Strange Art

 

[It seems I’ve been focusing on visual art on Rick On Theater over the past few weeks.  I started July off with a tribute to Sam Gilliam (posted on 2 July) and two weeks ago, I launched two-part profile of the pre-teen artist Andres Valencia (17 and 20 July).

[Over the years since I started the blog, I’ve raided my archive of pre-ROT reports on both theater and art.  Now I’ve reached back to the 2000s and put together a collection of vintage reports on art exhibits that focused on unusual, even peculiar art or artists.  For lack of a better descriptor, I’ve called the assemblage “Strange Art”—although, of course, strangeness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.]

DECEPTIONS AND ILLUSIONS: FIVE CENTURIES OF TROMPE L’OEIL PAINTING
National Gallery of Art, East Building
Washington, D.C.
9 & 12 January 2003 

Here’s my report on one of the art exhibits I saw while in Washington, D.C., over the year-end holidays of 2003.  On an art trip downtown, my mother and I went to the National Gallery of Art’s East Building to see two shows.  One was a Willem de Kooning (Dutch-born American, 1904-97), an exhibit on which I’m not going to comment here.  The other was unusual, but quite curious with respect to its theme.

After Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (29 September 2002-5 January 2003), which, as the title specifies, focused on the artist’s “figurative” drawings, we went upstairs to Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting (13 October 2002-2 March 2003).  Escaping Criticism (1874) by Pere Borrell del Caso (Spanish, 1835-1910), a painting of a boy climbing out of the frame of the painting, had been prominently featured in the New York Times as part of a review of this show (Holland Cotter, “Playing Tricks With Reality and Realism,” 11 October 2002). 

Actually, from my perspective (an unintended pun, as it turns out), that was the most interesting thing in the show.  It had an element of whimsy that seemed to be missing in all the other pieces (and this was a big show: 116 paintings, sculptures, books, prints, drawings, decorative arts, and one mosaic.) 

The concept behind the exhibit is that it presents examples from Roman times (several frescoes from Pompeii) through the 19th century of art intended to fool the viewers into thinking they’re looking at real objects, not paintings.  Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, was the guest curator and Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings at NGA, was coordinating curator

Some were remarkable as phenomena (not necessarily as art, you understand) because they were painted long before perspective was discovered; others used forced perspective—a favorite gimmick of the 18th century, as witness the stage settings of that era (that’s my insertion; it’s not in the exhibit—though there are some paintings that were for all intents and purposes little stage sets)—to fool the eye.  (That’s where my lame pun comes in, by the way.) 

The problem with the exhibit, for me at least, is that it’s repetitive and presents works as examples of an idea, not of good art.  The show’s divided into themes—fruit, insects, flowers, coming out of the frame (that’s where Escaping Criticism is), and so on—but the technique exemplified in each section is the same.  After a couple of themes, the idea was well established and everything became a repeat of what went before. 

Except for Escaping Criticism, none of the paintings themselves were particularly interesting, so after seeing the technique exemplified a couple dozen times, it was boring to me.  We rushed through the last several rooms of the show. 

(We were also pretty “arted out” from the de Kooning’s 65 works and the 20th-century exhibits we’d seen just before at An Artist’s Artist: Jacob Kainen’s Collection in the West Building [22 September 2002-9 February 2003; 77 prints and 2 drawings].  Unlike some culture-vultures, we go through an exhibit slowly, so it takes some time on our feet; one or two shows at a time is often all we can handle.)

[After I got home to New York, I loaded Escaping Criticism into my PC as the wallpaper for the desktop.  When properly sized, it looked as if the boy is climbing out of the monitor.  It gave me a chuckle every time I booted the computer up.  (My current wallpaper is Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, which I think is one of the most beautiful paintings ever created.)]

*  *  *  *
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ART OF THE CHILD
Phillips Collection
Washington, D.C.
21-25 August 2006 

[The art in this small exhibit isn’t really so strange—but the point of it seemed . . . well, odd.  It’s meant to examine drawings by children, looking at the issues of present and future giftedness.  “Do childhood works by artists reveal traces of their future genius?” asked Leslie Camhi in the New York Times.  “What can the drawings of gifted children teach the viewer about the relationship between art and society?”

[The exhibit catalog included reproductions of childhood work by other now-famous artists, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and the 8-year-old Joan Miró (1893-1983).  It also includes 17th-century drawings by the very young Louis, Dauphin of France (1601-43), the future King Louis XIII (reigned: 1610-43).]

