A Different Eakins Sold to Wal-Mart Heiress's Crystal Bridges

Eakins’ “Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand” (1874), sold to Alice Walton’s Arkansas museum.
The painting is destined for the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Carol Vogel in the New York Times is reporting that Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has been at it again in their attempt to sell an Eakins to Crystal Bridges. This time it is Thomas Eakin's portrait of Benjamin Howard Rand. "Less than four months after Philadelphians thwarted its bid to buy “The Gross Clinic,” an 1875 masterpiece by Thomas Eakins, an Arkansas museum founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton has quietly purchased another much-loved Eakins painting from the Philadelphia medical school that sold the first."

Michael Kimmelman describes the painting:

"A tour de force from 1874 -Benjamin Howard Rand- a chemistry professor whom Eakins knew as a teacher from his school days. He sits, reading and distractedly stroking a cat (an echo of Manet’s “Olympia” perhaps) at a desk almost comically crammed with microscopes, test tubes, quills and papers. Raking light picks out, like flashes of colored fireworks, the polished brass instruments, a pink rose and a woman’s afghan draped over a chair before the desk. The cat stares at us. Professor Rand remains absorbed in his book.

"At the Centennial, where Eakin's “The Gross Clinic” was banished to the medical tent for being too graphic, critics praised the Rand painting as more than a portrait because of the still life of objects in it. Now it seems brilliant but anecdotal."

In Memory: Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA

No Fear of Beauty: Sol LeWitt in San Francisco

"Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."
--Sol LeWitt, 1969

Sol LeWitt's retrospective, which ran from February 19, 2000 - May 21, 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was a revelation. The timing of the exhibition was deeply personal for me. It was the end of one phase of my life, an introduction to a new path, and ultimately a springboard -both personally and artistically- to a new world.

Sol LeWitt's life work as laid out in SFMOMA's exhibition was intellectually stimulating and ravishingly beautiful. This was an artist who was deeply serious, yet who had no fear of beauty.


Sol LeWitt
"Cube-Circle 4"
wall drawing
from Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings & Photographs at the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco which ran from Sep 9 - Oct 30, 2004
"I would like to produce something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto."
--Sol LeWitt, 1980's

"Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, LeWitt moved to New York in 1953, just as Abstract Expressionism was beginning to gain public recognition and was dominating contemporary art. He found various jobs to support himself, first in the design department at Seventeen magazine, doing paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats, and later, for the young architect I.M. Pei as a graphic designer. This contact proved formative, for as LeWitt would later write, "an architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He's still an artist."
-from the SFMOMA website created for the Sol LeWitt retrospective which ran from February 19, 2000 - May 21, 2000.

Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA


Sol LeWitt
Wall Drawing at Crown Point Press, 657 Howard St Entrance.

Sol LeWitt's essay "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", from 1967, provided a clear explanation of his artistic aims:
"No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea."
"When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

The SFMOMA site on the Sol LeWitt exhibition explains, "In 1960 LeWitt took a job at The Museum of Modern Art, working first at the book counter and later as a night receptionist. He met other young artists working there (Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman, and Scott Burton), placing him in the midst of a community of young artists searching for a new direction."

Other artists were important to Sol LeWitt. As Tyler Green points out: "Stories of LeWitt's generosity to other artists and to the art world are everywhere. In addition to supporting groups such as Printed Matter, for years LeWitt traded work with near any artist who wanted to trade with him. He kept the works he received in a warehouse near his home, in Chester, Conn. He sent his collection of contemporary art around the country, mostly to small museums that have limited access to top new art."

LeWitt most often used assistants to execute the works based upon his detailed instructions.

Below are LeWitt's instructions for the execution of Wall Drawing #340, 1980:

"Six-part drawing. The wall is divided horizontally and vertically into six equal parts. 1st part: On red, blue horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a circle within which are yellow vertical parallel lines; 2nd part: On yellow, red horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a square within which are blue vertical parallel lines; 3rd part: On blue, yellow horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a triangle within which are red vertical parallel lines; 4th part: On red, yellow horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a rectangle within which are blue vertical parallel lines; 5th part: On yellow, blue horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a trapezoid within which are red vertical parallel lines; 6th part: On blue, red horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a parallelogram within which are yellow vertical parallel lines. The horizontal lines do not enter the figures."


Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing in the Lobby at SFMOMA

LeWitt's work strikes a delicate balance between the physical work and the idea. His wall drawings begin with a series of mathematical calculations laid out on papers, which are crafted into precise yet open instructions that a team of collaborators executes.

LeWitt's massive, vibrant wall drawings are like Renaissance frescoes in their ability to create a new kind of space which is both painting and architecture.


Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing in the Lobby at SFMOMA

Even though LeWitt used industrial materials that he felt would erase any trace of craft and employed assistants to execute his ideas, the importance of the artist's hand is still evident in the subtle shifts in color and line in the wall drawings. LeWitt's desire to adhere to a system did not negate his wish to create truly beautiful wall drawings. As the artist said in the early 1980s, "I would like to produce something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto."

More at:

Tyler Green
Video: Sol LeWitt Makes a Drawing from SFMOMA*

*The interactive media works created by SFMOMA'S education department are consistently remarkable. Artist,
Tim Svenonius, is deeply involved in many of these projects, including his work on the groundbreaking discovery of an early Picasso found hidden under SFMOMA's "Street Scene" painted by Picasso in 1900


Hidden Picasso Under SFMOMA's "Street Scene" painted by Picasso in 1900.

Interactive Site: SFMOMA's Hidden Picasso
Tim Svenonius Site



Painting in SFMOMA lobby
photo by Clay Vajgrt

A Trinity of Light - L.A.

I am re-reading Lawrence Weschler's volume of essays: "Vermeer in Bosnia." Weschler's piece on the light of L.A. resonates:

The architect Coy Howard, a true student of the light explains:
"Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing -the object- and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach ... and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and a wave comes in, splashing its feet. At this moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow, and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here - the air, the atmosphere, the light - that makes everything shimmer. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world - the diaphonous soup- which in turn, grounds a magic-meditative sense of presence."



Icons From Sinai

School of Los Angeles

Update: RB Kitaj Exits


R.B. Kitaj at Hammer Museum

RB Kitaj presented a lecture on his art at the Hammer Museum on Thursday, March 8, 2007


R.B. Kitaj
Los Angeles no. 20 1990-2003
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

"Don't listen to the fools who say either that pictures of people can be of no consequence or that painting is finished. There is much to be done. It matters what men of good will want to do with their lives."
-RB Kitaj

We are fortunate to have Kitaj back in Los Angeles. Much like Alex and Jane Eliot, Kitaj should be declared a living national treasure. Almost thirty years ago Kitaj curated an exhibition, for the Arts Council of Great Britain, entitled The Human Clay. Let me be the first to propose a new exhibition incorporating Kitaj's School of London with our new - School of L.A.

The School of London - School of L. A. connection is a natural one with Kitaj and Hockney working here and inspiring a whole new generation of artists. In the catalog essay for the original Human Clay exhibition, Kitaj wrote, "If some of the strange and fascinating personalities you may encounter here were given a fraction of the internationalist attention and encouragement reserved in this barren time for provincial and orthodox vanguardism, a School of London might become even more real than the one I have construed in my head. " Substitute Los Angeles for London, and the above sentence supports the brave efforts of many, including Caryn Coleman's and Mark Vallen's mission to encourage the development of a vital art press in Los Angeles.

As artists, gallerists, curators, writers and collectors, we need to come together and refuse to accept the status quo.
I hope that this School of L.A. which I have construed in my head, will become real. RB Kitaj - we need you.


R.B. Kitaj Lectures at Hammer Museum

Three Mexican Directors Up for Oscars at Tonight's Academy Awards

Three esteemed Mexican film directors are up for Oscars at tonight's Academy Awards:
Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro

"Hollywood often makes socks," Cuaron said. "I work with the studios when they decide they want to make a film and not socks."

Guillermo del Toro

In Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," up for six Oscars including best foreign-language film, fascist soldiers in post civil-war Spain torture rebels as an eyeless, child-devouring demon lurks nearby in a mysterious underworld.

Alfonso Cuaron and his daughter Bu

Writer-director Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of the P.D. James novel, "Children of Men," is set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic England. Cuaron directed the third Harry Potter film as well as "Y tu mamá también".

Cuaron's take on Harry Potter brought an eerie depth and a sense of real danger.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film "Babel," which features a global cast speaking five languages, portrays the cultural barriers we face in an era of globalization amidst wrenching inequalities of wealth and power.

The film runs like a thread linking scenes from a Mexican village wedding, to a barren Moroccan desert landscape, to a Tokyo nightclub pulsing with a post-modern beat.

Director Alfonso Cuaron, in a conversation on the ABC News program Exclusiva, said, "In many ways, I think these three films are a trilogy. We read each other's scripts and it goes beyond that — we are in each other's editing rooms, cutting … editing from each other's film."

"I couldn't make a film without Alejandro and Guillermo telling me what to do. I think these three films share a sensibility about the world we live in and about humanity."

Jimmy Shaw, the owner of the amazing Loteria Grill at the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles grew up in Mexico City. His restaurant is a meeting place of sorts for the Mexican film community and last week he was beaming at the attention being focused on their innovative films. Jimmy is set to open a branch of the Loteria Grill in Hollywood - walking distance from tonight's award ceremony and will be catering a party for the three directors and the Mexican film community. His food is also worthy of an Academy Award.

Rothko at MOCA

Installation View: Rothko at MOCA

The recent exhibition of Mark Rothko's work by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art at their Pacific Design Center satellite space was both profound and encouraging. The paintings, many originally from the Panza Collection outside Milan, were crisply installed in the high ceilinged space and gently lit.

In one of the essays collected in the posthumous volume "The Artist's Reality", Mark Rothko expressed his hope that a democratically educated populace "through increased facilities for the seeing and practice and discussion of art, will actively and genuinely be moved by the creations of their contemporaries."

I think that Rothko would appreciate the crowd that gathered to reflect upon his paintings. A group that took time to step away from an increasingly murky politcal reality to contemplate something deeper, richer and more lasting. Rothko wrote that "society profits most not when art at its highest applauds its appearances, but when it pictures its society's highest aspirations. The Renaissance was an age of murder. Greek freedom was based on slavery."


Installation View: Rothko at MOCA

Accompanying the Rothko paintings on the final weekend of the exhibition was a sound work by Steve Roden entitled "dark over light earth". Steve Roden's sound piece enlisted violinist Jacob Danzinger and added to the chapel-like feel of the space. While I was there, gallery viewers spoke in hushed tones. There was a spirit of contemplation in the room. I wished that the moment could go on forever, that we all could soak into the paintings - breaking the space between object and viewer.

Hello, Goodbye

Thomas Eakins, (1844-1916)
The Cello Player, 1896
Formerly the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
Joseph E. Temple Fund, 1897

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes has the scoop on the deaccession of Thomas Eakin's "The Cello Player" to help fund the accession of the "Gross Clinic": "Proceeds from the deaccessioning will be applied toward PAFA's co-purchase of Eakins' The Gross Clinic, which PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are co-purchasing from Thomas Jefferson University."

Grace is Gone

At the Sundance Film Festival “Grace Is Gone,” by first-time director James Strouse and featuring John Cusack, has won the the dramatic audience award and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award. John Cusack stars as a former soldier - Stanley- home from the front caring for his two daughters while his wife continues to serve in war-torn Iraq. Early in the film, Stanley is delivered the news that his wife has been killed in Iraq. Rather than tell his daughters of their mother's death, Stanley attempts to flee the reality of absence by taking his children on a road-trip.

James Rocchi, from Cinematical, describes the film as a needed look at contemporary reality:
"There's a certain play of light in Grace is Gone, and carefully composed moments as well as a swiftly-captured realism that still looks wonderful. Grace is Gone has the look of life, and the glow of art. The film is as affecting -- and as ultimately human -- as one might hope, and it still brings home the ugly real fact that for too many Americans, the evening news isn't just background noise."

John Cusack in an interview with the New York Times said,“I find [the Iraq war] to be the most cowardly, egregious political act of my lifetime. It was callous, it was brazen, and an attempt to hide what this war is doing to people. And not just Americans. I know this might make me sound like a bad person, but I will say it anyway — Arab life has as much value as American life. Too many people are being killed.”

A long, nonstop line between the march in Selma in 1965 and the inauguration in Washington in 2009

Senator Barack Obama speaks in remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr.
-Photo by Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

Speaking today at the annual Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship breakfast in Chicago, Barack Obama evoked the memory and the social activism of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
''As I recall, Dr. King wasn't hanging out in Manhattan, Dr. King wasn't hanging out in Beverly Hills."

Introducing Obama, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told a crowd at the annual King scholarship breakfast, ''it's a long, nonstop line between the march in Selma in 1965 and the inauguration in Washington in 2009.''

Phil Cousineau and Gregg Chadwick at Esalen Redux

This upcoming weekend Phil and I will be presenting the second in a series of exploratory workshops at the Esalen Institute.


Gregg Chadwick
"Immersed in Silence"
60"x48" oil on linen 2006

Upcoming Workshop at Esalen,Big Sur

Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick

DEC 22-24, 2006 AT ESALEN INSTITUTE

"Genius is the power for lighting your own fire." -- Emerson

For thousands, one of the profound mysteries of human adventure has been the creative impulse. The irrepressible urge to leave our mark, to express ourselves, is an essential part of what makes us human. But while creativity is as natural as breathing, it is also notoriously elusive, challenging, and riddled with ordeals--like any grand adventure.

This workshop will use a three-stage model of the Creative Journey -- Inspiration, Process, Realization-- to explore what it means to harness our imagination and tend our creative fires over the course of a lifetime. To explore this possibility, the course will use innovative exercises to encourage fresh ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling. These include listening for the color of music while drawing, sketching word colors while working on a poem; using photographs, movies and music to help break through creative block.

The leaders will also share the secrets which have allowed them to break their own creative blocks, such as Phil's sketching to help rekindle his powers of observation, and Gregg's use of writing and reading poetry and working with music to help him constellate new work.

There will be slideshows, film-clips, music, and discussion to help crystalize where students are on their own unique journey -- and what they need to make their vision a realilty.

This passion - filled workshop will appeal to artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, as well as teachers, parents, psychologists, and business leaders -- all who are fascinated with the creative adventure.

For reservations and more info see: Cousineau and Chadwick
 
Address: Esalen Institute 55000 Highway 1, Big Sur, CA 93920-9616
Esalen's Fax: 831-667-2724
Reservations:
831-667-3005

Remembering Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard
"In the Box"
gelatin silver print
1962

"My aim is to transform the complexities of the figure into harmonies of simplified forms revealing the innate reality, the life force, the spirit, the inherent symbolism and the underlying remarkable structure – to isolate and give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity."
-Ruth Bernhard

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the photographer Ruth Bernhard died yesterday in San Francisco. Ruth Bernhard was a vital presence in the Bay Area art world. I remember running into her at a gallery opening south of Market a few years ago. Her eyes were like open lenses. She seemed to embody Christopher Isherwood's phrase - "I am a Camera."
In "Goodbye to Berlin" (published in 1939), Isherwood writes:

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."

For Christopher Isherwood and Ruth Bernhard, Berlin between the wars provided a starting point for future artistic explorations. Ruth Bernhard was born in Berlin in 1905. She studied photography at the Berlin Academy of Art, and moved to New York in 1927 before the onslaught of Nazism. In 1935 she met Edward Weston in California. Peter Marshall writes about this event:

"In 1935, also the year she became an American citizen, that Bernhard first met Edward Weston on a beach in Santa Monica, California. It was a meeting that was to change her life. Until then she had seen photography as a matter of finding a solution to a problem, largely as a design exercise to meet a commercial need. Seeing Weston's work, and talking with him was an epiphany that awakened her to the creative artistic possibilities of the medium."

Ruth was inspired by this meeting, traveled west from New York to work with Weston and eventually resettled in San Francisco.


Ruth Bernhard
"Rice Paper"
gelatin silver print
1969

Ruth brought a forceful presence into her black and white photographs of the figure. Weston's work, though formally exquisite, could seem psychologically hollow in comparision to Bernhard's knowing interpretation of the female form.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Accepting Donations to Save Eakins from Wal-Mart Heiress

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is making an effort to keep Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia. Please note that everyone who supports this cause can help by making a donation to a fund specifically set up to purchase the painting:
Save "The Gross Clinic"
Your donations will contribute to the $68 million needed and will send a powerful message that the American public wants to stop the plundering of America's libraries and collections.

More at:
Save "The Gross Clinic"
Keep "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia

Reading Obama on Thanksgiving

Barack Obama

I have been reading Barack Obama's new book, "The Audacity of Hope" on this Thanksgiving. Obama's astute words on Abraham Lincoln brought to mind the ongoing need for healing, thanks and humility in the United States. On October 3, 1863 as the Civil War raged, President Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday in November:

"I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise... for deliverances and blessings, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, and commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union."

Keep Eakins' "Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia

Thomas Eakins
"Gross Clinic"
96"x78" oil on canvas 1875
-image courtesy Thomas Jefferson University

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton and under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas, is trying to pry away another important painting from its longstanding home. Carol Vogel in the New York Times reports that Thomas Jefferson University - a medical school in Philadelphia - has decided to sell the work which was purchased for $200 by University alumni in 1878. The proposed sale price is $68 million and the painting would be shared between the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the not yet completed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Crystal Bridges' recent plunder of Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits" from the New York Public Library set a poor precedent.

Asher B. Durand
"Kindred Spirits"
44"x36" oil on canvas 1849
formerly in the collection of the New York Public Library

Carol Vogel goes on to report that Thomas Jefferson University seems to be "mindful of potential objections from residents of Philadelphia, Eakins’s lifelong home,[and] has given local museums and government institutions 45 days to match the offer."

"Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said she would immediately explore the possibility, perhaps in tandem with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. “It’s a painting that really belongs in Philadelphia — his presence still resonates here,” she said of Eakins’s masterwork. “There may be a way we could band together to make it happen.”

I am in on this one and hope that the Philadelphia Museum will accept offers from around the country to help keep "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia.

Thomas Eakins
"Gross Clinic"
96"x78" oil on canvas 1875
-image courtesy Thomas Jefferson University

More at:
New York Times on the Gross Clinic

In Philadelphia they are aghast at the news-
"This is our cultural heritage. We cannot let it be bought.

If we sell it, we are selling Philadelphia's future. Would we allow the Liberty Bell to be bought? This is no different.

Philadelphia is the home of the first hospital, founded by no less than Ben Franklin. A tradition grew out of that, a tradition that is summarized by this painting. We have a rich history of medicine that will be plundered by the sale of this art."
-from Phillyville

And the alumni from Thomas Jefferson University are livid:
"Isn't this a little like selling your soul to the devil? Couldn't Jeff issue bonds in the usual fashion and go into debt like any respectable university?

Says Bob Barchi (University President), "We're not a museum. We're not in the business of art education" and in two sentences betrays his failing grade on his Two Cultures book report , a crushing ignorance of the centrality of art to the human experience, and spins Jefferson's expansion as an Eakins rejection redux.

Heroic myth writ large (Homer) or small (Rocky Balboa, Luke Skywalker) inspires great things in real life, just as Eakins painting of Gross has inspired countless artists, physicians and patients. It is arguably Philadelphia's David. But Philadelphia is not Florence, and the Jefferson Board no Medici."
Is Art Important to Medicine?

Vote Tomorrow and Remember the Ghosts of Baghdad & New Orleans

Gregg Chadwick
"Ghost of New Orleans"
48"X36" oil on linen 2006

We were in my studio Saturday night mourning the loss of our country to Karl Rove, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Enough is enough. Vote tomorrow and vote for a House and Senate of the future. Thomas L. Friedman said it well in the New York Times:

"Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country's health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you're not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has -- through sheer incompetence -- brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq -- and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate -- it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we're as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don't think we're that stupid. On Tuesday, November 7th we'll see."

-by Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times, November 3, 2006

The Angel of History

Gregg Chadwick
"The Angel of History"
28.5" x 73" sumi and oil on screen 2006

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."
- Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," IX

More at: https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-The-Angel-of-History/25560/4677196/view

San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art: New Building, New Exhibit

Darren Waterston
Interior (Green), 2001

The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (SJICA) has moved into its own building just down the block on South First Street from its former site. Recently, SJICA's director Cathy Kimball , gave me a tour of the former warehouse. SJICA is in the model of a European Kunsthaus, a space dedicated to museum worthy exhibitions but without a permanent collection of its own.

Gregg Chadwick
Buddha of the Future (In Memory of Uri Grossman), 2006

The current exhibition, art destined for SJICA's 26th Annual Fall Auction, provides an overview of contemporary art practice in the Bay Area and beyond. Including works by Darren Waterston, Binh Danh, Judy Dater, Naomie Kremer, Gustavo Ramos Rivera, Robin McCloskey, Gregg Chadwick, Bruce Conner, Kim Frohsin, Manuel Neri, Hung Liu, Michael Kenna, Jamie Brunson, Kyoko Fischer, Enrique Chagoya and others - the exhibit is visually and intellectually astute. The group show opened on October 6th and runs until the auction at SJICA on Saturday, October 28th.

