Art History

When my parents moved into a care-home earlier this year, they asked me to: take the art work from their walls, take the music and books from their bookshelves and sell everything else. I recognised all their paintings and drawings, except for their beloved Noel Coun­ih­ans.Noel Counihan (1913–86) was born in this city, Melbourne. He event­ually studied part-time under Charles Wheeler at Melbourne’s famous National Gallery of Victoria Art School in the early 1930s, where he met social realist artists for the first time. In the middle of the world’s worst depression, what a joy that must have been. Social realism, the belief that art should reflect the realities of society under capitalism, could not have suited young Counihan better.While still in his teens, Counihan joined the Communist Party, helped found the Workers Art Guild, created artistic banners and began printmaking, producing linocuts and lithographs for the party’s magazines and pamphlets.He wanted to be known as a pencil portrait­ist and press cartoonist. I presume it was because these were the very media that enabled him to create art that had a social purpose and could be used to expose social inequalities. Pastels, water colours and even oils might have been too soft and not gritty enough to depict people living in the slums.During the Great Depression Counihan participated in the Free Speech fights in Brunswick, organised by the Communist Party in response to a Victorian state government law banning subversive gatherings. Doz­ens of members of the Unemployed Workers Movement were arrested, and unemployed meetings in Sydney Road Brunswick were broken up by the police. Counihan, artist and brawler on behalf of the starving unemployed, became the stuff of legends.In the 1930s Counihan worked as a cartoonist for famous and not so famous pub­lic­ations, including The Bulletin and the Communist Party's paper, the Guardian.Here peace begins. 1950linocut with ink, 21 x 30 cmNational Gallery of Australia Even during the terrible war years, it was another social realist artist, Yosl Bergner, who encouraged and cajoled Counihan to continue. And to paint, rather than draw! A founder and member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, Coun­ih­an initiated its very successful anti-Fascist exhibition that was held in Melbourne right in the middle of the war, 1942. His work The New Order, one of the few paintings that he preserved from the show, was influenced by one of the American social realist artist William Gropper. And also influenced by the drab colours, sagging figures and ill fitted clothing as painted by Yosl Bergner. The Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition had works from artists who all saw their work as having an important social and political role in documenting the suffering of the oppressed. Some young artists participated in the exhibition after they became friends with Noel Counihan and other social realist painters and writers. They clearly shared Bergner’s social conscience.In The New Order 1942, Counihan wanted to be as direct as he could be with his anti-fascist politics. Both The New Order and Miners working in Wet Conditions (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) were shown in the Australia at War show, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1945. Miners won first prize in this major exhibition.Canberra's National Gallery described the New Order thus: He believed that art should have a social mission and that it could be used as a tool to expose political corruption, the hypocrisy of the church and the inequal­ities in society. The faceless Nazi soldiers are shown from behind, as anonymous symbols of oppression. They are symbols for all military oppressors. The victims, an elderly bearded peasant who has been shot and a decapitated woman, are symbolic of the civilian human sacrifice throughout the ages. Counihan’s comment has a timeless and universal significanceLater Counihan helped organise an Artists' Unity Congress, receiving awards for his painting

