September 16, 2017 to January 15, 2018
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, metmuseum.org

On November 17, 1917, France lost Auguste Rodin, a titanic sculptor and by some lights France’s last. By 77, after youthful failures (thrice rejected by the École des Beaux Arts), recurrent bouts of self-doubt, misprizal, and neglect, miseries more than matched by dogged perseverance and unshakable dedication to an artistic quest that he abandoned only once to a brief stay in a monastery after his sister’s death, Auguste Rodin had achieved international distinction. His centenary is being celebrated this year in the form of major museum exhibits worldwide as well as by programs, books, articles, and a dedicated website in his honor, a movie. Among these, an exquisite display has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will remain a permanent installation there (the adjacent gallery with works on paper and Steichen’s photographs of the Balzac adhere to the exhibition dates). Comprised mainly of the Cantor Collection, the display greets visitors entering from the east end with two monumental figures turned away from them. To the right is Eve, banished and crushed with remorse. To the left is Adam, his head pendant, an image that will be tripled on the Gates of Hell. In the center of the space, mounted on a four foot high pedestal, sits The Thinker in a bronze casting of no more than two feet.   Three backs greet us: three works of art seen from behind, works by an artist who asks us not to stand still but to move, to change position, to keep looking, asking, and reflecting. This installation of Rodin’s work by the distinguished sculpture curator Denise Allen serves as a supreme aesthetic tribute to its restless master.

Dwelling all summer in Paris “with” the artist, so to speak, contemplating his Burghers in differing light and weather, poring over Ruth Butler’s riveting biographical pages among others, strolling the streets of the various arrondissements where he worked—at first in cold ateliers shivering while wrapping his clay to keep it moist and later surrounded by students, including Camille Claudel, acolytes, and skilled assistants—I introduced his sculptures to students abroad, both at the Musée Rodin and the centennial exhibition taking place at the Grand Palais, and dreamt about him by night. Increasingly, it became evident to me that Rodin was au fond a compulsive modeler, never a carver: it felt right to flee his famous marbles (the emblematic stone Kiss, Hand of God, Cathedral) for his bronzes, his waxes and terra cottas, his fragments, cropped bodies, accidents cast as such, plasters with their rods left in, and crude small works. In my quest for confirmation of this hunch—that Rodin’s genius is found in his fingers—I suddenly recalled Leo Steinberg.

The great art historian’s stunning 1963 essay on Rodin (augmented in 1971 as the last chapter of Other Criteria) has never been surpassed on its subject. Steinberg’s insights richly reward re-reading in this commemorative year. They supply conceptual ties, moreover, between Rodin’s art and much sculptural work that followed in the twentieth century. Steinberg recounts his lifelong fascination with Rodin, starting when he was ten years old and saw the iconic marbles in sepia reproduction on the pages of Rilke’s 1903-07 meditations on the artist when serving as his secretary in Paris. Then as modern art flourished and Rodin’s oeuvre went into eclipse, Steinberg too suffered a predictable disenchantment with it. But subsequently, this being the core of his essay, he awakened to a new comprehension of Rodin: Rodin as, beyond all else, an incessant modeler (rather than a carver) whose “real self had gone underground.” It is Rodin’s full oeuvre that must be engaged, especially his multiple smaller works, which demand being brought into focus and examined with care. They are what matter most. Not the world-famous stone pieces and monuments, wrought by others albeit under Rodin’s aegis, for in them the exploratory touch goes missing—that burst of energy which makes and unmakes form in flurries of protean ambiguity—an ambiguity forever denied to the unforgiving mallet and chisel. To mount a case for Rodin, an artist often misunderstood, as a harbinger of modern art, one can do no better than take Steinberg for one’s guide. In what follows, I shall do just that. Steinberg’s eagle eye, his erudition, and his own direct studio experience equip him to reveal just how, in this case, modeling prefigures modernity.

It has long been recognized, ever since Rodin’s first rejection by the Salon in 1865 (for his mask of the Man with the Broken Nose), that he breaks ground with academic norms by erupting with those modeling hands of his right up to the final stages of his art. We intuit his fingers in each bump, groove, rough and savage texture, each harsh or delicate correction. Rodin’s refusal of closure compels us toward co-creation of our own as we look on. He plies his art moreover with an openness that extends to theme as well as form. Take the Burghers of Calais. Anathema at first to patrons because they saw it as diverging from prevailing academic norms for public monuments, Rodin meant it to incarnate the duality of ignominious defeat and raw courage in the face of enmity. While subsequent scholarship has altered the historical record (Jean-Marie Moeglin, a scholar at Paris XII, writing in The Guardian, 8/14/ 2002, argues that the events in Calais were neither as unusual, heroic, or sacrificial as was previously thought), Rodin’s masterpiece stands. Obsessively re-working it, figure by figure, its heads, arms, and hands, limb by limb, he strives to embody the fundament of human tragedy, the ground of this 14th-century legend of six brave men striding forth together from a besieged French town, ready to die to save their fellow citizens. From brute matter, he wrests a wrenching tribute that eclipses all narrative revision. Steinberg, writing on the magnificent figure of Jean d’Aire, one of the six, speaks of “how desperately these statues act out the drama of powerful bodies giving their whole strength to the labor of holding on.” And this, Steinberg adds, is what is necessary to be a man.

But holding on also matters in reverse for Rodin, who is equally obsessed with the “threat of imbalance which serves like a passport to the age of anxiety.” Think of the precariousness of Icarus, and recall the Prodigal Son whose outsized arms, raised wildly aloft, threaten to capsize him backwards. Bastien Lepage balances dangerously on his pedestal, palette in hand, and what about Falling Man on the Gates of Hell? Steinberg points to a “hovering” aspect inherent in so many of Rodin’s works, an unstable relation to any ground. Interpreting this with him as a symbol of the anxiety that will come tearing in with the advent of modernism, I wonder whether it might also serve as an analogue of the modeling process per se—which goes on and on, unlike carving, and never reaches the terra firma of certainty.

What about replication? Rodin reuses figures. And fragments. He reiterates them, adds to them, transports them from one site of aesthetic or semantic significance to another: Think of Paola and Francesca on the Gates of Hell and of Fugit Amor, or the Prodigal Son, who morph and reappear in the former work. Such re-visionings point backward in time perchance to the pounding hoof-beats of multiple horses profiled on the Parthenon frieze and simultaneously they prefigure incredible repetitions in modernity as detailed by Walter Benjamin in his classic 1935 essay—the work of art as infinitely replicable by mechanical and now digital technology. The repetition also figures an inner obsession, a mental perseveration. Steinberg points to Rodin’s “cross-breeding” of forms, his borrowing of figures and body parts and re-assigning them: how the exquisite Torse d’Adèle reappears both in Eternal Spring and on the Gates. No Rodin work is known, Steinberg avers, until it is beheld in all its adaptability, until the body is understood not as an integral whole but as imperfect, as fissured, cracked, distorted according to its momentary purpose: this, he implies in his reading of Rodin, is the human body’s greatest truth.   But something deeper than momentary impression matters here: an expression of force that dwells in the act and therein finds its authenticity. Think of the small bronze and terra cotta dancers in the Musée Rodin, those coils of clay simply bent and twisted into miracles of exertion and intense extension.

Steinberg speaks of Rodin’s art in terms of what he calls “pure sculptural energy.” In so doing, he cites the bronze Figure volante of 1890 as an example of directional motion foreshadowing the pure abstraction of Brancusi’s 1923 Bird in Space. Rodin’s art is an art that cannot be finished but only abandoned or reworked, he states, and he imagines a secret dream on Rodin’s part of keeping each work ongoing forever. Above all, Steinberg shows how energy, inert matter, and time make of the part a whole, “wholeness wholly immanent in the fragment.” This is modernity tout court and, with it, we can better parse the ways in which later artists have and will continue to draw upon Rodin.

The post “Pure Sculptural Energy”: Seeing Rodin, Reading Steinberg appeared first on artcritical.

September 23, 2016 to January 7, 2017
Seventh Avenue at 27 Street
New York, 212 217 4558

On November 14th, 1904, a wedding took place in Paris at the neoclassical church of La Madeleine of peerless elegance, and public brouhaha. With the trappings of a royal wedding, including specially commissioned music and a veritable who’s-who guest list, the marriage was that of Armand de Gramont, duc de Guiche and Elaine Greffulhe. As reported by the press, however, it was not the bride’s outfit but that of her mother, Elisabeth, that drew the oohs and ahs: an embroidered Byzantine gown in beige lamé with incrustations of pearl, silver thread and paillettes, and a fur-trimmed train. The creation of couturier Frédéric Worth, this dress is featured in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s exhibition, “Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe.” A fashionable aristocrat, the countess was immortalized as Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu, hence the show’s title. The show comes from the Paris fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, where it was titled “La mode retrouvée.”

The sumptuous, sometimes surprisingly modern clothes and accessories dating from the 1890s to the 1930s on display here by designers such as Worth, Vitaldi Babani, Paul Poiret, Mario Fortuny, Jeanne Lanvin and Maggy Rouff certainly make one want to know more about their noble wearer whose intimate circle Proust managed to enter, in part through his friendship with Armand de Gramont. Although the depth of his relationship with the Greffulhes has been questioned, a recent biography of the countess by Laure Hillerin includes correspondence confirming a certain friendliness though perhaps not the intimacy projected by Proust in his novel.

Opening on the heels of “Manus x Machina, Fashion in an Age of Technology” at the Metropolitan Museum, an extravaganza of female high fashion for the most part since World War II, the FIT show features clothes that rival in fabric, handwork, and imagination those recently on view at the Met, done without today’s technological advantages. Worth’s Byzantine gown described above, but also his Lily Dress (1896), an evening dress in black velvet with applications of ivory silk in the form of lilies, embroidered pearls and sequins, and his tea-gown of dark blue velvet cut outs on green satin ground (circa 1897) are cases in point.

Born and raised in a Belgian aristocratic family that was relatively poor but highly cultured and connected to nobility in several countries, Elisabeth de Caraman-Chimay married the fabulously rich real estate magnate, Henry Greffulhe, and soon was siphoning the attention of some of the most powerful men of her time with her famous musical laughter, her tiny waist, her ineffable personality and, of course, her wardrobe. The glittering evening cape by Worth on view at FIT, with a patterns of large abstracted gold flower motifs, worn at a charity event she chaired in support of wounded Russian soldiers in 1904, was based on a gift from Tsar Nicolas II during his visit to Paris in 1896.

Thanks to her high-placed connections, the countess served as a go-between in foreign affairs and national politics, subsidized scientists including Marie Curie and Edouard Branly, and patronized contemporary music, art, and of course haute couture. The organist at her daughter’s wedding was no less than Gabriel Fauré from whom she commissioned an original piece for the occasion. She raised funds for Serge Diaghilev and supported the Ballets Russes. But it is with the show of French decorative arts organized in London by Elisabeth with the sculptor August Rodin in July 1914, that her secret political ambition came to the fore. Hoping for peace to continue, she invited royalty and diplomats from all over Europe who were soon to be on enemy sides.

Her stunning white dress (unfortunately not in the exhibition) symbolized her preference for international coexistence. Proust, who had his own agenda in selecting the colors and styles of his muse’s attire, depicts Oriane in her box at the Opera in the same white dress (according to Hillerin) with a white headpiece “part flower,” “part feather… alive and amorous… running down her forehead and cheeks.” The color white is often said to be the color of women looking for love, and Oriane, like Elisabeth, suffered an unfaithful husband. Both women seem to have handled their situation with irony and wit.

As the muse outlived the novelist by almost three decades, the exhibition includes couture that Proust could not have seen. Even so, it is replete with dresses, but also accessories that readers of Proust may recognize. The captions that accompany the presentations of the objects brilliantly document such connections as does the presentation itself by Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at FIT. Bathed in the metaphorical darkness of oblivion, some of the clothes on mannequins shine in a blaze of light coming from above, while others manifest a ghostly presence by reproducing on mirrors their horizontal positioning. The countess liked to be photographed in front of mirrors.

One accessory on view at FIT will be particularly meaningful to Proustians: a pair of red shoes by Lagel-Meier dated 1905. The shoes appear in the last moments of The Guermantes Way when Charles Swann has just told Oriane and her husband that he has only a few months left to live. While Oriane refuses to engage in conversation with Swann over his devastating news because she and her husband Henry are already late for a dinner party, they nonetheless delay their departure when Henry discovers, as Oriane is climbing into their carriage, that she is wearing black shoes with her red dress. Throwing a fit, he sends for red shoes for his wife, explaining to Swann and to the narrator, how unbecoming black shoes would be with a red dress. Proust’s critique of the selfishness, self indulgence and superficiality of the Guermantes, and of aristocracy in general peaks in this passage.

Dark green hues and black were the favorite colors of the real countess in her mature days, while pastels like those seen in 18^th century French paintings by Fragonard and Boucher in particular had been her choice for evening dress early in her marriage. Around the time of the Ballets Russes, her clothes, though lacking the bold colors worn by the dancers, adopted an Orientalist look. A loose fitting kimono evening coat (1912) by Babani, and a quasi- geometric short vest (1912) by Mario Fortuny strike a more relaxed “modernist” note in her wardrobe.No more tight corset to accentuate her tiny waist. A black Jeanne Lanvin coat with the motif of a brick wall imprinted on it from 1936 hints at René Magritte paintings in which brick walls are featured and oddly pierced.

For those who would like to know what the Countess Greffulhe looked like, the show includes a number of photographs of her, by famous fashion photographers, among them the German-born Otto, and Paul Nadar (son of the famous Nadar). With her frizzy light brown hair piled high, pouting lips, fine nose and sad dreamy eyes, the photos of her as a young bride do not look like the Oriane Proust describes in the church at Combray, tall, blond, with a pointed nose, red cheeks and piercing eyes. But then the countess grew from awkward and unhappy young bride to alluring self-assured beauty thanks to help from her childhood friend and close relative Robert de Montesquiou (a model for Charlus in Proust’s novel). The show also includes short movie clips of her.

The widowed countess lived through the Second World War, always aloof and always elegantly turned out, though close to financial ruin. Forced to allow a German commandant to occupy her country estate, she used her charm to get him to help feed her beloved greyhounds. Like her creation by Proust, Elisabeth seems to have enjoyed being looked at and photographed though only in poses of her own choosing. She could have hardly suspected that she would lose control of her self-image to the upstart Proust, whose novel she claimed to have never read.

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When news first circulated that the Metropolitan Museum was to lease Marcel Breuer’s building from its original occupant, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the word was that the Madison Avenue facility would be the Met’s new contemporary wing. We should be grateful, on the evidence of its opening exhibitions, that that does not appear to be the plan. Contemporary art needs to remain visible and vital at 1000 Fifth Avenue for the Met to thrive fully as a encyclopedic museum, for there is nothing like being able to see the work of a living artist within close proximity to achievements of distant eras, to be reminded of continuities and ruptures alike, of shifting aspirations and perennial concerns.

Breuer’s architecture is sold short, furthermore, if we think these sumptuously grave galleries are exclusively suited to modernist and contemporary art. As in the museums of Louis Kahn, the dark, rich timbres of exposed concrete and raw slate beautifully offset the textures of many kinds of art and artifact. Just as high modernism looks startling and fresh in classical settings, so too, anything from medieval armor to Mughal miniatures can take on unexpected resonances in stark modernist surroundings. A case in point: Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas. Although arguably a little cramped and deserving a wall of its own, the Venetian master’s late glory is the magisterial opening salvo of Met Breuer’s inaugural survey exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” It is an incredible privilege to see this picture in New York City.

It feels unsporting to spoil the celebration with an inconvenient observation, but this painting is surely not unfinished. “Unfinished” (a title and concept that recall the New Museum’s 2007 re-launch exhibition, “Unmonumental”) is an audacious and enterprising way of connecting the satellite with the mother ship. Emphasizing art of the last 150 years while sustaining broader historical attention, the exhibition draws a thematic thread from old master tradition into contemporary sensibility. But by what specific criteria is The Flaying of Marsyas unfinished? It is a painting in the fast, loose, bravura old-age style of Titian, but if every aspect of a picture’s demeanor is meant and felt by its author (and the style of this painting is totally commensurate with contemporary works by Titian) why should its lively, self-consciously ambiguous painterliness be designated “unfinished”?

Maybe it would have been better to title the show “Unfinish” — in the present tense. This would suggest a proto-provisionalism in the colorito of Titian’s late touch and to justify the whole range of intentionality in the works this survey assembles. Provisionalism is, of course, a hot button contemporary label that makes the nonagenarian Renaissance master sound like a Bushwick hipster, but the term is no more anachronistic that the likes of “romantic” and “impressionistic” which would have been the natural ways to describe Titian’s late surfaces not so long ago. Of course, there are many works in this exhibition that were abandoned, or just meant as sketches, or in some fashion disrupted, and the process and pictorial thinking laid bare is indeed illuminating. But the key problem with “unfinish” as deployed here is that it privileges tightness, all-overness and gloss — literal “finish,” as in signed and sealed — as somehow yardsticks of artistic accomplishment, or the norm from which the plethora of artists in this show are deviating. But these are good problems for an exhibition to have because they have us pay attention to surface, think deeply about intentionality, and allow for disruption of canonical successions and period divisions.

Even more encouraging and heartening is the choice of artist for the first solo presentation at Met Breuer. Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90) was a minimalist of exquisite poise, rigor and resoluteness. This comprehensive retrospective focuses on her graphic works and monochrome paintings. The quiet austerity of her vision is the perfect complement to Breuer’s dignified architectural understatement. But more significant is the defiance of marketing expectation on the part of the Met’s curators in choosing a relatively unknown artist from outside the international mainstream and contemporary fashion: “difficult” art in “slow” mediums. It signals, let’s hope, that Met Breuer is to be placed at the service of the best that museum scholarship can come up with, defeating any sense that modern and contemporary equals flashy and populist.

The post The Case For Understatement appeared first on artcritical.

I was only four and yet I had a job already. I’m walking, hand in hand with my mother, down crowded, chaotic New York streets and my job is to provide protection whenever we pass a group of men. Even though we were a mother-daughter duo, they’d be watching her like a hawk. I never forgot the helplessness I felt at that moment, because I knew that the men’s gazes demoralized my mother, yet what could I do?

This distinct memory came to mind the other day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A show of portraits of grand ladies like Marie Antoinette and Russia’s Princess Alexandra Golitsyna created during the late 1700s showed off the artist’s meticulous skill and way with vibrant pigments. The artist who painted these portraits of such esteemed individuals was a woman: Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who was active as a portrait painter from teenage years until her death. Vigée Le Brun spent her early years in a convent, moving to the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris when her widowed mother remarried a wealthy jeweler. Thereafter she grew up in an influential circle of court artisans. She was accepted to the Royal Academy and was then allowed to show her work in their Salon. Nevertheless, Vigée Le Brun was a fish out of water, since the academy was completely dominated by men. I can only begin to imagine the ridicule and disdain that her fellow male artists showed her, just for being a woman and endeavoring to fulfill her passion. In 1776 she married painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, whose great-great uncle was Charles Le Brun, the first Director of the French Academy under Louis XIV.

As I strolled around the Met, looking at her paintings, I felt a strong sense of pride, respect, and indeed gratification towards Vigée Le Brun for helping to pave the way for female artists and women in general, just through her unconventional success. The painting that had the most drastic impact on me was one of a famous subject in a non-traditional dress: La Reine en gaulle (1783) whose subject is Marie Antoinette. In this painting the doomed queen, unadorned by royal jewels, wears a loose fitting muslin dress with a simple sash around the waist. She delicately holds a rose and wears a straw hat. This painting caused quite a stir when it was first shown, what with the Queen of France in such a relaxed and un-royal pose: It was a major faux pas. Yet to me, even though the painting does not show her in the typical grand style that was the custom with the royalty during that time, I believe that Marie Antoinette exudes a sense of regality—even though, at first glance, one would not recognize the subject as a royal or a wealthy individual, since it has all the bearings of a commoner. When I first laid eyes on this painting, despite the casual aspect of it, I knew that the subject of the painting was someone of great importance, simply through her stature and poise. Even in a simple smock, Marie Antoinette exudes elegance and that is what I find most striking. Marie Antoinette had a reputation for disregarding tradition and etiquette at Versailles, one that this painting confirms. It shows her “wild” side, the individual she might have become if she wasn’t a royal. That’s what attracts me to this painting, the unconventional female artist and her equally unconventional royal subject.

Due to public uproar that greeted this risqué painting, Vigée Le Brun was forced to execute another, this time with Marie Antoinette adorned in a lavish headdress and a heavy corseted blue satin gown. Ironically, the new painting mimicked the old, with the same body position, and Marie Antoinette once again posed holding a rose—a rose that by any other name would smell as sweet. All that differs is the style of dress. The curators have placed these paintings side by side, inviting comparison. I almost feel as if Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun planned it so, as if to say “take a hike” to their harshest critics.

Max Weber once wrote, “Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.” I believe that this applies to Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun. In a time where women had little or no power, art was the outlet in which these women interpreted themselves. That is why I find this work so powerful. Most art is meant to please, but La Reine en Gaulle was meant to provoke.

