Oceanic art silhouetted against the window wall of the new wing of the Crocker Art Museum, overlooking the original Gilded Age mansion.

The Crocker Art Museum was founded in 1885 to house the collection of Judge E.B. Crocker (brother of the “Big Four” railroad tycoon, Charles Crockett) and his wife,  Margaret. Today the museum houses, according to Wikipedia, “one of the state’s premier collections of Californian art dating from the Gold Rush to the present day, a world-renowned collection of master drawings, European paintings, one of the largest and most comprehensive international ceramics collections in the U.S. and collections of Asian, African, and Oceanic art.” The original 1868 Italianate home and adjoining gallery, which once included a bowling alley, skating rink and billiards room, was expanded in 2010 with a contemporary wing, the Teel Family Pavilion, more than tripling the museum’s exhibition space.

Several special exhibitions were on view when I visited, on April 14: retrospectives of the Western landscapist Edgar Payne and the multimedia feminist artist Judy Chicago; a show of contemporary glass from the museum’s collection; a selection of fishing-themed prints from the collection of Gary Widman; and an impressive 200-figure sculptural installation by Gong Yuebin invoking the terra cotta army of China’s First Emperor, but with additional contemporary elements. Photography was not permitted in these shows, so my photographs focus on the architecture, both old and new, and the permanent collection, only a tiny part of which caught my hurried eye. Don't try running around like this at home! www.crockerartmuseum.org

Art by Frank Lobdell, Robert Hudson, and Unknown Artist (sorry).

Video installation by Jennifer Steinkamp, "Rapunzel," 2005. 

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The artist competition formerly known as “Hearts on Fire” has been renamed “The Left Coast Annual.” This year’s edition, comprising around fifty pieces, was judged by Michael Schwager of Sonoma State University.

 The artists: Michael Acker, Julie Alland, Peter Baczek, Jenny E. Balisle, Helen Bellaver, Nancy D. Brown, Pam Chavez,  Arthur Comings, Lizzy Crossm Tamara Danoyan, June Daskalakis, Carlos de Villasante, Stevee Duber, Andrea Ewald, Larry Fowler, Bill Gallo, Jon Gariepy, Alan Grinberg, Robert Haemmerling, Bridget Henry, Benjamin Hersh, Tyler James Hoare, Curt Holzinger, Carole Jeung, Janet Jones, John Kaine, Patrick J. Killeen, Rolf Kriken, Barbara Landis, Rosalie Lang, Oleg Lobykin, Barbara Maricle, Charles D. McDevitt, John Q. McDonald, Paul Merryman, Cynthia Millionis, Chester Ng, Joe Palsa, Robert L. Pratto, Roger Rosenfeld, Marsha Shaw, Joshua Solis, Sandra Ortiz Taylor, Sheila G. Ticen, Stephen C. Wagner, Sharron L. Walker, Kathleen Youngquist, and Jade Zabrowski.

 Title information is left blank where my label photos were illegible; corrections/additions are welcome. The reception was April 13, 2012; the show continues through May 20. Schwager will give a talk on May 20 at 3:30pm. Sanchezartcenter.org.

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Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes, is a retrospective of the twenty-five year  career of the Oakland cartoonist whose fifty comic books (Eightball, Ghost World, David Boring, Ice Haven, Wilson, Mister Wonderful) have been translated into ten languages; printed on covers of The New Yorker; and transformed into two movies, both directed by Terry Zwigoff (Crumb)—Ghost World and Art School Confidential—with a third, Wilson, which was named by Time as one of the top fiction books of 2010, to be filmed by Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways, The Descendants) in Oakland. Of the Wilson character, Clowes has said: “{He] just emerged without anyone asking him to.... I couldn’t stop writing because Wilson could giver you something on almost any subject, and a character like that comes along very seldom. I was also working in a lot of coffee shops at the time, and he felt like someone who could be in that world I was inhabiting. He felt like a guy that could be hanging out on Grand Avenue or Lakeshore or Piedmont.”

 The show was assembled by Guest curator Susan Miller and OMCA Senior Curator of Art René de Guzman, who explains that OMCA’s enthusiasm for Clowes beyond mere local pride: “Daniel Clowes is an artist who bridges the boundaries of high and low culture. It’s only fitting for OMCA as a museum dedicated to the culture of California to present this exhibition that showcases the Oakland-based artist’s significant contributions to the popular media of comics, film, and the visual arts.” Kristine McKenna, in a introduction to her 2011 interview with the cartoonist, adds: “Clowes’s contempt for pretension has been central to his work from the start, and he continues to loathe the fatheaded behavior success tends to breed. He still has a sense of righteous indignation at the injustices of life, and still rages at the bullies who make life even harder than it already is.  These are the things that make Clowes’s work brilliant and allow it to transcend what’s traditionally been regarded as the lowbrow art form of the comics. The themes in his work—longing, shame, loneliness, cruelty, and compassion—are profound, and he handles them with a very light touch.”

The hundred works in the show, all originals, are nicely displayed, traditionally framed and hung at eye level, or ensconced in hinged display racks, like posters, or digitally reproduced as enlarged graphics high on the walls of the tall, airy new gallery. A catalogue, edited by Alvin Buenaventura, published by Abrams Books, is available. A curators’ tour takes place Saturday, June 16, at from 1:00 to 2:00; a panel discussion takes place Friday, July 27, from 7:00 to 8:30; both feature Miller and de Guzman. The show runs through August 12. Museumca.org. My pictures were taken during the press preview on April 12, when some of the wall labels had not yet been mounted. .

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From the press release:

“Each artist provided their collaborating writer three sources of information inspired by the theme of vanquished terrains: a piece of music, a movie, and a location. The writer then created a short piece in response to these prompts, which was then given back to the artist to create work in response to the writing. This became the content for the traditional broadside, printed by Lisa Rappoport & Littoral Press (www.littoralpress.com). The traditional “poetic” broadside usually consists of a visual element atop and below it the body of the poem. Additionally, each artist and writer pair were then asked to create another piece that could embody the same set of ideas and concepts with any form or media that they wanted to utilize, including sculpture, painting, video, sound, and stop-motion animation. Each artist and writer pair will have two pieces on display in the exhibition, a traditionally printed broadside and a contemporary reinterpretation of the broadside in a variety of media.”

The artist/writer teams: Eliza Barrios & Myron Michael, Paul Bridenbaugh & Steve Gilmartin, Karrie Hovey & Elise Ficarra with Evelyn Ficarra, Misako Inaoka & Jaime Cortez, Keiko Ishihara & Chaim Bertman, Patricia Kelly & Vince Montague, Dwayne Marsh & Nana Twumasi, Nathaniel Parsons & Ly Nguyen, Christine Ponelle & Annice Jacoby, Matthew Rogers & Maw Shein Win, Megan Wilson & Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Liz Worthy & Jenny Bitner. The show was curated by curators Megan Wilson and Maw Shein Win along with Intersection’s Kevin B. Chan.

I took pictures at the reception on April 11, and again a few days later, but not all the artworks are represented. More info at BroadsideAttractions.com.

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The Russian-born painter showed around twenty works, small- to medium-sized, mostly portraits and figure paintings, with a few florals and still lives. Art historian Galina Tuluzakova writes: “Her vision turns [reality] into something monumental, revealing the significance of objects and situations, regardless of their narrative... Her portraits and still lives are taken out of context, time and space. She is not interested in the individual, but rather in the archetype, not in the specific, but in the essential. Thus, in her paintings, we sense the character of an antique sculpture in the face of a familiar contemporary woman... Beneath Zolonitsky’s seemingly static works [lie] powerfully hidden emotions conveyed through saturated contrasts of color... Loneliness and fragility of beauty are not reasons for melancholy but just the opposite, the structure of life forms and the steadiness of their inner core yield the feeling of an everlasting and ever-advancing being...” Reception was April 12, 2012. Through June 7. PaulMahderGallery.com.

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With all the attention for the huge Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980 project centered in Los Angeles’ dozens of venues, it bears remembering that Modernism did not wash ashore in Southern California at only one place. A current exhibit, Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951-1969, at the Santa Barbara Museum, organized by its Curator of Contemporary Art, Julie Joyce, asserts the achievements of two less centrally located museums (in what was called California’s Riviera) in that esthetic revolution: the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Pasadena Art Museum (now known as the Norton Simon Museum).

There’s a catalogue, with essays by Julie Joyce (“Avant-garde on the Pacific Côte-d’Azur: The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1940-1968”); Leah Lehmbeck (“Bringing Pasadena to Life; Postwar Art at the Pasadena Art Museum, 1950-1970”), Associate Curator of the Norton Simon Museum; and artist-critic Peter Plagens (“Two Cities, Two Tales, and Art”) outlining both the dual institutional histories and their place within the wider postwar Southern California art scene. We tend nowadays to see museums—at least the large ones—as faceless, monolithic corporations, but sixty years ago, individuals with vision and public spirit could leave a mark. Several exemplary figures emerge from Joyce’s SBMA article.

 —Artist-collector Wright Ludington amassed the first West Coast collection of contemporary art—comprising Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Oskar Kokoschka, Aristide Maillol, John Marin, Amedeo Modigliani, Georgia O’Keefe, Pablo Picasso, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella and Mark Tobey, along with Egyptian, Chinese and Roman antiquities—and bequeathed it to the museum for its core collection.

—Founding Director Donald Bear, who served from 1940 to 1952, was an artist himself, and had previously worked for the Federal Art Project. His wife Esther summarized his creators-first sensibility: “There wouldn’t be any museum if there weren’t any artists.” This passion manifested itself in a punishing and nearly superhuman exhibition schedule averaging fifty shows per year (in 1948 achieving a astounding high-water mark of seventy-two). In 1943, Bear exhibited the collections of actor Edward G. Robinson and the Walter Arensbergs (which included Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase). Other artists exhibited during Bear’s tenure include Ansel Adams, Josef Albers, Arthur Dove, Thomas Eakins, Claire Falkenstein, William Stanley Hayter, Walt Kuhn, Jacques Lipschitz, John Marin, Agnes Pelton, Mark Rothko, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Mark Tobey, Max Weber, and Ossip Zadkine.

—Ala Story, director from 1952 to 1957, inaugurated the Pacific Coast Biennial, a competition, open to all artists from California, Oregon and Washington, that garnered wide acclaim, with a selection from the second show sent on a national tour by The Smithsonian. Works by Hans Burkhardt, Richard Diebenkorn, and Lee Mullican were acquired by SBMA from these biennials. Story also exhibited, among others, Max Beckmann, Lyonel Feininger, Alberto Giacometti, Marsden Hartley, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka,, Kathe Kollwitz, John Marin, Grandma Moses, Gordon Parks, Georges Rouault, John Singer Sargent, Saul Steinberg, Rufino Tamayo and Minor White.

—James William Foster, director from 1957 to 1963, presided over the third Pacific Coast Biennial, in 1959, featuring Ruth Asawa, Robert Cremean, Jon Mason, Peter Voulkos and Jack Zajac, and the revised Pacific Coast Invitational, in 1963, which included paintings by John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, Ynez Johnston, John Paul Jones, Edward Moses, Lundy Siegrist, and sculptures by John Baxter, Ray Jensen, Edward Kienholz and Philip McCracken.

—The redoubtable Thomas W. Leavitt worked at both museums. As director at PAM from 1957 to 1963, he mounted a vastly influential 1963 retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work, curated by the young Walter Hopps, and memorable (or infamous) for Julian Wasser’s photograph of the unflappable Dadaist playing chess, incongruously, with a naked young woman. As SBMA director, from 1963 to 1968, he showed the work of Albert Bierstadt, Philip Guston, PIet Mondrian, David Park, Ed Ruscha, Ben Shahn, Tony Smith, and June Wayne, besides introducing Op Art, Kinetic Sculpture and the renaissance in printmaking to Southern California.

Lehmbeck’s article on the Pasadena Art Museum outlines a similarly colorful past. The original museum, known as the Pasadena Art Institute, “housed in a quirky Nouveau–Chinese palace (Lehmbeck),” began inviting contemporary artists to show in two of its galleries in the late 1940s, providing showcases for such local talents as Adja Yunkers, Karl Benjamin, Helen Lundeberg, John McLaughlin, Edward Kienholz, Robert Irwin, June Wayne and Doug Wheeler.

The director from 1951 to 1953, John Palmer Leeper, eschewed “following the primrose path of easy popularity,” and mounted a show of the political leftist Jose Clemente Orozco, an act of some daring in conservative Southern California during the height of the McCarthy Red Scare. In 1953, due to Leeper’s efforts, the museum acquired Galka Scheyer’s stunning collection of European modernist art, including The Blue Four, the expressionists Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

W. Joseph Fulton, director from 1953 to 1956, and Thomas W. Leavitt, director from 1956 to 1974, continued Leeper’s mission, characterized by painter-printmaker June Wayne, of “bringing Pasadena to life”, with dynamic contemporary art. Leavitt proved to be particularly effective, first, hiring the sharp-eyed Walter Hopps as curator in 1962; second, by bringing artists onto the board of directors; and third, by embracing new developments in art as exemplified in the work of Edward Kienholz, Robert Irwin, and Emerson Woelffer, all of whom were given first-time solo exhibitions. If the museum became less representative of Southern California art as a whole, as Lehmbeck asserts, its championing of the new art helped galvanize and modernize the whole scene. (Remember that Hopps had once been co-owner of the radical, new Ferus Gallery, memorably documented in the film, The Cool School.) Leavitt’s early shows of Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis and Mark Tobey, all based (however tenuously) on European modernist painting, were succeeded by shows featuring the more experimental Jasper Johns, Kurt Schwitters (rediscovered), and a collage show featuring Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Bruce Conner, William Dole, Llyn Foulkes, Joe Goode, George Herms, Edward Kienholz, and Ed Ruscha. When Leavitt moved to the Santa Barbara Museum in 1963, curator Walter Hopps became director and proceeded with the Duchamp retrospective that the two had been planning, scoring a great esthetic and social success; Andy Warhol, in town for his show of soup-can paintings at Ferus, came to the reception, and was photographed by Julian Wasser, looking unusually happy, clowning with Billy Al Bengston and actor Dennis Hopper. With James Demetrion hired on as curator in Hopps’ old job, PAM exhibited works by Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Price, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and the print ateliers ULAE and Tamarind Lithography. Succeeding the exhausted Hopps as director in 1966, Demetrion hired John Coplans, an Artforum editor, as curator, leading to shows of John Altoon, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler. In November, 1969, PAM’s new modernist building at 411 West Colorado Boulevard was inaugurated with a show entitled West Coast 1945-1969, featuring what The Los Angeles Times considered “Coplans’s favorites” rather than a representative regional survey. In 1974, the financially beleaguered museum—Plagens: “Fingers were pointed, hair was pulled, faces were plunged down into palms... I was one of the distraught.”—was renamed the Norton Simon Museum, but we are moving beyond the scope of this show. NortonSimon.org.

Since I was unable to travel to Santa Barbara, I have made do with reading the catalogue and compressing its extensive material into a few over-generalized paragraphs. If the newspaper art critic cited just above thought PAM’s 1969 omnibus show too limited in scope, this show appears to do justice (however incomplete) to the diverse cavalcade of talent displayed in the two museums in that era. Brief biographies of the twenty-two artists in the exhibition, compiled by Curatorial Assistants Jennifer Sudul Edwards and Patricia Lee, are informative and gracefully written, covering John Altoon, Karel Appel, Karl Benjamin, William Brice, Richard Diebenkorn, Willam Dole, Marcel Duchamp, Llyn Foulkes, San Francis, Philip Guston, Robert Irwin, Ynez Johnston, Edward Kienholz, Helen Lundeberg, John McLaughlin, Robert Motherwell, Lee Mullican, Larry Rivers, Richards Ruben, Mark Tobey, June Wayne, and Beatrice Wood. Through May 6. SBmuseart.org. (Pix from my November visit to SBMA for the Picasso-Braque show are at http://dewittcheng.com/winging-it-in-los-angeles-day-4-november-21-2#more)

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Two shows about the years between JFK and Reagan (to generalize a bit) opened at the Oakland Museum of California. The 1968 Project: A Nation Coming of Age, featuring some 500 objects from that tumultuous year (including a much-noticed Huey helicopter from the Vietnam war), originated at the Minneapolis Historical Society, with OMCA the second of its ten stops around the country. It is mandatory viewing for anyone growing up in the 60s, and highly recommended viewing—history made relatively easy—for newcomers who think Baby Boomers wrecked the world (a sin that some of my college peers ascribed Greatest-Generation old farts).

The 1968 show, considered along with the Berkeley Art Museum's current exhibit of conceptual art in California in roughly the same period, raises some questions about art and politics. The conceptual works were revolutionary in spirit, in keeping with the Zeitgeist, though their political content was not always clear or persuasive, whatever the artists believed about capitalism and war, or however much they believed that a new art could reform society. So did their explorations of style and testing of the boundaries of art actually avoid politics in most and even many cases? Remember that formalist criticism had mocked and scourged political art for a generation by 1968, beginning at the end of WW2. SImilarly, does the postmodern/conceptual art that evolved from 1968 (with its roots in subversive Dadaism and the erotic mystifications of Duchamp, no defender of the barricades), and ostensibly advancing various sociopolitical agendas, have any effect beyond the charmed circles of higher academia and the art world? Where is the postmodernist or conceptualist Death of Marat or Third of May? The could-be contenders, Golub, Kiefer, Wojnarowicz, and Coe (and others, probably) are all pictorial (retinal) and emotion-laden; most contemporary political art preaches to the PC choir too much. Through August 19. By the way, an article on the 1968 show by Steven Winn, formerly with The Chronicle, is now online, if you missed it, at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/31/DD4R1NS3C7.DTL

Such doubts about the conflict between aesthetic freedom and effective communication do not tarnish the accompanying show, All of Us or None: Social Justice posters of the San Francisco Bay Area, a large selection of proudly polemical street artworks from the collection, almost 24,000 items strong, of the late Michael Rossman, a Free Speech Movement activist who bequeathed his collection to OMAC. A catalogue written by Lincoln Cushing (the shoiw’s guest curator) and published by Berkeley’s Heyday Press is available. Lots of workshops on political activism, murals, and screenprinting are scheduled; see OMCA website, museumca.org. Through August 19.

Fake sisterhood is powerful.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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The Bay Lights is a light-installation artwork planned for the Bay Bridge, which just turned 75 this year. Artist Leo Villareal (who had a stunning solo show at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2010) will install 25,000 low-energy computer-programmed LED lights over the bridge’s superstructure. The artwork, a mile and a half long and five hundred feet high, will not be visible to bridge drivers—unfortunately, to drivers who have had the magical experience of driving the bridge during eye-level fireworks displays, but fortunately, for driver safety—but it will be visible to San Francisco and Marin every night for the next two years, starting in late 2012. (The utility cost of $15 per night is already covered.) The economic impact of such a staggering artwork is estimated to be some one hundred million dollars. It has attracted the support of arts, government, and philanthropic leaders (see website, Thebaylights.org); over half of the seven-million-dollar budget has already been raised. Conceived by Ben Davis of Words Pictures Ideas after being inspired by the San Jose Villareal show, this is an ambitious and even visionary project. I support it enthusiastically, and so should everyone in the Bay Area art world, however deep or shallow your pockets. Let’s up the Bay Area art ante and get on the national/international scene;  sign on at causes.com. More on the artist at villareal.net. I have included, along with shots from Wednesday’s cocktail party fundraiser at the beautiful loft of designer Ken Fulk, some shots from the San Jose Museum show that I never got to use before. (Imagine a shot of the illuminated Bay Bridge for "Son of the Graduate.")

Ken Fulk

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The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk opened at the de Young Museum today (Saturday March 24), and it is a stunner, even for former fashion-scoffers like me who only gradually and grudgingly came around— my epiphany due to  Susan Orlean’s profile, entitled, Fantasyland,” in The New Yorker six months ago (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/26/110926fa_fact_orlean).

Followers of this designer, who proclaims respect for artists while modestly (and charmingly) declining the title for himself, will consider this huge exhibition, with some 140 designs covering a 35-year career, a must-see, and rightly so. Swank eroticism and bizarre humor go nicely hand in hand. Whatever Gaultier is, he is a genius.  I attended the press preview on Thursday and was stunned (and still am) by the mannequins, who appear very much alive, with their eyes and mouths in constant motion, an effect created by projecting straight-on video recordings of the models (who include Gautier), talking and singing, onto what I believe to be digitally casts made from scans of their faces. Kudos to Montreal's Ubu Compagnie de Création! This show is probably not for kids unless they’re impossibly knowing (which they probably are). Catalogue available. Through August 19. Deyoung.famsf.org.

Jean Paul Gaultier (left), introduced by show curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot.

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Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art and Jewish Thought, a group show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, takes its title from the injunction in Deuteronomy, Bal Tashchit, proscribing the wanton destruction of trees during war. In Jewish tradition, trees symbolize Eden, Paradise and earth’s bounty — with, if I interpret the press release correctly, genealogical implications, too. Curator Dara Solomon has assembled some seventy objects from artists around the world that will inspire visitors, in Solomon’s words, “to consider the ancient dictum ... to not only protect trees but to dream of a better world.”

 The show comprises three parts:

 1) The Dorothy Saxe International, an annual invitation to artists of all backgrounds to interpret some aspect of Jewish tradition, this year’s subject being TuB’Shevat, February 7-8, the New Year for the Trees, which has now taken on an environmental reading and inspired here a number of works made with reclaimed wood. The artists: Dov Abramson, Gale Antokal, Tor Archer, Lynne Avadenka, Helène Aylon, John Bankston, Luke Bartels, Bennett Bean, Yves Behar, Garry Knox Bennett, Terry Berlier, Harriete Estel Berman, Johanna Bresnick + Michael Cloud Hirschfeld, Jeff Canham, Lisa Congdon,  Topher Delaney, Kiki Probst & Joel Cammarata of SEAM Studio, Richard Deutsch, Paul Discoe, Josh Duthie, Lauren Elder, David Ellsworth, Tamar Ettun, James Gouldthorpe, Beth Grossman, Grace Hawthorne, Tobi Kahn, Lisa Kokin, Paul Kos, Naomie Kremer, Daniel Libeskind, Deborah Lozier, Ron Lutsko, Liz Mamorsky, Jane Martin, Matthew McCaslin, Tucker Nichols, Josh Owen, Lucy Puls, Amy Klein Reichert, Galya Rosenfeld, Elliot Ross, Ellen Rothenberg, Yoshitomo Saito, Kay Sekimachi, Nancy Selvin, Cass Calder Smith, Harley Swedler, David Tomb, Merav Tzur, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Lawrence Weiner, Allan Wexler, Gail Wight and David Wiseman.

 2) International Survey of Trees in Contemporary Art, featuring works by ternty artists who have explored the tree theme previously or are doing so on a regular basis. They include: Gabriela Albergia, Zadok Ben David, Joseph Beuys, April Gornik, Rodney Graham, Natalie Jeremiejenko, Charles Labelle, Jason Lazarus, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Marcel Odenbach, Yoko Ono, Roxy Paine, Rona Pondick, Claire Sherman, Tal Shochat, Yuken Teruya, and Robert Wien.

 3) a site-specfic plaza installation of tree planters fashioned from recycled wood  by Rebar, a San Francisco design firm, in front of the museum.

 I attended the press preview on February 15. Catalogue available. Show continues through May 28, with many public events. See website: Thecjm.org. Nice writeup by The Chronicle’s Patricia Yollin originally printed 3/17/12 at

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/16/DD8S1NI138.DTL

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The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860-1900, makes the case for late nineteenth-century England as a center for progressive art,  not the prim and proper cultural backwater we associate with Victorianism. Aesthetic Movement artists sought to create private visions of beauty—in painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, wallpaper, ceramics, metalwork and architecture—without any of the utopian ideals or love of modern technology that later Modernists would espouse. The Downton Abbey era is a bit later, at the end of the era that The Great War demolished, but the art in this show is aristocratic or at least luxurious in spirit—and splendid, even though some of the chivalric-code medievalism and velvet-knickers preciousness—“How utterly utter!” was how contemporaries satirized it— looks dated today (but maybe not tomorrow). Very nice catalogue edited by Lynn Federle Orr and Stephen Calloway. I attended the press preview on February 17. This show was previously shown, apparently in larger form with some apparently immovable objects not shown here, at the Victoria and Albert and the Musée Orsay; this is the only American venue. Many public programs; see website. Through June 17. http://legionofhonor.famsf.org.

