Christmas Lights by Dan Flavin

Ah, Christmas Eve in Washington, D.C., when most of those pesky temporary residents (yes, him included) are gone and few tourists darken our doorstep. I have always thought of it as a perfect morning/afternoon to visit a museum, before I get all involved in singing liturgical services for most of the evening and following day. So I bundled my almost 3-year-old son into the car and went to the National Gallery of Art, to the show I promised myself I would see before the end of the year, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective. I remember being driven around in my parents' car on Christmas Eve night, to look at Christmas lights on neighborhood houses, and I suppose that this is my own artsy variation on that theme, which I now forced on my own child.

The last couple times I have been near the gallery, or in the West Building for a concert, I have looked up at the otherworldly green light emanating from the East Building—from the atrium installation of untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection), from 1973—and thought that I must go to see this exhibit. This has only been compounded by the positive reviews of competent arts bloggers.

I was correct in my assumption that a toddler would enjoy looking at rooms full of colored neon lights. His favorite was untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) (1972–1973), an 8' x 8' wall of fluorescent bulbs, yellow on one side and green on the other. We went to see it several times, because he liked to see his hands tinted green by the rich, powerful light. However, I do advise other parents that it was indeed essential to keep my son strapped in his stroller, which kept him from touching the pretty lights or climbing on them. They are mostly displayed right at child level. The gallery does have one of its well-made brochures for kids on the Flavin exhibit (.PDF file), but my son wanted to spend most of his time looking at the sculptures and telling me and anyone else who would listen what the colors were.

I most enjoyed the works that Flavin connected with the artists who were most obviously his heroes:

• the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) (1963), which was the breakthrough work and is shown in the first room with much less satisfying early "icon" works
  
• untitled (to Henri Matisse) (1964)
  
• "monument" 1 for V. Tatlin (1964)
  
• greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) (1966)
  
• untitled (to Barnett Newman to commemorate his simple problem, red, yellow and blue) (1970)

These works are all dedicated to artists who, in spite of working with more traditional sculptural materials or even the "retrogressive" medium of paint, favored simplified lines and pure colors. Tyler is absolutely right in his criticism of the installation:

Flavin's work looks best when it is installed in galleries with reflective floors. The show's curators, Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell of the Dia Art Foundation and Jeffrey Weiss of the NGA, know this. In their beautiful catalog, every photograph of a Flavin shows it installed on wooden or concrete floors. But as a result of building logistics, the NGA has installed Flavin on speckled gray carpet. That carpet, and the overly dense installation of several galleries, hold back the show.

Those catalog images are what appear on the Web site, too, which looks so much better than the galleries themselves, which have the feel of motel corridors. That's a shame, but it did not detract too much from our enjoyment of the sculptures, particularly untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3 (1977), dedicated to a Chicago curator.

If you are in or near Washington, see Dan Flavin: A Retrospective before it closes on January 9, 2005. It will then travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas (February 25 to June 5, 2005) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (July 1 to October 30, 2005).

Chopin's Last Concert in Paris

Following on my post about the Présences Festival, there is another interesting musical event in Paris, which already took place on December 21. It was a re-enactment of Frédéric Chopin's final concert in Paris, which occurred on February 16, 1848, in the Salons Pleyel (20, rue Rochechouard, in the 9th arrondissement). That hall no longer exists, but the program was recreated in another hall where Chopin did indeed perform, the la Salle de l'Ancien Conservatoire (2 bis, rue du conservatoire, also in the 9th), which now belongs to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique. This event was was presented as part of a season of Polish music in France, Nova Polska, sponsored by the Société Chopin de Paris with the support of the Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina (Fryderyk Chopin National Institute) in Warsaw and the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris. Simon Corley was there, and his review appears on ConcertoNet.com. He is the only one to print the entire program:

• Mozart's Piano Trio no. 5, K. 542, a piece that Chopin revered
  
• Chopin's Nocturne, op. 48, no. 1; Barcarolle, op. 60; Etudes, op. 10, no. 12, and op. 25, no. 1; Berceuse, op. 57; Sonate pour violoncelle et piano, op. 65 (excerpts); Préludes, op. 28, no. 3 et 18; Mazurkas, op. 17, no. 4, and op. 24, no. 2; and Waltzes, op. 64, no. 1 and 2
  
• Vincenzo Bellini, Ariette da camera (three excerpts)
  
• Gaetano Donizetti, Le Crépuscule and Ah! Rammenta, o bella Irene
  
• Giacomo Meyerbeer, De ma première amie, La Fille de l'air, and Ballade de Raimbaut, from Robert le Diable

The performers included Maciej Pukulski (piano), Henri Demarquette (cello), Olivier Charlier (violin), soprano Olga Pasichnik, and tenor Tomasz Kuk (here are their pictures). It will be broadcast on France Musiques on January 19, 2005, at 8 pm, in France.

Marc-André Dalbavie

Pierre Boulez will celebrate his 80th birthday in the coming year, as it turns out, with the Berlin Philharmonic and Staatskapelle, at the invitation of Daniel Barenboim. Radio France had hoped Boulez would celebrate in France for its 15th annual Présences Festival. Instead, as I learned from an article (L'ombre de Boulez, December 20) by Jacques Doucelin for Le Figaro, the honoree will be Boulez's student Marc-André Dalbavie.

This is no small matter, since the program consists of 23 free concerts, during which 92 new and recent compositions will be performed, and it has been announced that 19 of those pieces will be Dalbavie's. Judging by a quick search, his music is mostly unknown and unavailable on this side of the Atlantic, since on Amazon there is one piece on one CD (two other CDs are out of print). To perform the program, including works by 56 composers (39 world premieres and 18 French premieres), several ensembles have been invited to assist the Orchestre of Radio France: the Orchestre de Montpellier, the Orchestre des lauréats du Conservatoire, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Ensembles Itinéraire, Court-circuit, and the Forma 6 percussion ensemble.

There is an interview with Dalbavie, available in English and French on the same page.

Anne Frank House to Shelter Refugee Writers

No one in the Northeastern U.S. Lit Blog Cabal has picked up on this, so I guess I should mention it. French blogger Heileen at La Muse Livre noted last Friday the plans for a former residence of Anne Frank's in Amsterdam (not the famous secret annex, now the Anne Frank Museum, in a warehouse on the Prinsengracht, where she wrote most of her diary). It will be renovated as a place to welcome persecuted writers who have to leave their home countries:

Anne Frank lived from 1933 until July 1942 in this apartment located on the Merwedeplein Square, in one of the southern neighborhoods of the Dutch capital. In homage to the the teenager who so loved to write and in coordination with the Anne Frank Foundation, the Merwedeplein apartment's new owner has decided to stored it in the 1930s style. The foundation Amsterdam City of Exile, which is part of the network that supported the writer Salman Rushdie, is associated with the project.

An article (Anne Frank Apartment to Become Home for Writers, December 17) by Paul Gallagher for Reuters was not widely carried in the United States. (The Agence France-Press report is what Heileen was quoting.) Gallagher says that Anne celebrated her 13th birthday in the Merwedeplein house,

receiving the diary which was to make her a household name. The 3-bedroom apartment, overlooking a park in a quiet suburb of the city, will be restored to its former 1930s glory. The first visiting writer will be welcomed in September 2005 and will be invited to stay a year. "It will be used by the foundation to house writers from countries where it is difficult to write freely," said Pieter de Jong from the Ymere Public Housing Cooperative, which is buying the apartment.

I'm sure that Anne would approve.

Modern Art in the Louvre

Other Articles: Le Louvre invite des artistes contemporains (France 2, December 13, with a video you can watch) Harry Bellet and Sarah Leduc, Le Louvre et Orsay, résolument contemporains (Le Monde, December 4) Harry Bellet, Un jeu de piste amusant, qui peut devenir dérangeant (Le Monde, December 4)

I did a pseudo-series of posts this summer on the practice of embedding new art within historical art, in several exhibits in Europe (go to my posts on August 13, August 30, and September 9). Well, as Marie-Guy Baron writes in a recent article (Louvre : l'entretien infini, December 10) for Le Figaro, they are doing it again, this time at the Louvre, where eleven new art works have been installed among the permanent collection in an exhibit called Contrepoint (my translation):

Everyone has his own Louvre and his own favorite works. Today's artists also have their favorites, and among them that one work that speaks the most to them today. At the Louvre's invitation, eleven contemporary artists reveal that personal exchange in the exhibit "Contrepoint." Beyond the classic dialogue between past and present, they revive the vein of the ancient masters. The new walk through their creations reactivates the way we look at the permanent collection and recalls the force of art.

Masterfully so by Gary Hill in the Department of Oriental Antiquities. In a confrontation between humanity's first written language, on Mesopotamian cylinder seals, and that of computers, he illustrates the fragility of civilizations and the importance of their relics. On video screens, American tanks in Iraq destroy cuneiform writing: an imaginary translation is given a tape loop in French, based on words excerpted from a speech by Bin Laden.

To this violence of Thanatos, Eros responds sensually in its own way, in the work of Jean-Michel Othoniel. In the neighboring Khorsabad room, he has place the ancient small idol of the goddess Ishtar in its alabaster roundness. Her ruby eyes are fixed on a gigantic necklace of pearls decorated with nipples: its double row runs like the Tigris and the Euphrates, the two rivers of seed and milk nourishing and making fertile the Mesopotamian lands. Nearby, three jewels in balls of giant colored glass make the woman seem like the faces of monumental Assyrian dignitaries.

Feminity again among the Egyptian antiquities, with the homage of Marie-Ange Guilleminot to Absalon, of which she presents models of living cells across from Egyptian room models in terra cotta. With her pleated wedding gown that seems to have been created in that period along the Nile [presumably for the Louvre's female statue, probably Nefertiti] and with her Oursin, an enormous but light sculpture/installation in golden tissue that swells up like a warm balloon in the cold Cour Marly. Still the feminine in the Department of Islamic Art where Susan Hefuna examines the moucharabieh [the Egyptian screenguard] in a work of sculpture and photography, while José-Maria Sicilia, interested in Arabo-Spanish culture, interprets the 1001 Nights through an oriental rug with plantlike decoration floating on a floor of painted plaster diamonds.

Inspired by the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities, Ange Leccia projects, in the mosaic room, the trembling and slow-motion image of a statue of a child by putting together on flat screens the interior shots of a sarcophagus, the technique of the pixellated image recalling here that of the combination of tesserae. A slide toward personal archeology dear to Christian Boltanski. His Reconstitutions d'objets ayant appartenu à C. B. is found in the middle of those everyday things found during recent excavations of the museum and exhibited by the curators in the Boltanskian manner, in glass cases in the underground medieval space. Nearby, around the donjon room of the château of Philippe Auguste Charles V, Frédéric Sanchez has created a sound spectacle, La Salamandre, based on the legend of King Midas with the ass's ears and the death of Etienne Dolet, burned alive for having doubted the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

From these resonant ruins, the visitor proceeds to the mystery of Watteau's Gilles. He allows Jean-Michel Alberola to delve into the enigma of this canvas through a series of drawings that retrace the themes of his own painting, from Celui qui fait les gilles to Beau parleur and the donkey in L'Éclairagiste. Elsewhere, in the Department of Art Objects, Xavier Veilhan offers another vision of an animal. He seized on the space of the room of famous 17th-century men in Sèvres china, to install them on a modern dais in the company of his own 20th-century celebrity: Laika, the dog sent into space by the Russians. As for the anthropologist of art, Cameron Jamie, he has focused on the contemporary rituals of America, costumes and exorcism of violence, and brings them into comparison with rituals practiced among primitive civilizations. To develop his version of Western primitivism he had the old glass cases of the Musée colonial de la Porte-Dorée [which will now be incorporated into the new museum on the Quai Branly; see my post on October 13] brought to the Louvre's Pavillon des Sessions. A fascinating juxtaposition of Halloween, Tyrol masks, and Korwar reliquaries from Africa.

I am reminded of Gertrude Stein's remarks, in the opening paragraphs of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, about her housekeeper Hélène, who was so impressed by the recognition that later came to the contemporary artists she had helped entertain in her employer's salon:

She said isn't it extraordinary, all those people whom I knew when they were nobody are now always mentioned in the newspapers, and the other night over the radio they mentioned the name of Monsieur Picasso. Why they even speak in the newspapers of Monsieur Braque, who used to hold up the big pictures to hang because he was the strongest, while the janitor drove the nails, and they are putting into the Louvre, just imagine it, into the Louvre, a picture by that little poor Monsieur Rousseau, who was so timid he did not even have courage enough to knock at the door.

Yes, that's Henri Rousseau. Gertrude Stein could truly say she knew them when. As the article from France 2 notes, "This dialogue is not new, because in 1948, Picasso was invited to hang his own paintings in the Grande Galerie, and Georges Braque even decorated a ceiling in the Louvre." The Louvre has just opened its renovated Galerie d'Apollon, too (see my post from November 27), with a Delacroix hiding among Baroque paintings and sculptures.

You can download the exhibition catalogue (.PDF file) and a press packet (.PDF file), both of which have pictures of the works and explanatory text in French. Contrepoint: L'art contemporain au Louvre will be at the Louvre, in Paris, until February 10, 2005. A similar exhibit, Correspondances, will be at the Musée d'Orsay, until January 23, 2005.

More on Viola's Tristan

I have been following the premiere and critical reception of the new Tristan und Isolde, in concert performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic now and planned for a fully staged production in Paris, and the video sequence created for it by artist Bill Viola (see my posts on December 1, December 10, and December 18). Well, Tyler Green has weighed in on this interesting artistic collaboration in his frank and perceptive way, which is why we all read his blog every day (December 22 post at Modern Art Notes). Tyler considers the "Tristan" video along with another recent Viola work at the Whitney:

The most problematic of the two productions is "Tristan." Viola's visuals are so trite, so predictable, that "The Tristan Project" could be an infomercial selling a CD of lite rock hits from the '80's. Beyond the clichés is plenty of other borrowed imagery. For "Tristan," Viola borrowed from himself (the opening sequence of Act II is strikingly similar to Viola's own forest scene in 2001's "Going Forth By Day"), and from feature films. (The grainy hand-held-camera-scanning-through-the-dark-forest scenes are right out of the film "The Blair Witch Project.")

As in the other reviews I have read, Tyler makes clear that "every other element of the production succeeded" but that Viola's work took the focus away from the music:

While the Walt Disney Concert Hall is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, this was essentially a Bill Viola gallery opening at a Frank Gehry-designed museum. (The singers and the orchestra players all knew that this production was all about Viola – they frequently looked up and watched Viola's video as they waited their turn to perform.)

As usual, great observations. While you are at Modern Art Notes you should also read Tyler's personal tribute to artist Agnes Martin, who died last week.

Musical Comedy by Shostakovich?

Since the end of the Cold War, we have been learning more and more about "the real" Dmitri Shostakovich, much of it thanks to the work of musicologist Laurel Fay (see the class materials put together for Opera in the 20th Century). The latest thing I have learned about him came from this article (Une comédie musicale à la soviétique signée Chostakovitch, December 21) by Marie-Aude Roux for Le Monde. It is a review of a new production, by Macha Makeïeff and Jérôme Deschamps at the Opéra National de Lyon, of a musical comedy by Shostakovich, which I translate here (with added links):

Intentionally leaving behind things like the La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein [see my post from October 8], Véronique, and another joyous Widow, the Opéra de Lyon's ballsy holiday programming feat paid off with the French premiere of a musical comedy by Dmitri Shostakovich. From the same period as Bernstein's West Side Story, Moscow, Cheryomushki (Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers) was composed by the Russian composer in 1957–1958, under the friendly influence of the Moscow Operetta Theater conductor Grigori Stoliarov, who had directed Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in Moscow, before the opera, violently criticized in Pravda in January 1936, was finally withdrawn from the stage.

