À mon chevet: Adriatic

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Great art should affect you physically, it should "tune us like instruments," because painting is an intensification rather than a distortion of the material world. "We must look and look and look till we live the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it," writes Bernard Berenson. "A good rough test is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life." Berenson, in yet another battered, age-old paperback I own, called this "the aesthetic moment," which is "that flitting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art," so that he "ceases to be his ordinary self."

I feel this with Byzantine art: an art that Berenson called, in order to be exact, "medieval Hellenistic art," that is, a remnant of ancient Greece. To him, this art is "precious refulgent, monotonous," and ends around 1200 "as a gorgeous mummy case." I don't mind the monotony, and yes, there is the touch of beauty-in-death about it. But Byzantine art to me, exactly as Berenson suggests, has always been classical, in the sense that it evokes its forebears in ancient Greece. Thus, it is a fusion of East and West, and what the Adriatic is all about -- a guidepost in my journey. I keep Berenson's thoughts in mind as I enter San Vitale.

-- Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic, p. 46

This new book came to my attention because of a review written by Prof. Thomas F. Madden for the New York Times this spring. Kaplan is a journalist who synthesizes enormous amounts of poetry, literature, history, and academic writing in a gripping narrative, as he travels from place to place around the Adriatic Sea. In search of what he calls, in his subtitle, "A concert of civilizations at the end of the Modern Age," he begins his examination of the relationship of East and West on the Italian side of that body of water, in Rimini and Ravenna, moving to the Balkans and down to Greece. According to Prof. Madden, who not coincidentally has written a new history of Venice, Kaplan errs only in glossing over La Serenissima as a focal point.

Kaplan actually makes a sort of circular journey, noting that his interest in Rimini, where the book begins, goes back to a much earlier visit to Mistra, a ruined medieval city in southern Greece, a connection to his final destination, the Greek island of Corfu. In Mistra he became interested in Georgios Gemistos Plethon, the neoplatonist scholar who visited Florence in 1439, sparking an interest in Plato and the Greek language in Cosimo de' Medici, and thus helping to light the fire of the Renaissance.

During a visit to the home of a fellow writer, Kaplan learns that Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the rather infamous condottiere and patron of the arts, stole the remains of this great humanist figure during his occupation of Mistra. Malatesta took the scholar's body back to Rimini to be buried near the Tempio Malatestiano built with his money by Leon Battista Alberti. This Malatesta is descended from the family of Paolo Malatesta, condemned with his lover, Francesca da Rimini, to the second circle of Dante's Inferno, and thus within the first few pages the book captured my attention.

Cool Summer Suggestions

Summer is upon us in western New England, and baby, it's hot out there! The first thing that comes to my mind is a nice nude swim to cool off. On second thought, Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes From the Prado is on view in the Clark Art Institute's beautiful new air-conditioned wing (through October 9).

Twenty-eight luscious, sensuous old master canvases by the likes of Velazquez, Titian, Tintoretto, and the lover of luscious flesh himself, Rubens. Collected by the Spanish royals during the early 17th century, these risque paintings were kept in private salons, "salas reservadas," where they could be secretly viewed. Eventually the work ended up in the Prado's collection around 1830. Several of the paintings are traveling to the U.S. for the first time.

Over at Mass MoCA, where there are always several changing exhibits, Richard Nonas takes over Building 5. This big hall can easily overpower, but Nonas's meditative sculptural work turns this massive industrial space into a Zen-like garden. Another exhibit, The Space Between, sets seven artists loose around the campus, using a variety of media, both inside and out, to investigate ways to actively inhabit this state of “just passing through.” It's the kind of installation art that MassMoCA is perfect for.

In Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish and co-curator, Columbus, Ohio-based artist Sean Foley, enlist 23 artists to consider what the writer Ray Bradbury often spoke of, the need to retain a sense of wonder: you remain invested in your inner child by exploding every day. You don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about the past — you just explode.



The Hall Art Foundation has a satellite program on the Mass MoCA campus, in the spotlessly renovated Building 15, filled with the work of Anselm Kiefer. Included in this on-going exhibition are Étroits sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow are the Vessels), an 82-foot long, undulating wave-like sculpture made of cast concrete, exposed rebar, and lead; The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Revolution, 1992), comprised of more than twenty lead beds with photographs and wall text; Velimir Chlebnikov (2004), a steel pavilion containing 30 paintings dealing with nautical warfare and inspired by the quixotic theories of the Russian mathematical experimentalist Velimir Chlebnikov; and a new, large-format photograph on lead created by the artist for the installation at MASS MoCA.

Something About Summer is the title of an exhibit by Yours Truly, which opened on June 16 at the Bennington Museum, in Bennington, Vermont. Guaranteed to cool you off or drive you in search of a cold drink.

