Hockney Sells for $80M

This is about the end of a relationship, i think.  The man in the salmon jacket seems to begin a grave Japanese-style bow, his body held rather tensely, his arms parallel, the feet revealing a slight pigeon-toe. His gaze assesses - this is what I have wrought.

 He isn't dressed for poolside; he just stopped by, he will be leaving soon, going on to afternoon cocktails at the beach.  

Set at hillside's edge, the pool is elevated; it tops a mountain of its own, the vista of forever stretches beyond its deck. It's warm, the sun is fresh and high, all sparkles and all is still. The light breaks up the water's movement into puzzle pieces - the swimmer's search for passage through is ended. The pool is the grave, the body floats in blue eternity, limbs sprawling; it will never again need to draw breath.

The young man bids farewell. He waits until it ends for him, he can say no more.  He will turn on his heel and  make his leave-taking a recessional. 

Matisse and the Yu'pik: Dance Masks, Heard Museum

Henri Matisse, White Mask on Black Background (Masque blanc sur fond noir) ©2018 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

Central Yup'ik, Lower Yukon, Alaska. Dance mask, representing the Moon

Central Yup’ik, Napaskiaq Village, Kuskokwim River, Alaska. Wanelnguq dance mask c. 1900. Wood, feathers, pigment. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 9/3432. Photo by NMAI Photo Services.

Tree of Life

René Magritte at SF MOMA: The Fifth Season

Sunlit Surrealism, 1943-1947

 “Against widespread pessimism,” he said, “I now propose a search for joy and pleasure."  (https://www.biography.com/people/rené-magritte-9395363)

“We have neither the time nor the taste to play at Surrealist art, we have a huge task ahead of us, we must imagine charming objects which will awaken what is left within us of the instinct to pleasure.”  (www.mattesonart.com/1947-1948-vache-period.aspx)

Magritte lived in Belgium throughout the war years, concerned that if he continued to paint as he had pre-war, his paintings with their politically incendiary meanings would get him arrested and imprisoned or worse, placed in an asylum.

He questioned the purpose and value of painting as the horrors of war consumed the European world once again. He wrote a Manifesto, "Surrealism in Full Sunlight" and

 “Against widespread pessimism,” he said, “I now propose a search for joy and pleasure."  (https://www.biography.com/people/rené-magritte-9395363)


“We have neither the time nor the taste to play at Surrealist art, we have a huge task ahead of us, we must imagine charming objects which will awaken what is left within us of the instinct to pleasure.”  (www.mattesonart.com/1947-1948-vache-period.aspx)

began to paint Renoir-like works such as    

Forethought, 1943.

This painting, scanned quickly, looks over-the-top upbeat.  But all the full-blown flowers grow from only one stalk, and there's something blowsy and caricatured, emulating the great Dutch painters of flower still lives. It's deliberately jejune, garish, and  insensitive to nature, as if the flowers were actually plastic or silk.

The parodic quality extends to the style and palette of the work, and presages the later Vache Period, when his ever-lurking sly humour mutates into full frontal crassness and vulgarity.

"La Période Vache", 1947-1948

The Cripple, 1948

Magritte departed from his experiment with sunlit figuration, perhaps having sickened himself. He then painted this group of deliberately bad satirical parodies of themes and styles, his own and others, such as Ensor and Renoir. 

Certainly he was stricken by a dilemma about the value of painting and art following the devastating world war. But he also wanted to tweak the Parisian art world that he thought had not paid significant due to his oeuvre, which was already a significant accomplishment in modern painting. 

The Famine, 1948

These works were received very negatively by the art world when they were shown. 

The Mark, 1948

...With some international recognition and success ... Magritte was not impressed by his invitation to hold his one man show at the Galerie du Faubourg, Paris. As a joke concocted by Magritte and his friends, Rene painted a series of hilarious pictures to exert a bit of revenge upon the Paris art world. Magritte experimented with a brash Fauve-inspired style in late 1947* dubbed "Vache" (literally, cow)...

