Tag: 20thcenturyart

Something for fans — like me — of Hockney, Bacon, Guston and more

Here’s a fine collection of links on some of my favorite artists, as well as new artists who had work that intrigued me:

Keith Haring work from Victoria Beckham's collection

From Bouguereau to Cattelan (what I find interesting in art, Jan 2024)

From Bouguereau to Cattelan, here’s a baker’s dozen pieces on artists new and old thought worthy of my attention and yours.

First up a good article on the young artist Lee Bul and their work, The Four Mysterious Guardians.  Also this Colossal piece on how  Dabin Ahn Balances Hope and Melancholy in His Sculptural Paintings  As for other newer (to me) artists, I think it’s good to remember that the  art market giveth and the art market taketh, as this piece shows: Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust.

Some good exhibits that recently showed were:


As for older artists, this is a good introduction to Hans Haacke  Why Are Museums So Afraid of This Artist? The great artist Frank Auerbach died not too long ago. The Guardian has a piece on him here: Frank auerbach a life in pictures. Sadly John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, recently died at 96 (one of his painting is at the end).

Some artists are good at getting attention. Even people who don’t know or follow art know about the conceptual artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, “Comedian,” which consists of a fruit-stand banana taped on the wall. In the end the art market did the very thing Cattelan was mocking, with 7 bidders biting before it went to …you might have guessed before hand…a crypto entrepreneur.

Another artist who gets lots of attention is David Shrigley. I admire what he is doing here:  David Shrigley urges schools to prioritise arts with aid of giant mantis. Will it be successful? I don’t know.

Finally I went down a rabbit hole on 19th century painting after I came across someone ripping into Basquiat and Twombly and extolling the work of William Adolphe Bouguereau, and I dunno. I’d take the first two over the third any day.

On the artist On Kawara

I was not aware of On Kawara until recently, and so I went down a rabbit hole reading as much as I could about him, as well as taking in whatever art I could find online. The following links I found helpful if you want to know more about this artist:

Thoughts I had:

  • To me he seems a fine combination of minimalism and conceptualism. That some of his earlier work was related to  minimalist Agnes Martin was also interesting.
  • While time is the focus of many of his work, secondary ideas come from that, such as scale and precision. Even location is there in the painting.
  • While the Date Paintings are minimal to the point of looking mechanical, they are actually produced by hand. Indeed there was significant effort by the artist to make one of the Date paintings.
  • Perhaps they could have been even more minimal by only using black and white, but there are color choices made for the paintings,  reflecting the part of the painter.
  • Like other conceptualists, Kawara had rules for his work, For example, “When Kawara was unable to complete the painting on the day it was started he immediately destroyed it.”

As someone fascinated by time and how it is measured and what that signifies, I was intrigued by the work of Kawara. If that appeals to you too, check him out.

Were Marcel Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bonds the precursor to NFTs?

If you are a fan or even passingly aware of Marcel Duchamp , you likely have heard of works of his: Nude Descending a Staircase to Fountain to Large Glass. They are all well known With the arrival of NFTs on the art scene, I was reminded of another of his works not so well known: Monte Carlo Bonds. As Wikipedia explains:

The Monte Carlo Bonds were a 1924 Marcel Duchamp work in the form of legal documents, created as bonds, originally intended to be produced in editions of 30. The creation of the work came out of Duchamp’s repeated experiments at the Monte Carlo Casino, where he endlessly threw the dice in order to accumulate profit through an excruciatingly gradual process.

The use of an artificial and random process is not unlike using blockchain for NFTs. And while both methods are associated with art, the primary purpose seems to be to generate profit. Duchamp was well ahead of his time.

Christie’s has more on these bonds.

On Philip Guston

I had some other things to say about Philip Guston until this  article came out in the Times, saying:

Last week, a handful of museums decided to postpone a retrospective of the painter Philip Guston over concerns that Ku Klux Klan imagery in his work, intended to criticize racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry, would upset viewers or that the works would be “misinterpreted.”

I was disappointed, to say the least. Fortunately I am not alone. The article goes on to state:

On Wednesday, a letter drafted by the art critic Barry Schwabsky addressed to those museums — the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Tate Modern, London — and signed by nearly 100 artists, writers and curators, was published by the Brooklyn Rail, protesting the postponement. To date, more than 2,000 names have been added — young and old, Black, Asian, Persian, Arab, L.G.B.T.Q.

So I am collecting a list of sites and pages on Guston, because he is an artist people should get to know more about. Especially if they were to simply mindedly misinterpret his work and think he has anything but abhorrence for the KKK. 

I am also doing this because I am a fan of his courage as much as I am of his work.  He made a big break from abstract expressionism late in his career and suffered for it. I don’t know many artists who have done such a thing. I think he needs to be more well known.

I also find it surprising to think people were surprised by this big break with AbEx. The elements he reintroduced were there from the beginning. And the cartoonish nature of his work is parallel to the drawings he was doing of Nixon and others. He needed to break from AbEx and went with the tools he had.

If you want to learn more about Guston, here is some links I have found that are useful: