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Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan, Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York/Sabam Brussels
Urban avant-gardist or small-town loony? The Belgian painter James Ensor, who has a survey of hilarious, gruesome beauty at the Museum of Modern Art, is a puzzle to fans and strangers alike, a classic insider-outsider.
He knew all the right art-world people but hated most of them and was sure they hated him. He was an aggrieved traditionalist with a pop-culture itch, equally entertained by Rubens and tabloid cartoons. He was a sophisticated artist who helped shape early Modernism, not in a Paris studio but in an attic room over a novelty shop in a resort town on the North Sea.
Although Ensor has long been a fixture in the art canon, he is also a fugitive presence. My guess is that a lot of people know his name without knowing quite who he is. Who can blame them? He’s hard to pin down. Gothic fantasist, political satirist, religious visionary: one minute he’s doing biblical scenes, the next the equivalent of biker tattoos, in a style that veers between crude and dainty.
Just consider his self-portraits. Within the span of five years in the late 1880s he depicted himself as a cross-dressed dandy, a rotting corpse, a bug, a fish, Albrecht Durer and a crucified Jesus. Clearly that attic room was a crowded, cacophonous place, and the MoMA show, though airily installed, puts us right inside it.
Ensor was born in Ostend, Belgium, in 1860, and his life began with uncertainties. His father, an Englishman, was probably an alcoholic and a bankrupt. The family’s main income came from the Ostend shop owned by his Belgian mother’s family, an antiques-and-souvenirs emporium selling china, taxidermic specimens and grotesque carnival masks.
Ensor studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, immersing himself in Bosch and Rembrandt, as well as in modern realists like Courbet and Manet. Goya and Turner, artists “obsessed with light and violence,” as he put it, became favorites. He aligned himself with a circle of painters who were politically leftist — anti-imperial, anti-clerical, pro-worker — and aesthetically progressive. In 1883 they formed a group called Les Vingt, or the 20, and organized a salon that drew contemporary artists from across Europe, including Monet and Seurat.
Ensor exhibited in the salon for a decade, but he had a bitter parting of ways when several of its members converted to neo-Impressionism, while he held firm to a dark-hued realist path. The early paintings at MoMA, crumbly still lifes and gravy-brown interiors, are in this style and get things off to a lugubrious start.
Holland Cotter
New York Times
“Triangular Solid with Circular Inserts (Variation E),” 1989-2007, at the Whitney Museum
Here’s a good art-world quiz question, one that could stump many an astute insider: What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?
The answer, Dan Graham — a Zelig of so many creative circles over the past four decades it is dizzying to keep track — sat recently sipping an iced tea and eavesdropping on conversations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a retrospective of his work opened Thursday, finally adding him to the ranks of conceptual art’s thorny 1960s pioneers to receive a full-blown American career survey. (The show, organized with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, began there and travels to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis after it closes in New York on Oct. 11.)
Among his conceptual peers, those who set out to wrest art from the realm of objects and move it more fully into one of ideas, Mr. Graham, 67, is someone whose work does not come easily to mind even for an informed artgoing public. In part this is because his restless intellect has never allowed him to settle into anything resembling a signature style or to be easily categorized. (Most attempts at categorization are parried by Mr. Graham himself with a professorial annoyance and fencer’s agility, and he dislikes being called a conceptual artist and says he is not a professional one in any sense, calling art his “passionate hobby.”)
If the world had nothing else for which to thank him, it might be enough that during a brief stint as a dealer he gave LeWitt his first solo gallery show, along with presenting early work by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. Or for the part Mr. Graham played later in the formation of Sonic Youth — he helped Kim Gordon, one of the group’s founders, land her first New York apartment in his Lower East Side building and cast her in an all-girl “band” for a 1980s performance piece, jump-starting her music career. When Mr. Graham, rumpled and white-bearded with a kind of Mr. Natural aura, shows up at cutting-edge rock concerts these days, well-read 20-somethings tend to mill around him admiringly.
But it is the way his artistic DNA has seeped into the work of younger artists over such a prolonged period that underscores his importance. Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney who organized the show with Bennett Simpson, a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, said that prominent artists as well distributed over the years as Tony Oursler (video artist, born 1957), Rirkrit Tiravanija (known for the shows in which he cooks for gallery visitors, born 1961) and Wade Guyton (who “paints” with printers, born 1972) all showed strong traces of Mr. Graham’s influence. Their work looks and feels almost nothing like his, or like one another’s, a remarkable testament to the way Mr. Graham’s fascination with perception and with the conventions of art and mass-produced culture have become part of the contemporary art landscape.
Because so much of his work — from early pop-culture writing to performances with video cameras to his well known mirrored pavilions — is about what Mr. Simpson called “the way one experiences the space of the self,” it has also seemed more prescient as each new iteration of the Web alters the calculus of media, society and individuality.
“The pieces make sense, in a way, even more than they did 10 years ago,” Ms. Iles said, “when they had a completely different kind of reading because we hadn’t gotten to this stage yet, the stage of Twitter and Facebook and Flickr.”
Randy Kennedy
New York Times
“How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies),” a 2006 work by Yinka Shonibare with mannequins, guns, Dutch wax-printed cotton textile,shoes, boots and plinth (Steve White/Museum Purchase, Wellesley College Friends of Art)
In his Victorian house in the East End here Yinka Shonibare, the British-Nigerian conceptual artist, perched on an exercise ball at the wooden table in his book-crammed study, sipping peppermint tea and examining a shipment of faux oysters on the half shell.
A stationary hand cycle sat beside him, an electric wheelchair across from him. One of Bob and Roberta Smith’s slogan paintings, “Duchamp stinks like a homeless person,” hung above him, and a tuna on toast prepared by his housekeeper was sandwiched between a vase of yellow tulips and a stack of Dante volumes: “Inferno,” “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso.”
It was a small tranquil moment in the midst of a whirlwind time for Mr. Shonibare, whose theatrically exuberant work, with its signature use of headless mannequins and African fabrics, will be featured in a major midcareer survey at the Brooklyn Museum starting Friday. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, large-scale installations, photographs and films.
Erudite and wide ranging, Mr. Shonibare, at 47, is a senior figure in the British art world but one who intentionally eludes easy categorization. A disabled black artist who continuously challenges assumptions and stereotypes — “That’s the point of my work really,” he said — Mr. Shonibare makes art that is sumptuously aesthetic and often wickedly funny. When he deals with pithy matters like race, class, disability, colonialism and war, he does so deftly and often indirectly.
“I don’t produce propaganda art,” he said. “I’m more interested in the poetic than the didactic.”
On that gray May day in the East End, Mr. Shonibare was trying to decompress after directing a weeklong photo shoot that involved 25 live snakes, 14 nude models, 6 pigs and 2 lamb’s heads. Inspired by Dante, Arthur Miller, Gustav Doré and the financial crisis, the shoot was a work in progress, “Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall,” which seeks to depict what happens after the death of the salesman. (Hint: It’s hellish.)
At the same time Mr. Shonibare was preparing for a trip to Jerusalem, where he is a guest curator at the Israel Museum. He was granting an hours-long interview, interrupted periodically by his plumber — “Do you happen to know where the stopcock is, mate?” — and he was evaluating the oysters for inclusion alongside a peacock with gilded beak in a 19th-century dinner party installation at the Newark Museum.
“I’m juggling a few things, yeah,” said Mr. Shonibare, who in contrast to his bold and lavish work, is disarmingly gentle and restrained in person.
Because of a condition that left him partially paralyzed, Mr. Shonibare’s head lists to the right, as if being tugged there by a few of his jaunty dreadlocks. This often makes it look as if he were cocking his head to see things more clearly. But that impression is misleading because, as Arnold L. Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, put it, his is the sure gaze of a “visionary” artist: “He’s able to juggle so many different ideas so brilliantly and to express them in such an immensely appealing and extraordinarily visual way.”
Deborah Sontag
New York Times
Flight into Egypt 1996 . Photograph: Private Collection/Tate
It is rare for any major museum to play daring with a wild card of a show, still less during times of recession, but so it is with Per Kirkeby at Tate Modern. Ten galleries have been devoted to this unfamiliar painter. For although Kirkeby (born in 1938) is a household name in Denmark, and the nation’s most acclaimed artist since Vilhelm Hammershøi and Asger Jorn, he can hardly be well known to many people over here, since he has never had a full-dress show in Britain before, despite a career lasting more than 40 years.
It might have been longer had Kirkeby not started out as an Arctic geologist, a fact that becomes more significant the deeper one looks into his work. And depth is always at issue. For the first thing to say is that Kirkeby is a paradoxical painter, a neo-expressionist whose enormous canvases of flaring colour and passionate gesture might appear to be purely abstract were it not that there is some kind of realist in him, too. Look into his surfaces and you see figures and forms tangled up in the paint.
