Painter Eyes Hip-Hop’s Titans

Los Angeles Times

by Lynell George

August 31, 2008

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The Forum Gallery

STATURE: Hip-hop artist Kanye West is among the subjects of painter Alex Melamid, previously renowned as a conceptual art rebel in Soviet Russia. His large paintings of the rappers are cast in amber light, recalling the work of Old Masters.

From Soviet realism with a twist to portraits of American rap stars might seem something of a leap — but not necessarily for Alexander Melamid.

The Russian-born artist has often been interested in creating more than a bit of political havoc. Known for decades for work that was both bold commentary and incisive satire, Melamid and his creative partner, Vitaly Komar, were renowned as conceptual art rebels in Soviet Russia and were also considered to be the architects of the Soviet Realist Pop Art movement. But in 2003, Melamid parted ways not just with Komar but also, it seemed, with the international scene.

As it happened, Melamid had simply turned another creative corner. His son, Dan “The Man” Melamid, a video director, had introduced him to hip-hop’s royalty — literally. From 2003 to 2005, Melamid spent time with a dozen of the business’ most famous icons, including rappers Kanye West, 50 Cent, Lil Jon, Snoop Dogg and Reverend Run and entrepreneur Russell Simmons. During their sessions together he both photographed and drew them, providing the basis for what would become a new series of paintings.

“Holy Hip-Hop!” is the result of Melamid’s close study and conversations. The portraits — rendered larger than life and cast in an amber light that references the Old Masters — find the figures all about their business: on the telephone, at the computer, ready to take a meeting, poised for performance. They are decorated with the trappings, or iconography, of their time — diamonds, cellphones, designer watches and shoes. The show, which premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is Melamid’s first solo exhibition and will be on view at the Forum Gallery in Los Angeles from Sept. 12 through Nov. 1.

– Lynell George

Ancient Art, Served on a Present-Day Platter

Monica Almeida

The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The Latin American collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is back on view after three years’ absence. And the reinstallation opens with a piquant flourish in a display of ancient

Entrance to the newly installed “Latin American Art: Ancient to Contemporary” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The artist, Jorge Pardo, who was born in Cuba, is well known for blurring the lines between art, architecture and design. Several years ago he turned the lobby of the Dia building on West 22nd Street in Manhattan into an all-over grid of brightly colored tiles: it was like a bathhouse conceived by Mondrian. The Mountain Bar, a music club he opened in this city’s gallery-packed Chinatown, is distinctive for its blood-red walls and a hanging garden of sculptural lamps.

In his design for the Los Angeles museum’s Mesoamerican collection, he has outdone himself in buzzy inventiveness. He has also, to some degree, done in the art consigned to his visual care.

For the new setting, Mr. Pardo, 45, has covered the lower walls of three galleries with units of stacked fiberboard sheets. The horizontal sheets, thinly cut, alternate with empty spaces of the same size to create a continuous light-dark stripe pattern running through the rooms. The sheets have in addition been shaped with curves and undulations, so the cavelike walls swell organically outward and recede into niches that become display cases. A few free-standing stacks suggest biomorphic sculptural forms that are also pedestals for other sculptures.

Finally, Mr. Pardo has accessorized the space with complicated colors (yellowish burgundy, electric green), zany little chandeliers and thick curtains of a taffeta-type fabric. All have counterparts in his bar design.

As an introduction to the rest of the more straightforwardly presented Latin American collection, Mr. Pardo’s extravaganza does what it is supposed to do: pull you in the door. The stripes and bulges grab and hold the eye. The colors and curtains are like cartoon versions of the faux-period embellishments we’re used to in museums. Here those conventions assume a goofy, festive air, which makes you realize how tacky the originals can be.

The trouble is that the pre- Columbian art gets lost in the décor. The museum’s collection, though relatively new, is very fine. It has superb holdings in ceramics from West Mexico and individual objects from across the Mesoamerican world that would shine in any North American institution. Virginia Fields, the museum’s curator of pre-Columbian art, memorably showcased the collection in “Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship” a few years ago, and has taken an intriguing thematic approach to it here.

But the logic of her arrangement becomes hard to follow because the art itself is hard to see. The stripes and curves distract from objects; the colors suddenly change their look. The green in particular leaches visually into terra-cotta sculptures, giving them a liverish cast. And why this green anyway? To evoke a primal jungle setting à la Quai Branly in Paris? If so, bad idea.

These days, design is a mainstream art-world hobbyhorse and political correctness is seriously uncool. (It always has been; people are just more relaxed about dissing it now.) So we’re probably not supposed to ask questions like: How come self-aggrandizing designs like Mr. Pardo’s, which obscure rather than enhance objects and their meanings, end up being applied to non-Western objects but only rarely to their Western counterparts?

Would the museum hang, say, Rembrandt or Degas or its stunningly yawnsome Broad collection in Mr. Pardo’s clamorous setting? If the answer is yes, great. By all means do it. Truly break some museological ground. But if the answer is no, or if there’s even a hesitation, the problem becomes obvious.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, like other museums, has begun to invite artists to design and organize shows. This is a fantastic idea, and the results can be inspired. John Baldessari’s “Magritte and Contemporary Art” there was; so was Kara Walker’s “After the Deluge” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. With Mr. Pardo the case is both less and more complicated. He was asked only to provide a visual context, not to choose what it would hold. This may help explain why his installation seems detached from the art it is meant to serve and overwhelms it, producing the equivalent of a Mesoamerican group show inside, and a subsidiary to, a contemporary solo exhibition.

None of this amounts to a crisis. It’s just revealing about where we are now on the politically correct front, and it’s part of one museum’s learning curve. I like Mr. Pardo’s vivacious sensibility; I just think it is misapplied here. And there are many models available for how it might have been done otherwise. The last few decades have seen a revolution in Western institutional approaches to presenting non-Western cultures. The Museum for African Art in New York has led the way. So has the Fowler Museum at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the city’s major and undersung cultural resources.

The Fowler’s recent “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diaspora,” organized by Henry John Drewal, was an object lesson in how exhibition design can be visually magnetic, object-centered and idea-clarifying; how it can deliver both a big thrill and a hard think. The Los Angeles museum is aware of this gold mine of a resource — it recently invited a Fowler curator, Mary Nooter Roberts, to create its first African art display. Perhaps it will encourage its future artist-designers to pay the Fowler a visit. Artists, more than any art lovers on earth, will love what they see.

Great British Watercolors

By KAREN WILKIN

WSJ.com
August 2, 2008;

New Haven and New York

An English friend maintains that the British are not a visual people. “We like words,” he says, “and gardens. That’s why all those British conceptual artists who do things with trees and rocks are so popular. But what we’re really good at is language. Look at our novelists and poets.” He may have a point, but visitors to “Great British Watercolors From the Paul Mellon Collection,” at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., through Aug. 17, may have reason to doubt his pronouncement.

Seen last year at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, and the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia, the exhibition was organized to honor Paul Mellon, the founder of the Yale Center, on the centennial of his birth (he died in 1999). Yet what the show really celebrates is not a connoisseur’s passion, nor even British mastery of a particular kind of painting, but the importance of English artists in transforming a medium once thought of as purely utilitarian into something appropriate to the demands of ambitious art — all in purely visual terms.

“Great British Watercolors” can be enjoyed simply as a miscellany of prime examples of the discipline. More than 80 works from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries provide a great deal to delight the eye. Some of the best-known British artists are represented: Richard Parkes Bonington, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Girtin, Samuel Palmer and Joseph Mallord William Turner, for example, along with the satirist Thomas Rowlandson. But the Mellon collection is notably broad — only a fraction is represented in the exhibition — so the selection also pays homage to less familiar figures, known for their contribution to the evolution of the medium, artists such as Alexander Cozens, Cozens’s son John Robert, Paul Sandby and John Cotman. And there is a host of obscure but often gifted painters, including the irresistibly named Julius Caesar Ibbetson, Michael “Angelo” Rooker, and Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding; the last, christened in honor of the Flemish-born 17th-century master and the Boston-born 18th-century portrait painter, was clearly destined for his chosen profession.

The closest we get to the words and language my friend claims dominate the British consciousness are the works by William Blake and Edward Lear, both equally accomplished as artists and writers. The exhibition’s Blakes include several sheets from an illustrated version of Thomas Gray’s poems, prepared as a birthday gift for the wife of the neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman; Blake surrounded pages from a printed edition of the poems, pasted on larger sheets of paper, with sinuous images tenuously related to such themes as “The Progress of Poesy.” Lear is represented by two fluent records of his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land, one with color notes written in for future reference.

Yale Center for British Art

William Blake illustrated Thomas Gray’s poems — such as ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,’ above — as a gift for the wife of the sculptor John Flaxman.

The subtext of “Great British Watercolors” is a history of the medium itself, in terms of both its reputation among artists and its technical possibilities, during the crucial century spanned by the selections on view. While water-based paint has a long history in Britain — the lavish manuscripts produced by English and Irish medieval monasteries were illuminated with watercolor — the earliest works in the exhibition demonstrate that in the 18th century, the medium was subservient to drawing. Renderings of picturesque landscapes, towns and monuments, both at home and abroad, executed with meticulous line, are enlivened with tinted washes.

Against these sharply focused images, Alexander Cozens’s washy, direct “fantastic landscapes” signal the beginning of a new way of painting on paper. A theorist, painter and teacher, famous for advocating working from the imagination, rather than from observation, Cozens suggested inventing images through free association. He advised starting pictures by laying in broad, monochrome washes and than turning the “blot,” as he called it, into an ideal landscape. (There’s an echo of Leonardo da Vinci’s recommendation that artists study the stains on walls for inspiration.) Cozens’s work was crucial to the acceptance of watercolor painting as serious art.

