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In the last episode of season 4 of the True Fiction Project, I am honored to welcome the amazing Anand Thakore. I've known Anand since we were in school together, and it has been incredible to see his journey and learn of his success as an Anglophone Poet and Hindustani Classical Musician. During this episode we reminisce on some of our school experiences and share stories. Then we dive in to learn what Anand is up to now, while he shares his latest projects. We hear an excerpt of music and a poem from Deepankar Khiwani, titled Cathedral. Anand shares his experience working with Deepankar and how their work together inspired him to start writing poetry again. The episode goes on to include three original pieces by Anand Thakore titled Sea Link, My Place and Mughal Sequence. Tune in for this entertaining episode! IN THIS EPISODE: [2:28] Anand shares about his journey with Sanskrit. [4:03] What was Anand's journey with music and poetry? [9:49] What is the style of contemporary Indian writing? [10:50] Anand shares his story about the creation of the Mughal Sequence. [13:50] What is the backstory behind some of his latest pieces? [16:30] How do poets utilize characters in their poetry? [18:42] Anand talks about the work he's done with Deepankar Khivani. [21:23] Anand shares the song and poem Cathedral by Deepankar Khivani. [22:51] We hear the poem Sea Link, by Anand Thakore. [25:09] We hear the poem My Place, by Anand Thakore [26:24] Why was Anand feeling like a sock puppet? [29:01] Anand shares more about the poem Mughal Sequence and then we hear an excerpt from it. KEY TAKEAWAYS: [12:51] Anand wants the American audience to understand that they are a trans culture, multicultural, multilingual people. Their themes are Indian, their language is English, their music can be Indian, they can also experience Western music in great depth. [14:49] Anand feels that poetry really has to embrace the moment and be very short and brief and make its statement in a short space. [16:32] Sometimes poets reveal themselves when they are pretending to be someone else. Fiction Credits: Poems below written and narrated by: Anand ThakoreSea Link My PlaceMughal SequenceCathedral Poem: Written by Deepankar Khiwani and narrated by Anand Thakore The Cathedral & John Connon School Anand's song at end of episode: Pt. Anand Thakore - Kabir Bhajan-Kuan thagva nagariya lutal ho (Juhu Hamara Festival Kaifi Azmi Park 2019)Anand's other works and information:De Kooning's Smile: Collected PoemsIn Praise of BoneElephant BathingSeven Deaths and Four ScrollsSelected Poems-1992-2012youtube interview and reading at book launchAnand Thakore introduces you to 'In Praise of Bone' ( video)_THE-KOH-I-NOOR, Poetry International , Anand ThakoreBIO: Born in Mumbai in 1971, Anand Thakore grew up in India and in the United Kingdom. He has spent most of his life in Mumbai. His published collections of poetry include In Praise of Bone (2023), Waking In December (2001), Elephant Bathing (2012), Mughal Sequence (2012), and Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls (2017). A Hindustani classical vocalist by training, he has devoted much of his life to the study, performance, composition and teaching of Hindustani vocal music. He received musical instruction for many years from Ustad Aslam Khan, Pandit Baban Haldankar and Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande. He is the founder of Harbour Line, a publishing collective, and of Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians. He holds an MA in English Literature and is the recipient of grants from The Ministry of Human Resource Development and The Charles Wallace India Trust. He lives in Mumbai and divides his time between writing, performances, and teaching music. His fourth collection of verse, entitled Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls, was recently shortlisted for The Jayadeva National Poetry Award. Anand Thakore's Facebook Anand Thakore's Website Poetry International Website Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/true-fiction-project/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
We can be many things in our lifetimes. Sometimes we discover passion at a later age. Jan shares the story of one such woman who was dripping canvases before Jackson Pollock and who is now being rediscovered. The story of artist Janet Sobol is one that will empower the possibilities in each of us.
Back in 1958, Robert Rauschenberg erased a De Kooning. Sometime since 1964, an Angry Girlfriend vandalized an Amazing Spider-Man #14. In 2023, we're assaulting your ears... On this episode, we discuss the First Artwork to Increase in Value After Being Vandalized. Was it "Erased de Kooning Drawing"? Was it the Angry Girlfriend Variant? What is vandalism? What is art? Oh... we get into it! Plus, we play I See What You Did There!Learn about some vandalized art: https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/news/art-vandalism-mona-lisa-van-gogh-famous-artworks-1234647552/Have a First for us? Or maybe a cloaca? Just wanna try to convince Kelly to play a video game? Email us at debutbuddies@gmail.comListen to Kelly and Chelsea's awesome horror movie podcast, Never Show the Monster.Get some sci-fi from Spaceboy Books.Get down with Michael J. O'Connor's music!Next time: First Book of the Bible... Genesis.
A conversation with Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Executive Director Elizabeth Smith about a new exhibit of Frankethaler's work currently on display at Gagosian's 24th Street gallery in New York. “Drawing within Nature: Paintings from the 1990s” features more than a dozen works by Frankenthaler made during a period when she took inspiration from the environment near her Connecticut studio on Long Island Sound. The conversation touches on Frankenthaler's life, career and this latest exhibit.https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2023/helen-frankenthaler-drawing-within-nature-paintings-from-the-1990s/https://www.frankenthalerfoundation.org/
Anyone familiar with Abstract Expressionism will tell you that this art movement was one where all the insiders or practitioners were more closely involved than many other art movements. Such close confines also made for some serious rivalries, too. But there were other artists who were more intimately involved with one another and their artistic process-- they were married, or were lovers. Such is the case with both Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning --both of whom married women who were incredible artists in their own right. Interestingly, and sadly, when these two spouses are mentioned, it's very rare that we are treated to sincere commentary just about their works of art. More often than not, we are, instead, given explanations of how these women measure up to their (admittedly more famous) husbands, and are relegated either to a supporting role, or just plain seen as not good enough in comparison. Why is it that such talented women continue to have their posthumous careers and stories marked and shaped by their husbands? Please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW our show on Apple Podcasts and FOLLOW on Spotify Sponsor ArtCurious for as little as $4 on Patreon Instagram / Facebook / YouTube SPONSORS: Lomi: Enjoy $50 off a Lomi Composter by visiting our link and using promo code ARTCURIOUS Mau: Upgrade your cat furniture stylishly and sustainably at maupets.com. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to sales@advertisecast.com or visit https://www.advertisecast.com/ArtCuriousPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The art market has been holding its breath for nearly three months. How will the global economy affect the art market in 2023? With the important London auctions now on view, we speak to Sotheby's Helena Newman, Phillips's Cheyenne Westphal, Christie's Keith Gill, Olivier Camu and Tessa Lord, as well as Sotheby's James Sevier to learn more about the upcoming lots including a $45 million Kandinsky on offer through restitution, a several Gerhard Richter abstract paintings at different price points, a very early work by Lucian Freud, a collection of diverse Surrealist talents assembled by a San Francisco "tech" couple and much more.
Recorded live, Monday, February, 20, 2023 / A multi generational conversation between Catherine Howe and Zachary Sitrin, with host, Sharon Butler, and guests Elizabeth Riggle, Peter Dudek, Elisabeth Condon, and Janice Caswell. We discuss what it means to spend a lifetime engaged in the solitary studio practice of painting. Episode notes: Brooklyn Rail Conversation with Rob Storr; Rob Storr's show at Kingfish Gallery in Buffalo; the story of the erased DeKooning; Roberta Smith's review of the Derrick Adams exhibition at the Flag Art Foundation. Read Two Coats of Paint here.
A couple stole a deKooning from the UAMA . Fun stuff! Thanks for tuning in! #handsinalottasoups --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-gooder-guys/message
In this episode, Lauren and Chris unpack the for-profit vs. non-profit debate. They share their personal experiences working at both commercial and public arts organizations, and debunk some myths perpetuated by academia and art school. Other topics include an explanation for the podcast's hiatus and the announcement of a series of episodes intended to help artists get their work into galleries. Stay tuned for those!Check out Lauren's Patreon at:https://www.patreon.com/laurenstarotCheck us out on Instagram at:@laurenpiemont@chrisclampart@avartclubEmail us at:avartclubpodcast@gmail.com
A legal battle launched by an elusive Sierra Vista man against the Cochise County Board of Supervisors and their appointment of one of their own as the justice of the peace for Precinct Five has finally come to an end.Support the show: https://www.myheraldreview.com/site/forms/subscription_services/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
“I had heard the tale and knew what to expect, but it was by far the most damaged painting I had seen. When it arrived, it came into the studio and the damage was almost all that you could see.” In 2017 Willem de Kooning's painting Woman-Ochre returned to the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) more than 30 years after it had been stolen off the gallery walls. Because the theft and subsequent treatment of the work had caused significant damage, the UAMA enlisted the Getty Museum and Getty Conservation Institute to help repair the painting. When the work arrived at the Getty in 2019, the damage was so extreme that it was all paintings conservator Laura Rivers could see; prominent cracks and flaking paint obscured the artwork itself. Rivers worked alongside her colleague Douglas MacLennan, a conservation scientist who used advanced analytic methods like X-ray fluorescence and microfade testing to inform their conservation work. The results of their multi-year collaboration are finally on view in the exhibition Conserving de Kooning: Theft and Recovery. In this episode, Getty Museum conservator Laura Rivers and Getty Conservation Institute scientist Douglas MacLennan discuss their work conserving Woman-Ochre, which is on display at the Getty Center through August 28, 2022. For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/podcast-damaged-de-kooning-on-display-at-last/ or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts To hear more about the theft and conservation process for Woman-Ochre, visit http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/podcast-the-recovery-and-conservation-of-a-stolen-de-kooning/ To learn more about the exhibition, visit https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/de_kooning/index.html
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Violets are Blue, an exhibition by New York-based artist Claire Seidl and her first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibit is comprised of 15 oil paintings, mostly on linen and a couple on canvas, painted during 2021 and the first part of 2022 with just a few included from 2018 to 2020 that resonate with the new paintings. The compositions created by the artist's layering of drawn lines with a range of subtle to bold gestural strokes will be readily recognized. However, the surprise in this new body of work is the broader, more vivid color palette that includes pinks, yellows, blues and reds. The three paintings incorporating pink are the largest in the presentation and would even make De Kooning take pause. The variations in hues are from soft pink infused with yellow, thinly applied as ground colors, with overlays of thin, bold, linear strokes of black in The Big Picture that create an upbeat nod to spring. Another painting with pink, Believe You Me, is moodier with combinations of red and pink, overlayed with thicker, bolder, wider strokes of black and white. The third painting, Take it From Me, uses darker pink with smudges of red, infused with yellow, to generate an orange glow. Black is also extensively used in this work, but in two contrasting ways: dark, fine lines and thin, translucent swaths of black that read as dark gray revealing the warmer colors below. The yellows are also very dynamic, ranging from large passages of sun-kissed lemon yellow in It Don't Mean A Thing, to thick, short smudges of less vibrant, ocher yellow on a neutralized grey-green ground, accented with thin vertical strokes of bright yellow in This Must be the Place; then, all the way to a darker painting derived from the surface-mixing of yellow with black that generates an olive green color with hints of bright yellow peeking through.
