Off the Wall with Color

Julie and I postponed our trip to Storm King because of the rainy weather, so we stayed in Connecticut to visit The Bruce and Aldridge museums.

Hans Hoffman, Mosaic Mural, 1956

Hans Hoffman, Awakening, 1947

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bruce features a voluptuous exhibit on Hans Hoffman right now, where you can scoop the paint and eat it right off the canvas.

Gabriel Schachinger, Sweet Reflections, 1886

Oh, that might be Gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins not being shown at the Bruce (seven regional museums are tackling the sins).

There, it’s Pride.  In a tightly curated show of prints and paintings from the last 500 years, Pride is dissected in ways you may not have thought about before–not just pride in the body, but pride in landscape, drawing in the hubris of ‘man over nature’.  And the vanitas of pride about possessions–you can’t take it with you.

How is the story of Adam and Eve about pride?  The Bruce attempts to make sense of that.

 

The Aldridge features several contemporary artists making site-specific installations, including the works that inspired their own creations.

My favorite came from B. Wurtz.

The quotidian.  Three walls of aluminum cooking pans that he has painted.  Turn a pan over, and you may notice the stamped-in pattern on the bottom.  B. Wurtz has painted the pattern in acrylic, then arranged the pans on the wall.  You can get a sense from the above.  I was mesmerized.

Like Hoffman, we have color leaping off the wall…with very pleasing patterns, replicated without repeating, along the huge open space of the gallery.  Love it!

Turkish artist Elif Uras now lives and works in New York.  She brings traditional Turkish pottery-making methods to contemporary subjects in funny ways.  We have the reference to ancient Greek red-and-black pottery with the style and its figures.  But instead of fighting the Trojan war, they are vacuuming or talking on the phone.

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Gorgeous technique, with in-this-moment social commentary.  Just like those Greeks, the ancient enemy of the Turks.  And she celebrates women–women’s labor, women’s form, and women’s artistry.  A must see.

In the salute to Off the Wall is Virginia Poundstone.  Flowers are clearly one of the most popular art subjects ever.  But you’re not likely to see a mammoth flower coming off the way quite so literally as it does in its two-story incarnation at the Aldridge right now.

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Color coming off the wall?  Not bad for a drab day!

 

 

 

Politics and painting, and so much more

George Caleb Bingham, Jolly Flatboatmen, 1846

George Caleb Bingham, a mid-19th-century, self-taught American artist, was also a state senator from the new state of Missouri.  His wonderful “Jolly Flatboatman” can be read as a political document.  Bingham advocated for Congressional funding to develop the Mississippi River.  See, the river was wild, and in order to access all those western resources, the river needed to be ‘improved’.  Man over Nature, and all that.

So here we see a placid, wide Mississippi River and a boat sailing easily into a future full of riches in them thar hills.  These men don’t have to work hard, as if the West wasn’t quite as dangerous as Eastern investors feared.  Everyone could dance for joy.  That is, if the river was cleared and re-routed as needed.

Landscape, Rural Scenery, 1845

What the current show at the Met also shows is the development of an artist.  His early awkward scenes, like this one, show his lack of training.  Here, we see its monstrous Hudson-River-School-inspired plants and trees dominating the scene all out of proportion and the blatant use of red to draw our eye to…a piece of laundry.  Hmmm.

But in that same year of 1845, Bingham begins his remarkable series of Mississippi and Missouri River scenes and becomes an art star in the Art Union, putting reproduction prints in the hands of the middle class everywhere.

The exhibit also demonstrates his method, which starts with intricate drawings until he gets the face and pose just right.  Then he lines up the drawing and his canvas to accomplish his planned composition and basically retraces his drawing until it transfers to the canvas.  At least, that’s the sense I could make of the description on the wall label.

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He also could make a drawing on one side of a thin page (as above), put it by a window, and in its light, trace the reverse, to voila, reuse the pose in another work.

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Storyteller, study, possibly 1849

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Wood boatman, 1850

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Skillet-beater, 1857

 

I was mesmerized by the beauty of these drawings, so much more subtle and sophisticated than his paintings full of types.  The curators explain this, too.  The Bingham brand sold better, especially in the eastern U.S. and Europe, with these rougher types.

He reused favorite characters and compositions again and again.  Like Gilbert Stuart and his portrait of George Washington, these were Bingham’s dollar bills.

My favorite painting in the show is just such a recycled character, “Mississippi Boatman” from 1850.  Note the much better use of attention-grabbing red, now drawing our eye to this riverman’s grizzled features.  I’d love to break bread with this man, since he clearly has seen a thing or two.

Taxpayer dollars rescued (as in purchased) the discovered drawings, now lent to this exhibit by “The People of Missouri.”  Bingham, who served these same people, would surely approve.

Cooing and Wooing

The Mark Morris Dance Group celebrated a cool spring night with breezy frolic in Acis and Galatea.  To Handel’s music with the opera singers on stage and completely involved, the performance feels anything but staged-dance-y.  The movement has a naturalism that made me want to run on stage and join them in their silly and playful movements (what fun when that happens!).  Like on a playground at times and at others, like sprites in the friendliest of woods.

Here’s a taste:

Is there any more joyful end to an Act I than this?  After a lot of billing and cooing and wooing, the complex lyrics repeat, “Happy we.  Happy, happy we” over and over in the most infectious way, so that I sprang into intermission singing and gesturing along.

Wouldn’t you?  Take a listen…along with some Rococo, period paintings by Watteau:

Act 2 was witty and physical, with a gorgeous hunk of a baritone playing the lascivious monster. Somehow, even he managed to be frothy. The dancers changed movement vocabulary around him, forming more of the moving sculptures you might associate with the Galatea story.

But that would be the Greek story of Pygmalion bringing his sculpture Galatea to life as a real woman. You might have even noticed a Galatea sculpture in the Watteau paintings in the “Happy We” video.

This opera is based on the Ovid Metamorphoses edition–much more tragic when the deceased Acis is turned into an immortal stream by Galatea, a reverse on the Pygmalion story, as here the woman is the creator, not the created.

 

Happy me!

Chast on aging

Chast-BWThe International Festival of Arts & Ideas has unleashed on New Haven again, and on this second day, Penny and I stood in a loooooooooooong line to get in to hear Roz Chast talk about Memoir and Cartoons.  Of course, she told the story of her aging parents through images and her award-winning graphic novel Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? 

Check this out for a taste.

There is some genius in the book, as evidenced in the Q&A that followed.  People suffering through the passing of their parents commented on how much the book helped them, more than anything else they had found.  Chast does pull apart all the complexities of thoughts and feelings at this fragile time through the simplicity of line drawing.  It is brilliant, funny, sad, uplifting, wistful, and true, true, true.

I especially loved hearing how she got started as a New Yorker cartoonist in 1978 and laughing along with the throngs at her truthful twists on tropes.

Like this one:

 

and…

plus:

and her commentary on values:

For all her success, Chast comes across as nice, self-aware, and self-deprecating.

Asked if her parents understood and appreciated the humor in her cartoons, she said they were so proud of her.  Very Jewish-y parents.

 

Separately she told the story of how her father interpreted this New Yorker cover she did.

She was showing the evolution of ice cream.  He thought is was about a doctor telling people all the bad things they shouldn’t eat.  Very Jewish-y parents.

 

 

 

 

I leave you with this bit of wisdom from Chast:

Seize the day!

 

Marvelous Sightings

Marvelous sightings everywhere in New York City.  Last night, this window caught my eye.

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Ralph Lee and Casey Compton were obviously advertising their puppets, masks, and costumes, with this hand-lettered, notebook paper sign.

But what came to me for me was Cezanne and any of his card players paintings.

Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, 1890–92, Barnes Foundation

Don’t you think?

Today was bright and lovely for the marvelous Duck Day in Naugatuck.  Money is raised for local charities when people buy a rubber duck for $5.  The  thousands of ducks are then dumped into the Naugatuck River to race.  Forget the Belmont Stakes.  The real champions are yellow and squat.

The tension definitely was mounting as the ducks approached the starting gate.

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And watch and listen for the countdown and launch!

And they’re off…

Except for mine perhaps, probably ending up like so many, mired in the banks.

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Look at ’em go!

Theresa Bernstein

A new essay from the “Finding Her Way” series in Art Times Journal has now been published.  Feel free to spread the word!

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Theresa F. Bernstein, In the Elevated, 1916 Oil on canvas,
30 x 40 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase,                 American Art Trust Fund, 2011.2                                                                                   
ART TIMES JOURNAL Summer 2015