Saturday, December 24, 2016

Painting Colors after 1910, continued

Childe Hassam
Strawberry Tea Set
1912
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Childe Hassam
Castle Island, Boston Harbor
1916
watercolor, gouache
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Erich Heckel
Bathers on the Beach
1913
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Meise:  Before you started your dance education there was time when you wanted to be an actress. But you experienced yourself as unable to act. In Feelings are Facts you describe a situation at an Actors' Workshop as follows: 'While trying to fulfill a 'sense-memory' assignment, I pantomimed walking along a riverbank and retrieving a stone from my show. The response was 'We don't believe you'. I couldn't generate a proper illusion. The spectacle of someone trying to create an illusion was not, of course, interesting.'  I liked this text passage a lot. Maybe we could appreciate looking at someone who's trying to create illusion.

Rainer: . . . or appreciate looking at failure. A failure can be interesting. Which reminds me of Sally Silvers' solo in AG Indexical where she turns the video around and she's copying the male solo part in Balanchine's Agon.  She, of course, has no ballet training whatsoever, and she's imitating this very masculine, physical series of moves which, it's apparent, she can't do in the style in which it's supposed to be executed. So, it's a failure, but it's fascinating because she is so involved in it. She's doing it in her own way. I got this idea and the first time I saw her do it I said: 'OK, that's it. Don't try to make it any better. You're trying to do this thing that is impossible to do perfectly, and you have created something else.' That is exactly what my situation was in acting. In their eyes I was no good at anything I tried. They also said I was too cerebral: 'We can see you thinking'.

– Yvonne Rainer and Michaela Meise, extract from Once a Dancer Always a Dancer: an Interview with Yvonnne Rainer (2008)

Erich Heckel
Before the Red Curtain
1912
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Max Pechstein
Summer in Nidden
ca. 1919-20
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Max Pechstein
The Bathers
1912
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Brücke (exhibition catalog cover)
1911
woodcut
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Auguste Macke
Hussars on a Sortie
1913
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Kurt Schwitters
Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist)
1919
oil, assemblage and collage on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid


Christian Schad
Composition in N
1919
wood relief with collage
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Berlin

"Without my relationship to what may seem like these inanimate objects, I am just an indulgent misfit. If the spirit of being isn't present in the face of this work, it should be destroyed because it's meaningless. I am not making some things. I am making a synonym for the truth with all its falsehoods, oblique as it is. I am making icons that present life in terms of our death. A bouquet of mistakes."

 Julian Shnabel, from Statement (1978)

Wyndham Lewis
Composition in Red and Mauve
1914
gouache on paper
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

František Kupka
Language of the Verticals
1911
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Edvard Munch
Geese in an Orchard
ca. 1911
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Bart van der Leck
Study for Compositions no. 7 and no. 8
1917
gouache on tracing paper
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid