Smithsonian.com

Artists draw us in not only with their work, but also with their colorful charisma. Of all those in the art world who fulfill such creative archetypes, the most endearing character may well be Hokusai, the witty Japanese woodblock printmaker of “The Floating World” period, who once published under the pseudonym Gakyo Ronji Manji, “The Old Man Mad With Painting.”

Hokusai worked within a printing tradition that flourished around Tokyo between the 17th and 20th centuries. “The Floating World” refers to the cosmopolitan ambiance in which such woodblock prints grew, and contrasts with “The Sorrowful World” espoused by Japanese Buddhists at the time. In “The Floating World,” earthly pleasures come to life in landscapes and narratives that depict or elaborate upon historical scenes, folklore and traditional poetry. Japanese woodblock art was made for the masses, and it has a distinct look: pearly paper, sharp edges, and vivid, carefully composed planes of color. The art grew within a luminous, distinctly Japanese cultural bubble, which was pierced by the introduction of Western influences in the early 20th century.

For 89 years, Hokusai worked in good-humored tumult within this peaceful bubble. “The Old Man Mad With Painting” assumed 26 pen names throughout his life, depending on his particular station; even “Hokusai” is a pen name, meaning “North Star Studio,” a reference to the Buddhist sect to which he ascribed. He outlived his family and moved 93 times—many accounts of Hokusai became as floating and varied as soap bubbles.

Ever prodigious, Hokusai remains most well known for his “36 Views of Mount Fuji,” (1826-1833) which shows vignettes of his contemporaries at work in Tokyo; Mount Fuji, snow-capped and often pale blue, appears in each print, unifying the series. Hokusai invents freely here: his dynamic compositions all nest Mount Fuji, the icon of Japanese Buddhist spirituality. His most famous work, “The Great Wave at Kanagawa” shown above, was created for this series (note Mount Fuji in the background.) Other print series include “One-Hundred Poems.” Here, Hokusai illustrates famed traditional poems, but he does so with great irreverence, sometimes assuming the persona of a semi-literate nurse who misinterprets the poem with hilarious illustrative results.

Hokusai may have coined the term “manga.” Today manga is a wildly popular Japanese comic book form, but for Hokusai, the term meant whimsical picture. Hokusai filled his notebooks with thousands of drawings of daily life, just trying to get his rendering skills right. He introduced whimsy to ordinary scenes of daily life and also to creatures such as a rhinoceros, which he never saw in person—much like Albrecht Durer, the Early Northern Renaissance artist who also drew a famous rhinoceros, which he never actually saw. In this sketch book, one can believe in Hokusai’s legend: at nearly age 90 on his deathbed, he said, “If I had another five years, even, I could have become a real painter.”

Photo credit: Hokusai’s “The Great Wave at Kanagawa,” 1826-1833 (Wikipedia)

Though he was a visual artist, Joseph Cornell seemed more like a literary recluse, a soulmate of Emily Dickinson. Cornell was bird-like in stature, dreamy in temperament and monkish when it came to the artistic fame he found in later years. Between 1903-1972, he spent most of his days in a small home on the aptly named Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. He lived with his mother and took care of his younger brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. By day, he was an unlikely door-to-door salesman and barely made ends meet; by night, he was an artist of unusual lyrical power.

He made collages from pulpy ephemera such as starlet photographs and astronomical maps. Cornell often juxtaposed such imagery with precious, discarded objects like clay soap-bubble pipes and jars of sparkling pigments. He liked to create his compositions in jewel cases or wood boxes, giving his collages a sculptural feel. For Cornell, these boxes held “eterniday,” meaning the past is ever unfolding into the present. Linear time disappears in favor of a poetic meditation upon the object, and within it, a curious juxtaposition of imagery.

I recently attended Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, a chronological retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which originated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The show covered his well-known work in collages and boxes (it closes January 6th). Amid teeming works, one piece exemplifies Cornell’s poetic nature—a jewel case holding fake ice cubes, dedicated to the 19th-century ballerina Marie Taglioni. Cornell was extremely well-read and fluent in all things French; he especially appreciated the ballet. Taglioni supposedly kept a fake ice cube in her jewel case, a memento of a time when she twirled in the snow to bemuse a Russian highwayman who had halted her carriage on a starlit night.

Like Rembrandt, Cornell coaxed a more subtle richness from his materials in later years. The original pieces glow with a spiritual light, which can’t be reproduced in photographs. “Medici Princess” (ca. 1952) comes from Cornell’s “Medici” series, dedicated to the ruling family of Renaissance Florence and its more poignant figures. The box features a reproduction of a portrait by the court painter Agnolo Bronzino. In it Bia de’Medici, an illegitimate child of Duke Cosimo I, gazes toward the viewer with eerie prescience and preciousness. Around her neck, she wears a tiny medallion bearing the picture of her powerful father. Cornell seems to evoke the transcendent power of art and memory here. Bia would live only to the age of five, but Cornell has nested her enamel-like image in a dark wood box, behind a glass pane, blurred and deep blue—Cornell’s favorite color. Her image is repeated in smaller vignettes at either side, also encased in glass. Below her, one can see a feather, bound book pages and a floor-plan of the Florentine palace, where once she played ever so briefly, so long ago.

In post-apartheid South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation became the
 ruling ethic of the new, black majority government. Archbishop Desmond 
Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and other black leaders shunned violent 
retribution against a regime that had institutionalized racism.
 Instead, black leaders embraced a healing confrontation with their now
 powerless white oppressors, documenting past horrors so that all South
 Africans could make peace with the past and live more freely from its
 shadow.

Born in 1950s Johannesburg to a well-to-do Jewish family, William
 Kentridge would become a preeminent moral light too. But Kentridge is 
an artist and an animator, not a politician. He wields humble tools of 
surprising wit and power: charcoal, erasers, cut paper and light,
 beamed from projectors in black-and-white flickers.

Kentridge is best 
known for his sensuous charcoal drawings and erasures, which are
 brought to life using the antique technique of stop-motion animation. His best work, concerned 
with South African history, is poetic rather than documentary.

Recently I attended a lecture by Kentridge in Baltimore. He showed 
some sketches for an in-progress collaborative animation project with
 the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Theater seems an appropriate venue
 for the grand societal themes found in Kentridge’s subtle and witty 
animations, and he has already produced a piece based off Mozart’s
 Magic Flute.

This new project 
is based off a Shostakovich opera about The Nose,
 a satirical short story by the
 Ukrainian writer Gogol. The opera comes from an ominous era just after 
the Russian Revolution as Stalin ascended to power. To strike the
 right visual tenor in his sketches and clips for the final animation,
 which shows a galloping horse of cut paper and an eponymous nose
 walking about, Kentridge researches his work with a scholar’s zeal. He
 appropriates stylistic elements and artifacts from Russian culture of 
the time. Also, he overlays the eerie radio cacophony of Stalin,
 downloaded from YouTube, which he calls a digital sketchpad for 
animation.

An audience member asked how his research differed from a scholar’s 
research, or presumably the kind of enlightening fact finding that 
took place in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation era. Kentridge
 replied that artists use evidence as a raw material not for an essay,
 but for a fiction that is nonetheless true in essence. He calls the
 willingness of an audience to accept a work of art as “real” an act of
 generosity. From the land hallowed by Truth and Reconciliation,
 Kentridge says that artists seek a “physical reconciliation with the
 world,” which is stronger and more lasting than the particular context
 in which the raw 
materials once existed.

Image courtesy Hackett-Freedman Gallery

Recently, I met Marc Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based painter who exuberantly contradicts most narrative art with its emphasis on drama and desire. An “urban landscape” and figurative painter, he depicts neither striking vistas nor compelling characters. Instead, he focuses on gas stations, super markets, and shopping malls—those urban and suburban shelters for transitory souls. The paintings appear photo-realistic. But Trujillo mediates them by changing spaces, lighting, surfaces, characters, and gestures, all in service to his vision and the mood he wishes to convey. In these banal places, he notes, most people are thinking of where they’re going, not where they are in the present. “I like to paint purgatories,” he says, “rather than destination points like the Grand Canyon. I draw from the middle ground of experience. Extremes play into sentimentality.”

Trujillo also remains remarkably interested in narrative—or at least the inversion of our traditional notions of drama. He cites Peter Brueghel’s “Fall of Icarus” (c.1558) as a visualization of his storytelling philosophy. In the Greek myth, Icarus crashes into the sea after the sun melts his homemade wax wings. But in the bustling scene Brueghel painted, Icarus is just a small, incidental splash. With gentle wit, Brueghel seems to say that the story doesn’t really matter.

However Trujillo does play with the idea of storytelling in much of his work, and he has had a gallery show called “Seeing & Reading” with Chris Ware, his good friend and a prodigious comic-book artist and writer. Notably, Ware makes a cameo in one of Trujillo’s Wendy’s fast food restaurant paintings—a witty homage to Ware’s high school employer.

But where Ware simplifies his forms almost into hieroglyphics to keep the flow of the story moving, Trujillo deliberately muffles that flow by his intense rendering of details except in the signage. In his paintings, most of the text is obscured. We wile away in Trujillo’s eerily beautiful, familiar spaces—the mercury vapor lights of gas stations, the cement floors of mass shopping centers, and passing buses, presumably going nowhere.

Initially I wasn’t too wary of the up-and-running Louis Vuitton boutique in the middle of Takashi Murakami’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Modern Art Notes rang the alarm bell early, but it’s not like commercial enterprise didn’t have a place in the artist’s career before now.

A good deal of Murakami’s time has been spent developing his commercial art studio, KaiKai Kiki LLC. He has designed more than 500 mass-produced items, including cell phone caddies, key chains, stationery and t-shirts. When he was just starting out he even branded himself as “first in quality around the world,” appropriating the logo of a model kit company in Japan.

Artistically Murakami is at his best when he riffs on popular culture and products using high-art traditions. He’s heavily influenced by Japanese cartoon and comic illustration featured in anime and manga publications, but also incorporates 12th-century Japanese scroll painting techniques in his work. All in all, the collaboration with Louis Vuitton seemed like a fairly organic offshoot of Murakami’s established artistic acumen.

What has me bothered is the lack of distinction being made between art and objects of consumption. Paul Schimmel, curator of the Murakami show, was quoted in ArtNews last month as saying “I liked the idea of addressing the commercial work as rigorously as the so-called high art.”

I would disagree that putting this season’s must-have Louis bag in the middle of an art exhibition, no matter how strong the relevant ties to design or fashion, demands the same intellectual rigor needed to evaluate the rest of the show.

Schimmel continues, “…the experience of purchasing the luxury goods has an emotional resonance in the same way you have an experience seeing a great painting or sculpture.”

What a misunderstanding. Art is a catalyst—for thought, for reaction, for emotion, for change. That is where the power of an art object lies. The object itself is secondary. Price tagging art and putting it on the same plane as a shopping spree is shortsighted and a bit silly, because the endgame of true consumption is deterioration, destruction and obliteration. Art is just not subject to the same vagaries.

(“Army of Mushrooms”)