Revelation in art may include found art or pieces of art. This is an interesting discovery of a piece of art of one of my favorite Dutch artists, Vermeer.
During restoration work, conservators discovered, to their surprise, that the naked figure—which dominates the upper right section of the picture—was overpainted long after the artist’s death.
On the original canvas, the Cupid “picture within a picture” hung on the wall behind the letter-reading girl. It was detected 40 years ago by x-ray, but scholars had always assumed that Vermeer himself painted over it, says Uta Neidhardt, the senior conservator at Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie. The decision to restore Cupid to the work was taken after recent laboratory tests established beyond doubt that the figure was overpainted decades after Vermeer completed it. (The Art Newspaper, May 2019)
The painting by the Dutch Golden Age master, one of only 35 paintings attributed to him, is considered one of the most famous paintings of all time and is one of the crown jewels of Dresden’s city collection.
Vermeer, A Lady Standing at a Virginal, 1670–72. National Gallery, London. Via Wikimedia Commons.
What’s more amazing, the same ars-poetic image of Cupid is featured prominently in another Vermeer painting, A Young Woman standing at a Virginal (1670–72), housed in London’s National Gallery. This has led scholars to believe the Cupid may be based on a real painting owned by Vermeer. An inventory of his widow’s belongings includes a mention of an item referred to as “a Cupid.”
[The painting is] purported to be in good condition, though a layer of varnish that darkened with age turned the painting’s subtle colors yellowish, and Schölzel’s first task is to focus on this. His work will require a microscope and a scalpel, allowing him to scrape off overpaint without removing the original varnish…. [Article from Arsty.net. On May 8, 2018.]
Annika Roll at Dia: Beacon, New York. January 2020.
photos by Maureen B. Fitzmahan
Sunday, January 5, four members of Art Junket East gathered to visit the astounding museum, Dia:Beacon. Annika Roll, Lisa Sikorski, Erin Mahollitz, and Maureen Fitzmahan attended.
Dia:Beacon, which opened in 2003, occupies a former Nabisco box-printing facility. With 160,000 square feet, it is one of the largest exhibition spaces in the country for modern and contemporary art. (Wikipedia)
Michael Heizer, North, East, South, West. Weathering Steel.
Annika Roll viewing: Gerard Richter (b. Dresden, Germany), Six Gray Mirrors, 2003.
In 1981 Richter produced the first of his mirror works, which, expelling all traces of their maker, instead absorb the world around them, in all its transitory serendipity. Subsuming spectators, the mirrors deprive them of any stable relationship to space. Meanwhile, Richter’s practice has progressively turned to a fusion of architecture, painting, sculpture, and decor.
Richter’s Six Gray Mirrors (2003) combines the style and intentions conveyed in his Gray Paintings and the glass-and-mirror works. Six gray-enameled glass panels hang from the walls on supports that allow them to be tilted at various angles. Their neutral depths not only reflect visitors but also respond to the light from the high windows, combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a synthetic whole. The somber appearance of the work simultaneously negates and combines Richter’s passion for glass, mirror, and monochrome. (Dia)
Dan Flavin. b. New York City – 1933. d. 1996.
Few artists are more identified with a particular medium than Dan Flavin. After 1963 Flavin’s work was composed almost entirely of light, in the form of commercially available fluorescent tubes in ten colors (blue, green, pink, red, yellow, ultraviolet, and four whites) and five shapes (one circular and four straight fixtures of different lengths). He arranged fixtures in varying autonomous configurations, as in the series of “monuments” for V. Tatlin (1964–90), and then increasingly in color and in relation to architecture, exemplified by his monumental barriers that physically block a passageway or segment of a space with light.
Flavin once summed up his practice as “decisions to combine traditions of painting and sculpture in architecture with acts of electric light defining space.” His simplified formal vocabulary can be related to the work of contemporaries such as Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, and Donald Judd, in its reduction of formal devices, emphasis on serial and rational rather than gestural forms, and focus on the phenomenological presence of the works rather than their narrative implications.
Despite dedicating many of his untitled works to individuals or ideas, and his deep awareness of the historical symbolism of light in art, Flavin always refused to attach any transcendent significance to his works. As he explained, he always titled his “monuments” in quotes to emphasize the irony of such temporary commemorative structures, whose parts have a limited life span and need to be replaced regularly. (Dia)
Dia: BeaconAnnika Roll and Erin Mahollitz at Dia: Beacon, NYAnnika Roll viewing work by Mary Corse.
A pioneer of light-based art, Mary Corse is one of the few women associated with the Light and Space movement that originated in Southern California in the 1960s. Throughout her career Corse has experimented with different ways to physically imbue her paintings with light. Her techniques have included the use of electric light, ceramic tiles, and glass microspheres, with which she creates simple geometric configurations that give structure to the luminescent internal space of her paintings. This focused presentation of Corse’s painting, examines her treatment of internal compositional space—using geometric form in juxtaposition with gestural brushwork—from the 1960s to the present. These works open themselves up to their environment, reflecting and refracting light, and invite a perceptual encounter that is grounded in both vision and movement. (Dia)
Louise Bourgeois (b. Paris-1911, d, NYC-2010), Crouching Spider, 2003.
Mnemonic, symbolic, evocative, and restrained—these strong, if contradictory, qualities are typical of Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture. “Every day,” she declared, “you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” For her, the art-making process was a search for the forms that translate experiences—an operation that she compared with exorcism. The sculptor is her own healer, the work a sort of proxy that reveals the forms of trauma: elusive, almost abstract, but also descriptive. In Bourgeois’s figures, one can recognize limbs, organs, and organic formations that fuse with the inorganic materiality of the medium, be it marble, resin, wood, or bronze. In fact, the choice of a specific material was something completely intuitive for the artist: “The medium is always a matter of makeshift solutions. That is, you try everything, you use every material around, and usually they repulse you. Finally, you get one that will work for you. And it is usually the softer ones—lead, plaster, malleable things. That is to say that you start with the harder thing and life teaches you that you had better buckle down, be contented with softer things, softer ways.”
The artist’s repertoire of materials was as connected to traditional media such as bronze or marble as it was open to new textures, such as those of latex and synthetic resin. Latex, in its similarity to human skin, conveys a feeling intrinsic to Bourgeois’s aesthetic, where representation often entails the creation of a surrogate for the body and its suffering organs. Yet her images of the body point not at its appearance, but the way it is perceived from within. Bourgeois’s body is a psychological, internalized one—the body as it is experienced by the sufferer—and the accumulations of members and membranes are symbolically powerful because they are imaginary. (Dia)
John Chamberlain (b. Rochester, Indiana – 1927, d. NYC – 2011)
John Chamberlain’s dynamic, vibrantly painted, often candy-colored objects made from crushed-metal car parts simultaneously combined the gestural vigor of Abstract Expressionism and the vernacular consumerism of Pop art. In the late 1960s, Chamberlain experimented with other unconventional yet significantly more malleable materials, such as urethane foam, synthetic polymers, and aluminum foil. When he returned to automotive parts and other steel components in the mid-1970s, his work was amplified by a new sense of inventiveness. While encouraging assistants to improvise on his elements with further cutting, crushing, torqueing, and crimping, he also elaborated his enameled surfaces with sprayed, stenciled, dribbled, graffitied, and airbrushed coats of color—which were jazzy, tropical, even raucously patterned.
The names of Chamberlain’s sculptures are often puzzling and unexpected, such as Flufft (1977), Coup d’Soup (1980), and Pigmeat’s E♭ Bluesong (1981). These humorous titles are usually composed from found words and expressions; some were even composed by randomly shuffling index cards. Chamberlain’s titles are deliberately open-ended and reflect a poetic sensibility that was developed while attending Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina, in the mid-1950s, where the artist befriended many poets.
In 1967 Dia cofounder Heiner Friedrich presented one of Chamberlain’s first international solo exhibitions at his gallery in Munich. Friedrich continued to collect the artist’s work voraciously, amassing an unparalleled collection of Chamberlain’s sculptures and painting, which now belong to Dia Art Foundation. (Dia)
Richard SerraRichard Serra
Richard Serra has consistently and rigorously probed issues fundamental to sculpture over a career now spanning almost five decades. In the late 1960s he introduced “process” into his sculptural practice, by making explicit the means of his production. Between 1967 and 1968 Serra penned a list of transitive verbs that defined actions—examples include “to roll” “to prop” and “to bend”—which he applied to new and innovative materials to make sculptures. Serra’s Scatter Piece (1968), for example, consists of strips of rubber randomly distributed throughout the gallery, evidence of “to scatter.”
In this same period, Serra was also strongly affected by the work of a number of contemporary dancers, which prompted him to consider “ways of relating movement to material and space.” He soon began “to think about sculpture in an open and extended field, in a way that is precluded when dealing with sculpture as an autonomous object.” Three decades later, these concerns remained central to Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. These large-scale installations of contorted steel plates elaborate concerns with orientation and movement, destabilizing our experience of space as we attempt to comprehend each sculptural volume. They are part of Serra’s investigation into the embodied experience of perception. As he explained, “I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body’s movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement.” (Dia)
Lee Ufan (b. Kyongsang-nambo, Korea – 1936, lives and works in Kamakura, Japan and in Paris), Relatum (formerly Language) , 1971/2011.
Lee Ufan is a Korean minimalist painter and sculptor artist and academic, honored by the government of Japan for having “contributed to the development of contemporary art in Japan.” The art of this artist, who has long been based in Japan, is rooted in an Eastern appreciation of the nature of materials and also in modern European phenomenology. The origin of Mono-ha may be found in Lee’s article “Sonzai to mu wo koete Sekine Nobuo ron (Beyond Being and Nothingness – A Thesis on Sekine Nobuo.” Once this initial impetus given, Mono-ha congealed with the participation of the students of the sculptor Saito Yoshishige, who was teaching at Tama University of Art at the time. One evidence may be found in the book [ba, so, toki] (場 相 時, place phase time) (Spring, 1970). Lee, the main theorist of the Mono-ha (“School of Things”) tendency in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was trained as a philosopher. As a painter, Lee contributed to ‘Korean Monotone Art’ (Dansaekjo Yesul, 單色調 藝術), the first artistic movement in 20th century Korea to be promoted in Japan. He advocates a methodology of de-westernization and demodernization in both theory and practice as an antidote to the Eurocentric thought of 1960s postwar Japanese society. (Wikipedia)
“There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 1657–59, after partial restoration. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. © SKD. Photo by Wolfgang Kreische.
The Art Junket 