While I was looking at the Picasso cubist drawings in this exhibition a sweet little old lady standing next to me turned and with a look of rapture on her face said: “This one is famous! I know this one is famous.” Responding to her plea for my approval I looked at Woman Ironing, a blue period painting, which I have seen many times, and I smiled: “Yes, I believe it is famous.” I then indicated that I would not be doing anymore talking. Later, as I passed through the galleries, I saw her several more times and she seemed always bewildered, perplexed. (There were no other famous paintings.) The last I saw of her she was drifting out of the galleries…looking greatly disappointed.
This exhibition raises questions that were raised at the Picasso exhibition at the Frick, (scroll down to the next entry for those comments,) and which I believe are answered here: if an exhibition is too much directed to the connoisseurs and to the art world professionals does it run the risk of attracting smaller crowds now and in the future and is that a bad thing? This one does attract fewer visitors. I arrived at the museum late morning and spent about an hour and a half looking at these art works. Spotted here and there throughout the galleries were several clumps of the ladies who lunch most of whose conversations had to do with where exactly they could enjoy their chief pastime in life. After I had gone out to eat and returned for a second viewing in the early afternoon, I had the galleries almost to myself. Believe me, for myself that is not a bad thing. And it shouldn’t be a bad thing for others or for the museum but I’m sure there are those who would try to make it so. (Again, see the Picasso comments below.)
In this era of the museum blockbuster it might seem odd that the Met would mount such a large Stieglitz show. His is no longer a household name and most people probably don’t even know that he was other than a photographer if they know that much. Nor do his American artists have much of a fan base at this time. But I was anxious to see it…I have spent the last several years reading about him and his galleries and his artists. In fact when I saw the Picasso show at the Philadelphia Museum two years ago there was in an adjoining hallway an exhibition of their Alfred Stieglitz Collection (this blog, April, 2010.) and I wrote in my comments that I would love to see an exhibition of the best works of his artists. When I saw the announcement of this exhibition of course I felt that the Met had read and was responding favorably to my suggestion.
My curiosity about Stieglitz came from two sources: my growing interest in photography as a fine art and my growing appreciation for the work of Marsden Hartley. While I might have known the name Hartley for some time it was not until I saw his charcoal drawing, Madawaska-Acandian Light-Heavy, at the Morgan several years ago that his work commanded my attention. In 2005, seeing the painting that followed from that drawing, at the Art Institute in Chicago, I resolved to become more familiar with all of his work and in that endeavor the name Stieglitz is constant. As for photography as a fine art, in the United States the subject begins with the name Alfred Stieglitz.
Thus equipped with a little knowledge one could once have walked into the Lane Collection in Boston, where nine magnificent Arthur Dove paintings greeted you at the entrance, (that was before the museum was reconfigured and that space transformed for another purpose.) next to selections of paintings by Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Charles Demuth and photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand and know that he was in the presence of a man who had known Mr. Stieglitz. The same occurs at the Phillips Collection in Washington. But there there is an interesting difference: with the exception of Hartley all of the Stieglitz group is in a gallery on the top, third, floor. Marsden Hartley’s works are on the main floor with the masters of modern art …Cézanne, Braque …as they should be.
Furthermore my Stieglitz studies were concomitant to my studies of the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Mr. Wright made it his business to create an American architecture, an architecture that he called organic architecture and by which he meant that like democracy it was a desire for freedom that emanated from the heart and grew out into the world. As a boy he had been inspired by Emerson’s essay, The American Scholar, and I would place a safe bet that Stieglitz, who made it his life work to promote an American modern art, had read the same essay at about the same time in his life…as I had done. (While that puts me in their company as a reader I am not claiming that it puts me on an otherwise equal footing.) I think it might also be possible that as Frank Lloyd Wright had been the subject of an important monograph in Germany in 1911, Stieglitz might have been influenced by his work when he turned from an emphasis on modern European art to modern American art. Thus far, however, I have not found any reference of a cross pollination between the two.
Knowing that the work of these men and these artists was a search for the essential character of the American experience, I think you can understand my dismay when I see that the corporate world has taken over this country, and art museums specifically, with its trading of artworks as a commodity, the emphasis on the success of blockbuster exhibitions, and, in short, Making Money. If, in America, there is nothing but Making Money, it is indeed a decadent society and we don’t need an American art: German expressionism will do us quite well.
American art in the early 20th Century manifest itself in a broad spectrum of styles. There were the American Impressionists in Connecticut, California, and the Southwest still working in the French manner. There were still large numbers of academic painters doing landscapes, portraits, etc, working in the European manner, there were other early moderns, the primitives, the realists, and later in the thirties the regionalists and the early American abstractionist led by George G.K. Morris. During the first forty years of the century Alfred Stieglitz took a particular position and represented artists of a like mind. His position was not always the dominant position. Then with the rise to celebrity of the abstract expressionists after his death in 1946, his work was almost totally eclipsed.
As to why this collection is being shown for the first time, according to the catalogue essay by curator Lisa Mintz Messinger this project has been in process for decades. It was given to the museum in 1949 but this is the first fully illustrated and documented catalogue of the over 400 artworks in its entirety. And while there were thoughts about exhibitions using this material in many different configurations, it was finally decided to show as much of the Metropolitan’s Stieglitz Collection exclusively as was possible. This decision was motivated by the museum’s present concentration on the holdings in their collection. I recall that as the motivation as well behind the Picasso exhibition two years ago. That would seem to indicate that a number of other similar exhibitions might be in the planning stages.
I don’t know that this motivation is sufficient, with this collection, to engender a record breaking museum crowd, or even, considering the lack of famous paintings, that it will generate positive word of mouth. But if it is a process of re-evaluating the museum holdings and of re-evaluating American art, then it would have some value beyond the limited appeal as stated and should probably draw a large audience of art world professionals who could involve themselves in an ongoing process.
One of my fascinations with museums is the character of the collector as evidenced through his collection. Because these art works were sometimes purchased individually, sometimes gifted from the artists, and sometimes purchased to avoid returning work to the artist, this collection is not so much a collection as it is an accumulation. It is only a collection in the usual sense in that each of the works was chosen by Stieglitz for exhibition in galleries under his aegises.It is a very large exhibition and circles through the space with individual galleries devoted to specific artists. It begins with modern European artists as a group …Stieglitz was the first to show Picasso and Matisse in this country although this begins with Rodin and Lautrec. Except for the Woman Ironing, the Picasso works are all cubist drawings and when my would-be friend in the gallery informed me that the painting was famous, I was amused because I was looking at Standing Female Nude, 1910, which I had seen two years ago in the Picasso in the Met, and which will be travelling to Washington to join the Picasso Drawings, Reinventing Tradition, currently at the Frick. Now that is really famous!
In gallery two which the catalogue describes as avant garde works of sexually liberation I saw instead a group of turn of the century French works that depict the female as sexual object. I was enamored of the Rodin Satryess which likely defines Erotic …one can feel the heat of the body. I am always up for more Rodin …drawings or sculptures. However, the great discovery in this group was the etchings of Gordon Craig. Having studied set design his is a name I have known for many years but I suddenly realized that I had never seen his work face to face. And while I dislike etchings, I found these fascinating. In sum there are 16 European artists.
Following the 1913 Armory Show the concentration was limited to American artists. Of his American artists, Stieglitz usually spoke of “the seven” meaning that the core group was Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and an alternate from amongst others added in group shows. In all there are 11 “other” American artists in the collection.
It is intriguing that there is no biography of Strand in the catalogue and in retrospect I don’t recall a Paul Strand photograph in the exhibition. There are Stieglitz photographs in the introduction to the exhibition but there are neither catalogue photographs by Stieglitz nor a catalogue biography except as the impresario of the various galleries. These are glaring omissions: were there no Strand and Stieglitz photographs in the bequest? I thought that Stieglitz had given the museum some of his work at other times? Or does the Met make a distinction between art and photography? Are these two separate departments? There is a Stieglitz exhibition in the Gilman Gallery down the hall but it seems coincidental rather than an extension of this one and it is found only by accident.
I hope I am not too subjective when I say that the best works in this exhibition, as a group and as a representative sample of the Stieglitz Circle, are the eleven paintings by Marsden Hartley. Over the course of his lifetime Hartley’s work took on many different stylistic approaches. (I prefer this to the work of someone who has created a signature image and churned out product for America’s collectors and museums.) Except for his late Maine work, he and Stieglitz parted company in 1937, all of his various stylistic turns are included here. What is always consistent in his work is his expression of his naked emotional life felt as an undertone in the work. In that regard I would say that he is to painting what O’Neill is to the drama. In accomplishment I believe they are equals.
Each of these illustrate why I think he achieves greatness: when seen face to face one can see in the difference between the work and reproductions of the work that he was not a picture maker but a painter. Banquet in Silence, in reproduction, seems no more than one of Hartley’s sometimes bizarre subjects, but seen face to face it is a luminous experience. Landscape New Mexico has the dryness AND the feel of the desert.
As a group Hartley’s early work in Germany, seen here in Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, is among his best. Those paintings were made with the limited colors carefully placed within each design motif over an under painting of black. Each of them is perfectly executed …they are the kind of paintings where one false move would require the remaking of the whole of the work. From that perspective they have a wonderful tension. But of the group I prefer Himmel, in the Kansas City Art Museum, which is packed with homosexual coding. That I think is essential to understanding Hartley and this period of his life.
Two Paintings, Dark Mountain Nos. One and Two, 1909, are a direct reference to Albert Pinkham Ryder. In his early days in New York, Hartley befriended his neighbor, the elderly Ryder, and as Hartley was always poor and in need of materials I would not be surprised to learn that Ryder might have advised him; “Materials be dammed. Just get the painting done.” Whatever the source, Hartley consistently used inexpensive grounds for his work.
It can also be seen in all of these paintings that throughout Hartley’s career there is a persistence of black and I believe that one could follow the thread of that persistence in the work of Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, and Braque to understand Hartley’s achievement and his place within that tradition.
When I was last at the National Gallery the one Hartley painting on view, Mount Katahdin, 1942, was in the West Building hanging with the old masters, not because he is not modern but because he is more properly placed in that environment.
The Georgia O’Keeffe works, 3 drawings and 14 paintings, are a curious group. As I understand it, they were not a part of the Stieglitz accumulation but work that she added to the bequest. I would not say that she chose her best work. (I must be honest and say that she is not one of my favorites.) I see no difference between her work face to face and in reproduction. In this exhibition the visitor can compare the painting Cow’s Head, Red, white, and Blue, to the photographic blow up (on vinyl?) and try to determine which is which. Although she was an excellent draughtsman and mastered the craft of painting with flawless brush work, she was a picture maker, as opposed to a painter. If you don’t care for her picture, there’s little more to hold your attention: she lacks Hartley’s deep, rich undertone of emotional expression. Seen in groups her work seems almost gimmicky: it cloys very quickly. The best here is The Black Iris with its wonderfully lyrical and rhythmic line and its advancing and receding forms held in perfect balance. The most perplexing, as a gift, is Ranchos Church: it struck me as poorly executed.
John Marin is represented by 65 watercolors and 72 etchings. I do not like watercolors and I do not like etchings. Marin is best known for his watercolors, which I do like somewhat, and while most of these are up to snuff many of them are marred by a too specific reference to “things” that diminish their abstract quality. Marin seems never to have developed a shorthand iconography in which a shape is understood to represent a specific reference. I like that because it eliminates a manufactured quality when the work is seen in groups but I always feel that I don’t know where I am when I look at his work, and, further, because of the thinness of the water-color, that I don’t really care to know.
Basically I like his work only in oil…the late oils and the early Weehawken series (see this blog, March 2011.). But I must say that I was unprepared to discover the etchings Notre Dame, Paris and Near the Quai Orfevres and that discovery could cause me to revisit all of his work. His watercolors are so loose and free I would never have suspected that he was able to work as he does in these prints.
The Arthur Doves, whose work I like and who I recognize as a great painter, are likely of interest only to art world professionals and connoisseurs. The 31 watercolors are a record of Dove on his way to becoming Arthur Dove, which is interesting and valuable information. However, the pastels, Pagan Philosophy and Sentimental Music, are Dove at his best and of the two I would be willing to put up hard earned cash for the former. Excellent.
Demuth, often the Stieglitz 7th, is represented by 18 works including the stellar oil painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. The others are watercolors. Nuf sed.
As for other famous or near famous pieces among the best is a wonderful series of charcoal caricatures by Zayas, specifically the double portrait of Alfred Stieglitz and John Marin. The initial impact of this is maintained by the lovely composition almost hidden in the overall blackness.
There are also several pieces of sculpture but I am tone deaf when it comes to sculpture and in an exhibition primarily of paintings they always seem to be something left in the center of the room that someone forgot to take away when they had finished hanging the show.
Over all there is a lot of wonderful work by many artists one rarely sees in museums, restricted as museums appear to be now to the Big Names, the box office stars. This in itself is a welcome change. As to what it tells us about the collector we can get a real sense that after the initial shock of the Picasso cubists drawings and the Matisse Fauve color experiments, works selected for the gallery by Edward Steichen and others, there was a cooling off, a stepping back. When the focus turned to the American artists Stieglitz was somewhat uncertain, cautious, and throughout the life of the galleries, essentially conservative. The works are always representational and the subject is always a motif for making a painting; there are no consistently abstract expressionist works such as the one Kandinsky…we can understand in the work seen here that Arthur Dove’s work was always derived from an observation of nature, of a subject. For each of the artists the palette is almost always local color. In the compositions there is always a sense of deep picture space: none of these artists’ works are a purely surface event, such as one can see in the work of Will Barnet (of the succeeding generation) currently on view just up the street. (See this blog, September, 2011.)
Lately I have decided that when twentieth century American art is re-evaluated, now or in the future, the artists in the Stieglitz circle will come to the fore and their works will be seen to have an importance that will inspire future generations of artists, more so than the late twentieth century New York artists who have raked in all the dough and have luxuriated in all the publicity. Not because I think the conservative experience is the more American sentiment, but because the work of these artists covers a broader range of the American experience than the insular New York art world dialogue, and because they successfully communicate that experience to a very much wider audience across the broad spectrum of twentieth century American painting. Picasso always worked with a subject in order to give the viewer something to hang onto, an anchor. Something that others can experience as a human experience is always expressed in his work. The Stieglitz painters followed his examples but retained a national character.
While this exhibition has its importance I think it is insufficient to alter public or professional opinion. But I would urge the Met to continue in this vein with their future exhibitions. If that results in fewer visitors in the galleries I for one could not be happier.
I do hope however, that they will exercise better care in lighting their shows.
Platinum prints are very rare objects and when they are placed in an exhibition it should be possible for the public to see the unique character of this work …the deep rich saturation of the tonal values and the care taken in the lighting and the composition: they can only be made as contact prints. In every one of the photographs in the first gallery here, and in the Gilman gallery, one sees his own reflections in the glass and the lights around the room and the reflections of the other photographs. Nothing can be seen of the details in the works nor can they be seen as a work as a whole. I have seen this before in the Gilman galleries: it is a consistent distraction at The Met (see this blog, April 2011). And there is no reason for it. One does not see it at the Photography Center on 43rd Street, nor at the Frick or at the Morgan. Photographs can be correctly and well lit. The Met simply doesn’t know how to do it or to take the time to do it if they do know how. Nobody seems to demand it. Without the correct lighting the exhibition of photographs is a waste of time all around.
I do not see these reflections in the glazed paintings. But that is another matter. I suppose they are using non-reflective museum glass. However, why anyone would glaze an oil painting is a mystery to me: it eliminates the direct experience of the painted surface and in creating an artificial picture plane it reduces the painting to an almost reproduction. Many museums now do this and I wish they would stop. If the exhibition of paintings is to be dumbed down like so many other things in this culture soon we can all limit our art viewing experiences to the museum web sites. I have a feeling that the corporate overlords, with their eyes ever on the box office, will not like that.
Excellent show. I for one was pleased. I hope I am not alone. Thank you, folks.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgl/hd_stgl.htm#slideshow16
Monday, November 21, 2011
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Picasso's Drawings 1890-1921. Reinventing Tradition. At the Frick Collection, NYC.
Before I am misunderstood let me say that this is an excellent exhibition and I would think that any serious Picasso student would want to see it. It is well worth the trouble of getting there. The Frick is one of the loveliest of art venues in New York and over the years I have maintained my fondest for it. But… There are issues here that I think are worth making a public consideration.
This exhibition raises questions which are more about exhibitions than about the art works. I think we assume that every exhibition has an appeal to the lay public and a separate appeal to connoisseurs, to scholars, or to those who work within the art world. It is likely that as each exhibition is designed thought is given to all those audiences and that efforts are made to find a happy balance amongst them. While that is my assumption I have to say that in the galleries I most often feel that I am surrounded by laymen. Very, very few of the visitors spend more than a few seconds with each art work, the statistical average is thirty seconds, and I have rarely seen two persons conferring about a work who give the impression that they are scholars or art world professionals. Perhaps that elite audience has different hours.
Those thoughts come to mind in this exhibition because it includes so many works that are working drawings, musings, and half finished experiments rather than bravura finished works. As per the title, Reinventing Tradition, we see that Picasso was not a magician, as he sometimes claimed to be, but that he labored over his efforts and we have a better sense of the time quotient in his time line of accomplishment. That should come as sheer delight to scholars who have the opportunity to study rarely seen examples of process in the important stages of his development: one catalogue item is described as never having been exhibited to the public. But I wonder if the lay public, without having read the catalogue and without the aid of the head set guided tour, understand exactly what they are seeing or if they might not think that, as they might have long suspected, Picasso wasn’t always all that good after all.
This exhibition runs the risk of appealing primarily to the specialists. I wondered: Should an exhibition be too unbalanced in favor of the scholars, et al, would there be a risk of alienating the layman and thereby reducing the potential audience for future exhibitions? And that in turn raises the question: would that be a bad thing?
A gallery for what is hoped will be a “big ticket” show should be easily accessible to a large and disparate audience. As most gallery visitors appear to me to be retired senior citizen, elevators and instant access to rest rooms are a must. I would like to suggest that the cellar of a Fifth Avenue mansion is probably not the ideal space to have “big ticket” exhibitions of art works on paper. Unless it is well hidden there is no elevator in the Frick and one must descend and ascend a long curving staircase. There is to my knowledge no restroom on this floor. But more importantly, there needs to be a better system of climate control than provided in these rooms.
On a cool autumn day I arrived at the museum upon the stroke of noon, as per the time stamp on my ticket, and after about thirty minutes downstairs in rooms that were far too overcrowded, perspiration was running down my face. The room was so hot and humid I could hardly breathe. Now: is that good for the art work? It’s certainly not good for seeing them. I have seen in these rooms as well the Late Goya and the Rembrandt exhibitions and suffered nearly the same heat.
Seeking relief I went upstairs to find a quiet, uncrowded space and to my astonishment found that the entire museum was filled to brimming with milling hordes. I remember the Frick from fifty years ago and recall that I loved it because it was a quiet to the point of solemn home in which one could ramble at will without being jostled by overexcited tourists. Because of the crowds I have given up going to MOMA, which I now consider as merely an extension of Times Square, and if The Met, which I also recall as a wonderful once deserted out of the way space, gets any more congested I may have to give that up too. Hence my next question: is all this foot traffic necessary?
What is the reason for all this foot traffic?
I have often suspected that it has to do with the corporate take over of America, including the art institutions on whose boards the captains of the corporate world sit, and the need on the part of management, answerable to said boards of directors, to prove to the businessmen that, yes, an art institution can turn a profit, even though it has nonprofit status, and to pay its own way. Is the Republican worldview, Making Money, the proper yardstick for measuring the success of museum offerings?
It is my understanding that a person is wanted on a board of directors because of their access to both money and privately held art works. Once they are onboard, I am certain that they in turn make demands on the institution. But when does this relationship begin to be a liability rather than a dividend? When do the expanded programs made possible by corporate donors create an unwieldy infrastructure that changes the character of the organization and deter it from its established mission? When do the physical plant and the artworks in custody begin to suffer physically from the too constant and too large audience? Doesn’t the incessant foot traffic lead to an endless round of expansions and renovations?
At times it seems as if the much vaunted Conservative talking point, competition, might be the culprit. But what benefit accrues from competition among museums for the largest numbers of visitors? Free publicity in The New York Times? …Five Hundred Thousand Visitors Establish new Record at the Met! Or is it, as in the corporate world, competition with a goal of winning just for the sake of winning, an endless Pyrrhic game of one-upmanship? Or do those record numbers attract the corporate powers that can bring even more loot to the table? Yet another vicious cycle!
I suppose it’s good for the convention and visitors bureaux to be able to rely on cultural institutions to augment the host city’s offerings, but I wonder if they need to play such a primary part. Viewing art was once considered a quiet and contemplative activity. Viewing art elicits two questions: what is expressed? What is experienced? If the art cannot be seen that process is disrupted. Lately it seems to have become an overly boisterous athletic race to the finish. At the end of the day the tourist can tick off his list of accomplishments: I saw this and this and this and this. And then the question becomes: yes, you looked at many things, but what did you actually see?
The problem of a too large audience is extremely obvious at the Frick which has a fixed collection with a fixed presentation. In order to fit in special exhibitions alternatives spaces have to be found. Many years ago special exhibitions were mounted in the East and Oval Galleries. That would certainly be a wrong choice for a “big ticket” show today. By contrast, The Morgan Library has never had a fixed presentation and they are at liberty to book special exhibitions and to hang them in whatever gallery they think best. But what is missing now at the Morgan, aside from the actual library, is any sense of a permanent collection. Now the Morgan is like an empty Broadway theatre that merely books shows.
