swimming freestyle

Sigmar Polke

From his NY Times obituary:

Sigmar Polke, an artist of infinite, often ravishing pictorial jest, whose sarcastic and vibrant layering of found images and maverick painting processes left an indelible mark on the last four decades of contemporary painting, died Thursday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69.

Mr. Polke was nearly as influential as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, the postwar titans who made his own work possible. And ultimately his influence could even exceed theirs through its sheer diversity, stylistic promiscuity and joyful, ruthless exploitation and expansion of the ways and means of several mediums.

...his main achievement was to be an early and astute adopter of American Pop Art, belying its crisp, consumerist optimism with tawdry materials that added social bite, and with random splashes of paint that implied disorder and the unconscious. His paintings were essentially Conceptual in their skepticism about the very act of painting. 

From a portfolio of Mr. Polke's work:

 

 

Philippe Halsman just said 'Jump'

Photographer Philippe Halsman called his method 'jumpology'. 

“When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears.”

An exhibition of Halsman's photographs is currently being displayed at the Lawrence Miller Gallery in New York and the Times had a nice article on the artist's works.

There is a sublime silliness to Halsman’s images that can make you laugh or at least smile regardless of how often you see them. They may offer incontrovertible proof of Schiller’s claim that “all art is dedicated to joy.” Evidently the simple act of getting off the ground requires giving in to something like joy. You have to let go.

Some samples from the Times portfolio:

     

 

Silent portraits

Every day for the last seven weeks, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic has sat silently in her exhibit ("The Artist Is Present") at New Yorks MoMA and scores of museum visitors have signed up to sit and "commune" in silence with her.  Abramovic calls it her "ordealism" ethos.

During Abramovic's performance there's a live video feed broadcast and a photographer takes portraits of the attendees "communing" with the artist.  The portraits, more than 800 at this point, are presented in a Flickr portfolio.  There's lots of recognizable faces like Sharon Stone, Rufus Wainwright, and Christiane Amanpour, but it's the unrecognizable faces that I find more interesting.

You can make up your own mind about the art.  But almost without exception, the captured portraits are so startlingly intimate, it's very clear Abramovic's art has deeply effected those who participated.  And I reckon that's really what art is supposed to be all about.

 

 

 

(h/t The Daily Beast)

Vermeer only needed a ballpoint pen

The Girl With A Pearl Earring recreated by artist James Mylne with a BIC Crystal pen.

Living art

Alexa Meade is a young Washington DC artist who paints her living subjects and places them in real settings.  From her website:

The reverse trompe l’oeil series is Alexa Meade’s spin on reality. Alexa has invented a painting technique that makes 3 dimensional space look flat, blurring the lines between illusion and reality.

Typically a painting is an artist's interpretation of the subject painted onto another surface. In Alexa's paintings, she creates her artistic interpretation of the subject directly on top of the subject itself. Essentially, her art imitates life - on top of life.

By wrapping her subject in a mask of paint, she skews the way that the core of the subject is perceived.

 

"Timmy"
Acrylic on flesh
5 feet 9 inches
Alexa Meade, 2009

(h/t Boing Boing)

The dichotomy of Paul Gauguin

The Guardian has a nice piece on the French painter, Paul Gauguin, in advance of a major exhibition of the artist's work in London.  Most known for his lovely paintings from his time in Tahiti, Gauguin was, pretty much, a self promoting cad in his personal life. 

(Gauguin's) beautiful semi-naked young women proffering platters of fruit were, argue the curators, largely a product of Gauguin's imagination. By the 1890s, Tahiti, a French colony, had been comprehensively worked over by missionaries.

"They were wearing smocks and going to church on Sundays," says Belinda Thomson, curator of the exhibition. She called his relationships with his Tahitian models-mistresses "fairly exploitative". They were not, she says "equal relationships, nor could you call them properly professional relationships".

In Parahi te Marae (1892), a landscape in which a glowering idol looms over a yellow field circled with elaborate fencing (its form gleaned not from observation on the ground, but rather from looking at objects in Parisian museums), Gauguin hints at cannibalistic ritual ‑ a feature of Tahiti's very distant past. "He is reinventing the scene, playing on his audience's prejudices," says Thomson.

Manipulative in both his life and his art.  But they are truly beautiful images nonetheless.

The MoMA in 2 minutes

Every painting in the Museum of Modern Art on April 10, 2010.

3D masterpieces

A cool advertisement for Samsung's new line of 3D televisions.

Cartier-Bresson exhibit at NYC MoMA

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered the father of modern photojournalism and one of the founders of the great photographic collective, Magnum Photos.

The NY Museum of Modern Art just began a 300 piece exhibition of the first collection of Cartier-Bresson's iconoclastic works since the photographers death in 2004.  From a New Yorker article on the exhibition:

Cartier-Bresson has the weakness of his strength: an Apollonian elevation that subjugates life to an order of things already known, if never so well seen. He said that the essence of his art was “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” Too often, the “significance” feels platitudinous, even as its expression dazzles. Robert Frank, whose book “The Americans” (1958) treated subjects akin to many in the older photographer’s work, put it harshly but justly: “He traveled all over the goddamned world, and you never felt that he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.” The problem of Cartier-Bresson’s art is the conjunction of aesthetic classicism and journalistic protocol: timeless truth and breaking news.

Examples of Cartier-Bresson's works (click to enlarge):

 

 

 

I love this last one.  It reminds me of Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte".

The 'whirlygig' artist

Vollis Simpson probably began building his "whirlygigs" thinking it was only a hobby and an amusement for his neighbors on Wiggins Mill Road.  Little did he realize he would emerge, at 91 years old, as a leading figure in what's now called "outsider" or "visionary" art.

His sculptures have been displayed in a Christmas window display at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan and at permanent installations in Baltimore, Atlanta and Albuquerque. 

The New York Times had a nice profile yesterday of Mr. Simpson and his art.

Thirty feet in the air, held aloft by sturdy steel pillars, are some of Mr. Simpson’s pieces: a team of horses pulling a wagon, a metal man strumming a guitar and an airplane cum rocket ship that might have escaped from an old comic book. They are painted in a dozen colors and festooned with propellers that spin in the breeze. With every gust they creak and whir like some phantasmagoric junkyard band.

And down below, barely distinguishable in the shade of a barnlike building with “Simpson Repair Shop” painted on the front, is a gaunt man with big, gnarled hands bent over some scrap metal. It’s Mr. Simpson himself, a retired farm-equipment repairman who turned 91 in January, and who has hammered from discarded steel and aluminum a long second career as an artist.

Some examples of Mr. Simpson's work: