Wangechi at the Nasher

I used to live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.   It’s where I found my bearings on the arduous path of the artist.  Some might think it an unlikely place to find art of the highest caliber. Think again.   In the neighboring city of Durham, art has found a formidable home at the Nasher Museum. Its curator of contemporary art, Trevor Schoonmaker, has ushered a number of artists, many of who are African American or of African origin, to the forefront.  The exhibitions he has orchestrated have been ground breaking and insightful. The most recent superstar exhibiting at the Nasher is Wangechi Mutu.  Originally from Nairobi, Kenya, a Yale MFA graduate, and now a Brooklyn based artist, Wangechi first crossed paths with Trevor at Sikkema Jenkins gallery in Chelsea some fifteen years ago.  They have remained friends and colleagues ever since.

As one who works with collage, it’s no surprise that I was bowled over by her magnificent works.  She pulls from her African roots, where women and earth are celebrated with elegance, grandeur, luxurious curves; they are brazen and bold. Her glorious imagination comes to life on paper and Mylar.   Our “stories” are different, but I connected to her collaged imagery of distorted, surreal bodies- part human, part animal and part machine; backgrounds are embellished with fine brushstrokes of watercolor. The reconfigured female bodies might have animal printed skins and motorcycle wheels in place of feet. Tendrils of dreaded hair appear like dancing earthworms or like vibrating talons of a rooster.  (This is my imagination speaking.) The reference to Hannah Hoch would be a natural one, but she claims a stronger alliance with Romare Bearden, a pioneer for African American art whose depictions of the south and of Harlem are colorfully painted and collaged.  Perhaps it is his attention to the basic struggles of oppressed people to which Mutu connects.  As for the more obvious similarities that I, and others, may see in Hannah Hoch’s collages, in faces with cut out eyes stuck into primitive masks, they are apparently nothing   more than that.

Wangechi Mutu’s sculptures are a mixed bag. (No pun intended there.) The plastic bags rolled into makeshift balls and held together by twine, reference what young children from her country sometimes use to play sports. They hang en masse from gold thread giving them a kind of preciousness.  The tree trunk- like pieces made from felt blankets, call our attention to a divide between developed and third world countries. In prosperous countries, these blankets are used for moving furniture. In Nairobi, they are often used by less wealthy people as blankets to keep warm. Packing tape is used to outline the bases of the sculptural “trees”, the tree being also an important feminine symbol. I didn’t love them, but I appreciated her point.  They are unavoidably ominous, strange and powerful, not unlike her collages.

Coming Abstractions

Modernism is so associated with abstraction that the term "abstract art" is sometimes used as a synonym.  The most celebrated modernist movements, cubism, futurism, and expressionism, all abstracted away from retinal realism.  Other movements, such as constructivism, suprematism, vorticism, bauhaus, and de stijl pushed this even further, experimenting with pure abstraction, devoid of representational significance.  Abstraction is now back in vogue, as evidenced by a recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, so it unsurprising that the Museum of Modern Art elected to mount a show tracing the its origins.  Inventing Abstraction is massive, spanning what may be the most inventive fifteen years in the history of Western Art.

Not every experiment in this period was successful, as the show dutifully reminds us, but the failures are often interesting, and it is nice to see them pulled out of the archives.  Even more welcome is the inclusion of artists who have failed to become household names, despite producing outstanding and important work.  Among them a number of women, reminding us that modernism ushered in new opportunities for women artists.  The image at the top of this blog is a painted metal sculpture by Katarzyna Korbo.  Korba was Riga reared, Russian trained, and final settled in Poland.  Though classified as a suprematist, this work also anticipates the minimalist sculptures of Judd and Lewitt.  The MoMA show also profiles Lyubov Popova, a more doctrinaire Russian suprematist.  The handsome piece to the left has been chosen for the front page of the museum's impressive web site.  They also hosted a huge Popova retrospective a couple decades back, which helped to establish her as the artist equal of Malevich, the more famous male pioneer of the movement.

