Non-profits to the Rescue of Fine Art

In a follow-up on the story about the Detroit Institute of Arts (see this Blog entry for July 8, 2013), The New York Times reports that 9 philanthropies have agreed to pool donations totaling about $330 million to help the Institute avoid having to sell parts of its priceless collection of world art. The philanthropies, including the Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation and Kresge Foundation, are offering the  money to the city to reduce the debt the City of Detroit owes its pension funds. The deal would mean that the Institute would no longer be owned by the City, but by a non-profit formed for the purpose. But not so fast. The $330 million may not be enough since some estimates say that over $500 million is needed to rescue the Institute from the auction block. Additional fundraising will be pursued.

Space In View

Elizabeth Kessler, a professor at Stanford, published Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime in 2012. This is her argument for the space telescope's value in creating images of the universe in bright colors that everyone can understand. And not only understand, but savor like an experience of a vast mountain range, Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon - in other words, the experience of the Sublime.

 

The Sublime has been a topic of philosophical and literary discussion since the days of the Roman rhetorician Longinus (1st Century CE) and more recently Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. The debate has become a standard among academics and their discussions, centered on the difference  between a visual sublime and a reasoned sublime, or an emotional sublime and a mathematical sublime. No matter, for us non-academics, the point is that there are some things in the world that are beyond exciting, stimulating or arousing. There are some things that are mind-blowing (to use a dramatic visual from the sixties). The Grand Canyon may be the paradigm in the natural world, due to the immensity of the canyon (a mile wide, over a half-mile deep). To stand at the rim of this monstrous hole is to feel something like a pull into the vastness, which is terrifying and that combined with the spectacular natural beauty of the place equals the Sublime experience.

 

It is along these lines that Professor Kessler argues for the inclusion of images of deep-space novelties such as the Horsehead Nebula and the Butterfly Nebula in the discussion of the Sublime. She argues strenuously that these pictures, numbering in the 10s of thousands, should be considered windows on the sublimity of the limitless expanses of the Universe. She says they may be a new vision of the infinite, or at least a glance at the cold indifference of the expanse of mostly empty space from which we came and to which we will return.

 

I enjoyed reading the book, and I enjoyed getting into Kessler’s discussion of what the pictures showed. But a few things bothered me as I read about the way the beautiful colors were made (that not the way the nebulae actually look - the images are enhanced for effect). One problem is the scale. I'd like to know that these cloud-like, smoky manifestations of dust and gravity, are a certain number of light years away and a certain number of light years in depth, width and height.  I can accept that the wily astronomer cannot actually figure out these dimensions down to the square mile, or even to the square light year, but why not give me a ball-park? Or an analogy. (e.g. it is wider than a million football fields; or, 100 dollar bills, placed end-to-end, would pay the national debt a billion times before reaching from one end of this galaxy to the other.) But there is nothing in the book that will ground the reader in anything understandable.

 

This brings me to the central conundrum of the pictures.  On the surface,  they are beautiful abstractions, but when you read the discussions of their depth and subtle ranges of color, I just didn’t  see it. It's too easy to see them as abstracts and too hard, unless truly compelled by Kessler's verbal description, to see them as heavenly bodies. Indeed, Kessler stretches her argument to the breaking point when she compares the forms seen in the Hubble images with similar shapes and color to be found in the epic landscapes of the 19^th century painters Bierstadt or Moran. I cringed when she led me through a specious comparison of the colors and spiritual intensions supposedly illustrated by Rothko to the fluffy pretensions of the Trifid Nebula or various galaxies where stars are “being born”.

I will admit to seeing something in a few of the pictures. The Eagle Nebula, apparently bursting like time-lapse debris from an explosion, shown bright against the empty blackness of space gave me a little vertigo because my mind could not grasp what was beyond the shape. But then I am not an astronomer.

Banksy in New York

Banksy, the clever British graffiti vandal chose a beautiful October to race around spray painting his frequently clever designs on walls throughout the five boroughs. Due to the general scale of his designs (often life sized figures doing body-stretching things) and the stark black-on-white color scheme, his labors stand out against the raged old posters and other graffiti vandalism that dominate the two dimensional sidewalk-level canvas that is the New York City street.

Banksy’s reputation is built on two things: his prized secrecy (he has yet to reveal his real identity in many years of practice) and his politics. His art in itself is generally forgettable because it is always crude spray-painted stencils. What can be said is that it is grounded in safe ridicule of the powerful and loving tribute to the foibles of man and animal.  In other words, it’s safe and it’s charming, like an old rock poster from the 60s touting the virtues of illegal drugs. The medium and the message  are a little obnoxious, but oh those guys were weird.

My only complaint about Banksy is that he won’t go away the way bad, silly artists are supposed to. Indeed, it looks like we may be putting up with him for a while; evidently people are willing to pay real money to own what is basically free. Why captivate what is there to be had at anytime, by anyone? Is it some perverse need like keeping a bird in a cage?

Van Gogh Tries Again

 

 

 

In 1888 Vincent Van Gogh painted an oil on canvas titled “Sunsetat Montmajour”, a work that remained in his brother Theo’s collection until his widow sold it. After decades of buying and selling, and falling into the disrepute of fakery, the work has now re-emerged as genuine. It is presently on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Paintings are like any other object: they can be lost, stolen, faked, reproduced and destroyed. The fact that one can be hidden away in shame (so to speak) because some authority declared it a fake, only to be declared genuine years later, is an odd testimony to our need to feel we are looking at something genuine. Even though it was a fake or forgery yesterday, if today an expert through some new kind of analysis (or, as in this case, just taking some old evidence seriously) finds that it is good as gold, well, then, we’ll look at it. Otherwise, get this stinker out of our sight!

I bring this up because of its philosophical interest. How do we know that we know something is genuine? Do we take someone else’s word for it? Or, do we use our own two eyes and go with our own talents of observation? Clearly, few people know Van Gogh’s oeuvre, style, touch and chronology well enough to ascertain once and forever if this painting or that drawing is actually from the hand of the master. Nevertheless, I can aspire to have as reliable an opinion as anyone who makes the same mistake for 125 years. Yesterday it was a miserable, worthless fake, today it is a discovery.

Hands Off

With Detroit’s bankruptcy has come rumors that the collection of paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts will be sold to pay off the debt. This is because all of the city’s assets must be “put on the table” in any bankruptcy decision and because the collection is worth an estimated $18 billion at auction. Opponents of the sale make the case that the collection is vital to the city. Not only does it bring in dollars from the 600,000+ annual attendance, but it adds immeasurably to the prestige of the city of Detroit. Detroit may be down for the count, but it still is a place on the map for people who love fine art.

One reason this story is interesting to me is that so much art is in the hands of the wealthy already, why make more available to their rapacious and philistine intentions to own in it all? If sold, won’t most of the Detroit collection go into the hands of the super wealthy, when sold at Sotheby’s or Christie’s? Won’t the recently hatched Russian billionaires, to say nothing of the mature billionaires in the software and dot.com industries, be lusting for the Van Goghs (see below) or Louis’s?

I don’t believe I’m overly protective of our nation’s heritage when I say: leave the Detroit collection alone. Even though it is legally owned by an entity known as Detroit, isn’t is actually owned by the people who use it and need it? You may question this last idea – that the people need art – but I point out to you that art is about the ineffable, the sublime, and as such it points the way to hope for something grand in the face of things going bad. To something more significant than money.

 

Docent at the Institute discusses Van Gogh's "Portrait of Postman Roulin" with visitors.

 

Morris Louis, Painter's Painter

I often think of Morris Louis and his short, brilliant career. A man who was old enough to have known many of the Abstract Expressionists – those heroic Americans who forged a new expression in opposition to the hegemony of European art (especially Picasso) – and  a man who knew something about color, enough to make some of the most startlingly beautiful large-scale paintings of the 20^th Century.

Morris Louis was a humble teacher of art, but part of an ambitious circle of painters, including Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons and Jules Olitski, who were committed to a new vision of formal painting someone dubbed the Color Field School. Lyrical Abstraction was another name used at the time. The names, no matter their origin, are appropriate  because these men were able to make art from the simple notion that color is best experienced as a sensation that fills the vision and the mind with sensory experience. Sometimes this experience is both memorable and mystical. The latter is controversial, as anything that refers to Spirit and Modernism in the same breath must be. That aside, to witness the Spirit at work one needs only to direct one’s eyes to the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Morris Louis (and a few others). Their content, beyond the merely descriptive,  was unspoken - or secret -  (their titles are notoriously unhelpful).  No matter, all three managed to achieve an unmistakable sense of awe through the scale of their paintings and their very obvious simplicity.

Louis had two periods: the Veils and the Unfurleds.  The example I reproduce here comes from the Veils, because I happen to think these are the most arresting. It’s important to remember that each of Louis’s paintings is immersive (by which I mean that when viewers are within a few feet of the canvas, they feel immersed in the experience, the effect due probably to the approximately 10 to 15 feet wide by 9 or 10 feet high size canvases the artist produced. They were made by letting the paint flow in carefully planned directions, probably by lifting and tilting the canvas as the wet paint flowed down over it.,  The paint had been carefully diluted to be transparent and liquid, making the painted surface entirely flat, a goal of the painting aesthetic of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

These works sometimes suggest to me flowers of many colors blossoming from their buds; and, other times, Salome’s veils as she danced for Herod; and, other times, the muscularity of a force of nature.

Louis died of lung cancer in 1962 at the age of 49, likely due to inhaling the fumes from Magna, an oil-based acrylic auto body paint, that had been custom prepared for him by Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden. Like Pollock, he worked standing over his canvases which he had affixed to stretchers to permit movement. And like Helen Frankenthaler, he developed and refined his own method of using paint as a staining medium., with no surface texture. His paintings have been collected by museums and individuals with great enthusiasm since his death, and now they are in public and private collections all over the world.

Louis is one of several little known master painters of the late Abstract Expressionist period. He should probably be accorded the title “painter’s painter”, because, although he is not widely appreciated by the general public, he is very much admired among artists. This post was prompted by a visit to the Seattle Art Museum, which recently hung its Unfurled.

Original or Costly Mistake?

A story in The New York Times about a woman arrested for trafficking in forgeries of Abstract Expressionist paintings brought to mind the idea that it must be easier to fake a Jackson Pollock than a Rembrandt. For one thing, even the experts are often stymied by supposed originals. They resort, in the case of Andy Warhol (who produced multiples of silk screened stock photos), to hiring experts who reputedly can determine if there is any mention of painting X in the artist’s recorded oeuvre. In other words, is there any proof the artist did this? Like evidence of a crime, only experts, we’re led to believe, who are extraordinarily familiar with the artist’s work, can discern the correct attribution: original or bogus original.

In the case of accused tax dodger and agent for phony art, Glafira Rosales, who is now in jail awaiting trial it's now pretty clear than her supposed gold is actually pyrite. If found guilty of these crimes, the 56 year-old could face five years. Not so bad for duping dozens of wealthy non-experts, not to say fools, and scoring over $15 million. And in the bargain she also brought down Knoedler Gallery in New York, probably the most visible international dealer in modern the art of the Abstract Expressionists.

Reading between the lines in the story, I got the impression that the FBI had agents on the case for some time. Then the IRS got involved, since Mr. Rosales had not paid taxes on her millions. And since she is a Spanish national who  stashed her loot in Spain, I can only guess what European officials came to bear down on her.

But back to the question of authenticity. It has often been said, to the point of tedium, when looking at a Pollock or a Rothko, et al, that “my ten year old daughter could do that”. Which could be true if the girl had been painting for decades, learning a subtle craft and then applying her knowledge and intuitions to major works that hang  in museums and private homes world-wide. No, I want to put that notion to rest. No youngster could conceivably make a Pollock or a Rothko, not even the immature works by these modern masters. I know none of this is convincing if you insist on remaining ignorant, but try to hear me over the noise in your consciousness, this is great art, contributing great things, great ideas and great accomplishment to history. We will never see their likes again.

 

Here's a fun brain tickler: which one's the forgery? The top is "Elegy To The Spanish Republic" The bottom is I don't know. Both cost millions. One is worth less than the canvas it's painted on. But then, who cares? My ten year old could do this.