Take the very funny picture that the curators have shrewdly chosen to open this show. It is called The World’s Northernmost House. But where is this fabled place? The canvas is a maze of ice-cracking lines, rickety black slate and rock, drips, damp outcrops of claggy brown and grey, rising up to a threatening green sky (or so one perceives it). Is there a hint of roof, doorstep or track? It’s not clear. There is no obvious vantage point – indeed, one could as easily be looking at a map as a landscape. But either way there is a powerful sense of absurdity: a room at the top of the freezing world.
What is discernible in Kirkeby’s art is often foolish or extreme: a medieval knight, a horse so strangely angled it could tip out of the picture, sinister huts and doorless dwellings. One painting is named after the ship Nansen was forced to abandon in his attempt to reach the North Pole and certainly there is some sense of deadlock and of splintering horizons, though these seem equally bound up with the action of painting itself. Forge ahead, keep going, don’t stop trying.
Now there is scarcely anything less enticing one could say about a painter’s work than that it is concerned with painting itself, and that is not the case with Per Kirkeby. It is obvious that the mind’s meanderings are as susceptible to expression for him as for any poet (and Kirkeby is also a poet), also that the infinite variety of the world inspires in him an infinite variety of representational methods.
He paints Pop on hard Masonite in the 60s. He glues on, tears off, splits the canvas into four screens in the 70s. By the 80s, images are overlaid and interleaved, paint is scraped and coagulated, thinned, dripped and squeezed in lush smears. He goes against the grain – huge stabbing strokes of black and white in Crystal, making a cataclysm out of delicate refraction – and he walks out into the landscape like some latter-day romantic. In several works, a calligraphy of lines spread across the canvas, rather like the branches of trees latticing a beautiful vista.
If Kirkeby is prolific and uncommonly various, he is also up to his eyes in art history, seeing the world, and his art, through that of others. You get a hint of what is to come in the second room where his commentaries on fellow painters fill a whole wall of bookshelves. I freely confess that I don’t know quite what Kirkeby is doing in paintings that reprise other artists – Monet’s poplars and water lilies, Soutine’s flayed carcasses – other than to isolate and celebrate their motifs, though the overwhelming sense is of exploration.
Kirkeby wants to paint a version of The Flight into Egypt for modern times and his imagination turns to the heat, the route, the ankle-turning rocks of the terrain; the painting navigates an immense range of hazardous lines and hot colours. He wanders into the woods and the resulting pictures suggest elusive spaces, alternately airy and densely gnarled, the shadows breached by flashes of exultant colour.
Kirkeby’s colour – radiant violet, cobalt, glowing ochre – is like a gift, a compensation for the complexity of his art. For he never offers any easy statements. None of his paintings is sewn up, resolved, and very often you feel more certain of the mood than the subject matter. His early work has been compared to that of contemporaries such as Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz, but in its primitive and irreducible pleasures seems more connected to Cy Twombly.
Though there are, of course, those who just find it annoyingly resistant and obscure; which is the occupational hazard of the abstract artist. With abstraction, there has to be some kind of affinity, some vocabulary or tone of voice that the audience may recognise as it recognises the content of figurative art. In which respect, the relative unfamiliarity of Kirkeby’s work is a boon.
For it allows one to see the paintings clearly, uninflected by the judgments of others, to meet them like relative strangers. And this show is the ideal encounter, for it has been very subtly arranged to display the fullness of their character. Rich, earthy, spearing, dynamic, fiercely inquiring, solemn, droll, sceptical and yet abundantly romantic: perhaps a portrait of the artist as much as his art.
Laura Cumming
Guardian
Embarrassed by our former selves, we often recoil from the art we loved as adolescents. Artists we ardently fall for in our teens are frequently – and sometimes savagely – “dropped” later in life as our tastes become more sophisticated (or so we think).
In literature, such writers as J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver routinely suffer such a fate, while in art, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, and Vincent Van Gogh are perhaps the classic cases.
Francis Bacon, too, belongs in this category. For those who succumbed early to an infatuation with his violent and glamorous work, as I did, the question of whether he is really any good can be as much a test of respect for our former selves, and the special receptiveness of youth, as it is of Bacon himself.
Widely regarded as a – if not the – leading figure in postwar British art, Bacon, who died in 1992, is the subject of a major retrospective here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Over the years, he has been received in America with am bivalence. His first work to enter a public collection was bought by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1948. And the Met made Bacon the first living artist from Britain to be accorded a solo show in 1975.
But many leading US critics, offended, perhaps, by his disdain for abstraction – the idiom that established American ascendancy in art after 1940 – failed to give Bacon the lavish praise he was accorded in Britain and France.
