Too Many Images Hide Each Other: Arcimboldo, Dali, Raetz and the Rest of the Ambiguous Cast at Grand Palais

Perhaps it was my fault for turning up at 4:30 p.m. knowing full well that Grand Palais would shut its doors on me three and a half hours later. Perhaps it was my fault for not reserving an advance ticket although, truth be told, I didn’t mind queuing for an hour under the rare Parisian sun and getting started on Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, the first of my "light and fluffy" summer reads (yeah, right). But perhaps my most marked erroneousness was procrastinating until the final hours on the final day to view an exhibition I was certain would move the heavens and earth for me, One Image May Hide Another: Arcimboldo, Dali, Raetz.

I was certainly moved alright, but it had nothing to do with heaven and earth. Jostled, pushed and man-handled by late-blooming comrades similarly struck by the ridiculous inspiration of an end-of-days tour, from the moment I entered my experience at this “double image” opus was a singular mess.

Our collective bad decision making aside, the show's organizers bear just as much blame for the chaos as us last-minute, one-stop shoppers. Grand Palais has several different gallery spaces and unfortunately this show was on in the same claustrophobic caverns where I fought my way through 200 plus paintings at Picasso and the Masters earlier this year. Cramped tighter than a muscle spasm, lit with all the might of a medieval confessional and boasting an inconvenient staircase whose downward spiral halfway through the exhibition breaks up the flow of viewing with the same delicacy that a reeling hammer breaks up a cube of ice, this space is just not compatible with vast exhibitions and large crowds. Why it’s continually used for such shows is one of the greatest art wonders of the century.

But oh, if the dissonant quarters were the only problem. Far be it from me to complain that there is such a thing as too much art, but after drudging through this exasperating debacle, I declare that my threshold for art glut has been crossed! Arcimboldo, Dali and Raetz were in the house, but so too were Michelangelo, Andrea Mantegna, Mazzolino, Alberto Giacometti, Gauguin, Degas, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, David Hockney, Max Ernst, M.C. Escher, Tchelitchew Pavel, Brancusi, Rorschach (yes, he of the mighty test) Utagana Kuniyoshi, Magritte, Picasso, Jasper Johns (dizzy yet?) and enough Albrecht Durer to make me pause and say "What are all these artists doing at a Durer exhibition?" (Check out the Durer etching Les Bains des Hommes at right. Can you spot the hidden image? Big hint: check out the spout, far left. I'm pretty sure water isn't the only thing flowing out of it). I understand how the idea of presenting such a fabled array of artists who also dabbled with ambiguity and hidden images in their art is a tempting one, but shoving them in under the headline radar of a Surrealist/Renaissance/modern Swedish sculptor triad makes it impossible to give each artist their due diligence, relegates the “headliners” into the background of their supposed show and results in completely disastrous aesthetic and chronological incoherence.

I was hoping that the textual notes and the audio guide would help me better sort through all this exquisite muck and mire, but alas, no such luck. The textual notes were terribly esoteric, full of alienating polysyllabic words that confused far better than they enlightened. Trying to use the audio guide was a supreme lesson in patience. Chronology was cast to the winds as paintings corresponding to the guide’s numbers 19 and 29 sat side by side, notes on painting 31 came well before I even entered the room bearing 30 and I never did find the masterpiece that warranted note number 10. Oh well…

But, as they say, the show must go on and the lofty aim of this one was to examine the way in which ambiguity and hidden and double images inhabit paintings and sculpture, in particular those of Arcimboldo, Dali and Raetz.

My passion for art is steeped in the Renaissance and so it was really for Giuseppe Arcimboldo that I suffered through all this pandemonium. This past spring I taught a one week children's art course where we spent two days doing Arcimboldo style self-portraits, dismembering newspapers and magazines for images of everything from race cars to high heels, from hamburger buns to eyeballs, with the aim of re-creating the odd genius of one of the 16th century’s most unique talents. Arcimboldo is renowned for painting portraits – most notably those of the Habsburg's in Vienna where he was the much beloved court painter – made entirely of other images. The most famous examples of this technique are Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons in which he renders portraits representing not only spring, summer, autumn and winter, but also the four temperaments - sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic – using images relevant to the season. Of these four portraits Spring, composed of colorful blooming flowers and foliage, and Autumn, with a head made of grapes, leaves, a pumpkin and a potato nose sitting atop a broken harvest barrel, were on display (I'm assuming Summer and Winter remained at their permanent home down the street, the Louvre). Arcimboldo’s Gardner was also on display, a reversible delight that, right-side-up, appears to be a bowl full of seasonal vegetables but upside-down is revealed as the head of the gardener who’s harvested them.

