Artnosh

La Bella Principessa

2012-01-26T09:14:00.001-08:00

Last night I watched the PBS special La Bella Princepessa on a drawing some experts believe to be a Leonardo da Vinci. A beautifully executed portrait, the pen-and-chalk drawing on vellum, features lovely rosy and golden tones. One of the highlight’s of the TV program was watching a contemporary artist recreate it using authentic materials. She began with a vellum calf-hide, which she cut to size before sketching in the figure. It was trial and error to get the colored chalk to adhere to the vellum and she eventually resorted to using her fingertips to rub it on. Interestingly, there is a partial fingerprint on the drawing, Leonardo left prints on other works, which not only supports the likelihood of finding one here, but also provides an example of the real McCoy for comparison. In the end, the print from the drawing wasn’t extensive enough and the results were inconclusive.

The drawing’s story is the kind that galvanizes the art world. Purchased for a relative pittance ($21,850) in 1998 by New York dealer, Kate Ganz (who held on to the painting for ten years) it was eventually bought by Canadian collector, Peter Silverman who suspected it might be a Leonardo and sent an image of it to eminent Leonardo scholar, Martin Kemp.

Kemp noted "uncanny vitality" in the work and says, "I experienced a kind of frisson, a feeling that this is not normal." The vellum had been carbon-dated c. 1440-c. 1650, which was within the range of Leonardo’s dates. Intrigued, Kemp embarked on his own investigation using high-resolution multispectral scans. Studying the drawing in extraordinary detail, the evidence began to mount up. Kemp discovered many areas that seemed to confirm that it was a Leonardo, most notably that the artist of the drawing was (very unusually) left-handed like the master himself. Other aspects include: the precise lines and adept modulation of colors and the enigmatic expression that is reminiscent of Leonardo’s other muses: Mona, Anne, Genevra. Lastly, the sitter’s headdress belongs to the Milanese court of the 1490s where Leonardo was.

Because there are stitch marks on the edge of the portrait and vellum was used for books, Kemp theorized that the portrait came from a book that may have commemorated a royal marriage. (This might also explain why hidden within the pages of a book it remained unknown for so long.) Armed with this clue, further research led him to theorize the sitter was Bianca Sforza (Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis (c. 1455–c. 1508) painted a strikingly similar portrait, right down to the hair net, that's positively identified as Bianca), the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan, who married Galeazzo Sanseverino in 1496. Her husband was not only commander of the Milanese troops, but most tantalizing, a patron of Leonardo's. Sadly Bianca, who was probably only 14, died just a few months after her wedding.

All this is very compelling, but there are experts who are not convinced that the portrait is by Leonardo and it was excluded from the blockbuster show now on view at the National Gallery in London. I have to say that while I think it is a gorgeous drawing by a consummate artist, it doesn’t look like a Leonardo to me. Now, I am no Leonardo expert, but his women are distinctly odd looking (it would be interesting to have a forensic facial reconstruction artist translate their features into “living” people to get a sense of odd they really are) and tend to look alike, probably because he used the same model. There are a couple of exceptions: The Lady with an Ermine (who kind of resembles Bianca) and his Portrait of an Unknown Woman aka La Belle Ferroniere. But even these have a stylized, almost archaic quality to their features. Not so the drawing, which not only looks like a real person, but possesses an ideal of female beauty that seems distinctly different from Leonardo’s. While there were contemporary artists who did paint beauties that look like actual people—Botticelli springs to mind—Bianca looks too pretty for Leonardo and too fleshed out, if you will, for the period. She’s more like a pre-Raphaelite glammed-up take on the Renaissance (though I’m not suggesting the drawing is from that era). Or I'll put it this way, if you asked Gustav Klimt to paint a by-the-book Renaissance portrait of a young girl, I think you'd end up with something like this.

It’s possible she was done by some other Renaissance artist or else is the product of an incredibly skilled forger. The multi-pronged expertise required to pull this off would be incredible, but with a potential $100 million payout it’s not completely inconceivable. While the evidence that points to Leonardo is manifold, for me it’s how something looks, it’s the ultimate test and all the facts in the world can’t take away from this. Just sayin’.

53rd Street Gem

2012-01-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

The eminent architect W. G. Clark has called the American Folk Art Museum building the most beautiful in New York. Designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects it was completed in 2001.

Sheathed in bronze, the eight-level sliver of a building more than holds its own against the black glass behemoth to its right. On this block of megaliths, the human scale of the AMFA building offers a welcome visual respite. Its clifflike surface, which is pockmarked and mottled and looks both ancient and modern, presents a dynamic pattern of intersecting planes. A clever use of recessing creates a strong line bisecting the façade that culminates in a dramatic slanted V at the top, which expresses upward and downward movement simultaneously. All this dynamism adds lightness to a material that has a pronounced brooding intensity. Strips of glass on either side provide interior light without compromising the sculptural integrity of the façade.

Built by an overly ambitious board at a reputed cost of $32 million, the 30,000-square-foot building, beautiful though it may be, spelled trouble for the museum from the beginning. After years of struggle the institution finally threw in the towel, recently unloading the building to its next-door neighbor, MoMA, and retreating to its former home at 2 Lincoln Square where it pays $1 a year in rent to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Talk about a comeuppance.

Rumors abound that the AMFA building will be razed. Adding fuel to the fire is its location: right smack in the middle of MoMA and an empty lot where a proposed Jean Nouvel high-rise, offering condos as well as galleries for MoMA, is slated to go. But MoMA claims that it intends to use the AMFA building as gallery space. One hopes in its Yoshio Taniguchi-induced fog that it does. Designed specifically to exhibit art and a seminal example of Contemporary architecture to boot, it would make a most fitting location for MoMA’s architecture and design collections and a delightful palate cleanser amid a sea of glass.

Philip Johnson's Glass House

2012-01-09T06:10:00.000-08:00

(This article first appeared in the January/February 2012 issue of Artillery magazine.)

Philip Johnson’s Glass House, completed in 1949, is one of my all-time favorite buildings. Never mind that Johnson borrowed heavily from Mies van der Rohe, or that he also designed a number of notable eyesores: the false-fronted 1001 Fifth Avenue, the Chippendale-crowned, post modern AT&T headquarters (now Sony Plaza) and the pink marble “Lipstick” building—infamous these days as the onetime home to Bernie Madoff’s offices (all in New York City). On the plus side, Johnson also designed the sublime Rockefeller guesthouse and the almost perfect, original MoMA addition and sculpture garden; projects that are more in keeping with the aesthetics of his New Canaan, Connecticut masterpiece.

A sublime structure in a sublime setting, the Glass House is both rich and modest. Built for one, it’s the chicest monastic cell you will ever come across. The design is simplicity itself, composed of a rectangle bisected by a central cylinder that encloses the bathroom and provides housing for the all-important hearth. Aside from glass, brick is the predominant material; used to form the cylinder and to compose the striking herringbone floor, it’s also visible through the windows at the Glass House’s pendant structure, the Brick House. There’s a freestanding galley kitchen that when not in use, is hidden under hinged, wooden panels. Concealed behind a built-in cabinet is the acetic bedroom with the bed, and off to one side, a desk, where Johnson wasn’t ever able to work because he found the view so distracting. (He would eventually build a separate more enclosed structure for his study.) His favorite perch was at the dining room table facing north, from which vantage point, he could admire what he called his “very expensive wallpaper.” The Barcelona chairs, ottomans and récamier, elegant, restrained, sculptural, suit the setting perfectly.

A sizeable Elie Nadelman sculpture, Two Circus Women anchors the south end of the house, helping to define the space. The only other piece of art in the house is a large painting attributed to Poussin that’s mounted on a handsome Johnson-designed stand, a necessity given the glazed walls, but a design solution that turns the painting into an object as opposed to flat, wall decoration. Johnson bought the 17^th century work at the urging of his mentor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of MoMA. It’s an unexpected choice, but it works well in the space, its earthy palette echoes the dark bricks and landscape just outside the glass walls. At certain times of the year when nature’s colors synch with it, the flow between the two must be seamless. The painting depicts the burial of Athenian statesman, Phocian, sentenced to death for treachery and buried in disgrace outside the city walls. As my guide pointed out, the subject may have had particular resonance for Johnson, whose youthful flirtation with Nazism left him feeling ostracized. I kept thinking of its elegiac theme as I wandered through the grounds of what is in essence a memorial park, with 14 (mostly Johnson-designed) folly-like structures that call to mind 19^th century mausoleums dotting the 47-acre estate.

Johnson viewed the Glass House as one wing of a larger edifice that included the Brick House as its opposing wing diagonally across the “courtyard” of open lawn. The “doorway” was where the paths from the parking area begin; the gravel lining them, which crunches when you step on it, the “doorbell.” Near the entrance, a large, rather blah Donald Judd circle is balanced by the swimming pool on the far side of the courtyard. The pool, round with a rectangular plinth for sunning/diving cutting across it at one end, is a Suprematist painting made three-dimensional.

Though it mirrors the Glass House in length and shape, the Brick House is its polar opposite. Complete exposure is replaced by almost total concealment. The Brick House contained amenities impossible in the Glass House, including the mechanical components of both buildings, storage and privacy. Johnson referred to the Brick House bedroom as the “sex room” (he enjoyed being titillating) and it certainly has the aura of a seraglio. The familiar arch and column motif seen repeated in many of Johnson’s designs, lends a middle-eastern flavor to the room. Fabric panels ensure that the outside world is sealed off. Despite the fact that they’re Fortuny and the room itself is appointed simply, there’s something undeniably Liberace about it. Originally, the Glass House was Johnson’s weekend retreat with the Brick House at the ready when he desired more privacy or if the weather was too hot or cold, eventually Johnson lived there full-time, and fittingly would die there in 2005.

Behind the Glass House the land falls away to a pond, which boasts a “floating” pavilion that Johnson designed in 1962. It’s primarily an ornamental feature adding interest to the view, but Johnson also used it as a picnic venue. Inspired by the Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain, the pavilion references its famous arches and columns that seem to go on and on, using Johnson’s attenuating spin. A Mannerist folly, the structure is much smaller than it appears and is placed slightly away from the shore, so that you must step across a couple of feet of water to get to it. Johnson enjoyed the concept of “safe danger” and orchestrated encounters with it in other areas of the property, most notably the rail-less footbridge that crosses a creek. Above the pond is the Cubist tower Johnson constructed in honor of his best friend, Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the New York City Ballet.

In 1965 Johnson completed the underground painting gallery modeled on the Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae. His partner, David Whitney, was a curator and serious collector and given the constraints of the Glass House it became necessary to build a structure that could contain their growing collection of large, statement paintings, Warhol, Salle, Schnabel, Rauschenberg and Stella. Johnson devised a nifty series of three circular tracks with movable panels, allowing 42 paintings to be moved around easily for display. While the building worked for two-dimensional artwork, it functioned less well for three-dimensional pieces and so in 1970 Johnson built the Greek village-inspired, sculpture gallery. He devised a mechanical glass roof intended to open up like a gull-winged car to create the illusion of being outside. The roof proved problematic not only because the mechanics failed, but on sunny days its tubular supports cast prominent shadows that are distracting and compromise one’s experience of the sculptures.

Johnson referred to the small building built in 1980 that houses his library and study as an “event” on the landscape. Like something in a Precisionist painting, its vernacular is vaguely industrial, vaguely agricultural. In either case, the design connotes work. And it was here that Johnson could sequester himself to read, think and produce, surrounded by his books and the tools of his trade. The building was originally white stucco, but after Johnson built his final structure, Da Monsta, nearby, which he painted a dramatic red and black, he decided (using the advice of color consultants) to change the Library/Study to a more simpatico and, to my eye, safer bronze that Johnson referred to as an “emotion,” not color.

Four years later, Johnson built the Ghost House behind the Library/Study on the foundation of an old barn. Constructed of chain-link fencing and featuring a broken façade, the structure was influenced by Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry. Though the “house” is but a folly, Johnson has succeeded in finally uniting inside and outside. Vines are allowed to grow up within the Ghost House before they are periodically cleared out, creating dramatically different effects depending on the season.

Johnson’s final structure built in 1995 was his most experimental. Based on a Frank Stella design for a Dresden museum, it’s both sculpture and structure, a tour de force made of modified gunnite shot onto a pliable wire mesh superstructure creating dramatic angled walls and graceful curves. For Johnson it was almost a living thing and he coyly christened it: “Da Monsta.” He considered it his apogee, though in fact he’d reached that 46 years earlier. While I like aspects of Da Monsta, most notably its shape, I’m not wild about its fun house apertures. I kept wondering what Da Monsta would have been like if Johnson had taken Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-de-Haut as a reference point and painted it white to conform to the then white library/study rather than introducing a new color and painting the earlier building to conform to it

Johnson loved nature and the Glass House allowed him to live in it sheltered within a transparent box. He liked to refer to himself as a landscape architect and his treatment of the land is masterful. Composed of gently sloping meadows and woods, it looks natural but has been planted and pruned to Johnson’s exacting standards, creating handsome woodland vistas and interesting juxtapositions of plants. Like a director tinkering with a stage set, Johnson was hands-on, sometimes supervising distant landscaping projects using a bullhorn.

Insecure, prone to depression and sometimes difficult, Johnson was also wealthy in his own right, bien élevé and could “talk the talk.” Though the money may have trammeled his creativity, his polish guaranteed his position as society darling despite the fact he produced a number of mediocre, even ugly buildings. In this respect, he’s always reminded me of Ayn Rand’s Peter Keating. But at least Johnson admitted he was an emulator and gave credit to the architects he referenced.

Johnson’s work didn’t so much evolve as vacillate from one extreme to another. Above all, he seemed to be a pushover for whimsy, which did his work no favors, dating it rather quickly. Yet, when he was able to reign in that inclination, his work soared. The retrained elegance of the Glass House is so timeless it could have been built just yesterday. It must have bedeviled Johnson to have attained his apogee so early in his career never to reach such heights again. But he remained passionate about architecture, freely indulging it at his New Canaan “hameau du roi.” In the process, he created an iconic monument to his vision. One must admire his willingness to experiment and his incredible zeal for what was both avocation and vocation.

Sisters of Mercy

2011-12-29T07:21:00.001-08:00

A couple of years ago at a friend’s house, I spied a sepia photograph of a bride on her wall. From the 1920s, it was very elegant; the bride wore a stylish dress and elaborate veil and was holding a large bouquet of flowers. It looked like an ordinary, if rather grand, professional wedding portrait and so I was taken aback when my friend told me it was a photograph of her great-aunt dressed for her final vows to become a nun. Now I had heard of the whole Bride of Christ notion, but I didn’t realize such extraordinary lengths were gone to with wedding portraits and tulle and such (the distinctly bridal First Communion get-ups I used to see in my New York neighborhood, notwithstanding). If I thought about it at all, I would have envisioned a simple white dress and veil.

I was convinced that if this family had such a portrait, others must exist and thought what an amazing collection it would make if one could assemble them. The exhibition and book possibilities made my mouth water. All these women…what were they thinking as they sat in their finery contemplating their futures? It seems incredibly poignant and I’m sure the photographs would reveal a rich mine of human emotion. Of course, trying to locate any photos has proved to be a challenge. Searches on the Internet have come up empty and I haven't even bothered with the Catholic Church knowing they wouldn’t be inclined to provide any assistance.

In recent years it seems the church has toned the fuss accompanying the ceremonies down considerably. But you can see how making such a to-do had been a brilliant move on its part, playing on every girl’s fascination with weddings. That a wedding (and most important, a dress) was still in the cards made becoming a nun so much more appealing and the bitter pill of entering a convent so much easier to swallow for everyone involved. It also helped secure the involvement of wealthy girls whom the church was known to target, since they’d have to sign over their inheritance. Members of this group and their families, in particular, were accustomed to marking life’s milestones with extravagant displays. The dress and ceremony would satisfy this requirement and the photograph would provide a lasting memento of the daughter who, in many cases, the family would never see again.

I still have hopes of finding a treasure trove of these portraits in the archives of some old photography studio. I would love to shine a light on them again for all to see.

Pick Up Sticks

2011-12-27T17:26:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Brilliant’s an artist after my own heart, elevating ordinary, everyday humble objects into the realm of the sublime. His Stick Stack Show is currently on view at the Visual Arts Center in Richmond, Virginia where Brilliant is 2011 Artist in Residence. The show is an offshoot of the Have Sticks Will Travel World Tour that began in 2009 eventually expanding into a series of site-specific installations recreated over an 18-month period in 13 different galleries. The current iteration in Richmond took two weeks for the artist to install.

Composed of items (stirrers, cup sleeves and lids, etc.) readily available at what Brilliant refers to as “his natural environment,” namely the corner coffee shop, he transforms them into wondrous sculptures. I particularly loved the monumental, The Richmond Piece, an undulating wall of 70,000 interwoven wooden coffee stirrers held together by tension and compression alone. It has a pleasing organic quality thanks to the material and amorphous shape. Well lit, it casts dramatic, twiggy shadows that extend the piece well beyond its physical borders, creating a negative image that splashes against the wall and floor.

I also loved Brilliant’s works on paper, which are elegant and retrained. The stir stick impressions are fresh and serendipitous and the lithograph, The GR Haze and laser cut, 18 Rabbit were just plain beautiful.

Brilliant may be making a comment on the caffeinated culture we live in, but I like to think he’s just working with the materials at hand. Certainly, the labor-intense, almost OCD nature of the work suggests a practice that is caffeine fueled, or at the very least Brilliant is tipping his hat to the jag and jolt that’s found within a cup o’ joe.

White as Wool...

2011-12-27T07:41:00.000-08:00

I love it when you stumble upon an artwork by someone you’ve never heard of before that just blows your socks off. A couple of weeks ago this happened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts when I came across Tristin Lowe’s incredible life-sized whale sculpture, Mocha Dick. 52 feet long and constructed of creamy industrial felt, the sculpture features an inflated interior frame, which imparts a lifelike tautness to the form, suggesting skin covering flesh and bone. A venerable beast, this whale is battle-scared from a life spent roaming unfriendly seas and features clusters of finely detailed, appliqué barnacles across its surface and two soulful eyes that gaze out from within puckered lids. It's a work of real power that conveys both awe and empathy for the animal.

I liked the yin and yang dialogue between the exceedingly realistic details and the medium, which is pure artifice with its exposed stitches and zippers crisscrossing the wooly surface. The piece took six-months to create in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and involved a team of technicians and apprentices overseen by Lowe.

Exhibited alongside the sculpture are a whale oil lamp, a Robert Salmon painting of whaling ships in a harbor and a Rockwell Kent of a sailor on a ship’s rigging, I gather they are present to anchor the piece within the whaling narrative, but they seemed anemic—completely de trop, in fact—against the backdrop of such a show stopper.

At first I thought Mocha Dick was the artist’s play on Moby Dick, but I read in the exhibition dialectic that Mocha Dick was a real albino sperm whale that inhabited the waters off Mocha Island in the South Pacific. Mocha Dick was legendary, reputedly having attacked 20 whaling vessels. He was described in Knickerbocker magazine in 1839 as “white as wool . . . as white as a snow drift . . . white as the surf around him.” The account appeared in the magazine again in 1846, five years before Moby-Dick was published and while it's widely accepted that Melville was inspired by the events surrounding the sinking of the ship, Essex by a whale, given the similarity in Mocha Dick's name and the fact he was also albino, it’s clear he played a part in Melville’s inspiration.

Lowe acknowledges a longtime fascination with both Moby-Dick and maritime history, but he says the work's also about something more: “This project was like the story of Moby-Dick—embarking on a journey, transfixed by the call of the sea. It is not about Ahab’s quest for revenge, and not even about the whale itself, but more about Ishmael’s search for the unattainable.”   

Park Avenue Haversham

2011-12-21T09:16:00.001-08:00

For a number of years my mother was president of the Chapin-Brearley Exchange, the wonderful now-defunct consignment shop that benefited the scholarship funds of those two New York City girls’ schools. The Exchange originated as a swap meet of sorts for school uniforms morphing over the years to include party dresses and sporting equipage, and eventually women’s, men’s and boys’ clothing. Drawing from a pool of crème de la crème New York closets, including after her daughter started going to Brearley, Jackie O’s, the Exchange was a treasure-trove of incredible finds. Years before Patricia Field was dressing Sarah Jessica Parker in vintage, my sister and I on our limited allowances were combing the Exchange’s racks for bits of finery to adorn ourselves. You never knew what you’d find there and it was the source of many divine articles of clothing that are still in my closet 35 years later: a beautiful gold silk 1940’s kimono jacket that looked like it could have been worn by Katharine Hepburn, a pair of sealskin Lapland boots with turned up toes and an ivory bangle carved from (I’m sorry to say) an elephant tusk to name three. What I liked best were the things that seemed to have been picked up on a whim during someone’s far-flung travels, only to be jettisoned later on when they returned home and to reality.

The Exchange set the stage for one of the most unusual New York stories I know. The year must have been 1969 because my sister was still at home (she graduated from Brearley in 1970). My mother had received a call from the lawyer of an alumna—I forget from which school—who’d recently died and had left her personal effects to the Exchange. There was such a quantity of belongings, and I suspect my mother, fearing the potential feeding frenzy that might occur among the Exchange volunteers when confronted with such booty, had everything brought to our house for pricing. This is how our living room came to be transformed temporarily into Ali Baba’s cave. There were boxes and boxes of unopened Caron perfume, silk scarves, Indian saris, beaded evening bags and cashmere twin sets, most of it never worn and in its original wrapping. In addition to these items, there were some exotic robes including a magnificent Chinese brocade tunic. It was a special piece and my mother arranged for a curator from the Metropolitan Museum to examine it. He concurred with her assessment, noting that the number of digits (eight I think?) in the claws of the dragons featured in the design signified the rank of emperor. (The robe was donated to the museum on behalf of the estate.)

