Vladimir Kagan's Blog

The Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair 2016

Copyright Vladimir Kagan, January 23, 2016

 

I wasn’t going to write about this show.

 

contemporary art has become a science class. Experimentation is the buzzword. 'Putz' around with LED lights; flashing, changing colors, twirling, snaking. There were neon signs of yesterday reinvented. There were three-dimensional ‘paintings’ with appliquéd metal, plastic and paper. There were the tricky paintings intended to fool the eye, trumpe l’oeil. There was art using automotive enamels, a robotic artist painting all day on an electronic canvas, a diminutive Indian artist ‘plucking’ paper. There was manipulated photography and there was the usual infatuation with bare breast. To qualify as a contemporary art, it is fair game to try anything as long as it is different. This produced some interesting stuff, but is it ART?

As for Modern Art? Anything goes. Slap some colors onto a canvas and let it drip, depict humanity as artsy, disfigured bodies, add a samplings of installation art, and there you have The Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair 2016… in a nutshell.

In spite of this jaundiced overview, there was some delightful art to enjoy. We found some exquisite pencil and pen drawings, an art form virtually missing in contemporary shows. Sculpture still found its antecedent in tradition. Casting bronze has not changed. The most imaginative experimentations were with glass. Glass is a most time honored material, a molten mass of sand cannot be easy be fooled. The glass artist is wedded to tradition. He or she must respect the material’s limitations. Therefore their experimentations are all the more exciting.

Art is in the eyes of the beholder, one person’s treasure is another’s junk. Below is some of the ‘art’ that I found interesting. I am sure there will be many who will disagree.

   

 

The Fernando Botero's lying nude was the first piece of art I encountered on entering the show. Botero is one of my favorite contemporary artists. I love him for glorifying the obese and fat and making them lovable.

 

This pair of life-sized  black children was one of my favorites as the artist caught their youth, despair and wisdom in their faces.

Marek Zynga mixed media sculture is beautifully executed in clay and glazed tiles. You can recognize him as the artist as he and his subject are dressed alike.

I have always loved aboriginal art. This five by five foot painting was done my Esther Giles Nampitjinpa, a diminutive native Australian. To know her is to love her, but you would never associate this little woman with her bigger-than-life-art.

 

  

 A few miles North of us in Tampa, works Marlene Rose, an amazing artist pouring hot molten glass into sand molds. The ball gown with the decollate is a spoof, but her work is serious. She is doing a job more frequently done by brawny men able to take the extreme heat of the furnaces. Marline has gone back to the ancient art of casting glass as sculpture and her Buddhas, ceremonial bells and ancient relics in a range of colors from subtle to vibrant are amongst the finest works in the show this year.

     

Marlene and many of the glass examples above, are represented by Habitat Galleries of Royal Oak, Michigan, the finest art glass  gallery in America.

I like the growth, simplicity and use of color in this life-size enameled steel sculpture.

 

 

I was intrigued by the textile-like character of these wallhangings even before I met Neha Vedpathak, the charming young Indian artist, who created these 'plucked paper' hanging. Her's is a most time consuming task, using Japanese handmade paper, which she laboriously pulls apart with a fine needle, inch by inch.

 

 

Two drawings by an Italian artist.
The lightness of line were executed with a minimalist's skill, They were among our favorite in the show.

Quite to my amazement, I found my 1970s Day Bed in mint condition, in the exhibit of The Silver Fund, a gallery on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. The sofa is covered in the original fabric I had hand woven in Munich at the time. It is a rare example of my lesser-known linear minimalist designs.

 

Some of the most intriguing avant-garde art came from the ArtLabbe Gallery from Santiago de Chile including the ribbon sculptures below by Solange Heilenkotter and the glass and stone sculptures by Alejandro Herrera.

   
 

These slender ribbons of sliced plastic sheets were made by Sollange hellenkotter. Her work was amongst the most original of the new experimental art at the show.

Using thin shards of rigid plastic, this three-dimensional painting was one of the more intriguing works at the show.

 

Two black marble and glass sculptures were a unique mix of two disparate materials.

 

...And to finish off the show, the ubiquitous "installation Art"

 

 

 NOTE: The show closed tomorrow, Sunday afternoon. If you're not stuck in the snow, try and visit this great Art Fair.

Frank Stella - six decades of being on the top of the heap

The Stella Retrospective at the Whitney

Copyright Vladimir Kagan January 3, 2016

Walk off the elevator on the 5th floor of the Whitney and you are confronted with a 30 0r 40 foot long paining of 'The Earthquake in Chili". Why Stella chose to write the title in German escapes me.

 

Let’s talk Frank Stella – my favorite artist. 

