Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends. ca. 1868.
Oil on canvas.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Birmingham, UK.
Oil on canvas.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Birmingham, UK.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Friday, December 28, 2012
Art School Tells Students to Buy Pictureless $180 Art History Book
What is this, October!? According to a blog post published by a disgruntled parent of a student, the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) is forcing students to buy an art history book
for $180 — which wouldn’t be unheard of, but the catch is that the
publishers of this book didn’t get any of the image rights for the
artwork it includes. To reiterate, that’s an art history survey without
any pictures. WTF?Instead of having pictures of artwork, the book, Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800 (so named for the course it goes with), instead just has placeholders with instructions to see a digital version for the actual image. It’s like a website with only broken image links. Just check out this hilarious sample page from the book:
An excerpt page from the pictureless textbook (courtesy ashleyit.com)
The disgruntled parent complains, “I’m not particularly interested in paying any amount for an imageless art history textbook.” We’re inclined to agree. In the context, OCAD’s faux-inspiring slogan of “imagination is everything” takes on a whole new meaning. Don’t have any pictures of art? Just imagine them all!
Friday, November 30, 2012
Romans and electricity
Electricity,
it's a child of the 19th-century, right? The Romans might have been
pretty clever but they never mastered putting a D cell in a torch...or
did they? There does seem to be at least some evidence of wet-cell
batteries being used on the peripheries of the Roman Empire. The famous
Baghdad Battery is more closely related to the post-Persian Parthian
Empire, but these two ancient super powers shared borders, Greek culture
and technology. Okay, so what was the Baghdad battery? Several
five-inch tall clay jars have been found around Mesopotamia (modern day
Iraq) containing hollow copper cylinders and iron rods that appear to
function as anodes and cathodes when the jar is filled with acid.
Voltages of up to 0.5-volts have been recorded from modern copies of
these vessels using vinegar, and their performance could certainly be
boosted if a stronger acid were to be used - the Romans and Parthians
would have been quite capable of manufacturing sulphuric and
hydrochloric acids which should be able to boost these wet-cells into
the region of 4 or 5 volts. All right, so they had a battery...what was
it used for? There's a couple of theories. During this period the Romans
and the Egyptians were using bio-electric fish - such as the Torpedo
Fish (the electric ray) - to numb severe pain; including gout, child
birth and migraines. One could imagine an electric ray would be hard to
find in the Mesopotamian deserts, so a 'clay ray' battery might have
been a worthy alternative. Then there's the jewellers. Just as we dress
up silver by electroplating it with gold, the ancients probably cottoned
on pretty quickly to the same game. Importantly, both pain relief and
fiddling the jewellery would have provided sufficient cash equity to
experiment with battery technology if nothing else. But is that all?
Well, maybe. These 'batteries' don't show up in Roman or Parthian
rubbish dumps like an Eveready or Duracel would these days...but, maybe,
just maybe, Thomas Edison wasn't the first guy to invent the light
bulb...more on that later.Find out if Calvus had a light bulb moment
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
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|
Caracalla took the official name of M.
Aurelius Antoninus Pius as part of the Severan dynasty’s attempt to
appear as the legitimate and worthy successors of the secondcentury
Antonine emperors. Despite this, in his official portraiture, he
abandoned the luxuriant hair and beard of his predecessors for a
military style characterized by closely cropped curls and a stubble
beard. An ancient source records that on his deathbed, his father
Septimius Severus advised Caracalla to “enrich the soldiers and despise
everyone else.” This finely carved head is a powerful rendering of the
official portrait and was probably produced at an imperial workshop, since the statue fragments are said to have been found in Rome. It is from a statue, the legs of which also survive and are displayed in the Study Collection on the Mezzanine Floor. |
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
10 Innovations That Built Ancient Rome
10 Innovations That Built Ancient Rome (Roman aqueduct)
1. Aqueducts
The Romans enjoyed many amenities for their day, including public
toilets, underground sewage systems, fountains and ornate public baths.
None of these aquatic innovations would have been possible without the Roman aqueduct.
First developed around 312 B.C., these engineering marvels used gravity
to transport water along stone, lead and concrete pipelines and into
city centers. Aqueducts liberated Roman cities from
a reliance on nearby water supplies and proved priceless in promoting
public health and sanitation. While the Romans did not invent the
aqueduct—primitive canals for irrigation and water transport existed
earlier in Egypt, Assyria and Babylon—they used their mastery of civil
engineering to perfect the process. Hundreds of aqueducts eventually
sprang up throughout the empire, some of which transported water as far
as 60 miles. Perhaps most impressive of all, Roman aqueducts were so
well built that some are still in use to this day. Rome’s famous Trevi Fountain, for instance, is supplied by a restored version of the Aqua Virgo, one of ancient Rome’s 11 aqueducts.
2. Concrete
Many ancient Roman structures like the Pantheon, the Colosseum and the
Roman Forum are still standing today thanks to the development of Roman
cement and concrete. The Romans first began building with concrete over
2,100 years ago and used it throughout the Mediterranean basin in
everything from aqueducts and buildings to bridges and monuments. Roman concrete was
considerably weaker than its modern counterpart, but it has proved
remarkably durable thanks to its unique recipe, which used slaked lime
and a volcanic ash known as pozzolana to create a sticky paste. Combined
with volcanic rocks called tuff, this ancient cement formed a concrete
that could effectively endure chemical decay. Pozzolana helped Roman concrete set quickly even when submerged in seawater, enabling the construction of elaborate baths, piers and harbors.
3. Newspapers
The Romans were known to contribute to public discourse through the use
of official texts detailing military, legal and civil issues. Known as Acta Diurna,
or “daily acts,” these early newspapers were written on metal or stone
and then posted in heavily trafficked areas like the Roman Forum. Acta
are believed to have first appeared around 131 B.C. and typically
included details of Roman military victories, lists of games and
gladiatorial bouts, birth and death notices and even human interest
stories. There was also an Acta Senatus, which detailed the proceedings of the Roman senate. These were traditionally withheld from public view until 59 B.C., when Julius Caesar ordered their publication as part of the many populist reforms he instituted during his first consulship.
4. Welfare
Ancient Rome was the wellspring for many modern government programs,
including measures that subsidized food, education and other expenses
for the needy. These entitlement programs date back to 122 B.C., when
the tribune Gaius Gracchus instituted lex frumentaria, a law that
ordered Rome’s government to supply its citizens with allotments of
cheaply priced grain. This early form of welfare continued under Trajan,
who implemented a program known as “alimenta” to help feed, clothe and
educate orphans and poor children. Other items including corn, oil,
wine, bread and pork were eventually added to the list of
price-controlled goods, which may have been collected with tokens called
“tesserae.” These generous handouts helped Roman emperors win favor
with the public, but some historians have argued that they also
contributed to Rome’s economic decline.
