I came across this really nice resource when I was doing research.  You can sign up for free and get news on current artists and people doing interesting things.

mutualart.com link

I found myself wanting to know more about Rauschenberg.  I spent time online viewing some of his work and reading quotes and various biographical accounts.  I think I was drawn to him because I found his works so visually interesting.  It was not always aesthetically pleasing, but looked as if each piece was saying something.  It felt like a puzzle to be solved or interpreted.  I thought to myself that he must have been so intentional in his work.  Then I found a quote (actually a series of quotes) in which Rauschenberg spoke about his process being one of improvisation.  He also talked about how being "right" simply isn't necessary in the work.  A very interesting man.

Anyway, one quote that I really liked was this:

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

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Odd Guerilla Girls Manifesto

Art Manifestos are emboldened with hope and passion. Art Manifestos declare and expect. Art Manifestos depend on the egos that write them. Since the manifesto for the Futurists called to arms against the art status quo, each of the subsequent art manifestos rebelled against and declared a prespective on art, how it should or could relate to the world. Do manifestos have an impact? By looking at several past manifestos, I certainly think that it gives direction and voice for a particular art cause or perceived injustice. Most manifestos are directed from a single person or single group's perspective. When I started to look at the Wikipedia list of 29 manifestos since 1909, I started to wonder about two manifestos I remember personally, that were not on the list, one from an individual artist and the other from an fledging group. Both these manifestos came out of the 1980s, both of these manifestos used media techniques to manipulate the media to their cause. Both of these manifestos had an impact on the art world that could be described as significant.

Although Odd Nerdrum and the Gorilla Girls have two very different manifestos, there are similarities to Marinetti's Futurist's manifesto and every other manifesto thereafter. The basic manifesto structures and formats used the culture and systems in society to foment their declarations and to carry out their ideas.

Odd's manifesto is called On Kitsch. The odd thing abouts Odd's manifesto is that it seems to follow a singular logic and dignified rant until you get to the title and the word kitsch. Odd seems to have taken the term kitsch and rebelled against the cultural meaning of kitsch, and then for me his whole manifesto seems out of whack and too illogical- just based on the word kitsch. To explain this a bit, one of the many historical cultural meanings of the word kitsch means 'bad taste' or a tacky mass-produced comodity. In the early 1980s the writer Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) wrote that kitsch presented a sanitized version of the world, and he defines it as the "denial of shit". In this single word, properties of sameness and simpleness became associated with kitsch, and with this term totaliarism had been tossed about. When kitsch became the ugly, garish objects that define the commercialization of our culture, the pop artists appropriated kitsch aligned it with camp and edged it with humor. Perhaps camp/kitsch is a fun aspect, a relief from the serious arrogant art headed to the galleries or art palaces called museums.

In 1998, Odd Nerdrum took out several full-page ads in a 1998 Artnews edition to post his manifesto On Kitsch. I remember reading this when it first came out, and my first thought was ego and what the .... Odd was very serious, very strident in his version on what is kitsch, contrary to what the culture had implied. Kitsch was the opposite, kitsch was a spiritual endeavor. Again I admired the rant, it was the word that undermined his theory without context. This manifesto is not camp, not the 'denial of shit', but a view of kitsch as a spiritual renewal. A rant against contemporary art and the values it imposes on artists. He completely takes Kundera's definition and says the opposite, indicating that kitsch is an eternal and sensual expression, kitsch is the essence of life and beauty, not the camp ironic tome of the pop artists. It is truly odd that Odd takes this defense. His version of kitsch in his manifesto is for a positive structure for figurative painters, not ironic and in a narrative format. Odd declares in his manifesto that art is not art but kitsch. In his manifesto he stated, " that he is no longer an artist, but a maker of kitsch, or anti-art, free to take his liberties where he may, outside of the critical eye." Source:http://portraitsocietygallery.wordpress.com/essays-about-portraiture/

For me the redefined word is still wrapped in the strapping of years of cultural notation and it still doesn't make sense, and I think he does want to make serious sense. Despite my problem with this contradiction, Odd has many figurative artist followers. The Kitsch artists have a biennale on kitsch painters and strive to show romantic themes of eternal beings. This is so odd, why rebel against the word kitsch when in reality he is rebelling against the art and the art culture. Yet, it is not any more strange than the Futurists who made up words and rebelled against cultural icons and everything that wasn't nailed down.

The following is an excerpt from Nerdrum's manifesto:

Source: http://www.jahsonic.com/OddNerdrum.html

The kitsch painter occupies himself with the eternal things in life- like love, death and the sunrise.

Renewal or to locally belong to your own time is uninteresting; as is personal expression. Absorption is the goal, for in nature itself lies the personal.

As modernism and the state together have taken over the art world, kitsch is the savior of talent and heartiness.

So Odd Nerdrum got his say, his picture on Artnews and a printed manifesto in a major magazine. He used the print media in a straight and direct format initially, and now has branched out to other social networks. He has group followings and the Kitsch Biennale is an established event., proving today that a singular artist can still publish their own manifesto and develop a group around his/her theories. Odd's singular vision in his art, drove him to take his cause to the greater world. Like Marinetti he has a large-size ego and convictions that propelled action and his manifestos that led to media events. Perhaps art needs these outbursts to keep it balanced.

The Guerilla Girl's manifesto can be viewed on many media formats. These girls are media savvy and that is probably why their twenty year Guerrilla Girl gigs are still thriving. The following You Tube :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHVBZh5HBgc

is an example of their manifesto stating in visual imagery and humor their cause and the discrimination within the art world. Like the Futurists, the girls manipulate and mix-up their art mediums to give a voice to their causes. Sly wit, rhetorical format, direct observations juxtaposed with facts keep their message alive. Although the Girls have the advantage of internet self-publishing systems, the distribution and marketing are similar challenges to the Futurists. The Girl's use humor as their weapon as the Futurists used violence. Below is an extract of their manifesto:

Source: PDF: Guerrilla Girls reinventing the F Word-Feminism

SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS MAY 22 2010

The following is extracts from their manifesto:

The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly (Which You Have to Do Most of the Time in the World as We Know It)

Be a loser. The world of art and design doesn’t have to be an Olympics where a few win and everyone else is forgotten. Even though the art market and celebrity culture is set up to support the idea of hyper-competition and to make everyone but the stars feel like failures, there’s also a world out there of artistic cooperation and collaboration that’s not about raging egos. That’s the one we joined, and the one you can join, too. Get beyond the outdated assumption that only a handful of you will "make it." Don’t all waste your time running after the same few carrots.

Be impatient. Don't wait for a stamp of approval from the system. Don’t wait around to be asked to dance. Claim your place...Be anonymous. You’d be surprised what comes out of your mouth when you’re wearing a gorilla mask. We started wearing them to protect our careers, but soon realized it was one of the secrets of our success. Anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. So join that long line of anonymous masked avengers, like Robin Hood, Batman, and of course, Wonder Woman.

Be an outsider

Lead a double life. Be a split personality.

Just do one thing.

Don't make only FINE art. Make some cheap art that can be owned by everyone, like books and movies can.

Sell out

Complain, complain, complain. But be creative about it. Sure we've done 45 feet high banners and billboards all over the world. But here's some simpler things we've done: Put anti-film industry stickers in movie theatre bathrooms, insert fliers with facts about art world discrimination into books in museum stores, send anonymous postcards to museum directors. Want more ideas? How about attaching political hangtags to items in clothing stores, putting up street art or billboards across from your office, slapping stickers on fashion magazine covers. You can probably think up a million better ideas than we can.

Use the F wordAnd last, but not least, be a great ape.

Guerrilla Girls use rhetoric to entice not to hammer down their point. Not to rant or to admonish. Masters at turning a phrase or a question, for an example, the most famous question a Guerrilla Girl billboard asked, “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?” The question implies that there is a problem. The Girls followed up on this question by counting all the female nudes and male nudes in the the Met museum and published their finding, by asking another question. As Marinetti and the Futurists thrived on controversy so do the Guerrilla Girls. There is no bad press, and its more fun, the worse the event. The Guerrilla Girls use of the visual argument has the same appeal of a really good commercial. I think that for the Guerrilla Girls the textures of their visual collages of words and images seem rebellious at the same time stating facts, which drives home the contradictions, creating a bigger punch.

Like Marinetti, the Guerrilla Girls use events and theatrics to continue to clarify their agenda, and address issues of discrimination or current events. Their posters have a distinctive and unique quality similar to the distinctive quality of Marinetti's designs and type on media. There is a sensational feeling regarding the Futurists and the Guerilla Girls, bad boys and girls for a good cause kind of thing. Both groups enjoy the insults and derision, and they use it to their advantage. The staging of events are strategic, although it looks random, no event is random initially. Both groups are able to orchestrate their events so they are filmed and photographed to be used again in another context. There is a multi-tiered approach to their image events. The Guerrilla Girl's technique starts with the creation of the first media event, and then it is rolled over to a new event, and continues to cycle through one event leading into another. Below is an example of the Guerrilla Girls creating a media event out of a current event. They filmed the event and it was looped onto TV, presented on posters and went viral on You Tube. Marinetti would be so envious. I could see him embracing this technology to create chaos.

Source: Enculturation 6.2 (2009): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/6.2/tulley

The Guerilla Girls invented the“anti-grope” shields in response to the media report of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alleged fondling of female co-workers, We think all women in California should protect themselves by carrying our new, specially designed, “Schwarzenegger Shield.” This anti-Arnold armor can be used to block any unwanted advances, and insure that the new governor won't be able to grope, grab or sexually harass any of us, in any way. Don't go to the governor's office or mansion without it!

Today we are geared into visuals. We are conditioned to respond to visual nuances and take delight when it is thrown back at us. The Girls know how to market and balance this road. The best part of the Guerrilla Girls is you don't have to formally belong or take an oath of allegiance to participate in Guerrilla Girl activities. Anyone can create an image event, create bumper stickers or posters and put them up in art establishments. This system allows the iconic message and method to spread across the planet. It seems in other manifestos there is a more formality to its groupings. The Guerrilla Girls seemed to have embraced the contemporary wiki spirit of a loose organization that trusts that humans will take the spirit of a manifesto and do right by it.

In our previous week's readings, I was intrigued by Dick Higgins reference to liminality, or the "liminal experience"  I wasn't quite sure about what this meant, so looked it up.  It turns out that it is an anthropological term related to tribal rites of passage.  Victor Turner, and anthropologist who taught at the University of Virginia studied this and wrote (among other things) a classic essay, "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage".

In his essay, Turner asserted that in tribal cultures, the initiate would usually be required to go through a period of time in which s/he reliquished all former structural ties by enduring "nakedness, poverty and complete submission to the terms of the liminal passage in order to attain the next life stage".

He goes on to tie this into our own modern western culture, where such rituals rarely exist.The liminal experience would then be some method of leaving old ways behind by somehow letting go of the ego's claim to rank and social function in order to attain a "more highly individual state of growth".

I am not sure that all people accomplish this, but I do see the connection to Dick Higgins and his definition of Intermedia.  He mentions that the new art (Avant-garde) carries with it some liminality.  It is a process of acquiring a better state of being (becoming).  As I have been trying to figure this all out, these ideas of Intermedia and becoming and Fluxus and so on, I realize that it is, perhaps, a rite of passage that occurs as an artist (or group) attempts to discover a new way of being that expands beyond the traditional or comfortable place that has been established.  If artistic expression is to be ever fresh or changing, than certaily rites of passage must exist.

(In summary) One of my favorite Higgins quotes thus far:

The great works of the past no longer provide us with the experience we are seeking, however wonderful they are.  For this, it is not among the perfect voices of our past that we must look but, rather, among the most unsatisfactory of our present, knowing that these are, at least, alive.  One is not searching for the memory of the perfect lover but, rather, for the warm and living lover.

The last four essays have brought clarity to my mind as to the meaning of the term “intermedia,” while at the same time challenged my perception of art forms and audience, making me feel both excited and even more muddled.

At last, I can finally wrap my head around the context and intent of the term Dick Higgins coined “intermedia.”  I get that it’s a fusion, a hybrid, an integration of more than one art form that when brought together creates something new.  I love that concept because I love new stuff: cutting edge, novelty, avante garde, never-been-done-before, free-thinking, new ideas.  These ideas and terms excite me as much about art as entrepreneurship.  Whether art or commerce, each time I hear a new idea, I want to cheer it on from the sidelines with pom-poms and chants: “Go, idea, go!” as if I could help elevate, broaden, expand, or support it.  This is how I am wired; I believe every new idea deserves a chance to “make it” in the world.

On the other hand, I look at what many of the Fluxus artists have done and struggle with labeling their ideas, sets of instructions, and Happenings as “art.”  I want “art” to reflect a developed skill, a skill that artists develop and become more critical with over time.  A skill, or set of skills, in which the artist learns, applies, refines, hones, reapplies, and further develops. 

While I don’t dismiss the importance of Higgins and others’ interest and work, it is hard for me to embrace it as an accomplished art form because it feels less like art and more like simple experimentation (I acknowledge that this is based on my feeling, not critical research or much exposure to art history).  Don’t get me wrong; I think experimentation is important.  I think a lot of lessons can be learned.  I think the lessons can be applied in new ways. I just don’t necessarily agree it should be deemed “art.”

Take Higgins’ 4’33 as an example.  What an interesting experiment to see how an audience would react to a performance of silence!  If I were the artist, I would be curious to know: How would people respond?  What emotions would they feel? Would they be stretched to see or experience something new or different?  How can I apply what I learn from this experiment to evoke a response from my audience using my art? Isn’t this more about exploration and experimentation than “art?” 

When I think about myself in the role of the audience, I question my own likely response.  When I attend a venue, there are times when I like to be entertained and times I want to be stretched.  But I also want to know which role I will be in when I attend.  Otherwise, I would feel as though my trust in the performer has been violated.  Who wants to experience mistrust?

When I read Hannah Higgins’ description of Piano Activities, I intellectually tried to appreciate the experience of the deconstruction of the piano.  But when I watched YouTube videos of Piano Activities, I felt disappointed, saddened, and angry that a piano was being destroyed.  My interpretation was a group of white men using aggression to destroy an inanimate object; I could not see their appreciation or attentiveness toward the ‘sound’ the piano was making as it was “incidentally” destroyed.  For these reasons, this piece doesn’t feel like art to me.­­­

I enjoy our class explorations of intermedia, other art forms, and artists, even while I am often mystified by them, such as Fluxus artists and Duchamp.  I continue to attempt to wrap my head around these new concepts and make sense of them, however, I took much comfort in a comment I read recently by Dave Eggers (writer/artist) interviewing David Shrigley (artist), in which Eggers says:

“The art world does tend to attract a very self-serious type of person. I noticed that when I was in art school myself, and then when I worked at an art gallery. I tend to think that there’s a fear of acknowledging the inherent absurdity of, say, sticking a urinal on a plinth and calling it art. Duchamp knew it was absurd, and very funny, but I’ve been around a lot of art-world people who treat Duchamp with great seriousness, when that’s sort of the opposite of his purpose as an artist. It’s as if to crack a smile would be to diminish the importance of the work.’”

I have to agree.

(http://www.timeout.com/london/feature/2150/david-shrigley-interviewed-by-dave-eggers)

We have read 6 essays on what constitutes intermedia, and while I am beginning to see somewhat of a framework, it is still crossing boundaries of its own. A space between understanding and seeing a blurry haze of recognizable form.  I see how intermedia becomes more than just a visual experience, how it involves th senses, and how the idea of horizon plays into this- giving the viewer/participant a unique experience depending on their position on the horizon of the work. After so many years in the mindset of "seeing" art, now there is the possibility of feeling it. a much more powerful existence is achieved, and it reminds me of eastern mindfulness, a being that is in the moment, and an awareness of everything that surrounds.  this also connects to the udience being inquisitive/curious. if the experience of the art is open to posibilities, then the audience will be invovled, and wondering, interested in what is to occur. This curiosity also for me has a link to eastern thought, in its being in the moment, seeing what is happening. An unfolding rahter than an articulated closed statement. 

But then- there is the idea of fusion and separation.  i get the melding of media into one form, that if it is fully realized, will result in the creation of a new genre eventually. i have a harder time figuring out swalwell's ideas about additive vs subtractive.  

Higgins writes that after we have this liminal experience that art can give us "we return to the everyday world, and the experience becomes marginal with regard to our daily, normative existence; but the liminal experience has refreshed us and can be a source of energy and meaning for us." 

This liminal experience that he speaks so eloquently about made me think about the expectations and disappointment that follows from viewing conceptual piece of work that feel impossible to understand or connect with. 

At some point art got stuck in the specific materials of paint, canvas, tradition, order, likes and dislikes and specific composition. These are just a few modes of art, possible outcomes among millions that have not been discovered yet.  The avant guard (in this case post-self cognitive) is breaking outside the art of self reflection, emotional experience and beauty and I wonder if it requires a different desire from the audience. Can our desires change?

People think conceptual = boring, lacking emotion, lacking human connection. I think this comes from a place of ignorance but also from the fact that people are starving for something out of the ordinary, more beautiful than life, they want emotional release from art. They want to be impressed, people look to art for entertainment and beauty, look for a pause in their everyday life to be uplifted or inspired. That speaks to the power of art and its ability to inspire and provoke emotion. 

If people want art to be an escape from the everyday normal (painful, boring, sad, mundane) life than how will art that is wholly conceptual satisfy? if you work all day in an office, you don’t want to walk into an installation piece of a gallery only to find an exact replica of your office… real life… we want art to take us to something extraordinary- outside o life- bigger than life. This post-cognitive art work is hard for people to “get something out of” because this culture, especially now, is moving towards having information fast, easy-- a database… the attention span of our society is shrinking- more than ever we are looking for spectacle, something to top everything else that we see on the internet.

Maybe the audience will evolve and become so sick of being over stimulated that they beging to crave, like they once craved emotive paintings, a silence, a work that asks more of you, that requires thought and contemplation… maybe we have not fully developed our tastes yet to receive this.

Any thoughts?

Thinking Outside the Canvas

WASHINGTON — As art mediums go, painting is both intractably consistent and endlessly malleable, and perhaps never more so than now. While it continues to renew itself in its traditional paint-on-canvas incarnations, there’s also a well-established maverick branch that is constantly stretching the medium, extending it into installation art or questioning its status as a precious, high-skill commodity, sometimes by eliminating paint altogether.

One of the pioneers of this stretching and questioning is the German painter Blinky Palermo, whose invigorating first American retrospective currently fills one ring of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s doughnut-shaped building. The survey teems with spare yet surprisingly spritely works — many of them previously unexhibited in this country — that push and prod painting in various directions while still luxuriating in its optical possibilities, especially where color is concerned.

