The Gropius-designed Fagus Shoe-Works, Alfeld an der Rhine, Germany (1911)

The first in a 3-part series that traces the historical and cultural influences that spurred the rise of modernism from the flames of conflict in early 20th century Western Europe.

In the fall of 1938, the incoming class of architectural students at Harvard University sat in eager anticipation of the arrival of their new professor, Walter Gropius. His arrival in New England, his presence on campus, as well as the completion of his new, ‘modern’ home in nearby Lincoln, Mass., were the culmination of a long and sometimes dangerous path in search of free, creative expression that had been precipitously wrested from him five years earlier. He had been a resident of Germany until 1933 and the one-time director of the Bauhaus school, in Dessau, when Hitler’s SS troops arrived at the institution, on April 11th of that year, to shut it down and disperse its ‘decadent and subversive’ faculty. Jewish members of the staff were retained and questioned and all were threatened, if they continued on their path of instructing and encouraging students with their radical, ‘modernist’ art and architectural design curriculum. fine arts magazine

Tracing the events that account for Gropius’s journey from Germany to Harvard Square requires a comparative look at political and cultural history in Germany and nearby England and France, going back to the mid-19th century. It also requires gaining a broader perspective on the intimate and inseparable connection between artistic movements in those neighboring Western European countries and the sea-change in the socio-political climate that engulfed these same nation-states, in the decades leading up to, and immediately following the birth of, the 20th century.

Crowded tenements and pollution-the new urban life-style in 19th c. London

While the focus of this exposition will be on the birth of modernism (a descriptor for an artistic or aesthetic movement), it is important to differentiate it from modernization. Modernization has its roots in progressive improvements in manufacturing, transportation, agrarian output and the increasingly important role of the city as a consolidation center for a skilled labor force. “[Modernization] consists of a chain of 30 or 40 related changes, each link of which forms a necessary component in the total operation. It certainly includes…the ‘Industrial Revolution’, which is taken to be just one vital part…of the total process. By general consent, modernization was first experienced in Great Britain…but it soon spread in ever-widening circles to the Continent—first in the ports and then in the capital cities and then across the countries that received the industrial stimulus. Modernization must be seen as a motor of change, not as a static sum of its component parts. [Like an aircraft], the engine of industry needs to ignite and gain momentum, reach a critical point of take-off and then pass into an entirely different mode of motion. [While, in 19th century Europe], industry advanced rapidly in the north and western regions…Germany was seen as the exception to the rule. Britain’s industrial efforts, for example, had benefitted from colonization, with access to sources of food, raw materials, cheap migrant labor and as capital markets for manufactured goods.”

“Germany, though a dynamic country lying in the northern industrial zone, was prevented for reasons of politics [Bismarck’s resistance to colonization] and timing from acquiring a commensurate collection of colonies. Once Germany was united in 1871, it forged close economic links with the countries of Eastern Europe, thereby compensating itself for its colonial failures. Whereas, in former times, the divide between Western and Eastern Europe had largely been religious and political in nature, it now assumed strong economic overtones” (Davies 764-765).

For purposes of this exposition, German modernization and its modernist art movement will be compared and contrasted to that of England and France during the same period (1850-1938). It is particularly instructive as a study in socio-cultural development, emerging as it did from political opportunism posed by nationalistic movements of the period (some of which are discussed here). But, unlike related political movements and the emerging body of inventive visual and literary works found in neighboring countries, during the decades leading up to the Great War (1914-19), the German artistic community eventually came to embrace radical or liberal elements, posing a direct and immediate threat to the political ambitions of an aspiring power class and thus, would eventually fall victim to violent suppression or elimination.

In both England and France, in the decades leading up to the second decade of the 20th century, forms of art expression transitioned and thrived as an effective voice for the avant-garde, persisting and even evolving through periods of social change, political transitions, armed conflict and economic crises. To a lesser extent, Russia, too, experienced a ground-swell in artistic experimentation and innovation in the same period. But, even the dramatic and far-reaching effects of the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s rise to power did not have the profound and devastating effect on the self-defined ambitions of a community of artists, artisans, writers and musicians, as was the experience for many in Germany, during the period of the Second Weimar Republic (1919-1933).

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1857), wealthy British engineer, typical of emerging merchant 'aristocracy' in industrial era

Modernism defined: Various experts can mark the beginning of the Modern Era at different points in history. Some would argue that the empowered individual was first recognized with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215; others, with the Renaissance and the rise of Florentine arts, letters and science; still others, the Reformation and the subsequent weakening of the Catholic Church on portions of northern Europe and, eventually, England. Yet others would focus on the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, with the early attempts by Newton to dispel prevailing myth and sophistry to be found in his Principia Mathematica (1685-6), as well in the philosophical writings of Hobbes, Locke, Hegel and Rousseau:

“Rousseau is authoritarian, but the authority he favors is explicitly distinguished from mere power; it is based on conscious and vocal assent, and is offered as something wholely consistent with liberty…for authority [between liberty and authority] is a form of potency which rests on the credence of those who respect it, and Rousseau insists that if authority is to be legitimate, the credence and acceptance must be universal and unconstrained. There is no resemblance between Rousseau’s republic and the actual systems of twentieth-century totalitarian states…” (Dunn 34).

Still others mark the birth of modern times with the successful American and French revolutions, defining the Rights of Man and yielding (in the case of America) an empowered and self-directed republican polity, unburdened by centuries of European-style territorial conflict and time-worn political entanglements.

In truth, the modern impulse hinged on no single event, but emerged gradually and imperceptibly over time. By the beginning of the 19th century, western nations were at a tipping point and “the combined influence of social democratization, industrialization, colonial expansion, widening trade, sizeable professional armies and population mobility toward cities and away from rural lifestyles marked the beginning of a new, rapidly-unfolding period in history” (Poggi 91). The Modern Era, with its far-reaching power to shape everything from individual enfranchisement to the rule of kings was underway.

During that same period in the arts, radical breaks with the past and concurrent search for new forms of expression were occurring. Modernism saw the dawn of a renewed period of experimentation in creative pursuits. In an era characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, advances in science and the social sciences (e.g., Marxism, geology, Darwinism, theoretical physics), modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with urbanization, alienation from nature, the obfuscation of the individual in the machinery of mass production and the conventions of institutions of learning and established taste, which seemed locked in the past. The modernist movement was fueled in its various forms by a reaction to industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world.

Stylistic shifts toward the avant-garde in literature, poetry, painting, music and theater were well underway in the second half of the 19th century. By the period 1880-90, most artists and intellectuals on the Continent had come to terms with the radical changes that technology, scientific discovery, industrialization, urbanization, the emergence of a powerful middle class and the weakening—if not utter disempowerment—of the ruling class, were playing out in daily life. “The modernization of established and emerging nations was occurring at bewildering speed and, for the cultural elite who embraced it, there was a pervasive climate of exuberance, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory [in the continents of Africa, Asia and the Middle East] to ‘explore’, and above all, the sense that art, in the most noble and disinterested way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically-changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”(Hughes 9).

Before moving to a detailed examination of the emergence of modernization in Germany, it is useful to briefly explore the course of events in neighboring England and France in the 1800s. The core premise of this document is that the evolution of innovative artistic styles during this period was a response, in large part, to:

1. a more open, prevailing political climate at that time, with shifting rules of law (liberalization);

2. easing of suffrage regulations with associated free will and self-determination;

3. a movement toward more egalitarian forms of governance, in response to the rise of the merchant/industrial class and;

Classical revivalism in architecture, design dominated tastes in 19th c. Europe (and U.S.)

4. the resultant increase in empowerment down the social hierarchy.

These factors, among others, allowed the intellectual community to move away from regimented and regulatory institutions (officially-sanctioned école, academé and sociétiés) and standards of performance that, historically, would be tantamount to exclusion or expulsion by recognized authorities and successful practitioners in their respected disciplines.

Modern thought and expression were wrenched from the grip of deeply-embedded Classical traditions of motif and narrative. Greek and Roman Revivalism was part-and-parcel of Enlightenment thinking. Re-invented notions of classical perfection were the standard-bearer that reached as high as representative governance under the Laws of Man (…that [Man] seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others, who are ready to unite, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates” (Locke, 2nd Tr. 123), to the design elements of a column or lintel holding up the portico of an English country manor, to the expected representation of biblical and/or allegorical themes in painting and poetry as the raison d’etre for an artist or writer’s career. Choosing to break from these societal norms was risky, indeed. Apart from rejection by one’s professional colleagues and ridicule by critics and the public-at-large, financial hardship was also a cold reality. The story of this revolution in the arts is intricately woven into the political event of the time. Indeed, art history is truly the history of art in the context of the social and political events surrounding it at the time.

England

Art- The democratization of feeling

William Blake, poet & artist, God with Adam & Eve in the Garden, woodcut (1832)

Among its European counterparts, England led the way in the trend toward modernist thinking in the first half of the 19th century, as industrialization redefined both the landscape and the social order. In this regard, Huntington’s observation that modernization in the form of increased production, mechanization and social mobility as a destabilizing force unless government can correct for these changes, is correct:

“Social and economic change—urbanization, increase in literacy and education, industrialization, mass media expansion…undermine traditional sources of political authority and traditional political institutions combining legitimacy and effectiveness. The rates of social mobilization and the expansion of political organization and institutionalization are low. The result is political instability and disorder. The primary problem of politics is the lag in the development of political institutions behind social and economic change” (Huntington 5).

While many in England of the 1820s were calling for a radical redefinition of the role of the common man in governance, the actual transition towards expanded rights and protections was felt incrementally, with the Workers’ Rights Act of 1832 and in worker’s strikes that seemed to herald (but did so less traumatically, and over a 50-year period), a change in rule-of-law that would ultimately and incrementally redefine the power-base of the landed gentry in favor of increased enfranchisement and suffrage for the property-owning and working classes.

