Josse Ford :: Art Journeys and Conversation ::

"The Eloquent Nude" - an excellent documentary on the life of photographer Edward Weston

Yesterday i saw an excellent documentary called "The Eloquent Nude" directed by Ian McCluskey. The film tells the story of the relationship between Weston and his muse, Charis Wilson. Charis inspired a series of nudes that inspired some of the most famous and beautiful images of the twentieth century. Weston was also known for his black and white abstractions of nature. Their relationship unfolds through interviews with Charis, aged 90, telling her stories, Weston's black and white photographs, and engaging reenactments of the couple's travels.

Nude, 1936 (227N)
Edward Weston negative, Cole Weston print

Edward Weston lived on the California coast, near Big Sur, and was a contemporary of Steiglitz, Georgia O'Keefe, and Ansel Adams. The 1940s was my favorite time in American art history. So many great artists and photographers came together in New York and California, immortalizing the beauty and wildness of nature. A spiritual thread runs through their work, a desire to know truth and perfection through the practice of their art. Interestingly enough, it was through the stress of commercial pressure that their relationship started to disintegrate. The happiest years of their work together was when they were traveling around the country on the first Guggenheim grant awarded to a photographer.

I feel a close affinity with the artist from those days because traveling around in my RV painting the national parks in the States is such a source of joy for me. I have traveled all over the world, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Africa but it still the grand mountains and the wild deserts that inspires and informs my art. I am preparing for another art journey to the mountain and deserts of New Mexico. The stormy skies are quite something in late August! I'll be adding some photographs from my last trip there to the photo galleries soon.

Edward Weston photographed shells, forlorn desert dunes, the San Louis Obisco coastline, the Sierra mountains, clouds in the desert. And his eye turned everything that he saw into a window, that leads us into a more refined, shimmering world.

Shell by Edward Weston, available from the Contessa Gallery

The film can be seen today at 5pm at the Riverview Theater, 3800 42nd Ave S., Minneapolis. I would highly recommend make the effort and see the film as it is hauntingly memorable. If you don't live in Minneapolis, support the project by buying a DVD here.

Technorati Tags: art, film, journeys, photography, women

Einstein Finds Inspiration in the Music of Mozart

A recent issue of the New York Times featured an inspiring essay by Arthur. L. Miller about two giants of modern history......

Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago.

There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think.

Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's "was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a "pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.

Thus it was less laborious calculation, but "pure thought" to which Einstein attributed his theories.

Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between their creative processes, as well as their histories.........

.....he (Einstein) wrote four papers that were destined to change the course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries in physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing theories lacked the "architecture" and "inner unity" he found in the music of Bach and Mozart.

In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.

"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music," recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all his difficulties."

In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.

This story is a beautiful example of the power of art and music to uplift and inspire. It also reminds us of the compelling and potent connection between science, art, and music - that a holistic approach to living is what we humans need to prosper and achieve great things!

Read the Full NYTimes Essay...

Technorati Tags: art, art collectors, art resources, art techniques, spiritual art, writing

The American Sublime - a review of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" by Arthur Danto

There is an excellent review of Robert Smithson by Arthur Danto in an essay entitled The American Sublime over at "The Nation" (link thanks to Amy at the ARTery). Danto has this to say:

"One of the most famous works of art in America, Robert Smithson's Spiral
Jetty transcends the "earth art" genre to which critics have consigned
it, and has become an emblem of the American sublime."

"An autodidact, widely read in science fiction, amateur geology and
crystallography, Smithson was a singularly original thinker who brought
to bear in his art and writing as many of his intellectual pursuits as
he could. His master concept was entropy--a statistical measure of
energy disorder or randomness--which gripped him much as the concept of
blind will gripped Arthur Schopenhauer, as the ultimate reality against
which form and order crumple and collapse. He connected the coolness of
contemporary sculpture with the inevitable cooling down of physical
systems. Thus, he suggested, the most important new works in American
sculpture "bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age"--an
allusion that suddenly vests his abstract ice crystals with a certain
prophetic meaning."

In the essay Dante sites Robert Smithson as more of an influence for today's young artist than Picasso: "anti-institutional, in touch with the environment, hospitable to myth and ritual, alive to the poetry of the wilderness, ambitious in his desire to touch the public through a vision of monumentality that throws the world of the shopping mall and the parking lot into a moral perspective."

Robert Smithson's work can be seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 23.

Technorati Tags: art, artists, nature, nyc art, spiritual art

Cezanne and Pissarro at the MoMA

Last night I visited the "Pioneering Modern Painting" exhibition at MoMA which focuses on the dialogue between Cezanne and Pissarro and how that spurred them on to become better painters. I am fascinated by friendships between artists or writers, where without the friendship , neither would have become the artist they were destined to be. For example, Van Gogh and Gauguin, O'Keefe and Steiglitz, Michealangelo and Pope Julius. The exhibition is extremely comprehensive although I would have liked more commentary on how the friendship affected each of the artist's thoughts on the practice of art. There's a complete on-line version of the exhibition available here.

At the start of their friendship both artists shared a need to overturn the established art institutions. They were looking for a new visual language. They met in Paris in !861 and both felt like outsiders in the Parisian art world. Cezanne set out to "enrage the Salon" and Pissarro to "set the Louvre on fire."

Although I enjoyed both painters for me Cezanne was clearly the master of the two. His paintings grabbed me and shook me with the originality of his singular vision. I loved his use of color. He made an ordinary plate of apples seem good enough to eat. Pissarro seemed more conventional in his tonal use of color, his design and the ideas he wanted to communicate. I found Cezanne to be bold and courageous in what he choose to put on the page. His striking design sense made me see ordinary objects in a new way. He was willing to edit nature and filter it through his unique gaze to Cezanne believed that everything in nature could be broken down to three shapes: the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere.

1875 was the climax of their working relationship. They both were bringing in new techniques to solve the creative problems they found themselves faced with. They painted without drawing the scene first. They also used a combination of both palette knife and brush. However at this point their ideas started to diverge. Cezanne started using parallel diagonal strokes to express the way he saw the world. This was unusual in that it displayed the creative process of the artist on the canvas rather than blending into a harmonious whole.

These patches of color were placed next to each to create the overall effect of modulation. For me, it was like viewing visual music in the fractured and crystalline colors worked together to create a shimmering tapestry of music.

Cezanne looked into his own worlds for his creative vision. He transformed what he saw into this unique perspective and left signposts of his journey trailing across the canvas. He was monastic in the way he lived his life, looking not to the prevailing trends of his fellow artist but to his aesthetic sensibilities and contemplative thought processes for the way ahead.

Pissarro looked out to the world and painted what he saw. He also drew upon the artists of his day for his painting influences. For example, at one stage he was influence by the Neo-impressionism of Seurat and Signac. I loved the large scale paintings of Pissarro - for example, "L' Hermitage at Pontoise."

His young friend and fellow artist, Emile Bernard had this to say about Cezanne: "Thus amongst the great painters, Paul Cezanne can be called a mystic because he teaches us lessons on art, because he sees things, not in themselves, but in their direct rapport with painting, or, through the concrete expression of their beauty. He is meditative, he sees aesthetically, not objectively. He expresses himself by sensitivity, or in other words, by the instinctive and sentimental perception of relationships and harmonies. And because in this way his work touches on music, we can repeat irrefutably that he is a mystic, whose means are supreme, heaven's own art. All art is on the path to absolute perfection. In language it becomes poetry; in painting it becomes beauty."

"Mill on the Couleuvre at Pontoise" by Paul Cezanne

"L'Hermitage at Pontoise" by Camille Pissarro

Technorati Tags: art, artists, nyc art

The friendship of Cezanne and Pissaro: Review of the upcoming exhibition at MoMA

The N.Y.T has an interesting review of a new exhibition on Cezanne and Pissaro: The Innovative Odd Couple of Cézanne and Pissarro - New York Times by Holland Cotter. The exhibition, opening June 26, at MoMA highlights their friendship and the influence their ideas had on each other as they worked side by side painting plein-air.

