Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

International Print Week, Me And A New Appreciation

Hurricane Sandy has, as my last brief post indicated, messed up a lot of lives and livelihoods in the art world, among others. Late today, Sotheby’s postponed its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, moving it from Monday, Nov. 5, to Thursday, Nov. 8. Christie’s sale had been set for Wednesday, the 7th, and it seems to be going ahead.

Earlier this week, the International Fine Print Dealers Association postponed the annual opening of its print fair here in New York from tonight until tomorrow, and the International Print Center moved the opening of its annual fall print exhibition from last night to tonight and then was forced to postpone until further notice. IPC is based in waterlogged Chelsea, which has little if any electricity.

But I am going ahead with what I planned to blog about anyway — as I had two connections to print week. For a start, I wrote a piece about the print market for the October issue of Art + Auction. It has not been posted on line, though it’s on my website. Here’s the money quote, so to speak:

Traditionally, fine prints have appealed to new art buyers with limited resources as well as to committed collectors who are pursuing the gamut of works made by favored artists. But in recent years, with the very best paintings fetching record-breaking prices that place them beyond the reach of all but the top 0.1 percent of buyers, prints have been getting a second look from a broader range of people. Collectors are learning that prints may be the best way to purchase distinctive images by well-known artists, and that many artists devote considerable effort to making important, highly desirable works in print mediums. Moreover, in the world of online art sales, prints have been a success story.

Read further and you’ll find out where you can buy a Cezanne for $35,000, among other samplings. The best thing about writing that story was reminding myself, and readers, that prints aren’t copies of other works — artists use them for many reasons, including to test out techniques and images, and they’re originals.

Which is a nice segue to my second connection: in August, I served on the jury for the New Prints show at the IPC, and I wrote the essay for the exhibition. It will be published online once the show opens, and I will link to it here. It isn’t easy for six people to review some 2,600 prints together in one day (we could preview them online) and then agree on the “best.” We were tough — we chose only 36 prints by 26 artists.

After reviewing the process in my mind, and explaining in print what we didn’t do (seek balance, etc.), I was forced to distill what we did this way:

If pressed to describe how we made our decisions, I’d say that a print had to strike us viscerally. It had to have visual impact. And it had to speak to us, sometimes directly, sometimes – we discovered afterwards, when we reviewed our selections – in relation to another print. It had to have staying power, lingering in our minds. Nothing slipped in – that’s why the final count is so small…

We chose prints that were funny, beautiful, romantic, shocking, delicate, brutal, inventive, emotional, confronting, confining, expansive, and lyrical….

I’ll give you a few more hints: some were aesthetically pleasing, of course, but others had a built-in conflict, a look but don’t look aspect, perhaps, or a beauty-and-discomfort angle.

All of this has given me a new appreciation for prints, and I’ll be going tomorrow to the delayed opening of the fair.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Pace Master Prints (top); Galerie St. Etienne (bottom)

 

Leonard Lauder’s Semi-Secret Obsession

You know Leonard Lauder as an unsurpassed collector of Cubism, but what turned him into a collector was something completely different. He actually began collecting as a boy of five or six, or maybe seven. As he tells the story, his father gave him five cents as an allowance, and he spent the whole thing buying five postcards of the Empire State Building — all the exact same image. “Five,” he told me, “is a collection.”

I tell this story, in slightly different form, in an article headlined The Pleasures of Postcards for The New Yorker.com, published as to coincide with the opening this past Wednesday of The Postcard Age: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection at  the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Billed as “the first general exploration of the postcard as an artistic medium at a major museum,” the show contains about 700 postcards (all a promised gift to the MFA).

Last month, I visited Lauder in his office at Estee Lauder Cos., and paged through the catalogue with him — trying to get him to pick out favorites so that we could do a slide show for The New Yorker. Hah! I came home with at least 100 bright yellow post-it notes hanging out of the catalogue — that’s how he marked them. We actually ran through a pad of them, and had to ask for more.

Courtly and ever genial, Lauder protested “I love them all!” And when I urged him to be more selective, he countered, “Why should I do your job? I’m not even getting paid for this. Everything in here is my favorite.”

