ANDREW WYETH DIES AT 91

ANDREW WYETH, the popular American painter of rustic landscapes, farmhouses and plain country folk whose pictures evoked a range of feelings and emotions and a nostalgic vision of times past, died at home early Jan. 16 at age 91. No cause of death was reported, according to the Associated Press.

Mr. Wyeth sketched, painted and drew the people and places of Pennsylvania's Brandywine River Valley and the rugged Maine coastal region near Cushing, where he had lived all his life. He died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum, the AP reported.

His artistry was of fields and hillsides, wildlife, sawmills, springhouses, farmhands, farm tools, fixtures and furniture. It was symbolic and paradoxical, expressing tranquillity and turbulence, tenderness and rigor, cruelty and compassion. Some of it included such discordant details as hanging animal carcasses, rifles, hunters, meat hooks, peeling paint, cracked ceilings, fallen and sharply sawed or broken logs that conveyed subliminal suggestions of violence and decay, and a sense of loss.

One of the most widely recognized and highly priced American artists of his era, Mr. Wyeth was probably best known for his 1948 painting, "Christina's World," which shows a young crippled woman in a pink dress crawling across a brown field toward a bleak and distant farmhouse. In its degree of familiarity, this picture was once compared with the portrait of George Washington that appears on the $1 bill.

In the 1980s, Mr. Wyeth was the subject of an intense media spotlight for his "Helga" series of 45 paintings and 200 sketches. These pictures, many of them nudes, were the product of hundreds of modeling sessions with a Chadds Ford neighbor, Helga Testorf, over a 15-year period. No one else, not even Mr. Wyeth's wife, had previously known about them, and their disclosure to the public was arguably the art event of the decade.

A household name in the national artistic community since the middle years of the 20th century, Mr. Wyeth rose to prominence in the same period in which the abstract expressionist painters of the New York School were establishing their mark as the mainstream artists of the era.

His work was different. The abstract expressionists did non-representational compositions, characterized by what they said was a spontaneous and self-expressive application of paint. They often worked in bright and flowing colors with flamboyant brush strokes.

Mr. Wyeth painted in pale colors, lighter shades of brown, red, yellow and black, and the shapes and objects in his pictures were concrete and easily recognizable. Houses looked like houses and people looked like people. He favored fall and winter landscapes, which he believed gave the impression of a deeper and unarticulated meaning; his messages were indirectly conveyed. Rarely did he speak or communicate with others in his profession, and in his personal life he tended to be reclusive.

As an artist he was generally considered a realist, but he never accepted that characterization. "In the art world today, I'm so conservative I'm radical. Most painters don't care for me. I'm strange to them," he said in a 1965 interview with Richard Meryman for Life magazine. "A lot of people say I've brought realism back. They try to tie me up with Eakins and Winslow Homer. To my mind they are mistaken. I honestly consider myself an abstractionist. Eakins' figures actually breathe in the frame. My people, my objects breathe in a different way; there's another core—an excitement that's definitely abstract."

To many critics, Mr. Wyeth was out of touch with the primary artistic trends of his time, and the quality of his work failed to merit his popularity with the general public. Nor did it justify the prices people were willing to pay—a collection of Wyeth works including several of the Helga paintings brought $40 million in a 1989 sale.

"Compared to master draftsmen, Wyeth cannot draw," wrote Washington Post art critic Paul Richard in a 1987 review of an exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. New York's Village Voice newspaper called Mr. Wyeth's art "formulaic stuff, not very effective even as institutional realism . . ."

The prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused even to display the Helga paintings. "We had an opportunity to show the Helga series. We quite pointedly and as a conscious decision declined to do so," said museum director Philippe de Montebello in 1987.

And so turns the vicious world of art criticism. Note the tone of this obituary, also a product of the Washington Post.

Read it all

SHIMMERING GROTESQUE AND GORGEOUS

MARLENE DUMAS AT THE MUSEUM of Modern Art in New York City. Folks, this is an exhibition that meets the eye with the same might as a two by four.

Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer.

