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.”
Two shows shed light on the story behind the iconic photograph.
One of the best-known photographs in avant-garde art is Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), an image of the artist soaring over an empty street with an expression of pure bliss on his face. Down below, a bicyclist rides into the distance, unaware of the miraculous occurrence overhead, while at the end of the street a train passes by. Since Klein’s unexpected death, in 1962 at the age of 34, a mystery has remained: how did he make the purported leap?
Two major exhibitions about to open should shed light on the controversies that still surround this iconic photograph, which was made six months before Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space and which Klein claimed (in fabricated broadsheets he inserted into France-Soir) was made partly to protest the space race: “Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance,” at the Menil Collection in Houston, and “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers,” co-organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Michelle White, assistant curator at the Menil, says she conceived “Leaps into the Void” after she discovered an odd object in the Menil archives: a piece of slate. It wasn’t art — just a piece of slate “collected” by Dominique de Menil in 1981 from the mansard roof that Klein presumably leaped from. The photograph, shot and assembled by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, was originally published on November 27, 1960, in Klein’s broadsheet, which he considered a guerrilla intervention. In that faked four-page insert, titled Dimanche, Klein appropriates — as his artwork — all human activity on the planet for the entire day. The caption reads: “The painter of space hurls himself into the void!” When the piece of slate turned up nearly 50 years later, it was like a religious relic — proof of an apocryphal action that has reverberated ever since. Klein — part shaman, part showman — aimed not only to make art immaterial and demonstrate the presence of absence, but also to levitate into another dimension.
Art critic and Klein friend Pierre Restany, in his 1982 monograph on the artist, only mentioned the photograph once, referring to it as “The Leap into Space, which was the prelude to this gesture (the appropriation of a day in the world), and over which hovers the greatest mystery (did the monochrome painter really jump?).” It is curious that Restany, some two decades after the image was made — and after several different versions had been published — left its veracity open to question.
Klein’s first love wasn’t art; it was judo, which he studied from 1946 to 1951, along with his buddies Arman and Claude Pascal. He earned a black belt and worked in Madrid as a judo instructor. At the same time, he explored various spiritual outlets, including Zen Buddhism and the cult of Saint Rita (patron saint of the impossible), and he studied Rosicrucianism with an old astrologer, Louis Cadeaux. In 1952, when he was 24, he went to Tokyo, where he attained the 4th Dan (Yodan) at the famed Kodokan Judo Institute. After returning to Paris, in 1954, he published The Foundations of Judo, which remains a classic, and he opened the Judo Academy of Paris, which was not a success.
It was then that he turned seriously to art. He had already come up with the idea of the monochrome that same year, and in 1955 he submitted an orange one to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, an organization of abstract artists. It was rejected by the jury with this explanation: “A single color, no, no, really that’s not enough.” In the “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto” of 1961, Klein suggested that he had conceived his first artwork in 1946, when as an adolescent he had lain on a beach in Nice and imagined himself signing his name “on the other side of the sky.”
New research has turned up several clues to the circumstances surrounding Leap, but they are contradictory or ambiguous. It seems that in 1960, Klein did actually make a number of leaps. According to Menil archivist Geraldine Aramanda and documents in the Yves Klein Archives in Paris, he performed a rehearsal jump on January 12 from 67, rue de l’Assomption, the site of Colette Allendy’s gallery, where he had shown monochromes in 1956. Shunk and Kender’s famous photo was staged the following October 19, when Klein leaped from the roof ledge of a pavilion at 3, rue Gentil-Bernard, in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Two versions of that doctored photo were published during the artist’s lifetime: One in the fake Dimanche and the other, with no bicycle or train visible, in the catalogue for his 1961 show in Krefeld, Germany. There also exists a photo focusing closely on the leaper and the sky behind him, as well as one showing Klein, facing left, flying over the pillars of a gate; these are in the Menil archive and will be in the exhibition.
According to Kerry Brougher, deputy director and chief curator of the Hirshhorn, Klein’s widow, Rotraut, confirmed to him that Klein made the leap several times. Some people maintain that his judo-school colleagues held a tarp to catch him, while others state that it was a blue sheet or a net. Brougher also says that Rotraut told him Klein claimed to have made an undocumented leap with one witness, no photographer, and no safeguards.
“It’s quite possible,” Philippe Vergne, director of Dia Art Foundation and former deputy director and chief curator at the Walker Art Center, who cocurated the Klein retrospective, told ARTnews. “Remember, he was also a judo master, so the notion of falling was part of his practice. He appropriated something from judo into his art.” As Klein wrote in his instruction manual, “Judo is, in fact, the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.”
