Fruits of Fancy

New artist alert: well, actually not so new — hails from the 16th Century, in fact — but you’d be hard-pressed to guess that.

I delved into the background of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (born in 1526 or 1527 in Milan), an Italian iconoclast whose legacy is still surprisingly vibrant and creative, after running across an installation by American artist Philip Haas that’s on display at the New York Botanical Garden throughout this summer. Haas’ 15-feet-tall fiberglass creations are inspired by Arcimboldo’s portraits of the Four Seasons, with faces constructed of such items of nature as fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

What’s neat about Arcimboldo is that the jury is still out on whether his paintings were either products of a quirky sensibility or the fruits (excuse the pun) of a deranged mind. Many consider him to be a Methuselah-like forerunner of what’s now known as Surrealism, which makes his output, that coincides with the strict classicism of the High Renaissance (he’s labeled a Mannerist), seem even more cutting edge for the time.

Case in point, and a piece I find delightful, is his Reversible Head with a Basket of Fruit, from 1590. What looks like a pretty punnet arrangement at first glance, top, becomes a clever portrait of a human face, right, when turned upside down. With apples for cheeks, and whimsically ringed with grapes and leaves as curls and beard, it brings artistic meaning to the term “organically produced.”

Throughout his years at the court of the Hapsburgs, Arcimboldo didn’t shy away from mocking the monarchs to whom he owed his employ. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II shows up as the ancient god of growth and the seasons, Vertumnus, and his subtle critiques of the upper class underlie such works as The Librarian.

It took such artists as Salvador Dalí and the wave of Surrealism that swept contemporary art in the early part of the last century to revive interest in Arcimboldo’s one-of-a-kind imagination. (In another surrealistic twist of his influence on popular culture, his allegorical painting, Water, was the cover of an album by the rock band, Kansas.)

Whether madman or genius, old Arcimboldo definitely met one criteria for what can be considered art in any form: providing a new way to see.

That Loneliness Thing

Study for “Nighthawks” (1941 or 1942)

It’s not just any diner, of course. The coffee shop depicted in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks is the most celebrated in American art history, and a new exhibit at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Hopper Drawing, explores the creative process of an artist whose singular style made an indelible impression across a broad spectrum of the visual arts.

Nighthawks – which draws crowds as enthusiastic as any for the Mona Lisa at the Louvre when it’s on tour – exhorts the viewer to devise a multitude of potential backstories for the tableau of characters set amidst its moody isolation. Where the luncheonette was actually located has long been an intriguing question, but the general agreement now is that it was probably a synthesis of the real and imagined. It’s ironic that one of the great beauties of the painting, and so many other Hopper pieces — their exquisite sense of melancholy – was downplayed by the artist himself: “The loneliness thing is overdone,” he once said.

I’ll disagree.  The “loneliness thing” is exactly what draws one inside the world of Hopper, where his “Nighthawks” inhabit only a small corner. Those citizens of the night are pretty hard to forget, but so are the metaphoric shadows that presage the dark in such works as Early Sunday Morning and Morning in a City.

Hopper Drawing includes over 2,500 pieces donated by his widow, Josephine, to the Whitney, many never before seen by the public, and as seen in the sketch for Nighthawks seen at top, provide a fascinating window into the genesis of some of the most evocative works to be found in the modern American art landscape. (The exhibition runs through October 6.)

A corner of the night: “Nighthawks” (1942)

Green Lights

Of all that’s been written about the latest film adaptation of one of the most iconic works in American literature, this much is true: it is inherently faithful to the spirit of the novel — or, as the headline for critic David Edelstein’s review in New York magazine put it, “The Colossal Vitality of His Illusion.” And that’s no small thing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is all about illusion, and though I approached director Baz Luhrmann‘s depiction of the piece I most cherish in American fiction with trepidation, it is that very faithfulness that won me over. At its heart, the film very much captures those elements so integral to the novel’s lasting hold on generations, and which keeps this sometimes over-the-top interpretation by the maker of Moulin Rouge! from being a sort of hip-hop Gatsby Bergère. (Movie trailer to the contrary.)

Gatsby’s “green light” at the end of the pier has never become a hackneyed concept to me. The poignancy of this enigmatic character, who so doggedly places all his hopes and dreams in someone intrinsically unworthy of the purity of his inspiration, has always had tremendous resonance. Far beyond its significance as a paragonic parable of American culture in the 1920s, and its timeless truths about the callousness of the rich, Gatsby is at its core about one man’s mythical invention, which, though folly, reflects a touching dignity that stands as a testament to the tenacity of the soul.