5. Bound Books
For most of human history, literature took the form of unwieldy clay
tablets and scrolls. The Romans streamlined the medium by creating the
codex, a stack of bound pages that is recognized as the earliest
incarnation of the book. The first codices were made of bound wax
tablets, but these were later replaced by animal skin parchment that
more clearly resembled pages. Ancient historians note that Julius Caesar
created an early version of a codex by stacking pages of papyrus to
form a primitive notebook, but bound codices did not become popular in
Rome until the first century or thereabouts. Early Christians became
some of the first to adopt the new technology, using it extensively to
produce copies of the Bible.
6. Roads and Highways
At its height, the Roman empire encompassed
nearly 1.7 million square miles and included most of southern Europe.
To ensure effective administration of this sprawling domain, the Romans
built the most sophisticated system of roads the ancient world had ever
seen. These Roman roads—many of which are still in use today—were
constructed with a combination of dirt, gravel and bricks made from
granite or hardened volcanic lava. Roman engineers adhered to strict
standards when designing their highways, creating arrow-straight roads
that curved to allow for water drainage. The Romans built over 50,000
miles of road by 200 A.D., primarily in the service of military
conquest. Highways allowed the Roman legion to travel as far as 25 miles
per day, and a complex network of post houses meant that messages and
other intelligence could be relayed with astonishing speed. These roads
were often managed in the same way as modern highways. Stone mile
markers and signs informed travelers of the distance to their
destination, while special complements of soldiers acted as a kind of
highway patrol.
7. Roman Arches
Arches have existed for roughly 4,000 years, but the ancient Romans were
the first to effectively harness their power in the construction of
bridges, monuments and buildings. The ingenious design of the arch
allowed the weight of buildings to be evenly distributed along various
supports, preventing massive Roman structures like the Colosseum from
crumbling under their own weight. Roman engineers improved on arches by
flattening their shape to create what is known as a segmental arch and
repeating them at various intervals to build stronger supports that
could span large gaps when used in bridges and aqueducts. Along with
columns, domes and vaulted ceilings, the arch became one of the defining
characteristics of the Roman architectural style.
8. The Julian Calendar
The modern Gregorian calendar is modeled very closely on a Roman version
that dates back more than 2,000 years. Early Roman calendars were
likely cribbed from Greek models that operated around the lunar cycle.
But because the Romans considered even numbers unlucky, they eventually
altered their calendar to ensure that each month had an odd number of
days. This practice continued until 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar and the
astronomer Sosigenes instituted the Julian system to align the calendar
with the solar year. Caesar lengthened the number of days in a year from
355 to the now-familiar 365 and eventually included the 12 months as we
know them today. The Julian calendar was almost perfect, but it
miscalculated the solar year by 11 minutes. These few minutes ultimately
threw the calendar off by several days. This led to the adoption of the
nearly identical Gregorian calendar in 1582, which fixed the
discrepancy by altering the schedule of leap years.
9. The Twelve Tables and the Corpus Juris Civilis
Subpoena, habeas corpus, pro bono, affidavit—all these terms derive from
the Roman legal system, which dominated Western law and government for
centuries. The basis for early Roman law came from the Twelve Tables, a
code that formed an essential part of the constitution during the
Republican era. First adopted around 450 B.C., the Twelve Tables
detailed laws regarding property, religion and divorce and listed
punishments for everything from theft to black magic. Even more
influential than the Twelve Tables was the Corpus Juris Civilis, an
ambitious attempt to synthesize Rome’s history of law into one document.
Established by the Byzantine emperor Justinian between 529 and 535
A.D., the Corpus Juris included modern legal concepts such as the notion
that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. After the fall of the
Roman empire, it became the basis for many of the world’s legal
systems. Along with English common law and sharia law, Roman law remains
hugely influential and is still reflected in the civil laws of several
European nations as well as the U.S. state of Louisiana.
10. Battlefield Surgery
The Romans invented many surgical tools and pioneered the use of the
cesarean section, but their most valuable contributions to medicine came
on the battlefield. Under the leadership of Augustus, they established a
military medical corps that was one of the first dedicated field
surgery units. These specially trained medics saved countless lives
through the use of Roman medical innovations like hemostatic tourniquets
and arterial surgical clamps to curb blood loss. Roman field doctors
also performed physicals on new recruits and helped stem the spread of
disease by overseeing sanitation in military camps. They were even known
to disinfect instruments in hot water before use, pioneering a form of
antiseptic surgery that was not fully embraced until the 19th century.
Roman military medicine proved so advanced at treating wounds and
promoting wellness that soldiers tended to live longer than the average
citizen despite constantly facing the hazards of combat.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Were Roman slaves hungry?
What
was it like to be a slave in the Roman Empire? The answer, according to
the latest excavations at Vagnari, is that slaves were rather better
looked after than one might expect: they ate quite well, they suffered
less from childhood starvation than did the population in general, and
when they died, the grave goods they were buried with suggested that
they were certainly not living in abject poverty.
This at least was the implication of research that was revealed in a
recent conference held at Edinburgh University organised by Alastair
Small on 26th – 28th October 2012, when Alistair Small and his
associates told us about their latest work at Vagnari.
Vagnari is the name of an abandoned farmstead – you will not find it on
any map, but it lies just outside the town of Gravina, near Bari in
Apulia. Here Professor Small has been excavating for nearly 40 years,
at first in the nearby hillfort of Botromagno, and subsequently doing
field surveys over the whole area which revealed an interesting site at
Vagnari: we have already covered the whole history in Current
Archaeology 45. But in the Roman imperial period,
it appears to have been an imperial estate, centred round a tile works,
and one of the tiles was found stamped with the name of Grati Caesaris,
which means the work of Gratus, slave of Caesar. And the argument goes
that if the person who stamped his name on the tiles was a slave of
Caesar, then presumably this was an imperial estate and all the other
workers would have been, if not slaves as least as the very lowest end
of society. Nearly 100 skeletons have now been excavated from a cemetery
at the site, and the results of the extensive work on those skeletons
carried out by Tracey Prowse of McMaster University in Canada are
extremely illuminating.
An analysis of the grave goods by Liana Brent suggested that they were
relatively well provided for in the next world, with an average of 7.4
grave goods for the males and 4.4 for the females. Indeed two of the
skeletons were buried with spears and the spear tips were rounded
showing that they had been used, presumably for hunting. It is
difficult to see slaves possessing spears and using them and being
buried with them, so perhaps these were tenants, coloni. Is this the
reality of slavery in the Roman world?She has now examined nearly 100
skeletons, and 656 teeth which are particularly interesting as they give
evidence for childhood stress. If you go through phases of
malnutrition in childhood there will be bands in your teeth to reveal
this stress. On this analysis Vagnari showed up remarkably well.
Indeed comparing the Vagnari evidence with other known collections of
teeth from Italy, Vagnari was among the best. And if Vagnari was a
cemetery of slaves, then slaves were better fed than the normal
population.