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. She has not substantially varied her subjects or her habit of basing her images on photographs in about 25 years. And when you stand in front of her paintings, far too many other photo-dependent artists come to mind for the pictures to qualify as original. Her work tends too much toward well-done pastiches of ideas and tactics from the last 25 years, primarily Conceptualism, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism

Ms. Dumas’s stained and brush-worked canvases are lurid in subject or color, and usually both. The subjects include pregnant women; rather monstrous-looking newborns; murdered children and victims of suicide and execution (mostly women); hooded prisoners; forlorn adolescents; bodies in morgues. Each image is served up in a blank, abstract space with handsome trimmings of lush colors and surface action that have their history in Abstract Expressionism and even Color Field painting.

Striking abbreviations and fuzzy blurs make us look twice. Is that woman asleep or dead? Has that naked child been playing with red paint or is that blood on its hands? In many instances such doubts keep you moving between the harsh, suggestive imagery and the brushwork and process, but after a while you may begin to feel a bit manipulated.

Other paintings go for point-blank sensationalism. “Dead Girl” shows just the head and shoulders of a fallen adolescent with blood streaming from her face. Yet in some of Ms. Dumas’s portraits suffering is subtle and implicit, a life sentence and therefore more convincing. In “Moshekwa” the resolute face of a black man fills most of a large canvas with an aura intensified by the shifting tones of his skin, which culminates in a gorgeous patch of dark purple glowing from his forehead like a mark of nobility.

Read the entire NYT review.

GALLERY CLOSES AFTER THREATS

The following entry is adapted from an earlier quick comment I posted on another website earlier this year after it reported the news that a Berlin gallery had temporarily closed an exhibition of satirical works by a group of Danish artists after six Muslim youths threatened violence unless one of the posters depicting the Kaaba shrine in Mecca was removed.

IT'S ABOUT TIME a few extraordinary Western artists step up to the plate to take a swing or two at this crucial issue. This is a very serious issue in terms of defending our own culture against the egregious assaults made on it by ruthless newcomers with their strange gods and ideas, and since I work in the arts myself, a painter, I know that few artists are tackling the Islamic problem with anything more than fearless silence.

In fact, just the opposite position rules. I'd surmize that 95% of the art being created today in this most political of cities, and I speak from the underground art movement, is frivolous and redundant, lost in fairy tales and harmless charm, and anything remotely "controversial" is dismissed. The so-called controversial art is hardly controversial any more because how many times can Christianity or homophobia or the president be attacked in the generic way that artists depict their hyperventilated disgust with religion, sexual mores, or politics, and it still be new, iconoclastic, or controversial? But with all the world in flames and blood, hovering at the brink of financial crisis, most of the "ruthless honesty" work is anti-American at worst, anti-war (pseudo-lofty) at best, and nothing is ever presented that even hints of global incrimination due the jihadists and their copious allies in shepherd's clothing.

But what can be expected otherwise? The art world, unlike the more recently abducted halls of lower and higher education, has long been the high-browed bastion of the liberal cognoscente, and today's system of wine-tasting galleries and its stiltifying air of mass dementia is now vigorously geared to the boilerplate Left.

Scandal is often the fast track in the whirl to "make" an artist, but history seems to prove that this model holds only when breaking "preferred" molds.

Let's hope Berlin doesn't bend knee to this Islamic nonsense compounded by thuggery. It will only encourage more outrage. Don't we all deserve better than this?

STUDIO GALLERY

I DELIVERED MY MATERIALS to the Studio Gallery this afternoon. Tonight the membership will jury some 65 selections in considering my application for membership. Studio Gallery is Washington's oldest artist owned gallery, located in a beautiful brownstone in historic Dupont Circle. The director, Adah Rose Bitterbaum, has been most helpful and courteous in guiding me through the application process.

I don't know if I am overwrought in the explanation of process of at the expense of highlighting the transliterative matter of the work itself. Below is the statement I offered along with three canvases 1200 square inches or better, and two smaller 24"x18" ones. In addition to these five paintings, I presented a portfolio of over 60 images—photographic glossy 10"x8" digital prints of other work.

My statement:

I work from the gesture, or rather, wherever my quivering stroke takes the brush.

