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The Creative Process behind an American Masterpiece—Bingham’s ‘Fur Traders Descending the Missouri’

August 27, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / General / 4 Comments

The best thing about the exhibition Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through September 20) is the light it sheds on the creation of Bingham’s wondrous Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), one of the treasures of the Met’s holdings in American art.

NY Met bingham fur traders

 

Since that painting happens to be featured in my chapter on “The Pleasures and Rewards of Art—Real Art, That Is” in Who Says That’s Art?, it’s of more than usual interest to me. Revisiting it in this exhibition, highlighting its artistry, heightened my appreciation of Bingham’s achievement.

A mainly self-taught artist, Bingham (1811–1879) was not a brilliant draftsman. But he was an astute observer of life in what was America’s western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century. And as the numerous preparatory drawings in the Met exhibition demonstrate, he succeeded in capturing subtleties of attitude, gesture, and facial expression that vividly evoked the diverse humanity he depicted at work or play along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

In its dreamy evocation of a by-then-dying enterprise, however, Bingham’s Fur Traders far surpasses his customary genre scenes. It was, by all accounts, his masterpiece. Happily, two elements of the Met’s show help to reveal the artistic choices that contributed to the painting’s poetry. One is Bingham’s extant drawing for the figure of the father (identified as such in the painter’s original title, French Trader and Half-Breed Son). The other is infrared evidence regarding Bingham’s initial conception of the scene, as indicated in a small video display next to the painting.

While essentially similar in costume and broad outline to the preparatory drawing, the father in the painting is older and sterner. In addition to adding a gray mustache and beard, Bingham intensified his expression, and adjusted the slightly jaunty angle of his cap to one more emphatically erect. As revealed by infrared examination, the painter also greatly simplified and subtly modified the composition. He eliminated extraneous details such as a flagpost erected between father and son, and minimized tree stumps in the background. Finally, he reduced the size of the bear cub [see Martin Rieser’s Comment below], thereby making the creature more catlike in appearance. In Who Says That’s Art?, I suggested that it conjures up images of ancient Egyptian sacred cats. Though one cannot know if Bingham had such prototypes in mind, if only subliminally, the impression remains indelible for me, contributing to the scene’s aura of mystery.

Remarkably, six years after creating this consummate work, Bingham reprised the subject in The Trappers’ Return—a painting so clumsy in comparison that one might think he was engaging in self-parody. On loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts for the Met exhibition, this relatively pedestrian treatment of the same theme serves as a telling gauge of its predecessor’s mastery.

Duchamp or the Baroness?—What Difference Does It Make?

August 2, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art / 17 Comments

Is the infamous urinal signed “R. Mutt” (featured as the centerpiece on the cover of Who Says That’s Art?) really the brainchild of Marcel Duchamp, as the artworld has long claimed?

Or was it instead merely a copy by him of a piece originally created by a relatively obscure figure of the early twentieth-century avant-garde—a minor baroness named Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven?

And if the urinal is really traceable to the baroness, what are the implications for a contemporary art establishment that regards the piece as the “readymade” that instituted “conceptual art”—the innovation said by the Dictionary of Art to have “decisively altered our understanding of what constitutes an object of art”?

Those are the key questions raised by Julian Spalding and Glyn Thompson in a recent series of articles, and soon to be posed more publicly by them in an exhibition entitled A Lady’s Not a Gent’s, mounted as part of the 2015 Edinburgh Festival.

Thompson is an art historian who has been exploring this matter for some time, posting his views on it in several papers on academia.edu. Spalding—formerly director of Art Galleries and Museums in Glasgow, Scotland—writes widely on art, often as an artworld gadfly (see “Artworld Maverick,” by Aristos co-editor Louis Torres). Together they’ve laid out the known facts of the case in exhaustive and frequently convoluted detail, documenting the many points at which the artworld’s generally accepted account of the piece’s origin is belied by the evidence. They summarize their case for the Edinburgh exhibition as follows:

The Urinal is the first great feminist work of art, created by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in 1917 as a protest against America’s declaration of war on Germany. Long after she died, Duchamp appropriated it and robbed it of its meaning. This fact, known since 1982 but ignored by the art world, changes the history of conceptual art.