According to Bernard Marcadé: "In French, the term vache is used for an excessively fat woman, or a soft, lazy person. An unpleasant person is described as a peau de vache (cow-skin); amour vache (cow-love) refers to a relationship more physical than emotional. It thus treads a line between vulgarity and coarseness, and that is what characterises this set of paintings and gouaches, representing a radical departure from the painter’s neutral, detached style which had finally been accepted by Parisian Surrealist orthodoxy...

After the misunderstood Parisian show, Magritte returned to his signature figuration to paint a late group of images that re-iterated his early painterly insights, repeating some motifs and introducing new ones. Post war paintings seem to have a certain quality of light I don't see in the earlier work.

Evening Falls

The Great Early Work (Recap)
• text/image relationship drawn from modern advertising
• impactful, surprising, conceptual concision  
• psychological, conceptual, modern linguistic, semiotic content
• repetition of motifs and images 
• airless, repressive, static energy and mood
• rational and mysterious paradoxes

The False Mirror, 1928

The Lovers, 1928

The Treachery of Images, 1928

The Human Condition, 1935

...Still, there is no getting away from the sense that most of the works, as ingenious as they are as illustrations, are basically one-liners. Their power is striking and blatant, much like that of the advertising flyers and billboards Magritte made throughout much of his career to pay the bills. What we thought we knew about Magritte, it turns out, was pretty much all we needed to know, easily accessible in dorm-room posters and ubiquitous reproduction...

-Charles Desmarais, May 18, 2018, San Francisco Chronicle


But wait. Other paintings are conceptual heavyweights, revealing the subjective, abstract nature of language.  They comment on the philosopher-linguist Wittgenstein and his
abstruse and significant perspectives that define and shape modernity.  This painting is discussed at length in John Berger's "The Ways of Seeing", a key book of criticism which parses the issue of subjective perception, superficial decisions and misconceptions based on the visual.  

One of Magritte's last paintings even references phenomenological philosophy directly. In Hegel's "Phenomenology of Mind"(1807) he explains the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge.  

In the above painting the word below the image doesn't match - what is the reference of door to horse?  I always thought it looks like the horse is actually standing in a half-door of his stall - it's Mr. Ed in the old TV show about a talking horse.

In the clock/wind it's "time flies" (with the speed of the wind and it's fleeting quality) or a play on the confusion of English pronunciation. We used to wind clocks!  I still do, my mother's old mantle clock, and my grandfather's pocket watch. 

Bird/pitcher uses one of Magritte's motifs,
the bird beak.  The pitcher seems poised 
like a perched bird, it's bird-beak spout functioning with the opposite of a food-gathering function.

In the last quarter, the word and image have equal reference - word and picture match.  The use of the quarter divided frame is another reference to a Magritte motif the window and the frame.  The painting also appropriates the format used in childrens' language primers which pair image above the corresponding word.  

When I study Magritte, I think how widely referential the visual can be, and how easy it is to miss them, or be miscued by them.I loved 

Hegel's vacation

Now when I look at a Magritte painting, I think, "what did I miss?" and thinking that has become a mantra for me as I struggle to "see".  

Magritte in later life

Dystopia is Here: The pathology of America

18 school shootings in 45 days. The United States ought to mourn for years.  

Maybe this is the reality: Republicans and pseudo-liberal capitalists have decided that it's every man for himself.  It's too late to save the world, the planet, the refugees,  the public schools, and our children. 

So they might as well just get theirs now, and do it smart and shrewdly: hegemony, deception, duplicity, manipulation, inflated capital, expansion of power creating legal entitlements, gross consumption, imitation, cults of celebrity, substitution of the trivial for content. Let the weak fall where they may.  Nothing can be done about them, anyway.  

Stay ready to change course instantly when the winds change.  Survive and thrive and the let the rest be lost. The elite will adopt tribal isolationist positions and values.  

[from Eudaimonia, an online journal, article
by Umair Haque

...we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

...a predatory society: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes,

Why are we experiencing societal decline?
We are corrupted by consumer/capitalist entitlement, extremist libertarian-socialism, and weakened by familial, cultural and social deterioration of ethical values  


...They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.

