Inscribing the Divine: The St. John's Bible

Inscribing the Divine: The Saint John's Bible, LUMA Museum, through Oct. 23

In 1998, master British calligrapher Donald Jackson (b. 1938) was commissioned to hand letter and illuminate the entire bible, from Genesis to Revelation. No longer proclaimed as the first such project in 500 years, it may well be the first ever that involves an English translation approved by the Catholic Church. The author of “The Calligraphers Art”, Jackson has been a major force in the revival of same, and his abilities have been complemented by up to 20 collaborators under his supervision.

The thirteen bifolia from the Pentateuch and Psalms included in this exhibit only hint at the scope of this project, which cost over 4 million dollars, and has lasted over 10 years. A Committee on Illumination and Text, comprised of Benedictine scholars, supervised theological content. Their approach has been ecumenical and text centered, offering a cogitation on ideas rather than picture windows onto the world.

Chris Tomlin’s meticulous, naturalistic illustrations of plants and insects appear occasionally in the margins and Aidan Hart’s Byzantine figuration appears in the later books. But mostly this project reflects the simple, clean, though sometimes enervated elegance of Donald Jackson’s calligraphy, complemented by the bright, loose splashes of color in his illuminations.

The narrative illustrations are few and far between, but when they occur they can be fascinating and innovative. For example, the dark, spotted, discontented faces of Adam and Eve are a far cry from the sweet, innocent bunglers of tradition. Nor are they full figure nudes. And God does not appear as that big old guy in the “Creation” that Wiligelmo and Michelangelo once imagined him. Indeed, the seven stages of creation, beginning with the “big bang” and culminating in abstract human images that resemble Paleolithic rock paintings, might just as well have been used in a grade school text book on natural history.

The institutional, ecumenical and decorative priorities of this project, and its supervision by a calligrapher, may preclude exciting, visionary imagery, But since the modern technology of reproduction and distribution allows this kind of labor intensive project to be profitable, hopefully, many other Christian institutions will be inspired to commission their own versions with a greater emphasis on story telling. Most of the bible illustration done today is at, or below, the aesthetic level of cereal boxes. From the fall of the Roman empire up to the 19th Century, biblical narration was the primary subject of Western art, and nothing that came after has sustained its focus on human dignity, destiny, and spirituality.

Tass War Posters

Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945
Through October 23, 2011, Art Institute of Chicago.

(the text in red was edited out)



In 1939, Clement Greenberg famously distinguished avant garde art from kitsch, the “predigested art” manufactured for the “ignorant Russian peasant” who knows “no discontinuity between art and life”. That distinction has framed the discourse of American art ever since, but it was a matter of life and death for Soviet artists once social realism was officially established by Stalin, and even more so after June 22, 1941 with the beginning of a Nazi invasion that would take 23 million lives.

In 1997, 26 mysterious brown paper parcels were discovered deep in a storage room of the A.I.C. ‘s Department of Prints and Drawings. They turned out to be the legacy of a cultural exchange 50 years earlier that brought to Chicago a collection of war propaganda posters created by TASS, the Soviet News agency. Ranging in size from 5 to 10 feet tall, their irresistible visual impact is stunning, especially now, after they have been restored to their original condition, augmented with spectacular pieces from other museums (including M.O.M.A and the Hoover Institute) and displayed chronologically to tell the story of both the art studio that created them, and the nation that was fighting for its life.

Thanks to Greenberg’s theoretical distinction, American museums have only shown Russian art which is early 20th C. avant garde. . A single example of Russian realism, impressionism, or Orthodox icon painting will not be found in the encyclopedic collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. But now, perhaps, that will change with the impact of these dramatic posters, many of which are as graphically severe and strong as they are narrative. Possibly the art director of the TASS studio, Pavel Sokolov-Skalia (1899 – 1961), himself a very good designer, deserves much of the credit. As one might expect from a government run production studio that employed 300, at least half of the work does not rise above the illustrations one would expect to find in a grade school text book. But there are also many examples of the painterly approach and tendency toward abstraction that characterize the work of Sergei Kostin (1896-1968) even if he was criticized for preferencing aesthetics over message.

And most enjoyably, as the Nazi armies were driven back, there is that dark, cantankerous Russian sense of humor that the war propaganda of other nations just can’t match.

This is a fun show! Now, when do we get to see the great Russian realist painters of the last 200 years?

Go Figure - at the Smart Museum

Go Figure - through September 4, 2011
Smart Museum, University of Chicago


Representational art may have lost status in the postwar artworld, but it never disappeared, and now Smart Museum curator Jessica Moss has selected nine artists “to illustrate pivotal moments in figurative art of the last 60 years”.

Confining herself to pieces from the Smart and other Chicago collections, chronologically her story begins with Leon Golub (1922 – 2004) .



His “Colossal Heads” from 1958 look more like the rough, corrupted surfaces of two colossal Shigaraki clay pots, but there’s just enough facial detail to identify them as ugly monsters and thus express the moral despair of the ‘monster roster’ Chicago painters of the 1950’s.







A decade later, both the morality and the despair is gone, and we have the personalized , defiant fetishism of the Chicago Imagists, represented here by a dozen pieces by Christina Ramberg (1946-1995).






In New York, the figure re-emerged in Pop-Art, but recognizing that the artworld has become more global than ever, Ms. Moss brought in a giant folk-pop head by Ravinder Reddy (b. 1956) who is represented by Walsh Gallery here in Chicago, but works at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. Though reflecting a tradition that is measured in centuries rather than decades, he still manages to convey the vapid banality of Jeff Koons.





Another world-wide phenomenon, especially important in the Midwest, has been the celebration of art brut. The outsider artist shown in this show is Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), whose obsessive drawings were first collected by doctors at the California mental facility where he was confined and posthumously validated and collected by Chicago artists, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson.







For the figure in conceptual art, a wall-sized installation by S.A.I.C. M.F.A. Clare Rojas (b. 1976) was commissioned. To get the full effect, it needs to be accompanied by her performance as alter-ego “Peggy Honeywell” the folk singer. But even on its own, it would still make for a sharp, decorative mural in a corporate cafeteria.








The five above genres are rather obvious choices for a Chicago based exhibit of figurative art in the contemporary artworld. It’s the other four that are more remarkable, beginning with a few sound suits by S.A.I.C. professor, Nick Cave (b. 1959), who has created a genre all his own. The accompanying theory of concealing racial identity is a bit depressing, but the beautiful costumes are as wild and wacky as anything worn by the Sun Ra Arkestra.









Another local artist whose work echoes African American music is James Kerry Marshall (b.1955) whose narratives of ghetto life are as poignant, topical, structured, and rhythmic as a song by Muddy Waters. American scene painting was banished from high-art by 1950, but, happily, the Chicago artworld encourages it as long as that scene is African American. (another distinguished local practitioner is the sculptor, Preston Jackson)

Neither of the other two artists are from Chicago, but they do represent two of the greatest figurative traditions in the world, a world that now includes its largest civilization, China.

Most artists from the Middle Kingdom gain attention in the West by entering the discourses of contemporary art theory, which makes this show’s selection of a traditional brush painter like Yun-Fei Ji (b. 1963) so remarkable.











Yun-Fei made his Chicago debut at the Smart Museum’s 2008 exhibition of Chinese artists responding to the displacement caused by the Three Gorges Dam. His current scroll continues to work that theme, though he has added two of the most powerful members of every Chinese community, the uniformed officials and the ghosts.







More topical than classic, Yun-Fei may lack the gorgeous power of the great masters, but the gentle humor of his work is as timely as an editorial cartoon.

