Matisse, Picasso and the perfume of hedonism surrounding Montmartre finally opened up sex in art from the furtive, neurotic business of the previous century
A confidently carnal painting … Blue Nude (1907), by Henri Matisse. Photograph: Francis G Mayer/Corbis
Something happened to artists at the dawn of the 20th century. They started to have sex. If you look at a nude by Matisse, and the painting in my head is his Blue Nude (Souvinir de Biskra) (1907), and compare it with a late Victorian painting such as JW Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), one of the things that strikes you is surely how much healthier, abundant, and fulfilled Matisse is, sexually. His Blue Nude is a fully, confidently carnal painting. By contrast, the Waterhouse is a perverse fantasy, a lubricious idyll, neurotic, bizarre, solitary.
There’s no way around it: many 19th-century paintings reek of masturbation. They are not lacking in sensuality, but it is of a deferred, fantastical, almost proudly warped kind, typified by Waterhouse. It’s only among the avant garde that love becomes real – in Gauguin’s painting Nevermore, for instance.
Read more at: How modern art shed its inhibitions
Courtesy of Art BarterAn untitled piece by a (for now) anonymous artist, part of the Art Barter Event in London.LONDON | For those of you with a desire to collect art despite the recessionary pinch, here is a solution that doesn’t require dipping into your wallet. The Art Barter Event, an art fair where you can pay in imaginative goods and services rather than cash, is taking place at the Rag Factory (16-18 Heneage Street, E1 5LJ; 44-20-7650-8749 ;www.ragfactory.org.uk), a former studio on Brick Lane, from Nov. 27 to 29.
Fifty artists, from big names (Tracey Emin) to up-and-comers, (Boo Saville) offer pieces — without titles or artists’ names attached — that people can then bid for. The idea is to encourage people to pursue works they genuinely like, rather than being drawn to a recognizable signature.
The public then fills special “barter forms” that they pin to a bulletin board, proposing their juiciest offers on the art (say, French lessons or a personal massage).
Read more at: Saving on Art the Old-Fashioned Way - Globespotters Blog
An exhibition of oil paintings by the abstract artist celebrates the museum’s 50th anniversary.
Vasily Kandinsky’s “Impression III [Konzert],” 1911. His work has three categories: “Impressions,” “Improvisations,” “Compositions.” (Guggenheim Museum)
By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT Art Critic
Reporting from New York - ”Kandinsky,” the big exhibition of 95 oil paintings made between 1902 and 1942 by the visionary pioneer of abstraction, Vasily Kandinsky, is a show that looks like it was made expressly for the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim Museum. That’s because in a sense it was.
Solomon R. Guggenheim, the museum’s founder, was a major collector of Kandinsky’s art, amassing no fewer than 150 canvases in his lifetime. (He died in 1949, five years after the artist.) The work was perhaps the most profound influence on the collector’s thinking about nonobjective painting, which shed direct relationships to the visible world. Kandinsky instead explored the emotive possibilities of color and form, study central to avant-garde art for the next half a century.
In 1939, a scant decade after the collector bought his first Kandinsky, he opened the Museum of Nonobjective Painting — the precursor to today’s Guggenheim. And 20 years after that, Frank Lloyd Wright’s radically designed Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue opened, showing just how much nonobjective art had informed a variety of advanced ideas. A powerfully expressive, light-filled void pierces the building’s core.
Wright’s building recently underwent a much-needed, beautifully achieved restoration. As a celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Kandinsky retrospective (running until Jan. 13) not surprisingly elicits a major “Wow.”
Read more at: Kandinsky retrospective is natural for Guggenheim
Zadie Smith’s passion for writing and film shines through in this sparkling collection of criticism, says an admiring Peter Conrad
Zadie Smith: ‘Her enthusiasm is almost shocking.’ Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/ Getty Images
For Zadie Smith, criticism is a bodily pleasure, not an abstracted mental operation. Reading, like eating, caters to her ravenous but discriminating appetite: she finds the essence of Kafka in a sliver of words from his diary, carved, she says, as thin as Parma ham and containing the creator’s “marbled mark”. She doesn’t need a snack when watching a film, because her eyes are feeding on the images: Brief Encounter is, for her, a chunk of Wensleydale cheese, inimitably English. The critical arguments in which Smith engages are as vital and as potentially violent as sexual wrestling matches, and in an essay on Katharine Hepburn she recalls that she ejected two lovers from her bed – on separate occasions, I should explain – because they disagreed with her about the relationship between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib.
Smith consumes books and films, by which I mean that she absorbs them, seizing on them with all her acute, avid senses. When she was 14, her mother gave her Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to read. The aim was to raise Zadie’s biracial consciousness, though the result, vividly described in the first essay in this volume, was more intense and more transformative. “I inhaled that book,” Smith recalls (like an oenophile, she reads through her nostrils). It took her three hours to finish the volume and she expressed her critical judgment on it in a fit of grateful, ecstatic tears. When her mother called her to dinner, she took the book to the table, not because she intended to discuss it but because it was in itself a meal, offering her communion with the nutritious blood and body of its author.
This is not the way critics are supposed to comport themselves. Smith’s enthusiasm is almost shocking; she breaks the rules established by the black-gowned, gruel-blooded nerds in universities who murder books by dissecting them, reduce poems and novels to texts which are no more than snarled networks of verbal signals and revenge themselves on the literature they secretly hate by writing badly about it.
Read more at:
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith
Although this show is more than two years old (oops, must have missed it), I am intrigued by Stella’s career: starting from very “flat” paintings, to large colorful wall sculpture (see second video), and now these large architectural pieces.
James Kalm bikes uptown to view Frank Stella “On the Roof” and Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, at the Metropolitan Museum. With a career spanning nearly fifty years in the New York art scene, Frank Stella is finally honored with a double show of recent and historic examples of his work at the Metropolitan Museum. An exclusive interview with the artist is featured and a cameo appearance by Walter Robinson.
Filmmaker Tim Burton, pictured, got the art-world seal of approval last night when he appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to help launch a career retrospective featuring his drawings, paintings, puppets and, of course, his films.
The show of Burton’s works, which runs at MoMA from Nov. 22 to April 26, is one of the most eagerly anticipated exhibitions of the season. Last evening’s gala offered a first look at some of the artwork on display, much of which has never been exhibited in public before. (And yes, we have photos of some of that work.)
Joining the goth auteur at the museum was actress (and mother of his children) Helena Bonham Carter, frequent collaborator Johnny Depp, composer Danny Elfman and actor Danny DeVito. (MoMA breathlessly tweeted their arrivals at the party.)
According to the museum, the show features artwork generated during the conception and production of Burton’s films, as well as pieces from unrealized projects. Also on display are Burton’s student art, his early non-professional films and work for non-film endeavors. (It’s not clear whether the exhibition includes work from Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” which opens in 2010.)
Read more at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/11/tim-burton-helps-kick-off-retrospective-at-moma.html
A collaboration with his wife Nancy led Ed Kienholz to create his most richly textured work of art in The Hoerengracht, his reconstruction of Amsterdam’s red light disctrict.
A nice girl like you, in a place like this? US sculptor Ed Kienholz’s ‘The Hoerengracht’ is an unflinching replica of Amsterdam’s seediest quarter Photo: ED and Nancy kienholz, courtesy of LA Louver, CA
Back in the early 1960s every school boy knew about Amsterdam’s Red Light District, where the ladies of the night sat in windows to be inspected by their clientele. I was on my first visit to Amsterdam, in a party of fifteen year olds being taken around Europe by a kindly Jesuit. Late one afternoon, three of us peeled off from our visit to the Rijksmuseum, cashed our cheques at American Express, and ran off to ogle what we imagined would be a bevy of Playboy bunnies striking provocative poses behind plate glass windows. Instead, what we found were half a dozen friendly grannies in their underwear (some literally knitting) whose waves and smiles seemed to promise us milk and cookies, not the longed for experience we would later have to repent. The story is not irrelevant to the exhibition opening tomorrow at the National Gallery.
