“The Eloquent Nude” – an excellent documentary on the life of photographer Edward Weston
Must see! An excellent beautifully photographed documentary on the relationship and art travels of photographer Edward Weston, and his muse and writer, Charis Wilsdon.
Einstein Finds Inspiration in the Music of Mozart
Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago. There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think.
The American Sublime – a review of Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” by Arthur Danto
There is an excellent review of Robert Smithson by Arthur Danto in an essay entitled The American Sublime over at “The Nation” (link thanks to Amy at the ARTery). Danto has this to say: “One of the most famous works of art in America, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty transcends the “earth art” genre to which critics have consigned it, and has become an emblem of the American sublime.” “An autodidact, widely read in science fiction, amateur geology and crystallography, Smithson was a singularly original thinker who brought to bear in his art and writing as many of his intellectual pursuits as he could. His master concept was entropy–a statistical measure of energy disorder or randomness–which gripped him much as the concept of blind will gripped Arthur Schopenhauer, as the ultimate reality against which form and order crumple and collapse. He connected the coolness of contemporary sculpture with the inevitable cooling down of physical systems. Thus, he suggested, the most important new works in American sculpture “bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age”–an allusion that suddenly vests his abstract ice crystals with a certain prophetic meaning.” In the essay Dante sites Robert Smithson as more of an influence for today’s young artist than Picasso: “anti-institutional, in touch with the environment, hospitable to myth and ritual, alive to the poetry of the wilderness, ambitious in his desire to touch the public through a vision of monumentality that throws the world of the shopping mall and the parking lot into a moral perspective.” Robert Smithson’s work can be seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 23.
Cezanne and Pissarro at the MoMA
Last night I visited the Cezanne and Pissaro exhbition at MoMA which focuses on the dialogue between Cezanne and Pisarro which spurred them on to become better painters. I am fascinated by friendships between artists or writers, where without the friendship , neither would have become the artist they were destined to be. For example, Van Gogh and Gaughin, O’Keefe and Steiglitz, Michealangelo and Pope Julian. The exhibition is extremely comprehensive although I would have liked more commentary on how the friendship affected each other’s thoughts on the practice of art. At the start of their friendship both artists shared a need to overturn the established art institutions. They were looking for a new visual language. They met in Paris in !861 and both felt like outsiders in the Parisian art world. Cezanne set out to “enrage the Salon” and Pissaro to “set the Louvre on fire.”
The friendship of Cezanne and Pissaro: Review of the upcoming exhibition at MoMA
The exhibition, opening June 26, at MoMA highlights their friendship and the influence their ideas had on each other as they worked side by side painting plein-air…. I love their art: Cézanne’s transparent palisades of stained-glass green and blue; Pissarro’s woods and fields, light-dusted and virginal…. It continues into the decade with the years around 1875 marking the culmination of their effort to define an innovative, increasingly conceptual form of painting, in which a traditional grammar of drawn outlines, tonal volumes and perspectival depth – in a word, realism – gives way to a new logic of color and light.
More on New York Contemporary Art Fairs
Despite the growing number of art fairs, though, with the market so strong, there are more and more galleries all the time, and so competition for the most important fairs is fierce. The directors of the most important fairs are virtual superstars (truly, Art Basel director Samuel Keller was listed in Details magazine a year ago as one of the “50 Most Influential Men Under 37″), and the anxiety among dealers who apply for the best fairs is high…. Not getting into an important fair can have devastating effects on younger galleries, who rely on them for a big chunk of their annual sales, though, and as necessity is the mother of invention, younger galleries are finding ways to take control when the bigger art fairs turn them down.
Are art critics dead, dinosaurs, or does anybody even care?
Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes had a post this week drawing attention to an article at the L.A Times questioning the relevance of critics in today’s art world…. Papatola from the St Paul Pioneer Press has this to say: Blogs, podcasts and Internet chat boards not only allow everyone with a modem to have an opinion but also make it possible for that opinion to travel limitlessly. In these opinion-rich days, is there any room for the old-style critics — the sort who, instead of just spouting half-formed observation in tortured, inflammatory and/or my-way-or-the-highway prose, can actually back up their ideas with cogence, context and expertise?
Agnes Martin at the DIA Beacon, New York
Paintings hang without titles or text accompaniments which means you have the choice of having a purely visual experience of the art itself, without literary explanation (or you can read information from one of the cards they have in holders at the entrance to each of the galleries.) One of the attendants told her that Agnes Martin’s work was in one of the smaller galleries, off to the side. After getting lost, and enjoying Blink’s xxx work on the way there, I eventually found myself in the Agnes Martin section where three large galleries showcased her work from the “Unknown Years.”
I.A.P.S Conference – Albert Handell workshop on painting trees in pastel
I recently attended the A.I.P.S conference in Raleigh, New Jersey. One of the interesting workshops that I attended was a workshop focused on drawing trees, taught by Albert Handell.
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