Friday, November 30, 2012

Van Gogh and Gauguin letter tells of artistic hopes that turned sour

'Electrifying' missive written by artists on pages of French exercise books goes on sale in Paris next month

Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin letter
Part of the letter written by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin which is being sold at Christie’s Paris.

The handwritten letter, penned jointly by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin on cheap paper torn out of a school exercise book, speaks of friendship and hope. Written at a critical point in the careers of both men, it refers to dreams of founding a utopian community of brother artists, of a new artistic renaissance, and of paintings now recognised as masterpieces.

The reality was to be less idyllic. Shortly after the missive was sent, the pair quarrelled violently and in one of history's most notorious acts of self-mutilation, Van Gogh sliced off his right ear. It was an act that marked the Dutchman's final decline into madness and suicide.

Now, the four-page letter signed by both artists has emerged from a private collection before its auction in Paris next month, where it is expected to fetch up to €500,000 (£405,000).

Thomas Venning, an expert with the auction house Christie's, said the document offered an insight into the "most famous artistic menage in history".

"I spend my life dealing with letters and this is one of the greatest, most electrifying I have ever seen," he said. "It takes you into their house, into their lives at this particular moment.

"You can imagine Van Gogh sitting down to write the letter on cheap paper because they didn't have much money, then saying to Gauguin: 'You finish it off'."

The letter is written on the square-ruled paper of French exercise books and addressed to Emile Bernard, a young avant garde artist who inspired both men. It was composed in November 1888 at Arles in Provence, where Van Gogh had rented two floors of a private house, 2 Place Lamartine, the subject of the painting La Maison Jaune.

The previous week, after months of procrastination, Gauguin had arrived to live and paint with Van Gogh for one or two years. At the time, the French art world was moving from impressionism to modernism and surrealism, but Van Gogh and Gauguin had yet to be widely recognised.

Van Gogh, mentally fragile and prone to violent mood swings, was fired up with childlike excitement. In the letter, he gives his first impressions of the French painter.

"Gauguin interests me much as a man – very much – I have long thought that in our dirty profession as painters we have the greatest need of people with the hands and stomachs of a labourer – and more natural tastes – more amorous and benevolent temperaments – than the decadent and exhausted Parisian boulevardier.

"Now here without the slightest doubt we are in the presence of a virgin creature with the instincts of a wild animal. In Gauguin, blood and sex prevail over ambition."

He adds: "We have made several excursions to the brothels and it's likely that we will end up working there often. Gauguin has at the moment a painting under way of same night café that I also painted, but with figures seen in the brothels. It promises to become a beautiful thing.

"I've made two studies of falling leaves in an avenue of poplars and a third study of this whole avenue, entirely yellow." [Les Alyscamps.]"

Van Gogh writes that he and Gauguin are discussing "the terrific subject of an association of certain painters" and of his "presentiment of a new world … and a great artistic renaissance" that will find its home in the tropics.

On the final page, Gauguin adds: "Don't listen to Vincent, as you know he's prone to admiration and ditto indulgence. His idea about the future of a new generation in the tropics seems absolutely right to me as a painter, and I still intend to return there when I have the means to do so. Who knows, with a bit of luck …?"

Eight weeks later, on 23 December, the partnership came to a violent end when the pair quarrelled violently over, it is believed, Van Gogh spending the meagre household budget on prostitutes, and his refusal to stop drinking absinthe.

Van Gogh threatened his "friend" with a razor before slicing off his own ear. Shortly afterwards he entered the first of a series of asylums and died in 1890 aged 37 after shooting himself.

Gauguin returned to Paris and later set up a studio in French Polynesia where he died in 1903, aged 54. The pair never met again, though they subsequently corresponded.

Venning says the letter reveals the two men's different characters, and the calm before the storm in their relationship.

"It's a moment of friendship, optimism and shared work. It looks like everything is going to be OK and they achieved a lot of work in a short period of time."

He added: "The dramatic events that followed the writing of this letter make it rather sad. It's a mind blowing document."

The letter is part of the Pierre Berès Collection, being sold at Christie's Paris on 12-13 December.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Abandoned Old Masters Paintings

In this fascinating series of works, Hungarian new media artist Bence Hajdu has removed the figures from a series of Old Master paintings with such precision that it’s almost hard to believe. While some compositions, like Jacques-Louis David’s “Oath of the Horatii” (1784) seem perfectly suited to such background reconstruction (see its clean, minimal lines and crisp shadows), others like Claude Lorrain’s “Seaport with the Embarkation of St. Ursula” (1641) seem like a more difficult selection, because of the picky details — in this case, waves and small scattered figures.

Hajdu’s works, which I’ve converted into GIFs (apologies to the artist) to make it clear what a fantastic visual feat the artist has achieved, also highlight the theatricality of the scenes. The pieces, which he has previously exhibited accompanied by smaller versions of the original images (a set up pictured below), have a silence that the original images lack. It is as if the characters have wandered off the stage and we’re left to ponder the world where such drama occurs.

Bence Hajdu with his “abandoned” Old Masters works on display with the original images at the bottom right corner. (images via Bence Hajdu’s Facebook Page)

In some cases, his erasures give a new life to the works, like Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” which seems a natural fit for the process as we’re all familiar with the table clutter of a meal. Somehow it makes the scene appear more human when the frozen figures disappear. I can’t say I had ever pondered the meal Jesus and his disciples shared in Leonardo’s masterpiece but it’s a curious revelation — is it just me or do the disciples on either end appear to be hoarding most of the food? #LOL

 Others, like Botticelli’s “The Annunciation” don’t benefit much from the editing, as the sparse interior and idyllic view through the window tell us little if anything about the original scene.

In the case of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, Hajdu has taken the liberty to leave a scarf behind for where the Virgin Mary was sitting. In this one scene, we’re left to feel that the angel has just left and the Madonna gone inside. And even if the floor shadows are a little bizarre in Hajdu’s rendering, it only helps us to see that the geometric arrangement of the scene in general is quite peculiar in and of itself.

One of the things I keep thinking about as I look at these scenes is how much I’d love to play a video game that wanders through familiar scenes like this. It’s like visiting a childhood home that you see anew after all these many years. The Old Masters don’t disappear, they’re just constantly reinvented.

 

 

http://hyperallergic.com/58661/abandoned-old-masters-paintings/

Billon

2007
Polystyrène, résine
110 x 100 x 300 cm


http://www.vincentkohler.ch/billon.html
Crédit photo : Geoffrey Cottenceau

billon

Monday, November 26, 2012

The Art of Rosa Verloop

by Nastia Voynovskaya

Using nylon stockings and pins as her primary materials, Dutch artist Rosa Verloop creates sculptures that appear to stem from primordial depths. Resembling both fetuses and octogenarians, her figures sit at an uncomfortable place in the life cycle between birth and death. Despite the simplicity of her chosen materials, the works appear delicate and ethereal, as if the figures are floating peacefully through a sleepy spirit world. The tan nylon stalkings eerily resemble skin, which the artist folds and bends into a twisted cacophony of wrinkles that give each form a unique, organic structure. Verloop currently has work on display in the Hague Municipal Museum in the Summer Expo 2012 group show. Take a look at some images courtesy of the artist. 

 

http://hifructose.com

Saturday, November 24, 2012

BBC David Hockneys Secret Knowledge

The Dreamy, Nostalgic Paintings of Dan Voinea

by Nastia Voynovskaya

Romanian artist Dan Voinea creates hallucinatory paintings of characters descending into madness and fantasy. Roughly painted figures appear doubled or translucent; sometimes different bodies melt into one another, blurring the lines of identity. Featuring wardrobes reminiscent of the 20th century and a color palette derived from early color photos, Voinea’s work is imbued with a twinge of nostalgia for a time that perhaps never existed in the first place. We find characters floating or lying supine — an allusion to an alternate dream world we watch them experience with their eyes closed. Take a look at some of his works below.

 

http://hifructose.com/

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Lucian Freud: Painted Life

Cane Dojcilovic’s Chaotic Anatomy Drawings

by Nastia Voynovskaya

Serbian-born, New York-based artist Cane Dojcilovic unravels the human figure, drawing and painting model-esque female characters whose anatomies spiral out of control. The ordered unit of the body explodes into chaos in his delicately crafted works, hinting at a spiritual dimension that lies beyond the boundaries of the physical body. Take a look at some images of Dojcilovic’s works below.  


http://hifructose.com/2012/09/20/cane-dojcilovics-chaotic-anatomy-drawings/

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The Child Dreams - Gottfried Helnwein

Fake Art May Keep Popping Up for Sale

As soon as Richard Grant, executive director of the Diebenkorn Foundation, glimpsed the three drawings in an Upper East Side apartment several years ago, he knew there was a problem.

