The Art World is Obsessed With Felines

By Charles Kessler

Cat with Kittens (detail), reportedly from Saqqara, Egypt. Late Period to Ptolemaic Period, Dynasty 26 or later, circa 664–30 B.C.E. Bronze, solid-cast and wood, 2⅜ x 3-7/16 x 1-15/16 inches (Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.406E).

Felines seem to have taken over the art world lately. Here's an article about the trend, and for even more evidence, there's the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition of Ancient Egyptian cats. (BTW, Sunday is the last day you can see the best show in the city – the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition of John Singer Sargent's watercolors.)

Well, I want to be trendy too, so I've decided to devote this post to photos of lions that you can find scattered about the Metropolitan Museum.

Figure of a lion, Syria, Iron Age, early to mid-1st millennium, copper alloy, 7 ⅜ x 10 ½ inches (2002.457a,b). 

Striding Lion, Neo-Babylonian, Mesopotamia, ca. 604 - 562 B. C., ceramic, glaze, 38 ¼ x 89 ½ inches.

Head of a roaring lion, Mesopotamia, Neo-Assyrian, ca. 9th - 8th century B. C., ivory, 3 ¾ x 3 x 2 ¾ inches (62.269.1).

Marble Statue of a lion, Greek Classical, ca. 400 - 390 B. C., marble, 31 ¼ x 63 ½ inches (09.221.3).

Statuette of a double-headed lion, Etruscan, Archaic, ca. 550-500 B. C., bronze, 2 ¼ inches high (1989.281.76).

Terracotta vase in the form of a lion. Roman, mid-Imperial, 2nd century A. D.,  11.4 cm high (74.51.1666).

Cybele on a cart drawn by lions, Roman, 2nd half of 2nd century A. D., bronze, 12 x 54 ¾ inches (97.22.24).

Guardian Lion, Cambodia or Thailand, 11-early 12th century, stone, 42 ⅞ inches high (1979.406).

Incense Burner of Amir Saif al-Dunya wa’l-Din ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi, Iran, 1181-82, bronze, 33 ½ x 32 ½ x 9 inches (51.56). 

***

And NOT at the Met, but just for the fun of it, is this unattributed photo that's been making the social media rounds lately:

I guess it's been that kind of summer!

How to Make Jersey City Even Better

By Charles Kessler

Warning: Although I have written about similar issues before, I feel I must alert readers that this post has nothing to do with art – unless, like some people (Michael Kimmelman?), you consider Urban Planning an art form. It is also about local Jersey City matters that may be of little general interest. Feel free to skip it.

I went on a brief tour of Bushwick with Eric Silverman, partner in one of the few, maybe the only, enlightened development firms in Jersey City. (Just that he wanted to explore Bushwick is proof of enlightenment in my book.) On the way there he asked me if I had any ideas to make Jersey City better, and I mentioned a few. Since I think they were such clever ideas (none of which originated with me), and I have this blog as a soap box, I thought I'd present them. But first some background for those unfamiliar with Jersey City.

Google Earth view of Downtown Jersey City seen from from the Hudson River, overlooking the new high-rise development along the waterfront and the low-rise Historic District further inland.

People often confuse Jersey City with Hoboken, its tiny (population just over 50,000) northern neighbor. But Jersey City is the second largest city in New Jersey with a population of more than 250,000 and growing (slightly less than Newark's 277,000). Jersey City is across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan (5 minutes on the PATH train to the World Trade Center, 10 minutes to the Village) and it's overshadowed by it, like Brooklyn used to be.

Washington Street, Historic Downtown Jersey City.

I'll mainly be writing about a small part of Jersey City, the Historic Downtown where my wife and I have lived for 31 years. The building stock here is primarily 19th-century one-to-four-story brick row-houses (inaccurately known as brownstones). Lately the Downtown has become affluent, hip and popular. (Who coulda knowd?)

Sussex Street in Jersey City

Fortunately, at least for now, it's still diverse (the second most diverse city in the country according to a Brown University study), and pedestrian friendly (we don't even own a car). Jersey City has suffered through corrupt and (even worse in terms of the impact on the city) stupid and arrogant political administrations, but there seems to be some hope for the future in that respect.

Newark Avenue:
Newark Avenue is one of the main shopping streets in Jersey City. It cuts diagonally through the city, and in the Downtown section, many streets intersect it at an acute angle making the intersections too wide to cross comfortably. These intersections (see example below) are also dangerous since cars don't need to slow down to turn onto Newark Avenue. Here's one solution that not only makes it safer for pedestrians, but also creates a space where it's possible to have a small green space or plaza:

Columbus Drive: 
Columbus Drive cuts through the middle of the Historic District, but it's too wide and too fast to comfortably cross (and the walk signal intervals at the intersection of Grove Street are confusing – but that's another matter).

Columbus Drive looking west. I hope you appreciate the risk I took to take this photo for you!

A median strip to slow traffic and narrow the street would be an improvement, but better would be a barrier strip and perpendicular parking (the barrier strip would make it safer to back out of a parking space). Like this:

Adapted from Traffic Calming: State of the Practice, Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE).  

The larger stores on the south side of Newark Avenue extend all the way through to Columbus Drive, but at present most only have their loading docks on Columbus Drive making for an ugly and dull street. (Historically a railroad literally ran down the middle of Columbus Drive – it was still called Railroad Avenue when we first moved here – so it was never attractive to pedestrians or retail activity.) Perhaps the extra street parking and calmer traffic might encourage some of the retailers to open entrances on the street.

Another way to get more retail on Columbus Drive would be to divide the large spaces into two smaller stores, with one having its entrance on Newark Avenue and the other on Columbus Drive. Columbus Drive would get some activity, and owners should like it because smaller stores usually pay more per square foot.

AND, since these stores tend to be relatively wide, have high ceilings and few columns, they would make excellent black box theaters and/or entertainment venues for small theaters, dance companies like Nimbus Dance Works, and entertainment venues like Maxwell’s. Especially suitable are the one-story buildings which might be easy to shore up and remove all the columns.

As long as the entrances to the theaters/entertainment venues are on Columbus Drive, it's unlikely they would be a nuisance to the residents, especially since they are only a block or two from the PATH train, so parking in residential areas shouldn't be an issue. (The city might consider putting limits on the total number of bars allowed in the area to prevent an obnoxious bar scene like Hoboken or the Lower East Side.)

Luis Muñoz Marin Boulevard:
Marin Boulevard, because it also is too wide and too fast (it's a main route to the Holland Tunnel), is a barrier between the Historic Downtown and the new high-rise corporations and luxury residential buildings recently built along the waterfront. The Powerhouse Arts District (PAD) was supposed to induce people living along the isolated waterfront to come out of their apartments and into the Historic Downtown, but sadly the PAD is not going to happen now, so something else needs to be done.

Narrowing Marin to two lanes by adding a median strip and perhaps allowing parking (which actually makes pedestrians feel safer since cars provide a safety barrier) would slow traffic and make it easier and more pleasant to cross. (I can hear commuters, most from outside the area BTW, complaining that it would slow traffic all right – to a crawl. But that's not necessarily a bad thing since it would encourage commuters to stay on the highway to get to the tunnel, and not use the Downtown as a shortcut.)

East of Luis Muñoz Marin Boulevard:
Many of the older high-rise buildings on the east side of Marin Boulevard (the other side of Marin from the Historic District) were built at a time when it was fashionable to build "towers in a park" – tall buildings surrounded by land and surface parking lots. This makes for ugly, boring streets, and unpleasant places to walk.

Google Earth view of Downtown Jersey City showing part of the Historic District on the left, and the surface parking lots of the high-rise district on the right. 

Better would be to build parking structures (if parking absolutely must be replaced) on this valuable land, and surround the parking structures with retail on the ground floor, and maybe even construct more residential on top of the parking structures.

