Culinary Delights

Going on right now at the Metropolitan Museum is a fantastic little show entitled Vermeer's Masterpiece: The Milkmaid. I highly recommend it. I was actually expecting a very stuffy, high-brow examination of this painting in historical context. Quite the contrary, this show is not only instructive, but intimate, personal, and downright funny. There are also somewhat complicated Feminist issues being alluded to by the discussion, but I'll let someone else travel down that bumpy road.

I had actually missed the retrospective of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) when it was going around the United States in the 1990s. If I remember correctly, I think it bypassed New York and the closest it got was the National Gallery in D.C. But that summer, a friend of mine and I were traveling all around Europe, and got to Amsterdam while the retrospective was in The Hague. We figured we were already close enough, and The Hague seemed an interesting side-trip, a bit off the beaten path. So we went for two days and a night so we could see the Vermeer. He didn't really do all that many paintings, I think it's something like thirty-five altogether, and I think the retrospective included pretty much all of them. It was quite wonderful. So I'd seen all these pieces and studied them somewhat closely before, but as I told another friend when the Met show opened, I don't think you can ever really see too much Dutch Renaissance.

Anyhow, a first section explains how milkmaids and kitchen workers in general had a reputation--or "were assigned" the reputation--for being ~ahem~ amorous. The similarity between a milkmaid milking a cow and...other activities...was not lost on these painters or viewers of the works. These paintings have enough subtly and not-so-subtly sexual imagery to make a 1970s advertising executive start foaming at the mouth.

Click that and look at her back, right above his left hand.

--Credit there in the image.

This is the earliest piece in the show.

Peter Wtewael, Kitchen Scene (1620s, oil on canvas)

Her putting the chicken on the spit is so blatantly obvious it's almost hard to believe this is a painting from the 1600s. It's practically obscene and totally hilarious. But then there's also his hand holding the jug, also quite suggestive of certain other...parts.

It's not all fun and games, however, here's one without as much suggestiveness:

Hendrick Sorgh, A Kitchen (ca. 1643, oil on wood)

Sorgh's piece is more just a reflection on the lives of these women, tending house for a wealthy middle-class family in the Netherlands. Text in the show also mentions how the middle-class grew to such prominence in the Netherlands during this time, and the lower-class house workers became a favored subject amongst painters, no doubt for its brutal realities. The woman at center does look off to the right, though. Evidently an older version of this work included a man entering with fish for sale, likely suggesting some erotic interlude. The posture and position of the woman on the left is remarkably similar to that of Vermeer's milkmaid.

Emanuel de Witte, Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft (1650, oil on wood)

De Witte (1616-1690) is surely one of my ancestors, or at least, descended from one common to me. Since the name is relatively uncommon, I get excited about things like this. Very likely, he and I could both trace our lineage back to the Wittisheim or Witternheim communes in Alsace. I guess it's only fitting then that I adore this piece in so many ways. There's another, almost identical view of the Oude Kerk by Hendrick van Vliet, but I thought it'd be better to support the work of my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-uncle twice removed instead (that's thirteen "greats"). I wish I could find a more similar view, but here's the Oude Kerk in a lovely photograph by Theo Jacobs:

But click on de Witte's piece. First of all, it's a beautifully precise architectural rendering, which I love, of course. The quality of the light foretells the work of Vermeer and painters like him. And I just had to laugh. The boys at the left are tagging the column with graffiti. It'd be awesome to visit and examine that column very, very carefully to see if there are still remnants of graffiti on that spot. Even better, there's a dog peeing on the column on the right. Again, the realism is astounding, as is the painter's sense of irreverence for his sacred architectural subject.

Back to the sex, we have this one:

Gerrit Dou, The Kitchen Maid (ca. 1650, oil on wood)

This is the original. The piece at the Met is an engraving of it done about a century later. Dou's kitchen maid is incredibly lusty. Her surroundings are just chock full of all these objects that, to a viewer in 1650, would have been completely, blatantly sexual and suggestive of parts of the body where your bathing suit covers. The orifice of the jug she's pouring and the carrots are particularly obvious. I'm going to take a guess that the open lantern is an invitation for the viewer to light her passions aflame. The look on her face is about as come-hither as it gets.

