BMW Plant Central Building, Leipzig, Germany, 2005
One of Hadid's most audacious projects was a building that acts as a gateway and office center linking three production buildings at a BMW factory complex. The exterior is another of her fields of bracing diagonals, but the real surprises begin inside.
2010年4月24日9時48分
デジタル再製された狩野探幽の障壁画＝京都府京田辺市、高橋一徳撮影
とんちで知られる室町時代の一休禅師が晩年を過ごした酬恩庵（しゅうおんあん）「一休寺」（京都府京田辺市）は、国の重要文化財「方丈」（接客・仏事に 使う建物）にある障壁画４７面をデジタル技術により再製し、本物と入れ替えたと発表した。障壁画は江戸前期の狩野派の絵師・狩野探幽（かのう・たんゆう） らが手がけたもので傷みが激しく、今後は境内の宝物殿で保管される。
障壁画は、探幽が描いた「松竹梅図」など４３面と、江戸後期の画家・原在中（はら・ざいちゅう）が描いた４面。日焼けや度重なる修復で、墨と余白の境目が判別しにくくなるなど傷みが激しかった。
一休寺はデジタル技術を持つ大日本印刷に依頼。昨年５月ごろから同社が大型のスキャナーとカメラで原画を読み取り、汚れた部分は保存状態の良い部 分と同じ色合いになるように調整して和紙に印刷した。再製により、探幽の円熟期の端麗な筆遣いが鮮明によみがえった。同寺の田辺宗一住職は「今後は劣化の 心配なく、安心して見てもらえる」と話している。
2010年4月22日0時9分
聖武天皇（７０１～７５６）の遺愛品などを納めた奈良・正倉院の宝物のひとつで、人の顔のような文様のある「椰子実（やしのみ）」（直径１１．８センチ、重さ１７０グラム）に鼻やひげも描かれていたことがわかった。宮内庁正倉院事務所が２１日に発表した。「椰子実」はココヤシの殻を利用した容器。芽が出る穴を口、子房（しぼう）（めしべの膨らみ）跡２カ所を目に見立て、眉や瞳を描き加えている。
同事務所が蛍光Ｘ線や赤外線で調べたところ、両目の間に鼻が墨書きされ、口の両脇にひげらしい墨線があった。表面全体から水銀が検出され、赤色顔料の水 銀朱が塗られていた可能性もある。底部には「是」「白」「目」と読める、墨で書かれた３文字もあったが、意味は不明という。
同事務所は「ココヤシは南方産でも、加工は中国か日本の可能性がある」としている。（編集委員・小滝ちひろ）
「椰子実」の赤外線写真＝宮内庁正倉院事務所提供
椰子実の図
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
2010/04/20
A computer graphic shows the interior of the Byodoin temple's Phoenix Hall as it probably looked about 950 years ago. (BYODOIN 平等院)
UJI, Kyoto Prefecture--A brilliant computer graphics representation of the interior of Byodoin temple's Phoenix Hall is being exhibited in the temple's museum, showing how the hall presented the "Pure Land"--heaven--at its foundation about 950 years ago.
The temple, a World Heritage site, was founded in 1052. When the hall, which houses an Amida Buddha statue, was completed the following year, it was decorated with a mother-of-pearl inlay of imaginary flowers and gold powder as well as paintings of lotus petals and flying musical instruments against a blue sky.
The computer graphics are based on recreations of the hall's paintings by a team from the Tokyo University of the Arts and others.
The exhibition runs through Aug. 6 at the Hoshokan museum.
Under proposed new rules, the number of vendors who can sell art at city parks would be limited. Noel Donaldson at a popular spot at Union Square Park.
Vendors of art in the broadest sense now face no limits in places like Central Park South.
On Friday, the Department of Parks and Recreation is scheduled to hold a hearing on a proposal to slice the number of vendors allowed in parts of Central Park and all of Union Square Park, Battery Park and the High Line Park. If the proposal is approved, as expected, the restrictions would begin to take effect in a month.
The reason for the change, said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, is safety — because the vendors block sidewalks and hamper pedestrians, creating hazards. But, he also said, too many vendors are turning the parks into “year-round flea markets” and “selling stuff that you wouldn’t consider expressive art” as protected by the First Amendment, like “refrigerator magnets, small sculptures that are mass produced, books, DVDs, CDs, signs with funny slogans.”
“The artists can vent,” Mr. Benepe said. “The people who sell other goods can vent. And everybody will adjust. This is not the end of art. It is just a very slight and strategic moving of where people can sell art.”
