“World’s greatest architect” Frank Lloyd Wright once declared of himself. Wright’s many projects often drew on a central idea – “organic” architecture that harmonised people and the landscape. “Despite Wright’s mothlike attraction to the flame of celebrity, he was deeply engaged with the essential question of how buildings can uplift the lives of individuals and communities.” Images and a video (4 min) are here.
Physiognomy – the inference of personality from someone’s appearance – doesn’t work. But a century ago it motivated Sander to photograph thousands of his fellow Germans. “All of his subjects seem to wear labor like a badge. [Sander said] allow me to be honest and tell the truth about our age and its people”. Sadly, he didn’t prove the theory but did lay the foundations of fine art photography. Some images are here.
Image: Hauser and Wirth
We are so used to Calder’s works that it’s easy to forget how radical he was. His leap of inspiration – from observing Mondrian’s work to thinking kinetic sculpture – was huge. “[His work], freed from coffee tables and institutional lawns, regains its purity of intent, abstracted once again into the primary tools of form, shape, line and movement … you realise that a Calder is in its essence its own language, a vocabulary of fresh ideas.”
European emigres arrived in 1920’s America in such numbers that they created a new avant garde. None of the newcomers was to prove more influential than John Graham. Steeped in the theories of Jung, he advocated painting from the unconscious. His own portraits show this with their psychosexual undercurrents. But the idea caught on even more among those around him – de Kooning and particularly a young Jackson Pollock.
Reviewers seem flummoxed by Murakami. He doesn’t see a difference between high and low art. Fine – but given the multiple assistants, his manga characters and the slick marketing, is he serious? “[The show is] more like watching someone capitalize on whatever happens to resonate… are we all moving toward a world wherein there is no difference between avant-garde and kitsch?” An excellent video (7.5 min) is here and more images here.
On the event of his first US retrospective Lüpertz cheerfully reveals his forthright views. Basically, new media is fine but painting is what matters. “You can’t do anything differently, whether it’s Baselitz or me there is no difference. All we can do is put a brush to a canvas. Caravaggio couldn’t do anything differently. The individual aspect of art is the artist … and that’s the exciting and wonderful part of painting.”
Lange is commonly referred to as a social activist but that’s not how she saw it. She said she just wanted to show the truth. Her portraits of people who fled to California from the Dust Bowl are iconic images of poor America. “Five years earlier, I would have thought it enough to take a picture of a man, no more. But now, I wanted to take a picture of a man as he stood in his world.” More images are here.