"Untitled 1950," exhibited as a Jackson Pollock.

The artwork on the wall had been previously identified by the artist’s estate as fake Richard Diebenkorns. But here they were again, proudly displayed as Diebenkorns by a new owner who had no idea he had bought discredited drawings.

For organizations like Mr. Grant’s that are charged with protecting an artist’s legacy, the job of patrolling for fakes has become something like a game of Whac-A-Mole.

“You put it down, and then five, seven years later, poof!, and there it is again,” he said by phone from the foundation’s offices in California.

The resale of fakes is a persistent and growing problem without a good solution, say collectors, dealers, artist estates and law enforcement agencies. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation can seize forgeries in criminal cases, these represent only a tiny portion of the counterfeit art that is circulating.

“They churn through the market,” James Wynne, an F.B.I. special agent who handles art forgery cases, said of fakes.

There are no clear rules for what happens to phony art after it is identified. “It all depends what the facts are, what the art is, how many works are involved and how expensive they are,” he said.

Art whose authenticity is disputed occupies a special sort of limbo, as demonstrated by the settlement last month between Knoedler & Company, a Manhattan gallery that abruptly closed last year, and a customer who accused that gallery of selling him a forged Jackson Pollock for $17 million.

The F.B.I. is investigating whether that painting, known as “Silver Pollock,” might be part of a larger cache of forgeries. But no charges have been brought and the gallery maintains that the work is authentic. So what happens to a $17 million painting that some people consider a fake?

Given the publicity surrounding this particular case, a sale any time soon would be surprising, art lawyers and dealers agree. But nothing in criminal law would necessarily prevent the owner from selling it today as a Pollock. (Details of the settlement are confidential, including who owns the artwork now.)

When it comes to undisputed fakes, law enforcement officials try to halt resales by such practices as stamping works as fake or, in rare cases, destroying them. Each option has drawbacks, including the possibility of mistakenly destroying an authentic work.

Ultimately, though, both the police and buyers mostly rely on the art market to police itself.

Artist foundations and estates that find fakes on eBay or at small auction houses can inform the dealer or Web site, but they have no authority to seize or mark the work. Frequently, they say, counterfeits go underground only to re-emerge later, labeled as the real thing.

Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, said that during the years that it authenticated works by Roy Lichtenstein, he regularly noticed that collectors informed that they had a fake would later quietly sell it as genuine. “And then we’d find somebody else would send the same work to us six months later” asking for it to be authenticated, he said.

In France, Switzerland and other countries that recognize the “moral rights” of an artist, heirs or foundations like Lichtenstein’s can ask the courts for permission to destroy a fake. But Ronald D. Spencer, a Manhattan lawyer and editor of the art-law handbook “The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts,” said he was glad that is not done in the United States. The notion is “an anathema,” he said, noting how frequently opinions about authenticity can change. Just two months ago, for example, three J. M. W. Turner paintings that had been dismissed as fakes were reclassified as genuine.

“Stamp it, by all means, so that any subsequent owner knows that it was considered a fake, but don’t destroy works,” Mr. Spencer said, echoing the view of many art dealers. If destruction becomes routine, he added, a genuine work will mistakenly be consigned to the shredder at some point.

Marking a work was the course taken in 2011 by the Dedalus Foundation, a nonprofit created by the artist Robert Motherwell, after it identified a putative Motherwell painting as forged.

As part of a civil settlement, Dedalus demanded that the work be permanently marked as a fake. Now on the back of the work, “Spanish Elegy,” an indelible stamp states that “this painting is not an authentic work by Robert Motherwell but a forgery.”

The effort to keep fakes off the market may be most hampered by the reluctance of those in the know to speak out. Art experts and institutions, most prominently the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Lichtenstein Foundation, have stopped authenticating artwork, or pointing out suspected fakes, for fear of being dragged into a lawsuit by the owner of a work they rejected.

Major auction houses that discover an advertised work is fake usually cancel the sale and return the art to the seller. For example, when Christie’s learned that a Marc Chagall it had sold in 1997 for $450,000 was fake, it canceled the deal and sent the work back to the seller. What happens afterward to these sorts of returned works is anyone’s guess.

Once law enforcement becomes involved, the picture changes. Government agencies like the F.B.I., the United States attorney’s office or the Postal Service (which has a role in forgery cases involving mail fraud) may stamp forgeries after a conviction or plea agreement, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said. Sometimes the work bears an F.B.I. evidence sticker.

While convicted swindlers generally forfeit their fakes to the government, duped buyers can usually get their property back with a letter identifying the work as a fake after a case is closed, F.B.I. officials said.

Sometimes the F.B.I. may end up with the goods. As part of a 2004 plea agreement, for example, Ely Sakhai, who orchestrated an ingenious forgery operation, put up $12.5 million to reimburse his victims. Since they were being paid, the owners were happy to give their paintings to the F.B.I., which added them to its extensive collection of fakes.

These works, along with ones confiscated by the government, are stored in warehouses and occasionally brought out for lectures and seminars, F.B.I. officials said. In 2007 the agency lent some to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., for its exhibition “Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception.”

The government has the power to destroy uncontested fakes or to ask a judge for permission to do so if the defendants insist they are real, but that rarely happens, law enforcement officials said.

Judges, however, can be unpredictable.

In 1995, when a gallery in Hawaii could not pay a $2 million fine levied for selling phony prints by Salvador Dalí and others, a federal court ordered the government to auction off more than 12,000 of them to the public.

The proceeds went toward repaying the debt, but federal investigators and art dealers protested the large-scale sell-off of fakes. Most of the prints were marked as counterfeit with only a tiny stamp, easily hidden by a frame. Others had a removable sticker or no marking at all to identify them as discredited.

“This makes the federal government an accessory to future art fraud,” Bernard Ewell, a Dalí art appraiser, said at the time. Then he added, “But I’m delighted because it gives me guaranteed job security.”

As for the phony Diebenkorn drawings that Mr. Grant saw in that Upper East Side living room, their whereabouts today are a mystery. The owner told him that he had returned the forgeries to the dealer and been given his money back. “We called the guy repeatedly,” Mr. Grant said of the dealer, “but we never heard back.”

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Art expert contradicts Knoedler gallery

Jack Flam, president of Dedalus Foundation, doesn’t remember seeing a painting by Rothko that Knoedler says was viewed by him

Mark Rothko's Untitled 1956

Jack Flam, the president of the Dedalus Foundation, which oversees Robert Motherwell's estate, said he reacted with “astonishment” at the news that the now-defunct Knoedler gallery listed him as a Mark Rothko expert who had viewed a painting at issue in a high-profile court case.

In a lawsuit filed in March 2012, Eleanor and Domenico De Sole (who is the chairman of Tom Ford International) say that the gallery Knoedler & Co, its former president Ann Freedman and others conspired to fraudulently sell them a counterfeit Rothko, Untitled 1956, in 2004 for $8.3m. The gallery bought the painting for $950,000 in 2003 from the dealer Glafira Rosales, who is now under federal investigation.

Flam is one of ten experts listed in an attachment to a letter dated 10 December 2004 and sent from Freedman to the De Soles' daughter under the heading “The Painting Has Been Viewed by the Following Individuals with Special Expertise on the Work of Mark Rothko”. The letter was written in response to the collectors' request for assurances of authenticity and provenance, the De Soles say in an amended court complaint filed in September. The letter refers to experts who “viewed” the painting and concludes: “In summery [sic], Knoedler warrants the authenticity and good title of the painting… ”

The De Soles characterise the letter as part of a sales pitch that, “while convincing, was a scam”. According to the amended complaint, “Knoedler and Freedman previously had informed the De Soles [that these experts] had authenticated the Work”, when in fact, “none of these experts actually had examined the Work for the purpose of providing an expert opinion, and many had seen the Work, at most, only briefly”.

“I'm not a Rothko expert, and I don't remember seeing the painting,” Flam said at an annual art law conference organised by the Appraisers Association at New York University on 9 November. Flam is a Robert Motherwell expert and wrote the artist's catalogue raisonne. He added: “If I did see it, it was probably behind someone's desk” and if he said anything about the painting, it was something along the lines of: “How lucky you are to have it.”