Each painting I complete is nothing but the conflicted wonderment of an angst-driven subconscious on the prowl for a brutal honesty, urged to sniff out those personal heresies residing somewhere between a humble arrogance and an arrogant humility, harnessing hidden energies which instruct the flow of imagination. Rarely do I start with a pre-conceived notion of what "I would like to imagine" but instead, I struggle against the common elements of mind and materials the status quo presents. So, when painting, I follow the paint from first splash to finished canvas, making choices of color, syntax, and narrative.

Believing I privately owe each image to the Muse of Idea, to the God of Permanent Arrival, my attack of the canvas is best described as a tension-loosening charge of inertia transfixed in sequence as a terse mixture of hesitation, followed by an explosive jolt of fierce joy at what is happening, almost always followed in the end by a weak fear, anxious worry and misgivings until I eventually reach a plateau of reflex gratitude, or flat acceptance of what has transpired.

Concerning the veracity of any paint, I presume that my art begins from a "condition of need" and is a matter of ambiguous perception with carry-on luggage both in sociopolitical and metaphysical terms, and while I often struggle against my operative senses when confronted with an uneasy thought or a complexity I can't easily deconstruct, a certain unexpected beauty and intelligence are often the reward for faith and diligence, hence, each canvas is the physical battleground where an immutable struggle works itself out.

"Does this painting resolve itself in an apt equation? Is it a valid expression of real concerns, rooted in its own space and time and asthethic experience?" I ask. If I affirm that it does on all counts, I accept it as a finished painting, or mixed media work.

As a conflicted idealist, I find myself continually drawn to the manifested contradictions of global society in all its metaphysical flux. I use a strained figure, a rough erratic line, oscillative texture and virilent color to speak of that battleground where art and politics beat each other up while few are they who seem the wiser.

Self-taught, I work full-time from my 52 O Street Studios loft located in the northernmost reaches of the NoMa neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Yeah, maybe a bit too overwrought...

DEFACING ART THE ISLAMIC WAY

NYC street piece by Swoon before defacement. See below for links.

PRO-TALIBAN MILITANTS in Pakistan have used electric drills to chisel off the face of a massive 7th century Buddha sculpture, raising concerns that hundreds of other Gandhara-era relics located nearby could also be at risk.

The picturesque Swat Valley has become infested with Taliban militants in recent weeks as the influence of the radical Islamic movement sweeps rapidly across northwest Pakistan.

The militants have launched a bloody vice campaign that has left 47 dead, decimated the valley's tourism industry and terrorized the local community. Locals tell ABC News authorities have made no effort to stop the spread of "Talibanization" in a normally peaceful region, often described as "Pakistan's Switzerland."

One Pakistani archaeologist described the Jehanabad Buddha as the second most important Gandhara monument after the Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, which were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.

"For me at least, the Jehanabad Buddha was the most beautiful," said Fidaullah Sehrai, a retired professor of archaeology and a leading expert in ancient Buddhist art.

Buddhism flourished in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 7th century, and the Swat Valley is considered the birthplace of Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism. In his memories, the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang described hundreds of Buddha sculptures, monasteries and stupas in the valley. Only a handful has been excavated so far.

The Jehanabad Buddha watched over a stretch of the ancient Silk Route, said Professor Sehrai, and was believed to offer protection for travelers and traders. It is the second Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in recent months.

Read it all.

Now in New York City, the same sort of art defacement is being charted by an unknown assailant who has been dubbed simply—the Splasher. Two different NYC street artists have had their works scarred recently. Two female artists, known only as Swoon and Gaia have had their work partially sprayed out or marked over in deliberate fashion. Any connection to the NYC phenomenon and the Pakistani one? Probably not, but have no fear. What the Taliban is doing in Pakistan, the keepers of the Koran have done all over the world whenever the Islamic regimes gain a modicum of power over a previous culture.

But let's be clear here, thee is no solid evidence that the defacement has been carried out by Muslims on the prowl. But those Muslim youths who agitate in the shadows against Western targets (evidenced here and here and here) often roam in packs and attack single defenseless victims, male or female.

THE WAKING LIFE

JUST FOR THE RECORD, my painting is not a hobby, it's a work of pernicious desperation. And to be clear about that, allow me to put it another way. After fifty years of trench warfare, flailing, wounding and being wounded on the battlefield of words, I have chosen another weapon with which to wage battle against those who would demand from me my soul and insist upon my allegiance to any and sunder of these grotesque, viciously competitive arguments contemporary life offers. The inquisitive mind of the diligent seeker hacking through the kudzu of civilization, its sleepwalkers, and its enemies is always at peril. Whether delivered with a calm whisper or a bone-chilling rant, it's the same shouting of which side are you on? It's the same seductive shell game aimed to recruit and implicate, taking you off your own uniquely, sweat-and solace-inspired path. For what? the same old, same old, but now we are substituted a host of new partners who may or may not have one's best interests in mind as they squiggle in pursuit of their own. What rubbish! The Organization. Sanctified. Polished. Well-funded, or NOT. Either way, the trap is set before you.

Where on God's Green Acre is the DMZ in all this ? There is none. Not in one's own home. Not in one's own mind. There's always some entity ready to step up with you to the firing post or down with you in the dirty ditch as long as you agree to pursue the party line. Yes sir. Marching off as to war. Stuffed to the gills with pamphlets and profiteers piled high upon your back.

War and Peace. Brother against brother.

I may cherish and respect them both but only at arm's length. Or I may loathe them with every ounce of integrity I command, but I reject them all as tightly torqued gears of the consumer society, eager to pounce and package me with the same wrapping they adorn themselves. The anti-uniformity packaging is easily pierced with a hard look beyond the surface tension of its delivery system.

Painting, painting exactly as I do, is my own brutalized response to each and every one of them. To quote the poet of my generation, sometimes the devil comes as a man of war, but sometimes he comes as a man of peace. I ask then, where is the false consciousness of those who would portray the Luxmachina of my own aspirations as merely the illusion of a "sensitive" personal constitution?

Not even Pablo Picasso (that asshole) could be ursurped by an ideology's need for famous lynchpins and reputations in their stable of tools and weapons for further recruitment. In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso explains:

"If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean."

Death may be lonely, but life among the recruiters is far lonelier. Condescension is the law. The only mass movement I am interested in, is the movement of my own mass upon the path I am already storming so as to inspire my own sense of fear, awe and love, disappointment, recovery, crass numerology, entitlement and peace.

For our dear magnificent, delirious Picasso also said, "Painting is not made to decorate apartments, it's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy." (Tery, Picasso, n'est pas officer dans l'Armee francaise, Les Lettres Francaises, March 24, 1945)

Me? I've narrowed it down to occasionally wanting to hang out and talk the talk with fellow painters. To smash the knots governing painting. That's personal. Then there's the whatnot dealers, the galleries, the special collectors. If I have any say so in my future, it is that I want to confine myself to these people. To meet the mark. That's the challenge. Global politics IS about peace. And I think I am already in that combat, and have been for all of my conscious life, with exception of playing soldiers as a kid. But that kidstuff came natural as a result of heritage and culture. Not that it's been easy. I have blood on my hands, maybe, maybe not so much, but it's a life of bruises and egos. We have ALL, each and every one of us, contributed to the crimes of our own natures. Basic sin. We've all had to be dusted off every once in a while. All that is in my blood, and by deed of hand of head. Yours too, no doubt. And as the story goes I am staging myself from a family of pioneers, kings, governors, soldiers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, numbers keepers, carpenters, peach peddlers, drunks, and now, here I am barely in my fifties, but not yet thirty, the eldest son five of a navy piss drunk carpenter and his woman, my mother, a woman trailed by a remarkable track record of dog-eared discontent which become a staple in her childrearing arsenal. Then we rock on into MY generation.

That's the narrative I am poised to paint and weave into my worldview (without appearing passè).

The world is full of stories. I am one. We are another. I don't presume to presume a lot about other people except general nicety, but how so often even that small portion of human kindness is missing. Fortunately, I have my true spruce with Liberty Sue, and a handful of nice friends these days. But friends, well, as Jim Morrison put it, he preferred the feast of friends to the giant family, yet it's been one of the twisted poverties of my own peculiar life to have found neither to be much comfort or strength, both somewhat suspect, both very competent at failing to meet fair chunks of their own words even halfway. But my own corruptions and failures and spotty loyalty (in terms of ALWAYS putting THEM first) across the tracks can't be avoided either.

