An extensive selection of original photographs and reprints by Eakins and his students (many printed expressly for this exhibition, in the case of originals too fragile to display) make up a large portion of the presentation. Delving into Eakins’s process, the solidity of his figures becomes increasingly apparent, each body excessively studied and articulate in contrast to its photographic inspiration. The process and evolution of the artist is most remarkably displayed in the depictions of wrestlers. In the two painted studies and a series of photographs of young men in various poses, Eakins seems to have spent a significant amount of time exploring the possibilities for bodies to intertwine, searching for an adequate arrangement. The final Wrestlers, a 2007 acquisition and the incentive for the show, gives the viewer a model of taut stability distilled out of motion, a perfect knot of locked bodies, positioned marvelously in the lower foreground of the painting. It is loosely based on one of the photographs, but Eakins willfully departs from it, making the figures more compact, the angles of their bodies more jarring. Eakins’s paint, notably, becomes sharper the greater the strain of his figures’ bodies, either surrendering his brushwork to the wrestlers’ bulging muscles or visibly asserting it across the loose pantsuit of their coach.

LACMA simultaneously presented an installation by Los Angeles artist Tad Beck based directly on Eakins’s photographs, and an adjacent exhibition of Catherine Opie’s work including her football landscapes, attempting to generate a dialogue grounded in subject matter. It’s a nice example of an institution thinking broadly and working across departments. In lieu of a catalogue, an e-book will be published later this year. The scholarly compilation of primary sources, contemporary criticism, and art historical pieces on Eakins’s sporting scenes is intended to compliment publications from the Amon Carter on swimming and Yale on rowing. The e-book, available for preview on i-Pads in the gallery, marks a step towards online publishing that is becoming increasingly frequent. In the meantime, aside from the two excellent volumes already mentioned, recent scholarship includes Henry Adams’s Eakins Revealed (2005), in which, using a structure Adams calls closer to that of a novel, he explores Eakins’s “profoundly tragic vision.”  That vision seems more pressing after viewing this show, seeing the persistent photographic exploration of the body in motion countered by an ever-increasing heaviness in his figures, collapsing, eventually, to the ground.

Thomas Eakins, Wrestlers, 1899

The series will culminate on July 1 with the launch of the Ecole des Arts Politiques de Sciences Po (SPEAP), a project founded by Latour and supported by the Centre Pompidou and The Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The school’s aim is to provide artists with a high-level training in the social sciences (methods for empirical inquiry), and, conversely, to confront social scientists and public or private sector professionals with the qualities and methodologies of the arts. These two fields will not be studied side by side; but rather will converge through teaching experiments and an innovative curriculum grounded in common objects of study. The public sphere will be taken as the focal point of this convergence. For, indeed, the question at the heart of this project is the crisis of representation (in the largest possible sense). This crisis can only be overcome by associating three practices of representation that have as yet been relatively separated: political representation, scientific representation, and aesthetic representation.

ProQuest will distribute IBA content created by GRI—covering the years 2008 through 2009—and build on it by adding new index records going forward. ProQuest will retain the editorial policies that made IBA a trusted and frequently consulted source in the field, continuing to provide full abstracts and subject indexing for its wide international and multilingual range of periodicals, monographs, and catalogues. Over time, ProQuest intends to expand coverage of art from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, in response to requests from art librarians and researchers.

This answers several of the questions raised in the Getty’s April meetings, including expansion to include non-Western art and continuing to provide full abstracts. Further, the historical data (BHA and RILA) that has been freely available on the Getty’s website will continue to be accessible to researchers.

Palais du Luxembourg in the 17th century

Centre Pompidou-Metz

The Centre Pompidou-Metz, which officially opened Wednesday, is one of a recent surge of “satellite museums” in what would seem to be a contemporary phenomenon.

Yet the desire to make use of collections otherwise confined to storage could arguably have emerged simultaneously with the idea of the modern French museum. In 1750, even before the Louvre was officially a museum, paintings from the royal collection “traveled” to the Luxembourg palace for public display, making “satellite museums” a historically grounded phenomenon with rather entangled political connotations. Andrew McClellan teases out the significance of the exhibition in the Luxembourg galleries in Inventing the Louvre. Put in place under Charles-Francois Lenormand de Tournehem, the director general of the Bâtiments du roi, McClellan writes:

Over and above the appeal of art as a vehicle of upward social mobility, Lenormand must have recognized in the Bâtiments post an opportunity to make his mark as a civil servant by effecting improvements in an area of government perceived as in need of reform.

Sarkozy, at the inauguration ceremony in Metz:

This museum, which is a strong cultural act, is at the same time an element of a strategic policy of economic development. …  France believes in art and France believes that investing in a museum as extraordinary as this one is as important as investing in a university, in a laboratory, in nanotechnology.

Louis Petit de Bachaumont, who McClellan suggests likely proposed the idea for display in the Luxembourg galleries, was also one of the earliest proponents of art conservation; in the proposal submitted to King Louis XV it was noted:

And as they will be on display attention will be given to those in need of restoration. Appropriate restorations will be carried out under the supervision of the First Painter of the King.

The Pompidou similarly took the opportunity to restore works that would be on display in Metz, including Joan Miro’s Bleu triptych of 1961.

One distinction, of course, that has been repeatedly emphasized is that the Centre Pompidou Metz is not an outpost of the Centre Pompidou, but rather an independent entity, akin to a kunsthalle. The Louvre Lens, projected to open in 2012, will be used to showcase primarily Louvre works, albeit in radical curatorial configurations that will “abolish frontiers between techniques, schools or regions.”

Cy Twombly, The Ceiling, 2007-2009

A few people have already commented on Cy Twombly’s recently unveiled ceiling for the Louvre (here and here) – including one technically detailed letter that reveals a significant part of it was painted by a professor of art history!

Last night art historians Alex Potts (who has a forthcoming book on post-war art) and Richard Leeman (author of a monograph on Twombly and the Louvre publication on the ceiling) gave their thoughts. Potts insisted that the work – a vast expanse of painterly blue with hovering medallions and white bands containing the names of seven Greek sculptors from antiquity – is an “intelligent departure” from Twombly’s typical style, praising him for not simply enlarging his work to fit the space (as he hinted other artists creating large-scale public works were wont to do). He specifically noted the loss of texture and the unusual clarity of the writing as “honest responses to the demand” to create a work of such magnitude and prominence.

Leeman, however, pointed out several crucial points of congruence with Twombly’s earlier works, most notably the instability and uncertainty proper names carry – especially proper names as grand and mythic as those of the Greek sculptors; the presence of a father-son relationship between Praxiteles and Cephisodotus, the supposed name of both his father and his son; and the collage-like style, extending so far as to see an echo of scotch tape in the rectangular white bands, recalling Twombly’s important but little-known collage works.

Twombly himself, the first artist since Georges Braque to be invited to decorate a ceiling in the Louvre, remains laconic in his commentary,

I was just thinking of the blue with the disks on it, it’s totally abstract … I put all the great Greek sculptors’ names on the top. It’s that simple. [AP via USAToday]

its mission is to reconfigure inherited critical discourses in art, media, culture, and technology. Each individual issue is centred around a singular theoretical or affective event, formulated as an “intellectual moment” modeled on lived experience, where critical discourses react and readjust themselves.

Topics include Canadian-based Aboriginal new media art, the recent Tino Sehgal show at the Guggenheim, and interviews with Hans Haacke and art historian Amelia Jones.

Ciprian Muresan, Leap into the void - after three seconds, 2004

Prompted by the opening of Les Promesses du Passé at the Centre Pompidou, some recent work on post-Wall “Eastern European” art (one of the tenets of the exhibition is to demonstrate the irrelevance of this term in light of the polyphony of voices; the exhibition layout is designed to be discontinuous, accordingly):

Transitland is a “collaborative archiving project” with 100 single-channel video works produced between 1989 and 2009 in Central and Eastern Europe. A related publication is also available.

The papers collected in Mel Jordan and Malcom Miles’ Art and Theory After Socialism, written by politically engaged artists, critics and curators, provide both theoretical and practical accounts of recent and contemporary art from Armenia, Germany and the United Kingdom. Miles writes in the introduction:

For want of a better term, the condition of post-socialism… indicates European culture after the demise of state socialist regimes in the East bloc while, I would argue, socialism as an ideology is not erased by the failure of state socialist regimes. The book offers a series of specific windows on this field.

In Victor Tupitsyn’s The Museological Unconscious he defines a “communal optic” as requisite lens for viewing Russian contemporary art:

Tupitsyn argues that socialist realism does not work without communal perception—which, as he notes, does not easily fit into crates when paintings travel out of Russia for exhibition in Kassel or New York. Russia, he writes, went through an immense “optical restructuring” in the 1930s, in which viewers of art were “communalized.” … Russian artists, critics, and art historians, having lived for decades in a society that ignored or suppressed avant-garde art, have compensated, Tupitsyn claims, by developing a “museological unconscious”—the “museification” of the inner world and the collective psyche.

Art Power, by Boris Groys, argues for “for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse” noting that art

is produced and brought before the public in two ways—as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function; the official and unofficial art of the former Soviet Union and other former Socialist states, for example, is largely excluded from the field of institutionally recognized art, usually on moral grounds (although, Groys points out, criticism of the morality of the market never leads to calls for a similar exclusion of art produced under market conditions).

For more, see Art Margins, which offers book reviews, articles, artwork and interviews focused on Central and Eastern Europe.