Issey Miyake, by Yoshiyuki Miyamae, autumn/winter 2014, in Paris.Credit
Guillaume Roujas/Nowfashion.com
PARIS
— Issey Miyake offers proof that a great designer can continue to bathe
his brand in his spirit. The collection sent out by Yoshiyuki Miyamae
was a youthful and lively rendition of everything that Mr. Miyake has
always believed in — notably, invention, transformation and sporty
clothes for an energetic life.
As
the models walked in to the sounds of a Japanese spring guitar on
stage, the audience should have guessed that the flat, circular bags
they carried would unfurl into dresses using the famous Miyake pleating
techniques.
They
were followed by more outfits with a three-dimensional effect of
stained glass squares standing away from the body. But the designer was
also smart enough to produce simple pieces that might be just a colorful
shawl cocooning the shoulders.
The
balance of this collection, inspired by the rhythmic pulse of life in
the forest, was perfectly aligned with the clothing and brought the
young designer a cascade of cheers.
Rick
Owens made a smart step out of cult status and toward his personal
fashion family. Instead of the extraordinary step dancing of last
season, the designer kept to the concept that women of all body types
could wear his clothes and, indeed, swap them with each other.
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Rick Owens, autumn/winter 2014, in Paris.Credit
Regis Colin/Nowfashion.com
So
out came favorite models from the past and people from his work studio,
proving that there can be a modern elegance in loosely cut clothes in
chic colors like wine red, or a stomping energy in deliberately awkward
proportions and techno-looking leg wear with knee protectors.
From
black and gray, Mr. Owens added dresses in gleaming fabrics, perhaps
with the flourish of a big bow at the neck. It proved that climbing down
from his fashion pedestal was a good move.
At
Nina Ricci, the designer Peter Copping said it with flowers near the
end of his collection. After a long wait, the show focused on the
romantic womanliness that is his specialty. His orchids, traced on
graceful long dresses with a hint of sensuality, have been a trademark
of the house. Lace dresses had a similar evening glamour.
But what else was there to associate the Nina Ricci name with but polite, wearable tailoring in shades of cloud gray?
Mr.
Copping is a romantic and maybe he should push that feeling forward,
for the autumn collection, pretty though it was, seemed not much more
than a useful wardrobe — plus those appealing flowers.
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Nina Ricci, by Peter Copping, autumn/winter 2014, in Paris.Credit
Guillaume Roujas/Nowfashion.com
Roland
Mouret’s geometry changes subtly each season but, like a compass with
the pin fixed firmly in place, the designer does not move far from his
position.
“I
have reached the exact point in my life where I am doing what I feel
passionate about, rather than what I feel is expected of me,” he wrote
in his program notes.
So
there was a grid, drawn finely around the body, framing it with
window-pane squares. The clothing was always slim, sometimes zippered
and occasionally with coloring splashes for painterly effects.
With
a collar high around the neck and inserts of leather, Mr. Mouret drew
his own fashion map, and sometimes it is wiser to follow that than to
reach out into unknown territory.
“It’s
a wardrobe about construction, texture and color,” said Hussein
Chalayan backstage to explain the apparent simplicity of a collection of
pieces where the models were free to stride. That was because a slit
skirt encouraged movement, whether it was something as simple as a big,
heavy textured sweater over a wispier skirt or one of the evening gowns,
light, elegant and splattered with color.
Although
the designer still talked a convoluted tale of moon and sky, his
clothes for this Chalayan collection have become increasingly simple,
with just the right dose of imagination and reality.
“Untitled,” 2013, by Laura Owens, one of the women revitalizing abstract painting.CreditPrivate collection; courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York.
WHITNEY Biennials can be daunting, confounding, exhausting and sometimes even outrageous. No matter how the curators organize this sprawling survey of what’s happening in American contemporary art right now, trying to navigate the museumwide exhibition and make sense of it all is a challenge, even for the pros.
This year’s edition, its 77th, which opens next Friday, is the last in the Whitney Museum’s Madison Avenue home before it decamps to its new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district in 2015. It is also perhaps the most highly anticipated contemporary art event in a week jam-packed with gallery openings and art fairs.
For the Biennial’s finale in the Marcel Breuer building, the Whitney invited three outside curators to organize the show: Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art; Anthony Elms, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and Michelle Grabner, an artist and a professor in the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In a break from years past, the three have each taken a floor and will present distinct visions, rather than one buildingwide narrative. Although they have coordinated in some of the public spaces, the second, third and fourth floors can be seen as independent shows and visited either in bite-size pieces — one floor at a time — or swallowed in one gulp.
