Art reader's digest

Last spring when I was taking an art history class heavy on theory, I wondered in the blog whether theory actually had anything to do with people who make art, or if it was just for people who talk about art.  Here's one answer to that question.

From "Art and Fear," by David Bayles and Ted Orland, 1993:

"Today art issues have for the most part become solely the concern of artists, divorced from -- and ignored by -- the larger community.  Today artists often back away from engaging the times and places of their life, choosing instead the largely intellectual challenge of engaging the times and places of Art. But it's an artificial construct that begins and ends at the gallery door.  Apart from the readership of Artforum, remarkably few people lose sleep trying to incorporate gender-neutral biomorphic deconstructivism into their personal lives.  As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art."

"In such a setting artists strain to find material of any human consequence.  Under pressure of impending irrelevance, they may begin to fill their canvasses and monitors with charged particles 'appropriated' from other places and times.  It is as though art itself confers universality upon its subject, as though in art all objects automatically retain their power -- as though you could incorporate the power of the Plains Indian medicine bundle into your work.  Or convincingly complete the closing movements of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.  Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists -- people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a German shepherd at a hundred feet -- casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work.  A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time.  It cannot.  There's a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced.  As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman's hat except a Greek fisherman."

Sign of the week

and they are both in the same building

Paris museums 13 -- The Thinker at Musée Rodin

My art history teacher last spring, Chris Fulton, is an authority on Rodin's great statue "The Thinker," which came about by accident.  When Chris arrived at the University of Louisville a dozen years ago he noticed that the bronze Thinker who sits on the quad at U of L was much the worse for weather, its patina severely damaged and deteriorating before our eyes.  He started to pester the administration to do something about it -- our Thinker, the first bronze casting ever made in that size, is priceless.  (There are about 28 full-size Thinkers around the world.)

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, at University of Louisville, surrounded by Chris Fulton and his art history students

After years of pestering he got them to commit to restoration of the Thinker, but as reward for his good intentions, he got put on the committee.  The job was finally completed a year ago, and in the course of his work with the restoration, Chris became quite the expert.  He also has begun working with some of the people he met on a larger project to document and study all the Thinkers ever cast.

Hearing him tell about his adventures in Rodin made me especially eager to hit the Musée Rodin when we got to Paris.  The building used to be Rodin's studio/workshop, and he donated all his sculptures to the government upon his death on condition that they turn the place into a museum.

Rodin first did The Thinker in 1880 as part of a commission to sculpt two massive front doors for a museum in Paris.  The doors depicted the Gates of Hell, a scene from Dante's Inferno, and Dante himself sat above the lintel contemplating the folly of mankind.

Rodin, La Porte de l'Enfer, third maquette (plaster), 1881-82















The museum was never built, and Rodin kept working on the doors until his death, but it was hardly a failed project!

Rodin, La Porte de l'Enfer, bronze


















The huge production spawned many figures and poses that were given their own spinoff series, so to speak.  The Thinker was first made as a free-standing statue in 1888, the same size as in the doors (about 28 inches tall).

Rodin, Le Penseur, bronze, 1881-1882 (cast in 1917)
















It was so popular that Rodin scaled it up to monumental size, about three times as big.  Multiple casts were made in both versions, and one of the big guys is in the garden of the Musée Rodin, thinking under the golden dome of the Invalides.

Rodin, Le Penseur, bronze, 1804

Paris museums 12 -- Musée Marmottan Monet

A decade or two ago, I thought art history peaked with the impressionists, and Monet was my absolute favorite.  My tastes have changed and now I'd rather look at 20th century art, but how can I abandon Claude, the hero of my youth?   So when we were in Paris, we had to visit Musée Marmottan Monet, which has the largest collection of his works in the world.

Housed in the old hunting lodge of a rich family, it used to be in the countryside but now has been engulfed with the modern metropolis.  While the old house stands, as it did in the day, with its period furniture and decor, they have built a modern new museum underneath to house the 300+ Monets.

When we walked in the door, the first room we entered had 35 Monets.  I was in heaven.  I lingered over them and realized that I'd never before been in a room with 35 Monets.  We then walked down the hall and saw another one before going downstairs for the real treat.

But bummer.  Instead of 300+ Monets in the rooms specially built to house them, there was an exhibit of paintings by Marie Laurencin, a decidedly fourth-tier artist in my opinion, one of those people who apparently was famous because she slept with half the boldface names of both genders in pre-WW1 Paris.  All her paintings looked pretty much the same to us, call it the 1910 version of the schlocky big-eyed Keane waifs of the 1960s.

Marie Laurencin 

Margaret Keane



















Mainly all her paintings looked like her.  And there were as many of these dumb things as there should have been Monets.  We were unhappy campers.

So unhappy, in fact, that I violated policy and took a few photos of the Monets that had been exiled upstairs for the duration.  After all, a room with 35 Monets is nothing to sneer at, even if we had wished for many, many more.  Although the later magnificent blurry water lilies and Giverny ponds and bridges, painted when the master had begun to lose his vision, are wonderful, I am fond of Monet's early paintings, much more realistic and in-focus.

Claude Monet, Effet de Neige, Soleil Couchant, 1875

Claude Monet, Le Train dans la Neige, La Locomotive, 1875

Claude Monet, Le Pont de l'Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877

Christmas spirit -- early this year

So here it is Labor Day, but my thoughts are a couple of holidays ahead.

Faithful readers of this blog know that I do Christmas ornaments each year for friends and family, always personalized with names or initials and the date.  Since I've been doing this for decades, it gets harder and harder to think of a new approach, and a point of pride to come up with something sort of new.   On my recent road trip, with lots of time to talk about everything under the sun, I was musing about what I was going to make this year, and was guilted by my friend into making the ornaments out of fabric rather than some of the other materials I have experimented with in recent years.

I won't show you what I'm making, of course, but I will show you the half-yard of fabric that came in the mail last week.  You will note the digits 1 and 3 and probably surmise that I'll use it for the dates.

This will definitely be the earliest I've ever finished my ornaments.  I'm feeling so smug!

As I did last year, I'm offering to make an ornament for one of my faithful readers to say thanks for following.  Leave a post before this coming Friday and tell me why you should be the lucky one!  Maybe it will put you in a Christmas mood and take your mind off the HOT weather for a minute or two.

Photo suite 88 -- Two doors