Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/article/the-influences-of-manet/
Painter Alan Gouk visits Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy (through April 14, 2013) and muses on the ways Manet has influenced later painters.
Gouk concludes: "There are aspects of modernism which of course challenge this nexus of values, but Manet’s art is a permanent reminder that the complex constructions of cerebral compulsiveness, the ploddings of so called 'realism,' or indexes of socio-political advance in mores and life-style, however 'modernistic' they may consider themselves to be, are likely to be, in spite of themselves less a true reflection of their times than an indictment of it. They have missed the message. Manet emphasises that the continuity of painting, the continuity of value in life, is made apparent if the artist finds and holds on to his own mode of vision, trusting his own eyesight and his 'convictions of taste,' influenced as they inevitably will be by the passing show, and the march of 'history'."
Link to Post:
http://artobserved.com/2013/02/new-york-paul-klee-late-klee-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-through-february-24-2013/
K. Shahi blogs about the exhibition Late Klee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through February 24, 2013.
Shahi writes: "In 1936, Klee was diagnosed with scleroderma, a chronic systemic autoimmune disease. Knowing that he was nearing the end of his life, Klee’s work took on a renewed sense of urgency. As the Metropolitan Museum describes, he began to work more quickly, his lines becoming heavier, forms more generalized, colors more simple and deliberate. Chronology is not the primary emphasis of “Late Klee;” the exhibition does not map a straightforward progression. Instead, the artist’s rapidly shifting experiments with form, color and composition reveal a creativity that was unimpeded – indeed, even abetted – by his impending death."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/64046/fritz-winters-crystalline-vision/
John Yau considers the work of Fritz Winter on the occasion of the exhibition Licht-Bilder: Fritz Winter and Abstract Photography at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, on view through February 17, 2013.
Yau writes that "In a number of the 'light pictures,' Winter compresses semi-transparent crystalline forms, a dark gray, depthless space and a moon-like orb, which he overlays with a black, open linear structure. In these works the tension between surface and depth is held by the black linear structure, through which a soft radiant light emanates from the gray depthlessness and amber-colored crystalline forms. A sharper symbolist glow comes from the cold white, moon-like orbs. The palette runs from white to black with grays and browns marking the in-between areas. The coolness of the palette endows the paintings with a chthonic presence, at once mineral-like and otherworldly. Light and materiality coincide, overlap and even switch places."
Link to Post:
http://sameoldart.tumblr.com/post/41100173975/inventing-abstraction-of-soil-and-air
A blog post asserting a true commonality shared by the artists included in Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through April 15, 2013.
The show's "biggest achievement is that it brings together the main narratives of early twentieth-century Modernism while also casting light onto lesser known artists and works. By doing so the show emphasizes the creation of art works as a result of intersecting ideas, inventions, practices and individual biographies. These artists worked to understand what possibilities abstraction in art could open. Abstraction was neither a goal nor a uniform phenomenon... Inventing Abstraction is not about arriving at a final state or drawing a conclusion. Abstraction was never meant to be finished or concluded. Abstraction (hopefully) resonates with a part of us that welcomes all suspension of ideologies and beliefs. Abstraction is a long-term project, acutely relevant and still nourishing today’s paintings - no matter if they are made of air or soil."
Link to Post:
http://www.tnr.com/article/art/111990/moma-inventing-abstraction-exhilirating-challenging-and-completely-wrong
Jed Perl reviews the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view from December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
Perl writes: "As [curator Leah] Dickerman tells the story, abstract art is a prescription rather than a permission. This is a terrible mistake. She is fascinated by work by Mondrian and Malevich, where at least for a time it seems that abstraction is a way of limiting and thereby intensifying the possibilities of painting. She banishes from the exhibition Paul Klee and Joan Miró, two seminal figures whose profoundly abstract visions did not exclude 'recognizable subject matter.' What Dickerman cannot admit is that abstraction in fact released painters to approach experience in an extraordinarily wide variety of ways."