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Violets are Blue, an exhibition by New York-based artist Claire Seidl and her first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibit is comprised of 15 oil paintings, mostly on linen and a couple on canvas, painted during 2021 and the first part of 2022 with just a few included from 2018 to 2020 that resonate with the new paintings. The compositions created by the artist's layering of drawn lines with a range of subtle to bold gestural strokes will be readily recognized. However, the surprise in this new body of work is the broader, more vivid color palette that includes pinks, yellows, blues and reds. The three paintings incorporating pink are the largest in the presentation and would even make De Kooning take pause. The variations in hues are from soft pink infused with yellow, thinly applied as ground colors, with overlays of thin, bold, linear strokes of black in The Big Picture that create an upbeat nod to spring. Another painting with pink, Believe You Me, is moodier with combinations of red and pink, overlayed with thicker, bolder, wider strokes of black and white. The third painting, Take it From Me, uses darker pink with smudges of red, infused with yellow, to generate an orange glow. Black is also extensively used in this work, but in two contrasting ways: dark, fine lines and thin, translucent swaths of black that read as dark gray revealing the warmer colors below. The yellows are also very dynamic, ranging from large passages of sun-kissed lemon yellow in It Don't Mean A Thing, to thick, short smudges of less vibrant, ocher yellow on a neutralized grey-green ground, accented with thin vertical strokes of bright yellow in This Must be the Place; then, all the way to a darker painting derived from the surface-mixing of yellow with black that generates an olive green color with hints of bright yellow peeking through.
At the 2021 Plein Air Easton festival, Lon Brauer won the Judge's Choice award with his piece "Solitary Man". In today's episode, Tim and Marie sit down with Lon to talk about his unique style, and Tim works on getting his name correct. Lon Brauer is an American artist known for his work in figure and plein air landscape. He has a BFA from Washington University and an MFA from Fontbonne University – both in St. Louis, Missouri. Born in 1955 Brauer's esthetic leans toward early 20th Century Realism as well as the Golden Age of illustration. This coupled with a sprinkling of Abstract Expressionism results in a mash up of the traditional and the avant guard. Consider it a salad of Eakins, Henri, Wyeth, and DeKooning. Brauer's work is firmly rooted in figurative themes with a strong emphasis on drawing. His subject matter ranges from the conceptual to the concrete. In his work he develops a strong foundation composition on which to hang the paint. He feels that painting should be primarily about the paint itself as it describe subject. The subject of a painting is only a part of the story. The way the paint is applied and manipulated speaks to the making of an image and drives the narrative - the emotional narrative. Follow Lon Brauer: Official Site Facebook Instagram Twitter Follow Plein Air Easton: Official SiteFacebookInstagramYouTube To inquire about being a guest or sponsoring the Plein Air Easton Podcast, send us an email at info@pleinaireaston.com. This episode is sponsored by JFM Enterprises, providing distinctive ready-made and custom frames & mouldings to the trade since 1974. Music in this episode was generously provided by Blue Dot Sessions and Podington Bear.
This Fun Fact Friday is one of my favorites. It explains a little bit about the odd incident when a young Robert Rauschenberg knocked on Willem de Kooning's door and asked to erase one of his drawings. Learn more about Erased de Kooning created by Robert Rauschenberg with a little help from Jasper Johns.
Ryan sits down with two of his WT colleagues, Dr. Amy Von Lintel, Professor of Art History, and Dr. Bonnie Roos, Professor of English, who join him to discuss their new book, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West, forthcoming in February 2022 from Texas A&M University Press. The book seeks to “recenter” Abstract Expressionism by examining how this NYC-based movement flourished in the Texas Panhandle in the 1960s and ‘70s, as Amarillo art dealer Dord Fitz helped create a network of patrons and students for Elaine de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Jeanne Reynal (whose 1974 mosaic portrait of Nevelson is the image accompanying this episode). The book also explores how the work of these artists was shaped by their time in the “Middle American West”; considers the role of gender performance in defining and re-defining Ab Ex; and makes the case for why Reynal's mosaics and Nevelson's wall sculptures should be considered part of this painting-centric movement. The interview touches on what being a part of this artistic community meant for queer and Black artists in this deeply conservative region, and it ends with a consideration of Fitz's legacy here in the Panhandle. (Who, if anyone, is the modern-day Dord Fitz?) For more information on “The Women: Tops in Art,” the 1960 show that helped create the art scene explored in this book, see Von Lintel and Roos's article in the Fall/Winter 2021 edition of Woman's Art Journal, available for order here.
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists, Curators & Collectors
Curated by Graham Nickson and Rachel Rickert in collaboration with the artist's estate, the exhibition features works from both public and private collections as well as Anderson's gallery, Leigh Morse Fine Arts. Ranging from figurative works like Mrs. Suzy Peterson (1959) to the unfinished painting Three Nymphs on a Bluff left on his easel in 2015, the exhibition brings together a variety of genres, such as the human form, still life, portrait, landscape, and streetscape. Viewed together, the works attest to Anderson's lifelong interest in the interplay of tone, color, and light. Speaking with Jennifer Samet in 2002, Anderson explained, “When you look at nature from a distance, you can see how it all fits together. There is a harmony, and that is what interests me.” The presentation also demonstrates the singular approach that informed his artmaking, which defied trends such as Abstract Expressionism. Described in the New York Times as one of the “most prominent and admired painters to translate figurative art into a modern idiom,” Anderson had a profound interest in formalism and an appreciation for both Old and New Masters, especially Piero della Francesca, Diego Velázquez, and Edgar Degas, and his work was directly inspired by this knowledge of art history. For instance, Idyll 4 (2012) is one of four paintings inspired by Claude Poussin that depict pastoral bliss, a subject Anderson began exploring in the 1970s. Born in Detroit, Anderson earned an undergraduate degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, a Masters at Cranbrook Academy, and later studied briefly at the Art Students League in New York with Edwin Dickinson. Anderson taught at several prestigious schools, including Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale University, before serving as a distinguished professor of Brooklyn College. He received numerous awards, including the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tiffany Foundation. Anderson was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Anderson's work is represented in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fralin Art Museum, Palmer Museum of Art, and Delaware Art Museum, among others. This exhibition has been spearheaded by the artist's daughter, Jeanette Anderson Wallace, who manages the estate for the artist's family. Of the process of bringing together this collection of works to show the scope of Anderson's practice, she says “It has been particularly meaningful to bring out paintings that have not been seen by the public for many years, and introduce a new generation of painters, curators, and collectors to his work.” Co-curators Graham Nickson, Dean of the NYSS, and Rachel Rickert, Exhibitions Coordinator, comment “Lennart Anderson was a terrific painter; his works are pure obsession made palpable in paint. He mused constantly about tone, surface abstraction and measure. He painted things, people, and places in relationship. Anderson's work is never exactly what one expects. Perceptual works transcend observation and synthetic move into territory of belief. In this exhibition, we pull together a collective force of his slow works for the unacquainted to understand and revel in their profundity. Lennart was a great wit, so serious it allowed for surprises in his painting. He had an absolute passion for Degas and yet an attraction to DeKooning. He shaped his own vision with links to the great tradition from Roman times to present day. Lennart painted firmly and resolutely to the end. His warm shadow in the cool landscape is still with us.” NYSS will present a virtual lecture the evening of Tuesday, October 26, 2021 to delve into Anderson's work: “The Unexplained is Irresistible: A Discussion On the Work of Lennart Anderson with Jennifer Samet, Brian Schumacher, Amy Weiskopf & John Yau, Moderated by A'Dora Phillips.” The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue that pairs more than fifty full color reproductions of Anderson's work with essays by art historians Martica Sawin and Jennifer Samet and painters Susan Jane Walp and Paul Resika. It is available for pre-order now from New York Studio School and independent bookstores. An in-person catalogue launch will be hosted by the Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff Foundation on Saturday, November 13, 2021, a fitting location as Anderson, Resnick and Pasloff worked together in the Lower East Side and remained life-long friends. David Cohen, the publisher of artcritical, will moderate a conversation with curator Rachel Rickert and painters Kyle Staver and Steve Hicks. Following its presentation at the New York Studio School, the exhibition will travel to other venues, including the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts and the Southern Utah Museum of Art. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the American Macular Degeneration Foundation (AMDF), BNY Mellon, Center for Figurative Painting, Charina Foundation, Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund, Richard T. Spurzem, The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, Wolf Kahn | Emily Mason Foundation, private collectors, individuals, and anonymous patrons of the arts. Restoration for work in the Estate of Lennart Anderson has been generously donated by Simon Parkes Art Conservation in New York, NY. LINKS: https://nyss.org/exhibition/lennart-anderson-a-retrospective/ Submit Work I Like Your Work-The Works- Year Membership Exhibitions Studio Visit Artists I Like Your Work Podcast Instagram Observations on Applying to Juried Shows Studio Planner
“We hear the security guards talking to one another on the walkie-talkie, saying that there's a man on the line saying that he has a stolen painting. And I wish somebody could've seen us, because we just stopped our conversation and Jill's eyes got big, and she said, ‘Oh, my gosh, are we gonna remember this moment for the rest of our lives.'” On the day after Thanksgiving in 1985, two thieves casually entered the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA). They strolled out minutes later with Willem de Kooning's painting Woman-Ochre. Without security cameras or solid leads, the trail to find the stolen painting quickly went cold. In 2017, however, the artwork turned up in an unlikely place: a small antique shop in Silver City, New Mexico. After more than 30 years, the work was finally returned to the UAMA, but it was badly damaged, due to the way it was torn from its frame during the heist and how it was subsequently stored and handled. The UAMA turned to the Getty Museum and Conservation Institute to help conserve the painting. In this episode, UAMA curator of exhibitions Olivia Miller and Getty Museum senior conservator of paintings Ulrich Birkmaier discuss Woman-Ochre's theft, recovery, and conservation, as well as its place in de Kooning's oeuvre and the UAMA's collection. The treatment is still in progress, and the restored artwork is scheduled to be on view at the Getty Center from June 7 to August 28, 2022. For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/podcast-the-recovery-and-conservation-of-a-stolen-de-kooning/ or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts/
Alex Reyes is a painter, sculptor, musician, and much more. We crash his Brooklyn studio to discuss his work, his influences which include Basquiat, Pollock, De Kooning and how memory and loss play a significant role in his work.
“Chaïm Soutine / Willem de Kooning“La peinture incarnéeau Musée de l'Orangerie, Parisdu 15 septembre 2021 au 10 janvier 2022Interview de Claire Bernardi, conservatrice en chef au musée d'Orsay et co-commissaire de l'exposition,par Anne-Frédérique Fer, à Paris, le 13 septembre 2021, durée 20'38.© FranceFineArt.Communiqué de presse Commissariat :Claire Bernardi, conservatrice en chef au musée d'OrsaySimonetta Fraquelli, conservatrice indépendante et historienne de l'art, commissaire pour la Fondation BarnesLe Musée de l'Orangerie organise une exposition faisant dialoguer les oeuvres de Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), peintre de l'École de Paris d'origine russe (actuelle Biélorussie) et de Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), expressionniste abstrait américain d'origine néerlandaise. Cette exposition s'attachera plus spécifiquement à explorer l'impact de la peinture de Soutine sur la vision picturale du peintre américain.Soutine a en effet marqué la génération des peintres d'après-guerre par la force expressive de sa peinture et sa figure d' »artiste maudit », aux prises avec les vicissitudes et les excès de la bohème parisienne. Son oeuvre a été particulièrement visible aux États-Unis entre les années 1930 et 1950, moment oùl'artiste figuratif de tradition européenne est relu à l'aune des théories artistiques nouvelles. La peinture gestuelle et l'empâtement prononcé des toiles de Soutine conduisent critiques et commissaires d'exposition à le proclamer « prophète », héraut de l'expressionnisme abstrait américain.C'est précisément au tournant des années 1950 que Willem de Kooning entame le chantier pictural des “ Woman “ toiles dans lesquelles se construit un expressionnisme singulier, entre figuration et abstraction.L'élaboration de ce nouveau langage correspond au moment où le peintre convoque l'univers artistique de Chaïm Soutine et s'y confronte. De Kooning découvre les tableaux de son prédécesseur dès les années 1930, puis à la rétrospective qui consacre le peintre au Museum of Modern Art à New York en 1950. Il sera particulièrement marqué ensuite par la présentation des toiles de Soutine dans les collections de la Fondation Barnes de Philadelphie, oùil se rend avec sa femme Elaine en juin 1952.Mieux que tout autre artiste de sa génération, de Kooning a su déceler la tension entre les deux pôles apparemment opposés de l'oeuvre de Soutine : une recherche de structure doublée d'un rapport passionné à l'histoire de l'art, et une tendance prononcée à l'informel.L'oeuvre de Soutine devient alors une référence permanente pour l'artiste américain. De Kooning, qui cherche à dégager sa peinture de l'antagonisme art figuratif / art abstrait en élaborant une “ troisième voie “ originale, trouve dans l'art de Soutine une légitimation de sa propre pratique.L'exposition mettra en dialogue les univers singuliers de ces deux artistes au travers d'une cinquantaine d'œuvres articulées autour des grands moments de la réception de l'oeuvre de Soutine par de Kooning, et abordant quelques thématiques essentielles : la tension entre la figure et l'informe, la peinture de la “ chair “, la pratique picturale “ gestuelle “ des deux artistes.Cette proposition, la première sur ce sujet, s'inscrit dans la ligne de programmation d'expositions temporaires que porte le musée de l'Orangerie autour de sa collection, notamment autour de celle de Paul Guillaume à la suite d'Apollinaire. Le regard du poète (2016), de Dada Africa, sources et influences extra-occidentales (2017), de Giorgio de Chirico. La peinture métaphysique (2020) et rejoint la question de la réception américaine, faisant suite à Nymphéas. L'abstraction américaine et le dernier Monet (2018).L'exposition est organisée conjointement avec la Fondation Barnes de Philadelphie, qui possède un nombre important d'oeuvres de Soutine. Elles ont été réunies par le docteur Barnes sur les conseils de Paul Guillaume, qui est à l'origine de la collection du musée de l'Orangerie.Pour accompagner l'exposition Chaïm Soutine / Willem de Kooning. La peinture incarnée, un catalogue est disponible en coédition Musée d'Orsay / Hazan. Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.
Susumu Kamijo is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He currently has a solo show on view in Tokyo, Japan at Maki Gallery titled Beyond The Hills, and is also in a group show at Venus over Manhattan in NYC. We discuss his moving to the US at age 16, why talking to writers is better than painters, how poodles entered the work and how they have changed, mixing opposites, the poodle as an entranceway to his world, the intensity of De Kooning, feeling like your work is dorky, the absurdity of choosing to paint poodles, feeling the capacity to encompass the fucked up part of you, performing comedy in the past as a challenge, painting as an expression of the subconscious, letting unexpected things happen, finding joy in the studio, using meditation but trying not to be cringe about it, the earlier years, the importance of friends in his development, having faith that he would be able to make it as an artist, finding inspiration in other peoples death, his mentor relationship with Denzil Hurley, and a story about Susumu's MFA experience.Susumu Kamijo - Beyond The Hills, Maki Galleryhttps://www.makigallery.com/exhibitions_en/4910/https://www.jackhanley.com/artists/susumu-kamijoAkira Kurosawa - Dreamshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcXk_PLrHp8In Memoriam – Denzil Hurleyhttps://art.washington.edu/news/2021/07/01/memoriam-denzil-hurley
La extraña historia del paradero de la obra de uno de los máximos artistas del movimiento expresionista abstracto Síguenos: https://www.instagram.com/stacagadopodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/stacagadopodcast/
Episode No. 496 features curator Kelly Baum and art historian Judith Zilczer. Along with Randall Griffey, Baum is the co-curator of the retrospective exhibition "Alice Neel: People Come First" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition is on view through August 1. It presents Neel as a radical portraitist whose work most often foregrounded humanism and social justice. The exhibition catalogue was published by the Met. Indiebound and Amazon offer it for around $50. On the second segment, Judith Zilczer discusses Willem de Kooning's engagement with Chaim Soutine's work on the occasion of "Soutine/de Kooning: Conversations in Paint" at the Barnes Foundation. Zilczer contributed an essay to the catalogue, which was published by the Barnes in association with the Musees d'Orsay and l'Orangerie in Paris, and Paul Holberton Publishing. The exhibition was curated by Simonetta Fraquelli and Claire Bernardi. It is on view in Philadelphia through August 8.
We visit the Phillips Collection, this country’s first modern art museum, which has reopened for its 100th anniversary with an exhibition highlighting the collection’s great diversity. After a year-long closing due to COVID precautions, the museum in Washington DC has reopened to visitors. In addition to great modernist masters Cezanne, Bonnard, De Kooning, Rothko, etc., […]
And we are back! We are talking art and it feels good! We talk about the famous collaboration between Robert Rauschenberg & Willem De Kooning Thanks for listening !!!!!!! #handsinalottasoups Let us know what you think! gooderguysradio@gmail.com https://www.instagram.com/gooderguysradio/ https://www.facebook.com/GooderGuys https://twitter.com/GooderGuysRadio --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-gooder-guys/message
One night in 1953, Robert Rauschenberg knocked on the door of Willem de Kooning's house. He held a freshly purchased bottle of Jack Daniels in his nervous hands, and a concept in his head so fiendishly ingenious that it's execution would reverberate around the art world and help turn Rauschenberg into an icon himself. Kunst Please is a micro-dose of modern art history. Tune in every fortnight for an exploration into the more unexpected side of modern art, featuring stories of the famous and the infamous, the weird and the wonderful, the unheard, the cult, the criminally overlooked and the criminally insane. Created and produced by Jonathan Heath. Follow the gallery space on Instagram @kunstplease
Today's discussion is about…two African Americans whose undeniable talent changed the comics industry forever. George Herriman (1880-1944) created "Krazy Kat" (1913-1944), the most revered strip ever made. When "The Comics Journal" chose its greatest comics of the 20th Century, Herriman's strip was #1. There is arguably no comic work as canonical as Krazy Kat. "The comic counted E.E. Cummings, Picasso and De Kooning among its fans." And Matt Baker (1921-1959), who created the endlessly imitated "good girl" style in comics, like "Phantom Lady". He created the first black hero/superhero, "Voodah" (1945) and was the artist on the first graphic novel ever made, "It Rhymes with Lust" (1950). We'll discuss their groundbreaking work and put their lives into historical context to truly understand the struggle they must have had during Jim Crow era America. Their stories are not well known, but they should be...because of...you know...racism. REFERENCES For links to everything we mention on the show, visit: www.7robots.com/podcast/ LINKS
For this week's fun fact friday, learn about how Robert Rauschenberg created a famous work of art simply by erasing another artist's drawing. The piece is called "Erased de Kooning Drawing" from 1953. This work is often misunderstood as an act of aggression or disrespect as Rauschenberg figuratively and quite literally erases Willem de Kooning's work, but actually this work was meant to be a celebration of de Kooning. Rauschenberg knew that the piece would only work if he were erasing a significant work by a great artist. De Kooning reluctantly agreed and gave a drawing for the younger artist to erase. Over the course of 2 months, Rauschenberg meticulously wore through numerous erasers until all that was left were a few smudges on an otherwise blank paper. Ultimately, we will never know what was originally on that paper, but de Kooning indicated it was a high quality piece and something he would miss. He felt that was important to the project. Now viewers are left to imagine what great drawing was once on that paper. The erased drawing creates an an absence or a loss that is somehow more empty than a new white page and in doing so it has elevated de Kooning's drawing to a space of legend freed from the page to now live inside the viewer's imagination.
Sheila and Tom discuss the the careers and late paintings of artists who painted to the ends of their long lives: Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Willem de Kooning, Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois. Originally broadcast November21, 2020.
Curator Samantha Friedman joins us to discuss a new exhibit at MoMA called Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury, which opens November 1. The exhibition features almost 80 rare drawings by well-known artists, including Louise Bourgeois, De Kooning, Giacometti, and Matisse and places them in conversation with drawings by other artists working during the same time period in the aftermath of WWII, like Nigerian artist Uche Okeke, Brazillian painter Alfredo Volpi, and Korean artist Joong Seop Lee.
