"Three Bedrooms and One Art Gallery: A California couple sell local art from their ranch house" in @wsj

Ojai, Calif.

Many people choose to live in Ojai because of its arts scene, which includes lots of galleries. After moving to this mountain town north of Los Angeles two years ago, Jeffrey Weinstein and his wife, Wendy Wilson, went one step further: They turned their home into an art gallery.

About 50 paintings and 10 pieces of pottery were recently displayed in the living and dining rooms of the couple's three-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot contemporary ranch house, which is close to the center of town. Open since November and named after their street address, Ojai Gallery 353 focuses on the work of established local artists and is open every day by appointment. The couple also hosts receptions every few months; Ms. Wilson, a 47-year-old personal chef, caters the events.

[SB10000872396390443864204577621593026239010]Noah Webb for The Wall Street Journal

The couple didn't originally intend the house to be a gallery. That idea came when they were looking for someone to do a mural in their kitchen and for some paintings to hang on the walls of their newly built home. They met local artists and heard them complain about how difficult it was to get good exhibition space in town.

"We had a lot of space. They needed space," said Mr. Weinstein, 58, an architect. Plus, "it lets us have beautiful art."

While the art is mostly traditional landscapes, the house, with its pink and brown wood shingles, stone base and pitched metal roof, is a mixture of Craftsman and industrial modern. The front door opens into the living room, where the Douglas-fir ceilings slope higher as the room progresses, from 9 feet to 20 feet at the other end. Floor-to-ceiling windows, including a panel in blue, yellow, purple and green squares, look out to a yard with eucalyptus and Chinese elm trees.

The house's open spaces and materials have made it a good place to view art. The large windows provide sufficient light and the walls are white. Tile floors can handle the foot traffic and hide dirt. Leather sofas and a cultured stone fireplace add warmth to the room.

The receptions often spill into the kitchen, which looks like the set of a cooking show. A 10-foot-long, custom-made stainless-steel hood hangs over the middle of an oval-shaped island. The ceiling is barrel-shaped, and the top of one curving wall is covered by a 12-foot-by-7-foot mural of orange fields and mountains painted by Ruben Franco, a well-known Ojai artist originally from Mexico. The kitchen opens up at one end, through sliding glass doors, to a wood deck, an outdoor fireplace and a large yard with lots of trees.

Large, rolling, red barnlike doors can be closed, shutting off the private wing of the house when an art event or cooking class is taking place. "That way I can stay in my room," said the couple's son Elijah, 12. There, a large playroom leads to the master bedroom and two bedrooms for Elijah and his 13-year-old brother, Josh. The kids' rooms are identical in size and furnishings, so there would be no fighting. The art in the bedroom wing of the house isn't for sale.

The gallery doesn't generate much income: The couple takes a 40% commission from the sales of the paintings, eight of which have sold so far this year priced between $500 to $2,500. "It's a labor of love," Mr. Weinstein said, adding that one side benefit is that he's befriended several artists with whom he drinks beer, plays tennis and talks.

Landscape and still-life painter Bert Collins, who lives next door, said the artist community in Ojai gets bigger every year, but the weaker economy has made gallery space scarcer. "I think what Jeff is doing is the greatest thing in the world if you've got room for it," she said. The home will be a stop this year on the gallery, or "detour," portion of the artist's association's October studio tour.

Mr. Weinstein, originally from Brooklyn, moved to Santa Monica, Calif., in 1977 for architecture school; Ms. Wilson, from Berkeley, Calif., moved to Los Angeles in 1983. They met when Mr. Weinstein was redoing an office where Ms. Wilson worked. Finding Ojai a nice escape from the city, the couple bought the 1-acre property in 1998 for $300,000, and rented out the existing 1,500-square-foot ranch house.

When Mr. Weinstein began drawing the floor plans for a new house in 2002, it took him four years to get it right. Some of the delay related to practical changes: He originally made it two stories but eliminated one story when construction costs went too high. But it also took so long because he enjoyed the process. "When I finally got to do a house for myself I wanted to make it last as long as possible," he said. After initially trying to give the existing home away, the couple tore it down.

