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Posted: |
Jan 9, 2025 - 2:29 PM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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Jim, what do you think of the Rothko? I haven't picked it up because it seemed too slim (I'm very partial to Rothko). I did get an exhibition catalog from last year of his paintings on paper, pretty fantastic!
I requested the Rothko and Francis Bacon books out of curiosity. Initially, neither of their work did anything for me, but the large number of glowing, even deeply emotional testimonies of many a Rothko fan made me give his work a chance. I'm trying to find a way in, so to speak, and while I haven't had anything like a "deeply moving" reaction, I do find that the era in which Rothko's work was made allows me to appreciate how the Abstract Expressionists turned the art world on its head, but not in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge manner that the Pop Artists did.
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My wife (who is an artist) and I have a dim if semi-respectful view of Bacon, but I have been finding the color field artists very appealing in recent years. I have never seen a Rothko in person, and hope one day to travel to Houston to visit the Rothko Chapel, which may be the best way to experience his work.
I'm even enjoying Agnes Martin these days, (she of mostly monochrome lines and strips), and I despised her work when I saw a couple of her pieces at the local art museum when I was 19. Now I find it somehow quite calming.
Barnett Newman is another, but books of his are harder to find and pricey.
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Double post, so here's a Barnett Newman...
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I have not, but I see I can rent it on Amazon. Thanks!
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Posted: |
Jan 11, 2025 - 5:40 AM
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By: |
chriscoyle
(Member)
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My wife (who is an artist) and I have a dim if semi-respectful view of Bacon, but I have been finding the color field artists very appealing in recent years. I have never seen a Rothko in person, and hope one day to travel to Houston to visit the Rothko Chapel, which may be the best way to experience his work.
I'm even enjoying Agnes Martin these days, (she of mostly monochrome lines and strips), and I despised her work when I saw a couple of her pieces at the local art museum when I was 19. Now I find it somehow quite calming.
Barnett Newman is another, but books of his are harder to find and pricey.
One of the great things about living near NYC is to be able to see some great art shows. The major galleries Pace, Gagosian, Zwirner put on museum quality shows occasionally . Gagosian and Pace did it with Picasso for the 50th anniversary of his passing. Pace, which I think represents Rothko, puts on a show of his painting every couple years. Im going to see the Orphism show at the Guggenheim soon. Not my favorite museum space. May be great architecture but I like to look at paintings on level ground.
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Posted: |
Jan 13, 2025 - 4:36 PM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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The last couple of years have been hectic, to say the least. Having broken free of my Floridian shackles, I was able to return permanently to Europe and avail myself of my new-found freedom to explore cultural pursuits, acquiring in the process about 60 new art books. I’d be happy to post photos of my bulging shelves… when I finally learn how to do so! In the meantime, allow me to present a few “artistic” highlights from these COVID-addled years.
First, I travelled to NYC to see two inspirational exhibitions: “Manet/Degas” at the Met and “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925” at the Neue Galerie. The Met exhibition was a palpable success; by paralleling the two artists’ oeuvre, the 160-odd paintings in the exhibition threw into direct relief their overlapping and diverging creative trajectories – an excellent conceptual strategy! The sizeable exhibition catalogue is a knowledgeable and penetrating souvenir. Had a second chance to see Léon Frédéric’s glorious “Three Sisters” in their permanent collection. Whilst it’s never actually acknowledged, Eastern European symbolist art appears to infuse a great deal of Frédéric's work, including this striking evocation of peasant life.
The Beckmann at the Neue Galerie was no less of a triumph. The verist Neue Sachlichkeit period in his artistic life is his most creatively and ideationally febrile. The exhibition, which concentrated on this period (though there were residual traces of his Impressionistic origins on display), lived up to all my expectations. I was particularly pleased to see in the flesh Beckmann’s “Hell” lithographs courtesy of MOMA. Popped into their Aladdin’s Cave of a bookstore where I spent a king’s ransom on a (Xenomorph) handful of NG exhibition catalogues - all unsurprisingly scrupulously-researched and copiously-Illustrated:
1.“Max Beckmann: The Formative Years 1915-1925”
2.“Modern Worlds: Austrian and German Art, 1890-1940” – finished reading this 656-page behemoth last week and am suffering withdrawal symptoms!
3.“Ernst Ludwig Kirchner”
4.“Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art, 1907-1917” – If you read my earlier posts highlighting my passion for eastern European art, you’ll understand why I treasure this book so highly.
