David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France, Drawings from the Louvre. At the Morgan Library, NYC

The Morgan, Part I.

In the catalogue introduction to the exhibition Louis-Antoine Prat, curator in the graphic arts department of the Louvre, describes the thinking that resulted in the selection of the chosen art works: by framing it within the years 1795 to 1850 both the extended turmoil within the French state and the wide range of drawing styles would be included illustrating the many interests in the French graphic arts. And it appears that the intentions have been successfully realized. There are a variety of schools and genres …classicism, romanticism, troubadour, genre, figure drawings, portraits, landscapes and cityscapes representing 19^th Century French artists from David to Daumier. There are drawings in graphite, chalk, charcoal, pen and ink, wash, and watercolor. The only thing that I notice missing is that there is no still life and no works in pastel. With only the slightest forcing of the dates that omission might have been corrected by including something by Chardin…he overlapped the era by three years. But that might be a subjective desire on my part: I am a fool for Chardin.

As for the drawings there is a full range from doodles to quick sketches and sketch book works made in situ  to gesture drawings, contour drawings, layouts for larger works, finished drawings for larger works, and drawings intended as art works that stand on their own. Some of these have interests as drawings and some of them have interest as curiosities: I had no idea that David could work on such a small scale!

Regarding the quality many of them are superb, many of them are very good, some are historically interesting but mediocre and only a few of them are questionable as “art”, notably the Sappho Leaping into the Sea by Chasseriau: whatever its historic importance it is the kind of bad drawing that I would expect to see only in an exhibition of works by high school students. The inclusion of drawings like this makes one wonder if the Louvre might have a very limited collection of drawings.

By contrast Paul Gravarni’s Interior View of a Courtyard at five by three inches, despite having what the catalogue describes as a lack of finesse, makes one wonder whatever became of him. It is a very tight value study in grisaille similar to the works of Charles Sheeler made from his photographs.

Among the pleasant discoveries is an intriguing female nude by Corot. One often forgets that many of Corot’s landscapes feature dancing nymphs…a fact I often do try to forget. In addition the watercolor and gouache, Two Leopards from Peru, by Barye is equally delightful, as his works always are…nobody does better beasts.

In the realm of showstoppers there are of course the usual suspects; Gericault, Delacroix, David, all of whose works here are truly inspiring, and, of course, Ingres. And with ten works in this exhibition and sixteen from the Morgan collection in a second exhibition down the hall a wonderful range of Ingres’ work gets a more than welcome showing. (That entry follows this.)

But the star of the show, as he would be in any exhibition that included his works on paper, is Prud’hon with two nudes, one male and one female, a portrait, a working drawing squared up for a painting, and a small and overly maudlin illustration with watercolor. Prud’hon is one of the few artists whose every nude can stop me dead in my tracks. They are not drawings so much as they are modeled forms seemingly sculpted on the flat surface and with the most exquisite sense of lighting. Encompassed by caressing air they are all romantic soft edges and seem to conform to Kenneth Clark’s statement that every nude should evoke a sexual response and indeed, whether male or female, these do.

But the great work here is his portrait of Constance Mayer, black and white chalk. Here is one of those rare portraits, Picasso’s portraits of Marie Therese are similar, in which the artist is able to express his love for both the subject and the medium in which he works. Because of that love Prud’hon is able to communicate her unique individuality, yet he captures as well her archetypal essence: while she is his Constance she is as well someone we could know and love in our own time: the lighting is beautiful, the range of tonal values is perfection, the execution is flawless. And I love that she is not in an environment but that she is a drawing on paper. It is all so fragile: not the drawing alone, but life …life is fragile. The juxtaposition of controlled mastery and spontaneous delight has never been better essayed.

This is a lovely exhibition: it is the kind of work I would expect museums to always have on view but which they do not. Because the subject matter is almost always on the human scale I was aware of liking it so much more than I do exhibitions of Italian Renaissance drawing. However, I went through it twice and I left both times feeling that it was not quite enough, that I wanted it to be more than it was. I don’t mean by that more drawings, the 60 here and the additional 16 Ingres drawings are just right for one museum visit. Perhaps it was the inclusion of so many of the lesser known artist of the era, who I agree are due their few moments of recognition if not fame, but who had the character here of being merely filler. Perhaps their appeal is to those scholars who dote on these things…and who too often make verbal mountains of erudition out of molehills of achievement. In the end, for me, there was a feeling of thinness to it. But maybe the fault is mine: perhaps I spend too much time looking at art simply for the pleasure of it. Is that possible?

Here is a link to the web site. Unfortunately there is no online slide show:

http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=49

The catalogue is all inclusive and the reproductions are splendid. There is, however, practically no commentary on the various mediums or the techniques they require. My thoughts on that are included in the comments on the Ingres exhibition.

Ingres at the Morgan. The Morgan Library and Museum, NYC.

The Morgan: Part II.

The claim is often made that American museums are teaching institutions and with their lectures and talks that accompany each of their special exhibitions that can be understood as a somewhat apt description. Unfortunately those talks and lectures are too often only anecdotal material about the artist or his models. Very few museums in either their lectures or their catalogues discuss at length or in detail an artist’s technique or his method of using the various media. (That is regrettable as an artist is a master of his craft before he can be a fine artist.) I often find that much more could be done in this area to inform the general public and to make the public more curious than it presents itself as being, thereby increasing its knowledge and further whetting its appetite for the fine arts in general. As I have said many times before; we have fine arts institutions in this country but we do not have a fine arts culture. By giving us only cursory information, museums are partially to blame for that.

This small exhibition is an excellent example of my meaning. According to the web site there is only one scheduled gallery talk. That’s a real shame. But there is a greater missed opportunity: several letters written by Ingres are displayed in the center vitrine. As the print is so small as to be illegible and because Ingres is not regarded as a man of “letters” I think a far more valuable set of information could have been provided elucidating the term: “Graphite”.

All but one of these sixteen drawings are designated as Graphite and ten of them are portraits using the full or three quarter figure. Each of these is a contour drawing in which the edges of forms are recorded at the point where they recede from the eye. Each contour line is reported with great specificity. Each carefully made line has the same width, weight, and tonal value as all of the other lines. It is only in the faces that stumping has been employed to suggest highlight and shadow so that only the faces create the perception of dimensional form. There is no shadowing around the figures to suggest that they are standing out from or sinking into the surface of the paper: these drawings are very specifically on the surface. (I love the existential clarity of that.) Each of these was intended as a finished art work and they are the kind of portraits that were made passé by the invention of photography. They are as well the works that inspired both Matisse and Picasso, both of whom created finished works in a similar linear method. But in the case of Picasso his linear drawings are often denoted as “Pencil”.

In 1560 deposits of the finest grade of European graphite was found in Cumberland England. Slowly it made its way through Europe into the artists’ tool boxes, eventually replacing silver or other metal points. However, with the constant warfare between States, this material was often difficult to obtain. In 1795, the Frenchman, M. Conte, formulated controlled blends of materials and invented the Conte pencil. By the time Ingres began his career there were many superb drawings in this new medium.

Because I study art and because I draw I avail myself of books that discuss the artists and their materials and so I somewhat know the history of graphite. My comments arise because when I am in galleries I hear one woman say to her companion: “What is graphite?” To which I hear the reply: “I don’t know, but these look like they were made with a pencil.” To them, as to most people, a pencil in whatever form is a “lead” pencil. Not to make too fine a point of it, I think if museum goers had a better understanding of materials and their history it would enhance the point of view of the curators: in this instance, this period in France could be understood to be both revolutionary and evolutionary and that art and history have many affinities. As a further example, on a visit to a gallery showing Picasso’s prints I overheard one woman asking her friend why Picasso was conferring, as the photograph showed us, with “the printer…” “I guess,” her friend replied, “Picasso didn’t know how to run the machines…he was just an artist.” Now that is just ignorance and there is no excuse for that …on the part of teaching institutions.

The technical questions this exhibition raises are these: did Ingres use a wooden pencil as we know it or did he use what we call a mechanical pencil. If he used a wooden pencil I think he would have had to sharpen his point after every line had been made in order to control the uniformity of the lines. With a mechanical pencil with a specific grade of material, hard to soft, and a variety of diameters in the various rods, less sharpening would have been required had the stylist been held in the same way for the whole making of the drawing. Knowing the exact marking device  he used would tell us about the speed at which he worked, just as the size of the format has to do with the place where he worked …in his lap or at his table. Knowing the nature of the craft he had to master would enhance the appreciation of these drawings and we want to know that because he is so present in the making of these drawings.

As it stands they look as if they had simply been gently laid down onto the paper. As a connoisseur and a would-be fellow artist my question is this: How did he do that!

All of the art works in this exhibition are on view on the museum web site and so I see no reason to comment on any but one of them individually. I can report that all of Ingres drawings are perfectly centered on the pages, (I don’t know if that was on purpose or if the paper was trimmed once the drawing was completed), but as all of the figures are drawn to the same scale, I assume that they were specifically placed on the sheet…and well placed they are. When you first see them on the web site they look extremely pale as if overexposed but if you zoom in to see details there is truer representation of their tonal values.

But I do want to comment about the drawing Odalisque and Slave. At 13 by 18 inches and rendered in graphite, black and white chalk, and with gray and brown wash, this work appears at first as if it were an example of photo realism if not a photograph. This is enhanced because there are no drawn lines in this work; the only lines are the direction of the dynamics and the implied axis of the various planes. Yet on closer inspection it can be seen that it is indeed a drawing. That difference is worthy of contemplation: because everything is so perfectly rendered, what about it makes it different from a photograph?

Seeing this drawing brought to my mind a number of questions about photography and drawings. Were the original photographs in black and white because the film could only record the tonal values of the light striking the plate or were they made black and white specifically to suggest drawings such as this one. For instance, in his earliest explorations Fox Talbot attempted to print photographs with inks creating in essence a new drawing medium. Color photography was available in the early 1900’s but was rarely employed by photographers until much later.

But, further, how is it that drawings in black and white, such as this one, and photographs when they first appeared, were so acceptable to the public that saw the world around them in color? Why is it that some movie buffs prefer films in black and white as being more “real”? I wondered if it might have to do with the insight of psychologists that we do not dream in color. Is an art work analogous to a dream, to those strong, sudden images that command our attention? If so that might then explain our acceptance of oil paintings in which the skin tones are rarely flesh colored but rendered instead in the color key of the whole painting. Finally, is it because when we look at fine art works we do not expect to see “reality”, as if we were looking through a window, but rather that we expect an interpretation of the physical world made an aesthetic distance away from us? Is that an inherently human understanding of art works, of made “pictures”, or have we learned that over the generations? (Perhaps I should reread Suzanne Langer’s writings on art as symbolic experience.)

But perhaps it is not the starkness of the image but the content that suggests the image as the dream. Confronting us is a sensuous, sexually available female, a maid lost in song, a guard/eunuch whose attention as well is elsewhere, and an implied observer whose helmet is sitting at the woman’s feet. It is common, I suspect, to regard something like this as merely a bizarre example of a la mode orientalism of the day. But generations of artists have been compelled to repeat and to reinterpret this situation and this pose. Which aspect of this drawing, the subject or the technique, has the stronger impact on us and gives it its dream state?

Ingres’ work is very tight, remarkably tight. And I was reminded here of a time in one of my art classes when the exasperated instructor shook his head and said to me: “We all know that you can work tight: we are waiting to see if you are going to step into the 20^th Century someday soon and draw loose.” Well, eventually I did, but my true inclination and admiration is always for the way of Ingres. And in that way I am very much like Picasso.  …and, yes, in only that way!!

The Morgan web page:

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/ingres/drawing.asp?page=15

Whenever I visit the Met Museum I always take a few minutes to look at this Ingres painting. Again, it appears to be a photograph but it is indeed a painting. It is flawless; it inspires me and intimidates me at the same time. In the best Aristotelian understanding it inspires terror and awe.

