Soutine Landscape

Landscape at Cagnes, ca.1923
Chaim Soutine (Lithuanian, 1883-1943)
Oil on canvas
23 13/16 x 28 3/4 in.
Art Institute of Chicago 1947.114
Image: artic.edu

It is becoming more common for me to discover the glorious landscapes of painters who I've known for very different subject matter. A similar find is the landscapes of Egon Schiele. I am more familiar with his work in general. Chaim Soutine is an artist I've always known but have only ever been able to associate with raw meat, sounds glorious doesn't it? I first encountered Soutine at my home art gallery, the Albright Knox, and passed by Soutine's Side of Beef, c.1925 (image: Britannica) on every trip to the museum. The artist's name never locked into my head until my graduate school (though I am sure I saw some more of his "food" paintings over the years. I have a love for expressionism and while I was not particularly fond of the subject matter (never have been of food in painting, despite my love for the real thing) I did start to find Soutine's style of painting attractive and interesting. A quick browse through a catalog of his work recently prompted me to take up some more research into his work and I discovered his glorious landscapes. Rich and twisted and dramatic with their skewed perspective and rich application of painting, I would love to live in any of the towns and cities he depicts.

His portraits are wonderful too, you will see a very strong affinity with those of Amedeo Modigliani (a friend).

The sculptured pot

Cortez, 1995
Peter Voulkos (1924-2002)
Image: http://www.voulkos.com/frameportfolio.html

Peter Voulkos' work came into my head the other day, one of his plates is a part of the new exhibition at the TMA. It is a gorgeous plate and if I could have found an image of it, you would probably be looking at it right now. In my search of another work to share, one of Voulkos' stacks caught my eye instead.

My first encounter with a Voulkos work was at Alfred when I was lucky enough to see Voulkos spontaneously make a stack from the ground up. He was visiting Alfred (no surprise, due to its prominence in the education of ceramics) and was doing a workshop demonstration (which he did all over the country). Watching Peter Voulkos work was incredible (note, he was in his mid 70s when I saw him) His works are improvisations, done in front of an audience. The rough hewn nature of the finished work doesn't exactly imply a gracefulness to its creation but for one privileged to see a work come together the strength, detail, attention and grace that Voulkos put forth was an experience.

I know that a sculpture like this is not amenable to all aesthetic tastes but I do think that with just a little care one can begin to see the beauty, craft and artistry in Cortez and Voulkos' extensive other work. His works are not only sculptural but painterly, their abstraction blurring boundaries between mediums. Watching Voulkos work is similar to seeing video of the action/gestural painters of the 1950s. Voulkos started out as a traditional potter and was soon influenced by the painters he met in New York. He eventually dropped any semblance to a traditional pot form, using both wheel thrown and slab elements to create spontaneous works. He ultimately returned to traditional forms but never to functional forms. While using familiar forms such as vases and plates Voulkos renders them nonfunctional through rough gesture.

Villa

Villa am Strande, 4 (Villa on the Shore, 4), 1920
Lyonel Feininger
Woodcut, 26.6 x 34.2 (32.2 x 38.6)
From Online Image Collection, German Expressionist Prints, 1904-1928 (The Goldman Collection)

I love the strong lines and dramatic angles.

Sorry, I didn't get a chance to write much more, I was preoccupied looking at what art to see when I am in the city this weekend!

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

Blue

The Large Blue Horses, 1911
Franz Marc
oil on canvas
41-5/8 x 71-5/16 in.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) expressionist group. The group formed around Kandinsky and Marc, who both considered blue the color of spirituality.(Stokstad, 1069). The artists of the group were joined by their common goals with manifested themselves in loosely connected visuality. Yet a significant similarity in their work focused on the intensity of color. Marc painted animals rather than people because he believed they had a stronger spiritual relationship with nature. His animals, like the horses in this painting flow and merge with their natural surroundings.