Bass Museum has the only mummy south of Atlanta... "Mummy Dearest: Shadow of the Sphinx" in @wsj via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

 

By Barrymore Laurence Scherer
August 27, 2012, 4:37 p.m. ET  

 

Utica, N.Y. - The hills of central New York have been alive with the sounds and sights of Egypt this summer. In Cooperstown, the Glimmerglass Opera Festival featured Verdi’s “Aida” and the Fenimore Art Museum exhibited costumes from Metropolitan Opera “Aida” productions of the past century. And in Utica, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art is presenting the absorbing “Shadow of the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt and Its Influence.”

Comprising roughly 150 objects, paintings, works of art, pieces of jewelry and related items from 30 lenders as well as the museum’s own collections, the show underscores the fascination with a multimillennial legacy that has long made Egyptology a staple of museum culture. Moreover, it places its venerable subject within a fresh and notably accessible historical context: The exhibition isn’t just about ancient Egypt but about its lively effect on fine, decorative and performing art from the Napoleonic era right through Cecil B. DeMille’s brand of Egyptofantasy.


Richard Walker - Detail of a mummy portrait mask from 332 B.C. - A.D. 395.

The first gallery, “The Burial Chamber,” sets the scene with a vivid selection of antiquities concerned with the rites of death, mummification and burial central to ancient Egyptian culture.

Flanking its entrance are two Ptolemaic-period sphinx fragments of carved limestone (332-30 B.C.), their delicately sculpted features softened by the erosion of countless windblown grains of sand. Taking center stage are a wood coffin lid and its base from the Late Dynastic Period (c. 525-343 B.C.) embellished with meticulously carved and painted human and bird motifs. Its splendid condition reminds us how posterity has reaped the preservative benefits of Egypt’s dry climate and the painstaking methods of ancient Egyptian craftsmen and funerary workers.

Many of the objects here would have been buried with the dead to accompany them in the afterlife—brilliantly glazed pottery; diminutive, beautifully wrought amulets and jewelry of cast and beaten gold, carved lapis-lazuli, beads of colored faience. A limestone canopic jar (c. 1070-945 B.C.), to contain the entrails removed from a body as part of mummification, resembles a small coffin with carved face and painted eyes. There’s also an actual mummified head from the Roman period (c. mid-second-century B.C. to mid-first-century A.D.), its face masked in gold leaf and given painted features, to imitate the solid-gold masks of royal mummies. And striking a poignant note is a mummified cat. Whether it once enjoyed life as a sacred creature or a family pet, now its eviscerated, sausagelike body is tightly wrapped in linen, with feline features painted on the swaddled head, its two perky ears distinct.

Virtually all of the chosen artifacts embody the colors, shapes and decorative motifs from which European and, afterward, American craftsmen derived their highly imaginative Egyptian Revivals, initially sparked by 18th-century archaeological discoveries. Representing the awakening interest is a fanciful English “canopic vase” produced about 1770 by the pottery firm of Wedgwood & Bentley. Possibly inspired by elements in the “Egyptian” mantelpiece designs published in 1769 by the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, this striking piece is essentially a bulbous neoclassical urn with a finely modeled Egyptian head pre-empting the usual pine-cone finial.

The shiploads of antiquities sent back to France during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign of 1798 incited the first Egyptian Revival craze during the Directoire and Empire periods and England’s Regency. And the lure of Egypt and its surroundings fostered an enduring “Orientalist” school of painting, as European artists voyaged to Egypt and North Africa, where they produced exotic views of deserts, pyramids and street life that found a ready market back home. The show features lush Orientalist canvases by such exponents through successive decades asCharles Théodore Frère, Rudolf Ernst and Joseph Farquharson, which document their fascination with “primitive” life still extant in 19th-century Egypt. Works like Edwin Long’s “Love’s Labor Lost,” Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s “Cleopatra on the Terraces at Philae” and Gustave Doré’s “Moses Before the Pharaoh” attest to those artists’ mastery of romanticized, dramatic interpretations of ancient and biblical themes.

The construction of the Suez Canal and its completion in 1869 sparked a second Egyptian Revival, represented here with examples of opulent, imaginative furniture, silver, glass, lamps and other decorations in the Egyptian taste whose obelisk, pyramid and sphinx motifs lent distinctive flair to French Second Empire and High Victorian design.

Taking a spin on the stylized Egyptian scarab beetle, a massive porcelain paperweight shaped like a startled but anatomically correct beetle and a porcelain vase embellished with another beetle (replete with six legs and probing antennae) represent experimental extremes by the inventive English designer Christopher Dresser during the 1880s.

More beautiful, and more dazzling, are ancient and European scarab-inspired jewelry in the “Jewels of the Nile” gallery, the exhibition’s visual climax. Among the dazzlers are a scarab brooch of fire opal and enameled gold by Marcus & Co., New York, and a Swiss gold ladies’ watch. Articulated beetles-wings covering the watch face are enameled in royal blue and ablaze with 16 tiny diamonds in star-shaped settings.

The final gallery represents Egypt’s hold on 19th- and 20th-century popular culture, reinvigorated by the English archaeologist Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb. Film posters and other material document successive “Cleopatra” extravaganzas starring Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor; George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” starring Vivian Leigh; “The Mummy” with Boris Karloff and its 1999 remake; “The Ten Commandments,” and of course “Death on the Nile.” There are vaudeville posters, old souvenir postcards, souvenir pencils, toiletries and other commercial relics that once exploited Egyptian fads.

Most endearing is colorful sheet music for such Tin-Pan Alley numbers as “My Cairo Maid” (1917) and “Ilo (A Voice From Mummyland)” (1921), and the wistful tenor air “Star Light, Star Bright” from Victor Herbert’s early operetta hit, “The Wizard of the Nile” (1895). It’s a pity that there isn’t an accompanying selection of historic recordings to let visitors hear the tuneful melodies behind those inviting covers.