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/150000154?rpp=20&pg=2&ft=*&who=Jean-Auguste-Dominique+Ingres&pos=39

Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore, at the Jewish Museum, NYC.

For the past several years I have been wanting to go down to Baltimore to see the Cone Collection. Having been to Baltimore about thirty years ago, the thought of returning is still not inspiring. Baltimore seems to me always to have been one of those large, congested, and characterless areas with nothing to recommend it and nothing that I have read about it since being there has changed my mind. Imagine my delight when I read that selections from the Cone Collection were to be shown at this museum in NYC.

However, now that I have seen them, I am rather glad that I saved myself the trouble of going all the way to Baltimore. I am fascinated by collections and always try to discern the central interest that has motivated the collector. I know that the Sisters made an annual jaunt to Paris where they fell under the mystique of the Stein siblings and that they bought what interested them but, from this sample of the collection, I sense without much input from the Steins. The bulk of the collection is Matisse/Picasso and there is a real sense in the works purchased that they were selected based on a mercantile mind set: “Let us have six of these and four of those, but in red rather than blue.” There is a real sense that these drawings and paintings were amassed by someone who might have known what they liked but who knew little about the arts.

Most of the works shown here are from the artists’ early years, when the buying was affordable by just about anyone, and most of it, I regret to say, looks like student work. For example: there is a drawing of Fernande, possibly in Gosol, which is a rather murky representational drawing. The Cone sisters knew Fernande and so I think I understand the charm for them of this drawing: they bought a souvenir of a friend signed by an up and coming young artist but a drawing not necessarily a good art work. It in no way has the intrigue and excitement of the early cubist drawing of Fernande, from approximately the same time, that Alfred Stieglitz gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There is a variation here of the well known Matisse drawing of the young woman in the plumed hat, but this variation is interesting only because it has obvious erasures, false starts, and searching contour lines. Whereas we have always been asked to believe that in his Ingres mode Matisse was infallible with his marking device, here we see that we have been misinformed. He was human after all.

Of the paintings the most interesting, by these two artists, is a blue period portrait by Picasso. And while it is a rather straight forward and sort of dull effort, it would fit nicely into an exhibition of Picasso’s Blue Period. More about Matisse after this…

The most interesting and professional works here are the oil paintings by Courbet, Pissarro, Gaughan, and Van Gogh. The latter was done early in his stay in Arles and it shows him working in the technique that was to erupt with the energy of a furious storm in his last years. But in this painting the areas are calm and clearly delineated, the colors are flat and the heavy brush work over the flat areas of color indicates contours and energy. Everything in this painting is controlled and deliberate. We can also see the strong influence of the Japanese wood cuts that were so inspiring in those days: this looks almost like a woodcut in oils with brush work emphasizing the impasto replacing the gouge marks of the carving tool. While it is an interesting painting I suspect it is probably a very valuable painting because it shows so clearly the influences and the growth of his experimentation and the birth of the technique.

The best in show is the Courbet. It displays a facile mastery of craft and has an authentic expression of the sentiments achieving the stature of fine art. Courbet is one of those often considered an also ran painter but the more I see of his work the more I am convinced that he is an undiscovered genius lurking in the shadows…like Tintoretto. Should I live long enough I might become better acquainted with those two.

There are shown as well three beautiful sets of jewelry and some really gorgeous antique fabrics. If I ever decide to go to Baltimore to see more of this collection likely it will be because of these beautiful objects. I‘d always like to see more of this kind of thing and it was an absolute delight to discover them here.

Matisse.

Back in the late eighties when I began to more seriously study modern art I was very enamored of the work of Matisse, more so than I was of Picasso’s work. Most of it I saw in reproductions on heavy, glazed paper in either art books or museum calendars and in such a slick, commercial presentation likely anyone would find himself enamored. However: there is a great difference between those reproductions and the actual paintings. The paintings look flat, whereas the reproductions are juicy, and the colors dull whereas in the books they are brilliant.

I have noticed on several occasions that there are various differences between paintings and their reproductions. The paintings of

Fitz Hugh Lane

are hardly different from one to the other media: they are about the same size and both have a nicely varnished and or glazed finish. Claude of Lorrain, on the other hand, can only be appreciated face to face: his paintings are larger than any reproduction suggests and the accumulated effect of size, color, composition and finish create both a visceral and an emotion response that one would not expect having seen only the prints.

As to why Matisse’s work is so different face to face I think I would have to say because of the finish. Most are not varnished, most were intended, I suspect, to look as if the artist had just left the easel …but 100 years later they look not “just completed” but dulled with age. One of the strongest attractions for me of any painting is its olio resinous impasto, the visceral experience of its presence. Sadly, in the Matisse paintings that quality is now completely missing if in fact it ever existed…he painted very thinly. And so we are left with merely the concept of the painting.

As for the concept, which is a perfectly good offering for an artist to make, in the case of Matisse its repetition wears thin after a while. His work falls into the early works which are a journeyman effort and fine for what they are, the period of Les Fauves when the palette erupted in a riot of color, and then his early experimentations with color and composition which resulted in some very good early modern art works, most of which are at the Museum of Modern Art. Then there were the very late papiers colles. What I find interminable is the long thirty year period between the great early paintings and the papiers colles when he sat in Nice painting odalisque after odalisque. There is one odalisque in this exhibition and it is dull with age, flat, the concept stated but the brush work sloppy and hastily done and if I never see another of these I think I could live happily ever after.

We are also shown an early female nude, the one which he reworked some twenty six times carefully photographing each variation. (As favored collectors the photographs were given to the Cone Sisters who of course bought the painting.) I was especially anxious to see this but was turned away by it because of its slap dash and poorly executed finish: it is a concept and only a concept, an oil sketch, which, had there been a finished painting, might have had some interest for me. Instead, I am further turned away from his work on the whole. As it is, its only interest is that the unintended abstract expressionist quality of the loose painting came to its fall development twenty years later when William de Kooning did his Woman series.

