Category Archives: Visual Art

Bob Hicks, General, Theater, Visual Art

Link: Life, interrupted by Auschwitz

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By Bob Hicks

Charlotte Salomon was a Jewish girl who had the fortune to grow up amid a well-to-do creative family, the misfortune of growing up in a family that seemed to thrive on a certain amount of emotional drama, and the utter disaster of being born in Germany in 1917, which placed her smack in the middle of the rise of Nazism.

Jamie M. Rea as Charlotte Salomon in "Life? or Theater?" Photo courtesy Jewish Theatre Collaborative.Her life, like so many others, ended in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, where she died in 1943, at age 26. But in a few fevered final months of 1941 and ’42, before she was shipped off from her refuge in southern France to the concentration camp, she left her mark on the world — a mark that, remarkably, survived, even though Charlotte did not. In those months the young artist created a portfolio of more than 700 paintings, many also covered with words or musical notations, that together amounted to an autobiography.

Director Sacha Reich has adapted Salomon’s story to the stage in the play Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theater?, which is running through Feb. 20 at Disjecta in a production by the Jewish Theatre Collaborative. It’s a fascinating story, told in an expressionistic self-conscious style that seems to echo Salomon’s approach to her own art. I reviewed it in Monday morning’s Oregonian, where it ran in a brief version. You can read the longer Oregon Live online version here.

Charlotte’s remarkable life’s work survives at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and you can see examples of her painting online here. Her story is one more reminder, if we needed one in our ethnically and religiously riven world, of the insanity of human culture, and one more reminder of the hope of the human spirit that thrives in spite of it.

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Jamie M. Rea as Charlotte Salomon in “Life? or Theater?” Photo courtesy Jewish Theatre Collaborative.

General, Journalism, Visual Art

Portland collects: nailing down the story

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Pablo Picasso, "Blind Minotaur, Guided through a Starry Night by Marie-Therese with a Pigeon)," 1934-35 from the Suite Vollard, 1930-37. Aquatint, drypoint, and engraving with scraping, edition of 250, Anonymous loan.

By Bob Hicks

Riches of the City: Portland Collects, the 237-work exhibition of art loaned by 83 of the city’s collectors from their private collections, opens Saturday at the Portland Art Museum, and I reviewed it in this morning’s Oregonian. You can read the review online here, but if you pick up a copy of the morning paper, this is one instance where you’re better off seeing it in print. It’s the cover story of the A&E section, and it includes a lot more pictures than the online edition, including photographer Thomas Boyd’s fine portraits of collectors Jordan Schnitzer, Bonnie Serkin and Chris Rauschenberg with some of their art.

Roy DeForest, "Forest Hermit," 1990, Acrylic on canvas with artist-carved frame, Collection of Arlene and Harold Schnitzer.The review stands pretty much on its own, as an overview of what is an overview exhibition. Each of the exhibit’s six areas of concentration makes up its own statement, and each could have been reviewed rigorously on its own, but for most viewers — and for the museum itself — the larger picture is more important.

So instead of listening to me go into more detail about specific works, I thought you might be interested in reading about how the whole package (the newspaper package, not the museum’s, which took a whole lot longer to negotiate and assemble) came together. The process is both complex and routine, and is a good example of what an amazing structure the modern newspaper is, for all its historical failings and current flailings. Keep in mind, this is an ordinary story that could be planned, not the unexpected emergency that sends journalists into deep scramble mode. Someday someone will write the story of how news of today’s Egyptian crisis reached the world. It’ll read like an unusually fascinating operating manual to a great big complex machine that’s constantly being retooled and reinvented while it’s operating full steam ahead.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Museums onscreen: Google Art Project

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UPDATE: The New York Times’ Roberta Smith took the Art Project on a long test drive and filed this excellent report on what works well and what still needs to be done, emphasizing that this is very much a work in progress.

"The Harvesters," by Pieter Bruegel the Elder," Metropolitan Museum of Art. Detail from Google Art Project.

By Bob Hicks

Say you have a hankering to see Hans Holbein the Younger‘s portrait The Merchant Georg Gisze but you just can’t get away to Berlin today to see it where it hangs, in the Gemäldegalerie.

You can always go online. But chances are that when you find it, the image will be pretty poor quality. And what if you want to examine it closely, to see Holbein’s brushstrokes or the effects of craquelure?

Then you might want to check out the new Google Art Project, which is bringing gallery tours and specific artworks together from 17 major international institutions, including the Gemaldegalerie. Not every great museum is on this list, but the 17 are pretty impressive.

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Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

Budget ax takes forty whacks

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By Bob Hicks

All right, times are tough all over. But who’d’a thunk Lizzie Borden would be getting the ax after all these years?

Lizzie Borden, ca. 1889. Wikimedia Commons.This morning’s Art Daily passes along a brief item from the Associated Press reporting that the 40 Whacks Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is going out of business after two years: high costs, low attendance.

The museum’s existence in Salem, about 70 miles north of Fall River, where Borden was acquitted of hatcheting to death her father and stepmother in 1892, was a bit of a puzzler. But then, Salem, where Mr. Scatter briefly lived almost 40 years ago, bases a good deal of its economy on commemoration and re-creation of its past, from its witch trials to its seafaring days — so why not steal another town’s infamy?

Four or five years ago, on a visit to Massachusetts, Mr. Scatter took the Scatter family to see the house where he’d lived in old town Salem, only to discover it had been torn down to make room for the front lawn of the rebuilt Peabody Essex Museum — a very good regional museum, by the way, run by Dan Monroe, a onetime director of the Portland Art Museum. To assuage their keen disappointment, Mr. Scatter took the family to the New England Pirate Museum, where several T-shirts and a treasure map were bought.

When they saw what they had done, the Scatters cried, “The pirates won!”

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PHOTO: Lizzie Borden, ca. 1889. Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

Sneak peek at the new Broad in L.A.

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Artist's conception of new Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles. Diller Scofidio + Renfro

By Bob Hicks

From Art Daily, the first look at designs for the new Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles. The 120,000-square-foot museum will house the expansive modern collections of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, and in at least one way it aims to be friendly: It’ll be known as “The Broad,” something in the manner of Portland’s Dolores Winningstad Theatre (“The Winnie”) and Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (“The Schnitz”). Maybe it doesn’t have a lot of choice: It’s across the street from the supersonic flapping wings of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, as well as MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. It’ll build on what’s already a significant cultural district.

Designed by Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (which also handled the makeover of Lincoln Center in New York and created the not-yet-inflated “Bubble” at the Hirschorn in Washington, D.C.), The Broad will be a great big honeycomb with nearly an acre of column-free gallery space. It’s due to open in two years. The era of big-statement architectural designs for new museum buildings came tumbling down with the collapse of the world economy in 2008, but it’s not quite dead yet. It’ll be fascinating to see how the new Broad plays out.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Muzzled: the art world strikes back

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By Bob Hicks

We are the land of the free, except, of course, when we aren’t. Fortunately, when we aren’t, we are still sometimes the home of the brave — or at least, of the politically canny.

David Wojnarowicz self-portrait/Wikimedia CommonsIn the latest turn in the David Wojnarowicz flap, the Associated Press reports that the Andy Warhol Foundation has given an ultimatum to the Smithsonian Institution and its National Portrait Gallery: restore Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly to the gallery’s exhibit Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, from which it was removed after complaints from the Catholic League and U.S. Rep. John Boehner, or say bye-bye to any future Warhol checks.

We’re not talking fifty bucks and a bag of popcorn. The Warhol Foundation has given $375,000 to Smithsonian museums in the past three years, including $100,000 for Hide/Seek, a show that explores the impact of sexual orientation on art. So far the Smithsonian hasn’t blinked. We’ll miss the money, it’s essentially said, but we won’t be bullied into changing our minds. That’s a neat spin, invoking principle and bravery to defend an act that was itself a craven and expedient caving-in to political pressure. The whole tawdry affair makes Wojnarowicz’s lips-sewn-together self-portrait shown here seem disturbingly prescient. Speak no evil, indeed.

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Bob Hicks, Books, General, Visual Art

Gulliver’s Travels, unbowdlerized

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Luis Quintanilla, illustrator, Yahoos fighting, "Gulliver's Travels," Crown Publishers 1947.

By Bob Hicks

It’s possible Mr. Scatter should have kept his mouth shut.

There he was, scanning the shelves at the local outlet of a mega-mega multinational book store, when a man and his son approached, trailing a clerk behind them. The boy looked to be 10 or 11, and he and his father had seen something on television about a new movie version of Gulliver’s Travels coming out later this month (Jack Black stars as a travel writer on assignment to Bermuda), and they thought it’d be fun to read the book before they saw the movie. But what version?

dscn0629“You probably want one of the adaptations,” the clerk said helpfully. “The language is modernized, and they’re a lot easier for kids to read than the original.”

Having fulfilled her function, she walked away, never having mentioned that most adaptations also snip out big uncomfortable chunks of the text.

Father and son stood undecided, not sure whether to go for the condensed version or the real thing.

“Buy the original,” Mr. Scatter found himself saying. “It’s lots better.”

