Dorothea Tanning opens eyes and doors at the Tate Modern

Like Warhol, Dorothea Tanning, the subject of a new retrospective at the Tate, toiled first in advertising when she came to New York. She had been deeply affected by the groundbreaking MoMA Surrealism/Dada show of 1936 and her ads for Macy’s and others reflected this new awareness of the ability to disassociate body parts and imagery.

She herself was selected by her future husband Max Ernst—then married to Peggy Guggenheim—for a show of women artists at Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery when she returned from a stay in Europe. (Was this the moment of the Ernst-Tanning coup de foudre? A year later they were together) Georgia O’Keefe refused to be relegated to this show of ‘women artists” but Tanning accepted. When next invited to participate however in a women-only show in the 70’s second wave of feminism, like many creative women who had already made their own way (Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman et al) Tanning was also finally a refusnik. ‘Women artists,” she said, “There is no such thing – or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as “man artist” or “elephant artist”. You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.’

She had by then grown into a bold, incisive, self-confident practitioner of painting, poetry, sculpture, costumes and set design.

"Just put yourself in my place, George, " she wrote after she had, in a labor of love, produced the costumes and sets for Balanchine’s new ballet Night Shadow, supported by Lincoln Kirstein, "and you would cry too." Tanning was passionate about ballet, but her production had an unfortunately short shelf life when a new production by the Monte Carlo ballet appeared just a few years later. "I really thought all this time that I had helped to make it a good work, and lots of other people thought so too. I was proud to have worked with you to make such a pretty ballet and I felt it was a real collaboration of all 3 of us. But I suppose it’s a very complicated story and I don’t understand very well how these things work."

Tanning went on to work on other ballets and had plans for many more, but was thwarted by lack of funding and the nature of the collaborative process which stymied her as a solo practitioner .

I wonder what Tanning would have made of the many women-only international shows organized this year in response to #MeToo.  Ghetto or Gift?  The concurrent counter narrative solo exhibitions—besides Tanning (Ernst), Lee Miller(Man Ray) and Gala Eluard (Dali)—who have finally been removed from the rolls of the ‘muses’-only, tell a more complete tale.  

The exhibition runs from February 27 to June 9, 2019 at the Tate Modern. All images courtesy of the Tate.

Van Gogh by Julian Schnabel: At Eternity's Gate

Julian Schnabel is a very brave artist.  After being a wildly successful artist du jour and then coming down off that perch, he turned his hand to film and made, among others, some beauties: the story of Basquiat and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 

 At Eternity’s Gate, his film portrait of Van Gogh is as ambitious as the others but is hampered more than anything by the dialog seemingly lifted in whole chunks from letters that Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, to Paul Gauguin fellow artist, and others. Despite help from veteran screenwriter Jean Claude Carriere (or maybe alas because of it)  nothing ever sounds natural.  And therefore the performances, though earnest and deep, draw attention to their static quality instead of to their verisimilitude.  Schnabel should have trusted himself more. 

 Instead of bringing on a French screenwriter, the casting could have been more European. Not that I am PC about that. But the American-ness and British-ness of the principal roles doesn’t help you dive into the characters. 

 Willem Dafoe is abjectly tortured, (even if a good thirty years older than the artist actually was as this series of events unfolds), the artist who can’t get anyone to even hang his work for free in a bar, whose manic depression overwhelms him, whose obsessions for capturing on canvas a girl walking home from work or a fellow asylum mate get him into trouble.  His compulsive desire to fill every canvas, to layer it, to exhaust the paint itself, is made real and here Schnabel’s own expertise comes into play. We feel keenly his desire to suck up the sights, sounds and even smells of the world.

 Oscar Isaac is a suitably arrogant Gauguin who alternately thrills and chills his less successful friend.  The best surprise is Rupert Friend as brother Theo.

 This relationship of the brothers is wonderfully drawn: Theo the sane, Vincent the genius madman, linked forever as helper and helpless.  Theo’s desire for his own life eventually overrides his compassion for Vincent when he institutionalizes him. 

 Van Gogh’s intellectual heft, his knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible is set against his dramatic deficits of personal intelligence.  I don’t know if Schnabel invented this or it was real. (I reached out to John Walsh, ex Getty director, now giving a series of lectures on Van Gogh at Yale open to the public for some context. Walsh reminded me he would be dealing with this period in Arles next semester .)

 The production is filled with the southern French light that so warmed Van Gogh’s aching heart and soul.  (Arles, once a favorite city of mine, is now undergoing massive development by the Luma Foundation. I saw things in construction a few years ago. I’m hopeful they can retain something of the city’s historic character) Schnabel managed to find the still rural Arles, the one that was Van Gogh’s home at the end of his life both inside outside the asylum walls. 

 Every loaf of bread, bowl of fruit and indeed every character from barmaid to priest is filled with the unique texture of real life. And then every once in a while the screen goes black.  A moment of darkness descends on us just as it does on Vincent. 

 The film opens on November 16th.

The Price of Everything: an HBO documentary lifts the veil on the art world

The Price of Everything is a comprehensive and clear-eyed documentary on the subject of the relation of art to commerce. To that end, we hear from collectors, curators, journalists, auctioneers and artists—from the wildly successful (Jeff Koons), to very successful (George Condo, Marilyn Minter) to those whom the market lost sight of (Larry Poons) and those just coming into view (Njideka Akunyili Crosby).

 It could not be more depressing.

 Koons’ hedge fund factory art which some collectors can’t get enough of is on full display. So is Poons’ neglected ramshackle self and barn. So is Amy Cappellazzo’s auction house sophistry, and Jerry Saltz’s I’ve-seen-it-all shrug. And Crosby’s face as she realizes a work of hers has topped 900,000 at auction—and she won’t see a cent of it.

 A Russian collector cries over her Hirst butterflies. Condo paints an entire painting as if he’s painting a fence while carrying on an interview. Between him and Koons and really the rest of the interviews with the possible exception of Crosby, the veil is entirely lifted so as to dispel any remaining magic we ever felt about artists or certainly the art world. The film is in direct contradiction to the artist’s panel I attended last week. 

 The following conclusions are drawn:

 It’s very important for good art to be expensive.

If the gimmick owns you. it’s over.

To be an effective collector, you have to be a decorator.

Everything is metaphor.

Contemporary Art is a luxury brand.

 Kill me now. Or maybe the messengers? The producer of the film is Jennifer Blei Stockman, an art collector herself, former chair of the Guggenheim Board, once named ‘Republican Woman of the Year”. The director is Nathaniel Kahn, architect Louis Kahn’s son who once made the infinitely more marvelous and uplifting documentary about his father.  

 The film opens theatrically this weekend in NY and then makes its way across the country to depress everyone else.  A program at the 92nd Street Y on November 4th with some of the subjects is just more masochism if you ask me. On November 12th it hits HBO. 

The Spirals and Spiritualism of Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim

The Hilma af Klint exhibition curated by Tracey Bashkoff, just opening at the Guggenheim is an almost perfect marriage of subject and space.  Like Frank Lloyd Wright, and a number of other artists working at the time, af Klint was absorbed with spirals and circles.  These forms had migrated from spiritual practices, specifically Theosophy, Rosicruianism, and Utopianism, and influenced the practices of Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, and other artists and architects who were seeking to find some kind of artistic  compatibility with the universe and scientific discoveries. Color theory became connected to mood and a number of new ideas relating to psychiatric states of being. Symbols and words were incorporated. 

 Like other adherents, Klint, who had already been a member of a Swedish women artists group, began to hold séances with four other like-minded women. After ten years, at one of the séances, she felt herself ‘instructed’ by one of the ‘High Ones” to create a cycle of paintings. (I would have liked to have been at this one). Af Klint felt herself to be a receptacle, similar to the adherents of surrealism and Breton’s automatic writing. Out of this impulse, arose The Paintings for the Temple, 193 works begun in 1906 , many on view at the museum. These works, some quite large, are lush abstractions that build on the geometries of the spiritual but are not in any way circumscribed by that impulse. The colors pop, but also soothe, and a rare harmony is achieved. They were never installed in any temple, but now they are installed in Wright’s temple.  And it is heavenly. 

 Smaller works, later watercolors, display similar forays into geometric and biomorphic work, but then you will see hints of Josef Albers, Georgia O’Keefe and Victor Hugo. Af Klint often worked in series, variations on a theme. This adds to the didactic quality but surprisingly, that does not get in the way of delight.

