The Bronze Pope Sculpture that Riled Modern Rome

The Fate of the Modernist Statue Awaits the Ruling of a Panel

By all accounts, the Italian sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi is taking the public trial of his bronze pope statue in Rome very well. Last week, amid public outcry that the sculpture was “ugly” and did not look like the late Pope John Paul II, the city's mayor summoned a panel of experts. It will decide the fate of the modernist bronze, which stands in a square in front of the busy Termini train station.

            The future holds a few possibilities for the art work, donated by a private Catholic group. It could stay as it is, be located elsewhere, or undergo alterations. For the present, the city must also decide how much, and how long, it can pay for the security now required to discourage vandalism.

            The massive square bronze statue, topped by a large nub of a papal head, is supposed to offer a gesture of the pope extending a hand of friendship to the world, and as his cape extends as well, offering shelter to the faithful. To critics, the head looks like Mussolini, the bronze hulk like a guard booth or public bathroom.

            The sketches for the sculpture had been approved by the head of the city’s Cultural Heritage Department. It is said that even the current pope was pleased at the prospect of a modernist monument to the late pope, especially since it was unveiled this month, a time when John Paul was beatified, a step toward sainthood.

            Rainaldi has done other works for the Catholic Church and his collectors are members of the faith. In his statements, he seems a good sport about the controversy. “Usually, I get more compliments,” he told the New York Times. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have survived in this business for 40 years; they would have stopped me earlier.”

            Soon after the statue was unveiled, the Vatican daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, criticized the work because it “bears only a remote resemblance to the pope.” This pulled the lid off a good deal of pent of Roman feeling about the statue. No less than the deputy head of Cultural Heritage called it very “ugly.”

            As the panel decides what to do, Rainaldi stands in the shoes of other famous sculptors who, truth be told, often reacted with less cooler heads.

            The French sculptor Auguste Rodin stood in these shoes in 1891, when a literary society asked him to make a memorial bronze sculpture of Honoré de Balzac, the novelist. After seven years of delay, Rodin unveiled his plaster-cast statue at a great art salon in Paris. It drew so much criticism that the literary group dropped the project and Rodin simply stored the statue at home. In 1939 it was finally cast in bronze. Today it is famous, with duplicate copies in many great museums.

            The chief criticism had been that the sculpture did not look like Balzac. That was exactly Rodin’s intention (though he conceded he may have made the neck monstrously too thick). “Modern sculpture must exaggerate the forms,” Rodin said. Gesture is what counted, not resemblance. He imagined the statue showing “Balzac laboring in his study, his hair in disorder, his eyes lost in a dream.”

            For historians of modern art, Rodin had done the right thing. After his innovation, sculpture that distorts human form—and even specific personages—has become more widely accepted, and in some art circles even required.

            In 1981, the American sculptor Richard Serra stirred an art brouhaha in New York City by taking form in an even more radical direction. A federal public art committee had commissioned him to decorate a large plaza outside of the federal building in lower Manhattan. Serra’s forte was making “site specific” minimalist sculptures. For the Federal Plaza, he designed a wall of rusty steel and called it “Tilted Arc.” At 12 feet high and slighty tilted, the 120-foot-long slab of brown metal curved gently across the plaza.

            At first it was a victory for modern art in a public places, since the rusty wall was so conceptually radical. But soon, the public outcry was immense. The arc was called ugly, but mostly a nuisance, blocking pedestrians and views across the plaza. When a federal agency decided to remove it, Serra sued for $30 million, primarily on the grounds that the action violated his right to control the integrity of his art work.

            Serra lost in court and the slab was removed in 1989. However, Congress passed a law recognizing the “moral” rights of artists to protect their creations. Under the law, for example, a rightful owner (i.e. buyer) of a painting does not have a legal right to destroy it if the artist protests. In all of this, Serra was not the coolest of heads, as befits his rugged temperament, which returns us to the Rainaldi case in Rome.

            This case is unique for erupting in the Catholic tradition, which has long taken pride in great sculpture. True, popes have fitted galleries of naked statues with marble fig leafs. That was before modern art, however. Even so, it seems that modern Romans still want a papal statue that looks something like a pope.

            Whatever the outcome, Rainaldi tried his best. He may prove to be the coolest head of all amid this public art ruckus. For that alone he may win his place in history.

The 1912 Down Payment that Launched the Armory Show

How the Colonel and the Artist Brought Modern Art to America

One hundred years ago this month, a New York City artist named Arthur B. Davies crossed town and signed a contract with Colonel Louis D. Conley, commander of the 69th Regiment, National Guard, known as the “Fighting Irish.”

            The colonel controlled the vast Armory building in mid-Manhattan, and with the deal, the greatest modern art exhibition in America was on its way. This was the International Exhibition of Modern Art, put on a year later (February 1913) by the short-lived Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Today we know it as the 1913 Armory Show, the launch of modern art in America.

            The anniversary awaits us in early 2013, and the ways it will be celebrated, dissected, or capitalized upon remain to be seen. Looking back through all the mists of glory, however, it’s always worthwhile to consider the humble, happenstance, all-too-human origins of such events.

            Several months before Davies made the down payment (from his own pocket), four other artists had been milling around one day in a gallery with no visitors. Clearly, they agreed, young artists in the U.S. needed a boost. They needed a “modern” artist association that would throw a big, big exhibit. This was the seed of the Armory show idea.

            At the time, almost no modern art galleries held forth in New York City. The reigning group was the conservative National Academy of Design, and the only resistance to it was photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s obscure 291 Gallery and a group of talented and scrappy painters called “the Eight” or the “Ash Can School.” They were modern in their loose-style painting of every-day life and in holding left-wing social views.

            The four artists who wanted to challenge the National Academy would soon find out how difficult it was to organize any group of artists. But their plan to challenge the National Academy earned immediate and favorable press coverage. Indeed, thereafter, newspaper coverage, and the controversy it thrives upon, is what propelled the Armory show into the history books.

            As would be seen, a single painting at the Armory Show almost singlehandedly guaranteed a nation-wide press storm: that was the French artist Marcel Duchamp’s cubist-biomorphic painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a title that was more important than even the image for publicity-making.

            Before the fanfare that attended the Armory show’s three stops in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, the behind-the-scenes build-up was crucial. It was carried out by a small band of activists. Almost by default, the retiring Davies had become president of the new Association, and he worked closely with another artist, Walt Kuhn (among the originators of the idea) to open the exhibition to a tide of European art.

            This is how it happened.

            At first, the intention was to highlight American progressive art and sculpture, with as much European material as was conveniently available (perhaps among U.S. collectors). Then in fall of 1912 Davies saw a catalogue for a massive modern art exhibit in Cologne, Germany, the “Sonderbund Show” (the International Art Exhibition of the Federation of West German Art Lovers and Artists). It was probably the largest showcase of representative European modernism—post-Impressionists, fauves, cubists, expressionists—yet assembled on the continent.

            At the time, Kuhn was off painting in Nova Scotia, but when Davies telegrammed him, he dropped everything to catch a steamer for Cologne. He arrived the last day of the Sonderbund, but this inaugurated a tour of Europe, from The Hague to Paris and London, to tap a rich sampling of European modernism. Before this, most American artists barely knew what variety was available. The European shopping tour was aided by American artist Walter Pach, who was living in Paris.

            By January, the European art works were on steamships headed for New York City. When assembled, the Armory Show featured nearly 1,300 works by 300 artists. Just a third of the artists were European. However, the European art drew the most attention, especially the so-called “Cubist Room” (where Duchamp’s work hung) at the back of the partitions that divided up the Armory’s vast space.

            What is more, the European art sold best. Of some 174 works sold, only about 50 were by Americans. In fact, these 1913 purchases of European art essentially began serious U.S. collecting of modern art, collections at the heart of today’s mainstay museums.

            All told, however, the story for American artists was not that ennobling. As soon as the European art flooded in (based on the happy accident of the Davies-Kuhn trip to Europe), the American artists felt they were sidelined. After the show, the Association became fractious and closed down. Still, thanks to the Association, modern art had arrived and, in the eyes of the media and the wealthy art-collecting public, the National Academy no longer had a monopoly or preeminence. Among the progressives, meanwhile, the Armory diversified the American avant-garde, going beyond the Ash Can school by adding a heightened interest in European trends such as the fauves, cubism, and other self-proclaimed movements.

            On that particular day in May 1912, Davies had handed Colonel Conley the down payment check for $1,500. At the time, the Association had no money. That Davies could make this financial commitment is the reason he became the captain of the entire enterprise. As a colleague said of Davies’ financial formula, “He knew a lot of rich old ladies.” Their money and interest primed the Armory revolution, and in many cases such ladies have ever since underwritten some of the greatest U.S. collections.