Though this was all very exciting to a 12-year old girl, the really interesting part occurred before the things arrived at our house. My mother had met the woman’s lawyer at her apartment on Fifth Avenue to see what was what. After they finished, the lawyer told my mother that his client had another apartment that might contain additional items. The second one, which she’d used as her office, was a few blocks away on Park Avenue. At first upon entering the apartment, it appeared to consist of only one room containing desks for her secretary and herself, but the lawyer opened a door to reveal additional rooms, which had been closed off for forty years. It clearly had once been very elegant, but was now completely derelict. My mother described how the paint was hanging in sheets off the walls and draperies that were in tatters. The windows were filthy and everything was covered in a film of dust including the breakfast dishes still on the table. In the bedroom closet, beaded flapper gowns hung in shreds, and in the bathroom and kitchen was the evidence of long ago quotidian life. To say my mother was blown away, is not an exaggeration. On an ordinary day in the middle of New York, she’d run up against a real-life, 20^th century Mrs. Haversham.

As it turned out, the day the woman’s husband died in the 1920s, she’d walked away, shutting the door on her life and the apartment only to return once it had been altered. All these years later I am still astounded by the person who would make such an extravagant gesture in terms of grief and wealth. I wonder if it worked. Wouldn’t being in the same city/neighborhood/building, have been only less painful by a matter of degrees than in the apartment itself. Of course, I have no way of knowing the particulars and she may well have left New York for a period of time. But all that aside, the story stands as an amazing tale in the annals of New York (and beyond) and it makes me marvel at what else must be out there.

Animation

2011-12-07T14:12:00.001-08:00

Last week I went to see Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s charming valentine to Paris, his daughter and the "cinemagician," Georges Méliès. We got there early only to be subjected to a barrage of ads for Coke and cars and, worst of all, a faux movie trailer for Activision's new toy/video-game hybrid: Skylanders, which features Spyro, the fire-breathing purple dragon along with 32 other characters. Watching it, I felt like I might have an epileptic fit and my niece who at 19 has been subjected to way more technology than I, said she couldn’t follow it—just the ticket for the ADHD crowd! The cutsey animal figures are designed to hook small children, but their bratty attitude, special effects and heavy metal soundtrack will ensure they stick around through puberty. I can picture them with their jaws hanging open as they stare wide-eyed at the screen and pity the parents who will be badgered into buying the crap. My niece and I both thought the trailer/ad was horrendous: violent, smart-alecky and just plain obnoxious. No wonder society is going to Hell in a hand-basket if this is what our junior citizens cut their teeth on.

I happen to be a fan of animation. I used to regularly attend an animated film festival when I lived in New York, which featured short films made by people like Gary Larsen. I find I can return to an animated film again and again, I think because, in a very real sense, it is a piece of art. I am captivated by the visuals that transcend whatever narrative is going on. My favorite animated film is The Triplets of Belleville. I think I could write a dissertation on it. It is so visually rich with so many wonderful touches that evoke France and the French. The Triplets radiates humanity. I love how the characters look, how the dog ages as the film progresses and his film-length grudge against the train. Sylvan Chomet employs live action film within the animation, which makes for a really interesting effect. There are also several different animation styles used throughout from retro looking black and white employed to render the wonderful Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire-like personages, to hard-edged lines and rich color, to areas which use a light, delicate hand and pale hues. There's very little dialogue; when it is used (with one exception), it almost sounds like French gibberish: conveying the language without really saying anything. The soundtrack is simply marvelous with a swingey '30s sound. I recently viewed Sylvain Chomet's newest film The Illusionist which I am happy to say is on a par with The Triplets. The film's protagonist is based on Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot. The animated film includes a snippet from Tati's brillaint, Mon Oncle. Tati is someone I liked mildly when I first saw his films years ago, but now I think is brilliant. His social commentary, made primarily through the use of sight gags, is so dead-on.

Other animated films I admire are Waking Life, The Secret of Kells (beautiful soundtrack) and Waltz with Bashir, which uses animation brilliantly to tell the story of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, an event almost too horrific to relate using ordinary means.

While I was watching the abysmal Skylanders’ ad, I was thinking specifically about a relatively new film to me, Paprika, an anime confection by the highly regarded Satoshi Kon. Its bright colors and zippy vibe can compete with Skylanders, but Paprika is so imaginative and visually stunning, you don’t feel like watching it is going to burn out your eyes and rot your brain. On the contrary, you are simply dazzled.

Weddings

2011-12-07T09:20:00.001-08:00

In case you hadn’t noticed, weddings are bigger than ever. There are three Say Yes to the Dress franchises on TV, the original at Kleinfeld’s (which is actually pretty good, providing little vignettes of people’s lives (the saleswomen, classic New York characters and the clients) along with some lip smacking style voyeurism) followed by ones from an Atlanta and a Beverly Hills store and a fascinating Reality TV offering from the UK that tracks over-the-top gypsy weddings.

Recently, my attention was directed to a couple of wedding planners’ websites which each feature slideshows of some of the weddings they have planned. It’s an amazing window into 21^st century American civilization. It speaks volumes about our society. The weddings are beautiful, no question about it, with even the smallest detail whipped into shape. Each wedding is unique, boasting imaginative touches specifically tailored to a bride’s style. Yet, despite the beauty, something seems to be missing. The absolute perfection is suffocating and ironically, though the goal is hyper personalization, the weddings come across as incredibly impersonal.

Now I confess I am a little cynical about marriage even though my parents were happily wed for 64 years and were parted only by death. But, from where I sit with, apparently, a front row seat to Kim Kardashian’s shenanigans not to mention all the “Family Values” hypocrites (Newt, Vitter, Sanford, etc. You know who you are!) I have a right to be cynical. Personally, I think more people should focus on the marriage part rather than the wedding part, which as Kim K. and many others before her have demonstrated has become an opportunity for young women to play Queen for the Day.

Not so long ago before we all got so entitled, brides and their mother’s did their own planning, now, even the middle class hires wedding planners. Is it really that complicated? Isn’t it just like throwing a big party? It all seems a little spoiled and princessey to me.

I went to a wonderful wedding a couple of years ago, which was a haute WASP bohemian affair if you can imagine such a thing. It was at the bride’s family’s beautiful farm in Upstate New York. Exuberant controlled chaos is how I would best describe the affair. India played a big role in the festivities including the fabric for the dress and the bride’s jewelry; her family is in the textile business and all of them have spent a lot of time in India. The aisle for the ceremony, held in a field under an oak tree, was delineated using pots of dahlias, obviously just purchased at the local co-op. To keep the heavy blooms upright someone had lashed them to PVC pipe. They’d begun to disguise, the pipes, but time must have run out because not all of them had been camouflaged and the pots were mis-matched. There must have been 300 guests. To accommodate them all three non-matching tents had been set up haphazardly on the lawn, which was on two different levels. The tents were decorated with yards and yards of Indian fabric. Let me tell you they looked fabulous, large pink paper lanterns were suspended from the main one, which glowed with lovely, warm light. At the reception there was an attempt at a Virginia Reel accompanied (not very well) by the bride’s uncle on the bagpipes, the food on grills was unevenly cooked. But the band was great, the wine (private label) flowed and the colorful guests whooped it up. It was one of the best weddings I’ve been to I think because it wasn’t a hermetic ideal, nor was it an event that’s ultimately about reliving the past (through the glamorous photographs) in the future and gaining an edge with your peer group. No indeed, this wedding was relaxed, joyful, in-the-moment and exceedingly personal. And that my friends, is the definition of real class.

Crystal Bridges

2011-11-22T05:46:00.000-08:00

Ever since I first got wind of it, I have been rubbing my hands together in delight at the anticipation of the opening of Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. It’s just too delicious for my inner snark to resist. First of all there’s the name. Crystal Bridges. Who names an art museum that? At best, it sounds like a shopping mall, at worst, a “memorial garden.” But the museum is serious stuff (the embarrassingly cute video on its website notwithstanding) no Thomas Kinkade or Little Mermaid cels here. Norman Rockwell is represented, but then so is Jenny Holzer and, even more bizarre, given his skewering of corporate imperialism and the destruction of the environment, Walton Ford. (No family connection, I trust!)

I have not seen the Moshe Safdie-designed complex in person, though I've studied the photos. Let's just say that if I saw it and didn’t know what it was called, I would call it Crystal Bridges. It’s glitzy with a lot of glass and yes, what look like bridges over turquoise expanses of water. At night, it lights up like a Christmas tree. It would not look out of place in Las Vegas or Dubai.

The museum focuses on American Art from the colonial era up to the present day and it’s been busy Hoovering up as much as it can from private collections and smaller museums and institutions that have fallen on hard times. Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic has been sucked up for a cool $68 million as well as Asher B. Durand’s iconic Kindred Spirits from the New York Public Library. Most disturbing, Ms. Walton recently visited the Maier Museum of Art, at Randolph-Macon College in Lynchburg, Virginia, which boasts a superb collection of American paintings. It’s a particularly sad state of affairs given the genesis of the Randolph Macon collection. Started by art professor, Louise Jordan Smith who felt that a liberal arts education must include familiarity with the art of one’s own time, she established an annual contemporary art exhibition in 1911, and nine years later, the Randolph Macon Art Association, which raised funds for the college to purchase a work from each exhibition. Operated on a shoestring, the collection grew over the years to include seminal pieces by Modern American masters as well as a significant holding of 19th century art. Smith purchased incredibly strong work, including George Bellows's glorious Men of the Docks. Acquired for a few thousand dollars, it appreciated to many tens of millions over the century or so it was owned by Randolph Macon and was the first to go in 2007. Now, with Walton sniffing around the place, you know the others are also in jeopardy. What a contrast these two women provide: Smith had limited funds and only her amazing eye to go with and a belief in bringing art work directly to students; Alice, equipped with a fat wallet and the best art consulting advice money can buy seems to be motivated by the desire to build a monument to herself.

I have purposefully avoided reading anything about Crystal Bridges as I wanted to put my own particular spin on things. But I did catch a fawning article in Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2011/11/14/how-alice-waltons-crystal-bridges-exposes-the-foolishness-o-occupy-wall-street/ using the museum as an example of how ill begotten Occupy Wall Street is. The gist being we should be grateful to billionaires like Alice Walton who have the means (and the low tax bracket) to bestow gifts like this on us. More specifically, the reporter lauds Walton for creating jobs and stimulating tourism when she could have easily been spending her money on baubles. A let-them-eat-cake attitude if I ever heard one, this perspective, among other things, completely misses the point of OWS. I certainly am grateful for the generosity of wealthy donors. But let’s not go overboard whitewashing their wealth in the process. To talk about Crystal Bridges in terms of some sort of sacrifice (she could be spending money on bracelets, private planes, mansions) is ridiculous. Shoot, Alice Walton could build a museum in every state and still not feel the pinch; she's a BILLIONAIRE several times over. In reality the museum, big and attention-grabbing though it may be, is a pittance of the debt the Walton family, who epitomize the expression: “a few profit, we all pay” truly owe America. As Elizabeth Warren so eloquently puts it: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces [sic] that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory—and hire someone to protect against this—because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

I will go further: to me, Wal-Mart is one of the real villains in our economic downturn, not to mention the dumbing down of American standards and style. Wal-Mart made its billions eviscerating businesses and towns across America and selling imported schlock, mostly from China to people who didn't need it and couldn’t afford it, all the while taking advantage of its workers. I ask you, what’s to like?

Okay, yes, in the creation of Crystal Bridges, Ms. Walton has created jobs and boosted her hometown’s economy, but how many/what sort of jobs? I doubt the crème of the museum (the curators and administrators) come from Bentonville—and how big an impact (“a corner of northwest Arkansas”) are we really talking about? My one hope is that the art will speak to people and maybe raise them up in some way out of their Wal-Mart-induced fog of mediocrity.

If, as the Forbes writer suggests, Alice Walton is motivated by generosity why didn’t she establish a foundation that would support small museums around the country like Randolph Macon’s that are struggling to maintain their collections, rather than raiding them? New York’s wonderful American Museum of Folk Art almost closed earlier this year. No doubt it and many other struggling institutions around the country could do with an injection of Wal-Mart cash. (Reportedly, Ms. Walton refused to support the museum because she was offended by the work of Henry Darger. Oy.) But this kind of support doesn't grab headlines the way a splashy new museum does. All the eleemosynary posturing aside, Crystal Bridges is about ego, self-aggrandizement and legacy; it's Alice Walton's gambit to add the sheen of culture and taste to the Wal-Mart name with what (forgive me for sounding snarky) I can’t help feeling is a heavy dose of nya-nya-nya-nya-nya directed at the art establishment.In the end for me it’s a missed opportunity because I question whether we really need another traditional American Art museum. Why not instead take a page from Louise Jordan Smith’s book, or Herb and Dorothy Vogel's for that matter, and support contemporary emerging artists, living people who could really use the money and who's life's work pushes American culture forward. (I’m not talking Jeff Koons here.) Now, that could be really exciting. But this requires imagination, bravery and most important, connoisseurship—a real understanding of art and what the role of contemporary artists is. They are not supposed to regurgitate the past ad nauseam; their work should be rooted in the present, reflecting the era and atmosphere in which it was created. Of course, if Alice Walton is put off by Darger, there’s not much hope for her in this department. Better to stay safe within an area where the boundaries are laid out and the standards are set and for this end, Crystal Bridges (the name, the design, the mission) fits the bill.

Hidden Costs

2011-10-24T07:16:00.001-07:00

Last night I re-watched the elegiac Manufactured Landscapes. The documentary follows photographer, Edward Burtynsky as he travels through China documenting factories, quarries, recycling yards, mines, dams, the epicenters of the country’s massive industrial revolution. The images are both beautiful and repellant. The scale is jaw dropping with the landscape transformed on a magnitude to rival Mother Nature. I admire Burtynsky because he forces to confront what is normally hidden.

I first became acquainted with Burtynsky’s work at the Corcoran where his show, Oilwas on view. Oil has been a major focus of Burtynsky’s since his “oil epiphany” over a decade ago experienced while driving a car powered by gasoline and partially constructed with petroleum products on a tarmac road. In chronicling the soup to nuts of what he calls the “key building block of the last century” Burtynsky has traveled the globe exploring everything from extraction and refining, to the car culture—and the freeways and mind-numbing suburban landscape it has promoted—to oil’s denouement in the form of tanker salvage, abandoned oil fields and vast dumps filled with automotive detritus.His stunning, large-format color photographs of this netherworld are haunting meditations on the real cost of oil.

Regarding these surreal landscapes transformed by man, we realize how totally disconnected we are from what actually happens in oil production. Like Upton Sinclair before him, Burtynsky pulls off the veil, showing us things we weren’t meant to see. These otherworldly landscapes of mind-boggling scale compel us to consider the flip side: nature and our relation to it.

Burtynsky is an artist on a mission, he wants to highlight oil’s collateral damage, but his work is not preachy. He neatly finesses that balancing act between message and medium, letting his eloquent images do the talking. Burtynsky admits he’s conflicted and says his photographs are metaphors representing the dilemma of our modern existence: we depend on nature to provide the raw materials that support our lifestyle with all its attendant conveniences, yet we’re in an uneasy position because our demands place the planet’s health (and thus our own) in jeopardy. And it’s not just First World denizens and the environment Burtynsky is concerned with, as his series on oil tanker deconstruction attest. Here, young Bangladeshi men scrape crude oil out of rusting hulls, working sometimes neck deep in the ooze. The show’s final image, crude-filled footprints, speaks poignantly to the human toll such employment costs.

The photographs are gorgeous with crystalline focus and color that can be both subtle: Oil Fields #27,Bakersfield, California, USA, 2004 and arcade glitz bright: Breezewood, Pennsylvania, USA, 2008. I happen to be a sucker for work that combines beauty and ugliness. It’s why I love Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie and, of course, Andreas Gursky, who like Burtynsky uses subject matter not known for its beauty, oversized scale, repetitive pattern and splashy color to comment on our contemporary world. There’s a real frisson in a challenging image that’s rendered so exquisitely. Oil Refineries #22  St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, 1999 a dramatically-lit nocturnal shot of pipes and ducts that evokes both Mondrian and Sheeler is a favorite; I love Burtynsky’s dump series where mountains of tires, oil filters, drums and other automobile cast-offs are both beautiful and unsettling.

Burtynsky’s arresting photographs articulate grave and complex concerns about the oil industry and its fallout, providing the perfect response to the avaricious and simplistic “Drill Here, Drill Now” attitude. After seeing how oil transforms the world into something untenable thanks to Burtynsky, I for one, don’t want drilling anywhere near “here.”

Quirky, Quaint and Cosmopolitan: Charlottesville

2011-10-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

(This article originally appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of Virginia Living. Here is the unedited version.)

When I moved to the Charlottesville area from New York City in 1993, I was looking for a kinder and gentler existence in a setting that was rural yet urbane. I had fallen under Charlottesville’s spell as a little girl accompanying my father—who earned his law degree at the University of Virginia in 1940—on his annual pilgrimage to Law Weekend. Held in early May—one of the loveliest times of the year here—the weekends were the perfect introduction. The lilac and boxwood-scented air, Jeffersonian architecture and, most of all, the beautiful landscape made an indelible impression on me. The Charlottesville of my youth was a delightfully exotic departure from all that was familiar to this New York City girl; it was then sleepy, genteel and very Southern. Native Boo Barnett, 55, a writer, describes the city as “so quiet, all the neighborhood dogs lay about in the street. You’d ride by on your bike, they’d open an eye, lethargically wag a tail and then go back to sleep.” I wasn’t exactly looking for that Charlottesville when I settled here—I knew it was long gone—but I hoped its vestiges remained.

Comprising just over 10 square miles, and boasting a population of nearly 45,000 (closer to 120,000 when combined with Albemarle County, which is considered part of the greater Charlottesville Metropolitan area) Charlottesville is a far cry from New York. And while I was willing to downsize from a big city, I didn’t want to end up in a dull backwater. I needn’t have worried. Charlottesville’s mix of artists and writers, students and scholars, natives and entrepreneurs who live and work here speaks to Jefferson’s enduring legacy of creativity as they come together to make Charlottesville a happening place with a rich and varied cultural life and a sophisticated, big town vibe. As befits a sophisticated place, there’s a strongly international flavor. In addition to those individuals brought in by the University, Charlottesville is a resettlement site for the International Rescue Committee, which places a couple of hundred refugees here every year, many of whom end up making Charlottesville their permanent home. This mix of people makes for a lively human olio. And while some people stick within their particular group, others move easily between the different circles. And there is that hard to articulate sense of place that so appealed to me as a child and which still seems to hover in the air—a combination of history, landscape, tradition and way of behaving that evokes “Southerness.”

History is a constant presence hovering over the place. I remember soon after I moved here standing on the train platform and overhearing two men intently discussing some aspect of the Civil War talking as if it had happened just yesterday. Best known as the home of Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia and Monticello, Charlottesville was formed by charter in 1762 along the all-important Three Chopt Road, connecting Richmond to the Shenandoah Valley. Named for George III’s consort, Charlottesville was originally targeted for tobacco, but the crop didn’t do well and wheat and land speculation soon took over. That they were lucrative is clear by the abundance of great historical houses gracing the area. From the outset the Rivanna River occupied an important role. At Jefferson’s urging, a channel was created in the river to make it navigable for cargo bateaux. Such high hopes initially were had for the Rivanna that Charlottesville’s port near the site of the Woolen Mills was called "Pireus," (sic) after the port city of Athens. But as a reliable transportation route, the river proved to be problematic.

Between 1779 and 1781 the Convention Army composed of British and German soldiers was imprisoned in Charlottesville. (Today, you can see evidence of this in the names Barracks and Hessian roads.) The “Paul Revere of the South,” Jack Jouett made his famous ride from Louisa to Charlottesville to warn Jefferson and members of the Virginia Legislature of an intended raid by General Tarleton on June 4, 1781. During the Civil War, Charlottesville was spared the brunt of the conflict; its one claim to fame being the Skirmish of Rio Hill in which Custer was repulsed by local Confederate militia. More destruction was prevented when town and university officials preemptively surrendered to Union generals Sheridan and Custer on March 3, 1865.

Nowadays Charlottesville has a decidedly Liberal bent though the same cannot be said for the surrounding counties. Many who move here from away have an idealized view of the area, glossing over the issue of slavery. But slavery was central to Charlottesville’s prosperity. The slave auction block was located in front of #0 Court Square and it’s rumored that when the late afternoon light is just right, one can still see the letters of the auction sign on the wall of the building.

Desegregation proved to be a challenge for Charlottesville, as it did for many places. The schools were shut for a time and white families scrambled to start private white only institutions to educate their progeny. The Robert E. Lee and Rock Hill Academies flourished in addition to private tutoring set-ups in basements across town. In 1960 in reaction to desegregation a particularly egregious urban renewal program was approved dooming the African-American neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, a 20-acre tract of land west of the Downtown Mall. It was eventually razed displacing 600 law-abiding, church-going, employed people. Uprooted, ostensibly to improve their living conditions (though the very fabric of their lives (homes, neighborhood, social networks and jobs) was effectively destroyed) they were shepherded into housing projects.

Charlottesville was a different place then; the Old South was still very much alive. One of my earliest Charlottesville recollections is breakfast at the Farmington Country Club during one of those mid-1960s Law Weekends. Back then, one dressed up and breakfast was an event, served in the formal dining room, then painted a soothing dove gray. My freshly scrubbed sister and I, in matching seersucker dresses, were served “turkey hash” and waffles with twin pitchers of heated maple syrup and melted butter by “yes sirring, no ma’aming” elderly black waiters moving soundlessly about the hushed space. I drank it all in, delighting in the gentility and ceremony, though even as a child I could sense that something about the hierarchy wasn’t quite right.

A lot has changed since then, for instance people still say “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” but now it’s just a courtesy exchanged among equals, but things aren’t as rosy as they might be. Charlottesville native, Eugene Williams, 83, a long-time civil rights activist (his two daughters were plaintiffs in the desegregation case against the Charlottesville school system) who grew up in segregated Charlottesville bemoans high unemployment and academic underachievement among African-Americans today and offers his perspective on the state of things: “We have come a long way, but at the same time we are moving backwards. In many ways, Charlottesville was more integrated during segregation than it is now.” He cites the dearth of black faces in businesses along the Mall, where once upon a time in restaurants at least, the staff (chefs and waiters) was all black. "I would like people to be more vigilant at seeing where discrimination exists in education, employment and housing" he says. "It's still present in every one of them.” These are sobering words to hear in 2011 when many of us believe that racism is behind us, but it is healthy to hear them for only then can they be addressed.

“For a small city, Charlottesville is doing a great job culturally,” says Deborah McLeod, director of Chroma Projects, a changing exhibition space and collective of artist studios located on the downtown mall, one of the longest outdoor pedestrian malls in the nation, which boasts a lively street scene and restaurants, theaters, art galleries and shops including the recently renovated 1930s movie palace Paramount Theater which offers a wide variety of entertainment from HD simulcasts of the Metropolitan Opera to Ravi Shankar, Chinese acrobats and Lucinda Williams. If you walk around to the side you’ll see a scaled down marquee over the segregated black entrance—a potent reminder of the past.

The mall also hosts the Virginia Festival of the Book in March, the Charlottesville Festival of the Photograph in June, and the Virginia Film Festival in October. McLeod has observed Charlottesville’s art scene for 25 years. “Charlottesville has been facilitating its artists in a more comprehensive way,” she says, “and I find more interconnectivity now.” Second Street Gallery, established in 1973 and the oldest contemporary art space in central Virginia, is now located inside the City Center for Contemporary Arts building on East Water Street along with two other non-profit groups: Live Arts (a community theater) and Light House (a youth media organization). McLeod points to the new institutions that have popped up too, like The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative in Belmont—a small arts organization that promotes young and emerging artists—and The Garage on 1st Street—a multi-purpose arts and events venue—who have what she describes as fresh young voices that speak outside the established arts organizations and galleries. This, she says, “is the kind of healthy growth a good city should enjoy and encourage.”

And it does, not just in its arts scene, but in its music scene as well. Even before the homegrown Dave Matthews Band found national fame, Charlottesville was a music mecca with Miller’s (where Dave used to tend bar) on the mall and Trax on West Main Street. Today there are five state-of-the-art venues including the Paramount, the Jefferson, the Southern, the Pavilion and the John Paul Jones Arena. I catch up with Andy Gems, owner of the Southern, as he’s setting up for the Friday night show. “For a town its size, Charlottesville has an amazing music scene—at times it’s a blessing,” he says, “other times it’s a curse. But the competition’s good because a rising tide raises all boats.” For top-shelf acts like the Rolling Stones, U2 and Lady Gaga, Scott Stadium and the John Paul Jones Arena at UVA are the most accommodating of large crowds. Charlottesville’s taste in music runs the gamut though, and the Tuesday Night Concert Series at UVA’s Cabell Hall throughout the academic year along with the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival in September, feeds this community’s appetite for world-class musicians. Gems, who moved to Charlottesville from San Francisco in 2002, says he loves the urban yet small town feel of the place. “It’s about restaurants, food, music and art. What more do you need?”

And indeed, Charlottesville is a foodie’s paradise. My favorite place to eat in Charlottesville has to be the C&O Restaurant, which opened in 1976. Housed in a former railroad bunkhouse on Water Street, it is a Charlottesville institution. With appealing dining spaces, cozy downstairs bar area, imaginative seasonal menu, their veal liver in mustard sauce served with garlic mashed potatoes is my go to comfort food and definitely not your mother’s liver and onions, and pleasant staff, it’s no wonder C&O continues to be so popular. “I had a customer remark to me one evening in the restaurant that the C&O was one of the most honest places he’d ever been,” says owner Dave Simpson, “that made me feel great.” Simpson says that in the 32 years he has been at the restaurant the thing that has kept him interested is the relationships he has forged with his regular customers. He describes delivering food to families with newborns and catering those children’s graduation parties or wedding receptions years later. “It is astounding,” he says, “how one small corner of the world can attract such bright, funny, earnest and dedicated people year after year.” Other notable restaurants Downtown are Bang!, Fleurie, Petit Pois, Hamilton’s and Escafé. For a walk down memory lane there’s Timberlake’s Drugstore’s lunchroom, which has fountain service and, in colder months, a fire burning in the grate. For a quick bite there’s pizza from Christian’s, Chinese dumplings from Marco and Luca, or crêpes from The Flat on Water Street.

Once a modest, working class neighborhood, Belmont just over the Belmont Bridge from the Downtown Mall has attracted a young, hip crowd who’ve been gentrifying the area and luring top-notch restaurants. Chief among these is the superb MAS, which specializes in tapas. The Local, Tavola, Belmont Bar-B-Cue and La Taza are all within a stone’s throw of each other on Hinton Avenue and Monticello Road. Michael Keaveny opened Tavola in “Little Brooklyn,” as he likes to call Belmont, in 2009. “Being in Charlottesville has exceeded all my expectations,” says the chef and owner who has worked in restaurants in New York, San Francisco and Napa Valley. “I like to think of Virginia as a region of Italy, considering how the Italians would work with the raw materials we have here.”

With its eateries, butcher, baker and chocolatier, the Main Street Market is all things to all foodies. Locally-sourced raw materials are a mainstay for many of the vendors here. From the famous pimiento cheese at Feast! to the breads, cakes and pastries at Albemarle Baking Company and the delectables at Gerhardt’s Chocolates, the market offers a bounty of comestibles sure to impress the most discriminating epicurean. On Saturday mornings from April to October, a bustling farmers’ market is in full swing downtown. But Charlottesville residents also have Foods of All Nations located at the Ivy Square Shopping Center near the university, the go-to emporium for arcane and international ingredients like marmite or peanut soup mix. Foods (as it is familiarly known) is still going strong after more than 50 years in business. “Back when Foods opened, none of the big supermarkets carried the international selection we stocked,” says Butch Brown, the president of the company. To keep competitive, Foods maintains a friendly atmosphere that’s big on service. “We know most of our customers by name and offer charge accounts.” Newcomers to the scene are Whole Foods, which just opened a mega store to great acclaim and in 2012 Trader Joes will open a market.

Somewhere along the way Charlottesville became known as the “Hook” or “Hookville.” Some say the hook referred to a C grade; others say it arose because once you’ve spent any time in Charlottesville, it "hooks" you. Whatever the history, the “hook’s” residents are just as interested in spirits as they are in sustenance. Robert Harllee, 53, opened Market Street Wine Shop located one block off the mall, in 1986 and hosts Friday evening wine tastings that take on a party-like atmosphere. In addition to their vast selection of wine and beer, they also carry a wide assortment of bread, cheese and other comestibles. Tucked into a basement, it resembles an actual wine cave. It’s funky, fun and loaded with atmosphere. “Despite the growth, there’s still a small town feel to Charlottesville, especially in the downtown area, says Harllee. “There’s a real sense of community and local issues matter a lot. In the course of a day, I encounter poets, novelists, dancers, actors, visual artists—everybody seems to have something they do, some passion they pursue, beyond their job.” One of those passions could include the business of wine-making: There are some 25 vineyards in the Charlottesville area, most notably White Hall, Barboursville, Keswick, Blenheim and King Family.

“I think of Charlottesville as laid back and kind of quirky,” says Amy Gardner, 40, owner of shoe boutique Scarpa on Barracks Road since 1994. “It’s full of interesting and eclectic people who are bright and creative.” Gardner who looks like a fresh-faced college student embodies hip, young Charlottesville. She is just one of a number of shop owners who purvey goods to an affluent, plugged-in clientele. Yves Delorme on the mall sells luxurious bedding (a not so local secret is this shop’s blowout Thanksgiving sale) and Caspari’s flagship store on Main Street showcases, in addition to the cards and cocktail napkins they are known for, furniture accents with a European twist. The Warehouse District—a new area of shops in former industrial buildings bordering Garrett Street—includes stores like C&A Camp with stylish inventory from around the world that owner, Carlin Stargell Camp, refers to as “classic luxury.” I have my eye on one of the fabulous Cari Borja asymmetrical coat she carries.

You’d expect a place like Charlottesville with its rich history to be a center for antiquarians and there are several very good antiques shops. Your best bet is the Ivy Square Shopping Center where Kenny Ball, Joseph, Joseph and Joseph and Mirabelle all vie for attention. Further west on Ivy Road you’ll come to the Curious Orange Shop and ultra-chic And George. For more eclectic taste, there’s John Sarah John a hybrid of antiques shop, interior design studio, espresso bar and event space on West Main Street.

As might be expected in a university town, Charlottesville has plenty of used bookstores; three notable ones located in the Downtown Mall area are Daedalus Bookshop, Blue Whale Books and Read it Again Sam. You’ll find the latest addition, the funky Random Row in a former car mechanic’s up on West Main Street.

“If I had only one word to describe Charlottesville,” says Carol Troxell, 63, owner of New Dominion Bookshop located on East Main Street, the oldest independent bookseller in Virginia, “it would be ‘smart.’” Troxell moved to Charlottesville in 1971, and though the city has changed dramatically during that time, she says the its overall tenor has remained the same. “Charlottesville’s still full of an interesting mix of people who are engaged with the world.”

And that mix of people balloons by more than 20,000 when classes are in session at the University of Virginia. UVA, established by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, may be Charlottesville’s best-known institution, and for good reason. Ranked in 2011 as the number two best public university (tied with the University of California Los Angeles) by U.S. News & World Report, UVA has earned the top one or two spots since the publication began ranking public universities 14 years ago. Additionally, UVA ranks in the top 25 of America’s best universities, both public and private. And its history is deep. Located on the west side of town, Jefferson’s Academical Village is the campus’ centerpiece. Known as the Lawn for the terraced greensward it overlooks, the U-shaped design is crowned by the Rotunda (based on Rome’s Pantheon) and features a long colonnade fronting the original 54 student rooms and 10 larger structures known as pavilions. Housing for professors and their classrooms, the pavilions are of unique design intended to reflect the various branches of learning and to showcase different architectural orders. Nowadays, the rooms on the Lawn as well as the parallel Range (site of Edgar Allen Poe’s room) are highly prized. Says Sara Allen Harper, class of 2011, who lived on the Lawn during her senior year. “I felt so much pride living there, thinking about all the people who had lived there before me and wondering what their experiences had been. It was also a bizarre and unique experience on account of all the tourists and even other students who you ended up sharing it with!”

My fellow locals occasionally gripe about the constant construction and endless expansion of the campus. I must admit I enjoy the summer when parking spaces at the Corner are plentiful and the lines at Bodo’s bagel restaurant’s three locations shrink. But all in all, people recognize the boon the university affords the town. (UVA and its health system are the area's largest employers providing over 17,000 jobs according to the city’s 2010 Comprehensive Financial Report.) Says Ida Lee Wooten, director of community relations at the university: “City residents do express concern about traffic in the University area, but in the past two decades I’ve seen the university and city of Charlottesville increasingly working together to build a strong community.”

Surrounded by mountains and lovely countryside Charlottesville promotes an active lifestyle, with hiking, biking horseback riding and skiing topping the list. There are two active foxhunts: Farmington and Keswick. Since foxes aren’t pursued and killed once they’ve “gone to ground,” there isn’t the same controversy as in England. Non-riders can get a taste of the pomp and circumstance associated with the sport when at Thanksgiving, Grace Church in Keswick holds its Blessing of the Hounds. It’s a scene straight out of the 19^th century. The field turned out in full regalia with the “pinks” (actually scarlet coats) of staff and visiting hunt dignitaries very much in evidence, hounds and horses assembled in front of the church. If that’s not enough equine activity, the Foxfield Races are held in April and October. There’s also an annual horseshow in Keswick and a Farmington-Keswick point-to-point both held in the spring.

Charlottesville is “a progressive city that values education, the environment, social justice, the arts and our history and is a cultural, social and economic hub in Central Virginia,” says Mayor Dave Norris, 41 who has lived in Charlottesville since 1995. Norris points out that unemployment in the city is consistently lower than the national average. The small-town, big university atmosphere attracts a cosmopolitan and diverse crowd, many of whom have been lured by the bevy of top rankings the city has earned. It has been named one of the Top "Brainiest" Metropolitan Areas by The Atlantic, Number One City for Retirement by Kiplinger.com, the Healthiest Place to Live by Men's Journal magazine, and the 4th Best Place to Live in the Country by Kiplinger's Magazine. Indeed, the floodgates may have opened in earnest when Cities Ranked & Rated ranked Charlottesville as the #1 Best City to live in USA & Canada in 2004. Unfortunately, all this growth brings with it sprawl, traffic and homogenization. A lot of problems are blamed on the influx of people. But some of the worst offenders in the sprawl department are homegrown developers who seem oblivious to the perils of fouling the nest. As for “the Donald,” his recent acquisition of the Kluge estate and winery (and, if he gets his way, Albemarle House) has cast a pall over southern Albemarle. More sinister though is the fact that the killer of Morgan Harrington, the 20-year old Virginia Tech student who was murdered after she was stranded outside a Metallica concert) has not been caught and the word on the street is he’s a local.

But there is good and bad in all places and in balance, Charlottesville has much to offer. Suzannah Fischer, 45, owner of gift shop O’Suzannah’s on Fourth Street, says, “I take huge pride in being a C-Ville native. I am still reminded of so many of my childhood experiences, despite the growth the city and counties around us. Of course, most every landscape of C-ville has changed, but the vibe is still relaxed. I think the city feels progressive with an emphasis on families and community. Once you make your home here it's nearly impossible to leave. There seems to be something that draws us back, not just a feeling of missing home, but feeling you're missing out on something if you are not here.”

Family Values

2011-10-13T11:55:00.001-07:00

Is it just me, or do others loathe the stick families you see on the back of minivans as much as I do? The glib, pro-family message they send strikes me as essentially homophobic and I can’t help but feel there’s some creepy religious undertone to it all.

The stick families are not only vapid, but seem to reveal a peculiar level of self-absorption. First of all, do the people who have them really think others on the road care about their stick figure families? And, call me paranoid, but do they really want that kind of information (i.e. the names of their children) out there?

Someone pointed out to me that 9 times out of 10 while the figures are stick, the person driving the vehicle is usually fat. Is this some kind of weird group body dysmorphia disorder?

I have fantasies of all the unorthodox families I could come up with for the back of my car, I’m sure someone’s beaten me to this. I sure hope so and that I’ll see their handiwork soon.

Xu Bing: Tobacco Project

2011-10-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

“I am interested in an examination of inherently human issues and weaknesses through an exploration of the extensive, entangled relationship that exists between human beings and tobacco. .. Taken together, human weakness and the meaning of tobacco form a kind of awkward relationship, a relationship that reveals the innate quality of self-professed helplessness.” – Xu Bing

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond to see Xu Bing: Tobacco Project, which explores the production and culture of tobacco. The VMFA show is the third part of a trilogy that began with Xu’s residency at Duke University in 2000 followed by a 2004 show in Shanghai. It is fitting that the final piece of the trilogy is in Richmond as Virginia is tobacco’s ground zero. Leading up to the show, Xu toured Philip Morris in Richmond—one of the largest cigarette production facilities in the world—and visited a tobacco warehouse and several family-owned tobacco farms in Southside Virginia.

It was in researching the Duke family that Xu zeroed in on tobacco, which has figured largely in Chinese culture since the 19th century and holds particular resonance for him as his father died from smoking-related lung cancer. As with most anything when you begin to scratch the surface, you discover a whole world opening up, and Xu’s explorations into tobacco expanded to include its history, production and marketing.

The VMFA show is an iron fist in a velvet glove, quiet and serene, yet packing a punch. There is beauty and inventiveness, humor and awe. The first thing you notice as you approach the show is the smell. Sweet and heady tobacco reaches out to you from several rooms away. It’s a powerful metaphor for tobacco’s insidious pull. I loved Traveling Down the River, which features an eye-popping 30’ long cigarette laid atop a reproduction of the great 11th century Chinese scroll Along the River during the Qingming Festival. The painting is considered the Mona Lisa of China. So to besmirch it in this way, with ash and burn marks is akin to blasphemy. An accompanying text likens Xu’s piece to Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., which features Mona Lisa sporting a graffiti moustache and goatee.

Backbone, a collaboration between Xu Bing and René Balcer, is a book presenting historical tobacco logos printed onto oversized pieces of cigarette paper. Here they are exhibited unbound, individually framed and hung en masse on the wall. The names are so delightful (Black Satin, Custard Pie, Queen of Ophir, Pure Cream, Dew Drop)—quaint, innocent, puffed up, evocative—they inspired Balcer to create a free-verse blues piece. A recording performed by Captain Luke and Big Ron Hunter is available by calling a number provided by the museum on your cell phone. Xu is known as a print- and bookmaker and he has a field day with the fine paper, interesting logos and distinctive cigarette tins and boxes, inscribing texts on cigarettes, presenting uncut and thus unsmokable cigarettes in custom made containers, joining well-known corporate names to cigarettes, and the like, marrying words, images and materials in ingenious ways.

Xu was in Richmond in advance of the show for a two-week residency. He worked on several large pieces, some new; some recreations of past site-specific works assisted by graduate students from Virginia Commonwealth University’s highly regarded School of the Arts. Included among these is the star of the show: 1st Class (pictured above), a giant tiger-skin “rug” made from 550,000 1st Class discount cigarettes. The cigarettes are arranged with alternating filter and tip facing up to create the distinctive orange and white tiger pattern. The effect is astounding. The piece just stops you in your tracks. It’s a thing of beauty, but it is also a thing of beauty made from such mundane and easily identifiable things that are completely and utterly transformed. As if all this wasn't enough, when you walk by it, the white changes to brown as the tobacco becomes visible, creating a whole other effect. Simply extraordinary.

Though I am happy to embrace the piece on visual merits alone, when I think about why Xu chose a tiger skin, I guess I look at it as the subjugation of the once fierce and proud Chinese/Asian people through cigarettes. Specifically choosing a discount brand of cigarettes with a phony, highfalutin name to make the piece, underscores the treachery.

Unfortunately, the catalog accompanying the show doesn’t have a good image of 1st Class. (I do understand this is because the catalog had to go into production in advance of the recreation of the piece in order to be ready for the show.) The image supplied is the Shanghai iteration of the piece, Honor and Splendor; it’s unfortunately bisected by the room’s columns, detracting mightily from its explosive effect. I did like the cigarette filter paper used as end pages though. It made me wonder about the origin of that distinctive orange, flecked appearance. Turns out in the old days premium cigarettes had cork tips that didn’t stick to your lip like plain paper ones.

Goodbye to All That?

2011-09-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

I recently moved. It was a big one, moving not just my belongings but also disassembling my mother’s house and dividing everything up amongst me and my siblings—so lots of work and emotionally draining, for it seems as if we were closing the book on my parents' lives.

I have put most of my things in storage with the exception of my paintings, which are now arrayed around the apartment (on the floor leaning against the walls) that I am temporarily calling home. Much as I love my things, I am also loving the idea of being divested of them and am seriously toying (is that an oxymoron?) with opening a pop-up store and selling them all off. Things, especially nice ones are a huge responsibility and the thought of carting them all around after me is exhausting right now. Maybe I’ll feel differently after some time has passed...

I have always lived in rather funky places and decorated accordingly. I sometimes wonder if given my druthers I might prefer a more minimalist approach, but then I think of who I am how I dress, think, interact with the world and see that my multi-layered pastiche of objects and styles is very much a reflection of that.

Ne Plus Ultra

2011-09-01T09:04:00.001-07:00

At breakfast today my friend was telling me about a story he’d heard on NPR while I was away about the evacuation plans for selected artwork from the National Gallery in the event of a terrorist attack. After the passing jolt of fear the news of the existence of such codified plans generates, we decided wouldn’t it be great to get one’s hands on the list of the art that made the cut? Fat chance. Though it would make a great walking tour of the museum’s collection, for many reasons I’m sure this won’t be made public. Interestingly, after 9/11 I was going through all the treasures in New York and wondering what I would take in an emergency. Of course, not being the National Gallery my sights were smaller, and I had it narrowed down to just one using the burning building model.

People who know me as a Modernist (and atheist) might be surprised by the choice, for I picked Bellini’s St. Francis of Assisi in the Desert at the Frick, which depicts St. Francis receiving the stigmata. In the painting St. Francis is standing on a rocky ledge outside his cave, a hapless donkey and blue heron, his only companions. I love the few, quotidian details Bellini inserts here and there, the little wooden gutter jutting out from the rock, St Francis’s clodhoppers kicked off under the lectern, the wonderful twig gate leading into his lair. They root the scene in the real world, and for the modern viewer they are delightful period touches. And of course there is the memento mori skull to remind us where we're headed.

Looking carefully you can see a thin line of gold representing the Holy Spirit passing down from the heavens to his hands. St. Francis seems to be knocked back from the impact. The rocks that form the cave take up most of the background creating a large grayish dun colored expanse and a strong diagonal upwards thrust. In the left corner one can see the distinctively Italian countryside and the towers and fortification of a hill town rising up to the cloud-flecked sky. The overall palette of tawny golds, beiges and greens is the perfect foil for that patch of glorious Bellini celestial blue that hovers above and which fills me with such a sense of exhilaration.