The letter is also being used as the lynchpin in Knoedler and Freedman's motion to dismiss the case, now under consideration in Manhattan's Federal District Court. They argue that the De Soles' claim is barred because the statute of limitations had expired, that they had adequate notice that the painting might not be authentic, and that the collectors had a duty to inquire into its authenticity themselves.

According to Knoedler and Freedman's motion to dismiss: “In the end, [the] plaintiffs seek to blame Knoedler and Freedman when it was plaintiffs and their art advisor… who acted recklessly: they purchased a multimillion dollar painting without asking a single expert for an opinion considering its authenticity (including any of the experts Knoedler and Freedman said had 'viewed' the work), [and] without seeing a single document reflecting the provenance (which they knew could not be entirely and indisputably verified by Knoedler)… ”

The De Soles argue they could not have known the facts of a fraud until they learned that the London hedgefunder Pierre Lagrange sued Knoedler and Freedman in December 2011, alleging that the gallery sold him a fake Jackson Pollock. The De Soles then hired a forensic expert to examine their painting who concluded that the “materials and techniques… are inconsistent and irreconcilable with the claims that Untitled was painted by Mark Rothko.”

The Knoedler gallery and Freedman deny any wrongdoing.

Gregory Clarick, the De Soles' attorney, says he was “not surprised at all” by Flam's remarks. Freedman's attorney, Nicholas Gravante of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, quipped: “He can't remember [seeing the painting]? That's convenient.” A statement attributed to Knoedler's lawyer, Charles Schmerler, reads in part: “Knoedler's internal records are quite clear that Mr Flam viewed the work.”

Knoedler & Co was established in 1846 but closed at the end of November 2011, just a day before Lagrange filed his suit. (The gallery maintains the two events are unrelated.) The Lagrange suit settled on undisclosed terms in October. Freedman left Knoedler in 2009 and set up her own shop. 


http://www.theartnewspaper.com/

Friday, November 16, 2012

Shopping List: Tuna, Detergent, a Warhol

Rick Bowmer/Associated Press

A shopper at a Costco store in Portland, Ore. The company has begun selling fine art again.

Along with the bales of toilet paper and drums of tomato sauce that Costco customers load into their online shopping carts, they can now add an original Warhol or Matisse, a result of this giant discount retailer’s recent decision to re-enter the fine-art market.

2012 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This print of Matisse's "Femme au Chapeau" was sold by Costco on the company's Web site.

Quietly and cautiously, like someone newly divorced returning to dating, Costco has begun selling fine art again after quitting the business six years ago when questions were raised about the authenticity of two Picasso drawings it had sold online.

In the two or so weeks since Costco, a warehouse club store, began listing “Fine Art” in the Home & Décor section of its Web site, it has sold 8 of the 10 works it initially listed, including two framed lithographs by Henri Matisse, one for $1,000, and the other for $800; a framed lithograph by Georges Braque for $1,400; a framed screen print by Andy Warhol for $1,450; and a framed textile-and-paint collage by Heather Robinson for $1,699.99, said Greg Moors, the San Francisco dealer supplying the art to Costco.

Mr. Moors said he has about five more works that he expects to list on the Web site over the weekend, but added that it takes time to find and frame original art.

Ginnie M. Roeglin, senior vice president for e-commerce and publishing at Costco, said, “We just started this program and are just testing a few things.” She declined to comment further on the decision to sell art again.

Mr. Moors said in an interview that he was driven by his vision of art for everybody, and he dismissed any incongruity in the notion of a discount warehouse club selling fine art. For many gallery owners and Internet art sellers, “the deal is more important than the customer,” Mr. Moors said, but with a brand-name store like Costco, “the customer is more important than the deal.”

Galleries will sometimes take sizable markups on works of art they purchase for resale, according to dealers. By contrast, Mr. Moors said, Costco is charging a maximum of 14 percent over what they pay him, the same markup it applies to all its merchandise.

Costco is certainly not the first large chain to offer fine art. Between 1962 and 1971, Sears sold more than 50,000 works by artists like Picasso, Rembrandt, Chagall and Whistler through its catalog and in its stores as part of the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art. Customers at Sears could buy a work on layaway for as little as $5 down and $5 a month. Sears guaranteed every purchase just as it would with a refrigerator or lawn mower.

Costco also guarantees “satisfaction on every product we sell, with a full refund” within 90 days of purchase. Mr. Moors’s phone number is listed under “product details” on the Web site so that potential buyers can ask him questions.

Costco stopped selling fine art in 2006 after Picasso’s daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso questioned the authenticity of a few drawings attributed to her father that the store was selling. Those works ranged in price from $37,00 to $146,000 and did not come from Mr. Moors, who started supplying museum-quality art to Costco in 2003. This time, the retailer is offering lower-priced items, he said.

Shoppers who now click on the company’s Web site can find lithographs for three and four figures, less than many of the televisions Costco regularly sells.

The lithographs are primarily unsigned. As Mr. Moors explained, unsigned works eliminate the potential problem of forged signatures.

He said he was taking other steps to ensure the art’s authenticity. “Certain artists are known to have had problems,” he said. “For instance, although I like him as an artist, I won’t go near Dalí.” Mr. Moors was referring to the proliferation of fake Dalí prints on the market.

Ultimately, the best way to avoid suspicion, he said, is to work with living artists. At the moment he plans to offer art by Ms. Robinson and Johnny Botts, another California artist, who says on his Web site that he uses “simple shapes, hard edges and happy colors” to make his whimsical robots.

Mr. Moors came across Ms. Robinson’s work at a boutique and studio space she shares with a jewelry designer on Mission Street near the Bernal Heights section of San Francisco. Mr. Moors chose colorful pieces that combined fabric and paint for the Costco collection, Ms. Robinson said. Her art is being offered on consignment, and the contract she signed with Mr. Moors does not prevent her from selling her artwork anywhere else, including her own Web site.

Asked what her initial reaction had been to to Mr. Moors’s proposal to sell her art at Costco, Ms. Robinson searched for the right phrase.

“I was a little surprised,” she started.

“My work is very. ...” she continued.

“It’s not necessarily. ...

“When you think of Costco. ...”

“How should I put it?” she asked, before settling on the idea that selling her work at Costco “would not have occurred to me.”

Nonetheless, she is thrilled to have access to Costco’s 60 million members. “It’s a really great way to get exposure for my work in a way I wouldn’t be able to get on my own,” Ms. Robinson said, adding, “I know their customers are really important to them, and they have a really loyal following.”

As Mr. Moors said: “She is starting off with an audience of 60 million people. You can social-network for the next 30 years and never get that audience.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2012

 

A picture caption on Oct. 6 with an article about Costco’s decision to start selling fine art again omitted an artist who collaborated on the work shown, “Sail Away.” In addition to Johnny Botts, the artist known as Misho contributed to the piece.

Monday, November 12, 2012

My big art inspiration

A milkmaid bathed in light, dust on a Duchamp and Ophelia drowning … leading artists, from Tacita Dean to Rachel Whiteread, decode the masterpiece that most inspires them

'Divine breath' … Vermeer's The Milkmaid. Photograph: Krause, Johansen.

Chuck Close on Johannes Vermeer

Ever since I was a student, my favourite artist has been Johannes Vermeer. I understand, or can intuit, how every painting ever made, from the Lascaux caves to today's most cutting-edge work, was painted. Information about a piece's creation – touch, hand, process, technique – is embedded in the paint, like a Hansel and Gretel trail.

Vermeer, however, is the only artist whose paintings I cannot readily deconstruct. Other than the fact that they were all made with a camera-obscura-like contrivance, they remain impenetrable. The paint appears to have been blown on by divine breath. Neither opaque nor translucent, it does not seem to function as a film of pigment, but as light itself.

While most people only notice the subject matter and marvel at the verisimilitude, time spent with a painting like The Milkmaid, painted in the 1650s, is time spent communing with an image so sublime that it transcends its physical reality (mere paint on a panel) and becomes an apparition worthy of creation by the gods. Such sophisticated and remarkable paint handling – all for a plain and ordinary-looking Dutchwoman with sleeves rolled up revealing a farmer's tan. The foodstuffs that surround her are so naturalistic, a passing fly might try to land on them, while the pail and the basket that hang on the wall are, in terms of perspective, perfect.

