APOLLO MARCH 2022 1 THE INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE MARCH 2022 £7.95 Immersive van Gogh Taylor Kibby’s Sculptures Tell a Story Oh Pantone, Why so Blue? Vanguard of Modernism in Brazil Thierry Mugler’s Thrilling Sense of Drama Submerged in van Gogh Would Absinthe Make the Heart Grow Fonder?
APOLLO MARCH 2022 2 WW Experience Tiffany Glass at The Neustadt The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass Office, Archives, Conservation 5-26 46th Avenue Long Island City, NY 11101 The Neustadt Gallery at the Queens Museum New York City Building Flushing Meadows Corona Park Queens, NY 11368 Tiffany's Lamps: A one-of-a-kind Collection
APOLLO MARCH 2022 3 Tiffany's Lamps: A one-of-a-kind Collection MARCH 2022 VOLUME CXCV NO 766 15 16 19 23 Editor’s Letter Agenda March Highlights Letter Sophie Barling is dazzled by a display of Kazakh gold in Cambridge Diary Oh Pantone, Why so Blue? by Rakwell 26 28 32 34 42 Architecture Carmen Portinho and the Vanguard of Modernism in Brazil by Camilla Inquiry Michael Prodgar considers how the Courtauld and Warbug Institutes have shaped the fieldof art history Winter Show Preview Emma Crichton Miller selects her highlights In the Abstract Howardena Pindell talks to Jonathan Griffin about her long career of painting Out of the Past? Daniel Trilling considers how the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin 50 56 62 68 Boy Wonders By dressing his subjects up like Van Dyck’s, Thomas Gainsborough created an intriguing kind of youth portrait, writes Juliet Caret Holding Steady William Dunbar on the medieval Christian art in the Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography in Georgia Art Market Susan Moore previews March auctions in New York and reviews November’s marquee sales Collectors’ Focus Emma Chrichton Miller on CoBrA Cover Self-Portrait as a Painter (1888) by Van Gogh Vincent van Gogh Foundation; Detroit Institute of Arts / Bridgeman Images See feature on pp. 34-41
APOLLO MARCH 2022 4 70 76 78 81 82 84 86 89 90 Around the Galleries By Samuel Reily Exhibitions Durer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist Noguchi by Will Wiles Books Off the Shelf Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain, by Oliver Cox Alex Danchev, Magritte: A Life, by Christopher Turner Francis Russel, A Catalogue of the Pictures and Drawings at Wilton House, by Christopher Turner Food Thomas Marks on stones that look good enough to eat From the Archives Robert O’ Byrne on the little-known Liverpudian Society of Bucks 2 Old Queen Street London, SW1H 9HP Tel: 020 7961 0000 Chairman: Andrew Neil Editor: Edward Behrens [email protected] Deputy Editor: Fatema Ahmed [email protected] Associate Editor: Susan Moore Assistant Editor: Samuel Reilly [email protected] Designer: Tom Lobo Brennan [email protected] Advertising Director: Nigel McKinley [email protected] Senior Business Development Manager: Amada Maxwell [email protected] Partnerships and Sales Manager: Hannah Nashman [email protected] Production Manager: Seral Emirali [email protected] Subscriptions Marketing Manager: Adele Lee [email protected] Subscriptions queries: [email protected]. com +44 (0)330 333 0180 (UK & ROW) Circulation and Marketing Director: William Delmont Subscriptions Marketing Manager: Adele Lee Production: Seral Emirali [email protected] +44 (0)20 7961 0114 Subscriptions +44 (0)330 333 0180 Museum & Retail copies +44 (0)20 7961 0004 p. 76 Subscription and Delivery Queries Apollo Subscriptions Department Rockwood House, Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH Tel. UK & ROW: +44 (0)330 333 0180 Tel. USA (toll-free): 1-800-567-5835 Email: [email protected] Subscription and Delivery Queries Apollo Subscriptions Department Rockwood House, Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH Tel. UK & ROW: 44 (0) 330 333 0180 Tel. USA (toll-free): 1-800-567-5835 Email: [email protected] Subscribe to Apollo Annual Subscription (11 issues incl. P&P) by continuous credit card UK £69 Europe €99 USA, Canada and South America $114 Rest of world: £108 To order visit: www.apollo-magazine.com/M3577A or call +44 (0)330 333 0180 and quote code M3577A Back issues and newsstand: £7.98 Any facts stated or opinions expressed anywhere in the magazine are the responsibility of the individual writers and contributors. Apollo Magazine, the Publisher and the Editor are not responsible for any injury or losses relative to such materials sustained by anyone. Any material omitted intentionally is also the sole responsibility of the individual contributors. All material is compiled from sources believed to be reliable, but published without responsibility for errors or omissions. Apollo Magazine accepts advertisements from advertisers believed to be of good repute, but cannot guarantee the authenticity or quality of objects or services advertised in its pages. Apollo Magazine assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. Return postage should accompany such material. All rights including translation into other languages reserved by the Publisher. Nothing in this magazine may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. When you respond to offers and promotions in Apollo Magazine, The Spectator (1828) Limited part of Press Holdings Group (including Telegraph Group Limited and other companies with the Press Holdings Group) will use your information for administration, customer services and targeted marketing. In order to fulfil our commitments to you we will disclose your information to our service providers and agents. We may contact you by mail or telephone to let you know about any other Spectator or Press Holdings Group services or promotions which may be of interest to you. For further information please write to: The Data Manager, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP or email [email protected] Photo: © Christie’s Images Ltd / Photo: © National Gallery, London
APOLLO MARCH 2022 5 DIARY Oh Pantone, Why so Blue? Rakewell Displaying a carefree confidence and a daring curiosity that animates our creative spirit, inquisitive and intriguing PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri helps us to embrace this altered landscape of possibilities, opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives. Rekindling gratitude for some of the qualities that blue represents complemented by a new perspective that resonates today, PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri places the future ahead in a new light. We are living in transformative times. PANTONE 17- 3938 Very Peri is a symbol of the global zeitgeist of the moment and the transition we are going through. As we emerge from an intense period of isolation, our notions and standards are changing, and our physical and digital lives have merged in new ways. Digital design helps us to stretch the limits of reality, opening the door to a dWWynamic virtual world where we can explore and create new color possibilities. With trends in gaming, the expanding popularity of the metaverse and rising artistic community in the digital space PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri illustrates the fusion of modern life and how color trends in the digital world are being manifested in the physical world and vice versa. Rakewell remembers when a new colour for a season promised bright delights and wonderful things. We remember when critics discussed the colours in a painting with consideration and care. We remember when the announcement from Pantone of its colour of the year promised a reinvigoration of a home. So Rakewell was a little surprised when the colour that Pantone selected for its colour of 2022 was Very Peri. We have no doubt that Very Peri sounds very on trend. Peri peri chicken has been a runaway restaurant success for some years: witness the growth of Nandos. Yet this shade is not the hot tone of exotic pleasure but a tincture of lilac that seems to come from one of Dame Edna’s wigs. Pantone assures us that Very Peri ‘places the future in a new light’. We could not agree more. This is not the delicate lilac of a Mary Cassatt painting but a colour of such strong hue that it could do nothing but place everything in a new light. There are certainly big hopes for Very Peri. Apparently it ‘illustrates the fusion of modern life and how colour trends in the digital world are being manifested in the physical world and vice versa.’ Rakewell is particularly fond of that ‘vice versa’. Just imagine if the manifestation was a one-way street. Yet for all its proclaimed modernity, Rakewell cannot help but feel that the thing this colour brings to mind most strongly is the indomitable image of Are You Being Served?’s Mrs Slocombe. The colour of a flirtatious lush who loves to serve – what could be more 2022 than that? Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories. Got a story for Rakewell? Get in touch at [email protected] or via @Rakewelltweets. 1. Blue Rinse, as sported by Mollie Sugden in ‘Are You Being Served?’ (1972–85). 2. Pantone’s Color of the Year 2022.
