Selling Out: Should Museums Sell Art to Survive?

Desperate times call for desperate measures. But what happens when desperate times strike cultural institutions such as museums? The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (aka, Cimam) recently restated their opposition to museums taking the “nuclear option” of selling off works of art not to improve their collections but, instead, simply to keep operating financially. Others claim that in today’s lagging global economy we need leaner, meaner museums or risk having no museums at all. At the heart of this great “selling out” rests the question of who decides what is to be sold. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Selling Out."

Out of the Ashes: Art Stolen by Nazis Rediscovered

It’s a sad fact of human history that the leadership regime most obsessed with art belonged to that of the Nazis. From Adolf Hitler the frustrated painter to obsessive collectors such as Herman Goering and Joseph Goebbels (who knew enough to step aside when Hitler lusted after an object), the Nazi power circles thought about art and its effect on their country’s culture continually, more often to art’s detriment than to its benefit. Exhibit A of the detrimental effects of that cultural concern is that dark episode in modern art history—the infamous Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition of 1937 that defined for Germans what was and what wasn’t acceptable art. Some of those “degenerate” works and the artists that made them escaped Nazi clutches, while much of that condemned art seemed lost to posterity in the same conflagration that consumed the Nazis themselves. A recent discovery, however, adds a small, but happy coda to the tragic symphony of the Nazis destructive love of art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Out of the Ashes."

Going Deep: Art and the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

When critic Randall Jarrell mentioned Vermeer in a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, Bishop excitedly expressed her joy over someone making the connection. We can only guess how she’d feel about Peggy Samuels’ Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art, in which the Drew University professor analyzes the influence of more modern artists such as Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Alexander Calder on Bishop’s poetry. “From the late-1930s through the mid-1950s, Bishop drew on visual art intently to work out her own aesthetic,” Samuels asserts. Like a great quarterback, Samuels huddles up these visual artists and the poet and explains how they team up to create a whole new understanding of surface and depth in images and words. Deep Skin goes deep, and scores. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Going Deep."

[Many thanks to Cornell University Press for providing me with a review copy of Peggy Samuels’ Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art.]

Flower Power

For the April Art Poll By Bob, in honor of the the U.S.’s tax return deadline on April 15th, I asked the following question, “Which of these following money- or tax-related works brings you the most to account?” The returns are in and say the following: Quentin Matsys' The Moneylender and his Wife (1514) won with 9 votes over Hieronymus Bosch's Death and the Miser (1490s) with 8. Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600), Albrecht Dürer's (attributed) Of Usury, from Brant's Stultifera Navis (the Ship of Fools) (1494), John Leech's Ebenezer Scrooge and the Last of the Spirits from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), and Paul Vos' The Tax Collector (1543) all tied for third place with 4 votes each. Lucas Cranach the Elder's Christ Drives the Usurers out of the Temple (1517) and Rembrandt's Christ Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple (1626) tied with 2 votes each and Niels Larsen Stevns' Zacchaeus (1913) and Thomas Sully's Shylock and Portia from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1835) brought up the rear with a single vote each.

Thanks to everyone who chimed in and voted. I wish I could say a refund check is in the mail, but I can’t.

For the May Art Poll By Bob, I’ve decided to go floral in honor of those great May flowers allegedly brought by all those relentless April showers and ask, “Which of these beautiful bouquets would you pick for your garden of earthly delights?”:




Eugène Delacroix. Bouquet of Flowers (1849-1850).


Paul Gauguin. Sunflowers (1901).


Frida Kahlo. Flower of Life (1944).


Paul Klee. Heroic Roses (1938).


Gustav Klimt. Country Garden with Sunflowers (1905-1906).


Claude Monet. Monet's Garden, the Irises (1900).


Emil Nolde. Flower Garden (1908).


Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Roses (1890).

Vincent van Gogh. Irises, Sait-Rémy (1889).

Maybe all this flower power will help usher in a new age of peace, love, and understanding like back in 1967 when Bernie Boston snapped his famous Flower Power photo (top of post) showing Vietnam War protestors sticking flowers into the rifles barrels of National Guardsmen. Stop, smell the roses, tune in, tune out, and vote, but not necessarily in that order.

Getting in Shape

The greatest argument for going out and seeing paintings in person is the insufficiency of reproduction, especially when it comes to modern art. Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis seems small and paltry in a book or on a computer screen, but when you stand before it you are overcome with a world of red-hued emotion. Likewise, the works of Kenneth Noland suffer in reproduction. Born April 10, 1924, Noland sometimes finds himself linked with Abstract expressionism, perhaps in his kinship with Newman, but is more often grouped with Color field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. Noland’s work can be broken down into fairly self-contained sections, beginning with the circle paintings he did from 1956 through 1963, such as Beginning (above, from 1958). Although they might remind one of Jasper Johns’ target series, Noland’s circles focus on the interplay of color rather than the repetition of familiar shapes. Many of Noland’s circles seem almost mechanical in reproduction, where the subtle touches of the human hand are lost, much like the feathery edges of Newman’s “zips.” Beginnings shows more clearly Noland’s gamesmanship with the boundaries of the circle. Noland uses circles and shapes to emphasize the way that shapes contain or set boundaries and then breaks out of that containment. The colors in Noland’s circles and other shapes interplay to create a mood while simultaneously push beyond the canvas into the viewer’s imagination.

In the mid-1960s, Noland shifted from circles to chevrons, such as those found in Blue Veil (above, from 1963). Another common motif structure for Noland during this period was stripes, which essentially just unbent the chevrons. Both series again explore the way that colors can be arranged to create a mood. Blue Veil stands out from many other Noland paintings in that the dark background evokes feelings in strong contrast to the white backgrounds and brighter colors of other works. Noland cites Paul Klee as a great influence on his approach to color, but you could make a similar argument for the influence of Matisse. Noland could then be seen as a Fauve minus the beastliness but with the same aggressively innovative approach to experimenting with color’s capacity to bypass the mind and touch the heart. By eliminating the recognizable imagery of Matisse and others and going straight into abstract color, Noland defies rational explanation while inviting irrational responses.

By the 1970s, Noland went beyond putting shapes on canvas and began to shape the canvas itself into irregular delivery systems for his ideas. In Moon Ray (above, from 1976), Noland paints a series of stripes radiating from a point and physically stretching the usually square or rectangular canvas into something unique to the composition. Again, form follows function for Noland. Where circles and chevrons once supplied containers for him to overfill with color, the dimensions of the canvas itself now bend to his will. Ellsworth Kelly, Noland’s almost exact contemporary, similarly uses irregularly shaped canvases to express an idea, but more often using a single color, such as his Lake II, which “steals” a lake right out of a Cezanne. Noland experimented with many other shapes, some of which resembled surfboards. Still active, Noland continues to work the edges and surf conceptually through the very idea of painting, testing the boundaries and yet, unfortunately, rarely recognized for how he helped shape modern art.

Garden Party

The story of Nils Büttner’s The History of Gardens in Painting is essentially the story of the garden in human history itself—a wish to return to paradise physically, spiritually, or both. Using the usual Abbeville Press style of lavish illustration, Büttner works his way through the beginnings of art history to the present day, hitting upon the usual suspects such as Claude Monet and the Impressionists (above, Monet’s Iris Bed in Monet’s Garden, from 1900) but also calling forth artists less well known for their natural touch, bringing both those artists and their periods into fresh perspective. Büttner’s text strikes at the heart of the human fascination with green oases and how the philosophy underpinning that fascination has changed in tandem with Western civilization’s evolving relationship with the earth. “[E]ven illustrations of actual gardens intended as topographical records are often echoes of human hopes or longings or projections of symbolic meanings,” Büttner writes. From the ancient Romans to the most modern of modern artists, the garden has held a unique place in the creative mind of mankind and reflected many of the central concerns of each age.

Büttner begins with the Romans and “the ideal of the Roman villa, which over time had come to epitomize otium, that exquisite calm, far from the hectic bustle of city life, universally considered necessary for any kind of intellectual activity.” The Romans actually borrowed this garden ideal from the Greeks and Egyptians, from whom they borrowed almost everything else. When living gardens were impractical, painted ones sufficed. A garden landscape of the Villa of Livia (above) created a grotto-like effect in a windowless, underground room. Büttner easily transitions from this Roman contemplative use of the painted garden to the religious contemplative use of the early Christians, who linked Christ with the lost paradise of Eden. Without getting bogged down in detail, Büttner explains how flower symbolism developed around figures such as Christ and the Virgin Mary into a full-grown visual garden of salvation for believers. Büttner shows how even the garden of courtly love, a parallel development to the Christian painted garden, bought into the idea of garden as the means of salvation. “Nothing that conflicts with the ethic of courtly love is admitted into the garden,” Büttner writes, “wickedness, hate, greed, envy, and miserliness are banished from it as surely as are old age and poverty.” Sacred and profane love follow the same program of green power.

