I have not posted an art review for three months - winter in Dublin
seems to be dead when it comes to major art exhibitions. But the new
art season has now started and I hope to be writing more soon.
Yesterday I went with my girlfriend to the opening of Georgia O'Keeffe
'Nature and Abstraction' at the Irish Museum of Modern art. I had seen
a full scale retrospective of O'Keeffe's work in 1989 in the L.A.
County Museum, and I had not been that impressed. But times change and
so do people. My girlfriend happens to be a passionate fan of her work
- and was utterly thrilled to see these great works by her hero.
O'Keeffe of course is a female artist - who famously painted flowers
that looked ***ual in nature (the leaves of the flowers echoing the
folds of the labia) was one of the first artists to develop an
abstract vision, was the first woman to be given a retrospective in
M.O.M.A. (the St. Peter's of the art world), posed ****d for her
photographer husband Stieglitz and later lived like a recluse in the
dessert of New Mexico - so of course she is a great hero to many
female art lovers. With artists like Gwen John, Frida Kalho, Louise
Bourgeois, and Paula Rego, she is among a select group of female
artists to have established a major reputation in the art world. But
where as the work of Kahlo, Bourgeois and Rego can at times be violent
and ugly - O'Keeffe's work is rarely less than beautiful even when she
is painting animal bones. Unlike other over admired female artists
today, O'Keefe's work bears up to close scrutiny. Maybe she is not in
the league of Pollock or De Kooning. But she is an infinitely more
serious artist than other Americana's like Thomas Hart Benton, Barnett
Newman, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, or a league of painters touted as
im****tant today in New York. I continually stress O'Keefe's gender,
because it seems so central to her work. She was one of the first
painters to express a uniquely female vision of the world, and
countless female art students today are still in debt to her. While
female art today is often beset with visual cliches of natural forms,
human hair, genitals, wounds - O'Keefe and Kahlo were pioneers in this
territory, and so I think it is im****tant to remember how personal and
original their concerns were in the male dominated art world of the
mid twentieth century.
This exhibition which concentrated on O'Keeffe's more abstracted
canvases turned out to be unexpectedly good - mainly because it lacked
the more illustrative aspects of O'Keefe's work which I feel are her
weakest efforts. O'Keefe was a keen student of nature - the veins of a
leaf, the bud of a flower, the crease in a rock, or the bulge in a
mountain could all fire her imagination. She could take these natural
objects and imbue them with mystery and an abiding female presence.
Perhaps it is unfortunate that she is famous mostly as a painter of
flowers (seen in close up perhaps influenced by photography) which
seem vulvic or womb like. Because in truth there is far more subtlety
to her approach in her landscapes and abstractions than a mere
reduction of nature to a saucy postcard. Although I could see some
similarities in her work with Cezanne's pallet, Kandinsky's sense of
abstract rhythm, and Dali's playful metamorphoses of forms - over all
her work was very much her own. Her pallet of pinks, apple greens,
creams, mauve's and browns was beautifully displayed in her oil
paintings. But it was her use of white which I found revolutionary.
>From a distance many of her oil paintings looked like watercolours on
slightly crumpled watercolour paper. Up close, O'Keefe's gentle and
sure brushstrokes feathered the colour into place. Occasionally she
would let the white, pink or brown undercoat show through as a vein in
a leaf or as a cloud - a wonderful indication of her sensitive and
witty approach to painting.
However while this was a small and well judged exhibition, I was
disappointed not to see any of her lovely watercolours or drawings,
some of which I would prize over her larger oil paintings. In fact it
is beyond me why so many exhibitions I have seen recently have been
devoid of drawings, even when the artists involved are known to have
produced significant studies. After all, drawings are the secret
blueprints of art which can unlock so much about the ideas and levels
of skill of an artist, not to mention explaining more clearly the
development of an artists forms.
Before we went to the opening we went early to see the Alex Katz
exhibition also in I.M.M.A. What an utterly repellent exhibition it
was! Katz's is an eight year old oil painter who emerged in the 1960's
with stylish paintings which took a flavor of Pop art and mixed it
with illustration to create 'safe' modish works of the rich. Some
people call his work beautiful - I think its some of the most vulgar
painting I have ever seen. I found Katz's use of colour to be utterly
stomach churning - turgid peach, cake icing pink, baby blue, ****
brown! As for his figurative skills - they were utterly contemptible.
He draws no better than a high school teenager. It so happens that I
have spent my life painting ****traits of people, and I know from
experience how very difficult an art it is. But all my life I have
battled away. Each time I paint a person, I look and look and look
again. Every face is different, and the light falling on someone
changes by the hour. As a painter I try to paint what I see - when I
see it and how I see it at that time. That means that I try to avoid
the mannerisms and illustrative shorthand that painters can fall into.
But Katz's approach is almost the exact opposite. He approaches the
world through the illustrative forms you would be failure with in clip
art or the New Yorker magazine. For Katz, people are ciphers - almost
interchangeable. His mouths are all the same misshapen and swollen
shape, the noses are all half-formed and his eyes are all as dead and
lifeless as those of a mannequin. But the real give away for me was
the way he painted eyelashes - painted individually hair by hair with
all the subtlety of a doll maker! To his admirers Katz with his
cliched long brush strokes and creamy paint is a modern day Manet -
but in reality he is not an even moderately skilled billboard painter.
Katz is one of those painters who's work looks better in reproduction
than in reality. He mixes the scale of the abstract expressionists
with the short hand of pictorial illustration and a dash of French
'alla-prima' painting (meaning painting a picture in one go without
correction) - the result? Facile and empty work all style and no
content. Katz played up the fa****on of his sitters - the Jackie O
hairdos the leisure suits and the fur coats - which paradoxically
make his work look very old fa****oned. His paintings are needlessly
big, and about as deep as a puddle. Yet despite their often huge size,
Katz's handling of detail's was fumbling and botched - god knows how
bad a painter he would have been working on a small scale! There are
some like Mathew Collings who rate Katz very highly, and consider him
an im****tant influence on young painters. God help them! If these are
the idiots they choose to teach them, then all they will ever learn is
incompetent modish pomposity. In fact if Katz can teach young artists
anything - I would suggest its how to wine and dine the rich. There is
a symbiotic relation****p between the fawning Katz and the the WASPS of
Park Avenue which resulted in vomit inducing ****traits of rich
Americans, but also a constant source of income for Katz. One painting
of two middle aged wasps - was quite the most 'gay looking' painting I
had ever seen and a psychopathic low even for Katz. The moral of the
Katz story is that a tenth rate painter with good 'people-skills' and
who paints rich people in New York, will be touted as im****tant by the
American Juggernaut while painters of real talent who are unfortunate
not to be born in an art world capital will be forgotten. Even in
Ireland there are a dozen painters better than Katz - Robert Ballagh
to name just one.
The big surprise of our visit to I.M.M.A. was Thomas Demand's
exhibition 'L'Esprit d'Escalier'. Demand is forty three and one of a
handful of great photographers to come out of Germany in the last five
years like Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. Since I never read the
blurb on the wall to exhibitions (preferring to go in cold, and
tending to feel that if something needs a text to explain it then its
probably not worth bothering with) I was puzzled by Demand's huge
photographs of office tables and security x-ray machines. They looked
real, but odd. Something was not quite right about them. I felt they
had the feel of Andreas Gursky's brilliant photographs in which he
photographed places like the stock exchange, and then photo shopped
them to make the places look bigger and more complex. My girlfriend
who has worked as an illustrator also thought that maybe the
photographs had been photo shopped. So for once I went to the wall
text and read... It turned out that Demand made cardboard sculptures
to look like - phones, boxes, stairs, escalators, cups of tea you name
it. In fact nothing in these photographs was real - it was all made of
cardboard! I laughed my ass off! What fun! So then we looked around
the exhibition with a whole new take on things. This is the kind of
conceptual art I like - witty and very clever, but accessible to
everyone. Of course like many artists today Demand questions the
nature of the 'reality' we are given in photography and the media -
but like very few others he does it with humour, skill and real
invention.
If you enjoyed my review and want to see some of my art check out my
website - www.thepanicartist.com but be warned you may find some of
the images of *** offensive.
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