Franz Kline ~ Reprised and with a Mind Open to all Kinds of Things

Okay, this is just not a reprised piece from our archives. I've decided to include some additional content that I came across while trolling the internet. Voice from the Couch knew that I wouldn't be able not to add to this site. Here's a nugget from Crown Point Press ~ well worth the five minutes.



Franz Kline 1959, Steve Martin 1981 ~ Rue  originally posted 02/05/09



This piece by Franz Kline, famous Abstract Expressionist painter, is entitled Rue (on loan to the Portland Art Museum from a private collection). Like his other paintings, Rue is the result of Kline having lived for many years in New York. He said that the feelings aroused in him by seeing the city for so long was what he painted. Although some abstract expressionist painters of his day left their paintings untitled. Kline chose to name many of them. Just before his first one man show he asked Willem and Elaine De Kooning to help him name his paintings. "[I]n a spirit of levity with a bottle of scotch on the table," was how Elaine would later describe the eight hour naming session. My own mind turns over the word rue and I chuckle thinking about the person who rues the day that he ate the rue he had found on the "rue".

Kline definitely belongs to the sub-group of abstract expressionists known as action painters. In my reading I found this quote from his friend Philip Pavia , "When I would visit Kline in his studio, he had stretched a large canvas on the wall, and underneath he would push with his feet a wood beer box to a certain spot. After a few trials and errors, he fixed the box into a right spot. He then slanted a plank from the floor with one end on the beer crate. A temporary ramp. Coming up the plank and down the plank, he slanted his brushstrokes for long strokes or short ones, and some of them were very loaded with paint."

Although Kline's paintings were the result of the emotions the city aroused in him and he didn't care to be in his painting, one owner of Rue did say that he could see himself in it. Steve Martin is listed as being the previous owner of this painting and had always said that he wanted to be part of it. The Portland Art Museum is also exhibiting the photo Annie Leibovitz took of Steve Martin in Beverly Hills when he posed for his portrait. Complete with black brushstrokes on his white suit, Martin realized his dream. A companion photo appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

The Top Ten

Here's our list of the top ten artists at Fifty Two Pieces and the pages that made them so popular. Like most popularity lists this one is skewed by length of time a page has been circulating on the internet. Although Raphael and La Donna Velata made the cut it was just barely. However, Raphael only first appeared during the last week of October. Part of the reason Josef Sudek is a front runner in popularity has to do with the world wide audience Fifty Two Pieces has. Visitors come from all over the world and make frequent revisits. Although most of the over 17,000 visitors are from the United States, Canada and Great Britain, people from over 100 countries have dropped in on Fifty Two Pieces.

Check out these artists and the other 42 that we have presented in the last year. For each one on the Top Ten List we've also included a link to all of their posts.

Franz Kline
Franz Kline - Rue and Steve Martin
Etchings and Poems

All things Franz Kline...



Sol LeWitt
All of Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes

Sol LeWitt's Letter to Eva Hesse

All things Sol LeWitt...

Karl Hofer

Early Hour

All things Karl Hofer...

Josef Sudek

Labyrinths and Windows

Prague Panoramics

Portraits of Czech Friends

All things Josef Sudek...

Roy Lichtenstein

Van Gogh Appropriations

Sweet Dreams Baby

All things Roy Lichtenstein...

William Adolph Bouguereau

Nature's Fan

All things Bouguereau...

Ann GaleInspiration from Lopez Garcia and Giacometti
And Lucian Freud

All things Ann Gale...

Gustave Courbet

Self Portraits

All thing Courbet...

Mark Rothko

No. 14 - 1960

Other Visiting Rothkos

All things Rothko...

Raphael

La Donna Velata and La Fornarina

All things Raphael...

Amy had this to say today...

My personal favorite, the artist I most enjoyed learning about this year, is you LaValle. This project taught me so much about partnership in writing and learning. It has been invaluable for me. I have logged into Fifty Two Pieces for the last time and no new years resolution will ever be the same.

LaValle had this to say on this last day of 2009...

Starting tomorrow, I'll no longer be thinking about what I'll be writing about on Fifty Two Pieces, nor will I be researching what that writing will be about, nor will I be waking up early to actually write it. Not doing all of that in turn will be leaving hours of extra time every day. What is she going to do you might ask? Voice from the Couch is also waiting to hear and not too patiently for that answer.

Well, I'll be starting a photography blog Portland Through My Lens. I'm challenging myself to ride the Portland Streetcar every day of 2010 and take photographs and post at least one of those images. The restrictions I'm imposing on myself are that the photos must be either from the streetcar or within two blocks of the streetcar. And I should amend the challenge to everyday that I'm in Portland since I do hope to travel sometime during the year. I'll have to come up with a sub-challenge for those days.

2009 has been a fine year, full of lots of planning, website maintenance and many discoveries. Thank you Amy for a great year. And thank you to everyone, all 17,000+ visitors, who have helped to make the year as good as it was.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Mark Rothko

Yesterday, Voice from the Couch couldn't put down the Monet and Modernism book. He had already read up on Andy Warhol and then found Mark Rothko in an earlier section. Voice had this to say... "Well of course, Rothko would be connected to Monet. This is great." Some time later, Voice let me have the book back and I was able to continue my reading on Rothko and some of his thoughts on Monet.

The reactions [of the viewers]...say unanimously my work has the power to convery anew way of looking. This message becomes visible through a new structural language they have never experienced before. In my pictures you find an unspoiled, conscious, elemental humanity. Even the pictures of Monet have something of this, which is why I prefer Monet to Cezanne... Despite the general view that Cezanne created a new way of looking at things and was the father of modern painting, I prefer Monet. Monet was the greater artist of the two. I don't agree with the current public opinion about the colorists and their art... because color in itself is among the sensory components of art.

This quote is from a conversation between Rothko and Alfred Jensen on June 17, 1953.

The two paintings above show Claude Monet's Water Lily painting from 1916 and on the right Mark Rothko's untitled, 1952 in similar yellow greens and lavenders. Rothko has taken the horizontal Monet with its visual field of waterlilies and made it vertical. Rothko carries the abstraction one more step. Take a look at the Rothko piece and you can that see his technique of taking spaces filled with color and then have them hover is very similar to the inner spaces of surface found in Monet's waterlily paintings.

And of course there is also the series aspect of Rothko's work. Much like Warhol (see yesterday's posting), Rothko is indebted to Monet for pioneering the concept of repetition, the creation of a series. A prime example of that would be his Seagram murals (see below). Originally designed for the Four Seasons the original plan was for seven – that is all the rooms the restaurant could handle. How many did Rothko produce? Not just the nine that ultimately became part of the Tate collection but 21 others for a total of 30. To see all of the Tate murals click here. There's also a curator's video at that site as well as gallery notes. The image below is of three of the murals. Voice from the Couch is making plans to see these sometime this year! Until then he plans to make frequent visits to the Portland Art Museum's Monet - Waterlilies.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Andy Warhol ~ Flowers

These two images are part of one of Andy Warhol's very successful series using the flower motif. The Flowers series in 1964 was based on a photograph of hibiscus flower blossoms. Warhol saturated the large images of the flowers with intense color and put them on a verdant background. They really do seem to float off the canvas much like Monet's treatment of lilies in his pond. Warhol deeply admired Monet's waterlilies spending much time with them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So in addition to leaving the artists of the next generations the legacy of rich, varied color, Monet also introduced the 20th century art world to the concept of the series - "a systematic approach to the the subject of art and to pictorial means." His many studies of light and haystacks, cathedrals and waterlilies were the precursors to the many varied uses of a series. Some artists may present images in series so that all things are different, for others, the images are increasingly similar. Monet's Legacy Series - Order and Obsession in Hamburg in 2001 explored the connection between Monet and artists of the twentieth century. It's catalogue was intended to:

investigate the historical and cultural backgrounds against which artists began to work in series. Factors such as the advent of industrial mass production and the accompanying development of reproductive techniques will be taken into consideration, as will philosophical issues such as the notion of the whole and its parts, the individual and the collective, perception, space, movement and time.

Warhol is quoted in Monet and Modernism, another exhibition during 2002 as having said...

Most artists repeat themselves all their lives. Isn't life a repetition of the same things happening all the time? I just like doing the same thing over and over again. It's one way of expressing yourself! All of my motifs are always identical but also very different. They change wit the luminosity (of the color), with time, and with the atmosphere. Isn't life a series of motifs that change while they go on repeatin themselves?

If you listen carefully, you'll probably hear Claude Monet agreeing with those last two sentences.


Unfortunately Claude Monet's Waterlilies is the only waterlily painting owned by the Portland Art Museum. So to see a series of them in person, you'll have to travel to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art and see all three of theirs. Or you can do a search on Google.








Voice from the Couch sat down with Monet and Modernism last night and had this to say...
"Hmmm... Warhol was born in 1928 and died in 1987.
You have to include this portrait. Those eyes in the negative will stay with you all next year."

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Ellsworth Kelly, Tableau Vert

This Ellsworth Kelly painting, Tableau Vert, is the first one he painted after he returned from his trip to Giverny to see Claude Monet's home. That was back in August of 1952. Kelly had just discovered that Monet had painted work after the infamous Haystack series. When Kelly arrived at Giverny, he saw a different Giverny than we see today or when Monet was still alive. After Monet's death in 1926, his house and gardens had not been kept up and had fallen into a state of disrepair. At the time Monet's stepson, Pierre Hoschede took Kelly to the studio to see the paintings that had been completed after 1900, Kelly walked into a building where pigeons were flying around. Those birds had entered through broken panes of glass. Leaves were strewn on the floor probably similar to the peanut shells at certain bars. However, the room was filled with paintings of waterlilies - about fifteen of them were over twenty feet long. Kelly describes them as "overall compositions of thickly applied oil paint representing water with lilies, no skyline. I felt that these works were impersonal statements. ... Monet's last paintings had a great influence on me, and even though my work doesn't look like his, I feel I want the spirit to be the same."

Ellsworth Kelly recently gave Tableau Vert to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. In an interview he talks of how he created it "by mixing blues and greens to echo the colors of grass underwater". Unhappy with the result when he finished it, he had set it aside until 1985. At that time he had this to say “I liked it, but perhaps that was because time had passed." Now that Tableau Vert hangs at the AIC it presents new challenges that would probably interest Monet. Like most paintings it changes colors depending upon the light that it is seen under.

Photographer Robert Hashimoto, has worked for the AIC for more than 25 years, and says that Tableau Vert has been the work that has been most difficult to shoot. Although the name of the painting translates as "green picture" it is a mottled blue-green. Hashimoto felt that to him the painting seemed almost blue when he had it in the studio. Here is how the resolution of that issue went down.

The photo proofs were made on an ink jet printer and compared with the painting in the galleries. Digital prints “metamerize” in mixed daylight and tungsten light, making the colors look strange under different wavelengths. The warm, yellow Tungsten light used in the galleries makes the painting look greener than it does in the color-balanced light of a photography studio. “Perception of color is so subjective,” Robert says, “everyone sees color differently.” After cataract surgery, Robert now sees far more intense colors than he’d seen before – particularly in the blue end of the spectrum. “That’s when I call someone in to give me a second opinion,” he says.

Monet, having had his own issues with both cataracts and myopia, certainly would have taken great interest in how the issue of light unfolded in this scenario.

If you want to see Tableau Vert in person, you'll have to travel to Chicago and visit Gallery 297 in the new Modern Wing of the AIC. Of course, Monet's Waterlilies is a bit more accessible for those of us who live here in Portland. We just need to go to the second floor of the CMCA at the Portland Art Museum.

Voice from the Couch reminded me to tell you that the photo of Ellsworth Kelly in this post is of Kelly while he was painting Tableau Vert in 1952.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Irises, Favorite Flower?

Ah, two days after Christmas and it's Monet time here at Fifty Two Pieces. The piece of the week is Monet's Waterlilies. Meandering around the internet I find multiple references to Monet's favorite flower. Now most of us might think it was a waterlily. After all, that was what he painted for so many years. But some would have it that the iris was his favorite flower. The iris isn't paramount in most people's minds or museums, but there are some images on the internet.