5.“Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925”
6.“Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870-1940”
At MOMA, I gawped for fifteen minutes at Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” - much to the chagrin of a group of burly Texans desperate to get a Vincent group selfie without me in the picture. In MOMA’s well-curated bookshop I picked up “Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas by David Anfam”, one of the most stimulating and rewarding art books ever written. A steal at $250.
Procured fantastic tickets for the NYC premiere of Philip Glass’s “The Triumph of the Octagon”, conducted by Ricardo Mutti, with Glass in attendance. Dazzling, though somewhat overshadowed by Strauss’s spectacular “Aus Italien” and Mendelssohn’s Fourth.
Visited (for the first time) the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which houses two items from my bucket list: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s monumental “Great Bathers” and Léon Frédéric’s quadriptych, “The Four Seasons”. Regarding the “Great Bathers”, I’ve seen many of Renoir’s smaller preliminary pictures and the two full-scale drawings for this magnum opus which Renoir produced over three years, but nothing prepared me for the mesmerizing brilliance of the final piece. I was dazzled by the painting’s almost translucent lighting and its left-side/right-side dichotomy (classical tradition vs impressionism). Its cognates in the works, inter alia, of Ingres, Rubens and Boucher are on splendid display. As for Frédéric’s “The Four Seasons”, all four paintings have a similar diaphanous luminescence. The colour scheme and unnerving discombobulation of the human form and its morphing with the background flora are stylistically reminiscent of fellow symbolist Jacek Malczewski.
As a unapologetically passionate admirer of Casper David Friedrich, I bought tickets for Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie CDF exhibition “Infinite Landscapes” (marking the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth) the moment they went on sale. My appetite was thoroughly whetted by the opening sentence of an online AN article: “When we think of the wanderer as a painterly motif, the famous painting "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich comes to mind. This exceptional loan from the Hamburger Kunsthalle forms the starting point for a special exhibition held at the Alte Nationalgalerie.” This particular painting just happens to be in my top ten masterpieces of world art and re-acquainting myself with it after many years would have been a major highlight. Imagine, therefore, my shock and dismay when my wife and I arrived at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin only to be told that the painting was on display in a complementary CDF exhibition in distant Hamburg!
To allay my disappointment, I took in the stunning 360° Panorama of the Greek city of Pergamon (in present-day Turkey) as it looked back in 129 AD. There’s a fascinating accompanying exhibition of facsimile statues and stone friezes from the city, along with extensive information boards about the history of Pergamon and its modern-day excavation by the Germans. Unfortunately, the Pergamon Museum itself is undergoing a 13-year renovation, so anyone hoping to see the monumental Ishtar Gate or Pergamon Altar will have to wait until 2037!
In London, I caught the Vincent van Gogh exhibition “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers”. The absence of MOMA’s “Starry Night” was more than jarring, bearing in mind that the exhibition focused on the period of van Gogh’s stay in Arles and the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy. Quite frankly, the MOMA painting should have served as the fulcrum around which the exhibition unfolded. As with the CDF exhibition in Berlin we left the National Gallery feeling rather short-changed.
Tate Modern’s “Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider” was, in equal part, magnificent and disappointing. This oxymoronic duality has nothing to do with the shortcomings of the first-rate exhibition per se and more to do with the fact that the twin German expressionist movements (Die Brücke in Dresden and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich) active between 1905 and 1914 and clearly sharing a mutually symbiotic relationship in their nascent years, are now hermetically sealed in their own expository worlds. Look in vain at the Tate for German expressionist luminaries like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel or Fritz Bleyl. Again, this is not the fault of the exhibition; however, the Tate’s eschewal of any reference whatsoever to these three pioneers of the movement borders on the heretical.
Regarding the new art books that grace my bookcases, apart from assorted art analysis tomes, Taschen’s Basic Art series constitute the bulk. I now possess 42 of them, with two more (Kazimir Malevich and Diego Rivera) wending their way to my doorstep. I also have several recently-acquired Polish translations of the large format “in detail” series” including Bosch, Durer, Raphael, Malczewski, van Eyck, Caravaggio and Vermeer. These books revel in the intimate painterly minutiae of selected art works with the close-up fetishism of a BBC nature documentary! One of the best Christmas gifts I received this year was the catalogue accompanying the Guggenheim’s groundbreaking exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s talismanic paintings. This underappreciated Swedish artist produced the first fully non-representational painting five years before Vassily Kandinsky, heralded by the art establishment as the pioneer of abstract art. Hopefully, art history textbooks will correct this ubiquitous oversight in the very near future.
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