He continues: "I am left thinking about how often the will to abstraction returns us to representation of one kind or another. I am left thinking that a broader definition of abstraction—a definition that fully embraced the achievements of Miró and Klee and the later work of Kandinsky (which with its symbolic forms may strike Dickerman as insufficiently abstract)—would make it easier to see the art of the twentieth century as a whole. And I am left thinking that a more honest and inclusive view of early modernism would render irrelevant all the talk of postmodernism, because so many of the values we tend to associate with postmodernism—narrative, symbolism, heterogeneity—are in fact aspects of early modernism."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/01/inventing-abstraction-absences-dawson/
Tyler Green argues that Manierre Dawson was the first american abstract painter, and thus Dawson's work is a glaring omission from the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through April 15, 2013.
Green reports that Dawson "started painted abstractions in 1910, just after he’d joined the Chicago architecture firm Holabird and Roche. At the time, Dawson seems not to have had any awareness of the European or the fledgling American avant-garde, excepting possibly a familiarity with Cezanne. That summer he left for a year-long grand tour of Europe and found himself more interested in art than in architecture. He soon left Holabird and Roche to devote most of his time to painting and to running a Michigan fruit farm. After being fairly prolific in the 1910s, Dawson produced relatively little in the 1920s, almost nothing in the 1930s, only to spend the 1940s and 1950s exploring reliefs and sculptures. Dawson’s is far from the typical modernist story."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/01/inventing-abstraction-absences-matisse/
Tyler Green laments the abscence of paintings by Henri Matisse in the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view from December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
Green writes: "Much in the coming abstraction — in particular its bright, shining hues — is descended from Matisse... Leaving the tricky question of foundation for another time, it could be argued that Matisse pushed harder toward abstraction than Picasso did." Green convincingly cites Matisse's paintings Palm Leaf, Tangier (1912), French Window at Collioure (1914), Composition, Issy-les-Moulineaux (1915) and Shaft of Sunlight, the Woods of Trivaux (1917) as proof.
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/01/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-henri-matisse/
Tyler Green talks to Rebecca Rabinow about Henri Matisse and his process of investigating a visual ideas on multiple canvases. Rabinow is one of the three curators of the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through March 17, 2013.
In the web introduction for the show Rabinow writes that Matisse "used his completed canvases as tools, repeating compositions in order to compare effects, gauge his progress, and, as he put it, 'push further and deeper into true painting.' While this manner of working with pairs, trios, and series is certainly not unique to Matisse, his need to progress methodically from one painting to the next is striking... For Matisse, the process of creation was not simply a means to an end but a dimension of his art that was as important as the finished canvas."
Link to Post:
http://cityarts.info/2012/12/26/luminous-gravity/
John Goodrich reviews the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through March 17, 2013.
Goodrich writes: "As the 20th century’s greatest colorist, [Matisse] possessed an uncanny instinct for the energy of colors—for the way shifting hues illuminate a painting from within—but other qualities as well: drive, an anxious but methodical disposition, a willingness to fail and a reverence for great painting... In Search of True Painting is the rare show that reveals and connects art on its own, intimate terms—in its purely visual manifestation. Looking on, we absorb the evidence of one of the greatest minds of modern art, a painter who, to a unique degree, combined intelligence, self-awareness, and knowledge of precedents."
Link to Post:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/12/16/modern-art-defined.html
Blake Gopnik previews the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view from December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
In addition to a slideshow of works from the exhibition, Gopnik posts: "At this moment we are officially in the middle of yet another abstract-art revival, according to dealers and certain writers. But the urgency that once came with abstraction has clearly disappeared. The nonfiguration that’s attempted today inevitably seems like a rehashing of the abstraction of old, or a footnote to it and ironic poke at it, or some kind of retro revisitation, akin to the Mad Men suits on today’s businessmen. It’s almost impossible to see today’s abstraction as mattering much for tomorrow’s art..."
He continues: "But it could be that to note the passing of abstraction as a form of current art is to misunderstand what mattered most about the abstract revolution in the first place: it may have been less about the 'abstract' than about 'revolution.' Its impact didn’t depend so much on the gorgeous works of art it led to as on the fact of leaving so much behind. Abstraction was the model, the test case, for art as innovation, so that almost all the radical art that came later had its roots in that moment in 1912. Readymades and monochromes, text-based art and performance, happenings and purely conceptual gestures, all depend on abstraction’s pioneering rejections of business-as-usual art. 'Abstraction unsettles more than just the fact of depiction,'says [exhibition curator Leah] Dickerman-it establishes the act of unsettling as the sign of modern thought."