Robin McCloskey
Baylands, 2005

SJICA's new building is located at 560 South First Street in San Jose’s growing SoFA arts district. The large (7,500 sq ft) space will soon be completely renovated. Director Cathy Kimball, SJICA'S staff, and the Institute's board have a large and compelling vision for the place of the arts in San Jose.

Binh Danh
Persimmon Eclipse, 2003


San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art's 26th Annual Fall Auction:

Exhibition (Free Admission):
October 6 - October 28, 2006

Auction (Tickets required):
Saturday, October 28
Doors open at 6:00pm;
auction begins promptly at 7:00pm

Tickets are $35 for ICA Members/$45 for non-members
(20% discount on tickets purchased before October 28.)
Call 408-283-8155 for tickets.

The Medical Consequences Of The Iraq War: Health Challenges Beyond The Battlefield

photo by Lance Cpl. Brandon L.Roach USMC

The Medical Consequences Of The Iraq War: Health Challenges Beyond The Battlefield

A Symposium To Present The Issues Behind the Headlines

WHAT: Physicians for Social Responsibility, along with UCLA Extension and UCLA, School of Public Health, will hold a one-day symposium on the medical consequences of the war in Iraq.

WHY: Health effects of the war have been grossly underreported. According to public health studies, three years of war has resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 Iraqi civilians. To date, 2,685 American soldiers have been killed with 19,945 soldiers wounded. US and Iraqi war soldiers are being diagnosed with mental disease in shockingly high numbers – portending an avalanche in veteran mental health needs in the coming years. Ten authoritative physicians and social scientists will present their findings and testimonies, including:

Dahlia Wasfi, MD The War in Iraq: A First Hand Account
Richard Garfield Dr.PH Mortality and Morbidity in Iraq
Gene Bolles MD Treating American Soldiers: A Frontline Account
John Pastore MD Physician Ethics and War
Gregg Bloche MD Physician involvement in Torture: Ethical and Legal Issues
Helena Young, PhD Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in American Troops
Harriet Zeiner, PhD Traumatic Brain Injury
Nafisa Abdullah-Huf MD The Medical Situation for the Afghan People
Congressman Bob Filner Healing America’s Soldiers in the Coming Decades

WHEN: Saturday, October 21, 2006
9am - 5:30pm

WHERE: UCLA Campus, Grand Ballroom, Ackerman Hall

COST: $25 – Open To The Public, Wheelchair Accessible
Register on line: uclaextension or call: (310) 825 9971
Course Registration Number: S3972U

The Scream and Madonna On View Before Restoration at Munch Museum

From September 27th to October 1st at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, the newly returned paintings "The Scream" and "Madonna" will be exhibited before restoration. Both paintings will be laid out flat in glass display cases like aenesthesized patients bearing scars from their saga of theft and return.

More at:
Munch Museum

An Elephant is Not a Wall

Tai, a 38 year old Indian elephant gets painted for Banksy's exhibition in Los Angeles
(Photo by Marissa Roth for The New York Times)

Banksy, the mischievous, witty and at times sophomoric intervention artist, has picked a thirty-eight year old Indian elephant named Tai to intervene upon. At his current and very brief Los Angeles exhibition, it opened on Thursday and closes on Sunday, Banksy has created a literal depiction of the metaphor – “There is an elephant in the room and nobody talks about it.” It seems that moving from public spaces to private elephants has created a justified uproar in Los Angeles: "I think it sends a very wrong message that abusing animals is not only OK, it's an art form," said Ed Boks, general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services, to the Los Angeles Times. "We find it no longer acceptable to dye baby chicks at Easter, but it's OK to dye an elephant?"

It seems only fitting that the anonymous Banksy out his identity in a tit for tat body painting session with Vitaly Komar & Alex Melamid and the painting elephants of Northern Thailand and Bali - Banksy as blank canvas for the painting elephants.

Komar & Melamid's Elephant Project. Could Banksy be next?

More at:
Elephants That Paint

New York Times on Banksy

Los Angeles Times on Banksy and Tai

Tai at Banksy's Show
(Béatrice de Géa / LAT)

An earlier artistic intervention by Banksy in Los Angeles proved to be much more succesful in intent and final outcome:

Remembrances

My current paintings are filtered through my experience of September 11th, 2001. I was visiting my family in Thailand and had spent the morning in Chiang Mai following the saffron robed monks on their small morning pilgrimages. I hopped a flight for Bangkok and while waiting for a connecting flight to San Francisco I watched in horror as the planes hit the World Trade Center. On my return to the U.S. later that week I began to paint Buddhist monks, privately at first - as a form of meditation. Only later did I grasp the dharmic sense of responsibility inherit in this new body of work. I needed to paint these paintings. And I found that the audience I had developed over the years felt the need to see them also. They have given me their trust that I will create paintings that speak of our times but also provide clues to a future path away from the darkness.

More from:

Edward Winkleman

Franklin Einspruch

Moby and NY'ers tell GW to go home

Exiting

Gregg Chadwick
Screen Memories (Fin de Cinema)
60"x60" oil on linen 2002

A new poem by Kent Chadwick about the experience of leaving a theater after watching a film:

Exiting

the dream, the dark left behind,
done sipping our coke, done suckling on
the Big Nipple of Hollywood, christened
so by Bertolucci at the Oscars,
the credits rolling as the lights come up,
stumbling from our shared, climactic dream,
fantasy experienced in common,
back to the foyer of reality,
the cacophony of unscripted sound,
shock of daylight after the matinee,
the third act’s satisfaction rippling
within us, but lessening so quickly
that we try to prolong it conversing:
What have we learned? What truth? What lies?
We learn lies too: pseudo-ideas
that bond with what we think we know
but catalyze wrong conclusions.
The lies in question here are facts
refined beyond reality,
simplified so as to produce
more powerful pure emotion
(while complexity fosters
more nuanced and reflective thought).
The troika of Hollywood lies:
First—that violence is redemptive—
that just enough judicious force
can reform the schoolyard bully,
clean up Dodge City, save the Bronx.
Second—that love is just romance—
that the romantic spark is love’s
one true and only kindling,
that sex is its one fulfillment
and passion its signature sign.
Third—that the hero always wins
and gets just what he wants—
that happy endings are the rule,
that every problem can be solved
and in time for the curtain call.
We leave accepting the unreal,
not doubting the impossible,
more prone to choose expedience,
less willing to show forbearance,
primed to demand happiness now.

Yet poetry, like movies, lies.
For that Plato and Mohammed
elected to banish this art.
There are lies we choose to live by—
fiction is our euphemism,
poetry their celebration—
humor, hope, imagination,
artifices over the void
contra despair, versus ennui.
The lies of classic tragedy
to those of sentimental soaps
and Hollywood’s cheap romances
fulfill a basic human need:
Aristotle’s art catharsis.
Two types of lies to consider:
imagined facts
subverted facts.
The arts create much neater worlds,
places our minds can understand,
invent untruths, imagine facts,
things that never have been nor will.
But the artist and audience
agree they’re false. The artist does
not conceal her art nor does she
attempt to delude the viewer.
Instead we play an elaborate
game where the artist tries to win
a suspension of disbelief,
a surrender of our careful
guard against both lies and liars
with bold strokes and rich verities.
And the frisson of art is when
the artist-magician defeats
our disbelief and seduces
us into a private world where
magic happens regularly.
These imagined facts are tall tale
bones for our imagination
to gnaw on down to the marrow.

Not so lies of subverted facts.
These violate reality
to make things easy, to make things
fit within the artificial
system of a Pollyanna,
huckster, conman, true believer,
propagandist, or demagogue.
The worst subverted fact is “they”—
smooth, simple, and innocuous,
insidious as a virus.
“They:” the demonized other crowned
responsible for all our ills.
“They” fills our rhetoric, our news,
our elections, and our movies.
Ungrammatical Pogo hints
at the antidote: We have met
the enemy, and they is us.

Though, like cartoons, films teach truths too.
What have we learned? Signs and wonders
abound: we have new eyes and ears;
we have slipped inside another,
seen from a different angle
how the world alternately feels,
practiced cheering for a stranger.
Scenes have been framed and staged for us
of incomparable beauty
that thrill our sense of life’s glory.
We have been given life lessons
in how to kiss and how to fight,
how to suffer and how to dance,
how to laugh at our foolishness.
Again we’ve been reminded how
easily we break into song.

