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BANG BUA CANAL: A renovated public walkway, top, along the canal in Bangkok, where residents are helping to design cleaner places to live. (Photo: ACHR)
I joined the line to get into the United Nations the other day, fiddling with my iPhone before shuffling through security. The couple in back (he was toting an iPad) mused about what a design guru Steve Jobs had been. They headed toward the information desk and I toward “Design With the Other 90 Percent: Cities,” an infelicitously titled but inspired show organized by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and now installed (since the museum is closed for renovations) in the United Nations visitors’ lobby.
Design shows may conjure up fizzy displays of Van Cleef & Arpels or stylish tributes to Helvetica and classic automobiles. Design implies for most people the beautiful things an affluent society makes for itself.
This show is not about that kind of design. The objects here tend to look rugged and sometimes embarrassingly simple, as in “Why hadn’t anyone come up with that idea before?” Their beauty lies elsewhere: in providing economical, smart solutions to address the problems of millions of the world’s poorest people.
Michael Kimmelman
New York Times
Bertha and Edward Rose break ground on the museum in 1960
Like Lazarus rising from the dead, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University will reopen this week (26-27 October) after a four-month renovation with two celebrations that university president Frederick Lawrence says are heavy with significance for the museum’s future.
“The fact that we are having the reopenings during the fall board of trustees meeting is designed to raise the profile of the Rose in the university community,” he says. It was these same trustees, mostly, who in January 2009 voted to sell the Rose’s famed collection of modern and contemporary art to keep the university from shrinking drastically after the 2008 markets’ crash.
Since then, the Rose has been in limbo. Its supporters successfully sued to block the sale, reaching a settlement this June. But former director Michael Rush, who helped foment the opposition, left when his contract expired in the spring of 2009, and has never been replaced. Instead, Roy Dawes, an artist who joined the Rose staff in 2002 and was once a gallery manager at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, has led it as “director of museum operations”. Some exhibitions had to be cancelled, including one for James Rosenquist, who blamed a fire in his studio for his withdrawal, but also said he didn’t want to have to deal with the controversy.
Rosenquist is now part of the 26 October re-opening, which kicks off a series of events to mark the Rose’s 50th anniversary. On 27 October, there is also a public reception and viewing.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
The Art Newspaper
Down the pan … in Mumbai, where 60% of the population live in slums, there is one toilet seat per 600 people
A series of familiar images unfolds on the screen: a wall of glass towers, a Brazilian favela, the Shibuya pedestrian crossing in Tokyo. Visual shorthand for a crowded planet, they are accompanied by an equally familiar sequence of statistics: half of humanity – or 3.5 billion people – now live in cities, and urbanisation is so rampant that by 2050 this figure is projected to be 75%. So begins Urbanized, a new film about the challenge that cities pose in the 21st century, which had its London debut this weekend, playing to a packed house at the London School of Economics. It is directed by Gary Hustwit, who made the cult hit Helvetica in 2007 (an unlikely film about a Swiss typeface) before taking on the much broader topic of industrial design in 2009′s Objectified. With Urbanized, he zooms out even further to complete his trilogy, a cinematic story about design moving from the micro to the macro.
Justin McGuirk
Guardian
Willem de Kooning’s difficult masterpieces, recently so unfashionable, can now be seen with new eyes. De Kooning’s work for decades was virtually blacklisted by Greenbergian formalists, but MoMA makes amends with a well-chosen and complex survey. “Willem de Kooning, A Retrospective” at MoMA to January 9 is the must-see of the fall season. Jackson Pollock was great, but so was de Kooning, and we are here reminded why.
Of course, the single minded cannot allow anything but a single line. Art-historical descent does not allow dissent, or anything beyond clear-cut teleology. De Kooning’s error is that he seemed not to have left behind descendants who needed justification by patrimony to boost their prices, whereas Pollock supposedly fathered Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and maybe, just maybe, Kenneth Noland. We need a new schemata.
Last season’s MoMA survey of Abstract Expressionism was not good enough to bend the curve. The MoMA de Kooning show might. Anger, angst, and ambiguity can no longer be repressed. De Kooning descended from Picasso; Pollock from Thomas Hart Benton.
