Remembering a Lifetime of Work by Willem de Kooning

The MOMA Retrospective Wraps Up After Offering a “Cosmos Unto Itself”

NEW YORK—For ten more days, the art of Willem de Kooning will dominate the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art, telling the story of a New York artist in the city that made him famous. This retrospective, opened in September with nearly 200 works across de Kooning’s long career, shows him “as a whole and in depth.” It has been unlike any previous exhibition of the Dutch-American “abstract expressionist” painter.

            The exhibit also wants to reveal that de Kooning was more than simply a star “action painter” in 1950s Manhattan. His works spanned seven decades. However, to do justice to the “depth” of his career, you will have to read the definitive biography, De Kooning: An American Master (by Mark Stevens and Analyn Swan, 2004), as well. What the MOMA retrospective offers is a visual feast of de Kooning’s periods and themes. The visual effect is quite enough, and every viewer will find favorites. After looking, though, it will take some extra intellectual digging to understand how de Kooning’s work was also shaped by the ideological battles in the Manhattan art scene of his day.

            In this column’s opinion, de Kooning’s early mid-career work (1938-50) was his best. It was a time when he swung between, and mingled, abstraction and “figuration” (human figures). At the start, his images looked a lot like Arshile Gorky’s biomorphic portraits and fantasias, but de Kooning was authentically distinct, using a color scheme of green, pink, yellow, and orange. His drawing skills added to the gratifying sense of limbo he created between two realities (real and abstract).

            At the end of this early period, he veered toward pure abstraction in his truly unique black “landscapes,” and then the flip-side, his white landscape abstractions. Of these, his whitish Excavation (1950) was his largest canvas and most praised work. This period is full of visual effects that evoke mystery and contemplation.

            Then de Kooning started to do his “Women” series (1950-53). At this point, it seems that he was under pressure in New York to stand out. A handful of art critics were choosing ideological sides. Clement Greenberg made Jackson Pollock messianic, whereas Harold Rosenberg promoted action painters such as de Kooning. Greenberg said true painting was an abstract “object”; Rosenberg said it was an “event.” For this reason, Greenberg opposed de Kooning (who used some figures), while Rosenberg and Artnews cheered the Dutch-American painter for his eventful and emotive actions with paint and canvas.

            As a consequence, perhaps, de Kooning is best known for the raw-emotive Women series—and more for its raw emotion than its visual mastery. Inexplicably, the Women paintings each took a year or three to complete. They underwent revisions, falters, redoings, and abandonment before being declared “finished.” Often, according to photos of the process, the final work is not much different from the start. With the Women series, therefore, the emotional “process” is supposed to be the important element: it is de Kooning’s calendrical struggle charted in paint.

            The MOMA curators speak of the Women series (of six similar paintings) as de Kooning’s epitome of resolving “figure and field.” The curator has every right to say this, of course. Let it also be said, however, that even “expert” art judgment invariably leans subjective. Others might say that the figure and ground in Women is unexceptional.

            What is certain, of course, is that de Kooning’s Women series created controversy. It opened the way for a new period and, don’t forget, gallery sales. The next period was called his most successful, his “full arm sweep,” when he used giant house painting brushes to make brutal strokes of oddly clashing, or very muddy, colors on canvas. These bespeak the emotion that, according to favorable critics, made abstract expressionism the greatest art to ever appear in the Western tradition.

            This raises the question of emotion in art. In de Kooning’s very productive life, we are confronted with the role that intoxicants played in all this painterly emotion. Unfortunately, he and other painters, such as Mark Rothko, became alcoholics. A sober question always lingers: how much of their abstract painting was intoxicated. Over his later years (1960s-1980), de Kooning produced new and stunning “periods,” but they all show a deterioration of control. Sometimes the effect is beautiful. But more often one wonders why these murky, cavalier works are extolled so highly by art critics and sold for millions.

            Nonetheless, de Kooning’s life was a heroic artist’s life. He stuck with his trade through thick and thin, even unto the tragic onset of Alzheimer’s. His gift to the world is a productive life in art. There is virtually something for everyone to look for and enjoy. He learned traditional art as a youth, paid his dues painting 1930s murals, and then caught the great abstractionist freight train in Manhattan, producing as unique a lifetime of paintings as any artist we know.

            Remember, however, this is uptown New York. And in New York celebrating the “New York School” is part of cultural legend-making and provincial pride. We forget that in de Kooning’s day, the Manhattan art writers battled for supremacy, as did the gallery dealers. They were all myth makers. Often, the artists were merely the weapons the writers used to score points in their rival theories of "true" art. Offering a more level-headed approach today, New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz gives us this nice summary of MOMA’s de Kooning retrospective: “A cosmos unto itself, visual wisdom for the ages.”

These Stained Glass Windows Offer a Detective Story

The Medieval Revolution in Gothic Art Reassessed at St-Denis Church

The monastery church, or even the towering cathedral, is not exactly a hot topic in today’s contemporary art. Around Christmas time, however, it’s harder to ignore the role that stained glass windows in medieval sanctuaries played in shaping the Western art tradition.

            How did Gothic art arise, and who was responsible? The detective work could begin in 12th century France, at the ancient church of St-Denis in north Paris, according to the current issue of The Art Bulletin, which offers a cover story on stained glass.
            At St-Denis, burial site of French kings, the monastery's abbot merged the art styles of his day, including stained glass, and this synthesis rapidly spread the Gothic look across all of Europe. “Nothing less than a new conception of the religious work of art was taking place at St-Denis,” art historian Conrad Rudolph writes in Art Bulletin.
            During the 1100s in Europe, the great monastery churches were embroiled in a certain amount of politics, and one of the most heated topics was the use of art in the vast monastery church network. Christians had always used art. Very simple and didactic stained glass, like murals, had been in use for 500 years already. The early Pope Gregory the Great gave the rationale: “Those who are illiterate may at least read by seeing on the walls what they cannot read in books.”
            Over time, churches also began to fill up with pictures of monsters, grotesques, weird plants and animals, and human contortions, all of this spreading on walls, drain spouts, columns, and seen even in stained glass. Such crazy resplendence did not last, however. By the 12th century, monastic reformers had been cutting back on such distractions, arguing, as did the influential Bernard of Clairvaux (in 1125), that art in principle was a lower material experience. Art was an obstacle for monks on their spiritual journey to higher contemplation and virtues.
            So along comes Abbot Suger, a young monk at St-Denis who became its abbot and, in 1135, began a great building program to expand the old Romanesque church (movig away from those Roman characteristics of heavy walls, towers, and pillars). As is well known, with his resources, Abbot Suger was able to bring together all the new architectural inventions of the era to create a more light-filled, vertical, and ornate kind of church—to be called Gothic, and to take Europe by storm.
            With new architecture, Suger could make the leaded glass windows much larger, and it was only natural to want to make them more elaborate, educational, and stunning. But he had a political problem: how to expand this art without upsetting Bernard, who set the tone in monastery politics? Suger found the solution, historian Rudolph tells us, by cleverly using theology to justify the expansion of art. In short, Suger said that an elaborate window could be like a book. When monks looked at this kind of window art, they were studying scriptures, theology, and the virtues (which Bernard endorsed heartily). The information in the stained glass was “accessible only to the literati,” Suger explained. It was higher learning, not artistic distraction.
            This was very much theological inside-baseball among the monks, as Rudolph shows, involving beliefs about the three (or four) stages of spiritual growth in a monk's life. For all we know, Abbot Suger simply liked stained glass, and by citing the theologian Hugh (another player), he began to suggest that even non-monks could spiritually benefit from the art.
            In time, Suger and Hugh’s implicit argument won the day: non-literati could also grow spiritually by looking at sophisticated stained glass windows. Ordinary people, too, had spiritual stages that art could stimulate. And so it was that Abbot Suger’s art program, carried out systematically at St-Denis, opened the way for truly Gothic stained glass to appear in other churches. Over at Chartres Cathedral, for example, a slightly less elite window was innovated, producing 184 portals as if giant Gothic kaleidoscopes.
            In his article, Rudolph takes us through a good deal of theological detective work. However, his broader conclusions about art history may be the most fascinating for today. Because Abbot Suger justified higher quality art as a service to both monks and the 12th century’s growing class of educated Europeans, he spurred a widespread revival of art. He renewed the populist vision of Gregory (over that of Bernard).
            Rudolph also shows that today’s heated debated on “originality” in art is not new. Back in Suger’s day there was always a young theologian or two who claimed a radical new “invention” in the face of orthodoxy. Suger had sidestepped such revolutionist rhetoric. “Suger did little more than propose the same justifications for religious art that had been offered since the beginnings of Christianity,” Rudolph says. Abbot Suger's innovation was to pull together “previously existing elements to address contemporary needs.”
            This was a quiet revolution in art. For ordinary people, the day soon came in most churches of Europe when their “field of vision was flooded with brilliant light, glowing color, obviously meaningful forms, bewildering detail, and unfathomable inscriptions.” They couldn’t necessarily read these theological books of stained glass—as it still goes today. But the art inspired. The rest is art history.

