MoMA Mia! Vincent, Joan and Pipilotti Ring Out 2008
by Beth S. Gersh-Nesic
Sixty-five degrees fahrenheit in Manhattan on Sunday, December 28, 2008. The annual holiday mass of humanity squeezes along Fifth Avenue, inching passed Rockefeller Center to view a splendid 75-foot Norway spruce Christmas tree at 50th Street, and then branches off--some going north and others going west on 53rd Street, making a beeline to the Museum of Modern Art, the Mecca for midtown museum-lovers. Ah, New York at Christmas! The economy may be tanking and the Middle East may be exploding, but NYC holiday crowds remain in full throng--as if on automatic cruise-control until January 20th.
Entering MoMA to see Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night feels like a pilgrimage to Lourdes or the Mona Lisa. Teeming crowds are everywhere: the lobby, the escalators, the bathrooms. I quickly pick up my admission ticket and sprint up the stairs to the second floor where I receive another ticket, a timed-ticket, to see VVG three and one half hours later. In the meantime, I visit Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937 twice, before and after lunch (out--because the lines for the cafés look three hours long); sit through Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out, once; slowly ponder Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, while listening to her commentary on the audioguide (a must), and spent the last fifteen minutes quickly scanning Focus: Jasper Johns (some oldies, but goodies in few small rooms). At 3:30 sharp, I inject myself into the VVG fray, cheek to jowl within the narrow confines of five exhibition spaces. It's Rockefeller Center on Fifth all over again.
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
The Night Café), 1888
Oil on canvas
28 1/2 x 36 1/4 in. (72.4 x 92.1 cm)
Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903
© Yale University Art Gallery
What were these curators thinking? VVG in Manhattan during Christmas Week, installed in five little galleries, instead of the large spaces given to Miró and Dumas? The requisite pas de deux among strangers, jockeying for an unobstructed view, could try the patience of Job. But for this obviously reverent crowd, the challenges to reach yet another Vincent shrine do not disturb. For we came to see the "promised land," interpretations of sunrise, twilight and the witching hour, a veritable Vincent van Gogh Heaven: The Potato Eaters (1885), The Night Café (1888), and The Starry Night (1889), mingling among lesser known paintings, such as The Cottage (1885), The Stevedores in Arles (1888), Eugène Bock, The Poet (1888), and Landscape at Twilight (1890)--all rarely on view in one museum. In addition, there are numerous drawings, letters (drawings in letters), and books opened to poems that might have inspired Vincent's fascination with the sights and sensations of life lived after dark.
For example, a couple strolls in the shimmering light of The Starry Night over the Rhône (1888), hung in close proximity to MoMA's own The Starry Night (1889)--though unfortunately not in the same room. It is a wondrous vision in comparison to the seedy Night Café and The Dance Hall in Arles (1888) which hang opposite this first celestial scene in the south of France. "[I have] a tremendous need for, shall I say the word--for religion--so I go outside at night to paint the stars, and I always dream a painting like that." (Letter to Theo from Arles, September 28, 1888.) In this room alone, we see Vincent's extraordinary empathy for the good, the bad and the lonely.
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
The Starry Night), 1889
Oil on canvas
29 x 36 1/4 in. (73.7 x 92.1 cm)
Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York
In the room devoted to farmers and wheat fields, The Sower (1888) shows off its almost candy pink clouds embedded in an Easter grass green sky while a round lemon yellow sun rises behind the peasant's head like a halo. The opportunity to drink in these authentic colors leaves me weak in the knees. I am transfixed and reluctant to move on, lest I forget again that reproductions of Vincent's paintings lie. No wonder this sweaty crush of humans jumps through MoMA's hoops to reach the finish line. Most of Vincent's fan base knows that his works never look right in the books or online. Therefore, we attend these VVG exhibitions at any cost (including limited time, space and air supply) in order to commune with the one who could turn the darkness of our souls into light. How fitting during the Festival of Lights (Hanukah), Christmas and the Winter Solstice.
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I viewed the Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937 exhibition twice--once without an audioguide and once with. The emphasis for this curatorial endeavor seems to be "obdurate" brutality aimed at the process of making art that would visually act out an "anti-painting" mentality. The audioguided tour concentrates on the physical evidence (featuring commentary by the curator Anne Umland and the conservator James Coddington). Here, Miró's non-paint elements, such as wire, feathers, cork, heavy rope, papier collé and wood of all sorts, operate as this artist's WMD for the Winsor-Newton (founded in 1832) set. However, the thesis began to wear thin as I considered what fellow-Spaniard-living-in-Paris Pablo Picasso had already achieved with some of these materials much earlier in the century: rope in Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 (Musée Picasso, Paris); newspaper clippings, along with Georges Braque, in various works, such as Man with a Hat, 1912-13 (MoMA); sand in Student with a Pipe, 1913 (MoMA); cardboard and string construction in Maquette for Guitar, 1912 (MoMA); and aluminum foil, in a maquette for the cover of Minotaur, 1933 (MoMA). While we must not dismiss Miró's astonishing creative powers that can simultaneously amuse or appall, the lack of contextual examples (which are on hand) short-changes the trusting MoMA visitor and reduces important scholarship to narrow conclusions.
Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983)
Dutch Interior (I), 1928
Oil on canvas
36 1/8 x 28 3/4 in. (91.8 x 73 cm)
Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
© 2008 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris
Photograph: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Imaging Services
Another complaint: the Dutch Interior series installation had no photographs of the Hendrick Martensz Sorgh works that Miró drew upon for inspiration. For example, Dutch Interior (I), Montroig, July-December 1928 is based on Sorgh's Lute Player (1661). Notice that Miró exaggerates the proportions of the original work--a large head for the male lute player and an oversized beagle for the dog. Meanwhile Sorgh's listening woman, the tablecloth and the meal on the table become a parade of Miró's whimsical shapes dancing upon the surface of a swirly white expanse.
Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983)
"Un Oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse," 1927
Oil, aqueous medium, and feathers on glue-sized canvas
32 7/8 x 40 1/4 in. (83.5 x 102.2 cm)
Private collection
© 2008 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris
Finally, the title Un Oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse was not translated. "A bird pursues a bee and shags it" would be my intuitive guess, not because baisser means "to shag" (it means "to lower" or "the drop") but that baiser, a vulgar word, provides the buzz of the bee--the implication of sound and sight together. (Notice that even in 2009, we can only publish an acceptable synonym and not the exact translation.)
Ms. Umland believes that the title "resists" translation. No--that's the museum "resisting" full disclosure. At the very least, the words should be defined: bird, bee, drop/shag--especially in this context where these beautifully formed letters are the most legible features. The "bird" looks like a few pasted feathers. "Poursuit" meanders between the feathers and a blue blob, in accordance with Surrealist automatic writing. The "bee" seems to be the thick blob of cobalt blue paint on the lower right, and a yellow elliptical line seems to lasso or hover over the black calligraphic "poursuit." This yellow ellipse can jump into three-dimensions, as if it were a circular ribbon tied around the word "poursuit," although it seems to be purposefully broken.
Perhaps, that break represents a rupture, a physical separation in paint that marks the artist's desire to discover a new path toward his creative conscious. The raw, unprimed canvas, which bears this drama, may be the symbolic "tabula rasa" that sets the course for the artist's new directions. Painting and Anti-Painting divides Mirós ten-year odyssey into twelve sustained episodes of "assassinations." The last work in the show, Still Life with Old Shoe (1937) proves that the seductive muse, Painting, eventually pulled Miró back into a long-term relationship. He just couldn't quit her, folks.
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Installation view of Pipilotti Rist's Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
at The Museum of Modern Art, 2008
Multichannel video projection (color, sound), projector enclosures, circular seating element, carpet
Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
© 2008 Pipilotti Rist
Photo: © Frederick Charles, fcharles.com
Pipilotti Rist's huge video installation entitled Pour Your Body Out (2008) transforms the museum's enormous two-story atrium into a giant public living room. Sitting on or sprawled around a huge donut shaped couch, people either killed time waiting for the Vincent show or took a well-deserved load off their feet. This idea of relaxing in a lush natural environment projected onto three gigantic screens proved to be too good to be true. For Ms. Rist, a Swiss artist, does not indulge pleasuring for long. Anyone who knows her video Ever is All Over (1997), where a delicately-dressed woman wields a long-stemmed "flower" that shatters the windows of parked cars, should anticipate long sequences of tranquility interrupted by sudden dissonant action or imagery.
In Pour Your Body Out, a giant wild boar sniffs your face on one mega-screen while on the opposite mega-screen a nude young woman with long, light red hair and pale white skin also crawls through the grass. Both hunt for apples and both devour the whole apples in their mouths, full-frontal mastication. On a scale of one to ten, the boar was a nine--much more fascinating to watch all the way through the sequence. The woman--a bit too Elvira Madigan slo'mo for my taste--looked almost comic. Soon fields of red tulips with verdant green stems gently sway against a postcard-perfect cloudless sky and dissolve into water that slowly gives way to garbage drifting in a watery street or stream. Mercifully, the water changes into a pond with lily pads twined around human feet, and then this scene transforms into green pastures with bunches of apples hanging overhead, heavy on the limb. Very cosmological, if you follow the sequence from apple to apple. At this point, before the boar returns, the sky is a dazzling blue, and we are transported back to late summer in December again.
View a selection of works from Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.
View a selection of works from Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937.
See a clip of Pipilotti Rist's 1997 video Ever is All Over on YouTube.
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Vincent van Gogh and the Colors of the Night, through January 5, 2009
Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937, through January 12, 2009
Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), through February 2, 2009
The Museum of Modern Art is located at 11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues New York, NY 10019-5497 (Telephone: 212-708-9400; Website). The museum is open Saturday through Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., and is closed on Tuesday. Admission is $20.00 for adults, $16.00 for senior citizens (65 and over with ID), and $12.00 for full-time students with current ID. Free admission for members, children sixteen and under, and all visitors to the museum during Target Free Friday Nights, sponsored by Target, each Friday evening from 4:00-8:00 p.m.
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From your Guide: Beth Gersh-Nesic is an art history professor, author, art critic and the director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service which offers tours, lectures and workshops in various venues, including museums, galleries, artists' studios and arts organizations.
