Peggy Guggenheim

Franz von Lenbach
Peggy Guggenheim, ca. 1903
Oil on board, 128.9 x 92.7 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
Purchase 98.5247

I came across this painting at the back of an art journal, listing acquisitions by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. I loved the expression on the girl's face and then once I realized it was a portrait of Peggy Guggenheim herself, I was quite interested particularly due to the style of the painting since it doesn't mesh well with my thoughts of the 20th century in which the majority of Guggenheim's life spans.

Peggy Guggenheim is a legend in the art world. She amassed one of the foremost collections of Modern art and gave Jackson Pollock his first show and support when she ran The Art of this Century Gallery in NYC. She later moved to Venice where she opened her collection to the public, Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

The painter, Franz von Lenbach, is a new one to me. Born in Schrobenhausen, Bavaria, he eventually settled in Munich and became internationally successful painting portraits like this one of society personalities. In 1900 he won the Grand Prix for painting in Paris. Lenbach's painting is world away from the Modern art that Guggenheim so loved and promoted.

Gorky

Arshile Gorky (Armenian/American 1904-1948)
The Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1944
Oil on canvas
73 1/4 x 98 in. (186 x 249 cm)
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
image: artnet.com

Upon Gorky's arrival in the United States he lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, my old stomping ground. Watertown has one of the largest populations of Armenians outside of Armenia.

"Arshile" is Russian for Achilles, and "Gorky" translates into "the bitter one."

Part of the Public Works of Art Project in 1933, to give artists jobs during the Depression. This work is seen as crossing between surrealism and abstract expressionism.

The controversy of Mary

The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996
Chris Ofili (British, b.1968)

In celebration of Banned Books Week, I am going to focus on banned or controversial artists. Oh how we wish these recognition weeks weren't necessary but continued controversy over books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland and Tango Makes Three still persist. I'll always remember the controversy set by the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1999. Then mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, denounced the show without even seeing it and one of the most talked about works (despite some much more difficult and actually disturbing work in the show) was Chris Ofili's, The Holy Virgin Mary. The work was actually defaced with white paint by a man in the gallery.


"Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary" by Jerry Saltz (artnet magazine 10-8-99)

Penelope

Penelope Unraveling her Work at Night, 1886
Dora Wheeler (American, 1856–1940) for Associated Artists (New York City, 1883–1907)
Silk embroidered with silk thread
45 x 68 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Daughter of Candace Wheeler, who founded, among many other accomplishments, Associated Artists, a women-run decorating/design firm. Candace Wheeler also patented the technique of embroidery seen in this work. Dora created this design and others, but this is one of the few which has not completely disintegrated.

Dora studied with the painter, William Merritt Chase (painter of the portrait of Dora Wheeler to the right). You can see the brilliance of Wheeler's experience with painting as she applies it to the painterliness of the silk embroidery.


Dora Wheeler, 1882-83
William Merritt Chase
Cleveland Museum of Art

Summer Street

Summer Street, 1956
Grace Hartigan
oil on canvas
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Image from The New Yorker slideshow

A significant artist of the 20th century died this past November. She was part of a group of prominent women abstractionists in New York, though often pushed aside for members of the boy's club of the time, such as Pollock and de Kooning. Hartigan works, while for awhile wholly abstract began to incorporate representational imagery which threw her at one time supporter, Clement Greenberg, off her support. I need to spend some more time with Hartigan's work but I am very attracted to her use of shape and color and am interested in the representational imagery (reminiscent of Kandinksy but with more all over approach to filling the canvas). Richard Lacayo (who wrote a blog entry for time about Hartigan after her death) comments that he feels this painting is "crossing a line into kitsch" (pointing out the green striped melon). While I agree the melon stands out and doesn't add anything to the painting (it stands out as wholly identifiable unlike the more ambiguous nature of the rest of the painting) I would go so far as to applying kitsch to it. The comment is fascinating in that it falls straight into the argument Greenberg and many others had about the high level of purely abstract art. Work which provides instantly understandable and approachable subject matter and aims to please would fall into kitsch. I think that this greatly detracts from Hartigan's approach to paint and color.

I may come back with another Hartigan as comparison between her works will give me a greater understanding of her style but until then I'll say that I am particularly attracted to the lower half of the painting and will be seeing one of her works soon when I visit Buffalo as it is part of the exhibition I've been looking forward to that started out at the Jewish Museum in nyc, Action/Abstraction . Check the site out as it has a great collection of work from the period.

Also a great addition to the world of resources, the Smithsonian's online collection of oral histories, many which are transcribed.
Oral History

Depth of Image

Collage, 1929
Joan Miro Spanish (1893-1983)
Conté crayon, gouache, ink, flocked paper, newspaper, abrasive cloth, and various papers on flocked paper, 28 5/8 x 42 3/4"
Museum of Modern Art

I am simply blown away by the online exhibition
of a current MoMA exhibition , Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting. First alerted to the show by a beautiful catalog received at work I meant to find a Miro for my blog. I promptly forgot as I am wont to do with the amount of art I see on a daily basis, but a search for a Magritte painting (which will surely come along after not too long) brought me to Miro and here we are (you just love to hear my pathways to selection don't you? :). Miro has been a favorite of mine since I was a child. His colorful, abstract and surrealistic paintings were always a draw for me, one of my favorite museums on my European tour in college was the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona. As I got older I wasn't as sure, but some time spent with my broader art knowledge as well as exposure to a greater selection of Miro's oeuvre (drawings, collages etc.) my love for, appreciation and understanding of Miro grew.

I intended on sharing one of the colorful, rich paintings, but a perusal of the online exhibition encouraged me to share a work that showcases what museums are doing with images online and in turn focus more on the "Anti-Painting" part of the exhibition. Collages are wonderfully dimensional, something that is often difficult to get any grasp of unless you see it in person. The large images and zoom function are fantastic. You can see the ragged edges and wrinkles of the paper. The online exhibition also incorporates works that are not a part of the physical exhibition (a great way to complete a theme, discussion etc. as it is often the case that desired works could not be used for the show for various reasons, this particular work is not in the exhibition).

Another fantastic aspect of the online exhibition is the ability to present a group of works in more than one grouping. MoMA has presented the works as series (by both medium and subject), a chronology, an index, and most interesting of all by size. You can easily scroll through these rows, click on a work of interest, increase its size and read it's "wall label".

I've went on for a bit, haven't said anything about the collage! Check out the online exhibition and have fun! (It definitely works better in the full screen version).

Realistic Time

"Time", 2006
Max Ferguson (b. 1959)
36" x 36" oil on panel

Ferguson produces paintings of a vanishing New York. I discovered Ferguson in a pile of exhibition catalogs that we were selling at our annual book sale. The paintings are impeccable, many are sometimes indistinguishable from photographs. The paintings focus on a New York that Ferguson sees slowly dissipating. They are are monuments to time and place. Uber-realistic they not only capture the technical details of what they sees but are also imbued with emotion and care.