Installation view of Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (April 14–August 5, 2013). Photo by Jason Mandella. © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art There are people sighing in the Mouse Museum. They are moaning, clucking, and cooing, too.(1) There’s no telling which objects elicit which murmured reaction, since part of Mouse Museum’s potency derives from affinities between things, and the repetition and variation among them. For those who haven’t seen it, Claes Oldenburg’s “Museum” is as it sounds: an exhibition space shaped in Mickey Mouse’s image (well, a geometric distillation of his iconic head, to be precise). Inside, an illuminated vitrine—filled with souvenirs, gadgets, and studies for sculptures—encircles the space. Heavy with faux food (pizza, hot dogs, ice cream sundaes), this display gives the impression of an aquarium made for a spoiled animal, a back-alley palace for a hungry mouse. But to scurry through the Museum would be to miss out on many of the subtleties within its densely ganged configurations. Indeed, the insights and pleasures on offer are different, and more gritty, than those of street food, nostalgia, or finger-pointing cultural critique. For me, it initially offered up a sensation similar to what I feel when I pack a lunch for my young cousins—a Tetris board of sandwich, granola bar, string cheese, goldfish crackers. Maybe even pudding. Placed just so, these industrially processed foods align in florid combinations of signification and absurdity. So too in the Mouse Museum: one gets the sense of a deliberate human—one exercising a brilliant eye for color and for the particularities of form—creating a civilization of things. Certain tableaux amount to practical jokes and visual puns: plastic bananas next to dildos, two ruddy pig masks ogling a half-eaten plastic Oreo keychain, a stack of bread made of sponge. Other combinations encourage more nuanced readings. Take the two porcelain stamp-moisteners glistening behind a wax hamburger. These moisteners were made to replace tongues as the workplace means for wetting the glue on the back of a postage stamp. In this case, they seem to be salivating at the greasy provocation of the burger/candle. They thus accentuate the very qualities of a tongue (bodily, carnal, erotic) that they were presumably manufactured to avoid. In the same square foot of space sits a pair of pears, a pack of cigarettes, and strange little booties. In the foreground rests a hunk of something rose-colored and meaty. Juxtaposed with this lump, the burger becomes baroque. It suddenly seems just as likely that the stamp-moisteners are licking their lips at the fleshier object. Here and throughout the Mouse Museum, what’s so challenging to summarize, and what’s responsible for so much pleasure, is this torqued and sustained cleavage between function and form. The objects seem willfully tangled between categories. In this way, the installation stays connected—in an intensified form—to certain familiar delights: figurative candy (Coke bottles, Swedish Fish); wearing a stem of cherries as a dangly earring; honey bears. Over time, these things have a tendency to get neutralized, their forms so taken for granted that they slip back into the realm of function. In contrast, the Mouse Museum’s objects do not settle down. This is Oldenburg’s currency: where expert play with form, scale, color, culture, incongruity, and category mistake makes room for new visibilities—for an expanded and fluctuating syntax. (1) By and large, these utterances are whispered, audible only if you stand quite close (which, mind you, isn’t too difficult to pull off given the popularity of the compact display). The looped soundtrack of the artist washing rubber toys seems to play in harmony.

Brian Sewell laments the state of art history teaching today, including the neglect of Byzantine studies; though he ends on a hopeful note-  on THES site. Yes, an art history education should open up great cultural possibilities whatever your station in life. “If, on graduating, the student of art history has grasped enough of the discipline to form a chronological frame for further observation and experience, then he can add to it. No matter whether he becomes a monied banker or digs tunnels for the new fast train to Birmingham, his appreciation of paintings in the Louvre and the Prado (or even Birmingham), the architecture of Amsterdam and Angkor Wat, and the sculpture of Michelangelo and pre-Columbian Mexico, will be enriched by what he sees and reads and hears. No other compulsory subject (and certainly not mathematics) pursued in our adolescent years could so swiftly, broadly and ubiquitously elevate our cultural lives.” Am I glad that I recently taught some Byzantine art, at least its influence on the early renaissance, like the painter Berlinghieri shown here . I can’t run to Pre-Columbian, but I will be doing some Egyptian and Etruscan art on my Vatican blog. Watch this space.  