The theme song returns to mind and we want
to hum and hold onto its bright tune as
the double doors push us back outside changed
from audience to individuals,
our feelings pitched, ideas stirred, images
swirling then forming into memory
and new stories settling in our souls.

Echoes of Munch's Scream

The Norwegian police are reporting that Munch's paintings - "Scream" and "Madonna" , stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2004, have been recovered. Munch's "Scream" and his numerous variations in different media have inspired a host of references, homages and parodies. The Munch Museum, before the theft, hosted an exhibition of contemporary works influenced by Munch's proto-existential painting.

Gilbert & George
"Street"
121 x 100cm photomontage 1983

The museum provides a concise description of "Scream's" genesis:

"In his writings, Munch connects "Scream" (1893) with a specific event - a walk with some friends from a vantage point high up on Ekeberg at sunset. Munch paints the subjective experience of "the scream in nature" as an expression of universal angst rooted in existential uncertainty. Mankind is on the threshold of a new and frightening century, abandoned by God, whom Nietzsche had declared dead in 1872. Through its deeply expressive power this picture has attained the status of icon in the history of art. The universal angst of the age and the personal angst of the individual here reach their apogee. But "Scream" also expresses the universal struggles in life and what it is to be human."

Edvard Munch
"Scream"
84 x 67cm oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard 1893

The Munch Museum provides a history
of the newly recovered paintings on it's website:

Edvard Munch
"Madonna"
oil on canvas 1894

"Scream" and "Madonna" in the Munch Museum collection were in the artist's possession when he died in 1944, and part of his bequest to the City of Oslo.

"Scream" in the Munch Museum is one of two painted versions of the image. The other is to be found in the National Gallery, Oslo. The National Gallery version is signed and dated 1893, and many scholars believe this to be the first one. Both versions are painted on cardboard, and Munch has also sketched the image on the reverse side of the National Gallery version. "Scream" - one of the two versions - was first exhibited at Unter den Linden in Berlin in December 1893. In 1895 an important version of the image was produced as a lithograph. There exist two pastels of the image, one belonging to the Munch Museum, the other privately owned. There are also a few sketches related to "Scream" on a sheet of paper in the Munch Museum collection

A text from Munch's diary in 1892 relates to "Scream":

I was walking along a path with two friends
the sun was setting
I felt a breath of melancholy
Suddenly the sky turned blood-red
I stopped and leant against the railing,
deathly tired
looking out across flaming clouds that hung
like - blood and a sword over the
deep blue fjord and town
My friends walked on -
I stood there trembling with anxiety
And I felt a great, infinite scream pass
through nature.

The Munch Museum's "Madonna" is painted on canvas. There are four additional painted versions of the image. The National Gallery Oslo and the Hamburger Kunsthalle each have one, while two are in private collections. The Munch Museum "Madonna" is dated 1893-94. In 1895 Munch made a lithographic version of "Madonna", with a decorative frame depicting spermatozoa and an embryo. Several poetic texts related to Madonna underscore the intimate relationship between love and death:

...Now life is shaking hands with death
The chain that binds together the thousand generations
of dead with the thousand generations yet to be born
has been tied...

"In "Scream", humanity's desperation and angst is emphasised by the strikingly harsh colours and the restless, agitated lines of the background. The characteristic wavy brushstrokes that Munch introduces in the 1890s are related to the ornamental painting of symbolism and art nouveau. Yet by contrast with their carefully calculated decorative effects, Munch's brushwork is spontaneous and unpolished, becoming a direct physical expression of the artist's inner turmoil. At the same time, this dynamic approach is an important part of Munch's portrayal of himself as the ostracised, mentally unstable genius."

Child's painting made after the theft of "Scream" and "Madonna" in 2004.

For those with children in Norway the museum holds an Edvard Munch Children's Workshop for kids, aged 5 to 8, once a month and on special occasions. The students learn about Edvard Munch as an artist, his life story and spend time looking at and asking questions about the Munch paintings in the museum. Afterwards they work on their own paintings in the children’s workshop. The workshops are held in Norwegian.

I wonder if the Norwegian artist Laila Carlsen was able to take part as a child?