Notes on art and culture by Ashley & Associates
Interior view of Cézanne's atelier
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz visits the artist's studio.
A few years ago, during a visit to Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, I experienced a flash of insight about the artist that I saw as intrinsic to his becoming the father of modern painting. Once having seen it, it inspired me to move in a new direction in my own work. Read more...
Julian Wasser; Joan Didion, 1968
The long-awaited documentary about her life makes clear: She has escaped the demands so often placed on other authors.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Joan Didion confessed in 1976. “What I want and what I fear.” The writer was in one way taking preemptive credit — or, depending on your point of view, accepting the preemptive blame—for the explosion of personal essay-writing that, fueled by the internet and its egotism, would later become known as the first-person industrial complex. Didion, with her faith in the moral worth of introspection—her conviction that understanding oneself operates on a continuum with the understanding of everything else—helped to inspire a generation of writers to remain, via acts of performative journaling, on nodding terms with the people they used to be. Read more..
Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti in 1961
Judith Wilkinson has written an interesting account of Samuel Beckett‘s friendship with the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. In a recent piece published on the Tate website, she describes how they came to know one another:
“At the time of Giacometti and Beckett’s first meeting, Beckett was living at a modest artists’ hotel in Paris called Hôtel Libéria. Located down a narrow alleyway, Giacometti’s studio (and home) was a mere twenty-minute walk from Beckett’s accommodation. The two would meet late at night, when they had finished work, in one of the Parisian cafés, such as Café Flore, Le Dôme or La Coupole, to drink and socialise. The cafés were the central hub of French cultural and intellectual life during the period, and other notable artists and thinkers, such as philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet, as well as painters Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell and Bram van Velde also visited these establishments.
The pair would often leave the cafés in the early hours of the morning to embark on long walks around the city together. During their nocturnal rambles, they frequently discussed each other’s work, although Giacometti is believed to have dominated these conversations with his anxieties concerning his artworks. Beckett and Giacometti’s nights routinely concluded with a visit to a brothel – the favourite being the legendary Sphinx located behind Montparnasse train station.”
Read the full article here.
Camille Claudel, La Valse, grès d’Emile Muller, musée Camille Claudel, Nogent-sur-Seine
As a 19-year-old in Paris, Camille Claudel was already a promising student of the most famous sculptor of the day: Auguste Rodin. Before long, her own work would appear in the city’s well-regarded Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants. By any measure, her young career was off to an auspicious start.
When she died in 1943, however, Claudel’s legacy was all but forgotten. The artist was buried in an anonymous public grave; when her nephew attempted to move her body to the family tomb following the conclusion of World War II, he was informed that it would be impossible to find. Read more...
Vito Acconci, New York City, 1984 © Chris Felver/Bridgeman Images
We are saddened to share the news that Vito Acconci passed away in New York this morning at the age of 77. He is survived by his wife Maria Acconci.
It is impossible to forget a first encounter with the work of Vito Acconci, who was born in the Bronx in 1940. Subversive, shocking and truly unique, he was one of the most inventive artists to emerge during the radical period between the late 1960s and mid-1970s.
Part of a generation that came on the heels of the Minimalists, Acconci’s art was a reaction against the “father-art” that he said he needed to kill. “Because Smithson went outside, I could go inside,” he told fellow artist Richard Prince in an interview for Bomb Magazine in 1991. “I had to go somewhere else—inside myself”. Read more..
Gordon Walters, Untitled, 1978, P.V.A. and acrylic on canvas, 1500 x 1200mm. Image Courtesy of Starkwhite and the Walters Estate.
The Walters Estate and Starkwhite are delighted to announce the launch of a Gordon Walters website.
The site is an ongoing project to record the works of Gordon Walters dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. It also features a bibliography and list of selected exhibitions dating back to 1941, along with recent exhibitions, published writing and news.
A link to the website can be found here.
Still from The Challenge (2016), directed by Yuri Ancarani (all images courtesy Atopic Films, Dugong Production, La Bête, Ring Film)
Yuri Ancarani’s documentary The Challenge immerses viewers in the dazzling subculture of ultra-wealthy sheikhs who practice falconry.
Close to 100 falcons swarm in a gargantuan, high-ceilinged warehouse. Two men wearing thawbs (the traditional Arab garb consisting of a white headpiece and robe) slowly walk the perimeters of the room, spreading seed for the hungry birds. The score (from Lorenzo Senni and Francesco Fantini) uses woodwind, synthesiser, and xylophone in a manner cheekily reminiscent of the swelling, dramatic strings in the scores of film composer Bernard Herrmann, a frequent collaborator of Albert Hitchcock who served as sound consultant on The Birds. As more food hits the ground, many of the falcons land until only a few flutter around the emptying indoor airspace. The scene stretches over three minutes of wordless action, men feeding and falcons being fed.
