Books I'm Reading: Night Studio

Musa Mayer's Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (Knopf, 1988) has been in my bookshelves for years - more than 25 years. When I took it down recently to finally read it, the sales slip was still in it. I bought it on September 2, 1989 at a store in Nihonbashi, in Tokyo. I paid $5,900 for it, which in those days was about $40 (¥146/$). I tended to buy whatever looked of interest and was willing to pay what it cost because interesting English-language books were comparatively hard to find in Tokyo at the time.  

Musa Mayer, born Musa Guston, is the painter's daughter. While she is not otherwise a writer, as far as I know, she writes very well, painting a vivid picture (unavoidable pun?) of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a famous man and particularly of her stained relationship with her father who appears to have been more attentive to his painting than he was to his family – which is not to say that he was cruel or manipulative. He was simply devoted to his work. 

Additionally, the book was interesting on a personal level because it turns out that the author left New York and her parents as a young bride and lived and worked in Yellow Springs and Dayton, Ohio – both locations I know well. It's odd how often Yellow Springs seems to pop up. Among my artist friends here in Sonoma County, two have lived in Yellow Springs, and one, like Musa Mayer, worked at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs. According to the book, Mayer became a counsellor and worked with youth patients at Good Samaritan Hospital, in Dayton. I walked past Good Samaritan every day on my way to high school, although my school is no longer standing and I've heard that Good Samaritan is gone too. 

Books I'm Reading: Lee Krasner: Living Colour

I've just finished reading Lee Krasner: Living Colour, edited by Elaine Niarne (US paperback edition, Thames & Hudson, 2024), a monograph accompanying a 2019 exhibition of Krasner's work that showed first at the Barbican Art Gallery in London (later traveling to Germany, Switzerland, and Spain) – a continuation of my recent deep dive into the history of the women painters among the Abstract Expressionists. This is a richly illustrated show catalog but it also includes a number of essays about Krasner's work, a 1970 interview with her, and a chronology. An excellent overview. 

On the Road: Munich (June 30, 2018)

Bols: The Governers of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants' Guild (1659)

Aching feet, but I'm happy. I spent the whole day at the Pinakotheken—Alte, Neue, and der Moderne, in Munich. Half the Alte Pinakothek (yes, half of the entire museum) was closed for renovation, which was very disappointing, but perhaps a blessing in disguise. I would probably not have made it to the other two museums otherwise.

I can't complain. I got to see a few paintings that I've always wanted to see—in particular The Governers of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants' Guild (1659), by Bols. I had a postcard of this painting pinned over my desk at work for many years, although I can't remember where I got the card. The figure at far left, is a servant, according to the wall label, not one of the governors. He holds a pipette for sampling wine and a tastevin, the only indicators of the profession of the main subjects. Seeing the painting in person, I noticed that, aside from the marvelous faces, the cushion on the stool (lower right) is particularly well done; it seemed so real, I wanted to touch it.

Rubens: The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (c. 1616)

The early German section of the museum was open, as were the Reubens rooms. Among the paintings by Rubens, I especially wanted to see The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (c. 1616) as my mother once saw it and, impressed by it, had on a number of occasions described it to me. It's quite impressive—large and full of action. I love the expression on the face of the man top center (half obscured by the raised arm of the man in the white turban to right of him). The hippo, too, is wonderful. The wall label suggests Rubens may have based his depiction of the hippo on a stuffed hippo that was on display in Rome in 1601, although the painting is dated to about 15 years later than that.

Cranach the Elder
Lucretia

Early German portraits and religious figures have a certain distinctive quirkiness that appeals to me deeply. The bodies are sometimes a bit exaggerated or not quite right in some way (yet oddly convincing). The clothing is often interesting. The figures in portraits usually hold something of interest in their hands that indicates a profession or social rank. There are often inscriptions in otherwise blank areas of the image. Interesting hats abound. Memling, Balding, and the Cranachs are quite familiar. It was thrilling to see Cranach the Elder's Lucretia, with her cloak so diaphanous as to be virtually non-existent (although it is more apparent in person than in my photograph here).

Bernhard Strigel: Conrad Rehlinger the Elder (left)
and The Eight Children of Conrad Rehlinger (right)

In addition to these, I saw a number of very strong works by one Bernhard Strigel that impressed me, and, fittingly, a portrait by a painter named Maler (meaning "painter" in German) that I liked very much, also a portrait by a painter named Meulich. Strigel, Maler, and Meulich I'd never noted before, although chances are I've seen their work elsewhere. In the French section, it was also fun to see one of the several versions of Resting Girl on a Sofa by François Boucher (1753).

Boucher: Resting Girl on a Sofa (1753)

There were too many very beautiful paintings to mention or to show here. Again, maybe it was a blessing that half the museum was closed....

Hans Muelich: Portrait of Andreas Ligsalz

Hans Maler: Portrait of Wolfgang Ronner

Hans Baldung: Portrait of Christoph I, Margrave of Baden

Art I'm Looking At: The Cult of the Machine at the De Young

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930
Museum of modern Art, New York

The Cult of the Machine, now on view at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, although promoted as a look at Precisionism in general (and it is that), is a veritable Charles Sheeler retrospective. It includes some of his most important works—photographs, paintings, and drawings. It was a pleasure to see in person so many Sheelers I've long admired in reproduction, particularly the paintings he made from some of his well known photographs of Ford's River Rouge plant, and his Upper Deck (1929) and Rolling Power (1939)*.

Installation view:
Shadows cast by Shaker furniture

There is less familiar work here, too—by Sheeler, by other familiar names, and by names new to me. Besides paintings, photographs, and objects of design from the period during which the Precisionist style flourished in the United States (roughly 1915 to 1945), there is a display of Shaker-designed household items that echo in their simplicity the stylized geometries of Precisionism. The venue is also showing the brief 1921 film Sheeler made with Paul Strand, Manhatta, that looks at a day in Manhattan, inspired by Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and a looping clip from Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The Shaker items are artfully backlit, their shadows projected onto a screen. When viewed from behind, the shadows look like one of Sheeler's cityscapes.

Strand is represented by several well-known images such as Wall Street (1915) and The Court (1924). Several of Sheeler's photographs of the Doylestown Quaker meeting house are here, as are painted and drawn versions of views he photographed there, allowing side-by-side comparisons. There are a couple of good Paul Outerbridge photos and work from photographers less familiar, such as Anton Bruehl. His Untitled, a 1929 shot of part of a Cadillac engine is striking. Some of the photographs of my grandfather, Warren R. Laity, would have been right at home here.

Anton Bruehl, Untitled, 1929
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Warren R. Laity, Mail Plane, circa 1930
(Not in show), Private collection

Gerald Murphy, Razor, 1924
Dallas Museum of Art                               

Also striking is a 1924 painting entitled Razor by Gerald Murphy that immediately brings to mind paintings from the same period by Stuart Davis that draw on advertising imagery and bright colors for their impact, works that anticipate Pop Art. There is nothing by Davis in the show and I was surprised to see only one piece by Charles Demuth—the name, along with Sheeler's, that comes to mind most readily when thinking of Precisonism. But most of the artists associated with Precisionism are here, including Joseph Stella, George Ault, Niles Spencer, Morton Shamberg, and Edmund Lewandowski. George Ault's Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946, Smithsonian American Art Museum), a moody night scene dominated by eerily lit barns, and Lewandowski's small Furnace No. 5, are particularly attractive.

Francis Criss, Waterfront, c. 1940
Detroit Institute of Art

New to me were the painters Francis Criss, Elsie Driggs, Bumpei Usui, and Peter Blume. Criss's highly stylized Waterfront (c. 1940) reduces a waterfront industrial scene to its geometrical essence, using starkly contrasting saturated colors, a lamppost vestige of an earlier age, and a bold yellow-gold frame to heighten the effect. The frame is one of many in the show that are beautiful in their own right. Usui's 1924 New York cityscape 14th Street is a strong piece, with its cubes, cylinders, and pyramidal forms in a style reminiscent of some of the WPA frescoes of the period (and the show includes a painting by John Langley Howard, among those who contributed to the 1934 Coit Tower murals, a WPA project). There are also a couple of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe likely to seem surprisingly unlike her to most viewers. They differ markedly from the style she's best known for. One is a view of barns at Lake George. Another is a New York cityscape done from an elevated perspective—from the window of a high-rise apartment she shared there with husband Alfred Stieglitz.

Charles Sheeler, Upper Deck, 1929
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Precisionism was an extension of cubism in its attention to the underlying geometry of things, in its interest in architectonic form, an extension of Futurism in its obsession with the modern and with machinery, but I'm not sure how coherent it was—if it was recognized at the time as a movement at all. Perhaps underscoring that is the fact that "precisionism" was only one of several contemporary terms used to describe the style. The painters were sometimes known as "the immaculates" or they were referred to as "modern classicists." "Precisionism" is the name that has stuck. Names aside, the work on display is quintessentially of its time.

Bumpei Usui, 14th Street, 1924
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

"Precisionism" was a label given to the American expression of anxieties common between the world wars in rapidly industrializing societies globally. The paintings and photographs of the period reflect a fascination with machinery, with scale, with industrial might, but they also betray a deep, veiled fear. The clean lines, the simplified forms, and the tendency to eliminate human beings from angular cityscapes all suggest a need to slow things down, to examine reality in an artificial, controlled way, to tame things before they spin out of control. As the Cult of the Machine wall texts point out, these anxieties are familiar today, with technology rapidly outpacing our ability to adjust to it. To express the angst caused by forward leaps of technology, artists of the early twentieth century turned to depicting the physical manifestations of rapid change—to depicting bridges, dams, turbines, factories, propellers, ocean liners—large, tangible objects that overwhelm, things built not on a human scale. Artists of the early twenty-first century perhaps have a right to feel even more overwhelmed and anxious, handicapped as they are by the seemingly insubstantial nature of the technology that today drives so much change. Our technological marvels do not have an oppressive physical presence. They are not built on a grand scale. They are miniaturized and hidden behind sleek, portable steel and glass packages, hidden inside phones and tablets. They are barely visible. There is nothing to see.

The Cult of the Machine is on view at the De Young Museum (50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, CA 94118) through August 12, 2018.

*It's worth noting that, in addition to the River Rouge pieces, both Upper Deck and Rolling Power were originally done as photographs (the Upper Deck photo is in the De Young show). There are many other examples of Sheeler working in a highly realistic style from photographs. I'm not aware of Sheeler being considered anticipatory to Photorealism, but surely he was, even if he usually took stylistic liberties a strict photorealist might not have.

Charles Sheeler, Rolling Power (1939)
Smith College Museum of Art

Art I'm Looking at: Claude Smith, on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi

I'm pleased to announce the next show on the Art Wall at Shige Sushi will feature work by Graton-based artist Claude Smith. These are the last few days to see the exquisite work by Bob Nugent up on the Art Wall now (through tomorrow, Sunday, September 3). Claude's show will go up over the long weekend and open on Tuesday, September 5. The opening reception will be the following Monday, September 11, from 5:30 to 7:30PM. Drop by, meet the artist, have a glass of wine, take in the art.

Art I'm Looking At: "Cries and Whispers" Contemporary Painting at Sonoma State University (Paintings by Cate White and John Yoyogi Fortes)

I attended the opening last night (November 3, 2016) of a show of contemporary painting at Sonoma State University's University Art Gallery, tucked away in a corner of the campus and hard to find (I wonder who thought it was a good idea to give EVERY building on the Sonoma State campus the same address?) but worth the trouble. "Cries and Whispers" features paintings by two Northern California painters, John Yoyogi Fortes and Cate White.

Both painters draw in a way that seems deliberately intended to look less skilled than it really is, White using a nervous, wiry line, Yoyogi Fortes a thicker, weightier line. Both painters make narrative paintings, White's seemingly grounded in reality, Yoyogi Fortes's more abstract, a little surreal. Both painters use layering and juxtaposition of apparently random elements that give the works a graffiti-like look. The work of neither painter would look out of place in an urban concrete setting. It's easy to see why this pairing made sense to the curators.

While the two painters clearly have affinities, they have different concerns. Cate White's work is intensely personal. Assuming the named characters peopling her canvases are real people—people she knows—she is recording significant moments in her life. If these are fictional people, there is at least a recurring cast of characters. "Rory" is one such character. Among the most memorable paintings by White is Rory Counting His Money (2015, acrylic on wood panel), in which we see precisely that: Rory, secretively counting money in a kitchen, seemingly worried about who might observe him, perhaps someone in the room pictured through an open door behind him. The kitchen is crudely depicted but realistically enough drawn in the top half of the painting to make it easy to accept the space on its own cartoon-like terms, but White pulls the carpet out from under the viewer in the bottom half of the painting by making Rory's legs transparent, by suddenly shifting to an abstract depiction of space roughly blocked out with patches of flat color. And Rory's cat, too, is transparent. The orange outlines of the cat and the orange patch beneath Rory's boots are jarringly set against the aqua highlights in the room. The real world dissolves here. In other works, White again uses this transparent effect to keep things one step removed from reality.

In Dre Looking at Me at the Mike Brown Memorial (2015, acrylic on Canvas), a nude female figure is one of several figures (the others clothed) that hold up cell phone cameras to snap photos of the pile of stuffed animals and other objects that appeared in Ferguson, Missouri's Canfield Drive as a spontaneous memorial at the site of the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, in August 2015. If the female figure is White herself, the image shows an outsider both observing and being observed—observed by people local to the scene (the man in the car, Dre), the scene under the surveillance of police cars tucked away into nearby alleyways. Why the foreground figure is nude, I cannot say. In other paintings, a prison visit is depicted; a woman, possibly the artist, stands naked, peeing in the shower; a soldier, flanked by two dogs sits in an ambiguous space (apparently on a sofa placed outdoors), a pair of phantom arms holding his gun.

The work of Yoyogi Fortes is bolder. In some ways it appears crude. The thick, clumsy outlines are reminiscent in places of Philip Guston's late work (itself a crude departure from his earlier representational work). At the same time, however, Yoyogi Fortes is a subtle colorist and his concerns are more painterly than White's. He works in layers. There are splashed areas of dripping paint. Some layers are applied, sanded down, and then overlaid with new layers. Thin, wiped layers float on top of textures left behind by thicker, sculpted layers underneath. The surfaces are of interest in themselves.

The cast of characters is more abstract than in White's work. It includes a stylized monkey face and headless bodies with skinny, booted legs (or heads on legs, reminiscent of Spongebob Squarepants). Recurring symbols include dollar signs and elongated, bloodshot eyes (R. Crumb comes to mind), and brick walls or linear grids. There is frequent use of irregular blobs of pure color that help to rob the paintings of depth—the flatness and the color blobs reminiscent of Japanese techniques, the first associated with traditional woodblock prints before artists in Japan were widely familiar with Western-style perspective, the latter a favorite technique of certain schools of contemporary Japanese abstract printmakers—as in Sweaty Pickle (immediately above: 2016, acrylic, pencil, charcoal, enamel, and collage on canvas). The positioning of these various elements on the canvases suggests narrative in some places, particularly the narrative style of manga or other graphic novels. Elsewhere, the elements appear more randomly placed, more like graffiti tags on walls that have been tagged and covered, tagged and covered repeatedly—although, no doubt, the artist is making decisions about placement based on compositional concerns. Text fragments commonly appear, as in POV (above: 2015, acrylic, enamel, charcoal, pencil, collage, and glitter on canvas), again suggestive of graffiti or street art, a style very much in vogue these days. Not all the pieces by these two artists are immediately appealing. It took me a while to warm up to some of the work, but I left the show glad I'd made the effort to see it. The paintings of both artists are worth a look. Recommended.