For younger viewers as well as adults, videos and board games introduce aspects of Egyptian culture; bins of flash-cards explain hieroglyphics, Egyptian cats, scarabs and other motifs. There are even “scent stations,” whose fragrant boxes of dried seeds and herbs invite visitors to inhale the aromas of “the spicy shores of Araby the blest.” Indeed, virtually no stone has been left unturned, as it were, to make this exhibition delightful and memorable.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

 

 

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"Artist Focus: Barry McGee: Street Art Steals A Berkeley Show" in @wsj

By RACHEL WOLFF

In the vein of pioneering New York street artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barry McGee got his start spray-painting San Francisco walls in the 1980s with "Wild Style" graffiti and cartoony faces. His work quickly grew to include sculptures, immersive installations and elaborate murals, painted both in and out of doors.

[image] 
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - Barry McGee's 'Untitled,' acrylic on glass bottles from 2005.

Like many of today's street artists and unlike Basquiat, whose work set an auction record in June with a $20 million sale at Christie's, Mr. McGee, 46, is formally trained. He earned his BFA in 1991 at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he specialized in painting and printmaking but found himself drawn to the street rather than to more traditional galleries. Mr. McGee—who is represented by Cheim & Read in New York—and his ilk have made street art more complex while finding homes for it with private collectors willing to pay from $25,000 to $500,000 for a new installation.

In the past decade, mainstream museums have embraced this generation of artists too. Tate Modern commissioned a handful of street artists (including the Brazilian duo Os Gêmeos) to make massive murals on its exterior walls in 2008; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles hosted a major survey dedicated to the movement in 2011, in which Mr. McGee's work was featured prominently.

"Barry McGee," the first comprehensive look at his career, opened Friday at the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and remains on view through Dec. 9. In April, the show travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

Street-Art Standouts

[image]Christies Images Ltd. 2012

A Keith Haring ink on vinyl tarpaulin piece executed in 1982 that sold for $2,840,000, more than double the estimate.

[image]Christies Images Ltd 2012

An acrylic by street artist Kaws, the alias of artist Brian Donnelly.

Mr. McGee is widely admired for his ability to create in-gallery environments that evoke the street, and insisting that museum exhibitions include an outdoor display. "There is a tension in artists between wanting to exhibit our work in galleries and wanting to make work that defies that same system and maintains our sense of being individuals," says John O'Connor, an artist and visiting assistant professor in the fine arts department of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Mr. McGee's approach has inspired unknown graffiti writers, MFA hopefuls, and younger New York street artists like Swoon. The wider art world embraced his aesthetic, and he was exhibiting his work regularly by the mid-1990s, often enlisting friends and collaborators (including his late wife and fellow street artist Margaret Kilgallen) to aid in his large-scale installations and make contributions of their own. He has shown everywhere from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to the Prada Foundation in Milan.

The Berkeley show features dozens of framed drawings, prints and bright Op-art-like abstractions clustered tightly on gallery walls; little-seen early etchings; and murals bearing his signature "'toons"—expressive, often droopy faces with deep-set eyes and heavy lids inspired, in part, by the homeless population in San Francisco's Mission District. There's also a sculpture of five hoodie-clad animatronic kids stacked on each other's shoulders as the top one tags a gallery wall with the word "Amaze."

As part of his usual effort to bring his art outside, Mr. McGee has also spray-painted "Amaze" in a graffiti-like scrawl on panel that sheaths the museum's exterior facade. "The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still—it's not something that a museum would really embrace," he says. "And even if they let me do it, I like to make it look like it's done illegally to some degree."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358404577605410129516228.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

 

"Eye Candy or Eyesore?: Work by Niki de Saint Phalle and Bruce High Quality Foundation" in @nytimes

Julia Gillard for The New York Times
An installation by Charles Long at Madison Square Park. More Photos »

By KEN JOHNSON
Published: August 23, 2012

Public art makes me think of what the Conceptualist Douglas Huebler once said: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” That may be a funny thing for an artist to say, but if you live in a place as densely packed with objects of all kinds as New York City, you may appreciate its wisdom. Nevertheless, for better or worse, temporary public art displays pop up all over the city during the warm seasons in hopes of adding beauty and zest to the urban fabric.


Julia Gillard for The New York Times

Outdoor Sculpture One of nine installations by Niki de Saint Phalle on traffic islands from 52nd to 60th Streets on Park Avenue features a stout tree whose branches have morphed into gold heads of lively snakes.


Julia Gillard for The New York Times
John Chamberlain’s sculpture on the plaza of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue.

A stretch of Park Avenue is one place where the necessity of public art comes into question right now. There a series of monumental, bulbous figures clad in colorful mosaic tiles by Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) punctuates the traffic islands from 52nd to 60th Streets. Dating from 1983 to 2001, they include simplified but recognizable portraits of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, as well as a number of renditions of curvy, knob-headed female beauties and a stout tree whose branches have morphed into gold heads of lively snakes.

Back in the ’60s, when Ms. de Saint Phalle was developing her aesthetic, figures like these had a goofy, liberationist vibe. But the works here seem woefully outdated, more tacky than visionary.

As a counterpoint to Ms. de Saint Phalle’s strenuously playful works, a quartet of abstract metal sculptures by John Chamberlain occupies the plaza of the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Made from 2008 to 2010, they are unlike the Abstract Expressionist conglomerations of automobile body parts he was known for.

Mainly they consist of tubular elements, made of crushed sheet metal, that resemble elongated elephant legs bound together into knotlike configurations. They were copied from small maquettes that Mr. Chamberlain created by molding aluminum foil with his hands. Colored metallic green, copper and silver, they are weird hybrids of beauty and ugliness. Here on the Seagram Building’s porch, they call to mind the old dismissive label for abstract sculpture on corporate plazas: “plop art.”

As chance would have it, there is a piece of outdoor sculpture in the same neighborhood representing the opposite of the beautifying imperative. Installed on the plaza of Lever House, it is a giant rat, one of those balloons that labor union strikers often bring with them to represent masters of the capitalist universe, but here cast in bronze by the team of young artist-provocateurs known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. In a poetically just world, it would be permanently installed on Wall Street within waving distance of the raging bull.

The rat, titled “The New Colossus,” accompanies an exhibition of the group’s works in the glassed-in lobby of Lever House. It consists of real objects, like mops in buckets, vacuum cleaners, a step ladder and office furniture, scattered about the space. Each has an audio speaker built into it that is connected by radio to a video montage on a flat screen called “Art History With Labor: 95 Theses.” Different professional actors’ voices enunciating texts about art and labor emanate from the speakers, as if these objects associated with daily work had themselves become animated, like ventriloquists’ dummies, by unionizing passions.

I wonder what the denizens of this zone of corporate business and super-expensive domiciles think about the Bruces’ agitprop? It is hard to imagine many of them being aroused to revolutionary fervor. Still, the incongruity itself is refreshing. In this respect it is worth noting that the Lever House art program is privately sponsored, with the former Whitney Museum of American Art curator Richard Marshall organizing its exhibitions. It is rare to find such baldly partisan expression as the Bruces’ in outdoor art sponsored by public institutions. Offense is so easily taken, especially if taxpayer money is involved.

A more circumspect approach to political art can be found in two pieces included in “Common Ground,” a 10-artist exhibition in City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, organized by the Public Art Fund. “It’s Never Too Late to Say Sorry,” by the team Elmgreen & Dragset, consists of a glass case displaying a gleaming aluminum megaphone. The case is locked, but a descriptive label explains that once a day a performer will open it and “activate” the piece. No actor showed up while I was there, but in an online video of the sculpture’s debut in Rotterdam you get to see a man unlock the case, take out the megaphone, hold it to his mouth and cry out, “It is never too late to say, ‘Sorry!’,” whereupon he returns the bullhorn to its case and walks away.

Placed across the park’s circular central plaza is Amalia Pica’s “Now, Speak!,” a podium cast in concrete that seems to invite people to step up and say whatever is on their minds. Otherwise implacably silent, it shares with Elmgreen & Dragset’s piece a funereal feeling. Both could be memorials to the loss of a widely shared and well-developed public discourse.

As Martha Schwendener observed in her review in The New York Times, other works in “Common Ground” exemplify the distinctive language of high-end contemporary art. Paul McCarthy’s colossal inflated ketchup bottle; Christian Jankowski’s plaque announcing the burial of his remains somewhere in the park; Justin Matherly’s rough re-creation of a part of the Ancient Roman sculpture “Laocoön and His Sons,” elevated on a platoon of aluminum walkers: these as well as works by Matthew Day Jackson, Thomas Schütte and Jenny Holzer speak in tongues likely to be as mystifying to the public as they are familiar to people conversant in the polyglot lingo of today’s art world.

There is another, more democratic — utopian, even — rationale for presenting this sort of art to the public. It might interrupt the usual flow of collective consciousness, diverting minds from routine compliance with the banal order of things and opening up ordinarily hidden vistas of imaginative vision.

A more viewer-friendly example of that approach is an installation called “Pet Sounds” by the sculptor Charles Long at Madison Square Park in Manhattan. The main elements are large, cheerfully colored fiberglass blobs resembling extraterrestrial or subaquatic life forms as imagined by the makers of “Ghostbusters.”

Some stand on their own; one sits on a park bench; another sprawls on a picnic table. All are connected to swerving hand railings that create winding pathways for visitors. A close encounter with any of the blobs reveals that each is equipped with a small speaker that emits futuristic electronic noises. A kind of surrealistic petting zoo with a nod to the Beach Boys, Mr. Long’s creation requires little esoteric knowledge to enjoy. Its generosity of spirit is infectious.

Although very different in style from Mr. Long’s sculpture, works by Oscar Tuazon in Brooklyn Bridge Park also aim to tweak everyday consciousness. “People,” the most complex of three pieces there, consists of a poured concrete handball wall with a tall dead tree attached to one vertical edge and an old basketball hoop and backboard attached to a truncated branch. Placed near a chain-link fence setting parkland off from an adjacent construction site, it looks less like art than like an ad hoc construction waiting to be broken down and carted away by a demolition crew. Another production of the Public Art Fund, it reflects a considerable uncertainty about who it wants its public to be.

You might suppose that the High Line would be a good site for outdoor art. Thus far, however, the park’s public art program has done little to distinguish itself. This summer’s effort, called “Lilliput,” sounds like a good idea. Organized by Cecilia Alemani, the High Line’s art curator, it presents small-scale sculptures by six artists distributed in inconspicuous places to either side of the main walkway.

Only one piece creates the sort of surprise you would hope for: Tomoaki Suzuki’s “Carson,” a startlingly realistic, two-foot-tall portrait of a young man with bleached hair wearing tight black jeans and a black motorcycle jacket. Made of carved and painted wood, this miniature hipster stands nonchalantly on gravel between old steel train rails, oblivious to the giant tourists who gawk at him or stop to pose next to him for snapshots.

Nothing else in “Lilliput” has such a galvanizing relationship to its environment. Though mildly appealing, Francis Upritchard’s Rodinesque pair of bronze simian creatures and Oliver Laric’s colorfully striped cast resin portrait of Sun Tzu with two faces like the Roman god Janus, would be seen to better advantage in an indoor gallery.

The High Line public art program faces an unusual challenge. The site is almost a mile and a half long but mostly no wider than a one-way street, and grass and other plantings take up a lot of that space. Because of its popularity, it is pretty congested in nice weather. With vendors selling drinks and snacks, as well, and so much nonart to see in different directions near and far and up and down, there is almost too much going on. Does the High Line need art on top of all that? I’m not convinced that it does.

Site Specific

 

BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION: ‘ART HISTORY WITH LABOR’ Through Sept. 28. Lever House, 390 Park Avenue, at 53rd Street; leverhouseartcollection.com.

‘COMMON GROUND’ Through Nov. 30. City Hall Park, between Broadway and Park Row, Lower Manhattan; publicartfund.org/commonground.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Through Nov. 16. Seagram Building, 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets; gagosian.com.

‘LILLIPUT’ Through April 14. The High Line, six sculptures between 30th and Gansevoort Streets and 10th and 11th Avenues, Manhattan; thehighline.org.

CHARLES LONG: ‘PET SOUNDS’ Through Sept. 9. Madison Square Park, 23rd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues; madisonsquarepark.org/art.

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE ON PARK AVENUE Through Nov. 15. Park Avenue between 52nd and 60th Streets; nikidesaintphalle.org.

OSCAR TUAZON: ‘PEOPLE’ Through April 26. Brooklyn Bridge Park; entrance at Old Fulton and Furman Streets, Dumbo. publicartfund.org/oscartuazon.

 

A version of this review appeared in print on August 24, 2012, on page C21 of the New York edition with the headline: Eye Candy or Eyesore?.

"Diego Singh Does Denim at Sydney's Mclemoi Gallery"

Lost My Memory in Hollywood, 2009-2012 & The New Yorker 3 by Diego Singh

by Nicholas Forrest
August 20, 2012

I think I speak for most people when I say that I have never felt the desire to contemplate the artistic qualities and cultural significance of my favourite pair of jeans; but I am glad that American based, Argentine-born artist Diego Singh has – or at least appears as though he has.

 

Of all the works by Singh currently on display at Sydney’s Mclemoi Gallery, the most striking are the large, mainly blue canvases that dominate the gallery space. Although the imposing nature of the bright and highly textural paintings is at first somewhat unsettling, a strange sense of familiarity quickly takes over.

 

It might take a few moments, but the dominant blue and grey backgrounds, the textural qualities and the appearance of seam-like patterns soon evolve into what would normally be instantly recognisable as denim. They are, however, not really denim; Singh actually paints the realistic denim pattern by hand and uses the texture of the linen canvas to full effect.

 

The fact that the primary subject of Singh’s paintings is not immediately identifiable alludes to a cultural phenomenon that is characterised by varying levels of disconnect from particular subjects and objects that we are constantly exposed to in our everyday lives.

 

That noise; that hum; that all-consuming, constant sensual bombardment we experience every day, and which in many ways inhibits our ability to assess and examine what influences our decisions and behaviours, appears to be represented in some of the “denim” paintings as bright and energetic swirls reminiscent of the intoxicating glow emitted by big city neon lights.

 

One of the most noticeable characteristics of Singh’s “denim” series is the varying number of layers visible in each painting that suggests that they are at varying stages of completion – which they actually are.

 

Many of the artist’s paintings are completed in-house at the location of the exhibition and display responses to past experiences in past exhibition spaces which are added to as different layers by the artist as his artistic journey unfolds.

 

For many people a pair of jeans is a wearable, biographical account of past experiences and events that are identifiable by the rips, tears and stains that have become fashionable components of jean culture.

 

By reusing and reinterpreting his canvases, Singh is treating each piece like a continually developing and changing story. In the same way that a pair of jeans changes over time in conjunction with the lifestyle of the wearer, Singh’s paintings accumulate the distinct markings of different venues and experiences.

 

The fact that people purchase brand new pairs of jeans that have been given the appearance of well worn jeans is testament to the influence that fashion and popular culture has on the decisions we make. Far from being a mere homage to jean culture, Singh’s “denim” series is a complex exploration of the way we interpret and react to the interminable and innumerable series of images and messages that we are bombarded with every day.

 

“CAPTCHA” by Diego Singh, is on view at Mclemoi Gallery in Sydney until August 25, 2012

 

For more information visit http://www.mclemoi.com

"Jean Prouvé: A Testimony to Ingenuity" in @nytimes

By
Published: August 17, 2012

NANCY, FRANCE — Jean Prouvé was at his lowest ebb. In 1952, when he was in his early 50s, the French designer lost control of his factory, which had once employed more than 200 people, and was fighting to regain ownership of his trading name and patents. Hoping to distract him, Prouvé’s family encouraged him to start a new project: the construction of a house where he would live with his wife, Madeleine, and the two youngest of their six children.


Courtesy of the Centre Pompidou and Adagp
Jean Prouvé working as an apprentice in 1917

Courtesy of the Centre Pompidou and Adagp
A prototype of a prefabricated house Jean Prouvé designed for use in Africa.

The Prouvés bought a plot of land on a wooded hill on the northern outskirts of Nancy. The site was cheap because it was thought to be too steep to build there. Working with his architect brother Henri, Prouvé designed a long, skinny single-story building made mostly from prefabricated components foraged from the factory. Some parts were originally intended for emergency housing, and others were left over from the construction of a school. His children pitched in by helping him to haul the components up the hill in an ancient Jeep and to assemble them, finishing the house in 1954.

Peeping out between trees, the home, known today as Maison Jean Prouvé, is a model of rationalist ingenuity with tiny bedrooms resembling ship’s cabins and panoramic views across Nancy from the glass wall in the living room. The house now belongs to the City of Nancy, which rents it to an architect and his family on condition that the public can visit at certain times. Together with Prouvé’s workshop from his factory, which has been rebuilt in the grounds, it offers fascinating insights into the life and work of one of the most influential designers — or “factory workers,” as Prouvé described himself — of the 20th century and is a highlight of the current “Tribute to Jean Prouvé” in Nancy.

The tribute includes the opening of permanent galleries devoted to Prouvé’s work at the Musée des beaux-arts and Musée de l’Histoire du Fer. Running through Oct. 28 are an exhibition of his ironwork at Musée de l’École de Nancy, an analysis of his impact on the city during and after World War II at Musée Lorrain and the installation of one of the prefabricated Maisons Tropicales he designed for use in Africa at Musée des beaux-arts. It is to be displayed at Musée de l’Histoire du Fer in 2014. A map has been produced identifying a dozen of Prouvé’s projects in Nancy, ranging from the aquarium doors and a funerary monument, to his family home.

Nancy is renowned for the historic grandeur of its medieval churches and the sumptuous 18th-century Place Stanislas. (When I described the latter as “one of the most beautiful squares in France” to a local, she corrected me with: “No, in the world.”) The tribute to Prouvé asserts its Modernist credentials as the city he chose as his home.

Born in Paris, the second of seven children of the artist Victor Prouvé and the pianist Marie Duhamel, Prouvé grew up in Nancy, where his father co-founded the École de Nancy, an alliance of local artists, industrialists and artisans that championed the Art Nouveau movement in France. After leaving school, Prouvé was apprenticed to master blacksmiths in Paris before returning to Nancy to open a small forge in 1924. Having begun by making wrought-iron grilles and doors, he went on to design metal furniture and other objects intended for mass production.

Prouvé’s work was always more austere than his father’s, and rapidly became wholly utilitarian. “He had no interest in aesthetics,” said Cathérine Coley, who co-curated the tribute. “His work was determined solely by its function.” But Prouvé shared the underlying principles of the École de Nancy, often quoting his father’s belief in the importance of “industrial production for the widest possible public."

By the 1930s, his workshop was manufacturing furniture and architectural components for schools, factories and other buildings. During World War II, Prouvé developed a barrack unit that could be assembled in three hours, only to be compelled to make cooking stoves and bicycle frames under the German occupation. He joined the French Resistance, using the code name “locksmith,” and was appointed mayor of Nancy after the war before returning to manufacturing.

Prouvé continued his wartime research into speedily assembled structures by making emergency housing for refugees and the homeless from modular wooden panels, as metal was still scarce. (A 1945 emergency shelter is in the Musée Lorrain exhibition.) After opening his factory in 1947, Prouvé produced more sophisticated prefabricated structures including the Maisons Tropicales. He was devoted to his employees, whom he called “compagnons” or “comrades,” and insisted that each one owned at least one share in the company. When a janitor explained that he could not afford to do so, Prouvé bought a share for him. After being forced out of the factory by his financial backer, he worked mostly as a consultant in Paris, but spent as much time as possible in Nancy, and died at Maison Jean Prouvé in 1984.

The Nancy tribute comes at a time when Prouvé’s ideals are in danger of being obscured by his improbable posthumous role as the darling of the design-art market. Would the man who referred to himself as an “anarchist in a good sense” have approved of the furniture he designed for schools and factories being auctioned off as collectors’ trophies? Unlikely.

Perversely, Prouvé’s commitment to mass production has enhanced the marketability of his work, because there is so much of it for dealers to sell. (Most of his contemporaries made furniture in smaller quantities.) The discrepancy between his vision of his designs and the market’s is illustrated by the contrast between the faded panels of his home and the exquisitely reconstructed Maison Tropicale at Musée des beaux-arts, whose gleaming finishes would never have survived the journey to Africa, let alone its climate.

Gorgeous as the Maison Tropicale looks, it has not simply been restored, but beautified, which may not be what Prouvé would have wished. As he said: “If people understand, there’s no need to explain. If they don’t, there’s no use explaining.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 20, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

"Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Pillar at the Bass" via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Pillar Breakfast at the beautiful Bass Museum of Art- July 27, 2012. Pillar members enjoyed a wide array of artwork, a guided museum tour and a speaker panel discussing the highly-anticipated Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach. Speakers: Terry Riley, K/R Architect PC and Jeffrey Lawson, Art Fairs Unlimited. Moderator: Silvia Cubina, Bass Museum of Art Executive Director

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"Why Arts Managers Short of Cash Are Looking at Detroit" in @wsj Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

By Terry Teachout
August 17, 2012

When it comes to the fine arts, things are really, really rough all over. Yet another major regional orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, is now publicly grappling with a debt crisis (it’s nearly $20 million in the hole) exacerbated by high labor costs that threaten the ensemble’s existence. The situation, says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is “increasingly dire.” Meanwhile, a growing number of much-admired performing groups, including Palm Beach’s Florida Stage, have been forced to shut down permanently, while others, most notably the New York City Opera, have chosen instead to gut their operations to the point of unrecognizability.

image
Associated Press
A viewer at a current Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition, ‘Picasso and Matisse: The DIA’s Prints and Drawings.’

That’s why everybody in the art world is now talking about the Detroit Institute of Arts, a world-class institution that just came within inches of closing. Instead, it’s now more financially stable than at any time in the past quarter-century.

The DIA, as Judith H. Dobrzynski recently reported in the Journal, no longer receives public funding from the city of Detroit or the state of Michigan, both of which have been hit brutally hard by the current economic downturn. Because the museum’s operating endowment is so small, more than half of its operating expenses are directly funded by its donors—a model that, as Ms. Dobrzynski wrote, “is simply not sustainable.” DIA director Graham Beal responded by hacking away at the museum’s budget and raising enough money to retire its current debt. But he knew that the DIA was doing no better than running in place, and that the fiscal road ahead would soon grow sharply steeper.

What to do? Mr. Beal went to the voters, asking the residents of Michigan’s Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties to pass a modest 10-year-long dedicated property-tax increase known as a “millage.” It would supply up to $23 million in public funding each year for the next decade—91% of the DIA’s annual operating budget—thus buying time for Mr. Beal and his colleagues to build up the museum’s operating endowment to the point where it can bring in sufficient income to pay the bills.

