The Cy Twombly Gallery, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

The Building.

The museum web site has very good photographs of the building and a good text describing its components and so I do not have to repeat that here. But I do want to comment on the fact that it presents its side rather than its front to the street. A sidewalk leads from the street parallel to the entry door wall and so close to it that it is not possible to get a full view of the building design before entering into it. Architecturally I consider this a bad idea: wherever the entry door might be, and Frank Lloyd Wright was very good at hiding them, one should have a sense of the building’s form while he is on the inside.Renzo Piano did much the same thing in the Morgan Library renovation and I dislike it for the same reason.

Why this was done I do not know. However, in one of the photographs you can see that the walk to the door includes a slight rise in the terrain and so it is possible that if the building was sited on a hill, by entering at the side the architect could use the sidewalk rise to avoid adding a stairway or pedestal base at the entry. I am not at all sure, however, that this is the reason: Houston is a very flat city.

You can see as well from the photographs that the building appears to be square in plan. It is but with the addition of an entry lobby that is a thin rectangle across the entry side which extends the square on that side. Inside the gallery plan is square and it is divided into nine parts, three, three, and, on the north side, two …one gallery is two units.

Both times that I visited this building I turned to the left upon entry and moved clockwise from front to back to front, seeing the middle gallery last. It was not until leaving the second time that I realized that the long bare wall in the double unit gallery had been finished with white Venetian plaster. I asked the docent (attendant?) why just that one wall had been done and she informed me that all of the interior walls had that same treatment. Mr. Twombly had demanded that finish and had recommended the workman who came from Italy to do the job.

Venetian plaster is an old world technique. It is, nowadays, spackle made of marble dust, easily tinted to the desired color, and in the mid to late 1990’s it was all the rage in American interior decoration, especially among the moneyed set. (It is expensive.) Done in one color, or white, it is almost impossible to see in diffuse lighting …you can only really see it if you stand next to the wall and let your eyes rake the surface. Sometimes it is finished by being buffed with the stainless steel floats used in the application and in other instances it can be further buffed and waxed. When it is waxed and polished it looks like Formica. Because it is so hard to see, as it is here, I have always wondered why they bothered …apparently, here, to placate Mr. Twombly. (The interior of the new Herzog de Meuron wing of the Walker Art Center has the same finish and from the ripples in the wall you can discern that it has been applied over sheet rock laid horizontally.)

Mr. Twombly also required that the flooring be six inch yellow pine plank neither too red nor too yellow, neutral, so that it bounced a neutral light from the floor up onto the artwork. The docent assured me that each plank had been individually selected: also I assume by Mr. Twombly.

What are noticeable here are the large pieces of cotton fabric stretched tautly across the ceilings below the sunlight filtering roofing system. These huge pieces are hemmed on the sides and have grommets about every six inches. There are clips attached to turnbuckles that in turn attach to the walls. Originally it was estimated that they would probably hang for about ten years before the mid sections began to sag. Fortunately, in the eighteen years since they were installed, they have not needed to be replaced at all. In a display of masterful design and execution there are perfectly placed openings for the lighting fixture’s stems that pass through to the ceiling light grid. They supplement the illumination of the paintings. This fabric had been a requirement by Mr. Twombly as well.

Near the end of my conversation with the docent I was reminded of the 1895 exhibition in Paris, the first career retrospective of Cezanne’s work. After sending his work to Paris from his home in Aix, Cezanne made his way to the gallery with his son. Later, on their way home, Cezanne said to him, proudly: “Did you notice: every one of those paintings was framed!” Apparently he had made no suggestions regarding the decoration of the rooms in which the paintings had been shown or of the manner in which they were displayed. And for himself, an unframed Cezanne was fine …as I suspect it would be for any one lucky enough to own one.

At the end of his summer in Antibes where he had been provided a studio for his painting by the community, Picasso said to the mayor, “I’m giving you the work I did here this summer: make a museum.” I have yet to read that he had any requirements for its interior decoration.

I think it is possible that when a man is confident of his own genius he probably doesn’t need to concern himself with gilding the lily of his production with fussy decorator innovations: he knows full well that the work will stand, not stand or fall …stand… on its own and in whatever environment it happens to be placed.

When an artist does concern himself with the choice of draperies and hand towels in the exhibition hall  I think it’s possible that he suspects that his work is borderline decoration and furthermore it is likely that he believes that only old world elegance will give it that added something to boost it toward the awesome.

I find that much of the artwork of the New York School is merely decoration, which Corbusier defines as the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. A lot of it looks like stuff you can find in any upscale furniture store. I have never considered Twombly’s work in that light, but as I was for the most part greatly disappointed by what I saw here, learning about his obsessive involvement in this project caused me to reconsider his achievement.

The  Work.

I believe it is correct to say that Cy Twombly is considered a member of the New York School even though he spent most of his working years in Rome. He was a recognized, commercially successful modern artist from the 1950’s until his recent death. Even though I lived and worked in New York during those years I was completely unaware of him or his work. He only came to my attention a few years ago when the Whitney did a retrospective of his work…more or less 2002.  At that same time I bought the catalogue to his 1977 Whitney retrospective at a flea market for a dollar.

That catalogue featured work from the years 1954 to 1977 and in looking through the book I was saddened to see that for that whole period it all looked much the same. I always respond with sadness when I see that an artist has boxed himself into a corner with the creation of an imagery that cannot be repeated by other artists without there being made claims of plagiarism and that he never allows himself to work outside that concept. (Rothko, Barnet Newman, Stuart Davis, Frank Stella, et al.) I am more inclined to like the work of Picasso who could work in six or more styles in one day, or by Warhol who appeared to flit from one thing to another: they give strong evidence of a lively and healthy mental life and seem to celebrate the great variety of the human experience.

From some source, (the Whitney catalogue?) I remember reading that in his early days Cy Twombly would arrange a paper so that he could not see it and make unpremeditated marks on it and then study the results. I suppose this was somewhat in the nature of the automatic writing/drawing that the surrealists had done. I can understand why the de Menil’s would have liked his work.

I think of those works as scribble drawings, the kind of thing my ex mother in law would look at and exclaim: “I can do That!” The truth is that even if she could, she didn’t. But there is also a feeling when looking at those works, and there are two galleries of them here at the Menil, that Twombly knew how much to put in and when to stop …my ex mother in law, by contrast, did not.

It is also true that while one or two of these might be interesting, they are all so much alike that two galleries of them are more than one needs to get the idea. From them I understand that there is a something that wants to be said. That is perfectly legitimate: I for one am ready to move on. Like my mother in law Mr. Twombly didn’t.

They also open themselves to ridicule: the friend who saw this work with me suggested that the paintings looked like pieces of sheet rock in a house under renovation. (In years past he did house renovation. As did I.) I could only agree. They do.

As writings/drawings I am more inclined to prefer the later work which bears a striking resemblance to sweeping arcs on a blackboard. I love the freedom of those and the looseness of the shoulder movement. (I love drawing.) But, again, I have a limited patience for too many of these. And as for Twombly’s work being decoration, I can think of several places in a number of homes where paintings like these would, as they say, look nice.

As for their being considered fine art, I think not. It should be impossible I would think to convince an audience that that which appears on a construction material as an act of public defacement is, on a well prepared length of linen an example of fine art. And while the concept is memorable in the aggregate, none of them individually achieves an iconic presence that would sufficiently intrigue a person to want to know more about them or the artist. When we, I, think of Cy Twombly’s work, there is no Marilyn or Jackie screen print, no Marie Therese sleeping, no Rape of Europa, no Burghers of Calais, nor fifty three Rembrandt self portraits …I can also recall specific Grecian urns, African masks, pre-Columbian figurines, and Han and Tang Dynasty tomb figures, etc.

In the three galleries across the back of the building there are paintings where Twombly worked with color, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. What is so noteworthy about all of them is that he seemed not to know how to use color. The work is either very tentative or over wrought. In the last of these three galleries there are a series of paintings in green and black, lots of green and black, too much in fact. They are poorly done and rather third rate in their sensibility. To me they read as Fragonard in the New World. In fact I thought that they were embarrassing …likely the poorest work in the entire Menil Collection.

I have seen him do better with color elsewhere …at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There, in a gallery to themselves, are a series of paintings: Fifty Day of Illiam, of which five or six are shown. They are magnificent. They are commanding but not too big. They evoke an incredibly strong visceral response. Even though mythic, this is a human engagement that altered the course of western history. I believe it and feel it as never before.

By contrast, here in the double square gallery hangs a large painting that I believe is a companion to those paintings. It is literally the length of a tennis court. And as if to extend that conceit, plain wooden bleachers have been provided for the spectators. But when sitting there and turning your head from this end to that and back again you become aware that the painting is too big. It is so big, in fact, that in the turning this way and that you lose interest in it. It evokes nothing like a visceral experience at all. Sans a tennis ball it is a non event. In an era of large scale paintings for which the New York school was so famous, this is simply the granddaddy of big paintings.

Hopefully no one will challenge its supremacy. I have had quite enough of oversized paintings. Few of them can do what Mondrian accomplished in a twenty four inch square. Kurt Schwitters could take the detritus at the bottom of an old desk drawer, glue it to a sheet of typing paper and create a world without end. The lesson here as in so many other places is simply this: less is more less is more less is more.

When I began writing this blog about my museum going a few years ago, I determined that I would not write about something if I had a negative response to it; I wanted my comments to be positive and to encourage those who read them to get out and see things that I thought were worthwhile. In rereading these notes I feel that I am being more negative than I should be. Allow me to amend this attitude: I like this work but it has its limitation. And in my comments in Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures I stated that Cy Twombly was one of the few New York School artists whose work could be seen in large groups without being tiresome. I hereby amend that to read …groups … not large groups.

And I think if I were to erect a gallery to but one New York School artist it would be either a Jackson Pollack or an Andy Warhol gallery. In a properly arranged Pollack Gallery the museumgoer would see the history of his development as an artist and share in his intellectual growth, comprehension and development. One would also see that in his restless pursuit of what might be attainable, he never stopped or came to rest at any one place…he, like Picasso, was always moving on.

Andy Warhol’s work is an ongoing dialogue with western painting and much of it sets out to debunk the conventional wisdom of high art. There is one series of his work that is relevant here. In a group of very large paintings on beautifully prepared linen grounds he poured paint in three or four areas and achieved a result somewhat similar to these Iliad paintings. As you get nearer to study them up close, you can then lean over and read the wall label and you discovery that these are the famous Piss paintings: Andy poured out the paint here and there and then asked whoever was in the studio to urinate into the wet puddles creating spontaneous design by accident areas of color. When you discover that you have your face in a puddle of dry piddle the paintings evoke a response even more visceral than Twombly’s. Was that the intention? Which came first?

While I might have been more negative here than I had intended, I believe I am not as cynical as Andy Warhol could be. But what I admire about him is his honesty: when there was a something that wanted to be said, he didn’t diddle around: he just said it.

Because the front of the building is so on top of you as you enter, you might not see at the front four posts and a lintel which create the entrance. As you exit the galleries, you do notice two posts and a lintel forming a portal back to the lobby. I suspect that these have been made of precast reinforced cement. This unit is perfect in its proportions and evokes the strongest sense of an archaic passageway into an arena where secret rites might once have been performed. It also evokes the design philosophy of Louis Kahn, one of the great masters of twentieth century architecture. If the museum had been sited so that these entry portals were more clearly evident this would have been a deeper and richer experience. Discovered as you exit, this one simple building element is suddenly the most rewarding aspect of this installation. I urge you to see it: it’s that good.

http://www.menil.org/collection/CyTwomblyInDepth.php

The Mark Rothko Chapel at the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

The web page for this attraction pretty much contains all the necessary information. Should you find my comments harsh I think you might come to agree with me after looking at the photographs.

The more I see of Mark Rothko’s work the less enamored of it I become. Scroll down to my comments on John Golding’s Mellon lectures for my more complete commentary. However, being at the Menil for likely the only time in my life I was under an obligation, to myself, to see this chapel. I have seen the Rothko Chapel at the Phillips Collection in Washington so I pretty much thought I knew what to expect. It is surprising how sometimes one can be so wrong.

Here, rather than the dimly lit room with benches of the Phillips I discovered a cement chamber jammed with folding chairs and so garishly lit, as seen even from the courtesy counter prior to entering the “room”, as to suggest that there was some construction underway. There was none. Thus this harsh glare from an unmodulated center skylight is the lighting that is supposed to transport the visitor into the higher levels of meditative experience. Frankly, I found this space about as spiritual as the waiting room of a Sears tire store. Of course if you are so superstitious as to give yourself up to the myth of religious experience I suspect you could as easily give yourself up to buying into the management’s sales pitch.

On six walls Mr. Rothko has had placed his usual overly large canvases, in this case all of them painted black with subtle variations of other dark colors. Prior to the opening Mr. Rothko committed suicide. Not to be unkind but I would not have been surprised to hear that.

As one exits the “chapel” one faces a terrace with Barnet Newman’s Broken Obelisk standing in a stagnant pool afloat with leaves and other scum. There were more metal chairs strewn about and a string of lights dangling from the trees dangerously at about neck height. This was intended as a memorial to Martin Luther King: on a nice day this might be attractive in a modern art sort of way but until the maintenance improves his family has grounds for complaint.

http://www.rothkochapel.org/

Picasso Black and White. The Guggenheim Museum, New York

Among the more mundane lessons one learns in art school is the instruction to sign a work which signifies that for the artist it is finished. Among the more mundane indicators of Picasso’s classical training is his signature writ large on the margins of his works. While looking at this exhibition the absence of that familiar flourish became very obvious to me: many, in fact most, of these works were not signed. In the John Richardson biography he states that early in his Paris years Picasso discovered that there were ready buyers for even his most preliminary sketches and so they were all made with an arrangement that suggested a finished work and all of them were signed and dated if not perhaps upon completion then at the time of sale or sometime soon after that. As most of the works in this exhibition appear to be “finished” it made me curious to know if they might have been works that he had always intended to keep for future reference, and later owned by or sold by his family from that private collection after this death.

A great many of them in fact are designated as being from private collections and so one might deduce that we are being shown uncirculated works. And as the interpretations and the notes in the catalogue tell us, many are Picasso’s working drawings and we are being allowed a more insider view into his working method than is usually the case.

Many exhibitions ago I became aware that a Picasso painting is really a drawing in oil on canvas. Of the plastic elements, color, line, and form, line is always dominant, form is his second interest and color is often not a consideration at all …apparently whatever was at hand would do. (Yet when he wanted to be a colorist he could be.) That elicits no complaint on my part: I love looking at drawings and he is the master draftsman of the twentieth century …few could draw better than he did, few loved to draw as much as he did, and no one else made anywhere near as many art works. Apparently he never tired of making them. Yet this is not to say that he was in the thrall of a compulsion …he was no sorcerer’s apprentice: sorcerer yes, apprentice no..

Most of these drawings are on canvas, (only seven are on paper, in contrast to what the exhibition title might suggest), a beautiful linen fabric perfectly stretched and primed and giving them, in the unpainted areas, a look of real elegance. I have seen Picasso drawings on paper on very large sheets, probably as large as these canvases so why he chose canvas rather than paper I do not know nor does the catalogue tell us. I have seen this technique, unpainted ground, before, notably in the Last Works at the Gagosian Gallery a few years ago, and I like it …an elegant piece of linen beautifully prepared is as handsome as the finest hand made paper. Most of them are made with paint and brush but others are in charcoal or pencil. Left unpainted the visible linen ground suggests watercolor with its areas of unpainted paper, but it also references the many unfinished late works of Cezanne. In its effect it gives the impression of an open and breathing space rather than the hard wall of a completely covered and varnished surface. I think we might conclude that in the poetry of modern art exposed canvas is a welcome conceit.

The catalogue states that Picasso used black and white throughout his career and to illustrate that point we are shown paintings/drawings that represent his entire 70 year career. Of course the most well known of his black and white paintings, if not of all his paintings, is Guernica and there are several works which illustrate the development of his design for that painting. But those fall within the chronological order in which the exhibition is arranged and while it is wonderful to have examples of the broad range of styles associated with him, there is a sense, ultimately, that all of this leads up to nothing; the exhibition lacks a narrative: one slowly makes his way up to the sixth level of the spiraling ramp, comes to the end, and then slowly makes his way back down to the street. The audio guide is easy to use but the information it contains is almost all personal recollection by family members and friends. In the catalogue reproductions there is no commentary on the individual works. As to what use specifically he made of these black and white works we are not told. Of course if we are familiar with his work we do not need to be told…but not being told we are uncertain if we are drawing the same conclusions as the curators had hoped we would.

One of the remarkable aspects of Picasso’s work and working method was his ability to step up to an empty space, make a line, study it, and then conceptualize a drawing/painting and turn it quickly into a finished work. That implies that concept, execution, and critique were simultaneous impulses in his mind. This process can be seen in the 1956 Clouzot film which is shown at the museum during the run of this exhibition. (It is also available from Netflix.) While some viewers have commented that he is too facile for his own good, what they fail to realize is that in this process Picasso could imbue each work with a strong statement of his sentiments regarding the subject at hand. That ability to add the emotional content is what Suzanne Langer defines as that which elevates the mastery of craft to the level of fine art. In this exhibition there are very few works that lack emotional content. Where it is lacking we can understand that he was simply exploring the formal values. And this is what sets him apart from other artists: the modern art world is full of practitioners who concerned themselves with formal values but I think it should be understood that that in and of itself in insufficient to creating a work of fine art.