The only work I actually delighted in seeing was a large pen and ink drawing of a woman leaning against some cushions. I have a reproduction of this work which I bought at a local auction years ago and I have always assumed that it was a reproduction from a series of lithographs he did in 1936 where he drew directly on the stone. However: I think I prefer my reproduction. In it every line has the same weight and there is a crispness of the black over the white paper. In the drawing the pen is loaded and moved across the paper until the pen is dry and then reloaded. Thus there are thick and thin lines and blacks and grays but they are by chance and without emphasis as it relates to the subject. Whereas in my reproduction the subject can be approached and communicated with, in the original one confronts a calligraphic tangle of lines strong and weak. I don’t know that I think that was the artist’s intention.

There are as well a number of small sculptures of the female figure but alas I am tone deaf when it comes to sculpture: I don’t know why anyone makes it and I don’t know why anyone would want to look at it. I gave them some attention but I remained indifferent.

For years after their deaths there was an ongoing art world dialogue in which it was asked: who was the greatest painter of the twentieth century: Picasso or Matisse. At different times I have sided with one and then the other. But when I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art some years ago and saw the title of their permanent collection: From Matisse to the Present, I realized at once that with Matisse we have some very pretty paintings but without Picasso there is no modern art. I had a very similar response to the title of this exhibition: Matisse and Modern Masters. Matisse has had his influence and there are painters who owe him a debt but most of those painters are not of the first rank whereas those who saw Picasso’s work and who studied his cubism and his drawing and his application of paint to surface have created the main body of subsequent modern art.

The more I see of Picasso’s work the better I understand that he was a creative force without equal in not only the twentieth century but in the whole of western, or even world, art. The more I see of Matisse’s work the more I sense that he was merely a bourgeoisie with a hobby. While this exhibition is light on Picasso, it strengthens that understanding of Matisse. As this is only a small sample of the larger collection, perhaps, if I ever brave another visit to Baltimore, I might again change my mind. It is indeed a shame to waste a human mind but an even great shame to never change it.

The Jewish Museum page:

http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/conecollection

The Cone Collection, Baltimore:

http://www.artbma.org/collection/overview/cone.html

Picasso and Marie-Therese. At The Gagosian Gallery, NYC.

Leaving the Picasso Museum in Paris after my visit in 1986, I was overwhelmed by the shocking evidence that the man hated women. I could not recall having seen art works that so successfully expressed an artist’s feelings for his subject…with the exception, perhaps, of Guernica, which always greatly disturbed me as well whenever I saw it at MOMA. The impact of those feeling were so strong that that Paris visit turned me off his works for many years. It was not until 2005 when I was visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, looking at his etchings from the Vollard Suite, where I fell madly in love with his love of drawing, that I began to give him some reconsideration.

Leaving the Gasgosian Gallery after seeing this exhibition, I had an exactly opposite response: I have never known Picasso, or anyone else for that matter, who has made so many loving portraits of one particular woman. It seems inconceivable that a man could express his feeling for another person so nakedly and so publically. And what is so odd is that from the John Richardson biography I know that this was indeed a very strange and perhaps very unpleasant relationship throughout its history. Richardson’s written evidence to the contrary, these paintings indicate that Marie Therese might very well have been the only woman Picasso ever really loved. You have to go back to the Fernande era to see anything similar.

To refresh your memory, Picasso met Marie Therese in the streets in Paris when he was a successful 45 or 49 and she was, or was pushing, 18. He said to her: “I am Picasso.” Her reply was wordless and blank: the name had never crossed her mind. Marie was a large, strapping, blond German girl, Picasso a short, five foot four, Spaniard. He immediately set her up in her own apartment where he kept her for many, many years. According to the sources this was a boisterously physical and purely sexual relationship. Keeping her always at hand but always in a separate dwelling, introducing her to none of his friends, Marie Therese overlapped his wife Olga, his mistresses Dora Maar and Francoise Gilot, and lost place only with the arrival of Jacqueline Roque. MT was the mother of their daughter, Maya.

During the last several years that I have been giving Picasso’s work a lot of renewed attention, I have been awestruck by his ability to walk up to a blank canvas and with seemingly no preparation or forethought, take bush loads of paint and whip out a masterpiece. The Clouzot film, The Mystery of Picasso, available on Netflix, shows you exactly what I mean. Beginning with a simple line, the man sees something that he allows to draw him in and as the spontaneous work progresses, he corrects and changes until he finally steps back with a fully realized work. I find it uncanny that anyone can do that. Well, I guess that shows us why Picasso is a genius. That process was also seen in Picasso’s Last Paintings, seen at this same gallery two years ago, see below.

To continue the list of contradictions: even though Picasso could be so unpremeditated and so immediate, there are in this exhibition two charcoal drawings that are among the most controlled works Picasso ever produced. The two drawings are very carefully and lovingly made and are respectful of both the subject and the medium. They are among the best portraits any artist ever produced.

And whereas in his usual slap dash painting style of wet color over wet color he  seems to be totally indifferent to the choice of those colors, there is a small, elegant still life,1936, also carefully executed, in the most specifically chosen and harmonious hues. If nothing else the man is a contradiction and I suspect that it is the element of the lurking unexpected that infuses all of his work with excitement. If further evidence is wanted, there is in this exhibition a primed canvas over which has been laid a charcoal drawing of Marie Therese. That’s it. That’s all. He saw a finished work and walked away from it.

In another a thick impasto of white paint has been smeared over the surface of the ground and, using a pointed object, the drawing has been incised into the impasto.

And in yet another the canvas has a charcoal drawing on a white ground that has been wiped out and another drawn over it. That too is it: nothing more is needed to express what he felt at that time. Now, perhaps that is a part of his genius: he knew when to stop, which would imply that he knew what he had done.

As in the Last Paintings there is in these paintings as well strong indications that for Picasso, who so loved the act of drawing, the concept of the painting as a drawing in oil on canvas. Once again his bold freely drawn black lines have been stated and, when lost, restated. There is some exploration in which each of the lines is drawn in a different color, an idea I and I am sure other artists have had. Picasso tried it several times and gave it up. Yes, it doesn’t work except as an experiment.

In only one of the painting have the shapes been allowed to touch without there being any lines around them, or elsewhere in the painting at all. After that one attempt, they returned: Picasso loved drawing, he loved those lines.

