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Newsletter 296 - 3 - 22 - 2006
In this issue:

1) AT GROUND ZERO, AN ACCORD BRINGS A WORK OF ART
2) SPECIAL OFFER OF THE WEEK
3) SPIRITS, GOTHIC FANTASIES AND SEX, PLEASE, WE'RE BRITIS
4) AN ARTIST LOVED BY NO ONE BUT THE PUBLIC

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Please check out our website at CJR Fine Arts for artists like Tarkay, Pino, Neiman, Ferjo, Fanch Ledan, Fairchild, Keeley, Schluss, Benfield, Maimon, Hessam, Treby, Kondakova, Mcknight, Shvaiko, Park and many, many more!


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1) AT GROUND ZERO, AN ACCORD BRINGS A WORK OF ART
BY GLENN COLLINS

Cultural negotiations at ground zero between the artist Jenny Holzer and the developer Larry A. Silverstein have ended not just in an agreement, but in a work of art.

The initial disagreements might seem puny compared with the disputes between Mr. Silverstein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, between Mr. Bloomberg and Senator Charles E. Schumer, and between Gov. George E. Pataki and various other stakeholders at the site.

But the accord is a rare and public sign of progress in this very disputatious neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Already, thousands of moving, ghostly-white words of text have been programmed by Ms. Holzer evoking the history of New York; they will scroll across a glowing, 65-foot-wide, 14-foot-high wall in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center. Though the artwork resides in the lobby, it is already visible several blocks away. It is the ornament of the first skyscraper to have been built at ground zero, rising from the rubble of the first 7 World Trade Center.

The artwork - a continuing stream of poetry and prose written by dozens of different authors, from Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg to Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman - will move along a screen made of acid-etched, diffused, translucent glass illuminated by whitish light.

It will take at least eight hours for the entire text to scroll by, Ms. Holzer said. The piece will dominate the lobby of the 52-story building, a shimmering, sharp-edged parallelogram sheathed in glass at the intersection of Greenwich and Barclay Streets at the northern edge of ground zero.

Though the $700 million building is not scheduled to open until mid-May, the artwork is already being tweaked. The letters appear in a five-foot-high band of text about two-thirds of the way up the high-tech wall, which was created, with Ms. Holzer, by James Carpenter, a Manhattan designer.

Under the high slabs of glass, white light-emitting diodes are threaded on 14-foot-tall metal ribbons. The laminated, structurally fortified wall is also a security amenity, screening the public from the private precincts of the building, and acting as a blast shield in case of terrorist attack.

As with so much related to the World Trade Center site, the lobby art for Building 7 did not come into being without initial struggle. Mr. Silverstein thought a competition among glass artists might yield a grand centerpiece for the lobby, but David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of 7 World Trade Center, had another idea.

He wanted Ms. Holzer, the 55-year-old art star whose enigmatic light projects - which often feature words that savage government and capitalism - have been displayed from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to the Reichstag in Berlin.

"The building is all about light and transparency," Mr. Childs said. "I thought the wall would be a prime opportunity to do something on a grand scale."

Mr. Silverstein was concerned that the location at ground zero imposed restraints. "Sometimes the message of artists is a downer," he said. "Down here, after 9/11, we need positive stuff. Good stuff, as opposed to the miseries of 9/11. I didn't know how we could work together." Mr. Silverstein added, "I decided not to do it because I felt that I'd have difficulties with her word program." He agreed only after prodding by Mr. Childs and an agreement from Ms. Holzer to remove text he found objectionable.

"I was taken aback at the gravity of the project," Ms. Holzer said. "I didn't want to make bad or insensitive art."

Mr. Silverstein asked his wife of 49 years, Klara, to work with Ms. Holzer. Theirs was an on-again, off-again collaboration for more than a year. Mrs. Silverstein reviewed Ms. Holzer's poetry selections and felt that several "were too graphic; I felt that they would bring back images that people might want to forget," she said. She worried that many of those who would pass through the lobby had personally experienced Sept. 11, 2001.

