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Andy Warhol (Photo credit: allposters.com)
Masterpieces of the Universe: The famous art owned by bailed-out banks
To view several art-rich banks, click here.
Paul Smalera
The Big Money
Ken Price’s works at this annual fair include bulbous painted ceramic sculptures and small landscape images at the Park Avenue Armory. Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Art Show Ken Price’s works at this annual fair include bulbous painted ceramic sculptures and small landscape images at the Park Avenue Armory.
It’s not clear if art fairs are dying or going back to their “used to be,” in the words sung by Bessie Smith. Either way, this year’s Art Show, courtesy of the Art Dealers Association of America, is pretty much “same as it ever was,” to borrow from David Byrne.
Razzle-dazzle spectacle, stampeding collectors and buy-it-now pressure-cooking has never been the Art Show’s style; neither has aisle upon aisle of booths stretching as far as the eye can see. But the times may be catching up with it.
The Art Show was founded in 1989. This year’s version has, as usual, just 70 participants. It serves as a reminder that the boom-time art world was only a portion of a much larger, less volatile sphere. The vast majority of artists in this sphere never saw their work go to auction, much less fetch stratospheric prices there. Their boats may have floated a little higher, but they weren’t swamped in dough. Most of the dealers did not have month after month of sell-out shows, nor were their rosters teeming with freshly minted M.F.A.’s.
This fair is loaded with work that you will be grateful to see. There’s little grandstanding and few works that reach out and grab you by the neck. The two main exceptions: At Ronald Feldman, Tavares Strachan has hermetically sealed 20 square feet of sidewalk from New Haven — complete with dirt, moss, parking meter and signs — in an immense nautiluslike chamber set at 40 degrees, commemorating the place (and temperature) where he received a parking ticket. At James Cohan, the centerpiece of a show called “Body as Prop” is a performance sculpture, “In Just a Blink of an Eye,” created by the Chinese artist Xu Zhen. It shows an actual, motionless person suspended midfall, as if just shot. It might almost be a Duane Hanson.
And yet, race through this fair and you may conclude it is lackluster. Seek and you will find more than enough that rewards.
Roberta Smith
New York Times
Impressionist Claude Monet was distraught. Despite a few adulatory press notices and the sale of some paintings and works on paper, the 38-year-old artist could not support his small family. Constantly broke, Monet approached collectors as well as friends and colleagues such as Frederic Bazille, Gustave Courbet, and Edouard Manet for loans and handouts. He could hardly afford art supplies. And now his wife, Camille Doncieux, the mother of his two young sons, was on her deathbed. She was 32.
After a long illness, probably uterine cancer, Camille succumbed on Sept. 5, 1879, and at her side Monet painted his grief. He wrote Georges Clemenceau, later the eminent French statesman and a dear friend, that “finding myself at the deathbed of a loved one, I was surprised … by the colors that death brought to her immobile face.” The changing tones of blue, yellow, and gray mesmerized him. Reacting instinctively, he “found himself desiring to reproduce the last image of she who would leave us forever.” He used long, rapid brushstrokes and subdued colors.
Though he would live for 47 more years, enjoying love and fame, Monet carried Camille always in his heart. His tender depiction of her was hanging in his bedroom when he died at the age of 86 in 1926. After the oil entered the collection of Michel Monet, the executor of his father’s estate, the work remained unknown for 38 years. Today, it belongs to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and is often on view.
For Monet authority Charles Stuckey, the poignant painting is “truly a labor of love.” Art Institute of Chicago curator Gloria Groom points out, “This was one of the most tragic moments of Monet’s life. And he chose to remember this moment that would never repeat itself, exactly what the Impressionists did.” With one twist: These artists painted light, not death.
Monet always wanted to see his art hanging in the Louvre. But it wasn’t his landscapes he pictured in its palatial galleries. Monet had his figure paintings in mind. And the woman who posed for many of these over the course of 13 years was Camille Doncieux. The artist met his attractive model, who was born in Lyon and raised in Paris, when she was 18; he married her in 1870, almost three years after the birth of their first son, Jean. Their life together resembled scenes from Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme crossed with chapters from Emile Zola’s l’Oeuvre.
