Now in The Hague, The Netherlands!!
http://www.nouvellesimages.nl/
More info about Ronald de Bloeme:http://www.spielhaus-morrison.com/galerie/start.htm
Sunday, May 06, 2007
New Show Ronald de Bloeme
Now in The Hague, The Netherlands!!
http://www.nouvellesimages.nl/
More info about Ronald de Bloeme:http://www.spielhaus-morrison.com/galerie/start.htm
Exhibition Art Amsterdam
‘Berlin – Amsterdam’ of the Rijksakademie
Each year Art Amsterdam makes space for a surprising exposition at the heart of the exhibition.This year the honour goes to the Rijksakademie, which is showing the work of ex-participants who are presently working in Berlin, including Tjebbe Beekman, Mathilde ter Heijne, Alexandra Leykauf, Mathilde Rosier, Bojan Šarčević and Marike Schuurman.The presentation consists of paintings, drawings, installations, video and photographs chosen by the Berlin-based Erika Hoffmann, a top German collector.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
De beangstigende schoonheid van Tuymans
di 24/04/07
- Eigenlijk hoeft Luc Tuymans geen introductie meer. Hij is gewoonweg een van onze beste kunstenaars. Een presentatie van nieuw werk is dan ook een echt evenement. De expo is getitteld "Les revenants", letterlijk vertaald "zij die terugkomen", maar ook "spoken".
"Les revenants" verwijst naar het boek van de Franse historicus Jean Lacouture "Les jésuites".
Het eerste deel heet "Les conquérants" en beschrijft de veroveringen die zij onder het mom van het christendom en de beschaving uitvoerden.
Het tweede deel heet “Les revenants” en wijst op het feit dat de macht en de invloed van de jezuïeten nog altijd aanwezig is, zij zijn terug van nooit weg geweest.
In het woordenboek staat er bij jezuïet ook: sluw. Deze religieuze orde spreekt al jaren tot onze verbeelding door een sfeer van geheimzinnigheid en ambiguïteit.
Boze tongen gewagen zelfs van een soort loge. Het is een orde die zich aan de ene kant als humanistisch voordoet en zich beroept op het concept van de vrije wil, maar aan de andere kant blijft zitten in een star conservatisme.
De bekendste en waarschijnlijk meest omstreden activiteit van de jezuïeten is het opzetten van een netwerk van hoog kwaliteitsonderwijs.
De macht van een christelijke orde
Tuymans is geïntrigeerd door de grote impact die een jezuïetenopvoeding op het verdere leven van hun leerlingen heeft en door het feit dat een klein land als België in de greep is van een kleine elite met diezelfde opleiding.
Tuymans wil opnieuw de aandacht vestigen op de machtige jezuïeten, die terug van nooit weggeweest zijn.
“Les revenants” kadert perfect in zijn zoektocht naar het begrip macht: hij schilderde eerder de “heimat” van rechts Vlaanderen, het Belgische koloniale verleden, de terreur van het nazi-regime.
Momenteel werkt Tuymans aan een reeks over “Disneyworld”, waarin hij de macht van publiciteit en de media aan de kaak stelt.
Van miniatuur tot monumentaal werk
De expo begint met kleine, monochrome aquarellen. Het zijn vignetten die zich inspireren op de geestelijke oefeningen van Ignatius van Loyola, de stichter van de orde.
Het zijn meditaties over de zeven hoofdzonden. De schilderijen hebben grote afmetingen, met schaalvergrotingen die een overweldigende indruk maken.
De doeken ogen als een immense overbelichte foto, waarop de kleuren uitgevlakt of verhevigd zijn.
Als Tuymans het barokinterieur van een Italiaanse kerk schildert, beeldt hij die kerk af als een opengeslagen boek: de bladzijden bollen op en de vouw loopt als een barst dwars door het beeld.
"Rome" straks naar Amsterdam
“Rome” is een monumentaal schilderij van 2,3 bij 3,1 meter van het al even monumentale interieur van het Sint-Pietersbasiliek. Het gebouw is verpletterend en de aanwezige gelovige mensenmassa wordt herleid tot kleine, ongedefinieerde vlekjes.