“It’s as if you’re on your laptop and have three windows open,” Mr. Comer explained. “It’s not a collaboration but a conversation, a dialogue.” To drive home the point that this is “a show with three chapters,” as he calls it, the catalog gives each curator a distinct section, printed on differently textured papers.
This year’s biennial is especially dense, featuring the works of 103 participants (a word carefully chosen to include both individual artists and artist collectives), more than twice the number in 2012. Art is everywhere — in the stairwells, the sculpture court, the elevators, the lobby (where the composer and artist Sergei Tcherepnin has created a sound installation emanating from the ceiling).
Performances will be sprinkled throughout the museum, changing during the run of the show, which ends on May 25. (The schedule will be posted on the museum’s website.)
It’s not the first time the Biennial will spill out of its home, this time into Hudson River Park, at 17th Street, with a monumental multimedia work by Tony Tasset, composed of colored acrylic panels etched with the names of 400,000 artists, from Picasso and Warhol to little-known emerging artists.
For visual omnivores, the week also offers a panoply of commercial art fairs. There are the Art Dealers Association of America Art Show, at the Park Avenue Armory (at 67th Street), which opens on Wednesday, and the sprawling Armory Show, at Piers 92 and 94 (12th Avenue and 55th Street in Clinton) and the Independent Art Fair, (548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea), which both open on Thursday.
But it is the Biennial that aims to capture what’s happening in American art. Themes inevitably emerge, delivered in different ways, in different mediums, by different curators. Here are a few to look out for during your visit.
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"Five Senses for One Death,” 1969, ink and watercolor by Etel Adnan, 84, the Beirut-born cultural editor.CreditCollection of the artist; Callicoon Fine Arts, New York
Words and More Words
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The “Midwesternism” notebook, from “The Pale King” materials by David Foster Wallace.CreditHarry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin/David Foster Wallace Literary
PAPER is a star of this Biennial, with dozens of books and printed material. “Now that we have access to more archival material, we are all preoccupied with how we can reanimate it and create living histories,” Mr. Comer said. The independent publisher Semiotext(e) is presenting a series of books; an artist duo, Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan, have created an installation whose imagery and objects are based on a lifetime of airline menus collected by a Chicago anthropologist.
The 84-year-old Beirut-born cultural editor and artist Etel Adnan, whose accordion-folded paper books and diaries depict street scenes of New York, suggest the relationship between writing and painting. Also on view are the spiral notebooks with sketches that the writer David Foster Wallace kept while researching “The Pale King,” his last novel. (His biographer, D. T. Max, called them “an improvised bulletin board.”)
In addition to printed matter, look for literary accouterments, such as a writing table created for Nancy Mitford, the British novelist, by the Canadian-born artist Paul P.
Arts and Crafts
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“Blehh,” 2012, a delicately tooled wall piece of leather, enamel, brass and acrylic, created by Carol Jackson.CreditCollection of the artist, Courtesy the artist
The first Arts and Crafts movement, in England, challenged the taste of the Victorian era. Now the handmade aesthetic is flourishing again, Ms. Grabner said. “As so much moves to the digital world, there is a movement of slowing art and life down.”
Sheila Hicks, an artist whose career has involved melding art, design, craft and architecture, has created a monumental fiber sculpture from ceiling to floor in a spectrum of colors. Lisa Anne Auerbach, based on the West Coast, has knitted sweaters with political messages in the trim.
There is also ceramic art by Shio Kusaka, John Mason and Sterling Ruby, as well as a delicately tooled leather wall piece created by Carol Jackson. The Los Angeles artist Joel Otterson created a 14-foot-tall curtain wall of colored beads that seems straight from a hippie apartment.
Looks That Deceive
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“Relationship,” 2008, from a photographic diary by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst that chronicles the couple’s years together.CreditCourtesy of the artists and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
Things are not always as they appear. Genders are switched. Artists known for working in one discipline are presenting work in another. There are writers who paint; painters who write poetry; filmmakers who create sculptures; photographers who draw.
What appear to be abstract canvases by Ken Okiishi are actually oil paintings on flat-screen televisions, with a mash-up of footage from old VHS tapes and new digital images in subjects ranging from newscasts to commercials in an installation that is neither a painting nor a video.