Paul Cézanne. The House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise. 1873.
Oil on canvas, 21 5⁄8 x 26" (55 x 66 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Count Isaac de Camondo Bequest, 1911.
Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Camille Pissarro. The Conversation, chemin du chou, Pontoise. 1874.
Oil on linen, 23 5⁄8 x 28 3⁄4" (60 x 73 cm). Private collection

"I love Cézanne for his crankiness, which guarded an isolated soul; I love Pissarro for his kindness, which seems to have been completely unguarded and unconditional. I love both for being workaholic rebels with high causes - revolution, simplicity - and for being rebels to the end, the very end. I love their art: Cézanne's transparent palisades of stained-glass green and blue; Pissarro's woods and fields, light-dusted and virginal. Maybe more than anything, I love how they loved each other, with an affection alternately paternal, brotherly and collegial, competitive but protective. Thanks to Pissarro, a hazardously high-flying young Cézanne made it to earth without a crash. Thanks to Cézanne, Pissarro took flight in ways he might otherwise not have."

The friendship spurred the two artists on in their quest for beauty and perfection.

It continues into the decade with the years around 1875 marking the culmination of their effort to define an innovative, increasingly conceptual form of painting, in which a traditional grammar of drawn outlines, tonal volumes and perspectival depth - in a word, realism - gives way to a new logic of color and light.

A gallery of landscape paintings at the center of the show is devoted to this high moment, their own private Woodstock. It's a room of rigorous, fanatically concentrated beauty. Paintings of woodland scenes line one wall, with alternating pictures by each artist. They are like windows onto a sun-dappled Eden, an unbroken curtain of green seen by two sets of eyes that have become one.

Cezanne, the artist was monastic in his dedication and pursuit of painting for it's own sake. "This man thought only of painting, loved only painting," Monet, a worldlier type, said of Cezanne long after his revered Impressionist confrere was gone.

Here are some of Cezanne's thoughts on painting, gathered by his son, from "Conversations with Cezanne", a book I would highly recommend.

"Conversations with Cézanne (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art)" (Paul Cezanne, P. M. Doran)

• The artist must avoid literature in art
• Art is the manifestation of an exquisite sensitivity
• the nobility of an artist's creation reveals his Soul
• Art is a religion. Its goal is the elevation of thought
• He who does not hunger for the absolute (perfection) is content with placid mediocrity
• the quest for novelty and originality is an artificial need which can never disguise banality and the absence of artistic temperament
• the artist knows the joy of being able to communicate to others his excitement about nature, that masterpiece whose mysteries he believes he has deciphered

Technorati Tags: art, artists, spiritual art

More on New York Contemporary Art Fairs

Edward Winkleman has an interesting post on contemporary art fairs.

"The art market is so incredibly hot right now, it's no wonder that the most concentrated venues for it, art fairs, have become the centerpiece and controlling aspect of it. The plethora of art fairs now is approaching the level of farce, but with so much money and, more importantly, networking at stake, few emerging galleries can afford not to get into as many fairs as they can. Despite the growing number of art fairs, though, with the market so strong, there are more and more galleries all the time, and so competition for the most important fairs is fierce."

The directors of the most important fairs are virtual superstars (truly, Art Basel director Samuel Keller was listed in Details magazine a year ago as one of the "50 Most Influential Men Under 37"), and the anxiety among dealers who apply for the best fairs is high. For the 2005 Armory Show (New York's most important art fair for new art), a record 522 galleries applied for the 162 available booths.

Not getting into an important fair can have devastating effects on younger galleries, who rely on them for a big chunk of their annual sales, though, and as necessity is the mother of invention, younger galleries are finding ways to take control when the bigger art fairs turn them down."

There was quite a flurry of posting on art fairs earlier on in the year when the Armory, Scope and P.S.1 were going. Here's a sampling:

Thinking about Art: "My review may disappoint some readers who are hoping for a long detailed description of the art and the shows. Unfortunately, I can't do that. I found the shows to be quite disappointing. Armory was interesting, if only for the scene, but the art was expected. Given the profile and expense of the show, I shouldn't have anticipated otherwise. After all, many ppeople have pointed out that basically this fair is all about selling. That's fine, but it doesn't make for an interesting experience for a mere spectator. Sure, there were some pieces that stood out to me but not enough to warrant cracking open my notebook to jot down the names. After 3 hours of walking, I had my fill of the Armory and decided to head on to Scope."

