Et la Renaissance créa l'art

Elisa de Halleux sur Edouard Pommier, Comment l'art devient l'Art (Gallimard, 540 p., 45 €), au Figaro (21.06.2007) :

Comment l'art devient l'Art dans l'Italie de la Renaissance : il ne s'agit pas ici d'une histoire de l'art qui envisagerait les oeuvres à partir du contexte culturel, politique et socio-économique de l'époque, ni d'une histoire des artistes, de leurs ambitions et de leurs désirs, de leurs trajectoires personnelles. Il s'agit bien plutôt de l'histoire du « cortège » qui, à l'image du catafalque de Michel-Ange, entoure et accompagne le développement de la production artistique - autrement dit, de l'invention « d'un ensemble complexe de textes et d'images, de monuments et d'institutions, [...] qui envahit les marges du fait artistique proprement dit et qui aide les contemporains à reconnaître sa spécificité ». Car l'art ne s'incarne pas seulement dans une fresque, un retable, un groupe sculpté. « L'art, c'est aussi, parfois, une valeur ajoutée aux oeuvres d'art et à leurs créateurs. » Cette transformation de l'art en Art s'élabore à travers un ensemble de phénomènes parallèles. En plaçant Giotto parmi les hommes illustres de la cité de Florence, Boccace reconnaît aux artistes le statut d'acteurs essentiels de l'histoire. Ce changement se prolonge au quattrocento par l'éclosion d'un discours sur la création artistique. C'est à cette période qu'apparaissent les premières biographies d'artistes, tandis que, grâce à l'humaniste et architecte Alberti, naît la théorie des arts. Le peintre est désormais défini comme un savant, détenteur d'une vaste culture, et les arts plastiques, longtemps relégués du côté des arts dits « mécaniques », sont peu à peu élevés au rang d'arts libéraux. Au XVI^e siècle enfin, l'artiste et écrivain toscan Vasari s'adonne, dans ses Vies des meilleurs peintres, sculpteurs et architectes italiens, à la tâche colossale d'écrire l'histoire des artistes italiens. Ce faisant, il désire surpasser Pline l'Ancien, qui avait, lui, retracé l'évolution de la peinture et de la sculpture grecques. L'histoire de l'art est bien « une renaissance à l'intérieur de la Renaissance ».

Interview with Yoko Ono

"All She Is Saying: Yoko Ono's Enduring Feminist Message" by Jessica Dawson at Washington Post (22.04.2007).

Continue reading "Interview with Yoko Ono"

L'érotisme rêvé de Klossowski

Par Philippe Dagen au Monde (13.04.2007).

"Pierre Klossowski, tableaux vivants", Galerie d'art graphique du Centre Pompidou, place Georges-Pompidou, Paris-4e. Mo Rambuteau, RER Châtelet- Les Halles. Tél. : 01-44-78-12-33. Du mercredi au lundi, de 11 heures à 21 heures. Jusqu'au 4 juin. 10 €.

Continue reading "L'érotisme rêvé de Klossowski"

Sol LeWitt Dies

From The NY Times (09.04.2007).

Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Susanna Singer, a longtime associate.

LeWitt Installation.

Atget, l'artisan cache un artiste

Par Michel Guerrin au Monde (30.03.2007).

"Atget, une rétrospective". Bibliothèque nationale de France, site Richelieu. 58, rue de Richelieu, Paris-2^e. M° Palais-Royal. Tél. : 01-53-79-59-59. Du mardi au samedi, de 10 heures à 19 heures ; dimanche, de 12 heures à 19 heures. 7 € et 5 €. Jusqu'au 1^er juillet.
Catalogue, éd. BNF/Hazan, 288 p., 260 photos, 45 €.

Continue reading "Atget, l'artisan cache un artiste"

Au contact d'Atget

Par Ange-Dominique Bouzet à Libération (28.03.2007).

Atget, une rétrospective Bibliothèque nationale de France, site Richelieu, 58, rue de Richelieu, 75002. Jusqu'au 1er juillet. 7 et 5 euros. Tél. 01 53 79 59 59. Publication homonyme, 260 illustrations, 288 pages. BNF/Hazan. 45 euros.

Continue reading "Au contact d'Atget"

Yoshu Chikanobu

From Art Daily (22.03.2007) :

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Yoshu Chikanobu (1838-1912) was a popular artist in the Meiji period, the era from 1868 to 1912 when Japan underwent rapid westernization and the emperor was reinstated as ruler. Like many other print designers of these years, Chikanobu worked with subjects of traditional Japanese woodblock prints, such as actors, courtesans, famous sites, and beautiful women, while at first reflecting western conventions in art and picturing current events, such as the Saigo Rebellion and various battles of the Sino-Japanese War. In fact, his prints are frequent illustrations in history books about the Meiji era. However, he later changed his approach and embraced more traditional themes stemming from his recollections of life in old Edo, before the modern period ushered in by the Meiji emperor.

The new touring exhibition Chikanobu: Modernity and Nostalgia in Japanese Prints (to be presented March 23-May 13 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center), centers upon several areas of the artist's interest, including early works, kabuki theater, current events and modernization, traditional views, famous sites and festivals, virtuous conduct, famous warriors (men and women), the Sino-Japanese War, and beautiful women. The exhibition comprises nearly sixty woodblock prints and one painting, including individual sheets, numerous triptychs, and several series, all from the large collection of Chikanobu prints in the permanent art collection of Scripps College (Claremont, CA).