On the floor rests a foot-warmer which, despite the abundant light flooding through the window, speaks to the unmistakable chill in the air. Chips of plaster are missing from the rough and cruddy surface of the wall, which is much in need of a paint job.

So much information and compressed energy is packed into such a small painting. Inch for inch, The Milkmaid is one of the most remarkable achievements in art.

Nash's Event on the Downs
Nash's Event on the Downs. Photograph: © Tate, London

Tacita Dean on Paul Nash

A while back, I woke earlier than usual and sat on my balcony looking hard at a book of Paul Nash's paintings. I tried to pin down what it was about them I found so compelling. After an hour or so, I was overcome by a wistful longing – a desire to return to the places in his pictures, as if I actually knew them myself.

Place is about biography. It is more amorphous and less comprehensible than we suppose. Nash makes place not by verisimilitude, but by summoning up totemic symbols, motifs and spirit. His is an unconscious depiction borne out of a creative process. At its heart is an exploration of both English surrealism and the English landscape: looking and finding ancient animism in the rocks, trees and hills of an old land.

This is where I go to in his paintings: a half-remembered or half-imagined place that I can share with him – a warm cornfield on the edge of a disused country estate, a chalk scar disfiguring a hill, the humus, fungi and dead leaves on the floor of a damp copse.

I will always love his Event on the Downs (1934). A tree stump sits by a tennis ball in the foreground, a forked track divides the middle ground, and the chalk downs fill the background. A cloud-as-flint or a flint-as-cloud hovers nowhere in an impasto sky. The relationships between the inhabitants or personages in Nash's paintings, whether organic or inorganic, are always unsettling, out of scale, odd. He often leaves canvas bare, appearing not to be an artist who loves the stuff of paint. Instead, he fills in anxiously. The ungainliness of his pictures, although slight, is part of their attraction.

Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ
Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ. Photograph: Krause, Johansen

Rachel Whiteread on Piero della Francesca

The Baptism of Christ, painted by Piero della Francesca in the 1450s, is one of the few paintings I can conjure up in my mind's eye. I first saw it at the National Gallery in London when I was nine or 10. I remember seeing it again as a teenager, and later during my first year at Brighton College. Then a boyfriend took me to see his favourite painting: it happened to be this one.

I see a quiet symmetry in it, which is one of the things that makes it feel like a silent painting. By symmetry, I mean the way Piero has constructed four "pillars" across the canvas. There are the angels on the left, the tree, the figure of Jesus, and then the partially clothed figure in the background. Together they give sculptural and vertical strength – almost like a building. To emphasise this verticality, the blue cords on the robes of the garments, about a third of the way up the painting, hold the image together horizontally. This is what draws me in.

The architectural quality appeals to me. When I was making Ghost – a cast of an entire room, stripped down to its bare architecture – I had a postcard of this on the wall of the room I was casting.

Man Ray's Dust Breeding
Man Ray's Dust Breeding. Photograph: Scala/Man Ray Estate/Dacs

Cornelia Parker on Man Ray

I didn't really know what I was looking at when I first came across Man Ray's Dust Breeding, his photograph of a work by Marcel Duchamp called Large Glass. It looked like an aerial photograph, or a view through a microscope. Taken in 1920, it seemed a truly ambiguous image – abstract, yet at the same time an accurate record. It was only later, when I'd read more, that I appreciated how Duchamp deified neglect: he thought allowing dust to settle could be a valid process in the making of art.

The Large Glass, which took Duchamp about eight years to complete, was a work-in-progress when Man Ray took this. As the dust gathered, it was silently recording the time Duchamp took to process his ideas. Duchamp allowed this long pause to become part of the final work – fixing some of the dust to the surface with varnish so that it looked like stained glass.

In 1997, I made a pair of earplugs from dust collected in the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's Cathedral; and in 2001, I made a homage to this photograph, called Dust Breeding (On Judd). The Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art museum in Texas founded by the sculptor Donald Judd, asked me to create a print. I asked them to clean Judd's 100 stainless steel sculptures, housed in an aircraft hangar there, and send me the dust. When magnified, it was teeming, made up of particles of sand and cacti that had blown in from the desert, wasps, and the legs of other insects. Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

Millais's Ophelia
Millais's Ophelia Photograph: Corbis

Ed Ruscha on John Everett Millais

I first saw John Everett Millais's Ophelia when I came to the UK in 1961 and was struck by its originality. I guess I had a fondness for all sorts of pre-Raphaelite images back then. The feeling passed, but the nature of this painting stayed with me.

At first, I didn't delve into its story and symbolism. I viewed it strictly as a picture, how it was composed and so on. But later I learned that it had been analysed by so many people. Every blade of grass and each plant has been botanically identified, and someone has found almost exactly where Millais set up his easel. Some believe there is a skull hidden just to the left of the forget-me-nots on the right.

The painting became a trigger in my art, an inspiration. You look down on her from an oblique angle, so the painting is an aerial view; the diagonal of her body in the water is an aspect my work echoes. My study of art is ordered on that thinking: that you look at something almost as if it were a tabletop arrangement. I regard a lot of my paintings and even my photographs as the offspring of this painting.

Ophelia is in the grand tradition of English painting, and its story goes back to Shakespeare; my work goes back to 1968 and, you could say, is the culmination of commercial America. But pictorially they are connected, like brother and sister. Each time I come to London, I feel obliged see it. In some ways, I feel I am looking at myself.

• This is an edited extract from In My View: Personal Reflections on Art by Today's Leading Artists, ed Simon Grant, Thames & Hudson. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop here

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Saturday, November 10, 2012

TateShots: Frank Bowling

 

 

Here, Bowling looks back over his long career and explains why he made the change. Bowling’s ‘Poured Paintings’ are on show at Tate Britain until 1 March 2013, and other works feature in the Tate exhibition ‘Migrations: Journeys Into British Art’.

 

http://www.tate.org.uk

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

My chair

One of the absolute must haves for a studio is a comfortable chair; a good place for looking at the painting and sometimes a place to fall asleep. My working day usually consists of a series of 30 to 40 minutes of painting divided by 15 to 20 minutes of sitting in my chair analyzing what I have just put down and what the painting needs next often with a coffee or lately a tea and sometimes one of those little O'Henry's pulled from the freezer.

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Here’s a preview of what I’m working on currently.

 

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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Franz KlineMeryon 1960-1

 

T00926_10

 

Kline began as a figurative painter, but by 1950 was making vigorous, large-scale abstract paintings in black and white. His sense of space and insistence on flatness were particularly influenced by Japanese art and many of his works have a calligraphic feel. The bold directional marks in this painting also have a strong architectural sense, and it has been suggested that the work relates to an engraving of a clock tower by the nineteenth-century French artist Charles Meryon. Despite the spontaneous feel of his work, Kline often made small preparatory sketches before executing the larger paintings.

July 2008

 

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kline-meryon-t00926

Monday, November 5, 2012

Doyen of American critics turns his back on the 'nasty, stupid' world of modern art

Dave Hickey condemns world he says has become calcified by too much money, celebrity and self-reverence

Dave Hickey
Dave Hickey says he is quitting the art world. Photograph: Nasher Museum Of Art

One of America's foremost art critics has launched a fierce attack on the contemporary art world, saying anyone who has "read a Batman comic" would qualify for a career in the industry.

Dave Hickey, a curator, professor and author known for a passionate defence of beauty in his collection of essays The Invisible Dragon and his wide-ranging cultural criticism, is walking away from a world he says is calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing.

"They're in the hedge fund business, so they drop their windfall profits into art. It's just not serious," he told the Observer. "Art editors and critics – people like me – have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It's not worth my time."

Hickey says the art world has acquired the mentality of a tourist. "If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been. But I'm interested in Gary Hume and written about him quite a few times."

If it's a matter of buying long and selling short, then the artists he would sell now include Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan. "It's time to start shorting some of this shit," he added.

Hickey's outburst comes as a number of contemporary art curators at world famous museums and galleries have complained that works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn are the result of "too much fame, too much success and too little critical sifting" and are "greatly overrated".

Speaking on condition of anonymity to Will Gompertz, the BBC's arts editor, one curator described Emin's work as "empty", adding that because of the huge sums of money involved "one always has to defend it".

Gompertz, who recently wrote What Are You Looking At? 150 Years of Modern Art, sympathised with Hickey's frustration.

