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