It seems to me the painting says so much about beauty and about goodness and integrity. Though unreligious, I do admire St. Francis and what he stood for (the sweet donkey references this) and I admire his spiritual quest, so artfully depicted here, which to me is about courage and independence and an ultimate belief in oneself. So for its beauty, spirit and humanity there’s no question that I’d grab St. Francis of Assisi in the Desert before the conflagration.

Airstreams in the AIr...

2011-07-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

I’m supposed to be writing about Charlottesville (where I live) for Virginia Living magazine, but I find myself procrastinating at every chance. Perhaps it’s because it’s too close to home and it’s such a rich subject on so many levels. Having come here all my life accompanying my father on his annual Law Day Weekend forays and then lived here for a number of years heading up a nonprofit Contemporary Art space and then running a decorating business, I’ve straddled all the different groups that call Charlottesville home, the University people, the horse people, old Charlottesville, new Charlottesville, hipster Charlottesville, blue collar Charlottesville, etc., I’m hyper aware, as a friend said, of “the good the bad and the ugly.”

Which brings me to something I’d much rather write about: Airstream trailers. I have been yearning for one. The house is on the market and I have been delighting in the prospect of a mobile living arrangement. There’s something so appealing about having all that is necessary for existence neatly incorporated into a 25’ x 5’ space. Airstreams with their luscious streamline curves and snappy unadorned silver are just so cool. As a child, I remember reading in National Geographic about an Airstream trailer club traveling the world and I believe there was a Lucille Ball movie I was much taken with in which an Airstream featured prominently. I was happily daydreaming about my transition into Airstream living when I realized the one fly in the ointment is my art collection which I’m very attached to. I doubt there’s much wall space inside one of those babies. Then I began to think how great it would be to retrofit an Airstream removing the living accoutrements and enhancing the wall space to function as a mobile art gallery. It would be exhibition space, artwork and performance piece all at once.

Anyway, something must be in the air because I discovered that an architect friend who possesses a superlative sense of aesthetics has also been fantasying about Airstreams with plywood interiors and cowhide upholstery, and I have read on Facebook that another friend who owns the local very hip shoe store has just purchased an Airstream that she is restoring, I gather as an adjunct to her store as it’s on the store page.

But wait, it gets better. Ever since I first rode in the back of one in Paris when I was 10, I have wanted a Citroën DS. I remember how very comfortable it was as I sank into the velvety back seat of one outside the Gare du Nord and how its shape reminded me of a Guinea pig (my sister and I had several adored ones at home). Even the movement is similar: when a Guinea pig runs and then stops it lowers its hind end much like the hydropneumatic self-leveling suspension in the car when it stops—or maybe I was reading too much into it?

In any event, I had an epiphany this morning. In my mind’s eye I clearly saw a shiny black Citroën DS with its trademark white roof pulling an Airstream, my dog, Tallulah, in the backsaeat with her head out the window. I just bet the DS has the horsepower for the job.

A Bit of Blueberry

2011-06-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

One afternoon, not long after we moved to New York in 1961, the doorbell rang. My mother opened the door to reveal a great moose of a man. He had wild white hair, a generous moustache, a prominent hearing aid with wire attached to a box in his breast pocket and a cigar jammed into his mouth. He wore a proper Brooks Brothers raincoat over, what I would learn was his uniform, khaki shirt and pants and Jack Purcell sneakers. He introduced himself as Waldo Peirce a childhood friend of my mother’s mother. He’d heard from her that we’d recently moved to the neighborhood and he’d stopped by on the way to his studio on the next block. He invited us to visit him there and so a few days later my mother, sister and I found ourselves in the one-room apartment on the second floor of a walk-up where he did his painting.

Waldo had a booming voice, as deaf people often do, and an easy laugh. He sat my sister and me down at a table with a large book between us. It was full of watercolors he'd done of various animals. He asked us each to pick one; my sister chose a tiger and I, younger and a little timid, followed her lead and selected another big cat, a lion. After we left, as happens with children, our attention soon shifted to other things and my sister and I completely forgot about the tea party in the artist's studio.  

But we were on Waldo’s radar screen and a week later, he appeared at our house with two large packages wrapped in brown paper. He presented one to my sister and one to me. Unwrapping them, we discovered paintings personally inscribed by Waldo to each of us. My sister's shows a three-quarter portrait of a magnificent yellow-eyed tiger positioned against a jungle green background, mine a rather gentle looking lion lying under a tree beneath a full moon enjoying a hunk of meat. (My older brothers used to tease me by pointing to the meat and saying it was me). I loved the painting instantly and knew even at five what a treasure I’d received. Thereafter, Waldo painted a charming landscape of a Central Park playground in which my sister, I and our dog, Foxy are featured. I can date the picture to Spring 1962 as I am not wearing the uniform our school required and my sister is, so I was not yet in kindergarten.  

Not long after our meeting, Waldo gave up his studio and moved back to live full time in Maine, but our connection didn’t falter. We used to visit him on our annual pilgrimages to our lake near Bangor and for many years he sent us postcards and letters written in silly rhymes and decorated with wonderful animal illustrations. He had a wide circle of lucky friends who received these missives. My mother carefully saved ours and we each have a framed group.  

The following summer my grandmother rented a cottage in Searsport, Maine where Waldo owned a rambling Mansard-roofed Victorian house. Grandmother’s cottage was one of those perfect summer abodes, unpretentious, funky and charming. Gray shingled, with blue shutters sporting half moon cut-outs, it was perched among hydrangea bushes on a slight hill facing the bay. In addition to the kitchen, there was one large room. I remember it as being dark, not in an unpleasant way, just old-fashioned. It had unpainted bead board walls and was appointed with a hodgepodge of wicker and upholstered furniture in faded chintz that looked like it had been there forever. There were a couple of small bedrooms in the rear off the single bathroom. I think my brothers must have bunked in the living room during our weekend visit. The crowning feature of the house was the covered front porch. It was here that Waldo painted watercolor portraits of my sister and me. I remember the day vividly. Waldo filled the place with his voice and laugh. At lunch, my grandmother served cantaloupe and I was astonished because not only did Waldo put salt on his melon, but black pepper as well. (It was not until decades later that I encountered a similar approach at a Mexican vendor’s stand in Los Angeles where cayenne pepper was sprinkled on the cut fruit—delicious I might add.)  

Grandmother must have served blueberry pie that day for on my portrait there was a purple stain and penciled note in Waldo's hand (both fading over time) identifying it as “a bit of blueberry” that must have fallen onto the paper. The mar seemed to encapsulate Waldo’s character. He was just the exuberant type who embraced life with the sort of gusto that meant you ate the pie at the same time you painted, and once the damage was done you cheerfully made the best of it, incorporating the flaw into the work and actually making it all the more special. It was a good lesson to learn at an early age.  Waldo did a subsequent portrait of me that must have been painted the following year (my grandmother rented the house for several summers) because my hair is short; in the first one I had braids. I don’t remember that episode and maybe it’s become merged in my mind with the previous year. I don’t know what’s become of that portrait, my grandmother kept it and I think it went to my aunt (DJ), but where it went after her death I have no clue. Sadly, the other two were inadvertently stowed in the basement of my parent’s new house when they moved and were destroyed by moisture.  

Waldo has been compared to many artists, most notably to Cézanne and Renoir. He was once even called the "Hemingway of American painters," to which he replied with a twinkle, "They'll never call Ernest Hemingway the Waldo Peirce of American writers!" But Waldo was a true original. He may have been trammeled in his pursuit of artistic greatness by the ever-present security blanket of his family’s wealth, but he produced an oeuvre that perfectly mirrored his joyful existence.  Born in 1884 in Bangor, Maine then known as the "lumber capital of the world," Waldo lived an idyllic life, hunting and fishing in the surrounding forests with his father and brother. His was an affluent existence; his doting parents, Mellen and Anna Hayford Peirce, owned vast tracts of timberland north of Bangor.  A bright, but indifferent student, Waldo attended Andover graduating in 1903 and Harvard. Of college, he said he "majored in pool," playing upstairs at the Leavitt and Peirce Smoke Shop (no relation as far as I know) in Cambridge, where his comical, illustrated poem about the poolroom still hangs). I remember hearing Waldo recount with great glee how on a visit to New York as an undergraduate, he got hold of some police barricades and convinced his companions to help him dig a hole in Times Square in the middle of the night, which they surrounded with the barricades. He was delighted to discover on his return several months later that the barricades and hole were undisturbed. While he did the prank as a lark, to my eye it also stands as a credible example of an early art performance piece. During his time at Harvard, Waldo was on the football team, he was a strong swimmer, tennis player, golfer, and avid fisherman. All these extra curricular activities took a toll on Waldo’s studies and it took him six years to attain his undergraduate degree.  

His most famous exploit occurred just after he graduated from Harvard when he and his friend, John Reed (of Reds fame), booked passage together on a freighter to England. As the ship was leaving Boston Harbor, Waldo decided the accommodations were not up to his standards. Without telling anyone, he jumped overboard and swam (reputedly several miles) to shore. Back on the ship, with Waldo unaccounted for, suspicion turned to Reed who was accused of the murder of his traveling companion and thrown into the brig. When the freighter arrived in England, Waldo was waiting on the dock to greet it—he’d sailed across on a faster (and more luxurious) ocean liner.

  Waldo joined the American Field Service in 1915, driving an ambulance during WWI. He received the Croix de Guerre for bravery at Verdun. He'd been living in Paris since 1910 and he stayed on after the war, continuing there on and off until 1931. This was certainly the time for an artist to be in Paris and Waldo immersed himself in the heady atmosphere. He studied at the Academe Julien and for a time in Segovia with the Spanish Impressionist Ignacio Zuloaga, where he met and married the first of his four wives, the unconventional Dorothy Rice, who drove a motorcycle. To the detriment of the marriage, Rice's mother, who Waldo referred to as "the umbilicus" was very much in the picture. Before leaving Paris, Waldo would marry twice more; first to Ivy Troutman, an actress, whom (always one with a witty turn of phrase) he later referred to as "Poison Ivy" after they divorced. His third wife was Alzira Boehm, with whom he had twin boys and a girl. He married his final wife, Ellen Larsen in 1946; they had two children. Four marriages is a lot, especially back in the day when divorce was still fairly scandalous. But all this matrimonial upheaval didn't seem to adversely affect Waldo; I suspect he easily became carried away romantically and married the women he slept with, as well-brought up people were inclined to do in those days. These impulsive early marriages were made without a huge emotional investment and so when they ended, the damage was slight. I only saw him with his fourth wife, Ellen and they seemed genuinely devoted to each other. She was yin to his yang. A slight, graceful woman, she was quiet, much younger and a serious painter in her own right. With her, he'd finally met his match and their 24-year marriage endured until his death.  

in Paris, Waldo (subsidized by his parents) had a magnificent apartment overlooking the Seine at 77 rue de Lille. He knew almost everyone who was anyone, there is no mention of Picasso and I suspect that, in a addition to a probable personality clash, this is also because Waldo was somewhat of a traditionalist when it came to painting and this would have been a profound parting of the ways for these two. But Waldo hobnobbed with James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Ford Maddox Ford, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway, who would become a lifelong friend. I had always heard Waldo first encountered Hemingway driving ambulances during the war, but it seems their relationship really took hold in Paris. In July 1927 they traveled to Pamplona. Waldo recorded the trip in a collection of drawings, watercolors and photographs.  Waldo found early success in Paris with his Impressionist paintings and portrait commissions. In 1915, in New York City, his works were exhibited along with those of John Sloan, George Bellows and Edward Hopper. The Peirces moved back to the States and settled in Bangor in 1931. Waldo's career flourished throughout the '30s. He exhibited alongside Andrew Wyeth, Bellows and other prominent artists and his self-portrait with his family, Haircut by the Sea, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum.

  I know from my interactions with him that Waldo had a special affinity to children. A gentle giant, he was devoted to his own five, painting them hundreds of times. Hemingway gives a amusing, if somewhat exaggerated account, of a visit Waldo and his brood paid him in Key West. It reveals a besotted father: "Waldo is here with his kids like untrained hyenas and him as domesticated as a cow. Lives only for the children and with the time he puts on them they should have good manners and be well trained but instead they never obey, destroy everything, don't even answer when spoken to, and he is like an old hen with a litter of hyenas. I doubt if he will go out in the boat while he is here. Can't leave the children. They have a nurse and a housekeeper too, but he is only really happy when trying to paint with one setting fire to his beard and the other rubbing mashed potato into his canvasses. That represents fatherhood.

"  Growing up we had a copy of Mary Norton’s 1943 edition of The Magic Bed-Knob, or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (The precursor to Bedknob and Broomstick), which Waldo illustrated. In fact the story goes that Norton wrote the text specifically to accompany Waldo’s illustrations. They were wonderful so rich in detail and full of life. I regret that the well-thumbed book finally fell apart. Of course, a much more insipid illustrator was chosen for the subsequent edition.  In addition to his countless drawings, paintings and voluminous correspondence, Waldo produced ribald poems and ballads. Scribner's once considered publishing the pieces, but ultimately felt they were too risqué. He was given a $500 advance from the publisher to write his autobiography, but it was never completed. It's a pity; Waldo's many funny and irreverent quotes indicate how much he enjoyed expressing himself through words. An example: "I'll give you a tip on painting ladies of today...I always let the lady paint her own mouth, which she knows better than I do, and does it two or three times a day on the original countenances."  Waldo often visited Hemingway in Key West, where they fished for tarpon and Waldo painted many portraits of him. One, Kid Balzac, hangs in the Hemingway collection at the JFK Library. In 1937, Time magazine commissioned Waldo to paint Hemingway for its cover. Waldo and Hemingway met for the final time in March 1959 in Tucson, Arizona, where in later life Waldo had a house. Two years later, hearing of Hemingway's death, Waldo immediately knew the initial story of an accident was false and that his friend had killed himself.  

Waldo died in 1970 and is buried next to his mother in Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor. A bon vivant, Waldo was incredibly generous and despite his bold, larger-than-life persona, humble—always insisting he was a “painter,” not an “artist.” As he was wont to remark, he never "worked" a day in his life, yet he devoted countless hours during his lifetime to painting thousands of pictures, toiling away well into his eighties. The downside of being so prolific is that not every painting is going to be a keeper. Sometimes Waldo’s pieces have an overly slapdash quality and the exuberance that is his trademark devolves into messiness. But when he’s on, they’re great. As a critic said, his splashy, sensuous paintings “smell of sweat and sound like laughter.”  It was a real gift to have Waldo in my life from an early age. A free spirit and true bohemian he showed me you don't have to follow an expected path. Part of Waldo's great appeal to the young was that he was so very modern, or perhaps timeless is a better word as he seemed to fit so easily into whatever time period in which he lived. The other people I knew his age, including his great friend, my very proper grandmother, were much more conventional and decidedly elderly. I have such posthumous respect for her for valuing him and being his friend; I can't imagine Waldo interacting with my father's parents who remained formal Edwardian creatures until the day they died five and seven years after he did.  In addition to the Met, Waldo’s work (unless it’s been deaccessioned) is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the University of Maine, the Penobscot Marine Museum and Colby College. There is a beautiful, extremely sympathetic portrait of him done by Bellows in 1920 that I was delighted to happen upon at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Full Circle

2011-06-09T08:42:00.001-07:00

Another bit of serendipity occurred while walking through the Central Park Zoo where we came across posters for Full Circle: Ai Weiwei and the Emperor's Fountain a sculptural installation presented by New York's wonderful Public Art Fund.

The piece which is installed at the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza, references the 18th-century zodiac fountain clock designed by European Jesuits for the imperial compound known as the Yuanming Yuan (the Garden of Perfect Brightness). The fountain clock featured large-scale bronze heads of the 12 animals that make up the Chinese zodiac. The fountain heads are potent symbols for the Chinese, a painful reminder of the humiliation it suffered at the hands of the West: during the Second Opium War (1856-1860), Yuanming Yuan was ransacked, the fountain destroyed and the animal heads looted. Seven have since been located, including, famously, the rat’s head, which turned up in the auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s belongings two years ago. The hammer came down at $12 million, but the sale was cancelled after the Chinese government protested.

Ai’s heads are not exact replicas of the originals; in recasting them he has created new layers of meaning to address China’s complicated understanding of its past and its complex relationship with the West. As Ai points out, the heads are not really national treasures—designed and made by Europeans as they were—but have assumed such a prominent place in the Chinese collective consciousness on account of their history. The fact they represent the zodiac—so important to Chinese culture, as anyone who’s ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant knows—adds to their potency. There is another set of Ai's animal heads on view in London, I assume in front of another western fountain, but it is particularly fitting these are in New York as Ai, who lived here for many years, refers to it as a “zodiac city.”

The heads are really beautiful, ranging from the simple, almost archaic mouse and monkey to the far more complicated and animated cock and dragon. There is something august and eternal about these inscrutable beasts who stare out at the world from their elegant Giacometti-like stands.

An accompanying exhibition examining the history of the fountain clock and the concept behind Ai’s piece, is on view at the Arsenal Gallery (located within the Central Park zoo). (I discovered on my visit that the Arsenal originally housed of the Museum of Natural History. Something growing up in New York, I never knew.)

To add further frisson to the piece, In early April, Ai, who’s an activist (he's been actively birddogging government corruption in China, including the scandal surrounding the construction of the schools that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake) was arrested at Beijing airport in early April.

Serendipty

2011-06-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

I love stumbling across something unexpected in a museum, which becomes a door to a whole new, unexplored world. At the Metropolitan last week while in the Asian wing admiring the matinee idol Buddhas from Afghanistan, I overheard a docent tell her tour group that they must see the exhibition of Tibetan rugs. She said it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see them all together. Intrigued, I climbed up through the carved Indian temple to the upper gallery where the rugs were displayed. The small, but dense exhibition focused on Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, exploring the role ritual objects played in the advanced sect of Buddhism that flourished in Tibet 8th-20th centuries. On views, in addition to the tantric ritual rugs, were utensils—including knives, vessels, fire-offering ladles, ritual staff and daggers.

There were several rugs featuring tiger skins. I have seen plenty of modern versions. I never realized they were anything other than trompe l’oeil, less expensive takes on the real thing. It turns out they are ritual rugs and the skin has been flayed. More surprising were the human versions of the rug. The one I have pictured featured a flayed man (who reminded me of an E.C. Segar cartoon character with his bedhead hair and clown-like (amputated?) nose) the red stripes on his flesh indicate arteries; he is surrounded by his bones with his skull between his legs. The border is made up of severed heads. It's very handsome, if one can get beyond the subject matter, with its archaic stylization and subtle hues and I can see why it would appeal to its owner, the former British Contemporary Art dealer Antony d’Offay who appeared to own most of the items on view.

The gruesomeness seemed totally out of sync with what I know about Tibet and Buddhism, which granted isn’t a whole lot. The accompanying text was pretty vague as to whether the flaying/deboning/decapitating actually took place (one would assume it did at one time) or if it was ritualized. (There was mention of life-sized human effigies.) But whether real or ritualized, the point of it was to celebrate detachment from the corporeal body, removing obstacles, specifically the three poisons: Ignorance, Delusion, Greed that stand in the way of enlightenment replacing them with Good, Wisdom and Compassion. While the means may have been extreme, the goal is admirable. When I look around at the world these days, I can see that it is truly poisoned by the former triad. As Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” And so I will strive each day for the latter through deeds and meditation. You?

Fasci-NOT-ers

2011-05-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

Having watched the royal wedding, all I can say is British Millinery art has taken a tragic nose-dive. I blame the fascinator. Whether it’s a twee, feathered pompom or a rococo ribbon sea creature, I think they all look ridiculous. Small, sassy hats aren’t new; they were very much the thing in the ‘40s. Back then, women’s hair was coiffed in a sleek manner suitable for setting off their headgear; nowadays girls (and long-in-the-teeth women) for the most part, wear their locks loose looking both sloppy and off kilter.

Mother of the bride, Carole Middleton would have looked so much better if her hair had been neatly coiffed in a chignon (or the way she wore it for the evening reception) with the hat sitting more securely on her head. As it was, it looked liked she’d had an unexplained encounter with a Frisbee. One hat I liked at an extreme angle was Zara Phillips’s. But her hair was in an up-do and the hat had enough mass underneath—a large flower—to balance the angle.

I’m not against stylish exuberance. The late great Isabella Blow took to wearing outré headgear as a means to disguise her rather plain features (she was an early booster of both Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen) and it worked because she had exquisite taste and knew how to complement what God had given her.

It’s one thing to have a sense of humor in one’s dress and to be adventuresome, but what woman wants to look like a buffoon? I mean, really. At the end of the day, isn’t the point to look one’s best and not like you’re wearing some dowdy number whipped up from great-aunt Maisie’s bedroom curtains?

Obviously the princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are fashion-challenged. One need only Google them to see the ghastly schmattas they insist on wearing. But given the circumstances of the day (the fact that their mother was persona non grata and banned from the wedding) the last thing they should have done was draw attention to themselves. (Ironically, I spotted Fergie—nearly ran into to her twice—the week before the nuptials in Penn Station of all things, in the company of Bravo’s Andy Cohen I think (reality show anyone?) and she looked very chic and very trim as she high tailed it to the DC-bound Acela.) But her daughters had a bratty me-me-me take on the festivities. Aside from ungracious, their choices were incredibly unflattering and though they are royal (or at least half so), they looked tacky and middle class. Commoner Kate, the great-granddaughter of a coal miner, in her elegant and demure dress looked effortlessly regal and beautiful.

I give high marks to Charlene Wittstock and Princess Leticia of Spain for their chic hats and ensembles. They at least got the fact it was a wedding, not a carnival. Others like Tara Palmer-Tomkinson appeared to have borrowed their outfits from the Ice Capades wardrobe stock judging from the loud color, frou-frou touches and overall matchy-matchiness. And the footwear! She, Posh and Samantha Cameron all wore shoes more suited to the West Side Highway then Westminster Abbey.

So I’ve weighed in with my vent, but I really wouldn’t change a thing because Princess Beatrice has spun dross into gold, auctioning the infamous hat off on ebay for (at this writing) over GBP 50,000 (!) to benefit UNICEF and I also realize that if Princess Anne, for instance, opted for Chanel instead of the Dame Edith ensembles she favors, the whole thing would be so much more boring.

SOFA

2011-04-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I went by the SOFA (Sculpture Objects & Functional Art) show at the Armory In New York. It was one of those situations where you enter and see a couple of wonderful things and think it’s going to be totally great, but then it ends up being only marginally so. I missed there being more functional objects, but I guess that's not the purpose of the show. Still, I loved the ceramics by Molly Hatch that used traditional shapes and glazes but with a contemporary spin and Michael Eden’s monochromatic plastic pick-up-sticks covered urns.

My favorite work was by beadist, Jan Huling. Her anatomically correct human heart, Japanese anime figures, pony and babydolls were simply wonderful—perfect eye candy with an ethnic vibe and a decided edge. I love obsessions and clearly in order to produce such intricate work, one must be obsessed.

Condo-scension

2011-04-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

It probably wasn’t such a good idea to go to the George Condo show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art hot on the heels of the resplendent Picasso show at the VMFA. Condo’s smart alecky, all over the map, scattershot approach is so lacking when compared to the master of exuberant, and comprehensive artistic daring do. That Condo is trying hard to emulate Picasso, particularly in the area of portraiture is abundantly clear. One need look no further than Spanish Head Composition, Condo’s Picasso rift for affirmation. But he plain doesn't get it; it's all superficial—a lame attempt to reproduce what Picasso looks like rather than to understand the substance of what he was trying to accomplish. Condo also seems to be sampling Francis Bacon but with none of Bacon’s subtlety and finesse. Bacon knows how to parse visual information, leaving much up to the viewer’s imagination, allowing him to connect the dots of his pulpy, grotesque visages. As a result, his work has immense psychological power.

Though Condo knows from paint and creates really beautiful surfaces—The Fallen Butler was extraordinary in this regard—his insistent use of monstrous faces, which reminded me of the sophomoric doodlings in a high schooler’s notebook are the visual equivalent of a phonograph needle scratching across a record making it impossible to see the forest for the trees. (Forgive the mixed metaphor, but the work inspires such misguided hyperbole.) Sadly, you lose sight of what a great painter Condo is on account of his over-obvious, sledgehammer, attention-grabbing shtick that he seems unable to drop.

But all was not lost. I actually liked his quasi-abstract work, which reveals a powerful sense of composition and allows Condo to revel in paint and surface. Here, I could not help but think of Gorky and Matta, but with Condo’s own vision shining through.

Picasso

2011-04-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts scored big when they nabbed the collection of the Picasso Museum in Paris, which needed a temporary home during building renovations. I saw the collection in Paris many years ago. With my focus on Cubism and thanks to a Picasso coloring book I was given as a child, I dismissed much of Picasso’s other work as trite or as trying too hard. (Ah, the callowness and arrogance of youth!) I enjoyed my position of contrarian and proud New Yorker that I was, I knew many of Picasso’s masterpieces resided in my hometown: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Three Musicians, Girl with Mandolin, Ma Jolie. Indeed from my perspective, the city seemed lousy with Picassos. Twice I had had the good fortune of visiting the Victor Ganzes’ expansive collection on tours conducted by Mrs. Ganz herself in their sumptuous Gracie Square apartment, where several works are actually personally dedicated to the couple, souvenirs from their visits to Picasso's villa, La Californie. The Ganzes owned La Reve which Steve Wynn subsequently acquired and famously put an elbow through in 2006 just prior to completing a deal to sell it for $140 million. (I just read an account of the incident written by Nora Ephron where she erroneously alludes to the Ganz apartment as "small" and implies that the Ganzes were church mice along the lines of the Vogels. This is nonsense; they had plenty of money. Victor Ganz ran the family's very successful costume jewelry business and the Ganzes' apartment was a very grand duplex overlooking the East River in the same building that Gloria Vanderbilt lived in.) When the Ganzes' collection, which the couple bought for less than $2 million over the course of their lifetimes, sold at auction in 1997 for over $206 million (a return of over 10,000%) it was the largest private collection art sale in history.

Aside from the eye-popping work on the walls, I remember that as we mounted her gracious stairway to the upper floor, Mrs. Ganz allowed as how she always walked on tip-toe when climbing stairs to ensure shapely legs. She also said her daughters (alumnae of my school, hence the entrée) referred to one of his great portraits of the ‘30s hanging in the grand salon as the “Saks Fifth Avenue portrait” because of the resemblance of the cross-hatched pattern in one area to a SFA shopping bag.

When a friend invited me to the Picasso show in Richmond, I was delighted to go on an outing with him, but I didn’t hold out much hope for the show. Even though I had seen the collection, I had retained the false impression that it consisted of the dregs, works that were left lying around the studio at the time of Picasso’s death.

Boy was I wrong. The show is totally inspiring. I wonder whether viewing the work through the “lens” of the art of the intervening years has made me appreciate Picasso all the more for his innovative spirit, endless creativity and vibrant character; qualities that explode forth from nearly every work. He makes the others I see as his artistic progeny: Schnabel, Salle, Clemente look stale and even kind of timid. (The one exception is Basquiat who I think actually does have “the goods.”) Painting like they did after Picasso is the easy part; painting as he did when he did is the mystery and the magic. My friend and I kept marveling at the fact that the work was nearly 100 years old and still had such freshness and power.

The show is beautifully curated with wonderful juxtapositions of art. We loved Painter with a Palette and Easel of 1928, a supremely satisfying and subtle study of black, white, grey and pale yellow paired with the sculptural piece, Figure (submitted as a design for a monument to Guillaume Appollinaire), 1928 the bold lines in each echoing one another. Other favorite pieces are Seated Woman in Front of a Window, 1937; Self-portrait in Straw Hat, 1938 (that just knocks your socks off; the image reproduced here is a washed out shadow of the original, conveying none of its zing, but I used it because it is not often seen) and Large Still Life with Pedestal Table, 1931. And of course there’s the winsome Portrait of Olga in an Armchair painted the same year as the Synthetic Cubist Pipe, Glass and Playing Card—I love Picasso for his confidence and flexibility in daring to move back and forth between styles and doing it so brilliantly. Among other things, not wanting to be pigeon holed, he realized this kept him on pointe. With a mind as lively as his obviously was, he would have become incredibly bored plugging along in one style.

It occurred to me that it may be that some of the show-stopper pieces in the collection were donated by family members after my visit many moons ago, for surely I would have been as captivated by the paintings that grabbed me on this visit. I know for instance, I have always loved the portrait of his wife, Olga and hadn’t realized it was in the collection.

The exhibition includes photos and film footage of Picasso and it’s a delight to see this brilliant manchild at work and play. In the shop you can buy a pull marin and even a rather goofy looking Picasso doll; I wonder what the man himself would make of that?

Museum Design

2011-04-20T15:46:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about the Getty Museum recently and remembering its dramatic outdoor spaces with their killer views of Los Angeles. While I’m not a huge admirer of Richard Meier and the Getty design doesn’t bowl me over, I was impressed with how the building takes advantage of light and shadow, its brilliant white travertine against its desert canyon setting, the pleasant outdoor café and the wonderful Contemporary garden. I realized the most profound lasting impression of the museum was that I couldn’t remember a single piece of art.

This got me thinking about museum buildings and what constitutes successful ones. I was puzzled because the Getty is basically a conventional rectilinear building as opposed to say, the Guggenheim in New York, which I would characterize as unconventional given it’s circular shape. But while I do delight in the Guggenheim's design when I visit, I also always manage to see, appreciate and remember the art, whether it's a retrospective of Yves Klein—mostly 2-dimensional work or MatthewBarney which included video and installations and even incorporated the building into the work. Part of the fun there is seeing the art across the central atrium, and then again up close.

So are my Guggenheim memories more vivid because the art is just better there, or is the Getty (and its kick ass setting) just too distracting for the art it contains?

Mummy

2011-04-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

One of my earliest memories of my mother is her coming in to say good night before she left with Daddy for a dinner dance in Washington. She rustled to my bedside accompanied by the tinkling of her charm bracelet and a cloud of Arpège. I remember the dress: pale pink silk faille dotted with rows of pearls. I remember too being enveloped in her arms, the warmth, the love, the feeling of inestimable pride that this fairy princess of loveliness and glamour was my mother.

Some while later, on a summer evening, my older sister and I had been bathed and put to bed in our matching yellow gingham nighties. Mummy was going out; Daddy was away on a business trip. I don’t recall the circumstances, but before I knew it, Felicity and I were crouched on the floor of the back seat of the car (at her instigation of course). How we managed to sneak out of the house past my mother, the baby sitter and our brothers undetected and keep quiet on the ride over to the Chevy Chase Club, which granted wasn't far, I don’t know. But we did, popping out only after my mother had parked. “Surprise!” we yelled very pleased with our feat of daring do. Mum did not get cross; she laughed—I think she was quite pleased with the chutzpah of her little girls. She even took us over to say hello to her friends before driving us back home.

In 1981 the summer before I went to graduate school, Mum and I went to Italy. In Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum we were looking at a series of photographs of Peggy Guggenheim that line a downstairs corridor. A woman, clearly American, in flashy white pantsuit and bouffant hair rushed over to us. “Are you Americans?” she demanded. “Yes,” we replied, thinking she was in distress and needed help finding the consulate. “So, can you tell me something?” She asked; we nodded expectantly. “Why with all her money, didn’t she get a nose job?” There was a long pause while we digested her question and then my beautiful, but un-surgically enhanced mother said in an incredibly diplomatic tone: “Well, I guess her mind was on other things.” It was a Mrs. Prothero-worthy remark.

About a month before she died, Felicity and I were tucking Mum in for the night, all three of us curled together on her bed singing “Dites Moi” and “Jesus Tender Shepherd,” which was our lullaby when we were small. As we moved to go, she grabbed our forearms with a real sense of urgency. She was beaming and her eyes shone, “I wouldn’t trade this for a sharp price,” she whispered, squeezing our arms. What a gift it was to feel our mother’s abiding love expressed so poignantly as she struggled with the words she once so delighted in!

In reading the many condolence notes, “beautiful,” “elegant” and “intelligent” were used again and again to describe Mum. She also had a great sense of humor and a great sense of fun, though an acquaintance would not necessarily pick up on this, for Mum could be quite formal. A woman of substance who’d been forged in no-nonsense New England, she demanded the best from herself and expected it from others. In all her life, I don’t believe she ever did a petty or unkind thing. She was my lodestar, my mother and my friend.

Matt Kleberg

2011-04-20T15:40:00.001-07:00

It’s hard to breathe life into an area like portraiture that’s been done to death. But Matt Kleberg’s portraits are so fresh and also masterful, providing accurate representations of their subject while at the same time being compelling stand-alone Contemporary paintings. Kleberg is in his early 20s and about to enter graduate school to obtain his MFA. How he applies the paint—with bravura brushstrokes—his sure line, strong palette and clear grasp of compositional arrangements reveal a confidence rare in one so young.

At this juncture, Kleberg seems poised between representation and abstraction. Graduate school will provide the study and time to discover his path. There is no question in my mind that he has all the tools in his grasp to be a truly great artist.

W.G. Clark

2011-03-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

W.G. Clark may be the most important architect you don’t know. Quietly plying his craft in Charleston, South Carolina and Charlottesville, Virginia since the 1970s, he’s produced a small number of sublime buildings that occupy that rare nexus where architecture meets art. This is not to say Clark is completely unknown: he’s regularly entered and won major competitions, is sought after on the lecture circuit and is a revered professor of architecture at his alma mater, the University of Virginia.

Raised in the rural south, Clark grew up with a deeply rooted appreciation of nature. It is this reverence that governs his quest to produce work that balances beauty and restraint. ”We want our [artifacts and habitats], like those of the civilizations we admire, to form an allegiance with the land so strong that our existence is seen as an act of adoration, not an act of ruin.” It’s all about economy, which to him signifies “an ethical act that regrets the taking, imposing itself as a respectful, if insufficient act of atonement.” His choice of scale, materials and design all reflect this attitude. The work may make a small physical footprint, but its design seizes the attention in a way that transcends its modesty.

Clark uses inexpensive building materials, poured concrete, veneered plywood, steel door and window frames; it’s in keeping with his economy-driven philosophy but it’s also an approach that imparts strength: without the distractions of fancy materials, all attention becomes focused on the design. It’s a bold and confident choice because you really have to know what you’re doing to make concrete blocks look sexy.

Clark credits his grandmother, a self-educated woman as being his greatest inspiration. Indeed, her encyclopedia occupies pride of place in his house, clearly still a touchstone of great import. He says his architectural epiphany occurred as a youngster on a Boy Scout trip when he came upon an old mill in Louisa, Virginia. He was bowled over by its extraordinary “power of belonging to the place.”

Early on in his career, Clark worked for Robert Venturi in Philadelphia, hired for his skill as a draughtsman. When he decided to strike out on his own, he set his sites on the South expressly because it had no serious modern architectural tradition, and picked Charleston because it had once been a great architectural center and he thought it could be so again.

Clark was lucky to get a few plum commissions, including, the Middleton Inn built on the grounds of historic Middleton Place. Such a forward thinking design, especially in such close proximity to one of Charleston’s sacred cows, must have raised eyebrows, but the building went on to win a national AIA award and was featured in Architectural Digest.

Clark returned to Virginia in 1988 to assume the chairmanship of UVa’s Department of Architecture then in the throes of a Post-Modernist possession. Clark swept the house clean, bringing in a replacement crew of Modernist “savages.” But he loathed administrating and soon got back to the hands-on approach that he loves: teaching and designing.

Clark knows his worth, but he’s not arrogant. He comes across as a generous and kind mentor, one who demands excellence but is also willing to nurture it. His addition to the UVa Architecture School is a paean to the architectural review process, which Clark extols and a tribute to the students themselves. Warm, inviting and elegant; it is a transcendent statement of function and design; one would feel genuinely worthy standing on the raised step that runs along one wall forming a podium to face one’s professors in defense of one’s work. And Clark says he’s most proud that the top floor room is where the custodial staff gather each day to eat their lunch.

Perhaps Clark’s most beautiful building is the house he designed for himself in Charlottesville in 1994. A perfect little villa, it’s gloriously contemporary and yet so at one with its woodland setting. Inside, soaring space gives a sense of expansiveness despite the fact the structure is a succinct 1,400 square feet. Light, diffused and crystalline, is a major player in the design. Glass blocks are used for privacy from the street in front and to disguise a less than stellar view in the rear, their opacity is counterbalanced on the sides by large plate-glass windows looking out to woods. From the outside, the house resembles an organic sculpture during the day; at night, it becomes a glowing box of light.

Another fine example of Clark’s work is Les Yeux du Monde Gallery just outside Charlottesville. Art dealer, Lyn Bolen Warren and her husband, painter, Russ Warren wanted a dynamic design to house her art gallery and his studio, what they got was a structure that addresses, and befits, the artistic endeavors it contains.

Approaching the building up a long hill, you initially see a large expanse of rusting steel rising like a Richard Serra sculpture from the meadow. It suits its setting just as a piece of rusting farm equipment seems at home in a rural landscape. The façade is broken at one end by a two-storey window—the only indication that this is, in fact, a building. Fortress-like, it begins to take shape as you drive around. A second steel wall forms the end, separated from the front wall by another, more narrow, two-storey window. Coming around to the parking lot side, the building opens up: here, imposing rusted COR-TEN steel is replaced by a wall of glass blocks set in the gentler surface of painted steel sending the message that this is the home of a welcoming enterprise where aesthetic concerns are paramount. From here the graceful flourish of wing-like roofline becomes apparent. To really highlight this side, Clark has extended the gallery walls and roof beyond the ends of the building creating a frame of brilliant white. At the entrance, a ramp of poured concrete is both practical and aesthetic forming the handicapped access and establishing a directional pull towards the front door. A poured concrete rectangle is set in front of the ramp providing a nice geometric contrast as well as a step.

Inside, the space is airy; it’s a night and day contrast to the visual weight of the exterior. The exhibition space is a luxurious double-height room. Light floods in from the glass block wall, where because it’s diffused is perfect for displaying artwork, and from the multiple, different shaped windows that pierce the walls. In addition to light, these provide glimpses of the outside landscape. Their size and placement ensure that there’s adequate wall space for artwork.

At the rear, the area is divided into two levels with the gallery office on the ground floor and the studio above reached by a handsome wood stairway. A large rectangular wall separates the work areas from the gallery space. It’s freestanding which maintains a sense of airiness and flow, and when the gallery is crowded, allows traffic to move around on either side. Gaps are very much a part of the Clark aesthetic, appearing throughout the design. He uses them to create a lively negative and positive spatial dialogue and in linear form on a stair riser or where two panels of wood or steel meet, they act almost as an underline emphasizing a feature or direction Clark wants to draw attention to.

The Warrens’ residence, adjacent to the gallery, makes a bold architectural statement itself and it was important that the two structures complement one another, as well as maintain a separation of public and private spaces. The property’s views are spectacular and making use of them to their best advantage was key. Russ Warren’s studio on the second floor has the best view of distant mountains, a particularly inspirational vista for an artist. And as with all Clark’s buildings, Les Yeux du Monde relates to its surroundings in a symbiotic way, adding to rather than detracting from its lovely setting. http://www.lesyeuxdumonde.com/about/

Clark's firm is currently occupied with the design of the guest quarters for Mepkin Abbey, a Cistercian order in South Carolina. It's a logical choice as the Cistercians are known for their brilliant architectural tradition, which fuses austerity and spirituality to produce structures of great power.

Asked what his dream job would be, Clark points to the Habitat for Humanity multi-unit complex he designed for a SECCA (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art) competition. His intention is to form a community (as opposed to a neighborhood) with different size options to accommodate different sized households and a variety of design choices available to the residents. A green structure, power would be supplied by photovoltaic strips on the roof, which is slanted so water runs off into a channel in the central courtyard to be collected into a reservoir. This water is used for irrigation of the communal vegetable beds that take the place of lawn. The structure seems to sum up what’s Clark’s about: it’s low impact, democratic, and stripped down to the bare essentials, it is a triumph of graceful design.

Thomas Jefferson casts a long shadow over UVa, Charlottesville and the South itself; the place is rife with modern iterations of his architectural vernacular. But using brick and white columns does not a Jeffersonian make. It’s more about the spirit of the thing, its form, its function, its inventiveness. And while there is much that is different about Clark’s architecture, it’s far truer to Jefferson’s spirit than what's out there masquerading as Jeffersonian.

Chicken Salad...

2011-02-23T03:42:00.000-08:00

from chicken shit.

Say you were given $5 to build a shelter for two that you and a friend had to spend the night in in the middle of February. What would you come up with? Here are four creative options designed and constructed by University of Virginia architecture students. Set up in a professor’s backyard with volunteers from each design team gamely spending the night in their creations, one uses supermarket shopping bags, another plastic bottles, another cast off wood and a fourth, which resembles a storm cellar with it’s slanted door, stacks of telephone books.

From a purely visual sense, I loved the bottle one because the multicolored bottle caps created an interesting design. I pitied the occupants of the carrier bag one, which was lashed to a tree with plastic bag “ropes.” Mother Nature did smile on everyone with unusually mild temperatures, but the wind was fierce and I could imagine how noisy and insecure it would be surrounded by rattling plastic bags. The wood one, though a tight little capsule looked like it could become airborne in a strong enough wind, like a mattress on the roof of a car. Using the Three Little Pigs as a guide, I'd have to go with the telephone book one for my chosen shelter, which given the weight of those things, you know isn't going anywhere. Just pray it doesn't rain.

Funnily enough, yesterday I read about a group of women who crochet plastic carry bags, which they cut into strips and call plarn (plastic yarn) into sleeping mats for the homeless. Each mat is very labor intensive taking about a month to make and requires 500-700 bags. According to them, Kroger bags are the best.

Check out Dawn’s demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiUC0iDQtkA

Two More

2011-02-02T06:41:00.001-08:00

Here it is the glorious Klismos chair. Someday I will have one. (If not an entire set!) If you ever happen to find yourself on the Côte d’Azur, you must plan a visit to the Villa Kerylos in Beaulieu sur Mer. (The villa's website is listed in "Artnosh Picks.")

A Belle Epoque fantasy of an ancient Greek villa, it was built by Théodore Reinach, a French archeologist. It is simply extraordinary and full of all sorts of Klismos furniture. Going there, you feel like you've been given a window back into antiquity—a perfect stage set for a Mary Renault yarn.

Though I like the version pictured here best, Klismos chairs come in many variations of shape and materials. I’ve seen some vintage metal versions that, though not cheap were less costly than a mint wood one and I may settle for one of those so long as they have the right graceful curve of legs and back and a trompe l’oeil version of the original woven leather seats.

For no particular reason except that I think it is a thing of beauty I am including a lamp designed by Carlo Mollino. What a bravura shade and such simplicity and grace in the slender adjustable arm and almost jaunty, quadrifoil base. On a lighter note, Pierre Chareau designed a lamp he dubbed "La Religieuse" (nun in English). The name could also apply to this one, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Sally Field's head gear in The Flying you know what.

