Comic CONsciousness

Hudson Yards

Much hoopla has been published about the ‘largest urban development project in US history.’  But it has been predominantly negative. Hudson Yards is overrun with Super stores like Balenciaga and Hermes, and criticism over ‘public space’ [air] waste above the turn around yards from Penn Station.

The Shed’s wheels are forty feet high, that use the tracks to reveal its roof, and cover an expansive outdoor venue for top flight mainstream performances. Within the West Side Rail Yard of 28 acres, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with others, The Shed is made of steel, and a translucent Texlon-based polymer, which rolls out to form McCourt Plaza. Co–designer David Rockwell stated, “the mark of a good design is that that it survives reality.” (Credit: Pilar Viladas)   “Meh” – I say.  In a place of white-boxed galleries and glass stores, it is not embracing and certainly not a novel use of urban development-same old stuff.  It’s our contemporaneous Atlantis.

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ICE, photograph by Henry Wessel, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

As a shooter of film for forty years, it has been a struggle to grasp the impact of the digital age and the Internet on of the status of photography in our world.  The act of shooting has become an indulgent, social event.

Henry Wessel, sadly recently deceased in California, was a profound photographer, mentor, professor and thinker on photography, especially on the American West.

“Pressing the shutter is saying yes to the world.’” One of his most poignant quotations which set me back; upon arriving at LAX, he commented on the light intensity, “it looked like you could lean against it.” He was honored by many museum exhibitions from Szarkowski’s at Moma, to Eastman House, to Cologne. He was instrumental in the photo program at the San Francisco Institute, joining its faculty in 1973.

Lee Friedlander called him the “Photo Buddha.” I could mention Walker Evens or Cartier Bresson as his inspiration, but he embarked further into the ordinary terrain of life. This plots a direct collusion with Instagram and Facebook imaging. He was concerned about the proliferation of pictures and it’s deterioration of the import of the photograph.

“People don’t pay much attention these days to the descriptive, expressive and suggestive facts found in a good still photograph.

“The process of photographing is a pleasure: eyes open, receptive, sensing, and at some point connecting. It’s thrilling to be outside your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts.”

That’s picture taking.

I cannot help to be critically drawn to the narcissistic nature of people’s images – selfies, food, pets and fronting famous objects. Nothing to do with image making but all about themselves. Sadly that is our future.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

October 24, 2019 – 24 February 24, 2020 at
Musée du Louvre, Paris

The year 2019 has a special significance for the Louvre, as it will mark the fifth centenary of the artist’s death at Amboise, in the Loire Valley. When his patron Giuliano de’ Medici died, Leonardo da Vinci left Italy for France at the invitation of the new French king, François I. Probably around November 1516, he arrived at the Château du Clos Lucé, a stone’s throw from the king’s residence at Amboise.

This château was the splendid home provided by François I for Leonardo, whom he appointed “First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King,” a position for which the artist received a princely allowance. This is where he spent the last three years of his life, compiling notes on various scientific and artistic subjects with a view to publishing treatises, and working on the paintings he had brought with him to France, such as Saint Anne, the Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist. Some remarkable drawings from this period, done on French-made paper, illustrate his work on hydraulic projects, festivities for the king and a monumental equestrian sculpture.

On May 2, 1519, the great Italian Renaissance genius died at the Château du Clos Lucé. This is why the Louvre holds almost a third of his corpus of paintings: those he brought to France were purchased by François I and entered the royal collections, which probably already included The Virgin of the Rocks and La Belle Ferronnière, acquired by Louis XII. This outstanding set of paintings, which formed the beginning of the Louvre’s collections, was supplemented by twenty-two of the artist’s remarkable drawings.

The fifth centenary of the Italian master’s death is therefore a unique opportunity for the Louvre to bring as many as possible of the fourteen to seventeen paintings now attributed to Leonardo, according to specialists, to join the five large paintings in the Paris museum. The exhibition will include a large selection of drawings and a small but significant group of paintings and sculptures that will provide some tangible context.