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Silvia Poloto: Rosa Louca dos Ventos

Contemporary art, in all its bewildering variety, makes for a dazzling spectacle, but a confusing one. Since there are no prevailing styles, but rather a Babel of competing voices and visions underlain by various theoretical issues, the casual viewer gradually comes to the baleful conclusion that contemporary art is an insider’s game, and that all one can reasonably expect from the culture industry is mild entertainment. Cultural traditionalists have often made the case that modernist art no longer satisfies human emotional needs; if we are honest we must admit, despite fears of playing the curmudgeon, that there is some truth to this opinion. Art’s decline—from the personal religion that it was for early modernists, a substitute for traditional religion—to its current status—as hipster tchotchke and corporate-state status symbol—was already the target of critic Jacques Barzun in the 1950s. Great critics, he declared, produce work that is “autobiography enlarged; their opinions are not gathered but felt; the truth is not a work of ratiocination but a secretion from experience.” His statement apparently applies to artists as well, for in his essay, “Why Art Must Be Challenged,” he sounds the clarion:

Nowadays anything put up for seeing or hearing us only meant to be taken in casually ... the Interesting has replaced the Beautiful, the Profound, and the Moving... if modern man’s most sophisticated relation to art is to be casual and humorous, is to resemble the attitude of the vacationer at the fairgrounds, then the conception of Art as an all-important institution, as a supreme activity of man, is quite destroyed... if art has importance, it is because it can shape the minds and emotions.

These remarks, of course, implicitly place a huge burden on the subject of the essay, but Silvia Poloto, a talented and prolific Brazilian-born mixed-media artist, self-taught and inner-directed, is not a product of America’s art higher-education system; she is an artist committed, almost defiantly, to self-expression and emotion. “Nothing could stop me,” she once said, describing her progress from electrical engineer to artist, a personal quest not without its humorous side: after “inventing” welded metal sculptures on her own, for example, she discovered a book on Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith. In a 2008 show entitled Absence/Presence at the now-closed Gallery 415 in San Francisco, she explored the psychology of illness and mortality. Her Crush series paired enlarged photographs of common but unidentified household objects with allegorical titles like “Lust,” “Discord,” “Crave” and “Release’; her Crush series, comprising “Power,” Penance,” Worship” and Lies,” employed photos of dolls to investigate religious themes. At the time I wrote:

The new works, generally door-sized, hint at transcendence and transformation, combining the beauty of her painterly color and gesture with the submerged emotional content of the photographic work to suggest an infinite or mystical vision revealing the eternal and the temporal as interpenetrating and complementary. Art critic Terri Cohn writes: “Poloto consistently savors the play between the power of the photographic images she uses, the gestural, abstract ground she paints around them, and the gridded compositional format that holds the two in dialogue with each other.” For the artist, objects and field, figure and ground are equivalent — merely different states of matter.

What I did not elucidate then, four years ago, was the artist’s personal situation, with her father recently died, and her husband failing. Poloto, in a recent statement:

Eight months ago I lost my mother.  Four years ago I lost my father. Three years ago I lost my husband. One year ago I lost my best friend. ... During this period, my identity as a wife, daughter, mother, and friend shifted and transformed. My identity as both woman and artist expanded.

The themes of loss, memory, transformation and transcendence pervade her current assemblage work. If most of ithe pieces were made with the Triton Museum layout in mind, almost like a site-specific installation, each piece works separately as well, testaments to Poloto’s hard-won skills in painting, photography and sculpture; her unerring gift for color, texture/surface, scale and composition; and her ability to infuse her juxtaposed photographic imagery—a pictorial mode usually employed to communicate ironic detachment and knowingness—with beauty and emotion. The symbolic roses, thorns, webs, rays or threads, cells and holes/wounds, as well as photos of her family and relatives (often taken at religious ceremonies) suggest some contemporary version of Catholicism, but Poloto is, like the early modernists, interested in a kind of personal spirituality and seeking for meaning. She was astonished, on happening on a dictionary of symbols, to find that the objects she had selected intuitively had long cultural histories dating back centuries. Poloto’s written statement is an illuminating guide to the genesis of such personal, autobiographical works as  “The ache, the sorrow, the grief, the tears...,” about Poloto’s family karma; “White flower as blood-tinged rose,” and “The void of the heavens,” about her fraught relationship with her self-sacrificing but narrow-minded mother; “A cry for more than crazy pink,” about her female relatives’ contradictory emotional strength and cultural conformity; “Ring around a rosie,” “Pink dawn, pink white, pink shift, pink Sao Paulo, pink San Francisco,” and “Sacred rose, rose profane,” about finding her way from science to art, despite familial disapproval; “The crazy pink is the crazy pink, the red rose, a cry for more than flower color,” about self-acceptance; “The gaze plumbs infinity, the pink forever escaping it,” about visiting the family home after her parents’ death, re-experiencing the past in the family home after her parent’s death—“The smell, the taste, the memories, the heat, the sadness, the raindrops the size of dinner plates”; and “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down” and “Optical Delusions” about the impermanence and illusion of human life. If this description tends to present the works as a kind a private scrapbook of the Poloto clan, that, too, is illusion: even without such notes, the works serve as a universal elegy and celebration for those of us who can, when called to do so, see ourselves as wayfarers, though no longer in conventionally religious terms, not consumerist vacationers. Poloto explains the symbolism of  “The torn branch born in the rosebush”:

My process of working is highly intuitive. The rose has been present in my work for some time, while some of the other symbols have newly emerged. The rose is both me, my soul, and the feminine spirit — a celebration of womanhood... I have embraced my roles as woman, artist, mother ... expressive and exuberant, unique yet connected. — Copyright 2012 Dewitt Cheng

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"Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary 

“… In this empire the art of cartography had reached such a perfection that a map of a single county covered a whole city, and a map of the empire that of a whole county. Finally, a point was reached when these colossal maps were no longer considered satisfactory, and the institutions of the cartographers made a map of the empire which was as large as the empire itself and coincided with it point for point. Later generations, who were less prone to practice the art of cartography, came to realize that this vast map was useless and through some neglect abandoned it to the forces of sun and winters. In the deserts of the western regions [of the empire], home to beasts and beggars, there remained dispersed ruins of the map, but otherwise there were no remains of the practice of geography in the whole land.“ —Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science

It’s hard to imagine now, but only two generations ago, abstraction and figuration were locked in mortal combat. (The accusations of treachery that greeted Philip Guston’s 1970s abandonment of abstraction for his late, figurative style should be required reading for impassioned art revolutionaries.) Esthetic fashions come and go, but some, if not all, of the best art has always sought to capture the world of appearances and to examine it in some transcendent light, sub specie aeternitatis: to show flux and eternity fused. John McNamara makes surrealist photocollages and then slowly covers with them with a layer of oil paint, mixing not only figuration and abstraction, but also raising questions about representation in the way that many photographers of constructed realities are also doing.

 McNamara is a painter, however, who has explored the creation of presence, or “sense of place” in painting for his entire career. A Bostonian trained at Massachusetts College of Art, he initially painted turbulent Abstract Expressionist fields inset with stylized, totemic figures and rectangular apertures: sketches or photographs suggestive of windows or electronic displays. The free-association imagery  (Marilyn, animal skulls, feet, lips, Einstein, daguerreotypes, Cary Grant) was evocative, but ambiguous, defying narrative, or, rather, suggesting multiple narratives, with an implied reality lying beneath the welters of brushstrokes (“I have always loved the tiny mark.”). In 1982, the Boston Phoenix critic Kenneth Baker (now art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle) praised the works’ implied “presence of reality,” or “the impression of inexhaustibility that defines reality.” McNamara’s “meandering composition[s] ...  present you with more than anyone’s memory can hold in the way of physical structure and color interaction.” In 1986, The Christian Science Monitor’s Theodore Wolff admired the paintings’ “highly personal and provocative fusion of geometric and organic forms, their ability to objectify primal experience, and their knack of maintaining a dynamic, contrapuntal relationship between the products of impulse and those of calculation.” Prestigious art fellowships (AVA, NEA) followed, as did articles in art magazines (Art News, Artforum) and purchases by major art museums (Metropolitan Museum; List Visual Art Center, M.I.T.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In 1993, McNamara moved to the Bay Area, teaching first at San Francisco Art Institute and later the University of California at Berkeley, where his courses in drawing, painting, and Visual Studies, along with his mentoring of graduate-student instructors, continue, both popular and academically well regarded.

Despite such success, however, by 1989, McNamara felt the need for creative change: the paintings had less and less meaning for me.” After a five-month hiatus from painting, he decided to “make narratives,” by incorporating photographic and other found imagery—“life’s realities”—into his paintings. The commandeering of pre-existing, “low,” vernacular material for “high” art derives from Cubist and Dadaist collage, developing with Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s hybrid 2D/3D artworks and Pop Art’s mass-media image appropriations. McNamara continues this rich tradition by assembling printed images from magazines and other sources. Instead of presenting the works as is, however, or re-photographing them (or composing them in the computer), McNamara repaints the images in oils, preserving the source material in idealized, unchanging form, atop the original material. His unorthodox practice is analogous to, say, decorating mummy cases with encaustic portraits of upwardly mobile dead Egyptians, or making a 1:1-scale map of the topography underfoot, as in Borges’ story quoted above. McNamara, fascinated with combining photographic frozen moments from different eras and areas, and preserving them in the amber of art, writes: “For me, collage is a time machine of sorts. The painted skin on top jettisons the photo document into the world of painting; but these people, places and things still speak from underneath the painted skin.” The artist thus practices a kind of Photorealist painting—he particularly admires the complex urban landscapes of Richard Estes—crossed with conceptual performance and ritual, the painting being the end product of his focused attention, even compulsion. “Total fixation activity—I admire that tremendously,” he says, of the paintings of Beat painter/collagist Jess Collins. “Obsessive, crazy — I have total respect.”

Some of McNamara’s eye-popping obsessive-compulsive covers or coverlets include “Wise Ass,” a panoramic landscape reminiscent of Dali in its succulent palette and unfettered fantasy;  “Encroachment,” a merger of two images of high-altitude maintenance workers in New York City and Dallas; “The Suitors,” depicting a Gothic Revival mansion and its upstart neighbor, a postmodernist work in progress “Unreal,” a montage of children, wounded soldiers and movie spectators with the epic quality of nineteen-century history painting, but without its canned sentiments; and “White on Color,” a large painting combining scores of images dealing outer space that have been edited with white paint and then preserved and muted by an overall glazing of white-tinted wax, resulting in a kind of artifact already dimmed and obscured by time. Social satire, surrealist fantasy and elegy vie with formal concerns in these works, but however ambiguous or enigmatic the narrative implications, the images are always compelling to viewers open to their eccentric seductions. With their surreal juxtapositions and cinematic jump cuts, they are, in the words of Gerrit Henry (Art in America), “ridiculous and sublime, all at once”—like real life.

—DeWitt Cheng

"Time Machine."

"Solitude."

“Tripping.”

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Figurative works in ceramic and bronze made by Stephen De Staebler (1930-2011) during the past few years were shown concurrently during January, 2012, at San Francisco’s Dolby Chadwick Gallery (the show ended January 28) and at the de Young Museum (Matter + Spirit: The Sculpture of Stephen De Staebler). I wrote about an earlier De Staebler show at Dolby Chadwick; the review was published in the December 2010 issue of Sculpture magazine but is not available online, so I have reprinted it below, with some minor deletions restored. For more, please see Peter Selz’s fine piece on DeStaebler at http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag02/may02/staebler/staebler.shtml

A few photos from the 2012 DCG show are included here, but most of the shots come from the de Young’s retrospective, modestly sized, but thoughtfully curated and beautifully displayed.

A panel discussion on De Staebler takes place on February 25 at 1:00pm, featuring—here I C&P from the museum website—Timothy Anglin Burgard, Ednah Root Curator in Charge of American Art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco [and the show’s curator]; Nancy M. Servis, Executive Director of the Richmond Art Center; and John Toki, a noted Bay Area sculptor and former assistant to Stephen De Staebler. The discussion will be moderated by John Handley, a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Free.

An excellent catalogue, edited by Burgard, is available as well. I’m not sure how much will remain to be said or written after I finish reading essays by the likes of Burgard, Rick Newby and Dore Ashton, but De Staebler’s work is rich, fascinating and profound, and I recommend the de Young show, which is up until April 22, very highly. The 2010 review follows.

STEPHEN DE STAEBLER: Recent Work

(Dolby Chadwick Gallery, January 14-February 27, 2010)

 We may still marvel today at the art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, but an Old-Europe time traveler inculcated on Holy Writ and seeking ethical and spiritual meaning in our art would be completely flummoxed. Modernism evolved a century ago as a gradual rejection of the past; religion (with the exception of the stalwart Catholic Georges Rouault, and, perhaps, a few others), monarchy and feudalism, especially after the shattering debacle of The Great War, were replaced by the alternate values of republicanism (i.e., democracy) and even anarchy, secularism, and skepticism, and naturalism, that simulation of the sensory and sensual, was deemed a lie; even the human body, for centuries the locus of empathetic projection, was reshaped and reconfigured into ecumenical colored planes and pure geometries as artists abandoned their traditional role of ethical instruction in order to explore, individually, or in stylistic affinity groups, intuition, subjectivity, and the role and definition of art. 

 Stephen De Staebler’s ceramic figure sculptures—tragic and transcendental, poetic and profound, in the antique style—may thus appear to be anachronistic these days, but to viewers unblinkered by orthodoxy, and hungry for intellectual and emotional fiber in their visual diet, they’re satisfying and delectable. Human figures or statues (or some petrified/fossilized human-clay hybrid) that have been seemingly excavated from ancient ruins, these works belong emotionally to the grand humanistic, faith-based tradition of Michelangelo, Bernini and Rodin; intellectually and formally, however, they derive  from the modernist collage tradition based on fragmentation and recontextualization. Although De Staebler studied theology in college, writing a thesis on St. Francis, he cannot be categorized as a religious artist, with all that connotes, despite the moving art he has created for churches in his home states of Indiana and California, any more than Giacometti, an important influence, with his spectral figures eroded by light and space, could have been labeled the house artist iof postwar existentialism. Former San Francisco Chronicle art critic Thomas Albright aptly characterized De Staebler’s anonymous figures, embodying fragility and strength, growth and decay, birth and death, endurance and transcendence, as “contemporary parables of death and resurrection.” The dozen or so works displayed at Dolby Chadwick Gallery are all “transgenic (to employ Rick Newby’s term)” i.e., composites assembled from pre-existing fired clay fragments—three-dimensional collages. that extrapolate from the artist’s earlier works, archaeological matrices of earth/clay cut into sections, with buried statues emerging from their dark wombs/tombs. The new works, cairns/caryatids/columns assembled from stacked fragments, we seem to have moved indoors from excavation to speculative reconstruction without sacrificing visual authority or spiritual power, thanks to the human presence afforded by their lifesize scale and judiciously worked anatomical details amid the ruins. Figure with Black Torso (2008), a symmetrical piece standing atop a small layered-earth plinth, features a horizontal piece suggesting chest and shoulders supporting a bipartite vertical head. Figure with Lost Torso (2008) is a stack of rough-hewn flat blocks that might be part of a reconstructed wall but for the legs at the bottom and vestigial shoulders and head at the top. Figure with Split Torso (2008) features one of the artist’s elegant, elongated figures with partial shins and feet, an intestinal jumble of clay resting atop the hipbone, the whole surmounted by a blocklike head and the suggestion of a scapular wing. Two Found Legs (2008) depicts only a pair of shins and feet mismatched in color and size, but posed in classic hipshot contrapposto, resting atop a seemingly hewn wooden (or petrified wood) base. Two Feeble Legs (2008) possesses a rudimentary torso (sans head), but the sloping base and mismatched legs suggest that balance is a dynamic resolution of contraries and thus precarious. De Staebler sees the archaic figure in modern, relativistic terms, with the psyche “not a whole or a unity but an idiosyncratic bundle of contradictions.”

