Hold on tight! Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor is (a bit belatedly but so what) arriving in LA. Perfect timing I’d say. Not your much more chaste MoMA show of a few years back. This MOCA/Geffen Contemporary joyride is the non-Van Gogh immersive experience a/k/a the real show-stopping funkadelic- psychedelic deal. Also not quite the Mr Rogers hood. The Geffen couldn’t be better, the installs of videos, supersized furniture, domesticity-gone-wild in an ideal setting. Here’s Pippi herself at the check in to her version of home- the very space we need right now to get out of our own cocoon to hers -a dizzying dissolution of boundaries. She’s seeking “the semi private semi public spaces, the weeds and cracks” according to curator Anna Katz. MOCA has been in a very tough place with its directors and curators coming and going but let’s give them a cheer for bringing Pipilotti and a grin.
Young Anais Nin's Diary
Another remarkable treasure from the UCLA Special Collections at the Fowler: the second diary of Anais Nin when she was 12 years old, having just the previous year begun keeping her infamous diaries in Kew Gardens, New York. She had begun the first volume on the boat over from Neuilly, France where she was born to talented Cuban musician emigres.
Her mother Rosa bought the first notebook in the 'hope that it would distract Anais from her fear of abandonment." Anais later said she had begun the diary as a letter to her absent father. But the notebooks proved much more than that. Things were not real to her until she committed them to paper. Her brother said, 'the diary was her indispensible lifeline."
The diaries explored her fascination with herself. We think of her today as one of the first really honest memoirists.
She was still writing in French, until she was 18 when this photograph of her posing as Cleopatra was taken. By then the diary had become a reflection on marriage, career, what the future might hold. "Love me someone," she had told her diary.
Nin went on to become loved and the lover of many men, including Henry Miller, two husbands whom she stashed on different coasts, (She had what she called a 'lie box' to keep her two lives straight) a writer of erotica for money. Though the later diaries and erotica are much more well known, as they were titillating when published, when I saw this one in her perfect, girlish script with the drawing on the facing page showing her window, I was very moved.
All of Nin's original diaries are at UCLA, in Los Angeles, where she died in 1977. They are the only truly unexpurgated versions.
Treasures from The Grunewald Center
More treasures from the Grunewald Center at UCLA Hammer via the Fowler. This ingenious photograph by Doris Salcedo, a splicing of the Guggenheim Rotunda with inner city housing (the Guggenheim is on 89th, Harlem is a hop skip jump) is thought provoking and beautiful.
At first I thought it might be too facile--it's easy to poke holes at art institutions now (this photo from 2009) as they are under fire for their trustees, their racial practices, their lack of inclusiveness.
But Salcedo is actually referencing a previous 'cancelled' exhibition from 1971 of Hans Haacke (it's his photos of the housing) that also got its curator Edward Fry, dismissed. Their point was similar: to raise awareness of the building's ownership and the deals of influential trustees who were connected to the museum.
Some exhibitions and a number of directors and curators have recently gotten the heave ho; it remains to be seen whether the institutions can financially withstand wholesale house cleaning.
Labor Day Musings
On this Labor Day, I am celebrating the work of Jacques Toussele, a photographer from Cameroon, who along with his colleagues now on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in Photo Cameroon, took what was ostensibly a kind of passport photo (identity cards) practice into delightful realms, proving that work can sometimes be art.
I had seen a similarly engaging show about three other African photographers at the Maison Europeene de la Photographie a few years back.
Toussele did the majority of his work in an indoor space on a main street in Mbouda. Subjects often brought their treasured possessions since few props were available. They celebrated engagements, births, family reunions. Upon arriving at the studio they would consult examples of previous work displayed on the wall. Sitters would create their personal 'backdrop' with Toussele.
This is an image of Emmanuel Lucky Sparrow who himself was a backdrop painter, with his girlfriend. He was an itinerant painter going from studio to studio through the Grassfields region and was employed frequently by Toussele.
I love this photo, the insouciance and moxie of the couple and how they wished to be remembered. Though undated, it captures the seventies with the untraditional fabric and the length of her mini dress, his Carnaby Street hat, bell bottoms, form fitting shirt and most of all their attitude.
