ARTISTIC PRECEDENCE IN "OLD MASTER" PAINTINGS

I often go to see great “masters” for reasons that are not about beauty, innovation, transcendence, etc. but rather to find their “mistakes”, slip-ups, sloppiness, laziness, and pure incompetency that reinforce my idea - especially in regard to representational painting - that NO ONE is a “perfect painter”, even if all the art history books say so, and declare that those old guys and gals achieved excellence. Ingres is a great example - beautiful drapery with noodle fingers delicately placed on sumptuously painted fabrics.

Too many years of teaching and developing my eye cannot be shut off when I “eye” major exhibitions - So here goes with the terrific - yes still terrific - Manet/Degas pairing show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There are many images here and some paintings are wonderful just as they are, and I include them. Manet knocked out Degas in the 3rd round but Degas still got in some punches not that there was a competition though the Met might have handled it that way - making them competitors thematically. Manet has a luminosity and serpentine hand that can dance and punch its way around a canvas. Degas is softer - these oil paintings show why he loved pastels so much - they began crisp and became fuzzier around the edges as he developed - blending into the background. They both employ narrative and in my opinion, could have been edited….but alas I was not around almost two centuries ago.

With these photos (which include wall labels and details) I apologize for being too lazy to edit or remove the glare to peak culmination, I show some of the painting gaffes that distracted me. Manet loved to smush out a toe and fingers here and there; Degas would allow a pant leg to be as flat as an ironing board; canvases were literally torn /sliced away from the original works and I believe Manet just got too bored to finish up the less finer point of a piece. Also interestingly Manet was not afraid of using dark tones in even the whitest of draperies, but rarely would he model a person's particularly a woman’s face with darker tones. so some of his greatest depictions of women are very pale and delicate. The exception is a great Berthe Morisot portrait.

I loved seeing the show - don’t get me wrong - but I also love to search for the eccentricity and the humanity in the work.

THE BURIAL 10/23/23

 I recommend THE BURIAL which I viewed on Amazon Prime with Jamie Foxx as Willie E. Gary and Tommy Lee Jones as Jeremiah O'Keefe. This is a David vs Goliath law case litigated in a small Mississippi courtroom; a true story made into a film based on a 1999 New Yorker article by Jonathan Harr about the Loewen-O'Keefe trial exposing the exploitation of poor and black people by a billionaire Corporation. 

This is a powerful film as evidenced in one scene of a group of people viewing a vast, flat expanse of green with no headstones - a  burial ground of slaves. This plot of land references the historical roots of racism and how time piles up one injustice over another so that the original  'sins" are buried so deep they are forgotten. 

 The two lead actors are both passionate fighters for what they believe in. Watching Jamie Foxx with incredible charisma as a small-time, hotshot personal injury lawyer stepping out of his comfort zone to defend a funeral home director who decides to sue a company that is attempting to decimate his family's legacy made me forget the world falling apart around us. 

Tommy Lee Jones also gives a terrific performance, using his body to express the feeling of defeat, shoulders slumped with a gait that is no longer straight but unsteady. THE BURIAL is filled with sentimentality which felt appropriate in the beauty of the relationship between Jones and Foxx - opposites but both respecting each other's values. 

I particularly want to mention a young actor, Mamoudou Athie, a quiet and commanding presence as Hal Dockins who O'Keefe hires just out of law school and is a catalyst for much of the film's legal maneuvering. 

WANGECHI MUTU AT NEW MUSEUM, NYC 6/2/23

 

I have attended almost all of Wangechi Mutu’s exhibitions in NYC over the years, and the effect on me, from the early pieces to the most recent bronze sculptures, has been profound. Her use of collage as an art form - one in which I once felt Hannah Hoch dominated - attained new levels of personal and political expression equal in range and breadth to exquisite and majestic paintings. These works at The New Museum closing June 6th, literally unearth the Kenyan soil - dry sand and deep red mud embodying the beauty and scourge of her homeland. Writhing cutout female figures containing imagery reminiscent of flayed animal flesh with a contagion crawling through the skin gives us a sense of what is “seen and unseen.” Mutu uses medical illustrations for one of her series of women’s faces describing death and disease - viruses brewing below the surface waiting to erupt.

Her potent satirical collages also speak to Western myths about Africa - women tattooed with leopard skin bodies and contorted faces romping around the landscape’s reeds and bark trees like insects collapsing into fetal positions - glitter and mylar bringing light and color unto their bowed bodies. There is always a stunning dream-like fascination with Mutu’s world of women which captivates and draws us to them - repulsion and seduction are compelling forces that bewitch and beguile.

Seeing this mini-retrospective at The New Museum helped me to better understand her large bronze sci-fi sculptures. They are a logical transformation from paper pulp and wood to molten metal. The surfaces are shiny with sleek ribbings. Women are conjoined with crocodilians and other imaginary creatures as if emerging out of cocoons - or seated atop them like noble blossoming royalty.

John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres - Exhibition SWAGGER AND TENDERNESS at Bronx Museum, NYC

The last time I took a bus traveling through the Bronx was in 2008 when I frequently visited Montefiore Hospital and shortly thereafter Calvary Hospital/Hospice where my mother lay dying receiving palliative care. I always chose the front seat on the bus so I could look out the driver’s translucent windows observing the teeming vibrancy of the neighborhoods we careened through. The ride back and forth became a bridge from vitality to death-a time of reflective memories and the finality of loss. At that time I noticed how some buildings were also collapsing, slowly fading away into the dusty ground while others were being renovated - rising up from decline.

I was on the way to The Bronx Museum to see the exhibition Swagger and Tenderness - The South Bronx Portraits featuring the artworks of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres. This bus trip was different from 15 years ago. The Bronx where I grew up in my teen years having moved from Washington Heights was being “refurbished” - a double-edged sword grinding the buoyant culture of street games, locally owned stores/bodegas, and families sitting outside on stoops talking about the shared vicissitudes of their lives - both joyful and painful - which was slowly being eroded. But once I arrived at the Museum the world had tipped over again and I was drawn into the images of the inhabitants of this vital South Bronx community realizing that the breadth and breath of a neighborhood could not easily be extinguished.

I have been a fan of John Ahearn’s art since the early 1980s when I first glimpsed the four young girls on the side of a Bronx building playing “Double Dutch” jump rope. I was deeply touched by the profound affection, and “there-ness” displayed toward his subjects without resorting to any contrivances. I soon learned that John joined with Rigoberto Torres who had made plaster casts in his Uncle’s statuary store and that life-long partnership, each with distinctive stylistic and painterly touches is ongoing.

The Museum walls are painted a resonant blue - a bridging of sky and water; the sculptures float in that atmospheric space. Many works are collaborations - and I often wondered who did what? Separately I could often distinguish their stylistic differences, particularly in the acrylic painting on the casts. The “tenderness of the exhibition’s title is evident in almost every piece. The “swagger” is also visible, but the delicate beauty of John’s and Rigoberto’s brushwork with its range of skin tones and exuberant colors unearthed the humanity that exists below the veneer of bravado. I was uplifted by this generous exhibition allowing me entry into the gift of loving relationships be it with a parent, child, or friends.

https://bronxmuseum.org/exhibition/swagger-and-tenderness-the-south-bronx-portraits-by-john-ahearn-rigoberto-torres/

John Ahearn, BB, 1979, Acrylic on Plaster

John Ahearn with Rigoberto Torres, Maria, 1981, Acrylic on Plaster

John Ahearn, Cosmic, 1979, Acrylic on plaster

John Ahearn, Miguel, 2017, Acrylic on Plaster

Rigoberto Torres with John Ahearn, Teri, 1980, Acrylic on Plaster

John Ahearn with Rigoberto Torres, Mario and Norma, 1979, Acrylic on Plaster

Rigoberto Torres, Julio, Jose, and Junito, 1991/95, Acrylic on Plaster

John Ahearn, Pregnant Girl, 1979, Acrylic on Plaster

john Ahearn with Rigoberto Torres, Selena, 1985, Acrylic on Plaster

John Ahearn, Yashua Rd, 2021, Acrylic on Plaster

Rigoberto Torres, Keon and Jeanine, 1995, Acrylic on Plaster

NAN GOLDIN: ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

 

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED documentary directed by Laura Poitras is on HBO and worth viewing. I felt nauseated viewing the despair and the tentacles of agony that Oxycontin wrested on those who were attempting to avoid pain and instead were engulfed by a "vampire" drug that devoured the essence of one's being eviscerating mind and body. 

We glimpse Nan Goldin from early childhood to the warrior activist she has become through the interweaving of deeply personal photos and slideshows of friends who became the family she yearned for. As a young girl Nan Goldin was terribly shy having lost to suicide her 18 years old sister - the one person in her biological family who she adored - the one who had the will to crash through the confines of suburban conformity.

Goldin speaks about her own Opioid addiction which she vividly describes as almost taking her life. Instead, it galvanized her to fight to make Purdue Pharma/Sackler Family pay for their greed and voracious propaganda through their promotion of Oxycontin, trafficking an epidemic of death into billions of dollars in corporate profits.

This is also a journey into the early East Village art and nightlife scenes and the devastation of so many young people to AIDS - another epidemic that was ignored for many years. Moving and heroic, I was enlightened and saddened by this film.

THE ENGLISH 11/18/22

I recommend seeing The English, a strangely surreal six-part Western series on Amazon and BBC, beautifully acted by Emily Blunt - the title’s English woman - who has come to this dry, expanse of land that is the American frontier in the 1890s where the rule of law is discarded, tossed into the air to fly among the vultures. There are many flashbacks whereby time and space are dislodged which can be disconcerting and often vertiginous. But these vignettes eventually coalesce - with deep poignancy and desolation.

Emily Blunt’s character,  Lady Cornelia Locke’s rarefied life in England is suddenly and violently assaulted propelling her to journey to the “new world” on a mission of revenge. There are many cameo roles with wonderful actors popping up throughout the series but Blunt commands our gaze and our heart. She appears to be a beautiful innocent toting a bagful of cash, but we discover early on that she has the ability and confidence to unleash carnage on her enemies.

Chaske Spencer, a Native American actor plays the other lead, Sgt. Eli Whipp, a Pawnee scout who recently left the US Army in Oklahoma and is traveling to Nebraska in order to legally “stake a land claim” in his ancestral home.  A harrowing incident brings Cornelia and Chaske together and they begin to travel alongside one another developing a relationship that delicately balances that tensile line between the cliched stoic silent hero and the damsel in distress. Their connection eventually becomes one of understanding and wonder in their very affinity. 

In the many subplots which expose the underlying cruelty, greed, and racism imposed by the myriad “old world” settler’s acquisition of the wild beauty and bleak dirt of the terrain, we glimpse the roots of America’s infirmity. Wresting power from the native tribes, retribution, hatred of the “other”, and a belief in extreme individualism were as rampant then as it is today. 

 Throughout the series, I was captivated by the startlingly original clipped dialogue which translated into the mystery of poetry. Words are often terse and stilted launching visual images. The silence of the sprawling landscape echoes the silence of communication. This is a love story with the knowledge that it is ill-fated and forever immutable.