Art I'm Looking At: Color prints at the Legion of Honor

After seeing the Manet & Morrison show at the Legion of honor earlier this week, I looked into the side gallery on the first floor always used for small shows of prints and book arts from the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this one called 'Printing Color: Chiaroscuro to Screen print'. 

As the title suggests, it's a survey of color printmaking. Here are a couple of pieces I particularly liked. These shows are easy to miss but almost always worthwhile.

From top to bottom: Erich Heckel. 'Portrait of a Man,' 1919. Color woodcut with monotype printing on paper; Jasper Johns. 'Bushbaby,' 2004. Color spit-bite aquatint and soft ground etching on paper; Loretta Bennett. 'Forever (for Old Lady Sally), 2006. Color soft ground etching and spit-bite aquatint on paper; Wayne Thiebaud. 'Paint Cans,' 1990. Color lithograph with lithographic crayon and colored pencil; Alex Katz. 'The Green Cap,' 1985. Color woodcut printed on handmade Tosa Kozo paper

Art I'm Looking At – "Woodcut: Primary Printmaking" at the Legion of Honor

On a recent visit to The Legion of Honor in San Francisco, I saw two good shows – "Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World" (which closed August 18) and "Woodcut: Primary Printmaking" (which runs through October 20). I recently posted some comments about the first of these. Here are some highlights of the Woodcut show. 

On the basement floor at the Legion of Honor there are a couple of small side galleries that are easy to miss, but they are almost always rewarding. One of these often presents works owned by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts (originally independent but now part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), which has a fabulous collection of more than 90,000 works on paper. The Woodcut show is one such show.

The current show focuses on one printmaking process, the woodcut. "Woodcut" refers to a specific type of relief printing. A relief print is made from a surface from which the non-printing areas have been removed with a sharp tool leaving the original surface to carry the ink that forms the image (in this case the surface is a block of wood). The Japanese prints in the show mentioned above are an example of relief printing that uses multiple blocks, one each for each different color in the final image, but a woodcut may be made from any number of blocks or just one. 

This show now on at the Legion of Honor is not extensive but it draws on the Achenbach Foundation collection to give some idea of the range of expression woodcut allows. Here I post a few of my favorites from the show, but several others that I liked very much were virtually impossible to photograph because of the way they are framed – in particular, what is perhaps my favorite piece in the show, a large print by Carol Summers in rich, deep blues and blacks (at the bottom here I've added an image of the piece, entitled "Stromboli Dark" that I found on a Smithsonian website). 

As noted above, Woodcut: Primary Printmaking runs through October 20 at the Legion of Honor. The Legion of Honor is at 100 34th Avenue (at Clement St.), San Francisco, CA 94121, generally open from 9:30 to 5:15, closed on Mondays.

Art I'm looking at: Recent Shows

Sometimes it's hard to keep up with all the good art on view in the Bay Area. I've recently seen Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter (October 14, 2017 – January 28, 2018) at The Legion of Honor, Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World (October 28, 2017 – January 7, 2018), also at The Legion of Honor, and Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942-1955 (October 8, 2017 – January 7, 2018) at the Crocker Museum of Art, in Sacramento.

I didn't need convincing that much ancient statuary and sculpture was once polychromed. We are used to seeing such statuary and sculpture stripped of color, but scholars have long been aware that many pieces preserve virtually invisible traces of pigments, and some pieces retain quite a bit of obvious color. Why were so many scrubbed clean (mostly by 19th century archaeologists and collectors)? A symptom of prejudice perhaps, but at least a result of taste, it seems. Some have argued the practice reflects racism--a deliberate attempt by mostly white males to suggest that the gods were "white like us." That seems a bit far-fetched to me, but my incredulity may be mainly a result of the progress in thinking we've made in the last 150 years (I have no such racial insecurities). Maybe scholars really did feel uncomfortable with colored statuary because of racial prejudice. I can't say. In any case, it seems clear that many felt ancient statues were more aesthetically pleasing without adornment, whatever the underlying, subconscious reason for that feeling.

