The Sixties Live -- and that's a good thing.

Woodstock, New York, Last Sunday

Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, New York, yesterday

I'm Back!!!

By Charles Kessler

I just came back from two weeks touring Spain, Tangiers and Portugal. It was great (need I say it?). But whew, I'm exhausted! I'm not complaining, mind you -- we loved every minute, but I'm exhausted. And coming home to an art scene as insanely full and hectic as New York's isn't helping.

Let me begin by telling you what I'm NOT going to write about: The Prado. It's beyond anything I can say -- period. The monumental paintings by Velasquez, Rubens and Titian and the boys are so grand, powerful, and resolved that they're beyond words, at least my words. Maybe some day I'll take a crack at writing about Goya's "Black Paintings" (especially his heart-wrenching Drowning Dog) -- the only body of work at the Prado that's unconventional enough and unresolved enough to allow me some room for discussion -- but that's it.

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de, Dog half-submerged, 1821-1823, 131 cm x 79 cm (Museo Nacional Del Prado).

Later I'll write a bit about the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid's enormous modern art museum, but for now I want to report on some interesting articles and art news I've read in the last month or so.

British street artist Banksy has been in the news a lot. He directed a TV special called "The Antics Roadshow" for Britain's Channel Four on infamous pranksters. It was shown on Vimeo for a short time, but it's gone. Watch for a possible return. Perhaps more interesting is his (faked?) feud with "arch rival" King Robbo. The best reporting I found on this is on ArtInfo's website, here. Like Banksy's movie, "Exit Through the Gift Shop", one doesn't know what is real.

Calvin Tomkins, who has written about artists for The New Yorker for more than fifty years, was honored at the Whitney's annual gala, and he deservedly earned his own profile in the New York Times.

Speaking of profiles, the classy, veteran gallery dealer Paula Cooper has a great one in the Observer.

Even Larry Gagosian can't make a go of a bookstore. 

CLOSED

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones has written at least two perceptive and provocative posts while I was away: Was postmodernism born with Close Encounters of the Third Kind? and We need critics to define truly great art. How does he do it?

I'm only up to the J's -- more later! 

On Vacation

No posts until the beginning of October.

de Kooning, a Retrospective

Willem de Kooning, Untitled, (1976). Oil on newspaper mounted on paper mounted on linen, 29 1/8 x 22 3/8". Fractional and promised gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 802.1996

A friend invited me to the opening of the de Kooning retrospective at the Modern tonight, and we were both blown away. What really struck me, aside from the jaw-dropping quality of the work, was de Kooning's great range -- he may be second only to Picasso in that respect.

I want to write about this show, but I need to see it a few more times and read the catalog essay written by the curator, John Elderfield. I'm going away Friday for a couple of weeks, but I'll get on it as soon as I get back. In the meantime, go see it if you can.

Willem de Kooning, Pirate (Untitled II), 1981. Oil on canvas, 7' 4" x 6' 4 3/4". Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 107.1982

Sol Lewitt at Mass MoCA

 By Charles Kessler

Sol Lewitt, A Wall Drawing Retrospective, Mass MoCA, on view for twenty-five years.

Some artists are hurt by retrospectives -- their work is revealed to be thin or repetitive or minor or just boring. Other artists, Sol Lewitt in this massive semi-permanent retrospective for example, are shown to have great range and substance.

I've seen a lot of Lewitt's art over the years, and even though I've usually liked it in a mild way, I think the mechanical generation of the work kind of put me off. To quote him: "The idea becomes the machine that makes the art."  (These timelapse videos show how the work was made.) But this show blew me away. I love that Lewitt didn't insist on a rigid consistency (e.g., only straight lines drawn on discrete squares or bands of four colors on white walls), but that he'd change his mind and experiment with different ideas (e.g., bright colors and curved lines). The work here is absolutely thrilling.

Elizabeth Murray on 9/11

The New York Times

September 23, 2001

ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE AFTERMATH

ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE AFTERMATH; Clinging To Belief In Art

By ELIZABETH MURRAY

WHEN my husband and I went to bed on Sept. 11, our house on Duane Street, just six blocks from the World Trade Center, was in total darkness. We felt as if we were in a war zone. I said to him that I felt how futile my artmaking seemed right now: how could balancing shapes with line and color have any meaning or be of any use to anyone? Bob is a poet, and I felt that words were the only way all these feelings that were surfacing could be adequately expressed.

The next morning I made myself go into my studio and work, because however futile it may be, it's what I do, and all I can do. I worked with no light -- only the daylight and smoke filtering through my studio windows -- until I couldn't see properly anymore. I played the most beautiful music I have -- Berlioz's ''Harold in Italy'' -- and I felt lucky beyond words to be able to be in my studio balancing shapes with line and color.

A few days ago I made myself go into the street, where I ran into two friends, one a writer, the other a sculptor. They were talking about a show going up in Chelsea -- photographs that depict simulated images of people jumping from buildings. One person thought this was offensive. The other said: ''The work is there; it was done before all this. It exists.''

I don't know where I stand on this. A good deal of art is going to seem silly and inconsequential now, and so will a lot of artists, I suppose. I cling to my belief in art as a way for us to try to understand our real situation in life, which is a condition of not knowing what is coming around the next corner.
I don't know what will happen to my career or to the art business. I think that perhaps things will slow down and that it may be good for things to slow down and get quieter so that we can all think and reflect. Maybe there is no understanding, but there is opening yourself and trying to continue to grow and hope.

Great Idea!

The Local Cafe, 144 Sullivan St. (near Prince St.), SOHO

Whew!

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Wreck Buoy, 1849, oil on canvas (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)

Leonardo's Deluge

Leonardo  da Vinci, A Deluge, c.1517-18, Black chalk, 15.8 x 20.3 cm (Probably acquired by Charles II; Royal Collection by 1690, RL 12377).  More of Leonardo's deluge drawings can be found here.