Dit prachtige schilderij werd al aangekocht door het Stedelijke Museum van Amsterdam. Op “The deal” schudden de paus en de generaal-overste van de jezuïeten elkaar de hand na een hevige polemiek over Latijns-Amerika en pedofilie.
De schilderijen van Luc Tuymans zijn van een beangstigende schoonheid, waar er altijd een onderhuidse spanning zindert.
Die “unheimliche” sfeer is de weergave van de stille terreur die de jezuïeten nog altijd uitoefenen. Want Tuymans schildert intelligent, en sluw…als een jezuïet.
Claude Blondeel
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Autocenter
We all need an Autocenter
Founded in 2001 by Joep van Liefland and Maik Schierloh, the Autocenter has become, in the last months, one of the most important spaces for contemporary art in Berlin. Of course, the invitation from the last Berlin Biennial to show in their fake Gagosian Gallery has been putting a lot of light on that projektraum (for a serious and complete definition of that word, see the special issue “Berlin” from FGA). But the two founding members were clever enough to produce in that context an event that will not establish or promote Autocenter as a “label”. They simply built up with tires and car parts, light and sexy posters, a proper garage in Berlin-Mitte. The name was the program.
The last time I was in the big white cube located in the surroundings of the S-Station Ostkreuz (one of the most depressing locations I have ever seen...), a commercial gallerist that was visiting the opening carefully looked at the portfolio of the previous exhibitions, writing on a piece of paper the names of artists that could be interesting. And his shopping list became quickly longer than a Xmas wish-list. The Autocenter, with exhibitions lasting only a weekend, is a dynamic and exceptional place with a broad view from contemporary art. Within the last months we have seen there Damien Deroubaix, a french painter that deals with grindcore and trash culture. A large video installation of Markus Draper evoking a haunted house. Some sculptural-paintings from Eva Seufert, Ulrich Emmert and Norbert Witzgall made a picturesque duo, and Marike Schuurman hang her black and white photographs... Etc.
But the important fact is that Autocenter has been able to develop some no-profile as a profile. Nowadays many small and young independent art spaces are finding a line that they consciously follow to quickly build up an image and an existence in an over-informed and over-competitive world. One will be dealing with art that thinks about art, another will show figurative-post-expressionist-paintings when the neighbor will focus on scandinavian political art... The Autocenter however, in its large selection and openness, remains a place for surprises and discoveries.
But the point with those spaces is that they can propose things that neither a gallery nor a museum could do. Like the younger place called Homies that was, on sunday november 26th, inviting all the collectors of the artist Tatjana Doll to bring their pieces and leave them there for the duration of the exhibition. The artworks will not be for sale: they are already owned by people. No curator, nothing to buy (except the few beers you might drink during the opening) and a lot of good mood and good food (visitors where invited, on top of bringing their art pieces, to contribute to the buffet). Like the Autocenter, they are building a community of people that share the same hedonistic vision of art. A moment of fun and pleasure, of intellectual quality and unexpected breakthrough.
www.autocenterart.de
www.homie.travelhome.org/body.swf
^Thibaut de Ruyter, curator and editor based in Berlin
Founded in 2001 by Joep van Liefland and Maik Schierloh, the Autocenter has become, in the last months, one of the most important spaces for contemporary art in Berlin. Of course, the invitation from the last Berlin Biennial to show in their fake Gagosian Gallery has been putting a lot of light on that projektraum (for a serious and complete definition of that word, see the special issue “Berlin” from FGA). But the two founding members were clever enough to produce in that context an event that will not establish or promote Autocenter as a “label”. They simply built up with tires and car parts, light and sexy posters, a proper garage in Berlin-Mitte. The name was the program.
The last time I was in the big white cube located in the surroundings of the S-Station Ostkreuz (one of the most depressing locations I have ever seen...), a commercial gallerist that was visiting the opening carefully looked at the portfolio of the previous exhibitions, writing on a piece of paper the names of artists that could be interesting. And his shopping list became quickly longer than a Xmas wish-list. The Autocenter, with exhibitions lasting only a weekend, is a dynamic and exceptional place with a broad view from contemporary art. Within the last months we have seen there Damien Deroubaix, a french painter that deals with grindcore and trash culture. A large video installation of Markus Draper evoking a haunted house. Some sculptural-paintings from Eva Seufert, Ulrich Emmert and Norbert Witzgall made a picturesque duo, and Marike Schuurman hang her black and white photographs... Etc.
But the important fact is that Autocenter has been able to develop some no-profile as a profile. Nowadays many small and young independent art spaces are finding a line that they consciously follow to quickly build up an image and an existence in an over-informed and over-competitive world. One will be dealing with art that thinks about art, another will show figurative-post-expressionist-paintings when the neighbor will focus on scandinavian political art... The Autocenter however, in its large selection and openness, remains a place for surprises and discoveries.
But the point with those spaces is that they can propose things that neither a gallery nor a museum could do. Like the younger place called Homies that was, on sunday november 26th, inviting all the collectors of the artist Tatjana Doll to bring their pieces and leave them there for the duration of the exhibition. The artworks will not be for sale: they are already owned by people. No curator, nothing to buy (except the few beers you might drink during the opening) and a lot of good mood and good food (visitors where invited, on top of bringing their art pieces, to contribute to the buffet). Like the Autocenter, they are building a community of people that share the same hedonistic vision of art. A moment of fun and pleasure, of intellectual quality and unexpected breakthrough.
www.autocenterart.de
www.homie.travelhome.org/body.swf
^Thibaut de Ruyter, curator and editor based in Berlin
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
David Hockney
Dual exhibitions showcase new work by Hockney, and his choice of Turners.
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Monday April 16, 2007
The greatest ever painter of watercolour landscapes will be joined at Tate Britain this summer by one of the most celebrated modern exponents of the form. An exhibition of JMW Turner's watercolour landscapes will be selected by David Hockney, working with Tate curators. And in a parallel exhibition, Hockney's landscapes of the east Yorkshire countryside will be shown, including recent work never seen in this country.
The five new, hitherto unseen Hockney oil paintings, each about 12ft long, depict the same view in Woldgate Woods in east Yorkshire.
Last year, the artist returned to the same spot five times between March and November. At a forking path in the forest he set up his equipment and made his large, six-panel oil paintings. Each took him a couple of days to complete as he worked in situ.
Each painting is strikingly different. In late March, when the leaves have yet to burst their buds, the view is all rich purple, lime and orange, the trees stark and architectural. In May, the colours have softened to luscious greens, which by July have deepened so that they have an almost luminous quality.
Contrasting versions painted in November show the cool clarity of autumn sun, and the greyish-creamy mistiness of a cold, hazy morning.
The Bradford-born Hockney has become increasingly obsessed by the east Yorkshire landscape. His links to the countryside there began when he worked on the land as a young man; and he has returned regularly over the years to visit family in Bridlington.
The landscape, which he describes as having "the sort of wide vistas you get all the time in the American west", started to become his focus around four years ago, when he started to produce watercolours - which allowed him to capture the changing moods of the weather quickly - in situ. Now he is concentrating on painting in oils. He loads up his pickup truck with his equipment and drives until he finds a spot he wants to paint. Then he absorbs the view, looking intently for a couple of hours before picking up a brush and painting quickly, with enormous concentration.
Hockney, who celebrates his 70th birthday next summer, said he was looking forward to the chance to "study in depth the Tate's extraordinary collection of Turner's watercolours. This is one of the most exciting mediums for an artist to work with." As part of his work on the Turner show, Hockney will present a selection of Turner's exploratory colour studies along with his own commentary on the artist's methods in constructing perspectives and patterns of colour and light.
Turner's watercolours have been in the limelight this year after the Tate managed to raise £4.95m to save the late masterpiece The Blue Rigi for the nation after a five-week public appeal. It will be one of the highlights of the exhibition, which will include 165 works, including Turner's beautiful studies of the Thames, which he made on the spot in notebooks.
Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, said: "This is a rare opportunity for us to mount an exhibition of Turner's greatest watercolours, which due to conservation reasons can only occasionally be exhibited. I am delighted that David Hockney has agreed to work with us on the exhibition. It will show the development of the virtuoso techniques that enabled Turner first to paint watercolours that could compete with oil paintings, and later to transform all aspects of his art by their example."
· Hockney on Turner Watercolours and David Hockney: The East Yorkshire Landscape both open at Tate Britain, London, on June 11
Saturday, April 14, 2007
JONATHAN MEESE
Idiot Savant, Genius or Charlatan?
I still don´t know what to think of this guy?
More:http://www1.janbauer.net/cfa/templates/publish.php?filename=medias-meese
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Monday, April 02, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
Kimberly Clark
FOOLISHNESS AND PASSION MAKES US LIVE
Kimberly Clark plays with her own emotions…
In a hysterical way the artist’s collective uses
clichés surrounding them: sex, party, booze, violence,
art, mythology, poetry…
Kimberly Clark mixes all these ingredients to slick
installations, in which they express their love-hate
relationship with the world they live in.
It’s 'Art with pleasure' created with passion.
Kimberly Clark is the name of the artist collective
consisting of three female artists: Josepha de Jong,
Ellemieke Schoenmaker and Iris van Dongen. Many of the
sculptures they make are inspired by ‘nocturnal
escapades’ of the women in the streets of Rotterdam,
recorded on photographs. The work they are making
right now for an exhibition in TENT Rotterdam, for
example, with the working title 'crusade, Rotterdam', is
based on two women climbing to the top of a heap of
construction waste lying in the street. One of the
women is carrying a piece of beam, the other one iron
curtain rails. The composition of the women is that of
a crucifix. A combination of trash, abundance and
devotion.
The art works consist mainly of 3 dimensional ‘human
figures’ combined with ready-made objects. Kimberly
Clark wants the works to express rawness through the
mains of humor. In a way you could say the
installations are autobiographical. At least the
artists can identify with the subjects they chose.
That explains why the collective often takes ‘the
woman’ as their point of departure. They contradiction
between the beauty of women and the rawness of the
subject creates vulnerability but at the same time
female heroine and power.
CARPE NOX
Lorna Simpson
Talking Pictures
by Vince Aletti April 2, 2007
Lorna Simpson makes photographs and films that deal with race, gender, and identity, but if that sounds forbiddingly polemical, you’ve got the wrong idea. The work in her elegantly spare mid-career survey at the Whitney never gives off the chill of haute conceptualism. From the beginning, Simpson has tempered formal sophistication (typically, a multipart arrangement of photographs and text panels) with teasing and provocative ambiguity. Her work is poetic, layered, and tantalizingly open-ended; it never tells us what to think (much less what she thinks), but it won’t allow us to slip mindlessly through its grasp. Images of hairpieces, full lips, black glass vessels, and the bodies of black men and women whose faces are turned away or otherwise obscured are fraught but surprisingly playful. If the mysteries hinted at in her films are less immediately intriguing, it’s only because they often flirt with the conventions of romantic or historical melodrama. Always going her own way, Simpson remains a model for artists who want their audience to think as freely as they do.
Monday, March 26, 2007
ARMEN ELOYAN
WIM PEETERS ON ARMEN ELOYAN
Who Killed Bambi?
WHAT is it exactly that turns Armen Eloyan’s matchstick, inflatable figures, smoking cigarette butts, drinking beer or soda from cans, and wandering aimlessly, into such powerful mementos? Is it the emptiness that lurks beneath our corporate values of security, stability and state of mind? Eloyan stands out in creating a cartoonesque vision of a classless, ageless and ‘revolutionless’ society where free will is expressed by means of the remote control. His agitation with the universalising, egalitarian promises of anodyne peace, shows us a post-historic condition that is radically different from the one that was promised to us by postmodern theory.
