Monthly Archive for June, 2011

From Eric Banks, The New York Review of Books

Has the Venice Biennale outlived its usefulness? By most indications, the question is specious. Witness the preview leading to the public unveiling of the fifty-fourth edition of the gigantic international exhibition of contemporary art in early June. Though long ago the Biennale got so big as to overspill its already commodious accommodations in the city’s Giardini and the warrens of the one-time shipbuilding hangars of the Arsenale, it continues to metastasize each year, with a greater number of national pavilions in this edition than ever before (ninety-one countries had signed on before the last-minute defections of Lebanon and Bahrain). Several countries––Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Haiti, Andorra––participated for the first time, while others, including India, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Congo, and Cuba, returned with national pavilions after lengthy absences. More…

The Crowd (1914-15) by Wyndham Lewis

From Richard Cork at Prospect

In the summer of 1914 a new movement and its magazine changed the future of British art—and now the Tate is devoting its first major show to the Vorticists.

A century ago, rebellious young artists across Europe banded together in a succession of loudly publicised avant-garde movements. After Expressionism had erupted in Germany, Cubism revolutionised painting in France. Then the Futurists came out of Italy, demanding that art should celebrate the blurred excitement of machine-age dynamism. Rival groups issued manifestos, proclaiming their ability to transform everyone’s vision of the modern era. The years leading up to the first world war were alive with the energy of all these conflicting “-isms,” and in the summer of 1914 a new British movement was announced by a belligerent magazine called BLAST. More…

From The Telegraph…

The artist, whose full name was Maqbool Fida Husain but who was popularly known as “MF”, began his career in the 1940s as a poster artist for the Bollywood film industry. He rose to prominence after Independence and was later hailed as “India’s Picasso”. His paintings and drawings are eagerly sought by India’s new rich, and in 2005 he became the first living Indian artist to command $1 million for a painting. In early 2008, his Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12, a large diptych, fetched $1.6 million, setting a world record at a sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, New York.

Husain was a master of vibrant colour and dynamic movement, and his boldly-drawn, figurative compositions, often featuring horses or women, bore the clear influence of artists such as Chagall and Kandinsky, but combined western modernism with classical Indian folk art traditions. In India no fewer than four museums are dedicated to his work and, though less well known outside India, from the 1950s his work was widely exhibited in Europe and America. In 2008 the Serpentine Gallery included several of his paintings in an exhibition of modern Indian artists. More…

Museum of Modern Art/Courtesy 2011 Francis Alys

From Christian Viveros-Fauné at The Village Voice…

Two comments from the artist Sol Le Witt bookend the history of art since the 1970s. The first professes conceptualism to be “the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.” The second—“You shouldn’t be a prisoner of your own ideas”—identifies the practice’s frequent obviousness.

Conceptual art, pegged “the new Cubism” by Roberta Smith, recently morphed from yesterday’s radicalism into today’s museum orthodoxy. If MOMA’s hugely successful Marina Abramovic retrospective last spring was its October Revolution, then the museum’s 2010 summertime installation of Yoko Ono’s gratingVoice Piece for Soprano quickly proved its official Leonid Brezhnev autobiography. (WriterClive James declared that book so mortifyingly dull that, were it read outdoors, “birds would fall out of the sky and dogs would drop dead.”) More…