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Posted: |
Aug 18, 2020 - 8:44 AM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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An interesting-to-only-me article, "The 1918 Spanish Flu Wreaked Havoc on Nearly Every Country on Earth. So Why Didn’t More Artists Respond to It in Their Work?"
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/spanish-flu-art-1836843
Edvard Munch's painting, Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu (1919) is one of the few notable works inspired by the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed at least 20 million people. Munch was a prolific painter who was also fascinated with disease and death, so his creating a painting on the subject is consistent with his character.
The Spanish Flu killed Egon Schiele and his wife. It also killed poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was already weakened by his war injuries. Gustav Klimt also died from the flu, yet many artists of the era remained conspicuously, maddeningly silent on the subject of the Spanish Flu.
Even Our Man Hemingway, in his copious correspondence, rarely mentioned the flu. The only reference to the pesky pandemic was in a letter to one of his younger sisters in which he states, "Don't get the flue [sic]" (or words to that effect).
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Posted: |
Aug 24, 2020 - 7:37 AM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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I suppose you should include me in the art book junkie category. Over the last forty-five years there’s hardly been a month without my purchasing at least one book on the visual and graphic arts. About half of my 500+ art books are of the coffee table variety and can be roughly categorized as follows: artists, art movements, galleries and national collections. The smaller-sized books tend to deal with art history, theory and criticism. There are also a couple of dozen books on US and international film posters, though nearly all of these are now permanently housed with my 3,000 film books upstairs.
It’s a decidedly eclectic collection, with books covering the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century predominating. Approximately half the books are in English and the other half in Polish, with a smattering of German, French and Russian editions.
I have four multi-volume encyclopedias of art (1 English, 3 Polish), including a six-volume bound edition of “The Great Artists”, the Marshall Cavendish weekly series from years back.
A sizeable majority of my books (Quarto-size or larger) seem to be about specific artists. Just running along the spines of two bottom shelves of my bookcase, I see the following illustrious names:
Jozef Mehoffer
Jacek Malczewski
Tadeusz Makowski
Wojciech Weiss
Jan Matejko
Valentin Serov
Mikhail Vrubel
Ilya Repin
Martiros Saryan
Niko Pirosmani
Yuri Vasnetsov
Mikhail Nesterov
Alexey Venetsianov
Ivan Aivazovski
Stanislaw Wyspianski
Henryk Stazewski
Wanda Mecedonska
Zdzislaw Beksinski
Mihaly von Munkacsy
Boris Kustodiev
On the same two shelves we have ten lavishly illustrated gallery guidebooks:
The Tretyakov Gallery
The Hermitage
The Pushkin Museum
The State Russian Museum
The National Museum in Krakow
The National Gallery in London
The Slovak National Gallery
The Louvre
The Dali Museum Collection (“Oil Paintings Objects and Works on Paper”)
The Art Institute of Chicago
And also a dozen or so city-wide art collections: Budapest, Krakow, Warsaw, Wroclaw, London, Vienna, Paris, Dresden, Madrid, Berlin, Rome.
And finally an assortment of national art collections: Armenian, American, Polish, Russian, Italian, Dutch, French, German, Austrian, Polish, English.
Not all shelves are so well organized. The two just above the aforementioned are a veritable pot pourri of subject matter and accommodate, among others: Lucie Smith’s “Art Today”, Broude’s “World Impressionism”, Magdalena Droste’s doorstopper “Bauhaus”, Alastair Duncan’s magnificent “Art Deco”, Strinati’s “Raphael”, Witkovsky’s superlative “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe: 1918-1945”, “Turner & the Sea - “ a brilliant overview by Christine Riding, Neret’s “Renoir”, Majewski’s 600-page tome on Polish poster art, W.R. Publishers similarly-sized “Italian Renaissance” (ridiculously priced at $1,001.86 on Amazon!) a massive Degas exhibition Catalogue by Jean Boggs, and a host of sundry items stored almost wholly according to book size (the only way I could fit them all on my limited shelves).
The books which garner the greatest personal attention are the collected works of the tragically murdered Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski - extremely well-thumbed volumes that require imminent replacement. I was privileged to know Beksinski personally – along with his son, Tomek, with whom I shared a very close sibling-like relationship up until his suicide twenty years ago. Whenever the need for presents arose, Tomek would simply give me a signed & framed poster-sized print of one of his father’s graphics, which still adorn what’s left of my walls…
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Posted: |
Aug 24, 2020 - 11:11 AM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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I think I saw a documentary about Beksinski the other year, his art is fantastic.
There have been many documentaries over the years about the artist and his son, most of which have tried to paint (sorry!) Zdzislaw as a egomaniacal sado-masochist and Tomek as a suicidal freak. A recent, much-lauded 2016 feature biopic, The Last Family, is perhaps the most egregious example of playing fast and loose with reality to create “art”. The scriptwriter, who had never met Zdzislaw or any member of his family, had contrived a totally fictitious but cinematically compelling image of the Beksinski family that would eventually clean up at the Polish Oscars – at the expense of the tragic but filmically unappealing truth.
Tomek Beksinski is played by the much respected actor David Ogrodnik, who exploits this award-bait role to the hilt. His personification of Tomek, a publicly ebullient but privately subdued individual, is a textbook example of caricature over characterization – with Tomek’s infrequent emotional excesses becoming the sum total of his on-screen personality.
For my sins, I was one of Ogrodnik’s consultants, but was never actually shown a script. I was simply given narrative highlights to help shape the actor’s performance. In one scene, I was told that Tomek, in a petulant fit of pique, throws his beloved 32-inch Sony Trinitron TV out of the window of his 10th floor apartment. I stressed that it was emotionally and psychologically inconceivable for Tomek to do such a thing and thus I had no idea how he would have behaved in such a situation. Furthermore, the TV weighed 165 pounds and Tomek, weaned on Coca Cola and pizza, was incapable of lifting half that weight at the best of times.
And in a moment reminiscent of the final scene from Some Like It Hot, I pointed out that the TV set in question, far from being smashed to smithereens on the streets of Warsaw, was still standing—totally intact— in my Krakovian flat!
Ogrodnik merely shrugged hs shoulders and smiled.
They went ahead and shot the scene as scripted. Needless to say, given the director’s passion for truth, the exact model of TV was located and used – but entirely denuded of its innards to make it light enough for Ogrodnik to lift.
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Posted: |
Aug 24, 2020 - 3:58 PM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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Stanislaw Szukalski is seen by many as the Leoh Ming Pei of Poland. What Pei did to the Louvre (he designed the pyramids in the main courtyard of the former palace), Szukalski wanted to do to Wawel Castle, the royal residence of the Kings and Queens of Poland. His plans, however, were much more draconian in scope and had profound fascistic overtones.
For this and several other reasons, he’s an extremely divisive personality, not just in Poland.
Szukalski was a self-acknowledged curmudgeon and genuinely convinced of his own unique genius. Furthermore, he loathed critics – with the combined passion of Ken Russell and Alan Parker. Like Parker, Szukalski reveled in insulting critics in print. But he didn’t limit himself to polite invective; he used every known Polish vulgarity—many he coined himself—to vituperate and damn critics to hell. And whereas Russell merely hit a critic with a copy of his own review on TV, Szukalski actually threw one down a flight of stairs during an exhibition.
Regarding his art, he was undeniably a visionary sculptor and designer. Sadly, much of his best work was destroyed or looted in Warsaw during WWII; what is left hints at the largely unfulfilled artistry of later years in the USA. Despite his exceptional talent, he failed to get many exhibitions of his art, largely because he detested museum curators and started every exhibition pitch with the few curators who were interested in his oeuvre by insulting their collections. After such a barrage of abuse, doors were politely shut in his face.
His unashamed right-wing views also discouraged private patronage from more liberal sponsors of the arts, which meant that most of his more ambitious designs remained unrealized.
As for my feelings about his work, I’m really in two minds. As much as I admire his raw and untrammeled talent, I deplore his virulent anti-Semitism and lifetime obsession with fascism. Unfortunately, you can’t divorce his politics from his art, because one stems from the other. Looking at some of his major projects, it’s difficult to ignore the ideational and formal streak that weaves its way through them and the iconography of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. His design for a monument of Benito Mussolini is well-known, but not many people are aware that he was approached by the Nazis for designs for commemorative statues and posters of Hitler. Apparently, Szukalski obliged them with a few of his ideas.
In a 1935 article in The New American, Blanche Gambon wrote of Szukalski: “His motifs are the product of the emotional and sensitive soul of the patriotic Pole who, for the last one hundred and fifty years suffered the criminal invasion of his neighbors”.
It is interesting to imagine what the sensitive and patriotic artist thought four years later as the Nazis marched through the ruins of Poland brandishing his proffered designs…
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Posted: |
Aug 26, 2020 - 2:37 PM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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As far as art books are concerned, the mailman obliged me this afternoon with two much belated additions to my collection. In terms of quality, the books couldn’t be farther apart - absolute polar opposites on the Gaussian distribution curve of art book excellence.
The first is Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon – a 2004 catalogue from London's Royal Academy of Arts. Despite being the first ever exhibition of the a relatively unknown Polish artist, it was extremely well attended and the accompanying catalogue is a worthy companion piece. It’s brimming with unedited (cropping is a major gripe of mine) and predominantly decently-sized reproductions – all in full colour. Apart from a few biographical anomalies (the author inexplicably russifies her surname to Lempitzky, for example), there’s very little to cavil at. On a personal note, it’s a pity that my favourite de Lempicka painting, Group Of Four Nudes from 1925—one of her larger canvasses—is the smallest reproduction in the entire book (barely the size of a cigarette packet). Another of my favourites, Seated Nude, also from 1925, isn’t included at all. (Fortunately, the Lempicka monograph in the Taschen Basic Art Series does full justice to both paintings.) Overall, this is an exemplar of the art of catalogue production.
I wish I could say the same about Thames and Hudson’s Fauvism, an ignoble addition to their World of Art series. Put succinctly, it’s a prime candidate for consignment to the Ninth Circle of Hell.
I suspect that many readers of this thread are familiar with fauvism, a movement that stressed the primacy of vibrant colour to capture the essence of the subject matter. The blurb at the back of the book waxes lyrical about fauvism’s “strong, even strident colours, applied in a manner deriving from Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh…” In the introduction, the author quotes Matisse’s description of the quintessence of the movement: “beautiful blues, reds, yellows, stuff to stir the sensual depths of man."
Beautiful colours indeed. But you’ll be damned if you can find them in this book because nearly ninety per cent of the reproductions are in black and white!
"A remarkable, comprehensive achievement," says The New York Times Book Review – not for the first time shooting itself in the foot.
Enough said…
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Posted: |
Aug 29, 2020 - 7:12 AM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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As you may have gathered from my earlier posts, I’m extremely partial to art books from east of the Curzon Line. In fact, they constitute approximately seventy percent of my entire collection. Over half explore western art, leaving about 150 books, predominantly in Polish, dealing with art from behind the former Iron Curtain.
I’m aware that this is not a topic that most of you good Stateside denizens give two figs about. During my 35 years in Krakow, I’ve discovered that westerners in general, and Americans in particular are mainly ignorant about Eastern European politics, geography and history and wholly ignorant about the film, literature and art of this region. (This is not a criticism in the slightest, just a statement of fact.)
In perfect exemplification of this ignorance, my local Barnes and Noble - well-stocked on art and design, is totally bereft of books exploring Eastern European artists and movements and all inquiries into the availability of the aforementioned evinces an immediate and emphatic “no” - as if the entire staff have just finished a fruitless marathon search for exactly these items.
This negative rejoinder is invariably accompanied by a look of utter bewilderment, born, I suspect, of a belief that such inquiries are a clear violation of the Patriot Act.
Now, I can understand your indifference to Eastern European cinema, because it necessitates engagement on a linguistic level: the idea of reading subtitles seems to be anathema to most of the English-speaking world. And I can also comprehend the antipathy towards the written word because a lot of Communist Bloc literature requires cognizance of sophisticated decoding mechanisms that propel its arcane narrative artifacts.
But art (i.e., painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) is a visual form of communication that almost entirely eschews conventional language. And yet, there is almost no attempt on the part of the Anglophone world to embrace Eastern European art, or to even sample its riches; despite the fact – and this is crucial – that it closely mirrors the visual language of the West, as well as replicating the cultural influences from the classical Greco-Roman world.
Naturally, to be interested in books on the subject, you have to be exposed to this art first. I’ve spoken to several gallery/museum curators in the US and UK and they all sing from the same commercial hymn-book : there’s simply not enough interest to warrant an exhibition of Eastern European art. It’s difficult to get people into museums and galleries at the best of times for non-western exhibitions - unless it’s something spectacular, such as the recent Tutankhamen exhibition in London. Otherwise, there’s little chance of attracting public attention to something that’s below their cultural radar.
So all those unfamiliar Russian and Polish artists that I listed in my first post will remain little more than an admixture of unpronounceable syllables, even though a few Google clicks would open up a whole new world of art and design that may get you ordering one or two books about these wonderful creators of visual magic.
Stranger things have been known to happen!
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Posted: |
Aug 29, 2020 - 7:23 AM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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Having reread my previous post, it behooves me to point out the glaring hypocrisy in my ramblings. How can I talk about Westerners snubbing Eastern European art when my own art book collection is a paradigm of ethnocentricity?
The art of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region is not so much under-represented on my shelves as non-existent. Apart from Europe (including the entire expanse of the former Soviet Union) and North America there is very little else. I baulk at that final knee-jerk qualification, because there is, in fact, not “very little else” but simply and unequivocally nothing.
I’d love to say that I’d willingly collect art books from these unexplored areas were shelf space not a pressing issue. But that would be a lie. I’ve consciously avoided buying books readily available on these “alien” cultures throughout my art-book-buying life. Yes, I look through them in bookstores; however, I never buy them because they don’t resonate with my western aesthetic sensibilities. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. And it’s not as if there’s a shortage of art books covering these regions of the world. Publishing houses in Krakow have a rich and time-honored tradition of delving into non-European art.
To make matters more bizarre, I have many African statues and masks dotted around my apartment. My lounge is adorned with Arabic jewelry and ornamental weaponry and I even have a large oil painting depicting tented Najrani Bedoiuns in the desert. However, I have no intention of buying books on the subject of African and Middle Eastern art and culture.
I suppose it’s like my soundtrack collection, which betrays an analogous bias against non-European/North American scores. Again, “bias” is a euphemism for “almost complete disregard”. I like what I know and buy accordingly.
Should I force myself to engage with this “exotic” art in print form – at least making a symbolic gesture by purchasing the odd book? But wouldn’t that forced inclusivity be a textbook definition of tokenism? Posturing at its worst?
So while I’m stuck in this ethical quandary, I promise to refrain from commenting on the cultural dereliction of fellow FSM aesthetes and hand this highjacked thread back to Jim Phelps…
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Here’s a list of my all-time favourite 20th century Polish artists. If you have a spare fifteen minutes, they’re definitely worth a click or two:
Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929-2005)
HE ROCKS!
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Here’s a list of my all-time favourite 20th century Polish artists. If you have a spare fifteen minutes, they’re definitely worth a click or two:
Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929-2005)
HE ROCKS!
Ooops! "Rocked"
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Posted: |
Aug 31, 2020 - 11:01 PM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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Here’s a list of my all-time favourite 20th century Polish artists. If you have a spare fifteen minutes, they’re definitely worth a click or two:
Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929-2005)
HE ROCKS!
I’m delighted that Beksinski’s tremendous talent hasn’t gone unnoticed in these here parts!
Not only was he an amazing and prolific painter, Beksinski was also an obsessive photographer who knew no bounds as an archivist of the bizarre and unusual. Rarely was he seen without his camera – even at the breakfast table.
Especially in the latter years of his career, when he focused on manipulating photographic images for his graphic art, every situation he found himself in was a potential subject for his surreal imagery. I never failed to be shocked at where he drew—or failed to draw—the line for artistic succour.
A typical example was his son’s suicide. Before the funeral date was fixed, Beksinski invited me over to Warsaw for—as he put it—“a moment of reflection”. My abiding memory of that short stay is the sixty-minute visit to his son’s apartment. When we got there, Beksinski asked me to ignore him and wander freely around Tomek’s rooms. He also had me touch anything and everything within reach, including the numerous paintings on the wall. I did as he bid me, behaving in all probability like Catherine Deneuve’s character in Polanski’s Repulsion. During this entire time, Beksinski was walking behind me and photographing my every move. An hour of profound grief for me was, it transpired, a moment of inspiration for the artist.
Fortunately, I managed to dissuade him from utilizing any of these photos in his work, but twenty years on, I still reflect on just how far an artistic genius like Beksinski was prepared to go in search of a creative spur.
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