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