Alya Albert and Ryan McNamara holding hands as part of her performance Alya Albert, 19, is an alumnus of our In the Making teen arts program and a second-year Cross-Museum Collective member. On Sunday May 19, she and the other CMC teens, under the guidance of artist Ryan McNamara, created a series of in-gallery performances and provocations at MoMA PS1. In the following post, Alya describes the feelings and fears she experienced getting ready for her big performance art debut. —Calder Zwicky, Associate Educator of Teen and Community Programs  I’ve been doing this for over two years now and I have never in my time as a MoMA Teen been as panic-stricken as I was this past Sunday. We were 12 kids crowded around in a pre-performance huddle in our “green room” at MoMA PS1: our teachers Mark Epstein and Matthew Evans giving us a pep talk, artist Ryan McNamara holding our hands, and for the first time ever at MoMA I thought, there’s no way I can do this. And then it was go time. The first time I met performance artist Ryan McNamara he asked if we were all artists. We gave the signature shrug and mumble that can be found in any teen art class. “Kind of.” “I want to be.” “Not really.” The next time we met with him we presented our original ideas for our debut at PS1. We had each created an intervention plan to be performed in the museum. Our goal was to intervene with a visitor’s experience, using our own bodies and minimal props. So of course Otis decided to serve homemade sausages on a silver platter in the bathroom, obviously Julia knew she would shave her legs in a bathing suit on the entry steps, and John was clearly going to realize his dream of a urinal-side Britney Spears sing-along. From left: Otis carries his sausages to the bathroom; Julia shaves her legs for one hour in the MoMA PS1 courtyard; John sings Britney Spears songs for an hour at the urinal This should not be taken lightly. Just the chance to perform at MoMA PS1 is insane, but Bianca pushed it even further and tied herself up in electrical cords and laid on the hallway floor for an hour as museumgoers assembled around her, taking pictures and interpreting her piece. She told me afterwards that she had to close her eyes because the feeling of being tied up and stared at was too intense. Christian, who had stripped down to his underwear and socks, screaming and dancing, surprised us all with his bravery and fervor. From left:Bianca, bound and laying on the hallway floor; Christian dances and yells in the MoMA PS1 hallway I had decided that I would walk around the museum barefoot and, without notice, hold hands with visitors. So there we were leaving the conference room, each of us going our separate way, and all I could think of was how sweaty my hands where. I walked slowly through the galleries, at first to ensure I would not vomit on an Ansel Adams photograph, but eventually and naturally a slow glide became part of my performance. It took me five minutes of fierce inner dialogue to rally the courage to quietly approach a stranger and take her hand. Alya holding hands with an unknown visitor Her name was Rajeed and she did hold my hand. We chatted as we walked to the end of a long hall where I thanked her and we unclasped. As soon as our fingers touched the barrier was broken for me, I saw the force fields around each stranger dissolve and just like that the fear was gone. I went on to hold between 30 and 40 hands in that hour. Very few were like Rajeed. The first rejection stung, but I soon grew excited when I saw an empty hand dangling by an unknowing visitor’s side. I would swoop in and hope for a smile, or, if I was lucky, a conversation, but even with the brush-offs, each hand was a connection. I think the concentration of intimacy in just a few square inches of our hands was humbling for both the stranger and for me, that I did not want to stop; it was so lovely, and all I could do was smile. I was not alone in this. My piece gave me the un

Carla Passino wrote in Country Life (13th March 2013) about the Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index. Her conclusion is that passion-driven investments have significantly out-performed more traditional assets such as the FTSE 100 or the property market. With the exception of furniture, all enthusiasm-led purchases have done well, presumably because there has never been so much interest in art and culture. Stamps have more than trebled in value. Rare coins have risen significantly. The ultimate in collecting indul­gence, classic cars, has had a turbo-charged performance. The only asset to have performed better than Classic cars is gold.How assets appreciated in the decade to September 2012:Gold 434%Classic cars 395%Coins 249%Stamps 217%Fine art 199%Jewellery 140%Prime central London property 104%Chinese ceramics 85%Watches 76%Prime New York property 73%FTSE 100 54%Furniture -18%Nothing tells the story of appreciating collectibles more than a pastel version of The Scream 1895 by Edvard Munch. It fetched $120 million at Sotheby's in New York last year, setting a new world record for a work of art sold at auction. Experts had expected the masterpiece to break new ground since its presale estimate of $80 million was the highest ever listed at Sotheby's. Edvard MunchThe Scream, 189579 x 59 cm Sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2012 I am assuming for the purpose of this post that Knight-Frank's asset-appreciation figures are accurate and universal. And very useful to know! But there is something uneasy about believing that “if you follow your heart, the money will come”. A passion-driven investment seems like a contradiction in terms. I am saying it because passion has to do with the love of collecting, usually based on aesthetic pleasure or historical importance. One sentence will make that clear. “Stamps are quietly building a following among wealthy investors, many of whom are not actually collectors”. If those wealthy investors are buying stamps because of the stamps’ rate of appreciation, and not because they love collecting stamps, where does the passion come in? I may as well buy pork bellies, as long as pork bellies are appreciating rapidly.My collecting passion is for 18th and 19th century French, German, Austrian, British and Czech porcelain. But if these art objects are not appreciating very well, I should probably lose my passion for old porcelain and simply invest in another area of collecting. Or I should separate passion from investment and clearly differentiate between the two. In the latter case, “following one’s heart and the money will come” is not meaningful.

go here Or for just images here.      

Cover of What is Contemporary Art? A Guide for Kids by Jacky Klein and Suzy Klein, published by The Museum of Modern Art MoMA’s current exhibition, Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, celebrates the early years of artist Claes Oldenburg’s extraordinary career, when he experimented with painting and sculpture by reworking the stuff of every day into larger than life objects made with unexpected materials. Oversized sculptures like the plush Floor Cone (1962) and the papier-mâché “Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun (1959) imbue viewers with child-like wonder—and at times, bewilderment—so it’s fitting that Oldenburg’s iconic duo of juicy cheeseburgers would grace the cover of MoMA’s children’s book, What is Contemporary Art? A Guide for Kids. Oldenburg’s Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything (Dual Hamburgers) (1962) may look good enough to eat, but as the book explains, they are in fact made of thick cloth covered in hard painted plaster. Authors Jacky Klein and Suzy Klein, a former museum curator and an arts and culture writer, go on to explain that Oldenburg “loves to make soft things in hard materials and hard things in soft materials.” It’s kid-friendly information that allows adults to have their own second looks at well-known works in MoMA’s collection. The book explores a wide range of iconic works from the past 50 years through inventive categories like “Getting Dressed,” which groups together Joseph Beuys’s Felt Suit (1970) and Vito Acconci’s Adjustable Wall Bra (1990–91), and “Read All About It,” which features artworks that employ wordplay, like Ed Ruscha’s OOF (1962). Also included in the roster are Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Damien Hirst, and Louis Bourgeois, among others. Spreads from What is Contemporary Art? A Guide for Kids A short biography of each artist is included, along with prompts asking kids to think about materials and processes,  quotes from the artists, idea boxes that bring important contemporary art concepts to light, and a glossary of key art terms. Whether for kids to explore on their own, or for grown-ups looking for some answers themselves, What is Contemporary Art? serves as a great introduction to contemporary art. Download a free PDF sample to check out chapters like “Bizarre Beasts” and “Playing Games.”

http://cooper.edu/art/news/prof-sharon-hayes-wins-75k-alpert-award

Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring). 1960. Sweden. Directed by Ingmar Bergman These notes accompany screenings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring on May 22, 23, and 24 in Theater 3. Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) had turned 40, and had already directed 20 films (including international hits like Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Magician), when he made his Oscar-winning Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring). Although he was an established director, there is, for me, a sense of breakthrough in The Virgin Spring. Bergman had worked with the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist once before (on the excellent Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night), but with The Virgin Spring they embarked on a quarter-century-long collaboration and mutual dependence with few rivals in film history. As Robin Wood points out in his book-length study of Bergman, one of the great virtues of The Virgin Spring is the credible re-creation of medieval life, largely devoid of the mysticism and magic so dominant in much of Bergman’s work. The film thus makes him more accessible, and much of the credit must go to Nykvist’s ability to capture the textures of the natural world. For once, it seems Bergman is not manipulating his characters to present larger metaphysical truths in his obsession with his personal relationship with God. I don’t pretend to be an authority on Christianity or any other religion, but it seems that, over time, Bergman despaired of faith in a way the great Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer (Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet) did not. Ultimately, Bergman seemed to retreat to a realistic/autobiographical/non-cosmic milieu (as in Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander). Max von Sydow and Gunnel Lindblom are illustrative of another important aspect of Bergman’s career. Great directors (Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir) had historically relied on their own personal stock companies of actors. Von Sydow and Lindblom (today both well into their eighties) were there for him well before The Virgin Spring, and remained for decades. The former, of course, parlayed his Bergman connection into a highly successful international career, including two Oscar nominations and roles as varied as Jesus, Father Merrin (the exorcist in The Exorcist), and Ming the Merciless. Bergman’s reputation in America has undergone a degree of revisionism. By the time of The Virgin Spring he was considered, as Daniel Humphrey puts it in his new book Queer Bergman, “arguably the paradigmatic figure in the history of mid-twentieth-century art cinema.” In big cities and college towns, it was impossible to ignore the pervasiveness of his influence, even though a great many who venerated him were blissfully unaware that serious filmmaking was already a half-century old and that Bergman, himself, was singing the praises of a disreputable cowboy director named John Ford. It would have been impossible to foresee a time when a screening of Wild Strawberries or this film would meet with surprise. I must confess to a certain ambivalent respect for Bergman’s work. His serious films seem perhaps too serious, his comedies perhaps too unfunny; I feel strangely more comfortable with his operatic adaptation of The Magic Flute or the soap opera-ish Scenes from a Marriage. And, frankly, this may result more from my failings, not Ingmar’s. *************************************************** It might be appropriate here, while praising Bergman’s recreation of the medieval world, to take note of the passing of Ray Harryhausen. During his 70-year career, Harryhausen seldom took directorial credit for his films, but he managed like very few others (designer William Cameron Menzies or special effects guru and Harryhausen mentor Willis O’Brien, for example) to place a personal stamp on the work. In the process, he created his own world of the past (both archeological and mythological) and the future.

