Wolf Kahn

Self-Portrait, 1954, Wolf Kahn

Although it's not so critical in art, one of the problems of studying computer sciences is that the education you get has a shelf-life of...ohh...say...fifteen minutes? No, it's not quite that bad, but things change so fast that in as little as fifteen months, unless the individual keeps up on things, he or she becomes a technological Neanderthal. Other practitioners from doctors and to auto mechanics have the same problem except not on quite such an accelerated timeline. For artists, the situation is a somewhat less critical, though not without it's similarities. Tools change; so do materials, techniques, styles, tastes, and marketing practices. Fifteen years ago, computers, for instance, were an anathema to most artists, the very antithesis of what it meant to employ the human touch to the creative act. Today, many artists would sooner give up their brushes than part with their beloved bucket of bugs.

Green Tangle Pastel, 2004,
Wolf Kahn, styles change, so
do artists.

Imagine the plight of an artist during the 1950s, studying in Europe, soaking up the great Abstract Expressionist theories and techniques, immersing himself in color, Italian Futurism, and the centuries of artistic beauty associated with the city of Venice. Now multiply that times two as that artist marries another artist. When they return to New York about 1960, they discover, to their dismay, that their cutting edge Abstract Expressionism is suddenly so dated that critics wouldn't even look at it, much less write about it. It would be enough to make one start to think about painting canned goods or fast food. That was the plight of Wolf Kahn and his wife, Emily as they faced the desperate realization that Pop was popular and their giant, abstracted, color, nature studies were dead in the water.

Mineral Spirits, 1993, Emily Mason Kahn

However, as any truly dedicated artists would, they persisted. Working well outside the mainstream, Wolf's work became more about nature, less abstract perhaps, but nonetheless eternally about color harmonies, and disharmonies. Eventually, some degree of success came along, gradually outstripping that of his brother, Peter, who was also a noted painter, but whose interests were more broadly focused on several other of the arts. Wolf's nature paintings were not landscapes in the traditional sense. They were not so much depictions of nature, but more accurately distillations. Emily's work remained quite abstract and gestural, her colors slipping and sliding across the canvas like oil on water, glistening and glowing ephemerally. Emily's creative efforts also include work that previous generations of female artists seldom experienced--raising a family. She notes that in the past, "...women painters did not have children, or if they did, they were not taken seriously." Emily and Wolf have two daughters. Cecily is a painter (the most avant-garde in the whole family) while Melany is a filmmaker. In that Wolf's mother was also a painter, the girls make up three generations of creative efforts in the arts.

The work of Cecily Kahn can be seen at: www.cecilykahn.com

Why Sculptors Envy Painters

How sculptors must envy painters! As painters, we pull together our works through many different processes. But the two most critical points are the beginning and the end. It could be a photo, a drawing from life, a scene painted on location, or just simple "inspiration" but we all have our sources. And just as important as the process in getting ready to paint is that leading up to the last stroke, when we are in the process of exhausting our last drops of genius and making the ultimate decision regarding the work--it's finished. In between, from preparing the canvas to drawing, and through the whole painting process, there is room for lots of trial and error, and seldom is there much of a possibility for a single mistaken stroke bringing the whole thing crashing down around our ears. It's little wonder then that an artist such as Michelangelo, the sculptor, would consider mere painting such a trivial pursuit and find the need to work on paintings of such enormous scale in order to challenge his genius.

David (preliminary drawing),
1501, Michelangelo

As a sculptor, Michelangelo began planning his work much as he would if he were painting it. He started with drawings, often several, depicting various parts of the work, evolving it into the completed design. As the idea grew in his mind, so too did the scale of his drawing until it was the actual size of the final sculpture. (Michelangelo planned most of his works from a single viewpoint.) As he made the arduous journey into the Apuan Alps to Carrara to select his stone, he must have envied the ease at which a wooden panel or bare wall could be plastered, ready to paint. He would spend days and weeks choosing the stones for a large commission, looking for faults, discoloration, and other defects. Then the stones had to be carefully cut free and moved down the mountain on skids, managed by huge ropes and lots of human muscle, whereupon each was loaded onto a sturdy wagon to be pulled by a train of up to ten teams of stout oxen, each team with a driver mounted on their yoke to "encourage" the animals to move the great weight. And if the ground was wet, forget it! Fortunately, Michelangelo didn't have to go through all that for his David. He "inherited" the David block from the Florentine city fathers, who commissioned the work. The chunk of marble was a misbegotten leftover from an earlier sculptor's incomplete effort. However, moving the finished piece to its original setting in the Piazza della Signoria, must have been a nerve wracking endeavor for all concerned.

