Is David Bowie the Picasso of Our Time?

 When David Bowie played Andy Warhol in the 1996 film Basquiat, he wore Warhol’s actual wig and glasses. Bowie met Warhol in his travels through the art world and even played the song he wrote about him to Warhol, which Andy, of course, didn’t like. In an interview leading up to the exhibition David Bowie is (at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, Canada, through November 27, 2013), artist Jeremy Deller compares Warhol’s influence on the 1960s to Bowie influence on the 1970s. “They both ruled the decade,” Deller claims. “They defined it and they changed it.” However, the artist that Bowie mirrors the most may be another of his favorites, Pablo Picasso. Like Picasso, the single constant in Bowie’s career has been being on the cutting edge of change. Over the years, Bowie’s been Ziggy Stardust, Tao Jones, Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and John Merrick, the “Elephant Man.” But Bowie’s always been Bowie through all those incarnations. David Bowie is shows you how he’s been all those things and more, but also what he “is” today—an influential force beyond any single art form, the Picasso of our time. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is David Bowie the Picasso of Our Time?"

When Modernism First Moved

Modernism first moved on May 29, 1913. That’s century-old hyperbole, of course, but if any date achieves day of infamy status for modern art in the 20^th century, it’s the day that Russian composer Igor Stravinsky teamed up with Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes company to stage Le Sacre du printemps, or, in English, The Rite of Spring. Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929: When Art Danced with Music, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, returns to that cataclysmic moment when modernism became an unavoidable reality for the mainstream public, which had done its level best to ignore it previously. Multimedia in its combination of music, dance, and artistic design, The Rite of Spring and other productions by the Ballet Russes helped modernism move beyond the fringe to the center of Western culture ever since. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "When Modernism First Moved." 

[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for the image above and other press materials related to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929: When Art Danced with Music, which runs through September 2, 2013.]

Going Negative

The big question asked during any campaign season, including the current one for president of the United States, is who will “go negative” and when. Ukrainian artist Alexander Archipenko went “negative” early and often in his innovative Cubist sculptures such as Blue Dancer (above, from 1913-1918), which defines the human form through negative space as it does through volume. Born May 30, 1887, Archipenko left his native Kiev for Paris in 1908 and never looked back. Surrounded by the founders of Cubism—Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque—and by fellow Russians such as Kazimir Malevich and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Archipenko found a second home in Paris. Unlike many other figures of the Russian Avant-Garde, Archipenko escaped the mania and, later, the repercussions of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism. Like his Blue Dancer, Archipenko skipped away lightly to the political and creative freedom of Paris at its most thrilling during the early days of modern art.

In addition to sculpture, Archipenko painted and did graphic work, such as the lithograph Cubist Still Life (above, from 1921). Archipenko drafted Cubist Still Life in Berlin, his home after World War I. Since 1913, Archipenko exhibited in Germany and found a receptive audience. Although post-war German artists at that time were exploring the possibilities of Expressionism and New Objectivity , Archipenko’s take on cubism, specifically Synthetic Cubism , caught their eye and spurred them to new ways of seeing the world around them. Archipenko left Germany for America in 1923, again escaping before the economic crises of the late 1920s paved the way for Hitler and the Nazis to assume control. As would be expected, Archipenko’s art found its way onto the list of “Degenerate Art.”. The Nazis forced German museums to expel all their works by Archipenko in the late 1930s, but by then Archipenko was an American citizen, teaching and working there for the rest of his life.

If you’re ever on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania , walk down to 36th and Walnut Streets and see Archipenko’s King Solomon (above, from 1963), erected just a year before the artist’s death. As war raged in Europe, Archipenko found asylum in America, adapting his sculpture over the years to include found objects (ala Duchamp , a friend from his Paris days), terra cotta, and even internal lighting. Whereas Blue Dancer is all lightness and air, King Solomon, done half a century later, is all monumental gravity and weight, a symbol of wisdom meant to inspire some intellectual gravitas in the undergraduates blithely walking by on their way to a game of Ultimate Frisbee . There’s a timelessness in Archipenko’s work that makes you wonder just how influenced he was by world events other than the most current art movements. Always one step ahead of the forces of oppression, Archipenko never allowed the negative energy of the world to touch him or his art.

