Tag Archives: sculpture

May 13, 2013 · 9:35 am

Is Tate Britain Rediscovering Its Purpose?

“Gloriously, satisfyingly reactionary,” is the assessment of the Torygraph’s art critic, Richard Dorment, on the renovations to Tate Britain, the London museum dedicated to British art from the 16th-21st centuries.  The museum’s Director, Penelope Curtis, has presided not only over the renovation of the galleries themselves, but in re-hanging the paintings contained within it in chronological order.  In so doing she is bucking an unfortunate trend which hit public museums like the Tate, and the Hirshhorn here in Washington among others, in which their sense of purpose was forgotten in the fight to re-brand themselves as beacons of hipster nonsense.

Beginning around a decade ago a number of public art institutions, inspired by the example of Sir Nicholas Serota at the Tate conglomerate began to rearrange the collections of painting and sculpture in their care.  The exercise lead to the works being displayed, not chronologically or in “schools”, as one would study them in art history, but in whatever bizarre arrangement the management felt would draw in the curiosity-seeking public, and get them more press.  Curators would decide that a group of completely unrelated works evoked thoughts – for them, anyway – about sex, the environment, a cause du jour, and so on, and group them together, often in a highly discordant fashion.

At the time, the art press went into raptures over the idea that this idea was something bold, new, and fresh – which of course it wasn’t.  If you have ever been to a private museum, such as The Wallace Collection in London, you know that oftentimes private collectors and their families hung pictures of different centuries and styles together in their homes.  They did so because they liked the way the pieces looked together, as well as matching the colors of the drapes, furniture, or carpets.  Some pieces then occupied the space they did because they were thematically suited to the purpose of a room, or conversely were banned from a particular room because they were ill-suited to it.  One would not like to see a painting of the beheading of St. John the Baptist hanging over the sideboard in the dining room, for example, even if it was by Sassetta.

However when more public institutions began to make similar idiosyncratic arrangements of their collections copying Serota’s lead, there was quite correctly a vociferously negative reaction from those of us who love good art, but who thought that museums  were losing their way.  There is a time and a place for creating what are popularly called “mash-ups” of seemingly conflicting elements in exhibition spaces:  it has always been the purview of the temporary exhibition to juxtapose works which might not otherwise be displayed nearby each other, so as to encourage the visitor see the connections between them.  Artists always influence each other, sometimes centuries apart, and so for these traveling shows the mixture of styles and centuries can work rather well.  The highly-regarded Manet/Velázquez show at The Metropolitan in 2003 was a good example of this.

The point of the public museum is not to indulge the personal whims, bad taste, and general ignorance of its leadership.  Serota for example once argued that the great High Renaissance master Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” should be allowed to be sold and leave the country, since British public institutions needed to collect more “foreign” art – apparently forgetting the fact that Raphael was from Urbino in present-dy Italy, and never set foot in Britain in his lifetime.  Unfortunately this is the sort of person leading most major public art collections these days, and we all suffer as a result.

Rather museums are meant to be institutions which both preserve art for future generations, and educate us as to its history and meaning.  Having been established for the public good, they are provided with certain legal protections and exemptions, as well as taxpayer funding.  As a result, they are not meant to be a rich man’s plaything, nor a venue for proving to others in your field that you are a bigger hipster than they are.  Thus it is a very good thing indeed to see that Director Curtis has taken the time to examine the role of the art museum in public life, and to try to recapture a sense of purpose from which all may benefit.

TateInterior Loggia at Tate Britain, London

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April 30, 2013 · 10:49 am

Rags, Riches, and the Contemporary Art Trade

Why is it that when one sees articles like this, describing how the halls and salons of The Louvre are being filled with contemporary art, that the sensation is one of anger arising from a deep sense of injustice? We all know instinctively that much of the headline-making contemporary art we see is garbage, and sometimes quite literally so as shown in the photograph which accompanies this post.  Unfortunately, few people have the courage to actually stand up and say so, and there are several possible reasons as to why.

One reason might be that many in contemporary Western society are brought up to believe that anyone can make good art, which is simply not true.  It is one thing to encourage little Tracy to make a nice picture for Aunt Hilda with her fingerpaints. It is another to convince adult Tracy that she is a great artist, and can in fact teach other people how to be artists, when she cannot even draw properly.

I cannot speak to the European experience, but the rather poor state of art education in this country is something I suspect most of my American readers know first-hand.  One learns very little beyond a smattering of Attic sculpture, the Italian Renaissance, a bit of Dutch genre painting, and the French Impressionists,  followed by an over-concentration on Modern Art.  Then one spends the rest of the course making bad pots, or poor sketches of one of the girls in the class seated on a wobbly stool.  In fact, far more time is spent in the American education system teaching students how to boil an egg, parallel park, or avoid getting Suzy pregnant, than is on educating them about the great artistic legacies of Western civilization.

Increasingly it is the persona of the artist, feigned or otherwise, and not the art itself, which is valued and praised.  The art becomes secondary to the story, i.e. the mythos created around the artist: this one is a political dissident, or that one is a public drunk, or that one sleeps with anything he can get his hands on, and aren’t they fascinating people?  In the end, seeing someone put thousands of porcelain sunflower seeds in a room may be amusing, but no one dares to ask whether it is actually good art. [N.B.: It isn't.]  

The contemporary art world does not genuinely want to ask itself this question, nor does it want you to question their judgment on this point, because in reality much of that segment of the art market is nefarious, at best.  When you read about someone paying astronomical prices for what looks like – and in fact, is – a pile of poo with a title placard, the story is not really the art.  Rather, it is about the amount of money changing hands, based on how well the art dealers and press have managed to create a marketable brand value for the artist whose work is being sold.

What most people do not realize is that the majority of this art which makes you scratch your head or roll your eyes is not actually being brought home for people to display.  Instead, it is going into places like bank vaults or gigantic tax-free storage facilities, where it is kept as an investment  readily convertible to cash by financiers, spendthrift entertainers, and arms/narcotics merchants.  This story which broke yesterday, about private AND institutional collectors pulling out of Christie’s art storage warehouses in Brooklyn, should give you some idea of the vast amount of art created and sold over the past 30-40 years which is sitting crated up somewhere, unseen.

If it were all released onto the market at once, the value of such art would collapse, since frankly no one would actually want it.  There is already so much of it available that it has lost that one quality which collecting objects like Old Master paintings or fine porcelain has always had, which is scarcity.  We all know from economics that once the market becomes aware that something is not actually rare or difficult to obtain, it begins to lose value, and sometimes precipitously.  The contemporary art market keeps pushing along, making new art stars out of delusional half-wits to keep the flow of goods coming, but looking less like an intelligentsia and more like the purveyors of tulip bulbs.

As someone who has collected in some very niche areas of art for the last couple of decades, I regularly encourage my readers to go out and collect what you love.  Owning art is not only an ongoing means of self-education, it is simply a joy.  I would based on the forgoing advise you to avoid the temptation of buying art which requires you to install a dedicated video monitor, or put down a layer of plastic on the living room floor, in order for you to be able to display it.

Instead, look for those contemporary artists who know how to do things like actually paint – like this guy – and have made a career of careful and attentive craftmanship.  These people develop their natural talents into something striking and accomplished, whatever style they happen to work in, because they know that great art takes time and patience to create.  These artists are the men and women who inspire and encourage us to feel that link of continuity with the history of our culture, and not that we are simply cattle to be manipulated by the contemporary art world for the purposes of commerce.  And when the contemporary art market finally does burst, these will be the artists left standing.

Louvre

“The Venus of Rags” by Michelangelo Pistoletto (2013)
from an temporary installation at The Louvre, Paris

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February 21, 2013 · 8:45 am

The Statues That Washington Forgot

Now that the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery has announced it will be closing for major renovations for the next three years, it seems an opportune moment to address a subject which one of my readers alerted me to some time ago.  The grand museum on Pennsylvania Avenue here in Washington, across the street from the even grander Old Executive Office Building, was known as “The Louvre of Washington” when it opened in 1874, thanks to its combination of French Second Empire style and luxurious gallery spaces.  It was the first home of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which by 1897 had grown so large that it moved to its present location a block away.

However the keen-eyed  observer of the building will notice something amiss on its imposing red brick and sandstone: why are there only two statues, when there appears to have been space for so many more?  The answer, as it turns out, is that the museum was originally adorned with many over-life-sized statues of important figures from Western civilization.  So where have these works gone?

The eleven statues that originally stood along the facade, each standing around 7 feet high, were carved in Rome to order for William Corcoran by American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917).  After the Corcoran collection left the building in 1897, it was turned over to the Judiciary, and served as a Federal courthouse for the next 50 years.  Ezekiel’s statues were subsequently removed from the exterior, since it was determined that they had no relevance to the new use of the building, and in 1901 they were sold at auction to local heiress Evelyn Walsh.

Walsh owned what was formerly known as the Friendly Estate in NW Washington; a gigantic expanse of land that was later sold off and subdivided into numerous communities.  She arranged the Ezekiel statues around her swimming pool, and presumably bathed under the appreciative gaze of Da Vinci, among others.  Through subsequent auctions after the sale of her estate, the collection of statues was eventually split up among several owners in Virginia.

Meanwhile, by the 1950′s and continuing through the Kennedy Administration, Congress began to consider a proposal that the old, crumbling Corcoran museum be demolished, so that a new and more efficient courthouse could be built in its place.  Eventually LBJ intervened, thanks to lobbying pressure from people like Jackie Kennedy, historic preservationists, and S. Dillon Ripley, the influential Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution for many years.  In 1965 the building was turned over to that body, and following renovations it opened to the public in 1972 as the Renwick Gallery, a museum of American craft and design.

Today the statues carved by Ezekiel for the facade of what is now the Renwick Gallery stand in the Botanical Garden of the city of Norfolk, Virginia, hundreds of miles away.  An owner of six of the sculptures donated his to that city, for placement in the public garden back in 1963.  Eventually the owners of the remaining five were located, and persuaded to donate their statues to the city of Norfolk as well.

Several months ago a friend from Twitter alerted me to the fact that he had taken his family to see these same gardens, and while admiring the statues was surprised to learn that they had been transported to his city from Washington.  While originally these sculptures would have had at least some protection from the elements, standing in their covered cubbyholes studded across the facade of the Renwick Gallery, for decades now they have been completely exposed to the elements, standing out unprotected in the snow, rain, and summer heat which characterize this part of the country.  No doubt standing around Mrs. Walsh’s swimming pool did not do them much good either.

While the Ezekiel statues are no longer the property of the Federal government, it is a pity in some ways that they cannot be returned to their original home on the facade of the building for which they were designed.  Today, copies of two of the statues – those of artists Peter Paul Rubens and Esteban Murillo –  stand in their original niches on the facade.  They seem isolated and forgotten, without purpose, particularly without their brethren.

Admittedly, the Renwick, unlike the Corcoran which preceded it in the space, is not an institution that attempts to provide a reasonably encyclopaedic overview of the history of Western art.  However one cannot help but think that those empty niches ought to be filled with what was originally placed there by the architects, artists, and donors who built it.  Instead, these original works of art are now covered in mold, crumbling away in a public park, leaving the building originally designed to display them lacking a crucially important part of its intended decoration.

DaVinci

“Leonardo Da Vinci” by Moses Jacob Ezekiel (c. 1871)
Botanical Garden, Norfolk, Virginia

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November 27, 2012 · 10:42 am

Raise Your Glasses

Today is the anniversary of the death of Jacobo Sansovino, who was born in Florence in 1486 and died in Venice in 1570. You may not be familiar with his name, gentle reader, but because of one single piece of art he created, he helped spur on the development of the Renaissance in Western Art, which of course had a far greater impact on world history than simply serving as decoration.  In one sculpture, Sansovino helped convince his contemporaries that not only had they managed to rediscover the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, but in fact they were reaching the point at which they would be able to surpass those who had come before them – and for this he certainly deserves a memorial toast.

