Andy Warhol

Out of the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s came an artist who became the icon of the free spirit. Andy Warhol introduced the world, and particularly an artistically fertile America, to the idea of life as an art. Gone were the days of portraiture and classical sculpture — this was the era of the movie star, the celebrity, and consumerism. Warhol looked at the life surrounding him and portrayed it on his canvases and in his films, stating that “if you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Yet, to critics, the most intriguing aspect of Warhol was his private life, an indefinable mixture of artistic creativity, mystery, and sexual scandal. It is this very inexpressibility that comes through in the artist’s work, giving Warhol an aura of cool acceptability and ambiguity.

Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, Warhol was one of three boys in a Czechoslovakian immigrant working-class family. Growing up during the Great Depression in Forest City, Pennsylvania, Warhol faced an unstable household, further complicated by the death of his father in 1942. Three years later, Warhol dropped out of high school and enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he received his B.A. in pictorial design in 1949.

After graduation, Warhol moved to New York, living in a co-ed basement apartment. He was a strange one to the others, being very quiet, young, and having an unusually white pallor. Angry with Warhol for not speaking to her, one of the female occupants of the apartment once threw an egg at him, which hit him in the head. The quiet young artist spent most of his time drawing and taking his work around to agencies in a brown paper bag, as he did not have enough funds for a portfolio.

Campbell’s Soup

Intrigued by the odd character who walked into her office holding a brown paper bag, Glamour art director Tina Fredericks commissioned Warhol to design shoes, inadvertently launching him into the world of commercial arts. Gaining the attention of exclusive shoe store I. Miller, Warhol was soon offered an appointment in their art department.

In 1949, Warhol changed the spelling of his name because of a credit that mistakenly read “Drawings by Warhol” for the article “Success is a Job in New York”. Around this time, his eyes began to bother him, and Tina Fredericks urged him to go to an oculist. Having been told he had “lazy eyes,” Warhol wore opaque glasses that had a tiny pinhole for him to see through — these became his signature accessory, even though they were hideous. Warhol dyed his hair a distinct silver, showing a flair for the dramatic that set him apart from other artists.

With the name change and his position in the commercial field, the intrepid artist soon created a niche for himself, becoming known for his exploration of the shoe as a reflection of the person. Warhol captured the essence of various people in his shoes, creating the likeness of celebrities and friends on paper. It did not matter if the shoe features were in the right places — I. Miller loved his drawings. He received the Art Directors’ Club Medal for his shoe designs in 1957.

Earlier, in 1952, the artist had his first solo exhibition, showing pictures drawn for Truman Capote’s short stories; unfortunately, the exhibit did not make much of an impact in the art world. By this time however, Warhol had an agent, Fritzie Miller, who got him contracts with big magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He worked with Eugene Moore to create window displays for Bonwit’s, a department store. The introspective artist, who wore only old clothes, radiated a charm and mystery in both his manner and work that began to be noticed by people in the business.

Velvet Underground Album Cover

During this period of development in his life, Warhol came into contact with other cultures, both local and abroad, that were to have an influence on his later artwork. In the mid-1950s, he was part of a theatre crowd that focused primarily on the plays of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht; Warhol especially admired Brecht’s idea of realism and would later apply the philosophy to his work. Influences from abroad came through his six-week tour of Europe and Asia, where he began his own collection of modern art, buying works from artists such as Joan Miró and Larry Rivers.

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol combined all of these early influences and experiences into a style that was distinctly his own and yet allowed others to be involved in the creative process. This came to be known in art history as American Pop art, a movement against the “original” as the bastion of the elite. Warhol’s outlook on artwork focused not on the end result, the “original work of art,” but on the creative processes that produced the work of art. Reflecting this philosophy was the artist’s use of the silkscreen, a process that allowed multiple identical images to be produced by anyone: Warhol liked to have his friends create prints using his silkscreens.

Self-portrait with camouflage

Most of Warhol’s creative work at this time took place in his studio, which he called “the Factory”. This work, done between 1962 and 1964, ranged from portraits of friends and celebrities to car crashes to electric chairs to consumer products. Perhaps the most famous of his Factory work — consumer product images of Campbell’s Soup, Brillo boxes, green stamps, and Coca-Cola — distinctly point to Warhol’s fascination with America’s growing identification with brand-name labels.

In 1962 Warhol had his first show in the Stable Gallery. It was a huge success, widely reported in the press and fully sold out. His paintings, manufactured in the Factory, were bought almost as soon as they were shown. People stood in lines at exhibit openings to look at his work. A trendsetter, Warhol and his work were definitely a hot commodity. But in 1965, Warhol declared Pop art “dead” and decided to retire from painting; his last gallery exhibition at Leo Castelli in 1966 consisted of Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds.

From 1966 onward, Andy Warhol concentrated on making films, initially intent on studying the lives of the people surrounding him. The first films for which he gained recognition were shot between 1963 and 1964, a total of eight hours, with the titles of Sleep, Kiss, Haircut, Eat, Blow Job, and Empire. Awarded the Independent Film Award by Film Culture, this series of films translated Warhol’s philosophy on painting to the screen: the focus was not on the finished product (indeed, most of these films could never be mass-marketed), but on the creative processes that went into the work. Just as Warhol emphasized the fact that others could use his silkscreens and create paintings, so his films underscore the truth that anybody could take subjects and film them. Not only could the subjects be ordinary people, but Warhol also made this often-quoted prediction: “In the future everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” Those made famous in Warhol’s pictures included Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, Ultra Violet, and Viva.

Turquoise Maralyn

Warhol began working with a rock band called The Velvet Underground in 1965, introducing them to the chanteuse Nico; to the music of the band he orchestrated an interactive show consisting of images and lights and called it The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The mixed media showcase created an international sensation when it opened at the DOM nightclub in New York City. It was an onslaught on the senses, and it described in music and art the feeling of young America.

Much has been speculated about Andy Warhol’s sex life. He featured both men and women in his artistic endeavors, and his entourage was a mingling of the two sexes. Most people tend to think Warhol was gay, and he did have boyfriends. However, it is a mystery as to whether or not he actually was intimate with these men; Warhol’s attitude was more asexual than homosexual.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, the mentally unstable founding member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), shot Andy Warhol two times in the stomach; she had mistaken him for a kind of god, telling police that “he had too much control over my life.” Warhol spent two months in the hospital recovering from the wounds. This shooting was the inspiration for the 1996 film entitled I Shot Andy Warhol.

In 1968, Warhol tackled the next level in the artistic medium and wrote a novel called a. a demonstrated the philosophy Warhol had expressed previously on canvas and reel — it did not take an accomplished author to write a paper. In order to prove his idea, Warhol recorded twenty-four hours of conversation that occurred within the Factory and entitled it a. In 1969, he founded the magazine inter/View, and in 1975 he published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. Warhol died in February of 1987 from gall bladder surgery complications.

Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch painter whose formal distortions and humanistic concerns made him a major pioneer of twentieth-century expressionism, an artistic movement that emphasized expression of the artist’s experience. I find his artwork fascinating and particularly mesmerizing. I was once asked to paint a reproduction and as someone who normally paint abstract expressionist, found this challenging but thoroughly enjoyable.

Here is my repro

Childhood

Born on March 30, 1853, at Groot-Zundert in the province of Brabant, Holland, Vincent Willem Van Gogh was the son of a Protestant minister, Theodorus Van Gogh. Exactly a year before his birth, his mother, Cornelia, gave birth to an infant, also named Vincent, who was stillborn, or dead upon birth. His grieving parents buried the child and set up a tombstone to mark the grave. As a result, Vincent Van Gogh grew up near the haunting sight of a grave with his own name upon it. His mother later gave birth to Theo, his younger brother, and three younger sisters. Not much is known about Van Gogh’s earlier education, but he did receive some encouragement from his mother to draw and paint. As a teenager he drew and painted regularly.

Starry Night, oil on canvas

Van Gogh’s uncle was a partner in Goupil and Company, art dealers. Vincent entered the firm at the age of sixteen and remained there for six years. He served the firm first in The Hague, the political seat of the Netherlands, and then in London, England, where he fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, who rejected him. Later he worked for Goupil’s branch in Paris, France.

Because of Van Gogh’s unpleasant attitude, Goupil dismissed him in 1876. That year he returned to England, worked at a small school at Ramsgate, and did some preaching. In early 1877 he clerked in a bookshop in Dordrecht. Then, convinced that the ministry ought to be his calling, he joined a religious seminary in Brussels, Belgium. He left three months later to become an evangelist (a preacher) in a poor mining section of Belgium, the Borinage. Van Gogh exhibited the necessary dedication, even giving away his clothes, but his odd behavior kept the miners at a distance. Once again, in July 1879, he found himself dismissed from a job. This period was a dark one for Van Gogh. He wished to give himself to others but was constantly being rejected.

