The Social Media Phenomenon (aka Naked Men)

24 hours ago, I was in Chelsea to see two exhibitions: Jeff Miller's show "Through the Looking-Glass: Alter Egos & Others" at the Atlantic Gallery; and "The Young and Evil" curated by Jarrett Earnest at David Zwirner. Soon afterward, I posted on my Instagram account pictures showing installation views and object shots from both shows. Whenever I post on Instagram, the norm for me is about 50-60 likes. Occasionally, it goes up to the 80+, and I've had about 4 posts that were liked by over 100 people. Let's face it: despite some personal "fans" (you are reading this right now!), I'm not a social media phenomenon, nor have I ever aspired to be. So you can probably imagine my complete shock and surprise how--only 24 hours later--I now have over 1,300 likes on my Instagram post about the exhibition at David Zwirner. I am literally stunned by this and--dare I say--even a little disturbed by it. I said to AA at least twice today "post a picture of a painting of a naked man..." Clearly that has something to do with it. But there has to be something else going on. I wonder if it is some sort of algorithm, pushing the image higher in the search for people or coming up randomly on people's Instagram posts because friends-of-friends-of-friends are liking it, and it's growing exponentially as a result. I don't think my hashtags (e.g. #queerart #stonewall50 etc.) are that special, but maybe I'm wrong. It has occurred to me that perhaps the gallery is somehow actively pushing the feed, but I don't see how they could do that. In any case, it's all completely bizarre how over 1,300 people I have never met, who live everywhere in the world, are liking these pictures. A few have commented and asked questions, so I've helped identify the works and responded to them. Some have started following me now, which is how this is supposed to work I imagine, and I in turn have chosen to follow a few back.

What is fantastic about the exhibition (which has now closed--yesterday was the last day) is that it presents a number of pictures never published before and rarely, if ever, seen by the public, all depicting works of art by a group of gay male artists (and women close to them) who were all active in the 1930s and 1940s in New York City.  The artists on view include Paul Cadmus, Jared French, George Platt Lynes, George Tooker, and so on. The style of art is largely figurative, somewhat surrealist, frequently provocative (and unapologetically so), and using older painting techniques out of favor at the time (e.g. tempera paint). Ultimately, it presents an alternative canon of American art, and it challenges the modernist tendencies that lean towards abstraction and social realism--art movements almost completely dominated by heterosexual men, culminating in the mid-century, uber-macho-modernity of Abstract Expressionism (i.e. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, etc.). One of the artists who has been underappreciated and clearly comes to the foreground in the show is the Russian-born artist Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957). The image you see above is by him: The Lion Boy, 1936-37, gouache on paper mounted onto canvas. The stark hyperrealism of the muscular, blonde youth whose mane-like hair bursts from his body even more strongly than that from his head is without a doubt incredibly startling to see. The fact that it is uncomfortable for some to even see it now, or the fact that so many others are enamored of it because of its eroticism, reinforces how unusual such images are in our society. Would anyone have reacted the same way if it was a painting of a nude woman with blonde hair? I doubt it. Even if it were a spectacular painting, I can't imagine that it would have generated over 1,300 likes just 24 hours after I had posted the picture.

Going back to Jeff Miller's show, if you're in the NYC area, you should go see his show too before it closes next week. Like the other exhibition profiling gay male artists, Miller exhibits his own interpretation of the idealized male body. His drawings have a fascinating energy to them, and his hyperrealistic sculptures play with ideas of ego and superego in their doubling effect. So far, though, the post of his pictures on Instagram has only generated about 40 likes in 24 hours. The thing is, that is actually a great number! But when compared to the other post, it just demonstrates that there is something more going on that has to explain how the other post has literally shot through the social media roof.

First Snowfall: 2018-2019 Fall/Winter

The meteorologists had predicted some snow flurries for the NYC area today, with most of the actual snow heading further north and west. Well, imagine everyone's surprise when the snow actually starting sticking and didn't go away! Yes, today was our first snowfall of the 2018-2019 fall/winter season. I was stuck in my office working through most of it, so I didn't get to take pictures. AA, however, was working from home, so he took this picture you see here during the afternoon hours when the snow was coming down pretty heavily. It was a very wet snow, and by the end of the day had turned into slushy ice-like rain that was very slippery. Nothing too pretty about that kind of snowfall today!

It seemed rather ironic to me, then, that here we are freezing and getting iced by Mother Nature, when right in the heart of NYC at Rockefeller Center, Christie's auction house this evening broke the record for the most money a work of art by a living artist ever sold at auction: the hammer price went for $90m! The painting is the one you see here, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972, by that grand dame of a British queen, David Hockney. According to The New York Times, "The painting was executed during a three-month period of intense creativity after the artist broke up with his American art student lover, Peter Schlesinger. Many viewers assume that the scene is set in California, where Mr. Hockney has lived for decades. But the canvas was painted in London, based on photographs taken at a pool in the South of France." I was fortunate to have seen this painting at the recent Hockney exhibition at The Met, and it was the star of the show, an exquisite composition with incredible color, without a doubt one of Hockney's best works. And now with the price tag to match. Oh, but to jump in that pool right now, instead of bundling up with the heater on beside me...

New Solomon Records

For those of us who love and appreciate Simeon Solomon's paintings and drawings, yesterday and today were major days in the auction world. Yesterday, 26 Solomon drawings and watercolors went up for auction from a single collection at Christie's London, all of them selling in the range of £2,600 to £38,000. Today, though, at Sotheby's London, there was a sale of nine Solomon paintings and drawings in the Victorian sale. These works came from two different collections, and the sale broke not just one but two sale records. Up to now, the record was held by the sale two years ago of his watercolor A Prelude by Bach (A Song), 1868, which sold for £182,500. The painting you see above, Habet!, has broken that record. 

This painting has often been considered his best work, not so much by reviewers at the time, but by his colleagues and friends like William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and subsequent art historians. Painted and then exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, the picture depicts a group of ancient Roman women having different reactions to a gladiator fight in the arena. The painting's first owner was Charles P. Matthews, a brewer who had homes in London and Essex, England, and it was sold at the auction of his estate after his death at Christie's London on June 6, 1891. It was sold then for 21 guineas. Around a century ago, it was purchased by the grandparents of the owner who sold it today, and surprisingly was actually "lost" for most of the 20th century, having only been "found" in the mid-1990s. Today that same family sold the painting, and it earned £370,000 including premium. As I've mentioned in the past, as compared to his fellow Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian painters, this is still relatively low (some major paintings by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti go for over £1m these days). Nevertheless, this was a satisfactory acknowledgment of his work and has helped reaffirm his importance in this canon of Victorian painters.

Also by Solomon up for sale today was this picture, the 1867 watercolor version of Bacchus, that he painted when he was in Rome, finishing it in London once he was home. In some ways this painting best epitomizes Solomon's style and subject matter, showing the god of wine as a sensual youth half-dressed, basking in the sun. The homoerotics of this painting are self-evident, and in many ways has become an important subject in discussing Solomon's own homosexual identity and how he frequently depicted youthful males as objects of beauty at this time. The picture was estimated to sell for £50,000-£70,000, but I knew it would sell for much more. It set the record for the second-highest work by Solomon sold at auction, coming in at £237,500 including premium. Two works on paper did not sell at today's auction, because they didn't meet their minimum estimate, but I think between these two big-ticket items and all the works sold yesterday at Christie's there was a sense of exhaustion. I don't think there's ever been this many Solomons up for sale at the same time, so this certainly made for an interesting two days of sales. To read more posts on this blog about the Solomon family painters, click here.

Solomon's Arrest in Paris

Exactly 140 years ago in Paris, on Friday, April 18, 1874, the 33-year-old Anglo-Jewish artist Simeon Solomon was sentenced to 3 months in prison for "mutually indulging in obscene contact in public" with 17-year-old Henri Lefranc (aka Raphael-Maximillien Dumont), both having been arrested in a public urinal at the Place de la Bourse on March 4. One often doesn't think to commemorate an event such as this, particularly since it isn't as well-known as Solomon's previous arrest for the same crime in London the year beforehand. Both arrests attest to the secrecy and danger male lovers faced at a time when same-sex passion was a criminal act. Credit goes to historian William Peniston for first uncovering the documentation of this arrest, and my colleague Carolyn Conroy has expanded on Peniston's research. It's actually rather surprising that biographers and art history has chosen to forget about the Parisian arrest. His friend and collector Robbie Ross (himself later buried with Oscar Wilde) wrote about Solomon in his obituary that he: "used to boast that he had been in prison in every country in Europe; but besides London there is no evidence that he was arrested elsewhere than in Paris, where he was detained three months." Solomon's artistic productivity in 1874 was blunted by this time in prison; nevertheless, he produced that year this beautiful drawing you see above, Until the Day Break and the Shadows Flee Away, a quote from the Song of Solomon 2:17 (King James Version). The image you see here is a Frederick Hollyer platinum print photograph of the drawing from the collection of the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

For more information:
Carolyn Conroy, "'He Hath Mingled with the Ungodly': The Life of Simeon Solomon after 1873 with a Survey of the Extant Work" (Ph.D. Diss., University of York, 2009).

William A. Peniston, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004).

Robert Ross, "A Note on Simeon Solomon," Westminster Gazette (August 24, 1905).

15 Minutes Are Over

The pictures above and below are installation views of my one-day exhibition "15 Minutes: Andy Warhol's Photographic Legacy," which was held outside the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia yesterday, April 4th. I blogged about this here a few weeks ago. I decided to make the exhibition more archival and less traditionally "museum"-like in its arrangement, largely because the more I looked at the Polaroids and black-and-white silver gelatin prints (156 total in the collection), the more ideas about what the images said to the viewer and to each other struck me as an interesting way to display them. For instance, I juxtaposed works that questioned aspects of masculinity and femininity, incorporating photographs of a woman with her baby and Halston's lover Victor Hugo carrying a beach ball under his robe simulating pregnancy. I incorporated one Polaroid of a drag queen named Kim from the Ladies and Gentlemen series. I also played with ideas of age and beauty, laying out a not-so-flattering collection of Polaroids of Lola Jacobson beside a runway fashion show photograph. And then I explored fame through Polaroids of well-known individuals in the collection, including Princess Caroline, Dolly Parton, and Dorothy Hamill (see below), but I also included elsewhere "unidentified" people to suggest how his photographs gave unknowns an equal amount of 15 minutes of fame. My staff in Art Properties (Larry & Lillian) deserve due credit for working hard on mounting the boards and creating the labels.

The public program was a great success. We wound up standing-room-only (200+), which was a fantastic surprise. My talk lasted 5 minutes (see below), then Deborah Cullen introduced each of the Warhol speakers, who couldn't help but go on longer than 15 minutes, although they all managed to introduce in their allotted time interesting thoughts about the significance of Warhol and his work, in its historical day and now. Blake Gopnik explored the mysterious origins of the quote attributed to Warhol on "15 minutes of fame," suggesting there is little evidence (or is there?) for Warhol ever having said it. Neil Printz gave a fantastic talk on Warhol's art work and brought in the Polaroids a lot to demonstrate how they related to Warhol's different projects. Larissa Harris spoke about the upcoming Warhol exhibition at Queens Museum of Art, and Tom Kalin discussed his own film projects and the influence of Warhol on him and his work. All in all, it went well, and the I think we were all satisfied with the results and feedback. I admit I was a little dismayed that by the time I got to the reception there was no more wine left (!!!!), and, since I had to take down the exhibition, it was getting late, etc., I did not get a chance to hear the chat between Peter Brant and Urs Fischer, but I was told it was another full house. Considering I am in no way a Warhol expert, let alone a contemporary art specialist, overall I think I can say things turned out pretty well. Below is the text of my "5 minutes" of fame. Admittedly parts of it only make sense in reference to the PowerPoint presentation I showed, but I think you get the basic gist of what I was trying to say.

15 Minutes: Andy Warhol's Photographic Legacy

Roberto C. Ferrari

Good Afternoon. As the Curator of Art Properties at Columbia University, I also would like to welcome you to this program today, and tell you how excited we are to be able to showcase a curated selection of the photographic works by Andy Warhol from our permanent collection. Art Properties is based in Avery Library, and our department acts as the steward for the approximately 15,000 works of fine and decorative art that have been donated to Columbia since its foundation over 250 years ago. The exhibition component of our program is located in display cases outside the Wallach Art Gallery. If you have not had a chance to see the exhibition, you will have time after the round-table discussion. I would like to thank my staff in Art Properties, as well as my colleagues in Avery and the Wallach Art Gallery, for their assistance in making this exhibition come together. And, as a reminder, be sure to engage with all forms of social media using #WarholColumbia this afternoon. If he were alive today, Warhol likely would have been a prominent Tweeter and shot numerous digital photos with his iPhone.