Design Center and Incubator:
While a lot of artists left Jersey City after the 111 First Street fiasco, there are still many designers living here. This facility would give them a venue and perhaps make Jersey City known as a center for design. The facility could provide common equipment and spaces for designing, and possibly also for fabricating their designs. Showrooms and retail spaces open to the public to promote and sell their designs could also be a part of it.  This center could be Downtown, but it might be even more beneficial for Journal Square.

Next post: back to art!

EXPO 1 at PS1

By Charles Kessler

Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1, with his assistant, Margaret Knowles.

Last Thursday I got to go on a tour of PS1's contribution to the multi-venue exhibition, EXPO 1 (until September 2nd) – check here for the other venues. The tour was lead by the curator of the PS1 exhibition, the brilliant director of MoMA PS1, Klaus Biesenbach. To quote from the exhibition website, the show is "an exploration of ecological challenges in the context of the economic and sociopolitical instability of the early 21st century." Biesenbach mentioned in passing that he was concerned such a show could be embarrassing, but he felt that after hurricane Sandy it was important to do. And, as expected in a show as didactic as this, some of the work is indeed heavy-handed and triggered my "oh please" reaction.

Pawel Althamer and Pawel Buchholz, Marcin Leszczynski, Michal Mioduszewski, Slawomir Mocarski, Julia Matea Petelska, Jedrzei Rogozinski, Brodno People, 2010, mixed media and sound, 99 x 236 x 65 inches (© MOMA PS1; Photo: Matthew Septimus).

Fortunately most of the art isn't silly. There's this subtle work by Charles Ray:

Charles Ray, Hand Holding Egg, 2007, porcelain (Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Galler).

And this tense video of a wolf and a deer confined in the same room:

Mircea Cantor, Deeparture, 2005. 16mm film transferred to video, 2:43 minutes looped (Museum of Modern Art). 

And most of all, a powerful, breathtaking/heartbreaking monumental work by Adrián Villar Rojas (whom I wrote about before here) that PS1 commissioned to be used as a lecture room for the exhibition's EXPO school.

It's sort of like a science fiction Greek amphitheater made of clay which, as it dries, will crumble and eventually fall apart. It's already cracking.

Installation view, Adrián Villar Rojas, La Inocencia de los Animales, 2013, MoMA PS1. 

Installation view, Adrián Villar Rojas, La Inocencia de los Animales, 2013, MoMA PS1. 

There's a threatening, eerie presence about the place that's diminished when a lot of people are around, so if possible, try to view this when the amphitheater isn't being used. You can check the schedule  here.

"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" In Detail

The Bonovitz Collection of Outsider Art at the Philadelphia Museum

Bill Traylor, 1943 (collection of Judy A. Saslow).

By Charles Kessler

You missed your chance to see this heartwarming exhibition – it closed June 9th. But don't fret. Although Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz have been complaining that museums don't exhibit outsider art, lucky for you the Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the few museums that does. As a result, some of the work that was in this exhibition – one of the most enthralling I've seen in years – will always be on view. The informative exhibition website is still active, and here's a link to excellent reproductions of almost everything in the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection. Best of all, a beautifully illustrated hardcover exhibition catalog with excellent essays about this exhibition, and outsider art in general, is still available.

Installation view, Felipe Benito Archuleta's carved animals, Philadelphia Museum of Art. To the credit of the PMA, each artist was given the respect of having their own space, often their own room. 

There's some dispute about what outsider art is, but it's safe to say that it's art made by people who are not connected to the fine art world. Outsider artists have no traditional art training (although for some reason, trained artists who become schizophrenic are sometimes considered outsider artists). And outsider artists are not engaged with the business side of the fine arts, at least when they first begin making art. 

To be clear, outsider artists are self-taught, not untaught. Nor are they anti-social – they are isolated from the fine art tradition not by choice, but by poverty, racism, geography or some other reason beyond their control. The artists in this exhibition were driven to work hard, they were prolific, and they got better at what they did. Most of them enjoyed showing their work and were pleased when they got a positive response.  

Most outsider artists that we know about began making art late in life, when they were too old to work. They were usually motivated to create art by some inner compulsion or a sign from God. Most didn't see themselves as artists or their work as art, but rather their work served some functional objective like spreading the gospel, curing illness, or documenting some current or historic event. A great deal of outsider art is inspired by popular culture, but it's stylistically very varied.

Many art professionals say that some outsider art is among the best art made in our lifetimes. I agree. And this isn't a trendy new view. Via Lynne Cooke's essay in the exhibition catalog, I learned in 1942 the legendary Alfred Barr wrote:

Just as [Henri] Rousseau now seems one of the foremost French painters of his generation, certain of our self-taught painters can hold their own in the company of their best professionally trained compatriots. [From They Taught Themselves, one of the first books on outsider art.]

Here are some of my favorite artists in the exhibition:

Felipe Benito Archuleta, born Santa Cruz, New Mexico, 1910; died Tesuque, New Mexico, 1991.

Felipe Benito Archuleta, Mule, 1975, wood, paint, sisal, sawdust and glue, 51 ¼ x 70 x 15 ½ inches (PMA, BST-68).

When he was fifty-five, Archuleta received a vision from God that he should make wood carvings, but he said he didn’t feel worthy enough to make religious art like Santos, so, using traditional Santos carving techniques, he carved animals instead.

I find it interesting that eventually Archuleta was engaged enough in the art world that he was encouraged by collectors and dealers to make larger animals. They even encouraged him to make some exotic animals like the lynx below. Unlike the earlier work of animals he saw everyday, for these he needed to refer to magazines like National Geographic. This "insider" influence didn't seem to effect the quality of his work.

Felipe Benito Archuleta, Lynx, 1977, cottonwood, paint, sisal, sawdust and glue, 37x15x29 inches (PMA, BST-67).

In spite of the stiffness and simplification of his animals, they have a disconcerting aliveness about them, as if they are real animals inside a wooden animal costume. Perhaps it has something to do with Archuleta carefully choosing logs appropriate for carving his animals, like Michelangelo did with marble.

Emery Blagdon, born Callaway, Nebraska, 1907; died Callaway, 1986.

Emery Blagdon inside his Healing Machine, 1979 (Photo copyright Sally and Richard Greenhill).

When his mother and father died of cancer, Blangdon started to construct hundreds of sculptures (more than 600 – he called them "pretties") that, according to him, channeled the electromagnetic energy of the earth and healed anyone who came into the shed where they were installed. Blangdon may have been on to something – even though he too died of cancer, he lived to be almost eighty, much older than his parents.

Installation view of Emery Blagdon's machines for healing the sick.

Blagdon's "healing machine" was made up of wire, scrap metal, beads, aluminum foil – whatever was around, and the whole thing was lit by Christmas lights. Entering the shed must have been quite an experience. Unfortunately, separating out just three of his sculptures from their context saps the magical impact they must have had. In this case, photos of Blagdon's "healing machine" may give you a better idea of what it must have been like.

Emery Blagdon inside his Healing Machine, 1979 (Photo copyright Sally and Richard Greenhill).

James Castle, born Garden Valley, Idaho, 1899; died Boise, Idaho, 1977.

James Castle, Gray Bowl, n.d., dark gray paper (from a Sears shopping bag) tied with cotton string; green wax crayon,
3 ¼ x 7 ¾ inches (PMA, BST-15).

James Castle was born deaf and had no language. He wasn't able to work on the farm like his brothers and sisters, so he spent his time making art from things he salvaged in his everyday life – things such as flattened food cartons and cigarette packs, packaging of all types, shopping bags and envelopes; and he made his ink from soot. He produced an enormous amount of work which he carefully stored in his house. He was particularly fascinated with making books and invented his own secret code of symbolic pictographs.

James Castle, Abstract Construction, n.d., cardboard, string, wiped soot wash, 8 x 6 inches (PMA, BST-11).

