Κατηγορία: painting

Death and the Maiden: from Munch to Abramovic

Edvard-Munch-Museum-Life-and-Death-1024x766

Some time ago I wrote about one of the most stunning and moving themes in the work of Edward Munch: The Madonna. Following my visit to the Munch Museum in Oslo, I wrote about Munch’s fable “Alpha og (and) Omega“. 

Some of the paintings and etchings of the “Madonna” series I used in a subsequent post on poetry: “Naked heart forever.”

Munch described “Madonna” in this way: “Now life and death join hands. The chain is joined that ties the thousands of past generations to the thousands of generations to come” (qtd. in Hughes 281). He painted a woman in warm hues, her torso bare and her head tilted back, with long reddish hair flowing around her body. Her eyes are closed, her lips slightly parted in silent rapture. Her face is pale and bony, and crowned with a deep orange halo. The corpse-like face above the voluptuous, sensuous body is a strange rendition of the Madonna as virgin-especially given that the work was originally presented with a painted frame of circling sperm. The lithograph versions have the sperm border, and a fetus with its arms crossed in the corpse position looking up unhappily at the Madonna from the lower left corner. Munch is playing with opposites here: fertility and virginity, lust and chastity, and in his words, life and death. (1b)

Edward Munch, Self portrait with bottle
Edward Munch, Self portrait with bottle of wine, 1906, Munch Museum, Oslo

The “naked heart forever” post ended with an etching by Munch that sets today’s topic: “Death and the Maiden”.

But what is the origin of this theme in the western world?

I quote from “Black Calavera“

Rudolph Binion argues that artist Hans Baldburg painted Death and the Maiden during the early 1500′s, which also originates from the ‘Dance of Death’.

According to Binion, the Renaissance Reformation introduced the Death and the Maiden to the public sphere. These particular paintings featured death holding or touching a woman in a suggestive and sexual manner.

In comparison Enrico De Pascale  claims that “The origin of the theme lies in Greek Mythology, in the abduction of Persephone by Hades, king of the Underworld who epitomised the eternal conflict between Eros and Thantos, between love (life) and death”

Hans Baldburg Grien: Death and the Maiden, 1518 – 1520
Hans Baldburg Grien: Death and the Maiden, 1518 – 1520

“Death and the Maiden” is an even more explicit rendition of the same themes. The woman and the skeleton clasp each other in a purely erotic pose. She is, as in the “Madonna,” very sensuous and voluptuous, while the skeleton is cold, thin, harshly white. The figures-death and sex-are thrust together within a background that is black and chasmic. They are framed by red, upward-moving sperm cells on the left, and two fetuses on the right in the same style as the “Madonna” fetus, with their arms crossed over their chests in the corpse-position. The moment of conception parades around the figures, who are taunted by the hollow stares of the fetuses. The unborn present their judgment on the nature of sex, conception, life, their own ultimate demise.(1b)

Edward Munch, Death and the Maiden, Oil on Canvas, 1893, Oslo
Edward Munch, Death and the Maiden, Oil on Canvas, 1893, Oslo

The link between Eros and Thanatos is embodied in the images-he imbeds it there so that he might reach us through our own relationship to love. He presented his paintings as packets of emotional impressions rather than as a narrative, thereby allowing us to arrange and rearrange the impressions, to create our own oppositions and links. Throughout, though, he firmly establishes the destruction inherent in creation. A creation of the union between two people results in conception, which is quite clearly the beginning of death. The idea of love involves an opposition in trying to combine with the other person, in trying to break the original barriers of communication. It is an attempt to move together towards one space while still retaining one’s own identity. (1b)

This motif dates back to the Middle Ages, but has been repeated and developed throughout the history of art thereafter. A precursor of the strong focus on the erotic that we find in Munch’s engraving Death and the Maiden is Albrecht Dürer’s portrayal of death as a skeleton, part-seducer, part-rapist. Yet in Munch the roles are reversed; it is the woman who is the seducer, and the man who allows himself to be ensnared by her, loses his integrity and his creative powers – and dies, if not physically, then figuratively. Perhaps this mirrors the man’s scepticism vis-à-vis the sexually and socially emancipated woman – the femme fatale in various guises was a popular motif in literature as well as art at this time of change and upheaval – yet above all it reflects Munch’s own horror at the fact that an all-consuming relationship with a woman should stand in the way of his artistic vocation. The link between love and death was graphically real for Munch, as it was for many other artists of the age. Woman was a creature who, by virtue of her bodily cycle, was closely bound up with life and death, and who therefore brought man face to face with his own transience. (1a)

Death and the Maiden
Edward Munch, Death and the Maiden, 1894, Private Collection

Matthias Claudius, Der Todt and das Maedchen – Death and the Maiden

Das Maedchen – The Maiden

Vorüber! Ach, vorüber!

Geh, wilder Knochenmann!

Ich bin noch jung, geh Lieber!

Und rühre mich nicht an.

Over!

Oh, pass by!

Go, wild bone man!

I’m still young, go dear!

And do not touch me.

Edward Munch, Dance of Death, 1905
Edward Munch, Dance of Death, 1905

Der Todt – Death

Gib deine Hand, du schön und zart Gebild!

Bin Freund, und komme nicht, zu strafen.

Sei gutes Muts! ich bin nicht wild,

Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen!

Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender form!

I am a friend, and come not to punish.

Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,

Softly shall you sleep in my arms!

P J Lynch: Death and the Maiden
P J Lynch: Death and the Maiden, 2010

Musical Interlude: Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), D.531; Op. 7, No. 3, is a lied composed by Franz Schubert in February 1817. It was published by Cappi und Diabelli in Vienna in November 1821. The text is derived from a poem written by German poet Matthias Claudius. The song is set for voice and piano.

Júlia Várady soprano sings and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau plays the piano.

Egon Schiele’s painting “Death and the Maiden” puts us in mind of the circumstances of Schiele’s own life at this moment. He is on the eve of conscription. Perhaps then the mood of this painting is being tainted and informed by the thought that he is being spirited away into the arms of death. He has also just chosen between two women in his life, with great callousness. One he has married, the other, a model of long standing, he has abandoned.