Some of the objects on view in this show made it especially fantastic. They show pottery almost identical in style and age to the ones in Vermeer's painting. Not the one on display at the Met, but very similar is this Westerwald stoneware jug:

Westerwald Stoneware Jug (ca. 1650-1700)

--Photo courtesy H. Paul Garland.

The one in Vermeer's scene and the one on display have a pewter lid and slightly different design, but it's clear these were quite common at the time. The Met also shows a couple of earthenware kitchen vessels remarkably similar to the ones in the painting. In other words, when the exhibition is described as putting the painting into a context, they really mean in every possible way. It's such a delightful work of curatorship by Walter Liedtke from the department of European paintings.

Vermeer was quite a bit more subtle when it comes to l'amour than some of the other, more crass examples in the show, but one little detail was quite interesting. It's a ceramic tile in the lower right hand corner of the painting with the figure of cupid on it. It's very easy to miss if you're not looking closely. To illustrate all the better, the Met had next to the kitchen vessels an example of such a tile:

Delft tile depicting cupid (ca. 1650-1700, tin-glazed pottery)

--Photo courtesy Essential Vermeer.

Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep (ca. 1657, oil on canvas)

Here Vermeer has already started to explore the subject of romance amongst household workers. The door left ajar and the position of the chair on the right indicates the recent departure of a gentleman caller. The maid is dreaming about the guy, of whom she's obviously quite fond. On her face is the remnant of a sort of peaceful smile.

Here it is, the painting touted as his "masterpiece":

Vermeer, The Milkmaid (1658, oil on canvas)

It really is a gorgeous painting. So much of Vermeer's work was masterful, however, I think I'd be hard-pressed to decide on a favorite. Nonetheless, it really is fantastic and the Met describes it as such because it was a transitional piece for Vermeer. The orifice of the milk jug has the same connotations here. The cupid tile is on the wall at bottom right, just next to that wooden box, which is a foot warmer. One might be tempted to wonder if these paintings weren't sort of like pin-ups. The only problem, really, is their intended audience. Presumably the consumer of such a piece would be an upper-middle class man with adulterous fantasies about the woman working in his kitchen. It leads to all kinds of creepy exploitative implications.

This is that guy's wife or potential girlfriend:

Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (ca. 1662, oil on canvas)

Here Vermeer switched from the servant of the house to the mistress of the house. This is an upper-middle class woman who the presumed owner of the painting would have courted. The map indicates worldliness. Here the pitcher isn't shown with its orifice on display, but rather concealed from view. Furthermore the bowl in which it sits is a symbol of purity. The faceted planes of the pitcher are rendered with these beautiful bands of reflected color. Those bands travel up her arm and are mirrored by the pleats in her collar, leading to her head, connecting her mindset directly to those symbols of purity. The headdress is the type of garment that would be worn during the morning toilette, alluding to a relatively intimate aspect of ordinary daily life. Another painting in the exhibition, A Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid (ca. 1651) by Gerard Ter Borch, who was a bit older but a contemporary of Vermeer's, describes a similar scene but with the tinge of vanity.

There are quite a few other interesting paintings in the show that really round out this examination. I've decided not to mention them, but they are definitely worth going to see. It's a very impressive little show.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Neck Sculpture

I had sort of told myself that I wouldn't be going too far in the direction of Fashion Design here. I figure there are enough people discussing it in alternately sappy and intelligent ways everywhere you look. Granted, jewelry is a different art form altogether, but it's definitely a close cousin. I think the recent show at the Metropolitan Museum deserves a post, however, because it's the work of Alexander Calder. I'm struck again by the synchronicity of this show chasing the tails of the one at the Whitney, but it was inspired by the donation of four of Calder's elaborate necklaces to the Met in 2006 and started out its tour at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Nonetheless, it complements the Whitney's show beautifully. The press release calls this the very first show focused solely on his jewelry. I'd say it was about time.

Bracelet (1948)

--All photos courtesy the Met.

He made his first jewelry at the age of eight, and continued throughout his career, but the majority of the pieces in the show are from the 1930s and '40s. The year of 1940 seems to have been especially prolific. They became extremely popular and sought-after, with good reason. His designs had to have been disgustingly hip in the '40s, the simpler pieces included, even if they hadn't been by a renowned artist.

Bracelet (1945) and Bracelet (1940)

Apparent in his jewelry, much more than in his sculpture, is how strongly influenced Calder was by Primitivism. A good number of the pieces have an obvious African tribal sensibility to them.

Necklace (1940)

The larger necklaces are so conceptual and huge, as the exhibition text notes, they make the wearer a living artwork herself, almost a work of performance art, and compete with her other garments for the spotlight.

Necklace (1940)

The most impressive pieces have protrusions that fully cantilever off the wearer's body into the surrounding personal space. From them dangle perfectly balanced metal bars that tilt and sway and swing whenever the person moves.

The Jealous Husband (1940)

I'd find it hard to believe guests at a cocktail party would be able to talk about anything other than the Calder necklace this woman was wearing.

Bracelet (1940)

The only thing I could possibly bring myself to find wrong with this exhibition is that I wish it were larger. It takes up only two relatively small rooms of the Modern wing. It's a good number of pieces, and so inspiring in its unique perspective on one of my favorite artists, it left me wanting more.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Re-Installation

I recently had the great opportunity to talk with the head of the Richard Lippold Foundation, who is restoring the brilliant sculpture in Walter Gropius' Pan Am Building.  I wasn't sure if it was even still there, but he said they would remove it "over his dead body."  It's really an incredible piece, and what occurred to me is that Lippold was really doing Installation Art before there even was such a thing.  Lippold's pieces weren't sculptures created for a certain application, they were fully determined by and designed around the architectural spaces where they would be placed.  No one was doing work like this in the 1950s.

The Pan Am piece is occasionally rumored to have started out titled The World, but this is incorrect.  It was only ever known as Flight, and it's beautiful, but it's gotten extremely dusty over the years.  The golden sphere at its center got fully blackened by patina and environmental circumstances in as little as five years.  They're meticulously cleaning it up to restore it to its glorious original beauty, and hopefully improving the lighting to showcase it to its best advantage.

His The Sun was the first piece by a living artist ever commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1956.

 

When you look at it in the context of the ancient Middle-Eastern rug designs in the room where it was intended to hang, it appears to be even more brilliant: capturing the same geometric precision and complexity, but in three dimensions.  

In around 1976, it was taken down to the National Air & Space Museum in DC, where I'm fairly certain I may have seen it as a young kid.  I do distinctly remember visiting that museum, but I was probably so overwhelmed in general that I have no specific memory of this piece.  In any case, it's also being completely restored according to Lippold's original drawings and plans, and will eventually be reinstalled at the Met, allegedly.

I'm actually kind of surprised that more people don't talk about Lippold, because his work was really astonishing in a lot of ways, but evidently he rejected the commercialism of the art world in his time and the fame that might accompany it.  That attitude may have contributed to his not being more widely discussed.

I also got to see one of New York's truly hidden treasures.  It's a Lippold piece called Winged Gamma inside the Park Avenue Atrium.  

The building is somewhat bland unfortunately, but got an overhaul by Edward Durrell Stone in 1981, when the piece was installed.  Stone carved a cavernous atrium out of the center of the building, what was originally an air shaft.  In this atrium hangs this sculpture, which is twenty stories high.  It's absolutely astonishing.

I still need to see the Lippold piece hanging over the bar in Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagrams Building, but that's for another post.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Mariners, Majesty, and Monsters

Next I went to see the retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), which was truly comprehensive at almost 150 works, and incredibly impressive.  Without doubt, Turner forms a talented link between early Romanticism and Impressionism, but I'll have to admit I was not as crazy about his later, impressionistic works.  Nonetheless, there were some amazing things to see.  

There was way too much visual information (I'd heard the show described as "exhausting"), so I didn't and won't concentrate as much on his watercolors and gouaches.  He had a real feel for them, though, and they really are some of the best watercolors I'd seen.  There's also a good number of sketches and studies that are interesting to get an impression of his process, but there's no reason to discuss those here.