Gary Tinterow, a curator at the Met, suggests another cause. In the catalog for “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective,” he writes that Bacon’s “overt homosexuality was incompatible with the disguised Puritan and overtly macho ethos of many of his American contemporaries . . . at least until the 1980s” when, he says, feminism and queer studies introduced more sympathetic attitudes.
Tinterow’s claim is as ridiculous as it looks (homosexuality was far from unknown in American art between the 1940s and the 1980s). But it is fair to say that Bacon’s psychological complexity, his combination of intense charm, queeny wit, and instinctive perversity, can seem very British (although he was actually born in Ireland) and, to some American observers, perhaps, alienating.
The Met show, which originated at London’s Tate Britain last year, does not make an open-and-shut case for Bacon’s greatness. It includes too much early work, and too much late work. The early paintings, from 1944 to 1962, which made such a big impression on observers at the time, look histrionic and bloated (big canvases with not much going on). The late ones lack tension, depending on arbitrary mannerisms and sensation-craving effects.
But there are two rooms filled with works of devastating force – and that ought to be enough for anyone.
Part of what makes these works, painted between 1962 and 1976, great is Bacon’s introduction of bright, saturated colors to his carefully designed and fastidiously painted backgrounds.
The early works, including the series of screaming popes that Bacon later dismissed, quite rightly, as “very silly,” tended to set isolated figures in transparent enclosures against black or gray backgrounds, often with vertical striations, vaguely suggestive of veils, prison bars, or the rows of spotlights used as ghostly extensions of architecture at Nazi rallies.
The contrast between the near-monochrome sobriety of this early work and the sumptuousness of the post-1962 colors is extreme. But nowhere in the lamely dutiful introduction to the catalog by curators Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens is color discussed.
Certainly it is strange to think of this supreme painter of human agony and despair as a connoisseur of royal purples, lush spring greens, phallic pinks, perfumed mauves, and commercial oranges. But Bacon was a great colorist who, like Matisse, came to understand the impact that large areas of saturated tints could have.
In paintings like “Lying Figure” (1969), “Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer” (1971), and the Matisse-like nude “Henrietta Moraes” (1966), Bacon set up thrilling tensions between the rectilinear areas of flat, unmodulated color he used for his backgrounds; the liquid, bulging outlines of his figures, which cast shadows like spilled blood; and the scumbled, layered brushstrokes he used to convey flesh.
The commentary on Bacon focuses always on the flesh. Bacon was, after all, a connoisseur of mortality and an avid student of gruesome medical textbooks, scenes of cinematic violence, and photographs of abattoirs. But in his great period, all these elements are splendidly interwoven.
A gambler, Bacon liked to play up his reliance on chance. But his orchestration of all the various elements in his paintings was so carefully controlled that the operations of chance were surely minimal. He began his creative career as a designer of modernist rugs and furniture in the vein of Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and Eileen Gray, and it’s hard not to see the carefully plotted designs of his later canvases, especially the great triptychs, as vestiges of this period.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
Bacon in 1951, photographed by Cecil Beaton. (Photo: Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s)
Francis Bacon, whose centenary is being marked by a Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective opening this week, is the Irish-born English artist whom the English consider their Achilles: a truculent hero rising from the turbulence, an outlaw god. Indeed, the first word of Homer’s Iliad comes to mind when thinking about his paintings and tumultuous life: “Rage.”
Those who knew the artist—some of them his friends—described him variously as “devil,” “whore,” “one of the world’s leading alcoholics,” “bilious ogre,” “sacred monster,” and “a drunken, faded sodomite swaying nocturnally through the lowest dives and gambling dens of Soho.” Bacon was no kinder: He called himself a “grinding machine” and “rotten to the core.” This hasn’t stopped admirers and critics alike from proclaiming him “the greatest painter in the world,” “the best … since Turner.” Never one to spare hyperbole, Robert Hughes wrote, “This painter of buggery, sadism, dread, and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyric artist in late-twentieth-century England, perhaps in all the world.”
For me, Bacon—who may be the only artist sharing a name with one of his main subjects, meat—has always been more of a cartoonist. He’s an illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst. His early accomplishments are undeniable, and the Met’s survey of 66 paintings and a cache of never-before-seen source material is peppered with high points, especially the signature paintings of the forties and fifties: Canvases with twisted masses of faceless flesh and otherworldly homunculi, creatures of the id posed in living-room wastelands and Stygian prisons. The best of this work shrouds you in a sulfuric gloom where strange powers transform human souls into delirious monsters. These paintings make audiences stare as if they were looking at animals in a zoo, trying to come to terms with these merciless inhuman presences. You’ll see this at the Met: people blankly gaping in wonder.