Over the years, going to a museum has become a less pleasant experience than it once was. I would hate to think that it is only because over the years I have become old and cranky. In my defense and as I have tried to indicate, I believe the evidence of the problems lies elsewhere. Something, on the part of museums, has to be done. For myself I have taken to going to commercial art galleries and if you’ve never seen art works these past twenty or thirty years in quiet, large, deserted rooms, you have no idea how wonderful that can be. Unless the artist is Picasso.
Well, yes, perhaps problem is Picasso. He certainly packs them in. This is the eighth large Picasso exhibition I’ve seen in the last three or four years and every one of them have been jammed. What other artist could sustain that number of visitors to that number of shows and likely be building larger audiences with each succeeding exhibition?
And why now? Has the lay public who longs for bucolic scenes with deer grazing beside sky blue lakes finally thrown in the towel and decided that he is here to stay? Have they accepted the truth at last that modern art is not a passing phase and that they had better start to understand it by going back to the source? Has it dawned on them that although there are acknowledged Picasso masterpieces to be seen daily in any number of museums, in each new exhibition there are as well rarely seen masterpieces coming out of an endless number of closets? Has the staggering evidence of the sheer magnitude of his achievement finally cowed everyone into submission?
The sheer magnitude of his achievement. I can sit here and imagine any number of future Picasso exhibitions. This one is showing us only 60 (67 total in the two venues) drawings from his first thirty years. Yet to come are the second thirty years, the last twenty years, Guernica Revisited, the drawings for Guernica, the weeping women, the pottery, the sculpture …the early, the middle, and the late periods, the shaped and the assembled from found objects…as well as the drawings for same, the portraits, the children, the landscapes, the bull fights, the still life’s …it is conceivable that there will never be a time when a Picasso exhibition is not on view or in the planning stages. (In January the Guggenheim will present Picasso in Black and White.) And once the full cycle is completed I’m certain there will be new audiences wanting to see them repeated from the beginning.
I highly recommend this exhibition. It begins with an accomplished drawing from a cast by a nine year old wunderkind and carries on through a drawing quoting Ingres in graphite: Madame Georges Wildenstein. In the catalogue that drawing is compared to the Ingres drawing of Madame Louis-Nicolas Marie Destouches, in the collection of the Louvre which, by some great fortunate ordering of things, is presently on view at the Morgan Library offering the art lover the opportunity to compare the two side by side with the interstice of but 35 city blocks.
If, amongst this demonstration of the man at work, you should want masterpieces, they are to be had. On the main floor in what is referred to at the Frick as The Cabinet, (I love museum nomenclature!) you will find a series of portraits of women in pastel …yes he was a master as well in pastel …and in gouache, pen and ink, pencil, graphite, charcoal, etc, etc, etc …portraits in pastel and among them Two Women in Hats in which the light within the work shimmers above the surface of the paper. Indeed. He was a magician!
Then there is Pierrot and Harlequin, Sleeping Peasants, Two Dancers, etc, etc, etc. But I ramble.
I recommend getting the catalogue and reading it before seeing the exhibition. The making of each work is well documented and they are often shown with the works of those artists who inspired Picasso. But I especially recommend that when you go that you be at the door at 10:00AM when they open. For some reason the New York museumgoer does not appear at the Frick until closer to lunchtime. And then it’s every man for himself…especially those with the head sets. Exercise caution when you pass near those people because, believe me, they won’t: they are all alone like babes lost in cyberspace. Multiply that by 100 head sets in two small rooms and I think you will see what I am getting at.
Why the august Frick Collection wants to participate in this museum madness is a mystery to me.
All of the works in this exhibition can be seen in the museum’s online gallery. If you can’t make it to the actual site this and the catalogue are good second choices. But keep in mind that there is nothing like seeing them from the same distance as the man who made them. Photographs of drawings and digital reproductions can show you an image but it cannot convey the experience of seeing a work face to face. Up close one can see and almost feel the texture of the ground and the texture and patina of the medium, the powdery softness of the pastel and the rich flat mural like hardness of the gouache. Reproductions do not have the intimacy of the actual works: knowing Picasso on an intimate basis is an incomparable experience.
http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/picasso/works.htm
This exhibition raises questions which are more about exhibitions than about the art works. I think we assume that every exhibition has an appeal to the lay public and a separate appeal to connoisseurs, to scholars, or to those who work within the art world. It is likely that as each exhibition is designed thought is given to all those audiences and that efforts are made to find a happy balance amongst them. While that is my assumption I have to say that in the galleries I most often feel that I am surrounded by laymen. Very, very few of the visitors spend more than a few seconds with each art work, the statistical average is thirty seconds, and I have rarely seen two persons conferring about a work who give the impression that they are scholars or art world professionals. Perhaps that elite audience has different hours.
Those thoughts come to mind in this exhibition because it includes so many works that are working drawings, musings, and half finished experiments rather than bravura finished works. As per the title, Reinventing Tradition, we see that Picasso was not a magician, as he sometimes claimed to be, but that he labored over his efforts and we have a better sense of the time quotient in his time line of accomplishment. That should come as sheer delight to scholars who have the opportunity to study rarely seen examples of process in the important stages of his development: one catalogue item is described as never having been exhibited to the public. But I wonder if the lay public, without having read the catalogue and without the aid of the head set guided tour, understand exactly what they are seeing or if they might not think that, as they might have long suspected, Picasso wasn’t always all that good after all.
This exhibition runs the risk of appealing primarily to the specialists. I wondered: Should an exhibition be too unbalanced in favor of the scholars, et al, would there be a risk of alienating the layman and thereby reducing the potential audience for future exhibitions? And that in turn raises the question: would that be a bad thing?
A gallery for what is hoped will be a “big ticket” show should be easily accessible to a large and disparate audience. As most gallery visitors appear to me to be retired senior citizen, elevators and instant access to rest rooms are a must. I would like to suggest that the cellar of a Fifth Avenue mansion is probably not the ideal space to have “big ticket” exhibitions of art works on paper. Unless it is well hidden there is no elevator in the Frick and one must descend and ascend a long curving staircase. There is to my knowledge no restroom on this floor. But more importantly, there needs to be a better system of climate control than provided in these rooms.
On a cool autumn day I arrived at the museum upon the stroke of noon, as per the time stamp on my ticket, and after about thirty minutes downstairs in rooms that were far too overcrowded, perspiration was running down my face. The room was so hot and humid I could hardly breathe. Now: is that good for the art work? It’s certainly not good for seeing them. I have seen in these rooms as well the Late Goya and the Rembrandt exhibitions and suffered nearly the same heat.
Seeking relief I went upstairs to find a quiet, uncrowded space and to my astonishment found that the entire museum was filled to brimming with milling hordes. I remember the Frick from fifty years ago and recall that I loved it because it was a quiet to the point of solemn home in which one could ramble at will without being jostled by overexcited tourists. Because of the crowds I have given up going to MOMA, which I now consider as merely an extension of Times Square, and if The Met, which I also recall as a wonderful once deserted out of the way space, gets any more congested I may have to give that up too. Hence my next question: is all this foot traffic necessary?
What is the reason for all this foot traffic?
I have often suspected that it has to do with the corporate take over of America, including the art institutions on whose boards the captains of the corporate world sit, and the need on the part of management, answerable to said boards of directors, to prove to the businessmen that, yes, an art institution can turn a profit, even though it has nonprofit status, and to pay its own way. Is the Republican worldview, Making Money, the proper yardstick for measuring the success of museum offerings?
It is my understanding that a person is wanted on a board of directors because of their access to both money and privately held art works. Once they are onboard, I am certain that they in turn make demands on the institution. But when does this relationship begin to be a liability rather than a dividend? When do the expanded programs made possible by corporate donors create an unwieldy infrastructure that changes the character of the organization and deter it from its established mission? When do the physical plant and the artworks in custody begin to suffer physically from the too constant and too large audience? Doesn’t the incessant foot traffic lead to an endless round of expansions and renovations?
At times it seems as if the much vaunted Conservative talking point, competition, might be the culprit. But what benefit accrues from competition among museums for the largest numbers of visitors? Free publicity in The New York Times? …Five Hundred Thousand Visitors Establish new Record at the Met! Or is it, as in the corporate world, competition with a goal of winning just for the sake of winning, an endless Pyrrhic game of one-upmanship? Or do those record numbers attract the corporate powers that can bring even more loot to the table? Yet another vicious cycle!
I suppose it’s good for the convention and visitors bureaux to be able to rely on cultural institutions to augment the host city’s offerings, but I wonder if they need to play such a primary part. Viewing art was once considered a quiet and contemplative activity. Viewing art elicits two questions: what is expressed? What is experienced? If the art cannot be seen that process is disrupted. Lately it seems to have become an overly boisterous athletic race to the finish. At the end of the day the tourist can tick off his list of accomplishments: I saw this and this and this and this. And then the question becomes: yes, you looked at many things, but what did you actually see?
The problem of a too large audience is extremely obvious at the Frick which has a fixed collection with a fixed presentation. In order to fit in special exhibitions alternatives spaces have to be found. Many years ago special exhibitions were mounted in the East and Oval Galleries. That would certainly be a wrong choice for a “big ticket” show today. By contrast, The Morgan Library has never had a fixed presentation and they are at liberty to book special exhibitions and to hang them in whatever gallery they think best. But what is missing now at the Morgan, aside from the actual library, is any sense of a permanent collection. Now the Morgan is like an empty Broadway theatre that merely books shows.
Over the years, going to a museum has become a less pleasant experience than it once was. I would hate to think that it is only because over the years I have become old and cranky. In my defense and as I have tried to indicate, I believe the evidence of the problems lies elsewhere. Something, on the part of museums, has to be done. For myself I have taken to going to commercial art galleries and if you’ve never seen art works these past twenty or thirty years in quiet, large, deserted rooms, you have no idea how wonderful that can be. Unless the artist is Picasso.
Well, yes, perhaps problem is Picasso. He certainly packs them in. This is the eighth large Picasso exhibition I’ve seen in the last three or four years and every one of them have been jammed. What other artist could sustain that number of visitors to that number of shows and likely be building larger audiences with each succeeding exhibition?
And why now? Has the lay public who longs for bucolic scenes with deer grazing beside sky blue lakes finally thrown in the towel and decided that he is here to stay? Have they accepted the truth at last that modern art is not a passing phase and that they had better start to understand it by going back to the source? Has it dawned on them that although there are acknowledged Picasso masterpieces to be seen daily in any number of museums, in each new exhibition there are as well rarely seen masterpieces coming out of an endless number of closets? Has the staggering evidence of the sheer magnitude of his achievement finally cowed everyone into submission?
The sheer magnitude of his achievement. I can sit here and imagine any number of future Picasso exhibitions. This one is showing us only 60 (67 total in the two venues) drawings from his first thirty years. Yet to come are the second thirty years, the last twenty years, Guernica Revisited, the drawings for Guernica, the weeping women, the pottery, the sculpture …the early, the middle, and the late periods, the shaped and the assembled from found objects…as well as the drawings for same, the portraits, the children, the landscapes, the bull fights, the still life’s …it is conceivable that there will never be a time when a Picasso exhibition is not on view or in the planning stages. (In January the Guggenheim will present Picasso in Black and White.) And once the full cycle is completed I’m certain there will be new audiences wanting to see them repeated from the beginning.
I highly recommend this exhibition. It begins with an accomplished drawing from a cast by a nine year old wunderkind and carries on through a drawing quoting Ingres in graphite: Madame Georges Wildenstein. In the catalogue that drawing is compared to the Ingres drawing of Madame Louis-Nicolas Marie Destouches, in the collection of the Louvre which, by some great fortunate ordering of things, is presently on view at the Morgan Library offering the art lover the opportunity to compare the two side by side with the interstice of but 35 city blocks.
If, amongst this demonstration of the man at work, you should want masterpieces, they are to be had. On the main floor in what is referred to at the Frick as The Cabinet, (I love museum nomenclature!) you will find a series of portraits of women in pastel …yes he was a master as well in pastel …and in gouache, pen and ink, pencil, graphite, charcoal, etc, etc, etc …portraits in pastel and among them Two Women in Hats in which the light within the work shimmers above the surface of the paper. Indeed. He was a magician!
Then there is Pierrot and Harlequin, Sleeping Peasants, Two Dancers, etc, etc, etc. But I ramble.
I recommend getting the catalogue and reading it before seeing the exhibition. The making of each work is well documented and they are often shown with the works of those artists who inspired Picasso. But I especially recommend that when you go that you be at the door at 10:00AM when they open. For some reason the New York museumgoer does not appear at the Frick until closer to lunchtime. And then it’s every man for himself…especially those with the head sets. Exercise caution when you pass near those people because, believe me, they won’t: they are all alone like babes lost in cyberspace. Multiply that by 100 head sets in two small rooms and I think you will see what I am getting at.
Why the august Frick Collection wants to participate in this museum madness is a mystery to me.
All of the works in this exhibition can be seen in the museum’s online gallery. If you can’t make it to the actual site this and the catalogue are good second choices. But keep in mind that there is nothing like seeing them from the same distance as the man who made them. Photographs of drawings and digital reproductions can show you an image but it cannot convey the experience of seeing a work face to face. Up close one can see and almost feel the texture of the ground and the texture and patina of the medium, the powdery softness of the pastel and the rich flat mural like hardness of the gouache. Reproductions do not have the intimacy of the actual works: knowing Picasso on an intimate basis is an incomparable experience.
http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/picasso/works.htm
Georges Braque, Pioneer of Modernism. The Aquavella Gallery, NYC.
One of my major complaints about the work of some modern artists is that too many of them seem to have discovered a signature image and caught up in the commercialism of the art world they have then gone into production and have devoted themselves to churning out product for the many well heeled collectors and museums in America. (For the sake of brevity I won’t mention names.) It might be that my earlier efforts at playwrighting impressed upon me the fact that a play is a well tuned transition from point A to point B during which progression variation adds spice to the mix. When I see an artist repeat himself ad infinitum without any sense of development, and with no excursions into different areas, I see the work of that lifetime as without drama and lacking interest. I often wonder: did he never want to draw the nude? Did he never want to paint a landscape or a still life? That said, it doesn’t require a genius to figure out why I love Picasso.
I don’t have that same intolerance with classical painting: classical painting has a fixed way of presenting and a fixed way of looking and the variations that arouse our interest are the expression of individuality within the tradition by each of the artists. But I do have impatience with the fact that after some five hundred years that tradition had begun to wear out, it had become decadent, and that some people continued to work in that tradition. Something different had to happen. It is because of that feeling and my understanding of art that I am drawn to the work of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, et al.
I believe it is generally accepted that the most profound break with the tradition was the development of cubism fostered by Cezanne’s achievement: an understanding of cubism is a portal to creating modern art and in museums one can see in their early works that almost every modern artist has gone through a period in which he has worked in that genre before discovering his own voice, his own penmanship. That cubism is valid is verified by the fact that so many young artists of the day, and since, have intrinsically understood its importance on first acquaintance.
I have to confess that despite all that I have read and been told about cubism I do not understand it. I don’t see that a cubist work simply presents multiple views of the subject. I understand that Cezanne was an influence and I believe that it was he who reconceptualized the painting as not a window into another world but as a surface that became an object in and of itself. He used the subject as the motif, the motive, for making a painting and in the process of making the painting he created displacements and distortions for purely pictorial reasons. Picasso and Braque used that freedom to create artworks that were a further remove from previous picture making. If that involved multiple views, so be it, but the multiple views alone were not the raison d’être of the procedure.
My understanding of cubism is that the subject is only the motif and that deciphering the subject is not the objective, seeing the whole of the work as a stand alone work is the objective: the uses made of the plastic elements have priority over the subject. Often this is difficult: we want to find the subject, as we have been trained to do. And while I can almost always identify the subject, which is always placed in the center, I cannot understand those other elements that mix with it nor do I understand what has been done with the surround that bleeds to the edge of the format. It generally reads as conveniently disposed of extraneous space and for some reason I seem to resist that interpretation as too facile. (In the cubist drawings the surround is generally left as blank paper.) For Cezanne there was no extraneous space, the whole canvas was the work, and I want to believe that the same was true of the two cubists.
This is not to say that I don’t like cubism, albeit with reservations. Beyond the fact of the paintings what most intrigues me about it is that Picasso and Braque were able to submerge their individual identities and create work in the service of art that is without ego. I find synthetic cubism far more interesting, perhaps because I love color, but in those initial works there is that same fascinating loss of ego/identity as well.
One of the interesting aspects of the partnership is that the two men came together from very similar/different backgrounds. Picasso was academically trained, by his father, from a very young age. Braque, at a young age, was trained in decorative painting by his father, and had some study in the local fine art academy. Thus there is in both phases of cubism a mixture of the academic and the decorative and I am not always certain if I feel that a particular painting is merely decorative or if it achieves the status of fine art. This is especially true with synthetic cubism, catalogue Plate 23, Guitar and Glass, (number 6 in the web site gallery.) being the perfect example. It’s a beautiful painting but if it were hanging on my wall would I become aware some day in the future that I had stopped being aware of it hanging on that wall in the same way that I might some day forget the color of the pillows on my sofa?
It was at the beginning of the 1920’s that the individuality of the two artists began to be expressed in their cubist works. Picasso continued in that style but in many other styles as well whereas Braque limited his work to those ideas for the next three decades. For the most part that thirty year development is the subject of this exhibition. It is a wonderful collection of paintings: it is a record of growth and development.
Beginning with his work with the fauves and including some of his early independent work exploring the achievement of Cezanne, it can be seen that for Braque subordinating his ego, his personality, is an integral part of his understanding of a particular stage of making art. In each genre it is not until he understands the central idea that he allows himself to speak with his own voice. Only then can he use the form to further the understanding of art. Of course this reflects the process of the academy wherein one learns to master the tradition before one is encouraged to “express himself”.
The exhibition catalogue essays are rich with the intellectual antecedents in his work and I have two opposing responses to them. First I deeply appreciate the analysis. Braque’s paintings are thick with content, his paintings are visually crowded and I agree that there is more happening in them than meets the eye. The essays are a great stepping off place for working one’s way into the thick of the matter. Some writers have claimed that Picasso was an intellectual and that if he did not read the intellectually current writings of his day, he at the least absorbed them through osmosis. It’s nice to have some of them named in these essays and I was especially struck by the inclusion of Henri Bergson, who of course was a very well known thinker of that time although he is no longer a household name.
On the other hand, I have heard much gratuitous art world babble and I have seen exhibitions of graduate student’s work at University art galleries which are often prefaced with overlong, many paged, guides to comprehension, printed copies of which are made available to the museum going public. My response to those manuals is always this: if a painting is not a visual experience, four hundred pages of verbal explanation will not make it so.
Braque’s paintings are visual experiences. If that experience needs to be elucidated I think that should include not only essays such as these but more biographical material as well. One experience of his work is that there is a persistence of black, not just in the well placed areas of black that balance within the compositions, beautifully balanced in Plate 31, Gueridon, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but in an overall pervasive sense of blackness in many of them. Herman Melville has so well defined the symbolism of white and the symbolism of black that a viewer of Braque’s work could not be faulted for suspecting that his black has a similar symbolic value. The first essay brings the blackness to our attention but does not offer a deep analysis of its origin or meaning.
What is the origin of that blackness? It might very well be the age in which he lived. After the interruption of World War I he resumed painting and not long thereafter witnessed world financial collapse, the rise of Nazism in Germany, then World War II, which he spent in occupied Paris, and following the war the advent of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear devastation…the whole of his adult life, his working years, were far from the utopian, rosy future predicted at the rise of the century.
Might it have been his war injury? In every biography we are told that he suffered a head wound in the war and that he was trepanned during his treatment. Nothing more is ever said about this. But there is the sense that he resumed his painting somewhat in isolation and outside the social whirl of the Parisian art world. I have not read in any source that he suffered any impairment from his war wound: speech impediments, impaired mental processes, or physical disability. Yet there is such an implied change in his character one is curious. Perhaps it was simply a more dedicated commitment to his work and his love of painting following a near death experience. I think because the war wound is so consistently mentioned, it needs to be clarified as to its effect on his life and work, either that it did effect the work or that it did not. If it did not, perhaps mention of it should be put to rest.
As for complaints about this exhibition, I have to say that I was very disappointed not to have seen some of his works from the last ten years of his life. It was at that time that he seems to have followed the advice of the apocryphal mentor to go out into the world, to forget everything he had been taught and everything he knew and to just paint. And so he did. But he painted landscapes, some really beautiful landscapes also seemingly rich with symbolic meaning. While he is known as a still life artist, those works are bookended with landscapes in his earliest and last works. I was sorry not to have seen some of the last landscapes here and to have had a sense of the fullness of his career. Despite all the good work in the catalogue and the opportunity to see these many wonderful paintings the full length portrait is incomplete.
Back in the 70’s I saw the Cubism exhibition a MOMA. The last Braque retrospective in the United States was in 1988. Those of us of certain years are not likely to see again in our lifetimes forty Braque paintings hanging in four large adjoining rooms. Ahem. Do I have to tell you to see this?
http://www.acquavellagalleries.com/exhibitions/2011-10-12_georges-braque/
I don’t have that same intolerance with classical painting: classical painting has a fixed way of presenting and a fixed way of looking and the variations that arouse our interest are the expression of individuality within the tradition by each of the artists. But I do have impatience with the fact that after some five hundred years that tradition had begun to wear out, it had become decadent, and that some people continued to work in that tradition. Something different had to happen. It is because of that feeling and my understanding of art that I am drawn to the work of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, et al.
I believe it is generally accepted that the most profound break with the tradition was the development of cubism fostered by Cezanne’s achievement: an understanding of cubism is a portal to creating modern art and in museums one can see in their early works that almost every modern artist has gone through a period in which he has worked in that genre before discovering his own voice, his own penmanship. That cubism is valid is verified by the fact that so many young artists of the day, and since, have intrinsically understood its importance on first acquaintance.
I have to confess that despite all that I have read and been told about cubism I do not understand it. I don’t see that a cubist work simply presents multiple views of the subject. I understand that Cezanne was an influence and I believe that it was he who reconceptualized the painting as not a window into another world but as a surface that became an object in and of itself. He used the subject as the motif, the motive, for making a painting and in the process of making the painting he created displacements and distortions for purely pictorial reasons. Picasso and Braque used that freedom to create artworks that were a further remove from previous picture making. If that involved multiple views, so be it, but the multiple views alone were not the raison d’être of the procedure.
My understanding of cubism is that the subject is only the motif and that deciphering the subject is not the objective, seeing the whole of the work as a stand alone work is the objective: the uses made of the plastic elements have priority over the subject. Often this is difficult: we want to find the subject, as we have been trained to do. And while I can almost always identify the subject, which is always placed in the center, I cannot understand those other elements that mix with it nor do I understand what has been done with the surround that bleeds to the edge of the format. It generally reads as conveniently disposed of extraneous space and for some reason I seem to resist that interpretation as too facile. (In the cubist drawings the surround is generally left as blank paper.) For Cezanne there was no extraneous space, the whole canvas was the work, and I want to believe that the same was true of the two cubists.
This is not to say that I don’t like cubism, albeit with reservations. Beyond the fact of the paintings what most intrigues me about it is that Picasso and Braque were able to submerge their individual identities and create work in the service of art that is without ego. I find synthetic cubism far more interesting, perhaps because I love color, but in those initial works there is that same fascinating loss of ego/identity as well.
One of the interesting aspects of the partnership is that the two men came together from very similar/different backgrounds. Picasso was academically trained, by his father, from a very young age. Braque, at a young age, was trained in decorative painting by his father, and had some study in the local fine art academy. Thus there is in both phases of cubism a mixture of the academic and the decorative and I am not always certain if I feel that a particular painting is merely decorative or if it achieves the status of fine art. This is especially true with synthetic cubism, catalogue Plate 23, Guitar and Glass, (number 6 in the web site gallery.) being the perfect example. It’s a beautiful painting but if it were hanging on my wall would I become aware some day in the future that I had stopped being aware of it hanging on that wall in the same way that I might some day forget the color of the pillows on my sofa?
It was at the beginning of the 1920’s that the individuality of the two artists began to be expressed in their cubist works. Picasso continued in that style but in many other styles as well whereas Braque limited his work to those ideas for the next three decades. For the most part that thirty year development is the subject of this exhibition. It is a wonderful collection of paintings: it is a record of growth and development.
Beginning with his work with the fauves and including some of his early independent work exploring the achievement of Cezanne, it can be seen that for Braque subordinating his ego, his personality, is an integral part of his understanding of a particular stage of making art. In each genre it is not until he understands the central idea that he allows himself to speak with his own voice. Only then can he use the form to further the understanding of art. Of course this reflects the process of the academy wherein one learns to master the tradition before one is encouraged to “express himself”.
The exhibition catalogue essays are rich with the intellectual antecedents in his work and I have two opposing responses to them. First I deeply appreciate the analysis. Braque’s paintings are thick with content, his paintings are visually crowded and I agree that there is more happening in them than meets the eye. The essays are a great stepping off place for working one’s way into the thick of the matter. Some writers have claimed that Picasso was an intellectual and that if he did not read the intellectually current writings of his day, he at the least absorbed them through osmosis. It’s nice to have some of them named in these essays and I was especially struck by the inclusion of Henri Bergson, who of course was a very well known thinker of that time although he is no longer a household name.
On the other hand, I have heard much gratuitous art world babble and I have seen exhibitions of graduate student’s work at University art galleries which are often prefaced with overlong, many paged, guides to comprehension, printed copies of which are made available to the museum going public. My response to those manuals is always this: if a painting is not a visual experience, four hundred pages of verbal explanation will not make it so.
Braque’s paintings are visual experiences. If that experience needs to be elucidated I think that should include not only essays such as these but more biographical material as well. One experience of his work is that there is a persistence of black, not just in the well placed areas of black that balance within the compositions, beautifully balanced in Plate 31, Gueridon, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but in an overall pervasive sense of blackness in many of them. Herman Melville has so well defined the symbolism of white and the symbolism of black that a viewer of Braque’s work could not be faulted for suspecting that his black has a similar symbolic value. The first essay brings the blackness to our attention but does not offer a deep analysis of its origin or meaning.
What is the origin of that blackness? It might very well be the age in which he lived. After the interruption of World War I he resumed painting and not long thereafter witnessed world financial collapse, the rise of Nazism in Germany, then World War II, which he spent in occupied Paris, and following the war the advent of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear devastation…the whole of his adult life, his working years, were far from the utopian, rosy future predicted at the rise of the century.
Might it have been his war injury? In every biography we are told that he suffered a head wound in the war and that he was trepanned during his treatment. Nothing more is ever said about this. But there is the sense that he resumed his painting somewhat in isolation and outside the social whirl of the Parisian art world. I have not read in any source that he suffered any impairment from his war wound: speech impediments, impaired mental processes, or physical disability. Yet there is such an implied change in his character one is curious. Perhaps it was simply a more dedicated commitment to his work and his love of painting following a near death experience. I think because the war wound is so consistently mentioned, it needs to be clarified as to its effect on his life and work, either that it did effect the work or that it did not. If it did not, perhaps mention of it should be put to rest.
As for complaints about this exhibition, I have to say that I was very disappointed not to have seen some of his works from the last ten years of his life. It was at that time that he seems to have followed the advice of the apocryphal mentor to go out into the world, to forget everything he had been taught and everything he knew and to just paint. And so he did. But he painted landscapes, some really beautiful landscapes also seemingly rich with symbolic meaning. While he is known as a still life artist, those works are bookended with landscapes in his earliest and last works. I was sorry not to have seen some of the last landscapes here and to have had a sense of the fullness of his career. Despite all the good work in the catalogue and the opportunity to see these many wonderful paintings the full length portrait is incomplete.
Back in the 70’s I saw the Cubism exhibition a MOMA. The last Braque retrospective in the United States was in 1988. Those of us of certain years are not likely to see again in our lifetimes forty Braque paintings hanging in four large adjoining rooms. Ahem. Do I have to tell you to see this?
http://www.acquavellagalleries.com/exhibitions/2011-10-12_georges-braque/
Will Barnet at 100. National Academy Museum, NYC
My original plan for the day had been to see the Picasso exhibition at The Frick and to walk from there up Fifth Avenue to see this exhibition on 89th Street. When I read a day or so before going into the city that the Braque exhibition was opening on 79th Street, I decided to add that to the agenda. As it turned out, that made it possible to discover similarities and differences among the three artists that otherwise I might not have recognized.
As it regards their public audience, Picasso often seems to have spent as much time courting a public awareness of his work and in creating his famous artist persona as he did in actually making the work. Because he is credited with having made 30,000 works I can’t really say that his method was a detriment to his achievement. Braque received and ensured his lasting fame through his early close association with Picasso but seems to have removed himself from the limelight afterwards and to have just concentrated on getting his work done. Will Barnet, by contrast, seems always to have been preoccupied with the work and to have given little effort to participating in the New York art world hullaballoo. For the most part his is neither a household name nor one that first occurs to those listing important modern artists.
That is not to say that he is unknown in the art community. After studying for several years at the School of the Fine Arts in Boston, (he is native to Beverly, Mass.), he began his studies at the Art Students League in New York in 1930, under Stuart Davis, where he was introduced to Cubism. (As Davis was one of the Stieglitz late circle, and because Barnet’s ambitions were so similar to those of Hartley, Marin, and Dove, I am curious if Stieglitz was interested in any way in Barnet’s work) Upon completion of his studies Barnet began a thirty year teaching career at the League. He was one of the early and few modern art champions at the league and his tenure was not always easy. Among his students were Cy Twombley, Eva Hesse, and Al Held. He has taught as well at Cooper Union, Yale, The New School, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and others. He was also a participant in many of the artists’ ateliers.
Although he taught painting at the League he is better known for having been the director of the print studio and as a print maker and in sources other than the exhibition catalogue I have read that he was influential in reviving lithography as a fine art form in the mid twentieth century United States. In this position he worked with and as the printer for Raphael Soyer, Louise Bourgeois, and Jose Clemente Orozco.
His commitment to making art had been determined in his earliest years through his exposure to great art in the many museums in the Boston area. He has always believed that the work of the masters establishes a high professional standard that should be met by the modern artist and that it provides a working artist with the solutions to the many problems that one encounters in each new work. As reported in the catalogue, he has sometimes spent a year or more working out his compositions. Over the course of his lifetime his interests have gone beyond the western cannon and includes Asian, African, Egyptian, and Native American art as well. In much of his work one can see as well references to the itinerate early American painters. His deep knowledge of wide ranging fine arts masterworks can often be felt in the spirit, the essence of his work, and often seen in the paintings’ details, whereas Picasso was pleased to let the viewer continue to see the source directly quoted within his work.
Included in the catalogue is a reprint from The League Quarterly, Spring, 1950, in which Will Barnet briefly sets out his credo of picture making, commenting on nature as space, and how he attempts to balance horizontal and vertical spaces using forms and colors and illustrates this with reference to a medieval work in the Metropolitan Museum. As I read it I couldn’t help but remember Matisse’s statement: “What I dream of is an art of balance.”
Certainly balance is a central achievement in Barnet’s work. After some early works in which he employed the young man’s virtuoso brush work with thick impasto, he eventually confronted the reality of the flat quadrangle surface and resolved his plastic elements in a finish that is without evidence of brush work and which almost denies the presence of the painter. In this he is unlike Braque who was ever aware of the surface and reiterated that surface with sand, obvious brushwork, and pasted papers, making of it a tactile experience. For Braque the presence of the surface and the presence of the maker were vitally important: for Barnet it was always the expressiveness of the motif as an independent entity.
This is true in his figurative works and it is equally true in his hard line abstractions which in their shapes and in his palette again recall Braque. And this is one of the wonders of art: with any given subject, motif, each artist working with a full mastery of a common craft will create a unique work in his own penmanship: think of the work that Pissarro and Cezanne did side by side, think of analytic cubism after 1920, and see in the paintings here Barnet using that genre as a starting place but ending with making paintings by Will Barnet.
The line of his development begins with drawings of social commentary, his earliest influence was Daumier, then in New York he began to paint in the regionalist or New York street scene style. Once he moved into the printing shop he worked in lithography, woodcut, and etchings. Following his early studies at the League he began making hard edge abstract paintings, in the 1960’s he retuned to figurative work and continued with that in the areas of both painting and print making. In the1990’s, very late in his life, he returned to abstraction.
