Diversity

When I studied History of Art in the UK in the late 1960's, it was all about European art, mostly European art produced by men. (Click here for details of influential women artists who contributed to European art history.) https://artuk.org/discover/stories/facing-the-new-century-women-artists-19001909

Art from other cultures was mentioned vaguely but in reference to the influence that it had on Western European artists.

European Art Movements: Classical, Byzantine, Medieval, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Modern, Post Modern, European Contemporary.

The Euro-centric perspective of art history during that time perpetuated a narrative that excluded or marginalized artists from diverse backgrounds. It is important to acknowledge the limitations of the art education I received and to recognize the significant contributions artists from diverse cultures throughout history.
Contemporary scholarship has made significant progress in challenging these historical biases and expanding the narrative of art and art history. Today, we have a greater understanding and appreciation for the various art movements, styles, and artists that were previously overshadowed or omitted.
As we explore the immense range of artistic expressions that exist across cultures and time periods, it is vital to ensure inclusivity and representation. By embracing a wider perspective and giving voice to artists who have been historically overlooked, we can create a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the artistic landscape.
In our pursuit of knowledge about art, it is necessary to engage with diverse sources, question traditional narratives, and promote a balanced representation of artists from different backgrounds. Through these efforts, we can foster a more inclusive and enriched understanding of art history.

"At some point you become acutely aware of your absence in the whole kinda historical timeline that develops this kinda narrative of mastery."

https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/kerry-james-marshall-on-museums-short/

Kerry James Marshall’s “Many Mansions” (1994)

https://art21.org/watch/artist-to-artist/kerry-james-marshall-at-prospect-3/

Creative Growth

“Founded in 1974, Creative Growth is a leader in the field of arts and disabilities, establishing a model for a creative community guided by the principle that art is fundamental to human expression and that all people are entitled to its tools of communication.” Read more about Creative Growth based in San Francisco here: https://creativegrowth.org

“In Spring 2024, SFMOMA will open an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Creative Growth and featuring a selection from the 114 works by 10 Creative Growth artists acquired by the museum this fall. “ “The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Oakland-based Creative Growth Art Center announced today an unprecedented partnership that honors the emergence of the art and disability movement in the Bay Area and brings to the fore a critical and often overlooked aspect of the region’s artistic richness. Coinciding with Creative Growth’s 50th anniversary, the partnership encompasses the acquisition of more than 100 works created by artists associated with Creative Growth; the development of two exhibitions with Creative Growth artists; and the presentation of a series of events that will be activated over the course of three years. Additionally, SFMOMA will acquire works from Creative Growth’s two Bay Area peer organizations, with 31 objects from San Francisco-based Creativity Explored and 12 from Richmond-based NIAD (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development). Together, the acquisitions make SFMOMA home to one of the largest collections of art by artists with disabilities, a historic moment of recognition for a group of artists long underrecognized by the art world.”

https://www.sfmoma.org/press-release/sfmoma-and-creative-growth-art-center-announce-unprecedented-partnership-in-celebration-of-creative-growths-50th-anniversary/

Dan Miller

Dan Miller Untitled, (DM 1193), 2019 Courtesy Creative Growth Art Center

More about Dan Miller here: https://www.gateway-magazine.com/articles/the-art-of-dan-miller

Franna Lusson

Franna Lusson Untitled 2023

“Drawing is so important to me. It is a lifeline out of the confusion and anxiety I live with everyday. I started drawing in grammar school but didn’t start working seriously until my late 20’s. Now I mainly draw animals, but have also drawn people, the figure, and portraits.  I work in collage and printmaking as well. Usually I start with line, shape and movement using mixed media: charcoal, oil and chalk pastel and oil paint sticks.” https://creativegrowth.org/artists#/franna-lusson/ More about artists who work at Creative Growth: https://creativegrowth.org/artists

Jillian Crochet

Jillian Crochet My Beating Heart, 2014 SOMArts Cultural Center. Richard Lombiao

More artwork featured in this exhibition: https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/gallery/28483/5/recoding-criptech

Adaptation highlights artists living with disability or chronic illness, whose practice has evolved to facilitate bodily or psychological conditions. https://www.casulapowerhouse.com/casula-powerhouse-exhibitions/past-exhibitions/2020-exhibitions/adaptation

Sharif Persaud

Sharif Persaud Self Portrait, 2015 https://autograph.org.uk/online-image-galleries/identity-and-neurodiversity-the-work-of-sharif-persaud

Art from Asia

Tiffany Chung

Tiffany Chung: 17th Parallel (2010) Courtesy of the artist

More about Tiffany’s work here: https://www.aaa-a.org/programs/presentation-by-tiffany-chung

Sangdon Kim

"Sangdon Kim makes use of a wide range of media and engages with core systems of representation in Korea through materials of everyday life and social relations. In the sculptures on view in the Biennale Hall, he mobilizes elements from Korean shamanism, colonial memory, contemporary politics, and circuits of hyper consumption. According to Kim, shamanistic polytheism and pluralism serve as important modes of understanding the world as they do not refuse the secular but rather pursue the sacred. The outlook of shamanistic faith is rooted in the realization and integration of community and Korea’s indigenous culture. Kim has said that when all of human civilization is in crisis, we are once again bound to turn toward long-standing spiritual cultures based on collective catharsis and reconciliation. The prevailing pandemic, combined with current structures of power, has contributed to deeper class divisions. A unifying approach based on shamanism facilitates the healing of social wounds, mourning, and remorse." https://13thgwangjubiennale.org/artists/sangdon-kim/

Sangdon Kim Kart 2019-2020

Kwon Young Woo (1926–2013)

Kwon Young-woo Untitled, 1984 Gouache and ink on Korean mulberry paper

"Trained as an ink painter and part of Munghimhoe (묵림회, Ink Forest Group), Kwon Young-woo made works that disrupt mark-making and gestural abstraction norms. In the 1960s he began exploring the three-dimensional transformation of hanji (“Korean paper”)—confronting the elevated status of painting and the strict division between painting and sculpture. Traditionally, paper was revered as support for ink, but Kwon tore, pasted, and molded it, thrusting it to the forefront.

Working in Paris in the 1980s, Kwon reintroduced ink and color while still emphasizing the paper. Here, gray-blue radiates from the center, darkening vertical slashes as if by capillary action—yet the darkest “line” is a torn horizontal gap. Kwon applied color on the reverse, letting it seep through to the front, a challenge to the glamorized act of paint application.” https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/lineages-korean-art/exhibition-objects

Click here to see Kwon Young-woo talking about his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z326N9i2pLU

“Joan Kee has written a seminal book entitled Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method. The book considers Tansaekhwa, one of the most important artistic movements in contemporary art history—yet one that has been significantly over-looked.” https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/joan-kee/

More about contemporary artists from Asia: https://www.prestigeonline.com/my/lifestyle/art-plus-design/10-of-the-most-famous-asian-contemporary-artists/ https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/dineke-blom/

Nalini Malani

Nalini Malani Transgressions, video/shadow play installation, 2001. https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/nalini-malan More about Nalini Malani’s work here: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/nalini-malani/

More contemporary Asian art below https://www.creationcontemporaine-asie.com/en/

Art from the Middle East

From mesmerizing calligraphy to thought-provoking installations, these artists have pushed boundaries and challenged societal norms, shedding light on the complex narratives and diverse experiences of the Middle East. Through their art, they have fostered a dialogue that transcends borders, inviting viewers from all backgrounds to engage with the intricacies of their work. With an ever-evolving art landscape, the Middle East continues to produce exciting and groundbreaking contemporary art for our time.

Radhika-Khimji

Radhika-Khimji Install View 2022 Oman National Pavilion, Arsenale at the Biennale Arte 2022 in Venice. Photo credit: Thierry Bal. Images courtesy of Experimenter.

“I read some post-colonial theory while I was studying in University that really shaped my ideas about hybridity and identity in our world today. It made me question how I could talk about identity in my work without it becoming a formula for an artist of Indo-Omani ancestry working in the UK. It’s been a challenge to navigate these sticky points of loaded traditions, and not make them the central, easily digestible points of interest in my practice. I feel I consciously keep the registers and terms in flux to prevent any possessive and fixed interpretation. I am interested when the work can evade these terms, and somehow subvert a cultural reading of the work.”

Click here to see more work in the Oman National Pavilion at the Biennale Arte Venice by Radhika-Khimji: https://south-south.art/biennale/radhika-khimji-at-venice/

Larry Abramson

Larry Abramson Gafno XLIII, 2020 oil and acrylic on paper More work by Larry Abramson here: https://www.gordongallery.co.il/now-artist/larry-abramson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Abramson

Canan Tolon

Canan Tolon Alidade, 1993

More about Canan Tolon’s work here: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/canan-tolon-alidade

More Turkish Artists below: http://www.naturadergi.com/haberler/sanatci-burcu-percin-ile-soylesi/?lang=en. https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/contemporary-turkish-artists/gulay-semercioglu https://theculturetrip.com/europe/turkey/articles/10-best-turkish-artists-and-where-to-find-them

khalil Rabah’s exhibit at Desert X AlUla 2022

More information and artists. Desert X AlUla here: https://ocula.com/magazine/photologs/desert-x-alula-2022/ https://whitewall.art/art/khalil-rabah-is-examining-the-human-condition-through-art-and-community/ https://thethirdline.com/artists/33-farhad-moshiri/ https://www.riseart.com/guide/2459/contemporary-middle-eastern-artists-to-know-about

First nation American art

Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey Gibson Infinite Indigenous queer love 2021

“For the fringe cubes, I remember thinking it’s like taking the person who has always been in a supporting role and then making them the star,” Gibson said. “How do we take something like fringe that I’ve seen in this context in one particular way–usually on shawls and moving through the air, which is beautiful–but I’m like, what’s the difference?”

The fringe, typically a feature of Indigenous dance regalia, continues Gibson’s habit of combining elements from traditional Native American art with contemporary artistic references. To find out more about Jeffrey Gibson’s work click here: https://bostonartreview.com/reviews/issue-07-jeffrey-gibson-mary-mcneil/#:~:text=Paper%2C%20paint%2C%20and%20beads.,opening%20of%20his%20solo%20exhibition.

Emmi Whitehorse

Emmi Whitehorse Jackstraw, 2000. Lithograph on paper

Through her artworks, Whitehorse represents the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, which refers to the interconnectedness of harmony, beauty, wellness, and order. Hózhó guides and informs Whitehorse’s abstract paintings as she explores the balance between paint, pastel, and graphite to tell the story of the connection between land and life. “My work is about and has always been about land, about being aware of our surroundings and appreciating the beauty of nature. I am concerned that we are no longer aware of those,” https://nmwa.org/blog/5-fast-facts/5-fast-facts-emmi-whitehorse/

Susan Point

Susan Point Flight (1995) the world’s largest spindle whorl, at Vancouver International Airport Spindle Whorls were historically used by the Coast Salish people to spin wool.

"Right from the beginning, I pushed the boundaries of Coast Salish imagery in my own personal art style, creating original designs, but always incorporating stylized Salish elements within every piece. While my work is rooted in Coast Salish traditional art, I create my contemporary works so that anyone, at any age, can relate to my imagery and form their own opinions, assumptions or interpretations. We, as Salish people, continue to evolve. We are rooted in our history, yet facing the future. As an artist, I love the challenge of creating art that works in any medium." https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/artists/an-interview-with-susan-point

Bill Reid

Bill Reid The Raven and the First Men 1980

“This massive piece of laminated yellow cedar, set in its own alcove at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, is a burnished amber beacon of artistry and meaning. It depicts the ancient Haida oral story about Raven encountering a large clamshell on a beach in Haida Gwaii, in the Haida homeland along the North Pacific Rim. Intrigued by a commotion emanating from inside, Raven opens the shell and finds a group of humans clamoring to get out.

