off the easel

Graffiti

2010-05-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

Before history was written, when people didn't know how grow food or build shelters, they painted. Cave dwellers covered their rock-lined rooms with the days of their lives. You might say that graffiti artists carry on the Paleolithic tradition.

While teaching art in a New York high school some years ago, I had a student given to marking up subway cars. But he was no "Kilroy Was Here" disciple of America’s pop culture efforts of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

An aerosol paint can in his hand was like a chisel in Michelangelo's. I'm not kidding. This kid could make a trail of subway of cars sing like a chorus in a Broadway musical, down to the applause he prompted from strap-hangers.

This was before graffiti rose up from the street to exhibit halls. This boy’s underground picture-making seemed less an act of vandalism and more a demonstration of urban folk art. And even though the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of the most infamous graffiti artist in subway lore, Keith Haring, a court sentenced him to cleaning the subway cars he had ``marred.''

Clearly, the subway artist in my classroom was on the right track. Haring's subway art, down to its homoerotic hardcore porn, is deemed public art now.

The Whitney exhibit traced Haring's development from his chalk and felt-tip pen days to his ornate field painting. I'm partial to his outlaw variety, the jostling figures art and their chaotic, cartoon-y quality. They reminded me of my student’s subway art, minus the homoeroticism.

Primitive to the core, Haring's subway work was a kind of latter-day cave art. His exhibit at the Whitney was just the beginning of connoisseurship for graffiti. Claudia Barbieri, writing for the New York Times out of Paris, has chronicled the bounty of graffiti exhibits on both sides of the Atlanti, complete with adoring exhibit goers. “People have been lining up round the block to get in,” she said.

Shades of the strap hangers in the ‘70s who swooned over a boy’s subway car art.
Daily lines around the Grand Palais, a leading picture palace, reportedly stretched further than those for the Warhol exhibition next door. The attraction? A collectionof graffit paintings from street artists ranging from New York’s subway art of the ‘70s to contemporary urban art in Europe and South America.
My student’s work didn’t show up in this collection, but that of other New Yorkers like him did, including examples by a former delivery boy and son of a well-known banking family credited for bringing the New York style of graffit to France in the ‘80.
How respectable has graffiti art become? The Grand Palais puts on display work by Nunca, the Brazilian street-artist famed for being invited to spray paint murals on the river facade of the Tate Modern, in London.
And in Manhattan, a couple of galleries – the Helenbeck and Gismondi – debuted a graffiti show along with 17th- and 18th-century furnishings.
Pre-opening jitters centered on the worry that gallery goers in New York may not take to graffiti in galleries. But the stuff of subway scrawlers wowed the crowd. Barbieri said that opening night drew hundreds that lined up around the block – in the rain, no less.
Wait, there’s more: a show at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris with a retrospective of urban street art. To hear Barbieri tell it, you can’t get more of a “sacramental consecration” than a graffiti show at the Cartier foundation.
Transitioning from marking up walls to doing it on canvas has changed the tools from your basic aerosol cans to something quite elaborate: spray cans that can produce thick and thin line and blend-able colors that mimic painting with a brush.
If you ask me, such sophisticated tools are coloring the new graffiti inauthentic. Why go to the trouble of spray-painting an image that looks as if it were? Isn't that like a photo-real painting trying to look like a color slide? Why should something look like something else when the real thing is do-able?
Mind you, all artists should be able to make art out of anything they want and that ought to include blendable spray paints. But to make art out of a spray can that looks like art made with a brush is making art under false colors, not to mention pointless.
The digital photography of Florida artist Nancy Hellebrand – look-a-likes for painting - raises questions that go unasked in a digital art exhibit. The following exchange between Hellebrand and me may hold some answers.
ALTABE: You go to the trouble of electronically generating an image that looks as if it were painted by hand. Why? I grant you that artists have always taken lifeless matter, like clay, and transformed it into living form, and it may be said that circuitry is another form of clay. I also acknowledge that electronic technologies gets art out of its traditional spaces. It can likewise be argued that it doesn't matter if art comes in cyber form, as long as it's good art.
But I don’t kid myself. I like the way your pictures look because of their beguiling resemblance to painting. When I remember that the images are not painted, but push-buttoned, the light of the cathode ray comes on in my head and in a click, I become un-beguiled.
HELLEBRAND: I actually didn’t choose to work with a computer, but technology made darkroom work and conventional photographic printing obsolete. Hours and hours in the darkroom (with no sunlight and intense noxious smells) made no sense when it became possible to accomplish the same thing in a minute fraction of the time on the computer.
I feel that the means an artist uses are of no great significance. It's what the finished product is that matters.
ALTABE: OK. Take us through your thinking about your exhibit example it and what you think matters about it.
HELLEBRAND: It is a picture of familiar trees and shrubs of our region. These trees and shrubs are very beautiful without my intervention. However, I'm a photographer and this is grist for my mill. I liked the single photographs that were combined for this image, but they didn't really get my juices flowing. When I combined the files and worked with them in Photoshop it became a new thing - different, not what we know. To me the final picture has an interest apart from what I see and know from my daily life here.
Myy artistic struggle is to invoke the infinite in the finite. It is the unseen aspect of my subject matter which I am constantly trying to discover. By "unseen" I mean something beyond vision and speech, something which cannot really be articulated in pictures or words, but which is even more essential than that which is describable.
ALTABE: You talk of a desire to photograph the underside of what you see, Isn’t that what art is about? Thomas Messer said it in a Guggenheim exhibit note about modern painting more than 40 years ago. He said that art of the time was not necessarily concerned with the re presentation of visible things, but often reflected that part of existence that lies behind and beneath observable appearances.
Given that you've taught art history and must surely know of the driving force behind modernism, why do you consider your wanting to photograph the unseen a discovery?
HELLEBRAND: What I am doing may not seem so unique, but because it is me who makes the photograph and because it is happening at this time in history, in this place, there is the possibility of something new, hopefully an Ah Ha!! experience. To elegantly and juicily capture a subject in a photograph is thrilling to me, but less thrilling than taking that as my starting point and then making it more revealing, way beyond subject matter.
My pictures happen to reflect concerns one usually associates more with painting than photography. All the same to me - it matters not. I'd say the proof is in the work. Good work coming from a computer or camera makes it because it speaks to us. You can't argue truth and beauty!
ALTABE: Arguing that would be like sparring with Keats’s view that truth and beauty are all we need to know.

Warhol

2010-05-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol’s paintings of Brillo boxes might have made art popular, but they have nothing to do with art. He had a different goal. He made this clear when asked, "What you do want?'' Patrick Smith, author of "Warhol: Conversations About the Artist,'' did the asking: "You've got everything: You have crowds, hordes, young people, beautiful people, charming people, rich people, lovely people. Nobody seems to touch you. What do you want?'' Warhol answered, “I want more fame.''

And he acted out that wanting. He used to sit in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan dolled up in wild white wigs, sunglasses and a James Dean leasther jacket, hoping to be noticed.

Also helping him get noticed were the celebrity portraits he painted, like Marilyn Monroe's after she died and Jackie Kennedy Onassis' after she was widowed. Following the deaths of Monroe and President Kennedy, Warhol began his "Disaster Series,'' such as the "Electric Chair.'' After he was shot by one of his groupies, his work grew still darker with images of skull, gun and knife.

You might think that such imagery reflects on the violence in America society, but not if you take seriously the words of his assistant, Gerard Malanga. Each painting in the "Disaster Series'' took about four minutes, he said. "We worked as mechanically as we could, but we made mistakes. The critics interpreted them as intentional.''

Worshipful words from critic Carter Ratcliff come to mind: "Warhol is secretly the vehicle of artistic intentions so complex that he would probably cease to function if he didn't dilute them with nightly doses of the inane.''

Warhol's own words deny such intentions: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he famously said, “just look at the surface of my paintings . . . There's nothing below it . . . I want to be a machine.''

He wasn’t kidding. He attacked individuality, originality and everything else that art was in the '60s, and the real thing never quite recovered.

