andy goldsworthy

an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature



Andy Goldsworthy was born in Chesire, England and currently resides in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. He studied at Bradford School of Art and Preston Polytechnic and has been producing work since the mid 1970s. Goldsworthy works directly with nature, using a variety of materials including leaves, twigs, flower petals, pinecones, sand, snow and stone. Much of his work addresses issues of growth and decay, seasonal cycles; and the idea that an artwork too has a natural life that eventually must end. Goldsworthy finds a richness of understanding in revisiting certain forms such as mounds, holes, arches, spirals, and lines each revealing a different facet of its constructive material. Goldsworthy has produced over 70 commissions for organizations and collections throughout the world, such as the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Abbeystead Estates, Duchess of Westminster, Lancaster; and Stanford University, California Andy Goldswothy was born in Chesire, England and currently resides in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. He studied at Bradford School of Art and Preston Polytechnic and has been producing work since the mid 1970s. Goldsworthy works directly with nature, using a variety of materials including leaves, twigs, flower petals, pinecones, sand, snow and stone. Much of his work addresses issues of growth and decay, seasonal cycles; and the idea that an artwork too has a natural life that eventually must end. Goldsworthy finds a richness of understanding in revisiting certain forms such as mounds, holes, arches, spirals, and lines each revealing a different facet of its constructive material. Goldsworthy has produced over 70 commissions for organizations and collections throughout the world, such as the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Abbeystead Estates, Duchess of Westminster, Lancaster; and Stanford University, California. Andy Goldsworthy was born in Chesire, England and currently resides in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. He studied at Bradford School of Art and Preston Polytechnic and has been producing work since the mid 1970s. Goldsworthy works directly with nature, using a variety of materials including leaves, twigs, flower petals, pinecones, sand, snow and stone. Much of his work addresses issues of growth and decay, seasonal cycles; and the idea that an artwork too has a natural life that eventually must end. Goldsworthy finds a richness of understanding in revisiting certain forms such as mounds, holes, arches, spirals, and lines each revealing a different facet of its constructive material. Goldsworthy has produced over 70 commissions for organizations and collections throughout the world, such as the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; The Getty Musum, Los Angeles; Abbeystead Estates, Duchss of Westminster, Lancaster; and Stanford University, California. Biography Source: Haines Gallery


resources

• andy goldsworthy portfolio
• sheepfolds : a major Cumbria-wide sculpture, landscape and environment project with the internationally renowned sculptor
• artcyclopaedia
• artnet
• bibliography : forthcoming (or do a search on Powell's search engine box at right)

isamu noguchi

ISAMU NOGUCHI
November 17, 1904 - December 30, 1988

Isamu Noguchi was a sculptor, designer, architect, and craftsman. Throughout his life he struggled to see, alter, and recreate his natural surroundings. His gardens and fountains were transformations meant to bring out the beauty their locations had always possessed. His large abstract stone sculptures were both majestic and personal. He believed that through sculpture and architecture, one could better understand the struggle with nature. It is that search for understanding which brings together his many and varied works. Isamu Noguchi was born Isamu Gilmour in Los Angeles in 1904 to Leonie Gilmour, an Irish-American teacher and editor, and Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet. It is the cultural divide between his parents, between East and West, between two distinct histories of art and thought, that would engage him his entire life. In 1906, Noguchi's mother took him to Japan, where he attended Japanese and Jesuit schools. While in Japan, Noguchi gained an appreciation for its landscape, architecture and craftsmanship. Later his mother sent him to Indiana to attend a progressive boarding school she had read about in a magazine. After high school Noguchi enrolled in Columbia University to study medicine, while at the same time taking sculpture classes on the Lower East Side. It wasn't long before he realized that art, not medicine, was his true calling. He left school and found a studio where he could sculpt full-time. While in Manhattan he became acquainted with the work of the Surrealists and with contemporary abstract sculpture. These interests led him to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship, where he met and worked with the great modernist sculptor, Constantin Brancusi. Brancusi's engagement with the abstract and his belief in understanding the pre-disposed forms of his materials made a strong impression on Noguchi. While in Paris he also met the sculptors Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti. Source: PBS American Masters

He was also an important landscape architect known for public works as well as his stagee sets for Martha Graham productions.

