“Sometimes the intention is to shock. But what is shocking first time round is boring and vacuous when repeated. This makes art into an elaborate joke, one that has ceased to be funny. Yet the critics go on endorsing it, afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes.” Roger Scruton
American workers, David Burliuk
David Davidovich Burliuk July 1882 – January 1967) was a Ukrainian Futurist, Neo-Primitivist, book illustrator, publicist, and author associated with Russian Futurism. Burliuk is often described as "the father of Russian Futurism."
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism's artistic style.
Although it was largely an Italian phenomenon, there were parallel movements in Russia, England, Belgium and elsewhere. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and even Futurist meals. To some extent, Futurism influenced the art movements Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism. Rayonism (or Rayism[1] or Rayonnism) is a style of abstract art that developed in Russia in 1911.
Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova developed rayonism after hearing a series of lectures about Futurism by Marinetti in Moscow. The Futurists took speed, technology and modernity as their inspiration, depicting the dynamic character of early 20th century life.
(The Rayonists sought an art that floated beyond abstraction, outside time and space, and to break the barriers between the artist and the public.)
(Vorticism was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century, partly inspired by Cubism. The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, which contained its manifesto and the movement's rejection of landscape and nudes in favour of a geometric style tending towards abstraction. Ultimately, it was their witnessing of unfolding human disaster in World War I that "drained these artists of their Vorticist zeal". Vorticism was based in London but was international in make-up and ambition.
Study for ‘A Glass with the Squire’, Eastman Johnson
Jonathan Eastman Johnson (July 29, 1824 –
April 5, 1906) was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was
best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and
his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham
Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch
masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The
American Rembrandt in his day.
Johnson's style is largely realistic in both
subject matter and in execution. His charcoal sketches were not strongly
influenced by period artists but are informed more by his lithography training.
Later works show influence by the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters, and
also by Jean-François Millet. Echoes of Millet's The Gleaners can be seen in
Johnson's The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, although the emotional
tone of the work is far different.
His careful portrayal of individuals rather
than stereotypes enhances the realism of his paintings. Ojibwe artist Carl
Gawboynotes that the faces in the 1857 portraits of Ojibwe people by Johnson
are recognizable in people in the Ojibwe community today.[14] Some of his
paintings, such as Ojibwe Wigwam at Grand Portage, are highly realistic, with
details seen in the later photorealism movement.
His careful attention to light sources
contributes to the realism. Portraits, Girl and Pets and The Boy Lincoln, make
use of single light sources in a manner that is similar to the 17th-century
Dutch Masters whom he had studied in The Hague in the 1850s.
Nine Discourses on Commodus, Cy Twombly
NINE DISCOURSES ON COMMODUS
CY TWOMBLY
In the mid-1950s, while working as a cryptographer in the US Army, Cy Twombly developed his signature style of graffiti-like scratches, scribbles, and frenetic lines that simultaneously referenced and subverted the then-dominant painterly mode of Abstract Expressionism. Following Twombly's permanent move to Rome in 1957, the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism was counterbalanced by and tethered to the weight of history. A series of works from the late 1950s and early 1960s chart Twombly's deepening fascination with Italian history, ancient mythology, and classical literature.
During the period from 1962 to 1963 Twombly's paintings and their historical referents assumed a much more somber and anxious tone, as Twombly took up a panoply of historical assassinations as his point of departure-a shift perhaps reflective of the darkening mood of the early 1960s, which witnessed the Cuban Missile crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Produced in the winter of 1963, the painting cycle Nine Discourses on Commodus serves as a summation of this agonized and singular phase in his career. The cycle is based on the cruelty, insanity, and eventual murder of the Roman emperor Aurelius Commodus (161–192 CE). Conflict, opposition, and tension dominate the paintings' composition. Two whorls of matter hold the central focus of each piece, ranging in mood from serene, cloudlike structures to bleeding wounds and culminating in a fiery apotheosis in the final panel. Despite the paintings' intrinsic aesthetics of chaos and instability, a tightly controlled armature governs their composition. The gray background acts as a negative space to counterbalance the bloody whirls of paint and scabs of congealed impasto. Over this neutral backdrop, the line that runs along the middle of the paintings serves as a guiding mark to subdivide the composition. Many of the Commodus paintings also feature numerical sequences, often articulating the grids, graphs, and geometric axes that form the paintings' skeleton.