3 Quarks Daily: "Every year at about this time fancy-pantses from around the world pay 1000 bucks or so for the right to roam around the Armory and buy art. As Holland Cotter from the tells us, the youngsters are in this year.'Once upon a time, when the Armory Show - then called the Gramercy Art Fair - fit into a bunch of bedroom suites in a midsize hotel, artists of extreme youth were a novelty. "He's barely out of art school, you know. And he's so unusual. He's into painting! Can you imagine?'

James Panero of "The New Criterion": "A new generation of art writers share such an ear for culture gossip, if not the stomach of Mr. Rimanelli’s. Bloomberg News’s Tyler Green and the art-world gadfly Choire Sicha, a founding father of Gawker Republic, are among its most expertly dismissive. In an example of coveting thy neighbor’s art fair, Green noted, “In terms of an art-world industry convention, where collectors, curators, artists and critics gather, the Armory is really a distant second.” Sicha wrote in The New York Observer: “All the world’s a fair, baby—and the dealers, the fairs, the museums and the collectors are interconnected in deeply unwholesome and permanent and, most probably, totally vital ways.”Just where is the vital art in this vitality, baby? The art blogger Josse Ford wonders, “Call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t art evoke some sort of response, some sort of ‘revelation’ that is as much about the journey in arriving there, as in the ‘sensation’ of the moment?” Sicha responds: “Things are in such great shape that we’re totally screwed.”

Earlier posts of mine:

• PS 1
• The Armory

Technorati Tags: art, art sales, culture

Are art critics dead, dinosaurs, or does anybody even care?

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes had a post this week drawing attention to an article at the L.A Times questioning the relevance of critics in today's art world. A very interesting article, well worth reading and highlighting the role that critics, could play, as visionary leaders.

According to Frank Rick, who was supposedly the last critic who could close a show:

"The only thing that bothers me is that serious criticism is disappearing from newspapers and magazines. There has to be an alternate discussion of art, including works of popular culture, that is not tied to merchandizing. It's fine to have the endless canned junket of interviews with stars, but it's also helpful to have writers discussing the ideas and the craft and the quality.

"I'm not saying critics should have a life-or-death vote on a piece's success or failure. I've never felt that, even when that role has been ascribed to me."

Dominic P. Papatola from the St Paul Pioneer Press has this to say:

Blogs, podcasts and Internet chat boards not only allow everyone with a modem to have an opinion but also make it possible for that opinion to travel limitlessly. In these opinion-rich days, is there any room for the old-style critics — the sort who, instead of just spouting half-formed observation in tortured, inflammatory and/or my-way-or-the-highway prose, can actually back up their ideas with cogence, context and expertise?

In a word: yes. In four words: Now more than ever.

Now, culture is a smorgasbord — everything's designed to look yummy, and no one's willing to say what's good for you and what's junk food. You remember that "Star Wars" exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts a few years back? How about the fact that the Children's Theatre Company is doing Disney's popular pabulum "Aladdin" for its holiday show this year?

When some of the smartest arts organizations in your town are tackling the least challenging projects, something's amiss. These are decisions driven by economy, not by aesthetics.

Amen to that! According to Grammar Police there's just not the jobs there any more for critics while JL from Modern Kicks says that "not that many people ever paid much attention to art critics in the first place.: Even so, as art writers and artists we can still hold up some kind of standard of what we believe constitutes the aesthetics or good or great art.

Technorati Tags: art, culture, writing

Its Frank Lloyd Google Day

I didn't realize it when I posted earlier - today is Frank Lloyd Wright's Birthday. He was born on June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin.

Many thanks to Google for the creative heads-up!

Agnes Martin at the DIA Beacon, New York

Recently I was lucky enough to see some of Agnes Martin's work at the DIA Beacon. As reported in a earlier post of mine, Agnes passed away this year. The DIA Beacon is an incredible space in which to view contemporary art. It is a huge barn of a minimalist space. Paintings hang without titles or text accompaniments which means you have the choice of having a purely visual experience of the art itself, without literary explanation (or you can read information from one of the cards they have in holders at the entrance to each of the galleries.)

The Peach 1964. Oil and Graphite on paper. 72 x 72 inches. Dia Art Foundation.