Among the rejected works was a poem, "Photographs of Sept. 11th," by the 1996 Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska; it focused on those who jumped from the World Trade Center. Ms. Holzer's texts became the poetry of compromise, and the project avoided the fate of famous disastrous collaborations like that of the artist Diego Rivera and John D. Rockefeller Jr. that resulted in the 1936 obliteration of the artist's anticapitalist mural in the lobby of the RCA Building.

"A lot of artists would have huffed and gone off," Mr. Childs said. "But Jenny didn't."

The Holzer-Silverstein collaboration was an odd fit. "He is very energetic and positive," she said, "and I'm energetic and always think the sky is falling."

There was little desk-pounding, but Mr. Silverstein said, "Conflict is part of the creative endeavor." Ms. Holzer has by no means finished with Mr. Silverstein's wall, and friction between artist and patron could resurface. After a while, she would like to refresh it with new text. "I hope to feed it again," Ms. Holzer said. "It would be nice to keep it alive."


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3) SPIRITS, GOTHIC FANTASIES AND SEX, PLEASE, WE'RE BRITISH
BY ALAN RIDING

The poet Philip Larkin famously declared that the English discovered sex in 1963, but a new show at Tate Britain proposes the far earlier date of 1782, the year curious Londoners flocked to the Royal Academy's summer exhibition to look in amazement, confusion and excitement at Henry Fuseli's painting "The Nightmare."


There, amid the usual worthy portraits and landscapes, Fuseli's oil displayed the prostrate body of a sleeping maiden, with a depraved-looking ogre or incubus sitting on her chest and the head of a blind horse protruding menacingly through red velvet curtains. What could it mean?

It was a decade before a Church of England minister cleared things up by denouncing Fuseli as one of the "libertines of painting." Fuseli naturally objected, insisting he would never play to the "charm-struck crowd." But, yes, "The Nightmare" was about sex: with her head thrown back, her arms hanging limply yet sensually, the young woman was surely dreaming of sex.

Fuseli also appears to have added his own pun. The "mare" of "nightmare" comes from the German "mara," meaning a tormenting spirit who applies pressure on a sleeper's chest. Thus, it may well have been Fuseli's joke to accompany the "mara" - the imp in the painting - with a "mare" in the form of a horse's head. Ah, the stuff of dreams.

"The Nightmare" soon became a popular image, copied by other artists and reproduced in prints. Indeed, a print of the oil was pinned up in Freud's office in Vienna. And now, the original - on loan from the Detroit Institute of Art - is again drawing crowds as the centerpiece of "Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination," which continues at Tate Britain through May 1.

Still, this is not a sex show, even though a veil does isolate some saucy images. (Or is the veil there to make sure no one misses them?) Rather, it is an exploration of the world of fantasy, mysticism, horror and sexual perversity that found expression in art and literature in Britain between 1770 and 1830 and which, fueled by novels, movies and even pop music, later became known as Gothic.

In literature, the iconic work was Mary Shelley's 1818 "Frankenstein." In art, the fad translated into paintings and drawings with strong narratives, muscular Michelangelo-inspired men and naked nymphs, as well as myriad fairies and demons. In one sense, these works were a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment; in another, they represented a search for a uniquely British mythology.

The political context was relevant. Britain had just lost its American colony, while the French Revolution was spreading turmoil across Europe. The ferocity - even vulgarity - of the cartoons in this exhibition testifies to the political battles taking place in Britain itself during the oft-unstable reign of George III.

The odd thing is that the man who came to personify the Gothic in English art was Fuseli, a Zurich-born self-taught artist who was in his mid-30's when he moved to London and who never spoke English fluently. Yet, more than any of his contemporaries, he turned to Shakespeare and Milton for material, attracted in both cases by the supernatural elements in their writing.

Among the 50 paintings and drawings by Fuseli in this show is "The Weird Sisters," his take on the witches in "Macbeth," itself a much copied - and parodied - image. Many others are more erotic. For instance, his two paintings based on "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - "Titania and Bottom With the Ass's Head" and "Titania Awakening" - portray Titania gloriously naked.

Fuseli certainly liked his dreams, ghosts and spirits. In "Queen Katherine's Dream," taken from Shakespeare's "Henry VIII," the dying and deposed queen is visited by "spirits of peace." His contemporaries were similarly inspired: an engraving by Robert Thew has Hamlet meeting the ghost of his father, and William Blake has Richard III haunted by the ghosts of his victims.

Fuseli also tapped into Milton's "Paradise Lost," with "Satan Starting at the Touch of Ithuriel's Lance" presenting Adam and Eve in happy naked embrace. And as a Swiss, he was close to Germanic folklore and legends. All in all, he was devoted to mumbo-jumbo.

The 18th-century Swiss theologian Johann Casper Lavater wrote of Fuseli: "Specters, demons and madmen's phantoms, exterminating angels; murders and acts of violence - such are his favorite subjects; and yet, I repeat, no one loves with more tenderness."

But was Fuseli also a good painter? In a way, the question is unfair as he was among those artists more concerned with what they say than how they say it. Certainly, his fantastic imagination prompted the Surrealists to revive interest in his work in the 1920's.

Blake, too, was interested in the supernatural. Tate Britain displays 25 of his watercolors, drawings and paintings, including several from his Apocalypse series. Others use biblical subjects, like "God Writing on the Tables of the Covenant." Quite his strangest and certainly most Gothic work is "The Ghost of a Flea," which shows a muscular vampire-like figure and, it was said, resulted from Blake's conversation with a flea.

Perhaps most surprising, though, is how the Gothic still appeals to the British, at least if measured by newspaper art critics here, who have responded with a peculiar mixture of delight and embarrassment.

"By the end of this show," Richard Dorment wrote in The Daily Telegraph, "I had come to feel that Fuseli is a schlock artist, but a great one." In The Independent on Sunday, Suzi Feay wrote of "The Nightmare:" "It's camp, it's tacky, it's silly. It's pure Fuseli." But she then confessed: "Gothic art, like the Gothic novel, is a guilty pleasure: so enjoyable, you feel it can't be doing you any good."

For Rachel Campbell-Johnston, writing in The Times, "this is a thrillingly extravagant, exhilarating show." But it also speaks of a key moment in British history. "As room after room of images unfurl," she wrote, "we watch a nation peering for the first time into the inner recesses of its psyche, exploring its dreams and its memories and desires, probing its fears and its phobias." And it all began one summer's day in 1782.


4) AN ARTIST LOVED BY NO ONE BUT THE PUBLIC
BY SARAH LYALL

For every critic who has sneered at Jack Vettriano's work, for every curator who has spurned or ignored it, there is someone like Liz Davison from Newcastle, who begs to differ.

I find it exciting," said Ms. Davison, 57, admiring the paintings in the newly opened Vettriano Room at the Portland Gallery in Piccadilly. She was particularly taken with one that examines the smoldering erotic tension between a man in evening dress and a woman wearing a black slip, garter belt and red stilettos. "It tells you a story," Ms. Davison said, "and you wonder what's going to happen next."

Mr. Vettriano is far and away Scotland's most successful contemporary painter. "The Singing Butler," his 1992 painting of an elegant couple dancing on a stormy beach, sold for nearly £750,000 (about $1.3 million at today's exchange rate) two years ago, the highest price ever paid for a Scottish painting at auction. The image has become ubiquitous on mugs, mouse pads, prints, posters and dish towels, outselling reproductions of masterworks like van Gogh's "Sunflowers" and Monet's "Water Lilies."

Another painting, "Dance Me to the End of Love," is to come up for auction in Edinburgh on March 4. The estimated sale price is $300,000 to $500,000.

But critics tend either to ignore Mr. Vettriano or to swat him lazily away with the backs of their cultured hands. Among their objections are that "he can't paint; he just colors in" (Sandy Moffat, former head of painting at the Glasgow School of Art); that his work is "inoffensive enough" but "repetitive, limited and soulless" (Duncan Macmillan, art critic at The Scotsman); and that he is "a media creation" whose " 'popularity' rests on cheap commercial reproductions of his paintings" (Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art).

Perhaps, too, they don't care for the artist's subject matter, which falls roughly into two categories: elegiac homages to the past featuring elegant couples doing elegant things; and darker, kinkier studies of uneasy erotic power struggles. Mr. Vettriano's work has been compared, variously, to that of Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell, to film noir stills and to cover art from 1940's potboiler fiction.

In a telephone interview from his house in the south of France, Mr. Vettriano said critics just don't like his work. "If I was painting about social issues or industrial decline or something more intellectual, then it would be regarded as interesting," he said. "Because it's what people do every day, I don't think it quite rings their bell." But it certainly rings the bell of many others, said Tom Hewlett, the director of the Portland Gallery and Mr. Vettriano's dealer.

"He paints images that are uncomplicated, easy to understand, don't need explaining to the general public and which the general public can engage with," Mr. Hewlett said. Collectors of the work are said to include Jack Nicholson, the England soccer manager Sir Alex Ferguson and the lyricist Tim Rice.

Is he a good painter?

"There are all sorts of artists where you can discuss whether they are good draftsmen or not, but for him it's the atmosphere he evokes on the page," said André Zlattinger, director of the British paintings department and head of Scottish paintings at Sotheby's in London. "Clients love the romance and the ambience."

Mr. Vettriano, 54, the son of a miner, has an unorthodox background. Born Jack Hoggan in Fife, Scotland, he changed his name as his career took off to the more artsy Vettriano, a souped-up version of Vettrino, his mother's maiden name. He left school at 15 and worked indifferently as, among other things, a mining engineer and a civil servant.

He taught himself to paint, first with a set of watercolors that a girlfriend gave him and later by obsessively visiting art galleries and poring over art books and catalogs, copying other painters' techniques. He applied to art school but did not get in.

His lack of formal training figured prominently in a mini-scandal in Scotland last year ("Jackgate," Mr. Hewlett said grimly), when a newspaper investigation revealed that the figures in "The Singing Butler" had all come from photographs in a £16.99 book called The Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual.

But Mr. Vettriano explained that he used the book because at the time he could not afford to hire models. In any case, he says, he mixed and matched the figures, creating the setting and the narrative. "The whole point is to help artists," he said of the book, "but the artist has to come up with the idea."

Mr. Vettriano's first success came when two of his paintings were accepted into the Royal Scottish Academy's 1988 summer exhibition, but it was the popularity of the posters, prints and the like that earned him his first real money. His work is exhibited in none of the big British museums or galleries and can be seen publicly in Britain only in his hometown, Kirkcaldy (pronounced kir-KOD-dy), Scotland, whose museum has two Vettrianos, and at the Portland Gallery.

For a while, "Dance Me to the End of Love," the romantic picture of a couple dancing in the mist that is to be auctioned in Edinburgh next month, was previewed on the ground floor of the Edinburgh branch of Harvey Nichols.

"We did that for two reasons: Harvey Nichols is a high-quality, fashionable department store, and their target audience is attractive to us in trying to sell the picture," said Richard Longwill, director of Shapes Fine Art Auctioneers, which is handling the sale. "Also, the galleries in Edinburgh have been reluctant to exhibit Vettriano's work." One gallery he approached told him "that there was absolutely no prospect," Mr. Longwill said; several others did not return his calls.

Mr. Vettriano, who is divorced, says his seamier work more accurately reflects his personal obsessions than do the early sunny fantasies. Having left Scotland and his detractors behind, he is no longer painting as hungrily, as feverishly as he once did. "The criticism I've had hasn't exactly sucked my spirit," he said, "but it's kind of taken the edge off the pleasure I once felt."

His much-cultivated status as the unappreciated outsider - "I don't get invited to their shindigs," he said of the Edinburgh art establishment - may irritate him, but it has also been a boon. Members of the public read the sneering commentary, Mr. Hewlett said, and think, "How dare this pompous prat lecture us about art?"

Admiring the sexy Vettrianos inside the Portland Gallery, Ms. Davison and her friend Sue Whittaker, 54, said they did not appreciate being told what was good and what wasn't. "People might think, 'If I like these, I might not be very intelligent,' " Ms. Whittaker said. Ms. Davison added, "But we know we are."


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