Blinky Palermo, a precocious art star in Europe at the time of his sudden death in 1977 at 33, comes across here as remarkably focused, not the least in his unwavering dedication to abstraction. He painted on canvas, wood and metal; made shaped works that he sometimes paired in eccentric, mismatched diptychs; executed temporary pieces for specific architectural settings; and fashioned severe modernist abstractions from swathes of solid-colored department store fabric.

The through line is that nearly everything he made seems to imply the phrase “this is a painting” simultaneously as a statement and a question, and to leave us juggling our perceptions and preconceptions. The “Fabric Paintings” read as simultaneously mildly satiric — send-ups of Brice Marden’s exquisitely wrought monochrome panel paintings — and optically engaging in their own right, with their subtle color juxtapositions and physical modesty. Sometimes the artist’s wit is more overt, as in “Blue Disk and Staff,” from 1968, a borderline sculpture with a borderline mythological title, which consists of a tall, thin piece of wood and a circle of wood, both completely wrapped in vivid blue tape. They lean side by side against the wall, suggesting a “Shield and Spear.”

First seen at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall, the Blinky Palermo show was organized by the Dia Art Foundation in New York City and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., under the direction of Lynne Cooke, Dia’s veteran curator. This summer it will appear upstate, split between Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., and Bard.

The Hirshhorn version, then, is the last chance to see the exhibition whole, and it is hard to imagine it looking much better than it does in the museum’s serene, gently curving galleries. The show is another sign of the Hirshhorn’s quiet rejuvenation under Richard Koshalek, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles who took over the museum in Washington in 2009. Among other things, Mr. Koshalek has removed the false ceilings in some of the Hirshhorn’s galleries, revealing more of the cast concrete vaults that give the building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft, its air of industrial ruggedness.

This kind of adjustment would have pleased Blinky Palermo, some of whose environmental pieces consisted of little more than painting the molding of a space or outlining a wall in a thin band of color. He was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig, Germany, in 1943, and adopted as an infant, with his twin brother, Michael, by foster parents named Heisterkamp, who moved to Munster in what was then West Germany in 1952.

He grew up enthralled by American culture, especially the Beat Generation and the Abstract Expressionists, and in the early ’60s he took the name of the American gangster (and Sonny Liston’s manager) whom he was said to resemble. By then, he was enrolled at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, a student and favorite of Joseph Beuys, the sage of “social sculpture,” who later said that Blinky Palermo had “a far greater porosity” than any of his other students.

At the Hirshhorn, Blinky Palermo’s “porosity” comes across as an openness to history, to playful suggestion and to the complexity of visual experience, guided by a stringent sense of economy and strong doubts about painting’s traditional materials.

Ms. Cooke lays out the prevailing characterizations of Blinky Palermo’s achievement in her lead-off essay: that he was a Conceptual-oriented manipulator of architectural sites not unlike Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren and Michael Asher; a fellow traveler of American Minimalist painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Marden (and their predecessors Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko); or part of the tradition of European mysticism stemming from Malevich and Mondrian and even earlier. (This last can seem a bit far-fetched, yet an untitled two-part work dated 1967-72 — a small canvas brushed in shades of brown and black, paired with a large attenuated wood T — neatly distills a Caspar David Friedrich cross-in-the-landscape painting.) However distinct these artistic positions may sometimes seem, they are certainly effortlessly encompassed by Blinky Palermo’s art.

Many of the earliest works in the show come across as wry, layered tributes to Modernism’s illustrious past. “Composition With 8 Red Rectangles” of 1964 is a scattering of bright red rectangles that pays homage to the Russian Modernist Malevich by using a title nearly identical to that of his painting “Suprametism With Eight Red Rectangles” from 1915. But the references to Malevich’s legacy continue: The Russian artist’s rectangles are, in the main, elongated, while Blinky Palermo’s tend toward squares, which means they also evoke Malevich’s paintings of groundbreaking abstractions of single black, white or red squares, while their arrangement conjures a well-known photograph of Malevich’s small geometric abstractions dotting the corner of the last futurist exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1915.

In “Blue Bridge” of 1964-65, a schematic blue-black bridge stretches edge to edge across a field of bright red; its title collapses the names of the Blue Rider and the Bridge, the two artists’ groups that initiated German Expressionism, and hence modern German painting.

In the mid 1960s, as Blinky Palermo moved away from conventional rectangular canvases, the perceptual poetry of his work increased. “Untitled (Totem)” is simply a vertical strip of wood, 7 feet by about 2 inches. It is painted orange and punctuated, like a primitive ladder, with five short, horizontal pieces of canvas-wrapped wood, each painted white with a portion of a blue triangle. Suggesting abstracted traffic cones down the center line of a highway, it turns the wall into a landscape.