APOLLO MARCH 2022 6 FEATURE Fashion is in dire need of more of Thierry Mugler’s thrilling sense of drama Rosalind Jana ‘I am not trying to seduce you. Would you like me to seduce you?’ The video for George Michael’s hit ‘Too Funky’ (1992) opens with a model in a black veil. Red-lipped and blonde, she has the imperious expression of Marlene Dietrich and the gothic high glamour of a Catholic widow. As Anne Bancroft’s famous line from The Graduate rings out, the model pulls off her veil to reveal a dress with padded shoulders and a tightly buttoned waist. She removes a square of fabric from the bodice, transforming the garment into something explicitly sexy with its translucent panel framing her cleavage and collarbones. The fashion show is beginning. Let the chaos commence. The video was directed and costumed by Manfred Thierry Mugler. In it a bevy of supermodels including Linda Evangelista and Tyra Banks strut for the audience, trying to ignore the backstage mayhem slowly bleeding out on to the catwalk. Some of their outfits are conventionally seductive: black latex, white feathers, red tassels. Others are stranger: metallic headpieces and breastplates fit for a robot; a bustier recalling a motorcycle, complete with handles and side-mirrors for the model to steer herself a clear course. To anyone familiar with the work of the provocative French designer, the video is a ‘greatest hits’ montage of his style and preoccupations, with its exaggerated eroticism and hard edges, its love of a good show and its willingness to poke fun at the spectacle. It’s a fitting manifesto for the kind of person Mugler envisaged and wanted to dress. After his death earlier this week at the age of 73, the designer’s obituaries were filled with descriptions of his predilection for femme-fatale theatrics and larger-than-life characters. In an oral history of the filming of ‘Too Funky,’ republished on Vogue, participants in the video described Mugler as a man with an unswerving vision. He created superhumans and sexy soldiers. He understood the magnetism of celebrity star power. But he wasn’t a Gianni Versace or a Tom Ford. He was too campy, too kinky for that. His designs had a fearsome quality. Dressed in Mugler, a woman could be a Venus or a bird of paradise, but she could also be an insect, a vehicle, an uncompromising alien. Did she always intend to seduce? No. But she definitely could, if she wanted to. Born in Strasbourg in 1948, Mugler’s life and career were defined from an early age by a taste for performance. He trained in ballet and acrobatics during his youth, then studied interior design before embarking on a fashion career in Paris in his twenties. In the mid 1970s, he launched his first label, Café de Paris. From the very beginning his designs were surreal and sculptural, scrupulously attentive to form. Emblematic of Eighties power dressing in the extreme, the silhouettes were frequently cartoonish – hourglass cuts, oversized shoulders – and the sensibility post-modern. Mugler devised a world populated with showgirls and cyborgs; human, animal and mechanical fused together with crafted precision. In doing so he pushed conventional femininity towards the point of parody (his catwalks feel inextricable from the world of drag, from his use of performers including Lypsinka to the kinds of outfit reveals that are now a staple on Drag Race). He produced shows where, no matter how high the heels or tight the corset, the models looked like they were actually having fun. This stagey-ness later found other outlets when Mugler left the brand in 2002. He created costumes for the Cirque de Soleil, outfitted Beyonce’s 2009 world tour, worked on the shows Mugler Follies in Paris and The Wyld in Berlin, and collaborated with the choreographer Wayne McGregor on a short piece in 2019. Often, when raking over the legacy of a designer, we turn to pictures: catwalk shots, editorials, celebrities on the red carpet. But in the case of Mugler, it’s the videos that capture the essence of his magic. It’s all in the movement. A crowd of models in shiny catsuits and huge, squat hats like blackening waxcap mushrooms stride and writhe and pose, Bob Fosse-style, to the beat. Fetishistic leather skirt suits are unzipped to reveal a meadow of appliqued pastel flowers beneath. For his tenth anniversary in 1985, Mugler held his show in the Zénith arena in Paris and invited the public along. Pat Cleveland appeared as a glittering Virgin Mary to an audience of 6,000. Ten years later (when, as fashion critic Tim Blanks points out, Mugler had the budget of a man responsible for the world’s best-selling perfume, Angel), that troupe of models in black heralded the beginning of an hour-long extravaganza including Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Jerry Hall as well as Rossy de Palma and Tippi Hedren, and topped off with a performance from James Brown. Why the need for magnitude? The same impulse is visible in the photos Mugler took, his designs thrown into startling relief against skyscrapers and deserts. Perhaps it is pure creative bravado, the endpoint of someone who said ‘What if…?’ and ended up corralling his model into posing on a freezing iceberg 20 miles off the coast 1. Iman in the Thierry Mugler haute couture Autumn/Winter 1984–1985 show in March Photo: Daniel SIMON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