 Donald Kuspit writes that De Staebler “addresses the loss of our primitive sense of being human, in effect our primitive sense of ourselves” and that because religion addresses suffering, the artist  “wants to create a modern religious art [for]...the articulation and remediation of suffering.” He creates “regressive ruins..[that] articulate the subjective complexity of being human.” De Staebler: “I want to express the quality of erosion in the loss of limbs over time and the restoring of the figure to the earth in time, so that it becomes in its way an extension of earth, which we are. We only exist by the grace of the earth’s nature. So what you see is this feeling of an eroded separation from something larger in time.” De Staebler resurrects the archaic idea that life and art—notwithstanding Rauschenberg’s famous quip—can be made, and fruitfully combined; even lowly mud, “slip, then slop, then sludge,” is also stardust. —DEWITT CHENG

Ron and Susan Casentini and Kyle Milligan (Studio Quercus) with De Staebler ceramic chair.

Artist Jim Melchert.

The following additional comments were published on Huffington Post on March 2, 2012.

Stephen De Staebler: Matter + Spirit

 De Young Museum, San Francisco

 January 14 - April 22, 2012

I’m not attracted to formal religion, but I am drawn to the questions that religion tries to deal with: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Those questions will never be answered in any final way. While you’re alive here on earth, you can ignore them or you can try to deal with them.¹

The sculptor Stephen De Staebler died in 2011, leaving a legacy of figurative sculpture that invites comparison to the work of Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti, two artists whom he revered. To the list of acclaimed shows in recent years around the Bay Area—at Richmond Art Center, San Jose Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Dolby Chadwick Gallery—we may now add the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which is showing nearly sixty works in a medium-sized retrospective, Stephen De Staebler: Matter + Spirit. Nearly sixty pieces, including masks, maquettes, semi-abstract wall and floor landscape pieces, wedge-enclosed figures and free-standing figure columns, and bronze angels, are beautifully displayed in several medium-sized galleries. An excellent catalogue, edited by the show’s curator, Timothy Anglin Burgard, features gracefully written, illuminating essays by critics Rick Newby and Dore Ashton that provide esthetic, historical and psychological perspective into the man and his art.

De Staebler is important both as an exemplar of certain postwar trends and as an anomaly, or, to reclaim a regrettably misused word, maverick. As one of Peter Voulkos’ graduate students at Berkeley in the 1950s, where Hans Hofmann and others advocated a subjective and intuitive approach to nature, De Staebler was one of the pioneers who made clay the respectable art medium that it is now. Voulkos’ and De Staebler’s physical, intuitive approach to clay, a three-dimensional analogue to Abstract Expressionist painters’ dripping and slathering, is well and comically expressed in De Staebler’s account of how he abandoned his early impulse to perfectionism:

I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t see the clay... And then I just jumped like crazy all over that thing. I just wallowed in the clay. I just mashed it, punched it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t see the clay. You know, I had to do it by kinesthesia alone. And then finally, after I’d punched myself out, I peeled [the plastic] all off. And it was just incredible.  It was really beautiful.²

The matrix of clay, infinitely malleable, became not just an arena for action, in the Abstract Expressionist sense, but also a surrogate for human anatomy:

There was this beautiful undulating flesh landscape. It was so much more beautiful than anything I had in my min, just one of those great moments where what you’re given is more beautiful than what you wanted.... I began to realize that clay is earth... When it’s wet and soft, it’s very fleshlike... And when it gets stiff, it becomes like bones. And when it gets dry, it becomes brittle like old bones. And when it’s fired, it’s frozen.³

But if De Staebler’s improvisatory technique was cutting-edge, his allegiance to the human figure, or, perhaps, human artifact, in a time dominated by the grail of abstraction (sometimes to the point of dogma), must have seemed contrarian and quixotic at the time. In 1951, the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell advised his young Black Mountain College student, then unsophisticated about abstraction, and art (he would eventually major in theology at Princeton), to consider working with children; it was a devastating blow. (Another teacher, the social realist Ben Shahn, was more sympathetic.) Although De Staebler once described being intimidated in his youthful “mud-pie production” ⁴ by the great figurative art of the past, his interest in the monumental, heroic and tragic art of the past remained: “the Michelangelo prisoners and finished figures... the Winged Victory of Samothrace... the Three Graces... from the Parthenon.., these things just never leave me.” ⁵  His description of the Belvedere Torso of Hercules, a Roman copy of a Greek original that Renaissance artists exalted and studied,

...this magnificent twisting torso with no head, no arms, no legs. It just sits there, this gigantic statement of man’s endurance.⁶

might stand for his own eroded, shattered fragments of classical statuary, exemplars of the existentialist sensibility that dominated the Cold War 1950s and symbols of heroic endurance. De Staebler wrote, about the “boneyard” of ceramic torsos, limbs and heads that he used for what one critic called his “recombinant poetics,” ⁷ “Your past work is the truest record of who you are.” ⁸ He certainly knew Giacometti’s statements about the difficulty of capturing human life and personality and the importance of perseverance; one of them comes from a book whose author had previously written about De Staebler: “Just the fact of living requires so much will and so much energy.” ⁹ Matter runs on spirit.

—Copyright DeWitt Cheng 2012

1 Timothy Anglin Burgard et al., Matter and Spirit: Stephen De Staebler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 34.

2 Burgard et al., 28.

3 Burgard et al., 25.

4 Burgard et al., 72.

5 Burgard et al., 23.

6 Burgard et al., 80.

7 Rick Newby, “Wrested from the Earth: The Recombinant Poetics of Stephen De Staebler,” Rick Newby (Chicago: Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, 2008).

8 Burgard et al., 57.

9 Matti Megged, Dialogue in the Void: Beckett & Giacometti (New York: Lumen, 1985), 40.

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The 3D sculptural paintings/assemblages of Berkeley artist Tom Holland fill the Main Gallery until February 12. Aluminum and fiberglass sheets are looped, twisted and riveted together to form free-standing planar sculptures whose colorful palettes and loose, gestural paint handling suggest an Abstract Expressionist (or Impressionist) treatment of the California landscape that also  exploits the properties of the then-new epoxy paints of the 1960s and 1970s. Some related watercolors on paper and epoxy paintings are included here. Holland has taught at SFAI, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. His work resides in many prestigious museum collections, including those of MOMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and LACMA. Holland will speak about his work this Sunday, February 12, at 4pm. My caption information is incomplete, so only a few titles are listed at the moment; if I have time on Sunday, I’ll capture and post that info. The pictures as presented here are in illogical chronological order.

http://www.sanchezartcenter.org/EXHIBITIONS_Main.html

See the full gallery on Posterous

Also showing until February 12 is a show of Arts Guild of Pacifica members, entitled Something Edgy, focusing on the provocative and subversive—the only reasonable reaction to much of what's going on now. Here endeth the editorial.

 http://www.sanchezartcenter.org/EXHIBITIONS_West.html

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This show, an homage to avant-garde musician John Cage and his embrace of chance in the creative process, was curated by Justin Hoover and Hanna Regev, and features (by my count) some thirty-one artists. Kenneth Baker’s San Francisco Chronicle review begins:

 Cage (1912-1992) personified good humor, curiosity and readiness to consider any creative course of action that might have liberating effects on himself or others. Many people acquainted secondhand with his ideas or his work - particularly his use of chance procedures to avoid decision making and personal taste - regard his influence as destructive, parallel to that of his Dadaist friend Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). But anyone who talked with Cage soon found such a position unacceptably simple. Gann quotes composer William Duckworth as saying that "at first, I thought that Cage had given me permission to do anything I wanted to - a benign anything goes. But lately, I've been feeling that Cage's real influence was the instilling of an understanding that dedication, and the committing of time to what you believe in, is of the utmost importance, and creates a very different kind of composer than one focused on fame and fortune. "Get Lucky" contains a lot of work that reflects the sort of discipline that indeterminacy disguises in Cage's work, as well as the permission it implies to defy all orthodoxy.... (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/06/DDIF1MK26T.DTL)

The artists: Nick Agid, Kirkman Amyx, Michael Bartalos, Richard Berger, Antonio Cortez, EXCOR (led by Sherry Parker), Mauro Ffortisimo, Nancy Genn, Bryan Hewitt, Vita Hewitt, Robin Hill, Janet Jones, Nolan Jones, Theodora Varnay Jones, Jonathon Keats, Scott Kildall, Naomie Kremer, Jon Kuzmich, Garrett La Fever, Tony May, Jim Melchert, David Middlebrook, Davoid Molina, Luke Ogrydziak, Sandra Ortiz Taylor, Zoe Prillinger, Renee Rhodes, Tim Roseborough, Micky Tachibana, Kenneth Wilkes and Michelle Wilson.