Humor Us: The Search for Truly Funny Art

A Serious Discussion of Art and Laughter Can Be Rare as a Good Joke

In 1967 the conceptual artist Bruce Nauman made a neon spiral in blue and pink that said, tongue in cheek, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”

            That was funny, if you got the self-effacing irony.
            Then in 2008, another artist named Bert Rodriquez made a suspiciously similar spiral of neon in blues and pinks. It said, “The True Artist Makes Useless Shit for Rich People to Buy.” That was funny, too, especially if you knew that Nauman, by poking fun, had sold his neon works to rich people.
            For better or worse, the question of humor in art has tended to be like the proverbial tiger chasing its tail. One artist makes jokes on another artist—making jokes on other artists. Most art does not intend to be funny, and perhaps that’s way the wider topic is addressed only occasionally.
            This month, at least, the venerable Artnews devotes its year-end issue to “What’s So Funny,” and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is getting attention for its “Infinite Jest” exhibit of satirical prints across history. Everyone realizes that most humor is not strictly visual (in a fine art sense), and when it is, it’s usually in the form of comics or sit-com “sight gags” (something to see that evokes immediate laughter).
            As the “Infinite Jest” exhibit suggests, the best documented form of visual humor is the satirical drawing. Every day, newspaper cartoonists still do this, a tradition that goes back to such fine art greats as Leonardo da Vinci and Francisco Goya. Satire usually relies on caricature or exaggeration, or by turning people into animals or objects to make an editorial point. Doing this well can be a rare talent, says graphic artist Steven Heller in his book Design Humor, but it makes communication easier: “Humor lowers defenses, releases steam, and excites the mind.”
            Humorists from Mark Twain to Woody Allen have warned about dissecting humor, but it’s been done nevertheless. The still-dominant “incongruity” theory of humor was well put by the French essayist Pascal long ago: “Nothing produces laughter more than a disproportion between that which one expects, and that which one sees.” All rapid surprises are not pleasant, of course, but humor fills this benign role (with punch lines, timing, etc.) Two other theories are common, that humor offers “relief” (a Freudian anti-repression idea) and that it allows us to feel superior, since much humor is about laughing down at the absurdity and misfortune of others.
            Traditionally, art has generated amusement through straight-forward images that create surprising incongruity or exaggeration. The painter Red Grooms’s large 2003 canvas, “'Manet at the Met,” is funny for its ability to caricature every kind of city person who jams into big art museums. This is not laugh-out-loud humor. But the pleasure is augmented by Grooms’ painting and rendering skills.
            Today we have postmodern artistic humor, according to Sheri Klein in her book Art and Laugher. Since the 1980s, she says, art humor has increased by way of more literary forms, or use of events and technologies. “Postmodern artists my not produce any objects at all,” Klein says. Postmodern art humorists often look like entertainers, a long tradition in cabaret or theater. Meanwhile, if there are four uses of humor—group solidarity, reduction of malice, pleasure, and criticism of norms—the last two best characterize postmodern art, Klein suggests.
            Postmodern humor may be a revival of “blague,” a French term for a condescending prank. The revival may be a mystery. “Why has the past century in particular been rich in jokes, hoaxes, forged identities, subversive graffiti, and mass and solo performances with an aim to shock or annoy, as well as shenanigans that some would be loath to qualify as art?” art writer Ann Landi asks in Artnews. The instigators of pranks as a form of art claim that they provide helpful commentary on problems in society, and problems in the art world, at least by getting attention. One art theorist is advocating “prank theory” to explain these in and outs, if they need explaining.
            Landi cites art historian Simon Anderson’s assertion that humor is probably hidden across all of art history, even in its great works. We just don’t know the times, clues, and incongruities—indeed punch lines—that might have existed, say, in the Sistine Chapel in its day. “I think there are jokes going on throughout the history of painting,” Anderson said. Uncovering that context is a challenge, according to the “Infinite Jest” curators. They found “humorous” prints, but could not find an obvious punch line. “We have to dig through the historical record to reconstruct not only the event to which a print refers but also to figure out what people thought about it at the time,” said Nadine Orenstein, the Met’s curator of drawings and prints.
            Trying too hard to be funny can backfire. A good deal of contemporary joke-art is hard to “get,” seems forced, or is simply too bitter to be funny. Still, no medicine has a better vehicle than humor. As design guru Heller says, amid the constant parade of art and design books and annuals he sees, the “most memorable” pieces tend to provide humor and information all at once. And it's not easy to do.