 It is going to be a social media extravaganza.  Contemporary artists and audiences will thrill to these lesser-known works. (There is a roundtable on her, and her work on Friday open to the public)  Apparently, wounded in love at an early age, she decided never to marry. 

 Af Klint’s will stipulated that the work not be shown for 20 years because it had been misunderstood by Rudolf Steiner, one of her philosophical idols, and he counseled her that she might get a similar reaction among her contemporaries. She was part of a 1986 exhibition at LACMA where I first saw her work, and much more recently a retrospective in Sweden but her foundation still is the principal proprietor. This exhibition marks the first dedicated solely to her in the US, . 

Tell Me Something Good

An ordinary/extraordinary thing happened last night.  Three artists and a moderator/interlocutor sat down on folding chairs in a funky, large space with peeling paint and mottled stained cork floor at the NY Studio School and talked about their art with each other, with him, and eventually with us. They sat with a mini slideshow that read Tell Me Something Good.

Miles away from trickster artists letting their paintings explode, fancy gallery shows and auctions where artists do not generally participate except through their work, it was just three guys and a girl sitting around talking.

 It was not contentious. It was not invasive. The artists got to talk a little about their own practice and what other work inspired them. They got to ask questions and interact with each other. People were respectful and listened to each other at non CNN/Fox/MSNBC decibel levels.  It was everything that the world, not only the art world, is mostly not these days. It was a real pleasure.

 Nominally also hosted by The Brooklyn Rail (still free, a commercial publication would never let its writers run on so…) moderator Jarrett Earnest and artists Rikrit Tiravanija, Matvey Levenstein and Dana Schutz revealed something of what made them get up in the morning and work.  All of them have taught, or are teaching, but they were not professorial. They are just worker bees. 

 There were references made to Pontormo and angels, Caspar David Friedrich, Philip Guston, Rudolph Schindler, Ned Kelly, Sidney Nolan, the Vienna Secession, Expressonism, religion, Utopia, dystopia, certainly an eclectic set, and we were an eclectic audience: young, younger, old, older, male, female, students, artists and I don’t know what else.  Politics, blessedly, was mostly not present. It was a good break from all the #Toos. 

 We first looked at Pontormo’s Visitation (now at the Morgan Library)

We looked at Levenstein’s Peonies

We looked at Schutz’s Self Exam

We looked at Tiravanaja’s Performance Structure 

Among other things.

 Only Schutz is US born. The others privileged their immigrant status as both adding and subtracting to their experience here as artists. They talked about meaning in art. Should art have to mean anything? Does it by default? No conclusions were reached. That was ok.

 Schutz was brave enough to ask about the impact of social media.  The elephant in the room was of course her own experience with its vicious onslaught last year. But the others did not push her to revisit this terrible time. 

 Do artists need to be in NY? Not really, it was agreed for the nth time, NY has changed. I wanted to tell them they are asking the same thing in LA, London, Paris, Rome, et al. Artists, and all creative people, by definition, are always wondering if they are in the right place to receive the magic and also sleep and eat reasonably well.  The grass is always greener, or in the case of LA, browner. 

 The evening did almost end however on a bit of down note.  It was generally agreed: There is too much art. There is too much art writing. Nobody has time to see (or presumably, read) anything except her or his favorites anymore. 

Earnest ended by telling us just to go have fun.

 I hopped on the subway and read the latest issue of the Rail on the way home.  Really there is too much art and writing about art.  But it’s fun. 

Stones to Stains: Victor Hugo's romantic drawings at the Hammer Museum

As a college student of 19th Century French literature, I became enamored of the great observers of love and life, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola and Balzac.  Though Victor Hugo, poet, journalist, statesman, politician and hero of the Republic for his resistance to waves of Napoleonic repression and the death penalty was among them, it was not until I saw Francois Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adele H while working at the New York Film Festival that Hugo resounded for me in a more personal way. 

 The story of the film is based on the true story of Hugo’s daughter Adele, diagnosed in real life with schizoprenia, but in the film primarily the victim of unrequited love. As anyone who has seen the film knows, Adele goes crazy after being rejected by a handsome solider with whom she’s had an affair, follows him to Halifax, then Barbados where she eventually collapses in the street and is returned to Paris and her father.  Hugo never appears in the film as Truffaut, who got the rights from his son Jean, was contractually obliged never to depict him on screen. We hear him only in voice over. 

