Arts and Exhibitions

[madupont]

Donotremove, 

It's more Garrison Keillor, on aesthetics, he says:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/garrison_keillor/2009/11/17/art_appreciation/index.html

[madupont]

http://www.bvnewswire.com/2009/12/29/boondocks-naomi-campbell-lady-gaga/

You can skip naomi campbell,lady gaga as just filler. The news is the return of boondocks. I will never forget the day that the nytimes.com made T.McGruder and his cartoon The Boondocks disappeared from their daily cartoon page which was as ubiquitous to the news business as the editorial page.

It occurred rather in the beginning of the Bush administration, despite the fact that it has two or three important staffers, not just editorial writer Bob Herbert, it appeared to be dismissive of Black popular commentary while maintaining that equal opportunity employment was always honored at The New York Times.  I know that the artistic quality of the total layout of all special features there is "black maintained", that they have a black cultural historian expert against whom any and all facts can be checked, and I fortunately encountered an assistant on editorial staff who has helped me importantly with the glitches that arise and that others ignore when you request help with malfunction; none of whom are as crazy as D.Brooks(celebrity?)M.Dowd whose footing on the high-wire is getting wobbly,Tom Friedman who recently appeared on MSNBC apparently high on himself when allowed to be a wired-in electronic guest of a successful hard-working anchor-hostess.

Oh, well, one year down, in the current administration. Is there  a powerful monied enemy on high in the field of press ownership who dislikes non-Anglo-Saxons more than any other threat to Western Imperialism? Or, is it just habit?

Meanwhile I can go and appreciate The Boondocks on tv or video replay.

[madupont]

http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/onlinecollection/object_collection.php?objectid=27467&artistlist=1&aid=5936

Stieglitz

[madupont]

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/node/1615146

HAITI, A PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW

[madupont]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Edouard_Manet_004.jpg

You can adjust this frame from left to right and top to bottom.

If you move carefully to the right to bring in the central figure, you can then navigate the right adjustment from top to bottom. There is an anomaly* here.
If you go to the immediate left-side of the young woman (approximately 3/4ths of the  distance across the enlargement, while you are facing her at what is known as "stage Right") and then carefully descend down the curve of her arm to her hand, you will see a magnificiently Impressionist glazing of the surface of the tangerines in the bowl of tangerines.

I remark this because quite often the portrait does not reproduce well and the skin tone of the face shows no glazing to reflect light. Was Manet considering the heavy face-powdering and was this to deflect from the rosiness beneath which appears to be rosacea of the skin, or was he attempting to  model the face shape more than the skin-tone, placing an undertone of color as if of rouge or natural blushing/high color,or rosacea, and then placing a light wash over these areas after the undercoat had thoroughly dried.

As he frequently painted exceedingly  well reproduced skin, not only glowing from exterior light falling upon the face or body, but appearing to  emanate light from within,is this merely the practicing of technique improving gradually over the decades but still subject to error?

*As there is in the painting below, almost two decades earlier. In which the woman in the lower left of the balcony has a clearly painted expression detailed or her face compared to the other two figures behind and next to her. The painter became tired of this exercise? I have had an entirely different image of the same subject.  Or, is this just a mix-up with the work of Degas?






http://www.abcgallery.com/M/manet/manet17.html

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Frida Kahlo

Watch this space

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http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ouxxa0eFam8/SqUtB5Nxr_I/AAAAAAAAEtg/bumCTeWTa3A/s1600-h/9781568988306.jpg

[Lhoffman]

Frida Kahlo:   I've been following this.   I'd been considering buying the book and came across varied reviews.   Be interesting to see how the controversy resolves.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/06/entertainment/ca-kahlo6

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Forthcoming-Frida-Kahlo-book-denounced-as-fake/18682

[madupont]

I've got more.  From the time when the film with Selma Hayek,Alfred Molina, Antonio Banderas, Ashley Judd, Edward Norton, Geoffrey Rush, came out, I immediately researched, read the book(Hayden Herrera's), went on-line to every museum that owned paintings of Kahlo's, made reproductions in color of those that were available at the museums and sizable and sent the whole splurge off to my youngest sister whose only question was,"Did she really sleep with Trotsky?", or vice-versa? It seems like a long time ago.