The beauty of Fitzgerald’s writing carries a luminescence that hovers over any reading (and I think I’ve read it at least half a dozen times). In an article that appeared in the same issue of New York as the Edelstein movie review, writer Kathryn Schulz debunks the novel from a literary perspective with particular relish, yet nevertheless describes Gatsby as “a single crystal, scrupulously polished.”

She also alludes to an interesting aspect that struck me as I watched the film, which has to do with the pronounced lack of romantic chemistry between the actors at the center of the story — Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in this case, for those who’ve been hiding in a cave — and which I intellectualized as being perhaps not an important thing, because in the end, the character of Daisy Buchanan is no more than a blank canvas upon which Gatsby alone sketches his solitary and imperturbable imprint.

As it turns out, Schulz writes that Fitzgerald himself had once admitted that he “gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.” It really was all about the green light, bigger in mind and memory than any of the more pedestrian aspects of love and desire.

Call me idealistic (or sentimental), but I’m always moved by those lines at the conclusion of the book about how “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther,” before it ends with what I think is the most perfect closing in American literature. (Something about boats and currents…)

Gatsby believed in that green light. And he wasn’t the only one.

So, Who’s the Artist?

In the art-as-gimmick department, this item is perhaps more interesting for the questions it elicits than how the so-called artwork is actually generated.

Tarinan von Anhalt practices what is called “jet art,” flinging paint into the vortex of hurricane-force winds generated by the engines of airplanes, splattering onto blank canvasses that are eventually worth thousands a pop. An idea invented by her late husband, Jurgen, on a tarmac in Dallas in the 1980s, his wife later expanded the medium to include fashion accessories. Earlier this month, she showed off the technique as part of an event in Florida, above, marking the 50th anniversary of the Learjet. (Later this year, she’ll be interacting with the famous Boeing 707 that belongs to actor John Travolta.)

An article in the Palm Beach Post posed the conundrum of just who the creator really is here: “If art is the expression of the artist,” wrote Carlos Frias,” then whose emotion is landing in [the] purple and blue and yellow and red splashes and speckles?”

Good question. Who gets the credit for these colorful (and not especially terrible) examples of faux expressionism? Is it the facilitator (von Anhalt)? The machine (i.e., the jet)? Or even the pilot (who sets things into motion in the first place)?

All of the above, combined in the combustion of a moment. Art or not? That’s debatable.

(Photo: Thomas Cordy / The Palm Beach Post)

The Art in Aisle One

“Contemplating Prospect”

Finding art in the mundane is a theme I always return to, and a series of paintings with the evocative title, Cathedrals of Desire,” epitomizes how a unique sensibility can elevate the everyday to a transcendent level.

The “cathedrals” in question are those high altars of American consumerism, the Targets and Walmarts and the like that litter shopping malls across the retail terrain like giant repositories of instant gratification. Artist Michelle Muldrow was inspired by a treatise by the philosopher Edmund Burke that equated the sublime with aspects of terror: “My paintings of big box stores are intended to elicit fear and awe at the vast American consumer landscape,” she writes in a statement about the series. “These environments represent not only the actual structural space and overwhelming chaos of goods, but also the psychology and vernacular of American consumerism.”

I was taken with how Muldrow uses splashes of color and light to capture the underlying clamor inside these mammoth structures that “reveal the most naked of American consumer desires,” according to the artist. The unfocused images ironically convey an immediate familiarity, a testament to how deeply ingrained these contours are in the corners of our minds. If the paintings are intended to create uneasiness, they also result in a curious mix of both dread and recognition.

Something to think about the next time I step into that Home Depot…

Scrabbled State of Mind

I’m nowhere near app crazy, but I don’t know what I would do without Scrabble on my iPad. Like so many other aficionados, I have my own biases that apply to the game — adored vowels and unloved consonants, of course — as well as a kind of amazement at the incongruities that I often run across in this world of wordplay I admit consumes way too much of my time.

Since I use solo Scrabble as a way to relax, not to stress out, my opponent on the Pad is always NORM (as in “normal”), as a few encounters with his older, more artificially intelligent brother, HARD (as in “self-explanatory”), left me frazzled. (Youngest sibling, EASY, plays with the kiddies.) There are some advantages in competing against NORM: he doesn’t place seven-letter words, along with their 50-point bonuses, for example. (Fine with me!)