This pure cinema — the reliance on juxtaposed moving images and little else to convey meaning — is typical of Italian director Yuri Ancarani’s documentary The Challenge, screening this week at the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center as a part of the annual New Directors/New Films series. Composed primarily of long, contemplative shots, the film waits 18 minutes into its 70-minute run time to introduce dialogue. Even when the characters — wealthy Qatari sheikhs obsessed with practising falconry — do speak, the dialogue is not always of much consequence to the plot, typically an observation or an aside between two individuals. Read more...
Auguste Rodin, Le Baiser, pentelican marble, 1822 x 1219 x 1530 mm.
The Auckland Art Gallery’s upcoming exploration of the evolution of the nude in Western art is its major show for 2017. Metro took a preview tour in Sydney with one of the exhibition’s curators.
Marthe, the wife of artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), spent much of her later life in the bath. Suffering from a tubercular condition, she was prescribed water therapy, and so bathed for several hours each day.
Bonnard painted her more than 300 times, many of his works showing her preparing for, immersed in, or emerging from a tomb-like bathtub. His gentle, sensuous depictions range from the traditional viewing perspective of the bather seen from behind, to radical compositions in which Marthe becomes a fragmented figure whose legs float in disembodied space, the blue tones of her flesh visible through the water.
Of more than 100 works in The Body Laid Bare: Masterpieces from Tate, it is Bonnard’s paintings of Marthe that co-curator Justin Paton would take home if he could. It’s their tenderness and radiant, lyrical light he most admires. “He kept painting her that way after her death,” he says, “even when she was no longer there.” Read more...
Philip Greenburg, Lou Reed in a Manhattan hotel room in 1993.
After Laurie Anderson recovered from the initial shock of the death of Lou Reed, her husband, in 2013, she had to decide what to do with his archives — a responsibility she describes as “like a 15-story building falling on me.”
Packed away was a huge collection of paperwork, photographs and recordings — more than 600 hours of demo tapes, concerts and even poetry readings — that spanned most of Reed’s career. He had spoken “not one sentence” about what to do with it all, Ms. Anderson said, and her first instinct was simply to put it all online. But soon she began looking for an institution that could maintain the material properly and also make it accessible to the public. Read more...
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Prospect Mountain, Lake George, (1927), gelatin silver print
In 1927, Georgia O’Keeffe had her first museum show ever at the Brooklyn Museum; 90 years later, she returns. However, the focus of the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is not her paintings but her identity and persona as an artist. Read more...
Len Lye; Moon Bead (1968)
“Tangible motion sculptures.” That’s how Len Lye, the innovative New Zealand artist, described his motorised kinetic works, which he deftly shaped from stainless steel. Creating evocative forms when set in motion, they are perceptible not just by sight and touch but by hearing; each one is designed to emit sound, so that they present viewers with a multisensory experience.
Five of the works are currently on view at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in Len Lye: Experimental Moves, a small but illuminating exhibition curated by Sarah Wall that explores Lye’s shift from film to sculpture in the 1950s and ’60s. Some are elegant and others comical, but all are mesmerising, easily standing as the centrepiece of the show, which also features screenings of Lye’s short, dynamic films and a trove of his personal correspondence and notes. The exhibition is not Govett-Brewster’s only tribute to the artist: the gallery opened its Len Lye Center in 2015, its exterior resembles his shiny sculptures, and the building holds his entire archive, which he wanted to ensure remained in his home country. Read more...
Ed van der Elsken; Girl in the Subway, Tokyo, 1984.
The Dutch postwar photographer Ed van der Elsken lived with, and through, his cameras.
They came with him into his bedroom, capturing life with his first, second and third wives; they were slung around his neck and across his chest as he travelled to Paris, Tokyo, Chile, central Africa and back home to his native Amsterdam. They joined him in his deathbed, as he recorded his own slow capitulation to cancer in 1990.
He was “a man who would have liked to have transplanted a camera into his head to permanently record the world around him,” wrote Beatrix Ruf, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Marta Gili, the director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, who have collaborated to present a major retrospective of his work for both museums. Read more...
Sam Hunt is larger than life and lately, at the ripe old age of 70, he’s become increasingly preoccupied with death – namely his own.
Arguably New Zealand’s greatest living poet (for now at least, mortality being what it is), Hunt is the stuff of clichés; it’s impossible not to reach for expressions like “national treasure” or “cultural icon” when trying to describe him, because that’s just what he is.