I sometimes think that those who do not like Picasso and who consider him facile consider only the volume of his work and consider that great number an indication of superficiality. I see his work as visual poetry, and no matter how many of his works I see, they are equally as valid human expression as poems of but a few stanzas.

For the past several years I have been trying to decipher analytic cubism and one of the delightful surprises in this exhibition was the opportunity to give further study to the development of the concept of cubism in the sequence of works catalogue numbers 3 through 16 which are examples from the earliest geometricized figures to synthetic cubism featuring a work with pasted papers. This was especially of interest in works 12 and 13 in both of which the nude female forms are very distinctly presented and with geometric divisions in the surrounding areas. Afterward it was very easy to sit with a pencil and paper and isolate the figure within the composition and identify the various views selected by the artist. I am not always certain what those surrounding divisions indicate in analytic cubism and from these two works I think it can be assumed that they are an arbitrary division of the picture surface. They might possibly refer to the environment in which the model posed but as this became a standard compositional development in analytic cubism I think the arbitrary division is the better explanation. One constant I have observed is that in the cubist paintings (i.e. number 14.) the whole of the surface is covered with paint whereas in the cubist drawings (i.e. number 15.) the figure is generally isolated in the center of an otherwise unworked sheet.

As always the drawings of Marie Therese are lovely and lovingly made. I will never tire of looking at these. It has been reported that Picasso’s first spoken word was piz …lapiz… (pencil) …and from his first to his last works there is always the thrill and wonder of the child who lived in what Freud described as the oceanic experience in awe of the line that is blazed by his marking device and nowhere more so than in his Marie Therese drawings where the great sweeping arc of the line turns and curves and fixes her forever on the ground. Drawing was his most loved medium and she was the most loved of his many muses.

Those who have read these notes in the past know that I am tone deaf when it comes to sculpture: I don’t know why anyone makes it nor do I know why anyone would want to look at it. The only exceptions are the work of Rodin and Picasso. And in this exhibition there are several works of interest…Woman with Outstretched Arms, 1961, which has the dynamic of a summer breeze, several studies of Sylvette, more later, and Head (Tete), 1928, a work which completely captivates me. As to why I might like these I would have to say because all three of them are painted…I almost always like a painted surface. As to why I might like Head I think I read it as a three dimensional drawing…in the catalogue it faces Musical Instruments on a Round Table, 1927, synthetic cubism, and comparing the two my response to Head can be understood immediately. But what was so astounding to me is that in the photographs Head appears to be of substantial size and weight whereas in the museum I almost passed it by: it is only six inches high!

And of interest to those of us who saw this exhibition in New York are the five or six works Picasso made from the model Sylvette in 1953, of interest to New Yorkers because of the very large (about 30 feet) Sylvette that stands in the yard of the residences of NYU just off Houston Street, south of Bleecker and east of West Broadway. It was interesting to me that nothing in the exhibition or the catalogue made reference to that work. But perhaps I am prejudiced: I once lived just down the street and when that was erected I was able to observe the ongoing process.

Of the works with a high degree of finish I have always been fascinated by The Kitchen which looks like the diagram for a construction of gas pipes and fittings, and the Milliner’s Shop in which Picasso’s flowing line has been subsumed by the filling in of the created shapes defined by the lines. There is a certain humor in the many shapes making reference to the work of the milliner in which the shapes of her materials are stitched together to create a whole, almost as if Picasso was admitting that while he loved drawing, he was aware that in nature there are no lines.

Toward the high end of the ramp the exhibition closes with the late works in which his need to hurry and get everything done manifested itself in a series of fluidly drawn compositions filled in with wet on wet liquid paint. And my perplexity at the near end on seeing Picasso’s take on Velasquez’ Las Meninas: I understand the painting’s point of view, I can decipher the composition, I can appreciate the rich color of it. What I don’t understand is why it is considered one of the truly great paintings of Western Art. This interpretation is very interesting, very faithful, and very respectful, but it too leaves me equally as mystified.

This is a lovely exhibition and I am always ready to see more of Picasso’s work, but I feel it is not one of the essential, must see Picasso exhibitions. While there are several really wonderful pieces that I was happy to experience first hand and several I could study closely, I really felt that overall this was merely just “more of the same”. I really dislike feeling that in regard to Picasso’s work …but sometimes it is inevitable there being so many to look upon. But, yes, perhaps it is the lack of a focused narrative.

Having said that: this exhibition sits beautifully in the Guggenheim Museum, in fact, it is one of the few exhibitions I have seen there …I cannot recall another off hand …in which the presence of the building is subsumed by the art works. This is saying something as I am a devotee of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and this building is among my very favorites.

The catalogue is excellent and a welcome addition to my growing Picasso library…now filling thirty six inches of shelf space. Four essays discuss Picasso’s life long work in black and white, the symbolism of black and white, and the use of black and white in the western tradition. In addition to reproductions of other Picasso works not in this exhibition, there are many reproduced works by other artists that were influential in Picasso’s career. In particular I found the essay, Turn, by Richard Shiff very informative in its discussion of the development of cubism. There are valuable insights and references in this essay.

I took an early train into the city to see this exhibition and I arrived at the museum at about 10:30 A.M. I was surprised to find that there were no long lines at the door. In fact, I walked in and went directly to the ticket counter. As I climbed the ramp I estimated that there were probably not a full one hundred visitors in the building….but perhaps the size of the space distorts the count. I am always happy to see smaller crowds in museums. There were, however, about twelve to fifteen groups of school children of all ages and while I think they were being well behaved, they do break away from their groups and fall into a lot of idle chatter. Each group had a leader and each leader had much to say in a voice that might have been raised higher than it should have. On the main floor at the very center of the rotunda there was a woman with a very piercing voice whose job it was to welcome each new group as they came onto the center stage. During the whole of my visit there was never a time when her voice was not heard. In short: despite the few visitors there was tremendous hubbub in this place. I certainly approve of educating young people in the fine arts. But please, can’t this be done on days when I am not there?

In the upper left corner of this page there is a little black box. If you click on that it will open photographs of some of the works:

http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/picasso/

John Golding. Paths to the Absolute. The 1997 Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

Like many I am an inveterate reader of obituaries and what I find most fascinating and enlightening about them is that there are so many persons who have made really important contributions to our knowledge and well being yet who have somehow managed to remain unknown to the general public. Often, I suspect, we tend to think that all the really important people are well covered by the press and the various media.  Actually, this is hardly so. In fact, in a world of six billion, with 300 million in this country, it is hardly to be expected. As an example, I recently read of the death of John Golding, writer, painter, and critic and thought it was odd that I had never heard of him, or remembered him if I had. Despite the present number of writers on the subject of modern art, I would have thought that my recent focus on the work of Picasso would have made his name known to me.

John Golding’s first published work was the study, Cubism, a History and Analysis 1907-1914, which was written in the late 1950’s as his doctoral thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art; Anthony Blunt and Douglas Cooper were his professorial supervisors.  It is considered the standard work on the subject. (Elsewhere Golding says that he does not understand cubism. Neither do I.) Over the years he has written on modern art for a number of publications, most notably for The New York Review of Books, which I have read from time to time, and those writings have been collected in the volume Visions of the Modern. In 1997 he presented a series of six evenings in the Mellon Lectures series at The National Gallery of Art and as it was on the subject of abstraction, an area that I am studying at the present, I decided to read his work.

As the Italians would say: Madonna! What a wonderful discovery! (Que bella cosa!) For a deep understanding of twentieth century art, one can discover few writers on the subject who have a greater scholarship, insight, and understanding. Mr. Golding has an easy and engaging writing style. His explanations are without art world intellectual pretense; he is eloquent and comprehensible and completely without obfuscation; he uses language to inform, not to impress.

When I compare what Mr. Golding has to say to what Kirk Varnedoe announced that he was going to say (speak for abstraction) and didn’t, scroll down to that entry, I was even perplexed as to why Kirk Varnedoe thought he had to speak for abstraction in the first place. Certainly he would have been aware of Golding’s work …Mr. Golding contributed an essay to Varnedoe’s 2002 exhibition Picasso/Matisse, and, as the Director of MOMA, he could have been expected to know any of the Mellon lectures which addressed modern art. Checking the index of the Varnedoe lectures I found no entry for John Golding.

