Wrapped Lemons: Angela Perko & W.J. McCloskey

I had never heard of Angela Perko until recently when I saw Wrapped Lemons apres W.J. McCloskey (above); I had heard of William McCloskey, but  couldn't remember how although I did remember why.  The elusive artist painted strangely captivating wrapped fruits, a genre he may well have  invented.
The artist Angela Perko, also  turns out to admire the Canadian artists known collectively as  the Group of Seven, artists I've mentioned recently.  Perko cites the group, especially its lone female member Emily Carr,  as influencing  her use of color.  She arranges colors fearlessly, as comfortable with dissonance as she is with delicacy.   Like the Seven, Perko explored painting through landscape; like McCloskey she was born elsewhere but eventually moved to California.
I think Perko's Wrapped Lemons  refers to  McCloskey's Florida Lemons (below).   Perko's painting lets us imagine a world where our eyes can separate planes of vision.  This feature, along with her use of depthless color achieved through barely visible brushwork, makes this a true cubist artwork.  There is a sad  story about the McCloskey painting.  According to The City Review (May 21, 2014), it was offered for sale at auction in New York City but "It failed to sell."

We are spoiled; we take the year-round availability  for granted of any fruit we desire.  Historically speaking, this state of things began just yesterday but there are artists whose works remind us of the magical properties of fruit, especially citrus fruit, with its contrasts of sweetness and tartness in seductively tactile containers.

Wrapped Oranges, painted in 1889 by the little known William J. McCloskey, brought me up short when I first saw it (see below).  These arrangements of fruits in tissue on what appear to be tabletops evoke a mysterious sense of place out of time, much as the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi' s empty rooms do.     Tissue was the preferred method for packing  these precious fruits for shipping before the days of refrigerated trucks..

The story of  American still life painting begins with the Peales (Charles Wilson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Raphaelle Peale, Titian Peale, and Margaretta Peale to name just five of the prolific and close-knit family).  Their paintings were among the best that a new nation produced during its early decades.  The Peales were also known as  experimenters in tromp l'oeil, a technique used to deceive the eye into seeing relationships between  planes and dimensions that are not there in ostensibly  realistic spatting.

Like the Peales, WillIma McCloskey and his wife Alberta Binford, painted works of great technical virtuosity; William excelled in portraits and fruit, Alberta in portraits and floral still lifes.  It was while staying in Los Angeles during the 1880s that the young couple established their artistic reputations.  Already southern California had begun to promote itself as the garden state of the west, home to  plentiful orange groves.  An unusual couple in many respects, the McCloskeys did not stay put, making their whereabouts at any given moment hard to pin down; but they lived in New York City (on 23rd Street near the Art Students League), London, and Paris and exhibited their works in Atlanta, Buffalo, and Providence, at least. Neglected after their deaths,  McCloskey's wrapped fruits again attracted  public interest beginning in the 1990s.
Both artists bring to the table, so to speak, an enthusiasm for  paint that makes  joie de vivre tactile.

Angela Perko is represented by Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, Santa Barbara.

For further reading about William McCloskey: Partners In Illusion: Alberta Binford and William J. McCloskey  by Nancy D.W. Moure, Santa Ana,  Bowers Museum of Art: 1996.

Images:
1. Angela Perko - Wrapped Lemons apres W. J. McCloskey, 2015, Sullivan Goss: An American Art  Gallery, Santa Barbara.
2. William J. McCloskey  - Florida Lemons, 1919, Sotheby's, NYC.
3. William J. McCloskey - Wrapped Oranges, 1889, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

Thoreau MacDonald: First Snow at Algoma

"...the end of our exploring to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot

One autumn years ago I saw the first snow at Algoma.  It was the middle of October, the time when Canadians celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.  I was on the road that runs along the north shore of Lake Superior, on the way from Sault Saint Marie to Wawa.  When snowflakes started to hurtle toward my windshield, I turned around and headed south.  Two days later at the McMichael Collection in Kleinberg (north of Toronto) I saw A.Y. Jackson's First Snow At Algoma  and thought "I have been there, too."

The McMichael centers on paintings by Jackson and the other members of The Group Of Seven, Canadian landscape painters active during the period between the two World Wars who are, lamentably, little known in the U.S.  Also works by Thoreau MacDonald (1901-1989), the son of Group of Seven member J.E.H. MacDonald.  Thoreau MacDonald was an artist and illustrator who preferred to work in black and white, as he was colorblind.  He was also a walker and, as such, sensitive to his place in a land populated by otters, minks, fixes,  and lynx.  His artistic method was to keep his attention focused on the moment - that thing that is the only thing any us ever has - and to make his art when he was back in his studio.  What was it that held the attention of this handsome lynx?

Meanwhile, an exhibition The Idea Of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris is on now and will continue until January 24, 2016 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.  It is the first, time that Harris had been the subject of abn exhibition in the United States.

