thoughts, reviews, and random musings on art, books, movies, music, pets/nature, travel, the occasional television show, plus gay/queer culture, genealogy, libraries, New York City, my photography and writing...and basically whatever else comes into my head
Better late than never, as they say! I realize I've been offline with the blog the past few months, but it's largely because I have been so busy and working on a few writing projects in my non-job time. As I mentioned in a previous post, AA & I took a week-long vacation over Thanksgiving to go to Amsterdam and Copenhagen: two cities I had never visited before. It was quite a nice trip. The weather was cool and it rained a lot in Amsterdam, but I truly enjoyed the canals and the charming architecture in Amsterdam, and the majesty of the Nordic palazzo and upscale fishing village feel one finds in Copenhagen. We hit just about every major museum, not surprisingly. It was at the Rijksmuseum where I discovered this gem of a painting from the 19th century: Willem Roelofs, Meadow Landscape with Cattle, ca. 1880. We did not venture to the picturesque regions of The Netherlands where one can see old, working windmills such as the one in this painting, so this will have to suffice for me for the time being...until I get back and see them live.
Roelofs was a member of The Hague School, a group of artists who were inspired by the French Barbizon school of painters, such as Rousseau, Millet, and Corot. These artists began painting the naturalistic landscape of the French countryside as early as the 1830s but came into their own by mid-century, thereafter helping to alter the respectability of landscape painting from something dismissed as a lesser art in prior generations. This idea of depicting the naturalistic landscape as it actually appears, rather than as an idealized scene for a narrative event, arguably goes back to British artists such as Constable and Turner, but in The Netherlands the most obvious source of inspiration goes back even further to the 17th century with the naturalistic Dutch landscapes by artists such as Ruisdael. You can read more about The Hague School here.
While there is an incredible charm to this painting because of the windmill and the beautiful, soft lighting and fluffy clouds, what is striking is how the windmill dominates the space in this vertical painting. Normally one expects to see landscapes as horizontal compositions, panoramic views that show sweeping swathes of nature. Here, however, by reverting to a vertical format, Roelofs transforms the windmill into a portrait, or at least a narrative composition. The pyramidal structure of the windmill and its arms dominate the center point and then moving out diagonally toward the lower left and right lines, creating a pseudo-head-and-shoulders figure. Although the title references the cattle, both they and the man are diminished by the monumentality of the windmill itself, a man-made machine that for the 19th-century viewer demonstrated the development of technology, i.e. man's dominance over nature. Even the arms of the windmill seem to be moving the air and clouds themselves with a superior strength--which is exactly what they are meant to. This interpretation may seem rather droll because the painting is quite beautiful. But this is where Roelofs succeeds. He portrays the power of the windmill as an object of beauty, conveying both its picturesque qualities and the harmonizing of man with nature.
Few would disagree that one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century was Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). An artist who specialized in landscapes that ranged from the classical to the sublime, he so impressed his contemporaries with his work as a young man that he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 and a full member in 1802. He excelled both in oil paintings and watercolors, and could paint in the spirit of the Old Masters while also introducing something new for his own modern world. Later in life Turner was criticized for his eccentricities in subjects and painting techniques, and the recent biopic Mr. Turnerreportedly makes him a bit of a bumbling idiot rather than an eccentric painter (I have not seen the movie yet). During the last twenty years of his life he failed to impress most viewers, and he was often derided for his paintings because of their seemingly slipshod compositions and abstractions of color. His one defender late in life was the conservative art critic John Ruskin, who saw in Turner (perhaps surprisingly) the epitome of the principle of "truth to nature." Today, Turner is recognized as a master, and retroactively appreciated as a key figure who influenced many of the modernist tendencies in painting from the Impressionists through Abstract Expressionism.
I've selected as this Monthly Work of Art Turner's painting The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834, which he painted from 1834-35 and now is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. AA and I saw the painting once again on a visit there a few weeks ago, and it still continues to impress me every time. On the night of October 16, 1834, a tremendous conflagration burned down the Houses of Parliament in London. (The neo-Gothic building and Big Ben were the replacement buildings that stand today.) Hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators flocked to the shores of the Thames to watch the massive fire. Turner was among them, and he recorded on the spot a series of watercolor sketches that he later used to create two different oil paintings in his studio. This is one of them; the other is in the Cleveland Museum of Art. All of these works were cleverly brought together in 2007 when the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC hosted the exhibition J.M.W. Turner. I remember to this day how much I loved this one particular room that demonstrated Turner's understanding of energy and light and color in his watercolors and the oil paintings recording this cataclysmic event.
Christopher Riopelle writes in the PMA's handbook about this painting that Turner watched the blaze from the south bank of the Thames: "Here he exaggerates the scale of Westminster Bridge, which rises like a massive iceberg at right and then on the opposite bank seems to plunge down and dissolve in the blaze. At the dazzling heart of the flames is Saint Stephen's Hall, the House of Commons, while beyond the towers of Westminster Abbey, which would be spared, are eerily illuminated. Turner was drawn to depictions of nature in cataclysmic eruption, and here in the middle of London he confronted a scene of terrifying force and drama that he recorded in several watercolor sketches and two paintings."
Turner's vibrant palette of color and the swirls of energy emanating from the fire make this a magnificent painting. Even the smoke takes on a life of its own as it rushes like a wave into the night sky. One can understand why people today often see Turner as a proto-abstract painter. I am reading at present Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, and a passage recently caught my eye (no pun intended) that made me think of this painting again from my visit to Philadelphia a few weeks ago. Crary's interest in this book is demonstrating how advances in physiology and socio-philosophical theory during the first half of the nineteenth century impacted the world of painting and the development of photography thereafter. Rather than reinforce the paradigmatic argument that modernist painters, from the Impressionists on, were so radical in how they saw the world as artists, he contends that their sense of the world was a natural development because of changes in the understanding of how people actually saw and perceived the world around them through scientific discoveries and hypotheses made earlier in the century. This led some to want to understand the essence of the "innocent" eye, what one sees before the brain interprets the imagery. Crary writes: "Ruskin was equally able to employ [this theory] in suggesting the possibility of a purified subjective vision, of an immediate and unfiltered access to the evidence of this privileged sense. But if the vision of Ruskin, Cezanne, Monet, and others has anything in common, it would be misleading to call it 'innocence.' Rather it is a question of a vision achieved at great cost that claimed for the eye a vantage point uncluttered by the weight of historical codes and conventions of seeing, a position from which vision can function without the imperative of composing its contents into a reified 'real' world." (pp.95-96)
What strikes me is that if we believe Crary's argument (and I confess I am doing a hack job summarizing it; read the book), then why do we have to leave it to the Impressionists in the 1870s to receive the credit for a new interpretation of this understanding of vision? Surely other artists experimented with these discoveries earlier? Indeed, Turner paints what his eye sees, not necessarily a photorealistic representation of what the viewer expects to see. He painted swirls of color as the eye sees them, but before the brain's interpretation of what they are. While this seems most apparent in the color and brushstroke of the background and upper left quadrant, other components of visual acuity are evident here too: the bridge, with its warped foreshortening and perspective. As the eye focuses on the rising flames of orange, yellow, and red, peripheral vision skews the natural alignment of the bridge. Similarly, the people in the foreground along the banks lack any physical features; they are shrouded in smoke and the night sky, and are only visible again in Turner's periphery. This painterly demonstration of what Turner "saw" relates well, then, to Ruskin, who praised Turner for his "truth to nature" approach in his art. It is not so much that his paintings capture a verisimilitude of the landscape; rather, his paintings convey an unadulterated understanding of what his eye saw. Such is the genius of Turner.
POSTSCRIPT 8/6/16: When I wrote this blog post, I was only just more than half-way through Crary's Techniques of the Observer. I should have glanced ahead. In his last chapter, Crary discusses Turner as exactly the prime example of artist who utilized new principles of vision in his art. He discusses briefly two of Turner's paintings from the 1840s that emphasize the vortex of light as their subjects. These paintings and Turner's late color/light-filled experiments are among those works most find inspiring today, largely because of their foreshadowing of abstraction yet to come. But for Crary it was the natural development of the understanding of a subjective sense of vision that made this possible. He writes: "Seemingly out of nowhere, [Turner's] painting of the late 1830s and 1840s signals the irrevocable loss of a fixed source of light, the dissolution of a cone of light rays, and the collapse of the distance separating an observer from the site of optical experience. ... Turner's direct confrontation with the sun ... dissolves the very possibility of representation that the camera obscura was meant to ensure. His solar preoccupations were 'visionary' in that he made central in his work the retinal processes of vision." (138-39) Crary thus utilizes Turner as the grande finale to his thesis. Fortunately, this coincides with my observation above: that one need not wait for the 1870s and the Impressionists to assume that scientific understandings in the subjectivity of vision manifested themselves in art. They were happening simultaneously.