Since the dawn of time, society has regarded women as incapable, unequal, and subordinate to their male counterparts. The same can be said for the art world. According to a famous poster by the Guerrilla Girls from the 1980s, less than 4% of the artists in the modern section of the Met are women, but 76% of the nudes are female. This is only one statistic that shows how the art world is a man’s game. My mother, who I mentioned earlier, the artist Brenda Zlamany, has always been an inspiration to me, a single parent trying to create art in a field where the odds are set against her. She is a portraitist and has used me as the subject of countless paintings, which might be why I took such a liking to Vigée Le Brun who also created many a painting with her daughter as muse. Both artists show the stages of growth of their daughter, from infant, to tween, to teenager. Vigée Le Brun is not as well known as Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, but women who are equal to men in every way are often left in the shadows. Even now in the “modern” era, women can still make less money than men for the same job and are often excluded from opportunities, just because of their gender. I hope to use Vigée Le Brun as an example and express my feelings about gender equality through art and the power of words. Art and words can change the world. Maybe I’m an optimist for saying that, but I really believe it.

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NOAH DILLON: You had considered two different paintings: one was a portrait, and although there’s descriptive information there and signifiers that you can read, this other scene has an interior space and an exterior landscape and several people interacting. How would you describe it?

HIBA SCHAHBAZ: This painting is very beautiful and complex and has a rich cultural narrative. It’s an illustration from the Shahnameh, the “Book of Kings,” which is an epic Persian poem consisting of over 50,000 rhyming couplets. It was customary for kings to commission a copy of the Shahnameh which was compiled by the best calligraphers and miniaturists.

What drew you to look at this in particular? There are several miniatures here to choose from, including other moments in this narrative. I wonder if it’s the narrative, the history of the piece, the formal qualities of this particular painting, or something else.

I think it’s a mixture of all those things. The story is interesting and the image is beautiful. When I was looking for a painting to talk about, I wanted to choose one that had all the signifiers of Islamic art and this has pretty much all of them. It has calligraphy, geometry, floral arabesques, figuration; it even has a little horse in there. I also like it because of the way it’s been framed, with a frame within a frame within a frame: you have the outside on the inside and everyone’s kind of on the same plane. And it has a flattened perspective, which is prevalent in miniature painting.

I tend to gravitate toward work that I find visually appealing. The other painting we looked at before, a portrait called Shah Jahan on Horseback (ca. 1628–58), I chose for emotional reasons. I love that painting. It has a sister painting here, in the Met, which is usually on display but isn’t at the moment. It’s a painting of Shah Jahan in a pink tunic, one of the first paintings I copied when training as a miniaturist.

Are there formal qualities in this that you find especially interesting — things you don’t see in the ones nearby? You mentioned the arabesques and the calligraphy, the figures and how they’re arranged in space to convey a sense of movement through time and place, and then there’s the geometric patterning that has flattened out certain areas.

I’m interested in the intricate patterns in this painting, and how these patterns are placed side by side but don’t compete with each other. There are so many colors and varied geometries, yet everything fits together and flows harmoniously. The peripheral figures in the paintings frame the two main figures, Mihrab and Sindukht. And the white wall behind them forms a sort of a halo and emphasizes them at the same time. It’s a very complex and elegant way of framing a domestic dispute.

The narrative is also very intriguing. Mihrab is angry at the woman next to him, his wife, Sindukht, because he found out that his daughter, Rudaba, is in love with Zal, a warrior who was not her chosen husband. I’m really intrigued with the way that Rudaba and Zal met. She had heard about what a great warrior he was, and he had heard about how beautiful she was. When they met, she let down her very long hair in a Rapunzel sort of scene. And then they sat together and they talked.

You are interested in conflict, it seems, and the narrative complexity that comes with it. 

I’m interested in complicated romance and cultural drama. Which is found in a lot of epic stories. There are several paintings in this room telling the tale of Layla and Majnun, which is a story about unrequited love. I would say they have very similar cultural connotations to this painting.

Visually, there’s a lot going on. I wouldn’t necessarily paint this sort of painting anymore myself, but when I was learning to paint, copying images, trying to understand the patterns and arabesques and making the tiny little figures was something I was obsessed with.

One of the things I’m interested in is that you’ve picked out this Iranian painting and the other Mughal portrait — two very different cultures. You’re from Pakistan, but you’re immersed in miniatures’ broad and deep well of stories and iconography, which spans a large geographic area and a lot of time.

Well, both paintings were produced during the height of their respective traditions. They are both categorised here under Islamic Art. I guess I feel drawn to both of them because the training that I received was very broad and encompassed more than merely one school of miniature painting. I feel connected to the height of Mughal and Persian painting, which produced very refined works. I like the polish of these works. And the colors and geometry and the way they flow together to create a strange, harmonious balance.

Are there particular colors here that you find especially attractive or that make their way into your own work?

I’m really attracted to the blues in traditional miniatures and I’m always trying to replicate them in my own work. I love the different ways that gold is used as well. I suppose I use a lot of gold in my work, too.

You’ve also been playing with brown in your work recently, with your use of tea. Yours is much more expressive, but I think there’s a real affinity there.

There are three traditional disciplines in miniature; partial color (which can be tea or sepia), opaque watercolor (full color), and sia kalam (black pen). When I arrived in New York, I got really interested in color. I was trying to be more colorful, not just in painting, but as a person too. It was a challenge and I wanted to work with every color I could think of and make. However, these last couple of years I’ve found myself revisiting the partial color technique and getting very involved in it. Painting with tea comes very naturally to me and I’m really enjoying exploring its possibilities.

Is there something particular about seeing it in this space — surrounded by these other works, and with chairs and the particularities of the Met — do you think that something about that comes into your perception of the painting?

The Islamic wing at the Met re-opened soon after I moved to New York, and it was so exciting for me to visit it. I’ve seen and copied a lot of miniatures from books and I had a master teaching me how to paint, but there was something magical about standing in front of an ancient miniature painting. I think during my first visit to the Met, I also saw a Klimt and started crying because it was my first time seeing his work in real life. So it was very meaningful to see paintings that I had only ever seen before in books.

Is there a way that seeing this in New York, in the context of moving here and going to school, colors the way you experience them, think about them, or the way they come into your own work?

It’s possible. Although I think that when I start looking at a painting I forget about my environment, instead wondering “What is that? How was it made?” When I look at a miniature, I see it as a miniaturist. An abstract painter probably sees an abstract painting in a way that I don’t understand. But when I look at this, I instinctively understand it. I can see how it’s made. I can resolve my own work by looking at it and seeing different things that I can take into my practice. The painting becomes the teacher. The Islamic wing of the Met also feels like a safe haven, like home away from home.

Well, this is from a book, but this is not at all a book: it’s been taken out, a single page, with matting, on display, behind glass, and so on. And I just wonder if that changes things.

When my own work goes from my studio to the gallery, the work is taken out of its context. It’s a small shift, but it’s important. It feels different, is arranged differently, and there’s the continuing possibility that you can keep rearranging it and make a million narratives. As an artist, I can take my own work and turn it into a giant pudding. And anything an artist does can and will be taken out of context, right?

Yeah, probably. I think you release it out into the world and everyone else has to deal with it in ways that are beyond your control. You’re doing something very different from what these artists did. They’re painting kings and illustrating epic stories. My understanding of this art form is extremely limited, but I can’t remember ever seeing a self-portrait, or a seeing a woman self portraitist more specifically.

Well, back in the day miniaturists had patrons. These patrons were often kings who commissioned court paintings. There’s very little self-portraiture, but it’s not unprecedented. Some of the more favored male court painters would include little portraits of themselves, in the border of the painting, for instance. Otherwise there were just portraits of important people. There were portraits of women, but these were not self-portraits. Sometimes portraits of women were specifically commissioned. For instance if X was going to marry Y, they’d send her portrait over so that he could see her.

There’s also more explicit eroticism in your work, and what I read as its feminism. I wonder about this image and its encoding of the social roles of men and women and how they find their way from here to your studio.

There’s a great erotic painting called Pleasures of the Hunt on display right now. It’s part of the “The Royal Hunt” exhibit and it shows a man making love to a woman while hunting a tiger.

This work was an attempt to document the time in which it was made and my work deals with something happening now. Even though I was trained as a traditional miniaturist, I’ve always worked with the female body. My painting process is very intuitive. It’s natural for me to paint whatever I’m feeling or thinking.

Is there any other fundamental aspect of this painting that we’ve missed?

This painting is so tiny, but I feel very vast. It’s multi layered. There’s a foreground, spaces at the sides, a background, views through the windows, of the sky, hints of the clouds. There are nearly a dozen figures in this painting and multiple rugs, calligraphy… There’s so much information here that even though it’s a miniature and it’s small, it’s also, for me, very large. I like that aspect of it. There’s a flattening of perspective and a lot of subtle details and cultural signifiers which come together to tell a story. When I look at it, at first I’m absorbed in all the separate colors and intricate patterns. But when I look into it, I begin to see the interactions between the figures and the figures within the space. And my mind begins to put together all the little details which create this monumental scene.

Hiba Schahbaz is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in the centuries-old art form of miniature painting. She trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and received an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York City. In addition to exhibiting her work internationally in galleries and fairs including the Vienna Art Fair and Scope NYC, Schahbaz has curated exhibitions of miniature paintings in Pakistan and India. She was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and The Wassaic Project and has taught miniature painting as part of the Alfred Z. Solomon Residency at the Tang Museum. She is a teaching artist at the Art Students League of New York.

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March 17 to August 16, 2015 (Uklanski Selects closes June 14)
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York City

The soaring banners that greet visitors in the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall are “living photographs” by Piotr Uklanski, the subject and selector, respectively, of exhibitions currently on view. The banners reconstitute a work of his from 2007, Untitled (Solidarity) in which aerially shot images of red and white clad soldiers at the Gdansk shipyards spell out the name of the independent trade union, ‘Solidarnosz in one image while the same word is seen disintegrating, in the other, as three thousand soldiers spill away. 1990 was the year that Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland and Uklanski was able to immigrate to the United States.

Despite this theatrical flourish, Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklanski Photographs overall feels a bit thin in places, particularly in a clustering of early work.

The show opens with images from Uklanski’s series, Joy of Photography 1997-2007, where he appropriates and plays with ‘how to’ ideas of photography. By faithfully following step-by-step instructions to achieve the perfect photograph from a Kodak manual – resulting in colorful blobs of soft focus flowers, a chiffonade waterfall, a tropical setting sun – Uklanski critiques the utopian promise of self-expression available to all, His project remains conceptually interesting even though the eventual aesthetic outcome is utter visual ennui

If Joy of Photography implies a mistrust of photography as a means to an end, the work that follows, The Nazis (1998), questions film’s reliability as a source of historical representation. This is a floor to ceiling wall installation of looming close-ups of Hollywood actors that are the embodiment of the American heroic ideal: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Ronald Reagan, Robert Redford, William Shatner, even ‘ol’ blue eyes’ Frank Sinatra. To Uklanski, the volume of Second World War films speaks to a subconscious fascination and fetishization of the Nazi aura, portrayed in a sanitized and glamorous way. The American audience are to be kept safe and at a distance from the Holocaust reality by experiencing a dual consciousness, of a trauma, but appropriated and mediated by the faces of familiar stars.

In a nod to the infamous 1974 Artforum double page spread paid for by Lynda Benglis depicting herself nude, gloriously defiant and brandishing a dildo, Uklanski collaborated with curator Alison Gingeras on the piece ‘Untitled’ (GingerAss ) (2002). This portrays Gingeras, his partner, naked and lit from behind in a glamorous, erotic style that brings photographer Guy Bourdin to mind. Like Benglis, the artist paid for the image to appear in Artforum. Despite all the cheeky bravura however, their piece is compromised here by what seems to me a sheepish sentence within the wall text where the museum feels the need to tell us that Gingeras was “his romantic partner (they are now married).”

Benglis’s 1974 work was a sophisticated feminist critique, using her own body satirically on her own terms within a predominately male art context. Why should it make any difference whether they are now married, a fact offered in parentheses like an apologetic disclosure– as if the audience, after seeing a naked rear end, need reassurance that this couple still follow conventional societal norms? Such a patronising attitude offends the spirit of Benglis’s radical gesture and undermines Uklanski’s oeuvre.

Piotr Uklabski is known for heterogenous work ranging from large scale ceramic installations, fabric pieces, paintings, film and photography to his infamous relational aesthetic piece Untitled (Dance Floor) 1996 for Gavin Brown’s Broome Street space. It appears that this polymath has put together Piotr Uklanski Selects from the Met Collection with ease: it is by far the better of his two shows, compelling and engaging, evoking a pre-Internet, old-fashioned pleasure in making connections between disparate images and objects.

Using the themes of Eros and Thanatos, the “life force and death wish”, to guide his choices, Uklanski culled artefacts and images from eleven curatorial departments in a refreshing, occasionally shocking display. One gallery wall is hung with many of the photographic greats: Nadar, Alfred Steiglitz, August Sander, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann, Martin Munkasci and Malick Sidbé are here, to name a few. Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier 1936, hangs nearby the surreal Laurie Simmons Walking Gun 1991, and a Pierre-Louise Pierson from around 1863-66, Games of Madness, of an elegant woman looking drolly through a small picture frame back at the viewer feels subversive yet so fresh

A sly wit is seen in a subtle repetition of patterns from different images: a tangle of lesbian’s legs hard at it, shadows of a man’s arms and legs, and the abstract close-up of a horse’s hip and thigh with leather and metal harness. One small painting hung so low one has to kneel to see it properly appears to be of a half dressed young boy who seems about ten lying on a bed while a woman, naked, her face hidden by long hair, fellates him. This is Picasso’s La Douceur, (The Pain) (1902). The ‘boy’ is in fact Picasso aged twenty-two, joking about orgasm and le petit mort. Painted over a hundred years ago, the sexuality and sexism are both still raw and palpable.

After the subtle and tonally muted photographs, Uklanski’s sculptural work, Untitled (Sacre Coeur), 2015, a visceral glistening heart in red resin, is a jarring experience. It is placed next to a cool, sleek yellow jasper Egyptian fragment of a mouth from around 1350 BCE. It almost works, her lips a wonderful contrast of ideas, temperament and form, but ultimately Sacre Coeur is too brash for her distinct, inscrutable, beauty.