Chief among the supporting evidence for that position is a letter written by Duchamp to his sister in Paris, just two days after the Society of Independent Artists had rejected the piece’s application for inclusion in their presumably unjuried 1917 exhibition. In his letter, Duchamp stated:

One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. . . . The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York.

Yet Duchamp’s account of the incident decades later claimed that he had bought the urinal in question at the J. L. Mott Iron Works Company, signed it “R. Mutt,” and submitted it to the exhibition. Further, he expounded on that name as follows:

Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip “Mutt and Jeff” which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man . . . I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags].

Surviving records from the J. L. Mott Company fail to show the model used in the piece, however—another key fact cited to question Duchamp’s authorship.

Based on such information and on linguistic interpretation published by the baroness’s biographer (literary historian Irene Gammel), Spalding and Thompson have concluded that the baroness was the actual creator of the piece. Consequently, in a protracted correspondence published in the July-August issue of the British magazine The Jackdaw, they have insisted that Britain’s Tate Museum (which paid $500,000 for one of the piece’s numerous copies attributing the original to Duchamp) should revise its attribution and thereby acknowledge that the postmodernist artworld’s founding myth is an outright lie, perpetrated by Duchamp at the baroness’s expense.

So far, so good. No one could be happier than I to see Duchamp publicly exposed as the charlatan I always thought he was.

But in the process Spalding and Thompson make several astonishing claims that to my mind profoundly undermine the value of their project. “[S]ince Duchamp was not the author [of the original piece],” they maintain, “any replica of it . . . must seek its aesthetic legitimacy elsewhere.” To which I am moved to respond (inspired by Jerry Seinfeld’s response to his friend George’s claim to “artistic integrity”) that the piece “is not aesthetic,” and “it has no legitimacy”—as art, that is.

Remarkably, however, Spalding and Thompson state that while Duchamp’s readymades “were not art, . . . Elsa’s urinal was”! In that connection, they note without objection that the piece was submitted “as a sculpture,” and they proceed to refer to it as such.

I protest that no matter who submitted the urinal, or why, it did not thereby become either a “sculpture” or a work of “conceptual art.” It remained an ordinary urinal, plain and simple—albeit one employed as a “statement” of some sort (whether political or art-related) or merely as a prank.

Significantly, Duchamp’s biographers Calvin Tomkins and Alice Goldfarb Marquis, both of whom accept Duchamp’s latter-day account, nonetheless regard the incident as a mere prank. As I note in Who Says That’s Art?, the irony is that the artworld elevated what was no more than a practical joke in Duchamp’s account to a momentous event altering the course of art history.

A still more fundamental point is at issue here, however—one evidently ignored by Spalding and Thompson. They argue that the matter of the urinal’s attribution “has immense implications for the whole history of conceptual art.” Yet they never question the very notion of “conceptual art.”

Even if Duchamp had submitted the urinal, in deadly earnest, as a work of art, it remained (as I’ve indicated above) a urinal. The mere fact of submitting it to an art exhibition did not alter the essential nature of art, much less create a new category. Moreover, as I’ve argued in Who Says That’s Art?, “conceptual art” is an absurdity. Variously defined as “Art that is intended to convey an idea or concept to the perceiver and need not involve the creation or appreciation of a traditional art object such as a painting or sculpture” or as “forms of art in which the idea for a work is considered more important than the finished product, if any,” it is, as I point out, the antithesis of art.

Would anyone say of Michelangelo’s Pietà, for example, that the idea is more important than the finished product? Of course not, because what matters in art is the unique way in which an idea is embodied. Even without proof of duplicity on Duchamp’s part, the “whole history of conceptual art” should be questioned. Sadly, that overarching truth is entirely missed by Spalding and Thompson.

In sum, whoever submitted the urinal signed “R. Mutt” to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, it was not a “work of art” of any kind. It was, at best, a gesture of trivial significance, worth little more than a minor footnote in the history of art.

conceptual art, contemporary art, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Fountain, Glyn Thompson, Julian Spalding, Marcel Duchamp, readymades, urinal

“Public Art” for Whom?