The man’s stare is blank and wild, disinterested, otherwhere engaged – look at that distended pupil. With the long and bony fingers of his left hand he appears to be caressing, as if dispassionately evaluating, the dome of the woman’s skull. The impulse of the other hand appears to suggest that he may be repulsed by the way in which she is exaggeratedly enwrapping him with the long curve of her left arm.

That curiously long arm of hers is rendered all the thinner, longer and stranger-looking by the fact that the sleeve of his coat part-conceals it. Her fingers – are they loosening their grip even as they embrace him? – are turning and twisting about. We have noticed that he appears to be disengaged from this embrace – even though it is everything that is happening here. She too looks askance, into the middle distance. There is no pleasure in that look of hers.

Meanwhile, everything behind and beneath them, all that agitated landscape, seems to be engaged in a kind of heaving, in-and-out breathing, erotic dance of sorts, coaxing the two of them into a dance of death. In this case, the last dance with death perhaps. Or the last dance with the jilted or jilting lover. (3)

Death and the Maiden (1915-16) by Egon Schiele Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna
Death and the Maiden (1915-16) by Egon Schiele
Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

Joseph Beuys, the man who can fairly be called Europe’s most influential postwar artist, was influenced by Munch.

A characteristic feature of Joseph Beuys is the identification with everything from mythological figures and historical personages to writers and artists. Edvard Munch is one of them. Beuys developed an interest in Munch towards the end of the 40s, when he was going through an existential crisis, partly attributable to splitting up with his childhood sweetheart.

In a long series of drawings from this period, Beuys explores woman, love and death, for example in Loving Couple (1948-49), Autumn of Life (1952) and Death and the Maiden (1957). We recognise Munch’s ambivalent attitude to woman in a number of these, where she is portrayed as a blend of the fascinating and fear-inspiring – as a dual symbol of eroticism and death. (1c)

Joseph Beuys, Death and the Maiden, 1957, Drawing on a manila envelope
Joseph Beuys, Death and the Maiden, 1957, Ink and Watercolor on a manila envelope

The drawing depicts the shadows of two skeletons in an intimate embrace upon the back of a manila envelope stamped ominously with the address of “Auschwitz.”

Andy Warhol Portrait of Joseph Beuys
Andy Warhol
Portrait of Joseph Beuys

In contrast to traditional iconography, Beuys changed the perspective in his watercolour of 1957, Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) by representing the maiden, too, as dead in her encounter with Death. Death, so it seems, is communicating with his equal. In this image Beuys refers to a life that is ruled by Death. Life appears here as a strangely unfamiliar paradox: Death speaks to us, and by way of the element of death in life, the human being ultimately achieves a new awareness of life. (2)

Ana Mendieta About giving life, 1975 Photograph, 33.65x50.8cm Documentation of performance, Iowa 1975
Ana Mendieta
About giving life, 1975
Photograph, 33.65×50.8cm
Documentation of performance,
Iowa 1975

Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic place the motif in a contemporary feminist context. By substituting their own bodies for the maiden they take on the female role that was so alarming and novel in Munch’s time. In a ritualised episode, life and death become acquainted with one another and the woman confirms the cyclical power of her sex. These two artists also reiterate Munch’s analysis of himself and his relation to his surroundings. His role as outsider in the bourgeois society of the day becomes a parallel to the female artist’s situation in a society dominated by man. (1a)

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

Sylvia Plath

Self portrait with skeleton by Marina Abramovic 2003 Photograph: Marina Abramovic/Sean Kelly Gallery New York
Self portrait with skeleton by Marina Abramovic 2003 Photograph: Marina Abramovic/Sean Kelly Gallery New York

Death,

I need my little addiction to you.

I need that tiny voice who,

even as I rise from the sea,

all woman, all there,

says kill me, kill me.

Anne Sexton

clear

Sources

(1a) Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic: Death and the Maiden 

(1b) Anna K. Norris, Ruminations on Munch

(1c) Joseph Beuys: Woman as Symbol

(2) Michael Kröger: Death keeps me awake’ The Thresholds of Life and the Consciousness of Death in the Work of Joseph Beuys

(3) The Independent: Great Works: Death and the Maiden (1915-16) by Egon Schiele, Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

 

Head of a Woman: Picasso’s interpretations of Fernande Olivier

Head of a Woman (Fernande), autumn 1909
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), bronze, autumn 1909, Art Institute of Chicago

During a visit to Chicago I viewed the Picasso Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Prominent amongst the exhibited artwork, was the sculpture “Head of a Woman (Fernande)”.

The following post presents modern art from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Modern Art

It is not a simple sculpture. It is an adventure. Every angle opens new dimensions, interpretations, and insights into what the head might be. 

This sculpted head gave me the inspiration to write this article.

Pablo Picasso, "Portrait of Fernande Olivier”, 1906, Gouache on Paper, private collection, Stockholm
Pablo Picasso, “Portrait of Fernande Olivier”, 1906, Gouache on Paper, private collection, Stockholm

Picasso and Fernande Olivier met on a rainy day in August 1904.

Fernande became reportedly Picasso’s first known long-term relation & subject of many of Picasso’s Rose Period paintings (1905-07).

Their romance lasted until 1909, but continued to be together as friends until 1912.

Pablo Picasso, Fernande with a Black Mantilla (Fernande à la mantille noire), Paris, 1905–06. Oil on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection,
Pablo Picasso, Fernande with a Black Mantilla (Fernande à la mantille noire), Paris, 1905–06. Oil on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection,

Picasso’s portrait Fernande with a Black Mantilla 1906, is a transitional work. Still somewhat expressionistic and romantic, with its subdued tonality and lively brushstrokes, the picture depicts Fernande Olivier wearing a mantilla, which perhaps symbolizes the artist’s Spanish origins. The iconic stylization of her face and its abbreviated features, however, foretell Picasso’s increasing interest in the abstract qualities and solidity of Iberian sculpture, which would profoundly influence his subsequent works. Though naturalistically delineated, the painting presages his imminent experiments with abstraction. (Source: Guggenheim Museum).

Head of a woman, 1906
Head of a woman, 1906

Another 1906 picture “Head of a woman (Fernande)”, is totally different in style. Space and perspective are somehow distorted. The angular aspects of the face are prominent.

