Press Coverage

FINANCIAL TIMES  21 OCTOBER 2010
 
 

The official history of Pop Art is the tale of men who prowled the domestic arena, staging their paintings in suburban kitchens, closets, bedrooms and bathrooms. Warhol’s soup cans, Lichtenstein’s romance comics, Oldenburg’s lipsticks, Rosenquist’s spaghetti and Jim Dine’s bathrobe are icons of a movement that fetishised female equipment but spurned female company. Marilyn Monroe keeps cropping up in fluorescent splendour; so do big breasts and Cloroxed teeth. And yet no women have won permanent seats in the Pop pantheon. None.

All of which makes the Brooklyn Museum’s new revisionist survey such an astonishing delight. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968 unearths a secret history of talented ladies who toiled in the vineyards of Pop, gathered bushels of critical praise and were almost immediately forgotten. Warhol’s famous epigram on fame certainly applied to them, even if his own 15 minutes have proved infinitely renewable.

The travelling exhibition, curated by Sid Sachs of the Museum of the Arts in Philadelphia, makes it stunningly clear that Pop’s female contingent deserved better than four decades of shabby disregard. There’s the brilliant Rosalyn Drexler, for example, whose cool, noirish collages savour the overlap of power and malevolence. She has had a cinematic life – she wrestled professionally (as Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire), novelised the movie Rocky (under the pseudonym Julia Sorel), and has written novels, plays and films – and her paintings feel like movie stills.

Femmes fatales and sharply dressed thugs strut across vast blank spaces, playing out scenes of cruelty and coercion. A man wearing a fedora glares out of “Home Movies” and aims a machine gun straight between our eyes. In the upper half of “Love and Violence” a suited tough guy cradles a woman’s face in his hands, a gesture of tenderness or assault. We search the storyboards below for clues: is that the same man, wrestling a trench-coated goon for control of a pistol? Drexler’s elusive parables share the pessimism of Warhol’s roughly contemporaneous “Death and Disaster” series. But while Warhol has been posthumously promoted from celebrity to demigod, she has remained a minor polymath. “If you’re alive,” she once said, “things aren’t going to be that good”.

Across the Atlantic, the super-talented Pauline Boty also won a flicker of fame with her lush renderings of stars and gangsters. From a newspaper photo of one Big Jim Colosimo sitting in his attorney’s grubby office, Boty produced a majestic portrait of low-life royalty. The white-suited mobster perches in a throne-like chair like a Velázquez potentate, isolated and monumentalised against an indigo background. His name is inscribed in imperial-sized letters of pastel pink.

Even as Warhol was busy silkscreening odes to Liz Taylor and Elvis, Boty was creating her own idiosyncratic homages to film stars. She, too, worshipped Marilyn Monroe, and she also had a weak spot for the French New Wave. “With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo” (1962) magnifies the Gallic heartthrob’s head to monstrous proportions. His face, half-hidden by sunglasses, looks sensual and oh-so-cool. But from his goofy straw hat blooms a scarlet shape – a mutant rose, a woman’s private parts or a pulsing human brain.

Her renown peaked in the early 1960s, when she was featured, with Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, and Peter Phillips, in Ken Russell’s film Pop Goes the Easel. An actress as well as a painter, she hobnobbed with Bob Dylan, sketched the Rolling Stones, and had just completed the set design for Kenneth Tynan’s production of Oh! Calcutta! when she died of cancer at 28, in 1966. Within a few years, her paintings were gathering dust in an outhouse at her brother’s farm in Kent.

Most of what’s on display has enough self-evident power that the exhibition doesn’t need to holler about injustice. Vitrines full of press releases and clippings record the fact that for a while the female pioneers received plenty of admiration – though not necessarily of the sort they craved. A Vogue profile of Pauline Boty was headlined “Living Doll”. Another magazine marvelled: “Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blond and you have PAULINE BOTY.”

Pop was a scene as well as a movement and its women knew how to leverage their sex appeal, which simultaneously boosted their reputations and made it easy to write them off. Niki de St Phalle posed for Vogue and Life. Evelyne Axell was an actress before taking her clothes off for a series of erotic self-portraits. Marisol’s knockout looks attracted attention to her sculptures, and at the same time deflected it towards herself.

