November 16, 2017 Look The Rhyming Photographs of Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb By The Paris Review Left: Alex Webb, Havana, Cuba. Right:Rebecca Norris Webb, Havana, Cuba. © Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb In Slant Rhymes, published in August, photographers Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb paired eighty images taken over the course of their nearly thirty-year relationship. The photographs appear side by side—one of Alex’s, one of Rebecca’s—to create “a series of visual rhymes that talk to one another—often at a ‘slant’ and in intriguing and revealing ways.” Below, a selection, with locales ranging from Cuba to India to Indiana, the rhymes bridging the geographic spans. Left: Havana, Cuba A.W. Right: Near Gray Goose, South Dakota, R.N.W. © Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb Read More
November 14, 2017 Look Inside Paul Cézanne’s Studio By Joel Meyerowitz A few years ago, during a visit to Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, I experienced a flash of insight about the artist that I saw as intrinsic to his becoming the father of modern painting. Once having seen it, it inspired me to move in a new direction in my own work. Cézanne painted his studio walls a dark gray with a hint of green. Every object in the studio, illuminated by a vast north window, seemed to be absorbed into the gray of this background. There were no telltale reflections around the edges of the objects to separate them from the background itself, as there would have been had the wall been painted white. Therefore, I could see how Cézanne, making his small, patch-like brush marks, might have moved his gaze from object to background, and back again to the objects, without the familiar intervention of the illusion of space. Cézanne’s was the first voice of “flatness,” the first statement of the modern idea that a painting was simply paint on a flat canvas, nothing more, and the environment he made served this idea. The play of light on this particular tone of gray was a precisely keyed background hum that allowed a new exchange between, say, the red of an apple and the equal value of the gray background. It was a proposal of tonal nearness that welcomed the idea of flatness. Read More
October 31, 2017 Look Mother Mold: Keith Edmier’s Frozen Faces By The Paris Review “Mother Mold,” an exhibition of sculptural portraiture by Keith Edmier, is running at the Petzel Gallery, on Sixty-Seventh Street, until November 4. The fifty masks draw inspiration from imagines, a type of wax casting that aristocratic families made of their male members’ faces and displayed in their homes during the Roman Republic. “In an age before photography, imagines were considered the truest, most objective representation of a person.” Unlike the Romans, Edmier makes his masks from plaster, and includes female faces. “Some of these people are famous, some are not. Some casts were made by me, others were not. Some people I knew intimately, others I knew casually or never met. Edmier’s imagines is a lifeline or, possibly, a dysfunctional family tree of my own.” The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of the imagines as a boxed set of fifty postcards, written by Edmier himself, shown below. Barack Obama, recto. Barack Obama, verso. Read More
October 24, 2017 Look Art and Biology: Ernst Haeckel’s Masterpieces By The Paris Review Ernst Haeckel, the turn-of-the-century biologist, naturalist, professor, and artist, was an ardent Darwinist, a denouncer of religious doctrine, and a writer of philosophical treatises. He coined terms still in common use today, such as phylum, stem cell, and ecology. He discovered, described, and named thousands of new species, depicting them in sketches and watercolors as notable for their artistic mastery as they are for their celebration of nature’s symmetry and diversity. Of course, some of his theories have aged more poorly: his passionate Darwinism bled into the rising fascist doctrine in his native Germany, and he became a leading proponent of scientifically justified racism. But, at a moment when the planet’s biodiversity is dwindling, allow us to focus on the beauty of his images and the lasting legacy of his contributions to science. Here is a peek into Taschen’s forthcoming The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel (out December, too big for a stocking but still perfect for the burgeoning biologist in your life). Mollusca-Cephalopoda, plate 54. Copyright: © TASCHEN Köln/Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Read More
September 27, 2017 Look Picabia’s Covers for André Breton’s Literary Magazine By Stephanie LaCava The cover of Littérature from May 10, 1923. Littérature, founded in 1919 by André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, was couched as an innocent literary journal, but it was known for its avant-garde writings and critiques. In March 1922, André Breton launched Littérature: New Series. He asked his friend, the shape-shifting artist Francis Picabia, to create drawings for the covers. Ultimately, only nine of Picabia’s twenty-six covers were chosen and published. The rest remained in an envelope dated August 8, 1923. They were unseen by the wider public until 2008, when they were presented by Breton’s daughter, Aube Breton-Elléouët, at the Galerie 1900-2000, in Paris. In an essay accompanying exhibition, “In Praise of the ‘Funny Guy,’ Inventor of Pop Art,” Jean-Jacques Lebel argued that these cover illustrations foreshadowed Pop Art. He credited Picabia with “the transformation of a commercial strategy into a subversive artistic practice.” Picabia’s work provided an early, wicked critique of the art and literature industries. In a letter from Marcel Duchamp to Breton in 1922, Duchamp wrote that the scandalous nature of Picabia’s images, many of which associate sex and religion, made it difficult for him to distribute Littérature in New York; vendors were reluctant to display it in public. So Duchamp distributed it among his friends instead. Read More
September 26, 2017 Look Tina Barney’s Embarrassment of Riches By Joseph Akel Tina Barney, Self-Portrait, 2014. For the photographer Tina Barney, proximity to, and membership in, the upper class has come to define her body of work chronicling the life of the patrician set. Her images, taken over some forty years, are at once a choreographed glimpse into the lives of the leisure class and candid meditations upon universal themes of family. Barney’s recently published an eponymous monograph—with an introduction by Peter Galassi, the former curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art—comes at a time when economic inequality is at the forefront of people’s minds. Here, she reflects on the critical reception of her work, the importance of time in her photographs, and the role of family in creating them. Read More