The Eurovision Song Contest has been broadcast every year since it started in 1956 and is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world. Up to 600 million people across the globe watch each year, including my family. Congratulations to Denmark for their great success this week.**In 1970, Ireland’s Dana Rosemary Scallon (born 1951) unexpectedly won Eurovision. Her song, a very soft, passive version of All Kinds of Every­thing, was Ireland's first ever victory in this very important competition. Dana, as she was known, was a teenage school student, Catholic, anti-women’s rights in abor­tion, contrac­ep­tion and divorce, and later married with four children.In 1967, Dana’s family had moved to the Bogside, an area in the shadows of the historic city walls of Derry in Northern Ireland. The Bogside was a majority-Catholic area within a Protestant-British state which probably explains the long and terrible history of unrest in Dana’s home town in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And it also probably explains why Dana’s victory was so sweet for Catholic Irish citizens.The other Dana, Dana International (born 1969) is an Israeli-born pop singer of Yemenite Jewish parents. Born Yoram, he was the youngest of three children and was named after an uncle who had been massacred by Arab terrorists. Dana International in featherswinning for Israel, 1998Dana International could not have been more different from Ireland’s Dana. The Israeli lad came out as a transsexual when he was barely into his teens and underwent sex reassignment surgery in London in his mid 20s. Could the very gorgeous Dana International have known at that stage that she was going to have an unlikely win in Eurovision and follow in the footsteps of Ireland’s very plain Dana?In 1998 Dana International was selected to represent Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest with her song Diva. Diva was an amazing song about strong women in history: “Viva nari'a, viva Victoria, AfroditaViva la-Diva, viva Victoria, Cleopatra”. Dana International came onto the Eurovision stage in Birmingham, with confident movement, fabulous legs, fabulous dress, amazing voice and jazzy lyrics, and took the audience’s breath away. There was nothing passive about this Dana! Every Jewish viewer in the world (except perhaps for the most religious) prayed to whatever god they had ..for a win for Dana International. Gays, straights and transsexuals thought their moment in the sun had arrived. Jordan and the other middle eastern countries censored her performance and blocked their state-run television programmes whilst the Jewish performer was on state. Yet she won anyhow!Dana International released Diva as a single in Europe and the song climbed towards the very top of the hit parade in the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands. She later represented Israel in Eurovision for a second time, but never quite reached the giddy heights of 1998.For Israel's gay community, Dana International's victory in the Euro­vision song contest was a turning point. When Israelis celebrated Dana International's victory in the streets of Tel Aviv that night, people started to recog­nise that there was a big gay community, full of talent and colour. Eurovision’s own history page said that Time magazine chose her as one of the important people in the world. Dana International's story is not only the story of a successful singer; it is a rare and in­sp­iring story about courage. She completed the cultural revolution that she started with her first album; a symbol of liberalism and human rights.Dana,winning for Ireland, 1970.