...We must be, then, operating under a perpetual and dangerous assumption: that the worst that can happen isn’t very bad.The worst, we imagine, still lies within the bounds of sanity, reason, and normalcy: kleptocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, populism, a difficult period of turmoil, sure enough — but a passing thing, that will soon enough be fixed and patched up

...The strongman can only become the strongest one if he is the exception to all of society’s norms, values, and rules. And in a society with a broken social contract, what are those worth, anyway? [why Trump prevails:  it's over and we decent naive clods don't get it]

... Transgression becomes instititutionalized into subjugation

- school shootings, opioid epidemic, homelessness, old-age poverty, capitalistic predation, meta-junkie consumption, techno-predation, necro-patriarchial-social institutional expansion, nuclear war, environmental devastation

3-23-18  From the NYT, David Brooks' column, 
"Speaking as a White Male"
But the notion that group membership determines opinion undermines all that. If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud. The epistemological foundation of our system is in surprisingly radical flux.

Cedars-Sinai: The Second Day

The hublet is in a lot of pain. The staff has kindly drugged him up again. It's so bad he said he would rather not have had the surgery. I remember pain like that from my hysterectomy surgery to this day.  The first two days were a nightmare.  Thank god for the passage of time.

Tom Lieber 

Yellow Abstraction (the alligator series?)

Abstraction: The Alligator Series, 1980

Lieber studied in the Midwest, worked in Berkeley, now lives in Maui. He's more lyric and beautiful than Cy Twombly, the gestural quality exploratory and final, floating on the ground like fog, while the figuration bites down through it, anchoring the image.

Lee Mullican

Grounded in the belief that modern painting should merge abstraction and representation to best reveal the underlying order of the universe, Lee Mullican made drawings and paintings that synthesized European Surrealism, American abstraction, and Native American heritage geometries. Mullican’s experience as a topographer during World War II instilled in him an admiration for the abstract patterns inherent in natural forms and refined his drawing abilities. Favoring contradictory visual elements, he opted for clashing yet complementary colors, building images simultaneously serene and stimulating. Mullican painted in a style influenced by printmaking, forming ridges of paint and using the edge of a palette knife to achieve a line raised and puckered; the resulting surfaces caught light and cast shadows, ultimately assuming a tapestry-like quality. - from Artsy website


Ken Price

Known for his extravagantly beautiful, groundbreaking ceramics-as-sculpture, here he does serigraphs of his cups, with humor and a fine sense of space and form.

detail, Interior Series, Green Turtle Cup,1971

An amusing erotic cup, a reference to the famous Surrealist fur cup by Meret Oppenheim

Luncheon in Fur

Claes Oldenberg

Icebag

Byoung Ok Min

Untitled

I can find a brief biography of this artist, but I didn't find this work. The artist seems to be very experimental, moving through various phases of abstraction. I loved this work, 6 horizontal rows of "tongues", each sampling colors, brushwork, and negative/positive space, repeating the form yet each different.  It's like a semaphore flag poster, or cut up string candy. It's whole in itself, finished, balanced, yet filled with tension because of the relation between the cut-off of each bar and line.

Richard Bosman

Beacon, 1987

detail, Beacon

Bosman is an East Coast figurative artist who studied at the Skowhegan School, where Neil Welliver worked and taught.  I find some similarities between his work and David Bates. Very strong bold, almost crude forms created by thick impastoed brushstrokes, with little sentimentality for the places, people, and things they each depict. (Bates will give us humor sometimes.) Much of Bosman's early work I find lacking in enough draftsmanship to be compelling. In this painting I think his technique works very well, and the edge of control is a tightrope balance that works.

Super Blood New Blue Moon: Scientific and Calendrical Event

I cannot express how marvelous the super moon looked last twilight.  Was there ever anything more beautiful?  My photograph doesn't capture the oversize quality of the sphere - last pic.  Others are from web.

Another doesn't occur until 2037.

my poor little photo

Mark Rothko, #27, 1954

Elizabeth Hazen: Painter

Elizabeth Hazen - maps as undergrid, structural color - coral and pthalo - two difficult colors to work with - reminiscent of some of Wayne Thiebaud's landscapes - paint like this?