There are parallels. I own six Japanese wooden chests (tansu). Three we brought back from Japan (where I lived for about 19 years), three we purchased here, in California. The three from Japan retain their original finish. The three purchased locally have been stripped of their color. Tansu usually were finished with stain or lacquer and have mostly acquired a patina of accumulated soot and dirt, but Tansu dealers here typically strip the pieces they buy in Japan because they can't sell them locally to an audience that expects them to be "clean." The patina is prized in Japan, despised here.

I think of carpets from the East and Japanese woodblock prints. Both weavers and print designers were delighted by the introduction of garishly bright (although often fugitive) aniline dyes in the 19th century, while taste among Western scholars and collectors of both rugs and Japanese prints has always shunned the brightest colors.

The reproductions in the Legion of Honor show are based on pigment traces and remnants of patterns found on the statuary. Scholars seem to be fairly confident their recreations are close to reality, but freshly painted, they seem garish and cartoon-like. Perhaps they would have quickly weathered into something much more subtle. Straight from the factory, so to speak, they are startlingly bright. I was reminded of my feelings about new tennis shoes in childhood--bright white shoes I'd always try to quickly dirty by hopping into muddy puddles. A small but thought-provoking show. A final display with samples of some of the pigments found on ancient statuary and modern methods of detecting their presence was particularly engaging, I thought.  

The Klimt/Rodin show is a sensible pairing of the work of contemporaries. The paintings seem right alongside the Rodin sculptures---an impression that contrasts with that created by the incongruous Sarah Lucas sculptures recently shown in some of the same galleries, although the connections between Rodin and Klimt are rather sketchily drawn here. No matter. The show offers an excellent chance to see some important work by Klimt and some rarely displayed drawings by Rodin (I've always thought Rodin's drawings more interesting than his sculpture). Several of the Klimt paintings have never been shown before in the United States.

Among the Klimts are several in the style he's best known for--stylized figures surrounded by and wrapped in bold patterning, such as The Virgin (1913) shown above, but included are some earlier works in a more realistic style, notably Portrait of Sonja Krips (1898), and an interesting unfinished Portrait of a Lady (1917) that brought to mind some of the oil sketches on cardboard done by Toulouse-Lautrec.

There are a number of large, square landscapes I thought reminiscent of Van Gogh (and one of the labels mentioned that they were painted shortly after Klimt had seen works by Van Gogh). A detail of A Garden In Italy (1913) is shown here. The frames on the paintings, too, are worth a careful look. Many are masterpieces of craftsmanship.

The Diebenkorn exhibition now on at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento subtitled Beginnings: 1942-1955, offers a good opportunity to see early works by Diebenkorn not often on view. The show focuses on the period preceding the artist's shift toward figurative work around 1955, but most of what's on display is from the latter part of this early period; there's little here that could be called juvenilia. The earliest pieces date to the time of Diebenkorn's WWII military service. There are a couple of interesting early sketches of fellow soldiers, for example, but the most compelling works are from the rarely seen cubist-influenced period (roughly 1946-1948), and then from the later Sausalito, Albuquerque, and Urbana periods. Diebenkorn moved to Sausalito in 1947, to Albuquerque in 1950, and later spent a year teaching in Urbana, Illinois, during the 1952-1953 school year, before moving to Berkeley, in 1953, after a very brief stay in New York.

I was familiar with the cubist-influenced work from photographs, but this was the first time I'd seen any of it in person. These paintings rely on bold primary colors and often use heavy, black linear elements to separate areas of color. Untitled (The Magician's Table) of 1947 shown here is typical. I struggle to see the later Diebenkorn in these. They are harder, more grid-like, and less subtle than the later work. Diebenkorn's best work I think derives its strength from a sublime balance between the dyadic and the static, from a generally (although not always) muted palette, and a subtle color sense. In the cubist-influnced works of 1946 to 1948 the artist focused on creating bold effects relying on stark contrasts and largely unmodulated, mostly primary colors. Seeing a grouping of them at once is jarring.