In looking at the work of various artists over the years it is interesting how one becomes attuned to the interests of the artists. When considering his use of the plastic elements it can be seen that for Cezanne he ranked their importance as …color color color, form …line. In Diego Rivera we see form form form, color …line. But In Picasso it is all line line line line, color …and sometimes form.

Most of these paintings are labeled as privately owned. There is one from the Metropolitan Museum, one from MOMA, one from Philadelphia, and a pen and ink drawing, featuring Picasso at his most slap dash, spontaneous, and manic best, from the Morgan Library.

What I noticed missing however was any sample from the Vollard Suite, The Artist and his Model. MT was that model. But over the past few years we have had more than ample opportunity to see the Suite in all of the other Picasso exhibitions, see the several entries below, so much so that it might have been thought to be unnecessary this time around. But what we have in the paintings, most of which the public has never seen before, that is so prominent in all of those etchings are the flowers, the little vases of flowers here and there and the garlands of flowers that encircle her head. And as in the etching where she is almost always nude, here she is also nude or almost nude and in almost every one of these paintings the circle of her breast is a recurring motif…the circle of her breast, her athletic body …and her watching eye. That eye speaks volumes.

Finally, the written record suggests that in their relationship Picasso envisioned himself as MT’s lord and master, he gave himself the role of the demanding and dominant personality. However: the pictorial evidence is quite the contrary: as you walk through these galleries you have a very real sense of this being a temple and of these paintings as being an homage to a goddess. Clearly, as his muse, as the eternal feminine spirit, Marie-Therese lived beyond his reach. And I think he knew that: that eye speaks volumes…and he painted it again and again and walked away from a finished painting every time. She must have driven him to a frenzy of frustrated egotism.

This lovely, lovely exhibition has been extended to July 15^th. Don’t miss it.

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2011-04-14_picasso-and-marie-thrse/

Louis I. Kahn: Building a View. Lori Bookstein Fine Art Gallery, NYC.

The story is told that when Mr. Kaufman called to say that he was on his way from Chicago to Taliesin, a trip of about five hours, to see the designs and drawings for the house he had commissioned in Pennsylvania about eighteen months earlier, Frank Lloyd Wright asked a colleague to bring him paper and his colored pencils whereupon he then sat down at his desk and drew out the design of what was to become Fallingwater, completing it just as Mr. Kaufman walked through the door. “Ah, Mr. Kaufman,” Mr. Wright is said to have exclaimed, laying down his pencil, “we’ve been waiting for you.” Other projects from the Wright studios had finished drawings at different times in the design process, some early, some somewhat late…but perhaps none with such a good story attached to them. But whatever the project, it was not always a given that the drawings would have been from the hand of Mr. Wright himself. Every architectural firm has a staff, Cesar Pelli suggests that a staff of 100 is a good size for most firms doing corporate work and large public projects, and on each staff there are three of four persons whose job it is to make the architectural drawings which sell the projects to the clients. But what is a given is that every architectural firm has a consistent style in its presentational drawings.

How that style is achieved and established has everything to do with the man whose name is on the door. Just as that man’s sense of architectural excellence achieves a personal idiom during the years of his apprenticeship so the renderings must be correlative to that personal take: there must be a consistency of style from rendering to completed edifice. In addition the drawings must achieve what all good drawings achieve and that is they must read as expressive form…as understood by that architect.

Now, it might seem unfair to hire an artist and ask him or her to make drawings in a particular style, rather than to display their mastery and to express themselves, but every artist academically trained has mastered the classical styles, a variety of styles, and they accept the work knowing that they will be working for that particular architect and in his personal voice.

As to how the architect achieved that style we must go to the archives.

About four years ago I visited the Architectural Museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I am fascinated by the concept of the architectural museum: as you cannot bring buildings into a gallery which parts do you feature and how do you determine which of the parts are most expressive of the whole? The immediate and obvious answer is that you select from the drawings and the models. And the museum in the Frank Furness designed Fisher Library has the Kahn drawings and the models and it is a wonderful experience to see them face to face. But you must keep in mind that the models were made by model makers often off the premises and the drawings were possibly made by the members of the staff.

Drawn to scale the drawings were impressively large, about three by five or six feet if not larger. But more impressive was the draughtsmanship. Done, many of them, surprisingly, in charcoal, they displayed an absolutely fluid mastery of drawing. Tonal values were rendered not with hatching and cross hatching but with a freely drawn waving line. Encountered as stand alone drawings each not only elucidated the project at hand, each expressed the poetry of the concept. In fact, they were so eloquent of their love of drawing that I realized immediately that they had been made, if not by Louis Kahn, then to his specific instructions. If so, not only was he a great draughtsman, he understood great drawing and how to instruct someone to achieve it. He had, as Moholy Nagy called it, visual literacy.

This exhibition at the Lori Bookstein gallery, which I saw this past week, has a very nice overview of Louis Kahn’s development as a draughtsman. There are two strictly academic drawings of buildings of a historic period, the kind of tedious work every young student must master at the academy, there is one pen and ink drawing of California houses that is an out and out reference to Rembrandt’s villagescapes, and there are works that reference drawing styles, the southwestern desertscapes and New England seascapes, fashionably current in the years they were made. There are two drawings made in Italy, in charcoal or conte, which show Louis Kahn mastering the descriptive stroke. Obviously Louis Kahn was a well informed man of his day and unafraid to work in a variety of styles on his way to being able to expressing his ideas freely in his own hand.

While none of these drawings show us that moment when he made the transition from drawing like another artist, or artists, to making Louis Kahn drawings, and I suppose those are buried more deeply in the archives, what does becomes evident while looking at these drawings is that Mr. Kahn loved drawing, the physical act of drawing. I have had the same response while looking at the work of Goya, Rembrandt, and Picasso.