Armenian painter Armen Eloyan’s star is rising fast. His first gallery solo show at Bob Van Orsouw in Zurich was astounding and at last year’s Frieze Art Fair in London collectors were cursing the waiting lists, desperate to lay their hands on paintings that were already shipping to faraway destinations. Eloyan turned 40, yet only recently has his career taken a definite turn through exposure at the Kunsthalle Bern and at Van Orsouw. Today galleries and museums are standing in line around the block of his Zurich studio.
Eloyan’s paintings draw upon the endless imagination of a fantasy world, yet they are dirty, loud and grotesque in every true sense of the word. If there were to be some kind of Dionysian moment identified in contemporary culture, Eloyan’s work would not be part of it.
He is able to appropriate and successfully manipulate all the identifications that such a recycling entails: scale, impasto, roughness, even machismo. Eloyan is definitely no Apollo with a brush either. There is an anti-puritan impulse that overthrows the romantic ideals of painting as a politically correct environment.
Canvasses range from small to monumental. One character has a dick-shaped nose and wanders around in a birch tree forest. Two guys in a living room, one wearing a high cap, the other one a cap with a flap sit back in a sofa staring at an empty television screen. Maybe there’s football on. References to television, art history, propaganda, advertising and popular music all have an equally important role in the shaping of his project.
Who Killed Bambi? is the title of a Sex Pistols song that was originally the title of the first ever Sex Pistols film to be directed by the legendary Russ Meyer in 1978. Meyer never completed more than a day and a half of footage, worth only a minute in the 2000 feature The Filth and the Fury. Much like Meyer’s footage, Eloyan’s paintings contain explicitly unseductive, overtly transgressive overtones. His tableaux are constructed in a relentless, grotesque way and they envision the subversion of the banal, founding fantasies that are constructed by mainstream ‘imagineering’. The benign, soporific creatures of animation movies and fairy tales, alongside the rock and roll heroes of juke box bars, conceal the often brutal and violent underpinnings of clichéd role models in society. Eloyan adds an interesting pitch in this relationship between a fantasy world and our own lived experiences. Could it be that he is denying the legitimacy of a fantasy world that is radically different from the one we are inhabiting?
Wim Peeters Is An Independent Curator And Critic Based In Antwerp
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen's tribute to Britain's war dead features stamps bearing the soldiers' faces. Why wouldn't the MoD help him?
Adrian Searle
Monday March 12, 2007
Going to Iraq was a frustrating business from the start for Steve McQueen. The artist was flown to Basra and then not allowed to go anywhere. "I knew I'd be embedded with the troops, but I didn't imagine that meant I'd virtually have to stay in bed. It was ridiculous. We went to see some schools the army was rebuilding. I could talk to the guys but that was it." McQueen was told that if he wandered off on his own, he'd get no support. "It was too hostile an environment. Obviously for the military you are just a token artist. You're in the way."
Article continues
He was in Iraq for six days as the UK's official war artist, not nearly enough time to get acclimatised, or to begin to know what to do. The plan was that he would present work the following year. The war escalated, and McQueen still had no project, no film, no plans. The US military was approached to see if McQueen could visit Iraq again with them. The plan fell through. "Obviously, it was going to be impossible to make a film. I was living and breathing the fact that I didn't know what to do every day.
"I was thinking of something else, relaxed, sticking a stamp on my tax return in Amsterdam. The stamp had a picture of Vincent van Gogh on it. And then it hit me - a stamp has a beautiful scale, the proportions are right, the image, it is recognisable, and then it goes out into the world, who knows where. Perfect. Wonderful."
The result was For Queen and Country; unveiled in the Great Hall at Central Library, Manchester, it's a co-commission by Manchester International Festival and the Imperial War Museum. McQueen has used a large oak cabinet with sliding vertical drawers to present 98 sheets of postage stamps. Each sheet depicts a different member of the armed services who has died in the conflict, and each sheet tells us who is depicted, and when they died. The sheets are presented in the chronological order of the deaths. "Every time you pull out a sheet of stamps, there is something in the physical contact and intimacy you have with each sheet of images, and the time it takes to look at them, before replacing them and moving on. But the real point is to have the stamps made available for use."
The Royal Mail's director, Allan Leighton, has turned down a request by McQueen to have the work turned into real commemorative stamps. McQueen mixes exasperation with an acknowledgement of the absurd humour of dealing with officialdom.
"The Ministry of Defence were polite about the idea of the stamps. I gave the MoD my idea, and this man asked me, why couldn't I do a landscape? I said, 'Are you telling me you are ashamed of these people? A landscape? Hello?'
"Then they tried to stop me getting in touch with the families. So we hired a researcher. Of the 115 families we tried to contact, we got 102 responses. Four said no, and 98 said yes. We had a sort of cut-off point. We didn't want to ask people who had suffered their losses too recently. You need to give people time to grieve. And I know it is one thing to show your son or daughter in a cabinet in a library, another to put them on a stamp that you can buy and stick on a letter. But I think the majority do want it. When the families came to the unveiling, it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. People were very moved.
"This is the hardest thing I ever did," says McQueen, who was first invited to be the war artist by the Imperial War Museum's Art Commissions Committee in 2003. "Even after four years, we are not there yet. The problem is that you think people are supporting you, then you discover they're not." Resistance to McQueen's project has taken the form of delay, back-tracking and obfuscation. As soon as one obstacle disappears, another is invented. The artist went to see Leighton to discuss having the stamps used for real. "The temperature dropped as soon as we walked into the room. The next thing you know, you're on the street."
What isn't obvious is where McQueen stands in relation to the war. "Like everyone else in the country, I have my feelings about the war. But the project is the project. Strangely, it seems that for those who are against the war, my project is regarded as a good thing. For people who support the war, it is regarded as a good thing too. It is not pro or anti-war. This work is like a sphere - roll it this way, roll it that way. In the end, it is an art work.
"When we hear about all the men, women and children killed in Iraq, we are numbed to it. I'm pointing out that these people are all victims, too. What happened to them all was a consequence of their participation. The MoD try to say that such and such many soldiers died in action - they don't include or count all the people who died in friendly fire, in traffic accidents and so on. Some were suicides. They chopped them all out. They deleted them. They're all part of this war.
"Nor do I think that soldiers have to have been manning a gun emplacement with one arm tied behind their back and doing a double somersault in order to be remembered or to get a medal. An 18-year-old kid gets killed by a landmine or catches a bullet. He has contributed his life."
Logistically, how many different stamps can there be? "Why not use all of them? What's the problem? All first class. The Royal Mail will make money. Give some to the families."
A recent McQueen exhibition in Paris included an installation, Pursuit. In a dark basement, the walls were lined with mirrored plastic sheeting, and a screen in the middle of the room was lit by odd flickers that bounced off the walls. You lost yourself in the occasional reflections that come at you from all sides. There were sounds, as if someone were fighting their way through tangled undergrowth. It was utterly disorientating. McQueen has never said what he was filming. As with Queen and Country, he makes us do the work, provokes us into deciding where we stand. It is a complicated business.