This international retrospective will present the latest research findings, critical editions of key documents and the results of the latest analysis carried out in laboratories or during recent conservation treatment by the Louvre.

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REMBRANDT - VELÁZQUEZ: Dutch and Spanish masters

October 11, 2019 – January 19, 2020 at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Rembrandt - Velázquez: Dutch and Spanish masters will present an outstanding selection of paintings by Dutch and Spanish masters of the 17th century, including for the first time some of the greatest pieces by Rembrandt van Rijn, Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals, Bartolomé Murillo, Johannes Vermeer and Francisco Zurbarán, amongst other outstanding figures. In partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid), this unprecedented exhibition will mark the 200 year anniversary of the Prado and the Year of Rembrandt in 2019.

he 17th century can be regarded as the Golden Age of both the Netherlands and Spain; a period of tremendous artistic achievement that saw the emergence of two of the greatest painters in history: Rembrandt and Velázquez, leading artists of their respective lands. In the exhibition, paintings of highly-renowned Dutch and Spanish masters will be displayed in pairs, combining two works —one from each country— to explore, for the first time, the stimulating and often surprising dialogues that inevitably arise between the paintings. During a time of war and political tension, the Dutch and Spanish artistic traditions seemed to come closer than is generally thought. By pairing the paintings together, the exhibition sheds light on those points of contact, even if sometimes the differences might seem stronger than the similarities. Each pair has a story behind, centered around religion, faith, wealth, power, specific iconographical motifs, light or composition.

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SEE AND BE SEEN: Picturing Notoriety

June 14, 2019 – October 22, 2019, at Norton Museum of Art

From the 19th-century flaneur to today’s social media networkers, the need to get a glimpse of famous or notorious personalities and the compulsion to be seen within an aura of celebrity and influence has driven – and been driven by – the graphic arts. Photography, printmaking, and the rise of illustrated periodicals have given way to televised reality shows and the posts, tweets, and ‘likes’ that define viral internet exposure. In response, artists have absorbed and mobilized the transition from one technology to the next. Their visions and sensibilities are at the core of how we respond to and define “celebrity.”

The exhibition will feature more than 50 works from the 19th to the 21st Centuries and will include images of Queen Victoria, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Marilyn Monroe, and Lil’ Kim in works by such diverse artists as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Hollywood photographer George Hurrell, and artists Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Annie Leibovitz, and John Baldessari.

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PREHISTORY: A Modern Enigma

Exhibitions: May 8, 2019 - September 16, 2019, at Center Pompidou, Paris

Travel in a story of glances and fascination, in the presence of prehistoric, modern and contemporary icons! From the Mammoth de la Madeleine to Dove Allouche and Louise Bourgeois, this original exhibition highlights the link between prehistory and modern and contemporary art.

Over a chronological journey, discover how artists and society have come under the allure of origins during modernity, yielding to a fantasy vision of what was before history. This real time machine has constantly shaped the mental horizons of modernity and provided concrete models for experiments of all kinds.

The Centre Pompidou is staging an original exhibition presenting the ties uniting prehistory with modern and contemporary art.

How, in the great period of crisis called "modernity," first artists, then society as a whole, felt drawn to their «origins» and how a fantasy vision was built up of «what preceded History». It reveals that some of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st century were haunted by the question of «prehistory»: Picasso, Miró but also Cézanne, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Beuys, Klein, Dubuffet, Louise Bourgeois, Marguerite Duras, Robert Smithson, and, among our contemporaries, Giuseppe Penone, Miquel Barceló, Marguerite Humeau, Pierre Huyghe, Dove Allouche,
and others.

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MANET AND MODERN BEAUTY

May 26, 2019 – September 8, 2019, at Art Institute Chicago

The first Art Institute exhibition devoted exclusively to Édouard Manet in over 50 years focuses on the transformation of the artist’s style in his later years.

