Some Noteworthy Events and Reading Suggestions

 By Charles Kessler

Christine Goodman

There are a few Jersey City related events worth noting — unfortunately this is the only one that can still be seen (until June 23rd) — Jersey City’s own Christine Goodman, Art House Production’s energetic founder and Executive Director, is the lead in an intense play in Brooklyn. It’s a dream part for an actor and Goodman nails it, exhibiting great power and emotional range — a real tour de force. The play, What’s in a Name, is part of the BoCoCa Arts Festival (for Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, three adjoining neighborhoods in Brooklyn) and, like all the plays in the festival, it takes place in an unconventional venue — in this case a small room in the back of the Ceol Irish Pub. This adds to the tension and makes the theater experience even more extreme. DON’T MISS IT.
Click here for tickets.
They are only $15 in advance ($18 at the door) and Smith Street, where the theater/pub is located, is one of the liveliest and most interesting urban streets around.

Jersey City photographer Edward Fausty had a major exhibition of his otherworldly digital pictures of night scenes at the Hunderdon Art Museum. (For some reason I can’t make a hyperlink here -- you need to copy and paste the address: http://www.hunterdonartmuseum.org/past_exhibits/index.php#fausty.)  It closed last week, but I believe it was important enough to at least document here. The subtle, glowing color and velvety surfaces make these some of the most painterly photographs I’ve ever seen. A better place to view this work online is Fausty’s website.

Edward Fausty, House and Tree, Mt. Wilson Observatory, CA. (#3682), 2010, 25 x 34 inches

The Times and the Star Ledger reviewed Nimbus, a Jersey City dance company, so you don’t need my input. Suffice to say that for less than 20 dollars you got to sit a few feet away from first-rate professional dancers performing some of the best of Martha Graham as well several new works choreographed for this group.



SOME READING SUGGESTIONS

Long-form articles, like those found in the New Yorker or The Atlantic, haven’t been completely obliterated from the web. In fact there seems to be a small revival, possibly thanks to such free apps as Read It Later and Instapaper that let you save the text of a web page for future offline viewing, and websites like Long Reads, Long Form and my favorite, The Browser, that recommend long-form articles. These sites are not automated news aggregators but are run by actual human beings (what will they think of next?) who select the work and provide brief summaries to help you decide if you’re interested in reading them.

Here are two examples of long-form articles I found via The Browser. Neither one is strictly about art, but both are brilliant and provide insight for the larger cultural picture.

The first is a review of  The Anatomy of Influence by Harold Bloom, the prominent literary critic. Bloom said he wrote this book at the age of 80  “to say in one place most of what I have learned to think about how influence works in imaginative literature.” The review, by Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, not only summarizes Bloom's own overview of his thinking (no small achievement), but he puts Bloom in the context of twentieth-century literary criticism.

One might not need The Browser to find a New York Times book review, but what are the chances you’d come across this review in the online edition of the Israeli Haaretz Daily Newspaper?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Photographiert von Ben Richards unter Anleitung Wittgensteins, September 1947 in Swansea Quelle: Schwules Museum, Berlin © Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge

It’s an erudite review by Avner Shapira of an exhibition in honor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great 20th-century philosopher, who died 60 years ago. The exhibition, in the Schwules Museum (The Gay Museum), Berlin, examines Wittgenstein’s ambivalent attitude toward his Jewish origins and his homosexuality. 

And a final bit of good news on the long-form article front: a new online book-review website has been launched, The Los Angeles Review of Books. They just published a comprehensive review  by Ben Lerner of MoMA's Ab Ex show, and an extensive and insightful review by Robert Polito of Patricia Patterson: Here and There, an exhibition at the California Center for the Arts (until September 3, 2011).

Patricia Patterson, The Conversation (Manny and Steve at the Table), 1990, casein on canvas, painted wood frame, 72 x 102 inches (Collection Maggie and Terry Singleton)

There are, of course, several typical short web articles worth reading, like this from the intrepid reporters at ArtInfo on pole dancing as art:

 ...In the end, the legal implications of the decision are clear: yes, exotic dancing can count as art — but only if the dancers' "particular moves" are something they picked up in college. 

And this from The Observer, The Guardian: Van Dyck paintings unearthed by saleroom sleuth

...A London dealer has revealed the methods that have enabled him to attribute three unknown works to Charles I's court painter. ...Philip Mould, a British dealer who once bought a Gainsborough on eBay for £120, has proved his eagle eye once again with the find, which includes two paintings sold by Christie's last year as anonymous works.

Anthony Van Dyck, Self Portrait, 1640, oil on canvas, oval 23 x 19 inches

And this beautiful photo essay of caves and tunnels from the Atlantic.

Tourists visit the Kuha Karuhas pavilion located inside the Phraya Nakhon cave, in the Khao Sam Roi Yot national park, some 300 km south of Bangkok, Thailand, on December 5, 2010. The pavillon was built in 1890 on the occasion of a visit to the cave by King Chulalongkorn, the grand-father of current King Bhumibol Adulyadej. (Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images)

Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

Mahatma Kane Jeeves on Charles Garabedian

Here's a response to my post on Charles Garabedian.The best way to view this is to click on each image to enlarge it, and click again to enlarge it even more.

Page 1 - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Page 2 - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Page 3 - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Pages 4 & 5 - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Detail - Page 5 - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Curatorial Flashbacks #14: Barnet Rubenstein RIP

By Carl Belz

I recently rediscovered the obituary I wrote for Barney Rubenstein, a Boston-based painter whose work and whose friendship exceptionally enriched my life for many years prior to his death in 2002. It was written on the assumption that it would be published in The Boston Globe, but it was filed away when I learned of the Globe’s policy to write its own obituaries. Rereading it, I have been moved to share it—in the company of a few images of Barney’s pictures—in the hope of sparking an awareness of his achievement to an audience that ranges beyond the Back Bay.

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Barnet Rubenstein, 1923-2002

Barnet Rubenstein, painter, teacher, raconteur, sports enthusiast, and beloved friend of countless members of Boston’s cultural community, died in his Brookline home on April 15, 2002, Patriots Day, Marathon Day, with the Yanks at Fenway wrapping up a four game series with the Olde Towne Team. Born and raised in Chelsea, Massachusetts, he would have been 79 on July 21.

Of all the things Barney was, he was first of all an artist, always making images. He drew cars and comic strip heroes for fun while at school in Chelsea, and for diversion he drew tanks and planes while serving in the U.S. Signal Corps during World War II. He then started to draw and paint in earnest, figures and interiors and still lifes, first at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1946-47, and then for five years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts where he would later teach for more than three decades. He became practiced in the manner of Abstract Expressionism while living in Southern France for twelve years starting in 1953, but he drew and painted ocean liners and buses and racing ponies—he called them New York subjects—when he came back to the USA in 1965 and took up residence at the Chelsea Hotel in Gotham. After returning permanently to Boston in 1975, he spent the next twenty years imaging take-out food containers, cardboard boxes, jars of cookies, and arrangements of fruits and flowers, and he continued to draw and paint up to the very end—mostly the tree-lined paths where he regularly walked—despite a debilitating neurological condition that made it nearly impossible, physically, for him to draw or paint at all.

Barnet Rubenstein, Calumet Rider and Jockeys, 1967, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches 

Like many artists of his generation, Barney could lovingly be said to have lived at times in a dream world untroubled by contradictions. He’d talk about making it in the Big Apple, though he didn’t have an entrepreneurial bone in his body. He’d describe series after series of ambitious pictures that he had in mind while working at a snail’s pace, as if time just didn’t matter. He’d be scheduled for a longed-for solo exhibition but would then want to postpone it because he wasn’t sure his current paintings were fully realized. But exposure and recognition came in spite of the endearingly mixed feelings he had about success: In numerous group exhibitions during the 1970s when realist-type painting enjoyed renewed attention, and theme shows began their ongoing ascendancy; in an eye-opening mid-career survey at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1979; in a handful of radiant solo shows at the Alpha Gallery during the 1980s; and in a crowning retrospective at the Rose Art Museum in 1997 that celebrated four decades of his achievement. As a result, public and private collections throughout New England and elsewhere became homes for treasured paintings and drawings that in many cases had to be coaxed from Barney’s studio.

Barnet Rubenstein, Grapes, Pear, Apple, 1984, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 10 1/4 x 15 1/2" private collection.

Throughout his life—in his art, in his teaching, and in the stories he memorably told—Barney communicated a deep respect for art’s recent and distant past. In this he followed the model he learned as a student at the Museum School more than a half century ago, and he in turn gifted it to the generations of aspiring artists who studied with him, just as he gifted it to countless colleagues and friends, which was always with boundless generosity. He extended the same respect to the humble objects he painted—the fruits and flowers, the cookies and jars and boxes—patiently articulating each of them with nature’s life-giving light and attendant color. We know the pictures came about through painstaking effort and were hard to part with, but we don’t feel that effort when looking at them. We feel instead their joy and wonder, how they justify themselves by merely existing, and we in turn feel as though their maker was grateful simply for the opportunity to bring them into being. Such is the gift of art when it is practiced at its highest level, which is the way Barney practiced and gifted it, and a supreme gift it remains.

Barnet Rubenstein, Sunflowers and a Rose, late 1990's, pencil and colored pencil on paper, private collection

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. 