With our iphones and their instant-ness, we don't achieve the same self-curation, or when we do, it's likely to be less studio-centric. I think this kind of portrait photography is ready for its next act.
Happy Labor Day!
Getting to Know Paula Rego's Stance on Injustice
An exhibition I am sorry I think I will miss: Paula Rego at the Tate. Rego's work was largely unfamiliar to me.
"Rego grew up in Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship, witnessed many injustices and consistently sided with the victims of abuse and prejudice." She went to Slade like many of our School of London artists, and was also praised by David Sylvester who was so instrumental to them as well.
One of the things she has consistently addressed are issues around women and suppression. On my mind today of course is the confounding and extremely disturbing non ruling of the Supreme Court over the Texas abortion law.
Rego did a series of pastels and drawings in response to the legalization of abortion in Portugal in 1998. These remind me of the hyper reality of Alice Neel's pregnant women--only on the other, darker side. Rego wanted to show the aftermath of illegal abortions--which is where some poor Texas women are going to certainly end up. This is one, Untitled, 1998.
"I want to draw a real person who has an everyday story," she once said. Alas all too soon this aftermath will become an everyday story.
Rego has chosen to take figuration to a political level. It takes a certain courage to be responsive to cataclysmic world events. Now no artist need search for topics as the daily onslaught is overwhelming.
Joan Mitchell's Tumultuous Life
After a suicide attempt in 1954 brought on by the wild nights at the Cedar Bar where she became a 'brawling, destabilizing demon when drunk", a tumultuous relationship with the painter Mike Goldberg and her father's death, Joan Mitchell painted this City Landscape in 1955. It was the very height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, yet each painter had found his or her own way,
"I don't go off and slop and drip," she said, obviously referring to Jackson Pollock, "I stop, look, and listen."
Learning About Joan Mitchell
My story about Joan Mitchell's life and work timed with the retrospective of her work at SF MoMA opening this week appeared in Air Mail News over the weekend. In learning more about Mitchell, I began to see beyond her fairly reductive reputation as a very talented but very volatile artist.
I hadn't understood how her childhood, while privileged, had betrayed her earliest impulses towards art and poetry and that she had to fight her way past a controlling father to be able to study art and reject the life of an ice skating princess.
I didn't know that she had helped her first husband, Barney Rosset, who went on to become a fearless publisher, imbue new life into Grove Press. And that her other relationships with men who were also painters were fraught. Mitchell was not great at commitment to anything but her work.
Mitchell felt she had to be as tough as one of the guys to be taken seriously. At the time, even among the other strong women of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 50's, this was unusual.
I hadn't realized that the pull of Paris and of France, where she ended up living, was at first a place where she felt uninspired. She bought a property where Monet had lived, and she both enjoyed and, at times, resented the connection.
Most importantly, I hadn't known that her dramatic paint strokes and large canvases had been inspired by artists like Van Gogh and Cezanne, and had roots in the sunflowers and bridges that she could see from her window. That she remembered landscapes and didn't need to have them in front of her. And that her abiding painterly energies went towards expressing the feelings that she had--and not some 'abstract' idea of things. Joan Mitchell opened my eyes. Link to the story in my bio.
Photo: Loomis Dean, Life Picture Collection
Women Artists Take Over San Francisco
In the past weeks, we have been looking at some wonderful, all male artists in the Bay Area and London (Joan Brown the notable exception).
This week there are two, very different, simultaneous shows opening in San Francisco that are light years from those groups.
Two Chicago-born women artists, Judy Chicago and Joan Mitchell, are taking over the De Young and SF MoMA. It's a moment worth celebrating. Though their trajectories and practices are wholly different, it's a reminder that other breakthroughs were going on as the figuratives in London and the Bay Area had returned to the human body for inspiration.