John Perreault
Artopia
Brushed aside … the Van Gogh Museum has dismissed claims the artist, shown here in an 1887 self-portrait, died in an accident.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam counsels visitors not to interpret his last works as clues to his suicide – which, according to conventional wisdom, took place when the artist shot himself in a field near the doctor’s house that was his last refuge in a world he found almost impossible to inhabit. Last time I was there, a label advised against taking an overly melodramatic view of his roiling blue, black and gold late vision Wheatfield with Crows.
Now the museum has once again urged caution, this time about the claim in a new biography that Van Gogh did not shoot himself after all but was mortally wounded in a bizarre accident. Well might the Van Gogh Museum express scepticism. After all, it seems like only yesterday that “scholars” were claiming poor Vincent did not cut off his own ear after all but was injured by Gauguin with a sword. That claim soon vanished into thin air and rightly so. Will this theory be as short-lived?
Both claims have the instant appeal of challenging the “myth” of Van Gogh the tortured artist, the man “suicided by society”, in the words of Antonin Artaud. Yet both come up against the mystery of why he never mentioned that he had been injured by others. In the case of his ear, it would seem strange that he allowed himself to be hounded by locals as a dangerous madman and incarcerated in asylum without mentioning that, oh, by the way, he was the victim of an assault. Similarly in this case, asks the BBC’s Will Gompertz, why let his family think he’d killed himself if that was not the case? He managed to walk back home and survived the gunshot to his chest long enough to speak out.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
UK artist Jenny Saville, who rarely produces fresh material, will unveil a selection of new works next month in her first solo show at a US museum. The exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida (30 November-4 March 2012) includes 15 large-scale paintings and 15 drawings dating from 1992 to 2011 by the Young British Artist, who is known for her graphic figurative representations of the human figure.
“The exhibition will include new and existing works from the artist’s studio that have not been previously exhibited. Other works in the exhibition were only shown in the US in 1999 and 2003, but not in solo shows,” said a museum spokesman. A selection of works on paper include examples from the artist’s most recent series based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s preparatory drawing The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (The Leonardo Cartoon), around 1499-1500, which is housed at the National Gallery in London.
Gareth Harris
The Art Newspaper
Not many museum directors have the opportunity Dean Sobel has—which is nothing short of the chance to rewrite a chapter of American art history.
As the first director of the Clyfford Still Museum, set to open in Denver on Nov. 18, Mr. Sobel will be reintroducing a first-generation Abstract Expressionist who abruptly severed his ties to the commercial art world in 1951 and rarely showed or sold his works after that. A few museums own some of his works—massive canvases of ragged swaths of black and a primary color that resemble rawhide—but his last large exhibition was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979-80. Nearly 95% of Still’s output has been locked away for decades. At the Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionist exhibition earlier this year, which had roomfuls of works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Still was represented by one painting.
Mr. Sobel, who has spent the past six years studying the hidden trove—825 paintings and 1,575 works on paper—is convinced that Still is not only a giant of Abstract Expressionism, but also the first of the breed. “We are going head to head with Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning and Newman,” he says. “The goal for us is to put Still back in, to show the greatness of him and that he was the great innovator of the movement. He creates Abstract Expressionism before all the others.”
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Wall Street Journal
Betty, 1977, Gerhard Richter’s first portrait of his daughter. © Gerhard Richter/Museum Ludwig/Private Collection
Walking through Panorama, Tate Modern’s Gerhard Richter retrospective, is like turning the dial on an old radio. Things erupt from the static as you swim between stations. Suddenly there is a voice, a garbled news broadcast, a shrill single tone, a story being told, music, then silence. Little wonder Richter admires John Cage; following Cage’s dictum, Richter is a painter who professes to have nothing to say, then says it.
Whenever you think of Richter as one kind of artist, he turns out to be another. However bewildering this can be, there is a consistent tone of voice, whatever his subjects. It is something much more than style: here’s a skull, some morbid candles, a flayed abstraction; how about some white fluffy clouds, isolated in their painted skies? At 80, Richter still surprises me. His continuing inventiveness and constant doubt, the variety and stern pleasures of his work give me a bleak sort of hope. This is hard to explain. I do not know what that hope entails.
The present exhibition is more than a blow-by-blow account of Richter’s development since 1961, when the artist, by then a successful young mural painter, crossed from East Germany to the west and re-embarked on a career full of interesting confusions, cross-currents, contradictions and detours. The exhibition makes a kind of cumulative sense. (The longer Richter works, the more sense his art makes.)
Adrian Searle
Guardian
