Peggy Guggenheim Collection - Venice

On my last gorgeous day in Venice, I visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. It was fantastic! It was a lovely building with intimate galleries and a terrace overlooking the Grand Canal. The collection was superb - I felt like I was taking a stroll through the history of early to mid 20th century art, as I recognised a good number of the artworks from art school textbooks.

Guggenheim was very interested in collecting Cubist and Surrealist works when she first started collecting, so there are a number of works by Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, Magritte, Duchamp, Gorki, Richier and others. Indeed, Duchamp was one of her advisors at the beginnings of her project in London. This Picasso is from 1937.

I loved seeing this scrumptious painting by Grace Hartigan, whose work I did not remember learning about in art history classes, but who was apparently just as well-known in the New York art scene of the 1940s and 1950s as all the male artists who were written about later in texts. I am certainly very aware of how female artists (scientists, thinkers, etc.) seem to have been erased from the collective memory, but are now suddenly reappearing (reclamation!) as having been there all along.

Another woman artist whose work with which I was unfamiliar, is Lynn Chadwick. This small sculpture from 1955 begs to be a large, public sculpture but I really enjoyed the lighting which created defined shadows on the wall behind it.

It was also a joy to enter a room and see Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space in the flesh (so to speak). A staple of modern art histoy, I have seen reproductions of this work so many times in books.

I attended the Gallery School on Saturday mornings when a teenager, after receiving a scholarship from the Art Gallery of Ontario, and one of the first things the class was shown was a short film about Alexander Calder, as an introduction to modern art and methods of a modern master. So it is always a joy for me to see Calder's work. This piece is unusual from other works of his, that I have seen, in that it is two dimensional and wall-mounted, as opposed to mobile and free-floating.

There were several large Jackson Pollock paintings, which are never a surprise to see in a major collection, but always a delight.

While there was minimal and geometric work by Vladimir Malevich, an artist whose paintings I have always liked, in the same room I found myself attracted to this piece, by another woman artist of whom I had never heard. The work of Irene Rice Pereira, while being two dimensional in form, appears three dimensional through layering and reflective surfaces.

I had to do a double-take when I saw the didactic for this work as I am familiar with the writing of English playwright David Hare but have never come across his American sculptor namesake before. Once again I found myself as much enamoured by the lighting and well-defined shadows as I was by the artwork.

The large 2017 sculpture near the café by Joanna Migdal gives proof that this collection continues to grow. Peggy Guggenheim bequeathed her collection in Venice to the Guggenheim Foundation and, though it is a magnificent historic collection, it is not static.

The Tidal Series - Collages

In July I posted some images from The Tidal Series, pastel paper drawings plus what was left of a series of acrylic paintings -- a little figure that I had cut out from one of the 18  4' x 3' canvases! So I was pleasantly surprised that four collages from the series were in that drawing box I re-discovered a few weeks ago. I never expected these collages to still be in existance!

 Around this time (1986 perhaps?) I was getting ready for xmas and making cards. That year I had the brilliant, crazily time-consuming idea of making individual collage cards with the figure from the Tidal Series enjoying falling snow. Needless to say, this involved a lot of gluing tiny pieces of white paper onto about 50 cards... I know I still have a few of the cards myself, but the little card box they are in is somewhere in the black hole of my attic studio. I will eventually find them, but not today.

These four collages, though, are not greeting card sized; they are 55 cm x 37 cm. The coloured paper is mostly standard copier colour paper, but the interesting bits have other sources. In those days in Toronto (and environs) industrial estates had dumpsters that could be scavanged for great art supplies -- the glossy yellow paper, silver paper and gold tape (which I cut in thin lines) all came from a dumpster. The patterned turquoise of the figure's skirt is from wrapping tissue from a gift a friend gave me. I used a mix of matte and gloss medium as my glue, so there is an overall sheen on the collages. I still have some of the silver paper and gold tape with my supplies almost 30 years later and I still save interesting scraps of paper for use in collage cards that I still make for special occasions.

I love the combination of bright pink and silver, something I associate with a smallish Jackson Pollock painting I saw in New York on one of my early trips there. I am pretty sure the image below represents the last of the four collages that I made -- I thought the figure by this time was self-assured and had coralled the stars into the gold "net" formed by the gold lines emanating from her hands.

Artist Biography Films

Over the past few days I have been catching up on some of the films I have wanted to see for awhile. I am not sure if it is a coincidence or I just happened to be in the mood for artist biography films, but that is what I watched. Gustav Klimt is one of my favourite artists so I don't know why it has taken me so long to see this bio pic. "Klimt" stars John Malkovich in the title role, which gives a clue as to the type of film it is -- enigmatic, hard to follow, interesting...I love films about artists so I cannot be an objective critic here as I love seeing the necessary bits of painting as the artist is at work and reproductions of paintings like the one below, Two Women Friends, which was destroyed in a fire in the 1940s.

Klimt's drawings are always amazing.

Egon Schiele, Klimt's protegé and friend, was portrayed in the film by Nikolai Kinski. I cannot help being an admirer of Schiele's drawings. Below is a portrait of Klimt by Schiele. There is a fantastic scene in the film where Klimt and Schiele are in a café and take turns working on a drawing, just as something artists might do while having a coffee...

I read an interview with Michael Douglas when "Behind the Candelabra" was at Cannes last year and this film was put on my "to see" list. Douglas really was Liberace and the film co-starred Matt Damon. It is a fabulous film, fabulously and sympathetically presented, and the actors showed a real relationship between the older, eccentric Liberace and the younger, romantic lover. As a child I loved watching Liberace specials on TV because he was so entertaining and this film shows how he was so well loved by his audiences.

The third artist film that I watched recently was "Pollock" with the wonderful Ed Harris playing the artist and Marcia Gay Harden also doing an amazing interpretation of Pollock's wife, fellow painter Lee Krasner. The scenes of both Pollock and Krasner painting really got my heart beating!

Dublin Visit

Yesterday I went to Dublin with my daughter, on both a cultural and fun visit! After a coffee shop stop once we got to the city, we started the day with a visit to the National Gallery. "Masterpieces of the Collection" was the main exhibition on and I wanted to revisit one of my favourite paintings in the collection - Frederick William Burton's "Hillela and Hildebrand - the Meeting on the Turret Stairs". Unfortunately, due to the sensitivity of the painting, it can only be viewed on certain days and Wednesday wasn't one of them! But here is an image anyway. 

My daughter is familiar with American art history and loves the likes of Jackson Pollock for his action style and painterliness. She had, however, never heard of Jack B Yeats, and I wanted to rectify this! There were  a number of Yeats paintings in the Masterpiece exhibition, and she did like them for the same reasons she likes Pollock. She also enjoyed some 18th century Constable-like landscapes in the collection.

We also popped over to the nearby National Museum of Ireland, which is almost like a home away from home to us. On this visit we focused on the compact but superb Egyptian room. After lunch we went for a glorious stroll (blue sky and heat!) around St. Stephen's Green, before joining the Viking Splash tour of Dublin. The tour takes place in a DUKW vehicle, created for WW2 and we were told that our particular vehicle had been on the beaches of Normandy. Part of the tour takes place in the water of the Grand Canal Basin which makes this a very unique tour of Dublin. The tour includes the wearing of faux Viking hats and shouting at pedestrian "Celts" so it was lots of fun! (The DUKW we were in was the Thor, but they all look the same -- like a boat in the water, and like a truck on land.)

Birthday and Baking

As I tucked in my 11 year old daughter last night, once again I wished her a happy birthday, but I also told her it was the 11th anniversary of the happiest day of my life. Which indeed it was. Here is the finished sketchbook I made for her. 

Last Saturday, we were doing all the prep work for her party with friends on Sunday. Elise loves Pokémon things and picked out which character which was to appear on her cake this year. The cake is chocolate and the icing is a butter icing.

For Monday's celebration, a fondue dinner with my Mum (Nana) was in order, and the cake was decorated a la Jackson Pollock. Again, it was chocolate with a butter icing.

Yesterday, the actual birthday, Elise had Brownies. So we made chocolate muffins which she decorated using the Brownie colours and symbol with a glace icing. None came home after Brownies, so I guess the troop liked them!