In comparing the two series of lectures I believe the difference lies in their identification of the underpinnings of modern art. For Golding there is an intellectual, literary, tradition which has had an impact on society and culture. For Varnedoe, if I read him correctly, there is an impact of the society on the cultural life but there are more importantly various procedures from a set of formal values. In that regard I believe that Varnedoe continues in the line, the tradition if you will, of Alfred Barr, and I suppose by inference, William Rudin, his predecessors at MOMA. This philosophy is in accord with that of Nelson Rockefeller, art collector and an early Director and benefactor of MOMA, who did not like intellectual art or art that spoke of existential angst.

If these are indeed two distinctly different understandings of modern art I believe each has validity although I respond in a more positive way to Mr. Golding’s. But likely that has to do with my own education, background, and life experience. From my earlier interests in poetry and theatre I have a positive interest to art that has an affinity to the vegetation rituals although I am aware that such art often runs the risk of becoming merely illustration. Pollack’s Guardians of the Secret, a wonderful painting, is an excellent example. And while I can appreciate art that has as its concern the interplay and balance of the plastic elements, I am aware that it hovers above the canyon of intellectual nothingness, it runs the risk of quickly becoming a bore. The former evokes at the least the response: how interesting, while the latter too often engenders a …so what.

Paths to the Absolute is divided into six chapters, six monographs, one each for Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Pollack, and two chapters which elucidate the life and work of Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, and Clifford Still.  Thus another difference with the Varnedoe lectures is that Golding keeps his focus on painting while Pictures of Nothing has an overview of painting, sculpture and environmental constructions.

The first three of these painters were Europeans who came to their maturity prior to World War II; the latter four are Americans who hit their stride after that global event. With the exception of Kandinsky all of these men were sent toward their final destination by the development of cubism. Hence knowledge of cubism, even if only a knowledge of its history, is a necessary step toward the understanding of modern art.

But a knowledge of cubism alone is insufficient for the greatest understanding. It is Mr. Golding’s premise that born into a world that had lost the certainty of a spiritual path, each of these artists devoted their careers to finding the right path. There are many Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century works which contributed to the strongly held perception that the social order as it had been known had ceased to be operative. Among those works were The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Karl Marx’ Capital, and, among others, Golding also names Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson.

The work that is generally cited as having had the most profound influence on society and the arts was Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra which contains the well quoted line: “…the people do not know that God is dead” meaning, as I understand it, that the Church no longer stands as the moral authority for western civilization. The dilemma this posed was played out in turn of the century French literature in the works of Paul Claudel, Andre Gide and Roger Martin du Gard. Claudel converted to Catholicism while Gide remained a steadfast atheist. In his journals Gide tells us that he trembled with fear each time he was visited by Claudel, terrified that his old friend might try for his conversion.

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is often cited, as it is here, as having had the most profound influence specifically on writers and artists …Shaw, Eliot, O’Neill, et al. Also inspired by Nietzsche’s works there followed in 1920 Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

Early in the twentieth century Freud’s works acknowledged the impasse, Civilization and its Discontents, a truly great title, but sought to provide a way forward. He identified the ego and the id, the conscious, the unconscious, and the super ego, He also identified the libido, the sexual energy that is the basis of all our energy, and with it the concept of the polymorphous perverse, which states that we are all bisexual and that we are sexually attracted to everyone and that conflict arises when we use our social skills to sublimate those impulses. (You can see how Freudian Picasso’s works can be understood to be.) Equally important to surrealism was Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

In addition there was Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, which brought to the table Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, the basis of Eliot’s Waste Land, Mircea Eliade’s work, and later Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. All of these works engendered in the art community a new appreciation of the world’s ethnic arts.

World War I was also an important cultural moment: cubism precedes it and the modern art referenced here followed. As an additional influence we might also insert the work of Kurt Schwitters who took from the detritus of the old, dead, civilization the materials for making a new art.

Theosophy was a strong influence in the life and work of Mondrian and Kandinsky is designated here as the most religious of these painters. In reading these pages I was sorry that Golding appears not to have been familiar with the work of Suzanne Langer because I think her statement best describes his intent: Every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art.

The two painters of this group who provoke in me the most positive response are Mondrian and Pollack. While I can admire what Golding here considers their spiritual purity, I am much more taken with their life long transition from a mastery of academic art toward a very personal idiom that has always the character of fine art. And I especially like it that having achieved a signature image that could not be borrowed by others without obvious plagiarism, they moved on to further explorations. It is for this same reason that I am so taken with Picasso…that always moving on …finding, exploring, exhausting, and moving on …that and perhaps the intellectual realization that we cannot know: every day our telescopes in earth orbit tell us that our suppositions about the universe are wrong. I am certain that our spiritual certainties are equally wrong and for that reason I always prefer Langer’s “symbolic experience”.

The chapter on Mondrian achieves the remarkable feat of humanizing the man. Even though I suspect that he was very much a difficult person…more intelligent than everyone else and impatient because further along in his quest for his goal, he seems here to have been a likeable person. I also appreciate that the whole of his career is taken into consideration not just the grids and minimal colors for which he is so well known. Over the years in one museum after the other I have seen a full range of his life’s work and I find all of it extremely satisfying.

The chapter on Pollack, always the tragic figure due to his compulsive self destruction, tragic because his talent and achievement were so great, is one of the great pieces of writing on the arts. Mr. Golding knows his subject thoroughly and he has the most profound admiration and respect for his achievement. While he recognizes the drip paintings as a great moment in western art he is also aware that those paintings were made in a rather brief period and that Pollack went on to make other paintings that came out of that moment. It is those last paintings of Pollack’s that I find so intriguing.

I am less impressed by the work of Malevich and Kandinsky. In my earliest days in New York I saw the exhibition of Kandinsky’s work at the newly opened Guggenheim Museum and I was very excited to discover that if I wanted to be a modern artist all I had to do was to learn the language he had created …red means this and blue means that …or to add to it the language of Malevich …triangles mean thus and such and many little squares mean something quite other. Seeing the Kandinsky exhibition a second time, fifty years later, 2009, I realized that during the interim I had come to think of this as merely a technique, a contrivance, and I had by then learned that contrivance is the antithesis of art.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy seeing an occasional Kandinsky now and then …but certainly not in groups of two hundred…every fifty years is enough of that. And while I admire the writings of Moholy Nagy, Kepes, and Rudolph Arnheim, none of whom are mentioned at length by either Varnedoe or Golding, perhaps there is a third theory of modern art, I consider their ideas as suggestions for the use of the plastic elements in the construction of a painting not, as in Malevich, an end in itself.

Had I written these essays …or delivered them as lectures, I would have referenced the work of Schwitters rather than Malevich. Schwitters created a body of work almost every example of which has tremendous presence, a sense of rightness to it, and of such rich complexity as to demand the most intense scrutiny. He achieves excellence in works that are often only 8 by 10 inches. His works create a sense of symbolic experience the equal of Mondrian’s. But most specifically I would have chosen Schwitters because his work has been so influential: it is almost impossible to go into any gallery or museum in town or in the country and not see collage that references his example. Certainly his work represents a human something that wants to be acknowledged.

Because this survey stops in the mid 1950’s there is no mention of the revival of interest in Buddhism that entered into American intellectual life at that time. Seen from that perspective, modern American art has a completely different aspect.

After years of contemplation Buddha revealed his insights. All human life is suffering. All suffering comes from our attachments. If we can give up all of our attachments including our desire to experience sartori we will discover that we have always had it within ourselves.

When we explore the nature of our attachments we discover that life is Maya, illusion. This Philadelphia Chippendale chair that I prize so highly is a family heirloom given to me by my grandmother and given to her by her grandmother on her wedding day. While I cherish the object and its history Buddha would tell me that it is just a piece of wood in a specific configuration. Prior to this it was timber in a mill and prior to that it was a tree in a forest and prior of that it was light and air and nutrients in the soil. It is what it is and whatever color I give to it that is only the color that I give to it. That color is Maya.

Mr. Golding is a master of modern art scholarship and I certainly bow to his great knowledge. But I am sorry that he omits reference to the Buddhist tradition. I think it is wonderful that he sees in Barnet Newman’s zips the echo of the primeval artistic gesture. Not knowing about the primeval gesture I have only ever seen them as large monochromatic surfaces with a contrasting line. Knowing now about the primeval gesture, I see them as large monochromatic surfaces with a contrasting line.

I have sat in Rothko’s chapel at the Phillips Collection in Washington and I have seen, in a dimly lit room, three (four?) large paintings …pigments applied in a specific way on a sized and primed ground. I have stood before the enormous No. 14, 1960, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and despite the sense that it had been made as a visual experience designed to make me experience awe, it remained for me paint and ground …it has as its purpose manipulation, a benign and well meaning manipulation, but manipulation all the same. But, I admit, it can be Maya to those willing to allow themselves to become lost in wonder.

As each of these three painters, I am including Still, came closer to the symbolic experience he wished to share with others the works themselves grew larger and larger until in the end they sometimes became room sized. It is that aspect of modern art …that Larger is More Important… that The Big Theme Needs a Big Canvas …that often turns me away from it. (Mondrian could say as much with 24 by 24 inches.) Most of us look at the majority of the art works we see in reproductions in books or prints, just as artists from the classical eras saw most art works in reproduction. Few of the great artists throughout history had the ability the average American housewife has to see so many thousands of world class art works face to face. Reduced to eight by ten or even three by five inches a work should give us a strong indication of its vital import through its visual presentation alone: conversely, imagining a huge art work in a museum as a postcard reproduction helps to balance its ambition against its performance. I have a small post card collection of Rembrandt self portraits on my bookshelf and every one of them has tremendous presence and impact. In his comments on Barnet Newman Mr. Golding cites his work, Uriel, 1955, as one he finds extremely successful. In fact it is used as the dust jacket of the book and, frankly, as an example of fine art, I find that it is perfectly successful as a dust jacket. When I see these enormous works dominating the walls of museums I am often reminded of my visit to the Louvre where I stood before David’s Coronation of Napoleon. I consider these modern works equally overwrought and equally silly.

In my comments on Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures I suggested that with the rise to dominance of the Chinese nation the cultural capital was likely to move there as well. In these Golding lectures I am compelled to mention China in another context.

The present socio/political reality in modern China is, according to many, merely a new manifestation of its dynastic tradition that extends in a somewhat unbroken line back six thousand years. What is most remarkable, to a Westerner, about this long history is that China has never had an official religion. There has never been any authority other than respect …if the emperor does not respect the peasant who grows the rice, everyone, including the emperor will starve. In the arts as in life there has never been in China a quest for or even a desire to experience the Absolute. Those magnificent Tang Dynasty tomb figures are as close as they want to get; they celebrate life and express the wish that it might last forever. Compare that to civilizations that have had a religious basis …I say have had because those civilizations are extinct. So much for the absolutes.

Perhaps, here in the west, there is something we have yet to understand.

Maya. Hmmm.

Mr. Golding’s excellent book is available through internet book sellers. Strangely it is not available through the National Gallery Online Bookstore. Neither is there a list on the NGA web site listing all of the Mellon Lectures. This is a wonderful series of lectures that should have more public exposure. In the future I hope the deficiencies of the museum web site will be corrected.

John Golding’s writing in The New York Review of Books:

http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/john-golding/

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The Steins Collect. Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde

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At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

When studying modern American literature Gertrude Stein, the experimental writer, comes onto the stage as the doyenne of a literary atelier in 1920’s Paris, mother superior to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Pasos, et al. In those literary years her salon was physically dominated by her portrait by Picasso, which gave her the imprimatur of modernity, and while they had been friends for many years, he was only now and then to be met there. It was also known that she was friendly with Matisse and that she had two brothers, Leo and Michael, who shared her interests in modern art.

When seen from the perspective of Paris, 1905, and the explosive appearance of modernism in the arts, Gertrude Stein is a beginning art collector and a very important one among the first supporters of Picasso and Matisse. In almost every telling Gertrude was the instigator of the collection put together by Claribelle and Etta Cone, her friends from Baltimore. (The famous Cone Collection.) It was also known that Gertrude, and her brother Leo, a would be artist, had an older brother, Michael, who shared their interest in art.

From whichever perspective the story has been told, it has been a constant that the Gertrude Stein residence at 27 Rue de Fleurus was a place where wonderful examples of modern art could be seen. Always as the background to the story of writers or painters that collection has attained legendary status. It would seem evident that eventually someone would have the idea of locating all of those art works and of recreating those historically important moments.

The Steins Collect is the result of that obvious thought, but strangely almost 70 years after the last of the Steins has died. In the catalogue overview, when seen from the perspective of the Stein family, Gertrude is now but one of three each of whom has equal importance. At last we get to know what Leo and Michael were up to!

In sum there were seven Stein siblings. Two died in infancy. Michael was the eldest and Gertrude, ten years later, the youngest. A sister, Bertha, accompanied Gertrude to Radcliffe and another brother, Simon, died in his early thirties. In this telling once Michael, Leo, and Gertrude are ensconced in Paris, Bertha and Simon disappear from the historical record. (Perhaps there is yet more to this Stein family saga.)

During the years when the Stein parents were alive the family had defined the word peripatetic. There was much relocating from city to city in the United States and at one time they spent four years in Europe, (the father was German born), most of them in Paris. Upon the parents’ death, when the children were all young adults, Michael took over the family business in San Francisco and very soon thereafter had established it so well that all of the siblings had a comfortable income for the rest of their lives.

The education of these peripatetic siblings could be described as equally peripatetic …the three of them studied, among other things, law, medicine, psychology, and philosophy, at a number of universities in the United States…Harvard, Radcliffe, USC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins …these were brilliant children. But with an educational emphasis on science and medicine, one might well ask, why did they buy art works? And how did they know with such certainty which art works by what unknown artists to buy?

This exhibition makes it clear that Leo is the key to that understanding. He was the first to leave the United States as a young adult and to travel widely …he made an around the world trip with a friend in 1895. As an urbane, educated, and cultivated person with independent financial means, certainly he had entre to those social environments that appreciated the arts. Early on, through his summers resident in Italy, he became friends with Bernard Berenson and through him, Roger Fry, one of the leading exponents of the work of Cezanne.

By 1902 Leo had decided to become an artist …hence the apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus which had a studio for his painting. Gertrude, after much educational shifting about, came to live with him in 1904 dedicated to trying her hand at writing. And in 1904 Michael and his wife Sarah moved permanently to Paris as well.

Three important events at that time should be kept in mind. Since 1880 it was more and more accepted that the academic style of painting had fallen into decadence …the Ecole de Beaux Arts was no longer held in high esteem. Secondly, the recent work coming out of Munich was creating a high level of excitement: Picasso’s first choice for the move out of Spain had been Munich but because of his limited funds he had to settle for Paris. And, third, in 1905 a career retrospective of Cezanne’s work convinced many, many people that the French route to modernism had been found ...Matisse, Braque, and Picasso among them.

In his book, The Nude, the 1952 Mellon Lectures, Kenneth Clark, at the very end of the study, introduces Matisse and Picasso and tells us that both were extremely ambitious for fame and success as painters. Both of them understood that this was a transitional period and both of them, academically trained, understood that a new tradition had to be created. We know their names because they were successful, and, being successful, they reinvigorated the art of painting. Their revolutionary works Clark names were Matisse’s Blue Nude, included in this exhibition, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, at MOMA, but the studies for that painting are here as well. Both works reference art which the two artists had seen in Parisian ethnographic museums and in both works the human figure has been reconfigured as the motif for creating expressive form.

Shortly after her arrival Gertrude and Leo decided to pool their resources and to collect as they were able …none of these drawings and paintings was very expensive. The burgeoning collection served two purposes: one; it identified them as not philistines, and two; as these artists gained fame the value of those works would increase, they could be traded up or sold as funds were needed. It was Leo’s understanding of the art world transitional moment that gave him the certainty that these were the right works to buy that made the collecting a sensible enterprise and explains why certain painters were their focus.

As the collections grew and as more and more people called wanting to see the works, it was decided that a regular At Home would be held on Saturdays at 27 Rue de Fleurus as Gertrude and Leo had known the Cone sisters to do back in Baltimore. At these times Leo would guide the guests through the collections and expound on art and modern art and the new tradition as it was being defined. Despite encouragements to write his comments down and publish them Leo was not a writer, neither it turned out was he a painter, and it was not until many years later that he was able to publish his ideas. I have never read his book, I have never known anyone to quote him, and there is but little mention here of any specific insights he might have had about the new art…so I am doubtful that his book has been very widely appreciated over the years. He comes off as a rather tragic figure and I couldn’t help wondering if he might not have been the inspiration for his sister’s well known remark: You are all a lost generation. And his dual lack of development might account for the fact that Gertrude is generally the star of the biographies and histories of the period, that and the self serving Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

With the arrival of Alice B. Toklas in 1910, Leo left to go on his own and he and Gertrude divided their collection. When Picasso entered his cubist period, Leo lost interest in his work and eventually focused on Renoir. That left Gertrude as the Picasso collector but as his fame indeed increased and as his prices soared, she was no longer able to buy his work. (She continued to support the work of other young artists, however.) She bought her last Picasso in 1924 but had to sell several earlier works in order to finance the purchase. It’s an odd Picasso; a Still Life with a guitar and many off putting black lines, as if to say “The way is barred.” Except that it suggests Picasso was suffering “painters” block, a rare condition for him, I can’t think that she made the right decision.