I know I am not alone when I say that winter landscape scenes are perhaps some of my most favorite subjects in paintings. There is something breathtaking in the vision of falling and new-fallen snow that many artists over the centuries have attempted to represent, knowing full well this is an idealistic sense of reality. In our automobile/truck-occupied world today, snow plows and vehicles quickly make the snow disgusting, slush turns gray and gross, and for all eternity neighborhood dogs like to...how should we say?...turn white snow yellow as fast as they can! Nevertheless, there is something tranquil about watching snow fall from the skies, then afterward listening to children play in the snow and wandering out in the crisp air admiring the effect of the snow on trees and houses. Snow is about the power of nature to purify and cleanse, and in a major city like New York it is fascinating to see how snow even here can diminish the noise and bustle of the urban environment and make it as serene as a country landscape, if but for a short while. It is the white-ness of new-fallen snow, with its Western associations of purity and innocence, that has the power to blanket and coat the urban environment and create a visual sense of rebirth.
From a painter's perspective there is the trick of how to represent the actual effects of snow. It would seem easy to just use white paint, but light and shadows play tricks on snow, and one realizes there is no such thing as snow that is just one white hue. Artists such as Childe Hassam, in the work you see here as this Monthly Work of Art, used tones of icy blue in this representation of Central Park South/59th Street on a snowy late afternoon, just before twilight, suggesting how the setting sun's rays, at a sharp angle, give snow an iridescent quality. Hassam was one of the most successful American Impressionists. Influenced by Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, Hassam and other Americans by the 1890s were absorbing the lessons they learned in Paris and introducing to an American audience their version of paintings that showed both the transience of modern American life, often using short, quick brushstrokes to suggest action and immediacy, but also playing with the visual effects of light on the world around them to create a unique vision of how the artist saw the world. Although I always admit that I am not a big fan of Impressionist painting, I certainly can appreciate the talents and skillful experiments many of these artists exuded. And, as in this case, I do love a beautiful winter landscape scene, particularly one that shows a historical view of New York.
Image credit: Frederick Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935). Late Afternoon, New York, Winter, 1900, oil on canvas, 36 15/16 x 29 in., Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 62.68.
Record-high prices from the art auction world continued to astound people this year, even those of us who work in the art industry. Of course, this is in modern/contemporary art, where prices for a handful of artists from the past 140 years (mostly 20th-century) continue to garner often shocking prices in the millions and alter the landscape (no pun intended) in the valuation of art. For instance, in May of this year, Christie's set a new record bringing in for the first time over $1 billion in a single week of sales: $658.5 million from their postwar/contemporary sale and $705.9 million from their 20th-century sale, each a few days apart from one another. Then, in November, Christie's made news with the record-breaking sale of the painting you see above, Amedeo Modigliani's Nu Couché (Reclining Nude), 1917-18. This picture sold for $170.4 million (with fees) to Chinese collector Liu Yiqian, a former taxi-driver, now billionaire, with a private museum in Shanghai. This record-breaker has earned the painting the number 2 spot on the most expensive works ever sold at auction (a Picasso also sold this year as number 1). Now, I like Modigliani's work a lot, but this nude...not so much. These other Modigliani nudes at the Met Museum and the Courtauld (the second one of my favorite paintings of the nude) are far superior in their execution than this one. I also think Modigliani's portraits are hauntingly fantastic, such as this portrait of Paulette Jourdain that sold this year at Sotheby's for $42.8 million (with fees) from the collection of their former CEO A. Alfred Taubman (a highly controversial figure himself). This record-breaking sale of a Modigliani has now effectively escalated the overall appreciation of his entire oeuvre. That may not seem to be a bad thing, because he is a great modernist, but this escalation in value also has skewed the market for his work in a way that costs museums and private collectors more money to insure his art works in their collections. On the surface this may not seem like a big deal, but when museums want to organize exhibitions, it costs them more to ship and insure these paintings, and as a result these costs trickle down to the average museum-goer in the form of higher ticket prices, book and merchandise sale increases, and other costs. The impact factor of these auction sales go beyond what a wealthy Chinese collector is willing to pay for a particular work of art.