How the Internet and the Masses Gave Us “Participatory” Design

A New Book Talks about Designing Art with User-Generated Content

For graphic designers, the times they are a changing
            That’s the message of a delightful new book, Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content. In a concise 160 pages (with lots of pictures), the paperback aims to help artists find handles on the nebulous Internet and software revolutions, which are rapidly changing art making.
            The first kind of handle is the term “participate.” The authors, Helen Armstrong and Zvezdana Stojmirovic (both college art instructors), define participation as different from the more traditional “collaboration” in art. In the fast-paced world of Internet relationships, collaboration by co-equal partners is being eclipsed by lots and lots of people joining in a particular art project.
            This is the brave new world of participation: Artists must now expect their audiences to want to add on to artworks, contribute to information flows, and even alter the images and advertisements of products and services they buy. During participation, in fact, there may not be a final product. Participation is about a process that may be unfinished. The payoff could be an artwork, or a cash benefit. It may also simply be social therapy—the satisfaction of joining in. As every politician now realizes, Internet participation creates the “base” and brings out the vote. The same is true in organizing art projects, apparently.
            This is changing the ground rules for graphic design, the authors say. “Graphic design is often about control—controlling what the audience sees, controlling the typography of a piece, controlling its concept.” In contrast, “Participatory design requires user content for completion. Rather than delivering clean, finished products to a passive audience, participatory designers are creating open-ended generative systems.”
            This may sound a bit nebulous (as is the Internet itself). But as the authors know well enough, big business and big media are taking this nebulosity quite seriously. Facebook and Goggle have become behemoth industries. Time, Inc. has just hired a digital advertising pro as its new head. The new editor of the New York Times says her goal is to make the grey old lady of newsprint “interactive” to consumer participation.
            The great shift is generational, of course. Older folks are accustomed to the old model of hard copy art and media, produced by individual writers or artists. This has grown too costly and no longer has cache. The younger generation through the thirties, even forties, is shifting its mindset entirely, we are told, toward Internet products, mobile devices, apps, Internet groups, and just about every new bell and whistle you can buy at an Apple Store (or purloin from the Internet).
            So what is the graphic designer to do? According to Armstrong and Stojmirovic, the designer should keep four themes in mind: Community, Modularity, Flexibility, and Technology. The book, published by Princeton Architectural Press (in New York) is nicely organized around these four topics. Each section has a critical essay, examples of participatory design, interviews with designers, and projects for students in the classroom.
            The authors start with Community. They make a fairly persuasive argument that the social Internet is based on the number of “conversations” you can get going. From these come “connections” and finally a semi-permanent community. That community can join projects, buy products, or simply produce fun and enjoyment. These communities are also “wrenching cultural production from the hands of mass media.” Thus, the tone of the new approach, while commercial, is also rather anti-establishment and anti-corporate. As one slogan goes: “Content is Not King—Contact Is.”
            These communities can create artwork on the Internet (or by meeting at real places) through the use of Modularity, or pre-designed small pieces (modules) that can be added on. Modules have limits. But the adding-up power is unlimited. So for example, in participatory art projects people fill in templates, or add new modules to a growing accumulation. This may not suit the aesthetic tastes of everybody. But as the book’s examples show, it is a growing phenomena in the art world. Today, you can punch out your own modular book or piece of clothing “on demand.” Another slogan fits here: “Mass customization.”
            What, then, is Flexibility? This is the fact that product logos and brand names can no longer be carved in stone. A company or organization must interact with its community and alter the brand image as the community likes. This moving “from corporate mark to flexible identity” is delicate. The company must retain its integrity while still responding to whims of the mob. Like it or not, this is being called for in the new Internet market, and designers must pay heed.
            The final concern is Technology. The authors give an overview of the high-tech revolution beyond just computers: It includes the “open source” software revolution begun with Lenix in 1983, followed by anti-copyright movements such as “copy left” and “creative commons.” Meanwhile, the key to technology is that computers create algorithms: set patterns that computer code experts make and put into action. For artists, these algorithms (or “parameters”) can be off-the-shelf tools to create designs quickly, cheaply, and with a degree of chance mixed in, hopefully to produce new creativity.
            The challenge for designers is to become comfortable with the brain-numbing fact of code, indeed, thousands of lines of it everywhere. When it comes to writing code, “Code easily intimidates.” The tyranny of code experts may now be upon us. Despite dreams of democracy, it is unimaginable that everybody will write code. Nonetheless, the authors say that the algorithm-based technology has for the first time opened the way for enthusiastic amateurs to invade the art and design field.
            This problem of who controls the code is one of many challenges the book states plainly enough. Another is the copyright conundrum: How to be law-abiding, yet make code and products free, and yet still allow designers and artists to earn money. On this battlefield “between corporate control and open source ideology,” the book does not presume to offer a solution. Its goal is to introduce projects and opportunities.
            If there’s a gap in this discussion—and it appears in most works about art and the Internet—it is the ethical side. Art usually avoids ethical questions anyway. It simply wants the largest playing field for creativity. Recall also that it was telephone line “hackers” who launched the computer-Internet revolution. Seen in this light, participation ideology may be the early glimmers of an “Occupy Wall Street” for art and design.

A Museum Focused on Clyfford Still Opens in Denver

The Late Abstract Expressionist Painter Wanted His Work all in One Place

There is Norman Rockwell’s museum in Stockbridge, Mass., Salvador Dalí’s in St. Petersburg, Fla., Marcel Duchamp’s in Philadelphia, Georgia O’Keefe’s in Santa Fe, and Andy Warhol’s in Pittsburgh—and now Clyfford Still has his own museum in Denver.

            Clyfford Still?
            In the 1940s and early 1950s, Still was in the pantheon of American Abstract Expressionist painters. But as an independent sort, he departed from the New York scene, and in 1961 moved to rural Maryland. When he died, virtually all of his lifetime work was stored in his barn. His will, executed through his wife, said that the art would never be sold separately or be shown with other artists.
            Virtually that entire body of work—825 canvases, 1,575 works on paper and 3 sculptures—has now been deposited in the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which opened on November 18. The project has been seven years in the making.
            Like Rockwell, Dalí, Duchamp, O’Keefe, Warhol and a few others, Clyfford Still is among that elite group that has an American museum devoted to its work. After his early success, up to 1952, Still broke from the gallery system and stockpiled his art. After his death in 1980, his will required that his artworks stay together. A number of large museums appealed to his wife to donate the collection. But it was Denver’s mayor—and now governor—who persuaded her in 2004, a year before she died, that the western city was the place to entrust her husband’s legacy.
            Still was a son of the West. He was born in North Dakota of Canadian parents. He moved to Spokane, Wash., for most of his youth, lived on a large wheat farm, and began his painting career doing what looked like “regional” painting—images of workers, farmers, and rural landscapes. Suddenly, he turned to complete abstraction. He was among the earliest of the Abstract Expressionists (some say the first) to use extremely large canvases, a scale that he liked in old-masters mural paintings. However, his large work was very “minimal”: He could cover an entire 13-by-19 foot canvas with a single color, then apply just a few jabs of other colors at an edge or corner.
            Critics of his work say he fell into a stylistic predictability. Many of his paintings have a “lightening” motif, jagged thunder-bolt-like lines overlapping each other. Nonetheless, his kind of “Ab Ex” painting is apparently in high demand, if only because of the name and hard-to-get status. This explains what happened at a Sotheby’s auction in New York a few days before the Clyfford Still Museum opened.
            On the evening of November 9, four of Still’s paintings fetched a total of $114 million on the contemporary art auction block. “Up in the skybox [at Sotheby’s], the Denver officials were toasting themselves with champagne, or perhaps it was Coors,” said one report. The $39 million museum was paid for by private donors, so the sale was necessary to produce an endowment for the museum, its trustees have said. The idea of a museum selling its art for cash is frowned on in the profession (it is called deaccession). Even so, the surviving Still family did not object, and Denver needed a cash flow.
            The custom-made museum (with 28,500 square feet of space) has special features. Foremost, it will show only works by Still, according to the artist’s will. The museum is just a few blocks from the Denver Art Museum, so the reclusive painter nevertheless will be in a larger context of other artists.
            The top floor of the two-story museum has natural lighting. On the bottom floor, visitors can also see the glass-enclose storage area, where many of the non-exhibited paintings will be visible on racks. At its opening, the museum features an overview of Still’s styles and experiments, seen in 60 paintings, 45 works on paper, and 3 sculptures. These date from 1925 to the late 1970s. About 200 of his paintings are on the gigantic-sized canvases, so a few of these will dominate.
            Many artists try to control their work with the same alacrity as did Still. However, most of those artists go to the grave undiscovered. Other artists are the opposite of Still—they put their work up for exhibit and sale as soon as the paint is dry. Clyfford Still did offer exhibitions at a few major museums. But he played the game his own way. As rarely happens, his strict intentions continue to be fulfilled.
            A few of the museums devoted to a single artist open their doors to others. The Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe is overwhelmingly a showcase of her work. Yet it also is dedicated to “O’Keeffe’s art shown with that of her contemporaries [and] works of living artists of distinction.” The Andy Warhol Museum is dominated by 8,000 of his own works, but regularly shows other artists as a main feature.
            We will watch and see what happens with the Clyfford Still Museum.
            In the meantime, all of his works are in one place, shown together, protected in perpetuity, and brooking no comparison with other artists. It’s about as honorary a monument as any bygone artist can ask for. If there is life after death for an artist, this must be its highest earthly form.

Thanks to the Louvre, but No Thanks to the Turkeys of Art

Thanksgiving Season Requires that We Pardon Even the Anti-Artists

Thanksgiving is a two-edged carving knife. First, let us be thankful for impressive art. The season also requires that we point out the turkeys that make jokes about art.