In most North Pacific indigenous cultures, Raven is the “trickster,” a querulous, ever-busy instigator of change and turmoil. In this case, he opened the shell not just out of curiosity but as part of his innate role as a catalyst. Several timid proto-humans peered out, then clambered from shell to beach. And so began the history of the Haida people. Reid’s interpretation of this origin story is a mesmerizing work of art whose power and beauty surpass every sculpture I’ve ever seen.” https://discover.silversea.com/destinations/alaska/vancouver-artist-bill-reid/

More First nation American art here: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-11-influential-native-american-artists https://artuk.org/discover/stories/highlighting-modern-indigenous-art-of-north-america https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/in_focus/contemporary-native-american-artists-challenging-the-way-we-look-at-american-history-55116 http://www.matikawilbur.com

Art from South America

South American art encapsulates a rich tapestry of cultural expression, an intricate fusion of history, indigenous traditions, and artistic innovation. From the vibrant colors of the Amazon rainforest to the mystical allure of the Andes mountains, South American art offers a captivating journey into the diverse landscapes and complex narratives of this continent. Each brushstroke and sculpture carries within it a profound connection to the spirit of the land, mirroring the people's deep-rooted connection to nature and their ancestral heritage. With influences from Pre-Columbian civilizations, colonialism, and modern reinterpretations, South American art not only reflects the past but also acts as a dynamic lens through which contemporary issues and identities are explored. The art of South America is multifaceted, with a myriad of styles, techniques, and mediums employed by its talented artists. From the vibrant murals found in the streets of Valparaíso to the intricate weavings of the Quechua women, South American art is a testament to the region's creative spirit and human resilience. Through this artform, we are invited to celebrate the cultural diversity and profound history that defines the South American continent.

Rosângela Rennó

Rosângela Rennó Wedding landscape 1996

“I usually say that my interest lies in the humanities, in history and its erasures, and in the history of photography itself, its social uses and functions. All of this begins with an immersion into the images themselves, in collections I find in Brazil and abroad. My work process resembles a researcher’s, because my involvement with a specific set of images requires investigating their origins, their fate, and the reasons for their existence. Mostly, I am interested in collections that were destined to oblivion or destruction, such as in badly classified or stored archives, or archives that come up for sale in flea markets or are found in the trash. The discarded image takes on an “anonymous” quality, though of course it was made by someone. Beyond this, the discarded image has much to reveal, perhaps even more than one that has been classified. In looking for the reasons these images have been abandoned, I believe I am better able to understand their existence and connect them to some form of humanity through their political, ethical, or aesthetic aspects.” https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/769

More work by Rosângela Rennó: https://revuecaptures.org/contrepoint/experiência-de-cinema

Denilson Baniwa

“Sometimes the challenge is not to occupy positions. When the existing ones don't work, it is necessary to create something new. Denilson Baniwa is an indigenous artist; he is indigenous and he is an artist, and his being indigenous leads him to invent other ways of making art, where processes of imagining and making are, by force, interventions in a historical dynamic - the history of the colonization of indigenous territories that we know today as Brazil - and interpellations to those who find him to embrace their responsibilities.”

https://www.agentilcarioca.com.br/en/artists/111-denilson-baniwa/

Denilson Baniwa Natureza Morta (2) 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqmmEV2ED_g https://www.digitalbrazilproject.com/denilson-baniw.

More Contemporary Latin American artists below: https://www.spanish.academy/blog/10-innovative-contemporary-latin-american-artists-who-broke-the-mold/

Art from Africa

Batoul S’Himi

Batoul S’Himi Untitled, from the series “World Under Pressure,” 2011,

More about the work of Batoul S’Himi here: http://islamicartsmagazine.com/magazine/view/batoul_shimi_world_under_pressure/

Yatreda

kingdoms-of-ethiopia

“As a family of artists based in Addis Ababa, part of Yatreda motivation is to create and preserve the traditions of Ethiopian culture on the blockchain by making art in the style of tizita- nostalgia and longing for the past.” https://www.thisispaper.com/mag/kingdoms-of-ethiopia-yatreda

El Anatsui

El Anatsui Behind the Red Moon, installation view, Tate Modern, London, UK. Photo: Joe Humphrys.

“In his 50-year-long career dedicated to sculpture, El Anatsui has worked with wood, ceramics, and metal. With a preference for materials sourced locally, he repurposes used, broken, or discarded objects, emphasizing their transformation from purely functional items to contemplation pieces.

The artist’s philosophy of always working with what’s around him and cheap, widely available materials led to experimentation with parts of metal tins. His famous use of liquor bottle caps goes back to the late 1990s when he found a bag filled with them lying around his studio. Anatsui then started to sew the flattened caps together with copper wire, creating sheets of lightweight, colorful, and malleable metal.

For the Turbine Hall installation, these immense panels of metal hang from the ceiling, forming abstract compositions that change according to light and offering a dazzling experience for visitors.” https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/el-anatsuis-turbine-hall-commission/

El Anatsui’s talks about his work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zguexoZcV7U

Michael Armitage

Michael Armitage Curfew (Likoni March 27 2020)2022

“As you try to figure out what’s going on, you pick up on crowds and mayhem. In the immediate foreground, a man in a pink shirt looks to be in a state of mortal desperation. Something terrible is taking place.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2023/michael-armitage-curfew/

Michael Armitage talks about his work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hOxyPTisRw

More African art here: https://www.africancontemporary.com/paintings.htm

Oceana Click below to find out about this geographical area

https://pressbooks.pub/worldgeo/chapter/oceania/#:~:text=The%20region%20of%20Oceania%20includes,the%20Arctic%20and%20the%20Antarctic.

Art from Australia

Fabian Brown

Fabian Brown working at the Tennant Creek Brio

“In Warumungu country in the Northern Territory there is a collective of male Aboriginal artists who call themselves the Tennant Creek Brio.”

“We make the new and the old cross over. Joseph comes up with poems, and writes stories. We’re making our stories strong, about where we come from. We collaborate in our collective. Fabian can do a nice story painting and Joseph can do a poem on it, and then the culture stuff I might come in with— whether it’s traditional dancing, or a boomerang or a spear that represents our traditional culture. Or even a video. Because we live in a new world today, our old culture is adapting to contemporary times, and sits side by side and hand in hand to go forward.” https://artguide.com.au/tennant-creek-brio/

More here showing different artists working in a variety of styles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0WfqQAbV0o

“Billboards of contemporary works and archival images intended to illuminate First Nations’ perspectives of place in north Queensland”. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/07/itll-certainly-intrigue-people-roadside-art-tells-hard-truths-about-indigenous-history

Rosalie Gascoigne 1917-1999

Rosalie Gascoigne Piece to Walk Around 1981 “How can I show you the land I walk? You, who stands on pavements,
Have never seen the wide place I know.” https://goulburnregionalartgallery.com.au/exhibitions/rosalie-gascoigne

Bio and more work by Rosalie Gascoigne: https://ocula.com/artists/rosalie-gascoigne/

More artworks by Australian artists: https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/australian-contemporary-artists

John Pule

John Pule Savage island hiapo 2008 “Throughout his career, John Pule has developed his own language of motifs and figurative elements anchored in the history and mythology of his birthplace Niue, an island country in the South Pacific.” https://artcollector.net.au/john-pule-time-will-tell/

Matt Arbuckle

Matt Arbuckle All the more afraid 2019

“Arbuckle’s practice is a process-driven exploration of place, representing landscapes that are conceptualised through their very making. Through an experimental practice that favours process over outcome, Arbuckle uses elements of traditional Japanese shibori dying techniques to create abstract compositions by wrapping, twisting, folding and draping fabric over found surfaces and structures. The resulting paintings use depth and movement to trace and reveal abstract memories, imprinting the experience of place into the artwork. Matt Arbuckle is represented by Two Rooms, Auckland; Daine Singer, Melbourne” http://www.mattarbuckle.com/new-page

Maile Andrade

Maile Andrade (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) Ka ʻŌpua Hina/ The clouds of Hina, 2019. “The cultural bearers of kapamaking are few compared to the needs of kapa in ceremony, burials of iwi (bones) of our ancestors and in cultural practices.” https://www.nativeartsandcultures.org/maile-andrade

More about artists from the Pacific: https://theculturetrip.com/pacific/articles/top-10-incredible-contemporary-artists-from-the-pacific-islands

Inuit art

Qaumajuq art gallery Winnipeg Canada

Qaumajuq is a new art gallery, home of the largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art in the world and part of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Shipping containers dot the landscape of many northern communities, but in a downtown art gallery, it was an unexpected touch in a new exhibition space.

When Qaumajuq at the Winnipeg Art Gallery unveiled INUA, its inaugural show for Inuit artists in early 2021, a full-size, red shipping container, doors open, was placed in the centre of the room.

It’s not what you think of when Inuit artwork comes to mind. And yet, it was perfect for the occasion.

Qaumajuq is a first-of-its-kind gallery for Inuit art and culture in the heart of downtown Winnipeg. The large-scale installation commissioned for the exhibit was created by Glenn Gear, a multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker of mixed Inuit-Settler ancestry from Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador.

“That container really is a container for so many of my thoughts and wishes about Labrador, about culture and about my place within it,” Gear said. “It’s very much a space of reflection, but also it’s a love letter to Labrador.” By Megan Robinson & Dawna Friesen Global News Published April 1, 2023. https://globalnews.ca/news/9590246/quamajuq-inuit-art-future/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/qaumajuq-winnipeg-inuit-art-gallery-inua-exhibit-artists-1.5952257

Shuvinai Ashoona

Shuvinai Ashoona Help Us (2022) Installation view REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION DORSET FINE ARTS COURTESY MARION SCOTT GALLERY © THE ARTIST

More about this artist and others here: https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/iaq-online/inuit-artists-to-watch-for-at-art-toronto

Visual metaphor

“Visual metaphors are of the nature of what Kant called an aesthetic idea—a representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however being reduced to any definite thought. That is, with visual metaphors, the image- maker proposes food for thought without stating any determinate proposition. It is the task of the viewer to use the image for insight. This is not to say that the image-maker has not provided some direction for the viewer to follow. And the ingredients in the image obviously constrain the viewer’s imaginative flights. Rather, there is no single, fixed propositional meaning, for the visual metaphor is not a proposition.”

Carroll (1994)

The treachery of images. 1929 Oil on canvas. René Magritte (1898-1967) Los Angeles museum of modern art

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

Art can be lots of things but it isn’t reality, it’s a construct created by the artist. To that extent every artwork is a metaphor even if it is illustrative. Artists have used visual metaphor in their work instead of, for example, adopting a narrative. In using a metaphor, the artist is not trying to tell a story or demonstrate what an object looks like. It is using images which might suggest a meaning to its viewer. It is an image that is used to suggest that it represents something else. It is a strategy which presents a clue as to the artists intent while leaving room for the viewer’s understanding/experience of the piece and its content.

A comprehensive study about the ways in which artists use visual metaphor by Daniel Serig 2008 https://www.academia.edu/6613346/Visual_Metaphor_and_the_Contemporary_Artist_Ways_of_Thinking_and_Making

Just what was it that made yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing?

Here Richard Hamilton explains his work below.

“was to throw into the cramped space of a living room some representation of all the objects and ideas crowding into our post-war consciousness: my ‘home’ would have been incomplete without its token life-force so Adam and Eve struck a pose along with the rest of the gadgetry. The collage had a didactic role in the context of a didactic exhibition, This is Tomorrow, in that it attempted to summarize the various influences that were beginning to shape post-war Britian. We seemed to be taking a course towards a rosy future and our changing, Hi-Tech, world was embraced with a starry-eyed confidence; a surge of optimism which took us into the 1960s. Though clearly an ‘interior’ there are complications that cause us to doubt the categorisation. The ceiling of the room is a space-age view of Earth. The carpet is a distant view of people on a beach. It is an allegory rather than a representation of a room.”
Quoted in Exteriors, Interiors, Objects, People, p.44. and below:

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-just-what-was-it-that-made-yesterdays-homes-so-different-so-appealing-upgrade-p20271

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? ( 1956) Collage. Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) (Kunsthalle Tübingen Germany)

Brushstroke

“Throughout his career, Lichtenstein addressed the issues of what it meant to be a visual artist, especially a painter. In particular, he wrestled with the symbolic and literal power of the painter’s mark – the brushstroke.”

https://www.miandn.com/exhibitions/roy-lichtenstein2/installation-views?view=thumbnails

Strange Suspense Stories 1964 #72 Charlton Comics. Artist Dick Giordano

“Lichtenstein embarked on his Brushstrokes series in 1965. He intended the series to be a satirical nod to the abstract expressionism movement, from which he had departed with the creation of Look Mickey in 1961. He stated, “Brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture, but in my hands, the brushstroke becomes the depiction of a grand gesture.” Lichtenstein was parodying artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, declaring “The real brushstrokes are just as pre-determined as the cartoon brushstrokes.” https://blog.singulart.com/en/2019/11/04/the-story-behind-roy-lichtensteins-brushstrokes-series/

Brushstrokes (1965) Oil and Magna on canvas. Roy Litchenstein ( 1923-1997) © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2017

The starry night

The starry night 1889 Oil on Canvas. Vincent van Gogh ( 1853-1890) Museum of Modern Art, New York

The starry night Murat Yildirim. Digital artwork

Murat Yilderim is a Turkish visual art director working in Istanbul. He says about his work:

“it has long been common to reproduce the world’s most famous paintings by imitation. in this abstract idea, i used furs as a creative tool to move world-famous paintings forward. with this effect, i combined the colors of all pictures in an innovative and vibrant way. i have been impressed by classical paintings since my childhood. however, since modern art has become digital, i have turned all this into my favorite 3d artwork.”