From their beginnings as collectors, Michael and Sarah focused on the work of Matisse and ultimately became his closest Stein friends. After seeing it in the Salon of the Independents in 1905, Michael and Sarah, who had studied the arts in college, bought Matisse’s Lady with a Fan, one of the greatest paintings in the Stein holdings, a Cezanne remade in the fauve palette. (Gertrude and Leo owned Cezanne’s Lady with a Fan.) Later Sarah assisted with the establishment of the Matisse school and studied with him.

Unlike the Cone Collection there is no extant Stein Collection: it was an accumulation over the years of many paintings that came and went. One very important piece of information about the Steins we learn here is that they were great proselytizers of modern art, not only inviting perfect strangers into their homes but encouraging exhibitions and loaning works to exhibitions and especially exhibitions in the United States. At the outbreak of World War I Michael and Sarah lost 16 of their Matisse paintings when they were confiscated while on exhibition in Germany. Thus not only was their pictures important but the Steins are important for having done so much to promote the new tradition.

In the catalogue photographs of 27 Rue de Fleurus are shown giving us an impression of the number of works owned by the Steins and of their placement within the small apartment. In a large empty gallery within the exhibition those photographs are projected onto the bare walls giving us a better sense of the physical size of the collection. This gallery can be seen in the web page video.

In walking into the exhibition I suppose one should try to imagine what it must have been like all those many years ago to enter a space where such unimaginable art works were hanging as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Unfortunately so many of them are now so well known that to imagine that one has never seen such things is impossible The closest I can get is to remember how, back 50 years ago, I first walked into the Museum of Modern Art and saw many of these and similar paintings there for the first time. Despite my having at that time a very rudimentary education in art appreciation 101, I was shocked, amused …by my shock and by the works both …and humbled by a display of authority for I did not know what. But certainly I felt like an outsider, a feeling, having lived with these works for 50 years now, I can no longer muster.

What is so immediately astonishing here is that so many of these works were very small. Several of the Cezanne bathers are only about 12 by 16 or 8 by 13 inches. Accustomed as I am to the Philadelphia room-sized Large Bathers it was pure delight to discover that Cezanne could work on such a small scale and create a work that in reproduction had all of the information of the larger, indeed grander work. Even smaller is his painting of five apples, 4 by 10 inches.

And the same goes for Matisse whose work here in the Collioure series are all oil sketches for later well known works. Several of the Picassos are miniscule …the self portrait from the same period as the Gertrude portrait is only 10 by 7 inches. A beautiful cubist still life, Guitar, is 6 by 7. His painting of one Cezannesque apple is only 5 by 6 inches! However, Boy Leading a Horse, a mainstay at MOMA, is very large and the nude portrait of Fernande from the summer in Gosol, which I have only ever seen in reproduction and which I assumed to be half life size, is in reality nearly full life size. And while in reproduction it is one of the interesting works referencing prehistoric Spanish art, when seen face to face it glows with luminosity. Picasso often achieves this effect although it is never suspected when seeing reproductions. Perhaps it should be emphasized from this that when one collects art works it is not the reproducible image that he buys, the composition, but the first hand experience and response to the actual object.

Over the years my enthusiasm for Matisse has waned considerably …I generally find him too slap dash and slap dash on purpose as if he had set out to create an anti-art. Kenneth Clark’s comments about creating a new tradition are probably relevant here. In some of the paintings on view we are made very aware of his process, that process being as it were a part of his technique. In particular we see in the portrait of the young Boy with a Butterfly Net, Allan Stein, the son of Michael and Sarah, that the pose has been changed and that the changes were made by painting out the original and over painting the revisions. It reminded me somewhat of the ethics of restoring a painting in which passages that have been repainted are of a purpose not quite the same color. As a conceit I suppose this is permissible but as a painting it seems to me to suggest a rather eccentric arrogance…which is pretty much what I have come to think of this person.

There are many other artists in the exhibition both masters and wannabes and it’s interesting that while the younger artists made wonderful paintings, when seen in situ with the innovators and the masters, they lack the masters’ passions; they take on the aura of the also-rans. Perhaps if they had lived longer and had made more paintings we might think differently: very few artists can achieve greatness on a handful of works …one thinks first of Vermeer and then…

In the first gallery there are some paintings that the Steins did not own and I believe they are only shown to remind us of the world in which the family moved. Among them are two Renoirs which represent what it is about the man’s work that I dislike …boneless over-stuffed sausage casings slathered with orange and blue polka dots to suggest …The Female! When Leo Stein began to focus on Renoir’s work Roger Fry commented that it indicated he had lost his interest in art. If he meant by that what I think he meant, I completely agree.

Despite the fact that this is an exhibition of the artworks collected by the Stein family, the highlight is the section devoted to the house Michael and Sarah commissioned from Le Corbusier. This was built in 1928 outside of Paris when they had ended their collecting days. They had seen his work at the 1925 International Exposition and decided to offer him the commission.

Here we see his drawings, his plans, photographs of the work in progress and photographs of the finished structure. Seeing this made me aware that for an architect who is considered one of the three great architectural geniuses of the first half of the century, and considering my love of architecture and my travelling to see examples and gallery exhibitions, this is the first time that I have seen one of his drawings face to face. (I have seen his one building in the United States, the building on the campus of Harvard University next door to the Fogg Art Museum.) In contrast to his staid classical modernism these evident hand made drawings spring to life. It was a delightful discovery and I can recommend this section of the exhibition as being worth the price of the ticket …which at the Met is no longer cheap. I suppose we should all be complimented that the new management considers all of us as comfortably within the 1%. But it is only a suggested contribution, even though there are no longer posted signs to that effect, which I suspect is in violation of New York State law, and one may still offer what he wishes to offer.

To end on a personal note: when I took my first art class in the eighth grade the teacher explained to us that most artists learned to paint by going to museums and copying the masters. As we had no museums in Kansas, at our immediate disposal, he suggested that we could use reproductions in books and magazines. For a reason now lost to me I decided to copy Picasso’s portrait of Leo Stein. The project was very successful and I was certain that it bore a striking resemblance to the original. I carried it around with me for many years and I suspect that I still do have it buried somewhere in the flat files. It was a great thrill for me to step to the wall here at the Met, to live for a moment in both the present and the past, and to study the original gouache, sixty years later, for the first time face to face. I continue to believe that my work, which I executed in poster paints, is an excellent copy. And of course it puts me in company with so many twentieth century artists…all of us guilty of having made careers copying Picasso. Alas, that genius is so rare!

But give credit where it is due that some recognize geniuses when they see them and that they support their efforts, as well as the efforts of those who show only “a spark”. Here’s to the Steins! Hip hip…

The exhibition web page:
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/steins-collect

Naked Before the Camera at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

On my last several visits to the Met I have turned out of the long Rodin Gallery, in reality a corridor on the east west axis, (every gallery at the Met is now in reality a corridor), into the galleries of 19th Century French Art where, two galleries away, a very large Courbet female nude, Woman with a Parrot, confronts the oncoming visitor. My interest is in the persistence of black in the work of Courbet, who I think of primarily as a landscape artist, and this painting seems to me representative of that aspect of his work.

Each time I see it I am reminded as well of the central role the nude has maintained in the art of Western civilization up until the mid twentieth century when the claim was made that abstraction successfully terminated any further need for or interest in figurative work. With that shift in emphasis I have concluded that the place of the nude in modern art probably lies in the field of photography. And as I am rather familiar with the nude as the subject of photographs I am aware as well that there are very few photographs of the nude on strictly photographic terms that have the presence or the power of a Picasso, a Courbet, a Rubens, or any of the other masters of fine art painting who used the nude as expressive form. Clearly an exploration of that subject would seem to be in order.

This exhibition might seem to be a welcome attempt but it does nothing to elucidate the subject beyond an academic overview. In large part that might well be because it is a small exhibition and that in turn is occasioned by the fact that the Gilman Gallery, the designated museum space for photography exhibitions, has been greatly reduced in size. Originally it was five small rooms that opened off a long corridor on the north south axis connecting the grand stairway to the Rodin Gallery. Now the first three of those rooms have been taken over for works on paper and the Gilman Gallery is but the last two small rooms from which one formerly exited into the Rodin Gallery. I don’t know if this is a permanent or a temporary reconfiguration but in either case it is indicative of the Met’s low regard for photography. Another indication of that low regard is that the lighting, as usual here, is really bad: every one of the photographs reflects the lights all around the room as well as the shirt fronts of the gallery visitors. As a final insult this thin offering is scheduled to run for almost six months. (Perhaps the photography department is on extended leave.)