To some art vendors, though, the administration’s proposal smacks of an attempt to remove them as much as is legally permissible — or at least to hurt their incomes — as if they were eyesores or nuisances to tourists and corporations. And one casualty, they believe, will be the kind of spontaneous and messy mingling of art and commerce that makes New York so New York.
“New York City is not a hospital operating room, yet Mike Bloomberg is continuing the sterilization campaign that Rudy Giuliani started in Times Square,” said Robert Lederman, a longtime foe of Mr. Benepe’s and the founder of A.R.T.I.S.T., an advocacy group with approximately 2,000 members. “And the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, sees himself as a real estate agent who’s trying to get the maximum price per square foot for all of our public parks.”
The proposed regulations would limit the number of vendors of printed texts and visual arts in congested areas of the four parks, which are among the city’s busiest, to a total of 81, compared with the more than 300 there now. Vendors would be limited to designated areas on a first-come-first-served basis. The rules would also dictate the dimensions of a seller’s table, as well as a table’s proximity to public property like monuments and benches.
One supporter of the proposal is Edward Wallace, a former councilman who helped to write the original 1982 law that allowed vendors to sell “expressive matter” under the First Amendment’s right to free speech.
Mr. Wallace, who is now a lawyer and a lobbyist but does not represent any clients in the current battle, said his goal was simply to allow poets and other artists the liberty to speak freely on street corners. “This is the law of unintended consequences,” Mr. Wallace said.
Some constitutional law experts were uncertain whether the city would be able to change the rules, as planned.
Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University Law School, said that while it was true that “the city can regulate the place, not the content,” it also had to give “reasonable access to the distribution of art.” And reasonable, he said, “is a term of art.” He also said he was troubled by the first-come-first-served provision.
“I don’t know what that means,” Professor Lupu said. “I would be constitutionally more comfortable with a lottery system that you could do online a week ahead of time.”
Lee Stuart, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group, said the plan had the right balance between protecting the parks, and granting the vendors enough room. “I don’t think this is a blanket restriction at all,” she said.
But several artists were dubious about the plan. At the southeast corner of Central Park, Dario Zapata, a caricature artist from the South Bronx, said: “The First Amendment is protection for artists. What will happen if the city limits us to eight spots here? Maybe hundreds of people will sleep on the benches to get a spot.”
Some pedestrians said they were troubled by the idea, too. Walking through Union Square, glancing at paintings, was Kristan Hibron, who studies marketing management at Pace University and works for an outdoor advertising company. “I love that I can come into New York and have a huge, diverse collection of art to choose from,” she said. “I really appreciate it. I respect artists. And this is one of the only venues they have for selling. They need to make money.”
記者方惠宗／專題報導
攝影／記者趙世勳
如果我們有不只一個古又文，而是一群古又文，台灣會不會更不一樣？
2009年12月，古又文在紐約拿下Gen Art Styles Competition前衛時裝獎。一夕之間，家喻戶曉。他日前返台辦展，作品終於在台北登場。各方邀訪、合作案相繼找上古又文，著名的法國「卡菲舞 團」（Kafig）藝術總監、Hip-Hop舞者Mourad Merzouki還親口對他說「你的作品啟發了我」，邀他合作。他領獎時說的那句「我來自台灣」，他的成功是台灣的驕傲。
古又文︰時尚力強 國力一定強
古又文說：「台灣有很多才華設計師，問題是我們的環境願不願意、用什麼方式給他們機會。」他向政府喊話「時尚輔導金制度」為文化建設，希望台灣有更多品牌揚名國際。因為「時尚力強的國家，國力一定也強。」
文建會副主委李仁芳將古又文比擬為不久前去世的英國設計師Alexander McQueen。兩人都是逆境圖強代表。「McQueen是計程車司機之子，沒有豐厚的背景資源。古又文也沒有背景支持，一步步實現理想。」
Alexander McQueen是古又文現就讀的英國「中央聖馬汀藝術設計學院」（Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design）學長。在McQueen卒於40歲的生涯裡，他多次以時尚向世人溝通人類與環境的關係，而且你根本看不到一件庸俗之作。除了美，他擴大時尚 的功能，希望感化人們對世界的責任。
古又文認為「McQueen的精彩，在於他傳達的價值，」即使一開始並沒有人了解他在幹嘛，然而McQueen用「美」證明很多事。「McQueen在真實世界去世，卻在很多人心中活過來。他讓我們知道，原來時尚可以這樣。」
古又文也認為時尚的本質是很大的概念，有很多功能。他說：「時尚力強的國家，國力一定也強。來自那個國家的東西，也會比較吸引人。」
這是假設，卻不無道理。古又文問：「為什麼老外看到穿著入時的東方人，就覺得是日本人？」他說：「就像川久保玲讓他的國人知道，如何用時尚征服國際。安特衛普六君子吸引世界見識比利時的另一種魅力。」在古又文心中，時尚能陶冶人們如何擁有比較高的生活水準。
陳劭彥︰專注細微，傳達強烈理念。
也是古又文的學長、來自宜蘭的陳劭彥，日前在倫敦時裝週發表他的「中央聖馬汀藝術設計學院織品服裝設計研究所」畢業作品。
陳劭彥去年在盛名的比利時布魯賽爾「Fashion Weekend」時裝大賽獲得首獎，這場畢業秀自然引來很大關注。
他用尼龍繩結合羊絨與彈性纖維，以針織技法層疊流線。外觀像毛皮大衣，實際上卻是短洋裝，創新身體曲線。沒意外的，他贏來極大好評。
陳劭彥曾在McQueen的工作室實習，他說：「我們用很大的心力投注在很細微的事情，然後傳達很強的理念。」他現在致力以傳統技法處理意想不到的材質，創造非凡的質感。
中央聖馬汀藝術學院
中央聖馬丁藝術與設計學院成立於1854年，是倫敦藝術大學（University of the Arts London，UAL）六大學院之一，是公認的藝術名校。這裡曾培育出許多時裝大師，包括已逝的Alexander McQueen、Dior現任設計師John Galliano，以及Stella McCartney、Paul Smith、Hussein Chalayan等。
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| 古又文日前以「破界?為題在北美館展出，提出反工業化的服裝。獨一無二的作品已傳有買家欲高價收藏。 |
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| Alexander McQueen在工作室留影。可惜此景永不復返。（達志影像）◎部分圖片提供／古又文、陳劭彥 |
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| 古又文認為時尚力強的國家，國力一定也強。 |
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| 1994年，Alexander McQueen透過伸展台詮釋懷胎母親的美。（達志影像） |
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| 陳劭彥在倫敦時裝週發表畢業作品。這些看似皮草的短洋裝竟是尼龍繩製成。 |
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| 陳劭彥認為時尚可以傳達理念。 |
Vollis Simpson, 91, a self-taught artist who makes sculptures out of steel and aluminum, in his North Carolina workshop. More Photos >
LUCAMA, N.C. — Just when you think you’ve traveled too far down Wiggins Mill Road, and you start to look for a spot to turn around, the rusting masterworks of Vollis Simpson loom into view.
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
Thirty feet in the air, held aloft by sturdy steel pillars, are some of Mr. Simpson’s pieces: a team of horses pulling a wagon, a metal man strumming a guitar and an airplane cum rocket ship that might have escaped from an old comic book. They are painted in a dozen colors and festooned with propellers that spin in the breeze. With every gust they creak and whir like some phantasmagoric junkyard band.
And down below, barely distinguishable in the shade of a barnlike building with “Simpson Repair Shop” painted on the front, is a gaunt man with big, gnarled hands bent over some scrap metal. It’s Mr. Simpson himself, a retired farm-equipment repairman who turned 91 in January, and who has hammered from discarded steel and aluminum a long second career as an artist.
Mr. Simpson, a graduate of the 11th grade and the United States Army Air Corps, is the creator of some of the most recognizable work in the genre of American homemade art by self-taught practitioners, now known by the dressed-up names of outsider art or visionary art.
He has lived to see what he thought of as a hobby for himself and quirky entertainment for the neighbors become part of a seriously regarded corner of the art world, one that generates master’s theses, museum shows and significant money.
His work, which graced a window at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan last Christmas, is on permanent display in Baltimore, Atlanta and Albuquerque. City people regularly find their way down Wiggins Mills Road to his place, and some of them give him $125 or more for a little nuts-and-bolts dog with a propeller for a tail. His biggest pieces have sold for many thousands, though he gives a lot away, and his only business manager is his wife, Jean, 82, who used to do the books for the repair shop.
The attentions of the outside world seem to befuddle him even today. When he first started making these things he calls his “windmills” 25 years ago, did he call it art?
“Didn’t call it nothing,” he said. “Just go to the junkyard and see what I could get. Went by the iron man, the boat man, the timber man. Ran by every month. If they had no use for it, I took it.”
