Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

Van Gogh Liked Pink, And Other Revelations

If you went to Van Gogh Up Close at the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier this year, you saw a painting many thought was one of the stars of the show: Undergrowth with Two Figures from the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum, a bequest of Mary E. Johnston accessioned in 1967.

But back in Cincinnati, Per Knutas, the former paintings conservator at the Cincinnati museum, had questions about it. When the painting (original view at left) was cleaned, he had discovered tiny traces of bright pink in the areas under the frame. On the rest of the painting, they were white. Did van Gogh use pink? For which flowers?

Knutas called on Dr. Gregory D. Smith, the Senior Conservation Scientist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who agreed to examine the painting in hopes of identifying the mysterious paint colorant van Gogh used.  Dr. Jeffrey Fieberg, a visiting researcher and Associate Professor of Chemistry at Centre College in Danville, KY, was there to help.

Now they know. The IMA Lab researchers have now determined that bright pink pigment was the original color of many of the painting’s flowers. They had “rapidly faded to white due to the properties of a dye that van Gogh often used at the end of his career,” the press release says.

Van Gogh was known to use a bright Geranium Lake organic dye, whose brilliance is short-lived when exposed to light. And the researchers knew of a letter written by van Gogh to his brother, Theo, while he was painting the work that described it this way: “. . . undergrowth, lilac trunks of poplars, and underneath them some flower-dotted grass, pink, yellow, white and various greens.”

Here’s how they did it:

Smith utilized a small broken paint chip found lodged in the varnish to analyze the dye by Raman microspectroscopy—a process that collects a characteristic spectral fingerprint from the dye by measuring changes in laser light scattered by the molecules. Comparison of the spectrum to a digital library of thousands of materials identified the dye as eosin, which gives Geranium Lake its vibrant color. After identifying the ink, Smith and Fieberg painstakingly mapped out its location by elemental spectroscopy in the 387 dobs of white paint used by van Gogh to represent the flowers. The team used Adobe Photoshop to record all the spots in which the dyestuff was detected, creating a virtual restoration of the aged painting [bottom].

The release has more details on this painting and on one by de Chirico, and I’ve pasted the current version and the reimagined versions here — even at this size, you can see some pink in the lower one.

But here’s a possible fly in the ointment. Yesterday, the Daily Mail in London printed a story positing that van Gogh was colorblind. That’s according to a Japanese vision expert named Kazunori Asada. If you go to the article, you’ll see various pictures through normal eyes and  how they look to people who are colorblind. At the bottom are several van Gogh paintings seen the same way.

I wonder what Asada would think of the original painting.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Museum of Art

A Window On The Future Of The Clyfford Still Museum

The exhibition I feature here doesn’t open until Sept. 14, but this is the summer doldrums, and hey there’s not much else going, despite some promises to the contrary. (I would be happy to be contradicted on that reference.)

So let’s look at the Clyfford Still Museum, in Denver, which opened last November. As I wrote in October, 2011, in an article for the Wall Street Journal about the museum,

Creating a constituency for a one-artist museum can be tricky even when, like Georgia O’Keeffe or Andy Warhol, that artist is widely known (and loved) and has a local base (Santa Fe, N.M., and Pittsburgh, respectively). Still, a loner who was born in North Dakota in 1904 and died in Maryland in 1980, with several stops in between, had decreed that his life’s work should go to any city that would erect a museum solely for his works—and nothing else, ever.

And that turned out to be Denver. So how is Dean Sobel, the museum’s director, going to pull off Vincent/Clyfford — “a focused exhibition exploring connections between Vincent Van Gogh and Clyfford Still—in particular those found during the initial decades of the latter’s career,” according to the press release?

Reproductions and “interpretive material.” The exhibition itself will feature about 20 of Still’s paintings and works on paper, all executed between the late 1920s and the 1930s. They expose, we’re told, “direct parallels with Van Gogh’s preferred subject matter—including vignettes of agrarian labor, moody landscapes treated as soul-scapes, and dark interior scenes—as well as his use of the grotesque to accentuate the plight of human beings living on the edge.”

Still apparently identified with van Gogh because of his bare-bones childhood on farms in Canada, where he did manual labor, like the peasants van Gogh depicted. “Cycles of growth, decay, and rebirth in their work are evoked in their through recurrent symbols such as corn, the sun, and the sower,” the museum says. “Still’s paintings also echo Van Gogh’s in their rich color palette and heavily troweled painterly surfaces.”

I credit Sobel and adjunct curator David Anfam for coming up with the theme. They have discovered a very good, direct pairing of a 1936 painting by Still with van Gogh’s Two Peasants Digging, from 1889, illustrated on the press release, which I encourage you to view.

I asked for more and received PH-418, from 1936, above left, which is paired with Van Gogh’s marvelous Night Cafe, 1888, from the Yale  University Art Gallery, at right. Interesting.

The museum is also pairing Still’s now-famous  Self-Portrait from 1940 (which you will find on this webpage) with van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, 1888, from the Harvard University Art Museums, bottom left.

Based on this information — one never knows until one sees an exhibition — I give the Still museum credit for trying and being enterprising. It’s a good theme.

But I think Still made a huge, egotistical mistake — preventing comparisons of works by other artists side-by-side doesn’t make him look better, it makes him look afraid. Wouldn’t this have been far more interesting if the van Gogh works were actually present, instead of there in reproductions?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Clyfford Still Museum (top); ©  the Yale University Art Gallery (middle); © the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums (bottom).

 

A Few Thoughts On The Future of Signature Styles

Over on her Brainstorm blog, artist Laurie Fendrich has an interesting post about painting, specifically about developing a mature or signature style, which raises a question about today’s art I will get to shortly. Let’s start with this quote from her:

Although my compositions and colors change from one picture to the next, they don’t change so dramatically that they no longer resemble one another. You could say that my paintings resemble one another [link mine] in the way that children in a given family, even when they have different heights, hair color and eye color, all manage to look as if they are related [see above].

Although Fendrich doesn’t say so outright, she implies that sooner or later, as artists evolve, they each develop their own style — which ought to be unique.

Although there’s seldom an actual “eureka” moment for artists—a moment where they shout that they’ve finally discovered their mature style—when people look back at any given artist’s complete oeuvre, it’s fairly easy to spot such a moment.

And later she adds that after 40 years of painting:

My artistic habits—the way I put on paint, construct compositions, and come up with colors—are deeply entrenched at this point, and are as big a part of my style as my temperament. To alter them is not impossible, but there’d have to be a reason beyond anything I can imagine.

There’s more along that vein, which I won’t post here, because I was she also said “More than one student has asked me why I don’t ever change my painting style.” Fascinating that it comes from her students (she teaches painting).

Some artists do try many things before settling on their big idea, but it seems to me that many artists over the past few decades have not settled at all. Rather, they go through ideas, perhaps one at a time, then move on. Their body of work ends up to be a series of unrelated bodies. Think Damian Hirst. Think Tom Sachs. Think Tracey Emin. Think of the many artists today who work in many mediums — no longer painters or sculptors or jewelry-makers or glass artists, but all of the above.

Now try to think of an equivalent of Rothko or Still or Pollock… contemporary photographers come to mind, yes, but not too many other artists are almost always recognizable.

What this means for the future of art, I’m not sure. But it does seem that the more things artists try, the less chances they have of truly developing that mature, signature style that will send them into art history. Just a thought that I think I think.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Williamson Gallery  

Ever-Busy Theaster Gates Advances An Old Cause in Chicago

Chicago artist Theaster Gates has been on a winning streak for a while now, and he’s making the most of it in a way that, I hope, turns out also to be a good thing for Chicago.

Showing his entrepreneurial side, Gates is now trying to turn an abandoned bank building in his home city into  a cultural hub. He gets a gold star from me right from the start for wanting to reuse a  historic building. Located on Chicago’s South Side, at East 68th Street and South Stony Island Avenue, the Greek-style edifice was set for demolition until Gates decided that it would make a good place for an art space and library. Now it’s his project, with a $5 million price tag, for renovation and renewal.

As he told the Chicago Tribune last week,

I’ve always felt like it’s important that artists be good citizens. Citizenship for me includes thinking hard about the cultural life of the place that I live in. No matter what my resources have been, I’ve always tried to make culture happen.

His vision for the building includes a “soul food pavilion,” artists’ studios, offices, and a room housing the books by black authors from the collection of John H. Johnson, the founder of Ebony and Jet magazines, some of which would also be available.

Asa the bank, empty since the ’80s, the paper said, is cleaned out, Gates gets raw material — “some of [the bank’s] debris, once destined for a landfill, would make its way into Gates’ coveted pieces of contemporary art,” the Tribune piece said.

Of course, Gates needs help — approval of his plan and some public financing — $1 million of the total. He and other investors will put in $3.5 million, the Trib says, while donors provide $500,000 and a bank loan covers the rest.

If other artists were trying this, it might have slim chances. But Gates has had a few other success with housing and arts projects — he seems to have a good chance at this.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Chicago Magazine

 

More Women Artists “Rediscovered” In New Hampshire

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote an article for Smithsonian and a post here about the “rediscovery” of the women artists who were part of the Hudson River School of artists and who, during their time, were even accepted by some of their brother-artists and made a living at art.

Now, the artists whose work was shown then in Remember the Ladies: Women of the Hudson River School at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site are being joined by women who painted alongside and in the style of the male artists of the mid-19th century who made up the “White Mountain School” of painting. Their work — admittedly a small body of it — will be on view at the Museum of the White Mountains, which is now under construction at Plymouth State University in Concord  Plymouth, N.H. [See comment below, and thank you, Barbara] It’s set to open in February.

Who were the women? Their names include Maria a’Becket, Susan Ricker Knox and Lizzie Stevens, according to a recent article published by the Associated Press, which said:

The paintings are similar stylistically to those produced by the more well-known male artists of the mid-19th century “White Mountain School” of painting, but the women often were overlooked, said Catherine Amidon, the museum’s director [above with some of the paintings]. Some of the women didn’t sign their paintings because the work wouldn’t sell as well if they identified themselves, she said.

The fledgling museum acquired the collection from Frances MacIntyre, who wrote her master’s thesis at Dartmouth College about female artists of the White Mountains. She later collected their work, and has donated the 19 paintings, which depict “mountain views, pastoral valley scenes and detailed renderings of the mountain flora,” the AP said.

The museum will be housed in a former church on the Plymouth campus.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Plymouth State University