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
The picture you see here is one of those images that has been reproduced so many times that you know it instantly, even if you aren't sure who it is or who painted it. This is Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, painted in 1770, from the The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. I have never seen this picture in person, because I have never been to this institution--yet! But like anyone who has seen it I have always been fascinated by the boy's overtly confident, almost cocky, facial expression and pose, and the vibrancy and bravura of the blue garments that Gainsborough painted. I chose this work for February's Monthly Work of Art because I recently read Martin Postle's short book on Gainsborough. Rather than do my own interpretation of this painting, then, here are the words of specialists who know much more about this than I do.
This painting "was Gainsborough’s first attempt at full length Van Dyck dress--knee breeches and a slashed doublet with a lace collar--which is based on the work of Anthony van Dyck, the 17th-century Flemish painter who had revolutionized British art. ... Though clearly indebted to Van Dyck, Gainsborough’s painting technique was entirely his own. Whereas Van Dyck applied color in discrete patches composed of short consecutive strokes, Gainsborough presents a chaos of erratic color and brushstrokes. The shimmering blue satin is rendered in a spectrum of minutely calibrated tints--indigo, lapis, cobalt, slate, turquoise, charcoal, and cream--that have been applied in extremely complex layers of vigorous slashes and fine strokes. At the proper distance, the diverse pigments crystallize into an illusion of solidity." (online catalogue entry)
"The Blue Boy is Gainsborough's most famous picture, and his most enigmatic. Through its elevation to iconic status in the twentieth century this picture, more than any other, has served to promote the artist's image as a romantic painter of chocolate-box cavaliers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The painting is a parody. The boy in question was not the offspring of an aristocrat but the teenage son of a prosperous Soho ironmonger, and a person friend of the artist. His costume was a popular form of fancy dress which ... was otherwise restricted to the ephemeral realm of the masquerade, then a popular form of entertainment in the capital. ... X-rays have revealed that Gainsborough painted The Blue Boy upon a discarded, cut-down canvas, which further suggests that this was not a straight-forward portrait commission but an impromptu jeu d'esprit." -- Martin Postle, Thomas Gainsborough (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002), 46.
Last year I wrote a blog post highlighting all the travel I did in 2014, but this time I am just doing a recap of the cities I visited over the course of the year. I realize on some level this may seem like I'm bragging about my travels, but this blog has involved me writing about my travels since the very beginning, so consider this an encapsulated list rather than an extended post on places I have been. One reason I decided to do this is because 2015 has turned out to be rather exceptional in terms of travel, with more than half of these cities related to my job and career (conferences, talks, courier trips, etc.). The rest was vacation or family visits. The picture you see here is of AA and me on the wall of San Gimignano with the rolling hills of Tuscany behind us. God, what a beautiful day it was and what a beautiful memory it is. Even though I have visited almost all of these cities before (some many times), three were first-time visits (Monteriggione, Beacon, and Kansas City). When I visit these cities, I always strive to visit museums or galleries to see exhibitions or permanent collections, all as part of expanding my knowledge-base on artists, art works, movements, styles, and the materiality of art. I frequently like to go back to museums I've seen before to see old favorites and what may have changed. Every one of these trips, then, becomes a learning experience. But perhaps the most important reason why I am posting this list is because I realize how fortunate I am to have had the opportunity to visit these places and to engage with cultures, no matter how similar or different they are from my own. For me, life is about experiences and encounters, and travel helps make that happen. Here is the list, in the order in which I visited them.
Munich, Germany
St. Petersburg/Palm Harbor, Florida (March visit)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (April visit)
Cattolica, Italy
Venice, Italy
Rome, Italy
Florence, Italy
San Gimignano/Siena/Monteriggione (day trip through Tuscany)
Milan, Italy
St. Petersburg/Palm Harbor, Florida (May visit)
Liverpool, England
Southport, England
London, England
Oxford, England
Washington, DC
Provincetown, Massachusetts
St. Petersburg/Palm Harbor, Florida (August visit)
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.
I'm writing this blog post from my hotel room in San Francisco. I arrived today and will be here just for a brief couple of days. This is work-related. We have a painting at Columbia that will be on loan to the de Young Museum for its upcoming exhibition Jewel City: Art from San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition. I am here to oversee installation and make sure our painting (a gorgeous 1913 landscape by Arthur Wesley Dow), which traveled cross-country, made the trip in good condition. Our painting was in the Expo in 1915, a century ago (I will likely share that work soon, so stay tuned). The picture you see above is the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the Expo, and the work is by Edwin Deakin, showing rather Impressionistically one of the main buildings and the lagoon. I was able to visit this area, along with doing so many other things, when I was Frisco-bound two years ago on vacation here. Indeed, I must say, thanks to AA we saw so much on that trip that I think I have seen all the primary highlights here, including the de Young and the Asian Art museums, rode the cable car and a trolley, saw the Redwood forest in Muir Woods. drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, even took a ferry to Sausalito, and went to Napa and Sonoma overnight for wine-tasting trips. It was a great visit, thanks almost entirely to AA. So this afternoon as I wandered around a bit, I was quickly reminded of a few things, and how insanely crazy the hills are! It was great to have another peak at the Golden Gate Bridge in fog and see the Bay. Time to think about dinner though...