In this overview we see that the nude as the subject for photography began as an effort to create works like fine art painting and drawing, the reference to Ingres is unmistakable, then offered itself as a helpful tool for artists, including a photograph that might have been an aid to Courbet in creating the above mentioned painting. In the modern era we are shown two works by Edward Weston who resolved the problems of photographing the nude by posing the models in contorted and uncomfortable positions, optical distortions created by Brassai, Kertesz, Brandt, et al, and two straightforward Harry Callahan photographs of his wife Eleanor. Evidence is presented that the effort to revive the male nude as subject verifies the assumption that that is but a lot of borderline homoerotic/ pornographic work, and then it concludes with some work from medical journals. In keeping with the smallness of the gallery all of these are small, mostly eight by ten, prints. One of the Callahan prints is a square two and one half inch contact print. But Harry Callahan made many small prints and in most cases I believe that he was right to do so.

Apparently unbeknownst to the curators, or to the Met, is the fact that there has been a rebirth of the male nude as the dominant subject of the nude in art since the 1980’s and that in the digital age a very large body of work has been created using Photo Shop. Ink jet prints are being made in large formats now. I wouldn’t say that all of it is good work but just a quick Google search will lead the interested person to web sites of well over a thousand photographers who only photograph the male nude. Not a word of that is mentioned here. But as I said, the gallery space is small and the interest in photography at the Met is nil.

This exhibition reads as filler biding the time of the staff until the next touring blockbuster show can be booked for the gallery. I hope the staff is outraged by that offense on the part of management …or that the management is outraged to find it has such an uninspired curatorial department. In either case it was a disappointing day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Other Than Photography.

Considering the really poor lighting at the Met which obscures the character of the paper on which the photographs are printed, one is probably best advised to see the exhibition on the internet. The web page for the exhibition:
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/naked-before-the-camera


Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot:
http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110000435

Pictures of Nothing. The Kirk Varnedoe Mellon Lectures as The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

One of the truly great uses of the internet is the development of museums posting videos, lectures, biographical materials, et al, free to the public. Because I am on the National Gallery emailing list, every month I receive their newsletter letting me know how they might be of further assistance in my ongoing education of the fine arts. A few weeks ago I was informed that the 2003 Kirk Varnedoe Mellon Lectures, Pictures of Nothing, were being made available on the internet and as iPod broadcasts and that the six lectures were being posted one per week.

Prior to this announcement the only one of the Mellon Lectures known to me was Kenneth Clark’s, The Nude, which I have had in book form for many years. By coincidence I had just finished reading it for about the seventh or eighth time when this announcement was received.

Kirk Varnedoe was a name known to me for many years but a person I knew little about, despite my thirty years working in the New York City arts. On the website I learned that he had been the curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA as well as the curator of several exhibitions, none of which I had seen. I won’t list his full resume here, it is impressive, as that is available on the museum web page. I can also direct you to an archive of the Charlie Rose Show and to the interview in which Kirk Varnedoe explains how he made his decision to leave the museum and present these lectures. It has much to do with the fact that he died, at age 56, only a few months after having delivered them.

In his opening remarks he refers to the Mellon Lectures of 1956 by E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, a survey of the psychology of representation in art, and he states that it is his intention to do for abstraction what Gombrich did for representation. Because Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures were so inspiring, after hearing the third one I went to the internet and bought a copy of them so that I could follow the slides he was presenting which are reproduced in the book, and so that I could quickly read them all. And at the same time I bought as well a copy of the Gombrich lectures. When making art every gesture, every motion, every movement an artist makes requires the making of a decision and the dilemma of Representation versus Abstractions is perhaps the first brick wall the young artist comes up against in his career, if it is not indeed a career long preoccupation, as in the work of Will Barnet. How that crisis is resolved is one of the first steps toward the creation of a personal voice.

On a broader view the dilemma between representation and abstraction has been an unresolved ongoing debate in the fine arts in general. Neither Matisse nor Picasso forsook representation and neither made purely abstract art works. They remain the undisputed giants of the modern art world and their influence remains as strong today as it was during their lifetimes. But because abstraction was for so long considered the legitimate end game of representation subsequent artists have had to find their way. The exemplar here is Jackson Pollock who, when he studied with Thomas Hart Benton made drawings that looked like Thomas Hart Benton’s, or when he studied Picasso made paintings and drawings that looked like Picasso’s, and who one day dribbled the paint directly onto the canvas and achieved a moment that is probably only slightly less important to subsequent art than was cubism.

From the moment he begins to speak Mr. Varnedoe is a charismatic presence. He is charm personified and he addresses his audience respectfully as a congregation of well educated intelligent persons. His knowledge of art history is encyclopedic and he brings information and personal experience to the surface faster than a computer with dual processors. But what is so truly remarkable is that he speaks in complete sentences with a majestic command of the English language. Because his delivery is so fluid and easy I wondered if he was speaking extemporaneously and indeed the introduction to the book states, with a wonder equal to my own, that he was; he referred to only note cards and slides. As a depth of knowledge and a command of the language are achievements I appreciate, after the first lecture I was committed for the duration.

Each of the lectures is devoted more or less to one of the decades of the last half of the century. Without going into them in detail, I urge you to hear them on your own, I will cut to the finale and ask the obvious question: Did Mr. Varnedoe achieved his aim of making the case for abstraction? Sadly, and despite this wonderful theatrical performance, I have to conclude that he did not.

Beginning with Pollack’s drip paintings, Varnedoe uses that as the locus of the New York art scene, referring to them constantly during all of the lectures. He contrasts that with Jasper John’s Flag, which he considers a reaction to Pollock’s work and proceeds to insist that abstraction of the last half of the century was created within this dichotomy of those two ways of thinking.

I was surprised that there was little retrospective summary of the years 1900 to 1950, that nothing was said about the dichotomy of the Munich/Paris art world of the beginnings of the century. Abstraction had, when these lectures were given, a one hundred year history and we are guided through only parts of it during the second half of that history. Because so much is missing these lectures read, ultimately, as an example of cultural relativism, as an advertisement for the New York School, and very likely, even if unwittingly, as an apologia of his tenure at MOMA.

In the late 1940’s Henry Luce, the publisher of Time/Life, made his pronouncement: This is the American Century. And indeed when we consider the same years that Kirk Varnedoe covers in these lectures we can see that it was the American Century; we had the world’s strongest economy and the most powerful military. In that environment our culture would obviously have world influence as well …think Hollywood films, rock and roll, and blue jeans, etc.

As the only world class city in the United States, New York would of course be the self proclaimed cultural fine arts center of the American Century, (Chicago was our only other possibility) Having lived in New York from 1959 to 1992 I can attest to the super abundant and rich fine art cultural life there. But I have often questioned the claims made for the superiority of the New York cultural world and have just as often considered it merely the self aggrandizement of those who thought of themselves as King of the Hill. I have found it hard to believe that a society that is outside this urban elite would produce, by inference, only second rate art, whether domestic or foreign, when the truth is to the contrary …think Francis Bacon, Fellini, Peter Brook, Pedro Amodovar, Pina Bausch, Shoji Hamada, Samuel Beckett. I believe that New York was the art capitol only because of its combative New York self assertiveness and its propinquity to corporate wealth. When the world situation changes the cultural capitol will move.

In defense of my view I can point out that some have already proclaimed the 21st Century as the Chinese Century and if you follow the pages of the current art journals you will see that Chinese modern art is quickly achieving the status of Cultural Capitol and that the prestige, and more typically, the money, the corporate money, is shifting to the Far East: let us keep in mind that China will soon be the world’s largest economy, that the Chinese army now numbers in the millions, and that China will likely have the first colony on the moon. Will that dominance make modern Chinese art good? Better than other art?

This narrow focus on the New York art scene brought to mind Bernard Berenson’s far broader work on the Italian renaissance. During the Italian renaissance the world of painting and sculpture fell into several schools of thought; the school of Florence, the school of Rome and the school of Venice. If he had set out to make the case for Italian renaissance art and had spoken only about the school of Venice, we would know nothing about Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Raphael. From these lectures we know nothing about Kandinsky, Diebenkorn, Calder, Morandi, Hans Hoffman, Lucian Freud, Joan Mitchell, et al, nor is there a whiff of a mention of the Latin American painters who have produced some of the greatest art of this same period.

In 2007 I happened upon an exhibition of the Bank of America photography collection, Made in Chicago, formerly the La Salle Bank Collection, at the Chicago Cultural Center and I was stunned that such great photographic works existed and without wide, national, public recognition. One of the photographs in particular interested me and through the internet I was able to contact the photographer and I bought a copy of that work. In a series of exchanges with him through the email I asked why he thought those Chicago photographers had such low name recognition, Harry Callahan was among them, wondering if perhaps it was because they worked outside the boundaries of the New York art scene. He replied that that might have been the case but that more than that he thought it was because of their inherent Midwestern reticence …all of them were Midwesterners.

