Author Archives: NCAF

California’s Roots in Queen Califia

SEE CALIFORNIA  OCTOBER 2010
 
 

Escondido, California honors Queen Califia with park statues.

“Queen of California,” Queen Califia is on view in Escondido with a mosaic garden sculpture designed by internationally renowned artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She was commissioned to create an interactive sculpture garden at Kit Carson Park inspired by California’s mythic, historic and cultural roots. The installation is known as Queen Califia’s Magical Circle. The garden consists of nine large-scale sculptures, a circular “snake wall” and maze entryway, sculpturally integrated bench seating, and native shrubs and trees planted within the interior plaza and along the outer perimeter. The garden bears the brilliant, unique mosaic ornamentation that is an unmistakable part of Saint Phalle’s later work. Niki de Saint Phalle was a citizen of Switzerland who resided in La Jolla until her death in 2002. She is known worldwide for her work in Europe, such as the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris and a sculpture garden in Italy.

History of Queen Califia:

The western U.S. state was once described in a novel as an island: “Know that on the right hand from the Indies exists an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise.” The ruler of this island, Queen Califia, ruled an empire without men, and gave riches away wherever she traveled. It took several hundred years for the world to recognize that this place did exist, but it wasn’t an island, and it had both men and women. In 1776, just as the U.S. was being formed, Spanish explorers settled it once and for all that California was very much connected to a larger land mass on the North American continent, and was populated with both sexes.

A mural at Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco depicts Queen Califia, the ruler of a fictitious place for which California was named.

 
See California

Niki de Saint Phalle at the Château de Malbrouck

From 11 April to 29 August 2010, the Château de Malbrouck will present an exhibition dedicated to the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. The completely restored 15th-century Château de Malbrouck is located near Metz in northeastern France, just a stone’s throw from the German border. This exhibition is made possible through a collaboration with the Niki Charitable Art Foundation. Watch this space for more information.
 

Dennis Hopper

New York — If memory serves, when Easy Rider was released, in 1969, it was both terrifying and bewildering. Now it’s easier to see why. The movie Dennis Hopper directed, starred in and co-wrote was both randomly violent and deeply nihilistic. Not among the year’s anthems to a new age (Woodstock) nor one of its dirges (Altamont), it is instead a gorgeously crafted fashion treatment. Its protagonists are a pair of drug dealers who visit a commune and ride fancy bikes though they are neither hippies nor bikers but freelancing road-trippers, just looking for the main chance and trying, mightily, to stay cool.

The 100-plus gelatin silver prints (most of them 16 by 24 inches or the reverse) that were on view in “Signs of the Times,” all taken between 1961 and 1967, provided a handy guide to the intersecting worlds within which Hopper moved in the years leading to his best known film. As now, they include the California and New York art scenes along with Hollywood. Hopper is a great flatterer but also an astute observer, and while capable of combustible behavior (in the cenotaph-size book that Taschen has just published on his work of this period, the late Walter Hopps tells a chilling story of gunplay, with automatic weapons, in the Hopper household) he mostly stays out of the picture. His subjects seem to have been comfortable with that. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, John McCracken, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman — all, as Hopper saw them, were young and handsome and happy to strike beatific poses with their identifying attributes: James Rosenquist with a billboard, Allan Kaprow with a block of ice. Despite some mild antics — Robert Rauschenberg sticks out his tongue to show it’s been stamped “souvenir of Claes Oldenburg wedding”; curator Henry Geldzahler blows cigar smoke in the camera’s eye — most offer their best sides. Niki de Saint Phalle and gallery owner Virginia Dwan show up among the art crowd but in Hopper’s view they were mainly boys’ clubs, and proud of it.

If the artists tend to look like movie stars, the actors find themselves in some of the artier images. A radiant Paul Newman is shadowed by chain-link fencing that patterns his bare back and legs like a fishnet body stocking. Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim, shot on their wedding day, eye each other like tigers. At the Chateau Marmont, Bill Cosby takes shelter behind thick greenery, which exposes only his Converse-clad feet and deeply wary face. The Grateful Dead, the Byrds and Jefferson Airplane all look like they just stepped off album covers. Hopps, the shape-shifting curator, is captured — barely — between glare and gloom in an over-furnished parlor.

It being the ’60s, Hopper duly went south, catching shots of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and some protestors in Selma. But the photographer is no activist. (Not long ago Hopper became a committed Republican, donating heavily to the party during the 2004 campaign before finding himself on Obama’s side in 2008.) There were dashes, in this show, of urban grit, seen in New York, and of Latin flavor, in Mexico, but they seemed pro forma. More vibrant are the paeans to car culture: Double Standard (1961), taken from the driver’s seat in L.A. and presided over by a rearview mirror, careens right into a Standard gas station and anticipates by two years Ruscha’s famous Standard Station. Hopper’s photos of Rosenquist-like billboards are equally sharp and powerful.

As a kind of coda, the exhibition included roughly three dozen clips of movies starring Hopper, which ran on 11 monitors and created an effect something like the film medleys shown during Academy Award ceremonies. There were also some recent painted enlargements of the photographs. Both felt almost comic in their grandiosity.

On view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York at the same time, Robert Frank’s The Americans provided a useful comparison. While Frank aimed under the skin of the nation’s character, Hopper seems always to have been less interested in who we really are than how we’d like to be seen — fantasies he observed keenly during a period when the rest of the world was paying close attention to us, too.

 
— Nancy Princenthal, Art in America

 
Photos: (left) Andy Warhol and members of the Factory (Gregory Markopoulos, Taylor Mead, Gerard Malanga & Jack Smith), 1963 printed 2009, gelatin silver print, 20 by 30 inches; both at Tony Shafrazi. (right) Dennis Hopper: Double Standard, 1961, 2009, oil on canvas, 79 1/2 by 120 inches.

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art Unveils Charlotte’s Newest Public Art

PRESS RELEASE  BECHTLER MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
 
 

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, 3 NOVEMBER 2009 — The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art today unveiled the Firebird, a playful, monumental outdoor sculpture that will greet visitors on their way to the museum when it opens January 2, 2010.

The Firebird is Charlotte’s newest work of privately-owned public art and is a permanent fixture in the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art collection. Standing 17 feet 5 inches tall, the sculpture is a whimsical, bird-like creature covered from top to bottom in pieces of mirrored and colored glass. The Firebird was installed on the plaza of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art facing South Tryon Street overlooking the new Wells Fargo Cultural Campus where the museum is located.

Created in 1991 by French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), the sculpture was purchased by museum patron Andreas Bechtler specifically for placement in front of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. Bechtler, a Charlotte resident and native of Switzerland, was looking for a sculpture to serve as a counterpoint to the geometric lines of the museum’s architecture, designed by renowned Swiss architect Mario Botta.

“When I saw the Firebird, I knew it was outstanding. I knew it would be great for the museum,” Andreas Bechtler said. “The Firebird is joyful, uplifting and engaging. It makes you feel that life is good.”

The unveiling ceremony included remarks from Cyndee Patterson, Board Chair of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art; Heinz Roth, Honorary Consul of Switzerland; Urs Ziswiler, Swiss Ambassador to the United States; Andreas Bechtler and John Boyer, President and CEO of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. Also in attendance was Laura Gabriela Duke, the daughter of Firebird artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

“The Bechtler is excited to celebrate the great legacy of Niki de Saint Phalle with the placement of the Firebird — a piece that we trust will serve as an exciting and welcoming gesture to Charlotte visitors and everyone who comes to the Wells Fargo Cultural Campus,” said museum President and CEO John Boyer.

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is named after the family of Andreas Bechtler. Bechtler assembled and inherited a collection of more than 1,400 artworks created by major figures of 20th-century modernism and committed it to the city of Charlotte.

The Bechtler collection comprises artworks by seminal figures such as Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miro, Jean Tinguely, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Le Corbusier, Sol LeWitt, Edgar Degas, Nicolas de Stael, Barbara Hepworth and Picasso. Books, photographs and letters illustrating personal connections to the Bechtler family accompany some of the works in the collection. Only a handful of the artworks have been on public view in the United States.

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is located at 420 South Tryon Street in uptown Charlotte. The museum opens to the public January 2, 2010. Operating hours will be Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Sunday 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.; closed Tuesdays. Admission is $8 for adults; $6 for seniors, college students and educators; $4 for youth (11 to 14) and free for children (up to 10). For museum details, visit www.bechtler.org.

For more information contact: Pam Davis, Director of Communications and Marketing, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, pam.davis@bechtler.org, office: 704.353.9204 / mobile 704.975.2363

Niki de Saint Phalle Retrospective to Open in Rome

Italy’s first major retrospective exhibition dedicated to Niki de Saint Phalle will open on 4 November 2009 at the Museum of the Rome Foundation (formerly Museo del Corso).

The exhibition will present more than 100 of Niki’s works, exploring what organizers call “an extraordinary artistic path that goes beyond classifications and fashions, mingled with a tumultuous and fascinating life.” The historic show will include many paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the famous polychrome Nanas for which Niki de Saint Phalle is famous throughout the world.

The exhibition, curated by Stefano Cecchetto, is co-produced and organized by Arthemisia Group in collaboration with the Niki Charitable Art Foundation. The retrospective, which is sponsored by the Rome Foundation, will be on exhibit from 4 November 2009 through 17 January 2010.
 

Le scatole dei segreti di Niki de Saint Phalle

Two years after a show devoted to Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, the cheerful and colorful universe of Niki de Saint Phalle — Tinguely’s wife and artistic collaborator — has come to the Museo in Erba in Bellinzona, Switzerland.

Le scatole dei segreti di Niki de Saint Phalle, a child-friendly exhibition in the form of an interactive game, is the fruit of a collaboration between Lausanne’s Center Culturel d’Aide à la Jeunesse and the Musée en Herbe in Paris. It consists of 14 modules exploring the artist’s work, short texts and games. The show gives autonomous, active children a rare opportunity to dive into an artistic universe full of life, joy and color.

The exhibition, which opened 12 September 2009, will continue through 28 February 2010. Learn more.
 

‘Joie de Vivre’ Extended in Sorano

Niki de Saint Phalle: Joie de Vivre, a solo exhibition of work by Niki de Saint Phalle that came to the Fortezza Orsini in Sorano, Italy on 22 August, has been extended through 26 October.

The exhibition was shown in three venues in the Province of Grosseto, Italy, over the summer. It appeared at the Palazzo dell’Abbondanza in Massa Marittima, Italy from 31 May to 28 June 2009. It then moved to the Castello Aldobrandesco di Arcidosso in Amiata, Italy on 4 July, remaining until 19 August.
 

New York Times: Celebrating the Female Artist at the Pompidou

Marguerite Suozzi of The New York Times says “the sheer scope of elles@centrepompidou, a vast exhibit — over 500 works by 200 artists are on display — at the Centre Pompidou makes it noteworthy.” Shown at right are Niki de Saint Phalle’s Crucifixion (left) and La Mariée, both from 1963. The exhibit, which runs through 24 May 2010 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is open Wednesdays through Mondays from 11 am to 9 pm. Adult admission is 6 euros. Read more.
 

Innovations in the Third Dimension

Sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle are among the masterworks in “Innovations in the Third Dimension: Sculpture of Our Time,” now showing at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The exhibition showcases 45 masterpieces of modern sculpture and addresses how ideas about the medium, size, presentation, patronage, and techniques of sculpture in the 20th and 21st centuries have created exciting and startling new possibilities for the medium.

Other sculptors included in the group show, dating from the late 19th century to the present, include Alexander Archipenko, Fernando Botero, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Duane Hanson, Keith Haring, Lisa Lou, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Marc Quinn, Auguste Rodin, David Smith, Sue Webster and Tim Noble.

The exhibition, which opened on 24 January, will run through 24 May 2009.

Shown: Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana with Serpent. Painted plaster, 29 x 16 x 10 in. Collection of Sachiko and Lawrence Goodman. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Paul Mutino.