The new house was finished in 2008 for about $750,000 and the family used it as a second home until they moved in 2010. A four-bedroom, four-bathroom contemporary home nearby on 4 acres is currently for sale for $1.3 million.

Opening their doors to customers is sometimes tough. "We always have to be on our best behavior," said Mr. Weinstein, noting some guests overstay their welcome at receptions, and he has to "show them the door."

But the couple said having prospective art buyers traipse through their living room is mostly fun. "I felt connected to the community really quickly here—more connected than I did after 17 years in Santa Monica," said Ms. Wilson. Mr. Weinstein added that he sometimes has to show the door to his friends, too.

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com

"Campbell channels Andy Warhol for new cans"

Published August 29, 2012
Associated Presscampbell.jpg
Aug. 24, 2012: A new limited edition Campbell's tomato soup cans with art and sayings by artist Andy Warhol are seen at Campbell Soup Company in Camden, N.J. (AP)

Campbell Soup is tapping Andy Warhol for another 15 minutes of fame.

The world's biggest soup maker plans to introduce special-edition cans of its condensed tomato soup bearing labels reminiscent of the pop artist's paintings at Target stores starting Sunday. The 1.2 million cans will cost 75 cents each.

The Campbell Soup Co.'s embrace of Warhol's iconic imagery is a switch from its initial reaction, when the company considered taking legal action before deciding to see how the paintings were received by the public.

"There's some evidence to show there was a little bit of concern," said Jonathon Thorn, an archivist for Campbell Soup. "But they decided to take a wait-and-see approach."

By 1964, however, the company realized the paintings were becoming a phenomenon and embraced the depictions. Campbell's marketing manager even sent Warhol a letter expressing admiration for his work.

"I have since learned that you like Tomato Soup," William MacFarland wrote in the letter. "I am taking the liberty of having a couple cases of our Tomato Soup delivered to you."

Later that same year, Campbell commissioned Warhol to do a painting of a can of Campbell's tomato soup as a gift for its retiring board chairman, Oliver G. Willits; Warhol was paid $2,000 for the work. Campbell also invited the artist to visit its headquarters in Camden, N.J., although Thorn said there's no indication a visit ever took place.

There was no contact after that until 1985, when the company commissioned Warhol to paint packages of its new dry soup mixes for advertisements. Warhol died about two years later.

In 1993, the company bought a Warhol painting of one of its tomato soup cans to hang in its boardroom of its headquarters. The company also has a licensing agreement with the Warhol estate to sell clothing, magnets and other gear, mostly overseas, bearing the artist's renditions.

Campbell has sold Warhol-inspired cans on two other occasions, although on much smaller scales. In 2004, the company sold 75,000 four-packs of Warhol-inspired cans at Giant Eagle, a Pittsburgh-based supermarket operator. During the holiday season in 2006, the company sold 12,000 units at Barney's in New York.

The latest promotion comes as Campbell looks to turn around its struggling soup business after years of declining sales; the company plans to introduce dozens of new products this year.

The cans to be sold at Target will come in four color schemes, with famed Warhol quote such as "In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes."

The red-and-white Campbell label made its debut in 1898. Significant changes to the front of the can have been made only a handful of times since then.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/08/29/campbell-channels-andy-warhol-for-new-cans/#ixzz253x9Zsd8

"Viredo Espinosa, famed Cuban painter, dies" in @miamiherald

el Nuevo Herald

Special to El Nuevo Herald

Viredo Espinosa, a member of The Eleven, whose work represented the birth of Cuban abstract art and the tuning of Cuban modern art, died Sunday at his home in Costa Mesa, Calif.

Espinosa was born in Regla, a hamlet of fishermen and workers closely linked to the port industry, home to Afro-Cuban religions and a cradle of musicians and dancers. Since his childhood, the artist was attracted to the lively folklore that invaded the life of his native city. The direct contact with Afro-Cuban and Catholic religions gave shape to the imagery that would always accompany him.

Espinosa studied architecture at San Alejandro Academy in Havana. At a very early age, he contributed illustrations to periodical publications such as the newspaper Zigzag, and he learned the craft of sign labeling that would lead him to painting murals.

Espinosa’s work can be summarized in three fundamental stages.

The first one, which the artist said was influenced by children’s drawings, was mostly occupied by his mural paintings.

The second stage was marked by geometric abstractions and it is during this time that his work as a member of The Eleven emerged.

Finally, a third stage finds him already in exile, where the merging of the two previous stages prompts a symbiosis that will give birth to his definitive characteristic style in which the presence of his native Cuba’s customs, and more specifically of his town of Regla’s, are fundamental.

Espinosa’s work erupted in Havana’s art scene in 1948 during the Book Fair hosted by the Ministry of Education at Havana’s Central Park, where two of his paintings were exhibited, and later in 1953, when he was assigned the murals and stained-glass windows of the Vedado’s Embassy Club.

However, the dark years of Batista’s dictatorship and later Espinosa’s refusal to take part in the political system of Castro’s revolution eclipsed his creation for several years. Finally, in February 1969 Espinosa and his wife Alicia Sánchez left Cuba on one of the Freedom Flights and arrived first in Miami and later in Los Angeles.

Espinosa continued his indefatigable work, shifting from decorating store windows to painting.

He received many awards, among them a citation from the U.S. Congress and by California’s State Assembly. In 2000, he received the prestigious award “La Palma Espinada,” presented by the Cuban American Cultural Institute.

His most recent personal show took place in February at the Old Town Gallery in Tustin, Calif.

Although he never returned to Cuba, Espinosa lived always near the ocean and the sea salt, as close as he could to his native town of Regla, which always showed through his paintings.

"Subcontinental Drift: Modernist Art From India: Approaching Abstraction" in @wsj

When friend and fellow artist Akbar Padamsee was—as a 1954 issue of the Bombay Sentinel termed it—"charge-sheeted" for obscenity, M.F. Husain came to his defense. Husain argued to the prosecutors that in Mr. Padamsee's painting, "Lovers," a man was not holding a woman's breast; straight lines and flat planes of color were crossing a circle. These "geometrical structures," he added, are "what you see in the folk art of India."

The case—whose outcome set a precedent for artistic freedom still invoked in Indian courts—features in an ingeniously simple timeline created by Beth Citron, assistant curator at the Rubin Museum of Art. Posted on the museum's website, it accompanies "Modernist Art From India," a continuing series of shows Ms. Citron has curated to explore artistic developments and experimentations in India and by Indians from the 1950s through the 1980s.

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Peabody Essex Museum
'The Diagonal' (1974) by Tyeb Mehta.

The lower track of the timeline highlights landmark events in the rise of Indian nationalism through the country's independence in 1947 and chronicles postindependence history until the early 1990s. The upper register, meanwhile, features seminal events in the lives of individual artists and in the country's art scene as a whole. It starts with the foundation of Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan school of art in 1901, just six years after the birth of the Indian National Congress, and ends with exhibitions both at home and abroad in the late 1980s. The stage was set for the splash Indian artists were to make in the international art market in the following decade.

The value of the Rubin's "Modernist Art From India" series is that it provides some background to that splash without, for all that, trying to "explain" it. The timeline does not draw neat correlations between politics and art—sometimes they exist, sometimes they don't—just as the series' second and current show, "Approaching Abstraction," does not construct a cohesive, chronological narrative. Ms. Citron has grouped its 30 or so works by author under headings that capture the thrust of each artist's approach to abstraction—"Abstracting Language," "Marks of Minimalism," "Architectural Abstractions," "Formalist Abstraction," and so forth.

