contexts: a poem about a painting

Obviously I've been reading and thinking about Burt Kimmelman's writing recently because Burt was here at the Writers House visiting. Before we move away from this poet, as is inevitable given so much that's going on, let's take one more look. It's a poem with a fabulously open first line: "Nothing is ever decided." Open enough out of context--just as a line--but now add that the poem is about a Robert Motherwell painting (seen at MoMA in January 1988) and, further, that the poet gave an illuminating brief intro to the poem before reading it at KWH the other day. Sometimes I like blogging about these matters because in such a space (as a matter of lasting record) several contexts can be laid out so easily across the various shareable media: the video (above) of the poet's intro; a PDF (click here) of the text of the poem (from the book Musaics, pp. 20-21); the audio-only recording of the poem being performed.

series of black & white paintings

In the new building at the National Gallery in DC, I saw Barnett Newman's series of paintings--done between 1958 and 1966--called "The Stations of the Cross." The Stations of the Cross series of black and white paintings, begun shortly after Newman had recovered from a heart attack, is usually regarded as the peak of his achievement. The series is subtitled "Lema sabachthani" - "why have you forsaken me" - words said to have been spoken by Jesus on the cross. Newman saw these words as having universal significance in his own time. The series has also been seen as a memorial to the victims of the holocaust.

the written sea

The work by John Marin I know is watercolor. And mostly I've seen his early stuff--from the 1920s. But here is a canvas (at the National Gallery) done in oil, and it was made in his last year (1952; he died in '53). The curator at the gallery suggests that Marin's later painting--a flurry of caligraphic brushstrokes--"inspired the younger generation of abstract expressionists." Here Marin thinks of the perpetual movement of the windswept Maine seascape as a kind of writing. "The sea...wants to be horizontal," Marin said, "but then the horizontals begin to play, to move. Sympathetic lines turn up all over the canvas...all related to each other...all living together." The painting is called The Written Sea.

miniaturist's exploding sublimation

Murad Khan Mumtaz, All Debts Public and Private, 2009. Opaque water color on dollar bill, 6.25 x 2.75 in.

New Art from Pakistan: Noor Ali Chagani - Amna Hashmi - Ayesha Jatoi - Ismet Khawaja - Nadia Khawaja - Murad Khan Mumtaz - Seema Nusrat - Lala Rukh. January 7 - February 20, 2010. Opening Reception: Thursday, January 7, 6-8:30pm. Thomas Erben Gallery (526 West 26th Street, floor 4; New York, NY 10001) presents a group of emerging artists from Pakistan. Murad Khan Mumtaz sublimates images of explosions, some executed on one dollar bills, through their execution in the miniature tradition.

he never had any why

Marcel Duchamp on painting: "I don't believe in the magic of the hand." Q. "Why did you retire from the world of art?" A. "I couldn't tell you why. I never had any why... Painting always bored me."

From a television interview conducted by Russell Connor on the occasion of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibit of the work of Duchamp’s brother, Jacques Villon, 1964.

Here are the full details about the video:

Marcel Duchamp Interviewed by Russell Connor
Museum of Fine Arts Boston in association with WGBH-TV
1964, 29:02 min, b&w, sound

Russell Connor interviews Marcel Duchamp on the occasion of the Boston Museum of Fine Art's exhibition of the work of Duchamp's brother, "Impressionist-Cubist" Jacques Villon (formerly Gaston Duchamp). Connor first introduces paintings, etchings, sculpture and lithographs by Villon, and is then joined by Duchamp, who discusses Villon's work and contributes his thoughts on art in general. This fascinating document gives the viewer a rare opportunity to hear the legendary Dadaist as he reveals observations on the state of art in the 1960's.

Presented by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in association with WGBH-TV, Boston and the Livell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council. Director: Allan Hinderstein. Lighting Director: Linda Beth Hepler. Video: Al Potter. Audio: Will Morton. Recordist: Pat Kane. Associate Producer: Thalia Kennedy. Executive Producer: Patricea Barnard.