For the most part, these artists accepted the beauty bargain of those times, but Jann Haworth, an American who lived in London and studied at the Slade in 1961, resisted it. “The assumption was that, as one tutor put it, ‘the girls were there to keep the boys happy.’ He prefaced that by saying ‘it wasn’t necessary for them to look at the portfolios of the female students … they just needed to look at their photos.'” Haworth answered contempt with competitiveness. “I was determined to better them, and that’s one of the reasons for the partly sarcastic choice of cloth, latex and sequins as media. It was a female language to which the male students didn’t have access.” Defying the sexist culture there, she made the “partly sarcastic choice” of cloth, latex and sequins as media – “a female language to which the male students didn’t have access”, she recalled. The result is a catalogue of hilariously grotesque, squishily soft sculptures like a life-sized doll in a French maid’s uniform, bewigged with human hair.

Her diligence only helped for a while. In 1967, she and her husband, artist Peter Blake, collaborated on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which included one of her stuffed old ladies and a Shirley Temple doll wearing a “Welcome The Rolling Stones” sweater. The couple won a Grammy Award for the design, but while Blake enjoyed permanent celebrity, she drifted into obscurity.

The exhibition feels like a companion piece to the television series Mad Men, which shows professional women in the early 1960s suffering a daily drizzle of humiliation. So perhaps Idelle Weber, another of the forgotten women of Pop, finds some bitter satisfaction in seeing the work she made then being imitated now for the sake of period authenticity. The TV series’s credit sequence shows a silhouetted man in a suit plummeting past a modernist office building. It’s an image of stylish despair, and also either a rip-off or a tribute to Weber’s “Munchkins” triptych, where silhouetted men in suits ride escalators inside a modernist office building. Finally Pop culture is recognising Pop’s women with sincerest flattery.

 
— Ariella Budick, Financial Times

 
“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, 718-638-5000), 15 October 2010 – 9 January 2011. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

 
Photos: Detail from “Big Jim Colosimo” (c.1963), by Pauline Boty; detail from “With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo” (1962), by Pauline Boty. In “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” at the Brooklyn Museum.

ARTDAILY  15 OCTOBER 2010
 
 

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — The first major exhibition to explore in depth the contributions of female Pop artists, “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968,” seeks to expand the definition of classic Pop art and re-evaluate the role of the women who worked alongside the movement’s more famous male practitioners. It features more than fifty works by Pop art’s most significant female artists and includes many pieces that have not been shown in nearly forty years. The exhibition will be on view in the Brooklyn Museum‘s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and in the adjacent fourth-floor Schapiro Wing galleries.

Although radical social changes were taking place in America in the 1960s, the female Pop artists of the time remained largely unacknowledged by the contemporary art critics and academics. Relegated to the margins of history by discrimination, historical precedent, and social expectations, these women were forced to take a back seat to their male counterparts, who became icons of the era. Informed by their personal histories, the work of female Pop artists was often collaborative and incorporated empathetic social commentary.

“Seductive Subversion” includes Marisol’s “John Wayne” sculpture, commissioned by Life magazine for an issue on movies; the French sculptor, painter, and filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle’s eight-foot-tall “Black Rosy,” one of her “Nana” sculptures exploring the role of women; Rosalyn Drexler’s oil and acrylic work “Chubby Checker,” inspired by the poster for the movie Twist around the Clock, and “Home Movies,” based on frames from old gangster movies; the Times Square–inspired “Ampersand,” a multilayered, stylized, and illuminated neon ampersand in a Plexiglas cube by Chryssa, one of the first artists to utilize neon in her work; and a seventeen-foot-long triptych by Idelle Weber. Artwork has been loaned by the National Gallery; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.); the Neuberger Museum (Purchase, New York); and major private collectors.

Works from the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings have been added exclusively for the Brooklyn exhibition. They include “Squeeze Me” and “You Can’t Catch Me” by Mara McAfee; “Dear Diana” and “My Love We Won’t” by Niki de Saint Phalle; “Nestle’s Box” by Marjorie Strider; and “Cents Sign Travelling from Broadway to Africa via Guadeloupe” by Chryssa, which will be on display at the Museum for the first time.

Paintings and sculptures by Evelyne Axell, Pauline Boty, Vija Celmins, Dorothy Grebenak, Kay Kurt, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Mara McAfee, Barbro Ostlihn, Faith Ringgold, Martha Rosler, Marjorie Strider, Kiki Kogelnik, Marta Minujin, and May Wilson will also be featured.