View fullsize

In another stroke of luck, I was often able to stay at the home of friends on the Place des Vosges, right near Victor Hugo’s home which has been preserved qua home and archive.

 All this came back to me when I entered the magical exhibition of Victor Hugo’s drawings at the Hammer Museum curated by Allegra Pesenti and Cynthia Burlingame. Besides being one of the leading writers, politicians and human rights advocates of his century, Hugo was a marvelous and ingenious draftsman and observed and depicted the world in a very original way.

 The exhibition of 75 drawings is titled Stones to Stains (Taches) as these were the methodologies with which he began and ended his drawing practice which took place largely while he was in exile for 20 years in Jersey and Guernsey, the Channel Islands to which he had repaired when political events continued their downward spiral. Not content to use the formal methods available to him, he creased, folded, puddled, stenciled, smudged, traced, collaged, frottaged, cut out, and literally shadow boxed with his paper. Though most of the drawings are a range of sepias, browns, beiges and blacks, it is the ones with a just a touch of polychrome that do stand out.  

 A highly romantic and skilled amateur of photography, astronomy, oceanography, and spiritualism, Hugo incorporated aspects of these passions into much of the work. Yet the work is not literal minded or illustrative.  Instead as Pesenti reminds us, he took the simple tools with which he was writing Les Miserables and Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and other works—pen, paper, and ink—and gave them alternative expression in the drawings.  

I imagine him late at night in Hauteville House, his splendid home on Guernsey which he decorated himself, after a long day of writing, taking out a clean sheet of paper and giving his automatic style which the surrealists eventually so admired, free reign, a release after the long day of keeping together his complex plots and syntax. Florian Rodari, a consulting curator on the project says in his excellent and enlightening catalog essay that he “defended disorder and the commotion of life”. He describes how Hugo looked on architecture as another alphabet, stones set upright, each one a letter, finally forming words in the ensemble.

 Adele was not the only Hugo family victim.  Her older sister Leopoldine, reportedly Hugo’s favorite, was drowned in a horrible accident along with her husband who tried to save her.  Hugo had many devoted mistresses in addition to his wife and so we see the elements of the classic genius syndrome where geniuses are allowed things the rest of us are not.

 Hugo did not sell his drawings. They were given to friends as gifts or aides-memoires of events, or eventually to publishers who used them in various publications, outlined in Burlingame’s catalog essay. The loans for this show, primarily from the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Maison of Victor Hugo in Paris will probably not be allowed to travel outside of France again, and the Hammer is the only venue  Do watch the video of the curators in their behind the scenes of the creation of the exhibition.

 Pesenti summons Odilon Redon, Andre Breton and Picasso, as artists akin to Hugo in various ways, but all I could think of was Alberto Burri, perhaps because I had so recently both written about his Guggenheim exhibition and the Gibellina Cretto. 

Alberto Burri

Victor Hugo

 The exhibition is open until the end of the year. The Hammer is screening the film on November 20 but it’s also for rent on Amazon. It’s a great warm up to the exhibition as it’s filmed almost entirely on Guernsey. And if you’ve ever been rejected in love, you will weep along with Adele as she tries to win back the favor of her lover. In real life, Truffaut, who often fell in love with his leading ladies, apparently was rebuffed by the much younger Isabel Adjani who played the role and she instead had an affair with her co star Bruce Robinson, who was also a very good writer. So real life imitated the art which imitated real life, precisely in keeping with the masterful Victor Hugo. 

Images courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, The Metropolitan Museum of Art / image source, Art Resource, NY, Collection of David Lachenmann, Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernesey / Roger-Viollet, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon/François Jay.

The Sketchbooks of Francoise Gilot: life went on after Picasso

I worked on a film biography for PBS on Picasso in conjunction with MoMA’s first comprehensive retrospective after Picasso’s death. William Rubin, the chief curator of MoMA, who was organizing the exhibition was adamant we not interview Francoise Gilot because he was very concerned about getting loans from Picasso’s widow Jacqueline who was controlling an important part of his estate and he thought contact with Gilot might jeopardize that, given the acrimony with which Picasso and Gilot had landed after her 1964 tell all memoir about her life with him.