The inspiration was in his gleanings, he said. “I’d look at a piece of metal, think of something and jump right on it.”
His cluttered yard is a recycling center on steroids. Junked air conditioners are great for fan blades. The police auction in nearby Wilson, N.C., supplies “all the bikes you want.” With an acetylene cutting torch, he can find the man or mule, hat or cat, hidden in any castoff sheet of steel.
“If he goes to the junkyard and finds 25 fans, he comes home and makes 25 whirligigs,” said Leonard Simpson, a 54-year-old television producer in Greensboro, N.C., who is one of Vollis Simpson’s three children.
To visit the elder Mr. Simpson on his home turf, among back roads where the abandoned tobacco barns are held up by vines, and billboards exhort drivers to repent, is to understand how naturally his art grew out of his old business.
Mr. Simpson, one of 12 children, learned to fix things before he learned to read. He joined the military, and while stationed in the Pacific during World War II made his first windmill from parts of a junked B-29 bomber, to power a giant washing machine for soldiers’ clothes.
Back home he settled into the equipment repair business, and when the oil embargo drove up fuel prices in the 1970s, he made another windmill to blow wood-heated air into his home. “My mom complained about the smoky smell so much that it didn’t last long,” Leonard Simpson said.
Some years later Vollis decorated the discarded windmill and planted it in the pasture, next to the pond. Then, starting in the mid-1980s, one thing led to another, and tractor repair was gradually supplanted by whirligig construction.
“He just did it for enjoyment,” Leonard said. “People would come from Wilson and stop and point. He came to enjoy the social aspect of it, and people started coming from further and further away. Next thing you knew, people were coming from Atlanta and Richmond.”
Perhaps his biggest break came in the mid-1990s, when Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, a Maryland philanthropist and consultant to nonprofits who was preparing to open the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, decided Mr. Simpson was just the man to provide its signature piece. She had visited him in Lucama and was attracted by the grand scale of his larger works, and by their complexity and precise engineering. She also liked his modesty.
“He’s delighted with attention, but he doesn’t need it,” she said. “My favorite artists don’t watch themselves being artists.”
She brought him up to look over the museum site at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, and he went to work, eventually coming up with a 55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs that now towers outside the museum. Built atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station, topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels, and incorporating oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle-iron parts, it prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms.
He painted it mostly red, white and blue and called it “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Unlike the pieces in his pasture it gets regular touch-ups that keep it bright.
In Ms. Hoffberger, who has become a major figure in the national movement to champion the art of the self-trained, he found a “rabid fan” (her words) who once brought two busloads of his relatives up from North Carolina to admire his masterpiece. She calls Mr. Simpson one of the “true visionaries,” whose wit and genius for color and balance never fails to move people.
“You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they’re doing and stare and smile and say, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Hoffberger said.
“I only wish that Alexander Calder could have known him,” she added. “He would have been smitten.”
The work has taken its physical toll on Mr. Simpson, who spent two days in a hospital burn unit a few years ago after a spark from a cutting torch set his shirt on fire. His knees are so painful that “I walk like a drunk,” he said.
He credits the whirligigs with carrying him long past the 70 years or so that his father and brothers lived. But even as he puts in 10 hours in his workshop on some long, warm days, he wonders about the future of the amusement park his pasture has become.
“I guess it’ll just rust and fall down when I’m gone,” he said.
Meanwhile, though, there’s work to do: the steel man smoking a steel pipe, the horse he’s got to cut out, the bicycle wheel he mounted a month ago on a frame and forgot.
“I got to get to the supply shop and get some cogs and chains,” he said, mostly to himself.
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From 1913 to 1917, Matisse reinvented painting. A new show at the Art Institute of Chicago traces his path
Something about Henri Matisse always brings to mind the famous line from André Gide: "Do not understand me too quickly." Isn't that what we so often do with Matisse? We rush to indulge in the pleasures his art provides without coming to grips with its complexities. Compared with the Cubist-period work of his near contemporary Picasso — one picture after another that can be like a cheese grater for the eyes — even the most recondite Matisse is pretty beguiling. All those canvases flush with rose pink and aqua, filled with dancers and flowers and fruit — it's hard to look at them and remember the tough-minded choices that went into them. (See pictures of Matisse's art.)
