Archive for March, 2010

It’s bang-on trend to give back these days, and it seems the squeeze of the suffering economy has yet to stem society’s push to put money, time and effort into good causes. President Obama just announced that he’s spreading the $1.4 million that came with his Nobel Peace Prize among ten charities he’s chosen. It’s inspirational stuff, though some cynics may say it’s nothing new for a star (whether from Capitol Hill or the Hollywood Hills) to pin their colors to a charity mast. True enough – doing good deeds can be beneficial for someone in the public eye – but Obama has zoned into the zeitgeist by giving back in an innovative way.

Because there’s a rumbling revolution in the ways we’re giving these days. For example, it’s now fast and feasible to donate money via text message (tens of millions of dollars were collected for Haiti in this way). Facebook can also be used to poke and persuade friends and friends-of-friends to pool funds and forces.

In the UK, the charity Ctrl.Alt.Shift is overturning the white, middle-class, middle-age stereotype of altruism and reaching out to a totally different crowd. Launched two years ago, this hip and secular arm of Christian Aid is looking to enroll 18 to 25 year-olds. In order to rev up and recruit young supporters, Ctrl.Alt.Shift does cool fashion, music and speaking events. Their massive club nights are hosted around the country, with all profits going to charity. The idea is to capture an audience on their own turf and teach them how better to get involved.

The Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus (1410 – 1475/6) paints a picture of fifteenth century donors. His Portraits of a Male and Female Donor (c. 1455) show the couple who have commissioned the picture, featuring them as the people paying, praying and giving back.

Christus was a leading artist in Bruges in the generation after Jan van Eyck (who we’ll be looking at tomorrow). Some of his best works were his portraits, and it’s easy to see why from the rounded forms and individualised features of this pair. These two portraits most likely made up the side wings of a hinged three-paneled painting, called a triptych. The wings would have opened like doors to reveal that they were praying to an image of the Virgin and Child in the center.

The first thing we see is how Christus observed and recorded detail meticulously. The woman’s costume is that of a wealthy lady from the Low Countries, complete with diaphanous veil wafting off her hat. In the man’s picture, clock the wooden clogs tumbled across the floor. Christus paints both room settings with delight and intrigue in the minutiae of daily human life. See for example the small woodcut stuck to her wall with dabs of red sealing wax: it shows Saint Elizabeth, who may have been her namesake. As Michelangelo noted, “In Flanders they paint, before all things, to render exactly and deceptively the outward appearance of things.”

Christus is credited with being the first northern European artist to use geometrically accurate perspective in a painting. Flemish artists used perspective to increase sense of space in all directions, rather than to unify the scene. Since these two are shown inside a domestic setting, we can assume that the panels were probably made for personal devotion in their home. So what we have here is the more private, inconspicuous kind of donating. And of all the ways of giving back, that’s got to be the purest and the best.

Art and fashion have long been friendly bedfellows, stitched together by steadfast threads of two-sided aesthetic admiration and lots of creative collaboration. In the Renaissance, artists painted the form, fit and fabulousness of their subjects’ clothing with care, since a well-depicted dress could make a picture pop. Fashion also allowed an artist to showcase his skills: someone like Titian really reveled in rendering textures and accessories, spinning furs, velvets, brocades and pearls as if by magic from the tip of his brush.

More recently, fashion tapped the fat vein of art when Art Nouveau spread across Europe in the late 1800s. It wasn’t long before the movement fertilized fashion and sprouted stacks of sinuous, decorative jewelry. From 1910 Cubist art caught the eye of Coco Chanel, who responded by making more cylindrical shapes and cuts in her clothes. In the 1930s, Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli put the Surrealist Salvador Dali’s iconic lobster on a silk dress she designed while the printed paper dresses popular in the 60s, were inspired by Warhol’s take on rash consumerism.

The enmeshed art-fashion weave shows no signs of unraveling. A year or so ago catwalks and sidewalks were awash with “paint splatter” effect clothes. Last year London’s Victoria & Albert Museum staged a retrospective on the mega milliner, Stephen Jones. But it was 2008 that produced one of the most hip and hyped art-fashion hybrids of recent years, when the French fashion house Hermès looked to the German artist Josef Albers. As soon as Hermès brought out their series of six limited-edition silk scarves based on paintings Albers had done in the mid 60s, tempers frayed as artistas and fashionistas fought tooth and nail to get their hands on one.

Albers (1888 – 1976) studied art in Berlin, Essen and Munich from 1913 – 1920, after which he enrolled at Bauhaus, the pioneering modern design school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919. Bauhaus promoted functional design and collaborative cross-over between architecture, fine art and applied art. Albers was the first graduate to join the staff. In the early 30s he moved to New York and it was in 1949 he started the iconic Homage to the Square series that would preoccupy him until his death (and also inspire those hard-to-come-by scarves).

The NGA’s Homage to the Square: At Sea B (1964) shows the format that Albers followed in these paintings. Flat, colored squares are arranged concentrically on the canvas: lines are precise and it’s all most measured. For one thing, these works are about spatial dynamics: there’s a quivering sense of space (recession or protrusion?) and it’s a bizarre optical experience, as the eye tries gauge what’s going on. The nested squares are also about an intent investigation into color interaction. At Sea B looks at yellows, from acid to yolk. But whether he’s taking shades of the same color, clashing complementaries or introducing black and white, Albers is addicted to the retinal effects of color combinations. He even put the results of his research in his 1963 volume, The Interaction of Color.

Albers’s Squares stick to a regime that’s carefully removed from any reference to nature. His clean forms, made up of consecutive right angles, find no reflection in the natural world, representing a rare and pure aesthetic exercise. Perhaps that’s why the Squares have become one of the most recognizable examples of abstract art in the 20th century, and why Hermès felt fine sticking a true art-piece price point of $2,800 on their scarves. Thank goodness the real thing is available free of charge every single day at the NGA.

Today is International World Water Day. It was in 1992 that a day dedicated to freshwater issues was recommended at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The United Nations General Assembly responded by designating 22 March 1993 the first World Water Day. It’s an event created to focus attention on the importance of freshwater and the sustainable management of its resources. Each year, World Water Day highlights a topical theme. Last year it was “Shared Water – Shared Opportunities”, which talked about trans-boundary waters and the fact that countries can create co-operation, trust and respect (as well as economic growth) by managing mutual waters together. Other years have spot-lighted sanitation, scarcity and the ways water plays into culture. This year’s World Water Day foregrounds water quality.

Today, the American painter and printmaker Pat Steir (born 1940) helps to plummet us headlong into the drumming theme of water. Born in Newark, New Jersey and now based in New York City, Steir wanted to become an artist from an early age. She studied graphic art in New York and painting and comparative literature at Boston University before working as a book cover designer and an art director in publishing during the 1960s. Steir persisted with her painting and printmaking throughout this time and started exhibiting in solo shows in the 1970s. She is now at the forefront of American painting.

For me, Steir’s Curtain Waterfall (1991) hanging in the East Building at the NGA sees her at her breath-taking best. She became preoccupied with this subject and its execution in the late 80s, and I have to say I can easily imagine having this subject soak you up. What Steir produces is a monumental (352 x 296 cm), lyrical and dramatic explosion off the wall.

How does she do it is the obvious question. Steir’s dripping paint makes me think of Pollock, who pioneered this sort of approach in the 1940s. But it’s clear that Steir works in a different way, that she’s come up with her own style that stands alone. Here she causes cascades of light-colored paint to run rivulets down a darkened canvas. She’s set it up vertically, loaded her brush and dragged it across the top in a swathe. She lets the liquid drips run freely and easily down, where they’re met near the base by back and forth flicks and splatters, that clatter across from left to right. With the colors kept simple, we get to concentrate on the pull and pitter-patter of the paint on this sensual, highly-articulated surface. I like the way Steir harnesses gravity and chance effects to evoke natural phenomena.

The waterfall of the painting’s title appears at close range, a dense, impassable wall of liquid, looming in darkness. Are we outside looking in or inside looking out? This reversal effect is fluid and fabulous. And moving beyond the label and look of this waterfall, Steir invests the work with conceptual richness. Here it’s as if she’s seeking to reconcile a series of dichotomies: complexity and simplicity, dynamism and sensitivity, discipline and chaos.

World Water Day raises awareness about sustaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being through addressing the increasing water quality challenges in water management. It encourages governments, organizations, communities and individuals around the world to engage in addressing the issues of water. Steir’s painted waterfall certainly sets the power and privilege of water center-stage. This is a thunderous message with tidal momentum.

As the weather warms and our coats come off, the mind meanders to life outside. Whether you’ve acres of land and big green lawns or something smaller like a patio, a balcony, or even just a couple of window boxes, gardening takes on a new joy in the spring.

But before we can scatter seeds with abandon, with visions of plums or petunias dancing in our heads, any gardener must tackle the prickly problem of weeds. To believe that gardening is only about pretty plants and flowers is far off the mark: it’s actually more about pulling, spraying, chopping and cursing weeds. To keep weeds at bay requires planning and cunning. First you must get into the mind of the weed, to asses its character (annual or perennial, taproot or fibrous, warm-season or cool, how quick to set seed). Any invaders should be attacked with attitude, hacked with hoes, uprooted and booted off the plot. With vim and vigilance, it’s possible you’ll prevail.

There’s a knot of weeds in the NGA, but I don’t think anyone’s doing anything about it. Probably because it’s by John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), one of the most celebrated and financially successful artists of his era. An American living in Europe, Sargent was the sought-after society portraitist on both sides of the Atlantic. He received training in Italy and then Paris, where he started exhibiting at the Salon in 1877. He moved to London a few years later, when his erotic portrayal of Madame X in a picture submitted to the Salon in 1884 caused a scandal in Parisian society.

Though Sargent’s portrait work would go on to influence an entire generation of American painters, he was aware of the limitations of the genre and kept up his interests in other subjects. Around 1906 he actually abandoned portraiture entirely, to focus on landscapes and murals in watercolor. The NGA’s unruly thicket, Valdemosa, Majorca: Thistles and Herbage on a Hillside (1908) dates from the time that Sargent had stopped painting people and shows the ease with which he carried his virtuosity and painterly techniques over. What a wonderful jumble of a picture it is! The close-up, cropped shot looks so modern and makes me think of the times my digital camera has clicked a picture without me knowing, and captured an image of the ground.

Sargent snares the essence of the undergrowth in color and texture. His brushwork unravels the thorns, small leaves, gnarly roots, boughs, and brushy blades of sun-bleached grass. The colors are a serious study in varieties of green, brown, beige and white. This work has the clever effect of pulling you in, making you focus. I can imagine being young again, hunkered down to the ground, peering for insects or the sight of something interesting.

Though there’s no seeming structure to the composition, the tangle of lines has rhythm and verve. The crooked bough roughly in the center leading to the open bleached patch down below does something to anchor the image. But this isn’t about order or organizing or framing. I can only imagine that after years of perfecting glistening society portraits it was a revitalizing relief for Sargent to get down and dirty with all the chaos and spirited beauty of nature. Which brings us back to those terrible weeds, and in fact I’m now thinking it might be alright to relax. On closer inspection, many of them are actually quite fascinating and attractive. So who knows, for the green-fingered among us, the odd spot of herbaceous riot-running might even provide some interest and inspiration.

The spring equinox takes place today in the northern hemisphere. The word equinox comes from the Latin for “equal night” and refers to the fact that, twice a year, the sun shines directly on the equator, making the length of day and night equal in all parts of the world. For northerners, vernal and autumnal equinoxes fall around March 20/21 and September 22/23 respectively and always occur at a specific time (today’s is at 13:32 in Washington).

People have recognized the spring equinox for thousands of years (long before the astronomical intricacies were understood, I imagine). Early peoples celebrated for the basic reason that their food supplies would soon be restored. The date is significant in Christianity because Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. It is also probably no coincidence that early Egyptians built the Great Sphinx so that it points directly toward the rising sun on the day of the spring equinox.

So today marks the official shift of the seasons. People south of the equator will gear up for fall, while anyone who lives north of it can start to expect warmer weather and a lot more light. Who better to celebrate the lightening of our lives than the American artist Dan Flavin? After starting his career as an abstract painter, Flavin (1933 – 1996) moved on to make more object-based wall pieces. In the early 60s he began attaching light bulbs and tubes to monochromatic hardboard boxes. It was in 1963 that he had his seminal idea of taking a solitary fluorescent tube and attaching it diagonally to a studio wall: from that moment on, fluorescent light became Flavin’s exclusive artistic medium.

The NGA’s “monument” for V. Tatlin (1968) shows what an elegant solution Flavin found for the artistic problems of his time. On one hand, it syncs with Minimalism’s taste for simple form: the object is mass-produced, industrial, fitted to a wall, with an undisguised power supply. On the other, it deviates from Minimalism’s deliberate lack of expressive content in that pulsating light is highly atmospheric. It also calls attention to the gallery’s space and role by filling it with light.

