Monat: Oktober 2016
J. DEWEY
A genuine ‚Idea‘ is an ‚Idea‘ in motion.
Eine wirkliche Idee, ist eine Idee in Bewegung.
ART: CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY AND PAINTINGS AT THE MET
The periods spanned by the show are among the most important in the history of Chinese art. The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) has been called the golden age of Chinese painting. Monumental landscape painting came into its own. There was a constant dialogue and tension between the academy, which saw artists as craftsmen and valued a precise, almost realistic approach, and scholar-amateurs, who fought to elevate the status of artists and approached painting more in terms of natural philosophy and self-expression.
In the Northern Sung, landscape paintings attained a special majesty. Human beings were tiny and mountains rose and swept into the sky. Kuo Hsi was a key painter and theorist. In his “Trees Against a Flat Vista,“ which may be his only work outside China, everything except two small figures crossing a bridge and a handful of isolated rocks and trees seems to be behind a film. Nature is revealing and concealing itself, pulling back its curtain and fading away like rivers and hills in a dream.
In 1127 the Jurchen barbarians sacked the capital of the empire and carried off the emperor, and the court moved south. Southern Sung enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity, and there was a growing sense of sophistication and refinement. But the empire had been sharply reduced in size, and there was a deep sense of vulnerability. The metropolitan area of Hangzhou, the capital city, was so large – it had a population of several million people; no city in Europe had more than 50,000 – that the natural world was even more attractive as guide and refuge.
If the empire was smaller and less expansive, so was Southern Sung painting, but that does not mean it was less effective. In Ma Yuan’s fan painting “Plum Blossoms by Moonlight,“ two robed men face the moon while a craggy tree seems to twist and turn in a ritual dance binding the two men to earth and sky. The anonymous “Evening in the Spring Hills“ is a fan painting that demonstrates the Chinese feeling for void. The scroll is 90 percent blank, and the few landscape forms seem to be painted in order to allow the empty twilight space to live.
The Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), established by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, marked the first time that all of China had been conquered. The Mongols turned Chinese society upside down, placing scholars at the bottom with prostitutes and beggars. There was an artistic reassertion of traditional Chinese values. Calligraphy was the preeminent Chinese art, and partly to raise his status, the scholar-amateur painter developed a calligraphic style that changed Chinese art forever. Calligraphy, painting and poetry became inseparable.
Ni Tsan was one of the four great Yuan landscapists and one of the most influential figures in all of Chinese art. He was born into privilege and eventually gave it up for a nomadic life. Three of his paintings are in the show – one early, another after he was forced into hiding by the Mongol court, a third, “Woods and Valleys of Mount Yu,“ painted two years before his death. The compositions are formulaic, but the last work suggests the versatility of his brush. Slashes of ink give shape to leaves and trees, but the slashes also seem to be gestures of artistic license that swarm over parts of the painting like locusts. Ni Tsan, like Huang T’ing-Chien and Mi Fu, two great calligraphers of the Sung Dynasty, had a long, troubled, picturesque struggle with political power. It would be nice if the many layers of meaning in this show -which runs through Aug. 2 – were more clearly mapped. Also of interest this week: Donald Lipski (Germans Van Eck Gallery, 420 West Broadway, near Spring Street): Donald Lipski’s current show has fewer and generally larger objects than his last show at the Germans Van Eck Gallery. Six of his playful and sinister enigmas are spread, splattered and coiled across the floor and walls. There is also a dicey installation in the back office in which thousands of little game sets -the kind used in Parcheesi – pour over the floor like water from a forgotten sink.
Published: March 6, 1987
Holland Cotter’s Winning Work for the Pulitzerprize 2009
Winning Work2009
January 31, 2008
Artistic Muscle, Flexed For Medicis: Art Review | ‚Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries‘
By Holland Cotter
Michelangelo was a terrible kvetch. His back forever ached; popes were slow with the paychecks; the local food was always an insult, a disgrace. No one worked half as hard as he did, and slacker artists made him nuts. “Draw, Antonio; draw, Antonio; draw and don’t waste time,” he scrawled on a sketch he gave to a lackadaisical young pupil and studio assistant, Antonio Mini, in 1524.
He gave Mini many drawings — two trunks full, according to one account — as he did to several other pretty men he taught. You’ll find a choice example from the Mini cache — a stormy, swirling study of a muscular male leg — in “Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi” at the Morgan Library & Museum. That sketch is just one of 79 16th-century Florentine works, shaped into a thematic exhibition that would give even the fault-finding master scant cause for complaint.
For Michelangelo drawing was the most practical and personal medium; it was a laboratory, a diary, an end in itself. If you could do a perfect drawing, he came to think, why bother to turn it into a painting or sculpture? Perfection in any form was the goal. One of the most famously perfect drawings he made, “Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man and Bust of a Child,” is in this show.
Of the three figures, the woman is the most vivid and polished. With her chiseled features bordering on masculine, her breast-baring gown and horned helmet of braids, she blends Renaissance neo-Classicism with proto-Mannerist fantasy. She looks completely at home in the mannerist phase of our own postmodernism, and was hugely influential in her time. Everyone wanted to make art this good and this strange.
The matter of influence is important. It is one reason that 16th-century Florence is usually cast in art history books as something like the Age of Michelangelo and the Michelangelettes, or Michelangelini if you prefer, referring to the many students and emulators who toiled in his shadow. The title of the Morgan show seems to echo this interpretation, though the curator, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, a former director of the Uffizi in Florence, has done something more interesting. Through her selection of artists she has drawn a picture of Florentine art not as a heroic, strictly top-down hierarchy but as a collective endeavor. This was exemplified by the decorative plan organized by Giorgio Vasari for the Palazzo Vecchio, the hulking fortress-palace in the center of Florence that had been city hall since the 14th century and later a Medici residence.
Heroes come first, though. Among them was Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo (1494-1556), who zealously scrutinized Michelangelo’s work, then took it in a new direction — away from a reliance on natural forms — to create an intensely personal, conceptual style known as Mannerism. In Pontormo’s hallucinatory altarpiece of the Entombment at Santa Felicita in Florence, mourning figures float around the body of Jesus like a funerary wreath of pink and blue clouds. We are in the zero-gravity realm of mind and spirit, not on earth.
At the Morgan two side-by-side studies of a seated male on a single sheet of paper illustrate the transition between these realms. The figure in red chalk on the right looks grounded enough; the figure in black chalk on the left, though, is a snarl of snaking lines. It’s as if Pontormo were drawing a constantly moving model and trying to record each motion in an overlaid stop-action sequence. We don’t see a solid figure; we see the vapor trails of moving atoms.
Pontormo was a difficult character who ended up living in paranoid isolation. But for art as a record of neurosis, nothing quite compares with the work of his exact contemporary, Giovan Battista di Jacopo, known as Rosso Fiorentino, or the Redheaded Florentine, who all but erased the line between spirituality and satire.
A Rosso drawing of the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints is a brittle, twisting affair of posturing figures in a depthless space. It looks the way Gesualdo’s music sounds. It could be sincerely devotional; it could be a satire of devotion. More peculiar still is a presumably secular image of a nude woman sketched on an oddly cut sheet of paper. Is she pregnant, or just out of shape? Or does she represent a foreign, Gothic standard of beauty? (Dürer was hot in cinquecento Florence.) And what act or thought has prompted her look of languidly shocked distress?
We’ll probably never know, just as we’ll never know where piety ends and devilry starts in Rosso’s religious art, or what led to his death, reportedly a suicide, in 1540.
With younger artists, like Bronzino (1503-72), we are in a more consciously stylized Mannerist phase. The subjective energies that charged the drawing of Rosso and Pontormo are all but gone. In their place we have the chilled, expensive exquisiteness of a court art. A Bronzino drawing of a buff male nude might as easily have been based on a sculpture as on a live model. It appears to be made of stone rather than flesh.
What links all of these artists is patronage. Each of them at one time or another worked for the Medici family, the ruling dynasty of Florence. And each of them, early or late, contributed to the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio. And by focusing on this link Ms. Tofani transforms the show from a survey of Uffizi treasures into a concentrated historical essay, one in which Vasari (1511-74) assumes a leading role. Vasari is best known now for his “ Lives of the Artists,” the series of biographical essays that supply much of our firsthand knowledge of Italian Renaissance art from Giotto onward. But he was admired in his day as a cultural polymath, a painter, architect and writer who was also an entrepreneurial art-world insider.
He was a familiar type, one common in New York today. Professionally and socially ambitious, he made his way with shrewd judgment, acquired sophistication and engaging but dissembling charm, the charm of a back patter who is also a backbiter. His artistic talents were broad but thin, made up of well-schooled expertise and a knack for imitation. Because he lacked originality, he could mold himself to the needs of any patron, and he became house artist to rulers of the era.
It was largely for his connections that Cosimo I, the Medici grand duke of Tuscany, hired Vasari in 1555 to bring some order to the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio interior. With a handpicked crew of artisans, Vasari began replacing the accumulation of older, piecemeal works — Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Pontormo and Rosso had all contributed to the palace — with a unified visual program that was essentially a walk-in piece of Medici propaganda.
Vasari was also a chief painter of the new scheme, and an entire wall of the Morgan’s gallery is devoted to his drawings, some for the Palazzo Vecchio. They range from sketches for an allegorical ceiling design to a swooning study for an altarpiece to a worked-up image of the young Cosimo dressed in Roman armor and lording it over his political foes.
To see so many Vasari drawings — there are 14 — makes for an interesting study in personal style, mostly because none is apparent. You can tell a Pontormo or Rosso at a glance. To scan a dozen Vasaris is to see a dozen artists, all related, all slightly different, some more imaginative than others.
This also applies to the selection of drawings by several artists who worked under Vasari on the Palazzo Vecchio, in the majestic civic halls or in the Mannerist jewel box called the Studiolo. Some of these artists are familiar to even beginning students of art history. Alessandro Allori, who had studied Michelangelo’s work in Rome, is one; Santi di Tito, leader of an anti-Mannerist, return-to-naturalism movement, is another. His murmurous art — a sketch of a sleeping child is as soft as a lullaby — stands out in a room of operatic voices.
Not all the artists display such assurance. Girolamo Macchietti (1535-92) had a fabulous hand, but could made mistakes. In his study of a male figure made for the Studiolo, the left leg is, to my eye, slightly off; it doesn’t quite belong to the body it’s attached to.
Michelangelo, of course, would have spotted this in a flash and delivered a rebuke. (Draw, Girolamo, draw!) And he might have had problems with another Michelangelino, a whippersnapper named Francesco Morandini (1544-97), known as Poppi, at least until he saw the drawing titled “The Punishment of Titius” in the Morgan show.
It is Poppi’s copy, exacting, almost stroke for stroke, of a drawing that Michelangelo had done decades earlier, in 1532, as a gift for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, his inamorato at the time. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but copying is also a form of love, as Michelangelo knew. “Poppi?” you can almost hear him say, “He’s young. He’s got a lot to learn. But the kid’s all right.”
© 2008, The New York Times
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