The Glam-Ur-ous Life: Archaeology and Modern Art

When British archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered in December 1927 the tomb of Puabi, the queen/priestess of the Sumerian city of Ur during the First Dynasty of Ur more than 4,000 years ago, the story rivaled that of Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt just five years earlier. “Magnificent with jewels,” as Woolley described it, Puabi’s tomb contained the bodies of dozens of attendants killed to accompany her in the afterlife — the ideal material for a headline-grabbing PR campaign that momentarily shouldered Tut out of the spotlight. A new exhibit at New York’s The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World titled From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics puts Puabi back in the spotlight to examine how archaeology and aesthetics intersected, transforming ancient art into modern and making modern art strive to be ancient. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Glam-Ur-ous Life: Archaeology and Modern Art."

How Football Is Like a Modern Painting

As the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks prepare to meet this Sunday in Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium, you’ll hear a lifetime’s worth of metaphors for football, many of which have already been catalogued and parodied in George Carlin’s classic routine “Football versus Baseball.” One metaphor you’re less likely to hear is how football is like a modern painting, but that’s a common metaphor in one of the most unusual, but most insightful sports books written about the game—Nicholas Dawidoff’s Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football. If you’re a fan of football or just a fan of interesting, quirky writing that gets at the creative artistry of any activity, including sports, Dawidoff’s Collision Low Crossers is the book for you. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Football Is Like a Modern Painting."

Old Friends: The Surrealists at the National Galleries of Scotland

When Roland Penrose began buying artwork after returning to England in 1935, he focused on purchasing the works of the Parisian Surrealists—the circle of artists that had embraced him as one of their own. Old friends such as Dali, Magritte, Miro, Picasso, De Chirico, and others graced Penrose’s walls. Penrose left most of his collection to the National Galleries of Scotland, who bring the old gang together in Another World: Dali, Magritte, Miro and the Surrealists, an exhibition running through January 9, 2011. Scotland doesn’t seem like the obvious place for Surrealism, but isn’t that the point of Surrealism? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Old Friends."

[Many thanks to the National Galleries of Scotland for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Another World: Dali, Magritte, Miro and the Surrealists, which runs through January 9, 2011.]

The Thin Man

“To my terror the sculptures became smaller and smaller,” Alberto Giacometti once said of his earliest attempts at sculpture. “Only when small were they like, and all the same these dimensions revolted me, and tirelessly I began again, only to end up, a few months later, at the same point.” Giacometti, born on this date in 1901, found himself compelled to create distorted figures, thinning and elongating them beyond normalcy. Such distortions mirror the distorted view Giacometti had of life and art. Friend of the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Satre, Giacometti sculpted his Existentialism. As innocent and almost cartoonish as Man Pointing (above, from 1947) may seem, the man may be pointing towards the horror of human existence as much as anything else.

Giacometti lived in Paris in the glory days of modern art, befriending fellow artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and Max Ernst. Giacometti flirted with Surrealism during this time, taking away more of the horrific, life-negating aspects of that movement than the playful, life-celebrating ones. Giacometti lived in a style as thin as his sculptures, rejecting the conventional life in every way. “Establishing yourself, furnishing a house, building up a comfortable existence, and having that menace hanging over your head all the time—no, I prefer to live in hotels, cafés, just passing through,” Giacometti once said. The “menace” of life appears in his macabre 1932 sculpture Woman with Her Throat Cut (above). As violent and perhaps misogynistic as the eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou, Woman with Her Throat Cut screams with the Existentialist view of life Giacometti adopted. When diagnosed with stomach cancer near the end of his life, Giacometti bizarrely remarked that of all the diseases he could have, stomach cancer was the one he always wanted.

Casts of Giacometti’s work can be found in almost any major museum. By the end of his life, Giacometti became one of the most financially successful and lauded artists of the twentieth century. Works such as Monumental Head (above, from 1960) display that undeniably recognizable Giacometti touch. Devoid of the artist’s philosophy, such works can actually seem benign, a playing with the conventions of the human form. Taking into account the ravages of fascism’s effects on twentieth century Europe, however, they become characters of the apocalypse. Giacometti once remarked that he felt crushed standing in front of the frescos of Giotto. Such a sensitive soul could only feel equally crushed and stretched beyond all proportion before the mosaic of human cruelty he witnessed firsthand during the two world wars. Perhaps these works offer some solace in showing that the human soul can be crushed and stretched almost beyond recognition yet still, in some sense, remain intact.

The Tactility of Desire

Henri Matisse, Still Life with a Geranium, 1906; oil on canvas; 38½ x 31½ in.; The Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Winterbotham Collection; © 2007 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


“I sculpted as a painter,” Henri Matisse once maintained. “I did not sculpt like a sculptor.” The exhibit Matisse: The Painter as Sculptor opening on June 9th at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art tries to rewrite Matisse’s self-deprecating remarks and return his sculpture to its proper place in the overall scheme of his ground-breaking modernist work. “We can acknowledge the primacy of [Matisse’s] painting without valuing sculpture, drawing, or printmaking any less,” writes Jay McKean Fisher in the catalogue to the exhibit, expressing the overall goal of the exhibit not to play down the power of Matisse’s paintings but to elevate sculpture to the secondary but not subservient level it deserves in his oeuvre. Matisse’s Still Life With Geranium (above) features his sculptures The Thorn Extractor and Woman Leaning on Her Hands to the left and right, respectively, of the flower, emblemizing the organic unity of Matisse’s painting and sculpture at the heart of the exhibit.

