Smithsonian.com

One rainy Friday afternoon in 1964, a 24-year-old Richard Serra, then wrapping up his studies at Yale, hopped a train from New Haven to New York City. Upon arriving, he headed uptown, to an East 77th Street townhouse, where he first encountered the work of Cy Twombly. “They gnawed at me,” Serra has said of the paintings he saw that day at Leo Castelli’s gallery. “I couldn’t forget them.”

Forty-three years later, Twombly, now 79, remains a master of the unforgettable, creating ever larger and more exuberant paintings that gnaw at you even after you’ve scrutinized them from every angle and tried to memorize their colors. And so it is fitting that an exhibition of recent paintings by Twombly now on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York blooms with that most enduring, enigmatic, and temperamental of flowers: the peony.

Any gardener will tell you that the most important thing about planting peonies is selecting a site, ideally one that gets at least a half day of sun. Long-lived but initially slow to grow, peonies sulk if disturbed. Try to move them and they’ll punish you by not flowering for several years. Leave them alone and they’ll bloom forever.

The cultivation of artists can be just as tricky. In the history of art, there’s no easy place to put Twombly. Today he is typically lumped with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in a catch-all category of second wave Abstract Expressionism, but the label is an awkward fit. Site selection was critical for Twombly. A Virginia native who studied in Boston and New York before matriculating at Black Mountain College, he escaped the go-go New York art world in 1957 for a place in the sun — Rome — where he still lives for most of the year. There he managed to meld abstraction and antiquity, painting and drawing, lament and reverie.

Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery — sprawling, high-ceilinged, and impeccably finished — is an excellent venue to show off the ten paintings and single sculpture (all untitled and executed in 2007) that comprise “A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things.” The main room is ringed with the six large horizontal paintings on wooden panels, each measuring about eighteen feet wide by eight feet tall. Entering the rectangular space, the viewer is stunned by epic constellations of peony blooms that appear to bob, weave, and punch triumphantly through fields of pencil and wax crayon scribbles, handprints, and haikus scrawled in Twombly’s shaky cursive. Where stems should be flow layered trails of thin acrylic paint, downward drips that wash the panels in verticals as if attempting to tether the buoyant flowers to the foreground. (more…)

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.

Vincent van Gogh was a missionary in a coal-mining village in Belgium before finally becoming a painter at age 27. I often wonder how van Gogh chose painting over writing as his primary devotion. After all, he had little money for art supplies and his village was slate-gray and sooty. His first paintings, such as The Potato Eaters, seem made of charcoal and tar.

Yet in his earliest letters to Theo, his brother, van Gogh speaks with a vibrancy that rivals anything captured in his latter, luminous paintings from the south of France. His voice as a writer, philosopher and art critic–widely printed today–seems so learned and assured.

In New York City, the Morgan Library & Museum now has an exhibit of van Gogh’s letters to Emile Bernard, a fellow painter who befriended van Gogh in Paris while still a teenager. “Painted with Words” pairs van Gogh’s lively, impassioned letters to Bernard with the original paintings they created and discussed from afar, revealing how intensely van Gogh read poetry and literature, and how he sought out serious camaraderie even as he slipped into madness and solitude.

Though the painters were friends, van Gogh’s letters often assume the tone of a concerned brother—often admiring, but in the end, blistering and admonishing. Van Gogh disavowed abstract symbols and worked from nature, once writing that he replaced the halo of medieval paintings with the sun. Bernard, meanwhile, preferred to paint from his imagination.

In one funny collision of wits, young Bernard created a picture of a brothel; van Gogh chides him for being naïve and not working from experience. In another letter, van Gogh calls one of Bernard’s paintings a “nightmare” for its religious iconography, stressing that one can convey spiritual struggle simply through the gnarled branches of olive trees.

Drawings within letters offer a glimpse into the artist’s working process, such as a small sketch showing how he tethered his easel to the earth on windy days. I have often admired van Gogh’s Japanese-style reed-brush drawings: lines and dappled dots evoke the texture of his oil paintings. But until this exhibit, I never realized that van Gogh created many of these drawings only after finishing his oil paintings, reversing the normal process of sketching, then painting.

The exhibit even calls the drawings “repetitions.” Because van Gogh settled in the south of France, he often mailed out letters with “repetition” drawings so that others in Paris could imagine the original painting. He would even write the name of his colors in French right on the drawing, literally painting with words.

The exhibit includes stunning paintings from Bernard and van Gogh, but my favorite painterly moment, so intimate and humane, remains in one of the letters. Van Gogh, committed to a mental institution at Saint Remy, writes that he hopes to paint a nocturnal scene—what we know today as Starry Night.

A flurry of shows and exhibits will soon touch down for the fall, and some will stay through winter.

Summer had a few gems (the Louise Nevelson show at the Jewish Museum was an unexpected delight), but also some duds (note to the Whitney: featuring a show called “Summer of Love” will succeed only if you pass out acid to go along with the psychedelic theme; if not—it is a no-go). So I’m looking forward to cutting my teeth on the up and comers.

A few that should be worth a trip, and will hopefully stand up to any hype thrown their way:

At the Power Plant in Toronto, “Francesco Vezzoli: A True Hollywood Story!” uses the fictitious remake of a film about Marlene Dietrich as an opportunity to explore the artist’s career-long obsession with celebrity.

“Global Feminism Remix” at the Brooklyn Museum is devoted to feminist contemporary art and is a solid riff on the previous exhibition of the same name.

The art history student in me is thrilled with the Wadsworth Atheneum’s “Faith & Fortune” exhibition, because it means the return of so many sumptuous Old Masters’ paintings to the museum after years of being shown abroad.

Phew. That was quite a summer.

Richard Serra’s massive sculptures tested the strength of the renovated floors at the Museum of Modern Art, while those of Frank Stella looked ready to float off the walls at New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery and spruced up the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Across the pond, calendrical coincidence made the summer a blockbuster for the world’s leading art fairs, with Art Basel in Switzerland, the 52nd Venice Biennale, Documenta XII (which takes place every five years) and Sculpture Projects Munster (held once a decade) opening within weeks of one another.  (more…)