In 1510 Sansovino was commissioned to sculpt a statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, for the Florentine aristocrat Giovanni Bartolini.  It was to be placed in a niche in the classically designed gardens of the latter’s home, the Palazzo di Valfonda, alongside statues of other gods and heroes from Greek and Roman mythology.  Fortunately for us, ever since the sculpture was later acquired by the Medici family, it has been housed in a museum for many centuries.  If the statue had been left outside, what makes this particular sculpture so special might very well have been lost, as a result of exposure to the elements.

When the work was completed in 1512, it astonished viewers because of a single factor, which may not be apparent unless you think about what you are looking at.  We see the figure of a nude young man, crowned with a wreath made out of grapevines.  He is striding forward, while at his lower right a small faun is trying to snatch a cluster of grapes from his hand.  All of this seems very ordinary at first, if we have seen Greek and Roman sculptures before.  Yet what is truly remarkable about this particular piece is that the figure of the young god holds his left arm aloft, bearing a drinking vessel, and that left arm has no visible means of support.

Up until this time, sculptors were extremely reluctant to attempt this type of carving in stone, since they had little or no remaining evidence from the past that such a thing could be done successfully.  Typically, when they were carving limbs that would be held away from the body, ancient sculptors would carve the arms of their statue separately and attach them later, since the weight of the heavy marble arms and the lack of support would tend to cause this part of the sculpture to crack and fall off, were it carved from a single block.  For example, in the famous example of the now-armless “Venus de Milo” in The Louvre, on the right side of the torso one can see a hole, which originally held a metal strut to support the now-vanished right arm of the statue, carved separately and attached later in situ.

Moreover, not many patrons would be willing to pay for such a feat, which would likely end in failure.  In a lightweight material such as wood, where things could be hollowed out or pinned together, gravity was not such a significant issue, but when it comes to stone, its heavy weight can be its undoing.  Thus it was considered so difficult and risky to attempt to carve a statue with an arm held aloft in a single piece of carved stone, that until Sansovino made this bold attempt most sculptors – including Michelangelo – simply avoided the challenge altogether.

The arm alone is not the only innovation however,  for here Sansovino is not simply copying his artistic forebears.  He is portraying a classical subject in stone, of course, which would have been familiar to the ancients, but there is a more natural sense of motion and fluidity in the body than one would often find in classical sculpture.  Admittedly this is not a universal observation, and there are notable exceptions, particularly from the Hellenic period.  Yet here we have a sense of movement in the pose of the figure, and indeed of boldness on the part of its sculptor, to create a sense of liveliness caught in a split second, rather than portraying someone standing still or at rest, which is what Classical sculptors tended to do.

In his later career Sansovino moved to Venice, where he became an engineer and a brilliant architect, helping to spread the aesthetic ideals of High Renaissance Florence and Rome to that city.  In fact, this native Florentine became so beloved by the Venetians, that when he died he was buried in the great Basilica of San Marco.  Yet this single work from when Sansovino was only an up-and-coming artist in his mid-20′s, competing with dozens of other young sculptors in the artistic hotbed of Renaissance Florence, can be admired not only on its own merits, but more importantly as part of a whole.

Achievements such as this in the arts, sciences, literature, and so on, had a profound impact on the thinkers and writers of the Renaissance.  These people became convinced that they were on the right track to achieve an even greater civilization than the ancients, to whom they had previously felt so inferior.  As we are all aware, in the end this change of attitude had a profound impact on the entire history of humanity.

“Bacchus” (detail) by Jacobo Sansovino (c. 1510-1512)
The Bargello, Florence

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July 24, 2012 · 10:53 am

London’s New Orbit Tower: An Olympian Failure

While watching news coverage of the lead-up to the London Olympic Games over the past few days, I became aware of the existence of the Orbit Tower, more formally the “ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower”, which is without question one of the ugliest public monstrosities that Britain has built to date, at least since the “Cool Britania”-era Millenium Dome – now known as the O2 Dome –  was plopped down like a rusting metallic jellyfish impaled on a sea urchin made out of Tinkertoys along the south bank of The Thames in Greenwich.  The difference between the two, of course, is that we are told that the Orbit Tower is in fact a work of sculpture in the form of a building, whereas the Millenium Dome is simply a building.  This means that we can be force-fed different ways of looking at the issue by the press, by Olympic organizers, and by those whose goal is to advance their own social-climbing, as is the case here.