Buy it here: LINK.

Wallace Stevens of the New York School

I've made an mp3 recording of a speech avatar reciting the lecture Wallace Stevens gave at MoMa in 1951, "Relations between Poetry and Painting." Stevens himself spoke in a low droning monotone so the avatar, minus the patrician accent, gets it about right. Stevens made more public visits to New York in 1951 than any other year. He read at the Poetry Center/92nd St Y, at MoMA, gave several short talks at various occasions, etc. Some of his letters read like I-do-this-I-do-that accounts of walking and looking along the avenues.

so decorative as to be abstract

Barbara Brody Avnet's drawings are so elaborately and insistently decorative as to be (sometimes) abstract. They're not all like this, but the ones I admire most are. Some of the works you can view on her web site have been recently exhibited. I've had the pleasure of seeing the work right there in her studio. If you click on her inspirations link, you'll have the sense that in some instances the studio itself (gorgeous) marks the start of the work. Here is an artist with a constant aesthetic sensibility: the way she lives.

which side are you on?

Readers of this blog will know by now that one of my obsessions is the representation of the 1930s in the 1950s. I suppose you could say I collect these bits of (usually politicized) retrospectives. At right is an oil-and-charcoal painting by Robert Motherwell about the Spanish Civil War - done in 1958-60. Look over at my 1960 blog for more.

Alex Katz in 1960

Click here for more.

Alice Neel

A 7-minute video shows dozens of Alice Neel portraits, including this one of Frank O'Hara.

immense dew

Regular readers of this blog will know that I tend to follow the contemporary uses of Wallace Stevens. Most of this is of course trivial and/or incidental. Yet some of it makes startling great sense. Laura, a watercolorist who seems to reside in or aesthetically dwell upon some tropical clime, re-read "Nomad Exquisite" (presumably while painting one of her florid watercolors) and it suggested to her that it was time for another whiskey smash. She gives the recipe for the whiskey smash just below the poem, in similar format. So I read the poem and the drink recipe and realized that as parallel texts they make a great deal of sense. Especially after a few smashes. (Laura calls this drink her "summer Manhattan.")

Nomad Exquisite

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, comes flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

this is the color of my dreams

Philippe de Montebello — whose long career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art has spanned nearly a third of the institution’s entire history — is retiring after more than thirty-one years as director. Now the curators of the various departments have each dug around in their collections and chosen to feature acquisitions made during the de Montebello years, their favorites. And that's one of the current exhibits. Some pieces have been chosen more because the story of the acquisition is fascinating than because the artwork itself is tops. So it's a hodge podge, arranged, room by room, according to the date the work came to the museum rather than its year of creation. So you'll get whiplash moving from the 18th-c. wooden bust of a powerful Russian politician to Segovia's favorite Spanish (actually Austrian) guitar to some Tahitian faces drawing by Gauguin in 1899.

Jane and I went last night. We saw an especially large Brancusi bird-in-space sculpture, made in 1923 and acquired in 1995. We saw and loved Jasper Johns' 1955 White Flag. Prior to getting this big canvas the Met had never owned a single Jasper Johns. The director and modern painting curator went to Johns' place in Connecticut to purchase it from the artist himself. White Flag is the largest of Johns's flag paintings and the first in which the flag is presented in monochrome. It's been described as having a "lush reticence," and I'd say that's exactly right.

And, to my mind, the most compelling piece in the show: Miro's 1925 "Photo: This is the color of my dreams," a fine instance of peinture-poesie. Miro was thinking about a photograph and then painted a painting "about" it while at the same time making not effort to reproduce the photo visually. It's not a painting about a photograph but, rather, a painting about the poetics of photography.

Damn, I forgot to bring my good camera and so took these not-so-clear shots with my phone. Forgive me, but you get the idea.