Ghiora Aharoni is an artist and designer whose work is centrally premised on humankind’s interconnected existence, as well as a nonlinear concept of time. Descriptively, his work is at the “intersection of art, design and architecture.” Experientially, his work is the soul’s conscious expansiveness across time. Aharoni’s own faith is foundational to his creativity, but his explorations and creations are not limited to any one religious belief, culture or medium. Instead, his artwork frequently expresses an interest in exploring dualities, such as the intersection of religion and science, and the intertwined relationships of seemingly disparate cultures. Much of his work involves text, traditional objects or symbols—such as cultural artifacts or sacred texts—that have been recontextualized and imbued with meaning that asks the viewer to question or reconsider their conventional social/cultural significance. An Israeli-born descendent of Yemeni Jews, Aharoni grew up near Tel Aviv, and his grandfather introduced him to the central texts of Jewish mysticism at an early age. At 21, he left Israel to study at the City University of New York where he graduated summa cum laude from the Spitzer School of Architecture, and later went on to receive a Master of Architecture from Yale University. In 2004, he opened Ghiora Aharoni Design Studio to “engage with all the disciplines” he adores. The studio’s work encompasses interior design, art, product design and museum exhibitions. The design principles that govern his studio are “guided by the tenets of gesamtkunstwerk—engaging multiple disciplines to create a total work of art.” Every year, Aharoni, takes a month-long sabbatical. He always travels with an amulet in his bag that belonged to his great-grandmother, and usually goes to India, where spiritual practices co-exist with architecture in a similar juxtaposition as his art and design. In India, he says the ancient resides within the urban center and one can time travel by walking a few hundred yards. "In much of Aharoni’s work," it has been said, "the unification of multiple narratives offers an exquisite commentary on the potential of human life in a celestial universe – whether it be Indian and Jewish, divinity and humanity, or the natural and industrial materials integrated in his design work in the form of walnut and steel. To paraphrase Aharoni, ultimately there is an expansive vitality, which springs from intercultural co-existence, and an unending dynamic process that resonates in both divine and mortal existence." Aharoni’s work is in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Center in Paris, The Vatican Library in Rome, The Beit Hatfutsot Museum in Tel Aviv, The Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York—as well as numerous private collections in North America, Europe, Israel and India. In February of this year, Aharoni was the Artist-in-Residence at the India Art Fair in Delhi, and his sculptures were on view at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam from March through August 2019 in the exhibition Kabbalah: The Art of Jewish Mysticism. In February 2019 he was invited to present a solo artist project at the India Art Fair in New Delhi that explored cultural interconnectivity via sculptures and works on paper, some of which included Hindru© (a phrase-based melding of Hindi and Urdu he created in 2016). In 2018, his work was exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, Austria. From November 2017 through October 2018, Aharoni’s solo exhibition, The Road to Sanchi, was on view at the Rubin Museum in New York. Aharoni traveled to four different pilgrimage sites (Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi, and Jewish) throughout India to create the art for The Road to Sanchi, which invite viewers “to question our relationship to time and imagine a world where past, present, and future can exist simultaneously.” The sacred sites are never seen so the work becomes a pilgrimage for the viewer, an expression of India’s history of cultural plurality, a co-mingling of sacred and secular, and a focus on the act and action of pilgrimage for the benefit of one’s future self. In 2017, his work was selected for the Jerusalem Biennale. Aharoni also added two works to his eight-part series Menorah Project, the Antiochus Scroll Menorah and Paradesi Menorah. The work represents the core values of respect and advocacy, intercultural understanding and the “narrative of victory over oppression” which Aharoni characterizes as “our obligation to defend cultural freedom and to engender light in a time of darkness,” as well as, “the responsibility of the individual in the role of social vigilance.” In 2016 in conjunction with the Biennale, two of his sculptures were exhibited in Divided Waters, a group exhibition of international contemporary art at the Palazzo Fontana in Venice, Italy, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. In the spring of 2016, Aharoni was commissioned to create a public art installation—a series of stainless steel sculptures of Hebrabic/Arabrew© (a combination of Hebrew and Arabic that he conceived in 1999 while at Yale)—at the New York Live Arts Performance Center in Chelsea. In May of 2012, he was commissioned to create a large-scale art installation at the 14thStreet Y in Manhattan of Hebrabic/Arabrew© entitled, The Divine Domesticated. Four panels from the installation were permanently installed that fall in the theater lobby of the Y. Missives, Aharoni’s first solo exhibition in India, opened the Fall 2013 season at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, India. Inspired by the discovery of a trove of his mother’s love letters written as an adolescent in Israel, the artworks and installations included collages with reproductions of his mother’s letters and his drawings, installations of vintage photographs with the letters, and antique Phulkaris embroidered with snippets of her letters. The exhibition reflects the confluence/fluidity of time, universal notions of desire and collective memory, as well as his love for India. Aharoni’s designs and commissioned pieces are also in numerous private collections. Since establishing his studio, Aharoni has designed many residential and commercial projects in New York—ranging from the DeKooning residence and a duplex penthouse in a landmark building in the West Village to a storefront studio/performance space in Williamsburg and the offices of an art law firm on 57th Street. Aharoni’s work has been published internationally in books—most recently in The Word is Art from Thames & Hudson—as well as newspapers, journals and magazines including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Elle Decor U.K., L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Architectural Digest Spain, Art India, IDEAT, Elle Decor Italia and New York Magazine. His essay proposing the displacement of Jerusalem’s monuments was included in the book “The Next Jerusalem.” Prior to opening his own studio, Aharoni worked at several distinguished architectural firms including Polshek Partnership [now known as Ennead Architects] and Studio Daniel Libeskind. While at Polshek Partnership, he worked on the design for Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall; the space planning and design of The American Museum of Natural History’s subterranean entrance and public spaces; as well as the space planning of The New York Botanical Garden’s Museum Building. His design work for Studio Daniel Libeskind included the competition submission for The Ground Zero World Trade Center Design Study, and the façade design for Hyundai Development Company, Seoul, Korea. In addition, Aharoni was on the winning design competition team with Zaha Hadid and Arata Isozaki for the building and urban planning of Milan, Italy’s Fiera Convention Center. Of his designs and art, one sculpture that is particularly stirring, timeless and relevant today is “Parting Waters”— a sculpture that Aharoni completed a few years ago just before Passover. It was inspired by the biblical story of Exodus and the current-day Syrian and African refugees. Descriptively, “Parting Waters” is composed of wooden crates containing slender-necked beakers used to test if milk was diluted with water in the mid-20th century. Had the beakers been filled with diluted milk, the water would have risen into the necks, forming columns of water—an allegory of Moses’ parting of the Red Sea, representing both the Israelites’ and contemporary refugees’ journey, “the universal human desire for freedom and the leap into the unknown.” Experientially, Parting Waters transports the viewer’s soul into that compassionate space bridging past, present and future where faith is foundational to creation. His work will be exhibited later this year in the Asia Society Triennial in New York. Join us in conversation with this gifted creator of sacred containers and spaces for the divine!
CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN PARIS. Damien Hirst discusses his career and the new paintings on beauty, life and death that he plans to exhibit at Fondation Cartier.
La vida i l’obra dels artistes contemporanis apareix referenciada en moltes cançons. Fins i tot, n’hi ha de titulades amb el nom propi dels creadors. Warhol n’és un dels més coneguts, producte de sí mateix, que inspirà Bowie i molts altres compositors. Els surrealistes (Dalí, Ernst, Magritte) són omnipresents en la música popular com també els expressionistes americans (Manic Street Preachers dediquen un tema a l’obra de De Kooning). L’art outsider fascina a Sufjan Stevens, que pren l’obra de Royal Robertson per la coberta i l’interior del seu álbum “The Age of Adz”, tal i com ja havia fet amb l’obra de Henry Darger, que inspirà una cançó anterior “The Vivian Girls Are Visited In The Night”. A TЯA-TЯA! vos proposam una selecció possible de temes en aquest sentit. Tot això en forma de recorregut sonor ho teniu a un play de distància:
WILLEM DE KOONING raccontato da Costantino D'Orazio
Ciclos de conferencias: Cuatro ciudades. Episodios de la historia cultural del siglo XX en Occidente (III). Nueva York 1945-1968: Pollock, Jacobs, Dylan. Luis Fernández-Galiano. La victoria aliada en la II Guerra Mundial trasladó el liderazgo cultural de la Europa devastada al nuevo continente, y Nueva York reemplazó a París como capital de la vanguardia artística, muchos de cuyos protagonistas –Duchamp, Kandinsky o Mondrian– habían buscado refugio al otro lado del Atlántico. Agotada la Escuela de París, el expresionismo abstracto de Pollock o De Kooning se convirtió en la referencia clave de exaltación de la libertad artística en la pugna ideológica de la Guerra Fría. Los intelectuales transitaron de Marx a Freud, y los arquitectos convirtieron la modernidad socialmente comprometida en un estilo internacional de refinada abstracción, promovido por el MoMA y Philip Johnson, y consagrado con obras como la Lever House de Bunshaft o el Seagram de Mies van der Rohe. Por su parte, Robert Moses transformaba la ciudad con grandes infraestructuras y autopistas, amenazando el delicado tejido urbano de barrios como Greenwich Village, defendido entonces por el activismo de la periodista Jane Jacobs, que se convertiría en un símbolo de la resistencia frente al urbanismo del capital, la ingeniería y el automóvil. Ese mismo barrio bohemio incubaría la cultura alternativa de la generación Beat y de músicos como Bob Dylan, que pondrían las semillas de la disidencia, del flower power, y de la oposición a la Guerra de Vietnam. La fecha mítica de 1968 marcaría el tránsito de una Nueva York en crisis a la costa californiana, donde surgiría una poderosa contracultura juvenil, alimentada a la vez por las transformaciones de la vida cotidiana y por la fascinación con una tecnología que el año siguiente llevó al hombre a la Luna. Explore en www.march.es/conferencias/anteriores el archivo completo de Conferencias en la Fundación Juan March: casi 3.000 conferencias, disponibles en audio, impartidas desde 1975.
Fiona and I discuss the relationship between primitive mark-making and charcoal drawing, art history, the notion of 'shy painting', making sense of chaos, finding balance between acceptance and criticality, Picasso, poetry, Disney cartoons, Van Gogh's sunflowers, Rauschenberg, De Kooning and using drawings as 'spirit guides'. Cover image: 'Figure 1g'. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2014, 72 x 51 in / 183 x 129.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the artist. Intro & Outro Music: www.hooksounds.com
After a small town, middle class couple passed away, it was discovered they were in possession of a stolen De Kooning painting worth over 100 million dollars. Where did they get it? Were they secret international heisters hiding in suburbia? It's a really intriguing story we just had to cover. And as always we have some great heist news involving a stolen church roof, what?!
This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get a FREE month of unlimited access to over 9,000 lectures presented by engaging, award-winning experts on everything from art to physics, interior design and world languages. Sign up today at thegreatcoursesplus.com/ART. This episode is also sponsored by HelloFresh. For $30 off your first box of delicious, fresh ingredients and easy step-by-step recipes, please visit HelloFresh.com/artcurious30 and enter the promo code "artcurious30." Anyone familiar with Abstract Expressionism will tell you that this art movement was one where all the insiders or practitioners were more closely involved than many other art movements. Such close confines also made for some serious rivalries, too. But there were other artists who were more intimately involved with one another and their artistic process-- they were married, or were lovers. Such is the case with both Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning --both of whom married women who were incredible artists in their own right. Interestingly, and sadly, when these two spouses are mentioned, it’s very rare that we are treated to sincere commentary just about their works of art. More often than not, we are, instead, given explanations of how these women measure up to their (admittedly more famous) husbands, and are relegated either to a supporting role, or just plain seen as not good enough in comparison. Why is it that such talented women continue to have their posthumous careers and stories marked and shaped by their husbands? Please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW our show on Apple Podcasts! Twitter / Facebook/ Instagram Episode Credits Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Social media assistance by Emily Crockett. Additional research and writing for this episode by Patricia Gomes. ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Additional music credits "Song Sparrow" by Chad Crouch is licensed under BY-NC 3.0; "Converging Lines" by David Hilowitz is licensed under BY-NC 4.0; "Today, Tomorrow, & The Sun Rising" by Julie Maxwell is licensed under BY-ND 4.0; "Is everything of this is true?" by Komiku is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal License; "Fantasy in my mind" by Alan Špiljak is licensed under BY-NC-ND 4.0. Ad Music: "Hello September" by Proviant Audio is licensed under BY-NC-ND 3.0 US; "The Valley" by Dee Yan-Key is licensed under BY-NC-SA 4.0; "Galaxies" by Split Phase is licensed under BY-NC-SA 3.0 US Links and further resources Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, Mary Gabriel The Art Story: Lee Krasner Artsy: "The Emotionally Charged Paintings Lee Krasner Created After Pollock's Death" Smithsonian Magazine: "Why Elaine de Kooning Sacrificed Her Own Amazing Career for Her More Famous Husband's" National Portrait Gallery Blog: "Elaine de Kooning's JFK" NPR: "For Artist Elaine de Kooning, Painting was a Verb, not a Noun" Elaine de Kooning in her studio, 1963 Elaine de Kooning, Self-Portrait, 1946 Lee Krasner in her studio, date unknown Lee Krasner, Self-Portrait, c. 1929 Elaine de Kooning, John F. Kennedy, 1963 Lee Krasner, Untitled (Umber Series), c. 1960 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get a FREE month of unlimited access to over 9,000 lectures presented by engaging, award-winning experts on everything from art to physics, interior design and world languages. Sign up today at thegreatcoursesplus.com/ART. This episode receives additional support from Reynolda House Museum of American Art, where you can find one of the nation's most highly regarded collections of American art on view in a unique domestic setting - the restored 1917 mansion of R. J. and Katharine Reynolds surrounded by beautiful gardens and peaceful walking trails. You can browse Reynolda's art and decorative arts collections and see what's coming next at their website, reynoldahouse.org. The art world is a man’s world- or, at least, it used to be entirely one. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who is a longtime listener of the ArtCurious Podcast, because we’ve touched multiple times on the difficulties that have faced women who have sought careers as artists. Now, thankfully, in the age of #metoo, the male-heaviness of the art world is changing a bit, as it is in other facets of society. But turning back the clock to any other era in history, and the reality is that it was totally a man’s game. And the absolute manliness of it all was compounded intensely in one particular time and place: post-war America, where it was all about brusque machismo, the biggest innovations, and the biggest splash. It was a measuring contest like none other, and two larger-than-life characters were at the center of it all. Please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW our show on Apple Podcasts! Twitter / Facebook/ Instagram Episode Credits Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Social media assistance by Emily Crockett. Additional research and writing for this episode by Stephanie Pryor. ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Additional music credits "The Walk" by Dee Yan-Key is licensed under BY-NC-SA 4.0; "Catching Glitter" by Split Phase is licensed under BY-NC-SA 3.0 US; "Aquasigns" by Tagirijus is licensed under BY-NC-SA 4.0; "You know why" by Loyalty Freak Music is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal License; "Tethered" by Nctrnm is licensed under BY 4.0. Based on a work at https://soundcloud.com/nctrnm/; "Dancing on the Seafloor (KieLoKaz ID 110)" by KieLoBot is licensed under BY-NC-ND 4.0; "Attempt 7" by Jared C. Balogh is licensed under BY-NC-SA 3.0 Ad music: "Ground Cayenne" by The Good Lawdz is licensed under BY-SA 3.0 Links and further resources The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, Sebastian Smee The New York Times: "Ruth Kligman, Muse and Artist, Dies at 80" Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith De Kooning: A Retrospective, John Elderfield Willem de Kooning and his wife, Elaine, photograph by Hans Namuth, 1952. Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, photograph by Hans Namuth, 1950. Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950 Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure, c. 1942 Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-1952 Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 Jackson Pollock painting on panes of glass, Hans Namuth documentary stills, 1950. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As much as I love artists like Rauschenberg, deKooning and even Boucher, the first artist I knew by name was Frank Frazetta. He painted worlds I had never seen before, filled with warriors being pulled by a team of polar bears, red eyed demons on horseback and beautiful scantily clad maidens. I poured over his books, meticulously copying my favorite characters. While it was great drawing practice, I wasn't doing anything original. I had sketchbooks filled with Frazetta drawings, but not one that was a Saddoris.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Overcast | RSSI'm loving the work of Canadian illustrator Terry Edward Elkins. He has a terrific style that reminds me of vintage national parks posters and some of my favorite children's book illustrators.Questlove is a monster. He's the founder and drummer for the Roots, a DJ, a producer, a professor, and an author. As you'll hear in this NPR conversation, he also has some really inspiring thoughts around creativity.Israeli photographer Natan Dvir was the winner of the 2017 Lens Culture Emerging Talent award. His project Platforms takes viewers below the streets of New York to “investigate the interactions (or lack thereof) between the city's commuters.”Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0
As much as I love artists like Rauschenberg, deKooning and even Boucher, the first artist I knew by name was Frank Frazetta....
