Melbourne, Australia. People have a picnic in a park after the state government announced the partial lifting of restrictions as the city battles a second wave of Covid-19. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images.
“Male Pattern,” oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in. (JMN 2020)
Art Spiegelman’s comment below, encountered on the fly as if on zoom wings, has helped me realize that this latest painting is just wrong: grotesque in subject, torpid in execution, and the end of a line. Fury and disgust can be better spent.
Early on I realised I didn’t want to become a Trump caricaturist – that it was just playing into his narcissism, ultimately. I just backed off and I’m now trying to see what the hell’s been happening to us. It makes me recant something I rather cockily said back in 2001, which was when I found myself unable to move from September 11 to September 12. About three months later, my brains poured back in my head and I said: ‘I guess disaster is my muse.’” He recants: “Now disaster is just a fucking disaster.”
(Sam Leith, “Graphic artist Art Spiegelman on Maus, politics and ‘drawing badly’,” the guardian.com, 10-17-20)
Hilma af Klint inspires a certain perfervid evangelism which is diluted in this article by careless editing.
The article cites a beautiful film by Halina Dyrschka about the visionary artist’s astonishing work.
The beguiled film maker contracted[sic] MoMA to find out why Af Klint had been “erased from art history.” The answer she received was even more beguiling than the question posed:
“They weren’t so sure Hilma af Klint’s art worked as abstract art. After all, she hadn’t exhibited in her lifetime so how could one tell?”
Science historian Ernst Peter Ficsher[sic] is quoted saying “… our world has become blurred stupid dulled[sic] unless somewhere out there there’s a Hilma af Klint painting it all so in a hundred years we will see what we’ve missed…”
The article celebrates Af Klint’s having eventually “got what she deserved” more than a century after she “arguably invented abstract [sic] and painted some of the most beguiling if neglected canvases in art history…”
It concludes thus:
Hilma af Klint’s paintings, just maybe, gives [sic] us the opportunity to escape the everyday and marvel anew.
(Stuart Jeffries, ‘They called her a crazy witch’: did medium Hilma af Klint invent abstract art?” theguardian.com, 10-6-20)
Ms. Sillman’s “XL12,” from 2020. Silk-screened passages of polka dots, mesh with calligraphic swoops. Things seems to be on the edge of tottering over; looming is the operative word. Credit… Calla Kessler for The New York Times.
… [Amy Sillman] has helped lead the charge over the last decade for a reinvigorated mode of abstraction, alongside colleagues like Laura Owens, Julie Mehretu, Joanne Greenbaum or Jacqueline Humphries. These painters, mostly women, have reclaimed the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures, which for so long had felt played out. Their work is smart as hell, but not afraid to laugh at itself. Conversant with digital media… yet committed to the facticity of paint.
Amy Sillman, in Manhattan. A willingness to fail brought her to this moment but young artists are “scared not to succeed,” she said. “The political and social and economic environment that they find themselves in is so unconducive to failure. To any kind of experimentation.” Credit… Calla Kessler for The New York Times.
… Ms. Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in “Faux Pas,” a just-published collection — her fourth — of her writings that display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings.
These floral still lifes, all untitled, from 2020, were painted at her Long Island retreat during lockdown. “We were all thinking we were going to die,” she said, “and spring was just carrying on.” Credit… Calla Kessler for The New York Times.
“It was the first time I cried at a museum,” she says, remembering the irises at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “Because he was so tortured. The flowers were flowers of misery. Tears of dejection and tears of joy…”
(Jason Farago, “Amy Sillman’s Breakthrough Moment is Here,” NYTimes, 10-8-20)
“Dabbled Eggs,” oil on canvas, 11×15 in. (JMN 2020)
A novelist’s prose can crowd poetry turf with an ineffability that thwarts paraphrase. Of his mother a protagonist says:
“Ten minutes she will spend in the kitchen working with her swift cat-efficiency, then out and away with the children, surging to and fro in their light inconstant play, her eyes fading in a fond infected look.”
And a little later:
“Outside is the special close blackness of night over water. Bugs dive into the tight new screen and bounce off with a guitar thrum. The children stand in close, feeling the mystery of the swamp and the secrecy of our cone of light.”
The passages are from “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy.
What strikes me is how ostensible prose can somehow say more than the sum of its words, somewhat like a difficult lyric poem can: The question What does it mean? gives way to the question Could what it says be conveyed exactly in any other way? The reader’s quest is to reach “no” for the answer.
Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred that one bears for the other. In … Continue reading →
This article describes Philip Guston (1913-1980) as an “artist’s artist” whose “deceptively simple subjects and emphatic brush strokes” influenced many painters of our era.
In Philip Guston’s paintings of the 1950s, like “Voyage” (1956), urgent brush strokes dominate the work. He was fighting battles with his own mental health as well as the long arm of Western art history. Credit… Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth.
… Part of the reason he is embraced by artists in the current moment is that he stood up to the bullies in the art world who wanted art to be a certain way — notably writers like Clement Greenberg… who thought that serious, modern painting should be abstract…
“I got sick and tired of all that Purity!” he said in a 1977 interview, referring to abstraction. “Wanted to tell Stories!”
In Guston’s “The Studio” (1969), with hooded figures, the artist turns the brush on himself, suggesting the racism ingrained in all of us. Credit… The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth.
Along with the return of figures and the hoods — now drawn in a crude, cartoonish fashion that shocked even his peers in the early ’70s — Guston continued to paint ordinary objects: shoes, cans, clocks and bricks that asserted both the materiality and everydayness of painting. The critic Harold Rosenberg called his later work “a liberation from detachment” — which is to say, it was unafraid to address messy politics, the body, failure, or the changes an artist goes through in his lifetime.
It seems worth noting that what shocked Guston’s peers in the ‘70s wasn’t what he drew, but how he drew it.
(Martha Schwendener, “Why Philip Guston Can Still Provoke Such Furor, and Passion,” NYTimes, 10-4-20)
“Everyone agrees Tuesday’s debate was a train wreck. A major contributing factor was the moderator Chris Wallace repeatedly interrupting to try to help Joe Biden.”
“Sloop Padre,” oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in. (JMN 2020)
Painting is a way of providing a balm, to artist and viewer alike, in a calamitous era. “We live in almost Old Testament times, with plagues and insane kings,” says [André] Gregory. “It’s crucial that we look at those things critically but also try to feel hope and joy. The grief isn’t the whole story.”
A new study of Edward Hopper says that “Old Ice Pond at Nyack,” circa 1897, was the teenage artist’s copy of an earlier painting by Bruce Crane. Credit… Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
It’s interesting to see instances of a teenage Edward Hopper’s copying of other artists, the more so as it touches on the reputation he cultivated “as an artist whose innate genius allowed him to emerge on the scene without a debt to others.”
Louis Shadwick found that Bruce Crane’s “A Winter Sunset,” circa 1880s, in The Art Interchange magazine, was an almost perfect match for Hopper’s later teenage work, right down to the horizontal streak of light. Credit… Bruce Crane.
Edward Hopper, “Ships,” circa 1898. A similar image appeared in the Art Interchange in 1886. A Hopper expert points out that 19th century artists almost always got their start by copying. Credit… Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Edward Moran, “A Marine,” c.1880s, was the source for Edward Hopper’s “Ships.” Credit… Edward Moran.
I’m not a critic or scholar, but I share their intrigue that, in his mature work, Hopper “allowed himself” to be awkward in a studied way.
Critics and scholars have always been intrigued by an awkwardness that Hopper allowed himself in many of his classic paintings…
… seas that look more painted than liquid in his famous “Ground Swell”…
Edward Hopper, “Ground Swell” (1939), Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund).
… the awkward anatomy of his female nude in “Morning in a City”…
Edward Hopper, “Morning in a City” (1944), wikiart.org.
… or the stony faces of the diners in “Nighthawks.”
Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks (1942), Art Institute Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection.
A third point of interest for me in this article is Hopper’s perceived affinity with illustration.
In rendering his pioneering views of everyday life in average America… Hopper chose an everyday style that brings him closer to the modest commercial illustration of his era than to the certified old masters.
Gopnik caps his treatment of the Hopper copy revelation with something I marvel at in creative art critics: propositions that soar, like poetry, above interpretation.
Now that we know that Hopper was never a painting prodigy, we can think of his later paintings as deliberately revisiting the limitations of his adolescence, and finding virtue and power there… It’s as though, to be truly in and of their time and place, and fully “American,” paintings of a city’s simple shopfronts, or of plain women in plain rooms, had to be rendered in a plain manner worthy of their subjects, or as unworthy as them.
(Blake Gopnik, “Early Works by Edward Hopper Found to Be Copies of Other Artists,” NYTimes, 9-28-20)
EthicalDative 
Protecting the Male
(c) 2020 JMN