Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Pink Abstraction

Once again, I'm seeing way more things lately than I have time to write about. One of the shows was Georgia O'Keeffe--Abstraction at my favorite museum, the Whitney. There can hardly be any doubt the Whitney was at least in part prompted to mount this show by the recent film with Joan Allen in the role of the artist.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe (1918, gelatin silver print)
--Image courtesy The Artist's Magazine.
There was a lot of discussion about her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. He championed her work in his gallery, and when she moved to New York, they quickly fell in love and became this sort of crazy Power Couple in the art scene. They kind of remind me of Matthew Barney and Björk. The press would eat up everything they did, basically. He took a series of nude photographs of her, many of which are on display in a dedicated museum gallery. The photographs cemented her image in the public consciousness, but also gave her a reputation, true or not, of being this kind of free-wheeling, free-thinking, Bohemian modern woman.

It's kind of a shame how fantastic and important an artist Georgia O'Keeffe is, because she's become so stigmatized for me. It's the little old ladies. I said to my friend who works there, "the little old ladies just looove O'Keeffe, don't they?" He was like, "yeah, that's all we've been getting lately."

When I showed up, I was lucky to find a gallery tour just beginning, so I started to listen. This docent was so fantastic that I followed her for her entire talk, which I almost never do. A lot of other people thought so, too; there were about thirty or thirty-five little old ladies who stayed with the docent and...one other guy and myself. Then there's this third guy, maybe in his early forties, who was like 225 pounds of muscle and made for a kind of amusing contrast. It was an olfactory experience, too, since each little old lady was surrounded a heavy cloud of some different sickly sweet, flowery perfume, and one of them was--audibly--passing gas. I find it so bizarre that the little old ladies worship O'Keeffe so readily since the woman was, essentially, painting her private parts.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Blue Line (1919, oil on canvas)
--Image courtesy The Art Database.
This one is probably not safe for work or for underaged readers: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe (1922, gelatin silver print). I absolutely love the irony of how difficult this image is to find. As practically impossible as it is to avoid seeing pornography on the internet at least twelve times a day, this photograph, which is indubitably a work of art, is sorely hidden behind pages and pages of Googling.

It's true that she was one of the only influential female artists to be recognized as such during her lifetime, which is empowering and must have been a great deal more so for women of the generation who grew up in the 1940s. If you're not paying attention, she's just painting nature, and with extraordinary use of color. Her work is without question pretty. In that sense, her work is very "safe" by today's standards, especially compared to someone like Damien Hirst, showing us the insides of animals. But I just thought it was fairly obvious to everyone that she was painting female genitalia. Doesn't that kind of stuff make little old ladies uncomfortable? I don't get it.

Although women are legally permitted to go topless anywhere that men are, and this is also clearly a work of art, I'd prefer to keep things clean on here: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe--Breasts (1919, gelatin silver print). Unfortunately, the work in the show that most alludes to this, Alligator Pears (1923, oil on board), is from a private collection and impossible to find online.

By the way, the museums are once again in sync with one another in this regard. The sexual subtext of the Vermeer exhibit has obvious parallels. Wassily Kandinsky's work went through an exploration of abstraction very similar to that of O'Keeffe at various points in her career. Perhaps I'm being unconsciously indoctrinated, myself. Her depictions of skulls (none of which are in this show) can't help but remind me of Sylvie Rosenthal, and some of her later work very much reminded me of Daniel Zeller's:
Black Place I (1944, oil on canvas)

In any case, I had the added challenge of setting aside my feelings about O'Keeffe's stigma in order to appreciate her work as fully as it deserves. I think I was fairly successful, despite my company in the galleries. I'd seen many of these pieces before, of course, but there's nothing like a full retrospective to clarify what an artist truly accomplished. As usual, the Whitney has done a fantastic job.

The first couple of galleries are devoted to her early studies in watercolor, where you can see how she was beginning to experiment with abstraction and develop the visual elements that would recur time and again throughout her career. Although extremely illustrative, I wasn't as impressed with the watercolors and early oils, so I'd like to begin a little further along.

Dark Abstraction (1924, oil on canvas). The docent kind of joked about the titles O'Keeffe gave her paintings, which said so very little about what the work was. This is a great example.
--This and following three images courtesy SoHo Art.
I'll have to say that I like these darker works far better than the lighter, pastel ones. They just feel so much more legitimate to me. There is always an element of Beauty in all works of art, even those that might be considered ugly. Ugly works of art in their own way question our perceptions and concepts of Beauty, by rejecting it. Ironically, I feel as if I trust the intentions of artworks more if they aren't trying to be "pretty." I also heard it said recently that, once it was commandeered and widely disseminated by industrial production around the beginning of the twentieth century, Beauty became no longer the province of Art.