Hunt was born in Castor Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore in 1946 – 13 years ahead of the harbour bridge – and it was clear from an early age that he would be a poet; he wrote his first precocious poem at the age of seven. Since then, he has written hundreds of poems, possibly thousands, but who’s counting? Certainly not Hunt. Read more...
Catalan sculptor Joan Gardy-Artigas has worked alongside some of the leading artists of the twentieth century, from Picasso and Miró to Giacometti and Chagall. Here, Barcelona-based director takes us into El Racó, the artist’s farmhouse studios to reflect on his life and career. Read more...
Unknown artist, bookplate for Hilprand Brandenburg of Biberach, woodcut, black printing ink, and hand colouring on paper (Germany, 1480). Bookplate is in Jacobus de Voragine’s Sermones quadragesimales (Bopfingen, Württemberg, 1408), on view in The Art of Ownership at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
The first known bibliophile to adorn his collection with the personal touch of a bookplate is Hilprand Brandenburg of Biberach. The 1480 woodcut print, on view in The Art of Ownership: Bookplates and Book Collectors from 1480 to the Present at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, depicts an angel holding a shield emblazoned with an ox. Details of the seraphic wings are hand-colored in red and green, with the angel’s cloak, flowing as if in flight, given a rosy hue. The Rosenbach states that this is the “oldest known printed bookplate in the western world.” Read more...
Robert Smithson’s “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill” in Emmen, a town in the Netherlands.
Almost 50 years ago, Robert Smithson, along with his fellow artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria and other adventurous colleagues, pioneered earthworks, an audacious — and short-lived — movement of the 20th century. Named for a sci-fi novel that Smithson read in 1967, earthworks represented a new genre of landscape art. Instead of painting a view of nature, sculptors created their own massive works outdoors on mesas, moraines and even the floor of the Mojave Desert. In 1971, r. Heizer told me: “You can’t really find a harsher climate than where a majority of my work exists right now. It’s in semi-arid, flat, windy, heavy rainy season areas.” Read more...
Anne Hamblett; Still Life with Flowers in Blue Pot, unknown date, oil on canvas, 615 x 480mm (including frame). Private collection.
Few people know Anne McCahon, the wife of Colin, was also an artist in her own right. To mark the first solo exhibition of her work, family members tell Metro about the couple’s creative partnership.
There’s a popular discussion in international art circles right now that seeks to identify and acknowledge the Overlooked Female Artist. It goes like this: after years toiling in the darkness, the genius of certain women artists is recognised by institutions who put their work on show and the artists finally get the recognition they deserve. Read more..
Richard Avedon; Andy Warhol, New York City, August 14, 1969.
Young men and women recline on their backs, some shirtless, staring at the camera confrontationally, or smoking, aloof. They are often serious and sexy. They are the subjects of Andy Warhol‘s screen tests, where visitors to his studio, the Factory, sat alone with a rolling video camera. The silent footage occupies a large wall at the Andy Warhol Museum, where you can also make your own screen test. Sitting before a camera and under a blaring light for four minutes and 41 seconds, I didn’t know what to do with my limbs or what facial expression to make. Whom was I looking at? I felt painfully inept.
Jessica Beck, a curator at the Warhol Museum, says there is an “uncomfortable encounter with shame and sexuality” in the screen tests. Recording one makes you hyper aware of your body; it sort of felt like I was staring into a mirror, but couldn’t see my own reflection. Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Saint John the Baptist” (c. 1513–16)
Painting conservation is a perilous business, requiring the perfect blend of historical knowledge, technical skill, and respect for the immeasurably fragile, ancient object held gently between gloved hands. Just ask Cecilia Giménez, the 83-year-old amateur painter whose farcically botched attempt to restore an almost century-old fresco of Christ in her local church in Borja, Spain, propelled her to international infamy. Other conservation mishaps have been far less amusing. Read more...
Hera Lindsay Bird has been the fastest selling, and the most popular book of poetry VUP, has ever published.
It’s a midwinter Monday night and Hera Lindsay Bird – New Zealand’s most exciting young poet – is tucked up in bed in pyjamas and a robe her boyfriend calls “too Laura Ashley for human consumption”.
Her first book of poetry – a provocative, raunchy bestseller – was published in July by Victoria University Press and a reprint has already been ordered.
The self-titled book has catapulted the 28-year-old from a respected but anonymous graduate writer to semi-cult status, and she is well aware that her life and work are now inextricably bound together. She’s also pretty OK with that. Read more...
Purchase Hera's book here.