It is also evident that he was a colorist, that the drawings achieve their effect through the use of color, and that he loved color, and I felt somewhat sad thinking that he rarely used such colors in his buildings as he did here. I am a firm believer that architecture could be done in colors other than the colors of natural building materials. Fine art requires a mastery of the three plastic elements, color, line, and form, and I see no reason why a great architect could not work with color to create forms harmonious with their environment. But of course the corporate world, the play it safe conservative client, has the last word in modern architecture. It is regrettable that the example of Luis Barragon or Richardo Legorreta cannot find an enthusiast in this country. As Louis Kahn so loved color I wonder if hidden in the archives there might not be something of this nature, some kind of sketch pad musing, something like Frank Lloyd Wright’s original concept for the Guggenheim Museum rendered in lobster pink. Yes, well, perhaps that was not such a great idea. Then again…

Unfortunately this exhibition has closed but the on line exhibition is here:

http://www.loribooksteinfineart.com/exhibit_artwork.php?pageNum_exhibit=0&totalRows_exhibit=17&id=160

See good old Wikipedia to refresh your memory of Louis Kahn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kahn

Sketch for the Kimbell Art Museum:

http://www.design.upenn.edu/archives/majorcollections/kahn/kimbell3.gif



Revolutionary Film Posters Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constuctivism 1920 -1933 The Tony Shafrazi Gallery NYC.

American museums have all become so look alike and all show such similar works by the same small handful of artists, all of whom apparently knew how to Make Money in the best free market sense, that it is absolutely refreshing to go to the art galleries and to see things that have limited commercial value and that are hardly ever seen under the strictures of corporate America sponsorship. This exhibition of Soviet film posters is a good example of what I mean. I suppose that in a more liberal era we might once have seen these at MOMA, but certainly not in this current climate so rigidly proscribed by lock step Reagan Republicanism. So much for the GOP claim that it is the one true and only path to freedom of expression.

In the standard American museum, and in most of the really commercially successful galleries, each art work is placed one in each vertical unit of space …unlike the old style museums in which the massive paintings were “skied”, or splattered over the whole surface of the walls. Here most of these very large posters are hung in pairs, one above the other, on all four walls of each of the two galleries (there are fifty in each room …Count them 50!). The effect is overwhelming but, frankly, my dear, I don’t mind being overwhelmed by art. Add to that that the style is dynamic, bold, and in your face, meant to grab your attention and to encourage your participation, and you have a gallery going experience through which it is impossible to drift along in a somnambulist state or to chit chat merrily with your cousin Betty who is in town visiting from Louisville. (“This one’s nice. Oh I know a wonderful place where we can have lunch!”)

If that style, the Russian constructivists school of thought, is successful at capturing the essence of each of these films, none of which I have seen outside the Harold Lloyds, the Buster Keatons, and the Eisenstein classics, I could not say. But I have my doubts. The poster for Buster Keaton’s The General shows us Keaton twice against on an all-over ground of small steam engines and suggests a benign working class drama about what might be a pair of twins who work in a toy factory. Others so blatantly promise studio manufactured modern day horror, chills, and thrills that, when one recalls that these were Party agenda docudramas, it could be surmised that the Soviet film industry was the Fox News of its day.

As regards the aesthetic, I find most of these designs too self consciously constructed, as in nearly synonymous with contrived. It is almost as if these were the result of an ongoing art school project in which the search for a unique style lead down many interesting dead end streets. In fact the dread “interesting” is about as attention commanding as the individual posters become. Nothing is completely “outrageous”, nothing is “magnificent”, nothing is “beautiful”, nothing really “sings”. There’s never the sense in any of these that the perfect concept has been married to line, form, and color resulting in the expression of a sentiment for the subject (the film). And while the aesthetic is “interesting” I did not find it in any way inspiring. I was most favorably impressed with #84, Living Corpse. It is more Baus Haus than constructivist and I’m afraid that was my prejudice going in. I suspect that the design has nothing to do with the film. Furthermore, even though it’s a nice design, but it didn’t induce me to want to see the film: there is a decided sense that each was a separate entity.

In fact, none of them induced me to want to see any of these films. So have they done their work? No, they haven’t.

As for their all being of a specific style, an objection I could imagine being raised by those who continue to view the dead Soviet world as the still viable evil empire and who denounce it as the command post of conformity, I have only to remember that when I was growing up in the 50’s it was a simple matter to know which studio, Fox, MGM, Warners, etc, produced the proffered film simply by looking at the one sheets: every studio had it own aesthetic yet none of them too very much different for their time. It wasn’t until the demise of the studio system in the late fifties that each film, produced independently, had a poster with an individuated design: I still remember being jolted out of my childhood movie going reverie by the art work for The Man with the Golden Arm. More than that, it was one of those events that awakened me to “art”.

All of the posters appear to be in mint condition and I assume none of them is a reproduction although there are reproductions of some of them for sale. They are lithographs and as that is beyond my area of interest or expertise, I’ll not go on about it.

Typical of galleries in our time each poster has a very heavy bevel cut matte and is glazed in a swank black museum style frame. As the posters are all so similar stylistically, this repetition in the presentation is, I suppose, laudatory. However, I wondered, sitting there, if it might not be wonderful to see an exhibition of skied art works in which all the mattes were in a different material, all of the frames riotously colored, and all of the art works in different styles, a field of chaos that referenced the heavens above our heads. This union of two conformities saddened me with the realization that in eighty years the political pendulum has swung from one kind of conformity to its polar opposite and all the while the human race appears to be content in being merely a huddled mass of dispassionate spectators.

Ralph Waldo Emerson; wherefore art thou?

On the left of this page is an “images” link where you can see these posters.    

http://www.tonyshafrazigallery.com/index.php?mode=current&object_id=206&view=pressrelease

Cezanne's Card Players. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Looking at some Cezanne drawings can be an interesting but a painful experience. Often he has a very tentative touch with a crimped and adolescent result. He seems incapable of establishing contours or proportions. Having seen last year in this same museum many hundreds of Picasso drawings, and having seen last month at the Frick Collection sixty some Rembrandt drawings and etchings, as well as some knock out Goya drawings there four years ago, I realize that Cezanne is not one of the worlds master draughtsman. However! When it comes to painting Cezanne more than holds his own in the company of those other three gentlemen. And so the moral of the story is that, for all his short comings as a draughtsman, Cezanne is a painter: he achieves his effects through the manipulation of oil paint. And in order to understand his achievement you must look at his work as painting, not as filled in drawings, not as expression with mythic implications, not as anecdote, and not as a dissertation of formal values.