But were they slaves? And was this an imperial estate? Indeed what do we
mean by an imperial estate? In loose terminology, an imperial estate is
often thought to be state property, but in the Roman world there was a
sharp distinction: in the early Republican period, the imperial estates
were called the patrimonium, but by the third and fourth centuries it
was called the res privata, to distinguish it from the res publica, that is the property owned by the Senate and People of Rome
(SPQR). The res private was often very extensive, for when rivals to
the Emperor were condemned, their was confiscated by the Emperor and
became res privata: indeed Domenico Vera, Professor at Parma University,
pointed out that in A.D. 422, 18.5% of taxable land in Africa
proconsularis was res private. A
He introduced the concept of an Emphyteutic lease, which again I must
confess I had not heard of, but which apparently existed in Roman law
and is still found today in Quebec and most of Latin America. It is a
long-term lease for a period of up to 99 years where the lessee agrees
to add improvements to the property over the period of the lease so as
to increase the value at the end of the lease period. But in return
there is a reduced rent, or sometimes even a peppercorn rent.
Apparently the Italian government has proposed that some of their
historic buildings might be leased out to the public or companies on an
Emphyteutic lease. Indeed the National Trust makes similar sorts of
agreements. But were such Emphyteutic leases used in imperial estates
where the land would be leased at a moderate rent which would guarantee
the emperor a steady and constant income stream, but at the same time
give the lessee every incentive to manage the property well?But the res
privata was often rented out on long-term leases so that it often
became virtually indistinguishable from privately owned land. The matter
was discussed in a splendid guest lecture given by Nicholas Purcell,
the new Camden Professor of Ancient History
at Oxford, succeeding Alan Bowman who has just retired. I must confess
I had not met Professor Purcell before, but I think Oxford has got
another hit on its hands: it was an absolutely superb lecture, very
thought provoking in content and beautifully delivered — just the sort
of lecture that the Camden Professor should deliver. He began – horror
of horrors with a quotation from Adam Smith – Oxford professors are all
meant to be left-wing and should not be quoting right-wing people like
Adam Smith. But times are a-changing, even at Oxford, and he quoted “No
two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and
sovereign”. And he went on to ask just how imperial estates (the
sovereign) were run (by traders?)
Other new concepts were introduced such as coloni or inquilini (a term
that apparently is still in use in Italian and Spanish meaning tenant).
I know about coloni who were free tenants, until under Diocletian they
were tied to the soil and thus turned into serfs. But should we perhaps
think that there may not have been such a sharp distinction between
slaves and freedmen, but recognise that there were probably gradations
in between
Another fascinating talk was by Philip Kenrick who is becoming the great
pottery guru for the whole of the Mediterranean. There is one great
oddity in the Vagnari pottery – a small but significant proportion of it
comes from Illyria, that is modern Albania and Yugoslavia. This is an
off-shoot of the very extensive excavations under Richard Hodges at
Butrint in Albania, which is producing a massive database of material of
all periods. And some of the pottery specialists trained at Butrint
have been coming to Italy and have been looking at the pottery and
saying “Hi, that is Butrint pottery”. We are used to the idea that in
southern Italy many of the finewares in the early period, the terra
sigillata, come from north Italy, to be replaced in the late period by
African red slip wares. But Illyria is actually nearer than north Italy
or Africa, so there is no reason why Illyrian potters could not be
selling their wares in southern Italy.
There were many other fascinating lectures, but it is clear that
archaeology is beginning to produce an entirely new story of the history
of the Roman conquest of southern Italy that is rather different from
the successes of the Roman conquest of northern Italy.He suggested that
we should look for a new terminology of redslip wares. Here in Britain
we normally call them Samian pottery, which form the dominant finewares
of the first and second centuries. In Italy and the Mediterranean such
wares tend to be called terra sigillata, or Arretine wares, being
produced not in Gaul but in northern Italy, but with the same technique
of red pottery with a red slip on the surface, and elaborate moulded
decoration. And just as in Britain Samian dies out at the end of the
second century, so in the Mediterranian, the north Italian potteries
around Arezzo die out and are replaced by African red slip wares. He
suggested that we should use the term common slipped wares or regional
slipped wares to cover all this pottery that was so ubiquitous
throughout the Roman empire.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
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| “Museum senior conservator Jim DeYoung with the janitor, while fabricating its shipping crate. Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996), Janitor, 1973. Photo by Terri White.” (Milwaukee Art Museum) |
 |
Nov. 12, 1939: This photo, published shortly after the start of the Second World War, ran with this caption: “The Winged Victory of Samothrace, another great achievement of the ancient Greek sculptors, packed for removal in accordance with plans for its protection formulated far in advance of the war.” A 2009 exhibition at the Louvre showed photos documenting how art was relocated for safety during wartime. Photo: The New York Times |
Cats in the Ancient World
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| Colorful Cat Mosaic from a dining room (triclinium) in the House of the Faun in Pompeii (Photo credit: mharrsch) |
Although it has been commonly accepted that cats were first domesticated in Egypt 4000 years ago, their History among human beings goes back much further. Wild cats are now known to have lived among the people of Mesopotamia
over 100,000 years ago and to have been domesticated there
approximately 12,000 BCE at about the same time as dogs, sheep, and
goats. Archaeological excavations in the past ten years have provided
evidence that the Near Eastern Wildcat is the closest relative of the
modern-day domestic cat and was bred by Mesopotamian
farmers, most probably as a means of controlling pests, such as mice,
which were attracted by grain supplies. The writer David Derbyshire
cites a 2007 CE research project in which, “the study used DNA samples
from 979 wild and domestic cats to piece together the feline family
tree. They looked for markers in mitochondrial DNA - a type of genetic
material passed down from mothers to kittens which can reveal when wild
and domestic cat lineages were most closely related.” This project was
headed by Dr. Andrew Kitchener, a Zoologist at the National Museums of Scotland, who writes, "This shows that the origin of domestic cats was not Ancient
Egypt - which is the prevailing view - but Mesopotamia and that it
occurred much earlier than was thought. The last common ancestor of
wildcats and domesticated cats lived more than 100,000 years ago”
(Derbyshire). Dr. Kitchener’s findings built upon the evidence of cat’s Domestication provided by the discovery in 1983 CE of a cat skeleton in a Grave dating to 9,500 BCE on the island of Cyprus. This find, made by the archaeologist Alain le Brun, was important because Cyprus had no indigenous cat population and it is unlikely that settlers would have brought a wild cat by boat, to the island.
The cat’s association with ancient Egypt, however, is understandable in that Egyptian Culture
was famous for its devotion to the cat. The export of cats from Egypt
was so strictly prohibited that a branch of the government was formed
solely to deal with this issue. Government agents were dispatched to
other lands to find and return cats which had been smuggled out. It is
clearly established that, by 450 BCE, the penalty in Egypt for killing a
cat was Death (though this Law
is thought to have been observed much earlier). The goddess Bastet,
commonly depicted as a cat or as a woman with a cat’s head, was among
the most popular deities of the Egyptian pantheon. She was the keeper of
hearth and home, protector of women’s secrets, guardian against evil
spirits and disease, and the goddess of cats. Her ritual centre was the City of Bubastis (“House of Bastet”) in which, according to Herodotus (484-425 BCE), an enormous Temple
complex was built in her honour in the centre of the city. Herodotus
also relates that the Egyptians cared so much for their cats that they
placed their safety above human life and property. When a house caught
fire, the Egyptians would concern themselves more with rescuing the cats
than with anything else, often running back into the burning building
or forming a perimeter around the flames to keep cats at a safe
distance. When a cat died, Herodotus writes, “All the inhabitants of a
house shave their eyebrows [as a sign of deep mourning]. Cats which have
died are taken to Bubastis where they are embalmed and buried in sacred
receptacles” (Nardo 117). The Period
of mourning was considered completed when the people’s eyebrows had
grown back. Mummified cats have been found at Bubastis and elsewhere
throughout Egypt, sometimes buried with, or near to, their owners as
evidenced by identifying seals on the mummies.
The greatest example of Egyptian devotion to the cat, however, comes from the Battle of Pelusium (525 BCE) in whichCambyses II of Persia defeated the forces of the Egyptian Pharaoh Psametik III to Conquer
Egypt. Knowing of the Egyptian’s love for cats, Cambyses had his men
round up various animals, cats chiefly among them, and drive the animals
before the invading forces toward the fortified city of Pelusium on the
Nile. The Persian
soldiers painted images of cats on their shields, and may have held cats
in their arms, as they marched behind the Wall
of animals. The Egyptians, reluctant to defend themselves for fear of
harming the cats (and perhaps incurring the death penalty should they
kill one), and demoralized at seeing the image of Bastet on the enemy’s
shields, surrendered the city and let Egypt fall to the Persians. The HistorianPolyaenus
(2nd century CE) writes that, after the surrender, Cambyses rode in
triumph through the city and hurled cats into the faces of the defeated
Egyptians in scorn.
The Egyptians are also responsible for the very name `cat’ in that it derives from the North African
word for the animal, “quattah”, and, as the cat was so closely
associated with Egypt, almost every other European nation employs
variations on this word: French, chat; Swedish, katt; German,
katze; Italian, gatto; Spanish, gato and so forth (Morris, 175). The
colloquial word for a cat - `puss’ or `pussy’ - is also associated with
Egypt in that it derives from the word `Pasht’, another name for Bastet.
Cats are mentioned in the two great literary epics of ancient India, The
Mahabharata and The Ramayana (both c. 5th/4th century BCE). In
Mahabharata a famous passage concerns the cat Lomasa and the mouse
Palita, who help each other escape from death and discuss at length the
nature of relationships, particularly those in which one of the parties
is stronger or more powerful than the other. In the Ramayana, the God
Indra disguises himself as a cat after seducing the beautiful maid
Ahalya as a means to escape from her husband. As was the case everywhere
else, cats in India were
found to be particularly useful in controlling the populations of less
desirable creatures like mice, rats, and snakes and so were honoured in
the homes, farms, and palaces throughout the land. That the cat was seen
as more than just a method of pest control is substantiated by the
reverence accorded to felines in the Literature
of India. The famous story of Puss in Boots (best known through the
French version by Charles Perrault, 1628-1703 CE) is taken from a much
older Indian folk tale in the Panchatantra from the 5th century BCE
(though the character of the cat’s master has a very different
personality in the older tale than the one in Perrault’s story). The
esteem in which cats were held is also evident in the Indian cat
goddess, Sastht, who served much the same role as Bastet and was as
greatly revered.
A Persian tale claims the cat was created magically. The great Persian
hero Rustum, out on campaign, one night saved a magician from a band of
thieves. Rustum offered the older man the hospitality of his tent and,
as they sat outside under the stars, enjoying the warmth of a fire, the
magician asked Rustum what he wished for as a gift in repayment for
saving the man’s life. Rustum told him that there was nothing he desired
since everything he could want, he already had before him in the warmth
and comfort of the fire, the scent of the smoke and the beauty of the
stars overhead. The magician then took a handful of smoke, added flame,
and brought down two of the brightest stars, kneading them together in
his hands and blowing on them. When he opened his hands toward Rustum,
the warrior saw a small, smoke-grey kitten with eyes bright as the stars
and a tiny tongue which darted like the tip of flame. In this way, the
first Persian cat came to be created as a token of gratitude to Rustum.
The prophet Muhammed was also very fond of cats. According to legend,
the `M’ design on the forehead of the tabby cat was made when the
prophet blessed his favourite cat by placing his hand on its head. This
cat, Meuzza, also features in another famous story in which Muhammed,
called to prayer, found the cat asleep on his arm. Rather than disturb
the cat, Muhammed cut the sleeve from his robe and left Meuzza to sleep.
The status of the cat, therefore, was further enhanced by its
association with a figure of divinity.
This was also true in China
where the goddess Li Shou was depicted in cat form and petitions and
sacrifices made to her for pest control and fertility. She too, was a
very popular goddess who was thought to embody the importance of cats in
the early days of creation. An ancient Chinese myth relates that, in
the beginning of the world, the gods appointed cats to oversee the
running of their new creation and, in order for communication to be
clear, granted cats the power of speech. Cats, however, were more
interested in sleeping beneath the cherry trees and playing with the
falling blossoms than with the mundane task of having to pay attention
to the operation of the world. Three times the gods came to check on how
well the cats were doing their job and all three times were
disappointed to find their feline overseers asleep or at play. On the
god’s third visit, the cats explained they had no interest in running
the world and nominated human beings for the position. The power of
speech was then taken from the cats and given to humans but, as humans
seemed incapable of understanding the words of the gods, cats remained
entrusted with the important task of keeping time and so maintaining
order. It was thought that one could tell the time of day by looking
into a cat’s eyes and this belief is still maintained in China.
In Japan, the famous image of the `Beckoning Cat’ (the maneki neko
figure of the cat with one raised paw) represents the goddess of mercy.
The legend goes that a cat, sitting outside of the temple of Gotoku-ji,
raised her paw in acknowledgement of the Emperor
who was passing by. Attracted by the cat’s gesture, the emperor entered
the temple and, moments later, lightning struck the very spot where he
had been standing. The cat, therefore, saved his life and was accorded
great honours. The Beckoning Cat image is thought to bring good luck
when given as a gift and remains a very popular present in Japan. The
cat was regularly considered a guardian of the home and was thought to
be the special protector of valuable books. Cats were often housed in
private pagodas in Japan and were considered so valuable that, by the
10th century CE, only the nobility could afford to own one.
