Art Of The Day Weekly
#88 - from 1 May 2008 to 7 May 2008
IN THE AIR
Mona Lisa without varnish
PARIS – We knew Leonardo's masterpiece was varnished. With time this varnish has become yellow and has altered the aspect of the original colors. How can we find the initial aspect of Mona Lisa? Researchers at the CNRS have maybe found the solution. With advanced optical techniques and by using a multi-spectral camera, they have analyzed the composition of the color reflected by the surface of the painting, in hundreds of millions of different points. They carried out the same measure on samples of pigments from that time. By comparing the two series, they have untangled the three respective parts of the Mona Lisa: the varnish, the superficial layer and the under layer. The technical conclusions on the under layer show it is made of umber – a mixture of 1% vermilion and 99% of white lead. What is most interesting for neophytes is to learn that in order to give this intensity to his colors, Leonardo seems to have been the first Italian painter to have used a glaze (a multitude of diluted layers of one same pigment). This confirms once again his innovating talent, inspired in this circumstance by the progress made by the Flemish artists. This new technique should allow us to look at other masterpieces with different eyes.
EXHIBITIONS
A century of Coppola
MADRID – « The most difficult years, are the first one hundred » according to a known comedian. At the age of 101, Argentine Horacio Coppola is undoubtedly the oldest of the world’s great photographers. To celebrate his entry into his second century, the Fondation Telefónica has dedicated an ambitious retrospective of over 150 images to him. It includes some of his still lives from the time when he took lessons at the Bauhaus – accumulations of metallic objects, reflections in the water, dolls – and more recent trials from the 1990s. Most of the photographs shown though are the ones that made him famous: urban and often night atmospheres in Buenos Aires in the thirties. From the bookstores and theaters from the calle Corrientes to the neon lights on avenida Florida, from the horse track of la Plata to the traffic on the port of la Boca, this is the successful portrait of a large Southern metropolis that never sleeps at night, a cross between the New York of Walker Evans and Paris seen by Brassaï.
Sacred resistance
PARIS - How far can society go in becoming secularized? Is God dead in art? The Centre Pompidou, in an ambitious pluridisciplinary exhibition bringing together over 350 works, tries to show that artists of the XXth century have never interrupted their quest for spirituality. The progress made by science, the setback of the unknown and the unexplainable, the progressive liberation from the material constraints did not prevent Malevitch nor Bill Viola from asking themselves the question already put forward by Gauguin «Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?» The 200 artists invited have grouped into various sections with poetic names: the Great Initiated (Gallen Kallela, Duchamp and Alesteir Crowley), Cosmic Revelations (with Johannes Itten or Sigmar Polke), Homo novus (Chagall, Boccioni and Abdessemed), Doors of perception (Michaux, Burroughs and company) or Sacrifice (where we find Herman Nitsch and Marina Abramovic). This somehow proves that the «disenchantment of the world» announced more than once by Max Weber is not really there…
The sixties, Italian style
STOCKHOLM - The Moderna Museet celebrates this year its fiftieth anniversary in a very original manner. Rather than show the growth of the collections over that period (what the Getty Center is currently doing to celebrate its first decade), the Swedish institution of modern and contemporary art preferred organizing a series of retrospective exhibits. Each one of them underlines the vitality of an artistic center at the beginning of the sixties. After Rio de Janeiro and before Los Angeles (next October), it is now the turn of Milano and Torino. It was the period of the economic miracle, the Red Brigades had not yet sprung up their ugly head and creation reflected an impressive enthusiasm and diversity. From the monochromes and the conceptual (the Merdes d’artiste-Artists' shit-) by Piero Manzoni, up to the Arte povera by Merz and Penone, not forgetting Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti and Enrico Baj, Italy becomes once again what it was at the time of Futurism and metaphysical painting: a major center of contemporary art.
AUCTIONS
The race for millions
NEW YORK – The constant rise of the art market is bound to stop one day: everyone is ready to agree to that even if no one wants it to happen. In any case, the major auction houses act as if nothing will come trouble the serenity of the times. Every six months, they announce the arrival of the «last painting to still be in private hands» by one master or another, belying the cliché of a dwindling down of the reserves, and making the volume of work one of their major arguments. Christie’s thus announces for the sole session of modern and impressionnist art on 6 May a mind-boggling volume ranging between 287 and 405 million dollars. A beautiful Monet, the train bridge at Argenteuil, a Large standing woman by Giacometti, a light filled Matisse (Portrait with a blue coat) should each line up the dollars (and Euros) by tens of milions. Sotheby’s follows suite with the breaking up of the Raymond et Patsy Nasher collection, that is some one thousand works (Picasso, Dubuffet, Lichtenstein, etc), the income of which will be invested in the sculpture garden created in Dallas by these great lovers of modern art.
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Pushkin Girl, courtesy galerie Sadie Coles, London
John Currin
Is figurative painting dead? It was announced for a long time but it is no longer on the agenda. In the midst of the conceptual avalanche of the Young British Artists, Jenny Savile imposed herself as one of the highest rated in the group with her characters over flowing with flesh. Botero, Hockney and Freud have never sold as well. And one of the new pets from the USA is John Currin, who renews academic painting with an errorless oil technique. Born in 1962, he «explosed» in just a few years, with his paintings now flirting with 7 digit dollar prices. His men with empty eyes exude a touching boredom and stupidity. His women seem brainless. In his last series, they are all naked and often set
in pornographic scenes the artist would like to see attached to the greater tradition illustrated by Fragonard or Courbet. This filiation is not yet assured…
BOOKS
Good patterns from Peru
She was a highly appreciated collaborator of Worth the designer but the name of Elena Izcue (1889-1970) has been absent from Parisian memories for a long time now. Graduated at the beginning of the 1920s from the brand new school of Beaux-Arts of Lima, she participated in her own way to the birth of a Peruvian artistic identity. At the time Hiram Bingham, leading an expedition from the university of Yale, had just discovered Macchu Picchu. The Moche and Chavin cultures were discovered right after, as well as the remarkable textiles from Paracas, with their bright colors and their stylized motives. This was the aspect of the precolombian civilization that fascinated Elena Izcue: she worked over and over on the friezes, the frets, the schematic animals with large eyes and big beaks. Following a historic introduction, recalling in particular her role in the Peruvian pedagogic movement, the work offers a reproduction of her drawing boards, her watercolors, drawings or materials of hand printed natural silk. World War II interrupted Elena Izcue's activity in Paris. Once she was back in Peru she directed workshops of graphic art but she never found the influence she had before the war.
IN BRIEF
AMSTERDAM – The Stedelijk will be allowed to keep most of its paintings by Malévitch. The conflict with the heirs who demanded to get back the paintings given by a friend of the painter's in 1958 has just been solved in a friendly way: the Dutch museum has returned five works and will be able to keep the others.
BAGDAD – Last week Iraq recuperated over 700 objects stolen from the national museum of Archeology. They were seized and returned by the Syrian authorities.
LONDON – The church of Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields, on Trafalgar Square, has just reopened to the public after two years of restoration. The building dates from the XVIIIth century and was particularly enriched by contemporary stained-glass windows by artist Shiraz Houshiary.
MADRID – As part of the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the uprising against Franco, the 1st and 2nd of May will be dedicated to recreate, in dance, music or theater, six famous paintings by Goya on just as many squares in the city.
MADRID – Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Reina Sofia museum has announced the Guernica room will soon be re-arranged to allow for Picasso's famous painting to be looked at from the front. And it will now be accompanied by a model of the Spanish pavilion at the International Exhibit of Paris in 1937.
PARIS – A group of artists and of legal heirs have sent a petition to the minister of Culture asking that the "droit de suite" (the right to receive a percentage of the sale of a work of art) be maintained in its current state and not be limited to living artists and to the commission received by the seller. This change of legislation had been advocated by the Bethenod report for the development of the art market.
VIENNA- The Austrian Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer heirs about the restitution of a sixth Klimt painting. So doing, it has completely overturned the current jurisprudence and shifted the burden of the proof from the person receiving the property to the Nazi victims.
ON ART-OF-THE-DAY.INFO
This week, do not miss
THE GRAND-DUC JEAN MODERN ART MUSEUM FOUNDATION , THE MUDAM LUXEMBOURG, RECRUITS ITS GENERAL DIRECTOR
LUXEMBURG - The future director must be a graduate in art or cultural management, a confirmed specialist in the field of modern and contemporary art, and should also have experience as a director in a major museum.