Art

19th Century American Artists and the Grand Tour

Charles Ebert, Church in Venice, circ. 1913, oil/canvas

Eighteenth-century American artists relied on European art long before they set sail for the Continent. Mezzotints after French and English portraits were imported by the hundreds during the eighteenth century and supplied the colonists with what was often their only contact with fine art. John Singleton Copley wrote to Benjamin West on November 12, 1766:

“It would give me inexpressible pleasure to make a trip to Europe where I should see those fair examples of art that have stood so long the admiration of all the world. … I think myself peculiarly unlucky in Living in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be called a Picture within my memory, which leaves me at a great loss to guess the stile that You, Mr. Reynolds, and the other Artists practice.”

Yet Copley was more fortunate than most Colonial artists. He had access to the first art gallery to open in America. English-trained artist John Smibert (1688-1751) brought an art collection to Boston consisting of prints, copies of Old Master paintings, and casts after antique sculpture. Beginning in the 1730s, Bostonians could view oil on canvas copies of some of the best-known European paintings in his gallery-cum-studio. With few exceptions, colonists living outside Boston had to content themselves solely with mezzotints—mainly Baroque-style portraits of aristocracy—to learn about European art.More

Pinta Latin American Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, 2009, Scores Big Success

Three years ago the newly hatched, Pinta Latin American Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, jumped bravely into the ever-growing, melange of art fairs and biennales. Opening at the Metropolitan Pavilion/Altman Building in New York City, “The fair’s primary aim”, according to its director, Diego Costa Peuser, was “to bring Latin American art to the world.” As the only art fair in the U.S. featuring works exclusively from Latin American artists, Pinta was an immediate hit. Continuing its winning streak this past November, with double the number of exhibiting galleries, the fair stormed into the city. Again the crowds came. Roughly speaking, half the 60 galleries (all ensconced in their own mini spaces) were U.S.- based (most all from New York and Miami); most of the rest hailing from South America, the Caribbean Islands, and Mexico. With just five galleries from Madrid and one from Berlin, European presence was scant. In addition to increased attendance and public sales during the traditional 4-day event, purchases by art museums like the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, sky rocketed. Capitalizing on their successful track record, and hoping to conquer the European market, as well, Pinta will bring the mountain to Moses, when they take their fair to London, in June, 2010.

above: Carmen Mariscal, Recuerdo (Remember), 2008More

Recent Paintings by Connecticut Artist, Lenny Moskowitz, Currently on View

The seaside village of Stony Creek, Connecticut lays under a blanket of white. The January wind whips up a dusting of confection, frosting any figure or form that stands its ground in defiance of the cold with sweet, but merciless, revenge. The Willoughby Wallace Library Art Gallery sits close by the harbor road and tonight, it welcomed guests to an exhibition entitled, Landscapes in Light: Recent Paintings by Lenny Moskowitz. Modestly appointed, the gallery and its installation of colorful works by Moskowitz served as a bastion of light and warmth against the night’s chill.

His work recalls the colors and saturated light of a summer day not so long ago. The collection of twenty-four works includes figurative paintings, a single still life and a generous presentation of landscapes, completed en plein air. The paintings reflect the spontaneity and confidence of an artist who is comfortable with bold color and equally at ease with the deconstruction of nature as abstraction. “A good painting is as much observed into existence as it is painted into existence”, the artist explains. “Paint is liquid, spontaneous and unpredictable. For me, working with an understanding of the subject, but without an attachment to the technical demands of the process, results in a more honest translation.”More

Diane Dewey Offers Key Points on Art Valuation

Recently, Diane Dewey, Contributing Editor for ARTES e-Magazine gave a presentation in which she described to the audience what she, as an appraiser, looks for when evaluating a work of art. These factors, that give value to art, are one aspect of the appreciation of an artwork. “When a work speaks to us we should listen,” she noted. The following clip is an excerpt from her talk and deals with two important themes: the importance of quantifiable information such as artist name; date; medium; signature; dimensions; subject matter; condition; provenance; and current artist’s market. She also hastened to include the vital eleventh theme—a more subjective and elusive one – “your own view of the work.”

Dewey explained the personal aspect of buying art: “The symbols of paint, chisel or pencil markings made may replicate the artist’s sensibility, but we as viewers seek imagery that conforms to or stimulates our own sensibilities. The process of art appreciation is like matching a fingerprint. We seek ourselves, our own imprint, what turns us on, or what articulates a thought or emotion that for us may be unexpressed, but which is embodied in a given work. That resonance, combined with a quality of execution and the quantitative data I described, engenders an understanding of the value of art for us all.”

Click on the image below to hear a portion of Diane Dewey’s talk:

Chinese Contemporary Art is Symbolic of a Changing Market

Landscape, HUANG Gong Wang (1269-1354 C.E)

Ancient pictographs depict China as the Land of the Middle Kingdom, suspended half way between heaven and earth and blessed by splendid isolation from the rest of the world. In this century, this sprawling nation of 1.3 billion sits squarely in the real world, striving to find a place and a voice in a vast and rapidly-expanding global economic marketplace. In spite of its transition to new-found prosperity, China remains a country of stark contrasts. The language of wealth, materialism and a new-found lifestyle for a privileged few co-exists with the poverty and illiteracy of a far-flung and uninformed rural populous, divided, as it were, by language and centuries of isolation and ethnic conflict.

The hide-bound and myopic patriarchal leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regularly co-mingles with the rapidly-emerging intellectual and business communities of the urban centers of financial power and influence; each continues to view the other warily and with mutual distrust. Both factions of the political/social divide, however, reap the enhanced financial and political benefits that free trade policies offer. Additionally, more open access to unfiltered news, spawned by the technology of the Information Age, lurks in the background as an omnipresent threat to the reins of control customarily applied to the general population. In spite of this uneasy shift to social transparency for the power-elite, China continues to transition from economic oblivion; emerging as a major sphere-of-influence on the international playing field, far exceeding anything they could have envisioned for themselves—this once-remotest of lands– given a national legacy veiled in mystery, spaning five millennia.More

Opinion Poll: Contemporary Art and the Revelation of Meaning

E.H. Gombrich’s, The Story of Art, famously begins with the thought that, “There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” Contemporary art has indeed fulfilled Gombrich’s prescience and insight with a somewhat sorrowful consequence, probably unforeseen when first published in 1950. The past half century has birthed an art in which the conceptual presence of the artist has eclipsed his creation – the work of art. As theory and ideas have become both the driving force of the artist’s creation and the measure against which the viewer evaluates it, the ‘work of art’ has been subject to a draining of its language, i.e.- of its ability to articulate its own reason for being. This deficit of language is now manifest in an excessive reliance on a large infrastructure of ancillary exposition to give voice to these concepts. In this way the work of art has become relegated to a mere illustration of the artist’s thought and unable to dialogue independently of its context.More

Guggenheim Museum Celebrates 50th Anniversary with Kandinsky Retrospective

If you think you know Kandinsky’s work, look again! The current retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Kandinsky(through January 13, 2010), is an eye-opener. Best known for his early, Blue Rider period works, this handful of images has come to serve as art-historical shorthand for a lifetime of artistic evolution. Lesser known and rarely referenced outside a small circle of curatorial experts and collectors is his constantly shifting vision of organizing principles over the course of his long and varied career and the richly symbolic style Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) developed as the central element in his work.

Kandinsky’s seminal role in the shaping of the modern art movement in its earliest years and the path to the creation of the Guggenheim Museum go hand-in-hand. The museum– a Frank Lloyd Wright design-was first proposed in 1943 and opened to critical reviews in 1959. It was intended to be a showcase for Kandinsky’s work. Wright flaunted his futuristic creation at a time when critics were labeling him as outdated and denying him the modernist imprimatur that he believed he deserved. Through Kandinsky’s work (and the relationship that developed between them), he saw an opportunity to place himself squarely in the ranks of the contemporary architects of the time.

(above: Kandinsky in front of his work, Dominant Circle [Courbe dominante]), 1936More

Peter G. Ray, Canadian Artist Creates a New Vocabulary of Painting

peter g. ray painting.jpg — G-Ray, Untitled, VI, 2009, mixed media on Mylar, 16" x 24"

The persistent autumn rain had turned the streets of lower Manhattan to patent leather, slick and reflecting a maze of city lights, like slender, broken threads of yellow, red and white at my feet. With daily regularity, in late afternoon, Houston Street serves as a busy cross-island artery, draining the living city of its commuter life blood; as an endless stream of cars inches toward the Holland tunnel to the west and the Williamsburg Bridge to the east.

I dodge the gleaming fenders of creeping traffic to find my way to bridgegallery, a Lower East Side destination that has long championed the cause of emerging and established artists, alike. In her narrow studio, brightly-lit against the fading light of day, galleryist and curator, Marilyn Garber, once again offers an evening event, showcasing unique contemporary art. I am there to meet artist, Peter G. Ray (known as G-Ray), Bulgarian by birth, but for many years a Canadian citizen who splits his time between Montreal and New York City.More

Marjorie Strider, Pioneering ’60’s Artist Remains a Creative Force

strider artist photos 004 (2) — A past catalogue montage , picturing the artist with her work and a Village Voice cover story from her early career.

Like her ooze paintings that were Happenings in the 1970’s – enacted at The Clocktower, where wanton ooze descended a spiral staircase, and at PS1, where orange and red urethane foam swept ladders in their wake and tumbled out of the windows – Marjorie Strider’s canvas works signal emotional release and fusion with their surroundings. In paintings that followed during the 1990’s, Strider delivered, through modeling paste, ceramic and acrylic, the excavated channels into which we shuttle our thoughts and feelings that involuntarily gush out and uncontained, are sent off the canvas edge by her “extensions.” Surface texture consists of hyper-brilliant helixes of concave paint that furrow through a built up terrain of dots, radiant hatch marks, and color amplitudes upon which objects–Egyptian and Buddhist cultural icons as well as roses, skulls, and Madonna are deposited, a detritus of time. More

Phillip Pearlstein Paintings on Exhibit at Lyme Academy College of Art

Pearlstein bttrfly — Philip Pearlstein, Study for Model with Butterfly Kite, 2007, watercolor on paper

There are artists who protest too much. And they often find an audience, half-grateful, willing to defer to the presumed authority of their declarations on meaning. This simplifies matters. Or so Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) would have one think.

His canvases, heaped with images, are offered as meaningless. One might dismiss this as merely disingenuous, and leave it at that. But while the artist may disown his metaphors, the world cannot so easily be stripped of them. Pearlstein’s consistent pairing of objects and naked human bodies is not merely a series inventive, but empty, free associations.

Representation has its price. One does not escape allegory either by edict or by wishing. Myths will have their way, even if – like the neglected witch of Sleeping Beauty – they are not invited. A nude woman in the company of a swan is always Leda, though in one of Pearlstein’s renderings, the fable is made wooden with what might be a shooting gallery target. In another version, now accompanied by a statue of the god Mercury and an accordion, the bestiality becomes comic. In several variants of another ancient story, the sirens are made gigantic by miniature boats.More