Objects of Desire

2011-01-31T10:08:00.001-08:00

Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping I furnish an Imaginary house with some of my favorite pieces of furniture, decorative items and art. Ever since I first saw it years ago in a magazine, I have coveted a Carlo Mollino Tavolo a Vertebra. The chances for me getting one are pretty slim as the last one sold for in excess of $1 million and a less, to my eye, beautiful Reale table by Mollino sold last year for $3.8 million. Still, it's in the dining room of my fantasy house. I've always loved Klismos chairs but I'm not sure if they would just be a little be de trop and detract from the pure simplicity of the table. I'd have to see them side by side to make the call.

I recently saw another dining room table that is a close second to Mollino's. It was designed by Noguchi for Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden for their stunning Wallace Harrison-designed house in Northeast Harbor, Maine. I'm one of those people who has never really liked round tables--I know they're supposed to be more conducive to conversation, but I guess because I grew up sitting at a rectangular one, I feel more comfortable at that kind of table. What's so brilliant about the Noguchi table is its amorphous shape is both circular and rectangular so you get the best of both worlds. The one thing that needles me is the extra spindly support at one end--I wish the table was able to stand on the wasp nest like central pedestal without it, or at least have a support that was less obtrusive.

Though very different the Mollino and Noguchi tables have a wonderful organic quality, evoking bone and shell that really appeals to me. I also covet a Curtis Jere's Raindrops mirror. I love mirrors for how they play with space and add light and interest to a room. This 1970s Jere one is gorgeous.

A new addition to my fantasy house would definitely be the felt Cappellini Peacock Chair, which I came across flipping through an old Vanity Fair. I love it; it's fun referencing the creature that inspired it without being cutsey. It also looks comfortable.

Maison de Verre

2011-01-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre is a revelation. A ‘High Tech” design, completed in 1932, decades before such a term was coined, the house was built for Annie Dalsace and her husband, Jean. The Dalsaces were close friends and patrons of Chareau’s and he built for them an abode perfectly tailored to their interests, habits and demands.

In reality, construction of the house was a collaboration between Chareau and Dutch architect, Bernard Bijvoët, although it is Chareau’s vision behind the innovative design. The house, which took four years to complete, was built on the site of (and partially under) an 18th century hôtel particulier on the rue Saint Guillaume on Paris's Left Bank. The original building, which was enclosed on all sides and included a forecourt and rear garden was purchased by Mme Dalsace’s father in 1928 with the intention of tearing it down and replacing it with an entirely new structure. But the building also contained an elderly, legally protected tenant on the top floor. So the plan of razing the structure and starting anew was scratched. Instead Chareau and Bijvoët embarked on a highly unusual approach. They placed steel supports under the top floor apartment, demolished the building underneath, and inserted the new house in the void. The Maison de Verre took four years to complete.

The new house, encased in a translucent skin of glass block, contains three levels: Dr. Dalsace’s office on the first floor, the living area with a dramatic grand salon on the second and sleeping quarters on the third. The glass blocks allow for diffused light to fill the house with select expanses of clear glazing that provide views of the garden. The effect is clean and spare, evoking the astringent beauty of Japanese design. At night the house glows and seems disembodied, hovering ethereally above the courtyard.

The aesthetic of the Maison de Verre is decidedly industrial. There are exposed steel beams, perforated metal sheeting, industrial light fixtures. A "well oiled machine," the house boasts numerous mechanical elements: sliding, folding or rotating screens in glass or metal that define and make adaptable the internal space, an overhead trolley dumb waiter running from kitchen to dining room, a retractable stair from the blue salon to Mme Dalsace's bedroom and a weight activated lighting system in the floor of Dr. Dalsace’s telephone booth. The Mason de Verre is an homage to function, but also to industrial form: Perelli rubber floor tiles—their circular blisters, intended to cushion feet on factory floors nicely echo the circular motif found in the ubiquitous glass blocks—are used on the stairs and in the grand salon. (Silly me, before seeing the Maison de Verre, I thought the use of this particular industrial flooring was a specifically 1980s innovation).

It turns out Chareau was an admirer of Cubism (the subject of my Master’s thesis). He amassed quite an impressive collection of “horrible paintings” (as some of his friends were wont to call them) by Picasso, Braque and Gris. They proved to be his salvation from financial ruin when he sold them in the late ‘30s. What interested me was to note the style’s unmistakable influence on his work. His layering of planes and textures seems so distinctly Cubist to me. I see it at the Grand Hotel in Tours, in the folding fan screens and the tessellating designs he used in fabric, mosaic tile and wall treatments; and it’s also prevalent in many of his table and desk designs, which feature dramatic Cubist-like shelving options.

At the Maison de Verre, Chareau explores all aspects of the Cubist aesthetic. I have not seen the house in person and perhaps the effect is more pronounced when looking at photographs, which are two-dimensional. But I was stuck, for what I took to be, Chareau’s constant toying with spatial perception. In the grand salon the vertical steel beams and the horizontal staircase treads slash across the space, calling into question our sense of it. In certain directions we’re not sure which way things are heading. Are they coming towards us, or moving away; this concurrent sense of depth, flatness and protuberance apes the spatial dynamism of Analytic Cubism. Textural layering of different elements—the Jean Lurçat needlepoint, enormous wall of books, and paintings—all set against the industrial backdrop is a complex Cubist collage, and Lurçat’s designs themselves (of which I’m sure Chareau had some hand in) with their bright colors, overlapping abstract and representational shapes and sprinkled with Pointillist confetti are Synthetic Cubist confections.

While I love the Lurçat tapestries that cover the chairs and sofa, I’m not completely swayed by Chareau’s furniture designs. He did produce interesting tables, desks and lighting, but with the exception of his folding garden version, I find his chairs clunky and uncomfortable-looking. They’re heavy on the art deco and too closely aligned with what you’d see in some proper bourgeois home. While Chareau’s architecture is audacious, when it came to furniture, it’s as if he couldn’t quite let go of his preconceived ideas about what constitutes acceptable design.

Chareau's architectural output was fairly small, but after he moved to the States during WWII, he designed a house-studio for Robert Motherwell in East Hampton. This structure really speaks to me as Chareau incorporated a Quonset hut into the design. I have always harbored notions about living in a Quonset hut—I know, I know: freezing in the winter, broiling in the summer. How about as a summer retreat situated on a northern lake somewhere? I love the simplicity of design and quasi-mobility. The graceful arching shape is reminiscent of the asphalt plant hard by Carl Schurz Park in New York, which Khrushchev famously admired when he visited New York. (The lowly industrial structure was the only building he admired, so the story goes, and I have to say Khrushchev was onto something.)

A masterpiece of Modernism, the Maison de Verre is unquestionably a bold design. Though constructed from “cold” industrial materials, there’s a definite warmth about the house. To a large degree this has to do with the appointments that create an inviting and gemütlich atmosphere. But the architectural design is the soul of the house and it imparts an irrefutable sense of harmony and joy. Three generations of Dalsaces ended up happily living there, a testament to its comfort, allure and staying power. Lovingly restored bt its current owner AMerican , Robert Rubin, the Maison de Verre is open for limited tours.

A Little Late to the Party

2011-01-16T09:38:00.000-08:00

Just heard Reggie Watts (on Studio 360) for the first time. Wow.

Though he’s referred to as a comedian and musician, I would call him a performance artist. He uses improvisation, stream of consciousness and a rotating cast of personae—he has a great ear for accents—mixed with a cappella compositions and a sound mixing control board.

Born in Germany, the only child of a French mother and an African-American father, Watts was raised in Great Falls, Montana. From the time he was five until he was 16, Watts studied piano and violin. He attended the Art Institute of Seattle before eventually studying jazz at Cornish College of the Arts. Along the way, he played in a number of Seattle bands of wildly varying styles/genres.

Watts reminds me of a funky Laurie Anderson, taking big ideas—Watts has a serious interest in theoretical physics—combining them with music and voice filters. Anderson’s music has classical origins; Watts’s is rooted in jazz and soul. His complex musical compositions also remind me of another favorite, The Orb.

Here's a taste:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiIdmT1GURg&feature=player_embedded#!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=344OpaQCAQI

True Blue

2011-01-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

My mother’s younger sister, Dorothy Chilcott Jackson, lived in New York in the 1950s and ‘60s working in publishing for one of the photography journals, either Modern Photography or Popular Photography and running with the hip, intellectual crowd in the Village. I don’t know much about that aspect of her life, having been so young, but I wanted to convey what a remarkable person she was. When I was little I called her Aunt Dottie. At about 13 she insisted I switch to “DJ,” her initials, which is what my older siblings had taken to calling her. She loathed the dotty-sounding Dottie; to me, DJ sounded cool, and it made me feel very grown up to call her that.

DJ was wonderful. She was funny and fun to be with. She possessed such a quick wit and zest for life; I loved being around her. Everyone did. In addition to being my aunt, DJ was also my godmother. I always felt we had a special bond on account of this. But one of the great things about DJ was she was able to convey this to me without diminishing her love for her other nieces and nephews. She adored us all.

DJ was, I realized much later in life, a lesbian. It was never an issue—even with my very prim and proper grandmother who I’m sure was much less naïve than one would think—and was never discussed openly, but it seemed entirely normal. I think the way the adults handled it with acceptance and lack of interference is responsible for how tolerant I and my siblings have always been about homosexuality. DJ had had beaux in New York when she was a gamine twenty-something and I’m not sure when she made the switch. As long as I can remember, Jane was there. I wouldn’t call DJ butch, though she preferred jeans and kept her hair cut short, she wore dresses and lipstick, heels and jewelry when situations called for them, but when I think about it, her energy was male. She was a lifelong tomboy and did things men (back then at least) did: sailing, fishing, constructing things. I don’t believe she ever hunted; she was a gentle soul and most likely it wouldn’t have appealed to her, but I’m sure she would have been a crack shot (like her maternal grandfather) and could have done it if push came to shove. She was sporty and loved physical activity, especially alpine skiing. She liked fast cars, Labrador Retrievers, Maine Coon cats and most especially young people for whom she had a special affinity.

She was multi-talented: an astute writer, terrific photographer, talented graphic designer, excellent and adventurous cook. She had a natural élan and great taste both in her environment and clothes (something she and her sisters inherited from their inherently stylish mother) with a tendency toward ethnic touches. She was independent, self-sufficient and brave, building her delightful cabin in Vermont herself. It was a simple, yet handsome structure, vaguely Scandinavian that could easily grace the pages of one of the hipper shelter magazines today. She was a consummate New Englander. She knew how to live off the land, digging for clams, fishing for flounder and picking berries in her beloved Maine. She would take us all along on foraging adventures, teaching us these skills. Some of my favorite memories center around her wonderful shack in Birch Harbor. Others are from Silvermine, Connecticut in her cozy house that always smelled like wood smoke, where we celebrated the most wonderful Thanksgivings and I played office in her home office and swung in the exhilarating hilltop swing. Later in palatial New Canaan, twirling around in her Arne Jacobson egg chair by the slate hearth, swimming with the dogs in the beautiful grotto-like indoor pool, changing in the hysterical, orange carpeted (floor, walls and ceiling) changing room, lying on her bed watching movies on TV with her and Jane.

When things got tough, after the devastating break up with Jane and she was strapped financially, she worked in a sardine factory in Maine making fast friends with the locals. They loved her, loved her authenticity, her warmth, her integrity, her particular charm. For her it was an adventure and a means to perfect her already spot on Down East accent and collect Maineisms.

Since her death in 1984, I’ve wondered so many times what she would have thought of this and that. She suffered through Nixon and Reagan and Vietnam. I remember her derision at certain jargon—she hated “the bottom line,” for instance. There have been so many choice examples since then that she would have enjoyed raking over the coals—what she would have made of Dubya-speak, I can only wonder at and regret not knowing. But I see so well her delight with the good that has transpired (the Internet, the end of apartheid, Obama), I feel her absent comfort during the hard times (9/11, the deaths of my parents) and hear her scorn expressed through a wicked sense of humor (the Bush years, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney).

I think part of the reason she died when she did was she’d had so many disappointments, both professional and personal and was just exhausted by the struggle and gave up, allowing the cancer in her gut nurtured by worry to carry her away. It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that she died so early on. I miss her very much.

Doppelgänger

2011-01-12T19:47:00.000-08:00

Working on two very different articles. A profile of photographer, William Albert Allard and a feature on the extraordinary artist, writer and style maven, Beatrix Ost. The Ost piece is basically finished, just waiting to see if the final edits made it through. It was fun to write. As part of my research, I read her memoir, My Father's House, which was very well written. And of course it is a treat to be in her presence soaking up her chicness and élan.

The Allard is coming together. Right now I am reading his book, Five Decades. Allard, who has worked for nearly half a century for National Geographic as a photojournalist is a consummate storyteller both with the camera and the pen. This neatly sums up his approach: "I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.” His writing is a joy to read, but I am eager to finish the book so I can start the writing!

Now for the tenuous link connecting the two, when I first saw Allard's photograph of actress, Benedetta Buccellato, I thought it was Ost.

The Nameless Hour

2011-01-09T02:50:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things to do is to go to the thermal baths in Warm Springs, Virginia. The area was sacred to the Indians who regularly soaked in the waters for spiritual and salubrious reasons. For me, it is indeed a spiritual experience floating in the waters: a letting go, a return to the womb, an elemental connection with nature. I always leave feeling refreshed, renewed and on some level, healed.

I had a similar experience watching Sigalit Landau’s hypnotic DeadSee which is part of the exhibition The Nameless Hour: Places of Reverie, Paths of Reflection at VCU’s Anderson Gallery. It has all the characteristics of a good art video, beautiful to look at and curious with an element of suspense, qualities that draw you in, making it impossible to look away. Landau is Israeli and uses the Dead Sea with its historical significance and high saline content repeatedly in her work. DeadSee begins with the camera hovering over watermelons bobbing in water. As it pulls back, we see they are strung together forming a ball. Most are intact but a few have been cut to expose their red flesh. As the camera continues moving away we see the artist, nude and floating within the ball which is slowly uncoiling, the long line of watermelons, like a string of pearls moving off to the right. More than anything it looks strangely molecular. It’s so odd and mysterious and visually appealing, one is riveted. We want to see what happens to Landau’s body when her section uncoils, what the bits of red from the cut watermelons will look like as they move in the green line across the screen, most of all we just want to make sense of it, if only in a nebulous, metaphorical way. Nothing all that surprising happens and yet the whole thing is a surprise.

There is a second Landau video in the show. In it she stands on a watermelon floating in the Dead Sea. Shot underwater and looking up, the top quarter of the video is a fish eye view of the alien world above, a blurry swirl of bright sunlight, blue sky and movement. Below, one senses the quiet and calm and the eternal constancy of the turquoise depths of that storied body of water. Landau had a major installation at MoMA a few years back. I am sorry I missed it; it won’t happen again.

My visual water cure continued with Janine Antoni’s life size video Touch in which she crosses a tightrope set up on a beach. As she steps on the rope it aligns briefly with the horizon and her feet appear to be stepping directly on the ocean. It’s a nice metaphor for an island girl (Antoni grew up in the Bahamas) whose existence would have spanned sea and land and for whom the horizon would have represented (for better or worse) the larger world. When Antoni steps out of the field of vision, the rope hovers there and then fades away so that we see a pristine view of the ocean. It happened so subtly, at first I thought I’d imagined it.

I first became aware of Pipilotti Rist years ago when the video of herself walking along a street gaily smashing car windows with a red hot poker went viral, or as viral as things did back in 2000. Gravity, Be my Friend her installation here is simply extraordinary. One is directed to enter the room, remove one’s shoes and sit (I ended up lying down) on an amoeba shaped pile of carpet layered in such a way to recall a topographical map. The aesthetic is decidedly groovy ‘70s. On the ceiling, within a mirror image amoeba shaped frame, an ecstatic (and downright trippy) video of figures frolicking in water, amidst flowers and weeds is projected. It’s a kaleidoscope of color and images. Joyful, fresh and just plain fun. A cool soundtrack adds aural balance to this visual feast. I really could have spent the entire afternoon there.

Stephen Cartwright’s work explores landscapes that have been altered by man. Fort Peck recreates the topography of a valley flooded to form a reservoir. A graceful hanging sculpture of translucent laser cut plastic suspended by fine wire, it’s hung at waist height so that you look down on it. The piece steps beyond its footprint, casting filmy shadows about the room.

To create his immersive soundscapes, The Sound of the Red Earth and Water Stephen Vitiello made extensive recordings in the Australian Outback. For this installation, he collaborated with Jeremy Choate using neon tubes of light to complement the sounds. I love me some neon and standing within the glowing light with the sounds washing over me was intense.

So I left the gallery after being taken on various journeys by different artists. They took me places I didn’t expect and provided me with an hour of reverie and reflection that left me inspired, uplifted and renewed.

Collecting on a Dime...

2010-12-25T04:07:00.000-08:00

so to speak. That’s what the Vogels did. They were hoarders in a way. But instead of a snarl of clothes, broken-down household items, out-grown toys and cast-off fast food containers, the Vogels hoarded art. Beginning in the 1960s the Vogels acquired over 4,000 works (paintings, drawings, sculptures) by mostly Minimalist and Conceptual artists ( Sol LeWit, Donald Judd, Richard Tuttle, Robert Mangold, Lynda Benglis, to name a few). The collection, much of which was literally kept under wraps, was crammed into the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment they shared with turtles, fish and a cat named Archie.

The Vogels are considered among the most important art collectors of the 20th century. Certainly they are it’s most unusual: an unassuming couple: Herb was a postal worker, Dorothy a librarian. Self-taught, they collected what Chuck Close called “the most unlikable, the most difficult art.” And the best thing is they did it all on a shoestring.

To be fair, the Vogels, did rely on a certain amount of creative financing, particularly when buying more established artists’ work. As the Vogels’ stature as collectors rose, artists naturally wanted to be part of their collection and so cut deals or arranged barters. For instance, the Vogels accepted a collage in exchange for taking care of Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s cat while they were away building Valley Curtain in Colorado.

I love the Vogels because they are obsessed and passionate and they show that challenging art is indeed accessible if you are willing to put in the time to develop an appreciation of it. Decidedly un-chic they went about the business of collecting in a quiet, modest way and managed to show up other pretentious poseurs. By the time I encountered them in New York in the early '80s they were well-known bellwethers, watched like hawks for what emerging artists caught their fancy.

The Vogels were not speculators, "buy what you love" was their motto, and they never sold anything to improve their humble lifestyle. They began working with the National Gallery in the early '90s and In an act of mostly selfless largesse, ended up giving their entire collection to it (832 works were donated outright; 268 were promised gifts; in 2008, 2,500 were distributed throughout the nation, with fifty works going to a selected art institution in each of the fifty states http://vogel5050.org/) in a combination of partial purchase and gift because as Dorothy has said, the collection was “built on the generosity of artists.”

The Vogels are the subject of the documentary, Herb and Dorothy (2008) by Megumi Sasaki.

Abby Kasonik

2010-12-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

Abby Kasonik is a calm, centered presence. You get the sense she’s one of those people who’s always had a clear vision of what she wants out of life. Kasonik lives with her boyfriend (antiques dealer, Roderick Coles owner of The Curious Orange Shop) in the charming house she bought when she moved back to the Charlottesville area after college. It’s a chic setting with an unpretentious elegance that suits both the architecture and its owner.

Her latest series began as underwater meditations on the Baltimore aquarium (Kasonik is drawn to aquariums) but began to morph into works that are hard to classify, ranging from the quite abstract to more distinct sea and landscapes. The common theme is clouds in a sky that takes up most of the picture’s real estate. This low horizon line emphasizes the infinity of space and engenders a sense of contemplative peace. It is so exaggerated that it keeps the paintings from being mere derivative iterations of traditional landscape, though there are certainly elements that remind you of van Ruisdael and Turner.

Another unifying element is the rivulets of water Kasonik overlays on the paint. My first impression was rain on a window and thought of being on a train passing through countryside. But the rivulets perform a more important role than evoking precipitation; their real purpose is to keep the work contemporary; to remind you these are not your garden-variety landscape (Kasonik dislikes the classification) paintings. Indeed the “landscapes” aren’t literal; they’re mystical, dreamlike vignettes of the inner topography of the artist’s imagination.

It is telling that Kasonik studied sculpture at VCU as the paintings are so textural with surfaces composed of so many layers they almost appear three-dimensional. Fresh out of college, Kasonik worked as a furniture restorer using faux finishing techniques to disguise mars and says that she found inspiration in the aged patinas she came in contact with.

Kasonik’s process is laborious. She builds up her surfaces with alternating layers of acrylic paint and a glaze of clear pigment. In between layers she uses water almost like an eraser to help form clouds, trees, land mass, etc. When she’s satisfied with the image, she takes a squirt bottle and sprays water in a pattern of even lines that run down the panel before sealing it within the glaze coat. She repeats these steps through many, many layers. The results are luscious. Both surface and depth are emphasized; the image remains intact and smooth behind a watery undulating curtain of line.

Kasonik says she wants to achieve the effect of hard candy, which has a shiny exterior but is translucent so you can see into its depths. Like the candy she references, her work is beautiful but it has a psychological weight that takes it beyond mere beauty and makes it so very satisfying.