Some Reading Suggestions

By Charles Kessler

Another relatively recent archeological discovery is radically changing the way we understand the evolution of civilization (see my post on the Cauvet cave paintings). Charles C. Mann summarizes some of the latest thinking in his National Geographic article about the Gobekli-Tepe Pillars of southern Turkey: We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

Gobekli-Tepe-Pillars, southern Turkey. Photograph by Vincent J. Musi

The Gobekli-Tepe Pillars are a Stonehenge-type structure but taller, more finished and much older (about 11,600 years old).  One of the other interesting things about Göbekli Tepe is the builders got steadily LESS competent over the millennia. More photos can be found on the official Turkish site. (Scroll about halfway down for a text in English.)

Jonathan Jones of the Guardian suggests curators could learn something from the way Shakespeare is presented:
Theatres bring Shakespeare searingly alive time and again, so why are art galleries content to leave the old masters in their graves?  ...why can't the custodians of great art make Rembrandt, Raphael and Rubens as immediate as actors and directors make Shakespeare?


Richard Dorent, the astute art critic for the London Telegraph, reviews the Musee Orsay's Manet exhibition. He compares Titian's Venus of Urbino with Manet's Olympia (see photos above):
...All this implies a new and more active relationship between the subject and the viewer. Titian’s goddess feigns indifference to our presence whereas Olympia sizes us up, takes our measure. One is immortal, beyond human reach; the other could be booked after a good lunch at the Jockey Club.

Alan Taylor of the Atlantic put together this breathtaking album of 38 NASA photos of the solar system.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite captures an image of the Earth's moon crossing in front of the Sun, on May 3, 2011.

In his article Adrift: Will the Whitney’s new home allow it to finally find happiness?, Jed Perl, The New Republic’s art critic, makes some good points about the expansion of most art museums: 
.... What museums are really looking for is not more exhibition space, per se—and certainly not more space for under-appreciated aspects of the permanent collection—but rather for spaces large enough for a Richard Serra sculpture or a Matthew Barney installation. That stuff will impress potential donors, who couldn’t tell a Charles Demuth from an Arthur Dove if their lives depended on it.

Kyle Chayka, writing in the Hyperallergic art blog, has a rudimentary but good summary of Performance Art here including this serviceable definition:
...If we were to assign performance art a single defining characteristic, it would probably be the fact that a piece of performance art must be centered on an action carried out or orchestrated by an artist, a time-based rather than permanent artistic gesture that has a beginning and an end.
In addition, she provides a brief description of several iconic performances.

Chayka also has an excellent photo essay on the newly opened Section 2 of the High Line.

Section 2 of the High Line. Photo: Kyle Chayka.

Update: The Guardian has an article today on the opening of Section 2 of the High Line. What's taking the Times so long?

Vanessa Thorpe of the Guardian/Observer goes out on a limb:
...The freshest art on the contemporary scene appears to have turned its back on the ironic jokes and personal confessions epitomised by Tracey Emin's notorious unmade bed and Damien Hirst's dead floating shark.
From her lips to God's ears!

Joanne Mattera has some suggestions for making artists' statements more effective. I still think the best advice is that unless you're really good at it, DON’T DO IT --  you could easily sound like a pompous ass.

Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

Chelsea and 57th Street Gallery Roundup

By Charles Kessler

Installation view: Willem de Kooning, The Figure: Movement and Gesture, paintings, sculptures, and drawings, The Pace Gallery.

Willem de Kooning, The Figure: Movement and Gesture, paintings, sculptures, and drawings, The Pace Gallery, 32. E. 57th (at Madison), until July 29th.
This is a museum-quality show, and beautifully installed too, especially the large two-sided drawings that are set into the wall. I don’t have anything to add to the extensive de Kooning literature, but I’m eager to find out what John Elderfield will come up with for his major (more than 200 works) de Kooning retrospective at MoMA this fall.

Pablo Picasso, Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge (1932) Photo: © Tate, London 2011/Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Picasso and Marie-Therese L’Amour Fou at Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, until June 25th.
Another museum-quality show -- more than eighty paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and sculptures. It's work inspired by Marie-Therese, Picasso's young lover of the late twenties to 1940. This show, even more than the current Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914” (see posts here and here), not only showcases Picasso's preternatural creativity but demonstrates how he milked an invention for all it's worth.

Installation view: Keith Haring, Gladstone Gallery

Keith Haring at Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st (down the street from Gagosian’s Picasso show), until July 1st.
This show is a good reminder of how generous and fun Keith Haring was. Haring’s openings were lively parties, often with live music and all kinds of free stuff like posters, stickers and t-shirts. The three large paintings in this show (about 9' x 23' each) were created on stage during a series of Bill T. Jones dance performances in 1982 (the sounds of the mark-making serving as the musical accompaniment). I thought Haring’s sketchbooks (Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, 1978 and Untitled (Cityscapes), 1978), also on display, were even more inventive and funny. The gallery is selling a reproduction of the sketchbooks for only $10.