Chicago (nee Cohen) is one of the leading figures of American feminist art. Through painting, textiles, installations (notably The Dinner Party, likely her most well-known work)and perhaps most importantly pedagogy, Chicago galvanized art practice in the women's movement both by her teaching at Cal Arts and Fresno and by the founding of Womanhouse and its successor, the Women's Building in LA. (This aspect of her practice was front and center in the stimulating exhibition Wack, Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoCA in 2007.) Chicago aimed to demonstrate how women artists had been routinely marginalized. She conjoined her own personal practice with education--a true sisterhood. For some observers, this is still a tough pill to swallow.
Though Chicago began in minimalism which was in ascendance in LA at the time, she broke away from this movement and began working with acrylics and sprayed and painted forms that explored a visual language that could impart her feelings about women's sexuality.
In 1972, Chicago began a series Women and Smoke, early performative works in the California desert. Immolation, pictured here, is symbolic for me of the explosion of radical thinking about women and art that Chicago incited and encouraged. Image two is one of her beautiful plates dedicated to Virginia Woolf, 1975-8 from The Dinner Party which memorialized the contributions of women who had made similar important strides.
Kitaj Paints Still Beauty
Like Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, RB Kitaj, the sixth artist in the Getty London Calling show, was Jewish, but for him, especially as he grew older, it became an abiding subject, not just a religion. Kitaj was born in Ohio but ended up living in London, where the Marlborough Gallery represented a number of the figurative artists. He was also great pals with Hockney who is not technically part of this group though his subjects were also figurative at the time.
He loved cinema, and baseball. He was married twice, the first time to an American art student in Vienna, and the second time to Sanda Fisher, also an American artist.
Kitaj was much influenced by Degas. A retrospective at the Tate in 1994 received poor reviews due his use of text in the galleries, (what would they make of today's art?) and he abandoned London for LA after the death of his wife which he blamed on the turmoil the exhibition had aroused.
In LA, where his son Lem Dobbs the writer lived, he was able to find some measure of peace surrounded by family.
Though Kitaj used collage in his paintings, it is two pastels that I find remarkable. In The Rise of Fascism,1975, at the Tate, Kitaj said, "The central grotesque bather is the fascist. The bather at the left is the beautiful victim. The right hand bather is the ordinary European watching it all happen. A bomber appears in the upper left corner (not visible in this poor IG crop please forgive) which will cross the English Channel and bring an end to it all one day." (Hello Tate, please put this painting back on view!)
Two London Painters, 1979 is at Lacma (Hello Lacma, please put this painting back on view!). It's Auerbach and Fisher reading, contemplating, friends. I think it's so moving.
Kitaj committed suicide in 2007 in LA. He was 75.
The St. Martin's Connection
Leon Kossoff met Frank Auerbach at St Martin's. In the early 50's he worked on building exteriors and on portraits of his parents and family. He reworked paintings as he did drawings. These were the two general subjects to preoccupy him for much of his life. Rail stations and swimming pools, where his son was taking lessons, also contributed, and the latter lightened his palette. His impasto rivaled, even exceeded that of our recent subject David Park. The similarities between these two groups continues to impress me.
This painting, Woman Ill in Bed, Surrounded by Family, 1965, which lives at the Tate, appears to me almost as a Russian icon, or oddly as Madeline once appeared with her fellow orphans at a table headed by Miss Clavell. The pathos of the characters, whose faces are anguished, and of the dying woman who is in agony, is Christ-like, with disciples gathered round. However you read it, it is so moving, the window open high above as a place she might eventually ascend to heaven.
A cache of 14 of his paintings that were stolen from a truck en route to Italy tormented Kossoff, and a new retrospective which will travel to LA in 2022, is meant to help possibly jog people's memories about where they might have seen these. The Mafia was suspected. In September a catalogue raisonne will also be published. Kossoff recently died in 2019.
Francis Bacon's Rare Painting of A Woman
The majestic new biography of Francis Bacon by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan tells us more about Bacon and his circle than anything that has come before. It also serves to complicate what had become a slightly reductive take on this master of 20th century art whom almost every artist I've written about has looked towards both for formal qualities and the autobiographical way in which he excavated for subject matter.