 Looking at those paintings it is not always immediately discernable what he was doing or attempting to do. And the longer he painted the more complex his paintings became. Many years ago, one of the first responses his paintings provoked in me was the question: what was his reference?

Among the stories told about him is that of visitors to his home in Provence who had gone walking into the woods where he was known to have painted and who found in the under brush paintings that had displeased him and which he threw away rather than go on with them. Because he painted in a way like no one else it was not immediately evident to me what there was about some paintings that he liked and kept, what there was about some that he did not complete …and there are a great many of his paintings in an unfinished state…and what there was about the paintings that he decided could not be salvaged. What was his standard for making those determinations? What was his reference?

In an effort to understand his work more intimately, I have made copies of two of them, one being the Metropolitan Museum version of The Card Players. What I have tried hard to understand and discern is what he referred to as his modulation of color. Every object has a local color as well as highlights and shadows and color reflected onto it by nearby objects. Rather than light and dark he saw highlights and shadows as warm and cool. Thus: how much can one elucidate the local color and its variants without losing the truth of the local color and the identity of the object? Roger Fry says that it was this fascination with color modulation that inspired Cezanne to make painting after painting.

On yet another level there is the matter of the tonal value of color. Josef Albers has written that the ability to discern similar tonal values among different colors is one of the rarest of all visual skills. Cezanne’s paintings are masterworks of the harmonious interplay of similar and different tonal values. Renoir stated that Cezanne had an infallible eye for color tonal values.

I have also become aware that for Cezanne a painting had a dual perception: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. The careful balance of those two created a sensation of vibration that made the surface of the painting appear to be alive. Further, there is his understanding that the left eye and the right eye saw two different things when they looked at an object and that by restating the contour lines the surface of the painting also began to suggest movement, living form in living space.

A Cezanne painting is essentially a field of colors broken into tiny brush strokes of color. Those strokes are applied side by side creating squares but not tessarea so that the look of a mosaic is avoided. As he worked into wet areas the color applied was changed with each subsequent stroke. When you copy one of his paintings or work in the same method you become aware that the application of those brush loads of color were applied in a rhythmic succession. In some of the early paintings the strokes had a relationship to the contour of the object being depicted, in later paintings the strokes are sometimes all parallel, but in the late paintings the strokes have no relationship to one another or to the contours of the object.

In his last years Cezanne lamented that he had finally found what he had been seeking to understand but that he no longer had sufficient years left to him to make use of it. One aspect of that discovery, as I understand it, was the technique he derived in which strokes of color layered over color could be manipulated to create an exciting field of color through which one can see the depths and the forms within the perception of color. When we see a painting the first thing we see is color: as we look at the world around us, the first thing we see is color. After color there is form and depth. Looking at his unfinished paintings we can see that he worked in a reverse order: depth, form, and color.

Some of those late paintings create the most electrified response in the viewer. After the visitors have seen this exhibition they should go upstairs to the Nineteenth Century European Painting Gallery and see Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire, 1902-06. It is a perfect example of his late career achievement. You are dazzled by its surface and then slowly you fall into its depths: it is a sensation of the world but not as you have ever seen the world before.

One quality that all of Cezanne’s paintings have in common is that each of them is first and foremost a painting. There is never a suggestion that the format is a view into another world. The painting is always what we see on the surface of the format. And I think Cezanne is able to make that presence paramount because of his point of departure: his subject matter is never subject matter but always a motif, (he used this word often), for making a painting. He set out to make a painting and what was in front of him was the motive for the organization and development of the picture space. In his mind, all of his paintings are paintings. It was that perception that allowed him to work in all the various genres. And it was that perspective that allowed the painters who followed him to create modern art, the painting as an object in and of itself.

It is rare that a single painter is known as a master of all the various forms. Cezanne is among that rare group. He is known as a still life painter. He is known as a landscape artist. He is known for his portraits of himself, the members of his family, and a few close colleagues. He is known for his paintings using the human figure although those paintings are few and they come late in his life. (I am politely ignoring his earliest work.) And he created one series of paintings that can be referred to as genre paintings, The Card Players. That series of five paintings and some related works that are and that might possibly be studies for the paintings, are the subject of this exhibition.

An introductory gallery exhibits prints and drawings and small paintings of the French and Dutch genre schools showing us examples of the antecedents of these paintings and in the larger gallery there are three of the known five paintings of The Card Player series. There are as well drawings and oil portraits of some of the men who worked in his village or on his estate. Not shown is the Barnes Foundation Card Players: in his will Barnes prohibited his paintings being loaned to other institutions and exhibitions. He also prohibited photographic color reproductions but as reproduction techniques have become more sophisticated the Barnes seems to have been able to disregard that prohibition. (I had hoped that with the Barnes new home currently under construction that painting might have been made available.)That painting is included in the catalogue. Neither is the privately owned Card Players exhibited but it too is included in the catalogue.

There is much hypothesizing, in the catalogue, about the order in which the paintings were made. Lacking any comment or documentation from the artist, scholars and biographers have long contradicted one another as to that order. The Met takes the position that their painting came before the larger but very similar Barnes edition. I disagree. In the Met version all of the clutter in the Barnes edition has been removed …the backgammon board on the table, the shelf with the crockery jar, the gilt picture frame, and the little girl. In the Met version all four of the men are wearing hats and those shapes can be read as a visual rhyme. In the Barnes painting the man in the center is without a hat and the rhyme is broken, to the detriment of the painting. The brush work in the Met version is tighter and more “finished”; in the Barnes edition the brush work is so loose as to suggest that it was only a color sketch, albeit a very large one. The delineation of form in the Barnes version is also less sculptural: all of the forms in that painting have the same degree of development. In the Met version the figures at the table are given a pronounced suggestion of sculptural roundness and the man in the back is allowed to appear distant by giving him less roundness. Finally, the looseness and the clutter in the Barnes painting give it the quality of a rough hewn genre painting but the tightness and lack of clutter in the Met version, the more controlled sense of the brushwork, elevate it above the genre: the painting has the stature of major art, it has greater classical “repose”, it is simply more “monumental”.