Although cats were kept by people in Greece and Rome, the appreciation for the animal as a hunter was not as great in thosecultures owing to the Greek and Roman practice of keeping domesticated weasels for pest control. The Romans
regarded the cat as a symbol of independence and not as a creature of
utility. Cats were kept as pets by both Greeks and Romans and were
regarded highly. A first century CE epitaph of a young girl holding a
cat is among the earliest pieces of evidence of cats inRome and, in Greece, the playwright Aristophanes frequently featured cats in his works for comic effect (coining
the phrase, “The cat did it” in assigning blame). Among ancient
civilizations, however, the cat was probably least popular among the
Greeks owing to its association with the goddess of death, darkness and
witches, Hecate. A much later development in Greek appreciation for the
cat is evidenced in the legend that the cat protected the baby Jesus
from rodents and snakes and so is accorded the best of spots in a Greek
home but, originally, they do not seem to have been regarded highly.
Cats are thought to have been brought to Europe by Phoenician
traders who smuggled them out of Egypt. As the Phoenicians are
acknowledged to have extensively traded with every known civilization of
the time, cats could have been spread around the region on a fairly
regular basis. It is well documented that cats were kept on ships to
control vermin during the time of the 15th century CE Age of Discovery
and, most likely, they served the same purpose for the Phoenicians. If
the Phoenicians did bring the cat to Europe, as seems very likely, they
may have also introduced the Greek association of the cat with Hecate.
The Greek myth which suggests this link concerns Galinthius, a
maid-servant to the Princess Alcmene. The godZeus seduced Alcmene and she became pregnant with Hercules. Zeus’ wife, Hera, was thwarted in her attempt to kill Alcmene and Hercules through the cleverness of Galinthius. Enraged, Hera
transformed Galinthius into a cat and sent her to the underworld to
ever after serve Hecate. This myth, then, associated cats with darkness,
transformation, the underworld, and witchcraft and, in time, these
associations would prove very unfortunate for the cat.
Although cats seem to have enjoyed their ancient high standing in European countries at first (in Norse mythology, for example, the great goddess Freya is depicted in a chariot drawn by cats and in both Ireland and Scotland
cats are depicted as magical in a positive sense) the Christian Church,
following their regular course of demonizing important pagan symbols,
drew on the pre-existing link between the cat and witchcraft to
associate cats with evil as personified in the Devil. By the Middle
Ages, cats were demonized to the point where they were regularly killed
across Europe. It has long been argued that the death of so many cats
allowed the mice and rat populations to thrive and that the fleas these
vermin carried brought about the Bubonic Plague of 1348 CE. While this
theory has been disputed, there seems no doubt that a decrease in the
cat population would result in an increase in the number of mice and
rats and it is established that there was such a decrease in the number
of cats prior to 1348 CE. Desmond Morris writes, “Because the cat was
seen as evil, all kinds of frightening powers were attributed to it by
the writers of the day. Its teeth were said to be venomous, its flesh
poisonous, its hair lethal (causing suffocation if a few were
accidentally swallowed), and its breath infectious, destroying human
lungs and causing consumption” and further states, “As late as 1658
Edward Topsel, in his serious work on natural history, [wrote] `the
familiars of Witches do most ordinarily appear in the shape of Cats,
which is an argument that this beast is dangerous to soul and body”
(158). The inhabitants of the European nations, believing the cat to be
evil, shunned not only the animal but anyone who seemed overly fond of
the cat. Elderly Women who cared for cats were especially susceptible to punishment for witchcraft simply on the grounds of being so accused.
Cats survived these frenzied superstitions better than many of their
human companions and, during the Victorian Age (1819-1901 CE) were again
elevated to their previous high standing. Queen Victoria of Great Britain
(ruled 1837-1901 CE) became interested in cats through the many stories
of archaeological finds in Egypt being published regularly in England.
Many of these stories included descriptions of the Egyptian reverence
for cats, images of statues of Bastet, and the feline association with
the gods and monarchy. The queen’s interest in the cat led her to adopt
two Blue Persians whom she treated as members of her court. This story
was carried by the newspapers of the day and, as Queen Victoria was a
very popular monarch, more and more people became interested in having
cats of their own. This trend spread to the United States and was
encouraged by the most popular magazine in America at that time, Godey’s
Lady’s Book. Published by Louis A. Godey of Philadelphia from 1830
-1878, this monthly periodical featured stories, articles, poems, and
engravings and is perhaps best known for helping to institutionalize the
practice of the family Christmas tree in America. In an 1860 article,
Godey’s stated that cats were not solely for older women or monarchs and
that anyone should feel comfortable in embracing the “love and virtue”
of the cat. Cat popularity in the United States grew appreciably after
Godey’s article. Cats first came to North America, it is thought, in
1749 CE, from England, to help control the mice and rat population but
they seem to have been largely considered utilitarian until the
Victorian Age.
Many writers of the age owned and admired cats. Charles Dickens was so
devoted to his cats that he allowed them into his study and regularly
allowed his favorite (known as The Master’s Cat) to snuff out the candle
on Dickens’ Writing
desk even when the author was at work. Evidently, the cat would grow
tired of Dickens’ attention being directed toward the page instead of to
feline companionship and petting (Morris, 167). Mark Twain, William
Wordsworth, John Keats, and Thomas Hardy were all great admirers of the
cat and Lewis Carroll, of course, created one of the most enduring
images of the feline through the Cheshire Cat in his Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland. The first major Cat Show was held at the Crystal Palace
in London in 1871CE and appreciation of the cat was elevated to such a
level that, for the first time, cats were given “specific standards and
classes” which are still used to categorize felines in the present day
(Morris, 148). Cat shows became increasingly popular after this event
and interest in breeding and showing cats spread throughout Europe and
North America. The first cat show in America (in 1895 CE) was so popular
that it was held at the large venue of Madison Square Garden in
Manhattan. From agents of pest control to divine or semi-divine
creatures, to incarnations of evil, and, finally, to house pets, cats
have been the close associates of human beings for centuries. They
continue to be valued companions for people across the world today and,
in this, these individuals carry on the legacy of the ancients in their
devotion to, and appreciation for, the cat.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Art Review
Restless in Style and Subject
‘George Bellows,’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Librado Romero/The New York Times
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: November 15, 2012
Just after the American painter George Bellows died of a ruptured
appendix at the age of 42, in 1925, the writer Sherwood Anderson offered
a poignant assessment. Anderson wrote that Bellows’s last paintings
“keep telling you things. They are telling you that Mr. George Bellows
died too young. They are telling you that he was after something, that
he was always after it.”
Multimedia
At least as seen at the Met, Bellows was constantly changing his subject
matter and adjusting his often buttery handling of paint, but too many
of the canvases fall short of being convincing. His best efforts here
are limited mostly to the early years of the 20th century, when, in a
burst of promise shortly after arriving in New York, Bellows made
paintings of street urchins, boxers, construction sites and urban
riverscapes that are found in the exhibition’s first four galleries. Too
many works in the remaining six are stilted period pieces.
The Bellows conjured in the Met show comes across as a talented and
ambitious yet complacent artist, earnest and hard-working but often
remote, an artist who frequently failed to work from that crucial point
where criticality and desperation forge ambition and skill into
something indelibly personal and expandable. He once said, “A work of
art can be any imaginable thing, and this is the beginning of modern
painting.” And yet his own art rarely questions the accepted conventions
of his time.
But whether this exhibition does Bellows’s achievement justice is a good
question, and easier to answer than usual: the catalogue raisonné of
Bellows’s paintings is available online. (It was assembled by Glenn C. Peck, who contributes an essay to the catalog.)
Perusing the nearly 700 paintings reproduced on the site reveals that
the show ignores all but four of the hundreds of increasingly visionary
plein air oil panels of rocky coasts, landscapes and ramshackle farms
that Bellows painted from 1911 on, first in Maine and then in Woodstock,
N.Y. (A wall text in the final gallery dismissively refers to the small
Woodstock landscapes as “bucolic,” an underestimation.) There are also
numerous larger works that might have improved the show, among them the
National Design Museum’s great Maine canvas, “Three Rollers” (1911).
Bellows may have enjoyed more success than was good for him. Born in
Columbus, Ohio, in 1882, he was the only child of a comfortably well-off
builder; he grew up excelling at sports and art and wanted to be an
illustrator. He played baseball and basketball at Ohio State University
and was encouraged to pursue art. By 1904 he was in New York, where he
played semipro baseball during his first two summers and studied with
the charismatic artist Robert Henri, who diverted him from illustration
toward painting.
Henri exhorted his students to paint urban life at its grittiest — which
would later lead them to be known as the Ashcan School — and to study
Manet, Daumier, Velázquez and Goya and other European masters of
suggestive darkness. “On the East Side,” a deeply shadowed early drawing
that Bellows made around 1906, evinces a touching reverence for
Rembrandt, though he would also look to Renoir, Degas and Whistler.
Bellows was exhibiting his work by 1907, receiving prizes and positive
reviews. It didn’t hurt that as a former athlete and eventual family man
who liked to paint his wife and daughters, he projected a virile
persona, nonneurotic and nonbohemian. By 1911 he was represented in the
Met’s collection; by 1913 he was a full member of the National Academy
of Design, the youngest ever admitted. In the thick of New York’s
progressive art circles, he helped install Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a
Staircase” in the Armory Show — in which he was also represented — but
he disdained the exhibition’s most radical import, Cubism.
Bellows’s gifts for illustration and handling paint enabled him to
follow Henri’s advice with rare verve, as evidenced by paintings like
the 1906 “Kids,” whose lush surface and precarious composition captures
the incipient chaos of children’s sidewalk games with an immediacy that
presages the photographs of Helen Levitt.
In the 1907 “42 Kids,” with its swarm of boys skinny-dipping in the East
River, his painterly and caricatural ease collude so effectively that
the figures read as cartoons. This hints at a problem that runs
throughout his work: his figures often feel more like glosses, types or
character actors playing parts than like real people. Exceptions can be
found in early portraits like “Paddy Flannigan” (1908), where a
cross-eyed, bucktoothed newsboy strikes a defiant, bare-chested pose,
fully present.
At times Bellows seemed to think that modernity was achieved by scaling
up the oil study until the physicality of paint becomes an especially
active part of the story. In his best-known painting, the 1909 “Stag at
Sharkey’s,” the colliding bodies of the two fighters are defined by
sinuous strokes of paint that make their flesh seem almost to meld at
impact. It looks back to the French and Spanish masters, while pointing
in its raw violence toward Futurism and even Action Painting. The work
personifies an artist who, as Carol Troyen, curator emerita of American
paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, writes in the catalog,
shrewdly walked the line between tradition and innovation and was seen
in his time as an unlikely combination of academician and independent.
More genuinely forward-looking are three dark, enigmatic paintings of
the excavation for Penn Station from 1907-9 that, as Ms. Troyen
suggests, show modern progress as a violation of nature, a giant void in
the earth, and give this “wound” a reality and lasting power that no
photograph could match. In these works paint is laid on in broad, rough
slabs, becoming earth and also incipient abstraction. Loosely
descriptive details intimate machines, bonfires, workers and surrounding
buildings, all but dwarfed by the primordial setting. Across the way,
“Rain on the River” of 1908, a sweeping view of Riverside Park, busy
railroad tracks and the Hudson rendered in misty, Whistlerian grays, has
an effortless ease.
In the fourth gallery Bellows’s painting starts to stall. He mustered a
few more strong depictions of city life, countering the void of the
excavation paintings with the 1911 “New York,” an allover cacophony of
people, vehicles and buildings on Madison Square in Manhattan at rush
hour, and coming to terms with Impressionism in paintings of the
snow-banked Hudson in winter.
But his tactile surfaces and compositions start to feel regimented and
sometimes overly full. Summery images of white-clad figures at leisure
in Central Park or watching a polo match resemble illustrations for
Vanity Fair, as do later paintings of tennis matches at Newport, R.I.,
to which he adds glowing, El Greco skies. His images of New York
dockworkers and later Maine shipbuilders start to be more ennobling and
hollow than gritty.
Hereafter the show feels rushed, superficial and slightly disorganized.
It pauses briefly for the Maine landscapes, most notably “Shore House”
and “An Island in the Sea”; scatters Bellows’s lithographs about
incoherently; and gives too much space to a group of histrionic,
propagandistic paintings of atrocities that, it was later revealed, the
Germans mostly did not commit during World War I.
A final gallery (where Anderson’s quotation appears on the wall)
includes four large stiff group portraits, where one — the deeply
strange portrait of “Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Wase” — would have sufficed.
Depicting a farm couple from Woodstock, where Bellows summered during
the last several years of his life, the Wase portrait’s dry, honest
realism is justifiably seen as a precursor to American scene painting.
On the opposite wall hang three smaller, more freely worked paintings
dominated by fantastical landscapes, the most intriguing of which is
“The White Horse,” where the El Greco sky seems quite at home among a
panoply of feathery plants and trees.
This exhibition, which has been overseen at the Met by H. Barbara
Weinberg, curator of American paintings, and Lisa M. Messinger,
associate curator of Modern and contemporary art, conveys the complexity
of Bellows’s work without sorting its strengths and weaknesses or
examining the importance of his landscape paintings — whose bright
colors can still be off-putting — during his final decade.
The preface to the catalog states that the show “highlights the ends
more than the means of Bellows’s art — its subjects and meanings more
than its methods and techniques.” This is an unfortunate approach to
take with an artist like Bellows, whose passion for paint was so overt.
In his final years it may have brought him closer than anyone yet
realizes to the something he was always after.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
MET MUSEUM SUED!?
Met Museum Is Being Sued Over Admission Fees
By RANDY KENNEDY
Karsten Moran for The New York Times The Metropolitan Museum of Art.The museum members, Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson, who filed suit in state court in Manhattan, argue in court papers that the museum makes it difficult to understand the fee policy, a practice intended to “deceive and defraud” the public. The suit, reported by The New York Post, cites a survey commissioned by Mr. Grunewald and Ms. Nicholson in which more than 360 visitors to the museum were asked if they knew the fee was optional; 85 percent of visitors responded that they believed they were required to pay. Their suit asks the court to prevent the museum from charging any fees.
Signs above the museum’s admissions desks include the word “Recommended” in small type below the word “Admission,” and on the museum’s Web site, an additional phrase is included: “To help cover the costs of exhibitions, we ask that you please pay the full recommended amount.” (There is no extra charge for entry to special exhibitions; 250,000 New York City schoolchildren visit for free each year as part of the museum’s programs.) When the recommended fee was first instituted in the 1970s, signs over the cashiers’ desks included the phrase: “Pay what you wish, but you must pay something.”
Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the museum, called the suit “entirely frivolous.”
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
After Floods, Galleries Face Uncertainty
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: November 7, 2012
At most of the art galleries in Chelsea the water that poured in from
the Hudson River during Hurricane Sandy has been pumped out, and the
business of sorting out artworks — separating those that survived intact
from those that didn’t, figuring out which of the damaged works are
reparable — is well under way. Gallery owners no longer sound as
despondent as they did last week, when they returned to their businesses
in the strip between 10th and 11th Avenues, from 18th to 29th Streets,
and found flooded basements, high water marks five feet up their walls,
and a loss of art, documentation, catalogs and reference books, to say
nothing of physical spaces that will need to be rebuilt.
But many dealers are looking at a long recovery process that will
involve huge expenses and, in many cases, uncertainty about whether or
to what extent insurance will cover damage to galleries and artworks as
well as lost business days. And the timing could not be worse. Although
some galleries are back in business or will soon be, several dealers
estimated that the district as a whole will not be fully back to work
until mid-December, near the end of the gallery world’s prime selling
season, when dealers’ and artists’ fortunes typically revive after the
slow summer months.
“In some ways things are not as bad as we first thought,” said Andrew
Liss, the assistant director at Gallery Henoch, on West 25th Street,
which has showing space at both basement and street levels and sustained
serious damage in its basement. “That said, we’re a week into it, and
the area still isn’t fully up and running. We have electricity, but no
phones or Internet. And everybody is concerned about the long-term
effects on business.”
Dealers declined to say what percentage of their annual sales are made
in the fall. “If I had a dry computer, I could tell you,” a gallery
owner said. But Linda Blumberg, the executive director of the Art
Dealers Association of America, described the season as critical.
“There’s a pattern of expectation, among buyers as well as dealers,” she
said, “that this is the time when people are engaged in making buying
decisions.”
Instead, gallery owners expect to spend the next several weeks juggling
meetings with restoration specialists, contractors and insurance
adjusters. And new problems are cropping up. One dealer said that the
contractor rebuilding his space was unable to get to the site early this
week because of the gas shortage.
Christiane Fischer, president and chief executive of AXA Art Insurance,
which insures many of the galleries, said that her agents had been
working the neighborhood since last Wednesday, but that it’s “too early
to put numbers on the loss.”
“We’ve sent people out, street by street, to visit clients and make
assessments, and brought in teams of conservators and contracted
truckers and handlers to bring the art to warehouses,” Ms. Fischer said.
Insurance is a complicated issue for galleries, which require several
distinct kinds of policies. Most crucially there is art insurance, which
brokers say most galleries carry. According to New York State law art
insurance includes flood coverage.
“With galleries there is a lot involved,” said Brian Frasca, the
director of fine arts at the Rampart Group, a brokerage that specializes
in insuring galleries, museums and private collections. “Does the
gallery own the art? Is it on consignment from a collector?” He said
costs vary based on the size of the gallery and how much art it has, and
he noted that galleries do not necessarily insure for the full value of
their holdings, on the theory that even in a disaster a percentage of
their inventories may survive.
But art insurance does not cover the galleries themselves — the physical
space and its contents beyond the art — or the potential sales lost
when the galleries are closed. For that dealers need business and
property insurance that specifically includes disaster coverage, which
many dealers lack.
“We’ve tried to push our galleries to get that for years,” Mr. Frasca
said. (Business insurance carries a heavy deductible. Scott Schachter, a
broker at Marsh, a company that insures businesses, said a $1 million
policy can have a deductible of up to $500,000 for physical damage, as
well as a time deductible of up to 96 business hours — or 12 days —
before the lost revenue coverage kicks in.)
Galleries without flood insurance are finding ways to cope.
“With our commercial general liability policy,” said Zach Feuer, the
owner of a gallery on West 24th Street, “we’re trying to interpret
whether the surge counts as a flood.” If it does, Mr. Feuer will be on
his own in replacing the various furnishings and equipment (including
computers) of his gallery. But his landlord has agreed to pay for the
rebuilding of the space.
Inadequately insured galleries have other options too. On Tuesday, the
Art Dealers Association of America announced a program in which
galleries in the Zone A, low-lying neighborhoods that could demonstrate
that they have been unable to conduct business since the storm, could
apply for grants and loans. They need not be members of the association.
Conservators and restoration specialists have jumped into the fray as
well, and they have an eager audience: dealers, artists and insurance
companies have a shared interest, if for different reasons, in
determining what can be saved. When the Museum of Modern Art and
representatives from the American Institute for Conservation Collections
Emergency Response Team presented a free lecture on the basics of
post-disaster conservation on Sunday, MoMA’s auditorium was packed for
two sessions.
“Just because something is wet muddy or torn,” said Eric Pourchot, the
conservation group’s institutional advancement director, “doesn’t mean
it’s not recoverable. That’s one of the messages we want to get out. And
instead of walking down 21st Street, ringing a bell and saying, ‘Bring
out your wet,’ we decided to get everyone together and see what they
need.”
Still, conservators’ services don’t come cheap. Restoration specialists’
fees can be as much as $400 an hour. For artists insurance payments may
be welcome, but the loss of work is dispiriting. Sofia Bachvarova, an
artist whose solo show at the PVS Gallery in Hoboken was about to end as
the hurricane arrived, has spent the past week fretting about what she
describes as four year’s worth of work — paintings on canvas as well as
sculpture. Neither she nor the gallery’s owner has been able to visit
the site, and she worries that even if the work was not directly damaged
by the flood, moisture in the walls may affect it.
Other artists have been able to reach a philosophical view.
“So far as I know I’ve lost only one piece,” said David Kassan, who had
some paintings at Gallery Henoch, “a painting that’s worth about
$24,000, and a couple more were damaged. But I’ve been volunteering in
Staten Island, where people lost their homes, and where there’s been
loss of life. And in the larger scope of things, what I lost was only a
painting.”
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Critic's Notebook
Chelsea Art Galleries Struggle to Restore and Reopen
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
The Casey Kaplan Gallery is recovering from damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: November 2, 2012
There are many pleasures to being an art critic in New York. One, in my
view, is definitely the late Saturday afternoon crunch in Chelsea, that
day’s-end rush through a last few galleries, seeing shows and
squirreling away experiences and ideas just before they all close for
the weekend.
Casey Kaplan Gallery
The gallery was showing a survey of the paintings of
Giorgio Griffa before the storm. Mr. Kaplan said he was determined to
reopen and to continue the Griffa show.
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
Drywall pulled from flooded galleries filling trash
bins in Chelsea. The neighborhood’s art dealers, some in tears, are
salvaging what they can in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
I had a great final 60 minutes in Chelsea last Saturday and,
consequently, one of the last looks at what would suddenly become, on
Tuesday, the old, pre-Sandy Chelsea gallery scene. That day, as I
started hearing reports of flooding in the neighborhood, some of the art
I had seen on Saturday became increasingly vivid in my mind, as did the
weird thought that I might be one of the last people who would ever see
it.
I had enjoyed Eberhard Havekost’s show at Anton Kern on West 20th
Street, a don’t-pin-me-down stylistic array that gave this German
painter a sharper, slyer edge than he had ever had for me. There were
hard-edge abstractions, diaphanous images of sunsets and one quirky,
crusty Expressionist exercise that seemed laden with enough paint to
make the rest of the show.
On West 21st Street, a small new gallery named Guided by Invoices (talk
about sly) had been showing small abstractions on Masonite, enlivened by
spurts of spray paint and rugged lines that appeared to be more sawed
than incised. They were by a virtual unknown: Rafael Vega, a 2012
graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, making his New
York debut.
Farther down the block, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery had been offering an
unusually gimmick-free show by Olafur Eliasson, with photographs of
Iceland’s hot springs and volcanoes and a wall-to-wall floor piece made
of large chunks of dark obsidian, or volcanic glass. It was a welcome
alternative to the immersive, perception-distorting environments that
have become an Eliasson specialty.
One of the most beautiful and surprising shows had been next door at
Casey Kaplan: a four-decade survey of the paintings of Giorgio Griffa, a
little-known Italian artist born in 1936 who had not shown in New York
since the early 1970s. His sparse, plain-spoken works constitute a kind
of visual counting: simple brush marks, lines or bands of radiant color
applied one after another to expanses of raw, unstretched canvas. They
expanded history on several fronts for me, adding to my understanding of
European abstraction of the late 1960s, speaking to the efforts of
American painters as disparate as Alan Shields and Agnes Martin, and
presaging the low-tech painting of younger artists like Sergej Jensen.
I had left Chelsea, as I often do, feeling a little high at the sight of
different kinds of art made at different points in artists’ lives:
starting out, continuing, approaching the end. Whatever you think of the
actual art on any given day in Chelsea, regulars to the neighborhood
are privy to a lot of human endeavor on the part of artists and art
dealers. It is a gift.
That point was brought home with special intensity when I returned on
Wednesday and then again on Thursday, witnessing devastation everywhere,
and also the purposeful reaction to it. On Wednesday, to the thunderous
clatter of water pumps and generators, ashen-faced, sometimes
teary-eyed art dealers, along with their staff members and often their
artists, were pulling sodden furniture, computers and irreplaceable
archival documentation and artworks from their dark, water-blasted
galleries.
There were huge piles of wet, crumpled cardboard on the street. “You
know, most people look at this and think it’s just cardboard,” said
Michael Jenkins, a partner in Sikkema Jenkins & Company, on West
22nd Street. “They don’t realize that all of it was wrapped around works
of art.”
At Bonakdar, there was no sign of the Eliasson photographs, just the
long, Donald-Judd-style wooden table and bench that have become friendly
landmarks on the ground floor, severely warped by water. At Kaplan, the
front desk had already been removed, and the Griffa paintings were, I
was told, at the restorer.
Everywhere there were signs of water’s relentlessness, but also odd
exceptions. At Guided by Invoices, which sits as far west as you can go
on 21st Street, on the corner of the West Side Highway, the Vega show
was still hanging, and the gallery was almost completely dry. Something —
perhaps unusually watertight gates — had saved it.
Anton Kern was locked when I went by, but through the window there were
no Havekost paintings to be seen, only what would become the
increasingly familiar sight of works on paper spread out on tables and
the floor for drying.
I ventured north to find that the floods had not touched the galleries
on West 29th Street, and then back down to 27th Street, between 11th
Avenue and the West Side Highway, where the string of small galleries
nestled in the south side of the old Terminal Warehouse building — Derek
Eller, Wallspace, Winkleman, Foxy Production and Jeff Bailey — had lost
huge amounts of art when the building’s common basement flooded.
At every turn there was evidence of salvage and conservation, as well as
rebuilding. Even on Wednesday workers were cutting away ruined drywall
in galleries so it could be replaced; on Thursday trucks from lumber
yards were delivering drywall and plywood. At CRG at 548 West 22nd
Street, a floor that had been slick with water on Wednesday was a day
later arrayed with tables for drying works on paper. Upstairs, where the
Artist’s Book Fair was to have been held this weekend but had been
canceled, the space had been converted into a kind of art hospital for
drying out.
For all these efforts, it was easy to wonder, on first encounter, if
Chelsea would ever come back as an art district. And when I talked to
dealers about what they thought, reactions were mixed. Asya Geisberg,
whose 23rd Street gallery was flooded, said: “I worry about the
longevity of Chelsea for smaller galleries. We don’t have the staff or
resources to deal with this.”
“My artists are helping me out,” she added. “Other people are helping me out, but it’s not enough.”
On 22nd Street Andrew Kreps confirmed that he had lost most of his
inventory in his flooded basement, and my next, perhaps undiplomatic,
question to him was “Will you close?”
But his immediate reaction was “No.” James Yohe, another 22nd Street
gallerist, put it more romantically, “We’re here because we’re true
believers.”
Mr. Kaplan said he was determined to reopen and to continue his Griffa
show when he did. “I have to do this for him,” he said, referring to Mr.
Griffa. “He’s been kind of written out of art history.”
“We won’t come back in the same way — we might be on one leg financially,” he added. “But we will.”
His commitment was echoed on 19th Street, where David Zwirner was
overseeing an immense conservation effort spread, in his case, through
three large spaces. He said his faith in Chelsea was unshaken. Referring
to both the density of Chelsea’s galleries and their lack of entrance
fees, he said, “It’s the craziest freebie in the world.” He sounded as
if he didn’t want to miss a minute of it.
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