“Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917” opens next week at the Museum of Modern Art. It shows off new advances in technology, with Matisse’s work as the test subject. It features 26 pieces that were examined with new digital imaging techniques, laser scanning, ultraviolet illumination, and computer software to determine changes Matisse made to the works over their construction. (For more on the upcoming exhibit, see the New York Times article “Electronic Insights Into Matisse’s Technique.)

It’s truly amazing that we  now have the technology to look deep through layers of paint to ascertain insights into an artist’s changing outlook as the painting progressed.

Curators could see changes in the outlines of figures beneath the painting’s surface, revealing a constantly shifting landscape of figures, with stronger lines and more intense tones over time.

The article also reminded me of how artists’ works are perfect anthropological time capsules. Matisse, as other artists, were moved in their subject and construction techniques by the current social and political climate. During WWI, for example, Matisse reflected a grave atmosphere and opted for neutral, less flamboyant colors. The painting above, Mme Matisse: Madras Rouge (The Red Madras Headress), created by Matisse in the summer of 1907, clearly shows a pre-war oeuvre.

Rome is caught up in an art conundrum. Wealthy art collectors support a contemporary art scene; politicians clutch at the crumbling classics.

Rome’s architecture crumbling? Yes. A recent New York Times article “As Rome Modernizes, Its Past Quietly Crumbles” brings up some dire realities. Funding for restoring antiquities is not keeping pace with the wind, rain, and time’s lashings. And so politicians are faced with a challenge:  do you throw money at the old, at the expense of the new? Just rely on private benefactors to bootstrap and bankroll the contemporary scene?

Apparently, in Italy, you do. Italy provides less support to its young artists than do museums in Holland, France, or Britain. The Museum of Modern Art in the U.S., the Tate in Britain, and the Pompidou in France have emerged as central institutions that spur spin-off museums and private foundations. There’s fewer of these institutions in Italy. In Italy, the private galleries must pick up the slack.

"The Artist is Present" A viewer sitting with Marina Abramovic at MoMA - New York

Performance art is a difficult art media to understand — one which people may be less comfortable with or familiar with, than say visual art. Marina Abramovic, perhaps one of the most well-known performance artists who began her work with the emergence of the form in the 1970′s and ’80′s, is exhibiting at MoMA in a work entitled “The Artist is Present”.

In this work, she simply sits in a chair. Across from her is an empty chair in which viewers can sit for as long as they like. Some viewers sit for 5 minutes, some sit all day. A camera crew is present to photograph these viewers, many of whom are very emotional; some cry and others show extreme anguish). This is striking. What can possibly be so interesting about Marina’s face, her hair, her body, her expression?

It appears that she takes on a luminescence, that she somehow is able to look through the viewer. In interacting with others, we usually have their full attention – there is engagement. This performance art seems to keep the art on display and the viewer distanced, yet I wonder if Marina’s movements or changing facial expressions reflect the viewer’s response? After all, aren’t they also reacting to the piece and being photographed as the art? In essence, is the viewer actually part of the art? And is the title of her show “The Artist is Present” yet another clue that may allude to the viewer also being the artist?

The photos that the photographer has taken of these viewers are surely fascinating to look at, and cause me to wonder if indeed they will, in the future, be an accompanying piece to any writeup or essay on this exhibition, where the viewer is artist…

Bringing Forth the Fruits of Righteousness from Darkness, 2008
Damien Hirst’s famous butterfly paintings
Currently on loan to the Cleveland Museum of Art

The two major art auction houses -Christie’s and Sotheby’s – held their Spring auctions recently. Record prices were set, record lows were recorded. And in the past year, some famous artists’ works have received zero bids. ZERO.

What’s causing all of this fluctuation in the art market? The international economy. And just like in a recession where we revert back to comfort food – meat and potatoes – so too does the art market switch from flamboyant Damien Hirst to the comfort of a Renoir or Monet.

Another factor leading this is the increasing share of Asian collectors holding up the auction paddle. Relatively new to the scene, Asian buyers choose “safe” bets, like European impressionists.

Other characteristics of art that sell in a recession is rarity. Count Jasper Johns in this category. Many of his works were owned by the late Michael Crichton, and when his estate went up for sale, people realized what they’d been missing and so they pounced.

Some classic artists who have enjoyed previous fame have fallen out of favor with new collectors – Pierre Bonnard being one of them. It was one of his works that had no bites at an auction last year. Edvard Munch (The Scream) is another example of an artist whose work is sputtering.

Undervalued works are also snatched up more feverishly in times of recession. A good deal of prospecting goes on, and surprisingly, Alexander Caulder’s works fall into this category.

Damien Hirst, who had his origins as a Young British Artist (YBA), has gone dormant in auctions as of late. As mentioned above, rarity whets the appetites of collectors, so perhaps this is his intent. I stared at one of his butterfly wing works (the series features butterfly wings that mimic stained glass windows) at the Cleveland Museum of Art this past weekend and I found myself up close, sorting the butterfly wings to see how many repeats there were, rather than stepping back to capture the piece in its holistic form.

The art market is fickle, but that’s what makes it all exciting.

The Cleveland Institute of Art is holding its annual CIA Spring Show, and it is nothing short of inspiring. When I walked through the exhibits, glossy marketing posters shone under the white curvilinear walls in Case Western University’s Peter B. Lewis Building (designed by Frank Gehry, by the way). I snuck a peak at Industrial Design, Interior Design, Communication Design and small portions of Ceramics, Enameling, Glass, Jewelry + Metals.

In the Design Environment, there were re-styled foodmarts based on adult vs. teen preferences, an American Greetings kiosk which merged their card selection and a candy outlet, ergonomic chairs (that often looked really uncomfortable), re-thought ways to re-brand hip-hop music from illicit lyrics to clean lyrics, restyled totes/water bottles/coffee mugs, and wallpaper inspired by Viktor Schreckengost, the industrial engineer who was an instructor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. (Another aside: Schreckengost was a powerhouse. His foundation’s webpage says this about his work: “Every adult in America has ridden in, ridden on, drunk out of, stored their things in, eaten off of, been costumed in, mowed their lawn with, played on, lit the night with, viewed in a museum, cooled their room with, read about, printed with, sat on, placed a call with, enjoyed in a theater, collected, been awarded with, seen at a zoo, put their flowers in, hung on their wall, served punch from, delivered milk in, read something printed on, seen at the World’s Fair, detected enemy combatants with, written about, had an arm or leg replaced with, graduated from, protected by, or seen at the White House something created by Viktor Schreckengost”.)

All in all, it was an inspiring show. Now I’m really ready to figure out how to satisfy that 20-years-long design annoyance: how to create a nailpolish bottle and a brush long enough to scoop up that last bit at the bottom?

This morning I downloaded all of my weekly podcasts for this week, and in the afternoon, while in the jacuzzi at the gym (which provides the perfect environment for a soak, a sweat, and a listen-to of all of my ~30 minute New Yorker Fiction podcasts) I heard something that so strikingly paralleled my novella, Degrees of Freedom, I couldn’t help but crank up the iPod. Chang-Rae Lee (author of “Daisy”) read Don DeLillo’s “Baader-Meinhof” or, in English, “Art and Terror” and discussed it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. (Right-click here to download).

Theme, theme, theme. This is what Degrees of Freedom and “Baader-Meinhof” have in common. They both chronicle the chance meeting of a man and a woman in an art gallery; the woman sitting there staring at an art piece; the man sauntering in; both of them wondering about the other; both sizing up the other; both challenging each other to assess the paintings, and life, and everything else, even death…

But the relationships turn quite different corners.

How they vary is what really fascinated me. First, in DeLillo’s piece, the characters are staring at pieces of photography illustrating the terrors of the Holocaust and the rope burns and anguished faces of death, while in Degrees of Freedom, Pietri and Marguerite stare at the Spanish masters. Beautiful works. Works in Mannerism. Works where the artists mask every blemish. Works where creamy, buttery skin is sacrosanct. Where the subjects you’d swear have had Botox. Jewels drip. Puppies sit on laps.

The two works are also written from different points of view. Degrees of Freedom is written from the perspective of Pietri, a Maltese professor who is visiting his daughter in Seville, Spain, who meets Marguerite, a former art professor who is partially blind.  And in Delillo’s work, the two aimless protagonists have neither a job nor, it seems, much of a direction in life.

While I kept my characters largely within the art museum, in discussions that alternated between children and the merits of a Seville orange versus a Maltese fig, Delillo takes his characters out of the museum. But they take the photography with them, it seems, as they are forever changed by these horrific pieces. They seem less secure, less bounded by their relationship. In fact, once they leave the museum, their hours-old relationship falls apart. Undoubtedly, the photography in the museum changed Delillo’s characters,  shook them into walking zombies as they left the museum, rendered them unaccountable for their actions, unsure, not tethered to anything other than shock at how vile humanity can be. Pietri and Marguerite took the paintings to heart too, but they used the Spanish painters — Zurbaran, Murillo — as a connection, as a charged force that brought them together. Their relationship proved to be boundless.

You never know who you will meet in an art gallery. Regardless, it could be a while ride.

The Bullfighter, Juan Gris, 1913

What do artists Joan Miro, Goya, Juan Gris, and Cezanne have in common with the writer, Ernest Hemingway? A lot. A lot.