The famous image — a photomontage — was made by Shunk and his partner, Kender, who were photographers for the group of artists Restany had christened the Nouveaux Réalistes: Christo, Arman, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely among them. According to Shunk’s obituary in the London Times, published on July 22, 2006, the photo was a fake — a “confection,” as Shunk himself had called it — manufactured in the darkroom long before the days of Adobe Photoshop. Shunk first photographed the street empty except for the bicyclist. Then, according to the obituary, Klein “climbed to the top of a wall and dived off it a dozen times — onto a pile of mats assembled by the members of his judo school across the road. The two elements were then melded to create the desired illusion.”
While the leap itself has been confirmed, the accounts continue to differ: How was the artist caught? How did the instructors of the judo school, which was at 104, boulevard de Clichy and which supposedly closed in 1956, catch him? Adding to the intrigue, Shunk and Kender later split up, and it is thought that Shunk further rewrote history by omitting Kender’s name from the photo’s attribution.
Perhaps the discrepancies can be explained by the unreliability of eyewitnesses, even those who are trained in art. The suspension of disbelief may merely be our own skepticism. Or perhaps the truth has yet to be revealed. In 2008 the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation acquired the entire photo archive of Shunk, who not only was the photographer for the artists in Paris but also later moved to Greenwich Village and became the photographer for Warhol and the Pop artists in New York. The Lichtenstein Foundation managed to prevent the photo archive from being dispersed. And the true story of Leap may still await us among those 100,000 negatives, contact sheets, and photographs.
Kim Levin is an independent art critic and curator.
“Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance” will be at the Menil Collection in Houston from March 19 through August 8. “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” will be at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., from May 20 through September 12 and then the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from October 23 through February 13.
WASHINGTON, DC – In a few weeks, a fanciful and colorful trio of women in bathing suits will rise from a median on New York Avenue NW. They promise to be showstoppers, as contemporary as the last splash of pop art, as exaggerated as Las Vegas showgirls. They will be visible from the Treasury Department all the way down to the jumbled landscape that was once the old convention center.
The sculptures are part of a public art project, organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, that is scheduled to appear in April, the museum has announced. The work in the first act of what is called the New York Avenue Sculpture Project is by the late French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, whose outsize sculptures are both celebratory and bold. Her fiberglass forms are 12 and 15 feet high and will be placed in four groups. One sculpture represents basketball icon Michael Jordan flying through the air, a hapless opponent unable to stop him.
The museum, along with its public and private partners, hopes the displays will bring some much-needed zing to its sector of downtown and spark interest in the 23-year-old museum. The first sculptures will be placed on the median of the 1200 block of New York Avenue, outside the museum. By 2015, sculptures will have been installed along New York Avenue from 13th Street to Ninth Street, the heart of the Mount Vernon Square redevelopment efforts.
“This part of the city really needed a project like this. There is a lot of good stuff going on, but the street lacks character and it doesn’t pull together,” said Patricia Zingsheim, the associate director of revitalization and design at the city’s planning office. She said the approvals were given because the project benefits residents and visitors. Plus, it was unique.
In Washington, “we have a lot of traditional sculpture and even some that are commemorating grim history and grim events,” she said. “This work is fantastic. I think this will be transformative for the museum and the blocks around it and lead to other improvements.”
“We wanted to transform the five major median strips into sculpture islands,” said the museum’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling. All the artists will be women, and the work will change every year or two. “We have precious little contemporary art in Washington,” Sterling added. “The goal of having contemporary art is to create a statement in a part of town that is becoming more hip and vibrant.”
Richard H. Bradley, the executive director of the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District, said the project will help the city develop some new cachet with unique public spaces. “We do have some of that in the monumental core. But great cities have great streets and great art, and we want those blocks to became a sculpture alley,” Bradley said. “The art project speaks to the overall change-in-brand downtown is offering. We want to be a remarkable urban experience.”
De Saint Phalle, a self-taught artist, used mosaic glass and colored stones to decorate the three women, whose bodies are chalk white, canary yellow and ink black, a 1999 grouping called “The Three Graces.” Also part of the Washington project will be her “Serpent Tree,” created in 1999, and “Nana on a Dolphin,” another outsize woman standing on the back of a dolphin, made in 1998. The sculptor, who died in 2002, is known for creating the much-talked-about Stravinsky Fountain outside the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Formal dedication of the sculptures is scheduled for April 28.
The project’s supporters are banking on the appeal of the “Graces” sculpture’s voluptuous hips. “Excitement and fun shouldn’t be out of our vocabulary,” Bradley said.