The Commodus paintings were first exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in March 1964, appearing before an American audience still in the thrall of Pop art and Minimalism. In this context, Twombly's messy and esoteric Commodus paintings seemed severely out of place and out of date. They attracted scathing reviews, which tellingly focused on Twombly's absence from the New York art scene, implying his abandonment of the United States and carrying the distinctly chauvinistic subtext that these paintings had been imported from "old Europe." Given their intrinsic reliance on narrative and sequence, it can hardly have helped the situation that the Commodus paintings were installed in a jumbled and confused order at Castelli Gallery, leaving their overall trajectory undecipherable.
After this ignominious reception, the Commodus paintings, all unsold, were returned to exile in Italy. The controversy over the works and its aftermath had far-reaching repercussions on Twombly's painting and career, reverberating in his diminished output during the following two years and perhaps acting as a catalyst for his subsequent change in direction with the "blackboard" series. It was not until the summers of 1977 and 1978, while preparations were under way for a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, that Twombly would create another historical ensemble, Fifty Days at Iliam. When the Whitney retrospective opened in 1979, it was only the second time the Commodus paintings had been exhibited.
It would take many years for the true impact of the Commodus paintings to become apparent. Today, distanced from the rivalries and debates of the 1960s, the strength of Twombly's painting is no longer obscured by such polemics. The Commodus paintings-previously seen as peripheral or aberrant by Twombly's contemporaries-now clearly occupy a unique and central position in the history of postwar painting.
Source:
Nicholas Cullinan. "Cy Twombly." In Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection. Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Madrid: TF Editores, 2009.
A Venetian Covered Market by Oscar Björck, 1887,
Oscar Gustaf Björck ( January 1860 – December 1929) was a Swedish painter and a professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. He y settled in Stockholm in 1888 where he concentrated on portraits. Björck's earliest portraits were influenced by Georg von Rosen and his pictures from Skagen reflected the influence of Danish artists, especially Peder Severin Krøyer. In many of his characteristic works, he depicted the Swedish middle class of his times.
Björck was encouraged to go to Skagen in 1882 by P.S. Krøyer whom he had met in Paris and for whom he showed great admiration. He immediately became attached to the artists' community there, especially Michael Ancher, his wife Anna and Holger Drachmann. It was not just the Skagen landscape that attracted him but equally the warmth and hospitality of the artists themselves. Björck spent several summers there, completing some of his best paintings under the influence of Krøyer and the French Naturalism movement.
How to Build a Rust Belt Art Boom
MARK BYRNES
AUG 9, 2018
Aaron Ott, the first-ever curator of public art at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, talks about leading an uncommon cultural initiative across Western New York.
As the director of the Helsinki Art Museum, which is owned and operated by city government, Janne Sirén was required to provide art for the streets and parks of the Finnish capital. So when he moved to Buffalo, New York, in 2013 to become the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, he asked to meet with their public art curator.
They didn’t have one. Most U.S. museums don’t.
Sirén quickly changed that, hiring Aaron Ott, who had previously worked on art projects for various Chicago-area institutions, as the first-ever curator for the Albright-Knox’s public art initiative. The 156-year-old museum is now five years into an ambitious program that’s been injecting life into the Western New York region’s parks, neighborhoods, buildings, and other infrastructure through paint, plastic, steel, cloth, and whatever else their international cast of commissioned artists want to work with.
