Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artworks

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  

Discovery In the Basement — A Picasso, No Less — Leads to Deaccession

Now it’s a museum in Indiana that has found a treasure lying around in the basement: Picasso’s Seated Woman with Red Hat, dated 1954-1956, has been in storage at the Evansville  Museum of Arts, History & Science since it was donated in 1963. Because of a mixup and misunderstanding, no one knew it was a Picasso — even though it was signed! 

Last week, deciding it was unable to properly secure and show the picture, the museum’s board voted to deaccess Seated Woman with Red Hat through Guernsey’s, the small New York auction house, which plans to sell it privately (about which more, below).

It’s hard to tell, judging by this picture, how good (or bad) this portrait of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter is — but it has an interesting provenance. The museum’s press release reveals  the whole story; here’s an excerpt:

Seated Woman with Red Hat was created using a layered-glass technique called “gemmail” (plural: gemmaux). Gemmail uses individual pieces of color glass overlapped and joined together with clear liquid enamel and then fired. …Picasso…produced 50 or more gemmaux masterpieces during his two years of study at the Malherbe Studio in France.

Picasso gave one-half of his collection to the Malherbe family in return for their expertise, training and collaboration, and kept one half for himself. The pieces in Picasso’s portion of the collection were sold to private collectors [including, the museum added later, the Emperor of Japan, Nelson Rockefeller and Prince Rainier of Monaco].

Raymond Loewy, an internationally known industrial designer, purchased Seated Woman with Red Hat in the late 1950s and gifted the piece to the Evansville Museum in 1963. …

…associated documentation indicated that the piece was created by an artist named “Gemmaux” – confusing the name of the technique with the artist’s name – and that it was a design inspired by a Picasso painting, which is how it was cataloged by museum staff. It was noted that the piece was signed by Picasso. The piece was placed in museum storage and never displayed. Earlier this year, Guernsey’s, in researching Picasso’s gemmaux works, contacted the Evansville Museum about the gift from Raymond Loewy. It was this contact from Guernsey’s that revealed the significance of the piece, prompting further research and study.

Loewy died in 1986, apparently never asking why his gift wasn’t on display.

Although the museum says it doesn’t want to pay the additional expenses associated with showing the picture, this is a curious excuse for deaccessioning. The museum also owns five works on paper by Picasso, and two are on view in an area it says is “devoted to portraits and figure studies.” It has what appears to be an extensive collection of art that requires security: “American and European painting, graphic works, and sculpture dating from the 16th through the 20th centuries.” It mounts temporary exhibitions. It owns, according to one published report, works by Rembrandt, Hopper and O’Keeffe. Its most recent 990, for 2010, shows net assets of more than $20 million and an operating surplus that year of $461,225. It’s accredited by the American Association of Museums.

Neither the museum nor Guernsey’s have placed a value on the portrait, which was based on Picasso’s 1934 Woman With a Red Hat. But that is what appears to be the motivation for selling, doesn’t it?

The message to patrons is clear: don’t give this museum anything too valuable; we’ll have to sell it. Not a way to build a collection.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Evansville Museum

A Confab To Sort Out The World Of Biennials

My favorite biennial is the Biennial at the End of the World (also here, in Spanish with pictures) That’s physical, not time-based. Not that I’ve been yet — it began in 2007 — but I love the billing. It takes place in  Ushuaia, the capital of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego Province and of the Southern Atlantic Islands, and on its first go-round it

artistically joined both ends of the Earth in real time, by means of an electronic station located in Ushuaia and others in the North of Canada and Finnish Lapland. In key points of the participating cities, screens were installed for the passers-by to watch and witness the development of the video-artists’ work, to communicate, and also to participate in this multimedia performance.

Did you know that there are now more than 150 biennials “for art and related disciplines”? That number doesn’t include, obviously, art fairs or annuals or triennials. (No wonder curators are tired.)

But now comes a group called the Biennial Foundation with plans to bring together organizers, curators and supporters of biennials to discuss their challenges. From October 27th through the 31st, it’s hosting the first World Biennial Forum in Gwangju, South Korea coinciding with the 9th Gwangju Biennale  (7 September–11 November). And just in case that’s not enough, you can also attend the nearby Busan Biennale 2012 (22 September–24 November) and the 7th Mediacity Seoul (11 September–4 November). That shows a bit of the problem right there: when does synergy turn into subtracting rather than adding to the combined whole?

While the Forum says it aims to “diffuse knowledge and to promote public awareness of contemporary art biennials,” I think it should also provide an eye-opening look at the big picture here. Can all of these biennials be supported? For how long? That, I hope. will be part of the “critical reflection” on the total number the Forum promises.

The Forum has Co-Directors – Ute Meta Bauerand Hou Hanru — who will develop the structure and content for this “first get-together of biennale professionals.”

Bauer is “Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art…served as the Director of the Visual Arts Program and as Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…was co-curator of documenta 11, artistic director of the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004) and was the Founding Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).”