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Le thé et le tao

Un essai français d'Okakura Kakuzô (ou Tenshin) est publié par La revue des ressources (22.03.2007). C'est le second chapitre du Livres du thé. Qui l'a traduit?

Sonna : Bodily Finesse

Birgit Sonna on Conrat Meit at Sign and Sight (05.03.2007) :

In the central room, Conrat Meit's delicate statuettes are hoisted up to eye-level in their window-boxes, like a festive show of trophies. And while surveying the body's smooth contours, carved in boxwood, bronze or alabaster, often draped in Biblical robes, one comes to an ever clearer understanding of the highly sensual quality that the Berlin museum impresario Wilhelm von Bode was referring to when he wrote of the sculptor in 1901: "Naturalism as the representation of the nude, in particular the illusory reproduction of skin, has never been achieved as well by another German artist."...

Meiji-Art from the Khalili Collection and Japonism Opens

From Artdaily.org (09.03.2007) :

KREMS, AUSTRIA.- As its first major show of 2007, the Kunsthalle Krems presents an outstanding and comprehensive exhibit of Japanese art of the Meiji-era as well as European Japonism which followed in its wake. These two parallel phenomena are in the focus of attention of “Japan”, showcasing the incredible craftsmanship of Japanese Ukyo-e and applied arts while carving out its close ties to the roots of European and particularly, Austrian modernity.

The exhibit features over 100 objects from the famous Khalili collection, the world’s largest and most diverse collection of Japanese Meiji art. These works, which were all made during the reign of the Emperor Meiji who ruled from 1868 to 1912, will be complemented by paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Egon Schiele and other outstanding artists who were immensely influenced by the stylistic implications and themes of Japanese art.

Kunsthalle Krems.

Duchamp : L'insolence de la liberté

Pr Josyane Savigneau au Monde (08.03.2007).

MARCEL DUCHAMP de Judith Housez. Grasset, 540 p., 21,90 €.

MARCEL DUCHAMP. La vie à crédit de Bernard Marcadé. Flammarion, "Grandes Biographies", 608 p., 27 €.

Le livre de Judith Housez a reçu le prix de la biographie du magazine Le Point.

Continue reading "Duchamp : L'insolence de la liberté"

Assouline : Peter Beard l'Africain

Un beau essai à La Républiaue des livres (06.03.2007). -- « Ce que j’aime, c’est la rencontre avec un sujet. Cartier-Bresson ? Trop académique et trop ennuyeux. Richard Avedon m’emmerdait avec sa dévotion pour son maître. Je ne crois pas à l’instant décisif. J’appuie sans cesse sur le bouton jusqu’à ce que je trouve. Il n’est pas de plus grand artiste que le hasard. »

Esthétique et sémiotique : interpréter l’art contemporain

Par Éric Trudel à Fabula Acta (02.03.2007). Sur Nicole Everaert-Desmedt, Interpréter l’art contemporain. La sémiotique peircienne appliquée aux œuvres de Magritte, Klein, Duras, Wenders, Chàvez, Parant et Corillon, Bruxelles, De Boeck, coll. « Culture et communication », 2006, 318 p. :

Cet écueil, l'entreprise d’Everaert-Desmedt l’évite justement en construisant son modèle explicatif, heuristique et global de la communication artistique. Celui-ci, en effet, vaut transversalement pour différents genres hétérogènes de la production artistique contemporaine et permet de dégager, au fur et à mesure de son établissement et de son enrichissement à travers les analyses concrètes qu’offre l’auteure, un schéma commun pour un corpus de pièces diversifiées. Ainsi, dans un constant aller-retour de la théorie à la pratique, l'auteure développe et teste ce modèle sur des productions d'artistes tels que Magritte (peinture figurative), Klein (monochrome), les Nouveaux Réalistes (texte de déclaration constitutive du groupe), Duras (littérature), Wenders (cinéma), Chàvez (photographie), Parant (arts plastiques et écriture) et Corillon (intervention artistique).

Peirce.org.

Pons : La vague d'Hokusai en vogue à Tokyo

Par Philippe Pons au Monde (24.02.2007).

Continue reading "Pons : La vague d'Hokusai en vogue à Tokyo"

Hirschhorn and Deleuze

From Jorg von Uthmann's report "Paris Galleries Show Naked Men, Pierced Dummies, Beheaded Owls" :

The Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn, 60, who lives in Paris, has never been a friend of discreet statements. His installation "Concretion Re" fills the Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 Rue Charlot, to the brim.

"Re" stands for repetition and event -- two terms central to the thinking of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925- 95). "Man is a repetition between two events", says an explanatory essay which the visitor is urged to peruse. "In moments of grace, he will be an event between two repetitions."

Why Bloomberg?

