Art Of The Day Weekly

Carmen Herrera, 101-year old geometer

NEW YORK - The honorable Robert Marchand has just set the record of one hour track cycling in the over-105 category. He was totally unknown until he completed his first exploit on the track at the age of 100. Carmen Herrera performed a similar feat. This artist of Cuban origin, born on 30 May 1915, settled in the USA in 1939, and also spent five years in Paris -1948-1953 – where she befriended the artists from the Réalités Nouvelles salon. She waited to go past her first 100 years to see a first major retrospective of her work. It just closed, at the Whitney Museum, and confirmed the interest of her abstract painting, or even minimalist style, before the style was in vogue, comparable in certain aspects to that of Ellsworth Kelly or Shirley Jaffe - who died in 2016 at the age of 92- two other Americans in love with Paris.
• Carmen Herrera was exhibited at the Whitney Museum, from 16 September 2016 to 9 January 2017.

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Karl-Otto Götz, informal at 102

LIECHTENSTEIN – Following the very intellectual abstract movement in the period between the two wars, Europe went through an informal period after 1945. It was a truly continental movement, but certain countries developed very national specificities, from Mathieu in France to Vedova in Italy up to Tápies in Spain. In this quest for a formal freedom, for the great power of a gesture, German artist Karl-Otto Götz holds a fundamental place. He was over 30 at the time of the fall of the Third Reich and sought a type of outlet in the automatisms inspired by the Surrealist movement. Associated to the CoBrA movement, he became truly known at the end of the fifties, mostly in events such as the Biennale of Venice in 1958 or Documenta II in Kassel in 1959. He has pursued that path ever since, varying his chromatic intensity, sometimes only in black & white, very close to cinema, and sometimes very bright, in reds and yellows.
• Informel. From the Collection Veronika and Peter Monauni at the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein until 12 February 2017.

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William Pachner, a resistant at 101

ST. PETERSBURG (United States) – If one is an artist near or past the age of 100, it means one experienced the horrors of the war. In the case of William Pachner, we can refer to tragedy. He was born in Czechoslovakia near Brno, and loved drawing from an early age. He accidentally pierced his eye with one of his pencils as his grandfather, an engine driver, pulled him up next to him. A brilliant student in Vienna he managed to get a visa to visit the USA in March 1939. While there he learned of the invasion of his country by Hitler. In spite of trying three times to enroll in the US Army, he witnessed, powerless, as the war raged on. In 1945, he learned his whole family had been exterminated in the camps. He is capable of caricatures – he was the artistic director for Esquire - and of very figurative drawings in black & white that resemble expressionist prints. He also had a bright, painterly expressive manner but often tortured side to his work, with whirlwinds and drippings in his abstract compositions.
• The Museum of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg dedicated a retrospective to the artist for his 100th anniversary, from 1 April to 10 November 2015.

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From Soulages to Alechinsky

Pierre Soulages (born in 1919) is known as the champion of black. We all recall the beautiful retrospective at Beaubourg in 2009-2010. The Ecole polytechnique in Lausanne now studies the scientific dimension of his “outrenoirs”, until 23 April 2017. The tireless Carlos Cruz-Diez (born in 1923), at the head of a true multinational of optic art, is present at the galerie Mitterrand, in Paris until 18 February 2017. Vera Molnar, the great lady of design born in 1924, takes part at the Ludwig museum in Budapest in an exhibition in tribute to Bartok, until 5 February 2017. The Patrice Trigano gallery in Paris sheds light on an artist not sufficiently known: Maurice Lemaître, born in 1926, a Lettrist artist, until 28 January 2017. We include in this group a younger artist who has not really reached the age to be a full member of the group: the Matisse museum of Cateau-Cambrésis explores the special link Pierre Alechinsky, born in October 1927, has with books and typography (until 12 March 2017).

Kandinsky the Parisian

Contrary to the artists mentioned in this letter, Wassily Kandinsky did not die at a late age. He was only 78 years old when he passed away in Neuilly, in December 1944, a few months after the Liberation of Paris. For him, as for more ancient artists such as Dutch painter Jan Lievens – a contemporary of Rembrandt – who started a brilliant career at the age of 12 but died in severe poverty -, the question is how to reinvent oneself. Indeed, though he started painting at the age of 30 (in 1896), Kandinsky found himself at the age of 45 crowned as the first abstract painter in the world (“The destruction of the object is concluded in 1911”, Christian Zervos said elegantly in Cahiers d’art in 1934). How do you continue to trace your path over the following thirty years? The catalogue of the exhibition at the museum of Grenoble –that continues until 29 January 2017 – shows his last period when he left the Bauhaus which had been closed by the Nazis and curiously found refuge in France. He sought inspiration in botany or embryology, tinkering during the Occupation with whatever materials were available (cardboard, Ripolin), wandering between the Surrealists and the advocates of strict Abstraction, he continued until the end to produce symphonies of signs and colors, less cerebral, more diverse than before. He was not really considered a prophet in his new country, of which he became a full-fledged citizen in 1939: his famous Concerning the spiritual in art, written in 1911, partially translated into English in 1912, available in Italian as of 1940, would not be translated into French until 1949, after his death.
• Kandinsky, 1933-1944, les années parisiennes, published by Somogy, 2016, 288 p., €28.

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