Titans in Natty Attire

Posted on March 7, 2019 by JMN
joni mitchell and david hockney

Joni Mitchell and David Hockney at L.A. Louver gallery in Los Angeles, where Mr. Hockney’s solo exhibition is on view. Credit Jacob Sousa, via L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

Joni Mitchell describes herself as a “painter derailed by circumstance.” (“Joni Mitchell,” Wikipedia)

(Photo from Guy Trebay, “Of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell Holding Hands,” NYTimes, 2-28- 19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Proto Trudeau?

Posted on March 7, 2019 by JMN
Hogarth

Painter and his Pug, 1745, is a self-portrait by William Hogarth. Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty.

[“Sir John Soane’s Museum [London] will announce this week that it is to stage Hogarth: Place and Progress, an exhibition of 50 or so works in which Hogarth observed the morals of contemporary life, conveying the comedy and tragedy of all human frailty.”]

“[Hogarth] was a social critic but he wasn’t against the establishment or in any way politically radical,” [David Bindman, Hogarth scholar] said. “The paintings are often seen as an attack on pretension and the aristocracy. It’s not actually the case. He had a lot of friends who were aristocrats. He simply picked up on contemporary literary ideas that the aristocracy and the merchant class had a number of people who didn’t live up to their ideals.”

Dalya Alberge, “Gin, syphilis, lunacy: Hogarth’s grotesques united in new show,” The Guardian, 3-2-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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The Screaming “Caravaggio”

Posted on March 6, 2019 by JMN
caravaggio judith and holofernes

“Judith and Holofernes” which was found in an attic in Toulouse, France 2014, will be auctioned in June. Credit Cabinet Turquin.

Eric Turquin, art dealer: “Look at the execution of the lips, the way the chin and eyelids are painted… It belongs to Caravaggio. How could it be by anyone else?”
Keith Christiansen, MOMA-NY: [Contains details too crude to be by Caravaggio, including the] “concentric wrinkles of the old servant’s face.”
Gianni Papi, University of Florence: [The head of Holofernes is] “too loaded, with those animal teeth” [to be by Caravaggio].
James Bradburne, Pinacoteca de Brera, Milan: “The touch of the brush screamed out Caravaggio,” [referring to the delicacy with which Judith’s left cuff is painted].
(Quotations are from Scott Reyburn, “Is That a Real Caravaggio? It’s All in the Detail,” NYTimes, 2-28-19)

I have limited interest in fights over attribution of art works to old masters. However, the tumescent rhetoric swirling around the disturbing painting in question attracted notice. The discussion doesn’t live up to my expectations in the matter of scholarly debate. It rings shrill and opportunistic. Consider that Marc Labarbe, an auctioneer, found the “spectacularly well-preserved 17th-century canvas” in an attic in 2014. Mr. Labarbe will auction the painting “in collaboration with” Mr. Turquin, the art dealer quoted above saying, “How could it be by anyone else?” They hope it will sell for between $115 and $170 million. The auctioneer and art dealer (and perhaps someone they represent) have money
riding on the attribution of this pristine canvas to Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), the brawling murderer known as Caravaggio, who also painted well. And money screams.

(c) 2019 JMN.

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The “Immortals” Budge

Posted on March 4, 2019 by JMN
feminine firefighters

Women firefighters are already often called sapeuses-pompières.

Decades after other French-speaking countries adopted feminine names for professions, the official guardians of the language in France have also backed the change.

The Académie française, whose members are known as “immortals”, has said it has no obstacle in principle to such a “natural evolution” of French.

In its report it said “the academy considers that all developments aiming at recognising in language the place of women in today’s society can be foreseen, as long as they do not contravene the elementary and fundamental rules of language”…

(“Feminine job titles get go-ahead in France,” BBC.com, 3-1-19)

Examples — Masculine/Feminine:

professeur/professeure
auteur/auteure-autoresse-autrice
préfet/préfète (prefect)
député/députée (MP)
avocat/avocate (lawyer)
procureur/procureure (prosecutor)
le juge/la juge
le ministre/la ministre
le médecin/la médecin (doctor) [“médecine” would be confused with “medicine”]
chef/cheffe
écrivain/écrivaine (writer)
ingénieur/ingénieure (engineer)
sapeur-pompier/sapeuse-pompière (firefighter)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Haircut Comment of the Day

Posted on March 4, 2019 by JMN
rob auton

Grizzly… Rob Auton. Photograph: Julian Ward .

Rob Auton: ‘My haircut got comments like – Doth thou playeth the lute, sire?’

The polymath standup, writer and painter on the things that make him laugh the most…

(Harriet Gibsone, The Guardian, 3-1-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Correct Me If I’m Wrong

Posted on March 4, 2019 by JMN

exclamation-mark

People often say that our problem in America today is incivility or intolerance. This is incorrect… You might be tempted to say we need to find ways to disagree less, but that is incorrect… This might sound like a call for magnanimity, but it is just as much an appeal to self-interest… Finally, we should see the contempt around us as what it truly is: an opportunity, not a threat… It is easy to feel helpless in the current political environment, but I believe that is unwarranted.

(Arthur C. Brooks, “Our Culture of Contempt,” NYTimes, 3-2-19)

Mr. Brooks’s rhetoric is interesting. The snippets quoted above, taken out of context, might lead one to think he’s being provokingly disputatious in his essay, bent on contradicting the reader’s “incorrect” assumptions. That would be a misreading, however; Brooks in fact has some affirming things to say and states them persuasively. As basis for his discussion he cites the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on “motive
attribution asymmetry.” This, he says, is “the assumption that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate.”

This blog skirts ideology for the most part, so I leave it there, having noted a style trait used to good effect in my view.

(c) 2019 JMN.

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The Shed

Posted on March 4, 2019 by JMN
alex poots the shed

The Shed will keep back 10% of the seats in every row for low-income visitors, who will be able to buy $10 tickets. Photograph: Christopher Lane.

[This April the Shed will be “the largest new art space to have opened in New York since the Lincoln Center in 1962.” Originally, it was to be called the Culture Shed.]

“I didn’t like the sound of [the name],” [Alex Poots, its director] says. “Culture Shed – it sounded a bit preachy.” He called a friend, one of the creative directors at Framestore, the company responsible for the CGI sequences in the Alfonso Cuarón film, Gravity. “And he said, ‘Why would you call it Culture Shed? It’s like a soap opera putting on a laugh track to tell your dumb audience when to laugh.’” Then he called Marina Abramovic, who … said: “Why call it that? When they made Apple, they didn’t call it the Apple Computer.” Finally, Poots went back to the board and suggested dropping “culture” from the title and just calling it the Shed. “I liked the idea of the Shed because it’s where you make things,” he said. Plus, “it would’ve been shortened anyway, like the Met, so you may as well save on rebranding costs in three years’ time.”

(Emma Brockes, “Alex Poots: The Scottish impresario opening NYC’s largest new art space,” The Guardian, 3-3-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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How Rembrandt Worked

Posted on March 1, 2019 by JMN
rembrandt

“Portrait of a Young Gentleman,” discovered by Jan Six XI in a Christie’s catalog as a likely Rembrandt. Credit René Gerritsen/Jan Six Fine Art.

I liked the detail quoted below of how Rembrandt painted lace — the “hieroglyphic jumble” that coheres from afar– as well as the notion that a painted copy of a repetitive pattern actually looks artificial. This is helpful to a striving painter.

[Jan Six, Dutch art dealer based in Amsterdam] was particularly drawn to the lace on the collar. Lace was a signifier of status throughout the 17th century, and Six believes Rembrandt had a signature way of depicting this variety, which is called bobbin lace. Other artists of the period painstakingly executed its intricacies in white paint on top of the jacket. Rembrandt did something like the opposite. He first painted the jacket, then over it the collar area in white, then used black paint to create the negative spaces in the collar. And where other painters were careful to create repeating patterns in the lacework, Rembrandt wove a freestyle design. For viewers standing a few inches away from such a painting, the collar appears as a hieroglyphic jumble; step back a pace, and it coheres. Six believes this was one aspect of Rembrandt’s genius. “He realized that a painted copy of a repetitive pattern, even if it followed the original, actually looked artificial.”

(Russell Shorto, “Rembrandt in the Blood: An Obsessive Aristocrat, Rediscovered Paintings and an Art-World Feud,” NYTimes, 2-27-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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Incorporates a Stretchy Sock

Posted on March 1, 2019 by JMN
chloe gives highlands twist

Ramsay-Levi imagined the 2019 Chloé woman immersed into the Scottish Highlands. Photograph: WWD/REX/Shutterstock.

I have a vicarious affection for Scotland nurtured by family genealogy. Coupled with a weakness for spirited fashion talk, it leads me to share the following:

[Natacha Ramsay-Levi, Chloé’s creative director] joins many other European designers this season, including Riccardo Tisci at Burberry and Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, in looking to icons of British culture for inspiration for her autumn/winter 2019 outing. “I started this collection by putting her on a landscape, grounded in the Highlands with kilts, Prince of Wales checks and outdoor clothes to protect [her] from the storm,” Ramsay-Levi said of the woman she had in mind for this collection. It accounted for the enveloping ribbed knits, capes and drawstring anoraks for outerwear, and all manner of prints, which included a “Highlands Toile de Jouy”. Her square-toe leather boots, meanwhile – complete with a practical chunky heel – incorporated a stretchy sock.

(Scarlett Conlon, “Chloé gives Highlands twist to its traditional Parisian chic,” The Guardian, 2-29-10)

(c) 2019 JMN.

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A Painter’s Painter With Painterly Allure

Posted on March 1, 2019 by JMN
Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns’s “Untitled” (2017), acrylic over etching with collage on canvas. It’s among the works in his latest exhibition, “Recent Paintings & Works on Paper,” at Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan. Credit Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via Matthew Marks Gallery.

… In its sheer variety and vitality, this exhibition is optimistic, and generous in spirit. It reaffirms Mr. Johns as, foremost, a painter’s painter and a working artist rather than an art historical subject. In it he revisits three or four previous series — extending, editing or recombining their motifs — and introduces two new ones that more than meet the Johnsian standards of mystery, suggestion and painterly allure.

(Roberta Smith, “Jasper Johns Stays Divinely Busy,” NYTimes, 2-26-19)

I’m drawn to the phrase “painter’s painter” (seen it before) and “painterly allure” (new to me) without knowing exactly what they mean but sort of what they mean or at least what they mean to me. I’ve also noted the term “Johnsian,” which I initially misread as “Johnsonian,” which sent me on a wild goose chase for quotations by Samuel Johnson about “mystery, suggestion,” etc., in painting. Having fetched up chastened on my Nicholsian rock of misunderstanding, I say here only that I’m attracted to Johns’s paintings, and in particular to what he does with stenciled-looking lettering. It has, for want of a better word, a painterly quality to it — brushy and overlapping and indistinct and modeled and luscious.

(c) 2019 JMN.

 

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