Fine Arts News

Ionel Talpazan's "Fundamental UFO".

Ionel Talpazan thought he saw a UFO when he was a boy, and never stopped seeing them. Of course, he created them.
Ionel Talpazan was 60 years old when he died this week, of diabetes and stroke. He was a boy in a small village in Romania, given up by his parents and raised by a succession of foster parents. He told interviewers he escaped into the woods one night because he thought he would be beaten.

He saw a blue, beating light in the sky above, and was sure it was a spacecraft.

Ionel began to draw spacecraft; I'm not sure you can call them UFOs when an artist gives them such a vivid, colorful identify.
It is hard not to think that a lost, frightened little boy in the woods would dream and draw pictures of amazing machines to swoop down from the heavens and take him away.

But Ionel Talpazan had to make his own escape. As a young adult, he swam across the Danube River and into Yugoslavia, where he lived in a refugee camp before he could get to New York in the 1980s.

He had rough times in his new world, too. But Ionel continued to draw pictures of spacecraft he imagined, often thrown open to reveal innards as elaborate as schematics; but rarely people. He slept in a cardboard box near Columbus Circle and sold drawings, paintings, and small flying saucers that he made out of plaster and scavenged parts.

I don't know where life would have led Ionel Talpazan if he'd slept in a cardboard box on a corner of, say, Akron or Peoria. But in New York, a famous art figure named Henry Tobler saw an artist in his drawings, and wrote about him in scholarly journals. His pictures were included in Manhattan art galleries, and from the 1990s on, Ionel made his way in the world by his art.
By the time he died, his works had hung at the American Visionary Art Museum, and museums in San Franciso, London, Berlin, Madrid, and France. Talpazans were sold in fancy galleries from Soho to Chelsea. The man who had slept in a box moved to a New York apartment.

"My art shows spiritual technology, something beautiful and beyond human imagination, that comes from another galaxy," he once told the Western Folklore journal. "So, in relative way, this is like the God."
Ionel Talpazan imagined incredible things, and made them alive in the eyes of others. In a way, he did escape on his UFO.


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Alder branches form a bridge in a Dumfriesshire, Scotland, stream. (Jan. 17, 2014)

Andy Goldsworthy/ Abrams



Curved sticks surround a river boulder in Woody Creek, Colo. (Sept. 16, 2006)




British artist Andy Goldsworthy works in the fields and forests near his home in Scotland using natural elements as his media. His pieces have a tendency to collapse, decay and melt, but, as he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "It's not about art. It's just about life and the need to understand that a lot of things in life do not last."
The list of elements Goldsworthy has worked with includes ice, snow, mud, wind and the rising tide. In one piece, he used twigs to fashion a giant spider web hanging from a tree. In another, he decorated a stone wall with sheets of ice. He has also lain in the rain to create "rain shadows" in the shape of his body on city streets.

Goldsworthy refers to his creations as "ephemeral works." He says, "When I make an ephemeral work, when it's finished, that's the moment that it ends, in a way."
Though Goldsworthy has also worked with more enduring materials, he says that using temporal materials is a reflection of the world we live in. His materials, he says, "Come raw from the ground and have all the irregularities and peculiarities because of that."

But Goldsworthy's ephemeral creations aren't completely lost to audiences upon completion; a new book, Andy Goldsworthy: Ephemeral Works: 2004-2014, presents a collection of photographs of his work. There's also an exhibition of Goldsworthy's photos opening Oct. 22 at the Galerie Lelong in New York.

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You may have thought you used mountains of index cards while working on school research papers, but Tara Donovan shows you what mountains of index cards actually look like in her installation for the "Wonder" exhibit.

When you were a little kid, everyday objects could be amazing — twigs, bugs, old tires, there was potential in everything. And it's that sense of awe that the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery is trying to recapture in its new show, Wonder.

In the Renwick's newly renovated gallery in Washington, D.C., nine artists were each given free rein over a space to create inspiring installations. Tara Donovan used hundreds of thousands of index cards to create a mountain range. Gabriel Dawe made a rainbow out of some 60 miles of colored thread. Patrick Dougherty turned sticks into giant, swirling nests.



Stick sculptor Patrick Dougherty creates nests in his 2015 work Shindig.

"I wanted people to be overwhelmed, to feel as if there's something in the world greater than yourself," says Renwick curator Nicholas Bell. He spent over a year reflecting on wonder — that feeling you get before mental clutter like "intellect" and "taste ... drown out the senses," as he puts it in the show's catalog.
The Renwick was closed for two years for renovations, and for its reopening, Bell looked for artists who would transform the building's spaces. Seattle-based artist John Grade told Bell he was going to "bring" him a tree. Bell wasn't entirely sure what Grade meant.



Artist Maya Lin made a map of the Chesapeake Bay using blue-green marbles.

"I'm going to find a tree that is the same age as your building and I'm going to build it for you," Grade explained.
The Renwick was built more than 150 years ago, so Grade went to the Cascade Mountains and found a hemlock tree of a similar vintage and made a plaster cast of it.

"They rigged up ropes and they covered this whole tree with tin foil so that it would protect it, and they covered it with plaster," Bell says. "They popped these pieces of plaster off the tree and took them back to his studio. Then they used that as a mold. So they had hundreds of volunteers coming in off the street — people on their lunch hour, people coming in after work and on the weekend."

Those volunteers helped Grade rebuild the tree using a half a million small blocks of reclaimed wood from a bridge that was being torn down. At the Renwick Gallery, the tree is now suspended on its side, filling the entire room.



John Grade modeled this tree on a 150-year-old hemlock he found in the Cascade Mountains.

The natural world is where most of these artists found their wonders.
Maya Lin created what she calls a "jewel-like map of the Chesapeake Bay," using clear, blue-green marbles. "If you look at each marble they're not precious," says Lin. "They were very functionally made. They're cracked. They have flaws. But the color to me is probably the closest I can get to capturing the shimmer and glimmer of water."



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One of the main attractions in "The Edible Monument" exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is a nine-foot long sugar palace showing the Greek sorceress Circe meeting Odysseus' men.

Enter a Getty Center gallery in Los Angeles, and you'll be greeted by a nine-foot long sculpture of the Greek sorceress Circe transforming Odysseus's men into swine.

What's most remarkable about this piece is that every inch of it – from the ornamental balustrade to the fine pink, yellow and white sands in the miniature garden — is made of sugar.

The sugar palace might have been the centerpiece of an 18^th century French wedding table. Today, it's part of a Getty exhibit called "The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals" that runs until Mar. 16.



At the end of the party, guests were often invited to break off pieces of sugar sculpture to eat or take home as souvenirs.

"These very elaborate centerpieces in the middle of tables were made for people to admire while they ate and then the food would be served around them," says the exhibition's curator Marcia Reed.

At the end of the party, guests were often invited to break off pieces of sugar sculpture to eat or take home as souvenirs.
What "The Edible Monument" shows us is that our love of party decorations goes way, way back, says Reed. Besides this sugar art, the show features extravagant serving vessels and scenes, such as silver tureens with sculpted rabbits and heads of cauliflower, colorful scrolls depicting 16^th century ox roasts and prints portraying triumphal arches made of bread, cheese and suckling pigs.

Sugar and pastry were two of the foods that moved out of the kitchen and into the artist studio during the Renaissance. The period's finest kitchens employed chefs and confectioners who knew how to handle sugar paste and turn it into sculpture. White sugar was prized by Europe's elite because it was pure, beautiful and exotic, having been imported from Africa and the Caribbean.

"Sugar is a great way of showing how skillful these past practitioners were because it is one of the few foodstuffs you can show in a museum without it decaying," says British culinary historian Ivan Day, who created the Circe sugar temple on display at the Getty with artist Tony Barton using sugar paste, molds and a 1749 French engraving. Day's latest sculpture should last a while; he says similar sculptures he made 30 years ago remain in good shape today.

It helps that when sugar is combined with gum and water, it becomes an extremely pliable paste that has the consistency of Play-Doh, according to Reed. She says the sugar paste used in the Renaissance period is comparable to wedding cake fondant we see today. When it hardens, this sugar paste has the color and substance of Necco Wafers.