And Voice from the Couch weighed in with this ... "Lilies, I don't remember any lilies at Giverney except those fields of them heading towards the Mediterranean".

Monet on Christmas Day

Monet has been in my thoughts today. Primarily about light. Light from my window here in Astoria. Start with the light from the stars at 2 am. Then the moon descending across the sky until it sets and the stars became even brighter. The overall brightness of the sky increased with the sunrise and the glow of pink on the clouds. Then the sun reflected from the water and now the pink of the sunset. It's been almost the full cycle. During all of those changes I thought of Monet and his various series – the haystacks, the cathedrals, the waterlilies. I'm most grateful that the Portland Art Museum has one of Monet's Waterlilies.

And for me this particular painting is one of the best. Waterlilies has a level of abstraction that attracts me. And yet I know without looking at the title that the subject is waterlilies. How much better can that be? The color is vibrant. Some say that was because Monet's eyesight was deteriorating from cataracts and that intense hues would have appealed to him. Even without cataracts they appeal to me. Look at it closely and you can start to see fish swimming in the water. Those little circles are most definitely from fish. Ask any person who fishes and they'll tell you. Like all of the pieces of art featured here in the last year, to truly appreciate the wonders of this painting, you'll need to see it in person.

Since I'm not near the museum, on this Christmas Day my present to myself was watching the light reflected from the Columbia River here in Astoria, Oregon. Different light and different water than Monet's but light and water nonetheless.

Voice from the Couch: Nice choice of river photos. I like the verticals of the piers with the verticals from the Waterlilies.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies

Dateline: December 24, 2009
Today marks the first day of the last full week of Fifty Two Pieces. It's been a great year and we'll have a recap on December 31. For now though we'll move along with our piece of the week, Waterlilies by Claude Monet. Some say it's the anchor of the first floor of the CMCA at the Portland Art Museum. It certainly commands your attention as you come up the stairs. Although it's neither signed nor dated, scholars have placed it as having been created sometime between 1914-1915.

Voice from the Couch and I are headed to Astoria and will be there through Christmas. Since Voice helped select this week's piece ("why don't you do the Monet?" were the exact words), I'm certain he'll have a few pithy comments and more suggestions during the week.

Dan Flavin ~ (to Donna) II Background Information

Take a close look at the image of untitled (to Donna) II 1971 and then look at the original image used here at Fifty Two Pieces on December 17, 2009. Notice anything different? Voice from the Couch is always up for these sorts of questions and his response was the image is flipped. Yes, indeedy, that is a true statement. As the image exists out there on the internet, the blue bulb is on the left, pink on the right. Truth in blogging, I must tell you that as exhibited at the Portland Art Museum the blue tube on untitled (to Donna) II 1971 is on the right, pink on the left, yellows on the bottom. Images seem to get reversed as you can see in the Flickr photos below. Some show the blue on the right and others blue on the left.

Being intrigued by whether the blue should be on the right or on the left, I did some further sleuthing and found this image in "Portland Art Museum - Project for the Millenium". Voice from the Couch is kindly assisting in bringing you this image.

Not completely satisfied and knowing that Flavin made copious notes for each of his pieces, I did some further investigating into untitled (to Donna) II 1971. Flavin did dedicate his works to people – artists he admired such as Constantin Brancusi and Vladimir Tatlin, artists who were his friends like Donald Judd. It's unclear though who Donna was. What is clear is how untitled (to Donna) II 1971 should be set up. "How do you know that?" Voice from the Couch asked. Michael Govan's book "Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights" lists all of the 'untitled (to Donna)'s'. It turns out there are five editions of this work, each a bit different than the other. To complicate matters editions 4 and 5 have what I'll call a companion edition 4a and 5a. Click here to see the Google Book Result showing the colored layouts of the editions. Here's a written summary including the number fabricated:
untitled (to Donna) 1 1971 four bulbs (yellow on right, pink on left, two blues on bottom
Fabricated - 1
untitled (to Donna) 2 1971 four bulbs (blue on right, pink on left, two yellows on bottom
Fabricated - 2
untitled (to Donna) 3 1971 four bulbs (blue on right, yellow on left, two pinks on bottom
Fabricated - 1
untitled (to Donna) 4 1971 four bulbs (blue on right, yellow on left, one pink on top, one pink on bottom
Fabricated - 1
untitled (to Donna) 4a 1971 four bulbs (yellow on right, blue on left, one pink on top, one pink on bottom
Fabricated - 0
untitled (to Donna) 5 1971 four bulbs (blue on right, pink on left, one yellow on top, one yellow on bottom
Fabricated - 4
untitled (to Donna) 5a 1971 four bulbs (pink on right, blue on left, one yellow on top, one yellow on bottom
Fabricated - 4
The question still remains in my mind why the signage in the museum shows a Roman numeral and every place else lists an Arabic one. Does it matter or not? Some might say yes, since Flavin was such a stickler for documentation.