Donald Judd, Untitled (Menziken 89-6), 1989, anodized aluminum, clear and blue with blue Plexiglas, 39 x 79 x 79 inches (Judd Art copyright Judd Foundation)

Donald Judd at David Zwirner Gallery, 525 and 533 West 19th, until June 25th.
The impersonal fabrication, radical minimalism and the use of non-art materials (anodized aluminum and tinted Plexiglas) are supposed to preclude preciousness, and until a decade or so ago they did. But I think we’re over the shock of this, the way we’re over the rawness of Impressionist paintings. This work no longer has the presence of non-art, so now preciousness becomes an issue. Ultimately I don’t think they are. Maybe they’re so elegant that they pass preciousness to go on to jaw-dropping gorgeousness.

Installation view: Richard Tuttle, "What's the Wind," Pace Gallery

Detail: Richard Tuttle, "What's the Wind," Pace Gallery

Richard Tuttle, What’s the Wind, The Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th , until July 22nd.
Tuttle, like Judd,  can come dangerously close to preciousness, albeit in a way as different from Judd as is conceivable because Tuttle’s work is always experienced as handmade. The fragility (or apparent fragility -- they could in fact be very durable, I suppose) makes them appear delicate; and the careful placement of elements sometimes feels a little arty. But he’s so good at it, and the work is so playful and inventive, that preciousness is avoided here as well. Besides, these are large sculptures, self-contained installations really, unlike most of his other work, and the greater size alone helps give them more power.

Tuttle is hugely influential on younger artists, as any tour of the LES galleries will demonstrate. I don’t know why this show isn’t receiving more attention.

Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2007, Aluminum, 108x83x2 inches

Jasper Johns, New Sculpture and Works on Paper, Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd, until July 1st
Johns, at the age of 81, is making some of most sensual work he ever made — something that he’s gotten away from in the last few years. Yet I still find this work as unnecessarily and annoyingly obscure (is he trying to muddy the waters?) as always.

William Kentridge, Drawings for Other Faces, 2011, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 65x35 inches

William Kentridge: Other Faces at Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th (between 5th and 6th), until June 18th
Of all the big-time shows currently on view, this was my personal favorite. I’m always surprised at how many people never heard of him even though he’s had shows at major museums. Kentridge is a South African artist who makes animated films by using successive charcoal drawings that he photographs, erases, changes and photographs again — each drawing getting a quarter of a second to two seconds of screen time. As the film evolves, there’s a sense of the passage of time like vestiges of a fading memory. And unlike conventional cel animation, Kentridge emphasizes the hand-drawn quality of the work — one is always aware of the artist’s presence. (Last Tuesday I went to an Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presentation and talk by Andrew Lampert, a film and video artist also involved with acknowledging the presence of the artist and with making work that's experienced as handmade. Maybe there’s something in the air. I hope so.)

Kentridge’s choice of subjects is inspired by his childhood in apartheid South Africa and the brutalized society left in its wake. His work is ambiguous, subtle and sometimes contradictory, but, unlike Johns, there’s a reason for it. As Kentridge said when asked (in a very good interview with Lillian Tone) why his work had become more associative and ambiguous: “Things that seemed more certain eight years ago seem less certain now.”


Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

Falling in Love with a Rock

by Kyle Gallup

Kyle Gallup, Rocky Beach, 2010, watercolor on paper, 12" x 16"

As summer returns and I emerge from the cocoon of my studio, it’s time to look outside. Painting from life is a way for me to clear my head and keep my eyes sharp. I’ve done this as long as I can remember.

In my early teens I was intent on immersing myself in the landscape, seeing what I could make of it; pencil drawings of a dappled Ozark light, watercolors in Ireland with its pastoral green patchwork dotted with fallen stone castles and cemeteries, Maine’s coastal rock-strewn beaches. Landscape painting has romanced me, connected me with a grand tradition and masters of the sublime.

It’s hard to say how chronicling light and color in nature has effected my studio work. What I do know for sure is that the process of laying out paint on my palate and putting loaded brush to paper is at once a challenge and freedom like no other. Translating the scene on to paper, the natural world becomes entertainer, teaser and sometimes taunting muse.

Beginning with bold washes of transparent color helps me to set up what’s most important, a simple outline or pathway to the thrust and weight of any scene. A passing cloud on an otherwise clear, blue-sky day adds interest or a shadow in the heat. Swaying silver-topped trees and gullies of dark, deep green conjure Corot or the rough, barked-edge of a tree in the foreground brings to mind Van Gogh with his precise, pen-to-paper intimacy, making his way up and down the gnarled trunks, getting to know his pollard birches. 

Vincent Van Gogh, Pollard Birches, 1884, pencil and ink heightened with gouache, 15" x 21", (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

I find myself in the middle of the most exciting visual happenings from one moment to the next. There is complexity, nuance, sound, weight, depth and clarity that exist separate from me. There are edges and colors that induce hallucinations, sounds of the wind, birds calling to their mates, laughing, shouting children in the distance. All these gently pierce the ebb and flow of life.