Indeed, our technology-driven social world is arguably linked to our obsession with pop culture, celebrity, and glamour. The opportunity for fame through reality television, selfies, Twitter, and Instagram owes much of its success to the cult of celebrity spawned by Andy Warhol. The artist reportedly once said, “in the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes,” and through his art Warhol ensured that everyone—the famous, the infamous, and the mundane—all had 15 minutes of fame. Our exhibition echoes this time-based ideology as a one-day event, giving you, the public, a mere glimpse—a snapshot, if you will—of Warhol’s photographs at Columbia. These works in our collection were a gift from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of their Photographic Legacy Program, which began in 2007 when the Foundation made the decision to disseminate to Columbia and numerous other institutions selections of photographs in an effort to share Warhol’s artistic legacy. Columbia received 106 Polaroids and 50 black-and-white silver gelatin prints, and I am pleased to announce that this year we also acquired an extension of this gift with six large silkscreen prints. Among these is this image of Martha Graham, which Warhol created from a 1940 photograph by Barbara Morgan, demonstrating Warhol’s interest not only in his own photography, but that of others, as sources for his artistic interpretations.

Warhol shot Polaroids during the 1970s and ‘80s, primarily as studies for the portrait paintings he made at that time. An artist-friend of mine recently commented that Warhol used his camera like a drawing instrument, and certainly in utilizing photographs as studies for paintings he was following the historical legacy of painters since the Renaissance. Art historians see drawings as glimpses into the artist’s mind at work; similarly, Warhol’s Polaroids allow us to emulate what he saw through the lens of his camera. Individually, his Polaroids personify idealized types: models and movie stars, royalty and rock stars, swindlers and socialites, all of them ready for their proverbial close-ups, posed and displayed as emblems of glamor, fame, and fortune. Collectively, however, these same photographs reveal the mechanics of an artist at work, as if on an assembly line. They show all the ticks and quirks of the sitters, and they do not always flatter them. The instantaneity of the Polaroid allowed Warhol to act spontaneously and waste film in an effort to find the right image that he ultimately chose as worthy of becoming one of his squared portraits, painted in multiples in a hyperbolic display of colors, all churned out by Factory assistants.

Unlike the glam of the Polaroids, Warhol’s black-and-white prints seem more documentary in nature. They reveal snippets of Warhol’s quotidian existence…touristy pictures and vapid interiors…candid paparazzi shots and scenes of yet another party. They have their own aesthetic, and certainly warrant further study. But what strikes me most about these prints and Polaroids are the messages they send when shuffled and juxtaposed against one another. These are some of the themes you will find in the exhibition upstairs. For instance, why is aging so ugly, in need of white cover up? And why is young and blonde so idealized and beautiful? How does society judge femininity? What exactly ‘makes’ a man? And how do you judge those who are somewhere sexually in-between? Are these charming socialites or elitist snobs? And are there any limits as to who or what can win fame, or even how one achieves it?

We live in a society where glamor, fame, and fortune are pandemic, but they can only flourish because of the image. Paparazzi or selfie, it is how one maintains celebrity. Warhol understood this and utilized the image above almost everything else to propagate the cult of celebrity, for without a face, anyone is just another name. Warhol’s photographic legacy is the cult of celebrity, an enticement for all of us to strive for our own 15 minutes of fame. Thank you.

15 Minutes

One of the great surprises of my new position at Columbia is that there is such a vast array of works in the Art Properties collection that I'm often surprised what I may be working on. Take, for instance, the photography of Andy Warhol (1928-1987). I certainly would never claim to be a specialist on Warhol's work, but I can certainly recognize aspects of glamour, celebrity, and fame that his photographs conjure up for viewers. His famous phrase "In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes" clearly continues to resonate in our fame-obsessed world today, from reality TV to Twitter and YouTube. His Polaroids and black-and-white prints are visual evidence of his own attempt not only to apotheosize the mundane and unknown, but exploit the famous for their glam as sham.

On April 4, 2014, Columbia University will hold a 1-day exhibition (curated by me!) of photographs by Warhol and host a public program of talks about Warhol's legacy and the cult of fame, fashion, portraiture, and so on. Our keynote speaker is the Swiss-born contemporary artist Urs Fischer, and there will be a round-table discussion by Warhol specialists: Neil Printz, Blake Gopnik, Larissa Harris, and Tom Kalin. As for the exhibition of his photographs, why only 1 day? It's in the spirit of his "15 minutes" of fame ideology...present for the moment, gone before you know it. This program is a joint venture between my department, the School of the Arts, the Wallach Art Gallery, the Art History & Archaeology Dept., and sponsored by the Brant Foundation Art Study Center. For more information and to RSVP, go to  http://library.columbia.edu/locations/avery/art-properties/WarholatColumbia.html. And follow news at the collection, exhibition, and program on Twitter and other social networks, #WarholColumbia.

Image Credit: Andy Warhol, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Princess Caroline of Monaco, 1983, Polacolor ER, Art Properties, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2008.6.18).

Solomon's Vision

On Monday, February 10, 2014, Bonhams Los Angeles sold at auction a rare book that anyone who is a follower of Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) and the Pre-Raphaelites would have loved to own…including me. However, it was clearly above my income bracket, as it sold for the amazing price of $17,500! The good news about this is that I know who the winning buyer was, and I’m delighted to hear this person was successful in the bid, for this treasure of a book will go to a good home and be available for scholars in the near future. The seller had been in touch with my fellow Solomaniac Carolyn Conroy and me about this book for a few months already, so we were very eager to know how things would progress with this sale.

