Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i Art & Antiques

AFTER SOME seven hundred years during which painting was the master medium in Western art, culminating in a 50-year period in which it fundamentally transformed that art, it became fashionable to claim that painting was “dead,” or at least no longer relevant. Photography, video, installations, and the multitude of possibilities that go under the name of multimedia seemed to be getting all the attention and drawing all the energy. However, rumors of painting’s death have been greatly exaggerated. For viewers, paintings remain persuasive not only because of their optical qualities but because of the awareness that they were made by hand, and for artists, the project of making images by hand remains perennially seductive. In this issue of Art & Antiques, we have two occasions—at least—to reflect on the allure…

IN 1943, LIVING in Nazi-occupied Paris amid shortages of many different kinds of goods, Pablo Picasso made a lucky find. “By chance, I managed to get hold of a stock of Japanese paper,” he wrote to his friend Brassaï, the photographer. “It cost me an arm and a leg! But without it, I’d never have done these drawings. The paper seduced me.” Paper seduced Picasso throughout his life, and what he did with it seduces us to this day. His relationship to the material was intimate and multifaceted—he not only drew and printed on it but cut it, pasted it, folded it, crushed it, and sculpted with it. While Picasso’s oil on canvas works bring the top prices and get the greatest number of eyeballs at museums, it was paper…

We tend to think of Jean-Michel Basquiat as a brash outsider working his contacts in the Warhol circle to convert street cred into art cred. And while there is a good deal of truth in that, there’s also another side to the story. From the point of view of the dealers, critics, and collectors in the lily-white New York gallery scene, Basquiat’s work was a blast from another universe, the mostly Black and Latino world of graffiti and hip-hop. But to the creators of the nascent hiphop culture, Basquiat, a middle-class Haitian-American–Puerto Rican Brooklynite who had gone to posh private schools, was a bit of an outsider, too, not quite a full-fledged member and certainly not a pioneer. In regard to “post-graffiti” artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Toxic, and…

IN DISCUSSING the work of the Ethiopian-born artist Wosene Worke Kosrof, the phrase “visual language” can be taken literally. Kosrof’s most important body of work consists of paintings in which the characters used to write Ethiopia’s Amharic language are the central graphic element. Cohabiting on the canvas with simple geometric forms and fields of color, the Amharic characters create a dynamic, logicchallenging, visually fascinating abstraction. The abstraction is deepened by the fact that the characters—technically not letters but syllabic signs—are indeterminate and generally don’t spell out actual words. Kosrof, who has lived in the U.S. for over 40 years—first in Washington, D.C., and then in Berkeley, Calif.—has observed that non-Ethiopian viewers may have an advantage over native speakers when it comes to experiencing his work. Those who know Amharic may…

A TOUR OF the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., begins with a supersized-screen video of a young woman paddling across a crystalline lake at dawn; an older man bundled up against the winter cold as he photographs snow-mantled peaks; and parents with kids romping through woods and farm clearings on a bright summer day. The scenes are so enticing that I’m left to wonder: What am I doing indoors? It’s a question that the museum—formally known as Adirondack Experience, the Museum on Blue Mountain Lake—constantly strives to answer, thus far with a good deal more success than many other regional museums. Adirondack Experience starts off with enviable advantages. Few regional museums can match its reservoir of potential visitors. Every year, some 9 million people flock to the Adirondack…

IN CÉLINE Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Marianne, a woman painter, travels to a manor on a remote island in Brittany to paint the portrait of Héloïse, a young aristocrat. The portrait is to be sent to the Milanese nobleman to whom Héloïse is betrothed. It is the 1770s, and Marianne has inherited a successful painting practice from her father—a boon for a woman artist of any period. In France in the 18th century, there was a limit on the number of women who could be admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and they were excluded from life drawing classes (Marianne addresses this by noting she paints nudes in secret). But a number of female painters excelled by painting portraits of well-to-do…

ART HAS BEEN an integral aspect of Native American cultures for millennia, so there should be no particular difficulty or paradox involved in the idea of a Native American artist. And yet during the 20th century it was extremely difficult for Native artists to establish themselves in that role and to define what Native American art could and should be in the modern age. Nonetheless, they persevered against the odds, and as a result there now exists a vibrant, innovative Native American art world in which artists are equally free to draw upon their heritage and to define themselves independently of it. How this came to be is chronicled in an ambitious longterm exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian’s George Gustav Heye Center in New York, “Stretching…