In the early 1960's, Bacon's practice evolved to a more shallow picture plane and more intense color. This painting, Reclining Woman from 1961 is of Henrietta Moraes (see also Michael Andrews rendering of her in a blue dress in my post on his group painting of the denizens of the Colony from a few days ago) who Bacon painted many times from photographs he commissioned from John Deakin. (He of the group photo) Of course, she also had an affair with Lucian Freud who also famously painted her wrapped in a blanket. As I mentioned, Bacon did not like being lumped in with any 'school' but it's clear that they all found inspiration from those close to them.
We don't think of Bacon painting women in general, but Moraes, a free spirited and mercurial intimate, was a frequent sitter. The biography makes plain that in and amongst the more celebrated (and sometimes violent) relations with his lovers, Bacon had good female friends and supporters throughout his life. This image is a precursor to his 1962 triptych of the Crucifixion, a format that was to become something of a regular.
Later Moraes ending up sharing an apartment with Marianne Faithfull. London can sometimes seem a very small town. Her life became somewhat chaotic, and she had to go into rehab etc, but for a time she was the muse par excellence of this stellar London group.
I'm not sure where this painting is now--at the time of the London Calling show it was still part of the Estate.
Frank Auerbach and His Work Have Staying Power
The marvelous, indomitable Frank Auerbach is still alive and working. His recent show at Luhring Augustine showed that this member of the School of London/London Calling exhibition who was born in Berlin in 1931 has extraordinary staying power.
He was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport at age 7 and never saw his parents who were killed in the camps again.
This image of his friend and colleague Leon Kossoff from 1951 shows how thick as thieves the two were. They met at Borough Polytechnic and became each other's family.
Like Bacon, Freud and Andrews, he found favor with critics John Berger and David Sylvester (father of Cecily Brown).
Later he would come to a brighter palette as in Portrait of JYM from 1961. But in the portrait of Kossoff, the line from a painter like Walter Sickert is clearer. It's haunting.
Michael Andrews Depicted His Own Life
Leaving aside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, the most well known members of the London Calling group for the moment, let me share a little about Michael Andrews whose work is deserving of more attention.
Andrews was a student of Freud's at the Slade. While still at art school, he painted A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over. It's surreal and whimsical but realistic all at once. He was only 24. He won the Rome scholarship, but, unusually, returned to London mid stream, unable to settle in Italy. He needed his posse.
Andrews went from painting small groups to larger, more social groups and back again. One of which is the group at Colony Room 1, 1962, which was a drinking club favored by his pals. Party scenes and social gatherings drawn from his own life as well as newspaper images had begun to preoccupy him.
His recollections of a typical evening at the club included images of John Deakin (who had taken the wonderful photo at Wheeler's of the group, back to viewer), Henrietta Moraes who sat for Bacon and Freud (in blue dress), Freud (in dark coat facing out), Bacon (seated) and other friends. He thrived on this social interaction.
Andrews said, " "I think we thought our responses to people and circumstances and life were more important than nursing some systematic idea of what painting was all about.
Courtesy Estate of Michael Andrews
The Well of The School of London
The British painters in the London Calling Tate/Getty exhibition did not spring from nowhere. There had been a great tradition of figurative painting prior to their collective. These earlier painters had not only focused on the body however, but also drew from more unusual sources of under represented groups, or the more intimate, in some cases, darker side of life.
Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Graham Sutherland as well as the usual suspects like Picasso and Matisse were all influential.
Walter Sickert, German-born but a long time resident of Britain, here represented by La Hollondaise, 1906, was a painter who captured reflective nudes in domestic interiors as well as a series on Jack the Ripper and who also worked from photographs. At the time he was quite well known and though Bacon later claimed only a scant connection, in his earlier student days he had been an admirer. The use of photographs was something Bacon would come to rely on almost exclusively.
One hates to generalize, but the London Calling 'group' in becoming fast friends and inspirations for each other, also voraciously consumed both the well known artists of the previous generations and the more obscure nooks and crannies of everyday life which was then a hodge podge of post war strife and new growth.
London Calling
This week’s posts will revisit the School of London, especially as it was so brilliantly curated in the exhibition at the Tate and Getty, London Calling, in 2016. Brexit made it all the more powerful.