Medieval sugar statues were the inspiration behind the sphinx artist Kara Walker installed in Brooklyn's Domino Sugar factory in 2014. "I was reading this book, Sweetness and Power [by anthropologist Sidney Mintz], and I came across these sugar sculptures called subtleties that they had at medieval banquets," Walker told the Guardian. "Up until that point, I had been thinking of finger-wagging doom-laden things about the history of slavery and sugar and America. It didn't take into account what people wanted to look at."
Day says sugar monuments may be stunning to behold but also have a dark history worth remembering.
"When these extraordinary self-indulgent masterpieces of edible art were being produced for European palaces ... poor human beings who harvested the raw material lived dreadful and tragic enslaved lives," he says.
Selected works from "The Edible Monument" exhibition can be viewed online. And several special events are still to come.
In January, Day will discuss the evolution of edible table art at the Getty and teach museum visitors how to make their own Twelfth Cakes and tazze from sugar paste and 18^th century molds. Then in February, art historian Joseph Imorde will discuss how the popularity of refined sugar led to an increase in tooth decay in Renaissance Europe. Sugar at that time was thought to have health benefits and was often taken as a digestive.


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Willem de Kooning's Woman — Ochre (oil on canvas, 1954-55) has been missing for 30 years.

Thirty years ago, one of the most valuable paintings of the 20th century vanished. It wasn't an accident and it wasn't some elaborate movie heist. It was a simple theft — and it's still a mystery.

It was the day after Thanksgiving in 1985. Staff at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson were getting to work, just like any other day.
"It was almost 9 o'clock so the museum was gearing up to open the doors," says museum curator Olivia Miller. "The security guards opened the doors for one of the staff members, and two people followed behind."

It was close enough to opening time that the guards let the man and woman come in. They started climbing a flight of stairs to the second floor, and the guard followed. In the middle of the stairwell, the woman stopped and turned to chat with the guard. Her partner continued on up.
"A short time later the man came back down the stairs and he and the woman left," Miller says.

A little odd, the guard thought. Then he walked up to the second floor gallery to discover any guard's worst nightmare: an empty frame where one of the institution's most prized pieces had hung. Willem de Kooning's painting Woman — Ochre had been sliced out of its frame.

The painting is part of the abstract expressionist's celebrated "Woman" series. Another work in the series sold about a decade ago for more than $137 million. The museum estimates that today Ochre could be worth as much as $160 million. It was a huge loss.

University of Arizona police chief Brian Seastone, a campus cop 30 years ago, was one of the first investigators to arrive at the scene.

"It was almost a hollow experience because it was so empty," Seastone recalls. "Not only is this painting missing on this wall, it was just a very quiet scene."
To make matters worse, there were basically no leads: no fingerprints, no license plate from the getaway car, just a description of how the couple looked.
"The woman was a bit older," Miller says. "She had a scarf around her head, was wearing glasses. The man had dark hair, had a mustache."

That's all the cops had to work with, because it turns out, in 1985, the museum didn't have any security cameras. No one who was working at the museum that day wanted to be interviewed for this story. So the question remains: Where is the painting?

Irene Romano, a professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on art plunder, says in general, people who steal works like this are not art lovers.

"They're common thieves who are hired by others to do the dirty work, and then the works of art pass into the underworld and are traded for drugs and arms and cash," Romano says.

We'll always keep hope that the painting will come back. And at the same time we're always going to know that our collection isn't complete, and that's the sad part about it.

Curator Olivia Miller

So the University of Arizona's painting might have been sold on the black market and may be hidden away in a vault somewhere ... or it could even be hanging in someone's home.


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Watercolor Sunset

Artist Hale Aspacio Woodruff was commissioned to paint the Amistad Murals in 1938.

Most Americans know little about the painter Hale Woodruff, but he had a profound influence on 20th century American art. Like many black artists in the 1920s, Woodruff left the country for Paris. He later studied in Mexico with Diego Rivera.
Today Woodruff is best-known for a set of murals at Talladega College in Alabama. After a national tour, those murals have made a final stop in Kansas City, where Woodruff's family has roots.

Shawn Hughes, Woodruff's great nephew, stands in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, surrounded by giant paintings in vivid colors with nearly life-sized figures. On one wall, a deck full of slaves is about to mutiny on the Amistad. On another wall, an urgent scene in the woods, as slaves are about to cross the Ohio River to freedom.

In the second mural, the trial of the Amistad mutineers, is a man in a green shirt in the crowd. It's a self-portrait of Hughes' great uncle, Hale Woodruff.

"He always puts his image in his works," Hughes says.



In this 1939 mural, Woodruff depicts the trial of the Africans aboard the Amistad.

This exhibition was organized by the High Museum in Atlanta back in 2012. Hughes has been to see the murals in New York and Washington, D.C., as well. Woodruff died when Hughes was a young man.
"He was a very sophisticated man," Hughes says. "Our family was very outgoing and gregarious, but he was very reserved, very quiet. I mean, he had an awesome presence about him."



At Atlanta University, Woodruff founded what was known as the Exhibition for African American artists.

Growing up in Kansas City, Hughes knew about the famous muralist Thomas Hart Benton, who lived and taught there. And he learned about the European painters in high school. But he didn't learn about his great uncle's importance until he went to Fisk University in Nashville.

"First day I walk into the library. And as I walk into the library I look to my right, and they had a huge exhibit on Uncle Hale," Hughes says. "I was so excited about it I ran back to the dorm, called my mother collect, and I said, 'Mom, Mom, they got an entire corner dedicated to Uncle Hale.' She said, 'Yeah, now I want you to get off this phone and go read every book, and learn not only about him but learn about Aaron Douglas and the many other great African-American artists that are in the world.'"

Woodruff was a pioneer, says David C. Driskell, a distinguished art professor emeritus at the University of Maryland-College Park. Woodruff was one of the major art teachers at historically black colleges and universities at a time when there weren't that many people in that discipline, says Driskell.

In 1942, when Woodruff was at Atlanta University, he founded what was known as the Exhibition for African American artists. It "was the only venue where people of color could exhibit on a national scale without the forces of segregation," Driskell explains.



In his 1942 mural The Underground Railroad, Woodruff shows slaves about to cross the Ohio River to freedom.

This was a place where black artists could compete and have their work judged by a mixed jury of blacks and whites. Major artists like Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and many others considered Woodruff a mentor.

"By bringing subjects of importance relating to the African-American experience to the American art canon, he was very much bent on helping to tell the history of African-Americans by painting murals," Driskell says.
Hughes organized another exhibition across town in the art gallery at the American Jazz Museum. This exhibition includes black-and-white prints and Christmas cards Woodruff painted for his relatives, abstract paintings and some of his black and white prints. Curator Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin says Woodruff deserves two concurrent exhibitions.
"Now, you can't get enough black," she says. "Now, you can't get enough African-American art. We are now considered American artists. This is the man that paved the way."

By the time Woodruff died in 1980 he was recognized by his peers in the art world. But he had a warning for his great nephew and niece.

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Artist Rogan Brown's paper sculptures are many times larger than the organisms that inspire them. Magic Circle Variation 5 is approximately 39 inches wide by 39 inches tall in its entirety. Brown has created multiple versions of Magic Circle, the shape of which alludes to a petri dish and a microscope lens.

Do you remember cutting paper snowflakes in school? Artist Rogan Brown has elevated that simple seasonal art form and taken it to science class.

These large-scale paper sculptures may evoke snow, but actually trade on the forms of bacteria and other organisms. The patterns may feel familiar, but also a bit alien. You're not looking at a replica of a microbe, but an interpretation of one. And that distinction, Brown says, is important.

"Both art and science seek to represent truth but in different ways," the 49-year-old artist, who lives in France, tells Shots. "It's the difference between understanding a landscape by looking at a detailed relief map and understanding it by looking at a painting by Cezanne or Van Gogh."

Brown wants to you to feel something looking at these sculptures.

Last year, he met with a group of microbiologists to plan an exhibition on the human microbiome. He became fascinated by the hidden world of microbes and the strange shapes of pathogens. He was particularly interested in humans' fear of the invisible microbiological world. That meeting led him to spend four months creating Outbreak entirely by hand.



Outbreak, which is approximately 58 inches long by 31 inches tall, was exhibited in London in 2014.