The image you see here is the cover of the book, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, written by Solomon and published by F. S. Ellis for him in 1871 (i.e. self-published with Ellis). There were a small number of these beautifully-bound copies of his prose-poem published at the time, mostly for him to give away to his friends, so they are already unique on the market. (A search in WorldCat shows that only 16 libraries in the US, Canada, and the UK have copies.) What makes this particular copy even more special is that it was the one owned by the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909). Inside, it is inscribed in the author’s handwriting: “With S. Solomon’s affectionate regards / to his friend, A. C. Swinburne / March 1871.” As a personal copy given by the author to his friend, it’s a lovely complement to another copy that once belonged to the painter Edward Burne-Jones, which is now at the University of Rochester.

Solomon and Swinburne were for many years a “dynamic duo” in 1860s Pre-Raphaelitism. They probably met through Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Burne-Jones around 1862, and the two young men quickly took a liking to one another, Solomon (photo right) a Jewish youth with unkempt hair, a beard, and sad eyes, Swinburne a slender fop with a bush of red hair (photo below). One of the most audacious anecdotes ever told about them is that Rossetti came home one day to discover Swinburne chasing Solomon down the stairs, and both of them were naked. All that said, it is doubtful they were ever lovers. Biographers tend to see Swinburne as an auto-erotic who indulged in flagellation and birching. But combined with Solomon’s homosexuality, history saw fit to mix the two as sexual deviants of the Victorian era. Solomon is credited these days with being one of the first artists to depict the ancient Greek poetess Sappho as a lesbian (see, for instance, the Tate's Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene), and this imagery was clearly part of the working association he had with Swinburne, who wrote poetry about Sappho in a similar way. Solomon also illustrated Swinburne’s birching tales, such as Lesbia Brandon, drawings one can see in the collections of the British Library. With their friendship blooming, Solomon spent the 1860s painting provocative male figures and exhibited them at the Royal Academy and the Dudley Gallery, while Swinburne scandalized readers with the first edition of his Poems and Ballads (1866) with odes written for and about sado-masochistic women.

A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep is seen today as an early example of gay literature, and indeed it was republished in its entirety most recently in Chris White’s edited anthology Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 1999). Expressing the physical and emotional angst of different types of love, Solomon’s text has come to be seen as a paean to same-sex passion at a time when one could not express this kind of love in society. At the time of its publication, however, his prose-poem was seen by reviewers as an artist’s statement for his highly symbolic, personalized imagery that drew on ancient mysticism—ephebic gods of love, angels, and love-struck youths—figures that populated his paintings such as Love in Autumn and Sacramentum Amoris and often left viewers confused as to what they meant. Discouraging reviews of the prose-poem appeared in the Athenaeum and the Jewish Chronicle, but John Addington Symonds (later a champion for same-sex passion) wrote a laudatory review in the Academy. Swinburne also wrote a review (at Solomon’s request) and it appeared in the first issue of the Dark Blue. Sadly, Solomon was less than pleased with Swinburne’s review, concerned that it gave the wrong impression of Solomon’s symbolic meaning. In retrospect it seems safe to speculate from some of their letters that this may have been the beginning of the rupture in their friendship.

After Solomon’s arrest in 1873 for homosexual crimes, Swinburne was among his former friends who outright rejected and distanced himself from Solomon, probably fearing for his own public reputation. Years afterward, when he was desperate for money, Solomon reportedly tried to sell off some of Swinburne’s more salacious letters, for which the now-reformed and alcohol-temperate Swinburne never forgave him. Swinburne’s letters to Solomon have never been found and probably were destroyed at some point. However, many of Solomon’s letters to Swinburne do still exist and were published in a few books, most recently Terry Meyers’s edited Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Pickering & Chatto, 2005). The letters reveal hints of their secret adventures, occasionally written in coded language. More boldly in 1871, just two months after the publication of Vision, Solomon wrote letters to Swinburne about the trial of the famous cross-dressers Thomas Ernest “Stella” Boulton and FrederickWilliam “Fanny” Parke. The friendship of Solomon and Swinburne lasted less than a decade, but it produced a fruitful, creative relationship that clearly benefited both of them in art and literature. This particular copy of Vision that has just been sold is rather special then. It records a moment in time at the apex of their relationship when this talented duo respected one another and were close, actively learning from one another. After this moment, things changed, and this book and its inscription now forever commemorate a relationship where each was able to say, for a short period of time, “affectionate regards” to a friend.

UPDATE 3/2/14: I can now announce with some excitement who won the auction for this rare copy of Solomon's 1871 prose-poem, dedicated to Swinburne. The book now resides in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library. Mark Samuels Lasner has spent much of his life amassing one of the best private collections of Victorian literature, manuscripts, and drawings. He has been incredibly generous in providing access to works in his collection for researchers (myself included), and he has exhibited his collection widely to encourage further scholarship. His long-term plan of making the collection accessible through the University of Delaware Library means scholars worldwide will be able to have access to these rare and excellent items for ages to come. I can't think of a better home for this special copy of Solomon's little book.

NECBS 2013

On Friday I headed up to the University of Connecticut in Storrs for the 2013 Northeast Conference on British Studies. I had never been there before, but I had heard that it was in the middle of nowhere and a rather charming campus. Both are true, and if you like being in the middle of nowhere in a small university town, then UConn is a place to consider. Not for me, however, but it was good to see a new place anyway, even if I had to take a 2-hour train to New Haven, then rent a car and drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic for nearly 2 more hours. Alas, because I had to return the car in New Haven before the agency closed, I wasn't able to stay for much of the conference, so I really can assess just what I experienced, which wasn't much.

I was there to read a queer-interpretation paper on the sculpture you see here, John Gibson's Mars Restrained by Cupid, 1819-25, a commission he received from the 6th Duke of Devonshire for his planned sculpture gallery at Chatsworth. I had given a less-organized (in retrospect) version of a paper on this same sculpture back in 2010 in Montreal at the British Queer History Conference (which I first blogged about here and talked more about the conference here). This current talk was an opportunity to polish up my presentation with a few new ideas. I was part of a panel session with 2 other NYers, our panel focusing on the role of British aristocratic patronage in the visual arts. Randolph Trumbach (Baruch Coll.) spoke first about the use (or dismissal) of images of Jesus with St. John in Last Supper scenes, as they moved from Italy to England during the period of the Reformation. Note that his paper was intended to be provocative in its homoerotic, iconographic approach; indeed, there has been scholarship on the so-called "queer Christ" image that includes him embracing on his lap the young St. John, to sensualized Crucifixion scenes (see also the great art historian Leo Steinberg's infamous book The Sexuality of Christ, which I mentioned here when Steinberg died). Although Trumbach is a well-respected scholar on the history of homosexuality, this was his admitted first foray into art history, and...well...it needs work. I have a great deal of respect for his past scholarship and publications. But this situation is not uncommon, when someone outside of art history chooses to explore so-called Visual Culture. Without art historical training, the "image" becomes merely a representation that, without proper contextualization in the making of art or its social historical construction, can easily be misread. His paper has future merit in his exploration of a changing iconographic theme, once he has a better grasp of exploring the background context for how the iconographic image was created and why it evolved over time.