Buffalo isn’t exactly known as a hotbed for adventurous contemporary public art—at least not since Green Lightning, an infamous downtown installation that drew the ire of then-mayor Jimmy Griffin in 1984 for its perceived vulgarity before being dismantled and relocated to Chicago. But Ott’s team has already delivered a few instant hits. Casey Riordan Millard’s Shark Girl sits on a bench by the city’s Inner Harbor, accommodating selfie-seekers from across the region. New “emotional wayfinding” signs by Stephen Powers (a.k.a. “Espo”) tap into the region’s love-hate relationship with itself and are sure to fill up local Instagram feeds. Robert Indiana’s Cor-Ten steel NUMBERS ONE through ZEROprovide photogenic pop art in the verdant Outer Harbor while the museum itself hosts a retrospective on the recently deceased artist.
But the program, funded with city, county, and private money, stretches well beyond Buffalo’s most visited parts. In a city neatly segregated by its street grid, murals by London-raised Shantell Martin and Wrocław-based Wojciech Kołacz bring contemporary, internationally identifiable murals to the city’s East Side—the hub of black culture in today’s Buffalo, laced with the lingering traces of the Polish community that has mostly resettled in the suburbs. Closer to Main Street, four local artists have transformed a bus depot wall into a tribute to 28 civil rights leaders. And in a section of the West Side that has been the center of Buffalo’s Hispanic and Latinx community since the 1960s, a mural by artist and activist Betsy Casañas celebrates the neighborhood’s identity.
CityLab recently caught up with Ott to talk about the origin of the program, the planning behind each commission, and the power of public art to change the community conversation in Buffalo.
So this is for forever?
That’s my hope! The Albright-Knox, it’s such a big part of Buffalo. We’re the sixth-oldest museum in the country. Period. We’re the oldest museum dedicated to modern and contemporary work. We’re essentially the oldest museum in America that’s not encyclopedic, so people are really familiar with us as a cultural beacon. But the public art initiative is now only on its fourth year. In the long history of the institution, we’ve started something that’s only taken up a wee little bit of it, but people have responded well to it so far.
It’s been humbling to see how excited the public is for the work we’re doing. Since we have a campus expansion coming up, my hope is that during the construction period we can be more active in the community by having great art outside the museum’s walls.
We have great partners, which is critical. It’s not just about relying on other institutions or individuals to help us manage the work—we also share financial obligations. Placing the Robert Indiana numbers at the Outer Harbor was larger than my annual budget. Having the assistance of a number of people in the community—in this instance, the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation—to help make that financially feasible allows us to do the kind of work that we’re really excited about.
Besides Helsinki, are there other case studies you looked at for public art programs?
It’s a bit novel for a museum to be doing this in the States. There are museums that have programs that present as public. Newfields in Indianapolis has 100 acres of space that serve as a garden of sorts for sculptures. The Walker in Minneapolis has a newly expanded sculpture garden and a big hill that they program with performances. There are places like the High Line and anything Creative Time and the Public Art Fund have done, which aren’t necessarily museum-affiliated projects but are museum quality.
There are all kinds of different models to do something like this, but we took what we liked and what we thought could be applied to our own situation. We wanted to figure out how to craft a public-private partnership using the assets and expertise of this museum, not just in terms of the collection but the people we have and our relationships with the art world. It’s a network that’s been developed over a century and a half. You can’t create that from whole cloth.
When did public art start appearing?
I got here in April 2014. Because the Public Art Initiative didn’t exist yet, one of my first tasks was to go out in the community and meet stakeholders, individuals, and organizations that wanted to partner with us, because that was going to be the only way we could make it as successful and broad-based as we wanted it to be. Through those conversations we established how we might want to begin. It took a couple of months to figure it out.
There were a couple pieces that we launched all at once. In late August and early September of 2014 we placed a couple of things that were concurrent with each other. We did Matthew Hoffman’s You Are Beautiful project, which included 44 billboards placed throughout Erie and Niagara counties as well as a sticker campaign. We also had a temporary, performance-based mural with a Providence group called Tape Art where people from the public would come and meet the artists and build it with us on the facade of the Central Library
The Loing at Moret, Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley ( October 30 1839 – January 29 1899) was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air (i.e., outdoors). He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)