Monkdogz Artblog

If you are lucky enough to be in New York this thursday evening, consider going to Chelsea to a unique talk on the making of the documentary film “Herb & Dorothy 50×50″ by the director Megumi Sasaki at Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects on 27th Street.  An RSVP is recommended to te@myartprospects.com .

Back in August of 2009 I wrote a post on Dorothy & Herb Vogel and the amazingly large and significant collection that they had amassed, titled “Affordable Collections“.  They are a really interesting couple with an amazing story that you have to become familiar with if you are at all interested in art and collecting.  Here is a wonderful opportunity to learn more about this wonderful couple.

If you can’t make the evening it’s worth trying to see the documentary.  A short trailer is available from their website. 

If you don’t know the story:

HERB & DOROTHY tells the extraordinary story of Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history with very modest means. In the early 1960s, when very little attention was paid to Minimalist and Conceptual Art, Herb and Dorothy Vogel quietly began purchasing the works of unknown artists. Devoting all of Herb’s salary to purchase art they liked, and living on Dorothy’s paycheck alone, they continued collecting artworks guided by two rules: the piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Within these limitations, they proved themselves curatorial visionaries; most of those they supported and befriended went on to become world-renowned artists including Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Lynda Benglis, Pat Steir, Robert Barry, Lucio Pozzi, and Lawrence Weiner.

After thirty years of meticulous collecting and buying, the Vogels managed to accumulate over 2,000 pieces, filling every corner of their tiny one bedroom apartment. “Not even a toothpick could be squeezed into the apartment,” recalls Dorothy. In 1992, the Vogels decided to move their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The vast majority of their collection was given as a gift to the institution. Many of the works they acquired appreciated so significantly over the years that their collection today is worth millions of dollars. Still, the Vogels never sold a single piece. Today Herb and Dorothy still live in the same apartment in New York with 19 turtles, lots of fish, and one cat. They’ve refilled it with piles of new art they’ve acquired.

HERB & DOROTHY is directed by first time filmmaker Megumi Sasaki. The film received the Golden Starfish Award for the Best Documentary Film and Audience Award from the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival. It has also received Audience Awards from the 2008 SILVERDOCS Film Festival and the 2009 Philadelphia Cinefest. Palm Springs International Film Festival named HERB & DOROTHY one of their “Best of Fest” films in 2009.

I suppose that most artists who study “art” somewhere in their careers do “studies” of the nude form. So it shouldn’t be a surprise when artists who are better known for other mediums and styles produce a drawing of a nude. Such is the case with the British artist John Constable (1776-1837) of the “Hay Wain” fame who was best known for his iconic representation of the British countryside.

However what made Constable’s paintings so original in a time when there were plenty of other British landscape artists, was his wonderfully expressive characters in his paintings. There seems to be a story behind each person in his works and part of this must have been his study of the human form.

An example of this is coming up for auction at Bonhams on April 22nd in their 19th Century Paintings sale. This particular piece thought to have been drawn around 1808 has spent most of it’s life stuck in an album covered by an invitation to a Royal Academy dinner, probably because the Victorian owner may have thought it too risqué. With than sort of mentality, I wonder what they would have thought of his male nude study?

One of the treats at the Armory Show this week was a collection of ink drawing portraits by Elaine de Kooning, of her naked husband exhibited by Mark Borghi Fine Art.

It’s not that common to see drawings of the male form by female artists. They are elegant drawings and I feel blatantly show Elaine’s love for Bill early on in their marriage.. She first met him when he was teaching art, becoming his student. Five years later in 1943 they married. Although they were married for 46 years, they did spend much of their time apart and were known to each have had several affairs. However eventually they did reconcile.

She was part of the New York school of abstract expressionists and continued to draw but also worked as an art critic for Artnews and also taught. She developed her work as an abstract expressionist but interestingly she also gained a good reputation as a stylized portrait painter which resulted in her being commissioned to create a portrait of John F. Kennedy for the Truman Library.

De Kooning was a very thorough artists and often created hundreds of sketches and several canvases to produce her finished paintings. To see her drawings is to see part of her thought processes and her work in progress which is a treat with any artist.

See more drawings here…

We visited the Armory Show at Piers 94 and 92 today, where there were 287 galleries from around the world showing contemporary and modern art.

The overall mood was settled, a welcome change from the fear and desperation that could be felt last year. There wasn’t a frenzy of activity despite a few such stories being paraded here and there; the mood was rather calmer, a mix of eager anticipation mixed with a little underlying concern that it may not be as good as they hoped. There were enough people wandering around the first day to give the show energy. There certainly were unmistakable red dots and telltale empty hooks and holes in the walls. Sale conversations could also be overheard in many booths.