One of the attendants told her that Agnes Martin's work was in one of the smaller galleries, off to the side. After getting lost, and enjoying Blink's work on the way there, I eventually found myself in the Agnes Martin section where three large galleries showcased her work from the "Unknown Years." Her canvases are grand exquisite harmonies of light and subtle color, various nuances of white, gold and pale pastels. An interesting woman, she has been linked with the Minimalist movement as well as the Abstract Expressionists. However she saw herself positioned with the lineage of the ancient classics. In her own words "I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition as representing the Ideal in mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness - of perfection." Another artist who thinks that truth and beauty is something to aspire to in the persuit of art.

Like some of my other favorite female artists she felt that sensations experience while deep in nature such as the desert, the plains, the ocean evoked archetypal feelings of happiness, beauty and love. Like Georgia O'Keeffe, she experienced the wildness of nature as a source of inspiration. She aimed to portray the blissful, egoless that portrays the untroubled mind of Buddhism. "People are not aware of their abstract emotions, which are a big part of their lives, except when they listen to music, or look at art."

The Islands, 1960. Acrylic and graphite on canvas. 72 x 72 inches.

Her paintings are huge color fields of a very fine vibration. I would have liked to move the large comfortable chairs from the Andy Warhol exhibit to her small gallery and spend the whole day sitting in one of them, my head lolled back, my heart soaking up the subtle vibrations, exquisite color harmonies and resonance of her paintings. A fitting tribute to a life lived in the pursuit of perfection.

Technorati Tags: artists, southwest, spiritual art, women

I.A.P.S Conference - Albert Handell workshop on painting trees in pastel

I recently attended the IAPS (International Association of Pastel Societies) conference in Raleigh, New Jersey. One workshop I really enjoyed attending was taught by Albert Handell, a master oil painter and pastel painter from New Mexico. He focused on a mixed media approach to painting trees in the landscape. I felt an immediate affinity with Albert as he, too, had studied at the Arts Students League of New York and believed that drawing was fundamental to good paintings. He used the same techniques that he had been taught in his life drawing classes at the League in his approach to trees. Using vine charcoal or a dark nu-pastel he looks at the tree as if looking at the human figure and asks himself questions such as:

• Is the branch higher or lower?
• What sort of a contour line would I get if the tree were cut off here?
• What direction is the light coming in from?
• What kind of angle does this branch have?
• Is this part fatter or thinner than that part?

Initial Drawing of Tree Using Vine Charcoal and White Conte Chalk

The way that Albert talks about trees brings them to life, just as if one were drawing the human figure. Because he feels this way about nature, his trees are very alive on the page. The placement of the moss, the touches of sunlight, and the weight of the twisted knots reveals the form and inner beauty of the tree.

Next, Albert painted in the darks of the foliage as large shapes using a hard Cretacolor from Sennelier. He brushes over these foliage and shadow shapes with turpenoid. At this point, he is looking for how the colors mix and for creating lost and found edges through blending the turpenoid. He works from dark to light, bottom to top, creating mystery through lost and found edges. Classical line works with oriental patterns and spots of color to bring out the form of the color in a wonderful balance of Western academic tradition with the simplicity of the Eastern brushwork.

Tree with Turpenoid and Pastel Wash

Albert believes that if you get the value right then there is nothing you can't correct in the color. He takes his time. Each moment is an orchestration of darks and lights to reveal all the nuances of the tree. In order to further understand the tree Albert used to take home clippings and hanging them from wire against a white background he would do further studies.

Another interesting technique that Albert shared with us was a form of "visual painting" where he would go out in nature and imagine himself painting. Without actually physically painting, he would mix up the colors and see himself painting the scene in front of him. I know that Jack Nicholson uses a similar technique in golf where he mentally rehearses a shot and sees it successfully completed, before he actually takes the shot. Albert said that this techique allowed him to "be the master" and get past the fear of making a mistake.

When choosing a subject matter to paint Albert doesn't like to drive very far. Once he has arrived at a spot he gets out of the car and looks until something hits him. An interesting observation he made is that whatever gets his attention usually relates to something he is feeling inside. He's attracted to it because there is something that he is going to learn from the painting of it. Once something grabs him he will give himself five more minutes to see if there is anything better. If not, then he sets to work!

And what about that sixty four million dollar question: When is a painting finished? According to Albert, only experience and your gut can teach you this. The worst thing you can do is to kill a painting by overworking it. But at the same time, you want to push a painting as far as you can.

Technorati Tags: art, artists, nature, spiritual art