got caught up in work, will do a massive post today or tomorrow.
Atget, Point Neuf, Gold Print Albumen Photograph, printed ca 1925
There is an Atget photo of the Point Neuf at the Corkin Gallery, in Toronto—this one is in the collection of SF:Moma, Atget tried to photograph every building in Paris, and most of the bridges, parks and other infrastructure. The tension between the project of recording, and the making of aesthetic objects. The photos of water and boat are accidentally caught between these instincts. The reflection, the oblique angles, the trees providing a visual anchor between the river and sky, require concentration to see. The acclamation of visual pattern seeking works on this image, and this group of images.
Klee, Angel Novus, Watercolour on Paper, 1920.
Walter Benjamin owned this Klee, and talked about it in his small but tightly packed essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History. He thought of the angel as not new, though Klee called it that, and the painting and the essay were engaged in a modernist project that was profoundly attached to progressive methodology. For Benjamin, the painting is a tragic attempt to recognize this progression’s failure. Writing during the rise of the Nazi’s, the angel becomes a holy way to work through the problems of the destruction of history. In this capacity, it looking backwards and forwards collapses time.
Morandi, Still Life, 1963, Watercolour on Paper. Collection of Museo Morandi.
In Siri Hustvedt’s essay on Morandi, talks about seeing a gallery of his paintings in Venice, at the Peggy Guggenheim collection. She overhears American tourists going through the museum and saying bottles, bottles, even more bottles. The idea of Morandi, that it is an endless set of work in dull colours, of bottles and boxes. Hustvedt’ extends the argument that there is so much in these boxes, and to look at them has a meditative power. But, looking at his work, one wonders if he will eventually collapse into a pure abstraction. This watercolour has gotten closest to that anticipation.
Head of a Roaring Lion, neo Assyrian, Ivory or Bone, 9th Century BCE
This is elegant in how the entire peice rests on the open mouth, the entire piece constructs a narrative of pure ferocity. Through it’s millenia of existence, parts of have broken enough, so the effect is lessened, but the terror is present. One of the ways that the orality of the work manifests itself is a set of circles, that function together and apart, they are not concentric, that work from a central place. The mane is a larger curve of the mouth, but the mouth is interupted by the teeth, for example-or the whiskers that reinforce the raised surfaces.
Eunice Pinney, Memorial to Herself, Watercolour, 1816, collection of the Fennimore.
Eunice Pinney was a watercolour artist, from colonial New England. We have 40 of her work, mostly domestic scenes, but a handful of memorials. Both kinds have a dedicated balance between natural and manufactured elements, and between pattern depicting and reportage. Her memorial pictures have the required elements —-grave, weeping willow, jar—sort of christian, but also a community built folk mythology. This picture is fascinating, not only because of it’s deft working of expected convention, but because it is a self portrait, but one that does not feature her husband or children on the grave, and one painted when she was relatively young.
Judd, Untitled, Sierra Marble, ca 1978.
Judd’s industrial minimal is slick and cautious—precise in it’s use of iron, steel, plastic, plywood. The precision constructed with materials which we are used to not only being used for art-making, but who we are not used to being used with this kind of precision.They are made in workshops and foundries, but not with the industrial anonymity that marks mechanical reproduction. He was a serious artist without much of a sense of humour. This box, as much about the space made by absences and holes, as presences and constructions, is a self-conscious jape, traditional marble meant to look like cast concrete.
Tina Barney, Jill and Polly in the Bathroom, C Print, 1987.
Tina Barney’s work’s about seeing how the other half lives, and her prints reflect this wealth. They are clean, precise, and large. The quality of the printing process furthers the idea of them as luxury objects but the size of the work marks them as art. This idea of capital as way to access the mechanics of art production, makes the viewing of the work infused with a kind of schadenfreude. But her work features large distances between subjects, oblique angles, backs turned, or arms crossed. The emotional isolation betrays any of the other political ideas bubbling to the source.
Christopher Pratt, Wall Facing West, colour serigraph on illustration board, 1980, collection of the national gallery of canada.
Christopher Pratt, the Canadian hyper-realist, lacks the observational skills of his fellow photo-realists like Estes or Bechdel. He also lacks the slow burn of malice and implied violence in the work of his fellow Atlantic Canadian Alex Coville. The work is thought to be domestic, and in a Canadian context both decorative and safe. It does well in the market, almost as well as the Group of 7. The prints and paintings he has done since the 70s, of clapboards, often clapboards on clapboards, are severe and elegant, restrictive in ways that mirror that generation’s experiments with more reductive minimalism.
For centuries, their was no notion in European depictions that non-western cultures had any sense of authorship. Instead of artists names audiences were told that they were of a nation instead of a person. This has changed in the last few years, the best examples are the first nations of the Great Western Plains—esp. galleries in North Dakota, and Minnesota have started to name artists, treating workers not as objects of anthropological curiosity, but masters of aesthetic practice. The narrative and visual complexities found in Shoshone Cadzi Cody’s paintings on elk skin, are among the strongest fruits of this restoration.
Gerald Davis, Archangel Gabriel; The Virgin Annunciate, Oil on Limewood, 1582
Intended to be an ecclesiastical object, often Netherlandish triptychs, hide their hinges in the midst of decorative elements. They are not intended to be part of the narrative. This one is just different enough. The hinge works as a gilded line, making literal, the separation between the earthly realm and the heavenly one—but because this is an annucation, the initial movement in the time of Christ, where the two realms become one, the line has to be both liminal and permeable. This is done by making Gabriel closer, the movement of the hand, how he holds the rod, and the dove’s presence.
Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park 67, Oil on Canvas, 1973, Collection of SF:MOMA
If you fly towards the bay area, there is a section of the portland, maybe through industrial activity, or some other kind of pollution, or something more natural, that is a collection of rectangles and squares, some diagonal lines. The colours are deep—greens, blues, the occasional pink or red. Seeing them, one is reminded that the structures of Diebenkoren come from a profoundly settled representational energy. They are abstracted, in the sense that the work is distilled from one geographic source. This ocean park painting, reminds us, that colours extend past blues and greens, this example a warm, wet, pink.
Gwen Jones, Cat Cleaning Itself, Watercolour and Pencil, b/w 1904 and 1908
Gwen John is known for a series of fairly severe portraits, some of them of herself, and some of them of close friends and families. They are composed from a set of chromatic greys, and are not beautiful, but significant and difficult. Knowing these paintings, and their difficulty, there is something wonderful about a set of drawings and watercolours she did of cats between 1904 and 1908. They depict the stretching, sleeping, curling, bodies—by looking, they create a corpus of work that fufills a call towards observation above all else. Of course, this has a diaristic component, but refuses anthropomorphizing.
John Rushkin, Withered Oak Leaves, Watercolour on Paper, ca 1869
Writers, who work about art, finding they come to a place, where the descriptions fail, and they push towards illustration. It is tempting to think of Ruskin in this sort of position, when he made this watercolour illustration of two dried leaves on a blue background. But it must also be remembered, that it used to be, in the Victorian era, that it was expected that educated people would be able to draw or play music as a matter of course—so this is not an allegory of language, but work that was done for it’s own sake, if not pleasure.
Cornelius Van Haarlem, Banquet of the officers and sub-alterns of the Haarlem Calivermen Civic Guard, 1599
The Dutch Group Portrait edited by Alois Riegl is one of those books of art history, that takes an almost autistic obsessiveness about what seems like a very limited subject, extending it, so that subject becomes a matrix or lens to talk about other things—this time, capital, social mobility, the virtue of the collective in the midst of an emerging commodities market, and the power of art as a tool of political propaganda and social markers. These portraits—of merchant groups, went from being almost regimental in line and station, to the swirling mass of material culture, in this later example.