Getting to know one’s place within the whole scheme of things can have its risks, like any great affair. Searching and seeking out those things that are most moving, getting close to the heart of the scene, the bend in the road I can not see beyond, the allusive, pastel horizon between sky and sea, finding form in the boldest gray faceted rock that sits shiny wet, in the sun.

Discovering the shape of things can take me to the edge, make me feel compulsive about getting it right and knowing all there is to know. Mixing a dark clay color looks one way on the palette and then another way on the paper. How does that rock sit so firmly there? It must be a give and take, from observing eye to paper. A bond forms as I try different ways of getting at the truth of the rock’s presence. The way the sand and other stones sit nearby, the sunlight hitting the lightest side, bringing out it’s dimpled, indented mass. When I see a relationship that feels close to what I am looking at, I’ll take a break.

The next day, and the day after that, if I’m lucky enough to be in the same spot, looking at the same rock on the shore, I’ll feel smitten. A friend awaits my attention. I am finally able to caress the rock on paper with all its colored variations and know its structural shifts. The rock now sits in my mind and has given its self over to my knowledge and understanding of it.

Hudson Beach, 2009, photo credit: Philip Turner

Kyle Gallup, Hudson River, NYC, 2009, watercolor on paper, 9" x 12"

Often I’ll take several photographs of where I have been painting, a record keeping, just in case I have the opportunity to return. I have returned to familiar spots to find trees, rocks, and shorelines unchanged and then I take up where I left off. Old friends in the landscape make themselves known after a brief, getting-reacquainted period. Or sometimes I review my photographs of the scene and look closely, trying to understand how I could have been so involved with a seemingly unimposing rock on the beach.

Kyle Gallup, Study for Coney Island Landscape for John Baldessari 2011, graphite, ink, lithographic prints, painted paper on wood panel, 9.5" x 13.5" (Click to enlarge photo.)

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Editor's note: On my request, Kyle Gallup included her own studio work in this post.

                      --Charles Kessler

Curatorial Flashbacks #13: Building Memories

Rose Art Museum.  Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

By Carl Belz

The Rose Art Museum has been closed for renovations since the end of April to prepare for next year’s 50th Anniversary celebration. For starters, the facade will be spruced up by the replacement of the existing curtain wall with new, more energy-efficient glass. The Stephen Antonakos neon, a Rose signature since it was commissioned in 1985, will be removed to storage, and the original look of the building will presumably be restored. Embedded in that last sentence alone are a couple of stories that should go on the record.

(1)     The commission was scheduled for installation a few months before an exhibition of Antonakos neons and drawings would open in the museum on May 5. Everything was going as planned—the Collections Committee had enthusiastically endorsed the project, the electrical system had been prepared, the sculpture itself was being fabricated—none of which surprised me at that point, because working with Steve had been a dream from square one: Whatever he promised, he delivered. What did surprise me, when I excitedly mentioned the approaching installation to a couple of faculty colleagues I played tennis with every Friday afternoon, was the question one of them immediately raised about whether I had informed my boss, Brandeis President Evelyn Handler, about the project. Q: Why would I do that? A: It would be a good idea, just do it. So I wrote the president a memo. First thing the next day, the phone was ringing off the hook. The president herself, telling me to stop everything, I had no jurisdiction outside the museum’s front door—that territory was hers! 

So we met, we talked, I made a presentation, the dust settled, and the project continued. And I learned my lesson: My colleagues and I ran the museum program and guided its aesthetic and intellectual content, but the building and its physical contents, including artworks housed there or elsewhere, were university property. 

(2)    You see in the accompanying photograph that the curtain wall consists of two large sheets of glass on either side of the entry doors, each measuring 14 feet high and 6 feet wide.  But that’s not what you would see if you went to the museum today, nor what you would have seen at any time since 1989, which would have been four sheets on either side of the entry, each 14 feet high but only 3 feet wide.

What brought about the change was this. We had a Dorothea Rockburne exhibition in the spring of 1989, which was curated by friend and colleague Susan Stoops. It comprised a very beautiful series of very abstract, ethereal pictures whose spiritual energy was best experienced in contemplative surroundings—as in a chapel. Dorothea wanted the gallery darkened, so preparator Roger Kizik went to the roof and covered its dozen skylights with a large canvas tarpaulin. Still, too much light flooded the gallery, so we went out and bought several huge rolls of opaque, heavy-weight, midnight blue paper—the kind of paper photographers use to create seamless abstract backdrops—that Roger fashioned to cover the entire inside of the curtain wall, every inch of it. And Dorothea was satisfied, her show could go on. 

But not without a hitch, for the very next morning—and a wonderfully sunny spring morning it was—Roger came to my office and insisted I accompany him to the front porch of the museum where we helplessly watched in horror as a large crack made its way across the glass panel on the left side of the entry doors. Physics had taken over: The sun shone directly on the museum façade, the dark paper absorbed the warmth and heated the glass, the glass in its steel frame was allowed no tolerance for expansion and so became the weak link in a chain of events we started but in which nature—as always—batted last. 

