Aventurina King

 

I went to the Whitney.  Two exhibits: Picasso and American Art; Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World.

The first was impressive: impressive paintings, impressive names--Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky.  Most memorable (for me) was this small charcoal cubist sketch that greeted visitors with its indiscernible smile.  After that it was all confident pitch black lines and bright colors that popped out at you like bubblegum.  A room of Pollocks splashed around Picasso's provocative colors and the artful messiness of his sketches.  Roy Lichtenstein's plastic women grinned amid a dotted sky and beach.

I liked the second exhibit better.  Time was running out by that point, and I admit I only spent 20 minutes running through it, but it impressed itself on me.  Maybe because its organizational structure was simpler--there were only two artists--or maybe because its theme moved me. 

An introduction crawled up the opening wall: in the 1920s, amid the viral distribution of industrial art and kitsch, these two artists stood up like beacons and redefined the boundaries of high art and commercial art. (I'm supposing they were trying to place themselves among high art.)  They both adopted mechanical precision and abstraction in their paintings. 

Albers seemed obsessed with squares and color experimentation.  I remember reading once about Matisse's color theory: that the larger a colored area is, the stronger that color will be in the painting, and that certain colors are inherently stronger than others (red for example).  The painter is like a visual conductor, at times giving immense breathing space to a vivid green, or shrinking its prairie to let a red bloom fully.  

Matisse's color boundaries are curvy, like the warm marble of a breast.  Albers' colors are steel cut into squares.  There are violet and magenta squares, and blue squares.  There are squares within squares, and squares overlapping squares--their colors overlap too.

Moholy Nagy experiments with shapes.  He is a bit like Kadinsky.  No, this sort of simile makes describing art toooooo easy.  He places an opalescent circle over a criss-cross of red lime lights.  Over black, a white ring marches towards a delicate intersection of white lines like a trapeze artist.  There is a glass sculpture, a clean sheet of glass that twists itself into itself until its shadow becomes beautiful to the eye.

 

How do you maximize your time in new city? Most will opt for the following sequence: walking around historic buildings and taking pictures of them, walking inside of museums, tasting local food, getting lost, refusing the title tourist and assuming the same habits as the locals in order to breathe in the atmosphere of the town. All this gets more complicated when the city is both a vacation venue and an opportunity to see old friends (as in friends of "long date"). One has to selectively divvy up time, put some aside to do some tourism, refrain from the social impulse all human creatures feel to be around their kin and not in some musty museum alone looking at an earless auto-portrait of van Gogh. Well I wasn't that good at dividing my time up in Boston, success was minimal with two museums visited over a period of one hour and 38 minutes. One was the Fogg museum, an eclectic collection ranging from ancient wooden clocked madonnas, 18th century paintings of nudes in their harems to van Gogh with his ears on. The second museum (thank heavens it was right across the street) I have forgotten the name of featured an exhibit on Degas. In Paris, I was accustomed to see Degas paintings and pastels, bursting with colors and sensuous upright ballerinas along with their arabesques. There were also mazes of peach colored women's backs offering themselves to the eye as they curled their serpentine spine in an unconscious reverence. The exhibit in Boston had the same subject matter, but it was all etches of charcoal on paper. Most of the pieces were the black and white studies for the oil paintings and pastels shown in Paris. It was refreshing, a different aspect of Degas whose trembling, faltering lines nonetheless capture perfectly the sweep of an opera singer's hand, or the delicate torsion of a ballerina's waist. But these could have had better exposure had they been set off by some of the finished paintings and pastels, as the simple, roughness of the stone is sublimated by the diamond within it.

Floor carpeting, stretches of sidewalk and squeaky clean skyscrapers, yes, I am definitely back in New York.  And it's back here that I realize how different from a western city Beijing is.  New Yorkers taking the subway have the luxury of holding their books in front of them, regally lifting their elbows like a college professor with his textbook.  In Beijing, hardened subway readers must squeeze the newspapers up to their nose and adopt the compact stance of an Egyptian mummy. 

But then there are places more crowded in New York than in Beijing.  Museums are not a big thing in China, museum going is not on the top ten list of Chinese people's week-end activities (which would in foremost positions feature surfing on the internet in a café until dawn, clubbing until dawn or karaoke until dawn).  When I asked my Chinese friends why they wouldn't come to the Shanghai's art museum one sweltering afternoon, they retorted "I've been to the museum once, seen it, why would I go a second time?"

The 23rd of August, I returned to New York, city of museums and high brow culture.  A few days later, I was at the metropolitan museum, sauntering through knit-browed Greek sculptures and mute 16th century porcelain tea kettles.  I arrived in the temporary exhibition Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams His Art and His Textiles

6 months ago, I had visited the same exhibit in London at the Royal Academy.  The theme and information ran the same: Matisse was deeply inspired by the colorful fabrics and clothes he encountered and featured them in many of his paintings, his bold-colored and confident-stroked style he owed to these fabrics.  The space was small: paintings and drawings along with fabrics and clothes packed into three small rooms on the top floor of the academy.  Pieces of fabric were placed alongside the paintings in which they were featured or the paintings which exhibited the same stylistic characteristics as them.  It was quaint, the thesis was well supported and one came out convinced of how much Matisse's painting style was influenced by his props.

The exhibit then traveled to the metropolitan, but in this institution, it became something more.  The exhibit did not only prove how closely Matisse had worked with his fabrics, it demonstrated the evolution of this artistic relationship.  There were more paintings and they spanned a bigger portion of Matisse's life.  The paintings of fabrics and clothes were presented in a chronological order that delineated Matisse's artistic maturation. 

The exhibition began with Matisse's first paintings, those which were completed before he discovered the fabrics.  They were classic still life paintings, copies of those from 19th century masters.  Perhaps the colors were a bit more opaque on the glasses and paper, the surfaces already leaning toward a unified plane, not the original's shimmering cluster of photographic details.

But then Matisse discovered the toile de Jouy.  This blue and white patterned linen is revealed with the same amount of suspense released as the revelation of a murderer's identity in a crime novel.  Its importance is mentioned with increasing persistence throughout the first portion of the exhibit, and then finally, there it is, a wall to its own, gloriously trailing along the painting in which it is first depicted.  In this first painting, Matisse's change in style is immediately apparent.  The colors of the cloth in the painting are bolder then in his still lives, they become sticky and savage.  Later, he extends opaque, collision of colored planes glides over the rest of the canvas.

In the next rooms (and there are quite a few of them), fabrics and clothing are introduced in the same way as the toile de jouy.  I favor the room with all the ink drawings.  Inspired by the Romanian shirt (a piece of clothing composed of three puffs of fabric, one covers the waist, the other two are decorated, encrusted with sequels and cover the arms). In a style of drawing which looks more like writing, Matisse inscribes the silhouette of his models and their Romanian shirts.  The lines are deliciously simple, they swirl, travel over the paper, pirouette into spirals then impetuously run off and do the same thing elsewhere.  It is careless but so precise.  Matisse is endowed with quality I look for in every artist:  Effortlessness that never misses its mark.

It is a question I cannot answer.
And it comes with many others.  What is the purpose of the installation?  Is it purely aesthetic?  Or can one graft an interpretation on it?  What are we as viewers supposed to experience by walking through them?
According to an interview with Christo and Jean-Claude,  they " want to create works of art of joy and beauty".  And that's it.  For my part, I can't see this beauty.  The gates seem fragile in their separation one from another, clumsy in their thousand-fold repetition which gives them the appearance of an orange herd in central park.  Had they all been linked by a long piece of orange fabric, maybe the effect would have been different. 
But I am probably just yearning for something akin to their previous works.  There was something so powerful about the idea of wrapping up monuments, transforming these huge relics of history and authority into gifts.  Something to make us realize that these monuments belong to the people, belong to the culture.  They are gifts.
Mayor Bloomberg managed to pull off a reading of the gates that would place it in the pool of the couple's other works: "Innovative works of art provoke debate, spark our imaginations and help us redefine the space we live in, and 'The Gates' will bring that experience to those who come to see it."  In one sense, the gates did redefine central park for me, it made me yearn to see the park without the gates.  But maybe this is due to the barriers along the gates which prevent people from straying out of the stripped path.  I trust that imprisonment isn't the sensation of joy and beauty Christo and Jean-Claude wanted to create.

In a little room of the Metropolitan Museum, a dozen of golden icons huddle around a shining representation of the Virgin and Christ. This jewelry box of paintings constitutes the museum's exhibit: "Duccio's Madonna and Child" and the central piece is one of Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna's masterpieces. The metropolitan recently acquired this painting for the golden price of 45 million dollars, a number which becomes rational considering the intricate beauty and the historical significance of the piece.