Granted, logistics and budget dictated that Ms. Citron could bring in only works from nearby collections in the Northeast—more than half of those in "Approaching Abstraction" are from individuals and institutions in New York. The selection is therefore by no means all-inclusive, but it does a good job of delineating various trends animating India's modernist art scene. These range from Zarina Hashmi's mid-1970s monochromatic, textured prints or Nasreen Mohamedi's spare, pencil and ink drawings on grid paper (c. 1977) to the controlled exuberance of Krishna Reddy's "Great Clown" (1981) and the impasto of Shanti Dave's "Accordance" (1963), where the layers of paint are occasionally scraped away, leaving an after-image as revealing and ephemeral as reflections on water.

Ironically, while Eastern mysticism propelled Europeans like Wassily Kandinsky toward an abstract visual expression, only two of the artists here telegraph a connection to spirituality. Biren De's and Gulam Rasool Santosh's paintings, from 1962 and 1980 respectively, play with symbolic language of the esoteric practice of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, even though, it turns out, neither artist was a practitioner. More interesting is the work by V.S. Gaitonde, a reclusive artist whose understanding and practice of Zen Buddhism propelled a lifelong quest to achieve a purity of form and color. Credited with pioneering the abstract in India, Gaitonde is represented here by two works. "Painting, 4" (1962) shows the vestiges of representation in markings that could be human figures or calligraphic symbols; in his 1964 untitled painting, coincidentally created during a year-long fellowship in New York, he strips away representation altogether, leaving a field of texture and color.

There are also some direct references to India. In Tyeb Mehta's "The Diagonal" (1974), for example, a jagged diagonal line splits a figure. This is a recurring image for Mehta, who witnessed the brutal killings and violence that flared when the country, at independence, was partitioned into India and Pakistan. And two short movies—Husain's "Through the Eyes of a Painter" (1967) and Mehta's "Koodal" (1969-70)—were shot in India. They run about 17 and 14 minutes, respectively, and plunge viewers into the forms and rhythms that these artists saw in the India that surrounded them.

So much variety packed into a small show makes it feel kaleidoscopic and splintered—yet therein lies its honesty. What comes through is that independence brought with it a measure of freedom for artists, both from the European models imposed by British colonialism and from the nationalist dictates of India's freedom struggle.

The artists on view do not appear uniformly compelled to proclaim their "Indianness," nor do they evidence the need to articulate an overarching ideology for their forays into abstract art. Indeed, many bounce back and forth between styles—a handful of these artists were also featured in the series' first show, "Body Unbound," and some will recur in the third part of the series, "Radical Terrain," which opens Nov. 9 and will explore artists' treatment of landscape. And while some find their moorings in European art, others, like Husain, arrive at a modernist stance through indigenous Indian art forms.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

A version of this article appeared August 30, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Subcontinental Drift.

"Noises Off: Silence @ the #Menil Collection" in @wsj #andywarhol via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

By Willard Spiegelman
Houston  - Updated August 28, 2012, 6:59 p.m. ET

In 1819 John Keats called his imaginary Grecian urn a “foster-child of silence and slow time” and a “sylvan historian.” He put himself in a line going back to the ancients, who thought of pictures and statues as silent poems that speak volumes.

 

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‘Lavender Disaster’ (1963) by Andy Warhol - Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS

 

Silence is now as precious and rare as slowness, or solitude, clean air and a star-filled night sky. As someone who never goes anywhere without ear plugs, and who would rather stay hungry than be forced into a noisy restaurant, I was keen to visit “Silence” at the Menil Collection here. In a variety of tones, voices and media, it reminds us of what we often want but can never have.

You won’t experience silence here. That would be impossible, even in the cool, chaste chambers of Renzo Piano’s exquisite building. This exhibit is really a riff on the composer John Cage’s remark that “there’s no such thing as silence.” The show has 52 pieces. Some are metaphysical or abstract paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, all favorites of John and Dominique de Menil, who had amassed a fabulous if quirky collection before the museum opened in 1987.

Hanging on the walls, too, are such two-dimensional works as Yves Klein’s vibrant, glistening, gold-leaf “Untitled (Monogold).” Sculpture, small objects, neon-tubing and other three-dimensional works complement the pictures. The show features audio and video installations, as well as a living performance piece by Tino Sehgal in which a dancer rolls slowly along the floor of an interior room for 2½ hours, followed by another dancer who does the same thing. It certainly is silent; whether it is gripping, rather than boring, depends on a viewer’s patience.

A typical museum show often moves chronologically; in a thematic show, organizers make other arrangements. “Silence” may seem random, but it has a partially recognizable plan. After entering a vestibule containing a selection of representative works, you go on to four inner rooms. The first, the most conventional and tightly arranged, is in many ways the most moving. Four Andy Warhol pieces—silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen from the mid-1960s—represent the ultimate silence, death: in this case, death by electrocution. Warhol’s depictions of the electric chair at Sing Sing are beautiful, almost abstract in their swirls of color, a kind of phantom homage to Jackson Pollock. The smallest one, “Little Electric Chair,” is so black that you might mistake it for a cousin to Ad Reinhardt’s all-black “Abstract Painting” in another room, until you come close and see the chiseled outline of the electric chair staring right back at you.

Interspersed among the Warhols are seven silkscreens by Christian Marclay, each focusing on the single word “Silence” above the electric chair in the death chamber. “Silence” surrounds you, at least visually, on all sides.

The other rooms contain miscellaneous pieces. Some “talk” to one another; others seem more randomly placed. Dominique de Menil, a woman of austere and religious character, famously said that “only silence and love do justice to a great work of art,” but one is seldom alone in a museum, where quiet contemplation is hard to achieve. Interrupting a private experience of the art are not only the voices and footsteps of other viewers but also the sounds from the audio installations, including—most boomingly—Kurt Mueller’s “Cenotaph” (2011), an old jukebox into which you put a quarter and then get to hear one of 99 moments of silence, all of which are preceded by very noisy introductions. No silence comes without sound.

Two of the most compelling pieces are video installations, each within its own darkened chamber. Jacob Kirkegaard’s 2006 “AION” (Greek for eternity or infinity) was shot on location in ruined spaces at Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear reactor explosion. Shapes and colors move, come in and out of focus; an interior landscape is bathed in light, then dark shadows, then overwhelmed with whiteness. Static architecture changes as though it were Tai Chi, Keats’s “slow time” reimagined.

If you move counterclockwise through the show, the last thing you will see is the most resonant—a return to Cage, silence’s major spokesman. Sixty years ago, on Aug. 29, 1952, David Tudor sat down at a piano and performed for the first time Cage’s now celebrated (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) “4’33”“: a work in three movements and total silence other than the extraneous sounds within the hall. Cage himself said it could be “played” by any soloist or group of musicians.

Manon de Boer’s film “Two Times 4’ 33”” stars Jean-Luc Fafchamps. We see him at his piano—stern, unblinking, virtually motionless—and we hear him set and release the chess timer that marks the three movements. A plate glass window behind him gives on to wintry snow, ice and wind, whose sounds we also hear. He finishes, he stands up. An unseen audience applauds. The screen goes black.

The film resumes. It’s impossible to know if he’s playing the piece again or whether we are just seeing the first performance from a different angle. This time, we hear only the timer’s clicks but now we watch the rapt audience of earnest, attentive young people. And we see another view to the outside: a northern European city (it’s Brussels, Dec. 2, 2007), part industrial, part architectural, part natural.

To reach Mr. de Boer’s installation, you walk through two heavy doors with sound-deadening panels, and two sets of heavy black draperies. You sit on a bench, with a single light above you. The chamber is dark. You are bathed in silence, except for the sounds of the jukebox outside, which penetrate into this inner sanctum whenever someone puts a quarter in the old nickelodeon.

Cage would have smiled, audibly.

Mr. Spiegelman writes about the arts for the Journal. His essay “Some Words on Silence” appeared in the April issue of The Yale Review.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

"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.

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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.

 

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

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

 

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

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.