- - -

The Miro painting/anti-painting show at MoMA is open until January 12. "I want to assassinate painting," said the artist in 1927 and these works date from '27 to '37. (Thanks to Kaegan Sparks for reminding me of this exhibit, which I haven't yet seen.)

mirror, mirror

I haven't seen Steve DeFrank's new show at Margaret Thatcher Projects (Chelsea; 511 West 25th Street) yet but I hope to get there very soon. Here are some links: 1 2 3.

Buster Crabbe & John Glenn are the same person

I'm taken by what's been called "pop surrealism." This is recent (post-2000), mostly southern-California and Detroit-area stuff, but its visual basis seems often to combine 1950s-era kitsch advertisement and space-race era forms, modernist design (and coloring), 1960s TV characters, and skeletal or monstrous deformations and grotesques (cute kittens in a basket, but they have three eyes; a monkey with a clown head carrying a trophy and a dented Arthurian sword across a Hudson School landscape).

There's Charles Kraft's carefully made porcelain figure, with hand-painted underglaze: a rabbit with a dagger stuck in its back, 12" tall - called Sal Mineo Bunny (2000).

Larry Reid's essay on pop surrealism says it combines "mid-century dementia" with "bad-ass low brow." He observes about the 1950s what has been said many times before: "Beneath the thin crust of conformity that characterized mid-century America lay a bubbling caldron of weirdness." Well now, in the first decade of the 21st century, mostly young painters have founded an underground art that looks back at the 50s as non-witnesses who see, or try to see, only the surface (and not the psychological or political depth) of that weirdness - who see the 50s through the pop culture of the 60s and don't show any loyalty to the experience of either.

It's a steady diet of drive-in monster movies, Rat Pack playboys, prehistoric fantasy Flinestones immediately following the futurism of the Jetsons, cathode characters, the anti-Comics hysteria, the mayhem of a 1960-era Los Angeles hot-rod emporium - all combined and gone awry.

Tim Biskup's The Demon Painter (2001 - above) is not actually typical of the group, given what I've said above. Yet then again, it is - in a more specifically painterly way. It nods toward the figure-drawing end of the depictive spectrum modernist Paul Klee painted, pushing it toward cartoonishness, adding a little beatnik straggliness, and creates a dark yet comic vision of the artist's position. I've inserted a few figures from Klee here for comparison, "Dancing Girl" and "The Drummer Boy" (both from the
Chicago Institute).

Isabel Samaras (like Biskup, she's from L.A.) does oil on wood - more straightforward remakings of 60s TV. Batman and Robin sharing a French kiss in Secrets of the Batcave part 2 (2002). A Madonna and Child panel in medieval style - except that they are Hollywood-kitch chimps from Planet of the Apes (Behold My Heart of 2003). Then there's the Botticellian Birth of Ginger of 2002 (below). (It takes off, of course, from the 60s TV show, Gilligan's Island, which is a child, in a way, of the boob-tube version of the Beat revolution, via the Maynard G. Krebs-Gilligan equation.)

Robert Williams, one of the artists included in Pop Surrealism, ed. Kirsten Anderson (Ignition Publishing/Last Gasp, 2004), embraces the category "low brow art," offers topsy-turvey phrases such as "dumbing down to DaVinci," describes his California aesthetic origins in comic book art, carnival-show banners from the 1880s through the 1950s, music posters, hot rod and biker art, pin-up art, graffiti and beach-bum graphics and believes that, visually and more generally culturally speaking, Buster Crabbe as Buck Rogers and John Glenn are the same person.

the child is in the mother of the woman

Earlier this evening I saw Mary Frank's presentation at the Writers House. She began by showing slides of some of her recent work (in a current show at D.C. Moore Gallery) and ended by reading poem-like lists from rounded bark-like pieces of parchment. Here's a rough 5-minute video made of the hour-long program with my handheld.

One of the pieces Mary showed us was Childhood, a recent work that is part of the new show. She told us that when was a child she knew that the baby-in-utero was inside the mother but did not know that it was small and curled up - and down low. She imagined it fully stretched out, arms in the mother's arms, legs out toward the legs - so that the mother is a ghostly after-image of her fetus. Here is Childhood:

when you're in the poem

"When I am in my painting," Jackson Pollack once wrote, "I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own."

Much later John Yau wrote a poem that consisted of variations on this statement. It's called "830 Fireplace Road":


"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing"
When aware of what I am in my painting, I'm not aware
When I am my painting, I'm not aware of what I am
When what, what when, what of, when in, I'm not painting my I
When painting, I am in what I'm doing, not doing what I am
When doing what I am, I'm not in my painting
When I am of my painting, I'm not aware of when, of what
Of what I'm doing, I am not aware, I'm painting
Of what, when, my, I, painting, in painting
When of, of what, in when, in what painting
Not aware, not in, not of, not doing, I'm in my I
In my am, not am in my, not of when I am, of what
Painting "what" when I am, of when I am, doing, painting.
When painting, I'm not doing. I am in my doing. I am painting.

modernism? no thanks

This 1926 Leger was owned by a collector in Pittsburgh from 1953 until 1966. The collector wanted to give this and hundreds of other modern objects to the city of Pittsburgh, no strings attached.

Pittsburgh said no thanks.

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when Warhol had trouble getting a gallery

This is Andy Warhol's picture of stamped shoes, 1959. In '60 he began to do some very different things, but even when Leo Castelli came visiting in early '61 Warhol still had to endure doubts -- for one thing, that what he was doing (e.g. his large canvases of Coke bottles) was too much like Roy Lichtenstein. For more about Andy in '60, go here.

napkin surrounded by bottles is an angel surrounded by peasants

Wallace Stevens loved to buy paintings from Paris, especially in the late 1940s. And yet he never traveled to Paris and in those pre-internet, pre-fax days, he typically could not see the painting he was about to purchase. In several instances, he depended entirely on the descriptions in words provided by the daughter of his long-term Parisian agent (who died during the war); her name was Paule Vidal. Through long letters back and forth, Stevens came to know her well and could tell what he wanted in a painting from the way she described it. In one case, she sketched the painting that interested him and mailed the sketch to him along with yet another letter of descriptive language. The sketch is reproduced here above right.

I found this whole process fascinating: a modern poet imagining his paintings for weeks and months before he saw it. And of course this wouldn't be nearly as interesting is Stevens didn't write poems about some of these paintings. I should say poems "about" the paintings, because it's not entirely clear whether Stevens could properly be said to have written "about" the painting or about the description of the painting or indeed about the interanimations entailed in the process of slowly apprehending or viewing the painting. After all, their representations slowly emerged for him.

So I wrote a long essay about this, and chose the story of one painting and one poem to tell--that of Stevens' "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (first published in 1950) and Still Life by Pierre Tal Coat. The painting depicts some items on a table: a napkin surrounded by a tureen and some vases and bottles. The angel-like quality of the napkin is something Stevens "saw" in the letters from Paule Vidal. Back in the late 1980s my colleague Wendy Steiner was editing a special issue of Poetics Today and invited me to write this story for that. It appeared in the summer 1989 issue. Here is the article as a PDF. The full citation: "Still Life without Substance: Wallace Stevens and the Language of Agency," Poetics Today, "Art and Literature II," vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 345-72.

I once visited Stevens' daughter, Holly Stevens, at her ocean's-edge home in Guilford, CT, and spent the afternoon with her and my friend and co-editor Beverly Coyle. I had a chance to see many of Stevens' paintings right there on the walls of this small house. I was struck by the Tal Coat. There it was. I either took a color photograph of it then, or later had Holly or Bev take a shot of it, but in any case somewhere in my files I have a color photo of it. The black-and-white reproduction of the painting done for the Poetics Today article was taken during a 1963 exhibit of Stevens' paintings at Trinity College in Hartford.