William Turner, The Fighting Temaraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to be Broken Up (1838), Nat'l Gallery, London

Poets like William Wordsworth dramatically broke with the poetic traditions of the 18th century and composed lines written about and for the common man. William Blake illustrated his writings with mythic and god-like figures bathed in amorphous light (see: ‘God with Adam and Eve in the Garden’, 1832); described by a contemporary as, “a man who had seen God and talked to the angels” (Johnson 591). The poet, Matthew Arnold was one of the first to capture the cadence of urban existence in his writing, mourning the loss of a private, country reverie for the anonymity of city life.

“Among the artists who were active during this period was one whose work stands out as particularly illustrative of the ‘new vision’ for a ‘new time’. William Turner painted in a bold, new way—emphasizing atmospherics through diffuse color—with objects and people portrayed at the mercy of nature (right, ‘Slave Ship in a Storm’, 1840). He placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity, on the one hand, but also their vulnerability and vulgarity amid the ‘sublime’ nature of the world, on the other. His rendering of the sublime (reflecting awe, savage grandeur and a natural world un-mastered by man), was evidence of the power of God–a common theme for this period. The significance of light was, to Turner, the emanation of God’s spirit. For this reason, he refined the subject matter of his later paintings, leaving out solid objects and detail and concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires—a precursor to ‘impressionism’ and, therefore, a forerunner of the French movement, some thirty years later” (Becket 124) .

Politics- “The most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen.”

Franz Winterhalter, Queen Victoria (1842), Nat'l Gallery, London

Royal succession and progressive political policy in 18th and 19th century England opened the door for English arts to step off in important new directions. Following closely the progress of Enlightenment Era scientific exploration and innovation (geology, astronomy, chemistry, botany), as well as men and women of letters, English aristocracy viewed such accomplishments as matters of national pride, especially when they provided a competitive edge on the world stage over arch rival, France. Cultural vibrancy characterized the Georgian Courts (1740-1837), including the interim Regency Period (1811-1820), with active financial support for research in the arts and sciences. With the assent of Queen Victoria to the throne (1837-1901) along with her consort, Prince Albert (d. 1861), English culture had set an unalterable course for a celebration of modern innovation:

The Crystal Palace, Great Exhibition of 1852, Hyde Park, London

“In 1831 John Stewart Mill asserts, ‘We are living in an age of transition.’ In the same year Thomas Carlyle writes, ‘The old has passed away, the new appears not in its stead; the Time is still in pangs of travail with the New.’ …England of the 1830s had been in progress for many decades…[sharing] a sharp new sense of modernity, a break with the past that…responded to their sense of historical moment with a strenuous call to action…self-consciously distinguished form the attitudes of the previous generation.” (Norton: 981)

London’s Hyde Park was the host location for the crystal palaces of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (“Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations”). Its prime movers were Prince Albert, himself President of the Society of Arts and public servant, Henry Cole (inventor of the Christmas card). Albert, speaking in both English and German, declared the exhibition to be a, “true test of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived…the union of the human race.” The Queen, awed by the influx of technology and people to London from around the world, called it, “the greatest day of our history, the most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen…” (Weston: 23)

James Webb, Stricken Vessel (1880), Private Collection

The literary art, in particular, would continue to flourish under Victoria and well into the early decades of the 20th century, under Edwardian rule. The decade of hardship, sacrifice and loss of life brought about the Great War and its mechanization of death, as well as the inexorable march toward national industrialization at the expense of the pastoral English countryside would deeply affect and inspire the work of writers like Ezra Pound, J.R.R. Tolkien and musicians like Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

The early gains in the movement toward modern style in English visual arts was somewhat stalled in the second half of the 1800s by Victorian conservatism and a reversion back to a sentimental and allegorical representation of country life style, in the wake of urbanization (see: James Webb, ‘Stricken Vessel’, 1880). Public demand for this type of genre painting was soon supplanted by the camera. But, the eyes of the word would soon turn to France and a group of artistic rabble-rousers who would steal the spotlight from the English. It would be another hundred years before the English artistic community made a serious play for the world stage.

France

Art- Caught in the act of capturing light on canvas

Edouard Manet, Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1862), Musee d'Orsay, Paris, re-invented perspective and shocked viewers with bold nudity

The history of modern art began to evolve, in earnest, in Paris in the 1860s. It was a movement founded by a small group of artists as a reaction to, and in protest of, the rigid traditions favored by institutions such as the Academie des Beaux-Arts and other state-sponsored écoles. These institutions annually sponsored exhibitions of paintings their juries viewed as ‘acceptable’ in their eyes, marking the paintings that were rejected with a large red ‘X’ and the word, ‘refusé’.

In 1863, Edouard Manet exhibited his painting Dejeuner sur l’herbe (right) at a self-organized public event called, the Salon des Refusés. The painting was immediately controversial, but the heavily-attended event drew wide public attention to the work of a group of radical artists. They were challenging traditional modes of studio painting, by working outside (en plein air), while representing everyday and often, vulgar scenes in a style that broke from accepted notions of perspective, modeling, and subject matter. The movement gained more attention when, in April, 1874 a group of artists (without Manet), called Societe Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs began regularly exhibiting outside of the official salon system. That same year, the disparaging term, Impressionism, was coined by a critical journalist, Louis Leroy (Dempsey 114).

Georg Seurat, La Parade de Cirque (detail),1887-88, Coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

So, while conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketch-like appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. In the late 19th century, their work was already being recognized for its modernity—embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demioselles d’Avignon (1907), Coll. MOMA, NY, did not leave his studio for four years because of controversy surrounding it.

The last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 also saw the beginning of a new phase in avant-garde painting. By this time, few of the participants were working in a recognizably Impressionist manner. Most of the core members were developing new, individual styles that caused ruptures in the group’s tenuous unity. Pissarro promoted the participation of Georges Seurat (example, detail, here) and Paul Signac, in addition to adopting their new technique based on points of pure color, known as Neo-Impressionism. A young Paul Gauguin was making forays into Primitivism. Other styles, spun off of Impressionism, marked the progression in artistic thinking that led into the first two decades of the new century for France. Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Symbolism, Dadaism and Surrealism all arose out of a constantly re-evaluated sensibility about color, form and subject matter shaped by the modern life-style, while in turn, desiring to use artistic means to redeem humanity in the face of war and discover a previously-unrevealed side of human nature that offered some hope for the future.

The ultimate expression of the fragmentation and objectification of the human form came from a Spanish artist, living in a cold-water garret in the heart of a poor neighborhood in Paris at that time. In 1907, Pablo Picasso delivered his personal manifesto regarding the beauty and repugnance of the underbelly of civilization in a style of his own invention, Cubism. His, Les Demioselles d’Avignon , spoke to a number of themes: depersonalization; depravity; distortion of face and form to achieve purity of line; invented anatomy; liberties with color and perspective and bold social commentary. It was a single painting that would do what none other had been able to do until that moment—redefine the playing field for the world of art (and those who viewed it) for decades to come. “Cubism became the ultimate statement about the spirit and collective psyche of the time: unified, coherent and embraceable, but under a new set of rules…rules established by a world in flux and not easily embraced in accordance with 19th century principles of order and tradition” (Samu 38).

Politics- “L’Empire, c’est la paix”

Between 1795 and 1866, France was the second most populous country of Europe, behind Russia. Unlike other European countries, France did not experience a strong population growth from the middle of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. Until 1850, the population was concentrated in the countryside—a phenomenon that would persist until the rural devastation of World War I drove increasing numbers to the cities looking for opportunity.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Napoleon III (1852)

But, beginning during the Second Empire (1848-1870), a trend toward urbanization could be seen. Unlike in England, industrialization was a late phenomenon in France. “The Napoleonic wars had hindered early industrialization and France’s economy in the 1830s (limited iron industry, under-developed coal supplies, a massive rural population) had not developed sufficiently to support an industrial expansion of any significance. French rail transport only began hesitantly in the 1830s, and would not truly develop until the 1840s. By the revolution of 1848, a growing industrial workforce began to participate actively in French politics, but their hopes were largely betrayed by the rise to power of Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as self-appointed emperor (Napoleon III, left) in 1852 and the establishment of the Second Empire. The loss of the important coal, steel and glass production regions of Alsace and Lorraine in a disastrous war with Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia in 1870 would cause further problems.”

“Paris, on the other hand continued to function as the cultural and political center of the French universe. In its early years, the Napoleon regime was authoritarian in nature, curbing most freedom of the press and assembly. But a number of events would destabilize the Republic during that twenty-year period, including ill-conceived foreign policy, numerous wars and population unrest, as France lost influence with its hostile and competitive neighbors, Prussia, England and Russia “(Pinkney 97). In spite of this, the country was moving inexorably toward the modern era, with industrialization, urbanization, economic growth and the massive re-design and reconstruction of Paris by engineer and architect, Baron Haussmann.

Historically, France had reached a cultural ‘tipping point.’ Governmental pre-occupation with foreign matters, internal unrest by liberal and populist elements, a shift toward more representative parliamentary rule and the relaxation of censorship in the 1860s cleared the way for a small group of artists to test the waters of the tradition-bound academic establishment and come forward with a new and controversial style of painting. It was during this period of broad dissatisfaction and the imminent failure of the Second Republic that French Impressionism was born.

Eiffel Tower under construction (1888), for World's Fair in Paris following year

With the collapse of the Napoleonic Regime in 1871, political chaos continued to plague the French. “The repression of the bloody Commune (1871-75) which followed and the ultimate stabilization of the government as the Third Republic brought with it a wave of social reforms and progressive movements. Women’s rights, a Marxist-inspired socialist movement, efforts at separation of church and state and a cooling off of international conflicts through a series of treaties and détentes would characterize the French home front in the last quarter of the 19th century” (Williams 72).

While many of these agreements would later serve as entanglements that would drag France into a world war and as the country remained deeply divided, politically, the latter years of the century and the first decade of the next would, nevertheless, be known as the belle époque for the emerging middle and intellectual classes, centered in Paris. In 1889, the Eiffel Tower was completed to celebrate the centenary of the revolution. Rising above the city to a height of 1056 feet, it was a technical marvel and a symbol of the power of industrialization and the Modern Age.