But unlike the Italian composer or the French novelist, Monet did not transform extreme poverty, incurable illness, and artistic indecision into art. When Camille appears in the Impressionist’s paintings, she wears fashionable dresses to a picnic in a forest clearing; sits on the beach elegantly holding a parasol; lunches with her young child at a food-laden table; and fans herself while wrapped in a dramatic Japanese kimono. Then, too, the friends who visited the Monets at the houses they rented in Argenteuil during the early 1870s were artists facing real struggles. When the 30-something artist wrote to Camille Pissarro that “Renoir’s not here — you can have the bed,” he was extending a concrete invitation.
Phyllis Tuchman
Obit
Paul Rudolph’s Modernist building, completed in 1963, has undergone a restoration led by the New York firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, which designed an addition, right. (New York Times)
It’s hard to think of a building that has suffered through more indignities than the Yale School of Art and Architecture. On the day of its dedication in 1963, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemned the oppressive monumentality of its concrete forms. Two years later the school’s dean brutally cut up many of the interiors, which he claimed were dysfunctional. A few years after that a fire gutted what was left. By then the reputation of the building’s architect, Paul Rudolph, was in ruins.
Under the circumstances it’s a miracle that Yale didn’t tear the building down. But several years ago the university started down the road to atonement, investing $126 million in a major restoration and addition designed by the New York firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates.
The result should stun those who have continued to deny Rudolph’s talent. Now seen in its full glory, his building turns out to be a masterpiece of late Modernism, one that will force many to reappraise an entire period of Modernist history and put Rudolph back on the pedestal where he belongs.
Only Gwathmey Siegel’s addition prevents this from being a total triumph. The firm’s principal designer, Charles Gwathmey, went to great pains to ensure that the addition didn’t disturb Rudolph’s masterwork. Yet the challenge Mr. Gwathmey faced was not only to be a good neighbor, it was also to rise to the high standards set by his predecessor. By that measure his design is a major letdown.
Rudolph had his own generational battles to fight. His building, which will be renamed Paul Rudolph Hall at a dedication ceremony in November, stands directly across the street from Louis Kahn’s 1953 Yale Art Gallery, one of the most brilliant and revered structures of the postwar Modernist period. But many of the attacks against the Rudolph building had more to do with polemics than architecture. To classical Modernists the art and architecture school’s Brutalist aesthetic betrayed the taut glass-enclosed structures of Kahn’s museum. To postmodernists it represented the indifference to history and context that they saw as the Modernist movement’s greatest sin…
The Rudolph and Kahn buildings are not only masterpieces, they are also powerful statements about the values that shaped American architecture at a critical moment. Together they represent an enthralling conversation between two great minds across time.
The addition was a rare opportunity to broaden that conversation by extending it into the present. It should have answered the questions: “Who should speak for our era? Where are the great voices of today?”
Mr. Gwathmey doesn’t make a strong case for himself. His addition, a series of stacked slabs, lacks the intriguing complexity of Rudolph’s vision. He offers an abundance of light-filled spaces, but they lack the precisely framed views and the careful manipulation of light and shadow that are some of an architect’s most valuable devices. Nor does he demonstrate the level of artistry that not only reinforces a building’s central ideas but also gives you a feel for the architect’s hand — the love of craft and obsessive attention to detail that can elevate a structure to greatness.
Everything here, in short, feels sadly conventional. And unlike Rudolph’s masterpiece this is something that no amount of restoration work can repair.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
Like most consummate stylists Christopher Wool tends to get away with aesthetic murder. He shares with artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Alex Katz, Agnes Martin, Helen Frankenthaler and Raoul Dufy an ability to pull off suave-looking paintings with a display of effort so seemingly minimal as to be irreverent.
Mr. Wool began his career using stencils and rolled-on patterns but took up the brush again in the mid-1990s. Since then he has experimented with different ways of mixing hand and machine, unique and reproduced, hot and cold. He seems to want to prove that it is possible to be a De Kooning acolyte without relinquishing his postmodern credentials. The result is a form of Abstract Expressionism lite.
In this, his 13th solo gallery show in New York, Mr. Wool sprays on black lines, smears them into fields of brushy gray and sometimes rubs them out entirely before repeating the process. This layering of studio and street — of macho yet ghostly, half-meant bravura painting and lax, abstract graffiti — has an undeniable liveliness. The primary energy comes from the lines, which vary in thickness and suggestion (roadmaps, cursive writing) and are often fringed with drips that defy gravity. Painterly incidents pile up, but the surface never thickens. More is definitely better as exemplified by the densely composed central painting in the second gallery.
Mr. Wool seems to have deliberately overhung the show. If you don’t sort out the better paintings, they all start wearing thin. Discernment in the face of overproduction or satiation may be part of the point.
It helps that the paintings alternate with large silk-screen works in porous shades of dark gray or sepia. The best of these resemble clusters of cells, dust particles and stray hairs seen through a microscope; fashioned partly on a computer, they owe something to the paintings Albert Oehlen made in the mid-1990s. Other silk-screens maintain the De Kooning effect, but with pale divisions and out-of-sync brushwork that suggest cutting and pasting. With their Benday dot surfaces signaling mechanical reproduction, the silk-screen works are more layered, satisfying and skeptical than the paintings and truer to Mr. Wool’s barbed devotion to his medium.
Roberta Smith
New York Times
For generations, the study of literature has been a pillar of liberal education, a prime forum for cultural self-examination, and a favorite major for students seeking deeper understanding of the human experience.
But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the “outside world,” but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can’t find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.
The latest author to take the flagging pulse of the field is Yale’s William Deresiewicz. Writing recently in The Nation, he described a discipline suffering “an epochal loss of confidence” and “losing its will to live.” Deresiewicz’s alarming conclusion: “The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.”
Not every literary scholar is so pessimistic, but most would agree that the field’s vital signs are bad, and that major changes will be needed to set things right.
Though the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex, I believe the dominant factor is easily identified: We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.
I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.
Jonathan Gottschall
Boston Globe
One more take on the now over-discussed topic of Aliza Shvarts’s senior project at Yale…
It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others. And such seems to be the case with Ms. Shvarts.
In “My Life Among the Deathworks,” the sociologist Philip Rieff coined the term “deathworks” to describe works of art that celebrated creative destruction, and which posed “an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.” He argued that the principal artistic achievements of the 20th century were such deathworks, which, however lovely or brilliant, served primarily to negate or transgress the existing culture, rather than to affirm or celebrate it. He did not live to see Ms. Shvarts’s piece, but one suspects that he would have had much to say.
Mr. Rieff was especially interested in those who treated their bodies as an instrument of art, especially those who used them in masochistic or repugnant ways. By now, it is hardly an innovation to do so. Nearly two generations have passed since Chris Burden had a bullet fired into his body. It is even longer since the Italian artist Piero Manzoni sold tin cans charmingly labeled Merde d’artista, which contained exactly that. Even Ms. Shvarts’s central proposition — that the discomfort we feel at the word miscarriage is itself a species of linguistic oppression — is a relic of the highly politicized literary theory of the late 1980s. As she wrote in an op-ed published in last Friday’s Yale Daily News:
“The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming — an authorial act. It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.”
In other words, one must act to shatter the rigid lattice of categories that words impose upon us. Although the accompanying jargon is fashionable (or was a few years ago), it is essentially a portentous recycling of the idea behind Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 urinal, which became a “Fountain” when he declared it so.
Immaturity, self-importance and a certain confused earnestness will always loom large in student art work. But they will usually grow out of it. What of the schools that teach them? Undergraduate programs in art aspire to the status of professional programs that award MFA degrees, and there is often a sense that they too should encourage the making of sophisticated and challenging art, and as soon as possible. Yale, like most good programs, requires its students to achieve a certain facility in drawing, although nowhere near what it demanded in the 1930s, when aspiring artists spent roughly six hours a day in the studio painting and life drawing, and an additional three on Saturday.
Given the choice of this arduous training or the chance to proceed immediately to the making of art free of all traditional constraints, one can understand why all but a few students would take the latter. But it is not a choice that an undergraduate should be given. In this respect — and perhaps only in this respect — Ms. Shvarts is the victim in this story.
Michael Lewis
Wall Street Journal
Art’s place between public and private has become more problematic than ever. During Modernism, with its trust in the lone artist’s daring, the pendulum swung toward the private, but now it is swinging decidedly back to the public. Not just political, but commercial and institutional pressures keep increasing. Art functions more and more like a commodity, inseparable from craft or design.
John Haber