The line between sculpture and building can of course become blurred. The famous Statue of Liberty at the entrance to New York City’s harbor is both a sculpture and a building. Lady Liberty has stairs, rooms, and so on inside of her, but appears to be a giant sculpture from the outside, because she is clad in her iconic copper skin, gone verdigris from time and the elements.  The Eiffel Tower on the other hand, was not intended to be a sculpture but a building, designed to be an entrance gate to and an observation platform for the World’s Fair – or more properly, the Exposition Universelle – held in Paris for the centenary of the French Revolution. Over time, some critics have called it more akin to a work of sculpture since it serves no practical purpose, and has sculptural qualities.

In fact the Eiffel Tower is a good point of comparison for the Orbit Tower, for despite the fact that the former was considered a building and the latter considers itself a sculpture, both serve the same purpose, which is no real purpose at all. Neither tower was particularly popular at the time it was built, either. However what has changed in the century or so since the construction of the former has been the gradual deterioration of all sensible debate over the question of whether a work of art or architecture is actually any good.

Back in Eiffel’s day, a who’s-who of the French art and literary establishment tried to get his tower stopped, complaining that the construction of what would become, and still is, the tallest building in Paris would ruin the skyline. “To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.” Guy de Maupassant, quite possibly the greatest short story writer in France, supposedly ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant every day in protest, saying it was the one place in Paris where you could not see the Eiffel Tower. Nowadays, of course, most people (though not this writer) love the Eiffel Tower for its lacy symmetry, and cannot imagine Paris without it.

Will people one day say the same of the Orbit Tower? The answer is almost certainly no, though I am prepared to revisit this blog post in 20 years’ time and see whether public reaction to it has changed. It is an asymmetrical, twisted mess, demonstrating no talent or ability other than that of wasting other people’s money, and then daring anyone to question whether it is any good by bringing out the black turtleneck brigade to attempt to insult those with common sense.  It looks for all the world as though someone forgot to do their class art project until the night before it was due, and then rapidly scrunched together a bunch of odds and ends from around the house, and said, “Here: this is art.”  Art it may be, but bad art it certainly is.

In fact the designer of this structure, the untalented but inexplicably popular sculptor Anish Kapoor, has said that he was inspired by – brace yourself – the Tower of Babel. “There is a kind of medieval sense to it of reaching up to the sky, building the impossible. A procession, if you like. It’s a long winding spiral: a folly that aspires to go even above the clouds and has something mythic about it.” However the Tower of Babel, lest you forget your Genesis, was a story about human ego and pretension, hubris and failure: about how man sought to make himself equal to God, and how he failed miserably.

That whopper of a quote aside, quite possibly the most head-scratching statement I have read thus far on the Orbit Tower comes from Lakshmi Mittal, often listed as the richest man in Britain, and the man without whose deep pockets, bad taste, and need to climb the social ladder the project might never have come to be.  Mittal apparently told the Associated Press that people just need to get used to the building – er, sculpture.  ”People are still trying to criticize the Mona Lisa,” he says.  That is true, except there is one major difference: if you don’t like the Mona Lisa, you don’t actually have to go to The Louvre and look at it.  Londoners who live within sight of this utter waste of materials, manpower, and money are going to have to look at this doomed-to-demolition monstrosity every day for the next several decades, until a more sensible generation has the sense to knock it down.

So, enjoy your broken roller coaster wrapped around the Seattle Space Needle for as long as it stands, London. My guess is that about 24 hours after the games end, petitions for this tower to be demolished will begin finding their way to Boris Johnson’s office.


The Orbit Tower, London

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