May 5, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / Public Art / 5 Comments

The recent installation of a newly commissioned work entitled Masks (Pentagon) by Thomas Houseago in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza highlights the latest of a long list of bizarre projects spearheaded by the Public Art Fund.

Houseago - Mask (Pentagon)

Thomas Houseago, Masks (Pentagon) – Rockefeller Center

Like numerous other projects organized by the Fund and supported by prominent public officials and business leaders in recent years, it promotes the “anything goes” agenda of the contemporary art world far more than it serves the public.

The Public Art Fund is a 501(c)(3) organization that receives support from individuals, corporations, and foundations for temporary exhibitions of “contemporary art” in New York City. Its stated aim is to “redefine public art in relation to the changing nature of contemporary art” (emphasis mine).

Redefining art is, in fact, what the art establishment has long been bent on doing. The public, however, has not been buying the redefinition.

It is too soon to tell what the response of most ordinary people to the Houseago project will be. However, only yesterday (a beautiful spring day), very few of the many pedestrians I observed around the Plaza seemed even to be looking at the piece.

I asked three of them how they liked it. “Not very much,” answered one, with a decided frown of disapproval. A second woman, who was struggling to get a picture of it with her cell phone, replied in some frustration: “I don’t know what it is.” Just one of the three answered that she found it “very interesting.”[*]

Also indicative is the public response to last year’s Rockefeller Plaza installation of Split-Rocker—a floral construction by art world megastar Jeff Koons. As judged from remarks following articles online [more], it ranged from confusion and boredom to a frank indictment as “crap.”

Nor did the public respond with enthusiasm to an earlier, more expansive and expensive Public Art Fund project—Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls. Costing millions to construct (and resulting in substantial damage owing to the saline spray it produced), that project consisted of artificial waterfalls in four waterfront locations, one of them under the Brooklyn Bridge. The Fund’s “most ambitious project” to date, it was actively promoted by Mayor Bloomberg.

As indicated by countless comments following a post on a New York Times blog, however, the response of ordinary people to the Waterfalls project was overwhelmingly negative, often questioning its status as “art.” A typically irreverent remark was: “Looks like the Brooklyn Bridge taking a leak if you ask me . . . an expensive leak.” One person aptly quipped: “This is not art, it is plumbing!”

Houseago - Masks (Pentagon) - 2Houseago’s project—a quasi sculptural installation of five giant mask-like structures—is at least not plumbing. But it intrudes upon one of New York’s most urbane public spaces. And its status as art is equally questionable.

Flouting the traditional view of art as something made with great skill and care, for example, the piece entailed such creative processes on Houseago’s part as his incorporating the footprints left by his young daughter’s dancing on damp clay and his “hurling lumps of clay down from a ladder.” Not quite the techniques employed by the likes of Michelangelo or Donatello. The work also involves the interactive gimmickry of enabling visitors to view their surroundings through openings in the masks. Such spurious approaches to art-making are standard fare in today’s art world, which embraces virtually anything—except traditional painting and sculpture, that is.

What has been the point of the Rockefeller Plaza exhibitions? According to Jerry Speyer—chairman of Tishman Speyer (the owner of Rockefeller Center), which has co-organized them—”It’s been an interesting way of educating the public.”

Educating the public about what? one might ask. The likely answer would be: about the establishment’s view of what constitutes “contemporary art.” That view was succinctly expressed a couple of years ago by Glenn Lowry—the director of the Museum of Modern Art, of which Speyer also happens to be chairman.

When I asked Lowry whether what some “contemporary artists” are creating might no longer be “art,” he replied that, thanks to Marcel Duchamp (the putative creator of Fountain—a urinal that was purportedly transformed into “art” by his signing it with an assumed name), we can no longer ask that question.

“If an artist does it, it’s art,” Lowry declared with finality. That dictum has long been the mantra of the art establishment—with little thought being given to what qualifies someone as an “artist.”

Such an attitude does not “redefine” art. It undefines it. Ordinary people seem to get that.

Perhaps the time has come for the public to educate the Public Art Fund—as well as its all-too-willing cadre of public officials and business leaders (not to mention art experts such as Lowry)—who have for too long been imposing their distorted view of “contemporary art” on the rest of us.


*In The Use and Abuse of Art, cultural historian Jacques Barzun aptly criticized “the Interesting as an esthetic category,” observing that it is “the first word [used] about the new and usually also the last,” generally referring to “the offbeat, the Absurd, the Minimal or any other form of the unexpected.”

Two Exhibitions Worth Praising

April 22, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / Exhibitions / No Comments

Refreshing relief from the artworld’s standard offerings of “modern” and “contemporary” art has been provided by two of this year’s exhibitions in New York: Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered, which just closed at the Metropolitan Museum; and Hebrew Illumination for Our Time: The Art of Barbara Wolff, at the Morgan Library & Museum through May 3.

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Barbara Wolff, Among the Branches They Sing from You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104. The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.1190, fol. 3. Gift of Joanna S. Rose, 2014. Artwork © 2015 Barbara Wolff.

Strikingly though they differ in medium, style, and content, both shows demonstrate the power of visual art to stir the heart and mind. They also reveal the ways in which talented artists can build upon tradition to create something vibrantly new. Barbara Wolff’s exquisitely crafted miniatures—made to illustrate religious texts (Psalm 104 and the story of Passover in the Haggadah)—were inspired by medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, examples of which are included in the Morgan exhibition. Benton’s murals, in sharp contrast, are on a secularly heroic scale, loosely emulating the great fresco cycles of the Italian Renaissance. They present a dynamic panorama of American life in all its teeming diversity in the Roaring Twenties.

Especially delightful in the Morgan show are Wolff’s images inspired by Psalm 104, “You Renew the Face of the Earth”—a hymn in praise of creation. Her charming depiction of Among the Branches They Sing (see above), illustrating line 12 of the Psalm, includes no fewer than twenty-eight identifiable species of birds—a graphic evocation of nature’s astonishing variety. In The Mountains Rose (line 8 of the Psalm), a giant wave crashes over the upper left border of the image, while jagged gilt-and-silver layers below snow-capped mountains and green hills are studded with prehistoric shellfish and trilobites, whimsically suggesting a scientifically updated interpretation of Genesis. Equally whimsical is Wolff’s evocation of the ancient Egyptian pantheon in Against All the Gods, a page in the Haggadah.

Thomas Hart Benton, America Today (City Building), 1930-1931, egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted on wood panel, 92 x 117 in. (233.7 x 297.2 cm)

Thomas Hart Benton, America Today (City Building), 1930-1931, egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen, mounted on wood panel, 92 x 117 in. (233.7 x 297.2 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Extensive research and preparation went into both projects. Not for these artists the “spontaneous” expression or mere chance favored by modernists. Wolff, for example, delved into Biblical and Egyptian archaeology, the European tradition of illuminated manuscripts, and the ecology of Israel’s flora and fauna—not to mention drawing upon her own extensive familiarity with botanical and animal illustration. For his part, Benton had traversed the United States, notebook in hand, for four years in the mid 1920s. As reported in an excellent article in Smithsonian magazine,

He went down rivers, up mountains, along country roads; camped and hiked and bunked in farmhouses; into the heartland of farms and confronting the cities of roisterers and skyscrapers-in-the-making, obsessively sketching.

Sketches and paintings included in the Met’s exhibit indicated the truth of Benton’s claim that “Every detail of every picture is a thing I myself have seen and known. Every head is a real person drawn from life.”

Another significant commonality between these disparate artists is that neither of them is part of the art historical “mainstream” represented in standard accounts of American art. Barbara Wolff has had a long and very successful career as a botanical and natural science illustrator—a pursuit requiring the dedicated skill in depiction that the artworld mainstream has flouted. Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), after spending his early years first studying in Paris and then as a respected instructor at the Art Students League in New York for a decade, turned his back on those cultural capitals, becoming a leading “Regionalist” painter and an outspoken critic of the art establishment. Most important, despite the ascendancy of abstract art in subsequent years, he never wavered from representation, focusing on the manifold people and places of America that impressed and engaged him. Ironically, one of his art students was Jackson Pollock (he was the model for the sinewy worker in the right foreground of panel entitled Steel)—whose fame in time lamentably eclipsed Benton’s. Perhaps the long-overdue attention to Benton’s work generated by the Met show will help to reverse that unfortunate fact.

