William Kentridge: Return

By Simonida:

Wonderful intellectual exaltation, a new kind of “intaglio”, playing with two and tree dimensions.

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William Kentridge | “Return”

February 19th, 2010 by Wesley Miller, Art21 Associate Curator

Shot in his Johannesburg studio in South Africa, William Kentridge reveals the process and unusual presentation of the video work Return — a component of the larger project (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo (2008) — which had its debut on the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy.Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.The traveling exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, February 24–May 17, 2010. Kentridge’s The Nose, a multimedia production of Shostakovich’s adaptation of Gogol’s story, debuts at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, March 5-25, 2010. Get a chance to hear the artist speak about his recent projects, in conversation with Paul Holdengraber, as part of the New York Public Library’s series of talks Live from the NYPL on March 12th.

February 19th, 2010 by Wesley Miller, Art21 Associate Curator Shot in his Johannesburg studio in South Africa, William Kentridge reveals the process and unusual presentation of the video work Return — a component of the larger project (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo (2008) — which had its debut on the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy.Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.The traveling exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, February 24–May 17, 2010. Kentridge’s The Nose, a multimedia production of Shostakovich’s adaptation of Gogol’s story, debuts at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, March 5-25, 2010. Get a chance to hear the artist speak about his recent projects, in conversation with Paul Holdengraber, as part of the New York Public Library’s series of talks Live from the NYPL on March 12th.

Nature of planet Pluto and similar effect introduced in XIX century porcelain glaze

On Thursday (Feb. 4th. 2010), NASA released “the most detailed set of images ever taken” of the dwarf planet and also a composite video of it rotating.

http://www.aolnews.com/science/article/pluto-former-planet-ready-for-its-close-up/19345778

by Simonida Uth

The same visual effect was created by famous “Eosin glaze”, invented by Vince Wartha (from Fiume /Rijeka, borne 27th June, 1844, died 20th July 1914) and famed by: Zsolnay porcelain in 1893 . The Zsolnay factory was established by Miklós Zsolnay (1800 – 1880) in Pécs, Hungary and it was a family run business. The company introduced the eosin glazing process and pyrogranite ceramics. The eosin-based iridescence became a favorite of art nouveau and Jugendstil artists.

from art collection of Simonida and Robert Uth

from art collection of Simonida and Robert Uth

“ARTS OF ANCIENT VIETNAM: FROM RIVER PLAIN TO OPEN SEA”

Great exhibit, but you can’t help thinking that this is the place where Central American style meets Hindu art…..

Ancient Sphere Where Cultures Mingled

by Holland Cotter for New York Times, Published: February 4, 2010

Librado Romero/The New York Times

A pedestal from Van Trach Hoa village, Phong Dien District, Thua Thein Hue province, in the 8th-9th century.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

A stone carving of an imaginary animal, the Gajasimha, from Thap Mam, Binh Dinh province, in the 12th to 13th century.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Left, a wooden Buddha from the Fu Nan period, about the sixth century. Right, a stone carving of Dvarapala, ninth century.

In 1988 the art historian Nancy Tingley, then a curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, went to Vietnam to talk with museums about borrowing examples of the country’s ancient art for the first major United States exhibition. It was a bold idea. To most Americans, Vietnam still meant little more than the memory of a nightmare war. And who knew it had a great art tradition, never mind museums that preserved it?

The show didn’t happen. The diplomatic situation was volatile; negotiating loans proved impossible. The Asian Art Museum dropped out as a sponsor, and even after new ones signed on, the project remained in limbo. But Ms. Tingley stuck with her original plans, and her persistence, 20 years on, has paid off in “Arts of Ancient Vietnam: From River Plain to Open Sea” at the Asia Society Museum. Is the show worth the wait? It is. It’s fabulous. Perfectly (meaning modestly) scaled, with the kind of Asian art loans — matchless in quality, straight from the source — that we rarely see here anymore.

From the moment you enter the galleries you’re seeing things you won’t find anywhere else and certainly not in this combination: a bronze drum as hefty as a hot tub; a wooden Buddha, tall, dark and Giacometti-thin. Avid-eyed Hindu deities keep company with contortionist dancers. A tiny serpent of beaten gold basks in a spotlight. Ceramic plates and bowls crowd a room just as they had once filled the hold of a ship that went down in the South China Sea.

Once you’ve made your way through the society’s suave installation, you’ve seen treasures from 10 Vietnamese museums. You’ve time-traveled from the first millennium B.C. to the 17th century A.D. And you’ve style-traveled through dozens of cultures both inside and outside Vietnam itself.

Geographically Vietnam was made for trade. A narrow slice of land with a 2,000-mile coastline running from China to Cambodia, it was open to the world whether it wanted to be or not. Where nearby countries like Laos and Thailand are chunky and dense in shape, Vietnam measures at certain points less than 40 miles across. It has virtually no interior, no way to shut its doors and retreat.