            In the thanks department, the Louvre museum in Paris has authorized a coffee table-sized book that, for the first time, shows all of the 3,022 paintings in its permanent collection. Of these, the book identifies 400 iconic ones. The Louvre: All the Paintings is the most convenient look yet at this historic repository.
            Large and heavy art books are still in vogue, and they still have the “large and heavy” drawbacks. The chore of flipping the 784 pages of this volume is assuaged somewhat by the quality of the images, though glare on the pages continues to be the the norm in color-reproduction art books. Since the book images must be smallish to fit the pages, it has been hoped that the computer CD that accompanies the book would offer large high-resolution images for closer study.
            Alas, the CD is somewhat low-tech and the images do not allow close up viewing in higher resolution. The reason for the limitiation probably is more a copyright matter than technology: if the Louvre handed out all its paintings in high-resolution digital form, it would lose control of its birthright. So we can be thankful to Black Dog & Leventhal, an imprint of New York’s Workman Publishers. The volume is perhaps the closest substitute to taking a trip to Paris, where 8.5 million people visit the Louvre every year (excluding millions more who now, arguably, can make the trip over their coffee table).
            Now for the turkeys.
            The seriousness of the art represented by the Louvre has given a class of contemporary artists a new shtick: making “art” that cracks jokes about art. They are comedians and non-artists, but they have come under contemporary art’s generous wing. Two of these artists have been profiled by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and their odd allure has fetched both of them New York museum retrospectives this year.
            The first is the French-speaking Belgian Francis Alÿs, who Schjeldahl reviewed in May for a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “A Story of Deception.” This week Schjeldahl has written on the Italian Maurizio Cattelan, whose retrospective is now at the Guggenheim. Of all art writers, Schjeldahl surely has the largest and most colorful vocabulary. Thanks to that gift, he has not repeated himself even though Alÿs and Cattelan are very much the same.
            They are jokesters on art, now in their fifties. “I am not an artist,” Cattelan says, intending to mystify. Alÿs says that nobody needs to see his performance pranks: they just need to hear about them. What Schjeldahl says about Alÿs applies to them both. They are the artist as “public jester.” As with bookings at comedy clubs, they are given art shows at galleries and even biennales to “attract and entertain large, fickle audiences.” They make art as art world self-flagellation, the humorous kind.
            When Alÿs pushed a block of ice around a Mexico City street until it melted, he said the action was “settling accounts with minimalist sculpture.” Cattelan also parodies art: he joked on the marble sculpture of Constantine’s hand (which now gives the finger) and another artist’s white-slashed paintings (which he turned into the sign of Zorro).
            When humor is not enough, both Cattelan and Alÿs have used shock-value to keep the attention of art curators. The tall and gangly Alÿs, who videotapes his art events, strode ominously around Mexico City with a large revolver. This lasted 11 minutes until police intervened. Cattelan, who often uses wax museum-type sculptures to joke on famous people, ordered up, in 2004, three lifelike children to lynch from a tree.
            Perhaps appropriately, Cattelan’s 128 works, produced since 1989, are hanging by long cords in the six-story rotunda of the circular Guggenheim museum. It is, of course, a joke on “hanging” art. But as Schjeldahl says, even the good (and funny) Cattelan works lose their appeal in a “bland pulp” of too many dangling things.
            Cattelan and Alÿs rank as artists of the conceptual variety, those who “do things” rather than fit the traditional category of art: “the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria.” Curators say their pranks are serious commentary on world problems. The curators also shoehorn them into sophisticated new art theory categories. Alÿs is involved in “reception theory,” for example, while Cattelan does “relational aesthetics.”
            Instead, Schjeldahl argues that the two men essentially specialize in the art of making inside jokes. The appeal is that when viewers “get” the joke, they feel both very hip and very smart; they feel like a real insider to the art world. “The goof is all,” Schjeldahl says of Cattelan. In the case of Alÿs’s work, there is an “imperative to displace your love of art into a vicarious relish of somebody else’s pranks and caprices.”
            So on this Thanksgiving, we can be thankful for a Louvre volume. The artist twosome, too, can be thankful that the Louvre exists, for its legacy has created the target for their comedic barbs against all art. There’s a great Thanksgiving tradition of “pardoning” the turkey. In that spirit, we pardon Cattelan and Alÿs. By no fault of their own, someone in charge of the art world has invited them to walk, “gobble-gobble,” through the great art museums.

Christo Gets Federal OK to Wrap a Colorado River in Silver

Much Work Ahead for Two-Week “Over the River” Event in August 2014

WASHINGTON D.C.—The environmental artist Christo swung through this city last week, but not to wrap the National Gallery of Art in orange fabric. Instead he came to celebrate the U.S. government’s green light on his project to suspend 5.9 miles of silvery fabric over the Arkansas River in Colorado.

            On November 7, the U.S. Interior Department approved his “Over the River” project. The next day, Christo appeared at a National Gallery press conference to give it two collages that visually describe the project. He has had the idea since 1992.
            Christo’s gift to the National Gallery is not really the newest thing. The newest thing is the federal involvement. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management oversees the river land in question. Thus, this was the first time it did an environmental impact study for a work of art. In the end, the federal and state agencies have agreed that the undertaking would not harm the wildlife and ecology of the river area. For its two-week run in August 2012, “Over The River” could generate $121 million in revenue (mostly tourist). It could also boost south-central Colorado—already a recreational favorite—and the state’s modern art scene.
            Obviously, Christo is grateful. After losing his devoted wife, Jeanne-Claude, 74, to illness last year, the 75-year-old Christo is now on his own (though surrounded by his usual team of professionals). This week, Christo was in the United Arab Emirates continuing his decades-long effort to win approval for stacking 410,000 color-painted oil barrels in the desert. Desert monuments notwithstanding, Colorado may end up being his last great project. At $50 million, it is one of his most expensive.
            In their revolutionizing of “public art,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created some of the largest pieces on record. They have waged some of the longest and friendliest battles with civic official—ranging from 20 to 40 years—to gain permission to unleash their giant fabric scenarios in Paris, Berlin, Miami, and New York City.
            Their real novelty, however, is their system. Once Christo became famous enough, he could sell sketches of his ideas to collectors. With tens of millions in sales, he paid for his outdoor projects himself. The projects, while taking months or years to install, bloomed as a few weeks of “experience” for viewers. “I don’t have any artworks that exist,” Christo once said. “They all go away when they’re finished. Only the preparatory drawings and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character.”
            It’s a remarkable art strategy that has served Christo and Jeanne-Claude well for their exemplary life together. A Bulgarian-born artist, Christo met Jean-Claude in her native France. In 1962 Paris, Christo’s first project was to pile barrels to block a street. It was a protest against the Berlin Wall. When the police came to stop him, they agreed to let the barrel-wall stand a few hours. That was the beginning.
            After the couple moved to New York, they decided their public art would no longer be a protest message. They decided that art is for beauty alone. “The artists’ goal has always been to create works of art of joy and beauty,” says their website. That is why they have succeeded against other odds. Some of their projects, like wrapping Paris’s oldest bridge and the Reichstag, or erecting giant blue and yellow umbrellas in California and Japan, have drawn millions of viewers. People do like joy and beauty. Politicians and zoning officials usually give in.
            In Colorado, the beauty debate has been waged. Opponent groups such as “Rags Over the Arkansas River” see Christo as a celebrity who gets his way, imposing his artistic vision on locals who don’t want three years of construction hubbub for a two-week art show. Christo’s vision of beauty won out (with a few minor permits to be had). The eight sections of see-through silver fabric, totaling six miles of stretched ceiling over 42 miles of river, will have this effect, according to Christo:
            “The translucent fabric will enhance the contrast of the clouds, mountains and vegetation. These waves of fabric will play off the natural lighting throughout the day, transitioning from shimmering pink in the morning light, to shiny silver in the mid-day sun, to golden as the sun sets. From the water level, the rafters, kayakers and canoeists on the Arkansas River will view blue sky, white cloud formations and the undulating mountain skyline through the fabric. Cars and buses on Highway 50 will also get a unique view of Over The River from the roadway, where the fabric will reflect the colors of the sky while moving with the wind like waves in the ocean.”
            Spoken like an artist. Most of what comes now is engineering. The longest part will be determining countless spots along the river banks to sink anchors for stretching steel cables. Then a few weeks before the opening (August 2014), six miles of fabric will be unfurled. Two weeks of enjoyment follow. Hopefully, wildlife will not have been scared away, and unexpected storms will not collapse the fabric. Next comes a few months of clean-up to restore the area to its pristine state.
            As in past cases, members of Colorado's stop-Christo faction may change their minds when it’s all over, if all goes well. And as Christo promises, nothing should remain but the legend.