Tintoretto : Venetian Brass

By Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker (12.02.2007 Issue). :

“What is a Tintoretto?” the art historian Robert Echols asks in the show’s catalogue. The answer might be almost anything touched with genius and a strange, thorny, dashing humor. Tintoretto was reported to be a witty man who never smiled. What is his “Susannah and the Elders” (1555-56) if not a grand lark? A luxuriant, glowing nude sits outdoors, surrounded by a glittering still-life of jewelry and implements of beauty, and is ogled by dirty old men (one pokes his bald pate, at ground level, practically out of the canvas) from behind a hedge that forms part of a corridor-like recession into the far background. There are distant little ducks, and the rear end of a stag. But the picture’s form is too disorienting to sustain any particular response, including amusement. The backstage space outside the hedge ignores the unity of the central perspective, bespeaking a world that rolls away in all directions, indifferent to pocket realms of mythic anecdote. The effect is stirring and confusing. “Who is Tintoretto’s viewer?” strikes me as the really compelling question. No other great artist before modern times, in which shifting contingency affects every enterprise, seems less certain of whom he is addressing, and why. It might as well be you or me as some cinquecento ingrate, and, if we happen to think of people we know who may be interested, the artist encourages us to contact them without delay.

Ce temps où l'art prenait Duchamp

Par Elisa de Halleux au Figaro (08.02.2007).

Marcel Duchamp de Judith Housez Grasset, 544 p., 21,90 euros.

Continue reading "Ce temps où l'art prenait Duchamp"

Japanese Nanga Masters at Philadelphia Museum of Art

From Art Daily (07.02.2007) :

PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an exhibition of works by the 18h century Japanese master of ink painting Ike Taiga (1723-1776) and his wife Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727-1784). The first exhibition in the United States to focus on Taiga, it will bring together key works from Japanese and Western collections and provide an in-depth look at the major Japanese artist of the 18th century. His inventiveness and endless experimentation fueled the emergence of the Nanga School and laid the groundwork for the multiple paths that Japanese artists would follow in succeeding generations. On view from May 1 through July 22, 2007, Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush will contain over 200 exceptional and rarely seen screens, handscrolls, hanging scrolls, as well as album and fan paintings by Taiga and Gyokuran. Among them will be designated Japanese National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, several of which will be seen outside Japan for the first time. Philadelphia will be the exhibition’s only venue.

Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Ptolemy Dean : Sir John Soane and London

Book description at Lund Humphries :

The great architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837) carried out over four hundred recorded architectural commissions in London. Although many never resulted in a finished building, these little-known commissions formed the backbone of his life and practice and were the key to its development. Sir John Soane and London pulls together this vast archive of work for the first time to illustrate Soane's remarkable and extensive involvement in the fabric of the city.

Soane's work in London falls naturally into four areas: London townhouses, surveyorships, commissions for monuments, mausolea and churches, and public-works commissions. Soane's London townhouse practice was the most substantial, and the architect often had to act more like a modern-day estate agent, gathering and arranging properties for his clients in the hope that lucrative architectural commissions would follow. Surveyorships, particularly the long-destroyed Bank of England, provided Soane with a regular stream of work which he could use to develop his architectural themes, and informed the important public-works commissions in Westminster which came at the end of Soane's life. There was also a surprising amount of church and mausoleum work. All of these projects fed into Soane's wider desire to give London the buildings he felt worthy of a major European capital.

Sir John Soane and London is organized in the same way as Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (Ashgate, 1999), with a sequence of eight case studies on important surviving Soane London buildings followed by a fully updated gazetteer of Soane's known London projects. The buildings are illustrated by newly commissioned black-and-white photographs by Martin Charles and the author's own watercolour drawings. Combined, Sir John Soane and London and Sir John Soane and the Country Estate provide the most accurate and complete record to date of Soane's work.

Gary Hill : Le corps est le matériau central de mon travail puisqu'il est toujours avec moi

Par Henri-François Debailleux à Libération (03.02.2007).

Continue reading "Gary Hill : Le corps est le matériau central de mon travail puisqu'il est toujours avec moi"

Bevilacqua La Masa Presents Pierre Klossowski : Bafometto

From Art Daily (30.01.2007) :

VENICE, ITALY.- The Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation is proud to exhibit to the public for the first time an important moment in the collaboration and friendship between Carmelo Bene and Pierre Klossowski. The work encompasses the complete series – 17 drawings and 4 studies –Klossowski made for a comedy based on Bafometto, for which he also wrote the script. Carmelo Bene intended to stage the work at the Venice Biennale of Theatre, of which he was then director. The dream, however, went unrealized due to the sudden decision by this Italian histrionic figure to abandon the work.

Following celebrations of Klossowski by the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and prior to that by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the BLM of Venice is proud to present this compact group of unpublished drawings. Mystic and religious breath, fear of homosexuality and perverse erotic desire, homage to Sade and Foucault who were two diverse masters of the liberation of power and of its chains, and youth and suicide are a few of the central themes of this exhibition.

Early photos offer rare glimpse of fading world

By Brad Quinn at The Daily Yomiuri (27.01.2007). Reviews Terry Bennett, Photography in Japan: 1853-1912, Tuttle, $65.00 :

Although photography in Japan was initially dominated by Westerners, the book also charts the development of Japanese photographers such as Kazumasa Ogawa, whom Bennett calls, "the most complete Japanese photographer of the Meiji era."

Kazumasa's contributions to the field were numerous: founding the Photographic Society of Japan in 1889, mastering Western technical innovations, and introducing Japanese art to a broad international audience via his images.

Bennett's book undoubtedly succeeds in its stated aims to give an up-to-date picture of Japanese photo-history research, provide biographical details on early photographers and facilitate further research efforts, but based simply on its own merits as a work of art and unparalleled visual survey of 19th-century Japan, Photography in Japan is one heavy book that's hard to put down.

Kazumasa Ogawa's most popular photo is the portrait of Sokeki Natsume, I guess. Calotype?

Les estampes de Monet

L'Express presents Monet's collection of Japanese Ukiyoe stamps (Flash movie).

Sebastian Smee : Against the Grain

By Sebastian Smee at The Australian (27.01.2007). On three painters in Weimar Germany : Otto Dix, Christian Schad, and George Grosz.

Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s.

Danto : Surface Appeal

Arthur C. Danto reflects on Marden and Manet, Greenberg's conception of "Modernism," at The Nation (29.01.2007 Issue).

Brice Marden Retrospective and Manet and the Execution of Maximilian.

Also see "Soldiers of Misfortune" (on Manet) by John Elderfield at The Guardian (06.01.2007).

A Return Trip to a Faraway Place Called Underground

By Holland Cotter at The NY Times (26.01.2007). On Wallace Berman :

Time is forever. Love is the goal. Art is what you are, not what you do. Many young artists and poets in California in the 1950s and ’60s felt and lived this way. And a traveling band of them, trailing a cloud of marijuana-fragrant air, has arrived at the Grey Art Gallery in “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle.”

The mostly dense paintings, drawings and collages in the show make visual sense in New York today. Updated versions of their type have flooded galleries in the last few years. Yet the throwaway, amateur-proud spirit that propelled the older work is largely absent in the new. It belongs to another time and place, with a different set of possibilities and necessities, to a small imploded star, now far, far away, called Underground.

The artist Wallace Berman (1926-76) lived on that star. His name still rings only a faint bell. Actually, he was something of a mystery even to his friends, who were legion and seem to have loved him deeply. And as the show, a kind of scrapbook of art and ephemera, makes clear, three decades after his death he is well worth getting to know.

Innovator and Master, Side by Side

By Michael Kimmelman on Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martin Munkacsi at The NY Times (19.01.2007) :

He was born Marton Mermelstein in 1896. As a teenager in Budapest, he wrote gossip, news and poems for local newspapers and magazines, and to illustrate them picked up a camera. By the mid-1920s he had become a prominent photographer in Hungary.

He favored scenes of daily life, absorbing avant-garde ideas about odd angles and abstract compositions. His sports photographs epitomized his special gift for action and movement: capturing a soccer ball just as it neared a goalie’s outstretched hands or a motorcyclist at the instant he splashed through a pool of water.

In 1928 he moved to Berlin, where the opportunities were better, and traveled the world on assignment for Ullstein, not just to Africa but also to Brazil, Algeria and Egypt. He made bird’s-eye views from zeppelins above the ocean and close-ups of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever in Rio de Janeiro.

Interesting. The first time I knew Munkacsi.

Warhol : POPism

From Metapsychology, Aakash Singh reviews Andy Warhol's two books : POPism (Harcourt, 2006) and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Harcourt, 1975).

The Chapman Brothers : Welcome to Hell

By Sue Hubbard at New Statesman (15.01.2007 Issue) :

Like Laurel and Hardy, Flanagan and Allen, Gil bert and George, the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman realised that forming a duo is a good career move. The audience gets two for the price of one and there is always someone around to act as a foil. The self-appointed bad boys of British art, they came to prominence with the advent of the notorious Young British Artists. Now they have produced Tate Liverpool's "Bad Art for Bad People", and the more they shock us, like pigs wallowing in their own muck, the happier they are. "We are sore-eyed scopophiliac oxymorons . . . our discourse offers a benevolent contingency of concepts, a discourse of end-of-sale remnants, a rationalistic hotbed of sober categories . . ." declares a mud-spattered manifesto plastered on a wall at the Tate. But what are they really up to, with their infantile, penile-nosed mannequins and their obsessive scenarios of death-camp horror made up of myriad tiny plastic bodies, like those used by small boys for Airfix models?

Simon Schama : Power of Art

John McDonald reviews Simon Schama, Power of Art (BBC Books), at SMH (06.01.2007) :

Power of Art feels as if it has been written in one breathless burst of enthusiasm, in a prose style that crackles like electricity. Schama sets out to investigate the creation of eight great works of art via a rapid jaunt through the biographies of eight great artists and the stages that led up to that eureka moment. "When they happened, in a bolt of illumination," he writes, "the works tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver."

So the stakes are high - Schama wants us to understand how a work of art may change one's life, how it can make us see the world as we have never seen it before. He also wants us to realise how visionary these artists were, for their careers are punctuated by spectacular failures. Those failures were sometimes the fault of an uncomprehending, hidebound audience, but were often due to the difficulties of artistic temperament.

The Line of Beauty

Eric Griffiths reviews Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Architectural Sculpture : The Charles Eliot Norton lectures, edited by Linda Seidel University of Chicago Press, 256pp, £25.50, at New Statesman (08.01.2007 Issue) :

Schapiro began his 1967 Norton lectures at Harvard, published here for the first time, with this multinational outburst of carving that gave to the churches "the kind of speaking face which comes from sculpture". There had been nothing like it for a long time, because, as he pointed out, the Romans broke with the Greek habit of putting statues around their temples, and saved their monumental energies for triumphal arches and other such stately boasting.

Schapiro was keen to bring out how responsive these religious works were to the world they faced. Romanesque sculptures on exterior walls appear "neither as ornament nor as theological illustration but as 'argument'"; they are conversation as well as conversion pieces. In them, the Church is "in a posture which relates to conflict, to conviction, to persuasion, to threat, to the imaging of consequences", and those who look at them are "people free to move, to regard things according to their own inclination or position at the moment, and to shift their point of view"

Wings of Desire

By Fiona MacCarthy at The Guardian (23.12.2006). On Edward Burne-Jones and the golden-haired angel.

On Segantini's suicide

Ophélie rounds up Giovanni Segantini (a fin-de-siècle Italian painter) and his "unconcious death" : Part 1 and Part 2. (to be continued)

Also see Hans H. Hofstätter, Symbolismus und die Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, Du Mont Verlag, 1965. This book inspires you much, I guess, but it may be out of print.
 

L'hôpital de Lille régénéré par les fruits zen de Katsuhito Nishikawa

Par Geoffroy Deffrennes au Monde (20.12.2006).

Continue reading "L'hôpital de Lille régénéré par les fruits zen de Katsuhito Nishikawa"

Les tensions lascives de Pierre Klossowski

Par Elisabeth Chardon au Temps (21.12.2006) :

Alors que son cadet, Balthazar Klossowski, dit Balthus, exposait déjà en 1929 à Zurich à 21 ans à peine, Pierre Klossowski, né en 1905, attendra encore une quarantaine d'années pour se consacrer au dessin, à la peinture et à la sculpture, exposant d'abord, encouragé par Alberto Giacometti et André Masson, dans l'ancien atelier parisien de son frère. Auparavant son chemin passera par le séminaire et surtout par l'écriture romanesque et l'essai.

Lors d'une de ses premières expositions, à la Galerie Benador, à Genève, en 1972, il s'exprimait sur ses dessins à la mine de plomb, reprenant des personnages et des situations de ses livres. «Mes livres n'étant qu'une transcription de motifs perçus et vécus d'abord en tant que tableaux, que figures muettes – tout ce que j'en avais cédé à l'expression écrite, il m'avait fallu le récupérer comme appartenant primitivement au mutisme de la vision pour le communiquer dans son état premier» (in Tableaux vivants, Le Promeneur, 2005). Pour lui, la couleur, récemment utilisée, restait «entièrement subordonnée au caractère scénique du tableau – notamment à la dramaturgie du corps dénudé».

A Painter of Our Time

By Barry Scheabsky at The Nation (01.01.2007 Issue). On Diego Velázquez :

When Italian Baroque artist Luca Giordano declared Las Meninas "the theology of painting" in 1692, he was paying an extravagant compliment, "by which he meant to convey," as Giordano's friend and Velázquez's biographer Antonio Palomino put it, "that just as theology is superior to all other branches of knowledge, so is this picture the greatest example of painting." But just as a passage from Pierre Menard's Don Quixote is, according to Jorge Luis Borges, "almost infinitely richer" than the original by Cervantes, so this phrase becomes infinitely richer if we imagine it being pronounced by a later admirer like Édouard Manet, who certainly did consider Velázquez the greatest of all painters. A visit to the exhibition of the Spanish master's work at the National Gallery in London, on view through January 21, makes it hard to disagree with Manet, even despite a big handicap: Of necessity, the show lacks many of the artist's most celebrated works--including Las Meninas. Most remain at home in Madrid, as the great portrait of Pope Innocent X does in Rome. Still, the Prado, along with other institutions and a few very fortunate private collections, has been generous with its loans, and since London already domiciles the largest concentration of Velázquez's works outside Spain, the National Gallery has been able to round up forty-six paintings, about a third of the surviving oeuvre, to give a powerful précis of this astonishing career.

Download PDF file (34.0K)

Pierre Klossowski and Hans Bellmer

By David Markus at The Brooklyn Rail (December 2006) :

Pierre Klossowski and Hans Bellmer are two twentieth century figures whose controversial artistic production has limited their acceptance by the general public especially when compared with the international reputations of their immediate contemporaries. Paradoxically, Klossowski (1905-2001) was the consummate ‘insider.’ His brother was the painter Balthus, his early mentors included Rilke and Andre Gide, and his philosophical writings and erotic fiction would eventually influence such intellectual supermen as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. However, Klossowski’s unusual sexual predilections and radical individualism have more or less confined him to the realm of esoterica. Bellmer (1902-1975), for his part, operated on the margins of major movements like the New Objectivity and Surrealism. His work was not exhibited in the United States until 1975, and as late as the mid-nineties, prior to the publication of Peter Webb’s definitive exposé, he had yet to receive major notice outside of France and Germany. In the past ten years there has been a surge of interest in both of these artists. Their double billing at Whitechapel Art Gallery this past November—the first major retrospective for either one—presented an incomparable feast for the Sadean imagination.

Dada ou la boussole folle de l’anarchisme

Par Laurent Margantin à La Revue des Ressources (18.12.2006). Le premier paragraphe :

Si l’anarchisme est avant tout l’affirmation des potentialités individuelles - contre la société bourgeoise, contre l’Etat, contre toutes les formes d’aliénation collective -, alors il faut commencer par reconnaître avant le dadaisme, dans la littérature allemande, ce qui a pu annoncer cette avant-garde que l’on associe automatiquement avec l’anarchisme. Cela commence avec Fichte et les romantiques allemands, avec l’affirmation d’un sujet autonome et absolument libre de s’auto-créer : « Avec l’être libre, conscient de soi, apparaît en même temps tout un monde - à partir du néant ». Le « Plus ancien programme de l’idéalisme allemand » - dont l’auteur est soit Hölderlin, soit Hegel, soit Schelling (plus vraisemblablement Schelling), continue en démolissant la légitimité de l’Etat : « Seul ce qui est l’objet de la liberté s’appelle Idée. Nous devons donc dépasser également l’Etat ! - Car tout Etat est obligé de traiter les hommes libres comme un rouage mécanique ; et c’est ce qu’il ne doit pas ; il faut donc qu’il arrête. » Fondé sur l’idée de liberté, ce « Programme » est sans doute le premier manifeste anarchiste, bien loin du culte de l’Etat auquel on associe habituellement le romantisme allemand et la culture germanique. En son fond, le premier romantisme est anarchisant et annonce le dadaisme, il est même foncièrement provocateur, comme il ressort de ce texte de Friedrich Schlegel, dont les intonations sont dadaistes (voire nietzschéennes) avant l’heure : « L’homme domestique tient sa formation du troupeau où il a été nourri, et surtout du divin berger ; lorsqu’il parvient à maturité, il s’établit et il renonce alors, jusqu’à finir par se pétrifier, au fou désir de se mouvoir librement - ce qui ne l’empêche pas bien souvent, sur ses vieux jours, de se mettre à jouer les caricatures multicolores. Certes, ce n’est pas tout d’abord sans peine ni sans mal que le bourgeois est ajusté et tourné pour être transformé en machine. Mais pour peu qu’il soit devenu un chiffre dans la somme politique, il a fait son bonheur et l’on peut, à tous points de vue, considérer qu’il est accompli dès lors que, de personne humaine qu’il était, il s’est métamorphosé en personnage. Et la chose vaut tout autant pour la masse que pour les individus. Ils se nourrissent, se marient, font des enfants, vieillissent, et laissent après eux des enfants qui vivent à nouveau de la même manière, laissent des enfants semblables - et ainsi de suite à l’infini ». Et Schlegel d’ajouter une sentence implacable : « Ne vivre que pour vivre, telle est la véritable source de la trivialité ».

Bacon à plein tubes

Par Gérard Lefort à Libération (07.12.2006).

David Sylvester, Francis Bacon à nouveau, traduit de l'anglais par Jean Frémon, André Dimanche éditeurs, 267pp., 48 €.

Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon. La Chambre claire, texte français de Daniel De Bruycker Actes Sud 225pp., 58 €.

Continue reading "Bacon à plein tubes"

L’Orient régénérateur

Par Régis Poulet à La Revue des Ressources (04.12.2006).

Rake's Progress

By Lewis Kachur at ArtNet Magazine (05.12.2006). On Brian O'Doherty.

Frocks and Blocks

By Judith Thurman at The New Yorker (04.12.2006 Issue). "Fashion meets architecture in Los Angeles" :

Most of the architects in “Skin + Bones” emerged at about the same time, the early nineteen-eighties—a period of experiments with “deconstruction.” Jacques Derrida coined the term in his writing on linguistics, and parallel essays in the show’s catalogue—on architecture, by Hodge, and on fashion, by Patricia Mears, of the Fashion Institute of Technology—treat that pliable theory as the show’s intellectual bridge. As Mears notes, references to “deconstructed” clothing appeared in fashion criticism in the early nineteen-nineties, to describe the next, and predominantly Belgian, wave of iconoclasm—in particular, Martin Margiela’s fusion of structure and ornament, and his mythical vestiary of mutant garments. Like Kawakubo, and, indeed, most of the participants in “Skin + Bones,” he dismantled, ruptured, fractured, or fragmented, then reconfigured, not only clothing or buildings but the traditional logic behind them, which suddenly ceased to seem inevitable.

The Witch as Muse

Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse : Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005 :

Occult topics have long fascinated artists, and the subject of witches—their imagined bodies and fantastic rituals—was a popular one for painters and printmakers in early modern Europe. Focusing on several artists in depth, Linda C. Hults probes the historical and theoretical contexts of their work to examine the ways witches were depicted and the motivations for those depictions.

While studying the work of such artists as Dürer, Baldung, Jacques de Gheyn II, and Goya, Hults discerns patterns suggesting that the imagery of witchcraft served both as an expression of artistic license and as a tool of self-promotion for the artists. These imagined images of witches demonstrated fertile imaginations and were designed to catch the attention of powerful and important patrons. As witchcraft was being debated in political and intellectual centers, these images of witches were likely to be seen by those in power. Dürer's early engravings of witnesses made in the wake of the Malleus maleficarum of 1487 were crucial in linking the seductive or aged female form with the dangers of witchcraft. The polarized idea of gender pervaded many aspects of early modern culture, including art theory. As the deluded female witch embodied the abuse of imagination and fantasy, so the male artist presented himself as putting those faculties to productive and reasoned use.

Because there was little agreement about what constituted witchcraft and how society could best control the phenomenon, the images were viewed differently in various political, social, and religious contexts, but the aim of the artist was always calculated to further his career by the portrayal of witches.

Linda C. Hults is Professor of Art History at The College of Wooster. She is the author of The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History.

Wow, I didn't know that such a great book was published last year.

Art contemporain, années Zero

Par Philippe Dagen au Monde (24.11.2006).

Continue reading "Art contemporain, années Zero"

Edward Hopper : Cubist in Disguise?

By Donald Kuspit at Artnet.com (22.11.2006).

Nobuyoshi Araki : Intimate Photography

By C.B. Liddell at The Japan Times (23.11.2006).

Controversial architect Koolhaas discusses future of cities

By Stephanie Schorow at MIT News Office (22.11.2006) :

Koolhaas' MIT lecture was intended to focus on Lagos. But shorn of his slides, he answered questions about his work there. In response to a question by Alexander d'Hooghe, assistant professor of architecture and urban design, Koolhaas detailed his approach.

To avoid "tourism," he matched Harvard students with local students for research. He sought evidence of inhabitants' resiliency, finding that, for example, the huge slowdowns of traffic on highway cloverleafs fostered the creation of markets catering to bus passengers. While at first sight, the extreme poverty seems to show that Lagos is a "city in crisis," Koolhaas sees "self-regulating chaos" at work. Yet, he noted ruefully, as a result "we are accused of being completely free of human feeling."

This Is Not an Art Review

By Doug Harvey at LA Weekly (21.11.2006). On René Magritte.

Freud tops favourite artist poll

From BBC News (21.11.2006) :

Lucien Freud has topped a list of favourite artists in a survey of the UK artistic community.

He beat the likes of Rembrandt and Van Gogh - who also made the top ten - to become the artists' favourite artist.

Other modern day giants such as Howard Hodgkin and David Hockney also featured in the poll, carried out by The Great Art Fair.

Annie Leibovitz's reckless candor

By Sarah Karnasiewicz at The Salon (18.11.2006). — The renowned photographer's snapshots of her partner Susan Sontag and of her family, exhibited for the first time, are shocking in their intimacy -- but they should have stayed inside that shoe box.

The Body in Pain

By Arthur C. Danto on Fernando Botero at The Nation (27.11.2006 Issue).

Hans Bellmer and Pierre Klossowski

By Sally O'Reilly at Frieze.com (November 2006) :

The net of history appears to have closed around Hans Bellmer and Pierre Klossowski, lumping them together as ‘sensualists’, as it might be put in polite circles. Tangential and direct connections can be traced throughout their work and lives: both were associated with the Surrealists and the movement’s tactics of transgression; they also shared an obsession with erotica, especially the writings of the Marquis de Sade, and a preoccupation with Freudian psychoanalysis, seeing these discourses as modes of retaliation against Fascism. Odder, more direct connections can be dredged from their biographies too: for instance, Bellmer began exploring his obsession with dolls after a recommendation by doll-maker Lotte Pritzel to read Rainer Maria Rilke’s essay Puppen (Dolls, 1914); Rilke, meanwhile, was having an affair with Klossowski’s mother and apparently had some influence on his education too.

L'envers du décor

Par Nicolas Mavrikakis at Voir (26.10.2006). Sur Patrick Bérubé :

La petite salle de Circa est exhibée presque vide. Une photo montrant l'artiste se cachant derrière une étagère y est installée. Le visiteur est presque déçu. Mais une porte, laissée ouverte, et qui n'existe pas habituellement dans cette salle, semble nous inviter à aller voir ce qui s'y passe. Enfin on va connaître ce qui se trame dans les murs de la galerie... Là, la lumière intense de la salle d'exposition laisse place à un obscur petit local, sorte de placard de rangement ou d'entretien. Vous y retrouverez un évier avec de la vaisselle sale, des livres, un lit (avec un nounours), des boîtes en carton, des espaces de rangement et puis un passage dans le sol, sorte de tunnel menant on ne sait où... Qu'est-ce que ce lieu? Une chambre d'enfants, le studio d'un célibataire un peu pauvre et un peu gamin, un laboratoire pour y faire des expériences sur un être humain en captivité? Une ambiance un peu secrète et sombre y plane, atmosphère renforcée par (le son de) la pluie qui bat contre une fenêtre.

Jed Perl on Meyer Schapiro

TNR (30.10.2006 Issue).

Also see "A Tribute to Dr. Lillian Milgram Schapiro (1902–2006)" at The Brooklyn Rail (October 2006).

Meyer Schapiro, The Language of Forms: Lectures on Insular Manuscript Art, The Pierpont Morgan Library, 2005.

Les réponses érotiques de l’art préhistorique : un éclairage bataillien

By Régis Poulet at La Revue des Ressources (23.10.2006). On Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art.

Back to Barbarism

By Georg Seeßlen at Sign and Sight (19.10.2006). On Caravaggio.

Japonisme

What a wonderful weblog! Via del.icio.us.

Le mystère de l'intervalle

Par Olivier Cena à Télérama (07.10.2006). Robert Rauschenberg, “Combines (1953-1964)”, du 11 octobre 2006 au 15 janvier 2007, centre Pompidou, 75001 Paris.

Très en Klein

Par Gérard Lefort au Figaro (05.10.2006). Yves Klein Centre Pompidou, 75004. Jusqu'au 5 février 2007. Rens. : 01 44 78 14 63.

The other Michelangelo

By Richard Owen at The Times Online (03.10.2006) :

Antonioni (“Il Maestro”, as his admirers call him) turned 94 last week, and to celebrate, an exhibition in Rome, Silence in Colour, is showing more than 100 of his abstract paintings, sketches and sculptures to remind the world that, as well as his long career as a film director, with movies such as L’Avventura, Red Desert, L’Eclisse and Blow Up, he is also an artist.

La Nipponne nue qui choque Charleroi

Par Jean-Pierre Stroobants au Monde (27.09.2006).

Continue reading "La Nipponne nue qui choque Charleroi"

Arasse, pour le plaisir

Par Philippe Dagen au Monde (21.09.2006).

Continue reading "Arasse, pour le plaisir"

Huysmans, l'oeil et la plume

Par Philippe Dagen au Monde (21.09.2006).

Continue reading "Huysmans, l'oeil et la plume"

Abstrait de génie

By Xavier Lacavalerie at Télérama (26.08.2006) :

Rétrospective Kandinsky à la Tate Modern de Londres. Flux et vibrations, harmonies… l’artiste composait ses toiles à la manière d’un musicien.

L'art comme réponse au malaise social

By Bérénice Bailly at Le Monde (18.08.2006).

Continue reading "L'art comme réponse au malaise social"

Rossetti's 'Chelsea years'

By Angela Leighton at TLS (16.08.2006 Issue). Reviews Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Correspondence Volumes III-V, "The Chelsea Years, 1863-1872", edited by William E. Fredeman,.D. S. Brewer.

American Abstract

By Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker (31.07.2006 Issue).

Making It New

By Charles Simic at The NY Review of Books (10.08.2006 Issue). Reviews Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, Catalog of the exhibition by Leah Dickerman, with essays by Brigid Doherty, Dorothea Dietrich, Sabine T. Kriebel, Michael R. Taylor, Janine Mileaf, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, National Gallery of Art/DAP, 519 pp., $65.00; $40.00 (paper).

これは欲しいな。

L'ombre et les lumières

By Marc Fumaroli at Le Monde (20.07.2006).

Continue reading "L'ombre et les lumières"

All About Eva

By Arthur C. Danto at The Nation (17.07.2006 Issue).

Sound and Vision

By Gerard McBurney at The Guardian (24.06.2006). On Wassily Kandinsky, music and painting.

Also see Pierre Boulez, Le Pays fertile : Paul Klee  (Gallimard, 1989).

How Shall We Know Thee? Searching for Shakespeare's Likeness

By Grace Glueck at The NY Times (23.06.2006).

Rothko the writer

By Dushko Petrovich at The Boston Globe (18.06.2006). On Mark Rothko, Writings on Art (Yale, April).

Plagiarizing painter plummets from grace

Ryan Connell rounds up "the Wada case" at WaiWai (16.06.2006).

Au pied de la déesse bleue

Olivier Cena reports on Cézanne retrospective at Télérama (01.06.2006).

Le Jeu des arts

Maude Poissant reviews Matteo Majorano (dir.), Le jeu des arts (Bari, Éditions B.A. Graphis, 2005, 226 p.), at Acta Fabula (07.06.2006) :

Ce collectif franco-italien dirigé par Matteo Majorano rassemble les interventions de divers acteurs du milieu littéraire qui s’interrogent sur les rapports entre la littérature et les autres arts dans la production contemporaine. Bien que le recueil rassemble des textes en français et d’autres en italien, le présent compte rendu ne s’attardera qu’aux textes en français (des résumés des textes en italien sont disponibles (en français) à la fin de l’ouvrage). Les textes, accompagnés de reproductions de sculptures de Pierre Bergounioux et de photographies de Nicoletta Morolla, présentent donc des réflexions et des approches variées — analyse de corpus, entretiens avec des personnalités littéraires, réflexions sur le processus d’écriture — qui tentent à la fois de caractériser la production contemporaine du point de vue de l’espace qu’elle occupe (et qu’elle laisse) au sein des autres arts et de discerner les « variations historiques » qui la caractérisent. Ainsi, auteurs, chercheurs, et éditeurs mettent en commun de nouvelles considérations permettant de saisir le corpus français actuel et d’établir les prémisses d’une réflexion sur la perméabilité entre les différentes manifestations artistiques.

Japanese Artist Accused of Plagiarizing Italian Friend's Works

Japan Now & Then (04.06.2006) rounds up "the Wada case." Is it plagiarism or not? I think yes, and do you?

Australia's Wackiest Postmodernists

By James Franklin at MercatorNet (01.06.2006). Via Butterflies & Wheels.

Gallo's right ear

Ms. Ayako O'kubo sketches Vincent Gallo's right ear at Chokugen (27.05.2006). Compare with his profile.

I'll Be Your Mirror

By Arthur C. Danto at The Nation (01.05.2006 Issue) :

The Whitney Biennial 2006 draws its title, "Day for Night," from François