Go figure. Stuck. Stuckism.

Did I fail to mention that I watched Richard Linklater's Waking Life again this morning? Tough flick. Delivers an existential punch to philosophy framers everywhere they groom themselves. Third or fourth time I guess I've watched it over the years. A tough, intelligent objectivist-collapsing device at endgame. Awesome animation technique that Linklater picked up from a few pioneers.

I'd love to be able to say I can memorize the entire dialogue, do it, and then converse dazzlingly at fashionable dinner parties all across this brave land, but I'm just a painter now, and besides, I pretty much have internalized most of the chicanery, and had done so before sitting for Linklater. But it's still a cheeky flick to check out...

Five elephant trumpets.

Then there's Martine and Norman's Midnight Movie tonight. I do very much want to go, but with Liberty Sue gone to the Florida, me in a dietary rush, so much weight to lose, so little time, I tell myself I can't afford to place myself in a jovial crowd with lots and lots of calories to be passed around, with so much studio work awaiting me. But here's Norman's great plan for tonight:

"In lieu of true independence, Martine and I have decided to celebrate films that said "Fuck you" to standard Hollywood ideals, and are hosting the first of our "Midnight Movie Madness" series. We're kicking it off with the film that has been credited as being the first movie to be intentionally shown at midnight because the distributors had no idea what else to do with it: El Topo.

"This surreal western has been listed as favorites by John Lennon (who actually persuaded a friend to buy the rights and get its first distribution in the U.S. going), directors David Lynch and Samuel Fuller, actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and performers Bob Dylan, Marilyn Manson, and Peter Gabriel. It has been claimed that this movie was the beginning of Gabriel's inspiration for the classic Genesis concept album, 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway'.

So get your late night faces on and come enjoy "El Topo" with us! BYOB and snacks."

See what I mean? It sounds divine and delicious...

I'll decide later. I have a few hours before curtains.

WHY NEO-EXPRESSIONISM?

THE CONTROVERSY OF THE RISE of American Neo-Expressionism in the very late 1970s, informed by Philip Guston's controversial 1969 show, rooted in the earliest salad days of Julian Schnabel and John Salle has been presented quite charmingly in the book I am currently reading—Art of the Post-Modern Era (From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s). Of course, there was a controversy. Change is always controversial. But what made this ideological controversy a bit different was that the movement's predecessors had declared painting itself completely exhaused, with nothing left to teach, ultimately worthless to the post-modernist sensibility, in fact, dead.

Guston, a first generation abstract expressionist of considerable reputation, helped rescue figurative art from the dustbins of history after coming to consider abstraction as "an escape from the true feelings we have, from the 'raw' primitive feelings about the world—and us in it."

As he put it, "the Vietnam War was what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. I thought there must be some way I could do something about it. I knew ahead of me a road was laying. A very crude, inchoate road. I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid."

The Canadian-born painter concluded that there was "nothing to do now but to paint my life—my dreams, surroundings, predicament, desperation, Musa (his wife), love, need. Keep destroying any attempt to paint pictures, or think about art. If someone bursts out laughing in front of my painting, that is exactly what I want and expect."

Elsewhere he commented that abstract painting was hiding in mystery. He was bored with all that non-sense, and just wanted to tell stories.

We already know the sensation of Guston's new work. It shocked and disgusted the old guard and its devoted followers but inspired and redeemed the younger breed of new image painters following in his wake, new painters who also rejected the apparent vacuousness of the Warholian pop world then dominating the scene after its own rebellion against the stagnation of abstract expressionism.

What immediately followed were the "Bad" Painting and New Image Painting movements. The breaking down of the social order was reflected in the art world by identifying with "kitsch" and "low" art—considered reactions against the photo-realism and other post-minimalist work of the era.

...an essay in progress, and as the photograph above plainly shows, Gabriel's new studio does meet certain abstract expressionist criteria while he pauses to genuflect to mark the transition from feeling cramped like a passenger class hostage to keying up as an adeptly organized visionary ready to prosper within the framework of the semi-public posture, quite unlike those heady days of the 1980s when I first began to organize myself as an artist, but hardly in earnest...