Usually thought of as a "serious" composer (15 symphonies and as many string quartets), Shostakovich never looked down on film music—he composed 37 film scores—jazz, or musical comedy. Between 1928 and 1933, the dates of Tahiti-Trot based on the famous Tea for Two by [Vincent] Youmans and the unfinished operetta The Big Lightning, he attempted to set a Mayakovsky comedy, The Bedbug (1929), and wrote music for the stage revue Hypothetically Murdered for the Leningrad Music Hall (1931).

"Boring, talentless, stupid" was how the composer first described Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers, in a letter, dated December 19, 1958, to his friend Isaac Glikman, before reconciling himself to the score that he revised in 1963 for a film adaptation by director Gerbert Rappaport. A popular success, the work takes place during the Kruschov years, in the heart of an urban revolution intended to solve the housing crisis. Old downtown neighborhoods, unhealthy suburbs, student and worker lodgings shelter the good and the bad of the proletarian masses who have come to take part in the industrial building of Stalinesque towns. Constructed according to the dogma of soberness, functionality, and rationality, the green spaces, public works, and apartment buildings of the Cherry Tree Towers neighborhood, in the southern suburb of Moscow, incarnate modernity and, in the era of space conquest, the communist utopia—at once the ideal life, the communitarian paradise, and a radiant future.

The three couples in love imagined by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky's libretto, in trouble with the corrupt apparatchiks (Chief Administrator Drebedniov and his follower, Concierge Barabachkine), sweep away the stereotypes of youth. From a boring young married couple, Sacha and Macha, to the Soviet couple, Sergei and Lioussia (she is an emancipated constructed worker, in keeping with the Soviet ideal), to Boris and Lidotchka, two backward-looking "intellectuals," at the whim of spiritualist and metaphysical moods.

Performed in the Russian original, except for French dialogue (translated and adapted with the help of the dramaturge Macha Zonina), Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers is interpreted with great freshness and verve by a cast of young singing actors, many of whom come from the famous Academy of the Mariinsky Theater, with the full Chorus and Orchestra of Lyon under the hedonistic direction of Alexander Lazarev. A poetic lightness and appropriate theatrical tone are found in the inventive, funny, and tender staging by Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeïeff. The latter takes credit for the very beautiful sets and costumes (the colored and "graffitiesque" decoration of the HLM [French public housing block] apartments, the Soviet costumes in utopian shades). But tragedy is mute under the concrete. With a laugh, a cry, a mimicry offered by the two excellent "Deschamps actors" (Lorella Cravotta and Robert Horn), all the silent horror of the totalitarian system suddenly rises up menacingly.

Performances remaining at the Opéra National de Lyon include December 23, 26, 28, 30, 31, and January 5. You can download the entire program for this performance (a rather large .PDF file) and look at this great gallery of images. This is a coproduction with the Opéra royal de Wallonie.

Although I didn't really take notice at the time, Francesca Zambello directed the American premiere of Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers this summer, at the 15th annual Bard Music Festival, this year dedicated to the theme Shostakovich and His World (August 12 to 15). Alex Ross was there for The New Yorker, and he mentioned the performance briefly in an article (Unauthorized, September 6).

UPDATE:
See also Bertrand Dermoncourt, Le temps des Cerises (L'Express, December 13); Jacques Doucelin, Le sourire forcé et critique de Chostakovitch (Le Figaro, December 21); and David Stevens, Shostakovich's revenge on Stalin (International Herald Tribune, December 25).