The Met says this:

[Hemingway] remarked in one interview that he learned as much from painters about how to write as from writers. Painters and their works were integral to Hemingway’s learning to see, to hear, and to feel or not feel. They were part of the writer’s renowned ability to present an image hard, clear, and concentrated, using the language of ordinary speech without vague generalities, as true as a painter’s color.

In The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, even the editors bridged art and literature: they chose Winslow Homer ‘s  “Canoe in Rapids” painting for the front cover. It was wisely chosen because Hemingway was a big fan of Homer’s. Hemingway also visited museums quite frequently, including the Louvre, the Prado, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He wrote essays about art as well, and in many of his works he refers to paintings by Cezanne, Goya, Homer, Bruegel, and others. He owned a Joan Miro that now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and he wrote an article for Cahiers d’Art about his purchase of the painting and the impact of Miró’s composition on him. Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon was inspired by The Bullfighter, a painting they bought from their friend Juan Gris (and shown above).

Again from the Met:

In his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), he gives excruciating accounts of the devastation suffered on both sides during the Spanish Civil War, with many of his passages reading very much like the images depicted by Goya in his series of etchings (32.62.17) entitled The Disasters of War (1810–23). In other works, Hemingway comments on Cézanne’s style and way of interpreting the world around him.

It’s easy to see how the subject matter, style, and execution of these master painters played out in Hemingway’s works.

It’s widely believed that he influenced English-language writing more than anyone else, with his spare, tightly written prose and tendency toward understatement.  He was so acutely aware that people have assymetric dialogue. He was infatuated with “place” — his works spanned continents, from Italy, to Spain, to Cuba, to Idaho. He wrote about war, death, bullfighting; life-threatening situations. He focused his microscope on how people deal with those situations. 

He used a photographic “snapshot” style to create a collage of images. Short sentences build one on another; events build to create a sense of the whole. Multiple strands exist in one story; an “embedded text” bridges to a different angle. He also used other cinematic techniques of “cutting” quickly from one scene to the next; or of “splicing” a scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap, as though responding to instructions from the author, and create three-dimensional prose. [Wikipedia]

How much that description of his works makes me envision a painting. Perhaps one by Miro or Cezanne!

Fruit Dish, Georges Braque, 1912

Thomas Wolfe. I knew his name enough to know that I needed to read something of his in my lifetime. Like many authors, we know their name more than any singular work they’ve produced. Look  Homeward, Angel. Ever  heard of it? I hadn’t either. It’s probably his most well-known work.  But since I’m on a short-story compendium kick, I picked up  The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe instead.

And I was blown away.

I can’t seem to hang on to Faulkner; he’s just, well, out there. And Melville’s abysmal abysses and personification lose me.

Thomas Wolfe has that comfortable language, that lilting dialogue that pulls you in, in accessible, personable, familiar prose words. But then he peppers things up, sharpens the dialogue, creates a parallel dialogue, uses big words. But those big words – ”vituperative” for instance – somehow you know what they mean. Perhaps it’s the logical context? He cuts back and forth between continents; in one sentence you are in France, the next you are in Cincinnati. He is a master of inflection and voice. “I wondeh what t’ hell she’s doin’ all dis time! –Hey!” she cried harshly, and hammered on the door, “Who’s in dere?… Com on out, f’r Christ’s sake!… Yuh’re holdin’ up duh line!” But perhaps his most interesting practice is his unique ability to paint several different feelings of one character in response to one event or observation. It’s very multi-faceted: “I knew the passionate heart of the boy who from the darkness of his berth watched, with a wild exultancy of joy and hope and sorrow, the great stroke and fanlike sweep of the immense and imperturbable earth… I  had known as well all other joys and labors of the night.” (From “Death the Proud Brother”)

So what picture does Thomas Wolfe, the author, paint?

Perhaps a pieced together, patchwork quilt or a cut-glass collage. But he’s still something more, perhaps something more innovative, elite. Perhaps if we knew the cultural context in which he wrote — the day, the age — we could make a guess and be spot on. He wrote in the 20′s and 30′s. He was southern – from Asheville, North Carolina. He was said by Faulkner to be his generation’s best writer (Faulkner credited himself with being #2). He influenced Jack Kerouac and Philip Roth. And he was a master of autobiographical fiction.

Mix all of this up and you get (according to this critic, at least)… Cubism.

Why Cubism?

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized painting and sculpture and inspired movements in music and literature. In cubist works, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth.

Wolfe took an abstract, liberal view (viewpoint of interlopers to a bum’s death), tackled many viewpoints (from the farmer to the upper crust), and wrote with pieced-together, mad passion (“he spoke roughly, casually, but with a kind of brutal…”).

Wham, bam! Braque and Picasso flew into my head when my eyes hit the page.

I’ve learned to love collections of short stories. I used to balk at reading shorter pieces by famous authors, thinking that I was shortchanging myself by reading ”The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf rather than everyone’s favorite “A Room of One’s Own” (just shoot me now; I still haven’t read it). But after having been jilted, inspired, struck to spooning chocolate brownie fudge icecream out of the carton without realizing what I was doing for fifteen minutes at a time as I just… wanted… to finish… this short… short… story…

I’ve had a reawakening.

I love the short story. The short, short story, to be exact.

Why? The way you can look at a writer’s writing under the microscope. The rich comparative analysis it offers. The tiny pieces that are there for you to sift through – to linger on some pieces, to move more quickly through others. To get a quick character sketch, decide you like the way she pours her tea with her hand hovering over the other’s cup so as not to splash the other’s napkin, or how you don’t like the way he called his wife “Lapinova” – a rabbit is, after all, a hare, for Pete’s sake.

What did The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf teach me about her writing? That to Ms. Woolf, the first line is essential.

“People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.” (You can only imagine what comes next.)

“Since it had grown hot and crowded indoors, since there could be no danger on a night like this of damp… Mr. Bertram Pritchard led Mrs. Latham into the garden.” (Cha-ching! Makin’ the move.)

And what of Ms. Woolf’s use of color? She constantly uses color in description — everything seems to be red and blue, with touches of gold here and there — but it’s never tawny gold or fire engine red or cerelean blue. Just blue. Just red. Just purple. Yet you realize that the sky doesn’t really need to be robin’s egg blue, does it? No. Virginia, thanks for saving us the cliche. But then, she does use color in ways that make me scratch my head. “The lines deepened on his red and blue shaven cheeks…” What?

And her focus on the outdoors is immutable. The lake, the country, the linden tree. These vistas are larger than life. In her character development she pits lovers of country to city (they can never live side-by-side, of course). “The heath would so long outlast all people…” “He really did not like churches at all… [referring to Westminster Abbey, the monstrosity in downtown London].”

And more on her ability to focus. She’s a master at threading through a theme, an object to which we compare everything. She is a master of allusion. The fly in the teacup, for example, in The New Dress. How she keeps harping about that fly! The fly swimming in the milk. Can’t it get out? It’s just swimming and swimming round and round in there. She hates her dress: “I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, dingy old fly…” she says. “We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of a saucer…” she says. Or her use of the white thread in Happiness: “As Stuart Elton stooped and flicked off his trousers a w hite thread…” (that’s the first line!) and then “I went to Kew this afternoon… bending his knee again and flicking his knee, not that there was a white thread there…” What is the purpose of the white thread? Really.

And then men are like moons and women are like cherry trees.

And portraits. One story is a composite of her reflections on portraits, as if she is stiting in a gallery, taking in the paintings and making up stories about the people in this one or that one: “Monsieur and Madame Louvais stared at the mustard pot and the cruet; at the yellow crack on the marble-topped table.”

As Woolf progressed from her earlier stories to later ones, she further refined her use of the first line to set us up, to stage the entire climax of the story. She also more brilliantly cast and clarified her characters and took us deeper into the heads of them.

Brilliant, Virginia. There  is a master in the HOUSE!

A very good friend of mine works for AOL, and when she asked me if I could contribute to an article titled “25 Books Women Love” I was so very excited! (Without further ado, here’s the article) Digging through some of the art-themed books that I’ve discussed on this blog, including the Matisse Stories (A.S. Byatt), Volcano Lover (Susan Sontag), How Proust Can Save Your Life (Alain de Botton), and the Museum of Innocence (Orhan Pamuk), I couldn’t resist writing up a new one for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). I just put this supremely hysterical Dominican family saga down a few days ago, and I’m still reeling from the travails of the incredible lead character that Diaz created in Oscar. The whole novel etched itself powerfully in my head. While the book doesn’t have an art or art history bent, per se, (except for the fact that it ‘etched’ itself in my head!) it is a great read.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” – by Junot Diaz

Remember the nerdy guy in your high school chemistry class? The sweet, but devastatingly overweight boy who stared at you from across the room? Made your arm hairs stand on edge? Oh, you could sense him pining away… Lucky you.

Well, meet Oscar. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar, front and center, is that guy. But because you are grown up now, and have shed your vain, over-sensitized teenager ways, you like Oscar, really like him. You root for him. You want him to get “the girl.” The beautiful one.

Oscar is Dominican — at least, his mami and grandparents were raised there — and so the lush backdrop of the Caribbean sweeps through the book as his family saga unravels as he travels (searching for love, of course) between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. But Diaz doesn’t paint the island all sexy and fabled. No. Oscar’s life journey is a rough, feisty ride, peppered with Diaz’s electrifying (and uproariously hilarious) language.

The Brief Life of Oscar Wao truly takes you back to those high school and college days, a time you wished you’d been nicer to boys, nicer to girls, nicer to yourself. But it leaves you somehow invigorated that you are who you are. Now.