On a recent sunny September afternoon, I stood on one of the hills of Rome with a group of Italians, looking across the brown Tiber (below) to the old orange buildings of Trastevere. A bright green bird, maybe some sort of parrot, swooped over the river toward a row of darker green umbrella pines. Modern Rome has few birds, except for sparrows and pigeons, and precious little quiet, so we stood for a while and drank it in.
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“I don’t control painting, painting controls me.” ~ Hubert Roestenburg, German Expressionist
Left: Henri Matisse, Woman in a Hat (1920) Private Collection.
What can art teach us about human motivation? It is in our nature to surround ourselves with the people and things that reinforce our self-image and belief systems, as evidenced in the case of the current president? Take notice of the ‘new’ oval office and the change in art work that now hangs within sight of the chief executive, and all those who care to notice in photographs of proceedings there. To the right of the desk, from a viewer’s perspective, is a large portrait of Andrew Jackson (c. 1834), by then-Nashville colleague and White House resident artist, Ralph E.W. Earl. Jackson lost a bitterly contested election to John Quincy Adams in `24. His next campaign—characterized by his rough-hewn style and unconventional Tennessee country ways—was aimed at earning the vote of the ordinary man. This carried him to victory in 1828. In order to manage his public image, it is said that Jackson kept the artist close by in the years that followed, requiring that multiple portraits be produced to reinforce the perception of the man as a heroic and statesman-like figure.More
“Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.” ~Kenneth RexrothLeft: John Neagle, The Studious Artist (1836). Collection: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
It’s the silly season again in American politics. Wide-ranging intolerable rants, invectives and urgent pleas are being aimed at the most vulnerable members of our community, marginalizing and vilifying many for simply for not being “one of us,” while seemingly animating others to demand accountability for the actions of the “one-percent.” This Age of Exclusion seems to strike a chord with alarmingly large numbers of people on both sides of the aisle—those fed up with the system, with died-in-the-wool politicians and with a feeling of powerlessness—who then, historically, act on a sense of disempowerment and disenfranchisement to take notice, rise up and agitate for change. This particular essay is not a call for some ill-defined new world order, or even for an upending of our historically-stable republican (small-‘r’) system. Yet, this current state of affairs is all too reminiscent of a passage by William Butler Yeats, who fretted in his 1919 post-apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” xxxxxMore
IN MEMORIAM: For the innocent victims of the recent Paris attack on the satirical publication, Charlie Hebdo. And, in support of all who make art, editorial content and literature as political and cultural commentary, we run the cover of their magazine, appearing just a week after twelve cartoonists and five others were gunned down by extremists in places where they worked, lived and shopped. Now, in the name of free expression, we are all ‘Charlie!’
Recently, in another part of the world, artists and activists gathered in a public square in Havana, Cuba. They assembled on the day President Obama announced new U.S. political and cultural relations with the Castro regime. In spite of the spirit of openness that supposedly accompanied this diplomatic initiative, several artists at that celebratory event were detained, questioned and held for two days by police . One such detainee was Tania Bruguera, whose work was reviewed by ARTES Magazine in 2010. Read more about her political art here:
http://www.artesmagazine.com/2010/03/neuberger-museum-features-installation-art-by-cuban-artist/
The first in a 3-part series that traces the historical and cultural influences that spurred the rise of modernism from the flames of conflict in early 20th century Western Europe.
In the fall of 1938, the incoming class of architectural students at Harvard University sat in eager anticipation of the arrival of their new professor, Walter Gropius. His arrival in New England, his presence on campus, as well as the completion of his new, ‘modern’ home in nearby Lincoln, Mass., were the culmination of a long and sometimes dangerous path in search of free, creative expression that had been precipitously wrested from him five years earlier. He had been a resident of Germany until 1933 and the one-time director of the Bauhaus school, in Dessau, when Hitler’s SS troops arrived at the institution, on April 11th of that year, to shut it down and disperse its ‘decadent and subversive’ faculty. Jewish members of the staff were retained and questioned and all were threatened, if they continued on their path of instructing and encouraging students with their radical, ‘modernist’ art and architectural design curriculum. fine arts magazineMore
In advance of his keynote presentation at the Art of Leadership symposium on October 5, 2010, at Bonhams in New York City, I spoke with Ben Genocchio (left) about the search for value in the art market during challenging economic times.
“Who still has the money to spend on fine art and collectables today and are these buyers finding bargains in the current marketplace,” I asked?
“Money is pooled at the top,” said Mr. Genocchio, “and the luxury sector is doing very well. Of course, the art market is a very small component of the total luxury market, but it is still reflective of a general trend. You can see that Tiffanys recently reported good earnings, while for the same period, Wal-Mart did not. This is an indication that the people with money are still spending, but they have pulled back a bit and buying behavior is more conservative.” More
Place, memory, and emotion are closely intertwined in the paintings of Charles Burchfield (1893–1967), at a exhibition currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Thoroughly grounded in the landscapes and neighborhoods of Western New York, Burchfield meticulously observed and freely interpreted places that others might overlook—sites not conventionally scenic or remarkable—transforming them into highly charged works of art. Reflecting a personal sensibility that evolved over six decades, Burchfield’s oeuvre constitutes an important chapter in the history of American art, fully equal to those articulated by Albert Pinkham Ryder, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Joan Mitchell, Fairfield Porter, and others who forged a contemplative visual language from the places they inhabited and recollected.
(left) Charles Burchfield (1893–1967),Yellow Afterglow, July 31, 1916, Watercolor and graphite on paper, 20” x 14”, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, Gift of Tony Sisti, 1979. Fine Arts Magazine. Whitney Museum of American Art.More
Seeking – Director for Museum, open 4-10 days a year with hundreds of curators involved, and tens of thousands of visitors. Must be able to cope with logistical nightmares and able to please everybody all the time.
How many museums are there in the world? Have a guess. I have no idea so email me if you know. My point is there are thousands upon thousands of museums, more than it would be possible to count with any great ease. Museums are, for the most part, continuously in operation. Their time horizon, as a business, is long range. They are afforded the luxury of time to organize, correct, and improve. But, in the case of an art fair or expo, how do you cram all of these operational considerations into a just a few days of intense activity, and accomplish it without serious incident?Fine Arts MagazineMore
What’s going on?
The dismaying dearth of intellectual rigor in our popular culture has been parried with an overly- zealous esotericism among the architectural elite. This clique of influential architects has been given a much louder voice by their precocious benefactors than befits their numbers and yet their stamp upon the contemporary architectural landscape has been profound.Fine Arts MagazineMore
Stereotype and cliche are to Marjorie Strider as Istanbul is to Orhan Pamuk or the chador to Shirin Neshat. They are goads to her art.
She first came to art world attention in the 1965 “International Girlie Show,” with her blandly outrageous bikini girls flaunting their flawless suntans and smiling their Ipana smiles. They were the goddesses of airbrushed Playboy fantasy exposed as vapid and bloodless, sisters to the Barbie Dolls then relatively new to the market.More