Art I'm Looking At: Palo Alto

Last month, I went to Palo Alto to see the big glass and ceramics show they do there every year in the summer. It's always a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours outdoors. Didn't buy anything this year, but there were some interesting pieces. 

A visit to Palo Alto wouldn't be complete without a stop at the two excellent art museums on the Stanford Campus, The Cantor Center for the Arts and The Anderson Collection. The Cantor has a diverse collection. The Anderson Collection is mostly 20th century art with a good core of abstract expressionist works. I always enjoy seeing a few favorites in each of the collections. The Cantor has a good Sargent portrait and a good Hopper, among others. The Anderson Collection has a Louis Morris, a De Kooning, a Motherwell, and a Frankenthaler that I like and both collections have good examples from Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series. 

On the way home, dinner at La Salette, the Portuguese restaurant of long standing in the town of Sonoma. I particularly enjoyed the cold cucumber soup with shrimp and doing one of the Portuguese wine flights they offer. 

Art I'm Looking At: Art at Stanford

I recently spent a day at Stanford University. I went to see the Art-o-Mat® that's supposed to be on campus, but, despite two hours of looking—questioning telephone operators, librarians, and people in the art building and at the Cantor Arts Center—I had to give up. I imagine it's there somewhere, but apparently its exact location is a guarded secret. The Art-o-Mat website mentions "Residential Services." Their officers were closed. A subsequent phone enquiry so far has been ignored.

After giving up, I went into the Cantor Arts Center thinking I'd look at the permanent collection quickly,  but immediately I got sidetracked by a show of mannerists prints. Prints and paintings of this period usually aren't my sort of thing—but I was quickly drawn into the show (Myth, Allegory, and Faith) and ended up seeing it all, in detail.

Detail is the right word. Myth, Allegory, and Faith includes etchings, woodcuts, chiaroscuro woodcuts, and engravings, but most of the prints on show were the latter—and engravings often of astonishing precision. Magnifying glasses, tethered to the walls, were provided to facilitate seeing the finest of lines, a nice touch. It's hard to imagine the time and effort required to produce this kind of work. I enjoyed nearly every piece there was to see, but favorites included: David Beheading Goliath (1540), an engraving by Giovanni Battista Scultori (1503-1575), shown below; Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Grows Cold (1600), by Jan Saenredam (Dutch, 1565-1607), shown left; Saturn (c. 1540, printed 1604), a four-block chiaroscuro woodcut by Giuseppe Niccolo Vicentino (Italian, active 1540s), after Pordenone; Neptune and Thetis (after 1551 to 1580), an engraving by René Boyvin (French, 1530-1598) after Léonard Thiry; The Three Fates (1538-1540), an engraving by Pierre Milan (French, active 1540 to around 1557); The Rest on the Return from Egypt (1575), an engraving by Cornelis Cort (Dutch, 1533 to before 1578), after Federico Barocci; and Venus and Cupid (1505-1536), an etching by Daniel Hopfer (German, 1470-1536), among many others. The luminous quality achieved in the engravings in particular was startling. Nearly every print included the human form—notoriously difficult to capture accurately in any medium, particularly when foreshortened. These artists have succeeded, using overlapping engraved lines that in some instances wrap themselves around contours with such natural grace and rightness that they beggar belief. Well worth the time. Through June 20, 2016.


I also saw an interesting group of drawings of the Battle of The Little Bighorn by one of its participants, one Chief Red Horse of the Minneconjou Lakota Sioux, who fought against Custer there, and a small (one-room) exhibition called Speed and Power, a rather disparate grouping of photographs from the Cantor Art Center's permanent collection. While the theme seemed a little forced, there were a few gems among them. I particularly enjoyed Mechanical Form 003 (2004) by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948- ), shown here, and Satiric Dancer (1926), by André Kertész (1894-1985).

I had intended to look at the new Hopper and the Diebenkorn sketchbooks again at the Cantor Arts Center, but, with time running short and having seen them back in December, I headed next door to The Anderson Collection, in a low, modern building that looks closed even when it's not. I wanted to get a taste of the place to see if it was worth coming back to for a more leisurely look. Worth it? Yes.

The building (itself very interesting) houses only a portion of the personal collection of the Andersons (whoever they are—I didn't have time to find out*), who must be in the upper 1% of the 1%. Frankenthaler, Motherwell, Diebenkorn, Pollock, Guston, De Kooning, Nevelson, Rothko, Morris Louis, Wayne Thiebaud—many more. Just what's on display here would make a very fine museum of post-war modern art for a fairly large city, yet this is only one part of a much larger collection in the possession of a single family. I particularly enjoyed a black Louise Nevelson sculpture positioned directly across a passageway from a large set of black metal elevator doors—creating a pair of bookends—with an uncharacteristically dull De Kooning visible between them (the De Kooning one of the very few duds in the place.) Definitely worth another visit. Below is Wall Painting No. IV (1954), by Robert Motherwell (1915-1991).


*Following my visit, I looked at the website for The Anderson Collection.

Art I'm Looking At: Richard Diebenkorn's Notebooks at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University

It's been a year of Diebenkorn in the Bay Area. Following a show of prints at the De Young in San Francisco and a show of works on paper at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in Sonoma, earlier in 2015, The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford is hosting Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed, a show of 29 of Diebenkorn's sketchbooks, mostly a gift of Diebenkorn's widow, Phyllis. The sketchbooks are displayed publicly here for the first time. In conjunction with the show is a small exhibit celebrating the center's recent acquisition of an Edward Hopper painting from 1913 entitled New York Corner. The connection may not at first be obvious, but early in his career Diebenkorn was deeply influenced by Hopper.

I visited the Stanford campus recently to see both offerings. I had never been to the Cantor Arts Center, which has an extensive permanent collection that looks well worth exploring.

The sketchbooks contain more than 1,000 drawings that span Diebenkorn's career. He appears to have kept several sketchbooks going at once and to have used them randomly, so that looking at them from page to page doesn't provide a sense of development. Almost none of the pages is dated and the chronological order of the books itself appears to be unclear. Instead, we get a series of snapshots--some finished works, others the simplest outline of an idea. All but one of the sketchbooks are opened and housed in plexiglass cases, so only two facing pages are visible from each. One has been separated into individual leaves and hung in a rack that allows you to see the whole as if turning its pages.

All 29 sketchbooks have been digitized, however. Two large monitors in the gallery allow you to look at every drawing, as well as the various items Diebenkorn left tucked into their pages, and even the front and back covers of each book. The digital presentation is available online. Thus, the 29 sketchbooks can be browsed from home, although the pages are slow to load, even with a fast Internet connection.

The sketchbooks may not document a linear development of the artist's work, but they offer glimpses into his thinking. Most of the drawings are figure sketches--some from models, some sketches of friends and family—, but there are doodles that record ideas for later use, there are preparatory sketches for some of the large Ocean Park paintings, and there are abstract sketches that appear to be finished pieces. Of special interest are clusters of related sketches of models that allow us to see Diebenkorn making repeated attempts to capture a pose (as seen above).

The Hopper is worth seeing all on its own, but the galleries juxtapose New York Corner with early paintings by Diebenkorn that show a genius still unformed. They are, on the whole, not compelling works, but demonstrate that even the most highly regarded of artists has to start somewhere. I doubt contemporaries looking at these pieces would have predicted Diebenkorn's subsequent development.

The Hopper shows the influence of Impressionism, especially in the rendering of the distant cityscape at the left of the canvas and in the use of black (and here, indirectly, the influence of Japan). I particularly enjoy the way the little rectangle of white at the left of the clustered figures interacts dynamically with the white blocks at the far right. Despite the Impressionist influence, Hopper's signature style is already apparent. He was a master at using architecture and human figures to suggest the quiet, almost inaudible hum of distracted humanity.

Both the Diebenkorn and the Hopper exhibits were to have closed February 8, but have been extended to August 22, 2016. The Cantor Arts Center is at Stanford University (328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford, California). Free admission.