Well, it is. Jonathan Swift‘s novel, first published in 1726 under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, is one of the most hacked-at and sanitized books ever written, and those are the versions, unfortunately, in which most people encounter it. That seems to be largely because its fantastical elements (little people, giants, talking horses, flying cities) tilt it toward the catch-all of children’s literature, despite its often coarse detail and sophisticated adult themes. It is, underneath the flimsiest tissue of whimsy, a scabrous satire on European morals and politics, and quite rude on the subject of bodily functions, and such things will never do for the young and tender-cheeked. (Nor is it the only book to be hogtied and forcibly hustled into the children’s playpen in spite of its original intentions. It’s a bit of a jolt to remember that the Grimm folk and fairy tales, which have been so resolutely cleansed and prettified for nursery and adolescent consumption in the almost 200 years since the brothers first published them, were themselves sanitized versions of older, even more savage folk traditions.) In brief: Take out the scruffy parts of Gulliver’s Travels and you’ve ripped out its heart and soul.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

The canvas goes blank: Farewell to Nathan Oliveira and Beth Van Hoesen

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Nathan Oliveira, "Nineteen Twenty-Nine," oil on canvas, 1961. Smithsonian American Art Museum/Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.

By Bob Hicks

We’ve arrived at a time when many of the bright figures of 20th century art are slipping away into that final blankness that artists seem to anticipate better than the rest of us. Maybe it’s because artists begin each day with a blank canvas or paper and understand that the void is both an opportunity and an inevitability.

In the past week two fine West Coast artists, both based in San Francisco but well-known in Portland art circles, have died. Nathan Oliveira, who died last Saturday, was 81. Beth Van Hoesen, who died on Tuesday, was 84.

Beth Van Hoesen, "Boris," aquatint, etching, and dryprint, 1981.Both were figurative artists, although in very different ways and with very different outlooks and techniques. Oliveira, who is represented in Portland by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, was primarily a painter and sculptor (he also produced a lot of very good prints) and he was very much a modernist, an artist who explored the psychological dark corners. Van Hoesen was primarily a printmaker and an observer of the small wonders of life, a meticulous craftswoman and traditionalist whose skills and approach harked back to the likes of Durer. You can read Van Hoesen’s obituary here.

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General, Laura Grimes, Visual Art

The calculus of photography and life

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By Laura Grimes

Sometimes life plays tricks and secrets sneak up when you least expect them. Hidden talents. Buried stories.

Three months ago I went to a high school reunion. (I won’t tell which one.) Before this year I had been a pill about attending them. I had really terrific friends in school. I had lots of great memories. But that was then and my life now seemed so far removed.

Invariably every five years some of my closest friends from school would make all the reunion arrangements, I would ignore them, and as the date drew close my phone would ring. “Grimes, get your butt up here!” And I would oblige.

Of course, I would have a great time. Laugh my guts out. What was I thinking? I was such a twit.

So this year, I just gave myself over to it from the beginning. (The phone call was looming anyway. I really didn’t have a choice.) I paid early and booked a room with friends. I looked forward to it.

But something very curious happened this time.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Jack Levine: farewell to a great satirist

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Jack Levine, "Street Scene #2," oil on masonite, 27 x 37.5 inches, 1938. Helen Thurston Ayer Fund, 43.5/Portland Art Museum

By Bob Hicks

One of the odd things about fame and notoriety is that they freeze people in time, to those moments or years when they were outsized public figures, no matter that they might have eaten breakfast and traveled and read books and made love and voted in the local county commission race and helped fix Thanksgiving dinner with their children for many years afterwards in a state of semi-obscurity. It’s the story Billy Wilder was getting at in Sunset Boulevard, I suppose, although he was more concerned with Norma Desmond’s unhinged inability to deal with her loss of celebrity than in the public’s collective amnesia about her.

The other day my friend John, who’d just been in Kentucky, excitedly showed me a snapshot he’d taken of an oil painting he’d discovered on a distillery wall. It was a Thomas Hart Benton, and a good one, which Benton had painted for the distiller in the early 1950s, a couple of decades after the artist’s brawny regionalist images had set him firmly in the public mind as a sort of Grant Wood with muscles. We were surprised that he’d created such a good and representative piece so late in life — or so we thought, until we looked it up and discovered Benton had lived until 1975, well into the Age of Aquarius. It wasn’t his fault that art and audiences had moved on to other things: He was fixed in our minds as a highly talented 1930s American regionalist.

Then, last night, I discovered while looking through ArtDaily.org that Jack Levine, one of my favorite American painters, had died on Monday at age 95. Here‘s the ArtDaily link, which pairs the Associated Press obituary by Karen Matthews with a good color reproduction of Levine’s wonderful 1946 painting of post-war avarice, Welcome Home. And here is William Grimes’s very good obituary from the New York Times.

Again, I was surprised, because I’d had no idea Levine was still alive. He seemed a figure from an earlier time, a social realist with a strong satiric bent, one of those admirable 1930s and 1940s characters who believed that art had a crucial and very public role to play in the great brawling melodrama of American democracy. Ben Shahn was another.

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