Hou is “an art critic and curator…[who] worked at San Francisco Art Institute as Director of Exhibitions and Public Program and Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies (2006-2012)….has curated numerous exhibitions including the Biennials of Johannesburg, Shanghai, Gwangju, Guangzhou (Triennial), Tirana, Venice (French Pavilion, 1999, Chinese Pavilion, 2007), Istanbul, and Lyon….[and] is currently curating the 5th Auckland Triennial.

They’ve not released a program yet, but I hope it’s a realistic one. What we probably do not need is more biennials.

The Gwangju Biennial was, according to Culture360, “the first international art biennale in Asia to be introduced as such to the international community and has established itself as Asia’s oldest and most prestigious Biennales of contemporary art. It is amongst the world’s “most visited” Biennales and attracts a huge international audience every year – alternating between art and design.”

Photo Credits: The Gwangju Biennial 2010/Culture360 Magazine

 

Kids Say The Darndest Things About Modern Art

Get ready to laugh. As museums and parents try to figure out how to get kids interested in art, it’s amusing to learn what they think when they first see it. Can you guess whose paintings in the Modern’s collection these kids are talking about:

  • It’s just a big red piece of paper with four lines on it. It’s not very interesting. I’d rate it a one-star. I think it’s stupid.
  • It’s fun to look at because you see kind of like a target-shaped thing… There are little faces that could be like fake people peeking up and you could try and shoot them with a bow and arrow. They’re real people.
  • Make-up Girl. It’s too much eye shadow. I never saw a lady with pink skin. I think I saw a picture of her before but I’m not sure what her name is. I think she’s in the fashion show. I saw a TV commercial that have those same exact colors.

Those are a few excerpts from a new feature on AudioTourHack called MoMA Unadulterated:

an unofficial audio tour created by kids. Each piece of art is analyzed by experts aged 3-10, as they share their unique, unfiltered perspective on such things as composition, the art’s deeper meaning, and why some stuff’s so weird looking. This is Modern Art without the pretentiousness, the pomposity, or any other big “p” words.

The kids comment on 30 works of art — those above are by Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, respectively — and they are both touching and hilarious at times. They don’t think some of these works should be in art museums. No one likes Jackson Pollock, and one of his critics believes he made No. 31 for the money.

But beyond the fun, AudioTourHack, whose previous effort “reimagined Chamberlain’s sculptures [at the Guggenheim] as an exhibition about the Transformers….” has a serious mission: “to use creative story-telling to send people on fun, interactive journeys, redefining the way they perceive art and their surroundings.”

MoMA cooperated with the team making the tour, and the tour’s website page includes a handy map of where to find these works of art in the collection.

The AudioHackTour people say on their website, “We sincerely hope it introduces a wider audience to the art and gallery and reinvigorates both adults’ and children’s love of art.”  As funny as the podcasts are — and they are worth a listen no matter how you know about art — they may just serve their purpose well. There’s a cute little trailer on the site, too.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of AudioTourHack.

 

 

 

Is That A Strand of Hair In My Painting? Technology And Fakes

Don’t laugh if it is, and least not if we’re talking about Still Life with Peonies, a painting (left) that looks something like a van Gogh, but… no one is sure.  

Now, using technology that analyzes DNA, a conservator named Ester Monnik plans to assess a three-inch strand of red hair that she extracted from the painting, drawn from deep in the paint (!). She’ll compare it with DNA taken from van Gogh’s descendants.

All this is at the behest of Markus Roubrocks, a resident of Cologne, who is said to be a multi-millionaire art collector. He says he inherited the  painting from his father, and that it was found in Belgium in 1977 — “in an attic,” according to the Daily Telegraph. Roubrocks has shown the work before, getting validation from two “independent” art experts but a nay from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which the article says believes “the brush strokes are inconsistent with Van Gogh’s style, and therefore the painting is nothing more than an expert piece of forgery.”

I have not a clue as to whether or not this painting is real. It certainly has a crazy backstory, but so have other real paintings. I’m more interested in the techology and its implications. While developments like this suggest that we might solve more art-world mysteries in the future, they may also bring forward a lot of fancy fakes. Technology can make copying easier.

And, to hear some stories, it’s not that difficult now. Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a review of Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of An American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi. Perenyi — for three decades — “duped auction houses, dealers and collectors in the United States and Britain with hundreds of forged paintings by his own hand, ranging from pseudo 17th-century Dutch landscapes to watercolors mimicking those of Alexander Calder,” Jonathan Lopez wrote in his review. “…anybody with the slightest interest in painting or deception will find “Caveat Emptor” an engrossing read. ”

Lopez ought to know. He wrote The Man Who Made Vermeers, a biography of the art forger Han van Meegeren.

As it happens, the BBC is about to start a new series called “Fake or Fortune” in September, according to Art Fix Daily. In three episodes, Philip Mould uses forensic evidence to examine “paintings that may or may not be by Degas, Turner and Van Dyck.” Perhaps PBS will once again lean on the better art offerings of the BBC and bring the series here.