APOLLO MARCH 2022 7 2. Thierry Mugler with Jerry Hall at his fashion show in March 1995 in Paris. of Greenland. It suggests a desire to dominate the horizon too. Look, these photos seem to say, there is no skyline too high, no monument too vast, no idea too wild that I couldn’t make it happen. In his later years, Mugler decided to re-craft his body into a taut, muscled statue. ‘It’s important,’ he said, ‘for people to be a complete realization of themselves’. Like his clothes, this felt like a rejection of softness and indeterminacy, revealing once again a devotion to the body as an endlessly malleable, perfectible thing. Such an approach is not for everyone. When I spoke to a friend the other day about Mugler, she made a face and said how much she’d hated him in the eighties. She saw his designs – and consequently his vision of womanhood – as not just restrictive, but disturbing. Right now, when the fashion industry feels vaguely adrift, full of good ideas and innovations but lacking much of the uninhibited weirdness and vision (as well as time and money) that creates a Mugler or a McQueen, the idea of genuine love-it-or-hate-it provocation feels thrilling. The previous generation of fashion greats are currently departing too quickly. André Leon Talley, whose death was announced last week, was another example of someone who was a complete realisation of themselves: Louis Vuitton luggage, Karl Lagerfeld capes, and all. In their departure, these figures remind us of what has been lost in their absence. There is no point being nostalgic about the past. If anything, the fashion industry is currently stuck there, endlessly reviving and recycling previous decades in a merry-go-round of frilled Seventies dresses and Nineties spaghetti straps. But there are still some useful lessons that we might take from the Muglers and Talleys of the world: a commitment to excellence, even in the extreme; the value of a singular and wide-reaching imagination; the willingness to be full-throated in one’s passions, even if that risks annoying or alienating people. A love of drama too. Fashion is always, to some degree, theatre. Sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy the show. Rosalind Jana is a writer based in London. She writes on fashion and culture for ‘Vogue’, Magnum Photos, ‘Prospect’, and the ‘Telegraph’. 3. At the end of the Thierry Mugler show in March 1998 in Paris. Photo 1: ARNAL/PAT/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Photo 2: Pool DUCLOS/STEVENS/Gamma-Rapho via
APOLLO MARCH 2022 8 ARCHITECTURE Carmen Portinho and the Vanguard of Modernism in Brazil Camilla Ghisleni In the early 1920s, a time when women could not even work without their husband’s authorization, Carmen Portinho started an engineering course at the Polytechnic School of the University of Brazil. At the vanguard of the profession, as one of the first three women to graduate as engineers in Brazil, she was opening up a field in a space dominated entirely by men. Carmen Velasco Portinho was the daughter of a gaucho father and a Bolivian mother. She was born in 1903 in Corumbá, Mato Grosso do Sul, a border region, and only 8 years later she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her family. Before emerging in the profession, she became known as a suffrage leader fundamental to the conquest of the female vote, of those who travel by small planes, spreading flyers to call on women to join the feminist struggle. A visible boldness that permeated all the activities she developed, incorporating women’s rights in different instances, from professional encouragement to project details. Among her great social achievements, it is worth mentioning the creation of Women’s University Union in her own home in 1932, a place where women could seek support in the career they chose, helping to raise awareness of the importance of technical preparation and intellectual development – after all, as Carmen herself stated, political emancipation would be useless without economic emancipation. As her first job in her career, Carmen was invited to take over the directorship of Works and Traffic at Rio de Janeiro’s City Hall, the country’s capital at the time. A public office in which she suffered numerous episodes of demoralization for being a woman, but where, despite this, she stood out with important projects such as coordinating the implementation of electric power grid in public schools, a fact that made it possible to open night