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January 10, 2006 (Tuesday) - Rauschenberg books
 Two books by Calvin Tomkins:
"The Bride and the Bachelors, Five Masters of the Avante-Garde," published in 1965 by Viking, reissued in 1976 by Penguin (ISBN 0140043136)
"Off the Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg," originally published in 1980, recently issued in paperback by Picador (ISBN 0-312-42585-6)
The earlier book is a collection of five short biographies (Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinquely, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham.) The later book is a more in-depth look at Rauschenberg, but since his life and work intersects with those five artists (as well as Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and their dealers) "Off the Wall" is really a focused look at a particular section of the NY art world, in the second half of the twentieth century. The new paperback edition has an additional chapter, updating the story to 2005.
Both books are easy reads, full of amusing anecdotes and personal observations. I've always felt pretty neutral about Rauschenberg's work. I found it mildly interesting at best. But I'm a big fan of John Cage, and I was fascinated by their exchanges:
"The Abstract Expressionists continued to have great admiration for (John) Cage. Some of the artists could even discern, in Cage's music, the same kind of "all-over" texture that characterized Pollock's post-1947 paintings in which there was no center of interest... But Cage's denial of the artist's central control was a heresy that seemed to most of them simply negative or quixotic. In Rauschenberg's case, Cage's thinking became an unexpected source of support. ... Like Cage, he was exploring ways of limiting the artist's control over the final result, principally by trying to make the viewer work harder and harder and become more involved in the process."
from "Off the Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg," by Calvin Tomkins
I'm glad I read it - this kind of back-story goes a long way toward enhancing my appreciation of an artist's work. I"ll have to go back up to the 5th floor at SFMOMA and take a new look at whichever Rauschenbergs they have out now.
Incidentally, if you're near SF, the Meyerovich Gallery has a good show of Rauschenberg's work, "In Celebration of His 80th birthday." They have some pieces that I think are superior to some of the Rauschenberg paintings at SFMOMA.
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December 14, 2005 (Thursday) - About Curators
 Last week when I was at the Legion of Honor, the sale table in the gift shop was piled high with steeply discounted books. I scored a real deal on a little paperback called "Words of Wisdom: A Curator's Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art". It's a collection of very short essays by more than 60 art curators from around the world. They talk about what they do, why they do it, and what's important about it. Here's a bit of the publisher's blurb:
A modern update of medieval trade manuals—the 'come-along-with-me' (vade mecum) of medieval craftsmen—Words of Wisdom: A Curator's Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art is an invaluable guidebook for anyone interested in contemporary art and the practice of curating. In short and concise essays, this compendium presents advice to a new generation of curators from established masters of contemporary art exhibitions who, over the past twenty-five years, have played a crucial role in shaping what we see today, and how we see it. While providing an intimate look at the minds of these master curators, Words of Wisdom also establishes the curator's craft as an important vocation that has changed tremendously over the past quarter-century. In the course of their musings, the curators offer behind-the-scenes insights into influential exhibitions and institutions and the contemporary art world they represent.
PUBLISHED BY: INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL, NEW YORK
FORMAT: Paperback, 5 x 8.5 in. / 144 pgs / 100 b&w
ISBN: 0916365603; RELEASE: 2001
As an artist, I found it fascinating to get a look the kind of thinking that goes on at the other side of the gallery/museum walls. Just a quick, more-or-less-at-random google search of some of the contributing curators turned up these gems:
Rosa Martinez - Spanish-born, New York-based independent curator - her chapter from the book
Carlos Basualdo - born in Argentina, recently hired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art - the Philly Inq article
Robert Fleck - Austrian curator posts a manifesto advising, "It has now become absolutely impossible, in moral terms, for any artist, galerist, museum curator or collector, to exhibit any longer in Austria, or to cooperate with any Austrian institution."
Thelma Golden - Interview with Gothamist - A born and bred New Yorker, Golden is the Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Olu Oguibe - BOMB interview with this Nigerian artist, writer, theorist and curator
Marcia Tucker - what does a curator's private web site look like?
Barbara Vanderlinden - born in Belgium, chosen to co-curate the 2004 Taipei Biennial - an article about her co-curator (Amy Cheng) boycotting the exhibition, which was titled, "Do You Believe in Reality?"