The exhibition’s lively Gainsboroughs, their loose strokes and washes heightened with chalk, further advance the cause of watercolor as a responsive painting medium, rather than as an adjunct to line. These improvisational landscape fragments, punctuated with sketchy carts and country folk, are both demonstrations of virtuosity and embodiments of the cult of sensibility — feeling — that dominated Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was mercilessly pilloried by Jane Austen.

Watercolor’s enhanced status was officially announced in 1804 with the first exhibition of the newly formed “Society of Painters in Water-Colours.” The exhibition makes clear the ambition of the society’s members. British watercolor painters used their portable, quick drying medium to address everything from domestic interiors and English beauty spots to still life and scenes of exotic travel. The best exploited the transparency of the medium to evoke the pale sun of an English spring, the cloudy skies of Northern Europe, the brilliance of the Mediterranean — and more, including the agonies of the Crimean War.

Constable and Turner are the stars of “Great British Watercolors,” their paintings tributes to the evocative power of pools of tone and subdued color. The Constables are sketchy studies, the Turners usually more finished, but both depend on rapid gestures, bold overlays, and, often, wiping or scraping. The luminosity and audacity of the Turners make their rather conventional subject matter irrelevant. A study of Crichton Castle, amid mountains, with a rainbow, is so apparently spontaneous that it’s like watching the artist at work.

In a sense, Turner’s whole career illustrates the thesis underlying “Great British Watercolors”: An accomplished recorder of notable places in Britain transformed himself into an internationally acclaimed painter of romantic, often fantastic, landscapes and seascapes. Until Sept. 21, that evolution can be traced in the retrospective “J.M.W. Turner” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There’s a splendid selection of Turner’s paintings, including a stellar group of his uninhibited watercolors, both public and private, many of them even more brilliant and remarkable than those in New Haven, good as they are. See both exhibitions and then try to decide if the British are better at words than images.

The art of naked vs. nude

By Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic
Is Carla Bruni naked or nude? • This photograph of her unclothed body has been widely circulated through the media and the Internet since it was sold to an anonymous collector at a Christie’s auction on April 10 for what was considered the wildly inflated sum of $91,000, after Christie’s estimated its worth between $3,000 and $4,000.

Naked versus nude may seem like a small, irrelevant distinction in a debate over the propriety of the photograph’s sale. But those two words represent important and very different ways not only in how we look at an image but how we judge its value and the value of those involved in its creation. And a recent shift has occurred in how we might perceive and judge the photograph of Carla Bruni.

It was taken in 1993 by Michel Comte, a respected commercial photographer, when Bruni was a top model. Many months ago, it was a minor player in the sale of 135 photographs owned by the distinguished German collector Gert Elfering, not in the same league as, say, those by Richard Avedon or Irving Penn, both of whom were also represented and whose photographs were valued in the $100,000 range. Christie’s assessment of the Bruni-Comte photograph seemed spot-on because Comte is still living, he isn’t in the highest ranks of photographers and the Bruni photo isn’t from a special or limited-edition. And several months ago Bruni, 40, was just an ex-model with a fairly successful singing career and a string of famous lovers (e.g. Mick Jagger). Then in February she married Nicholas Sarkozy, president of France.

You can guess what happened next.

After the Bruni-Sarkozy wedding, Christie’s suddenly elevated the image to the small group of special photographs used to promote the auction. Bidding at the event went through the roof with the anonymous collector finally snagging the print for $91,000. And Madame Sarkozy’s birthday suit was posted far more frequently on Web sites than the little gray suits from Dior she wore on a state visit to Britain that same week.

She and her husband reportedly feel victimized and exploited by the sale. Knee-jerk reaction would concur.

But let’s look at her response through the prism of art history. The naked/nude question is a subcategory of — and inevitably leads to — the Big Question: What Is Art?

Bruni’s photograph has made it a more potent question not based on the photograph’s merits or even who she was in 1993. Its value now seems based on who she has become, a personage rather than a person, someone with the potential to exert influence, even power, on an international, political level.

Here’s what the late Lord Kenneth Clark, one of the most respected art historians of the 20th century and maybe of all time, said about naked versus nude in his classic book from the 1950s, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form:

“To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled, defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body.”

The bottom line for Clark was that nude is art and naked is not: “… in the greatest age of painting (the Renaissance), the nude inspired the greatest works.”

Nude confers power; naked implies helplessness. In an ironic coda for Bruni, the elevation that has given her access to a power base has also been the agent of its potential loss.

If we believe she is naked, we agree with her that she has been victimized and exploited; if she is nude, we view her as the fortunate subject of a work of art whose physical form is celebrated and glorified. And, it’s important to remember, that in 1993 she was at the top of her game and had collaborated often with Comte for fashion magazines such as Vogue. She was no desperate naif persuaded to remove her clothes by a cheesy adventurer.

The Medicis, an Italian renaissance family who had their own broad power base, were unequivocal about the woman Botticelli painted for them in The Birth of Venus (c. 1482-1486) which you see here in a pose similar to Bruni’s. It’s believed to be a homage to Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, the greatest beauty of her day who was loved by Giuliano de Medici. Like Bruni, she wears no clothes. Unlike Bruni, Simonetta — and her rich and famous boyfriend — would have considered the portrait and public interest in it honorable things.

“Look at my woman!” it proclaims. “Isn’t she gorgeous!”

President Sarkozy has made, at the time of this writing, no comment about his wife’s portrait.

Lord Clark, in discussing naked and nude, did not take very seriously the ascension of photography as an art form in the latter part of the 20th century and the role it would play in the genre of nude portraiture. As we all know, a photograph today can be manipulated every bit as much as a painting. But it has the illusion of unadulterated reality which affects our sensibilities about it, especially in this instance, with an immediacy and intimate directness. A photograph can convey a feeling of voyeurism far more often than a painting or sculpture. That and its potential to be endlessly reproduced often distinguish it in people’s minds from paintings and sculpture.

Nor did Clark reckon with the pervasive influence of popular contemporary culture. I can’t think of any women who look more “balanced, prosperous or confident” than Playboy centerfolds and the gals who happily pull up their shirts on their Web sites. And the highly paid models who remove their clothes for respected photographers.

And while I would disagree with those who claim a Hustler photograph as art, I would argue their right to have different definitions of art from mine, just as I would defend others at the opposite end of the spectrum in their right to believe that no representation of the unclothed body is art, that Botticelli’s unclothed Venus is as naked as Venus the Stripper on MySpace.

More common is the middle ground of those who would be enchanted by Botticelli and appalled by Helmut Newton’s provocative, subtly sado-masochistic photographs that have been published in every high-end magazine in the world.

As a point of reference, Newton’s Tied-Up Torso, a photograph of a bare-chested woman in semi-bondage get-up, went for $109,000 at the auction.

I am, of course, using a few words out of context from Clark’s lengthy discussion of a classic art genre to make a point about how personal our ideas are about the question, what is art?

This auction was not about prurience or aberrant tastes. It contained some true photographic masterworks, some of them nudes, along with landscapes, portraits and still lifes.

Examples from the auction and what they sold for:

• Irving Penn’s portrait of a nude Gisele Bundchen, $193,000

• Avedon’s Bridget Bardot (face only), $181,000

• Horst’s unidentified model wearing a Mainbocher corset, $133,000

• Penn’s portrait of Picasso (fully clothed), $133,000

• Richard Avedon’s semi-nude of Lauren Hutton, $127,000

• Penn’s nude of Kate Moss, $97,000

• Herb Ritts’ nude of Alek Wek (probably the most revealing nude in the group), $25,000

• Albert Watson’s nude of Kate Moss, $21,250

• David Bailey’s portrait of John Lennon and Paul McCartney (fully clothed), $16,250

• Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s documentary photograph of the moon’s surface from their Apollo craft, $6,250

• Garry Fabian Miller’s seascape, $6,250

• Michel Comte’s portrait of Jeff Koons (fully clothed) $3,250

• Comte’s nude of Carla Bruni, $91,000.

I expect you’re seeing a pattern. Except for the last example, which is the anomaly.

It’s an undistinguished photograph of a pretty girl in an awkward, postmodern pose, taken after a shoot for Italian Vogue according to Comte, the kind of outtake common with models and photographers who are comfortable with each other. It looks quickly and casually made with none of the care taken to pose and compose an image that you see in many other photographs from the auction. And, according to a description by Christie’s, it is unsigned and has no reference to the number of prints Comte has made of the image, unlike almost all other high-priced photographs in the auction which are part of very small, beautifully made limited editions. It was in the lowest category of Christie’s estimates for those reasons.

When my editors and I talked about this story, I argued hard for inclusion of the complete photograph of Carla Bruni. They decided against it (the naked/nude thing again).

Now I believe they were right.

I can only hope Anonymous Collector bought it for the best reason in the world, because he loved it.

I’m skeptical.

I can imagine a scenario in which the French president and first lady go on some state visit and encounter Anonymous Collector who will say to her, “Oh, Carla, how nice to see you in clothes!”

I can also image a scenario in 10, 20 or 30 years, when Carla Bruni is no longer a personage and Anonymous Collector will realize that this was not investment art.

If the photograph had sold for $4,000, Carla Bruni would be nude.

At $91,000, Carla Bruni is naked.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293
or lennie@sptimes.com.