The Artist’s Bedroom

In 1880, after much soul searching, Van Gogh decided to devote his life to art, a profession he accepted as a spiritual calling. When in London he had visited museums, and he had drawn a little while in the Borinage. In October 1880 he attended an art school in Brussels, where he studied the basics of perspective (representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface) and anatomy (the human body). From April to December 1881 he stayed with his parents, who were then in Etten, and continued to work on his art. At this time, too, he studied at the academic art school at The Hague, where his cousin Anton Mauve taught.

Dutch period

During Van Gogh’s Dutch period (1880–1886) he created works in which his overriding concerns for his fellow man were growing. His subjects were poor people, miners, peasants, and inhabitants of almshouses, or houses for the poor. Among his favorite painters at this time were Jean François Millet (1814–1875), Rembrandt (1606–1669), and Honoré Daumier (1808–1879). Complementing Van Gogh’s dreary subject matter of this time were his colors, dark brownish and greenish shades. The masterpiece of Van Gogh’s Dutch period is the Potato Eaters (1885), a night scene in which peasants sit at their meal around a table.

Fishing in Spring, Pont de Clichy

Van Gogh decided to go to Paris in early 1886, partially because he was drawn to the simple and artistic life of the French city. His younger brother, Theo, was living in Paris, where he directed a small gallery maintained by Goupil and Company. Theo had supported Vincent financially and emotionally from the time he decided to become a painter, and would continue to do so throughout his life. The letters between the brothers are among the most moving documents in all the history of Western art. Vincent shared Theo’s apartment and studied at an art school run by the traditional painter Fernand Cormon, where he met Émile Bernard (1868–1941) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), who became his friends.

Self Portrait 1889

By now Van Gogh was largely under the influence of the impressionists, a style of painting where the artist concentrates on the immediate impression of a scene by the use of light and color. Especially influenced by Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Van Gogh was persuaded to give up the gloomy tones of his Dutch period for bright, high-keyed colors. Also, his subject matter changed from the world of peasants to a typically impressionistic subject matter, such as cafés and cityscapes around Montmartre, an area of northern Paris. He also copied Japanese prints. While subjects and handling were obviously taken from impressionism, there frequently could be detected a certain sad quality, as in a scene of Montmartre (1886), where pedestrians are pushed to the outer sides of an open square.
Stay at Arles
Longing for a place of light and warmth, and tired of being entirely financially dependent on Theo, Van Gogh left for Arles in southern France in February 1888. The pleasant country about Arles and the warmth of the place restored Van Gogh to health. In his fifteen months there he painted over two hundred pictures. At this time he applied color in simplified, highly dense masses, his drawing became more energetic and confused than ever before, and objects seemed to radiate a light of their own without giving off shadows. During this period he also turned to painting portraits and executed several self-portraits. Among the masterpieces of his Arles period are the Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries (June 1888); the Night Café (September); and the Artist’s Bedroom at Arles (October).

Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries

At Arles Van Gogh suffered fainting spells and seizures (involuntary muscle spasms). The local population began to turn against him as well. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), responding to his invitation, visited him in October 1888, but the two men quarreled violently. Gauguin left for Paris. Van Gogh, in a fit of remorse and anger, cut off his ear. On May 9, 1889, he asked to be admitted to the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de Provence, a hospital for the mentally ill.

Production at Saint-Rémy
In the year Van Gogh spent at the asylum he worked as much as he had at Arles, producing 150 paintings and hundreds of drawings. Van Gogh suffered several attacks but was completely peaceful in between. At this time he received his first critical praise (a good review), an article by the writer Albert Aurier.

During Van Gogh’s stay at Saint-Rémy, his art changed markedly. His colors lost the intensity of the Arles period: yellows became coppers; reds verged toward brownish tones. His lines became restless. He applied the paint more violently with thicker impasto, the application of thick layers. Van Gogh was drawn to objects in nature under stress: whirling suns, twisted cypress trees, and surging mountains. In Starry Night (1889) the whole world seems engulfed by circular movements.