If it weren’t for the recent exhibit of Warhol's work at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, I wouldn't have brought him up. His art of slickness and shallowness is enough to send those of us who shrink from the emotional excesses of Baroque art at Florida’s Ringling Museum running there for relief.
It was no accident that Warhol used silkscreen prints for his celebrity portraits, including those of Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie and Martha Graham. With such a reprinting technique, he could reproduce an image over and over for the most stale, impersonal look. Warhol repeated his images in mechanical reproduction ad nauseum with photographic enlargements that he silkscreened onto canvas. He made wallpaper-pattern reprints of these, glorifying their sameness and their mass-production.

This muse-less master of the mundane repeated the look of Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles just as he had the face of Jackie Kennedy in her bloodied pillbox hat after her husband's assassination. He made wallpaper out of her image, too. And in the repetition, he numbed our perception. He gave us aesthetic emptiness.

He once said that anything is boring if you look at it long enough. He loved being bored and wanted to be a machine - blank and cold. In the catalogue for his first retrospective show in '68, held at the Moerna Museet, Stockholm, he said, "I like boring things . . . If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

I could cry – not only over what Warhol did, but because Pop Art lives on extolling banality, deifying detachment and disassociation. Gone is metaphor, allusion, that part of life that lies beneath outward appearance. When Leonardo painted his celebrated ``Virgin of the Rocks,'' he added a soft glow emanating from within the figure. It beats any depiction of a halo. There's more to art than messages. There's mystery. I just wish Pop Art would go away, already.

No such luck. Art, the so-called food of the soul, is processed now, far from fresh and as far removed from human experience as a TV screen, and I blame Warhol. This Chauncy Gardiner of picturemaking, who liked to watch life rather than live it, succeeded in turning art into a banality that deifies detachment. I'm thinking of the 3-foot-tall mound of synthetic excrement and the splotch of plastic vomit seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the ‘90s. I hold Warhol's deadpan expressions accountable for such crap.

Not that Pop wasn’t OK in the '60s, when it first burst onto the art scene out of rebellion against abstract expressionism's messy inwardness. But by now, I miss the Zen-like calligraphy of Robert Motherwell, who pioneered abstract expressionism. He was my teacher, so I'm probably biased, but I miss a&e’s ampageousness.

I shuddered at the news a couple of years ago when a Warhol; painting of a Campbell soup can , sold at a Christie’s auction for $11.7 million. Bad enough that he imitated soup cans. But it wasn't even his idea. In a Warhol biography in '89, author Victor Bockris related the genesis of the soup can paintings.

Warhol had just come out of a "nervous breakdown" and feared he might be slipping towards another after seeing a show of fellow Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures of underwear, ice cream and pies. Warhol was upset because he didn't think of it.

The soup can paintings came out of a conversation between Warhol and a struggling interior designer Muriel Latow. Warhol was intent on doing something big in art, but he didn't know what.

Warhol: "It's too late for the cartoons," he said, alluding to the fact that Roy Lichtenstein already was doing that. "I've got to do something that will have a lot of impact, that will be different from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing. I don't know what to do! Muriel, you've got fabulous ideas. Can't you give me an idea?"

(She agreed if he would pay her for the idea).

Warhol: "How much?"

Latow: "Fifty dollars."

Warhol: "OK, go ahead," he said after writing out a check. "Give me a fabulous idea!"

Latow: "What do you like most in the whole world?"

Warhol: "I don't know. What do I like most in the whole world?"

Latow: "Money. You should paint pictures of money."

Warhol: "Oh gee, that really is a great idea"

Latow: "You should paint something that everybody sees every day, that everybody recognizes --- like a can of soup."

Fifty dollarsa turned out to be the bargain of the century when you consider the market value of Warhol’s work. – a head-scratcher, especially of you compare the $11.7 million for his soup can to auction sales of work by painters like Picasso and Monet. Picasso's "Le Repos" painted in 1932, said to be his greatest period, fetched $7.9 million. Monet's "Matinee Sur la Seine," part of a series that was the precursor to the famous "Waterlilies" series, sold for $5,725,750. Warhol outsold Picasso and Monet.

Muriel Latow was gypped.

Top 200

2010-05-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

Polls show that the difference between British and American connoisseurship is the difference m between a Picasso and a picture postcard.

Picasso came in first in the recent British survey - “The Times Top 200 Artists of the 20th century to Now.” In contrast, a ‘90s survey of America’s “most wanted” and “most unwanted” imagery called “People’s Choice” showed that the least favorite imagery had the look of Picasso’s cubism. America’s “most wanted” was a pictorial of historical figures posed in a paradisical springtime setting full with frolicking deer beneath pristine blue skies.The only thing missing were kittens chasing yarn balls.

"Best" lists are a commonplace and not just in art. Itemizations like Random House's "100 Best English Language Novels" and the American Film Institute's top 100 "Greatest Movies of All Time" come to mind. The biggest problem with such lists is the danger of taking them too seriously. But guess what? I have a “best” list, too.

My criteria comes ouf of something Picasso said: "What do you think an artist is, an imbecile who has only eyes? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, fiery or happy events, to which he responds in every way."

Best American artists in no particular order:
GEORGE SEGAL, 147th on Britain’s top 200 list.
"Walk - Don't Walk" 1976.
Sculptural situations that show life-size white plaster casts of anonymous-looking figures placed in real-looking environments are signs of the times: people lost, overtaken by places, events.
EDWARD HOPPER, 29th on Britain’s list.
"Nighthawks" 1942.
The impassive look of bored, lonely figures in a diner, underlining their isolation and alienation from themselves and the world around them, is the story of many in a rootless century.
JACOB LAWRENCE
"War Series, Going Home," 1947.
Flattened, angular forms, which are ornamental and festively colored, tell deceptively simple stories of black culture in America. They’re also loaded with social conscience.
SUSAN ROTHENBERG
"Hector Protector," 1976.
Mixing abstract and real, painter Rothenberg creates sketchy images - horses, mostly - silhouetted against obscure, thickly painted backgrounds that tends to muffle, even stifle the animals, which makes them emblems of Everyman struggling to be, to rise above the mire.
EVA HESSE 61st on Britain’s list
"Repetition," 1968
With an inventive use of materials, such as rubber tubing and wire, Hesse created sculpture at once emotional and mysterious. Maybe it's because I know that she was born Jewish in Nazi Germany, that her parents divorced, that her mother committed suicide, that her own marriage failed, that she suffered from a brain tumor, and that she worked from a wheelchair to the end, but her work puts that ache in the throat I was talking about. It's also gorgeous in its way.
BEN SHAHN
"Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," 1932
Shahn was a social realist whose subjects were topical and usually about class struggle. He used incisive line to show society's scapegoats and underdogs that, for their deadpan looks, can break your heart.
ALICE NEEL
"Warhol," 1970
A portrait painter who rendered her subjects, usually posed staring straight out at the viewer, with a raw quality and a trademark directness that etches your brain.
LOUISE NEVELSON
"Sky Cathedral," 1958
By arranging found wooden furniture and buildings parts — knobs, moldings, chair slats — sculptor Nevelson created shrinelike displays with a message. By themselves, the wooden parts have little impact. In relation to each other, they take on a spiritual air.
MARK ROTHKO (28th on Britain’s list)
"Black on Maroon," 1959
His way of painting rectangles - hovering one over the other so they shimmer in gentle rhythm - is hypnotic. Like the movement of the sea, they’re something to meditate by.
For all the chutzpah it takes to made a “best” list, why not take it to the limit and name just one - the best picture that came out of the past 1,000 years? Criteria? A game-changer.

I nominate "Luncheon on the Grass'' ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe'') that Manet painted in the middle of the 19th century. The painting defines the moment when traditional art became modern art. And beyond introducting a new era of art, it begat the sexual revolution, and maybe feminism, too. The painting shows two clothed men and a nude woman picnicking under the oaks and chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Which was not in itself revolutionary. Many Old Master paintings mixed clothed men with unclothed women.

Manet's painting differed in content and technique and the difference shocked high Parisian society. Even Emperor Napoleon III, who was not exactly a paragon of decency, called it "indecent.'' This, despite innumerable paintings of nude women over the past 1,000 years. "The Turkish Bath'' by Manet contemporary Jean August Ingres – describing a harem of nude females waiting for a call from their master - caused no stir at all.

The thing is that Manet’s painting wasn't allegorical or mythological. The woman pictured was real, even well-known as artist’s model and painter Victorine Meurend, who ran off to America with her lover after Manet finished the painting.

Something else in the painting was different. Meurend boldly stares back at you, as if you were intruding. "Yes?' she seems to ask over her shoulder, her face direct and challenging. Clearly it wasn't Meurend's nudity that offended, it was her face, which lacked the usual demure reticence of naked females in art. What’s more, this nude woman was actively engaged in conversation with men in public.

Compare Manet's scenario to the one of two clothed males and a pair of naked females by 15th-century painter Giorgione in "Concert Champetre.'' It's one of the Old Master paintings on which Manet based his painting. In Giorgione's rendition, the women are waiting on the men, who are talking only to each other. It's as if Manet whited out the double standard, replacing it with a woman in a social relationship with her male companions: minus the female passivity, vulnerability and the playing out of all the male fantasies known to art history.

To further see the difference Manet made with this painting, you have only to see, say, "Susannah and the Elders'' by 17th-century painter Sisto Badalocchi, in which clothed men are eyeing an undressed woman. Manet rebelled against the Badalocchis of the art world, who made erotic spectacles of women. He also rejected Renaissance painters who put naked women on pedestals as symbols of truth and beauty.

"Luncheon on the Grass'' refers to the past and moves art forward to a time when Robert Mapplethorpe could photograph body builder Lisa Lyons flexing her muscles in the nude in the Great Outdoors without a word of surprise from anyone.

Manet's technique, likewise, broke with long-held ways of painting. He used bold strokes and simple, unshaded shapes that he flattened to make more clear, and he filled his shadows with color. Not realism; not yet impressionism; call it "Manet-ism.''

Of course, before one can pick the best painting, one should answer the "What is art?'' question. I saved this for the last, so you could see the answer in Manet's painting. Art critic Charlotte Willard, who braved the what-is-art question in her book “What is a Masterpiece?” guided me here:

Art is a discovery. Manet brought painting outdoors, inspiring, by turn, a group of young painters who later became the Impressionists. His flattening of the female form without shading also led from realism to abstraction.

Art is visionary. You can't look at Meurend without knowing she is a contemporary woman, emancipated before women actually were.

Art gives form to our dreads and dreams. Manet didn't know at the time that he painted a revolutionary picture. He said to his friend Antonin Proust, "How foolish one must be to say that I am trying to fire pistol shots. I render as simple as I can things I see.'' Call me foolish.

Art remembers the past and predicts the future. Picasso's 1907 painting, "Les Demoisselles d'Avignon'' ("The Brothel of Avignon''), which introduced Cubism to the world, is a direct result of Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Picasso said it, himself: “When I see Manet's `Dejuener sur l'Herb,' I say to myself, `Trouble for later on.’”

The "later on'' came in his brothel picture, which was Picasso's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Like Manet, he took an old theme - women as vessels of pleasure, and made them brutal looking.

I'm not prepared to say that Manet would have approved of what Picasso did to women in his painting. Or of what performance artist Carolee Schneemann did later in our century when she pulled a paper scroll from her vagina to read its text on "vulvic space,'' and called it art.

But I think it's fair to say that Manet was the first shock artist.

The Elgin Marbles

2010-05-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

It looks like the British Museum has run out of excuses for keeping its cache of stolen property known as the Elgin Marbles.

The long-running reason for not returning the 253 sculptures, which Lord Elgin lifted from Athen’s Parthenon in 1861 and sold to the museum, was that the Greeks didn’t care enough to take proper care of them.

Greece’s new 226,000-square-foot, $200 million state-of-the-art museum at the base of the Acropolis answers that charge. But the answer came long before.

Consider this: when the Turks, who occupied Athens in the early 1800s, ran out of bullets in battling the Greeks and began melting down the Parthenon's 2,300-year-old lead clamps for bullets, Greek soldiers sent bullets to the Turks to stop the defacing. So much for the Greeks not caring.

Indeed, if anyone can be faulted for careless, it’s the British Museum. William St. Clair, a British authority on the Elgin Marbles, told the London Observer some 10 years ago about a British Museum cover-up he discovered in the diaries of museum official Roger Hinks, which disclosed that the antiquities had been badly damaged at the museum.

Apparently, London's polluted air ate away at the marble because the museum didn't use proper air-quality filters until 1962. St. Clair also blamed the museum for a bungled cleaning in 1938 when metal scrapers were used to scrub the marble to an alabaster white in order to demonstrate classical perfection.
To mask the damaged surface, the museum coated the carvings with wax.

The cleaning was ordered by Lord Duveen of Milbank, the British Museum's benefactor, who, St. Clair said, made his fortune retouching old masters and selling them to gullible Americans.

Given all this, shouldn't the British Museum return the marbles? The answer would be easy if Elgin's robbery occurred after 1954. That's when an international convention was adopted requiring all art expatriated in times of war to be returned. A similar convention was adopted in 1970. It was on that basis that Iraq returned what it took from Kuwait's museum in 1990. In that spirit, while the Seattle Art Museum didn’t have to, it agreed to return a painting by Henri Matisse to the heirs of an art dealer whose collection the Nazis stole in France during World War II.

Clearly, my sympathies lie with the effort that Melina Mercouri made in 1983 when, as Greek minister of culture, she pleaded with the English to return the Elgin Marbles. As she famously said, “You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness. In the world over, the very name of our country is immediately associated with the Parthenon.”

That said, though, I think there must be a statute of limitations on stolen goods, the cutoff on art being before 1954, when the rules were set.

Is a picture worth a thousand words or not?

2010-05-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

It’s often true that words hinder communication. Putting descriptive titles on paintings is a model for weakening a message. Clearly, some artists haven’t gotten the memo.

If art lovers are to be guided by explanatory titles, then art becomes little more than a visual aid, or worse - controversial for no good reason.

Andres Serrano title “Piss Christ” a photograph of a cross submerged in a jar urine, had unintended consequences. Without the title, the sunny glow of the urine lends incandescence to the cross, even splendor. If Serrano hadn’t named his image, it might have been interpreted as he intended: Christianity drowning in crassness, in commercialism.

Titling art too narrowly can have another sorry effect. It can beg the issue. “Icons of Loss,” the show title that holocaust survivor Samuel Bak gave his harrowing paintings, needlessly pushes the point, particularly since his works hang at the Florida Holocaust Museum.

Bak also titled each of his exhibit examples. How unnecessary are the labels? Even if you didn’t know that his painting series of a small boy with raised hands in a don’t-shoot pose is based on a Nazi photo documenting the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in ‘43, the imagery can leave you wrecked.

Not content with painting the boy bound with roped strips of splintered wood that form an “X,” Bak felt the need to title it “Crossed Out.” In a variation on the theme, Bak renders the boy in another work blindfolded and dissolving into the brick wall behind him. At this point, you can almost guess his title: “Walled In.”

This is a little like a film score that aims to manipulate the moviegoer with operatic sound. A lesser artist may need such devices, but Bak is too good a painter.

How good is he? In “Walled In,” he added a pictorial detail not found in the photograph: the boy’s socks sag, one already fallen around his ankles, leaving them at uneven heights. In this way, Bak wordlessly stresses that this is a small child under the gun.

Nicholas Ray did a similar thing when he directed the 1955 film “Rebel Without A Cause.” To heighten the drama of a boy accidentally killed by the police, Ray simply zoomed in on the dead boy’s unmatched socks. The sight was a silent reminder of innocence lost to death.

Lose the titles, Mr. Bak. Your pictures are enough to fasten viewers to the floor, as if standing at the edge of a hole.

A nonsense show from a museum that should know better

2010-05-08T20:21:00.000-07:00

The news that the Centre Pompidou purged its collection galleries of male-made work for a near-year-long, women-only show was bad news. Women-only shows tend to ghettoizes women and there’s been enough of that. Even if an historical corrective were needed, it’s not good to isolate art by gender. The separation only reinforces the divide.

But those days of denying women their place in art history have been gone for quite a while. The beginning of the end may have come back in the '40s when O'Keeffe was invited to participate in a women's art exhibit. Rather than simply decline that invitation, she walked into the gallery to tell the gallery director she wasn't a "woman painter.''

