More Snow to Make "The Gates" Even More Fun To See Again!

Beyond my hopes this new snow comes to enliven and enhance the incredible experience of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates in Centeral Park. Enjoy Nueva York!

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Creamsicles in Central Park

Ah, just what I had been hoping for: a great snowfall to bring a new perspective to “The Gates”. Now we can see “The Gates” with new eyes. Remember Creamsicles? Those delicious evocations of summers past are memorably reconstituted at a giant scale for all to see in the Park: child-like wonder is the result. Wide-eyed wonderment from locals, tourists, mad dogs and Englishmen has replaced the usual curmudgeonly New York glumness. Conceptual Art is Dead! Long-Live Conceptual Art.

Tim Hawkinson @ The Whitney

Tim Hawkinson gets my vote for the whackiest and most far-out exhibit of the season. I went to the

"Whip-me" Museum

ostensibly to see the Cy Twombly exhibit (a bore!) and instead was diverted into the much more interesting Hawkinson exhibit. More on this to come.

Sotheby's Cape Cod Tag Sale: Duck Decoys

I stopped by to see the auction of Property from Kennedy Family Homes (New York:
15 Feb 05 - 17 Feb 05)at Sotheby's today.From what I glimpsed it looked like an old-fashioned Cape Cod tag sale with cheesy watercolors of the sea and duck decoys! Yes, I witnessed the auction of three duck decoys which went for five thousand clams. Is that a good price?

de Kooning : "The King"

Did you know that "de kooning" means the king in Dutch? I just finished the first section "Holland" of the Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan recently published biography. The rags-to-riches immmigrant boilerplate is here re-told in an engaging and fresh style. I hope that the last section "Twilight" doesn't try to gloss over the fact that the last fifteen or so years of de Koonings output was suspect from many angles... more on this later.
Joop Sanders, a former painting teacher of mine, is quoted throughout as he was a fellow Dutch expatriate and F.O.B. (de Kooning, that is). Like many New York artists, the shadow of "de king" loomed large and much of the art of the last 50 years is a reaction against the macho/loner/magalomaniacal/hard-drinking/womanizing painter. We are still too close to really get an historical perspective on all of this but this biography promises to be interesting if not entirely un-biased.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates Unfurled 2/12/05:

The Gates: A jolt of optimism for these parlous times

Just got back from Central Park where the Gates were unfurled today. Although the gates were erected over the course of the last week, today was "the unfurling"; each gate held aloft a cocoon containing the bright orange nylon awaiting this day to emerge. For Christo fans, this was an epiphany; for art lovers an event; but for many this was a chance to get out in the park and take a look through new eyes with fresh colors, shapes and ideas to mingle with and muddle through.

Read more about the gates from the artists website.

This from the official website of Central Park:

On February 12, New York City and Central Park launched an extraordinary art event. Celebrated artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude unfurled THE GATES, PROJECT FOR CENTRAL PARK 1979-2005. On view for 16 days, the 7,500 gates will line 23 miles of pathways in Central Park, from 59th Street to 110th Street. Saffron-colored fabric panels will hang seven feet above the ground, blowing in the wind and delighting the public walking beneath with a warm glow of translucent color. The gates will seem like a golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees. The exhibit is free for everyone to enjoy and will not interfere with normal Park activity.

Beckmann/Picasso at Feigen Gallery Extended

With the recent Matisse / Picasso and the Max Beckmann shows at MoMA Qeeens still fresh in our collective memory, this thoroughly engaging show turns out to be one of the highlights of this season.
Mythic in ambition and accomplishment, Beckmann shared with Picasso an interest in harlequins, acrobats and the theater in many signature works. Beckmann, of course, knew of the Spaniards work and this show presents many paintings and prints produced immediately before or during his stay in Paris in the late thirties.
Both Picasso and Beckmann backed away from pure abstraction and their images remained rooted in “the real”; even the most distorted of Picasso’s images always refer to something: woman’s head, a kiss, or a guitar.

“Works of art are objects of metamorphosis-like the gods.” – Andre Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, 1974. p.239

The pairing of these artists makes perfect sense and offers many reminders of the strength and vigor of both these titans. Proteus and Prometheus indeed as Jan Krugier put it so succinctly (the Jan Krugier Gallery is co-presenting the show with Richard Feigen). This show has been extended two weeks (until February 12th) and I was able to see it last week.

Read more about this show at Richard Feigen Gallery.