Van Gogh went to Paris on May 17, 1890, to visit his brother. On the advice of Pissarro, Theo had Vincent go to Auvers, just outside Paris, to submit to the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, an amateur painter and a friend of Pissarro and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).
Last year at Auvers
Van Gogh arrived at Auvers on May 21, 1890. He painted a portrait of Dr. Gachet and portraits of his daughters, as well as the Church of Auvers. The blue of the Auvers period was not the full blue of Arles but a more mysterious, flickering blue. In his last painting, the Cornfield with Crows, Van Gogh showed a topsy-turvy world. The spectator himself becomes the object of perspective, and it is toward him that the crows appear to be flying.

At first Van Gogh felt relieved at Auvers, but toward the end of June he experienced fits of temper and often quarreled with Gachet. On July 27, 1890, he shot himself in a lonely field and died the morning of July 29, 1890.

For More Information

Arnold, Wilfred Niels. Vincent Van Gogh: Chemicals, Crises, and Creativity. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1992.

Greenberg, Jan. Vincent Van Gogh: Portrait of an Artist. New York: Delacorte Press, 2001.

Hammacher, Abraham M. Genius and Disaster: The Ten Creative Years of Vincent Van Gogh. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1968.

Isom, Joan Shaddox. The First Starry Night. Dallas: Whispering Coyote Press, 1997.

Lubin, Albert J. Stranger on the Earth: A Psychological Biography of Vincent Van Gogh. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.

Metzger, Rainer, and Ingo F. Walther. Vincent Van Gogh: 1853–1890. New York: Taschen, 1998.

Schapiro, Meyer. Vincent Van Gogh. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.

Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes

As they have a wonderful exhibition happening at Somerset House in London of Walter Sickert’s nudes then I thought it would be fitting to do a piece on Walter Sickert. His nudes are particularly fascinating and beautiful. I have always had a passion for women nudes, the female body painted is just such an amazing visualization.

The Camden Town Murder or What Shall we do about the Rent?, c1908.

A naked woman with made-up hair lies prone on an iron bed, her face turned away from the viewer. A man, clothed, sits on the bed by her legs, his hands clasped, his head hung. His shirtsleeves and the bed sheets are picked out in white, but the shadows suggest that the daylight is filtered through half-closed curtains.

The Camden Town Murder (c1908) typifies the enigmatic and rather seedy subjects that Walter Sickert began to paint when he returned from several years living in France. The Courtauld Gallery is now showing a collection of these paintings that reinvented ‘the nude’ in British art, in Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes, (until January 20 2008).

These are paintings that call to mind TS Eliot’s imagery of yellow fog rubbing its muzzle on window panes, soot falling from chimneys on winter nights in Victorian slums, shabby Edwardian existences – even though all there is to suggest these circumstances are drab colours and deep shadows.

The Rose Shoe, c1902-05.

Suggested narratives and ambiguities are a running thread through the Camden Town Nudes, all painted in sparse studios created by Sickert in his Mornington Crescent boarding house, with a single iron bedstead the key motif.

The only work on show that doesn’t portray this rather bleak London interior is the first nude Sickert painted, entitled The Rose Shoe (c1902-05). Painted while he was still in France (his mistress lived in Dieppe), the naked figure is turned away on the bed, legs curled up, seemingly oblivious to the viewer. A lone shoe with red details draws the attention, appearing carelessly thrown off – but why? Exhaustion or passion? Or does her pose imply she is distraught?

There is no doubt that Sickert’s subjects are prostitutes – often used by artists of yore in need of a model who would pose undressed. One of his first publicly exhibited nudes – a heavy pastel of a semi-naked woman in a large black hat – clearly announced that it depicted a prostitute in its title, Cocotte de Soho (1905).

Le Lit de Fer (The Iron Bed), 1905.

 

Unflattering light exposes a reclining nude’s fleshy thighs and stomach in the counterpart pastel work, Le Lit de Fer (The Iron Bed). Such gritty realism set the tone for all the artist’s nudes over the next few years, which did nothing for the French view of London as a rather grim, Dickensian place.

“Here are whores collapsed on the unmade bed, whores with withered bodies, weary from the harsh work of prostitution,” as one Gallic critic is cited. Indeed, in Nude on a Bed (c1906), the splayed body has an arm stuck out and one leg awkwardly on the floor as if she had no energy left to lift it on to the bed.