For an online slideshow of exhibition photos, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/somarts/sets/72157628499987829/show/

Two events are scheduled:

—Wednesday, Jan. 18, 7-9pm: “Upgrade SF! The Art & Technology of Chance,” an open dialogue led by Scott Kildall and other exhibiting artists. Snack potluck.

—Thursday, Jan. 26, 6-9pm: Closing reception with panel discussion and curatorial walk-through and panel discussion, moderated by international curator/critic Jeff Kelley, featuring Kathleen Burch of the Center for the Book; Marks Lam of the I-Ching Science and Culture Association; and Cage-inspired artists Jim Melchert, David Middlebrook, and Tom Marioni.

Show ends January 26. My pictures are presented pretty much in chronological order. Information about the artworks is sometimes lacking, as I was unable to make a second trip to fill in the gaps.

David Middlebrook and marble-stainless-steel boat mounted atop bronze faux-bamboo legs.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Viewer-activated sculpture/installation by David Molina and Garrett La Fever, accompanied by digital video by Micky Tachibana.

Tim Roseborough and art.

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Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) is the unknown Impressionist. Despite his roles in as mentor and friend to Monet, Cézanne, Seurat, SIgnac, Cassatt, Degas and others, as well as his participation in all eight Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 to 1886, he remains, somehow, peripheral. A new show jointly produced by San Francisco’s Fine Art Museum and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute seeks to redress this situation by focusing, not on the landscapes for which Pissarro is best known, and deservedly, but little-known figurative works, portraits of his children, which until recently remained in the family, and depictions of servants and peasants that the artist enlisted or paid to model for him. In the show’s catalogue essay, Richard R. Brettell emphasizes the artist’s worldview, democratic and egalitarian, formed in his multiracial childhood and informed by his later readings of the anarchist utopians Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin. and Mikhail Bakunin. Political (or apolitical) conviction seemed absent from Pissarro’s work until now—restrained to the sly clues of little red books planted in certain portraits, Brettell theorizes—but there is a surprise in this show—a kind of bombshell, even. More on this later, but first some background information, and an apology to francophiles who will note occasional missing accent marks: désolé....

Born in the Danish West Indies island of St. Thomas (now the US Virgin Islands) to a Portuguese-Jewish mercantile family, Pissarro attended a Moravian primary school with the local Afro-Caribbean children, instead of a school for European children. This is probably the result of a scandal: PIssarro’s Jewish father, after the death of his employer (and uncle), became romantically involved with and later married the Creole Catholic widow, his aunt by marriage. His early education thus imbued Pissarro with a lifelong sympathy for the working class that also crossed color lines.

An early painting made in St. Thomas, Two Women Chatting by the Sea (1856), betrays no hint of the colonialist racism or class condescension that other artists might have included at the time; the subjects are equals, not colorful, amusing, inferior subject matter.

A painting made later in France shows a hint of social commentary, with a prosperous family’s leisure fun silently observed by poor children.

After working in Caracas for two years with a slightly older artist friend, Fritz Melbye, Pissarro accepted a position with Melbye’s brother, Anton, in Paris, in 1855. Lodging with relatives in nearby suburban Passy, Pissarro sampled and rejected academic art training in Paris, gravitating toward a new vision of art based on contemporary life. Gustave Courbet’s unstinting realism, Jean-Francois Millet’s depictions of timeless farmworkers, and the Camille Corot’s poetic plein-air landscape painting were formative influences. Pissarro, on his philosophy and method: ”Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on and equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.” His teacher, Corot, who finished his paintings in the studio according to standard contemporary practice, disagreed with Pissarro’s warts-and-all realism, his one-session approach, and lack of polish. Others, however, shared his vision.

From Wikipedia: "In 1859, ... Pissarro became friends with a number of younger artists who likewise chose to paint in the more realistic style. Among them were Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cézanne. What they shared in common was their dissatisfaction with the dictates of the Salon. Cézanne’s work had been mocked ... by the others in the school, and, writes Rewald, in his later years, Cézanne "never forgot the sympathy and understanding with which Pissarro encouraged him." As a part of the group, Pissarro was comforted from knowing he was not alone, and that others similarly struggled with their art. Pissarro agreed with the group about the importance of portraying individuals in natural settings, and expressed his dislike of any artifice or grandeur in his works, despite what the Salon demanded for its exhibits. In 1863, almost all of the group’s paintings were rejected by the Salon, and French Emperor Napoleon III instead decided to place their paintings in a separate exhibit hall, the Salon des Refusés. However, only works of Pissarro and Cézanne were included, and the separate exhibit brought a hostile response from both the officials of the Salon and the public."

Perceptive critics, however, responded to the works, despite their having been “skyed,” deliberately hung high above eye level. Emile Zola, the novelist, critic, and boyhood friend of Cézanne, who would later challenge the French government in the Dreyfus affair, enthused: ”Camille Pissarro is one of the three or four true painters of this day . . . I have rarely encountered a technique that is so sure.”  Pissarro’s rhapsody on the Japanese prints, aesthetic catnip to so many of his generation, might well apply to his landscapes: “...nothing that leaps to the eye, [but] a calm, a grandeur, an extraordinary unity, a rather subdued radiance.” Pissarro found further inspiration for his subjective working methods and objective subject matter during his stay in England during the Franco-Prussian War (for which he tried to enlist, unsuccessfully). There, across the Channel, he found encouragement in the works of Constable and Turner, and in his friendship with Claude Monet, anther artist at the Durand-Ruel Galley, who had also moved there for refuge.

Wikipedia: "When Pissarro returned to his home in France after the war, he discovered that of the 1,500 paintings he had done over 20 years, which he was forced to leave behind when he moved to London, only 40 remained. The rest had been damaged or destroyed by the soldiers, who often used them as floor mats outside in the mud to keep their boots clean... He soon re-established his friendships with the other Impressionist artists of his earlier group, including Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Degas. Pissarro now expressed his opinion to the group that he wanted an alternative to the Salon so their group could display their own unique styles. To assist in that endeavor, in 1873 he helped establish a separate collective, called the "Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs," which included fifteen artists. Pissarro created the group’s first charter and became the “pivotal” figure in establishing and holding the group together. One writer noted that with his prematurely gray beard, the forty-three year old Pissarro was regarded as a “wise elder and father figure” by the group. Yet he was able to work alongside the other artists on equal terms due to his youthful temperament and creativity. Another writer said of him that “he has unchanging spiritual youth and the look of an ancestor who remained a young man.

"In 1874, the group held their first 'Impressionist' Exhibition, which shocked and “horrified” the critics, who primarily appreciated only scenes portraying religious, historical, or mythological settings. They found fault with the Impressionist paintings on many grounds:

—The subject matter was considered “vulgar” and “commonplace,” with scenes of street people going about their everyday lives. Pissarro’s paintings, for instance, showed scenes of muddy, dirty, and unkempt settings;

—The manner of painting was too sketchy and looked incomplete, especially compared to the traditional styles of the period. The use of visible and expressive brushwork by all the artists was considered an insult to the craft of traditional artists, who often spent weeks on their work. Here, the paintings were often done in one sitting and the paints were applied wet-on-wet;

—The use of color by the Impressionists relied on new theories they developed, such as having shadows painted with the reflected light of surrounding, and often unseen, objects."

The Impressionist rebels triumphed, of course. Pissarro’s role, though generally underestimated nowadays, was always acknowledged by his peers and colleagues. Armand Silvestre, a poet and critic, considered him “basically the inventor of this [Impressionist] painting.”  Cézanne, who painted with “the first Impressionist” in Pontoise, dubbed him “a father to me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord,” and generously claimed to be, in 1906, two years after the older artist’s death and just before his own, “the pupil of Pissarro.” Mary Cassatt mused that ”the gentle Camille Pissarro” “could have taught the stones to draw correctly.” One of his students, his son Lucien, who became an artist (as did all but one of his siblings), described him as a “splendid teacher, never imposing his personality on his pupil.” Even Paul Gauguin, never troubled by self-doubt, proclaimed his debt: ”If we observe the totality of Pissarro’s work, we find there, despite fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will, never belied, but also an essentially intuitive, purebred art . . . He was one of my masters and I do not deny him.” The nickname of Père Pissarro, father Pissarro, was generally accorded as a mark of respect for his artistic integrity, even after he left the movement for four years to explore Neo-Impressionist divisionism with Seurat and Signac. (He abandoned it eventually as artificial and alien to his temperament: ”It was impossible to be true to my sensations and consequently to render life and movement, impossible to be faithful to the effects, so random and so admirable, of nature, impossible to give an individual character to my drawing...”)