Frank Stella is prolific, imaginative, a powerhouse. He neither stands still nor rests on his laurels. Other artists live and die with their signature handwriting; Stella reinvents himself and emerges more vivid with each rebirth. The Whitney Museum’s Retrospective, in their new home on Gansevoort Street in New York, is a comprehensive exhibit of the six decades of Stella’s work. beginning with his pre-black period, the Black Paintings and finally to his recent sculpture. This comprehensive show includes nearly one hundred pieces of his paintings, reliefs, sculpture, prints, drawings and Marquette’s. It is the first Stella retrospective since 1987 at the Museum of Modern Art and is the Whitney’s inaugural exhibit devoted to a living artist. 

This its the Stella we all recognize - squares, lines, rainbows - black on black or vivid  colors

 

Stella was born in 1936, in the small town of Malden, Massachusetts the son of Constance and Frank Stella. His father was a gynecological doctor and his mother dabbled in painting. She became a proficient landscape artist of the Sunday-school variety. Stella’s early inclinations were toward sports, not the arts. The closest he came to wielding a paintbrush was helping his father paint their house - house painting was his father’s hobby.

Young Stella was fortunate to go to Philips Academy in Andover, an elite boarding school not far from home. The school catered to an elite cadre of upper class, old-moneyed students. Socially, this was a new experience for Stella. While he was not an outstanding student, he was a good wrestler and a member of the school’s team. - The school is one of the few educational institutions with its own museum, The Addison Gallery of American Art. Under the influence of Bartlett Hayes Jr. the gallery’s director and Patrick Morgan, his studio art teacher, Stella developed a fascination with the concept of abstract art. Philips Academy was a life-changing experience for Frank.

After graduating from Philips, Stella chose Princeton University, geographically the furthest he could get away from home! At Princeton, he came under the influence of William Seitz, the respected art historian and Stephen Greene, who was an early exponent of abstract expressionism and taught painting at Princeton. Both stimulated Stella’s appetite for the arts. He was too young to have personally met some of the early modernists who shaped the post-war art scene; however, he greatly admired the works of Franz Klein, Hans Hofmann and Joseph Albers, all exponents of the German Bauhaus. Their art inspired him to experiment with his own expression. He did not emulate them - he followed his own muse.

     

 
 

No wall was ever too large for Stella to cover end to end

The rainbow series

 

 
Playing with designer's tools, Stella incorporated the French curve in many of his paintings

 

While others dripped and sprawled huge blobs of paint on their canvas, Frank Stella was diligently painting straight lines – exquisite lines in monochromatic colors, using texture and enamel for contrast. A lesson subliminally learned helping his father paint their home. The rigid lines of the clapboards; the straight lines of the wooden façade found expression in his early works. After graduating from Princeton In 1958, Stella moved to Greenwich Village in New York. The Village was the epicenter of the thriving art world. It was in this bustling environment that he created his seminal ‘black paintings.’  When his work was included at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 ‘Sixteen Americans’, Stella, at 23 years, was the youngest artist in the show.       

 Stella moved from black into metallic, bronze and aluminum paint - exploring the subtle shimmer and contrast of hues affected by the changing light. By the 1960s. His paintings no longer followed the traditional square or rectangle of the canvas, his angular lines, as if drawn with a T square and triangle, delineated his canvas. Abandoning his monochrome foundation, he added color, first tentatively, later with bold intensity, using vibrant fluorescent hues. He next merged his bands of colors into geometric rainbows. 

Stella kept his paint rich in color and smoothly applied to the canvas. Size was never a deterrent. Stella always thought big, Ideal for a museum walls where everyone could see the work. 

 

Never stuck in a groove, by the 1980's Stella again radically changed. He abandoned geometrics for three-dimensional expressions. These huge paintings exploded out of their canvas, liberated from their background and leaping into your face and consciousness. 

     

 

 

 

Stella's sculpture leave no stone unturned - he explores every media, material - some feather light - others weighing a ton and paints them with profusely like a graffiti artist

By the 1990's Stella expression took a radical turn once again as he abandoned canvas altogether! His latest creations are huge unearthly sculptures suspended in space or flying off the walls. Twisted metal, plastic, computer generated objects, some boldly painted, and others raw metal combined with found objects. This is limitless expression. Stella’s work is no longer produced in an artist’s studio. His sculptures are fabricated in a huge factory space using the latest automated machinery. It takes an ‘army’ to create these works: sophisticated machinery, computer technicians, welders, and dozens of craftsmen working under Stella’s astute eye. 

 

If you follow the prescribed route for viewing this overwhelming show, you arrive at the museum’s picture windows with a panoramic view of the Hudson River. There, with a backdrop of a setting sun, was the surprising tabletop exhibit of wire-constructed Maquettes reminiscent in their delicacy and lightness of Alexander Calder and the Swiss artist Jean Tinquely. These fragile sculptures stood in stark contrast to the explosive works of Stella’s latest works.

 

Stella's miniatures are light, playful and delicate  

 

Don’t miss this colossal exhibit. The exhibit will be on at the Whitney until February 7, 2016 and then moves to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

 

“Bravo Frank Stella! You still surprise and enthrall me after all these years.”