Ionarts Top Ten Art Lists 2004

In response to Tyler Green's call for this year's Top Ten Lists at Modern Art Notes (see Tyler's Top Ten and his catalogue of links to other Top Ten lists, which kindly included mine), here are the exhibits I enjoyed the most this year. Bear in mind that I do not spend nearly as much time as Tyler in galleries and museums.

1. Annette Messager, Sous vent (translated by the artist as "wind back") at the Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris
   
2. In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite, at the National Museum of Natural History
   
3. Verrocchio's David here in Washington at the National Gallery
   
4. Milton Avery at the Phillips Collection (reviewed by Mark Barry and yours truly)
   
5. Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum at the National Gallery
   
6. New French photography museum opens in the Musée du Jeu de Paume with Éblouissement and a Guy Bourdin retrospective
   
7. Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery
   
8. American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection at the National Gallery
   
9. Moi! Autoportraits du XXe siècle (Me! Self-portraits from the 20th century), at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris
   
10. Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera at the National Gallery

There is also this list of the top ten shows I read and wrote about but did not actually see:

1. Caravaggio, l'Ultimo Tempo 1606–1610, at the Museo di Capodimonte, in Naples
   
2. Aurélie Nemours retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris
   
3. Nan Goldin, Sœurs, Saintes et Sibylles (Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls), in the Chapelle Saint-Louis of the Salpêtrière, Paris
   
4. Luc Tuymans at the Tate Modern, in London
   
5. Sén'Art en Forêt, a modern art installation in a French forest
   
6. Giuseppe Penone's tree carvings at Versailles
   
7. Bartholdi: Les bâtisseurs de la Liberté (Bartholdi: the builders of liberty), photographs of the creation of the Statue of Liberty, at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris
   
8. New Works by Panamarenko (b. 1940), in the Antwerpse Luchtschipbouw, in Anvers, Belgium
   
9. Fernando Botero: Œuvres Récentes, at the Musée Maillol in Paris
   
10. Roy Lichtenstein—All about Art, a major retrospective at the Museum for Moderne Kunst in Louisiana, Denmark, which never came to the United States is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until February 22, 2005 (thanks, Tyler!)

Finally, you may be interested in looking again at my Top Ten favorite art stories from the year gone by:

1. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture in American Art
   
2. The Artothek, a sort of lending library of paintings and other artwork: we need them here in the United States (follow-ups here and here)
   
3. The Salvador Dalí Year as celebrated in Perpignan, France, which the surrealist painter proclaimed the "center of the universe" after an ecstatic vision in the train station there
   
4. Plans by artists to transform the the Volkspalast, the seat of the Communist government in (formerly East) Berlin into a "second Centre Pompidou"
   
5. Psychologist tries to save outsider art by sanitarium patients in Scotland
   
6. Large Statue of Philip the Arab discovered in the ocean off Corsica
   
7. Chinese sculptor sets a new world record for largest statue in the world, a vast reclining Buddha figure in Guifeng
   
8. In realization of Tyler Green's dream, stolen PandaMania panda sleeps with the fishes
   
9. Imre Makovecz's new building, The Stephenaeum, an auditorium and the cultural heart of the Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem [Péter Pázmány Catholic University] of the Sacred Heart's faculty of humanities at Piliscsaba, some 20 km north of Budapest. It looks like "two circular buildings, one adopted from the form of a traditional Magyar jurta (yurt), the other a Renaissance tempietto, crashing into one other."
   
10. Norman Foster's Viaduc de Millau finished in central France

Honorable mentions include:

• Art Returns to the Palais Lichtenstein in Vienna
  
• Crass Commercial Exploitation of the Frida Kahlo Anniversary
  
• Plans to redesign the site of an old factory in France
  
• Santiago Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences in his native Valencia, Spain
  
• Mexican architect Luis Barragán

You should also take a look at Jens's list of the Top Ten Best Recordings in 2004. Happy New Year!