By the late 1870s, when this exhibition begins, Édouard Manet had become recognized as a painter of modern life. He had long looked to historical subjects and style for inspiration but in the 1870s grew more and more immersed in the now—eventually proposing a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity. While he continued to pursue highly finished, heroically scaled paintings intended for the Salon throughout these later years (a time also marked by health problems and limited mobility), he simultaneously approached smaller works more fluidly and spontaneously, taking up pastel and watercolor while unapologetically embracing beauty and visual pleasure.

This exhibition is the first to focus on this important period in the artist's career, bringing together an impressive array of portraits of fashionable women—favorite actresses and models, bourgeois women of his acquaintance, and his wife—as well as intimate male friends. Among these are two striking paintings, one of the young model-actress Jeanne Demarsy and the other of his friend Méry Laurent. Called Jeanne (Spring) and Autumn (Portrait of Méry Laurent), the pair comprises the only two completed works in a project to portray the seasons through paintings of stylishly attired women.

Supplementing this display are the delicate and rarely seen letters Manet wrote to his friends, featuring exquisite illustrations of fruits and flowers; garden pictures, which themselves often feature elegantly attired women; and flower studies, consummate expressions of Manet’s favorite subjects at the end of his life. Punctuating the presentation are large-scale multifigure paintings, including In the Conservatory and Boating, both shown in the 1879 Salon, which focus attention on modern social and gender relations. Together these works showcase both Manet’s responsiveness to the moment and the continual flowering of his artistry.

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The EY EXHIBITION: Van Gogh and Britain

March 27 – 11 August 11 2019, at Tate Britain

The young Vincent van Gogh spent nearly three years in England between 1873 and 1876. His love of British culture lasted his whole life and contributed to the style and subject matter of his art. Born in the Netherlands in 1853, Van Gogh tried careers in the art trade and as a teacher and then a preacher before becoming an artist in 1880, at the age of twenty-seven. He died ten years later.

This exhibition is in two parts. The first looks at Van Gogh’s experience in London, the art and literature that caught his attention and its role in his journey as an artist. The second explores the impact of Van Gogh’s art and life on British artists up to the 1950s. The exhibition provides the opportunity to view artworks by Van Gogh afresh, to see British culture through his eyes and to see him through the eyes of the British artists he inspired.

By the 1920s Van Gogh’s pictures were exhibited regularly in Britain and collected by British individuals and public galleries. He became known to the wider public and established as a modern master.

The English publication of two biographies and Van Gogh’s letters led to his life becoming as famous as his art, and the two became strongly connected. Many British artists walked in his footsteps and interpreted their lives and surroundings in similar ways.

In 1929, eighteen of Van Gogh’s artworks filled the final room of a large survey of Dutch art at the Royal Academy in London. The catalogue summed up Van Gogh as ‘the brilliant and unhappy genius‘. Stories about Van Gogh’s mental illness, self-harm and death affected the way people looked at his art. The later self-portraits and his last paintings took on extra significance.

At the age of thirty-two Van Gogh left the Netherlands and joined his brother Theo in Paris. Theo was an art dealer, and Van Gogh met a network of artists.

In France Van Gogh developed his distinct mature style. He spent two years in Paris before moving to Arles in the south to set up an artists’ community. After only ten months, these plans were ended by serious mental illness which began to come back every few months. Van Gogh admitted himself to the Saint-Paul de Mausole hospital, in Saint-Rémy, where he continued to paint.

In spring 1890 Van Gogh moved to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris and closer to Theo, where he created a picture nearly every day. On 27 July of that year he shot himself in the chest and died of his wounds two days later.