There are unmistakeable elements of Degas, too, in the muted greens and blues, and rusty reds. Seated nude (1906), could almost be one of the dancers, thin and youthful, but in a fatigued pose, holding her lower back, a lanky swathe of hair obscuring her face.

Modern realism, with all its less pleasant aspects, was precisely what Sickert was after. He lambasted the idealised versions of the nude found in the Royal Academy and Paris Salon, which he called vacuous, ‘obscene monsters’.

Mornington Crescent Nude, c1907.

He put his money where his mouth was, with raw brushwork describing imperfect bodies in claustrophobic rooms, dark rugs on the floor, musty air you can almost smell through the language of the painting. He often positions the viewer as if we are entering the room, seeing the body from the foot of the bed with genitals exposed, or else you loom over her while she sleeps, creating the uncomfortable feeling that you are her exploiter.

The unsettling mood for which he was patently striving found its perfect muse in the murder of prostitute Emily Dimmock in 1907. The ‘Camden Town Murder’ was the talk of London, and prompted Sickert to introduce a quietly menacing male figure into his nude works, along with an obvious washbasin and shoes under the bed, as mentioned in reports of the murder.

In L’Affaire de Camden Town (1909), the man stands over the recumbent woman. There is a terrible cold light in this scene with its loud wallpaper background, but it’s not obvious whether the woman is beginning to cower away from the man, or if she is perfectly relaxed as her lower body – with one leg bent out – suggests. Associated drawings embody a similar uncertain tension – in one, the man has his hands on the standing woman’s shoulders. Is it affectionate, or the precursor to strangling her?

Conversation, 1909. Royal College of Art, London

Sickert was a master of ambiguity, offering various interpretations for these spectacles. The man in L’Affaire is substituted for a woman in a drawing he titled Conversation (1909), changing the meaning entirely. He also gave alternative titles to his murder paintings: ‘What shall we do about the rent?’ and ‘Summer Night’ rather change the couple’s relationship.

The Prussians in Belgium (c1912, renamed in 1915) likewise turns a seated nude and a clothed man into an allegory for the First World War, with the lecherous, nonchalantly seated man representing the German invasion.

One might say that Sickert exploited contemporary events, and ran off with the nudes for attention. He certainly had his fun with the Jack the Ripper phenomenon, telling people that the murderer had lived in his room before him.

Sickert’s story inspired the novel and Hitchcock film, The Lodger. Curator Barnaby Wright is certain Sickert would have been chuffed by crime writer Patricia Cornwell’s theory that he was Jack the Ripper himself. While it’s compelling as a conspiracy theory, if anything, Sickert seems to be more of a lover of sombre theatre, an observer, than an actual player in his Edwardian equivalent of kitchen-sink drama.

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin’s famous guise as the original Western savage was his own embellishment upon reality. No mere bohemianism, that persona was, for him, the modern sequel to the “natural man” constructed by his idol, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Gauguin’s rejection of the industrialized West for an earthly paradise embraced, in artistic terms, all handmade arts and crafts as equivalent creative endeavors. As his own ideal artist-artisan, he produced an abundant, cross-fertilizing body of work in many media, dissolving the traditional boundaries between high art and decoration.

Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, Arles 1888

The artist and his older sister Marie were born in Paris (he in 1848) to highly literate upper-middle-class parents from France and Peru. Gauguin’s early life was shaped by his family’s liberal political activism and their blood ties spanning the Old and New Worlds. His father was a republican journalist; his maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan (Flora Tristán y Moscoso), was a Peruvian creole and a celebrated socialist active in France. Through her, Gauguin claimed a special link to the earlier New World as a descendant of its pre- and post-Conquest elite. With or without foundation, Gauguin identified his grandmother’s ancestors as the noble Spanish Viceroy of Peru who ordered the first European voyage to the Marquesas Islands (the artist’s own final home) and, before that, a high-born Inca, a legacy that he “proved” with his own craggy “Inca” profile. In 1849 his parents fled France for Peru with their two young children, fearing repercussions from the candidate his father’s paper had not supported for president of the republic, Louis-Napoléon, later Napoleon III. His father died on shipboard. Gauguin spent his childhood in colonial Lima and his adolescence in his father’s native city of Orléans. Though his widowed mother had few means beyond a modest salary as a seamstress in Orléans, the boy was surrounded in both cities by prosperity and culture, thanks to family and friends.

Scene from Tahitian Life
In the late 1860s Gauguin traveled the world with the merchant marine, and then the eastern Mediterranean as a third-class military seaman. He started painting and building an art collection when he settled in Paris as a stockbroker in 1872. Having inherited trust funds from his grandparents and now earning good money in his new career, he lived well, married a middle-class Danish woman in 1873, and had five children with her. His artistic training was informal and limited. After learning to paint and model on his own, Gauguin was tutored by the active professionals among his landlords and neighbors. Intellectually restless and independent, Gauguin sought and absorbed information from myriad sources, synthesizing them into his own aesthetic. He apparently began to show his work before he sought any training. His Salon debut in 1876, with Under the Tree Canopy at Viroflay (Seine et Oise)–possibly the landscape of that area, dated 1875, that belonged to his sister’s descendants, Hernando Uribe Holguin, Bogotá–occurred four years before he met his only acknowledged painting master, his landlord Félix Jobbé-Duval, in 1880. In 1877, Gauguin modeled a clay bust of his wife and observed as another landlord, sculptor-praticien Jules Bouillot, carved a marble rendition (Courtauld Institute of Art, London), in order to execute the entire process himself immediately afterwards; he did so in a bust of his son Emil (1877, marble; MMA). His fellow tenant at Bouillot’s, sculptor Paul Aubé, may have guided Gauguin as well, and may have encouraged his interest in clay sculpture. Gauguin studied ceramics much later, in 1886 with Ernest Chaplet, whose studio was nearby. In 1879 he joined the “Independents” (Impressionists), thanks in part to Camille Pissarro, another New World transplant (from Danish Saint-Thomas) who became a special mentor. Gauguin showed regularly with them until they disbanded in 1886, entering a variety of works, including sculpture, that earned modest critical attention. Various dealers bought his work. Gauguin lost his final job in the brokerage world after the financial crash of 1882. He moved his family to the less expensive town of Rouen and became a sales representative for a canvas manufacturer. However, his focus intensified on art and political activism. He undertook missions to the Spanish border to promote the Spanish republican cause. Alarmed at the dramatic change their life was taking, his wife took the children to her native Copenhagen. Gauguin followed, but soon declared the city to be uncongenial. He left to pursue an independent life, though he remained in regular contact with his wife and children, largely by correspondence, for the rest of his life.

Breton Girls Dancing

Surviving on odd jobs and often without cash, Gauguin began his lifelong peripatetic migration between exotic regions and Paris in 1886. In the process he grew in stature as a colorful and controversial avant-garde artist, primarily through works sent from those remote sites for sale and exhibition in Europe. After an ill-fated move to Panama and Martinique, in 1888 he began spending extended time in the French provinces. He went first to Pont Aven, Brittany, where Emile Bernard’s (1868-1941) cloisonnisme profoundly affected his work. Yet Bernard and his circle of friends–notably Paul Sérusier (1863-1927), Maurice Denis (1870-1943), and Charles Laval (1862-1892)–regarded Gauguin as their own mentor. His art and stated views in Brittany shaped their aesthetic definingly for years, producing first what is known as the School of Pont Aven, and then the more varied work of their later years, as the self-styled Nabis. Gauguin then went to Arles to join Van Gogh, which proved to be a seminal encounter artistically, if tumultuous emotionally, for both. He then returned to Brittany, to the village of Le Pouldu. By 1890, Gauguin’s work was shown at avant-garde exhibitions in Paris and Brussels and had earned the admiration of Symbolist writers in Paris, particularly that of its current leader Stéphane Mallarmé. Gauguin was invited to attend regular gatherings when in the capital, and was often the honored guest. His final move to the Pacific Islands, with sporadic returns to Paris, began in 1891 with his transfer to Tahiti, as head of a government-funded artistic mission. He found his dream of an earthly paradise there severely compromised. As in Europe, he saw discord and a native culture overcome by Western values–including the need for capital to live. Nonetheless he produced prolifically, amidst quarrels with authorities, scandals, and relations with local women that yielded yet more children. Various illnesses, including syphilis, left Gauguin increasingly immobilized during his last years. He died in 1903 and remains buried on Atuona (Marquesas Islands).

Contes barbares (1902, Barbarian Tales)

Gauguin’s complex art has long been divided into the Impressionism of his early years, and the Synthetism and exotic Symbolism of his mature years in Brittany and Oceania. It is broadly defined as an incremental rejection of naturalist modernity, the tenets of high art, and Western illusionism, in favor of a syncretism that drew upon a broad range of artistic and literary sources. His course is frequently charted with landmarks: the landscapes, figure paintings, and interiors that particularly suggest the work of Pissarro and Degas, from his years as a leisure-time Impressionist painter; the brilliantly colored cloisonné paintings of Brittany (The Vision After the Sermon [Jacob Wrestling with the Angel], 1888, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh); and his enigmatic monumental testament from the Pacific, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897, BMFA). The formal qualities and meaning of that work, however, continue to be debated. His paintings in the Impressionist exhibitions of the early 1880s emerge, under renewed scrutiny, as more anti-naturalist and anti-conventional than previously thought. As is well established, the anti-illusionism of his mature work and the variety of media, especially functional objects, convey his advocacy of craft and the decorative, and of the artist as the physical, as well as conceptual, source of art. Gauguin was no pure formalist however. His support for the decorative encompassed, even demanded, the conveyance of meaning by a close alliance of form, content, and technique, a strategy–so dear to Symbolist poets–that was central to Gauguin’s disciples in Brittany, whether in a church fresco or a decorative screen. That sense of charged meaning, however, owed little to traditional Western symbolism and narrative strategies, which demanded coherent legibility. Gauguin’s later works from Brittany and beyond remain ambiguous, perhaps unresolvable, as provocative expressions of mysterious truths, at once personal and cosmic.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

The artist produced two- and three-dimensional sculpture and functional objects throughout his career. Typologically, they range from conventional portrait busts and architectural reliefs to functional objects–among them vases, knife handles, and wine casks. Many were intended for public exhibition and sale like his paintings, prints, and drawings. Throughout his career, Gauguin both modeled and carved; at some point, however, his choice of materials changed. Whether for practical or ideological reasons, Gauguin eschewed the “noble” marble of his first sculptural efforts (the family busts) for “humbler” materials, mostly wood and clay. His advocacy of direct handiwork caused him to reject methods that involved indirect mechanical processes, such as throwing ceramics on a wheel. Only one work produced by such techniques can be documented, a cast plaster of the so-called Self-Portrait, Oviri (1894-1895), known today through posthumous serial bronze casts. Famous for their “savage” subject matter and format, non-Western polychromy, and sense of slapdash formation, these works deliberately vary in character. Throughout his career, Gauguin’s carved surfaces could be smoothly undulating, like any traditional Western sculpture, as well as emphatically planar and “crude,” in the more familiar primitivizing mode. He did not completely reject commercial reproduction of his sculpture. While in Tahiti, the artist planned to serialize Mask of a Savage (1894-1895, terracotta; Musée Léon-Dierx, Saint-Denis, Réunion [Mascarene Islands]) and what he called his best sculpture, Oviri (1894, stoneware; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), in bronze. Oviri and several other figures were, in fact, cast by several commercial founders as lost-wax serial bronzes from the years before World War I to the late 1950s.Gauguin also published his extensive writings, beginning with a very revealing critical commentary on ceramics in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, and ending with autobiographical tracts such as Noa-Noa. After his death, as with Rousseau, his literary production shaped views of his work and persona as profoundly as the physical objects. His artistic influence in France took many forms before and after his demise; one of the most evident examples is the work of Odilon Redon, who revered the artist as much as his aesthetic.

