The Modern Blog

Viewfinder: Concrete

Smooth, cold, solid, constant, gray, natural, soft.

“Night Sky #17″ and the Perseid Meteor Shower

As summer comes to an end, I find myself thinking about some of the season’s finer qualities. Despite the sometimes-oppressive heat, there’s something nice about the sounds of cicadas in the trees, delicious dinners cooked out on the grill, and the comforting warmth of summer nights. The smell and feel of summer nights have always held a bit of magic for me, as the heat begins to retreat and the evening sky starts to glow.

With school starting soon and autumn creeping around the corner, I’m getting ready to say my good-byes to summer…and what better way to do so than with a night of stargazing? Tonight is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. It will best be seen late tonight and into the early morning, but if you watch carefully after dark, you might see a shooting star.

As you watch the vast expanse of sky, think about Vija Celmins’ painting Night Sky #17 (2000) here at the Modern. The 31 x 38 inch painting realistically depicts a small pocket of space with almost as much splendor as the real thing. Celmins began painting the canvas with gesso, then added monochromatic grey oil paints before finally dotting her celestial plane with white paint stars. Somehow, despite its simplicity, the piece appears to have depth and brilliance.

Celmins seems to appreciate the innate splendor of the night sky, having chosen to depict it in all its glory. Its subject matter is likely one of the most universal (pun intended?), because it’s so familiar to us all. Yet somehow, a starry night always seems able to provide many new opportunities for wonder – like the magic of a meteor seen in the warmth of a summer evening amongst friends and cicadas.

The Passage of Time in Sugimoto’s “Compton Drive In”

Tucked in the corner of one of the Modern’s upstairs galleries is a medium-sized, black-and-white photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto that can be easy to miss. But the piece has an elegant power that deserves a second look. The photograph, entitled Compton Drive-In (1994), is from Sugimoto’s popular Theaters series, which, in part, includes similar photos of drive-in theaters around the U.S. This particular photograph captures a large theater screen glowing white for an empty audience, flanked by old swings and merry-go-rounds of parks past.

For Theaters, Sugimoto exposed the film for the entire length of the movie that played on the screen. The result is ghostly, a still image of the passage of time. His technical ability is highly regarded because of this series, which he photographed with a nineteenth-century camera, before developing his gelatin-silver prints by hand. Unfortunately, modernization threatens this medium. The film is becoming archaic: Kodak may stop producing it, forcing Sugimoto to change the technique he’s been using for the past thirty years.

When I really looked at Compton Drive-In, it touched me in a way that I didn’t expect. The ethereal whiteness of the film drew my eye at first, but I soon saw that beneath it are the rows of old swing sets and three metal merry-go-rounds. On a more personal level, they reminded me of the playgrounds I used to visit in Oklahoma on trips to see my grandparents. Merry-go-rounds were always my favorite, but I rarely saw them in Texas. Fewer and fewer playgrounds seem to have them.

Drive-in theaters are also threatened to be left behind. Thinking about this piece, I looked up drive-in movie theaters here in Texas. They had their peak in the late 1950’s, with Texas at one time boasting 400 different locations – a number that has dwindled to just 16.

In his photographs, Sugimoto captures the passage of time – the lifespan of one film – as it exists in a setting that is threatened by time itself, using a medium that may soon become obsolete. When I look at this photograph, I sense the boundlessness of time, an enduring force that leaves the outdated behind in its wake.

Still, despite so many anchors to physical history, Compton Drive-In seems an ode to infinity. Although specifically the theater is antiquated, the anonymity of the screen that could be playing any film for any group of people seems to lend timelessness to the scene. Sugimoto says he looked for empty showings to shoot this series, but I like to think there were people in this theater, their movements vanishing over the long exposure time. Regardless of this photograph’s earthbound qualities – the necessity of film to capture it, the antiquity of the theater and the era it represents, it still seems to transcend time. In spirit, it surpasses the finiteness of the past, as the anonymous film plays infinitely for an invisible, ghostly audience.

Attics, Religion, and Carl Jung in Anselm Kiefer’s “Quaternity”

As a child, I was unnerved by our attic. Every Christmas, when my father climbed its ladder to retrieve a box of tinsel or lights, I cowered from that dark space, afraid of whatever unseen thing I knew lived up there. Our attic was not the charming variety where make-believe stirs young imagination, but was rather – in the spirit of Jane Eyre – like the realm of a madwoman. Indeed, in art as well as literature, attics often represent metaphysical spaces. An ascent into this space can be translated as a descent into one’s own psyche.

Viewfinder: Art Study

Drawing from artists such as Guston, Gerhard, Warhol, and Ruscha, artist Libby Black led students in Art Study last week.

“An Example of Free Thought”: Robert Motherwell and James Joyce

The first work of art that a visitor sees when walking into The Modern’s downstairs galleries is Robert Motherwell’s Stephen’s Iron Crown (1981). While the painting is rendered in simple black and white, the subject matter remains somewhat ambiguous. As it turns out, this piece is a nod to the literary influence of James Joyce upon Motherwell and his work.

Robert Motherwell grew up with a very prestigious education, and it began at an early age. He recalls being told stories by his grandfather which, he later realized, were paraphrased versions of Paradise Lost or Greek myths. By the time he was ten, Motherwell was spending the majority of his allowance on books at his local bookstore. He even claimed in an interview with Paul Cummings that he “read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.” Motherwell also noted that “all my life, next to paintings, I like books the best.”

This love of art and literature led him to study philosophy at Stanford and Harvard before beginning the doctoral program in Art History at Columbia, where he studied under the renowned art historian Meyer Schapiro and socialized with Surrealist artists on a regular basis. The time that Motherwell spent with the Surrealists proved to be incredibly influential on his artistic process. Specifically, he became interested in the process of automatism, or abtract “automatic” doodling that Surrealists would often use to tap into their unconscious. One example of this is Motherwell’s Drunk with Turpentine series, in which he did automatism with oil paint that had been thinned-out with turpentine to the consistency of ink.

It should not be surprising that Motherwell identified with the writings of James Joyce, given his literary background and his fascination with the unconscious. Joyce often incorporated stream-of-consciousness and dream-associations into his style, characteristics which make his most famous work, Ulysses, a formidable read. In fact, Stephen’s Iron Crown (1981) alludes to one of the main characters of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, whose name is derived from the Greek “stephanos” (meaning “crown”) and who experiences an Absinthe-induced hallucination that features the crown of Stephen I, the first Christian king of Hungary.

Because of their similar stream-of-consciousness styles, several of Motherwell’s abstract sketches and multiple titles from his Drunk with Turpentine series refer to Joyce or his books. For example, Bloomsday references the Irish holiday that commemorates the life and work of Joyce, (a holiday which is still celebrated annually in Dublin every June 16.) Motherwell’s Study for Shem the Penman #9 and Finnegan’s Wake VII With Green (at left) both refer to the character of Shem from Joyce’s novel, Finnegan’s Wake. Mulligan’s Tower and Drunk with Turpentine Series (Stephen’s Gate) are further references to Ulysses, and Beside the Sea No. 24 alludes to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the main character (also named Stephen Dedalus) experiences an epiphany that inspires him to become an artist.

Motherwell went on to produce a series of etchings to accompany a 1988 edition of Ulysses, and many of his Joyce-inspired sketches were collected and published as The Dedalus Sketchbooks later that year.

(Note: All works of art referenced in this post are part of The Modern’s permanent collection. The Modern houses one of the largest collections of Motherwell’s art in existence today, which includes over 70 pieces by the artist.)

Viewfinder: From Above

A couple of days after I took this photo I stood in his place over the balcony. I expected to be overwhelmed by a large expansive view of the water but instead was surprised and initially disappointed. The view was first stunted by a floor to ceiling screen and the view of the pool was short. The trees beyond the pool created a visual barrier, their trunks dotted with blurs of cars passing by on the road behind them.

The longer I stood there however, the more intimate the experience became. I noticed that the screen, initially daunting in its scope and distortion of light, actually seemed to move like smoke as reflections from the pool rose up its mesh and released onto the ceiling. Then I noticed the water moving in sections, creating rippled glitter that led to the trees. What first stunted my view actually held me inside that moment, creating a soft closeness. I was brought back to the museum. I noticed the subtle variations and profound details around me: the whir of the airplane movie and air conditioning ducts, the movement of footsteps in gallery spaces behind me. I saw the light from the window hit the two side walls and create a Y, the tip of the letter pointing in my direction.

I thought I wanted this great architectural expanse to open up to me, giving a view of something equally grand outside the museum. Instead, it brought my view full circle in one of the most peaceful journeys I’ve had. I was not entertained, I was allowed to be quiet.

Artist Background: Ellsworth Kelly (Part 3)

This is the third installment of our three-part series on Ellsworth Kelly. The first two installments can be found here and here. 

I have often found that to gain a deeper understanding of a work of art, it helps to know its historical context – perhaps even the background of the artist who made it. Consider first how artists’ lives – their experiences, what they love and what they fear – manifest in the art they create. When applying this investigation to the life and work of Ellsworth Kelly, and to The Modern’s Three Panels: Red, Dark Blue, Dark Green (1986) and Curved Red on Blue (1963), this method gave me better insight into their power.

As a supplement to these pieces, the three most eye-opening elements of his life are a childhood spent bird watching, a young adulthood in Paris spent shape watching, and finally an art movement-free isolation in which to develop his own style. His early experiences bird watching first trained his eye to the intricacies of shape and color in nature, an ability that opened him to a world of inspiration in Paris later in life. There he kept numerous sketchbooks of his findings, expanding upon a method of seeing he had begun as a child. Finally, these six years he spent in Paris kept him away from the strong influence of the Abstract Expressionists.

