Literature

An enlightening exhibit at the illustrious Cooper Hewitt Museum, Willi Smith: Street Couture, on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street (the old Frick mansion), focuses on Willi Smith, a ‘streetwear’ designer in the eighties–and a dear friend who fell to AIDS. The exhibit features Smith’s portrait by Boulevardiers Publisher, Kim Steele.  My portrait graces the entrance of the Cooper Hewitt exhibit– modeled after the original site at PS1, where I photographed Smith, for an exhibition titled “Art as Damaged Goods.” The current exhibition is suspended at the moment due to the coronavirus.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

NERO: Life and Legacy

November 12, 2020 - March 28, 2021 at British Museum, London

Nero (AD37-AD68) is the archetypal villain, the Roman all students of ancient history love to hate. Any accomplishment he achieved in nearly 14 years as Roman Emperor—he was the last ruler of the august Julio-Claudian line—is overshadowed by tales of murder, debauchery, corruption and cruelty. Thanks to accounts by ancient writers such as Suetonius, Pliny the Elder and Tacitus, we know of Nero’s penchant for patricide, matricide and fratricide (basically, all the major “cides”), his sexual interest in both sexes (the more unavailable the better) and his mad extravagance. Nero’s taste for the finer things is best illustrated by his Golden House, which boasted surfaces made of gold, gems and ivory, a 120ft-tall statue of the emperor and a banqueting hall that rotated day and night. During the Great Fire of Rome in AD64, which destroyed two-thirds of the city, Nero reportedly played the fiddle while marvelling at “the beauty of the flames”.

The British Museum is attempting to separate fact from fiction in a 200-piece exhibition that explores contrasts in written sources and seeks to answer the question: who was Nero? A press statement asks if he was “an inexperienced ruler reconciling change in the face of political diversity, or a merciless, matricidal maniac?” We will have to wait and see.

~~~

RAPHAEL

October 3, 2020 - January 24, 2021 at National Gallery, London, 3

The National Gallery in London will hold what promises to be one of the greatest ever exhibitions on Raphael with key loans coming from major museums including the Musée du Louvre, Vatican Museums and Galleria degli Uffizi. Among the paintings gathered for show will be Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist, also known as the Esterházy Madonna, (1508) from Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Terranuova Madonna (1504-05) from Berlin’s Staatliche Museum, to be shown alongside the museum's own masterpieces such as The Madonna of the Pinks (around 1506-07). Altogether the museum hopes to assemble around 30 Raphael paintings, with 20 or so outside loans. The show will also include important drawings such as Study for the Head of an Apostle in the Transfiguration (1518-20), which had come to England in the 16th century and passed into the Chatsworth collection. It was sold in 2012 at Sotheby’s, fetching £29.7m, then a record price for a drawing and will be coming on loan from a private collection in New York. The exhibition will cover the entire span of Raphael’s career, not just paintings and drawings, but also his involvement in archaeology, architecture and poetry, as well as prints, sculpture, tapestry and the applied arts. There will be several shows this year marking the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, including another major show at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, (March 3 - June 2, 2020).

~~~

GERHARD RICHTER: Painting After All

August 15, 2020 - January 18, 2021 at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

After a long absence, Gerhard Richter will return to US museums next year with his first major retrospective in two decades. The German painter, whose tireless experiments in form and format have made him a critical darling and auction house juggernaut, is due to present more than six decades of work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in August. It follows a version of the show that debuts in New York in the spring in what is due to be one of the final shows at the Met Breuer (4 March-5 July).

“He is one of the greatest painters of our time,” says Sheena Wagstaff, who is co-curating the Met Breuer show. “The twin modes of abstraction and figuration that he developed are now flourishing among younger generations of artists.”

The exhibition centres on the artist’s ground-breaking series lsuch as Cage (2006) and Birkenau (2014) while showcasing some of the painter’s earliest lithographs and other works not shown before in a museum exhibition. They include Group of People, a 1965 black-and-white painting from Richter’s early photo-based practice, which features a man reading a newspaper amid a crowd of demonstrators. Such works, says the curator, are a testament to not only the artist’s examination of art history but his engagement in the fraught political history surrounding it.

~~~

THE TORLONIA MARBLES: Collecting Masterpieces

April 3, 2020 - January 15, 2021 at Musei Capitolini, Rome,

A long battle between the Italian state and Alessandro Torlonia, who died in 2017 aged 92, has come to an end, and to celebrate the peace, 96 works from the family’s superb collection of 620 Greek and Roman sculptures will go on show this April, having been inaccessible for half a century. To emphasise the importance of the exhibition, not only is the Italian president due to open the show but the sculptures will spill out into the gallery housing Rome’s earliest collection: the bronze sculptures donated to the people in 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV, which include the Capitoline wolf feeding Romulus and Remus. The curator of the exhibition is Salvatore Settis, a noted classical scholar and former head of the Getty Research Institute, who mounted a ground-breaking exhibition on copies in classical sculpture for the opening of the Prada Foundation in 2015. He explains that the Torlonia show is of a collection that has incorporated earlier collections, right back to the 15th century. To gain the interest of the viewer without any classical education, he believes that the elegance of the display by the architect David Chipperfield will help a great deal, along with the fact that he has given the exhibition five stories to tell. Among these will be an evocation of the Museo Torlonia, which was open to the gentry from 1874 to the end of the 1940s, and a section about the pieces dug up by the Torlonia themselves on their huge estates. “We have also tried to put the pieces together in such a way that even a non-classicist asks questions,” Settis says.

~~~

ART at the TUDOR COURTS

October 6, 2020 - January 10, 2021 at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The late 15th-century Tudor dynasty, compared to royalty on the other side of the English Channel, were johnny-come-latelies. As upstarts, they were keen to prove themselves the equals of the more deeply rooted European dynasties, such as the tenth-century Valois, the 11th-century Habsburgs and Estes, or the 12th-century Colonnas. At the same time, the legitimacy of Tudor claims to the throne of England was itself shaky and their failure to produce multiple children did not add to their security. But, in order to keep up with the Joneses and materially to insist on their status, each successive Tudor monarch (with the possible exception of the short-reigned Mary I) collected and displayed works of art on a scale comparable to any other royal house. This exhibition shows the cosmopolitan range of their tastes from Henry VII’s seizure of the throne in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Works by European armourers, goldsmiths, printers, manuscript illuminators, sculptors, painters and weavers, from both the Met’s own collections and from international loans, will be brought together to show what was the particular Tudor style. Among the highlights is Hans Holbein’s Portrait of Henry VIII of England (around 1537), on loan from Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

~~~

THE OLMECS and the CULTURES of the GULF of MEXICO

May 19 - November 15 at Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris

The Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac has joined forces with Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia to present the first major exhibition on the Olmecs in Europe. While the Olmecs, who inhabited southern Mexico from 1400BC to 400BC, are celebrated in the Americas, European audiences are less familiar with the Pre-Columbian civilisation than with the Aztec and Mayan peoples who came after them. The museum aims to bring greater recognition to the Olmecs by presenting a display of more than 200 artefacts that show their economic, social, political and artistic prowess as well as their development into the first major Mesoamerican civilisation.

The exhibition examines concepts such as symbolism, writing systems, ritualism and ideology that led to the creation of the Olmecs as a complex society, which, in turn, paved the way for the development of subsequent Mesoamerican civilisations. “The rise to social complexity is a rare event,” says Steve Bourget, the Branly’s head curator, who oversees its Americas collection. “It only happened in about six places in the world, and the process that took place in Mesoamerica is still poorly understood.”

Known for their colossal heads carved from stone, Olmec artisans also worked in clay, wood and jade. Scholars think this 40cm-tall figure of a baby holding an ear of corn may have been an offering to, or a depiction of, the god of maize, as the crop was a staple of the Olmec diet.

~~~

ORDER and ORNAMENT: Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablatures

September 27, 2019 – September 27, 2020 at Whitney Museum of American Art

This exhibition will present a diverse array of works on paper by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) related to his Entablatures series from the 1970s. Inspired by the architectural facades and ornamental motifs he encountered around Wall Street and elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, the series addresses many of Lichtenstein’s central artistic themes while demonstrating a unique emphasis on texture, surface, relief, and reflectivity.

Named after the horizontal structures that sit atop the columns in Classical Greek architecture, Lichtenstein’s Entablatures represent a distinctly American derivative, one based in revivalist, industrialized architectural imitations that were built en masse in the early twentieth century. By isolating clichéd symbols of—in the artist’s words—“imperial power” and “the establishment,” Lichtenstein traces the effect of mass production and replication on cultural forms. A sustained investigation into pattern and repetition, the Entablatures also underscore the echoes of Classical order embedded within Minimalist sculpture and Color Field painting.