And an expensive weak link it was, which the university decided to reduce by replacing the 14 x 6 foot sheet of glass with two 14 x 3 foot sheets of glass. As this altered the symmetry of the curtain wall, decorative mullions were installed in the centers of original panels to correct the imbalance, and there they remain to this day. 

The renovation will also remove the pool that has dominated the lower gallery of the original museum since the day the Rose opened. Ah, the pool…

(1)    The pool which visitors always loved, as the gentle tinkling of its sprinklers calmed the humors, encouraged aesthetic contemplation, and occasionally even inspired the tossing of a coin to accompany a wish. 

(2)    The pool which drove us crazy, because it was forever interrupting sight lines, because its edge was always there to trip over when you backed up to better look at a painting, because you invariably had to turn the sprinklers off in order to be heard by a class or the audience attending a gallery talk.

(3)    The pool which we annually drained, to collect the aforementioned coins, but mostly to enable Roger to wash from the polished stones that came with the pool the slime that inevitably coated them, despite the gallons of chlorine we constantly poured into it in a futile effort to contain its tropical effect.

(4)    The pool that Judy Pfaff memorably incorporated into her “Elephant” installation in 1995 (see Curatorial Flashbacks #6).

(5)    The pool with a circular island in its center where Charlotte Mormon, wearing the “TV Bra” designed for her by Nam June Paik and—quite literally—risking electrocution in the process, gave a solo cello performance in conjunction with the legendary exhibition, “Vision and Television”, curated in 1970 by then assistant director Russell Connor. 

(6)    The pool which, in spite of its faults, came to the rescue when the roof drains clogged with ice one winter day, and melt water cascaded into its embrace under the watchful eyes of Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler, among other dignitaries who happened to be hanging nearby. 

New floors and ceilings and lights will also be installed, along with up-to-date heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. All of which sounds great. I wonder if it means the For Sale sign has been taken off the storage vault door.  

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. 

The Chauvet Cave Paintings

By Charles Kessler

The other day, I saw Werner Herzog’s new 3-D movie about the Chauvet cave paintings — Cave of Forgotten Dreams (now playing at IFC in New York). The Times reviewer doesn’t agree, but I thought it was a terrible movie: the 3-D effects will give you a headache (especially scenes shot in the cramped spaces of the cave), the music is an obnoxious distraction, there are too many irrelevant, sometimes silly, interruptions, and the movie is self-indulgent and  heavy-handed — typical Herzog Germanic romanticism. BUT SEE IT! It’s well worth putting up with Herzog’s nonsense just for the opportunity to see the Chauvet cave paintings.

Due to the fragile nature of the cave and artifacts, custody of the cave was taken over by the French Government (the official government website for the cave is here), and it has been closed to all but a few experts since its discovery in 1994 by the French speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet and his colleagues Eliette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire. Herzog persuaded the French government to give him, and a crew of three, access to the cave to film for four days on the condition he worked under careful supervision.

These paintings might be the oldest art ever discovered, possibly an incredible 32,000 years-old - twice as old as the next oldest, the Lascaux caves. But, the thing that’s so remarkable about this work, and other prehistoric cave painting, is it’s as good as any art that’s ever been made. In other words, art hasn’t improved in 32,000 years; it's just changed.

Four aurochs (left), two rhinoceroses fighting (below) and a panel of four horses (extreme right) [Credit: Wikimedia Commons] - click to enlarge.

The skill of these artists is astonishing. In many cases a single line delineates contours of the animals — and with anatomical accuracy too. Other times the animals are carefully modeled. Not only are the animals realistically drawn with great economy of means, but they're also compellingly expressive. The eyes of the animals are tense and alert, and their bodies are dynamic and powerful.

Detail of lions hunting panel. [Credit: Wikimedia Commons]

These artists were even able to portray motion. Several animals are depicted with multiple pairs of legs, as if their legs were rapidly moving (like the Futurist Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog On a Leash, 1912), or are shown in multiple places in time (like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912) — effects probably heightened by flickering light. And the means they used to create the paintings were varied and sophisticated. They carefully prepared the walls so they were smooth and white, they incised the wall along contour lines to emphasize the line, and they made use of the curve of the wall to aid in the illusion of volume.

There are no signs that prehistoric man lived in the Chauvet Cave; it was used exclusively for ceremonial purposes. And what a dramatic ceremonial space it must have been! Can you imagine what it must have been like to enter into this strange and dangerous cavern, an open space with tons of rock miraculously suspended above? Originally (before a rock slide sealed the cave about 20,000 years ago) they would have entered through a sort of outside antechamber that had red hand prints on the far wall. Then, going into the cave proper, with only torches for light, they would dimly see drawings of bears and panthers as their eyes adjusted to the dark. Further in they would come to two chambers with vast herds of bison, rhinos, horses and other animals -- more than 400 paintings in all! It must have been awe-inspiring — it still is, even just watching it on film.

This is clearly not the work of amateurs -- this isn't random scrawls or indiscriminate graffiti. It is clearly the work of highly trained specialists. (We can even identify one of the artists because his hand prints have a crooked finger). It’s pretty impressive when you think of it. This subsistence culture, as marginal as their existence was, must have believed that making art was so important that they would excuse certain people from hunting and other jobs and provide for them so they could devote their time to making art (or at least what we today call art).


Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

Curatorial Flashbacks #12: The Perfect Fit

By Carl Belz

Willem de Kooning, Woman, I, 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6' 3 7/8" x 58"  © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

MoMA’s John Elderfield, whose panoramic curatorial record is without equal in today’s museum world, and whose vision of modernism is exceptional in being fully worthy of the capacious emotional and intellectual sweep of its subject, will be mounting later this year a too-long-awaited Willem de Kooning retrospective. Willem de Kooning, whose name is synonymous with gestural abstraction—with Action Painting, as it was sometimes called—in the first generation of the New York School. Willem de Kooning, who in the 1950s was inevitably pitted against Jackson Pollock in barroom brawls and classroom debates about who was the number one painter in leading our troops to the triumph of American painting. Willem de Kooning, whose slash-and-burn woman paintings—in particular MoMA’s iconic Woman 1 (1950-52)—inspired and haunted an entire generation of young painters emerging at that time.

Pop artist Mel Ramos was one of those painters. Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Mel made his first trip to New York in 1956. He wasn’t a pop artist yet, he was 21 years old and was just getting into painting, just finding his way, and that’s when he first saw Woman 1, which flat out blew him away.  As he’s told me himself, he made a lot of de Kooning-inspired Ramoses after that, maybe a year’s worth, while in the process of finding his own identity. Which he did by the start of the 60s when he found his focus in the media heroes, heroines, and pin-up darlings we associate with his name. A couple of decades thus passed before he felt confident enough to confront, and exorcise, the de Kooning demons that lingered from his initial encounter with the modern old master.

Mel Ramos, I Still Get A Thrill When I See Bill #1, 1976, Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 inches. (Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University)

That encounter played out in an ambitious series of paintings and watercolors based on de Kooning’s early 50s images of women that Mel started in 1975. The cornerstone painting was I Still Get A Thrill When I See Bill #1, a stroke by stroke, line by line duplication of every mark, including every drip and spatter that comprised de Kooning’s Woman 1, except that every mark was distinguished by Mel’s singularly lucid personal touch. Despite the weight of its legendary source, the painting’s impact was all Mel Ramos, an astonishing feat that I experienced for the first time shortly after its completion, when I visited the Bay Area in 1976. In fact, it blew me away—as a postmodern appropriation, as an ironic comment about the creative act, as an oblique yet moving tribute, as a pictorial exploit, you name it, it was all there—and I accordingly had it high on my list when I returned to Mel’s Oakland studio in December 1979 to discuss with him the details of the mid-career survey of his work that we’d scheduled for the Rose Art Museum in the spring of 1980.

(Pause here for an interlude of California Dreamin’: By 1979 I Still Get A Thrill When I See Bill #1 had been acquired by Werner Erhard, a classic California entrepreneur who, like the 49ers before him, migrated to the Golden State to make his fortune, which he did by teaching people how to get in touch with their inner selves. He originated EST—Erhard Seminars Training—and it turned out he was giving his annual Christmas party over in San Francisco at the time of my visit. Mel and his wife Leta were invited, and they in turn invited me to go with them, so off we went for what turned out to be an unforgettable evening. The party took place in a large theater from which all the seats had been removed to make room for a hundred or more freshly cut Christmas trees that stood throughout the space and filled the air with their festive aroma. Oyster bars, fully stocked with a generous selection of vodkas, were conveniently sited to assure easy access to the pleasures they offered. And then there were Werner’s guests, about 200 of them, who were to a person friendly and considerate and who together gave off comforting feelings of affection. A stranger in their midst, I nonetheless felt as though I belonged, and I was momentarily transported back in time…it was 1967 again, the time we went to San Francisco and mingled with the gentle people there, when we wore flowers in our hair and drifted blissfully through the Summer of Love. Say what?)

Robert Colescott,  I Gets A Thrill Too When I Sees Dekoo, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 66 inches Gift of Senator and Mrs. William Bradley (Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University) 

A second offspring of de Kooning’s Woman 1 was welcomed at the museum as a gift just a year after Mel’s picture—the older sibling of the two—had been there as a temporary loan: Robert Colescott’s I Gets A Thrill Too When I Sees De Koo (1978), the title indicating the artist’s full awareness of Mel’s tour de force riff. But the pictures otherwise parted ways. Colescott’s painting belonged to an ongoing series of art historical appropriations through which he raised issues of racial exclusion, as he does in I Too Gets A Thrill by substituting a grinning Aunt Jemima for the spectral face of de Kooning’s demonic femme fatale. Still, I invariably thought first of Mel’s painting when, in subsequent years, I hung the Colescott in the galleries or showed it to guests in the vault—I even kept a reproduction of it handy just to demonstrate a back story in Colescott's creative process.