Outbreak took four months to cut and build. Brown writes on his website that the slow process of cutting mimics the "long time-based processes that dominate nature: growth and decay."



A detailed view of Outbreak shows the delicate forms Brown cut by hand. He says he works with paper because it "embodies the paradoxical qualities that we see in nature: its fragility and durability, its strength and delicacy."

He starts each construction by sketching detailed designs and then mocking them up in larger pen and ink drawings. Then he begins to think in 3-D. Each structure is composed of layers of paper, which are stacked using foam board spacers. This floating effect allows him to build a complex colony of organisms that appear to grow beyond the confines of their housing.

In Cut Microbe, that growth is chaotic. The whip-like appendages of the creature branch outward in an invasive way. Those legs, Brown writes on his website, were inspired by the flagella of Salmonella and E. coli, tiny appendages that help the bacteria move.



Cut Microbe, left, was cut entirely by hand. The entire sculpture, right, measures approximately 44 inches tall by 35 inches wide. Brown says it was inspired by Salmonella and E. coli.

In Magic Circle, the architecture is more constructive, ordered — there are colonies of intricately shaped forms that evoke the collaborative, constructive network of a coral reef. It also evokes microbes and diatoms.



Magic Circle borrows from the forms of bacteria, microbes, diatoms and coral. Brown needed a laser to cut some of the more intricately designed shapes.


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Over a decades-long career, Frank Stella has done sculptures, three-dimensional reliefs, brightly-colored geometric shapes and mostly black paintings that literally changed the way people looked at art. (Pictured here: Empress of India, 1965.)

Frank Stella does huge work — some of it 20 feet tall and twice as long — so he has a suitably supersized studio about an hour's drive north of New York City. With hundreds of artworks and tables strewn with ideas in progress, the studio is a museum in itself.

"This is a piece from 1970, that's a piece I guess from the '80s," Stella says, "and this is a very recent piece from about a year ago." He points to one of several free-standing organic forms — a matte black sculpture that looks kind of like the small, dried seedpods he has nearby, but not. It's different from anything he's done before.



Frank Stella, Eskimo Curlew, 1976.

Stella is one of the most influential and respected artists of the 20th century, and at nearly 80 years old he's still pushing the possibilities of his art. Over a six-decade-long career, he has done sculptures, three-dimensional reliefs, brightly-colored geometric shapes and mostly black paintings that literally changed the way people looked at art in the late 1950s. All that and more is currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art's traveling retrospective of Stella's work, curated in partnership with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

"The integrity of being an artist for Frank means going into the unknown," says Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney and co-curator of the retrospective. He says, "A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more."

Stella has pretty much always painted, whether it was helping his father paint the house or his mother decorate clamshells at home in Massachusetts. "I'm more of a house painter," he says. "That's the way I work."



Frank Stella, Chocorua IV, 1966.

Stella started painting seriously in high school, and even then he was ambitious. "I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do," he says. "And, you know, I couldn't forget [Wassily] Kandinsky and [Kazimir] Malevich and [Piet] Mondrian, I mean that was the basis. You know, and you couldn't forget [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse and [Joan] Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better."

But Stella didn't want to be like any of them. His goal was to not depict anything, something he notoriously achieved in 1958 with his black paintings. Co-curator Adam Weinberg says they changed everything.

"It's basically one color of paint," he says. "You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something — you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what he said famously: What you see is what you see."

Though, in this case, it took Stella some time to see it. He'd done a painting with red stripes (minimalist, geometric) and wasn't entirely happy, so he painted it over all black before he went to bed. In the morning, he considered what he'd done.

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Ellsworth Kelly, shown before one of his huge pieces at Peter Carlson Enterprises, Sun Valley, in 1996, has died at the age of 92.

Ellsworth Kelly, one of the greatest American artists of the past century, has died at 92.
Kelly died at his home in Spencertown, N.Y., says gallery owner Matthew Marks, who has represented the artist for two decades. Kelly is survived by his longtime partner Jack Shear.

For seven decades, Kelly created pure, strong shapes and colors, immersive and brilliant. His vivid geometric blocks, in sculpture and paintings, are displayed at modern art museums from Paris to Houston to Boston to Berlin.