You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2009.
The Sisters, by Brice Marden (Photo: Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society / Doris & Donald Fisher Collection)
Doris and Donald Fisher have found a home for their monumental art collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that will keep it in the city and elevate SFMOMA to one of the world’s leading showplaces of late 20th century art.
Placing the Fishers’ collection of 1,100 contemporary artworks – one of the finest in private hands anywhere – at the museum will put SFMOMA in the league of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London and enhance the city as a destination for art lovers internationally.
Kenneth Baker
San Francisco Chronicle
Editor’s Note: Two days after the acquisition was announced, Donald Fisher passed away. Rest in peace.
David Steinberger of Perseus Books and Tina Brown of The Daily Beast (Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)
Having ramped up her metabolism from magazines to online journalism with The Daily Beast, Tina Brown now wants to speed up book publishing.
In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books.
On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.
Motoko Rich
New York Times
A postcard of the stolen painting at the museum in Magritte’s former home ((Johanna Geron/AFP/Getty Images)
A masterpiece by the surrealist painter René Magritte worth up to €3 million (£2.7 million) was stolen by armed thieves yesterday in a lightning daylight raid on a museum dedicated to the artist’s life and work.
Olympia, a nude inspired by Magritte’s wife and muse Georgette, was taken off the wall of the small gallery in the artist’s former home after staff and visitors were ordered to lie down in the back garden.
The two raiders, said to be of Asian appearance, wore hats and wigs to hide their faces from surveillance cameras and made off on foot up the quiet street of terraced houses in the Brussels suburb of Jette, probably to a waiting car. One was said to have spoken English and the other French.
Staff at the museum, which has no metal detectors or other screening equipment at the entrance, were left in shock at the loss of their most prized asset, which was painted in the building in 1948. Police said that the thieves appeared to know exactly what they were looking for and that it was probably stolen to order.
David Charter
The Times
Mosaic mask of Tezcatlipoca. Aztec/Mixtec, 15th-16th century AD. © British Museum
“A sun of gold fully six feet broad and a moon of silver… all kinds of wondrous objects of various sizes. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that gladdened my heart so much,” wrote Albrecht Dürer, “as these ingenious marvels of men in foreign lands.”
Dürer was looking at a hoard of New World loot in Brussels. At the time of writing, 1520, he presumably had no idea what kind of men had made such art nor that their empire was in its dying days. The Aztec capital had already fallen to the Spaniards and the last elected emperor was about to meet a mysterious end. Moctezuma – Montezuma, we call him – was his name.
What is so extraordinary about the blockbuster opening at the British Museum this week is that it manages to summon any real mortal from the blood and darkness at all. For almost half a millennium, practically all we have known of Moctezuma was that he caved in to Cortés and was stoned by his people in revenge.
The historic revelation here, incidentally, is that the Spanish story – Moctezuma refuses treatment, politely dying in the arms of caring conquistadors – has its antithesis in the indigenous version. The colonisers present a trussed Moctezuma to the rioting Mexica (Aztecs, as we call them) as a lesson, slaughtering him when the warning fails.
The testimony is pictorial in each case. The Spaniards had their elaborate paintings of an emperor you could deal with, borrowed here from the Prado; the Mexica had their tiny parchment drawings of Moctezuma clearly roped by the neck. Not the least fascination of this show is that it presents images as evidence, picturing history in the absence of texts.
Laura Cumming
Guardian
A turquoise mask known as the Mask of Tlaloc, part of the Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler exhibition at the British Museum Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty
The latest installment in the British Museum’s fascinating survey of significant rulers (past exhibitions have focused on Shah Abbas and the emperor Hadrian) focuses on Moctezuma. And the Mexica culture as communicated through this exhibition profoundly stretches the limits of cultural relativism, at least as far as I am concerned.
Clearly it is a trap to apply 21st-century western judgements to a civilisation such as that of the Mexica people in the 16th century. As Herodotus pointed out: “if one were to offer men to choose out of all the customs in the world such as seemed to them the best, they would examine the whole number, and end by preferring their own”.
And yet … I couldn’t help finding it profoundly chilling. First there is the sheer ugliness of the objects: the heavy basalt carvings so crudely made. Then there is the grotesqueness of imagery: it’s all about bloodletting and the sacrifice of humans. Here’s an extract from one gallery label: “Devout warriers would use these sharp thorns to pierce their legs, arms and earlobes and let their own blood as a mark of loyalty.” Ouch. Even the apparently most striking objects – the masks decorated with turquoise – are fantastically ugly. One of them, cheerily, uses an actual human skull as its template. Sometimes I wish I could time travel; but I think I’ll be giving 16th-century Lake Tetzcoco a miss.
Charlotte Higgins
Guardian
Bubbles in space … Norman Foster may take Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes as his inspiration. Photograph: Tibor Bognar/Corbis
A permanent structure on the moon? The dream of building a base on the Moon where astronauts, scientists (and Richard Branson) can study the Earth’s most haunting and beautiful satellite is as old and as compelling as the dream of space exploration itself.
Now, the European Space Agency’s Aurora programme envisages a necklace of such bases strung out across the face of the moon. It’s a thrilling thought, but who – which architect – should design the first lunar structures? Why, Norman Foster, of course. Already working on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceport in New Mexico, due to open in 2011, Foster is the natural – and scientific – choice for such challenging new architecture and habitation. The European Space Agency certainly thinks so, too.