The show is arranged chronologically, more or less, but the cool thing is that--since Turner switched focus somewhat markedly a few times during his career--it ends up being thematic, at the same time.

--Conway Castle (1800, pencil, watercolor, and gum Arabic on paper)

I will actually start with a watercolor, though.  This was where I started to get a feel for how so much of his work concerns this idea of the connection between built structures and their surrounding environment, and the personalities, the people who inhabit both.  He hadn't begun animating his scenes with people here yet, but he was obviously quite friendly with the aristocracy, because he painted a ton of the castles throughout the U.K.

Anyway, you may need to click this, and hopefully you can see it, but you have to follow those sharp horizontal lines formed by the choppy sea from right to left.  When your eye gets to shore, all those lines encounter curves, curves in the rock formation, and another on the hill with the small tree growing out of it.  They all lead your eye right back to the castle.  The darker clouds in the sky above that do the same thing.  It really makes the castle the star of this show, and forms a loving relationship between the building and the land it oversees.

--The Pass of Saint Gotthard (1804, oil on canvas)

The other thing he was interested in around this time is the confrontation between human achievements and the powerful forces of Nature.  There's another painting of Saint Gotthard, The Devil's Bridge, which much like this one, shows both our wondrous abilities to surmount daunting natural obstacles, but the delicate, almost spooky precariousness of it, as well.  The stone pathway shown here I'm sure is relatively safe, but I can't imagine what it must have taken to construct it, and it still appears like a route that would require some measure of courage.  It's at once beautiful and eery.  He's put figures in the foreground, too, it's an interesting place for them, since in these wide expanses, individuals could so easily get swallowed up; he allows them to be prominent.  What's interesting here, though--and I didn't say "people"--the figures are actually pack animals, their guides presumably behind them, out of frame.  How many of them are there?  Who are they?  Merchants?  Nomads?  We'll never know.

--Interior of Salisbury Cathedral, Looking towards the North Transept (1805, pencil and watercolor on paper)

I thought I'd add another watercolor, because he did do a few architectural studies.  They're astonishingly precise to the point of being almost mathematical.  I assume therefore these were done more for posterity or educational purposes than for pride or celebration like the castle scenes.

--The Shipwreck (1805, oil on canvas)

Here is that battle again between humans and Nature.  Nature was the victor this time, and it's the personalities of the survivors that become the focus.  Looking up close, his brushstrokes are somewhat loose.  He didn't go in with a tiny brush and render every individual eyelash.  But that's one of the things that I found impressive, because despite these broad strokes of color, he was still able to get a sense of expression and gesture.  You can really feel the fear and agony of this experience, and you go in closer, you get nothing more and yet, it's somehow still there.

--Sheerness as Seen from the Nore (1808, oil on canvas)

A little bit more calm, this one, but there's still a great tension.  First of all, the huge ship in the background is tied very intimately to the little sloop in the foreground.  The cloud formation forms this direct line from the sail of the sloop right down to the deck of the ship.  The ship's rigging is a rhythm of diagonal lines almost exactly parallel to the pitch of the smaller boat.  In contrast to all these sharp lines are the sweeping, swirling textures of the sea and sky, i.e. the elements, Nature again.  So small and large, we get a camaraderie amongst the seafaring and the precariousness of that life.  This story is nice enough, but then he adds the dinghy in the foreground, which allows for visible characters to give the whole thing personality.

--The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius, Restored (1816, oil on canvas)

I'm glad I was able to finally find such a large .jpg of this, so you can really see it, because I liked this one a lot.  He's started bringing in these sort of classical themes, which seems entirely different from the hard gritty realities of life on the sea, almost like he felt he needed a little fantasy in his life.  There's this fantastic relationship between the temple in the background and the revelers in the foreground, by way of that grouping of trees in the center.  So check this out:

And specifically this:

But my favorite is this one:

I'm not making this stuff up.  So there's a connection between the people and this glorious temple they've constructed (as it may have looked when it was first built), the majesty of human creativity.  There's a connection between the temple and the beauty of nature itself, and another between the revelers frolicking in nature being a part of their land.

--The Field of Waterloo (1818, oil on canvas)

I wish I could've found a larger file for this, because it really is a stunning work.  There was a gallery guide discussing this piece for a huge group of visitors.  I didn't listen to all that much of what she was saying because I was following my own pace.  But she said that victory has been achieved, you can see the fire blazing over to the right, and it should be a cause for celebration.  Perhaps the folks in the foreground are glad it's all over, but what she was drawing attention to is that sharp, ominous moonlight making the whole scene very eery.  She went on to point out that light, itself, becomes a major character in Turner's work, and was used very purposefully.

--Raby Castle, The Seat of the Earl of Darlington (1818, oil on canvas)

What a majestic expanse of the world this earl had at his disposal.  This is also unfortunately small, so clicking it probably won't help much.  But I loved the vantage Turner chose for this one.  Aside from the sheer impressiveness of that lush, wide open field, it's all about how the clearing in the trees at center so rhythmically punctuates the towers of the castle.  Again, there's a very strong connection between the Earl's residence and the land it oversees.  The castle becomes a smoothly integrated part of the landscape, and at one with it.

--The Bay of the Baiae, With Apollo and the Sibyl (1823, oil on canvas)

I wanted to show you this one because there's a little bunny in it!

Heehee.  Oh yes, I know, it's a very, very seeerious museum exhibition, so I'm not allowed to have any fun.

--The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 (1824, oil on canvas)

This was my favorite piece in the whole show.  It's absolutely unbelievable.  The placement of it on the wall is really superb.  The horizon line of the ocean is just about at eye level, so you're looking out over the water.  But this painting is eight and a half feet tall, so there's literally another seven feet of painting towering up over your head.  No jpg or reproduction could ever possibly do this any justice.  The scene goes back out over miles and miles of Cape Trafalgar. 

And that battleship.  That battleship has four stories of gundecks, 104 cannons in all.  It towers up over the water like a colossal floating fortress.  It's the HMS Victory launched in 1765, and it still exists as a museum in Portsmouth.  It's almost 230 feet long, displaces 3500 tons of water, and its tallest mast soars 205 feet into the air.  Its oak hull is two feet thick.  Just look at the stern of it:

It looks like a freaking office building.  Those captain's quarters are bigger than my whole apartment, and I mean a LOT bigger.  Can you tell I'm impressed?

Never before had I been so struck by the incredible power and size and fortitude of the Royal Navy.  It's no wonder they were so very proud of it, and no wonder they ruled the seas for so long.  And I owe that to Turner.  The statistics are astounding, but it's really the artist's ability to capture the awe-inspiring scale of this battle that allows me to feel its immediacy.  The painting is virtually in motion; you can practically smell the saltwater and burning wood, hear those giant canvas sails flapping in the breeze, the cheers of the British sailors.  I might even be able to recommend seeing the show for this piece, alone.

--Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829, oil on canvas)

As Ulysses sails away from the island of Cyclopes, he finally admits to Polyphemus that it was he who had gotten him drunk and blinded him.  Polyphemus is furious, and prays to his father, Poseidon, to produce dangerous seas for Ulysses' journey.

--Sunrise with Sea Monsters (1845, oil on canvas)

Turner had begun exploring not just classical themes, but mythological ones, as well, late in his career, but this one was really very strange.  All of his other work was so rooted down in hard reality, to the point of being a quite accurate record of historical events, as with his series on the burning of the houses of Parliament.  Even Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, hinting perhaps at Poseidon's supernatural powers, is still more or less a realistic reconstruction of a described event.  And then...sea monsters?  It's such an abstract piece as well, but the monster looks almost goofy.  It makes me wonder if Turner wasn't losing his mind in his old age.

Since it is so very large, one critic recommended going through the show quickly one time and then going back for a longer look at the pieces that really grabbed you.  My strategy was to concentrate on his oils and not spend an awfully long time on the watercolors, as I mentioned above.  It worked out well for me, and certainly you could do the opposite if you're a huge fan of watercolor.  In any case, this is another highly recommended show.

©2008, Ryan Witte

This Is Not a Museum Exhibition

This past Friday, I went over to see the Salvador Dali exhibit Painting and Film at the Museum of Modern Art.  It's really incredible, and I highly recommend it.

Right outside the show they were playing a Buster Keaton film, a scene from One Week.  

I just adore Buster Keaton.

I'd seen both L'Age d'or and Un chien Andalou while in film school, so I didn't spend too much time on those.  There were a couple of other incredible things to be seen, however.

I went chronologically backwards, and first saw Dali's video work, Chaos and Creation (1960).  

I'd never seen this one, but it was pretty funny because he was totally making fun of Piet Mondrian.  He has a sort of pig pen with various compartments, which viewed from above looks like a Mondrian painting.  Then there's pigs and mud and a girl covered with food or some kind of goop writhing around in it.  This one was getting those comical kind of matter-of-fact observations from the crowd ("It looks like one of those hamster balls."  "There's soapy water in it.") that indicate they have no idea what the hell they're watching.

Next was Warhol's screen test of him.  It's sort of an unfortunate viewing experience in a crowded gallery, and a shame that they don't appear to be showing that one in their movie theater (which, by the way, is a fantastic place to see films).  I'd seen a bunch of Warhol's films at a festival at Film Forum many years ago, when I worked there.  I had a number of religious experiences during that festival, but Warhol's screen tests were really mind-blowing.  For the first few minutes, you think "okay, the person's just sitting there, doing nothing.  So what?"  But as you sink deeper into the experience of it, you start to notice the most unbelievably subtle things about the person's facial expressions.  The very, very slightest raise of an eyebrow, twitch of the lip, or series of blinks begins to take on the most profound significance.  You realize in the end, you've seen much deeper into this person's soul, their real persona, precisely because they're sitting there doing nothing at all.  I think my favorite of those I saw was the one of Henry Geldzahler, former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

He starts playing with his eyebrows halfway through and is just a goofy character.

Then there's Dali's Impressions de la Haute Mongolie from 1975, where he looks every bit the "guru in drag" that Lennon did.  He also appears like he'd have been a hilarious person to be around.

They're also showing his dream sequence for Hitchcock's Spellbound.  

I feel like I have the vaguest recollection of knowing that the sequence was actually by Dali, himself, but it's been a very long time since I'd seen it.  Hitchcock said he was bored with the hazy, out-of-focus way dream sequences were often done, because he felt that dreams were in fact quite sharp and vivid, much like Dali's paintings.  The best thing about this, in my opinion, is they have the actual studio backdrop from the film shoot there, a giant black and white canvas hanging in the gallery.

It was very cool to see The Persistence of Memory in person.  

I can't recall if I've ever seen it, although it's definitely possible.  It's very small, there was a huge crowd of people around it, about eight deep, so there was really no way I was going to be able to interact with that painting.  To make matters worse, there was this couple standing directly in front of it, pretending to know ALL ABOUT what the whole thing means, pointing out all the symbolism and having an oh, so intelligent conversation about it, meanwhile blocking everyone else's view of the piece.

Regardless, there are so many great paintings that for sure I'd never seen, in person or otherwise, that I didn't necessarily need to spend an hour on Persistence.

I think what excited me most, did you know that he had collaborated with Walt Disney?  No, really, it's true!  Dali felt Disney was actually one of the few true Surrealists himself.  A few years after Fantasia, Disney wanted to do another similar film, but perhaps more serious.  So he began working with Dali on a segment for it called Destino in 1940.  

They only completed about 18 seconds of it until the project was abandoned perhaps due to lack of funds.  But then in 2003, a group of Disney animators got together and finished it, based on the original treatment.  It's playing at the show, and it's really quite creepy and beautiful.

Oh, and just to make the whole thing even more Surreal, I bumped into a total blast from my past, John Witherspoon, The Artist Formerly Known as Lahoma Van Zandt.

As a man, though.  Lahoma was the greatest emcee to ever grace the stage of Limelight's Disco2000 (which I told him, a little too enthusiastically), and allegedly his trip from Atlanta to New York with Larry Tee and RuPaul was the basis for To Wong Foo...  I hadn't seen him around in years and years, which is kind of sad because Lahoma was such a hoot.  Maybe she'll do a comeback tour.

©2008, Ryan Witte