More about Oli Shivonen

As it turns out, you can see more images by Oli Shivonen at the Canfield Gallery site. The more I see by this painter the more I am entranced and excited. Oli hailed from Brooklyn and the Canfield Gallery is in Santa Fe, so there is really a lot more here than meets the eye, although what meets the eye is absolutely right on.

OLI SIHVONEN (1921-1991)

An American exponent of the theories of German Bauhaus painting, Oli Sihvonen was born in Brooklyn of Finnish ancestry. Sihvonen began formal art education at the Norwich Connecticut Art School, then attended classes at the Art Students League in New York City. After WW II he studied at Black Mountain College with the painter Josef Albers, who had directed the Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1930s and was associated with the painters Klee and Kandinsky.

Don't forget to see the Josef and Anni Albers show "Designs for Living" at the Cooper Hewitt before it closes on Feb. 17th. I become a real fan of Bauhaus textiles in general and Anni Albers in particular. check back for a review of this show in the next week or so.

BECKMANN-PICASSO/PICASSO-BECKMANN show extended two weeks!

The current exhibition of BECKMANN-PICASSO/PICASSO-BECKMANN has been extended for two weeks which will give me the time to see the show and post a review. Look for it here in the next few days. After having our appetites whetted at the magnificant Matisse/Picasso exhibit and the Max Beckman show at the MoMA Queens, it seems only fitting and oddly familiar to see these two giants paired together toe-to-toe on Manhattan soil.

Richard L. Feigen & Co. and Jan Krugier Gallery are pleased to announce a major collaborative exhibition Beckmann-Picasso/Picasso-Beckmann on view from October 30 to January 31 at the premises of Richard L. Feigen & Co., 34 East 69th Street. The exhibition is comprised of over 20 paintings and an extensive selection of prints and drawings by these two powerful masters of the 20th century. The juxtaposition of these works from the inter-war, Second World War, and postwar periods throws into relief two distinct styles, trajectories, and personalities, and highlights some of their shared formal and thematic concerns.

Read more about this exhibit.

Painting Senses: Oli Shivonen @ sandra gering gallery

Walking down 22nd Street after a particularly grueling game of NYC basketball at Chelsea Piers, I stopped to see a group of paintings that had attracted my eye. Those same eyes rolled up inside my head as I took in these vaguely familiar (as in “Oh No, not more repetitive DULL and hackneyed minimalist rip-off paintings”) hard-edged, square color-field paintings in the vein of the “Homage to the Square” series by Josef Albers.

I almost did a quick about-face like the one I do whenever some fool turns on a Powerpoint slide show at a trade show but then I stopped dead in my tracks. BOOM! POP! Zap! My eyes were hyper-stimulated and my cynical self dropped away in the face of the sheer electric kool-aid acid test overload in my optic nerves. These paintings were, in fact, the real deal. Who was this guy? When were they painted?

Turns out, Oli Shiven was a student of Albers (he had been to the mountain) and these were the received wisdom passed on to us. Painted in the late seventies, these paintings were alive with kinetic energy and infinite space to spare. Reproduced images can’t compare to seeing these paintings up close and personal, take my word for it. Rare are the paintings that can to bring you to your senses.

In looking back on the 3x3 series in 1979, Sihvonen felt that he had "explored the notions of multi-temporality: Flow, rhythm, beat, growth... etc., and found that these different manifestations of temporal phenomena could co-exist within an art work." This analysis perfectly describes the experience of viewing these dynamic canvases.
-from the sandra gering gallery

Next on my list is the Josef and Annni Albers show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

(Typo)graphics

Typographics by Hans Andersson

No. 7 and No. 8 are animated.

Still to Be Seen: Picasso, Beckman, Albers, FLW

What's Left to See:
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Vertical Dimension @the Skyscraper Museum , through Jan. 9. Last chance to see this show before it closes.

Picasso-Beckman/Beckman-Picasso @Richard Feigen & Co. 34 E.69th St. through Jan. 31. Two giants in a tete-a-tete.

Jacob Lawrence's War Series @ the Whitney Museum
Through Jan. 31.

Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living @ the Cooper Hewitt through Feb. 9. The Bauhaus is Dead! Long Live the Bauhaus!


What to Read:

I recently finished Ada Louise Huxtable's biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, a concise and compelling overview of the “greatest Architect of all time”.

Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simons”
While Tom can be a might turgid at times, I still savor his turns-of-phrases, bon mots and outragous-ness.

Mondrian Fights Back!

With all the hoopla over the latest incarnation of Mondrian on the web (Pac-Mondrian), I went searching for the real thing
and discovered “The Transatlanic Paintings” web site.
It just doesn’t get better than this. This site features photomicrographs taken with a 35-mm camera mounted on the microscope, photomacrographs, infra-red photographs and details of the 17 paintings which the Dutch Master re-worked after his move to New York City.

As a student of Harry Holtzman in the early seventies, I gained my earliest introduction to Mondrian, abstract and modern art in general.
If you have some time to browse, check out this overly obsessive collection of "Mondriana".

Roll Over Mondrian, Tell Kandinsky the News

Mondrian plus Pacman equals Pac-Mondrian!
Read all about it and play the game! KAZAM! An incredible blend of high and low, the sum is even greater than the parts. Too much? Just right.

Another Favorite Mondrian game:
Mondrimat
We’re all artists on this bus.

There Are No Straight Lines: Noguchi@ The Whitney:
I finally got a chance to see the show of sculptures by Isamu Noguchi at The Whitney Museum. Most impressive were the room of his Kouros. These sculptures look like 3- dimensional personages taken straight out of the paintings of Yves Tanguy, especially when grouped together as they are in this show. Also seen at the Whitney: the Romare Bearden show, a stunner; a slow-moving, strange and surreal Video installation by Bill Viola. All-in-all a thoroughly stimulating array of exciting and varied art works at "the uptown bunker for difficult art."

Image Processing and Art History

"Art historians have long used scientific tools to help them decide whether drawings and paintings are real or fakes, like counting isotopes in lead-based paints to spot anachronisms or shining X-ray and infrared radiation on oil portraits to discover what lies beneath.

Now researchers at Dartmouth College have introduced a forensic tool appropriate to the digital age: they have fed digitally scanned artworks into a computer, and then used image-processing techniques to create statistics describing the pen and brush strokes.

Like a connoisseur - a blend of Bernard Berenson and HAL - the computer analysis detected subtle differences in these strokes that might help distinguish an artist from an imitator."

-Who Really Wielded the Paintbrush?
By ANNE EISENBERG

NY Times, December 23, 2004


If you are interested in image processing, take a look at ImageJ:

powerful software developed at the NIH and available as a free download far any platform (Jave, Unix, Mac and PC). This software is as powerful as Adobe Photoshop (with many similar features) in addition it has may features that make it a perfect forensic tool to aid art historians in the analysis of images.
The most famous example of digital imaging software supporting art historical suppositions is the superimpostion fo Leanardo’s Self-Portrait over the face of the Mona Lisa. The Aha! Moment this caused has spurred many other speculations about the master from Vinci, leading invariably to The Da Vinci Code.

A Few "Museum Mile" Moments

Went to the Museum Mile today to check off a few items on my short list.
First, took the long downward spiral ramp at the Guggenheim to savor “The Aztec Empire.” Aside from some minor misgivings such as “I thought the Guggenheim was devoted to non-objective art? …Contemporary Art?”

"The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was incorporated in 1937, and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, as it was then known, was established two years later. The museum ...took as its basis the radical new forms of art being developed by such artists as Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian."

-from The Guggenheim Museum History

But, then again, this is where “The Art of the Motorcycle” drew record crowds of visitors not usually associated with the genteel and upper-crusty museum mile.
Cranky misgivings aside, once inside I was mesmerized by the sheer quantity of arresting sculptures, vessels, jewelry and statuary produced by this pre-Columbian culture. For sheer weirdness and necromancy this exhibit should also appeal to the bikers, tattoo artists, and alternative lifestyle crowd usually absent form mainstream gatherings of the art set.
Kudos to the curators for pulling off a surprising success from out of the proverbial hat.

Schlepped further on down Fifth Avenue, to the Metropolitan Museum to see the recently installed masterpiece by Duccio. At $45 million, this little gem is the most expensive piece of real estate to be seen in Gotham City. Let’s see… the painting is a little over 10 x 8 inches and cost a cool 45 million clams, that makes it about half a million per square inch. Donald Trump eat your heart out, better yet, go to the Guggenheim and let the Aztecs eat your heart for you.


Read about the painting here in The Art Newspaper.

Pop Artist Dies, Changing-of-the-Avant-Guard

Tom Wesselman passed away last Friday, joining Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the Pop Pantheon of "Past Masters Who Passed Away".
This from the NY Times, today 12/20/04

"Along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Jim Dine, Mr. Wesselmann belonged to a generation of artists who gave American art and culture a new sense of itself. They found inspiration, source materials and even working methods in areas beyond art - in advertising, movies, food labels, household appliances, newspaper front pages and in commercial art techniques like silkscreen, Benday dots and billboard painting. The changes they wrought continue to reverberate through contemporary art and life."

