I discuss the exhibition: Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, summer 2021.
Purchase The Exhibition catalog here: https://amzn.to/3xzEtCd
Category: Museums
One of the current shows at Mana Contemporary this fall is; Francesco Clemente, George Condo, Chuck Connelly, Julio Galán, and Daniel Lezama in the Pellizzi Family Collections. That’s quite a long title – but it is honest and descriptive. The show covers three floors of the recently opened art space, an art space that seems that it has the ability to grow and continue to do so until northern New Jersey is one large arts outpost.
Francesco Clemente and George Condo are artists that almost everyone knows and understands the work, Clemente is routinely shown at Mary Boone and Condo, whose Mental States at the New Museum was very well received. While Lezama and Galan are solid paintings, I was most intrigued by the inclusion of Chuck Connelly in the show.
Connelly was an ascending art star in the early eighties – showing at Annina Nosei Gallery alongside Jean Michel Basquait, Barbara Kruger among a host of others. While Mary Boone has “won” the narrative as the hot gallery of the eighties – it is clear that Annina Nosei was priming a number of artists for great success. Chuck Connelly had three solo shows in the space of four years at Nosei between 1984 and 1987. As well as a number of high profile commissions, and his artwork played major part in a hollywood movie (New York Stories – “Life Lessons” directed by Martin Scorsese) So what happened?
A place to start with that is the unfortunately titled HBO documentary Chuck Connelly “The Art of Failure”. According to the documentary as well as word of mouth, Connelly fell into depression that along with his particular temperament and possibly alcoholism sent him into a trajectory that eventually cost him collectors, galleries, and eventually his wife.
Connelly’s work (of the 1980’s) speaks volumes about painting during the run up to the art boom of the eighties, it’s thick and physical, it shows a resonance with Soutine and Beckman. Neither of which I’m sure Connelly would call inspirational. None the less it is that physicality of image that continues to resonate strongest in his work from that period.
Chuck Connelly, Roller Coaster, 1984, Oil on Canvas (above)
Chuck Connelly, Breakfast, 1985, Oil on Canvas (Below)
References:
Mana Contemporary: Francesco Clemente, George Condo, Chuck Connelly, Julio Galán, and Daniel Lezama in the Pellizzi Family Collections.
Chuck Connelly exhibition catalog (1985) at Annina Nosei
There are people who love and people who hate the artwork of Jeff Koons, oddly enough I’ve always been on both sides of that equation. I’m less enthused about his place in the canon of the collectors market, but that is a completely different beast. So let’s do something that is tough to do when we talk about Koons, let’s ignore (for the moment) the money and collectors market.
To me the artwork that was made while Koons was ascending to the higher reaches of the art market are still interesting to me. I’m referring to the vacuums in vitrines, the basketballs, and the bronze inflatable’s. To many the inflatable’s is the location where Koons starts to get lost a bit. Unlike other sculptures Koons was making at the time these are not directly out of consumer culture (as a ready-made). These bronzes stay away from the presentation of the real thing – effectively these bronzes would kill the user who, for instance used a bronze life raft as a life saving device. Any of the basketballs or vacuums could easily be used in any other setting.
Staying on the subject of both the Basketballs and the Vaccums, these works have an oddity that takes them from something in a box (of sorts) to something else entirely. This small-scale industrial nature seems to me to echo Donald Judd – his kind of small scale and quirkiness of production. Similar to Judd, his use of color is specific and careful; it is this nature that will eventually be discarded as Koons’ work turns a corner to become focused on spectacle and monumentality. In making this move – away from the quirky, small production feel, Koons finds new territory that is more akin to what Hollywood would make as art.
By the time of the “Made in Heaven” photographs Koons seemed to have lost his way completely (some would also say found his way – as the works that would Koons would make, would be the works that the mega-collectors would start to find most interesting).
An Ending.
The fact is that Koons is loved by the collectors and the few dealers that sell his work. However that love seems to end there (for the most part). Ask most artists and critics and after they stop bitching about the money aspect of the work, and very little gets said about the artwork.
I’m reminded of this last quote from the movie “Patton” when it comes to the bravura around Koons, I think it’s a rather telling quote.
For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.
This show at the Whitney is the conquerors slave holding that crown.
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With the current Exhibition on display at the NGA London, a number of interesting things about Leonardo have been getting a little bit more play in the mainstream press.
While I tend to write more often on a more modern approach to art, it is not without knowledge in the past. (And let’s be honest – anyone who has even a smattering of interest in art should have a reasonable understanding of the history of art)
I was reading the latest interview at ArtInfo this morning and the interview of Martin Kemp was pretty riveting. Among the many things he discusses about Leonard and the “Salvator Mundi.” the two that jump out at me are Leonardo’s interest and knowledge in geology and optics. The geological piece is about the Rock Crystal that the Jesus figure is holding and the optics has to do with depth of field. The depth of field one is really curious because DoF is primarily a photographic concern – and here we see Leonardo using the effect well before what we might call pre-photography.
Often we as viewers have been down the path that Leonardo is a genius – and let’s be frank – he was. However the thinking that is being show in the image of Salvator Mundi as Jesus is just phenomenal.
(small excerpt of the interview below) (URL: http://artinfo.com/news/story/750715/the-male-mona-lisa-art-historian-martin-kemp-on-leonardo-da-vincis-mysterious-salvator-mundi )
Excerpt begins here…
What was striking for me was the orb, and I’ve subsequently researched it quite heavily. The “Salvator Mundi” obviously holds the mundus, the world which he’s saving, and it was absolutely unlike anything I’ve seen before. The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they’re of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they’re terrestrial globes, sometimes they’re translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they’re like bubbles, but they’re not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that’s pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d’Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials.
So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, “Let’s have a look at some rock crystal.” And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the “Salvator Mundi”; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they’re not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you’ve got in the “Salvator Mundi” is really a “a savior of the cosmos”, and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.
Another thing I subsequently looked at is that there’s a difference from what we would call depth of field — the blessing hand and the tips of the fingers are in quite sharp focus. The face, even allowing for some of the damage, is in quite soft focus. Leonardo, in Manuscript D of 1507-1508, explored depth of field. If you bring something too close to you, you can’t see it and it doesn’t have a sense of focus. If you’ve got it an optimum point, it’s much sharper. Then you move it away and it gets less sharp. He was investigating that phenomenon. So there are these intellectual aspects, optical aspects, and things in terms of these semiprecious materials that are unique to Leonardo.”
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I found myself in DC this weekend and early Sunday morning found me at the Hirshhorn for the much-anticipated Palermo retrospective.
The timing of this travelling exhibit is just about right as many people are now directly or obliquely referencing Palermo – he is clearly one of the artists the current zeitgeist is looking at. To look at this show and to hope to find direct relations with new art may not be the hardest thing to do in places, but to look at his body of work and to see the openness that went through his work is quite another.
This quality, his “porosity” is what draws many to his work before the period of his living in New York – but in reality this is his strongest period. From the cloth images to the wall paintings and the rough hewn sculpture/paintings Palermo’s early work is a idea and subject rich outpouring of artwork created in such a short period of time (+/- 10 years).
That porosity would start to come to an end with his relocation to New York, as Palermo would start to produce a series of paintings that would be executed on aluminum panel, usually in a small series (most often groups of three and four). However to be fair about the end of the porosity in New York, it is unknown what the future would have held for Palermo as his early death in 1977 would dictate that future works would be very hard to produce.
Installed here is the painting series “To the People of New York City” considered the zenith of his New York body of work. This brutal and yet sophisticated artwork balances itself between both of these two approaches, it is an amazing body of work – my only complaint is that the install seems bit too open for my taste – I would have loved to have seen this just a bit tighter to see and feel some of the overlap between the images. In a way a slightly tighter hanging would let some visuals bleed over into the viewer just a bit, visually pulling the suite of images into a more connected state.
The images I was most interested in seeing was the Cloth “paintings” as these are more often found in Europe than the United States – primarily being due to the location of their origin and relative fragile-ness of the artworks. The cloth works seem to take the many approaches from post war painting and distill them in a way that is clean, open and yet slightly subversive. They are a great opening salvo to a career that was cut short.
