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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
This short documentary celebrates the late conceptual artist Chris Burden’s landmark work “Shoot,” in which a friend shot him in the arm. Produced by: Eric Kutner.
The iconic composer talks about his longstanding friendship with sculptor Richard Serra, his recent performance inside an art installation and his advice for young artists.
A drawing, from around 1482, that a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator says is by Leonardo da Vinci. An auction house values it at 15 million euros, or about $15.8 million.
It’s an auctioneer’s jackpot dream. A man walks in off the street, opens a portfolio of drawings, and there, mixed in with the jumble of routine low-value items, is a long-lost work by Leonardo da Vinci.
And that, more or less, is what happened to Thaddée Prate, director of old master pictures at the Tajan auction house here, which is to announce on Monday the discovery of a drawing that a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art says is by Leonardo, the Renaissance genius and master draftsman. Tajan values the work at 15 million euros, or about $15.8 million USD. On Thursday, this reporter was ushered into Tajan’s private viewing room, where the drawing, of the martyred St. Sebastian, about 7½ inches by 5 inches, stood resplendent in an Italian Renaissance gold frame on an old wooden easel. Read more...
Lost-wax casting, a sculpting technique dating to the Chalcolithic period, is an elaborate process. Its many steps include spruing, slurrying, burnout, and metal chasing — terms lost on your average sculpture 101 student. Why go to all the trouble? The process allows for the creation of exact, hollow (and therefore lightweight) metal copies of existing marble sculptures, which weigh a tonne and are otherwise difficult to reproduce. The ingenious ancient technique is beautifully illustrated in a new video that combines stop-motion and 2D animation. Read more...
Dan Flavin's "untitled," created in 1996 for Calvin Klein and on view now at the brand's Madison Avenue store.
Using everyday fluorescent lamps, the late conceptual artist Dan Flavin created sculptures that transformed the architecture of rooms and challenged notions of space. He called his glowing installations “situations,” tracing walls, corners, and floors in unpredictable ways that played with colour and structure. The artist chose an equally unexpected path for himself – before pursuing art, Flavin studied to become a priest and joined the U.S. Air Force. In the early ‘60s, around the time he began experimenting with light, he worked as a clerk in the Guggenheim’s mailroom. Read more...
The Bute Hours. An Extraordinary Medieval English Books of Hours. Estimated at £1.5 - 2.5 million. Photo: Sotheby's.
The Bute Hours, one of the most extraordinary Medieval English Book of Hours in existence, is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s London on 6 December 2016, with an estimate of £1.5 to 2.5 million, making it one of the most valuable English books to appear at auction. The manuscript comes to sale from The Berger Collection Educational Trust, set up by the Denver-based collectors William M. B. Berger and Bernadette Berger, who amassed one of the most important collections of British Art in America, spanning over 600 years. The proceeds will go to benefit future philanthropy. Read more...
The Factum Arte warehouse, in Madrid, is filled with copies of treasured art works, including a facsimile of an Assyrian winged lion that once stood in Nimrud—a site, in Iraq, that has been largely destroyed by isis. Photograph by Henrik Spohler for the New Yorker
The Egyptian painters who decorated King Tut’s burial chamber had to work quickly—the pharaoh died unexpectedly, at about the age of nineteen, and proper preparations had not been made. Plaster was applied to lumpy limestone walls. On the chamber’s western wall, twelve baboons with an identical design are arrayed in a grid, and various slip-ups suggest haste: one of the baboons is missing a black outline around its penis. When the entrance to the chamber was sealed, some thirty-five hundred years ago, the baboons, along with the gods and goddesses depicted in other panels, were expected to maintain their poses for eternity. This wasn’t an entirely naïve hope. Read more...