As much as I love artists like Rauschenberg, deKooning and even Boucher, the first artist I knew by name was Frank Frazetta....
In this Art History Babe Brief, Corrie & Nat provide an introduction to our upcoming "Women of Ab Ex" episode by looking at the life and work of one of the best, Elaine de Kooning. Check out our full length Abstract Expressionism episode: https://www.arthistorybabes.com/episode-49-abstract-expressionism And our Patreon for exclusive bonus episodes! www.patreon.com/arthistorybabes We got a blog! We got merch! We got newsletters! www.arthistorybabes.com Insta: @arthistorybabespodcast Twitter: @arthistorybabes Email: arthistorybabes@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
On this month’s podcast we discuss the role of science in fine art. Specifically, what can science tell us about a work of art’s origin and authenticity? Can science help us discover fakes and forgeries undetected by traditional connoisseur style observation? We are joined by the famous art scientist Jamie Martin to discuss these issues, recount famous forgery scandals, and delve into his techniques and practices. Resources: http://orionanalytical.com/media/ http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/blogs/all-blogs/sotheby-s-at-large/2016/12/scientist-art-world-james-martin.html https://www.wired.com/2016/12/how-to-detect-art-forgery/ https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-8-most-prolific-forgers-in-art-history-that-we-know-of https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/wolfgang-beltracchi-helene-art-scam https://news.artnet.com/market/forger-wolfgang-beltracchi-exhibition-296551 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/arts/design/ken-perenyi-art-forger-now-sells-his-work-as-copies.html Episode Transcription: Steve Schindler: Hi. I'm Steve Schindler. Katie Wilson-Milne: I'm Katie Wilson-Milne. Steve Schindler: Welcome to the Art Law podcast, a monthly podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law. Katie Wilson-Milne: And vice versa. The Art Law Podcast is sponsored by the Law firm of Schindler Cohen & Hochman LLP, a premier litigation and art law boutique in New York City. On this episode of the podcast we will be discussing the role of science and fine art. Specifically what can science tell us about the work of arts origin and authenticity? Can science help us discover fakes and forgeries that would be undetected by more traditional connoisseur-style observation? Steve Schindler: We’re here today with Jamie Martin, Senior Vice President and Director of Scientific Research at Sotheby’s auction house, a title that really doesn’t do Jamie justice. Jamie is an artist, art conservator and forensic scientist. In 2000, he founded a company called Orion Analytical that became the preeminent materials analysis and consulting firm, specializing in the scientific analysis of art and cultural property. Working at the intersection of art and science, Jamie has revealed multimillion dollar forgeries in the art market, taught at The Getty Conservation Institute and the FBI, and conducted more than 1800 scientific investigations for museums, galleries, insurance companies, and private collectors around the world. Katie and I have both worked closely with Jamie and it is a genuine pleasure to welcome him to the podcast. Welcome to the podcast Jamie. Jamie Martin: Hi! Katie Wilson-Milne: Yes, thanks for being here Jamie. So what can science tell us about art? Jamie Martin: The way I like to phrase it is, is that science helps art tell its own story. Science can reveal the structure of the work, its composition and its condition. Steve Schindler: How Jamie would you say that science intersects with questions about authenticity and fraud? Jamie Martin: Well, in about 2009, the College Art Association codified guidelines and standards for authentications and attributions. Steve Schindler: What is the College Art Association? Jamie Martin: I'm not a member, but my understanding is that it’s a national association of art historians principally in colleges but also working privately or working in museums as well. Steve Schindler: Okay, so they came out with some guidelines? Jamie Martin: They did and in codifying guidelines they identified three essential elements involved in the authentication attribution process. The first oldest most important and never to be replaced is stylistic connoisseurship, which is examination with learned eye of the scholar. The scholar is the person or the entity that attributes and actually authenticates work of art. The second essential element is the provenance of the work or the documented history from the time it left the artist studio to present day. And usually that’s fractured or incomplete in some way. The third essential element which has been part of these kinds of studies for at least a 100 years, but was codified in this document, is scientific or technical examination. And the role of science and technical examination in authentication and attribution studies is twofold, one is to test the claimed attributes of the attribution of the work and also test the claimed attributes of the provenance. In other words to see if the physical substance of the work is consistent with its attribution and provenance, the other principle aim of science and technology is to provide investigative leads, so to better understand the object – essentially to let the object tell its story about where it was, when it was, what it was. And those leads can help art historians and researchers better place the object in time, in some cases in a particular artist studio. Katie Wilson-Milne: So what is the analysis of the work actually look like in terms of what you’re doing, maybe walk us through a typical examination of a painting? Jamie Martin: So generally speaking from start to finish, every exam would start with visual inspection of the work in bright white light, the same way that a connoisseur would examine the work. They want to see the composition, or the design. They want to see the color, the opacity, essentially the facture of the work, the way the work is constructed. They’ll then move the light to the side, which is called raking light, and that reveals information about the texture of the work. And often identifies the presence of restoration or alteration, because in an authentication study a scientist doesn’t want to inadvertently identify restoration as original, find a problem and reach a wrong conclusion. Scientist and conservators then use ultraviolet light which, when I was a teenager these were lights on the ceiling of my room that illuminated Led Zeppelin posters. Steve Schindler: I had the same posters and the same lights – by the way. Jamie Martin: Alright. So we use the same lights now to illuminate works of art and materials have inherent fluorescence which allows us to see the distribution of different materials and often the distribution of restoration and alteration. We then use infrared light. We can't see infrared light as humans, but we can use cameras to detect it and record it and create an image. And with that we can often better see restoration, but more importantly we can see through the paint. We can see through some materials to see what lays beneath, so artist underdrawings. We can see inscriptions that have been obliterated or erased. And all of those are noninvasive techniques that basically tell us about the object as a whole. We then take the object and we put the object under what’s called a stereo binocular microscope – a microscope that gives us a three dimensional color image of the work and magnifications up to about 90 times – and with this we can look at the fine detail of the work. We can begin to understand its structure and its condition. We create a mental inventory of the number of different materials. We account for the presence of restoration. And this process helps guide the subsequent analyses that we do. The best most reliable way to analyze the work from a statistical point of view is to take the work of art, put it in a blender, destroy it, mix it up into a powder, take a pinch and analyze it. We obviously can't do that. So we have to select visually representative areas of our work and conduct our analyses on that. We have a range of noninvasive techniques that we can use. Not taking a physical sample, actually not touching the work of art, we can identify the elemental composition, so the elements like sodium or lead or mercury, we can identify where they are in the work. In the case of Remington sculpture, that can help determine whether the work was cast before Remington died or if it was cast after the artist died. And if after, whether it was authorized or unauthorized. If it’s a work of art like a painting or a painting on paper or a drawing, we can map the elemental composition of the work. So we can look for elements that stand out. Given the attribution, let’s say an artist who’s painting in 1800, if we find concentrations of elements associated with original material that is part of the object and those elements only became part of paints after 1800, then that raises red flags about the work. And then we can use other techniques to identify what those materials are. In variably however in most cases we need to take a sample and we need to analyze the sample so that we understand the full composition of the material to give you an idea of the kind of sample, the sample size that we need are typical sample sizes range from about 1/1000th of a millimeter to about 40/1000ths of a millimeter, which is about the width of a human hair. Katie Wilson-Milne: How do you even collect a sample that small? Jamie Martin: It’s good question. You collect it using the same microscope that you use to find the sample location, so using a microscope that’s analogous to a surgical microscope, same kind of microscope a neurosurgeon would use. And we actually use neurosurgeon tools. I use a scalpel. And I’ll use the scalpel to remove such a tiny piece of material, I can only see it with a microscope, but that one little tiny microscopic specimen can be used for one or two or five or ten separate analyses depending on what the questions are. Katie Wilson-Milne: Jamie I think one question we shouldn’t let go by for too long is how are you qualified to do this work, right. I mean the way you described the analysis of the art, presupposes a certain amount of knowledge when you look at the piece under the light initially and you’re sort of doing the visual analysis. How do you know how to do that? Jamie Martin: Well, conservation scientists have different backgrounds, some are PhDs who have advanced degrees in chemistry or engineering. Others come from the conservation ranks. And that’s the route I took. My background is a little different. It’s a bit unique in the field, when I was 13 my father gave me a microscope, a chemistry set and sent me to art school. And so from a very young age I was taught how to mix different powdered pigments together to make paint. And how to stretch canvases much the same way it was done in old master days in workshops. And at the same time I was blowing little things up in my bedroom with my chemistry set and beginning to explore the world with a microscope which sits on the desk I have now. After high school I attended a traditional art school in Baltimore. And we were taught to emulate the techniques of the old masters and one thing I became very proficient at doing was doing copies in museums where I could create works in some cases that were indistinguishable from the originals. I did a copy of William Merritt Chase of the Baltimore Museum of Art. And as I was walking out with it one day, the director of the museum asked me if I was taking it back to storage. And I sort of laughed. Steve Schindler: You were in training either to be a conservation professional or a forger – Jamie Martin: Well that – that’s very interesting when I applied to the conservation graduate programs which included Winterthur, the admissions committee raised questions and flagged me, because my art portfolio was so strong and my ability to copy was so good. They were concerned if they trained me as a conservator and a scientist that I would be a master forger. It turns out and I didn’t know at that time, I'm a bit of a master detective at catching forgers. So I got a graduate degree in art conservation at the University of Delaware, then I went on to postgraduate work at University of Cambridge. Then I set about creating the first two fee-for-service conservation analytical labs in the United States, one in a museum and one privately and they were both setup to provide basic conservation science services to conservators and museums that didn’t have scientists. So what equips me to take samples and what equips me to interpret the data and reach reliable, accurate conclusions is having taken about 15,000 samples and having conducted about 13,000 FTI or analyses. It’s just a lot of experience, the good luck, good fortune of working with really good scientists over the years who were able to teach me the tools of the trade. And then being surrounded by excellent people in museums and the conservation field and interestingly also in the art law field. Steve Schindler: So let’s talk about your detective skills, because one of the ways that we met was in connection with a case involving fakes and forgeries. How prevalent are fakes and forgeries in your view in the art market? Jamie Martin: Well, we really don’t know. We read in newspapers and magazines from time to time that it’s been estimated that 50% of works are fake or 80% of works are fake, but if you dig a bit deeper into those articles it’s often someone trying to make the claim to attract business and create a fear that everything is sold in the market place is potentially a fake. Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, I feel like I've read articles, “half the works on every museum all are fake, you just don’t know it.” Jamie Martin: Yeah, we just don’t know, there’s been no study done. There’s no data to look to. What we know publically is probably a small fraction of the art forgery case isn't fakes that are in circulation or from cases like the Beltracchi case or the Knoedler case or the Rudy Kurniawan case that dealt with wine, there are lot of investigations being done behind the scenes by law enforcement that we’ll probably never know about. And a lot of investigations I did were done under confidentiality agreements that I can't discuss. Someday I hope the FBI will get on to it, burst the forgery ring and make people whole. I would say that forgeries can be a significant problem, depending on what is being forged or faked and where it’s being sold. So generally a ring of forgers has a target market in sight. They more or less know the market that they want to create the works for and sell the works for. There is some evidence to suggest that forgeries pertaining to a particular artist spike up after a big exhibition on the artist or after publication of the catalogue raisonné, because there’s a lot of technical information and a lot of visual information that a forger can take and create a pastiche – using some of the materials that are disclosed in the publication. It’s one of the reasons why scientists like I, scientist in museums often don’t disclose everything we find, but withhold some important information, so that we don’t give away all the secrets of detection or we don’t disclose publically all of the stupid mistakes that forgers are making. We like them to continue to make those stupid mistakes. Katie Wilson-Milne: So can you tell our audience briefly about the Beltracchi case? Jamie Martin: Yeah, so Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife devised a really sinister scheme to create a large group of fake works that reportedly created in Europe, say between 1910 and 1930. And they would use publications that sided exhibitions of works by known artist that didn’t give illustrations, didn’t give sizes. They gave the artist name, the date, and the title of the work. And that was the basis of the provenance for the work. They could create a work, point back to that publication and say, “Oh, here’s the work.” What was particularly clever was that they created the false provenance of the so-called “Jagers collection” and Jagers happened to be Beltracchi’s wife Helene’s maiden name. And what Beltracchi did was to create framed posters of his fakes, he put them in a room. He had period furniture. Katie Wilson-Milne: I love this part. Jamie Martin: And his wife dressed up as her grandmother and posed with the works. Beltracchi used an old box style camera that would make the image a little blurry. He printed the photographs on deckled paper, which would have been period, photocopied them. And then you can imagine when Helene would take the painting and present the perspective owner with the photograph of the painting photographed with her grandmother, people would say, “Oh my God, the family resemblance! You look so much like your grandmother.” And as this often the case with fakes and forgeries it doesn’t take much to nudge someone to the point of accepting what is false as true. They didn’t look deeper. That was enough for them to believe the story that Beltracchi assembled. Steve Schindler: It always seems in these cases that the purchasers and fakes so much want to believe. Whether it’s in the Rudy Kurniawan case that you just eluded to before – passionate collectors of wine want to believe that they’re getting these rare vintages so much that they overlook obvious clues. In other cases, they buy works where the signatures are misspelled, as we’ll get to, so part of it just seems to be tremendous excitement and passion on the part of the purchasers. Katie Wilson-Milne: Well and there’s no incentive for anyone in that chain to want something to be fake, right? The buyer wants it to be worth what they paid for it. They want it to be by the artists they think it’s from. So who in that chain wants to disrupt that? Jamie Martin: Well, in a very clever way of introducing the fakes is to introduce the fakes that art fairs or dealers where there’s a real time pressure to purchase. So for example in an art fair, a fake might be exhibited, and you might get two people in the span of two or three days looking at the work, basically competing for who’s going to purchase the work. There really isn't the time to step back to examine the claimed attributes, so the work is attributed to artist X in year Y. I think I’d like to step back, look at some books published on the artist perhaps the catalogue raisonné and see if this work really fits. And then I want to look at the provenance. And I want to find out if there was actually a Jagers collection. And if not, those are going to raise red flags for me. Katie Wilson-Milne: So how did he get caught? Jamie Martin: Beltracchi got caught, because the Doerner Institute in Munich, Germany was given a painting by the police to examine and they found two things working with an art historian who probably was the first person to break the case. He noted that the fake labels that were applied to the back of many of the works were of a gallery that didn’t exist at the time the works were purportedly dated. So the gallery label dates were mismatched. The Doerner Institute then examined the painting and they found that the painting contained historically inaccurate materials. So pigments that weren’t introduced and used at paints at the age of that particular work of art. And that’s enough to conclude that the work couldn’t have been – could not have been constructed at that time, and that raised huge flags. At that point I understand that police began to assemble lists of works that were likely Beltracchi fakes. I became involved through looking at a number of works for private collectors and auction houses and was commissioned actually by 60 Minutes to examine a fake Beltracchi work in the style of Ernst, so I could explain to Bob Simon how Beltracchi created the work, but more importantly how Beltracchi got caught. Now Beltracchi was very careful about his materials. He would purchase old canvases that would have been used in the same period, so if you tried to date the canvas, it would be appropriate. And he tried to select paints that contained pigments that would be used at that time. So he would go to the store and he would look for Winsor and Newton paint and he would turn it around and look at the label. And it would say Zinc White. And that was the limit of Beltracchi’s knowledge of paint manufacturers. Now because paint manufacturer from time to time hired me to reverse engineer their competitors’ products to tell them what they were using to make paint, I was aware that manufactures often topped off or added materials to paints. And in this case the manufacturer added a little bit of a very opaque pigment called Titanium White to the Zinc White. And they used modern synthetic organic pigment called Phthalocyanine Blue that they used to top off or make the blue paint that Beltracchi used more intense. And those two materials were very easy to detect. And they proved that that those works were not authentic. Beltracchi himself I think was quoted saying, “Ah yeah, the Titanium White.” Katie Wilson-Milne: We should probably interject, Steve, to explain the legal background that it’s obviously not illegal to copy something that’s in the public domain, if you say it’s a copy and you tell people that you painted it and it’s not by the original artist. What is illegal is fraud and pretending that a work authored by you is by another person and leading a buyer, inducing a buyer to buy that work based on that fact. Jamie Martin: Correct. Steve Schindler: And so one question, Jamie, is – you mentioned before that you, one of the things you search for are these anomalies and you’re able to determine whether a work could have been created at the time that it was purported to be created, but do you actually authenticate works? Jamie Martin: No, rarely will scientific or technical examination unilaterally attribute or authenticate a work. And -- Steve Schindler: Why is that? Jamie Martin: Well, because there isn't a chemical or material fingerprint that would allow you to individualize a work to one and only one artist at a particular time. Katie Wilson-Milne: So science can't tell you something is authentic, but it can tell you something is fake? Jamie Martin: It can tell you that something is fake. From time to time, you can form a conclusive, reliable, durable opinion that a work is fake based on science. It can also buttress an attribution more provenance, but it will never substitute for the absence of or a defect in provenance or stylistic connoisseurship. Steve Schindler: Do you think in the area of stylistic connoisseurship which, is often criticized as being sometimes objective, insular, elitist, whatever you will – whether there is a place for science or an opportunity for science to replace the work of the connoisseur and I'm thinking particularly about advances in artificial intelligence the type of technology that makes an Apple iPhone work, the facial recognition. Do you sense that there is a place for that kind of technology in making attributions or authentications? Jamie Martin: For probably about 10 years there’s been an emphasis in the computer science and physics disciplines to use image processing, computer analysis and things like fractal analysis, sparse coding analysis to essentially replace what – in some cases is viewed as the subjective eye of the kind of connoisseur – with the more “objective eye” of the computer looking at a photograph. There’s been some interesting and promising research done which I believe can enhance the work of authenticating or dating works, that is, clearly showing that something is inconsistent with the work of an artist. Or in the case of Dürer drawings – comparing Dürer drawings to see how closely the strokes and the pressure applied to the implement and the basic composition is. However I haven’t seen any technology at this point that is able to accurately attribute works absent the human input of a scholar, of a conservator, of a scientist. I think it’ll probably happen in my life time. It’ll hopefully happen before I retire. Katie Wilson-Milne: You describe a very complimentary process, but there has been some suggestion that there’s a tension between a traditional connoisseur – a PhD in art history, works at a museum – and scientific analysis that, I don’t know, there’s a perceived fear that science is replacing that scholarly expertise. Is that something you come in contact with or you also perceive? Jamie Martin: Well, so there are a universe of conversations probably that are going on and they’re informed by different experiences and backgrounds and opportunities. I haven’t experienced that tension myself, before or since coming the Sotheby's, but I come from an old school conservation science background where I'm one of three players. I view it as a three legged stool. And that first most important leg of this stool is the curator, is the catalogue raisonné author, is the independent expert. The second leg is the provenance leg, and I'm the third leg. My job is there just to steady the stool. Steve Schindler: You’re telling yourself short Jamie but – Katie Wilson-Milne: You’re creating a stool, but yes we take your points. Steve Schindler: Yeah, one of the things that also dawns on me because we – we have experienced the problem in what we do of authenticators being reluctant now to authenticate work for reasons that we’re all well aware of: they get sued. They get sued by people who view themselves as possessing authentic works and they disagree with authenticators’ opinions. Katie Wilson-Milne: What would be the basis for a lawsuit on those grounds? Steve Schindler: Well, we’ve seen a lot of different theories, most of which had been rejected. It could be a theory of negligence, there have been reasons as wild as antitrust theories that have been set out. And the interesting thing is most of the lawsuits against authenticators end up either being settled or dismissed favorably towards the authenticators, but they have to spend an awful lot of money defending themselves, which is why they – in many cases, foundations and authenticating boards have stopped authenticating, and experts who are not paid a great deal of money typically to give opinions and find themselves tremendously at risk and we’ve been working in the art law community trying to remedy that legislatively at least in New York, but it does dawn on me that machines can't get sued probably, not yet. And so if there was a room for science to provide a clear or more objective authentication, it might alleviate some of the burdens on the whole process, I don’t know if you have any reactions to that. Jamie Martin: I do I guess, I think the Knoedler case was probably a textbook case of where an expert in good faith working first for the Knoedler gallery and its director in providing reliable, accurate opinions on the attribution of authenticity of works and then subsequently working for a number of people who purchased works from the gallery – again in good faith providing accurate, reliable durable data and conclusions got caught up not in a lawsuit but in a flurry of subpoenas. Katie Wilson-Milne: This expert is you, Jamie. Jamie Martin: This expert is me. And I had never heard of a third-party expert having to retain legal council to produce documents and to represent the expert in court to answer allegations of obstruction of proper discovery and handling of evidence before. Katie Wilson-Milne: So even the scientist can get caught up in these legal issues. Jamie Martin: And it had a chilling effect during the Knoedler case. Before Knoedler, I could pick up the phone and call someone of the National Gallery and ask if I could come in and look through the research files on a particular case. Once the subpoenas went out and Knoedler, which included the director of the National Gallery – I would call the National Gallery and I was told by my colleagues, “We’ve been instructed by the legal counsel not to answer the phone when you call.” Now since