But it was not long before Diebenkorn began to find that balance. He also seems to have found a better technical footing. I noticed that the paint is badly crazed in many of the pieces from the cubist-influenced period but rarely so in pieces done after about 1948. And it is from around 1949 that Diebenkorn begins to look like the Diebenkorn we know from around that year to the figurative work that begins about 1955. The colors are softer, the compositions less grid-like. The linear elements are more nuanced. Areas of color start to have rounder, less defined edges. Paint layers become thinner. Reworked areas are allowed to show their history. In short, the paintings acquire a much expanded visual vocabulary, a more subdued palette, and a more sophisticated one. My favorite piece in the show, Untitled (Alburquerque) of 1951 (catalog raisonné No. 1093) is a perfect example of the change in style. The two paintings shown here couldn't be more different. The difference seems to reflect a complete reinvention of self. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising. The figurative paintings and then the Ocean Park series of paintings look as different from each other and as different from these two styles as these two look from each other. Diebenkorn was rather good at swinging his rudder and veering off in new directions.

So many of the earlier paintings and drawings are untitled that it would have been helpful to have had each one identified with its number from the catalogue raisonné, but that has not been done. My other complaint would be that many of the large paintings are rather unevenly lighted in the Crocker galleries. But these are quibbles. The show is worthwhile if you're a Diebenkorn fan and haven't seen much work from the early periods. There is a lot here worth looking at and much of it is unlikely to be on view again any time soon. I plan to make a second visit before the show closes in January.

Catalog raisonné No. 795

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Art I'm Looking At: Bonnard at The Legion of Honor

Pierre Bonnard, The Table (1925)
Tate Gallery, London

The Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, is now exhibiting a large group of works by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), the first major show of the artist's work on the West Coast in 50 years, according to the Legion's website. The show is Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia.

The layout is roughly, although not strictly, chronological. The first spaces focus on early work, generally from around 1890—the artist's Nabi period. The latest pieces are from the mid-1930s or so, but most of the work is arranged thematically. One grouping is mostly nudes, another mostly interiors. Later rooms focus on large mural-like pieces Bonnard painted for patrons.

Pierre Bonnard, Table Corner (1935)

Bonnard's career was a long one. In terms of artistic movements, his working life spanned late Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Pointillism, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Surrealism, the rise of pure abstraction in the Western artistic tradition, Art Deco, and Cubism, not to mention coinciding with a period of great evolution in photography. Yet, Bonnard always did his own thing. Although his work is clearly of its time (sometimes reminiscent of Matisse or Dufy), although his instincts were aligned with those of the Post-impressionists and the Symbolists, and despite a strong impact on his sensibilities from Japanese art, he never was tempted to experiment with Cubist deformation or to embrace abstraction, even as those two trends began to dominate modern art in the West. His favorite subjects remained richly colored interiors, somewhat mysterious nudes in interiors, and landscape and lush vegetation. Although some of Bonnard's work has strong abstract qualities—in this show, notably Table Corner (1935)—he never completely gave in to the abstract impulse. Ultimately, he was a sensualist.

Pierre Bonnard Nude Before the Mirror (detail; 1931)
Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna at Ca' Pesaro, Venice

The brushstroke is always evident. There is no attempt at strict realism, there is no attempt to hide the hand of the artist, to create an illusion of reality. His technique is thoroughly modern if we understand modern to have begun with Impressionism. His technical proclivities could be quite contradictory; he was at once fond of thin washes that let canvas show through the paint and of leaving areas of canvas entirely untouched—this transparency creating an effect suggestive of watercolor—while happily applying heavy dabs of paint right from the tube in other areas, or applying thick, creamy layers of paint for effect. Nude Before the Mirror (1931), on loan from Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna at Ca' Pesaro, in Venice, provides an excellent example of the transparency. Shown here is a detail of what appear to be curtains at a window behind the nude figure (above). In contrast, in The Table (1925), on loan from the Tate Gallery, London, (top of this page), Bonnard's impasto nicely suggests slabs of creamy cheese and shrimp on crackers and his lemons glow with thick oval smears of cadmium yellow. The slatherings of Wayne Thiebaud come to mind.
      