The idiosyncratic diptych “Daydream I” considers the life of abstract forms — either cushily ensconced on canvas or liberated from it — with a dark green triangle painted on what is essentially a small, reddish canvas pillow paired with an identically sized dark green triangle made of painted wood. At the end of the decade, the artist devised a do-it-yourself stencil kit that people could buy and use to make their own Blinky Palermo triangles, in blue; it has been used at the Hirshhorn over a doorway.

In the mid-’70s, Blinky Palermo lived and worked primarily in New York; after returning to Germany in 1976, he made a new kind of work: an environmental yet portable multipart piece titled “To the People of the City of New York.” Owned by the Dia Art Foundation and often on view at Dia:Beacon, it consists of 40 smallish panel paintings in combinations of red, black and gold — the colors of the West and East German flags (and now the German one) — arranged in different groupings. Poised between Germany and America, its mysterious yet lively contrapuntal semaphore leaves you wondering what would have followed, had Blinky Palermo been granted more than a dozen very full years of maturity.

“Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” runs through May 15 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue and Seventh Street, SW, Washington; (202) 633-1000, hirshhorn.si.edu.

A painting in the Metropolitan long attributed to the circle of Francesco Granacci is really by Michelangelo— according to experts who cite underdrawings, imagery, and aspects of the artist's own biography as clues

by Milton Esterow

"I'm acutely aware that Michelangelo, like van Gogh, attracts a lot of crazy ideas, and people are going to say, 'This is another absurd idea,'" said Everett Fahy, one of the world's most distinguished scholars of the Italian Renaissance, who retired in March as John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I'm expecting that they're going to throw brickbats."

The brickbats may come from scholars who disagree with Fahy when he asserts that Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness, a painting that was attributed to "the close circle of Francesco Granacci" when the museum acquired it in 1970, is actually by Granacci's good friend Michelangelo. "I am confident that the only artist capable of making this splendid painting was Michelangelo," Fahy told me in an interview in the ARTnews office.

Keith Christiansen, who succeeded Fahy as chairman of the European paintings department and who is a prominent scholar on the Italian Renaissance, told me, "I think Everett has put forward the strongest argument that can be made for it."

Does that mean yes or no?

Christiansen smiled and said, "I don't do yes or no."

The late Edmund P. Pillsbury, a former director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, was convinced that the work was by Michelangelo, according to Fahy.

"When you put out something like this, there's going to be a lot of naysayers," Fahy said. "But the people who really have good eyes in this field that I've shown the painting to, they've all agreed with me. With attributions, it's not the number of people who agree with you, it's the quality of their judgments."

Fahy has written a 65-page article about the painting, which will appear in the Italian scholarly journal Nuovi Studi. The title of the article is "An Overlooked Michelangelo?" "I put the question mark there so that I would not offend people," Fahy said. "I thought it would be more diplomatic."

The Met bought the painting at Sotheby's London, along with a companion work attributed to Granacci, which depicts episodes in the life of the Baptist. "I think it's ironic that the Met paid 0,000 for the Granacci and 0,000 for the painting I attribute to Michelangelo," Fahy said.

Granacci (1469/70–1543), a pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio, was five years older than Michelangelo (1475–1564) and played a formative role in his early life, Fahy said. They were so close that when Michelangelo went to Venice in 1529, Granacci remained in Florence and looked after his friend's personal affairs.

"The second panel is so superior to the companion panel," Fahy said. "I believe Michelangelo painted it in 1506, two years before he started on the Sistine ceiling. It was already in my brain in 1971, the year after it was bought. When the Metropolitan showed it in 1971, I wrote for an exhibition called 'Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries' that the second panel recalled the figures in the Sistine Chapel. As years went by, it firmed up. I had long believed it to be by Michelangelo, but exactly when I don't know. There wasn't a moment when I suddenly said, 'This is absolutely by Michelangelo.' It was a gradual recognition."

The Granacci painting depicts seven scenes from the story of Saint John the Baptist, set in a classical pavilion situated in a pale grayish blue river landscape. The Met calls the panel Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist, but Fahy calls it Birth of the Baptist. "Titles of Old Master paintings can vary from one writer to the next," he said. "The birth of the Baptist is the principal episode in the painting." It is executed in oil, tempera, and gold on a wood panel measuring 30 9/16 by 59 inches, and dated ca. 1510.

"The second panel," Fahy said, "depicts a single episode in a landscape. It has a stony setting, with Saint John the Baptist standing in the center on a rocky dais, wearing a rose-colored robe over his hair shirt. On the far left are a pair of pharisees. One is pointing up toward Christ, with five of his disciples, walking down a narrow pathway in the rocks at the left. There are other figures flanking the Baptist. In the distance is a glimpse of a river with rustic houses and a town on the far side beneath a green mountain." This painting, which is slightly larger, is also executed in oil, tempera, and gold on wood, on a 29-by-82-inch panel.

Fahy said, "I had a eureka moment one day when I was standing in front of the picture. I suddenly realized what all those rocks were. The setting is a scene in a quarry, which is totally unlike the landscapes in Florence where Michelangelo lived. And I said, 'Wow, look at all those stones.' I was reminded of the time in 1497 when Michelangelo was complaining about all the time he spent in the quarry at Carrara, what life was like spending eight uninterrupted months with so many workmen—no restaurant around the corner, no library, really roughing it."

Michelangelo, Fahy said, "was dissatisfied with the stone he had used for the marble Bacchus, in the Bargello in Florence. He traveled to Carrara to select marble for the Pietà in Saint Peter's and superintended the rough-hewing of the block before shipping it to Rome." Visualizing in his imagination the scene of the Baptist in the wilderness, Fahy said, Michelangelo "depicted it in a quarry, which would have been an exotic sight to the people who first looked at the painting."

The panel has traditionally been called Preaching of Saint John the Baptist, but Fahy said that it actually illustrates the Baptist bearing witness, as described in John 1:29—the moment when the Baptist sees Jesus approaching him in the wilderness and says, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Although the episode is not often depicted, Fahy said, it does occur in late 13th- and 14th-century Florentine cycles of the life of the Baptist.

Both panels were traditionally attributed to Ghirlandaio, Fahy said. Their first recorded owner was "presumably" Samuel Woodburn (1786–1853), who was described as "the most eminent dealer in works of art in England." At some point the paintings were acquired by the fourth earl of Ashburnham. Late in the 19th century, Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist was recognized as a work by Granacci, an attribution that is almost universally accepted today, Fahy said.

"Nearly everyone agreed that the two panels were by different artists because of the handling of the paint, the design of the figures, and the rendering of the landscape," he said. "The notable exception was Berenson, who repeatedly listed both works as Granaccis."

The Met's paintings conservation department assisted Fahy in his research. Conservator Charlotte Hale made infrared reflectograms. "X-rays show only where there is lead white or defects in the wood, whereas this new technology reveals the underdrawing—the drawing the artist made on the wood panel before he applied the paint," Fahy said. "Charlotte did it to all five paintings by Granacci at the Met. Granacci's underdrawings are all complete, careful preparatory drawings. Michelangelo's are very fluid, boldly drawn. He knew when he started to paint what he wanted. He didn't have to follow any underdrawing."

Fahy continued, "There have been three serious proposals for the artist who painted the second panel: Raffaellino del Garbo, who was born before 1479 and died in 1524 or later; Raffaello Botticini, born in 1477 and still active in 1520; and an anonymous artist working on drawings provided by Michelangelo. The attribution to Raffaellino was made by Adolfo Venturi in the early 1890s. The Botticini proposal was made by Federico Zeri in his catalogue of the Italian paintings in the Metropolitan."

Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery in London, has suggested that the panel was painted by an assistant of Granacci's using Michelangelo's drawings, according to Fahy. There are striking analogies between some of Michelangelo's drawings and the painting, Fahy said. The two pharisees, for example, are reminiscent of Michelangelo's drawing Philosopher in the British Museum.

"Look at the standing figure of the Baptist in the painting," Fahy said, "with his right leg held forward, his right arm raised, and carrying his mantle over his left arm. There are analogies with two of Michelangelo's pen-and-ink drawings in the Louvre of full-frontal male nudes. In the literature on the drawings, one is repeatedly connected with the marble David at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. The other drawing shows a man with a mustache, bearing his weight on his left leg like the Baptist in the painting."

Fahy writes in his article that "the second panel also contains another unusual feature—the rustic buildings by the river in the middle ground, immediately to the left of the Baptist's pointing fingers, with their high-pitched roofs, have no equivalent in Italian architecture. Either they are based on some Netherlandish prototype, as Christian von Holst [a scholar on Granacci] has suggested, or they are a riff on Flemish painting, which was popular in Florence at the beginning of the 16th century. Michelangelo famously disparaged the 'painting of Flanders' in one of the conversations that a 16th century painter recorded when Michelangelo was painting the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel."

How did Fahy conclude that Michelangelo completed the painting in 1506, two years before starting on the Sistine frescoes? "Through observing his style in the Doni Tondo in the Uffizi," he said. "In the middle ground it shows nude male figures. They are sometimes called athletes. They are in the same poses of some of the figures on the far right of the Met's panel.

"The other thing that helped me to date it was Michelangelo's chronology. We know by a process of elimination that he was in Florence most of the year in 1506. The argument goes that he was in the right place at the right time. He had just finished a major work, the tomb of Julius II, in Rome, and was back in Florence. It coincides with the marriage of Giovanni di Lorenzo Tornabuoni, who was the logical patron for this picture—Giovanni, or John, as in John the Baptist. Giovanni and his wife, Caterina, were Michelangelo's best supporters. One of them had recommended him to carve the David. They were intimately involved with Michelangelo.

"He had time on his hands in Florence, and he was without a major job. Other times, he was stuck in Carrara or in Bologna doing the portrait of Julius II or in Rome working on the tomb of Julius. So he had this interval in Florence, and the style of the panel coincides with that period."

The Met now has on view a sculpture called Young Archer, which the museum attributes to Michelangelo. For decades, the figure of a boy wearing a quiver was in the lobby of the town house on Fifth Avenue that serves as the French embassy's culture-services department. Then, in 1996, a Renaissance scholar, Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, said she believed it was a lost sculpture by Michelangelo. The figure is now at the Met on a ten-year loan from the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. James Draper, Henry R. Kravis Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Met, is convinced that it is by Michelangelo. So is Fahy. Other scholars disagree.

Fahy said, "My article for the Italian journal was in the works before I left the Met. I hadn't thought about retiring until they started talking about laying off people. I realized that so many young, promising people would have to be laid off, and I felt it wasn't right for me—nearly 70 years old—to stay on. Retirement took me by surprise.

"I had to track down things in lots of catalogues. It involved a lot of detective work. It's a little bit of who you know, who can help you. For example, I found the only copy of the inventory of Ashburnham House in the National Gallery in London by talking to a colleague who made a photocopy. The same thing happened with a fellow I found working on archives in Pisa."

Why did it take so long to write the article? Fahy smiled, and then he laughed. "Well, I'm not a fast writer," he said.

Milton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews.

originally posted at: http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2932

By Martin Bailey | From issue 209, January 2010

Published online 30 Dec 09 (News)

An envelope depicted in a Van Gogh painting provides a clue that could help to explain why the artist slashed his ear. The envelope, in Still Life: Drawing Board with Onions, 1889, is addressed to Vincent from his brother Theo. Until now, no one has considered whether the artist was illustrating a specific letter.

The letter in the painting probably arrived in Arles on 23 December 1888, the fateful day when Vincent mutilated his ear in the late evening. It almost certainly contained news that Theo had fallen in love with Johanna (Jo) Bonger, and Vincent was fearful that he might lose his brother’s emotional and financial support.

In the still-life, the handwriting on the envelope is clearly Theo’s, and the letter is addressed to Vincent in Arles. Although the postmarks lack a legible date, one contains the number “67”, enclosed in a circle. This was used by the post office in Place des Abbesses, close to Theo’s Montmartre apartment.

The postmark directly over the two postage stamps reads “Jour de l’An” (New Year’s Day). This was spotted by Dutch specialists working on the new edition of Van Gogh’s letters, which was published in October. They concluded that the letter had been posted during “the busy period around New Year” and it had possibly arrived on 23 December, the date Vincent received his 100 francs financial allowance from Theo by post. The letter was probably posted the day before from Paris.

The established view is that Vincent did not learn of Theo’s engagement until after he mutilated his ear, but our research suggests that news of the love affair reached him on 23 December. Theo and Jo had met (for a second time, after a long break) in Paris in mid-December and decided to marry just a few days later. On 21 December Theo wrote to his mother, asking for permission. His brother must surely have been among the next to know.

It seems Vincent already knew of the impending engagement when Theo visited him in hospital on Christmas Day. In a recently published letter, Theo wrote to his fiancée about the brief hospital visit: “When I mentioned you to him he evidently knew who and what I meant and when I asked whether he approved of our plans, he said yes, but that marriage ought not to be regarded as the main object in life.”

On Christmas Day Vincent was suffering from a life-threatening wound and was in considerable mental distress, so it seems unlikely that Theo would have broken the news about his engagement. Although it was briefly discussed, this was presumably because Vincent had already known.

Still Life: Drawing Board with Onions was painted just a few days after Vincent returned to the Yellow House on 7 January 1889. News of the love affair could well have been a trigger for the self-mutilation, although there was probably no one simple explanation for the incident and there were also serious tensions with Gauguin. Vincent may have feared (wrongly) that he would lose the support of Theo. For years, Theo had provided money and friendship.

Vincent’s feelings must have been complex, and by January 1889 he may well have become reconciled to the engagement, following reassurances from his brother. The very fact that he included the envelope in the still-life suggests a message of hope.

Although it is speculation, the postmark on the envelope might represent a coded message that the strong links between the two brothers would survive. The Musée de La Poste in Paris told us that although “Jour de l’An” postmarks were widely used in the run-up to Christmas and New Year in the 1880s, most are fairly small marks, rather than the more prominent words inscribed by Van Gogh. This suggests that the personalised postmark may have been Vincent’s way of stressing to Theo that the letter depicted was a very particular one—and that he wished his brother well for the new year.

The painting, on loan from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, will form the centrepiece of “The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters”, opening at London’s Royal Academy on 23 January.

from: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Why-Van-Gogh-cut-his-ear-new-clue/19968