Matisse. Paires et séries eschews dense texts in favor of subtle installation techniques to activate the works’ mysteries. The walls provide just a short chronology, two quotations from the artist, and three explanatory panels, with no interpretation of individual works. The works seduce the eye, while their careful juxtaposition encourages thought. The viewer is invited to participate in the task Matisse set for himself early on—to merge sensation and cognition. “What I am after, above all, is expression. … Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings,” Matisse wrote in his 1908 “Notes of a Painter” (Translation Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, 1973).

In the first rooms, paintings treating the same subject are hung in two and threes. The paintings’ labels, which indicate studio locations and months or seasons, suggest that Matisse worked on these groups simultaneously or in rapid succession. The variety within themes is striking and instructive. The busy detail in both facture and narrative of the gray Pont Saint-Michel, Paris, Effect of Snow (c. 1900, Stiftung Sammlung E.G. Bührle, Zurich) seems downright Impressionistic compared to the roughly scumbled azure and turquoise sky that dissipates to gessoed canvas in the right edge of Pont Saint-Michel (c. 1900, Centre Pompidou, Paris) or the geometric planes of vivid color in Pont Saint-Michel (c. 1901, Santa Barbara Museum of Art). Clearly, something more than a simple recording of the changing seasons is at play here.

Matisse’s paintings, particularly their colors, lose much in reproduction. Seeing both versions of Le Luxe (1907; version I: Centre Pompidou, Paris; version II: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) illustrates his power to use color to express divergent visions of the same composition, as do the two versions of Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” (1912; version I: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; version II: Pushkin Museum, Moscow). Other pairings demonstrate how deeply Matisse engaged the issue of pictorial depth. The Cubist-inspired geometry and insistent flatness of Goldfish and Palette (1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York) complicates the seemingly comfortable perspective of Interior with a Goldfish Bowl (1914, Centre Pompidou, Paris), and vice versa. Witness the way Matisse scratched away paint with a wood brush-handle in the New York picture, revealing a literal and illusionistic depth in its multiple layers.

Many of these paintings were never exhibited as pendants, but as Matisse. Paires et séries unfolds, it provides evidence that at least by the end of his career, Matisse wanted to reveal his creative process. The exhibition next turns to drawings that Matisse expressly created in series and published in the 1943 book Dessins: Thèmes et Variations. It reproduced seventeen series—eleven of women, six of still lifes—that Matisse made in the Hotel Régina in Nice during 1941 and 1942. The drawings are complete works of art in their own right, lyrical meditations on a theme. In series F, Matisse depicts a reclining woman from multiple angles across ten drawings, alternately zooming in and pulling back, even depicting her twice in one drawing. From the spare lines of the initial charcoal drawing, the artist adds detail in his arabesque-like pen and ink variations, before returning to an economical but energetic line in the final pencil drawings.

Matisse. Paires et séries presents the original drawings from series F, H, and M. They benefit greatly from their display on the gallery walls, uninterrupted by the act of turning the page or the need to rotate the large folio as the drawings’ orientations change. (A photograph reproduced in mural scale in the exhibition tellingly shows the original drawings tacked in neat rows and columns filling the walls of Matisse’s studio-apartment.) Seen here, the drawings seem much closer to the non-linear experience that Matisse must have had as he was creating them. The result suggests an artist constantly moving around his motif, responding to it differently, and changing his mind about how he sees and feels it. These suites of drawings read as poetic explorations of the world in all of its variations rather than strict progressions toward an ideal.

In the 1930s, Matisse began employing photographers to document the unfolding of his paintings. In December 1945 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, in addition to drawings and sculptures, Matisse exhibited six paintings, each surrounded by framed photographs of the various ‘states’. It seems certain that Matisse wanted to grant his audience a glimpse of his artistic process.

Matisse. Paires et séries reunites four of the Galerie Maeght paintings and reproduces the documentary photographs in a format that I found frustrating at first. Postcard-sized and displayed in a glass-topped table, they are difficult to see when the gallery is crowded. Worse, only two of the completed canvases are exhibited in the same gallery as the photographs. Yet the close looking borne of this situation ultimately led to discovery. Forced to rely on my memory to make comparisons, I examined the preparatory photographs carefully, marveling at the variety they divulged. The fourteen photographs chronicling Matisse’s process of painting The Romanian Blouse (Centre Pompidou, Paris), from 11 December 1939 to 23 April 1940, show a fascinating trajectory. It began as a representational, floridly detailed portrait in contours, until Matisse added and subtracted detail en route to the elegantly spare final version. When I finally looked at the completed canvas in the subsequent gallery, the experience was intense. It looked less like a static resolution than a pulsing, almost living entity. I could no longer see the earlier layers (although in other canvases, pentimenti do exist), but my memories of them indelibly infused its current incarnation. The constant balancing act Matisse waged between sensation, cognition, and expression—between seeing, thinking, and feeling—was palpable. The artist’s desire to “reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting,” suddenly made thrilling sense.