But it remains difficult to fit Queen and Country into the larger context of McQueen's art. "Maybe it doesn't fit. But I have never wanted anyone tripping over my tail. If people anticipate my next move, thinking I'll turn right, I'll go left. I have never been interested in an easy narrative. I don't want to make things easy, either for the audience, or for myself"
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Olaf Holzapfel
Neue Sprachen, zweites Leben
27 March - 28 April
Galerie Gebr. Lehmann
Gorlitzer strasse 16 01099 Dresden
A n a n t J o s h i
N A V E L
One and the Many
By
A n a n t J o s h i
Preview : Tuesday 13 March 2007 6:30 - 8:30pm
Exhibition will continue until 4 April 2007 11:00am � 7:30 pm (Sunday closed)
Chemould Prescott Road
CONTEMPERORY ART GALLERY
Queens Mansion, 3rd floor
G.Talwatkar Marg (Above Yantra)
Fort, Mumbai - 400 001
Ph: 2200 0211/12
www.gallerychemould.com
gallerychemould@gmail.com
Atelier als Supermedium # 14
------------------------------------------
Atelier als Supermedium # 14 samengesteld door gerlach en koop
donderdag 15 maart 2007 vanaf 20.00 uur
Keiko Sato
Daniel Eatock
Jeroen Jongeleen
Michel François
Johannes Schwartz
Ian Kiaer
Lara Almarcegui
Ryan Gander
gerlach en koop
Atelier als Supermedium, Artists Space for Contemporary Art
Sammersweg 2, 2285 SB Den Haag, Rijswijk (eindpunt tram 16 richting Moerwijk)
Ton Schuttelaar, Machiel van Soest
Atelier als Supermedium # 14 samengesteld door gerlach en koop
donderdag 15 maart 2007 vanaf 20.00 uur
Keiko Sato
Daniel Eatock
Jeroen Jongeleen
Michel François
Johannes Schwartz
Ian Kiaer
Lara Almarcegui
Ryan Gander
gerlach en koop
Atelier als Supermedium, Artists Space for Contemporary Art
Sammersweg 2, 2285 SB Den Haag, Rijswijk (eindpunt tram 16 richting Moerwijk)
Ton Schuttelaar, Machiel van Soest
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Tintoretto’s fitful brilliance
by PETER SCHJELDAHL
Tintoretto was too good an artist for his time’s uses; he still clamors for a proper role, seeking affirmation, four centuries later. This thought came to me as whimsy, and stayed as conviction, at the Prado, in Madrid, which has just opened the second-ever retrospective (the first was in Venice, in 1937) of Jacopo Comin, who was also known as Robusti, and called Tintoretto, or “Little Dyer,” after his father’s profession. Tintoretto (1518-94) is the most mercurial of the five undisputed immortals of Venetian painting—the others being Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese—and I was eager to see the Prado show, because I have never managed to get a satisfying fix on him. How could someone so great, able to summon the world with a brushstroke, be so inconsistent in style, and, on occasion, so awful? Stupefyingly prolific, Tintoretto garnished the walls, ceilings, altars, exteriors, and even the furniture of Venice, performing commissions for free when that was what it took to edge out a rival. (He was not popular with his fellow-artists.) He brought off one of the world’s largest paintings—“Paradise” (1588-92), in the Ducal Palace, which, at seventy-two feet long and twenty-three feet high, is so vast as to be essentially unseeable—and perhaps history’s most sustained demonstration of sheer painterly talent, brimming the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, between 1564 and 1588, with pictures whose profusion and intensity burn the most concerted effort of looking to ashes. But he and his populous workshop also perpetrated some of the grimmest daubs—murky and slack—that you ever rushed past with a shudder. I realized, too late, that my puzzlement was a warning. Now I feel that I have acquired a brilliant, neurotic, exhausting friend who enjoins me to undertake on his behalf campaigns that he bungled when their conduct was up to him.
Nothing inferior taxes the eye at the Prado, which augments the cream of Tintorettos in European and American collections with a few loans from Venice, where hundreds of his paintings—including his greatest works, such as “The Miracle of the Slave” (1548)—reside immovably in churches, palaces, and galleries. The show more than overcomes doubts about presuming to assess the artist outside his home town, which he is known to have left just twice, briefly, in his life. The well-restored canvases, shown in good light, sparkle and blaze. Some make plungingly deep space with muscular figures of different sizes; your mind provides perspective that the artist didn’t deign to chart. Others array action on intersecting diagonals, along which someone is apt to be arriving from somewhere at terrific speed. (There is an old line that Tintoretto invented the movies; his ways of enkindling routine scenarios, with thrilling visual rhythms that seem to unfurl in time, endorse it.) He drew with his brush, light over dark—so that shadings came first, imparting a sumptuous density to forms that are hit with highlights like spatters of sun. He is supposed to have said that his favorite colors were black and white, but he could be every bit the startling and seductive Venetian colorist when a commission required it. With abject competitive fury, he was not above imitating the grand dragon of the Venice art world, Titian, and his designated successor, Veronese.