Dan Flavin ~ (to Donna) II and Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy

It's all about the light – that could be the subtitle of this post. With Dan Flavin (whether it's the Portland Art Museum's Unititled (to Donna) II or this image of Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the Diagonal of May 25, 1963) or any of his other more than 750 light sculptures), it's all about the light. Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the Diagonal of May 25, 1963) goes by many names. Sometimes it's listed as the Diagonal of May 25, 1963 and sometimes as the Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi). By whichever name it's listed, this single flourescent tube is the first piece of sculpture Flavin created with just florescent lighting. Prior to that he had been combining both florescent and incandescent lighting in his works.

In 1964, Dan Flavin had this to say about this work and his use of light in general.

"The 'diagonal' in its overt simplicity was only the installation of a distended or luminous line of a standard industrial device. Little artistic craft could be possible." 'Craft', in its strict, traditional definition may be absent from Flavin's oeuvre, but creativity, vision, and intellect remain commanding forces, The 'diagonal' of which the artist speaks is one his seminal works, 'the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusci)' (1963). It presents nothing more than an eight foot long yellow - or "gold" - fluorescent light. This sparing composition was the result of a searching artistic exploration: the hunt for a format which "with obvious electric light ... could become my standard yet variable emblem—the 'icon'"

.
Hear Flavin give an abbreviated version of his artistic statement in this very brief video...


And as a continuation of this week's string of videos here's another from David Zwirner, NYC (Nov 2009). Thanks to Youtube we can all enjoy room after room of Flavin light.

Albert Bierstadt ~ Mount Hood, Muybridge and Colescott

This week of Albert Bierstadt started with Arcy Douglass' Artist Talk about Bierstadt's Mount Hood at the Portland Art Museum on December 10. He mentioned that Bierstadt had dabbled in photography (box camera, glass plate, albumen print variety). Earlier I had read that Bierstadt's two brothers were photographers. Considering that I've been accused of spending far too much time on the internet, I felt compelled to search for some photographs of or by Bierstadt while on location. Imagine my surprise when I found this brightly colored image of a painting by Warrington Colescott – 1872: Edward Muybridge photographs Albert Bierstadt painting Yosemite Valley. Colescott (Robert Colescott's older brother) painted this watercolor in 1993.

Check out the photo on the left. It was taken by Edward Muybridge, the famous English photographer, while both he and Albert Bierstadt were in Yosemite in 1872. Bierstadt had busied himself painting Bridal Veil Falls, Nevada Falls and many other oil sketches of the Yosemite Valley. Muybridge had taken photos of Yosemite, the Indians who were there at the time and Bierstadt. Further searching turned up websites that contained more photos from Muybridge's trip to Yosemite. The photos make an interesting documentary and show that the Paiute Native American Indiams were inhabiting Yosemite in 1872, contrary to the information from the National Park Service. You can read more about this difference of opinion between the Paiute and the National Park Service here and here and here. I always thought it was the Miwok, but then I had visited Yosemite and looked at the National Park Service presentations.

Note: Check the Comments for remarks by Voice from the Couch.

Marcel Duchamp ~ Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, 1960

Voice from the couch, "I went down to the Portland Art Museum and saw the Duchamp."
Me, "What did you think?"
Voice from the couch, "Liked it. I could actually see the images. The computer screen just didn't do it for me."
Me, "True."
Voice from the couch, "We saw one of those pieces at MoMA last year. The color chart one, upper right hand corner"
Me, "Color Chart? I guess I'll have to go back to the museum. I can't see it."