So, when the Pompidou empties out two floors for ladies rooms only, the question goes pleading: Why is a stronghold of 20th and 21st century artrectifying a record already rectified? The question takes on extra weight when you realize that the French never showed the bias against women artists that the Americans did. (Note all the all–women shows in the U.S, not to mention an entire institution devoted to female-made art – The National Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C. Besides ghettoizing women, it shift focus away from art to advocacy of women's rights, and they don't need to do that.

How did women prevail? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em would seem to have been their marching order. Berthe Morisot, for example, braved the disdain of Renoir and Degas for women artists and joined the Impressionists. Had she created her own group, she might not have been taken so seriously.

Morison managed to convey her female complaint in her work. You can see it in “Reading." (La Lecture) at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, which looks like a simple picture of a young woman reading. But look again.

The space where she sits is tightly wrapped in foliage and balcony rails. That she included a bird cage may also speak of confinement. At the same time, the figure is self-contained as an egg, likely because she has escaped into the book she's reading.

In a way, Morisot escaped, too, with spontaneous and fleeting brushwork, which must have been very freeing to her. And drenching the image with light may also have been her way of conveying her sense of escape. As well, the focus on the females' face absorbed in her book rather than on idle play seems to complete the story of a woman bent on being taken seriously.

Morisot said it herself: "I don't think there's ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal. And that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as much as they."

But that was all then and this is now. When Pompidou Center, Paris’ citadel of contemporary and modern art, seeks to replace its collection of male art with that of females, it seems nothing more than a look back in anger.

Stadium design as a dining hall

2010-05-08T20:19:00.000-07:00

“Take me out to the ballgame,” isn’t the main idea in baseball,
anymore. Consider Tropicana Field, a.k.a. the Trop, in St.
Petersburg, the dome-topped home of American League
East’s Tampa Bay Rays. In 1996, it got made over from
a functional field to a dining, shopping, entertainment complex.

Seen from the highway, the dome slants down on one side like
a beret worn nonchalantly. The tilt sinks from 225 feet above
second base to 85 feet at the center field wall, and appears
downright debonair. The pitch of this roof, which reduces the
volume of stadium air needing climate control, was an economy measure. You get that point on arrival.

While the angle of the dome looks rakish from a distance, it
just looks lopsided up close. The attempt to save money is
made clear by the grim look of the inside walls: bare concrete, mostly in a sulking shade of gray – like a subway station.

It doesn’t matter how many Cuesta-Ray Cigar Bars, Monsta Lobsta stands or how much Spanish, Thai and French cuisine abound, the
crude stone of the interior walls seem unwelcoming, even forbidding. And the myriad points of food sale, which push at the gloom, only serve to define the Trop as a kind of tourist trap.

Granted, the eight-story-high rotunda entrance pays homage to the one that heralded Ebbets Field, built in 1913. But a 900-foot-long ceramic mosaic walkway that leads to the rotunda, complete with theatrical lighting and piped-in music, has nothing to do with baseball.

And because the dome is not retractable, there is no wind, no
rain, no sun at the Trop. There is no flag rippling in the air with
the singing of the National Anthem. Old glory stretches out
stiffly, like the one planted on the moon. Catwalks under the
mammoth tent-like dome – looking like high-wire rigging –
conjure up the circus at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

The field? Covered in artificial turf, only the dirt is real. After an
inning of play, it smudges, turning the turf into what looks like a
carpet in need of vacuuming after toddlers – in from their sandboxes – track it up. It’s the game of summer, but sitting under a glass-roofed rotunda, you wouldn’t know what season it is.

F. Scott Fitzgerald called baseball a game bounded by walls
that keep out novelty and change. Clealy, he never frequented
the Trop. It doesn’t focus on the sport. It’s multi-purpose, like
a reversible raincoat.

Follow the bouncing ball

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Latter-day stadium designs are like the settings on a Cuisinart - multi-purpose.

You heard of a retractable roof? Behold NFL’s Arizona Cardinals field, which can be slid outside the stadium like a rug when concerts and conventions occur. In the words of design architect Peter Eisenman, a stadium is a place not only to play ball, but also to bring people to the area to visit.

In that case, the Raymond James Stadium, home to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is a tourist destination in excelsis. In fact, when it was picked for the Super Bowl XLIII some five years ago, the reported reasons for the pick were the area’s beaches, balmy air, Busch Gardens and booming downtown nightlife.

Noticeably missing from the media list was the field of play. The fact that the National Football League Players Association calls it the best playing field in the league – owing to its Bermuda sodden surface – didn’t come up.

Are you getting this? The diversions, not the designs are what count. Which makes Raymond James less a ballpark and more a theme park on the order of the Magic Kingdom. Case in pointlessness: A $3 million, 103-foot-long, 43-ton pirate ship, docked behind one of the end zones, fires eight cannons when the Bucs make touchdowns. Also on parade: a monstrous 9-foot wooden skull with red eyes and smoke coming out of its mouth. There may be no better model of Floridian fun-seeking than the Raymond James.

But wait, there’s more. The sports arena showcases a contact sport of another kind: shopping. A 20,000 square-foot pirate village and a mock fishing village, plus an assortment of beach-hut kiosks full of concessions, re-create the mall experience.

And the field? It’s a veritable shrine to the god of fun: television. Two whopping, 92-foot-wide, high-definition videoboards called BucVision – standing like altars to merriment – one in each end zone, render the 400-foot-long grassland a sports bar of Cyclopean proportions.

And therein lies the problem with latter-day stadium architecture. It’s just another giant mall.

Museums ain't what they used to be

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Museum, a word from the Greek mouseion, meaning home of the Muses, covers the waterfront these days: from the Sex Museum in New York and the Lunchbox Museum in Columbus, GA., to the Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum in Plano, TX and the, Mustard Museum in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.

In Greek mythology the Muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. It follows that a museum is a kind of memory bank, where time stops and allows experiences beyond the day.

But in art museums today, you get displays seen elsewhere. Consider the shows that have taken place in New York museums, like Jackie Onassis dresses at the Museum of Modern Art. Or the motorcycle show at the Guggenheim Museum. Or Coco Chanel fashions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or the Met’s show of baseball cards, where packs of cardboard that once stiffened packages of bubble gum stand with the likes of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt. How do ball players’ pictures and their stats fit in with such art history?

Granted, contemporary culture takes in art forms other than the traditional painting and sculpture – video and performance art, for example. But a retrospective of bikes, baseball cards and ball gowns? Come on!

There are plenty of other venues for diversions like these and plenty of precedent for them, too. The “Dime Museum” run by Phineas T. Barnum in the 19th century was an example of the popular approach, where you could see jugglers, rope dancers and the 25-inch tall Charles S. Stratton, who Barnum re-named Tom Thumb.

And the hits keep coming.

Movies have come to area museums. While the ongoing film series at the Dali Museum serves the painter, and showing the work of video artist Janet Biggs next year at the Tampa Museum serves the mission of an art museum, the Ringling Museum of Art gives you the stuff of Turner Movie Classic, like “Some Like It Hot,” “Spartacus” and “Psycho.”

Barnum lives.

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2008-08-31T04:16:00.000-07:00

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2008-05-29T03:24:00.002-07:00

2008-05-29T03:24:00.001-07:00

2008-05-29T03:18:00.000-07:00

2008-01-25T14:14:00.001-08:00

CORRECTION: http://joaltabe.blogspot.com

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e-address: joaltabe@gmail.com
http//jaltabe.blogspot.com

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November 2007

NOTES & COMMENTS
The Aristos Awards
The awards this month are to Joan Altabe, an art critic; Heather Mac Donald, a cultural critic and public policy scholar; Lynne Cheney, a public policy scholar and former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Rupert Christiansen, a music critic for the London Telegraph; and Julian Spalding, a former museum director in Scotland. As indicated by the just-revised introduction to the Awards, they "pertain only to the individual's views on art as specified in the award citation--independent of any other beliefs held, whether in respect to art, philosophy, politics, or culture."

November 2007. New award winners (marked ) have been added for the following years: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, 1995.

2007
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry / Bradenton [Fla.] Herald)
Rupert Christiansen (Music Critic, London Telegraph)
Heather Mac Donald (Contributing Editor, City Journal; Fellow, the Manhattan Institute)
2006
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry / Bradenton [Fla.] Herald)
2005
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry / Bradenton [Fla.] Herald)
Victoria Dailey (Beverly Hills, Calif.)
Jennie Farrell (Wantagh, N. Y.)
Kaley Holmboe (sixteen-year-old student, London)
Joshua Kosman (Music Critic, San Francisco Chronicle)
National Review
New York Daily News
Henry J. Stern (Director, New York Civic; former Commissioner of Parks, New York City

Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry) [bio] [posted 11/07]
For "Conceptual Art Is a Crock!" [pdf version] ("Open Letter to Artists [From an Art Critic]--Part 26"), March 27.
Joan Altabe does not mince words. "Conceptual art isn't art," she boldly states. "It's [just] an idea, often without image or object." One early conceptualist, Altabe reports, simply "conducted a poll on museum goers' opinion of the Vietnam War." "No art" there, in her view. "You may as well write out the idea, which is actually what many conceptual artists do." Regarding the infamous "readymades" of Duchamp, Altabe also gets right what most critics get wrong, that "the way Duchamp saw his readymades, they were statements about the state of art, not art itself."
(Altabe has also won Aristos Awards for 2006 and 2005.)
2006
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry) [bio] [posted 11/07]
For "Shock Art" ("Open Letter to Artists [From an Art Critic]--Part 16"), October 23.
Notwithstanding her view of "shock art as art," her vague definition of art as "a mix of beauty and truth," and her questionable interpretation of Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Joan Altabe merits high praise for taking her fellow critics Michael Kimmelman (New York Times) and Kim Levin (Village Voice) to task for helping "the shock art crowd . . . take art's name in vain"--a phrase which to us implies that what that crowd makes is not art.
Here she quotes from Kimmelman's approving review of what she calls "the SoHo exhibit of cow carcasses hacked up by artist Damien Hirst":

The show left me somehow, unexpectedly, smiling. . . . It's a sense of something vivifying beyond, or besides, his infatuation with death and dead animals, that makes [Hirst's] work likable, and makes his art different from the merely slick and chilling. ['Cows, Pigs, Cigarettes: All Dead,' New York Times, May 10, 1996].

Altabe faults Levin for her vacuous remarks about the work of Julian Schnabel--who is known, Altabe notes, for "giant canvases [more] where globs of paint are applied to broken pieces of crockery glued to the surface." In Levin's view, such works "regurgitate residues of feelings that no longer exist. They manage to be decadent and barbaric at the same time." Altabe continues: "Then, as if she knew she wasn't making any sense, Levin added, 'Why should everything mean something? What's wrong with a taste of true meaninglessness?'" To which Altabe replies: "Nothing, if that's your taste. Just don't call it art."
(Altabe has also won Aristos Awards for 2007 and 2005. She is also the winner of an Excellence in Journalism Award for Criticism in 2006 from the Florida Press Club.)

Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Bradenton (Fla.) Herald) [bio] [posted 11/07]
For "Hanson Works Should Not Be Deemed 'Art,'"August 14.
"Now that the . . . Hanson show [more] at the Ringling Museum of Art has ended, I'll share my thoughts about it without worrying that I'll be spoiling your exhibit experience. As you can guess, I'm not a Hanson fan. If you are, you may not want to read further. Still here? OK, you've been warned. Hanson's life-like, life-size 'sculpture' of working-class people isn't sculpture. It isn't art."
(Altabe has also won Aristos Awards for 2007 and 2006. She is also the winner of an Excellence in Journalism Award for Criticism in 2006 from the Florida Press Club.)

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2008-01-24T11:23:00.000-08:00

Joan Altabe
An Art
Critic Who Creates Art
by Dan Koon

Most visitors to Fine Art Registry (fineartregistry.com) know Joan Altabe from her continuing series An Open Letter to Artists (from an Art Critic). Newspaper readers in Florida know her as the highly knowledgeable and opinionated art and architecture critic for the Bradenton Herald and before that the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a staff position becoming increasingly rare as newspapers downsize in an effort to stave off their inevitable demise. After all, you can masquerade corporate press releases as “All The News That’s Fit to Print” only for so long before people turn to other sources for more valid information.
This is no rant against the media, though a drop of acid isn’t irrelevant when discussing Joan Altabe and her vocation as an art critic. In fact, it is good for a society to have the occasional person willing to point out that the glass is, indeed, half empty and, through the natural progression of things, may become half emptier if we don’t watch it.

