Berthe Morisot

I developed a new appreciation for Berthe Morisot recently seeing an exhibition of her work at the Odrupgaard museum outside Copenhagen. I had always dismissed her as a lesser Impressionist. Boy was I wrong. I found her work fresh and confident with wonderfully expressive brushstrokes that reveal an exceptional sensitivity to both formal and psychological concerns.

A beauty, painted repeatedly by her brother-in-law Édouard Manet, Morisot was born into affluence and lived her life as a member of the haute bourgeoisie. Her family supported her decision to become a painter (her sister Edma was one too) and she was accepted and admired by her male peers—Manet had four paintings of hers hanging in his bedroom—exhibiting repeatedly at the Salon de Paris (the annual exhibition of the Ácademie des Beaux-Arts) until 1874, when she joined Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley in the Salon des Refusés held in the studio of photographer Nadar. The one real hardship Morisot experienced was her husband’s premature death, which left her devastated, turning her hair white overnight.

Morisot’s many advantages didn’t blunt her talent, although her circumstances limited her oeuvre to what was considered appropriate subject matter: domestic life, landscapes, portraits and the like. Her composition, palette, light and representation have a remarkable veracity. Morisot is also a master of restraint. Because her work doesn’t shout, you almost overlook what a truly great painter she is. I was struck by how she conveys so much with so little. On display at the museum were two portraits of Morisot’s daughter, Julie, one by her (she painted many), the other by Renoir. Hers depicts the ennui and nascent beauty of a pouty teenager; Renoir’s a flabby orange-tinged simp.

Morisot died at just 54 in 1895. One wonders the direction her work might have taken if she'd made it into the 20th century and lived another 20-30 years, like Monet for instance, a year older than she, who died in 1926.

Finn Juhl House

Mid-century Danish architect/industrial designer Finn Juhl’s house, located in a suburb of Copenhagen, is a must-see. I'm still not completely sold on Danish furniture, but seeing Juhl’s designs in their natural habitat, surrounded by his careful arrangement of objects and inspired color accents in this modest, richly appointed abode made me a convert.

In the living room, the "Chieftain" chair’s oversized proportions and shield back seemed to reference some ancient Viking past. The one here is a pinkish leather. The diminutive "poet" settee was inviting with its high curved back that looks like it would surround the sitter in an embrace. The graceful and petite "sculptural armchair" spoke to me of Wegner. An elegant shape with a carved curved back, contoured arms and clever "V" shaped support. The design was sufficiently challenging that only 12 were ever made, making them exceedingly valuable. I couldn't like the other armchairs used in the living room and dining room. I think I saw too many of the type in cluttered Upper West Side apartments.

But Juhl's use of Asian ceramics, Scandinavian woven rugs, his collection of artwork, palette, proportions and modesty of scale was genius. It was these elements, together with how he treated nature and light that reminded me of Frank Lloyd Wright, and in particular Wright's Usonian houses, although the exterior, at least, looks totally different.

I loved the almost adobe fireplace in the living room and bookshelves which boasted three doored cabinets and a set of colored drawers. 

I think my favorite room was the dining room. Here, one wall is a two sided glass display cabinet, which allows light in from the adjoining conservatory. Opposite, tall windows afford a view of green--a curtain of vines growing up an exterior wall provide color and texture. The piece I covet most in the house is the dining room table which features Swedish coins sanded down so that they look like silver metal discs embedded in the surface. It appears to be an abstract pattern but was apparently intended to act as a guide for where to put the place setting.

The dining chairs are covered in an intense kelly green wool to echo the outside foliage and pick up the hues in the artwork. Here, the ceiling is painted a surprising deep curry gloss, adding warmth and a wonderful, unexpected dash to the room. His use of ceiling color was inspired overall--I love the electric blue in the entrance foyer. I adore that color, the inside of the Whitney Museum's elevators were painted it originally. It's too much to have on a wall, but on a ceiling it's brilliant: you see it only when you look up. 

There was so much to admire and emulate in this wonderful domestic interior.  

Wanås to Venice

I am leaving today for Sweden to visit the Wanås Foundation in Sweden. Wanås is a world class contemporary art site specific art venue on the grounds of a 17th century (? ) estate in southern Sweden. I will know more after my visit! Pictured here is Maya Lin's Eleven Minute Line http://www.wanas.se/

After Wanås, I will spend a few days in Stockholm and then in Copenhagen, I am very excited about seeing these two cities and soaking up not just their history and beauty, but also the art and design, and of course food!

After my inaugural visit to Scandinavia, I will head south to Venice, specifically for the Biennale of Architecture in which a friend has a piece on exhibit. And also because well, Venice is Venice.  I was there last 31 years ago! How time flies.

I intend to check out the Aula Baratto in Ca' Foscari designed by Carlo Scarpa. I also plan to take a day trip to Verona to see the museum he designed there.

And then there's the Academia, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, The Basilica dei Frari with the sublime Titian Ascension of the Virgin, San Marco and Venice itself! 

My iPad comes with and so I will blog as I go. 

