Is the Hottest New Art Coming from Chilly Nordic Countries?

“Scandinavian Pain” burns crimson in the night in one photo by Ragnar Kjartansson featured in the new exhibition North by New York: New Nordic Art in celebration of the centenary of the creation of The American-Scandinavian Foundation. That phrase could serve as the motto for much of the work that appears in this choice selection of contemporary Nordic art curated by Robert Storr and Francesca Pietropaolo. This cross-section of modern angst from the territory of Munch, Ibsen, and Sibelius updates that Nordic sensibility for a new age and shows how these artists use new media to convey that old message. As Mieskuoro Huutajat, also known as the Screaming Men’s Choir (image above), prove, this new wave of hot art from a cold climate is something to shout about. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is the Hottest New Art Coming from Chilly Nordic Countries?"

[Image: Petri Sirviö featuring Mieskuoro Huutajat (Screaming Men’s Choir), Sorry Speech, 2010. Video stills—4 images total; 3-channel video installation, 3 min. synchronized loops, sound. Courtesy of the artist.]

[Many thanks to The American-Scandinavian Foundation for providing the image above from and a review copy of the catalog to North by New York: New Nordic Art, which runs through August 19, 2011.]

Holding On: Edvard Munch’s Prints at the NGA

When you hear the name Edvard Munch, you almost immediately think of The Scream. It’s unavoidable. Even during his lifetime, Munch found himself linked to that image and a select few others from his Frieze of Life series that comprised almost his entire career. Although Munch painted several versions of The Scream, the demand for more overwhelmed the supply. As a solution, Munch turned to printmaking, which allowed fans to have an authentic Munch at an affordable price, while also allowing Munch to capitalize on his fame. But it was much more than pure capitalism that compelled Munch to revisit certain themes and images, as Edvard Munch: Master Prints, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, clearly demonstrates. Printmaking allowed Munch to hold on to certain images seemingly forever in a cycle of creation and recreation that made the image and the emotions linked to that image forever new and forever real. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Holding On."

[Image: Edvard Munch. The Lonely Ones, 1899/c. 1917 or later. Color woodcut, from one woodblock sawn into three pieces, in black, blue green, yellow, and red with hand coloring on medium cream wove paper. The Epstein Family Collection. © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009.]

[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalogue to Edvard Munch: Master Prints, which runs through October 31, 2010.]

Fire and Ice

Please click over to Picture This at Big Think to read "Fire and Ice," some thoughts on art history and the history of climate change both natural and man-made. J. M. W. Turner's Chichester Canal (above, from 1828) plays a starring role in a tale that begins in 1816—the “Year Without a Summer.”

Absolutely

In his 1955 memoir titled It’s Me, O Lord, Rockwell Kent wrote, “There is a deeply satisfying finality about land’s end. Gone is that everlasting urge the island traveler feels to journey on and on; there are not further peaks to beckon you; you have attained the absolute.” Born June 21, 1882, Kent remains in many ways the American equivalent of England’s William Blake—a bold visionary who expressed ideas of the absolute in words and pictures. Kent’s And Women Must Weep or Shipwreck, Coast of Ireland (above, from 1927-1928) captures this sense of the absolute power of nature while simultaneously depicting the place of humanity within it. Kent studied under both Robert Henri and Abbott Thayer, two of the most spiritually oriented artists in America at the turn of the twentieth century. Henri believed deeply in vitalism and Kent clearly shared that same faith in an electric force in the universe far greater than any individual being. Kent is best known for his amazing illustrations in black and white for such classic works as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which was only rising to status as the Great American Novel when Kent illustrated a 1930 edition. As much as I love Kent’s graphic work, I think he gets even more cosmic in color.

Nudism and the cult of the body reigned in Europe in the first few decades of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure if Kent took that as his source for works such as Recumbent Nudes with Ringed Sun (above, from 1914). It’s entirely possible that Kent simply arrived at this image by extending the Romantic and Transcendentalist philosophy to the human body itself, unashamedly nude before the nourishing sun. Heliotherapy, also known as sun or light therapy, may be the source of the ringed sun baking the bodies beneath. Regardless of whether Kent subscribed to those particular cures, he did believe that freedom of the mind and soul could cure anything. For Kent, the good fight was always the fight against oppression, which won him the honor of being a target of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. An incurable traveler, Kent visited all kinds of peoples and studied their cultures closely, which allowed him to see clearly the bare truth that we’re all human beneath it all.

As fascinating as Kent’s sense of the beautiful side of the absolute is, his sense of the sublimely terrible side fascinates me even more. Kent’s House of Dread, Newfoundland (above, from 1915) shows a naked man leaning against a house built on a cliff’s edge as a crying woman leans out of a window above. The sense of dread created by the ambiguity of the situation reeks of the most dreadful works of Edvard Munch. A member of the golden age of American illustration, Kent knew the power of images to tell a story. Here, Kent tells the other side of the story of the absolute, the one fragile humanity doesn’t like hearing. Kent built a similar home on a rocky peak in Monhegan Island, Maine, that is now owned by Jamie Wyeth, grandson of another great American illustrator, N.C. Wyeth. Jamie’s style resembles that of his grandfather more than that of his father, Andrew Wyeth, so he understandably felt a kinship with Kent both artistically and spiritually. After several decades of obscurity thanks to the hostile political climate of the 1950s, Rockwell Kent has been reconnected with the body politic of art history and reminded it that it has a soul, too.

Correspondence Course

One of the reasons that modern art has left much of the public behind is the sheer weight of the theorizing that has gone into so many movements. The importance of a blank canvas buttressed by a manifesto leaves even some interested parties bewildered. What, then, should we make of the theory-less theorist—William Baziotes. Born June 11, 1912, Baziotes painted in a Surrealist style and frequented Abstract Expressionist circles with Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, but he resisted easy categorization. In 1947 he confessed his theoretical agnosticism in an essay titled, “I Can’t Evolve Any Concrete Theory,” a shocking admission in an age when Clement Greenberg and others wrung theoretical juice from everything at hand. Baziotes takes his cue from French Symbolist poets such as Charles Baudelaire. Yet, unlike other artists, such as Gustav Klimt or Edvard Munch, Baziotes leaves easily recognizable forms such as the human body behind. Instead, Baziotes subscribes to Baudelaire’s idea of “correspondences” in which all natural things are equal to the point that anything can symbolize a vast number of things. Baudelaire writes in the poem “Correspondences,” “Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance/ In a deep and tenebrous unity, / Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day, / Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.” Baziotes translates Baudelaire’s mystic ideas into paint in works such as The Flesh Eaters (above, from 1952), in which biomorphic forms that look natural but resist identification interact to generate a narrative built by each viewer from the depths of their own imagination. The Flesh Eaters of the title can be cannibals, Polyphemus the cyclops eating Odysseus’ crew, or a larger metaphor for humanity’s self-consuming desires run amok. The possibilities, like nature, are endless.

Baziotes worked extremely slowly, completing only one or two works during his prime years in the 1950s. While Jackson Pollock stepped on the gas and dripped his way to fame and infamy, Baziotes applied the brakes, quietly mediating over his works before allowing himself to begin the act of painting itself. "I want my pictures to take effect very slowly,” Baziotes claimed, “to obsess and haunt." Baziotes’ Dusk (above, from 1958) haunts through its elusiveness. The dusky pink shape and trailing ribbons of green, blue, and white are all that interrupt the pensive grey background. While teaching and painting in New York City, Baziotes frequented the Greek sculpture and pottery collections. Of Greek descent himself, Baziotes may have identified with the classical forms on multiple levels. The lines in Dusk resemble on one level the cracks in ancient vases they wear like the proud scars of millennia. Longing to replicate the eternalness of nature itself, Baziotes evokes the next best thing in terms of human creativity—the oldest and most lasting forms remaining. In many ways, Baziotes’ Dusk is his version of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Both conclude that "’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ —that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