Joan seems to have made it her calling to be such a voice in the cultural community of Florida’s west coast and, more widely, on various Internet sites in addition to Fine Art Registry. She states clearly what she likes and doesn’t like for all to read and they can like it or not; that’s her story and she’s sticking to it. However, anyone who concludes that here is someone substituting irascibility for intellect is making quite a mistake. Before she turned to art criticism, Joan taught art and knows whereof she speaks. Her 2004 book, Art Behind the Scenes: One Hundred Masters In and Out of Their Studios, ferrets out details about the leading lights through five centuries of Western Art that never seem to appear in your typical scholarly art history text. She’s done her digging and knows BS when she smells it.
Some people detest critics, thinking that criticism is merely faultfinding, a sort of counter-creation against another’s creation. And to be sure, a “critic” who only says, “I like it” or “I don’t like it” and can’t intelligently support his or her position is nothing more than an audience member in critic’s clothing. Yet, to ancient Greeks the word critic meant “skilled in judging,” and to exercise real judgment, there first has to be understanding and before even that, there has to be an ability to copy or duplicate. Perhaps then, one could listen to the pronouncements of a critic if they could demonstrate their understanding through an ability to perform in the field they were criticizing.
And that brings us to the focus of this profile, because Joan Altabe is an accomplished artist in her own right, and her art mirrors her art criticism in many respects. “I try to practice in paint what I preach in print,” is how she describes it.
Early Years and
Mentoring from a Legend
Joan’s lifelong affair with art began at age four with her grandfather who was an art teacher in the New York City school system. She attended New York’s famous High School of Music and Art which has produced a list of notables in music, dance, theater and film, photography and art (including the cartoonists who started Mad magazine).
She attended Hunter College in New York and studied under Robert Motherwell, one of the pillars of Abstract Expressionism, as much for his essays on the movement as for his paintings.
As for his influence on Joan and her art, she says, “[Abstract Expressionism is] not my -ism, but I learned how to compose from him. And something else. I’ll let him tell it: ‘The abstractness of modern art has to do with an effort to find a more adequate expression of subjective experience than what one sees in the street…’ You might say I apply his words to my non-abstract work. As a kid, I used to think that painting was recording ‘what one sees in the street.’ Motherwell taught me that painting needs to come from a personal place to be authentic.”
One other thing she seems to have borrowed from Motherwell, and even pushed further, was the predominance of black and white in his paintings. His most famous works comprise the long series Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 110 abstract paintings, monumental in scale, similar in composition: two or three freely rendered black vertical bars separated by black ovoid shapes and accented by tiny patches of color. Joan’s paintings are non-abstract but entirely done in black and white.
Man and
Nature in
Black and White
Like her art criticism, Joan’s paintings are clearly rendered. When asked why she paints, she replies, “I can only tell you what I like to paint: the human form and skies. Light and shade playing on people, on clouds, likewise attract me. I work solely in black and white. I find color distracting, even irrelevant. And in a world overrun with color, the limited palette comes as a relief to me.”
Black and white, the colors of mourning and radiance, of life and death (here in the Occident, anyway). The restriction seems apt for her figurative paintings, a series entitled State of Mind. There’s nothing for the eye to deflect onto; you’re forced to confront the images – monumentally sized, extreme close-ups of the most revealing parts of a character: eyes, nose, mouth. Neither subject nor viewer has anyplace to go.
“Elimination of color and emphasis on light and shade allows greater focus on the subject,” she says. “I cover the gessoed surface of Masonite with Mars black and apply Titanium white to reveal the image. I liken the technique to lighting stage actors to illuminate the action. If necessary, I dim the light by adding more Mars black. Mars black is the best available black polymer. It looks like Ivory black, but it’s prepared
from the State of Mind Series
from fully permanent iron oxide. Titanium white is the most permanent white known.”
She uses the same technique for her Big Sky series, paintings of semi-real skyscapes. Here too, Joan pares everything back to what, for her, is the essence of the scene. The absence of color concentrates your focus on the shapes themselves. That and the light that illuminates them. Joan has spent many an hour marveling at the Florida sky and what the sun does to it, particularly near the end of a day.
“No artist can hold a candle to this daystar when it comes to painting the sky at dusk,” she wrote in The Best Painter Ever, Part 37 of her Fine Art Registry series. “Nothing in the long history of art can compare to the spiritual content of Old Sol’s elaborate, incandescent candlepower at twilight. Picture-making by this fireball eludes all known processes of painting.” [Read the entire article here.]
Asked for other influences, she replies, “My favorite painter is Lucien Freud. That man can paint! The amount of feeling he gets into a face can make the nerves hop. I also like April Gornik’s landscapes for their moving, storytelling skies.”
A
Third Series and Another Side of Black and White
Joan’s passion for black and white may have started with a lifelong involvement with cartoons. She has been cartooning since childhood and thinks that something her father did for her and her brother had something to do with it.
She explains, “He asked the popular cartoonists of the day – Ernie Bushmuller, who drew ‘Nancy,’ to send an original drawing with a personal message to me, and Carl Anderson, who drew ‘Lil Henry,’ to send an original drawing with a personal message to my brother. I loved the look of both these strips, their simplicity, the black outlines.”
“The High School of Music and Art actually took pains to dissuade me from cartooning,” she continues. “Part of the entrance exam for the school (a decidedly fine art place), included presentation of a portfolio of work I had done over a sustained period. Naturally, mine included cartoons. And I remember the interviewer saying to me something like, ‘If you’re accepted, we’ll get you out of this’ – indicating the cartoons. Sure enough, the school did just that. I didn’t cartoon for a long time afterward.”
Joan, the art historian then adds, with typical forthrightness backed by historical fact, “Which was ridiculous when you think of the painters who were cartoonists. Goya lampooned society in Spain,
Ring the bells that still
can ring/Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in
everything/That’s how the light gets in
--Leonard Cohen
True story: Joan Altabe looks up at the Florida sky. She takes it all in, the endless curve of the horizon, the sweep of color and movement. Her face lights up like a child’s. “Look at that,” she says, “it’s magnificent. Just remove the blue and you’re all set.” Remove the blue? It makes perfect sense in Altabe’s world. Altabe dreams in black and white; her paintings have the purity of a film noir flick. To Altabe, color’s a distraction – and she’s taken it out of the picture. She adds no hues to dilute the splendor of a cloud or a sad-eyed face. Altabe’s black and white world may be uncompromising – but it isn’t simply bleak. There’s the fright of eternity in that deep and demanding blackness, but when this pit of color is confronted by her thick insistence of white – illumination happens. Light burns through a churning swirl of darkening clouds; a slash of spectral highlights hinting of something. Did the storm happen – or is it just about to? Her canvas crackles with the frozen movement of limbs stretched in rigid embrace, bones in faces jutting from skin, eyes opening wide, clouds breaking, light pouring. And there’s sound: In her blacks, supreme silence; in her whites, a howl, a call, a whisper. A viewer explores the usual association chain: light, salvation, dawn, hope, reckoning. But Altabe’s paintings don’t come with an easy answer key. Her world contains harsh realms of inner association and outer landscapes of stark mystery. Don’t search for answers. Revel, instead, in the light that comes creeping through the cracks.
Florida writer Su Byron, on Joan Altabe’s art. Reprinted with permission of the author.
from the Big Sky Series
Daumier did it in France and Hogarth did it in England.”
After college, she worked as a muralist, but when a car accident prevented her from working, she began cartooning again for a newspaper on Long Island. She found that writing the gags interested her more than doing the drawings. This led to reviews of art books and eventually a staff job as art critic for a newspaper in Sarasota.
But she’s since returned to her old love, and the result is her Hardliner series, which are not gags so much as dramas played out on a single panel. Each portrays a skirmish in the battle of the sexes with “words that can whip like steel.” Looking at/reading them, you know that those words and worse are being said every day and, unlike Roy Liechtenstein’s cartoon panels, the viewers become immersed in the drama almost whether they like it or not.
Some artists have also been writers, but like Motherwell and Kandinsky, they wrote to express the philosophy underlying their work. Joan must belong to a very small club of art critics who can also create. In fact, she was particularly active from the 60s through the 80s showing her work, and was included in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum Tour, in addition to one-person and juried shows. But for some sentimentality on the part of Alaskans, the state flag today might have been Joan’s design.
“During the Bicentennial in 1976, the Santa Barbara Museum initiated a national competition that the Smithsonian Institution conducted – to redesign state flags,” she begins. “I chose Alaska. Because I lived in New York at the time, where so many artists live, my chances of winning seemed nil. But I tried anyway. The Alaska state flag needed redesign in my view. A jillion stars and whatnot made it unreadable. I imagined something simpler (this is where I think my cartoon appreciation comes in), with bold, unadorned shapes. So, I sketched out a horizon line in white and a white moon above with a midnight blue shade above the horizon and a slightly lighter blue below it – all to capture the pristine air of the place.
“There were 25 winners in all. Quite unexpectedly, I was the New York winner. The sketches were transformed into flags by the Betsy Ross Flag Company, and traveled museums nationwide, including NY’s Museum of Modern Art. Big thrill to take my kids, then little, to see Mom hanging, as it were, in the coveted halls of MOMA. Got a little write-up in the New York Times, too.
“The flags became the property of Santa Barbara Museum, which displayed them on poles on the approach to the building. Each winner got a copy of the flag. It hangs now in my daughter’s den. But, and this is the big ‘but,’ the governor of Alaska turned the flag design down and for a very understandable reason: a young teen who didn’t live very long had designed the existing flag and Alaskans were sentimental about it. (Sad to say, none of the states accepted flags that won the contest. But I’m rather fond of the reason mine was rejected).”
Joan has accumulated her share of awards for her art criticism and has hit a trifecta of sorts as well, being referenced in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who of American Women and Who’s Who in American Art.
Fine Art Registry™
and Future Plans
After Joan began writing her column for Fine Art Registry, Founder and CEO Teri Franks invited Joan to begin registering her work, and Joan sees the benefit that registration has for an artist. The record keeping function alone is a considerable advantage. Without Fine Art Registry, Joan says, there would be none as far as her own work goes. In fact, much of her historical track as an artist is found in her FAR® portfolio. For Joan, it is record keeping. But for her children, grandchildren and great-grandchild (yes, she is a great-grandmother and still kicking butt in the Florida art community) such a record is an important family connection.
Joan hasn’t done many shows since moving to Florida. “I’ve been reluctant because I’m a critic here and because the number of artists outnumber available walls,” she says. “I worry that I’m taking up room and worse, competing with them for collectors.”
She does show occasionally, most recently last March in a one-person show in Sarasota’s downtown library, and she was named Artist of the Month in October by Sarasota website AnythingArts.com.
As for doing major shows, Joan says, “My editor argued me into it, saying that I should let those I critique see what I do. Which is another way of saying, if you dish it out, you should take it, too.”
Surely this would be a rare event. An art critic who not only creates art but let’s others see it? If you don’t think this must take a certain amount of courage, can you imagine Clement Greenberg, noted critic and promoter of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, showing his work (had he done any)? Or Simon Cowell getting up there on American Idol and belting out a song?
For certain, some will like Joan’s work and some won’t. No one will be able to say, however, that it
isn’t coming from a definite, strong viewpoint or that
it isn’t sincere or that it doesn’t communicate! Joan’s art communicates all right. And as with her art criticism, it is a matter of: can you bear up to what is being said? ✍
[You can view Joan’s Fine Art Registry portfolio here or see more of her work and read commentary at her blog. You can obtain a copy of her book, Art Behind the Scenes: One Hundred Masters In and Out of Their Studios, here. And be advised, several similar books are in the works, the next, Sculpture Behind the Scenes, being released next summer.]
Joan’s winning design

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Book: Art Behind the Scenes by Joan Altabe

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Art:
Behind the Scenes

One Hundred Old and Modern Masters: In and Out of Their Studios

Windstorm Creative’s
Full Spectrum Reference Books

by
Joan B. Altabe

Windstorm Creative
Bremerton ¤ Port Orchard ¤ Seattle ¤ Tahuya

What People Are Saying…

“It is easy to respond to a book on art history in this format. Featuring a
‘backstage’ section, the author breathes life into each artist’s story,
describing their goals, shortcomings and foibles – gathering enough
mishaps along with their achievements to let the reader – artist or
student – ‘meet’ the creative person along with his or her work. The
way Ms. Altabe hangs her hat on a choice limited to one hundred
makes it easy to grasp her distinct point of view – which allows, but
doesn't impose, opinion. Some of the alliteration – the ‘burly giants
buried beneath’ the writer’s brush makes me feel privileged to know
how much fun she found in the artists’ studios as they affected change,
inspired and shocked the world.

Art: Behind the Scenes begs the question, ‘what shall come next?’
What will be new? Therein lies the magic when these students, Altabe’s
students, are inspired to lift their graphite, or even (can I say it?)
mouse. Congratulations on a scholarly work with such a light touch.
Some art writers really kill art for those who want to learn about it.”

Elizabeth Case, former combat artist for the United States Navy
and animator for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty

“Joan Altabe's Art: Behind the Scenes is an engaging visit with one
hundred artists. She anchors the artists in a particular time period and
style, but goes on to give the reader much more than the usual
biographical facts by providing a context for each artist's life and work.
The most fascinating part of the book is "behind the scenes" where the
reader gains insight into the artist's intent and philosophy about making
art.

The book is filled with wonderful anecdotes, obviously the product
of intensive research, and a passion for the subject.”

Nancy Roucher, Arts Education Consultant
and founding director of the Florida Institute for Art Education,
one of six institutes in the country with primary funding
from the Getty Education Institute for the Arts

What People Are Saying…

“This guidebook should be tucked under the arm of every museumgoer.
The artist-by-artist format is easy to access. Each entry offers an
overview of the artist's work, followed by insight into their personal life
and motivation.

It's like walking through the museum with the artist by your side.”

Sara Quinn, Design Faculty,

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies

"Behind the Scenes" is an invaluable sourcebook for students, artists,
curators and lovers of history. With a conversational style and an eye
for the quirky detail of the artists’ inner life, Altabe gives us an
accessible but engaging hybrid of gossip and historical fact…an
entertaining addition to any arts library.”

Christopher Skura, Chief Exhibits Preparator,

New York University/Grey Art Gallery

“In contrast to the serious, and, to the art neophyte, intimidating tone
of some scholarly works on art, Joan Altabe uses a light touch to
provide insight into both the artists and their work. She never bogs
down in arcane art terminology. Instead, art lovers of all levels will find
something useful, startling or amusing in each of the brief portraits of
old and modern masters.

Joan draws quotes from each artist's contemporaries, whether
friend, rival or patron, to further flesh out the lives and work of the
world's greatest artists.”

Susan Rife, Books Editor

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Art: Behind the Scenes
One Hundred Old and Modern Masters: In and Out of Their Studios
© 2003 and published by
Windstorm Creative Limited

ISBN 1-883573-06-8
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
First Edition June 2004

Cover by Steve Moore
Interior Design by Sandy Van Densen and Cris DiMarco
Author Photo by Phil Diederich

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever, except in the case of short excerpts for
use in reviews of the book. Printed in the United States of America. For
information about film or other subsidiary rights, please contact Mari
Garcia at mgarcia@windstormcreative.com.

Windstorm Creative is a multiple division, international organization
involved in publishing books in all genres, including electronic
publications; producing games, videos and audio cassettes as well as
producing theatre, film and visual arts events.

Library of Congress data on file.

Windstorm Creative
Post Office Box 28
Port Orchard, WA 98366
fullspectrum@windstormcreative.com
www.windstormcreative.com

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for sale

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cartoon series 30

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cartoon series 29

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The corporate world lives

2007-06-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

In 2001, I became the last newspaper staff art/architecture critic on the west coast of Florida. And like the sunshine state’s wild fires, the rash of firings has spread to newsrooms countrywide.

Today, another daily newspaper is zapping its arts critics. Minnesota’s Star Tribune is doing it to a classical music critic and a part-time architecture critic.
Which means that while the arts make news a lot, little commentary about it gets written. A survey conducted by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University indicates that only 27 percent of art critics express judgments. Giving opinions ranked last on their list of priorities. Buildings, exhibits, concerts are noted without discussion. It’s called saving space. The corporate world lives.

yin and yang

2007-05-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

2007-05-30T04:40:00.000-07:00

Some of the best architecture in my town is in the summer sky. The upper atmosphere is so artfully styled that you want to grab a camera to capture it before the wind blows it away. An experience in constant energy, the “street” above is definitely fast lane.
Let me count the ways.
One minute, the blue yonder is just that – a cerulean lake, smooth and silent, a backdrop for a street busy with cars and trucks. The next thing you know, the firmament, upstaging the traffic, gathers up its clouds – the dark woolly ones, the silken, the delicate grays - as if they were building blocks, and builds itself a street scene of its own, stately and aloof to the traffic below.
This morning, n the horizon, against a blackening sky, I thought I saw the ceramic cornice of the old courthouse. It was white, like alabaster. I could almost feel its polish. But as I peered at it, I could see a low-laying cloud that the sky had made into a cornice. Some architect, the air!
Oscar Wilde was right: Nature imitates art. Call it the art of cumulism, after the word cumulus, meaning shaped cloud puffs. Cumulus’ towered piles often are topped with capitals and cornices on the order of alpine chateaus. Or their massive pyramidal black brumes form shaggy corridors that conjure up the ruins of some massive temple.
Altostratus clouds, smooth as frosted glass, are masterbuilders that seem to pave the sky in travertine marble. And the mountainously tall cumulonimbus variety forms a metropolis of skyscrapers and tree-covered peaks that outshine any city.
Of course, I’m not the first one to see cities in skies. The poets have the corner on this subject. In “Ode to Liberty,” Shelley wrote of Athens “built from the purple crags and silver towers of battlement clouds.”
And in “When June is Come” Robert Bridges tells us “Watch the sunshot palaces high that the white clouds build in the breezy sky.”
Speaking of bards, it’s odd that the most famous one of all, Shakespeare, saw everything in clouds but buildings. Remember Hamlet telling Polonius he could make out a camel, a weasel and a whale in the stuff of skies? Maybe that’s because he didn’t have skyscrapers for comparison.
While we’re looking up, check out the star of the day, the summer sun, especially when it’s bout to retire for the evening. Here's this architect, burned out and ready to drop, and it runs from one cloud to another, washing each with aurora reds - the footprints of its journey across the sky like a strobic play of light pushing at the night.

No architect can hold a candle to summer’s daystar when it comes to painting the sky at dusk. Nothing in the long history of art can compare to the spiritual content of Old Sol's elaborate, incandescent candlepower at twilight. Picturemaking by this fireball eludes all known processes of painting.

Holman Hunt, a 19th-century English painter, sought to capture the setting sun's color and light by working in a small room with screens and curtains to create dark. Painting by natural light in another part of the room, Hunt peeked into his make-believe edge of night through a hole to render the painting "The Light of the World."

Early photographers also used elaborate methods to capture natural light, purposely wobbling their cameras during exposure so that their images trembled.

But the mighty daystar in the sky around here doesn't have to resort to tricks. It has no need to shake anything to get a vibrating effect. It just rouges everything with a throbbing redness that takes away all sense of place. And in its half-light, clouds above look so dark that you expect thunder.

And when the sun stops painting the sky, Sarasota looks like one big charcoal drawing.

Even when the sun is up for the day, the sky is still the best show in town. Maybe it's because I grew up in Manhattan, where mountains of concrete crowd out such things, but Sarasota's upper atmosphere engrosses like few pictures on exhibition.

One minute, the blue yonder is just that - a cerulean lake, smooth and silent - a backdrop for a landscape busy with flowering. The next thing you know, the sky, upstaging even the showiest plants, gathers up its clouds - the dark and woolly ones, the silken and the delicate grays, as if emptying a closet - and puts on a show.

Once, on the horizon against a blackening sky, I saw a statue. It was white, like alabaster. I could almost feel its polish. It looked like the frenzied animal in George Stubb's famed painting, "Lion Attacking a Horse." But I could see it was a low-lying cloud that the sky had carved into a horse.

Some whittler, the sky.

Once in a while, the shifting mass looks like sand dunes soft against the gray sky in Eugene Boudin's "Normandy Women Spreading Wash on the Beach."

The paintings of romantic painters show up a lot in the Sarasota sky.

My favorite novelists also have seen the light and compared clouds to other things.

In "The Witches of Eastwick," John Updike saw plantlife: "At the base of this cliff of atmosphere, cumulous clouds, moments ago as innocuous as flowers, afloat in a pond, had begun to boil."

In "Karain: A Memory," Joseph Conrad saw animals: "Ragged edges of black clouds peeped over the hills, and invisible thunderstorms circled outside, growing like wild beasts."

It makes you wonder what Conrad and Updike would have written had they visited Sarasota. Everything you can think of shows up in the sky here if you watch it long enough.

Just don't let it know you're expecting anything. That's when the best pictures come on. I saw my long-gone grandfather that way. He was laughing about something, but I wasn't in on the joke. He was just standing on the air, laughing.

FYI: Artworks seen on this site are by my hand.

2007-05-29T07:41:00.001-07:00

thought on painting nudes

2007-05-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

Wearing two hats today, painter and critic. Painting nudes is a ticklish subject, especially female nudes. Get them right, and you get stories that are psychologically charged. Get them wrong, they can look like ads for feminine hygiene products - too pink, too posed, too prop-like.

Introduction to my book Art: Behind the Scenes (see below for details)

2007-05-29T04:36:00.000-07:00

Introduction

When I was a child, my grandfather gave me Hendrik Willem Van Loon's
history book, The Arts, and the preface, especially, stayed with me.

Van Loon wrote of a train ride through farm country where he saw
two small children coming out of their house: A girl carrying a portfolio
and the boy a fiddle case. For twenty years Van Loon said he wanted to
write a book on the arts, but couldn’t decide on a “fixed point” (xxii) -
the reader to write for - until he saw those children.

My “fixed point” for Behind the Scenes is not only the student of
art, but also those who think of art as a remote subject. The book aims
to avoid the dry-as-dust information found in many art histories.

If you think of an old photo album in the attic and nearby letters
that relate to them, you have the idea of Behind the Scenes. Besides
describing old and modern masters, this book aims to make known the
hearts and minds of painters by their own word or through the eyes of
those who knew them.

An art critic by trade, I routinely speak for artists’ work, interpreting
and assessing it. But a statement in landscape painter John
Constable's lecture to the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1836
haunts me: "I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to
painters for information on painting." (qtd in Goldwater and Treves
270).

He’s got a point. How else to know that Peter Paul Rubens'
signature show of fleshy females does not reflect his personal tastes,
that he was a physical fitness fanatic who railed against excessive
eating? (qtd in Goldwater and Treves 149). Or that Giulio Romano's
macabre paintings have nothing to do with his personality (Vasari. Vol
2, 233)? Or that Alonso Cano, an ordained priest who painted pictures
of supreme serenity, was an ill-tempered man suspected of murdering
his wife (Chilvers 77)?

Such contradictions testify to the purpose of past art, and self-
expression wasn't it. These stories make clear that while art's purpose
has varied over the years, artists have suppressed their natures to fulfill
the need. Pablo Picasso said as much in an interview given to Lettres
Francaises in 1945:

Joan B. Altabe 15

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has
only his eyes if he's a painter... On the contrary, he's at
the same time a political animal, constantly alive to
heart-rending or happy events, to which he responds in
every way. (Wein and Gelman 33).

To the one hundred artists in this book and to those who read it,
this one’s for you.

Joan B. Altabe

Fall 2003

my publisher's url

2007-05-29T03:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.windstormcreative.com

Art Behind the Scenes by Joan Altabe

2007-05-29T03:53:00.000-07:00

Available

230 pages * First edition

ISBN 1-883573-06-8 * SRP $14.99

5.5 x 8.5 trade paperback

Cover design by Buster Blue

Nonfiction

Your price: $11.99 US (20% off)
Art Behind the Scenes: One Hundred Masters In and Out of Their Studios is an invigorating introduction to one hundred artists of the last five centuries. Brief discussions of their work, their place in art history and a peek into their private lives makes this a fascinating book.

"This guidebook should be tucked under the arm of every museum-goer…. It's like walking through the museum with the artist by your side."

--Sara Quinn, Design Faculty,
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies

Ms. Altabe's books is "an invaluable sourcebook for students, artists, curators and lovers of history…. Accessible, engaging hybrid of gossip and historical fact…an entertaining addition to any arts library."

--Christopher Skura, Chief Exhibits Preparator,
New York University/Grey Art Gallery

art book published by Windstorm Creative

2007-05-29T03:45:00.000-07:00

straight talk

2007-05-29T02:51:00.000-07:00

Letters to the Editor

2007-05-28T05:28:00.000-07:00

As a newspaper critic, I don’t answer reader complaints in ``Letters to the Editor.'' After all, they're not written to me. Besides, everyone's entitled to sound off. Even when letter writers make their opinions sound like fact, I hold back. Everyone's also entitled to be wrong.

But I made an exception one time because readers who objected to a column I wrote unwittingly raised a larger issue that warrants discussion. In the column, I said that a sculpture called “Nobody's Listening” fronting a City Hall in Florida - which shows five hunched figures - reflects badly on the five city commissioners.

The sculptor took exception. He the sculpture deals with the racial strife and dissension about the Vietnam War in the '60s, when the work was created.

City officials also wrote letters to the editor, saying I hadn't done my homework because I didn't take into account Cartlidge's intention.

But here’s the thing. Since when are art lovers obliged to see a work according to an artist's dictate? Wouldn't such a thing mean that an explanation needs to accompany every work made? And wouldn't that make art nothing more than an illustration of a thesis?

In that sense, I also question the wisdom of titling an artwork. I'm thinking of Art Spiegelman's New Yorker magazine cover drawing of a crucified rabbit a few years ago, which had the Catholic League for Religion and Civil Rights up in arms.

The drawing might have been defensible if he hadn't titled his work, ``Theology of the Tax Cut Cut,'' making reference to a rabbit in the drawing dressed in a suit with empty pockets pulled out against a background of Form 1040A.

Spiegelman said he drew inspiration from the fact that April 15 - the tax deadline - came the day before Easter.

But if he hadn't given an explanation or title, it could have been defended as a visual pun. After all, crucifixions are not exclusive to Christianity. The Romans used them as a method of capital punishment on their slaves. Apply the ancient concept of crucifixion to paying wages to the IRS and you've got slaves being punished by the capitol.

Spiegelman's drawing could have been defended this way, especially since, unlike Christ's wounds on the cross, the rabbit showed no crown of thorns and no sword-pierced side.

Artists who insist on explaining their symbology not only create problems for their work, but they also miss the point of art. It's not math. There's no one answer.

Andres Serrano made the same mistake when he called his photograph of a cross submerged in urine ``Piss Christ.'' If he hadn't named it, if he hadn't told us that the golden fluid was urine, the image could have been a pictorial of Christianity engulfed: in crassness, in commercialism.

Artists who narrow the range of interpretation reduce art to a visual aid. Picasso was guilty of this narrowing. Even though he said, ``Paintings are not done to decorate apartments, but are instruments for war for attack and defense against the enemy,'' he insisted that the bull in ``Still Life With a Bull,'' painted in 1938, was not political.

Imagine all those who suffered under facism who might have seen the bull's brutality as an appropriate symbol of bullies and taken comfort in that, had Picasso not dissuaded them.

If artists insist on answering questions that their art poses, we may as well stay home.
Art shouldn't have to come with answer sheets. It ought to generate dialogues, not soliloquies, to stand on its own.

And on its own, a five-figure work called ``Nobody's Listening'' in front of a City Hall suggests the five commissioners who work inside ignore their constituents.

So this is my plea. Either stop complaining when people find their own meaning in your titles or stop titling.

off the easel: Art Criticism is Croaking

2007-05-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

off the easel: Art Criticism is Croaking

off the easel: couple?

2007-05-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

off the easel: couple?

off the easel: art and money

2007-05-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

off the easel: art and money

off the easel: couple?

2007-05-27T08:04:00.001-07:00

off the easel: couple?