Graffiti Art Storms Los Angeles in a Historic Survey

Two New Books on the Forty-Year Style also Offer Hindsight

When was graffiti art invented and who was its inventor? The answer has come with refreshing candor in the wake of two new books and a major survey exhibition, “Art in the  Streets,” in Los Angeles. Graffiti began when humans had walls to write on. And since its modern revival in the 1960s, it’s been re-invented a few more times.

            Beginning as an exploit of American urban youth culture, graffiti has become a vaunted global art form, according to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition and two related books, the Art in the Streets catalog and The History of American Graffiti. Unlike most new, short-lived art “styles,” the latest graffiti movement has expanded for forty years.

            And no wonder. “Graffiti is the rock and roll of visual art,” says Caleb Neelon, a graffiti insider and co-author of History. The other author, Roger Gastman, says that the art form’s essence is not just any old writing on the wall: “It is illegal art on a wall.”

            Many of us remember living in New York City on the cusp of the 1980s when not a single subway car was spared, inside or out. Most of it was dull black or silver insignia, overlaid ad nauseam. Who can deny, however, the splendors of the high-end “wild style” graffiti? Jeffrey Deitch, head of L.A. MOCA, is surely correct when he says, “Wild style graffiti may be the most influential art movement since pop art.”

            Wild style is an articulate abstraction, using letters, arrows, curves, and biomorphic shapes (think surrealism), almost like Celtic lace work. In the old Cubist days this violation of normal space was called “shattering the closed form.” Wild style has excelled all others in its brilliant colors and air-brush modeling. Nevertheless, on the way there we can’t forget the organic tendrils of art nouveau or the glossy hot rod and custom car designs of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

            With graffiti, size matters. Chroniclers agree that its main impulse was to do something big that could be noticed. For these entrepreneurs, the idea of a painting in a gallery was unthinking. If “style” is a loathsome term in modern art, style is everything in making a name in graffiti art.

            According to the “Art in the Streets” exhibition, which runs through the dog days of August, the modern roots of graffiti are found in Philadelphia and then New York City in the 1960s in a practice called “tagging,” or putting your initials on a wall. In the 1970s, Los Angeles had its own “cholo” graffiti (an angular style used by Latino gangs). That decade saw graffiti blossom in diverse forms in many cities. A turning point was New York City’s anti-graffiti campaign in 1989, but already in the early 1980s, graffiti artists had taken their work into upscale New York City galleries.

            L.A. MOCA’s Deitch, who is the first commercial gallerist to head a major U.S. museum, used his Los Angeles gallery to help establish some of the graffiti stars, including the late Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and the currently active Shepard Fairey. Not all of these artists are cut from the same cloth, however, according to the authors of History. For example, Basquiat, Haring, and Fairey did not originated as graffiti artists. They were simply street artists who paralleled the graffiti culture.

            Whatever the case, the art movement reached a kind of peroration in Fairey’s “Hope” poster for the 2008 Barrack Obama presidential campaign. The 2010 graffiti documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” was also nominated for an Academy Award.

            Today “illegal” graffiti continues, but it has mostly joined forces with commerce and expanded as a subculture entwined with city skateboarding and hip-hop music. Some of the best-known street artists now take commissions for public murals or show in galleries. Not a few commercial art design firms are now headed by former spray-can bandits.

            True to its originating spirit, graffiti still aims to rile the public. When Deitch took over L.A. MOCA in 2010, he commissioned a graffiti mural for the side of one museum building, Geffen Contemporary, only to white-wash it later in the face of downtown neighborhood complaints.

            For the “Art in the Streets” exhibition, Deitch brought in veteran NYC “subway” graffiti artist Lee Quinones to put up a new mural on Geffen Contemporary, scene of the exhibition. No doubt what’s inside is the most intriguing, an art form begun by teens in poor urban neighborhoods. Now it’s a celebrity art form, spreading like graffiti around the globe.

The “Sublime” in Art Makes the Terrible Beautiful

Caspar David Friedrich Paintings Show How

New York—The idea of the “sublime” in art has had a tortuous path up to the present. Use of the idea has come and gone, but its story could begin with the 19th century German painter Caspar David Friedrich. This painter, a product of the era of European Romanticism, is a topic this season since he is a centerpiece of “Rooms With a View,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

            At the exhibit, a single, small Friedrich painting dominates an entire wall: a woman looking out a window, her austere room filled with an eerie green light. Hanging on the wall by itself, this painting is as lonely as the mood Friedrich often tried to create in his romantic paintings of the early 1800s.

            Titled “Woman at a Window” (1822), this painting is a rare interior image produced by Friedrich. He is famous for evocative landscapes that contrast a pensive individual, often with back turned, against a panorama of nature, often awesome (terrifying, that is). One thinks of his painting of the gentleman on the alpine peak, or the sailing ship smashed by a gigantic ice flow. Placing a human being amid the vast powers of nature is what stirs the feelings of the “sublime,” a moment of awesome fear that is deeply satisfying.