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November 2, 2005 (Wednesday) - The Inspired Heart
  My recent post about artists who destroy their work, prompted a response from Jerry Wennstrom, one of the artists I mentioned. In 1979 he destroyed all of the paintings in his studio, gave away all of his possessions, including money. He became a modern version of the wandering mendicant, trusting in an unknown and formless spiritual path. He ate when he had food and fasted when he did not. He entered into and exited the lives of many people, as a gentle catalyst, channeling his creative energy into the dynamics of living, rather than producing a physical object.
(One of Jerry Wennstrom's early paintings, "Holocaust", at right)
 Eventually, he did start making art again. It began when he picked up a discarded envelope from the sidewalk and drew a body to go with the head on the stamp. This is what he had to say about that moment:
"The tiny act of drawing on the found envelope was the beginning of creation's return flight into my life, sanctified. I was doing what I wanted to do in a new way. Since art was what I knew best, I brought it with me as a gift when I went somewhere to work with people, or when I stayed in someone's home. the offering of this aspect of my life was not any sort of barter, a word people often use in trying to explain my life. Instead, it was a spontaneous act with no strings attached..."
 (One of Jerry Wennstrom's recent paintings, "Holy Fool", at left)
He moved on to the west coast, joining a community on Whidbey Island in 1987, where he still lives. He started making what he calls "interactive boxes." I haven't seen these in person, but from the photos and descriptions, they look like a combined automata and mummy case. They're extremely complex - many photos are at his web site. (One of his boxes, "Birth Death", opened, is at right. ) He says on his web site about painting:
"Painting is no longer my medium of choice. It simply doesn't hold the mystery for me the way creating the interactive boxes does for me now. What I have learned from years of painting in the studio has been absorbed into the larger whole and incorporated as a component in the creation of the boxes. "
"The Inspired Heart, an Artist's Journey of Transformation" is Jerry Wennstrom's book about his experiences as a "holy fool." He sent me a copy last week. It's written as a series of stories, not necessarily chronological, but more the way a work of art develops - with revelations, which come along at their own time and pace.
"The Inspired Heart, an Artist's Journey of Transformation"
Sentient Publications, ISBN 0-9710786-9-6
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July 4, 2005 (Monday) - Fairfield Porter, reality and idealism
 From the book, "Poets on Painters," Edited by J.D. McClatchy
©1988, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-06971-4
Excerpts from the chapter, "Respect for Things As They Are" by John Ashbery:
In his introduction to Fairfield Porter's posthumous collection of art criticism, "Art in Its Own Terms," Rackstraw Downes quotes a remark Fairfield Porter made during what must have been one of the more Byzantine discussions at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street, around 1952. The members were arguing about whether or not it was vain to sign your paintings. With the flustered lucidity of Alice in the courtroom, Porter sliced this particular Gordian knot once and for all: "If you are vain it is vain to sign your pictures and vain not to sign them. If you are not vain it is not vain to sign them and not vain not to sign them." We do not know the reaction of his colleagues; quite possibly this mise au net fell on the same deaf ears that ignored the urgent but plain and unpalatable truths that Porter voiced again and again in his writings on art, at a time of particularly hysterical factionalism. ... His reputation as an eccentric remains, though it stemmed from a single-minded determination to speak the truth. Handsome is as handsome does; actions speak louder than words: who, in the course of the Artists' Club's tumultuous sessions, could pause to listen to such drivel?
 I hadn't known this statement of Porter's before reading Downes's preface, but somehow it caused all my memories of the man I knew well for more than twenty years (without, alas, pausing very often to look or listen well) to fall into place. Porter was, of course, only the latest of a series of brilliant know-nothings who at intervals have embodied the American genius, from Emerson and Thoreau to Whitman and Dickinson down to Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. Her title "In Distrust of Merits" could stand for all of them and her preference for winter over summer reminds me of Porter's saying in a letter to a friend: "November after the leaves have fallen may be one of the best times of year on Long Island. That is, I like the way the trees don't block the light any more. " And I realized after such a long acquaintanceship that his paintings, which most people like but have difficulty talking about (Are they modern enough? Too French? Too pleasant? Hasn't this been done before?), are part of the intellectual fabric that underlay his opinions,his conversation, his poetry, his way of being.
They are intellectual in the classic American tradition of the writers mentioned above because they have no ideas in them, that is, no ideas that can be separated from the rest. They are idea, or consciousness, or light, or whatever. Ideas surround them, but do not and cannot extrude themselves into the being of the art... Porter had a horror of "art as sociology," of the artist who "treats art as though it were raw material for a factory that produces a commodity called understanding." For art and that commodity are one, and art that illustrates an idea,however remotely or tangentially, has forfeited its claim to be considered art by introducing a fatal divisiveness into what can only be whole. Politically "concerned" artists continue to make pictures that illustrate the horrors of war, of man's inhumanity to man; feminist artists produce art in which woman is exalted, and imagine that they have accomplished a useful act; and no doubt there are a number of spectators who find it helpful to be reminded that there is room for improvement in the existing order of things. Yet beyond the narrow confmes of the "subject" (only one of a number of equally important elements in the work of art, as
Porter points out) the secret business of art gets done according to mysterious rules of its own. In this larger context ideology simply doesn't function as it is supposed to, when indeed it isn't directly threatening the work of art by trivializing it, and trivializing as well the importance of the ideas it seeks to dramatize.
As a citizen he was preoccupied - almost obsessed, in fact - with questions of ecology and politics, and politics of a most peculiar sort; he had been something of a Marxist in the thirties but in later life his political pronouncements could veer from far left to extreme right without any apparent transition. And in conversation he could become almost violent on subjects like pesticides or fluoridation, to the extent that his friends would sometimes: stifle giggles or groans, though one almost always had to agree with him, and the years since his death in 1975 have proved him even righter than he knew. Nevertheless, this passionately idealistic man felt threatened by idealism. If I understand him, it is not idealism that is dangerous, far from it, but idealism perverted and destroyed by being made "useful." Its uselessness is something holy, just like Porter's pictures, barren of messages and swept clean, in many cases, by the clean bare light of November, no longer masked by the romantic foliage.
 In an earlier letter to Mrs. White, Porter complained about several sentences in an article she had written about him and submitted to him before publication. One was:"Since he does not like the white, misty summer light of the Hamptons he goes to an island in Maine in the summer." This nettled him because: "the fact is, we go to Maine in the summer because I have since I was six. It is my home more than any other place, and I belong there. . . . The white misty light would never be a reason for my doing anything." And no doubt the suggestion that he would travel to paint in a place where the light was better was inconceivable, since the whole point was to put down what was there wherever he happened to be, not with approval but with respect. Another sentence that Porter objected to in Mrs. White's article was this: "The Porters are quiet, intense and rather fey and seem to live on an enchanted planet of their own." He did not give a reason for his objection, and perhaps none was necessary. But Mrs. White could not really be blamed for her assessment; there was an element of truth in it despite the discomfort it caused Porter. His house in Southampton was an enchanting place: large and gracious but always a little messy and charmingly dilapidated. One of the bathrooms was more than that, while in an upstairs hall the wallpaper hung in festoons and no one seemed to mind. The children were strangely beautiful, wide-eyed, and withdrawn, and they spoke like adults. There were idiosyncratically chosen paintings by de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Leon Hartl (a little known artist whom Porter admired enormously) on the walls, along with Audubon and Ukiyo-e prints and a strange Turner drawing; there was a lovely smell in the house, made up of good cooking, oil paint, books, and fresh air from the sea. He painted his surroundings as they looked, and they happened to look cozy. But the coziness is deceiving. The local color is transparent and porous, letting the dark light of space show through. The painting has the vehemence of abstraction, though it speaks another language.
In the same letter Porter quoted from memory a line of Wittgenstein that he felt central to his own view of aesthetics: "Every sentence is in order as it is." And he went on astonishingly to elaborate: "Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you already find there, or that will be given if you don't try for it. When you arrange, you fail. " I think it is in the light of statements like these that we must now look at Porter's painting, prepared to find the order that is already there, not the one that should be but the one that is.
From the book, "Poets on Painters," Edited by J.D. McClatchy
©1988, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-06971-4
Image of Porter is a self portrait from artchive.com; painting of girl on front of mirror is from Yale Press; painting of "Breakfast" is from artnet.com
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May 10, 2005 (Tuesday) - The Tao of Symbols
 I've been re-reading "The Tao of Symbols" lately. It's a little paperback by James N. Powell, which I've marked up, thumbed, and bookmarked with sticky notes. It's a good reminder of the history and reach of images, as well as their limits. I like to pack as much meaning as possible into a painting, although I'm fully aware that it's like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean. This section is one of the ones I've marked to look at again and again (image at left from Chapter 1, "The Labyrinth"):
"In the line, 'sun rises in the east', we are given a picture of what actually takes place in nature. On the left we find the shining sun, on the right is the sun as seen through the branches of a tree, and in the middle we see the sun just above the horizon. ... In poetry as in science, the tendency to illumine as much reality as possible by means of the most elegant, concise expression prevails."
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April 4, 2005 (Monday) - Is painting about image or words?
 From"Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California" by Richard Candida Smith, 1995, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-20699-1
In the chapter on the West Coast Postsurrealists, referring to Helen Lundeberg:
Part of the postsurrealists' failure was due to their inability to compete in an art world increasingly structured as much around the written word as around actual art objects. Lundeberg was neither a philosopher nor a writer. (Her paper,) "New Classicism," was barely one page in length, and her subsequent statements were even shorter. She expressed her ideas in size and color range. Her subtle gradation of saturation and tone achieved the illusion of space and depth while bringing variety into her pictures in a way that required attentive observation if her effects were to be appreciated. the postsurrealist aesthetic was restrained to the point of being quiescent, with none of the dramatic leaping from the canvas that marked the paintings of Dali, Ernst, or their American followers.
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March 24,2005 (Thursday) -An Earlier "Never Again"
 The last couple of days, as I've been painting, I've been listening to an unabridged audio book version of "Picasso's War"- a book about Guernica, by Russell Martin. A whole book about one painting! And it's fascinating. He goes into the geopolitical history as well as the art history of the era, and Picasso's biography, as it relates to the imagery in this work. The author interviewed people who were there and got first-person impressions of the bombing, and of the first exhibition of the painting. In the first chapter there's an interview with a Spanish art teacher who talks about the importance of visual art in Spain. She contrasts it with the role of music in Germany and makes a pretty good case for climate and topography as reasons for the differences. (Made me want to pull out my copy of Lucy Lippard's "The Lure of the Local" and look through it again.) Anyway, before "reading" this book, I thought I knew the basics about Picasso's Guernica, but now I realize I didn't know diddly. The author has a lot of photos and chapter excerpts on his web site. Check it out.
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March 9,2005 (Wednesday) -Wayne Quinn
"Daniel Poole as a Platter Design", ©1966, oil on canvas 34" x 28", by San Francisco artist Wayne Quinn. I wonder if Kiki smith saw this before she did her 1995 self portrait titled, "My Blue Lake"?
The image is from Quinn's monograph, "The Art of Wayne Quinn," published in 1977 by New Glide Publications, ISBN 0-912078-57-X
Most of the work in this book is straight-ahead realism. If Wayne Quinn is still alive, he'd be about 64 now. I haven't been able to find anything more about him.
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February 28, 2005 (Monday) - Watercolorists Mark Adams and Hideo Date
"Mark Adams", a monograph by local publisher, Chronicle Books, ISBN 0-87701-365-9. This San Francisco artist is married to the artist Beth van Hoesen and his watercolors resemble her work. They both tend to focus on single objects in very simple settings. Mark Adams is also (perhaps mainly) known locally for his stained glass and tapestry work. Image at left is Mark Adams' "Rainbow Water Jar", ©1979, watercolor on paper, 12 x 12 inches.
"Living in Color" by Karen Higa, a book about the life of reclusive artist Hideo Date, by local publisher, Heyday books, ISBN 1-890771-45-7
Hideo Date lived in Los Angeles and studied at Otis in the late 1920's. Later, at the Los Angeles Art Student's League, his mentor was Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Date's art career (and life) was seriously derailed in 1942 when he was incarcerated, along with 19,000 other Japanese Americans at the Santa Anita racetrack (and later sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.) Image at left is Hideo Date's "In Search of His Dream," ©1936, watercolor and gouache on paper, 19 x 15 inches.
