Bill Viola, RIP

Strangely moving work...

The Innocents

I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like

Richard Serra, RIP

His sculptures seem like the work of natural forces while at the same time being intensely human. NYT obit.

Firuzabad

When Alexi is visiting, it's time for jigsaw puzzles. We did a city map of San Francisco, and then this Frank Stella painting. We followed Alexi rules for both: No peeking at the picture on the box. It came together. I'd say my contribution was about 15%.

Tomie dePaola, RIP

As far as I am concerned, the all-time best dePaola book was one he illustrated for the great Daniel Pinkwater, The Wuggie Norple Story. That's Wuggie by the way, the big orange one, straddled by young King Waffle and surrounded by the rest of the family and its pets, each bigger than the last. Some of them have silly names.

The Dinner Party

The day of Alexi's awesome recital, while he was preparing, I was left to my own devices and made my first-ever visit to the Brooklyn Museum. I had forgotten that Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party is housed there. Having come of age in the 70s, I was of course familiar with the work and had seen many photos of it. Nothing had prepared me for experiencing it in person, however. I was worried that it would be didactic, one-dimensional, dated, and maybe not that interesting to look at. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong: Beautiful and very moving. The scale was grander than I expected, and the "craft"– especially the ceramics– more sophisticated. The "vulvar and butterfly forms," as the museum website describes the plates, are blatantly, audaciously vulvar and glorious in their variety and cultural references... and not without a dose of humor. The emphasis on erasing the distinction between high art and folk art or craft was radical. But even were it not a work of major historical and political significance, it would be a great work of art.

Jordan Casteel at the Cantor Museum

A good way to get out of the smoke for a while if you live anywhere near Stanford is to check out the Cantor's exhibition, Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze. Casteel's large-scale portraits pay homage to fauvism but definitely show you something new. Yes, the eyes return the gaze– but there's plenty to look at in the hands, feet, and teeshirts of her subjects, too.

Elijah (detail)

Pedro Bell, RIP

Not always PC, but always visually funky.

Early Rubens

Now at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco– a fine little museum in a spectacular setting, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and what must be one of the world's loveliest golf courses (?!). This version of his Raising of the Cross, a later, smaller rendering of an earlier triptych, was my favorite piece. The energy and tension ripple across the painting.

Tintoretto

I attended and gave a couple presentations at the American Association of Geographers meetings in DC the past few days. It's a huge conference with tremendous breadth of topics and methods. I was most inspired by the poster sessions, where you can wander around and engage a (usually) young scholar in conversation about their work. The undergrad researchers are particularly inspiring.

The cherry blossoms were at their peak, but I didn't find time to join the hoards at the Tidal Basin to gawk at them. Instead, I spent my free afternoon inside, at the National Gallery, with Jacopo Tintoretto. I have been to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, which is justifiably considered Tintoretto's Sistine Chapel. That was probably the greatest artistic experience of my life. The National Gallery exhibition is not the San Rocco, but it provides a broader view of Tintoretto's genius, including his sketches, his impressionistic brushwork, his radical evocation of depth, motion, and narrative, his empathy, and, in particular, his stunning portraits. Some snapshots...

American prints

The San Jose Museum of Art has a nice collection of them, many from the 1930s– some by artists you know, and some by ones you don't. The best of the lot is by one you know: Grant Wood's "Tree Planting Group" (1937). Beautiful in its composition and pointillism, American Gothic in its tone...





Thomas Hart Benton's "Cradling Wheat" (1939) is also eye-catching... a touch of Hokusai?





New to me was Leon Gilmour, a Latvian immigrant who spent much of life out west. His prints of heroic, brawny workers are impressive, but smack of socialist realism... his flowers and trees share the same energy, with less polemic...

Now at the de Young Museum, Part 2

The quilters of Gee's Bend, AL, created some of the greatest works of art in U.S. history. To see these jaunty, audacious, thoroughly modern creations up close and personal is a revelation, and a privilege.

Willie "Ma Willie" Abrams, "'Roman Stripes' Variation", c. 1975:

And my personal favorite, Annie Mae Young, "'Bars' Work-Clothes Quilt," c. 1970:

Now at the de Young Museum

Art and artifacts from Teotihuacan. Over the first five centuries CE, they created one of the world's most remarkable and advanced material civilizations. C. 550 they seem to have collapsed. Nearly every object is extraordinary.

Today's political art message, 1973 edition

By Rupert Garcia, from an excellent exhibition of California art from the 1970s now at the Palo Alto Art Center. Also on display, Ant Farm's fantastic and funny Media Burn, more relevant than ever.

Chris Ware does it again

New Yorker covers are often kinda clever or pretty. Ware's make me stop and say wow. Not a single line or stroke is without deep intention.

My Gerhard Richter phase

Also known as my accidental photo of the sidewalk phase...

SFMOMA reopening

The considerably expanded SF Museum of Modern Art reopened to members this weekend after three years shuttered. The new wing, in scalloped white, rises up incongruously behind the original brick building. I'm not sure I like the look, but I guess they needed more gallery space, and they definitely got that. The highlight of the new building right now is the Fisher collection of German art since 1960, along with some postwar American galleries that give their excellent collection of Ellsworth Kelly paintings plenty of elbow room.

The German exhibition is dominated by some fine Richter paintings, spanning the wide spectrum of his styles, and some simply gargantuan wall-size works by Anselm Kiefer. The Kiefer paintings, which took up an entire 747 to ship from Europe, grapple with difficult themes of German national identity and historical accountability, and are almost literally overwhelming. I expect I will spend a lot more time looking at them in future visits.

The revelation of this visit for me was a room devoted to the photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who traveled the world taking pictures of utilitarian structures like water towers and mine tipples. I've posted an example (cooling towers) below. Sometimes these structures--especially the older ones--were clearly designed with some aesthetic goals in mind, but for the most part form strictly follows function. Yet when placed in grids of photos, their accidental beauty emerges.

Kelly's enormous, brightly saturated color field paintings are also worth a trip. They are given plenty of wall space, allowing the intensity of the light and disarmingly simple shapes to burn right into your brain. I can't articulate what makes them so good, but they are extraordinary. Kelly gave his paintings informative titles: below I pose with aptly named Blue Red.

The museum expansion provided Kelly plenty of space, but the same cannot be said of Richard Serra's enormous and fantastic Sequence, which is caged-up in a ground-floor lobby (see below). Apparently it is here only temporarily, which is good, because the piece deserves an outdoor setting where its canyon-like curves can be appreciated both from a distance and up close and personal in the full range of natural light.

Something new under the sun

Or new to me, at least. Pretty damn cool. Hat tip to Boing Boing, of course.


Kung Fu Motion Visualization from Tobias Gremmler on Vimeo.

Visit to the de Young

Always something new that catches my eye for the first time. In a special exhibition of prints from the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915: James McNeill Whistler's Weary. Whistler was an extraordinary printmaker.

And in the permanent collection, Elmer Bischoff's Yellow Lampshade (1969). I suppose I've seen it many times, but never really looked at it. A large, beautiful composition that invites you to tell the story.

Ellsworth Kelly, RIP

His Red White is just about my favorite painting at SF MOMA—the scale of the piece (very big) and the mass of deeply saturated red call out from across the gallery, and then the off-kilter mix of curves and angles holds your attention. I presume it will still be there when they reopen next year. I also blogged his plant drawings a while back.

Offspring's cool blog

Apparently Aidan has been spending a lot of his spare time in alleys, culverts, underpasses, vacant lots, and tunnels to bring you the best of San Jose graffiti and street art. Impressive!