Mark Rothko and his White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) Painting

Mark Rothko once exclaimed:  “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.  It dies by the same token.  It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.  How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend the affliction universally!”  Such a statement is rather unorthodox for a self-supporting artist who needed to sell his work in order to survive.  What are your thoughts on the artist’s concerns for his work once it leaves his studio and eventually winds up in a space where the multitude will have the opportunity to view it?

New York School, Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollock

In 1972, Robert Motherwell exclaimed in the Painters Painting documentary, “I think very few of the artists involved (in Abstract Expressionism) were interested in Expressionism, and I think that the so-called Expressionist element has to do with a certain anxiety and a certain violence that I think is in the American scene.  Abstract Expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.”  Do you see/feel the presence in the American scene of the 1940s and 1950s the expression of both anger and beauty in the aesthetic production of New York School artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, etc. as suggested by Motherwell?  Your thoughts?

Diego Rivera and the RCA Building Mural

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. retained the professional artistic services of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to design and execute a mural at the lobby entrance of the then new Rockefeller Center.  As the mural began to take shape, Rockefeller took exception to Rivera’s interpretation and, not able to persuade Rivera to modify his expression, eventually ordered the destruction of Rivera’s work just before he was able to complete it.  What are your thoughts on the controversy surrounding Diego Rivera’s mural design, Man at the Crossroads Looking With Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future?  Does Rockefeller’s final call for the destruction of Rivera’s mural constitute censorship or not?

Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnes

Marcel Duchamp exclaimed:  “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative art…the individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I’ve noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.”  Within the context of this quote by Duchamp, look at  the artist’s last great masterpiece, the Etant Donnes, and explain how it fits into the first half of the twentieth century’s production of advanced or experimental art.

Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism’s Action Painting

The critic Harold Rosenberg remarked: “At a certain point American painters, one after the other, began to consider the canvas as an arena in which to act, instead of a space in which to reproduce, redraw, analyse or ‘express’ a present or imagined object. Thus the canvas was no longer the support of a picture, but an event.” What are your thoughts regarding Rosenberg’s view of Action Painters like Jackson Pollock and the transformation of the act of painting into an “event”?

Rocco Landesman and the NEA

Here is a blog statement that was made to the LA Times regarding an interview with the new NEA director Rocco Landesman. Within the context of issues we have dealt with this semester in our Modern Art History class, what are your thoughts regarding the gentleman’s call for a “comprehensible Republican art”?  

Ironically the way to mollify the Right and improve the art world is to fund more high profile examples of art that Republicans can understand. It’s doesn’t have to be cowboys and sunsets, there are some fantastic artists out there who can paint in a way the masses can understand, are skillful and ground breaking. Continuing to exclusively pander to the tiny group of investment oriented intellectuals who control the art world by shoving incomprehensible conceptual art (that is decoratively abstract at best) down an uncomprehending public’s throat will continue to erode funding for the arts. It’s also called being fair and balanced, so much talent out there overlooked for grants because academic underpinnings can be detected in their art.

Giorgio de Chirico and The Red Tower

“Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.” Your thoughts on de Chirico in particular and Surrealism in general?

Dreams and Visions

Oskar Kokoschka wrote: “All that is required is to RELEASE CONTROL. Some part of ourselves will bring us into unison. The inquiring spirit rises from stage to stage, until it encompasses the work of Nature. All laws are left behind. One’s soul is a reverberation of the universe. Then too, as I believe,m one’s perception reaches out towards the Word, towards awareness of the vision.” What are your thoughts on Kokoschka’s assessment of dreams and visions and how he applied this assessment within the context of his work between 1912 and 1915 (i.e., during the Alma Mahler years)?

Portrait of Friederike Beer 1916

Portrait of Friederike Beer 1916

“When I went out to Klimt’s garden house in Hietzing I was really prepared for anything, because I knew how eccentric he was with that beard and always going about in a sort of monk’s robe and sandals. But when he opened the door for me I wasn’t prepared for one thing! He wore a big monocle in one eye and looked me sedately up and down without saying anything! That was rather unsettling. Finally he said to me: “What do you want to come to me for? You have just had your portrait done by a very good painter.” I was afraid he was going to turn me down and so I answered quickly that yes, this was certainly true, but that through Klimt I wanted to be made immortal, and he accepted that.” (Friederike Beer) What are your thoughts on Ms. Beer’s experience as a patron and of Klimt’s interpretation of the sitter?