...Read the rest HERE
February 18, 2005 (Friday) - New Art Book: Weirdo Deluxe
 "Weirdo Deluxe, the Wild, World of Pop Surrealism & Lowbrow Art"
by Matt Dukes Jordan,
2005, Chronicle Books,
ISBN 0-8118-4241-X
I'm drawn to this kind of art, whatever they call it, and that's apparently an issue to the practitioners of this genre. "Lowbrow" is the most prevalent term, and some like it, while others find the term inappropriate, limiting, and derogatory. "Pop Surrealism" is the next most common description and I think that's pretty close. Author Matt Dukes Jordan describes work by these artists as expressing, "a jaded joviality amidst the kitsch luxury trash and tortured toy-land of twentieth-century American pop culture." True enough. They aren't all surrealists, though. In fact, you'd even have to stretch the definition of representational to include all the artists in this book. They're all carnivalesque, and maybe that's the best term for them. The old-time carnival has disappeared from real life, but this kind of art keeps the spirit of the carnival alive and keeps it relevant by giving us the shivers using everyday images from our world.
...Read the rest HERE
January 28, 2005 (Friday) - Artist hostilities in old San Francisco
 Theodore Wores, a San Francisco native, was fascinated with San Francisco's Chinatown, and painted there everyday, setting up inside a little wagon. He won critical acclaim for his rich colors and interesting subjects, and was soon making sales in New York and England. In 1885, he went to Japan in search of new subject matter and inspiration, returning with fifty sketches and paintings of Japanese life.
In early 1891 Wores returned to San Francisco. Even though Whistler called his return "careless," it proved quite prudent. Amedee Joullin, one of the teachers at the Art Institute, had been poaching on Wores' territory, painting Chinese scenes and selling them at good prices. Open hostilities reportedly broke out between Wores and Joullin when James Phelan, the mayor of San Francisco, bought Joullin's "Interior of a Joss House" at the highest price "paid in some time" for a canvas by a local artist." The News Letter recorded the circumstances, thinly disguising identities. Two San Francisco artists, it reported, had both "made a hit in their treatment of a certain class of work."
...Read the rest HERE
 "In Passionate Pursuit" by art historian Alessandra Comini (published by George Braziller, 2004, ISBN 0-8076-1523-4.)
It's a slim book, 219 pages, with just a few, low quality, black and white photos. The author began life as a refugee from Franco's Spain, then Mussolini's Italy, landing in Texas for her school years, but traveling the world during her college years and ever since, as a musician and an art scholar. She's had an adventurous and art-filled life, but the most interesting part of the book is very beginning, when she writes about discovering Egon Schiele's Austrian prison cell. Schiele spent three and a half weeks there in 1912 for painting "immoral" works. But while he was there, he did another 13 watercolors and copious pencil sketches. He drew himself, his cell, and the hall outside his damp basement quarters. In 1963, when Ms. Comini sneaked into the Neulengbach courthouse and then downstairs to the old prison, it was not the Egon Schiele Museum. In fact, the basement was being used to store government papers, and firewood. She was easily able to recognize Schiele's cell because she was so familiar with his work from this period. Apparently the place hadn't changed much...
More HERE - originally posted December 14, 2004 (Tuesday)
"Contemporary Literary Comics: Selections from McSweeney's #13"
 I headed downtown yesterday, in the break between rainstorms, to the Cartoon Art Museum to see "Contemporary Literary Comics: Selections from McSweeney's #13". It's a group show which "showcases 25 of the most progressive and provocative talents in modern comics." The show is up through May 22, 2005, and I highly recommend it, especially if you like works on paper, ink drawing, and of course, comics. I'm not sure which came first, here - the show or the book. They're both terrific, and each stands on its own, but I consider myself lucky to live near enough to visit the exhibit before, during and after reading the book.
Most of the art in the exhibit is reproduced in the book, plus the book is a work of art in itself. The first thing I noticed on entering the gallery was a few big panels by Chris Ware (guest editor for this issue of McSweeny's.) With his teeny, tiny (hand-drawn) text, I was wondering how this work could possibly be reduced to a size small enough to publish in the 6.5" x 9.5" book pages. I got the answer later in the museum bookstore: they published these panels on papers the size of the Sunday funnies, then folded them make jacket cover for the book...