Sounds great, huh? But how do you get suburban taxpayers to pony up in support of a museum located in the heart of a city on which most of them long ago turned their backs? That’s the beauty part: Mr. Beal announced that the residents of every county that passed the millage would be admitted free to the DIA. Otherwise, he said, the museum would be forced to close on weekdays and lock the doors to half of its galleries.

Having offered voters this stark alternative, Mr. Beal and his staffers rolled up their sleeves and started working the phones … and all three counties passed the millage.

What lessons can other arts organizations learn from the DIA crisis? To begin with, the DIA showed it was serious about money by slashing every thimbleful of fat out of its budget. It simultaneously showed itself to be responsive to the wishes of its patrons by undertaking an imaginative reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection that was both user-friendly and artistically responsible. Then, when the DIA asked for public funding, it sweetened the pill with an equally imaginative free-admission plan that targeted not just Detroiters but local suburbanites.

Contrast the DIA’s approach with that of the Atlanta Symphony, which is opting for innovation-free budget cutting instead of root-and-branch institutional transformation. Or the New York City Opera, which has “transformed” itself into a mini-NYCO that has as much in common with the old company as today’s pre-shrunk Newsweek has with the once-healthy magazine of a quarter-century ago. Cutting is not enough. You also have to think creatively and be willing to take risks, as the DIA did when it asked the people of Detroit and its suburbs to agree to a tax increase.

Yes, Mr. Beal’s three-legged plan was museum-specific, especially the free-admission leg. But the thinking behind it has universal applicability. To wit:

• Don’t ask the public for more money unless you can prove that you’re not wasting the money you’re already spending.

• Keep the needs of your clientele in mind at all times.

• When the world changes, change with it.

That last commandment is the toughest to embrace, as well as the most important. Symphony orchestras and theater companies, for example, continue to cling to the old-fashioned subscription model that provides them with a yearly cushion of “front money.” But a fast-growing number of under-50 Americans are too busy to commit in advance to attending specific performances on specific dates. According to the Theatre Communications Group, the number of subscription tickets sold by America’s nonprofit theaters plummeted 15.1% between 2006 and 2010. That’s not a trend—it’s an avalanche.

No arts organization, however important it may be, is entitled to succeed. It must keep on proving its worth to the public, year after year. But Mr. Beal and his colleagues have clearly accepted the iron necessity of finding creative new ways to engage in the business of high art. As a result, they now have a shot at long-term survival—and they’ve earned it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444508504577593073546227962.html

via bassmuseumpres.tumblr.com

 

"Artist Lynn Golob Gelfman’s work shimmers, flows at two Miami shows" in @miamiherald

Posted on Sun, Aug. 12, 2012

By Anne Tschida
Special to the Miami Herald

 

On opposite ends of town, the shimmery fluid abstractions crafted by locally based Lynne Golob Gelfman combine to create a large survey of the work from of one of Miami’s most interesting – though sometimes overlooked – painters.

Gelfman’s compositions, which can be found in a number of museums across the country including here in Miami, are references to the never-static natural environment that surrounds us -- but not literally. Through repetitive markings and variations of one color scheme within each frame, the paintings seem to flow and shift, reminiscent of waves, clouds and sand, in perpetual states of change and formation.

So the titles of the two exhibits up for the summer are more than appropriate: scapes at the Frost Museum of Art at FIU, and sand at the Alejandra von Hartz Gallery in Wynwood.

Because of the subtlety to these compositions, the slightest change in light or in viewing positioning can transform the dynamic of the whole piece, which becomes clear when visiting the FIU show, spread through two rooms on the top floor. This location allows for natural light to shine in from a roof sky-light during the day, especially in the second room where several large paintings that first appear sandy- and dusty-colored hang. But move in closer, step from side to side, and the metallic material that Gelfman has applied to these works make them glimmer and gain a luminescence that at first, from a distance, is imperceptible.

That gets to the essence of why Gelfman’s paintings are so seductive and engaging: they are about movement, color, patterning and illusion more than studies in representational landscapes. Unfortunately, artificial light is not as generous in allowing some of this detail to shine through, so it’s great that some of these works get that exposure.

The most recent works -- found in the dune series at the Frost -- are based on Gelfman’s trip through one of the most fascinating ecological and geological outposts in the world, the Lençois Maranhenses in northeastern Brazil. Covered in undulating, white sand dunes that are interrupted by turquoise lakes, there is virtually no vegetation in this strange amalgam of desert and water. The vistas are endless and -- thanks to natural forces such as wind -- the sand is always shifting; like them, the paintings leave the impression that they go on forever and simply won’t stand still. To underscore this idea of limitlessness, in many paintings Gelfman lets the paint drip over to the sides, a signature mark of hers.

Other works flow in a less horizontal movement and suggest aerial views of a landscape, a metropolis, or ruins. Such is the case in the first room at FIU, where a number of paintings were inspired by a trip to North Africa, a parched land dotted with remnants of numerous ancient civilizations. These feel more like excavations than reflections.

Gelfman has also been influenced by a Japanese aesthetic, which is apparent in how her use of muted colors leaves a contemplative residue; and her extensive time spent in South America. (She lived in Bogota, Colombia for a time.) But the New York native, a Columbia University MFA graduate and long-time teacher who has made Miami home, seems to be most impressed over time with the nature directly around her, particularly the action of the tides, waves and sand that she observes daily with early morning walks along Biscayne Bay near Old Cutler Road.

Examples of this make up a part of the sand show at Von Hartz. These smaller works, in shades of greens, blues, purples and often in a grouping, are unmistakably references to these surroundings, although still planted in abstraction. The blues sparkle when passing by them, as the sea does when the sun hits lapping waves; while the greens might suggest the kinetic state of the shore-line sand as the waves constantly run over it and then retreat. As the sun’s light passes through clouds, bounces off waves, and glints off sand crystals, the motion never stops in this micro world.

As the artist explains, some of these works in groupings are frames that together tell a visual tale, whereas some of the larger-scale paintings are all-inclusive and stand alone. Both are represented. One especially intriguing series is comprised of two rows of small paintings, five in each, all in variations of white. As Miamians are well aware, hot mid-day heat can turn the world white – so called white-heat, washing out the subtle colors that can be observed at softer times, in early morning or twilight.

This series seems to detail that intense time of the day, when the sky, the water, the sand can fade to white. In the first couple of frames, some distinct color still emerges, until it almost all is erased by the last panel. “These are almost like drawings,” says Gelfman. “I like how the paint disappears into the surface,” becoming smooth and monotone.

Smooth in this case is literal. While nature, perspective and illusion make up part of the picture, Gelfman’s work is also about process. These compositions can appear so tactile – like tapestries at times – that viewers inevitably want to touch them. And because she does indeed sand her works and employ other techniques, she manipulates the surfaces of her paintings in such a way that when actually touching them (if you do, do it gingerly), they come as a surprise. Some are as soft as baby skin, others rough; at times her intense process has ripped the canvas. She uses acrylic, oil, sanding machines and unrevealed techniques to create her pieces.

Several years ago, in almost direct reference to the process of her work, Gelfman titled her shows in New York and at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery resist and react, emphasizing the push and pull of the imagery as well as the actual texture of the works.

Her patterning, in fact, can make the natural and man-made worlds overlap. At times the paintings can look more like woven textiles – or, conversely, vague images of a chain-link fence, the ultimate urban structure that unlike sand under waves, is immutable. As Gelfman says, “illusion is part of the work.”

On the back wall at the Von Hartz gallery, several very different works have been displayed. Called discs, they are circular molds on paper of a sanding-machine wheel, which Gelfman has used throughout the years. But they are also portals into the process of creation: the abrasive power of a sander helped form her imagery, while the abrasive power of nature helped form our environment.

While gentle and meditative on one level, the deeper one probes Gelfman’s work, the more complex it becomes -- waves, dunes and clouds are awe-inspiring, but both because of their beauty and their potency. Gelfman would have us explore it all.

via miamiherald.com

 

"Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74" in @nytimes

By
Published: August 6, 2012

Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.


Tim Robinson/WNET13
Robert Hughes’s “Shock of the New” documentary was originally seen by 25 million viewers.

He died after a long illness, said his wife, Doris Downes.

With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print, over three decades for Time magazine, where he was chief art critic and often a traditionalist scourge during an era when art movements fractured into unrecognizability.

“The Shock of the New,” his eight-part documentary about the development of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol, was seen by more than 25 million viewers when it ran first on BBC and then on PBS, and the book that Mr. Hughes spun off from it, described as a “stunning critical performance” by Louis Menand of The New Yorker, was hugely popular. In 1997, the writer Robert S. Boynton described him as “the most famous art critic in the world.”

It was decidedly not Mr. Hughes’s method to take prisoners. He was as damning about artists who fell short of his expectations as he was ecstatic about those who met them, and his prose seemed to reach only loftier heights when he was angry. As early as 1993, he described the work of Jeff Koons as “so overexposed that it loses nothing in reproduction and gains nothing in the original.”

“Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary,” he summarized, adding: “He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.”

Of Warhol himself, the most influential artist of the last 40 years, he was not wholly dismissive — he once referred to him as “Genet in paint” — and he softened in his judgment over time. But he argued that Warhol had only a handful of good years and that his corrosive shadow over contemporary art ultimately did more harm than good. “The alienation of the artist, of which one heard so much talk a few years ago,” he wrote in 1975, “no longer exists for Warhol: his ideal society has crystallized round him and learned to love his entropy.”

About artists he admired, like Lucian Freud, he cast the stakes in nothing less than heroic terms. “Every inch of the surface has to be won,” he wrote of Freud’s canvases in The Guardian in 2004, “must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the viewer as its right.”

“Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol, or Gilbert and George, or any of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”

“The Fatal Shore,” Mr. Hughes’s epic 1987 history of his homeland, Australia — which he left in 1964 and where his reputation seemed to seesaw between hero and traitor — became an international best seller.

And he continued to write prolifically and with ambitious range, on beloved subjects like Goya, Lucian Freud, fishing, the history of American art, the city of Barcelona — and himself — even after a near-fatal car crash in Australia in 1999 left him with numerous health problems. “Things I Didn’t Know,” a memoir, was published in 2006 and “Rome,” his highly personal history of the city he called “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error,” was published last year. In the memoir, Mr. Hughes was as poetically descriptive about his brush with death as he was about the art he loved: “At one point I saw Death. He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel: the bocca d’inferno of old Christian art.”

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes was born July 28, 1938, in Sydney, into a family of successful lawyers. His father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was a flying ace during World War I, who died when Robert was 12.

Mr. Hughes studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney and was associated with a group of leftist artists and writers that included Germaine Greer and Clive James, who described Mr. Hughes during those years as “the golden boy.” He pursued criticism mostly as a sideline while painting, writing poetry and serving as a cartoonist for the weekly intellectual journal The Observer.

After leaving Australia, he spent formative time in Italy before settling mostly in London. There, he quickly became a well-known critical voice, writing for several newspapers and diving into the glamorous hedonism of the ’60s London, an experience that confirmed him in a kind of counter-counterculturalism — not that he didn’t indulge himself during those years. As he related in his memoir, he was so under the influence of drugs when Time magazine called to offer him a job that he thought that it might be a trick by the C.I.A. (He wrote that he contracted gonorrhea from his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, who, he believed, had contracted it from Jimi Hendrix.)

