Recreating Paradise: Gauguin’s Noa Noa Prints

In late August 1893, painter Paul Gauguin returned to Paris after spending the previous few years in Tahiti, the Polynesian paradise that propelled his art to a whole new level. Hoping to sell his “uncivilized” works to a “civilized” audience, Gauguin realized that he had to first explain the allure and power of that paradise to prospective purchasers. Thus, the idea for Noa Noa (“fragrant scent” in Tahitian), Gauguin’s book of those experiences, was born, along with a series of woodblock prints he designed to illustrate it. Alas, Gauguin never got to see his work published, but the prints themselves took on a whole new life, which continues today in the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition, Gauguin's Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints. In this startling exhibition, we see that Gauguin’s prints portray a paradise more of the mind than of his actual experience. The island eden Gauguin hoped to enter, in fact, may never have existed—an idea that his prints, reproductions of a reality that was never truly real, emphasize through their very nature. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Recreating Paradise."

[Many thanks to the Princeton University Art Museum for providing me with a review copy of Gauguin's Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints (published by Yale University Press), the catalogue to the exhibition running through January 2, 2011.]

Pop Divas

When you think of Pop Art, the art movement that dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s in America, you almost automatically cast up the wigged head of Andy Warhol. A few other names might rise up from memory— Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, or even the British artist Peter Blake—but even those names have in common one thing—they’re all men. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968 at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia wants you to learn the names of the “pop divas,” the women who worked in the same culture-driven, irony-laced language as Warhol and others but were never heard, until now. Please venture over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Pop Divas."

[Image: John Wayne by Marisol, 1963, mixed media, 104 x 96 x 15 inches. Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Art © Marisol Escobar/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.]



[Many thanks to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for providing me with the image above from Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968, which runs from January 22 through March 15, 2010.]

Crossing Borders

If there’s an Andy Warhol-type artist out there today, it’s not Damien Hirst—it’s Takashi Murakami. Born February 1, 1962, Murakami’s built a smaller, yet still formidable commercial profile than Hirst, but one that’s much more appealing in its whimsy and cross-cultural freshness. Just last year, Time Magazine named Murakami one of their 100 Most Influential People—the only artist to make the list. While Hirst continues to slice and dice animal corpses and embalm them (when he’s not festooning skulls with diamonds), Murakami creates images such as Jellyfish Eyes Black 4 (above, from 2006) that appeal to the modern market for less confrontational pieces. Just as Warhol rose to prominence as a prankish antidote to the angst of the 1960s, Murakami’s dancing jellyfish eyes calm and soothe viewers and buyers who don’t feel the need for Hirst’s reminders of mortality’s inevitability in a world in which every news day provides plenty.

Murakami wisely rides the same tide of growing interest in anime and manga in America in creating his art. Red Flower Ball (above, from 2007) shows the influence of anime and manga characters on Murakami’s art. Those who recoil from the idea of Japanese cartoon imagery rising to the ranks of fine art should remember that Roy Lichtenstein once took a great deal of heat for his comic book-inspired paintings that now find a place in the art historical canon. Like Warhol, Murakami employs an entire “factory” of artists to carry out his ideas. Playing the “idea man” at the front of the enterprise, Murakami sports a ponytail and stylish round glasses as part of the marketing package. Most Americans don’t realize just how integral anime and manga are to Japanese culture. Over there, they’re far from just kid’s stuff. Murakami takes the cultural currency of his native Japan and converts it into something an international, primarily American audience can also appreciate.

The sheer prolific power of Murakami across multiple media places him light years ahead of Hirst, Jeff Koons, and others clamoring for the spotlight. In Planting the Seeds, a 10-minute animated film from 2007 (a still from the film appears above), Murakami completely enters the anime world. Planting the Seeds features two spirit guides traveling the universe in a living spaceship that symbolizes the earth itself. Without missing a beat, Murakami can turn from something as unique and deeply thoughtful as that ecological message to designing a new logo for Louis Vuitton. Murakami is without doubt a creature of the modern business world, but I never get the sense that he’s completely sold out on his artistic principles in the service of mammon. Perhaps that will change. Warhol became a caricature of himself over time, when his impulse for being famous overpowered his impulse to create great art that would lead to being famous. Murakami so far continues to maintain his balance while crossing over and crossing back between the borders of art and commercialism, sometimes blurring those lines when necessary. If as many people who know the name of Damien Hirst knew the name of Takashi Murakami, the contemporary art world would be a better and saner place.

Cursed by Success

"I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad?" Roy Lichtenstein’s young son challenged him lightheartedly in 1961 while pointing at a Mickey Mouse comic book. Born October 27, 1923, Lichtenstein probably paused for a moment and summed up his life. Thirty-seven years old, working in a dead-end teaching job, surrounded by paintings he couldn’t sell, Lichtenstein’s life as an artist seemed doomed. Why not?, Lichtenstein thought, and began to copy the Benday dot pattern of the comic book and produced Look Mickey, the first of his Pop art works that would soon become his signature style. Within three years, Lichtenstein tasted success beyond his wildest dreams, selling works such as Kiss V (above, from 1964) for ridiculous sums. Although he always denied he copied directly from actual comic books, especially the romance and war comics popular in the early 1960s, Lichtenstein’s mimicking of the work of comic book artists always seemed like stealing on some level, perhaps even to him. Copying the comics was the point of his work—the ironic spice that gave them the flavor hip collectors couldn’t resist. Yet, the painter Lichtenstein wanted to become before his son’s challenge never materialized, always overshadowed by the successful painter he actually became.

Lichtenstein enjoyed a relatively short period of profitable productivity, giving up the copying of comic panels after just 5 years in 1965. By then, the damage had already been done. The expectations of gallery owners and collectors was set in stone. A “Lichtenstein” equaled a comic book-style work, and nothing else. In the 1970s, Lichtenstein painted a series of works titled the Artist’s Studio. In Artist's Studio No. 1 (Look Mickey) (above, from 1973), Lichtenstein paints the work that started it all in the background of a Lichtenstein-styled studio composed entirely of those maddening Benday dots. No matter how much he wanted to escape, those dots pursued him. Even after doors of the swinging Sixties swung closed, Lichtenstein couldn’t break through into a new style. An artists such as Picasso changed styles like some people change their underwear, but Lichtenstein clung to the style that made him famous, even long after it had served its purpose.

Lichtenstein died in 1997, still painting Benday dots and still trying to escape. Lichtenstein’s Nude with Abstract Painting (above, from 1994) shows a Matisse-like nude sprawled across the canvas with an abstract painting hanging on the wall behind her. Alas, all hope of drawing closer to Matisse’s free style drowns under the ever-present sea of dots. Where Lichtenstein once sought to parody the excesses of comic book style, he now self-parodied the excesses of his own wearied style even as he nodded in the direction of another master who, like Picasso, enjoyed a chameleon-like career in painting. Lichtenstein certainly isn’t the only artist who found his niche and rode it into the ground. However, unlike those other artists, Lichtenstein’s niche was never truly his own. In the end, Lichtenstein struck a Faustian bargain in exchanging his personal creative vision and soul for the riches and fame he thought were what he really wanted from art.

Born to Sell

Ateliers Cheret (Jules Cheret and Georges Meunier), Specimen d’affiches artistiques, “Les Maitres de l’affiche,” 1895.

Assaulted by advertising images everywhere we look today, it’s hard to imagine a world not dominated by commercial imagery. The cartoonishly crowded look of ads plastered over every inch of racecars threatens to become the norm as America morphs into NASCAR nation. Advertising and Art: International Graphics from the affiche to Pop Art, edited by Claudio Salsi, helps us imagine a simpler time, when advertising art was just beginning to develop, and shows us how we got to where we are today. Delving into the mammoth print and poster collection of the Civica Raccolta delle Stampe “A. Bertarelli”, a team of Italian art historians trace the history of the advertising poster from the very beginning, starting with Jules Cheret,the “father” of the modern advertising poster. Cheret’s work (above) seems almost quaint by today’s brash standard, but it proved influential on more experimental graphic artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. As Giovanna Ginex explains in her essay, by the end of the nineteenth century, “[p]oster design became a profession” with “specialist printing houses” and “cities changed their appearance, welcoming—more or less knowingly—advertising material in their ‘modern’ urban fashioning.” Thanks to Cheret and others, advertising art grew from a poorly regarded corner of the art world to a new, distinct outlet for visual expression vitally linked to everyday, commercial life.

Alfons Mucha, Bisquit Dubouche & C. Cognac, 1899.

Advances in chromolithography removed the limitations of lithography, thus “leaving the artists’ prerogatives almost intact and rather bringing out their creativity,” Ginex asserts. The freedom to realize in reproduction almost anything they could paint attracts a new class of artists, including Alfons Mucha (above), who revolutionizes the look of the advertising poster, introducing elements of Art Nouveau into the common existence of European society and infecting every corner with a passion for that style so easily adapted to furniture, architecture, etc. Over time, the center of advertising visual innovation moves to Munich, where the Jugendstil branch of Art Nouveau flourishes. Thanks to the Raccolta Bertarelli’s vast collection to draw from, Advertising and Art supports each of its essays with a rich set of examples that show not only the well-known figures such as Mucha but also lesser-known but no less talented artists working in the field. These are commercials you don’t wish you could fast forward through.
Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Inaugurazione del Sempione. Esposizione Internazionale Milano 1906, 1906.

Much like early photography, early advertising found itself emulating the world of painting until it could develop a distinct language of its own. The work of Leopoldo Metlicovitz (above) shows how advertising art continued to resemble painting in terms of composition and style, perhaps even more so thanks to technological progress solving earlier problems in reproduction. At the same time, artists such as Leonetto Cappiello actively sought that new language for advertising. “The art of the poster has its own requirements and its own laws,” Cappiello said. “If the poster is good and successful, it is commercial and artistic, otherwise it is not a poster.” Giovanna Muri, in her essay on the poster’s development in the 1920s and 1930s, sees the influence of the Italian Futurists on the poster in a give and take process. “Futurist poetics.. not only used the means of advertising communication to promote the value of dynamism, progress, and technology, but also attributed a fundamental prominence to advertising as artistic experience,” Muri writes. Futurism lends only one of the many art dialects that merged into the larger language of advertising art taking shape in the first half of the twentieth century.

Nikolaj Petrovich Prusakov, The Calm Waters of the Volga, 1925.

Russian Constructivism and the vision of Alexander Rodchenko also played a role in the development of advertising art in Europe. When the new Russian cinema crossed Europe, it came twinned with equally new, striking advertising posters. Nikolaj Petrovich Prusakov’s poster for the film, The Calm Waters of the Volga (above, from 1925) stands as just one example of the new visual display of Russian Constructivism, which opened up another realm of possibility for advertising artists. In the 1920s a bevy of advertising-related specialist magazines emerged. Alessia Alberti examines in her essay the influence of those magazines on the industry and how they helped create the first advertising agencies as we know them today. Finally, the advertising world had finally broken free of the art world as a separate entity, yet it continued to borrow from the art world as the art world began to borrow from it.

Giovanni Pintori, Olivetti, 1953.

The years just before, during, and after World War II significantly changed the landscape of advertising art. As Anna Steiner points out in her essay on advertising from the 1930s to 1968, the techniques of Fascist and Nazi propaganda quickly crept into mainstream advertising imagery. “No strong difference was noticeable between advertising and cultural propaganda” after the war, Steiner writes. Members of the Bauhaus preached a new all-encompassing type of art that spread to America as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others fled Nazi oppression and took up teaching jobs. Scientific research on human behavior reveals that certain colors such as red more effectively reach the eye, spurring artists such as Giovanni Pintori to sprinkle red among the other colors of his 1953 poster for Olivetti typewriters (above). New fonts such as Helvetica come on the scene and suddenly define the “look” of a generation. As advertising’s language not only grew up but eventually grew amazingly powerful, artists in the conventional art world took note. The Pop Art movement of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, and others all addressed how the advertising world intersected with the “real” world. “The real is not ‘realism,’” Francesco Tedeschi writes in his essay, “The Phantasm of Reality: Advertising in the Art of the 1960s,” “but consists in the iconosphere and in the landscape determined and produced by the social and sociological dimensions of a reality made of images, commodities, and consumptions. It is not a matter of seeking a language that speaks to the masses, but of appropriating the language of the society of mass consumption.” The relationship had finally come full circle. In less than a century, where advertising had once emulated art, art now emulated advertising for its connection to the “real,” and what that might actually mean.

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Madama Butterfly, 1904.

Advertising and Art provides a concise crash course in the development of advertising imagery over the last century. Part of me longs for the days of beautiful works such as Leopoldo Metlicovitz’s poster for the premier of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in 1904 (above), but the eventual separation between mainstream art and a distinct sphere of advertising proved mutually beneficial to both parties. Today’s fast-paced, television-driven advertising world no longer places a priority on print campaigns, but Advertising and Art keeps its priorities straight and provides a straightforward assessment of the long, strange trip advertising art has taken in finding a voice of its own.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Advertising and Art: International Graphics from the affiche to Pop Art and for the images from the book.]