More Art News

By Charles Kessler


LINKS:

• Via the art blog Two Coats of Paint, I learned of this video (below) about Hans Hofmann’s legendary art classes in Provincetown. It contains interviews with many of his former students including Mercedes Matter and Red Grooms, and archival video and photos of his classes.

•  If  you don't want to spend $75 or $100 or more on a western art history textbook, especially since it won't even have very many good reproductions let alone videos narrated by some of the top people in the field, smARThistory.com's free art history "web-book" is for you.

Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, the founders of smARThistory, say they have "aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy." I checked out a sampling and agree.

• For some striking large-format photojournalism, check out The Big Picture: New Stories in Photographs, on the Boston Globe’s website.

EXHIBITIONS:

Breaking Ground: The Whitney’s Founding Collection (Until September 18, 2011).

I went to the Whitney mainly to see their comprehensive Lyonel Feininger exhibition so I was surprised to come across this delightful show — a selection from the more than 1000 works of the original Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney collection.  (BTW, even though I’m not a great fan of Feininger, I learned there’s more range and depth to him than I realized.)

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Chinoise, 1914. Limestone, 61 1/16 × 19 15/16 × 14 7/8 inches (Whitney Museum of American Art; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.79).

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was staggeringly rich even by the standards of today’s billionaires. She was the daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the richest man in America at the turn of the century, and the wife of Harry Payne Whitney from one of New York’s wealthiest families. Defying her background, she became a sculptor, and not a bad one as you can see from this photo (above). Perhaps more important in terms of her place in history, she was a major patron of contemporary American art at a time when American art was ignored.

The original Whitney Museum of American Art at 10 West 8th Street, c. 1931-3.

The exhibition attempts to capture the look of the original museum and the democratic approach to collecting and installing — salon style with a diversity of subjects, styles and quality. (The Studio School took over the building, and the original Whitney Museum entryway, lobby and several rooms on the first floor - now used for the school's gallery - are still pretty much intact and are open to the public.)

One of my favorite paintings in the exhibition is by the under-appreciated painter Louis Eilshemius. 

Louis Eilshemius, The Flying Dutchman, 1908, oil on composition board, 23 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches, (Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney).

Mark di Suvero at Governors Island, presented by Storm King Art Center (until September 25, 2011).

Governors Island, New York

Governor’s Island is worth a trip in itself. You have to take a ferry there (click here for the schedule)
so you feel like you’re on summer vacation somewhere. It’s a verdant island with historic old residential homes once used by naval officers.  They even have a beach with a volleyball court, a bandstand and a hamburger shack.

Governors Island Beach

The show is the largest outdoor presentation of di Suvero’s sculpture since the 1970s — 11 sculptures created over a period of 40 years and spread out over the 172 acres of  Governors Island.

Mark di Suvero, Fruit Loops, 2003, Steel, 16’ 4” x 15’ x 11’ 7” (Collection of Agnes Gund, New York).

These are big sculptures, some 16 feet tall, but they never feel imposing or oppressive the way Serra’s work often does.  Rather they are human in scale and even intimate in their way. De Suvero had a good point with regard to the height of his works: “Forty-story buildings are being torn down in New York so that sixty-story buildings can go up. Why are people so surprised at seventeen-ton sculpture?”

Storm King developed a free app to accompany the exhibition. It’s particularly useful since no map is provided and you really need something to locate the sculptures.


BMW Guggenheim Lab, at the corner of Second Avenue and Houston in the Lower East Side (Until October 16, 2011).

This isn’t an exhibition so much as a city-planning science museum. It’s purported goal is to get ideas from people about what makes a city livable, but, so far at least, it’s more didactic than that, and probably more interesting because of it. They will have lectures, films and various events, including games (like the one shown above), about the needs, trade-offs, and challenges of cities.

The "lab" is housed in a temporary space designed by the Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow. Made of carbon pillars and carbon fiber and open front and back to the street and air, it's more of a high-tech tent than a building. Practicing what they preach about livable cities, they provide a nice amenity -- a plywood food shack run by Roberta's, Bushwick's popular pizza restaurant.

This will be a long-term experiment. After they finish here, they'll pack up and take the show on the road to Berlin, Mumbai and several other cities.

Roberta's at the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

A quick note about "artist/philosopher" (the curator Alexandra Munroe's designation) Lee Ufan exhibition in the Guggenheim's uptown space. It is precious beyond belief. It's embarrassing in its pretentious artiness, and it's appallingly derivative. This is a bad show even in comparison to the recent run of bad Guggenheim shows. "Artist/philosopher" indeed!

Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Until October 30, 2011).
The show is a bit of a rip-off. The show should be called The Face of Jesus: a few Rembrandt paintings, drawings and prints and a lot of paintings by his pupils. And it costs $16 general admission and an additional $9 for the “Rembrandt” exhibition — $25 total. There are a few major works, though, that for me were worth the price of admission. I particularly liked seeing two of Rembrandt's famous “100 Guilder Prints” side by side so I could observe how Rembrandt wiped the plate in different ways to bring out different features of each print. And there was this profoundly moving painting:

Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ with Arms Folded, ca. 1657-1661, Oil on canvas, 43 x 35 1/2 inches,
(The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York, 1971.37) Photograph by Joseph Lev.

And finally, I noticed a strange phenomenon at MoMA and I wonder if you may have noticed it too. Almost always, on one side of a wall between galleries the art is wildly popular, while the opposite side is practically deserted.

Okay Van Gogh's Starry Night is famous, but Picasso’s Three Musicians isn't. And Cezanne's Bather and the Brancusi sculptures completely shunned? What's with that?