You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2011.
Cy Twombly
This year saw profound losses to the world of art. Richard Hamilton, Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud all died. They won’t make any more work. Their creativity belongs to the past now. We can’t bask in being their contemporaries.
On the other hand, their deaths came at the end of long and acclaimed lives. The Egyptian artist, Ahmed Basiony, was shot dead by security forces in Cairo in the early days of the Arab spring this January. He was born in 1978.
All these deaths were widely mourned, from the pavilion dedicated to Basiony at the Venice Biennale to the many memories of Freud that rushed into print. But how honest and how useful are these cults of the artistic dead?
It seems that every week, a major figure in the arts is mourned by the media – this week it is Ken Russell. Sometimes it seems the obituary pages are taking over the arts pages. It has become a media ritual, this black-veiled lamentation of the passing of creative figures – and it is not a healthy way to celebrate them.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Tatlin’s constructivist tower on Saadiyat
The most interesting work of art on show at Abu Dhabi Art 2011 is not for sale, it could hardly be more prominent, and yet most visitors give it no more than a passing glance.
Just beyond the main entrance to the Manarat Al-Saadiyat is one of the earliest surviving models of Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s The Monument to the Third International, conceived between 1915-20. Though the original disappeared long ago, this ten-foot-tall model was built in 1967 by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, using extant plans and photographs. The New York-based dealer Tony Shafrazi had the idea of bringing it to Abu Dhabi Art 2011.
Henry Hemming
The Art Newspaper
This week, the art world gave birth to a new platform called Sedition, which aims to create a marketplace for limited-edition digital artworks.
It has signed up some impressive names, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Shepard Fairey. These artists will produce pieces in editions of between 2,000 and 10,000, which are numbered, signed and sold for between $8 and $800, with Sedition taking a cut of the revenue.
The platform aims to encourage people who might not be able to afford these artists’ original pieces to become collectors of digital editions which they can access via their mobiles, tablets, PCs and connected TVs. With each purchase comes a certificate of authenticity, which — crucially — entitles the owner to resell the works at a later date if they so wish.
Once you have bought an artwork, it gets delivered to your personal online “vault,” which you can access via an app or web browser. There are currently two sorts of artworks — static prints and videos. The former can be accessed from different devices as a JPEG and the latter must be streamed directly from the site or via the iOS app (the Android and Windows Phone apps are in development).
Olivia Solon
Wired
The Royal Academy’s 2010 Van Gogh exhibition (Photograph: Nils Jorgensen / Rex Features)
Leonardo da Vinci has arrived at the National Gallery! Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan has been described as “the most eagerly awaited London exhibition in living memory”, and “the hottest ticket in town”. It’s the art equivalent of Michael Jackson and Elvis coming back from the dead to sing Christmas carols at the O2. Everyone wants to go. And that’s the problem. Because – assuming you can get a ticket – even though the National Gallery have restricted visitors to a mere 180 every half-hour, you can bet they’ll all be congregating in the same places. The exhibition is based around nine pictures that survive from Leonardo’s time in Milan in the late 1400s. Which means there’ll be at least 20 people clustered in front of each, and the idea of trying to peer through 20 sets of legs (I’m not very tall) to try to catch a glimpse of a dimly lit masterpiece is about as appealing as trying to hear Silent Night from row Z in the upper circle.
I understand that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see these paintings on walls quite near to one another. But the nature of these blockbuster shows means it’s no chance at all. Art requires you to spend some time with it, to contemplate and think, leave and return. And there’s no way you can do that with this type of show.
Miranda Sawyer
Guardian
There’s been plenty of talk about the establishment of the Clyfford Still Museum, the construction of its $29 million building and last week’s $114 million sale of four paintings originally intended for its collection.
Now it’s time to focus on what matters most — the 116 artworks (including many never before exhibited anywhere) that will go on view today when the museum welcomes the public for the first time with a grand-opening ceremony at 10 a.m.
More than 30 years after his death, Still remains largely a mystery even to art historians. Because he sold and exhibited only a small fraction of what he produced, his work has not been seen or studied anywhere to the degree of other major American painters.
Questions abound, none more pressing than these:
Was Still a strong enough artist to validate an entire museum dedicated exclusively to him?
Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post
Technology is changing all around us, and the issues for museums, it seems to me, are quite challenging. Choices are not inconsequential, and they are not (usually) easy to pull off. In an era of limited resources, where should time and money be spent?
All of that is a preface to my praise for what the British Library is doing with its Royal Manuscripts exhibition, which opened on Nov. 11. Subtitled “The Genius of Illumination,” it looks from afar to be a real occasion — a must-see exhibit if you are in London. And, combined with the once-in-a-lifetime Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery, it maybe even worth a trip there…
You don’t have to go to England… the show comes with an app, available worldwide for iPad, iPhone and Android device.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Detail from Sketch of a Youth (Study for the Head of Saint James) with Designs for Fortifications, 1493. Photograph: National Gallery/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II/The Royal Collection, 2011
In the National Gallery’s stupendous exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, drawings hang alongside paintings. On white paper yellowed by time, or on paper he coloured blue or red, Leonardo would draw in ink, chalk, or using the technique known as metal point, in which a fine nib is pressed against a sheet of paper coated with calcinated bone. The precise yet endlessly suggestive works that result from his unrivalled draughtsmanship are just as compelling as his paintings. In this exhibition they are shown beautifully, perfectly lit, with plenty of space between them.
But what are these drawings – which we are exploring in a weekly Guardian interactive series that starts today and runs for the duration of the show – for?
They are never just “preparatory studies” for paintings. That tedious terminology doesn’t apply to Leonardo. Even the ones that did lead to paintings stand up as magnificent works in their own right. What they all have in common is the fact that they come from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, those miraculous and elusive monuments to the human mind.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Art restorers have discovered the figure of a devil hidden in the clouds of one of the most famous frescos by Giotto in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, church officials said on Saturday.
The devil was hidden in the details of clouds at the top of fresco number 20 in the cycle of the scenes in the life and death of St Francis painted by Giotto in the 13th century.
The discovery was made by Italian art historian Chiara Frugone. It shows a profile of a figure with a hooked nose, a sly smile, and dark horns hidden among the clouds in the panel of the scene depicting the death of St Francis.
The figure is difficult to see from the floor of the basilica but emerges clearly in close-up photography.
Sergio Fusetti, the chief restorer of the basilica, said Giotto probably never wanted the image of the devil to be a main part of the fresco and may have painted it in among the clouds “to have a bit of fun.”
Philip Pullella
Reuters
Suit you? … French ministers inspect the Musée d’Orsay’s new-look non-white walls. And some paintings. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/AFP/Getty Images
The first thing to be said about the refit of the impressionist galleries at the Musée d’Orsay that have reopened to the public this week is that it was long overdue. With a grand central hall formed out of a great 19th-century railway station, this Paris institution is a beautiful museum that set the pace for spectacular art galleries in reclaimed buildings years before Tate Modern came along. Yet the most important paintings in the whole collection – the works of the painters who gave birth to the avant garde in late 19th-century France – were stuck in a characterless and ugly set of rooms on an upper floor.
Now those rooms have been transformed into subtly lit, opulent interiors that give the art of the belle époque the rich setting it deserves. One aspect of the transformation is the abolition of white walls. The walls are now a variety of colours including a special grey whose tone changes in different lights. White, says the museum, is a terrible backdrop for any pre-20th-century art. Is this true?
Well, it depends what replaces white. The Wallace Collection in London never had white walls exactly, but in recent years it has renewed a lot of its wallpapers using incredibly elegant and flashy materials. Presumably this is supposed to recreate the original appearance of the house, but I find it incredibly distracting to look at a Fragonard painting against a background of brilliant, shiny, blue.
It is a subtle art, the painting of gallery walls. The National Gallery in London has no white walls but has also redecorated many of its rooms, to excellent effect, with deep, dark colours that allow the brilliance of a Titian to hold the stage. The advantage of white is that it saves the curator having to choose. Now that galleries are more conscious of such things, the taste of their decorators is on test. Yet white itself is not so simple. There are lots of whites, good and bad.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Steve Jobs … the Apple CEO shows an image of the new storage centre for iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, June 2011. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
Perhaps the funniest passage in Walter Isaacson’s monumental book about Steve Jobs comes three quarters of the way through. It is 2009 and Jobs is recovering from a liver transplant and pneumonia. At one point the pulmonologist tries to put a mask over his face when he is deeply sedated. Jobs rips it off and mumbles that he hates the design and refuses to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he orders them to bring five different options for the mask so that he can pick a design he likes. Even in the depths of his hallucinations, Jobs was a control-freak and a rude sod to boot. Imagine what he was like in the pink of health. As it happens, you don’t need to: every discoverable fact about how Jobs, ahem, coaxed excellence from his co-workers is here.
As Isaacson makes clear, Jobs wasn’t a visionary or even a particularly talented electronic engineer. But he was a businessman of astonishing flair and focus, a marketing genius, and – when he was getting it right, which wasn’t always – had an intuitive sense of what the customer would want before the customer had any idea. He was obsessed with the products, rather than with the money: happily, as he discovered, if you get the products right, the money will come.
Isaacson’s book is studded with moments that make you go “wow”. There’s the Apple flotation, which made the 25-year-old Jobs $256m in the days when that was a lot of money. There’s his turnaround of the company after he returned as CEO in 1997: in the previous fiscal year the company lost $1.04bn, but he returned it to profit in his first quarter. There’s the launch of the iTunes store: expected to sell a million songs in six months, it sold a million songs in six days.
Sam Leith
Guardian