Steven Nash, Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, sets the tone for the catalogue in his opening essay, “The Other Matisse.” Nash sees Matisse as cultivating “an image of himself as an amateur sculptor” to allow himself “considerable freedom… in his exploration of the medium.” For Matisse, “sculpture provide[s] a means of thinking and feeling that painting did not and could not, in other words, a distinct epistemological system.” Nash goes on to show how Matisse moves from painting to sculpture and back again in a never-ending cycle of seeking solutions to issues of two- and three-dimensionality and volume that neither medium could answer alone. Along the way, Matisse breaks new artistic ground not only in his paintings but also in his sculpture. “No parallels exist in early modern sculpture for the abstractions of form that Matisse achieved at this early date,” Nash claims.

Henri Matisse, Reclining Nude I (Aurora), 1907; bronze; 13 9/16 x 19 5/8 x 11 in.; The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland; © 2007 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

One of the finest examples of this interplay between formats, which Nash sees as “always complex and not just the one-way street from painting to sculpture that is too often claimed with implications of prioritization,” exists between the sculpture Reclining Nude I (Aurora) (above) and the painting Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (below). Here, the sculpture existed before the painting, inspiring the voluminous representation of the nude, assisting Matisse in realizing in paint the solutions he had discovered in clay. Sculpture frees Matisse’s mind and spirit, permiting him “vicarious possession of [his] models” through the physicality of clay, resulting in a “tactility of desire” and a “sexual candor” painting alone may never have achieved.



Henri Matisse, Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra), 1907; oil on canvas; 36¼ x 55¼ in.; The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland; © 2007 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This transformation, which Matisse described as the desire to “condense my sensations,” owes much to the “direct sensual involvement” of sculpture and falls into place with the “revisionist view of Matisse now gaining currency that shows his passionate side” in the wake of Hilary Spurling’s invaluable two-volume biography of Matisse.

Dorothy Kosinski, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas, examines the issues of influence in “Matisse and His Contemporaries.” For Matisse, Auguste Rodin “was a starting point, a father figure, [and] the object ultimately of Oedipal fury,” as Kosinski shows. This exhibit strives not to reduce Matisse’s sculpture to a sum of his influences, but to illustrate how Matisse takes those influences to address the same modernist concerns of his contemporaries, such as Picasso and Giacometti. For example, Matisse views the “fleeting movements and fractions of seconds” captured in the sculpture of Rodin and Degas and tries to sculpt figures “in stasis but hardly at rest.” Matisse’s sculptures take the movement of Rodin and Degas but marry it to the architectural grounding of the painting techniques of Cezanne and Courbet while retaining the same core tensions. Eventually, Matisse sculpted figures consisting of nothing but torsos, the “densest region” of the body, “the source of its physical power and balance,” which Kosinski recognizes as the heart and soul of Matisse’s sculpture and the source of their continuing ability to fascinate.

We discover the interplay between Matisse’s drawing and sculpture in Jay McKean Fisher’s essay, “Drawing Is Sculpture Is Drawing.” Fisher, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at The Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland,
finds that “the very legibility of [Matisse’s] artistic process makes its apprehension by the viewer essential” and proceeds to lead us towards that apprehension through the wealth of studies and drawings (many never exhibited before) that reveal so much of the master’s process. For Matisse, the act of drawing, especially the tactile use of erasure and stumping, recalled the same sensation of using clay, marrying the two media in his imagination. Recalling that Matisse’s own “writings on art embrace a commitment to explanation,” Fisher helps enfold the reader in that same embrace.

This same desire for self-revelation comes into play in Oliver Shell’s essay “Seeing Figures: Exhibition and Vision in Matisse’s Sculpture.” Shell shows how Matisse’s sculptures how a “visual self-consciousness” and a “made-to-be-looked-at-ness” through a series of installation photographs and studio photos documenting how Matisse himself desired that these sculptures be seen in the context of his other works. Matisse allowed himself to be photographed by Edward Steichen, who employs a “pictorialist rhetoric—rhetoric specific to the depiction of artistic genius” to present Matisse as more than just a painter through his devotion to sculpture and the goal of being an overall artist. In this “visual self-consciousness,” even sculptures such as Large Seated Nude (below) become “a surrogate viewer occupying the space of the museum-goers while conditioning and instructing them about the ideal mental attitude with which to confront art.” Matisse’s sculptures actually dictate how they are to be viewed, inviting the viewer to ease back and allow the play of shapes and forms to wash over his imagination.

Henri Matisse, Large Seated Nude, 1922–29; bronze; The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland; © 2007 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Ann Boulton concludes the collection of essays with “The Making of Matisse’s Bronzes,” the first technical examination of the materials and techniques, most of which were grounded in the nineteenth-century training Matisse received, through the use of laser-scanned computer models and x-rays.

The exhibit and catalogue of Matisse: The Painter as Sculptor achieve their stated goal of unifying the various media Matisse used to examine the outer reaches of his imagination. Just as Matisse’s sculptures are best seen in the round to appreciate every nuance, the various essays of the catalogue each offer a new perspective on the works and Matisse that add up to a well-rounded masterpiece.

[Many thanks to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for providing me with a review copy of this book and for providing the images appearing above.]

Still Things to Believe In

The Tate Museum's magazine, Tate Etc., features a poem each month inspired by a work in their collection. This month's poem is by Tishani Doshi and is inspired by Alberto Giacometti's Walking Woman (pictured above). Here's a taste:

Ode to the Walking Woman

after Alberto Giacometti

Sit –

you must be tired

of walking,

of losing yourself

this way:

a bronzed rib

of exhaustion

thinned out

against the dark.

Sit –

there are still things

to believe in;

like civilizations

and birthing

and love.

And there's nothing like good poetry (and good art) to make you believe that there's still things to believe in.