The other great figurative tradition is post-Renaissance European - in this case, that variety of post-Impressionism that keeps attention on observed detail, but abandons that careful sense of volume that was cultivated from Giotto to Picasso. In middle-brow art, this is the world of art fair photo-realism, in high-brow art it’s Lucien Freud or David Hockney, and it’s fellow Brit, Sylvia Sleigh (1926-2010) who was chosen for this exhibit.









Sleigh was a brave choice because there’s not an ounce of irony, angst, or social criticism in her work. Her “Turkish Bath” gets points for political correctness by replacing appetizing young babes with handsome young dudes. (I think the old dude in front is her husband). But no major museum has collected her painting, and her primary credential for the world of high-art remains her huband, the critic and Guggenheim curator, Lawrence Alloway. Also, her large paintings look quite amateurish as 10 inch reproductions. She has no sense of volume, and since she clearly is trying to make people look sweet, real, and beautiful instead of depressing, sick, or ugly, she appears to be a failure.







But in person, her life size paintings are delicious and far, far removed from amateur naivete. Most remarkable of all is her portrait of Leon Golub, his wife Nancy Spero, and their three sons, with paintings by Mom and Dad on the wall behind them. (including, happily enough, Golub’s “Colossal Heads” which is also in this exhibit) This is the depiction of a happy, healthy, successful middle-class family, so different from the world of monsters that haunt the parents’ imaginations.

Despite 60 years of disparagement, there’s still an enormous artworld out there that is devoted to depicting a happy, healthy life within a beautiful world. Even if some of it’s most prominent practitioners are notorious kitch-meisters, many of them are good artists, and it’s about time that major art institutions, like the Smart Museum, has taken notice of them.

What's still missing are examples of non-cartoonish figure sculpture and volume sensitive painting in the Baroque or Impressionist traditions.

And wouldn't it be shocking if the museum did a show called something like "Go Landscape", with the best contemporary landscapes from Chicago and elsewhere?

************

This turns out to have been one of the most reviewed exhibits of the year:

*Lori Waxman at Chicago Tribune

*Jason Foumberg at New City

*Paul Klein in his Art Letter

AIC : New Galleries of African and Indian Art of Americas

The most exciting features of the new galleries of African and American Indian art are the videos intermittently projected high up on the wall. Made by the filmmaker/anthropologist Susan Vogel (who also founded the Museum of African Art in NYC) they don’t tell a story so much as create an ambiance for distant peoples and places that’s ignored by the same generic system of display cases used in the new Japanese galleries. But still these displays of ethnic artifacts are far less ambient and educational than those recently created for the Field Museum of Natural History. And even though these new galleries are more than twice the size of the previous spaces, there isn’t that much more new material that really belongs in an art museum. Though, happily, there are a few exceptions, including some pieces that were first seen in the 2006 special exhibit of “ Casas Grandes & the Ceramic Art of the American Southwest”.












The bowl depicting a Mogollon hunter (950-1150 Ad) is one of the most exciting pieces in the entire museum.










While over on the African side, there’s a highly animated carved wooden headdress for the Yoruba Gelede ceremony in Nigeria. It’s a remarkable figure sculpture that came to the AIC in 2008. It’s also remarkable that this time the artist has actually been identified (as either Fagbite Asamu or his son, Falola Edun). So much of the African art that we see in museums was made within the last hundred years, but the artists are hardly ever identified, probably because once an artist establishes a name in our artworld, his work no longer qualifies as an authentic tribal artifact. Hopefully, this restriction is being lifted, and museum galleries of traditional Indian and African art will eventually accept the work of living masters of their traditions, even if that work was made for art collectors instead of native rituals. So, in some ways these new galleries represent an important step forward (especially for the African section which was recently just a short, narrow hallway) The AIC’s collections in these genres are still nowhere near as substantial as the Chinese and Japanese material. But they’re growing.

Rosofsky and Burge at the Elmhurst Art Museum

The Unsentimental Journey of Seymour Rosofsky,
Denise Burge: Original Dirt through September 4,
Elmhurst Art Museum
(pieces shown: Rosofsky “Lady of the House – Venus” (below,
Denise Burge “Machination” (above))






Though presented as separate exhibits, the oil paintings of Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) and the quilts of Denise Burge (MFA, 1991) both overpower their walls with dynamic, centrifugal energies, while offering a fascinating contrast across generation, ethnicity, locality, gender, and media.

A second generation, blue-collar Jewish kid from Chicago, Seymour’s talent was recognized early and he ended up studying oil painting with Boris Anisfeld at the Art Institute. He picked up that Russian’s dreamy, decorative, modern classical style, and also became an art museum junkie, both in Chicago and Paris, drawing from a variety of primitive, post-impressionist, surrealist, and expressionist art. But when he put it all together, it was all about him. There’s a musty, cluttered, claustrophobic feeling about his work, with the viewer often placed in the role of the therapist puzzled by the highly emotional, confused world of a patient who feels trapped in a female dominated, family centered life.

Roughly 40 years younger, Denise Burge comes from the hills of North Carolina. Quilting is a traditional medium and her crude, overstated imagery and improvisational use of materials resembles the outlandish art of Howard Finster. But it would be a mistake to call her a folk artist. For the past 20 years, she’s been an art academic, and folk-themed quilting on environmental themes was just the strategy she employed 10 years ago. (more recently, she’s moved on to installations and then video). Unlike Rosofsky’s work, hers is extroverted and the narrative, rather than being ambiguous, is spelled out in text across the surface. The bold patterns and strong, clear fragments of color in the fabric are much more attractive than the blurry fog of Seymour’s rather pasty oil paints, and mark her as a very sharp designer. If the quilts don’t disintegrate (and some areas do appear fragile) they may well be recognized as exemplary in that medium.

In the catalog to Rosofsky’s 1985 posthumous retrospective, his friend, Chicago artist//historian/critic Franz Schulze defended his “rich color, carefully interwoven tonalities and assured drawing” against the 1972 attack by New York critic, Robert Hughes, in Time Magazine who railed against “Rosofsky’s clumsy paintings” and “wretched thesaurus of clichés.” . But Seymour’s special strength is honesty. His paintings are stocked with clichés from Giacometti, Bacon, Chagall, etc because he loved art history, and they are no more clumsy, cluttered and confused than his own happy/sad domestic life. He exemplifies the passion, resilience, and time honored futility of his favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, while Denise Burge might be considered just one more smart and talented academic working the politically correct mindscape.

Marion Kryczka at the Chicago Cultural Center

Marion Kryczka: Recent Paintings – Chicago Cultural Center, through July 3

(text in color was edited out of Newcity version)



Marion Kryczka’s well made, highly ordered, masculine vision of reality may fit the blue collar streets of Chicago, but he’s been peripheral to the contemporary artworld, unrepresented by galleries and remaining an adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute for 30 years. Kryczka’s work also 1acks either the photo finish and sentimentality, or the anger and ugly distortions that other corners of the artworld might appreciate, and he’s not even goofy, damaged, or unsophisticated enough to qualify as an outsider.

As critic, G. Jurek Polanski, wrote about the 1999 exhibit in the Fine Arts Building, “The variety of pieces tell a story, one in which each work, while complete in itself, is placed to build a context with its companions and comprehensively reveal the artist's personality.” And the same is true today, although the story is changing, as the artist mellows into his sixties. The still-lifes include the same dead fish, sharp knives, and bottles of alcohol on low-rent kitchen counters that he’s been painting for decades. But the light feels less harsh, the whiskey has been replaced by wine, and fish seem almost happy to be offering their tender, pink, slaughtered flesh. The vanitas theme is still explored with various kinds of skull, but now the shelves are cluttered with more of the stuff that he’s been accumulating in his life.