Matisse. Paires et séries concludes with a series of gouache cut-outs, Blue Nude I-IV (1952, version I: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; versions II and III: Centre Pompidou, Paris; version IV, Musée Matisse, Nice). No label need tell you that the “fourth” version was made first: the flurry of partially erased charcoal lines on its support, as well as the many fragments of cut and layered paper composing the figure, betray a complex distillation of a motif, which is then subtly adapted in the other three variations. This final moment in the exhibition is both visually and intellectually powerful. It suggests that for Matisse, artmaking was not just teleology, a series of steps toward a beautiful picture, but also a deeply personal coming to terms with a world in flux. In his words, “I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.” By inviting us to look carefully at Matisse’s art, and to reflect on the personal quest it conveys, Matisse. Paires et séries gently encourages us to open our eyes and minds to new perspectives on our own experience.

Matisse. Paires et séries is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through June 18, 2012. It will travel to Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst (July 14-October 28, 2012) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (December 2, 2012-March 17, 2013). A richly illustrated, 288-page French-language catalogue accompanies the exhibition in Paris. Edited by exhibition curator Cécile Debray, it includes short essays by scholars including Yve-Alain Bois, Éric de Chassey, Anne Coron, John Elderfield, Jack Flam, and Rémi Labrusse, as well as two conservation notes, on Le Luxe I and II and Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” I and II. An official iPad application devoted to the exhibition is also available for download.

Expect long lines and crowds. I recommend buying and printing tickets online in advance, and the evening viewing hours—it’s open until 10:50 p.m. Thursday to Monday. What better time to emerge from this exhibition than on a weekend night, when after-images of Matisse’s bright canvases will illuminate your dark walk home?

The National Gallery, London, 9 November 2011 – 5 February 2012

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

Tate Modern, London, 6 October 2011 – 8 January 2012

Two great exhibitions currently taking place in London, Leonardo Da Vinci: Court Painter at Milan at The National Gallery (until 5 February 2012) and Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern (until 8 January 2012), offer a telescopic opportunity to consider how artistic concerns in Western culture have (and have not) shifted in the last half millennium. Though the artists are from entirely different eras, these exhibitions share at least two common themes: the primacy of the artistic process, and the exploration of artistic illusions. Where Leonardo’s process is explored through careful presentation of his drawings alongside his paintings, Richter’s process is made explicit in the wall texts that accompany the exhibition. Some of Leonardo’s greatest innovations were his careful studies of nature and the lifelike illusionism of his paintings. Richter’s work on the other hand points to the false nature of illusions, and questions the authority of representation.

The Leonardo exhibition is small and very rich. Each room is dedicated to one or two Leonardo paintings alongside related drawings and works by his followers.  The first room focuses on Leonardo’ Portrait of a Young Man (The Musician) of 1486-7, and frames Leonardo’s innovations in easy-to-grasp terms: he was one of the first artists to break out of the standard profile portrait formula dominant in 15^th century portraiture. The Musician has the quality of a film still, as if frozen in some very subtle motion. The nearby Portrait of a Young Man from 1490-1 by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio sets up the theme of using Leonardo’s followers’ works as foils to the master, and that strategy works best here. This comparison heavily favors Leonardo, as his portrait has a sense of liveliness absent in Boltraffio’s picture. However, in some works which appear later in the exhibition, particularly some of the drawings in the room dedicated to the Virgin(s) of the Rocks, Boltraffio’s work is at times quite masterful.

Some of the most celebrated portraits by Leonardo come in the next room, where the Portrait of a Woman (The Belle Ferrioniere), c. 1494, and the Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), c. 1490, are arranged to vie for the viewers’ attention. That the cult of feminine beauty is still so dominant in contemporary culture surely helps these two pictures resonate with viewers. The crowds of visitors gathered in front of these women were practically impassible. In this case, one’s patience is indeed rewarded, as both of these pictures are exquisitely beautiful, with enough mystery to hold one’s attention for long periods. Despite the explanations offered for the awkwardly tense ermine held by Cecilia Gallerani, it just looks unsettling, particularly juxtaposed with the sitter’s delicate expression. The Belle Ferrioniere, however, unnerves you with her eyes. Certainly she is posed, and seems aware of the fact that she is being observed. Yet some clever, defining action appears to be taking form in her head, and we are left to imagine what it might be.