Since the original painting The starry night was made, copies have appeared in many forms and in a variety of media e.g. mugs, puzzles, tea towels and a digital immersive exhibition.

I feel that Murat Yilderim’s work isn’t just an imitation using a different material. The reason I chose to show this work in the context of metaphor is as follows. Van Gogh’s work is so famous, so revered, so popular that this, one of his most famous and most popular works, has become like a familiar pet. It is a pet that is loved and stroked by its owner and who bestows a sentimental persona upon that pet. To me, the furry starry night provides a visual metaphor about what the original starry night has become.

See more work by Murat Yilderim:

https://www.behance.net/muratyildirim

Picasso and the metaphor of the Minotaur.

Bull, Horse, and Woman 1934 Etching. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Click here to find out how Picasso used metaphor in this print and other works:

https://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/806.html?page=2&events=1

Persian miniature art

"Due to the religious and spiritual learnings, the way which the miniature artists saw and perceived reality had totally altered. For the miniature artist, objective reality stood counter to the subjective reality and one way to show this was to minimize the size of the artwork. That is to say, the smaller the size the bigger the meaning, or the smaller the signifier the larger the signified. They believed that any alteration in size or distortion in dimension would change the way one looked at an object, and by changing the way one looked they could change the outlook.”

https://publicaciones.unirioja.es/catalogo/online/interarts/pdf/02

khamseh. 15th C Illustration. Nezami Herat school. https://www.iranchamber.com/art/articles/history_iranian_miniature.php

Metaphor in Dutch ‘vanitas’ paintings 1580-1800

Still life with imaginary view 1645 Oil on canvas. Laurens Craen (1620-1670). Art gallery of NSW, Australia.

Dutch still life paintings were codified to project a message for their viewer. Click here to unravel meanings in paintings such as the one above.

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/in_depth/a-symbolism-guide-to-the-spooky-world-of-dutch-still-lives-56298

The viewers perception of metaphors in art

“Before exploring the viewers’ perception of metaphors communicating through art, it is important to mention here what the artists want from the viewer to ‘see’. Artists that are true to their practice simply want to generate other metaphors to their spectators. In other words, they only wish to trigger the spectators’ conceptual system in order the latter to make their own personal connections with the art piece. Sharing Serig’s (2008) conclusion on this matter, he states; “The artists want their work to be viewed; they want reactions, but they do not create art with the mindset of getting one, right interpretation from viewers. Rather, the artists speak of creating art that enables multiple interpretations within a range prompted by the piece” (p.96).

John Berger in his text ‘Ways of seeing’ (1972) makes a similar point by stating; “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe”. “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (p. 8-9).

On the other hand, in his text ‘Montage of Attractions’, Einsestein had a different opinion since his vision was to be able to trigger a sensual and psychological stimuli for the working class people, in order their perception to be manipulated towards an establishment of certain final thematic effects. He wrote this text in 1923 when the proletariat was trying to raise a strong voice against the Russian bourgeois and probably that was why it was very important for Einsestein the working class to have class consciousness.

“Approached genuinely, this basically determines the possible principles of construction as ‘an action construction’ (of the whole production). Instead of a static ‘reflection’ of an event with all possibilities for activity within the limits of the event’s logical action, we advance to a new plane –free montage of arbitrarily selected, independent (within the given composition and the subject links that hold the influencing actions together) attractions –all from the stand of establishing certain final thematic effects –this is montage of attractions” (p.182-183).

In his theatrical and film work he always used strong metaphors that referred to the ‘one day the working class will stop being suppressed by the bourgeois’ concept.

The cognitive operations of the brain are responsible for creating conceptual systems in order man to experience his world, to build up experiences thus to create memories and furthermore concepts when standing in front of his world. This is actually Berger’s ‘Ways of seeing’ and also Eisenstein’s ‘Montage of Attractions’ leading the human to new perceptions, explanations and inventions that only emerge through the experience of the phenomena trigger.

Surrealists are always a good example for metaphors created in artworks. That is succeeded through juxtapositions of familiar things placed out of context creating a visualization of a completely different meaning. In other words, we can see in their works one thing and recognize the absurd connections between that thing and something else. Duchamp’s READYMADES, Magritte’s paintings and Dali’s works are only few of the numerous examples that we can place in order to clearly present the visual metaphors through art.

An excellent example of metaphors created by artists and metaphors conceived by the spectators is Duchamp’s essay ‘The Creative Art’ (1989). According to this; “… the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle towards the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane”, (138-140). This is Duchamp’s way to describe the conceptual system of thinking towards creating art and thus creating metaphors through art. He suggests that the human brain’s ability to channel experiences/memories helps the artist to express him/herself.He continues by describing the personal ‘art coefficient’ like an arithmetical relation of ‘the unexpressed but intended and the unintentional expressed’.This is how Arnheim’s intelligence of perception operates and the artist cannot be aware of these operations.

In the same tone, Duchamp places the spectator experiencing ‘the phenomena of transmutation’ at the point where the spectator transforms the artist’s inert matter into a work of art. But, then again, it is also the spectator’s intelligence of perception that acts unconsciously and dictates the aesthetic value of an artwork.

The ‘art coefficient’ of the artist is best described in Serig’s (2008) statement: “The artists΄ reflections on their influences, content, idea generation and art making imply art practices pregnant with metaphor” (p.134). Where, in terms of the viewer’s interpretation, Serig (2008) states:

“The role of the viewer that the artists’ express seems to mirror their process of creation: Interpretation connects to the physical engagement of the artwork like the artist physically engages with the materials. Artists emphasize the desire for the artwork to allow for multiple interpretations that invite the viewer to bring their histories and experiences to bear on it in much the same manner that they do so in their processes of idea generation and art making” (p.97).

In Harrison’s text ‘Introduction to Art’ (2009) we find Bell’s sayings describing his term ‘Significant form’:

“Works of art are the things that provoke ‘the personal experience of a peculiar emotion… called the aesthetic emotion’, having ‘the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects’ as their common characteristic. ‘In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.’ To these aesthetically moving combinations he gave the name ‘Significant form’”.

Mieke Bal (1996), on the other hand, discussing on how we read art mentions that we are ‘reframing’ the image or the work of art by assigning new meanings to it. The initial ‘frames’ have been created by history, indicating the ‘theory’ that exists on an artwork. But, as viewers, where nothing is profound, but only the usage of our perception, we are free to interpret something and create a completely different meaning, even assign a new iconicity to it.

We can easily understand how all the above can be easily manipulated through advertisements for commercial reasons in order to convince consumers to spend more money on products. This is an argument that fits lots of discussion so that is why this essay is focused only on art pieces that people see in galleries and museums.”

http://manoeuvresto.blogspot.com/2012/03/in-what-ways-visual-metaphor-is.html

Visual metaphor in film

Statues and what they represent in The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene.

“In the opening shots of The Third Man we are shown an image of Vienna that is followed in quick succession by three wintery images of statues in the city.[15] The intricate details and striking postures of the statues invite the eye and one’s attention to linger, yet the montage is cut so quickly that we only have time to register each image before we are pulled along to the next, not only through the speed of the cutting but also by the quick, nonchalant voice of the narrator (that of Reed himself in the British release), commenting on how he never knew the “old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm.”[16] The rhythm of the editing does not allow one to pause or to become absorbed in the delicacy of Strauss’s stone bow resting lightly on the strings of his violin;or to pay attention to the three human figures that seem to push out in relief from part of an archway beneath the instrument’s delicate scroll; or to fully note the folds of the chiseled robes of the statues standing on the rooftop overlooking the city—one of them, in profile, winged and commanding a chariot pulled by horses—all wearing mantles and head-coverings of snow; or to dwell on the severe, imposing figure of Beethoven sitting atop a column with small putti and a classical figure grouped at its base, also draped in snow, and set against a backdrop of buildings as well as a network of branches as fine as the spreading cracks in a sheet of ice. These three views of statuary figures, public and commemorative, standing in for the “old Vienna,” which has become a city of monuments, are followed by visual evidence of, and speedy commentary on,the thriving black market in the new postwar order, quickly leading to a shot of a corpse (an amateur unable to “stay the course”) floating in the river near a sinking boat, amid ice not cracked, but instead broken into menacing shards”.

Jacqueline Shin -Jan 15, 2017

Click here to view opening shots (It takes a little time to open):

https://modernismmodernity.org/sites/default/files/media/StatuesinViennaF.mp4

Battleship Potemkin (1925) Director, Sergei Eisenstein.

The Odessa Steps excerpt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxaefqC-k90

”The Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin has been watched, discussed, and analysed countless times. It's been referenced in parodies like The Naked Gun, as well as almost lifted directly in Brian DePalma's The Untouchables (1987). The scene is iconic in and of itself, and the pram is a shorthand for the entire purpose of the scene.”

Read more about the film and this scene:

http://objectsinfilm.blogspot.com/2015/04/object-8-pram-battleship-potemkin-1925.html

The use of metaphor in the film Parasite (2019). Director Bong Joon Ho.

“Parasite‘s story centers on two mirroring families, the wealthy Parks and the impoverished Kims. The landscape rock first enters the picture when it is brought to the Kims’ dingy semi-basement apartment by Min, the privileged college-age friend of the family’s only son, Ki-woo. The arrival of this glamorous but largely useless gift — Mrs. Kim grumbles that she wishes Min had brought some food instead — initially seems to bring good luck. Shortly after, the Kim family begins a cascading series of cons to infiltrate the gilded lives of the Parks. But in the manner of all great fairy tales, the Kims’ seemingly magical object of good fortune eventually extracts a terrible toll. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

Landscape rocks, known as suseok in Korean, have a deep history in East Asia. The practice of collecting these attractively shaped stones dates back thousands of years, but they became a fixture of Korean society during the Joseun dynasty (1392-1897), when they were commonly displayed on the writing tables of Confucian scholars — hence their other popular English name: “scholars rocks.” Some ancient scholars rocks, or those made from rarer minerals, can fetch astounding sums at Korean auctions.

As a boy, Bong went for mountain hikes with his father looking for rocks suitable as scholars stones. In recent years, however, collecting them has become much less common, especially for Korean young people. Inserting one into the early stages of Parasite was a “deliberately strange choice,” Bong says. When Min presents the rock to the Kims, Ki-woo exclaims, “It’s so metaphorical!”

The rock is presented to Ki-woo as a gift to help the Kim family out of poverty.

Read more about it below:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/bong-joon-ho-reveals-significance-parasites-scholar-stone-1265811/

C. Douglas and the mind of an artist

Blind Poet & the Butterflies1 2011 Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas C. Douglas ( Born 1950)

Read more about this artist below:

https://www.sahapedia.org/c-douglas-the-mind-of-artist

Robert Gober (Born 1950)

“The Heart Is Not a Metaphor is a body art exhibition that took over 13 galleries at the MoMA and included a retrospective of Gober’s 40-year career. Of course, it was entirely forbidden to take photos in that room. It is also important to admit that certain things are impossible to narrate.”

Read more about this artist here:

http://backroomcaracas.com/escritura-expandida/robert-gober-the-heart-is-not-a-metaphor-eng/

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/robert-gober/

When a bunch of ribbons turned into a metaphor for strong powerful women.

“That’s just what San Diego based artist Sarah Stieber did. she changed the context and made a point. It all started when Sarah was inspired by the women, around the world, who marched together to advocate legislation and policies regarding human rights.”

View more of Sarah’s work below:

https://www.curatorsofquirk.com/when-a-bunch-of-ribbons-turned-into-a-metaphor-for-strong-powerful-women/

Pigment and light

Colour as pigment

Pigments are insoluble in water, they can be ground to form fine particles from natural substances like earth which can provide a red or yellow ochre, charcoal or calcite which provides white. Dyes are soluble in water and used for inks and dyes for fabrics. Contemporary pigments are usually synthetic.

Dyes can be extracted from plants or synthetic and are processed to provide a variety of colours.

https://www.ocres-de-france.com/en/content/56-pigments-information

Information about the development and use of pigment in painting (in timeline format) including examples from pre history to contemporary works. http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/history.html

Man discovers pigment

Cave painting. Lascaux South West France

A virtual tour of Lascaux: https://vimeo.com/40849516

More images of cave paintings: http://noisebreak.com/art-ancestors-10-amazing-cave-paintings-world/

Sculpture and pigment

We see most Greek sculpture or friezes as below and have appreciated this as something that has an aesthetic quality. 

Cavalcade. West frieze. Parthenon British Museum.

In fact many Greek sculptures and friezes were painted. The frieze probably looked as depicted in this painting below by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Phidias showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his friends (1868) Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) Birmingham museums trust.

So how did this appreciation of the ‘whiteness’ of these icons develop.

“As the artist and critic David Batchelor writes in his 2000 book, “Chromophobia,” at a certain point ignorance becomes willful denial—a kind of “negative hallucination” in which we refuse to see what is before our eyes. Mark Abbe, who has become the leading American scholar of ancient Greek and Roman polychromy, believes that, when such a delusion persists, you have to ask yourself, “Cui bono?”—“Who benefits?” He told me, “If we weren’t benefitting, we wouldn’t be so invested in it. We benefit from a whole range of assumptions about cultural, ethnic, and racial superiority. We benefit in terms of the core identity of Western civilization, that sense of the West as more rational—the Greek miracle and all that. And I’m not saying there’s no truth to the idea that something singular happened in Greece and Rome, but we can do better and see the ancient past on a broader cultural horizon.”

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture. Margaret Talbot (October 22nd 2018. The New Yorker) Full article below. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture

Left: The Phrasikleia Kore, an Archaic Greek funerary statue created in the sixth century B.C. Courtesy Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung. Right: A color reconstruction of the Phrasikleia Kore, completed in 2010. Courtesy Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung

“ I didn’t want them to be anything, to have the graspability of a figure or a statue. They had to be something that you really took time to understand visually and emotionally.” —Anthony Caro. https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2015/anthony-caro-works-from-the-1960s/

Early one morning (1962) Sir Anthony Caro (1924-2013) Tate Gallery London

The month of May (1963) Sir Anthony Caro (1924-2013) Courtesy Barford Sculptures adn Gagosian Gallery, photo: Mike Bruce)

“Great art, like the surface of a Teflon pan, prevents things from sticking to it, particularly criticism.

That’s true of Anthony Caro’s ebullient sculptures at Gagosian Gallery, which look as fresh as the day they were made. In the 1960s, all kinds of nutty stuff was said about the abstract sculptures Caro (1924-2013) composed. For a handful of critics, his welded steel structures embodied the best Western Civilization could deliver: true meaning and authentic experience in the face of a culture increasingly overrun by prepackaged sentiments and alienating distractions. That led to a backlash that lasted well into the 21st century. For nearly 40 years, Caro’s brightly colored arrangements of I-beams, bars and chunks of metal were seen as vacuous baubles that steered clear of social issues to preserve the illusion that art exists apart from everyday life. Today,neither view comes close to the pleasures—both physical and intellectual—that Caro’s sculptures serve up in abundance. At a time when so much of what we see comes to us via small screens, it’s thrilling to come across a sculpture by Caro. Three galleries filled with works made from 1960 to 1976 is an event not to be missed. To begin, all you need to know about Caro’s sculptures is that they take fun seriously—and share it generously. The fun he had in the studio—putting parts together as if just kissing one another—is palpable. You feel an adventuresome intelligence at work, saying to itself, “How far can I spread a form out in space and still have it hold together as a single entity?” To walk around Caro’s pieces is to see their compositions shift radically.His capacity to transform construction-site leftovers into stimulating compositions sharpens the senses, boggles the mind and attunes us to our surroundings, not to mention our memories of other situations. For me, Henri Matisse and ice hockey come to mind. The efficiency of Matisse’s cutouts—particularly the way they play positive and negative space off each other—lies behind Caro’s forms, which make space expand and contract. The same goes for the speed, power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”not to mention our memories of other situations. For me, Henri Matisse and ice hockey come to mind. The efficiency of Matisse’s cutouts—particularly the way they play positive and negative space off each other—lies behind Caro’s forms, which make space expand and contract. The same goes for the speed, power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”not to mention our memories of other situations. For me, Henri Matisse and ice hockey come to mind. The efficiency of Matisse’s cutouts—particularly the way they play positive and negative space off each other—lies behind Caro’s forms, which make space expand and contract. The same goes for the speed, power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”

David Pagel

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-art-review-anthony-caro-at-gagosian-gallery-20150512-story.html

Carmen Herrera

“FEW ART EXHIBITS ARE FIVE DECADES IN THE MAKING, but the pieces seen in Carmen Herrera: Estructuras Monumentales, an outdoor exhibition of oversized aluminum structures currently on display at Buffalo Bayou Park through April 23, 2021, are just that.

While the designs, first conceived by Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera in the 1960s, initially took shape on paper, their 105-year-old creator always envisioned them coming to life in three dimensions. But moving from drawings to physical structures was always too costly for Herrera to manage on her own.” https://repeatingislands.com/2020/10/30/check-out-carmen-herrera-estructuras-monumentales-an-exhibition-50-years-in-the-making/

Gemini, 1971/2019 Carmen Herrera (1915-) Estructuras Monumentales at Buffalo Bayou Park.

“Core to Carmen Herrera’s painting is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of colour: “My quest”, she says, “is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions” (2012). A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. As she moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of Latin American artists, such as members of the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretists and the Argentinian Grupo Madi. Her work also chimes with her peers from the U.S. school such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Reflecting on this period, she says, “I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential” (2005). While allied with Latin American non-representational concrete painting, Herrera’s body of work has established, quietly but steadily, a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of modernist abstraction.” https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/carmen-herrera

Black and orange (1989- Carmen Herrera (1915-) Lisson Gallery

Herrera is equanimous about the neglect. “Being ignored is a form of freedom,” she writes. “I truly used that all my life. I felt liberated from having to constantly please anyone.”

Read more here: https://www.ft.com/content/8f08a20a-ac28-4a56-92f2-362a426d35ad and here: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/29/carmen-herrera-art-without-lies/

Spirituality

“In their deep conviction in art’s power to express emotions, the Expressionists and particularly the Blue Rider group with Kandinsky at its head, explored the effects of color on man. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Kandinsky affirmed that the real mission of art is of spiritual nature and thus built a sort of reading grid for colors. He associated emotions and sounds to 10 colors amongst which he considers blue and yellow to be opposites, like black and white. In this way, “deep blue attracts man towards infinity, awakening in him a desire for purity and a quench for the supernatural”. In his search of abstraction, Kandinsky created paintings that do look like melodies, and inspire body, mind and soul.”

https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/understanding-color-theory/

Yellow, Red, Blue (1925) Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

More about Wassily Kandinsky here: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/kandinsky-wassily/

Colour field painting

“Color Field Painting is a tendency within Abstract Expressionism, distinct from gestural abstraction, or Action Painting. It was pioneered in the late 1940s by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, who were all independently searching for a style of abstraction that might provide a modern, mythic art and express a yearning for transcendence and the infinite. To achieve this they abandoned all suggestions of figuration and instead exploited the expressive power of color by deploying it in large fields that might envelope the viewer when seen at close quarters. Their work inspired much Post-painterly abstraction, particularly that of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, though for later color field painters, matters of form tended to be more important than mythic content.” https://www.theartstory.org/movement/color-field-painting/

Cathedra (1951) Barnett Newman (1905-1970) Municipal museum Amsterdam.

Robyn Denny

“Confronted by the monumental hard-edge paintings from the mid-1960s of Robyn Denny, who has died aged 83, the viewer may be reminded of the famous figures of the New York School – Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko, perhaps. Often in muted blues, greys and browns, and with sharply abutted planes of colour crystallising into a geometrical figure that locks the gaze, these works, however, are the product of a reaction to the British tradition of landscape painting.”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/29/robyn-denny

No title. Screenprint on paper (1970) Robyn Denny (1930–2014) Tate Gallery

More about Robyn Denny: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robyn-denny-997

Carnival of colour

Henri Matisse

“I finally came to consider colors as forces, to be assembled as inspiration dictates. Colors can be transformed by relation; a black becomes red-black when you put it next to a rather cold color like Prussian blue, blue-black if you put it alongside a color that has an extremely hot basis: orange, for example. From that point on, I began working with a palette especially composed for each painting while I was working on it, which meant I could eliminate one of the primordial colors, like a red or a yellow or a blue, from my painting. And it goes right against neoimpressionist theory, which is based on optical mixing and color constraints, each color having its reaction. For example: if there is red, there has to be a green…. In a picture, neoimpressionist color reactions involved dominants. These dominants create reactions, but they have to remain dominants…. In terms of intensity, my reactions aren’t subordinate to the dominants, they’re on the same level… All the colors sing together; their strength is determined by the needs of the chorus. It’s like a musical chord.”

https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/as-inspiration-dictates-henri-matisse-on-color/

Les Codomas (1943) Gouache on paper. Henri Matisse (1869-1954).

More about Henri Matisse here: https://www.vulture.com/2014/10/moma-henri-matisse-review-dont-miss.html

Ciro Quintana

“Ciro Quintana (Havana, 1964) is one of the cardinal artists within the second wave of the so-called Cuban Renaissance or New Cuban Art. His work, along with that of Ana Albertina Delgado, Adriano Buergo, Ermi Taño and Lázaro Saavedra, shook the artistic and social panorama of Cuba in 1986 when the iconoclastic group Puré -characterized as by kitsch, junk art, confusion between boundaries of artistic individualities and, above all, the treatment of themes directly associated with the daily and popular life of Havana at the time- broke in into Havana cultural scene. Although short-lived (the group finally disintegrated in 1987 to give way to the development of the personal poetics of its members), the impact of Puré and its bold collective actions implied a milestone in contemporary Cuban art and, consequently, in the further development of each one of the members of the group.”

Janet Batet

The rapture of my garden (date unknown) Ciro Quintana (1964-)

More about Ciro Quintana here:

https://ciroquintanaciroartcontemporarycubanartist.wordpress.com

Romare Bearden

“A pioneer of African-American art and celebrated collagist, Romare Bearden seamlessly blended images of African-American life in the urban and rural South with references to popular culture, religion, and Classical art and myth. He depicted jazz musicians, monumental subjects, nudes, or mythological characters set against abstract, fragmented backgrounds. Each of his collages integrated images painted in gouache, watercolors, oil paints, which he would then fix to paper or canvas. Bearden sought to give the African-American experience a universal, monumental, and Classical representation: he would often recast Classical events with African-American subjects, as in The Return of Odysseus (Homage to Pintoricchio and Benin) (1977). By rendering Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus as African-Americans, Bearden drew the political injustices of his time into a universal, allegorical context.” https://www.artsy.net/artist/romare-bearden

Collage: Profile/Part II, The Thirties, Come on (1981) Romare Beardon ( 1911 -1988)

More about Romare Beardon below

https://www.forbes.com/sites/natashagural/2019/08/08/more-than-30-acclaimed-collages-by-legendary-black-artist-romare-bearden-reunited-for-first-time-in-nearly-40-years/?sh=608196d942a1

Collage: Jazz II (1980) Romare Beardon ( 1911 -1988)

Colour as light

”Around 1671-72, Sir Isaac Newton discovered the origin of color when he shone a beam of light through an angular prism and split it into the spectrum - the various colors of the rainbow. This simple experiment demonstrated that color comes from light - in fact, that color is light. Scientists investigate the objective properties of color while artists explore its subjective visual effects.

Claude Monet, the greatest exponent of Impressionism, created several series of oil paintings analyzing the effects of light. Our example is from a series of around twenty paintings of Rouen Cathedral from 1892-1894 which show the building at different times of day, at different times of year and under different weather conditions. Monet explored the effects of light through a series of still images but he was trying to communicate an experience of color that was only observable across a period of time.”

More here: https://www.artyfactory.com/color_theory/color_theory_1.htm

Watch a ‘time lapse’ of the effects that the change in light made to the appearance of the entrance to Rouen Cathedral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9ykMJPu7FY

James Turrell

For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception.

“My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. I’m also interested in the sense of presence of space; that is space where you feel a presence, almost an entity — that physical feeling and power that space can give.”

https://jamesturrell.com/exhibitions/solo/

Key Lime (1994) James Turrell, (1943) fluorescent and LED light into space with fiber optic cable. Los Angeles Museum of Art (artwork © James Turrell, photo by Florian Holzherr)

“We seldom think of the artistic process in the same way we might think of traditional scholarly research. Those wholly unacquainted with the process might envision artistic frenzy overtaking the individual, who is then spurred into creative action. And even those who know or are themselves artists may find the process ineffable. But much like the traditional academic—who begins with a question, evolves a hypothesis, conducts research, and, finally, makes a discovery—there is in James Turrell’s body of work the sense of that same process: the bud of a youthful idea blossoming over decades, each phase of his career guided by a common question.”