I am a Midwesterner, I am socially reticent, and so I could accept that easy explanation as probably the most likely answer. When I considered if any of the artists Mr. Varnedoe describes might have been Midwestern, I realized that they were not. Wherever they might have come from to New York, reticence was not their style. Indeed, they had that New York energy and drive that can best be described as a will to power. And so when I ask what these artists might have had in common that created a bond between them and that bundled them together into an art movement, I was aware that the will to power is the best easy explanation. And while Kirk Varnedoe describes in detail the work and the world in which these artists lived I was too much aware that he was omitting this psychological component in their success: they are well known not just because of their work but because they were driven to make their mark in their professional field, they were driven by self aggrandizement, aided and abetted by dealers and critics with a vested interest; none of them was surprised by having the mantle of greatness laid upon them.

I specifically mention Harry Callahan because I think few of the artists featured in these lectures, contrary to their publicity; have achieved a level of fine art in their work the equal of Mr. Callahan’s. Let me ask again: Why isn’t he as famous as they are?

That makes me wonder if there might not be undiscovered artists of great stature outside the New York School. Varnedoe briefly mentions the Design Institute in 1940’s Chicago, where Callahan taught. Founded by Moholy Nagy as the American Baus Haus the influence of that school and that art philosophy has had wide ranging dispersal in the United States; the Black Mountain School, RISD, Alfred University, Parsons, The Art Student’s League in New York, the Santa Fe community, and through generations of students from there and elsewhere through those associations. It is very likely that the art produced by those persons is the American art that Alfred Stieglitz championed. I am certain it exists. Where is it?

I suspect the answer lies in the fact that the United States is a land of conformity and that museums toe the mark and walk the walk with the same modus operandi; they all show similar works by the same 37 modern artists in the same museum configuration. Neither originality nor individuality is an objective of any American art museum. (I have visited 100 American art museums.)

Although the artists within the camp Kirk Varnedoe describes concerned themselves with developing a signature image, we learn here that nothing actually stands on its own, nothing “good” that is. As here described this is an art that is incestuous and shallow; Judd: what you see is what you see: Johns: my work isn’t about anything. If it is about anything it is only about the work of others in the New York school. However: if indeed it truly is about nothing I can’t understand why we have been asked to sit through six hours of lectures in which nothing else but that will be discussed. Mr. Varnedoe counters by saying that when confronted with what seems to be nothing, we need to learn to look more closely. I don’t know that that works every time. I see many, many pictures of nothing in my local small town art gallery year after year and frankly few of them are worth more than the statistical thirty seconds of attention. In thirty years of gallery going in NYC I have seen my share of pictures of nothing unworthy of the same thirty seconds.

It is regrettable that he has ignored a broader view, regrettable because he speaks so well for modern art.

In his favor I can say that art does beget art and Mr. Varnedoe insists that the only way to evaluate modern or abstract art is to ascertain if it references other art. I agree with that; a genre of painting only has validity if it is contemporary to the time in which the genre came to the fore; the genre itself only has validity if it enters into a dialogue with the larger tradition, i.e., the tradition in western or eastern art.

Outsider art uses the materials and the techniques of professional artists but it references only the compelling mental content that motivates the work. There are some truly great art works in the outsider movement, many of them visual experiences with great impact, but thus far the art world has not found that a sufficiently valid argument for awarding the outsiders work with the status of fine art.

T.S.Eliot has written that it is the artist’s responsibility to bring forth order where none seems apparent. I have always disagreed with that. The social conservatives tell us that if we do not impose strong law and order we will live in a state of social anarchy. While I am a liberal to the left of Nader, I do accept that: anarchy is our natural state. Furthermore, as a result of the Big Bang, the universe, despite its randomly clumping into patterns, is nothing but an immense field of chaos. I believe it is the artist’s responsibility to help us live in that chaos.

When I visited the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh a few years ago I was made aware that Andy Warhol, who is respectfully included in these lectures, was a proponent of chaos. His works are a thumbing of the nose at the rules of art making and art theory. His art works are art works despite the rules….he shows us that it is possible both to live with chaos and to be successful. For all of his posturing as an art world village idiot he was extremely well versed in art history and each of his works is a dialogue with western art equally as much as are Picasso’s works. One of the hallmarks then of any fine art is that it references other art, the canon, not exclusively Pollack’s, and that it engages in that ongoing dialogue.

The secret to understanding Warhol’s achievement, I am convinced, is to see it, not as individual pictures of nothing, but as I did …in large numbers. As isolated works, one here, one there, the breadth of his understanding cannot be grasped. The opposite is true of Jasper Johns: standing alone, each of his works has visual interest and an intriguing presence. But seen in large installations, such as Jasper Johns Gray at the Metropolitan a few years ago, or Johns 40 years of Printmaking, which I saw in San Francisco, the work soon cloys, it is seen to be indeed about nothing, and in a exhibition in several galleries, by the middle of the second one has had enough.

Dan Flavin also works best in large installments: I saw the career retrospective in Chicago in 2005 and thought it one of the most exciting art experiences of my lifetime. But one of his fluorescent fixtures leaning against the wall by itself in any other art gallery looks ridiculous. That is the fault of museums and galleries who should know better.

Cy Twombly alone of this school works well alone or in a grouping.

If I have any complaint about Mr. Varnedoe’s commentary it is that it is too often rendered in the over wrought museum speak of the contemporary art world … wherein the Guggenheim staff can always be recognized by the over use of the word “fraught”. While I was delighted by and carried along with his enthusiasm, works here are too often over described in an emotional exuberance that borders bombast.

In particular I heard with near disbelief the comments made about Donald Judd and Frank Stella. I know that Judd was a prominent figure in the New York art world. I know that he promoted himself to a very lofty plane. Yet when I see his work it raises the question cited here by Mr. Varnedoe: “Is this a joke?” and while I think the work was not intended as such it has that feeling about it. For the most part Judd …and Stella …made decoration …Le Corbusier defines decoration as the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. And in the end I see Judd’s work in particular as merely the illustration of a polemic written during a not very interesting moment in art history.

In Art and Illusion Mr. Gombrich asks two questions: why is representation different in different ages and cultures, and why does art have a history. The answer, he shows us, is that art is the result of two impulses; matching and making, matching that which is accepted within each culture and making something that goes beyond that accepted norm, which is the rarer impulse, conformity being the rule always and everywhere it seems.

Mr. Varnedoe asks essentially one question: why abstraction? As it regards the works he describes I am unconvinced that abstraction is a valid art form. I can’t say that I dislike it. I admire a lot of it …Martin, Twombley, Flavin, Warhol, Turrell, Serra. Other than those I see it primarily as an area of exploration that is generally too subjective and of such narrow focus, especially as here presented, that its achievement is less than the claim that is made for it. Among artist who are not discussed here …Rothko, Stuart Davis, Clifford Still, etc …I often feel that once they have created an iconic image they have concerned themselves with merely churning out product for America’s many collectors and museums. It is always sad to me to see people who have locked themselves in boxes. By contrast I admire other intellectuals …Darwin, Freud, Jung, Karl Jaspers …who show us in their work that their worldview is endogenous and that their intellectual curiosity is its unfolding.

Gombrich makes it evident to us that the most engaging art works are those that require the viewer to participate in the completion of the work. By telling us everything Varnedoe has left nothing to the imagination. When it is such an easy evening of homework to know everything explains, perhaps, why the abstraction he champions creates no lingering iconic image; knowing now what it is all about, we are ready to move on to the next historic episode.

While listening to the conclusion of these lectures, I recalled that Clement Greenberg, the pre-eminent critic and champion of this school of art, defined the easily digestible as kitsch. I think we might infer from his essay that kitsch has an appeal not only to the pettite bourgeois but in a different form to the cultural elite as well.

I offer my comments because I would like to encourage others to hear these lectures, and to read the book if so inclined. I am aware that the arguments for or against them are likely in the past. But I would remind you that they were delivered in 2003, nine years ago and that not much water has gone over the dam in the interim: everyone mentioned here is now old or dead but no young Turk has since usurped the throne. Perhaps that nine year period should be seen as a period of stasis, the lull before the storm of China ascending the throne. (Should I pronounce this lull the decadent end of the western tradition?) When seen from that different perspective, the Chinese, what will we think then of abstraction? Or, for that matter, representation? I believe familiarity with Mr. Gombrich’s lectures will help us appreciate Eastern art both old and new, but if abstraction has validity as a universal form of human expression that subsumes cultural differences, Mr. Varnedoe has failed to tell us why.

Despite my disclaimer, I urge you to hear them.

The Museum Mellon Lectures web pages …scroll down about half the page.
http://www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon/index.shtm

The Charlie Rose Interview:http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/2442