Almost a decade ago, Roberta and I were walking through Grand Central Terminal in New York when we heard exuberant, vaguely African dance music. We followed the sound and came upon a group of dancers wearing elaborate horse costumes and executing precisely choreographed movements. Nick Cave, Heard-NY, Grand Central Terminal, 2013. Photo courtesy Metropolitan Transit Authority of the State of New York. It was our first encounter with the work of Nick Cave. Born in Fulton, Missouri, in 1959, Cave grew up in the large family of a single mother. Economic hardship required constant repurposing of items of daily life, and Cave learned to sew in order to alter and repair the clothing of his older brothers. This early association with fabric led to an interest in fashion and design. Cave attended the Kansas City Art Institute, earning a BFA in fiber art. Just as important, he met choreographer Alvin Ailey and began to spend summers in New York, working with Ailey’s dance company while continuing his activities in fashion and design. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1988 and began to teach fiber arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago the following year. He is currently head of their graduate fashion program. This blog is the result of another encounter with Cave’s art, this time at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. (The retrospective exhibition, titled Forothermore, will travel to the Guggenheim Museum on November 18.) The exhibition contained works by Cave in a variety of formats, but prominent were the pieces he began to...
My first job in the art world was working for Ira Spanierman, who used to run an advertisement with a large headline proclaiming, “We Will Pay Over One Million Dollars for Highly Important Paintings by . . .” followed by a laundry list of famous American artists. We got calls almost every day, most of them for things we were not interested in. I have forgotten all of those calls except for one, a transcript of which would go something like this: Me: Do you have a painting that you wish to sell? Caller: Yes, I do. It’s by Rembrandt. Me (thinking “Oh, boy.”): A painting by Rembrandt. What’s the subject? Caller: A pirate. Me: A pirate. I see. Caller: And it’s got another painting on the back. Me: Yes? Caller: By Monet. Me (protesting): But, sir, you know that Monet lived two hundred years after Rembrandt. That’s impossible! Caller: No, no, no. You see, the Louvre asked him to reline the Rembrandt, so he lined it onto one of his own canvases! This would normally be the point where I would say, “Sorry, but I don’t think it’s going to be for us.” In this case, however, I asked the caller to send me photos of both sides of his artwork. I really wanted to see this masterpiece. The caller promised to do so, but I never heard from him again. I’ve always imagined that, right as my caller hung up, the Matron entered the office and said, “Mr. Johnson, what are you doing in here? You know you’re not allowed to make phone calls without the Doctor’s...
Roberta and I were in Western New York a few days ago and took the opportunity to view the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University, a school which a friend who is a ceramic artist calls, “the established Mount Olympus in ceramic education in America.” It’s well worth a visit if you’re out that way. Susan Kowalczyk, the curator of collections, graciously gave a us a tour of the museum’s storage area whose shelves contained one treasure after another. Going through the objects, I saw a couple of works that took me back in time – ceramic pieces by Ruth Duckworth. I had met Ruth on several occasions when I was a graduate student in art history at the University of Chicago. She was only in her mid-50’s at the time, but she was considered by many of her colleagues in the studio art department there to be a dinosaur. Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1919 to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother, Ruth (née Windmuller) was 14 when Hitler came to power. Realizing the danger Jews were in, her family arranged for her to emigrate to England at the age of 17, where she joined a sister in Liverpool. She already knew that she wanted to be an artist, so she applied to the Liverpool School of Art. When asked in her interview what kind of art she wanted to make – painting, drawing, or sculpture – Duckworth said she wanted to do all three. The director protested that she couldn’t do both painting and sculpture, but Duckworth blithely pointed out that Michelangelo had done so....
Tchotchke: (Yiddish, of Slavic origin) a small object that is decorative rather than strictly functional; a trinket The kind of artworld story that the public loves popped up in the general press three weeks ago: a 22-year-old college student, browsing through his local Goodwill Store, spotted a tchotchke that took his fancy, an ashtray featuring an annoyed-looking girl smoking a cigarette. He bought it for $10. The ashtray turned out to be one of an edition done in 2002 called Too Young to Die by the noted contemporary Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. The ashtray had its original packaging, which added to its value. Knowing something about what he had, the student checked eBay and found other ashtrays from the edition for sale there. He subsequently sold the piece for $2,860. After reading the news story, I got to thinking about a tchotchke that our 8-year-old granddaughter, exploring the shelves of our basement, had recently retrieved: a multiple by Tom Otterness. Otterness (born 1952) has been called “the world’s best public sculptor” by critic Ken Johnson in the New York Times, and his whimsical sculptures have delighted New Yorkers for years. My tchotchke, however, is derived from a commission for another city: Lubbock, Texas, home of my alma mater, Texas Tech. Tech’s mascot is a mysterious figure on horseback who wears a flat-brimmed hat, a cape, and a mask, all derived from the folk hero Zorro. When Otterness was commissioned to make a statue of the mascot in 2003, he gave the horse a mask and hat as well, along with a pair of pants. Along with the bronze, the...
I once interviewed the artist Philip Pearlstein, who is well-known for his paintings of nudes. As a child growing up in Pittsburgh, Pearlstein was encouraged in his artistic leanings by his parents, who sent him to Saturday morning classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1942, at the age of 18, he won an art competition sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, and two of his paintings were reproduced in Life Magazine. He enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology the following year, but World War II was raging, and Pearlstein was soon drafted into the Army for the duration. He ended up in Florence, Italy, painting road signs for truck convoys. Released from the service, Pearlstein resumed his studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where one of his classmates was a pasty-faced 18-year-old named Andy Warhola, who would later drop the final letter from his last name. Pearlstein and Warhol became friends, and when the younger man learned about Pearlstein’s winning the national art competition four years earlier, he exclaimed, “Gee! You were famous!” “Yeah,” replied Pearlstein, “for 15 minutes.” Pearlstein looked at me, his interviewer, and added sardonically, “And that’s where it came from.” He was referring, of course, to Warhol’s much-quoted saying, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” I have been thinking about Warhol lately for two reasons. The first is the Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries, an entertaining if ultimately sad series that presents the artist as world-famous and yet unable to find the lasting love he privately longed for. The other reason is the upcoming sale (May 9) of...