Flavin admired the revolutionary ideas and plastic innovations of Russian Constructivism, an art movement that originated in Russia around 1914. It proposed and pioneered abstraction and the use of industrial materials such as glass and standardized metal parts and was intended to meet social needs. The name and approximate shape of the NGA’s work (indeed of an extensive series of Flavin’s works, some of which are shown below), derives from an icon of the Constructivist oeuvre: Vladimir Tatlin’s model for a proposed Monument to the Third International (1919 – 21). Though never built, the model toured the country as a symbol of Soviet aspiration. The vast structure would have been twice the height of the Empire State Building and would have housed the headquarters of international communism, the Comintern.

Looking at this light sculpture in a gallery is an interesting experience. It’s a small intervention that totally transforms the space it’s in. As the light diffuses, it’s clear that the boundaries of the work are not the object itself, but rather the architecture it’s contained in. It’s such a subtle way to make us pay attention to the context of the art. With his light tubes, Flavin can manipulate a building, making wall seams dissolve, ceilings disappear and rooms appear larger or smaller. He said: “One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is … as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.”

Ancient lovers believed a kiss would literally unite their souls, since the spirit was said to be carried in the breath.

Now we might not believe that anymore but we’re no less enamored with the kiss these days. You just need to see the reams of movie kissing sequences on YouTube to get a taste of our obsession with a good smooch. So in the name of research I’m going to Georgetown today to talk about the highs and lows of a proper snog.

Special thanks to all of my interviewees and Café La Ruche in Georgetown.

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A week or so ago the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was left reeling following accusations he’s a bully who likes to ‘lose it’ with his colleagues. Downing Street hit back, saying he’s a serious man under serious pressure.

The spatting got people chatting: is it ever OK to lose your temper in the office? Some say any anger in a workplace is bad, culling the confidence and creativity required among co-workers. Others believe the odd rant or kick of a Coke can is vapid venting. Uncouth as it may be, it’s not the sustained, personal aggression associated with bullying. Brown’s in a top, tough, tense job: he’s got to save the economy, manage two wars and deal with an impending election. His was never going to be a stress-free environment, and I can only imagine that the people who signed up to work with him knew well what they were getting into.

Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883) was a man tested by a tough environment, and might have  lashed out as a result. Manet was anxious about the kind of artist he wanted to be. He had a traditional training under an academic painter, and made careful study of Old Masters in the Louvre. The trouble was, he was just as taken by the innovations of Japanese prints and his friend Charles Baudelaire’s urgings to paint modern life.

Manet aimed for a modern approach, but still believed real success could only come at the Salon. In 1864 things came to a head, when his Incident in a Bullfight was ripped apart by harsh and horrid criticism. That’s when Manet ‘lost it’ and slashed the painting clean in two! Out of that violent act came two smaller works: The Bullfight (now in The Frick Collection, New York) appeared in the upper right of the original composition and the NGA’s Dead Toreador (1864) made up the lower left.

As unusual as this may seem, the critic and novelist Emile Zola (also a friend of the artist), described Manet’s unfettered approach: “… in beginning a picture he could never say how that picture would come out.” It seems Manet was happy to scrape away, re-paint, re-work, re-group and what happened was that this fallen matador evolved into an incredible icon of violent, visceral death. Manet changed the background, taking green to paint out the earlier sand, gate and bull. Out of the dusk the dead man looms large, lying on a dynamic diagonal line. The figure is dramatically foreshortened, shown at an angle to the picture plane by means of perspective to create the impression he’s jutting out. Manet’s choice of a Spanish subject can be traced to his love of the 17th-century painter Vélazquez, as can his lush tonal contrasts. See how he sets bright whites by pitch blacks, stark and stunning juxtapositions that escalate the drama.

Throughout his career Manet longed for official recognition, but ultimately stuck to his more modern impulses, saying “one must be of one’s time and paint what one sees.” Even though he was often mocked in official circles, his moves towards modernism made him a figurehead for future painters. So what if he lost it, now and again? Can we really blame him, given his testing circumstances? I suppose it’s OK for a painter or politician to ‘lose it’ (if things get heated and they’re shown a red rag), just as long as the tantrums and tirades don’t get turned on innocent bystanders. On the other hand, if you’re a matador, I’d say it’s never advisable to lose it, because then, as we see here, your goose is truly cooked.