Hollywood and Modern Art (and Drugs, Sex, and Rock n’ Roll)

New Book “Rebels in Paradise” Reveals L.A.’s 1960s Pop Patrons

When the Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper died last year, he took a piece of modern art history with him. In the early 1960s, the very hip Hopper began to buy the wild new modern art in Los Angeles, art works that nobody else seemed to care about.

            That has made Hopper more than an actor. According a fascinating new book by art writer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, he was part of a Hollywood network, galvanized by the 1960s ethos, that ended up making an entirely new “art scene” in America possible.
            Artistically, the scene had southern California characteristics. As Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s explains in a superbly written narrative, this included shiny colorful objects, plastics and lacquers, Pop art simplicity, paintings of swimming pools and palms, and tableaus made of detritus.
            The real story, however, is sociological, and that is where Hollywood and L.A.’s entertainment industry played a crucial role. None of the innovative artists coming out of the 1960s were actors or producers, where the money seemed to be. None of the artists had rich parents or a natural business sense. But all of the players did attend the same parties. It was sun, money, and excess that created the bond. Art was as good an excuse to party as any. In this chemistry, Hopper—who went to the bars and galleries of the beatnik artists—was the exemplar.
            Some Hollywood actors, such as Vincent Price, collected art. But it was Hopper who brought friends and neighbors in on the enthusiasm. He was a link between the new gallery art of “LA cool” and the already burgeoning movie, fashion, and music industry. For the art, one of the emblematic events came in 1962, when the Pasadena Museum of Art held a “New Painting of Common Objects” exhibit. It was probably the first Pop art show in the U.S. Andy Warhol was just one of the painters on the roster.
             Enter Hopper, who essentially hosted the party atmosphere of those early Warhol-meets-the-L.A.-artists days. As incarnated in Hopper, it was an art scene fueled by “drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll.” He’d done plenty of movies, but his new vision culminated in Hopper’s surprise blockbuster movie, Easy Rider (1969). Art scenes do not live on drugs alone, however. To get it going, L.A. still needed a New York boost. That came in the form of professional art dealer Irving Blum. He tutored the laid-back L.A. artists—attached to such humble operations as the Ferus Gallery—in reaching out to collectors, educating them about “contemporary art,” and then closing the deal.
            Drohojowska-Philp is a fine wordsmith. Backed by extensive research, and by way of her many interviews with the old hands (including Hopper, just before he died), she says a lot with a little, capturing the characters and mood of the L.A. sixties. At one point, a group of three artist who specialized in lacquers, room moods, and lighting, competed for who among them was the real founder of “Light and Space” art. Or, as Drohojowska-Philp says, “who did what first.”
            Besides good art, there was also a good deal of human wreckage produced by an art scene that was characterized by Hopper at his wildest. On this, Drohojowska-Philp sweeps nothing under the rug. We’ve heard of “Hollywood Babylon” before. But this is the 1960s art version: fleeting hook-ups, drug addictions, bitter divorces, and a network of copulating people that mingled artists, rock stars, wealthy collector-housewives, and high school-aged femme fatales.
            According to Rebels in Paradise, not quite all of them descended into debauchery. Overall, though, it is amazing that a core group of the innovators could succeed financially, given the haze that surrounded their artistic lives. What saved them, of course, were the hard-nosed art dealers and the wealthy collectors—collectors who in the spirit of the 1960s began to come out of L.A.’s otherwise conservative woodwork.
            Through her extensive interviews of the artists, their families and friends, Drohojowska-Philp found that the most alluring thing about southern California to them was its freedom from all conventions of history, ordered cities, or institutions. In sum, it was freedom from the Midwest and from New York City. Plus the weather was so good. It was easy to get along. That was the “paradise” part. It was unique to Los Angeles in those days before crammed freeways and super-smog.
            What gave birth to the L.A. art scene—now a major player with four contemporary art museums and an international reputation—was the same coupling that gave birth to every great art scene. It was a handful of determined artists, usually intoxicated, and a handful of very wealthy patrons. Such was the story of Montmartre (Paris) or Greenwich Village (New York). In the L.A. story, a few rebels survived in their ambitions. Fewer still boasted financial success. Very few, if any, had success and an admirable record of human relationships. Along with Hopper, who ended up in rehab, the L.A. crew constantly battled indulgence and excess.
            Some interesting art remains. Still, there must be a better way.

The “Master Painters of India” Tell Their Ancient Stories

The Met's Medieval Miniatures Mix Religion, Royalty, and Remarkable Detail

The story of Hindu and Muslim art had once been fairly simple. Hindu art illustrated the stories of the Bhagavad Gita and its hero, Krishna. Islamic art banned images of God or the Prophet. Thus, it developed elaborate designs and renderings of animals and nature.

            Eventually, the Hindu and Muslim approaches to art crossed paths in a very big way in India, as a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art vividly illustrates. The exhibit of about 220 works by 40 artists—nearly all “miniatures” done in ink or watercolor—covers almost a millennium, from 1100–1900 C.E. Given India’s history, it also illustrates how wars of empires and religions fueled happier wars between artistic styles.
            At first blush, the average visitor to the exhibition, “Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India,” will see the works as akin to medieval Europe’s illuminated manuscripts: small bright pictures that accompany texts. This medieval-to-modern period of art in India had patronage from Hindu and Muslim courts and, similarly, the patrons wanted small works of art in books or as visual delicacies. The earliest works of this period were done on palm leaf, moving to paper and, for this exhibition, ending in photography, which migrated to India by the end of the 1800s.
            The novelty of this exhibit—emphasized by its scholars and the many enthusiastic reviews—is that it kills off an old notion about medieval Indian art. The old belief was that paintings were done by anonymous members of court schools. However, since the 1990s, the new approach to Indian art has been to track down actually artists, as if named Renaissance figures, who in their day were the most accomplished painters, indeed famous in India's cultural circles.
            In the words of the curators, the exhibit “counters the long-held view of the anonymity of Indian art.” The Indian emperors knew who these individuals were and sometimes included their names in royal histories. Others were just called the “master” of a court. Some emperors called their top painter the “wonder of the age,” and hence the exhibition title.
            Around the world, the modern scholars of these exhibited Indian miniatures (works brought in from India, England, and the U.S.) have been finding enough clues—in texts or hints on the paintings—to name names of the artists. This is very new. According to the show’s curators, for the first time they have been able to “reveal the identities of individual artists and their oeuvres through an analysis of style.”
            That style also reflects the turmoil of India’s long-ago history (begun among Hindus, then “invaded” by Muslims, Mongols, and the British). It was a history of oscillations. Once an ancient ruler expanded an empire here, and then over there it broke into parts, either as Hindu kingdoms or Islamic Sultanates. This was complicated further by the invasion of the Mongols. As rulers they tended to adopt the religion of the population. Similarly, a Muslim Sultan often had a Hindu wife. Religions mixed.
            As regards art, the first significant stylistic influx to act on the native  approaches—Buddhist and Hindu storytelling mostly—came from Persia, with its ornate patterning and naturalistic rendering. Then the Europeans came by ship (around 1500), followed by the East India Company (1600). European topics and styles were imitated by the Indian court painters.
            Through it all, however, the dominant Indian characteristic was the small narrative painting illustrated, inch by inch, with sharp, colorful detail. The artists also experimented with flat space and perspective, creating a kind of Indian “cubism” in which several views or senses of dimension and depth can be evoked in a single tableau.
            If at first the sources of the new styles were the Hindu schools of north India, the later Sultanates, and the still later a renaissance in the Hindu courts (1650-1730), a new wave came with the East India Company. Its commercial concern produced a “Company School” style of painting, still of the highest quality. Indian art always liked detail. So when photography arrived, the clash was head on: what is more detailed than photo crystals? The result was a strong Indian court trend in color-tined photographs, as illustrated by the exhibition.
            Two brother artists were at the crux of this collision of painting and technology. One tried to outdo photography by painting a traditional  “miniature” that was five feet long, a veritable mural. The other brother opted for professional photography. Thus, a period of Indian art and its “wonder of the age” artists came to an end.
            Our knowledge of who these artists were, however, has just begun. Their names will boggle American minds: Farrukh Beg, Balchand, Pahari, and Chitarman, to name just a few of the forty who scholars have now identified “according to identifiable hands.” The exhibit has four or five works by each of these “master painters of India.” It may be by their “identifiable hands” (and not by their difficult names) that we can try to go back and meet these Indian masters, once faceless, as individuals who excelled at their meticulouis craft.