            “Woman at a Window” is hardly terrifying in this sense. Even so, it can evoke the sublime by showing us how the room-contained life of a person looks out on a vast, unknown world. Added to this is the drama of light, which creates a mood of foreboding or mystery.

            Most of the works in this Met exhibition—31 small paintings and 26 works on paper—come from a wide array of artists in the first quarter of the 1800s, when Romanticism prevailed in the arts and letters from Germany to France and Scandinavia, even as the Napoleonic wars filled the continent with travail. Perhaps the interior of a room seemed a particularly safe haven, with a window onto an out-of-control world.

            Windows have a psychological effect at any time. The window takes in the distant world. The exhibit quotes Novalis (1798), the German philosopher of Romanticism, to suggest why we like these paintings: “Everything at a distance turns to poetry.” The window lets in light, which in turn signals times and moods. For the artist, the window scene produces a “picture within a picture,” which offers clever effects. In general, the makers of these window scenes have indeed made the visual effect the entire import of the picture.

            Accordingly, the titles can be hum-drum without harm, from “The Family Circle” to “In Front of the Mirror” and “Man at his Desk.” They are scenes we have all known in life, especially on days when what is seen out the window creates anticipation in us, even a bit of anxiety or mystery. Images that try to amplify this window effect seem to have begun with drawings by Friedrich. He went on to landscapes, where the “sublime” is more evident: the scene of an abbey ruin in a snowy, foggy graveyard, for example. But that has not discounted windows as a source of similar moods.

            The sublime can go in and out of season, as illustrated by the reputation of Friedrich. Over the years, his works fell into disrepute along with Romanticism. His landscapes looked saccharine to the new “realism” in art. His use of Christian symbols (he was a Lutheran) made critics chafe. And when the Nazis liked him—his images of dark Germanic forests—it tarred his legacy to no end.

            Of course, history passes by and artists have revivals, as Friedrich certainly has. So has the idea of the sublime, a topic taken up by the modern abstract painters in the late 1940s. The abstract minimalist painter Barnett Newman, for example, argued that Western art had been futile in trying to find “beauty” by imitating or distorting nature. The goal of art is to find the sublime, Newman said, and other artists, such as Mark Rothko, agreed that the sublime comes only in pure abstraction, the encounter with the absolute relations of color and shape on a canvas.

            Not everyone agrees with Newman, of course. But at least we now have an expanding notion of the sublime. In literature, the characters in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick found it sublime to risk death in a vast ocean hunting a giant whale. For Friedrich, it was standing helpless on an alpine peak. Fans of Rothko paintings, needing no fathomless ocean or dizzying heights, call his floating color effects on canvas no less sublime.

            The sublime is something terrible that makes us feel good, or deeply alive. There is no shortage of such real-world events, such as tsunamis, to evoke the terrible and the fateful in human experience. So it is a wonderful thing that artist have tried to created the sublime on canvas, safely, with as little as a scene looking out a window.

Artists and Others Still Tote Sketchbooks to Museums

The Age-Old Practice of Copying Masters is Alive and Well

Washington D.C.—The painter Paul Cezanne did it in Paris, and even the humble art student today can do it anywhere that the opportunity arises. This is the occasion of going to a museum to sketch and copy from masterpieces.

            While living in Paris, Cezanne simply shuffled down to the Louvre or the the Luxembourg Museum to study the masters. Sometimes he would copy them to learn the ropes. Other times, stuck on a painting problem in his studio, Cezanne would head back to the museum to see how other painters had achieved various painterly effects, such as a shadow or arm gesture.

            In Paris, of course, painters have been doing this for the past 150 years. American artists today count themselves lucky to have a great museum nearby to do the same. In the nation's capital, for example, anyone can go to the National Gallery of Art on the National Mall and experience something like Paris. Admission is free, so the gallery is a regular home to sketchers and copyists. By prior arrangement, a painter may pull up an easel and copy paintings in oil (the easels are already out, and painters store their material in museum lockers).
            Drawing forays are more common, as was the case one spring day with David Perry, a photography student at the Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria. On the lower level of the National Gallery, Perry had arrived to draw what he saw at two exquisite exhibitions: the Chester Dale collection of mostly Impressionists and early modernists (Degas, Matisse, and Picasso, for example), and the Armand Hammer collection of drawings, which includes draftsmanship by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Van Gogh.