Portal 5: San Francisco (30 August 2013) (For other works in my Portals series, click here.) After this I looked, and,
behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I
heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come
up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter. And immediately I was in
the Spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on
the throne. And he that sat was to look
upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow
round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. -- from Revelations 4:1-3, King James Bible
With everything the past few months a big whirlwind for me, between a new job and a new apartment, I haven't had time to blog too much. I'm sure that will change soon, however, as I'm off on another great adventure: San Francisco! You may recall I was last in California (Los Angeles specifically) in February 2012, and about this time of the year I've been known to run off to Provincetown. But this year my friends and I decided to traverse to the West coast. It will be my first time in San Francisco, so I'm thrilled to be going, and we do have plans to go to Sonoma one night and partake of wine tasting opportunities. Hopefully I will recap highlights from the trip when I return. I wonder though...will I leave my heart in San Francisco? Tony Bennett did so, and he sang that song on Judy Garland's variety show back in the 1960s. Here's the delightful video of that crooner, or you can see it on YouTube by clicking here.
I arrived back in Brooklyn early Sunday morning after catching the red-eye flight, and I've been trying to get over the jet lag ever since. The College Art Association 100th annual conference was actually good, which surprises me because overall I wasn't confident that the panels were going to be that interesting. I also wasn't necessarily keen on going to Los Angeles again, but fortunately my opinion of the city has changed as well. I met up with a number of individuals, both colleagues and friends, and saw a few museums too (which I will talk about in another post). So all in all it was a productive few days in L.A.
CAA scheduled the panel session I was on ("Future Directions in British Art") for the same time as the honorary session for renown art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss, which really was rather annoying of them. Nevertheless, we had about 25 people in the audience and at least it seems they received the papers very well. You'll recall of course that my paper was on the sculptor John Gibson (image: Narcissus, 1836-38, Royal Academy). Amy Von Lintel's (West Texas A&M Univ) paper "Art within Reach: The Popular Origins of Art History in Victorian Britain" was an unexpectedly delightful coda to my own paper, in that some of the topics we covered (popular reproductive media and the world fairs of 1851 and 1862) were approached from different, though related, perspectives. She argued that the rise of popular culture helped teach the masses about the history of art in Victorian England. Corey Piper (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) gave an interesting paper on codes of behavior in sporting prints from 1750-1850. The other two papers by Cristina Martinez (Univ Toronto) on legal issues in 18th-century art, and by Irene Sunwoo (Princeton) on contemporary architectural pedagogy, were admittedly more challenging for me, but that was partly because of my lack of knowledge about the topics presented. Discussant Kim Rhodes (Drew Univ) gave an excellent wrap-up to our papers, aptly tying together the threads they shared in pursuit of "future directions" in scholarship. Peter Trippi (Fine Art Connoisseur), our chair, organized the session beautifully.
On Wednesday morning, I popped into the session on "The Materiality of Art: Evidence, Interpretation, Theory," mostly to hear Gülru Çakmak (Univ Mass, Amherst) give an insightful talk on the French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (image: The Death of Caesar, 1859-67, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). She focused on his technical skills in using paint and the canvas surface to create texture and alternative points of view in the picture plane. (Rumor has it we're both speaking at a symposium in England later this year! More on that another time...) Ann Smart Martin (Univ Wisconsin, Madison) gave an interesting talk on the effects of candle and gas lighting on furniture and wallpaper in 17th- to 19th-century England and America. This actually is a topic I frequently have wondered about, as electrical lighting today has seriously altered our understanding of how art from the past was seen in its own day.
On Thursday morning, I went to the session on early photography. Karen Hellman's (Getty Museum) paper on the daguerreotypist Antoine Claudet explored his interest in optics and binocular vision, while Melody Davis (Sage College, Albany) explored stereoscopes as a form of commerce targeted toward women, virulently challenging the scholarship of Beaumont Newhall and Jonathan Crary on these early types of photographs. Margaretta Frederick's (Delaware Art Museum) paper on Samuel Bancroft's collecting practices of Pre-Raphaelite art and photographic prints, and Deborah Hutton's (College of New Jersey) paper on the Indian photographer Raja Deen Dayal, rounded out the papers rather well. I missed the last paper on the panel because I headed to another room to hear my fellow CUNY Graduate Center colleague Tara Burk give a concise, thought-provoking overview of issues associated with the visual culture of queer activism in NYC from 1987-95. On Friday afternoon, the Historians of 18th-Century Art and Architecture held a session on installations and, as I saw it, the interactive roles of public/private spaces. Hannah Williams (Oxford) gave an excellent paper on the change in perception of two 18th-century French paintings as they went from being exhibited in the Salon to their permanent home in a nearby Church. Jocelyn Anderson (Courtauld) spoke about how English country estates and their owners molded the early experience of viewing works of art, and Heather McPherson (Univ Alabama, Birmingham) gave a thorough overview of the socio-economic politics behind Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in London. I also went to hear a few presentations sponsored by the Art Libraries Society of North America ("Collaboration, Access, Sustainability: The Future of Image Research Collections") and the Visual Resources Society ("Paint, Prints, and Pixels: Learning from the History of Teaching with Images"), but I have to admit I didn't find those to be as exciting as the art historical papers. As you can tell from my quick synopsis, there was a lot to hear, and this barely scratched the surface of other panel sessions that were given, all of which can be seen here.
I'm heading to Los Angeles for the 100th annual conference of the College Art Association, which is being held at the convention center, pictured above. I haven't been to LA since 2001, when I went to the annual conference for the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA). I'm definitely more a NYer rather than an LAer, but I'm looking forward to warm sunshine and meeting up with KB and other friends (and possibly even some relatives). I first found out my paper proposal had been accepted back in June. It's entitled "Reconsidering John Gibson, Remolding British Sculpture" and it's for a panel session sponsored by the Historians of British Art on "Future Directions." I'm arguing that in using John Gibson (1790-1866) as a case study of one who challenged ideas of nationalism, medium, and polychromy, we can expand our notions of what British sculpture itself actually means and thus better integrate it into the overall study of nineteenth-century art. Wish me luck!
Not too long ago, I had posted about the call for papers for the 2012 College ArtAssociation conference, which will be held in Los Angeles in February 2012. I just received word that my proposal was accepted, so I'll be heading to LA in about 8 months from now. The first time I went there was in 2001 for the annual conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America. I confess I'm not a big fan of the city (how many NYers really are?), but it was fun to see things like Hollywood and a few stars on the Walk of Fame (image above: Brian L's Picasa stream). In any case, it will be good to go back. I proposed a paper for the session "Future Directions in the History of British Art," which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the organization the Historians of British Art by looking forward to innovative modes of art historical inquiry in the field. My paper is tentatively entitled "Reconsidering John Gibson, Remolding British Sculpture," and will show how my research on Gibson offers us new and expansive models for reexamining the study of British sculpture itself. But there's time for all that. For now, it's back to readings for my YCBA seminar on the Artist's Studio in Britain.
Last Friday I went to the afternoon half of the 8th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in 19th-Century Art, organized by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA). I enjoy going to this symposium because I like to hear some of the projects that other graduate students and PhD candidates are working on. I wrote about this conference in 2010 and 2009 (when I gave a paper on the Ottoman Turks at the Great Exhibition of 1851). I do regret having missed one paper in the morning session on representations of King Louis-Philippe of France during the July Monarchy (1830-1848), but the papers I did hear later on were interesting.
Jennifer Chuong (MIT) gave a theoretical talk about the late 18th-century botanical and animal prints of William Bartram and their connections with the social-politics of the day. Barbara Caen (Universität Zürich) gave a museum-style talk on French and German weavers who had emigrated to the US to work in 3 different tapestry manufacturing firms in NY and NJ in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Hélène Valance (Université Paris 7 Diderot) gave a thought-provoking presentation on night and darkness in late 19th-century American painting. Two of my co-students at the CUNY Graduate Center presented as well. Mary Zawadzki spoke about travel imagery in the American children's periodical St. Nicholas Magazine, and Leslie Anderson gave an insightful talk about how early 19th-century Danish artists painting themselves at leisure can be seen as a form of freedom away from their academic training. Finally, Christina Ferando (Columbia)--a fellow sculpture historian whom I've met up with in New Haven, Rome, Washington, D.C., and now NY!--presented a great talk on Antonio Canova's Penitent Magdalene (image above, from Web Gallery of Art) and how French critics evolved in their appreciation of it from a despised object to a symbol of nationalism. Her PowerPoint presentation was excellent too, reminding me of the importance of showing multiple viewpoints when looking at figurative sculpture in the round.
Even though the College Art Association just ended its NYC conference, they've already released the call for papers (CFP) for the 2012 conference, which will be held in Los Angeles next February. I had gotten confused, thinking NYC was the 100th conference, but in fact the organization turned 100 last year and 2012 will be the centenary conference (got that?). Interestingly, the CFP seems to confirm the "crisis in art history," that new students only want to study contemporary art now. More than 50% of the sessions in the CFP relate to 20th-century and contemporary art. I find that disheartening, but it does reflect the dominant mood of the art market and museums/galleries around the world. Nevertheless, there are a few promising sessions on the CFP, one of which is seriously tempting me to submit a proposal (can you guess which one?)... ** "Other Histories of Photography: The First One Hundred Years" (hm...sounds like the influence of Geoffrey Batchen!) ** "Where the Bodies Lie: Landscapes of Mourning, Memory, and Concealment" (cemeteries, funerary monuments) ** "Impressionisms: From the Forest of Fontainebleau to the American West" (French and other 'Impressionist' art movements) ** "Classicizing the Other" (rubric of classical antiquity on racial/ethnic others) ** "Future Directions in the History of British Art" (celebrating 20 years of the Historians of British Art)
