Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

OFF-BROADWAY IN PROVENCE – La Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence, France and Joan Miro's world

Joan Miro, large blue stained glass at Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, France, detail

The wild flowers are yellow and purple and the hills are terraced with olives, and amidst it is what I will always think of as Miro-Land -- the Fondation Maeght, founded by Marguerite and Aime Maeght in 1964 for modern art, which remains a uniquely private museum.  Unique also:  it's open every day of the year "sans exception" -- I love the spirit of that!  And the total dedication.

Great modern artists have outstanding works here, but the Spanish artist Joan Miro in particular is everywhere and it’s his inventive genius, his sense of surprise -- his sheer joie de vivre that brings it all to life.   Not surprising, perhaps in that he was integral in the planning of the fondation, working with Marguerite and Aime Maeght, art dealers, art lovers, friends of art and artists and philanthropists, in the planning and development of the fondation which was inaugurated in 1964.

There’s some paradox in Miro’s art:  it's often whimsical and his paintings characteristically include miniaturist units suggestive of the smallest things -- microscopic views of one-celled life forms.  And yet none of the moderns is more fundamentally monumental.  A vast Miro tapestry, 20 x 35 feet, hung in the lobby of Number 2 World Trade Center:  its destruction was the greatest artistic loss that occurred in connection with the destruction of the towers.  (That's my personal view, but I was interested recentlly to learn that it was also the most expensive loss.)

And the tapestry makes the point that though many think of him mainly as a painter Miro worked in many media, small and large, sculpture in bronze, wood, and many kinds of stone, ceramics and stained glass, as well as tapestry. The first gallery I spent time in at the Fondation Maeght is the one dedicated to, taken over by and suffused 

 

                                                   Miro, La Fourche, 1963, bronze, Fondation Maeght

with the colors of Miro’s large blue stained glass double window (illustration at very top).  Matisse’s Chapel in nearby Vence the day before disappointed (more on this to come): Miro’s double window in intense blues and jewel colors reaffirmed the joie de l'art.

Outside is Miro’s Labyrinth, a garden where – beyond looking – one explores on foot and so becomes joined with Miro’s world of surreal transformations.  Free form wandering takes one through the polymorphic Gaudi-esque L'arc (left), made in concrete, and among enigmatic sculptures that seem to pulsate with life with a primal form and intensity, a fanciful ceramic wall spout filling a lusciously refreshing blue mosaic pool that sparkles with visitors' tossed coins.  And -- beyond any whimsy -- Miro’s La Fourche (above right) is a tall punctuation and another kind of thought: homage to the Spanish peasants, Miro’s countrymen, who raised their pitchforks as weapons against Franco during the Spanish Civil War.   In terms of immediate impact, it holds its own with Picasso's Guernica, and indeed, Miro holds his own among the greatest modern artists ( and surpasses Matisse -- at least in Provence!).  I came away feeling more than ever the strength and magnitude of his work.  How did I ever miss the Fondation Miro dedicated to his art in Barcelona?  I guess my head was too turned by Gaudi there.  Have to go back!

There’s much more to see here than Miro.  A stabile by Alexander Calder greets you.  A mosaic, Les Amoureux, by Marc Chagall and La Vie, the largest easel painting Chagall ever made, although he made even larger murals, such as the two that define the façade of Lincoln Center for the Arts in New York City.  There’s a powerful Leger as large as the Chagall and outdoors Leger’s wall mosaic.  An entire court is given over to a battalion of figures by Giacometti.  A pool (right) with fish is by Georges Braque (there's a surprise).  The building (which I liked best for its interior spaces and the courts and gardens) is designed by the Spanish architect Lluis Sert, a Catalan like Miro. The Fondation Maeght has to be on the this I must see list for any lover of modern art.

Joan Miro, L'Oiseau lunaire, marble, 1968, Fondation Maeght

For further information, click on live link of title in first paragraph.

Yvonne Korshak

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New American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with thoughts on Washington Crossing the Delaware

Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak, 1863, oil on canvas, 73 1/2 x 120 3/4 in. 186.7 x 306.7 cm (for other paintings, see full captions with dimensions at end)

The MMA’s New American Wing is a feast of paintings.  There are so many, and they are so fine and varied, and worth seeing for different reasons.  The overall effect is to give a sense of the strength of the American painting tradition, placing it on a par with the European traditions.  That’s clearly what the designers of the new wing intended, and they succeeded.  And why, evidently, the galleries are “a contemporary interpretation of 19^th-century Beaux-Arts galleries,” according to a Museum description.  The general sense is familiar great.  It engenders a sense of pride in the accomplishments of American painting in the circumscribed period the Wing covers, from the 18th Century to 1920.

In light of all the innovation current in museums throughout the world, the fundamentally conventional character of the New American Wing is surprising and even disappointing.  The designers went against the stream in this.  At the same time, though, while wondering, “wasn’t there another way to do it?”, I was delighted at their accomplishment in solving a difficult problem -- weaving together chronological organization with thematically focused galleries.  The decision in exhibitions to go with “chronology” or “thematic” often seems either-or (and can be bitterly fought over).  Here the designers effectively integrate the two, and it works.

It's wonderful to see favorite people of the past -- and for me that's George Washington -- seeming as if alive as in this painting by Charles Willson Peale (L) (apologies -- the painting is much brighter than the photo). Naturally portraits are almost always designed to magnify whomever's portrayed.  Charles Willson Peale's low point of view in this very large

portrait (all dimensions given in captions below) makes this tall man seem exceedingly tall, exceedingly solid, and his individuality of great importance.  How grand, and how expressive of the democratic spirit of the new republic, that the fabric seller,  Elijah Boardman, painted near in time by Ralph Earl on a canvas of approximately equal size conveys a comparable magnitude and substance.  Boardman is advertising his fabrics -- some, in this moment of warm feeling between France and the United States, look quite French.

The great icon of American patriotism, the huge painting by Emanuel Leutz of Washington Crossing the Delaware of 1851, has come out of the shadows of a long, dim wall and is now the centerpiece of a double-sized and well lit gallery, and a spectacular gilded frame has been constructed for it based on vintage photographs. 

The painting commemorates a key event in the American Revolution:  December 26, 1776, in harsh weather, Washington and his men crossed the Delaware River, surprising and capturing approximately 1,000 Hessians based at Trenton, N. J. who’d let down their guard following Christmas revels.  This victory, following upon darker days, raised Revolutionary morale and stirred a new belief in the possibility of the American cause, encouraging the new recruits Washington needed for the army.

Leutz sacrificed historical accuracy in the service of the inspiring image.  The Stars and Stripes flag, for example, hadn’t been designed at the time of the crossing but by 1864 had become a stirring national symbol, while the original Grand Union Flag of 1776 by then would have been largely unfamiliar.     

While the crossing took place in the dead of night, with rain, sleet and snow, Leutz gives James Monroe, right behind Washington, almost equal billing.  He carries the flag -- literally and figuratively.  Like Washington, Monroe was a future President, and his Monroe Doctrine of 1823 asserted the national policy of no further intervention by European powers in the Americas, extending the principles of the American Revolution.

The boats are painted smaller and the river wider than they were, heightening the drama, and horses were not brought over in small boats.  Yet, the fight against great odds, the hazard of the event, the intelligence of the complex plan, the courage to carry it out, and the momentous meaning of the victory are the truths that Leutz conveyed.  It’s hard to want it any other way -- or at least this image is so embedded in our national awareness, it’s hard to imagine it differently.

In the painting’s former, dimmer setting, I’d never noticed Washington’s watch fob, seen below his stomach, at the bend of his leg.  Watches were very valuable and symbols of status, and a watch fob is a favored male attribute, as in the portrait above of Isaiah Berlin, and is visible in several portraits of Washington (though not in the Peale above).  In place of the usual metallic chain, here Washington’s watch fob is represented by two round balls, where his leg bends out from his torso, below the belly (shadowed -- check it out in the museum). This is so unusual, I wondered if these two rosy balls are intended to suggest “balls” in the anatomic sense, and characterizing -- along with the stance, facial expression and weaponry -- Washington’s masculine vigor.  And it may carry an even more specific symbolic purpose -- as my companion suggested -- to connote specifically Washington as Father of his Country.   I think so.

Washington Crossing the Delaware is flanked by two important works, of our great Hudson River School, equally monumental, and artistically surpassing Leutze’s painting, Frederick Church’s Heart of the Andes  and Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains (illus at top):  the historic sense of the gallery is heightened by the fact that these three paintings were displayed together, much as they are here, in the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair of 1864. 

Entitling one of twenty-seven galleries "The West 1860-1920" marginalizes a good part of our country and highlights the Americans-doing-it-like-the-Europeans bias of the New American Wing.  On the other hand, it's interesting, though not unusual, to see Frederic Remington's Bronze sculpture Broncho Buster (L) adjacent to Remington paintings like On the Southern Plains.  While focused on paintings, sculptures are interspersed, pertinently, among the galleries of the New American Wing, though sculptures are mainly on exhibit elsewhere in the museum. 

In the fundamentally conventional organization of the New American Wing, Barbara Weinberg, Curator of this section created a stimulating shake-up.  Thomas Eakins' brooding portrait of his brother-in-law, The Thinker:  Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, is hung, unexpectedly, in the gallery of "Portraiture in the Grand Manner" among proud, patrician portraits such as Sargent's Madame X (below R; to compare Eakins and Sargent, click on live link).  Eakins' single standing figure, darkly dressed on the tall canvas coordinates with the "grand manner" portraits in form, but in spirit it's entirely different.  It fits in, and it doesn't.  The unexpected inclusion of Eakins' portrait with the "grand manner" portraits stimulates new thought.  

Eakins' large portrait in its newly-thought out position is climactic, given that the next gallery, if one is following the chronological arrangement, brings us to the latest works, the Ashcan School (1900-1920), not a strength of this museum -- there are some good paintings, e.g., but no George Bellows.  The American Impressionists nearby, of the same period, fare better. 

Sculptures are exhibited elsewhere … art of Native Americans is elsewhere … Modern art is elsewhere -- don't expect to find Jackson Pollock in the New American Wing!   There are no seventeenth-century paintings, although these galleries include an extensive collection American silver from 1660 to 1800 (including of course Paul Revere), Late Colonial furniture, and a fully re-created and furnished entrance hall from a the pre-Revolutionary Van Rensselaer Manor House.  Few women artists are represented, and little "outsider art," partly because, by definition, the mediium is mainly painting.  There’s no consistency in the decisions underlying these arrangements -- it’s a matter of taste, past practices, the “feel of things,” and the history of the museum’s acquisitions, and in that sense, “The New American Wing” is something of a misnomer -- buyer beware.  

Moving through the galleries, the stars remain the stars in a fixed firmament.   John Singleton Copley, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, simply stun among the rest. 

George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845, o/c 29 x 36 1/2 in  73.7 x 92.7 cm 

Additional captions in order of appearance:  Charles Wilson Peale, George Washington, ca. 1779-81, o/c, 95 x 61 3/4 in  241.3 x 156.8 cm;   Ralp;h Earl, Elijah Boardman, 1789, o/c, 85 x 51 in 210.8 x 129.5 cm;  Emanuel Gottlieb Leutz, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, o/c, 149 x 255 in  378.5 x 647.7 cm;  Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, 1895; revised 1909;  this cast, by November 1910, bronze, 32 1/4 x 27 1/4 x 15 in  81.9 x 69.2 x 38.1 cm;  John Singer Sargent, Madame X(Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883-84, o/c, 82 1/8 x 43 1/4 in  208.6 x 109.9 cm.  Photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak 

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For information on visiting the Museum, click on live link. 

 

Silver Screen Silver Prints, Hollywood Glamour Portraits from the Robert Dance Collection, curated by Ann H. Hoy, The Grolier Club, NYC

... star struck ...

 

This exhibition brings together 90 publicity photographs, made by the big studios, of major Hollywood stars:  the earliest is of Theda Bara as Cleopatra of 1917, and the latest of Elizabeth Taylor -- not as Cleopatra (that would have been fun) -- but as Barbara in Ash Wednesday (a woman driven to plastic surgery to keep hold of her husband), dated 1974.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra, by Albert Witzel, 1917, gelatin silver print, 10 x 8".  Photo: Grolier Club

 

These are ultra large format gelatin silver prints and required great effort and expense to produce but evidently the studios thought they were worth it -- I learned at an introductory Discussion that at one point MGM employed 500 people just to turn out the prints, and hundred of thousands of prints were made at "astounding" cost. These went to magazines, newspapers and elsewhere and, reduced in size and autographed before printing were sent to fans who wrote in requesting them. 

But why are most of the photos of female stars?  That excellent question was asked by someone in the audience during that Discussion presented by Ann H. Hoy, Robert Dance and film director Paul Morrissey, and the response was that "day-long photo sessions" lie behind these photos and the male stars didn't have the patience or interest in posing to do them.  Yet the star power and popularity of the male stars -- without such a stream of publicity photos -- equaled that of the female stars, which leaves open some questions well worth pursuing:  just what was the --evidently great -- impact of the studio publicity photos?  and on whom?  And why were they so valuable to the studios?   Any ideas?     

Ramon Novarro and May McAvoy, for Ben Hur attributed to Warren Lynch, 1925, geltin silver print, 13 x 10".  Photo: Grolier Club     

A valuable aspect of the exhibition is that while highlighting movie stars, it also brings out the specific talents of the photographers whose names, perhaps with the exception of Edward Steichen, even film buffs aren't likely to know.  The photographers didn't sign the photos but, through their work played a part in creating that sense of linked personality and image -- that persona that helped to emblazon the stars in the popular imagination.  Thus there are photographs Ruth Harriet Louise made of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford with Robert Montgomery, and others grouped so as to give a sense of the photographer's presence and individuality.  Photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull photographed Lillian Gish in 1917, Greta Garbo in 1931 and Hedy Lamarr around 1942.  You can read in the informative catalog essay how photographer George Hurrell enabled Norma Shearer to become a star.

Norma Shearer by George Hurrell, 1930, gelatin silver print, 13 x 10".  Photo: Grolier Club

The photographs are beautifully printed, often with the fine resolution and subtle chiaroscuro large format makes possible.  A few show the effects of time and the instability of the gelatin silver process, while remaining effective. 

I find, though, that for all the skill, there's a thinness in the glamour posturing and patent manufacture of personality.  It's a playing with surface -- lots of chiaroscuro but not much depth.  And how much more vital and communicative it is to see these actors in dramatic contexts, hard at work in their films, creating for us not mere image but characterizations! 

But publicity photos are significant and omnipresent in our culture and, thanks to Robert Dance making them available, Silver Screen Silver Prints lets you see original prints of some rare images that strike chords of resonant cultural memories. 

The illustrated Catalog is by the Curator Ann H. Hoy, Art Historian and author of The Book of Photography, published by National Geographic in 2005.  Silver Screen Silver Prints, free and open to the public, will be on view at the Grolier Club through November 11.  For further information, click on live link of exhibition title.

Yvonne Korshak 

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ART EXHIBITION - Anthony Caro on the Roof, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 26, 2011 - October 30, 2011, weather permitting

Midday, 1960, Anthony Caro, painted steel, 7' 73/4" x 37 3/8" x 12' 1 1/4" (233.1 x 95 x 370.2 cm), collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, photo:  MMA

There are two ways to think about a sculpture exhibition on the MMA's roof -- the pleasure of being there, surrounded by rosy sun-lit skyscrapers in one direction, Central Park in another, the big sky and fresh air.  And then there are the sculptures themselves that are set against this gorgeous backdrop.

This year the roof is given over the eight large works by the British sculptor Anthony Caro (b.1924).  Caro had a really important idea in the early 1960's -- to use found industrial metal parts, already made but able to be altered, to construct large sculpture.  It was a key contribution, a further development from the use of found objects or ready mades for the creation of art discovered by Dada artists in the early 20th Century -- one of the greatest inventions -- if not the greatest -- of modern art.   And boldly he sets his works directly on the ground -- no bases.  In contrast to his work in the new-for-art material, Caro's forms remain conservative, though, in the Cubist tradition.  Still, he grows as a sculptor -- and all this can been seen in the current mini-retrospective on the roof. 

For instance, the earliest work in this exhibition, Midday of 1960 (illustrated top of page), is constructed completely of I-beams, cut and arranged in a kind of bench form, 12 feet in its longest dimension, and painted all-over yellow.  In it, he pulls away from the swooping curves and organically felt figures of the British sculptor Henry Moore, whom he'd worked for in the '50's.  Newly arrived in the U.S. , he's fallen in with a forward-looking  group of young American  abstract artists.  He expresses his excitement:  "America made me see that there are no barriers and no regulations."  It's interesting, though, that while looking forward in his materials, he bypasses the most liberating aspects of the American artists he met, David Smith, Kenneth Noland, as well as of Moore himself.  Caro translates some of the more abstract aspects of Cubism into large scale sculpture of industrial metal.

After Summer, 1968, painted steel, 5' 2" x 19' x 24' (157.5 x 579.1 x 731.5 cm), collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto, photo MMA.

 But after this straight edge period -- a young artist's reaction to the notably swooping curves of his mentor, Moore -- he allows curves to creep back into his work.  At first the curves are a kind of mathematical sections, as in After Summer of 1968, above, a piece that's softened by its outdoor setting, where it takes on the breezy suggestion of an armada of sailboats, or Viking ships ... or ancient Minoan "horns of consecration."  

  Odalisque, 1984, Steel, 77 x 100 x 65" (195.6 x 254 x 165.1 cm), collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo: MMA 

 In Odalisque of 1984, the curves begin to suggest the organic;  it's even somewhat representational -- a woman.  Odalisques -- exotic, reclining women, and a favorite theme of art -- are almost inevitably curvaceous.  Caro's Odalisque conveys the shapes -- fundamental relationships of masses -- of a woman with her perky little head and voluptuous body, comfortably reclining with bent knees, leaning on her elbow -- a monumental cubist rearrangement, rendered in steel with Picasso-esque wit.

It's remarkable and inspiring the find in the current work of this 88-year  old sculptor a release from Cubist restraints beyond anything he'd reached so far.  End Up of 2010 looks at first straight-line geometric but -- check this on the roof -- there's a really wildly suggestive curving form squiggling between the larger metal pieces.  With a little imagination it becomes X-rated.  Also, he brings back with End Up  a crafted wooden base. 

End Up, 2010, Steel rusted, cast iron and jarrah wood, 72 x 90 1/4 x 62 1/4" (182.9 x229.2 x 158.1 cm), collection of the artist, courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, photo MMA.

 

 

And in an interview among his roof-top sculptures, Caro, charming, articulate, friendly, and alive to questions, told us that currently he's hard at work designing a three-block long sculpture for the median grassy strip of Park Avenue in NYC -- unless (he says) it grows longer!

 
Anthony Caro, photo MMA

Yvonne Korshak

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Anthony Caro on the Roof will continue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC through October 30, 2011.  Museum hours:  Tues - Thur 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 pm, Fri and Sat 9:30 am to 9:00 pm, Sun 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 pm, usually closed Mondays but check with the Metropolitan Museum of Art website  (click on link) for holiday dates, and suggested admission prices (suggested so don't stay away if you don't have the full admission --pay what you can).  The exhibition "Anthony Caro on the Roof" is included with your admission.   Refreshments are available for purchase on the roof.

ART EXHIBITION - Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century, Metropolitan Museum of Art

... observations and interpretations ...

The exhibition includes 57 works of art by 40 artists, small oil paintings and works on paper.  Works are divided into three groups:  quiet rooms with figures, artists' studios, and paintings without figures in which windows are the major motif.  The title is grander than the exhibit (at the risk of seeming "picky" -- the windows aren't always open, nor are there always views). 

But what's missing from this exhibition is a real view -- that is a point of view -- an insight that could emerge if the works had been brought together through a strong organizing vision.  The exhibition gives us the chance to see first hand a number of works not otherwise readily available but it's a one by one kind of exhibit, lacking synthesis, and the leap into enlarged understanding.

Still, as one moves through, among works of spotty quality, some paintings spring to life.  One in particular stands out, not surprisingly by the great German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window (1822).  It's a study in contrasts that seem casual and "everyday," yet they represent profound human issues:  inside and outside, near and far, dark and light (a Christian light, note the cross formed by the mullions of the window, backlit by daylight and the big sky), below and above, trees rooted in the earth and clouds floating freely, concrete and abstract, contingent and absolute, left (evil, dark, closed shutter ) and right (good, light) ... I'd bet, looking at this intricately planned painting you can discover other ways in which it expresses the contrasts of humanity's great ultimates.  A ship's mast, avatar of human longing, stretches upward.   

The woman is Friedrich's wife -- and this is apparently the only painting he made of her so, although it is quite small, one might think, it was particularly important to him.  Standing, she herself is part of a cross, the horizontal bar the window sill.  Eyelids are like shutters;  spirit is everywhere if you open your eyes to the light. Light -- spiritual as in a church -- touches the woman, and is carried inward by the keen strip on the shutter's edge. 

Here, by George Friedrich Kersting, is Friedrich at work (R), this time on one of his  characteristic large landscapes.  The studio is immaculate, austere as a  monk's cell as his contemporaries said; there's none of the lived-in feeling and parapharnalia usual in an artist's studio of the time, no curtains, plants on the windowsill, as in 
this painting (L) by Martinus Rorbye, nor any clothing or other personal items, plaster casts, nor paintings by other artists such as one expects in artists' studios of the time.  All of the other artists' rooms in this exhibit have are softened by creature comforts and memorabilia, but Friedrich wanted nothing to distract his mental focus.  

Here are Friedrich's two dryly painted and  precise sepia views from his studio looking onto the Elbe River at Dresden.  The painter must have enjoyed inflecting the windows' arched forms and play of perpendiculars through the oblique and direct views.  The exhibition reminds us that this pair were an inspiration for many artists to paint scenes of open windows.  

But there are legions of paintings, before (and during and after)  Friedrich, where the window figures importantly for its light and often for its symbolic meanings, such as, in this very Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vermeer's The Milkmaid :  for close-ups of this painting, including the broken window pane, click on this link -- enough to take your breath away.  Like Friedrich in Woman at the Window, Ghirlandaio, in the Italian Renaissance, expressed religious and existential issues through everyday-looking figures:  in An Old Man and his Grandson, the contrasts of youth and age are expanded through the window view of the path that winds from things growing to barren stone and, in the far distance, transcendent light (that's cracking paint on the old man's forehead).  Rembrandt sets himself near the window, like some painters of this exhibit.  The 17th-century Dutch painting tradition of Vermeer and Rembrandt was particularly influential on the Northern European painters of this exhibition (though this is barely mentioned in the exhibit wall information).

There  are some small treasures.  Kersting, in Man at his Desk, plays with  different ways of thinking about beyond the actual room:  through a mirror, a closed and heavily curtained window, an open window, and a door -- the door is closed for the moment but the coat and hat are ready.  The man is probably an artist since the room contains plaster casts, not only of a classical nude, which one might find elsehwere but, on the wall above the desk, what appear to be casts of feet, which are something only an artist can want and love.   

 

 

Evidently his family's reunion that Wilhelm Bendz paints in Interior from Amaliegade with the Artist's Brothers wasn't a very happy one.  (Maybe that's why this is the last time they got together.)  There's so much suppressed antagonism that the artist has to resort to an unusually wide format just to keep the two brothers in the same room!  They're ignoring one another,at least on the surface, and the man in shirtsleeves has his back turned to his brother.  And he's tense -- look at that right angled elbow and fist.  Even the disjoins in the floorboards set them in separate spaces.  Can we tell what's wrong? 

The artist has given some clues by including in the painting two specific and well known visual symbols:  the foot without its shoe, and the skull.  The seated brother wears only one shoe, the other kicked aside (clear when viewing the painting but harder to make this out in the photographic reproduction.)  In the history of art, a shoe off has a very specific symbolism:  it's a marker for sexual activity;  see, for example, Fragonard's The Swing where the girl kicks off her show as her lover gets a good look up her dress.  Evidently the seated brother's a rake. 

What Bendz conveys about the brother in shirt sleeves is more ambiguous.  His back is turned to his seated brother, and he's head to head with a skull, the symbol of Vanitas, a reminder of the triviality of pleasure in the face of the certainty of death.  Is he expressing disapproval of his seated brother?  Or has he been involved in some trivial pursuits, too?  Perhaps so, since the gazes of the stern parental portraits are directed toward him.  And what frustration or change of heart is signaled by note discarded on the floor?

Whatever precisely these brothers have been up to, the prominence of the nude male sculpture in the foreground is a visual -- and moral --counterweight to the stern portraits of the parents, the married pair, highlighting the sexually libertine undercurrent in this superficially controlled, conventional family setting.   

"Rooms with a View" covers only the first half of the 19th Century, and artists from only four countries, Germany, Denmark, France and Russia.  That seems pretty idiosyncratic.  It doesn't even take in, say, all of Europe.  What about England?  Japan?  The U.S.?  etc. etc.  The exhibition is limited to small paintings.  What about big ones, like Marie-Denise Villers life size painting of Young Woman Drawing (1801) just down the hall in the Metropolitan from the exhibition?  Now that's a room with a view -- and room size!

It's also disturbing that the paintings are hung in such a way that for many their frames cast heavy shadows across the top edges (which may be why the photograph of Friedrich's Woman at the Window, above, is cut off at the top -- the mullion-cross is really taller).  In general, the artists in "Rooms with a View" are significant in the story of art in their particular countries, but one would have welcomed some of the more significant painters and painters of time, and of the later 19th Century -- and a view!

"Rooms with a View" is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 5th through July 4, 2011.  For more information on times and tickets and the exhibition catalog, click on live link. 

Yvonne Korshak

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The paintings illustrated:  1.  Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822, oil on canvas, 17 3/4 x 12 7/8 in (45 x 32.7 cm), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie  2.  Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, 1811, oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 16 1/2 in (54 x 42 cm), Hamburger Kunsthall  3.Martinus Rorbye, View from the Artist's Window, 1825, oil on canvas, 15 x 11 3/4 in (38 x 30 cm), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen 4. Caspar David Friedrich, View from the Artist's Studio, Window on the Left, ca. 1805-06, graphite and sepia on paper, 12 3/8 x 9 1/4 in (31.4 x 23.5 cm, Belvedere, Vienna  5.  Caspar David Friedrich, View from the Artist's Studio, Window on the Right, ca. 1805-06, graphite and sepia on paper, 12 1/4 x 9 3/8 in (31.2 x 23.7 cm), Belvedere, Vienna  6. George Friedrich Kersting, Man at His Desk, 1811, oil on canvas, 18 3/8 x 14 1/2 in (46.8 x 36.8 cm), Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Goethe Nationalmuseum  7. Wilhelm Bendz, Interior from Amaliegade with the Artist's Brothers, ca. 1829, oil on canvas, 12 3/4 x 9 1/4 in (32.3 x 49 cm), The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen. Photos: Metropolitan Museum of Art.                   

 

      

   

Mummenschanz at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts of New York University

... Surrealism in motion ...  

Mummenschanz creates a world in which creatures take on forms different from our world but are governed by the same laws of physics as our world.  Performers dressed in fascinating and often beautiful materials create great shimmering shapes that roll, climb and cavort around the stage, as the properties of the materials and their construction drive original means of locomotion and unique negotiations with gravity. 

Mummenschanz looks much as if someone turned on the switch, setting the paintings of Joan Miro and the biomorphic surrealists into motion -- not that any one painting is "quoted," but in spirit, though Miro goes deeper.  This link has a naturalness to it because Miro and others sought to transcend the still boundaries of painting, yearning to express in their art the dimension of time and movement.

It's akin to dance, although in dance we recognize the movements as developments of what we can do, with the thrilling exaggerations training makes possible.  In Mummenschanz, the structure and capacities of the human body are masked in favor of bodies that, through their design, have other movements -- though behind the creative transformations are dark clad performers occasionally glimpsed, and their artistic imaginations.  With the help of sticks and struts and collaborations, the scale is generally larger than human.

In one scene, a huge biomorphic blob you have to love uses its eccentric physical properties to reach the top of a platform.  It gets there, not the way you would but its  way, that we've fast learned to understand.  Our relief in pleasure at its success shows that it's not form that engages our emotions, but valiant struggle.

In addition to these beautifully conceived and performed abstract dramas, there are also vignettes closer to classic mime, where the performers are fully visible but who maintain the theme of malleable transformations.  There's one, for instance, where through a dance of hands and putty, the faces of the two performers mold and remold in response to the give-and-take plays in their strutting rivalry.

Mummenschanz is dedicated to theater without words or music, but theater if fundamentally drama and there's plenty of drama, and laughter, and beauty.  Mummenschanz is a delightful adventure that leaves you smiling.  It expands the mind and imagination.

This Swiss company of performers performs at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Greenwich Village through January 8th, with post-show talk-backs on some occasions.  For more information about Mummenschanz, and for tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.

Big Bambu by Doug and Mike Starn, on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

   ... urban atavism ...

 

    
   Installing Big Bambu.  All photos courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art 

The roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is pleasant place to visit this summer, shaded by an overarching bamboo bower, a dense network of bamboo poles that pretty well covers the surface of the open roof area. The artists and the rock climbers who help them put it together will be working on it over the summer – it’s thought of as a work that “evolves” – but already at the start of summer its overall web-like structure with a rising wave like focus that is the climbing ramp are pretty much in place. 
 
It’s quite a sight: standing on the roof, surrounded by the bamboo, and looking out toward the green of Central Park (greener now than April when these installation photos were taken) and beyond to the vertical frame of concrete and stone buildings of varying heights, the buildings lit to lovely colors by whatever light happens to be in play. It suggests the exotic, the primitive – things far away in space from the big city, and long ago in time from today -– when nature grew untrammeled.

But that’s a fanciful illusion since all these things -- park included -- are man made. The bamboo poles are cut and lashed together, not rooted. No leaves. Enjoying it, one has to evade imagined nostalgia along to lines of “Too bad it’s not a real jungle.” The artists help bridge that disappointment by envisioning Big Bambu as evolving like life itself. “It’s an organism that we are just a part of – helping it to move along,” Mike Starm comments.

When you go, you’re likely to see Mike and/or Doug and some of the rock climbers at work up there on the heights. If you’re sure footed you can arrange to climb the ramp 20 to 40 feet above the level of the roof – with a guide – and get an even more dizzying view of the whole. The wave form, with its insistent association with movement, also softens awareness of its distance from what we conventionally think of as natural processes. I looked down, though, to the bottom of the roped poles, where the diagonally sawed edges barely touch the brick flooring, like the small, pointed feet of suspended dancers searching for a toehold, and wished I were in the country.
 
Yet it does change, at the hand of man, and as is said, “bridges realms of sculpture, architecture, and performance.” The breezes wafting through infuse Big Bambu's dynamism with a metaphorical breath of life.  

My hunch is that it's spelled "Bambu" to both draw on and separate it from the Calypso song "The Big Bamboo" made famous by Harry Belafonte -- and ... Big Bambu ... those syllables just have an appealing look as well as sound. 

It comes with statistics:  ultimately it will be 100 feet long by 50 feet wide by 50 feet high   (when it opened on April 27th it  was 30 feet wide – it does grow); the network will finally consist of 5,000 interlocking 30- and 40 foot-long bamboo poles, lashed together with 50 miles of nylon rope and, the artists tell us, it takes about 3 minutes to tie each knot.

 

Something else nice to know – refreshments are available on the roof. So if you’re in NYC this summer, give yourself an atavistic treat and visit the Big Bambu.  It will be on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum through October 31.

For further information, including the guided tours of the elevated pathways, click on this link:  http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7B9C6923D2-D348-4761-BEB3-A943934068D2%7D

 
Big Bambu installation ... it must have been a lot of fun to build it!

Comments very welcome … please scroll down , write in comment box and click on “post”. Thank you!

Yvonne Korshak

Tutankhamun Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- "Tutankhamun's Funeral"

... mighty warrior or frail human? ...

 

Meet Pharaoh Tutankhamun...  

 

Head of Tutankhamun with the hand of the god Amun behind.  Limestone, H 15.2 cm (6 in).  18th Dynasty, reigned ca. 1336-1327 B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund 1950.  Photo:  Museum
  

A "blockbuster" exhibition of treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamum, "King Tut NYC Return of the King" will be opening in near Times Square in NYC April 23.  It will be filled with lavish and stunningly beautiful works in gold and other precious materials, and the art will show the pharaoh Tutankhamun as a mighty conqueror of Egypt's enemies, a great hunter of wild animals, and a victor over death itself.  It will be a great event -- see it, if you can get tickets. 

 

That's another exhibition but don't miss this one -- and you can get tickets easily, just visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

 

By being smaller, less gleaming, more intimate, it shows the other side of the coin, and a greater truth.  Tutankhamun was not a great warrior but a frail, sickly youth who died young, at 18 or 19 years.  He could not in his short reign vanquish Egypt's enemies.  He could not conquer the wild animals of Egypt with a colossal bow bigger than all of them, as he's shown doing in the art from his tomb.  And as the Met's exhibition, which brings together artifacts associated with his burial rites and the mummification of his body makes very clear, he was unable to conquer death.

 

Here, for example, is a strip of linen meant for wrapping the pharaoh's mummy -- this piece was left over, discarded by those who mummified his body.  This show is truly close to the moment, and fascinating.  

 

 

Bandage woven for use in the mummification of Tutankhamun but not used.  L 164 cm (64 5/8 in.), linen.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Gift of Theodore M. Davies, 1909.  Photo: museum

 

And here's a floral collar or necklace: now it's brush-dry but, for the funeral, it was fresh, vibrant, living -- brilliant  with leaves of olives and persea trees, and petals of lotus, cornflowers and bright berries. 

 

Floral color of leaves, petals, beads and berries.  Diam. 47 cm (18 1/2 in).  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Theodore M. Davis, 1909.

 

How did these extras, throw-aways from the young king's funeral preparations over 4,000 years ago, find their way to this exhibition? Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 but earlier, 1908, Theodore Davis had discovered several storage jars near where the tomb would later be found, and some of what was crammed in those jars was given to the Metropolitan Museum.  Much of the material in this exhibition comes from those storage jars -- broken pottery, bags of natron used during mummification, small sacks of sawdust for filling out the shapes of mummies, the floral collars used to celebrate the continuation of life after death, and linen bandages and embalmer's aprons.  These objects, with explanations of their use in the funerary process, along with paintings and other artifacts, help us visualize ancient Egypt, Tutankhamun, and the activities around his funeral, for this fascinating exhibition.

 

Tutankhamun's tomb was small, evidently because he died so young, and for that reason it pretty much escaped the looting that cleaned out the valuable objects in all the other tombs of the pharaohs.  That's why when Carter discovered it there was so much inside to find:  lavish objects and works of art of gold and other precious materials, that will be seen in the forthcoming "King Tut NYC" exhibition.  These are the ones that show him as a mighty warrior.

 

But he wasn't a mighty warrior.  This exhibition, along with other recent research, including DNA studies, have illuminated much new about Tutankhamun.  He was not, in his short reign, able to amend the great inroads of Egypt's enemies, enabled by the laissez faire military policy of his father, Pharaoh Akhenaton, the first monotheist, who was more interested in his novel philosophy and religion than in preserving Egypt's imperial strength.  

 

It's not known whether Tutankhamun wanted to preserve his father's philosophical and religious legacy but one thing is clear:  he didn't.  The style of art, called the "Amarna style," inspired by his father's new and heretical faith in the single god, Aton -- the sun disk -- barely persisted into Tutankhamun's reign.  The conservative, anti-Akhenaton forces took over immediately after Akhenaton's death, destroying the town, "Amarna," Akhenaton had established, banishing all traces of the Aton god Akhenaton had worshipped, and quickly setting Amun, the traditional chief god of Egypt, right back in place.  That's why the tips of Amun's fingers are supporting the head of the young Tutankhamun in his portrait illustrated above.  

 

A facsimile painting of funeral rites taking place in a verdant garden, awhile before Tutankhamun, helps to bridge the gap between the artifacts and the vital event. 

 

 

A funeral ritual in a garden.  Wall painting in the Theban tomb of Nakhtmin, early 18th Dynasty, ca. 1450.  Facsimile painting by Charles K. Wilkinson, 1921.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1930.  Photo:  Museum.

 
Joie de vivre and a frantic desire for eternal life join hands in the Met's exhibition on the Funeral of Tutankhamun. 

 

Tutankhamun's Funeral is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art March 16-September 6, 2010. 

 

Yvonne Korshak

 

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Beyond the Text: Artists' Books from the Collection of Robert J. Ruben, with Catalog by Yvonne Korshak and Robert J. Ruben, at the Grolier Club, Press Release

Beyond the Text: Artists' Books from the Collection of Robert J. Ruben, originally shown at The Grolier Club in New York City March 25 through May 28, 2010, is now opening March 3, 2011 at the Bailey/Howe Library of the University of Vermont, http://library.uvm.edu/news/?cat=3

Beyond the Text:  Artists' Books from the Collection of Robert J. Ruben by Yvonne Korshak and Robert J. Ruben, 2010, 156 pages, 74 color illustrations, ISBN 978-1-60583-026-1 

 ... Beyond the Text ...

Artists' books take a leap beyond the kind of text and illustrations normally associated with the book to carry the viewer to new vistas of emotion and intellect.  Some artists' books arrive on our visual doorstep bearing humor while others -- all in mixed degrees -- convey intellectual challenge, or emotions such as awe or joy.  Some are embassies from the dark side of human experience. 

The Grolier Club's exhibition, Beyond the Text:  Artists' Books from the Collection of Robert J. Ruben, includes over 60 examples of accordion books, codices, scrolls, box books, pop-ups and tunnel books, in every variety of mixed media.  Some are by artists of international renown, others by new artists forging their creative paths.  Some of the books have previously known texts by writers such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and others have new texts or no texts at all, and the subject matter ranges from political, argumentative, ironic, lyrical to tragic.

 

For example, the giant pop-up Back to a Remembered Time by Paul Johnson shows a complex house-like form made up of many windows, entrances, and restive spaces, all with a dazzling range of colors.  Opening its kaleidoscopic wings, the viewer opens to a sense of joy. 

 

Back to a Remembered Time by Paul Johnson, photo by Robert Lorenzson

  

 Incantations is the first book created completely by Mayan people in nearly five hundred years, since the Mayan libraries were burned by the bishop of Yucatan.  Over 150 Mayans from all walks of life collaborated as writers, illustrators and paper makers working with the Taller Lenateros --Woodland Workshop.  The illustrations are accompanied by poetry written in the Mayan languageTzotzil, with English translations.  The Mayan women who produced the poems say they were written by the Earth, the Moon or the Sun, and come to them from books of their ancestors shown to them in dreams. 

 

Incantations, collaborative work of the Taller Lenateros, photo by Robert Lorenzson

  

In another mode, Julie Chen's 60" wide masterpiece Panorama heightens awareness of the fragility of our earth's capacity to support life in the face of climate change.  Past a panorama of rocks, and of a town, the book opens with a double-page spread, illustrated below, of a stunningly constructed perspective of the earth's surrounding spheres:  troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere (400+ miles out). 

 

 

  

 

Panorama by Julie Chen, photo by Robert Lorenzson

Robert J. Ruben, the collector and Yvonne Korshak, art historian and writer on cultural events have collaborated on this project, co-curating the exhibition and writing the catalog that accompanies it.  This catalog is the first book in print to consider artists' books not only descriptively but in terms of their meanings and iconography.     

 

The exhibition, Beyond the Text, will be held at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, NY, NY, from March 25th through May 28th, 2010, Monday through Friday, 10 am to 5 pm, free of charge and open to all.

For further information on the exhibition and/or the catalog, contact YKorshak@aol.com

For what it's like to visit the exhibition, see the vivid commentary at http://kyleolmon.com/blog/2010/03/25/beyond-the-text/

  

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down, write you comment in the "comment box," and click on post.  Email addresses do not every appear with comments.

 

 

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Georgina Berkeley, from the Berkeley Album, 1867-71, Watercolor and albumen silver prints, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.  Photo:  Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

 

"Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage” opens up a wonderful world of visual fantasy.  It’s a surprise and delight -- don't miss it!  It's so refreshing.
 
Photography was invented in 1839, and in no time small photographic portraits – cartes de visites– became popular as calling cards and souvenirs. In the 1860’s and ‘70’s aristocratic British women who, this exhibition indicates, led very busy lives, managed to find time to create photocollages using pieces they cut from the cartes de visites, usually the heads, and pasting them on their own watercolors and drawings to create witty, sarcastic, commemorative, and often wildly surrealistic images. They gathered their work into albums.   Not all who did this work were aristocratic British women but it was particularly their domain. The exhibit is a bounty of their images and albums.
 
Cut and paste allows for the union of things that can never be together, of sights that can never been seen. The collages differ with the personalities of the artists, their skills, and purposes but they almost always bring out a smile – and one senses the artist’s smile, too. In place of the royal family on picture cards, Georgina Berkeley pastes the heads of her own family – why not? Others (top of page) get rides on an ostrich and a turtle.

The Bouverie album, below, shows Alice in Wonderland children riding a toad and perched on toadstools. 

Elizabeth Pleydell-Bouverie and Jane Pleydell-Bouverie or Ellen Pleydell-Bouverie and Janet Pleydell-Bouverie, from the Bouverie Album, 1872-77, collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints.  Photo courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film 
 

Lady Filmer creates a drawing room scene, below, that includes her own portrait at the table near the back, with knife and paste and the album she's working on, that of her royal admirer leaning on the table, and her husband, small scale and near the dog. 

 Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer, from the Filmer Album, mid-1860's, collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints.  Photo E. Walter

 
My favorite artist is Kate Edith Gough who did this startling image of her proud -- and  

Kate Edith Gough, from the Gough Album, late 1870's, collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints.  Photo:  V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

hatted -- friends floating around as ducks.  Her most astounding collage: a “family tree" filled with a great variety of animated monkeys -- all with human faces: Darwin at work.  No photo available for that one -- guess you'll have to just go and see the exhibit!
 
As soon as that ostensibly “objective” medium – photography -- was invented (1839), artists, including inventors themselves, raced beyond “realism” to create imaginative, subjective images.  Here, too, we see the human imagination using objectivity not as an end … just a starting point.
 
These Victorian photocollages are highly innovative.  Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912 is regularly cited as the major turning point in modern art because his use of collage ushered in Synthetic Cubism. Take a look at it; Picasso has dismantled various visual realities – oil painting, oil cloth reproducing the pattern of chair caning, pieces of paper, newspaper type transformed into paint -- and reconstituted them anew, tying the whole together with a rope. There’s a lot of playing with pictures there too, as well as a great achievement in opening up new ways of seeing. BUT, though it’s often said, he didn’t invent collage.
 
By the way, way before Picasso artists of harbor scenes were framing their pictures in rope. And, amateur artists were cutting up photos and combining them with drawings and painting to create assemblages to express their social, psychological and aesthetic messages, their own visions.

"Playing with Pictures" is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, through May 9.

Yvonne Korshak

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The Young Archer sculpture "attributed to Michelangelo" on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

... sexual coming into being ... 

 

The Young Archer now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a sculpture of sexual discovery.  The nude, sensuous, sinuous, lightly built, somewhat effeminate youth, an object of desire, draws an arrow from his quiver with a dreamy look.  And what a quiver -- made from the paw of a leonine animal:  long, thick, strong, feral, in every way a contrast to the slim, delicate boy.  In this play of contrasts, the boy's act of drawing out his arrow from the quiver becomes a nascent sexual act.  (see the three photos of the Young Archer below) 

 

Did Michelangelo carve the Young Archer?  There's little or no evidence he did.

 

In the mid-16th Century a visitor to the palazzo of Jacopo Galli in Rome, Ulisse Aldovrandi, noting Michelangelo's sculpture of Bacchus, next comments about an "Apollo" that he says is a work by the "same" artist.  The curator, James David Draper, has a light touch, and has wisely not made too much of Aldovrandi's comment -- there's no reason to believe that this philosopher and naturalist, visiting from Bologna, was correct about Michelangelo's authorship -- all the more since he calls the work "Apollo" while the Young Archer is most likely Cupid.  Apollo is represented as older and most often with his lyre, not drawing an arrow from his quiver.  Michelangelo was the most famous and adored artist of the 16th Century and many works were said to be by him that were not.  Eventually, the Archer, now owned by France was on display at the French Embassy Cultural Service at 972 Fifth Avenue in NYC, and is currently on a ten-year loan just across the street at the Metropolitan Museum.

 

In sum, the sculpture's history doesn't support attributing it to Michelangelo.

 

What about stylistic traits and comparisons with Michelangelo's other works?  One should look particularly to his early works because, if by Michelangelo, The Archer would have been made in 1490 or '91 when he was around fifteen or sixteen, living in the palazzo of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, learning his skills and absorbing classical ideas and knowledge of classical art.

 

There are no significant stylistic comparisons.  Comparisons that have been claimed, such as "perfect correspondences" between passages in the carving of the hair of the Young Archer and Michelangelo's Kneeling Angel of 1494 in Bologna but upon observation, these are simply not there. 

 

A key issue involves classical contrapposto.  As in classical works, the Young Archer stands (as one can reconstruct from the current condition) with his weight distributed unevenly on his legs, a shift of weight that reflects the famous classical Greek negotiation with gravity -- the "deal" the human body makes to remain upright against gravity's incessant pull.  But the counter position isn't carried through to the Young Archer's head.  If it were, there would be a movement in his head in the direction opposite that of the more open, expanded side of his chest -- but no, the Archer's head follows the open chest.  From Michelangelo's earliest works, contrapposto is a central theme of his art.  In his first known carving, Battle of the Centaurs, among all the gyrations of figures, the play of opposites is always there. 

 

And throughout the figures he painted as well as scupted, seated as well as standing -- one can think of the Slaves, Moses, or the Prophets of the Sistine Chapel -- Michelangelo uses the tension of contrapposto, often as a kind of grinding conflict within the body, to convey inner, spiritual struggle in physical terms, to make the invisible visible.  It is a signature motif.

 

I think, though, there is one tantalizing reason for linking the work to Michelanglo:  its cleverness.  It's worth considering in connection with the Archer, that Michelangelo's early David, with its magnificent contrapposto, represents a spiritual coming of age.  The Archer represents a sexual coming of age.  Themes of coming of into being, process, movement, emerging, are characteristic of Michelangelo's art.  And the powerful idea of the sexually loaded contrast between the boy and the quiver may also point in Michelangelo's direction.  It's quirky enough for him!  But these issues are a "soft" kind of evidence for attributing a work -- and Michelangelo wasn't the only talented young sculptor around Florence to "come of age."

 

Since the Young Archer would be an early work, an advocate for Michelangelo can discount anything that doesn't "fit" in with what's known about him by saying he was still very young.  There are awkward anatomical passages -- "He was still learning."  The contrapposto is incomplete -- "He hasn't gotten there yet."  But discounting anything and everything doesn't get you anywhere.  The question of who made the work remains wide open.

 

Maybe he just made that quiver!

 

Yvonne Korshak

 

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down past the photos and click on "comment."  Thank you! 

 

   
 
 
  
  

 

 

 

Is "The Torment of St. Anthony" by Michelangelo? Here's another reason to think so.

                                                    ... look to the landscape ...

Did Michelangelo make the painting of "The Torment of St. Anthony" which has recently been in the news?  Writers contemporary with Michelangelo indicate he made a painting of the subject when he was around 12 or 13, and an apprentice in Ghirlandaio's workshop, but it's never been agreed that this painting is the one Michelangelo made.

A good place to see color photos, including excellent details, is the website of The New York Times.

Recently purchased in London for 2 million, the painting was cleaned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sold again, for $6 million or more, to the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas.  The arguments about its authorship are circling around connoisseurship issues.  Keith Christiansen, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum is particularly impressed by some strong cross-hatching.  Evidently Christiansen didn't persuade others -- if the Metropolitan Museum thought this was Michelangelo's first painting, they they never would have let it go!    (recession or not)

Judging from the photos:  This painting doesn't  "say" Michelangelo.

On the other hand, there's one aspect I detect so far that may point to Michelangelo -- the relatively simplified, even barren landscape.   Michelangelo is interested in the human body, never mind leafy trees!  His landscapes are less lush, less sensuous, more hard-edge than those of his Italian and Florentine contemporaries -- think Sistine Chapel Temptation and Expulsion.  In his earliest known painting, he pretty well lets his monumental figures squeeze out the landscape behind the Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist at a time when contemporary painters were glorifying the landscapes behind holy figures.

There's barely a nod to the famous, Renaissance "atmospheric perspective" in "The Torment."   Instead, the contours of the shore and distant hills are slick -- they look air-brushed.  The waves seem pasted on.  Condivi, who knew the artist, said Michelangelo told him he'd gone to the fish market to learn how to depict fish scales (they do indeed appear in this "Torment" and not the Schongauer engraving upon which this painting is based) -- no sign that the painter attended to what's out there in the landscape with that kind of focus.

Christiansen also sees in the vibrant, almost iridescent colors in "The Torment" a possible "prelude" to the colors in the Sistine Chapel vault.  Could well be.

Is this by Michelangelo?  The treatment of the landscape, the colors, and other aspects make it a genuine possibility.  I look forward to seeing the painting directly when it goes on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in June, before moving on to Texas. 

                                                                                           Yvonne Korshak

About Michelangelo's "Torment of St. Anthony" ...

You can read about why I think "The Torment of St. Anthony", recently purchased by the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas for $6 million, may well be by Michelangelo at  http://www.huliq.com/1/81004/torment-st-anthony-michelangelo

                                                 Yvonne Korshak

Comments always welcome!

Heightening contrasts -- Gustave Caillebotte, Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, at the Brooklyn Museum

                                        ... the front of a boy, the back of a man ...

Not always following the Impressionist "rules," Caillebotte fulfills the French Impressionist purpose -- to capture the moment, deliciously.  This exhibition covers his main subjects, scenes of the city and urban labor, and with a special focus on his paintings in which water plays a major role.  Here are two of my favorites ...

In Oarsman in a Top Hat, we (unseen), are in a rowboat, knee to knee with a rower who's taken time off from the office for a refreshing row on the river.  Beside him on the rower's bench is his folded jacket -- what a detail to conjure up th just before and the just after, framing the great Impressionist subject:  the now.  His cheeks are rosy, his face flushed with physical activity -- he's just pulled forward on th oars -- but he looks aside, caught in thought.  Physical activity and thought, the Impressionist broken brushstrokes of the water and the clear, curved contours of his hat, the color-filled shadows of his face and the black of his vest, the dappled patterns of the watter and the stripes of his shirt sleeves, he's near as he could be, others are distant -- this painting is a study of contrasts, a visual drama of available human joys.

The Floor Scrapers is a study of browns and sepias.  What -- no juxtaposition of complementary colors?  no broken brush strokes?  hard work as a subject? -- for reasons like these Caillebotte has often been overlooked, because the "true" Impressionists -- Monet and Renoir, bathed in such prestige.  What a narrow attitude that assumes that hard work isn't fun!  that arbitrarily decides that the color brown, poor brown, lacks light.  For this artist, neither is true.

As in Oarsman in a Top Hat, Caillebotte paints mind and body.  Concentration on the job, one of our greatest pleasures -- well, isn't it?  -- is as much the subject of The Floor Scrapers as scraping floors.  The older worker, on his knees, uses experience, training and focus to do a fine job -- it's all in his posture.  The young worker concentrates on sharpening his blade, head bent to the task.   

Natural light pouring through the window falls across the poignantly naked chest of the young man and the shirted back of the older one -- the front of a boy, the back of a man, coming and going, flesh and no flesh, youth and age ... and yet, both face the same direction.  This is one canny painter.  The unpausing light illuminates the parallel rows they've been cutting through the old floor varnish, the curly shavings a heightening contrast, and reflects with a refreshing dazzle from the wetted floor.

These are life-affirming paintings.

Gustave Caillebotte, Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, is at the Brooklyn Museum through July 5, 2009.

                                                                             Yvonne Korshak         

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