As important as accessibility was its location at a nodal point where international shipping routes met. With countless natural harbors — its coastline might have been cut with pinking shears — Vietnam made an ideal layover for sea traffic. It also made a lucrative global marketplace and as such gave as good as it got.

It absorbed early formative influences from China, evident in metalwork (seen in the show’s first gallery) from the prehistoric Dong Son culture that settled in northern Vietnam in the last half of the first millennium B.C. At the time Vietnam itself was valued for its creative vitality. The bronze ritual drums made by Dong Son artists were sought-after collector items, with examples, some weighing close to 400 pounds, turning up not only in China but across Southeast Asia as well.

With the rise of the pre-Angkor state of Fu Nan in the Mekong Delta in the first centuries A.D., Vietnam’s cultural spheres expanded further. We still don’t know much about Fu Nan — there’s a lot of basic archaeological catch-up work to be done — though we do know that its people established harbor cities and experienced a wave of influence from India, which led to adopting Buddhism and Hinduism and their intertwined traditions of religious sculpture.

The tall wooden Buddha, its features time-smoothed almost to invisibility and its figure in profile like a parenthesis, reflects post-Gupta style conventions current on the subcontinent in the sixth century. But it was Hinduism that really caught on, first with the worship of Vishnu. We see him, with the breath-swelled body of a yogi and wearing a princely crown, in a stone figure on loan from the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

Devotion to Shiva also became in vogue, and soon much of the rest of the Hindu pantheon found its way into Fu Nan and its art: Ganesha, with his elephant’s head and pudgy body; Durga, a blank-faced warrior-goddess stripped down to her skirt for a fight; and Surya, the sun god, in his buttoned-up untropical attire of West Asian tunic and boots.

These immigrant divinities showered Fu Nan with prosperity until the mid-seventh century; then their largesse stopped. For reasons we can only surmise — maybe the appearance of overwhelming commercial competition — a vital state grew moribund and gradually dropped from sight.

To finish the article please go to:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/arts/design/05viet.html?scp=1&sq=%20%22ARTS%20OF%20ANCIENT%20VIETNAM:%20FROM%20RIVER%20PLAIN%20TO%20OPEN%20SEA%22&st=cse

The Asia Society Museum does itself proud with this show, a collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. And Ms. Tingley, aided in New York by Adriana Proser, an Asia Society curator, is to be commended not just for her scholarship, but also for keeping the faith in an art she believes in and clearly loves, and for delivering it to us, at last, so exquisitely packaged, so historically rich and so fresh with life.

At London Sale, a Giacometti Sets a Record

By CAROL VOGEL Published: February 3, 2010 New York Times

Carl De Souza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A sculpture (R) by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti entitled “Walking Man I”, at the auction house, in London.

One of Alberto Giacometti’s best-loved bronzes, “Walking Man I,” has broken the world record price for a work of art at auction, selling to an unidentified telephone bidder for $92.5 million, or $104.3 million with fees, at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday night. The previous record was $104.1 million, paid for a 1905 Picasso, “Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice),” at Sotheby’s in New York in 2004.In an overflowing salesroom 10 bidders competed for the six-foot-tall sculpture, which was conceived in 1960 and cast a year later. The mystery buyer bid by phone to Philip Hook, an expert at Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department. As the price kept rising, the bidding narrowed to just two contenders: Mr. Hook and Bill Ruprecht, the chief executive of Sotheby’s, who was bidding for another telephone client. When the winning bid went to Mr. Hook, the salesroom burst into applause.

Sotheby’s had expected the sculpture to bring $19.2 million to $28.8 million. The $104.3 million was more than three times the record for a Giacometti, which was set atChristie’s New York in May 2008 when “Standing Woman II” from 1959-60 sold for $27.4 million.

As soon as the hammer fell, speculation began as to who the buyer could be. Many dealers said the high price must have been paid by either a Russian or a Middle Eastern collector. Among the names that have surfaced are Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who has dropped enormous sums for important works in the past — he is said to have paid $86.3 million for a 1976 triptych byFrancis Bacon — and Boris Ivanishvili, the Georgian mining magnate, who spent $95.2 million for Picasso’s “Dora Maar With Cat,” a large 1941 portrait that sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2006. A spokesman for Mr. Abramovich said he denied reports that he had bought the sculpture.

To finnish the article please go to:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/arts/design/04giacometti.html?scp=1&sq=At%20London%20Sale,%20a%20Giacometti%20Sets%20a%20Record&st=cse

The Giacometti was not the only work to fetch a high price at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening. A 1913 landscape by Gustav Klimt, “Church in Cassone — Landscape With Cypresses,” brought $43.2 million from another telephone bidder. The price was a record for a landscape by the artist.

Related

ArtsBeat: Readers Respond to Giacometti Sale

An Art Market Suddenly at Dizzying Heights (February 5, 2010)