I dashed from the Frick Collection over to the Whitney last night - knowing I did not have much time; it was 5:30 PM and I was let in for free and a guard told me to see Picasso and American Art on the 4th Floor - so I did - and what a show!

However, the Whitney site does not show much of the details about the Picasso and American Art exhibition - I understand they want people to visit - and no photography is allowed (so they want you to buy the catalog - I guess) ……

…but what about all those people who want to go but can’t (because they don’t live or visit NYC)? 

I think it’s somewhat shortsighted of the Whitney to not have put the entire Catalog of Picasso and American Art online - so it can be more widely discussed.  After all - it’s that level of Internet participation with Art Communities that makes Art interesting today…that is our 21st century Renaissance.  As a result, I need to quote other magazine articles that do discuss Picasso and American Art in more depth than the Whitney does - online.

To quote New York Magazine (which actually has some content) ..

“Picasso and American Art,” now at the Whitney, is an ambitious examination of how this great father-monster shaped the modern American imagination. The way serious artists influence one another is always a subtle and complex subject, especially when the interplay occurs, as it does here, among strong, independent figures rather than between a leader and his followers (as was the case with, say, Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti). In an exhibit where space is limited and curators cannot display less-visible forms of influence, such as the moral or personal sway of an artist, the focus inevitably narrows. “Picasso and American Art” leaves out much. But what it does do—juxtapose paintings—it does brilliantly. Those who like to look closely at individual works will savor the show, entering a state of compare-and-contrast bliss. And, more mysteriously, they may gain a better sense of what’s peculiarly American.”

Since I could not photograph anything, and there’s no online catalog - all I can say …. I had no idea that Jasper Johns was so influenced by Picasso till I saw this exhibition … a show I will go back to a couple of times (plus there’s a lot I missed at the Whitney that’s running right now).

Jasper John’s encaustic /wax and oil paintings are FANTASTIC - and there’s a lot of them in the Picasso show ….. it shows a range of work of John’s that is not particularly well represented in books or online - but is absolutely some of his finest work …and it turns out.. inspired largely by Pablo Picasso - who would have known?  I guess it is known..but who would have known that Picasso has SO MUCH influence on Modern American Art - since he never actually came to America?  Well, he did influence a lot of of struggling artists who worshiped Picasso’s popularity in the 1930’s and 1940’s and grew up to be famous artists themselves - like Jasper Johns.

But the show also says something at Picasso - and my inner intuition whispered this in my ear.

“…Picasso became bored with painting reality, painting representational reality by 1910.  Essentially, Picasso focused entirely on 2 and 3 dimensional design as a “problem to be solved”  and then put an eye or an arm of a part of a face on it …. to give it human meaning …. and meaning to him.  

You can trace the large ovals and circles on a flat plane as what interested him, balancing it with form and color …and then putting an eye there..to make it a face, or an arm, to show it was a shoulder.    Picasso essentially disconnected design from visual meaning ..and then threw in the eye, the arm, the hand, they table as a marker to where he began…and ended.  

Because of that … his later works are not that satisfying on a human level - though they are masterpieces of design and construction.  Picasso embodied the philosophy of his times, that painting really was just a representation of 2 dimensional objects …so he went all the way - to purely abstract qualities - and yet, still had to say …this is a person, this is a table, this is a still life….. because he thought that it still needed a connection to visual reality…the reality he now found boring.”

However, the influenced painters in this show, with the exception of Jasper Johns, don’t produce anything nearly as good as Picasso’s work … how could they ..when they imitate him?  

I’ll have more to say when I see the Picasso and American Art, perhaps Friday, when I will attempt to visit a friend, Liz Camps, in a nearby hospital, recovering from an operation.  I don’t usually like visiting hospitals..but I will, for a friend.

Been looking at David Galenston’s two books - thinking I’ll purchase the latest book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.   Got interested in David W. Galenson after reading a review of his ideas in the New York Times today.  

In The Art of Pricing Great Art, the writer, Mr. Leonhardt, expresses the following:

“The mysterious part of the current mania lies in figuring out what exactly makes a piece of art worth $30 million instead of, say, $1 million. Not even people who make their living selling art claim to have much of a definition of great art. In fact, they’re proud not to have one. “That’s where the market becomes magical,” Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, told me.”

In my www.webmetricsguru.com blog - I use with metrics to solve a business need (some times I make my own metrics - you have to be creative - you know); a theory explaining value of a work of art would appeal to someone with my values and way of thinking.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Leonhardt article so I’ll quote from it quite a bit, then comment at the end.

“…..he began collecting data on the sale price of works by Warhol, Jackson Pollock and other American artists, and he discovered a pattern. Most of them produced their most valuable work either very early in their career, like Warhol, or very late, like Pollock. When he expanded his research to European painters, he found the same pattern.

Not only that, but the two groups tended to approach art, and to talk about it, in strikingly different ways. The young geniuses, like Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, were conceptual innovators whose paintings broke sharply from previous work. They typically had a precise goal in mind when they started a piece and didn’t need long to finish it. “Above all, don’t sweat over a painting,” Gauguin once told a friend. “A great sentiment can be rendered immediately.”

The late bloomers, on the other hand, arrived at their innovations gradually, through trial and error, making their major contributions late in life. They painted the same subject again and again, experimenting on the canvas, often reluctant to say that a painting was finished. Consider that Cézanne, who did his most valuable and celebrated work in his 60s, signed few of his paintings.

