Tag Archives: Gagosian

Tete casquee

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Tete Casquee, 1933. Bronze

My favorite piece from the Gagosian Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’Amour Fou exhibition seemed to have little to do with Marie-Thérèse: the Tête casquée (1933) bronze head of a warrior is charming, a little goofy even, but fantastic. (It is also apparently under copyright protection in the US, because heaven forbid my blog show a small, low-res image of a famous Picasso sculpture without a ‘gettyimages’ tag over it. I mean, we all have to keep our standard up or soon the rabble would be sharing images of god-knows-what important sculpture.)

Luckily MoMA is a little freer with an image of a plaster cast of the same work, which shows the wonderful face of the soldier better:

Head of a warrior, Boisgeloup, 1933. Plaster, metal, and wood
I hope the inclusion of this piece wasn’t meant to be a riff on Marie-Thérèse‘s Roman nose?

Jean-Michel Basquiat at Film Forum

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For once a press release was sent to me that was topical and handy. Via my inbox, this was from Gagosian yesterday:

Gagosian Gallery

Image

JEAN-MCHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD
PRODUCED and DIRECTED BY TAMRA DAVIS

Wednesday, July 21 – Tuesday, August 3 • Two Weeks
Showtimes: 1:15, 3:15, 6:00, 8:00, 10:00 • Tickets available online beginnning July 14

“Tamra Davis creates a dazzling sense of the ’80s New York art scene.”
– Caryn James, Newsweek

The meteoric rise and fall of Jean-Michel Basquiat, born 1960. In the crime-ridden NYC of the 1970s, he covers the city with the graffiti tag SAMO. In 1981 he puts paint on canvas for the first time, and by 1983 he is an artist with “rock star status.” In 1985 he and Andy Warhol become close friends and painting collaborators, but they part ways and Warhol dies suddenly in 1987. Basquiat’s heroin addiction worsens, and he dies of an overdose in 1988. The artist was 25 years old at the height of his career, and today his canvases sell for more than a million dollars. With compassion and insight, Tamra Davis details the mysteries that surround this charismatic young man, an artist of enormous talent whose fortunes mirrored the rollercoaster quality of the downtown scene he seemed to embody.

USA • 2010 • 90 MINS. • ARTHOUSE FILMS

• Q & A with Director Tamra Davis after the 8:00 show on Wednesday, July 21st and Thursday July 22nd
•Q&A with Fab 5 Freddy to follow the 8:00 show on Friday, July 23rd

To purchase tickets online: Film Forum | Box Office

Just in case you’ve developed a similar fascination with the odd cast of characters I wrote about yesterday.

Linnea in Monet’s Garden

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Nympheas, 1907

Of course you have heard the hype and of course you like Monet, so if you haven’t heeded the call to go see Monet’s Late Work on view at Gagosian’s 21st street location, yet let me repeat them all and say: Go now. It’s cheaper than a museum (free) and shows works that museums rarely do (privately-owned). This being one of my first art excursions upon being back in New York, I was more than a little gleeful to find myself surronded by these late, great works. They are strangely wild, more so than you might give “pretty” Monet credit for. And the colors!
The colors almost beg you to paint, even if you should be someone like me: more of an enthusiast than an artist. From a distance all seems serene, giving an impression of reality. Up close, things in the pictures fall apart and you become filled with wonder at a surface that contains so many contradictions.
At least that was the joyful effect it had on me, reminding me as it did of Linnea in Monet’s Garden.There are few Linneas in the US and certainly very few in Georgia where I grew up so as a child, which is why I was given a copy of this book about once a year in honor of my name. However my trips to Paris have unfortunately been when the Orangerie hosting Monet’s circular water lily series was closed. Here I was finally in Monet’s garden.

L’Allee de Rosiers, 1920-1922

While I have been to the real garden of Monet in Giverny, it’s beauty doesn’t compare with the artist’s work. Somehow in the process of seeing and painting the same sights for so many years, Monet arrived a point in his later years when his paintings were so patently not about the object itself but about his experience with them, his experience with the paint, his desire for the right color, that he no more heeded his eyes than he did contemporary painting styles. He painted, as it were, from the heart, from years of experience, and with great love. It is a beautiful thing to see.