Antonio Canova at the Art Institute of Chicago

A review of Canova : Sketching in Clay - at the Art institute of Chicago

Canova, Hebe, 1816

The modern aesthetic often prefers the quick sketch to the finished work in both painting and sculpture.  They’re so much more spontaneous,  expressive, and fresh.  Many old master painters only appear in American museums for their preparatory drawings.

 

 Chicago has yet to see a major exhibit of marbles by Antonio  Canova (1757-1822) - and that's not surprising.  They emphasize smoothness on the outside, emptiness on the inside, and a dryly rational organization of surrounding space as well as narrative.  They were indeed appropriate for the Age of Enlightenment as well as empire  . But they were anathema to the modern world that soon followed.   Modern sculpture defined itself as the exact opposite.  Forward looking sculptors were even expected to carve their own stone, start to finish.

A celebrity in his own time, multiple editions of Canova's designs  were executed by the craftsmen in his studio.  His hands touched only the clay sketches - and sometimes  gave finishing touches to the marble.  This exhibition offers several opportunities to see the original clay, the finished marble, and sometimes the intermediary steps as well.

The finished marbles for my favorite clay sketch (shown above)  did not travel to this show, so we’ll have to go to the internet for images:

The angle of the torso is quite different - the clay piece  leans back, the  marble leans forward. Even more important is the inner dynamics.  The clay seems to erupt from the unfurling drapery around the middle. The marble drapery just sits there in frozen perfection.

Yikes! Canova was a "modern" sculptor when he wanted to be. (Though those inner dynamics  can also  be found in sculpture throughout art history, beginning with the very earliest)

Turning to the front view -  compare the uplift in the clay with the heaviness of the marble

 ( from Victoria Art Gallery, Bath )

Right:  Berlin State Museum

 

See how drapery reveals bulging volumes beneath it in the clay, but not  the marble.

Should  the clay version that came to this show really be called a study ?

It was hardly dashed off in a few hours.

It's more like a finished presentation piece intended as a gift for some important person.

Canova, Humility, 1783

 

This one feels more sketchy -

and it's another one of my favorites.

The finished marble - a detail in the tomb of Clement XIV - is so different, there's no point in showing it.  Suffice it to say - it's nowhere near as expressive 

 

It appears even more powerful in this lighting

Canova, Madame Mere, Latizia Bonaparte, 1803-5

The portrait of Napoleon’s mother is the largest marble in the exhibition, and it’s accompanied by several sketches in clay and one intermediary plaster cast.  From a distance, this view is a nightmare - the head sits so awkwardly on the torso.  Up close, it’s almost as bad since every detail feels frozen, lifeless, and divorced. This looks like a funerary monument - it belongs in a crypt.

This clay sketch is much more lively- and it’s sweet as well.  As gallery signage notes, it does indeed project  "an air of powerful yet informal majesty". Noting the inscription on the base, this may not have served as a preparatory sketch at all - but was spun off from the project to serve as a gift..

St. Helena, Roman,  Head 325 AD, Torso second century

This ancient piece is often credited as the model for Canova’s Madame Mere.  How appropriate!  Helena was the mother of another great emperor: Constantine. 

The head was also created apart from the torso — maybe two centuries later - but it still makes for a better match . The torso attends to inner volume and displays the interaction of opposing forces that pleases the eyes and gives it life. Note, for example, how the front leg of the chair meets and continues the line of the drapery fold above it.  Canova’s version ignores that possible connection.

Canova, Magdalene, (Genoa version - 1893-6)

This is the other large marble in the show. The green to pink colors in the stone feel so flesh like it’s spooky - because the form appears so cold and lifeless.

The exhibit put this piece near the floor, so viewers looked down at it.  But as this online photo shows, it looks better when the chest is eye level.

Here is a beautifully lit detail from the Museo Canova.

Believe me - it looks nothing like this on the floor of Regenstein Hall.

Canova, Magdalene (Hermitage version, 1808-9)

This later copy is now in St.Petersburg.

The detail is more delicate - especially in the hair - but the power in the torso has been lost. Perhaps that reflects the changing taste of Canova - or maybe a different crew did the carving for him.

Donatello, Magdalen , 1440

We can’t blame Canova for catering to the taste of his contemporaries - he had to make a living.

But still…..

Donatello’s wood carving is on fire with spiritual intensity.

Wouldn’t you like to see what she sees?

Canova’s marble is a sweet young thing, tearing up with shame.

Wouldn’t you like to touch her soft skin?

Canova, Bust of  Paris, 1809

This piece gives us a good opportunity to study Canova’s final touches to the marble surface.