I find the exquisite sensitivity of the work and meticulous care he took with it very touching. They remind me of Tantra Paintings in that respect.

Sam Doyle, born St. Helena Island, South Carolina, 1906; died Beaufort, South Carolina, 1985.

Sam Doyle in his yard, c.1983 (photo by Roger Manley).

Sam Doyle dabbled in art his whole life, but in his early sixties he decided he needed to document significant people and events in his Gullah island community, and important African Americans in general, and he went at it with great intensity. In the tradition of African American yard art, these were displayed in his yard – what he called "The St. Helena Out Door Gallery."

Sam Doyle, Dr. Boles Hi Blood, c.1985, reused corrugated and galvanized iron sheet and paint,  26 x 34 1/2  inches
(PMA,  BST-168).

What I believe to be his best painting, Dr. Boles Hi Blood, c.1985, is inexplicably missing from the PMA website, but fortunately I took a pretty good photo of it. I have no idea what's going on in the painting – perhaps it illustrates a Gullah spirit myth or a medical procedure. But the physicality of the work, the aggressive colors, the bold placement of the figures, the reduction down to bare essentials, and of course the lurid subject, result in an astoundingly powerful and dramatic work. 

Martín Ramírez, born Rincón de Velázquez, Mexico, 1895; died Auburn, California, 1963.

Martin Ramírez, Verticle Tunnel with Cars, wax crayon, graphite, water-based paint on papers, 58 x 23 ¾ inches
(PMA, BST-43).

Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1931, Ramírez was committed to a mental hospital where fortunately they encouraged his drawing. Like many of the other outsider artists, he preferred to draw on found papers pasted together from smaller sheets. His subjects are mostly cars or trains entering or leaving a tunnel, Madonnas, horses and riders, and landscapes, and sometimes he would include images from magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.

Martin Ramírez, Train, Cars, Tunnels, and Windows, 1953, graphite, wax crayon, water-based paint and ink on paper,
23 ¾ x 90 inches (PMA, BST-40).

In 1968, Jim Nutt, one of the Chicago "Hairy Who" artist, discovered Ramírez's work and told Chicago art dealer Phyllis Kind about it. Together they bought hundreds of his drawings, and she exhibited them in her gallery as early as 1973. As a result, Ramírez (along with Traylor, below) is probably the most well-known of these outsider artists, and he became an important influence on the Chicago art scene in the 1970s.

Bill Traylor, born near Benton, Alabama, c. 1853; died Montgomery, Alabama, 1949.

Bill Traylor, Runaway Goat Cart, c. 1939-42, opaque watercolor and graphite on cream card,
14 x 22 inches (PMA, BST-52).

Bill Traylor was born a slave on a plantation and remained on the land as a farmhand for most of his life. In his mid-seventies, when he could no longer farm, he moved to Montgomery where he became essentially homeless. In his mid-eighties, stimulated by the teeming street life and its raucous characters, he suddenly began to make drawings of animals, household objects, and what he called "exciting events." He produced an astounding 1200 drawings in four years. One interesting note: the young artist Charles Shannon tried promoting Traylor's work and occasionally bought him art supplies, but Traylor preferred to work on the rough, irregularly-shaped cardboard he found.

Bill Traylor, Men Drinking, Boys Tormenting, Dogs Barking, c. 1939-42, opaque watercolor on card with dark gray prepared surface, 14 ¼ x 21 ¾ inches (PMA, BST-48).

He was a master story-teller, getting down to the bare essentials of his subjects and animating his zany vignettes in a direct and visceral way.

***

The breathtaking quality of the work in this exhibition gives pause. How can such great art be made without art training? Are art schools useless or, worse, can they be harmful?  Can art training extinguish the drive to express oneself and substitute instead a necessity to make work that's tired, super-refined and empty, the way the Academy did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? I suppose it depends. Some people some time do well in some art schools; others are destroyed by them. Some people are helped by schooling; others are gifted enough to not need it. 

Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes

By Charles Kessler

In the last few weeks I saw two great shows that sadly will not be traveling to New York or anywhere else. Unfortunately, one closed last week (you were warned): Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; but the other, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929: When Art Danced with Music at the National Gallery in Washington, you can see until September 2nd. I'll report on the Diaghilev show now because there's obviously no rush on the Outsider Art show.

Serge Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky, Spain, 1921. (Photo: Victoria & Albert Museum, London.)

A case can be made that the great Russian ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) has had a longer-lasting influence than Picasso. Cubism isn't a factor in the art world any more, and neither is its progeny, Greenbergian reduction of each art form to its innate essence. But, for better or worse, Diaghilev's multi-media, collaborative approach prevails more than ever in today's art world, particularly with performance, conceptual and installation art.

And no one has ever been as great at discovering, choosing and guiding collaborators as Diaghilev: Picasso, Matisse, de Chirico and Leon Bakst all made sets and costumes for his dances; Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Satie wrote scores; and his choreographers were among the greatest ever – Mikhail Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and George Balanchine.

Dancers from the Ballets Russes in costume for the first ever production of The Rite of Spring in 1913. Choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky, score by Igor Stravinsky. (From the Guardian.)

While he produced unorthodox dances in Paris earlier (The Firebird in 1910 and Petrushka in 1911 – both with a score by the young Igor Stravinsky), Diaghilev's real revolution in dance began in Paris in 1913 with his Rite of Spring, a dance that combined dissonant, rhythmically complicated music by Stravinsky; colorful, exotic stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich; and strange, jerky, jumping up and down choreography by the greatest dancer of his time, Vaslav Nijinski – movement so radically different from the prevailing tutu/toe-shoe ballet that people were scandalized and, feeling insulted, actually rioted. Rupert Christiansen in the London Telegraph describes the impact well when he writes: For a generation struggling under the inherited weight of Victorian mahogany and gilt, the sensuality, brilliance and physicality of the Ballets Russes was seen as a liberation, always sensational and often scandalous, suggesting a new code of erotic possibilities (with Nijinsky’s bisexual appeal at its heart) and establishing the avant-garde as exuberantly glamorous rather than seedily bohemian.

Here is a video of the Joffrey Ballet 1989 Rite of Spring. Imagine what it was like 100 years ago.

(To put in a plug for the under-recognized Isadora Duncan as a precursor, Diaghilev saw her dance in St. Petersburg in 1902 and was impressed by her natural, fluid movements – so different from the moribund imperial court ballet of the time.)

The exhibition at the National Gallery (adapted from the original 2010 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum) is impressively inclusive, containing 130 original costumes,

Henri Matisse, costume for a mourner from The Song of the Nightingale, 1920. Wool felt and velvet. (Photos: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.)

Costume for the Buffoon in Larionov and Slavinsky's ballet Chout, designed by Mikhail Larionov, Diaghilev Ballet, 1921.

Pablo Picasso, costume for the Chinese Conjuror from Parade, c. 1917; and Sonia Delaunay, costume for title role from Cleopatra, 1918.

many original and replicas of the stage sets, and also paintings, sculptures and archival photographs. (The NGA provides an invaluable free "digital companion" to the exhibition here.)

The installations are marvels of color, animation and invention, but unfortunately the NGA doesn't allow photographing the exhibition and I couldn't find anything on the web; but I did manage to sneak a photo (below) that somewhat captures what the installations are like.

Surreptitious photo of the installation of Mikhail Larionov's costumes for the ballet Buffoons Wife (Chout) from The Tale of the Buffoon, 1921, music by Sergei Prokofiev. 

Installing Picasso's front cloth for The Blue Train, 1924 (with a story by Jean Cocteau and costumes by Coco Chanel). 

As exciting as the costumes and sets are, I found them kind of static. For a better understanding of how everything worked together, the NGA provides film clips of many of the dances, most of them shown in their theatrical context.

Don't miss this enchanting exhibition.