Brilliant animator and film director Terry Gilliam on a bizarre Old Master painting which inspired him – and became the origin of the Monty Python foot.
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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…”
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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.’”
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.
My wife writes about a pilgrimage to visit a sacred painting.
It’s hard to believe there is no velvet rope
separating me from this magnificent work of art.
This was the second time I saw The Annunciation by Jan van Eyck
up close and personal.
I could have stood there for hours..
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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.
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.
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Like most people, cultural commentator Matt Walsh does not understand so called “Modern” art died out in the 1960s. The junk he is describing is pretty much peak Postmodern art, with all its low acheivements and politics as a substitute for quality on display.
Still, Walsh provides some dry analysis which exposes the sham that our cultural insitutions serve up instead of art.
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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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French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) has been called both the last Old Master and a precursor to Modern art. In 2018 New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted exhibits of Delacroix’s paintings and drawings.
“The last great artist who was not a modernist, Delacroix synthesized very complex visual and verbal traditions in stunning works that, by summarizing the old master European worldview, open the way to modernism. Political and artistic transitions are tricky to deal with — but his handling of this transition was exemplary.”
Eugène Delacroix “Self Portrait in Green Vest” 1837
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Peter Doig ” Country-Rock (Wing-Mirror)” oil on canvas 76.7″ x 106.3″ 1999
Peter Doig is a contemporary painter who I was very interested in at one time – until I discovered he uses a projector to create his art. I have strong feelings against this practice, as I wrote about in an earlier piece, The Image Morgue:
“Projector artists. Artists who cheat themselves and their audience by projecting an image onto their canvas and doing a paint-by-numbers routine to create their works. Artists like this have reduced themselves to a mere cog in a mechanical reproduction process, not creating, but taking dictation from their gadgets. They let their tools make their discoveries for them. It is an inferior mode of creation.
“If you’re an artist, do your own rendering.”
Still, Doig has done wonderous things with color and the handling of the paint. which is why I continue to enjoy his work. He can evoke beauty.
It’s estimated Doig’s 1999 painting Country-Rock (Wing-Mirror) will be setting some auctions records.
“In 1972, sixteen-year-old Berg Johnson – a self-anointed ‘Caretaker of Dreams’ – painted a rainbow over the grey façade of a roadside underpass on the outskirts of Toronto. Johnson was inspired by the memory of a friend, Sigrid, who had tragically died in a car accident nearby. He would often complain to her that people in Toronto ‘never looked up’ and following her death he wanted to do something to make people smile.
“It is Johnson’s rainbow tunnel, just off Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway, that we glimpse as if from the passenger seat of a passing car in Peter Doig’s Country-rock (wing-mirror), 1999. This mysterious landscape is distinctly Doig: characterised by his trademark otherworldliness and capturing the familiar ennui of such peripheral spaces.
“Every time a major landscape by Doig is offered at auction it represents an important market moment: only last year, Swamped, 1990, established a new artist record of US$39 million. Replete with mystery and intrigue, Country-rock (wing-mirror)will be a highlight of Sotheby’s Hong Kong Contemporary Evening Auction this autumn, the most significant work by Doig to be offered at auction in Asia.”
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 