Through Thick and Thin

Before World War II, Nicolas de Stael painted mainly representational works. When hostilities erupted, de Stael responded to reality with greater and greater abstraction. Born January 5, 1914, de Stael met Jean Arp and Sonia and Robert Delaunay in the South of France in 1941 and followed their example in creating his first abstract paintings. de Stael painted Marathon (above) in 1948, but it represents much of his early work in the thick application of impasto. Like the Abstract Expressionists in America, de Stael’s paints in an athletic, physical style that naturally drew him to paint several sports scenes. The struggle of the straining marathoner mirrors the struggles de Stael encountered in finding acceptance and monetary success. Two years before he painted Marathon, de Stael’s wife died from malnutrition.

de Stael first found success in his abstract works based on recognizable landscapes, such as his Mount Sainte-Victorie (above, from 1954). To paint the same mountain that Cezanne made famous took a lot of courage, which de Stael certainly had. de Stael painted often with a palette knife, thickly working the paint onto the surface, similar to the technique of Chaim Soutine. Although de Stael knew and befriended Georges Braque, one of the founders of Cubism, I find it hard to see much influence in his work. de Stael’s unique blend of different influences, many of which concentrated on the use of color to express emotion, adds up to a school unto itself in many ways. This stylistic isolation found a counterpart in de Stael’s personal life, as depression forced him to pull away from his artistic peers. Many see de Stael’s work as a forerunner of Color field painting, which I agree with if you place his work next to that of Hans Hofmann, who also served as an inspiration to the Color Field artists but never truly became one of them.

de Stael finally succumbed to the worst elements of his depression in 1955 and took his own life by leaping from the balcony of his eleventh story studio. Blue Reclining Nude (above, from 1955) remained as one of his final works, a bold simplification of the human form that harks back to Picasso’s Blue Period and looks forward to the Color Field artists, again, in its use of broad areas of color composed of thinly applied paint. The artist who began working with such a heavy hand ended with a lighter touch. Sadly, nothing could lighten his heavy heart.

Designing Woman

“He who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery,” Sonia Terk Delaunay once said. Born November 14, 1885, Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert created some of the most powerful images of the Orphic school, such as her Electric Prisms (above, from 1914). Electric Prisms takes full advantage of Sonia’s incredible grasp of color relationships, playing the different tones off of one another, with all the subtle concordances and dissonances, as if she were playing on a musical instrument one of the compositions of her musical contemporaries Les Six.

Sonia and Robert followed the mystic lead of the Czech painter Frantisek Kupka, whose spirituality energized the earliest Orphic works. In many ways, Orphism stands at the intersection where turn of the century spiritualism, new color theories, and new musical innovations such as jazz all collide. Sonia’s Rhythm (above, from 1938) explicitly calls to mind this musical side of Orphism, where colors are meant to wash over the viewer like a symphony, appealing to the soul and the senses more than the rational mind. During their lifetime together, from their marriage in 1910 to Robert’s death in 1941, Sonia assumed a secondary role, allowing Robert’s art to take center stage. After his death, however, Sonia assumed her rightful place.

In 1964, the Louvre staged a retrospective exhibition of Sonia’s work, making her the first living woman artist so honored. In 1975, she became an officer of the French Legion of Honor. These accolades come not only in response to Sonia’s painting, but also for her work in theater design and fashion. Sonia’s startlingly designed (and startlingly uncomfortable) knitted wool swimsuit (above, from 1928) helped usher in a new age of fashion in the twentieth century linked to the latest art movements. With such designs, Sonia helped blur the line between fine art and fashion for future designers. By raising the previously disregarded area of textiles to the level of fine arts, Sonia paved the way for future artists such as Judy Chicago to create The Dinner Party, which incorporates all the supposedly lower, feminine arts in an epic work of grand art and feminism. Fittingly, Judy Chicago left a place at the table (albeit as one of the floor tiles) for Sonia Delaunay, one of the grand dames of modernism.

Body Color

With his shaved head and long, monkish robe, Johannes Itten cut an interesting figure in the halls of the Bahaus, where he taught the famed “preliminary course” from 1919 to 1922 that prepared his students for the diversified curriculum of that famed art school. Born November 11, 1888, Itten created a whole new way of looking at color, combining his own unique spiritual life and love of music to develop a nuanced, multifaceted approach to color, as can be seen in teaching tools such as his Farbkreis (above, from 1961). “He who wants to become a master of color must see, feel, and experience each individual color in its many endless combinations with all other colors,” Itten once wrote. “Colors must have a mystical capacity for spiritual expression, without being tied to objects."

Itten practiced the Mazdaznan faith, a religious health movement based on a combination of Christianity and Zoroastrianism that emphasized vegetarianism, breathing exercises, and the cultivation of the body. Before starting each class, Itten would make his students perform gymnastic exercises to loosen them up and free their bodies as much as their minds for his teachings. Itten wanted his students to feel color in their bodies as much as see it through their eyes and experience it in their minds. His book, The Art of Color, contains many of his almost mystical ideas on color and still inspires students today. In works such as Die Begegnung (above, from 1916), Itten put his theories into practice, creating images remarkably similar to those of the Orphic artists Frantisek Kupka and Sonia and Robert Delaunay.



Today, Itten is a forgotten figure, known only as a color theorist to intrigued specialists or as one of the many colorful characters who passed through the doors of the Bauhaus during its heyday. Space Composition I (above, from 1944) shows both Itten’s strengths and his weaknesses. In Space Composition I we see Itten composing an intricate web of color contrasts and dissonances, choosing each color with the surrounding colors in mind, maximizing each piece for maximum effect. Itten plays games with color like a chessmaster, thinking many moves ahead and seeing the whole board in a way that others simply can’t. I’ve tried to untangle for myself Itten’s color theories, but he is light years beyond me, which may be his weakness. Tied to such powerful ideas about the use of color, many of Itten’s works look like school exercises—elaborate color wheels rather than organic works of art. I just can’t feel the color in his works the way he hoped one would, which is probably more my weakness than his.

Bohemian Mystic

As a young man, Frantisek Kupka worked as a medium at séances, bridging the gap between this world and the next. Kupka, born September 23, 1871, used this true belief in the mystical and transcendent and created a form of abstract art that bridged the worlds of Fauvism and Cubism in works such as Planes by Colors, Large Nude (above) from 1909. This portrait of his wife Eugenie throbs with bright Fauvist color, taking the experiments of Henri Matisse even further, yet also incorporating Pablo Picasso’s Cubist explosion of the figure by seemingly looking into the insides of the body in an eerie prophesy of an MRI machine.

In works such as 1919’s The Colored One (above), Kupka uses explosively expressive color and evocative shapes to create an image totally divorced from this plane of reality to suggest higher planes. Born in Dobvuska, Bohemia, Kupka was truly a wild Bohemian, intensely spiritual in all aspects of his life. Although Kupka studied under Sequens and Eisenmenger, two minor members of the devoutly Christian German art school known as the Nazarenes, his spirituality never takes any orthodox form. He actually painted quite naturalistically until 1906, when he felt the constrictions of realism too greatly. After the transitional stage in which works such as The Large Nude were painted, Kupka allowed himself total freedom from recognizable subjects. “The work of art, being itself abstract reality,” Kupka once said, “needs to be made up of invented elements.”

Kupka composed with colors and geometric shapes the way musicians compose with notes and rhythms. He recognized this parallel and titled many of his works with musical terms, such as Amphora: Fugure in Two Colors (above) from 1912. Robert and Sonia Delaunay were greatly influenced by Kupka’s paintings and modeled their own Orphism style after his abstractions. This “fugue” seems fresh and striking even today in the evocative gestures and movement within the image. Kupka tries to pull the viewer into his realm of possibility, the spiritual plane of pure art freed from the bonds of the physical. With his contributions to the new ways of seeing in modern art, Kupka opened the doors for later abstract artists to explore and represent their own personal spiritual lives.

Facing the Stars

We will bring you brushes paints and canvas
That you may spend your sacred leisure in the
light of truth Painting
as you once did my portrait
Facing the stars

From the epitaph on Henri Rousseau’s grave by his friend, poet Guillaume Apollinaire


Henri Rousseau, French Post-Impressionist famous for his primitive style, was born on May 21, 1844. Although he only began painting in his 40s, he dedicated his life to art after his retirement at 49 from his job as a tax collector. Almost entirely self-taught, Rousseau painted in a style entirely his own, “facing the stars” and following them according to his own blissful whim.

Aside from some advice from Jean-Leon Gerome, Rousseau’s art education was entirely self-inflicted. One of the downsides of this lacking is the sad condition of much of his work today due to his poor technique and choice of student-grade paints. However, the benefit of his fresh outlook and child-like wonder, such as in the Carnival Evening above, more than make up for any technical difficulties. I’ve seen Carnival Evening at the PMA many times and like to think of Rousseau himself as one of the figures dwarfed by the scenery, looking up and facing the stars.

The Sleeping Gypsy (above) , perhaps Rousseau’s most famous painting, comes to life in an episode of the children’s show Between the Lions (one of Alex’s favorites) in a story about how stories are constructed. Rousseau used jungles and exotic animals and figures to construct stories far beyond the everyday life of a Parisian tax collector.

A select few artists, such as Picasso and Robert Delaunay and Sonia Terk Delaunay, recognized Rousseau’s greatness early on, but it took many years for him to receive wider acceptance. Apollinaire’s epitaph for Rousseau begins “We salute you, Gentle Rousseau.” In the often violent world of modern art, Rousseau offers a gentler, more playful alternative.

Taking Second Place

The Orphic painter Robert Delaunay was born on this date in 1885, but it is his wife Sonia Terk Delaunay that captures my imagination today. (Robert’s Forms Circulaires is above and Sonia’s Electric Prisms is below.)

Critics justly praise Robert Delaunay’s use of color, which is as bold and joyous as anything the Fauves used. But Sonia Delaunay’s use of color, not only in her paintings but also in her textiles and fashion designs, is equally striking, if not more so just for its diversity of media.

“From the day we started living together, I played second fiddle and I never put myself first until the 1950s,” Sonia once said (quoted in Whitney Chadwick’s Women, Art, and Society, 3rd ed., page 261). Despite playing “second fiddle” until well after Robert’s death in 1941, in 1964 Sonia became the first living female artists to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre. What she could have accomplished if she had decided not to devote more energy to Robert’s career is one of the great “what if?” questions of art.

Sonia Delaunay’s story makes me think of other women who have voluntarily played a more supportive role at the expense of their own art. Lee Krasner, wife of Jackson Pollock, and Susan MacDowell Eakins, wife of Thomas Eakins, both come to mind. Krasner’s work appears at the MoMA near Pollock’s and looks similar enough to make you wonder sometimes where the influences begin and end. Susan Eakins studied under Thomas Eakins at the PAFA and was an award-winning student. (Susan’s painting in the Thomas Jefferson University gallery may be the only Eakins’ painting at TJU not currently up for bid, but only because it’s on loan to them.) I’ve looked at Susan Eakins’ work and often thought how easy it is to dismiss her as just Thomas’ wife and student, but, as with Sonia Delaunay and Lee Krasner, how far they could have gone if the roles in their marriages had been reversed will never be known.