Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Revised Janson Part 11


Like the Great Pyramids, do you find yourself at a loss as pertaining to the question of doing something tonight, and if so what? Fret no more, as the answer involves instead of a boring art discussion, a mock game show, and instead of awkward silence a performance by the celebrated purveyors of hillbilly composition, Triple Chicken Foot. I am referring of course to the opening of No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College, including works by myself, Michael Arata, Pierre Picot, Walter Askin, Erika Rothenberg, Merwin Belin, Ilene Segalove, Stephen Berkman, Mahara Sinclaire, Jim Eller, Dave Smith, Walter Gabrielson, Masami Teraoka, Jeffrey Vallance, Richard Pettibone, & William Wegman.
Los Angeles Valley College Art Gallery
5800 Fulton Avenue
Art Building
Valley Glen, CA 91401

Band is on at 7, game show at 8, winding down at 10 - see you there!

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Revised Janson Part 10


Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Over the next year, Janson used those monies to acquire some 40 major works of European and American modernism, putting special emphasis on cubism, constructivism and surrealism. He worked primarily with exile dealers, including Paul Rosenberg, Karl Nierendorf and especially Curt Valentin, as well as the former expatriate American Peggy Guggenheim. Ernst's The Eye of Silence (1943-44) was bought from Julien Levy, the artist's longtime dealer, while Tanguy's La Tour Marine (1944) came from Pierre Matisse (son of Henri).

Janson left campus in 1948, but subsequent curators such as Frederick Hartt and William N. Eisendrath Jr. — working with prominent local collectors — continued to build on his curatorial architecture. Major acquisitions of the period include Matisse's Still Life With Oranges (II) (1899); Miró's Painting (1925); Gorky's Golden Brown (1943-44); Klee's Fragt Sich (1934) and Picasso's Women of Algiers, Variation 'N' (1955)."

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Monday, February 22, 2010

Revised Janson Part 9


Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Born in 1913 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Janson was raised in Hamburg, where his family settled after fleeing the October Revolution of 1917. He began his university education in Munich in 1932 but transferred the following year to Hamburg University, studying with Erwin Panofsky until the influential professor's firing by National Socialists. Though himself gentile, Janson left Germany shortly thereafter and completed his training at Harvard. In the 1930s and 40s, he emerged as a staunch defender of modern artists, writing pieces on Beckmann, Guston, Klee, Picasso and George Grosz while taking a critical scalpel to American Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood.

Janson arrived at Washington University in 1941 as an assistant professor of art history. At the time, public awareness of the University collection was almost non-existent. Though established in 1881, the collection lacked on-campus facilities and was held in storage at the City Art Museum (now the Saint Louis Art Museum). Janson only discovered the collection, then mostly19th-century American and European painting and applied arts, through a close reading of CAM's wall labels.

Janson was named curator of the university collection in 1944 and immediately organized a makeshift gallery in the School of Architecture. His boldest stroke came the following year, when he raised about $40,000 by de-accessioning 120 paintings and more than 500 additional objects — then almost one-sixth of university holdings. Ironically, more than half the funds, about $23,000, came from the controversial sale of Frederic Remington's Dash for Timber, a scene of the American West...


[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Revised Janson Part 8


Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
"Janson's story is not known in Germany; he is a rediscovery," said Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., curator of the Kemper Art Museum and a German native. However, "there is a lot of German interest in exile, in all of these artists and all of these artworks that were lost. It's part of Germany's art history.

"Exile and Modernism demonstrates what one exile art historian was able to do in the United States at a time when modern art was banned as degenerate in Germany," continued Eckmann, a specialist in exile art. "It also offers a chance to rethink the meanings of concepts like 'exile' and 'modernism' and their connection to one another. We typically see exile as an experience of loss or isolation, but Janson shows that exile can produce creative energies. There's an interesting dialog between his experience of Nazi culture, which caused him to react to certain strains of modern art, and his new orientation in America"...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Revised Janson Part 7


From An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Janson, who emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the mid-1930s to protest Nazi cultural policies, remains little known in his former country. That's about to change, thanks to Exile and Modernism: H.W. Janson and the Collection of Washington University in St. Louis, a touring exhibition organized by the university's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Over the next two years, Exile and Modernism — which builds on a similar show the university presented in 2002 at the Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York — will travel to four German museums and one in the United States. The exhibition documents how Janson, as curator at Washington University in the mid-1940s, employed prescient vision, a modest acquisitions budget and contacts amongst the exile art community to build what he proudly called "the finest collection of contemporary art assembled on any American campus"...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Friday, February 19, 2010

Revised Janson Part 6


Lee Sorensen's Dictionary of Art Historians adds: In 1962, Janson and his wife, Dora, published their History of Art. It grew over the years to be the best-selling textbook of any subject in the United States and, known simply as "Janson," was for years the standard text. Because Janson's appointment at NYU was primarily at the undergraduate level, he had fewer Ph.D. students than others of his profile. His students (at Washington University) included Irving Lavin and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.

Janson's work, especially his Ape lore book, show the influence of the Hamburg school/Warburg influence. The book focuses on the history of art or styles as much as it does mythological phenomenon and its manifestation in material culture. Janson's 1962 History of Art was an instant best seller, contrasting it from the other predominant art-history text, Art Through the Ages by Helen Gardner, which by its numerous posthumous revisions treated art as a history of styles. Janson's book came under criticism in later years for its lack of inclusion of women artists. Subsequent editions written by his son, Anthony Janson (b. 1943), changed this.

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Revised Janson Part 5


[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
He wrote about Renaissance art and nineteenth-century sculpture, and authored two prize-winning books, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1952) and Sculpture of Donatello (1957). In his later years he was concerned with East–West dialogue in the arts. Over his career, Janson consulted on the Time–Life Library of Art; was president of the College Art Association, editor of the Art Bulletin, and founding member and President of the Renaissance Society of America. He also wrote books on art for young people, some in collaboration with his wife.

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Revised Janson Part 4


[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
He taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1941 to 1949, in which year he joined the faculty of New York University, where he built the undergraduate arts department and taught at the graduate Institute of Fine Arts. He was recognized with an honorary degree in 1981 and died on a train between Zurich and Milan in 1982 at the age of 68...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Revised Janson Part 3


[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
In 1935, at the suggestion of Panofsky, who had emigrated to the United States, Alfred Barr sponsored Janson as an immigrant, and he completed a PhD at Harvard University in 1942 (his dissertation was on Michelozzo). He taught at the Worcester Art Museum (1936–38) and the University of Iowa (1938–41) while pursuing his degree. In 1941 he married Dora Jane Heineberg (1916–2002), an art history student at Radcliffe College, and he became a citizen in 1943...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Monday, February 15, 2010

Revised Janson Part 2


According to Wikipedia, Horst Waldemar Janson (October 4, 1913 – September 30, 1982), who published as H. W. Janson, was an American scholar of art history best known for his History of Art, which was first published in 1962 and has sold more than two million copies in fifteen languages.

Janson was born in St. Petersburg in 1913 to Friedrich Janson (1875–1927) and Helene Porsch (Janson) (1879–1974).[2] After the October Revolution, the family moved to Finland and then Hamburg, where Janson attended the Wilhelms Gymnasium (graduated 1932). He studied at the University of Munich and then at the art history program at the University of Hamburg, where he was a student of Erwin Panofsky...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Revised Janson Part 1


H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service. Happy Valentine's Day!

Monday, February 8, 2010

Rainbow Matter Custard


[I didn't get around to quoting this remarkable bit of didactic text in my review of the Mercedes Matter retrospective at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University but this is the perfect place to make up for the omission.]

"Some people have it rough. Born into the East Coast cultural aristocracy in 1913, Mercedes Matter began life as a beloved and privileged artistic prodigy. Her father was Arthur B. Carles, a pioneer American abstract painter who studied with Matisse, showed at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and exhibited work in the legendary Armory Show. He was also an unrepentant bohemian: long-haired and bearded, a lifelong alcoholic and womanizer. Her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a Parisian correspondent for Vogue and a favorite model of photographer Edward Steichen. Her uncle Pedro was a star of Broadway and early Hollywood, and her aunt Sara was a famous fashion photographer and illustrator. Her father started her painting at the age of 6, and she spent her early teens touring the art capitals of Europe. After attending the progressive girls' school Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, she moved to Manhattan and began studying with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students' League.


Matter (then going by the name Jeanne Carles) and Hofmann (33 years her senior) became close friends — briefly lovers — and maintained a close relationship until Hofmann's death, in 1966. Matter is said to have lured Hofmann back to painting after a two-decade hiatus, and casually instigated the summer painting retreat that evolved into Hofmann's Provincetown school. She became the lover of another student of Hofmann's, painter Wilfrid Zogbaum. Fudging paperwork, Matter qualified for the WPA dole and became an assistant, translator and lover to Fernand Leger, who was in America designing WPA murals along the Hudson River. In 1936 Matter was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Association, became the lover of Arshile Gorky, and was arrested at a WPA demonstration and thrown in jail. There, she met Lee Krasner, who became another close — though not lifelong — friend, joining Hofmann's painting class and modeling jewelry for Matter's close friend Alexander Calder.


