How Peter Blume Painted His Personal Reality of Hope

On October 3, 1948, at 3:50 pm, Peter Blume finished his epic painting, years in the making, titled The Rock (shown above). “After a turbulent decade in which Peter Blume embarked on false starts, endured debilitating anxiety, experienced self-doubt, and found his faith in the creative process renewed,” Robert Cozzolino writes in the catalog to the new exhibition Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis, finishing The Rock must have been a great relief. Blume recorded that date and time the way many record the
birth of their children, for The Rock was his precious baby, but completing it marked a rebirth of sorts for Blume as a different kind of artist. Shaped by political and artistic currents of the first half of the 20^th century, Blume emerges as a difficult to categorize artist, but also as a fascinating visionary who struggled to paint a personal reality clinging to the foundation of hope. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Peter Blume Painted His Personal Reality of Hope."

With Friends Like These: How Isamu Noguchi Became an Artist

If the The Noguchi Museum’s 25^th anniversary exhibition were an episode of Friends, it would be titled “The One Where Isamu Became an Artist.” On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and his Contemporaries, 1922-1960, which runs through April 24, 2011, demonstrates just how Isamu Noguchi navigated through the worlds of sculpture, painting, dance, theater, and even architecture and design with a little help from his friends. Borrowing bits from different means of expression, Noguchi added them together into the greater sum of his sculpture. With friends like Arshile Gorky, Constantin Brancusi, Frida Kahlo, Martha Graham, and Louis Kahn, Noguchi became an artistic force transcending traditional boundaries. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "With Friends Like These."

[Image: Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, De Hirsh Margulies. Hitler Invades Poland, September 1, 1939. Crayon and sealing ink on paper, 17 1/2 x 22 7/8 in. © 2010 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2010 The Arshile Gorky Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy Gallery Gertrude Stein, New York.]

[Many thanks to the The Noguchi Museum for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibition On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and his Contemporaries, 1922-1960, which runs through April 24, 2011.]

How I Met Your Mother

I can’t think of any artist who suffered as much in his life as Arshile Gorky. Fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turkish troops, he watched his mother starve to death in 1919 surrounded by fellow refugees. Upon coming to America, he shed his birth name of Vosdanig Adoian and remade himself as Arshile Gorky, taking the same last name as his hero, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had supported the Armenia cause. After years of success as an artist, the stretch from 1946 through 1948 became a sheer hell—a studio fire, rectal cancer, his wife’s infidelity, a car accident resulting in a broken neck and paralyzed painting arm—ceased only by his suicide. The Tate Modern’s exhibition Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective brings the pain, of course, but also the triumph of a man who never left truly left his mother country while bringing modernism to his new one. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How I Met Your Mother."

[Image: Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1926-36, 152.4 x 127 cm. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA). © Arshile Gorky Estate.]

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to and to the Tate Modern for the image above from the exhibition, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, running until May 9, 2010.]

Ladies Man

Of all the Abstract Expressionists, Willem de Kooning was always considered the most handsome, the most stylish, and the most debonair. (Val Kilmer played him in the movie Pollock.) Born April 24, 1904, came to America from his native Netherlands as a stowaway. Using his personal charm and growing artistic talent, he developed contacts throughout the New York City art world, the most important of which, at least early on, was Arshile Gorky. de Kooning painted in a very Gorky-esque style, full of the biomorphic figures Gorky is now famous for, into the early 1940s. By the 1950s, however, de Kooning had developed his own gesture-heavy style—a wild calligraphy of color. Some of the greatest examples of this style belong to the Woman series de Kooning painted in the early 1950s, beginning with Woman I (above, from 1950). de Kooning clearly has no desire to depict a woman realistically. In fact, he does everything possible to paint the figure unrealistically. Many people read misogyny into these paintings, extrapolating from de Kooning’s difficult relationship with his wife, Elaine de Kooning, and that’s certainly a possibility. But de Kooning also may be challenging the idea of portraiture and the figure itself, saying that we cannot get at the essence of humanity by painting the surface alone. Woman I, and her sisters, get at the heart of darkness within all men and women beating beneath our civilized exteriors.

In Woman II (above, from 1951), de Kooning almost seems to take a step back from the edge he approaches in Woman I. Although the heavy gestural style remains in effect, there’s a greater softness in Woman II in comparison to Woman I. Woman I’s big eyes and bared teeth seem almost animalistic. In contrast, Woman II almost seems to be smiling. It’s as if there’s a copy of the Mona Lisa buried beneath the broad brushwork. Dating the individual paintings in the Woman series is difficult because de Kooning moved back and forth from one to another over the course of several years. It’s possible that each of these versions represents a different mood (violent, tender, etc.) and that de Kooning would work on whichever version suited his present mood. Looking at them together, you get a sense of an almost fugue state in how de Kooning saw women, or perhaps just the specific women in his life.

Of the first three in the series, Woman III (above, from 1953) appears to be the most ready for action. She stands, whereas the first two in the series appear to be sitting. A smile seems to play upon her face. The big eyes of the first painting return, but with a less accusing look in them. de Kooning accentuates the breasts of this version even more, perhaps suggesting a sexual availability or aggressiveness not found in the first two. By a strange twist of fate, this version was belonged to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art for many years. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, however, the new regime refused to allow such a sexually charged painting to be displayed. Fortunately, it was sold out of Iran in 1994 and eventually resold in 2006 for $137.5 million USD, making it at the time the second most expensive painting ever sold. Despite the abstract expressionist style, it was clear to any observer that Woman III is all about sex, something even more permissive societies, let alone a fundamentalist religious state such as that in Iran, would want to keep under wraps. de Kooning’s women continue to amuse, frighten, entice, and offend to varying degrees, displaying the same versatility that their creator demonstrated throughout his long, distinguished career.

Forever Young

“Cezanne has never looked younger!” beamed PMA curator Michael Taylor at today’s press preview for the blockbuster exhibition Cezanne and Beyond. The culmination of 13 years of work since the 1996 Cezanne exhibition at the PMA, Cezanne and Beyond stunningly portrays the power of Cezanne’s influence on a wide range of artists across the entire twentieth century into the twenty-first hailing from all over the globe. PMA curators Joseph J. Rishel, Kathy Sachs, and Michael Taylor have done better than resurrect the old Cezanne—they’ve made Cezanne our contemporary.



By juxtaposing works by Cezanne with those influenced by him (above), the side by side comparisons really show the nature of influence between great artists, which the curators called more of a “resonance” than a direct following leading to derivative works. For example, after seeing the watercolors of Charles Demuth inspired by Cezanne’s watercolors, you appreciate the art of Demuth on its own merits, but you really understand the power of Cezanne’s watercolors, which I’ve always thought have been grossly underestimated. As Joe Rishel remarked, the fifty works by Cezanne in the exhibition provide a wonderful retrospective by themselves.



The PMA’s powerful Cezanne collection makes them the perfect (and for this exhibition, only) venue for this show. The PMA places its Large Bathers beside the National Gallery of London’s version (above), providing an opportunity for comparison not seen since the 1996 retrospective. (If only The Barnes Foundation could have allowed their version to join its siblings…) Dipping into their own collection again and again, the PMA gathers together Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and others to pay homage to Cezanne. Cezanne and Beyond is a Cezanne showcase, of course, but it’s also a tribute to the quality and breadth of the PMA’s collection.



The highlight of the press preview for me was the opportunity to hear Joe Rishel (above) speak. His warm and witty voice pervades the entire show, just as the spirit of the late Anne d’Harnoncourt, to whom the exhibition is dedicated, hovers over it. Rishel stressed the humor of many of the pieces, just part of the show’s intent to show that Cezanne and all of these artists are as alive today as they ever were thanks to their continuing influence on the artists of today—not only still-living canonical artists such as Johns, Kelly, and Jeff Wall, but also newer artists such as Sherrie Levine and Francis Alÿs. Survey-style museums such as the PMA always face the danger of stagnating in the public’s perception, always being about the distant past. Cezanne and Beyond brings Cezanne to life brilliantly and stakes a claim for the museum and art itself as a vital and important piece of the here and now.

Random Musings:

—As much as the preview of Cezanne and Beyond was a celebration, it was hard not to think about the funeral of slain Philadelphia police officer John Pawlowski taking place at the same time at the other end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Philadelphia has seen too many of their police killed recently. The PMA lowered their flag to half mast (above) in Officer Pawlowski’s memory.
—Before entering the exhibition area, I saw a man in the restroom who could have passed for Cezanne’s twin. He turned out to be another member of the press, but if he’d handed me an apple and mumbled something in French, I would have believed that old Paul had returned from the beyond.
—The Cezanne and Beyond gift shop is offering large lenticular versions of several paintings, including one version of The Card Players and a still life. Cezanne played enough games with depth and perspective that the paintings themselves are disorienting, but looking at these lenticular versions almost gave me vertigo.
—The gift shop also already had t-shirts for the Arshile Gorky exhibition coming this October. PMA PR Director Norman Keyes introduced Michael Taylor’s Gorky contributions to Cezanne and Beyond as an amuse bouche for the Gorky retrospective. (I freely admit that I had no idea what an amuse bouche was before I started watching Top Chef.)

—I looked long and hard at Picasso's The Dream, but couldn't see any evidence of where its owner, casino mogul Steve Wynn, accidentally poked a hole through it. Kudos to the restorers! Here's hoping you got a better tip than just free breakfast at the Bellagio.

[Many thanks to the PMA for allowing me to attend the Cezanne and Beyond press preview. I will be reviewing the catalogue once I’ve conquered the 600-page behemoth. You can see more pictures from the Cezanne and Beyond preview at my Facebook page.]

Not Fade Away

Is it “better,” as Neil Young suggested, “to burn out than to fade away?” When you look at the two greatest artists of the Abstract Expressionist school, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, you can weigh the possibilities. Pollock died relatively young in a drunken car accident. Born April 24, 1904, de Kooning lived much longer and sadly slipped into the slow oblivion of Alzheimer's disease. Of all the Abstract Expressionists, de Kooning was perhaps the most charismatic—handsome (Val Kilmer played him in Pollock), funny in an English as second language kind of way, and devoted to his friends, which included Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and the rest of the gang from the infamous Cedar Tavern, watering whole of the 1950s New York art scene. In 1981, de Kooning painted Pirate (Untitled II) (above), which shows some of the traces of his glory days of the Woman series but a definite softening and simplifying of his style, still based on gesture and movement yet no longer as brash and confrontational. Was this the way de Kooning wanted to take his art, the direction his illness was pushing him towards, or both?

Four years later, de Kooning painted a Triptych (above, individually named, from left to right, Untitled V, Untitled II, and Untitled IV, from 1985) for St Peter's Church in New York. The thick colors no longer appear. Instead, only the gestures remain. Some critics see de Kooning’s late work as a dialogue with other great artists, from his friend Arshile Gorky to modernist influences such as Kandinsky and Picasso. Again, de Kooning’s condition may have contributed to both the simplification of his gestures (as his dexterity waned) and his look backward. Alzheimer patients often develop a great sense of nostalgia for the past, longing to cling to their memories at the moment they become the most slippery. Emotions rise closer to the surface as well, making the memory of Gorky’s own painful end seem present despite being decades in the past.

de Kooning’s disease and his paintings during that period touch me for personal reasons beyond their obvious beauty. My family has a history of Alzheimer’s, a tradition I hope to evade. I remember visiting my grandfather in a nursing home with my father and having him mistake me for my father, unaware that the middle-aged man beside him was his son. Questions remain as to whether de Kooning actually painted such works as Untitled (above, from 1988), but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and accept that they’re the works of his brush and not fakes perpetrated by others, however much they differ from the rest of his work. These last works turn to pastel colors—simple, pleasing color arranged in broad, simple strokes. In that sense, they are childlike in their honesty and openness, much like an Alzheimer patient stripped of all their memories and, thus, identity and left with only the core of who they are. de Kooning’s late works show the core of who he was as an artist and a person, free of all the bravado and posturing. I like to imagine that looking at them I get a glimpse not only into the mind of the artist but into the mind of my grandfather and all those who are afflicted by this disease.

A Crucifixion in His Face

And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.

--From Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Whenever you look at photographs of Arshile Gorky you can see the pain in his eyes, as if he knew things were bad and were going to end badly. Like Melville’s Ahab, Gorky bore a “crucifixion in his face” yet maintained a dignity and poise that allowed him to become a seminal figure in the history of Abstract Expressionism. Born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan in Armenia on April 15, 1904, the artist took the name Arshile Gorky as a way of separating himself from his memories of the Armenian Genocide he and his family fled from. After the death of so many family members and his estrangement from his father once in the United States, Gorky, who claimed the author Maxim Gorky as a relative, formed a new family composed of the artists he surrounded himself with, including his close friend Willem de Kooning, portrayed by Gorky in Portrait of Master Bill (above, from 1929-1936). Gorky and de Kooning shared a studio for a time, bouncing ideas about art off of one another as they each shaped their personal visions. Gorky’s love of Cezanne appears clearly in this portrait, but cubism, especially by Picasso, and Surrealism also fired his imagination. Again, like Ahab, Gorky stalked an elusive prey—a wholly new way of creating art.

The influence of Joan Miro and his mythical little creatures appears in Gorky’s beautiful The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (above, from 1944). The title alone announces it as a surrealist work. However, Gorky begins to go beyond Surrealism and towards Abstract Expressionism in this work with the power of his gestures, a parallel development with that of his friend de Kooning. Younger artists such as Jackson Pollock soon saw Gorky’s work and listened to his words as they gathered at the local Cedar Tavern in New York City to talk shop. It’s hard to truly appreciate Gorky’s influence today because his works have been so overshadowed by those who came later and lived to see the rise of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant movement of the 1950s. The fame de Kooning and Pollock find in that decade comes too late for Gorky to enjoy, even second hand.

Gorky’s last years were as full of pain as his first ones. A fire in his studio destroyed many of his works, one of the reasons why his works are so scarce today. A diagnosis of cancer led to a painful colostomy. Shortly thereafter, a horrific auto accident left Gorky with a broken neck and partially paralyzed, unable to paint. Gorky’s wife left soon after, taking their children with her. Gorky’s Charred Beloved I (above, from 1946), painted before all his troubles, seems like a prophecy of this trial by fire and pain. Finally unable to cope with all his pain, Gorky took his own life in 1948. In his 44 pain-plagued years on Earth, Arshile Gorky managed to touch many lives and minds and helped shape the art world for decades.