Mr. Galenson has extended the theory to novelists, poets and beyond, arguing that most creative people fall on one end or the other of the spectrum, and he has earned a fair bit of attention. Malcolm Gladwell, in a speech at Columbia University, described “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” which Mr. Galenson published this year, as “a really wonderful book.” Wired magazine recently profiled him under the headline, “What Kind of Genius Are You?”

Maybe few artists are exactly one type or the other - I believe there is polarity in just about everything - including creativity.

“……If you look through the prices from the current auction season, or walk through any major museum, you can’t help but notice that Mr. Galenson is onto something. When a still life that Cézanne painted at the age of 56, for instance, fetched $37 million at Sotheby’s last week, art experts cited the rarity of Cézanne still lifes. The next night at Christie’s, another Cézanne still life — one painted when he was 34 — sold for just $1.1 million. “

I don’t find that surprising - Cezanne’s late still lifes are much more “unique” than his earlier work - when he was struggling to find himself and his style.  While Cezanne’s early work is notable - yet he had he not evolved his later style and revolutionized art.  Had Paul Cezanne painted his early still lifes, then died all of a sudden, before doing his later work - we’d probably not know he existed today - he’d never become that well known for his early work.

Now, it turns out that Malcolm Gladwell (the same Malcolm Gladwell who I heard at Webmasterworld Pubcon X in Boston, earlier this year) has come to Galenson’s defense and spoke about Galenson’s theory in February at Columbia.   I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Age Before Beauty all the way through and it’s great!

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What a show!  Perhaps the best Art Show in a museum that I have seen in the last 10 years, Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the best show in NY right now - if you like Post Impressionist and early 20th Century Art.   This Vollard show took the unusual step of focusing on the Art Dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who must have had uncanny taste as it’s largely due to his patronage that many of the most well known artists at the turn of century survived, rather than the artists he collected. 

And while Vollard was a dealer, after all, and profited handsomely on his early purchases of Cezanne’s work (which are noted in the show notes), it’s also clear that, without Vollard, and the insight he showed in collecting the work of artists largely unknown at the time, modern art would have taken a much different course.   It’s also true that if your going to make a fortune on Art - your better off starting by collecting unknown artists whose works you can buy cheaply and resell at a much higher price….a strategy that Ambroise Vollard used often - and sometimes it did seem like he might have profited more than he needed to.   And even as you have Vollard pegged, he keeps certain works because he really did enjoy them, for his own personal collection - and these he would not sell.

And what a Collection!   This show rivals the Barnes Collection and perhaps surpasses Barnes in breadth.  To be clear, most of the paintings in this show were not owned by Vollard when he died; they were paintings that he owned or showed in his galleries at some point …that’s why they are in the show.

Here’s a link to the Exhibition Catalog and I’ll discuss the paintings that most touched me - but it’s hard since most of the show touched me…. but I’ll focus on the top 10 for me.

The Basket of Apples has long been one of my very favorite Cezanne!  It’s also one I may never have personally stood in front of before.  I used to own an Abrams book on Cezanne that had this painting on the cover - I have admired this Cezanne for over 30 years.    I don’t know how to describe my feelings for Cezanne.  My paining sensibilities are much, much different - yet Cezanne influences me more than any other artist - and for most of my life, has been the strongest influence on my thinking about art and what it is and should be.  Cezanne’s paintings are a recreation of nature - not copying - he constructs.

Boy in a Red Waistcoat - a painting I admired for some time also.

Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Félix Rey   has an interesting story - I think it was given to the family of Dr. Ray and used at one time to fix a chicken coop - until Gauguin tracked it down and rescued the painting.  It’s a masterpiece but it’s also easy to see why Van Gogh was even separate from other artists of his time - who thought he was crazy.   Today, we can accept Van Gogh as someone who belongs to that time - but many were unprepared for his directness.   Time is the true leveler …. time reveals all ….. today we know Van Gogh’s greatness - but it might have been hard to accept him in his own time.

Gauguin’s large painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is considered one of his masterpieces - and probably his largest painting.   Gauguin’s success with  Ambroise Vollard was not as much as he’d have hoped - and many of his works did not sell - leaving Gauguin to sell off some of his personal collection of post impressionists just to make ends meet.  For the last years of his life, Vollard had Gauguin on a monthly stipend and took possession of a certain number of his paintings in return for the stipend.

I think Gauguin’s work is more subtle than some of the others in the show - it probably did not immediately catch on and find an audience like Cezanne’s did, for example.   Both Gauguin and Van Gogh did not have much success selling their work via Vollard (and Van Gogh was already dead, but his Sister in Law had most of his works and sent them to Vollard to be shown in two shows the dealer set up in 1895 and 1897 I believe).

There was a version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night over a river - I think this painting was perhaps, the strongest, in the show - I could not break away from it …it was so powerful -

      

Every painting in the show was a masterpiece and yet - this painting - I could not walk away from.  I could not take my eyes off of it - this is Art.  You can not explain it - and certainly I can see why Van Gogh was not accepted in his lifetime - even among his own fellow painters, in many cases - and yet the the pure life force of the river- of the night - is in this painting. 

How else can I explain that which can not be explained?