Back to the museum I went and found the Tu m' originally created in 1918 and now packaged in its reproduced form in the Boite-en-valise. Check out the upper right hand corner the next time you're at the museum. Or visit the Museum of Modern Art website and you'll find the video below. Watch it here (you'll hear one of MoMA's curators) or watch it there (and see many other videos).

Voice from the couch, "Be sure to tell them the size of the original." Good point. The original of Tu m' is 27 1/2 x 119 5/16 in. Quick math puts it at about 3 ft by 10 ft. When we saw this at MoMA, the bicycle wheel and the hat rack loomed above us with the color swatches projecting surreally from the canvas. And how could we forget the bottle brush, three safety pins, and one bolt.

Marcel Duchamp ~ Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, Rrose Selavy but no Chess

The image above is the expanded view of what I had seen yesterday of Marcel Duchamp's Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, 1960 at the Portland Art Museum. PAM has consolidated the box so that it looks more like the image on the left. After writing the post on Saturday about Duchamp's affection for chess (Saturday seems like such a short time ago), I decided to go venture down to PAM and see if I could see any chess images in the Boite. Alas, that wasn't to be. There are any number of images - just about what you see on the left but not all of what is shown above. Not one of them has a chess theme. However, there is at least one piece of art not represented in either of these images. On the left hand hinged cover and on the side we can't see is Duchamp's Nude Descending the Staircase. The original of that piece was shown here at the Portland Art Museum back in 1913 just after it was exhibited in the Armory Show. You can read more about that here at Fifty Two Pieces, just click this link. Back to the Boite. What I did discover that intrigued me were the two pieces by Rrose Selavy. Rose, as you'll recall from earlier posts at Fifty Two Pieces was Marcel Duchamp's feminine alter ego. His other self was birthed in 1921 and soon started to create art work of her own.

First up is Why Not Sneeze Rrose Selavy? This piece either carries the attribution Rrose Selavy or Marcel Duchamp, depending upon which book, website, museum is being quoted. In either case, Duchamp or Selavy created this Readymade of 152 marble cubes in the form of sugar cubes with thermometer and cuttlefishbone in a birdcage. Unless you're at the museum you'll probably not see the tiny three dimensional cut-out of this piece. It sits almost like a small crown inside the red Boite itself. Click on the enlarged expanded version of the Boite above and you might make it out. It's mostly grays and not the wonderful representation to the left.

Selavy was also represented with the piece La Bagarre d'Austerlitz, The best view of this is to look at the expanded version, second row from the bottom, far right hand image. Hmmph, Voice from the Couch is saying. How can anyone possibly see that? He's right. You'll all need to visit the Portland Art Museum or the closest museum that has a Boite on display and examine it closely. Each series is substantially the same, but the contents of the series vary from series to series. The Portland Art Museum has Series F.

Rrose Selavy, Duchamp's alter ego, kept him busy from the moment she was created in 1921. If she wasn't busy making art, she was having her photo taken or image painted. Duchamp spent a great deal of time preparing himself for these photo shoots as well as any time he ventured out into the world as Rrose. Man Ray took a number of portraits of Duchamp and of Rrose Selavy. Here's one of Rrose and then a portrait done by Carlo Mariani in 1990 from Ray's image. Duchamp would certainly love the visuals here. Mariani portrays Duchamp as the feminine Selavy but retains more of his masculine features. And then Mariani put in the additional tweak of Duchamp/Selavy in a da Vinci Mona Lisa pose with the added starter of the mustache and goatee from L.H.O.O.Q. (also in PAM's Boite).

The Light Is Different

Wherever you go, the light is different. It's different at any time of the year. Childe Hassam, and the other Impressionists knew that. They would set up canvases and paint each one of them at different times. That concept of light was driven home most decidedly when we were in Stockholm several years ago. The time was autumn. The days were shorter but the shadows were longer. And in those seven days in Stockholm the shadows were always longer. What I found each day when the sun would appear was that it never rose above what we would have considered four o'clock here in Portland at that time of the year. Four o'clock is the perfect time for making images with your camera whether it is film or digital. I loved those days in Sweden, long walking days filled with the golden yellow of its fall. In actuality it was the fall of the heritage of myself and my husband, otherwise known as "Voice from the Couch". Bless him, he thinks of himself as being all Swedish, but he's only half as am I. But those halves must have constituted a whole in the minds of the locals. They consistently addressed us as if we were one of them and knew where they wanted to go when we didn't know much more then "hej".

Rothko – No. 14 1960, Emotion and Myth

"In essence, it is emotionality which replaced the myth. The common designation for emotionality is mood." ... Mark Rothko

To stand as Rothko intended 18 inches from his paintings, the viewer becomes part of the painting. Here the people in the room are seeing with their eyes but are not engaged with the painting. They're missing the emotionality of the color that creates a vibrancy and at times an urgency. It's about contemplation in our world where myths have receded into the background. Color creates the emotion replacing the myth that was once there.

Renee Jorgensen wrote about this in her paper published on line at DismantledThoughts:

Rothko’s search for myth, and subsequent reliance on emotionality was motivated by

“dissatisfaction with partial and specialized truths and the desire to immerse ourselves with the

felicity of an all-inclusive unity.” He sought to re-establish myth by stripping away borrowed

forms, revealing the meaninglessness of representation, and thereby creating space for the age to

generate new myths. Emotionality, as the last powerful expression of the unity and

connectedness of individuals, was the sole form capable of ushering the viewer into the presence

of the metaphysical. Perhaps, if the paintings succeeded in their attempts to create such an

experience, the cultural ideology would slowly shift, building a framework capable of generating

a myth for our age. Ultimately Rothko’s paintings are as directly representational as possible in

an age without myth. To precipitate the change that would make possible the return of the

figure, painting had to be stripped of every particular, leaving only those elements capable of

creating mood: color, scale, and time.

My husband, Voice from the Couch, reminded me as we've talked of Rothko of the first time he saw Homage to Matisse at the Portland Art Museum. It wasn't until he stood directly in front of the canvas and looked that he saw the colors vibrate. Later at lunch he said he could still feel the warmth and joy coming from the top yellow/orange. "I wouldn't have really seen his painting unless I had stood in such close proximity to it."

Fractured French and an Opportunity to Draw

Knowing I'd have to tell people about the art work of the week "Nature's Fan" and who painted it, I decided to learn how to pronounce Bouguereau's name. That turned into quite a search on the "internets".

Many web sites set out to help all of us non-French speakers learn to pronounce the eleven letters in his name.
Portrait Artist Forum has a great discussion on pronunciation of both Bouguereau and chiaroscuro.
"Boo-jer-oh"
"Booj-row"
"Bu-jer-o"
"Boo-garo"
"Boo-ger-ew"
"Bo-ger-o"
"Bo-ger-ew"

Pronounce It Right even has an audio. If I were to do a phonetic, it would look like...
"Boo grow"
or as others have written...
"boo ger oh.."

And from the Concept Art Forum any number of people weigh in but this one comment caught my eye:
Rebecca is close, even if the "gue" is the most difficult part, due to the way French people pronounciate the "E". Said quickly, his name sound close to "'Boo-gro" as said by Midnight. Maybe the most natural way for be understood by French people ?

While checking other sites for pronunciation tips, I ended up finding out how people are approaching their art studies. On WetCanvas, CareyG announced that she had decided to copy some of the great masters to improve her skills. Her first choice was Van Gogh (that name is certainly pronounced many different ways by many different people) and her second was Bouguereau. I find it fascinating how artists learn by imitating. That reminds me that second Sunday is coming up. The Portland Art Museum offers drawing classes before the museum opens. The public can learn techniques from an instructor and "discover the age-old tradition of drawing from masterworks".

My husband and I started to laugh when discussing Boo gro and he remembered a Steve Martin truism...

On the French:
"In French, oeuf means egg, cheese is fromage... it's like those French have a different word for everything."

12.24.09

n.b. Voice from the Couch wishes to clarify that he is the "husband" mentioned here.