Focusing on Leonardo’s interest in the human anatomy, his unfinished Saint Jerome from c. 1490 is the centerpiece of the following room, with a dozen or so drawings that demonstrate Leonardo’s explorations of the human body. The Saint Jerome is a pleasant surprise simply because of how easy it is to see in this exhibition. At the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Saint Jerome typically hangs in small alcove which is dimly and unevenly lit. It is refreshing to see the work so beautifully displayed in The National Gallery, a rare presentation indeed, given how infrequently Leonardo’s work are lent out.

One little remarked upon advantage of this exhibition is the opportunity to see many of the Leonardo’s drawings from the British Royal Collection in the context of the artist’s practice. In this the case, the curatorial implication is that studies such as those hanging in these room are part of the process of developing paintings, like the one Saint Jerome was en route to becoming. Indeed, virtually all of the drawings by Leonardo in the exhibition are arranged to a provide a sense of the artist’s process, regardless of how tenuous the connection may be between the actual paintings and drawings exhibited in any given room.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the opportunity to view together for the first time both versions of the Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, dating from c.1485 and c. 1508. The earlier Louvre version is presented first, and its dark, mysterious presence is reinforced by the brightness and bolder coloring of the later National Gallery version. Many viewers prefer the Louvre version. It was painted first, and is generally accepted as more purely representative of Leonardo’s concetto. No doubt the sense of mystery that surrounds the Louvre picture is one source of its greater appeal. While it is of course a remarkable painting, I have to take the perhaps unpopular position the National Gallery version provides a better viewing experience in the context of this exhibition. The recent cleaning and restoration of this painting undoubtedly means that in its present state, it creates a viewing experience closer to the artist’s original intent than that of the Louvre version. Yes, the Louvre painting has had a life of its own beyond the grasp of Leonardo, and this history is presumably what the Louvre wants to preserve by leaving the picture in its present state. Yet next to (or across from) the Louvre painting, the National Gallery picture is gloriously crisp, exquisitely detailed, intensely colorful, and radiantly present. The Louvre picture is equally luscious, but heavily yellowed and desaturated. In fact, the stunning success of the National Gallery’s refurbishment hints at the possibilities that lie beneath the grimy surface of the Louvre painting.

The curatorial hand is perhaps at its strongest in the following room, where the painting known as the Virgin and Child (The Madonna Litta) c. 1495, is the focus. To its left hangs a beautiful Leonardo drawing of a woman’s head in practically, though not precisely, the same pose as the Madonna Litta.  The drawing has the effect of making the Madonna of the painting look rather stiff and tired. To the right of the painting, a drawing by Bolraffio of the Christ Child greedily suckling his mother’s breast looks exactly like the version of the child in the painting. There is no conclusion from the way the visual evidence is presented other than the suggestion that the Madonna Litta is in fact not by Leonardo.

The theme of attribution follows the viewer into the next room, where the recently authenticated Christ as Salvator Mundi, c.1499,  hangs, along with several drawings, the Virgin and Child (The Madonna of the Yarnwinder), c.1499, and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (The Burlington House Cartoon), c.1500. In these last two rooms, the question of attribution, which in the case of the Salvator Mundi has been discussed widely in the media, has the potential to distract from pictures themselves. While the top portion of the Salvator Mundi seems remote and distracted, particularly the face of Christ (for which explanations have been offered), the bottom half is exquisite. Christ’s hands are the stars of this picture, both the elegantly shaded right hand in the act of blessing, and the left hand partially obscured by the deservedly much-discussed crystal orb.

Turning to the right, viewers find themselves faced with the large drawing known as The Burlington House Cartoon. Another one of Leonardo’s unfinished works, this one has the distinction of having been exhibited to large, adoring crowds during the artist’s lifetime. It is this aspect of the historical Leonardo that seems to unite his contemporaries with a twenty-first century audience. As the Salvator Mundi attests, Leonardo isn’t done yet. His oeuvre is a work in progress. Hence there is the pervasive sense that despite what we know about this great artist, there are things beyond our grasp which may or may or be made clear in the future.

One gets the sense from the timing and length of the Leonardo exhibition, the ticket price, and the lack of any special accommodation for the massive crowds, that The National Gallery did not foresee the frenetic popularity surrounding the exhibition. The exhibition is overcrowded, making it difficult to actually view the works on display while one is pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with other viewers. Given the institution’s dedication to public service and education, it would not be out of the question to expect some kind of special accommodation for the enormous number of people who otherwise would not get to see the show. I feel very lucky to have been able to see this exhibition, and I hope that The National Gallery could find a way to share this extremely rare opportunity with a wider audience. Of course any show of this nature is going to be crowded, but this one seemed to set a new standard.