In the mid 1950’s Will Barnet seems to have hit his stride with his abstract work, notably, as seen here, Male and Female, Singular Image, and Positano. Positano in particular struck me as a triumph of ingenuity and simplicity. Now and then I see a painting that I think I would love to own, whatever it means to “own” a painting. I would love to own Positano.
In his figurative work his achievement seems restive until at last the paintings became flat on the surface. Once he was able to make that happen he proceeded with creating a visual experience expressive of feeling. All of his paintings, as seen here, reveal an intelligent and endlessly curious person, yet beyond that presence of intellect, there is a tremendously warm human relatedness and compassion.
His subjects are primarily members of his family: he believes that the family is the nucleus of the social order. His focus is on revealing the universal in the moment of common experience. While there is a consistent level of excellence through the mid 90’s, I am partial to those from the mid 1980’s, New England Family, the Three Chairs, as light and as fragrant as a spring day despite the chairs being, as they would be in a Braque painting, black, and Croquet, lovingly whimsical in its rigidity.
He has also accepted over 100 commissions for portraits and if the non family portrait in this exhibition, “Remi” is representative of that work then another exhibition is called for. This painting is a bold statement of the facts of color, line, and form but in perfect balance with the character of the sitter.
Returning to hard edge abstraction in his most recent work, he continues to meet his high level of standards. If anything these late abstract works are more engrossing than the earlier. Each of them has pictorial logic. Each of them has presence. Each of them has that quality of all great art in that if they have not always existed there is the sense that they should have: beyond what they might “mean”, they are absolutely right.
Even though his is not a household name Will Barnet has had a number of exhibitions in Museums and galleries over the years. I saw one of them just a year ago at the League; In addition he has been inducted into many fine arts organizations and has received many honors for his work and career. Many American museums have his works in their collections.
After giving much concentrated attention to modern painting these last few years, I have come to the conclusion that abstraction and abstract expressionism are minor movements within the larger cannon of western art. Abstraction lead to minimalism and finally to the statement that easel painting is dead. On the contrary I believe that man’s desire to paint, to make pictures, is as inherently human as is his desire to sing and to dance. I believe Picasso, and let’s not forget that he was the great twentieth century master, was right to retain the representative subject, almost always the human form, as the motif in his art. Obviously Braque agreed insofar as he maintained representation. The paintings of Will Barnet further convince me that this was the right decision, and that the human experience and the human form are the proper subject of art.
The Design Academy is an odd venue, recently renovated, in which the best use is made of rooms to the front and to the rear of a building with an architectural arrangement which has made the best of what I sense was an odd piece of property. If you go be sure to see the large circular Hera hanging over the elaborate grand stairway. At six feet in diameter it fits nicely into the space. It is a beautiful, luminous painting. However I found it difficult to see. I can’t remember if it was behind a chandelier centered over the curving stairway or if the light was just bad…it is a stairwell not a gallery. I was pleased to have no more than three or four other visitors in the galleries sharing the experience with me while I was there. How utterly civilized!
This past week Pablo Picasso turned 130. I suppose the exhibition at the Frick could have been called Picasso at 130. By contrast, Will Barnet at 100 celebrates the work of a painter who is still alive and still working. Do you suppose Pablito is lying in his grave green with envy?
There is only a notice regarding this exhibition on the Museum web page. But it will show you the other work they do there.
http://www.nationalacademy.org/pageview.asp?mid=3&pid=89
The Will Barnet pages at the Smithsonian American Art Museum show many of his 33 works in their collection:
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/results/?page=1&num=10&image=0&view=0&name=&title=&keywords=&type=&subject=&number=&id=245
As it regards their public audience, Picasso often seems to have spent as much time courting a public awareness of his work and in creating his famous artist persona as he did in actually making the work. Because he is credited with having made 30,000 works I can’t really say that his method was a detriment to his achievement. Braque received and ensured his lasting fame through his early close association with Picasso but seems to have removed himself from the limelight afterwards and to have just concentrated on getting his work done. Will Barnet, by contrast, seems always to have been preoccupied with the work and to have given little effort to participating in the New York art world hullaballoo. For the most part his is neither a household name nor one that first occurs to those listing important modern artists.
That is not to say that he is unknown in the art community. After studying for several years at the School of the Fine Arts in Boston, (he is native to Beverly, Mass.), he began his studies at the Art Students League in New York in 1930, under Stuart Davis, where he was introduced to Cubism. (As Davis was one of the Stieglitz late circle, and because Barnet’s ambitions were so similar to those of Hartley, Marin, and Dove, I am curious if Stieglitz was interested in any way in Barnet’s work) Upon completion of his studies Barnet began a thirty year teaching career at the League. He was one of the early and few modern art champions at the league and his tenure was not always easy. Among his students were Cy Twombley, Eva Hesse, and Al Held. He has taught as well at Cooper Union, Yale, The New School, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and others. He was also a participant in many of the artists’ ateliers.
Although he taught painting at the League he is better known for having been the director of the print studio and as a print maker and in sources other than the exhibition catalogue I have read that he was influential in reviving lithography as a fine art form in the mid twentieth century United States. In this position he worked with and as the printer for Raphael Soyer, Louise Bourgeois, and Jose Clemente Orozco.
His commitment to making art had been determined in his earliest years through his exposure to great art in the many museums in the Boston area. He has always believed that the work of the masters establishes a high professional standard that should be met by the modern artist and that it provides a working artist with the solutions to the many problems that one encounters in each new work. As reported in the catalogue, he has sometimes spent a year or more working out his compositions. Over the course of his lifetime his interests have gone beyond the western cannon and includes Asian, African, Egyptian, and Native American art as well. In much of his work one can see as well references to the itinerate early American painters. His deep knowledge of wide ranging fine arts masterworks can often be felt in the spirit, the essence of his work, and often seen in the paintings’ details, whereas Picasso was pleased to let the viewer continue to see the source directly quoted within his work.
Included in the catalogue is a reprint from The League Quarterly, Spring, 1950, in which Will Barnet briefly sets out his credo of picture making, commenting on nature as space, and how he attempts to balance horizontal and vertical spaces using forms and colors and illustrates this with reference to a medieval work in the Metropolitan Museum. As I read it I couldn’t help but remember Matisse’s statement: “What I dream of is an art of balance.”
Certainly balance is a central achievement in Barnet’s work. After some early works in which he employed the young man’s virtuoso brush work with thick impasto, he eventually confronted the reality of the flat quadrangle surface and resolved his plastic elements in a finish that is without evidence of brush work and which almost denies the presence of the painter. In this he is unlike Braque who was ever aware of the surface and reiterated that surface with sand, obvious brushwork, and pasted papers, making of it a tactile experience. For Braque the presence of the surface and the presence of the maker were vitally important: for Barnet it was always the expressiveness of the motif as an independent entity.
This is true in his figurative works and it is equally true in his hard line abstractions which in their shapes and in his palette again recall Braque. And this is one of the wonders of art: with any given subject, motif, each artist working with a full mastery of a common craft will create a unique work in his own penmanship: think of the work that Pissarro and Cezanne did side by side, think of analytic cubism after 1920, and see in the paintings here Barnet using that genre as a starting place but ending with making paintings by Will Barnet.
The line of his development begins with drawings of social commentary, his earliest influence was Daumier, then in New York he began to paint in the regionalist or New York street scene style. Once he moved into the printing shop he worked in lithography, woodcut, and etchings. Following his early studies at the League he began making hard edge abstract paintings, in the 1960’s he retuned to figurative work and continued with that in the areas of both painting and print making. In the1990’s, very late in his life, he returned to abstraction.
In the mid 1950’s Will Barnet seems to have hit his stride with his abstract work, notably, as seen here, Male and Female, Singular Image, and Positano. Positano in particular struck me as a triumph of ingenuity and simplicity. Now and then I see a painting that I think I would love to own, whatever it means to “own” a painting. I would love to own Positano.
In his figurative work his achievement seems restive until at last the paintings became flat on the surface. Once he was able to make that happen he proceeded with creating a visual experience expressive of feeling. All of his paintings, as seen here, reveal an intelligent and endlessly curious person, yet beyond that presence of intellect, there is a tremendously warm human relatedness and compassion.
His subjects are primarily members of his family: he believes that the family is the nucleus of the social order. His focus is on revealing the universal in the moment of common experience. While there is a consistent level of excellence through the mid 90’s, I am partial to those from the mid 1980’s, New England Family, the Three Chairs, as light and as fragrant as a spring day despite the chairs being, as they would be in a Braque painting, black, and Croquet, lovingly whimsical in its rigidity.
He has also accepted over 100 commissions for portraits and if the non family portrait in this exhibition, “Remi” is representative of that work then another exhibition is called for. This painting is a bold statement of the facts of color, line, and form but in perfect balance with the character of the sitter.
Returning to hard edge abstraction in his most recent work, he continues to meet his high level of standards. If anything these late abstract works are more engrossing than the earlier. Each of them has pictorial logic. Each of them has presence. Each of them has that quality of all great art in that if they have not always existed there is the sense that they should have: beyond what they might “mean”, they are absolutely right.
Even though his is not a household name Will Barnet has had a number of exhibitions in Museums and galleries over the years. I saw one of them just a year ago at the League; In addition he has been inducted into many fine arts organizations and has received many honors for his work and career. Many American museums have his works in their collections.
After giving much concentrated attention to modern painting these last few years, I have come to the conclusion that abstraction and abstract expressionism are minor movements within the larger cannon of western art. Abstraction lead to minimalism and finally to the statement that easel painting is dead. On the contrary I believe that man’s desire to paint, to make pictures, is as inherently human as is his desire to sing and to dance. I believe Picasso, and let’s not forget that he was the great twentieth century master, was right to retain the representative subject, almost always the human form, as the motif in his art. Obviously Braque agreed insofar as he maintained representation. The paintings of Will Barnet further convince me that this was the right decision, and that the human experience and the human form are the proper subject of art.
The Design Academy is an odd venue, recently renovated, in which the best use is made of rooms to the front and to the rear of a building with an architectural arrangement which has made the best of what I sense was an odd piece of property. If you go be sure to see the large circular Hera hanging over the elaborate grand stairway. At six feet in diameter it fits nicely into the space. It is a beautiful, luminous painting. However I found it difficult to see. I can’t remember if it was behind a chandelier centered over the curving stairway or if the light was just bad…it is a stairwell not a gallery. I was pleased to have no more than three or four other visitors in the galleries sharing the experience with me while I was there. How utterly civilized!
This past week Pablo Picasso turned 130. I suppose the exhibition at the Frick could have been called Picasso at 130. By contrast, Will Barnet at 100 celebrates the work of a painter who is still alive and still working. Do you suppose Pablito is lying in his grave green with envy?
There is only a notice regarding this exhibition on the Museum web page. But it will show you the other work they do there.
http://www.nationalacademy.org/pageview.asp?mid=3&pid=89
The Will Barnet pages at the Smithsonian American Art Museum show many of his 33 works in their collection:
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/results/?page=1&num=10&image=0&view=0&name=&title=&keywords=&type=&subject=&number=&id=245
Thursday, October 20, 2011
David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France, Drawings from the Louvre. At the Morgan Library, NYC
The Morgan, Part I.
In the catalogue introduction to the exhibition Louis-Antoine Prat, curator in the graphic arts department of the Louvre, describes the thinking that resulted in the selection of the chosen art works: by framing it within the years 1795 to 1850 both the extended turmoil within the French state and the wide range of drawing styles would be included illustrating the many interests in the French graphic arts. And it appears that the intentions have been successfully realized. There are a variety of schools and genres …classicism, romanticism, troubadour, genre, figure drawings, portraits, landscapes and cityscapes representing 19th Century French artists from David to Daumier. There are drawings in graphite, chalk, charcoal, pen and ink, wash, and watercolor. The only thing that I notice missing is that there is no still life and no works in pastel. With only the slightest forcing of the dates that omission might have been corrected by including something by Chardin…he overlapped the era by three years. But that might be a subjective desire on my part: I am a fool for Chardin.
As for the drawings there is a full range from doodles to quick sketches and sketch book works made in situ to gesture drawings, contour drawings, layouts for larger works, finished drawings for larger works, and drawings intended as art works that stand on their own. Some of these have interests as drawings and some of them have interest as curiosities: I had no idea that David could work on such a small scale!
Regarding the quality many of them are superb, many of them are very good, some are historically interesting but mediocre and only a few of them are questionable as “art”, notably the Sappho Leaping into the Sea by Chasseriau: whatever its historic importance it is the kind of bad drawing that I would expect to see only in an exhibition of works by high school students. The inclusion of drawings like this makes one wonder if the Louvre might have a very limited collection of drawings.
By contrast Paul Gravarni’s Interior View of a Courtyard at five by three inches, despite having what the catalogue describes as a lack of finesse, makes one wonder whatever became of him. It is a very tight value study in grisaille similar to the works of Charles Sheeler made from his photographs.
Among the pleasant discoveries is an intriguing female nude by Corot. One often forgets that many of Corot’s landscapes feature dancing nymphs…a fact I often do try to forget. In addition the watercolor and gouache, Two Leopards from Peru
In the realm of showstoppers there are of course the usual suspects; Gericault, Delacroix, David, all of whose works here are truly inspiring, and, of course, Ingres. And with ten works in this exhibition and sixteen from the Morgan collection in a second exhibition down the hall a wonderful range of Ingres’ work gets a more than welcome showing. (That entry follows this.)
But the star of the show, as he would be in any exhibition that included his works on paper, is Prud’hon with two nudes, one male and one female, a portrait, a working drawing squared up for a painting, and a small and overly maudlin illustration with watercolor. Prud’hon is one of the few artists whose every nude can stop me dead in my tracks. They are not drawings so much as they are modeled forms seemingly sculpted on the flat surface and with the most exquisite sense of lighting. Encompassed by caressing air they are all romantic soft edges and seem to conform to Kenneth Clark’s statement that every nude should evoke a sexual response and indeed, whether male or female, these do.
But the great work here is his portrait of Constance Mayer, black and white chalk. Here is one of those rare portraits, Picasso’s portraits of Marie Therese are similar, in which the artist is able to express his love for both the subject and the medium in which he works. Because of that love Prud’hon is able to communicate her unique individuality, yet he captures as well her archetypal essence: while she is his Constance she is as well someone we could know and love in our own time: the lighting is beautiful, the range of tonal values is perfection, the execution is flawless. And I love that she is not in an environment but that she is a drawing on paper. It is all so fragile: not the drawing alone, but life …life is fragile. The juxtaposition of controlled mastery and spontaneous delight has never been better essayed.
This is a lovely exhibition: it is the kind of work I would expect museums to always have on view but which they do not. Because the subject matter is almost always on the human scale I was aware of liking it so much more than I do exhibitions of Italian Renaissance drawing. However, I went through it twice and I left both times feeling that it was not quite enough, that I wanted it to be more than it was. I don’t mean by that more drawings, the 60 here and the additional 16 Ingres drawings are just right for one museum visit. Perhaps it was the inclusion of so many of the lesser known artist of the era, who I agree are due their few moments of recognition if not fame, but who had the character here of being merely filler. Perhaps their appeal is to those scholars who dote on these things…and who too often make verbal mountains of erudition out of molehills of achievement. In the end, for me, there was a feeling of thinness to it. But maybe the fault is mine: perhaps I spend too much time looking at art simply for the pleasure of it. Is that possible?
Here is a link to the web site. Unfortunately there is no online slide show:
The catalogue is all inclusive and the reproductions are splendid. There is, however, practically no commentary on the various mediums or the techniques they require. My thoughts on that are included in the comments on the Ingres exhibition.
Ingres at the Morgan. The Morgan Library and Museum, NYC.
The Morgan: Part II.
The claim is often made that American museums are teaching institutions and with their lectures and talks that accompany each of their special exhibitions that can be understood as a somewhat apt description. Unfortunately those talks and lectures are too often only anecdotal material about the artist or his models. Very few museums in either their lectures or their catalogues discuss at length or in detail an artist’s technique or his method of using the various media. (That is regrettable as an artist is a master of his craft before he can be a fine artist.) I often find that much more could be done in this area to inform the general public and to make the public more curious than it presents itself as being, thereby increasing its knowledge and further whetting its appetite for the fine arts in general. As I have said many times before; we have fine arts institutions in this country but we do not have a fine arts culture. By giving us only cursory information, museums are partially to blame for that.
This small exhibition is an excellent example of my meaning. According to the web site there is only one scheduled gallery talk. That’s a real shame. But there is a greater missed opportunity: several letters written by Ingres are displayed in the center vitrine. As the print is so small as to be illegible and because Ingres is not regarded as a man of “letters” I think a far more valuable set of information could have been provided elucidating the term: “Graphite”.
All but one of these sixteen drawings are designated as Graphite and ten of them are portraits using the full or three quarter figure. Each of these is a contour drawing in which the edges of forms are recorded at the point where they recede from the eye. Each contour line is reported with great specificity. Each carefully made line has the same width, weight, and tonal value as all of the other lines. It is only in the faces that stumping has been employed to suggest highlight and shadow so that only the faces create the perception of dimensional form. There is no shadowing around the figures to suggest that they are standing out from or sinking into the surface of the paper: these drawings are very specifically on the surface. (I love the existential clarity of that.) Each of these was intended as a finished art work and they are the kind of portraits that were made passé by the invention of photography. They are as well the works that inspired both Matisse and Picasso, both of whom created finished works in a similar linear method. But in the case of Picasso his linear drawings are often denoted as “Pencil”.
In 1560 deposits of the finest grade of European graphite was found in Cumberland England Europe into the artists’ tool boxes, eventually replacing silver or other metal points. However, with the constant warfare between States, this material was often difficult to obtain. In 1795, the Frenchman, M. Conte, formulated controlled blends of materials and invented the Conte pencil. By the time Ingres began his career there were many superb drawings in this new medium.
Because I study art and because I draw I avail myself of books that discuss the artists and their materials and so I somewhat know the history of graphite. My comments arise because when I am in galleries I hear one woman say to her companion: “What is graphite?” To which I hear the reply: “I don’t know, but these look like they were made with a pencil.” To them, as to most people, a pencil in whatever form is a “lead” pencil. Not to make too fine a point of it, I think if museum goers had a better understanding of materials and their history it would enhance the point of view of the curators: in this instance, this period in France
The technical questions this exhibition raises are these: did Ingres use a wooden pencil as we know it or did he use what we call a mechanical pencil. If he used a wooden pencil I think he would have had to sharpen his point after every line had been made in order to control the uniformity of the lines. With a mechanical pencil with a specific grade of material, hard to soft, and a variety of diameters in the various rods, less sharpening would have been required had the stylist been held in the same way for the whole making of the drawing. Knowing the exact marking device he used would tell us about the speed at which he worked, just as the size of the format has to do with the place where he worked …in his lap or at his table. Knowing the nature of the craft he had to master would enhance the appreciation of these drawings and we want to know that because he is so present in the making of these drawings.
As it stands they look as if they had simply been gently laid down onto the paper. As a connoisseur and a would-be fellow artist my question is this: How did he do that!
All of the art works in this exhibition are on view on the museum web site and so I see no reason to comment on any but one of them individually. I can report that all of Ingres drawings are perfectly centered on the pages, (I don’t know if that was on purpose or if the paper was trimmed once the drawing was completed), but as all of the figures are drawn to the same scale, I assume that they were specifically placed on the sheet…and well placed they are. When you first see them on the web site they look extremely pale as if overexposed but if you zoom in to see details there is truer representation of their tonal values.
But I do want to comment about the drawing Odalisque and Slave. At 13 by 18 inches and rendered in graphite, black and white chalk, and with gray and brown wash, this work appears at first as if it were an example of photo realism if not a photograph. This is enhanced because there are no drawn lines in this work; the only lines are the direction of the dynamics and the implied axis of the various planes. Yet on closer inspection it can be seen that it is indeed a drawing. That difference is worthy of contemplation: because everything is so perfectly rendered, what about it makes it different from a photograph?
Seeing this drawing brought to my mind a number of questions about photography and drawings. Were the original photographs in black and white because the film could only record the tonal values of the light striking the plate or were they made black and white specifically to suggest drawings such as this one. For instance, in his earliest explorations Fox Talbot attempted to print photographs with inks creating in essence a new drawing medium. Color photography was available in the early 1900’s but was rarely employed by photographers until much later.
But, further, how is it that drawings in black and white, such as this one, and photographs when they first appeared, were so acceptable to the public that saw the world around them in color? Why is it that some movie buffs prefer films in black and white as being more “real”? I wondered if it might have to do with the insight of psychologists that we do not dream in color. Is an art work analogous to a dream, to those strong, sudden images that command our attention? If so that might then explain our acceptance of oil paintings in which the skin tones are rarely flesh colored but rendered instead in the color key of the whole painting. Finally, is it because when we look at fine art works we do not expect to see “reality”, as if we were looking through a window, but rather that we expect an interpretation of the physical world made an aesthetic distance away from us? Is that an inherently human understanding of art works, of made “pictures”, or have we learned that over the generations? (Perhaps I should reread Suzanne Langer’s writings on art as symbolic experience.)
But perhaps it is not the starkness of the image but the content that suggests the image as the dream. Confronting us is a sensuous, sexually available female, a maid lost in song, a guard/eunuch whose attention as well is elsewhere, and an implied observer whose helmet is sitting at the woman’s feet. It is common, I suspect, to regard something like this as merely a bizarre example of a la mode orientalism of the day. But generations of artists have been compelled to repeat and to reinterpret this situation and this pose. Which aspect of this drawing, the subject or the technique, has the stronger impact on us and gives it its dream state?