            Perry says that by looking at such great works, he is learning about line, composition, and technique. “I notice how something is done with an upstroke or down stroke, or done with more or less pressure, in how the lines move,” he says. As a photographer, he’s more a “composition person” than a line person. Either way, for his Drawing 101 class, Perry is there to complete an assignment: do five drawings each from the Dale and Hammer collections. Then write a short explanation of each of the ten sketches.
            The benefit of sketching from the masters is getting around. In New York, medical students have often been taken to sketch from works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The idea is that attempts to describe things by drawing them sharpens the mental skills of observation and analysis.
            Back at the National Gallery, one floor above where David Perry is sketching, another artist, an oil painter named Lee (a resident of Virginia and wife to a successful real estate professional) is copying works in the maze of rooms that display classical European paintings. For twenty years, she has parked an easel and paint box somewhere in the National Gallery, recreating on her blank canvases Italian landscapes, Impressionist classics, and Dutch floral paintings.

            Lee earned her master’s degree in medical anatomy, but working in oils has become her pursuit. She has completed about 75 copies of paintings, either for friends or as commissions, coming in once a week for about a four hour session. Lee is a “certified copyist.” This status is open to anyone who can provide letters of recommendation and examples of their work. For a visitor, Lee shows her latest Copyist’s Permit, a folded piece of paper issued in 2005.

            On this particular day, Lee is copying the 1785 landscape “Fanciful View of the Castle St. Angelo, Rome” by Francesco Guardi, a Venetian painter. She prefers him over Canaletto, also a Venetian landscapist, who happens to be the topic of a special exhibit (“Canaletto and his Rivals”) elsewhere in the National Gallery this season.

            “I always start with drawing,” Lee says. To focus on a particular painting for several weeks, she must make an appointment. This ensures that the painting is on the wall for the duration, since paintings are often rotated or loaned to other museums for special exhibits.

            As Lee paints, it is not uncommon for children to stop and watch. They invariably ask her questions. One time, about ten years ago, the singer Tony Bennett pulled up by her side. He too was an artist by avocation, a proud Italian. He showed her his sketchbook, as she recalls.

National Portrait Gallery Reports Benefits of “Hide/Seek”

Did the Gay and Lesbian Art Exhibit Produce a Lopsided Debate?

In the afterglow of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit of gay and lesbian artists, one story has dominated all else: freedom of speech. That is because a video that included nudity and ants crawling on a crucifix—a film by gay rights artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS—was removed from the show when members of Congress said it offended taxpaying Catholics.

            For the arts community, the fight against “censorship” became a cause célèbre larger than the Portrait Gallery exhibition itself. The exhibition included works ranging from poet Walt Whitman and painter Thomas Eakins to Wojnarowicz and celebrity lesbians such as photographer Annie Leibovitz.

            To remedy the impression that art is only about free speech, the Smithsonian Institution has just produced a report on the many kinds of positive experiences visitors had. After all, this was the first-ever federally sponsored exhibit of gay and lesbian art: “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The report bespeaks a great success. With the report, the Smithsonian hopes to create a memory besides the censorship headlines.
            However, some topics raised by these recent events have been avoided in the public discussion.

            First, the complaint against the video came from a religious anti-defamation group. Everyone has an active anti-defamation office these days: blacks, Jews, Muslims, gays—and Roman Catholics, who filed the complaint over the Wojnarowicz art. They saw the art as defaming Jesus’ crucifixion. Since the time of Baudelaire, and later the Surrealists, modern art has proudly and deliberately offended Christianity. Naturally, Christians have protested back. Nobody should be surprised by this historic give-and-take.

            Second, modern art aims to “challenge” social conventions. In other circles this has been called civil disobedience. Thoreau succumbed passively to the lock-up for refusing to pay taxes. Gandhi accepted a stick-beating for not moving. Martin Luther King quietly went to a Montgomery jail. In short, they took the bane of society to prove the moral superiority of their principles. By comparison, some artists cry persecution at the smallest slight. In art, for some reason, there is little willingness to take a hit to claim the high moral ground, if that’s what art is claming.

            Third, as the Portrait Gallery exhibit showed, many artists, whatever their sexual orientation, prefer to “stay in the closet.” They prefer to emphasize their skill, craft, and aesthetic virtuosity over their sexual lives. Of course, another wing of gay and lesbian artists prefers to be sexually “out.” That is the stance of the show’s curator, art historian Jonathan D. Katz, a proud gay activist. This political approach demands that the public look beyond the art to the sexual complexities of human experience. Not everyone is a Freudian, however, or interested in the promiscuous side of sex, whether it be Courbet’s pornographic paintings or Mapplethorpe’s photos of a bullwhip in his anus.

            From its founding, the United States has experienced a cultural battle between puritans and libertines, between believers in modesty and celebrants of decadence. It will never end. The public divide over the value of displaying homoerotic art is just the latest version of the debate.