To restore Matisse to us in all his glorious difficulty is the public service performed by "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," a spectacular new show that can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago until June 20 and then moves to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Why focus on just four years? Because they were a moment when Matisse fundamentally reinvented painting. His works of that period — there are almost 120 in the show, including canvases, prints, drawings and sculptures — truly were radical inventions, new answers to the fundamental question of how to construct a picture. They were also, no surprise, considered ugly and incomprehensible in their time. Matisse once said he wanted viewers to feel about his art the way they would about "a comfortable chair" — an odd sentiment from a man whose art was more like an electric chair.
The years right after 1913 were an anxious time for Matisse. Born in 1869, he entered his mid-40s more visible than ever in the art world, but with work that to the French was still an eyesore. Though for the first time he was making enough money from his art to buy his family a comfortable house in a Paris suburb, much of his income derived from a single Russian patron, Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy merchant willing to fill his drawing room with Matisse's most difficult pictures while Moscow society snickered. (See the top 10 art exhibitions of 2009.)
And even as he struggled to gain a wider public, Matisse was losing his position as leader of the Parisian avant-garde to Picasso, 12 years his junior. Young artists were fascinated by the militant astringency of Cubism and its systematic means of exploding form and space. Compared with the bristling brown surfaces in Picasso and Braque, even Matisse's fiercest pictures, with their dizzying color, could look a bit "decorative" — a dismissive word thrown at him all the time. (See some artists from the 2010 Whitney Biennial.)
To be regarded as old hat was something new for Matisse. He had made his name in the preceding decade as the most dauntless of the Fauves — the Wild Beasts — a small group of painters who pushed the telegraphic brushwork of Impressionism and the dissonant palette of post-Impressionism into fever territory. At their head was Matisse, King of the Beasts, building pictures out of colliding zones of pyrotechnic color or from staccato dashes of magenta and ultramarine.
When he was through with the hectic charms of Fauvism, Matisse moved to distill and stabilize his art by conjuring up a stripped-bare world of preclassical antiquity, a place that was one part arcadia, one part Land That Time Forgot. In enigmatic pictures like Bathers with a Turtle, from 1908, bluntly rendered figures were disposed among wide, flat bands of nearly abstract blue and green that signified — just barely — land, sea and air.
Art During Wartime
These are the pictures that open the Chicago show, curated expertly by Stephanie D'Alessandro of the Art Institute and John Elderfield of MOMA. They represent a final prelude to the leap Matisse would make around 1913 into radical distortion and near abstraction. Much of that work he would do in the shadow of World War I. Rejected for service — he was 44 when the war began — he went on working in a Paris studio, while outside his door Europe hammered itself to pieces. Not long after, his hometown in northern France was occupied by German troops, his mother left stranded behind enemy lines and his brother sent to a prison camp. In Paris on many nights, the booming of German artillery was audible in the distance. (See the top 10 art accidents.)
These were the conditions under which Matisse began to produce pictures based on what he called the "methods of modern construction." Struggling to mount a personal response to the challenge of Cubism, he approached the very edge of abstraction. Things and people were reduced to concise signs of themselves, but in the end Matisse always remained attached to the visible world. Just look at Goldfish and Palette, from 1914, in which light and shadow, form and space, are distilled into ambiguous stage flats. Is that black strip down the center of the painting a wall or a shadow? Actually, it's the central mullion of a window and its shadow, widened and dislocated by perception and imagination. Planes of pure color pressed tight against the surface of the picture, those passages of black, white and blue don't so much depict light and shadow as conduct their essences into the canvas. At the same time, they act as compositional load bearers, structuring the picture into geometric zones that frame the fish bowl, the highly abstracted orange fish and, to the right, the painter's white palette with his thumb stuck through it.
Even in his portraits, like The Italian Woman, Matisse could almost entirely transform the sitter, because he was confident that feeling in a painting was conveyed not by physical appearance or facial expression but by the sum of the impressions created by line and color. Often he began a picture with something like a realistic scene, then distilled it repeatedly. This is what happened with his magnificent Bathers by a River. When he started the large wall painting in 1909, it was a panorama of voluptuous women in bright colors. When he finished it seven years later, the women were angular and anonymous, the setting radically flattened, and the river had become another of those vertical black bands, with a stark white snake shooting upward along it like a bent poker.
In 1917 Matisse relocated to Nice, in the south of France, and in much of his work over the next three decades he would return — you might say retreat — to more conventional renderings of space and form. Decades passed before other artists began to draw out the full implications of his fertile experiments. Color-field paintings, for example — the big monochrome wafers of Ellsworth Kelly, the gossamer pools of pigment in Helen Frankenthaler — would emerge directly from Matisse, but not until the 1950s. Maybe we didn't understand him too quickly after all.