As we approach 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” cleared the way to cubism, as John Richardson comments in his “A Life of Picasso”.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Oil on Canvas, 1907, MOMA, New York
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Oil on Canvas, 1907, MOMA, New York

Two years later, Picasso paints Fernande in the “Head of a Woman” as a multi-level distorted face.

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman, summer 1909
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman, summer 1909, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago

“Woman with Pears” has the same style.

This is one of several portraits Picasso painted of Fernande, during the summer of 1909, a period that the couple spent in Picasso’s native Spain. While the pears in the background are modeled in the round, Picasso radically reconfigured Oliviers head and bust, fragmenting them into geometrical segments. This fracturing of solid volumes offered an alternative to the traditional illusionistic and perspectival approach to depicting three–dimensional space on a two–dimensional surface and suggests the direction Picasso’s process would take in the development of Cubism. (Source: MOMA).

Pablo Picasso, Woman with Pears (Fernande), 1909
Pablo Picasso, Woman with Pears (Fernande), summer 1909, oil on canvas, MOMA, New York

The slices carved into the figures neck and the diamond recesses of her eyes are replicated in the sculpture Womans Head (Fernande), which Picasso created in the fall of that year.

‘My greatest artistic emotions were aroused when the sublime beauty of the sculptures created by anonymous artists in Africa was suddenly revealed to me’ Picasso told the poet Apollinaire. This sculpture is of his companion Fernande Olivier. Its flat, planed surface relates the work to his cubist paintings of the same period. Picasso made two plaster casts of the head, from which at least sixteen bronze examples were cast.

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande) 1909, Plaster, Tate Gallery
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande) 1909, Plaster, Tate Gallery, London

One of the plaster casts is today at London’s Tate Gallery.

“One of only two plasters made by Picasso from which at least sixteen bronzes were cast, this version is completely white, unlike Tate Modern’s version which has been toned in a brownish finish (presumably to emulate bronzes cast from it). The point of Cubism was to disregard one-point perspective in painting—long held since the Renaissance—breaking down the picture plane, the prison of two dimensions, enabling the artist to show the object or figure in the round.” (Culture Spectator, PABLO PICASSO AT MFA HOUSTON UNTIL THE 27TH MAY 2013)

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Head of a Woman (Fernande), 1909 Plaster Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas
Pablo Picasso, 
Head of a Woman (Fernande), 1909
Plaster Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas, USA

The other plaster cast is in Texas.

We now come to the bronze sculptures. The one I saw in Chicago was donated by Alfred Stieglitz to the Art Institute in 1949.

Head of a Woman (Fernande), autumn 1909
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago

“Like Rembrandt’s most intimate portraits, it is about the mystery of being close to another human being. Picasso makes you recognise this by inviting your eye down into those channels and crevices, until you feel you are inside Fernande’s head.

This is one of the seminal works of cubism, and in the state that Picasso liked it best. He moulded Fernande’s head in clay, then made two plaster casts from which he authorised a series of bronzes. He never liked the bronzes as much as this raw plaster version. It is a key work in the development of cubism because it was the first time Picasso realised he could translate his new kind of painting into three dimensions this is one of his paintings from that time given solid form.”

(Jonathan Jones, Head of a woman, The Guardian)

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande) c 1909, bronze, Art Gallery of Ontario
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande) c 1909, bronze, Art Gallery of Ontario

In 1909, over a ten-month period, Picasso was inspired to create more than sixty Cubist paintings, sculptures, and drawings of women that bear a striking resemblance to his paramour at the time, Fernande Olivier. Although few of these works could be considered traditional “portraits,” they do form a unique group within his oeuvre that shows him working with unusually singular focus. This bronze head of Fernande was modeled in autumn 1909 in Paris after the couple returned from a summer trip to Spain (Horta de Ebro), and represents Picasso’s first Cubist sculpture. Like his early Cubist paintings, the shape of her sculpted head is faceted into smaller units. Fernande’s hair, which she wore up in a rolled do, is here a series of crescent blobs, while her contemplative face is more sharply chiseled into flat planes. Intended to be seen in the round, the composition changes form when viewed from different angles, and the head’s slight tilt and the neck’s sweeping curves give the allusion of movement as if she were about to look over her shoulder. (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Head of a Woman, 1909
Head of a Woman, 1909, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
picasso1_detail
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), detail – autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), detail - autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), detail – autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), signature - autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), signature – autumn 1909, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago

Stations of the Cross: Giandomenico Tiepolo, San Polo Church, Venice Italy and Art Institute, Chicago USA

Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) was the son of Giambattista Tiepolo, a master of painting.

He never achieved the status and fame of his father.

San Polo Church, Venice

However, between 1747 and 1749 he painted “Via Crucis”, the stations of the Cross, in the Oratory of the Crucifixion in the Venetian Church of San Polo. In the same period he also etched the sequence of prints with the same title.

This sequence of 14 paintings is for me the most moving sequence of Christ’s path to the Cross and the Beyond.

Inside the San Polo Church (when I visited) there were on display only some of the 14 paintings, the ones I photographed and have included here.

To my delight, I discovered some of the etchings on paper at the Art Institute of Chicago, which I also display here. Although they do not form a complete series, they supplement the paintings very nicely.

I followed the numerical sequence for both the prints and the paintings.

Frontispiece to Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Frontispiece to the set of etchings

Station I: Christ is Condemed to Death, plate one from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station I: Christ is Condemed to Death

Station II: Christ Receives the Cross, plate two from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station II: Christ Receives the Cross

Station III: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the First Time, plate three from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station III: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the First Time

Station IV: Christ Meets his Mother, plate four from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station IV: Christ Meets his Mother

Station V: Christ is Helped by Simon of Cyrene, plate five from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station V: Christ is Helped by Simon of Cyrene

Station VI: Christ's Face is Wiped by St. Veronica, plate six from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station VI: Christ’s Face is Wiped by St. Veronica

Station VII: Christ Consoles the Weeping Women, plate seven from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station VII: Christ Consoles the Weeping Women

Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time, plate nine from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time

Painting IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time, San Polo Church, Venice

Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time

Painting IX - Detail: the crowd

The crowd is shown full of anticipation.

Station X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments, plate ten from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments

Painting X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments, San Polo Church, Venice

Station X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments

Painting X - Detail

The elder

Painting X - Detail: Mother and Daughter

Mother and daughter observing

Station XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross, plate eleven from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross

Painting XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross

Painting XI - Detail: Christ

Christ unconscious

Painting XI - Detail: Crowd

The watching crowd

Painting XII: Crucifixion, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XII: Christ crucified

Painting XIII: Deposition, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XIII: The deposition of Christ

Painting XIII - Detail

Deposition detail

Painting XIV - Entombment, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XIV: Entombment

International Womens’ Day: 8th March 2012 – Διεθνης Ημερα της Γυναικας: 8η Μαρτιου 2012


Salvador Dali: Muchacha en la ventana, 1925

L’amour, la folie

Order of the day, from Bonaparte, First Counsul, to his guard:

“Greadier Gobain has committed suicide for love: moreover he was a very fine soldier. This is the second event of this kind which has occurred within the corps in a month. The First Counsul orders the guard to be notified: that a soldier must conquer the pain and melancholy of the passions; that there is as much true courage in suffering steadfastly the pangs of the soul as in standing fast under the fire of a battery…”.

(Quoted in “Roland Barthes, by Roland Barthes”.)

Edward Hopper: Cape Cod Morning, 1950

Memory and Dusk

A poem by George Sarantaris

They come by slowly

In the garden that accepted us

And was our hideout for life

The hours the women the pigeons…

My photo: Woman in Lisboa, 1992

The Arrows

A poem by Andreas Empeirikos

A girl in a garden

Two women in a tub

Three girls in my heart

Without limits without conditions…

Caspar David Friedrich: Frau am Fenster, 1822

“When I was kissing her, I believed I was taking her soul from her lips, and I was offering her the whole of my soul. It was the sky, the universe.”

(Gamiani, Alfred de Musset)

Savas Haratsidis: Two female figures

“- Why are you slipping away from my hands? Where are you? I have new tatoos to show you. Do not wake up… Exactly the way you are, I will put your figure on the stern… Little girl. Take my hand and show me the world.

– I do not have a hand. There is no world.”

Nikos Kavadias, The Watch

Edvard Munch: The girl by the window, 1893

“What was making me furious was the fact that although I did not love Cecilia, the circumstances were forcing me to have the feelings and the behaviour becoming to a person in love. I wanted to liberate myself from these instances like an animal wanting to take the noose off its neck…”

Alberto Moravia, Boredom

Edward Monet: The Red Kerchief, 1873

Don’t wish too hard, or you will get what you want.

Jewish proverb

Jan Vermeer: Girl reading a letter at an open window, 1659

Desires

A poem by Constantine Cavafy

Like beautiful bodies of the dead, who had not grown old
and they shut them with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet —
that is how desires look that have passed
without fultillment; without one of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a moonlit morn.

Henri Matisse: Young woman at the window, 1921

I lost everything

A poem of Giuseppe Ungaretti

…

I remember how I used to tremble for you,

And look at me now I am lost

In the night’s infinity

…

Roy Lichtenstein: Collage for still life with reclining nude, 1997

“Hanold had chosen archaeology as a retreat from love. But it was an archaeological object, the sculpture of Gradiva, that aroused his desire. Thus his repressed sexuality used the very instrument of its repression (archaeology) to gain access to consciousness. The symptom of his disorder, the delusion that the sculpture was a real woman, was a compromise formed between the sexual drive and the repression.”

Freud Museum

Gradiva: The Cure Through Love, An exhibition on Freud as archaeological literary critic

Pamela Hanson: Monica Bellucci, 1994

ISOLDE

Do I alone
hear this melody
which, so wondrous
and tender
in its blissful lament,
all‑revealing,
gently pardoning,
sounding from him,
pierces me through,
rises above,
blessedly echoing
and ringing round me?
Resounding yet more clearly,
wafting about me,
are they waves
of refreshing breezes?

(continued…)

Henri Cartier Bresson, Calle Cuauhtemo, Mexico City

Are they clouds
of heavenly fragrance?
As they swell
and roar round me,
shall I breathe them,
shall I listen to them?
Shall I sip them,
plunge beneath them,
to expire in sweet perfume?

In the surging swell,
in the ringing sound,
in the vast wave
of the world’s breath –
to drown,
to sink
unconscious –
supreme bliss!

Isolde’s Death Song, Tristan and Isolde

Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas (The Letters of …)

Today I travel to Mexico, to join the Great Mexican Painter Frida Kahlo. My aircraft is Martha Zamora’s compilation of Frida Kahlo’s letters, Cartas Apasionadas, published in 1995 by Chronicle Books in San Francisco, USA.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

The painter was born in 1907 in Coyoacan, a borough of the Federal District of Mexico City as Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón.

I started painting twelve years ago while I was recovering from an automobile accident that kept me in bed for nearly a year. In all these years, I’ve always worked with the spontaneous impulse of my feeling. I’ve never followed any school or anybody’s influence; I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn’t say otherwise. (Letter to Carlos Chavez, 1939).

Frida Kahlo: Autorretrato con Collar de Espinas y Colibrí” (“Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Humming-bird”).

In 1925 Frida has a horrible accident while riding a bus.

The only good thing is that I’m starting to get used to suffering. (Letter to Alejandro Gomez Arias, December 5, 1925).

Frida Kahlo: Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931

A short while ago, maybe a few days ago, I was a girl walking in a world of colors, of clear and tangible shapes. .. If you knew how terrible it is to attain knowledge all of a sudden – like lightning elucidating the earth! Now I live on a painful planet, transparent as ice…I grew old in a few instants and now everything is dull and flat. I know there is nothing behind; if there were something I would see it. (Letter to Alejandro Gomez Arias, September 1926).

Diego Rivera: Man masters the Elements

In 1929 Frida got married to the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Their marriage hits the rocks quickly, as Diego is irreversibly unfaithfull. In 1934 Diego has an affair with Frida’s sister, Cristina. Frida is devastated.

First, it is a double disgrace, if I can explain it like that. You know better than anyone what Diego means to me in all senses, and on the other hand, she was the sister whom I loved the most and whom I tried to help as much as I could; that’s why the situation became horribly complicated and it is getting worse every day… My situation seems so ridiculous and stupid to me that you can’t imagine how I dislike and hate myself. I’ve lost my best years being supported by a man, doing nothing but what I thought would benefit and help him. I never thought about myself, and after six years, his answer is that fidelity is a bourgeois virtue and that it exists only to exploit (people) and to obtain an economic gain. (Letter to Ella and Bertram Wolfe, October 18, 1934).

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mask from Mexico

Even if we experience endless adventures, cracks in the doors, “mentions” of our mothers (the mentioning of one’s mother is considered to be very insulting in Mexico), and international complaints, don’t we always love each other? … All this anger has simply made me understand better that I love you more than my own skin, and that even though you don’t love me as much, you love me a little anyway – don’t you? If this is not true, I’ll always be hopeful that it could be, and that’s enough for me… Love me a little …. I adore you … Frieda (Letter to Diego Rivera, July 1935).

Frida Kahlo – Photo by Vicente Wolf

Diego has also been sick, but now he is almost well. He is working as usual, a lot and well. He is a little fatter; he is eating a lot and is as talkative as usual. He sleeps in the bathtub, reads the newspapers while on the toilet, and spends hours playing wiht Don Fulang Chang (pet monkey), for whom he already found a partner. (Letter to Ella Wolfe, 1938).

Diego Rivera: In the trenches – Photo by Tina Modotti)

Well child, let me thank you for your letter and for being so nice as to ask me about Diego’s shirts. I’m sorry for not being able to give you the sizes you asked for, but no matter how much I look inside the collar, I can’t even find a clue of what could be a number indicating the thickness of Don Diego Rivera y Barriento’s neck. So, I think it would be best to tell Martin to please buy six of the largest shirts that New York has, that is, if this letter gets to you in time, which I doubt very much. Get the kind (of shirts) that seem almost impossible to be made for a person, i.e the largest on this planet, commonly referred to as the Earth. (Letter to Ella Wolfe, 1938).

Frida Kahlo: Two nudes in the forest 1939

Now I will tell you some things about myself. I haven’t changed very much since you saw me last. Only I wear again my crazy mexican dress, my hair grew longer again, and I am as skinny as always. My character hasn’t changed either, I am as lazy as always, without enthusiasm for any thing, quite stupid, and damn sentimental, some times I think that this is bacause I am sick, but of course that is only a very good pretext. I could paint as long as long as I wish, I could read or study or do many things inspite  of my bad foot and other bad things, but, there is the point, I live on the air, accepting things as they come, without the minor effort to change them, and all day long I feel sleepy, tired and desperated. (Letter to Lucienne Bloch, February 1938).

Frida Kahlo: The broekn column 1944

My child, I really should not complain about anything that happens to me in life, so long as you love me and I love you. (This love) is so real and beautiful that it makes me forget even distance. .. I don’t have the words to describe how happy I am, knowing that you tried to make me happy and that you are so good and adorable… My lover, my heaven, my Nick, my life, my child, I adore you. .. Don’t make love to anyone, if you can help it. Do it only in case you find a real F. W. (fucking wonder), but don’t fall in love. .. Oh, my dear Nick, I adore you so much. I need you so much that that my heart burns. (Letter to Nickolas Muray, February 1939).

Excerpt from a Poem to Lina and Arcady Boytler

I am leaving my portrait to you

so you’ll have me in front of you

every day and every night

in which I am far away from you.

Sadness is portrayed

in my whole work,

but that’s my condition;

I am hopeless.

Frida Kahlo, 1941 – Photo by Emmy Lou Packard

Emilio Vedova – Italian Artist

During my recent visit to Venice, I was lucky to discover the Italian artist – painter, Emilio Vedova, who impressed me. Emilio Vedova was known as the ‘Italian brother’ of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

This post is triggered by the Exhibition “…in continuum”, that was on show in Venice until the end of November 2011.

The biographical notes that follow and the short description of the exhibition come from the site of the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova’s Foundation.

Biographical notes

Emilio Vedova painting in his studio

Born in Venice into a family of workers and artisans, from the 1930s onwards Vedova began an intense activity as a self-taught artist, drawing figures and buildings. In 1942, the young Vedova joined the anti-Novecento movement known as “Corrente”.
An anti-Fascist, he worked for the Resistance from 1944 to 1945 and in 1946, he was one of the co-signers of the “Oltre Guernica” manifesto in Milan. In the same year in Venice he was one of the founders of the “Nuova Secessione Italiana” followed by the “Fronte Nuovo delle Arti”.
In 1948 he made his debut in the Venice Biennale, the first of many appearances in this event: in 1952 an entire room was devoted to his work, in 1960 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting and in 1997 the prestigious Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement.


In the early 1950s he created his celebrated cycles of works: “Scontro di situazioni” (Collision of Situations), “Ciclo della Protesta” (Protest Cycle), “Cicli della Natura” (Cycles of Nature). In 1954, at the second São Paolo Art Biennial he won a prize that would allow him to spend three months in Brazil, where he encountered an extreme, hard reality that would leave its mark on him. In 1961 he designed the sets and costumes for Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza ‘60” (Intolerance ’60); in 1984 he would work with the composer again on “Prometeo”.
From 1961 onwards he worked on his “Plurimi” creating an initial Venetian series followed by works made from 1963 to 1964 in Berlin including the seven pieces forming the “Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ‘64” (Absurd Berlin Diary ’64) presented at the 1964 Kassel Documenta where he also showed in 1955, 1959 and 1982. From 1965 to 1967 he worked on “Spazio/Plurimo/Luce” (Space/Plurimo/Light) for the Montreal EXPO.


He carried out intense teaching activities in various American universities followed by the Sommerakademie in Salzburg and the Academy of Venice. His artistic career was characterised by a constant desire to explore and innovate.
In the 1970s he created the “Plurimi Binari” in the “Lacerazione” (Laceration) and “Carnevali” (So-called carnivals) cycles followed by the vast cycles of “teleri” (big canvases) and his “Disks”, “Tondi”, “Oltre” (Beyond) and “…in continuum…” (…in continuum…) works. He won numerous prestigious prizes and awards. His last important solo exhibitions included the major retrospective held at Castello di Rivoli in 1998 and, after his death in 2006, the sister shows at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and the Berlinische Galerie (Berlin).