New Paleolithic Sculpture Discovered

The prehistoric era is a period of art history where major discoveries remain to be made. A paleolithic sculpture has turned up in the cave of Foissac, carved from a large bovine bone and, somewhat unusually, with designs engraved upon it. Marie-Amélie Blin has a report (Une statuette découverte dans la grotte de Foissac, July 5) for Le Figaro (my translation):

The underground waters of the cave of Foissac (Aveyron) have just brought up to the surface a new prehistoric treasure: a statue carved with a flint tool into a bone of a bison or auroch. Found last month during winter work and authenticated by an expert from La Direction régionale des affaires culturelles (Drac), it was apparently made 20,000 years ago. The opening of the Foissac cave had remained sealed for five millennia following a landslide. It was reopened in 1959, after a team of scouts discovered it by chance. Since then the site has continued to reveal bit by bit its prehistoric treasures, buried in its waters and underground caverns.

The statuette that has just been discovered is particularly striking. It represents a human being, although paleolithic artists generally preferred to sculpt and draw animals. It is a piece of portable art, such as one finds rarely in caves. And it has come to us in a state of perfect preservation, despite being submerged in water and having survived thousands of years.

The cave is closed to the public from October to June. Sébastien du Fayet de La Tour, who made the discovery, explained how it happened: "During this period the rising river washes the soil, deposing silt, and it is not uncommon to find bone shards flushed out of the cavities, which we pick up in the summer. I was not surprised to find this year something that looked like a large bovine bone, covered with mud. After washing it, I saw that it was incised. Not just with one or two large incisions, but hundreds that form eyes, a mouth, a nose, hair -- it was then I realized I was holding a real statuette in my hands." The researchers, having learned the lessons of disastrous conservation attempts of the past, are keeping the object in the cave, in conditions as much as possible identical to those in which it has survived so perfectly this far.

Without any other historical sources, analysis of prehistoric art has to be made primarily, almost exclusively, on visual evidence. Du Fayet de La Tour identifies other marks that may be interpreted as tattoos or scarification on the cheeks; the figure appears female and the arms are carrying something, perhaps a child, a fetus, or an animal ("in the manner of a Virgin and Child," he says); one part has been polished with an unknown tool. A three-dimensional scan may allow researchers to understand more completely what the artist may have intended to depict. This will be a great way to open the prehistoric unit of my A.P. Art History class this fall.

Christo's 'Floating Piers'

As his first solo work after the death of his wife, Jeanne-Claude, Christo has installed The Floating Piers, a floating dock covered with yellow fabric in Lake Iseo, which is about 100 kilometers east of Milan. As Wired reports, it is something of an engineering marvel. Through July 3, visitors can view it from the mountains surrounding the lake, and they can walk on the work from Sulzano to Monte Isola and to the island of San Paolo. In less than a week since its opening, the work has received 275,000 visitors, which is causing some concern about the stability of the floating material, as Philippe Ridet reports (On se bouscule (trop) sur les pontons de Christo, June 23) for Le Monde (my translation):

The expectation of 500,000 visitors through July 3, when the work will be taken down, will be easily surpassed. As a result, the pontoons -- 200,000 polyethylene cubes held together by 200,000 giant screws -- are wearing down much faster than Christo had thought, even if they are limited to supporting no more than 11,000 people at the same time. The security of people walking on them is maintained by 150 people on the passwalks at all times, as well as 30 master swimmers floating in the water. [...]

Access to the work will now be closed to the public from midnight until 6 am, to allow the little villages serving as departure and arrival points for the piers to clean up after the hordes of visitors, as well as to reset and rearrange the pontoons.

The surrounding areas are also feeling the effects of the success of the art work with visitors. The town of Brescia, from which the trains to Sulzana depart, saw a pile-up of 3,000 people on Wednesday because there were not enough train cars to move them. Some 400 of these stranded people took ill due to the extreme heat that has settled over northern Italy. The regional prefect has decided to halt train service to limit the crowding around the lake.

18th-Century Fakes Uncovered

Le Figaro has knocked the arts and antiquities world for a loop by uncovering a "vast scandal" involving the sale of fake objects to museums and collectors. Last week two experts, Laurent Kraemer and Bill Pallot, were put under investigation. This week, it was Parisian collector Guillaume Dillée, arrested for his alleged role in passing off fakes as 18th-century furniture in a sale to the Château de Versailles reportedly worth 2.7 million euro. Valérie Sasportas reported the news (Scandale des antiquaires: un troisième grand expert mis en examen, June 18) for Le Figaro (my translation):

Contacted by telephone, Guillaume Dillée has not yet responded. But this news should resound like a new thunder bolt, because the man is a reference point. The representative of the third generation of a dynasty of historical furniture and art experts working at Drouot since the 1920s. On March 18, 2015, Sotheby's auctioned off the family's collection of furniture and art objects from the 18th century for 10.2 million euros. An amazing success for the expert, who had left three months earlier to relocate in Melbourne.

The danger of having an expert in historical art involved in such counterfeiting is that some of the fake objects were of such high quality that they had even been classified as "national treasures."

Royal Family Memorabilia

Descendants of Louis-Philippe, the last king of France, are selling a trove of over two hundred objects that belonged to their family, raising fears that relics of France's history will leave France. An article by Baudouin Eschapasse (Patrimoine : le trésor de la couronne de France dispersé, September 29) for Le Point has the details (my translation):

The eleven heirs of the Count and Countess of Paris, descendants of Louis-Philippe (1773-1850), the last king of France, are letting go of furniture, paintings, and other family jewels during an exceptional sale on September 29 and 30. In the catalog, works signed by major artists of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Such as gouaches by the painter-decorator Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle; or Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié, royal portraitist, who affords an intimate glimpse of the French royal family. One of these canvases, depicting the Duke of Valois in his cradle [shown at right], the future Louis-Philippe, is particularly moving.

The French Minister of Culture could oppose the sale of only three works (out of almost 250), which are not allowed to leave France: that includes the account book of the Château d'Amboise, portraits of Louis XIII by Philippe de Champaigne, and the portrait of the Duchesse d'Orléans by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The government reportedly purchased these three items, secretly, a few days ago.

Fragonard Still Naughty

The Musée du Luxembourg in Paris is opening an exhibit on Fragonard tomorrow called Fragonard amoureux, galant et libertin. An article by Frédéric Lewino (Visitez avant tout le monde l'exposition libertine de Fragonard, September 15) for Le Point has a video that includes many of the paintings in the show (my translation):

A worthy son of his century (the licentious 18th), "Le divin Frago" loved to depict country affairs with a saucy brush, inspired by the poissarde (lower class) literary genre. According to one witness, the artist supposedly declared, in typical southern eloquence, "I will paint with my ass."

In addition to his famous "intrigue paintings," Fragonard made illustrations for erotic stories, including the Contes by Jean de la Fontaine, tales that take quite a different tone from that author's celebrated fables. The exhibit brings together sixty-three works and remains open to the public through January 24.

Quirinale Boxer *NOT* Coming to Washington

We are looking forward to an exhibition, Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, currently at the Getty in Los Angeles, which will come to the National Gallery of Art in December. Ingrid D. Rowland has a beautiful consideration of this show and others (The Grandest Art of the Ancients, August 13) for The New York Review of Books:

The other statue, from the third century BC, a life-sized seated boxer, could not have been more poignantly human. Lanciani photographed him sitting on the ground, watching over the excavation, looking more like a companion or mascot for the workers than a masterpiece of ancient sculpture.

The boxer came to rest this summer at the center of an exhibition in Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, where he has been set so close to the ground that we can look directly into his face, and see what Lanciani’s workmen saw in 1885: the scars of survival. This man, too, has a heroic, muscular body, but his hands are swollen beneath the protective leather straps and leather padding that Greek boxers used for official matches (they practiced with gloves), and his face has been brutally battered.

The broken nose and cauliflower ears suggest a long series of previous fights, but the sculptor also makes it clear that the latest bout has finished only a moment ago by using a chisel to jab new cuts into the skin of the boxer’s face, uppermost ear, and arms. A purple patch of bronze appliqué creates the rising bruise on his cheekbone. Copper alloy suggests the red of fresh blood, oozing from a cut on his ear and splashed on his thigh as he turns his injured head to look upward, meeting our eyes head on.

There is nothing quite being able to look at a statue like this up close, as anyone who went to see The Dying Gaul at the National Gallery of Art a couple of years ago recalls. Famous works in the show (.PDF file) are the Aulus Metellus orator statue, known as the Arringatore in Italy, the Minerva of Arezzo, and the Piombino Apollo.

SVILUPPO:
Sadly, the NGA Press Office has informed me that the Quirinale Boxer is not among the bronze works coming to Washington this year.

Stunning Composition: Whistler at the Clark

As you cross through the roundabout in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and bear right onto South Street, you will notice a long line of cars parked along the roadside. They stretch all the way to the Clark Art Institute, including every available parking space on the Clark campus. Parking space is at a rare premium these days.

This is what it’s like to be so popular. Not only does the Clark have a stunning new Tadao Ando addition, but Van Gogh is also in town, through the 13th of September, proving once again to be a massive draw. Vincent is great, of course, and there are some stunners in the exhibit. But instead I suggest heading right up to the Lunder Center at Stone Hill to visit one of the grandes dames of American painting: Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother), popularly known as Whistler’s Mother. There’s plenty of parking, too.

On loan from the Musée d'Orsay, this beautiful yet dour lady fills the small entry gallery, and the dim lighting gives her a mysterious presence. I've seen this painting several times in Paris, but this time it was different. Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler has never looked better. Her black figure is solidly seated, feet resting squarely on a raised cushion. She holds her own against the sharp black edges of the framed pictures on the wall behind her. We’re supposed to keep our focus interior, but the dancing patterns on the drapery entice your eyes and allude to something more.

Anna is a stoic woman in her mourning dress, but the artist has softened her. The delicate handkerchief in her sturdy hands and the feathery lace of her cap that enshrines her face gently drapes to her breast. There is a similar quality to the paint that is also in the curtain. She is forever bound by that grey wall and the structure of the sharp black frames. But those amazing subtle brush strokes add a complexity to Anna Whistler, as her son lovingly depicts.

For Your Consideration: 'Dark Star: HR Gigers Welt'

Anyone who watched Ridley Scott's space horror film Alien will remember being creeped out by the world it evoked: a hideous alien species that was part organic, part mechanical. Disturbingly insectoid and humanoid, it uses us as its host. The outline of the story and the concept of the alien as interstellar parasite were the work of screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, but the way it looked was largely the work of Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger. This new documentary, directed by newcomer Belinda Sallin, examines the details of Giger's world, including extensive interviews with the artist, his friends and family, coworkers, and visits to his current home in Zurich and childhood vacation home in the mountains, plus some footage from earlier films about Giger.

Sallin shot the film over two years, concluding only a short time before Giger's death in 2014. The revelations that come directly from Giger's mouth are few, and one must instead be contented by oblique views into his mind. At one point, he shows the camera the oldest skull in his collection of skulls, which his father, a pharmacist, gave to him. In another memorable description, we learn that Giger, as a child, was frightened by an Egyptian mummy in a local museum, so he went to see it at least once a week. The filmmaker shows a museum staff member wheeling out the actual mummy, lifting the glass box around it, and drawing back the wrappings from its face: we actually get much closer to the time-encrusted body, its face still recognizable, than Giger ever did.

Other Reviews: New York Times | Los Angeles Times | Washington Post Philadelphia Inquirer | A.V.Club | Hollywood Reporter

In a documentary that was something of a snoozer, that was in fact the most interesting discovery, the influence of Egyptian art and religious fascination with death on Giger's art. The famous profile of the creature in Alien, with its elongated head, may have been inspired by the Egyptian headdresses of Nefertiti and other queens. Beyond that, though, the film does not say much about Giger or his work that seems new. It is the glimpses of his inner life, innocuous as they are, that may fascinate his art and film fans: his purring Siamese cat, the horror-filled child's monorail and other installations in his backyard, the piles of moldering books in his house.

This film opens today, at Landmark's E Street Cinema.

Three Years of Cartoons about François Hollande

(Rémy Molinari)

François Hollande has been President of France for three years. Lest you think that all French cartoonists are focused on making fun of fundamentalist Muslims, Hollande has been taking it square in the face, too. In an image comparable to U.S. President Gerald Ford's falls down airplane stairs, Hollande has been indelibly associated with rain since the day of his inauguration, when he was doused in a downpour, and rain is a regular theme in the cartoons about him. Aurélia Vertaldi looks at some of the memorable ones (François Hollande: trois ans de caricatures, May 6) for Le Figaro (my translation):

Our president's marital escapades are not left out. The revelation of his liaison with the actress Julie Gayet by the gossip press would lead to the stormy separation between Hollande and Valérie Trierweiler [his conjugal partner and First Lady of France until 2014]. There is also the Marche Républicaine in January 2015, when a pigeon defecated on his shoulder. Everything is a reason for laughter.

Translation: [Angela Merkel] "It's raining, François" [Hollande] "Yes, it's raining, Angela... at least on that point we are in agreement." This cover by Luz for Charlie Hebdo, where Hollande's penis realizes it is President of France, is also a winner, as is the Les Guignols music video to the tune of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, with the refrain "Gné hé hé" in response to all of France's problems, a simple-minded laugh that sums up Hollande's public persona.

A New Home for American Art -- Whatever It May Be?

In 1908 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened the Whitney Studio Gallery on West 8th Street, where she also had her own studio, to showcase the work of her artist friends and her steadily growing collection. By the 20s the Whitney Studio Club, a salon where artists such as John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Luks among others met to discuss, exhibit their work, and drink, was incorporated into the mix.

In 1931 Whitney approached the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an offer to donate her collection of some 700 pieces of modern artworks, and they declined her offer. She then decided to create her own museum, because she could. Needing more space, in 1954 the museum moved uptown to 54th Street and then moved once again in 1966 to a new Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue.

On May 1st the Whitney Museum of American Art makes a triumphal return to its roots in the West Village. Unlike its brownstone beginnings, this time it will have 50,000 square feet of indoor exhibition space and 30,000 square feet of exterior space, with amazing views of the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline. Not only will the new Whitney have plenty of room to show off its collection, which now exceeds some 21,000 pieces, but this shiny new space could prompt a reconsideration of the matter of just what American art is. It's a wide-open question and there is a lot of competition from other museums attempting to take on what the Whitney started, by showing American artists, especially living, working artists. The Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Guggenheim, and the stately Met have made strong moves in collecting and exhibiting contemporary art, courting benefactors, and waging the all-important battle for the young audience, with their short attention spans and interactive brains. Even its new neighbors, the big-money Chelsea galleries, have been putting on some impressive museum-quality shows of late.

It's clear as the Whitney opens its new Renzo Piano-designed home in the Meatpacking District, the heart of blue-chip art land, that it's ready to take on the challenge. With its big industrial gallery spaces, soft wood flooring, and expansive exterior spaces, great things can happen here. But will it be fresh, or will it follow a depressing trend of museums showing the same artists who seem to pop up in every exhibit, art fair, and auction house?

The Whitney's inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, is a selection of over 600 works by some 400 artists, spanning the period from about 1900 to the present, all from the museum’s permanent collection, with some well-known works, but also many never shown and several newly acquired. Now for the first time curators will have plenty of room to experiment, juxtaposing the old with the new, an ongoing inter-generational discourse, that in this first exhibit shows just how relevant the old guard of the collection is.

Marsden Hartley looks as bold and beautiful as ever, and Edward Hopper has the room and light-filled space he thrives in. Jackson Pollock’s Number 27 is in the company of Willem de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle, and across the way the irascible spray paint-wielding Hedda Sterne holds her own quite well and is looking very contemporary, thank you. It's clear as history unfolds floor by floor that the myths, versus the realities, of America are not easy stories. Lynchings, war, depression, strikes, protests, and social changes are on display in rawness and beauty.

Can the Whitney re-establish itself and keep the discussion going? I think yes. But it has to be about inclusion. Art is being made all over the country, by an incredibly diverse range of artists. Can we quibble about the building's exterior design? Sure. Although I like it, as a whole the industrial structure sits well in the district, a once gritty and rough neighborhood. The question I asked was will it survive the Hudson River, should it decide to spew forth into Chelsea again? And it will, and yes, they have thought about it.

So when you visit after the new Whitney opens on May 1st, take the elevator to the 8th floor, be swooned by the two Hartley paintings as the doors open, revel in a fabulous collection that now has room to show off. Be sure to take the exterior steps as you go floor to floor, contemplate the David Smith sculpture sitting proudly on the elevated steel and concrete runways, or take a seat in one of Mary Heilmann's colorful chairs. Look around: the mighty river, the city, it's an American story continuing to unfold, inside and out.

Other Articles: Peter Schjeldahl, New York Odyssey (The New Yorker, April 27) // Don't Be Aloof (The Economist, April 25) Holland Carter, New Whitney Museum’s First Show, ‘America Is Hard to See’ (New York Times, April 23) Philip Kennicott, At the Whitney, a new structure forges a different relationship with the city (Washington Post, April 19)

Le Corbusier and Fascism

In France it has been customary to sweep the Vichy period under the rug, except when a major cultural figure's connections to that part of the past can no longer be ignored. Last month there was such a connection alleged with composer Henri Dutilleux, which was ultimately shown to have been exaggerated. Another case in the news this week is modernist architect Le Corbusier. Marion Cocquet spoke to Antoine Picon, president of La Fondation Le Corbusier about it ("Qui a peur de Le Corbusier ?", April 25) for Le Point (my translation):

Just when the Centre Pompidou is devoting a major retrospective to him, the architect is taking some hits: three books have appeared that underscore his fascist sympathies. We knew about his belief in regenerated man, healthy in body and of use to a mechanized society. Xavier de Jarcy, Marc Perelman, and François Chaslin go farther, recalling his friendship with the doctor Pierre Winter or the engineer François de Pierrefeu, eugenicists and members of fascist splinter groups in the 1930s, drawing attention to antisemitic parts of his correspondence, underscoring his conception of a hygienic war and his stay in Vichy between 1941 and 1942.

In that more fascist era, where must we place Le Corbusier?

It is clear, first of all, that he was attracted to those ideas of authoritarian planning. This is not new, and the Le Corbusier Foundation, where his correspondence has been available for more than twenty years, has never tried to hide it. Furthermore, there is evidence that Le Corbusier was flattered by the attention given to him by the fascists and thought some of their ideas were interesting. For a time, he admired Mussolini, and he went to Italy hoping for commissions. But he also repeated many times that he was not a fascist, and he was never tempted by Nazism. One is always reminded of the example of the Italian Giuseppe Terragni who designed the Casa del Fascio in Como, but we forget that the Germans wanted to raze the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, created by Mies van der Rohe! Le Corbusier represented a style of architecture that most fascists found Arabized, fraudulent, foreign...

Picon, who teaches at Harvard, adds that "if there is a reproach to be made against him, it is that he had no political sense." His belief in the superiority of his architectural ideas led him to such ill-considered alliances. At best it may be described as naive.