Next to Arcimboldo, Salvador Dali, the undisputed poster child of the Surrealist movement, was perhaps far more adept than any other artist at imbuing his work with optical illusions. In fact, Dali’s dabbles with ambiguity are philosophized in his idea of the "paranoiac critical,” in his own words the "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena." In non-Surrealist jargon, this means that Dali sought to link things or images that are not normally related which is often disconcerting for the viewer. On canvas these “phenomena” appear, as Dali coined them, to be “double images” (think of the pocket watch melting over the eye-lashed monster center stage in the famous Persistence of Time). Several Dali’s were on display including Portrait of Madame Isabel Styler-Tas, Endless Enigma and The Three Ages as well as some drawing studies. Unfortunately, the majority of Dalis resided in a small curved room hemmed in by crowds at the end of the exhibition and, by the time it was reached by anyone who wasn’t popping valium, was just too exhausting and overwhelming to enjoy.

I confess I don't know much about Swedish sculptor and installation artist Markus Raetz and thanks to the fact that I encountered the majority of Raetz's work after the last strains of Dali and about the same time the museum custodians began barking their “clear out, closing time” orders, I'm not much wiser than I was before. However, seeing as I'm no stranger to the vino, I found it quite a propos that the one Raetz sculpture I was able to commune with was Big and Small, a bronze working of an average-sized wine bottle dwarfed by a large wine glass full at the bottom and compressed at the top. The obvious provocation here is “how did so much wine pour forth from such a small bottle,” exemplifying how Raetz's work focuses on the visual discrepancies between illusion and reality and, as such, how his sculptures metamorphose in appearance from varying angles and vantage points. All the more fitting that I should encounter this piece at the denouement of disorder since the only thing capable of assuaging my aggravated nerves after all this ZIP-file illusion was the reality that my good friend Bacchus was eagerly awaiting me at home.

Although the overreaching line-up in a too-small and awkward space was ultimately overwhelming, One Image Hides Another was nonetheless comprised of extraordinary artists and works that shed light on larger questions of perception and duplicity. What do we perceive in a work the first time we look at it? The second time? The third? Do we see something new each time or continue to focus on the same thing? Do we see only what we want to see, what the artist, through the mystifying juxtaposition of shapes and images, instructs us to see, or is there something else to be gleaned that exceeds even the artist’s intent? How do we interpret a visual reality composed entirely of illusions, of fictions that collectively appear as facts and what, if any, comment does this visual trickery make about us and the human condition?

A Colorful Life: Kandinsky at the Pompidou Center

My friends are no strangers to my rants and rails against the villainies of living in Paris. Iron-lung inducing pollution. Defiantly unreliable public transportation spiced up in the trenches now and again by the old 'suspicious package found on the metro/train/bus' trick or the perfect crescendo of a rush hour timed labor strike. Dour Parisians who, as Ezra Pound observed, resemble "apparitions" with faces like "petals on a wet, black bough." And lets not forget the Eiffel Tour gray weather ten months out of twelve.

But let this be the place where I confess I have a bit of solace, living as I do in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a pampered little pocket on Paris's western edge. Our main drag, Avenue General Charles de Gaulle, is a triumphal parade route leading to the Arc de Triomphe and the streets clustered around it are lined with luscious trees and dappled by graceful mansions, 18th century hotels particuliers, houses that are architectural gems, exclusive gated communities and hidden parks and fountains. Rain or shine, Ferraris, Aston Martins and Jags, vintage and new alike, come out to play on Sundays. Gerard Depardieu and Jean Reno call Neuilly home and so did its most famous former resident and mayor for nineteen years, President Nicolas Sarkozy. In a word - okay, two - Neuilly is très bourgeois.

But living here amongst les Joneses in a 1930's 50 square meter single with my better half, our well-worn metro passes and our far-reaching dream of rolling our own Testarossa around town one day, it's pretty obvious we weren't lured here for the bourgie hype. Although areas of Neuilly suffer from the same piercing traffic and other riffraff that plagues central Paris our petit quartier, bordered by the sprawling Bois de Boulogne on the south and by a sleepy houseboat-lined stretch of the Seine where two green islands meet on the west, is rather serene and idyllic. The woods, or bois, are a verdant playground of footpaths and trails, lakes and waterfalls, gardens and wildflowers, duck ponds and an impressive range of protected wildlife. Peacocks roam freely a five minute walk from my front door, an exotic luxury and a miracle that makes the stone and steel of Paris all but recede into a distant memory. For me the best thing about living in Paris is living on its edge where nature and solitude drown out the chaos of the inner city's harried arrondissements.

Deep in these thoughts yesterday, I was taking in the Kandinsky retrospective at the Pompidou Center in the harried 4th and reflecting on one of Kandinsky's last works, Blue Sky, a charming painting with buoyant, almost embryonic forms floating across an ethereal blue sky. Kandinsky divined giving this painting texture by mixing grains of pigment and sand together, a method that also results in the brilliant effect of forms and sky catching and glimmering in light. Noticing that it was painted in 1940, the same year the Nazis began their occupation of Paris, it occurred to me that perhaps Kandinsky, with only three years left of an extraordinary career plagued by political censure and war, just might have found a haven in my neck of the woods too.

Allow me to explain. Wassily Kandinsky was my neighbor - seventy years ago, that is. From 1934 - 1944, the last ten years of his life, the Russian-born "abstract" Expressionist and Bauhaus messiah lived a block over from mine. 135 avenue General de Koenig in a small sixth floor flat with a makeshift studio in a massive stone building on the Seine. Kandinsky had lived in Paris for a year in the early nineteen hundreds but left it for Munich where his painting thrived and where he would publish his first major theoretical work, On the Spiritual in Art. But as a Russian on the brink of the First World War, Kandinsky was driven from Munich in 1914 and, after a brief stay in Stockholm, he settled in Moscow until 1921. He was able to return to Germany in 1922 to teach at the famed Bauhaus school, pursue and publish his artistic theories and revolutionize painting, but this intense and flourishing period was once again cut short by impending doom. The Nazis officially classified his art as "degenerate" which resulted in driving Kandinsky from Germany and back to France for good. And so it was that in 1933 Kandinsky hung his proverbial hat in Neuilly.

Made possible by a triumvirate of Kandinsky's biggest holders - the Stadtische Gallery, the Solomon R. Guggenheim and the Pompidou Center itself - as well as a handful of other collectors, the Pompidou retrospective is a full spectrum journey through the shifting palettes, planes, shapes, and space of Kandinsky's groundbreaking and mesmerizing work. Defying what is sometimes the case with a seminal artist's retrospective, the size and breadth of this show is far from intimidating or overwhelming. In fact it's precisely the vastness of the collection - 100 paintings (some of which have never traveled or showed before) accompanied by meticulous textual notes on the audio guide and throughout the exhibition - that render it a deliciously intimate portrait of the artist.

A five part chronology, the exhibition is a revelation for those of us who only know the "abstract" Kandinsky and a celebration of the spiritual joy and hope that colored his paintings even in the darkest of times. Kandinsky's early years of European travel between 1896 - 1907 wound down in Paris where in 1906, with vibrant oils on a black background, he painted Colorful Life with clear elements of fauvism and pointillism and featuring subjects and motifs directly from Russian folklore (the Kremlin hovers on a peopled scene from a distant hill above). In 1908 Kandinsky began six prodigious years in Munich that peaked with his first retrospective in 1912. It was during this time that his paintings began to move into the realm of the abstract, becoming an accumulation of edgeless forms and dynamic colors bounding wildly across the canvas as in the near three-dimensional Black Arch or Picture with a White Border.

In 1914, World War One forced Kandinsky from Germany back to Russia, thus facilitating a dramatic shift in his art. Without a studio or materials in Moscow during the war he began drawing and doing small watercolors, a splendid display of which is on exhibition. Kandinsky returned to Germany after the war where from 1922 - 1933 he taught at the Bauhaus, a defining chapter in his life where he expressed, color, shape and the link between them on both canvas and in his theories in a way that transformed the art world forever. While at the Bauhaus he produced numerous works that experiment with geometric and amorphous forms, one of the most important being Yellow-Red-Blue, composed of a score of geometric shapes and angles gathered on the left of a large canvas and juxtaposed with an overlapping mass of varying forms and Rubik's cube-esque blocks of color on the right. The hypnotic Several Circles also from this period features colored spheres with iridescent halos that float like champagne bubbles across a dark, infinite and yet somehow celestial space.

This is the genius of Kandinsky - color, light and shape triumph in his paintings, vanquishing darkness or permitting its intrusion entirely. A color fanatic, Kandinsky intended the use of black in many of his paintings to be "heard" in the same way as an interlude is in music, as the dawn before the arrival of a new world, a new world of color.

I like to think that Neuilly was a sort of Byzantium for Kandinsky at his life's close, a place where, despite the Nazi occupation of Paris, peace dropped slow. In Neuilly, beset by a kind of isolation and with the catastrophe of Nazism and war at his back, Kandinsky composed a twilight symphony of imagined and unencumbered forms and, perhaps having beheld the local peacocks himself, deepened his connection to the spiritual world of color.

Kandinsky at the Pompidou Center

April 8, 2009 - August 10, 2009

Exhibition 11 am - 11 pm.

12 euro (includes access to all Pompidou Center permanent and temporary exhibitions)

http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/AllExpositions/A92256B1929D8228C12574EF00386B62?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.2.2&L=2

T.A.G.: Ghettofabulousness at Grand Palais

Before moving to Paris last July I spent two and a half years guiding tourists from all four corners of the earth up and down the seven hills of Rome. I gave homilies about the history of Western civilization under shady umbrella pines atop the Palatine Hill, spun yarns about the brutal and bloody history of the games in the magnificent shadow of Vespasian's Coliseum, marked the milestones of the Appian Way while recounting Saint Peter's fateful domine quo vadis encounter with Christ, pontificated at the foot of the altar where the twenty-thrice-stabbed body of the great Gauis Julius Ceasar was creamated among hordes of Romans in the ancient Forum, soliliquized the story of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel while the glory of it shone down from above, and encouraged my superstitious minions to splish splash their extra euros away in the famed Trevi Fountain for una tornata to the Eternal City one day. And after rolling history, to paraphrase the grand old T.S. Eliot, into a ball during an onsight bird's eye view into 2,500 years of it, what do you think was the most oft question I got from my holidaying peanut gallery?

