You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2010.
Here’s the latest installment in the courtship of Eli Broad — and the art museum he aims to plunk somewhere in the Los Angeles Basin, complete with big-name architecture, a spiffy $200 million endowment and the 2,000 works of contemporary art held by his Broad Art Foundation.
Downtown L.A. is officially making a play, courtesy of the Grand Avenue Authority, which today authorized negotiations with Broad toward a possible deal that would wrest the museum from Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, which are also in the running, and maybe some other location yet to be publicly disclosed.
After a closed session today of the Grand Avenue Authority, L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry, a member of the joint city-county authority that’s overseeing development of vacant land and parking lots in the heart of downtown’s arts district, said it will deploy a negotiating team “to proceed with discussions with the Broad Foundation to consider his proposal and reach a mutual agreement.”
Mike Boehm, Ari B. Bloomekatz and Cara DiMassa
Los Angeles Times
Van Gogh’s Still Life Around a Plate of Onions (Photograph: Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo)
Occasioned by the recent publication of his letters, The Real Van Gogh is bound to be a blockbuster. The artist groans under the weight of scholarship, popular biography and biopics, innumerable cartoons and gags. There have been pop songs and cakes decorated to look like his starry, starry night. Kirk Douglas wrestled manfully to depict him as troubled, over-sensitive artist, the disturbed and self-destructive hero. Retrieving the real Van Gogh – whoever he might be – from his place in the popular imagination becomes a more difficult task the more he is buried beneath the characterisations.
The story of his life is worth retelling. Van Gogh was a late starter, mostly self-taught, uneven, smitten with mental illness, dead at 37. His trajectory as an artist – from sodden Dutch landscapes under heavy skies, toiling peasants and weavers, to the flaring, sometimes hallucinogenic landscapes of Provence, all of which ended after he shot himself one afternoon in a southern French cornfield in 1890, an unfinished letter still in his pocket – is a luminous and shocking arc.
Adrian Searle
Guardian
William Eggleston’s Untitled (Newspaper on Ground, Grass, California, 2000): ‘More muted tones point towards pure abstraction.’ Photograph: Eggleston Artistic Trust
In her illuminating introduction to William Eggleston’s book The Democratic Forest (1989), Eudora Welty writes that his photographs “focus on the mundane world” and that “there is especial beauty in his sensitive and exacting use of colour, its variations and intensities”. This remains the case.
Now 70, Eggleston’s eye is still drawn to the everyday, and he still renders it as if he were a visitor from Mars. And yet what you sense here, in the 22 new photographs on display at Victoria Miro, is a tentative reinvention. Eggleston is a master of vivid, sometimes garish, colour, though the lurid oranges, reds and yellows no longer shock the eye like they used to. What intrigues more here is his deployment of more muted tones that, in certain photographs, point towards a move into pure abstraction.
Sean O’Hagan
Guardian
A woman looks at No Woman, No Cry (1998) at the Chris Ofili at Tate Britain retrospective. Photograph: Felix Clay
Think of Chris Ofili and you would be forgiven for imagining the following: elephant manure; the weeping profile of Doreen Lawrence; a black, dung-breasted Virgin Mary that enraged the mayor of New York.
But, when a major, mid-career retrospective opens on Wednesday at Tate Britain in London, visitors will see a new Chris Ofili.
His recent work may, frankly, come as a shock. There is no dung and no glitter. There are no richly-collaged, jangling surfaces. Instead, in the last room in the exhibition, unexpected swathes of colour lash down the canvases: imperial purple dissonant against citrus orange, saffron squealing against sea green.
With the exception of two paintings previously exhibited in New York, none of these eight works has ever been seen in public. They come fresh out of the artist’s studio. The exhibition is the first major survey since 1998 of the often controversial 41-year-old’s work. Almost a third of the 45 paintings on display have never been shown in the UK before.
Charlotte Higgins
Guardian
“The Actor,” a rare Rose Period Picasso, was damaged on Friday when a woman accidentally fell into it at the Metropolitan Museum (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Since 1952 “The Actor,” a rare Rose Period Picasso, has hung prominently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with other examples of early paintings by this Spanish master. But on Monday it could be found in a new, temporary home, the Met’s conservation laboratory, where experts there are trying to determine the best course of action for this 105-year-old painting’s brand-new feature: an irregular, six-inch tear running vertically along the lower right-hand corner.
On Friday afternoon a woman taking an adult education class at the museum accidentally fell into “The Actor,” causing the tear. Officials at the museum said that since the damage did not occur “in the focal point of the composition,” they expected that the repair would be “unobtrusive,” according to a statement released on Sunday.
Carol Vogel
New York Times
It was made to stand on six folding screens and is covered in Chinese annotations that both honor the emperor and affirm Europe’s and Christianity’s greatness. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times)
When a map of overwhelming dimensions and detail is presented to the ruler of a land, the homage, surely, is a kind of deference. The map is partly meant to be an illustration of the ruler’s powers, the extent of his realm, the range of learning he commands.
And yes, one of the remarkable aspects of the world map on display at the Library of Congress through April 10, is that along with its imposing scale (it is 12.5 feet long and 5.5 feet high) and grand ambitions (it encompasses the known world of the early 17th century), at its very center stands the “Middle Kingdom,” as China called itself, its mountains and rivers commanding attention with dense annotation, all of which is in Chinese.
Created by a visiting Italian-born Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, and apparently commissioned by the court of Emperor Wanli in 1602 — the year after Ricci became the first Westerner admitted to Peking and then the Forbidden City— this map is indeed partly a tribute to the land in which Ricci had lived since 1582, and in which he would die in 1610.
Edward Rothstein
New York Times
State Service Center, Boston (Photograph by Bruce T. Martin)
If you’re like most people, here’s your take on Boston’s mid-century-modern buildings: architectural abominations that stomped into town in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, trampled the delicate brickwork of yesteryear, assumed outsize proportions in the skyline, and today lord their ribbed concrete and geometric eccentricities over the city like barbarians that got through the gate. Mayor Tom Menino is right there with you. He minces no words when it comes to his dislike of our most famous mid-century-modern building, Boston City Hall.
But after half a century, at the start of a new decade, perhaps the time has come for a reconsideration: Could it be that the buildings are not inherently out of place in Boston? That rather they are feats of imagination and craftsmanship and tragically misunderstood — the architectural equivalent of an abstract Jackson Pollock painting or a forbidding 12-tone Arnold Schoenberg orchestral work.
Sarah Schweitzer
Boston Globe
Renzo Piano’s proposed addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, planned for completion in 2011. (Photo: Renzo Piano Building Workshop)
More than a few eyebrows will likely be raised on Thursday when the Italian architect Renzo Piano unveils his design for the expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here.
The cultural watchdogs of Boston don’t take well to change. And the museum, whose collections haven’t moved since 1924, is one of the most beloved art institutions in this city. Its eclectic array of artworks from the Middle Ages to the early-20th century, displayed in a dazzling faux-Venetian palazzo, stands alongside those in the Frick Collection in Manhattan and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., as a rare — and intimate — expression of a single collector’s vision.
Well, the preservationists should put away their torches and pitchforks. Mr. Piano’s design, dominated by a four-story copper-clad volume that encloses a 300-seat music hall and a temporary-exhibitions gallery, keeps a respectful distance from the Venetian dowager. And the new building’s strong geometric forms should make a welcome counterpoint to the old one, which, from the outside at least, has always seemed a bit bland.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
The Drawings of Bronzino “Seated Nude Youth Playing Panpipes,” in the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Photo: Louvre Museum)
Agnolo Bronzino’s was the hand to hire for a power portrait in mid-16th-century Florence. He could turn toddlers into potentates and make new-money Medicis look like decent people. His painting shaped late Mannerism, the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted, like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and bells of the Counter-Reformation.
At his peak, in the 1550s, Bronzino was the most influential painter in Florence. And although his reputation went into eclipse, it never went away. By the 20th century he was back. In Henry James’s 1902 “Wings of the Dove” a Bronzino portrait of a noblewoman, “with her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds,” is the culminating symbol of evanescent magnificence around which that deeply mannered novel turns.
Holland Cotter
New York Times
Feeling a little low? Ill even? Today Americans for the Arts announced and released its new National Arts Index, and you can see, the latest number isn’t good:
…I’m glad Americans for the Arts is trying something. It devised the National Arts Index by taking into account 76 “equal-weighted, national-level indicators of arts activity.” And the group says that makes it “one of the largest data sets about the arts industries ever assembled.”
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
