The Mario Giacomelli retrospective at the Getty is striking, first for introducing me to this talented photographer, but also because of the diversity of his work.
My eye drifted to his high contrast prints which felt akin to Saul Bass movie posters. This image from around 1957 from his portfolio of the Italian people, La Gente is a particularly good example of the deep blacks set against brilliant whites.
Giacomelli toured Italy to capture the postwar images which we now think of as iconic from the films of the period--the craggy local faces, the children gathering in the town square, the unemployed men. Here an old townswoman approaches.
The Fourth in the Lens of Immigration
This image of Dorothea Lange's from 1942 at the Getty --finally reopened, what a relief/thrill-- is particularly apt today, July 4th, when so many of our immigrants are either overtly or stealthily still under siege. Lange made haste to Little Tokyo in San Francisco after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to document the patriotism of this endangered community. Soon after the photograph was taken these children were interned for the remainder of the war. Forgive my compromised snapshot but you get the drift.
Pledge of Allegiance, Raphael Weill Elementary School, San Francisco, Dorothea Lange 1942, Getty Museum.
The Plastic Bag Store Pops Up in LA
The Plastic Bag Store has arrived in LA. If you are like me and cringe when you arrive at the grocery store having forgotten your canvas bags or stare in dismay at the farmers market when those luscious ripe strawberries need protection then this sly pop up installation is for you. Robin Frohardt’s on-the-road store is more fun than her puppet film which is a bit too didactic but nevertheless makes its point: the future is grim if we don’t figure out how to get the stuff home without sheathing it in something indestructible that will haunt our children and theirs. Everything is made out of recycled plastic or paper. The copy is very clever.
Silent Octopus
If you've seen My Octopus Teacher, this year's Oscar winning documentary, you will surely be fascinated by a very short French documentary, La Pieuvre, by Jean Painleve from 1928 available for free on the Cinematheque Francaise's website via their wonderful platform of goodies, Henri. Take the time to have a look. It's silent, so no translation necessary.
Released in December of 1928 for the inauguration of the Studio Diamant, the film was the first widely distributed 'biology film' of the filmmaker. Painleve (great name, translation: raised bread), the son of the minister of war, was apparently a jack-of-all-trades who established this tiny film studio at the summer home of relatives of his girlfriend. He had discovered octopuses at the age of nine in Brittany and they were the impetus for his degree in zoology.
I was devastated at first by the rough handling of this specimen (Are there multiples?) both in and out of an aquarium but remembered it wasn't until recently that we gave enough credence to the brains of species other than our own. Still, in the film’s fourteen minutes, you will become attached. (One colorized moment of the octopus scaling a children's doll is particularly haunting.)
Also for octopus lovers (I will never eat one again), a marvelous children's book that takes as it point of departure the true escape of the octopus from the aquarium in New Zealand in 2016, Inky's Great Escape (there are many versions, the one you want is by Casey Lyall).
Rodchenko the Renaissance Man
Aleksander Rodchenko was something of a chameleon. This Russian artist who argued for the death of traditional easel painting and was a guiding force in Constructivism (along with Tatlin, Malevich and in an early stage, Kandinsky) also was a collagist, graphic designer, photographer and even filmmaker. He was very much a renaissance man.
But though this painting, Untitled, 1920, in the new Lacma Modernist hang, depends on rational, constructivist, geometry, in fact I believe it's a beautiful painting even in the traditional sense. He used a compass and ruler and tried to eliminate brushwork, but the colors are subtle and almost warm even though the palette is blues, greens and grays and it's painted on wood. There is something very inviting about it.
By 1920, Rodchenko, and his also very talented wife artist Varvara Stepanova, seemingly considered an equal to these formidable men (along with Popova), had become a director of the fund that purchased art for the Bolshevik government and he was responsible for directing pedagogy. He was influenced by the Bauhaus in this idea of schools and practice being intertwined.
William Lam, on the Lam
This painting by Wilfredo Lam from 1947, Tropic, came at a time when Lam, an outlier among the last group of Surrealists as an emigre from Cuba, had returned to his homeland and the region and had newly become engaged with the traditions of Afro-Cuban divinities and spirituality.
Lam had gone to Paris in 1938 after living in Spain and fought in the Spanish Civil War and been taken up by Picasso by whom he was much influenced and who helped him get his first show. He was also the Surrealist who made primitive and ethnic sources central to his art. You can still see the influence of Picasso in this painting in the new Modern hang at Lacma but there is also a whiff of voodoo and masks. Lam was itinerant and much married, shuttling around Europe and the Carribbean during the war years literally, on the lam from the Nazis.
When I finally got to see the beautiful small Centro Wilfredo Lam devoted to his work in Havana however, it all came together for me. It’s so sad to hear about what is happening to Cuban artists today.
Dana Spiotta Shows Mother-Daughter Love
I always wanted a daughter and now with her newest novel Wayward, Dana Spiotta has shown me what that must truly be like. Her previous novels-Innocents and Others, Stone Arabia, Eat the Document and Lightning Field--had through lines around music, art, and film which brought them close to my experience. In Wayward she also hits another of my my sweet spots: architecture.
Spiotta has a way of rounding up the usual suspects and making them personal and new at the same time. Wayward, ostensibly the story of a woman facing mid-life and aging and getting lost along the way (who doesn't?), still manages to pull the rabbit out of the two stories, told by Sam (the mother) and Ally (the daughter).
Sam separates from her husband because she falls in love with an old house which becomes the vessel for her confusion and frustration with her marriage. She cherishes the tiles, the wood, the way the light comes in through the stained glass windows. Everything that is no longer cozy and even sensual in her marriage comes alive again in her cottage. The joy of finding the proverbial room of one’s own. That it's the wrong side of the tracks just like her marriage is only sinks in later when she's the witness to violence.
But she's also obsessed with her daughter, trying to parse her every move, watching her mature--she has a relationship with a much older man, a friend of her fathers-afraid for her, paralleling her own maturation which is heading instead towards infertility, not new life.
Sam tries to rebound off the Trump election. She fine tunes her body as she is rehabbing her house. She investigates its history, searching for clues about how another woman made a life. She even made me feel affection for Syracuse, a city for which I thought I could never feel anything positive.
I interviewed Spiotta in 2016 and was able to post some images of her about Ally's age. Take a look.
Victor Brauner's Troubles
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