Yesterday we looked at Maman, the weaver. I thought for today we might as well go for the real thing – a human weaver who represents one of the few true success stories of women who weren’t meant to be “artists.”

My choice was Anni Albers, a weaver who got her start at the famous Bauhaus in Weimar, and later worked and taught in the US, having found a safe haven here from the Nazi regime. I picked her for two reasons.

One, I am, seemingly eternally, working on an article about the centenary celebration of Bauhaus 100, to take place next year in Weimar. The time to book your tickets and lodging is NOW – Weimar is small, easily overrun, and they have a stellar schedule of happenings planned for spring (with some already ongoing in 2018.) There will be not only the opening of three (!) new museum dedicated to Bauhaus (in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin,) but also Bauhaus-related ballet (6. APRIL 2019 – the tradition of Bauhaus dance will be revived at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar for the opening of the new bauhaus museum. A co-production with the Stuttgart Ballet) and music (12. APRIL – 05. MAY 2019 : Thuringia Bach Festival – the concerts during Thuringia’s largest music festival are being held at authentic Bauhaus locations to mark the Bauhaus anniversary. The program showcases Bach in the musical world of the early 20th century. That program alone is pretty spectacular.)

In the meantime here is “Bauhaus Imaginista” already on the road. (“Bauhaus Imaginista” is a cooperative venture between the three Bauhaus sites in Germany – Berlin, Dessau, and Weimar, the Goethe Institute, and the House of World Cultures. This research project with a variety of exhibition venues is in honour of the centenary of the founding of Bauhaus. The Goethe Institute will expand upon it with an international element, and it will be brought together in Berlin’s House of World Cultures as part of the “100 Years of the Modern”. “Bauhaus Imaginista” is a joint venture with the China Design Museum (Hangzhou), the National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto), the Garage Museum for Contemporary Art (Moscow), the SESC Pompeía (São Paulo), and the House of World Cultures (Berlin).) More details here:

https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/bauhaus-100/03_Bauhaus-Imaginista/index_Imaginista.html

So, Bauhaus was on my mind. The other reason for my choice was a new exhibit of Albers’ work, curated by the Kunstsammlung NRW and the Tate Modern, London, which can be seen at K 20 in Duesseldorf now until September (it will move on to the Tate Modern in October). The video clip below gives you a short impression.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqUKyvoEvnw

So who was she? Born into a rich, assimilated Jewish family, owner of one of Germany’s most prestigious publishing houses, she was determined to escape the boring fate of bourgeois turn-of-the-century girls and become an artist instead. When she enrolled at the Bauhaus art school, she, like all other female students, was directed to textile art (pottery being the only other possible alternative) since the men deemed the traditional areas unfitting and only male students were allowed to choose. At Bauhaus! One of the most progressive places of the German universe whose director Gropius touted equal treatment for both sexes….

In any case. She took general art classes by Paul Klee, absorbed his love of adventurous process, complained about limp threads and somehow grew into weaving with a miraculous hand, and a talent to devise by now iconic geometric patterns.  She was smart, hugely energetic, and open to novelty. She was also lucky – she had the means to leave Germany early, found work and like-minded artists in the US, and did not have to compete with a loving husband who became notable in his own right and was always supportive of her work. Eventually she established a weaving studio at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she and her husband found a surprisingly progressive home. Working with other artists like composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham and painter Robert Rauschenberg she developed a rich environment and produced spectacular tapestries, with many solo exhibitions soon to follow. Details can be read below.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-bauhaus-master-anni-albers

One of her most important works was commissioned by the Jewish Museum inNew York. Six Prayers  is a Holocaust Memorial in its own right, echoing the disrupted lives or the perished. https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/16696-six-prayers

Photographs are from Weimar, home to Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Gropius, the Weimar Republic and, for some years, Anni Albers.

I lived for a year in Arnhem when I was little, and spent a large part of my later childhood in a small village at the Dutch border near Eindhoven. Summers were spent in Holland proper, at the North Sea. Water or inland – these two places shared important attributes: they were as flat as flat can be, and they were washed in soft, ever changing light. These two things are connected – wind rushes across these flatlands and drives the clouds, big old clouds from the sea. They shade the landscape in ever-changing patterns, dark now and beaming with light a minute later.

 Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael – Landscape in the evening with windmill – ca. 1650

I was maybe 12, during summer vacation, when I was allowed to venture out on a small boat, like a canoe, with an outboard motor all by myself, having convinced my host family that I was perfectly fit to do this, never mind I had never set foot in a boat. I proudly navigated a maze of small canals, actually outside of a city, I forget where it was. These were waterways historically used to transport turf. An exciting outing until the motor died. When I couldn’t get it going again, pulling the starter string 100 times in vain, I remember lying down in the boat deciding to wait for some other boat to pass by. In the meantime I looked up to a sky that seemed both beautiful and menacing at once, making me practically dizzy with the speed the clouds were racing. It was the first time that I consciously noted a quality of light. Eventually I gave up the hopeless wait and tried my luck again, this time succeeding and miraculously finding my way back to the harbor. Where I promptly fell into the cold water when trying to moor the boat. Another adventurous day in the life of Heuer. A day that shaped perception.

Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael – Rough Sea ca. 1670

The quality of the light is often misty from all the moisture in the air, a softness that becomes the otherwise pretty monotonous landscape. There is endless grey, unless the sun is for once unimpeded and the sky turns blue, endless green and brown of the land snatched from the sea and used for agriculture, and canals and waterways behind the dykes that reflect the color of the sky, as does the sea in front of the polders.

Inland it becomes even more monochromatic – there is the sky and then there are those endless fields of oats and sugar beets, green rotting to brown eventually, interrupted only by alleys of poplars and the occasional hawthorn hedges, or a few stands of chestnuts.

https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/dutch-landscapes-and-seascapes-of-the-1600s.html#slide_1

Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael – Landscape with ruined castle and a church ca. 1665

I have often thought that the preoccupations with tulips (as well as other, often exotic, flowers) originated in being starved for colors other than the muted ones inherent to the landscape. If you look at the still life paintings from the Golden Age, color rules all, down to the last glimmers and subtle hints of it in carefully painted reflections.

Given the commercial breeding of tulips as one of the major Dutch exports these days, the landscape, for a short time each year, undergoes this magical transformation into a riot of reds and oranges, purples and yellows, for acres and acres as far as the eye can see. But the sky looks the same, just as it did 400 years ago. And no one captured it better than Ruysdael and his pupil Hobbema. Well, maybe someone did, but I am just partial to these two during that epoch.

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/old-masters/hobbema.htm

Meindert Hobbema – Landscape withWatermill ca. 1666

Meindert Hobbema – Kanaallandschap met vissershuisje

One of the last exhibitions I saw in Germany before I came to the US in the early 1980s was a Chaim Soutine retrospective of many of his meat paintings. The artist was curiously missing from the German art museums, and the curator’s notes were stretching psychological analyses of the reasons why he painted the way he did and, particularly, what he painted, namely dead meat. Discussions of his life-long hunger, speculations about his dietary restrictions due to stomach ulcers (the ultimate cause of his untimely death) and veiled references to the physical abuse he experienced as a child in a dirt poor family of 11 siblings abounded. His urge to draw persisted despite beatings by an orthodox Jewish father who felt this was not in line with religious proscriptions.

I had trouble digesting the body of Soutine’s work – it seemed brutal and yet exuberant in its colorization.

And here we are in 2018 where I saw many of his paintings at a recent visit to the Barnes foundation, realizing now with a more adult and educated eye the power of his vision as well as the depth of his craft. Although Barnes bought 52 of his paintings at once, and, I believe, more later, the collector and artist did not exactly take to each other – see a description here:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-ca-shocking-paris-exerpt-20150503-story.html

Here is short french film re-enacting Barnes’ visit with various French artists and dealers, showing many of the treasures now on view at the Foundation. Most interesting for the actual photos of the artist(s).

The exhibit I wish I could see is the one currently offered at the Jewish Museum in NYC, Chaim Soutine: Flesh. ( I guess  meat is too gross a title for the refined sensibilities of the New Yorkers. I guess you cringe at today’s photos as well….)

https://thejewishmuseum.org

The Schjeldahl review below seems like the perfect guide to understanding what is on offer – he has written about Soutine multiple times, but this essay struck me as the ultimate combination of description and analysis.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-vulnerable-ferocity-of-chaim-soutine?utm_source=Breakfast+with+ARTnews&utm_campaign=2aaffa45e2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c5d7f10ceb-2aaffa45e2-293486709

A classic book on Soutine by David Sylvester (Chaim Soutine, 1893-1943) who died in 2001 is, alas, rarely available and then only for a steep price.  Maybe I’ll raid the piggy bank….

