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.
The Violin Stories in Art
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.
CultureZohn Book Club
Sunday Reading: Two books that will take you inside the minds of artists- though very differently. Rachel Cusk departs from her trilogy and her unflinching memoirs to look at the intersection between one woman’s fantasy about an artist and the real thing when the artist she has admired from a distance takes up residence in her guest house. What ensues opens her eyes to the fact that artists: they’re just like us- as needy, as complicated, as tortured by insecurities and achievement. Celia Paul’s memoir of her life-with and without Lucian Freud-is another unvarnished look at what it’s like to be in thrall to a powerful artist and try to maintain an equilibrium for yourself and your own work. In both cases, these talented women must lose their sense of powerlessness and return to their own creativity to survive.
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?
Mourning the Loss of Jacques D'Amboise
Jacques D'Amboise was two totems to me.
First: as a very tiny student at SAB, he was the dashing, handsome ballet star I got to see up close as he came in for class. And with my most favorite ballerina, Allegra Kent, he was the sexy, alluring male who danced Afternoon of a Faun which made me think that ballet was not just a profession but a calling.
Second: at WNET as a producer, my office was next to Emile Ardolino's. At that time Emile and I had big dreams about Hollywood. Emile took the first step: he produced and directed He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin", about Jacques’s National Dance Institute, which won Emile his first Oscar. (He went on to direct Dirty Dancing among many others) The film is still the joyous, upbeat ode to Jacques’s enormous energy, spirit, guidance, leadership, outreach and just plain exuberance. ( look closely and you’ll see a fab Janet Eilber now head of the @marthagrahamdance as the leading lady) I got to meet Jacques then, and a few other times, he just oozed humanity. You can catch the 23 minute version on You Tube. Please do and light up your day.
The ballet world and the whole world will be the poorer for his loss. He didn't only make you feel like dancin', he made you feel, period.