An especially provocative photographic diary compiled by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst in Mr. Comer’s installation chronicles the couple’s five-and-a-half-year relationship, in which one transitioned from female to male, and the other from male to female. Until now, this had been a private journal.
Toward the end of March, look for a 22-minute video by the duo called “She Gone Rogue,” described as an odyssey through a world of transgender-themed magical realism when it was shown at the Hammer Museum’s biennial in 2012.
Female Painters
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“Okie Dokie,” 2008, dyed cheesecloth and acrylic on canvas, by Dona Nelson, who lives and works in Pennsylvania and New York.CreditCollection of the artist; Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Women are revitalizing abstract painting, and they are well represented here, with works by artists like Louise Fishman, Jacqueline Humphries, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Dona Nelson, Laura Owens and Amy Sillman.
“I am focusing on a handful of women artists who take on the authority of abstract painting — its history, its ambition and its relationship to power and gender,” Ms. Grabner said. “I wanted to put them together to underscore how different the language of abstract painting can be.”
She isn’t alone; Mr. Elms has included two large-scale abstract paintings by Rebecca Morris on the second floor. Long a fan of Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist architecture, Mr. Elms said the works fit perfectly with the space.
Nostalgia
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“Gone With the Schwinn” hangs in Keith Mayerson’s installation.CreditCollection of Dan and Jane Slavin. Courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York
In trying to grapple with the future, artists of different generations are looking to the past for inspiration. The Surrealist environment on the fourth floor, created by Shana Lutker, a Los Angeles-based Conceptual artist, is loosely based on a fistfight between André Breton — a founder of Surrealism — and two artists, Joan Miró and Max Ernst, over their sets and costumes for a ballet based on “Romeo and Juliet” in 1926. (Breton considered the production lowbrow, Ms. Grabner explained). Ms. Lutker’s stage, an abstract re-creation of the sets and costumes, from Miró's drawing, includes hanging stainless-steel figures of dancers, two cast ballerina feet and hundreds of red fliers on a ballet bar, to symbolize those thrown onto the stage in a protest.
On the third floor, a 19th-century-style salon, the work of Keith Mayerson, is hung with images from his own modern family: he and his husband; Elvis Presley; Kermit the Frog; and Marvin Gaye, among them.
“It falls somewhere between comic books, a story board and an old-fashioned painting gallery,” Mr. Comer said. He also enlisted Triple Canopy, a nonprofit group that publishes books and an online magazine, to create an installation that explores the cultural meaning of artworks as they are collected, sold, replicated, photographed and exhibited. It focuses on the Garbisch family (Col. Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch) and its vast trove of American primitive paintings and furniture, given to many museums. (The Whitney sold its gift in 1999 to focus on the 20th century.) Objects include a wash basin on loan from the Met and carefully made reproductions.
Architecture
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An image from a camera obscura installation by Zoe Leonard at the Whitney Museum.CreditCourtesy of the artist
Perhaps because the Whitney is saying goodbye to the Breuer building — or because more artists today are preoccupied with architecture, both as a form and a discipline — watch for constructed objects and architectural images, and ideas about what a museum should be, to be addressed in myriad ways.
Zoe Leonard has transformed a fourth-floor space into a giant camera obscura. Most of the Breuer’s trapezoidal window is blacked out, with only a small hole left that projects an inverted image of the unfolding streetscape — people rushing, and taxis and buses barreling by — onto the walls, ceiling and floor of the gallery.
Morgan Fisher, a Los Angeles artist, has created a curious portrait of the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano building. His sculpture, on the third floor, is an intentionally scrappy construction fashioned from drywall, in which he has reconfigured spaces in the museum, from the lobby to a boardroom coat closet. “It’s about how we rethink the history of museums and the hierarchy of space,” Mr. Comer said.
Mining Marcel Breuer’s archives, Mr. Elms brought together 24 artists and groups to answer a question by Breuer in his earliest notes on the building, when the architect wrote: “What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?”
Look for the artists’ responses to that question in Mr. Elms’s second-floor installation.
With monastic masonry shipped in from Europe, an interior filled with liturgical luxe, and its air fragrant with spiritual expectation, the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval redoubt in Upper Manhattan, is a complete atmospheric package, and one of the city’s great examples of installation art.
The installation, like the medieval worldview, appears to be fixed but is open to fortuitous interventions, and there’s one on view now in the form of six large windows that seemed to have been beamed down from on high for “Radiant Light: Stained Glass From Canterbury Cathedral.”