Only to have her reply that her daughter(my niece) that already been to the Casa Azul. Although surprising, it made sense to me; they have that thing in common, having parents of widely different origins which causes you to weigh one background against the other because you grow up eventually having had a duality or hybrid of culture, neither one thing or the other but both in yet another generation and I guess that I have known a lot of women like that.

I would highly recommend Herrera's book as a starting point, and then look at the work in those places where they are on display because Kahlo did a lot of traveling, which took some guts, particularly in that she came to New York at the time of the Rockefeller Center mural being done by her husband,Deigo Rivera.   I grew up with a generation who matured in the Thirties during WPA and could expound to you at length while showing you some example of the muralist of all muralists, Diego Rivera.  No one spoke of Frida Kahlo. She was just the little woman.

Except that her flamboyance is very familiar, which meant that while Diego was painting what Republican owner of the Center would destroy, Frida naturally attracted the attention of wealthy women who had only Manhattan on this side of the ocean and immediately bought her paintings.

Although this appears to be a charming book, by reading reviews there is one word that daunts me. "Former" curator(or whatever) at SF Museum of Art. This causes me to come down on both sides of the "controversy" which I believe was created to sell books. Although I have certainly had a similar habit, in a flurry of  housekeeping, stuffing things into a box(as one of my early teachers had advised who had the authority of  an affair with the great Welsh poet of the White Horse Tavern),they would appear neatly piled  and aesthetically arranged before being taken out to a corner of the barn where last time I looked there was no more barn.  But, just to be honest about it, I threw away the very last "box" that imitated Joseph Cornell, at least going on seven years ago or when the above movie came out.  I didn't want to be reminded of anything in the past; especially in the form of derivative art.

I don't know what the answer is,as to the authenticity of the neatly arranged suitcase (I had one of those too, from that era), box,chest, which as photographed is meant to pull you in, the appearance of the photo itself Is Art.  Never mind that it becomes carefully stored from that moment on in some glass-display cases such as are used in a mercantile establishment(not on a par with museum technical advances)

There is also a remark about Kahlo's tendency to look toward her own posterity by planting her things for safe keeping with friends; and,where they remained for publicity when all was said and done and they would be brought forth in the light of another day by which time passing she would have acquired requisite fame by further word of mouth.  I don't fault her that. She taught the following generation of artists who happened to be women: how to take care of business.

[Lhoffman]

I see that Herrera has a book of her art and two others that are more biographical in nature.  

I've seen a lot of Frida's work, but most of what I know about her comes from materials provided by the Detroit Institute of Art related to the Rivera Murals.   Given the company she kept, I can imagine her concern for posterity.  She did appreciate Diego as a true and great artist, and as you mention, there was also Trotsky.

Looking at the murals, you see a lot of Frida's ideas transferred onto Diego's.   The most striking is her Henry Ford Hospital.   Frida's work draws a far different conclusion about the value of industrialism and mechanism than does Diego's.  

I have wondered what Diego meant when he offered to change his painting of Lenin to Abraham Lincoln in the Rockefeller Mural.   Was this meant as an ironic gesture, or did he simply want to be allowed to continue to create?  I suppose he relates the idea to liberty, as we see in his murals presenting Henry Ford as liberator through technology.  

[madupont]

Given the company she kept, I can imagine her concern for posterity.

Trotsky was a houseguest along with his wife. He was lucky she didn't shoot him herself but he had her well-trained. "Party discipline", I would suppose it has been called.

Frida appreciated Rivera, as his student; and then as her husband until she caught him having at everybody else in his studio.  In the film, there is a pretty good depiction of the studio and household as separate entities as a result of his flagrant alienation of her. Don't forget her Kahlo background was not categorically, as a class of Austrian with not just one but possibly two religious backgrounds, likely to accept his exceptional Latin dominant sexual machismo. The marital relationship of Rivera y epousa led to a two door  household which may have had a bridge that she traversed to her own "house" better than he did from his studio.

It is possible, although after eight years who(remembers) knows?, that her sister was willingly seduced by Diego nonetheless.

When I said that,"Frida naturally attracted the attention of wealthy women who had only Manhattan on this side of the ocean and immediately bought her paintings.", I was referring to the fact that she was lesbian in a bi-sexual's preference, following her disappointment in Diego's marriage "to the masses" of available females.

As a result of attracting the attention of women who could afford to buy their own collection of art like so many trinkets during her stay in New York, women who could also lavish these painting into Museum collections, Frida didn't  have to worry about her posterity. People went to the museum galleries, saw the astounding paintings that set you back on your heels in shock(but Frida was also aware of  her mordant morbidity on display. It was  a very large part of  her psyche as a result of the continual excruciating pain that she underwent ever after her bus accident. Difficult to say what the percentage was,fifty-fifty being a cliche,but she had at the same time a vivid humor and zest for all the positive aspects of life.);nevertheless, in traveling about, she dropped off belongings with people whom she felt confident would keep them and, at the same time with a duration that she knew would make them aware of what a celebrated artist she had become, want to cash in on it by selling these artifacts of her personal and artistic existence.

Selma Hayek did a magnificent job of portraying her (along with that being how she met her soon to be husband[since divorced]who played Nelson Rockefeller, Edward Norton.

As to the Kahlo y Rivera marriage,Looking at the murals, you see a lot of Frida's ideas transferred onto Diego's. --
what is apparent and obvious is that Rivera continued in the paint medium a tradition of muralism that goes back to the dimensional sculpted muralism of the Mayans of th peninsula and Aztecs of Mexico City which were originally painted three dimensional figures.  

I  have known a number of younger people from the late 1960s into the 1970s, who had more of a quasi mystical/anthropological fixation on those artifacts of civilizations, as North Americans;and one hidalgo of mixed French and Spanish-Mexican background who raised money on his ranch through tourism and then used that to finance his excavations around Cancun and other over-jungled areas where you barely got a look at the cleared surface after cutting away vines before they  grew back again.

But international community of artist today and back then, particularly in the period of the Great Depression as more elderly adults post-WPA, who knew their art history, would tell you that you can see Rivera adapting the Meso-American art in another medium, particularly with masses of people depicted in panoramic depth that brought contrasting movement in the mural from background to foreground in contra rhythms of motion that are comparative of the former period and the modern.

But I don't think that Rivera ever saw Henry Ford as the liberator rather than the profiteer through technology, as they were after all involved at this time by the Depression in which there was an Indian peasant Revolution.  Which of course is why Dwight Morrow (who was banker-financier Morgan's attorney) was appointed ambassador to Mexico where he took his daughter along on the trip and where she would meet Charles Lindbergh.

Morrow would not have been there politically except for that relationship by which he served Morgan legal interests.  They, as North Americans,had the greater investment in drawing the larger profits from Mexican resources then, by continuing the old patrone/peonage  system(which Kahlo and Rivera were politically against), just as today at present North America is interested in continuing that in Haiti, despite which organizations they will suggest serve humanity.  

(Haiti would not be in that shape if humanity was the priority of the organizations across the board  [or,"boards"] in the USA for the last eighty years  but which really began with the 19th. and even the late 18th.century under Jefferson.)


One can however leave her(Anne Morrow) out of having any knowledge that this was a fatal marriage , in that her father's representation in Mexico, of US Law, was a case of some East coast scum, as far as humanity was concerned, meeting and merging with some Minnesota scum of Scandinavian origins in the paternal Lindbergh generation; a man who had been a common thief in Europe, an embezzler in Germany, if I remember correctly who left for Scandinavia and then onwards, carefully having picked out Minnesota for being such a physically demanding climate and environment that no one would take any interest nor have a clue who he had been in Europe before he picked  his hideout.  

Although I am not surprised that Philip Roth did not even mention it in his Bush administration novel . Although the senior Lindbergh(the aviator's father) later became a congressman and threatened to spill the beans in some pamphlets composed to inform the American public of the rip off they underwent  vis a vis Washington,D.C. in government fiscal policy.
I think Roth may have felt somewhat as I had that Mrs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh was still alive at the time.

Of course, as they said in Germany, and people of German descent still do, their version of genetics will out, when they say that "blood will out", it had when Charles Lindbergh returned to his father's scene of his crime, Germany; and clandestinely began a second family that survives to this day as half brothers( I do not recall sisters, off hand)to their American sister and at least one or more surviving brothers.

Somehow Diego Rivera's infidelities to his equally artistically productive wife, who was a partial amputee, hardly stack up against the Lindbergh story. (I sometimes think Lucky Lindy made such a fuss about Bruno Hauptman's record as a thief in Germany because Lindbergh's father had been one too, for a somewhat larger take; and if you make enough fuss, the public will never even consider that you had something to hide.)

[Lhoffman]

Henry Ford as liberator.   I'm sure Rivera was no great admirer of Ford's economics or politics, but he did admire the streamlined factory production that made the workers' jobs and lives easier.   The murals are a celebration of work and industry.  The workers take the foremost part, but Rivera has also included capitalists and industrialists.  

(Also, these murals were created in 1932 into 1933.  Ford and Rivera would have been at odds over labor issues and unions, but the formation of the auto union would have taken place more toward the middle to the end of the 1930's....after the murals were completed.)    

Here's a story and photos from NPR on the Detroit Murals:

(photo gallery....these give a very small idea of the scope)

http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/04/rivera/gallery/index.html

(the story)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103337403

---------------

My early comment about Frida and Diego coming to different conclusions about Henry Ford.  To be clearer, I'll extend it to the idea of depersonalization (or even de-humanization) related to the rise of industry:  

Here is Frida's painting of her miscarriage in Henry Ford Hospital.   There is almost the sense that it takes place in a desert.   An emptiness.   In the bottom left, you see a representation of some sort of medical machine....I think meant to convey the impersonality of it all.   Far in the distance, you see the Ford factories.   I have read in a few accounts that there was concern that the Fords would be insulted by Frida's work.  



Here are two of Diego's representation of modern medicine:

Brain surgeons...no faces, but humanity represented in the hands:



Vaccination scene related to the Nativity:



Diego's work seems to be a celebration of growth and possibility, of humanity, while Frida's (at least this particular work) seems an expression of hopelessness.  She could be depicting the loss she felt and sadness or anger directed at her body and its failings, but it is interesting to me that she adds the Ford plant and the useless machine in the bottom corner.  Also interesting that there are no medical personnel at hand.  

(Of course, interesting to throw into the mix, and one of many reasons I find Frida's painting compelling:  Diego is referenced here by an image of a flower he gave her after the miscarriage.   Why the flower?   Where was Diego?   Was he off at the Rouge Plant photographing machinery?)  

When I tie the two works together, the idea that comes to mind is "Who Will Save Us?"   And it seems that related to these particular works, Diego and Frida came to very different conclusions.

[madupont]

"Iconic" seems to be the cliche word of the American moment 2010?
Unfortunate that the repros of the Kahlo paintings are not larger to see the detail*. I no longer have those that I sent on to my sister.

Anyway when Rivera was doing these, my uncle Frank must have already been there at "the other company" as a line worker who worked his way up.
What is obvious in the composite mural --if you look to the right of the main wall, you can see that the machine in full height, what ever it is(?), mostly resembles a gigantic Baal--but over and over again you see  
there  are "mono-tonous" workers, non-whites were not to be employed at GM for instance in theSweet case which took place in the mid Twenties, as we read about this  in the American History forum:
Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossian_Sweet

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"The country was in the midst of the Great Depression and some questioned why a Mexican artist had been chosen over an American painter,when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression and some questioned why a Mexican artist had been chosen over an American painter."[/quote

Sounds like tea-baggers.

'Edsel Ford, patron of the murals, never publicly responded to the outcry. He only issued a simple statement saying "I admire Rivera's spirit. I really believe he was trying to express his idea of the spirit of Detroit."



Last I looked, my great-aunt had an Edsel in the garage which she used by having a chauffeur drive her to the cemetery to visit her departed husband, and possibly when she went to Madison for her medical checkups. She was a friend of Clarence Darrow who then represented Dr. Sweet and got him off just a few years before Hazel returned because of the Crash 1929 to her home county/family area, from Chicago riding on a buckboard with her husband driving(just as she had originally come there to accompany her father on the cattle drive when she was a little girl).

Diego's nude with globular fruit reminds me of this painter who obviously was impressed with Rivera and whether or not imitated him will never be known as Bottero was assumed to be painting immense nudes like somebody else's sculpture; or that he was playing with gigantic baby art.

http://artpassions.com/artist-1/5164-Fernando-Botero.html/?
utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=adwords&gclid=COT87Lunk6ACFUFM5Qod7iPOew

* I had meant to say but  you brought it up with the first of the repros from Kahlo that what had been most effective about Diego  alienating Frida by his infidelities was the fact that she was already so badly injured as a school girl by that accident on the bus with the swerving truck that threw off all the metal rods and equipment that it was carrying on the open back of the truck, that it looked as if an armature had pierced Frida's body.(She sometimes paints herself as St.Sebastian,Martyr, pierced by Roman arrows.) Nobody of course ever mentioned that it was unlikely she would have children.Then when this man paid her attention and flirted with her when she had been observing the work he was doing, because she was an art student, she just adored him and he set her to mixing his paints.

