Art of the Day

Sollie 17

Edward Kienholz 

"Kienholz' work during the 1970s and 1980s became more sophisticated and elaborate. In a later example entitled Sollie 17 (1979-1980) Kienholz placed three cast images of the same man within a realistically constructed dilapidated urban dwelling. Clad only in a pair of baggy undershorts, the old man is seen lying on a soiled bed reading a pulp Western. On the right edge of the bed the same man sits. His head - a framed photograph attached to the cast body - is downcast as the lonely man plays a game of cards. Finally the man is seen to the rear gazing out a window which opens onto an urban cityscape. The barrenness of the man's life is echoed in the bare bulb that illuminates this sordid interior from above. This is a powerful image of alienation and the despair of a vacuous life; a life wherein time is not measured by a clock but by the water that drips from a faulty tap. Kienholz reproduced familiar environments by taking discarded objects from everyday life and assembling them in such a way that they took on a renewed significance. With an uncanny eye for detail and arrangement Kienholz orchestrated frozen dramas. By demanding that the viewers take an active part in his play he confronts them with images of themselves and the world around them. Everything suddenly becomes imbued with an allegorical significance and a once familiar world becomes hostile. Kienholz acknowledged that his wife often assisted him in his work. After 1973 Kienholz spent six months of each year in Berlin and the other six months in Hope, Idaho. Kienholz died of a heart attack on June 10, 1994 in Hope, Idaho. His burial was reminiscent of his "tableaux." He was buried in the passenger seat of a 1940 Packard coupe with the ashes of his dog in the back seat and, in the glovebox, a bottle of vintage wine. In 1996, a retrospective of his work was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York."
-Answers

Quote of the Day

"I realized that I should have had only 30 women in the show." 

- Peggy Guggenheim, after her husband Max Ernst left her for Dorothea Tanning, one of the thirty-one artists represented at Art of This Century's Exhibition by 31 Women

Artist of the Day

Diane Arbus

Three decades after Diane Arbus took her own life, her controversial portraits of the eccentric, the freakish and the alienated continue to exert a powerful influence on modern photography. "Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted to go and do whatever I wanted to do," Arbus said. With a camera as a shield, she entered a world far beyond the affluent New York of her youth, and returned with unforgettable images-the exasperated child with a toy hand grenade, an unsettling pair of twins, a Jewish giant towering over his parents-that have become icons of strangeness and pathos.

 Born in New York City on March 14, 1923, the eldest daughter of David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek, Diane was raised in a household of unusual privilege. Her mother's family owned the Russeks chain of fur and department stores, where her father worked as merchandising director. The son of a grocer, David Nemerov had worked his way up from the position of a window dresser to marry the founder's daughter. Diane, her elder brother Howard and her younger sister Renée were all born into a noveau riche family of the New York fashion circle, where the image of prosperity counted even more than wealth itself. 

Of her childhood, Diane would later say: "I was treated like a crummy princess." A private, intelligent girl, highly devoted to her brother, Diane was nevertheless expected to conform to an affluent Jewish ideal that included expensive clothes, piano lessons and the prospect of becoming a full-time wife and mother. This sheltered upbringing, in which she was shielded from all signs of poverty or strangeness, would one day drive her to seek out images of darkness and transgression against societal norms in her work as a photographer. 

Even as a child, Diane rebelled against her family in small ways. Though her father objected to the artistic ambitions of his children, Diane excelled in painting at Fieldston, a private school in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, and confessed that she wanted to be a "great sad artist" when she grew up. (Eventually, the Nemerov children all became artists, notably Howard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1988-1990.) In 1937, when Diane was 14, an even greater rebellion presented itself: she fell in love with Allan Arbus, a copy boy in the Russeks art department-and insisted that she wanted to marry him right away. 

Despite the fact that their own marriage had also crossed social boundaries, Diane's parents strongly opposed her romance with this 19 year old whose only ambition was to become an actor. Nonetheless, she and Allan continued a clandestine courtship for the next four years. While her brother went off to Harvard University, Diane insisted that marriage was all she wanted. Finally, her parents relented, and she and Allan were married on April 10, 1941, shortly after Diane's eighteenth birthday. 

During World War II, Allan was trained in combat photography. After his return, he and Diane began to support themselves as fashion photographers. Diane learned the trade secondhand, assisting Allan at photo shoots and taking lessons from him in the darkroom. Their first major account was photographing Russeks fashion and furs for newspaper ads; other clients soon followed, and by 1947 they were shooting fashion speads for Glamour, Vogue and other magazines on a regular basis. 