"Money and celebrity has cast a shadow over the art world which is prohibiting ideas and debate from coming to the fore," he said yesterday, adding that the current system of collectors, galleries, museums and art dealers colluding to maintain the value and status of artists quashed open debate on art.

"I hope this is the start of something that breaks the system. At the moment it feels like the Paris salon of the 19th century, where bureaucrats and conservatives combined to stifle the field of work. It was the Impressionists who forced a new system, led by the artists themselves. It created modern art and a whole new way of looking at things.

"Lord knows we need that now more than anything. We need artists to work outside the establishment and start looking at the world in a different way – to start challenging preconceptions instead of reinforcing them."

Gompertz said Hickey was not a man who ever regretted a decision but that he did not agree with the American that the whole contemporary art world was moribund. "There are important artists like Ai Weiwei and Peter Doig, who produces beautiful and haunting paintings in similar ways to Edward Hopper," he said.

As a former dealer, Hickey is not above considering art in terms of relative valuation. But his objections stem from his belief that the art world has become too large, too unfriendly and lacks discretion. "Is that elitist? Yes. Winners win, losers lose. Shoot the wounded, save yourself. Those are the rules," Hickey said.

His comments come ahead of the autumn art auctions. With Europe in recession and a slowdown in the Chinese and Latin American economies, vendors are hoping American collectors, buoyed by a 2% growth in the US economy, andnew collectors, such as those coming to the market from oil-rich Azerbaijan, will boost sales.

At 71, Hickey has long been regarded as the enfant terrible of art criticism, respected for his intellectual range as well as his lucidity and style. He once said: "The art world is divided into those people who look at Raphael as if it's graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it's Raphael, and I prefer the latter."

Hickey, who also rates British artist Bridget Riley, says he did not realise when he came to the art world in the 1960s that making art was a "bourgeois" activity.

"I used to sell hippy art to collectors and these artists now live like the collectors I used to sell to. They have a house, a place in the country and a BMW."

Hickey says he came into art because of sex, drugs and artists like Robert Smithson, Richard Serra and Roy Lichtenstein who were "ferocious" about their work. "I don't think you get that anymore. When I asked students at Yale what they planned to do, they all say move to Brooklyn – not make the greatest art ever."

He also believes art consultants have reduced the need for collectors to form opinions. "It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't," he says. "If you stood in front of a Bridget Riley you have to look at it and it would start to do interesting things. Now you wouldn't look at it. You ask a consultant."

Hickey says his change of heart came when he was asked to sign a 10-page contract before he could sit on a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Laura Cumming, the Observer's art critic, said it would be a real loss if Hickey stopped writing commentary. "The palace Hickey's describing, with its lackeys and viziers, its dealers and advisers, is more of an American phenomenon. It's true that we too have wilfully bad art made for hedge fund managers, but the British art scene is not yet so thick with subservient museum directors and preening philanthropists that nothing is freely done and we can't see the best contemporary art in our public museums because it doesn't suit the dealers.And that will be true, I hope, until we run out of integrity and public money."

Hickey's retirement may only be partial. He plans to complete a book, Pagan America — "a long commentary of the pagan roots of America and snarky diatribe on Christianity" — and a second book of essays titled "Pirates and Framers."

It is the job of a cultural commentator to make waves but Hickey is adamant he wants out of the business. "What can I tell you? It's nasty and it's stupid. I'm an intellectual and I don't care if I'm not invited to the party. I quit."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Sotheby's Sells Group of Clyfford Still Paintings for $114 Million

Clyfford Still, Detail, "PH-1033" (1976). Sold for: $19,682,5000.

Sotheby's

Sotheby's rounded out New York's major fall auctions Wednesday by selling a quartet of Clyfford Still paintings for $114 million, nearly twice their combined asking price.

Still, a lanky artist born in North Dakota in 1904, visited New York after World War II and fell in with the city's leading Abstract Expressionist painters like Mark Rothko. Unlike Rothko's pulsing rectangles, Still gained a reputation for slathering his own canvases with jagged shards of color.

Before he died in 1980, Still asked his wife, Patricia, to hang onto some of his early works in case a city ever built a museum devoted to his art. On Nov. 18, Denver will open its Clyfford Still Museum—and receive the proceeds from the sale of these four works at Sotheby's. That's because Ms. Still agreed to give the works to the city of Denver, and the city sold them to boost the museum's endowment. (The museum has at least 825 additional Still paintings in its collection.)

Collectors, who bided their time as the Still estate and museum were sorted out, pounced Wednesday. Only 11 works by the artist have come up at auction over the past decade, which makes Still rarer than, say, Rothko whose works have come up for sale over 100 times during the same period. In a volatile market, such rarity only adds to Still's luster. At least four bidders chased the artist's rust, black and butter-colored abstract "1949-A-No. 1," and a telephone bidder won it for $61.6 million, soaring past its $35 million high estimate. The price also eclipsed the artist's prior auction record of $21.2 million.

Minutes later, the buyer of the $61.6 million Still paid another $19.6 million for the painter's orange "PH-1033," which evokes a freeze-frame fire. That work was only expected to sell for up to $15 million.

Still's creamy canvas threaded with rivulets of black, blue and orange paint, "1947-Y-No. 2," also fared well, selling for $31.4 million. It was priced to sell for up to $20 million. Gabriela Palmieri, a Sotheby's specialist who handles clients from Latin America, fielded the winning telephone bid. The last of the Still group -- an earlier, less-ragged work from 1940, "PH-351" -- sold for $1.2 million, just under its $1.5 million high estimate.

After the sale, Christopher Hunt, president of the Denver Museum's board, hailed the prices paid for Still's art, adding that the sale "confirms Clyfford Still's rightful place as a leader" in 20th century art.

The early frenzy over the Stills helped stoke the competitive energy in Sotheby's York Avenue saleroom, which included everyone from Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell to tabloid favorite and oil heir Brandon Davis. The atmosphere was also lively outside the auction house's doors, as art handlers involved in a labor dispute with Sotheby's protested by bleating air horns.

The protests didn't seem to deter bidders, though. In all, Sotheby's sold 315.8 million worth of art—well over its $270 million high estimate and the third-highest sale total ever achieved by its contemporary art department. (Its peak remains a $362 million evening sale in May 2008.)

Elsewhere in the sale, a telephone bidder paid $19.6 million for Francis Bacon's emerald-green triptych, "Three Studies for a Self-Portrait," which the British artist painted in 1967. The work was priced to sell for up to $20 million. Two other Bacons also came up for bid: Bacon's moody-blue scene of an "Elephant Fording a River" from 1952 sold for $5.6 million, and his powdery pastel "Study for Portrait" from 1979 sold for $4.3 million. Bacon's performance here could soothe some of the recent jitters over his pricing levels, an uncertainty exacerbated by Christie's failure on Tuesday to sell his 1981 "Study of a Man Talking," which had been priced to sell for at least $12 million.

Sotheby's sale also amounted to a test of Gerhard Richter's market. With seven pieces on offer, Richter played a Warholian role in this sale in that bidders had a choice of pieces at varying sizes and price levels. Their top pick? Richter's fuschia-blue "Abstract Painting," a wall-sized work from 1997 that sold for a record $20.8 million, over its $12 million high estimate. The German artist's scraped, neon-hued "Abstract Painting" from 1992 also sold for $14 million; his 1987 "Gudrun" sold for $18 million. Altogether, the group of Richters totaled $74 million, over their combined $27 million estimate.

Mark Rothko was also present in these sales: "Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown)," a large, somber work from 1964 that Sotheby's said it owned as inventory. But either the work's owner or its palette failed to sync with bidders' appetites, and the Rothko attracted no bids. It had priced it to sell for at least $8 million.

Late-era works by Andy Warhol continue to filter into these sales, with varying results. A telephone bidder paid $6.5 million for his 1986 "The Last Supper," a salmon-colored depiction of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece that Warhol silk-screened twice on his own canvas, lining one "Supper" above the other like a film reel. It was priced to sell for at least $5.5 million. Warhol's 1981 "Mickey Mouse (Myth Series)" also sold for $3.4 million, just over its $3 million low estimate.

In a battle of currencies that feels current, Sotheby's also offered up two different versions of Warhol's silkscreen of the American dollar sign. As expected, the bigger, 7-and-a-half foot version of "Dollar Sign" from 1981 won out, selling for $3.6 million, while Warhol's laptop-sized "Dollar Sign" from the following year sold for $698,500.

