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Peter Greenaway’s'Last Supper’ installation as seen in Milan in 2008. Change Performing Arts
Artists have been riffing on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” for decades, from Salvador Dali’s 1955 painting to Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s chocolate-syrup version. Now, Peter Greenaway has joined them.
For 16 minutes, a series of cinematic projections and an accompanying original soundtrack will play over a copy of the painting that, through the use of high-resolution 3-D scanners, faithfully reproduces the original. It’s the first time Mr. Greenaway has shown any of his installation art in the U.S.
Mr. Greenaway projected images on the original in Milan for one night in 2008, then on a nearby replica in an exhibit that drew 55,000 visitors. “The Last Supper” was selected because of its iconic status and because of its increased popularity following the novel “The Da Vinci Code.” Through the artist’s manipulation of light, at various times the figures in “The Last Supper” can appear three-dimensional, and the time of day seems to change.
Katherine Bindley
Wall Street Journal
Sargy Mann at work in his studio. Photograph by Peter Mann
Even before he lost his sight, Sargy Mann was obsessed with ways of seeing. As a young painter he was tutored by singular realists – Frank Auerbach, Euan Uglow – who insisted that an individual artist must be exactly true to what he saw. For much of his working life Mann taught students at Camberwell School of Art all he knew about representing light and colour on canvas, with particular reference to Bonnard and Matisse, and he put all of that complex understanding into practice in his own, often gloriously sun-drenched landscapes and interiors. Like all painters, he suggests, he felt he knew instinctively what science was then in the process of discovering: that the eye was an entirely passive collector of visual stimuli, and that “seeing” was a learned activity that went on in different, discrete parts of the brain – the imaginative piecework of collating form, and colour, and light into an understandable vision of the world, one you constantly made up as you went along.
David Rees, with sharp pencils. Photograph: Meredith Heuer
Would you pay twelve dollars to get your pencil sharpened? Hand-sharpened, admittedly; lovingly so, and it comes posted back (including overseas) with a certificate, and its own shavings in a bag, and careful little rubber protectors. But, still … that’s something like £8.40 in Limey-money.
If you do David Rees, a New York state-based cartoonist for, among others the Nation and Rolling Stone, is your guy, blade at the ready. He describes himself as a “craftsman” who “practices the age-old art of manual pencil sharpening”. We called him to check if he was for real.
Euan Ferguson
Guardian
Bare brick houses stacked one on top of another cling to the hills of Rio de Janeiro.
Raw sewage trickles down the winding paths of these shanty towns, known as favelas, and in many, shootouts between drug dealing gangs and police are a daily ritual.
The shanty towns are resented and feared by the rest of the city.
But residents in the Santa Marta slum have transformed their community into a living, breathing canvas.
With the help of two Dutch artists and a pioneering paint firm, the main square is now a kaleidoscope of color.
“It gives the community life!” said Edimar Marcelinho Franco, who helped paint the 34 buildings and walked away with a professional painting title.
CNN
Mark Bradford’s “A Truly Rich Man Is One Whose Children Run Into His Arms Even When His Hands Are Empty.’’ (Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff)
Imposing and even quite grand at a distance, Mark Bradford’s paintings, like the sprawling cities they evoke, suggest ruins up close.
They are ruins — the ruins of other modes of communication, other forms of speech. One over the other, Bradford layers old billboard signs, maps, and street posters. They’re salvaged, shredded, stripped, glued on, and rubbed back.
Working intuitively, he converts all these materials and more into works of art that are dense with history, freighted not only with political and social readings but with an abiding, poignant silence.
It’s the silence that gets under your skin. To wander around Bradford’s superb survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Art is to oscillate between the desire to get up close and even to touch (the impulse to run your fingers over their corrugated surfaces is almost impossible to resist) and a growing sense that you are in fact looking on from unreadable distances, like a general watching a chaotic battle from the top of a distant knoll, or an uncomprehending politician flying high over a disaster zone.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
‘Black Rosy,’ by Niki De Saint Phalle Court. Courtesy of The Brooklyn Museum
Notice a tint of gender bias in terms like “masterpiece” and “old master”? Now a picture is emerging of not just historical, but persistent discrimination against women in the art world. A slew of recent museum exhibitions aims to fill in the blanks. The latest, “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968″ (at the Brooklyn Museum through Jan. 9), brings a feminine presence to the masculine-sounding term “pop art.”