courses. Although always very discreet, Carmen had an irreverent and audacious personality, which came out when she led construction teams with hundreds of workers with whom, according to her, she learned to appreciate a nice cachaça. However, despite her career in civil construction, it was at the beginning of the 1930s that Carmen officially took up the field of urbanism, becoming the first woman in the country to obtain the title of urbanist promulgated by the Universidade do Distrito Federal. To this end, it was customary for the student to defend a thesis and, in Carmen’s case, the chosen theme reverberates to this day in Brazilian history. The engineer and, from then on, urbanist presented the “Preliminary Project for the Future Capital of Brazil in the Central Plateau”. Based on a study carried out in 1892 by a commission charged by the Brazilian government to define the ideal place where the construction of the new capital of the country would take place, Carmen studied the climatic and geographical conditions of the central plateau, finally choosing the same region. that 20 years later would be defined by Lucio Costa for the foundation of Brasília. The similarities, however, do not stop there. Carmen, an assiduous enthusiast of the modern movement, followed Le Corbusier’s precepts to the letter for the design of her project, creating a kind of Ville Radieuse, defending the protagonism of residential areas, green spaces, density, buildings built on pilotis and garden roofs. When confronted about the great similarity between her project and Lucio Costa’s, Carmen credits the similarity to the fact that both used as a basis the same research on the place and the same precepts of modern urbanism. Carmen’s project was the prototype of the functional city defined by CIAM’s. Such boldness made her a precursor of the idea of building an entirely modern city in Brazil and the recognition of that is a debt that history owes to Carmen. Shortly after founding the Brazilian Association of Engineers and Architects (ABEA), Carmen began a study program in England in 1944, and found a war-torn London. However, in the midst of the chaotic and desolate scenario of the time, the engineer was touched by the way the public power was conducting and prioritizing popular housing. Together, they were responsible for several projects that marked the history of modern architecture in the country, among 1. Conjunto Residencial Prefeito Mendes de Moraes (Pedregulho) Photo 1 and 2: Pedro Mascaro
APOLLO MARCH 2022 9 them Pedregulho housing complex, in Gávea, Rio’s Museum of Modern Art and their own houses in Jacarepaguá and Itaipava. Regarding this sensitivity, it is worth highlighting Lucio Costa’s speech when he stated at one point that the role played by Carmen in the conception of Pedregulho extrapolated the technical demands of an urban engineer, she was there to “teach how to live”. In it, Carmen’s activism is once again intertwined with the professional role she played, clearly materialized through the automated collective laundries that, as Gropius had already proposed, symbolized the emancipation of women by relieving them of domestic burdens. After these projects, she was still director of MAM, art critic and director of Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI) for over 20 years. Carmen Portinho lived until 2001, and in her almost a century of life she left an unprecedented professional and social legacy through a militancy that genuinely reached all spheres of her life. Reference: RISÉRIO, André. Mulher, casa e cidade. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2015. Written by Camilla Ghisleni | Translated by Diogo Simões 2. Conjunto Residencial Prefeito Mendes de Moraes (Pedregulho) 3. Carmen PortinhoW 4. Museu de Arte Moderna Photo 3: Wikimedia Commons licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionGetty Images Photo 4: CAU/BR
APOLLO MARCH 2022 10 INTERVIEW Taylor Kibby’s Sculptures Tell a Story Camilla Ghisleni 1. Taylor Kibby. Tangle 1, Stoneware, Mason Stain, Embroidery Thread, 18 x 14 x 14 in 2. Taylor Kibby Taylor Kibby tells a story. A story of memory, connection, and energy. Her work reflects these narratives of shifting energy through the movement of her semi-rigid materials. “The piece is a being in its own right–with each move I make, the piece reacts and sways to its own internal logic. That is part of the pleasure of the work; we move together in conversation back and forth in search of balance and resolution,” says Kibby. Kibby is known for her intricate, flowing stoneware sculptures, which are moulded in interlocking links of a remarkable lightness and delicacy, making them resemble woven chains. Her interest in chain links and other permeable barriers is rooted in their potential to reflect the way, “objects and people occupy space in the world as well as notions of memory, identity and narrative.” We got the chance to ask Taylor Kibby a few questions about her art practice and about her art business. Read on below for that interview. Has your work changed over time—do you find yourself understanding your art career through different periods of expression? TK: I’ve definitely felt the growth of my work, especially in the last few years. Grad school was a super compressed and accelerated period of change and growth, but even in the few years since I’ve notice the shifts in how and why I make. Not just expansive growth, but I also feel like making work has me digging deeper into myself. I don’t think I have enough distance to say I have any understanding or perspective yet, but I can feel the reverberations of the changes. Do you have a favorite or most satisfying part of your process? TK: The most satisfying part is the daydreaming; before anything can intrude to change the vision in my head. How do you experiment within your art practice? When you start a work do you have an idea of how you would like it to look? TK: I try to keep experimentation alive in my practice by always introducing new materials and mediums and ways of making. I like to translate one idea from one material to the next to see what gets lost or found within the reconfiguration. I do usually have an image in my head but it rarely ever turns out that way. A large part of what keeps me interested in making work is using materials that have their own internal logic and way of doing things. They are hard to predict, which is a joy. What routines—art-making and administrative—are essential to success in your art career? TK: The administrative work that is essential is the good documentation of work. Without good photos and accurately recorded information I couldn’t apply to residencies, grants, or present the work to collectors with confidence. Artistically, I think the routine of taking time for yourself is the most essential. Refilling the well when it’s been drained is a lesson I continually relearn. Why did you decide to inventory and archive your artworks? TK: It was really for my own sanity. The amount of information that each piece has attached to it is astonishing and keeping a good archive preserves space in my mind for the actual imagining and making of art. What advice would you give an emerging artist during this time? TK: Don’t make decisions from a place of fear. How does Artwork Archive help manage your career? TK: I love Artwork Archive. It’s an amazing resource where I can keep all of the information that I could ever need about my practice and my business. It’s an amazing place to go to keep information about work: where it’s going, who has collected pieces, what galleries have work. Especially when I’m doing applications or sending out portfolios, having all of that in one place is extremely helpful and it makes me feel and look extremely professional. It’s a real sense of pride that I can put together a portfolio to send to potential collectors or galleries and they are able to see the work in its best light. Photo 1 and 2: https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/artist-spotlight
APOLLO MARCH 2022 11 Off the Shelf Apollo’s selection of recently published books on art, architecture and the history of collecting. APOLLO MARCH 2022 Matisse: The Red Studio Ann Temkin, Dorthe Aagesen The Museum of Modern Art, New York US $55.00 CAN $75.00 TRADE ISBN 9781633451322 Created in 1911, it would go on to become one of the most influential works in the history of modern art. The painting, which has hung in MoMA’s galleries since 1949, depicts the artist’s studio in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, filled with his own artworks, furniture and decorative objects. Women Painting Women Edited with text by Andrea Karnes. Preface by Marla Price. Text by Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold. DelMonico Books/Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth ISBN 9781636810355 US $49.95 CAN $67.95 TRADE Replete with complexities, abjection, beauty and joy, Women Painting Women offers new ways to imagine the portrayal of women. A thematic exploration of 50 female artists. Collecting Nature - The History of the Herbarium and Natural Specimens Clive Aslet, Svante Helmbaek Tirén Bokförlaget Stolpe US $40.00 CAN $54.00 TRADE ISBN 9789189425644 A gorgeous leatherbound compendium of flora, shells, rare insects and more from the golden age of curiosities. Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800 Highlights from LACMA’s Collection Edited with text by Ilona Katzew. Conversation by Edward J. Sullivan and Ilona Katzew. DelMonico Books/Los Angeles County Museum of Art US $85.00 CAN $115.00 TRADE ISBN 9781636810201 Including textiles, paintings and decorative arts, Archive of the World offers a lucid alternative to traditional interpretations of art from the so-called New Worldworks, furniture and decorative objects. Exquisitely illustrated with new photography, this stunning book represents the first comprehensive study of LACMA’s notable holdings of Spanish American art. Rembrandt, the Universal Artist - Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age Skira USD $45.00 | CAN $61 ISBN: 9788857246789 Key works by Rembrandt and Dutch painters from Hals to Vermeer, from a legendary New York collection The Leiden Collection, created by Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan and his wife, Daphne Recanati Kaplan, and based in New York, has assembled over 250 paintings in the past 15 years, including masterpieces by Rembrandt and many of the finest artists from the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age. Only on Saturday: The Wood Type Prints of Jack Stauffacher Letterform Archive Books US $70.00 CAN $95.00 ISBN 9780998318066 A stunning tribute to the experimental letterpress prints of the revered scholar-printer and AIGA medalist Jack Stauffacher. Created in his off-hours on the weekend and in part inspired by the modern artists of his day, Jack Stauffacher’s exquisite prints demonstrate what wood type can do when released from its role in traditional communication and instead used to explore letters as pure form. In the resulting abstract, dynamically composed, often lushly layered prints, Stauffacher reclaims typography as a subject fit for the gallery wall. Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse DelMonico Books/Los Angeles County Museum of Art US $49.95 CAN $67.95 TRADE ISBN 9781636810188 McQueen’s iconic fashion juxtaposed with historic textiles and works of art, revealing the designer’s dynamic approach to storytelling. One of the most significant contributors to fashion between 1990 and 2010, British designer Lee Alexander McQueen.
APOLLO MARCH 2022 12 REVIEW Submerged in van Gogh: Would Absinthe Make the Art Grow Fonder? Jason Farago “Immersive Van Gogh,” on Pier 36 near the Manhattan Bridge, favors lavish, synesthetic visuals. “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” in Battery Park City, offers a more chronological path through his sun-drenched and star-dappled landscapes. Each features irises, sunflowers and almond blossoms, cloned and flipped at mural scale, their short brush strokes whirling like cold fronts on Sam Champion’s five-day AccuWeather forecast. Like Vincent, I too suffer for my art, and so I attended both of them. If you are committed to trying one out, go to the east side, which has graphics of meaningfully greater sophistication. (Adult tickets range from about $36 to $55 and rise with various fees, supplements and hustles. MoMA is $25, and the Met is pay-what-you-wish for locals.) Whether you attend either or both you should bring a fully charged cameraphone; some might also enjoy a psychedelic supplement, and in fact the east side venue plans to install an absinthe bar later on. Sensuous selfie backdrops come well before intellectual engagement here, so you might as well make the most of it. At the east side venue, designed by the Broadway set designer David Korins, three consecutive rooms display the same video projections, created by Massimiliano Siccardi. Mirrored objects strewn throughout reflect the screens; you sit on the floor, on a few benches, or (if you’re feeling flush) on a rented cushion. On the west side, the projections fill a single, much taller room, equipped with beach chairs. An English-accented narrator drones van Gogh quotations over the west side’s projections; the east side show is unnarrated, backed instead by a trip-hop remix of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and, more curiously, Édith Piaf belting out “Non, je ne regrette rien.” The west side show offers more introductory materials, though really, you could just read the van Gogh entry on Wikipedia while you’re at each. Both exhibitions emphasize van Gogh as a lone, tortured genius rather than a figure of history, and both imply through their editing and exposition that his thick outlines and non-local color were a spontaneous outpouring of his soul. Fair enough if you don’t want to chart the development of painterly style in 19th-century France, but even the rudiments of van Gogh are not easy to capture in photographic reproductions. If you go to MoMA to see “Starry Night,” or to the Yale University Art Gallery (free admission!) to visit “The Night Café,” you can spend as much time as you like examining van Gogh’s mastery of impasto — that is, the thick application of paint that gives the paintings their nervous, shuddering quality. In these wall-size screen savers, impasto has to be mimicked through motion: dancing brush strokes, falling leaves, flapping crows. The animations at the west side show are rudimentary and have herky-jerky transitions that reminded me of the solitaire app I used to play in Windows 95. The east side show is cleaner and sexier, though not more sophisticated than the flat-screen visuals in airport terminals or sports stadiums. In both cases, the digital reproductions — particularly of the 1888 Arles street scene “Café Terrace at Night” — strongly recall the escapist fantasies of anime, and the childish moral sentiments that go with them. Contrasted with the immoderate passions of the 1956 movie “Lust for Life,” or the 2018 biopic “At Eternity’s Gate,” these selfie chambers are as benign as the Japanese animated film “My Neighbor Totoro.” The art’s personal anguish and social tensions both dissolve into a mist of let’s-pretend; this van Gogh is less an artist than a craftsman of other worlds. (A “universe,” as the Marvel or Harry Potter fans say.) As for the technology: although these immersives have been touted as breakthroughs in exhibition design, room-filling cinema projections go back many decades. The shows hark back in particular to multi-projector attractions at the World’s Fair in Queens in 1964 and at Expo ’67 in Montreal, which cast humanist visions of the 1. New York Exhibit Photo 1: https://new.mta.info/
APOLLO MARCH 2022 13 future in all directions. What’s new today is something else: not the pictures on the walls, but the phone in your hand. Individual absorption, rather than shared wonder, is the order of the day now. From every vantage point you will fill your phone’s backlit screen with glowing imagery, and there’s more than enough space to crop out other visitors and frame only yourself. Is it all worth your hardearned guilders? The east side immersion runs on a loop of about 35 minutes, the west side one about an hour. Not long for a ticket so pricey, but you can stay as long as you like, and both offer sideshows to boost your value. On the west side there’s a 3-D replica of van Gogh’s Arles bedroom, a coloring station for children, as well as a virtual reality experience that whisks you through a waxy simulation of Arles. The east side show has booths rigged up with sounds associated with colored lights to suggest the chromesthesia van Gogh described in letters to his brother Theo, plus mannequins wearing shockingly tacky van Gogh-inspired clothing. (Where might these dresses festooned with wheat and sunflowers be appropriate? The Miss Provence pageant? Is there a Saint-Rémy drag night I don’t know about?) Also a bar with snacks sold “to Gogh,” which is a cute joke that only works in America — the French pronounce his name “van GOGUE,” the Dutch “fun KHOKH,” and Diane Keaton in “Manhattan” prefers “van GOKH,” the final consonant disdainfully ejected from the back of the throat. Keaton’s character in “Manhattan” has nominated van Gogh (alongside Ingmar Bergman and Gustav Mahler) for her “Academy of the Overrated,” and there is a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel version of this review that could end: painting is not spectacle, and van Gogh is more than decoration. Even this era’s most narcissist-friendly art installations — Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Rooms,” Random International’s “Rain Room,” or the all-engrossing environments of Miami’s Superblue — are at least original works, with a greater aim than artistic brand activation. Still, after a few hours in these sensoria, I had to believe that the millions of visitors who enjoy these immersive van Gogh displays are getting something out of it. There’s a speechless and irreducible quality to great art, a value that goes beyond communication or advocacy. And if audiences find that quality more immediately here than they do in our traditional institutions, maybe we should be asking why. Have our museums and galleries played down too much the emotional impact of the art they show? In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gallery 822, you can stand as long as you like in front of van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses,” the agitated clouds rolling like waves, its climbing greenery edged with trembling blacks. I want everyone to discover, right there in the thick grooves of the oil paint, the wonder and vitality of art that needs no animation. There has got to be a way to lead people back to that discovery, even if some of us take a selfie afterward. 3. Courtesy of Immersive Van Gogh 2. Photo: Michael Brosilow Photo 2 and 3: https://www.theatrely.com/post/vincent-van-goghs-vision-prevails-through-the-immersive-van-gogh-
APOLLO MARCH 2022 14 Get ready for Francis Bacon: Man and Beast Experience the masterpieces of Francis Bacon in London for the first time in more than 10 years, including his monumental triptychs, rarely loaned paintings from private collections, and his last ever work. Here, the line between human and animal is constantly blurred, reminding us that our primal instincts lie just below the surface. 29 January - 17 April 2022 Tues - Sun - 10am–6pm Tickets £22–24.50. Concessions available. Main Galleries, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts