Posts from the “Painting” Category

The Vast Treasures of The Met Now Available in the Public Domain

Posted on February 8, 2017

Artwork: Egyptian, Fragmentary Head of a Queen, 1352-1356 B.C.E. Image provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, made about 375,000 public-domain images available for commercial and scholarly use through Open Access for anyone with a Creative Commons Zero license. This policy, which introduces partnerships with Wikimedia, Artstor, the Digital Public Library of America, Art Resource, and Pinterest, allows people from all walks of life free use of a vast range of digital images and data in from The Met’s vast history, collection, exhibitions, events, people, and activities.

Although the initiative was considered controversial when it was first introduced, as society continues to adapt itself to a digital interface, the movement to digitize and share works in the public domain has made major leaps and strides, recognizing that the open content movement is a necessity of modern life.

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Artwork: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868-69. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Categories: Africa, Art, Crave, Painting, Photography

Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959-1971

Posted on January 16, 2017

Artwork: Martial Raysse, Made in Japan, 1964, photomechanical reproductions and wallpaper with airbrush ink, gouache, ink, tacks, peacock feathers, and plastic flies on paper mounted on fiberboard, overall: 129.86 244.48 cm (51 1/8 96 1/4 in.) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972

For just over a decade, Virginia Dwan changed the landscape of the American art world at a critical period in its development. In 1959, at the age of 28, she launched Dwan Gallery in a storefront in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. Dwan was a natural, inasmuch as she worked on instinct. She had the dream of opening a gallery and she went for it, embracing the guts and nerve of the avant-garde.

Focused on the latest from Paris and New York, Dwan Gallery introduced Los Angeles to a definite selection of Abstract Expressionists, Neo-Dadaists, Pop Artists and Nouveaux Réalistes including Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Niki di Sant Phalle, and Jean Tinguely. Her 1962 group show My Country Tis of Thee has gone down in history as one of the earliest exhibitions of Pop Art and her 1964 exhibition Boxes marked the first time Andy Warhol presented his famed Brillo boxes.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Magritte: La trahison des images

Posted on January 16, 2017

Artwork: René Magritte, La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), 1929 Huile sur toile, 60,33 x 81,12 x 2,54 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection © Adagp, Paris 2016 © Photothèque R. Magritte / Banque d’Images, Adagp, Paris, 2016

La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est past une pipe) is one of Belgian painter René Magritte’s most infamous works. In English, the painting is known as The treachery of images, which depicts a sleek brown pipe with the words “This is not a pipe” underneath in French.

Naturally, it stops one dead in their tracks. Clearly this is a pipe we are looking at. But no, Magritte smiles with a sly grin. This is a painting. A pipe is an entirely different thing. This hangs on a wall. It is simply to be gazed upon for the pleasure of looking. Whereas a pipe, you stuff it, you hold it in your hands, set it aflame, and then draw it to your lips. While it might be a handsome object, its most important aspect is its function, one that is a matter of smoke and lungs, nicotine and blood, and that curious boost of energetic calmness that the drug so graciously gives.

Indeed, this is not a pipe. This is a painting calling itself out. The year was 1929, and it was quite unlike high art to take such a pithy view of itself. But Magritte had other plans for his life behind the easel. He abandoned the sanctity of art to use it as a means to deconstruct itself, creating a myriad of quixotic, romantic, sentimental, amusing, or tragic imagery.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Gene Davis: Hot Beat

Posted on January 14, 2017

Artwork: Gene Davis, Two Part Blue, about 1964, magna, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Florence Coulson Davis

“I became convinced that the way to make really good art was to do the outrageous, the unexpected—to be a renegade. That was my philosophy—to explore the seemingly impossible in art, to do things that were new for their own sake, whether they were good or bad,” American artist Gene Davis (1920-1985) reveals in the sumptuous monograph Gene Davis (Arts Publisher, 1982).

Indeed, throughout his life Davis left convention by the wayside. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he began his career as a sportswriter before covering the presidencies of Roosevelt and Truman. He was welcomed into the intimate circle, playing poker with President Truman on long trips across the United State. But proximity to power was not his dream. In his heart, he yearned to make art and although he couldn’t draw, in 1949 he began to paint.