To raise funds, the Swiss bank UBS tried to sell off a quartet of works from its corporate art collection, but no one wanted its untitled Willem de Kooning drawing, which was priced to sell for at least $1.2 million, or its untitled Robert Rauschenberg work on paper. Its Ellsworth Kelly collage, "Study for Tiger," fared better, selling for 686,500.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, another seller, got $494,500 million for Josef Albers's "Homage to the Square: Two Grays Between Two Yellows." It was priced to sell for at least $500,000.

Overall, 62 of Sotheby's 73 offerings found buyers, helping the house achieve 94.7% of it total potential value. Records were also reset for seven artists, including Still, Richter, Cady Noland, Joan Mitchell and David Hammons. On Thursday, Sotheby's daylong sale of lesser-priced contemporary artworks will conclude the city's two-week auction series.

 

http://online.wsj.com

 

The Pasadena Museum of California Art opens a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne Edgar Payne, The Rendezvous (Santa Cruz Island, CA), 1915. PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California Art presents Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne (1883–1947), one of the most gifted of California’s early plein-air painters. Payne’s work exemplifies the power and dynamism that separate California Impressionism from the picturesque French Impressionism of the 18th Century. One of the first exhibitions of his work in over forty years, the retrospective features nearly 100 paintings and drawings, as well as photographs and objects from the artist’s studio; the exhibition will be on view from June 3 - October 14, 2012. Born in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri in 1883, Payne began his art career by painting signs, stage sets, and murals. He considered himself completely self-taught—his training lasted only two weeks at the Chicago Art Institute—and believed that nature was his best teacher. He ultimately settled in California and from there travelled widely. He exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to create paintings of the Southwest, won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon, and was a founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Payne utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light characteristic of Impressionism, but his employment of powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to its raw, rugged beauty. His majestic and vital landscapes are informed by his reverence for the natural world. The exhibition traces Payne’s artistic development as he traveled the world in search of this grandeur: the Southern and Central California coast, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest. “In the course of his painting expeditions, Payne was determined to rediscover a broad and epic landscape that captured and conveyed the ‘unspeakably sublime,’” said Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., the exhibition’s curator and associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum. “In each locale, he sought vitality, bigness, nobility, and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life.” This exhibition was organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Shields.

More Information: http://artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=55802#.UHctChjebos[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Bookmark and Share The Pasadena Museum of California Art opens a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne Edgar Payne, The Rendezvous (Santa Cruz Island, CA), 1915. PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California Art presents Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne (1883–1947), one of the most gifted of California’s early plein-air painters. Payne’s work exemplifies the power and dynamism that separate California Impressionism from the picturesque French Impressionism of the 18th Century. One of the first exhibitions of his work in over forty years, the retrospective features nearly 100 paintings and drawings, as well as photographs and objects from the artist’s studio; the exhibition will be on view from June 3 - October 14, 2012. Born in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri in 1883, Payne began his art career by painting signs, stage sets, and murals. He considered himself completely self-taught—his training lasted only two weeks at the Chicago Art Institute—and believed that nature was his best teacher. He ultimately settled in California and from there travelled widely. He exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to create paintings of the Southwest, won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon, and was a founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Payne utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light characteristic of Impressionism, but his employment of powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to its raw, rugged beauty. His majestic and vital landscapes are informed by his reverence for the natural world. The exhibition traces Payne’s artistic development as he traveled the world in search of this grandeur: the Southern and Central California coast, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest. “In the course of his painting expeditions, Payne was determined to rediscover a broad and epic landscape that captured and conveyed the ‘unspeakably sublime,’” said Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., the exhibition’s curator and associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum. “In each locale, he sought vitality, bigness, nobility, and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life.” This exhibition was organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Shields.

More Information: http://artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=55802#.UHctChjebos[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

The Pasadena Museum of California Art opens a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne Edgar Payne, The Rendezvous (Santa Cruz Island, CA), 1915. PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California Art presents Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne (1883–1947), one of the most gifted of California’s early plein-air painters. Payne’s work exemplifies the power and dynamism that separate California Impressionism from the picturesque French Impressionism of the 18th Century. One of the first exhibitions of his work in over forty years, the retrospective features nearly 100 paintings and drawings, as well as photographs and objects from the artist’s studio; the exhibition will be on view from June 3 - October 14, 2012. Born in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri in 1883, Payne began his art career by painting signs, stage sets, and murals. He considered himself completely self-taught—his training lasted only two weeks at the Chicago Art Institute—and believed that nature was his best teacher. He ultimately settled in California and from there travelled widely. He exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to create paintings of the Southwest, won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon, and was a founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Payne utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light characteristic of Impressionism, but his employment of powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to its raw, rugged beauty. His majestic and vital landscapes are informed by his reverence for the natural world. The exhibition traces Payne’s artistic development as he traveled the world in search of this grandeur: the Southern and Central California coast, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest. “In the course of his painting expeditions, Payne was determined to rediscover a broad and epic landscape that captured and conveyed the ‘unspeakably sublime,’” said Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., the exhibition’s curator and associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum. “In each locale, he sought vitality, bigness, nobility, and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life.” This exhibition was organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Shields.

More Information: http://artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=55802#.UHctChjebos[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Bookmark and Share The Pasadena Museum of California Art opens a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne Edgar Payne, The Rendezvous (Santa Cruz Island, CA), 1915. PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California Art presents Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne (1883–1947), one of the most gifted of California’s early plein-air painters. Payne’s work exemplifies the power and dynamism that separate California Impressionism from the picturesque French Impressionism of the 18th Century. One of the first exhibitions of his work in over forty years, the retrospective features nearly 100 paintings and drawings, as well as photographs and objects from the artist’s studio; the exhibition will be on view from June 3 - October 14, 2012. Born in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri in 1883, Payne began his art career by painting signs, stage sets, and murals. He considered himself completely self-taught—his training lasted only two weeks at the Chicago Art Institute—and believed that nature was his best teacher. He ultimately settled in California and from there travelled widely. He exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to create paintings of the Southwest, won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon, and was a founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Payne utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light characteristic of Impressionism, but his employment of powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to its raw, rugged beauty. His majestic and vital landscapes are informed by his reverence for the natural world. The exhibition traces Payne’s artistic development as he traveled the world in search of this grandeur: the Southern and Central California coast, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest. “In the course of his painting expeditions, Payne was determined to rediscover a broad and epic landscape that captured and conveyed the ‘unspeakably sublime,’” said Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., the exhibition’s curator and associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum. “In each locale, he sought vitality, bigness, nobility, and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life.” This exhibition was organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Shields.

More Information: http://artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=55802#.UHctChjebos[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Bookmark and Share The Pasadena Museum of California Art opens a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne Edgar Payne, The Rendezvous (Santa Cruz Island, CA), 1915. PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California Art presents Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, a retrospective of artist Edgar Payne (1883–1947), one of the most gifted of California’s early plein-air painters. Payne’s work exemplifies the power and dynamism that separate California Impressionism from the picturesque French Impressionism of the 18th Century. One of the first exhibitions of his work in over forty years, the retrospective features nearly 100 paintings and drawings, as well as photographs and objects from the artist’s studio; the exhibition will be on view from June 3 - October 14, 2012. Born in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri in 1883, Payne began his art career by painting signs, stage sets, and murals. He considered himself completely self-taught—his training lasted only two weeks at the Chicago Art Institute—and believed that nature was his best teacher. He ultimately settled in California and from there travelled widely. He exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to create paintings of the Southwest, won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon, and was a founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Payne utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light characteristic of Impressionism, but his employment of powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to its raw, rugged beauty. His majestic and vital landscapes are informed by his reverence for the natural world. The exhibition traces Payne’s artistic development as he traveled the world in search of this grandeur: the Southern and Central California coast, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest. “In the course of his painting expeditions, Payne was determined to rediscover a broad and epic landscape that captured and conveyed the ‘unspeakably sublime,’” said Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., the exhibition’s curator and associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum. “In each locale, he sought vitality, bigness, nobility, and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life.” This exhibition was organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Shields.