Knoedler, that’s gotten better but the chilling effect in Knoedler was that you could be caught up in this and your life could be turned inside out. And other scientists who you know could say horrible things about you that had no basis in fact. And that was just the way the system worked. Katie Wilson-Milne: Let’s talk about the famous Knoedler case which, you were involved in it, we were also peripherally. Steve Schindler: Full disclosure – I guess at this point, since Jamie brought it up. We were representing Jamie and that’s how we were – fortunate enough to meet him and to be sitting here with him today. Katie Wilson-Milne: There were many, many lawyers involved in the Knoedler case. All right, so the Knoedler Gallery was the oldest and one of the most respected art galleries in New York City and the United States. It had been a business for 165 years in a beautiful town house on the Upper East Side. And in 2011, at the end of 2011, it abruptly shut down declaring bankruptcy. In the background of this declaration of bankruptcy in going out of business was a brewing scandal over the sale of about 40 works of art that Knoedler sold and had alleged work created by who’s who of modern masters: Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, William De Kooning, and others. There was one other dealer, Julian Weissman, who had sold 23 similar works of art. But we’ll focus on the Knoedler aspect of this. These works were said to have brought in up to $80 million in profits for the dealers and following the galleries, closing this started to come out. There were rapid succession of lawsuits that were filed by collectors, alleging that these works were fake. And not to give away the end of the story they were fake. The provenance of these works had been sketchy. The works had all been brought to Knoedler by a Long Island art dealer, her name was Glafira Rosales who claimed to have obtained these works – never before seen on the market – from the children of a European Jewish collector, who wanted to remain anonymous for a variety of tantalizing reasons which people can look up in the newspaper. This collector had supposedly bought these works through a dealer and friend of these artist directly from the artist studios in the ‘60s – the ‘50s and the ‘60s. So that’s why the works had never been seen on the market before. The story changed slightly over time and no documentation was ever provided by Rosales substantially in these origins, but that was the story that gallery retold to the buyers of these pieces and then later when they were brought in to these lawsuits. So Knoedler and its President, a woman named Ann Freedman did maintain that the works were genuine through the beginning of many of these lawsuits, notwithstanding the fact that Jamie demonstrated that many of them, conclusively were not genuine. But in August 2013 in a parallel criminal investigation at the U.S. attorney’s office was involved in, Rosales was indicted and the FBI raided a house in Queens, where a very talented Chinese immigrant artist had been creating all these works. He had been creating these De Kooning’s and Motherwell’s and Rothko’s and the evidence was right there. Steve Schindler: He had an amazing repertoire. Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah it was incredible and it – and when law enforcement got at the house the doors were open, someone told me that or I read somewhere that a cereal bowl was half full and this artist had just fled. Nothing had been really taken or disturbed, so it was pretty conclusive, after this Knoedler and Ann Freedman changed their story. They admitted the works were fake. And then they argued that they had also been defrauded, that they had no way of knowing that the words would have been fake. So there were series of civil litigations, most of them have settled, no criminal charges were ever brought against the gallery or Ann Freedman. Glafira Rosales was indicted. She pled guilty. Steve Schindler: She pled guilty and was given a very lenient sentence, which was house arrest, I believe, and some restitution. Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah and the Chinese artist is no longer in the United States and that’s all we know. So Jamie tell us how you were involved in the Knoedler case? Jamie Martin: Well, I was first hired by Ann Freedman and Knoedler Gallery to look at two purported Robert Motherwell paintings. And what became clear early on is that the works were created over old paintings, part of which had been removed with an electric orbital sander which was not a practice that Motherwell used. So that was one clue. Another clue was that the works had a series of white grounds that were materials that Motherwell was not using in the 1950s. One painting was signed and dated ‘53, the other was dated ‘56 is I recall. So I was finding materials that Motherwell wasn’t using till late ‘60s and I was finding pigments that weren’t introduced in paints until the ‘70s. So that work concluded and some years later I was asked to examine Jackson Pollock painting that was purchased for around $17 million. Katie Wilson-Milne: Also by the gallery or as – Jamie Martin: Yeah, it was sold by the gallery as a work by Jackson Pollock and within just a few days I was finding acrylic paint and I was finding pigments that weren’t being used and artist paints until the 1980s and 1990s. I issued a report, the attorney gave it to Knoedler, and Knoedler closed the next day. Katie Wilson-Milne: And so you were hired by a collector, a buyer to do that analysis? Jamie Martin: Yeah. I then became involved in a series of other works including a purported Mark Rothko painting and that painting was a fake based on a number of features, the principle one being that the Chinese forger used a white ground underneath the paint. Mark Rothko never used white grounds in the 1950s. Katie Wilson-Milne: What are white grounds? Jamie Martin: A ground would be like a primer, it would be like a base coat that was applied to the canvas. In the 1950s Rothko was using a transparent colored ground and in this case it was an opaque white ground and it was a white ground that you could see at the edges, if you’re new to look for it. So that was a tip off on that work and they were whole selection of other works that I examined. For collectors, also for the U.S. attorney’s office and FBI, and to put it in a nutshell, what I was finding in this group of more than 20 works was a pattern of reuse of old paintings to make new paintings, so that the backs of the paintings looked appropriately old. Katie Wilson-Milne: This is a common technique right? Beltracchi was doing this too. Jamie Martin: Very common technique. Take something that’s old and recycle it and on the front paint something that’s new and make it look old. So that was another thing I was finding – that material was being applied to the front of the works to make it look artificially old. I was also finding co-occurrence of the same material. So many of these works painted by more than five artists over a period that spanned about three decades from the late ‘40s to the early ‘60s contained the same white grounds. I mean, the same white paints. Katie Wilson-Milne: By different artists. Steve Schindler: So this was a case where you were fortunate to be able to have tested a number of works by the same forger and even though each work in itself had anomalies that led you to conclude that they were fakes, when you looked at them collectively and it was overwhelming? Jamie Martin: Exactly, so it was pointing to a common source for all of the paintings and that work continued. I was asked to examine the materials that were ceased from the Chinese forger’s garage which was an interesting process to go through for about six months. Katie Wilson-Milne: So you were working with the FBI for then. Jamie Martin: I was. I was working for the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office on the case as well. So I was able to look at the evidence that they ceased. I was able to examine practice paintings that the forger had created to try to achieve something that look convincing. Katie Wilson-Milne: You described several anomalies, what was the real smoking gun for you in the Knoedler case? Jamie Martin: Well, it was a different smoking gun for different works, I mean we – we knew for example that Jackson Pollock died in 1956, so when I'm finding polymers and when I'm finding pigments that were first discovered and patented and first used in paints decades after his death, the only explanation would be time travel – which I'm not a big fan of, so these were obviously fraudulent works. There were also features that contradicted the provenance. One thing that was mentioned in the provenance was that the works were collected over a period of a few years. And they were stored for decades and they were stored in a “hermetically sealed room,” which implies a room that had stable conditions – clean, archival – and many of the works showed paint transfers. They showed accumulation of debris and grime, which was just inconsistent with the story. And that’s one of the features we look at. We not only look at the composition of the work that we’re studying, but we look at the provenance. We look at the story to see if we see evidence of that or evidence that speaks against it. Katie Wilson-Milne: Am I remembering correctly that you found a fleece fiber in one of the paintings? Jamie Martin: Oh, that was a different painting. Katie Wilson-Milne: Oh okay, I love that. Steve Schindler: That was a different case, but that’s also one of my favorite stories. Why don’t you share that with us? Jamie Martin: This is a work that was signed and it was dated 1932 and the work was fairly large. As I recall, it was about 24” by 36” or 32” by 48” and as usual, I went through all the first steps with the work: technical imaging, stereo microscope exam. I made an inventory of all the materials used to create the work, from the canvas to the primer to all the different paints in the pallet. I analyzed all these materials, and I found that the binders and the pigments were consistent with paints that could have been used in 1932. And that’s the point at which a lot of scientists or labs would stop and they would write a report. Katie Wilson-Milne: It looks good. Jamie Martin: It looks fine, we find nothing to speak against it. That wasn’t my style, that wasn’t my practice, in part, because it’s informed by a forensic approach. So at that point whenever I engaged in a study and I find a result like that I start over. And I look at every square millimeter of the painting under the stereo microscope and I look for what’s called adventitious material, material that doesn’t belong there. Something that wasn’t part of the paint, something that the artist didn’t intend to include in the painting and I got – I started the bottom and by the time I got to the top two thirds of the painting, I found a fiber in the paint. And I knew it dried in the paint because two ends stuck out and the center was deeply embedded in dried paint. And I took a very small sample of that fiber and analyzed it and I found polypropylene. Polypropylene fiber was first discovered and introduced in 1958. So on the basis of finding one fiber I was able to conclude that there was no way that that work was painted in 1932. I had to spread out, I had to be sure that all the paint was integral across the surface. Fast forward to 2015, there’s a book published in Paris called The Forger. And it’s a story of a young man who meets a master forger who teaches the young man all the tricks of the trade and the last trick of the trade is: when you’re creating a fake you should always wear a cotton or linen smock, because if one synthetic fiber falls from your clothing and becomes embedded in the painting a good scientist will find it and declare the work a fake. That’s been part of a lecture I've given that was on the Columbia Art Law School website for eight years. And I suspect the person writing the book has internet connection. Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, I do just want to say before we get off Knoedler that it would be hard to overestimate how significant this scandal was for the art world. I mean the art world is a very secretive place deals happen privately, there was not a lot of paperwork and the fact that this scandal was going on and being covered up so well for – well over a decade and that 10s of millions of dollars were being made off the sale of these fake works was really disturbing and even art world people who certainly don’t follow legal claims and cases know about this case, because of the amount of money and the number of forgeries, but also because of the significance of the Knoedler gallery to New York, it really pioneered the art gallery world and it had been at the forefront of the art gallery world in the United States for really long time. So if a buyer went to Knoedler they felt like, “well, if there’s anywhere I can go and I can trust what they’re going to tell me, it’s the Knoedler gallery.” And that really upended people sense of safety I think in the art market. Steve Schindler: Right, and that was also reinforced by the judge who was hearing these cases in one of his decisions, because the Knoedler gallery and Ann Freedman, one of their defenses was well these sophisticated buyers should have known better, should have done their own due diligence and one of the things that judge said was, “but they were buying these works from Knoedler. They were buying them from one of the most respected galleries in New York.” Katie Wilson-Milne: Which is the due diligence. Steve Schindler: Right. Well actually, and one of the things – as long as we were talking about Knoedler still – that always interested me was how Ann Freedman used the fear of authenticators to speak out in her favor and we had represented a couple of these individuals who invariably recalled over to a gallery with a crowd of people shown a fake work and who looked at it and either didn’t say anything or said, “oh that’s nice” or something along those lines. And then afterwards she claimed that they had authenticated these works. And the way that they had authenticated them was to not shout out in a crowded room, “I think this is a fake!” Katie Wilson-Milne: They stood in front of the work. Steve Schindler: And they didn’t say anything. So – and of course they would never do that, they were not asked to do that, but even in the most ideal conditions most of these types of experts would have been afraid to speak out like that for fear of being sued and dragged further into this kind of case in the way that Jamie mentioned that he was. Katie Wilson-Milne: And another significant aspect of Knoedler, and one of the reasons we are so thrilled to be talking to you, Jamie, is that it was one of the first times I think for a lot of people that they understood how science could interact with claims of fakes and forgeries and it was in such a public way that I think the scientific analysis of art hadn’t been widely discussed or understood before. I don’t know if you could talk a little bit about how important scientific analysis was to the outcome of the Knoedler scandal in general but also if you’ve seen the importance of scientific analysis or people’s perceived – how they perceive the importance of scientific analysis increase after Knoedler? Jamie Martin: Well, I think what you have seen after Knoedler is an increase in the number of investor backed art analysis labs who are offering services to art investors and to some degree of art collectors. So, it was clear from Knoedler, because Knoedler was so widely publicized and covered over such a long period of time. And that the science really did factor quite importantly in the determinations that people recognized that science can be a very effective and necessary tool to assess those claimed attributes. Katie Wilson-Milne: I will just say that, I perceive the scientific analysis of Knoedler being one of the most important aspects of the proof that was used in those cases and that without the science there were such competing opinions from so called connoisseurs that it was difficult for a non-expert audience like the judge or if there had been a jury to make sense of those kinds of claims, but when there’s the scientific report it sort of – it changed the game in the case. Jamie Martin: Yeah, I testified in the De Sole case in January 2016, and what I heard after the trial was that the jury really did rely on the scientific information – the presentation of the findings in such a straight forward, visually accessible way – allowed them to understand the weight of the scientific evidence against the works, much in the same way that the testimony about the financial analysis and accounting did to. Katie Wilson-Milne: Right. The De Sole case, just for our audience, was one of the biggest Knoedler cases that went to trial and then ultimately settled. Steve Schindler: So, Jamie, if we were assembling the all-time Hall of Fame of forgers, who do you think would be on the top of the list? Who is the best all-time forger in whatever categories you want to rate them? Jamie Martin: Let’s say, so this would be modern times, this would be since Van Meegeren because fabulous forgeries were going on in Greek and Roman time and every time since. And Thomas Hoving talks a lot about that in his book. Van Meegeren was an incredible forger who exploited what he knew conservation scientists could and could not do. He knew that we could identify pigments. He knew that we had trouble identifying the binder, the liquid or glue that you mix with pigments to make paint. So he was very careful in his selection of pigments. In order to make his paintings dry quickly he threw in a synthetic polymer called Bakelite, which, after he created the work, he would put it an oven and heat it for some hours or days and it would be rock hard, as if the paint had aged naturally over three or 400 years. He was later found out. He was accused of collaborating with the Nazis, and the court instructed him that if he really was a master forger, he should paint a fake Vermeer in the court room. Katie Wilson-Milne: So he was forging Vermeers? Jamie Martin: He was forging Vermeers, and he sold a work to Goebbels, and he was in a lot of hot water over that. Steve Schindler: Wasn’t that also one of his defenses and the collaboration allegation, that, “Well I wasn’t collaborating, I sold him a fake, I sold the Nazis fake art, not real art.” Jamie Martin: Yeah. It was worth a try, it was a little flimsy. The thing is is that forgers have access to the same technical literature that I do. So conservation scientists like us, we publish the results of our findings, of analyses of documented artists, and if a forger wants to go and read our findings and try to replicate the same materials, theoretically they can do that. And there is a lot of evidence that forgers do look at technical literature. The best forgers I've seen – well, the worst forger I've seen, is a man named William Toy and he was creating fake paintings in Louisiana. His downfall was his love of cats. Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s a classic downfall! Jamie Martin: He had 20 or 30 cats in his home, and I did the project for the FBI, and they gave me memory sticks from cameras that showed cats all over his house, including cats on the table where he made his fakes. And in every one of the fake works I examined for the FBI I found cat hair embedded. So he was not a careful forger, but the forgers – Steve Schindler: There were lot of lessons in that story. Jamie Martin: Yes. Steve Schindler: Some involved cats. Jamie Martin: Yeah, don’t paint around cats and don’t wear polar flees when you’re creating an old master. The better forgers, the forgers that really had the painting skill, the kind of skill that I learned when I was painting, would have to be Beltracchi and then one other forger who’s name I refuse to speak publically, because he is absolutely unrepentant about his work. But he’s probably the most technically gifted painter-forger I've ever seen. Katie Wilson-Milne: And never caught. Jamie Martin: No, caught. Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, he was caught but not punished. Jamie Martin: I caught him many times, but he was never indicted and he was never brought to account. Katie Wilson-Milne: We’ll post links to some of these references. Steve Schindler: We’ve also seen him bragging about his accomplishments and it’s frustrating. Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah he speaks often in public in New York about his great skills. Steve Schindler: We could do this probably for another hour, but we know you have places to go and every good thing has to come to an end, but thank you so much for joining us on our podcast. Jamie Martin: You’re welcome, it’s always a pleasure. Katie Wilson-Milne: Until next time I'm Katie Wilson Milne. Steve Schindler: And I'm Steve Schindler bringing you the Art Law Podcast. A podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law. Katie Wilson-Milne: And vice versa. Produced by Jackie Santos
This month on the Artsy Podcast, we’re translating four of our readers’ favorite art-historical stories into audio. On this episode: how a young Robert Rauschenberg roped the admired Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning into his quest to make a drawing using only an eraser.
In his latest film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Dustin Hoffman plays an old, bitter, self obsessed sculptor, whose children from several marriages nonetheless crave his approval. He and the director, Noah Baumbach, discuss grumpiness, fatherhood and the nature of success with Kirsty Lang.In St Ives the Tate is about to reopen with refurbished rooms rehung with wonderful work, by international artists - Rothko, Gabo, deKooning - and those working there who achieved such status - Hepworth, Lanyon, Wallis. The writer on art, Michael Bird, who lives in St Ives, follows the conversation between these works with the artistic director, Anne Barlow and curator Sara Matson. He has a preview, too, of Tate St Ives' beautiful new gallery, a feat of engineering years in the making. It is cut into the hill, yet still illuminated with the natural light of St Ives that drew artists there to begin with.Singer and multi-instrumentalist Jon Boden caused some consternation when he decided to leave Bellowhead, the 11 piece folk big-band that brought traditional music and sea shanties to Glastonbury, Later with Jools Holland and the London Palladium, and the group dissolved. He has just released a solo album, Afterglow. He performs live with a string trio and talks about this work which is very different from Bellowhead, a cycle of his own songs charting a fleeting romance in a ruined city. And Annette Bening has her say about Harvey Weinstein. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Julian May.
The NPG's Warren Perry discusses a 1946 self portrait by Elaine de Kooning.
Abstraction- 1-The brief history of Abstraction in America-who were the painters that led the way- from the forerunners, to de Kooning, Motherwell and beyond... 2- What did some of these artists do to engage the processes differently, to feed the work and the process (painter printers) -print making 3- Where is abstraction going now- what are the possibilities? Stuff happening in NY and LA and hopefully here! Jim Caldwell, Artworknetwork.com, Annette Coleman, annettecolemanartist.com Margaret Pettee Olsen, www.petteeolsen.com Jessica Nissen, JessicaNissen.com Tatjana Krizmanic, TatyanaStudio.com Steven Mussman, StevenMussman.com Melinda Myrow, MelindaMyrow.com
Charlotte Eyerman, curator of modern art at the St. Louis Art Museum, discussed the exhibition Action/Abstraction opening October 19, 2008. Student: Emma Dent
John Curley discusses Willem de Kooning's Saturday Night (1956), part of the Kemper Art Museum's permanent collection. Presented in conjunction with the Museum's Spotlight Series.
John Curley discusses Willem de Kooning's Saturday Night (1956), part of the Kemper Art Museum's permanent collection. Presented in conjunction with the Museum's Spotlight Series.
Audio Profiles from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
"Con una conferencia de Lisa Messinger, conservadora adjunta del departamento de Arte Moderno del Metropolitan Museum of Art, de Nueva York, el pasado 9 de mayo se inauguraba en la Fundación Juan March la exposición «Expresionismo Abstracto: Obra sobre papel (Colección del Metropolitan Museum of Art, de Nueva York)», integrada por 75 obras realizadas entre 1938 y 1969 por 22 de los artistas más representativos del expresionismo abstracto norteamericano. Todas proceden de la colección del Metropolitan Museum of Art, de Nueva York, institución que ha organizado la muestra.«El Metropolitan Museum of Art -apunta su director, Philippe de Montebello, en la presentación del catálogo- tiene una fuerte vinculación con el expresionismo abstracto estadounidense desde los años cincuenta, cuando nuestro museo empezó a reunir una soberbia colección de pinturas de gran formato y obras más pequeñas sobre papel de los protagonistas de ese importante movimiento del siglo XX. En la última década esos fondos se han completado y enriquecido aun más con la adición de muchas otras obras sobre papel: de las 75 que integran la presente selección, 34 han entrado en el Metropolitan desde 1990, gracias sobre todo a la generosidad de las familias de los artistas y de unos cuantos coleccionistas entusiastas. Con esta presentación de las creaciones experimentales más íntimas de los expresionistas abstractos tenemos la esperanza de ofrecer nuevos puntos de vista sobre el valor de su arte.»En el acto inaugural, al que asistieron William Lieberman, director del departamento de Arte Moderno del citado Museo, y Paula Cussi, miembro del Patronato del mismo, el presidente de la Fundación, Juan March Delgado, agradeció a los directivos del Metropolitan Museum «su generosidad y confianza depositada en nuestra Fundación al prestarnos la excelente selección de obras que componen esta muestra. Hemos querido ofrecer esta exposición como continuación de otras sobre arte norteamericano del siglo XX organizadas en anteriores ocasiones, como las colectivas Arte USA, Minimal Art y Colección Leo Caslelli, así como las monográficas dedicadas a De Kooning, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Cornell, Rauschenberg, Rothko, Hopper, Diebenkorn, Warhol y Wesselmann, entre otros.»A continuación pronunció una conferencia Lisa Messinger, conservadora adjunta del departamento de Arte Moderno del Metropolitan Museum of Art, de Nueva York y autora del texto del catálogo"Más información de este acto
"Una exposición de Mark Rothko (1903-1970) abrirá el 23 de septiembre la temporada artística de la Fundación Juan March para el curso 1987-88. Por primera vez podrá contemplarse en España una antológica de este artista norteamericano, de origen ruso, uno de los primeros que trasladaron el centro de gravedad del arte europeo de París a Nueva York. Un total de 54 obras, óleos en su mayoria, realizados a lo largo de cuarenta años de trabajo, incluye esta Exposición Rothko, formada con fondos procedentes de museos y coleccionistas de Estados Unidos y Europa. La Exposición, que proviene de la Tate Gallery de Londres, permanecerá abierta en Madrid, en la Fundación Juan March, hasta el 3 de enero del año próximo, presentándose a continuación en el Museo Ludwig de Colonia. Cinco lienzos de Mark Rothko pudieron verse en 1977 en la Fundación Juan March, dentro de la colectiva «Arte USA». Mark Rothko, perteneciente a la denominada Escuela de Nueva York, que agrupaba a expresionistas abstractos norteamericanos como Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, De Kooning, etc., es conocido por sus grandes Iienzos, divididos en dos o tres secciones de colores vivos y de bordes difusos, que el prefería ver colgados en recintos pequeños para lograr una mayor intimidad de comunicación. Rothko hizo del color la sustancia de su arte y el vehículo «para expresar la tragedia, el extasis, el destino»."Más información de este acto