Artists

Yayoi Kusama is one of those artists whose work is easy to love. Although she made it (or much of it) as therapy for herself–beset from early on with mental health issues and thoughts of suicide–her works come across to viewers as exuberant and bedazzling. And in many cases, fun–even as they are thought-provoking.

Last week, I was lucky enough to arrive in Seattle (on an unrelated business trip) just as her show at the Seattle Art Museum, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, was about to open. I got a press preview, which means that the galleries were mostly empty when I was there. That’ll be in distinct contrast to the experiences of many: advance ticket sales for the exhibit are completely sold out, despite the steep cost of $34.95. A limited number of tickets are available now only on a first-come, first-served daily basis. And the museum has added Sunday night tickets for members only.

This exhibit was organized and appeared first at the Hirshhorn Museum and focuses, at Kusama’s request, on her mirrored rooms, according to the Seattle Times review. (The Times also made the show front page news on the day before the review (at right), for which all art-lovers must be grateful.)

These rooms are important to her. Here’s an explanation from WSJ. Magazine:

Kusama conceived of these installations in part as an opportunity to savor the supreme vanity of regarding one’s likeness reflected endlessly.

“I’ve always been interested in the mystique that a mirrored surface presents,” says Kusama. “In my mirror rooms, you see yourself as an individual reflected in an expansive space. But they also give you the sensation of cloistering yourself in another world.” Often lit up by myriad multicolored LED lights (earlier iterations of the rooms from the ’60s were simpler affairs, filled with polka-dot patterns and phallic, tuberlike soft sculptures), the rooms are meant to evoke a cosmic feeling of being an individual within a multitude—as planet Earth is “like one little polka dot, among millions of other celestial bodies.”

Still, as the Seattle review noted,

There are [also] surrealistic paintings from the 1950s, soft sculptures from the 1960s, Joseph Cornell-inspired collages from the 1970s, very recent work, and documentary photos and ephemera, all of which gloriously establish Kusama’s unique place in contemporary art history.

Agreed, and I loved it all! I had not seen her watercolors and gouaches before, and they are intriguing. (I’d post one, but the only one I took did not come out clearly enough to be useful as an illustration.)

Seattle is trying hard to prevent any incidents of damage, as happened at the Hirshhorn, when a pumpkin was broken by someone taking a selfie in the room called “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins” (above left). At SAM, visitors enter that room along with a staff member. This will slow things down, adding to the waits at the rooms, but it’s necessary.

A few more pictures:

One aspect has gotten less attention than I would have expected, given today’s emphasis on participatory art. Near the end of the Seattle show, there’s an “obliteration room.” It began as an all-white room, filled with furniture, and each visitor is given polka-dot stickers to place anywhere in the room–floor, walls, goblets on the dining table, etc. (label at right). Again, quoting the Seattle Times,

Kusama has said that her repetitive processes — covering everything with dots or sewing hundreds of fabric forms, for example — are acts of “self-obliteration.” She has described her labor-intensive methods as “art-medicine.”

I disagree, strenuously, with those who cannot consider this art, who think it is art for children, who say it lacks meaning, who say it is mere spectacle. Several pieces are, for me, quite eloquent. Maybe a trying a little harder to understand Kusama’s art is in order. Art can be enjoyed and consumed on many levels, and sometimes its impact is not clear until long after one leaves an exhibition.

 

It may be summer, but it’s school days at Jack Shainman Gallery in Kinderhook, and the revelation this year is–fantasy coffins. These fascinating works, three made by a Ghanaian artist named Paa Joe, are unlike most you’ve ever seen. They’re the centerpiece of The School‘s summer exhibition, which opened Saturday (June 24).

Called abebuu adekai, the coffins are a national tradition, a celebration of death and the afterlife of those who have died–thus, the sarcophagi represent the interests of the deceased. Through they are made for a purpose, they can ascend into the realm of folk art and perhaps beyond, depending on the eye of the beholder. The gallery’s press release says that the coffins, which used to be used only for chiefs and priests, have grown in popularity and are now attracting the attention of contemporary art museums and galleries.

Here’s one:

Shainman’s biggest find, perhaps, was El Anasui, and he had a piece on view at The School as well:

And there were plenty of other artists to see there. Shainman mixed contemporary works with older art.

But,  mainly, I am writing about The School because, like Magazzino in my last post, it adds to the art attractions in the Hudson Valley, and therefore likely expands the interest in art–it certainly gives art more exposure.

Here are two more views:

San Francisco beckoned me because of the Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Both artists are nothing if not seductive and, as I wrote in my review of the exhibition for The Wall Street Journal, published in yesterday’s print edition, “Rarely—if ever—in the history of modern art has a renowned artist been as deeply and openly inspired by another artist as Richard Diebenkorn was by Henri Matisse.”

So this was a natural, and like so many other naturals, surprising in that it had never been done in depth before. I loved it, as you will read, and I found different elements to admire in both venues: I saw it late last year at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it was slightly smaller but just as great.

The curators, Katy Rothkopf in Baltimore and Janet Bishop in San Francisco, made different juxtapositions and were working with a different suite of galleries; each installation has its merits. For example, in Baltimore, the show seemed to build to a climax with Diebenkorn’s “Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad”–which visitors saw on its own large wall as they rounded a corner (though they likely stopped before getting to it to see other works on the way). The Baltimore wall label, as I recall, said “Recollections” was a summation of all Diebenkorn had learned from Matisse. Then they moved on to a large gallery that showed off all the Ocean Park series along with the Matisse paintings that helped inspire them. It practically glowed.

In San Francisco,  the hang seemed more evenly paced. But, in a brilliant move, Bishop hung Matisse’s “Goldfish and Palette” nearer the start, alongside “Urbana #6.” The pairing stopped me in my tracks from the get-go. Have a look:

But in SF, I think, “Recollections” was less prominent, just one painting in a gallery of several, and the space there required the splitting of the Ocean Park series into two galleries. Still, Bishop made this revealing sequence (maybe Baltimore did too, I do not recall).

Both installations encouraged the close looking that affords real insight into both artists’ minds.

Diebenkorn seemed destined for a great career in art–at 26, he had already won a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. He was making abstract works then, and he continued to so do for years. But, as this show, which illustrates his evolution over the decades, he owes his greatness to his early exposure to Matisse. The works are accompanied by archival materials. Diebenkorn collected a vast library of publications about him, and he often later glued in color versions of the books’ black-and-white images. He would make notes, like the dimensions or the dates.

In fact, I came to the conclusion that a solo exhibition of Diebenkorn’s work would have been far less interesting than this dual show. (Not so for Matisse, obviously–he always looks great, to me.)

Here are a few more installation shots that I took at the SF exhibition–some, to my mind, more interesting than others.

UPDATE, 3/14: I just discovered this article written for SF MoMA that explains more about this exhibition and collaboration between Bishop and Rothkopf, which you can read here.