Archives for May 2010

Get out your walking shoes, or hire that car. Spring art season has begun in earnest. Today at 4 p.m., a few hours before Christie’s begins the two-week run of bellwether auctions of Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art, several of New York’s Old Master dealers are holding receptions: Masterworks of Six Centuries. “Special” exhibitions, for these art-heavy weeks, will continue over the next few weeks, at least.

On Friday, New York Gallery Week, which I’ve already written about here, kicks off a long weekend of solo shows, panels and other contemporary art events.

And mark your calendars for May 19, 4 to 8 p.m. — that’s when several American galleries will be open for their semi-annual evening event, always held during the weeks in December and in May when Christie’s and Sotheby’s have their American art auctions. More information is here.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. But in truth, I’m posting this because of the painting above, “The Twist” by Thomas Hart Benton, dated 1964 — it’s one of the works that will be on view on May 19.

Benton lived until 1975, when he was 86, and he had long since fallen out of favor. It’s a twist party imagined by someone who’d never been to one. (Bongo drums?) He was, afterall, in his 70s when he painted the scene. It’s also a bit incongruous with the burly workmen and midwestern landscapes of his usual works (but not the music themes). He was trying, at least, to what? Keep current? Chubby Checker had his smash hit in 1960, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard charts in September by pushing out Elvis’s “It’s Now Or Never.” By ’64, the Peppermint Lounge was running at a fever pitch. I’m no expert on Benton, but he’s reaching here way beyond his grasp — and somehow that tickles me. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Debra Force Fine Art Inc.

Artist and art professor Anne Walsh has raised the issue of better representation for women artists in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and she’s doing it right in the museum’s back yard, which is to say on SFMoMA’s blog, Open Space, where she is a columnist.

In one post, on April 13, she took senior curator Gary Garrels to task about SFMoMA‘s fourth floor, Focus on Artists, a permanent collection installation.

15 male artists own the majority of linear and cubic gallery-feet, 3 female artists have the rest. And of those three women, at least two could be called twofers: they’re the only artists of color in the entire installation, and they’re women!  (Here I am referring to Doris Salcedo and Kara Walker. If, in ignorance, I’ve overlooked someone, please correct me.)

Garrels didn’t blow Walsh off, but he didn’t provide a satisfying response either — he noted that many decisions on this had been made before he became curator and that SFMoMA’s collection is not a “comprehensive” one and therefore lacks work by women.

Yet asked whose work by women he’d like to show in this installation, he answered only one — Joan Mitchell.

Walsh also notes:

Early in our conversation, Garrels averred that there are so many strong women artists working today, that he can tend to forget that the stakes are still uneven for male and female artists. 

Then why answer with just one choice when pressed? Makes no sense — it’s one way or the other, not both.

To help Garrels out, Walsh has a made a little list, of dozens of women artists whose names she’d like to see on SFMoMA’s shopping list “so that at SFMoMA’s 100 year anniversary, things might look a little different for women, and for us all.” (This is its 75th anniversary.) Too bad Walsh herself labeled it a “fantasy.”

Here’s the link to her post, with the list. It’s ID’d as Part 1, and I’m looking forward to the next one, which hasn’t appeared yet.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of SFMoMA

 

Here’s a little grass-roots art effort that deserves some publicity and support: Slow Art Day. It’s kind of like the Slow Food movement, which attempts to get people to cook, eat slowly, and savor food. The art thesis is, if you look at art, really look slowly, you will see.

And we all know that people breeze through a museum too quickly.

Even if you work in a museum, though, you may not have noticed that Slow Art Day took place in mid-April — sometimes in your very museum. A guy named Phil Terry, chairman of the Reading Odyssey, started Slow Art Day in 2009, continued it this year and is seeking hosts for 2011 on the website. Terry wants to attract people who are not regular museum-goers (and don’t we all?).

So what is it?

Run by volunteer hosts around the world, Slow Art Day helps people slow down and see art in a new way. It’s very simple. Attendees visit a local museum and view on their own 5 to 10 works of art pre-selected by the volunteer host. They then gather for lunch to talk about the experience.

The result? Participants say they get “inspired not tired” and plan to return to that museum again and again.

This year, more than 50 museums and galleries on every continent except Antarctica (list here on FB) were the target of Slow Art groups.  

Slow Art Day has a Facebook page where some participants posted comments, like

• Slow Art Day in St. Louis MO was a mind and heart shifting experience that we can’t wait to repeat! A piece I thought I would not like gave the most discussion due to its complexity.
• Slow Art Ashland was a 5-star event for sure. It was great to take the opportunity to s-l-o-w down for art, and conversation. We had a lively conversation and learned so much from each other’s perspectives.
• A simple but powerful antidote to the common syndrome of “i-really-like-art-but-museums-often-leave-me-a-bit-blah.

My impression — the experience varies from place to place, and it depends on who organizes and who shows up. You can read more reports here.

And it you get inspired, here’s a link to the “How To” on FB for prospective hosts.

 

Ready for “a Pop social history, which is at its best when capturing the tempo of the movement’s march through the institutions — really a breakneck gallop that seems to have occurred in a matter of months”?

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent review — “Attack of the Hipsters” by Michael J. Lewis of Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s new book “The Pop Revolution.” (And a short excerpt from the book as well.)

That’s his description above. Lewis remarks on what he calls a strange attribute of the book, namely that it will please both “the friends of Pop and its foes:”

Pop’s friends will read it as an account of an aesthetic revolution that displaced the humorless and posturing European-derived formalism of the postwar years–one thinks of Barnett Newman’s portentous “Zip” paintings, where a quavering pillar of light suggested a portal opening onto another universe–and substituted a content-rich art that was deeply engaged with American life and subject matter. Among the iconic works that signaled Pop’s triumph were Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip- inspired “Whaam!” (1963), depicting a fighter-plane dogfight; and Andy Warhol’s multiple images of Marilyn Monroe in “Marilyn Diptych” (1962).

Pop’s foes, by contrast, will read “The Pop Revolution” as the saga of a crass commercial enterprise in which a mindless populist fad cut short the career of Abstract Expressionism, America’s only meaningful contribution to the world art.

That’s a great talent for an author who wants her book to sell. As Lewis says, preceding my first quote from the book above, “Ms. Marquis’s principal contribution is that she tells the story of Pop not by profiling the artists themselves, as is usually done, but by tracing the interlocking network of galleries and collectors that sustained them.”

Leo Castelli is chief among them, of course. Castelli is about to more scrutiny: In a few weeks, Annie Cohen-Solal’s biography Leo And His Circle will be published.

Judging by the advanced billing, Cohen-Solal’s book will have a different tone. From Publisher’s Weekly:

Cohen-Solal writes with energy, wit, and aplomb, and though she was a friend of Castelli’s, she maintains a balanced critical distance, pointing to his initial misjudgment of Andy Warhol’s genius, his perpetually complicated love life (with numerous mistresses and multiple marriages), his often frustratingly high standards and constant need for reassurance. Yet Castelli emerges as a rare individual: a magnanimous lover of art.

Could be an interesting contrast.