Art21, Inc. Just Keeps on Going

TV Series Ended in 2009 (and again in 2010) but Keeps Expanding Socially

The world’s longest TV series on contemporary art, “Art21,” ended on public television in October 2009 with these last words by American sculptor Allan McCollum: “It would be nice if everyone in the world agreed on a symbolic system. It hasn’t happened yet. It might, one day.”

            Then again, the series had not really ended. It emerged on television once again in October 2010 with a single “special episode” on the South African artist William Kentridge. His last words were: “That’s why art, rather than analysis.”

            The real last word on “Art21—Art in the Twenty-First Century” has not been uttered quite yet. Having produced 84 episodes over five biennial seasons (2001 to 2009), Art21 not only holds a record, but also a cache of boxed DVDs that keep the program before the eyes of the public. Just recently, moreover, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), its home sponsor, has posted all the half-hour episodes for free viewing (you used to have to buy the DVDs).

            Art21, Inc. also seems to be growing larger, moving beyond the television screen. Its expansion—into community engagement, public school activity, blogs, and everything from Facebook to Flickr and YouTube—tells us a lot about how the art world communication system is developing today. Most of it is digital, a realm with no limit—no last word—in sight.

            Back in 2007, Art21 was somewhat ahead of the curve by inaugurating its blog along with season no. 4 of its programming. Today the Art21 blogosphere is a veritable city: weekly video clips, a social network forum, and regular feature blogs on art and controversy, food, the studio, Los Angeles, London, teaching contemporary art, conserving art, making documentaries, and a news round-up. A staff of nine writers and fifty guest bloggers are churning it out, generating 30,000 visitors to the PBS Art21 site a month. This of course is the new model in journalism, from The Huffington Post to the Web “comment” sections now run by every print newspaper and magazine.

            A state of information overload may not have arrived yet. And nobody quite knows when to stop, since unlike print information, Web information is only limited by the electrons in the fiber optic cables and Internet servers.

            Hence, the limit is usually reached when an organization such as Art21 runs out of money, semi-volunteer staff, or a participating public. Based on foundation grants and commercial sales, Art21 launched itself in 1997 “with the mission to increase knowledge of contemporary art, ignite discussion, and inspire creative thinking by using diverse media to present contemporary artists at work and in their own words.”

            It won awards from the start, and the 84 episode videos have became a mainstay for class instruction by high school and college art teachers, mainly because students can see and hear real artist, many of them celebrities. The Art21 folks have also become a common feature at the annual meetings of the National Art Education Association, which gathers the nation’s art teachers.

           When the art-blog frenzy becomes too much, and when we’ve seen all the Art21 videos, we still have a haven to retreat too. That is the considerable volume of art documentaries produced for English-speaking television since the 1960s (all of which are on DVDs somewhere, and most of which still cost money to obtain). It began in 1969 with British traditionalist Kenneth Clark’s 13-part BBC series “Civilisation: A Personal View,” which prompted a leftwing reaction in John Berger’s 1972 series, “Ways of Seeing.” That four-part BBC event explained art with Marxist and feminist perspectives.

            Then in 1980 came art critic Robert Hughes’ eight-part series on modern art, “The Shock of the New,” done by the BBC and Time-Life films. A fallow period followed when suddenly “Sister Wendy” Beckett’s BBC series of art-appreciation tours stole the show (1992 to 2001), perhaps rivaled only by two recent BBC productions, the five-part "How Art Made the World" with Cambridge scholar Nigel Spivey and Simon Schama’s eight-part “The Power of Art,” both in 2006.

            To be fair, all along, private filmmakers have be making serviceable series on great artists. Outfits such as The Learning Company produce full visual lectures on art history. The most-watched television art program of all time, Bob Ross’s hokey “The Joy of Painting,” aired from 1983-1994 on PBS. In Britain, art historian Tim Marlow has kept turning out episodes on current art events (and history), and Australian painter and television personality Rolf Harris produced a British TV series, now on video.

            A pattern is now obvious: England and the BBC are way ahead in art television. State television alone, it seems, can guarantee funding for art programs.  This also may explain why Art21 just keeps on going. It is part of the PBS infrastructure. This is all to the good, no doubt, and suggests a future (though hardly to Art22).