A Pollock in Venice

"[It's] a stampede... of every animal in the American West, cows and horses and antelopes and buffaloes. Everything is charging across that goddamn surface."
—Jackson Pollock

After eighteen months of conservation and cleaning at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, Jackson Pollock's first large-scale work, Mural, approximately 8' by 20' in size, is now on display at the Guggenheim Foundation in Venice, as part of a traveling exhibit, Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’: Energy Made Visible.

Commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim for the entrance to her New York townhouse, Mural echos the work of his early mentor Thomas Hart Benton and the Regionalist style, Native American imagery, and Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Mexican muralists. Some see it as America's response to Picasso's Guernica.

As with anything Pollock, it was not an easy commission. He signed a gallery contract with Guggenheim in July 1943. The terms were $150 a month and a settlement at the end of the year if his paintings sold. He intended to have the mural done by the time for his show in November. However, as the time approached, the canvas for the mural was untouched. Guggenheim began to pressure him. Pollock spent weeks staring at the blank canvas, complaining to friends that he was "blocked" and seeming to become both obsessed and depressed. Finally, he painted the entire canvas in one frenetic burst of energy on New Year's Day of 1944.

In 1947 Guggenheim closed her gallery and returned to Europe. She had no room for Mural in her new canal-side quarters in Venice and donated the canvas to the University of Iowa.

For Your Consideration: 'Effie Gray'

The only thing I did not like about Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, a film that should have been in the running for Best Picture this year, was its dismissive treatment of art critic John Ruskin. Now the new film Effie Gray, with a decent screenplay written by Emma Thompson (who also wrote Sense and Sensibility and the Nanny McPhee films), piles on the anti-Ruskin wagon, with a look at the unfortunate critic's failed marriage to the title character, eventually annulled because it was never consummated.

Effie Gray, directed by Richard Laxton

Ruskin's attitude towards women was, let us say, conflicted -- influenced by his views on art and by the smothering attention of his parents, played here with disturbing relish by David Suchet (known for his turns as Hercule Poirot in those Agatha Christie TV movies) and Julie Walters (Mrs. Weasley in the Harry Potter movies). Ruskin, played here with a sneer and not much else by Greg Wise -- he played John Willoughy with Thompson in Sense and Sensibility and happens to be Thompson's husband in real life -- brings his young wife back to his parents' home after their wedding and appears ready to continue just as he was before. Effie, far from having been forced into the marriage, sincerely tries to make herself fit into this family that does not seem to need her at all. Dakota Fanning, the child actor who caught a huge break in the Twilight series, makes Effie into quite a bore (with facial expressions ranging from empty to expressionless). Fanning's Effie has a spark of life only when she falls in love with her husband's protege, the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everitt Millais (the beautifully pouting Tom Sturridge). In a nice coincidence, Fanning is a dead ringer for the woman shown in Millais's famous painting of Ophelia.

Other Reviews: New York Times | Los Angeles Times | Washington Post Philadelphia Inquirer | NPR

Indeed most of the fun to be had in this rather dour film, in spite of the steady oversight of TV director Richard Laxton and fine art direction, is farther down the cast list. Thompson and James Fox have a couple of delightful scenes as Elizabeth and Charles Eastlake, who preside over the National Gallery. Speaking of women whose lives might sustain enough interest for a feature film, Thompson should perhaps cast her attention on the life of Elizabeth Eastlake, whose work as a writer, artist, and art critic herself is not even mentioned in Effie Gray. Cameo roles by Derek Jacobi and Italian actress Claudia Cardinale (Fellini's 8½) are also worth the wait.

This movie opens today at Landmark's Bethesda Row Cinema.

Modern Inroads in Versailles

Architectural innovation is difficult at Versailles, the town designed by André Le Nôtre as a backdrop for the stage-palace of Louis XIV, but some buildings in contemporary styles are gradually being built. Jean-Jacques Larrochelle notes some of the progress in an article (A Versailles, l’architecture contemporaine fait de timides percées, March 29) for Le Monde (my translation and links added):

All contemporary building in the historic city center of Versailles confronts the unthinkable. It is here that, in 1779, under the authority of the Directeur général des bâtiments du roi, the Comte d’Angiviller, was born the ancestor of the building permit. Quite a symbol. In Versailles, modernity has certain residency rights, provided it is not permanent. Since 2008, the château has presented monumental sculptures of which some have fit into the urban setting. Thus there are the large rusted steel parentheses, 22 meters tall and weighing 140 tons, placed by the artist Bernar Venet in 2011, to "give a halo to Versailles," he said, on the château's Place d'armes behind the equestrian statue of the Sun King.