As a fashion duo, the couple had an almost symbiotic relationship, working in close collaboration on all their assignments. Despite their apparent success, however, they often struggled: fashion work did not pay very well, and Diane's family refused to help support the young couple. Diane herself sometimes suffered from intense depression, which rarely had a visible cause, and may have been genetic in nature. In any case, she insisted that she wanted nothing more than to be a faithful wife and a loving mother to their two daughters, Doon and Amy. 

 Moreover, neither Diane nor Allan found fashion photography-with its sameness and lack of artistic freedom-very satisfying. Allan continued to dream of success as an actor, while Diane began to take pictures on her own. Chronically shy at first, she began by photographing children and her friends; in 1957, however, she withdrew from fashion work to pursue her own projects full-time. She admired photographer Lisette Model, who was famous for her pictures of poverty and the grotesque; after repeatedly calling Model in hopes of purchasing one of her photographs, she was invited to join Model's art class. 

During this period, the elements of Diane's characteristic style began to emerge. Like Model, Diane felt that photography was an exchange between artist and subject, and that it often took many exposures to bring out the subject's true character. Diane was drawn to the strange, even the taboo. "I want to photograph what is evil," she told Model, and with her 35-mm camera as a shield, she ventured into unusual places (tenements, Coney Island, circuses, Hubert's Freak Museum), snapping hundreds of pictures. 

Soon afterward, the Arbuses' marriage crumbled. There was apparently infidelity on both sides. Years earlier, Diane had engaged a brief affair with Alex Eliot, the art editor of Time and a longtime mutual friend of the Arbuses; later, Allan fell in love with a woman in one of his acting classes. In 1959, they decided to separate, though they did not divorce for another decade, and Allan continued to send money to Diane and their children when he could. (As an actor, Allan eventually found success, notably in a featured role on the television series M*A*S*H.) 

Though deeply depressed by the separation, Diane continued to work, contributing photo essays to Esquire magazine. She photographed people on the street as well as such unconventional subjects as dwarves, giants and transvestites, taking many exposures until she captured the strangeness in the ordinary and the humanity of the strange. Most of her pictures were composed like conventional portraits, with the subject looking directly into the camera lens; the Rolleiflex camera she used provided great clarity and vividness within its square frame. 

To obtain the emotional immediacy that made her pictures so famous, Diane Arbus often went to extremes, sometimes following her subjects into their homes. Rumor has it that Arbus slept with many of her subjects; in any case, she became much more sexually adventurous after her separation. "Taking a portrait is like seducing someone," she told a friend, and she seems to have approached sex much as she did photography: as a way of testing herself, of having novel experiences and fighting off depression. 

By the early 1960s, Arbus's uncanny magazine work had become highly regarded in the intimate circle of New York artists and publishers. As her reputation grew, she began to receive fashion and celebrity assignments from such publications as Show and Harper's Bazaar, where her friend Marvin Israel worked as art director. Her subjects included Mae West, Marcello Mastroianni and Norman Mailer-who commented that "Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby." She also began experimenting with a direct flash, which seemed to peel away the public faces of her subjects. This use of the flash, along with the square frame, became one of the most widely imitated features of her work. 

Three Arbus pictures were included in a 1965 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, "Recent Acquisitions." Reaction to Arbus's portraits of nudists and female impersonators was sharply divided; workers at the museum had to come in early to wipe the spit off her photographs. Similar controversy greeted the 1967 show "New Documents," in which her disturbing portraits were given a room of their own. That show is now seen as a landmark in this history of photography, but at the time, Arbus was wary of being stereotyped as a photographer of "freaks." 

With her younger daughter away at school, Arbus moved into an artists' colony in New York, where she taught a class in photography. In her lessons, she emphasized that a picture was the product of the relationship between artist and subject: a photographer's truest art lay in coaxing a moment of revelation from a sometimes-reluctant individual. At the same time, however, Arbus had begun to take pictures of mentally retarded patients at a home in Vineland, New Jersey-subjects who were completely absorbed in themselves, whom she could never control or reach. This frustration contributed to the depression and loneliness that had long been part of Arbus's life. 

On July 26, 1971, Diane Arbus committed suicide by slashing her wrists. Her friend Marvin Israel found her two days later, lying fully clothed in her bathtub. A rumor arose that Arbus had taken pictures of herself as she lay dying, but no film was ever recovered. Because Arbus left no note or other message, the reason for her suicide remains uncertain. Her reputation has only increased since her death, due largely to a famous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the publication of several collections of her photographs, edited by Marvin Israel and her daughter Doon. 


 Brain-Juice

Art of the Day

Date

13th Century

Medium

Bronze

Dimensions

object: 40 3/4 x 15 3/4 x 14 1/4 in. (103.5 x 40.0 x 36.2 cm)

Department

Asian Art

Classification

Sculpture

Credit

Founders Society Purchase, Sarah Bacon Hill Fund

-Detroit Institute of Art

Photograph

Josef Albers's collage of photos of Gropius with Shifra Carnesi, taken in Ascona, 1930.

Quote of the Day

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

RIP

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the most formidable leaders of the 20th century, died Monday morning from a stroke, reports The Telegraph. She was 87.

"It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning. A further statement will be made later," confirmed Thatcher's spokesman.

As the first female British prime minister and a member of the Conservative Party, Thatcher was a polarizing figure in British politics, serving from 1979-1990. On one hand, she was lauded for her bold condemnation against Communism—it was the Soviets themselves who coined her "The Iron Lady"; on the other hand, her approach to the economy by privatizing aspects of Britain’s government and for reducing social services and restricting labor unions unleashed a fury of accusations that she was destroying the country's safety net.

One of the key turning points in Thatcher's political career was when she helped Britain achieve victory over Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982. Although sovereignty of the islands was not settled, her popularity soared, helping assure her re-election in 1983.

As one of only a handful of female world leaders, Thatcher cultivated close relationships with politicians, including U.S. President Ronald Reagan; the two are considered pivotal "architects of the West’s victory in the Cold War." Thatcher also became a fan of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of “perestroika,” which was a movement to reform Communism.

Thatcher left office in November 1990 after serving three terms as prime minister. She was given the title “Baroness,” and she was welcomed into the highest order of knighthood in England, the order of the garter. She also established the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, an organization dedicated to encouraging free trade, free enterprise, and democracy throughout the world.

Thatcher's health started to suffer through a series of strokes starting in 2001, and in 2008, her daughter Carol announced she had been diagnosed with dementia.

Thatcher is survived by her son and daughter. Her husband of almost 52 years, Sir Dennis, died in 2003.

Art of the Day

The Code of Hammurabi

Perhaps the most remarkable and influential creation of its time, Hammurabi’s code is the oldest set of laws known to exist. Hammurabi, king and chief priest of Babylonia from 1792-1750 B.C., expanded his empire greatly before focusing his energies toward wealth and justice for his people. He created a code protecting all classes of Babylonian society, including women and slaves. He sought protection of the weak from the powerful and the poor from the rich. The carving on the stone on which the code is written depicts Hammurabi receiving the divine laws from the sun god, the god most often associated with justice. This stone was unearthed by French archaeologists at S_sa, Iraq (ancient Elam), in 1901-02. The black diorite rock is 2.4 m high and had been broken into three pieces.

Hammurabi’s Code is 44 columns of text, 28 paragraphs of which contain the actual code. There are 282 laws (possibly more have been rubbed off) that probably amend common Babylonian law rather than define it. It describes regulations for legal procedure, fixes rates on services performed in most branches of commerce and describes property rights, personal injury, and penalties for false testimony and accusations. It has no laws regarding religion.

The Code of Hammurabi is significant because its creation allowed men, women, slaves, and all others to read and understand the laws that governed their lives in Babylon. It is unique in that laws of other civilizations were not written down, and thus could be manipulated to suite the rulers that dictated them. The Code is particularly just for its time. Although it follows the practice of "an eye for an eye", it does not allow for vigilante justice, but rather demands a trial by judges. It also glorifies acts of peace and justice done during Hammurabi’s rule. It symbolizes not only the emergence of justice in the minds of men, but also man’s rise above ignorance and barbarism toward the peaceful and just societies still pursued today. In the words of Hammurabi as carved on the stone, "Let any oppressed man who has a cause come into the presence of my statue as king of justice, and have the inscription on my stele read out, and hear my precious words, that my stele may make the case clear to him; may he understand his cause, and may his heart be set at ease!"

-Oracle Thinkquest

Poetry

Demain, dès l'aube

Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.
J'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l'or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j'arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.


Tomorrow at Dawn

Tomorrow, at dawn, at the hour when the countryside is alit,
I will leave. See here, you know what I must do.
I will go through the forest, I will go across the mountain.
I will not remain far from you for long.

I will trudge on with eyes fixed on my thoughts,
Without seeing what it outside of me, without hearing any noise,
Alone, unknown, bent, with crossed hands,
Sad, and the day will be for me as night.

I will not notice either the golden sunset as night falls,
Nor the distant mist which descends over Harfleur,
And when I arrive, I will place on your grave
A bouquet of holly and heather in bloom.

by Victor Hugo dedicated to his young daughter Léopoldine Hugo after her death.

 

 

 

 

 

Art of the Day

Spring Landscape in Rain

Bai Xueshi
born 1915 China