It seems the curators, Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, had the same experience: the exhibit started out as 400 postcards, was quoted as 450 in the summer, and is now 700. Lauder certainly helped select and chose the cover card, a flirtatious blue-eyed redhead, swathed in black fur and fancy hat, that was the public face of Italys’s Mele department store chain circa 1920. “I got it from an Italian auction run by a dealer in Milano, about seven or eight years ago,” Lauder says. “I paid about $50.”

Lauder’s interests in postcards sometimes shift from theme to theme, with the most recent being Wiener Werkstatte post cards. That, he says, “has been for a long time now, and there’s nothing behind it yet.”

Still, you can see he loves these postcards — if you go to the slide show on The New Yorker site, you’ll find his comments on 14 of the ones we ended up choosing as representative of his favorites. (You can see them all on one PDF that the MFA made for me after Lauder and I spoke  [Lauder_The_Postcard_Age-Selections], but not the captions — maybe it will whet your appetite.)

Now why would Lauder, worth billions, keep buying postcards when he can afford Picassos?

When I asked him that, a trace of incredulity passed over his face. “I like beauty, and you can never surround yourself with enough beauty,” he said. Plus, postcards connect him to history, another of his interests. Lauder admits to being an incurable collector, and says he gets as much pleasure from postcards as he does from his paintings. “The paintings I buy relate to one another, and the postcards do, too,” he says. No matter what he’s buying, “the thrill for me is the hunt.”

Then, he added, “Many people collect to possess. I collect to preserve, and no sooner do I have a collection put together than I am looking for a home for it in a public institution.” As usual, he declined to say anything about where his magnificent collection of paintings will go.

I’ve posted the beautiful cover card and a funny one, that made Lauder laugh, here.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the MFA

 

Discovering An Ancient Civilization In Cleveland — UPDATED

Last spring, when I was reporting an article about acquisitions endowments, I was seduced by a little guy who had been purchased not too long before by the Cleveland Museum of Art (which has one of the biggest purchase funds among U.S. museums).  Made sometime between 600 and 1000 AD, and pictured at left, he came from a culture — the Wari of Peru — that I knew nothing about. And I knew I was not alone.

Although I didn’t mention it at the time, I also knew that this painted lifelike human face on a hide bag, used to stash coca leaves, was to be featured in an exhibition this fall. And I watched for it. That 150-object show, Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes, curated by Susan E. Bergh, will open on Sunday at the Cleveland museum. It’s the first exhibition devoted to the Wari in the U.S., and so will introduce many of us to this culture (after Cleveland, it will travel to the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum).

We don’t know much about the Wari. That’s because, as I write in an article to be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, the Wari had no written language (of course, neither did the Inca) and because they were almost entirely left out of colonial accounts (which the Inca were not).

But the Wari aesthetic is warmer, more human, it seemed to me when I looked at the beautiful catalogue published for the show. Bergh feels similarly: Inca material is more geometric, abstract, muted and simple, compared to the warmer colors and figurative nature of the Wari works. You can’t take that too far — as I learned from her — the Wari believed in human sacrifice, as did many other early cultures. (But less so, perhaps, than the Aztecs and the Incas.) Still, one of the Wari characters is called the sacrificer.

This is the kind of exhibition that I believe can attract those often-elusive wider audiences everyone wants — they don’t have to be like the Princess Diana thing I mentioned yesterday. In fact, as I usually do when I arrive somewhere to report an article, I started talking about the museum on my way in from the airport last week: my driver hadn’t been to it in years. He didn’t know it was free, and had not even heard of the museum’s ongoing expansion, whose new atrium opened this fall to wide publicity. But when I told him about the Wari, he said he wanted to go (and, btw, that that plan would please his wife!). I do not think he was mollifying me — when I got out of his car, he asked me again when the exhibition opened.

The Cleveland museum has been thinking about marketing, of course. One tangible piece of evidence: when it announced the acquisition (two, really — there’s a ceramic piece bought at the same time), the exhibit was called Wari: Realm of the Condor. The current title has more allure, I agree.

Cleveland received money from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help fund this exhibition, which is also telling. It’s an endorsement of its scholarly nature.

And as I mention at the end of my article, Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes is intended to provoke more research and study. Cleveland is not hosting a symposium during the show (its educators’ guide, posted on the museum’s website, is worth a look, though) — but maybe someone else will jump in.

Eric Lee, director at the Kimbell — could that be your museum?

Meantime, I’m going to post picture of a few objects you’ll see in the exhibit here as an enticement.

UPDATE: Eric Lee has written to me — the Kimbell will indeed host a symposium. Here’s what he said:

yes, the Kimbell is planing to host a half-day symposium on Saturday, June 15, 2013, during the exhibition’s opening weekend, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.  We are inviting three leading experts in the field to discuss current research and new discoveries.  The speakers have not yet been confirmed, but we hope to announce the topics and speakers early next year.

By the way, he added:

ten years ago the Kimbell acquired the Wari figure pendant (image attached) featured on the back cover of the exhibition catalogue.  It is only a couple of inches high, but has enormous presence and is a favorite of our visitors.

I agree. I saw the pendant in Cleveland, and now I have posted it here, at right. You can see why it’s a favorite.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Cleveland Art Museum

 

 

Critcial Orthodoxy And Roy Lichtenstein

In addition to going to the Per Kirkeby exhibit at the Phillips Collection on my trip to Washington a week ago Saturday, I also stopped in to see several shows at the National Gallery. The Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, officially opened last Sunday, was available to families and members that day — in preview – and I was kindly allowed in, too. I wasn’t going to write about it, though, because — frankly — while I am no expert on him, I have only slight appreciation for the artist, and this show didn’t raise the level. I find his work, in total, to be shallow and at times even hollow — even though I think some of the paintings are pleasing to look at (especially his late works, Landscapes in the Chinese Style).

Then I read Holland Cotter’s review in Friday’s New York Times, and it made me think about Nicholas Penny’s comments on contemporary art posted here last week, particularly the line about a “lamentable lack of critical debate about contemporary art.”

Cotter didn’t pan Lichtenstein, but readers should notice that he employed several words and phrases that betray at least a mildly negative view: “virtually foolproof art style,” “narrow in range,” “ergonomically comfortable to the eye,” “clever, if slight,” “diverse but unrevealing,” etc. The headline went a step further: “Cool. Commercial. Unmistakable.”

Cotter’s ending:

Lichtenstein changed art to some extent, but nothing else. …his work looks like no one else’s, and some of it still feels fresh and audacious. He encapsulates, at least in his early work, the spirit of an era. He is embedded in the culture now, and unlikely to be dislodged.

Let’s call him an American classic, and leave it at that.

Damning with faint praise? It made me wonder whether anyone else even began to challenge the ordothoxy (a Lichtenstein painted fetched more than $43 million at auction recently, so vested interests are operating here). I looked up other reviews of the exhibit.

In the Washington Post, Anne Midgette, sounded a positive note:

…what animates [his work] is not solely its inherent social criticism, but the tension between the individuality of the painter’s hand and eye and the impersonality of what he uses them to illustrate. This tension runs through the whole show, and is what made it such a delight, even a revelation. …After [his]1993 retrospective, I came away feeling Lichtenstein had had a burst of fecundity in the 1960s and ended up repeating himself or looking in vain for a way to get back to that initial energy. The current show, by contrast, shows him dumping a huge bag of tricks out on the table in the ’60s and continuing to play with them, examine them, and follow them ever further to new solutions, for the rest of his life.

And in the Chicago Tribune, which published a review last May when the exhibit was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lori Waxman gushed:

[His appropriation of comic images and use of Ben-Day dots in Look, Mickey] was a great gambit, one of the finest of the 20th century, a period of art-making full of one gambit after another….By the mid-’60s he’d turned to landscape as a subject matter, depicting sunrises, seascapes and cloudy skies as amalgamations of colored dots, solid lines and blank spaces. The results, on view in a somewhat overhung gallery, are breathtaking. They’re also stunning in their efficiency and abstraction: Lichtenstein borrowed these images from comic books, keeping the background and leaving out all the extraneous details. The ensuing gorgeousness can be hard to believe.

I am sure that all three critics quoted here were sincere in their appraisals, and after all, their views are supposed to be subjective. But I think it’s time to have more debate about Lichtenstein. Of course, Peter Schjeldahl hasn’t yet weighed in, nor has Jed Perl. Maybe they will stir the pot.

This show travels next to the Tate Modern. It’s, no question, a crowd-pleaser: in Chicago, it was the Art Institute’s best-attended exhibition in ten years, drawing about 350,000 people.

And here’s the appropriate kicker: “The retail business was ’31/2 times what we projected,’ ” a spokeswoman told the Tribune.

 

 

 

Enigmatic Per Kirkeby Gets A Show At the Phillips Collection

On Saturday, I took the train to Washington for a look at a couple of exhibitions — one being the retrospective for Danish artist Per Kirkeby at the Phillips Collection. I was not very familiar with his work, but I knew he is considered to be the best (“most highly acclaimed,” the Phillips says in its press release) Scandinavian artist working today. 

As I walked around the show, I couldn’t figure him out at all. Some paintings were colorful, almost decorative (like New Shadows V, right); others, muddy, indistinct (like Untitled, 1993, left). His bronzes seemed unrelated (not necessarily bad). The selection was very eclectic, and I wasn’t sure how representative these pieces are of his work. They are all said to be about nature, natural history, and sometimes a merger of “the beauty of landscape painting and the grandeur of history painting.” 

But almost everywhere I saw aspects of other artists better-known in the United States — Guston, Mitchell, Rauschenberg, Richter, Twombly, Salle even — and I tried to figure out from the dates who influenced whom. (One painting, Untitled 2009, which shows horses — a red one, a yellow one — seemed very related to art I’d seen in Iceland in 2011.) When I got home, still thinking about Kirkeby, I thought of the chart that MoMA’s curators and the Columbia University Business School have devised laying out social networks among artists for MoMA’s coming Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which will open in late December. (This was called to my attention by a recent article in ARTNews headlined “MoMA Makes A Facebook for Abstractionists.”) Here’s the link to the social network chart (be sure to magnify it, or you’ll strain your eyes), and you can see that Picasso, Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay and others had the widest networks. 

Kirkeby, born in 1938, obviously wasn’t on it, but it made me wonder what his network would look like.  

I don’t think I’m the only one a bit mystified by Kirkeby. Notice that this review (which has a very good slide show), in Washingtonian, starts out quoting a British review: 

In a review of one show at Tate Modern, the London Guardian described his works as “rich, earthy, spearing, dynamic, fiercely inquiring, solemn droll, skeptical, and yet abundantly romantic; perhaps a portrait of the artist as much as his art.” 

I got hints as well from an interview with Kirkeby by Dorothy Kosinski, the director of the Phillips, in the catalogue. Such as:

  • “There’s this whole idea of being first with some kind of invention or someone being rare and so on. What does it all mean? Artists are there in their own time and they have different reactions, and essentially they are all good. Even the artists we do not like have done their very best, and you have to respect that.” 
  • On a trip to New York, he met George Maciunas, who asked him if he were part of Fluxus. “I don’t want to be a member, because basically I am a painter. I am attached to material and flamboyant things.” 
  • “In the painter community [in Europe], it was not so good to be an intellectual. But I couldn’t change the way I was and still am.” 
  • “It’s far too easy a conclusion, that I paint layer upon layer, therefore I’m a geologist. I wouldn’t emphasize geology too much.” 
  • “In painting, you have to invent, each time, a set of rules. …At a certain point, I know it’s finished and the painting kicks me out.” 
  • “[My wife sometimes] looks in [my studio] and says, ‘that’s beautiful,’ and then this painting is doomed.” 
  • “It’s very easy to be pessimistic about contemporary [art], because it’s all against my idea of art. There is something very didactic about it…”

 That’s enough to give you a feel for Kirkeby’s sentiments – you’ll have to read the catalogue (too bad that an excerpt of the interview isn’t online). Some of you may find him to be pretentious, but I didn’t. I not entirely convinced by his art, but having read parts of the catalogue I think he’s thought-provoking. Which is what an artist is supposed to be, right?

Good for the Phillips for introducing many of us to this artist.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Phillips Collection