What would the paintings look like after a fire in a museum, or if a gallery were allowed to be overrun by wildlife, and otherwise left uncared for so that it begins to rot and the canvasses warp? What if we could witness the decomposition of objects like artworks right before our eyes?
It would look like the surreal sculptures of Valerie Hegarty, an American artist living and working in New York. Sometimes bordering on the abstract, her mixed media work shows everything from fine art to everyday objects, such as furniture, in varying stages of decay and destruction.
Some highly creative exhibits include Seascape, which displays articles which could have recently been recovered from some maritime disaster, showing all the signs of waterlogged damage, rust, and ocean-floor gunk which spills here and there from the pedestals. A painting called George Washington Shipwrecked gives an example of the real fine art lost or destroyed over the centuries, stolen by the unforgiving sea.
A giant crack splits up a gallery wall straight through a painting of a canyon. Shards of pottery, bits of frame, and chunks of an antique bureau lay scattered where they landed under a shot-up wall. Other works are burnt, morphed, rotting, and otherwise transformed from what was once useful or beautiful.
What better time than December to reflect on artwork showing the transforming nature of all things animal, vegetable, and mineral. The leaves are now compost, the crop is long since harvested and eaten, and dead wood lines my shed ready to burn. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The glaciers which moved mountains are melted. The mountains will someday be sand in an hour glass. We’re all just clay; from clay we come, to clay we go. Life goes full circle.
Spring will come, a rebirth will ensue, but not until winter’s icy breath freezes the ground, shortens days, and reminds us of the darker, colder, yet necessary part of the circle.
Posted on 2008 under Modern Art | Comments are off
Andrew Wyeth’s desolate landscapes and somber portraits often convey a dreamy feeling, but none so much as the “The Snowhill,” which uses painter’s license, characters, and symbolism as if they form a snapshot straight from a dream.
No faces visible, a strange inexplicable shadow cast on the foreground, the usual muted colors of Wyeth’s palette all help to create a slight uneasiness, despite the apparent joy of the subject. Though faceless, this bunch has an identity to the author, even though they may have never met each other all at once as we see here, and certainly not dancing on a maypole.
They may as well be from a dream, because they are from the artist’s past. Each one is a former model who sat painstakingly for countless hours to be part of his canvasses. Helga Testorf, Karl Kuerner, Anna Kuerner, Allan Lynch, Bill Loper and Adam Johnson have all appeared in numerous paintings. It’s the Kuerner’s farm we see in the distance on the left, a place which has served as invaluable inspiration for Wyeth. The Keurners were German immigrants whom he met near his Pennsylvania home when he was a boy; Karl served in the German army in WWI, who is of course dressed in uniform in the painting.
Beside not being an actual landscape (the Kuerner farm would have been wooded near the house), there is one part of the composition which is there solely as a symbol- the tracks. N. C. Wyeth, Andrew’s father was killed by a train. According to the painter, the maypole dancing former models of his are dancing in anticipation of his death, because of the stress he had inflicted on them while they posed.
Wyeth is one of the great American landscape and realist painters, but this excellent painting borders on the surreal.
Posted on 2008 under Modern Art | Comments are off
I wasn’t sure exactly what to categorize this post as but decided on calling it “modern art” as in art made in a recent time. The funny thing is it actually involves “time,” or at least a fantastic way of displaying it.
Inventor Dr. John Taylor woke up one morning and realized his days were numbered. At 70 he has lived a lifetime of achievement but has so much more to offer. So much, as his epiphany taught him, which will never occur thanks to time eating away his life minute by minute. Precious time is gone and irretrievable; he is mortal like everyone else. This gave him the idea for clock which he calls Corpus Clock and Chronophage.
The chronphage, or “time eater,” sits on top with ghastly arms and legs marching time on the outer wheel. With each second the horrible mouth with needle-sharp teeth opens ever more until the end of the minute when it comes crashing down, devouring that minute forever. Every hour, a chain sounds the hour and a lid slams down on a coffin. There are no hands to tell the time, but rather lights around the face. Each second, a light races around to reach its next reading.
This work of art doesn’t cease to amaze. The time is actually a little off, except for about once every five minutes. Time, the same way it appears in life, fluctuates erratically in speed at random. The pendulum at some points will stop, the lights will sometimes go back a few spots, then speed up. As Einstein says of relativity: “an hour with a pretty girl seems like a minute, a minute on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
The clock was unveiled at Corpus Cristi College in Cambridge by renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, author of “A Brief History of Time.” Hawking once theorized that if the universe stops expanding and begins retracting, then time can be reversed and events will work in rewind.