More Information: http://artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=55802#.UHctChjebos[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Saturday, November 3, 2012

How Contemporary Art Lost Its Glamour

JACOB WILLER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rogue's gallery: Charles Saatchi

Suddenly, the press dares to criticise contemporary art. A number of coinciding events seem to have focussed a new, less reverential attitude towards the spin of the art world. Damien Hirst's retrospective at the Tate and Anish Kapoor's tower for the Olympics have borne the brunt of criticism in London. Not that these two do not invite harsh criticism in themselves, but last year they did not get it and now they do. The same strange thing happened in the USA, over Maurizio Cattelan's exhibition at the Guggenheim — last year a darling, this year a dud. Familiar artists with familiar styles; and these projects were years in the planning, so we could hardly have been shocked by them. I suspect they are picked on, now, as examples of something which once commanded timid respect, but with which we have lost patience. It is not Hirst and Kapoor, or Cattelan who have changed; it is we ourselves. We have not been disappointed; we have become disillusioned. But how? And why now?

Significantly, the most pointed criticism has been directed less at the art than the art market. Hari Kunzru, in the Guardian, looked at Damien Hirst's use of the market as an essential subject in his art, then suggested that Hirst's reputation depends on his having "single-handedly remade the global art market in his image". Felix Salmon, for Reuters, amended Kunzru's argument: "Hirst . . .  has moved himself out of the art market and into the consumption-goods market: he manufactures art works, sets the prices for them, and sells them to anybody willing to buy them. Once you have bought a Hirst, you then exhibit it as a way of displaying your wealth and, um, taste." 

Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit, commissioned for the Olympic Park, provoked a different debate, over the state's irresponsibility in sponsoring art so inflated by fashion and so unappealing to the populace. Libby Purves, in The Times, called the tower "a twisted red object . . . painfully visible from the Stratford train for weeks. It is Britain's biggest public sculpture, cost £22.7 million, of which you and I paid more than £3 million." 

The folly of public institutions submitting to the authority of the art market was also addressed in New York. Jed Perl, in the New Republic, wrote: "The truth is that Cattelan's presence at the Guggenheim has nothing to do with what the public may or may not want. Cattelan is at the Guggenheim because the big money in the art business is behind him." Perl noted that a minor Cattelan, a miniature model of two elevator doors, had recently been sold for more than a million dollars. These exhibition criticisms follow from a variety of broader art world exposés. Bryan Appleyard, for Intelligent Life, analysed Andy Warhol sales. Warhol is "the art market's one-man Dow Jones . . . nothing bounced out of recession quite like a Warhol . . . the rise in his average auction prices between 1985 and the end of 2010: 3,400 per cent. The contemporary-art market as a whole rose by about half that, the Dow by about a fifth."

 There were humorous accounts of auction houses' shady work, and avid study of the manoeuvrings of Larry Gagosian, the art world's number one gallerist/fixer. David Segal wrote in the New York Times: "If you want to spend $30 million on a de Kooning, you can check what's in the catalogues of the coming Sotheby's and Christie's sales. But if you don't find what you want, you'll probably call Mr Gagosian." Board members of New York's New Museum were accused of using the galleries to aggrandise their personal collections, thus boosting values. Kunzru described the "corruption of art museums by investors", suggesting that the Tate Gallery, too, was compromised; it has shown works from the UBS investment bank's collection in return for lucrative sponsorship. 

Dubious relationships between public galleries, private dealers and investors are not so new. A storm blew up in 2005 when the Tate bought for £600,000 a work by Chris Ofili, who sat on its board of trustees. After the press revealed the transaction, the Tate was censured by the Charity Commission. But, back then, such stories were usually only interesting to the "reactionary" press — the Telegraph, and specialist art publications like The Jackdaw. I suppose they were interested in the story primarily because they disapproved of sanctioning that sort of art — the dodgy transaction just made it juicier; corrupt business fomented by corrupt taste. The "progressive" press had the opposite agenda: they would try to ignore the corrupt business, as long as it sanctioned corrupt — i.e. anti-bourgeois — taste. The Left, through its own vanity, always too easily fell for the art world's oldest trick. Already in 1975 Tom Wolfe wrote: "Avant-garde art . . . takes the Mammon and the Moloch out of money, puts Levi's, turtlenecks, muttonchops, and other mantles and laurels of bohemian grace upon it." Not even Wolfe could foresee the artist's metamorphosis from bohemian to businessman, completing in 2008 when Hirst sold his own works at auction. Only after that auction could the Left take a stand against the art world. So now it is criticised from both flanks. The politics of taste are over; at this moment what matters — for the art journalist as much as for Hirst — is money.

Hirst's auction took £70.5 million on the day that Lehman Brothers went bust. A lot has been made of this coincidence — certainly it emphasised the irrationality and the untouchability of the art world. But we can make even more of it. Perhaps the banking collapse, as much as Hirst's unabashed commercialism, has brought the art world to its current disrepute. When towers of twisted glass seemed to shine money down on our cities, people were prepared to celebrate the absurdities of contemporary art. Its prices were glorious assertions of self-confidence; real value, even in an area as intangible as art, could just be created out of money, if the sum was high enough. Culture was to be the venerable crown for flaunting global finance. There was compensation here. I suspect some officials, especially in government, felt uneasy with the dogma that all this abstractly accumulated wealth was good for all, and so they guiltily willed from it this cultural deposit — they were desperate for substance, for their consciences' sake. Contemporary art would prove that all the money was for the good. Contemporary art was useful. Some of the modern super-rich learnt to launder their reputations as well as their money, with art. Money can be safer in some artists' names than in banks, but anything sold as art is more than an investment — it confers upon the buyer a sense of sophistication, even beneficence. The money laundering, whether for conscience or security or prestige, was easily disregarded, because it was more important that our riches were not just glorified, but at the same time dignified. Contemporary art was loved, I think sincerely, as a concealer of sins. 

There is nothing new in using art to pay a spiritual debt. But we do it differently, now that we have developed a strange idea that art should be a reflection of our society. We decided that art is not to "soften and humanise the mind", as Sir Joshua Reynolds said — such lofty sentiments are now dizzying. Art is not the wise balm of beauty to our rough and rushing lives, it is just the odd fact excerpted from life; it should be as rough and rushed — and as blandly real — as the rest. But, strangely, despite the currency of nihilistic arguments, our minds have not so hardened that we can fully prise Art away from Virtue. Precisely the people who would laugh at the old ideas of Reynolds, and call him pompous, prudish, even sick, inherit from him their extraordinary esteem for art, whatever art may be. But they even exaggerate and pervert his esteem. Art is no longer for the good; art is, essentially, good. Therefore, since art reflects us, we must also be good. Perhaps that is why so many otherwise reasonable people have let their sanity slide and applauded contemporary art; and that is why they let art be the vehicle for money and reputation laundering. Wherever there is art, there must be good. The more there is, the better we are. And, with our drunken faith in markets, believing that value is price, the more expensive art is, the better it is, so the better we are. So they thought. 

For people who had made mountains of money on intangible deals, the contemporary art world made sense. They were well prepared to accept that gigantic sums should shift around invisible qualities. And they were keen to shift more money. It was as if the very arbitrariness of which art became expensive, and therefore desirable, was their consolation. Their sort of art could not console, of course, but its awesome "value" could. The contemporary art world reflected the financial world perfectly, and the reflection was a flattering soother. Buying into Hirst, Warhol or any of the others, allows you to say: "Yes, I am proud of what I do for money, I make no apologies." It also says: "The market ethic I stand for is so powerful (so right?) that even art complies with it. Even what they grandly call ‘the aesthetic' will recognise the sovereignty of markets. The proof is on my wall." Art will celebrate the marketeer's way of life. It can be shiny, but crude; brash, but bland. And art can be commodified, and stocked. 

The people acquiesced — it all seemed glamorous. But after the 2008 crash things have gradually changed. Contemporary art had dazzled as a market phenomenon, but we have become more sceptical about markets. We no longer believe that high prices indicate high value and, on the whole, high prices have lost our trust. For now, at least, we have once more learnt to scorn mammon; and mammon's minions have been the most visible players in the art world. Perhaps an art that excused sin so mercenarily was not so good after all.

The glamour is gone; we recoil at the lustre of those glass towers whose triumph now seems tragic. Kunzru refers to Hirst as "house artist to the 1 per cent". Perl wonders why, all of a sudden, even New York's most sycophantic critics were not amused by the Cattelan show: "Maybe they're tired of partying in a funhouse where they will never be more than dinner guests. As for the people who buy and sell Maurizio Cattelan, my guess is they don't give a damn what critics — or for that matter museumgoers — say." Clearly, it is now us against them; the contemporary art world has become toxic and so the critics are keeping away.