Turning the Clock Back to “Pacific Standard Time”

The Survey of L.A.’s Postwar Art Spans the Forgotten Decades

A decade ago, a covey of intrepid art detectives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles began interviewing aging artists who worked in the city since the 1940s. They wanted their oral histories before they were gone. One thing led to the next, of course. This month the Getty, along with most of Southern California’s art establishment, opened a $10 million region-wide exhibition recalling what those artists accomplished, “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980.”

            On a hilltop in north L.A., overlooking the Pacific, the Getty Museum held a gala opening on Oct. 2. And it is worth noting that in attendance was the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the metropolis that once overshadowed Los Angeles; in the glare of Manhattan, L.A. struggled to gain attention for its modern art.
            The glare is mutual now. Los Angeles now ranks as the second hub of America’s contemporary art world. That status had brought amnesia about the hardscrabble past. So through March, the regional art event hopes to take people back in time to the two generations of innovative artists after World War II. Their work fills 60 shows at museums, university galleries, and art spaces from L.A. to San Diego.
            The cooperation of this many art venues, and the funding by Getty, may be unprecedented in the country. One model the Los Angeles project has kept in mind is the 1984 Summer Olympics, which included a well-attended Arts Festival. That even was mostly and music and performance, however. L.A. culture leaders will soon find out if they can draw their public to a visual arts tableau that is as much scholarly as it is theatrical.
            For local history buffs, the official exhibition catalog and a series of insightful articles by Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, have helped dispel the collective amnesia. Through the 1950s, “L.A. had no avant-garde because it had no garde—no mighty, monolithic artistic establishment ruling the city’s cultural life,” Knight says.
            As some of us native Californians know, moreover, California was essentially two states orbiting around San Francisco or Los Angeles. San Francisco was the risqué city. L.A. was conservative, a hub of rural migrants, business, freeways, stucco suburbs, hot rods, evangelicals, surfboards, and the aerospace industry. The kind of cheeky art galleries the operated openly in San Francisco got in trouble in 1950’s L.A., where they were likened to adult bookstores.
            That was only half of the story, however. Other kinds of art blossomed, and it was not just due to Hollywood (where movie stars had money to buy art and where Salvador

Dalí arrived to design an Alfred Hitchcock movie dream scene). Nor was it simply the Disney studios that fueled art as it produced such epic cartoons as “Fantasia" (194) and “Bambi” (1942).

            The modern impulse in art, Knight says, was “an unorthodox iconoclasm” that sprouted from California individualism, the cardinal trait of a young city with open spaces and high mobility. Open space produced some distinct L.A. looks. The open road, with its freeway-and-billboard aesthetic, a veritable world of signage, became models for L.A. painting and photos. To the east were the desert states, and from those high-vaulted skies young artists arrived in L.A. thinking about the light and space of their childhoods. Indeed, as the exhibition shows, “Light and Space” art was an L.A. contribution. It lit up gallery interiors and produced outdoor “earth art” that let the sun create the special effects.

            In one way or another, 1960s L.A. was about to have it all: enclaves for black and Chicano artists, and with the 1970s the art of feminists and the antiwar movements. As to painting, some Asian influence may have dropped into southern California as well, where the Japanese flat aesthetic arguably inspired early paintings now called hard-edge. If there was Abstract Expressionism, it was in wild clay-baked ceramics.
             In sunny California, sport and technology also made a difference. Its artists became known for mastering use of resin, plastic, fiberglass and colored lacquers, something first seen on hotrods, surfboards, and rocket design. When it was said that the “L.A. look” was airbrush slick, cool, and glamorous, it was not just the Hollywood spillover: it was mainly the colorfully lacquered paintings and minimalist sculptures.
            The detritus of city life and technology also made their mark in the rise of assemblage sculptures, and one is tempted to think that the mystique and ubiquity of  the Hollywood set must have borne some influence on this rise of shocking "tableau" art. The L.A. scene was dry kindling that still need a match, however, and that was struck by a New York City import: Andy Warhol, the future icon of Pop art. He rose to fame on his 1962 Campbell soup can show in L.A. As some view it, L.A. art was hitched to his rising star (until L.A. had its own momentum).
            Unlike the angst-drive Abstract Expressionists of New York, the L.A. artists never had a “dark side,” it has been said. They had their shy curmudgeon, however, in the city’s conceptual artist John Baldessari, now tall and very white haired. “I live here because L.A. is ugly,” he said at an exhibition panel. “If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art? . . . I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that.”

Revisiting Vincent van Gogh, the Sane Martyr

New Biography Shows that Gunplay, Not Suicide, Led to His Death

Experts on the life of Vincent van Gogh have long been convinced that he was neither insane nor mentally poisoned by his oil paints. His difficult personality, and apparent death wish, were probably related to his having temporal lobe epilepsy, which haunted him since childhood.