Lately, I’ve taken to jotting down some of those weird words that NORM often generates, so I can look up their definitions later. I don’t consider myself a slouch in the vocabulary department, but expressions like “dhow,” “mulct” and “foveae” can be stumpers. As both a lover of art and a language buff (though curiously never a big fan of crossword puzzles), I find these new discoveries little creations in themselves.

Casting Shadows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two pieces with surreal overtones from the exhibit Shadow and Light, a retrospective of the work of photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983), at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Considered one of the great masters of black-and-white photography (the “pre-eminent British photographer of the 20th Century,” according to the New York Times), his dark and moody images of wartime England were recently (and astutely) described by the writer Ariella Budick as “lyrical grime.” In later years, Brandt liked to focus on the eyes of artistic notables, such as painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, above left, in a photograph from 1960. (Seaford, East Sussex Coast, from 1957, is shown right). The exhibition traces the evolution of a multifaceted photographic legacy, and is on view through August 12.

Harmonic Convergence

I became aware of the British violinist Daniel Hope from his playing on the wonderful reworking of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons on the album Recomposed by Max Richter (Richter makes a cameo appearance here), released by Deutsche Grammophon a few months ago. Spheres is a project conceived by Hope as a 21st-Century exploration of musica universalis, the idea that the motion of celestial bodies is in itself a form of “music.” (One can’t help but think of Gustav Holst’s symphonic suite, The Planets.)

In his teens, Hope was introduced to the famed astronomer Carl Sagan by the violin maestro Yehudi Menuhin, a meeting that the young musician says opened his mind to the enormities of the universe and to the notion of “music of the spheres.”

“It started with Pythagoras and extended to some of those extraordinary German thinkers, such as Johannes Kepler, who were convinced that music was created when planets move or collide, and that music had a mathematical foundation, a kind of astronomical harmony,” he comments in an interview with Deutsche Grammophon.

The selections on Spheres (which could have benefited from a more creative cover design) feature an eclectic mix of composers, ranging from Bach and Fauré to Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt, as well as several young artists, including Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of the great Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev), and the refreshing inclusion of two female composers, Lera Auerbach and Elena Kats-Chernin.

Hope’s vision of this melodic brush with outer space has its hits and misses.“Imitazione delle Campane,” from a violin sonata by the baroque composer (and underrated Bach contemporary) Johann Paul von Westhoff, sets a sublime tone, with a piece one finds hard to believe was written more than three centuries ago. It resonates with a timelessness that’s perfect for the conceptual layout of the recording.

Arvo Pärt’s complex and challenging Fratres, for violin, strings, and percussion, is by far the most interesting of the offerings, as well as serving as an impressive showcase for Hope’s talents. And Gabriel Prokofiev shows compelling flashes from a string quartet or two by his grandfather, in a world premiere that provides the title of the album.

Spheres also includes some prosaic New Age-sounding pieces by Ludovico Einaudi and Michael Nyman, but closes, nicely, with the enigmatic “Nachspiel” by Karsten Gundermann, from his Faust – Episode 2, a world debut as well.

Though perhaps a bit uneven in its modernistic interpretation of the so-called sounds of the universe, Spheres provides worthwhile exposure to several younger composers as they pursue their own musical odysseys.

“So, is there anything out there?” the violinist asks in the liner notes. After listening to the otherworldly Spheres, most will probably agree with his answer: “I like to think so…”

[First published as Music Review: Daniel Hope - Spheres 
on Blogcritics.org.]

“JT” Times Two

So I really like Justin Timberlake’s new record, The 20/20 Experience. And as I listened during a daily trudge on the treadmill, I thought about the “JT” of my generation, James Taylor, above, and the marvelous way music has of providing its own circle game through the years. The first JT remains a dependable comfort zone for me, and has been since I first heard his iconic album, Sweet Baby James. For a preteen with melancholic tendencies, “Fire and Rain” was something of an anthem, along with a favorite chill song, “Carolina in My Mind” (where I still go when things get prickly). The sounds of this generation’s JT, as rendered on 20/20, are a smooth confection of ear candy — even one of the songs is called “Strawberry Bubblegum”— but also kind of perfect for the era, much in the way the introspective Baby James was in its time. (Timberlake, below, harkens back even further to a bygone period, with the Big-Bandish mood and feel of the chart-topping single “Suit & Tie.”) A new pop comfort zone is created, with two “JTs” now at the head of the class.