With Ms. Emerson, who died in 2003, Mr. Hughes had a son, Danton, from whom he was estranged after he and Ms. Emerson divorced in 1981. Danton, a sculptor who lived outside of Sydney, killed himself in 2002, at the age of 34.

Besides his wife, a painter, Mr. Hughes is survived by two stepsons, Freeborn Garrettson Jewett IV and Fielder Douglas Jewett. He is also survived by his brothers, Thomas Hughes, a former attorney general of Australia, and Geoffrey Hughes, and by a sister, Constance Crisp, all of Sydney. His niece, Lucy Hughes Turnbull, was a former lord mayor of Sydney, and her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, is a member of the Australian House of Representatives.

Mr. Hughes lived for many years in New York in a loft in SoHo, whose blossoming art scene he often lampooned. In 1978 he was recruited to anchor the new ABC News magazine “20/20,” but the reviews of his first broadcast were so disastrous that he was quickly replaced by Hugh Downs.

In 1999, while in Australia working on a documentary about the country, he was driving on the wrong side of the road after a day of fishing and crashed head-on with another car carrying three men, one of whom was seriously injured.

Mr. Hughes was critically injured, spending weeks in a coma. He fought a charge of dangerous driving, and after a bitter and highly public legal battle, he described the men in the other car as “lowlife scum.” (He was fined and banned from driving in Australia for three years; his anger about it led to his saying in the hearing of a reporter that it would not matter to him if Australia were towed out to sea and sunk.)

The accident slowed him greatly and required him to walk with a cane, a harsh blow for the kind of writer who almost always seemed happier aboard a motorcycle or a fishing boat than behind a desk. But he continued to travel, to study deeply, to appear on television speaking in impromptu sentences almost as accomplished as those he wrote, and to write.

“No critic could have asked for a better run,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in a review of Mr. Hughes’s memoir.

Mr. Hughes’s essential motivating drive may have been expressed best in his own words about Goya, who he said haunted him in the months when he was recovering from the crash. He was an artist, he wrote, whose genius lay in his “vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the depth of his appalled sympathy for it.”

 

A version of this article appeared in print on August 7, 2012, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74.

"Meet the thorn in China’s side - Ai Weiwei (@Aiww): Never Sorry" @MiamiHerald

 

Ai Weiwei in a scene from Alison Klayman's 'Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry.' Handout / MCT

By Tish Wells
McClatchy News Service

WASHINGTON -- For Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, the line between his public and his private life is thin. This is made abundantly clear in a 90-minute documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.

When filmmaker Alison Klayman graduated from Brown University in 2006, she knew she wanted to be a journalist or a foreign correspondent. Her only experience, however, was an internship at National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and some other radio work. So she went to China, bought a camera and began filming Ai at his home, a walled courtyard with 40 cats and dogs, and at his studio, where fellow artists help him create his masterpieces.

The result is a documentary that shows clearly why Ai has become such a thorn for the Chinese government.

“Who knew that a movie about an artist was going to have so many lawyers in it?” said Klayman. “And activists and filmmakers.”

Ai has become an international superstar known for his art, but it is his activism that fuels his fame. He was invited by the Chinese government to help design the 2008 Beijing

Olympics Bird’s Nest Stadium. But then he rejected doing any publicity on China’s behalf shortly before the Games.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He is known for his provocative performance art, including dropping 1,000-year-old clay pots to smash into pieces on the floor. But it is the photographs showing him giving the middle-finger salute to Tiananmen Square that directly challenge China’s government.

His preoccupation with the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed 70,000 people, is another constant source of tension with the government. Struck by online videos of the dead, particularly the thousands of children who died in collapsed schools, he started a “citizen’s investigation” to get the names of all the children whose dust-covered knapsacks he’d seen discarded in the rubble of the substandard concrete buildings. He sought out volunteers on Twitter, who descended on the stricken area and came away with lists of the dead, including their ages, birthdates and schools. One year later, he published all 5,121 names on his blog, and the lists, on paper, are a regular backdrop to scenes shot in his studio.

He revisited the theme again in a 2009 exhibit in Munich called Remembering, where he built a wall of knapsacks whose different colors spelled out a Chinese phrase sent to him by the mother of one of the victims — “She lived happily on this Earth for 7 years.” A year later, he asked people to record themselves reading a name and send the file to him on Twitter. He published the audios again on the anniversary.

After the 2009 list was made public, the government shut down his blog.

He has turned to Twitter as his major means of communications. “I’m mostly interested in communication. I couldn’t think of a world without good communication,” Ai says at one point in the documentary. “In the past two years I did about 10 to 15 documentaries. I put all those on Internet so that young people can see ‘this clown, and what he’s doing.’”

In 2011, Ai was arrested and disappeared for 81 days. Returning to his compound, he said he couldn’t speak of what had happened under the terms of his probation. This didn’t stop him from returning to Twitter shortly after. The Chinese government levied a fine of $1.85 million on him for unpaid tax and fines. After he posted this on Twitter, citizens drove to his compound and donated yuan.

Klayman sees Ai as more cautious now, partly because of his young son, Ai Lao, born to a girlfriend outside of his marriage, a circumstance he talks about openly, if somewhat embarrassedly, in the film. He doesn’t want the son to end up as a leverage point between him and Chinese government. One question weighs over Ai, who lived for 16 years in the New York, one of the first Chinese allowed to study abroad when China began its opening to the West: Could he be forced into exile? Recently Chen Guangchen, a blind civil rights lawyer who escaped house arrest by fleeing to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and then, ultimately, by flying with his family for a fellowship at New York University.

Klayman says she thinks that would not be Ai’s choice. “I don’t think he wants to be a citizen of anywhere but China, to be honest,” she said. “I do still think that that’s true, but what options the authorities present to him may result in some other choice having to be made. But I think . . . if he had his choice, absolutely he wants to stay in China to do the work there, to be relevant there.”

via miamiherald.com