Artists

In New York, I visited several special exhibitions this past week. Let me mention two here.

The first, Founding Figures: Copper Sculpture from Ancient Mesopotamia, ca. 3300–2000 B.C., is at the Morgan Library and Museum until Aug. 21. Don’t miss it, if you live nearby. Lucky for me, I had a tour of it from the curator, Sidney Babcock, but this small show in the Morgan’s cube gallery has real appeal to anyone interested in ancient art and the development of art, period.

It’s hard to get attention for small shows in New York, and this one did not receive the reviews or media coverage it deserved. It’s built around a figure of King Ur-Nama, ca. 2112–2094 B.C., that was purchased by Morgan (detail at left, but if you go to the link above, you can see not just the whole figure but a rotating picture of him) and borrows some works of the period from the Metropolitan Museum and other lenders, including a couple private collectors who are unlikely to lend these pieces again anytime soon.

Just ten little works, including a couple of cylinder seals, can make a big impression. I’m posting two pictures of two of the other figures.

The first, at right, dates to 3300 to 3100 B.C. and is thought to be a male priest. It’s one of the oldest surviving cast-copper sculptures from Mesopotamia. Just look at the muscular chest, the asymetrical posture and, if you can see it, the foot tucked under his body.

Below him is a man balancing a box on his head, dated c. 2900 – 2600 B.C. He is traveling down a ramp, perhaps, and you can just see him trying to maintain his balance and his erect posture.

The exhibit I’m glad is gone is Martin Creed: The Back Door at the Park Avenue Armory. I had seen one of his balloon works, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, some years back, and I know he won the Turner Prize. I wanted to see more for myself, especially since this show won loads of publicity. ARTNews wrote of it, “against all odds, his deadpan Duchampian strategies spill over into profundity.” The magazine called him triumphant.

I’ll say. The exhibition, despite positive reviews, is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.  Trying to explain it, The New York Times said:

…viewers will encounter films of people vomiting and of people defecating, along with a piano that opens and slams shut, an array of metronomes ticking at different speeds, and a room whose lights go on and off at one-second intervals. All are outpourings from Mr. Creed’s psyche, a delicate but highly tuned instrument beset by odd compulsions and Freudian obsessions.

The Armory gave him its entire first floor, including the historic rooms.

But what a disappointment. I didn’t find any of the many parts moving, or exhilarating, or even entertaining. I found it to be provocative without originality (a video of a penis and another of a female breast?) and, far from “compelling,” to quote Nicholas Serota, I found it tedious.

In the NYT article, Creed said: “I feel bad to say I’m an artist, because I don’t really know what art is…I would say I’m a person who tries to do things and work in a field that is commonly known as art. I try and do things because I find life is difficult and I want to make it better. More bearable.”

I agree with the first half of that quote, but I find the second half hard to believe.

 

 

You never know what might spark the idea for an exhibition, and at the National Gallery in London it was a 2011 gift left to the U.K. by Lucian Freud. He bequeathed a work called Italian Woman by Corot, which he had purchased 10 years earlier “no doubt drawn to its solid brushwork and intense physical presence,” says the NG.

And so on June 23, just a few years later, the NG will open Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyke, a show of more than eighty works that had once been owned by great painters, either by gift, swap or purchase, works that probably inspired them, paintings they lived with. (The spark also explains the backward chronology of the title.) As the press release says:

This is an exceptional opportunity to glimpse inside the private world of these painters and to understand the motivations of artists as collectors of paintings.

In the release, Anne Robbins, the curator of Painters’ Paintings, explained:

Since its acquisition the painting’s notable provenance has attracted considerable attention – in fact the picture is often appraised in the light of Freud’s own achievements, almost eclipsing the intrinsic merits of Corot’s canvas. It made us start considering questions such as which paintings do artists choose to hang on their own walls? How do the works of art they have in their homes and studios influence their personal creative journeys? What can we learn about painters from their collection of paintings?

As it happened, the NG owns a Titian once owned by Van Dyck (he had 19 Titians at this death, one pictured here), a Rembrandt once in the possession of Reynolds, and a Degas owned by Matisse, among others. Borrow more from private collectors, and voila, what should be a very intriguing exhibition. Many of the works have not been seen publicly for decades.

Works once owned by Degas, a famed collector; Lord Leighton; George Frederic Watts, and Sir Thomas Lawrence will also be on view.

In the catalogue, which extends the scholarship of the show, Robbins related how each work was acquired, sometimes at great cost, and how the artists “used these pictures, extracting their technical secrets and repeatedly appropriating motifs, poses and subject matter.”

I love this idea. This is what art exhibitions should do. More details here.

 

Paul Cezanne said that. He also said that Delacroix’s palette was “the most beautiful” in France.

That headline is the end of a short video made by the National Gallery in London; that sentence is the pitch to it. Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art is currently on view at the NG, and one aspect of Delacroix’s impact on other artists and modern art stems from his theories on color.

So the NG asked Professor Paul Smith to made a video and explores Delacroix’s theories on color and how his approach had a profound influence on the artists associated with the rise of modern art. You can see it here.

It’s a good, no-frills video and I wonder if it would resonate here in the U.S. Yet I found it, and other NG videos to be more informative than some here in the U.S. Here, for example, is the introduction to the exhibition and here’s a “tour” of it.

That’s Delacroix in a portrait by Léon Riesener at right.