There were many excellent pieces of art on display. Creativity was clearly abundant with well thought out, intellectual creativity rather than new and different for just the sake of being different. Mixed media was definitely in evidence with many three dimensional works including paintings which starts to blur the edges between paintings and sculpture.

All in all The Armory 2010 is a good show and worth a first look and maybe a second. It is hard not to get overdosed on art from just wondering around this and yet there is plenty more to visit this week as well with Scope, Pulse, Volta and the ADAA show at the Park Avenue Armory. It’s a good time to go wallow in art.

A threat of murder, theft of a $75million da Vinci painting, high speed getaway, extortion and a Swiss bank account are all part of the story that’s behind a court case at the High Court in Edinburgh, Scotland at the moment. 

It all started on day in 2003 when a dosen was guarding Leonardo da Vinci’s “Madonna of the Yardwinder” in the staircase gallery at Drumlanrig Castle. Two men who had joined a tour of the castle waited for the group to move on from the gallery when one of them grabbed the dosen, covering her mouth, forcing her to the ground and threatened to kill her.  In the meantime his accomplice grabbed the 500 year old painting off the wall.  The two men escaped into a waiting car and sped off, throwing the frame out of the car before leaving the castle grounds.  They swapped cars not long after and disappeared. 

The Times recorded that the accused five men were plotting to extort money and were said to have “menaced” the 9th Duke of Buccleuch, his son and their insurers Hiscox UK “putting them in a state of fear and alarm” that the painting would be withheld, damaged or destroyed if they did not pay the ransom.  The men were demanding that half of nearly $7million be delivered to a law firm in Glasgow and the rest to be wired to a Swiss bank account.  

The men were finally apprehended at the law firm in 2007, a month after the 9^th Duke passed away and the painting was safely recovered.  It appears that the painting was used as collateral for drug related transactions and that those who stole the painting did not appreciate the full value of the work.  

It sounds more like something out of the movies and certainly adds to the provenance of the work which can be seen at the National Gallery of Edinburgh until the summer when it returns home to Drumlanrig Castle.

5,200 people stripped down to their bare skins today for an art installation on the steps of Sydney’s Opera House orchestrated and photographed by Spencer Tunick.  The American was in Australia commissioned by the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras to create the tableaux of naked humanity for a series titled “The Base”.

A funny prefix to the story was that Tunick arrived in Australia before the shoot to find that his airline had lost his baggage.  So Tunick himself was without his clothes according to the US Post Today.   More importantly for him, his camera equipment was also missing, but it all ended well with him being united with his luggage and the crowd not having to be photographed by a naked Tunick.  

The people of both sexes, a wide range of ages, sizes, shapes, nationalities and sexual orientation gathered together from 4am to allow Turnick to catch the best light on an unseasonably chilly morning.  He had them standing up, sitting down, turning around, lying down, hands down, heads up and not smiling.  Getting this many volunteers to do as he directed was really an amazing feat.   There were few detractors or trouble makers with Turnick suggesting that anybody who would bother to get up at the crack of dawn or stay up all night to be naked in the cold morning air had to like art and want to be a part of an iconic installation.  The volunteers are rewarded with a limited edition print of the photos.  

Many who participated were just regular people wanting to do something different before they went off to their regular jobs.  I am sure that it made a story, worthy of a pint of beer from your friends at the end of the day.  

If you really want to see lots of naked bodies wonder over to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Rarely does a “undiscovered” masterpiece surface, a rarer still is a new discovery of Van Gogh.  Since 1970 there have been only five works which have been added to Van Gogh’s catalogue of some 900 pieces of art.  Yesterday was one of those rare days when experts announced that “Le Blute-fin Windmill” was indeed an authentic Van Gogh and worth millions.  

However it has taken experts 35 years to come to this conclusion, verifying what museum curator Dirk Hannema of the Netherlands had pronounced so many years ago.  The problem was one of the rare times when Dirk Hannema’s authentication had been proven correct.  Although Hannema was a respected director of a Rotterdam museum, he was considered a laughing stock as an authenticator of works for masters.  He boasted of many undiscovered Vermeers, VanGoghs and Rembrandts in his personal collection, but most of these were mistaken attributions or forgeries.  Partly due to this reputation, this particular work did not receive much attention from the art establishment after he had purchased the painting from a Paris dealer for 6500 francs and pronounced it a Van Gogh dated around 1886.

Today it is displayed  proudly at the Zwolle’s Museum de Fundatie which was the beneficiary of the work when Hannema died in 1984.  

Read more in the Telegraph.

President Obama has picked six people to join the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) according to the Culture Monster on the LA Times.   Amongst the list is Chuck Close who becomes the first visual artist on this committee which is heavy on actors and entertainment business executives. 

The role of the PCAH according to their not too well updated and very sparse website is “to initiate and support key programs; to recognize excellence in the fields of arts and humanities; and to encourage private-public partnerships around those disciplines through the three primary cultural agencies – National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)”.

The committee headed up by the First Lady as Honorary Chairman and currently lead by George Stevens Jr, film director and founding director for the American Film Institute in LA and Margo Lion, a New York theater producer, includes 12 federal including Hilary Clinton, Secretary of the US Department of State and Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the US Department of the Treasury.  Interestingly it also includes Anna Wintour, Editor in Chief of Vogue magazine. 

It will be interesting to see if Close in conjunction with Earl Powell III, Director of the National Gallery of Art will be able to raise the profile of the visual arts amongst the heavy film and theatre crowd.

I went to an English boarding school that I was absolutely sure was the basis for Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s school. If we wanted to, we could be absolutely delightful young ladies, well spoken with impeccable manners and angelic smiles. However more often than not we were wicked hooligans getting up to no good, smuggling contraband into the school, plotting and executing wild pranks and getting into very unladylike scrapes. We certainly looked very much like those St Trinian’s girls according to my absolutely horrified, very proper English guardians who came to see me at my first Speech Day.

So I was rather surprised to learn while reading an early 90th birthday tribute to Searle in the Times, that although he started drawing the St Trinian’s before he enlisted with the Royal Engineers at the start of World War II, much of the bulk of the content of these cartoons were the sublimation of his experiences at the Changi Prison, the Japanese POW camp in Singapore and working on the infamous Death Railway between Burma and Siam. According to Kaye Webb, his first wife and publisher “unconsciously (Searle) was seeking to reduce horror into a comprehensible and somehow palatable form”.

Searle documented the brutal conditions as a POW with drawings made on stolen paper and a smuggled fountain pen. He also helped illustrate a prison magazine “Survivor”. Some of the St Trinian’s cartoons were drawn during this time.

I haven’t heard Searle quoted but I should image that drawing was an escape for him, a way to numb the pain and suffering, and the salvation which kept him alive when 95% of those who worked on the Death Railway died in the jungle.

I’m half Japanese and half British. I was born and grew up in Tokyo until I went off to the English boarding school. Several of my Japanese uncles and cousins were military men involved in the war both in Japan and in the South Pacific. One of my uncles and his wife ended up as an Allied POWs in Borneo where his wife died from a lack of medical care. My father who is the same age as Searle on the other hand was British and an Engineer for the British Merchant Marine, sailing in the South Pacific bringing personnel and supplies to the war front. Add to this mix my Japanese grandfather who was a key player in ending the war.

I have been to Changi Prison and heard the first hand experiences of the war from both sides. What I know to be true is that war is a dreadful thing for everybody. The death of so many, the pain and suffering of those left alive. Worst of all are the memories, the grief, fear and hatred; the guilt of surviving that can haunt years after the war has ended. How those who survive a war cope and make peace with their memories is critical. Searle obviously threw himself into his work becoming a very prolific artist. He became a master of the modern caricature, a leader in graphic design, with his sharp wit and satirical humor, writing for Punch, Le Monde, and The New Yorker. He wrote books, travelogues and newspaper reporting. He drew illustrations, advertising posters, theatre designs, film animations and even sculpted medals for the French Mint. He has influenced many artists including according to Andrea Walker of the New Yorker,  Groucho Marx and John Lennon. He continues to expertly capture people’s frailties and failings but in a way that allows us viewers to be compassionate, understanding and loving nonetheless.

I am looking forward to be renewing my acquaintance with the St Trinian’s girls with a very different perspective this time. I wonder who and what I’ll find.

Two English friends have bought a wall from a construction site in south London.  It sounds like the start of a joke and may yet turn into one.

The wall has a stenciled image of a punk rocker reading an instruction booklet for an Ikea furniture flat-pack.  It looks very much like a Banksy graffiti and the pair thought that they might be able to sell it for around $780,000.  It took the two men nine days and nights to dig the wall out of the ground and then had to hire a crane to lift it out in a specially made metal cradle spending a total of just under $47,000. 

Now the joke is that Banksy, despite having an image of the wall on his website some time ago, has refused to authenticate this as his work.

The problem is that there have been a lot of Banksy “fakes” of late and selling unauthenticated pieces may be difficult and face a lot of opposition. However there are also organizations that are offering their own authentications.  

Read more on the Telegraph