Galerie St. Etenne has an opening on Tuesday evening, that I’ll probably attend, called ‘More Than Coffee Was Served: Café Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and Weimer Germany“.

Here’s the Gallery Notes on the show:

Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of the Composer Arnold Schoenberg, 1924

“The Galerie St. Etienne opens the fall season with an exhibition exploring the impact of the café on the development of the visual arts in fin-de-siècle Austria and Weimar-era Germany. This intriguing presentation features artifacts relating specifically to cafés (such as furniture, posters and artists’ depictions of the café and cabaret milieu), as well as works more loosely documenting the creative interchanges that this institution inspired. Among the artists to be included are Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Josef Hoffmann, E.L. Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Jeanne Mammen, Emil Nolde, Hermann Max Pechstein, Christian Schad, Egon Schiele and Bruno Voigt.

The café and its nighttime counterpart, the cabaret, were meeting grounds for all members of society in early twentieth century Austria and Germany, fermenting artistic movements and influencing artists’ subject matter. The cross-fertilization that existed among figures in various disciplines, all of whom rubbed shoulders at the leading coffeehouses, contributed in many ways to the rapid and simultaneous emergence of avant-garde movements in art, literature and music. So august were the personages who frequented the leading coffeehouses that no fewer than three were known by the nickname “Café Megalomania”: the Café Griensteidl in Vienna, the Café des Westens in Berlin and the Café Stefanie in Munich. It was here that the Secession movements in each of these cities gained impetus, cementing artistic alliances while at the same time sowing the seeds of future rivalries. The German variant of Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, was based in Munich, where contributors to the popular journals Jugend and Simplicissimus gathered at the Stefanie and other coffeehouses in the Bohemian Schwabing district. The Viennese Caféhaus –home away from home, office, letter drop and lending library–was the birthplace of the Jung Wien (Young Vienna) literary movement and the nexus for artistic factions that included both the elegant architect Josef Hoffmann (co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätte) and his arch-enemy, the iconoclastic Adolf Loos. It was in the Caféhaus that Jugendstil gradually ceded the ground to Expressionism.

The heady atmosphere of the fin-de-siècle coffee house was to some extent dampened by the impact of World War I. Hereafter, cafés and, especially, cabarets came to epitomize desperation and decadence. If the prewar café had been chaste and largely intellectual, its later incarnation was often blatantly sexual–a marketplace of bodies, not ideas. Particularly in Weimar-era Germany, artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Jeanne Mammen used the café and cabaret locale to capture the less savory vicissitudes of urban life. Poverty, loutishness and licentiousness abound in their treatment of the subject. Yet the Weimar-era café was also the home of the “new woman,” free for the first time to work outside the home, and at least some of the images suggest the emergence of a newly liberated, liberal society.

Image from Galerie St. Etienne.

I feel as if I lived in Vienna at the turn of the Century; I grew up admiring Gustav Mahler (I listed to all his symphonies over and over, esp the 9th) plus I have admired other painters of the period such as Edvard Munch, who was not Austrian or German, but was part of that that era (at least, in my mind); I reviewed the recent show at MOMA Edvard Munch Exhibition – The Modern Life of the Soul – MOMA at Webmetricsguru.com, my Web Analytics Blog.

I’ll have more to say about this show after I have seen it.

No sooner do I write about an artist in Holland who has a show in NYC, Marcus van Soest, than I get an email and salutation from him over the internet via real time video.

Aside from liking Marcus’s paintings, which I do, he is a new breed of artist that knows how to use the Internet to foster online communication, totally eliminating distance.  I feel like Marcus van Soest just became a friend of mine – and we haven’t even met yet (I missed his opening last week at MonkDogz).

Marcus does something that I have heard about and seen hotels do (an online cam of his studio) but not an artist.  I think that’s a great idea to foster communication and fans!   Think about it…what it the Internet if not “instant” ….. things need to happen fast, communication is “instant” and sales are often “impulse”.   Communities can form quickly and you can find out you have fans and followings from all over the world….if you know how to foster use the medium, partake in it.

I was talking to Amy Crehore about just that, the other day.  When Amy tried to explain her large swings in traffic and internet fans to some fellow artists she exhibits with …they did not understand …. they could not follow.   The internet changed EVERYTHING…and many people haven’t realized it yet….but luckly for those that do, like Marcus van Soest and Amy Crehore.

 

There appears to be an outcry on the West Coast about the a LA warehouse show by the self-described British “art terrorist” is taking place this weekend in LA. And in it, there’s an actual live elephant, painted pink.  I picked up this story from Boing Boing.

 
The technicolor elephant lives on a private reserve in Southern California. The paint she’s wearing doesn’t hurt her, says her caretaker, and Nelly has appeared in a number of commercials and movies so she’s “used to wearing makeup.” Stil, others believe her inclusion is exploitative and abusive.

Aside from the insensitivity to animals this Pink Elephant (no…I’m not drinking) this story reminds me of a local Brooklyn painter who’s work I saw a couple of months back at the MadArts Studio opening I reviewed over at Webmetricsguru.com.   In fact, here’s the painting below:

 

Here’s what I wrote about the artist Jaclyn Mednicov, who is a cosmetics artist during the day and a painter the rest to the time.

“I especially liked a painting that I don’t have an image of – it reminded me of Botero and there’s a surreal aspect – what’s hidden (behind a wall, behind a curtin, etc). Jaclyn was also very nice to talk with.”

Why is it OK to paint a Pink Elephant from imagination but not paint a real Elephant pink?  I think we know the answer, the Elephant, but it’s an interesting word problem.  

There’s more on this debate from Boing Boing which does an execellent synopsis by pulling in Blogging.la and the LA Times:

‘Blogging.la has more here on the controversy. There’s an LA Times article here. Snip:

‘I think it sends a very wrong message that abusing animals is not only OK, it’s an art form,’ said Ed Boks, general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services. ‘We find it no longer acceptable to dye baby chicks at Easter, but it’s OK to dye an elephant.’ Boks found himself decrying the presence of the elephant in the exhibit even though his agency had issued the two permits necessary to have the elephant there – ‘to my chagrin,’ he said. He tried late Friday to revoke the permits on grounds of public safety.’Some of the experts I’ve talked to have told me there’s no way of predicting when an elephant will go berserk,’ he said. ‘We want to do what’s right by the public and the animal.’

However, Boks would have to give five days’ notice to revoke the permits. And in five days, the exhibit will be gone. It is to run today and Sunday from about noon to 8 p.m. ‘This situation is causing the department to rethink its permitting procedures so there will be more scrutiny, so permits will not be issued for such frivolous abuse of animals in the future,’ he said. Although people may be drawn for artistic reasons, he added, ‘they don’t understand what the animal is suffering. I think we’re dealing with the psychology of an animal that needs to roam over large areas of land.’

Picked up this interesting news about Art in Washington DC this weekend from David Corn’s blog, which I read from time to time.

“Welmoed Laanstra, is unveiling a new public art project this weekend. Readers in the Washington, DC, area, please pay attention. It’s called Art not Ads. She has placed blowups of painting and poems and video pieces (created by a variety of artists and writers) on mobile billboards, and these trucks are driving through the Washington metropolitan area this weekend. The idea is to present Washington tourist, residents and workers with unexpected art experiences. You’re stuck in traffic, walking down the street, or waiting for the bus and–shazaam!–there’s a poem or painting passing by you. (The poems have been curated by local poetry whiz E. Ethelbert Miller, who selected the work of contemporary poets.) Welmoed didn’t take my suggestion and put T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” on one of the trucks and have it circle the White House. (“The eyes are not here/There are no eyes here/In this valley of dying stars.)”

I wonder if something like this would work in NYC?   Interesting idea as people are often more open when presented with information in unexpected ways – maybe there’s something in this idea of showing art while your commuting around town.