"Cries and Whispers: Paintings by John Yoyogi Fortes and Cate White" runs through December 11, 2016 at University Art Gallery at Sonoma State University. Parking Lot A is the closest. Exorbitant ($8) parking fee required. Gallery hours 11:00AM to 4:00PM Tuesday through Friday, weekends 12:00PM to 4:00PM. Closed Mondays and holidays. Closed November 11 (Veteran's Day) and November 23-25 (Thanksgiving). For more information, call (707) 664-2295.
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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: Mark Eanes on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi

I'm looking forward to showing the work of Mark Eanes next on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi, in Cotati. The show will run from October 6 through November 29, 2015. The opening reception will be Monday, October 12. Click on the image here for a larger view. For more information about current and upcoming shows on The Art Wall, visit The Art Wall website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/artwallatshige/

Art I'm Looking At: Seiko Tachibana on the Art Wall at Shige Sushi, Cotati (June 2 through August 2, 2015)

In my role as a curator, I'll next be showing the work of Oakland-based artist Seiko Tachibana on the Art Wall at Shige Sushi in Cotati. The show opens this coming Tuesday, June 2 and will run through August 2. Artist reception Monday, June 8.

Seiko Tachibana completed her Master of Art Education degree at Kobe University, Japan. She received an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and has since received many awards for the body of her work. She has had many solo and group exhibitions internationally. Her distinctive art balances Asian tradition with minimalist modernity. Her work shows an interest in a wide range of media, including drawing, painting, mixed media, and printmaking. Among printmaking techniques, she is a master of intaglio processes, particularly aquatint. Tachibana’s prints are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum, The Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, and the Portland Museum of Art, among others. She is widely collected in the US, Europe, and Japan. In the Bay Area, Tachibana is represented by the Ren Brown Collection, in Bodega Bay.

Shows on the Art Wall at Shige Sushi are curated by me, Colin Talcroft. For information about artwork or artists, about purchasing art, or about showing art on the Art Wall, contact Colin at Shigecurator@yahoo.com. For more information, visit http://ctalcroft.wix.com/artwallatshige/

This week is the last week to see the current show: Suzanne Jacquot: Abstract Painting. For more information about what's going on on the Art Wall, visit http://ctalcroft.wix.com/artwallatshige/

Art I'm Looking At: John Anderson at Paul Mahder Gallery

On the same night as the opening of "Aint Natural" at the Hammerfriar Gallery, Paul Mahder Gallery* opened a retrospective of work by John Anderson (1932-2011). Anderson is a new artist to me, although he appears to have a solid reputation. He was long the assistant of painter Gordon Onslow Ford, early a surrealist but later occupied with depicting inner realms of consciousness and trying to escape from what he seems to have seen as the tyranny of the visual. Ford was mentor to Anderson and Anderson's work shows a similar concern with capturing expressions of inner consciousness.

I'm always suspicious of art that seems to rely heavily on theory or that claims to be entirely spontaneous and unguided. The idea of representing inner consciousness without reference to the visual is an intriguing one, but is it really possible? What does consciousness look like? The surrealists looked to dreams for images of the unconscious, but that approach was inherently contradictory; dream images are recalled images from waking life (which isn't to say surrealism didn't yield some good art). Ford and Anderson apparently wanted to directly depict a world beyond consciousness—Ford emphasizing speed and spontaneity, Anderson taking a more deliberate approach, at times trying to work in a trance-like state.

What does inner consciousness look like according to John Anderson? Inner consciousness appears to be crackling with radiating energy and filled with particles—points, tiny circles, dots, blobs. Read the dots as stars and the images evoke the infinite. Read them as subatomic particles and they evoke the infinitesimal. Much of the appeal of Anderson's work comes from this ambiguity; are we floating in space or are we on Jules Verne's fantastic voyage?

Another ambiguity is created by the way Anderson's visual vocabulary simultaneously evokes physical phenomena on the one hand, living creatures on the other. We see lines radiating from a bright spot and surrounded by a field of dots; rings of increasing size as they move away from a point of apparent origin; wave forms; star clusters; entire galaxies; lines that suggest the tracings of subatomic particles in a particle accelerator; electrostatic charges in a Van de Graaff generator; excited plasma; electron flows. All these images come to mind. Some of the paintings put me in mind of Dr. Frankenstein's lab equipment (or at least the Hollywood depiction of his lab equipment). At the same time, it's easy to see the circles filled with radiating lines as diatoms or pollen grains greatly magnified. That is, much of Anderson's imagery is as suggestive of microscope views of living things as it is of physics experiments. Volvox, an old friend from high school biology class, is here. Cells and their nuclei and fields of protoplasm are here, some with embedded mitochondria and with vacuoles. The double helix of the DNA molecule is here.

The paintings by Anderson in the new Paul Mahder show seem to make abundant reference to the visual—specifically to the visual language of physics and biology. Thus, I wonder how successful Anderson can be said to have been at escaping the conscious, the visual. Perhaps it doesn't matter. I don't belittle the attempt. The process is important, and the art that resulted from years of effort toward achieving a goal (however elusive) is compelling. John Anderson at Paul Mahder Gallery will be on display through June 2015 (the gallery website does not give an end-date in June). Well worth a visit for the John Anderson work and a great deal of other good work in this very large display space.

*Paul Mahder is also in Healdsburg (and quite new, apparently; I discovered it by chance only a couple of weeks ago)—222 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg, CA 95448, (707) 473-9150).

Miscellaneous: Where Did Throwback Thursday Come From?

I've only recently become aware of the "throwback Thursday" thing people seem to do on Facebook--and elsewhere, I presume. I mostly see pictures of people I knew in college or high school with long hair, looking hopeful, having fun. It got me to wondering where this throwback Thursday idea came from. What is its history?

Above is my contribution for this Thursday--a photo of me in my first apartment in Columbus, Ohio. I found it yesterday while trying to clean up and organize my studio.

I lived for a year at 1350 Highland St., about a block south of King Ave., south of the Ohio State University campus. I had spent the previous year at Webster College, now Webster University, in St. Louis. Behind me on the walls are paintings I had done recently. Above right is a view of the houses across the street on Highland St. Below that is a view of my across-the-street neighbor's house in Dayton, Ohio, a painting I did when in high school. Just behind my head is a self portrait I did in my Webster College dorm room. Some of my Webster friends may remember that one. The large abstract painting to my right (left in the photo) I did in my Webster dorm room as well. The self-portrait is dated 1978. It hangs in my studio today. This photo is probably from about 1981.

[Update: A Google search, naturally, reveals something about the origins of throwback Thursday. Here's an article on the subject.]

Art I'm Looking At: Anders Zorn at The Legion of Honor (November 23, 2013)

Anders Zorn (1860-1920) is a name I've long been dimly aware of. On travels in Europe I've seen a few of his paintings and I've been impressed by them, but until today I'd never had the opportunity to see a full range of his work. It was a treat to see a representative selection of his early efforts – mostly extraordinary watercolors –, of his society portraits, of his nudes (oils, watercolors, and etchings), and also of his later works, which are mostly oils depicting rural scenes in his home country of Sweden, to which he retired after periods of living in London, Paris, and elsewhere, and doing a great deal of traveling around the world, including seven trips to the United States (which included a visit to San Francisco in 1903).

According to the large, wall-mounted text panels at the show, Zorn studied mostly oil painting as an art student, but a chance meeting with an English watercolorist shortly after graduation inspired him to take up watercolors, and he seems to have applied himself with singular concentration. The early watercolors on show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco (Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter runs through February 2, 2014) are nothing short of breathtaking technically, if somewhat idiosyncratic; Zorn uses watercolors more like oil paints, employing thickeners and adding touches with gouache to create heavy (but by no means clumsy) layers with less transparency, less wetness, than is usual. Zorn must have been an especially meticulous and patient man, at least in his youth. The detail of the water surface in a painting like Summer Vacation (1886) shown here is hard to believe. The figure in the boat is almost photographically rendered. If Zorn had lived in a later period, it's tempting to think he might have become a photorealist.

Zorn took up etching fairly casually, at the suggestion of an artist friend, the panels tell us. He seems to have mastered it in a very short time. His ability to capture light effects – so ably demonstrated in the watercolors – is apparent here, and again Zorn's approach is somewhat unorthodox. On the Sands (1916) pictured above (although not in the Legion of Honor show) is a good example of the style he developed as an etcher, using very long, parallel hatching to conjure startlingly life-like figures out of what look like hastily worked backgrounds (the freedom of line here and in some of the oil paintings is surprising when juxtaposed with the painstaking watercolor work). Remarkably, some of the lines are a third or even half as long as the long side of the plate. The woman on the beach looks as if she's been carefully carved out of a jagged stone matrix. Looking at other work in the show, this contrast between loving attention to a central figure and a less-meticulous rendering of a background began to seem typical as I walked through the galleries. The "floated" effect created by a figure rendered so surely as to look almost alive surrounded by a markedly more sketchily approached background is apparent in some of the oil paintings as well--notably Herdsmaid (1908) in which a young female cowherd (partially obscured by pine saplings and other low vegetation) is seen through a gap in the plants around her; the figure seems uncannily present, but what surrounds her is ever-so-slightly blurred – again suggestive of photography and lens effects (more below).

Zorn was immensely successful as a society portrait painter, both in Europe and on his trips to the United States. Looking at Zorn's work in the genre, the paintings of nearly contemporary painters John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Valentin Serov (1865-1905) immediately come to mind. These painters all had an uncanny ability to capture something about sitters that make their portraits look absolutely authentic while using brushstrokes that call great attention to themselves if viewed from close to the canvas. An entire room in the Legion of Honor show is devoted to portraits like this one of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron (1900).

The orange-red of the sofa in the Cameron portrait is a color Zorn appears to have liked very much. This (or a similar shade – the raw flesh of a Coho Salmon and the red sandstones of Arches National Park, in Utah, come to mind) is present in every one of the paintings in the portrait room – in the red bow in a sitter's hair, in the glowing, rusty curtains behind the former president in Zorn's portrait of Grover Cleveland (1899), or in a piece of furniture or clothing. In his Self-portrait in Red (1915), at the top of this page, Zorn took his predilection to an extreme.

Being a photographer, I was particularly interested to see the show touch upon how Zorn used photography as a resource in at least some of his later work. The etching called Cabin, of 1917, has its own display case. An example of the print is set alongside the original plate from which it was pulled and a set of five snapshots Zorn made of the two models depicted descending into the cabin of what is described as "Zorn's yacht" (his society portraits appear to have made him very rich). The photos are fascinating in themselves. The women are laughing. They seem to be having a great deal of fun. It's easy to imagine Zorn joking with the models, getting them to take the positions he was trying to visualize, in the right light, without making them unduly self-concious. Seeing the snapshots makes me wonder how often Zorn was drawing on photographs earlier in his career and exactly how he may have used them, if he did.

This work and the other nudes in the show (there are many, mostly oils) makes apparent the artist's love of the female form. He appears to have been especially fond of rear ends, and in the Legion of Honor show are some of the most lovingly rendered backsides you're ever likely to see in paint. Look for the one Zorn slashed to pieces and discarded because he was dissatisfied with it (a fellow artist rescued the pieces and sewed it back together).

Zorn retired to his home town of Mora and spent his last years mainly painting the country life of Sweden's Dalarna region – paintings that appealed to me less than some of the other pieces in the show (although everything was worth looking at). Here I've posted just a few impressions based on a single viewing of a selection of Zorn's work, but Zorn is a painter I'm now interested in learning more about.