 I had read Life with Picasso and thought it not only bold but instructive. It told how to hold your own with a powerful man. I came away admiring the only woman who had been able to extricate herself from Picasso and go on and have a productive life. I fought for her inclusion in the film, but I was very junior and had no say. 

 Though I did spend time with Claude and Paloma her children, it wasn’t until 2012 on the occasion of her show at Gagosian Madison that I finally got to meet her.  She was on the arm of John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, who is still working on the last volume of his definitive series on the life. Frail but steely is how she came across to me.

For a long time I had not admired her work as much as her person.  

 But having now received the new Taschen set of three sketchbooks she made while on travels to Venice India and Senegal, I am newly taken with it. These more spontaneous drawings, watercolors and make for a window into this remarkable woman that is a fresh look at the open, attentive, original way she has seen the world.

Gilot was a young artist when she met Picasso at 21, an acolyte. Inevitably, there has always been Picasso in her work. That’s not being revelatory. There is something of Picasso in almost every artist who worked in the 20th and 21st centuries.  

 But it is Matisse she invokes in these sketchbooks. She says he was the painter she felt closest to. That would have driven Picasso, who felt Matisse was his most important rival, crazy.  

 The Taschen series, 1974-1981, is a lively, colorful pictorial diary of her exotic travels. They began when she traveled with Jonas Salk, having moved on from an artistic genius to a scientific one (there was photographer Luc Simon in between). Francoise was both a companion to famous men (some women have a talent for that) and an artist who was able to maintain her own practice even in the midst of these larger lives.

 “These little books are complete in themselves,” she says. “I made them, and then once I’d made them I was free.  For me these little books are a step toward freedom.” 

Kusama-Infinity film documents the bumpy journey of an art star

I came to the Kusama-Infinity film by Heather Lenz a skeptic and emerged something of a convert.

 There isn’t one city I’ve visited in the last years that has not had a Kusama retrospective recently completed, up, or on the horizon. Museums fight to get a Kusama show, attendance increases dramatically when they land one.  Who does not covet a selfie with a Kusama?

It was not always thus.  Lenz’s film makes a strong case for another Kusama, the outsider who came to the US in 1958 with money sewn into her kimono at a time when Japan was stifling and reactionary after the war.  Her family—in the seed and flower business—did not recognize or support her talent. Her father was a philanderer and filled her mother with anger which spilled over into the children. To escape this toxicity was bold and rare.

New York held its own challenges.  Kusama was neither Ab Ex nor Minimalist nor Figurative.  Maybe she had a little bit of Pollock’s energy—less drippy- and Agnes Martin’s precision—less restrained.  She could not get arrested (later this would change).  But Kusama had extraordinary belief in herself and her work. She was very striking.  She recognized early on the value of documenting her work, and her person. Artfully draped over her or standing amongst her creations, she is every bit as arresting. 

Finally, in some smaller shows, other artists began to see her value and innovation.  There’s no doubt that Oldenburg—stuffing—Samaras—mirrors—and Warhol—immersive patterned installations—and later Hirst-dots--were inspired by her. Stella craved and eventually bought an early yellow work for 75 dollars.  Cornell had a crush on her, called her “my princess’ even though he was celibate (as was she.)

She cycled through obsessions with dots, infinity nets, balls, stuffed fingers, mirrors, naked happenings and protests.  She was against the war in Vietnam. She did get arrested. I could not help but think of Yoko on a parallel path at this point only instead in bed with a Beatle. Kusama was in bed with her dots and fingers. I also glimpsed affinities with Rei Kawakubo. And with Ruth Asawa, another outsider who marched to her own net-like drums.

Finally she moved back to Japan and eventually she had to check herself into a psychiatric facility, where she still sleeps each night.  Being obessesive compulsive and celibate? I don’t know how she was able to survive. 

“When I see dots my eyes get brighter”, she now says with her signature red wig. Alas, though I very much appreciate the earlier work, mine now glaze over when I see the red and white dots. But I’m an admirer of the grit and determination with which she has approached her life and practice.    

The film is in general release