Ingres’ work is very tight, remarkably tight. And I was reminded here of a time in one of my art classes when the exasperated instructor shook his head and said to me: “We all know that you can work tight: we are waiting to see if you are going to step into the 20th Century someday soon and draw loose.” Well, eventually I did, but my true inclination and admiration is always for the way of Ingres. And in that way I am very much like Picasso. …and, yes, in only that way!!
The Morgan web page:
Whenever I visit the Met Museum
Monday, October 3, 2011
Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore, at the Jewish Museum, NYC.
For the past several years I have been wanting to go down to Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore
However, now that I have seen them, I am rather glad that I saved myself the trouble of going all the way to Baltimore Paris
Most of the works shown here are from the artists’ early years, when the buying was affordable by just about anyone, and most of it, I regret to say, looks like student work. For example: there is a drawing of Fernande, possibly in Gosol, which is a rather murky representational drawing. The Cone sisters knew Fernande and so I think I understand the charm for them of this drawing: they bought a souvenir of a friend signed by an up and coming young artist but a drawing not necessarily a good art work. It in no way has the intrigue and excitement of the early cubist drawing of Fernande, from approximately the same time, that Alfred Stieglitz gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There is a variation here of the well known Matisse drawing of the young woman in the plumed hat, but this variation is interesting only because it has obvious erasures, false starts, and searching contour lines. Whereas we have always been asked to believe that in his Ingres mode Matisse was infallible with his marking device, here we see that we have been misinformed. He was human after all.
Of the paintings the most interesting, by these two artists, is a blue period portrait by Picasso. And while it is a rather straight forward and sort of dull effort, it would fit nicely into an exhibition of Picasso’s Blue Period. More about Matisse after this…
The most interesting and professional works here are the oil paintings by Courbet, Pissarro, Gaughan, and Van Gogh. The latter was done early in his stay in Arles
The best in show is the Courbet. It displays a facile mastery of craft and has an authentic expression of the sentiments achieving the stature of fine art. Courbet is one of those often considered an also ran painter but the more I see of his work the more I am convinced that he is an undiscovered genius lurking in the shadows…like Tintoretto. Should I live long enough I might become better acquainted with those two.
There are shown as well three beautiful sets of jewelry and some really gorgeous antique fabrics. If I ever decide to go to Baltimore
Matisse.
Back in the late eighties when I began to more seriously study modern art I was very enamored of the work of Matisse, more so than I was of Picasso’s work. Most of it I saw in reproductions on heavy, glazed paper in either art books or museum calendars and in such a slick, commercial presentation likely anyone would find himself enamored. However: there is a great difference between those reproductions and the actual paintings. The paintings look flat, whereas the reproductions are juicy, and the colors dull whereas in the books they are brilliant.
I have noticed on several occasions that there are various differences between paintings and their reproductions. The paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane are hardly different from one to the other media: they are about the same size and both have a nicely varnished and or glazed finish. Claude of Lorrain, on the other hand, can only be appreciated face to face: his paintings are larger than any reproduction suggests and the accumulated effect of size, color, composition and finish create both a visceral and an emotion response that one would not expect having seen only the prints.
As to why Matisse’s work is so different face to face I think I would have to say because of the finish. Most are not varnished, most were intended, I suspect, to look as if the artist had just left the easel …but 100 years later they look not “just completed” but dulled with age. One of the strongest attractions for me of any painting is its olio resinous impasto, the visceral experience of its presence. Sadly, in the Matisse paintings that quality is now completely missing if in fact it ever existed…he painted very thinly. And so we are left with merely the concept of the painting.
As for the concept, which is a perfectly good offering for an artist to make, in the case of Matisse its repetition wears thin after a while. His work falls into the early works which are a journeyman effort and fine for what they are, the period of Les Fauves when the palette erupted in a riot of color, and then his early experimentations with color and composition which resulted in some very good early modern art works, most of which are at the Museum of Modern Art. Then there were the very late papiers colles. What I find interminable is the long thirty year period between the great early paintings and the papiers colles when he sat in Nice painting odalisque after odalisque. There is one odalisque in this exhibition and it is dull with age, flat, the concept stated but the brush work sloppy and hastily done and if I never see another of these I think I could live happily ever after.
We are also shown an early female nude, the one which he reworked some twenty six times carefully photographing each variation. (As favored collectors the photographs were given to the Cone Sisters who of course bought the painting.) I was especially anxious to see this but was turned away by it because of its slap dash and poorly executed finish: it is a concept and only a concept, an oil sketch, which, had there been a finished painting, might have had some interest for me. Instead, I am further turned away from his work on the whole. As it is, its only interest is that the unintended abstract expressionist quality of the loose painting came to its fall development twenty years later when William de Kooning did his Woman series.
The only work I actually delighted in seeing was a large pen and ink drawing of a woman leaning against some cushions. I have a reproduction of this work which I bought at a local auction years ago and I have always assumed that it was a reproduction from a series of lithographs he did in 1936 where he drew directly on the stone. However: I think I prefer my reproduction. In it every line has the same weight and there is a crispness of the black over the white paper. In the drawing the pen is loaded and moved across the paper until the pen is dry and then reloaded. Thus there are thick and thin lines and blacks and grays but they are by chance and without emphasis as it relates to the subject. Whereas in my reproduction the subject can be approached and communicated with, in the original one confronts a calligraphic tangle of lines strong and weak. I don’t know that I think that was the artist’s intention.
There are as well a number of small sculptures of the female figure but alas I am tone deaf when it comes to sculpture: I don’t know why anyone makes it and I don’t know why anyone would want to look at it. I gave them some attention but I remained indifferent.
For years after their deaths there was an ongoing art world dialogue in which it was asked: who was the greatest painter of the twentieth century: Picasso or Matisse. At different times I have sided with one and then the other. But when I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art some years ago and saw the title of their permanent collection: From Matisse to the Present, I realized at once that with Matisse we have some very pretty paintings but without Picasso there is no modern art. I had a very similar response to the title of this exhibition: Matisse and Modern Masters. Matisse has had his influence and there are painters who owe him a debt but most of those painters are not of the first rank whereas those who saw Picasso’s work and who studied his cubism and his drawing and his application of paint to surface have created the main body of subsequent modern art.
The more I see of Picasso’s work the better I understand that he was a creative force without equal in not only the twentieth century but in the whole of western, or even world, art. The more I see of Matisse’s work the more I sense that he was merely a bourgeoisie with a hobby. While this exhibition is light on Picasso, it strengthens that understanding of Matisse. As this is only a small sample of the larger collection, perhaps, if I ever brave another visit to Baltimore
The Jewish Museum page:
The Cone Collection, Baltimore
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Picasso and Marie-Therese. At The Gagosian Gallery, NYC.
Leaving the Picasso Museum in Paris Guernica Paris Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth
Leaving the Gasgosian Gallery after seeing this exhibition, I had an exactly opposite response: I have never known Picasso, or anyone else for that matter, who has made so many loving portraits of one particular woman. It seems inconceivable that a man could express his feeling for another person so nakedly and so publically. And what is so odd is that from the John Richardson biography I know that this was indeed a very strange and perhaps very unpleasant relationship throughout its history. Richardson
To refresh your memory, Picasso met Marie Therese in the streets in Paris
During the last several years that I have been giving Picasso’s work a lot of renewed attention, I have been awestruck by his ability to walk up to a blank canvas and with seemingly no preparation or forethought, take bush loads of paint and whip out a masterpiece. The Clouzot film, The Mystery of Picasso, available on Netflix, shows you exactly what I mean. Beginning with a simple line, the man sees something that he allows to draw him in and as the spontaneous work progresses, he corrects and changes until he finally steps back with a fully realized work. I find it uncanny that anyone can do that. Well, I guess that shows us why Picasso is a genius. That process was also seen in Picasso’s Last Paintings, seen at this same gallery two years ago, see below.
To continue the list of contradictions: even though Picasso could be so unpremeditated and so immediate, there are in this exhibition two charcoal drawings that are among the most controlled works Picasso ever produced. The two drawings are very carefully and lovingly made and are respectful of both the subject and the medium. They are among the best portraits any artist ever produced.
And whereas in his usual slap dash painting style of wet color over wet color he seems to be totally indifferent to the choice of those colors, there is a small, elegant still life,1936, also carefully executed, in the most specifically chosen and harmonious hues. If nothing else the man is a contradiction and I suspect that it is the element of the lurking unexpected that infuses all of his work with excitement. If further evidence is wanted, there is in this exhibition a primed canvas over which has been laid a charcoal drawing of Marie Therese. That’s it. That’s all. He saw a finished work and walked away from it.
In another a thick impasto of white paint has been smeared over the surface of the ground and, using a pointed object, the drawing has been incised into the impasto.
And in yet another the canvas has a charcoal drawing on a white ground that has been wiped out and another drawn over it. That too is it: nothing more is needed to express what he felt at that time. Now, perhaps that is a part of his genius: he knew when to stop, which would imply that he knew what he had done.
As in the Last Paintings there is in these paintings as well strong indications that for Picasso, who so loved the act of drawing, the concept of the painting as a drawing in oil on canvas. Once again his bold freely drawn black lines have been stated and, when lost, restated. There is some exploration in which each of the lines is drawn in a different color, an idea I and I am sure other artists have had. Picasso tried it several times and gave it up. Yes, it doesn’t work except as an experiment.
In only one of the painting have the shapes been allowed to touch without there being any lines around them, or elsewhere in the painting at all. After that one attempt, they returned: Picasso loved drawing, he loved those lines.
In looking at the work of various artists over the years it is interesting how one becomes attuned to the interests of the artists. When considering his use of the plastic elements it can be seen that for Cezanne he ranked their importance as …color color color, form …line. In Diego Rivera we see form form form, color …line. But In Picasso it is all line line line line, color …and sometimes form.
Most of these paintings are labeled as privately owned. There is one from the Metropolitan Museum , one from MOMA, one from Philadelphia
What I noticed missing however was any sample from the Vollard Suite, The Artist and his Model. MT was that model. But over the past few years we have had more than ample opportunity to see the Suite in all of the other Picasso exhibitions, see the several entries below, so much so that it might have been thought to be unnecessary this time around. But what we have in the paintings, most of which the public has never seen before, that is so prominent in all of those etchings are the flowers, the little vases of flowers here and there and the garlands of flowers that encircle her head. And as in the etching where she is almost always nude, here she is also nude or almost nude and in almost every one of these paintings the circle of her breast is a recurring motif…the circle of her breast, her athletic body …and her watching eye. That eye speaks volumes.
Finally, the written record suggests that in their relationship Picasso envisioned himself as MT’s lord and master, he gave himself the role of the demanding and dominant personality. However: the pictorial evidence is quite the contrary: as you walk through these galleries you have a very real sense of this being a temple and of these paintings as being an homage to a goddess. Clearly, as his muse, as the eternal feminine spirit, Marie-Therese lived beyond his reach. And I think he knew that: that eye speaks volumes…and he painted it again and again and walked away from a finished painting every time. She must have driven him to a frenzy of frustrated egotism.
This lovely, lovely exhibition has been extended to July 15th. Don’t miss it.
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