For the next few months, we can all take a stroll through The Horengracht (Whore’s Canal) – a hugely ambitious life size reconstruction of a few seedy streets in the stews of Amsterdam created in the mid- 1980s by the late Ed Kienholz and his wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Under black- out conditions in the Sunley Rooms, illuminated doorways and windows festooned with blinking red fairy lights and strips of red neon beckon seductively. As you move closer, you discover the `reality’ behind the glamour: life- sized plaster figures of women (actually life -casts of the bodies of the Kienholz’s friends), each in the down-at-heel room where she plies her trade.
Though we cannot go inside the houses, the installation turns every viewer into a voyeur. It is exciting to peer into a sleazy lounge where the occupant is offering her body for cash, and annoying to find ourselves standing in front of a drawn curtain, imagining what must be going on behind it.
Read more at:
Kienholz: The Hoerengracht at the National Gallery
Two weeks just to paint the splash … David Hockney’s A bigger Splash at Nottingham Contemporary. Photograph: David Sillitoe
Joyous, funny and inventive, David Hockney’s early work was his bravest and his best. What better way to launch Britain’s newest art gallery?
Buildings that are big on architecture are often pretty lousy when it comes to showing art. The problem with fancy architects is that they think their buildings are the art. Nottingham Contemporary, which opens on Saturday, happens to be a series of interconnected boxes and a bunker; its entire lower floor is dug into the sandstone cliff on which the building is perched. But it isn’t a boring building, and the galleries are well-proportioned, flexible spaces. Their scale feels good.
The architects Caruso St John, who also built the New Art Gallery in Walsall, recognise that the art isn’t there just to decorate the architecture. Their work is ingenious when it comes to solving the practical problems of the site, and each of the four, top-lit galleries has its own character. One of them is double height, and the skylights themselves are grids of small, white truncated pyramids. These remind me of the “sky rooms” of the artist James Turrell, with each isolated patch of sky a glowing, fugitive rectangle whose light is gently diffused into the building.
As you approach, it takes a while for the building to reveal itself, the interesting way it straddles the scarp, and the ways the exterior and interior flow and interconnect. Patterns from a sample of 19th-century lace decorate the scalloped concrete walls. I am less keen on the lime-and-gold anodised detailing, which makes the building look like a packet of Benson & Hedges.
Read more at The Guardian: The pleasure principle
Wifredo Lam, “Personaje”, 1970. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Cernuda Arte.
NEW YORK, NY.- Sanford L. Smith & Associates’ two fall fairs become one superlative art and design event this year. In the past, ART20 occupied the historic Park Avenue Armory in early November, with Modernism directly following. From November 13 – 16, 2009, the fairs will combine, creating a singular opportunity to explore the very best of an era. In 1986, Modernism: Centuries of Style and Design was the first fair devoted to the major European and American design movements of the 20th-century. Modernism is still the setting where this market is defined and redefined every year. A selection of the finest international dealers will exhibit and sell museum quality prototypes and rare pieces of furniture, glass, lighting, silver and other decorative objects in the traditions of Art Deco, Scandinavian, Arts and Crafts, Wiener Werkstätte, Postmodern, the 50’s 60’s and 70’s. In recent years, examples of rare contemporary design that advance the spirit of Modernism have also made their way to the show floor.
Eight years ago, ART20 opened to provide blue‐chip dealers an international art fair venue in the fall. ART20 offers visitors a choice survey of the 20th and 21st-centuries through paintings, sculpture, prints and photography from movements including Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Hard Edge and Social Realism. Despite its wide scope and sophisticated quality, the young fair has also been praised for its intimate feel and accessibility… More
