Art events

I saw an interesting small show at the Scandinavia House of works by a Danish painter of the late 19th century, Vilhelm Hammershoi.   These were very subtle paintings chiefly concerned with light and solitude.   (The show advertised title was "Painting Tranquility"; that didn't happen until after the nattering ladies who lunch left the show.)  He has been called Denmark's Vermeer;  chiefly because he often paints rooms with light coming through windows.   The more you looked at the paintings, the more they revealed.  The sense of light and color was extraordinary, something that doesn't really come across in reproductions.

I also saw a show entitled "Art Brut in America" at the American Museum of Folk Art.   This was a show of works originally sent by Mr. Art Brut, Jean DuBuffet, to America in the 1940's.  The works were shown and stored in America for a period, and eventually shipped back to Switzerland.  They were in the custody of Alfonso Osorio, a Filipino artist who displayed them in his large house in the Hamptons, and was friends with Jackson Pollock among others.  It was a fascinating and invigorating show.   DuBuffet's point was that art by untrained artists was more original than that of artists with formal training.  Many of the works shown were collected by DuBuffet from patients (or their doctors) in psychiatric institutions.  The art world, of course, has come to value all kinds of "outsider" art, so this notion is no longer a big deal.   But what you see is quite varied, some of it quite sophisticated in execution.  A particular favorite for me was the work of Francis Palanc, who was once a pastry chef, and created amazing works combining crushed eggshells and other materials, and even used pastry tools in creating his work.
Photographs don't do justice to the work, since the textures don't really show up.

His short biography, from the Collection d'Art Brut in Lausanne:

Francis Palanc was born in Vence, France, where his parents were pastry-cooks. At the age of 16, after finishing school, he joined the family business and was initiated into the trade. At around 19, Francis Palanc invented a system of alphabets made up of angular graphics on the basis of which he attempted to obtain revelations about the origin and the essence of things.

He also created paintings made according to cake-making techniques: he worked with a sieve, piping bag and rolling pin. The ingredients used were lac, then gum arabic, mixed with crushed eggshells, dried egg white, boiled sugar, caramel, and sometimes sawdust.
His creations were made in the most complete isolation and remained secret, except for some pictures which he gave to a local dealer to sell in 1959. This experiment turned out to be disastrous: after a massive destruction of his work in 1960, Francis Palanc ceased all activity for good.

 Unfortunately, no photographs were allowed, and there are few images to be found on the web.



At MOMA there was a huge Picasso sculpture exhibit that took up the entire 4th floor.  I am not a big Picasso fan, and, for the most part, I like my art flat, so sculpture is not a big excitement for me.   But the exhibit was fascinating; it was particularly interesting to see Picasso's Cubist sculptures.  The cubist guitars looked much better in three dimensions than two.   And Picasso's creativity is endless; given any random three objects or materials, Picasso probably could have made an interesting sculpture.

At the same time there was a wonderful and not very well publicized Pollock exhibition.  MOMA basically put everything they own of Pollock's on the wall, which was enough to make a mini retrospective.  Seeing the progression of his career is fascinating.   There were a number of his engravings; I had never seen any of them before.

Very Kandinsky-like...

The show also charts Pollocks development through his career; you see his beginnings as he experiments with various representational modes, and then see how abstraction takes over and he eventually arrives at the style which made him famous.

Some detail:

As always, I have spent time lately wandering the far corners of the Metropolitan Museum.   One major discovery was the newly installed murals by Thomas Benton entitled "America Today".   (Benton was Jackson Pollock's teacher.)  They were originally painted for the New School, and subsequently bounced around various corporate locations before being donated to the Met recently.

The murals cover 4 walls; here are parts of two of them:

Glorification of industrial labor:

Street scenes:

At times it almost becomes abstract:

There was also a fascinating exhibit documenting art from Egypt's Middle Kingdom.  While some of the exhibit has more of a historical slant, there were many fascinating and beautiful objects:

This was some kind of game:

At the Guggenheim there was a big retrospective of works by the Italian artist Alberto Burri.  Burri, who was one of the big stars of post-war Italian art, is known for the diverse materials he used.  In fact, the art is really about the materials; things are shredded, burned, torn, distressed, melted, etc.   I liked the use of the materials, but they began to become repetitive after a while, and I longed for work with a more dynamic sense of composition and color.