Embedded in a sort of gray wood tower in the Romanesque Court at the Cloisters, the windows date from between 1178 and 1180. They are excerpts from what was probably once a set of 86 near-life-size ancestors of Jesus, images representing his male biblical genealogy, beginning with Adam and coming forward to King David, from whom Mary and Joseph are said to descend.
Recent structural repairs to the cathedral have required that certain windows be temporarily removed, presenting the opportunity for the six seen here — among the oldest known examples of English glass painting — to leave the precincts for the first time and travel, first to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and now to the Met, where their arrival puts a luminous cap on the Cloisters’ 75th anniversary year.
Medieval Christian religious art, like Christian theology, is based on a complicated interweaving of darkness and illumination. Church interiors were both sunk in shadow and saturated with light: sunlight filtering in through windows; candlelight glinting off gold vessels; halos radiating from images of saints. The idea that light penetrated glass but left it unbroken was taken as a symbol of the virgin birth. Churches were conceived of as truth-holding boxes of light, but also as power stations, feeding light into the world.
The original location of the Canterbury windows was pretty celestial: 60 feet up above the cathedral floor in the architectural register known as the clerestory. And the entire series seems to have been made in the late 12th and early 13th centuries for an extension of the church holding the shrine of a suddenly and sensationally popular saint, Thomas Becket.
Born in a London merchant family about 1118, Becket had risen to political power as a trusted favorite of Henry II, and as chancellor of England, he had supported the king’s effort to strengthen the authority of the throne against that of the Roman Catholic Church. But after being consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury, he had a shift in loyalties. Soon, he and Henry were locked in a secular-religious standoff.
When the situation grew dangerous, Becket exiled himself to France but then returned to Canterbury. There on Dec. 29, 1170, at Vespers, four knights, who may or may not have been acting on Henry’s orders, brutally cut him down. (In the medieval galleries of the Met downtown, you’ll find a vivid illustration of the scene etched on a small silver casket that may have been made to hold relics of Becket’s blood.)
The move to silence Becket backfired. With almost unheard-of speed, Rome declared him a saint. And even before that, literally from the night he was killed, he became a wonderworking cult object and his cathedral tomb a magnet for pilgrimage.
The ancestors of Jesus in the windows looked down on that tomb. Surely, they were meant to be seen as honoring Becket with their attention, encircling him within sacred history. At the same time, they may have conveyed a more seditious message. As revered progenitors dating back to humanity’s creation, they advertised a ruling line of far greater antiquity and spiritual legitimacy than that of the English throne. Continue reading the main story
However the figures were interpreted by Canterbury visitors, they were imposing presences, even glimpsed from afar. And they are especially so at the Cloisters, where they are presented just above eye level and close up, the way the artists who made and placed them must have experienced them.
The six windows are the products of different glazing campaigns, though all date from near the beginning of the window project. And they include the work of different artists, the earliest, the so-called Methuselah Master, being the greatest. He is responsible for the portrait of Jared, representing the fifth generation since Adam.
Seated upright on a backless throne, Jared’s large-headed body self-confidently fills the arched space he occupies. According to Genesis, he lived to the age of 962; here, he looks to be in the prime of life. With his clear brow, curling beard, and large, amused eyes, he is regally dressed in gold and green and immaculately groomed, right down to his cleanly clipped nails.
The image of Lamech, the father of Noah, is attributed to the same artist but makes a different impression. He twists in his seat; his robe is unkempt; his face — probably a modern copy — is shaded by a pointed, broad-brimmed hat. He was considered an unheroic character, a member of the corrupt generation that triggered the Flood. The fact that his hat was associated with Jewish attire would not have been lost on a medieval audience.
The design for Noah’s portrait may have been drawn by the Methuselah Master, but the window itself, of cut, painted and soldered glass, was by others’ hands. Although Noah’s gestures are expansively personable, the scale of figure is small and marks the beginning of a second style at Canterbury, with various painters sharing the job.
The three remaining windows at the Cloisters, depicting Noah’s descendants Phalec and Thara, and Thara’s son Abraham, are likely all from this time, toward the end of the still-early 1178-80 phase. Bodies are face-forward and somewhat stiff, hand gestures generic and faces psychologically less distinctive. (Again, in the case of Abraham, the head is a 20th-century replacement.)
Yet there are also attractive special features. The arches above the figures support increasingly complex images of turreted towns, and there are nice sartorial touches: Phalec fastens his cloak with a fat amethyst brooch; Abraham wears snazzy yellow socks under baby-blue boots.
And in the Cloisters installation, organized by Timothy B. Husband, a curator in the museum’s medieval art department, two windows, those devoted to Thara and Abraham, are set up in their original configuration, one above the other, with both enclosed in a glorious, wide, trellis-and-pink-palmette border.
Consistent throughout all six windows is the high level of craftsmanship brought to an art form that was fundamentally about painting. Each translucent piece in the pictorial jigsaw is brushed with minute attention to detail — folds of cloth, tangles of hair, shadings of lips — and washed on both sides with ruby reds, midnight blues and marigold yellows. Add sunlight, and the color is like that in no other medium, so succulent and luscious you could almost taste it.
As it happens, in the Cloisters display, the windows are electrically lighted from behind, the only practical way they can be seen unchangingly throughout the day and at night. Yet a changing environment is part of their history at Canterbury.
The Becket shrine they once encircled is long gone, obliterated in the 16th century by another English king, Henry VIII. In the late 18th century, some windows in the sequence were placed elsewhere in the cathedral. Others — about half of the full set — have been lost over time to weather, war and accident.
And, inevitably, because human history is dynamic and chaotic, the meanings of the windows have altered. Today, the ancestors they immortalize, patriarch after patriarch, imbued with the politics and prejudices of another day, are not necessarily models to admire or personalities to love.
Yet taken as evidence of a medieval concept of history as a divine work of art eternally finished, even if humans could only see it as puzzle of darkness and light, the windows remain of interest. And as visual objects made from glass, paint and luminescence, retaining true luster 10 centuries on, they still deliver the disbelief-curing clout of miracles.
“Radiant Light: Stained Glass From Canterbury Cathedral” remains through May 18 at the Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, Fort Tryon Park, Washington Heights; metmuseum.org, 212-923-3700.
James Ensor, the late-19th-century Belgian painter who helped shape Modernism, was an interpreter of a vast array of sources, from traditional masters like Bosch and Breughel to Courbet and Manet. Working in an attic studio in a resort town on the North Sea, he created myriad paintings over his 70-year career, including still lifes, interiors and portraits; tabloid cartoons; death masks; and biblical subjects. And by the end of the 1880s, his work became more satirical, fantastical and grotesque. Among his most prized works are the large-scale drawings made from pasted-together sheets of paper. One in particular, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” dating from the 1880s, is almost six feet tall and composed of 51 separate sheets of paper mounted on canvas.
Starting this spring, it will be on view first at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, from June 10 through Sept. 7, and later at the Art Institute of Chicago, from Nov. 23 through Jan. 25, 2015. It will be its first public showing in more than 60 years.
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James Ensor’s “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” from 1887, is composed of 51 separate sheets of paper mounted on canvas.Credit2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Sabam, Brussels
In 2006, the Art Institute quietly acquired the drawing from the artist’s patrons, the Speth family, with the help of the C. G. Boerner Gallery, which runs spaces in New York and Düsseldorf, Germany, and was aware of the Art Institute’s strength in 19th-century works on paper.
Depicting Anthony surrounded by a strange mix of modern, real-world temptations including a fast-food vendor and a hot-air balloon, along with imaginary beings like devils, the work shows him kneeling in prayer, while above his head are rays of the rising sun and a sorrowful Jesus wearing a military helmet. “It is Ensor’s most important drawing,” said Nancy Ireson, associate curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute. “It is his biggest, and it’s unique in its format and the sheer number of different themes contained within one giant work.”
By the time it entered the Art Institute, the delicate drawing was in need of conservation and restoration, which became an eight-year project. The separate sheets had been attached to the canvas, but over the decades, the supports did not stay in place. They therefore had to be removed and remounted onto Japanese paper, which conservators felt was the best way to preserve the work. The drawing had been restored in the 1940s with paper that had darkened over time, and those areas were removed to reveal the original drawing beneath.
When “The Temptation of St. Anthony” goes on view in Chicago, it will be the centerpiece of a larger exhibition, “Temptation: The Demons of James Ensor.” “We’re trying to explain some of the stranger aspects of St. Anthony and explore the meaning of this monumental drawing,” said Ms. Ireson, who has gathered more than 100 works from institutions and private collections, including the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. “While we’re used to seeing artists celebrating the advances that modernity brings, Ensor captures the fear and anxiety of a world in flux in a sardonic yet fantastical way,” she said.
The Chicago exhibition will be different from the one at the Getty, which is being called “The Scandalous Art of James Ensor,” and will focus on “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889,” a very large painting (more than 8 feet by 14 feet) from the Getty’s own collection that is too fragile to travel, as well as the Art Institute’s “Temptation of Saint Anthony.”
JUST LIKE LADY LIBERTY
It was only a matter of time before New York City’s parks got a sampling of Danh Vo’s “We the People,” a project that consists of about 250 sculptures fashioned from hammered copper. Each is a copy, in the actual size, of parts of the Statue of Liberty’s outer skin.
Some of these fragments have been on view before in New York. Now, from May 17 through Dec. 5, the nonprofit Public Art Fund is bringing the largest number outdoors, to City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park’s recently opened Pier 3. “We felt as though it was the perfect thing because of its proximity to the source of inspiration,” said Andrea Hickey, the Public Art Fund’s associate curator, who organized the exhibitions. “The Statue of Liberty evokes so many meanings to so many people around the world.”
Born in Vietnam and raised in Denmark, Mr. Vo, a Conceptual artist has been on a roll in recent years. In 2012, he won the Hugo Boss Prize, which, besides money, includes a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His work was also at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
For City Hall Park, the Public Art Fund culled sculptures from private collections and the artist’s holdings. The exhibition will be made up of about 40 works and includes a curl of Liberty’s hair, folds from her drapery, a ray from the crown and about 20 parts of the plinth. Also on view will be the chain at the figure’s feet, which is linked to a broken shackle, a symbol of America’s independence.
“City Hall Park is more like an outdoor gallery,” Ms. Hickey said. In Brooklyn, there will fewer works, but they will be larger and include a newly fabricated sleeve of the arm — but not the torch. “They lead your imagination to think about the torch without actually seeing it,” she added.
ARCHITECTURAL FOLLIES
Another imaginative project will occupy Madison Square Park — that swath of green space between Madison and Fifth Avenues from 23rd to 26th Streets — from May 1 through Sept. 7. Consisting of three fantastical architectural follies, it is the first public art exhibition in this country by the New York sculptor Rachel Feinstein and the largest sculptures she has ever made.
Ranging in height from eight feet to 26 feet, the three-dimensional structures are fashioned from powder-coated aluminum with applied surface illustrations.
“Rachel is an unusual 21st-century artist, because she has taken inspiration from 18th-century sources,” said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, senior curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, which organizes its art installations. “Think Piranesi meets public art.”
One of Thomas Crow’s most influential titles, The Rise of the Sixties,
first published in 1996, provides an excellent overview of the major
themes and figures in one of art history’s most radical and complicated
decades. Presenting an international array of artists against the
background of world events in the 1960s, Crow portrays the ways in which
the American art scene—including such key figures as Leo Castelli, Eva
Hesse, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Cy Twombly, and
Andy Warhol—fit into the corresponding European and international
movements of the time, among them Situationalism, Conceptualism,
Feminism, Environmentalism, and Op Art.
Generously illustrated
with 120 images, 80 of which are in color, the newly available book
encompasses all the major players in the art world of the 1960s and
examines how they influenced and inspired one another. The author’s
fascinating new afterword examines the themes of the 60s in the context
of recent historical, political, and cultural events.
Thomas J. Crow is director of the Getty Research Institute
and professor of art history at the University of Southern California.
Among his previous books are Modern Art in the Common Culture and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, both published by Yale University Press.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300106831
The
1921 painting Odalisque by Henri Matisse, one of the artists whose
works is believed to have been retrieved after being seized by the
Nazis.
An additional 60 pieces of art, including works by Picasso, Renoir and Monet, have reportedly been found in the Austrian home of the reclusive German son of Hitler’s art dealer.
A news magazine revealed late last year that investigators found 1,400 lost works of art in 2012, including pieces by renowned masters Matisse and Chagall, in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt,
81, whose father Hildebrand Gurlitt was employed by the Nazis selling
works stolen from Jewish families. The updated haul, reported by AFP, comes after more works were found at a property in Salzburg, Austria, that belonged to the man.
Of the original roughly 1,400 works found in Gurlitt’s home,
investigators say they’ve found about 590 which are suspected of having
be stolen or extorted from Jewish art collectors by the Nazi regime. An
initial inspection of the found art suggests there is no evidence any of
the 60 newly discovered pieces was Nazi loot, according to a Gurlitt spokesperson.
[AFP]
