Smithsonian.com

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”)

It must be one of life’s little jokes that Louise Bourgeois’s surname is synonymous with mediocrity, because her artwork is anything but.

This weekend that fact was reinforced to me. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston has put on a modest-sized show, “Bourgeois in Boston,” of the artist’s sculptures, prints, drawings and even an early painting (a rare inclusion for Bourgeois, who is known foremost for her three-dimensional forms). The venue was relatively small, but the short checklist did not hinder the impact of the exhibition.

After looking at only a few works, it becomes obvious that Bourgeois’s art is compelling because it’s simultaneously personal and symbolic. On par with Frida Kahlo’s work in terms of its autobiographical engagement, Bourgeois’s oeuvre is an open book when it comes to the her life.

Her close relationship to her mother; childhood traumas; her preoccupation with the body and sexuality; and her father’s infamous ten-year liaison with Bourgeois’s live-in governess—every one of these intimate disclosures finds its way into her work.

But at the same time, the viewer is never put off or alienated by the sharing of such intimacies. The artist’s highly developed symbolism turns diary confessions into so much more. A strong example of this is how Bourgeois’s tenderness for her mother is manifested through the personification of the spider, one of the artist’s most enduring symbols.

In Bourgeois’s hands, the threatening arachnid body becomes a sheltering, protective haven. As a weaver and spinner, the spider is also a source of fragile creativity and inspiration, quite a fitting homage to the artist’s literal originator and expressive muse.

Until January 2008, the National Gallery of Art will host timeless works from an odd couple: JMW Turner, the English romantic painter of the sublime, and Edward Hopper, the quintessential American artist of the quotidian.

Turner painted grand scenes from literary sources: bloody battles and infamous shipwrecks immersed in sensual glowing color, tumultuous brush strokes and thick impastos of paint. The exhibit of his watercolors and oil paintings span his entire career, and only one painting depicts London, Turner’s home, a distant city veiled by the murkiness of a new industrial age. Hopper, meanwhile, paints iconic scenes of early 20th-century New England and New York City: lighthouses, eerily quiet street corners, empty buildings and nighthawks at a diner.

Where Turner preferred a diffused atmospheric light, Hopper painted a light raking over solid forms, which would wash away all fussiness from his imagery. Turner was a maestro with paint, conducting it in ways still unmatched by any human hand. Hopper, however, struggled to find his form until he was in his 40’s, and even his masterpieces have awkward touches that contribute to the undeniable tension in his work. Turner was a member of the official academy by the age of 26 and moved swiftly from watercolor to oil to gain prestige as an artist. Yet Hopper painted a self-portrait wearing a hat and a tie. He could be a salesman or a businessman, and he liked to present himself that way.

JMW Turner courted controversy and fame in England with his daring subject matter and revolutionary painting style. Later, in bustling New York City, Edward Hopper found iconic status slowly and surreptitiously, finding timelessness in the mundane.

In terms of art stewardship, there are a handful of institutions that we simply could not do without. The Louvre, one of the oldest and largest of these museums, is among these precious places.

Not known for its cutting-edge offerings (with works like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, David’s Oath of the Horatii, and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, there’s really no need to be trendy), the Louvre has recently taken steps to assure that its “wow” offerings aren’t only historically seated.

German Anselm Kiefer is the first of four contemporary artists who will create permanent installations in the museum since Georges Braque painted an antechamber ceiling in 1953. These new works will not just hang on a wall or move from hall to hall, but will become part of the complex’s interior design.

The other artists who will be leaving a permanent mark on the museum will do so over the next three years. They are Cy Twombly, Francois Morellet and a fourth, yet unannounced, artist.

Kiefer’s offerings, recently finished, are housed in a stairwell leading into the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities wings. They include a self-portrait riddled with lead, silver and gold, as well as two arrangements of sculpted sunflowers—one surrounded by lead books and the other, titled Danaë, displays a lone flower stalk, sans petals, with gold-tipped seeds at its base.

In an age of abstraction and synthetic pop art, RB Kitaj re-vitalized narrative, figurative painting. He died last week at age 74.

Like many great artists, Kitaj endured public acclaim and charged disdain. His 1994 retrospective at London’s Tate Modern was panned in a stormy critical concert. Kitaj, an ardent reader and writer, included explanatory texts with each of his paintings—presumably circumventing the critics, much to their understandable yet misguided ire.

Working primarily during an age of abstraction, Kitaj and his paintings defy easy categorization. Though known as a British pop artist, Kitaj was in truth an American; a British expatriate, he was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. No matter his nationality, later in life Kitaj keenly allied himself with his Jewish faith, even embracing the stereotype of the “wandering Jew” from Anti-Semitic folklore.

Ever restless, Kitaj made for an unlikely modern art hero. He willfully ignored “art for art’s sake,” the reigning Abstract Expressionist doctrine; in thought and act, he referenced a realm far richer than glib pop, often alluding to existential literature and philosophy in his lyrical, figurative compositions. Using line even in his painterly works, critics claimed he could at once draw with the facility of Edgar Degas, and paint with the shimmering, multi-faceted style of Paul Cezanne.

His compositions seem almost cubist, with their figures and landscapes unmoored from ordinary constraints, geographic and temporal—a fitting feeling for an artist who, however embraced, viewed the world through the fragmented lens of an exile. This kaleidoscopic approach seems akin to collage; the collaged effect and Kitaj’s fresh, expressive use of color perhaps led to the unfortunate “pop artist” misnomer.

Critics may also want to re-consider Kitaj’s experimental technique of including texts with his paintings. Such texts may dampen the wordless mystery of art, but they also complement the paintings well, expressing the vividness of the artist’s vision in a distinctive voice. At his 1994 Tate retrospective, Kitaj gives the last word on his art, composed amidst the tumult of our times: “It is, perhaps, an original concept, to treat one’s art as something which not only replaces the inertia of despair, which may be common enough, but to press art into a fiction which sustains an undying love.”

(The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin) courtesy of the collection of Mrs. Susan Lloyd, New York)