Here is my new list of the Top 5 Auction Sales of Works of Art, which is an update of my 2013 post on this with extracted information from sites such as theartwolf and Wikipedia. (Keep in mind that this list is specific to auction sales and does not consider private sales, the most expensive of which is now in the range of $300 million for Paul Gauguin's painting Nafea Faa Ipoipo [When Will You Marry?].)
Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d'Alger (The Women of Algiers) ['Version O'], 1955, oil on canvas, sold May 2015, Christie's New York, $179.4m
Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché (Reclining Nude), 1917-18, oil on canvas, sold November 2015, Christie's New York, $170.4m
Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969, oil on canvas in three parts, sold November 2013, Christie's New York, $142.4m
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895, pastel on board, sold May 2012, Sotheby's New York, $119.9m
Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932, oil on canvas, sold May 2010, Christie's New York, $106.5m
In the world of British art, the picture you see here is of one of the more significant sales this year. The picture (taken by AA) shows me examining John Constable's The Lock, ca. 1824-25, when we visited Sotheby's New York in November to see the exhibition of upcoming works for auction. No, we weren't in the market to purchase it, as its estimate was in the millions of pounds/dollars range. This particular painting was number 5 of 6 in a series of Constable's famous "Six-Footer" paintings, i.e. landscapes that were elevated to the status of history paintings, but lacking a narrative. His paintings changed the history of art from the 1820s on when he exhibited them, as they opened up a new appreciation for the natural landscape as a large-scale, viable subject for artists and collectors. Constable's painting sold at Sotheby's London for £9.1m or $13.7m (with fees). (Note that another version of this same subject actually holds the record for Constable at auction, selling in 2012 £22.4m or $35.2m.). The sale of this painting now means that only two more major works by him are left in private hands.
Also in British art, I was pleased to see that this work, Simeon Solomon's Priestess of Diana Offering Poppies, 1864, which has been on the market and in private sales over the years, sold for £43,750 or $65,800 this past week. This isn't a record for Solomon, as his 1871 oil painting Rabbi Holding the Scrolls of the Law sold for £142,400 or $280,460 in 2006, but this latest sale is a demonstrated strength in the market for Solomon's oeuvre overall. For an artist long-maligned because of his homosexual crimes, Solomon has come into his own as an important figure among the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic artists of the Victorian period, and is now eagerly sought by collectors in this area. (You can see my Solomon blog posts here, and always remember to check the award-winning Simeon Solomon Research Archive which is co-managed by Carolyn Conroy and me.)
To wrap up this auction post, I must comment on what I consider to be one of the most bizarre sales of the year, another painting AA and I had the opportunity to see in person at Sotheby's: Carl Kahler's My Wife's Lovers, 1891. This was a commission to paint San Francisco socialite Kate Johnson's favorites cats from among her 350 of them. I am not making this up. The end result is mind-boggling painting to behold. It measures approximately 6 x 8 1/2 feet in size and is in an incredibly ornate frame. One can appreciate the attention to detail and emphasis on animal physiognomy, Kahler succeeding in capturing the characteristics of each individual cat. But the painting borders on the eccentric. The estimate price was $200,000-$300,000. It sold for $868,000 (with fees). All I keep thinking about this painting is that someone with a lot of empty wall space must really, really love cats. Here is Sotheby's video about the painting, which also shows you how popular in the press the picture was when it was completed almost 125 years ago.
Returning to our Monthly Work of Art posts, I thought I would share this beautiful landscape painting that is part of the Columbia University art collection stewarded by my department of Art Properties. Measuring approximately 31 x 57 inches, the painting is entitled The Sandpits near Valmondois (Les Sablières près de Valmondois) and is by the French artist Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878). Signed and dated 1870, the painting depicts a bend in the River Oise near the village of Valmondois, located about 23 miles north-northeast of Paris. These were areas where Daubigny spent parts of his childhood and adulthood. The artist is loosely associated with the Barbizon school, which included other famous painters such as Corot and Rousseau. These men introduced a new aesthetic for naturalistic landscapes that depicted the forests around Fontainebleau, frequently painting outdoors and capturing nature as it appeared. Prior to the 1830s, landscape painting exhibited at the Salon always was historical or narrative, and frequently represented a classical scene. These artists were considered radicals in their day for challenging this tradition, but gradually taste turned in their favor and naturalistic landscape paintings came to dominate not just the exhibitions but also the homes of the rising middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic. Daubigny favored depictions of river banks rather than forests, and his paintings are often seen today as precursors to the Impressionists with their sketch-like depictions of nature and beautiful sun-lit scenes.
The focal point of this work at first appears to be the fisherman in the center foreground of the painting. His fishing pole points diagonally across the river toward a boat colored with a dab of red paint. Further up the riverbank one sees the eponymous sandpit and sand barge, and to the left of those a village which likely is Valmondois. Together the sandpit and barge create a triangle with the fisherman and the boat, suggesting that at the heart of this tranquil scene is the juxtaposition of labor and leisure. It has been noted by scholars that, at the time Daubigny would have painted this work, the Oise River valley was growing industrially and thus losing its bucolic charm. In response to this, the artist frequently removed these signs of labor so as to present instead a peaceful landscape. Here, however, he has not so much as removed the elements of industry but minimized them so that the viewer focuses on the fisherman and a life of leisure in the countryside in spite of this change.
I have an article on this painting and two other works from the Columbia art collection coming out soon in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, a free, peer-reviewed e-journal. When it is released I will put a link to the article where you can read more about this important work in the collection.
Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) was one of the great landscape and Realist painters of nineteenth-century France. Like his contemporaries Courbet and Rousseau, he was considered a radical in his day. Looking at his landscapes like the work you see here, Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys, 1872-73 (image: Metropolitan Museum of Art), one is challenged to understand why these works at one time were radical. The scene is Barbizon, where Millet lived with his second wife and numerous children from 1849 until his death. Barbizon was originally a village near the forest at Fontainebleu 60 km (37 miles) southeast of Paris, but from the 1830s on, when many artists started to visit to paint landscapes en plein air (outdoors), the village grew in size and by the end of the century had become a major tourist town. Millet trained as a history and portrait painter, but eventually found his artistic calling with scenes of peasant farmers working the fields around Barbizon. His break from the tradition of painting idealized subjects, to instead paint the lowest members of society--glorifying them with Biblical allusions--led to a backlash among critics and academics that his work was a threat to the fine art traditions of the day. Millet's most famous paintings with these subjects include, for instance, The Angelus, 1857-59 (depicting a farming couple in the field taking a break to pray; see an image of the work here). In the painting here, Millet presents the starkness of the end of the Fall season. The trees are bare, a gust of wind is blowing, and the only person in the scene has her back to the viewer, huddled in her full-length cloak against the elements. A storm is brewing. Only the turkeys seem unaffected, going about their business, eating and wandering about, unaware the woman holds a stick to steer them back to their pen. Millet and his contemporaries started something new with the sketch-like quality of their finished paintings. They were able to use the short brushstrokes to convey a vitality to the scenes presented. It was a technique the Impressionists picked up on and perfected from this period on. Despite its gloom and doom, this painting charms me because of the turkeys and how carefree they are, not only in their movement but in how he painted them. The turkeys also seemed rather appropriate as this month's Monthly Work of Art. Happy Thanksgiving!
The picture you see here is the 1857 painting Niagaraby the American artist Frederic Edwin Church, a work owned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Church made an international career for himself in the 19th century by painting large-scale scenes of the American landscape. He was part of the so-called Hudson River school. His pictures capture the wild essence of nature in all its pristine and sublime beauty. This painting of Niagara Falls is no exception. You can hear the roar of the water, feel the chill dank atmosphere of the dark sky, but then wonder at the sunlight that shines through and illuminates the foam of the rushing water. I wonder if my experience will be as captivating. SVH and I are on our way to Canandaigua Lake, part of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, for the DG-RL wedding, and then she and I are going on our own "honeymoon" to Niagara Falls. I'm really looking forward to relaxing and embracing nature--and good friends--for a few days.