Silver Linings

Andy Warhol’s pillow-like Silver Clouds (shown in motion here), float dreamily amidst the Clouds: Fleeting Worlds exhibit that opened last week at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. The whimsical helium-filled balloons, adapted from a Warhol installation first created in 1966, are accompanied by an array of cloud renditions throughout history, by artists ranging from William Turner to Rene Magritte, whose surrealistic Summer (1932) is seen below. The exhibition runs through July in the Austrian capital.

Inner Visions

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, now out in paperback, isn’t a particularly soulful exploration of the inner mindsets of the more introspective among us — who happen to comprise at least a third of the human population — but its scientific and empirically based analysis provides a surplus of information that lends insight into the importance and impact of the introverted personality in a variety of practical settings.

With the premise that the introverted disposition faces distinctive challenges in the “Culture of Personality” which pervades our world, the author (herself on the shy side of the spectrum) lays out a series of scenarios that provide invaluable understanding of the rewards that are reaped from tapping the unique thinking processes of introverts, especially in the workplace.

The introversion/extroversion model can be summed up by a concept put forth by the eminent psychologist and analyst Carl Jung in the 1920s, which believes that introverts derive their energy from solitude, while extroverts need their batteries constantly “charged” by social stimuli. (In other words, the introvert is the first to leave the party, while the extrovert has to be dragged away.) To quote Jung, from his essential Modern Man in Search of a Soul, “One cannot be introverted or extroverted without being so in every respect.” (“Ambiverts” may disagree.)

Quiet, however, under-elaborates on the Jung theories and psychological perspectives in general; Sigmund Freud merits only one mention. Even the venerable Myers-Briggs test, so familiar to many in its gauging of introverted/extroverted traits, and based on the Jung blueprint, is also glossed over. (A makeshift quiz to assess your personality type does appear in the introduction to the book.)

The Gould Variations

Those familiar with the life and work of piano virtuoso Glenn Gould would probably not be surprised that his passion for innovation continues to resonate decades after his death in 1982 at the untimely age of 50.

The career of the Canadian pianist, who would have turned 80 last year, is one of the most storied in the annals of 20th-Century classical music. After shooting to superstardom with his landmark recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” in 1955, Gould soon developed a reputation for both brilliance and eccentricity (after conducting him in 1957, George Szell said, “that nut’s a genius”). Among his idiosyncrasies were an abhorrence of cold – he was often seen wearing heavy coats and gloves in one form or another — and the distinctive chair, fashioned for him as a child, that traveled with him to all his performances. (His life was memorably recreated in 1993’s award-winning Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.)

At heart, though, Gould harbored a deep dislike of public presentations. He kiddingly called his credo GPAADAK (the “Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds”). Little wonder that by the mid-1960s, he abandoned performing altogether.

Instead, he focused his attention on the studio and a “love affair with the microphone” – and, in the case of the recently released Glenn Gould – The Acoustic Orchestrations, in bringing fresh perspectives to old works. The recordings, originally issued by CBS records in the 1980s, have been fully re-enhanced here with a technique that long intrigued him, consisting of a sort of microphone “choreography,” which in cinematic parlance would be the equivalent of wide-angle and close-up “shots” of the music.

The multiple-microphone method, which positioned sets of microphones not only inside, but at varying distances from the piano, combined with the multitrack recording technology that came of age in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, allowed the artist to choose what thematic and structural elements to emphasize in the works, creating a language of spatial effects equivalent to the color palette of a painter.

Out of the Box

Intelligent advertising may seem like an oxymoron these days, but a remarkable print campaign from a long time ago still impresses with its creative uniqueness as well as longevity.

With the unlikely sponsor of Container Corporation of America, which was clearly thinking outside the box (couldn’t resist), the series, called “Great Ideas of Western Man” ran over a period of almost three decades (1950-1975) and matched artwork from a number of illustrators and designers with thought-provoking quotes from an array of philosophers, writers, scientists, and other cultural icons. The goal, apart from the simply inspirational aspects, was to introduce the American public to the work of artists — such as Milton Glaser, top, and Saul Bass, below — with which it would otherwise have remained unfamiliar.

Ahead of their time in not underestimating the discernment of consumers, the ads are considered a watershed moment in marketing history, as they bore no corporate message beyond the inconspicuously placed CCA name in small type at the bottom.

It was a rare and enlightening blend of commerce and art that would be refreshing to see more of now…

Mirror Image

Italian photographer Fausto Podavini was awarded first prize in the “Daily Life – Stories” category at the 2013 World Press Photo Contest last week, for his deeply moving portraits from a series called “Mirella,” a wife’s quiet and determined journey as caregiver for a husband suffering from Alzheimer’s. The photos, including the reflective (in more ways than one) and compositionally striking entry shown above, taken in 2010, capture stark moments from
a poignant end-of-life experience.

Straight from the Heart

It is not only necessary to love,
it is necessary to say so.
— French proverb

There’s no better day to wallow in the agelessness of romantic emotion, perhaps no more wonderfully expressed than by some of the most exalted figures in world literature. I remembered a small treasure of a book (still in print) called Love Letters – An Anthology of Passion, which celebrates what’s now lamentably a lost art, with its colorful detailing of the amorous correspondence between an assortment of famous writers, artists (and other lesser-known personages) — complete with reproductions of the original letters, inserted into envelopes, seals and all. Just a handful of excerpts:

You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.-– Poet John Keats to Fanny Brawne, October 1819

Believe me, nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings.-– Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to his fiancée, Valeria Arsenev, November 1856

You have lifted my very soul up into the light of your soul, and I am not ever likely to mistake it for the common daylight.-– Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, August 1846

Places that are empty of you…are empty of all life…-– Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris, February 1870

Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.-– French writer Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, August 1846

Lofty sentiments for sure, but I’ll stray a bit from the literary luminaries and end with an entry that’s short and to the point, and charming in its simplicity. It’s a note, circa 1840, from one Prince de Joinville, a French adventurer, to an actress, Rachel Felix, on seeing her for the first time:

Where? When? How much?
Her reply:
Your place. Tonight. Free.

Fluid Blueprints

Gehry’s “Fish Lamps” at LA’s Gagosian Gallery

It’s fitting that a legend renowned for his brand of “liquid architecture” would turn out to have a not-so-secret passion for…fish.

Fish Lamps, left, on view at the Gagosian Galleries in Los Angeles and Paris, are the latest aquatically inspired creations from famed architect Frank Gehry, who’s been called the “most important architect of our time,” as designer of such landmarks as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The lamps, made out of plastic laminate, are ironic for the warmth they impart, not a quality usually associated with the subject matter.

Detail of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

What’s fascinating is how Gehry has fused this penchant for the creatures in one way or another in works throughout his career. From the fluid undulations of the Guggenheim Bilbao, to Standing Glass Fish, which graces the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, it’s a motif that has long permeated his projects.

“Standing Glass Fish” at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

The affinity was born of a childhood time when his grandmother would leave the live carp she bought at market in a bathtub, where they would swim until ready for preparation as gefilte fish for the family meals. An indelible impression was born, interesting not only from a creative standpoint, but psychologically as well. Gehry says that fish became “like a symbol for a certain kind of perfection that I couldn’t achieve with my buildings.” It highlights how the artistic mind works in its own unfathomable ways, understandable only within the context of the sensibility and experiences of the creator.

Fish Lamps (created last year) are a return to what Gehry calls that “perfect form,” a continuation of an idea begun as a commission for the Formica Corp. in 1984. Their shimmering iridescence shines new light on an artist’s lifelong and lovely obsession with the shapes and patterns of the denizens of the deep.

Collective Creation

A phantasmagoric flock of starlings creates its own kind of Rorschach test in the sky — and a bit of art, too — in an image taken on January 24, 2013 over the southern Israeli city of Netivot. (Video of the event here.) This spellbinding natural phenomenon turns out to have a quite beautiful name, “murmuration,” which refers to the uniquely collective behavior exhibited by starlings. Likened to metals becoming magnetized, murmurations and their patterns have both baffled and dazzled naturalists throughout time. A couple of theories posit that these spontaneous aggregations are a result of socializing instincts amongst the species, as well as the possibility of safety in magnitude, as the birds scare off potential predators due to their sheer numbers. Regardless of the scientific explanations, the overall impression is one of a fluid aerial canvas, a sublime reminder that the power of nature can be as deeply affecting as any work of art…

 (Photo: Amir Cohen / Reuters)