Poignantly, near the end of the exhibition was a fragment of a right hand and forearm in marble, Greek, ca. 300 B.C. The written text stated: “this sculptural fragment may have belonged to Eros holding a bow or a torch “. It felt like amongst this gathering of talent from the era of photography, a hand was reaching out from the past.

Many thanks to Woman Around Town and Eleanor Foa Diestag for credited photographs above.  We apologize for the absence of Polish accents on the artist’s name and titles, a problem we are trying to fix.

The post A Sly Wit: Piotr Uklanski at the Met appeared first on artcritical.

NOAH DILLON: You wanted to look at and talk about a de Kooning painting. So why did you pick Easter Monday (1955 – 56)?

DANIEL HERR: Well there’s this one, and there’s another at the Guggenheim, Composition (1955), and when I was around 17 or 18, visiting New York, I remember seeing both paintings a lot. I didn’t really understand them, but I remember thinking that they must be what painting is. I don’t think I’ve seen the one at the Guggenheim in person since then because they just don’t ever seem have it out. But this one’s always here. I really like this one.

This body of work from 1955 is one of the best that he made. There are others — ’77 for example was incredible — but this work is special, and this is definitely a larger, grander piece of that series.

When MoMA did de Kooning’s retrospective, in 2011, there were several paintings from that period together. There was Police Gazette (1955) and Saturday Night (1956), etc. I remember thinking how they must have looked when he made them — how much brighter and striking the colors must have been, because who knows what he actually used when he painted this.

It’s a pretty stark contrast to the van Goghs that we were just looking at.

Those paintings were made 75 years before this one and they still look perfect today. It’s kind of sad. But he did mostly use good materials after this. And I guess the quality of the color is not really the point of his work anyway.

You can see, too, that this one probably inspired Robert Rauschenberg. Over here, in the same gallery, you have Rauschenberg’s Winter Pool (1959), which uses newspaper and paint in a similar way. You can imagine Rauschenberg — on whom de Kooning was a big influence — seeing this and taking it for his own work. This is one of the paintings where the newsprint is still visible. He would use newspaper to soak up the oil, or keep the surface wet when he wasn’t working on the painting. In part because the newsprint is visible and was transferred, this painting has the feeling and ideas of collage with paint that I find really interesting.

He did a lot of stuff that people do now. He used to throw pieces of paper on the floor, randomly, and then draw over them, and then rearrange the pieces of paper on the canvas to transfer them. He was able to synthesize all these different painting movements in his head. What’s interesting about this series, and maybe the Woman series, was that it is to me the first de Kooning style; there was no question that this was a de Kooning. It wasn’t a copy of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, or Arshile Gorky. I’m sure he knew what he had stumbled upon, because the work looks a lot different than it did even just five years before. And this was also the first series where there wasn’t a central figure anymore.

So it doesn’t have anything that had formerly held the image together?

Well it probably did. He would always say “the figure is in there somewhere.” He called these landscape paintings, or cityscapes. It’s dark, gray, there’s the newsprint, and it resembles architecture and billboards and things you look at when you walk down the street.

And there are perspectival elements that imply a street.

Yeah: lights, people walking, motion… And the fact, too, that it’s vertical, not a pastoral view. And this little patch of green is like a Green Spaces park or plaza.

What does this artwork mean to you and the paintings you make? You’ve talked about seeing this when you were younger and it being an example of what painting is. What does it mean now?

I think it still impresses me as what painting could be. I didn’t understand it at the time, not at all. I don’t think I really understood him until I was in my mid or late 20s and I’m still learning now. He is like Picasso. He was studying Picasso basically forever; he couldn’t ever get away from that influence. And there was no reason to, because the guy made so much work and there were so many different styles, and all of it was so rich with material and intense, creative personality.

I think you can find a lot of interesting stuff by working in someone’s shadow.

You can see Picasso in this, but de Kooning’s definitely not trying to make it look like a Picasso. It’s hyper-sensitive yet hyper-aggressive. The whole series is aggressive, in the way that he made these, and the subsequent landscapes, like The Door to the River (1960), at the Whitney.

You can see Picasso here, too, in the newspaper: that element of collage is similar to his use of pasted-in or painted newspaper, faux bois, or other materials. Obviously it’s translated into something else and may be happenstance, but it is funny the way that this carries through. And, again, one can carry it forward to Rauschenberg creatively misinterpreting this move by de Kooning.

I really wouldn’t be surprised if Rauschenberg saw this de Kooning and based his entire career off of this one painting. I mean, I would have done that. There’s no reason not to. You’d be an idiot not to.

[laughing]

His intuition as a painter is so precise, so sharp.

Can you point to anything in particular that speaks to that in this?

I think every mark in here is incredibly precise. There’s no excess, nothing insufficient, or that’s too soft. In a certain way everything that’s there is supposed to be. It has this quality that all great paintings have where it just looks like it painted itself. And at this point he’s 51 years old and he’s pretty much mastered this style of painting, which explains why he then went and did something totally different. And five years after that it’s totally different again.

He was also really sharp intellectually. He gave a few public talks early on and they’re really, really funny, really eclectic, like “The Renaissance and Order” (1949) or “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951). He talks about the history of art and what people thought about, using imaginary painters who see things a certain way but without understanding how to see it from a historical context. They’re kind of like Surrealist, absurdist prose poems — like reading DeLillo or something. I still can’t tell half the time if he’s just teasing people or if he means things literally or if it’s a language barrier. He definitely had a sense of humor about it.

And he knew what was going on. In one of those talks, he identifies Duchamp as the most important artist of the era. He said, basically, “Duchamp is a one-man movement and he’s showing people that everyone can be their own movement, and you only have to do what you think is important.” And he said that was more important than what he himself was doing, more important than painting. He was saying that before Duchamp was even taken seriously by most people.

Do you feel like this is a particularly relevant painting, or that de Kooning’s work is especially relevant right now in a way that isn’t being thought about, recognized, or has been forgotten?

Definitely it has come back, as with the MoMA retrospective, or the shows at Gagosian and Pace in recent years.

You could see the influence in recent shows, such as “The Forever Now.” As a painter, though, I kind of liked it better when it wasn’t popular. I remember being in school and painting like this and people would be like, “What are you doing? You can’t do this. Stop it.” Now everyone thinks they are abstract artists. The irony is that de Kooning didn’t identify at all with the term “abstract art.”

They’re also all much younger than he was when he made this painting. You described how long it took de Kooning to get out from under Picasso, and it’s going to take them time to get out from under de Kooning, and whoever else they’re looking at.

Do you want to say anything about this artwork in this gallery, in this museum? Does that have any bearing on what it looks like to you, how you experience it?

He’s a New York painter; it’s made in New York and it gets to live in a New York museum forever. Seeing the museums and galleries in person, you learn what kind of artist you want to be. Every time I would visit the city I would go the Met and I started wanting to see the de Koonings. I remember I thought they were ugly, early on. I always thought about how ugly the Woman paintings are.

They’re kind of a mess.