This is almost the final stage in the changing-of-the-avant-guard, leaving James Rosenquist and Claus Oldenburg very much alive to carry the Pop torch. If you haven't seen J.R.'s "F-111" at his Guggenheim show last year, then hurry to MoMA and see it in a setting that seems made for it. Claus Oldenburg is busy turning his studio/loft/residence in SoHo into a gallery/museum.

Did I forget to put the Rubin Museum for Himalayan Art on my short list? I love the very Zen quote on the exterior of this newest museum in Chelsea: "Walls Are Doors".
I like that, if walls are doors and doors are mirrors and mirrors are windows and toys are us and wednesday is sunday at Carvel...

If De Kooning Still Mattered

Don’t get me wrong, I love early-to-middle de Kooning painting (from the forties through to maybe the late-seventies). I remember being challenged, perplexed and thrilled at the Knoedler Gallery in 1975 with de Kooning's outrageous complexity and anti-aesthetic aesthetic. But soon thereafter, the fire went out…it was well-known that Bill had lapsed into a dementia or senility brought on by alcohol abuse, Alzheimer’s or something else and anyone with an eye could see that his paintings became simpler; thin and anemic and lacking in any vigor, rigor or lust that characterized the painting of the previous decades.
Yet, galleries and even museums showed these pseudo “De Kooning” paintings alongside his truly great masterpieces as if the proximity to the real thing would rub off on these dribblings by his sycophantic assistants. Schlock, mock and dreadful as these paintings are, I’m sure many people were taken in.
Now comes a new book De Kooning: An American Master by Mark stevens and Annalyn Swann
I look forward to reading it, I may even give to myself for xmas…

Full Disclosure: As a painting student of Joop Sanders ( a fellow Dutch ex-pat) we were tutored in the formal exigencies of De Kooningism which boiled down to a few simple dictates:
-Try using things besides a brush to “paint”
-Never make all four corners of a canvas the same
-Never close off your forms, literally or figuratively:
all shapes should be ambiguous and open to interpretation and also open in shape so as to shift from foreground to backgound in a constant dance
-Draw with the brush, avoid drawing and then “filling in the drawing with color”
That's it, now you too can paint just like De Kooning, which is what a lot of my fellow students were doing at that time. I found it hard to resist the strong pull of the sort of mystical regard and cultish fervor surrounding De Kooning and yet, following Groucho Marx's famous dictum "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It".

Related Reading (sort of)
"If Jackson Pollock Wrote Music"

Philly Cheese Steaks and Van Gogh To Go!

"Does It Matter Where This Painting Hangs?"
By ROBERTA SMITH, NY Times 12/15/04

Yet, while one art-world hand is wringing, maybe the other should be doing its Zen-like best to clap. The decision is a triumph of accessibility over isolation, of art over the egos of collectors and, frankly, of the urban over the suburban.

Great quote from Roberta Smith in today's NY Times article. It seems that the fabled Barnes Collection is most likely going to move to downtown Philly: Cheese steaks and Van Gogh! I'm all for it. What do you think?

The Short List: What Art to See in NYC

The Short List: Art in NYC Galleries and Museums
Always lots to see in NYC
Here is the absolute shortest list of "must-see"

Old Masters:
Duccio @ the Met
NYT article about the painting
Mucho dinaro for this little gem, no?

Raphael @ the Frick
Raphael's Mona Lisa?

Modern Masters:
Picasso / Beckman @Richard L.Feigen & Co.
A battle royale by two titans toe-to-toe and head-to-head.
34 E.69th St. through Jan. 31.

Isamu Noguchi / Romare Bearden / Jacob Lawrence @the Whitney: a triple threat at the uptown concrete bunker for difficult art during difficult times.
Bearden through Jan 9th. Noguchi through Jan. 16. Lawrence through Jan. 31.

Pre-Columbian Masters:
The Aztec Empire @ the Guggenheim Museum through Feb. 15
Aztecs in "Wrights revenge?" Sounds corny but it works.

Architecture:
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Vertical Dimension @ the Skyscraper Museum through Jan. 9.
FLW designs for a "Mile-High Building" downtown. This new museum has been on my list, but FLW is a must-see anywhere, anytime.

Design:
Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living @ the Cooper Hewitt through Feb. 9. Long Live the Bauhaus!

And don’t forget:
Alfred Leslie @ Allan Stone Gallery Seems Al liked to paint like De Kooning before switching to figuration... go figure.