It was gifted to Quatremere de Quincy - a distinguished art administrator and architectural theorist - so I’m guessing that Canova did the very best job he could.

Photos cannot reveal the special quality of the polished surface.  It’s infused with light, and transitions are oh-so soft.  It almost feels backlit - especially when compared to the flatness of the plaster casts in the show.

Canova, Nymph and Satyr, 1786

Many of the clay "sketches" really appeared to have been taken much further.  This one, however, might have been mostly done in fifteen minutes.  It’s a rape scene  - isn’t it?  Or at least one of those old school interactions where "no" really means "yes".  Nowadays about as politically incorrect as Trump.  But it’s so expressive - and it designs space so well - it’s often been used to promote this exhibition.

Overall, this is a welcome  show of a surprising master.  Will his reputation be revived, now that the Modernism that rejected him continues to fall farther away from contemporary art?  He even has an Instagram account:  museocanova

Bernini, Torso of Pluto, 1621

Yet he still seems eclipsed by Bernini whose terracottas came to Chicago in 1998. Compared with that Baroque master, Canova’s work is just "pretty".

  

Jackie Kazarian at O’Connor Gallery

 A review of Jackie Kazarian at O’Connor Gallery, Dominican University

Jackie Kazarian,  Um 1, 14 x 11, Acrylic on panel, 2023

Not all of Kazarian’s pieces in this show suggest impending cataclysm so much as the piece shown above, but there is an edgy anxiety about them all.  A powerful, uncontrollable force is arriving - both beautiful and deadly. Nothing here relates to a specific event - but it’s not surprising that in 2016  the artist painted a 26 foot long canvas marking the hundredth anniversary of  the Armenian genocide. 

There is something like a Japanese aesthetic at work here - a feeling of immediacy and impermanence - accentuated by the swift movement of a paint laden brush.  That bright, clear, fresh feeling of NOW is what I most enjoy in this work - especially  in the twisting spatial gymnastics executed by some of the brush strokes.  Disaster is always immanent- but that’s the nature of being alive - and life is a beautiful thing.

"Um 1", the piece shown above, is  a study for a larger painting, but it also stands alone as a fine painting itself.    

Jackie Kazarian,  Umwelt 1, Acrylic, watercolor, rice paper on paper, 40 x 40, 2023

The larger pieces in this show, however are mostly problematic - or perhaps this reviewer just cannot handle so much aggression and chaos.  Wesley Kimler is another local artist who works a similar territory though Kazarian is more about wonder and less about horror.  She creates a rich, complex, often overwhelming environment — much like the super-fast transformations of our civilization.

Jackie Kazarian, Um 5, 16 x 16, acrylic on panel, 2023

This one feels like a walk through the commercial center of a country I have never visited. Information overload. Too much excitement.  I am already lost.  Compositional elements seem to have been selected because they were the most unexpected - which is not uncommon in local non-objective painters ( Magalie Guerin, Molly Zuckerman- Hartung)

I first discovered Jackie’s work as hung in the back room of a Suzanne Doremus show at Zolla Lieberman Gallery., which is something of a coincidence, since Doremus herself was discovered by an art critic, Dennis Adrian,  in the back room of someone else’s show.  What goes around comes around?

 

 

Candida Alvarez : Multi-Hyphenate at Monique Meloche

 A review of Candida Alvarez at Monique Meloche

Celebrities are multi-hyphenate when they’re celebrated for more than one thing — like Rihanna for example: singer, songwriter, actor, businesswoman, fashion icon. Wow !-- amazing  - isn’t she?  Candida’s list of accomplishments is more modest. ( painter, professor, mother , daughter ) - but isn’t modesty one of her greatest strengths?  She does not appear to be aiming for artworld celebrity. Perhaps  that’s why it took  many decades before galleries wanted to show her.  Despite being a Latina person of color, her work does not proclaim identity.  Despite work that galleries claim is "conceptually rich", concept is neither sufficient nor necessary to notice and be captivated by her work.  She makes things that  are exceptionally beautiful - and that’s enough.

Alvarez loves color - she loves shapes -  and she weaves them together into  multiple streams of sensual awareness that erupt, flow, and interact with each other - as opposed to a painter like Helen Frankenthaller, for example, where one single, powerful flood is surging into each painting.  And as opposed to many painters whose shapes are provocative, angry, or threatening.  Candida’s happy shapes elicit joy and wonder - like those of Bob Thompson.

Candida Alvarez, Partly Cloudy,  84 x 72, acrylic , paint pen, glitter on linen, 2023

Doesn’t the above feel like idyllic life on a tropical island?

