If you have access to ARTE, the Franco-German cultural TV channel, don’t miss “Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely: the Bonnie and Clyde of Art,” a 55-minute film by Anne Julien and Louise Faure. This “joyful hommage to the pair of sculptors and their magical creations” will be broadcast Monday 23 August at 11:25 pm (23:25) European time. It will be rebroadcast 6 September at 11:20 am.
“Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely meet in Paris in 1955, in the artistic ferment of the post-war period. They are 25 and 30 years old, both married. They become friends. Five years later, they have fallen in love and decide to live and create together. For forty years, in the course of their journey, the nomadic pair give birth not to children, but to sculptures, most of them monumental, all over the world — totems, said Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘to make people happy.’ And indeed, from Europe to Japan, their work has found a huge audience, delighting children and adults with his sacred machines and her colorful creatures. With magnificent archival footage and accounts from relatives, Louise Faure and Anne Julien recount their lives and their epic art, always so closely intertwined.”
In June, the Charlotte Observer invited its readers to send photos of themselves with Niki de Saint Phalle’s Firebird (Le grand oiseau de feu sur l’arche), now on permanent public display in front of the new Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. The winners of this competition are graphic designer Rachel Hewitt and her husband, Eric Whiteside, a high school English teacher. “That’s me in the mirror,” says Rachel.
Speaking of her husband (the guy holding the mirror), Rachel adds, “Living with someone who encourages his students (and wife) to think creatively is continuously inspiring. Eric celebrates the unique — and one could say, I am merely a reflection of that. And it made me laugh to shoot the photograph.”
Congratulations to Rachel and Eric, the other finalists, and everyone else who entered. To see other entries, visit the Charlotte Observer web site.
Think of pop art, and a list of names comes quickly to mind: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Hamilton, Robert Indiana, Ed Ruscha, Mel Ramos, Wayne Thiebaud, Jim Dine.
While their work drew on consumerism and they shared a conversion of the everyday “popular” object into the subject matter of art, those pop artists also have another thing in common: They are all male, and that old-boys club has largely stood for a half-century.
With “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,” now on view at the Sheldon Museum of Art, the door to that club is being kicked in, forcing a re-examination of pop art and creating a new story of the movement from art and artists now being rediscovered.
Among them is Dorothy Grebenak, who created handmade hooked rugs depicting a “Tide Box,” a “Bugatti” logo, a “Two Dollar Bill” and a Babe Ruth baseball card, all of which are on view in the Sheldon exhibition.
By using the laborious hand-hooking technique and fiber as her material, Grebenak introduced the traditionally feminine into pop, making something functional (they could easily be on a floor) and an art object visually appealing enough to hang on the wall.
What makes Grebenak of particular interest here, however, isn’t that she was self-taught, that her rugs were originally sold in the gift shop of the Brooklyn Museum, or even the work itself. She was a native Nebraskan, born in Oxford in 1913.
I had not heard of her until I saw the show and was taken with her rugs. I didn’t know she was from Nebraska until I read the extensive, and highly recommended, catalog. This kind of discovery makes “Seductive Subversion” an important exhibition and a perfect fit for Sheldon’s “Year of the Woman” programming.
To understand the women’s art and why it is only now coming to the surface, it is critical to remember the times in which it was made.
Drawing on consumerism and its images, pop art tapped into an advertising/media culture that had two equally stereotyping and limiting views of women.
In the first, women were marketing targets, recipients of a barrage of advertising for household goods, food, children’s items and more that reinforced traditional roles of homemaking, domesticity and nurture of the nuclear family.
In the second, women were objects of male desire. Think of Ramos’ pin-up girls or Warhol’s “Marilyn.”
“It is easy to understand that women often were, and felt themselves to be, excluded from an art world in which they functioned so often in debased and stereotypical modes,” art historian Linda Nochlin writes in the catalog. “Comic-strip heroine, mass-produced portrait, flattened faceless nude … how could the woman artist find a position that didn’t either objectify her or run roughshod over her own subject-hood?”