For those of you who missed this--another group of post war artist outliers like the Bay Area Figuratives who didn't necessarily liked being lumped together with each other qua movement--it focused on six prominent painters whose work is characterized by the central role granted to the human figure. These, as partially pictured here, were Lucian Freud (2nd from left), Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews as well as R.B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff, not pictured.
Some were close friends, others admirers, and often were each others subjects. The war had affected Britain in a profound way, and these artists' work reflected the turmoil and re examination of what life meant after all. Mirrored by a film movement that also called into question everything that had come before, it gave me pause: in a way we are in such a moment now, a war of another kind which will inevitably give rise to a movement that characterizes what it all meant. (Black figurative art could be that movement. Isn't it interesting that we go back to the figure so ardently after a cataclysm as if to say this, in the end, is what really matters?)
Like the Bay Area artists, color and the quality of paint and impasto became very important (Kossoff). For Bacon, it was the flatness crossing over from abstraction. Freud broke down his subjects as if he were Vermeer. Some painted from life; others from photographs.
The recent Bacon and Freud biographies shed new light. But as a primer the Tate/Getty show revealed these artists also had been instrumental in refocusing artistic energies "on giving visual representation to the physical and emotional conditions that they inhabited."
Photo: John Deakin
The Octopus' Companion: The Hermit Crab
Recently I suggested The Octopus (La Pieuvre), a short silent film by Jean Painleve from 1928 available for free at the Cinematheque Francaise website platform, Henri.
Now, a companion piece, The Hermit Crab (Le Bernard l'ermite), 1929, only 14 minutes, has been loaded and it is equally worth your while.
This is a charming film which totally anthropomorphizes the life and proclivities of the sea creature who inhabits homes which do not belong to it. It not only is a squatter in abandon shells, but actively kicks out current tenants in the most aggressive (but to our eyes, delightful) manner. It's a housing crisis of a very different kind.
The film highlights the crab's quest for shelter, and will give you a small bit of relief from events in Afghanistan and Haiti which have overwhelmed us and make me feel that no amount of any kind of art or creativity can mitigate what is truly an horrific state of affairs.
The Sole Woman in Bay Area Figurative Brings Work Into Life
Joan Brown could only truly be considered as part of Gen 2 of Bay Area Figurative from about 1955 until 65. That's when the lessons of her teacher and mentor Elmer Bischoff really began to hit home and her style changed from AbEx to figuration-so really only 5 years of mature figuration.
But Brown's figuration was even more autobiographical and personal than any of the others. As the sole woman, and a young mother and wife (she was much married, but these years included the years of her short marriages to Bill Brown and Manuel Neri) she incorporated her life into work as a kind of diary.
She had an unhappy childhood with repressive Catholic schools and wanted to 'get the hell out of there." Brown gave her some books of European artists which began her flight from AbEx, (a Bacon show at the Legion had also been important) but a crit that David Park came to give in Bischoff's class where they actually disagreed over her work was dispositive. Park was a big fan.
She was the youngest artist to be included in a Whitney show of 1960, and the trip she took to Europe with Neri in 61 had as much of an influence on her as on him. This painting, Girl Sitting, from 1962, the year her child was born, is possibly a partial self portrait, and has the thick impasto of Park all over it. It is considered to be one of the masterpieces of her Bay Area Figurative era. But some of the other work, less derivative, is also spectacular.
Brown moved her studio home to be near her son Noel, and was utterly absorbed in him. She abandoned this kind of figuration in 1964, bored of impasto and her career after was suffused with flatter work and even more autobiography and mysticism. This marked the most definitive end of the 'movement'. A coming retrospective of her work curated by Janet Bishop at SF MoMA will surely be a revelation.
Sculptor Manuel Neri Creates His Place in the Bay Area Figurative
In general, sculpture is considered separately from painting. But there is one sculptor, Manuel Neri, who today at 91 can look back at his career as someone who was an important part of the Bay Area Figurative movement.
Another Gen 2 artist who was attached to the Beats and to Funk Art, Neri was nevertheless deeply influenced by his time as a student of Diebenkorn, Bischoff, Weeks, Oliviera and the work of the gone-too-early David Park. But Neri instead took the interest in the form and color three dimensionally.