When Büttner reaches the Renaissance and Baroque periods, we truly get a sense of how the garden became an ideological battleground in art. In addition to presenting familiar names such as Fra Angelico, Botticelli, and Andrea Mantegna, Büttner pulls out fascinating artists from the shadows of art history such as Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen. Van Oostanen’s Christ as Gardener (above, from 1507) depicts Christ as literally a gardener, with spade in hand, but “the garden here tended by Christ,” Büttner writes, “is to be perceived topologically as a symbol of the human soul.” Diving deep into the vast seas of religious images of these periods, Büttner always manages to resurface with a precisely apt picture to get his point across. Similarly, Lucas Cranach the Younger’s 1569 painting The Lord’s Vinyard shows a figure tending the garden of the human soul, but Martin Luther rather than Christ, who has been betrayed by the poor stewards of the Catholic church, according to the Reformation. The ancient Roman’s idea of the garden as philosophical facilitator gives way to a free-for-all atmosphere in such works in which the physical garden itself is reduced to nothing but a stage prop for propaganda.


As the power of the church began to fade and secular power took command, the garden as ideological battleground changed from a spiritual landscape to a landscape of social and political standing. Kings began to surround their palaces with elaborately structured gardens, such as the Gardens of Versailles. “Both the elaborate garden structures and the floral splendor displayed were luxuries reserved for the upper classes,” Büttner explains, “and thus clear evidence of social distinction.” When Rubens paints his self-portrait titled Peter Paul Rubens with Helene Fourment and Nicolas Rubens in the Garden in 1630, he shows himself as the owner of an elaborate garden to flash his “credentials” as a member of the elites in one single image. Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich resisted Rubens identification. In The Garden Terrace (above, from 1811-1812), Friedrich shows a seemingly simple image of a young woman reading in the garden. However, Büttner deconstructs this painting to show how Friedrich disdains the young woman reading and ignoring the natural beauty around her, preferring instead the sublime wilderness beyond. “Perceived as the symbol of rationalism, the French garden is here contrasted with religious faith, a specifically German virtue,” Büttner explains. Suddenly, a garden scene not only depicts a philosophical distinction but also a nationalistic one, concisely capturing the convoluted web of ideas that underlie much of the garden imagery of the early nineteenth century before the Impressionists.

When the Impressionists and post-Impressionists arrive on the scene, Büttner’s narrative picks up speed and falls in line with the standard story of modern art. “The pure artistry in Monet’s pictures and those of the Impressionists developed a dynamic of its own,” Büttner writes, “one that caused objectivity to retreat into the background in favor of a total focus on artistic subjectivity.” Van Gogh takes this a step further and, in Büttner’s eyes, helps originate “the notion, commonly held to this day, that the artist as a creative subject, working for himself without commissions, adds new images to the reality of his time that must be engaged.” Later, German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde engage artistically with Van Gogh’s work in paintings such as Nolde’s Trolhoi’s Garden (above, from 1907). Büttner’s text helps restore the centrality of the garden and nature itself in the evolution of modern art—specifically as the origin of the vibrant colors that inspired the Impressionists and every movement on down to the Abstract Expressionists. Taking examples from artists not normally associated with garden scenes, such as Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch, Büttner proves that the garden motif belonged not just to nature lovers but also to anyone addressing the course of modern art.

Paul Klee believed that the artist must hold “conversations with nature.” Klee’s Rose Garden (above, from 1920) is just one example of the many wonderful individual conversations within the larger dialogue of Western art with the idea of the garden found in Nils Büttner’s The History of Gardens in Painting. The garden may seem absent from the world of contemporary art, but Büttner believes that “[t]he garden painting fell into disrepute only when it degenerated into kitsch,” citing Bob Ross’ “happy little trees” and Thomas Kinkade’s sappy cottage gardens. Today’s focus on ecology will help reenergize the garden as a fruitful site of artistic exploration. If I have one complaint with Büttner’s text it is his laser-like focus on Western art to the exclusion of other traditions. A complete world history would be a tall order, but some inclusion of the garden in Chinese history (Craig Clunas’ Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China would be a great source) or the influence of Japanese garden painting on the West via Japonisme, a huge factor in the development of Van Gogh and others, would certainly add another dimension to Büttner’s argument. However, The History of Gardens in Painting remains a valuable compendium of how artists have lost themselves in gardens over time in the never-ending pursuit of paradise.

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for providing me with a review copy of Nils Büttner’s The History of Gardens in Painting and for the images from the book shown above.]