“As a matter of fact, he almost never takes the liberty of being himself unless someone builds up his confidence and leaves him alone in an empty room,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a 1957 essay, “The Venetian Pariah.” For Sartre, Tintoretto is an avatar of existential anguish, who was both behind his time—as the last native-born master on a scene ruled by a cosmopolitan élite—and ahead of it, as the ideal artist for a rising bourgeoisie that was too intimidated by the pomp of the ducal republic to recognize itself in his demotic trashings of aristocratic decorum. Intellectuals of the era, while in awe of Tintoretto’s gifts, scolded him for being too fast, careless, and insolent; when Vasari credited him with “the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced,” it wasn’t meant as unalloyed praise. (Vasari also called him the medium’s “worst madcap.”)
As a boy, Tintoretto is said to have entered Titian’s workshop as an apprentice but was thrown out after a few days, having either frightened the master with his aptitude or irked him with his personality; at any rate, Titian’s attitude toward him was plated with permafrost. Little is known of Tintoretto’s subsequent training. His earliest surviving work, from the early fifteen-forties, is anti-Titianesque—radically sculptural and draftsmanly, embracing Central Italian influences. Then something happened which the art historian Alexander Nagel compares to the bluesman Robert Johnson’s “going down to the crossroads and coming back with scary new powers.” “The Miracle of the Slave,” made for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, electrified Venice. Its unprecedented range of spatial, chromatic, and kinetic effect suggested a synthesis of “the disegno of Michelangelo and the coloring of Titian”—a contemporaneous formula, often cited, for ultimate greatness in painting. He was roundly hailed, though Pietro Aretino, Titian’s literary ally, added a caveat about his lack of “patience in the making.” Commissions came in bunches to the new hero, but solid status skittered out of reach.
He compensated by striving to engulf the town. Meanwhile, Titian refused to slacken his grip on preëminence, let alone die. When he finally expired, at the age of eighty-eight or so, in 1576, it brought Tintoretto no peace. Though he was now, by general consent, Italy’s leading painter, he responded with pictures as flailingly ambitious and various as ever. Three from the late fifteen-seventies triumph in as many styles. In “The Rape of Helen,” the hauntingly lovely captive languishes in the corner of a churning land-sea battle scene, with scores of figures, ranging in size from huge to tiny, which you can all but hear and smell. In “Tarquin and Lucretia,” the naked, lividly fleshy protagonists struggle at the edge of a bed, toppling a sculpture and breaking a necklace that rains pearls. The woman’s right hand seems to extend from the canvas, as if to be grasped by a rescuing viewer. (The Baroque, which took hold two decades later, with Caravaggio, can seem an edited ratification of tendencies already developed by Tintoretto.) “The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence” is a sketchy and fierce nightmare of death by roasting, with an anticipatory whiff of Goya. Tintoretto strongly influenced El Greco, blazed trails for Rubens, and fascinated Velázquez, who acquired his paintings for Philip IV.
“What is a Tintoretto?” the art historian Robert Echols asks in the show’s catalogue. The answer might be almost anything touched with genius and a strange, thorny, dashing humor. Tintoretto was reported to be a witty man who never smiled. What is his “Susannah and the Elders” (1555-56) if not a grand lark? A luxuriant, glowing nude sits outdoors, surrounded by a glittering still-life of jewelry and implements of beauty, and is ogled by dirty old men (one pokes his bald pate, at ground level, practically out of the canvas) from behind a hedge that forms part of a corridor-like recession into the far background. There are distant little ducks, and the rear end of a stag. But the picture’s form is too disorienting to sustain any particular response, including amusement. The backstage space outside the hedge ignores the unity of the central perspective, bespeaking a world that rolls away in all directions, indifferent to pocket realms of mythic anecdote. The effect is stirring and confusing. “Who is Tintoretto’s viewer?” strikes me as the really compelling question. No other great artist before modern times, in which shifting contingency affects every enterprise, seems less certain of whom he is addressing, and why. It might as well be you or me as some cinquecento ingrate, and, if we happen to think of people we know who may be interested, the artist encourages us to contact them without delay.
Friday, February 09, 2007
the abundance-Ton Schuttelaar
the abundance
Ton Schuttelaar
Supermedium
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Thursday, February 08, 2007
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Worse than we thought
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