…In Continuum

June 1, 2011 – November 30, 2011

Emilio Vedova began his artistic research in the 1930s surrounded by the seventeenth-century Baroque atmosphere of Venice. In the following decade, he was already a major figure in the post-war art scene, and in the 1950s, together with Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, he became a leading exponent of Italian and European art informel alongside abstract expressionist painters from the United States such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. The winner of the Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 1997 Venice Biennale, he endlessly fought for the freedom of the artistic experience against all forms of repression.

…in continuum, compenetrazioni/traslati ’87/’88 (…in continuum, compenetrations/transferred ’87/’88) is a cycle of 109 large canvases conceived and executed between 1987 and 1988. White on black and black on white paintings made using a unique technique, which Vedova called “blind painting”… in continuum is a sort of accumulation “with no beginning or end” that invades space in free and random layers. The potential gesture of arranging these canvases in ever-changing images in motion is meant to express the unstable precariousness of our lives and actions.

In an article on Italymag, we read:

[From the dark geometries of his experiments with cubism, Vedova’s work from 1950 onward grew increasingly abstract, placing him in league with the European ”Art Informel” movement that paralleled the work of abstract expressionists in America like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

”My [works] are not creations, but earthquakes,” Vedova once said.

”They are not paintings, but breaths”.

Vedova’s experimenting would eventually carry his work off the canvas altogether into the groundbreaking new terrain of artificial light play and installation art, for which he was featured in the Italian pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal.]

Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza – Venice 1961

Vedova worked with his friend Luigi Nono in the production of Intolleranza, at “La Fenice” in Venice, 1961.

The Italian Pavilion in the Montreal 1967 Expo

In 1967 Emilio Vedova was appointed by the Italian Government to create an installation for the Italian Pavilion of the Montreal Expo. Vedova came up with this great ideas of using small glass slides, especially created to reproduce his abstract painting, and then projected on the asymmetrical walls of the Pavilion. He then asked Nono to compose some electronic music, but Nono had no time, and suggested to ask Marino. He replied: “I could do something, but keep in mind that I am no composer”. The result is Parete (Wall) 1967, a spectacular and intense 30-minutes loop of pure and intense electronics, a magmatic cascade of harsh sounds and deep drones, and a fantastic counterpart to the harsh and expressionistic painting of Vedova.

P.S. For whatever reasons, Vedova has not been a darling of the publicity circus in Europe and the USA. Artists of lesser qualities have been publicized and known, but not Vedova. In any case, this is a matter for another discussion.

Byzantium in Venice: Stelios Faitakis' Imposition Symphony (2011)

The Greek painter Stelios Faitakis has painted a mural for the Danish Pavilion in the 54th Venice Biennale.

It is not just a mural. It is a mural with the style and colors of Byzantium. In addition, it is beautiful. You can seat for a long time in the garden outside the Danish pavilion, enjoying the mural.

I had seen photos of it in the newspapers prior to my visit, but could never anticipate the impact the mural had on me.

Another Greek, Katerina Gregos, has been put in charge of the Danish kiosk after a lengthy and transparent selection process. Faitakis was one of the artists selected by Gregos. The mural builds on the tradition of Diego Rivera, but like any good piece of art, it goes beyond it. It tells many stories and it does so in pictures.

The mural comprises six panels. In the remainder I will present each panel, starting from the left to the right.

Panel 1:A photographer in the December 2008 events in Athens, Greece

Panel 2: President Mao in a garden of flowers with human faces

Panel 3: The crowd and the winged smart phones

Panel 4: Wilhelm Reich and the burning of the books

Panel 5: Gas Chamber and Oven

Panel 6: The violin – playing Saint

Above the door: Nikola Tesla

Epilogue: The themes on Faitakis’s mural are political, in the sense that they deal with the community, the society, the individual, and power. I do not get a sense of an all encompassing harmony in his synthesis. Most likely there is none. Likewise, there is no universal “message”. Which distinguishes the work from Rivera’s where there was a loud and clear message about the good workers, the bad capitalists, and so on. Faitakis’ world is far more complex. And this is why he can survive his playing with fire. Well done Mr Faitakis!!!! Thank you!!!

Postscript

Right across from the Danish kiosk is the one representing the United States. There, an art duo from Puerto Rico, Allora & Calzadilla, have placed a tank from the Korean War upside down and on top of it there is an exercise machine, a belt on which an athlete with the USA shirt is running. The noise is horrible, and the sight is nothing to write home about. As for the inside of the USA pavilion, I better not say anything.

Takashi Murakami: Mr Superflat in Palazzo Grassi, Venice

Palazzo Grassi, Venice

Some time ago I wrote about Makoto Aida’s Harakiri Schoolgirls. The great modern Japanese masters appeared in front of me again, in the face of Takashi Murakami. During a recent trip toVenice, I visited Palazzo Grassi’s exhibition “The World belongs to you” where I saw Takashi Murakami’s  masterpiece 727-272 (The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate). Takashi Murakami is indeed one of the modern Japanese Masters.

Takashi Murakami

“Blurring the traditional lines between art, commerce, pop, and subcultural concerns, the range of Murakami’s creative pursuits are seemingly boundless. In addition to producing some of the most iconic paintings and sculptures of the past two decades, his “business-art” activities span from designing a full gamut of consumer merchandise (either for his own Kaikai Kiki label or for fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garçons) to running a gallery that promotes young Japanese artists to hosting a weekly radio talk show in Tokyo—to name just a few of the many preoccupations that keep him working on a legendarily nonstop clock.” (Source: Interview Magazine)

Takashi Murakami and Francois Pinault

Quoting from the Exhibition’s web site:

“(The work, especially commissioned for the space it occupies today in the Palazzo) draws on traditional sources ranging from Buddhist images, Zen painting, and 18th c. Edo-period compositional techniques that inspired Murakami to coin the phrase “superflat” to characterize the tendency throughout Japanese art history to eliminate threedimensional depth by arranging subjects non-hierarchically on a solid background. Murakami modernizes these traditions by combining them with contemporary Japanese popular culture, in the form of anime and manga (comic books), for instance in the central figure, Mr. Dob, Murakami’s own alter-ego depicted with a typically manga-style face. Mr. Dob’s figure contrasts with that of the legendary Chinese emperor Shennong, the deity of agriculture and medicine, who lived around 2700 BCE. This work illustrates how Murakami deftly links the traditional with the contemporary, Western with Japanese, high art and mass culture”

Front panel - Mr Dob

“The starting-point for this pictorial narrative is the central figure of “Mr Dob”; a sort of alter ego of Murakami himself, this character is depicted with a typically manga-style face, a sly smile and three eyes that seem to look far into the distance. The narrative starts on the right, with the flow of color, comparable to that one finds in Warhol’s Oxidation paintings, bringing us to the second figure of the work. This is an old wise man inspired by the legendary Chinese emperor Shennong, who lived around 2700 BC.”