            This debate is sorted out, some art critics tell us, by each kind of art having its own constituency. Each group will champion its favorite art—either Mapplethorpe’s leather-and-sex or Norman Rockwell’s happy genres. By the attendance estimates, the Portrait Gallery drew a particular art audience: four in ten visitors came specifically for “Hide/Seek,” and half of all visitors hailed from the D.C. metro area, with its large gay community. The exhibit spoke to its gay and lesbian constituency, which a new study (by an out gay demographer) puts at just 1.7 percent of the U.S. adult population.

            Like the American social fabric, the art world fabric is also made up of these constituent factions. That we disagree on what kind of art taxpayers should fund is no surprise. In the end, the offended Catholics scored a point, but so did the art world, showered as it was with sympathy for being "censored." Like it or not, the Smithsonian gave us a look at our American “difference and desire” in sex. What should surprise us, however, is not the private lives of artists, but the quality of the work they make.

The Barnes Art Collection is on Its Way . . . Maybe

As Paintings Are Being Packed Opponents Are Still in Court

Merion, Pa.—Visiting the late Albert Barnes’ vast art collection at his mansion in the suburbs of Philadelphia, you would not know that its fate still is being battled over in the courts.

            As visitors calmly enjoy the art downstairs, and the art upstairs is being carefully packed for safe transport, a local judge has reopened a complaint by those who oppose the plan to move the collection of more than 900 paintings to a new building downtown.

            On March 29, the court ruled that the Pennsylvania attorney general and the Barnes Foundation had until mid-April to rebut any final legal claims against the move.  A citizens group, anchored in the township, has opposed the change of venue for years. This is their latest, and perhaps final, legal maneuver.

            The legal drama around the Barnes collection—now valued at between $6 billion and $25 billion—is one of the most drawn out in American art history. Ever since Dr. Barnes died in 1951, various interest have tried to open up his massive collection, which he controlled posthumously through the directives of his will: it would not tour, be sold, or be rearranged. In the 1990s, however, when the Barnes Foundation faced financial problems, the paintings did go on tour and in 2004 the court allowed a move to a new building in Philadelphia’s museum district. The ground was broken in November 2009 and the modern building is nearly completed, open to the public in a year.

            Whatever the legal outcome, for the next few months the Barnes mansion, site of his art collection, continues to host visitors by appointment, taking in a limit of 450 people a day, four days a week. The mansion is located on twelve acres of gardens and woods in an upscale suburb that once protested the traffic problem created by art visitors to the Barnes. Now, however, that same township is fighting to keep it. The mansion and art collection have essentially put Lower Merion Township and its Montgomery County on the map, even worldwide.

            As an alternative to the downtown move, the opponents say the mansion could allow a greater number of visitors and also use a shuttle to bring them from downtown. Based on the admission fees, this would raise the revenue necessary to keep the old building going just as Dr. Barnes had liked.

            In creating his foundation in the 1920s, Dr. Barnes rejected the idea of being a high-tone museum. Instead he wanted to present the art as a look-and-see “educational” experience for ordinary people. Accordingly, the paintings and artifacts are hung and arranged by Dr. Barnes’ own eccentric lights. A native of Philadelphia, he became a millionaire by inventing an antiseptic. Then he spent the rest of his life buying art. For better or worse, Dr. Barnes was always at odds with the Philadelphia establishment, especially its wealthy philanthropic families: Annenberg, Pew, and the folks behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

            Those organizations, in alliance with the city and state, helped the modern-day Barnes trustees push through the decision to go downtown. For some, this was a colossal art grab by the powers that be. A book and documentary both argue a conspiracy behind the downtown move (indeed, the movie turned up an on-camera quote by the former attorney general that has reopened the court hearing).

            Before his death, Dr. Barnes became friends with the president of the historic black college, Lincoln University, and in his will gave the university trusteeship of the collection. The black leadership of the Barnes Foundation continues, but the school and its leaders could not escape being embroiled in a medley of financial fiascos. The issue of race became sensitive amid the charges and counter charges on the fate of the art.

            Dr. Barnes amassed one the world’s strongest collections of French Impressionists, post-Impressionists, and modern paintings (not to mention pre-modern works, African sculpture, furniture, and ironware). It is resplendent with art by El Greco, Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and more.

            Like the art, no one doubts that the new downtown museum is a beautiful work of architecture. It aims to draw 180,000 visitors a year compared to the mansion’s current 93,600. Still, the costs are turning out greater than expected. Taxpayers may be left holding a very large bill for a private foundation’s art educational mission. There is also no guarantee that a high downtown museum attendance will last: this is the plight of all art museums, which live from one blockbuster show to the next.

            If plans go through—it would be a shock if they don’t—the paintings will all be displayed in the new museum in the exact same way Dr. Barnes arranged them in his mansion, arrayed on two floors in about a dozen rooms. Opponents of the move are accurate when they say that it will mark the end of one of the world’s most unique, private, and eccentric art collections. How it looks in a brand new museum will be something worth waiting to see . . . maybe.