The clock is meant to remind observers of their own mortality.
Robert Rauschenberg was an important American abstract expressionist and pop artist who lived and worked in New York. He came onto the art scene in the 1950s with “combines”: arrangements of ordinary objects placed together in extra-ordinary ways in the forms of painting, sculpture and collages. His unorthodox methods and creativity have made him an international star, and he has enjoyed this success for over half a century. He died Monday of heart failure.
This interview is hilarious and had me cracking up several times. In it, Rauschenberg explains his famous “Erased De Kooning.” Don’t take my word for it, you have to see it to believe it…
Posted on 2008 under Modern Art | Comments are off
Call me old fashioned, call me whiny, call me what you will (just don’t call me late to dinner). My question for you is this- is much of what is being paraded around as art, actually art?
I’ve talked before about Modern Art (Is It Really Art?) where we consider “contemporary art” anything after 1950, which include Pop artists such as Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and abstract expressionists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock (all who I admire). But to be fair, I’m mostly talking about the “Postmodernists” as a school of art, and of course not all contemporary artists share these views and styles. Post-modernists, like the Dadaists of the early nineteenth century, tend to challenge what we consider art.
Since “modern art” is constantly being redefined and even the term term “art” has so many definitions, the whole art situation can never be simple white and black observations. In any period of time not all artists were orthodox, with a few trailblazers and oddities with their respective publics not always going along with their shenanigans. I’m not always sure I understand the artist’s statements, and I know I’m not alone on this one. Some art is absurd, some is sickening, and some is downright infuriating (i.e.- a starving dog on a gallery floor- don’t get me started on this one). But I must say, perhaps these reactions are the artist’s desired effect (or not).
Postmodernism questions orthodox art views and critiques and claims that art is in the eye of the beholder. For example, a urinal with the added fictional signature of R. Mutt is placed in a museum gallery, therefore it is now considered a “sculpture.” Some interesting and anything-but-orthodox art of the 20th century include:
Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp
(Conceptual art)
Marilyn Silkscreen, by Andy Warhol
(Appropriation art)
Wrapped Coast, by Christo and Jean-Claude
(Installation Art)
Giant Curtain, by Christo and Jean-Claude
(Installation Art)
Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson
(Installation art)
Now some ultra Postmodernism can be downright ridiculous. In order for anything to be art, in my book it has to at least invoke something in the viewer-
At the very least an appreciation of skill or talent of the artist
Any kind of an emotional response- fear, sadness, empathy, anger, etc.
A call to action- i.e.- anything political oriented, etc.
Some of the recent stuff you see simply doesn’t do any of these. I can’t argue against saying they don’t do anything at all. Art does not have to be representational as most of the pre-20th century art was, but at least we know most of the accepted fine art, i.e.the mainstream paintings and sculpture took effort and skill, as well as cerebral activity of some kind. Sometimes the paintings symbols were cryptic or hidden, and called for the intelligence of the viewer to unlock the mysteries, or “get” the painting. Do we much of this in today’s art? Maybe sometimes.
“For the Love of God” (really), by Damien Hirst- I think this is akin to those $1,000 pizzas, and $500 cups of coffee which come from beans which were defecated by cats (I can’t make this stuff up!). Maybe I just don’t get it.
Victimless Leather, by Oron Catts, and Ionat Zurr
Lullaby Spring, by Damien Hirst
Black Flag “Four Bars” by Raymond Pettibon
Humanity Asleep, by Julian Schnabel- Painted over glued broken glass and crockery.
(see top of page)
In conclusion I think most recent art is good and original. Only the good stuff isn’t original, and the original stuff isn’t good.
Andy Warhol helped turned the art world upside down with his consumerist pop art of the 1950s and ’60s. His ingenious use of making consumer products art forced the public to think about what art really was, and made fun of our consumer society. Boxes of Brillo pads became something to put in a museum. The mass produced soup cans of Campbell’s became mass produced examples of masterpiece pop art. What was going on in the art world?
Pop art got its origins from the Dada movement of the early 20th century. Dada and its anti-art messages led to a new movement of non-elitist culture centered on giving an alternative to upper crust avant garde styles. Pop art essentially is art from popular culture. It can be Lichetenstein’s comic book paintings, or the American flag of Jasper Johns, or mimicking the advertisements the world was seeing with increased intensity and frequency.
Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan, besides being a hot spot for socialite jet-sets, was first and foremost his studio. There he recruited many assistants to help churn out consumer art which was meant to be produced in high volumes the same way everyday products were. It was there he also made his movies with their purposeful low-budget indie poppish qualities. He also accomplish his silkscreen portraits there, which demanded quite a high price tag from celebrities who weren’t anybody unless they had a Warhol portrait.
