In 1932 Picasso had sex on his mind – a new affair with a young lover. History is not censorious because his art was scintillating. “His private life was complicated … his relationship to surrealism [undecided]; in many ways one feels Picasso was in a moment where he really had to clarify his position, in life as much as in art”. An excellent video (5 min) is here and images here.
After noting that he didn’t sell at auction for as much as Koons, Fischl was told by a collector ‘let’s face it, you didn’t make the cut’! Fischl is widely admired (and collected) for his paintings of striving American suburbs. Why isn’t he more of an auction room star? Perhaps it’s that the optimism of his suburbia no longer quite gels with the country’s present mood.
Getting a retrospective at Tate is a big deal so why the critical hesitation about Jonas? “Complicated viewing … an art of constant interruption, spillage and surprise” says one critic. For another it’s the “grand narrative of dualities … stillness and movement, object and image, ancient and modern.” Perhaps it’s best to just watch this survey video (6 min) and judge for yourself.
A hymn to the colour orange. Until modern pigments, orange came from processing the sulphurous deposits around volcanic vents. Laden with arsenic, the substance was dangerous to process, but in high demand. “A savvy arbiter between resolute red and unyielding yellow, orange is a pigment that pivots … between contrary states of being – this world and another, life and death”.
A painting of the black victim of a 1950’s lynching, included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, was bitterly controversial. Debate continues, at a lower volume. Some see the core issue as “treating Black pain as raw material”. The artist thinks the painting is being viewed “out of context”. Perhaps the question they are all getting at is – “who gets to tell a community’s story”.
When first shown “American Gothic’ was celebrated as an ode to regional conservatism. Is that what Wood really thought? Most likely he was gay. His landscapes “imply a freedom that Wood rarely had. It has to be significant that he’s airborne in these views, floating above the earth, maybe even escaping the fraught region that was his life.” More images are here.
New York’s Met has introduced compulsory admission fees. Doesn’t it still believe in “the general mobilization of the mind”? ‘User pays’ seems part of the answer. And then there is the cost of the Met, a history-focused institution, getting into contemporary art. Absent this venture, the Met “could have [allowed] nonmandatory admission fees … for all visitors, forever.”
Fascinating. Many artists of the day opposed building the Eiffel Tower, expecting it to be ugly. Mathematical rules now deeply influence art and ideas about beauty. In time, artificial intelligence will probably yield original art. “Untrained AI will [likely] produce something starkly original and even unrecognizable … both painfully boring and highly stimulating”
When Jackson Pollock was emerging in America, what was happening in post-war Britain? No one figure dominated, rather a prominent group of unusually fine realist painters, the so-called London school. Few critics seem persuaded that there was a school but most still like the show, even if a troubling number of works play to the male gaze.
Mary Beard claims this 16th century silverware is “the greatest jigsaw puzzle on earth”. Twelve plates, dazzling in their quality, were made, one for each of the first 12 Caesars. But who made them and for what purpose? Further, why were they pulled apart and then incorrectly put back together? Extraordinary eye candy, if you will, as this video (3.5 min) shows.
North Korea is getting plenty of headlines. Are we beginning to understand it any better? Hartmann’s images from repeated trips to Pyongyang reveal a lot, essentially because they reveal so little – “the immense blandness of the capital city … compressed into one monumental ideological statement.” Where do people fit in? They are scarcely to be seen.
Something from the outer reaches of the art world. de Borchgrave, a painter by training, re-creates dresses drawn from Renaissance art through to the Ballets Russes – all created from just folded and painted paper. Well known in Europe, a retrospective show of her work is currently touring the US. Multiple images are here.
A spectacular show of “magnificent” full length portraits, once de rigeur for the wealthy. “Her lace collar flows over her shoulders like sea foam … the bobbled silk of her rich black dress, which complements Soolmans’s, if anything, more flamboyant outfit, the intricate ribbing of which would have taken hours of painstaking work.” (An alternative, paywall-free, review is here.)
The ancient Greeks thought the finest art should be “a perfect illusion of reality”. Likewise the Romans. Why? In sculpture and even more so the portraits painted on coffin lids, the effort at realism is striking. “These portraits … were not just memorials. They were attempts to keep the dead present among the living and to blur the boundary between this world and the next.”