Through Leger, Matter met and began working for Swiss graphic designer and photographer Herbert Matter, who, as an artist for Condé Nast publications, was largely responsible for translating the photomontage innovations of the dadaists into the visual vocabulary of the cultural mainstream. They, too, soon became lovers. In 1941 they married, but by some condition of Herbert's Swiss citizenship, they were forced to move to Santa Monica and work for Charles and Ray Eames for the duration of World War II. Upon returning to Manhattan, they found themselves at the center of the burgeoning New York school — Krasner was now married to Jackson Pollock, and both Hofmann and Gorky were seminal figures in the emerging language of abstract expressionism. The Matters were among the Pollocks' closest friends, and Mercedes was part of the inner circle at the Cedar Bar and the first woman member of the Artists Club, forming close friendships with Philip Guston, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, critic Harold Rosenberg, and composers Morton Feldman and John Cage, among others. Herbert joined the Yale fine-art faculty, and Mercedes went on to found the Studio School, a small but influential atelier-style institution in the original home of the Whitney Museum.


All this biography is a roundabout buildup to the big question: "Mercedes who?"


Read the rest of Matter's Most here.

Images: Didactic panel; Woman with Red Hair circa 1922; Tabletop Still Life circa 1936; Untitled (number 11) 1933; Tabletop Still Life 1936

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Beans, Fish and Meta-mutational Gumbo

"Ginny Bishton is an artist who defies expectations. Or rather, completely dismantles them, leaving their components arranged in neat rows. One of her UCLA grad-school works consisted of a wall full of hand-copied bread recipes with the instructions left out — inventories of ingredients with the mixing, kneading, fermenting and baking aspects surgically excised — no narrative arc, no money shot. Since then she has steered a willful, idiosyncratic course that has seen her gallery work abruptly morph, often in the space between consecutive solo shows, from gnarly op/minimalist drawings into psychedelic/serialist photo-collages, defying expectations that an artist — particularly a two-dimensional one — needs to stake out a signature visual style and milk it for the rest of his or her life. I'm speaking to you in hell, Roy Lichtenstein...


Another L.A. artist whose oeuvre has been characterized by sudden stylistic about-faces is painter Tim Ebner, who rose to renown in the late '80s with minimalist geometric neo–Finish-Fetish assemblages produced in a surfboard factory. In the early '90s, he abandoned this successful marketing niche for a series of awkwardly rendered clown portraits and anthropomorphic animals crashing through the surf. Into the '00s these pictorial scenarios underwent only incremental change, but Ebner's painterly technique grew in leaps and bounds — a fact that became evident when in 2007 he suddenly began producing a flurry of loose, colorful abstract paintings and atmospheric minimalist landscapes. It seemed that Ebner had come full circle, returning to "serious" painting and a nonfigurative visual vocabulary that might easily take another decade to work through...


Mark Todd, a former student of Ebner's, offers a less clear-cut version of appropriation and collage in "Juggernaut," the next-to-last show at Billy Shire's Culver City digs before the operation folds back into a renovated La Luz de Jesus space on Hollywood Boulevard. Todd's work has evolved quickly and confidently over the past few years, successfully taking on the scale and materials of contemporary painting that have proven too daunting for many accomplished small-scale collagists — of particular significance in Todd's case because his subject matter/source material, comic book covers, particularly those of Jack Kirby dating from the '60s and early '70s, has an explicit size, loaded with formal and psychological baggage...."


Read the rest of The Bish, the Fish, and the Fantastic Four here.


Visit the shows before Feb 6th at Billy Shire Fine Arts, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, and at Richard Telles Gallery until the 13th.

Images: Ginny Bishton, De nada (red, pink, blue), Photo collage on paper, 2009; Tim Ebner Installation view, Acrylic on canvas mounted on plywood, feather, mounted on found, modified metal wall brackets, 2010; Mark Todd, Wrath Warrior, Mixed media on panel, 2009

Monday, February 1, 2010

Pushing the Envelope in Sherman Oaks

Once in a while I get a press release that, although I may not be able to promote in my capacity as an art critic, I feel compelled to share with the world. Here, and continuing in the comments is one such press release.

“HAUTE DATE” MAKING ART TOGETHER THIS VALENTINE’S DAY

DEPARTURE SITE OF JAMES DEAN’S LAST RIDE BECOMES ART REBEL

The Sherman Oaks Art Venue Offers Romantic Valentine’s Day Special
for Creative-Minded Couples Who Can Take Home Their Personal Work of Art

(Sherman Oaks, Ca. February 1, 2010) From the location of where the last photograph of James Dean was taken before for his final ride, Dean’s spirit remains in the sports car garage now converted into the venue known as Art Rebel, an art gallery, studio and event space in Sherman Oaks. For the entire month of February, the art studio turns into a floral paradise, complete with “love coves” for a one-of-kind Valentine's event entitled the “Love Art” experience. This new "haute date" is designed for couples to spend quality time, reconnecting through art. The two-hour session includes creative areas for two with a rose petal covered floor, canvas, paints, brushes, two heart-shaped boxes to be hand painted with love notes, chocolates, candies, and two long-stemmed roses. Call Art Rebel for reservations and prices, 818-907-5883, www.artrebel.net...

continued in the Comments