A recent Art Institute of Chicago exhibit highlighted the evolving art of Pablo Picasso.
“Presenting more than 60 of Picasso’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures, the show examines how these works reveal his professional relationships with art dealers and printers and his personal relationships with romantic partners, friends, and children. Because the show spans Picasso’s 70-year career, it also provides insight into the many styles Picasso practiced, from his early Blue Period to the works made during his last two decades. Here we take a closer look at some of these major artistic styles and approaches.”
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“From the River to the Sea,” Proposed Burning Man Installation
Burning Man is a celebration of Postmodern neo-pagen decadence, but one genocidal “artwork” was too much for even them. The title was a slogan calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. The watermelon was supposed to symbolize the colors for the flag of the non-existent country of Palestine.
“The 8-foot-by-14-foot fiberglass watermelon has the genocidal title ‘From the River to the Sea’ and was previously listed on the event’s website as part of the installation, but organizers suggest it was only submitted to cause a ‘stir’ and ‘likely won’t be part of the annual festival.’
“A petition signed by more than 1,100 people demanded its removal…”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The genius of Shakespeare is his subtle explorations of the human condition. His insights are so universal that his works have been adapted and presented to take place throughout history, from ancient Egypt to outer space.
Now a researcher has gathered together an online collection of Victorian illustrations of the Bard’s classic scenes and characters.
While reading Shakespeare’s works is still a thrilling experience for literary fiends, illustrations can help bring a little of the stage’s magic to the page. Michael John Goodman—who describes himself as an “independent researcher, writer, educator, curator and image-maker”—has made this magic easy no matter what edition you have. His Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive collects over 3,000 illustrations from 19th-century British editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I love the dark and powerful music Australian singer Nick Cave made through 1980s to the early 2000s. Starting off with the nightmare postpunk band the Birthday Party, then forming his own epic Old Testament/Southern Gothic flavored anthem group Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave survived addiction, angst and personal tragedies to become one of the elder statemen of alternative music.
Now Cave has intensifed his visionary explorations into another field, visual art.
“One can tell from viewing his work that Cave is serious about making art. In ‘The Devil — A Life,’ a honed and aesthetic sensibility is apparent in well-executed ceramics, which cleverly reference Victorian porcelain but which feature Lucifer as the main subject. The works relay a tempestuous tale that oscillates between good and evil and stirs corners of empathy in a strange sort of way, a way we might have felt before from his music. Cave loads in a lot of symbolism and draws on topics around death and violence, but also love and religion. Darkness is always paired with light…
These larger standalone pieces evolved out of so-called spill vases that he had initially started out making—Cave’s interpretations of Victorian vases that would hold a roll of paper or a twig, used to transfer a flame from one place to another in the house. ‘I wanted to make these because I wanted my work to be well and truly craft, so that it would not put me into the art world,’ Cave says. ‘On some level, it is the last place I wanted to end up as a musician—the track record is disastrous. I went to art school [and so] I had a lot of artist friends and making art was a serious thing; they put their lives into this. This idea that you can knock out some paintings between tours felt like a kind of a vanity. That’s why I wanted to make craft things.’”
Their folkloric style and craftiness, however, is exactly what makes them appealing. In an art world where so much work is just about a clever elevator pitch, the works Cave has made are sincere, clearly the result of an inner world percolating outwards, and products of an interest in process and curiosity. Maybe that is the irony—Cave’s attempts to avoid being read as an artist as such landed him in an art gallery. And that in-between state of Staffordshire ceramics (which he actually collects himself) as neither high or low art is what makes them so interesting to the art world, but also to Cave. ‘They are a bridge between craft and art, essentially made to bring a little joy into people’s lives,’ he says. ‘There is a naive innocence about them—no pretension.’”
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Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Jewish artist from Russia who immigrated to France
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Eric Fischl (b 1948) has been making his mysterious, somewhat sordid figurative pantings since the 1970s. His latest series uses the theme of hotel rooms as stages for ongoing pyschodramas.
This month, the artist has mounted a fascinating new exhibition at Skarstedt Gallery in New York titled “Hotel Stories”, which is on view through May 4th. It evokes a backdrop that many painters, filmmakers, writers, musicians, and storytellers in general have explored in their narratives. Do these rented spaces, separate from from everyday life give license to bigger feelings; do they contain secrets? Perhaps the loneliness sinks in deeper, or upsetting news seems more profound. Perhaps we’re more anonymous, for better or for worse. Or perhaps it’s just business as usual. Fischl’s first full series exploring this theme provokes this questioning and it does not disappoint.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The subject matter of Dutch painter Franz Hals (1580-1666) has suggested to posterity that he was a drunk, although we do not have firm evidence of that. But he sure did seem inspired by big personalities partying. A recent exhibition explored that aspect of Hals’s works.
“Still, Hals’s vivid, drink-filled paintings have undoubtedly played a role in helping that reputation endure. About 50 of them (a quarter of the oeuvre!) now fill a rollicking eponymous retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, many of their subjects raising glasses to toast or imbibe. Whether or not some potent elixir is present, his sitters tend to be some combination of pink-cheeked, ruddy, very jolly, and off-balance. These people are vividly, awfully present, and they are inviting you to join them. Do so with caution. I have not had this much fun in an exhibition in many years. But afterward, I did find myself rushing to the museum’s Gallery of Honor for the calm and equanimity of Vermeer and Rembrandt.”
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The legendary underground comix artist Robert Crumb continues to live as an expatriate in France.
“The French department of Gard is known for its Roman ruins, its landscape covered in scrubland, its Provençal villages, and… the cartoonist Robert Crumb, best-known as R. Crumb. This rugged but picturesque setting, once used as a place of hiding by members of the Resistance, has for years been home to a hero of American counterculture. In 1991, Crumb, who was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, and went on to become one of the greatest cartoonists of the last 50 years, decided to settle down in a medieval village in the south of France. He never left and seems to feel right at home.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Ed Paschke “La Chanteuse” oil on linen 25 7/8″ x 48″ 1981
Chicago Imagist painter Ed Paschke was ahead of his time.
“Though images that reference digital culture may feel common today, La Chanteuse and Prothesian looked radical when they were painted in the early 1980s. Mimicking the visual language of technology, with its static and surging electric impulses, Paschke veils his figures in distortion, evoking the loneliness, disjointed communications, and deceptions of the modern age.”
Ed Paschke “Prothesian” oil on canvas 42″ x 80″ 1982
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 