And by the way, what you see is what we eat……

I often pay particular attention to how people paint hands. It is not an easy task as anyone who has ever tried doing it can confirm. And clearly, people vary in their ability to capture something that looks like the real thing. In addition, though, I believe that people who lived in eras that depended on the work of hands more than does our own, took extra care to draw our focus to them. Today’s photographs, all from the last 6 days, can attest to that.

Hands hold something of interest so that the gaze moves over to it.

Hands reach,

point,

grab.

Hands represent activities of writing, reading,

Hands reference thinking, mourning.

Over and over they are central to music being played.

Sometimes they are the foil for detailed fashion exploration.

They pray.

They promise.

And sometimes they simply rest.

For me they often provide fodder for little sketches, montages that play on them with my own invented surrounding, something that reminds me of all the wonderful art I encounter in my travels. Travels that are possible as long as your body is willing, your hands can grab the backpack, your feet can carry you through the landscape, your back is cooperative and your stamina not exactly undiminished but still in existence….”Kinehora,” as they say in Yiddish when they’re thinking “Knock on wood…”

This came to mind since on the topic of hands – artificial hands, that is – there is good news. An Italian research team has developed a new hand prothesis that is way lighter and better able to function than all existing robotic models.

And this concludes this week’s travel report; I hope I was able to instill some vicarious joy. I sure had a blast.

Soutine

It’s all about education.I could not get these words out of my head at the end of an extraordinary day spent first at the Barnes Foundation and later in the streets of North Philadelphia.

Miro

The Barnes is an exuberant place with a wild history. North Philly is a wild place with a desolate future. I’ve decided to contrast those two today, motivated by the fact that artistic expression, jubilant or despairing, can be found in both places. The desire to depict wills out, regardless of geography, historical time, and fame – or lack thereof – of the painters. (Photographs are paired with the Barnes first, what I found on the streets second.)

https://www.barnesfoundation.org

Cézanne

Albert Coombs Barnes was born into a working class family in 1872. As a German-educated chemist he made a fortune from co-inventing the silver-based antiseptic Argyrol, a successful treatment for gonorrhea. Between 1908 and 1929 he ran his own company, based in Philadelphia, making sure that his workers had 2 hours of instruction each day during their regular wok hours: they were trained in philosophy, read about education (John Dewey was a close friend) and most importantly instructed in art. Barnes was a truly passionate champion of education and believed in experiential learning; he started to collect art in 1912. It was eventually hung in his home and gallery of a large estate and arboretum that he built in the outskirts of town and opened to the public and art students.

Matisse

Collected art? The NYT’s Roberta Smith once called him an omnivore art shopper. I wonder how long it took her to find that polite alternative to the term hoarder. The collection is vast, encompassing some 6000 paintings, furniture, sculpture and iron wrought gadgets that dot the wall. He seems to have enjoyed putting fine, functional and decorative art on the same level.

Matisse

Fast forward to this century, long after Barnes’ untimely death in a traffic accident. The Foundation wanted to leave its old home in Merion to attract more visitors in a more central location. Mismanagement of funds, strife among Board members, a community that did not want to loose one of its landmark attractions, and above all Barnes’ will that prohibited any changes to location and arrangement of the artworks led to endless legal fights. They eventually resulted in green light for the construction of a new building in the central museum district, which emulated the exact internal lay-out of the inside of the old estate, covered the walls in the same mustard yellow fabric (amazingly effective) and hung the collection within an inch of its old composition.

The building itself has garnered mixed reviews since it opened in 2012. I found it sterile on the outside – maybe he’d appreciate the involuntary reference to his medicinal antiseptic that enabled the amassing of the art displayed in the beautiful interior. The sparrows defiantly build their nests in the fissures of the walls, breaking up the monotony…. I’m sure the architects will be apoplectic.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/25/entertainment/la-et-cm-barnes-foundation-20120522

Courbet

There is irritating lack of signage, both with regard to finding your way around (getting tickets, for example, in a far off basement is hard to do on intuition alone); and none of the paintings has written information next to it – therefor no titles for today’s photos, I could not run around chasing information sheets discreetly placed in corners of the rooms.

Pippin

But that preserves, of course, a sense of intimacy akin to experiencing a private art collection, rather than a sense of visiting a museum. Intimacy spread among some 6000 paintings…… the variety is stunning, the color bursts elating, the sense of someone’s love for art and need to teach about it overwhelming. There are more Renoirs and Cezannes than I have seen in all my visits of European museums combined.

Modigliani

The collection is valued at 25 billion dollars. According to a research report by the Pew Charitable Trust from last November, 25%, or more precisely 25.7% is the number of Philadelphia’s population that lives below the poverty level. Philly is the poorest big city in the nation. In absolute numbers that is over 400 000 people concentrated in the city, almost half a million who are truly poor, more than half of them African Americans.

Matisse (Joie de Vivre)

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/collections/2017/11/poverty-in-philadelphia

Housing is cheaper and transportation more reliable than in the suburbs, which keeps the poor in inner city environments. There are, however, no jobs in the city to lift them out of poverty, job growth has only happened in the periphery. The few jobs added in the city since 2005 and the ones that are accessible to most people are in sales and service industry with a median annual income of $29.250. Almost 30% of the poor have not even a finished high school education and only 13% have a bachelor degree – the minimum needed for participating in the opportunities offered in the larger region for a more educated work force.

Tintoretto

At the root then is a lack of education – a fact surely determined by multiple factors, but required skills and knowledge sorely missing nonetheless. I can just envision Barnes turning in his grave in frustration with a society that does not emulate his example of providing supportive access to education for all. If we continue on our current path, Bosch’s vision might well come true.

Bosch

I had never been to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston before. It has been in existence since 1876, steadily growing. Its most recent home, designed by Guy Lowell in 1909, is an imposing art palace paying homage to the BeauxArt movement. Current modernization and additions by Norman Foster did not take away the grandeur, but make traversing the museum more like moving through a rabbit warren.

https://www.mfa.org

The sequences of galleries and corridors crammed with art can be overwhelming. But if you are willing to just float through and let the art find you rather than vice versa, it is a glorious experience. My habit of going to these places unprepared and then read up on them later served me well once again. I felt like a kid having stumbled into a candy store, sampling treats I’d never seen before.

Josiah McElherny Endlessly Repeating 20th Century Modernism 2007

 And in random association to kids and candy: I always wonder how children feel when they come into buildings of this imposing size, just like I wonder about centuries of people entering huge cathedrals: will the grandeur overshadow the experience of the contents? Will it inspire a sense of separation rather than belonging? Will it increase or diminish focus on and admiration for art and/or religion?

Museum visits, in any case, can be quite up-lifting.

Jonathan Borowsky I dreamt I could fly  2000

The big draw at the MFA this spring is a Klimt/Schiele Drawings special exhibit – the curatorial descriptions were more informative than the art under weirdly low lighting. It did not leave a particular lasting impression.

Egon Schiele The Artist’s Mother, Sleeping 1911

Below is more information:

https://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/klimt-and-schiele-drawn

In fact, no one thing I saw bowled me over. What did was the diversity of the offerings overall, a sense of artists being driven across time and place to document their environments or express their thoughts. You can get a glimpse of that through my random choices of photographs from that visit, sprinkled through today’s writings. (I checked out the Escher exhibit for old times sake’s – when teaching Perception to my undergraduates he was always good for visual examples.)

I did skip the Rothko exhibit, and Art of the Americas – samplings of European art will be covered in a later blog. I simply could not walk through every door….)

The museum is much engaged in education; I particularly like the idea of spot light talks, 15 minute pop-up tutorials on a single piece of art given by an expert. Here is an upcoming example, picked by me for the clever title: https://www.mfa.org/programs/gallery-activities-and-tours/18th-century-instagram-0

Claude Monet La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume). 1876

Sometimes they get it wrong big time, though. Viz. the Kimono Controversy 3 years ago – visitors were invited to wear replicas of the depicted kimono and pose in front of the painting – cultural appropriation screams erupted and the MFA did not exactly handle the situation well.

Kimonos and Controversy: What the Boston MFA Got Wrong

And in another random note: the giftshop sucked. Ok, politely expressed, it did not provide the postcards or small gifts to bring home that I was looking for. There is such a difference in museum gift shops, have you noticed? Clever ones need not be big, but they need to offer a variety, starting with price ranges.  Turns out, the Philadelphia Museum of Art rocked. No one will be disappointed!

Ivan Navarro  Man Hole 2011

And this is why you need curators for people like me – how could I have known? Three cheers for art educators, of all stripes!