And before it seems as if I am being hypercritical and not self-reflective, allow me to also say that I'm discovering more and more (frustratingly so) that my own explorations into queer-themed scholarship are often met with a lack of support and high levels of criticism. You would think one's (gay male) peers would encourage scholarship of any kind, but the essentialist/existentialist divide in gay studies/queer theory still creates an incredible sense of alienation. The essentialists want historical facts that "he" was gay and couldn't care less about theory; the existentialists dismiss anything as "gay" before the late 19th-century, when they argue homosexual identities came to exist for the first time. How then does one explore the middle-ground, which is how I work? It's a challenge, I must say, and I've found myself having to defend my work more often than not, and most often to other gay male scholars. (AA kindly stated they were jealous of what I had done. I appreciate the sentiment, but that isn't it. I do think some gay male scholars are simply catty bitches, but I would never claim my work is that good. I know it needs work. However, I also recognize that because it is in the in-between place, a moderate take that draws both on essentialism and existentialism, the extremists on either end just can't buy into this position because it doesn't satisfy their beliefs, practices, or perspectives.)  OK, that was a long-winded diatribe off-topic. Moving on with the conference...

Ching-Jung Chen's (City College) paper on 2 "conversation piece" paintings from 1732, commissioned by competing branches of the Wentworth family, was interesting. I like how she "read" so much iconography in these often understudied types of paintings and how they could tell the viewer so much about the families represented. The other panel session I attended also addressed of sexuality in 19th/20th-century British cultural history. Ruby Daily (Univ VT) gave a rather fun talk about the image of the governess as both a victim and a dominatrix (flagellation!) in Victorian literature and popular press illustrations. Brian Lewis (McGill) gave an excellent presentation about George Ives and his secret society, the Order of the Chaeronea, arguably one of the earliest gay-rights movements. Finally Paul Deslandes (Univ VT) spoke about the role of beauty and physique magazines in the 1950s/60s Britain. After a quick lunch, I had to head back to the City. It would have been good to hear more presentations, but alas it wasn't meant to be.

UPDATE 10/8/13: Ever since I published this post, I've been meaning to come back and do some editing. I've since decided not to edit what I've written, but add a follow-up comment. The feedback that I have received about this post has been both supportive and critical. Allow me to first say that in jumping from my discussion of Trumbach's paper to my diatribe on my personal reception of gay/queer interpretation was not related, so I didn't mean to suggest that it was. I'm still not exactly sure what led me to do proselytize about gay/queer studies, but clearly it was a personal sentiment I was feeling the need to express. I realize some might see what I've said as being defensive; but I'm also being honest about how I've felt working in this area of discourse, so I'm not going to sugar-coat that. (That said, to quote TM, one of my more sympathetic Facebook friends and colleagues, "Alas, it's not advisable to stand between two barricades when there is still some shooting.") As for Trumbach's paper, I don't mean to suggest that his paper and thesis were bad or not interesting. He has a solid working thesis that is worth pursuing and I look forward to seeing how he continues to work on this topic. One of his more interesting points was not only how or why the change in St. John occurred, but also how it manifested itself in English Reformation culture, in contrast to Counter-Reformation continental representations. My concern written here was more with how his images did not successfully communicate his thesis. If the image selection were fine-tuned and more time spent looking at a smaller number of images as exemplars of the thesis, then the overall presentation would have been--and would be--even stronger. I stand by what I said about numerous scholars in Visual Culture who have used images as merely illustrations of a thesis without understanding the making of the art object, which is critical to the understanding of how images are part of a culture's development.

CAA 2013 Recap

The annual College Art Association conference is still taking place this week. However, I'm thoroughly engrossed in finishing up my dissertation, so I just went today and heard a number of papers, some quite interesting. (Click here for the recap from Los Angeles last year.) The painting you see here is a portrait of the Countess of Charolais (1695-1758) dressed as a Franciscan friar, painted by the Rococo artist Charles-Joseph Natoire (image: Wikimedia Commons). This was the subject of a paper given by Melissa Percival (Univ Exeter) that I thought made some fascinating points. The Countess was notorious in 18th-century France for her romantic liaisons, but refused to marry, so she was seen as a rebel bucking tradition. This is just one of a number of portraits that depict her wearing a friar's monk, called in French "en Cordelier," referring to the knotted cord associated with the friars. What makes this portrait different from others showing her dressed as a friar is that this one plays out a balance of masculine and feminine traits, as if suggesting her more sexually aggressive sensibilities and anti-traditional attitudes. The knot itself is suggestive of the bonds of sexual union, and the way she holds it suggests a phallic symbol, reinforced by the phallic spoon in the cup of cocoa. These are all Percival's thoughts on the portrait. What made her talk more interesting was that she suggested it would be too easy to assume transgender roles were at play here. Dressing up in costumes was normal for 18th-century French aristocrats, and priest/nun costumes were quite popular. Percival suggests then that we shouldn't leap to conclusions about cross-gender appropriation just because she's dressed as a friar in these numerous paintings; rather, it is this particular painting that is unique of them all, in that it has symbols that say more about her sexual interests, and as such was likely meant for private consumption than public display. In looking up more about the Countess, I couldn't help but chuckle to find out that she was buried in a convent for Carmelite nuns.