“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968” was organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The Brooklyn presentation is coordinated by Catherine Morris, Curator of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

 
Image: Yayoi Kusama, “Untitled,” 1963. Sewn stuffed fabric, cooking pot, lid, ladle and paint d.v. Dimensions variable. (Private Collection, New York Courtesy of Peter Freeman, Inc., New York)

THE BROOKLYN PAPER  14 OCTOBER 2010
 
 

A new exhibit of feminist pop art during the turmoil of the 1960s gives the supposed King of Pop, Andy Warhol, a swift kick in the groin through an eclectic mix of works that are both provocative and humorous.

Warhol tended to tackle our commercialized culture through his ironic reproductions of the quotidian, but the works in “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” have an urgent, rebellious attitude.

Many of the pieces are more explicit in their attacks on male-dominated society. John Wayne, a “man’s man” if there ever was one, is lampooned in a wooden sculpture of him riding a carousel horse. The artist May Stevens’s father also gets skewered; he is depicted as a cop, butcher, military man, and executioner. Even King Kong gets in on the misogyny by menacing the ubiquitous damsel in distress in a painting by Rosalyn Drexler.

But men are not the only targets in “Seductive Subversion.” The Vietnam War is an influence on many of the pieces, as is the hyper-sexualization of women in popular culture.

The exhibit seamlessly includes photo collages from skin mags, sculptures, plenty of phallic symbols — including a colorful missile — and much more, all hinting that in a time of social upheaval these artists were struggling to make their voices heard over the din of revolution.

Take, for example, Idelle Weber, who portrays males from the Mad Men era as merely soulless silhouettes on their daily commute. She calls them “Munchkins.”

In another painting called “Marvelous Mechanical Men,” a cadre of identical businessmen with statuesque features enjoy a drink after work.

Finally, in “Squeeze Me,” those same mechanical men get what’s coming to them: a pair of hands — Weber’s — crushes them into oblivion. The piece features comic-book influences, like many of the paintings on display, as the men are crushed in a three-panel sequence.

Other works are less explicit in their aggression. Yayo Kusama’s seat made of phalluses tackles the familiar theme in pop art of mass production. Needless to say, Kusama’s seat — possibly the worst football chair ever — is much more shocking than yet another Campbell’s soup can or silkscreen portrait.

The art makes for a stark contrast with the work of Warhol — who was featured in an excellent retrospective last summer at the Brooklyn Museum and whose work tended have an ironic air of detachment rather than a pugilistic desire to shock the status quo.

Warhol’s dominance of the pop art scene was symbolically broken in 1968 when the feminist writer Valerie Solanas shot and nearly killed him — in the ultimate piece of performance art of the century. But “Seductive Subversion,” which features no works created after that shooting, proves that numerous artists were challenging the male pop-paradigm well before Solanas put a cap in Warhol.

Take Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Black Rosy or My Heart Belongs to Rosy,” which looks like a cross between the Venus of Willendorf and one of R. Crumb’s freakiest fantasies. The towering statue depicts a woman with outrageous proportions, tacky clothes and a tiny, featureless head. It’s as if some dirtbag’s fantasy is towering over the viewer.

“Seductive Subversion” brings levity to feminist art — the genre has a reputation for being earnest, to say the least — that makes it appealing, easy to approach and thought-provoking.

Overall, the exhibit works as an excellent complement to one of the museum’s most important pieces, Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” — the quintessential example of humorless, overwhelming feminist art. Chicago’s famous work is permanently set up in the museum in a pyramid-shaped, dimly lit black room, and features 39 vaginal dinner plates representing underappreciated heroines from history on elaborately embroidered tablecloth.

Taken together, the two exhibits are a powerful indicator of the diversity and creativity of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

 
— Stephen Brown, The Brooklyn Paper

 
“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, 718-638-5000), October 15, 2010 – January 9, 2011. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

 
Photo: The Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture “Black Rosy, or My Heart Belongs to Rosy” (1965) (Image © Niki Charitable Art Foundation. All rights reserved. Photo: Laurent Condominas)

THE NEW YORK TIMES  14 OCTOBER 2010
 
 

Why have there been no great female Pop artists? That’s the question posed by Sid Sachs at the start of his catalog essay for “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,” a revelatory time capsule of an exhibition that he has organized at the Brooklyn Museum. He is paraphrasing the title of Linda Nochlin’s monument of feminist art history, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

Like Ms. Nochlin’s, Mr. Sach’s question breaks down into several smaller queries: Is it true that no female artists did anything with popular imagery as powerful as the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein or James Rosenquist? If so, why didn’t they? If there were some who did, who were they, and why are they not more celebrated? And what does “great artist” mean anyway?

Produced initially by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where it opened in January, the exhibition presents an entertaining hodgepodge of paintings and sculptures by two dozen women. If it does represent the best female artists of the first Pop Art generation — and there is no reason to think otherwise — you’d have to admit that there were no women producing Pop Art as inventively, ambitiously and memorably as their male counterparts. That is not to say, however, that there were no interesting women mining the Pop vein.

Paintings by Rosalyn Drexler with figures lifted from news photographs, gangster movies and a Chubby Checker poster isolated on flat, gridded, Mondrianesque backgrounds anticipate the cool neo-Pop art of Pictures Generation artists like Robert Longo and Sarah Charlesworth. Idelle Weber’s mural-size painting of silhouetted businessmen riding escalators against an optically buzzing black-and-yellow-checked wall and her small, cast-Lucite cubes with men in silhouette silk-screened on them similarly evoke a shadow world of mechanical representations.

A neon-light sculpture by Chryssa, with variously colored cent signs blinking inside a box of translucent, dark plexiglass, is a nice marriage of Minimalism and commercial signage. Barbro Ostlihn’s Georgia O’Keeffe-like centered painting of a simplified, many-petaled, orange sunflower has a psychedelic vibe, while Dorothy Grebenak’s translation of liquor-bottle labels and other sorts of commercial logos into hooked rugs give Pop a sensuously tactile, folk-art spin. Kay Kurt’s 10-foot-wide painting of a box of white chocolates is a spectacular piece of Photorealism.

A quibbler might point out that some artists in the exhibition are not, strictly speaking, Pop Artists. A Vija Celmin sculpture of a greatly enlarged, stubby pencil, for example, is closer to Magrittean magic realism than Pop. Yayoi Kusama’s pieces of furniture bristling with white, stuffed phallic forms are more in a tradition of Surrealist assemblage, and May Wilson’s glittery, collaged portraits of masked women resemble works of an eccentric Victorian hobbyist. They have an idiosyncratic strangeness far from the cool modernity of Pop. Including such artists, however, does help capture the general spirit of playful novelty that inspired all kinds of artists in the early ’60s.

A self-consciously feminist art movement came after the decade covered by this show, but a few of these women asserted protest against sexism in no uncertain terms. Martha Rosler’s collages of Vietnam War imagery, domestic interiors and Playboy pinups are exceptional for their ideological ferocity. May Stevens’s “Big Daddy Paper Doll,” which was made in 1970 and was added to the show by the Brooklyn Museum, belongs to a later moment. It personifies the patriarchy in the cartoon character of a uniformed, thick-necked authority figure. But most of the exhibition’s artists were more ambivalent about the feminine mystique.

Marjorie Strider’s painted relief of a beautiful woman holding a basketball-size radish in her teeth is like a work by the lubricious Tom Wesselmann. Her 12-foot-wide triptych picturing a sexy woman in a bikini in three different poses, breasts projecting in three dimensions, seems simultaneously to embrace the sexual freedoms precipitated by the Pill and to mock the commercial exploitation of desire. A bulbous statue of a cartoon giantess by Niki de Saint Phalle, meanwhile, incarnates a zany, retrogressive Great Mother of countercultural revolution.

Few women of this era, evidently, were ready to challenge male domination in life or in art openly. Mr. Sachs’s anecdote-rich essay vividly describes a bohemian art world not unlike the bourgeois milieu of “Mad Men,” in which female artists were expected to play the roles of wife, lover, helpmeet and caretaker first and that of professional art maker last if at all.

Some women contributed significantly to their partners’ work with little or no acknowledgment. Ms. Ostlihn produced some of the paintings of her husband, Oyvind Fahlstrom, and Richard Hamilton created his seminal collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” using images that his wife, Terry Hamilton, and the artist Magda Cordell spent several days clipping from magazines.

Patty Mucha sewed the fabric shells for the early soft sculptures of her husband, Claes Oldenburg. Her essay chronicling her collaboration with Mr. Oldenburg is one of the delights of the catalog. Though notably rancor free, she admits that after they divorced in 1970 she stopped making her own clothes, as she was “suffering from intense burnout.”

Then there was what Mr. Sachs called “the beauty trap”: Women who were young and pretty could hang out with the boys, but few of them would be taken seriously as artists. Mr. Sachs quotes Carolee Schneemann, who said, “You had to shut up and affiliate yourself with interesting men,” and “you had to be good looking.” This is borne out in the catalog by pictures of artists like de Saint Phalle, Marisol, Evelyne Axell and Pauline Boty, who happened to be blessed with extraordinarily photogenic looks. It is easy to imagine why such naturally and socially privileged people would hesitate to break out of their gilded cages.

In light of all this, the exhibition’s title, “Seductive Subversion,” takes on a shady double meaning. Ostensibly it describes works that smuggle social critique under appealing aesthetic cover. But it also implies an old idea about what members of the so-called weaker sex must do to get what they want: use their charms and wiles to put men off their guard. In most parts of the world, open rebellion is still not an option for women.

That things are better today for female artists working in Europe and the United States is undeniable, though how much better remains debatable. While the highest prices are still reserved for male heavyweights, there were more women than men represented in the last Whitney Biennial. We might suppose, therefore, that some female artists living and working now will one day go down in history as “great.” But what would that mean?

It would be hyperbolic to claim that any of the artists in “Seductive Subversion” are great in the sense that Michelangelo and Picasso were. Nor will any of them be found to have eclipsed the kings of Pop. But then again, is the idea of greatness even relevant anymore? Are any artists of the Postmodern era, male or female, truly great? Absent consensus about standards for measuring excellence in art, it becomes an empty term of endearment and a marketing label. (Andy Warhol thought everything was great.) Maybe the Bravo reality television show “Work of Art” has it all wrong. Maybe there will never be another great artist. And maybe that will be O.K.

 
— Ken Johnson, The New York Times

 
“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” continues through January 9, 2011 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

 
Photo: The Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture “Black Rosy, or My Heart Belongs to Rosy” (1965) (Image © Niki Charitable Art Foundation. All rights reserved. Photo: Laurent Condominas)

SEE CALIFORNIA  OCTOBER 2010
 
 

Californians are big fans of French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, whose work can be seen at the Brea Mall.

Internationally renowned artist Niki de Saint Phalle created a whimsical public piece which sits in the center of a fountain pool at Brea Mall. Drawing inspiration from the 18th card of the tarot deck, the polymer creation evokes attention from passersby with its brilliant primal colors: red, blue, green and yellow. La Lune (French for “The Moon”) features the slender profile of a woman’s face in a double-image silver crescent moon. The moon is then clasped by a startling red and orange lobster, which is supported by a wolf and a dog. The dog implies domesticity, the wolf signifies the wild, the lobster represents the sea and the moon symbolizes man’s highest achievement. The artist’s work is known for searching the unknown and the mystical in feminine themes.

The piece is one of over 20 quality public installations throughout the city of Brea you can see during a visit.

About the artist: Born as Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, she lived from October 1930 to May 2002. Multi-talented, she was recognized not only for her sculpting and painting but also her film-making. Her striking features and figure also provided a career during her teen and young adult years as a fashion model for the French Vogue magazine, and she also appeared on the cover of Life magazine circa 1949.

Niki de Saint Phalle moved to the U.S. from France with her family and lived on the East Coast. Expelled from one school for painting fig leaves red on the school statuary, the budding artist had only begun to explore her creative side and fortunately, was not deterred from pursuing one of her many talents as painter.

In California you’ll find four of her sculpted works — all in Southern California, from San Diego to Brea.

Escondido — Queen Califia’s Magic Circle, a sculpture garden in Kit Carson Park, Escondido, California.

San Diego — Sun God is a fanciful winged creature next to the Faculty Club on the campus of the University of California, San Diego as a part of the Stuart Collection of public art.

San Diego — Coming Together is showcased at the San Diego Convention Center.

Brea — La Lune, a sculpture located inside the Brea Mall in Brea, California.

 
— See California

 
Photo: La Lune. (City of Brea)

ART IN AMERICA  1 SEPTEMBER 2010
 
 

LINCOLN, NEBRASKA — “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” is the rare show that encourages you to rethink an entire period. Curated by Sid Sachs of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where it premiered last winter, it is billed as the first-ever all-woman survey of Pop art. Affording us the opportunity to rediscover artists and see unfamiliar work, the show revisits the origins of Pop art and the influence wielded by popular culture internationally during the decade in question.¹ In subject matter, content and esthetics, the work on view departs in surprising and significant ways from what one might expect of Pop art, and in so doing challenges much received wisdom about the movement.

In the early ’60s, the term “Pop” was generally applied to art that depicted mundane objects or banal commercial products, and whose imagery and style referenced advertising or graphic design. Pop’s defining exhibitions-“New Painting of Common Objects,” curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum; “The New Realists,” at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York (both 1962); and “Six Painters and the Object,” organized by Lawrence Alloway at the Guggenheim Museum (1963)-were all-male affairs (though Marisol was included in the Janis show). Sachs reminds us that there is much more to Pop-to its artistic sources and objectives-than the critical and art historical canon would lead us to believe. Ideas about Pop art, right down to the roster of its principal proponents, have rarely strayed far from those set forth in Lucy R. Lippard’s 1966 book Pop Art.

“Seductive Subversion” includes not only underknown Pop artists but also artists who are not typically identified with the movement. Marisol and Niki de Saint Phalle, both well known and associated with mainstream Pop, are present, but so is the Greek-born artist Chryssa, who is now fairly obscure but had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1961, when she was in her late 20s. (Having begun as a painter, she did pioneering work in neon in the ’60s and ’70s.) Other familiar figures in the exhibition are Yayoi Kusama, Martha Rosler, Vija Celmins and Faith Ringgold, who, while they are not identified with Pop today, were considered Pop-ish during the decade covered. Still others were (and are) better known abroad than in the U.S.: the Briton Pauline Boty (1938-1966), who was also an occasional model and actress of stage, film and TV; Jann Haworth, an American who participated in the British Pop art movement; the Swede Barbro Östlihn (1930-1995), who had a retrospective at the Art Museum of Norrköping in 2003; and, from Belgium, Evelyne Axell (1935-1972), a TV presenter, actress and scriptwriter turned artist.

The catalogue does a good job of documenting the systematic exclusions these artists experienced. They were treated as second-class citizens in the male-dominated art world of the period, and their work continues to be overlooked in most surveys of Pop. Yet neither the catalogue nor exhibition constitutes a feminist grudge-fest. While the timeframe covered coincides with the emergence of second-wave feminism, much of the work in “Seductive Subversion” seems at first to replicate the objectification of women, along with prevailing views of the feminine and domestic. As Sachs points out, the era’s gender divisions, both in the domestic and public spheres, permeated the artistic and personal lives of the women surveyed. Nonetheless, we find in the representation of these themes an implicit proto-feminist attitude-though sometimes the work is more overt, as in the case of 10 photomontages by Martha Rosler focusing on what one might think of as the politicization of feminine domestic servitude and decorum. The women in Rosler’s collages may go about doing their chores, sometimes in homes decorated with posters by famous Pop artists, but the world impinges in places as images of war taken from newspapers occupy windows or picture frames.

Helpfully, given the unfamiliar terrain covered, the catalogue is less a document of the exhibition than a stand-alone book [not yet issued as A.i.A. goes to press]. It provides information on the lives and careers of women artists identified with Pop and furnishes a context for both the period and the show. Essays by Sachs, Rosler, Linda Nochlin and Kalliopi Minioudaki address the issue of feminism, while individual case studies of some of the artists are supplied by Bradford Collins (on Rosalyn Drexler), Annika Ohrner (on Östlihn) and Sue Tate (on Boty and other women artists associated with British Pop). Patty Mucha gives a first-person account of her years of marriage to Claes Oldenburg during the beginnings of Pop; it was she who fabricated his early soft sculptures. (The essay is a reprint of an article first published in A.i.A., November ’02.)

While this might seem petty, I find the title “Seductive Subversion” misleading, tinged more with chauvinism than irony. The term “seduction” can imply what were once considered feminine wiles — guile, coyness and even deceit.

The work in the show is, if anything, antithetical to seduction in this sense. In fact, the exhibition lives up to its original working title, “Beyond the Surface: Women and Pop Art, 1958-1968,” which is now the title of Sachs’s catalogue essay — a response to the famous comment by Warhol that if you want to know all about him or his work, all you need to do is look at the surface. Sachs’s efforts, by contrast, go well beyond a superficial reading of the movement. The artists in “Seductive Subversion” employ Pop motifs and styles, but they do not adopt the cool industrial look normally associated with Pop. Nor do they emphasize product labels and logos, or the esthetics of mass reproduction. While social and cultural commentary might arise in art using commercial techniques, formats and styles, the established artists here often turned to more hand-made means to convey their messages. They also make little or no reference to celebrities, glamour, glitz or kitsch (though Joyce Wieland does incorporate into her 1964 construction Young Woman’s Blues a cheap dime-store Valentine’s Day heart and a plastic model of a jet plane). Sachs’s account embraces Pop’s sources in craft, folk art, gendered imagery (particularly the representation of women’s bodies) and individual experience as well as other contemporary art. All combine to give expression to highly personal approaches and points of view.

In his seven years researching the show, Sachs culled a list of 65 names from periodicals, exhibition catalogues and checklists, books and articles. He also had conversations with artists Idelle Weber, Drexler, Marjorie Strider, Minioudaki, Östlihn and many others. Not all the artists whom Sachs uncovered are included in the exhibition. He hunted down works in storage facilities of museums and collectors, and in the holdings of inactive estates (nearly half the artists are deceased). Sometimes the works were in a state of disrepair; Dorothy Grebenak’s woolen hooked rug Tide Box (1964) had fallen apart and had to be replicated for the show (by fiber artist Emily Peters). The sole surviving example of Laura Grisi’s illuminated Plexiglas reliefs and boxes, owned by a German museum, is too fragile to travel. Only a small etching of a crossword puzzle (1964) by the late Letty Eisenhauer, originally an edition of 60, could be located; she had lost nearly the entirety of her oeuvre in recent years to floods. And some of the artists have actually gone missing: Sachs could find neither Gloria Graves nor any of her works. Not all the explanations of exclusions or near-exclusions are so bleak, however. Lee Lozano (who is represented by a single drawing on graph paper from 1958) and Haworth, for example, were the subjects of retrospectives at the time Sachs was organizing this exhibition; therefore key works by them were not available. “Seductive Subversion” (which in Philadelphia consisted of 56 works by 21 artists²) is obviously not comprehensive. Yet, while artists are often unevenly (though intriguingly) represented, the show as a whole gives us a compelling view of works that have long been unseen-if they were ever seen in the first place.

In its bold, aggressive imagery and grand scale — sometimes billboard-size — the work of Lichtenstein, Dine, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg et al. has often been characterized as the last bastion of the heroism and masculinity of Abstract Expressionism. Such traits are absent in “Seductive Subversion,” though the women here were certainly not alone in presenting an alternative. They remind me of some male artists at times associated with Pop — though not among the defining stars — who similarly lacked a critical link to Ab-Ex: Joe Brainard, Allan d’Arcangelo, Alex Hay, Joe Goode, Alex Katz, Öyvind Fahlström, Wayne Thiebaud and John Wesley, among others. These artists also drew upon elements of popular culture (comics as well as mass-produced and common objects), but their work — by turns minimal, personal, conceptual or formalist — never entered the canon of Pop art as narrowly defined.

Of course there are parallels between the women artists and their better-known male counterparts. Chryssa created a number of Warhol-like works, such as her painted grids of repeating images (Car Tires, 1962) or newspaper advertisements (Newspaper II, 1961), and a Johns-like plaster relief of letterpress type (Unmailed Letter, 1960). Grebenak appropriated imagery from other Pop artists (Warhol and Lichtenstein), which she turned into rugs. In so doing, she appears to have been less concerned with popular imagery per se than with addressing the difference between those artists’ paintings (high art) and her own craft, which played with the idea of hobbyism. Other works, like her rugs depicting Bugatti cars (ca. 1964), had more personal associations; her dealer, Allan Stone, collected them.

Marisol likewise incorporated elements of craft, though of the folk art variety. Her wooden sculpture John Wayne (1962-63) shows the cowboy star, gun drawn, astride a horse going at cartoonish full gallop (all four legs extending out from its body). Given its strong horizontal and vertical axes and pronounced silhouette, it is reminiscent of a whirligig or weathervane. (The work was commissioned to appear in a special issue of Life magazine devoted to film.) Marisol’s approach, in turn, is radically different from that of Drexler, whose works are more formalist. Drexler isolates her figures (pop singers, film characters and other subjects) within flat, geometric grounds. An example is Twist Around the Clock (1964), in which the figures of Chubby Checker and dancing couples were adapted from a poster for the eponymous film. Earlier, more collagelike paintings by Drexler similarly appropriated stereotypical imagery from film posters advertising damsel-in-distress movies, but in those she rearranged the elements to make the results more expressionistic (King Kong aka The Dream, 1963). Of a very different order are the mimetic paintings of Celmins and Kay Kurt, who rendered such objects as a pencil (Celmins) and a box of chocolates (Kurt) as deadpan as possible, strategically positioning their work in line with both the objectivity of Minimalism and the banality of Pop.

Sometimes mixed messages arise from combining socio-cultural critique and formalist esthetics. Strider’s paintings of bathing beauties — kittenish, Colgate-smile, bikini-clad girls (Green Triptych, 1963) — differ decidedly from similar works by such male counterparts as Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and the British artists Gerald Laing and Tom Phillips. Executing their breasts and buttocks in relief, Strider not only metaphorically but physically objectifies them. A woman’s appeal, she seems to say, is reducible to her protuberances; in accordance, she punningly “shapes” her canvases. Building masculine fantasy into her imagery, Strider at the same time transgresses the dictums of flatness associated with formalist and Minimalist hard-edge abstract painting, which were Pop’s main competitors for critical attention at the time. Another approach to sexual appeal may be found in the work of Alina Szapocznikow (Polish/French), who is represented here by Stele (1968), a gothic-looking, surrealist-tinged, predominantly black polyester and urethane sculpture that at first appears to represent a shrouded, kneeling female figure with exposed breasts. On closer inspection one realizes that the breasts are actually knees, as the sculptor turns the erotic into the grotesque.

Despite many differences among the works in the exhibition, a general theme that runs throughout is a critique of the emotional conformity and anonymity of Cold War society. Searching for a means of formulating a fresh, more effective representation of seismic shifts in their world, the artists turned to discrete objects, cheap goods, readymades, shiny plastic and enamel surfaces, and commercial design to better convey the sense of dislocation they were experiencing. The works in this show are devoid of tired humanistic tropes, from Boty’s painterly combinations of disparate personal and public images (With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo, 1962) to Axell’s glossy, Pop-psychedelic paintings in enamel on Plexiglas (Campus, 1970); Drexler’s cinema-derived practice (Home Movies, 1963); Mara McAfee’s deliberately mannered references to fashion illustration (Marvelous Modern Mechanical Men, 1963); Weber’s stark graphics (Munchkins I, II & III, 1964); and May Wilson’s faux-documentary “Ridiculous Portrait” collages. Far more than a simple rediscovery of women Pop artists, this exhibition offers us unexpected insight into the artistic challenges, issues and ambitions that arose in a period of radical change.

 
— Saul Ostrow, Art in America

 
¹ The exhibition will vary slightly from venue to venue.

² Evelyne Axell, Pauline Boty, Vija Celmins, Chryssa, Niki de Saint Phalle, Rosalyn Drexler, Letty Eisenhauer, Dorothy Grebenak, Kay Kurt, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Marisol, Mara McAfee, Barbro Östlihn, Faith Ringgold, Martha Rosler, Marjorie Strider, Alina Szapocznikow, Idelle Weber, Joyce Wieland and May Wilson.

 
“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968” opened at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia [22 January – 15 March]. Currently on view at the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska [through 26 September], it travels to the Brooklyn Museum [15 October 2010 – 9 January 2011] and Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Massachussetts [20 January – 3 April 2011].

Saul Ostrow is a critic, independent curator, and the chair of visual arts and technologies at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Currently On View: “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968,” at the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska, through 26 September, and opening at the Brooklyn Museum 15 October.

LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR  7 AUGUST 2010
 
 

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.

 
— L. Kent Wolgamott, Lincoln Journal Star

 
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 2: Rosalyn Drexler’s “The Dream (a.k.a. King Kong)” is one in a series of paintings that adds multiple images to explore the nature of cinema. (© Rosalyn Drexler / Artists Rights Society)

Image 3: Niki de Saint Phalle’s giant sculpture “Black Rosy or My Heart Belongs to Rosy” has the smile-inducing playfulness that has made pop the most widely embraced of the modern arts movements. (© Niki de Saint Phalle / Artists Rights Society)

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)

ARTDAILY  27 JULY 2010
 
 

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.”

 
Image: John and Dominique de Menil at the opening of “The John and Dominique de Menil Collection,” Museum of Primitive Art, New York, 1962. (Photo credit: © Adelaide de Menil)

ARTDAILY  30 APRIL 2010
 
 

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)

ARTDAILY  12 APRIL 2010
 
 

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.