To understand Bacon’s impact, look no further than the young Brits emulating him. Jake and Dinos Chapman place tortured figures in glass cases; Jenny Saville’s contorted Gargantuas are direct descendants of Bacon’s golems; Tracey Emin works with blood and guts; Sarah Lucas gives us spooks and deformities. Damien Hirst not only makes vitrines straight out of Bacon—he puts meat and carcasses in them. Like Dalí and Munch, Bacon is an artist we love when young. Tantalized by the urgency, angst, weirdness, blood, sex, and bodies, we think, That’s me! That’s how I feel!
You might have reconsidered feeling like Bacon if you’d lived in his skin. His love life is a study in emotional privation and degradation. “We are meat,” he often remarked—understandable, given his adolescence. Bacon, who was given morphine as a child for his asthma (the ailment that contributed to his death in 1992), always knew which way his erotic compass pointed, which is not to say that he approved of its inclination: He called his homosexuality “a defect” and a “limp.” And no wonder. When Bacon was 16, his father—the artist derisively called him “a failed horse-trainer”—caught the boy wearing his mother’s underwear. (“Fishnet stockings were an essential part of the artist’s wardrobe for most of his life,” one biographer notes.) As punishment, the father had him horsewhipped by the stable hands, whom, Bacon later claimed, he then had affairs with. Bacon Sr. asked a family friend to “straighten the boy out” by taking him to Berlin. The man complied—and subsequently bedded the younger Bacon, then abandoned him in the city that W. H. Auden called “a bugger’s daydream.”
Endless liaisons with rent boys and society types followed, until Bacon’s predator-prey notion of love and his “desire to suffer” reached new heights, in 1952. At the age of 43, he met a former RAF pilot, Peter Lacy, in London’s Soho. They spent a lot of time in Tangier, a refuge for gay men looking for freedom. “I’d never really fallen in love with anyone until then,” Bacon said. “Of course, it was the most total disaster from the start.” Bacon couldn’t live with or without him: “Being in love in that extreme way,” he said, “being totally obsessed by someone, is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” They experimented with the far reaches of S&M. The end was horrid, too. On the day before his first Tate retrospective opened, in May 1962, Bacon learned Lacy had been found dead, almost surely from drinking.
Less than two years later, Bacon met George Dyer—reportedly when Dyer broke into his studio to rob him. For the next seven years the relationship rocketed up and down, then history repeated itself. On October 25, 1971, the day before Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris opened, Dyer overdosed and died in their Paris hotel room. Bacon, then 61, was again devastated. No wonder he talked about “the destruction” of love.
Jerry Saltz
New York Magazine
The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright was hyper-sensitive to the nature of place, like this home built in Wisconsin (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation).
There’s a major new show here at the Guggenheim Museum on the work of America’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
If, like this writer, you’re a Wright fan, there’s tons of stuff to look at. No less than 64 of the master’s buildings are here in the form of drawings, models, photos, even computer simulations. The show is a grandma’s attic of Wrightiania, and you’re sure to be fascinated by stuff you’ve never noticed.
If you’re not such a fan, though, and you don’t already know your way around Wright’s work, I’m afraid this exhibit will seem random, confused, and pointless.
The occasion for the show is a double anniversary. Wright died at 91 in the same year the Guggenheim opened, 50 years ago, in 1959. The museum, one of his most famous creations, has just completed a massive $30 million, three-year renovation.
It must have seemed like a great idea. But an anniversary isn’t an agenda, and this show doesn’t have one. Instead it settles for rehashing every cliché you’ve ever heard about Wright.
Start with the title: “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward.” The idea here is that Wright designed his buildings by first planning the interior spaces, and only then shaping the exterior appearance around them. Well, hey, sure he did that. In some of his early houses, indoor space pinwheels outward from the center, morphing into porches and courtyards and gardens and binding indoors and outdoors into a single harmony.
The problem is, Wright spent most of the 20th century bragging about how he was doing exactly that. This is not an appropriate theme for a new exhibit. It’s an old-fashioned view of an artist who in truth is as relevant today as ever.
I’d rather have seen an exhibit, for instance, titled “Frank Lloyd Wright: Environmentalist.” Wright believed in building from local materials, not from costly stuff shipped halfway around the world as is common today. Often his buildings grow from the trees and rocks of the site they’re built on.
In a world that today is sinking into universal sameness, Wright was hyper-sensitive to the nature of place. He built two houses for himself, both of them in this show. The one in Wisconsin is as different from the one in Arizona as the northern forest is different from the southwestern desert. Each is carefully attuned to the local site and the climate they live in. And the one near Phoenix, Taliesin West, is an especially masterful example of sun control by natural means – surely a lesson for a world that is wasting its energy resources.