 Recently I heard an art world appointee challenged about the validity of his work. The challenge was clichéd: "It is the emperor's new clothes!" Back came the ready-made reply: "The emperor is not naked, if we can see his clothes." I think this is not just a pitiable misunderstanding of the tale. Surely the appointee meant to imply:"This is our parade, not yours. You may cheer, but you cannot interject. The emperor is dressed as we deem fit, until, and only until, our committee should decide otherwise." So the art world, too, is squaring up. It will not go down without a fight. The procession may continue, but the party is over. The pointlessly rich can no longer excuse their pointlessness by sponsoring the most extravagantly pointless art — they only draw attention to it. Once, art laundered the reputations of art buyers whose financial power then inflated the importance and the price of art; now, the reputations of the same buyers are again soiled — by their very financial power — and it is their soiled reputations that are threatening to spoil their own investments; contemporary art risks being ruined by money. What an ironic twist — it is now the financial world, sins and all, that reflects badly on art. Contemporary art has finally become uncool. Because of money. Money has become uncool. The aesthetic of superficiality, of shallow shiny rich, is dead and rotting. (Can you imagine a television network commissioning Sex and the City today?) Now art seems ugly because it is expensive; before, it seemed beautiful, or at least fascinating, because expensive. Vulgarity is vulgar again! So much so that even Charles Saatchi uses the word.

He shocked everyone with a recent article in the Guardian: "Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs." Saatchi, the man who made the reputations of almost all the artists now deemed most offensive, with an adman's snigger, tries to position himself away from the art of the 1 per cent. He sides with the masses, of course, to whom he has always sidled for his sell. He even pretends to be brainwashing his reader, implying that conceptual art has not been his problem; now conceptual art is just for those who are too timid to judge on painting: "For professional curators, selecting specific paintings for an exhibition is a daunting prospect, far too revealing a demonstration of their lack of what we in the trade call ‘an eye'." Back then when it suited him, Saatchi would have laughed at the idea of "an eye". It is only a small exaggeration to say that the aesthetic of superficiality was his own aesthetic, the advertiser's aesthetic defiantly conquering the terrain of art. Saatchi is alert to the public mood — that is the success of his business. In that public mood he must have noticed the significant new attitude. Contemporary art's old allure is gone. Since the art is not cool, the advertiser is hedging. He declares himself out before the others — the only way to stay cool.

Without cool, contemporary art may be devastated. A contributor to Vice magazine, a young person's guide to correctly subversive fashions, inadvertently showed how art is failing. "You know what? I'm sick of pretending. I went to art school, wrote a dissertation called ‘The Elevation of Art Through Commerce: An Analysis of Charles Saatchi's Approach to the Machinery of Art Production Using Pierre Bourdieu's Theories of Distinction', have attended art openings at least once a month for the last five years, even fucking purchased pieces of it, but  after attending the opening of the new Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, I'm finally ready to come out and say it: I just don't think I ‘get' art."

 The critic is in earnest, but he is not wholly honest with himself. He "got" art when it was cool; he does not "get" art when it is uncool. He "got" art because it was cool. And he really got it, as we can see from his dissertation title. He is a fashionable person. Accidentally, he confirms what every sane person always knew: contemporary art is just a branch of fashion. Judgment of contemporary art is a matter of being "on trend", not of discerning qualities. He is "finally ready to come out and say it", now, because this is just the moment a fashionable person would say it — the moment art lost its cool. If the fashionable crowds, with the critics, move away, art loses its status as commodity. It can still be a stock, of course, but it is riskier. The cheeriest sections of the crowd are now doubting, and pointing, so the big investors, with the museum directors in their pockets, will have to guard the emperor's clothes more vigilantly.

The artists, though, are fashionable people; for a while now we have seen them sensing the public mood and, like Saatchi, appeasing it as quickly as possible. In late 2009 Hirst remade himself as a painter, staging a show at the Wallace Collection so that his pictures could be seen one room away from Rembrandt. There was the usual vanity, but more important is the suggestive repositioning of his work, from commodity to high art. Just like Saatchi and his "eye", Hirst trusts paintings to have the power to convince people of high-minded intentions, and make them forget sins that fell out of fashion. In a recent interview Hirst referred to the influence of William Blake, Rodin, Bomberg, Bacon. When Hirst was at the peak of his popularity in the 1990s, he referred to older art, such as painting, only to introduce his epiphany about "visual language". "I was thinking that all the beautiful art always existed in the past . . . I suddenly realised that I'm walking round with my fucking head on the ground. And if you pick your head up, there's fucking advertising billboards and TV and magazine images and fashion and design and film [ . . . ] As soon as I lifted my head up off the ground, that's when I realised that all the stuff I saw wasn't shit."

Meanwhile, Tracey Emin has accepted the appointment of Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy. The appointment really says more about that institution than about Emin, but it tells us  that Emin, too, is anxious to position herself with craft and tradition, to move away from what was fashionable. Even the artists, now in desperate disguise, are jumping from the procession and trying to join the murmuring crowd. They have heard the music, and shivered. 

And now the art world's officials are catching up; they are learning from the artists this new way to guard the new clothes. They claim that the clothes, however meagre they may seem, derive from a venerable tradition, not a vulgar fashion. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times identified the new approach. "It's back to the future for culture. The 2011 Venice Biennale opened with three Tintoretto paintings . . . Cy Twombly was shown in the context of Poussin a few months ago." Tracey Emin's return to Margate was "marked by a sedate display of drawings shown alongside pieces by Rodin and Turner". And "the trendsetting Frieze [art fair] marks its tenth year by inaugurating Frieze Masters." She justifies this turn of events: "Artists who until now have charged forwards in the vanguard of fashion are starting to wonder about their place in history, not least as markets for the contemporary start to look rocky."  Campbell-Johnston cannot ignore the effect of falling prices, especially on the credibility of contemporary art. But she is happiest to see this new trend mostly as a sign that the art world is growing up and developing a historical sense — for her, the artists are just seeking to define their rightful place in the story of art. She concludes that this new historical sense endows contemporary art with a "gravitas that transcends fickle fashion". That is certainly the idea. "Meanwhile the past is endowed with relevance, infused with a fresh pizzazz. Either way, it's art that is the winner." Or, perhaps, art barely comes into it. This is about safer investments; this spurious historical validation of contemporary art (Twombly and Poussin! Emin and Rodin!) must be an attempt to secure old investments now suffering, and to encourage new investments. The past is no more relevant to investment prospects, or art buyers in general, than it ever was. The reason now for distancing art from fashion is not that the audience be convinced of a new "gravitas" but that the buyers are convinced that what they buy is of permanent value. To Campbell-Johnston it means that "contemporary art is at the end of its cycle". Or is this actually contemporary art's last resort?

Of course it is amusing to watch the art world fumbling thus to repudiate itself. But this does not mean we should assume a return to saner appreciations of culture — we must remain watchful. Of Kapoor's tower, Purves wrote: "It . . . looks hideous to me: a piece of vainglorious sub-industrial steel gigantism, signifying nothing." But the tower is signifying plenty. It may well look hideous, but it is doubly hideous for what it is overtly signifying. It is just a toy version of Tatlin's Tower, the proposed headquarters for the Comintern in Petrograd (now St Petersburg). Everyone on the academic side of the art world will recognise it, and smirk. Tatlin's unbuilt designs, from 1917, have come to symbolise the dormant Marxism in modern art. I have lost count of how many models I have seen, and how many contextual exhibitions have been devoted to the tower in recent years, let alone how often it is piously mentioned in essays on "art theory".

A reverential tribute to modernist orthodoxy, in its mode of address to the art world, Kapoor's tower harks back to times before Hirst. It begs for credibility, and sophisticated money, by appealing to sentimentality over subversive politics. Before the super-rich had found an art shiny and shallow enough to help them love their bare reflection, for near on a century they had been buying into an art which, as a polished incarnation of the revolutionary spirit, agreeably distorted their reflection. The new super-rich, with the collusion of cultural authorities, use art to say, "We are who we are, and isn't it fabulous!" The old super-rich, colluding with the same authorities, used art to say, "We are not what we seem, we are righteous and ready for the struggle!" Please let us not go back there.

 

Thank you to Reinhard Reitzenstein for bringing this artilcle to my attention

http://standpointmag.co.uk/