Quay Brothers

Intrigued by a macabre photo in the NY Times, I decided to go see the Quay Brothers’ show at MoMA. I must confess, I had never heard of the Quay Brothers and have to say their aesthetic is not mine. All that Victoriana. And dolls. Piero Fornasetti insipidness and Joseph Cornell dark whimsy...

However, I am drawn to obsessive, oddball artists. Indeed, the Quays seem like outsider artists even though they aren’t. I admire the fact that these twins, who settled in England in 1969 and seem to live and breathe only art, burst forth from rural Pennsylvania to scale the very heights of the art world. 

I also admire their work ethic. Though most famous for their stop-action animation, featuring puppets made of doll parts and other materials, there’s nothing they haven’t seemed to have done. From the 1968 Blood, Sweat & Tears album cover (the Quays’ original headless design was altered to include the band’s heads) to T.V. ads. In fact, I loved their ads. Many of their films resemble the opening credits of the Monty Python show, which doesn’t float my boat, but the Doritos ad has a definite Brazil vibe and the ones for Slurpee and a British throat lozenge, Lockets, were terrific.

During their long and fecund career, the Quays have worked as professional illustrators designing book covers; they’ve also designed sets for theatre and opera (in 1998 they received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for the play The Chairs) and have shot music videos for various artists—artists I’ve never heard of, I might add, not that that means a thing.

I was interested to learn about the Polish Surrealists who the Quays admired and emulated, and I realized just how pervasive their influence was remembering back to the posters that graced my high school homerooms in the 1970s.

I sat through the Quays’ most famous film, Street of Crocodiles based on a novella of the same name (nearly all the Quays’ films are inspired by literary texts and feature compelling musical scores) because I thought I should, and liked some aspects of it, most of all the creepy eyeless dolls and the actual liver, but I was really drawn into the shorter film, Bruno Schulz, Fragments and Scenes—Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2006) (actually the "pilot" or preview for their third feature which is currently pre-production) that incorporates live action and nature with puppets. It was mysterious, shimmering and beautiful.

The Quays' objects have a uniformly excavated look, threadbare and covered with grime or dust. This cuts through the saccharin, but in trying to be sinister, is also trite. There are a number of references to screws and watch works, perhaps a tribute to their father, a machinist.

In 2010 the Quays were commissioned to produce a new film entitled Anatomica Asthetica focusing on the history and collections of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. Having long known of the gruesome nature of the Mütter and never quite having got up the courage to go there, it sounds like a match made in Heaven.

Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City

Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City—part of Saraceno’s series Cloud Cities/Air Port City is a site-specific installation of 16 interconnected multipolygonal modules on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum. Composed of transparent, opaque and reflective materials connected by an internal network of staircases, the piece provides a funhouse experience where orientation is skewed. Discombobulation and vertigo flood one’s senses as one explores the interior space and tries to figure out what is reality and what is reflection. Taking in the exterior vistas framed through Cloud City’s apertures, it's clear that as with Big Bambu, New York City's an integral part of the piece.

On entering the structure the guards made me put away my pad and pen, which I thought silly, but soon realized I needed to grasp both handrails as I crawled, white-knuckled up the stairs. Though the piece goes up only 20 feet from the Met’s roof, one feels much higher seeing the city and park below. Some of the floors of the modules are clear adding to the knee-buckling experience. My companion said being in it felt like skydiving, which she has actually done. To me, it felt like I was inside an enormous kaleidoscope or even some giant honeycomb made by robotic bees. According to Saraceno: “Cloud City’s composition is based on a complex three-dimensional geometry from Weaire-Phelan, which is an idealized foam structure resembling the perfect packaging of spheres with a minimal surface and maximum volume."

Saraceno trained as an architect (he also attended the Space Studies Program of the International Space University at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and judging from his writings about the piece is pretty out there) and there is a definite habitat feel to the piece. According to the Met’s wall dialectic this is intentional: “Over the past decade Saraceno has constructed habitable networks based on organic forms, naturally occurring geometries, and interconnectivity that merge art, architecture, and science. His multidisciplinary project Cloud Cities/Air Port City is rooted in an investigation of how to expand the ways in which we inhabit and experience our environment…Saraceno uses his art to envision floating or flying cities that defy traditional notions of space, time, and gravity. He challenges the boundaries of earthbound living and explores the possibility of utopian airborne habitation, looking to the atmosphere, rather than terra firma, for inspiration.”

All I can say is it's an exhilarating experience to be high above the streets of Manhattan in the ethereal Cloud City.  

A Long Strange Trip

Sunday I flew to Seattle for an intensive immersion in Dale Chihuly. I went as part of a team composed of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts officials and press in advance of the museum’s Chihuly show scheduled for October 2012.

A lot has changed since my previous visit to that fair city, where the last time I was there, in the mid ‘90s, there was no Chihuly to be found. Now there is a glorious new museum and garden that is open late so one can see the glass in its greatest glory, dramatically lit up against the night sky. 

But this is just a foretaste. I will be writing more about the trip and Chihuly for later publication.

I flew home on Wednesday and am now ensconced in a dream of a house in Southside Virginia (that feels more like 19^th century Ireland than America) a continent and world away from the “Emerald City.” 