(Pause here for a little name-dropping and self-aggrandizement: The Colescott was a gift of Bill Bradley, Princeton alumnus, author, Basketball Hall of Fame member, and three-term U.S. Senator from New Jersey, who made a bid for the Democratic nomination in the 2000 Presidential election. We met on the hardwood of Dillon Gym in 1961 when he was a freshman and I was pursuing a doctorate in Art History. From there he went on to demolish and write anew just about every Princeton basketball record—except the one for most rebounds in a single game, which stands at a phenomenal 29 and is held by, you guessed it, me! But I was disappointed when Bill didn’t get the Democratic nomination for 2000, because it meant abandoning some of the dreams we’d hatched years before when we became friends at Princeton—like the one where he’d become President and appoint me our country’s first Minister of Culture. So I had to adjust my career ambition on that one, which I was able to do in 2008 when, as Chairman of our town’s Board of Selectmen, I unilaterally appointed myself to a lifetime position as Franconia Culture Czar. Now how about that!)

Willem de Kooning, Woman (Seated Woman I), 1952, charcoal, oil and graphite on paper, paper 14.5 x 11.5 ins.

An original Woman 1 family member came to the Rose as an extended loan in 1994, a fabulous little drawing of a seated woman executed by de Kooning himself in 1952 at the height of the excitement and controversy generated throughout the art world by his new series of pictures. As you can imagine, I used every possible opportunity to show the drawing when hanging the permanent collection—in connection with our Abstract Expressionist pictures, or a figure exhibition, or postmodern quotation via the Colescott (I still kept a reproduction of Mel’s picture nearby), or whatever.

(Pause here for a note about Extended Loans: ELs, as we called them, were objects that didn’t belong to the collection but were entrusted to our care—our storage space, our insurance, our expertise—by their owners in exchange for the opportunity to exhibit them in connection with our mission. Which we appreciated. And it naturally happened that we’d hope the objects would eventually become gifts and join the collection permanently, because that was the model of a mutually productive museum/donor relationship that we believed in. While some of our members harbored that hope with the de Kooning drawing, I always figured it was a long shot. Art like that, at that time, in a market spiraling ever upward, had simply become too valuable to give away. Its value no longer represented a vacation place Down East or a getaway farm in upstate New York, it represented trusts for the children, the grandchildren, and their children. And I was right: the de Kooning was sold at Christie’s in 2005 for more than $9 million! Yikes! And again yikes!)

I would now like you to take all of the above—the three key pictures that intersected with the Rose Art Museum between 1976 and 1994, along with the story of each, including the museum’s collection profile and exhibition history—enter it in your mental computer and tell me how you think I responded when I picked up a Christie’s auction catalog in 1996 and saw that Mel Ramos’s I Still Get A Thrill When I See Bill #1 was about to go on the auction block. I did a double take, I was beside myself with excitement, and I resolved to buy the picture. Which, with a go ahead from our Collections Committee, I then did—because it was hands down a beautiful acquisition that had everything going for it, because it brought all of the pieces of the puzzle together, because it was a perfect fit.

(And because I really loved the picture, too)


Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

Some Reading Suggestions

By Charles Kessler

Two challenges to accepted beliefs:
Jonathan Jones on Art, The Guardian: Surrealism? It was always old hat: The Tate's new Joan Miró show reminds me that surrealism was neither original nor revolutionary, it had clear antecedents.

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R. C. Baker, The Village Voice: The Misbegotten Career of Roy Lichtenstein: Roy Lichtenstein is the most overrated artist of the 20th century.

Tyler Green suggests Five art-related websites you could be enjoying (aside from the LeftBankArtBlog, of course).

Here's a rare interview with Jasper Johns in the Financial Times.

The New York Times has an in-depth article on the revival of LA's Chinatown gallery scene -- once I thought the most vital thing happening there; and a nostalgic article on SoHo in the good old days. 

Trisha Brown's “Roof Piece,” (1973), depicting dancers on adjacent rooftops, (Photo: Babette Mangolte) 

And while we're on New York and Los Angeles, here's a funny, and at the same time insightful, article by a New York woman who ran the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, a group that supports emerging Jewish artists living in New York City. She's trying to do the same thing in Los Angeles. 

USA Today reports this good news: Conventional wisdom has long held that pursuing a career in the arts is a likely ticket to a life of perennial unhappiness, hunger and unemployment. But the opposite appears to be true -- graduates of arts programs are likely to find jobs and satisfaction, even if they won't necessarily get wealthy in the process -- according to a new national survey of more than 13,000 alumni of 154 different arts programs.




Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.