LPDM Fine Art Consulting

An exhibition of five works of art by Brazilian artists Mauricio Dias and Walter Reidweg fits perfectly within the programming goals of its gallery space at the Americans Society as it references the similarities and the discord between cultures in the Americas.  Here the artists have chosen to examine  the  cross-cultural and social contexts of North and South America in a variety of ways in each of their works.

In Mama, 2000, a 16 minute film depicts a US border patrol agent discussing training  dogs for the tough job of drug enforcement and policing illegal border crossings.  The piece focuses on the personal and emotional connection between the trained dogs and their agents, and to the left and right of the main film are the “honor roll” of dog portraits with name banners on each to identify the successful canine.

In Suitcases for Marcel, 2006/2008, 12  distinctive cases rest atop separate pedestals, the tops propped open to reveal 7″ LCD panels playing films of characters carrying that particular bag around Rio.  The simultaneously running films document the journeys of the 12 cases while the cases reveal their films from within.  Each case seems to take on its own persona as it tells its own story.

In Raimundos, Serverinos and Franciscos, 1998, Brazil’s poor janitors and doormen gather in a small room and go about their daily activities for 4 minutes, piling in one by one and claiming a few inches of space, before hauntingly dropping their activities and turning to look at the camera as the film ends.  The final seconds create an awareness in the viewers that the men, the most popular names of men in such professions in Brazil, knew we were watching all along and have called us out of our voyeuristic privacy.  Their actions are then revealed to us to have been a performance all along.

Moving Truck, 2009, brings the work of the two artists to the present day and to New York itself.  The artists park a U-Haul truck on the street and broadcast their films in the open back of the truck container.  The reactions of viewers and passersby is filmed as part of the project and displayed in the gallery.

Dias & Reidweg:…and it becomes something else is on view now through August 1, 209 at the Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, New York City.

Now on view at the Park Avenue Armory is a fantastical installation by Ernsto Neto called anthropodino which acts as an otherworldly playground for children and adults.  The giant piece is composed of layers of sheer fabric stretching from the ceiling to floor with hanging sacks of sheer fabric filled with wieghts and even cinammon.  Weaving our way through the “hallways” created by the caterpillar-like forms of the work  (sheer fabric stretched over what look like bones) we reached numerous endzones such as a giant beanbag for lounging and a pit of aqua balls recalling a swimming pool.  Neto, a contemporary Brazialian  artist, chose this biomorphic form (which is itself a space) to recall the physical connection between artwork/architecture and the viewer, as if the installation itself were both body and architecture.  While there were a few adults partaking in the fun the children seemed to have the most fun of all.  This piece is the first art commission at the Park Avenue Armory which is now a not-for-profit institution designed to use the historical armory space for arts programs.

Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue (at 67th Street) New York, New York 10065.   Installation on view through June 15, 2009.

Seven Days In The Art World‘s book jacket depicts a sexy high-heeled female leg disappearing behind a corner of an all-white space that could only be an art gallery and leaves viewers wondering what could be behind this wall.  Sarah Thornton’s recent book tells us.  Thornton reviews and explores the contemporary art world from various perspectives and hits upon its various pressure points, exploring the trends, the players and the activities that make this world the glamorous and shady world it is.  Or at least it was until the market downturn…  The book’s chapters, devoted to the auction, the crit, the fair, the prize, the magazine, the studio visit and the biennale, provide a first-hand look at the deals and details of each of these places.

At times I was having such fun reading the impressions of those involved, the self importance and the total lack of perspective as compared to the world outside the art world.  At other times, it felt painful to be immersed in the details of such a self indulgent world of egos and shameless displays and discussions of money (and the access that money can buy.)  I am still left wondering if all of this isn’t just a case of the Emporer’s New Clothes, but this book qualifies as a guilty pleasure nonetheless.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Eli Wilner & Company’s studio in Long Island City, New York to see an incredible work in progress, the new frame made by the firm for an important American painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, by Emanuel Leutze.  This painting, the largest of the various versions produced by this German American artist, measures 149 x 255 inches (approximately 12 x 21 feet) and depicts General George Washington proudly leading the charge across the Delaware River to Trenton, New Jersey on December 25, 1776 during the Revolutionary War.  The painting and its impressive new frame form part of the Met’s American Wing which is in the process of being totally renovated with the third and final phase of the project scheduled for completion in 2011.  The grand opening of the new space took place yesterday in the presence of dignitaries, politicians and the New York elite as First Lady Michele Obama spoke to the crowd as part of her cultural visits around the city.  In two years, this grand painting will hang on public view at the completion of the renovation project.

On my visit,  gallery director Suzanne Smeaton showed me the maquettes for the final frame along with the crown jewel itself, the frame, which is currently being finished by a team of expert craftspeople at Wilner’s studio.  Smeaton explained that the painting had until recently been framed with a simple gold frame, but that in the course of researching the painting curators discovered a nearly 150 year old photograph of the painting which revealed a prior, more complex and patriotic frame – a frame with an elaborate carved eagle, arrows and flags atop the frame and four shields at the inside corners.  Metropolitan Museum curators hired Eli Wilner & Company to recreate the frame as it looked in the old photograph.  Master carver Felix Teran described this frame as the biggest and best project he may ever have to opportunity to work on, and recalled that it has taken years of work to accomplish this great task.  The frame is currently propped up on work tables, and when I visited three craftsmen were inside the center of the enormous wooden piece, a sculpture in itself, hard at work. 

Seeing this three-part example (the old photograph, the plain frame that had been on the painting in recent years, and the reproduction frame in progress) points out some of the more intricate issues of framing and artwork conservation.  While curators are often insistent upon accurate, period frames to accentuate the pictures within, there are always changes made over time to frames and collections.  Ms. Smeaton points out that as tastes and museum exhibition programs change, records are not always kept of the changes made to frames on paintings and the reasons behind those decisions.  We may never know, for example, what ever became of the original eagle frame.

I am looking forward to the day I see the frame on view with its painting which is itself in conservation during the building renovation.  It should be a perfect match.

(Photographs courtesy of Eli Wilner & Company)

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) has been revered and studied by successive artists since the end of his career.  In this exhibition, Cezanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cezanne’s work is shown alongside that of eighteen Modern and contemporary painters and sculptors from Picasso and Matisse to Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Jasper Johns and Jeff Wall, all of whom who were and are inspired by Cezanne’s revolutionary planar landscapes and portraits, composite still lifes and grand bathers.  Breaking free from academic tradition, yet still painting recognizable landscapes, still lifes and portraits, Cezanne charted a course towards seeing the geometry in everything and capturing the fragmented surfaces and planes which led future artists such as Pablo Picasso to identify Cezanne as the father of Modernism.

The exhibition is organized by showing a Cezanne beside the work of the younger artists he influenced, creating the closest visual similarities possible.  In some cases, artists have borrowed Cezanne’s favored aqua blue color and used it in their own forms (Mondrian, for example).  In others, the forms of Cezanne’s works themselves, either figures, landscape or still lifes, appear dramatically in a contemporary work that pays homage to the master in bold or subtle ways (Ellsworth Kelly, Matisse, Wall).  In others, Cezanne’s brushwork or palate knife paint application, as well as the slightly exposed blank canvas he favored, appear in works by artists of the next generation (Demuth, Giacometti).  For example, a series of figurative, primitive bronze sculptures by Picasso populate a raised platform before their inspiration, Cezanne’s Large Bathers.  The solidity of the sculptures seems to mimic that of the painted, weighty figures Cezanne created in spite of his soft colors.

There are some excellent comparisons between artists and works in the show, some of which are more obvious and more satisfying than others.  The visual synergies in the exhibition between, say, a Cezanne landscape and a Jasper Johns map of America are visual treats, and became so obvious when viewed together that I can’t believe we all had not thought of the obvious similarities of form and painting before.  A large crescent of blue canvas by Ellsworth Kelly, hung high on the wall, echoes the blue crescent of the bay of Marseilles in an adjacent Cezanne painting, yet eliminates the landscape which surrounds the sea and this pares the work down to the deep blue area alone.  After seeing the relationship of Marsden Hartley’s male bather to Cezanne’s, and the similar impact of a pair of portraits by the two artists, I was left craving the juxtaposition of a Marsden Hartley Mount Katahdin painting and a Cezanne Mont Saint Victoire, but there was no such duo.  Though not comprehensive and slightly chaotically organized, with cut up walls and a strange flow at times, the show makes some great points.

Cezanne and Beyond through May 31, 2009.  Philadelphia Museum of Art.