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Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design

Posted on December 24, 2016

Photo: Omar Victor Diop Aminata, 2013, Photograph from the series The Studio of Vanities © Victor Omar Diop, 2014, Courtesy Magnin-A Gallery, Paris

Since its launch last year at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design, has been touring the world, showcasing contemporary African design in an extraordinary new light. Now on view at Kunsthal, Rotterdam, through January 15, 2017, this landmark exhibition features the work of more than 120 artists and designers working today, introducing a new generation of creators to the global stage.

Featuring object and furniture designs, graphic art, illustration, fashion, architecture, urban design, handicraft, video, film and photography, Making Africa reveals how design relates to and reflect the economic changes across the continent today. Many of the artists featured work in different disciplines and skillfully break with conventions to create an entirely new approach that is equal parts innovative and compelling.

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Vigilism, Idumota Market, Lagos 2081A.D., 2013 from the Our Africa 2081A.D. series, illustration for the Ikiré Jones Heritage Menswear Collection © Courtesy Olalekan [vigilism.com] and Walé Oyéjidé [ikirejones.com

Categories: Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight

Posted on December 23, 2016

Portrait of Carmen Herrera in front of Blue Monday, 1975, acrylic on canvas, as installed in “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” (September 16, 2016—January 2, 2017), Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. Photograph © Matthew Carasella (September 14, 2016).

At the tender age of 101, Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera is receiving her due with Lines of Sight, the first museum exhibition in New York City in nearly two decades. Currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, now through January 9, 2017, the exhibition focuses on the years between 1948 and 1978, when Herrera developed her groundbreaking style that revolutionized modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition features 50 masterworks including paintings, three-dimensional pieces, and works on paper that embody her signature hard-edged style, which she pioneered throughout the twentieth century. Following the Whitney, the show will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Oho (February 4-April 16 2017).

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art

Posted on December 22, 2016

Artwork: Amy Sherald, High Yella Masterpiece: We Ain’t No Cotton Pickin’ Negroes, 2011. Oil on canvas; 59 x 69 inches (149.86 x 175.26 cm). Collection of Keith Timmons, ESQ, CPA. Image courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, Illinois. © Amy Sherald.

The American South: a land shrouded with myth and mystery, wrapped in layers of illusions and untold history. Novelist William Faulkner suggested that the South is not so much a “geographical place” as an “emotional idea,” furthering the disjunction between the reality and illusion that has permeated the South throughout its existence.

Place is the foundation upon which culture is built and from this culture comes ten thousand things that shape and influence the human experience, from the physical and the spiritual to the intellectual and the emotional realms. To understand the multifaceted nature of the South, it behooves us to take a more nuanced view, taking in the many elements that make the South its own complex and fascinating world.

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, currently on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, through January 8, 2017, does just this, approaching the subject from the perspective of its aesthetic progeny. The exhibition presents the work of 60 contemporary artists including Romare Bearden, Sanford Biggers, William Christenberry, Thornton Dial, Sam Durant, William Eggleston, Jessica Ingram, Kerry James Marshall, Richard Misrach Gordon Parks, Ebony G. Patterson, Fahmu Pecou, Burk Uzzle, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

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Rachel Boillot, 38765 Panther Burn, MS from the series Post Script, 2014. Archival pigment print, edition 2/12; 20 x 25 inches (50.8 x 63.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Rachel Boillot.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

The Color Line: African-American Artists and Segregation

Posted on December 20, 2016

Artwork: David Hammons, African American Flag, 1990, 142.2 × 223.5 cm, © David Hammons, Courtesy of L’oeuvre de David Hammons prêtéedans le cadre de l’exposition est la suivante : U.N.I.A Flag, 1990, New York, Hudgins Family Collection

“Few evils are less accessible to the force of reason, or more tenacious of life and power, than a long-standing prejudice. It is a moral disorder, which creates the conditions necessary to its own existence, and fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction. It paints a hateful picture according to its own diseased imagination, and distorts the features of the fancied original to suit the portrait. As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate,” Frederick Douglass wrote in “The Color Line,” an essay published by The North American Review in June 1881.

In the essay, Douglass brilliantly traces a history of tribalism across Europe before it washed up on the shores of the United States where it took on a new corrupted form, using the construction of race to undermine and call in to doubt the veracity of every word written in the Declaration of Independence. Here, the expansion of tribalism projected onto race created psychopathic ideologies that provided a pretext by which the government could create of a nation founded on the twin engines of slavery and genocide.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

László Moholy-Nagy: Future Present

Posted on December 19, 2016

Artwork: László Moholy-Nagy, A 19, 1927. Oil and graphite on canvas, 80 x 95.5 cm. Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Ann Arbor, MI.

“Designing is not a profession but an attitude’ László Moholy-Nagy asserted in his 1947 book Vision in Motion, which was published a year after his death, with the cool self-assurance that came from a life dedicated to the integration of technology and the arts.

Born in Hungary in 1895, Moholy-Nagy moved to Vienna in 1919, then Berlin the following year. In 1923 he began teaching at the Bauhaus, a celebrated German art school that became famous for utilizing design as the bridge between crafts and fine art. The schools influence was so strong it became a style in its own right, influencing Modern design, architecture, and art.

It was here that Moholy-Nagy perfected his approach, allowing him to work in media as diverse as painting, photography, film, sculpture, advertising, product design, and theater sets with the ultimate goal of putting art to use. Believing that “The experience of space is not a privilege of the gifted few, but a biological function,” Moholy-Nagy set forth to create work that served the people.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Words Are All We Have

Posted on December 19, 2016

Artwork: Jaean-Michel Basquiat, Jack Johnson, 1982 © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, New York 2016.

Brooklyn’s finest Jean-Michel Basquiat first came to fame writing SAMO© on the streets of New York between 1977 and 1980. He came up with the name one day while he and high school friend Al Diaz (BOMB 1) were smoking weed they called “the same old shit.” They shortened to “Same Old,” which easily became “SAMO” and a character was born.

SAMO© found his way on to the streets, a provocateur with a pithy yet poetic sense of humor. The name would appear alongside aphorisms, multiple-choice questions, or other turns of phrase that mocked the world at large. Anthony Haden-Guest reports in his book True Colors (1998) that Basquiat had told him, “Samo was sophomoric. Same old shit. It was supposed to be a logo like Pepsi.”

Perhaps this is why it caught on and stood out from the flourishing graff scene that dominated to New York. Basquiat did not participate in the glorious “Wild Style” of the day; no masterpieces of color and line that made heads turn and tongues wag. Instead, he kept to simple, clean block letters and went about his day, dropping bon mots that captured the attention of the Downtown art scene as it was taking shape.

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Painting

Awol Erizku: I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me

Posted on December 15, 2016

Artwork: Awol Erizku, Come and See Me ft. Drake – PARTYNEXTDOO,R 2016, Acrylic on wooden panel, 72 x 96 i. Courtesy of Nina Johnson, Miami.

Born in Ethiopia and raised in the South Bronx, Los Angeles-based artist Awol Erizku beautifully embodies the zeitgeist with I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me, a new series of 20 paintings and conceptual sound collage currently at Nina Johnson, Miami, now through January 7, 2017.

The exhibition takes a the image of the beautifully manicured hand of Queen Nefertiti holding a rose, appropriated from nail salon signage where ErIzku keeps his studio, as its central motif for a series of paintings. Throughout the works, elements of the cityscape take shape, be it the patches of buffed-out segments of paint, the ubiquitous cross outs of a graff writer who lives to hate, or the appearance of Rihanna’s adorable “badgirlriri” avi.

Bearing the titles of songs like “Where Do We Go” by Solange, “Love Can Be” by Yeek”, and “First Take” by Travis Scott, Erizku’s paintings are accompanied by a sound collage that includes work by Drake, Future, and Party Next Door, fusing the visual and sonic realms to create an immersive environment that evokes the here and now, invoking the cultural moment that speaks to people from all walks of life, resonating a deep, harmonious melody backed by a throbbing bass.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting