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A long-planned exhibition of nearly 70 pieces of Buddhist art from Pakistan will finally open at Asia Society on Aug. 9, after political intrigue in Pakistan and a breakdown in American-Pakistani relations delayed it for six months.
Anti-Americanism, which soared in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, helped put the show in jeopardy, said Melissa Chiu, the director of Asia Society Museum. The death of a major advocate, Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s senior diplomat for Pakistan and a former chairman of Asia Society, also complicated matters, she said, as did problems with getting American visas for the Pakistanis chosen to accompany the objects to New York.
Jane Perlez
New York Times
The Richard Neutra-designed Kronish House in Beverly Hills features 6,891 square feet of living space, six bedrooms and 5 1/2 bathrooms. (Marc Angeles, Unlimited Style / July 24, 2011)
The Kronish House, one of a handful of Beverly Hills residences designed by Modernist architect Richard Neutra, appears headed for demolition.
Soda Partners, the limited partnership that owns the nearly 7,000-square-foot residence north of Sunset Boulevard, has secured a permit to cap the sewer line, a step that often precedes a request for a demolition permit, said Jonathan Lait, Beverly Hills’ assistant director of community development.
The owner has not yet applied for a permit to raze the structure, an action that would require a 10-day notice of demolition. Mitchell Dawson, an attorney for Soda Partners, did not respond to requests for comment.
Rumors have spread among preservationists that a tear-down is imminent.
The house, which is not visible from the street, has been “terribly neglected, but the bones are still there,” said Dion Neutra, an architect who teamed up with his late father, Richard, on the project. “The new owner thinks it would be more valuable to tear it down and have empty land.”
Dion Neutra and the Los Angeles Conservancy say the loss of the Kronish House would be akin to the 2002 demolition of Neutra’s 1963 Maslon House in Rancho Mirage. That 5,000-square-foot, six-bedroom landmark was flattened even after assurances from a real estate agent that the new owner was thinking of restoring it. Preservationists across the nation protested the loss.
Martha Groves
Los Angeles Times
If architects were immortalized on Mount Rushmore, one of the portrait faces would represent Henry Hobson (H.H.) Richardson. As it was, Richardson was a larger-than-life figure who, following the Civil War, designed a variety of building types — both public and private — that are considered to be the first to embody a distinct American style. These masterworks include churches, libraries, commercial spaces, residential houses, a state capitol, a county courthouse and jail, a chamber of commerce, and a hospital for the insane. They were constructed in, among other places, Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Chicago during the master builder’s brief, jam-packed life.
Like his contemporaries Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Winslow Homer, Richardson expressed the aspirations, hopes, values, and virtues of his nation after its wrenching internal conflict. Completed in 1877, Boston’s Trinity Church, with its bold central tower, banded granite and sandstone walls, and wide rounded arches, heads most lists as the greatest American building of the 19th century. Others, such as the Allegheny County complex in Pittsburgh, have popped up in unlikely places — the prison served as a set in the 1984 movie Mrs. Soffel.
Phyllis Tuchman
Obit
Freud’s Large Interior W.11 (after Watteau) (1981-83).
Before saying why Lucian Freud, who died today, is the strangest case of my own personal artistic taste, let’s first remember a few things. It is difficult to imagine anyone in the profoundly homogenous, deeply tribal English art world of the mid-twentieth century, becoming as well-known and respected an artist as the German-born grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, someone with the last name Freud. It’s like being a Plato, as unthinkable as a Rockefeller’s becoming a famous bohemian Abstract Expressionist in fifties America. As if the burden of a royal bloodline were not enough, few world-renowned artists strike me as having less inborn talent than Freud. His genius, such as it is, seems the direct result of someone willing himself to accomplishment.
Which brings me to my personal taste. While I don’t particularly like Freud’s work (just last week I saw the Met’s current Freud show and thought, “Meh”). Yet then as now, I admire him greatly. I look at Freud’s intensely worked, eternally noodling oozey surfaces, the incessantly teeming little paint-brush strokes, the Morandi-like limited palette of flesh tones, and his claustrophobic vision of naked models forever posing in his famously dilapidated London studio, and am often struck by how the life of his art seems to drain away. Mostly what I see is nearly maniacal painterly control. Yet Freud is an important touchstone for the many of us who secretly fear that we are not naturally gifted; we who are not precocious geniuses, we non-Picassos who are always unsure that we even are what we say we are.
Jerry Saltz
New York Magazine
The Dia Art Foundation is positioned to re-claim the lease for the 10 acres of state land on which Robert Smithson’s masterwork Spiral Jetty sits as early as this week, MAN has learned. Dia will meet with officials from the Utah Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands in Utah on Thursday, at which point DNR and Dia will hold what could be the final negotiation to determine terms for a new lease.
Spiral Jetty, located just off Rozel Point in the north of the Great Salt Lake, is one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century and is widely regarded as the world’s greatest earthwork.
Tyler Green
Art Info
The opening scene from “The Biography Remix”, 2004, directed by Michael Laub
In her 40 years as a performance artist, Marina Abramovic has been no stranger to drama. Yet she has said that she isn’t interested in theatre, because it is too fake. The hardships she creates for herself—cutting a five-pointed star into her abdomen, scrubbing bloody cow bones for hours, fasting for weeks, or sitting in a public arena without moving or speaking for 60 days straight—may not be scripted and rehearsed, but their completion can be as cathartic as Greek tragedy. What’s more, she performs these tasks before audiences who want to be entertained.
On 9 July, when The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic premieres at the 2011 Manchester International Festival, they are likely to get a blockbuster. Always in full control of each moment in her own performances, this time the Serbian-born artist will perform a theatre work created—at her request—by someone else.
Linda Yablonsky
The Art Newspaper
Earlier this year, the Met invited visitors to “submit a photo of one detail in a single work of art from the Met’s permanent collection that captures your imagination, along with a photo of the full work of art and your own brief text (approximately 50 words) describing why you find that detail compelling.” It was a contest — called “Get Closer” — and entries were accepted between February 25 through April 8, 2011. The Met then chose five winners from the entries, gave each one a one-year membership at the Met, and posted their pictures on the Met’s website…the point of the exercise is both clear and worthy. The Met is using social media to get people to spend more time with a work of art, to really observe.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Pills are placed into the Damien Hirst artwork Lullaby Spring which has been bought by the Qatari royal family. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
The tiny emirate of Qatar has become the world’s biggest art buyer after a massive spending spree by the royal family to enhance its cultural portfolio before the 2022 World Cup. Research by the Art Newspaper has revealed that Qatar has been responsible for the bulk of contemporary and modern art purchases over the past six years, including work by Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko.
Last month the chairman of Christie’s, Edward Dolman, resigned from the auction house to become an adviser to Qatar’s museum authority. He will handle acquisitions for new museums including the National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, due to open in 2014. “Qatar is looking to deliver a series of exciting cultural projects in time for the World Cup in 2022,” Dolman told the Art Newspaper.
Sara Elkamel
Guardian
Feininger’s ‘Carnival in Arcueil’ (1911) Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC/ARS
It’s hard to predict who will be more delighted by “Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World,” now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art: Feininger’s small coterie of ardent fans or the vast majority of the public who have never heard of him.
To both groups, however, the exhibition—Feininger’s first solo museum show in the U.S. in decades—should be a revelation. Aside from displaying the full panoply of his paintings, it brings together for the first time his pioneering comic strips and caricatures, woodcuts, photographs, and hand-carved, painted wooden figures and buildings—toy sculptures forming a village that came to be known as “The City at the Edge of the World.”
Judith H. Dobrzysnki
Wall Street Journal
Cy Twombly, one of the 20th century’s great lyrical artists, died yesterday in Rome. The cause was not immediately disclosed, but he had suffered from cancer. He was 83.
He was the odd man out in a triumvirate of three friends from the American South – including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg – who built great reputations in the art world.
Unlike Johns and Rauschenberg, bridging figures between Abstract Expressionism and the Pop Art and Minimalism of the 1960s, Mr. Twombly achieved great fame only in his later years.
This was in part because he removed himself from the New York art world in 1957 and went to live in Rome. It was also because his work – paintings, sculptures, and photographs – had a romantic, at times nakedly erotic quality that left many critics struggling to know how to discuss him.
Mr. Twombly’s canvases are typically huge, with large areas often left unmarked. They are punctuated with scribbles, smudges, mathematical symbols, fragments of poetry, references to classical antiquity, obscene doodles, and – increasingly in his later years – vigorous blotches and drips of bright paint.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
