Eyes of a Master

I was riveted by this rarely seen Rembrandt painting, Portrait of the Artist (c.1663-1665), which was on special loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Kenwood House in London through the end of last week. It harbors an expression as enigmatic and difficult to characterize as that of the Mona Lisa smile: weary yet intense, elusive and omniscient. And what of the circles that seem to frame the image in a cryptic geometric pattern? More mystery from the grand master of the Dutch Golden Age…or as The New Yorker put it: “We see what he sees and, by the sorcery of paint, as he sees — with a consciousness both outward and inward, alive in a moment forever.”

Small World

In keeping with the street art/strange art theme I’ve been drawn to lately, I came across an English artist with the aka of Slinkachu, whose work kind of overlaps that of another British artist I previously wrote about, Ben Wilson, in its idiosyncrasy. Slinkachu (actually a blog title, as the former art director doesn’t like to reveal his real name) modifies tiny human figures taken from model-train sets and places many of them in unexpected settings, and, as with Wilson, turns your notions of the most mundane realities upside down.

Easily overlooked (and designed that way), the transient tableaus are usually destroyed by the elements (or unknowingly stomped upon), though some are absconded with by passersby…if they see them, that is. (Photographed close up, the miniaturist “installations” look like worlds unto themselves; viewed from afar, they’re as insignificant as ants on a molehill. Most of the figures are no larger than two inches.)  Imagination is definitely on display in the pieces shown here, of which I find difficult to pick a favorite. The island made out of an abandoned tennis ball? The skateboarder inside an orange peel? Rowing in spilt milk?

Unconventionally creative, Slinkachu’s mini-portrayals have dotted the landscapes of several cities in Europe, and harbor an almost existentialist sentiment, according to the artist. “The feeling of being ignored and overlooked, of feeling small, is a universal one,” he told the UK’s Observer last year. “It is as easy for us to fall through cracks in the pavement in a big city as it is for the ‘little people’.”

For now, photographs of the now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t creations appear in an exhibition titled Material Matters at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London through July of next year.

Puzzle Me This

A man strides atop a giant jigsaw of a self-portrait of artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), spread out in an area measuring over 3,000 square feet, in Nuremberg, Germany, 5/3/12. (For the record, the full title of the original painting is Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar…whew!) The huge creation, composed of 1,023 (oversized) pieces, will be reassembled in Moscow’s Red Square next month, in recognition of the historic relationship between Russia and Germany. It’s not the first undertaking of its kind in the painter’s birthplace of Nuremberg: a similarly massive project that recreated Dürer’s Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman
was constructed in 2005.

(Photo: Timm Schamberger / AP)

A Drop of Art

Finding art in the unobvious always intrigues me, and photographer Red Huber of the Orlando Sentinel did just that when he mixed a little imagination with creative photo techniques to come up with some surprisingly lovely, almost lyrical, images of drops of water as they strike the surface in a pan of water. Adding sprinkles of food coloring to his palette completed the artistic effect.

The technical details: “I used various types of lighting equipment…and timed the shutter release for the exact moment of the ‘splash’,” says Huber. “Some photographers have used automated shutter releases that use laser-beam triggers, but I wanted the challenge and the certain level of skill required to capture the action manually.”

The end result is reminiscent of fluid sculpture, quite beautiful in its aqueous disarray.

March On

Program cover for the landmark suffrage parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.,1913

With its designation as Women’s History Month, March is awash in celebration of women’s innumerable contributions to society. Today marks International Women’s Day, an observance that saw its inception in the early 1900s and which is now an official holiday in many countries, with over 1,000 events scheduled to take place in some form or another around the world.

In Washington, D.C., plans are currently underway for a physical location for the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM), presently online in cyberspace, waiting for a legislative march through Congress to provide the site with a permanent venue in the nation’s capital.

A high-profile supporter should help in making that a reality. Freshly re-minted Oscar-winner Meryl Streep, left, who’s already donated $1 million to the project – as well as her salary from The Iron Lady – is something of the fairy godmother for a dream that is close to her heart. “There are museums in Washington, D.C. for everything from postage stamps to poetry to spies,” Streep ironically notes, while also stating that the project is vitally important “because our history was written by the other team.“ The facility would be located on the Washington Mall, alongside the National Air & Space Museum and the Grant Memorial, with plans for a design by a female architect, making it the first repository on the Mall to be fashioned by a woman. It’s expected to be funded with private donations.

Already in place and marking 25 years since its opening in D.C. in 1987 is the National Museum of Women in the Arts, an assemblage of women’s creative legacies through the centuries. Among the artists in the collection, Georgia O’Keeffe, below, who summed up the frustrations of many pioneers when she mused in 1923:

“One day seven years ago, I found myself saying to myself: I can’t live where I want to, I can’t go where I want to go, I can’t do what I want to, I can’t even say what I want to … I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”

It’s that very same spirit that we celebrate today.

Chasing Pavements

It takes some kind of imagination to view a discarded piece of chewing gum as a potential canvas. I love the story of British “outsider” artist Ben Wilson, because it contains myriad elements of creativity in its paradoxical melding of art and a medium that would definitely be considered something less so. For the last few years, Wilson has occupied the streets of north London, primarily in the area of his neighborhood of Muswell Hill, hunched over pavements, painstakingly crafting mini flights of fancy (over 10,000 at last count) out of tossed-off litter. The detail he achieves on the squashed globs of gum, brought to life on the cement, below, is pretty remarkable, leaving a colorfully dotted landscape amidst the dreary sidewalks of the English capital (and other parts of the UK and Europe). Wilson’s work may add meaning to the adage, “one man’s garbage is another man’s art,” but more importantly, it brings beauty to blight, and offers yet a new way to see.

Ben Wilson, plying his craft on the streets of London

Out of Focus

New Year’s Day # 5074

In one of several similarly themed images taken in the early 2000s, New York City-based photographer Bill Jacobson captures some of the moodiness and uncertainty that often accompanies the start of a new year.

The Radiance Below

Something I saw in a recent issue of Smithsonian magazine led me to vicariously visit a world of darkness many, many leagues under the sea, a place where organisms subsist by way of a reactive chemical process that allows them to navigate their way through existence in the blackest of environments.

Bioluminescence, as it’s known, results in various forms of marine life emitting light, often glowing in colorful, beautiful patterns, as a means of adapting to the harsh circumstances of survival without benefit of the sun.

A real-life ctenophore (comb jelly), in full glory

Artist Shih Chieh Huang, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, was clearly captivated by the concept of bioluminescence, and his inspiration is displayed in The Bright Beneath, left, an exhibition currently on view at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Working closely with museum scientists, and with access to a collection of millions of specimens for research, Huang created a mix of lights, computer parts, plastic tubes, and other assorted items, that are an artistic interpretation of what it might be like to encounter these complex ocean creatures, suspended amidst the dimmed lights of the gallery space.

Of course, the really spectacular light show takes place in a world far removed from that of museums (brief clip here). But projects like Huang’s remind again of the creative bond shared by the spheres of art and science. (The Bright Beneath is at the Museum of Natural History through January 8.)

The Hidden Life of a Nanny

The story of a heretofore unknown photographer, much of which remains a mystery, will eventually be folklore, not only because her talent remained in the shadows until after her death at age 83 – but for the unlikely fashion in which her work came to see the light.

In a twist on one of those masterpiece-found-in-the-attic tales, a Chicago real-estate agent named John Maloof came across a box of negatives at an auction in 2007. Hoping they were historic photos of his Portage Park neighborhood, he paid $400 and stored the 30,000 negatives away for later review. When he took a look, what he saw, though not what he expected, was captivating – prompting him to hunt down what turned out to be another 70,000 pictures. When he posted some of the images on Flikr, his instinct regarding the greatness of the pieces was confirmed; hundreds of e-mails followed.

The creator of those photos, Vivian Maier, had died shortly before Maloof could contact her after his big find. (It wasn’t until 2009 that he discovered her name, scribbled on an envelope buried in one of the batches of film.) It turned out she had been a nanny for several affluent families in the Chicago area throughout the ’50s to the early ’90s, toting her Rolleiflex on assorted trips and outings, quietly capturing just some of the images now featured in the book Vivian Maier: Street Photographer  — released this month and compiled by Maloof after the incredible acclaim that followed their widespread dissemination on the Internet, along with subsequent exhibitions in Norway, Denmark, and England.

In approaching Maier’s work, one is struck by the naturalistic similarities to the craft of the Depression-era photographer, Walker Evans: the second-in-time spontaneity, the cut-to-the-heart facial expressions, the prosaicness of the everyday street scene taken to a sublime level. Maier photographed people from all walks of life, young and old, black and white, rich and downtrodden. Like all great street photographers, she understood that moments matter. And the expansiveness of what would now be called her portfolio shows that her curiosity about what lay behind those moments never wavered.

Her pictures are not titled and can just be described by their subjects – faces, places, and instants that only an outstanding eye could grasp: the simple sidewalk scene of a group of women shot from the waist down, with a pair of rotund legs unexpectedly revealed by a sudden burst of wind; a quizzical glance by a bystander at a man inexplicably attired in a hat, jacket, and boxer shorts; an aging, wealthy doyenne in mink, her haughty look implying impatience with the camera.

There’s irony in the fact that Maier’s newfound reputation owes itself to the networking of the digital age. Described as a highly private woman, she never made a point of sharing her secret passion with anyone, and were it not for Maloof’s accidental discovery, and her photography subsequently going viral, the treasure trove would sadly have remained undetected – and unlauded. As it is, the Maier archives are a unique contribution to the annals of American photography.

[First published as Book Review: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer,
Edited by John Maloof, on Blogcritics.org.]

That Smile

La Gioconda‘s enigmatic charm continues to captivate, as a spectator gazes at the back of a photograph of the Mona Lisa, part of the traveling exhibition Da Vinci — The Genius, on display at the Artillery Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, October 5, 2011. Scientific engineer and photographer, Pascal Cotte, was granted special access by the French government and the Louvre Museum to conduct an extensive review of the masterwork for the “Secrets of Mona Lisa” segment of the exhibit. Removing her from the frame and protective glass enclosure, Cotte’s photographic examination, using infrared light and other digital techniques, resulted in a number of new discoveries, including identifying her original pigment colors, confirming that she did indeed have eyebrows and eyelashes — and that a left finger was not completely finished. About that fabled expression, according to Cotte: “The smile is more accentuated, I would say.”

(Photo: Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters)

Something Like the Sun

It’s an ambitious — and somewhat risky — undertaking to try to capture the center of our solar system with bare eyes, but one photographer, Elijah Gowin, did just that in his supernal series Into the Sun. Comprised of several images shot straight at the brightest of stars, the pictures are a collection both dreamy and impressionistic, sort of like Monet via a camera: lens flare and distortion contribute to the artistic — as only nature can be — end result. One critic wrote that Gowin’s work “confronts the impenetrability of the world and the challenge of representing it.” Flirting with blindness, he finds new ways of seeing the light. (The exhibition, online here, is at New York City’s Robert Mann Gallery through October 22.)

Art of the Sell

There’s been a bit of buzz about the MAC cosmetic line’s announcement of the face (or faces, actually) for its latest advertising campaign, that of the edgy and iconoclastic self-portrait photographer Cindy Sherman (right). Set to launch at the end of this month, some are lauding the collaboration as a perfect fit, others lament it’s a sell-out by a serious and highly regarded conceptual artist.

It wouldn’t be the first case. Sherman joins a line of noted predecessors whose talents traversed the crass landscape of merchandising. One was Norman Rockwell, who had a long history of creating art for advertising, spanning from 1914 to 1976. A must-see and creatively outrageous example from the 1960s is the Salvador Dali commercial for Alka-Seltzer (video left), a strangely disturbing concoction that ends with the Surrealist genius’s voice-over: “Alka-Seltzer is a work of art. Truly one of a kind. Like…Dali!” In the ’80s, Absolut Vodka featured a memorable series consisting of bottles painted by such cutting-edgers of the art realm as Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha, and Keith Haring, below.

A surprise for me was learning that even that goddess of artistic purity, Georgia O’Keeffe, had a brief foray in pedestrian commercialism. In the ‘40s, she spent some time in Hawaii as part of a commission for Dole’s “Hawaiian Pineapple” brand; O’Keeffe being O’Keeffe, she produced a papaya instead. (A problem, as papayas were the purview of Dole’s prime competition.) It all worked out in the end (ad — with her pineapple bud — below left).

Profane or not, maybe a larger by-product of these creative/commercial combinations is wider awareness for consumers oblivious to the world of art.
Which is always a good thing.

The New Conversation

A neat exhibition that’s opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) explores the underlying dialogue that goes on with so much of what  permeates our everyday lives, focusing on designs that expand the communication possibilities between people and technology.

With interaction taking the place of the old maxims of form and function as a means of relevancy in the 21st-Century’s digital culture, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, illustrates how contemporary designers enhance society with integrated combinations of purpose and meaning.

The nearly 200 projects also include more idiosyncratic works like “Kageo” (top left), Japanese for “little shadow,” which creates mysterious and mischievous little creatures from the reflections of common objects, via a webcam and hidden projector. “Pretty maps, Beijing, Manhattan and Tokyo” (middle), sort of an artsy version of Google Earth, is an interactive map that renders multidimensional views of different locales, with cities morphed into colorful abstractions. “El Sajjadah” (bottom) is a rug embedded with a compass module that points the prayerful in the direction of Mecca; the carpet pattern glows brighter as it gets closer to its exact position.

Explaining some of the challenges that lie ahead for this new generation of communication designers, Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA told the New York Times: “There is still an imbalance between theaesthetic value of some projects and their functional value, and designers need to make much more effort to explain what they are doing. This field is moving so fast, but we are still dealing with the old clichés and still adding new ones.”

Some of it weird, all of it mind-provoking, Talk to Me runs through November 7  at MoMA.

An Artsy Fourth

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) titled this painting July 4th (1957), marking the date of
its completion.