Neri was from a Mexican immigrant family that had worked as laborers in the Central Valley. After a high school class in ceramics, and a course at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and a connection there to grad student Peter Voulkos who became his teacher and mentor, Neri served in Korea, and then traveled through Mexico with Billy Al Bengston (you see how the California artists begin to interconnect). Neri even invited Alan Ginsberg to read Howl in a debut of the piece.
He began by painting, but Diebenkorn thought he was a 'lousy painter' and that he should stick to sculpture. The early examples of his work are Picasso-esque constructions of wood and plaster, and very much in the vein of folk art. But Neri often decapitated his figures too, aiming for a kind of Greek archetype
He also lived with Jay De Feo who influenced him. "I'm a true romantic," he once said. But his more significant attachment was to come later as one half the power couple of the era with Joan Brown which provoked important exchanges including in this piece, Seated Girl from 1964 in a private collection and which sprang from a drawing of her. You can see the Parkian influence of color and shape.
Neri left the figure for a time but returned to it in the 70's and has devoted most of his career to this expressionistic form. He now also has fame as the father of Ruby Neri, another inventive sculptor.
Bay Area Figurative Artists: The Second Generation
The Second Generation of Bay Area Figurative Artists are perhaps not as easily categorized as Gen 1 but there are many things to discover. The 'bridge' generation (see previous posts) was more open to bringing their personal lives into their work, and did not shy away from the erotic or psychological. They also were willing to have one foot in abstraction, not having had the initial resistance to losing painterly, lyrical qualities.
Gen 2 was funkier. They even used that word-drawn from jazz. They did not have as much baggage as Gen 1 about resisting Abstract Expressionism. They also had a changing world to contend with. It was the sixties. They were Beats. Commercial success wasn't a priority.
Bruce McGaw had been the only one to be included in the landmark figurative 1957 show. McGaw revered his teacher Diebenkorn but he also loved Dada. "I just felt that anything was possible," he said. McGaw did not need for the body to appear frontally, or even in full. He could make small paintings of feet. Yet they still pack a punch.
This painting from 1957 does not represent the mature McGaw which hews closer to his beloved teacher Diebenkorn albeit with stark coloration. But in it I saw Ensor, and Bacon and an expressionism that borders on the cartoon. It is merely called Figure, but McGaw revealed it is drawn from a newspaper image of the Pope. McGaw wanted to poke holes at organized religion and repression. Like Bacon's image of the Pope, it is devoid of reverence.
Bruce McGaw is still alive, living in Oakland. He ranged far and wide stylistically, and has had a long life to graze. We should know more about this vigorous, talented artist. Alas, there is not even a hashtag associated with his name.
Oliviera Gets Hot and Personal
Nathan Oliveira whose family had immigrated from Portugal, had ambivalence about being lumped solely in with Bay Area Figurative artists. He had also been influenced by Bacon and Munch and the European tradition of Max Beckmann who was teaching at nearby Mills College. He also came to admire the work and the person of De Kooning.
He was included in the famous group drawing sessions. but he was not included in the important 1957 exhibition as the others were (see previous posts this week)-and wrote that his 'objectives were quite different'. Oliviera's art was described by Caroline Jones as "hot and personal" whereas Park, Diebenkorn and Bischoff, Gen 1, had been "cool and universal"
So he was something of a renegade, yet shared many of the main concerns of this 'bridge' generation. He had a foot in both worlds...and this painting, Spring Nude, 1962, from the Oakland Museum shows that synthesis. There is a feeling of mythology and of everywoman. (Oliviera began painting both sexes, but ended up concentrating on the female nude) The red spectrum is other worldly, the scale is large, and the woman drifts in and out of view, like an apparition. It is as if Park's figures had eventually dissolved into the canvas.
Soon after this was painted, Oliviera also moved to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA but then bounced back north to Stanford. By then the different strands of the Bay Area Figurative Movement had overtaken the original group. If you go to Stanford today, you can see where Oliviera's work ended, in a meditation center designed around his late paintings capturing bird flight.