The yawn-provoking theme, though, is only the beginning of problems with this exhibit. It’s a poor fit, for example, in the Guggenheim interior, which, of course, consists mainly of one endless sloping curving ramp. The heart of the Wright show consists of drawings, more than 200 of them. These are laid in glass vitrines, sometimes horizontal and sometimes tilted up like an old-fashioned drawing board. Rectangular tables on a curving ramp are awkward and they ignore the museum Wright actually intended. Wright designed the Guggenheim primarily for paintings and sculptures, which would be displayed on the vertical walls of the ramp (and skylit in his original conception). The museum works well when it’s used that way, especially for artists such as Miro, Kandinsky, and Calder who employ bold colors that carry across the space of the atrium and become part of the architecture.
Robert Campbell
Boston Globe
Part of Francis Alÿs’s installation Fabiola. The Belgian artist spent 15 years collecting these images by a range of creators. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
It would be hard to imagine a more startling show of portraits than the 300 heads now assembled, with barely an inch between them, in Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery. The spectacle is overwhelming. It is not just the critical mass of so many faces, floor to ceiling, nor the fact that some of these works might not ordinarily be found in a public gallery. It is that they all show exactly the same woman.
The same woman, what is more, in exactly the same pose: facing right, her head in profile, hooded in a red veil against a dark background. That she is a cult figure is obvious, even to those who have no idea who she is; that the cult is religious becomes apparent from the veil. But beyond that, what strikes over and again is the paradoxical sense that no matter how alike these images are – how alike they aim to look – each is tellingly different.
Fabiola is a Catholic saint and follower of St Jerome, who wrote a beautiful eulogy of her virtues when she died in 399. Born into a patrician family in Rome, she was married twice – once to a brute, as Jerome implies, whom she committed the sin of divorcing, next to a man whose early death she grieved in the streets of Rome before renouncing the world for her faith.
Fabiola might have remained obscure had not Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop of Westminster, written an improbably racy bestseller about her life in 1850 which was translated into 10 languages; and if the 19th-century French artist (who would himself be otherwise obscure) Jean-Jacques Henner had not painted his celebrated “portrait”.
The first of the many tantalising questions raised by this show is just how Henner’s portrait came to dominate all future images of the saint for the original disappeared long ago. It survives only in black-and-white reproductions based, one must suppose, either on a primitive photograph or an etching; and yet almost every artist here has painted the hair brown and the veil decisively red. It is as if Henner’s painting, even at several removes, was unanimously upheld as the right version of Fabiola, quite a tribute to his imagination for he had no idea how she looked.
But creativity is the true subject of this show – art and its power, its uses. This is the reason, one feels, that Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has spent 15 years unearthing hundreds of images by a whole range of creators from skilled painters to mediocre hacks and thrift-shop amateurs. There are hyper-real Fabiolas and Fabiolas worked on linen and black velvet. There are wood carvings, embroideries and icons accoutred with actual veils. There are glass works, pastels and images on tin foil. There is even a Fabiola laboriously worked in varnished sesame seeds.
Alÿs, one of the most humane of contemporary artists, is a great co-ordinator of ideas and people. He once brought 500 citizens together to move a vast sand dune, transforming the landscape (and their view) and one of his most beguiling works traces the sundial effect of a flagpole in Mexico City, providing shadow for passers-by even as it measures the passing of their day. With Fabiola, he has turned the act of collecting into a prism for looking. Where did this image come from, why was it made and by what sort of mind? Each picture inflects questions about the next. Fabiola looks more or less western, Mexican, eastern European. She acquires green eyeshadow, turns bottle blonde, appears by turns serene, tragic, meek, compassionate, powerful. Each artist makes her again to him or herself.
One has given her a presence so immediate she might be posing before him; another has tried to return her to Rome with the look of a classical mosaic. The portrait may be a sign of the times – art deco, Forties Hollywood – or it might be an absolutely timeless act of pure devotion. As Alÿs observes, the one defining constant in all this multiplicity is actually the scrolling fold of her veil, which looks variously like a loop, hook or ear, depending on the artist’s abilities.
Why they were painted – altarpiece, ex-voto, act of gratitude, penitence or prayer, just for the comfort of her company (Fabiola is the patron saint of the abused and widowed) – may speak of the artist’s private need or devotion. But what this immense assembly of images conveys above all is the universal power of the portrait.
Portraits have powers quite other than pictures of apples or rolling fields; they appear to us as people first, however momentarily, before they revert to pictures. Fabiola is the purest expression of this effect: friend, heroine, living saint to all these people, she has services to perform in this world, not least in proving that there are an infinite number of ways to paint a portrait.
Laura Cumming
Guardian
“Still Life with Apples 1893-94″ is carried by installers to the wall for hanging. It is part of the “Cezanne and Beyond” show. (Clem Murray)
Part of the fun of “Cezanne and Beyond” – the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition demonstrating how the 19th-century master Paul Cezanne directly inspired a century’s worth of artists – is that a visitor can see art history happen. The links between the generations of artists and their work are so clear that you don’t need an audio guide or wall text to get it. All you have to do is look from picture to picture to picture.
If I were a child, this show might get me hooked on art for life. And if I had children, I’d consider it a perfect way to show my kids how exciting art can be.
Except I wouldn’t be able to afford to, and neither will many other families. The museum is charging as much as $88 for a family of four to see the show, effectively pricing out all but the relatively wealthy. This is an enormous, embarrassing mistake, and the museum should be sure not to make it again.
By setting the entrance fees so high, the museum has effectively chosen to segregate itself into two museums. The area of the museum that features “Cezanne and Beyond” is available only to those affluent enough to afford the exhibition charge, while the rest of the museum is more accessible to the lower and middle classes.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a nonprofit housed in city-owned buildings. It gets about $2.4 million a year from the city and has received millions more in capital funding, with more on the way. So its willingness to effectively redline certain residents out of its programming is improper.
This kind of exhibition pricing is not the norm. The most analogous nearby museum is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a comparable relationship with New York City. The Met asks that visitors pay what they can, with a suggested donation of $20 ($10 for students; children under 12 are admitted free of charge). A visitor can pay $5 and see every exhibition.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s charge is part of an unfortunate trend that has museums seeing themselves as competing with for-profit entertainment businesses such as the local cineplex or professional baseball team. This is wrongheaded. The museum is a nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, exists to share its art, scholarship, and exhibitions with “an increasingly diverse audience as a source of delight, illumination, and lifelong learning.”
When the museum effectively blocks so many from its headline programming, it is overtly excluding an “increasingly diverse audience” from its halls. It’s OK if a business creates entertainment that is too expensive for some people. But it is not acceptable when a city-supported nonprofit limits access to its best offerings.
If the only way to accomplish an exhibition is to price out most of the audience, the museum should either raise more money from foundations and other sponsors, or it should not do the show. There is no imperative that a museum put on splashy, expensive shows. Nor must an exhibition be expensive to be great.
Tyler Green
Philadelphia Inquirer
Pawel Wojtasik’s ”Below Sea Level” is a long multichannel video of New Orleans scenes displayed, cyclorama-style, on screens that completely encircle the viewer.
If you’ve grown accustomed, resentfully or otherwise, to the frivolity and antics of the contemporary art world, the recent shift in mood toward elegy and soulfulness can be discombobulating, and even rather hard to take. Are we really to take seriously the Weltschmerz and despair of brutally ambitious young turks just out of art school, prospering denizens of Chelsea, or millionaire friends of Elton John?
Sam Taylor-Wood, one of the six artists in “These Days: Elegies for Modern Times” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, fits that last description. That she has also survived cancer and a recent divorce from her dealer, Jay Jopling, and that her art peddles in the fundamental themes of love and loss, doesn’t, unfortunately, change the fact that it has always been trite.
In almost everything Taylor-Wood does, you can feel her sniffing the winds of popular appeal, art-world cachet, and tabloid sensation, and pitching her work at the point where all three meet.
If clowns in art are suddenly all the rage again, Taylor-Wood will take photos of clowns (see here her photos of dejected clowns in “After Dark (with Flower)” and “After Dark (Trapdoor)”). If David Beckham has been caught sleeping around, she will make a video of him sleeping innocently like a god. And she will never a miss an opportunity to borrow gloss and gossip value from her many other celebrity friends, from Robert Downey Jr. to Woody Harrelson.
Still, precisely because she has the knack of keeping things simple, Taylor-Wood occasionally hits the mark, and one of her works in “These Days,” a video filmed in time lapse called “A Little Death,” has rightly become a modest sort of classic. It shows a hare and a peach in a still life arrangement reminiscent of paintings by Chardin, the hare’s leg nailed to the wall, its head slumping on a table. Over the period of just a few minutes, we see the hare efficiently disassembled by maggots, while the peach remains absolutely the same.