They’re definitely not clean. And I thought art was supposed to be clean because that’s what my teachers told me. Or maybe I just had a clean upbringing.

What do you make of the title, Easter Monday?

It has the ambivalence and duality that critics talk about with respect to his work. But a lot of times he and other New York School painters, in general, didn’t title their work. They used names like Composition X or Untitled XI, or Picture or whatever. Or their wives or girlfriends titled the work. Nobody really cared that they didn’t care what the title was. I like it. It’s Easter Monday: a special day but an ordinary day

Some of this generation titled their works, too, as a reflection of where they were in their lives. They named their paintings for the season or the day, or a place, such as Richard Diebenkorn’s various series. I connect with that, too, because those were about making a painting that reminds you of a certain place. His work in the Hamptons wasn’t serene, but the palette was different — a little brighter, a little more floral. All of his work is intense though; there are no laid-back de Koonings.

Do you want to say anything else about why it’s important to the work that you make?  

I just like how American his work is, even though he’s technically European. It’s so America-in-the-‘50s — tough, with a cigarette. He’s like a boxer, bashing away while he listens to Igor Stravinsky. The poor immigrant boy who comes of age during the time of American empire. There are all these influences: the classical Dutch art-school training, Surrealism, Existentialism, working in advertising and sign painting, the poverty of the Depression, and then meeting all these other artists around him like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Josef Albers.

What I’m always asking myself is what didn’t he do? The same things he was asking probably about Picasso. But if you’re starting to learn how to play jazz you don’t begin with third-tier improvisers. You go to Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. If you’re interested in painting, you don’t start with lesser artists. De Kooning is what he is for a reason; it’s not like he just happened to become an important painter. He’s better. It lets you see where the bar is, how high it is. That’s important if you want to continue to do something different.

The post Tell Me: with Daniel Herr appeared first on artcritical.

April 25 to May 30, 2015
54 Franklin Street (at Cortlandt Alley)
New York, 212 727 3323

The subject of Holly Zausner’s 2015 film Unsettled Matter is the artist herself, but just as clearly, it is us, the viewers. It is a cyclical film, which variously embraces and casts off narrative, almost on a whim. Zausner passes through New York as a ghost — purposefully marching through empty streets, lobbies and stations, sometimes no more than a flicker, but just as often stopping to contemplate: a book in the basement of the Strand, the mangled visage of Queen Hatshepsut at the Metropolitan Museum, or us, the viewer, at the center of the swirling maelstrom of Times Square (the only time in which we see other human beings). Though she interacts with no one, she is performing for us, right up until the possible endpoint of the film, when she comes physically crashing down onto her workbench strewn with stills from her last work — death by art.

We cannot tell if the most spectacular special effect of Unsettled Matter is in fact the end of the artist. In Unseen (2007), her previous film, set in Berlin, her silent antagonist is a larger-than–life-sized rubber doll. This feminine and sculptural figure has appeared as a prop in many of Zausner’s works over the years. It is burdensome and seems to provoke danger wherever the artist goes: in Unseen she is watched by a tiger and threatened by a nearby explosion. Unsettled Matter is more foreboding as the enemy is ever-present, and we get the inkling that it is somehow contained within our own act of spectation. Besides a sense of determination in her demeanor and gait, Zausner’s primary emotion seems to be impatience and weariness. At one point the artist, wearing sunglasses indoors, drinks a pint and takes a brief respite from her perambulations — giving us a moment to breathe as well.

If this film has a beginning or an end, it is a tale of escape and alienation, and of the artist’s lonely practice, which, it would seem, always ends badly — the tense lines that support, very literally, this floating life, can give away at any moment. But such a linear narrative to Unsettled Matter is a bit too easy, and Zausner inlays the very simple activities of the film — walking and looking — with a few brief supernatural gestures that lead us to understand that we may disbelieve our eyes at any moment — this is the stuff of metaphor. The mystical details also become more apparent after watching the piece again, when we are half-expecting them and the suspense is much stronger. This is another indication that there is a rhythmic and endless cycle at play. Zausner briefly communes with the pharaoh Hatshepsut, then while admiring a tomb in the Metropolitan Museum, she departs, leaving her reflection standing there a few seconds too long. Similarly weird is a passage in the Strand, in which all the titles are inverted — a mirror of a mirror. Zausner also moves in slow-mo and speeds up until she becomes a blur. Despite these visual sleights-of-hand, the superb sound always keeps us aware of her steps, clack-clacking on the pavement.

Unsettled Matter seems most likely to be a dream, and a rejection of time. Unlike Unseen, which was decidedly tragic — the artist weighed down by her life, her choice, her femininity and her art — here she eludes us, traipsing through memories of past and future alike. She flits and stomps through the city, which is all hers, coldly regards the hysterical Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, and moves on, and keeps us a sympathetic but bewildered spectator, hustling to keep up.

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NOAH DILLON: So why did you choose this painting?

ERIC SUTPHIN: I chose it in part because it’s personal. When I was pretty young — before I ever had any kind of idea to be a critic or to write about art — I watched Simon Schama’s The Power of Art (2006), and he talked about this painting. He claimed that Manet had left this corner piece of sail completely bare and it was just raw canvas coming through, so that it was raw canvas doubling as the actual sail.

When I saw the painting in person I realized that’s not true — it’s painted. And that inaccuracy imprinted this painting in my mind. It made me suspicious that he never saw this painting in person, and that perhaps he was talking from a reproduction of the painting. It’s an interesting painting for a lot of reasons and it’s atypical of Impressionism. It’s actually one year after the Bouguereau painting I’d originally wanted to talk about.

I think it’s important that you chose this as a substitute, because even if you think this is atypical of Impressionism, that Bouguereau painting was his last before the Impressionists arrived and pushed him (and academic painting generally) aside in a big way.

Bouguereau was sort of the archetype of the enemy to the Impressionists. And almost 150 years later both artists are in the same museum. I felt a little embarrassed picking the Bouguereau, because there’s still a little baggage. Not that Boating feels particularly radical, but it shows how the field has expanded so that anything goes. And I can simultaneously get pleasure out of this and the other thing, but they’re so far out of context that both paintings mean something completely different from when they were done. And I think the Bouguereau is more complex than this painting, but I think that this painting, right now, has a lot of implications.

Standing here, looking at it, I realize there’s no horizon. That might not mean anything explicitly, but implicitly it must. I recently drafted a review of “The Forever Now” at MoMA, and I was easing my way into ideas introduced by Paul Virilio in Open Sky (2008), about the disappearance of the horizon and what that means. It’s complicated, but right now I’m realizing that this guy is, in a sense, backed into a corner. He has no privacy; a ubiquitous eye has invaded his personal space and he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the boat.

Or he could disappear into the amorphous, blue nothingness behind him.

The image is basically space-less, all foreground, with everything pushed to the front, on the surface. It’s completely immediate. There’s no pretense; there’s no allegory. That’s really the crux of the Impressionists’ objection to the academics and salon painters, was that it’s all allegory, and here there’s none of that.

