So many reviews, and so many complaints! The exhibition wants to debunk the cliché of the genius male artist attended by his muse. However, it is variously too big (40 couples!), poorly hung, or too coy about power imbalances (think Rodin). Still, as one critic notes “when a creative partnership was made up of equals, it tended to implode under its own intensity.”
In life Cy Twombly was enigmatic. Since his death in 2011, his Foundation has put up a “torrid” battle to stop a biography. The result is a worthy but incomplete book. In particular Twombly’s tangled personal life, a great influence on his art, is not fully disentangled. The reviewer’s conclusion – “Desire is not simple or safe. In life and in art, desire is the complication.”
We acclaim the “lissome goddesses” in Renaissance pictures but do we pick up on their embedded narratives? These works reflect the (misogynist) culture of their day. Beauty was ideally associated with submissiveness. Rape was thought to often involve female consent. And pictures of nudity were kept private and swapped between men – who were just being men.
Coverage of the shredding of a work by street artist Banksy has varied wildly – Banksy’s philosophical motivation, the value of the shredded work, Sotheby’s suspected collusion. Pragmatically, the linked piece thinks the prank was “an accomplishment”. Why? Because art auctions are “shopping” where there is a “growing displacement of connoisseurship by marketing”.
Ribera lived much of his life in violent Naples. This seems relevant to his art which is terrifyingly and repeatedly violent. Was Ribera himself violent? Probably not. There is a “gentleness” with which he painted his ghastly scenes, implying a witness, not a participant. Still, his imagination was, according to one critic, “one of art history’s darkest alleys”.
Picasso and Braque famously collaborated to produce cubism. A decade earlier two young German artists enjoyed a similar collaboration. Marc had been painting animals in vivid colours. Responding to his chaotic colourations, Macke joined in. Over just four years they became pioneering abstractionists. Then it all stopped with WW1; by 1916, both had been killed.
In a sign of things to come an “artwork” generated using AI has sold at auction. A furious debate is now raging over whether an algorithm can be creative, or artistic. Art critics are generally dismissive, one calling the piece “100 percent generic”. The algorithm’s developer, shocked by the art world’s ire, says “for sure, the machine did not want to put emotions into the pictures”.
In so many ways, colour is central to our lives, as it is to art. So why do we understand it so poorly? Cezanne suggested that ‘color is a collaboration between the mind and the world.’ Fine, but what is the nature of that collaboration? David Kastan tackles these questions in a new book On Colour, written with Stephen Farthing, and shows just how baffling the topic is.
“I gave up on the idea that I could “explain” color or treat it in any systematic way. We color code lots of emotions. Blue is the color of dejection, of depression. And yet blue is also the color of transcendence, as in the Giotto chapel in Padua. This contradiction is so deep. It is unresolvable. There’s a blue of sadness and a blue of bliss.”
Even as a teenager Delacroix hated the “fussy” neoclassicism of Ingres. Romanticism in his hands was expressive colour, looser brushstrokes, a certain vagueness of image. This did not make him a modernist but he had taken a dramatic step toward a modern style. No less an admirer than Cezanne said of one painting “You can find us all in this Delacroix”.
Nauman is hard to get – Robert Hughes called him “a nuisance”. Reacting to polished, emotionless minimalism of the early 1970’s, Nauman adopted an unfinished and experimental look. Decades later, his work comes across differently, communicating disquiet, its humour seeming bleak, carrying “new meaning for a new generation”.
The “ardour for whiteness”. Ancient sculptures were brightly painted, some even gaudy. Paint loss over the centuries gradually led to the assumption that they were created in white marble. This is likely now a world lost to us – even with technology restoration is not possible. Besides, to modern tastes, we may well think the results ghastly.
A new film about money and the art world. The inevitable distasteful super-rich are juxtaposed against a sincere, out-of-favour artist. The film maker remains optimistic – “great art will find a way. Because it’s the voice of being a human being”. Conceding the film is a “masterpiece”, one well connected art critic admits “those in the market … seem not to even notice artists anymore.”
Just as photography challenged nineteenth century western artists so it also threatened Japanese woodblock printing. By 1900 the Japanese art form had nearly collapsed. It re-emerged in fits and starts, partly by developing a range of distinct styles. And, just as photographers had done, printmakers developed “an analytical gaze upon Japan.”
Vuillard’s early paintings feature his family members in the tight spaces of their apartment, amidst his mother’s dressmaking business. She was central to his life and his art – he painted her over 500 times. These images show her as very “private”. So, was she really his focus or just one part of a grander, and radical, project – a portrayal of female domesticity?