The show also draws attention to another artist from Russia, Natalia Goncharova.  As the painting on the right illustrates, he style is more futurist than suprematist.  But, unlike the Italians, who innovated the idiom, Goncharova's work is more purely abstract.  One would be hard pressed to discern that this painting depicts cats.  Goncharava is also less concerned with capturing movement than the Italians.  Indeed, her aesthetic inspiration was the recently invented x-ray.  She called her style rayism.  The museum should be applauded from bringing this boutique movement into the limelight.  Taking inspiration from technology is a central part of the modernist ethos, and the evocation here of a medical technology brings to mind more recent explorations in art, which explore medical imagery (think of Damien Hirt's anatomical models, for example).


The exhibition reminds us that modernism was an international occurance.  Abstract art quickly came into vogue throughout Europe, West and East.  The museum traces the links between movements with a helpful diagram of interconnections (see the web version).  The advents of photographic reproduction, new modes of transport, and exhibition spaces increased the flow of ideas.  As the diagram makes clear, geographically proximate groups were in greater communication, leading to a constellation of coherent stylistic movements.  We find, for example, Gustav Klutsis creating architectural illustrations (left) that could easily be examples of El Lissitzky's method, which he called proun, also on display in the show.

In Western Europe, modernist abstraction took on somewhat different forms, such as futurism, mentioned above, cubism, and de stijl.  The latter is well represented in the show. There are a number of impressive Mondrians, like the one on the right. Mondrian had not yet moved to pure primaries.  He allows himself three shades of blue, resisting the more purist distillation that would soon some.  Still the work is radical.  The gulf between these grid paintings and the early Braque/Picasso cubist canvases is enormous.  This is the logical culmination of Cezanne's fractionation.  Painting has been turned into a period table of artistic elements.  The show confirms that Mondrian was not alone in his exploration of formal essentialism (encapsulating a recent de stijl retrospective at the Pompidou).  For example, there are works by fellow traveler Theo van Doesberg, including his stepwise abstraction of a cow.  Two panels are reproduced below, courtesy of the MoMA image archive.

Moving closer to home, the exhibit also shows us expressions of abstraction in the Anglophone world.  There are strong, if forgettable, paintings by Americans, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, for example, as well as abstract photos by Paul Strand.  England is represented by a collection of works from the Bloomsbury group, including pure abstractions by Vanessa Bell, and some choice examples of vorticism, which has gained attention lately.  Especially impressive is a huge angular canvas by David Bomberg (left).  This is one of the most contemporary looking works on display.



The show also reminds viewers that abstraction was a factor in movements that are more associated with other forms of invention.  For example, members of various dada movements have important cameos.  Several works by Marcel Duchamp are on view (including his Network of Stoppages, which, I will argue in a future blog, is among the most important paintings of the 20th century).  There is also an enormous and lovely example of Francis Picabia's early abstract work (right).  Picabia's abstractions are almost painfully aesthetic.  It is hard to believe that the same artist would be creating painting based on mechanical diagrams within a few years.  But it also makes sense.  The move from organic forms to machines in central to the project of early abstract art.


Exemplifying this intersection, the show includes an impressive painting by Duchamp's sister, Susanne (below left).  The spoke-like forms at the center evoke Marcel's bicycle wheel, but the title invites a different impression.  Called Funnel of Solitude, the image is a conceptual merger of machine (the funnel) and mind (solitude suggests a psychological state).  The painting is a kind of vortex that sucks viewers into to its black core.

The exhibit gives an even more prominent place to another woman in the orbit of dada, Sophie Taeuber-Arp.  Spouse and collaborator of Jean Arp, Sophie gets my vote as one of the most interesting artists of the early 20th century.  Her modes of expression were highly varied.  She made clothing and marionettes (not on display), as well as functional art (some bowls and containers are included in the exhibit).  Her two-dimensional works spanned a range of styles, that exemplify various modes of abstraction.  For example, she produced some exceptionally good examples of de stijl.  The show presents some of her more extreme abstract works, including a collaboration with Jean Arp, which is described as one of the first grid painting (below left).  It is also an experiment in mechanical production (the elements were cut on a cutting board) and chance (the method of arrangement was partially accidental).  It anticipates both conceptual art and minimalism.  The work on the right is equally interesting.  Here Taeuber-Arp continues to explore grids but changes her medium from paper to colored thread.  The picture is woven together, rather than pasted or painted, making it an early example of fiber art.  Taeuber-Arp was decades ahead of the curve in her efforts to elevate craft media into fine art.