Ellsworth Kelly was born in New York in 1932, and spent much of his childhood bird watching and collecting beautifully colored and patterned beetles. I find these experiences are evident in his artwork. They seem an exercise in viewing – a play on the shapes and colors we see every day, a shifting of viewpoints, and a rearranging of negative and positive space. As a child, he trained himself through bird watching to see the world in new ways, a perspective that seems evident in his paintings like Curved Red on Blue.

Soon after World War II, Kelly was able to study at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts with support from the G.I. Bill. There he spent his time travelling, studying, and, most importantly, observing the world around him. He kept sketchbooks full of his observations, from shadows cast on windowsills and wrought iron fences to blocks of color in signs and letters. In 1949, the influence of fragmented shapes as they appear in memory or in shadow drew his work into abstraction. The Modern’s Three Panels, although spanning three separate canvases, could easily reference forms of shadows or the negative space around ordinary objects. Kelly’s lifetime of observation gave him a new and different vantage point from which to view the world.

His time in Paris is extremely important for another reason. The 1950’s in the United States was a time of intense artistic development, led by powerful art critic Clement Greenberg. By living in France during this time, Kelly escaped the debate from which the Abstract Expressionists were born. Rather, he was able to experiment in a way that led to his own unique style of abstraction, one that rejected both Greenberg’s rules and the rigidity of any specific movement.

In 1954, when Kelly moved back to New York, he brought with him a reliance on observation, memory, and a lifetime of experience drawing inspiration from what he saw around him. His paintings, such as Three Panels, appear to me like remembered fragments of the world, like shapes stripped of their context. By continuing the paint to the very edges of the canvas, he turns Three Panels into one quick glimpse of nature, rather than isolated paintings on stark museum walls. As Kelly himself has said, “as we move, looking at hundreds of different things … we see many different kinds of shapes. … In my paintings, I’m not inventing; my ideas come from constantly investigating how things look.”

Viewfinder: Spoof on Balkenhol

As you can see from our interpretation of Stephan Balkenhol’s 4 Figures, our Art Camp is proving to be a lot of fun for everyone, staff and campers alike! The Modern has been hosting kids between the ages of 11 and 13 all week long, and we’ve had a blast exploring our permanent collection together!

To see more pictures from Art Camp, please visit our Flickr page!

Shape and Color in Ellsworth Kelly’s “Red, Dark Blue, Dark Green”

This is the second installment of our three-part series on Ellsworth Kelly. For the first installment, click here. 

In his book Color in Art, historian John Gage suggests that our taste for primary color in Modernist art began when we were still “in the nursery.” I remember once, in grade school, a teacher rationing quarter-sized globs of tempera paint onto a paper plate on my desk. Carefully, he guided the class through the blending of red, yellow, and blue, and the resulting alchemy of color stunned me. With these three colors, he insisted, any other color is possible.

In a child’s awestruck mind, everything is magical. I had yet to learn about the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who developed a theory about light responsible for our current understanding of the primary colors. Still, his findings (compiled in Optiks of 1704), are only an excerpt from an extensive color dialogue that has preoccupied artists and alchemists alike for centuries.

When I look at Three Panels: Red, Dark Blue, Dark Green (1986), I remember Gage’s assessment. The two and three-colored birds that Ellsworth Kelly studied as a young boy coincide, as some critics suggest, with his two and three-colored canvases. But while it is tempting to linger on such a biographical understanding of Kelly’s work, the paintings themselves engage in a far more universal discourse. Kelly gives shape to his canvases, which recall to me the Russian artist Kandinsky’s dilemma.

Kandinsky believed shape to be as essential to color as Newton’s light. He inherited this view from his instructor, Adolf Hoelzel.  Hoelzel attempted to assign shape to color, arguing yellow to be a triangle, red a circle, and blue a square (as illustrated here.) His pupil disagreed. Wasn’t blue, instead, a sphere – recalling oceans and atmospheres that blanket the earth?

In the same way (though for his own reasons),  Kelly fuses shape with color in an attempt to replicate nature. The first canvas in Kelly’s triptych is red and convexly triangular; the second, dark blue and hexagonal; but on the third – where we might expect yellow – Kelly gives us dark green in a twisted rectangular form. This green activates tension within the work; while it harmonizes with blue, it is directly opposite red on the color wheel, creating a sense of disquiet.

Let’s pause. Here, Kelly is using a variation of the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color scheme. Discovered in 1861 by the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, RGB was an altogether different understanding of color. By adding red, green, and blue light, Maxwell was able to create pure white, and consequently, the world’s first color photograph. (It was this new spectrum of additive primaries that made Emerald City on MGM’s studio set glow so green in The Wizard of Oz.) With the advent of color television, red, green, and blue debuted as the primary colors of science.

Our eyes ingest the world through light, blending, as though on a palette, red, green, and blue. In Red, Dark Blue, Dark Green, Kelly is interested in the preservation of untainted vision: that is, capturing color and shape at the point directly before it is recognized, labeled, and filed behind human eyes. His use of shape, though taken from nature, is fragmented, obscured, and intentionally without context. For this reason, our interaction with Kelly’s work is purely visual – an almost scientific intake of information – as Kelly himself once said, “…if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.”