David, 1504., Michelangelo

The  uncarved marble had lain derelict in a weed-choked field near Florence's Duomo for  several years. The trip to Michelangelo's workshop amounted to only a few city blocks. Quite massive and heavy, yet fragile, any mishap could result in it being broken and made largely worthless. Once in place, ready to be carved, Michelangelo transferred a full-size drawing to the front of the stone, then began work, hacking away at it. Unlike many sculptors before and since, studies of his unfinished pieces tend to indicate Michelangelo liked to work primarily from the "front" of his work toward the back. It's believed he may have used a visual aid in working on the sculpture--a wax model, lying on its back, submerged in a container of water scaled to the outside dimensions of the stone. As water was dipped from the container, it exposed the front of the model allowing him to see that part of the stone which should be cut away to "free" the figure trapped within. Michelangelo was one of the fastest "marble cutters" of his time, yet, even with this little "trick," a smartly trained eye, years of experience, and a workaholic lifestyle, it took him three years to carve his David. Now, aren't you glad you're a painter?

Wayne Thiebaud

Thiebaud cartooning during his army days, 1944

One of the great things about studying Pop Art is that many of its painters are still alive. Whether you're talking Lichtenstein (no longer living) or Indiana or Claes Oldenburg (yes, he painted too), they have all taken their five years of Pop Art fame, built on it, and moved on. One of the more interesting of these, and perhaps more under-appreciated than most, is Wayne Thiebaud. It's hard to say why, but just maybe it's because, while the others were are New York artists, Thiebaud is west coast born and bred. Actually he was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, but close enough. And though he flirted with the New York art scene for a time in the 1950s, everything about him and his art almost literally screams California! This former art teacher, former Disney animator, former Universal Studios illustrator, and former Rexall Drug chain artist is more Californian than prunes or palm trees.

Wayne Thiebaud with his favorite food and
favorite art, Marthacakes, 1963, one of the
tempting confections (though inedible)
which made him famous.

Just looking at Thiebaud's 60's Pop creations will make you gain ten pounds. His work is like Edward Hopper gone mad in a deli bakery. Indeed, Thiebaud claims a great deal of affinity with Hopper. His paint, his style, his cold, dismal calculation, yet hot color environment is Thiebaud's most noticeable influence. But there is also the spirit of Chardin inhabiting his luscious cupcakes and bundt confections. There is David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, the rich, expressionistic colors of Rockwell Kent, and even Balthus haunting his work as well. Thiebaud considers himself a cartoonist who learned to paint. Indeed, in his early years, he lived in a YMCA where he drew cartoons six days a week then took off every Wednesday to make the rounds of New York magazines hawking his work.  Even now he considers his work caricature--not in the usual sense of drawing recognizable faces of celebrities, but caricatures of things. And still today, just as with his Pop Art, he's especially fond of food. Yeah, ain't we all.

River Cloud, 2002, Wayne Thiebaud

Thiebaud was raised a Mormon, on a farm that raised food. He milked cows, rode horses, fed the chickens, plowed the fields, planted the corn, potatoes, and beans; and in his "spare time" played with art--little projects his mother made up for him. He was sixteen before he began to seriously study art, but it was his work in restaurants as a teenager that may have had more to do with his art than what he learned in school; especially since he had no formal art instruction after high school. He learned on the job, drawing John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, and presumably Mickey Mouse. Today, mixed among the hot dogs and hors d'oeuvres, are cockeyed views of the city, often seen from above, where thoroughfares tangle like spaghetti, incline like roller coasters, and swirl downward like children's slides. At first glance, they seem nonrepresentational, except perhaps to Californians, use to peering down through TV lenses from helicopters watching traffic or high-speed freeway chases. Still dapper, even preppy, at 91 years of age, Thiebaud enjoys tennis as much as painting, and still the art teacher, he likes talking about art, more than either one.

Vincent's Love Life

If someone were to make a list of the most written-about artists who ever lived, the exact order of importance might be in debatable, but without a doubt, at the top would be Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. There have been other, equally great and influential artists living and working along side these titans, so why have these four seemingly gotten the bulk of the ink? The answer is simple. Merely writing about the art of great artists is boring. To generate any real interest, artists have to have been colorful, troubled, and tragic, as well as tremendously talented and influential. All of the above were all of the above.  Leonardo was a mysterious genius, Michelangelo a lonely workaholic, Picasso a flamboyant, creative dynamo, and Vincent...well, we might say he was something of all these rolled into one.

Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1888,
Vincent van Gogh

Perhaps because of this, Vincent van Gogh may well top the list. I'm not going to add significantly to the overwhelming volume of words depicting this troubled soul. Writing about his work would be redundant and, as I said before, boring (yes, even van Gogh). I could write about his chronic mental illness, but that would quickly become quite clinical and boring too. And, we all know already quite a lot about two of the men in his life, his crucial, touching relationship with his brother, Theo, and his stormy friendship with Paul Gauguin. Very well, what about the women in his life?  Mmm...that sounds juicy and also far less familiar. Moreover, there were five of them.

Cornelia Adriana Vos-Stricker

Eugenie Loyer,
Vincent's first love

First, of course, was Vincent's mother, Anna Cornelia (above). She appears to have been a very normal, Dutch, Protestant mother whose most notable trait would seem to be her surprising longevity. She outlived both her sons by some seventeen years! She died in 1907 at the age 88.

At the tender age of twenty, Vincent found his first love, a sweet, young English girl named Eugenie Loyer (above, left), the daughter of the woman who ran the boarding house where he stayed. She rejected him for another man. He became very depressed, began his Bible studies, and moved to Paris. Eight years later, in 1881, his fling with religion behind him, Vincent fell in love with Cornelia Adriana Vos-Stricker (above, right, called Kee), who incidentally happened to be his cousin. She rejected him too, this time triggering his first bout with the mental illness that would eventually end his life.

Woman Sewing with Girl,
1883, Vincent van Gogh

A year later, Vincent met Clasina Maria Hoomik (called Sien), a pregnant prostitute with a five-year-old daughter (both depicted by Vincent in the drawing at left). After living with her more than a year, he ended up in a hospital with gonorrhea. As the health of his father deteriorated, Vincent moved back to Holland where he set up a small studio and fell in love with the daughter of his neighbor, Margot Begemann (below). They planned to marry, but both families opposed the union, and in despair, Margot attempted to poison herself. With the death of his father in 1885, a tormented Vincent returned to France, his love life  as tortured as his state of mind.  There he finally found love, if not contentment, in his painting. During the next five years, he was to conceive and bring forth a remarkable 864 vibrant painted masterpieces--the timeless fruit of his one true love.

Margot Begemann, the only
woman to ever love Vincent.

Vernacular Art

The Fountain, 1913, Marcel Duchamp

Back in the year 1913, the French Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp (living in New York at the time), took a urinal, laid it on its back, signed it, "R. Mutt," and named it The Fountain. He then entered it anonymously into the ground breaking Armory Show of that year, much to the consternation of even the most liberal minds in charge. Actually, Duchamp was one of those liberal minds in charge. In any case, he then, as a member of the jury, argued for its inclusion. It was, after some rather heated discussion, eliminated from the show, unceremoniously dumped in a back alley. But by that time it had served its purpose (and Duchamp's) in attempting to broaden the definition of what is "art." This is very much the situation when a curator of a museum uses "vernacular art" in an exhibition. As a Co-organizer of the Armory show, Duchamp was both an artist as well as a co-curator.

In 1970, the curators of the Museum of Modern Art assembled surveillance camera photos of bank robberies to create a new work of art they titled One Eyed Dicks. Individually, none of them would be art, but together, through the artistic devices of the curator, they made an artistic statement. Vernacular photography is therefore art made, not by the maker of the photographs, but by the user of the photographs (in this case the curator). It would be no different if one of us found some old photos in the family archives and used them in the creation of a collage thereby making art where there was none before. Since the days of Duchamp, artists have been taking "found" objects and assembling them into works of art (especially sculpture). However, the question that arises is, should a curator of a museum take on this role?  Should a curator become an artist or should the two roles forever remain separate?

Orange Marilyn, 1964, Andy Warhol

A similar quandary arose with regard to the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and the family's attempt to regain its ownership from the federal government. So far as I know, except for its use in Irving Stone's film, JFK (which may or may not count), no one, curator or artist, has ever exhibited this footage as a work of art alone, or as a part of a larger museum exhibit, which would certainly leave suspect the Zapruder family's legal argument that the film is, in itself, a work of art involving a cultural icon. So, this begs the next question, what about a "cultural icon?" Is a cultural icon a work of art or merely a museum piece? Is the comparison of the Zapruder film to Warhol's Orange Marilyn a valid argument in that, like JFK, Marilyn Monroe is also a cultural icon? Warhol didn't make of Marilyn a cultural icon any more than Zapruder made one of President Kennedy. It's a complex issue. I think the question boils down to the fact that Warhol intended Orange Marilyn to be a work of art (a cultural icon about a cultural icon) whereas Zapruder was merely shooting a home movie of President Kennedy, the cultural icon, simply as a curiosity or keepsake. Therefore, the Zapruder family's legal claim that the film is in any way a work of art seems, at best, to be weak.

Renaissance Cities--Urbino

The Ducal Palace, Urbino, Italy

It's tempting when we think of Renaissance Italy to fall into the frame of mind that the whole world revolved around Rome and Florence. This is only natural for many of the best artists, architects, sculptors, and thinkers did tend to gravitate toward one or the other of these poles--the Catholic Church in Rome and the humanism of the de Medici family in Florence. And strangely enough, though it was Rome where many of the greatest works of the time were created, it was Florence who fed the church's insatiable appetite for artists, and even popes. A few well-informed students of Renaissance art might recall that Milan was where the Florentine, Leonardo, did much of his work, rather than Rome, and that Venice was also an important center of Renaissance art.

Federico da Montefeltro,
ca. 1450, Pierro della Francesco

But what about Urbino?  Ever heard of Mantua?  Could you even find Ferrara on a map of Italy?  It's quite likely most might be hard-pressed to find any of the cities I've mentioned (with the possible exception of Rome) on a map of the Italian "boot." Okay, a little art/geography lesson. Let's start with Urbino. It's almost due north of Rome on the opposite side of the boot, near the Adriatic Sea. It was a small, hilltop town in which the massive ducal palace of the Montefeltro family was almost bigger than the town itself, and indeed from a distance, it all appeared to be one structure (above). If you've ever seen a picture of the Duke (right), he's the one always shown in profile with a sort of notch in the bridge of his nose.  He earned that facial characteristic (and a missing eye) in battle as a heroic mercenary soldier for the church which was how he got his title and land.

Duomo of Urbino, 1604, Leon Battista Alberti
(the facade is of a later date)

From 1444 to 1482, he and his family presided over one of the most enlightened courts in Italy, his patronage being responsible for much of the artistic "research" responsible for the development of the rules of perspective, proportions, foreshortening, and anatomical studies. A brilliant scholar himself, Federico Montefeltro (above), was one of the most cultured, well-educated men of his time with a personal library of over 1,100 books.  His court sheltered such artists as the painter Piero della Francesca (above, right), the architects, Georgi Martini and Leon Battista Alberti (above), as well as their student Donato Bramante, the man responsible for the initial plans and construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.  During the coming days and weeks, we'll be looking at some of the other "lesser known" cities which shared in the reawakening of Italy and Europe in general during this fascinating period.

Transavantguardia

Son of the Son, 1982, Sandro Chia

Just when you think you've seen and heard it all with regard to new art and art movements, something really new or really obscure pops up that may lead you to think that, as they say, "You don't know the half of it." Ever heard of Transavantguardia? Heard of it, you say, I can't even spell it. Well, like so many art movements, it was one extreme in the pendulum swing. Basically it means beyond the avant-garde. Not long ago, I mentioned the Roman Secession and its negative reaction by Italians to, not only traditional Italian genius in the arts, but to Futurism as well. It would seem that a few more ticks of the clock, a few more swings of the pendulum and you come to Transavantguardia (sometimes called Neo-expressionism), which was a rediscovery of figural art, and traditional tools, techniques, and colors in painting. But it wasn't a rediscovery of 1950s, postwar figural painting but Renaissance painting (ala Michelangelo). The year was 1979. A whole new generation had grown up since the Figural 50s and had time to digest and react to what their fathers had done with paint, brushes, and pigments on canvas.

Inside Outside, 1980, Francesco Clemente

The reaction was one of dismay, longing for something more than mere bodies. Among the artists in the group was Sandro Chia (above, right), Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria, Mimmo Paladino, and Francesco Clemente (left). They wanted to pull out all the stops to expressive freedom without reference to any one cultural mode, but assimilating all of them. The result was a considerable amount of inconsistency often referred to by critics as "nomadism." Nonetheless, they moved to meld Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, Realism and numerous other divergent influences without any cultural or political ax to grind. There was even a German branch of the movement that was especially sensitive to their postwar past, wanting mostly to free German art from the overwhelming power of American art which had so pervading their culture.

La Mano ubbidisce all'intelletto, 1983,
Carlo Maria Mariani

Some critics called this development "anachronistic painting." It looked back to Mannerism and Neoclassicism such as in Carlo Maria Mariani's La Mano ubbidisce all'intelletto (The Hand Obeying the Intellect, right), painted in 1983. In it he depicts two classically nude Greek male figures each with brush in hand, sitting facing one another, both delicately painting one another. The figures and composition are crystal clear. The colors are Renaissance, the content Surrealistic, the poses Classical. It's a painting mirroring itself but also reflecting its independent existence. It's unquestionably Italian, but with so many international influences, it also reflects the fact that, by the 1980s, art was no longer provincial, but global in scope. In that sense, perhaps we're all Transavantguardian painters.