A number of his mass-produced furniture pieces and lamps are still being manufactured and are considered icons of twentieth century interior design.

[ IN-50 COFFEE TABLE, 1944 ]

[ AKARI LIGHT SCULPTURES, 1960S ]

the noguchi museum

isamu noguchi pbs american masters

artcylopaedia noguchi online

• moma noguchi collection
• metropolitan museum of art
• design museum
• walter art center (includes videos)
• isamu noguchi at the smithsonian sackler-freer gallery (online exhibit: isamu noguchi and modern japanese ceramics)

misc.

• slate.com : a slide show essay by lee siegel : "hybrid model: isamu noguchi went beyond modernism"
• noguchi california scenario

portland's wurst gallery

Portland has great art galleries and the wurst gallery looks like it could also be its most fun:


Check out their current exhibit : the wurstminster

artists were invited to reserve a dog breed on a first come, first served basis. the only requirement was that the artist attempt to capture the look and spirit of their chosen breed in their own unique way. a portion of the proceeds from this show will be donated to DoveLewis animal hospital in portland, oregon.

I just wish I liked the Wire Fox Terrier better. The Norwich and the Scottie are great however.


I like everything about Portland: great art, great music, great lit, and the best bookstore in the world. It just rains too damn much. I couldn't take it. I'm not a jolly enough person to live with such persistent gloom. Under those conditions you have to have a sunny disposition in order to prevent yourself from perishing of grief.

saint-tropez and modern art

Saint-Tropez (Municipality, Var, France)
In 1892, the painter Paul Signac (1863-1935), one of the leaders of the Pointillist school, sailing on his yacht Olympia, discovered the small fishers' village of Saint-Tropez.

Paul Signac. The Red Buoy, Saint-Tropez, 1895 Musée d'Orsay

He bought a house that he named La Hune (lit., the top [of a ship]) and transformed into his studio, where he invited his friends, such as Cross, Matisse, Derain and Marquet. Saint-Tropez became a main center of painting avant-garde of the early XXth century.

Henri Matisse, Luxe, calme et volupté (1905), Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The Museum of Annonciade
The Museum of Annonciade, housed since 1955 in a former chapel located on the port of Saint-Tropez and abandoned during the French Revolution, shows 56 paintings, dating from 1890-1950, bequeathed by the local collector Georges Grammont. The collection is fairly small but includes only masterpieces by painters from the Pointillist, Fauvist and Nabi schools. Among the painters exhibited there are André Derain, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Rouault, Georges Braque, Georges Seurat, Henri-Edmond Cross, Paul Signac, Raoul Dufy, Félix Vallotton, Albert Marquet, Aristide Maillol and Edouard Vuillard.

Paul Signac: Port St. Tropez, ( 1899)Musée de l'Annonciade, St. Tropez

Albert Marquet, Le port de Saint-Tropez (1905), Musée de l'Annonciade, Saint-Tropez

Pierre Bonnard , Le Port de Saint-Tropez, 1914, Saint-Tropez, musée de l'Annonciade

Paul Signac: French neo-impressionist painter 1863 - 1935

Artist's biography and a collection of his paintings

Recommended reading: Saint-Tropez: The Rise of an Artist Colony (an excellent illustrated online blog/article

Online Resources for Paul Signac:

• Paul Signac Web Museum
• Paul Signac Artchive
• Paul Signac Artcyclopedia
• 
  

Glossary:

Impressionism (n)/ Impressionist (adj)
A progressive art movement that originated in France in the late 19th century. Impressionist painters wanted to capture the rapidly changing modern world and the fleeting moods of nature. Impressionism relied on optical blending to depict the fluctuations of light and consisted largely of views of everyday middle-class life in the city and countryside of France.

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) Garden at Sainte-Adresse, (1867) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. "Monet’s Garden at Sainte-Adresse depicts the artist’s aunt, father, and cousin relaxing on a seaside terrace."

Postimpressionism (n)/ Postimpressionist (adj)
The French artistic style that followed Impressionism. Such artists as Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec pushed beyond the Impressionist emphasis on the appearance of nature, stressing instead qualities such as emotional expression and the formal structure of underlying objects. Postimpressionism led to a variety of bold new styles, including innovative uses of color and brushwork that sometimes bordered on abstraction. (Click here to go read Gauguin's Tahitian Interiors : my post from Monday February 19, 2007)

Pointillism (n)
A theory and technique of applying small strokes or dots of color to a surface so that from a distance, they blend together; also called Neoimpressionism or Divisionism

Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte / Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86) Art Institute of Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago
Art Access Glossary

gauguin's tahitian interiors

Merahi metua no Tehamana
(Ancestors of Tehamana /Ancêtres de Tehamana)
1893 Art Institute of Chicago

Gauguin's Tahitian interiors are marked by elaborate patterns on walls and fabrics; often every surface is covered a complex mix of pattern and color as with the two paintings above (Ancestors of Tehamana) and below (Nevermore). In these two interiors we see richly symbolic spaces made up of layers of patterns, sculptures, and natural objects such as flowers, fruits and animals.

Nevermore, O Taiti / Plus jamais (1897)
Courtauld Institute Galleries, London

Ordinary objects are shown to have with spiritual significance, such as the fan in Ancestors of Tehamana.

Gauguin's repeated use of certain objects such as mangos, which have such powerful symbolic associations with sex and fecundity makes us attentive to the mangos in the foreground of What's New? and Woman Brooding (below).

Tahitienne (Sur La Plage) / Tahitian Women (On the Beach
1891, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Interior and exterior spaces are not distinguished from each other by the use of naturalistic choices of color or light. It seems that Gauguin took his famous painting of his two women on the beach, Tahitienne and re-created it as an interior painting in What's New? There is very little to mark the change with the exception, perhaps, of some shading for floor boards and a hightened saturation that changes the coloring of the sand.

Parua Api? / What's New? / Quoi de neuf?
(1892) Gemaldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden

In other interiors surfaces are covered--floor to ceiling with a single bright swath of color, as with the bright mango-colored floor below (Brooding Woman) and, conversely, the world of nature is a riot of colors, sometimes arranged in ritualistic patterns. The intensity of the spiritual world associated with nature often led Gauguin to create otherworldly images of the Tahitian landscape using bold, rich but unnatural colors, as seen in the painting The Day of the God below:

Mahana No Atua (Day of the Gods) 1894, Art Institute of Chicago

While the world of nature can be depicted in bright unnatural patterns and colors, inner spaces are sometimes bathed in more natural hues, as in Not Working (below). An almost identical space in Woman Brooding is bathed in the bright colors of blue and mango -- colors of the dress worn by the woman in Not Working.

Eiaha Ohipa Not Working Pas de travail (1896)
Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow

Te Faaturuma Woman Brooding (1891)
Worcester Art Museum

Note how the canvases mirror each other in the frame of the door, the dog sitting guard, and the figure in the distance. The figures appear to be (perhaps?) the abandoned wife in the white dress catching view of her husband with another women, and the unfaithful husband returning to his unhappy wife.

To varying degrees, like Gauguin's exterior imagery, his interior spaces are fantasies. These interiors are fantasies haunted by two things: the first is Gauguin himself. As brilliant as his work is, and it is brilliant, it is also awful. Some of it is unspeakably painful. He behaved in ways that were monstrous. That his work can give testimony to this behavior is not a redemption of him as a human being but it is of him as an artist. And everyone knows those are not always the same.

Manaò tupapau /L’esprit des morts veille (1892) Albright—Knox Art Gallery.
Contes barbares, (1902) Marquises Essen, Museum Folkwang.

From his earliest arrive in Tahiti to his final death in the Marquises his artistic motivations were always twisted into his personal demons and desires and as a result he left behind him a swath of destruction in the communities where he lived. While it may be true that our current ideas about decency (whatever they may be) may not be applicable to middled-aged French men and Polynesian girls a century ago, there is no greater testament to their misery than Gauguin's own paintings. Historical materials also provide evidence that there are certain ideas about human dignity and rights that are universal.

Finally, Gauguin's Tahitian paintings are in a sense all interior spaces haunted by the reality of Tahiti itself. Tahiti was not Gauguin's tropical escape from the world -- an unspoiled paradise -- but was becoming an increasingly modernized colonial state. Tahiti was the center of French Polynesia, an important trade center. In addition, most of the native peoples had been converted to Christianity by missionaries.

Ta Matete (We Shall Not Go to Market Today)
Jour de Marché (1892) Kunstmuseum Basel

The world that Gauguin paints is no less powerful for being imagined. Indeed it is all the more significant for its being the dream vision of a created by mad Robinson Crusoe driven to find the last island with a Garden of Eden until only finding populations whose decline he can only hasten with his own debauchery ultimately ending in alcholism and syphilis. This is the European avant-garde artistic statement of the primitive par excellance. Not even Picasso could surpass Gauguin when it came to that.

the basics:

paul gauguin b. 1848, Paris; d. 1903, Marquesas Islands

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

• Biography with bibliography
• Paul Gauguin Tour
• Paul Gauguin -- (all works)

Terminology :

• Primitivism : definition from the Tate Collection online glossary
• Expressionism : definition from the Tate Collection online glossary

Additional museum collections :

• Paul Gauguin at the Hermitage : the best collection of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings available online
• Paul Gauguin at the Art Institute of Chicago

• Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic : web site for the June 18, 2002–October 20, 2002 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Additional online resources :

• Paul Gauguin at Artchive.com
• Paul Gauguin at Artcyclopaedia
• Paul Gauguin at Webmuseum
• Paul Gauguin Expo-net
  

Recommended reading :

• The Moon & Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham : a novel based on the life of Paul Gauguin

Gauguin & Van Gogh (because it always comes back to Van Gogh):

• Van Gogh | Gauguin : the special website of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam in connection with the Van Gogh & Gauguin exhibition (9 February-2 June 2002)
• Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South : an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago

Recommended reading (available online):

• "Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles" : a recent review article in the New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl (issue of 2007-02-05)
  
• Van Gogh's Letters : an online exhibit

Just plain recommended:

Lust for Life : the classic 1937 novel written by Irving Stone and based on Van Gogh's life.
Lust for Life : the classic 1956 film based on Irving Stone's novel, starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn and directed by Vincente Minnelli.

if not a room then a shrine

. . . and an entire city

or some history on the devotion of space to domesticated cats .

Bastet

Note: portions of this text have been excerpted from: http://www.moggies.co.uk/bastet/bastet.html

Bast is an ancient Egyptian goddess, the Sacred Cat and her name means devouring lady. She is depicted as having the body of a woman and the head of a domestic cat. Her worship began around the year 3200 BCE during the second dynasty in northern Egypt and her city is Bubastis. There, and in many other ancient cities, Egyptians celebrated Bast's feast day, October 31st.


Though the cat-headed goddess Bast was revered and loved throughout Egypt from the earliest of times there were several cities sacred to her cult and which hosted several large, important and influential temples.

Among the dozen or so cities important to the Bast Cult, none was more important or holy than Bubastis. During the Bubastite period (22nd dynasty), cat cemeteries became popular, and a huge profusion of cat amulets were being made. Cats were mummified and ritually buried.

FUN FACT: You can still purchase Bastet amulets including one with the image of a mummified cat:

Click on image above to order one from the Freer Sackler shop. It is the perfect pendant to wear when you want to tell people: "I like cats and I'm kind of sick in the head."

In 640 AD Bubastis was still alive and people were still worshipping cats there.

Cats were very sacred animals to the ancient Egyptians. They held a high, honoured position in many households and were more important even than humans. Cats were demigods in ancient Egypt. Anyone caught harming or killing a cat, even by accident, was punished by death, for cats guarded the royal granaries keeping them relatively free from vermin which threatened the food supplies.

She is also the goddess of shoppers:
the handbag is an important object in Bastet rituals.

The cult of Bastet was centered in Bubastis (located in the delta region, near modern- day Zagazig) from at least the 4th Dynasty. The famous Temple Ruins of Bast at Bubastis (Per-Bast in Tameran, today Tell-Basta). The sacred enclosure consisted of a grove of tall trees (the only one to be found in an Egyptian temple) holding the shrine of the goddess within.

The temple was full of cats who were carried around in baskets and ritually fed.


Once a year, a great festival was held in Bubastis to honour Bast, attracting devotees from all over the country. According to Herodotus, the original accidental tourist, upwards of 700,000 people attended.

(Heroditus. ii. 59, 60.):

"Temples there are more spacious and costlier than that of Bubastis, but none so pleasant to behold. It is after the following fashion. Except at the entrance, it is surrounded by water: for two canals branch off from the river, and run as far as the entrance to the temple: yet neither canal mingles with the other, but one runs on this side, and the other on that. Each canal is a hundred feet wide, and its banks are lined with trees. The propylaea are sixty feet in height, and are adorned with sculptures (probably intaglios in relief) nine feet high, and of excellent workmanship. The Temple being in the middle of the city is looked down upon from all sides as you walk around; and this comes from the city having been raised, whereas the temple itself has not been moved, but remains in its original place. Quite round the temple there goes a wall, adorned with sculptures. Within the inclosure is a grove of fair tall trees, planted around a large building in which is the effigy (of Bast). The form of that temple is square, each side being a stadium in length. In a line with the entrance is a road built of stone about three stadia long, leading eastwards through the public market. The road is about 400 feet broad, and is flanked by exceeding tall trees. It leads to the temple of Hermes."

Further information on Bastet:

Bastet was strictly a solar deity until the arrival of Greek influence on Egyptian society, when she became a lunar goddess due to the Greeks associating her with their Artemis. Dating from the 2nd Dynasty (roughly 2890-2686 BCE), Bastet was originally portrayed as either a wild desert cat or as a lioness, and only became associated with the domesticated feline around 1000 BCE. http://www.egyptianmyths.net/bastet.htm

Because the Greeks equated Bastet with Diana and Artemis and Horus with Apollo, Bastet became adopted into the Osiris-Isis myth as their daughter (this association, however, was never made previous to the arrival of Hellenistic influence on Egypt). She is stated to be the mother of the lion-headed god Mihos (who was also worshipped in Bubastis, along with Thoth). She is depicted most commonly as a woman with the head of a domesticated or wild cat or lion, or as a cat itself. Article "Bastet" created on 03 March 1997; last modified on 26 May 1999 (Revision 2). 318 words. http://www.pantheon.org/articles/b/bastet.html © MCMXCV - MMVI Encyclopedia Mythica™. All rights reserved.

the fifth fable : flyovers

note: fables 1-4 are from my commentary on episode one of bravo tv's top design show (da bear and other fables) but this is a more generic statement so I moved here to the arts | design section

the fifth fable : flyovers

For the stylemakers on the coasts Chicago is just part of the big "flyover" world of non-culture between New York and Los Angeles. Or, with O'Hare aiport it is more of a "stopover": a place you don't want to bother with; you are just waiting to get out it of as soon as possible.

(What's missed is the other, older, vertical axis -- running down the center -- Chicago/New Orleans, the Mississippi River. It is a deeper, darker line but that is another story.)

Of course anyone who knows anything about architecture knows that Chicago is the most important architectural city in America.


If you don't know this, here's a place to start: 1871 Great Chicago Fire. After that try:

• Birth of Skyscraper.
• Columbian Exposition/Neo-Classical revival.
• Prairie School.
• Modern/International Style.

Chicago is also the center for furniture design. (The Merchandise Mart is a thing to behold.) It used to manufacture the most furniture but with union busting the industry went south. Now it is probably all done in Asia. However Chicago is still known for its custom furniture design.

And all that modernist design that people in LA and NY worship? Where do you think much of that came from?


(Also, while Chicago may not be at the center for fashion design, many consider it the best restaurant city in the country.)

People will go there for business conferences and tell me, with surprise, that they discovered it was a really amazing city. Like it didn't occur to them that this a place of international significance not just in manufacturing but in arts and design and culture. After New York and Washington DC it has musuems with the most established and largest collections.

I can play city booster but part of me also wants to keep things a secret, like the jazz clubs that are such gems that they would be overrun with tourists if they were in New York or LA. A lot of what I like isn't glitzy stuff. It is the city of neighborhoods. The entire lakefront is public property. And Wrigley Field is one of the last great parks but you have to be a native to really understand the Cubs. (They are different from the Red Sox.)

Although midwesterners are seen as a bit dopey compared to the smarter east coast and hipper west coast, in fact, Chicago is the home to the university that fosters the most intellecually intense and challenging environment of any place in the world. The University of Chicago is truly devoted to fostering the life of the mind. Even the Ivy League thinks those people are total dorks.