet. Here he is pictured with longtime collaborator Charlotte Moorman ostensibly a cellist but an entrepreneur with an audacious collective spirit just like his. The two knew no bounds when it came to live performance. Paik sat in her lap as she ‘played’ him or allowed him to repurpose her breasts as a tv outlet. They were indomitable and precursors to the live international media feeds we now take for granted. “Sex is very underdeveloped in music as opposed to literature and art” he said. Also appearing in the wild and woolly exhibition are John Cage, Merce Cunningham, George Plimpton as an MC and other luminaries. It’s eye popping and immersive.
Rivera In San Francisco
A thrill to see two panels from Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity mural series made originally on Treasure Island in 1940 in front of a live audience being installed at SF MoMA. Chief Curator Janet Bishop tells me all of the 5 oversized panels are being transported in the wee hours to avoid traffic and disturbance. A joint project of the much beleaguered SF City College and the museum they will reside in a special Snohetta designed corner gallery. Opens early this summer and will be on view for at least a couple of years Rivera had in mind that all the peoples of North and South America would therein be represented. As events roiled Europe soon to spill over to the west, perhaps this was a hope and dream more than a reality. Still its majesty bespeaks a commonality we seek even today.
The Merz Family And Their Emergence Into the Public Eye
A Magazzino Museum lecture by Leslie Cozzi on the star couple of Arte Povera Marisa and Mario Merz which continued the series reminded me of the pow I got on seeing her retrospective at the Met Breuer, The Sky is a Great Space and again at the Hammer in 2017.
Here was a woman with a young child and a husband who was making art and willing to take over her own apartment with an installation of The Living Sculpture--Notice Me!—but was unwilling to engage with a public dialogue until decades later. This was complicated. In between the hours of feeding and caring, she made these incredible, large sculptures out of aluminum sheeting. They are thrilling. She also made little knit scarpette-booties-and other knitted sculptures that so reminded me of Ruth Asawa's work. Those women made lemonade....mothers everywhere take heart!
To round out the Magazzino lecture please take a look at a talk from that Met show from pre-Zoom days with the beloved, late, Germano Celant on the panel who knew the Merz family very well. It's so moving to hear him talk about this couple.
Benedetta Cappa, Romance and the Birth of Tactilism
I’ve fallen in love with Benedetta Cappa--one half of the Marinetti couple from the Lucia Re Magazzino Museum lecture series--but as compelling as her more famous husband.
Benedetta was a student of Giancomo Balla, Futurist par excellence, but when she met Filippo Marinetti, the two were forever conjoined in love and art. Benedetta experimented with many art forms, and was an intriguing writer, but it is her colorful paintings that we might know best.
Contemporary of Hilma Af Klint and Agnes Pelton, Benedetta’s work has synergies that recall these other artists yet I don't know of a time when they might have seen each other's work.
She and Marinetti birthed Tactilism--which was a multi dimensional production of objects that took Futurism to the third dimension. It sounds like an early virtual reality experience, "to perfect spiritual communication between human beings, (get this) through the epidermis". (This reminded me of the moment in ET when the beloved space creature sticks out his finger.)Benedetta--who jettisoned her surnames as she came into the fullness of her own self--went on to promote Aeropainting along with her husband and Balla and others. All in all, a very modern woman.
Her Palermo post office murals were the piece de resistance of the Guggenheim Futurist exhibition a few years back. But she is still less known than the other two women who have been subjects of recent solo exhibitions.