Front panel - Emperor Shennong

“Considered the deity of Agriculture, his name actually means “heavenly peasant” – Shennong would invent the plough and teach his people how to cultivate wheat and cereal crops. He is also celebrated as a deity of Medicine: according to legend, he would test hundreds of herbs to evaluate their curative properties; if of beneficial properties, the herb was said to light up his stomach – which was transparent – if harmful, it would blacken it. This is the role in which Murakami depicts Shennong, with a blade of grass in his mouth.”

Front panel

The work from the spectator’s view comprises three panels, forming an open rectangle. The front panel has Mr Dong and the Emperor.

Murakami must not be taken lightly because people call him “pop”, or because he likes “manga”, or because he has the tendency to be also in the fashion business.

Front Panel - Upper Left side - detail

As you can see in this detail of the front panel, he knows his painting and he creates some staggering compositions within compositions.

Left and Central Panels

The left panel has among other things, a stunning swirl, and some ideograms.

Left panel detail - swirl

The swirl, making direct reference to a tempest, appears often in Japanese art.

A painting by Shoga Shohauku

As to the ideograms, I have no clue about what they are, but I will find out.

Left panel detail - ideograms

Moving to the right panel, we are faced with a hollow mountain of skulls on top of which is a manga tiger.

Right and Central Panel

It should be clear by now that we are not talking about a single painting here, but a mix of paintings all coming together in the three panels.

Right Panel detail - skulls

In addition to the multiplicity of themes of this “collage”, one must also notice the changing texture of the paint and the colors, and the ruptures, or discontinuities that mark the shift from one to another.

Bruce Wallace of the Los Angeles Times, notes:

“Murakami’s art speaks to the sensibilities of the generation born in the 1960s, those who grew up with the reverberations of World War II’s disaster pulsing through the culture. They were raised on a media diet of anime and manga, with their anti-technology, antiwar story lines and themes. And they came of age in an era when Japan could throw up little more than Marxist jargon in resistance to the deluge of imported American culture.”

Right Panel detail - Tiger

“Surface is everything to Murakami—it’s all there is. I don’t know if you’re allowed to say this, but like a lot of contemporary Japanese artists Murakami is a craftmaster-whiz of flawless visual effects. He draws on traditional Japanese themes like flatness, pattern, and ornamentation. His kaleidoscopic paintings of Hokusai-like waves, his Lichtensteinian splashes, and DOB, his big-headed Mickey Mouse–like creature, are so immaculate you will think a machine made them.” (Jerry Saltz, Village Voice, 1999)

Jenny Saville, Painter

Jenny Saville

Back in 2010, I wrote on painting the human body. One of the artists whose works I included in the post was Jenny Saville. Today I want to present her and her work, as I believe she is one of the most promising artists of today.

Jenny Saville: Shift

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992. Her entire degree show was bought by Charles Saatchi and she later created a new body of work to be displayed in his London gallery.

Like the late Lucian Freud she paints women who are not exactly “thin”. But all likeness to Freud ends here. Saville is a subversive in my view. Her “fat” women undermine the stability of the “normal” society. But one may wonder: is the reason ideological, or is it simply that Saville paints flesh so well that she needs big bodies so that she can paint more and more?

Jenny Saville: Plan

I proceed with Under the skin, an interview of the artist to “The Guardian”. It is an interview that gives an answer to the previous question.

“Jenny Saville’s paintings are known for the mountains of flesh they reveal, but it is the neuroses bursting through that interest her, she tells Suzie Mackenzie.”

Jenny Saville: Red Stare Head IV

Saville is currently exhibiting in the Gagosian Gallery in New York . The title of her exibition is “Continuum”. When Saville exhibited in Gagosian Gallery in New York back in 1999, Roberta Smith of the “New York Times wrote:

Jenny Saville: Isis

“Ms. Saville is 29, and a discovery of the English collector Charles Saatchi. Four of her earlier works are in ”Sensation,” the widely reported exhibition of Mr. Saatchi’s collection of English art now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Ms. Saville’s general strategy is to exaggerate the age-old artistic obsession with the female nude — reflected in Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Ingres, for example — to extremes of imposing wall-like massiveness, where the body’s and the painting’s surface become one.”

Back in the Spring of 2010 Saville exhibited in the Gagosian Gallery of London three drawings.

“Bodies fascinate me. I find having the framework of a body essential. Having flesh as a central subject, I can channel a lot of ideas. “
Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville: Nativity I

“Each of the three drawings in this exhibition portrays the intimate relationship between mother and child, inspired in particular by Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist(National Gallery, London) an atypical scene in which the Virgin contends with a lively Christ-child.  ” (Source: Free Art London List)

Jenny Saville: Nativity II

I conclude this dedication to Jenny Saville with two video clips made in the New York Academy of Art, during the delivery of the 2011 Commencement Address.

(1/2)

2011 Commencement Address (2/2)

1001 Ways to Die – (7) Cy Twombly, American, Painter and Sculptor

Cy Twombly, one of my favourite modern artists, has died on Tuesday, 5th July 2011 in Rome, Italy, losing a long battle to cancer.

His work “The Rose” was the object of a previous article. In another article on this blog I presented his sculpture “Thermopylae” in relation to C. Cavafy’s poem. Today I want to travel with Twombly in the Sea.

I have somehow visualized Death, more precisely the departure from this life, to embarking, to getting on a boat and sailing in the sea. This is no crossing of Acheron, the river of Hades. This is becoming one with the Sea, taking his boat out to the sea, and then sinking with it.