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA – He made macho sculptures out of wheels, chains and gears. She created plump, brightly patterned earth mothers. Together they were the Bonnie and Clyde of the modern art world.
Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, partners in art and a married couple in life, are together again at the new Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 402 South Tryon Street in uptown Charlotte.
Charlotteans have fallen in love with the Saint Phalle “Firebird” in the museum’s outdoor courtyard, but there’s more inside. The museum’s second-floor gallery is dedicated to both artists, who met and started working together in the ’50s and were married in 1971. Visitors can see three of Tinguely’s trademark kinetic sculptures along with several two-dimensional works. De Saint Phalle is represented by “nanas” in two and three dimensions, as well as several reliefs and drawings.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930, but after losing their fortune in the stock market crash, her family moved to New York soon after. Niki was interested in art from an early age, although sometimes her enthusiasm got her into trouble. She was expelled from the exclusive Brearley School for painting the fig leaves on the school’s statues red.
Niki eloped with a music student at 18, quickly had two children and found herself living the sort of domestic life she always had despised. In her early 20s, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated with electroshock therapy and drugs. She turned to painting as part of her recovery. Meanwhile, she’d begun modeling, and became acquainted with some of the artists living in Paris while on a modeling assignment. Her family moved back to Paris in the mid-1950s, where Niki continued to paint. She met artist Jean Tinguely, and Jean and his wife both encouraged her artistic efforts. Niki asked Jean to weld an armature for one of her sculptures, the first of their artistic collaborations.
By 1960, both Niki’s and Jean’s first marriages were over. By the end of the year, they were sharing a studio and living together.
Jean Tinguely, who was almost a generation older than Niki, had a style that was markedly different from Niki’s. A member of the group of artists known as the “New Realists,” Jean’s works were masculine, often made of iron, steel and wood. Many of his sculptures had working mechanisms. “Homage to New York,” one of his most famous installations in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was a mechanical sculpture that self-destructed.
In contrast, Niki’s work had a cheerful, lyrical sensibility and a strongly feminist nature. While earlier in her career Niki had experimented with various themes, including a period in which she created paintings by shooting at containers of paint to form designs on the canvas, she ultimately settled into her best-known style with the creation of her voluptuous, brightly painted women, the “nanas.” While not all of Niki’s subsequent work includes a nana, she continued to produce them, in all sizes and many media, for the rest of her life.
Niki and Jean eventually got married, and they were each other’s biggest champions and most frequent collaborators. They worked together to create the giant nana sculpture “Hon” at the modern art museum in Stockholm. Visitors to the museum could enter the giant figure of a woman by walking between her legs; inside was one of Tinguely’s mechanical sculptures. But the couple’s best-known joint effort is the 1983 Igor Stravinsky Fountain outside the Pompidou Center in Paris, a group of 13 sculptures that dance, gyrate or stand majestically on the surface of the water.
Niki and Jean worked together on many projects for 30 years until Jean’s death in 1991; Niki continued stewardship of his works until she died a decade later.
The Bechtler family had a special relationship with Tinguely, according to the museum’s curator, Michael Godfrey.
“They knew him for years and both Andreas’s father, Hans Bechtler, and his uncle, Walter Bechtler, had pieces by Tinguely,” said Godfrey. “Tinguely used a number of found objects in his works. He would gather wheels and cogs, and one of the things he got particularly interested in were antlers, skulls and trophies. Andreas’s father was a hunter, and when Tinguely would come over to visit, Andreas would take him up to the attic to get pieces for his works of art.”
When Andreas Bechtler was looking for more Tinguely pieces for the Queen City museum, to add to those already in the collection, he discovered that a dealer had two sculptures that incorporated some of his father’s hunting trophies. These works, “Water Buffalo” and “L’execution,” are now in the Bechtler Museum’s second-floor gallery.
Tinguely’s relationship with the Bechtler family brought him to Charlotte long before the museum was even in the planning stages. The lobby of the Carillon building on Trade Street houses a monumental work of scupture by Tinguely hanging over the fountain. While Tinguely was visiting Charlotte he made a number of other works, some of which now hang in the Bechtler gallery.
The Bechtlers also knew Saint Phalle. “When the museum came on track and we decided to look to get monumental pieces by either Tinguely or Niki to go outside, we went to Atlanta, where she was having a major exhibition in the Botanical Garden,” said Godfrey. “We saw the ‘Firebird’ and fell in love with it.” The 12-foot, mirrored sculpture was purchased from the Bonnier Gallery in Geneva, which was reluctant to sell it at first, but then decided it would be better to have it on public display.