Percival's paper was part of an open panel session on French Art, 1715-1789. Judy Sund (Queens/Graduate Center--one of my favorite ex-professors) gave a great paper entitled "The Chinese Elephant: Unpacking an Improbable Pachyderm," in which she explored the image of the white elephant seen in Chinoiserie designs from the late 17th- and early 18th-century. She argued that there was a greater absorption of Siamese/Thai culture than previously understood or thought, in the general misconstruing of what "China" actually meant at that time. Ultimately she argued for the broader sensibility of exoticism as a world of fantastic recreations rather than reality. My colleague David Pullins (Harvard), whom I met in 2011 at the Artist's Studio in Britain workshop (see my blog posts here, here, here, and here), gave a well-researched paper on the 18th-century French printmaker Gabriel Huquier (1695-1772). I didn't hear the other papers on the panel, but it was chaired by Colin Bailey (Frick Collection), whose own paper on Fragonard's Progress of Love series at the Frick I wrote about in the 2011 CAA recap.

My friend and fellow GCer Jennifer Favorite gave a paper entitled "Creative Time in the Age of Bush: The Public Art Institution as Agent of Political Response" in a panel session on Art and "The War on Terror": Ten Years On. The room was packed with people at this panel session, so I really had a difficult time hearing her paper, which I regret, although I don't think I know any of the artists whose works she showed (maybe too contemporary for me!). The other panel session I went to was For and Against Homoeroticism: Artists, Authors, and the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name, which was co-chaired by my friend Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (Univ Louisville) and colleague Christopher Reed (Penn State)--whom you may recall I worked with back in 2010 in Montreal at the British Queer History conference. My colleague and friend Richard Kaye (Hunter/GC) gave a paper on 20th-century interpretations of St. Sebastian imagery, and I really liked what he covered with regard to Frida Kahlo and the idea of how women artists appropriate this male homoerotic icon. Andrew Stephenson (Univ East London) spoke about "beach" culture and gay poses in the paintings of Christopher Wood (in Cornwall) and David Hockney (in southern California). The paper by Michael Yonan (Univ Missouri-Columbia), entitled "Outing Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, or Ernst Kris's Creative Homophobia" was an interesting presentation about a mid-20th-century psychoanalytic art paper about the late 18th-century sculptor's physiognomic busts and how they supposedly represented the sculptor's suppressed homosexuality. Messerschmidt really was an amazing sculptor, as you can tell from the bust you see here (fondly titled Afflicted with Constipation; image: Neue Galerie). The 2010-11 exhibition on him was superb! Yonan's paper was less about Messerschmidt, however, and more about Kris, with Yonan arguing that the art historian, from Vienna, had to prove himself to the Freudians working in post-WWII American academia, so he purposely modeled his scholarship on Sigmund Freud's essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in which Freud psychoanalyzed Leonardo as a latent homosexual. I wish Yonan had gone a little further with all of this, including exploring how it differed from Kris's other writings, but perhaps all will be revealed in a future publication. That's all the papers I heard today, but I also did some socializing and networking, which is really what these conferences are all about.

Four More for Forty-Four

Four years ago, I blogged briefly about Barack Obama becoming our 44th President, and I followed up with my thoughts on the day of his inauguration. (I also couldn't resist reviewing the cultural events of the inauguration.) Regular bklynbiblio readers know that I intentionally avoid blogging about politics because I think others do it much better than I, and because politics is frequently divisive and painful I choose not to engage with it. That said, the election is a time for reflection, and so I thought I'd take a few moments to write about why I'm thrilled that America has reelected Obama. He may have won the electoral vote (as of now, 303 to 206), but he just barely won the popular vote (50% to 48%). Clearly Obama has a long road ahead of him that is going to be filled with obstacles. He will have to be steadfast on some issues, and make great allowances on others. Admittedly, he may not have a very successful second term at all. And yet I'm still thrilled that he was reelected.

During Obama's January 2009 inauguration, I wrote the following: "I'm not so naive as to think that Obama is a magician whose going to make all our problems go away, nor do I think he's a miracle worker who will heal all our woes. But I do believe that Obama brings a sense of education and righteousness and charisma that makes me believe in the possibility that our problems will dissipate and our ills go away. That belief is what we need right now, more than ever." Do I still believe that? Yes, but with some hesitation based on the past four years. According to critics, Obama's two major strikes against him during his first term have been his inability to successfully reinvigorate the economy and his move toward socialized health care. Do I agree with these critics? Perhaps, although I'm more sympathetic on his health care reforms than I am on his economic recovery. Clearly Obama isn't an economist or a financial expert or a business entrepreneur. That said, I'm not sure that even if he were any of these that he would have done a better job (note: if he were any of these things, he probably would have been a Republican). I'm not convinced that Obama or Romney or anyone in the government has the answers to fixing the economy. Personally, I think Obama and Congress need to create a non-partisan think-tank of economists, financial specialists, and business executives--people who are not in or running for political office!--and have them hash out ideas and make recommendations as to how to jump-start the economy. There has to be a middle ground between all the stalled attempts between Republicans and Democrats to fix the economy, and I can't help but feel that this middle ground is comprised of individuals who are knowledgeable from hands-on experience and (more importantly) are not in political office. As for health care, to me this is a no-brainer. Health care and insurance costs are astronomically high, and everyone is entitled to reasonably priced medical assistance. The obvious option is for the government to place restrictions on health care costs, but that will never happen because no one would allow the government to monitor and control the insurance and medical industries. The only other option then is to provide a government-sponsored form of health care that allows for everyone to be able to receive medical assistance. Of course that is going to be an outrageous fortune and a financial burden on the American people. But it is at least an option available to people who currently have no option at all, and left unchecked health care costs are going to sky-rocket.

While some of you reading this post may agree with me, I know there are others who will adamantly disagree with me. That's fine. That's why this is America. To quote my dear friend CF, who commented on my inaugural post: "To be able to disagree with our leaders and not face imprisonment, torture or banishment, that is what makes America unique." Although most people in my circle of family and friends are Democrats, others are Republicans, and I respect that we all have different opinions about these things. People assume I'm a Democrat and of course I am (a gay, art-loving writer, educator, and librarian?--hello!), but I publicly admit that I'm not as leftist as people assume. I'm not anti-Republican. I think there are points about the Republican party's platform, such as lessening government involvement and aspects of business politics, that are important and need to be taken into consideration. But I more firmly believe the Democratic party is right in its progressive move forward in the realm of civil rights. For me, the biggest mistake the Republican party ever made was aligning itself with the fundamentalist Christian population. America is (theoretically) about the division of church and state, and whatever personal religious affiliation an individuals has, those tenets must be overlooked to ensure that all Americans are treated equally from a socio-legal perspective, regardless of their own affiliations. In the long run, that is to me the most important part of this election and why I'm thrilled Obama has been reelected. To me, the fundamentalist Christian right has kept the Republican party from evolving and moving forward in understanding that the old way of doing things has to change. We need to start embracing change and moving forward. We can no longer keep looking back to the past like it was some sort of utopian America.

According to the Huffington Post, Obama secured anywhere from 70-75% of the Hispanic/Latino vote, and Republicans are admitting that they didn't work hard enough in that area. I'm not sure why exactly Republicans (in general) seem less aware of the power of this particular demographic group, but the fact remains that America is rapidly becoming more Hispanic/Latino, and the traditional White community that founded this nation is losing its place as the dominant socio-political group. I'm not sure where Blacks fit into this, but in some odd twist of fate, I think in a few decades Blacks and Whites will together be dominated by the rising Hispanic/Latino population. Let's face it: America is changing. Republicans--and Democrats--need to recognize this. We have a responsibility to become bi-lingual and learn Spanish (it's on my to-do list for 2013). I don't mean because immigrants coming to America aren't learning English; clearly people coming to the United States have a responsibility to learn English. But English-speaking Americans have an equal responsibility to recognize the rising power and influence of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America with the United States, and we must learn to engage with these people and nations by becoming equally bi-lingual--as so many of them are--in order to engage more peacefully with them economically, socially, and politically. 

And then there is the gay community. Maryland and Maine have now voted for the recognition of gay marriage, raising the number of states to do this to eight (Washington soon will be nine, plus Washington, D.C. already recognizes gay marriage). Wisconsin has elected the nation's first openly-gay senator. And our President and Vice-President openly support gay marriage, although they see it as a state issue, not a federal issue (another no-brainer since people are married by the laws of a state, not by the laws of the nation). I've blogged about gay marriage, so I won't repeat my thoughts on that right now. Admittedly it may seem like I'm pleading for the gay community as a group deserving special treatment, but the fact is gay marriage as a political platform is beyond any one individual's personal interest. This is about civil rights: all Americans are entitled to equal rights. And this struggle is no different from the battles that women have had to fight for the right to abortions, and African-Americans have had to fight for desegregation and equal rights beyond the color of their skin. As a country where democracy flourishes stronger than anywhere else on the planet, we have a responsibility to show the rest of the world that America is a progressive nation when it comes to civil rights. I cannot help but believe, from the rhetoric I have heard, that to have voted Romney into office would have set the nation backwards in its progress toward a more national acknowledgment of basic civil rights for the gay community.

What's interesting to me though is that these two issues I bring up about the Hispanic/Latino and gay communities will not always be this way. As I recently said to some of my friends, I believe there will be a time in say thirty years from now when gays and Hispanic/Latinos will have become so mainstream in American social politics that the current perception of special interest pleading will have dissipated. Indeed, I anticipate and expect a significant number of gays and Hispanics/Latinos actually will be Republicans. I wouldn't even be surprised if in say 2046 America elects as President its first gay Republican, a successful bi-lingual business entrepreneur whose parents were from the state of Puerto Rico, or perhaps immigrants from Mexico or Argentina. And perhaps it will be under that future President that the civil rights debate will be over the ethical treatment of clones, i.e. if cloned humans are entitled to equal rights since they weren't "born" but "made." Okay, so maybe that's a stretch into sci-fi, but I think you see what I'm implying. Life in America is going to keep evolving, and there will be new issues to tackle that Americans will debate and politicize. Eventually, however, they will settle those issues progressively as America has done in the past. That is what I see and hope for the future. And that future begins now. That's why I'm thrilled Obama has been reelected. As for 2016...anyone thinking Hilary Clinton could be our first woman President?

Week-in-my-Life: Aug 2012 (Pt. 2)

THURSDAY 08/09/12

7:30am = breakfast: egg & cheddar sandwich on multi-grain toast with blackberries & coffee

8:30am = more dissertation writing, discover 15 pages written in my introduction (stunned!)

11:00am = head to Maybelle’s Cafe again for Wi-Fi and early lunch, discover it’s completely mobbed with people hoarding all the tables, suddenly disgusted that no one in my neighborhood has consideration for me, so forced to go to Starbucks instead, where I do more digital image research on Buddhist art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection (image above: Head of Buddha, ca. 4th century, Gandhara or modern-day Pakistan)

12:00pm = lunch: chicken tarragon sandwich & iced tea at Starbucks

2:00pm = home with cup of tea, falling asleep on the couch, force myself to wake up with yet another cup of tea with a snack of cherries and a chocolate pudding

3:00pm = therapy with UK (always helpful, never disappointing)

4:30pm = back to working on Buddhist art, finish another PowerPoint lecture with about 65 slides of images for a 3-hour class (huzzah!)

7:00pm = dinner: tortellini stuffed with spinach & cheese in a with a butter/olive oil-peas-tomatoes sauce; Netflix movie = finally finish watching Mirror Mirror (3 stars, and I'm being generous)

FRIDAY 08/10/12

3:55am = alarm goes off so I can do early-morning trip to gym, decide to sleep for just a few more minutes

6:30am = wake up realizing I'm not going to gym for early-morning workout; breakfast: Eggo whole grain waffles with blackberries and tea

10:00am = breakfast #2: cinnamon coffee cake & iced tea at Starbucks

10:30am = at library to use Wi-Fi to pay bills, update files, and go through library books on textiles from India and Mughal decorative arts

1:30pm = lunch: roast beef & cheddar sandwich on whole wheat roll, small bag of Doritos, & cream soda (no judging - I can gorge on bad food sometimes!)

2:00pm = begin the wait for the Time-Warner cable repair man to show up, rest on the couch watching from Netflix first 2 parts of documentary about history of India

3:15pm = first automated phone call notifying me Time-Warner is on their way, but I should confirm just in case

4:00pm = second automated phone call notifying me Time-Warner is on their way, but I should confirm just in case (note: I already received 3 of these calls earlier in the week as well)

5:15pm = another phone call (this time from a live person!) notifying me Time-Warner is on their way

5:45pm = Time-Warner finally shows up (note: appointment time was from 2-4pm), the great drama of my Internet service problems continues, and he even has to climb down the fire escape to check wires in our courtyard

6:45pm = After 2 months of nightmare problems, Internet is working! (huzzah!), begin prayers that it doesn't go out again

8:00pm = dinner: red-leaf salad with chicken tenders, tomatoes, red beans, black olives, cheddar cheese, and honey mustard dressing with water; movie: finish watching parts 2 and all of 3 of The Story of India (5 stars - very interesting, highly recommended)

SATURDAY 08/11/12

8:00am = after letting myself sleep a little later than usual, breakfast: 2 sunny-side-up eggs on multi-grain toast with strawberries and coffee

9:00am = clean bathroom and start dusting, only able to get through task by listening to Kim Sozzi, Lady Gaga, and Nicki Minaj

12:30pm = lunch: leftover tortellini eaten as pasta salad

2:00pm = at library to go through more books on Indian textiles and Mughal decorative arts

3:30pm = gym, almost full workout, 400+ calories burned

5:30pm = starving! snack: mini-cherry pie & iced coffee at Starbucks

6:45pm = meet JM & DC (with his new friend K) at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art for opening of new exhibition Pop-Up Museum of Queer History: Before We Were Queer; network with people we know, drink some free wine, then realize dying of heat stroke and claustrophobia, so rush outside into sticky humidity to breathe

8:15 = dinner: Mexican appetizers and a Corona at Papatzul in SoHo

9:45 = after-dinner glass of Pinot Grigio at Novecento in SoHo

12:00am = Zzzzzzzzz......

Winter Exhibitions 2012

I've been M.I.A. for the past few weeks dealing with everything from a stomach virus to real estate drama, work stress, and writing projects I've needed to catch up on. But it hasn't all been bad. I've had a few opportunities to see a exhibitions since Winter began (we had a bit of snow today, but not enough to warrant a first snowstorm post). Last weekend it was all about Brooklyn Museum. I had gone to see Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties with DC soon after it opened, and I thought it was an excellent show, so I was delighted to return with a few other friends and see it again. Encompassing 140 works, the show introduces you to new artists and works you've never seen before, then pairs them old standards that take on new life seen from this 1920s-only perspective. When I first wrote about going to see this show, I used the Luigi Lucioni portrait of Paul Cadmus as my image, but this time around I thought I'd show from the exhibition this beautiful photograph of the actress Gloria Swanson by Nickolas Murray (image: George Eastman House, Rochester). According to the curators, positioning her arms in this way became a 1920s trope of feminine beauty: "A beautiful woman’s depth was to represent her holding her face, masklike, in her hands, as if to signal the simultaneous acts of self-invention and containment." In addition to mixing paintings, sculptures, and photographs, I love that the show focuses on portraiture and the body, although there is an entire room devoted to abstraction and the urban environment. Even the section on still lifes is fascinating. Who knew that grouping paintings of calla lilies by artists as diverse as George O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others, and then mirroring them with a Grant Wood portrait of an old woman holding a cactus, could provide to be such a fascinating cross-section of art from one decade? The show closes this weekend and travels, but I'm determined to buy the exhibition catalogue, the show was that good.

We also saw HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the gay/lesbian art exhibition, which I had first seen in Washington, D.C. with RL back in December 2010. Now, I know I should be supportive of this exhibition. After all, it is the very first show to focus on gay/lesbian art by a major museum (National Portrait Gallery and now Brooklyn Museum). And of course I do support it from a social-historical perspective. It is important and it is ground-breaking, even if there had not been any controversy over the inclusion of David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly. There are a number of works in the show that are interesting and worth seeing, like the earliest work you see here, a photograph of the poet Walt Whitman by the painter Thomas Eakins (image: NPG). Whitman became a champion of male-male love with his poems in Leaves of Grass (1855) and was known to have a longtime lover named Peter Doyle. And yet, as I went through the exhibition (again), I found myself often questioning why other works were even in the show. For instance, why include George O'Keeffe? The wall text talks about the sexual imagery inherent in her flower paintings, but then notes that she often denied it. What does this have to do with gay/lesbian art? O'Keeffe was not a lesbian, so presumably the implication is that this is about sexual identities, not gay/lesbian identities? But it doesn't say that. And the concept of "portraiture" is really stretched here, which typically isn't a problem, but it's not defined up-front for audiences, so I feel like people don't necessarily understand this is more about gay/lesbian identities then specifically pictures of gay/lesbian artists or sitters. My lesbian couple friends told me they didn't think there were even any women artists in the show because all the promotional material seemed to focus so much on men. That was surprising to hear, but definitely a noteworthy point. There are women artists and subjects in the show, but they are minimal. What was interesting is that Youth and Beauty actually seemed to have a greater celebration of the gay/lesbian subcultures of the 1920s than HIDE/SEEK did. So the exhibition is worth seeing for certain, but it may leave you with more questions than answers.


Over at The Met, I've finally been able to get to see some of the current exhibitions. Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine will leave you chuckling aloud, showing that we've always had a sense of humor for hundreds of years now. The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini is an impressive grouping of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the 15th to early 16th centuries. The room dedicated to the de' Medici family is excellent, and the busts by Mino da Fiesole are absolutely brilliant. The new galleries for paintings and sculpture in the American Wing also just opened, and they really are beautiful. The New York Times published a press preview by Carol Vogel and a great review by Holland Cotter, who with his usual flair describes them as "sensational." The highlight of the galleries is Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, an enormous picture that has been restored and newly framed, but let's face it, we're most excited to see John Singer Sargent's Madame X, 1883-84, is back and hanging proud (image: Met).


I still have to get over to see the Met's Victorian electrotype sculpture show, which I hear is very interesting. At the end of February, their spring blockbuster The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and Parisian Avant-Garde opens. Supposedly it will include at least one recreation of Gertrude Stein's home in Paris, which should be great to see. Tomorrow, I'm making a point to head to the Guggenheim to see Maurizio Cattelan: All before that show closes, although I'm sure I'll have to fight through the crowds to get in, it has been so popular. I missed the Museum of Modern Art's show on Willem de Kooning, which I hear was great, but I'm really excited to see their upcoming retrospective on photographer Cindy Sherman, which also opens in February. Considering how cold it is these days, it's always pleasant to think there's good art show to look at and keep you warm.