How and when did Christianity supplant Roman paganism?

Nope.

How did the Romans succeed in amassing a fifty million person empire in less than three centuries?

Nope.

Did Nero really play the fiddle while Rome burned?

Nope. (And for the record mythbusters, the fiddle didn't rear its ugly head for another 1500 years after the great fire in Rome of 64 A.D. "What is the lyre" will get you another crack at Jeopardy).

Were the Pope and Caesar friends?

Sadly I heard this innane query so regularly that I began to question the history taught by Western civilization.

Did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel laying on his back?

Surely the runner up to the most oft asked question, but no cigar. (And if you're interested in dispelling this impossible myth check out the section to the right entitled "The Most Infamous and Uncreative Lie in Art History.")

So, with the blood of kings, emperors, soldiers and martyrs under their dusty, Croc'd feet, what was my clients' Sixty-Four-Thousand-Dollar question?

WHAT'S UP WITH ALL THE GRAFFITI IN ROME?

Yes ladies and gents, Rome is drenched in graffiti and one can't fault the squeaky clean graffiti-is-a-pox-on-humanity minded tourist's curiosity or shock that everything from ancient Roman edifices to the fortress-like brick walls surrounding Vatican city have been scrawled, scratched, spat and sprayed upon to such a degree that it's easy to confuse your Roman holiday with a trip back in time to the late 70's Bronx. I myself grew up on the graffiti-riddled Venice Beach Boardwalk running amok with taggers and graffiti artists at a time when the manhunt for the LAPD's most wanted tagger, Chaka, was a regular nightly news headline and even I was amazed at the profundity of motley markings when I first arrived. But with my ghettochild roots, my amazement was steeped in something quite different from that of the average bear. I was struck by the Roman grafitiosi's emulating my rough, tough and dirty American youth street culture. My disturbed clients, on the other hand, wanted to know how in the Pope's name such a thing is permissable in the showplace of Rafael and Michelangelo's Renaissance.

Imagine the dropping jaws as I retorted that these stars of the quattrocento were guilty of graffiti too. Allow me to explain.

Graffiti - plural from the singular Italian graffito - is derived from the Greek word graphein, "to write," and refers to markings, drawings, scribblings, or scratchings - generally illicit or obscene ones - made onto a surface such as a wall, pavement, post, etc. Markings like this have existed since ancient times and can be found all over ancient Roman territory, my personal favorites being the instructional graffiti, shall we call it, at Pompeii's brothel and the directionally challenged penises scratched into the walls of the Coliseum that point the path to where randy game patrons could pass a slaughter-free intermission in the comforting arms of a prostitute. Since it wasn't in my best interest to share these examples on my family friendly tours I would lead clients to images of gladiators graffiti'd in marble that were displayed inside the Coliseum and explain how graffiti was the result of a number of things going on in ancient and in modern Rome alike. L'ennui was often a culprit. If you were waiting hours at the Coliseum under the miserable hot Roman sun for a new splattering batch of blood and guts you'd probably resort to a bit of doodling in the stones too (or check out those happy hookers - take your pick). Likewise, if you're spending eons on the 40 or 64 bus trying to get across town you might be given over to the same urges. Politics, maybe a disagreement over or a point of view behind them, was a notorious motivating factor behind putting your name or ideas in stone. If imprisonment, mutilation or death is the result of freeing one's voice then surely an anonymous scrawl, big or small, is the better choice - in the times of Augustus and Berlusconi alike. Another reason - and one we're all guilty of - is for the twofold sake of nostalgia and recognition. We've all carved our "I ♥ So&SO" initials on a prominent piece of bark somewhere in this world. Why? Because there's a special kind of irony in overcoming our anonymity with our anonymity. Sure, we want to remember our connection when we return but we also want others to recognize it when we're away - even if they have no clue who we are. Others see that we still exist in this place even if we're not here and they're left wondering who we are, why we came, and how we left. This is precisely why Michelangelo, Raphael and Pinturrichio hit up the walls of the emperor Nero's Domus Aurea when they visited during excavations in the 1500's.

M + R + P

Westside Renaissance Crew Wuz Here

BIATCH!

If Rome's greatest Renaissance artists recognized and appreciated the social relevance of graffiti to the point of perpetrating it on ancient stone then surely - blaspheme! - we can get on board too. From the most offensive fat black Sharpie marrings on our commuter trains to the funkadelic art pieces that infiltrate Coca Cola and IBM ad campaigns, graffiti is part of our collective human legacy and for some more than others doing it is coded in the DNA. What you can't say for fear of persecution, for lack of oratorial eloquence, for fear that spoken words vanish into thin air, for fear that no one is listening or that you lack the individual power to be heard, or simply just because you spray it better than you say it you can bomb like Hiroshima all over the goddamn walls.

And Hiroshima'd rainbowliciously all over the walls at Grand Palais is T.A.G. (Tag and Graffiti), the most courageous and comprehensive cornucopia of dropped bombs ever put on public display. Mingling Aerosol Art with the world of High Art is nothing new (take a look back at the early 80's PBS documentary Style Wars that features a few young artists bragging about how much their pieces fetch), but what sets T.A.G. apart from previous graffiti expos is the monumental number of artists involved and amount of pieces they produced. Over 150 artists of both renown and underground fame were commissioned by architect and gallery owner Alain Dominique Gallizia to drop an astounding 300 tags and graffiti pieces. Known as the Gallizia Collection, le Monsieur's vision as a down and die-hard devotee of street art was to gather a near impossible to conceive forty years worth of international bombers at his studio just outside of Paris to complete two original 180 x 60 canvasses . The first piece showcases the artist's tag, or street name, and the second is an interpretation of "Love." The result - intellectual art critics/theorist/freaks who discard street art as junk or any of my former graffiti-is-a-pox-on-humanity minded clients may take offense here - is the most exceptional room full of multiple talent I've seen since Picasso and the Masters showed at Grand Palais earlier this year.

Naysayers may dare to detract the credibility of a graffiti exhibition at this posh Parisian palace but with a show that commences with a nod to arguably the most famous east coaster to push the envelope of graffiti-as-art next to Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, such a task is more trouble than it's worth. An image of Basquiat's Hollywood Africans and a shout out to his friends and fellow graffitiosos Toxic and Rammellzee (both of whom have pieces on display) is just the kick start such a daring show deserves (although the original Basquiat would have been preferred). Lighting the stroll down vandalism lane next is a massive pink, gray and black lettered hanging with the infamous runny scrawl of TAKI 183, the 1970's NYC train wrecking terror who put east coast graffiti on the national map. The full text of the 1971 New York Times article "Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals" is blown up for all to read. The nostalgia continues with a video screen that features short interviews with the likes of Gallizia and NYC spray can pioneers Seen and Quick who discuss the formation of the collection and encourage visitors to respect the "stylistic evolution" of graffiti aesthetics. There is also compelling introductory text written by a legend in his own right, Henry Chalfont, author of Subway Art and director of the aforementioned Style Wars. Chalfont explains street art's NYC subway genesis and pays tribute to how these faceless "wild style" pioneers attained "Ghetto Celebrity Status" by arming themselves with little more than a can of paint and an alter-ego to war with the inner-city trains to create "a visual metaphor in which the energy of the soul finds expression in the circumstances of the given life."

And now... let the ghettofabulousness begin.

I was astounded as I entered and did my dizzy blond best to take in the prodigious spectrum of colors, bold and undulating shapes and mesmerizing wild style calligraphics of blocks, bubbles, swirls and strokes that ran along the length of the long, singular gallery's walls. I admit I was a tad hungover, but nursing one or not I don't know what could have prepared me for the stunning visual assault of colors, images and light that enveloped my senses. The collection is showing in the south gallery of the Grand Palais, a stripped down, unfinished space under construction with high ceilings, gritty exposed brick walls and endless oodles of cascading natural light that deliciously illuminate every last inch of the canvases. These elements along with speakers interjecting the subtle and intermittent street sounds of shaking cans and spraying paint came together for what was one of the most complimentary uses of gallery space I've encountered at a temporary exhibition. The graffiti canvases were arranged on the walls chronologically (on the left wall from 1969 - 1988 and on the right from 1989 - 2009) with each artists' two pieces placed side by side in a top-to-bottom row of four artists. A simple yet ingenious arrangement, like much of the graffiti itself.

It's impossible to give proper props to all on display but I will say this: with the exception of a handful of pieces that were clearly struggling overall the collection was incroyable. It was evident that some pieces were born of sheer fun, that some were exceptionally dark and that some were more masterful, captivating or creative than others (the distinction and the talent between old and new school artists was visible). But make no mistake - for as erratic and torrid as some of the pieces may appear there was an abundance of wizardry and wisdom written on the walls. For a standout many it was clear what "Love" meant - the trains, the cans and NYC. Numerous pieces by artists like Ces, Duro and Faust featured brilliant depictions of the Big Apple skyline, its trains bombed and careening off the tracks, personified spray cans and pictures or odes of love to it. My personal favorite ponderance on Love was Duster's artfully executed cautionary tale with Love as yellow brick road to the city flanked by a sign proclaiming it a "road to nowhere." For others Love was a headphoned baby in the womb, a bleeding heart, a portrait of a lover, an open eye, an abstract smattering of colors or a politic of peace like Freedom's tribute to Ghandi and MLK. Some artists like New York's Rammellzee took graffiti well beyond the can to create a metaphoric mixed media piece while others like Other (no shit, that's his name) skipped calligraphy entirely for image. The amount of international artists in the collection was also astounding. Next to the U.S., France had a prominent amount of it's artists on display as well as Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Tawaiin, Austria, Iran, Belgium, Holland and even Iceland whose Fridricks has got to be giving Bjork a run for her money as the supa dupa dopest femme fantastic our icy neighbors to the north have turned out.