As with the work of Robert Motherwell, I see a lot of Zen in Baziotes’ painting. In the same vein, I also sense a lot of Jung in Baziotes’ approach. In works such as Aquatic (above, from 1961), Baziotes looks to tap into what Jung called “the collective unconscious.” Again, the forms look like something we’ve seen in reality but Baziotes’ skews them just enough to make them seem dreamlike. In Aquatic, Baziotes becomes an artist of the floating world, riding the currents of his unconscious with the faith that his audience will meet him on the same high seas. As with the connection to ancient sculpture in Dusk, Aquatic connects back to the primordial sea, the source of all life on Earth. Baziotes titled this work to make the sea link clear, but I think the imagery itself would eventually lead most onlookers to that watery source. I began with the idea that Baziotes was theory-free and then proceeded to drop the names of Baudelaire and Jung to impose theory on him once again, whether Baziotes wanted to or not. Strip away all these ideas and even the titles of the works, however, and you still find yourself drawn to them as if called by something instinctual. It’s unfortunate that Baziotes’ art is often swamped by the bigger names of American art in the 1950s, but the intentional timelessness of his works gives them a “patience” that still may one day be rewarded.

Nothing to Lose

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
And nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free,
Feelin’ good was easy, lord, when Bobby sang the blues,
And buddy, that was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

—From “Me and Bobby McGee” by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster

It takes a lot of self-confidence to paint yourself as a kind of madman. The basic premise of Jay A. Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (my review here) is that Edvard Munch adopted the persona of a disturbed man for both artistic and commercial reasons. Munch, like many other artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, followed the cue of the original artistic madman—Gustave Courbet. Born June 10, 1819, Courbet initiated a second “birth” with the Self-Portrait also known as The Desperate Man (above, from 1843). Courbet, of course, like Munch, had full command of all his senses. Armed with the knowledge that no publicity is bad publicity, Courbet courted controversy and positioned himself at the center of the Parisian art world for all to see. “I am the most arrogant man in France,” Courbet proclaimed and set out to prove it. Behind that arrogance, however, lay great talent—the “steak” behind the “sizzle.” What separates Courbet and Munch from the masses of self-promoters is that they always had the goods to back up the marketing.

In 1869, Courbet announced, “I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.’” Courbet isolated himself from all ties, yet never separated himself from the mainstream so far that his works lost all profitability. Like Edouard Manet would do just a short decade later, Courbet lived both in and outside the academy. Manet continued to paint in a mostly academic style, yet his subject matter broke new ground. Courbet broke new ground in turning the relationship of the artist and the patron on its head. In The Meeting, or "Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet" (above, from 1854), Courbet paints himself meeting two prospective clients. Their styles of clothing clearly demarcate Courbet as the poor bohemian standing before wealthy patronage. Yet, the patronizing is done by Courbet. The two men on the left doff their hats before him, like royalty. They address him first, rather than the other way around. Courbet clearly paints himself in the position of power, owner of a higher authority thanks to his artistic skills. There’s a great sense of democratic values in this painting in that Courbet suggests a meritocracy based on talent to supplant the previous hierarchy based on wealth and nobility. Courbet wrests the title from those in power and crowns himself king.

As I said, Courbet never lacked for confidence, or for the talent to back up his boasts. In The Wave (above, from 1869), Courbet puts aside brushes and moves paint around purely with palette knives, as if he could channel the very forces of nature through the power of his own will. Renoir so loved this work that he surfed the same turf a decade later in his own freeform version. To get such brilliant effects from gesture, those gestures need to be totally uninhibited, free of all hesitation. The Wave shows Courbet at his most self-assured, a king in his own artistic kingdom. Renoir and others aspired to that level of self-confidence to armor themselves against the blows of critics as Impressionism gained favor with the public. Courbet led by example. Paradoxically, his example taught others that you need to find your own way and not follow the example of others. Just as Courbet belonged to no school, there is no school of Courbet imitators slavishly mimicking his works. People who understood the true Courbet knew that the best tribute to him was to be as confident in your art as he was in his.