I have seen the Barnes Collection and I have seen this painting there and as far as I am concerned it is a poor second to the Met version. I might be prejudiced in this view, however, as I am intimately acquainted with the Met version brush stroke by brush stroke.

The catalogue dates those two paintings to 1890-1892; the other three paintings are dated at 1892-1896. In these three later works there are only two card players. The palette changes as well, the dominant blue with brown and gold has now shifted to brown, gold, and green. The privately owned work is described as the largest of not only these in this series but of almost all of Cezanne’s other works. Again, like the Barnes painting, the brush work seems loose and somewhat meandering. (Perhaps, in the larger format, Cezanne was simply working beyond his comfort zone …his technique simply did not work for him as well at this scale, although I don’t sense that in the Large Bathers in Philadelphia.)

Of the three I would think that the large, privately owned version is the first. Technically it is more closely related to the earlier two paintings and can be seen as a bridge between the two versions whereas we can see very clearly in the Courtauld Gallery and the Musee d’Orsay paintings that Cezanne was working in his very late, post 1896, technique.

As a device to hook the audience in to the scholarly work the museum does, the curators as well seem to be questioning: what was his reference, why did he make this series, his only genre paintings? Several reasons are suggested but I think two of them are the most likely: the situation with his former friend Zola and his desire to create great art for museums.

Emil Zola, Baptistin Baille, and Paul Cezanne were boyhood friends, school fellows in Provence, known as “the three inseparables”. As overly romantic adolescents they dreamed of becoming great poets and of dominating the world of French literature. Zola was the first to graduate and go to Paris where he did indeed become an important figure in Parisian literary and social circles. Baille remained in Provence and became a minor government official. Cezanne made the decision to become a painter.

Through Zola’s encouragement Cezanne went to Paris to study painting but after several attempts to settle there he returned to Provence permanently. Eventually, despite his earlier encouragement, Zola seemed to weary of his old friend’s slow, plodding development and appears to have written him off. (On his part Cezanne, in mid life, began to see his old friend as having become a bourgeoisie.) In his novel, L’Oeuvre, the central character was a failed painter very much as he imagined Cezanne to be. As per his usual custom, he sent Cezanne a copy of that recent work. And as was his usual custom, Cezanne sent him a thank you note. But they never spoke again after that.

The following year, 1887, Zola published the novel Le Terre, a dark view of peasant life in France, and it must have seemed to Cezanne that Zola had betrayed not only his friend but his countrymen as well, the dramatis personae whose influence had contributed to the personality of the man the boy had become.

Cezanne was very familiar with the work of museums, especially the Louvre. He must have known that while there are great still life paintings and great landscape paintings and great portraits, the paintings most often referred to as the great paintings are paintings with the human figure, paintings that comment on the human condition be the subject historical, mythological, or religious. As he was as ambitious for immortality as any other painter, he was watchful for a human subject matter. As he wanted to paint nudes but did not because he was intimidated by nude models, he could turn to those around him, the workers on his estate and the men and women of Provence. I would think that Zola’s two books were a catalyst that set him to work with that material. Choosing a subject that had historic precedence, men at leisure, would relate his work to the works in museums, and summoning all of his energies, Cezanne could produce a great painting, or a series of great paintings, that would very quietly tell the world: Zola was wrong …about his countrymen …and about his former friend.

That all five of these paintings are extant tells us that Cezanne approved of them; they met his standard …so far as I know none of them was found in the underbrush or rolled up in a closet. What then is it about these five paintings, what do they have in common, that tells us that in regard to the artist finding them successful what his reference might have been? Is it that all of the pictorial elements create a harmony, a sense of balance? Is it because each stands on its own as an object in and of itself? Is it because they are as close as he was then able to make them to his personal understanding of the sensations he saw and felt.

Georges Braque said that a landscape depicts the relationship of the viewer to the subject whereas a still life depicts the spatial relationship amongst the objects: a landscape creates a desire to observe, a still life creates a desire to touch. In a Cezanne painting one shares the artist’s feeling for the atmosphere in which those relationships exist. After that time in his early career when Pissarro introduced him to the impressionist aesthetic Cezanne focused his attention on creating light and air …the atmosphere. In each of The Card Players there is an almost palpable sense of atmosphere. I wonder if the creation of that sensation might not have been yet another part of his reference.

If I have any complaint about this exhibition it is that I was promised Cezanne’s Card Players, of which I know that there are five and I am only shown three. What had promised to be a rare experience turned out to be something of a disappointment. It almost seems to be yet another example of museums luring an audience under false pretences. However, I was able to placate myself knowing that I have now seen four of the five and that the corollary paintings, some of which are wonderful, especially Peasant 1890-1892, Privately Owned, (Picasso must have swooned when he first saw this one!) had come from Paris, St Petersburg, London, and Fort Worth. The longer I live the greater the number of paintings I discover Cezanne to have made… to my great delight!

As it stands all of the material together gives us a better understanding of the antecedents and the work that went into making these paintings but the exhibition lacks a sense of eventfulness. Most of the museum going public is bewildered, even today, by Cezanne’s paintings …he is a painter’s painter …and I think that any exhibition of his work should devote a major share of its commentary to training the museum goers’ eyes toward an understanding of the complexities of his work. In the catalogue there is a discussion of his painting but it is not solely focused on his method of painting, rather on his having painted in isolation. I would love to see an exhibition in which, perhaps, photographs show us close up details of isolated areas of his brush work similar to the three examples in this catalogue.

Finally, location is everything, and this small first floor out of the way gallery, which always feels hermetically sealed and airless to me, just off the Greek and Roman galleries, too isolated from the other collections of paintings, enhances the impression that any exhibition here is a minor rather than the major exhibition it might have been.

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7b92AB40A5-F3CB-423C-AB19-2B266B9EB362%7d