Lets turn finally to the titular question of the show.  Who actually invented abstraction?  Who was the first to break away from representation completely?  Here answers will vary.  The textbook answer is Kandinsky, who is unsurprisingly given a prominent place at the start of the exhibition.  Other pioneers are also presented, however, including a lovely group of paintings by the Bohemian artist, Frantisek Kupka.  In one, a portrait of his spouse, we see a face nestled in a sea of colorful vertical brushstrokes.  In the others, the representational element is removed, and we find only the brushstrokes, making these some of the earliest examples or pure abstraction (circa 1910).

The search for an inventor may be moot, however, since abstraction was clearly in the air.  The rapidity of its spread and the extraordinary variety of forms in which it found expression testifies to an artworld eager to break from the confines of mimetic imitation.  The story of how abstraction came into being is almost too familiar to recount.  Its arrival seems inevitable in hindsight, after the transition from Cezanne to cubism.  Of course, abstraction did not need to be invented.  It was always already there.  In  body-paint and adornments, in textiles and architecture, in Islamic decorative motifs and Paleolithic rock carvings, and even in the palette and formal structure of representational paintings.  Abstraction was not so much invented in 1910 as exposed.  The frenzy with which it overtook the artworld was partially a function of the cult of the new, which is central to modernism, but it can be equally understood as fueled by an insight so basic that it could not be ignored.  Once noticed, it becomes glaringly obvious that all art is, at some level, abstract.

Lab Roth

Dieter Roth was born in Hamburg in 1930, and, in 1943 his family fled to his mother's native Switzerland.  He ended up living in a house in Zurich, the birthplace of Dada, along with other refugees, including Jewish and Communist artists.  He began making art in that house and didn't stop until his death in 1998.  In that half century, Roth produced an extraordinary range of work, which is now being honored at two exhibitions in New York--one at MoMA and the other at the impressive Hauser and Wirth gallery in Soho.  Roth was first and foremost an experimentalist.  What is most impressive about his output is the variety of media, techniques, and concepts that he explored.  One charming and timely example (courtesy of MoMA) is the bunny made from rabbit droppings, above. Part artist, part mad scientist, his work is a celebration of the artistic process even more than the product, though some of the products are remarkable to behold.

The MoMA show spans Roth's career, and includes some of his early experiments in graphic arts.  These include prints, books, postcards.  One impressive series includes images of tourist destinations that have been modified or partially occluded with blocks of color.  He also began using newspapers as a medium at this time.  The above left example show Roth experimenting with Pop iconography including comic images and printers dots, around the same time as Lichtenstein and Polke.  The image on the right (from the MoMA site) shows a tiny book made from newspaper.  Roth made books obsessively, and was obsessed with printed word.  The images below (left image from MoMA) show examples of his Literaturwurst--sausages made from classic books.

These sausage forms also relate to two other kinds of media experiments that can be found in Roth's work.  He liked to use food products to create art, as in frames spices below (courtesy of MoMA), and he also made a number of biodegradble works, in which foodstuffs were allowed to decay, as in the jarred doll, covered in mould on the right.  These experiments began in 1964.  The draw attention to the impermanence of art.  Everything is in a state of decay.  The world's masterpieces are changing each year, and will eventually return to dust.  This notion of impermanence resonates with themes in Zen Buddhism.  The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi is intended to celebrate the transience and imperfection of all things.   Roth's rotting works also have a post-modern appeal; they reminds us that artists are not in total control of what they produce.  Biodegrable art is collaborative art--the minuscule mindless organisms living all around us take part in selecting their colors and forms.

Food and decay are also important themes in the Hauser and Wirth exhibition.  That show includes some of Roth's celebrated experiments with chocolate and candy as art media.  Done in collaboration with Dieter's son Björn Roth, also an artist, the exhibition was involved a performative element of gradual creation, as well as decay.  A group of assistants cast numerous heads using various confections, and built two tall towers with them, over a period of weeks.  One is a colorful collection of canine-looking (apparently lions, however) and self-portraits of Roth (like the yellow one below).   The other is made of chocolate Roth heads, which develop a white film over time.