Breathing Light (2013) James Turrell ( 1943) LED light into space. Los Angeles Museum of Art (artwork © James Turrell, photo by Florian Holzherr).

More about James Turrell here:

https://www.cgu.edu/news/2013/12/artist-james-turrell-creates-intense-sensory-experiences/

Keith Sonnier

“Keith Sonnier is a post-Minimalist American artist. Starting out in New York in the mid-1960s, he completely reinvented sculpture, revamping traditionally used materials andtechniques to experiment with new forms. Despite sharing a desire for anti-illusionistsculpture with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, from the outset, Sonnier’s workswere imbued with a more narrative, literary quality than those of the Minimalist artists.In 1968, Sonnier became one of the first artists to explore the effects of light in his work by making and incorporating curved fluorescent lights to initiate a dialogue between the works and their surroundings.”

http://galeriemitterrand.com/en/artistes/presentation/3423/keith-sonnier

Dis-Play II (1970) Keith Sonnier (1941-2020) Foam rubber, fluorescent powder, strobe light, black light, neon, glass

Passage Azure (2015/2018) Keith Sonnier (1941-2020)

“These fluorescent light and glass pieces remind me a lot of driving in Louisiana,” said Sonnier in a 1977 interview highlighted in the exhibition. “Coming back late at night, and in the distance seeing a club somewhere in the fog. About the most religious experience I’ve ever had in Louisiana: coming back from a dance late at night and driving over this flat land and, all of a sudden, seeing these waves of light going up and down in this thick fog. Just incredible!”

https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/arts/article_3add9b2e-efd5-5805-9993-8d2aee028483.html

Leo Villareal

“Leo Villareal is a contemporary American artist best known for his installations employing LED lights and computer technology. Through customizing the codes himself, Villareal creates shifting light patterns in each installation, as seen in his Multiverse (2008). “Art is a distillation of ideas into material through which artists communicate. For me, art has always served as a portal—something that takes the viewer to another place,” he has explained. Born in 1967 in Albuquerque, NM, Villareal studied set design and sculpture at Yale University before attending New York University’s interactive telecommunications program at the Tisch School of the Arts. He was influenced by the work of James Turrell and Dan Flavin as well as the structures and systems of Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings. The artist has gone on to make a number of temporary and permanent public installations, including The Bay Lights (2013) which spans the western part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, taken down in 2015, the city had it reinstalled permanently a year later. Villareal currently lives and works in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, among others.” http://www.artnet.com/artists/leo-villareal/

Particle Universe, (2016) Leo Villareal (1967) at The Parrish Art Museum

Click here to view this kinetic artwork https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apHNVT3EXns

More work by artists who explore light and colour in their work. https://www.phillips.com/article/4600555/let-there-be-light-9-contemporary-artists-reimagine-the-relationship-between-light-and-art

Mark Making

Mark Making 
Artists make marks in all sorts of ways, the physical act (the gesture) of mark making creates a direct communication from the artist to the viewer.

“When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.”

(Jackson Pollock 1912-1956)

Jackson Pollock Alchemy 1947 (Guggenheim New York)

“Alchemy is one of Jackson Pollock’s earliest poured paintings, executed in the revolutionary technique that constituted his most significant contribution to twentieth-century art.” ( Lucy Flint Guggenheim online)

Find out more about this piece by clicking on the link below.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3482

Julie Mehretu (Born 1970)

“I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place.”

(Laurie Firstenberg, "Painting Platform in NY", Flash Art Vol. XXXV No. 227, November | December 2002, p. 70

Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Evacuation, 2001. (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. © Julie Mehretu, photo: Erma Estwick.)

https://walkerart.org/calendar/2021/julie-mehretu

“Mehretu’s points of departure are architecture and the city, particularly the accelerated, compressed and densely populated urban environments of the 21st Century. Her canvases overlay different architectural features such as columns, façades and porticoes with geographical schema such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings, seen from multiple perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric. Her paintings present a tornado of visual incident where gridded cities become fluid and flattened, like many layers of urban graffiti. Mehretu has described her rich canvases as “story maps of no location”, seeing them as pictures into an imagined, rather than actual reality. Through its cacophony of marks, her work seems to represent the speed of the modern city depicted, conversely, with the time-aged materials of pencil and paint.” (https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/julie_mehretu)

Julie Mehretu, Stadia II, 2004, ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inchesJulie Mehretu American, born Ethiopia, 1970 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh)

“Mehretu has long explored the use of abstraction in service of revolution and utopian politics throughout the history of Modernist art, “I am (...) interested in what Kandinsky referred to in ‘The Great Utopia’ when he talked about the inevitable implosion and/or explosion of our constructed spaces out of the sheer necessity of agency. So, for me, the coliseum, the amphitheater, and the stadium are perfect metaphoric constructed spaces.” These can represent both the organized sterility of institutions and the “chaos, violence, and disorder” of revolution and mass gathering.”

Find out more about this piece by clicking on the link below:

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/global-contemporary/a/julie-mehretu-stadia-ii

Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts Part 2 2012) Julie Mehretu 2012

Julie Mehretu talks about this work below:

https://high.org/video/video-artclix-profile-julie-mehretu/

Jean Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

“At a casual glance Basquiat’s paintings look as if they’d been made by a brilliant, autodidactic schizophrenic driven to download his inner demons, obsessions and fantastical ideas by whatever means possible. He worked rapidly with brushes, oil-stick markers, spray paint and other implements on small sheets of paper; roughly cobbled constructions of found boards and stretched fabric; an old wooden door; and large, professionally made canvases. You can imagine the creative persona Basquiat’s art conjures, muttering and chortling to himself while compulsively improvising his chartlike compositions of cartoon images, glyphic signs and enigmatic word lists.”

Ken Johnson New York Times Art Review Feb. 21, 2013

Find out more about Jean Michel Basquiat by clicking on the link below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/arts/design/jean-michel-basquiat-at-the-gagosian-gallery-in-chelsea.html

Jean Michel Basquiat Untitled 1982

Frank Auerbach (Born Berlin 1931)

‘What counts most in Auerbach’s work is the sense it projects of the immediacy of experience – not through the facile rush of most neo-expressionist painting, but in a way that is deeply mediated, impacted with cultural memoires and desires which do not condescend to the secondhand discourse of quotation.’ (Robert Hughes)

Frank Auerbach created many drawings as preliminary work for his paintings.

To the studios 1979-80 (a set of four drawings)

To the Studio 1982-83

Find out more about Frank Auerbach and this work below:

https://www.richardgreen.com/artwork/bt155-frank-auerbach-to-the-studios-a-set-of-four-drawings/

Sush Machida Gaikotsu (born 1973)

Moon Over Marine (?)

“Colors so bright they ricochet into your eyes, hypnotic patterns that sear the senses: Sush Machida’s paintings catapult Pop Art into the metamodern realm. In Twenty Years in Vegas at Sahara West Library, the telltale markers of Pop Art present themselves — action heroes culled from TV series, packaging shed from consumer culture — but Machida’s work won’t cozy up next to Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans for long. There’s too much irony. Or sincerity. Or both.The visual and emotional complexity in Sush’s art is partly a by-product of his Japanese-American identity. Born in Japan and trained in Western painting, Sush discovered the visual traditions of his homeland via 19th-century French artists inspired by Japanese woodblock prints. Classic Japanese aesthetic concepts — awe at the transience of life, respect for emptiness that is never really empty, reverence for beauty in imperfection — influenced him in subtle ways. In 1992, at 18, he moved to the U.S. and spent a lot of time on a snowboard. Seven years later, Dave Hickey poached him from Utah State University for UNLV’s Art MFA program. At that point, Sush was making dense, sexualized mixed-media works, collaging nudies onto painted Japanese seascapes with heaping patterns of salacious curves (bodies, water, fish) and dots (nipples) in contrasting colors. Motifs that would later earn his renown — waves, clouds, fauna, and dots — were already in place.” https://knpr.org/desert-companion/2019-03/visual-art-old-meets-new-meets-wow

Hypersonic Nocturn 2009

Sush Machida working in his studio click below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW5Wqjr9wrs

Sculpture can be the result of a mark and then translated through a particular materials or phenomena.

Massimo Uberti (born 1966)

"I realize drawings with a pencil on the paper and then bit by bit I build up particulars. Then when the project starts to take shape but mostly to make any sense, by that time and only then the drawings are being digitally transferred for blueprints. Then we go to physical implementation in the shop searching to reduce any findings or improvements with replacements or additions that improve the overall quality. The whole process "artisanal" made of invention on one hand and technique on the other hand lead to the final construction of the work like we see it exhibited." https://www.fart-neon.com/en/newsandpress-pkv1/art/interview-with-massimo-uberti.html

Città Ideale, omaggio a Giulio Romano 2018 – Mantova, Palazzo Ducale – Neon e trasformatori (courtesy photo: Paolo Bernini)

Casaluce (2017) – LED, trasformatori e ferro – installazione realizzata in occasione delle Olimpiadi Invernali in Corea – Como, Collezione Fondazione Volta (courtesy photo: Rohspace. https://www.lucenews.it/la-luce-come-spazio-possibile/)

Placing a found material or a combination of materials can make a mark/marks.

Eva Hesse (1936-1970)

Untitled, 1969-1970, latex, rope, string, and wire dimensions variables, (Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth, © The Estate of Eva Hesse)

“Weary of her inability to fully express her creations on paper, she used ropes found in her studio to extend the lines in her drawings into space: this marked the start of her mature period (1965-1970).” (https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/eva-hesse/)

See more of Eva Hesse’s work below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1gkIl6pxr4&feature=emb_rel_pause

Alejandro Durán (Born 1974)

Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape (2015)

Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape (2015)

WASHED UP: Transforming a Trashed Landscape
”Washed Up is an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international debris washing up on Mexico's Caribbean coast into aesthetic yet disquieting works.

Over the course of this project Durán has identified plastic waste from fifty-eight nations and territories on six continents that have washed ashore along the coast of Sian Ka'an, one of Mexico's largest federally protected reserves and a UNESCO World Heritage site. He uses this international debris to create color-based, site-specific sculptures that conflate the hand of man and nature. At times he distributes the objects the way the waves would; at other times, the plastic mimics algae, roots, rivers, or fruit, reflecting the infiltration of plastics into the natural environment.

More than creating a surreal or fantastical landscape, these installations mirror the reality of our current environmental predicament. The resulting photo series depicts a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our culture of disposable products. The alchemy of Washed Up lies not only in transforming a trashed landscape, but in the project’s potential to raise awareness and change our relationship to consumption and waste.” (Alejandro Durán)

Alejandro Durán talks about his work here:

https://alejandroduran.com/speaking

More works from this project:

https://www.artpeoplegallery.com/washed-up-transforming-a-trashed-landscape-by-mexican-artist-alejandro-duran/

Art and Politics

“Artists should get involved in what they see and its consequences.” (Doris Salcedo)

Doris Salcedo (b.1958)

Space between two buildings with 1,550 chairs. (2003 Istanbul Biennial)

The piece above was described by the artist as “Evoking the masses of faceless migrants who underpin our globalised economy.”

“Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.” (overview of artists work:White Cube Gallery London)

Video below: Doris Salcedo is an artist who lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Here she explains her response to the experiences of those affected by the politics of her own country.

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/doris-salcedo-on-bogota-artist-cities

18th / 19th Century

For some artists reflecting the society in which they live, involves responding to and in some cases, taking part in or opposing the political events of the day.

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)

Jacques-Louis David La Mort de Marat (1793) Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium,

© RMFAB, photo : J. Geleyns / Ro scan

More below: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat

Politics or Romanticism?

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824)

Radeau Meduse Théodore Géricault (1819) Louvre Paris

Was this painting a literal depiction of the reality of an event made famous at the time or an analogue for the expression of emotional feelings about events in the artist’s life? Can these two elements be separated?

Sometimes the political and the emotional state of the artist meet. See video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e8PBhhS_Bo

20th/21st century

Art and War

“War is the most destructive activity known to humanity. Its purpose is to use violence to compel opponents to submit and surrender. In order to understand it, artists have, throughout history, blended colors, textures and patterns to depict wartime ideologies, practices, values and symbols. Their work investigates not only artistic responses to war, but the meaning of violence itself.

Frontline participants in war have even carved art from the flotsam of battle -- bullets, shell casings and bones -- often producing unsettling accounts of the calamity that had overwhelmed them. Tools of cruelty have been turned into testaments of compassion and civilians have created art out of rubble.

Art, according to Izeta Gradevic, director of Sarajevo-based Obala Art Centre, can be more effective than news reportage in drawing international attention to the plight of ordinary people at war.”

"When you face an art form," she told journalist Julie Lasky, "it is not easy to escape death."

(Paintings, protest and propaganda: War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict." Joanna Bourke)

Joanna Bourke is a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and the editor of "War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict." The following is an edited excerpt taken from her introduction.

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/depicting-war-through-art/index.html

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Picasso in his studio working on the painting Geurnica



Geurnica Pablo Picasso (1937)

Perhaps Picasso’s most famous piece. The atrocity of war depicted through the slaughter of innocent victims.
”Eighty years after Picasso completed the mural, on June 4th, 1937, not only does Guernica still draw crowds, but it reminds the modern world of the atrocity that inspired it – the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish civil war – as well as the horrors of more recent events.”

(Irish Times Jun 3, 2017)

Read more here:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/guernica-80-years-on-still-a-stark-reminder-of-war-s-horror-1.3104410

In 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated overseas amid civil unrest at home, abstract artists as accomplished as Philip Guston wondered whether they were doing the right thing. “What kind of man am I,” he wondered, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”

(How American artists engaged with morality and conflict during the Vietnam war. Smithsonian Museum.)

Leon Golub (1922-2004)

"Monsters exist because we create them, through war and violence, and distortion, and the way we handle people and so on.”

Gigantomachy II. Look Golub (1966)

More about Leon Golub’s work below:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/feb/06/leon-golub-art-new-york-raw-nerve

Dan Flavin (1933-1996)

Monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) Dan Flavin (1966)

More below about Dan Flavin’s work:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dan-flavin-and-can-minima_b_6139966?

Tim Shaw RA (b.1964)

Casting a dark democracy Tim Shaw RA (2008)

Read more about this piece below:

https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/2759/1/casting-a-dark-democracy

Equality Issues

“If Valhalla exists in Britain, then it can be found in St Stephen’s Hall in the Houses of Parliament. A neo-classical gallery designed by Charles Barry in 1842, it is lined with statues of venerable men and framed by famous scenes from British history. To stand in its centre, on its intricately pattered encaustic floor, beneath the 29-metre-high ceiling, is to experience a strident, opulent lesson in male imperial power – one so commanding it might well compel a radical act of defiance from those it disregards. Such an action was taken by Sylvia Pankhurst in 1913 when, while waiting for the labour MP Keir Hardie, she threw a lump of concrete at one of the pictures.”

The Role of Artists in Promoting The Cause of Women’s Suffrage by Jessica Lach https://frieze.com/article/role-artists-promoting-cause-womens-suffrage

Emily J. Harding Andrews (1850-1940)

Convicts, lunatics and women! Have no vote for parliament She: Is it time I got out of this place - Where shall I find the KEY?

Emily J. Harding Andrews

Barbara Kruger (b.1945)

We don’t need another hero (1985)

More out about Barbera Kruger below:

https://www.thebroad.org/art/barbara-kruger

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)

Elizabeth Catlett Colour linocut "Sharecropper" (above, detail) from the 1950s. Source: Harvard Gazette.

“At Iowa, Catlett was encouraged to make work about the subjects she knew best – the reality of being an African-American woman, raising children, being at once dispossessed yet also proud and dignified. Women became the subject of much of her work, women with broad hips and angular faces, standing proudly, sometimes raising their fists, sometimes nursing children, but almost invariably depicted from a slightly lower angle, so that the viewer is forced to look up at them.”

Claudia Marinaro The Heroine Collective 2019

Full article below

http://www.theheroinecollective.com/elizabeth-catlett/

Barnett Newman (1905-1970)

Barnett Newman Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, 1968 Art Institute of Chicago

https://www.timeout.com/chicago/art/the-art-world-was-watching

Background into the event that led to Barnett Newman’s artwork below:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gabrielsanchez/dnc-1968-protest-photos-pictures-democratic-national

Kara Walker (b.1969)

 “But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model.’ Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche.

It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South-states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?”

The Katastwof Karavan. Kara Walker 2018 (photo: Alex Marks)

A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, Walker is best known for her murals in silhouette and the 2014 installation of  A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a giant sphinx-like figure with the face of a black woman constructed in a former Domino Sugar refining plant in New York. It referenced the history of slave labor in the production of sugar in the Western hemisphere. The Katastwof Karavan also addresses the history of slavery, and is placed at Algiers Point because enslaved peoples were held there before being sold at locations on the East Bank of the Mississippi. "Katastwof" is the Haitian Creole word for catastrophe, and it refers to the institution of slavery and its role in bringing Africans to European colonies. The wagon has figures in silhouette on its sides and a 32-note steam calliope that resembles those on Mississippi River steamboats. The wagon will be used for musical presentations Feb. 23 to Feb. 25. Some of the music is already programmed and includes songs by Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Cliff, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Sam Cooke, traditional jazz, hymns and protest songs. There also are live performances by pianist Jason Moran, who was commissioned to create music for Karavan. 

https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/events/art_previews_reviews/article_82f4a8ed-7d89-560e-a375-67b4eb3053d1.html

More about Kara Walker’s work below:

https://www.christies.com/Features/Kara-Walker-9955-1.aspx

Hank Willis Thomas (b.1976)

Raise Up Hank Willis Thomas 2014

More about Hank Willis Thomas below:

https://www.hankwillisthomas.com/WORKS/Sculpture/thumbs

Refugee

Refugees are persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and, as a result, require international protection.  The refugee definition can be found in the 1951 Convention and regional refugee instruments, as well as UNHCR’s Statute.  

--United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

Ah Xian (b.1960)

“Ah Xian fled China in 1990 to Australia after the Tiananmen Square massacre at age 30. Now, Xian continues to explore his native cultural identity despite this relocation from his roots. His particular works in the Metaphysica series (2007) and Concrete Forest series (2008/2009) articulate the representation of the body through his intricacy of skill and meaning.”

More below:

https://the-artifice.com/art-down-under-a-chinese-tale/

China China-Bust 81 Ah Xian 2008

Khadim Ali Khadim (b.1978)

“I was born as a displaced person in a displaced family, and now four decades later, I belong to a community of the displaced people. When I was attending school in Pakistan I was referred to as an outsider as the school was located outside my town. And then attending college as an art student at a national level, I could still feel the displacement and was not able to root myself as a local artist with a history and a future. And now in Australia, my convenient title is ‘refugee artist’ – although I did not come to Australia as a refugee – but I am seen from the community of the displaced and the refugees. Hence, displacement and migration are inseparable from my being.”

http://www.artnowpakistan.com/in-conversation-with-khadim-ali/

UNCR: 7 art initiatives that are transforming the lives of refugees

“Artolution supports Syrian refugee artists by providing capacity-building workshops and opportunities to work in their field and to engage the youth in their community. In Za’atari Camp, the Syrian artist collective Jasmine Necklace has co-facilitated community mural and sculpture projects. In Azraq Camp, an artist team led by Mohammed Hassan Ibrahim has engaged dozens of children and teens through public art, and is now developing an arts-based mentorship program with Artolution and the International Rescue Committee (IRC).”

Joel Artista/Artolution. More below:

https://joelartista.com/syrian-refugees-the-zaatari-project-jordan/

Za’atari Syrian refugee camp Jordan 2017

Mural Za’atari Syrian refugee camp Jordan 2017

The Jasmine Necklace Art Collective. Syrian artists in Za’atari camp

Climate Change

Olafur Eliasson (b.1967)

“Interestingly, when I did ‘the weather project’ at Tate Modern back in 2003, climate change wasn’t on anyone’s agenda. at the time, the work was received as being about the museum as a stage, about sociality, embodiment, being singular plural. only later did people start thinking about it in relation to the climate – and I think that’s just fine. The work is open to this shift in attention. it welcomes it. even when I did ‘your waste of time’ in 2006, which anticipated ‘ice watch’ in some respects, climate change wasn’t really on the global agenda. it was also not what drove me to bring chunks of hundreds-of-years-old Icelandic ice into an art gallery for visitors to touch them. the focus then was on direct, visceral experience – which has long been central to my art practice.

From this, I realised that encountering old ice may have extraordinary effects, and in 2014 I did ‘Ice Watch’ in city hall square in Copenhagen with Minik Rosing, a geologist and great friend. When you touch an old block of melting greenlandic inland ice, you physically feel the reality of time passing and climate change in a way different to reading the newspaper or through numbers and scientific data. This is where the arts speak a strong, direct language. in two minutes, ‘Ice Watch’ can communicate more than can be said in 700 pages of a scientific report.”

https://www.designboom.com/art/olafur-eliasson-interview-artist-designboom-02-16-2015/

Olafur Elliasson Ice Watch Ice Watch. Bankside, outside Tate Modern, London, 2018

Twelve large blocks of ice cast off from the Greenland ice sheet are harvested from a fjord outside Nuuk and presented in a clock formation in a prominent public place. The work raises awareness of climate change by providing a direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting arctic ice. Ice Watch has been installed in two locations so far.

The first installation was in Copenhagen, at City Hall Square, from 26 to 29 October 2014, to mark the publication of the UN IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change. The second installation took place in Paris, at Place du Panthéon, from 3 to 13 December 2015, on the occasion of the UN Climate Conference COP21, and the third version of Ice Watch was on view from 11 December 2018 to 2 January 2019 at two locations in London – outside Bloomberg’s European headquarters and in front of Tate Modern.

More below:

https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK109190/ice-watch

Yi Dai (b.1989)

Tide Tables / 6pm Yi Dai 2016

More below:

https://www.yidaistudio.com/tide-table-2016.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAs_tklRi0E

Subject and object

“Any art worthy of it’s name should address ‘life’, ‘man’, nature, death, tragedy.”

“I hope my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”

(Barnett Newman 1905-1970)

Brontosaurus.

Video. Sam Taylor Johnson (née Wood)

“Naked and alone in his bedroom, the dancer is performing an activity which usually takes place in a public space and which mixes acting with self-expression. By projecting the dance in slow-motion, Taylor-Wood has broken it down into a series of poses. The dancer appears to be lost in his own private ritual and oblivious to the camera's eye, and thus becomes an object of voyeurism, exposed in a state of extreme vulnerability. The chasm separating him from the viewer is extended by the poignancy of Barber's Adagio of 1936, which was used by the directors Oliver Stone in Platoon 1986 and David Lynch in Elephant Man 1980, two films which address male heroism and deformity. Moving between almost neo-classical heroic elegance and beauty, awkwardness, pathos and sheer ridiculousness, Brontosaurus covers a range of contradictory but co-existing human states and feelings. The archeological or primal nature of these is suggested by the title, which is the name of a dinosaur. This is comically referred to by a pink stuffed version visible in a corner of the room".”.

(Taylor-Wood quoted in Celant, p.192)

Click on on link below to read more.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/taylor-johnson-brontosaurus-t07545

Transfiguration

(Raphael. 1483-1520)

Ascension

Video. Bill Viola (1951-)

Like the protagonist of Ascension (2000), who suddenly plunges into the water from above as if involved in a choreographed baptism, in this retrospective the spectator was given the chance to drown into a spiritual element. As Viola says, ‘the artist must immerse himself in a world so intimate and private, with the aim to create something that may be shared with many and different people’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C66IBBpWYs

In this video from Tate (gallery) shots Bill Viola discusses his work.

https://vimeo.com/101609948

Setting sun over lake

JMW Turner (1775-1851)

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/england-constable-turner/a/who-is-jmw-turner

Magnitude

Video. Robert Seidel

Magnitude, a new series of “laser choreography” work by Berlin-based artist Seidel. His exhibition is a sequence of time-based laser drawings developed alongside the mountain terrain of the San Andreas Fault spanning from the Coachella Valley to the edge of the Imperial Valley’s Salton Sea.

https://vimeo.com/134786282

grapheme 

Robert seidel.
Sculpture & projection: robert seidel / sound: heiko tippelt
permanent installation at Museum Wiesbaden, Germany 2013

https://vimeo.com/90631986

Blind Eye

Digital work. Jennifer Steinkamp

Blind Eye, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts June 29 - October 8, 2018.

Blind Eye was conceived to interact with the Clark's 140-acre setting and the architecture of the Lunder Center at Stone Hill designed by the architect Tadao Ando. The art engages with one of the oldest themes in art history nature and landscape. Blind Eye depicts the seasonal phases of a birch grove. The composition is a play on monocular perspective, with no forest floor or way out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzBnRdm6oxQ

Winter Fountains

Digital work. Jennifer Steinkamp

Winter Fountains will run Nov. 30 through March 18 along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The domes are part of Parkway 100, a celebration of the historic road’s centennial.

From sunset to midnight, any passerby can see Steinkamp’s colorful pieces. The installation features four domes that are each 13 feet tall and 26 feet wide that glow with Steinkamp’s animations.

Each of the eight animations will be projected onto the domes in distinct colors. The images are representative of Benjamin Franklin’s research, as some animate the formation of electricity in clouds. The animations show dust particles colliding to create lightning or to spark static electricity; others illustrate water combusting into gas and steam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFa-6951KYM

Still Life with Lobster, Fruit and a Nautilus Shell

Ottmar Elliger the Elder. (1663-1679)

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-dutch-lifes-dark-secrets-hide-exotic-delicacies

Still Life (2001)

Sam Taylor-Johnson (Born 1967)

“In this piece Taylor-Johnson (formerly Taylor-Wood) references vanitas, a type of still-life prominent in 16th- and 17th-century Northern European painting. Artists working in this style paired symbols of death and decay with fruits and flowers, a haunting reminder of the fleeting nature of life on earth and the decadence of worldly pleasures. In Taylor-Johnson’s time-based work, a tray of beautiful fruit decomposes until nothing is left but a formless grey mass. The cheap plastic pen on the table, however, remains unchanged, quietly raising the environmental question of what will be left behind after we are gone.” (https://collections.mfa.org/objects/518595) 

Here are stills from the original video showing the decomposition of the fruit.

Cai Guo-Qiang and the art of explosives.

Chinese tradition in landscape art.

Landscape painting and calligraphy were the ultimate expressions of art in traditional China. 
The ideal for the scholar was to commune with nature, walking among the mountains and streams, but this was generally not practicable for a busy official, so taking out a landscape painting and allowing the mind to wander its paths was a substitute for this.The painting  below is attributed to Gong Xian (1618–1689). Gong Xian's life was greatly affected by the cataclysmic changes resulting from the fall of the Ming dynasty. His hopes for a comfortable life as a scholar official were dashed and although he is regarded as part of the wenren 'literati' painting tradition, he was forced to 'abase' himself and become a professional painter.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/tMHtSqOqR_aU_hVwROmKyw

Elements of the traditional landscape by Gong-Xian can be seen in the work of the contemporary Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang now living in New York. 

Born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, Cai Guo-Qiang received a BFA in
stage design from the Shanghai Drama Institute in 1985. He lived in Japan from 1986 to 1995, 
after which he moved to New York, where he has lived and worked ever since. 
Cai first began experimenting with gunpowder in 1984 and developed his signature
explosion events and related gunpowder drawings in 1989. 
He mines gunpowder’s charged identification with China, where it was invented, 
to create allegorical sociopolitical commentaries that riff on saltpeter’s
paradoxical associations with ancient medicine, ritual fireworks, and modern violence. 
By using explosives as pyrotechnical events outdoors or as a medium on paper, 
Cai recast a charged Chinese material to stake his contribution to the emerging global art scene. He also made the case that the catharsis of destruction and creation links art and war. 
In his varied practices and materials, Cai draws freely from ancient mythology, military history, 
Daoist cosmology, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, pyrotechnic technology, 
Chinese medicine, and images of terrorist violence.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/cai-guo-qiang

Installation view of Unmanned Nature, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2015
Photo by Michael Pollard, courtesy Whitworth Art Gallery

Review by Jamie Barnes, May 2015. The North/South Art Blog.

Several friends had told me about this exhibition at the re-launched Whitworth and I had seen
images of Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings in the space. However, when I saw the installation for myself it was like a punch in the solar plexus. I stood in awe not only at the installed drawings themselves, but also at the accompanying video playing outside the entrance to the exhibition space.
This 10 minute video showed various firework displays Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (pronounced Sy Gwo-Chang) had orchestrated using ‘black fireworks’ and a 2 minute sequence about how he made the gunpowder drawing. Black fireworks are designed to be used in daylight and use coloured powders instead of light to achieve their effects. 
Guo-Qiang uses these fireworks to create carefully controlled and instant drawings in the sky ranging from graphic ink-type effects and ‘black rainbows’ to veils of textured smoke pricked with points of light. I had literally never seen anything like this before, and stood open-mouthed in front of the screen. In fact I could have happily sat and watched this in a video room for hours.

I then entered the gallery room to see the large gunpowder drawing. 
The drawing is 45 metres long and four metres high. It is drawn onto 15 separate sheets of Japanese hemp ‘paper’ which is tacked to the wall and is presented behind a large lozenge-shaped shallow infinity pool (three visitors have stepped into the pool to date, mistaking if for glass!). The artwork looks exactly like an outsized Chinese ink wash drawing of a mountain landscape in sepia and black with a large abstract sun burning in the sky. However what looks like ink is actually burnt gunpowder.

The drawing was made in Hiroshima in 2008 for the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art’. This is the first time it has been seen outside of Japan. It took months of negotiations to get it to Manchester and it finally arrived rolled into four giant tubes packed in two crates. It is the first exhibit to grace the Whitworth’s new ‘Landscape Gallery’.

To make the drawing Guo-Qiang laid out the 45 metres of paper sheets inside a large gymnasium in Hiroshima. He then spread, sprinkled and brushed different colours of gunpowder over the paper in a very controlled way to draw the image. He used paper stencils laid over the paper to help define the lines in the landscape and to create the sun form, he then placed fuses amongst the gunpowder. After hours of careful drawing, he laid large sheets of cardboard over the drawing and placed small weights and rocks on top of the cardboard. 
He then lit the gunpowder and it momentarily ignited, then was extinguished as the cardboard suppressed the oxygen. At this instant the drawing was formed or ‘fixed’ onto the paper. In this way it is a little like printmaking, where the printmaker spends days and weeks thinking about, preparing, working, and inking the etching plate, then image is formed in just a few seconds as the paper passes through the press. When we look at Guo-Qiang’s drawing, we see scorch marks, ingrained gunpowder, and thin veils of watery background wash which make up an impressive experience to the viewer. We are able to get right up close to the drawing & I fancied I could even smell the gunpowder itself. Add to this the experience of seeing the drawing reflected in a pool, it all adds up to a powerful, impressive and contemplative experience.

In the video below, Cai Guo-Qiang talks about his work and how and how destruction has become part of the creative process. 

Visage

The Ife Head 12th - 15th century.  British Museum. 

Portrait of The Ooni (King) Oba-Esigie of the Benin Kingdom, Ife Nigeria. Ife was a city state situated by the lower Niger river. It became a political, economic and spiritual power through it's capacity to command trading routes.This and other beautiful examples of their art were discovered in a compound in Ife in 1938. 

Most of the many bronzes that were created are thought to have been made to celebrate their king, royal family and retainers, or  to commemorate state events. The bronzes were created using the lost wax method. These naturalistic portraits seem to me to have so much expression and individuality. They are as meaningful to us for that reason. It was said, at the time of discovery, that they were comparable to the classical sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome. It is my feeling that perhaps these Benin bronzes have more individuality and truth to humanity than many Greco-Roman busts where the aim was to portray their subject as a perfect image.

Female head with crown 12th - 15th century. National commission of museums & monuments, Lagos. Copyright Phot Scala, Florence 2012

Ife Bronze Head 12th - 15th century. National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.

Florentine Baroque

Cosimo III de' Medici (1642-1723) Grand Duke of Tuscany. Artist: Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1725)

These meltingly carved busts (above & below) of father and son are surely the finest examples of the portrait style of G. B. Foggini, the leading sculptor of the Florentine Baroque. While strong echoes of Bernini date the creation of the pair to shortly after the younger artist's return from Rome, they already exhibit Foggini's talent for the depiction of material opulence that earned him the post of Medici court sculptor. 
Dynamic contrasts abound: the fragile lace cravats and lavish mantles (emulating modes of the contemporary French court) set off the realistically depicted faces. They in turn provide their own study in contrasts: the commanding pose and classic Habsburg
physiognomy of the balding father serve as counterpoint to the sweet, somewhat unformed face of the youth, overwhelmed by a delirious cascade of curls. Foggini's artistic genius inaugurated the final flourish of Medici patronage. These busts, modeled from life, were followed by a series portraying other family members, all intended to promote the political aspirations of the fading dynasty.

  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/208149

Ferdinando de' Medici (1663-1713) Grand Prince of Tuscany. Artist: Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1725)

Japenese Noh Masks

In contrast to the Benin Heads and the Busts by Foginni, the Noh masks were made for performance in the Japanese Noh theatres. the actors face is mostly concealed. The actor feels that the mask has a spiritual power, the Noh masks usually portray a neutral expression. The mask can take on different emotions according to the position of the actors head or body, the angle of lighting is also important in this respect. Noh theatre began before the 14th century and was probably derived from the ritual ceremonies performed in Buddhist temples. Originally, the Noh mask was seen to be integral to the idea of reaching "Hana" (the highest artistic achievement) which was said to be the combination of natural talent, learned skill and the impression of easiness, which finally creates beauty.                                                                                                                                    

Noh Theatre mask (17th-18th century)

Noh Theatre mask (17th-18th century)

African Ceremonial masks

African ceremonial masks are integrated into a performance and usually enable those wearing it and others taking part to become spiritually at one with the character portrayed by the mask.  These ceremonies perform a variety of functions and mask styles vary according to tribal traditions.

One of the masks displayed at the mask festival at Burkina Faso 2014. www.aouaga.com

One of the masks displayed at the mask festival at Burkina Faso 2014. www.aouaga.com

The modernist architect, Louis Sullivan provided this very apt quote about form and function.

I like it in context of appreciating the pieces described above.

"Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages;the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and
metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the
head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever
follows function."
(Lois Sullivan 1896)

Matisse, Persian miniatures and Modernism

One of the reasons I have always admired the Red Studio by Matisse, is that, for me it is one of the  first modernist paintings.

The red studio. Henri Matisse 1911

It is a painting that really does leave the idea that we look through a window (frame) to observe something in front of us that is external to the self, behind. 
It is not just that Matisse uses colour in such a masterful  way, or that the composition is a reflection of his drawing skills, it's that he bought everything (objects and the room) up to the physical surface of the painting (the picture plane). It is this which makes it is such an innovative painting and influenced the direction that contemporary art would take.

Below is a definition which explains what the picture plane is:

"In traditional illusionist painting using perspective, the picture plane can be thought of as the glass of the notional window through which the viewer looks into the representation of reality that lies beyond. In practice the picture plane is the same as the actual physical surface of the painting.

In modern art the picture plane became a major issue. Formalist theory asserts that a painting is a flat object and that in the interests of truth it should not pretend to be other than flat. In other words, there should be no illusion of three dimensions and so all the elements of the painting should be located on the picture plane."
Tate Gallery London.

Still life with oranges and apples. Paul Cézanne 1895-1900

Matisse admired the work of Paul Cézanne.
"Look at Cézanne: never an uneven or weak spot in his pictures. Everything has to be bought within the same picture plane in the painter's mind."
Matisse.The Master. Hilary Spurling. 2005 P.80

Munich 1910 exhibition of Persian miniatures and carpets.

Matisse visited this exhibition and noted that:
"the Persian miniatures showed me the possibility of my sensations. That art had devices to suggest a greater space, a really plastic space. It helped me to get away from intimate painting." Matisse on Art. Jack Flam. 1995 P. 178

Matisse on Art. Jack Flam. 1995 P. 178

The 'plastic' elements of a painting are: Line, shape, form, space, texture, tone (value) colour and I would add time.

Prince in garden courtyard. Persian illuminated manuscript 1525-1530

It is this realisation that set Matisse free to follow his own expression, to state whether something should exist in his work through the juxtaposition of the plastic elements of a painting, time and space. In this way painting would become an individual expression rather than a depiction of an external representation that, in any case, can never be 'real'. 

Homage to Matisse. Mark Rothko 1953

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

Mark Rothko, original name Marcus Rothkovitch, American painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school; his use of colour as the sole means of expression led to the development of Colour Field Painting. In 1913 Rothko’s family emigrated from Russia to the U.S., where they settled in Portland, Ore. During his youth he was preoccupied with politics and social issues. He entered Yale University in 1921, intending to become a labour leader, but dropped out after two years and wandered about the U.S. In 1925 he settled in New York City and took up painting. Although he studied briefly under the painter Max Weber, he was essentially self-taught.

Rothko first worked in a realistic style that culminated in his Subway series of the late 1930s, showing the loneliness of persons in drab urban environments. This gave way in the early 1940s to the semi-abstract biomorphic forms of the ritualistic Baptismal Scene (1945). By 1948, however, he had arrived at a highly personal form of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Rothko never relied on such dramatic techniques as violent brushstrokes or the dripping and splattering of paint. Instead, his virtually gestureless paintings achieved their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colours that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space.

Rothko spent the rest of his life refining this basic style through continuous simplification. He restricted his designs to two or three “soft-edged” rectangles that nearly filled the wall-sized vertical formats like monumental abstract icons. Despite their large size, however, his paintings derived a remarkable sense of intimacy from the play of nuances within local colour.

From 1958 to 1966 Rothko worked intermittently on a series of 14 immense canvases (the largest was about 11 × 15 feet [3 × 5 metres]) eventually placed in a nondenominational chapel in Houston, Texas, called, after his death, the Rothko Chapel. These paintings were virtual monochromes of darkly glowing browns, maroons, reds, and blacks. Their sombre intensity reveals the deep mysticism of Rothko’s later years. Plagued by ill health and the conviction that he had been forgotten by those artists who had learned most from his painting, he committed suicide.

After his death, the execution of Rothko’s will provoked one of the most spectacular and complex court cases in the history of modern art, lasting for 11 years (1972–82). The misanthropic Rothko had hoarded his works, numbering 798 paintings, as well as many sketches and drawings. His daughter, Kate Rothko, accused the executors of the estate (Bernard J. Reis, Theodoros Stamos, and Morton Levine) and Frank Lloyd, owner of Marlborough Galleries in New York City, of conspiracy and conflict of interest in selling the works—in effect, of enriching themselves. The courts decided against the executors and Lloyd, who were heavily fined. Lloyd was tried separately and convicted on criminal charges of tampering with evidence. In 1979 a new board of the Mark Rothko Foundation was established, and all the works in the estate were divided between the artist’s two children and the Foundation. In 1984 the Foundation’s share of works was distributed to 19 museums in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel; the best and the largest proportion went to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Once he had arrived at his mature style of painting in 1949 Rothko rarely titled his works. His simple formula of 'breathing' paint into a sequence of feathery-edged rectangular fields of pure color bespoke a world of emotion and feeling beyond the everyday realm of objects, names or things. Striving for the transcendent by invoking a sense of the sublime, Rothko's paintings were not, as he famously said, 'pictures of an experience,' they 'were an experience'. His paintings therefore had little need for names, titles or descriptive explanations.

As the title Rothko gave to this work suggests, Homage to Matisse is a rare exception. It was painted in 1954, the year of the great French painter's death and it is equally rare in that it is a public declaration by Rothko of the debt he owed to another, and in particular, European artist. Like many artists of the New York School Rothko was often wary of allowing his work to be seen as in any way indebted to the then all-powerful French tradition in painting. Wishing to be seen as an independent artist and originator in his own right, Rothko was also ideologically opposed to the so-called "School of Paris" for what he saw as its lack of moral and political conscience in an age of profound crisis. Indeed the students he taught in California in the late 1940s remember him and Clyfford Still "yak, yak, yakking against the French tradition" and William Rubin has recalled that throughout his life Rothko "was always anxious lest he should be taken for a painter in the vein of Matisse, whom he nonetheless dearly loved" (cited in Anna Chave, Mark Rothko, Subjects in Abstraction New Haven 1989, p. 57, and W.Rubin, "Mark Rothko 1903- 1970", New York Times, 8 March 1970).

For Rothko to publicly declare a "Homage to Matisse" was consequently no small matter for the artist even though by 1954 Rothko was well established as one of the leading artists of his generation. It was also fitting. More than any other single artist, it was Matisse's example that had informed much of the direction as well as the ultimate liberation of Rothko's art between 1930 and 1949. In the 1920s Rothko had enrolled himself in the class of Max Weber a former pupil of Matisse's short-lived art school in Paris and in the 1930s Rothko shared a close friendship and working relationship with Milton Avery who, responding to Matisse's example, had inspired Rothko with his landscapes and female figures flattened into lyrical expanses of opaque colour. Essentially though it was Matisse's example and in particular, paintings like his Red Studio of 1911 that had given Rothko the courage to pursue his great breakthrough of 1949 when the representational forms, objects and symbols of his art finally disappeared and dissolved into his now familiar rectangles of pure non-objective color. The Red Studio was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art in the late 1940s and was first permanently installed in the museum in 1949. As Rothko told Dore Ashton, soon after the painting went on show he would repeatedly "spend hours and hours" sitting in front it. "When you looked at that painting," he said, "you became color, you became totally saturated with it" as if it were music (Rothko cited in J. E. B. Breslin Mark Rothko : A Biography, Chicago 1993, p. 283).

Rothko's own 'heroifying" of color, transforming it into the sole subject and drama of his art and his attempt to make it a direct experience for the viewer in the same way as music is clearly owed much to his understanding of Matisse's work and the elder artist's similar pursuance of an "inner vision" and his search through color for what he described as an underlying "essence". In a statement that parallel's much of Rothko's thinking, Matisse had declared in 1908 that "underneath this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character" (Henri Matisse cited in D. Ashton, op cit).
Both Rothko and Matisse were responding to the essentially Symbolist idea that there is a direct and ultimately transcendent correspondence between color, sound, sensation, feeling and memory. It is an idea that, as Dore Ashton has pointed out, was perhaps best expressed by Stephan Mallarmé whose poetry Matisse declared he, almost religiously used to read each morning ' as one breathes a deep breath of fresh air.' Mallarmé Ashton writes, "had told himself as a youth that he must purify language and use it so that it could 'describe not the object itself but the effect it produces.' He spoke of a "spiritual theatre " and an "inner stage" where absences (equivalent to the [blank unpainted] whites Matisse employed [in the Red Studio] evoked his inner drama" (ibid).

These notions effecting a "pure" language beyond the imagery and objecthood of phenomenal reality--of a "drama" that spoke directly to the "inner" being of the viewer--were of course shared by Rothko, though Rothko articulated these same ideals in ways that were often phrased within the context of his own great influences such as Nietzsche, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Mozart. "Free of the familiar," Rothko declared in his appropriately titled text The Romantics were Prompted, "transcendental experiences become possible pictures must be miraculous a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need." The "artist's real model", he asserted, is an ideal which embraces all of human drama" (Mark Rothko "The Portrait and the Modern Artist" broadcast with Adolph Gottlieb, Art in New York, WNYC, October 13, 1943, published in Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective New York, 1981, p. 170.).

That Matisse's work approached this "essence" or "ideal" by moving beyond phenomenal reality--painting as he often declared, not "things" but "the difference between things"--made him in Rothko's eyes what he described to Irving Sandler as "the greatest revolutionary in modern art". According to Sandler and somewhat typically Rothko immediately followed this statement of admiration with a clear disassociation between his own work and that of Matisse's, stating that he himself was "no colorist" and that morally he wished his art to be completely disassociated from that of all such "hedonistic painters" (Rothko cited in A. Chave, op.cit p. 57).

Executed at the height of what was arguably the most hedonistic and happy period of Rothko's career, in which the artist seems to have repeatedly revelled in a joyous and vibrant use of resonating color, Homage to Matisse is a clear, unashamed and unequivocal pictorial statement about the inherent similarities between the two artists' work. Consisting of a very simple scaffolding--three contrasting rectangles of strikingly different colour (red, yellow and blue)--the painting evokes a warm and joyous feeling. Tall and thin, the warmth simplicity and verticality of the work recalls the format of many of Matisse's balcony views onto the Mediterranean in which interior and exterior light and color radiate and interact in such a way that it appears that sunlight itself has become the subject of the painting.

Seeming to radiate a warm energy, the delicately brushed and feathery edges of the rectangles generate a hazy sense of shimmering light and heat. The deep rich calm of the lower blue rectangle contrasts strongly with the seemingly shifting and mobile transparent energy of the blended red and yellow rectangles at the top of the painting. In the magical transparent orange light generated by these two overlapping blocks of color, Rothko's masterful brushwork achieves an effect close to that of light pouring through a stained glass window. In establishing this effect, Rothko may have again been reminded of Matisse and in particular the stained glass windows he made for the chapel in Vence. This chapel was certainly in Rothko's mind a few years later when he contemplated his first series of mural paintings and it was also the primary motivation behind the Menils' later commissioning of Rothko to create a non-denominational chapel in Houston.

Using simple monolithic blocks of color to convey a pictorial drama that borders on the mystic, the powerful simplicity of this work demonstrates the radical new language of color that Rothko, at the same time as Matisse had done with his late cut-out paintings, had formulated in the early 1950s. In new and very different ways both artists were responding to the Symbolist belief that the simplest elements of painting, abstract color and form, could be used to speak powerfully and directly to the inner being and that in this way, they were creating approximations of the language of the human soul. As persuasive today as it must have been when it was first painted, Homage to Matisse is a fitting testament to this belief from one great artist to another.

Lot 34. Essay Christie's New York

Women Artists

This Summer, I have exhibited my work three times. Al, my partner helped me to hang the work. Each time someone came up and, turning to Al asked whether the work was his even though I was standing by his side. I thought we had been transported back ito the 19th, or even the 18th century. To me, the work is the important thing, not whether it has been made by a male or female. Anyway, it got me thinking about female artists past and present.
Here are two:

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 – 1842)

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, 1755–1842) is one of the finest 18th-century French painters and among the most important of all women artists. An autodidact with exceptional skills as a portraitist, 
she achieved success in France and Europe during one of the most eventful, turbulent periods in European history.
In 1776, she married the leading art dealer in Paris; his profession at first kept her from being accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Nevertheless, through the
intervention of Marie Antoinette, she was admitted at the age of 28 in 1783, becoming one of only four women members. 
Obliged to flee France in 1789 because of her association with the queen, she traveled to Italy, where in 1790 she was elected to membership in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome. Independently, she worked in Florence, Naples, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Berlin before returning to France, taking sittings from, among others, members of the royal families of Naples, Russia, and Prussia. While in exile, she exhibited at the Paris Salons.
She was remarkable not only for her technical gifts but for her understanding of and sympathy with her sitters. 
(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 2016)  

#VigeeLeBrun (follow this and watch an amusing video about one of the restrictions faced by Le Brun and other 18th century portraitists.)

Mona Hartoum ( b. 1952 )

Hatoum challenges the movements of surrealism and minimalism, making work which explores the conflicts and contradictions of our world. Her studies at the Slade School of Art coincided with developing ideas around gender and race, and she began to explore the relationship between politics and the individual through performance.

In the late 1980s she began to make installations and sculptures in a wide range of materials. These often use the grid or geometric forms to reference to systems of control within society. She has made a number of works using household objects which are scaled up or changed to make them familiar but uncanny. (Text taken from Tate gallery London. 'Who is Mona Hartoum?' 2016)

Hotspot 2013
The title Hot Spot 2013 refers to the term ‘hot spot’ meaning a place of military or civil unrest. Using delicate red neon to outline the contours of the continents, this sculpture presents the entire globe as a danger zone – what Hatoum describes as a ‘world continually caught up in conflict and unrest’.

WHAT IS HER CULTURAL BACKGROUND?
"Although I was born in Lebanon, my family is Palestinian. And like the majority of
Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948, they were never able
to obtain Lebanese identity cards. It was one way of discouraging
them from integrating into the Lebanese situation.
When I went to London in 1975 for what was meant to be a brief visit, I got stranded there because the war broke out in Lebanon, and that created a kind of dislocation, [which] manifests itself in my work…" 
(BOMB Magazine with Janine Antoni, 1998
conflict and unrest’.)

HATOUM IN QUOTES…
"Often the work is about conflict and contradiction – and that
conflict or contradiction can be within the actual object"
(TateShots, 2011)
"I’ve always had quite a rebellious and contrary attitude. 
The more I feel I am being pushed into a mold, the more
I feel like going in the opposite direction."
(BOMB Magazine with Janine Antoni, 1998)
"My favourite way of working is to go and spend time in
the place I am exhibiting in and make  work locally. 
I feel much more inspired when I… can work with people
and materials that I find in that location."
(Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2015)
(Tate Gallery London 2016)
 

Although centuries divide these two artists, I appreciate
their work, not only for the quality of the work but also
for the confidence they have demonstrated through their work.
Whilst Vigée Le Brun's work is limited in subject matter, 
(unlike some of her male counterparts), Hatoum's work is
interactive, engaged with the ebb and flow of world events.

"The power of Hatoum’s work is her ability to transcend local
and personal issues and make them universal and it’s why she
remains one of the most important artists in her generation."
(Rebecca Fulleylove, It’s Nice That, 2016)