These new sorts of triumphal arches were allowed to exist because their presence was temporary, although the leadership of the château, to the chagrin of a part of the populace, had once thought about their permanent installation. Quite the reverse, the concrete sculpture of sculptural architect Inessa Hansch (pictured), installed permanently in the Jardin des étangs Gobert, furnished by Michel Desvignes near the Gare des Chantiers, rapidly became a point of discord, and not only because of its cost, judged excessive at 120,000 euros.

"We are in the largest 18th-century protected zone in France. The pressure on the Architect of the Buildings of France (in charge of watching over the protection of the patrimony) is very strong," says François de Mazières, mayor of Versailles. "Make no mistake: it's a huge risk." Almost providing a case study, a few rare architectural initiatives are demonstrating that it is not a fatal one, and that the blond Saint-Leu stone, the favored medium in this town, can accommodate some neighbors of a different nature.

This past week, the city government announced that it was contracting the Agence Elisabeth et Christian de Portzamparc (AECP) to create a group of private and public buildings for students, offices, an assisted living home, and day care. No drawings of the buildings has been released, but it seems clear that the project, well away from the château, will be unusual in form. The article shows some of the existing buildings in modern styles that have been created in Versailles, without too much opposition.

For Your Consideration: 'Mr. Turner'

Mr. Turner, directed by Mike Leigh, T. Spall

Mike Leigh's latest feature, Mr. Turner, made a run for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival last May, losing out to Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep. Leigh, known for actor-centered dramas like Secrets and Lies and Another Year, could likely fill that Merchant-Ivory historical film void with pictures like Mr. Turner and the charming Topsy-Turvy from over a decade ago -- movies that take historical artistic figures and, rather than exalting them, bring them down to our level. This process does not degrade them, although I will never look at another Turner or hear Gilbert and Sullivan again quite the same way: it makes them more human. In Leigh's time-proven method, the actors use improvisation to create the dialogue and story, in this case based on extensive historical research. While certainly not history or even documentary, it is more than mere fiction.

Timothy Spall gives a momentous performance as the legendary English painter J. M. W. Turner, for which he was justly recognized at Cannes. Most familiar now, perhaps, from character-actor turns as Wormtail in the Harry Potter movies and in Enchanted, Spall explores the painter's eccentricities and character flaws in an unflinching way: refusing to speak of two daughters he fathered with Sarah Danby (the normally genial Ruth Sheen exploring her shrewish side); sexually abusing his devoted and rather hideous maidservant (Dorothy Atkinson, whom you may recall from Topsy-Turvy); sketching a nude portrait while visiting a young prostitute. As far as the film is concerned, Turner relies on two people for human warmth: his aged father, now his painting assistant, played with likable bonhomie by Paul Jesson, and Mrs. Booth, the woman who rents him a seaside room in the town of Margate on his regular visits to paint seascapes (a homespun and kindly Marion Bailey, who was also in Leigh's Vera Drake). Mrs. Booth was the companion of Turner's old age, and he often stayed with her under the name "Mr. Booth," a way to avoid the notoriety associated with his own name. Turner died in her care, when he was recorded as having uttered his last words, just as shown here, "The sun is god."

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Stunning cinematography (Leigh's regular collaborator, Dick Pope) captures the painterly glory of the places Turner visits on his painting trips. At the opening of the movie, we see Turner looking at a Dutch landscape with a windmill, sketching it in his little book, as was the artist's general way of beginning a painting. At one point there is a view of white cliffs near Margate, perhaps at Joss Bay, that is frozen, highlighted in a way that makes it look like one of Turner's paintings. At another, a transition from Turner violently applying paint to one of his more expressionistic canvases melts into a closeup of a mountainside of green grass and stony blobs of white. You think that the camera is close up on a canvas but it turns out to be real, as Turner is hiking through the mountains to a lake scene (the film was shot on location in England and Wales).



The real-life Turner locations include Petworth House in West Sussex (shown above in the film, a scene based on one of Turner's watercolors), where Turner often visited the Earl of Egremont, who became a major collector of his work. Several charming anecdotes about Turner also turn up, like a famous confrontation with Constable at one exhibit at the Royal Academy. As shown in the still at the top of this post, Turner vexed Constable, whose Opening of Waterloo Bridge was hanging next to one of his seascapes, by placing a blob of red paint on his own finished canvas. A few wipes and scrapes later, and the red blob turns out to be a buoy bobbing in the foreground surf -- as seen in Tate Britain's Helvoetsluys. Constable supposedly huffed out of the exhibit, muttering "He has been in here and fired a gun." Similar scenes show the inspiration of other famous paintings, like The Fighting Temeraire and Rain, Steam, and Speed. The conversation Turner has with Mrs. Booth's second husband, who was a carpenter on ships in the slave trade, is one of the more haunting scenes, not explicitly connected with Turner's Slave Ship but obviously an inspiration.

L. Costello, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History (Ashgate, 2012)

The only real miss in the film is the send-up of art critic John Ruskin, one of Turner's most steadfast defenders, who comes off here as a lisping, effete, bloviating nincompoop (played by Joshua McGuire, who had a similarly dweebish role on The Hour). Ruskin had his faults, to be sure, but to play him as unintelligent, pretentious about art history, and ignorant of how art is made is utterly off-base, smacking more of vengeance against some modern-day critic than anything else. To have a more serious look at the Ruskin-Turner nexus, see Leo Costello's book J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History, especially the chapter on the reception of Turner's Slave Ship, which was influenced largely by Ruskin's description and contextualization of the painting. For example, one of the figures shown drowning in the painting is bare-breasted, clearly female although with her head cut off by the bottom of the canvas, but Ruskin did not identify her as such, a detail that many subsequent viewers missed because Ruskin had.

In one memorable scene, Turner is moved by a woman at Petworth House playing Beethoven on a fortepiano. In his grunting, barely sociable way, he remarks that he enjoys the music of Purcell. The woman plays the aria "When I am laid in earth" from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and Spall's Turner sings along in a deep, gruff, and heavily accented voice. Rather than the decidedly modern original score, with its moody saxophone solos (by Gary Yershon, a theater composer who also scored Leigh's Another Year), it is a sonic moment that roots the story in its own time.

This film opens today at the E Street Cinema.

Giving Thanks for Shock Art

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers!

In case you needed any further evidence that shock art is still a thing, there are two major exhibits taking up a lot of space in the French dailies this week: a Jeff Koons retrospective, which opened at the Centre Pompidou yesterday, and Exhibit B by South African artist Brett Bailey, a performance-installation that opens today at the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe in Saint-Denis. See Koons speak about his work in this video from L'Express. Although the outcry against Bailey's "human zoo" has been widespread, France's culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, has come out in support of the exhibit, which involves black actors in tableaux vivants re-enacting scenes of colonial enslavement. In a public statement Pellerin said (my translation): "I forcefully reaffirm the fundamental principles of liberty in artistic creation and programming that are the pride of our nation." The minister is preparing to present a law on freedom of artistic creation, architecture, and patrimony to the French parliament in 2015.

Sabine Weiss, 90, on Photography

For an exhibit in honor of photographer Sabine Weiss, La Maison européenne de la Photographie asked other photographers to make a photograph inspired by one of Weiss's works. The exhibit will open on December 24, with a selection of works featured in this week's issue of Le Nouvel Observateur. The magazine's Web site has also published a video interview with Weiss, embedded below.

Things I've Seen Lately

At the turn of the last century, Louis Vuitton began his career with a novel idea, a steamer trunk for the fashionable and wealthy who were traveling the world on shiny new gilded steam ships. Vuitton covered his hand-crafted luggage with a weather-resistant wax canvas, and into the wax he embossed his signature emblem. Thus began a fashion empire and the beginning of the signature brand.

The architect Frank Gehry has created his own signature brand of building design which made him the perfect choice to design a home or, more precisely, land ship, to hold the historical collection of Louis Vuitton designs at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, in the Bois de Boulogne, in Paris.

Unfortunately for me I visited on the first day the center was opened to the public, and the line to enter was cued around the building. Nonetheless it was a beautiful fall day, perfect for strolling around the impressive, billowing sculpture. Clearly this new addition to the Paris cultural scene will be a destination point with many music, art, and performance programs going on.

Back in New York there has been an interesting phenomenon happening, the gallery as museum. Some of the best curated exhibits can now be seen in blue-chip galleries. Gagosian Gallery's West 21st Street location has a fascinating exhibit, Picasso and the Camera. Curated by Picasso scholar John Richardson, it's a pretty concise look at the influence the camera had on Picasso's work and being Picasso, his imprint on the camera. Lots of photos, some paintings I've never seen, from private collections and many drawings and preparatory sketches. The show is up through January 3rd.

On West 27th, Paul Kasmin, in partnership with the Dedalus Foundation, has a survey of Robert Motherwell works on paper. Again it is a museum-quality survey that explores Motherwell's role in blending European Surrealism with the work of the Abstract Expressionists in New York. A whole gallery of drippy, washy, splashy genius, including forty works from his Lyric Suite, an ode to Japanese Zen calligraphy.

The painter Sharon Horvath traveled to India this past year on a Fulbright-Nehru Scholarship. She was already a painter of dazzling scapes and imaginative environments, and her travels have added an interstellar dimension that she didn't previously have. I think she may have found her water-lilies. Horvath's work is up until the 8th at Lori Bookstein.

An exhibit that has created a bit of buzz and discussion was David Hockney's recent show of large inkjet prints of his iPad drawings, titled The Arrival of Spring, at Pace Gallery. Hockney has been an avid iPad user from the start. The program seems perfect for his matter-of-fact style. Spring rain in the Yorkshire countryside never looked better.