The show features works by 25 women who helped develop pop art but who (except for the sculptor Marisol) disappeared from art history books. “These artists were all visible once,” says Sid Sachs, director of exhibitions at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, who conceived the show. Yet when the first art histories and surveys of the movement appeared, he adds, “There was a real critical culling.” Mr. Sachs made it his mission to “cherchez la femme” and says, that through exhaustive research, “I found the women!”
Carol Strickland
Christian Science Monitor
When does an iPhone or an iPad cease to be a mere consumer gadget and enter the rarefied world of visual art? How about when someone willfully destroys it, turning it into an abstract, brutalized husk of its former self?
A series of smashed, mangled, shot up and melted Apple products are the subject of a recent photography project by a San Francisco-area graphic designer who said he’s trying to make people think about their relationship with these universally beloved gadgets.
Michael Tompert said he had spent the last several months purchasing the newest in Apple consumer technology and then creatively destroying the pricey toys. The results, which he photographed, briefly went on display at a gallery exhibition that ran over the weekend at the small Live Worms Gallery in San Francisco. (The art show was first reported on the site Cult of Mac.)
Speaking on the phone, Tompert said the idea for the project came to him after he gave each of his two sons an iPod touch for Christmas. He said the two boys fought over one of the devices, which had a certain game on it. Fed up with the quarrel, Tompert said he grabbed one of the iPods and smashed it on the ground.
“They were kind of stunned — the screen was broken and this liquid poured out of it. I got my camera to shoot it,” Tompert said. “My wife told me that I should do something with it.”
David Ng
Los Angeles Times
Jacqueline Kennedy attended the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1966. Jack Manning/The New York Times
Whither the Whitney? Yes, it’s got a swell building designed by Renzo Piano under way in the meatpacking district, to be finished in 2015. But what about its structure at 75th and Madison, where Jacqueline Kennedy attended the ribbon-cutting in 1966? Ornery and menacing, it may be New York’s most bellicose work of architecture.
The artist, heiress and collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney established the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931 in back of her studio in some row houses at 10-14 West Eighth Street. In the 1950s the Whitney jumped to a small structure behind the Museum of Modern Art. In 1961 the museum enlarged its board — to include, for instance, Mrs. Kennedy — and began seeking a site for a larger building.
The board found just the spot at the southeast corner of Madison and 75th Street, which was owned by the developer and art collector Ian Woodner. He had cleared it of a lovely little group of houses, including a brick-and-brownstone Queen Anne, an Edwardian limestone and a demure neo-Federal. Mr. Woodner, who had intended to erect an apartment house, agreed to sell the property to the Whitney.
The board, despite a mission to encourage American art, hired the architect Marcel Breuer, who was Hungarian-born and Bauhaus-trained, to design a building
Christopher Gray
New York Times
An aerial shot of the Museum of Fine Arts shows the new wing, with its distinctive glass courtyard roof (right), on the eastern side of the museum. (David L. Ryan / Globe Staff)
Museum building projects always spark a visitor boom, as people want to see the new spaces. But if attendance drop-off is too dramatic when the excitement wears off, a museum can fall into crisis. MFA leaders project they will double their usual attendance after the wing’s November opening. (Typical attendance is 60,000 to 80,000 a month in the winter, says Kimberly French, the museum’s deputy director of communications.) How will the MFA sustain the crowds? French believes an April show featuring work by glass artist Dale Chihuly should do for the MFA what Shepard Fairey did for the Institute of Contemporary Art in 2009: draw visitors even after the thrill of the opening has worn off.
Geoff Edgers
Boston Globe
Hiroshi Sugimoto is often venerated as a Zen master of film photography. But in “The Day After,” an exhibition that opened Nov. 6 at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, he has assumed a new persona — that of a wild and visionary scientist.
The show focuses on Mr. Sugimoto’s latest work: a series of monumental “Lightning Field” photographs, all from last year, that seem to sizzle with majestic lightning bolts. Marked by incandescent whites, velvety blacks and subtle textural detail, they suggest the birth of stars and planets.
These photographs are the largest that Mr. Sugimoto has ever made, and they took him some four years of intensive research to perfect. “I have always been curious about science,” he said in a recent interview at his Chelsea studio. “But now it’s getting very serious.”
Carol Kino
New York Times