            In the “last” Art21 episode with Kentridge, which featured his art and his latest opera, based on Nikolai Gogol’s satirical short story, “The Nose,” the artist explains that he could have followed the path of his parents, both rationalist lawyers. Instead, he decided that the irrational—even the absurd—was just as valid a way to deal with life: “The absurd … is an active and productive way of understanding the world.”

            Art21, however, has nothing absurd about it, since it is a paragon of rational planning, programming, and execution.

Expatriate American Painter Caught Between East and West

Whistler’s “Peacock Room” a Reason to See His Paintings and His Era

Washington D.C.—In popular lore, the Victorian American artist James McNeill Whistler, who worked in England, is known for the side-view painting of his seated mother, a work we call “Whistler’s Mother” (1871). Whistler also had a room, the so-called “Peacock Room,” a dining room he decorated with paint. We are just now being reminded of that feat: let us call it “Whistler’s Room.”

            The Freer Gallery of Art, located on the Washington Mall, has been home to the Peacock Room since 1923, making the gallery (the first art division of the Smithsonian Institution) an international attraction. Beginning in April, the Freer has presented the Peacock Room in a new light, re-arranging the large collection of Asian pottery that has always festooned the room’s many shelves.

            In London around 1877, when Whistler painted the room in what he called a “harmony in blue and gold,” the owner, British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, had decorated it with blue-and-white Chinese porcelain. Later, Freer-the-American, out of friendship for Whistler (who just died, in 1903), bought the London room and had it shipped (in 27 crates) to be re-assembled at his Detroit mansion. At this point, Freer decorated the shelves with his own growing collection of varied Asian pots and dishes.

            The new Freer Gallery exhibit, “The Peacock Room Comes of America,” has put Freer’s exact pottery arrangement back on the shelves to draw new public interest—to see the room “with fresh eyes.” says the curator. The exhibit also refocuses us on Whistler, a rare and colorful American artist of note when Europe reigned supreme in the arts.

            After Mr. Freer and Whistler met, Freer became a friend and devoted collector of Whistler’s art works. Hence, the Freer Gallery—otherwise considered a leading home to classic Asian art—is also the largest repository of Whistler’s art (1,300 painting, drawings, and prints). He is the expatriate American caught in the growing aura of Asia. As the gallery says, the Peacock Room is perfectly located between a permanent Whistler painting exhibit and rooms devoted to Chinese art and sculpture.

            Whistler, a kind of art prodigy reared in Europe and attending its art schools, ended up in London at a time when Japanese prints and Chinese porcelain were gaining popularity. Whistler contributed to this artistic interest. Not only did his paintings show the flat decorative quality of the Japanese art (and his portraits and genre scenes show westerners in exotic Asian costumes), but he collected and cataloged porcelain. As a London wag said in 1876, there was a “rage for everything blue and white.” As the Freer exhibition notes, this was also called “Chinamania” (and the exhibit room titled “Whistler and the Victorian Craze for Blue-and-White” explains why).

            Now, back to the original Peacock Room.

            In Victorian London, shipping magnate Leyland, who had bought Whistler’s paintings, one day asked him to update his dining room. This led to Whistler’s using a peacock design, painted decoratively in a stark two-tone blue and gold (the “blue” is actually blue-green to the eye). When a dispute over payment for the work arose, Whistler famously limned two gold peacocks fighting on the wall panel; Leyland was the big aggressive one, with coins all around, and Whistler the more defenseless, cowering bird.

            Today, Whistler is known for his mother, the Peacock Room, and his role in appreciating Asian design. He has other legacies. He was perhaps the first of a type, the American bohemian artist in Europe, and he played that flamboyant role to the hilt in London, fortunately with wealthy patrons to assist.

            His night-time paintings—which used a range of close dark tones—foreshadowed a kind of “tonal” painting. He called them “moonlights,” but patron Leyland called them “nocturns”—and the name stuck. In this, Whistler pre-dated by decades the tonal minimalists, such as Clyfford Stills (who simply puts two dark blues on a large canvas). Whistler's portrait paintings also mimicked the “lanky” elongated human figures on Chinese vases, which he did before Picasso hit upon elongation (probably mimicking El Greco).

            Before the nocturns, Whistler began to call his painting “arrangements” or “harmonies” of color; hence the quite literal painting of his mother is titled, “Arrangement in Gray and Black.” When the British art critic John Ruskin lambasted Whistler nocturns as an insult to the public, the thin-skinned Whistler sued him for libel, a rare art dispute gone to court (where, in 1877, Whistler won).

            As the critics tell us, however, Whistler’s painting styles did not spawn any new art movements. The Impressionists were doing that at the time in France. He was a beacon of the “art for art’s sake” idea and, again, a rare notable American abroad. Plus, he gave us an icon—“Whistler’s Mother”—the only American painting, famous among Americans, to have never left the possession of France.

The Serious and Frivolous Sides of Design Thinking

Design Educators Ponder a Dire Future as “Show Houses” Have Fun

For all the serious talk of “design” these days—design as innovation that makes modern economies competitive—there’s always time to pause for design-for-design’s-sake. Take the springtime activity called the “Decorators’ Show House.”

     In many cities, a charitable group will find a mansion and invite top design firms, typically interior designers, to make over the rooms. Then the public is invited to wander through the fantasy interiors, paying a fee and supporting a good cause. The invited design firms, at considerable cost to themselves, show off their latest design thinking. Two of the better known events are underway in San Francisco and Manhattan.

    The San Francisco Decorator Showcase, on track since 1977, takes place in a four-story Italian villa-style mansion in hillside Pacific Heights, raising tuition for needy high school students. The designers have filled its 30 rooms with themes ranging from a royal wedding to “The Cookbook Nook,” Art Deco, and a whimsical basement “Studio Craft Room.”

     In Manhattan, the Kips Bay youth club is presenting its 39th annual Decorator Show House in a borrowed  upper east side neo-federalist mansion with 14 rooms. The building is about to be renovated, but through May 26, it is resplendent with top designer show-house rooms to fire the imagination.

     The Show Houses are cropping up everywhere on an annual basis: Washington D.C., Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pasadena, Calif., and Greenwich, Conn., not to mention in Wisconsin, Maine, and New Jersey. For the next generation of designers, interior decoration seems as stable a design career as one can find. Design educators, however, are worried that the meaning of “design” is changing rapidly.

     “Design is not what it was 10 years ago, and is not now what it will be 10 years hence,” says a new study by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD). It reports that a majority of art students today are design majors. They are about 45,000 of the 70,000 art students in independent art schools and college art departments in North America. And while they matriculate, there is an “increasing gap between design practice and design education.” The chasm is widening rapidly: “If this gap is not closed, [art and design] schools and their graduates will not be competitive.”

     In short, design thinking is becoming less about producing creative visual things—such as interior design of rooms perhaps—and more about innovating the way that things and people go together. This is often called “systems” thinking. Mastering these systems has a big future. That is why business majors, engineers, and medical students are also poaching on “design thinking” turf, once the exclusive hunting ground of visual artists.

     While the new buzz words of systems, collaboration, and innovation often can be vague, the most concrete examples of what is at stake for design practice usually come from the computer world. For instance, IBM reports that it now takes just eight months to design and test new software. Yet art and design students still take four years to earn a degree. The folks around NASAD are saying that mastering a particular software tool is no longer the goal. Understanding the entire digital-and-social network of society certainly is: “Designers have to be mindful of the interaction between physical, social, cultural, technological, and economic factors, in addition to traditional visual concerns.”

     Design is a big draw in art education, both here and abroad (with China turning out design students by the bushel full). In America, the career still has a future, with 59 percent of people who studied design ending up in a satisfying design career, according to a survey by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project.

    The new discussions about design can become very abstract, especially since the premise is that the world of “design services,” rather than simply “design products,” is increasingly complex, rapid, and shifting. It seems to be about processes rather than things. That is why the old-fashioned design of the annual Show House can be an occasional tonic (if not necessarily a futuristic career).

     Well-designed rooms and buildings will always be a valued product at every level of a community, as recent events in Sheboygan, Wis., suggest. The Sheboygan Police Station was among 11 buildings given awards by the Wisconsin chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AAA). The station's Milwaukee architects were lauded for creating “a secure, yet inviting, sustainable new police station filled with natural light.” This could indeed sound like systems thinking and design services.

     All the Wisconsin design projects were noted for innovation, good use of materials, and environmental fit—but with a particular twist to them all. “Many of the projects recognized for design excellence are public projects, which also speaks very well of Wisconsin,” the AAA says.