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BLACK MODELS: from Géricault to Matisse

March 26, 2019 – July 21, 2019 at Musée d'Orsay

Taking a multi-disciplinary approach that combines the history of art and the history of ideas, this exhibition explores aesthetic, political, social and racial issues as well as the imagery unveiled by the representation of black figures in visual arts, from the abolition of slavery in France (1794) to the modern day. Designed to provide a long-term perspective, the exhibition looks more particularly at three key periods: the era of abolition (1794-1848), the new painting era up to the Matisse’s discovery of the Harlem Renaissance and the early 20th century avant-garde movement and the successive generations of post-war and contemporary artists.

The exhibition primarily focuses on the question of models, and therefore the dialogue between the artist who paints, sculpts, engraves or photographs and the model who poses. It notably explores the way in which the representation of black subjects in major works by Théodore Géricault, Charles Cordier, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, as well as the photographs of Nadar and Carjat, evolved.

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HANS HOFFMAN: The Nature of Abstraction

February 27, 2019 – July 21, 2019, at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California

It’s impossible to imagine a history of American abstract art in the postwar era without Hofmann, who taught many budding New York painters of the time—including Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—in the ways of color theory and modernist styles. Hofmann’s work, with its juxtaposed swatches of opposing colors and uneven textures, is lesser known than that of his students, so this show will bring together nearly 70 works to spotlight how he translated European techniques for American audiences.

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“THE JEWELED ISLE: Art from Sri Lanka”

December 9, 2018 – June 23, 2019, at LACMA

The first comprehensive survey of Sri Lankan art organized by an American museum, The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka presents some 240 works addressing nearly two millennia of Sri Lankan history. The image of a bejeweled isle, first invoked in Greco-Roman accounts of Sri Lanka’s precious gems, inspired numerous literary descriptions of the island’s wealth and tropical beauty. The Jeweled Isle includes precious decorative objects fashioned from gold, silver, and ivory, and 19th-century photographs documenting Sri Lanka’s extraordinary monuments, scenery, and flora. Several artworks convey the importance of sacred sites and relics in Sri Lankan Buddhist practice, while rare images of Hindu gods attest to the long and constant interaction between Sri Lanka and South India. Exquisite ivories, textiles, and furnishings further reflect nearly four centuries of European colonial presence in Sri Lanka and the dynamic interaction between local and foreign visual traditions. Featuring LACMA’s rarely displayed collection of Sri Lankan art—one of the finest and most extensive in the U.S.—the exhibition presents a timely exploration and celebration of a geographically complex, ethnically diverse, and multicultural South Asian hub.

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SEBASTIO SALGADO: Genesis

November 16, 2018 – June 23, 2019, at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Glaciers, densely populated by seals, endless Sahara dunes or mist-covered mountains in the Amazon rainforest: Sebastião Salgado depicts the earth as a creation of overwhelming beauty and thus sharpens our awareness of its preciousness. On over 30 journeys to all corners of the world, the French-Brazilian has created a photographic essay that simultaneously documents the majesty and the vulnerability of our environment. Salgado has sailed across oceans, scaled mountains, and crossed deserts. He has observed animals and met indigenous peoples in his endeavor to capture their environment and culture. The exhibition is a dramatic manifesto that not only touches visitors with its opulent black-and-white photographs, but also raises open questions about how we deal with the planet.

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We have celebrated The Boulevardiers raison de’tre for five years now, founded on the French pre-occupation of strolling and window gazing in Paris, and London, and Rome. This Publisher was struck by a newly found term, "Faire du Lèche-Vitrines," which is crudely translated as “window licking.” Now knowing the decorum of the French, I am convinced that they would not apply this term to their promenading in the trendy section, the Marais, of Paris, which is the center of all that is cool, hip and expensive. The original center of Paris, built in the 13th century by the Knights Templar, much has remained, avoiding destruction by City decree in 1964. The Boulevardiers strolled through this section last summer on the way to L’Orangrie and gazed covetously at the many shops, bakeries and patisseries... and could very well appreciate this phrase.

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Guest Musing from The Boulevardiers "Muse" Sally Steele:

Never let it be said that the Boulevardiers don't celebrate all who wander in search of inspiration, or in daily observation. A recently published book, The Flâneuse, is a lively tome focusing on the French flâneuse, the feminine of flâneur: defined as a woman who is or who behaves like a flaneur; who is defined as an idle man-about-town.