Pierre Bonnard, Woman Dozing on a Bed (1899)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The nudes are somewhat unsettling. They are always ambivalent—simultaneously a celebration of the female body and expressive of uneasiness. Woman Dozing on a Bed (1899), from the Musée d'Orsay, depicting the artist's lover (and later wife) Maria Boursin (also known as Marthe de Méligny), stretched out on a bed, is something of an exception. It seems a comparatively straightforward record of post-coital indolence (the painting is also known as The Indolent Woman). The painting captures lust renewed by the sight of lust temporarily slaked. It is the most purely erotic painting among the nudes. It brings Modigliani to mind in its apparent motivation, if not in style. Yet this painting, too, has deeper nuances. Stylistically, it evokes Edvard Munch, and no 20th century artist was better at expressing anxiety about sex and desire than Munch. A cat is curled up in the shadow of the model's hair. Everywhere there are cats.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bathtub (1925)
Tate Gallery, London

Some of Bonnard's later nudes seem more relaxed, as if the artist decided it's better in the end to celebrate sensuality (Woman Dozing on a Bed is an early work—among Bonnard's first nudes) even if he can never allow himself (or us) to be entirely at ease. Although the unsettling effects I speak of are real—created by veiled faces, turned-away poses, odd perspectives, and startling truncations—simultaneously there is much beauty in the nudes and their settings. In some of these paintings, color, surface pattern, and the female form manage to appear more important than oddities of composition, and, subordinated to the figure, they enhance rather than detract from sensual qualities. In others, however, it's harder to make a case for pure sensuality. Bonnard is paradoxical. Nude in the Bathtub (1925), from the Tate, London, is a case in point. The figure is cut off at the hips, partially submerged in a bathtub that appears lifted several feet off the floor—in the room but not of the room. Another figure, apparently male, perhaps the artist, enters from the left. Time seems to have stopped. It is a pregnant pause. The Bathtub (below), also from 1925 and in the Tate London collection, is similar.

Pierre Bonnard, The Bathtub (1925)
Tate Gallery, London

Pierre Bonnard, Marthe in the Bath, (c. 1908-1910)

Other highlights of the show include a group of rarely seen self-portraits and photographs by Bonnard, mostly small (about  2 x 2.5 inch) snapshots of friends and family, including travel photos. These small photos are modern prints from the original negatives. They're probably contact prints (printed at the same size as the negative), although enlarged in the exhibition catalog (and here). Wall text gives no information about size, but goes out of its way to point out that these were snapshots, that Bonnard would not have considered them artistic work. Nevertheless, a clear sense of composition is apparent in all the images, and one, Marthe in the Bath, a nude of Marthe de Méligny, with its ambiguous foreground and motion-blurred face, has all the qualities of the painted nudes.

The large mural-sized works that close the show include two of special interest, a pair of works commissioned by art critic George Besson for his Paris apartment. The first, completed in 1912, is a daytime scene. The second, from 1928, a full 16 years later, is a night scene (shown here). Both depict La Place Clichy, in Paris, as seen from inside a brasserie. Bonnard certainly loved cadmium yellow—and cats.

Pierre Bonnard, La Place Clichy (1928)

A large number of the paintings on display are from The Musée d'Orsay, in Paris, the Tate, London, and the National Gallery, in Washington D.C., and from other museums I've visited on multiple occasions. Despite that, and, although I've always admired Bonnard's work, I can't remember seeing a single piece in this show before. Everything seemed fresh. There are more than 70 works on display, but the galleries have been generously allocated. Nothing seems crowded. There is just enough to be deeply satisfying without causing fatigue. Notable for the quality of the work and for its breadth, going well beyond Bonnard's Nabi period, Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia runs at the Legion of Honor through May 15, 2016.

Art I'm Looking At: Raphael's Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn at the Legion of Honor

The Galleria Borghese in Rome, in what was once the Villa Borghese Pinciana, houses a large part of the collection of paintings, sculpture, and ancient artifacts amassed by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a nephew to Pope Paul V (in power from 1605 to 1621). The Villa was built by Flaminio Ponzio, who worked mainly for the Pope, the building and its gardens based on ideas proposed by Cardinal Borghese. On the outskirts of Rome at the time, it was used by the Cardinal for entertaining. Among the many works housed at the Galleria Borghese today is an enigmatic 1506 portrait by Raphael known as Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn, presently on display at The Legion of Honor, in San Francisco.

Finding it requires a short hike past many works of interest in the permanent collection (as well as a couple of ghastly paintings by El Greco) at the far end of a row of linked galleries. The Raphael has been given a small room of its own painted an ox-blood red that complements the sleeve color of the sitter in Raphael's portrait. Her name is unknown, but we are told the painting was probably commissioned to commemorate a wedding. That view is based on internal clues—mainly that x-ray examination has shown the unicorn was originally painted as a small dog, traditionally a symbol of marital fidelity, but the wall text points out that she wears a gold-clasped belt, symbolizing fertility and associated with marriage; that the necklace she wears was likely a betrothal gift or part of her dowry; and that the jewels it contains—pearls, rubies, and sapphires—were associated with such traits as virginity and purity (the pearls), prosperity and fertility (rubies), and fidelity (sapphires). There is also a suggestion that the unicorn may refer to her family's heraldry, although, if that is true, I wonder why the animal was not painted as a unicorn from the outset. An inspired afterthought, perhaps?

There are obvious echoes of Mona Lisa, as the wall text also points out. Most important of these is perhaps the sitter's slightly sideways, three-quarter-length pose with hands folded in her lap, but also the use of a parapet with columns (the columns barely visible in Mona Lisa) to separate the subject from a distant landscape behind her. Although there are precedents for both, the inclusion of an imagined landscape in the background is often considered an unusual feature of Mona Lisa, painted over a number of years from around 1503. Raphael has used this device, but he leaves the horizon low, at the shoulders of the sitter, while Leonardo uses horizontal landscape elements to draw attention to La Giaconda's eyes (a trick that, simplified, Van Gogh would later use to great effect in his self-portrait with a pipe and bandaged ear).

The hands have quite different effects in the two paintings. The hands of Leonardo's sitter are open and relaxed, Raphael's sitter captures her little unicorn's hooves and holds them tight. Her arms cradle the animal. The dark sleeves of her dress act like a pair of parentheses. The visual complexity of Mona Lisa is behind the main subject and mostly in the upper half of the painting. In the Raphael, the visual complexity is below and in front of the main subject. The face of the unicorn attracts almost as much attention as the face of the woman. If the beast were not so clearly in her possession, subordinated to her and under her control, this would be a dual portrait. Nevertheless, part of the painting's effectiveness is the back-and-forth between the two faces the unicorn's presence forces on the viewer. La Giaconda is much easier to look steadily in the eye than is Raphael's lady.

The small size of the cradled unicorn is rather startling at first, but, according to the wall text, the unicorn was often depicted in early bestiaries as a small animal—kid-like—rather than as the full-sized horse-with-horn we think of today. The unicorn was said to be wild and untamable but with a key weakness—a fondness for young virgins. A unicorn could be captured or killed if lured to sleep in the lap of a maiden, we are told, and a unicorn in the lap of a virgin was a common motif associated with the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. So, the Raphael painting can be read as a Madonna and Child not only as a wedding portrait.

The unicorn story puts me in mind of other men and beasts with a fatal weakness—near-immortal Achilles and his heel, of course—but also the kappa, a vaguely humanoid creature of Japanese folklore with a beak and characteristics of a reptile or amphibian, including a turtle-like shell. Mischief makers that dwell near streams and ponds, kappa are said to play pranks on passersby, sometimes with fatal consequences. The seat of the animal's power is a water-filled depression on the top of its head—but, if the water drains away, the kappa loses its power. Kappa, the stories go, are very polite, however. So they can be rendered temporarily powerless by a formal bow in greeting—as the animal will always return the bow, letting the water spill from its head. Similarly, Raphael's unicorn is at least temporarily tamed, captured and held in the lap of the maiden, a victim of its special weakness.

A chronology on one wall reveals other facts. The painting was first recorded in the collection of the Galleria Borghese in 1638. Surprisingly, Raphael's lady was once partially painted over, the image having been converted to a portrayal of St. Catharine of Alexandria some time after 1682 with the addition of a cloak around her shoulders, a palm branch (a symbol of martyrdom), and a wheel (Catharine is said to have been tortured to death—broken on the wheel). Until 1927, when the underlying work was firmly attributed to Raphael by Italian art historian Roberto Longhi (working from an earlier suggestion floated by historian Giulio Cantalamessa that two artists had worked on the painting—one markedly more skilled than the other), authorship was unclear. The painting was attributed variously to Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Granacci, and others. Suspicions about the later additions were confirmed in 1933, when the painting was first x-rayed and tests subsequently showed the existence of landscape elements under the cloak. Restoration work commenced in early 1936 when the image was transferred to canvas from the original panel and removal of the overpainting began. Within about 30 years, better x-ray technology revealed the presence of the dog under the unicorn.  

While I would like to have seen better images of the painting as St. Catherine, before restoration, (do they exist?)* and I would have enjoyed more details of the restoration process (described as having been done with a scalpel), the gallery offers a concise and informative presentation of an important painting. Yes, it's worth making a trip to see this single image.

Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn will be showing at the Legion of Honor through April 10, 2016. San Francisco is its second of only two stops in the United States following a stay from October 3, 2015 to January 3, 2016 in Cincinnati at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The painting is visiting the United States for the first time. Viewers in Cincinnati got to see the painting for free. At the Legion of Honor, admission ranges from $6 for students to $10 for adults ($7 for seniors). Closed Mondays. The exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Cincinnati Art Museum in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture and the Galleria Borghese. The Legion of Honor presentation is made possible by lead sponsorship from the Frances K. and Charles D. Field Foundation, in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Charles D. Field, with additional major funding from The Christian Humann Foundation.

* I have attempted to find such an image on line, with no success. However, Raphael actually did paint St. Catherine of Alexandria (below), around 1507, thus not long after he painted Lady with Unicorn. He shows her with her symbol, the wheel. The painting is in the National Gallery, London. The photographs of Mona Lisa and Raphael's St. Catharine are from Wikipedia.

[Update: This Hyperallergic article reproduces a black and white image of the painting from 1900, before its restoration.]

Art I'm Looking At: High Style at the Legion of Honor

Featured now at San Francisco's Legion of Honor is High Style: The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection--a rather poorly named show, it turns out. I'm tempted to call the subtitle deceptive. It gives the impression that a large swath of the Brooklyn Museum's costume holdings awaits the visitor. In reality, the selection is modest and everything being shown is from the first eight decades of the 20th Century--hardly the sweeping display of the collection suggested.

The show is poorly lighted. While I understand the need to keep light as low as possible to prevent damage to fabrics, the first room was so dark it was difficult to read the labels. Other rooms were only slightly better. Coming in from outdoors, my eyes were poorly adjusted to the dimness. With that in mind, I went back at the end of the show for another look at the earliest pieces, but the lighting still seemed inadequate. Also, a number of pieces were displayed on raised platforms divided into quadrants by semi-transparent plastic panels that created distorted reflections of some figures overlapping with veiled views of others through the plastic partitions (above). While visually interesting, the distortions distracted from the costumes.

The show is worth seeing--if you're seriously interested in the history of 20th century haute couture, including shoes (there is an entire room full of shoes, with some especially extravagant examples by Steven Arpad, including the rust calfskin pair shown here, from 1939, printed with circular Japanese designs in green, blue, and lavender and embellished with peach and aqua metallic kidskin). The fabrics and materials used in fine clothing are always a pleasure to look at and the sculptural or even architectural approach to clothing design taken by some of the designers, particularly Charles James, is instructive to see here.

The 1953 "Clover Leaf" Ball Gown by James is perhaps the centerpiece of the show, presented complete with preparatory drawings and a media display explaining the materials used, including computer graphics showing the details of its construction. Also given special attention is his 1955 "Tree" Ball Gown in pink silk taffeta, the dress used in the main advertising materials for the show (top of page). I was attracted just as much to a group of rather somber outfits from the 1940s designed by Vera Maxwell, Bonnie Cashin, and others, however, perhaps because they seem more like clothes you might have seen a woman wearing on the street in the period. In the end, I was disappointed, having come with the expectation of seeing an overview of the famed Brooklyn Museum collection. The High Style show runs through July 19, 2015.

After seeing High Style, I walked around the permanent collection a little, noticing a few pieces I'd been unaware of--particularly a small 1889 depiction of an unfinished Eiffel Tower by Seurat, a beautiful little 1879 portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose work I've noted before for the clarity of atmosphere he achieves, and a tiny 1650 painting of pea pods and various insects by Flemish painter Jan Van Kessel II.

Art I'm Looking At: Houghton Hall at The Legion of Honor

After seeing the Keith Haring show at the De young Museum, it took a moment to adjust to the very different mood of the Legion of Honor's show of work from Houghton Hall, in England, a large house originally built by Sir Robert Walpole, in 1776, generally considered a masterpiece of Palladian architecture. The show includes a large number of paintings from the Houghton Hall collection displayed along with furniture, dinner ware, silver, rugs, and other objects laid out in several large rooms. The walls have been covered from floor to ceiling with photographic reproductions of the original rooms, which give a fairly good sense of how the various object on display would look in context.

There's an entire room of Sargents--probably the highlight of the exhibition--paintings that rarely travel. They included a painting Sargent did to document World War I damage to a cathedral. His painting of gassed WWI soldiers is well known, but the captions in the Houghton Hall show suggest he was commissioned to do a lot of this type of work, which I hadn't known. There are a couple of full-length Sargent society portraits of note and several attractive charcoal portraits of Houghton Hall residents, but I especially enjoyed a quickly sketched head of a gondolier (c. 1878) from a visit to Venice (pictured).

In the room with the Sargents, I was surprised to see a very familiar-looking head of Pope Innocent X, clearly related to the famous Velazquez portrait. Approaching a little closer, I read the label. The painting turned out to be a Velazquez study for the larger painting.

I also enjoyed a portrait of Catherine Shorter, Lady Walpole (c. 1710) by Swedish artist Michael Dahl. The wall tag mentions that she was extravagant--"frequently attending the opera and buying expensive clothes and jewelry," although she is fairly modestly attired in the portrait. The Dahl portrait is shown in a facsimile of the Houghton Hall library, with walls covered in faux books--large photographic wall coverings like the ones mentioned above. The room displays several pieces of furniture and an interesting wool rug described as English, but I noticed that triangles, apparently cut from the borders of oriental carpets, have been worked into its four corners.

Among the most beautiful objects in the entire show are two large rolls of handmade Chinese wallpapers (detail below). It wasn't exactly clear, but these appear to be actual leftovers from papers made for bedrooms in Houghton Hal, papers that presumably still cover the walls in some rooms today. The many birds on the papers are exquisitely drawn. The foliage, rocks, and other background elements are highly stylized, in some places becoming almost entirely abstract, while somehow retaining the power to evoke environments the birds might have been found in. The blue is especially striking. The show was worth seeing just for these wallpapers. The Houghton Hall exhibit runs through January 18, 2015 at the Legion of Honor.

 

Art I'm Looking at: San Francisco--Keith Haring: The Political Line at the De Young

Two sharply contrasting exhibits are now featured attractions at the main venues of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco--the De Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. I visited both recently, starting at the De Young to see Keith Haring: The Political Line, a show  highlighting Haring's political activism. I enjoyed seeing the very large sample of work presented but kept wondering what fraction of his production might be called political. A little more context would have been helpful. Given the short period he was active (about twelve years, from 1978 to 1990) and the large number of works on display, my guess is that most of his work was politically motivated, particularly toward the end of his life, when his AIDS diagnosis spurred him and his growing fame had given him an international platform.

Motivation and message aside, what's clear from looking at this art is that Haring lived his short life at a fast pace. The work exudes energy. The zig-zag lines children use to depict lightning or electricity when they draw would not be out of place here. Garish, unmodulated hues; clashing colors set side by side; strong contrasts; angular, heavily outlined shapes; and "lines of motion" borrowed from the vocabulary of comic book artists all contribute. Influences are numerous and diverse. Mayan art, quilts, aboriginal art, graffiti art, the Nazca lines, comic books, advertising art, the chalk corpse outlines of Hollywood movies, writhing Boschian hells, and technological hells where demonic robots reign over electronic gadgets come to mind when looking at Haring's work. Yet, the work is always immediately identifiable as Haring's. This dialectical component is apparent also in the way his images operate on the level of pictographs--simple, symbolic, overtly didactic, and quickly absorbed on the one hand--yet remaining cryptic and baffling at the same time. Haring's is a language encountered in an anxiety dream; we feel we should know the language--and we recognize some of its words--but don't fully understand the meaning. The result is a lingering unease. Although there are political messages embedded in much of the work, Haring rarely gave his work titles--again leaving the viewer somewhat off balance. Without the direction provided by a title, it's often difficult to be entirely sure what Haring intended, despite his use of direct, icon-like pictorial elements (sometimes evocative of pictorial road signs or Olympic event symbols). That said, the work is not entirely without humor. There is joy in some of the dancing figures, a vitality in the glowing babies, and Andy Mouse (which does have a title) simultaneously pokes fun at Walt Disney and Andy Warhol; it made me laugh out loud (1985, private collection; detail above). A panel full of cartoon-like penis drawings from a sketchbook, many accompanied by diary-like entries indicating where the artist was when he made them, was funny too.

Haring's line is deft but un-nuanced. It sometimes leaves me cold, but I was impressed by the consistent confidence of its execution, whether in ink on paper, chalk on expired subway ad space, or in vinyl paint on a tarpaulin. I examined the works very closely. Nowhere is there any evidence of preparatory work--no sketching, no planning. Each piece appears to have been an unrehearsed improvisation, drawing on an ever-evolving vocabulary of signs and symbols, many recurring over and over again--barking dogs, crawling babies, snake-like creatures, robots, angular dancers, angels, crosses, bats, figures with holes in them, flying saucers, penises, electronic gadgets, and figures with Xs instead of brains.

The early subway drawings in the show were intriguing. These are perhaps the quintessential Haring. It was the subway drawings in chalk that earned him his first widespread recognition. They seem the most genuine expression of his gift. They were done quickly, as ephemeral performance pieces, in the platform time between connecting trains. They were done knowing the activity was technically illegal and might result in a fine (drawings on the blank panels were considered graffiti) and, like a graffiti artist, Haring made them knowing they wouldn't last, that they might be quickly covered by a new ad or wiped away. I was not alone in wondering how the examples in the show (presumably quite rare) were preserved, as they appear to be in the original metal frames that surrounded the subway advertising spaces they were made in, the whole in each case apparently lifted off the wall. Done in soft chalk, the subway drawings have an affinity with brush-and-ink calligraphy in that the artist has only one chance to get it right. Every hesitation is preserved. There is no going back to make corrections. Remarkably, there is virtually no evidence of hesitation. Perhaps our view of the subway drawings is a necessarily distorted one, based only on a few well-executed extant examples, but other work in the show suggests Haring didn't often hesitate. While some of the later work seems a little too practiced, a little too obvious in its message, a little complacent, I was generally impressed by the show.

Art I'm Looking At: Intimate Impressionism at the Legion of Honor

I recently saw the "Intimate Impressionism" show at the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, a show somewhat inappropriately named, as it looks at works not only by Impressionists but also by artists belonging to considerably earlier and later artistic movements, including several that never exhibited with the Impressionists or adopted their style. Most of the paintings are on loan from the National Gallery of Art. That said, the works on display generally are small works intended not as showpieces or for salon presentation, but for hanging in homes--works intended for intimate settings--and the show hangs together such as it does because of that common thread. I suppose curators know the word "Impressionism" brings in the public. I found the exhibition most interesting for the examples that seemed atypical of many of the artists represented.

Of particular interest were a lovely plate of three peaches by Fantin-Latour, known more for his floral still lifes; several pre-Impressionist scenes by Eugene Boudin (although these were rather typical harbor scenes); and most especially, a pair of landscapes by Odilon Redon, nothing at all like the symbolist works he's known for. One of these (Breton Village, c. 1890) is shown here above. A number of unusual small works by Pierre Bonnard were of interest. There was also an attractive Gauguin self-portrait (visible behind the viewer in the top photo). Perhaps most popular (judging from the attention it got and the spontaneous conversation it engendered among visitors) was a still life called Mound of Butter (1875/1885), by Antione Vollon on the model of earlier Dutch art. Everyone seemed impressed by the skill of the rendering but fascinated also by the sheer volume of butter represented. All in all an interesting if not especially cohesive show.