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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
Leo Villareal and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands will illuminate 17 bridges along the Rover Thames with a scheme called Current. Photo: Leo Villareal and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands
London’s bridges will slowly fill with light as the tide rises. Luminous colours will wash across their surfaces. Beams will shoot out from each bridge, pierce the sky and then drop, connecting with a beam on a neighbouring bridge to trace the path of the Thames. The bridges' underbellies will glow gently; the banks will offer floating stages for performances; waterfalls will create a screen for projections; a weave of projected light planes will hover over the surface of the Thames, creating a ghostly river of light. Read more...
Tim Noble and Sue Webster in Hydra aboard Dakis Joannou’s yacht. 1999. Photo: Dakis Joannou
From left to right: Jeff Koons, Dan Friedman, Jeffrey Deitch, and Dakis Joannou in Hydra (1987). Photo: Lietta Joannou.
At the apex of Greece’s financial crisis, 032c’s Thom Bettridge traveled to Athens and Hydra to visit Dakis Joannou, an industrialist and hotel magnate famed for his contemporary art collection. Much like his yacht Guilty, Joannou is a surreal, unapologetic, and larger-than-life figure. In a turbulent year of capital controls and austerity sanctions, Joannou’s endeavor proved to exist in its own sovereign universe. During 2015, his DESTE Art Foundation hosted more exhibitions than any other in its history. Joannou’s collection tells the story of a 50-year-long infatuation with art that has spun out into a network of objects and friendships. “It’s about changing ideas,” the collector says regarding the public impact of his work. While he has been credited with pulling the art world’s attention to Athens, Joannou insists that the social benefit of his foundation is “collateral.” But what larger project – or desire – this benefit is collateral of remains a mystery. Read more...
On July 2, 1978, the New York Times made a significant technological leap when they scuttled the last of 60 manually-operated linotype machines to usher in the era of digital and photographic typesetting. When working at 100% efficiency with an experienced operator the linotype machines could produce 14 lines per minute cast on the spot from hot lead. That number would increase to 1,000 lines per minute the very next day using an array of computers and digital storage.
Typesetter Carl Schlesinger and filmmaker David Loeb Weiss documented the last day of hot metal typesetting in a film called Farewell — ETAOIN SHRDLU (the obscure title is poignantly explained in the film). This amazing behind-the-scenes view not only captures the laborious effort to create a single page of printed type, but also the emotions and thoughts of several New York Times employees as they candidly discuss their feelings about transitioning to a new technology. One man decides he’s not ready for the digital age and plans to retire on the spot after 49 years, while others seem to transition smoothly into the new methods of production. Read more...