There are also some genres that weren’t there 12 years ago. Two magnificent winter cityscapes of his north side neighborhood tout Chicago as an energetic, seasoned, comfortable metropolis. Most remarkable are three views of the Donald Judd sculpture park in rural Texas. Judd’s minimalist stainless steel cubes are the cold, hard face of the industrial world. But set into a bright, sunlit gallery, Kryczka has co-opted the reflective surfaces of sculpture to meditate on beautiful impermanence, just as Monet did with Rouen Cathedral.. As with every painting in this exhibit, every brush stroke and patch of color not only defines a recognizable piece of reality, it also participates in the dynamics of a very tight design. And there are no people. It’s just the man behind the paintbrush and the quiet world in which he lives.

Art theory has not respected regionalism for more than 60 years. But if our local encyclopedic museum ever devotes a gallery to Chicago, it’s my guess that Marion Krycyza’s work will be there. Not because it reflects the trends of Chicago art (it doesn’t), but because it reflects so many lives that have been built here..

East-West at Murphy-Hill

Yan Shi Zhong





East Meets West, Murphy Hill Gallery, through May 20


(text in color was edited out of the Newcity version)


In 1955, the Soviet Union sent Konstantin Maksimov (1913-1993) to Beijing to train a select group of Chinese students how to make social-realist art.



Konstantin Maksimov



And thus began another east-west cultural exchange, one that is still practiced by Chinese artists around the world. Like their commercial counterparts in capitalist countries, their message was restricted to what they were selling. But with Maksimov, as well as many others, the work often seems to have been made to impress other artists, not just the unwashed masses, and at its best can be enjoyed as subtle, expressive, post-Impressionist painting just as much as works by Cezanne or Van Gogh. And so, over 50 years later, we now have the 15 members of the “Oil Painting Society of Chinese American”, most of them art professors in Midwestern universities, and now free to express whatever they wish. All but one were sent to peasant villages during the Cultural revolution, triumphed against the odds to win the post-Mao national competition to get into college, studied art with the generation trained by the Russians, learned English, and finally realized the dream of coming to America.


Victor Wang




Zhi Wei Tu







Each one of them would be a success story even if they never lifted a brush again, but indeed these 15 are still painting, some of them quite well, and a few of them, like Zhi Wei Tu and Victor Wang gaining national reputations despite an art education that was incompatible with either the minimalism or conceptualism of contemporary art. They have much more in common with what is here disparaged as middle-brow, even if American portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes done in traditional European styles continue to have many talented practitioners. Several of these American born artists have also been included in this exhibit.,
David Leffel



including David Leffel, who channels Rembrandt,



Clayton Beck III







Clayton Beck III who reincarnates Nicolai Fechin,


Matthew Almy





and Matthew and Magdalena Almy whose Ravenswood Academy, here in Chicago, harkens back to the ateliers of Bouguereau and Gerome. Notable about the pieces chosen, is that so many of them are still-lifes of Asian sculpture or ceramics, reminding us that cultural exchange continues to go in both directions. Joining these two groups, is a selection of more traditional water media painters from the Chinese Artists’ Association of North America, founded by a legend of Chicago’s Chinatown, Andy Chan.



Andy Chan






Their techniques, materials, and subject matter may be ancient, but the brash effect of their work is as modern as an interstate billboard. All of this, plus more, takes place in 40,000 square feet on the third floor of the old Sears Roebuck corporate headquarters near Homan and the Eisenhower, in the last show this space will have before it is converted into commercial development. Special credit goes to Chinese born artist Mary Qian who dreamed up this enormous display as a kind of homage to the generations of Chinese artists who came to America before her,

Mary Qian




and to African-American Ralph Murphy, the entrepreneur who always finds a way to make interesting things happen.




Li Hu






Sherrie Mcgraw






Ruby Wang






Richard Lee





Li Lin Lee






Feng Xie