While Leonardo Da Vinci: Court Painter at Milan focuses on a small portion of the artist’s career, Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern follows the stages of the artist’s career (thus far) chronologically. Whereas Leonardo is presented and understood as remarkably innovative, indeed practically without precedent, Richter looks to have spent much of his career absorbing the influences of, and reacting to, earlier artists and styles.

The topics around which the fourteen rooms are arranged vary from Richter’s rejection of Abstract Expressionism (though the specific term is avoided), to his interest in the constructed nature of landscape, to his attempts to address the intersections of political and personal history. Over one hundred works are presented in the well-lit, evenly spaced galleries, creating a refreshingly comfortable viewing experience.

Oscillating between the extremes of painterly photo-realism and pure abstraction, Richter’s oeuvre is united by themes of representation and history, or art history. One aspect of Richter’s delicately painterly images drawn from photographs is to question photography’s claim to any sort of truth. They often succeed in stealing back the authority of representation from photography itself. The wall texts emphasize the artist’s process, describing his motivations and techniques in any given phase of his career. In Richter’s case, the wall labels function as the drawings did for Leonardo, creating an overall sense of what the artist was trying to achieve and helping viewers identify with him.

Some of the most simply beautiful paintings by Richter are his large seascapes, such as Seascape (Cloudy) from 1969. One is confronted not only with an elegantly modeled surface, but also with the sense of viewing something much bigger than oneself. The deliberate painterliness of the otherwise precise pictures builds enough visual tension to open the picture to concerns outside of the raw beauty of nature and the viewer’s place in the vast openness. Here, wall texts explain Richter’s large seascapes as his attempt to deal with Romanticism, something about which the artist has serious critiques, but nonetheless can’t seem to write off.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example of Richter’s practice of incorporating elements drawn from other artists into his works is his 1973 repainting of Titian’s Annunciation of 1535, housed at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. The re-presentation is largely faithful, save for the textured softness which for many has become Richter’s trademark. Up close, Richter’s Annunciation looks almost abstract, as pools of color spill into one another. From across the room the picture glows, taking on a cinematic quality and suggesting the sort of mysterious spirituality one imagines that Titian sought to evoke in his own viewers.

On the next wall in the same room hang three large paintings of clouds dating from 1970. Each is colorful, delicate, and comfortable in its status as a painting. At this point in the show the viewer is tempted is to find comparative examples from the history of art in order to explain the cloud paintings. Wall texts help direct viewers toward Dutch landscape painting, but given Richter’s interest in photography I couldn’t help but think of Edward Steichen’s Equivalents series, an early twentieth century attempt to make photographs which would perceived as Art.

Richter’s purely abstract paintings (such as Abstract Painting, 1977) stand out in his oeuvre for his acidic use of color, which at times is quite jarring. These are certainly the loudest of Richter’s works, and they underlie his career-long interest in the tension between abstraction and representation. One curatorial curiosity of this exhibition was the placement of one or two small pictures of flowers (for example, Flowers, 1977) in rooms filled with large abstract paintings. Rather than provide a meaningful counterpoint, they serve to confuse the viewer’s understanding of the curatorial presentation, and no explanation is offered.

Both the Richter show and the Leonardo show continue with additional displays after they appear to have ended. In the case of The National Gallery, Leonardo’s fresco of The Last Supper from the convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, c.1478, is the subject of the additional room (which one finds on the first floor of the main building, entirely separated from the rest of the exhibition). Several drawings from Her Majesty The Queen’s collection set up the viewer for Giampietrino’s contemporary full-scale copy of the work from 1520, on loan from The Royal Academy of Art, London. The awkwardness of the placement of this final room is quickly forgotten, given the power of the works on display. In the case of the Richter exhibition, a final exhibition room appears after exiting through the café and gift shop, and it indeed seems like an afterthought.

Richter has been so successful at absorbing and re-presenting so many different styles that most viewers will find something intriguing on offer at the Tate Modern. Furthermore, viewers should find it easy to step into the artist’s shoes and re-imagine his process. That is, of course, a central source of fascination with Leonardo’s drawings: the opportunity to try and see his mind at work. His finished paintings, of which there are precious few, display his mastery of unsettling illusions, the kinds of illusions that Richter would deliberately deconstruct by painting in a way that is simultaneously photorealistic and painterly. The Richter exhibition is an utterly pleasant experience, with a well-paced presentation and none of the madness surrounding the National Gallery exhibition. The Leonardo show is somewhat of an exercise in patience. Yet the works on display are so rarely viewed in this sort of context, and so fundamentally worth viewing, that one’s patience is indeed greatly rewarded.