In order to do this, I will use his “Poems to the Sea”, a series of 24 works done in 1959, a photograph of the Sea that the artist took, and his monumental work “Lepanto”.

Twombly in 1958, the year after he moved to Italy from the US. Photograph: David Lees/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Poems to the Sea

‘As Twombly told the critic David Sylvester, “the Mediterranean is always just white, white, white”: in the 24 drawings called Poems to the Sea the colour blue barely appears, and yet the cursory lines and spots create a sea of the mind’s eye – hours of contemplation transformed into a few cryptic marks. With their textured, creamy backgrounds, the paintings inspired by Procida are also extremely evocative: parched cliff-tops in the Bay of Naples; crumbling plaster; the heat – it’s all there if you look for it, though without that act of the imagination the charm quickly fades.’ (source: Christopher Masters, the Guardian).

Poems to the Sea, 1959, Collection Dia Art foundation, New York

‘What order of poems, punctuated with numerals and question marks, are these? The sea is reduced to horizon line and word, scribblings and veils of paint against the stark white of paper. A persistent compulsion is invoked in the viewer, the desire to read what is there, but not fully manifest in the artist’s scrawled script. Two words in these drawings emerge into legibility, “time”and “Sappho”, as if washed up on the beach alongside sudden, subtle gem-flashes of colour – blue, orange-yellow, pink – gleaming all the more because of their discretion. In these pages, meaning is endlessly frustrated and pursued. It settles only in the distance, figured perhaps by the horizon lines that move across the top of each of the drawings – in fact, simply grey or blue lines made with a straight edge, but suggesting seascapes at the vanishing point. The flat planes of sea and page have been collapsed. Writing comes in waves, rolling funnels of cursive script, crossed out, erased, enfoamed in satiny greyish-white paint. The signs are given as nascent forms, as gestural indications of “the hand’s becoming”, as Roland Barthes so aptly phrased it.’ (source: Claire Daigle on Cy Twombly, Tate Gallery, London).

Cy Twombly: Miramare 2005

Miramare

‘Cy Twombly photographs the subjects that he encounters in his studio in Gaeta, in Bassano, Rome or in Lexington, on the beach at Miramare or in botanical gardens, using an instant camera. By means of a special pigmenting process that involves dryprint, these one-offs are enlarged and printed in limited editions. Not only the special saturation of color, but also the fact that the shots are strikingly out of focus account for their unmistakable nature and extraordinary appeal. The consistent lack of focus is reminiscent of the photographs of the late 19th-century Pictorialists. Hubertus Von Amelunxen, however, discerns photo-historical references to the early days of photography, namely to early calotypes, first paper photographs permeated in “light and emulsion”. Indeed, with their aesthetic effect, Twombly’s photographic images exhibit a sense of both astonishment and entrancement with the (new) technology. The unusual and the new is of a quite singular beauty.

Using his particular technique, Cy Twombly manages to concentrate on the textures of surfaces which, removed from the flow of time, generate visual orders of an over-arching world of perception. Hubertus Von Amelunxen calls them “musical, rhythmical positions in an ineffable syntax” – as the focus is not on representation but on the unmistakable nature of things or the clarity of motifs. Finding the invisible in the visible, retaining the purportedly excluded in the image and at the same time sensing the intangible dimensions of time and space, that is what constitutes the great appeal of Twombly’s photographs. The eye is always very close to things, the direct view suggests an almost intimate proximity – of tender tulip blooms, of everyday objects such as glasses and bottles, of the artist’s slippers, his brushes and painting utensils, and not least his paintings themselves.’

(Source: La Lettre de la Photographie)

Cy Twombly: Lepanto

Lepanto

The work consists of 12 large canvases that looks back to one of the most important naval battles of early modern history. Lepanto was shown in September 2008 in the Museo del Prado prior to its permanent installation in the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in October of the same year. I saw the work in Brandhorst in 2010 and was deeply moved by it.

‘When Cy Twombly was offered a gallery dedicated to his work at the 2001 Venice Biennale, he chose to create a new work especially for the space, a work that he describes as one painting in twelve parts. For his concept of the project, Twombly turned to the genre of history painting. Before the advent of Modernism in the late 19th century, history painting, which encompassed images from mythology, the bible, and the lives of the saints, as well as scenes from ancient to contemporary history, was considered the highest achievement of the painter´s art. Responding to the exhibition´s locale adjoining the Arsenale shipyard, Twombly chose of his subject the famous 1571 naval battle of Lepanto.

Cy Twombly in front one of the "Lepanto" panels in the Venice Biennale of 2001

Venice, then an immensely powerful city-state, instigated the formation of an alliance against the Ottoman Empire, which had been attacking its colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and defiling their churches. Brokered by Pope Pius V, the western European alliance consisted of Venice, the Papal States, and Spain, three major Catholic powers of the post-Reformation period. The battle of Lepanto has always been viewed as a turning point in the history of Europe. The Ottoman Empire had heretofore seemed invincible and its fleet was far larger than the alliance´s armada. With more manageable Venetian-designed ships and superior deployment of artillery, the alliance vanquished and burned the Ottoman fleet. Lepanto was the last major sea battle that involved ramming and hand-to-hand fighting on deck. It was the first triumph of Christian Europe over the seemingly all-powerful Islamic Ottoman Empire. It also marked the end of the Mediterranean as the locus of shipping and trade; henceforth, the Atlantic routes to the riches of the American colonies dominated naval activity.

Twombly arranged Lepanto in a way that is at once symphonic and cinematic with four images of flames and falling leaves presaging, interrupting, and concluding his highly abstract narrative of the battle. The maritime scenes, with their stick-figure images of fighting galleys, become increasingly dense with the final triad drenched in the colors of his rich, limited palette. The lushness of the reds and yellows counterpoints their depiction of flames and blood.’

(Source: The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, USA)

As the ship disappears in the horizon, where sky and sea merge, I quote from Roland Barthes (The Wisdom of Art by Roland Barthes 3):

‘If we wished to locate this ethic, we would have to seek very far, outside painting, outside the West, outside history, at the very limit of meaning, and say, with the Tao Te King:

He produces without appropriating anything,
He acts without expecting anything,
His work accomplished, he does not get attached to it,
And since he is not attached to it,
His work will remain.’

Farewell Cy Twombly