The first exhibition at the Whitney devoted to Lichtenstein’s work since the transformative gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, this capsule presentation provides a focused look at a single pivotal series, highlighting the artist’s inventive processes and techniques across drawings, collages, prints, photographs, and archival materials.

~~~

ARTEMESIA

April 4 - July 26 at National Gallery, London

The first UK exhibition on Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) will focus on her singular position as a successful female painter in 17th-century Europe and how she turned it to her advantage. The show’s curator, Letizia Treves, says that the “very selective” presentation of 35 works at London’s National Gallery—including 29 paintings firmly attributed to Gentileschi—will invite visitors to consider “Artemisia in the round”, as a talented artist, storyteller, entrepreneur and “determined woman of wit and passion”.

The broad chronology ranges across the Italian painter’s 40-year career, “drawing attention to her adaptability to different markets and tastes in the cities where she worked”, Treves says. Trained in the Roman studio of her father Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia established herself as an artist in Florence and returned to Rome in the 1620s before settling for the last 25 years of her life in Naples.

The museum’s recently acquired Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1615-17), which was unknown until it was discovered by a French auctioneer, will appear for the first time in context with star loans such as Susannah and the Elders (1610), Artemisia’s first signed work, and the unflinchingly bloody Judith Beheading Holofernes (1611-12). One room of the exhibition will explore images of the female hero, underscoring how Artemisia “brought an unprecedented female perspective to traditional subject matter”, Treves says.

~~~

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

March 18 - June 15 at Centre Pompidou, Paris,

The Bulgarian-born French artist Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude first had the idea of wrapping the Arc de Triomphe when they rented a small flat nearby from 1958 to 1964. Their dream will come true this autumn (19 September-4 October) when the imposing monument will be shrouded in a silvery blue fabric, tied by 7,000 metres of red rope.

But before that, the Centre Pompidou will play host to the first institutional show on the duo in France, which will focus on the years they spent in the French capital. Previously unseen works such as Cratères (1959-61), a series influenced by Jean Dubuffet, will be included as well as a special focus on the Pont Neuf project, which, along with the Reichstag in Berlin, is one of the most famous landmarks the pair covered in fabric.

Since Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, Christo has carried on alone, but she remains a constant companion. In a recent interview in The Art Newspaper, he said: “She was extremely argumentative, very critical and I miss that so much. I always think when things become very difficult, what would Jeanne-Claude think now?”

~~~

VAN EYCK: an Optical Revolution

February 1 - April 30 at Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent

Around half of the approximately 20 works firmly attributed to Jan van Eyck (around 1390-1441) will be gathered in Ghent for one of the largest exhibitions ever on the Flemish Old Master. The show will feature a number of freshly restored works, including the outer panels of the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) and Portrait of Baudouin de Lannoy (around 1438-40), which will come straight from the Berlin Gemäldegalerie’s conservation department. The Berlin restorers will have removed the old varnish and surface dirt, old retouchings and fillings, and will have applied up-to-date restorations of paint and a new layer of varnish. A relatively recent cleaning has also established Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon (around 1428-30) as autograph. In addition, but involving no restoration, there will be a unique opportunity to see the two versions of the Madonna at the Fountain side by side (1439 from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, and 1440 from the Frick Collection, New York). The exhibition will be complemented by myriad events as part of the Flemish Masters initiative (2018-20), a series of year-long programmes focusing on a different Dutch Master each year.

~~~

MAKING MARVELS: Science & Splendor at the Courts of Europe

November 35, 2019 – March 1, 2020 at
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Between 1550 and 1750, nearly every royal family in Europe assembled vast collections of valuable and entertaining objects. Such lavish public spending and display of precious metals was considered an expression of power. Many princes also believed that the possession of artistic and technological innovations conveyed status, and these objects were often prominently showcased in elaborate court entertainments, which were characteristic of the period.

Making Marvels will explore the complex ways in which the wondrous items collected by early modern European princes, and the contexts in which they were displayed, expressed these rulers' ability to govern. Approximately 170 objects—including clocks, automata, furniture, musical instruments, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, print media, and more—from both The Met collection and over fifty lenders worldwide will be featured. Visitors will discover marvelous innovations that engaged and delighted the senses of the past, much like twenty-first-century technology holds our attention today—through suspense, surprise, and dramatic transformations.

~~~

LEONARDO DA VINCI

October 24, 2019 – 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.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

~~~