The gallery show also included prints, paintings, video, and a grand installation.  One of the collaborative paintings, which a wonderful and extremely knowledgeable security guard identified as his favorite, is reproduced on the left.  It shows a figure in a chair looking out at a seascape with swirls of color--perhaps an artist's mind intermingling with the world.  The installation recreates an artist's studio.  A number of these have appeared elsewhere (e.g., P.S.1 and the Hamburger Bahnhof).  Though visually assaulting, they reinforce the mad scientist theme, by presenting world of alchemical chaos, in which food products (such as beer bottles) and traditional art media are interspersed.  Two small details are presented below along with a video still showing the elder Roth at work in his laboratory.

By sheer salience and scale, the centerpiece at Hauser and Wirth is a giant floor (two floors, actually) that were laboriously shipped at incredible expense from the artist's former studio in Iceland.  Roth moved to Iceland after the war, married an Icelandic woman, became a citizen, and raised three children there, including Björn.  This outpost allowed him to conduct his endless experiments at one remove from the epicenters or European and American art.  Though hardly an outsider, it is likely that geographical distance helped Roth avoid getting completely absorbed into one of the successive movements that emerged after the war.  He was affiliated with Fluxus, and one can find many hints of pop, new realism, conceptualism, and arte povera in his work.  He often walked in lock step with current trends.  But he never became wedded to a single approach, and that restless spirit makes his work seem more contemporary and more urgent than the pantheonic figures which whom these movements are associated.  Roth's studio floor (made with red tiles that were apparently pervasive in Europe) can be seen as a giant readymade.  It looks like an abstract painting, but its many marks are created by accident, not intention.  Like Roth's biodegradable art, it can also be compared to a gargantuan peri dish in which the artist himself has left tell-tale traces.  Fortunately this is not the only trace he left behind.  These two exhibitions remind us that Roth was among the most productive and inventive artists of the later 20th century, and his contributions should be elevated from the footnotes into the main texts of art history.

I Heard The Herd At HEARD

New York’s MTA Arts for Transit and Creative Time have brought something pretty damn cool to Grand Central Station on 42^nd Street. Oh yeah, and it’s FREE. No need to worry about coming up with the usual 25 bucks for museum admission. For four more days, anyone who can get time off from work, or those with a need to get from point A to point B, go through Grand Central at 11 am or 2Pm and take a peek at Nick Cave’s performance “Heard” which has dancers from the renowned Alvin Ailey Company.  It is an impressive display of dancers in Nick Cave’s celebrated “Sound Suits”, sculptures cum outfits cum instruments.   The particular collection is a herd of horses meant to be heard while the inhabitants dance, move and swish about. The subtle swishing of the raffia sounds something like leaves rustling, or water coursing through a rocky ravine. The sounds are gentle, the costumes are anything but. Nick Cave’s works are always exquisitely crafted, and these are no exception.  They aren’t my favorite pieces, and I didn’t quite understand why there was a harpist playing intermittently. The added musicians distracted away from the sounds of the suits, but I wonder if the music was meant to guide the dancers and cover up the background noise of the train station.  In the end, the venue wasn’t an ideal one for the Sound suits, but I thoroughly appreciate bringing art to both the primed and the unsuspecting for everyone to enjoy as they see fit.  The kids will most certainly love it.

Frickin' Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca has been hostage to changing fortunes.   In his time, Duke Guidobaldo (who was immortalized in a portrait by Raphael) called him the "prince of modern painters."  He is also honored with a chapter in Vasari's Lives of Artists and credited there with being the greatest geometer of his time, in addition to being a great painter.  Soon after, however, he drifted into veritable neglect.  In the Anglophone world, he was mentioned only passingly until the 19th century when he caught the attention of Charles Eastlake, first director of London's National Gallery.  By the turn of the 20th century, he had something of a cult following, with monographs written on him, and lectures by Roger Fry, who is also credited with bringing both post-impressionism and African art into British and American consciousness.  Under Fry's influence, Piero's fame grew steadily.  Modernists saw him as a precursor to their art and, in 1925, we find Aldous Huxley calling Piero's Resurrection (above), "the best picture in the world."

Interestingly, Roger Fry's affection in Piero predates his discovery of post-impressionism, and may owe more to the influence of the Pre-Raphealites on British thought.  Though they never championed Piero, the Pre-Raphealites drew attention to the spiritual austerity of quattrocento painting, and few artists realize their ideals better than Piero.  Thus, we can find a path from the Pre-Raphealites to Fry, and then from Fry to modernism.  On this telling, Piero becomes a bridge that allows English art enthusiasts to develop an appetite for modern art.