The women in the exhibition were able to find that position in pop. But as artist Martha Rosler writes, it wasn’t easy because pop explicitly worked against the feminine.
“There was no space for women in pop,” Rosler writes. “Its main tasks required a silencing of women that was related to its ambiguous theater of mastery through the transcoding and rearrangement of magical images, many of them images of women. The replacement of artistic touch by deauthored affectless production signaled more than deadening superficiality and detachment; the replacement of subjectivity-as-emotion and suffering (abstract expressionism, existential angst) with rationalism, or identity-in-cognition, meant an end to the problem of having a feminine intuitive softness at the core of art.”
Then there’s the fact that many of the female pop artists, including Marisol, Pauline Boty and Niki de Saint Phalle, worked as actresses or models and were caught in what curator Sid Sachs calls “the beauty trap,” while others were married to male artists and were expected to serve them as wives. The deck was stacked against them.
Given the institutionalized sexism and the male-dominated view of the movement, it is hardly surprising that it has taken decades to recognize the female contribution to pop.
It’s also not surprising that much of the work in the exhibition, organized by University of the Arts, Philadelphia, that was pushed to the side by critics and galleries in the ’60s is as strong as that of the male pop artists and often contains far more social critique.
That’s true of Rosler, whose photomontages examine body images using Playboy-style ’60s nudes in domestic situations; lampoon the tidy, uptight “First Lady” Pat Nixon; insert disturbing imagery from third-world violence into portraits; and stick it to the style itself with the funny “Vacuuming Pop Art.”
Even more explicitly political/social/critical is “Countdown to Violence,” a 1964 Boty painting combining images of the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and a caisson along with a Southern policeman grabbing a black man around the neck, while a German shepherd threatens the victim. The central image of the piece: a rose being cut on its stem by a woman’s hand.
Boty’s 1962 “With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo” is just as subversive, conveying a female gaze of the teeming sexuality of the French movie star, a drastic reversal for its time. It hangs in a gallery with a series of paintings by Rosalyn Drexler, who looks at “Chubby Checker,” “Home Movies” and “King Kong aka The Dream.” The images, by adding frames and multiple images, explore the nature of cinema at all levels.
But the celebrity portrait that makes the biggest point is “John Wayne,” a large wooden sculpture of a cowboy atop a flat carousel horse topped by a box covered with four images of the Western star. Made in 1962-63, the sculpture is both an acknowledgement of Wayne’s towering Hollywood status at the time and a hint, via its humor, that the cowboy was already a fading icon.
“John Wayne” is by Marisol, the best known of the female pop artists and the only one to have come close to making it into the canon. She, however, has become less and less known over the years, her work in wood banishing her from serious critical consideration.
Like their male counterparts, female pop artists were drawing from the same inspiration: the emerging post-World War II consumer society and its attendant technology in the rise of television and popular iconography. That means there’s plenty of unavoidable crossover of subject matter and approach.
Kay Kurt’s large 1968 painting “For All Their Innocent Airs, They Know Exactly Where They’re Going,” a depiction of paper-wrapped candies in a box, brings to mind Thiebaud’s food paintings.
The graphic silhouettes and backgrounds of Idelle Weber’s “Bride and Groom” and “Munchins I, II, and III” come from something of the same place as Lichtenstein’s comic book adaptations. But her works are true critiques, particularly the latter, a depiction of the era’s “organization man” going up and down what appear to be escalators.
(And for those taken with the depiction of the 1960s advertising world in “Mad Men,” many of the images in “Seductive Subversion,” especially those of Weber and Mara McAfee, provide a bracing contemporary view of that world’s work.)
The type-based pieces and use of repeated newspaper ad imagery by Chryssa hints at Warhol, while her neon sculpture “Ampersand” seems ahead of its time. Vija Celmins’ “Pencil” isn’t far from the sculptures of Oldenburg, including in a locally appropriate fashion, “Torn Notebook.”
Even Ramos’ pin-up girls have an echo. Marjorie Strider’s “Triptych II, Beach Girl” uses a molded canvas to repeat three images of a woman in a bikini, her breasts jutting out from the surface. It’s as explicit a critique of the male gaze as can be seen.
It seems odd to contrast the work of the women in the exhibition only to men. But in terms of the pop style, those are the only possible comparisons. It is, I suppose, possible to talk about the female pop artists in light of the work by women who followed them. But that would be both overstating the influence of the 1960s artists – they were largely obscure to all – and unfair to them and the later artists.
Most of the work in “Seductive Subversion” is proto-feminist. Feminism was only in its early stages when pop art flourished, and few of the women represented in the exhibition were part of the early feminist art movement led by Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago.
But, as Rosler points out in her catalog essay, the impact of feminism over the past four decades has helped create the impetus for a revised view of women in pop art and their work. Viewed through that lens, the art and artists in “Seductive Subversion” are groundbreaking.
All of this theory and history is important; it’s why the exhibition exists. But it would amount to little if the show lacked visual punch. It is, to say the least, eye catching and entertaining in museum show fashion.
Smartly hung by subject matter, the exhibition contains plenty of the instantly recognizable images that define pop art. In pieces like De Saint Phalle’s giant sculpture of a woman, “Black Rosy or My Heart Belongs to Rosy,” it has the smile-inducing playfulness that has made pop the most widely embraced of the modern arts movements.
That march of movements, from impressionism through cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and more, came crashing to a close with pop and minimalism, shattering into the pluralism of the contemporary art world.
That history makes “Subversive Seduction” a critical exhibition in understanding the depth and breadth of pop art and in establishing the little-known or appreciated female role in the movement. The visual punch of the work itself makes it one of the best Sheldon shows in recent years.
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 402-473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/KentWolgamott.
Image 1: Martha Rosler’s photomontage “Vacuuming Pop Art” is part of “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,” now on view at the Sheldon Museum of Art. (Courtesy Sheldon Museum of Art)
Image 4: Marjorie Strider’s “White Linear (Lilies)” is part of “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” at Sheldon. (Courtesy Sheldon Museum of Art)
LINCOLN, NEBRASKA, 27 JULY 2010 — The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Sheldon Museum of Art presents “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists,” the first major exhibition devoted to the work of female Pop artists, opening July 30.
Pop art, more than any other post-World War II art movement, is defined by a small group of American and British male artists. This show, featuring some work that hasn’t been exhibited in more than 40 years, explores the important contributions of women Pop artists.
These female artists found inspiration in many of the same subjects as men, including advertising, celebrities and commercial culture, but they also brought their own experiences to the movement, creating collaborative works, emphasizing handcrafted objects and developing new mediums, such as soft sculpture.
Artists in the exhibition include Idelle Weber, Rosalyn Drexler, Dorothy Grebenak, Chryssa, Marjorie Strider and Vija Celmins, among others.
Sheldon will hold two gallery talks during the course of the show.
Christin Mamiya, associate dean of UNL’s Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, will give a lecture titled “A Woman’s Work is Never Done: Pop Art and the Home” at 5:30pm on August 31.
Sid Sachs, exhibition curator, will give a lecture titled “The Inevitability of Pop” at Sheldon at 5:30pm on September 14. The lectures will take place in the Sheldon’s Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium and are free and open to the public.
“Seductive Subversion” is organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia. This project has been funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative with additional support from the Marketing Innovation Program. This project was also supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Nebraska Arts Council and the Sheldon Art Association provided local support.
Sheldon Museum of Art houses a permanent collection of more than 12,000 objects focusing on American art. Sheldon, 12th and R Streets on the UNL City Campus, is open free to the public during regular hours. The museum’s hours are: Tuesday, 10am to 8pm; Wednesday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm; Sunday, noon to 5pm; closed Mondays. For information or to arrange a tour, call (402) 472-4524. Additional information is also available at www.sheldon.unl.edu.
WRITER: Sarah Baker-Hansen
Released on 07/27/2010, at 10:45am
Office of University Communications
University of Nebraska – Lincoln
WHEN: Friday, July 30
WHERE: Sheldon Museum of Art, 12th and R Streets
Image: “First Lady (Pat Nixon), 1967-72,” photomontage by Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
HOUSTON, TEXAS — John and Dominique de Menil, arriving in Houston from France in 1941, built one of the world’s great art collections, championed modern architects and filmmakers, and became passionately involved in human-rights causes. In the process they transformed the cultural landscape of their adopted city.
The lavishly illustrated Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil is the first book to examine the couple’s wide-ranging interests over half a century — from art and architecture to philanthropy and politics. The de Menils established university art and media-studies departments; gave early architectural commissions to Philip Johnson and Renzo Piano; sponsored individual scholarships and funded civil-rights campaigns; built an ecumenical chapel with the painter Mark Rothko; presented one of the nation’s first exhibitions of racially integrated contemporary artists; brought Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini to town; took the Surrealist master René Magritte to a rodeo; and introduced Max Ernst and Andy Warhol to an awed Houston.
All the while they were building the art collection that would one day be housed in the world-renowned Houston museum that bears the family name — the Menil Collection.
Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil is a book of many voices — artists, activists, students, scholars, and family. The couple’s accomplishments — as patrons, philanthropists and political activists who lived and worked along a Paris-Houston-New York axis — is told in lively texts and remembrances by contributors such as the artist Dorothea Tanning, architect Renzo Piano, film scholar Gerald O’Grady, architectural historian Stephen Fox, curators Bertrand Davezac and Walter Hopps, and Africanist Kristina Van Dyke. Illustrated throughout with works of art from the Menil Collection and rarely seen archival photographs, the large-format book also includes private correspondence and reminiscences from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Man Ray, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, and Niki de Saint Phalle.
John and Dominique de Menil embraced all things modern and progressive. But as Josef Helfenstein and Laureen Schipsi write in the book’s preface, little prior to Houston indicated the direction of their interests or the fierceness of their commitment to art and activism. The Menil Collection, which anchors a green campus of museums, sculpture parks and art-filled chapels, speaks to the couple’s ecumenicism, commitment to human rights, devotion to individual artists, and prescient leadership in exploring cultural heritage issues.
John and Dominique de Menil met in 1930 — at a ball at Versailles (that neither wanted to attend) — and were married the following year. An heiress to the Schlumberger oil-field services fortune, Dominique held degrees in physics and mathematics from the Sorbonne; Jean (who would anglicize his name to John) hailed from a military family of more modest means.
Had it not been for World War II’s approach, the young couple surely would have stayed in Paris. But John, who joined Schlumberger’s Romanian office as supervisor of operations, was forced to flee Europe after aiding the Resistance. The family — there would eventually be five children — reunited in Houston, home of Schlumberger world headquarters.
Finding themselves in a new frontier, John and Dominique were determined to make a difference — and with the de Menils, making a difference began at home. To accommodate their expanding art collection and growing family, they commissioned Philip Johnson to design a modernist house. Dominique then hired the brilliant couturier Charles James to create a colorful, nearly baroque interior — the last thing you would expect to see in an otherwise severe International-style house.
Now known as Menil House, it became a laboratory for the museum — “its DNA,” said the Menil’s founding director, Walter Hopps. The de Menils saw it as a salon, the scene of lively kitchen-table dinners and debates, with many of the era’s artists and thinkers in attendance.
The rapid growth of the de Menils’ art collection was astounding, given its modest beginnings: a Max Ernst portrait of Dominique that took her years to appreciate followed by a small Cezanne watercolor that John bought for $300 and brought home in his briefcase. After the war the couple began to acquire more European paintings and American contemporary works. The de Menils were known to buy entire shows from their favorite New York and Paris galleries, including iconic examples of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Surrealism.
John died in 1973, shortly after the dedication of the Rothko Chapel. Dominique survived him by a quarter of a century, opening the Menil (Renzo Piano’s first U.S. commission) in 1987. Sited in a leafy residential enclave in Houston’s Museum District and bathed in natural light, the Menil presents art in a tranquil setting. Piano has described the Menil as a “portrait” of his client — “discreet, intelligent, welcoming, elegant.” Admission to the museum — and to all of its galleries, special exhibitions and programs — is always free of charge.
The institutions founded by the de Menils evolved into international forums that honor and further humanitarian causes. During her final decade, Dominique (who died in 1997) deepened her involvement in social causes, joining with former President Jimmy Carter to establish the Carter-Menil Human Rights Foundation. She created an award, sponsored by the Rothko Chapel, given to those who struggle against oppression, and established the Oscar Romero Prize in honor of the slain El Salvadoran bishop.
John and Dominique de Menil envisioned and executed a visionary program of art and activism. One of the themes that emerges from Art and Activism is the pioneering spirit with which the de Menils approached their projects. As Helfenstein and Schipsi write, “Building such a legacy required drive, determination, initiative, and a willingness to take risks… Such independence and confidence, as well as visionary foresight, is a constant theme of John and Dominique de Menil’s achievements. They set high standards for themselves and others, demonstrating the power and profundity of simple ideas executed with quality and passion. This book is a testament to the work they accomplished.”
MONTREAL — Initiated and organized by the Musée de la musique with the support of the artist’s family represented through Miles Davis Properties, LLC, in association with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), “We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz” is a multimedia retrospective exhibition devoted to one the greatest jazz artists of the twentieth century: Miles Davis (1926-1991). Bearing the same title as Davis’s 1982 live album, “We Want Miles” explores many of the greatest highlights of Davis’ exceptional life and career.
Tracing how Davis impacted the course of jazz several times throughout his life, and divided into eight thematic sequences arranged chronologically from his childhood in East St. Louis (MO), to his last concert at La Villette in Paris (1991), the exhibition features a wide range of exceptional works of art, archival materials, and objects many of which are on view for the first time. They include rare or previously unscreened concert film footage; original musical scores; examples of Davis’ trumpets and fellow band members’ musical instruments; original documents relating to his albums; stage costumes; vintage pressings of his records, as well as compelling personal portraits taken by legendary photographers Annie Leibovitz; Herman Leonard; William Gottlieb; Dennis Stock; Baron Wolman; Amalie Rothschild; Lee Friedlander; Bob Willoughby; Anton Corbijn, and Irving Penn, among others.
While the exhibition examines the many ways Davis pushed boundaries of jazz, an entire section will also be devoted to Davis’ work as a visual artist and feature a number of his original paintings. At first a means to rehabilitate his hand after a stroke, drawing and painting became a daily activity for Davis in the 1980s with select works appearing on his album covers. Further revealing Miles Davis’ reach beyond the sphere of music, the exhibition at the MMFA will feature a significant grouping of works, influenced by Davis, by contemporary artists, including: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mati Klarwein, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others.
Serving as an invitation to rediscover the music and the immense talent of an artist whose jazz innovations in the second half of the 20th century were profound in their scope and consequences, this initial venture into the realm of jazz continues the Museum’s exploration of links between the visual arts and music launched with Warhol Live (2009) and Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko (2009).
Exhibition Themes
Miles Davis had an extraordinary flair for new trends and sounds, and for associating the finest contemporary, young musicians to his own creative force. According to Vincent Bessières, exhibition curator, “Every five years or so he would revolutionize his music. Starting in bebop, then the birth of the cool, then in large orchestras with Gil Evans and modern jazz with ‘Kind of Blue,’ then the so-called Second Quintet with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, and then going electric with ‘Bitches Brew’ and going into funk with ‘On the Corner…’ [You can] divide his music into periods like you would for a painter.” The constant evolutions and revolutions that characterized Davis’ musical output over his 40-year career will be illustrated and presented both chronologically and thematically as follows:
The early years and influences of St. Louis and musicians from New Orleans to Chicago to Kansas City that developed a “school” of trumpet playing that would leave its mark on his own sound;
His affiliation to the vanguard of the 1940s, bebop, with the blessing of its mentors Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker;
Opening the way to a new jazz — cool jazz through the novel arrangements and the “soft” quality of sound put out by his first orchestra, which Miles would then turn away from and towards the expressiveness of the blues, the lyricism of standards, along with the main advocates of hard bop (Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Art Blakey, and John Coltrane);
The first years with Columbia marked by the orchestral works of Canadian Gil Evans, his ambitious adaptations of Porgy and Bess and his recording of Sketches of Spain, as well as his modal exploration with the sextet, culminating in the masterpiece, Kind of Blue — the largest-selling jazz album in history;
The “Second Quintet” during the middle of the 1960s — influenced by young guns (Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) — shaking the very structure of jazz, and ushering in a certain degree of rhythmic freedom without ever losing control;
The end of the 1960s marked by electric instruments, conceptual albums, and the influence of Jimi Hendrix, along with the future heroes of jazz rock (Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea);
The invention of afrofunk based on obsessive beats, and a saturated electric sound with strange undercurrents resulting from his collaboration with Indian musicians — a style with its finger on the pulse of popular music (Motown, James Brown and Sly Stone);
The rise of pop jazz, marked by new production techniques and synthesizers, his fascination with Prince, his covers of hits, and his close collaboration with Marcus Miller, who composed an entire album for him, Tutu, as a showcase for what had truly become his signature sound.
Image: Two paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat on display at the preview of the “We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz” exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Thursday April 29, 2010, Montreal. The exhibit is a multimedia retrospective that traces the life and career of the jazz musical icon. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson)
MARRAKECH — The first edition of the Marrakech Art Fair will be held from October 9 to 11, 2010 (with a preview on October 8) at the Es Saadi Palace.
Galleries from Europe, Morocco and the Arab world are pleased to invite art amateurs and collectors to present their recent discoveries during a four-day event. Modern art, contemporary art, and emerging scenes will be high on the agenda, during an ephemeral leisure staged between patio and garden through art works and creations from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Visitors will be given the opportunity to walk through the fair either to look for novelties or just to rediscover the works by internationally-renowned artists such as: Karel Appel, Arman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brassaï, Eduardo Chillida, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Robert Doisneau, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Erro, Jan Fabre, Philippe Favier, Sam Francis, Gérard Garouste, Raymond Hains, Simon Hantaï, Keith Haring, Hans Hartung, Rebecca Horn, Yves Klein, David Lachapelle, François-Xavier Lalanne, Richard Long, Man Ray, Roberto Matta, Mario Merz, François Morellet, Aurélie Nemours, Erwin Olaf, Giuseppe Penone, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, James Rosenquist, Georges Rousse, Niki de Saint Phalle, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Spoerri, Nicolas de Staël, Frank Stella, Patrick Tosani, Vladimir Velickovic, Jacques Villeglé, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann…
A series of cultural and artistic events will take place along with the launch of the Marrakech Art Fair, such as exhibitions in cultural centres, visits of artists’ studios, presentations of private collections and more.
The Marrakech Art Fair has also the «Golf Art Cup» in store, a golf competition between art market players, at the end of which a trophy made by a Moroccan artist will be awarded.
This event was born from the collaboration between Moroccan and French art market players who combine their skills to provide Morocco with an exchange platform for gallerists, artists and collectors.
The setting up of the Marrakech Art Fair is supported by Moroccan institutions: The Ministry of Tourism, The General Administration of Customs, the Moroccan National Tourist Office (ONMT) as well as partners such as the Es Saadi Palace, the ONAPAR Holding through the Amelkis golf club, and Prestigia, a company specializing in business travels and luxury stays in Morocco.
Hicham and Zineb Daoudi, Brahim Alaoui, Caroline Clough Lacoste and Henri Jobbé Duval partnered to implement this totally unprecedented artistic meeting. They enjoy the support of the honour committee, made of people involved with the local and international cultural life … and Marc Blondeau has accepted to be among the fair’s guests.
The Marrakech Art Fair is destined to become the yearly appointment of the art market in the Kingdom of Morocco, enhancing its visibility beyond its borders and being part of the international contemporary art fair calendar.
Image: A series of cultural and artistic events will take place along with the launch of the Marrakech Art Fair.
France 3 television’s Culturebox looks at the Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective now at the Château de Malbrouck, near Metz in the Moselle region of France.
The clip (in French) includes an interview with Bloum Cardenas, granddaughter of Niki de Saint Phalle and trustee of the Niki Charitable Art Foundation. The exhibition, which runs through 29 August 2010, features 130 works spanning the entire range of Niki’s career, from the shooting paintings of the early 1960s to the massive mosaic sculptures created during her years in California.
The landscape of the uptown district of Charlotte, North Carolina, is dominated by mega-sports domes like the Bank of America Stadium, home to the Carolina Panthers, and the much-ballyhooed Nascar Hall of Fame, a 150,000-square-foot entertainment complex set to open May 11.
But nestled amid these modern-day shrines to sweat and gasoline is a brand-new cultural oasis where high art reigns. Indeed, a 10-minute walk from the stadium to the hall of fame reveals three new museums and one new theater — which, by this fall, will have opened within one year and one block of one another on South Tryon Street. Called the Wells Fargo Cultural Campus, the project, which began in 2005, was the brainchild of Bob Bertges, the director of corporate real estate for Wachovia Corporation.
“At the time, Wachovia was growing very rapidly. We were looking for a global approach,” Mr. Bertges said of both public and private efforts to lure international sophisticates to North Carolina’s biggest city. And despite the recent upheavals in the financial world — including Wachovia’s acquisition by Wells Fargo in 2008 — the plan for the campus has come to fruition.
Perhaps the most eye-catching structure, and the most recent to open, is the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art (420 South Tryon Street; 704-353-9200; bechtler.org). Designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, the terra-cotta-tiled building has a playful, sweet-potato-like column supporting a cantilevered gallery containing works by marquee artists like Giacometti, Miró, Degas and Max Ernst.
Louise Hanford, who has homes in both Charlotte and Florida, is a fan. “I was totally impressed,” she said. “It was built in consideration of the art it would accommodate.” As an example, she cited the expansive fourth-floor gallery that includes floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding an atrium in the middle of the space that give framelike views of works from one side of the floor to the other.
The museum has an intimate feel because its entire collection — only 10 percent of which is shown publicly at one time — was amassed by one family. “Our holdings are a reflection of a particular family over 70 years and two generations who formed it while living in Zurich and the U.S.,” said John Boyer, president and chief executive of the museum.
The Bechtler shares an event space with the Knight Theater (No. 430; 704-372-1000; blumenthalcenter.org), which opened last fall and is now the permanent home of the North Carolina Dance Theater. Across the street is the Mint Museum Uptown (No. 500; 704-337-2000; mintmuseum.org), a new annex for Charlotte’s highly revered institution. The 145,000-square-foot structure, scheduled to open in October, will house the Mint’s American and contemporary collections (Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Ansel Adams), as well as some of its European holdings and all of its craft and design pieces.
Down the block is the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture (No. 551; 704-547-3700; ganttcenter.org). The center provides a permanent home for the renowned Hewitt Collection, which includes works by black artists like Romare Bearden and Ernest Crichlow. It also has three galleries with rotating exhibitions.
As for the campus as a whole, “It’s one-stop shopping from a cultural perspective,” said Mr. Boyer, who seems excited about the prospects of Nascar fans and tailgaters enjoying a little 20th-century modern art, and vice versa. “There is a wonderfully rich complexion here which one can argue is uniquely Charlotte, but in other respects, American.”
Image: Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Firebird” at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, part of the city’s new Wells Fargo Cultural Campus.
(Jeremy Lange for The New York Times)
HOUSTON, TEXAS — Pyrotechnics, exploding pigment, blowtorches, lacerated décollage, and found materials: these radical media, tools, and gestures characterize Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism), the avant-garde movement founded in Paris in 1960 by Pierre Restany and Yves Klein. Together, the noted art critic and artist drew their inspiration from the contrarian, anti-art philosophies of Dada.
Conceived and organized by Associate Curator Michelle White, “Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Realist Performance” will include nearly 40 works by artists associated with the group, including Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Martial Raysse, Christo, Mimmo Rotella, and Arman. All held to the belief that direct and aggressive physical explorations — characterized by a paradoxical emphasis on notions of deconstruction and accumulation, as well as the use of the detritus and debris of everyday life (in the tradition of Dada) — could lead to a more truthful understanding of modern society. This was especially so at a moment of rising, rampant consumerism. “If one succeeds at reintegrating oneself with the real,” according to one tenet of the First Manifesto of Nouveau Réalisme, “one achieves transcendence, which is emotion, sentiment, and finally, poetry.”
Highlighting the temporality of a lesser-known avant-garde movement, the exhibition will demonstrate how New Realism actively engaged with other conceptual and performance-based art as it was emerging in the United States. Along with Fluxus, Assemblage, and Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme remains influential in the history of modern art. Drawn from the Menil’s archives and permanent collection, “Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Realist Performance” will include film, photographs, painting, collage, and other media, pertaining to the movement’s ephemeral and performance-based projects. The lasting influence of Nouveau Réalisme is epitomized by Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void.” These remarkable photographs — in which the elusive Harry Shunk captured the artist leaping from a Paris rooftop, seemingly launching himself into space — will be shown along with other documents of the act. Among these will be Klein’s mock Sunday newspaper, a guerilla intervention played out on the streets of Paris that reported on the artist’s gravity-defying feat, emblazoned with the headline, “A Man in Space! The Painter of space throws himself into the Void.”
Shunk, who effectively served as Nouveau Réalisme’s house photographer, created extensive records of the artists’ work. He also photographed the artists themselves, including the Belgian surrealist René Magritte and American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. After Klein’s death in 1962, Shunk remained active on the scene, documenting the works of Tinguely, Saint Phalle, and Christo; steadily, however, he became more reclusive, not responding to publishers’ letters or lucrative offers for his archive. (After Shunk’s death in 2006 the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation acquired the collection of some 100,000 items.)
The exhibition will also feature works by Niki de Saint Phalle, well known for her “shooting paintings.” Using plaster, paint, and a .22 caliber rifle, Saint Phalle would elevate her works onto a platform and open fire, exploding bags of pigment — thereby creating a work of art. Saint Phalle often collaborated with her husband, Jean Tinguely. A founding member of the group, Tinguely satirized the overproduction of material goods in industrialized society by constructing kinetic sculptures with junkyard scraps, a process he called metamechanics. Tinguely’s machines stand as an embodiment of the Nouveau Realist philosophy — in the words of Pierre Restany, “a poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertising reality.”
If you have access to ARTE, the Franco-German cultural TV channel, don’t miss “Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely: the Bonnie and Clyde of Art,” a 55-minute film by Anne Julien and Louise Faure. This “joyful hommage to the pair of sculptors and their magical creations” will be broadcast Monday