              Victims of this form of epilepsy do not have seizures, but they do black out. Worst of all, they feel the “electric storm in the brain” coming on before it takes place. This fills their lives with constant anxiety. To others, it produces a personality that is entirely inexplicable: one that looks crazy.
              This can explain why, for the 37 years of his life, Van Gogh had erratic behavior, was considered insane by his family, had no close friends, and would maim himself, as illustrated by the cut he inflicted on his ear. Despite all this, he painted a thousand brilliant works.
              This week on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” two authors of a new biography of Van Gogh argued that not only was he perfectly sane, but his death was not a suicide. The traditional story has been that Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field. He borrowed a pistol from the innkeeper to scare away crows, which bothered him as he painted. A ten year investigation into the actual events of those fateful days is now telling a different story. With their 976-page book, Van Gogh: The Life, authors Steve Naifeh and Greg Smith have stirred an electric storm in the art world.
              “What the evidence points to is that this incident [the shooting] took place not in the wheat fields, but in a farmyard,” Naifeh told Morely Shafer on “60 Minutes.” The incident involved two mischievous boys with a gun. “And that it was either an accident or a deliberate act.”
              The two boys, who liked to play cowboys, were known for taunting the odd Van Gogh around the vacation town of Auvers. On this particular day they may have had a pistol (since American cowboys were all the rage in Paris at the time). “Was it playing cowboy in some way that went awry?” Naifeh asked. Or, “Was it teasing with the gun with Vincent lunging out?” Whatever the case, this scenario can explain two things from the police and medical reports. When the police asked Van Gogh if he had tried to commit suicide, he said two things: “Yes, I believe so,” and then added, “Don’t accuse anyone else.” In turn, the doctor’s medical report noted that Van Gogh's wound suggest a gun aimed at an odd angle some distance from the flesh.
              Naifeh and Smith have done their homework. Having visited the French town of Auvers, they found accounts of one resident recalling a gun shot that day in the neighborhood a half mile from the inn where Van Gogh lived. According to the previous account—told now for 121 years—Van Gogh had struggle back from the wheat fields, over rough terrain, for more than a mile with his wound. The half-mile of flat streets better explains how he made it back to the inn, where he died 30 hours later.
              There is also a modern-day account of a wealthy Parisian businessman who, a year before he died, told of how he had borrowed a pistol from the innkeeper’s daughter, but that Van Gogh had stolen it later. In any case, the businessman said, he and his friend—the two boys—had left Auvers for Paris before Van Gogh was shot. So a new picture comes into focus, thanks to what amounts to a CSI Van Gogh: he was shot by the youths, but did not want to get them in trouble.
              “A couple of kids had shot Vincent van Gogh and he decided to basically protect them and accept this as the way to die,” Naifeh said. “These kids had basically done him the favor of shooting him.”
              “So he was covering up his own murder?” Safer asked.
              “Covering up his own murder,” Naifeh agreed.
              The new understanding of Van Gogh’s death is meticulously reconstructed, but finally based on circumstantial evidence. It could well be true. It could also help us better understand Van Gogh the painter.
              First of all, Van Gogh’s approach to painting was not driven by madness or physical disability. He had discovered a personal aesthetic and had mastered it through oil paint, drawing, and colors. In his letters, he spoke of giving up the dark and light contrast of the painting in his native Holland for the brightness of the French Impressionists. He was proud that he could do a painting a day, and once completed a canvas in 45 minutes. He loved portraits: it was his chance to spend time with individuals, since finding lasting friends proved difficult. His “Wheatfield with Crows” (1890) was therefore no his last painting (with its ominous crows, harbingers of death). He actually painted several beautiful and cheerful works before the actual day of the shooting.
              As a second matter, Van Gogh, who once had tried to be a minister like his father, believed that suicide was wrong. Nevertheless, with his tortuous epilepsy and maladjusted life, he might have wished to die, but not by his own hand. If the taunting boys shot him, they did him a favor. He did not turn them in.
              “The miracle is that this alienated person ended up becoming the most popular artist of all time,” Naifeh said. “So he achieved exactly what he set out to achieve. I mean . . . [his paintings] provide consolation for humanity.”

Cultural Icons: Warhol Celebrated, Steve Jobs Mourned

The Andy Warhol Exhibits in D.C. Make Their Own “Headlines”

WASHINGTON D.C.—“Warhol Bombs!” “Warhol Sensational!”
            Depending on your point of view, either headline might serve as an accurate report on the two new Andy Warhol exhibitions on the National Mall. In one, the National Gallery of Art breaks fresh ground by looking at 80 works in which Warhol, a founder of Pop art, replicated in drawings and prints the front pages of tabloids with their bold headlines.
            Across the Mall, the Hirshhorn Museum (the Smithsonian’s contemporary art unit) arrays Warhol’s 450-foot “painting” titled “Shadows.” It is made up of 102 multi-colored panels, each a large-sized canvas that Warhol painted and silk-screened. On the Hirshhorn’s curved white wall, the canvases are lined up edge-to-edge, each one showing the same geometrical image that came from a shadow that Warhol had photographed. A Pop art rainbow comes to mind.
            The Warhol exhibit season in D.C., which runs through January, also features lectures and films. Much of that fare will be offered by people who were part of Warhol’s Factory, a studio-and-art-party scene he established in Manhattan. As the “Headlines” exhibit reminds us, Warhol died young. On Feb. 23, 1987 the New York Post tabloid blared: “Andy Warhol Dead at 58.” He was the “prince of pop art,” the Post said. He died during a routine hospital operation.
            Warhol first started to copy out newspaper fronts as pencil doodles in 1956. By the next decade he was taking photos of newspapers. Then, with a light projector, he traced out the photo images on paper or canvas and filled them in with pencil and paint. The result was rather unpolished. He eventually turned entirely to using photographic stencils on silkscreens, enabling him to mass produce high quality images of news pages. On small size canvases, Warhol nearly set out to silkscreen every page of the Oct. 24, 1983 issue of the New York Post. He also did newspaper fronts on canvases the size of an entire wall.
            Warhol’s “favorite subjects” were celebrity, death, and destruction, the exhibit explains. He did newspapers because they “represented another consumer product.” After all, consumer products—such as Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans—were Warhol’s signature style in the art market. It was tedious work, but by keeping up a production line of silkscreen prints, Warhol became the unrivaled icon of contemporary art. His partisans will argue—as does the “Headlines” exhibition—that Warhol’s mechanical replication of mundane images “radically shifted the boundaries between vernacular and fine art.”
            He also broke the speed record for art production. His works were printed rather swiftly, using a warehouse-floor production line, though each piece had a bit of variation. The 102 virtually identical canvases lined up in the “Shadows” exhibit are a case in point. Today, there are so many Warhol works that curators and lawyers often must rule on which are “original.” An original Warhol—whatever that may mean—can fetch hundreds of thousand of dollars on the art market.
            The Warhol “Headlines” exhibition opened during the same weeks in which we heard of the death of another cultural icon, Steve Jobs. As the Oct. 6 New York Post bannered: “Steve Jobs Dead.” It may be hard to imagine two greater cultural icons than Warhol and Jobs. Each gave our modern-day visual culture a salient feature. Warhol turned ads, products, celebrity photos, and headlines into large, simple, colorful artworks. Think T-shirts and posters. Jobs framed our world in a new kind of widow: computer screens with icons and animation.
            Most of all, however, Warhol and Jobs were not shy about being masters of mass marketing. Warhol had no qualms about saying that “art” can indeed print money, and the more the merrier. Jobs built innovative corporations that made no bones about cornering markets.
            In today's world, culture is changed not by highly refined artworks, but by images and objects that lend to large-scale output. It may not seem fair: Warhol mass-produced scores of five-minutes-to-make silkscreen prints. Jobs punched out millions of iPods on Chinese factory lines. Fair or not, these are what have shaped contemporary American culture. In short, Warhol and Jobs are mass media friendly.
            The big difference, however, is that Warhol operated inside the art world. He mass produced things, but as “art,” each one retained a special status, what art historians have called the “aura.” Owning an aura-laden Warhol print is beyond the means of ordinary people. Some of these run into the millions of dollars at art auctions. The price of Apple computers and mobile devices start out high, but eventually come within the reach of just about everybody who wants one.
            Thirty years after Warhol’s death, we continue to celebrate him in the form of major retrospective exhibits. What about Steve Jobs thirty years hence? One day there may be an Apple Museum or a Jobs Foundation. However, in 2041 will Jobs be celebrated on the scale that we still celebrate Warhol? That seems unlikely.
            The world of contemporary art is unique. It thrives on celebrating its icons on a regular basis. The Warhol show travels next year to Frankfurt, Rome, and his own hometown museum in Pittsburgh. Andy Warhol will always give contemporary art a fresh set of headlines.

