iPad Painter

The Museum of Fine Arts Houston features two masters at once for its first contemporary art exhibition since reopening: Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney. Who has not seen "a van Gogh" or at least a reproduction? Hockney on the other hand, best known for his paintings of swimming pools inspired by California's lifestyle, has reached a more selective audience of connoisseurs in the United States. The show is the occasion to see the works from the artist whose 80's birthday was celebrated with a five-month-long comprehensive retrospective at The Centre Pompidou in 2017.  Hockney-van Gogh: The Joy of Nature which premiered at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, highlights the Dutch painter's influence on Hockney and their shared love of nature. Paintings, drawings and other works are displayed in a succession of rooms, each focused on a theme: landscapes, trees, the arrival of Spring, the four seasons, and in the last room, new perspectives. 

Back to his native Yorkshire in 2004 after spending more than two decades in California, Hockney began to paint 'en plein air'. His landscapes of Woldgate fill the first room, intermingled with a few carefully selected scenes from Van Gogh, to highlight the similarities between the paintings. Fields, forests, roads, skies, horizons, subject, style, perspective, colors, show the correspondence. The comparison goes on with close-ups of trees, followed by a display of seasonal scenes from both artists. The Arrival of Spring in 2013, a collection of twenty-five charcoal drawings emphasizes the delicate process of representing nature: first looking then rendering 'every bit of grass', and showcases Hockney's draftsmanship. Watercolors complete the display which as we progress features less paintings from Van Gogh and becomes a one man show with works noticeably larger and more experimental including the famous iPad drawings. To meet the challenge brought up by the size of his oil paintings, Hockney divides huge canvasses like The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011, into  thirty-two smaller units assembled like a grid and prints his iPad drawings on four sheets of paper. The resulting landscapes are an invitation to walk in the forest, under the trees, on the path, and savor the precious gift of nature. Hockney's passion for images brings him to look through the lens of a camera or better nine at once on a monitor installed on a moving vehicle to record the forest's seasonal changes in Woldgate. The bench in the middle of the room offers a place to rest while watching The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods, 2010-2011, a dizzying synchronized projection of thirty-six videos, nine per season and per wall, offering different views of the same scenery. After this visual overdrive, walking through the show's conclusion is underwhelming, from the blinding orange of the walls to only three pieces which highlight Hockney's search for new perspectives during his sixty-year career with In the Studio, December 2017, featuring the artist surrounded by 3D renditions of his works for a grand finale. 

Of course, setting the works of the two artists in the same room highlights the similarities between them, and also their differences: heavy brush and garish colors for Hockney who favors a naive style. It appears also that size does not matter regarding a work's content. Van Gogh's landscapes offer more than a visual feast with to quote the artist: "that flat landscape in which there was nothing but.......... the infinite... eternity." Over the years, it feels like Hockney the artist who keeps experimenting with new technologies to enrich his practice in his pursuit of ways to describe space, is becoming Hockney the neophile. This should not become his legacy. The exhibition focuses on a period less than a decade of a long career which is ongoing. Van Gogh was 37 years old when he died, a pauper. At 83 years old Hockney just discovered Normandy in France (where he can smoke) and announced two upcoming exhibitions, 116 iPad drawings/paintings for the reopening of  the Royal Academy of Arts in London  and one involving a 288-foot-long tapestry in Paris. Prices of his works are skyrocketing.

Will David Hockney be remembered for his iPad drawings? 

photographs by the author:

"The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011", David Hockney

"Tree Trunks in the Grass, April 1890", Vincent Van Gogh

"May Blossom on the Roman Road", 2009, David Hockney

Coloring Clouds

Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski at the Museum of Fine Art Houston is a small but well researched exhibition about the work of Jules Olitski, the painter, omitting the sculptor and print maker, with more than thirty monumental canvases representing 50 years of his career.
Just across "King Tut", on the mezzanine, the paintings are inviting with several murals from the Color Field Painting period of the artist in the 60s, with "Patutski in Paradise", 1966, pink-violet to green-yellow or "Exact Origins", 1966, yellow-green, pink-orange-violet, shimmering in the light. The thin, luminescent colors give a liquid texture to the canvas.

The stain paintings, influenced by Frankenthaler are like watercolors, dripping on the canvas, smudging with a poetic touch.
Each period of the artist 's work is represented. The 60's with his thin, ethereal colors, The 70's with brown tones and thick impasto, going back to the heavy paintings from the 50's. The texture brings roughness to the canvas, a sculptural rendering. "Loosha Lone" 1970, "Third Indomitable" 1970s getting thicker during the action painting period like "Absalom Passage #10", 1973, ripples and waves. Some works look like a satellite view of the earth with canyon, mountains, valleys.
During the High Baroque period in the 80's, the artist attempted to recreate the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt in an abstract world. His paintings like "Of Darius" 1988, "Vive La France II" are like an explosion.
"Creation Flood", 1983, represents destruction and death.

The late paintings are orbs of different colors, abstract, a tormented glob, a world trying to be born, a magma of undiluted pigments, perhaps the world after death. The "Love and Disregard Series" are the last message of the artist.
From light and fluffy paintings like clouds on a Summer day to tormented works like rivers after a storm, the painter may have reached his goal:
"What I would like for my paintings is ...just a cloud of color that remains there transfixed."
Beyond this, the message stays superficial.



Photographs were not allowed.
Photographs MFAH's Website.

MFAH

MFAH stands for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which is composed of two buildings and the sculpture garden. The new building hosts two exhibitions from Sargent, "Sargent at The Sea" and "Houston's Sargents", and also watercolors from Prendergast, produced during his two trips to Italy... The succession of portraits and the seas from Sargent did bore me. The watercolors from Prendegast were also abundant, some of them unfinished.


Among the endless enfilade of rooms (especially the rooms dedicated to Europeans paintings and sculptures ), I discovered Frederic Remington, a great Western painter who depicted vivid scenes of the Far West, so harsh, like this corpse hanging of a cliff and the party coming at the rescue or this soldier, falling from his horse, death already in his eyes. The movement, the lighting, make the scenes very real. The rest of the permanent collection is somewhat light in paintings from Impressionist and Modern Art.

The highlight of this visit, for me, was the temporary exhibition titled: "Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made after 1960 from the MFAH Collection". A diptych by Hatakeyama, "Blast 2005" greets the visitor. It is startling to see the fragments of rocks and the dust flying. One can almost hear the sound of the explosion when looking at the photograph. The exhibition is very well curated, presenting more than 200 hundred photographs from 80 artists. The photographs are grouped in different sections: Self-Performance, Transformation of the City, Directorial Mode and Constructed Environments, New Landscape, and Memory and Archive. Notable for New Orleanians was a photograph from Robert Polidori titled "New Orleans 2006" depicting the desolation of one area in the city. Photographs from Brian Ulrich, William Eggleston, Lewis Baltz and many more were part of the exhibition. An installation from Boltanski "La fete du Pourim", 1989, was included: photographs of Jewish children, aligned along a wall with a rusty biscuit box below each picture, like a small altar, leaving each child with a familiar object. Every household in France had a similar tin box, the pictures on them differed (I can still remember the box at my house). Simple garlands of white light bulbs decorate the installation, like votive candles. A quote from the artist accompanied the exhibit: "A good work of art can never be read in one way. My work is full of contradictions. An artwork is open- it is the spectator looking at the work who makes the piece, using their own background".

An installation from Boltanski was just presented at le "Grand Palais". Another is scheduled to occupy the Park Avenue Armory starting May the 14th.

The other building, with other permanent collections (Islamic, African, Chinese), hosts a unique display of pre-Colombian gold objects. How could the Conquistadores leave so many beautiful pieces!

The works from a prolific artist, Alice Neel were allocated a large space for a temporary exhibition.. She is memorable as a female painter and also because of the subjects she chose to depict: daily scenes from her neighborhood in New York City, political figures or well-known artists.

Unexpected, an installation from Damien Hirst was surprising the visitors in the underground passageway between the two buildings.

photograph by the author

Surprises in Houston

Choices have to be made this week-end in Houston, from the Menil Collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a lot of ground to cover. There is also FOTOFEST2010 BIENNIAL, a biennial international meeting held in Houston, Texas, started in 1986 to promote photography. This year, the calendar of events stretches from March the 12th till April the 15th and is made of workshops, exhibits, discussions, parties, lectures...the program is very busy. I did not plan to attend and will skip altogether the event which brings a crowd in town.

The Menil Collection is the first stop...and turns out to be several visits: the main building built by Renzo Piano hosting the Menil Collection and temporary exhibitions, the Rothko Chapel, Cy Tombley Gallery, Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. The buildings are located in a sprawling neighborhood, South of downtown Houston, within walking distance of each other.

The day will be filled.

photograph by the author