For those of you who can't get to the expo before its closing date, Monsieur Gallizia has taken you into consideration.  He has no intention of dividing or selling any of the pieces and instead has vowed that they will travel the globe as a permanent collection. If only our Renaissance patrons would've made the same commitment to their artists (Michelangelo's ceiling isn't property of the Pope - it was sold for an obnoxious amount of ducats to a Japanese broadcasting company called Nippon - far more of a sacreligious selling out than any graffiti I've ever seen on exhibit). So unless you haul ass to Rome you'll never have the Sistine Chapel in your backyard, but if you keep your eyes peeled T.A.G. just might come bombing on your train next.

T.A.G.

Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill

South West Gallery, Door H

March 27th - April 26th

Monday thru Friday, 11 a.m. - 7 p.m., open late Wednesday and Saturday until 11 p.m.

http://www.tagaugrandpalais.com/

William Blake at Petit Palais: Pity No More

After quite the combustible row with my better half this past Sunday I left our house in search of the one calming and comfort indulgence beside a tub of cookie dough ice cream, a crisp, lime garnished cosmopolitan and anything-but-missionary make-up sex that I was certain could soothe my frazzled nerves. A-R-T. With a great huff in my step and even greater puff under my eyes I hopped the metro and dragged my self-pity down to Grand Palais - a turn of the century exhibition space as equally stunning as it is imposing – in anticipation that the hottest ticket in town, The Great World of Andy Warhol, would Calgon me away from my lover's quarrel reality. But alas, when I reared my low-hung head up from the city's bowels I quickly discovered that 4:30 on a sunny spring afternoon in Paris has to be about the worst time for a jilted lover to fix herself on Warhol. A million and two people were snaked behind barricades around the building and considering that the exhibition closed in two hours it was obvious that it was the two and not the million that would get to bypass the velvet rope that day. For a fleeting moment I thought about appealing to the obvious lonely hearts in line - surely I wasn't the only woman here escaping domestic unbliss. Or, maybe I had a better chance of getting in by flashing a little cleavage to one of the undersexed, walkie-talkie toting custodians corralling all this Warholian cattle. Not to mention that they do say flirting is the best revenge. But just as I spied the perfect balding prey and began to tug down the zipper on my blue and white polka-dotted Old Navy sweatshirt of seduction, I had a vision of what it must have been like during the glory days of Warhol's Studio 54 when gaggles of desperate starfuckers waited for hours to hummer down on bouncers just to try and get in for a glimpse of Warhol and his poppered-up Pop Art posse. They usually failed. Thanks, but no thanks I thought as I zipped my dignity back up. After resolving that fate hadn’t crossed mine and Andy’s stars that day, I walked over to another of the current gems showing at Grand Palais, T.A.G., a showcase of over 150 Tag and Graffiti artists. More bloated and barricaded lines that by this time I had ceased brainstorming to surpass. Tired, defeated and harboring about as much self-pity as a stood up bride on her wedding day I turned around to slink quietly off and Ophelia myself in the Seine when divinity intervened. Across the street from Grand Palais lays it’s little sibling, another gorgeous exhibition space, Petit Palais, and within it was just the thing to unmake my brown eyes blue: William Blake: The Visionary Genius of English Romanticism.

I knew fate had lured me to the right place when, standing in line to buy my ticket, I looked over to my right and saw William Hurt – yes, that William Hurt – deeply involved in sketching the remarkable first floor ceiling frescoes.

The Accidental Tourist indeed.

As I made my way downstairs to the collection I could not help but think how proud my former thesis advisor Dr. Dorothy Clark would be of me at this moment, on my way to pour over the remnants of William Blake, English Romantic poet, artist, engraver and visionary extraordinaire. I was an English major in college and it was in Dr. Clark’s seminar Literary Responses to Evil (an uplifting semester as you would imagine) that Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell first came into my life. Not that I understood many of his brain twisting axioms at the time - “Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; /Hungry clouds swag on the deep” WTF??? - but it gave me a grittier taste of Blake than I’d experienced in my previous British Romantics courses in which Blake, writing at the close of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, was usually lumped in with the daffodil frolicking and elegiac Wordsworth, the whiny, melancholic and lovesick Keats and the classical myth chasing Italophile Shelley. Not to take anything away from this genius crop of poesy makers but as many critics agree William Blake transcends categorization.

Certainly there are Romantic conceits in his poetry but Blake’s vision was far more complex – and ridiculed - than many of his contemporaries. He was shameless and unwavering in voicing his blatant social, political and religious views in his work. Blake was a radical rebel with tremendous causes that lead much of the public and his contemporaries not only to assume him mad but, as is often the curse when the best of minds are born ahead of their time, Blake achieved minimal fame and lots of shame during his days because much of his work was sexually, religiously and politically explicit (truly, a man after my own heart). Blake was a Dissenter from the Church of England, held an audacious belief in racial and sexual equality, supported both the American and French Revolutions, imagined his own mythology, practiced vegetarianism, and reported having visions in which he was visited by God and the archangels. Okay, so this last bit is a little kooky but surely it doesn't render him ripe for a lobotomy.

Despite his eccentric reputation and the lack of recognition that plagued his artistic life, Blake relentlessly communicated his progressive beliefs through poetry and used his unparalleled skills as an artist and engraver to literally “illuminate” his work. Here I must note that the word genius is one that is often misused but in Blake’s case it is synonymous with his name. In 1788 he invented a new method of engraving termed “illuminated printing” and in 1795 he created a mode of painting called “portable fresco.” Forgive my crude attempt at technical explication but the former, inspired by the Medieval illuminated manuscript, was a process whereby Blake wrote or etched the background of a design backward (because a mirror image is produced when printing) onto a copper plate using acid resistant varnish. After the image had dried Blake treated the plate to varnish so that his design remained standing in relief. The copper plate was then inked over, pressed and finally hand-decorated with watercolors. This resulted in beautiful imagistic art but was an expensive and time consuming process that only allowed for a few printed copies of a given text. The latter Blake invention, “portable fresco,” was a method in which he MacGyvered together pigment, animal glue, lead, white chalk, water and Indian ink to create a given design. Again, genius, but a time consuming process that resulted in a limited number of available copies.

The fruits of these brilliant inventions and a myriad of other Blakean creations are set against minimalist white-walls, wood frames, glass display cases and adorned with various Blake quotes at this excellent exhibition. Donations from such astute archives as The British Museum, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The University of Glasgow and The Tate Britain give patrons an extraordinarily comprehensive mind’s eye view of the visions of an incomparable master. The exhibition commences with simplicity, in particular early portraits of Edward III, and builds up to a fantastic crescendo of mindblowingly fine work. To be quite honest, I felt like everything on display was a crescendo and that even if my mouth were stitched up my jaw would have forced the stitches out to drop. Precious, original versions of Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are propped open to select pages and shown along with some of their original copper plates. Stunning oil on wood portraits of great Blake influences Chaucer, Milton, Dante, and Voltaire are on view and complimented by beautiful interpretations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tale "Pilgrims” and several dreamt-up images of damned souls from Dante’s Inferno. Blake was also a master at depicting darkly prophetic biblical, religious and mythological scenes. He did astonishing illustrations for the Book of Job, a famed interpretation of the 1st century sculpture Laocoon as an English, Hebrew and Greek annotated print with the central figures re-imagined as Jehovah and His Two Sons Satan and Adam and, shown ominously side by side are The Approach of Doom, Joseph Ordering Simeon to Be Bound, Our End is Come and Scene from the Last Judgment (took me right back to Dr. Clark's Evil course all over again). My personal favorite? Several brilliant “illuminated” panels from America: A Prophecy and Europe: A Prophecy, a vivid juxtaposition of images with a graceful yet dynamic and almost comic bookesque energy.

The exhibition culminates quite uniquely in a fitting honor to a man who was without his due during his lifetime. Two portraits of Blake by Jean Cortot are on display as well as a haunting Study of a Head inspired Blake by the austere Francis Bacon. An area is set up so that patrons can sit and watch Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man” starring Johnny Depp as a hero named after – who else? - William Blake. And in an interesting audio compliment to the spectacular visuals patrons can listen to two bard-influenced Patti Smith recordings, My Blakean Year and The Augurs of Innocence.

Oh yes - I almost forgot to mention that Blake’s Macbeth-inspired Pity is part of the collection. It stopped me particularly because I noticed it was the first work I’d come across with an elaborate - rather than a simple wood - frame. As I looked at it I reflected on the torrent of low emotion that had carried me here in comparison to how rapt and tranquil I felt now that I was in the midst of this Blakean bounty. I smiled at the tempting white cherub hovering above me as she looked down at woman laying prostrate beneath the nude baby in her grasp before I turned away thinking, Pity - suddenly I haven't energy to bear her anymore.

William Blake: The Visionary Genius of British Romanticism

April 2, 2009 - June 28, 2009

Petit Palais, Musee de Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008

Open everyday from 10 am to 6 pm, closed Monday, late opening Thursday until 8pm

http://blakearchive.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pressreleaseblake.jpeg

David LaChapelle at La Monnaie de Paris: Size Matters

One of the delights about experiencing art in Paris  is doing it after hours.  Several of the City of Light’s museums and visiting exhibitions host late night openings that can transform a just-another-dinner-and-a-movie Friday night into a visual feast at the buffet table.  One of the hottest dishes on Paris’s late night art menu is the surrealist provocateur David LaChapelle’s photography exhibition at La Monnaie de Paris, an 18th century behemoth of a structure built under Louis XV that towers over the left bank of the Seine.

Louis and LaChapelle.  Dinner is served. 

I adore the daring humour, subversive absurdity, spectrum-defying colors and the cult of celebrity images in the controversial and award-winning hyper-visualist’s photographs and attended his Parisian banquet with the highest hopes of stuffing my starved belly to the hilt this past Friday night.  Given the extraordinary size of the venue, the massive duo of Amanda Lepore banners swaying across La Monnaie’s grand façade heralding the gems within, and the fantastic breadth of LaChapelle’s work I expected absolute grandiosity within.  I was not disappointed – at least not entirely.

After purchasing my 10 euro ticket and ascending the sweeping staircase to the first floor I was a bit vexed by the traffic-jam causing placement of two of LaChapelle’s most famously audacious photos - Courtney Love's "Pieta" to my left (a personal favorite) and the crowned-by-thorns Kanye West as Christ to my right - facing each other on recessed walls in the entry way.  I fought a league of viewers (most notably a tragically spikey blond coiffed woman in a tattered peacock-motifed floor length coat bearing a sense of entitlement that only Love and West themselves could match) to read the accompanying annotation (excellent explanations for all of the photo groupings, by the way) before crossing the threshold into the next room, a stark white-walled and high-ceilinged space as big as a ballroom where LaChapelle’s fantastic “Deluge” was blown up to mesmerizing proportions.  Ah - now this is what I came to see.  A truly brilliant commencement, I thought, until I began to ponder the disconcerting mystery of the ten feet tall 3D cutouts of crushed and California-plated car grills lurking about the rest of the walls.  Okay, I admit I skimmed through the OT but surely this reformed Catholic would know if Noah was out repoing hotrods.  I turned to the two "making of" the exhibition videos at either side of the room for salvation but sadly they were surrounded by people and cramped in cubby holes smaller than Carrie Bradshaw’s closet when La Monnaie is probably big enough to accommodate an IMAX screen.

Unfortunately this sense of claustrophobia pervades the exhibiton.  I’ve been in confessionals bigger than the shoe box where LaChapelle’s “Awakenings” series hangs and, like the collection's subjects, felt as if I was being forced to hold my breath underwater.  I couldn’t help but notice that not only were LaChapelle’s gloriously white trash Americana photos from Heaven and Hell done a total injustice by the tic-tac sized inlet where they were displayed but also that given the hundreds of photographs LaChapelle and the organizers had to choose from these in particular were remarkably out of touch with the gawking Parisians, let alone this American, in a post-Bush (hallelujah!) era.  Upon arriving at the last of the rooms housing the group entitled “Accumulations,” I sarcastically quipped to my boyfriend that the collection was aptly named because the bungled placement of the explanatory text at the entry forced patrons to accumulate and cock-block the entrance.  Once I pardonnez-moi’d loud and ungraciously enough for Peacock Coat (she was stalking me, I'm sure of it) and the rest of the cock-blockers to grant me access, I was shocked to see a disorderly tour guide and her minions sucking up the center space in a room that wasn’t big enough to accommodate Paris Hilton’s cameltoe in “Hi Bitch, Bye Bitch,” let alone the hordes of people clamoring to spy the vacuous celebrity-without-a-cause’s smiling purple slit.

But, despite the undynamic-at-times placement of the photographs, the thin Friday night crowd that was somehow still too bloated for the venue and the baffling misuse of what could have been an extraordinary viewing space, the exhibition was definitely not without compelling moments.  The relevancy and socio-religious implications of photographs like “The Deluge” and “Holy War” were hauntingly profound when compounded by their larger-than-life scale and exhibition in the broader context of other theologistic LaChapelle spoofs such as the “Jesus is My Homey” series.  Beautiful and lucid celebrity eye candy portraits abound as well as those that touch with humorus irony on culture and consumerism.

LaChapelle lovers should not miss this show, although personally I left craving the midnight snack of the LaChapelle on my coffee table since the impact of many of the Guernica-sized pictures suffer from the limited space of the viewing rooms and the ceaseless rubbing up against the ass of my fellow exhibition goers frustration was a bit much to bear.  And unfortunately the TMI about your neighbor is even worse in the tiny gift shop, although the selection of posters and postcards is fab.

If you are reading this Monsieur LaChapelle: B-R-A-V-O.  But please take note that size does matter.

David LaChapelle

February 6 - May 31, 2009

Le Monnaie de Paris 11, Quai de Conti 75006 Paris

10:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m. daily; Late Opening Monday and Friday until 10 p.m.

http://www.monnaiedeparis.fr/images/expo/pdf/DP%20LaChapelle.pdf