The sight is at once incredible (how systematic these maggots are!), banal (you die, and this is what happens; get used to it), and mysterious (how to explain the immunity of that peach? Is it somehow a metaphor for the death-defying powers of eros, bolstered by the sexual reference in the work’s title, which in French refers to orgasm?). It’s as pithy an updating of the still life tradition of the “vanitas” as you could ask for.
In spirit, “These Days” relates most closely to the mood of late Romanticism. The artist is seen as a sort of mournful outside observer of various catastrophes, his or her capacity for poetic expression providing but a fragile bulwark against the great debacle at large.
It’s apt, then, that the Con necticut-based artist Robert Taplin has taken as his inspiration Dante’s “Inferno,” from “The Divine Comedy.” Taplin’s series of sculptures and dioramas made from wood, polychromed resin, lights, plaster, and Plexiglas take their cues from scenes in “Inferno,” updating them as allegories of contemporary strife.
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THESE DAYS: Elegies for Modern Times At: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, through Feb. 28. 413-664-4481, www.massmoca.org
The series begins with quiet scenes in familiar-looking interiors: Dante, a portly everyman figure based on Taplin himself, rising from bed, or sitting at a table, his head down, being summoned by two figures, Virgil, his guide, and Beatrice, his love.
Each subsequent work in the series takes us to another of the circles of hell: the smoky aftermath of a roadside bomb in what could be Baghdad; gathering crowds of refugees trying to cross the River Styx; a cave populated with refugees, many of whom meet our gaze; and so on.
The interpretations are sufficiently offbeat and unexpected to escape the dangers of kitschy illustration. The best one, I thought, was No. 5, “I Saw Shadows Carried on That Wind,” which has us looking through a window out over a courtyard in the gloaming. The ravishing sky is streaked with clouds and punctuated by two airplanes. The intimate courtyard below, its depth enhanced by Taplin’s stage-set-style tricks with perspective, seems forlornly abandoned, yet freighted with significance. The only evidence of life is a man disappearing behind a wall.
The show’s curator, Denise Markonish, has taken the first part of her title from a Jackson Browne song covered by Nico (these elegiac shows tend to have abstruse origins – see, for instance, the New Museum’s recent “After Nature,” which took its name from a poem by the late German writer W.G. Sebald and its inspiration from a diverse array of literary sources).
Markonish has been inspired by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and, wanting to temper the show’s overriding mournfulness with glimmers of hope, she adorns the small exhibition brochure with some lines from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: “And all things/hushed. Yet even/in that silence/a new beginning,/beckoning,/change appeared.”
Is it change we can believe in? Up to a point yes. Like almost all such shows, “These Days” is hit and miss. But it has haunting moments, and, impressively, it complements several other displays currently at Mass MoCA, including a huge room devoted to somber but thrilling works by the German artists Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer and a group show offering a wistful take on the state of the environment called “Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape.”
The cumulative effect is not exactly uplifting, but it has a real emotional pull, like a complex chord that echoes in the chest and threatens to constrict the throat.
To go from Taplin’s haunting worlds within worlds to Micah Silver’s concocted environment inspired by Yves Saint Laurent’s Safari Jacket, or Chris Doyle’s lame video animation riffing on various artistic representations of the apocalypse, is inevitably to be disappointed. But the show has other high points, including a series of works by George Bolster, an artist in his mid-30s who was born in Ireland and lives in San Diego.
Bolster riffs on the morbid ecstasies of religious experience. His contribution comes in two forms: One is a dramatic installation featuring a narwhal suspended by red strings from a ceiling. The room is lined with mirrors. Its ceiling is decorated with scenes from the Day of Judgment. A song by Radiohead, “Reckoner,” plays from speakers. It’s a bizarre but very singular scenario.
Bolster’s second contribution, in a neighboring room, is a series of drawings in pencil, silver, and pen on Maplewood veneer, each of them very private and evocative versions of well-worn religious subjects, with contemporary detailing and flickering sexual undercurrents. “La Vierge Et L’enfant Et Son Dior,” for instance, shows a short-haired woman – the Virgin Mary – with a unicorn on her lap in a pose recalling the Pietá. Bizarrely, a Christian Dior handbag dangles from her arm.
The elegy here seems to be for the loss of religious belief – but it is all a little too cool and savvy for us to feel carried away by a sense of conviction.
The other strong piece, “Below Sea Level,” is a long multichannel video displayed, cyclorama-style, on screens that completely encircle the viewer. It’s by Pawel Wojtasik, a Polish artist living in Brooklyn, and it’s a kind of collage of scenes from New Orleans, adding up to both a tribute and a lament.
It has its longueurs, but that is in the nature of elegies, is it not? One can mourn only so long before life leaks back in.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