On Thursday, 17 August 2006, Mother and I took a bus to the Phillips Collection near D.C.’s Dupont Circle to see Klee and America.  As an adjunct to the Paul Klee (Swiss-born German, 1879-1940) exhibit, in a gallery next door is a display called When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child (17 June-10 September 2006), one of the first museum exhibits, according to the New York Times, to look at children’s art from an aesthetic point of view. 

One of the curatorial points of Klee’s works is that he maintained a sort of childlike innocence in his pictures—not unlike Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910; see “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris” in “Short Takes: Some Art Shows,” 17 June 2018), though the source and result are quite different—and the nearby exhibit of Washington children’s artworks is an extension of this notion. 

When We Were Young juxtaposes three childhood drawings by Klee and one by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) with a work by the mature artist and with work by children from the private collections of Rudolf Arnheim and Victor Lowenfeld, the best-known writers on the subject of 20th-century American children's drawings, and Melody Klein, a well-known psychoanalyst of children.

The exhibit catalogue, edited by modern and contemporary art scholar Jonathan Fineberg, who curated the exhibition, addresses the psychological implications of the children’s art, as did a lot of the press coverage.  (The New York Times ran a heavily illustrated, two-page article on the exhibit in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday edition, “If a Little Genius Lives in the House, What's on the Fridge?” by Leslie Camhi, 18 June 2006.)

I’m not competent to comment on that, or even really to understand it, and I don’t feel comfortable commenting on the artistic content of the works on display.  [Sixteen years later, I seem to have shifted my position some when I wrote my profile of 10-year-old painter Valencia, but he was entering the professional field and selling his art for tens of thousands of dollars.  He was also appearing on television and sitting for published interviews.]

I’ll say here only that, aside from the three Klees and the Picasso, the children’s artworks shown in When We Were Young were by youngsters ranging in age from 3 to 5 and revealed various levels of skill and manual dexterity—as one might expect.  The level of perception concerning the works around them was universally astonishing.  [I felt the same way about Valencia’s work, but he was 10, which is quite different from 3-5, I think.]

The interesting thing in this exhibit, for me, is the presence of the several childhood drawings by the future greats.  One of the Klees, Woman With Parasol (1883-5), was one he did at around age five or so; the Picasso, Bullfight and Pigeons (1890), was from when he was about nine.  It astonishes me that these drawings still exist and that someone had them on hand to display!  It’s like someone knew they were going to grow up to be famous artists, so they kept these early pieces.

As I said, neither of these shows made all that much of an impression on me with respect to the art on display.  You can tell this is so because there are no paintings I wanted to come back for on a midnight shopping trip.  (I’m running out of wall space anyway.)

[This exhibit, though I saw it almost 16 years ago, came to mind recently while I was writing my profile of 10-year-old artist Andres Valencia.  I kept wondering, as I was reading and writing about the young painter, if there was any real correlation between the kind of attention he’s been drawing this summer and future success as an adult artist.  As the New York Times’ Leslie Camhi pondered, does the talent of a child artist predict future achievement?

[I also wondered if any of the baby geniuses of the past, such as Klee and Picasso spotlighted here, received the kind of excitement Valencia has been getting.  I suspect they might have if they had the kind of media—TV, Internet videos, and social media postings—that we have today, but since they didn’t, it took looking back at their youthful output after they reached the high level of acclaim as adults to see the nascent talent exhibited when they were children.]

*  *  *  *
DARK METROPOLIS: IRVING NORMAN’S SOCIAL SURREALISM
American University Museum, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
Washington, D.C.
29 November 2007 

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend of 2007 because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  (And we’ve just come out of a stagehands’ strike in New York that shut down most of Broadway since earlier this month.)

I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November, and on Saturday, my mother and I drove to the nearby American University Museum in the Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle, right near Mom’s apartment.

We went to see Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (6 November-30 December 2007; see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 26 November 2017), an exhibit of 79 paintings and drawings by the Colombian artist (b. 1932) of the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism (14 works on paper and 25 large canvases; 9 April-29 July 2006) was in the gallery below the Botero show in the AU museum, so we had a look. 

Norman (American, 1906-1989), a West Coast artist, used his art to inspire social reforms.  Born Isaac Noachowitz in Vilnius, Lithuania, the artist drew on his experience fighting fascism in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) to create highly detailed, monumental works that critique the inhumanity of war, the inequity of capitalism, and the tyranny of the elite. 

What he painted were depictions of a dystopia where capitalists essentially consume not only the products of the workers’ labor, but the workers themselves.  His canvases are like story boards for Tim Burton on acid.  George Romero with a social conscience. 

While Botero never intended to sell his Abu Ghraib works, collectors have bought—and, I assume, displayed—Norman’s dark, demented works; I don’t know how anyone could live with one of them on his walls.  (Reports are, unsurprisingly, that Norman didn’t sell well—but he did sell!)  They’re fascinating, however, and engrossing—the way a horrible auto accident is: you can’t stop looking at them, and searching for the minute details of societal disintegration in them. 

In a statement, Norman said, ”I try to go beyond illusion to tell the truth.”  Well, it’s his vision of the truth—the man had a horrific view of the world.  (“He scares people,” wrote a San Francisco critic.  That’s an understatement!) 

In his Washington Post review, Michael O’Sullivan, who encountered Norman’s work in 2001, wrote: “Life [in Norman’s art] is a nasty, brutish and short business from cradle to grave, interrupted only by bouts of unhealthy eating, joyless copulating and slavishly serving our corrupt masters.”  

On his blog, Lines and Colors, Charley Parker, an artist and illustrator (not the jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker), asserts that Norman’s art was “suppressed” by the “modernist art establishment” for a number of reasons, among them: “because it intentionally makes us uncomfortable” and “because his horrifically elegant tableaux of the landscape of suffering humanity, that expose how those with power dominate, manipulate, control and use those without, make those same powerful individuals uncomfortable and angry.”

In Meeting of the Elders (1977), bar charts hang like tapestries in a great hall where a cigar-smoking council emerges from stacks of gold coins atop human-skin rugs.  Norman’s Air Raid Shelter (1958-1977) resembles a nuclear reactor, with the people inside twisted into Guernica-like agony.  Even a topic as simple as rush hour is intensified to the point of anguish: dozens of cars become jail cells to the weary commuters of The Bridge (1946). 

Norman borrowed from religious imagery for his grand triptych, Human Condition (1980), and the towering (27' high) Crucifixion (1961-62), and from neoclassicism for his epic battle scenes, which look as though they could have taken place on the set of the movie Metropolis (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927). 

Perhaps the bleakest and most hard-hitting of Norman’s predictions is our era of cause célèbre in To Have and Have Not (Charity Gala) (1979), where futuristic models and socialites mingle and dance on a runway surrounded by the pockmarked and skeletal.  As one San Francisco critic wrote in 1970, “You may not like what he reveals.  You probably didn’t like what you read on the front page this morning.”  No newspaper story is as terrifying as Norman’s world, however.

*  *  *  *
JOHN DREYFUSS: INVENTIONS
The Sylvia Berlin Katzen Sculpture Garden, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
American University, Washington, D.C.
13 October 2009 

On Saturday, 26 September 2009, Mom and I drove over to the Katzen Arts Center at American University to have a look at John Dreyfuss: Inventions (8 September 2009-17 January 2010), an exhibit of six sculptures by this Washington artist.  (Mother had been an acquaintance of Dreyfuss’s parents and grandparents, though I didn’t know any of them; Dreyfuss [American, b. 1949] isn’t an artist I’d encountered before.) 

The outdoor exhibit in the Katzen’s sculpture garden (there’s another show of works for sale at Hemphill Fine Arts downtown) is of large-scale pieces evoking bones (one piece in front of the AU building housing the Art Center is a giant Vertebra) and “early tool shapes” in a study the Center’s brochure characterized as “examining the relationship between form, strength of materials and the harnessing of power.” 

For my dough—and thank God I didn’t have to expend any—this is close to Quatsch.  I was underwhelmed, to put it succinctly.  Of curiosity value, the manufacture of the sculptures was by a firm in Minneapolis, Alliant Techsystems, that calls itself “America’s largest supplier of commercial and military ammunition, a top manufacturer of satellite components and missile-defense systems” whose best customer is the army.  (The Hemphill exhibit includes a group of three “abstracted, truncated models of submarines,” collectively called Enigma [2009]—named for the World War II German encoding/decoding machine.)

ATK, as it calls itself, made the monumental sculptures from “composite materials,” presumably some of the same stuff out of which it makes post-modern weapons.  “Not the typical offerings at your local art store,” quipped Jessica Dawson in the Washington Post (“Sleek, Silent and Powerful,” 23 September 2009).  I’m not going to go into any more detail than this because, frankly, despite the oddity of their fabrication, I was unmoved.

[I posted an examination of the ideas of aesthetics philosopher Susanne Langer on art, beauty, and theater on 4 and 8 January 2010.  She had a few things to say about some of the kinds of art and artists on which I reported in the collection above.  For instance, Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions.  Where, then, does beauty enter the equation?

[Well, in a way, it doesn’t.  It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art.  “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criterion Langer applies to art when she considers beauty.  It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant.  In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so.  Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . .  Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them.  The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

[“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition.  In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty.

[The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work.

[I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings over 60 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive.

[When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it.  Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism.  We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in.  Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

[Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging.]