 Oviri

Bibliographic References

• Gauguin, Paul. Avant et après. 1903. Facs. ed. Leipzig, 1913, reprinted Copenhagen, 1951.
• Rotonchamp, Jean de [pseud. of Louis Brouillon]. Paul Gauguin 1848-1903. Weimar, 1906.
• Morice, Charles. Paul Gauguin. Paris, 1919.
• Chassé, Charles. Gauguin et le groupe de Pont-Aven. Documents inédits. Paris, 1921.
• Gauguin, Pola. My Father, Paul Gauguin. Trans. Arthur G. Chater. New York, 1937 (new edition, 1988). Originally Paul Gauguin, Mon Père. Trans. Georges Sautreau. Paris, 1938.
• Malingue, Maurice. Gauguin. Le Peintre et son oeuvre. Paris, 1948.
• Loize, Jean. Les Amitiés du peintre Georges-Daniel de Monfreid et ses réliques de Gauguin. Paris, 1951.
• Chassé, Charles. Gauguin et son temps. Paris, 1955.
• Goldwater, Robert. Paul Gauguin. New York, 1957.
• Malingue, Maurice. “Du nouveau sur Gauguin.” L’Oeil 55-56 (July-August 1959): 32-39.
• Gray, Christopher. Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin. Baltimore, 1963.
• Wildenstein, Georges, and Raymond Cogniat. Gauguin. 2 vols. Paris, 1964.
• Bodelsen, Merete. Gauguin’s Ceramics. London, 1964.
• Danielsson, Bengt. Gauguin in the South Seas. Garden City, New Jersey, 1966.
• Andersen, Wayne, assisted by Barbara Klein. Gauguin’s Paradise Lost. New York, 1971.
• Jirat-Wasiutynski, Vojtech. Paul Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism. Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1975. New York and London, 1978.
• Teilhet-Fiske, Jehanne. Paradise Reviewed. An Interpretation of Gauguin’s Polynesian Symbolism. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1983.
• Varnedoe, Kirk. “Gauguin.” In Primitivism in 20th Century Art. 2 vols. Exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984: 1:179-209.
• Merlhès, Victor, ed. Correspondance de Paul Gauguin. Vol. 1 of 3 [forthcoming]. Paris, 1984-.
• Chemin de Gauguin: Génèse et rayonnement. Exh. cat. Musée Départemental du Prieuré, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1985.
• Paul Gauguin. Exh. cat. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery. Tokyo, 1987.
• The Art of Paul Gauguin. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris. Washington, D.C., 1988.
• Eisenman, Stephen F. Gauguin’s Skirt. New York, 1997.
• Butler, Ruth, and Suzanne Glover Lindsay, with Alison Luchs, Douglas Lewis, Cynthia J. Mills, and Jeffrey Weidman. European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2000: 234-236.

Huang Yongping – Bat Project

Very interesting story of how art and politics can cross paths

In 1986, Huang Yongping formed the Xiamen Dada group, aiming to bring Dadaist principles to Chinese art. Following his participation in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou and the political upheavals in China of the same year, Huang moved to Paris, where he now lives and works.
In his work, Huang often deals with current events, history and reality by means of deconstruction and irony. In his installation ‘A History of Chinese Painting’ and ‘A Concise History of Modern Painting’ Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987 / 1993), the artist blended a Chinese and a Western art text into a messy pile of pulp. Other works raise the issue of illegal immigrants and post-colonial migration. Péril de moutons (1997) alluded to the mad cow disease epidemic and The Camels’ Back Project (1999) questioned the tense multicultural mix in Jerusalem.
Bat Project I–III (2001–2003) comprises replicas of the United States EP-3 spy plane, which is colloquially referred to as the ‘bat’. This type of aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter plane on 1 April 2001, before making an emergency landing on Hainan Island. The Chinese requested the spy plane to be disassembled and crated before being transported back to the United States in a freight carrier. What caught Huang’s interest in the incident was the disassembly of such a massive and sophisticated object. The artist felt that when one plane is dismantled and flown away inside another, it becomes a work of art in itself. According to Huang, it is also a rare instance of powerful technology ironically deployed against itself.
The first phase of this project (Shenzhen, 2001) comprised a replica of a portion of the plane from tail to fuselage, and was first produced for an exhibition jointly organised by China and France. In Bat Project II (Guangzhou, 2002), he recreated the middle and front portions, as well as the left wing. The final part, Bat Project III (Beijing, 2003), was a realisation of the remaining right wing.
The reconstitution of the EP-3 spy plane in each phase of the Bat Project was halted near completion, prior to the exhibition opening. As the artist explained, ‘whether or not it is due to pressure from government officials or from private patrons, and whether or not it is the practice of self-censorship or state censorship, the removal of the artwork from the three exhibitions has followed the same logic.’ Nevertheless, Huang’s construction of the EP-3 has unexpectedly evolved into a re-enactment of the original spy plane incident, as the disassembled plane is forcibly dismantled once again.

Bat Project I, 2001
Shenzuan, China.

Bat Project II, 2002
Guangzhou, China.

Bat Project III, 2003
Beijing, China.

Bat Project I and II, 2003
Arsinale, Venice Biannual, Italy.