“The late 19th century—the cradle of modernism—did not feel the uncertainties about the machine that we do [today]…and very few visitors to the World’s fair of 1889 had much experience of the mass squalor and voiceless suffering that William Blake had railed against and Friedrich Engels described. In the past [early 19th c. artists and writers] had represented and caricatured the machine as an ogre, a behemoth, or—due to the ready analogy between furnaces, steam, smoke and Hell—as Satan, himself. But, by 1889, the ‘otherness’ had waned and the World’s Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualified good, strong, stupid and obedient…controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources […] Perhaps this happened because, more and more, people were living in a machine-formed environment—the city (Hughes 11).

Claude Monet, The Rouen Cathedral in the Evening (1894), Coll. Pushkin Museum, Moscow

With its World’s Fair and Tour Eiffel (right, under construction in 1888)) as the centerpiece of France’s pre-eminence on the world stage, French art was also brought to the attention of museums and collectors in both Europe and the United States. Initially shunned by the established artistic community as outcasts and ‘rejects’, artists like Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir and others were celebrated for their genius and unique perspective on the world.

Modernism, symbolized by the Impressionist School of painting, succeeded for two principle reasons: First, it grew and flourished in France through periods of political strife and upheaval, because the French valued their cultural roots and found ways to celebrate their artists and artistic traditions. Paris, itself, was to serve as a cultural centerpiece, where its cafes and bistros would be the gathering places for artists and writers: personalities that would later come to dominate the world of 20th century arts and letters. This trend would persist until the final days of World War II, when the locus of cultural influence would shift westward to New York.

Secondly, and for a reason that extends beyond the city limits of Paris to encompass the increasingly mechanized and urbanized Western World of then (and now!), its success and longevity is something fundamental to the Impressionistic aesthetic—it is art, through its loose brushwork and indefinite forms—that captures the ephemeral and irretrievable moment, when nature, memory and the senses are perfectly aligned. Color, form and the visual narrative on canvas, all manage to break free from the limits of the hard-edged and alien world of commerce and urban confinement, to float in the dense atmospherics of the artist’s imagination and the pristine expanses of a natural world. For the modern city-dwellers of fin de siecle Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, New York and elsewhere, Impressionism evoked images of a world, then only vaguely recalled.

But, for that brief moment, Paris, poised at the dawn of a new century, was positioned at the center of the cultural universe, looking only to the future.

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

In Part 2 of this series, the emerging German Empire and its role in supporting and then crushing its artistic community will be explored.

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Bibliography (citations for Part 1 & 2 of series):

Cohen, Carl (Ed.). Communism, Fascism and Democracy- the Theoretical Foundations.  From a reprinted article by Alfredo Rocco, The Doctrine of Fascism (1925 321), New York: Random House, 1962.

Davies, Norman. Europe, A History. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.

Dempsey, Amy.  Art in the Modern Era- A Guide to Styles, Schools & Movements 1860 to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2002.

Dunn, Susan (Ed. & Intro.), The Social Contract; and the first and second discourses/ Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Harman, Chris. A People’s History of the World. London & New York: Verso, 1999.

Harman, Chris. The Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918-1923. London: Bookmarks, 1982.

Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

Huntington, Samuel. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1968.

Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Little, Stephen.  …isms: Understanding Art, New York: Universe Publishing, 2005.

Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.

Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic: the Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Pinkney, David H. Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958; paperback ed., 1972

Poggi, Gianfranco. The Development of the Modern State- A Sociological Introduction.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.

Samu, Heilbrunn. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Timeline of Art History- Impressionism, Art and Modernity. Publ. by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Weston, Richard. Modernism. London: Phaidon, 1996.

Williams, Roger L. The Mortal Napoleon III. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1971.

I

“Who still has the money to spend on fine art and collectables today and are these buyers finding bargains in the current marketplace,” I asked?

“Money is pooled at the top,” said Mr. Genocchio, “and the luxury sector is doing very well. Of course, the art market is a very small component of the total luxury market, but it is still reflective of a general trend. You can see that Tiffanys recently reported good earnings, while for the same period, Wal-Mart did not. This is an indication that the people with money are still spending, but they have pulled back a bit and buying behavior is more conservative.” Fine Arts Magazine

“But, the big auction houses are reporting good earnings as well, with some record prices for certain pieces.”

Alberto Giacometti ,''L'homme qui marche, I'' (1961)

“If you’re referring to Giacometti’s , L’homme qui marche, I, which sold recently for $104.3 million and Picasso’s, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (below), in June for $51.6 million, those were highly-publicized anomalies that, if you’ll recall, happened to coincide with spikes in global equity markets. People want to feel bullish after a long period of sell-offs in the markets. Those particular sales and others, to a lesser degree, respond to their own set of logical parameters. They may be purely anecdotal, when you consider the quality and rarity of those particular works—they would be considered a good asset class by anyone’s standard, but particularly if you have the money to spend.

“How are most other auction houses doing, if the bigger operations are struggling?”

“Other auction houses in the U.S., Europe and China are working hard to ‘make the sale’. The appetite for risk among collectors, particularly in the mid-priced market, has cooled. Those who can afford to have moved away from the contemporary category and into blue chips, like the Old Masters and early 20th century notables. In this way, the art market reflects broader market trends. I have noticed, for example, that Brazilians are buying now, Indians are buying, the Russian appetite for risk has diminished after they helped drive the market for a while. But, in spite of this, and speaking generally, the art market is reflecting broader market trends and discretionary spending is down. Sites like Art Info.com, that maintain daily records on global sales, are still showing very mixed results from most auctions.”

“If I’m not mistaken,” changing focus to another aspect of the secondary art market,” there is an abundance of art fairs around the world and the numbers of regional events just seem to keep growing. How do they all stay alive?”

Pablo Picasso, "Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto" (1903)

Apart from established events like Art Basel in certain key cities and a range of New York shows like the Armory show, most art fairs are in locations with a soft gallery structure. These are more spectacles, than a reflection of an established art market. They draw in a group from a particular geographic region for a short-term event that offers art for sale for a few days; then they pack up and leave. It is difficult to judge the state of the art-buying scene based on these retail events. They are fleeting and therefore, not reliable indicators.”

Shifting gears again, I move the focus to Mr. Genocchio’s address to the audience on October 5th. “I believe you are planning to talk about the impact of new media on the traditional art publishing world? What can you tell me about how things have changed in recent years?”

“I am currently executive editor for three Web sites and two magazines. I have seen a sea change in the way information is disseminated in recent years. There are generational and attitudinal issues to consider. By that, I mean we in the publishing business have to consider how people want to get their news. Weekly periodicals are struggling, but daily is still a key word when we consider how people choose to consume information. The weekly magazine is all but dead.”

“I can remember when I worked in my native Australia, in the ‘70s, Time Magazine was the Internet of its day. A local publisher would buy 30% of Time’s content from the parent company, plug in 70% regional news and advertising and sell a recognized brand in the marketplace. Under that arrangement, you enjoyed a geographical monopoly. The Internet explodes all of that!”

“Later, in the ‘90s, I went to work for Rupert Murdoch. I watched as he invested newspaper’s golden goose, otherwise known as classified advertising revenues, into high-tech infrastructure: dedicated satellites, TV networks and the like. He saw the future…and it was not made of paper! The issue that many publications are now confronting is, ‘adapt or die’. With so much invested in traditional forms of information management and delivery, many print media publications would rather go out of business than change to a new delivery method. A lot of that resistance has to do with revenue generation and how to monetize a Web-based system of information management. That is the challenge we all face and those who can do it successfully will be the ones who survive in the future.”

Lastly, I directed a question to Mr. Genocchio that had originally topped my list: “What advice do you have for today’s collector who may be trying to decide to jump into or re-enter the art market, but believes that it feels a bit like challenging the spring rapids on the Colorado River in a rubber raft?”

“I address this very issue in the most recent issue of Art + Auction, because I am asked about this all the time. Essentially, the issues haven’t changed. First, be aware of every buying opportunity. Don’t just buy at auction or through the same dealer. Scout the galleries and become familiar with emerging artists in your area. Then, educate yourself regarding the art market and the work of those artists who appeal to you. Read everything you can get your hands on and don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

“Third, don’t buy anything you don’t want to wake up to in the morning and look at every day. It has been said, ‘buy what you love’, and that still holds true. Of all the reasons to acquire art, the most important and time-tested is the enjoyment of looking at it. Over time, a given piece may increase in price, but if you only buy for investment purposes, you’ll probably end up with an artwork you really don’t like—and one that’s worth even less than you paid.”

“Next, work with a trusted expert who can guide you through the morass of unproductive and over-priced directions that you may choose to pursue. Good advice may cost you in the short-run, but the value of that guidance helps to take the emotion out of purchasing art and results in a dispassionate, more informed series of decisions, as your collection grows. And last, consider the work itself: what I call the ‘registers of value’. This includes the record of sales for comparable works by the artist, condition, subject matter and provenance. You can buy what you like, but remember that what you like may turn into a financial asset. It pays to buy smart.”

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

Editor’s note: Register to hear Benjamin Genocchio speak at New York City’s Art of Leadership lecture series on October 5, 2010 or to be placed on the list for future events at: www.artleadership.com

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(left) Charles Burchfield (1893–1967),Yellow Afterglow, July 31, 1916, Watercolor and graphite on paper, 20” x 14”, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, Gift of Tony Sisti, 1979. Fine Arts Magazine. Whitney Museum of American Art.

Having lived and painted in Burchfield’s locale for more than 20 years, I was particularly pleased this winter to visit a fascinating new exhibition, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield. Curated by the artist Robert Gober (b. 1954) for UCLA’s Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where it premiered in October, this groundbreaking show is now at the Burchfield Penney Art Center (BPAC) on the campus of Buffalo State College, and will next visit New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art.  

As the first major exhibition of Burchfield’s work since 1995, Heat Waves is notable for the fresh perspective offered by Gober, who is widely known for provocative, exquisitely crafted sculptures that evoke the complicated mysteries of domestic life. Ann Philbin, who directs the Hammer Museum, invited Gober to organize the show after she discovered a Burchfield drawing in the artist’s home. Setting aside his own work for a full year, Gober seized this opportunity to investigate a master he had long admired, and traveled to Buffalo to delve into the Burchfield archives at BPAC. The handsome exhibition catalogue has been enhanced by several authors, including BPAC curator Nancy Weekly and Cynthia Burlingham, respectively director of the Grunwald Center and the Hammer’s deputy director of collections, who contributed important insights on the artist’s life and use of watercolor.  

C. Burchfield, The Four Seasons, 1949–60, Watercolor on pieced paper mounted on board, 56” x 48”, Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Encompassing paintings, drawings, journals, wallpaper designs, doodles, and ephemera, Heat Waves reanimates Burchfield’s work and reframes our image of him as a family man painting in his backyard studio in Gardenville, New York, insulated by brushes and sketchbooks. Instead it reveals the complex world of an artist who had a profound appreciation for literature and classical music, and who lamented the problems of success in the art world even as he benefitted from its privileges.  

Burchfield’s Backyard  

Charles Ephraim Burchfield was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, a small town on Lake Erie’s southeastern shore that was shaped by the burgeoning coal, steel and railroad industries. Burchfield’s father died when he was four, prompting his mother to return with her six children to Salem, Ohio, where her family provided support. Young Charles found consolation in the sequences of nature that played out in the surrounding woodlands and byways. There he collected moths and botanical specimens, and made drawings of anemones and wrens in the grape arbor. From adolescence right into his early seventies, Burchfield kept journals that provide a counterpoint to his paintings; they reveal the rich interior life of an artist who struggled with financial uncertainties, notated bird songs, and kept meteorological notes on a calendar, because, as he wrote later, it was “important as you look back over a month what kind of weather you had.”  

In 1916, upon graduation from what is now the Cleveland Institute of Art, Burchfield won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York, but he quit after his first day of life class there. (He’d had enough of art school and never warmed to the figure.) A fortuitous encounter with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, co-owner of the Sunwise Turn Bookshop, led to Burchfield’s first significant patronage, followed by connections with galleries such as Montross, where he showed for several years before moving to the Frank Rehn Gallery. Returning to his beloved Salem late in 1916, Burchfield took an accounting job and embarked upon what he later called his “Golden Year,” during which he produced more than 200 paintings and cultivated many of the themes that came to fruition subsequently.  

In 1921, Burchfield moved to Buffalo to design wallpaper for M.H. Birge & Sons. He had married Bertha Kenreich, with whom he went on to have five children. Bertha was an ideal artist’s partner, unflinchingly supporting his decision in 1929 to leave Birge in order to paint full-time, and becoming a devoted archivist of his reviews. Their marriage provided a foundation of joy and security, enabling Burchfield to weather the storms of self-criticism and illness, and to continue taking artistic risks right into old age. Over the next three decades, he achieved professional success through sales, exhibitions, and awards, always painting what was close at hand: the railyards, ravines, and vernacular architecture of Western New York.  

Burchfield dismissed critics’ characterization of him as a Regionalist, however. Although he drew inspiration from his environs, he worked deliberately to express the deeper, universal forces suggested by place. Indeed, few of Burchfield’s titles refer to specific locations. Historian Kenneth Ames writes that “Place, in any petty political sense of the term, is not what Burchfield was about. It was more important for him to live in a comfortable and manageable world… Western New York gave him… easy access to Buffalo… and to the open countryside. And it gave him his own backyard.”  

Neighboring Backyards  

Rebecca Allan (b. 1962), Infant Stream/Wappinger Creek (2009), Acrylic on canvas, 58” x 64”

As a painter who spent my early years in Ashtabula and later lived 15 miles from Burchfield’s studio, my thinking has long been informed by his art. In 1985, for example, I helped reframe several Burchfield drawings that were being prepared for auction from Buffalo’s Sisti Gallery. (Tony Sisti often exhibited works by Burchfield and made a significant bequest of them to the BPAC.) Some of the drawings I handled contained notes the artist had made to himself. These were executed rapidly, as if Burchfield couldn’t wait to get things down because there was so much more to see, and to be remembered back in the studio. Burchfield’s lyrical, note-to-self drawings were never an end in themselves, but rather a means of preserving his visual memories. Looking at them day after day, I came to understand how a drawing might remain a flexible scaffold upon which a painting could be developed, rather than becoming overly polished or virtuosic.  

In addition, the poetry in Burchfield’s evocative titles formed a parallel in my mind with those of the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky (c. 1902-1948), who also relished music, and drew upon childhood memories of gardens. Titles such as The Sphinx and the Milky Way, Cornfield of Health, One Year the Milkweed, Song of the Telegraph, and Yellow Afterglow reveal a shared appreciation for language and metaphor that is often embedded within a painter’s experience.  

R. Allan, Turning Course (2009), Acrylic on canvas, 58” x 54”, Collection Mike and Doris Simon

Painted in Salem the year Burchfield graduated from art school, Yellow Afterglow [1] deftly captures the transitional moments after a summer rainstorm. From his backyard, looking past the tobacco-colored house toward East Fourth street, Burchfield paints a sulfur-yellow sky enclosed by dusky green and black masses of foliage. Menacing silhouettes of telephone poles and trees seem to hiss with electrical energy. The graphic play of light and dark in this composition reflects the artist’s awareness of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and Chinese landscape paintings, both of which he had seen in Cleveland. Using opaque watercolor (gouache), Burchfield expertly controlled his degrees of transparency, simultaneously suggesting the permanent and ephemeral aspects of weather and light. Not surprisingly, watercolor would always remain his preferred medium.  

My own paintings are derived from observations of weather and water as carriers of the transformative power of nature. The fluctuating tides and textures of Lake Erie, the massive ore boats that move toward and from its horizon, and its daily variations of color constitute my earliest memories. Now, whether I am working along the Hudson River, in the Pacific Northwest, Virginia, or Maine, I think about how water influences and mirrors its surroundings.  

For example, I recently painted Infant Stream/Wappinger Creek and Turning Course in response to a tributary of the Hudson that traverses 36 miles of woods and marshland. With these works, I strove to translate the spatial, ecological, and geological qualities of my chosen sites into a visual equivalent of the watershed landscape that goes beyond the place itself. In this respect, Burchfield’s interpretations of the contained spaces of thickets and streams—and also his ambition for an artwork to transcend the specificity of its source—still resonate powerfully for me.  

A Vision More Timely than Ever  

C. Burchfield, Sun and Rocks, 1918-50, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 40” x 56”.

Although Burchfield suffered periods of illness and self-doubt during his last two decades, the paintings of this period are imbued with a cosmological majesty and a visionary sense of awe. Consciously revisiting the work of his formative years—which he believed to be more improvisatory and less encumbered by realism—he created larger works that were literally reconstructed from earlier paintings. For example, The Four Seasons (1949–60) is composed of several sheets of paper added to an earlier, central sketch. This exuberant picture conflates the seasons in a single, symphonic image, framing space through a telescoping stand of animated trees and invented flowers. Trees in the distance form a Gothic portal—essentially Burchfield’s private cathedral of nature. Cadmium red and yellow brushstrokes surround the trees and radiate from the sun, producing an otherworldly glow that might be read as life-giving warmth or destructive fire.  

Many paintings from this late period express a dual vision of redemption and apocalypse, a reminder that life and death are often in close proximity, and never further than one’s own backyard. In our own era, which seemingly suggests that enlightenment is to be attained only by journeying great distances, now is an ideal moment to re-consider Burchfield’s remarkable—albeit more intimate—vision and achievement.  

by Rebecca Allan  

Rebecca Allan is a New York-based painter whose work examines the landscape and aspects of music. She is also the head of education at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture. A solo exhibition of her recent work will be held in September 2010 at Gallery 2/20 in New York.  

You can see more of her work at www.rebeccaallan.com  

Editor’s Note: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City www.whitney.org , now, through October 10, 2010  

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine and is presented here with their permission. Visit their site at www.fineartconnoisseur.com  

Endnote: 1. Yellow Afterglow does not appear in the show, Heat Waves in a Swamp.  

Interior of Maurice Agis's, Dreamscape (2006) Disaster would soon strike. See video, below

 Seeking – Director for Museum, open 4-10 days a year with hundreds of curators involved, and tens of thousands of visitors. Must be able to cope with logistical nightmares and able to please everybody all the time.  

How many museums are there in the world? Have a guess. I have no idea so email me if you know. My point is there are thousands upon thousands of museums, more than it would be possible to count with any great ease. Museums are, for the most part, continuously in operation. Their time horizon, as a business, is long range. They are afforded the luxury of time to organize, correct, and improve. But, in the case of an art fair or expo, how do you cram all of these operational considerations into a just a few days of intense activity, and accomplish it without serious incident?Fine Arts Magazine  

The Armory Show (2010): one of NYC's biggest art fairs, with dozens held in the city each year.

 That is the task that art fair managers aim to achieve. It has long been said, usually when journalists are within ear shot, that art fairs are temporary museums; the only difference is the art is for sale. But the often elegant façade betrays a huge undertaking. Logistically, this is a monumentally complex machine to assemble—sometimes years in the planning and just a week or two in the execution. Events like this would not be realistically achievable without the liberal application of insurance to grease the cogs. And this strategy stretches far beyond insuring the art on the walls at the show.  

“The most important thing in both personal and business life is peace of mind – insurance is part of achieving that.” That’s from Paul Morris, president and co-founder of the Armory Show. He definitely recognizes the importance of insurance to art fairs. In order to achieve that ‘peace of mind’ a fair needs to protect itself and its exhibitors from potential financial losses. According to Morris, Pier 94 in New York City (the expanded home of the historically-significant, annual Armory Show event) is undergoing a significant renovation, courtesy of MMPI (the fair’s parent company).  

As a rule of thumb, here are just three important considerations for art fair organizers:  

Venice Biennale (2009), Elmgreen & Dragset, curators/artists. 'Body' floats in a pool outside a house being 'sold.' Photo: Todd Hesler, The New York Times

 1. Workers Compensation Insurance: Required of staff for maintenance and building of all the booths at a fair venue. Add to this any and all employees working for the fair organizers, the exhibitors, and fine art shippers. This may represent hundreds of policies that each party involved must have to employ personnel. Without this coverage, the booths would never be built, the fair organizers and galleries would have no staff and the art would never ship. All of which adds a level of expense and difficulty to holding even a modest event. The insurance is there to protect both the employer and the employee–creating a protected environment for business to be conducted.  

2. Commercial Liability Insurance: For the fair venue, itself, its organizers, gallery participants and shippers, in the event an accident occurs. Without this insurance, exposure to financial losses due to accident or injury can quickly become extreme, in the face of an unexpected event. And the unexpected can occur, sometimes with fatal results.  

Maurice Agis, artist, 77, following his arrest on manslaughter charges on 2006

 Though not installed as an art fair, per se, the British artist Maurice Agis, created a public art event in 2006, when he erected a temporary, onsite immersive art work, Dreamspace, in a park outside a small town in North England. The acre-sized inflatable sculpture was designed as a series of huge intersecting, colored bubbles, inviting the public to walk through as they experienced the multi-sensory world of lights and colors of the artist’s creation. On one particular day, with a few people inside the structure, the wind outside picked up, breaking the moorings, and lifting the structure into the air. As it came crashing back down, coming to rest against a large pole, two women were killed and several were injured. Agis had no insurance. He was taken to court on manslaughter charges (a verdict on which the jury could not agree) and was fined $15,000. This fine was later reduced to $4,000 to better reflect his minimal income of $180 per week, from a state pension. He died in October 2009, at the age of 77, with the debt still standing. If this had occurred in the US, at a major art fair, the damages sought would have been exponentially higher. (left) Sequence of events as Dreamscape takes to the air.  

3. Event Insurance: Designed to protect the operators if the whole event is canceled, due to weather or some unforeseen circumstances. Seem unlikely? In 2008, the Summer Arts Fair in Omaha was completely flattened by very high winds. While not a major fair, it underscores the need to protect against unforeseen or even far-reaching natural occurrences. The organizing company, as well as a number of other parties, stood to be significantly out-of-pocket if they were not adequately covered. Event Insurance goes a long way in protecting the financial investment involved. Having to cancel an art fair or expo in the late stages can be more than enough to sink a great company. It can be doubly-hard when the event has brand recognition that may have taken years to build.  

Taking on the task of organizing and mounting a large art fair is multi-faceted and involves assuming responsibility for scores of people who may be involved. All of this before we even start to think about the juggling act needed to make exhibitors happy or the steps needed to protect the art itself!  

Claude Monet, Fishing Boats at Sea (1868). Alfred A. Pope Collection, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT

 In this complex mix of people, business interests and product, the art represents, far and away, the single largest financial exposure. Christiane Fischer, President and CEO of AXA Art Insurance in North America, says that at any major international art fair, “AXA Art insures anywhere between $100 million and $1 billion+ in art”. That is a pretty incredible number for a single, large event. Combine that with the exhibitors insured with other companies and you start to see a sweat-inducing number. The whole of The European Fine Arts Fair (TEFAF), widely recognized as the largest fair in the world, has approximately $4 billion in art on display each year.  

The Windsor Hotel fire, NYC (1899). Note the Monet painting, pictured above, being rescued from Mr. Pope's hotel room window by fire depart. Photo: Archives, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT

 In addition to the art work that will be on display, there is another key component for any event: shipping and handling. This is a massive undertaking. Transporting multiple billions in art at any one time is enough to cause a cardiac event. In order for the shippers to be able to conduct business, they need significant insurance policies in place to protect themselves from potential losses and lawsuits. Even the most cautious shippers, unfortunately, suffer losses at some point. In fact, shipping is the most common cause of art insurance claims. This is such a huge topic and I don’t want to digress so I will be dedicating an entire article to it in the near future.  

There you have it; everybody and every company involved needs the proper insurance in place for a market to trade. Often I get the impression some would rather do without all of this insurance. I have heard it said, “Insurance gets in the way of doing business. Why can’t we all just forge ahead without it? It costs money. It delays progress. It’s… simply put…annoying.”  

Those of you who have been reading these articles know that this notion is counter-intuitive. As my last article explained, insurance allows us to conduct business while transferring the large majority of risk to a third party. Indeed it allows us to take on larger financial risks than we would otherwise be able to assume. Rather than getting in the way of business, insurance facilitates it. It provides a safe environment in which to conduct serious business.  

What is serious business?… $4 billion art fairs are serious business.  

by Thomas Galbraith, Contributing Writer  

  

Contact Thomas at tgalbraith@gendelman.com  if you have any questions you would like me to address in the coming articles.  

Thomas Galbraith is Director of Fine Art for Bruce Gendelman Insurance Services. Galbraith has years of expertise in the art insurance marketplace. He previously worked as an art historian at the Art Loss Register, assisting in the recovery of stolen art, and as a collections specialist at Chartis Private Client Group. He most recently served as fine art expert for AXA Art Insurance in the U.S. and as part of the team that spearheaded the company’s Canadian operations.

Detail, The Green House, Santa Barbara, CA (1983)

  What’s going on?   

The dismaying dearth of intellectual rigor in our popular culture has been parried with an overly- zealous esotericism among the architectural elite. This clique of influential architects has been given a much louder voice by their precocious benefactors than befits their numbers and yet their stamp upon the contemporary architectural landscape has been profound.Fine Arts Magazine   

The last McDonald’s restaurant in classic 1950s style, San Jose, CA. A Stanley Meston design

 Just as our built environment is littered with construction that is bane and banal, the contemporary detritus is a plethora of factious forms that have been generated by sophisticated software and technological zeitgeist. These visually enticing, yet vacuous assemblies, have appeared in great numbers on the choicest of urban and rural site, as if they’ve come to existence in a vacuum, with wanton neglect of their context and past architectural achievements. The brazen new work seems to have rendered the architectural old-guard meek and humiliated by the new, brash neighbor who’s just made its grand entrance to the scene. After the initial fanfare, these awkward juxtapositions serve only to disrupt the architectural continuity and further diminish the cultural fabric.   

Has the architectural universe been distilled to a choice between another fractured Frank Gehry, or a Kentucky Fried drive-through? Probably, the answer is yes, but if there is a way to be modern, smart, sincere, and beautiful, and to offer the promise of contemporary architecture deemed worthy by future generations, it’s worth some observation and introspection to understand how we can improve the current state of affairs.   

Justification for the current paradigm:

With sheer determination that mistakes wealth for truth, and truth for beauty, the collective sense of being modern purveyed by certain acolytes coupled with the desire to being ‘different’ has ambushed our ability to distinguish between good and that which is simply unique. When Modernism embraced the machine and its physical manifestation, represented by the Bauhaus School of design, how neatly did the philosophy fit with the need to re-build Europe after the destruction wreaked upon the continent during the First World War? The economic advantage of being modern begs the question as to what is serving whom? Did the style follow economic necessity or was it just a happy coincidence that a financially friendly form just so happened to fall upon the architectural scene when society could no longer afford to build the way it used to before the Great Wars? Form follows finance?   

(above) Jackson Heights: Queens, NY- a laboratory for new ideas in 20^th C. housing. This planned community introduced several modern planning ideas in 1920’s. ‘Towers’ designed by A. J. Thomas (1925), illustrate ‘Garden Apartment ‘ planning- open space and suburban amenities – within confines of city’s grid.   

What was left behind and lost was not only the tradition of a tightly-woven architectural fabric but, almost entirely rendered to the waste heap of knowledge was the language of western architecture, developed and refined over the past 2,500 years. Perhaps the formal architectural predilection that we understand to be modernism evolved to suit manufacturing methodology and then continued to develop to the present day where even more sophisticated machines not only build the physical components and assemble the project, but then these machines are again employed to actually create the design itself.   

Even if there were a place for the language of architecture as we once knew it, how would we know it if we saw it anymore? Willful negligence and inexcusable ignorance regarding reference, context and a lack of reverence for appropriate precedent has resulted in the jettisoning of architectural and cultural context—so essential to the success of any architectural response. Have we lost for an eternity the architectural landscape that embodies those cohesive qualities of a built environment that were once taken for granted but are today only packaged and preserved in precious “historic districts”? Or is it possible to be both modern and reverential at the same time?   

Justification for trying something else:

This image and those below: Details of the Green House (1983)

 Not only is historical and cultural reference a valid, honorable, and completely modern point of departure for the design of a new building, but only an edifice that is fundamentally relevant can be considered truly modern; because its very nature embraces qualities that pay attention to its context, heritage, materials, culture, and its essential nature to be a product of the current time.   

The understanding of purpose and place and the difference between here and there are primary factors that warrant a project to be deserving of construction relative to one that is better left on the computer monitor because it didn’t know any better. Is there any reason that “Stupid” should be substituted for being “Smart” just because it’s been purveyed and then consumed as being “cool”?   

What I did:

The Green House, a single-family, three-bedroom house in Santa Barbara, California, is a construction that was commissioned by my mother, Norma Green, in 1981 and completed in 1983. As a Promethean effort for a newly-minted architect, this project provided the post-thesis culmination of idea, idiom, and execution. This writing is an investigation of concepts that are timeless and a retrospective of a specific architectural response that intends to be modern even though the last brush stroke of paint was applied nearly twenty-seven years ago.   

The design inspiration point of departure for the Green House arose from the Southern Californian Mission Style of architecture and surrounding Mediterranean landscape. The goal was to deliver an innovative, yet historically-informed design, into the ongoing diatribe of current taste and classical virtue; thereby making it essentially ‘modern’.   

The dissection begins with its composition. Modern convention insists on the arrangement of pure geometric volumes, planar screens and linear exclamations, celebrated to the exclusion of ornamentation, which would otherwise distract from the purity of sheer form. The assembly of these elements is both additive and reductive, creating a variety of dynamic forms that are perceived by mass and void and by the changing play of light and shadow.   

One experiences this architectural object through time and space and an unfolding view that cannot be fully digested in one sighting, but only fully appreciated by collecting immediate visual perceptions and combining them with a collection of previously digested memories of the edifice, giving power and life to this form. Inspired by spatial ‘surprises when touring through an Italian hill town, sightlines are designed to be abbreviated, changing, and without repose. Vistas open up to the viewer as the culmination of a lengthy approach. The banal and anticipated are vanquished in favor of the unexpected and varied, enjoining the relationship between landscape and serendipity.   

The courtyard, with its galvanizing point-of-focus, provided by the single palm tree, finds its precedent with the atrium house of the Vettii in Pompei. While the steep hills of Sycamore Canyon have been employed as a substitute for the “fourth wall” of the atrium space, the quality of this private/public outdoor vestibule remains true to the function of its predecessor. Openings to the house and garage are screened or framed according to the desired visual access deemed appropriate for these specific functions.   

The interior of the house seeks to provide a seamless play of the same compressed and expansive volumes that are experienced outside, only with a ceiling involved. Saltillo tile, a commonly found mission-style paver, is used at the exterior and then carried into the house as finished flooring so as to further interfere with standard conceptions of outdoor and indoor spaces. White stucco walls… monolithic, common, and ordinary to the region further support the sense of place and yet are the binding surfaces that transform the geometry of the structure to a uniform and cohesive composition.   

Could this house exist anywhere other than in Southern California? Perhaps so, but I would like to think not nearly as successfully. Can its design be traced to a specific date in time? I would hope that it could because only the honesty of a detailed design response that is acutely aware of its specific time and place of creation warrants the brand of being modern. It is also true that only the qualities of the design that are steeped in the context and tradition of this specific project will spare the house from appearing as dated. That fate would be a failed miscarriage of conception that places a preconceived form ahead of its influences, instead of the design of an architecture that gathers its strength and integrity out of respect for discovering the truth, without fear of finding it and with confidence that the journey will end with a design that is beautiful and consummately modern.   

William Green, RA, Contributing Writer   

To see more images of this project and others by William Green & Associates, Architects, go to www.wgaarchitects.net

M Strider, Come Hither (1990)

Stereotype and cliche are to Marjorie Strider as Istanbul is to Orhan Pamuk or the chador to Shirin Neshat. They are goads to her art.

She first came to art world attention in the 1965 “International Girlie Show,” with her blandly outrageous bikini girls flaunting their flawless suntans and smiling their Ipana smiles. They were the goddesses of airbrushed Playboy fantasy exposed as vapid and bloodless, sisters to the Barbie Dolls then relatively new to the market.

Strider turned the male gaze back upon itself as a sock in the eye. This is what you want, I’ll give you what you want, those beauties seemed to declare in an exhibition that included such big boys as Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselman and Andy Warhol—no slouches at the ironic cultural knockout themselves.

But Strider’s bikini girls raised the stakes even higher. They took on the more orthodox stereotypical sanctity of painting itself. Her acrylic paintings on wood panel disdain categorization, crossing the line into sculpture. Their breasts are painted wooded wedges, roughly the shape of the sole of a shoe, applied to the surface of the painting in primitive sculptural relief.

The iconic, 'Girlie Series', Revisited (1997). A dimensional work in mixed media

Strider revisited the theme of her bikini girls in 2009, and they are included in a selection of her works from 1981 and 2009, which is on view at the Bridge Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, through May 11. (The dating of some of these works is so vague, however, that it is also possible that some of the bikini girls at the gallery were made earlier. Or not. The checklist notes “We are unclear when she returned to creating them.”)

Strider, who like so many of the women of her generation was largely eclipsed by the men, has been receiving a well deserved second look of late. This exhibition permits a revisionist take on art that had seemed more politically engaged than formally inventive at the time. It took Frank Stella another two decades to discover the Baroque possibilities of painting that thrust from the wall into the viewer’s space.

Elizabeth Murray made her transition from sculpture to planar painting in the late 1960s, soon after Strider. The two painters share a spirit as rebellious as it is inventive. “The word being spread was, ‘Haven’t you heard? Painting is Dead!,’ “ Murray once explained. “I thought, Really? Well, to hell with that, I’m painting!”

But their approaches are wildly different. Murray burlesqued the comforts, chaos and tragedy of daily domesticity with the animated absurdity of a cartoon. Strider tilts at stereotypes with an unlikely fusion of abstract expressionism, folk art and the in-your-face language of advertising.

M. Strider, We Mourn, We Weep, We Love Again (1995) mixed media on paper

Her most blatant cliche of a cliche in the exhibition, and her most direct homage to folk art, is the 1981 painted metal sculpture “Florida.” Two elegantly striding pink flamingos are the legs of a table which holds two smaller flamingoes, dwarfed, like an Easter bonnet, by tropical flowers.

In her paintings of the 1990s, she is fierce and urgent. The acrylic on board painting “Untitled 1993″ is Strider at her tempestuous best. Primitive flames score the surface and leap off the edge, yellow, blue, red and white at the left, blue and green and scumbled at the right. A black and white shape hooks and snakes its way from the center, slithering off the bottom of the painting. Snakes are a constant theme in these paintings for their formal and psychological possibilities, usually in bright, pulsating colors.

In Strider’s strident abstractions, surfaces are raked with ribbons of color and often as studded as a votive cross with sequins, dressmaker baubles, tin Virgin Marys or crudely fashioned toy figures. The Mexico of “Mexico (floral),” from 1994 is Mexico as tourist cliche, here presented as a dream of peasants, flowers, fringe and boisterously printed fabric.

There’s anger in the depiction, but celebration too. Strider infuses the limpest banalities with the messy exuberance of life.

By Amei Wallach, Contributing Writer

Jesse Aron Green, Artzliche Zimmeregymnastic (Medicalized Indoor Gymnastics) (2008)

 If ever there were a middle-of-the-road exhibition, this year’s Whitney Biennial is it. In the spirit of an Obama promise for ‘Change’ and to ostensibly try to please everyone—traditional nattering nabob art critics included—guest curator Francesco Bonami and Whitney senior curatorial assistant Gary Carrion-Murayari transformed, with a few standout exceptions, what is usually a messy and colorful cacophony of coloratura voices all fighting to be heard, into a relatively tame and well-ordered blue-haired lady. This latest effort by the Whitney appears to lack pizzazz, speaking mostly in low, hushed tones and preferring dressed-down matinees to paparazzi-fueled, red carpet openings.Fine Arts Magazine  

Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York City

 Outwardly, the change in tailoring is obvious. There are fewer artists on view than usual. Most of the film and videos are on one floor, and art that one could call entertaining, compelling, brave, gay, cutting edge, obscene, or breaking new ground (if appearing at all!) has been kept to a minimum. The change du jour is on the 5th floor. Here, celebrating the seventy-fifth Whitney Biennial are fifty works–many textbook famous–culled from past Annual and Biennial exhibitions. It is interesting to note that the first Biennial in 1932 boasted the work of 358, predominantly male, artists. This year’s, PC-to-a-fault, seems to have bent over backward to equally balance gender, generation, and various artistic practices, among a mere 55 exhibiting artists.  

 While the curators claimed to have scoured the country for artists who truly represent the year 2010, “We thought that geographic boundaries and limitations would help to build a more defined exhibition. We stopped at the Pacific Ocean, the Mexican border, the Atlantic coast, and the Canadian border,” as the catalogue describes. The majority of those selected for the Biennial live in the nationally-recognized art centers of New York (31), Los Angeles (11) and Chicago (4). Most of the works on view are from the artists’ collections. Some 60% are listed as ‘courtesy of’ their galleries. Underscoring the mind-set of the Biennial curators, they write, “We looked to Hawaii, but without success; we did not feel too bad, though, since Hawaii is celebrated by leaving the coolest artist of all in the White House.”  

Josephine Meckler’s wordless video (on DVD), Mall of America (2009)

 In an exhibition with so few works, and so much space in which to contemplate the installations, it is initially easy to separate the ‘diamonds’ from the ‘costume jewelry.’  As with the last two Biennials, the strongest works fall into the video category.  Perhaps this is because both eyes and ears are forced to focus, thereby absorbing more content. Josephine Meckler’s wordless video (on DVD), Mall of America (2009) is an interpretation of American retail culture today.  It is an other-worldly examination of conspicuous consumption in saturated hues of red, blue and yellow. Slowly panning a large mall, nearly void of people, the camera moves from store displays, to escalators, to amusement rides, the visual tour heightened with eerie background music. One could imagine being in a wax museum, rather than a shopping center that hosts nearly forty-million people a year.      

At the other end of the spectrum—loud and brassy—is Marianne Vitale’s in-your-face video Patron (2009). Staring directly into the camera, this filmmaker and performance artist, obviously having a grand old time, spends eight minutes screaming a litany of commands to the viewer. Ironically welcoming us to “The Future of Neutralism,” she orders us to stand up, open our mouths, recite tongue twisters and spit at the ceiling.  

 On the more contemplative side, quoting a Joseph Beuy’s 1972 performance piece, is Bruce High Quality Foundation’s ambulance-cum-hearse installation, We Like America and America Likes Us (2010). YouTube video clips, Hollywood movies and new media flash across the windshield while a poetically-scripted female voiceover, referring to America variously as lover, family member and friend, exposes the strengths and weaknesses of our country; which in no small way reflect our very own, as well.  

 Lorraine O’Grady’s, The First and the Last of the Modernists (2010) occupies the same gallery as the hearse. In a series of three side by side diptychs taken at different times during their short lives, O’Grady compares the meteoric rise and fall of Michael Jackson to that of Baudelaire. Sharing similar traits: they were both perfectionists, flamboyant in their dress, sexually ambiguous, addicted to drugs, died young, and were skewered by the media for openly expressing lifestyles and beliefs. As social commentary, the artist examines the roles of art and popular culture, as well as how modern figures are presented, flattened, and distributed through the news media. Though simply presented—as is O’Grady’s style—her ideas are both subtle and in-your-face, complex but not complicated.  

Stephanie Sinclair, Self-Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help (2005)

 Not unlike like Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina film, When The Levies Broke, seen at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the socially-relevant, viscerally-brutal work of two photojournalists is included in the mix: Stephanie Sinclair’s series, Self-Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help (2005) documenting women who, in acts of desperation, set themselves on fire; while Nina Berman’s series Marine Wedding (2006/2008) – commissioned by People magazine – follows the heart-wrenching life of Ty, whose face was blown off by a suicide bomber attack. The experience of looking at both is painful.  

 Drawing additional attention to the human body – perhaps the subtheme of the Biennial – are the videos of Jesse Aron Green, Rashaad Newsome, and Kelly Nipper. In, Artzliche Zimmeregymnastic (Medicalized Indoor Gymnastics (2008), Green choreographs sixteen male performers to execute forty-five exercises from an 1858, “health and vigor of body and mind” manual, used well into the 1920s as a guide to moral behavior. Newsome’s, Untitled (New Way), 2009, features dancers known for their voguing abilities. The dance had its origins in New York City’s gay ballroom culture during the 1960s and ‘70s and his video highlights these various dancing styles. Through imaginative editing that removes the performances from their historical context, the artist creates a new dance composed entirely of abstract movements. In Nipper’s similar video, Weather Center (2009), dancer Taisha Paggett emulates the stylized gestures and movements of early modern dance pioneer, Mary Wigman.  

Curtis Mann, After the Dust, Second View (Beirut), 2009

 Curtis Mann’s, After the Dust, Second View (Beirut), 2009, a large, gridded assemblage of 120 altered photographic images, documents the thirty-three day war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Using common household bleach, Mann erases most of the original image. All the viewer is left with—primarily at the edge of each photograph—are a few random details of objects and people in a city devastated by war. His transformation of photojournalistic record-keeping, gathered on the Internet, from places he himself has not visited, moves personal grief and hardship into the realm of abstraction, much like our own experience of tragedy being reported from places far removed from our comfortable, daily lives.  

Jessica Jackson Hutchens, Couch For a Long Time (2000).

 One of the most inexplicably satisfying works of art on view–arguably more arts and craft tha,n art–is Jessica Jackson Hutchens’ obsessively-collaged installation, Couch For a Long Time (2000). Returning to the Obama reference, I can appreciate the curatorial point that his image may be practically unavoidable in today’s world. Hutchens has plastered her childhood living room sofa with hundreds of his photos, taken from newspapers. Several ceramic sculptures rest on the couch: two are vessels and two resemble severed limbs. As one critic wrote about Hutchins’ work in an earlier exhibition, it is, “steeped in a California funk attitude. Her papier-mâché sculptures and collages share a crass aesthetic and a preoccupation, with the thin line between disaster and success that disguise a genuine attempt to convey ideas about communion, fear and loneliness.”  

 The same indeed, can be said for much of the work in this current Whitney Biennial.  

 by Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer  

 Edward Rubin is a writer-photographer whose writings appear regularly in various magazines such as Sculpture, ArtUS, Canadian Art, d’art International, Hispanic Outlook, and NY Arts Magazines. Mr. Rubin is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Outer Critics Circle (an organization of writers on the New York theatre for out-of-town newspapers, national publications, and other media), the Drama Desk and the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC). When he is not art-viewing, he is reviewing theatre for NY Theatre Wire, and Hi! Drama, a Time Warner cable TV show, based in New York City.  

T

(left):  An illustration of Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, 1798, which served as a headquarters for marine underwriters.  Fine Art Magazine

Lloyd's of London World Headquarters today. Design by Richard Rogers

But consider this: coffee is pivotal to the story of how insurance came to be. Without coffee, and a place to drink it, the insurance industry may have taken a very different course. Lloyds of London, the original, official home of insurance, was first and foremost a coffee house, founded in 1688. At that time there were around 3,000 such coffee houses in London. So Lloyd’s must have been an entertaining and engaging-enough venue to have been frequented by ship owners, sailors and merchants – a rowdy bunch. Edward Lloyd’s coffee house provided a venue for weather reports, news from distant locales and discussion of business and, significantly, insurance agreements; all while slurping down cup after cup of coffee.

Santa Croce, Florence, Italy flood of 1966 destroyed 1000's of historic artifacts

Lloyd’s moved, expanded and stopped selling coffee. It became the global center and catalyst for the modern insurance industry, as we know it today. There’s much more to Lloyd’s history, of course. Their coffee house origins are merely a prelude to how the company grew and consolidated into the fully-functioning industry it is today.

So how does it work, is it important and why should we have it? Most importantly, why should a collector of art or other fine things want to understand the workings of the insurance world?

The answer is simple: because it is an important part of your collection management strategy, protecting what you’ve spent years building. And, because your broker says so! Also, as with the English game of Cricket, it’s slightly more fun when you understand the rules.

St. Mark's Square, Venice, Italy, floods each day due to sinking city and rising water levels, globally

Insurance works in its most basic form by pooling or transferring risk. A group of individuals, say art dealers, come together and all agree to pay a certain amount of money, premium, into a fund. Should one of the members suffer a loss or damage–like to a painting–they can then extract money from the fund for the amount of the loss. An individual taking a financial hit alone may very well bankrupt their business. When the loss is distributed among the members of the fund/group, not only can each individual afford to take on slightly larger risks, and therefore reap potential higher rewards, they also protect one another from financial ruin in the event of a large loss.

That is the core principal of insurance. Essentially, with some modifications, an insurance company extrapolates the principal to a much larger scale. Insurance loves the law of large numbers–the more people in the pool, the more predictable it becomes to measure likely losses and the more accurately annual premiums can be priced.

Portrait of a Flood, A. Sisley, Flood at Port-Marly, France (1876)

Insurance is everywhere and without it, very little could ever be done in the business world and art collecting, as you know, is often managed much like a business. I’m sure that if you’ve read this far, you have a story about insurance, perhaps involving an art fair, a shipping nightmare, or a consignment agreement gone wrong. All these are very direct examples of insurance at work, but what about the indirect examples? There is also workers’ compensation insurance so an art fair can be set up, a gallery staffed and art handlers hired; professional liability insurance for art advisors with overly litigious, “I’m-recording-this-for-my-lawyer” clients; and general liability insurance, in case a collector looses a toe to the unintentional and rapid descent of a large Kris Martin work!.

It is astonishing to consider how we are affected by insurance every day, in a wide variety of often invisible ways. In the coming articles, I will address exactly how important the role insurance is in our everyday lives, and particularly, how critical it is to the functioning of the art market. I also hope to offer some advice on how to handle your insurance proactively.

So at the very least, next time you’re making coffee for guests, you can talk about insurance in a most unusual and interesting way!

by Thomas Galbraith, Contributing Writer

Contact Thomas at tgalbraith@gendelman.com  if you have any questions you would like me to address in the coming articles.

Thomas Galbraith is Director of Fine Art for Bruce Gendelman Insurance Services. Galbraith has years of expertise in the art insurance marketplace. He previously worked as an art historian at the Art Loss Register, assisting in the recovery of stolen art, and as a collections specialist at Chartis Private Client Group. He most recently served as fine art expert for AXA Art Insurance in the U.S. and as part of the team that spearheaded the company’s Canadian operations. He currently serves on the board of APAA.

The original Ocean House, Bluff Ave. view at the turn of the last century

More than half a dozen grand hotels once graced the Watch Hill, peninsula on the western shore of Rhode Island, but a decade ago only one remained, Ocean House, an aging and ailing wooden behemoth whose top floors had been condemned for years. Odds were increasing that this iconic landmark, its era long past, would soon vanish like the rest.

By 2003, bumper stickers around Watch Hill implored “Save Ocean House.” The 1868 renowned, resort, ocean front hotel, where the silent movie “American Aristocracy” starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was filmed, had just closed for good. Its future was manifestly uncertain. If Ocean House was torn down, could a litter of McMansions be far behind? Fine Art Magazine

Ocean House today, surveyed by visitors of yore, thanks to Photoshop

Seven years later, Ocean House is rising again from the dunes, sporting its familiar soft-yellow coat and a return to the grandeur of its turn of the century heyday. Come late spring, the new hotel, designed by Centerbrook Architects from Connecticut and constructed by Dimeo Construction Co. from Rhode Island, will have 49 hotel rooms, 23 private residences, meeting and events rooms, a club room, a spa with pool and exercise facilities, public bars, restaurants with outdoor decks overlooking thrilling panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean, and direct access to one of New England’s most beautiful and dramatic ocean front beaches. How matters progressed to this point is an adventurous tale that combines high finance and daring with a “not-your-grandfather’s” approach to preservation.

Exterior detail, Ocean House design by Centerbrook Architects

Chuck Royce, a summer resident of Watch Hill and the moving force behind the project, wanted to preserve Ocean House and hired Centerbrook to evaluate the feasibility of doing so. We determined that in order to save it we had to destroy it, concluding that replication was its only salvation. However, first we had to convince a skeptical historic preservation community that such a drastic step was necessary. We focused on a number of factors, not the least of which were the building’s many insurmountable code violations and the dilapidated condition of the building’s long-neglected and frequently compromised structure. We also had to make the case that simply replicating the last incarnation of the building, which had undergone numerous and often non-felicitous changes throughout its life, would be wrong historically, aesthetically, and functionally. Instead, we argued, we should return to the Ocean House of 1908, indisputably its heyday.

Deck view- the Atlantic Ocean

To some, preservation of Ocean House meant saving the building exactly as it was when we started the project, even if it meant taking down whole sections of the building, restoring them and replacing them exactly as they had been. We countered that a viable Ocean House needed to move economically as well as architecturally into the new century while maintaining a strong foothold in its illustrious past. We also pointed to several highly regarded success stories of historic treasures that had been entirely torn down and replicated rather than restored, most notably The Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The preservation of Ocean House, we believed, could succeed if historically important aspects that had been lost over time could be resurrected in the new Ocean House alongside many of the appealing and architecturally important features that had survived the years of cobbled-on additions.

For example, at some point after 1908, the Ocean House’s signature Mansard roof on its tower had been replaced with a simple hipped roof for the purpose, we had been told, of accommodating a new invention inside, a mechanical elevator by Otis. Its once broad and iconic crown, with a widow’s walk top, had sadly vanished. But in Royce’s project, as we salvaged key features from the building we tore down, such as fan light windows and doors, a memorable fireplace stone by stone, an oak paneled elevator, and a well worn and beloved reception desk, and as we replicated other features exactly from molds and measurements we had painstakingly recorded, we also brought the original Mansard roof of the tower back to life in all its atavistic grandeur.

The New Ocean House, south elevation

To further make the replication as authentic as possible, we built those parts of the building located down at grade level, where close inspection by the hands and eyes of guests and visitors would occur, out of wood that would show over time desirable effects of aging, rather than of more durable, state of the art, synthetic materials.

A strict preservation of the building as we found it would have doomed the project. The exigencies of shoreline wind and rain, and new building code requirements, imposed in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, alone were strong arguments against the literal approach to saving Ocean House. To those who lamented “But it won’t be the same building,” others countered with, “Ocean House always underwent additions, demolitions, renovations, modernizations and was never really ‘the same building’ all along.”

The beach at Napatree, Watch Hill, R.I., 1950s postcard

When it opens this June, the grand hotel will be bigger than it was in order to simply meet the requirements of modern day support facilities such as kitchens, loading docks, mechanical rooms, exit stairs, staff facilities, and a spa. However, while it is larger in area than before, it was designed to be smaller in appearance. This slight of hand was achieved by building much of the new building underground and into the hillside, out of view from the street and neighboring properties. The design also melds needed modern amenities with the cherished charms of yesteryear and includes two new wings extending out from the replicated “historic kernel. These wings form an enclave that shields the neighboring houses from the commotion of hotel activities. The wings are in keeping architecturally with the historic building while embodying certain modern strivings of their own.

One review is already in: A summer visitor who had been away for a few years stopped by the site and exclaimed, “I thought they were going to tear it down!”

by Jefferson B. Riley, FAIA, Contributing Writer

Jenny Saville, Reverse, 2003

And by obligation, of course, I mean the artist’s motivation to deliver a work of art to the world that represents a highly individualized statement about a relevant theme or subject. In doing so, should the impact, legitimacy and enduring success of that creative effort be measured by the response of the viewer, alone? Is art deemed ‘important’ or ‘timeless’ if it resonates with the consciousness of the public? Or is it ultimately a private exercise in expression by the artist, requiring no moral or didactic justification, wherein capturing the attention and interest of the viewer is merely incidental? Is it true, as French artist and critic, Théophile Gauthier, argued in the 19th century, that the artist’s embrace of, ‘Art for art’s sake’ would protect him from the purely utilitarian and pragmatic demands of public taste and other external influences? And must art remain aloof from the currents of public taste to remain cogent today? This polemic is at the heart and soul of the long-standing debate about the creative forces that have shaped the artistic arena in the modern era.   

Rouen Book of Hours. The Kiss of Judas, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

 Through the ages, art’s primary function has been to inspire, instruct or document. The threads of both narrative and spiritual content have woven their way through art since the dawn of civilization: that of the Neolithic cave paintings of Lascaux; the fecund sculptural fetishes of the Etruscans; the Egyptian tomb reliefs of Tutenkhamun, laboriously-executed illuminated Biblical texts, Medieval tapestries, Orthodox Christian iconography and even early Gothic paintings from various regions of Europe, were all created in the service of nobility and the underlying tenets of a particular culture’s shared beliefs. For millennia, art has served to glorify military victories, memorialize royal accomplishments, offer devotional guidance for illiterate and errant religious devotees (as well as to reinforce the message for the faithful) and capture, for all time, the countenances of both the privileged and working classes from centuries long-past.   

Bust of Plato, Museo Capitalini, Rome

 Greco-Roman Classicism represented, for many, the epitome of beauty, form and balance. In art, architecture, literature and philosophy, the Golden Age of Reason has long endured as a standard against which all beautiful (read: aesthetically pleasing) objects d’art are judged. For Plato, beauty and pleasure go hand-in-hand; for one, ‘cannot experience ideal beauty without being provoked to pleasure while in its presence.’ While over the ages, the objective definition of beauty and its effects on the viewer have remained elusive, the debate over the role of the artist in the creation of visually-pleasing forms of expression has, in the last 150-years-or-so, become a source of hot debate.   

Mechanized farming in the early 19th century revolutionized productivity

 This debate had its beginnings in Florence, Italy, in the 16th century, when the city became center-stage for the emergence of a new sensibility about Man in the world. History had reached a ‘tipping point’, in the form of renewed interest and re-examination of the presumed moral high ground of Greek and Roman culture. A unique concentration of brilliant minds, power, money and regional political influence propelled Florence and men like, Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi and others there into the mainstream of intellectual debate on the world stage (then, central Europe). The progressive thinking and creations of these men, along with Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Emannuel Kant, Francis Bacon and others reflected a bold (if not heretical) view of man’s role in the natural order of the universe and a diminishing role for the Church in defining and enforcing its dogmatic principles. Ironically, it was this revival of Classicism and the enlightened writings of a handful of philosophers and scientists that truly ushered in the dawn of modernism.   

Whistler denounced specific interpretaion and called this, Symphony in White, Number 1

 Modern thought was not propelled by philosophy and scientific inquiry alone, with its underpinnings in a new belief that the rational mind could seek answers through observation and deductive reasoning. Additionally, a sea-change in the political and economic realities of Western Europe had reached critical mass by the middle of the 18th century. The success of the American Revolution in breaking the back of the world’s most powerful colonial power; the Humanitarian and Reformation movements of the period; mass migration to European urban centers in search of economic opportunities; the emergence of machine-powered manufacturing techniques and the weakening of oppressive empires in the face of human rights initiatives, all helped set the stage over a period of two-centuries. This confluence of forces helped plunge Western European civilization into the throes of lasting change.   

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

 By the mid-19th century, the stage was set for a new frame-of-reference to be applied to the work of artists. The liberal leanings of the Humanists were still at odds with the more conservative schools of thought in the classically-influenced fields of the arts and humanities. But, increasingly, artists were embracing the humanistic vision of a search for ‘truth’ enjoyed in other circles of society, in their own particular creative arena. The initial battleground was France, where the traditionally-trained painters of the Écoles des Beaux-Arts were pitted against the experimentalists. The more permissive government of the Second Republic, under Louis-Napoleon, cleared the way for artists like Manet, Delacroix, Courbet, Monet and others to break ties with the art establishment and develop their own means of self-expression through paint.   

By 1890, there were further indications that artistic endeavor was being reduced to a matter of color, form and line. Progressive, modernist painter and ex-patriot, James McNeil Whistler wrote, ‘Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All of these have no kind of concern with it.’   

Just a year later, the rebellion against public appeasement (driven by a need to establish a ‘line-in-the-sand’ against the conservative community of critics that dogged them) gained another voice, when Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘The beauty [of art] comes from the fact that the author is what he is…The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered an artist.’   

Joan Miro, Lithograph VII, (856), 1971

By the early 20th century, modern technology held a firm grasp on the intellectual community. Science and industrial innovation promised a bright future for the world. Progressive artistic communities in Italy, Germany, Russia and France met to plan and find ways to deliver their artistic vision, so that society, as they knew it, might be reshaped. Hopes ran high, but the notion that a painting could alter the course of history was soon dashed by the horrors of World War I and political and economic upheaval in its aftermath. The modern dream of a brave new world, defined by technology, would have to wait.   

In the ensuing years between world wars, the modernist message emphasized form over aesthetics, self-referential artistic intent over formalistic studio techniques and the promotion of socially disruptive or disturbing imagery by such movements as the Cubists, Dadists, Supermatists and Surrealists–all aimed at challenging the viewer’s conventional notion of art–through deliberate manipulation of content in their work. While considered only modestly provocative by today’s standards, artists working in the first half of the 20th century managed to set a standard that pitted the artist, with his personalized agenda, against the viewer in a way that still echoes today. It reverberates in the common misuse of the word ‘modern’ to describe, for many, all art that is not easily understood or which falls into the realm of the non-representational . While the modern period spanned the years from 1860-1945 (approx.), the term is often applied to the formalistic and stylistic elements of any work that appears to break with traditional painterly methods or themes readily connected to our everyday lives.   

Frederick Church, Autumn in North America, 1856. Courtesy Loeb Art Center, Vassar College

 Contemporary artists have struggled to bring social and personal relevance back to the visual arts (including performance and installation art). To this end, they have sought alternative materials and methods to achieve optimum emotional impact. Artists are, once again, embracing real-world themes and collectively extending their creative reach into socially significant areas. Today’s art argues for confrontation, paradigm shifts and disquieting moments. The risk that art will succeed or fail in the public arena is greater today than ever before (e.g. -will not engage the viewer). Painting a beautiful picture (in the Platonic sense) can insure that public opinion will likely fall in your favor. But, philosopher and critic, John Locke, argued that there is a distinction between ‘beauty’ (joy and cheerfulness) and ‘sublimity’ (awe and amazement). 

Andy Goldsworthy, from, Encounters with Nature, 2005

The Hudson River painters of the mid-1800s strove to achieve the sublime in their monumental works. For us today, that connotes the awesome specter of nature bathed in the divine light of the Creator. It is John Updike, in his book of essays, Still Looking, when reviewing an exhibition of Hudson River School painters, that he references Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on, “…Origin of…the Sublime and Beautiful”. There, Burke cites the sublime as, ‘analogous with terror; that is …productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.’ Updike equates ‘the sublime’ with Burke’s reference to, ‘the storm, the precipice, the waterfall’—imagery that repeatedly finds itself at the heart of the Hudson River genre.   

By this distinction, today’s progressive artists are seeking sublimity, not beauty, in their work. Their desire and intention is, as Updike says of post-modern landscape painter, Barnett Newman, regarding his painting, In Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51): ‘The danger and pain of the Abstract Sublime belonged to the painter, performing his high wire act with only intuition and impulse to guide him across the immensity of the canvas. The painter assumed the role of hero…in his visible wrestle with the paint itself.’   

The unanswered question is whether contemporary artists are able to span the chasm between their private world of emotions and succeed in engaging ours—the viewer– absent the narrative and spiritual bases that guided our relationship with the painter’s craft for so many centuries? Is the museum or gallery visitor prepared for a sublime, rather than a beautiful experience?