Images:
1.  A.Y. (Alexander Young) Jackson - First Snow, Algoma, c.1919, McMichael Collection, Kleinberg, Ontario.
2. Thoreau MacDonald  - Lynx At Kleinberg from Birds And Animals,  McMichael Collection, Kleinberg, 1968
3. Throeau MacDonald  - cover of Birds And Animals, McMichael Collection, Kleinberg, 1968.

Who Decides ?

"You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can't be both."  -  Gertrude Stein

But if you think Gertrude Stein laid that particular argument to rest, keep reading.

I. -  The title of the painting above tells a story, but not the whole story.  A Room at the Second Post-Impressionist Exposition - The Matisse Room was painted in 1912 by Roger Fry to commemorate the second exhibition of Post-Impressionist Art held in London. 

Roger Fry was a historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance when he was converted to modernism by Paul Cezanne’s paintings, seen in Paris.   Four years later Fry organized the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in London.  By 1910 these artists were not news, but Fry coined the catch-all term them that stuck, so we remember the moment.  At the same time, the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph is credited with first use of the term avant-garde (a military term originating in French) to describe what made artists modern.  That French culture aroused deep suspicion in the British only makes things more delicious.

II -  Call it a protest or a piece of performance art, it was an “anti-Renoir” event.     On Monday, October 5, a small group gathered in front of the Boston Museum of Fine Art to denounce the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, dead these one hundred years,   The participants held homemade signs, one stating “Treacle Harms Society.” They demanded that the museum remove a number of inferior Renoirs (there are a lot of them) and instead give their precious gallery space to  artists like Gauguin, Cezanne, etc.

The spectacle provided great fun to the public including a bemused Carol Off who interviewed the instigator  Max Geller on the CBC news program As It Happens   It is not often remarked in polite company just how mediocre Renoir's paintings can be; after all their prices are astronomical, assuming you can locate one for sale.   Ar his best, Renoir's pictures show him to be a gifted member of the dazzling group of French Impressionists painters.   But  his  pretty young women lived a precarious existence as working women in the 19^th century city, those nubile young nudes were intended not for the walls of museums so much as for the smoking rooms of lascivious rich men.

The protest could have been held, with equal justification, at the Clark Art Institute in Willamstown, at the  other end of Massachusetts.   The Clark owns thirty-two Renoirs, some very  fine and as many that are mediocre.  For my taste the star Renoir at the Clark is the still life Onions (1881).  Here Renoir applies his modeling technique to vegetables; what takes my breath is that the artist captured  the delicate  shimmer of their  papery skins.  

Sterling Clark’s taste for Renoir began in 1916 when he purchased his first painting, Renoir’s   A Girl Crocheting.  Despite its demure title, the subject is really the young woman’s luscious body.   There is ample evidence (Nymphs and Satyr by another French artists, William-Adolphe Bougereau, for instance) that Sterling Clark's taste in art extended to what we might call fuzzy porn.

Four years ago, the Clark deaccessioned ( a euphemism for sold off for $$$) one of its Renoirs,  Woman Picking Flowers, through a London gallery,  asking price $15 million. As the flower-picker was Camille Monet, wife of Claude Monet, the painting has some significance  as the document of a friendship.   Asked why the Clark decided to sell this Sterling Clark selection  at an art fair, director Michael Conforti explained in a written  statement that the offering “would afford both transparency and visibility since this art fair is so widely followed and well attended by those individuals who are most likely to have an interest in works of this quality.’’   Notice that this does not  answer the question. 

There may come a day when Pierre-Auguste Renoir is remembered as the father of Jean Renoir, one of the great 20th century filmmakers, rather than for his paintings.

III. - Both an art historian, Sir Kenneth Clark, and a structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, believed that collecting-and arranging, call it curation or bricolage, is a basic human activity.   Lévi-Strauss added a dark reminder: that ancient Roman curators were procurers, agents for hire.

Museums as we know them were built on the collections of royalty, beginning in the eighteenth century.   The first curators were hardly free agents, either.    By the 1860s, French artists were fed up with the curators of the official salons and began their own counter-exhibitions, joining aesthetics and commerce under their own banner.

The third act in this drama took place in New York City when Alfred Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art,, became art's chief arbiter of value, a model that ruled the art world until, like other ideas, it wore out its welcome.  It fell to curator Lucy Lippard, whose exhibition Six Years: The Dematerialization of the art Object from 1966 to `1972 to threw down the gauntlet.  The modern museum had made a fetish of art works?  Very well, we will dematerialize them!   And so they gave us conceptual art. 

Contemporary suspicion of institutions has given rise to art fairs (places where art is sold) and kunsthalles, (places where art is displayed but not collected).   The anxiety about separating the good from the bad seems to be a human constant and we have given the curator the power to assign value, but what values?  Aesthetic or monetary?  And let us not forget eros.  Deciding seems to be an activity very much like peeling one of Renoir's beautiful onions.

Revised 10/11/2015.

Images:

1. Roger Fry - A Room at the Second Post-Impressionist Exposition - The Matisse Room , 1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Onions, 1881, Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.
3. Pierre-Auguste Renoir - A Girl Crocheting, 1875, Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.
4.