October Harvest: National Arts and Humanities Month

The Creativity Starts with a Presidential Proclamation, Ends with Halloween

In the spirit of October harvest time, this column will jump on the hay wagon, or more precisely the bandwagon, of our national arts culture. Halloween might seem to be the season's biggest artistic event, but those smiling Jack-o'-lanterns can be deceiving. In reality, this is National Arts and Humanities Month. President Obama has kicked it off with a proclamation:

“Millions of Americans earn a living in the arts and humanities, and the non-profit and for-profit arts industries are important parts of both our cultural heritage and our economy. . . .We must recognize the contributions of the arts and humanities not only by supporting the artists of today, but also by giving opportunities to the creative thinkers of tomorrow. Educators across our country are opening young minds, fostering innovation, and developing imaginations through arts education.”

            Although Halloween will produce millions upon millions of creative costumes, fuel the candy economy, and produce some striking art work at art schools—which often have Halloween spectacles—National Arts and Humanities Month takes in a far larger political vision.
            The Obama excerpt above, which focuses on art economics, was selected to be sent around the nation by our main arts lobby in Washington, Americans for the Arts. Its job is to keep a fire to the feet of Congress for arts funding. That is because, as even Obama suggests, arts produce jobs. They fuel the economy. October is also, in effect, the start of the one-year countdown for the great political event of 2012: the presidential election, the great quadrennial mood swing in America. The main issue will be jobs and economics.
            The proclamation by President Obama, who has held several impressive music and arts galas at the White House, addresses more than just “earning a living.” So this column ends with other proclamation highlights: the president’s comments on art and social change, arts education—and, again, the economy:
            “Norman Rockwell’s magazine covers are classic and recognizable portrayals of American life. A longtime advocate of tolerance, Rockwell was criticized by some for a painting now hanging steps from the Oval Office—The Problem We All Live With. Inspired by the story of Ruby Bridges, this painting depicts a young girl being escorted to her newly-integrated school by United States Marshals. Today, the portrait remains a symbol of our Nation’s struggle for racial equality.
            “Like Rockwell’s painting, art in all its forms often challenges us to consider new perspectives and to rethink how we see the world. This image still moves us with its simple poignancy, capturing a moment in American history that changed us forever. This is the power of the arts and humanities—they speak to our condition and affirm our desire for something more and something better. Great works of literature, theater, dance, fine art, and music reach us through a universal language that unites us regardless of background, gender, race, or creed. . . .
            “Educators across our country are opening young minds, fostering innovation, and developing imaginations through arts education. Through their work, they are empowering our Nation’s students with the ability to meet the challenges of a global marketplace. It is a well-rounded education for our children that will fuel our efforts to lead in a new economy where critical and creative thinking will be the keys to success.
            “Today, the arts and humanities continue to break social and political barriers. Throughout our history, American hopes and aspirations have been captured in the arts, from the songs of enslaved Americans yearning for freedom to the films that grace our screens today. This month, we celebrate the enlightenment and insight we have gained from the arts and humanities, and we recommit to supporting expression that challenges our assumptions, sparks our curiosity, and continues to drive us toward a more perfect union. . . .
            “I call upon the people of the United States to join together in observing this month with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs to celebrate the arts and the humanities in America.”
             —Barach Obama.

            On its Web site, Americans for the Arts lists more than 300 events already scheduled in most of the 50 states. The events cover just about everything: music, art tours, historical re-enactments, storytelling, photo exhibits, free museum days, talks on art, green art, queer art, ceramic fairs, Artober (for artists) and Archtober (for architects), and lots of local theater productions.
            The number of events is expected to grow as the month passes. They will not end with a whimper, either. On October 30 comes the “Bayou Jam Halloween Bash” in Slidell, Louisiana. By that point, the Jack-o'-lanterns will be smiling. On October 31, the last day of the month, comes Halloween, a national bandwagon that rolls art and economics into one.

Pixar and the Animation Revolution at Year 25

The Era of Computer-Slickness Challenges Hand-Drawn Cartoons

Different parts of the art world mark their histories by milestones along the road, such as the invention of the squeezable paint tube in 1841. For animated movies (also called feature length cartoons), that landmark was the introduction of computer generated animation.

            That came just 25 years ago. It happened in a little studio on the east side of the San Francisco Bay at a company later to be called Pixar. The name, of course, derives from the pixel, which is the tiny electronically-generated square of color that makes up computer imagery on a film or on our computer monitor screens.
            The movie-going public, especially families with children, has had no doubts about the benefits of the Pixar revolution. The company produced a raft of memorable and entertaining movies (and other studios followed suit). Pixar began with “Toy Story” in 1995 (done in cooperation with the Disney Studios). This year Pixar released its 12th feature film, the sequel titled “Cars 2.”
            When the computer animation revolution was born, Pixar was struggling to sell a small animation computer product. To promote its capabilities, one of the staff produced a (now famous) short to show at a Dallas computer-graphics conference called SIGGRAPH. That was in August 1986. Titled “Luxo, Jr.,” the computer animated short film told the story of parent and child desk lamps (Luxo brand) playing with a ball on the table. The breakthrough was noticed. However, Pixar still had to prove itself viable by first doing TV commercials.
            What Pixar had done was escape the process of producing thousands of hand-drawn “scenes.” Instead, each frame could be replicated by using computer instructions. Once the basic images are scanned into a computer, it can produce subsequent movements automatically. One artist can produce in a short time what a whole studio of illustrators turns out over weeks. It was classic technology replacing manpower; classic John Henry the “steel driver” verses the steam-powered machine. We can see how quickly a “Luxo” short gave way to vastly more complex, human-and-animation movies such as “Avatar” (2009), which ran nearly three hours.
            The days of hand-drawn animation are still in memory. When the Disney studio revived feature length animation in 1989 with “The Little Mermaid,” it was all hand inked and painted. It was shot frame by frame. “Little Mermaid” was the most expensive art-man-hours project Disney had funded. The investment was worthwhile: it launched the so-called “Disney Renaissance” (a decade of successful animation films) and got other studio going that direction also.
            Now, computer animation is the genie out of the bottle. Anyone with a powerful computer can try it out. Younger Americans, moreover, have been watching this kind of animation since 1995. A growing number of art students at the college level are now seeking degrees in computer animation. Not coincidentally, they have learned that Pixar movies grossed $7 billion worldwide.
            At one art school not so long ago, a painting major produced an animation of her grandmother. The relative had sad memories of the Holocaust. In the manner of the South African artist William Kentridge, the art student did one charcoal drawing of her grandmother and then altered it many time. She took a photo of each change and then load them into animation software on her computer. Because of Pixar, she was able to do this. However, what impressed an art professor viewing the clip was its hand-drawin quality, seen less and less, he said. “This kind hand-crafted animation is making a comeback,” he told her. “Everyone is a little tired of the slick stuff, like at Pixar.”
           In the movie business, Pixar has touted the slower pace and deeper plotting of its films. By contrast, one Pixar founder said, Disney animation feature films such as “Aladin” are all action, razzle-dazzle. It’s spectacle over story. Though Pixar films do not use musical numbers or rely on Hollywood stars for voices, it claims to keep audience attention through longer cartoons by the story itself. Pixar opened the way for animated films to receive Oscar nominations for writing, plot, and dialogue. Its creators found a way to tell stories of sadness, joy, loneliness, loss, and even death through talking toys, cars, and insects.
            For a few years now, Pixar has been owned by Disney. The lament on the 25th anniversary of Pixar’s legacy is that, yet again, a quick technology has made art slicker and slicker. Art becomes formulaic. Push-button convenience produces a slew of low quality animation. Some of it reaches theaters. Most of it floods the Internet. However, the same could be said of the tube of paint. At first it allowed painters to leave their studio and paint out of doors—a real revolution. It produced the Impressionists and other marvelous plein air (open air) craftsmen.
            It also produced all the Sunday painters and amateurs around the world. The benchmarks in any art field, whether in painting or animation, tend to have the same democratizing effect in the long run. What is left is to sit on the rare laurels of being “first,” or to take the old-hat technology and keep doing something extraordinary.