The museum has relationships with both the Niki de Saint Phalle Museum in Japan and the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, which was designed by the same architect as the Bechtler, Mario Botta. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art hopes to mount major shows about both artists in the future. Considering that the Bechtler family owns other works by both artists, chances are Charlotteans will be seeing more of both Niki and Jean.
Photo 1: Niki de Saint Phalle’s mirrored “Firebird” greets visitors to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art on South Tryon Street.
Photo 2: Jean Tinguely’s “L’exécution” (1990) features metal, animal skull, horns and electric motor. (JoAnn Sieburg-Baker, courtesy of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art)
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.
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.
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.
Über 50 Werke von Niki de Saint Phalle in der Reithalle. Die erste große Sonderausstellung im Schloss Gottorf zeigt Kunst der Künstlerin Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002). In der Reithalle sind die bekannten Nanas, frühe Schießbilder und phantastische Skulpturen bis zum 28. Juni zu sehen.
Von Friederike Mackeprang-Meyer
Schleswig. Über fünfzig Arbeiten der französischen Ausnahmekünstlerin Niki de Saint Phalle sind in der Reithalle des Landesmuseums ausgestellt. Sie stammen aus der Sammlung des Sprengel-Museums in Hannover und geben einen representativen Überblick über ihre vielseitige Arbeit, deren Popularität ungebrochen ist.
Es sind nicht nur die bekannten Nanas, mit denen Niki de Saint Phalle berühmt wurde, sondern auch Assemblagen, Schießbilder und phantastische Skulpturen aus allen Phasen ihres Schaffen im Landesmuseum zu besichtigen. Nur wenige Zentimeter groß ist die „Nana in Bed“, aber auch die bekannte fünfeinhalb Meter große Dolores ist zu bewundern. Die Künstlerin verarbeitete in den Nana-Skulpturen autobiografische Erlebnisse und nahm Mitte der 1960er Jahre die beginnende Frauenbewegung vorweg.
Wie eine „vestalische Jungfrau“ weiß gekleidet, schoss sie im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes die Klischees von männlicher Rationalität und weiblichen Albträumen nieder, dies ließ sie ihren Platz in der Avantgarde finden, mit dem Effekt, dass die Öffentlichkeit aufmerksam wurde. Ihre Schießbilder und -aktionen sind in der Ausstellung dargestellt.
Doch Niki de Saint Phalle ist nicht nur Bildhauerin und Malerin. Ihre Großplastiken sind in der ganzen Welt aufgestellt und sprengen alle Grenzen zwischen Architektur und Skulptur. 1974 wurden in Deutschland von ihr die drei monumentalen „Nanas“ am Leineufer im Zentrum von Hannover unter Protest der Bevölkerung aufgestellt. Heute dokumentieren sie den gesellschaftlichen Wandel, der sich in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts vollzogen hat. Aus Dank schenkte die Künstlerin dem Sprengel-Museum rund 400 Arbeiten, von denen eine Auswahl auf Schloss Gottorf zu besichtigen ist.
„Kult|Urlaub 2009“ im Schloss Gottorf in Schleswig
Volle Brüste, kräftige Pos, starke Schenkel – und das alles überdimensional: Ihre bunt bemalten Nanas machten Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 bis 2002) weltberühmt. Im Schleswiger Schloss Gottorf werden bis zum 28. Juni 2009 über 50 Arbeiten der französischen Künstlerin aus der Sammlung des Sprengel-Museums Hannover gezeigt. Damit startet das Landesmuseum Schloss Gottorf gleich mit einer Ausstellungssensation in die Saison 2009.
Die Ostseefjord Schlei GmbH bietet für dieses Kultur-Highlight des Nordens ein Arrangement an: „Drei Kulturtage in Schleswig“ ist der Titel des Kurzreiseprogramms in die pralle Welt der Weiblichkeit à la Niki de Saint Phalle. Enthalten sind Eintrittskarten, Ausstellungsführung und Buch zur Werkschau Niki de Saint Phalles, zwei Übernachtungen in einem Komfort-Hotel in Schleswig mit Frühstück, ein dreigängiges Abendessen im Schleswiger Genießer-Restaurant Olearius und eine Stadtführung. Zu buchen für 235 Euro pro Person im Doppelzimmer unter Tel. (04621)850054.
Auch für alle weiteren kulturellen Höhepunkte der Kultursaison 2009 auf der Gottorfer Schlossinsel hat die Ostseefjord Schlei GmbH dreitägige Kurzreise-Arrangements komponiert. So wird am 29. März in Schleswig die Sonderausstellung „Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts“ (bis 25. Oktober 2009) eröffnet – mit Werken der bedeutendsten deutschen und dänischen Maler der goldenen Zeit der Malerei. Ab 18. Juli werden Meisterwerke der Moderne von Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Franz Marc und anderen aus der renommierten K20-Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen gezeigt (ebenfalls bis 25. Oktober 2009). Und vom 25. Juni bis 12. Juli stehen die Schlossfestspiele 2009 auf dem Programm: Jeweils donnerstags bis sonntags geht dann die barocke Komödie „Der Diener zweier Herren“ von Carlo Goldoni ab 20.30 Uhr im Schlossinnenhof über die Bühne.
„Kult|Urlaub 2009“: Tel. (04621)850054 und www.ostseefjordschlei.de und Tourismus-Agentur Schleswig-Holstein in 24103 Kiel, Tel. (01805)600604, E-Mail: info@sh-tourismus.de, www.sh-tourismus.de (bac)
Die Objekte auf den Fotos von Elke Backert sind in Niedersachsens Landeshauptstadt Hannover zu sehen, ein Teil in der Orangerie der Herrenhäuser Gärten.
The Mouse House: Works from the Olga Hirshhorn Collection featuring works by Picasso, Giacometti, Calder and many others.
NAPLES, FLORIDA – “The Mouse House” is the name lovingly given to the engaging yet diminutive house in Washington D.C., where Olga Hirshhorn spends a part of each summer (Hirshhorn is the widow of Joseph Hirshhorn, founding donor of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, part of the Smithsonian Institution). Formerly the carriage house of a larger residence, the house was redesigned by Hirshhorn in the late 1990s to suit her needs, and to act as a fitting backdrop for her art collection.
Olga Hirshhorn is a passionate collector, and has collected everything from Greek, Chinese and pre-Columbian antiquities to prints, drawings, paintings and sculpture by contemporary masters. Her house is a treasure trove of small and domestic-scale objects, displayed in an environment that gives them optimum impact. The collection, both powerful and whimsical, demonstrates her critical eye and her sensitivity to a wide variety of styles. Along with objects from antiquity, there are names from the 20th century that will be in the art books hundreds of years from now, such as Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Georgia O’Keeffe and Salvador Dalí (the collection includes six Picassos, four de Koonings, five Calders, five Man Rays and single pieces by O’Keeffe and Dalí). And there is yet more to discover – including works by 19th-century giants such as James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Antoine-Louis Barye, Honoré Daumier and Auguste Rodin.
Many of the 20th-century pieces are personally inscribed by the artist. A 1963 de Kooning is signed, “To Olga, Love Bill.” A 1968 Picasso bears the legend, “Pour Olga, son ami Picasso” (For Olga, her friend Picasso). A 1965 Niki de St. Phalle is simply inscribed, “To Olga.” In fact, a number of works were gifts from the artists, demonstrating the close relationship Olga Hirshhorn developed with some of the 20th century’s most important figures. While her husband Joe bought breathtaking large-scale works, Olga’s predilection for small objects led her to acquire sketches and idiosyncratic, personal expressions, which reveal the artist’s working methods and the close contact she had with artists. As Olga Hirshhorn has stated elsewhere, “This collection represents a lot of friendships that we established early on, but it also teaches us about how artists think, how they work. I’ve learned a lot from living with these objects.”
One can certainly learn a great deal from this collection of intimately-sized objects, and not just about American art. To take just one example; in sculpture, a great strength of the collection, there are signature works by the seminal American modernists Man Ray, Calder and Louise Nevelson, as well as by their English counterparts Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. The French tradition is represented by Jean-Antoine Houdon, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Rodin and Niki de Saint-Phalle, and you will also see inspired work by Albert Giacometti (Swiss), Arnaldo Pomodoro (Italian), Yaacov Agam (Israeli) and Picasso (Spanish). Such strength is repeated in the two-dimensional objects – paintings, drawings and prints. The collection in its entirety speaks volumes about the great art movements of the last 150 years, and beyond.
Though the “Mouse House” is a modern-day version of the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities – a small room or cabinet in which collectors crowded objects of virtue and curiosity from the arts and natural sciences – it is by no means a random collection. Each work defines an artist, a style or an era. Just because these works are typically small does not mean they lack power. On the contrary, here we have the Platonic idea of the macrocosm being illustrated by the microcosm – in this case, a whole world of art and ideas encapsulated by each tiny work of art.
At the Naples Museum of Art, the collection is installed in a room which roughly approximates in size the footprint of the house in D.C. Furthermore, we have tried, by adding the illusion of some of the rooms in the actual Mouse House, to present the works in an environment that allows them to resonate as they do in their own home. We hope you enjoy the special domestic atmosphere of this delightful small exhibition.
28 MARCH 2010