It’s one of four large pieces with a title that’s meteorological and an affect  that feels like a day at the beach - as experienced from  a variety of viewpoints including aerial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Raphael, Madonna with the Chair, 1513-14

In her New City interview the artist reveals that the above was one of her sources for this series, along with iPhone photos of her mom.  It's good to be inspired by high art as well as family affection.  To me, however,  these pieces bring to mind the soft shapes, contiguous edges, and various colors of laundry spinning around in a dryer, with a small red or yellow sock, for example, poking out among the blue or black trouser legs.

 

 

 

 

 

Candida Alvarez, from the Palimpsest series, 2021

Here’s a piece from her previous series.  The tropical island is still there, but here it’s seen through the windows of a very lively interior.  Is it really a palimpsest  ? - a technique currently  fashionable in academia because it involves written text - one that has been partially covered over.  Not really.  A preliminary sketch was printed onto her canvas - but text was never involved.  And even if it were - the artist is quoted as saying: "Success in my paintings is when I forget where I started."  An anti-conceptual manifesto if ever there was one.

Gallery shot of  Palimpsest at  Gavlok Gallery, 2021

I wish I had seen this exciting show.

 

 

 

The smaller pieces on display are somewhat disappointing - perhaps because of reflections off the protective glass. The works actually look much better online. But still, there is  a  collapsing smallness - a claustrophobia I never feel in the larger work. They make me feel trapped, though others may feel right at home.

Candida Alvarez, Skowegan #7, 12 x 9, 2023

flashe paint and pencil on yupo paper.

The reference to Raphael might remind us of the Raphael rooms at the Vatican - a place where over-achieving artists were once recruited ( or compelled) to furnish with the best of their work - for an exhibition that has lasted 500 years - and still counting.

This exhibition at Monique Meloche comes down in January and the four large, meteorological pieces will scatter to the four winds.

I realize that of the many problems faced by our civilization, this is pretty far down the list. But is it too much to ask that some mega-buck donor to our art museums might also fund buildings, like the Rothko Chapel, for secular artists with a compelling, universal, upbeat achievement in wall size painting ? Candida would certainly be one, among several, local  candidates for such a project.

N

Remedios Varo at the Art Institute of Chicago

 

Remedios Varo,  Creation of the Birds, 1957 (detail)

Thanks to Seymour Rosofsky and other Chicago Imagists, our local artworld is familiar with a secular, lighthearted, even comic variation of that European inward looking practice called surrealism.  Remedios Varo (1908-1963) has some of that, but her work is infused with historic Christian art rather than American popular entertainment.

Uccello, Procession of the re-ordained in a church, 1469 (from the Miracle of the Desecrated Host)

Her imagination was strongly affected by the early Renaissance in Italy - especially Paolo Uccello’s  (1397-1475) conflation of Albertian pictorial space with Christian mysticism.  Isn’t the above example magical and delightful?  It’s also horrible - ensconced in a narrative series that culminates with the public burning of a Jew at the stake on absurd charges - along with his wife and two young children.

Varo, Out of the Tower, 1960 (detail)

There’s something strange and a bit creepy about the above image by Varo, but the iconography is strictly personal and puzzling.  Much more charming than malevolent, or even ominous.  More like fanciful - and so we can consider her work more like entertainment than prophesy or revelation.  Like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, Varo provides charm and technical virtuosity —  with a shiny veneer of erudition.  The exhibit is like a box of  expensive ,  hand crafted, chocolates filled with creams of exotic flavors.  And her technique is especially impressive - with the linear precision of engineering drawing combined with  paint that has been dripped and blown as well as brushed. The sense of a dream-like inner illumination rather than sunlight is also remarkable.

 

Though far removed from Chicago gallery artists, Varo is not so different from another local artist,  Rita O'hara,  whose work is more distant from the Quattrocento, but often more like a serious encounter with a contemporary human psyche.

 

 

 

Rita O'Hara 

This piece appears to be an homage to Varo. 

It’s the heartfelt imagination escaping from a dreary existence.

Varo, The Juggler (Magician)  (detail), 1956

I’m not sure that this piece was meant only to entertain - but if the intended content were serious, what might it be?  Something wrong may be happening: having lost their identity,  those poor, dreary people are in thrall to  some kind of magical spirit. It would certainly work as an allegory for contemporary American populism.  Other interpretations see it as a positive, enlightening experience for the crowd.

Or perhaps - that ambivalence was intended.

Hieronymus  Bosch, The Conjurer, 1502. (Possibly a copy)

Some have related it to this earlier painting.