Over several decades, Foster has tried, often successfully, to fuse the materials, technology, forms and spirit of space adventure into the design of his world-renowned hi-tech buildings. Arguably more than any other architect, Foster has brought the world of Nasa into our towns, cities and university campuses – whether with the design of the gleaming Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, on the edge of Norwich, or with the very shape, as well as the structure, of the Swiss Re building, better know as the Gherkin, in the heart of London. This skyscraper – it looks nothing like a gherkin – even resembles a space-rocket.
Jonathan Glancey
Guardian
Photo: Hermitage Museum
Palace Square is the heart of imperial Russia,” says Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The heart of its immense collection is housed in the Winter Palace, the official residence of the Russian czars…
The current annual budget is close to $30 million and approaches $40 million when taking into account the Greater Hermitage Project. Partially funded by the World Bank, this expansion is transforming the East Wing of the General Staff Building into a showcase for contemporary art. Piotrovsky’s goal is to encourage a dialogue between classical and contemporary art, an exhibition strategy, dubbed Hermitage 20/21, that was launched in 2007 with “USA Today,” a show of contemporary American art from London’s Saatchi Gallery.
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is overseeing the reinstallation of the museum’s Islamic and Chinese galleries and working with the museum to conceptualize ways of incorporating the history that took place within the palace walls into exhibitions and to shape the museum for the 21st century. Everything is scheduled for completion in 2014, the museum’s 250th anniversary. The construction of the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Center, a state-of-the-art repository on the edge of town, will also be completed by then.
Sophia Kishkovsky
Art News
Something momentous is about to occur in the Van Gogh galaxy. His history is about to be retold at its Big Bang level. The world is about to have unveiled for it, with much international trumpeting, a gigantic new translation of his complete letters. Unedited. Uncensored. The truth. Ah yes, the letters. As if being the painter of scores of masterpieces that scorch themselves onto your retina were not enough, Vincent was also a marvellous writer. More than 900 missives by him are known to survive, most of them in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, where they form — let me take a deep breath here — the greatest cache of writing about art left behind by any artist. They really do. There are other artists, of course, who wrote good letters, and other artists who were fine writers. Have you read Michelangelo’s sonnets? Superb. But Van Gogh differs from the rest in the sheer copiousness of his outpourings.
Between September 1872, when he wrote the first letter to his brother to have survived, and July 1890, when he wrote his last — found in his pocket, covered in bloodstains, after he shot himself by a chateau wall near Auvers-sur-Oise — Van Gogh was an obsessive correspondent. Most of these letters were to Theo, his younger brother, an art dealer, who supported Vincent financially and fraternally for the whole of his career. Without Theo, Vincent could not have happened: there would have been nothing to live on and nobody to talk to.
Their extraordinary correspondence — intense, relentless, gossipy, wheedly, utterly fascinating — is the main ingredient of the letters. Theo died a few months after Vincent. From syphilis. They are buried side by side in Auvers in a grave covered with Vincent’s favourite plant: ivy. (The sunflowers are our preferred taste, not his.)
Waldemar Januszczak
The London Times
Surrealist biomorphism: “Capricious Forms” (1937), a work from Kandinsky’s Paris period, is part of a retrospective at the Guggenheim. (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris)
The Guggenheim Museum is not exactly thinking outside the spiral with its sleek Kandinsky retrospective. But maybe that’s as it should be.
The Russian avant-gardist Wassily Kandinsky — who dressed like the college professor he had trained to be and sounded like a mystic when he wasn’t thinking like a scientist — is the central god in the Guggenheim pantheon and genesis myth. The museum owns more of his work than of any other major Modernist and mounts some form of full-dress Kandinsky show like clockwork every 20 years or so.
It’s that time again. The Guggenheim’s last excursion into Kandinsky occurred in the early 1980s with three context-heavy exhibitions that examined his activities in all mediums, including his Art Nouveau embroidery and works by contemporary artists and designers. This one takes the opposite tack. It distills Kandinsky’s momentous career to about 100 paintings, with a large side order of works on paper displayed in an adjacent gallery. The canvases and almost nothing else fill Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda from bottom to top, sometimes at the magisterial rate of one painting per bay.
This looks sensational. Organized with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Pompidou Center in Paris — sites of the world’s other major Kandinsky collections — it contains stupendous loans from all over.
Roberta Smith
New York Times
“Red and Orange Streak” (1919) is part of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney. (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
There are two Georgia O’Keeffes. They’re closely related, but one is far more interesting than the other. Not so interesting, except maybe as a marketing phenomenon, is the post-1930s cow-skull painter and striker of frontier-priestess poses. More interesting, and less familiar, is the artist found in “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” a vivid and surprisingly surprising show of more than 130 paintings and drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The show’s focus is on the first two decades of O’Keeffe’s long career. The story starts in 1915, when she was an art teacher in South Carolina and produced her first abstract drawings, which were also among the first fully abstract images by any American artist. Three years later she had her first encounter with the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who set her up in New York, initiating a long personal, professional and mutually promotional partnership.
Holland Cotter
New York Times