The Ungovernables

The New Museum’s second Triennial, “The Ungovernables,” a saucy comeback to the Whitney Biennial, is a smaller show, consisting of thirty-four, mostly non-Western, artists and collaborative groups.

The Trainee (2008) by Finish artist, Pilvi Takala, is a mixed-media installation that documents the month-long job Takala held with a global financial company. During her tenure, Takala, intentionally exhibited increasingly abnormal behavior: sitting at her desk staring straight ahead for hours, spending a day in the company’s tax library not doing any work, and for the entire span of another day, riding up and down in the elevator. In addition to everything else, you have to admire Takala’s ability to maintain the ruse in the face of what must have been pretty uncomfortable circumstances dealing with co-workers and superiors perplexed and even angered by her odd behavior.

Though there’s a whiff of Candid Camera about the whole thing, the work speaks to the soul-crushing corporate environment, while also taking a swipe at the asleep-at the-wheel practices that have governed big financial firms, allowing for the kind of mismanagement that led to the recent global economic crisis.

Takala’s installation includes the company’s welcome letter, and a card key, workstation and computer. She even includes voicemails and emails from co-workers and bosses that discuss Takala’s conduct.

Hassan Khan’s compelling video, Jewel (2010) features two men dancing to hypnotic Middle Eastern music composed by Khan. The dancing treads a fine line between belligerence and eroticism. Adding to the tension, the men and the clothes they wear suggests different social classes. There’s something primal and out of control about their interaction; they seem ready to explode and you don’t know in which direction they will go.

Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machadovideo’s 2011 video, O Século (The Century) opens with an aerial view of an empty street. It’s unremarkable, empty and quiet. All of a sudden, objects begin being hurled into the street from the right of the picture: chairs, oil drums, tires, crates, bicycle wheels, and lots of fluorescent light bulbs, all making satisfying crashes when they hit the pavement. After 5 minutes in which the ferocity of the barrage waxes then wanes, the video returns to an empty street and the whole thing starts again, only this time the objects come from the left. I’m not sure what it’s about, but I enjoyed watching it, especially the fluorescents that hit the ground with a pouf and a pop.

Material for a sculpture commemorating the life of a soldier who died defending his nation against intruding enemies (2012) by Iman Issa features an assortment of colored geometric objects on a plinth. With their distinct shape and placement, the objects suggest there’s some sort of symbolism attached to them. I liked the cleanness of the lines, the purity of the colors and how the dispassionate quality of the physical objects jarred with the title. It speaks to the impersonality, inevitability and futility of war.

Rita Ponce de Leon’s 2011 installation of 120 tiny, beautifully executed India ink drawings in a table-top installation, Acepto que nada es mio (I accept that nothing is mine) toyed with scale and obsessiveness.

Eavesdropping (Version # 2, large), Amalia Pica’s 2011 installation, presents an array of different sized colored glasses placed against a wall, at the ready for listening in to next-door neighbors. The lusciousness of the vividly colored glass is visually appealing and in these times where our privacy is threatened by high tech devices, its reference to this low-tech spying approach is darkly amusing.

When I first saw Danh Vo’s We the People (2011) I took it for a series of purely abstract copper sculptures, possibly inspired by or evoking water or wind. But, it turns out they’re fragments—parts of the drapery—of a full-size replica of the Statue of Liberty that Danh is working on. Danh has broken the icon, and in pieces, not only has the sculpture become abstracted, but so too the ideals for which it stands. Danh has taken pains to exactly reproducing the thin copper skin. Looking at it, it seems impossibly fragile. In the original statue, the interior feature’s supporting scaffolding makes this fragile skin strong enough to stand and endure—a fitting metaphor for our democracy.

Finally, it was a delight to see Lynette Yiadom Boakye paintings (paintings are rare sights at this kind of show). Boakye compositions feature figures, generally one of two against stark backgrounds. Applying the paint liberally with forceful brushstrokes, Boakye uses color sparingly, but to great effect. I loved her surfaces and the way she conveys so much physical and psychological information with relatively little.

I haven’t been able to put my finger on why the downtown show seemed somehow better when compared to the Biennial. In terms of quality, the work was pretty evenly distributed between the two. In looking back, I wonder if this had something to do with the way the work was displayed in gallery spaces—the New Museum airy spaces are very appealing (so long as you’re not too close to the elevator and its annoying dinging bell), well-suited for displaying contemporary art. I hope this isn’t the case, as I love the Whitney and am sad that the museum is pulling up stakes and leaving its Breuer-designed home. If it is the case, it seems misguided as its collection includes more than just contemporary art. I hope the Whitney doesn’t go down the road MoMA took in their rush to reinvent themselves to “stay relevant,” and sacrifice the intimacy of their spaces.

“The Ungovernables” says it all. It’s a wonderful title, funny and subversive and youthful. It tells you right away that it’s not taking itself too seriously. By contrast, the Whitney Biennial has become so fraught with expectation (for both bad and good), and it’s also just gotten so unwieldy that it seems heavily weighed down with gravitas.