Philip Taaffe

(About art rather than language.)

Andrea K. Scott, “Critic’s Notebook: Imaging Systems”, in the May 20th New Yorker:

Remember beauty? For a refresher course, visit Philip Taaffe’s new show – a dozen kaleidoscopic big paintings and a wall of sixteen black prints – his first at the Luhring Augustine gallery, to which he decamped from the international supermarket chain that is Gagosian. Taaffe, fifty-eight, has spent years honing his unique approach, applying sourced imagery to canvas with stencils, rollers, and stamps. The results are pictorial conflations of organism and ornament that suggest the botanical studies of Karl Blossfeldt tiled at the Alhambra or Ernst Haeckel’s “Art Forms in Nature” inlaid at the Taj Mahal. Not every new canvas here thrills, but taking in the wheeling symmetries of “Illuminated Constellation” feels like chanting ecstatically with your eyeballs. Taaffe’s paintings are analogue all the way, but his fascination with layers, his nonhierarchical spirit – he’s as influenced ny the biomorphic patterns of sea kelp as he is by Mark Rothko’s Surrealism – and his restless circulation of images should make him a hero to the digitally minded young artists of the twenty-first century.

Paul Sietsema

(About art rather than language.)

In the mail recently, a flyer for an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State, featuring work by Paul Sietsema. In particular, this fascinating reflection on painting (in several senses):

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Sietsema was new to me, but he bears looking into.

More cattions: Reh, Bjorn, Sekigushi

On AZBlogX: a piece on male photographer Michael Reh (not actually X-rated) and another set of cattions (male art + a cat + a caption), this time based on the male photography of Reh and of Kristen Bjorn (totally X-rated) and on the homoerotic (but not actually X-rated) drawings of Kino Sekigushi.

As in the two earlier collections, the cattions are variously poetic, funny, slyly queer, and vulgar, often several at once.

 

Pin-up boys

(On gender and sexuality.)

From Franzo Law via Facebook, a pointer to this wonderful Men-Ups! site by Rion Sabean, offering

A restructuring of the ways in which males are presented in popular media, applying traditional pinup poses that are reserved for the female form, while still presenting the models in ‘masculine’ clothing [and engaged in stereotypically masculine activities].

One example:

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A skateboarder, his chest pushed out in front (as if displaying breasts), his butt pushed out in back (another sexual display), lips slightly pursued in a moué, and a saucy expression on his face.

The protean Colby Keller

(About “mail art” and gay porn and playfulness.)

From Will Parsons on Google+ a little while back, a link to Colby Keller’s blog, with the comment:

+Arnold Zwicky, your art has a name!

The blog entry is about “mail art”; Will’s allusion is to my collages and my captioning of images from gay porn and male photography (which I then mail to friends, and sometimes post on one or another of my blogs).

Legitimacy of comics

Today’s Zippy:

Griffy and Mr. (the) Toad in a meta-comic, about comics. On the growing elevation of comics to the status of an art form — as has happened many times before with other pop cultural genres (like movies and jazz).

 

Zao Wou-Ki

(About art, and my life, rather than language.)

In the NYT national edition today (but apparently printed first on the 11th), an obit (by Paul Vitello) for painter Zao Wou-Ki, “Zao Wou-ki, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92″:

Zao Wou-ki, a Chinese émigré who merged Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions in his abstract paintings — helping to shape avant-garde art in postwar Europe and attracting a newly wealthy Asian following that made him one of the most commercially successful living artists in either hemisphere — died on April 9 in Nyon, Switzerland.

… Mr. Zao’s paintings, which are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern, among others, have sold at auction in recent years for between $1 million and $2 million each. Since 2011, when sales of his paintings totaled $90 million, art journals and art dealers have frequently referred to him as the top-selling living Chinese artist.

Finding his own identity in that label — as a Chinese artist — was the crucible of Mr. Zao’s artistic vision.

Leaving China just ahead of the Communist takeover, Mr. Zao settled in 1948 in Paris, where his first sustained exposure to Western Modernist painting left him feeling ambivalent about the classical forms of landscape and calligraphic ink painting in which he had been trained. He loved the work of the Impressionists and Expressionists, and of contemporary artists like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

But through nonobjective Western painting, especially the work of Paul Klee, who was influenced by traditional Chinese and Japanese art, Mr. Zao gained new insights into what the British art historian Michael Sullivan called “the Abstract Expressionist element in his own tradition.”

Putting aside the issue of money in the art market (now a feature of virtually all artists’ obits), there’s the remarkable blending of Chinese and European Modernist artististic traditions in Zao’s work (the Times renders his name with family name first, Chinese-style). And a story from my life.

The adventures of AZ

From Stan Carey, this entertaining book cover:

This appears on the Lousy Book Covers site, the motto of which is

Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

But Stan was attracted to it because of the hero’s name.

Cubism

(About art rather than language.)

From the NYT on 4/10/13 (and on pretty much every other news outlet), a report of a spectacular gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: “A Billion-Dollar Gift Gives the Met a New Perspective (Cubist)” by Carol Vogel:

In one of the most significant gifts in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder has promised the institution his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures.

The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. It puts Mr. Lauder, who for years has been one of the city’s most influential art patrons, in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C. Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.

(Money figures prominently in these reports. The art market is extraordinarily strange.)

Man Ray

(About art rather than language.)

A set of notecards from Pomegranate Press I’ve been sending to friends has images of Man Ray gelatin silver prints from the 1920s. Fascinating stuff. Two samples. First, the famous Le Violon d’Ingres (1925) –

and then Noire et blanche of 1926, with Kiki de Montparnasse (as above) with an African artifact  –