Preoccupations

Banksy Graffiti Gallery

via Metroblogging London, a link to Banksy Graffiti Gallery:

This is not Banksy's website, if you want that go here. This is a collection of his graffiti taken all around London, Brighton and Bournemouth.

A whole load of new pictures were added in Jan '05.

Links also to other London graffiti artists.

Banksy goes Stateside

via Jason Kottke, news that Banksy has installed 'four pieces in New York's most prestigious museums - The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History' — Wooster Collective : A Celebration of Street Art.

The Brooklyn Museum:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Museum of Modern Art:

The Museum of Natural History:

Staff at the New York Met discovered and removed their new aquisition early Sunday morning while Banksy's discount soup can print took pride of place in the MoMA for over three days before being torn down. As of now, the other two pieces currently remain firmly in place...

Photos of Banksy installing his works ('This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue') at Wooster Collective.

Banksy

Banksy has produced a new book, Cut it Out, available from Pictures on Walls.

I have blogged about Banksy before, here.

RSS art from the Louvre

From Neopoleon:

Nicolas Kratzer (c 1486–after 1550) 1528 Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543)

Hockney on Photography

Photographs have been much in the news. The most powerful government in the world has been badly shaken by one portfolio of shots of American soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners. Meanwhile, one of the most prominent figures on Fleet Street has been blown right out of his editorial chair by another set of British soldiers in Iraq, because they turned out to be a hoax. All of this is of considerable interest to one of Britain's most celebrated artists, David Hockney, who has spent half a lifetime pondering on the veracity of the camera.

The other day I went to see the new video portrait of David Beckham asleep by Sam Taylor-Wood at the National Portrait Gallery. But it's just an hour's worth of observation of the subject. You don't see layer upon layer of scrutiny. The portrait of me by Lucian Freud that is on show around the corner took 120 hours — and there you do see those layers. That's why it's infinitely more interesting.

BBC News

81, and so much younger than Damien Hirst

Highly appreciative Guardian review of the new Lucian Freud exhibition of 22 paintings, at The Wallace Collection (Manchester Square, London W1; March 31-April 18): 'Britain's greatest living artist', his work 'has none of the facile emotional posturing that appeals to the kind of institutional adman's taste, the bratty cynicism and quick-fix sensationalism that pervades the ('Fresh Blood' show at the) Saatchi collection'.

Aleatoric

Ever since I first read this on Matt Jones' site, aleatoric has remained in my head and refused to go away. So I'm exorcising it now by posting it here. Aleatoric occurs in many associations on the web (Google lists some 8,940 occurrences): there are aleatoric places ('places decided by chance'), aleatoricity is central to Psychogeography, there is (most famously) aleatoric music ('The term was devised by the French composer Pierre Boulez to describe works where the performer was given certain liberties with regard to the order and repetition of parts of a musical work'), there are aleatoric methods for creating graphics ... The list goes on and on.

Aleatory and Aleatoric — Composition depending upon chance, random accident or highly improvisational execution, typically hoping to attain freedom from the past, from academic formulas and the limitations placed on imagination by the conscious mind. There is a tradition of Japanese and Chinese artists employing aleatoric methods, many influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the West, precedents can be found among artists of ancient Greece and later among artists of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) recommended looking at blotches on walls as a means of initiating artistic ideas. Aleatory (methodology) was also employed by numerous twentieth century avant-garde artists. Followers of the Dada and Surrealism (movements) produced numerous examples. Jean Arp (French, 1887-1966) made collages by dropping small pieces of paper onto a larger piece, then adhering them (to) where they landed. André Masson (French, 1896-1987) and Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) allowed their pens to wander over sheets of paper in the belief that they would discover in those doodles the ghosts of their repressed imaginations. Similarly, Tristan Tzara (Romanian, 1896-1963) created poetry by selecting sentences from newspapers entirely by chance. (adapted from ArtLex)

Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916–17
Torn-and-pasted papers on gray paper, 19 1/8 x 13 5/8" (48.6 x 34.6 cm)
Purchase © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

This elegantly composed collage of torn-and-pasted paper is a playful, almost syncopated composition in which uneven squares seem to dance within the space. As the title suggests, it was created not by the artist's design, but by chance. In 1915 Arp began to develop a method of making collages by dropping pieces of torn paper on the floor and arranging them on a piece of paper more or less the way they had fallen. He did this in order to create a work that was free of human intervention and closer to nature. The incorporation of chance operations was a way of removing the artist's will from the creative act, much as his earlier, more severely geometric collages had substituted a paper cutter for scissors, so as to divorce his work from "the life of the hand". (MoMA)

Lichtenstein at the Hayward (until 16 May)

White paint and an exemplary installation currently give the Hayward Gallery an of-our-own-time presence. But the paintings by Roy Lichtenstein which line the walls - the early ones anyway - are now so well established as an ironic commentary on pop culture that they read as decoration, as conventional and period-flavoured in their way as chintz. The general effect of the show is cool and spacious. You could be in a fashion store which has decided to go retro and jazz up the decor. To see more than decorative wit you must try to think of the moment in 1962 when Lichtenstein's show of enlarged frames from war comics and romance comics at the Leo Castelli Gallery put out the news that another artist - he was not well known - had taken a sharp turn off the path most American high art was following.