Pissarro’s People comprises nearly a hundred pieces, including thirty-seven paintings and numerous drawings, pastels and gouaches on paper. The show emphasizes Pissarro’s triple aspects as family man, realist and democratic (small d) anarchist. Intimate portraits of family members, friends, servants, and neighbors, observed and set down with freshness and immediacy, are interspersed with scenes of rural marketplaces in Pontoise and Gisors and scenes of farm life, which Brettell sees as depictions of an anarchist paradise, with young, well-fed, attractive workers engaged in reasonably pleasant-seeming tasks. He contrasts this Arcadian vision with the “fatalist” depictions of “backbreaking premodern work” by Millet’s agriculturalists,” their features generic and animal-like.” That’s a serious mischaracterization of Millet, who sought to ennoble agricultural life; Van Gogh and Tolstoy, despite their mystic utopian tendencies, were no fools, and they were wholehearted Millet supporters. However praiseworthy Pissarro’s intentions, his pointillist works are, to my eye, awkward and unconvincing, their motley skins at odds with the artist’s fundamental realism. Instead of noble workers we get  “staffage figures,” i.e., human prop. Furthermore, Pissarro;s vision of social harmony is somewhat generic, and could just as well feature Aryan Germans, midwestern German-Americans, or Russian collective farmers. Pissarro’s laborious divisionism is compared repeatedly to honest agricultural work, but these well-intended visions of well-tended fields look methodical and mechanical; no wonder Pissarro gave up divisionism up with relief.

His anarchist convictions did, however, find a visual outlet once, although ithey had to be kept secret in France’s nationalistic, anti-semitic, political culture. In 1889 Pissarro made a book of twenty-eight small drawings attacking modern capitalism’s abuses. Entitled Turpitudes Sociales, social disgraces, or social crimes, this unique book, bound between covers designed by son Lucien, was strictly a family affair, meant only for the eyes and edification of two nieces living in England, Esther and Alice Isaacson, and consequently hand-delivered, since such incendiary work was too dangerous for the mail. A facsimile is exhibited here, along with copies of La Feuille, an anarchist newspaper, featuring powerful drawings by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and others. Pissarro’s drawings for Turpitudes Sociales, by comparison, are rough and unpolished, but, like Philip Guston’s Poor Richard, a century later, seething with outrage. A sample of the text which Pissarro clipped from La Révolte, another anarchist newspaper, reads: “It is the War of the dispossessed against their dispossessors, the war of the hungry against the fat, the poor against the rich, the war of life against death.” If the rhetoric sounds unpleasantly familiar to that of the recent Occupy Wall Street movement or various peasant revolts over the past five centuries, it should remind us to take nothing for granted. Esther Isaacson’s overly optimistic commentary of a century ago ends Bretell’s catalogue essay:  “No doubt in the year 2000, ... they will look back at these drawings and wonder how people in the nineteenth century could be so stupid as to let themselves be troubled by such problems.” Artsy dreamers....!

Through January 22. Legionofhonor.famsf.org/legion/exhibitions/pissarros-people

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Yves Tanguy, Composition, 1936 (detail).

First, the location: this show is not in the corner gallery at Geary and Powell  (301 Geary, to be exact), but at 291 Geary, across Powell Street, in the same block as Macys. The show features works by a panoply of Surrealists including William Baziotes, Victor Brauner, Alexander Calder, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Enrico Donati, Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Duchamp, Jimmy Ernst, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, David Hare, Marcel Jean (who wrote one of the definitive histories of the movement), Gerome Kamrowski, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Joan Miro, Joan Miró, Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann, Stella Snead, and Yves Tanguy. A very nicely produced catalogue is available, featuring informative and entertaining essays by Rowland Weinstein and Mary Ann Caws, and nicely written notes on the artists and short bios. Through January 28. weinstein.com/surrealism-new-worlds/surrealism-new-worlds-artists

Roberto Matta, Black Mirror, 1947, and Les Courants du Secret, c. 1943.

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Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment 1910-1912, Santa Barbara Art Museum

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth assembled this small but eye-opening show entitled Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment 1910-12, covering the birth of analytical cubism, During those two years, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque collaborated so closely (in their separate studios during the day, talking by night) that some of their monochrome, faceted artwork—unsigned as a matter of principle— are now difficult to differentiate, even by specialists. Picasso’s famous characterization of their partnership as roped-together mountaineers—presumably scaling the cold, clear peaks of art cited independently by later abstract painters Kasimir Malevich and Clyfford Still—still holds true. After the war (in which Braque was wounded), the two men were never able to work so closely. This aesthetically revolutionary partnership was examined in greater detail in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1989 show, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, curated by William Rubin, a show that Golding labeled a curatorial “apotheosis.” That said, this smaller, more focused West Coast show, comprising some forty paintings and prints should still be seen by cubism fans and those trying to come to terms with this style, partly representational, partly abstract, which can seem forbiddingly austere, its humor unnoticed.

From the museum press release:

During the years 1910 through 1912, Picasso and Braque invented a new style that took the basics of traditional European art—modeling in light and shade to suggest roundedness, perspective lines to suggest space, indeed the very idea of making a recognizable description of the real world—and toyed with them irreverently. Eik Kahng, organizing curator and SBMA Chief Curator notes, “The works that these two artists produced during this two year period remain some of the most difficult and enigmatic in all of the history of art. In this exhibition, we hope to recover the excitement and sense of the unknown that we know they both felt. It is not an exaggeration to say that Picasso’s and Braque’s experiment would clear the way for an entirely new definition of the work of art, now freed from the task of imitation in the conventional sense. All of the greatest art to follow in the 20th century is in one way or another indebted to their achievement.” Following up on hints they found in the work of Paul Cézanne, and brimming with youthful bravado, Picasso and Braque created pictorial puzzles, comprehensible to a point but full of false leads and contradictions. Viewers pick up a few clues—a figure, a pipe, a moustache, a bottle, a glass, a musical instrument, a newspaper, a playing card— and these start to suggest a reality in three dimensions. The impression is that of a fast, modern world, with glimpses of models, friends, and the paraphernalia of drinking and smoking. But things never fully add up, either in detail or as a whole—and deliberately so. Teasingly elusive, the image is a construction of forms and signs that the artist has put together in a spirit of parody and play. The pleasure for the viewer is to let go of all normal expectations and enter into the game, which is an endlessly intriguing one.”

The catalogue features essays by Eik Kahng, Charles Palermo, Harry Cooper, Annie Bourneuf, Christine Poggi, Claire Barry and Bart J.C. Devolder that are well written and informative, but not aimed at the cubism newbie (though the wall labels in the show are quite good at elucidating the ideas, history and personalities). The illustrations deserve some mention because the digital process used will undoubtedly become a new printing standard for art reproduction. “Spectral imaging” replaces the RGB color filters of old with LED illumination adjusted to various frequencies. According to developers of MegaVision, “Because our eyes do not actually see colors in the same way that RGB cameras see colors, and because LEDs come in many different colors, more colors than just RGB can be used, resulting in much more accurate color images. And not only visible light is possible, but now there are options for ultraviolet and infrared which can reveal features invisible to human eyes. The elimination of the filters in the optical path allows for a higher quality image, greater accuracy of color, and most important in the art preservation world, a reduction of harmful light by a factor of 10-10,000----1000% and up ... The complex mark-making of so-called High Cubist or Analytical Cubist paintings is notoriously difficult to reproduce through conventional photography. The spectral images capture each brushstroke with astonishing fidelity, not only in terms of color but also texture.” Eik Kahng: “I firmly believe that spectral imaging is the wave of the future for museum best practices.... The spectral images we will show of Picasso’s and Braque’s paintings allow you to see the trace of the very hairs of the brush in the paint layer. They can be truly mesmerizing.” Squint all you want, but you will discern no dot screens in these amazing reproductions.

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment 1910-1912 runs through January 8.

Hans Hoffman, Simpex Munditis (1962), oil on canvas, at left. No info on the other two.

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