Gary Tinterow is the new director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which has the third largest art-museum endowment in the U.S. The Houston Chronicle welcomed the appointment:

Known as a scholar, Tinterow also has a flair for showmanship. Among the dozens of exhibits he organized are many of the Met’s best-attended shows ever, blockbusters like Degas (1988) and Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge (2006). Last year, his Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew an astonishing 700,000 visitors.

Nicolas Bourriaud has been elected to lead the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The controversial appointment rankled in part because he is a writer/curator rather than an artist, and also because his focus on contemporary art makes some worry he won’t look after the institution’s collections of Old Masters. The Art Media Agency writes (in quirky English):

Even before his nomination Nicolas Bourriaud was in the centre of debates. First of all, he should face a general strike by school instructors should he be elected. This rumour, which was quickly refuted, reflects however the atmosphere of the nomination. Then, after a publication in Journal des Arts, which stated that chairman post had already been reserved for Nicolas Bourriaud by the Minister of Culture, he had to defend himself and send a letter to art historian André Rouillé: “contrary to the fiction published by Journal des Arts, the post of the new director was never engaged to me by the minister who was the first to be surprised. He might have proposed Jean de Loisy but not me. I would like to ask you to change this untruthful statement”

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art May 21-September 6

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories

Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco May 12-September 6

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris

De Young Museum, San Francisco June 11 – October 9

What is an art exhibition for? Two opposing answers to this question are presented concurrently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the De Young Museum. At both exhibitions viewers will find many impressive and historically important works by canonical artists. At SFMoMA, viewers will find these works organized into a narrative structure that adds layers of meaning to the works and help viewers see them as more than isolated objects.

Having attended the curator panel discussion accompanying the opening of The Steins Collect, I was well prepared to appreciate the exhibition’s curatorial mission. Works purchased by primarily Gertrude and Leo Stein are organized according to the addresses where the collectors lived at the time. Not only does this form an essentially chronological view of the development of Picasso and Matisse’s paintings between the first decade of the 20^th century and World War II, it also helps the viewer see the pictures in roughly the same groupings in which they were displayed at the Stein residences. Large reproductions of period photographs are impressive not only for the amount of information that they contain, but also for the additional context that they provide. Some of the actual furniture pieces displayed in the photographs have been lent for the exhibition, helping to bridge the contemporary world of the modern art museum and the past represented in the photographs. If any part of the exhibition seems out of place, it is the room dedicated to the home built by Le Corbusier for Michael and Sarah Stein in 1926, Villa Stein-De Monzie. Films, photographs, and original drawings for the project are on display. The drawings by Le Corbusier display a delicate balance of meticulous draftsmanship and artful design, making them worthy of viewing for their own sake. That the viewer is presented with representations of the commissioned work strikes a contrast with the many canvases on display, notwithstanding the awkward notion of the commissioned house as part of the art collection. Nonetheless, by the end of The Steins Collect, viewers will not only have seen dozens of major works by icons of Modern Art, but will also have gained substantial insights into the lives and motivations of this highly influential family of collectors.

More of these insights are available one block away at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories is on display. Less about her art collection and more about her relationships, the photographs are the stars of this show. The title of the exhibition is apt, as much of the viewer’s experience involves looking at images of Gertrude and her companions. These images are informative and entertaining, and create a strong sense of the attitudes, beliefs, and interactions of Stein and her circle. As is typically the case at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the exhibition layout, wall texts, and overall exhibition design each help to achieve the goals of the exhibition. Though Seeing Gertrude Stein may lack the artistic firepower of The Steins Collect, the exhibition is nonetheless a rewarding experience for viewers with an interest in Stein herself or the period in general.

While the exhibitions at SFMoMA and the Contemporary Jewish Museum are decidedly educational experiences, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris at the De Young Museum feels like a gallery show by comparison. Over one hundred chronologically arranged works by Picasso are on loan from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, which favors the second half of the artist’s long career. After an initial wall panel introducing the artist and describing the genesis of the museum from which the works come, the only supporting texts are short quotes from the artist placed high on the walls that do little to explain the artist’s motivations, inspirations, goals, or methods. Though I did not utilize the audio guide for this exhibition, other viewers have described the commentary as adding little to their understanding of the artworks. Despite the exhibition’s lack of educational or curatorial mission, it provides Bay Area viewers with the opportunity to see works by Picasso that normally require a trip to Paris. Furthermore, though it may seem hastily constructed compared to the show at SFMoMA, any viewer with an interest in Picasso will find reasons to appreciate the De Young show. Some viewers may even appreciate the lack of a strong curatorial mission, which they may see as heavy-handed or intrusive. This viewer, however, believes that art exhibitions are at their best when they present and support a compelling thesis that serves not only to entertain the viewing audience, but to educate us as well.