There are pictures in the Hayward show from right up to the last year of his life - 1997. In the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in Clifford Street, W1 you can see, until 27 March, the last things he did: prints of interiors in which the usual elements are used to such bland effect that they could have been turned out by a Lichtenstein computer-graphics program. The comic-strip frames, which are still the Lichtenstein pictures one thinks of first, are not in a majority at the Hayward, and the other subjects are connected with them only by the use he made of the accidents and conventions of cheap comic-book drawing and printing - heavy outlines, flat colour and coarse mechanical screens. Among them are hard-edged drawings of big fluid brush marks - a mockery of gestural art. Or perhaps a tribute to it. There are pictures of rooms, a car tyre, an exercise book and a golf ball. Right at the end are paintings in which graded tints show hills rising out of mist with a tiny kitsch-Oriental boat or bridge in the foreground. But only by going back to the original moment - the moment when Life magazine headed an article, 'Is He the Worst Artist in America?' - can you imagine the force of his transgression. LRB

MoMA

Founded in 1929 as an educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art in the world.

Henri Matisse, Dance (first version), 1909 Oil on canvas, 8' 6 1/2" x 12' 9 1/2" (259.7 x 390.1 cm) Gift of Nelson A Rockefeller
in honor of Alfred H Barr, Jr © 2002 Succession H Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Museum of Modern Art is now in the midst of the largest building project in its history. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the new Museum will open in midtown Manhattan in winter 2004–05 to coincide with its seventy-fifth anniversary. The 630,000-square-foot Museum will be nearly twice the size of the former facility, offering dramatically expanded and redesigned spaces for exhibitions, public programming, educational outreach, and scholarly research. ... MoMA QNS, The Museum of Modern Art in Queens, is open with a full exhibition schedule while the Museum's building on West Fifty-third Street in Manhattan is closed for renovation and rebuilding. The new Museum of Modern Art will open in early 2005.

'What's on?' RSS for London Art

Welcome to the London art aggregator. I provide an RSS feed of art exhibitions in London today. If you subscribe in a news reader, you'll be updated with new openings, and warned when exhibitions are about to finish. ... I have a loose definition of art, and also of London. If it appeals to me, it'll be in. I've covered all the major museums, with occasional mentions for other places. There are a few one-off events in there as well. I don't have an idea about when galleries are open and closed. Some close during the week, or at weekends. Check the link for the exhibition before setting out. londonartaggregator

Banksy: London's stencil graffiti genius

Cory Doctorow writes: 'London graffiti writer Banksy is a true stencil genius. His site — frustrating to navigate — is still a stunning walk through some of the finest art you'll see on the street or in a gallery.'

ArtRage

ArtRage is a painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons and other tools. You can run ArtRage on a normal Windows machine with a mouse, but it works particularly well if you have a graphics tablet. Even better, running ArtRage on a TabletPC takes advantage of the unique interaction of pen and screen to produce a realistic painting feel.

ArtRage is all about playing with paint without the mess and having fun in the process. You can paint your own image from a blank canvas to completed work, or load in a picture to trace and have the tools pick their colours for you as you paint over it.

ArtRage is a free product.

Guernica remembered

The circle of violence: in April 1937, Hitler deliberately bombed civilian targets in a small Northern Spanish town on behalf of his friend Franco. One thousand people were brutally murdered, inspiring the most famous anti-war painting, Picasso's Guernica. Guernica was a Basque town and the atrocity was used to justify further barbaric atrocities by Basque separatist terrorists, ETA. David Galbraith

Whether Al-Qaeda or ETA was behind Thursday's bomb blasts in Madrid, there are lessons to be learned.

El Greco (1541–1614)

Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1612–14
(© Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)

In the latest issue of LRB, Nicholas Penny reviews the El Greco exhibition now running at the National Gallery:

Visitors to the exhibition at the National Gallery until 23 May may find it worth trying to understand why El Greco's colouring once seemed 'false' and his drawing 'execrable'. A good place to start is the Adoration of the Shepherds ... The foremost of the shepherds kneeling on the left is wearing a green jacket, and is placed in front of one with a yellow jacket. The yellow jacket, however, seems to jump in front of the green one. And then the white shirt of a third, more distant shepherd jumps in front of the yellow. Thus colour operates in opposition to the spatial logic of the picture. The composition has something of the fluttering instability of flames. Not only are figures elongated and distorted, but solid and void are confused: the head of the ox may strike us at first as the space beside the foremost shepherd and the infant Christ. And the black of the foreground shadows is continuous with the black background and also with a black outline which is neither foreground nor background.

A few decades ago it was fashionable to doubt whether El Greco really had been trained as a 'Byzantine' artist in Crete, but since then his signature has been discovered on an icon in a church on the Aegean island of Syros - number one in the exhibition. If we ask ourselves what prompted his departure from this style, part of the answer can be found in the household inventories of 16th-century Venice, in which the word 'Greco' constantly recurs. Many, perhaps most residences included at least one work of art in the Greek (that is, the Byzantine) style. Paintings of this sort were not, it seems, segregated from other types of picture, and the artists who made them were interested in adopting at least some Italian conventions - it is significant that fashionable Italian frames were used for some of these works (as can be seen from several examples in the museum attached to San Giorgio dei Greci in Venice). El Greco simply went further than his colleagues. By 1568, when he is recorded as being in Venice, he was especially attracted by the paintings of Tintoretto. His crimson, emerald, violet and lapis drapery with its flashy lights is extremely close to Tintoretto's. But El Greco's figures crowd together; their arms, even when outflung, tend to be absorbed into a complex surface pattern; and the marble architectural settings with their converging perspectives are just backdrops. In short, he was unable to assimilate the spatial dimension of Tintoretto's art - the way his figures fly, thrust, hurtle or topple towards or away from us.