Get the kiss

This is what Degas aspired to be. Born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, Cy twombly who inherited his name from his baseball player father, was about to become one of the most controversial and major artist of the 20th century in America. Cy Twombly is clearly an artist who works in a very intense way on a group of work equally working, in the early years of his career, in both painting and sculpture.

The starting point in his youth went in 1947 when he entered at the School of the Museum of fine Arts of Boston and painted works he describes as “abstract seascapes”, these are his early works. Under the influence of his parents he then spent a year at Washington and Lee's newly created art program before moving to the new capital of modernism.

While his interests were slightly pointed in Dada, Surrealism and the art of Kurt Shwitters he moves to New York in 1950 to study at the Art student League, where he is exposed to a wide range of contemporary American and European works. At this time he is confronted with shows of American keys artists such as Jackson Pollock. At the League he made a very determinative encounter with Robert Rauschenberg also a student at this time, linked with him by generation ties, friendship and a close artistic influence.
Briefly, he first came to prominence at this time when his graffiti work appeared to subvert abstract expressionism.
Studying at the Mountain College in North California from 1951 to 1952 and travelling to Italy and North Africa with his fellow Rauschenberg, on the return to New York the artists were called to a joint exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1953.
These early works were generally in black and white. In a work such as zyig (1951) for instance, Twombly worked on the idea of the primitive, notions of ritual whose inspiration was took from his travel in North Africa. Obviously these are works where we can feel the hand of the painter. Something which was generally developing in the American world at this time threw works such as Jackson Pollock or Robert Motherwell described by Clement Greenberg as the American type painting.
As Twombly was still young at this time, his challenge was to find a way to go beyond these masters.
In the first works created after his return to New York, Querzazat and Tiznit (1953), he maintained the black and white uniform of Abstract Expressionism but he added something more. Indeed, the scratching suggest that impatience with the status quo which was setting in. He also changed a generally dark palette for one more suffused with brilliant white and began to striate the surface influenced by his discovery of archaeological sites in both Africa and Italy. This influence of ancient ruins began one characteristic of his work by painting these phallics vernacular architectural structures and forms found in nature.
The gathering of primitive, classical, ethnographic and archaeology is also apparent in sculptures from this time: Untitled of 1953 also transmits the memory of Morocco and Italy.
“For myself the past is a source for all art is vitally contemporary (…) I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements”.

From 1953 to 1954 Twombly was drafted into the army where he served as a cryptographer. In this event we can see that his personal life feed his work as he modified the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing and writing, creating composition in the dark after lights out. These were blind drawings resulting in elongated forms and curves which became one of his signatures in his later works.
Following this idea of blind painting, in 1955 he was proposed a third solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York and then gave a new direction in his work. Hence, he rent a room in a hotel and starts drawing the lights out in order to loose his academic training, distort his graphic skills and began to reach his own more personal expression in the work.
It is clear that while he was exposed to the vitality and energy of Abstract Expressionism, Twombly was able to unite American and European tendencies. And, the graffiti-like scratches and frenetic lines that developed his work from the mid 1950s simultaneously referred to and also subverted the then-dominant painting mode of Abstract expressionism.

In 1957 we enter in the mature period of the work. Exhibited at the Stable Gallery for the third and last time, he presented one of his major work Panorama which he painted in Rauschenberg's Fulton Street studio, the only surviving painting of a group of six or eight works. As a matter of fact, Twombly often destroyed his works, highlighting the ephemeral characteristic of a work of art.
At this time he returned to Italy to live there with wife and child, there he started to read Stephane Mallarme's poems who symbolic whiteness will be a major inspiration.

According to his work, Twombly was an artist very conscious of his hands and what they could create. He didn't made any huge compositions or sculptures, the paintings were very much about a certain graphic style linked with the movement of the paint across the canvas. Thus there is a huge physical importance in his work.
In the work Poems to the sea created by 1959, once again we can feel the influence of Surrealism's automatic writing where the marks put together while the artist is actually sort of blind, create something, a whole together which is something in itself rather than the representation of something.

There is a cycle theme in Twombly's work, in addition to tribal and archaeological reference, were paintings such as Hero and Leandro created in 1981 – 1984 which became much more liquid. In these allusions to the water, the group has some alternatives with the work of Turner. Through his concerns with water he also made sculptures around 1980 equally very much related to the sea and to boats. These works emphasise ideas that he had found expression not as much in painting but rather in poetry with poets like Mallarmé or Keats that he frequently read. Twombly was clearly constructing (an abstraction and) a frequent allusion to the conditions of the natural world (sea, sky, landscape and floating water).
These ideas reached its climax in his later works such as Untitled VII (Bacchus) painted in 2005 where we find a relative allusion to the sensual pleasure of life threw the reference of the god of wine and a certain freedom drunkenness also inspired by ancient history.

Cy twombly clearly made a breaking on conventions to find something completely new, with all these works he choose the metaphor more than the description. Twombly's work seems to capture a fragment of a felling compelling us to use all our senses to complete the experience. Following the words of Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Modern, expression and experience are the beauty and the poetry of his vision.

Seven days in the art world

Accessible même pour ceux qui n'ont pas un grand attrait pour l'art contemporain, Seven days in the art world permet à tous les lecteurs, sans exception apparente, de se rapprocher avec ceux pour qui l'art est devenu une sorte de religion alternative.
Pendant sept jours, non situés dans la même année s'étendant donc sur une période relativement plus longue, Sarah Thornton, sociologue diplômée en Histoire de l'art, se glisse au coeur de sept systèmes liés au monde de l'art contemporain. Tour à tour, la sociologue étudie et observe en profondeur chacun de ces systèmes contemporains à savoir, la vente aux enchères New Yorkaise de Christies, maison de grande renommée, un séminaire au California Institute of the Arts, le marché annuel de Bâle, la remise du Turner prize par la Tate modern de Londres, le qg du magazine Artforum à New york, le studio de l'artiste Takashi Murakami et enfin la Biennale de Venise.
La journaliste intérimaire entre au coeur de chacun de ces domaines prescrivant une liste de questions précises conscieusement absorbées par son fidèle mégaphone. Malgré l'évidence d'une recherche extremmement poussée et détaillée, Sarah Thornton tournerait presque son enquête, nous en déplaise, en magazine people. Débutant toujours par conscieusement décrire l'allure et le style de la personne qu'elle interpèle, directeurs, marchands, artistes, journalistes, sans exception, le lecteur a alors l'impression de partager une cigarette et un café avec la personne en face, au bord d'un zinc. C'est cette impression de familiarité qui fait le trésor de l'oeuvre de la sociologue britannique en un sens où elle offre une vision simple où les principaux actifs acceuillent le simple amateur à bras ouverts dans un monde pouvant parfois paraître excessivement imperméable et dont le public s'effraie sans même essayer de l'infiltrer.
Evidemment, Thornton n'oublie pas de souligner le côté souvent élitiste et codifié de certains de ces milieux dont bon nombre d'artistes tentent d'échapper dans le but de préserver l'intégralité de leur intégrité. Cependant, chapitre aprés chapitre, le lecteur se prend petit à petit au jeu s'imaginant, à l'image d'un roman, à travers les yeux de l'auteur au coeur même de l'action de ce monde puissant constitué par les institutions contemporaines.
Le premier chapitre consacré à la vente aux enchères de Christies s'ouvre sur la préparation personnelle du chef des ventes Christopher Burge dans sa loge. A la manière de vocalises, Burge s'entraîne à énumérer le montant des pièces. La majorité de l'enquête ne s'adresse pas au moment même de la vente comme l'on pourrait s'y attendre mais sur l'avant, la préparation d'un des évènements les plus commenté à travers le monde de l'art. Avant d'entrer en scène, Thornton décripte méticuleusement chaque geste de l'équipe de la maison des ventes et l'angoisse permanente envahissant l'aura de son chef emblématique.
C'est encore là l'exactitude et la pertinence du propos de l'auteur, le choix du moment crucial, celui dont la totalité des évènements dépend, où les tensions de chacun, y compris le lecteur, atteignent leur apogée.
C'est ainsi que l'on assiste à plus de douze heures de séminaire au California Institute of the Arts, ou Colarts, dirigé par l'emblématique professeur Michael Asher. Tour à tour placés au coeur de l'amphithéâtre de l'école californienne, le lecteur assiste au passage des jeunes étudiants-artistes présentant leurs travaux à une critique collective, véritable consécration. On assiste alors à un monologue plus ou moins préparé,une réaction énigmatique d'Asher et le développement d'un débat, plus ou moins ouvert. L'audience lit, tricotte, prend note, certains se sont assoupis mais tous souffrent de l'attente d'une reaction du leader Asher. Voilà ce que Thornton nous décris consciencieusement. En réalité le propos va beaucoup plus loin qu'une description, il ouvre une porte qui nous était interdite depuis longtemps. Evidemment, tous ces évènements ne fonctionnent pas à huit clos. Et, si l'intérêt s'y prête, un nombre considérable d'ouvrages et reportages sont disponibles et accessibles au large public décrivant le fonctionnement de la grande Biennale de Venise. Cependant, une conversation avec certains participants au bord de la piscine d'un hôtel de la cité des Doges ajoute une pointe d'authenticité clairement non négligeable.
Thornton capture l'essence, la complexité et la masse de contradictions qui entourent le monde de l'art et fascinent souvent ceux qui y sont extérieurs.

The contemporary Art world is a loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art, writes Thornton, and we are fortunate that she was able to penetrate all of these opaque, protected and often sacred littles groups.
Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

There is a special phenomena in England. After the over-whole power of London the spread capital, the provincial world and its representation seems slightly poor in comparison.
When you live in Leicestershire or in Nottinghamshire, museums seems rather a familial sunday discovery rather than a cultural specialized place. It may appears as a non-objective view of it but however the gratuity of museums, except for the dominant place of London, seems to deeply affect institutions inside the lands of the country. Obviously I may hope this point of view stays discussable.
Entering in the New walk Museum and art gallery in Leicester for instance is like enter in a recreative place. More recreative than creative at all. After crossing the white polished marble columns above a neo-classical entablement, following the plan of the museum we first face to a room dedicated to the "natural process of the world". Classified by continents, it may be kind of instructive for children who invade the space. There is nothing to say against that or it would be seen as elitism and claim. At least, between an egyptian and african room, the main one is found in the embodiment of a conference room. On the wall is exposed their best collection inherited from British masters like John Constable and european ones as Pissaro for instance. As we feel reassured to finally found them, optimism fall down when these are hung on the walls side to side, sometimes without any frame like vulgar posters.
Upstairs seems more clear in the hanging of masterpieces, one room dedicated to the exhibition of the moment, others to the rest of the collection. The hanging appears clearly better and healthier for the canvas. In opposition other matters are infecting and appear inappropriate for any museum institution as everyone is talking, children shouting and running while touching a Degas' canvas pointing at the top of the figure depicted. And there is no one to react whilst the security guards of the rooms are peacefully reading sitting on their chair at the corner.
Obviously, questions have to be asked to ourselves. Does a less important town like Leicester or Nottingham should present minor respect or financial means for collecting and promoting history of art? Less financial system doesn't mean no means at all.
Of course, cities of a wider influence like Birmingham are better served in the distribution but there is nothing compared to the power of the Tate Modern Gallery of London when even moving staircases are installed inside the building. What is really about the part of art culture government in museums in Britain. Does people are forgetting little cities behind the shining capital?

Tous mécènes

5000 donateurs ont répondu à l'appel lancé le 13 novembre par le Louvre, pour compléter la somme de 4 millions que demande le vendeur des Trois Grâces, tableau du peintre allemand Lucas Cranach considéré comme un des chefs d'oeuvres de la haute Renaissance allemande.
Il aura fallut seulement douze jours pour récolter la somme de 328 000 € manquant au budget.
Les trois grâces bientôt dans les collections du louvre, un chef d'oeuvre appartenant à la collection Seligmann depuis sa création en 1531,
- "l'étonnante perfection de l'oeuvre, sa très grande rareté et son remarquable état de conservation ont permis de la décréter 'trésor national'", explique le Louvre.-
Bien évidemment, comment laisser cette pièce clé quitter le territoire Français sans la compter parmi les chefs d'oeuvre de la collection de l'établissement classé parmi les plus visités au monde. Peinant à regrouper trois millions d'euros, l'institution mythique semble pourtant forcée de se tourner vers les donateurs privés. Bien que le geste reliant l'oeuvre à son public soit honorable, le fond semble plus complexe puisque ni la RMN ou les financiers associés ne semblent au rendez-vous face à cette situation de crise.
Il est bien clair que dans ce climat d'instabilité où les musées continuent de jouer un rôle d'évaluation fondamental, l'état ne suffit plus à financer, mettant sous tension les grandes institutions publiques françaises, le mécénat culturel des entreprise se voit donc en chute libre ( moins 66% en 2010 selon l'enquête annuelle lancée par Admical).
Les institutions sont donc bien souvent entrainées à des logiques de co-achat peu courantes. C'est le cas ici, avec l'achat presque mendié d'un trésor national, un évènement surprenant sur le territoire français (cependant non inédit: rappelons nous de l'achat du Saint Thomas à la pique du maître George de La Tour acquis en 1988 par le Louvre), pourtant fréquent hors-frontières. Une quasi-première donc dans l'histoire de la muséologie contemporaine, où l'état éloigne une fois de plus le monde de l'art des premières lignes.
Il fût un temps où l'art était gratuit, où Picasso offrait une partie considérable de son oeuvre à son propre chauffeur et il est un temps où ses héritiers en bloque la vente mettant en doute la possibilité d'un tel don.



En outre, la liste des mécènes privés sera publiée dans le musée et pour ceux qui ont généré un don supérieur à cinq cents euros, une découverte en avant première leur sera offerte.
Tombola?