High Art/Low Art

2010-12-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

I couldn’t sleep last night and for some reason thought again about the amazing sand animation portraying life during the USSR’s Great Patriotic War against the Third Reich in World War ll (in which it's estimated that 20 -30 million soldiers and civilians died) Ukrainian sand artist, Kseniya Simonova that went viral on the Internet last year. If you missed it, it's worth a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo&feature=related

It really got me thinking about High Art vs. Low Art because it is so appealing, beautiful to watch and very moving. It shares some compelling similarities with William Kentridge (chronicling potent episodes of human suffering, whether through political oppression or war with graphic images that shift from one to another by “erasing” and “re-drawing.” Granted Kentridge is really drawing and erasing, while Simonova is moving sand around—with incredible control I might add. And lastly, both artists use powerful musical scores to add dramatic effect.) Yet, I hesitate to put them in the same league. There’s something undeniably Vegas about Simonova’s work. First of all the setting, Ukraine’s Got Talent screams show biz, and Simonova is almost too perfect: show girl-gorgeous with a dancer’s grace.

Though she manipulates it masterfully, the medium is undeniably gimmicky in a David Copperfield, sleight of hand kind of way. A quick survey on the Internet shows that there are other (less comely) sand animators out there and though it looks hard, Simonova only took sand animation up a year before the video was shot. Meanwhile, Kentridge has been practicing his oeuvre for years. His pieces are much more labor intensive, requiring hundreds of drawings and stop-and-go animation. While he works, he is making countless artistic decisions; Simonova’s work is more about chance. At the end of the day, Kentridge has something to show for all his effort whereas Simonova’s work is completely ephemeral. True, videos exist, but they aren’t part of the piece, just a means to record it. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, much of conceptual/performance art is ephemeral, but Simonova’s goals seem different from those artists.

That said, I love to see Simonova at work, watching her fingers tease recognizable objects out of the sand (not so unlike Bob Moss, who I’ve always found somewhat irresistible) and I admire her dramatic flair when at the climax she throws sand across the light board to evoke exploding bombs. One only has to see the audience’s reaction to grasp how effective Simonova is.

And as for Ukraine's Got Talent? Not surprisingly. she won.

Oversight

2010-12-12T09:51:00.001-08:00

When mentioning memorable noses in art in my review of Megan Marlatt’s show, I completely overlooked Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the Duke of Urbino (c. 1472). Talk about nasal character! And character in general, since the story goes that the duke, who had many enemies and was blind in one eye, had the bridge of his nose removed, in theory, to improve the peripheral vision on his blind side. I can’t imagine the surgery would have worked, but years before any real anesthesia, it must have hurt like a mofo.

Toys and Tondos

2010-12-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

I went to the Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia this week to see Megan Marlatt’s show, Molded from Complicated Mixtures, which includes her tondos of various cartoon characters, and drawings and large-scale paintings of toys.

You can tell from looking at the work that Marlatt has a really good time making it. There’s a joyful exuberance that shines forth from each piece. Painted in oil in an Old Master style and using a shape usually reserved for religious paintings, the tondos of Olive Oyl, Pinocchio, Captain Hook and others are both spare and rich, funny and serious. Though her tongue is firmly planted in her cheek, Marlatt knows when to pull back. Her images never devolve into the overly cute level of dogs playing poker in the back room. Part of this is her restraint, part of it the beauty with which they are rendered and part is because there’s frankly, something a little creepy about the vintage puppets with their just a-tad-too-jovial expressions she uses as subjects. Marlatt is well aware of this and uses it to her best advantage.

As far as I’m concerned there are two real stars of the show. Portrait of Pinocchio is one. There’s something about the position of the figure, the palette and the retro lighting that makes this painting so very appealing. Though it has already grown a bit, Pinocchio's nose looks twitching and ready to shoot out some more. (It's a nose that vies with Ghirlandaio’s for most nasal character in a painting.) Coupled with the mirth in Pinocchio’s eyes, these two features convey perfectly the mischievousness of this most famous junior prevaricator.

I also love the three-quarter view Portrait of Ms. Oyl. Again, the lighting and palette are superb. The sitter’s position is what gets me. It recalls the glamorous studio portraits by say a Horst of some starlet or other. Here, this “glamour shot” perspective adds a poignancy to Olive Oyl’s image because she’s such an ugly duckling, clearly doesn’t know it and is reveling in her movie star moment.

Special mention must go to the Portrait of Ms. Oyl as a Rembrandt, which Marlatt said was inspired by a real Rembrandt of a woman who resembled Olive Oyl. It was perhaps natural for Marlatt to take the work to this point and she almost goes too far into the poker playing dog realm. What saves it is the incredible Rembrandt-like virtuoso painting of the ruff and the laugh-out-loud bulbous shadow of Olive Oly’s nose falling upon it.

Marlatt has been painting mounds of toys for several years now. They are fun to collect, fun to arrange and fun to paint. Large assemblages are both visually interesting but also offer so many opportunities to flex one’s artistic muscles painting soft and hard, shiny and dull, masculine/feminine, animal/machine and so on. Plus there’s the eye-popping color that comes with the territory. (Marlatt uses acrylic in addition to oil paint because she simply can't reproduce the toy's colors with oil alone.)

But fun aside, by focusing on toys Marlatt forces the viewer to confront other issues. The jumble she paints seems to reference the chaos in our personal over-stimulated lives as well as the larger conflict-ridden world. The junk heap of cast-off toys points to our consumer culture where endless giant container ships arrive bearing fodder for the yawning shelves of Walmart and Toys R Us. The toys are both ephemeral and permanent. Interest in them is short lived—the child grows up and moves on, yet the toys are made from materials that will never degrade, ensuring we’ll be stuck with them for eternity.

My favorite is Orange Slinky whose luscious DayGlo slinky of the title commands front and center attention. There’s so much here to look at and enjoy in the busy snarl of toys at the bottom of the painting. A riot of color and form, it’s tempered by a refreshingly empty background. But empty is not boring and here the layers of hue that produce the shimmering pink and the prominent brushstrokes create a stand alone authority that holds its own against the more clamorous toys.

Marlatt’s work is so satisfying on so many levels. A storyteller, art is her medium and her passion. Though her work is not as overtly political as some, she is concerned about the human condition and the current state of the world. She confronts these issues gracefully with beautifully painted images that are rich in humor and metaphor.

Good news for all you locals: Megan Marlatt will be showing this body of work at Les Yeux du Monde in January, 2011.

Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit

2010-12-03T04:21:00.000-08:00

More than just an exhibition of sublime photographs, Sally Mann’s The Flesh and the Spirit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts also reveals the measure of the remarkable person behind the extraordinary images and the courage and conviction with which she operates. Mann burst on the scene in the ‘80s with her achingly beautiful, honest, yet provocative portraits of her children. The VMFA show includes some of these early images, but focuses primarily on her new work. Mortality is the underlying theme. It’s a natural subject for someone passing the half-century mark and it has particular resonance for Mann given her husband’s diagnosis of muscular dystrophy. She turns her lens unflinchingly on him, recording his once vital body now showing the ravages of the disease that will kill him. They are elegiac images, redolent of the sexual pull between sitter and artist. Shot by a female these beautiful nudes aren’t prurient but stand as Mann’s unsentimental, yet poignant love letter to her husband and their conjugal bond. Further exploring the theme of mortality, Mann also turns the camera on herself recording her neck, chest and face without vanity and unflatteringly (in real life Mann is a striking woman) capturing wrinkles, bags and blemishes that are the souvenirs of advancing age. These are powerful works. Indeed, the opening piece, a series of self-portraits on glass got my “best in show” award.

A number of years ago, an escaped convict was shot and killed by the police on the Manns’ farm. After his body was taken away, Mann went to the spot where he died and found a “chocolate syrup-like” pool of congealing blood. She reached out to touch it—if there’s one thing Mann isn’t, it’s squeamish—at her touch the blood seemed to retract as if “the earth took a sip.” It got her thinking of those places where thousands have died. And so she set up a darkroom in the back of her Suburban and began to travel around shooting Civil War battlegrounds. She decided to employ the wet plate collodion process used between the 1850s and 1880s (so what contemporary photographers would have used to photograph the Civil War). The process is both arcane and challenging involving cumbersome equipment and various toxic chemicals. Photographing outside means the work is always subject to conditions (wind, dust, a falling leaf or twig) beyond Mann’s control. She welcomes these various exigencies, which add serendipitous effects and visual interest to the work and hopes she never perfects (in her words) the technique.

In some prints the image is nicked by flecks of light, created by dust motes on the print, others have ripples radiating across them from how the chemicals were applied and in still others the image seems eaten away. All these effects add a patina to the work changing it up so it’s not just an everyday catalogue of what’s there. Mann is interested in capturing the unseen spirit of the place and producing grave images that seem to whisper of the enormity of what occurred there.

The process requires a long exposure time (six minutes), which means many things can happen to affect the outcome. It also means that with living subjects, you get those penetrating stares of the sitters who must remain still for the exposure’s duration, or blurry effects if they happen to move. In the excellent documentary, What Remains, on view at the end of the exhibition, we see Mann pose with glazed eyes for a self-portrait straining not to blink. She describes the sensation of posing like this as being almost in a state of beatification.

The large format wet plate collodion photographs of her children are haunting. Especially placed in a room adjacent to the one containing her early color photographs of the (much younger) children gamboling in the river by the Mann’s cabin. Looking at these closely cropped headshots with their corroded looking surfaces, one immediately thinks of death and decay, certainly unsettling given the children’s youth and beauty and the fact that their mother took the pictures. But "unsettling" adds weight and interest and the approach is in keeping with Mann’s exploration of mortality. Given Mann’s flintiness it was perhaps natural that she would move beyond this metaphoric treatment to the very extreme tactic of photographing real decomposing corpses at the University of Tennessee “body farm.” These photographs are not for the faint of heart. Hard as they are to look at, you have to admire Mann for looking death straight in the eye.

Watching What Remains which chronicles Mann’s working process and her near-perfect life in rural Virginia, I was struck by what a contrast this full-color, unedited world is from the restrained and plaintive one Mann creates. It’s a wonderfully revealing portrait of an artist with many scenes that expose Mann’s character and mettle. She is likable, articulate and down to earth, an ordinary woman making extraordinary art. One scene stood out for me. She is taking one of the affecting photographs of her husband that are at the beginning of the show. In real life the resulting gravitas is completely absent. It’s a funny scene. They’re in the bathroom; he’s wrapped a navy blue towel around his waist that keeps revealing a little too much as he bends to clip his toenails. She wants their Greyhound in the picture. They joke around as she smears bacon grease on her husband's leg for the dog to lick. She makes sure the dog’s stitches closing a large wound on its flank are visible. Filmed in color it’s such an unexceptional, even banal scene of the easy interaction between a long-married couple. But in her hands it will be transformed into a profoundly moving image and that is what’s magical about her and her art.

Vent

2010-11-19T08:31:00.001-08:00

Well it happened again, I’m at a party minding my ps and qs and some man (it’s always a man) hearing what I do, decides it’s his role, in a supercilious and patronizing way, to disabuse me of my illusions and set me straight about how bogus Abstract Expressionism and/or Contemporary Art is. All I can say is I’m tired of it. Note to these individuals, who consider themselves so knowledgeable about culture, even though they’re usually not even in a field remotely cultural: just because you have eyes in your head and can see, doesn’t make you equipped to pass judgment. It’s an insult to those who have spent years (in my case about 45) putting in the work, honing their eyes. Don’t get me wrong, there is much that is popular these days in Contemporary Art that I do think is bogus, but it takes someone who's developed real expertise to separate the wheat from the chaff. To dismiss all Contemporary Art out of hand is silly and lazy. I firmly believe Contemporary Art’s something that’s accessible to anyone who is willing to put in the time. It’s a language that like any language must be studied to be understood.

Holding fast to artistic principles developed in the Renaissance is incredibly out of touch. I want art that reflects the issues and times in which it was created and that speaks to the human experience in an immediate and profound way. I think Jackson Pollack said it best in defense of his work (I’ll paraphrase): “You can’t use the language of the Renaissance to describe a world in which nuclear weapons exist.”

As an art historian, I love many periods of art, but I don’t want my contemporaries regurgitating old ideas. Developing artistic skills is the easy part. What’s hard is developing the imagination. If all you’re doing is aping what came before, than you’re not doing that much and your output will be soulless. Soon you end up with Thomas Kincade or Arthur Ashe’s statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond. Schlock, schlock, shlock.

Years ago there was an essay in the New York Times by Tom Wolfe that made my blood boil. Now, I have a lot of respect for Tom Wolfe, but for him to step outside his area of expertise and wax eloquent on what’s wrong with Contemporary Art struck me as so arrogant. His essay focused on his sculptor friend, Frederick Hart, known for the creation series on the west façade of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Hart is undeniably a skilled technician and his work is well suited for this traditional ecclesiastical setting. However, Hart also made the representational statue that a Vietnam veterans group, unhappy with Maya Lin’s sublime Contemporary memorial, demanded. You know what Tom? NOBODY (and we're talking a broad segment of the population, not just the "art elite" you vilify) visits that statue; they all go to Lin’s monument because at the end of the day it’s about emotion and concept and not some antiquated Iwo Jima memorial wannabe that is leaden, hollow and out-of-date.

So my suggestion to those folks who think Rothko is a rip off or that their three-year old could easily recreate a Pollack: button your lip and before you buttonhole me, start looking at the work and I mean really looking. Then, we’ll talk.

New York

2010-10-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

I had two writing assignments in New York. One was to interview an art personage for a profile and the second (not actually in New York, but New Canaan) was a profile of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, which actually consists of a campus, if you will, of The Glass house and 13 other structures. I picked Jack Tilton for my profile. He's been at the forefront of the Contemporary Art market for over 30 years and is an old family friend. I met with him as soon as I got off the train, so my art week started off with a bang.

I got up early the next morning to head over to the Metropolitan Museum to get in the Big Bambú line when it started to form at 8:00 am fortifying myself with Dean & Delucca coffee and bran muffin. I had another bonding experience with the woman in line behind me as I waited for Tim to join me. By the time the museum opened and we got our BB tickets we only had to wait another 30 minutes before going up. While nothing can compare to that first visit it was still exhilarating being up on Big Bambú. It’s much bigger than it was and were able to go quite high up (150+' from street level). There were three of the band of climbers already working on its dismantlement; they gave off that boarder (surfer/snowboarder/skater) vibe. I loved seeing all the “improvements” they’d made: a bona fide recliner made out of woven ropes, hollow bamboo stalk cup holders, coolers and a monster all-weather boom box were lashed into the bamboo at points. It had a party on. frat house/surf shack air about it and you realized how much fun they must have had creating the piece. My only regret is that I dint go into the park and look at it from the ground (you can’t see it from the front of the museum.

From the Met we made our way to the Abstract Expressionist show at MoMA. I found it disappointing for several reasons. First, it was packed, always distracting. It also seemed choppy perhaps because it’s displayed on three floors off to the side in what seemed like second tier galleries. It didn’t flow well; when you finished one floor you had to go out into the crowded hallway to the escalator and then wend your way back into the galleries down below—a jarring and confusing experience. There was only one small Helen Frankenthaler, but two large Lee Krasners, no Morris Louis, nor Kenneth Noland, which I thought was peculiar.

Day three I went to the Drawing Center to see the incomparable Gerhard Richter’s drawings at one of the last Soho art bastions, The Drawing Center. (See separate post). Afterwards, I went uptown to the Asia Society to see the Yoshitomo Nara exhibition lured there by the giant sculpture in the Park Avenue median, hough I’m not a huge Japanese anime fan. I tried to like them and was intrigued by the Japanese concept of "creepy-cute" that Nara seems to explore ad nauseum, but I came away thinking they were really just too decorative and superficial for my taste.

Next stop was the Museum of the City of New York to see their show: Notable & Notorious: 20^th Century Women of Style. I’m a sucker for costume shows. This was a modest effort as compared to those Diana Vreeland extravaganzas of yore, but fun nonetheless. My favorite moment occurred when I was next to a group of women in front of a Tina Chow dress and overheard one say to the others in a thick “New Yawk” accent: "She used to come into Hermès...she was nothing to look at.

The next morning I went to the “Why Design Now?” show at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. It's a must-see show. I was totally blown away by the inventiveness and the problem solving accomplished (in most cases) with such simplicity and panache. The show reveals a parallel universe to the one occupied by Climate Change naysayers David Koch and the tea party where actually innovative (and hello, David) money-making solutions are put forth. From the beautiful and efficient water-powered H2Otel in Amsterdam, to a bionic arm, to an incubator made from recycled car parts to a biodegradable casket, there are so many interesting and creative products and one feels excited and inspired about the human imagination. They even made LED lights look good! It made me hopeful on the one hand about mankind and also kind of depressed thinking that we in the U.S. will be left behind in the dust while others lead the charge forward.

I wound up my New York art whirl with a visit to the Jan Gossart aka Mabuse exhibition at the Met. Influenced by classicism, he painted scenes from mythology, lots of Madonnas and childs and many portraits. His understanding of anatomy is very good: there’s a sexy painting of Hercules and Deianira their legs entwined in what the New York Times called “a pretzel of desire.” He paints with self-assurance and produces well-founded compositions in rich palettes. But I found his faces in the mythology and religious paintings, in particular, unappealing—Hercules looks like a simpleton—the weakest link in his oeuvre although he does better with the portraits, perhaps because he was dealing with flesh and blood subjects. I loved the portrait of what possibly was Dorothea of Denmark.

"The lines which do not exist"

2010-10-25T12:59:00.001-07:00

When I told a friend I was planning to go to the Gerhard Richter show at the Drawing Center he said he thought of Richter as a painter and wasn’t particularly interested in his drawings. I was a little taken aback, wondering to myself given Richter’s brilliance how could you not be interested in anything he did?

True, the drawings don’t have the star power of his paintings but they are gems nonetheless and so interesting in what they reveal about Richter, the artist. First off, you can see he takes the business of drawing seriously. Though for the most part, they’re studies and exercises, they are fully realized and complete. Richter gives himself free rein to experiment with different subjects (landscape, mechanical, schematic, abstract and autographic) and techniques, flexing his artistic muscles through arpeggios of line and form. As he explores representation and perception, he draws tenuous hair-like squiggles, great Lichtenstein angry hatches, delicate snail trails that meander across a page. He rubs and then erases graphite or charcoal to create depth, modeling and highlights, and in one seascape, masterfully creates with his eraser the greasy aureoles of stars on a hazy night.

7.1991, 1991 a China ink brush on paper abstract work that looks like something was glued on and then pulled off leaving remnants behind is a favorite. Also, R.O., 22.1.1984, 1984 (above), a 5” x 7” dynamo of highly saturated red watercolor and slashing pencil that demands attention from across the room.

The works seem like such trifles and yet have such presence. There’s a self- confidence about them, perhaps because Richter clearly respects the artistic effort and the result. You know this because he signed and dated every one. Some might argue that even back in the 80s he was aware of his legacy and was being savvy. I suspect he signed them as an indication that the work was completed; he’d taken it as far as he wanted it to go and was satisfied.

Headin' Home

2010-10-17T11:20:00.001-07:00

I am looking forward to my trip to New York next week. On the agenda is a return visit to Big Bambú to see it finished (hope I can get a ticket to go back up on it and I'd like to see it at night as it's lit), the Gerhard Richter show (natch) at the Drawing Center and the Abstract Expressionists at MoMA.

I also hope to make it out to New Canaan to see Philip Johnson's Glass House for which I have been asked to write a story. Right now, I'm trying to line up an interviewee--a Contemporary Art maven--for another story for Artillery. But I will be posting here my impressions of Richter and AE which don't have a buyer.

If I get my act together I may weigh in on Nazi art and Maurizio Cattalan both in the news this past week....

And again...

2010-10-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

My magnificent obsession strikes again. Blue Bands by Robert Stuart, a 14" x 11" gem. It will be mine in December.

Fallingwater

2010-10-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

I made a pilgrimage to Fallingwater on Tuesday. It’s a five-hour drive from Charlottesville that is if you don’t make any wrong turns (which unfortunately we did thanks to my defective navigating) so it is an undertaking to go. In my book, it’s up there with Monticello as required viewing.

It was my fourth visit. I first went as a young girl of 16. I had accompanied my parents on a white water rafting expedition to the Youghiogheny River. But it was spring and the water was high and the river was closed. So here we were in the backcountry of western Pennsylvania casting about for how to fill our weekend when we discovered that Fallingwater was just down the road from the unfortunately named, Ohiopyle.

My first impression was of walking on woodland paths lined with tall rhododendrons and mountain laurel. It was a gray day and as I came around the bend I spotted the house. I remember being totally bowled over because it wasn’t the white that photographs had led me to believe, but a glowing peach—a perfect foil to the lush foliage surrounding it. The “Cherokee red” of the window trim (which I had thought was black) was another unexpected delight. The colors gave the house such vitality and transformed it from iconic old chestnut to fresh, dazzling magnet.

Entering the living room with its riverine slate floor, nearly wrap-around windows and rich autumnal colors, I felt immediately as if I’d come home. With the exception of the replacement dining chairs (looking at them you realize why Wright was such a dictator when it came to the interior design of his houses) and one or two tchotchkes, I loved everything in the house and the rich pastiche of diverse ethnic fabrics, artwork, objects that seem to be a common thread among Wright’s clients (following his lead, no doubt). But perhaps the most magical quality of the house was the constant background noise of rushing water.

On this latest trip I am again in awe. Fallingwater teaches you so much about architecture, nature and sheer gutsiness. It’s such an audacious design, a complex confection of intersecting planes that hangs against the hillside. Visually, it’s so different from the landscape that surrounds it and at the same time so in sync with it. Like some bright exotic bird in a rainforest.

One of my favorite views is not the famous one shot from below which makes Falingwater appear monumental, but from the bank across a narrow chasm from the house. You can almost reach out and touch the terrace wall and certainly could call to a person standing there and, on certain months when the water is low, carry on a conversation. From here you get a real sense of Fallingwater’s intimacy. Though it’s larger than life in so many ways, its scale is human. For all its elegance and superlative design it is in essence, cosy. The low ceilings, narrow halls, small bedrooms and liberal use of warm, rich materials enhance this coziness. I think about what bliss it must have been to live in such a house, to have it to yourself, wandering about the empty rooms, walking down the steps to dip one’s toes in the stream, sleeping with the windows thrown open to the air and the sound of the falls…

It is rare when something manmade enhances a beautiful natural setting. But Fallingwater does. As I gazed at it from a distance, I tried to imagine the landscape without it and I was faced with an appealing but otherwise unremarkable scene of water spilling over rocks: with Fallingwater perched over it, it’s launched into the realm of the sublime.

Oops, I did it again

2010-09-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not in the habit of quoting Britany Spears. (I'm not even sure if that's how you spell her name and perfectionist that I am, I'm not even bothering to look it up.) In any event, I did do it again, I bought another piece, even though I was saving up for a small Robert Stuart and have many other more ant-like ways to not spend my money. But I was minding my ps and qs taking in an exhibit of the work of Michele Harvey at the Fenimore Museum in Cooperstown when I passed a case containing some of her small works and BAM there it was calling my name. Being the grasshopper that I am, I couldn't resist this one and the price seemed in range as oppposed to so far out there it wasn't attainable. In any event, it's a small study, just 4" x 6.5" of clouds against a heart-stopping cerealan sky, it's very representational, but because it's wall-to-wall sky and a small gem of a piece it got me where I lived. It's called Bit of Blue.

Just Kids

2010-09-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

I'm writing my review of Just Kids, a must read for anyone interested in the artistic process. So inspiring, this tale of youthful exuberance.

I have such admiration for Patti Smith such a nurturing, nonjudgmental force. She embodies the true nature of non-conditional love.

For the review: http://www.artillerymag.com/v5i2/featured-articles/featured-3.php

Carpe Diem

2010-09-09T04:36:00.000-07:00

My latest obsession has been hourglasses. Not just any hourglasses, but the beautiful Murano Glass ones. The trigger was a similar one my sister gave her husband at Christmas last year. Seeing it I remembered visits to her godparents’ house in New Haven. A childless couple, they’d lived abroad for many years and settled in New Haven because of Aunt Polly’s avocation as book binder and her affiliation with Yale University. Elegant and chic she smoked Cuban cigars smuggled in for her by my father in a Crest toothpaste box. (It fit four perfectly.) Their house oozed style, from the Calder stabile on the coffee table to the 18^th century panoramic wallpaper of St. Petersburg (Uncle Valla was a White Russian) in the dining room, where swaths of blue and green tulle formed the glass curtains, to the larger than life mirrors in the bedroom cut into his and hers Picasso-like nudes.

One thing that enchanted me particularly was the purple and green hourglass that sat on a bookshelf in the library. About 10" tall, it was heavy and the glass had a lovely watery quality. I delighted in turning it to watch the sand slide slowly through the hole, captivated not only by the lusciousness of the glass but also by the realization that right before my eyes time had become tangible.

I hadn’t thought of that hourglass in years, not until my sister’s gift, which made me remember and then covet it. In March I was in New York and dropped into Chelsea Passage at Barneys. I was half hoping to find some token for my hosts when I spotted an hourglass that made my heart skip a beat. Slightly smaller than Aunt Polly’s it was stunning: one half was a vivid emerald while the other a brilliant orange. I picked it up thinking it would be around $100 and nearly fainted when I saw the price was $750! I replaced it gently on the shelf and left.

When I got home I researched Murano hourglasses and discovered they are highly sought after, with the vintage ones going for several thousand dollars. Of course when you think of the craftsmanship that goes into them: creating a sealed glass object with two distinct colors filled with sand, it’s not surprising they are so dear. I have a vague memory of going to Murano when I was 10 and watching a glassblower with his long tube transform molten glass from a fiery orange blob to delicate translucence, but I can’t imagine how they make the hourglasses.

I hadn’t got around to asking my sister where she’d gotten hers and it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for when I happened to be in Marshalls and found a trove of Murano knock offs! I snapped up a purple and green one, which looks remarkably like the one of my youth. I still think about the beautiful one I saw at Barneys but for now I am happy with my Murano trainer that cost a fraction of the price. Just like at Aunt Polly’s it sits on a bookshelf. Every now and then I turn it over to watch time slip away.

With the Void, Full Powers

2010-09-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

My Review of the Yves Klein Show at the Hirshhorn is in the September issue of Artillery magazine and is posted on my blog in the Online Articles section. Because Klein was such a powerhouse, whose influence on Contemporary Art cannot be underestimated, I also wanted to post my review in its entirety here.

It was 102° in Washington the day I went to the Yves Klein show at the Hirshhorn. White hot, shimmering haze cloaked the city, making the prospect of an afternoon surrounded by expanses of IKB (International Klein Blue), so evocative of the sea and sky of Klein’s native Cote d’Azur, immensely appealing.

Klein virtually invented conceptual art. Indeed, much of what we take for granted about Contemporary Art can be traced back to him—quite an accomplishment for someone who was only active for eight years before dying prematurely at 34. The son of two painters, Klein was raised in an art hothouse, which explains his immense creativity and the ease with which he switched from one medium to another.

From the very beginning, Klein was fixated on monochrome paintings. Initially he painted them in a variety of colors, but he was unhappy with what he felt was a superficial effect and so he narrowed his concentration to “Yves Klein” blue. For him, the hue was more than just color; it was dimensionless, representing sky, water and space, in short, the immaterial world. The quest for immateriality was central to Klein’s oeuvre and his more conceptual pieces (the release of 1001 blue balloons in Paris, The Void exhibition consisting of an empty art gallery and the sale of “immaterial pictorial sensitivity zones,” empty space he “sold” in a transaction involving the exchange of gold ingots for a receipt, which the purchaser then burned, leaving the artwork to exist only in memory) are natural outgrowths of this attitude.

A showman and master of self-promotion, Klein operated in what seems like a perpetually manic state, with a finger in all manner of different art “pies.” One senses the urgency in him. Perhaps, on some level he knew his time was limited, or maybe it was, in fact, the creative fire burning within that cut his life short. His extensive writings, the many plans and maquettes he produced reveal a holistic approach to art (as well as a more than passing interest in science) and faced with all this, I couldn’t help thinking of Leonardo da Vinci.

As Klein ventured more into spirituality, he expanded his monochrome palette to include gold leaf, which symbolized the passage towards immateriality, and pink, representing flesh, thereby creating a potent trinity. In addition, he produced, fire paintings, “cosmogonies” (plant and rock impressions) and the infamous “anthropometries” in which nude models (“living paint brushes”) were coated with paint and dragged or laid across the painting surface.

Klein also created sponge reliefs and sponge sculptures—sponges, which he initially used to apply paint, became important symbols for him. Their absorption of paint made manifest his concept of the “impregnation” of the material with the immaterial. He planned to float the sponges in the air (levitation being another form of immateriality) using a combination of helium and electromagnets, but never did. He also collaborated on kinetic sculptures with the sculptor, Jean Tinguely, and took plaster casts of well-known items (human torsos, the Victory of Samothrace, a globe) coating them in IKB.

His technique of applying pure pigment suspended in synthetic resin onto gauze-covered panels allows for an incredibly deep saturation of color and creates a glowing three-dimensionality. Though static pieces, they are animated by the blue and seem almost to vibrate. The “monogolds” have indented surfaces that add shadow and shape. Standing before them, one is met with an indistinct reflection, a blurred and muted view of reality that provides an evocative window into another world. The anthropometries vary from lyrical explosions of pigment to tribal totems and the fire paintings with their artfully scorched surfaces are beautiful—both muscular and graceful. Some look like they’ve captured the very fire they were burnt with, others resemble cyanotypes making one wonder if the alchemy of intense heat on paper actually caused some kind of photographic exposure.

The films of Klein at work are as amusing as they are interesting. The marriage of surreal and serious is so very French. Neatly attired in dapper suit or tuxedo, Klein’s earnest demeanor in the center of such oddball circumstances recalls the antics of that great master of deadpan, Jacques Tati. One segment shows an anthropometric performance before a rather prim looking audience, dressed in cocktail attire. At this early art happening, the comely living paintbrushes do their stuff accompanied by an orchestra playing Klein’s 1949 composition, The Monotone Symphony, which consisted of one chord played for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence. In spite of the respect I have for the finished product, the spectacle’s more than passing resemblance to a Crazy Horse nightclub routine, or even mud wrestling is hard to shake. The other memorable segment shows Klein executing a fire painting with what looks like a flamethrower assisted by a uniformed fireman manning a fire hose.

Klein certainly had some pretty wild ideas as his manifestos attest. With The Blue Revolution he wanted to cover the entire surface of France in blue. Blue H-bombs were also on the agenda and he wrote to those in power (Eisenhower, Castro, etc.) to try and get his ideas realized. Certainly, this was part of a larger immaterial artwork, but there is an aspect of Klein that makes you believe that on some basic level he really embraced these ideas. He pursued them doggedly, his persistence, a reflection of the fighting spirit of judo (of which Klein was one of the best masters in France) where each defeat is viewed as a step toward victory.

Despite all the hype and hyperbole, and the bizarre notions, there is something authentic about Klein. His work’s got the goods. After all these years it continues to hold up and is as fresh and beguiling as it ever was.

Lake Effect

2010-08-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

After a lengthy break in Maine, I am now back at my post.

The story in Thursday’s Times on the house belonging to Vera Scekic and Robert Osborne (on a very different lake from the one I just left) in Racine, Wisconsin caught my eye. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/garden/26racine.html

The house is stunning, but I was struck by several points in the article about the owners. First of all they decided to live in Racine, Wisconsin, no garden spot, though it is home to the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Johnson Wax Building of the wonderful lily pad ceiling. Aside from that, and Ms. Scekic’s mother, there’s not a whole lot to recommend it. Secondly, they decided that it would be unconscionable to buy a useable house and tear it down to make room for their new house, and so paid way more ($500,000) for an empty lot. Now, that kind of selfless integrity you don’t see every day. Lastly, the house has only one bathroom. How refreshing. Most Americans are so spoiled these days they couldn’t imagine a family of four surviving with just one bathroom and yet, in 1941 just 46% of Virginians had indoor plumbing. The reason I have this figure at my fingertips is because I’ve been writing about the Pope-Leighey House designed by Wright. (The article has been occupying me and keeping me from this blog. But I think I’ve wrapped it up.) So much about the Scekic/Osbornes approach echoes Wright’s Usonians. Their house may be short on “extras,” but it’s long on good, intelligent design. The Scekic/Osbornes are savvy; they know a small house and sharing rooms will promote family togetherness. It’s a lesson lost on those occupants of those huge houses where family members basically live separate lives sequestered off in their respective wings.

The article mentioned Scekic was an artist and I was delighted to Google her and see her beautiful work (an image of one is above).

Mash Note

2010-07-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

I guess it’s pretty clear from my blog how I feel about Gerhard Richter. He is simply the best. There aren’t many who can move deftly between styles. Richter does it with such élan and surety, it’s dazzling. Everything he does is superlative and pulse quickening: the early monochromatic blurred paintings, the abstracts, the pixelated cityscapes and last but not least, his glorious photographic paintings of landscapes, candles and his children. I even love the Baader Meinhof series. That’s why, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the Man.

Eye Music

2010-07-25T04:56:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I went to the Pope-Leighy house in Fort Alexandria, Virginia. It’s a Usonian house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1941. I’m working on a piece on it, which will appear here in the future.

But now, as I begin the writing process I’m trying to put my finger on just what makes Wright’s houses (for me, it’s the Prairie and Usonian houses) so appealing. They seem to really nail that emotion of “home.” I was thinking it had something to do with their horizontal orientation, which engenders a sense of serenity, but Wright also uses verticals to play off the horizontals and to add strength as part of his compression and release pas de deux. Is it the materials? Just four in this case: wood, brick, concrete, glass, or maybe it’s the way the light pours in. (At the Pope-Leighy, Wright sandwiched glass between wood cutouts that vaguely resemble a Southwestern Indian motif, a less expensive version of his stained glass. These cast dappled patterns on floor and walls, which Wright called “eye music.”) Or perhaps it’s the way the houses relate to their natural settings. Clearly, it’s all these things and the spirit of harmony, integrity and honesty that they embody.

Mary Keller

2010-07-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

After my wallet went missing I took inventory of what I had lost. Of course, there was the wallet itself, a nice black pigskin number with brass hardware by the Florentine leather maker Il Bisonte. True it had seen better days, the credit card sleeves had become stretched and the cards would periodically tumble out littering the floor around my feet.

The credit cards were easily cancelled, but it was a bother nonetheless; the prospect of going to the DMV for a replacement license made my head hurt. I'd had some cash, but it was a nominal amount. There were a number of business cards from contacts I’d encountered and other scraps of paper of sentimental value or bearing information that I knew was gone forever. Among the photos, mostly school shots of freshly scrubbed nephews and nieces, I realized was the only picture I had of my godmother. This was the missing item I mourned.

My mother had met, Mary Keller during World War II when they were both WAVES. Mummy went on to pursue the traditional female role of wife and mother; Mary Keller (I always called her by both names, never just Mary) became a “career girl” in New York City. She worked for Standard Oil which became Esso and eventually Exxon as an executive in the stockholders relations department. It being pre-Woman's Lib, I am sure she was under-appreciated and underpaid as she climbed the corporate ladder. She dressed well, always in lady-like suits or frocks, her auburn hair was coiffed in soft waves and her nails manicured in a tasteful coral--a perfect muse for the Mad Men costume designer. She wore tinted tortoise shell glasses and resembled the fashion designer, Pauline Trigère whose clothes she probably wore. The snapshot in the wallet was an anomaly, showing her at our weekend house in Rhode Island. She is sitting on the deck in Aran sweater and slacks.

Being a child, I didn’t think much about Mary Keller’s life. I was fond of her; she was like an aunt and kind and generous to me. She was a fixture at my birthday dinners and at other times throughout the year. I can see her in our living room drink and cigarette in hand laughing as my father regaled her. But I have thought about it many times since then. In some ways it was a golden time to live in New York. I still get whiffs of the era. It’s present in places like The Four Seasons, Lincoln Center and along Park Avenue in the 50s on an early Sunday morning. Certainly it was tough to be a single woman earning your own way in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but the city, which still had a vital middle class, giving it real humanity, was so livable then. I assume she dated, but she never brought an escort with her to our gatherings and I wonder if she was often lonely.

One day I remember going with my parents and Mary Keller to Cartier. We sat at a circular counter in that hushed temple of luxury as Mary Keller tried on a series of gold necklaces, turning this way and that to show them off for our inspection. The necklaces were similar heavy circlets, varying in color and detail. It was thrilling being there with my parents and our wonderful friend in this elegant setting. I felt special to have been included in the outing and very grown up that my opinion was being solicited. I was eight or nine. She finally made her selection, picking one, which had a burnished quality that lightened the gold on the front giving it a matte surface. I believe it cost $500. That doesn’t sound like much now, but it was a princely sum in 1966.

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the back-story of the necklace. My father had a great friend who was unhappily married. At some point, he and Mary Keller met and fell in love, I believe this happened through my parents, although I am quite sure this wasn't their intention in introducing them. Eventually the man left his wife hoping to marry Mary Keller. Not long after, he was diagnosed with cancer. For reasons unknown, perhaps he didn’t want to burden Mary Keller (though knowing her, she would have gladly taken care of him) with his illness, he went back to his wife and died within months. The necklace was his parting gift.

It seems so very fin de siècle, so Colette, the proper way to end an affair by a man of means. It reminded me of when I worked at Tiffany’s, fresh out of college. During training, we were told about the oh-so-coy, “Mister Bill Special.” This had become part of Tiffany’s policy after a good customer had purchased a very pricey necklace for his mistress; when the wife found the bill, he was forced to buy a second necklace to cover his tracks. The Mr. Bill Special ensured that certain invoices would be sent to the customer’s office, not his home. Unfortunately, I worked in the china and crystal department so never got to experience a Mr. Bill Special first-hand. It was unclear if the purchaser would actually refer to the purchase as a Mr. Bill Special, or if there’d be some other awkward exchange. I have often wondered through the years, if the former, how did the man know what it was called? Was this information passed along at Skull and Bones or the Porcellian Club together with the secret handshake?

Mary Keller wasn’t able to enjoy her beautiful necklace for very long. She too succumbed to cancer within four years. When she died, she left it to my mother who still wears it at age 91. To me, she left 20 shares of the Standard Oil Company which having morphed into Exxon and splitting several times, have developed into a nice little nest egg. While I am conflicted about owning a stake in Big Oil, I feel that I have a voice however small which I make heard through my proxy votes at the annual shareholder’s meeting. Also, Mary Keller worked there all those years and I feel I have to hold on to them in deference to her loyalty. In her will, she stated they were given to me with the “hope that [they] will be used for pleasure and frivolity.”

Revisionism

2010-07-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

For the past few months I’ve been immersed in the Tudors, reading the superb, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker prize for literature (the gold standard as far as I’m concerned), and watching the oh-so steamy Showtime series, The Tudors. It’s an interesting exercise because they cover much of the same fertile ground of incidents and intrigue that make up the tangled history of Henry VIII.

All in all, The Tudors is a very good production, but I wonder why in the book it is Henry’s sister, Mary who is married to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, whereas in the series it’s Margaret. I also wish the women didn’t all look like Victoria’s Secret models and (picky me) think the costumes, headdresses and jewels sometimes don’t look quite right—a pity since there are so many contemporary portraits out there to draw inspiration from.

In fact, when I was at the National Portrait Gallery in London this spring, I happened on an exhibition on the Tudors with the famous Thomas More family portrait, (referred to in Mantel’s book). There was also a gorgeous full-length Hans Holbein of Katherine Parr. It is so beautifully done, so sumptuous in every detail. I loved noting that at the edge of her brocade overskirt, one can see the wisps of its fur lining peeking out.

Both the series, and to a larger extent, the book, present revisionist portrayals of More and Thomas Cromwell. The book is less kind to More than the series where he just seems misguided, but still a man of principle. Mantel’s More comes across as a merciless religious zealot. In her book it is Cromwell who’s the hero: he’s the humanist, the loving pater familias, the true friend to the king. The series presents him as a brilliant strategist, a loyal subject, tough when he needs to be, but reasonable given the circumstances.

It was Cromwell’s transformation from blacksmith’s son to the Earl of Essex that piqued Mantel's interest, causing her to contemplate a contrarian approach to him. It’s a daring undertaking and she produces a wonderful unorthodox portrait of a well-known historical figure. I’d like to believe it’s true, as I’ve become fond of Mantel’s Cromwell. He’s an astute observer with a wry sense of humor and part of the fun of the book is seeing the machinations and personages of Henry VIII’s court through his eyes.

But two things stand in the way of me totally buying it. They are the Holbein portraits of More (with the crimson velvet sleeves) and Cromwell at the Frick Museum in New York. Holbein actually appears in Wolf Hall as a crony of Cromwell’s working at his behest on the decoration of the Queen’s apartments in The Tower in advance of Anne Boylen’s coronation, and at the Cromwells’ house as well. I suspect Mantel did this because she was uneasy about the Frick portraits which depict the two men in a manner very much at odds with her version: Cromwell is thoroughly unappetizing, pig-eyed, pinched and furtive. By contrast, More with his kind, open face seems to epitomize humanity and goodness—an interesting dichotomy given that Holbein was a Protestant and thus on Cromwell’s side, not More’s.The fact that Holbein was a contemporary eyewitness and spent time in the company of each man gives his portrayal of their characters the more weight.

Addendum: Talk about timing, no sooner had I finished the above that I read the very passage where Cromwell views his completed portrait. Mantel wisely addresses the issue head-on (she needs to, to bolster her argument): his family complains that he’s never worn such an unpleasant expression and Cromwell decides that Holbein intentionally made him look “like a murderer” to inspire fear in his adversaries.

Happy Birthday Mr. President

2010-07-18T11:27:00.001-07:00

There’s a tempest in a teapot brewing in South Africa over a painting by Yuill Damaso modeled on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp that depicts Nelson Mandela as the corpse surrounded by various South African political luminaries (Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South African President Jacob Zuma and former presidents F.W. de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki. Performing the autopsy is Nkosi Johnson, an HIV/AIDS child activist who died from the disease in 2001 at the age of 12.

The painting’s artistic merits are questionable (In all fairness I can’t really judge it based on the online image) but it’s too literal for my taste and looks a little awkward: all those well-known visages corralled around the autopsy table. And Mandela’s arm and chest area look clumsily rendered. But the metaphoric message is quite clever. Here you have Johnson (the only one who has “passed on” to the other side) showing the assembled group, who’s on a fact-finding mission to discover what makes Mandela tick, that he’s but a flesh and blood man. Damaso has said his message is clear, these leaders need to stop searching for what makes Mandela a great man and get down to the business of leadership and build the country.

I guess I’m sorry Mandela had to be faced with this on the eve of his 92^nd birthday and so soon after the death of his 13 year-old great granddaughter, Zenani. But I also think he's a sophisticate, and if he didn't initially understand what the painting's about, once he grasped its meaning he'd see it was not meant to be disrespectful to him. Of course, at 92 he's uncomfortably close to that autopsy table and therefore it might not sit all that well.

It’s a funny thing about outrage; loud enough and it ends up drawing attention to something that if left alone would pass by unnoticed. (The painting’s on view at a shopping center after all.) With the notoriety, not only has it probably come to Mandela’s attention, but Damaso’s future success is no doubt assured.