New York is lucky to have a Piero exhibition right now at the Frick Collection.  7 works are displayed--the largest number ever grouped together in North America--including 6 panels from the Sant'Agostino altarpiece, which are normally scattered in different collections around the globe.  The alterpeice paintings include two austere portraits of a monk and a nun (above), as well as two full body portraits: a gorgeous St. John the Evangelist (owned by the Frick), and an imposing St. Augustine with a passion play decorating his robe.  Seeing these together is a special thrill.

The exhibit also includes a stunning Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels.  Like much of Piero's work, it can be described as movingly still.  The figures are erect and calm.  Their faces are classical, mask-like, and composed.  Most are looking inward, the Madonna's eyes are downcast and Luinesque, but the figure on the right looks out at the viewer, while pointing to the Christ child.  These angels lack the drama that is so characteristic of High Renaissance art, and this gives them a quiet humanism that is more affecting than works by many of Piero's successors.  The Virgin here has a quiet nobility.  She is like an ancient stone goddess, securely perched in the center of the canvas.  Piero's Mary paintings are among the best in the history of art.  Two others, both highly unusual, are reproduced for comparison to below.

All three Mary paintings have Mary at the center, towering comfortingly above the other figures.  The Mary exhibited at the Frick also exemplifies the trait for which Piero has become most known: his inventive use of geometry.   Piero wrote an important treatise on perspective, bringing that technique to a new level.  We see a hint of that in the upper right.  More strikingly, this painting, like many of Piero's most famous works makes extensive use of hidden formal regularities.

If one creates a square using the upper border of the panel, the midpoint will coincide with the outstretched hand of the Christ child (above left).  And if one creates a square using the architectural element in the background, its midpoint coincides with the hand of Mary, who is holding a rose (above right).

The upper-right quadrant of that inner square contains the heads of both Mary and Christ, and the crown of Christ's head falls at the midpoint (a device used in other Piero paintings).  Further decomposition of this square reveals many other precise alignments.  I created a grid to illustrate (above).  All four angels' faces have central points that line up with one of the nested verticals.  Two angels have v-neck garments that align with  verticals, and their robes also align.  Christ's and Mary's legs alight with other verticals.  The head's of christ and two angels align with one horizontal line, and that same line intersects the hairline of the other two angels.  The horizontal below that touches all of their chins.  The next horizontal hits the base of Christ's art and the base of the aforementioned v-necks.  The one below that intersects with Christ's knees as well as the belts of the two angels that flank either side of the panel.  Below that, a horizontal catches the hemlines of those two angels along with Mary's knee and Christ's foot.  These are just a few of the hidden geometrical coincidences that contribute to the painting's sense of harmony.  Highly formal but never cold, Piero's geometry is humanizing.

To fully appreciate Piero's poetic humanism, one need only consider his two most distinguished pupils. First consider the above painting by Melozzo da Forlì.  It has Piero's stillness and it takes his use of perspective to a new level.  But it utterly lacks the gentility of Piero's lines, his touching facial expressions, and his subtle palette.  Piero's other distinguished student is Luca Signorelli, famous for complex compositions with many interlocked figures.  For comparison, look at Signorelli's Last Judgment in comparison to the most figurally complex Piero that I know, The Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes.  Even in battle, there is a stillness to Piero's figures.  Signorelli's are highly theatrical in comparison.  There is hardly a vertical body in the painting. 

For a final comparison, consider this Signorelli Flagellation in comparison the Piero's treatment of the same theme (which is just a detail from the background of a larger composition).

Seeing these side by side it is hard not to think, with the Pre-Raphaelites, that the Renaissance took a wrong turn after Piero.  The serenity and dignity of his work was replaced by much cartoonish melodrama.  Signorelli is magnificent, to be sure, but his embellishments signal the loss of something very special, something that is present in much medieval art but gets lost as painting became more ostentatious.  Ironically, the High Renaissance painters are regarded as humanists, but Piero's work makes Michaelangelo and Titian look vulgar.  In this light, Piero's great contribution is not the he pre-figured modernism, but that he is pre-modern.  He gives us noble human archetypes at a moment just before humanity arrogantly asserted itself as the measure of all things.