That's the problem I think I have with her use of color: it's too pretty. In a way, I feel that it isn't challenging me as the viewer and feels cheap and too easy. For instance, I think it'd be fairly easy to see the problems with an evaluation of the historical significance of someone like Robert Mapplethorpe based solely on his floral still-lifes, considering how very shocking and disturbing his other work was. That's not to say Dark Abstraction is ugly in the slightest, quite the contrary. But with these works, she feels more like a real artist to me. Maybe that's pretentious of me.

Corn Dark (1924, oil on composition board)
I also consider her abstract work infinitely more interesting than her representational pieces. Perhaps that's another reason her work often felt little-old-ladylike to me and why I found this show so fantastic. When she got into the skulls and the imagery of the American West, there was the element of something dark--macabre I think is a little too strong a word--to balance out her style. With the flowers, rendered very realistically, it becomes a bit too prissy for me. Not that I can't find beauty in nature, of course, but that's exactly the point. To merely recreate that beauty on the canvas, it's little more than a pale copy. With her more abstract pieces, her artistry becomes tantamount. Here it's the work of art that's beautiful, in and of itself, not the subject being represented. Certainly her artistry comes through in all her different styles. But with the representational work, it's too muddled and obscured by the subject. With her abstract work, the painterly affects she achieved with line and color become much more prominent, and I think it makes the work in this show far more historically poignant.

Red and Pink (1925, oil on canvas)
This was one of the more interesting pieces on view. It's somewhat small, and it's actually one of a series of illustrations for a fabric manufacturer's advertising campaign. O'Keeffe here wasn't painting flowers, but a sheet of fabric with a floral pattern on it.

Pink Tulip (1925, oil on canvas)
This is exactly what I mean. The overwhelming pinkness and the frilly contours of the flower are just a bit too much for me to handle. I can't help but fear it's sexist of me to say such a thing, or at least bordering on it. But perhaps my embarrassing reaction to this painting is precisely the point. The art world was completely overrun by a whole lot of men, none of whom would have or could have painted this painting in a million years. It required a woman's voice for this type of imagery to come into existence. And while she was without question innovative in many ways that later (male) artists would emulate, she was also distinctive in ways they couldn't. She was going down a road where they couldn't follow.

Line and Curve (1927, oil on canvas)
--Image courtesy Happy Shadows.
Another one from this period, Abstraction White (1927, oil on canvas), was unfortunately impossible to find. I can imagine few more obvious precursors to Minimalism than these pieces, and this is nearly forty years earlier. I also really appreciate her work in black and white, because it offers an opportunity to ignore color for the moment and better discern what she was doing with line and field.

Abstraction Blue (1927, oil on canvas)
--Image courtesy Museum of Modern Art.
It's the way lines emerge, converge, diverge, and disappear again. Lines are always appearing out of fields, gradually changing their color or intensity, and threatening to dissolve back into complex fields of color. For O'Keeffe, lines don't just demarcate fields, they become part of the essence, the very body of the fields.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit--No. 3, No. IV, No. 5, and No. VI (all 1930, oil on canvas)
This was really one of the best things about this show. It's a series of paintings of one type of flower, a Jack-in-the-Pulpit (hence the titles), which shows with incredible clarity the process the artist went through in abstracting her subjects.
--Photo courtesy William Tanneberger.
With one simple series, it's as if she's training the viewer's eye to see in a very specific and peculiar way. Seldom has this been possible with any other artist outside of a retrospective of their work, after the fact. These were executed inside a single year.

Green Grey Abstraction (1931, oil on canvas)
--Image courtesy Art in Transit.
She and Stieglitz spent a lot of time apart because she loved to travel and he refused to leave New York City. Upon her return from one retreat, she discovered Stieglitz was having an affair. It devastated her. This dark, somber work is actually a portrait of Stieglitz. The fascinating thing this show illuminates, by focusing on her abstract work, is that she did virtually none of it for this entire decade. Abstraction was very hard on O'Keeffe; it took a lot out of her. It required her to bring to the surface and make manifest something very deep and personal inside her. Representational works were an escape, and in her depression, she found solace in them.

After this period, she began to realize that she could once again start to explore some of the principles of abstraction, but remain true to her interest in landscape and the natural world. This was the period that gave rise to works like Black Place I, above. They are representational, but frame the real world in an abstract manner. From there she continued in this direction, becoming more and more primary. Eventually, by the 1950s, she gets to a place that the Minimalists of a decade later should've been ashamed to not have acknowledged more vocally.

My Last Door (1954, oil on canvas)
--Image courtesy The Art Browser.
Black Door with Red (1954, oil on canvas)
--Image courtesy Antiques and the Arts.
They actually depicted her house and yard. These pieces so obviously prefigure the work of artists in the 1960s, it's quite astonishing. Not long after this, she started going blind. The docent pointed out that there could be no fate more cruel for a painter than this. Beethoven allegedly contemplated suicide. When her eyesight began to fade in the 1970s, she returned to simple watercolors which were easier for her eyes to handle. She lived another ten years, and in 1986, we lost one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

You have until January 17th to catch the Whitney's show. I must highly recommend it, whether you're a little old lady or not.


[EDIT: To all the porn-seekers who arrived here looking for Georgia's boobs, I hope you learned something.]


©2009, Ryan Witte

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Trumped--Queen

In recent years, things have tended to get worse with Trump, for the most part. It may be that his reputation precedes him with architects and he can't even get an audience with the stars. It may be that, from the start, he places so many restrictions on them--namely, the bottom line--that they refuse to compromise their integrity and back out. Or it may be that he's so difficult to work with that the architects who do go forward with these projects, even the truly talented ones, are prevented from doing anything of real merit. Whatever the explanation, a big part of Trump's responsibility is to produce an atmosphere that's conducive to creativity and excellent architecture. Clearly, he doesn't.

Las Vegas, Nevada

--Photo courtesy Daylife.
I'm willing to admit that the coppery hue of the glass does give this building a little bit of appropriate Vegas glamour, especially in sunset light. But from looking around at BW&A's other work, it becomes clear it wasn't a particularly original idea. They're a Las Vegas firm that mostly does incredibly bland, insipid work all around that city. They helped on the Mirage and Treasure Island. They also had a great opportunity in designing the towers for Caesar's Palace, which could have been a very interesting Postmodern study of ancient Rome: Which Caesar are we talking about and what architectural features categorized his reign? How did the Romans build upward? Instead their solution was to slap on a few awkwardly placed columns and pediments, showing they did very little homework. They're also responsible for the Paris. I can think of no less imaginative project than to simply recreate monuments from some other city. It's sort of like an art school student copying Rembrandt to perfect his or her technique: a questionably good learning tool, but not real work of any substance.

One of the best things BW&A did, in my opinion, never got built. It's a study for a Hilton hotel with a wonderfully paper-thin profile and sort of exploded, Pop, vaguely Edward Durrell Stony decorative motifs reinterpreted structurally. It's somewhat clever and appropriately kitschy for Vegas.


New Rochelle, New York

This is a wreck, I'm sorry. It's like they squashed the Empire State Building, then stole the crown from some different building from 1932 that was demolished for being too ugly, and slapped it onto the top. There may even be something mildly exploitative, if one asks why on earth New Rochelle would have allowed this thing to go up. Sadly at the expense of even great works of architecture, New Yorkers will fight developers to the bitter end (and usually do). The answer likely is that New Rochelle was just pleased to have such a prominent bit of development going up in their town. I'm imagining city government just rolling out the red carpet for Trump and allowing him to do whatever he wanted. And Trump's thinking "hmm, New Rochelle...now that's a town that'll let me get away with architectural murder. They need me."

So he goes with Lessard Group. They did a pair of towers next door to this called LeCount Square that are a bit better, but not by much. They designed a Ritz-Carlton for Stamford, Connecticut that looks like it might be fairly interesting. They're also putting up a building at 42-31 Union Street here in Queens which I'll confess is really not such a bad building, although it was necessary to tear down a delightful little free-standing house probably built around the 1930s or 1940s to do it.

Sunny Isles Beach, Florida

I suppose I could've cropped that panorama, but I decided I liked it, click it for larger.
As much as I could rave about Sieger Suarez for their previous Trump project, this one kind of makes me say, "oh, well." Don't get me wrong, these are some nice enough buildings, but apparently they only designed one of them and then built it three times. Jane Jacobs warned quite eloquently about this kind of visual repetition, and I think it's a bit lazy. Perhaps Sieger Suarez were getting bored and annoyed about working for Trump and convinced him the grouping would have solidity and force. That may be true, but this has none of the dynamic rigor of their earlier work for him.

Hollywood Beach, Florida

--Image courtesy Serge Kay.
I appreciate the elliptical footprint, I suppose, but it's not particularly original. The proportions are fat and unfriendly and show very little finesse. It almost looks like it was originally supposed to be about thirty stories higher, but they ran out of funding and capped it off. It's the kind of building that gets a less-than-flattering nickname from people who have to look at it every day. Swedroe's prolific work in cities all over the place goes from ultra-tacky and gaudy down to boring and uninspired, and all too often verges on downright ugly. He also blatantly ripped off Sieger Suarez to put up towers in Las Vegas in 2007 and 2008 almost identical to their Palace and Royale for Trump, except without any of the artistry.

And Zaha Hadid has built one building in the United States, one.

Trump Las Olas Beach Resort (2008)
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Oscar Garcia

The reserved praise I was able to bestow on Garcia did not include this monstrosity. I'm fairly certain I don't have to go into detail as to what this lacks. It looks like the administrative offices for a garbage treatment plant. As I said, in Garcia's defense, it is very possible that working with Trump saps the creative energy out of anyone with an imagination. But that's the whole problem. Garcia clearly put only the most minimal amount of effort into this project. He was probably just trying to get it finished so he could forget about it.

Jersey City, New Jersey

Despite the fact that I share a similar last name with one of the architects (and here I said it was uncommon), it makes my brain hurt just to look at this monotonous pile of crap. Looking through their work, I can kind of get what DTA is trying to do, but I think it seldom works for them. For some unimaginable, perverted reason, the entire construction history of this thing has been lovingly documented on New York Sixth. Any sense of artistry is totally absent from this project. It's not sleek enough to be Minimalist, and there's no detailing to make it remotely interesting. Its extreme, unforgiving verticality is entirely wasted by the numbingly conventional windows. The crown is a joke, showing not the slightest understanding of proportion and lacking any sense of drama whatsoever. I'm not the type to hate on New Jersey, quite the contrary, but Jersey City definitely didn't need this crime added to the rest. To add insult to injury, it's the tallest residential building in the state.

Philadelphia
William Alesker for Alesker & Dundon Architects (A&DA)

Here, instead of just the base being an inhospitable parking garage as in Jersey City, someone decided the entire building should look like a parking garage. This is all the more appalling considering what a glorious and prominent site on the Delaware River this occupies. A&DA has done some particularly awful things, mostly in the low-budget airport motel mold. Studying the brilliant work of Richard Meier all afternoon, I just could not bear to look through their depressing website anymore. Their "portfolio" is no selling point. There's no question in my mind they were chosen solely because they put in the lowest bid.

Having hit rock bottom, happily, I can end on a high note.

Chicago
I adore SOM, obviously, and not surprisingly, this tower is absolutely magnificent. I'm terribly glad Trump went with them for this, because just look at where it's sited:
Click that, it's pretty big.
I can't imagine many other places in the country more ideal for a tower than that spot in the bend of the river in one of our greatest cities. It's also one of the greatest architectural cities, on top of it. The tower is glorious. It's dramatic, contextual, responsive to its site, sleek and sculptural, and completely fascinating. Perhaps Trump is a nightmare for architects to work with, but SOM is a force all their own. They've been around much longer than Trump. They've consistently built the tallest, most beautiful, most widely recognized buildings all over the world. They have the best talent at their disposal. They've got integrity and clearly take their reputation very seriously. Furthermore, for a firm this big, presumably they can divide the labor between those with a creative spirit from the businesspeople who can handle a destructive force like Donald Trump and run rings around him. How could he ever hope to keep them down?

Stay tuned for the last hand.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Top Convertibles



I've said before that I am kind of steering away from stark Modernism in recent years. But I do think it still has its place at times. Here and there I do find people doing great work in this vein, one of them is Germany's Kati Meyer-Brühl. First, here's "Sunrise":

Click images for larger.
It's a bit hard-edged for my taste, personally, but surrounded by different kinds of pieces, it could work very nicely. Shown in some much brighter colors, it was a bit too much for me, but I really like it in the beige shown here. I think upholstery is very important with these kinds of pieces, which I've explained elsewhere.

"Lucky" is a very interesting line of seating, as well, pleasingly simple but with interesting textural qualities:

She's clothed this frame with a number of different upholstery treatments:


If you click that last one, you can see it's adorned with large upholstered flowers. I really love this idea in theory. Unfortunately, in execution, I think it becomes too overly feminine for all but somewhat limited situations. If done in a dark brown library red leather or paired with, say, a really thick, heavy, dark wooden coffee table, I definitely think it could work. But I think it'd have to be used carefully.

I think my favorite piece is "Mosspink," modern and sparse but playful and interesting at the same time:
The curvaceous asymmetry and the different colors give a welcoming, informal sensibility to an otherwise clearly modern piece. It works beautifully, but it has the same appeal even in a single color:


For anyone who happens to be looking for a sofabed and is consistently disturbed by the mostly awful selections there are to choose from, I definitely recommend checking out Brühl's convertible pieces. They're extremely suave and clearly a cut above the norm. Her "Roro" line is especially well done:

There are a number of different sectional pieces to choose, but most impressive is the way a single piece can be changed to provide so many different configurations.



We live in an era of flexible, adaptable spaces and are steering away from the single-use rooms of the homes of the twentieth century. It's surprising to me that there aren't more people doing things like this.

©2009, Ryan Witte