Duccio di Buoninsegna along with Giotto di Bondone is considered the founder of Western European art.  He is one of the initiators of European renaissance art.  Active during the early fourteenth century, his work constitutes a bridge from the rigid, apathetic Byzantine icons to the passionate, naturalistic renaissance paintings. 

Up until Duccio, the characters in religious representations wear self-reflecting gazes and rigid expressions devoid of human emotions.  They are divine in their distance from humanity.

In Byzantine representations of the Virgin and Christ, no emotional connection, no mother-child relationship is apparent. The two figures' gazes seldom meet, most often, both characters stare off in the distance towards the viewer, or one of them does so, leaving the other's gaze unanswered.

Duccio's Madonna and Child breaks away from this Byzantine representation. Upon the small (8x11 inches) alter-piece's gold leaf background, the Madonna enrobed in flamboyant green stares tenderly down at her child.  Her eyes are slightly hazy, as if dampened by affection. Her mouth anticipates a smile like a bud awaiting its blossom. The child stares up with wonderment into his mother's eyes, he playfully tugs at her veil.  The couple's gazes are directed outwards, towards each other.  They establish the emotional proximity of a mother and child between the two figures.

The amount of emotion that is transmitted between both characters is comparable to that in Renaissance artists Leonardo Da Vinci's Madonna and Child. Although Duccio's style retains Byzanitum's delicate sharpness and fragile precision. 

At the bottom of the painting lies a parapet upon which the Madonna stands. Seemingly a minor detail, the parapet marks yet another artistic step towards the renaissance.  It places the Madonna and Christ in the material world, they are represented on earth. In contrast, Byzantine representations suspend the couple on a golden expanse representing heaven.

Surrounding the magnificent couple are masterpieces by Giotto and Duccio's pupils. Like Duccio, Italian painter Giotto added emotions to his religious subjects. In his Epiphany, the Mage's reverent gazes alight on the newborn.  Most striking is the virgin Mary, she looks off to the side, away from her baby, her brow knitted in a frown. Perhaps she anticipates the fate of her child.

Giotto shades the characters faces offering an illusion of 3-dimensionality and make their expressions more realistic. The illusion of space was seldom explored in Byzantine art which emphasized the other-wordliness of its subjects through its flatness.

Pietro di Lorenzetti was Duccio's pupil.  The delicate shadows in his portrait of Saint Catherine of Alexandra along with her thought filled gaze further what Duccio had started. 

In Simone Martini's Crucifixion, a crowd of soldiers and saints chaotically mingles under Christ's crucified body.  This pupil of Duccio's decided to represent the Mary's violent emotion before her son's dead body by making her faint in the foreground. A surrounding group of friends sustain her, their features, stretched by terror and concern.

None of the pieces in the little room lack beauty.  The colors are sublime, their vivid tones heightened by the golden intricate background.  The delicate features are finely molded into expressions of sadness or joy. Moreover, they are all significant works, participants in the transition between two radically different artistic periods. 

What is disappointing though, is the failure of the exhibit to demonstrate their historical significance visually.  In the room, there is not one example of Byzantine art, nor is there any renaissance art. 

These are necessary though, to show what artistic background Duccio and his contemporaries had initially acquired, and what their experimentation later evolved into.  They are necessary to demonstrate the 14^th century's artistic significance visually instead of verbally (as it is stated in the exhibit's panel).  Without these, the exhibit lacks a clear thesis and becomes the simply pleasurable display of a handful of sublime Italian icons.

The Metropolitan Museum's "Dawn of a Golden Age".

The exhibit has usurped the space of last year's "Glory of Byzantium" without comparing to it scalewise.  Where the hanging byzantine chandelier had squizzed people along the wall like blocking paste, clustering chinese earthenware, silk and glass objects cower behind glass panes as intimidating museum goers lean in. 
Lack of glamour aside, the exhibit is well enough assembled to make its point, thrust a fragment of truth in our thoughts.  The first sections prepare us to receive it. They string early periods of art influenced by the West, South ... (you name it).  The following, last and most impressive section (a massive buddha and exquisitly garnished boddhisatvas almost challenge the Byzantine chandelier), reveals the flourishing Tang period pieces.  Our by now expert eye can pick out the foreign influences that assemble into its distinctively chinese style.  Point being: what is chinese today wasn't chinese in the first place.  I get it.