Till now, I have never been a fan of Benton’s mannered style, but it is wonderfully apt in this context. Bristling with energy, in unstoppable motion, it spans the gamut of American life in the twenties—from the imposing figure of a cotton picker in Deep South to the muscular heroism of the miner dominating Coal and the curvaceous forms of a subway straphanger and her praying counterpart in the panel encompassing sin and salvation in City Activities with Subway.

While the Wolff exhibition can still be seen at the Morgan (through May 3rd), I greatly regret that I was unable to post this review before the Met’s splendid Benton show closed. However, Met representatives have assured me that the murals will at some point be reinstalled permanently elsewhere in the museum. If you weren’t lucky enough to see it before, put it on your list for the future, for it is a work that, more than some, must be experienced firsthand to be fully appreciated.

I should add that both Wolff’s and Benton’s projects were the result of commissions by visionary patrons. In 1930, Benton was invited to decorate the boardroom of the New School for Social Research by the school’s co-founder and first director, Alvin Johnson. Though Johnson lacked funds to pay him, Benton considered it a good opportunity at that point in his career, and agreed to do work pro bono if Johnson would supply the eggs needed for his chosen medium of tempera. Just a few years ago, the New York philanthropists Daniel and Joanna S. Rose commissioned Wolff to create The Rose Haggadah and You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104 for their family, and then generously decided to donate both works to the Morgan’s superb collection of illuminated manuscripts, for the public to enjoy.


Further reading and viewing

  • The Morgan’s film, An Illuminated Haggadah for the 21st Century, aptly conveys Barbara Wolff’s mastery of the extraordinarily painstaking techniques involved in manuscript illumination. (Quite a contrast to Andy Warhol, who “didn’t love” any things enough “to want to sit down and paint them lovingly and patiently”!) See also Over Her Shoulder: Illuminating Psalm 104.
  • The Rose Haggadah, online exhibition of the entire manuscript.
  • “America Today, by Thomas Hart Benton” (slideshow) provides an overview of all the panels, with numerous closeups. See also “Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural” (Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History).
  • “MetCollects—Episode 9: Thomas Hart Benton’s Mural America Today Comes to the Met” (an 8-minute video) recounts the checkered history and reputation of the work, which is now being seen by Met curators “with fresh eyes.”
  • Paul Theroux offers an appreciative and informed account of Benton’s creative trajectory in “The Story Behind Thomas Hart Benton’s Incredible Masterwork,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2014.
  • For evidence of the lingering critical bias favoring “advanced art” over Benton’s forthright brand of boldly stylized realism, see Holland Cotter’s “America’s Portraitist” (review of Thomas Hart Benton, by Justin Wolff), New York Times, Sunday Book Review, June 29, 2012.

Folded Paper and Other Modern “Drawings”

March 31, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art / 7 Comments

Is a piece of paper folded and then unfolded a “drawing”? A curator at the Morgan Library & Museum thinks so. And the Associate Dean of the Yale School of Art agrees with her.

The “folded paper drawing” in question is by “Conceptual artist” Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). It is one of more than a hundred works (few of them meriting praise in my view) featured in the exhibition Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions, at the Morgan through May 24. Among other unconventional items included in that show is Gavin Turk’s Rosette, a “drawing” he created by placing a sheet of paper on his van’s exhaust pipe and then starting the engine.

Belonging to the old school that regards drawing as the art or act of representing people, places, or things on a surface chiefly by means of lines (as in Picasso’s Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, also on display at the Morgan), I was moved to ask the curator of the show, Isabelle Dervaux, how she defines “drawing.” Surrounded by eager members of the press, she did not hesitate to reply: “anything on paper.” (As was clear from the aforementioned examples, she literally meant anything.) Then she quickly added, rather testily: “I hate splitting hairs over what a drawing is.”

Hardly splitting hairs, Dervaux’s wall label for the LeWitt piece informs us that he

radically transformed the medium of drawing . . . [in part,] by exploring . . . different ways of producing a drawing—for instance, by tearing or folding paper. Here, he created a grid by folding and unfolding the sheet. “I wanted them to be another kind of drawing,” he said. “They do make lines.”

As for Gavin Turk, Dervaux notes that he was one of the Young British Artists “who gained notoriety in the 1990s” by creating “sculptures and installations that question traditional notions of authorship.” Nonetheless, she calls his exhaust pipe drawing “elegant.” Apparently unwilling to split hairs over the meaning of that word either, she ignores that it generally means a “refined and graceful” style and implies discriminating selectivity on the part of the maker. Having replaced himself as maker with his van’s undiscriminating exhaust fumes, Turk has in fact rendered the notion of “elegance” preposterous.

On the very next day after the press preview for the Morgan show, I happened to attend a panel discussion at the Art Students League on the revival of drawing instruction in art education. In the Q&A following the panel’s presentation, I introduced myself as the author of a new book dealing in part with the concerns discussed by the panel, and cited the example of LeWitt’s “folded paper drawing” at the Morgan as cautionary evidence of the contemporary artworld’s ignorance regarding the discipline of drawing.

Far from being applauded as a significant reminder of the challenges to be overcome, my remark met with a load of invective from one of the panelists—the Associate Dean of the Yale School of Art, Samuel Messer. Assailing me for daring to suggest that LeWitt’s work was not a drawing, he accused me of seeking to “impose” my view of art on others through my book—the title of which I had mentioned. None of his fellow panelists ventured to agree with me on the status of LeWitt’s “drawing” (although two of them later confessed privately to wholehearted agreement). Nor did James McElhinney, who teaches drawing at the League and had organized the panel, utter a word in defense of my position. Nor, finally, was there a peep of comment from any of the dozens of people in the audience.

I sat there in stunned silence, waiting till discussion of other points had ended, and then went up to Messer. He was wrong, I said, to impute an authoritarian motive to me without having read my book, the goal of which is in fact to stimulate intelligent debate. With considerable emotion, Messer proceeded to inform me that LeWitt had worked the way he did because he was a “very devout Jew”—as if that explained why he had eschewed all forms of depiction and was driven to creating “folded paper drawings.”

As it happens, the piety ascribed to LeWitt by Messer is not mentioned in any of several biographical accounts I have read. But even if it were true it would scarcely suffice to legitimate Lewitt’s unconventional approach to “drawing.” As another very different show now at the Morgan attests (Hebrew Illumination for Our Time: The Art of Barbara Wolff), Jewish artists have long found ways to engage in pictorial representation without transgressing the Second Commandment—which most authorities agree was intended to prevent idolatry, rather than to suppress all imagery.

Nor does LeWitt’s wanting folded paper “to be another kind of drawing” (since “they do make lines,” to quote Dervaux’s wall label) make them drawings, properly speaking. Because, unlike drawings, they do not represent something, which is the whole point of drawing—a basic fact that is evidently beyond the ken of both Dervaux and the associate dean of one of America’s most prestigious schools of art.*
________
*In recent rankings, U.S. News & World Report rated the Yale School of Art first in the United States for its Masters of Fine Arts programs.

About For Piero’s Sake

March 27, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / General / No Comments

The Piero referred to in this blog’s title is the painter Piero della Francesca (c. 1412-1492), one of the masters of the early Italian Renaissance whose work I especially esteem. (For information on the banner image, see the caption below.) I dedicate the blog for his sake to commemorate the values he and his work represented—consummate skill and sensitivity in the embodiment of things of enduring human significance.* Since those values should adhere to the terms art and artist today, For Piero’s Sake aims in no small measure to serve as an antidote to the bogus art and pseudo artists dominating the contemporary artworld.
________

*See “Peerless Piero.”

Detail of Piero della Francesca's Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (The Clark Art Institute). Photo © Mike Wegner, used by kind permission.

Detail of Piero della Francesca’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (The Clark Art Institute). Photo © Mike Wegner, used by kind permission.

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