Who would have thought a can of pepper pot soup would be art? Why not?
This is just amazing abstract art, isn’t it? It’s reminiscent of Cy Twombly but much, much better. The picture above has hung in a gallery in Brooklyn, New York. If it had hung in a gallery in Old City, Philadelphia, it probably would have gotten the same praise as it did in New York. I can hear it now:
“It speaks to me.”
“Just fabulous,” [as they swish their wine in their plastic cups.]
“Genius, pure genius. Just look how the artist has made such an intellectual statement. The vibrant reds are so emotional, it reduces us to a warm and fuzzy art snob glob of goo just staring at it.”
“I go to art school.”
“This artist is better than any new millennium abstract painter, and certainly better than Cy Twombly and other such scribble artists.”
Of course nobody told them who the artist is, and they probably didn’t read the info on the painting or the “artist’s statement” if any. Mostly, they were interested in hearing themselves talk, giving their avant-garde critique while wearing their berets and scarves.
I’ll give them the fact that the artist above is better than Cy Twombly. Also it is true that the artist has made much more an intellectual statement than any of these folk are capable of giving, and the artwork is done with more skill and the outcome produced is more aesthetically pleasing than any of them are capable of. But only if they knew who painted it:
A DOG!
Yeah it fooled them as I’m sure it fooled most of you. A dog painted this, and sure, for a canine it’s great. I amend my statement- for any abstract artist it’s great! I would die laughing if this little trick was played on the real people who hang around Old City on 2nd street and frequent the First Friday exhibits.
Not everybody is like this, don’t get me wrong- and the art shown is wonderful. It’s just the talentless spectators who cram into these galleries and look down their noses at people. Most are just interested in themselves and couldn’t care less about the art on the walls. But then again, I mostly don’t want to hear their b.s. about the art anyway: “It speaks to me!” It speaks does it? What does it say? It’s a canvas splattered with pink paint selling for $4,000. It doesn’t speak, it screams- “bad taste and overpriced!”
What gets me is that any dog or gorilla could accomplish most of what’s being paraded around as “modern art.” The minimalists of the ’50s were making a statement. They said since art history has been a constant reduction, why not skip straight to zero. That’s funny, and interesting, and they were the first to do it. Some art student today who paints a canvas blue and tries to sell it is not funny, or original, or talented. They may be talented otherwise, but splattering paint or making a blank canvas is not talent, and it’s not art. It’s been done!
I read an article the other day about how art has never really been representational and it’s actually always been abstract. I beg to differ. Since hieroglyphics, and cave art, people have always represented reality in recognizable ways. In ancient Eastern writing, the word for house looks like a little house. (I don’t speak or write in the languages, but you catch my drift.)
Art can be decoration, or can be a symbolic statement of some sort. And, risking getting away from my statement here, I will say abstract certainly has it’s place. Kandinsky comparing art to music is fantastic. He was a genius, and his art is beautiful. You can hear the symphonies and harmony while looking at his vibrant colors and shapes. His art had meaning, as does most of the art of the early abstract artists of the 20th century. Just don’t paint a canvas blue and call it, “A walk in the park while pondering the universe,” and think it’s art.
Even Jackson Pollock said most of his attempts have failed when splattering his paint. Some paintings turned out great and showed real energy and made a statement in force. Other times they just looked like paint splattered on a linen canvas on the floor.
So call it what it is. And don’t call it what it isn’t. Kudos to the art students who really come out with great art. Just don’t think that all art is abstract these days. If the underlining principle behind what the minimalists were saying was true, then art has already reached zero and it’s time to pack up and go home. There isn’t anything left to do. But that simply isn’t true.
If anything, abstraction is the fad. It was a trendy fashionable rage that had it’s time. It’s over now- get over it. But don’t despair. If you cannot paint, paid thousands of dollars for art school and you have no talent, then your paint splatters won’t get you far anyway. But if you have real talent, then create beautiful art. Forget about trends and fashions, and just paint.
If you sit down at a bar and order a “single plum floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat,” then you are a pretentious art snob and you will probably purchase that $4,000 pink blob. You will show all your friends at your cocktail parties and they will call you a genius. The trendy talentless art system needs you. So, give it your support.
If you are a paint splattering art student, study Tillie Cheddar the dog’s artwork. You could learn a thing or two!
What is Pop art? Pop art as a movement started in the 1950s in Britain and the U.S. which takes its art from popular mass culture as opposed to the elite art world. Today the term can still be used for art as an expression influenced from the mainstream culture of the masses.
While Andy Warhol was making his Soup Cans famous in the U.S., a new and exciting art in Japan was starting to form and take on a course of its own.
Tanaami and American Influences
One of the first and most important of the Japanese pop artists is Keiichi Tanaami. He was educated at the Musashino Art University, and would take a designer job after graduation. It wasn’t long before he left the company he worked for due to his busy schedule with outside activities. These creative activities included experimentations with animation, lithograph, illustration, and editorial design.
By the late 60s, Tanaami traveled to the United States where he had an influential meeting with Andy Warhol in his legendary Factory in New York. He was very happy to have met Andy while he was doing his silkscreens, and much of his work was inspired by Andy’s style. Later, after moving to San Fransisco, the Japanese artist’s work became very colorful and psychedelic. He even designed a cover for Jefferson Airplane.
Much of Tanaami’s work comes from dreams and memories. He remembers as a child squeezing goldfish that were about to die, until their guts came out. You can see this in some of his goldfish sculptures. Gruesome and interesting stuff.
Manga and Anime
Perhaps the best known contemporary Japanese artist today is Takashi Murakami. He is attributed with the modern art style known as “superflat,” for a blending of traditional art with newer concepts deriving, in part, from manga and anime. These artworks are known for their flat planes of colorful images.
While Andy Warhol in the 1960s was turning consumer products into art, Murakami is now turning art into consumer products. He says he knows how much the Japanese people love art, but very few can afford the upper class art. So he creates affordable art anybody can afford. His art comes in the form of toys, paintings, sculptures, dolls, and mannequins, T-shirts, videos, and any other type of product readily available for consumers. He also designed a Louis Vuitton handbag.
His art is often colorful and imaginative, such as the painting entitled “727.” Some of his art is daring, such as his (warning: NSFW) “My Lonesome Cowboy.” The “Cowboy” shows an obvious reference to American culture with the lasso made from the, uh, fluids.
Graffiti and Childlike Figures
Like Murakami, Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara derives his style from manga and anime. His work is usually done in graffiti-type painting and the characters are often cute and childlike, but which also possess dark characteristics. These characters come from a meshing of childhood memories and an input of contemporary style. What you get is a unique consumer art product.
There’s an excellent British miniseries called Japanorama, which chronicles the host’s seeking of Japanese culture in general. One of the episodes is all about J-Art and has the above artists and much more. So check it out, and don’t forget to watch it with a nice hot bowl of Ramen.
Good words to live by, it seemed Joan Miro thought as he picked up the broken sign he found near a train station. He put it up in his studio kind of as a “program,” something to keep him motivated. I suppose this metaphor imitated the Catalan artist’s desire to constantly move forward, to grow in life and art, and stop for no one or thing, as time indeed stops for no one.
His career is proof that he lived up to his rusty train sign’s advice. Throughout his career he kept growing and embracing change. He leapt from idea to idea, some influenced by other contemporary artists of early 20th century Paris, most his own. He loathed conventional art methods and strived to constantly innovate and learn new forms of expression. His techniques ranged from painting and sculpture to a blending of the two, to collage, and to wild new ideas such as fog and gas sculptures.
Miro’s art has been classified as Surrealist, especially seeing that he sometimes unofficially called himself one. He met with some Surrealists and Dadaists when he moved to Paris in 1919, where he also met Picasso, also from Catalonia. Yet no matter what group he belonged to (at some stretches none at all), his art was always his own unique creations.
The Harlequin’s Carnival (seen above) marks a change from the figurative to the abstract. In it we see many colorful characters dancing and floating around with a “jack in the box” harlequin in the center playing guitar. Miro was a fan of automatism, or automatic writing and/or drawing, which might explain the haphazard array of fantastical subjects all around.
The funny thing about this painting and others like it is the artist claims to sometimes see these happy little characters in reality. For instance, he explains the Harlequin’s Carnival by saying he came home one day very hungry and laid down. As he looked at the ceiling, these creatures appeared before his very eyes in a hallucinatory display.
Other paintings include his Constellation series, where patterns and images, often connected by lines are shown against a solid background, like the stars.
Pablo Picasso. Is there any other artist so versatile? The man felt it a tragedy if a person stayed the same, with the same style their whole life. The world changes all around, and one must constantly change along with it. The co-inventor of Cubism (along with Georges Braque) had a long, successful, and prolific career as a painter, sculptor, and potter. Nine of his paintings are in the list of the 25 most expensive paintings sold at auction. He is truly one of the most well known artists of the 20th century.
Early Art: Shades of Blue and Red
Pablo Picasso was the son of Jose Ruiz y Blasco, a painter and art professor, perhaps influencing young Pablo into a life of art. But according to his mother, Maria Picasso y Lopez, Pablo’s first word was “pencil,” thus the boy was born to be an artist. Picasso would reflect, “My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” He received his first formal training under his father and began with academic realism. Slowly, being influenced by El Greco and Edvard Munch, he developed a more modernist style.
His career can be broken down into several periods. His Blue Period (1901- 1904), is rightly named for the characteristic somber hues and sad subjects that dominate these canvasses. Often poor mothers with undernourished children, sad lower class families, and overall just depressed people in desolate surroundings were the main subjects. His bleak outlook on life at this juncture was probably the result of losing a friend to suicide.
The Rose Period (1904- 1906) marks a change into a happier era for the artist. “Boy With Pipe” which is the highest selling Picasso at auction, was painted during this period. This happier time was when Picasso met Fernande Olivier and is reminiscent of happier times earlier in his life before the Blue Period. You’ll see many acrobats and Harlequins in this period.
African Influences and Cubism
You begin to see a change in his style in the African Period of 1907 – 1909, away from more realistic representations of everyday people to much more expressive depictions. As the name of the period implies, this is when Picasso was influenced by African culture, particularly works of art in sculpture, which were being brought back to France during their expansion into the African continent. His most important work of this period is the “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Particular importance are the two figures to the right, whose faces resemble African masks, and show the first signs of Cubism.
The “Avignon” painting marked a transition into the Cubism periods, Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism from 1909-1919. Collaborating with Georges Braque, the two men invented a new type of art where the artist would analyze the subject and break it down into its basic shapes. Objects can be depicted two dimensionally but from many different angles and viewpoints. All depth is removed, and the foreground object and background blend and mingle into each other. This style of painting would apply to sculpting and collage, the new method invented by Picasso, Braque and others, of cutting paper and arranging the shapes in a composition.
Later Art: Classical, Surrealist, and Sculpture
Around the time after World War I, Picasso switched to a more classical style, following in the Neoclassical footsteps of Giorgio de Chirico and others. Drawings and paintings of this period often include the minotaur, which would lead into more surrealistic artwork.
It was in the 1930s when Guernica was painted. Probably one of Picasso’s most famous works of art, it shows the horrors of war and the agony of the innocent in detail, as the Nazi bombs drop on the Spanish town.
Picasso got into sculpture and pottery and in the summer of 1949, he along with Jacques Lipchitz and 248 other sculptors exhibited at the 3rd Sculpture International at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the 1950s he would move on to yet even different styles, doing versions of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, and other famous works by Goya and others. He was commissioned to do a 50 foot public sculpture for $100,000 for the city of Chicago. He refused the money and donated it to the people of the city.
Picasso died in 1973, leaving no will, but instead leaving his works, along with many Mastisse’s to France. These works form the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris.
Picasso In Modern Culture
Pablo Picasso is probably the most well known artist of the 20th century. When people are asked to name an artist, any artist, Picasso most often comes to mind first. His innovative styles have been copied by professional and amateur artists alike.
One very good movie about him is “Surviving Picasso” with Anthony Hopkins as the artist. Shot in Paris and outlying areas, it’s about the relationship with the artist seen through the eyes of Francois Gilet, played by Natascha McElhone. The movie shows most of the women in the man’s life, often meeting one another in sometimes awkward and comical ways.
Toward the beginning of the film, Germany occupies France and a few soldiers are inquiring of the value of some of Picasso’s paintings. Picasso had a knack for dealing with people, and often got his way, as he tricks the soldiers into believing the better paintings were really junk, and the bad ones the more valuable. He even gives one of the worser ones to one of the soldiers to give to his wife.
Another scene shows a parlor full of art dealers and collectors impatiently waiting in line to see the great artist, who pays them very little mind. Every so often he will come out and give all attention to one art dealer while completely ignoring all the others, even the ones he knows very well. Once in, a certain groveling collector begs for the most recent “Picasso” so he can take it back to New York. Picasso knows the guy is just kissing up to him, so he has a little fun and asks, “How about this one, you interested?” The man joyously says, “Am I? Of course I’m…uh…” only to see a few lines drawn on a scrap paper.
Vince' s ear: your art blog about art, art history, painting, sculpture, drawing, illustration, animation, artists, galleries, museums, and plenty more. Dan Kretschmer is the author of Vince' s ear, and also the author of a book called "Masters of the Renaissance," which takes a look at 18 of the most important artists of the Renaissance in Europe.
The purpose of this art blog is to raise general awareness of art and to share knowledge and interests. The author's goal is to spark interest in as many people as possible, and to inspire them to pursue art to enrich their lives.
