Knowledge, Passion, Persistence, Dedicated Mentors & Friends, and a Bit of Luck

This fall I “studied abroad” at Hunter College in New York City, after spending three academic years at the University of Michigan, the school from which I graduated with a B.A. in the history of art. At Hunter I took a basic sociology course and found that the differences between UMich and Hunter would make for an interesting sociological study in and of themselves… Regardless, among the many fascinating sociological concepts I learned are the ideas of social and cultural capital. In his 1986 work “The Forms of Capital,” French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claimed that cultural capital includes knowledge, skills, and education – essentially the advantages that give a person status in society. Social capital is a specific form of cultural capital in which a person develops, or inherits, relationships with others that serve as support in social, legal, and professional situations – in other words, social capital is a person’s “network.”

In 1943, Howard Putzel introduced Jackson Pollock to Peggy Guggenheim. At first, Peggy was not particularly fond of Pollock’s work, however a good friend of Peggy’s Piet Mondrian, who happens to be one of the most important 20^th century artists, convinced Peggy of Pollock’s brilliance. Peggy purchased several works from Pollock and even commissioned him to do a mammoth mural for her home, enabling him to support himself solely through his work as an artist for the first time in his life. As it happens, one of the paintings Peggy purchased from Pollock was The She-Wolf (1943), which Alfred Barr, who at one time was the director of the Museum of Modern Art, later bought from Peggy for the MoMA, making it the first Pollock work in a public institution. Overtime Peggy grew increasingly enthusiastic about Pollock’s work and in late 1943 she gave him his first solo exhibition, which she held at her New York City gallery, Art of This Century. In 1947, Peggy decided to move to Venice, but before doing so she convinced Betty Parson’s to represent Pollock in Parson’s successful New York gallery. In 1948, Peggy exhibited Pollock’s paintings at the Venice Biennale; this was the first time Pollock’s work was exhibited in Europe. By that point, Peggy had purchased so many of Pollock’s works that she began donating them to museums across the world to increase appreciation for the up and coming artist. In other words, Peggy was Pollock’s cultural capital – she gave him visibility by connecting him to important galleries and other prominent artists, in both the U.S.and Europe. Peggy facilitated Pollock’s fame, and in many ways nurtured the abstract expressionist movement.

However, Peggy’s success as an art aficionado was itself a product of cultural, and specifically social, capital… This week a brilliant consultant for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection by the name of Dario Pinton came to speak to the new PGC interns. Early in his three-hour tour of the PGC, Pinton discussed the difference between a “museum” and a “collection,” (as in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection). He stated that a museum is a survey of objects from a specific, or multiple, historical/contemporary periods, whereas a collection is works that represent the taste of a specific person. He went on to claim that “the secret to Peggy’s collection is the people with which she surrounded herself, including advisors and artist friends.” In addition to Putzel, Mondrian, and Barr, Peggy accrued a long list of famous friends to advise her on her collection, perhaps the most notable of which is Marcel Duchamp. Peggy and Duchamp met in the 1920’s when she first moved to Europe and began collecting modern art. They became quick friends and by 1938, when Peggy opened her first gallery, the Guggenheim Jeune of London, Marcel Duchamp was essentially her chief advisor, helping her do decide whom to exhibit at the gallery and which works to buy in order to boost her burgeoning collection. Though the list of important people who surrounded Peggy and helped make her the icon she is today, goes on forever, for the sake of holding your attention, I’ll leave you with this last thought: nothing better than knowledge, passion, persistence, dedicated mentors & friends, and a bit of luck – with those five ingredients we can truly do anything we set our minds to…

1. Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943, Oil, gouache, and plaster on canvas, Museum of Modern Art.

2. Photograph of Peggy Guggenheim with friends in her New York Apartment, 1942. Front Row: Stanley William Hayder, Leonora Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second row: Max Ernst, Amadee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp & Piet Mondrian.

Abstract Abstractions

Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1915, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art.

My taste in art has been consistent throughout my life. For as long as I can remember, Picasso has been among my favorite artists. As a child, I was particularly enamored with the MoMA’s Harlequin (1915), probably because of it’s identifiable shapes and accessible, or at least mimicable, style. As a young adult I’m awed by nearly all of the works I’ve seen by Picasso because of his remarkable ability to transcend the tendency to idealize humanity, a quality I believe most artists fall victim to.

There are two types of idealization frequently used by artists. First, there is the traditional form of idealization, in which a being is depicted using mathematically perfected proportions that do not exist in the natural world for the purpose of creating a flawless being. I’ll call this form of idealization “classical idealization” because it is most clearly exemplified by the hundreds of classical sculptures, that look just like Polykleitos’ Spear Bearer (c. 440 BCE). There are also contemporary examples of this form of idealization, such as advertisements and magazine covers, where women, in particular, are airbrushed to the point that they are unidentifiable, for the sake of perfection, or “beauty.”

The second type of idealization is idealization for the purpose of emphasizing a point other than perfection or beauty. Take Manet’s Olympia (1863) as an example. Olympia is idealized in the sense that she is represented in a particularly grotesque manner: she has disproportionate body parts, a yellowish skin tone, dirty feet, hairy armpits, a threatening gaze, and she is utterly naked. In his work, Manet intentionally amplified these negative qualities to make a statement about the pathetic nature of the female nude in art historical tradition. He challenges the traditional representation of women as passive nudes shamelessly exposed for the consumption of the male gaze. While I am enamored by this painting, and am certainly supportive of his sadly still relevant message, I also recognize that Olympia is in fact idealized in the sense she is not a truthful representation of humanity, though she is intended to look fairly realistic.

Picasso, on the other hand, forgoes both of these forms of idealization, proudly and fully abstracting his characters for the purpose of acknowledging, as I said in a previous post, that humans are abstractions. We are abstractions in the sense that what we are right now, both physically and psychologically, will never be the same as what we are at any other moment in time. And though there is certainly a time and a place for idealization in art, in many ways abstraction, or freedom from concrete representational qualities, is a far more accurate way of depicting human nature given that our essence is ever evolving and thus cannot be captured.

So if people are abstractions, and Picasso represents people in an abstract way, does that mean that Picasso paints abstract abstractions?

1. Polykleitos, Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer), c. 440 BCE, Roman marble copy of bronze original.

2. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay.

Memories

“Family that loves each other is the greatest gift and the best jewelry to decorate one's life with.” – Charlotte Kula, from her final e-mail to me on September 17^th, 2008.

As I pass the hundreds of tourist kitsch shops while I walk the streets of Venice, I’ve been surprised by the many familiar tchotchkes that bring me back to childhood memories. Most of the memories are funny, for example I recall that my best friend Yael had the tiny glass animal figurines I see everywhere; she’d place them in the palm of her hand and quickly close her fist, opening it ever so slightly to give me a momentary glimpse of the creatures, before hiding them away again. (Okay Yael, I know what you’re thinking right now – yes, I did used to lie to you about there being real live miniature people, who only came out at night, inside that small flower shop dollhouse thing that hung on the wall near my bed…) However, there is one memory that’s particularly meaningful, as it reminds me of the most creative and devoted person I have ever known: my bubbi, Charlotte.

As a girl, each time I visited my father’s parents in Boca Raton, Bubbi would give me the privilege of selecting one piece of her jewelry, which I could keep, and take home with me as a gift, in exchange for one of my stuffed animals, which she’d “babysit” until the next time I’d come over to play. Bubbi was a terrific artist and craftswoman, and usually I’d select a pair of her homemade earrings, or perhaps a necklace. However, once I selected a pin with a mask that looks just like the image to the left. I don’t recall ever asking Bubbi where she’d gotten the pin, or who gave it to her, but I know I thought it was the most spectacular, wonderful little treasure, because I kept it on a shelf of precious things until my family moved out of our first home. I hadn’t thought about the pin since we moved, but when I saw it in the window of a tourist shop here in Venice, I was reminded of one of the first things I thought when I received word that I’d been accepted to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Internship program, almost a year to the day after Bubbi passed away. Bubbi must have been there, watching over me, aligning the stars to ensure that I would receive this fabulous opportunity and it was for Bubbi, an artist, an art lover, a poet, a writer, and an unbelievable grandmother, that I would accept the position and keep a blog to document the experience.

So Bubbi, I dedicate this blog to you. Thank you for encouraging my creativity and always being the biggest fan of my artwork. As my six-year-old cousin Max put it best, “I love Bubbi, she was a great bubbi, I miss her.”

The Art of Being Human

Picasso, The Studio (L'Atelier), 1928, Oil and black crayon on canvas, Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

I’ve officially fallen in love with a work of art here at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Meet Picasso’s The Studio (1928), a synthetic cubist, minimalistic, yet painterly work. In the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Catalogue, art historian Lucy Flint suggests that this image depicts a sculptured bust on the left and a full-length painted portrait on the right, or more simply, a conversing male and female.

After reading my last post, my father pointed out to me that “people watching becomes a form of art criticism that invites us to think of human beings as artistic constructions...we are always the artists, the canvases, and the paints.”

Perhaps Picasso is a revolutionary artist because he understood this philosophy precisely… Look carefully at The Studio for a moment… The two figures stand together before a canvas on an easel, suggesting that they are the artists in their studio, (hence the name of the painting). The figures are completely white, suggesting that they are also blank canvases waiting to be filled with color, experience, life. And, as mentioned above, they are depictions of works of art, meaning that they are the paint! And of course, the work itself is abstract, suggesting that humans are abstractions, or ever evolving beings that constitute far more than physical manifestations, and thus cannot captured in a concrete, or idealized, way.

Could this work be more perfect?

Learning

Today was my first day of work at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and I learned about Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924)! Having guarded the galleries of Prendergast in Italy, the special exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, for approximately four hours this afternoon, I now know nearly everything the exhibition’s text panels relay about Prendergast and the body of work he produced while living in Venice. Prendergast was an American artist who moved to Venice at the turn of the 19^th century to paint Venice’s unique cityscapes and images of the everyday life of Venetian people, who were exotic to Americans at the time. Prendergast’s work is influenced by a variety of artistic movements. For example, like the impressionists, Prendergast exposed his process of painting thus abstracting his forms. Like the fauvists, he used color to express emotion, particularly in his later, more melancholic works. And like American artists of the period, such as Whistler, the content, or narratives, of his paintings are benign.

On the whole his delicate style, soft color tones, and calm, familiar scenarios, make his paintings quite peaceful, however his works are not “avant-garde” in the sense that they aren’t particularly innovative, nor do they make any bold statements. Perhaps the following judgment comes from the city girl inside of me, who longs for constant excitement, action, and spunk, but truthfully I don’t find Prendergast’s works particularly memorable; quite frankly, I find his works boring! I wonder what Peggy would have thought of them? After all they are the antithesis of the cubist, futurist, minimalist, surrealist, etc, works that make up the majority of her collection.

With that said, they have a few redeeming qualities: First, they are accessible because their narratives are obvious, and thus they do not require trained eyes to be appreciated. Second, as I mentioned previously, they are peaceful in terms of color and style. In fact, I’d dub them the visual version of smooth jazz, or soft rock, you know, elevator music, the type of thing most people don’t have strong feelings about one way or the other. Third, because Prendergast painted small planes of solid colors, his works often appear to have a mosaic-esque effect, which I find quite beautiful. Last, Prendergast’s brother designed many of the frames for Prendergast’s works, and though I don’t have much to say about the frames, (besides that they are pretty and well suited for the works,) I like the very fact that the two siblings worked harmoniously.

When I was through learning about Prendergast, I began focusing more closely on the museum’s visitors, in other words I actively engaged in “people watching.” As couples and families passed, I guessed where they were from and then discreetly followed them until they spoke, revealing their nationalities. After obtaining this preliminary information, I’d imagine the life stories of these people: what types of families are they from? What do their homes look like? What are their passions? What are their dispositions? How are they related to one another? How did they meet each other? What brings them to Venice, and specifically to the PGC? Etc…

And then, I’d pop back into reality and say, “Non toccare, per favore,” meaning please don’t touch [the artwork]. Just another little something I learned today…

1. Maurice Prendergast, Venice, ca. 1898-99, Watercolor and pencil on paper, Colby College Museum of Art.

2. Maurice Prendergast, Festa del Redentore, ca. 1899, Watercolor and pencil on paper, Williams College Museum of Art.

Curiosity

As I lie in bed tonight thinking of meaningful experiences I had in NYC this past semester, my mind keeps wondering back to the many Chelsea Market adventures I had with Alexander and one of my best friends, Mitch. Each time we drove to Chelsea we passed a puzzling billboard with an image of an unmade bed. Have you ever noticed these billboards and wondered what they are about? Well, they are part of a MoMA exhibition by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which to my understanding intends to explore the connections between the private life and contemporary art, as well as the ways in which art can be extended beyond museum walls... Any insights?

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, (In Conjunction with MoMA's Project # 34, organized by Anne Umland,) 1991.

* To See Anne Umland's Essay on this work visit this link: http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2000/Torres/torres/umland.html

Beginnings

"We forget very easily that which gives us pain." -Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear)

So I made it to Venice and had the best first week ever: my parents and sister were in town, we stayed in a great place, ate lots of fabulous food, rarely got lost because of my dad Irwin’s impeccable navigational skills, played loads of scrabble, laughed endlessly as my family tends to do when we are together, went into every food market we passed, (one of my and my mom Dana’s favorite pastimes, specifically when abroad,) and discovered the city that I will call home for the next three months.

Now they are gone and I am sitting alone in my dingy apartment. (Ramon, maybe I should have taken you up on your offer to help me with my apartment search!) I have that feeling of intense pain in my heart – you know, the kind that makes your chest throb, as your throat closes and your eyes tear… Perhaps it’s the fact that my family has just left, perhaps it’s that my apartment is not the glamorous palazzo I imagined, perhaps it’s the fact that I was not with my boyfriend, Alexander, on New Years Eve, (though he called at midnight Italy time which made me quite happy,) perhaps it’s the dreary weather, (aqua alta all the time,) the anticipation of beginning work, the discomfort of having to start fresh, or all of the above, but whatever it is and however soon it passes, boy is it real right now!

Yesterday my sister, Talia, taught me something very interesting. In Spanish they have two words that mean “to be.” One is meant to indicate a permanent status, (ie: I am from New York, or I am a sister and a daughter,) and the other a temporary status, (ie: I am very sad, confused, and/or lonely). She brought this point up to remind me of the transience of emotions – the feelings I have right now will pass as I settle into Venetian life, make friends, get into my work routine, and channel a dear family friend Linda White, (who brought the Peggy Guggenheim internship to my awareness,) in order to find all of the city’s hidden treasures…

But in the mean time, all I can think about is the funny ways of the mind… Despite the fact that I’ve never liked being away from home – I didn’t particularly enjoy sleep-away camp as a kid, I had my fill of college in Michigan after three years, wonderful as the experience was, and even when I go on lengthy vacations, by the end there’s nowhere I’d rather be than back in NYC with my family – here I am, on yet another none New York adventure, longing to be back in my city with the people I love most. Somehow my mind tricked me into forgetting how painful transitions are and how painful it is for me to be away from home, so that I’d embark, without hesitation or fear, on this journey, to learn about modern art, the art I am most passionate about, museum work, the field I hope to go into, and myself, both the person I am now and the person I aspire to be…

On that note, thank you to all the wonderful people who helped make the PGC internship a possibility for me, and thank you to all of the people who encouraged me to take the position. Can’t wait to share some happier news with you soon!

To a wonderful new year, filled with health, happiness, and even some of those painful moments that ultimately lead to growth and learning…