More HERE, originally posted December 8, 2004 (Wednesday)
 "Masters of Deception, Escher, Dali & the Artists of Optical Illusion"
by Al Seckel (of Cal Tech)
320 pages, 11" x 9"
©2004 by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
ISBN: 1-4027-0577-8
An art book written by a scientist. I stumbled across this in Stacy's books last week (they still have several copies.)
Seckel draws a coherent line from Archimboldo, to Dali, Escher, and others to contemporary artists like Shigeo Fukuda and Vik Muniz. (Archimboldo's "Autumn" at right.)
He documents how many of these artists experimented with the same optical tricks and parlor games, like double images, ambiguous imagery, and anamorphosis using reflecting cylinders...
more HERE - originally posted November 19, 2004
"Max Beckmann 1884 - 1950, The Path to Myth", by Reinhard Spieler, Benedikt Taschen Verlag 1995, ISBN 3-8228-9058-8
 Max Beckmann in a letter dated June 8, 1915:
"This morning I was at the dusty, white-gray front and saw remarkable, enchanted, and fiery things. A searing black, like golden gray-violet crossing over to lime-yellow, and a pale, dusty sky, and half- and totally naked men with weapons and bandages. Everything in disorder. Staggering shadows. Oh, I wish I could paint again. Color's after all, and instrument that one can't do without for long. All I have to do is just think of gray, green and white or of black-yellow, sulfur yellow, and violet, and a shudder of pleasure runs through me. Then I wish the war were over and I could paint."
image: "The Morgue", (after a drypoint of 1915) woodcut 37.2 x 47.4 cm
more HERE - originally posted November 10, 2004
 "Paintings that Changed the World, From Lascaux to Picasso"
© 2003, Prestel- Verlag
An almost useless book with a misleading title. But it was cheap and it had good illustrations, and I came across it in a weak moment. I'm not sure who the author is (never a good sign.) What an intriguing idea - that a painting could change the world! But nothing in this book comes close to addressing that idea.
This book looks at 90 well-known paintings from western art history (actually, from Lascaux to Warhol.). Each painting gets two pages - one for the image, the other for the essay. They're short, entertaining little things that point out some of the cultural milieu that may (or may not) have influenced the artist. Which is why it's not completely useless and I still have the book. I don't have a television, so on those evenings when I'm totally fried and my brain is not up for heavy lifting, I zone out on the sofa and flip through the pages of a book like this.
originally posted October 15, 2004
 "Between the Eyes - Essays on Photography and Politics" by David Levi Strauss
©2003, Aperture Foundation
ISBN: 1-931788-10-3
"Democratic culture is supposedly anti-elite, which if applied across the board ultimately leads to a lowest-common-denominator level of culture. The likelihood of extraordinary work being done is lessened if all work must have broad popular appeal in order to survive. If all people are created equal, doesn't this mean that all images and works of art made by people are created equal as well? And if so, aren't the claims made by artists and writers to a different scale of value pure hokum, intended to hoodwink the populace? when this fallacy is employed by cultural conservatives to foster public animosity toward contemporary art and artists, neoliberal politicians have no real stake in countering it. If there is to be nothing outside of the Market, art's claim to some value independent of the market is heretical, and any cultural activity that does not appeal to a mass audience must ultimately cease to exist."
from David Levi Strauss, page 178 of "Between the Eyes - Essays on Photography and Politics"
Originally posted October 14, 2004
 "American Expressionism - Art and Social Change 1920 - 1950" by Bram Dijkstra
©2003, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., ISBN 0-8109-4231-3
Dijkstra describes and defines "a distinctly American form of expressionism." This art movement was separate from the more popular Regionalism and many of its artists received support from from the government during the Great Depression. After World War II, American Expressionism was crushed by Abstract Expressionism. Dijkstra makes the case that it was a partnership between a conservative government and corporate interests that suppressed socially active representational painters and promoted "Art for Art's Sake" (meaning art that is non-objective, non-representational.) There was also a strange agreement between the left wing and the extreme right, that anything representational was propaganda. And then there was the fact that abstract art was the perfect object of conspicuous consumption. More HERE.
Originally posted October 13, 2004
Robert Schwartz Monograph
 Several years ago I wandered into the Contemporary Realist Gallery (now Hackett-Freedman) and saw some paintings that have haunted me ever since. They were by a guy I'd never heard of: Robert Schwartz. No one I talked to had heard of him either, so I dragged a few friends to his (rare) shows. In between shows, every once in a while, I'd get up the nerve to ask the gallery if I could see one of his paintings from the back room (they always obliged.) I had just started to work in gouache at that time, and his work had the the small scale, the intense colors and the narration of the gouache Persian miniatures at the Asian Museum. But Schwartz used perspective and contemporary scenes & symbols. It was exciting to see contemporary painting in gouache. The craftsmanship was the best I'd ever seen, and the narratives were so compelling it was difficult to leave one and move on to the other. More HERE
originally posted Sept. 15, 2004
 new Brassaï book
Charles at ionarts mentions the new Brassaï book. My husband just picked up a similar monograph. It was remaindered for $25 at CWLPB (I haven't had a chance to really study it yet - Bullfinch Press, 2000, 308 illustrations, 10" x 12".) It looks great: Paris after dark, dock workers, prostitutes, artists, landscapes, still-life, peeling paint, graffiti, plus sculptures and drawings. The man obviously loved life and loved to see.
originally posted Sept. 14, 2004
Where to Buy Art Books in San Francisco (June 17, 2004)
Does anyone remember when I said I was going to do a survey of the best places to buy art books in SF? It was months ago. My original plan was to personally visit every bookstore in SF and put the info into a spreadsheet... but it's too big a job for the likes of me. There are waaaay too many bookstores in SF (over 200.) So let's just call this an informal review: more here
My Favorite Art Books:
 I have a few hundred art books on my shelves, and I look at some of them every day. So I thought that maybe on days when I couldn't think of anything else to write, I'd tell you about one or two.
I'm starting off with a couple of books by Lewis Hyde that aren't, strictly speaking, art books. They're actually kinda hard to classify, which means you never know where you'll find them in the book store. I keep them with my art books because I keep reading them over and over again for inspiration and philosophical guidance on living the artist's life... more here
originally posted in august 2004
March 21,2005 (Monday, again) Amusing time-wasters for the busy (a meme)
I received this meme from Marja-Leena and, in keeping with its viral nature, I couldn't resist:
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
To be a book in a time when books are being simultaneously revered and obliterated is pretty much like being a human on the planet today (and most likely, at any point in history.) But I assume this refers to the intellectual outlaws in Bradbury's book who have memorized literary works so that someday, when it is safe to do so, they can print them again. So, with that in mind, I'd like to memorize "Mindfulness and Meaningful Work - Explorations in Right Livelihood", essays edited by Claude Whitmyer. It would be a good text to have at the renewal of culture.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
The wisteria vine in Clyde Edgerton's "Floatplane Notebooks."
The last book you bought is:
Well, I didn't purchase it, but yesterday I was staring out the window of the N-Judah as it headed down to the ocean, when a guy approached me and asked me if I liked to read. I answered in the affirmative, expecting him to offer me some kind of bible tract, but he handed me a copy of "Wicked, the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" by Gregory Maguire. He said, "This was a great book. I usually just leave these on the train when I'm done reading them, but you can have it if you'd like." So I accepted - I almost never read fiction, but this looks fun.
What are you currently reading?
"Visual Intelligence - How We Create What We See" by Donald D. Hoffman. It's a philosophy of seeing, with heavy emphasis on scientific experiments exploring the mechanics and physiology of sight. It was recommended by OldPro at Franklin Einspruch's Artblog.net.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Only five? Well, if you insist... these are my most thumbed, marked, tabbed, read and re-read books:
1. "Trickster Makes This World" by Lewis Hyde
2. "Conversations before the end of time - Dialogs on Art, Life & Spiritual Renewal" by Suzi Gablik
3. "Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend" (the unabridged original edition) by Maria Leach and Jerome Fried
4. "A Brief History of Everything" by Ken Wilber
5."Truth and Truthfulness" by Bernard Williams
Who are you going to pass this along to (3 persons) and why?
Pam Heyda, Harry Pariser, and Janet Rosen - because they're intelligent, creative people, I value their opinions, and they're good enough friends that they won't give me too hard a time about getting them into this.
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