In that regard, this upper right corner isn’t raw canvas, but it is just a grey space carved out there, which runs contrary to painting conventions. It’s an abstraction of the superficial framing of the image, along with the blue that you were talking about, which takes up most of the canvas. You’ve got the blue of the water, the blue of his hat, the blue of her dress — everything else is additional to that primacy. It also strikes me that, thinking about now, when everything is sort of up for grabs, in a similar way you’ve got this representational scene that these incidents of abstraction interrupt. They’re reflexive and disruptive, without appearing to call attention to themselves. That admixture of approaches has only become more open.

This is another reason I wanted to look at Boating: it’s a very severe painting. It’s all about the composition, about the negative shapes. And he’s framed it in such a way that every bit — even this little wedge of blue at the top right corner — becomes like a series of quadrilaterals. And then you see the portrait. That’s what the tension is — that the portrait is the center and you always come back to the guy’s face. But it’s ominous. He doesn’t want you looking at him; he’s tired of being looked at.

He’s responding to the painter. He’s not a sitter and he’s not someone in a scene, he’s got an indeterminate relationship to Manet.

And in the absence of allegory, you’re frozen there: the artist has stepped back, the painting’s finished, and it’s us. It’s uncanny in that sense that the face is so central to the painting, so we’re locked into a deadlock of looking at this person. His companion is almost there just for Manet to be playful when he paints her dress. I don’t know what that says about social relations between men and women in late 19th century painting, but it sounds like an opening to an uncomfortable issue. And while that’s important, it also seems tertiary to the composition and the sort of gridlock that the viewer gets into with the central figure. I think at first encounter there’s a sense of tranquility and you’re in this nebulous sea blue. But that slips away as you look at it, and you’re left with angles and the aggressive of his stare. And it becomes kind of uncomfortable.

There’s also the well-known affection the Impressionists had for Japanese prints but I think there are some compositional issues that are equally important here two things: it anticipates the camera view, the way Degas did, but also the disappearance of the horizon, which is maybe not so radical, but a fusion of eastern pictorial sense and with western developments in optical technology.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about this painting is that the rope was originally much farther left, buy was changed, leaving this pentimento. It’s a curiosity, to me, how that affects its appearance and how it’s read.

Well now it’s all I can see. The palimpsest of the movement of the rope is really weird, and the way that sort of imaginatively interacts with the scene. It becomes sort of like Cubist movement where you see two ropes simultaneously, like Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which inadvertently adds to the aggressiveness.

Is there a way in which this particular museum frames this painting for you? Or even where it is in the museum?

Well, in this room in particular it seems out of place, out of step with its time. It appears to belong to no time or era. Obviously it’s from a milieu and there’s a long tradition of these boat leisure scenes. But some of the other radical steps that Manet was making, pictorially, anticipate tactics that fully found their place 50 years later. It doesn’t really belong to its Impressionist counterparts, other than the handling of her dress and the fleeting quality of his brushstroke. But the rigidity of the composition feels very classical and it has this characteristic triangular golden ratio form. So in that sense it belongs to Bouguereau and the mannered history that preceded it.

How does this find itself in the writing you do and the art you’re attracted to? Or how does that relate to how or why you enjoy art?

I feel hopelessly pedestrian in choosing an Impressionist painting to talk about. So the question becomes how to talk about connecting this to contemporary concerns. I’ve been feeling depressed about a lot of contemporary art. But I’ve been looking at a lot of contemporary figurative work and I find it can be useful to think about that stuff in relation to strong figurative work such as this.

I’m always looking for a way to relate directly with a work of art: How does this work make me feel? What inside of me does the work incite? It connects to the things I’ve been thinking about with regard to contemporary vision. And these are all, for me, half-cooked ideas; I’m still working it out. This painting is not an end-all, be-all artwork for me. But it’s an important painting in a line of thinking I’m trying to explore with regard to how I take images, what I expect or what keeps me looking at something.

This painting feels rather stripped in a way, and I think our identification with some kind of subject, a human subject, is an important aspect of this painting. And it brings me into that by way of all of the vision games Manet’s playing. The Impressionists spent a lot of time, I think, considering vision. And sure it’s been explored, but I think it remains important. You brought that up when I was writing about “The Forever Now,” talking about light and surface, and you asked, “Isn’t that what the Impressionists were doing?” And that made me think, “You’re right, they were.” So maybe that’s what brought me back to this particular painting: the question of “What were they doing?” And I guess it comes back to the camera, which is just so… ugh.

[laughing]

But it’s interesting to see that problem as it was born and how it’s now complicated, in another way, by the prevalence of cameras and of photographic images.

When you spend a lot of time thinking about how contemporary vision is shifting as a result of the ubiquity of screens, lenses, cameras, all these things, it can feel a little scary, vertiginous. It’s a consolation to know that these guys were also at that same precipice. A significant difference between Bouguereau and Manet is the matter of vision and seeing. The two artists are representative of two types of seeing and a shift in the way that people perceive images. It’s not incidental: space like this becomes physiological, and by closing in on this scene Manet was both internalizing and depicting a new paradigm in perception.

That points back to the question of was Simon Schama looking at a photograph, or was he looking at the thing face to face?

I’ve looked at this painting at least 20 times, and the first time I saw it, I remembered the Schama video, which on the screen you could buy that it’s just raw canvas, and there was no way to verify or argue against it. It was there and I could see it, with an authority telling me that’s the case. That’s a fundamental issue for the authority the critic and their ethical responsibility. Somebody like Schama — who has television shows, who’s a populist and an entertainer — can make you see things: seeing is believing.

[laughing]

But I can go and look and see if they’ve done their due diligence. The disparity I experienced with the Schama video calls into question everything else I’ve ever seen. Do I have to see it in person before I buy it? I buy everything, I believe so much. I think we all do.

But so there’s this painting and in another room there’s another Manet painting: Lady with a Parrot (1866). It’s very gray and sort of claustrophobic, and it’s a little like two Manets: this is the Manet of the future, whereas that’s the Manet of the salon. So having this here you can see the work and corroborate it not only with its description, but with other works by the artist and by their contemporaries.
Eric Sutphin is a painter and writer based in New York City. Print and online publications include Art in America, artcritical.com, Painting is Dead, On Verge, American Artist Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. He has been a visiting critic at the Delaware College of Art and Design and The School of Visual Arts. Recent curatorial projects include “Detlef Aderhold: Null Komma Null,” “Berliner Liste” and “Rosemarie Beck: Paintings from the 60’s” at the National Arts Club. He is currently writing a biography of post-war American painter Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003). Eric received a BFA from Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, and an MFA from The School of Visual arts in 2014.

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Walter Liedtke, the Curator of Dutch and Flemish Painting at the Metropolitan Museum who was responsible for highly significant exhibitions and scholarship within his field, was killed in yesterday’s Metro-North train crash in Valhalla, New York. I had the honor of meeting Walter several times, at press views of exhibitions at the Met, for instance, and when he lectured at the New York Studio School. He was the quintessence of a gentleman, an impeccably dapper man, and no less warm and generous for it with his time and with his enthusiasm. And he was all one would want from a museum curator, an impassioned scholar, a natural communicator, a responsible but also courageous thinker in his field. Employed at the Met for over 30 years, he was responsible for several ground-breaking shows, including The Age of Rembrandt, reviewed in these pages in 2007 by Drew Lowenstein.

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