There are, of course, the more obvious inclusions: Banksy drew the most attention on my last visit. Dozens of camera phones were capturing his installation, including a wry, gilt-framed sign declaring “this is not a photo op” (Photos here). Space Invader’s contribution maintained his street persona – rather than a dedicated area, “invasions” popped up throughout the show. Outside the museum, there are rumors that a recently arrested vandal is in fact Space Invader, in town for the exhibition. It’s not only Space Invader, however, who is making his mark on the city. The LATimes reports an increase in tagging in the Little Tokyo area, prompting police concern and increased security near MOCA. These inside-outside questions are at the core of any show that attempts to institutionalize the deliberately unruly practice of street art, but one hopes the discussion generated can begin to carve out some possibilities and direction for future study of the genre.

Overall, the show treads a nice balance between new commissions, recreations, and historical documentation. A visual timeline gives a limited, bare-bones sketch of the history of street art, but it does provide some useful archival documents, including the “black books” of taggers that were crucial to fostering nascent graffiti culture and cans of early spray paint, whose development in the 1960′s effectively gave birth to the practice. While coverage of the phenomenon began in the 1970s, with attention from art critics, sociologists, even novelists, street art still sits uncomfortably within art history. A few options for further reading:

Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art Edited by Patrick Nguyen and Stuart Mackenzie, the volume includes interviews with key figures.

Trespass. A History of Uncomissioned Urban Art Curated by the founders of Wooster Collective, a crucial blog in the international dissemination of street art.

The Faith of Graffiti and The Birth of Graffiti Jon Naar first published his photojournalistic documentation of early graffiti in 1974 with The Faith of Graffiti. The book, which includes an essay by Norman Mailer, has been referred to as “the bible of graffiti.” His 2007 Birth of Graffiti looks back at forgotten images from that same period.

Graffiti Kings Based on artist and historian Jack Stewart’s doctoral thesis (in art at NYU), he gives a firsthand account of the movement.

Balenciaga and Spain: Exhibition and Symposium

De Young Museum, San Francisco, 26 March 2011

On 26 March 2011, the De Young Museum in San Francisco hosted a symposium to celebrate and inform its new exhibition Balenciaga and Spain. The exhibition, curated by Hamish Bowles, explores connections between Balenciaga’s work and six aspects of Spanish culture: Spanish art, dance, religious life, the Spanish royal courts, regional dress, and bullfighting. I will begin by reviewing the exhibition, which despite its problems is a compelling overview of the oeuvre of a master designer and craftsman, and follow with the symposium.

Exhibition

Despite its awkward layout, Balenciaga and Spain manages to present a compelling case for couture-as-art.  Garments are displayed thematically rather than chronologically, and this is apparent in the initial hallway where pieces date from the 1930s through the 1960s. What ties these first pieces together (with one exception) is the color: black. Balenciaga preferred to work in black for much of his career because it allowed him to emphasize form over surface (so explained curator Hamish Bowles during his symposium lecture).

It is in the following room where the first direct references to Spanish art are made. In front of an oversized reproduction of one of Miró’s sparse abstractions of the 1960s stands a cocktail dress from Winter 1967. After the initial disappointment of not seeing the actual Miró, one becomes aware of similarity of form between the black trapezoidal marks in the painting and the “batwing” structure of the rather novel cocktail dress. The curatorial gesture of appropriating some of the cultural gravitas of the Miró for the work of the couturier seemed effective.

Just around the corner, a panel of text contains a quote from Cecil Beaton’s 1954 book The Glass of Fashion, in which the author describes Balenciaga as “fashion’s Picasso”. It was tempting to consider how notions of exile and otherness might have informed Balenciaga’s work. Both Picasso and Balenciaga spent large portions of their careers working in Paris where they were both separated from their homeland and able to operate as outsiders in French culture. Questions of how notions of Spanish authenticity influenced both Balenciaga and Picasso’s work and its reception (from Paris) are left untreated.

Next one enters the main exhibition space, which is a large rectangular room organized according to themes stated above. Several of the themes identified by Bowles are well supported with wall texts, enlarged photographs, and carefully arranged display of garments. The influence of 17^th century Spanish court costume on Balenciaga’s costume work, the roles of Spanish regional dress and dance, and the influence of clerical costume are all readily apparent in the garments selected for comparison. From 1939 on, Balenciaga’s work made frequent references to bullfighting costume, particularly to the traje de luces and bolero jackets. Surprisingly, this theme is introduced with a text that begins by informing the viewer that Balenciaga detested bullfighting, an opinion reinforced at least twice during the symposium. The question of why bullfighting costume consistently appeared in his work over the course of many years is left unanswered.

What is clear is Balenciaga’s reverence for Velazquez. If front of a large reproduction of Las Meninas stand several garments which draw inspiration from the painting. Balenciaga even went so far as to refer to several pieces as “Infanta” evening dresses, referencing the series of paintings which depict the Infanta Margarita. The similarities in line, form, composition, and color are clear, even though the 1939 evening dress which displays the most direct links to Velazquez’s painting was placed oddly away from this grouping.

The exhibition audioguide provided little information beyond what was presented in the wall texts and labels. The exhibition itself ends with a small pop-up gift shop. This is notable due to the fact that just beyond the shop lies the entrance to the textile study department of the museum, the doors to which were propped open as if to invite visitors. Though it is difficult to imagine many patrons making their way into the stacks, the relevance of the museum as a research institution is highlighted. Similarly, the significance of Balenciaga’s life and work is made abundantly clear by the exhibition, and it is likely that many viewer’s will not be bothered by its unanswered questions.

Symposium

The panel of speakers included an international roster of experts in art and fashion history, including noted Balenciaga scholars. In addition to exploring the central thesis of the exhibition, the speakers presented new and exciting research into the life and career of Balenciaga, providing substantial historical context and correcting a few myths about the couturier.

Though he avoided the thornier questions of Spanish identity, Hamish Bowles made a strong case for its fundamental role in Balenciaga’s life and work, thereby expanding on the central thesis of the exhibition. Miren Arzalluz presented a detailed study of Balenciaga’s early career in San Sebastian, relying on well-researched documents and dispelling the myth that Balenciaga arrived in Paris in 1937 with little to no experience or skill. Lourdes Font provided an informative review of Spanish court costume, detailing its role as an inspirational source for Balenciaga’s work. Lastly, Pamela Golbin painted a detailed and entertaining portrait of the daily operations of the Balenciaga workshop, drawing on her extensive interviews and access to primary source documents.

Overall the speakers were informative, entertaining, and professional, and provided great insight into the Balenciaga’s life and work. Regrettably, there was no time for questions at the end. While filled with information, this listener was left with questions about some unresolved issues: Balenciaga’s relationship to bullfighting, his connections to the avant-garde art and literary circles in Paris in the late 1930s and early 1940s, his relationship with Franco (apparently Balenciaga made Franco’s daughter’s wedding dress), and his sense of national identity (Balenciaga hails from Guetaria, in the Basque region). Nonetheless, the exhibition and symposium were highly informative and well staged, while leaving avenues of further research open to those so inclined.

An unbending traditionalist, Ms. Cachin helped formulate the law, passed in January 2002, that now governs most French museums. It defines them as providers of a public service with the obligation to make their collections available to as wide an audience as possible and regard their collections as a public possession, not for sale…. Although high-minded about the mission of museums and impeccable in her scholarship, she had a populist streak. “I do not look down on ‘tourists,’ even if they do not look at things very closely,” she told the British art magazine Apollo in 1994. “They come to absorb something which they feel is important, and I feel one has to respect this.”

In her memory, Le Monde reran Cachin’s passionate 2006 article cautioning against museums’ increasing tendency toward the “entertainment business” and protesting paid loans and satellite museums. She was particularly wary of the Guggenheim model and the inevitability of major French works being sent to Abu Dhabi. Cachin wrote:

Of course, we must lend our works of art if their condition allows it and their security is guaranteed – but without charge, and in cases where there will be a contribution to the knowledge and history of art. This was, until recently, a moral and scientific imperative… Patrimonial objects are not consumable goods, and protecting them now will guarantee, for the future, their universal value.

These painters are unjustly ignored in the West, Yeng writes:

The tradition of studying and collecting historical Chinese art is well established, and during the last several decades, scholars and collectors have taken up the cause of contemporary Chinese avant-garde and experimental art in earnest. An extraordinarily rich category of Chinese art, however … has gone largely unremarked in the West … These four artists, in ways unique to each, understood and absorbed the essence of centuries of Chinese painting and aesthetics … they successfully met the challenges associated with the advent of China’s “discovery” of Western art, and overcame the suspicion–sometimes outright rejection–of the Chinese tradition that it provoked … and they consistently maintained artistic integrity in spite of an increasingly commercialized and politicized art market.

Yeng argues also that the Chinese contemporary artists who are today so popular among Western elites owe a debt to their countrymen of a century ago:

Even though some established contemporary diaspora artists are not actively ink painters, their successes were built upon the integration of Chinese cultural elements and Western avant-garde idioms … Chinese ink painting in the twentieth century has given rise to a new generation of artists who critically absorb their cultural and artistic heritage and innovatively reinterpret rather than mimic the past, who understand the trajectories of artistic progress, and who have the ability to “draw” the future. Qi Baishi once said, “Who imitates me, his art dies.”

constitutes a model of how to make a catalogue about specific collections that far outreaches the task of honoring the collectors in question. Offering acute insights into an important region and an understudied medium, Kantha not only celebrates a lively vernacular textile tradition but also accords, for the first time, a comprehensive, sensitive treatment to this form of women’s domestic, creative, and social expression. In a series of richly grounded, engagingly written essays, Mason and her collaborators—Pika Ghosh, Katherine Hacker, Anne Peranteau, and Niaz Zaman—locate Kantha in wider sociocultural, historical, political, economic, and religious currents while tackling issues sometimes avoided in such studies, such as matters surrounding the quiltmakers’ agency.

I’ll write more about the other award winners soon.

Anna Chave, Graduate Center, CUNY (chair)
Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Virginia Fields, LACMA
Erica Hirshler, MFA Boston
Anne Woollett, J. Paul Getty Museum

Today I’ll look at Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, edited by Darielle Mason. By the by, it seems worth noting that two of the three shortlisted books this year concern the decorative arts, and that two of the three concern Asian art, as have various winners in past years. (Past winners available online, though not past shortlists.)

According to the catalogue, Bengali kanthas are made “from fragments of old family garments and recycled threads … to celebrate marriages and births.” They are “ritual actions, women’s personal expressions, intergenerational bonds, icons of cultural and national identity, links with the ancient past, representations of cosmic reintegration [and] works of art.” They are functional, used as “bed and floor cloths to seat honored guests, blankets and wraps to keep warm … shrouds and palanquin seating … prayer mats, while tiny elongated pieces were often created to enfold mirrors, combs, and other personal items that also had ritual uses.” Most weren’t made to last, but “Elaborately embroidered or especially beloved pieces would be carefully preserved and passed down through generations.”

The kanthas reproduced in the catalogue are visually rich. The base is thin white cotton fabric, atop which appear various images, some representational, mostly in red and blue. There is “a wonderful variety of textures, from intermittent swells to ripples to densely regimented ridges” and indeed they often seem to be landscapes unto themselves.

The catalogue includes five provocative essays. In the first, Pika Ghosh “explores her family’s connection with kanthas in a personal reflection [as well as] ethnographic research to discuss the roles that kanthas and kantha-making continue to play.” In another, Ghosh embarks upon “a ground-breaking study of the religious narratives depicted on these textiles.” Katherine Hacker “examines how, during the first half of the twentieth century, the kantha was transformed from the product of a women’s craft into a symbol of tradition, heritage, nation, and, ultimately, fine art.” Niaz Zaman “has been gathering examples of inscribed kanthas over many years, and she uses this written evidence to probe the layers of Bengali society and women’s place in it.” Finally, conservator Anne Peranteau “documents her analysis of the materials and techniques of the kanthas in the Kramrisch and Bonovitz collections, as well as comparative examples.”

The catalogue concludes with portraits of Stella Kramrisch and the Bonovitzes. In an essay, Darielle Mason paints a vivid portrait of the late Kramrisch, a onetime Philadelphia Museum curator, who led a fascinating life that spanned Moravia, Vienna, Calcutta, and Philadelphia. It verges on the hagiographic at times, but retains some critical distance.

Mason’s treatment of the Bonovitzes is altogether different. Here a short biographical profile precedes an interview with Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz. She is an artist; he is a lawyer and a trustee of the museum. The couple helped underwrite the exhibition and its catalogue, as the copyright page notes, and I’m tempted to say they got their money’s worth. Their profile is vacuously laudatory: “his passionate conviction,” “has often been called a visionary by his peers,” “internationally acclaimed”:

Jill exudes an ethereality, wonderfully tempered by the contemplative candor of her speech, each phrase seeming to blossom forth, freshly thought. In contrast, Sheldon is pent energy and staccato sentences, broken by sudden stillness as he listens with almost feline focus.

Ick. The Bonovitzes may well be this wonderful, but what place does all this have in an exhibition catalogue? Mason’s subsequent questions to the couple are far from probing, and produce little of interest, as far as I can tell. I’m glad the Philadelphia Museum got the Bonovitzes’ collection (assembled in the early part of last decade) in the bargain, but I sure wish it had happened in a more seemly and scholarly fashion. Even the Bonovitzes’ kantha dealer got a page-long plug in the catalogue.

In related news, Tyler Green writes on “The Albright-Knox’s big, embarrassing mistake.”