In other words, with the marriage, he was already aware of her physical injuries  when he first made love to her, and the confidence this gave her was utterly destroyed when he was unfaithful to her.

Meanwhile, she had become pregnant any number of times and then went through the painful miscarriages when not being able to carry a baby to term. She would always end  up in a hospital  and, of course, she began painting expressionist or nativist style ("primitives", some people call them, after Grandma Moses)however you care to describe Frida's oeuvre.

When she finally caught him out, the only thing she could do about it was to deny him the household, to quit doing his housework or cooking for him, or helping his career; but rather to throw herself into her own Art. In those days it was "mistaken" for independence in a woman, and of course she worked to make her art sell and give her independence from relying on his support; so there is doubly this mural at Detroit, with fetus in utero, fruitful woman, etc, practically an insult to her while she is aborting at a hospital and undergoing treatment.

You asked, "...Diego is referenced here by an image of a flower. Why the flower? " He himself uses this flower many times in his own paintings to represent himself.  It is like a communication between them.

This was argueably interesting about early communism from the two Revolutions in Russia, and the seeming export by Trotsky going into hiding from assassins.   Mary McCarthy touches on this a bit on relationship in The Group because we then come into the period of Margaret Sanger in the Depression; so whether it is Richard Mulligan in this enlightening film, the girl is always cast as naive and embarrassed about birth-control by the time of The Depression while Diego is busy making money from Ford and Frida is in the hospital dependent upon his money. We see her become completely driven   and the flamboyant change in her personality, pointedly going to bed with Trotsky (this is kind of funny because I can here the word down in the Obama forum,"ah-hah, going to bed with communism....") whether any of them at that point believed in "open love" in the sense that a Russian playwright would write about it, and then make it perfectly clear that she was attracted to Mondotti who has taken up photography because she is the fetish of a prominent American photographer for whom she models when he goes through his wandering in the desert period photographing Mexican peasants.    

                      

[madupont]

.[/b][/b] 


http://www.sundancechannel.com/films/500255860

Tina in Mexico
200377 minsB&W
Brenda Longfellow, Director
Pioneering photographer, silent-film star, model, muse to artists and writers, revolutionary — the tempestuous life of Tina Modotti (1896 - 1942) could easily be confused with a novelist's creation. Documentary filmmaker Brenda Longfellow tells the story of Tina's time in Mexico, where she was Edward Weston's assistant and lover, modeled for Diego Rivera, became passionately involved in leftist causes and created some of the most beautiful and iconic photographs of the 20th century. "Graceful and elegiac" — Toronto Globe and Mail.
TAGS: Artist, Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, Leftist, Model, Muse, Photographer, Art, Biography, Documentary, English (en), Feature Film, Tina Mondotti

Nudity, Adult Content



Director Brenda Longfellow
Producer Normahilda Castanares
Producer Brenda Longfellow
Producer David McIntosh
Screenwriter Brenda Longfellow
Cinematographer Christopher J. Romeike
Editor Brenda Longfellow
Editor Glen Richards
Composer Bob DerKach
Actor Tina Modotti
Actor Diego Rivera
Actor Edward Weston

We met up with Tina Modotti in a little film for which Selma Hayek played Frida Kahlo and Geoffrey Rush is Leon Trotsky. Let's face it, the dance was so sexy that we forget that the photographer Modotti, Edward Weston's model and lover, was nothing like Ashley Judge.  I suspect it was done for contrast rather than have two brunette Latin lovelies enmeshed in an attentive tango (say that real fast, starting with "in").

This film not only shows you the reality of Mexico that both Weston and Modotti shot in their own respective styles but as shown on Sundance reveals more of the signature Modotti photographic art, and the strikingly beautiful person she was mirroring all the Mexican women she saw around her. Tina, herself, was Italian and realized through Mexico that she was not at home in the US but could be in Mexico. Her comments on the murals and style of Diego Rivera are I think important as one artist's insight about another artist's work. 

[Lhoffman]

I've been looking around Netflix today and there are quite a few films about Frida, fictional and non-.   Unfortunately, none are on the list that you can watch on-line.

I did like Selma as Frida.