Author Lauren Elkin: "The portraits I paint here attest that the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own…She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk."

For some time, I have been lamenting whilst walking my town, enviously observing the abundance of hipster bistros and coffee bars populated all day and into the evening by those lucky enough to grab the time to simply sit and watch the world go by. But how oh so boring that would be!

Recently perusing the tales of Diego, the sire of Galapagos tortoises, I smiled having "met" Diego in the Galapagos several years ago. And when reading about the rich arts scene in Milan, funded mostly via the largesse of the fashion houses, my head was full of images of days spent wandering there, not so long ago. As I poured over my travel photos I saw Los Angeles, Lima, and Santiago; New York, Maui and Athens; Venice, Istanbul, and Marseilles; Cannes, Sydney, and Tokyo, and so many more. I walked for miles in for London, from my favorite museum, The V&A, to Harrod's, to the trendy parts of town with all the big name galleries. Ditto for New York. And Rome, major renovations to ancient and Renaissance sites currently underway, again due to the largesse of the world's fashion leaders. And oh, Paris, strolling in the Tuileries in the drizzle after a glorious morning spent at l'Orangerie. Then there were some standout strolls on La Croisette amidst the excitement of the awards season. I live a fanciful life!

I'm lucky enough to be partner to the ultimate flâneur, who has so graciously guided me into becoming a full-fledged flâneuse.

Here's to women everywhere, and to living a life that takes the good walk, and turns it into the truly great walk.

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The raking light of fall brings out the Flaneur in me, the season of Flanerie. Elaine Sciolino reminds us of the first establishment of this pastime in literature, “Tableau de Paris,” a twelve volume set of observations the gestalt the of ‘street’ in Paris. Half a century later, this sites’ figurehead, Charles Baudelaire, demarked the ‘wander-spectator’ activity as flaneur. “The crowd is his habitat, as is air for the bird or water for the fish” he quoted.

This activity is so important to the French, that Hermes created a pop-up museum on the left bank to honor its significance. The artistic director of the project, Pierre-Alexis Dumas also created an illustrated book on the subject. It’s a small single room structure with four window displays, including from the collection of a past president, Emile Hermes.

To observe yes, to interact no. The sounds, the smells and the visual jewels glistening in the shop windows- draws us to the streets of Paris, or London or our favorite ville, Roma. And of course, the most animated of them all – the people who stroll and sit and observe in the cafes, not the harried New Yorkers who are irritated by strollers in their path. Years ago, I proposed a story for Life Magazine, on the important promenades of the world, but to no avail. Sadly, it is not an American occupation.

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On every trip to NY, I visit one of my favorite urban spaces, The Grand Central Oyster Bar. Between my passion for oysters and my adoration for Guastavino's tile craft, this is my ideal spot. We traveled to 103rd Street this last trip to enjoy a beautifully illustrated and informative exhibition at The Museum of New York, of his sumptuous tilework throughout New York employed by McKim, Mead and White, and NY City (including the recently uncovered bottom to the Queensborough Bridge, now a Farmer's Market).

Guastavino tile is the "Tile Arch System" patented in the United States in 1885 by Valencian (Spanish) architect and builder Rafael Guastavino (1842–1908). Guastavino vaulting is a technique for constructing robust, self-supporting arches and architectural vaults using interlocking terracotta tiles and layers of mortar to form a thin skin, with the tiles following the curve of the roof as opposed to horizontally (corbelling), or perpendicular to the curve (as in Roman vaulting). This is known as timbrel vaulting, because of supposed likeness to the skin of a timbrel or tambourine. It is also called "Catalan vaulting" and "compression-only thin-tile vaulting".

Guastavino tile is found in some of New York’s most prominent Beaux-Arts landmarks and in major buildings across the United States.

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