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.

 

 

Ellsworth Kelly: Expressionist Master

I don’t often think of the work of Ellsworth Kelly, except when I find one on a museum wall or displayed in a sculpture park. Recently, on a visit to the National Gallery in Washington D.C., I encountered a beautiful shaped canvas work (Blue Violet Curve I (1982) see above), typical of the artist, abstract yet somehow recalling a natural shape, reduced down to a few elemental forms and artistic decisions.

In this case, it was a work from the 1980s, when the artist was in his late 50s with his own niche between the Abstract Expressionist movement that had captivated world art since Jackson Pollock and minimalism that had led modern art since the 1960s.

The work to which I refer is small by Kelly’s standards, a mere 6x5 feet, consisting of a blue arc on a white background. The first thing I noticed was the subtle yet obvious optical illusion that the arc is actually a fan, the left side shorter and thus appearing to tip away from the viewer. Of course the choice of foreground or background is based solely on the optics of blue on white. In fact, it could go either way: white foreground, blue background or blue foreground, white background. In other words, it could depict a fan shape lying flat on a white ground or a deep blue, limitless space, like the track of a wind shield wiper revealing the sky.

This is the kind of ambiguity in which Kelly revels. Much of his work since about 1950 is made of simple, beautifully rendered geometric shapes, in primary colors, black and white. The magic is in the scale. The artist has the uncanny ability to match the clearest shape with the optimum scale so that the works appear to float, or “stand” as artists would phrase it. These works are stunning in any architectural milieu that does not crowd them.

This is an artist with an uncanny feel for scale and color and form. With no discernible content, Kelly’s art is so good that one feels in the presence of a master. Like all true masters, he is able to evoke wondrous things in simple paint and canvas, pencil on paper and in steel.

 

A case in point is the excellent steel rounded square at the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery (Stele II, 1973 (approximately 8 x 8 feet), see above). Floating above the lawn, this painted steel work suggests an object like a kitchen utensil, giddily enlarged. Because of its scale and its float, it is reborn as something beautiful that is not a trope. The mystery here is in the shift from something mundane and transitory to something immutable. A unique American master, Kelly makes representations of perfection by means of the manipulation of materials that would otherwise mean nothing.

 

 

Picasso: Trading on Le Reve

The sands of art world time and money are shifting again. SAC’s (hedge fund) founder Steven A. Cohen has just bought a Picasso. Still enmeshed in a legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over insider trading – offering a $616 million settlement so long as there is no admission of guilt – Cohen purchased a $60 million home in East Hampton in which he will presumably hang “Le Réve” (The Dream) (above) by Pablo Picasso.

Cohen purchased it in 2013 from Stephen A. Wynn (casino entrepreneur) for $155 million and it is now the most expensive piece of paint and canvas ever. In 2007, Wynn notoriously pushed his elbow through the painting during an animated conversation in his office in Las Vegas. Now repaired, and the gash Wynn made in the art work (mostly) invisible, the painting has been sold to Cohen for a record price six years later.

“La Réve” was in Mr. Wynn’s collection since 2001, so he may have thought it was about time he moved it. He’d looked at it long enough, perhaps. Or he wanted to make room for another work of art in his “vast”  art collection, as it was described in The New York Times. Or, as a gambling man - a superstitious lot - , he may have seen the whole elbow-through-the-painting incident as a harbinger of bad luck, cutting into his pleasure of ownership.

Cohen is not known as an insightful art collector, although now he may have a claim to that reputation. But no matter how he's called, he’ll always be better known as a profiteer. We conceive of him as a flamboyant money maniac. But that’s a preconception. Surely not all multi-billionaires who own the most expensive  duplex apartment in Manhattan - now up for sale at $115 million - can be objects of ridicule and even disdain. They must be at least part human, and therefore subject to some of the same joys and sadnesses as other members of our species. Yet, they manage to keep it to themselves, no doubt comforted by the beauty of their vast art collections.

Picasso, also a very wealthy man, was  a man of strong emotions, from cool to sentimental. This may be what Cohen and Wynn have in common with the modern master, but lacking his creative talent and instead having in abundance a talent for extracting crumbs from the cake, like Gordon Gekko.

As to “Le Réve”(51 x 38 inches)  (1932), it is an excellent example of the artist’s late synthetic style, with a clearly erotic theme.  It will look fine hanging on a wall in one of Mr. Cohen's homes.Stephen Wynn and Le Reve

Damien Hirst: Metaphysical Artist for Our Times

 

A few years ago, in 2007, British artist Damien Hirst exhibited a diamond-encrusted platinum cast of the skull of a 19th century man. 8,601 stones cover every external surface, the largest over 50 carets. The work (shown above), which cost $23 million to make, was sold for about $100 million. Its title is For the Love Of God.

 It is estimated that 47 year-old Hirst (born 1965) is the richest artist in the world. He lives on a large estate in the English countryside. He keeps a studio staff of dozens of trained artists that churns out works on order. Yet, despite his assembly-line methods, his work is in great demand.

 Hirst's wealth aside, the question is often posed: "Why so morbid? Why so much talk of death?", because he does seem fascinated with the greased sled we're inevitably all riding.

 Some critics assert that this is because he is a sensitive man living in difficult times. Economic decline, global warming, terrorism. By this argument, Hirst's near-obsession with death becomes a commentary, and not at all as morbid and lunatic as it first appears.

 Other critics assert that he's a sensationalist who would do anything to provoke the public because of his perverse need for recognition. He needs to be noticed. But that itch must have been scratched by now - after over two decades in the limelight, internationally lauded and placed into the pantheon of other break-through artists, such as Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp.

 A third, less well known critical theory is that Hirst is a metaphysician who looks at basic things and makes art from his observations. This theory may have seemed ridiculous when first proposed, but it is gaining traction as time goes by. Not so long ago Hirst showed us pickled dead animals and gave the results thoughtful titles, such as The Physical Impossibility of Life In the Mind Of Someone Living (1992). A provocative title for a disquieting exhibit of a shark in a tank of formaldehyde. And now, a worthless dead man's skull made priceless by a London jeweler.

 But is it art?

Surely Hirst is an artist who helps the world by revealing mystic truths. Or at least by alluding to mystic truths about life, death, and money. What are these mystic truths he is revealing? With the shark it may be in the form of a question: in what sense is a dead animal, preserved from decay, an intimation of immortality? And it may be that to bring an actual dead animal into an art gallery is to comment on the notion that once a work of art goes on public display, it is dead.

But that is for the artist to know, and the rest of us to find out.

 Hirst should be lauded for taking on the subject of death and dying. It is an uncomfortable discussion and it is one most of us would prefer to avoid, until absolutely necessary.

As Dylan Thomas wrote, "After the first death, there is no other". Let Damien Hirst prove him wrong.

 

 

Wassily Kandinsky: Father of Abstract Painting

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was the son of a Russian merchant who becamse a lawyer and academic, and one of a small circle of artists who so influenced the direction of art in the twentieth century that it can be said he changed painting forever.. He was a devout Russian Orthodox believer and a follower of Madame Blavatsky, who was as proponent of Theosophy, spiritualism and the occult. Kandinsky was author of a seminal manifesto, “Concerning the Spiritual In Art” (1910), a work that lays out  his conception of the language of the soul in form and color, and establishes a foundation for abstract art.  It is influential to this day.

The artist is credited with making some of the earliest advances in modern abstract painting that reverberate to the present, over 100 years since he painted them. Now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, many of these oil on canvas paintings, made between 1911 and 1914, are regarded as the earliest pure abstractions, consisting of striking color, lines and shapes that allude to a real-world narrative of mythical horsemen and mountain valleys, in what Kandinsky hoped would be the painterly equivalent of the music of Richard Wagner (1813-1883).

These paintings show Kandinsky exploring the essence of time, place and appearances. At this point, Kandinsky was an artist in search of something ethereal, something spiritual, manifest in the natural world. As his career progressed, the artist abandoned the references to the visible world characteristic of his lyrical expression for a more formal, geometric style, typical of the Bauhaus, where he taught. Some art historians trace this transformation to the experience of World War I, which so devastated Europe and forever altered its cultures and societal structures. As a consequence of their alientation from the past, many artists turned to the esoteric, embracing obscurity and secrecy.

I offer two examples of Kandinsky’s work. Composition VII, 1913 (79 inches X 118 inches) (above) is from his early abstract work, when the ideas were fresh. The other is Composition VIII, 1923 (55 inches X 79 inches) (below) from the Bauhaus period, when the artist had turned to more restricted, some would say refined, forms. Kandinsky’s work was well known to young artists of the 30s and 40s, including Arshile Gorky, Joan Miro and Jackson Pollock.

Van Gogh:Good and Beautiful

Sure it’s good, but is it good for you? Since Aristotle, philosophers have puzzled over the question “What is beauty?” The basis of aesthetics, up until the early 20^th century, was the pursuit of an answer to this age-old question. In the early decades of the last century, artists and philosophers alike expended considerable energy coming up with one theory after another, all ultimately to fail in getting down to the essence of beauty – beauty itself, without any need for an object of beauty.

I find that the greatest pleasure in my pursuit of the beautiful is my discovery of what is moral. I think beauty is good in that sense; it leads people to contemplate basic questions of how to live a good life. That is why I want to surround myself with art, because not only does it fill me with pleasure, it also creates in my mind a version of the good which is, at least, worth testing.

May I offer an example?

Here is something that is good on a painterly level. It shows skilled craftmanship plus an extraorindary ability at self-expression. Van Gogh painted “Gauguin’s Chair” during one of his manic periods when he made dozens of paintings a month. This one was done after he and Gauguin went their separate ways, an event that troubled Van Gogh for the rest of his short life. The painting is rich, it is good, and it is suffused with grief. The empty chair becomes a universal symbol of loss and it fills me with strong, resonant emotion, as I reflect on the people I’ve lost.

An eminent art historian, connoisseur and appraiser in the first decades of the 20^th century, Bernard Berenson wrote, “art must be life enhancing”.

Anish Kapoor: Awe In a Public Place

As much as I love modern sculpture, I’m afraid my true love ‘s heart is beating for the work of the 1970s, when Richard Serra was young. That said, I’m warming to post-modernist sculpture, owing much to the work of Anish Kapoor, a British artist born in India in 1954. Since art school, he’s created dozens of large scale public works, and who knows how many drawings, models and small scale sculptures. Of course, being an artist of our time, he does not waste sweat on small potatoes. Most of his work for public sites is colossal in scale and even his indoor work is the scale of a Renaissance equestrian, in other words at least as big a horse.  Here’s an example of a work in a private collection (Hole and Vessel, 1984, below, left) that is approximately 6 feet in any direction.

 

But what I’m really getting at is the big public pieces. For instance, Kapoor produced a stainless steel abstract titled “Cloud Gate” (above), lovingly dubbed the Bean by Chicagoans, whose hometown unveiled the piece in 2006 in Millennium Park, a large, paved public area. To happen on the sculpture can only be described as a breathtaking experience because the work is immense, truly huge. It is awesome, in the sense that you want to back away from it and go have a drink to try to forget. But you can’t leave because the thing is beautiful, hauntingly so. Here’s a picture of it (above) taken by Daniel Maidman, published on February 20, 2013 in the Huffington Post.

 

 



Make Yourself a Warhol

Andy Warhol was a prolific modern artist who is synonymous with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. But it's not widely known that this gifted artist pursued a variety of mediums, from his early days as an illustrator for high-end department stores, to the soup can paintings that made him famous, and on to the silkscreens he made for almost twenty years. The silk screen is an interesting medium that produces multiples, each slightly different from the next. Warhol famously made silkscreen pictures of the rich, glamorous and notorious using this medium to create many series of portraits. Perhaps his most famous silkscreen painting shows Marilyn Monroe. He used an iconic photograph and created the memorable image in multiples that are on display in museums and galleries world-wide.

Recently the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA (Warhol's home town) created an App for the iPhone that is both fun and instructional. With it, you can create silkscreen-like images using any photograph you choose. The app mimics the silkscreen process, down to sound effects that approximate the sounds you'd hear in an artist's studio. For instance, when a picture is selected, your iPhone will buzz, like an electric wire shorting out. This simulates  the sound of photo-flash used to create a photographic image on the silkscreen. Using the iPhone camera to take a snap of yourself, you can manipulate the image to create a high-contrast (black and white) self-portrait, which then you can color using a palette of seemingly infinite hues and tones. When you're satisfied that you've got the picture you want, you can complete the process by using your finger to pull a digital squeegee over the image (simulating the application of inks through the silkscreen to the paper), revealing the finished picture, which you can save or send to a friend. It's not easy to create something as striking as a Warhol, but you can have a lot of fun.

By the way, you can buy an original, signed Warhol silkscreen, if you're so inclined, for as little as $45,000. The one reproduced here is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is not for sale. To learn more about Andy Warhol go to www.warhol.org