Fine Arts News

In Chase's 1888 Hide and Seek, two young girls — sisters, perhaps — play on a vast shimmering hardwood floor, in a sparely-decorated room. A mysterious painting. Who is hiding? Who is seeking? Is it just a game? Or is the painting about growing up — the older girl approaching the door to adulthood, the younger one looking at her own future?

Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper and George Bellows were very different artists, but they did have at least one thing in common: They all studied with painter William Merritt Chase. Now, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is marking the centennial of the artist's death with a retrospective.



Chase used to paint fish during the classes he taught at the New York School of Art. He would buy fish at the market, paint them quickly, and return them before they went bad.

"You walk around these galleries and the paintings are gutsy and bold and scintillating and brilliant," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips.

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Back in the 1950s and '60s, Carmen Herrera was making art, but her male counterparts were getting all of the attention. Now, at 101, she's still hard at work, and finally getting some long overdue recognition.

For most of her career, Carmen Herrera's paintings of brightly colored geometric shapes went unnoticed, while her male counterparts — Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella — got plenty of attention for similar work. Herrera finally made her first sale at 89. And now, at 101, it seems she's getting her due at last. The Cuban artist's work can be seen at the Tate in London, MoMA in New York, and she has an exhibition coming to the Whitney Whitney Museum of American Art in September.

Tears streamed down Herrera's face as she viewed her art on display at a recent show at the Lisson Gallery in Manhattan. The 13 paintings and one sculpture were her first solo exhibition in the U.S. in nearly 10 years.



Carmen Herrera's recent exhibit at the Lisson Gallery was her first solo exhibition in the U.S. in nearly 10 years.

"It helps that they recognize you — that your work is not going to go to the garbage," Herrera says.


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A day after getting a phone call from Kanye West's camp, Vincent Desiderio was in Los Angeles for the premiere of the rapper's video "Famous," which Desiderio's painting Sleep partly inspired.

"It was very cryptic, and quite mysterious. I received a phone call and I was told that Kanye was an enormous fan of my work, and he would like to meet me."

That's how it started for painter Vincent Desiderio. The next day, he flew from New York to Los Angeles to meet Kanye West. When he arrived, he says, "It was as if I'd entered into a surprise party for me."

Desiderio sat down and was shown the music video for West's song "Famous," which was premiering that day. In the 10-minute,



grainy close-ups move across what appear to be the naked bodies of Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Taylor Swift and other celebrities. Then, a wide shot from above: those 12 figures, lying side by side in a pile of rumpled sheets. Desiderio says it took him a few minutes to catch on.
"I said to them, 'You must have seen my painting? This looks an awful lot like a painting I did,'" he says. "And they were smiling, because this was the big buildup."

West's video is an homage to a painting by Desiderio called Sleep: a 24-foot wide, hyper-realistic image of a group of people lying in mostly nude slumber. NPR's Rachel Martin spoke to the artist to find out what he makes of "Famous" and of West's new album, The Life of Pablo. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.

Rachel Martin: If you don't mind, since we are in the world of radio, how would you describe your painting?
Vincent Desiderio: The painting that I made is a kind of homage to Jackson Pollock's painting Mural that he painted for the apartment of Peggy Guggenheim, which involves a continuous and repetitive set of marks that calligraphically sort of move across a very wide canvas.
It's been described as an orgy, which is wrong. It represents a communal sleep — which in a larger sense might represent the sleep of our culture, the sleep of reason.

Let's talk about what I imagine has been a crazy few days for you. You got a call last week, asking if you could come attend an event that Kanye was holding the next day.
You know, when I got the first phone call they said "Kanye West," and I heard "Conde Nast." I thought, "Maybe they want to write an article?' It was very weird. Of course, when I told my children that Kanye West's office had just called me, they were freaking out. They said, "Dad, you gotta go!" So off I went.

So you get there and are ushered into a room. You meet Kanye West and he says, "Take a look at this"?
Kind of. I was welcomed with smiles, as if they had been waiting for me to arrive, and we exchanged a few words. "Pablo" refers to both Pablo Picasso and Pablo Escobar jointly, and so we talked about the criminality of art; I mentioned Degas' quote that the painting should be constructed like the perfect crime. And he smiled and said, "It's Saint Paul as well."
The minute he said that, I saw his face and I realized the depth that really was behind so much of what he has been attempting to do as an artist. And then he said, "Would you like to see what we've been working on?"

And you sit down and watch it for the first time. What was your reaction?
I was gobstruck, is the word. I was absolutely floored and honored, and I almost felt like crying. I think that Kanye and I embraced each other, and everyone else was sort of like that — they were all high-fiving me and hugging me. There are experiences like that in the arts where somebody actually gets what you're doing. Not that your goal is to communicate — it's more self-enlightenment. But at that moment I realized that Kanye and I were on the same page completely. He was an art student, and speaking to him was like speaking to the brightest of my peers.

Tell me what you mean when you say that he got you. The video he's made, while it more than echoes your painting with the imagery, he's saying something different: These are not anonymous people, these are famous people. And in his lyrics, he is taking aim at each of those individuals. He's saying something specific that I don't think your painting is saying, though you can tell me if I'm wrong.
One of the big similarities is that, as I was doing my painting, I wasn't feeling a tremendous amount of empathy for the people; I actually thought of them as slumbering idiots who really need to wake up to what's going on, to a different world. And yet, every time I worked on it, rather than taking the image to a highly critical point that's typical in the art world, jaded and cynical, I kept holding back. It was almost as if I began falling in love with the characters, even though at the beginning of my endeavor they were supposed to be people I didn't quite care for.
And so when I saw Kanye's video, I was also struck by [that]. A few these people are certainly repulsive to me, and everything in the habit of my intuitions would steer me to seeing this as a vicious attack on them. And yet, there was something in the execution of the piece that kept all of those thoughts at bay. I felt a spark of empathy — not really for them, it was for the world.

We should also just point out that Kanye himself is in the image, as is his wife, Kim Kardashian.
An incredibly important detail. An image like that is a mirror of the ridiculous cult of celebrity. I think Kanye, who I believe is very much like Andy Warhol in that he does not let his guard down about who he is, presents a mirror to people rather than he telling them how to think.

It sounds, to put it in very simple terms, like you were moved by the video.
What I like about it is, it's not a reproduction of my painting: It's a conversation with my painting. The discursive element of that is far more important than the simple idea of he stole the idea, he co-opted the idea, he did this to the idea. He quoted the idea and then brought something different to it, embedded in the strange thinking that went on in my head as I worked on the picture.

I probably don't have to tell you that Kanye West is a controversial guy. Part of his art is to be provocative, and he's married to a woman who made her name based on fame and the idea of garnering more fame — which some would say has led to this kind of "sleeping" of our larger culture. Are you at all uncomfortable that it has taken someone from the cultural mainstream to give you an amount of notoriety that you might not otherwise have garnered?
I think the people around me are a lot more excited about the notoriety — my kids, my wife, my friends — than I am. I saw this as a meeting of two artists. It represented a kind of tearing down of walls and an indication that even coming from both worlds, the world of the ultra-celebrity hip-hop scene, which I'm not part of, and the ultra-celebrity fine art scene. There's something going on beneath the surface of these things — a kind of undercurrent that is slowly, deliberately, and very consciously and undermining the obnoxiousness of those worlds.

You weren't a collaborator on this project, although it sounds like you're completely flattered by it. But can you imagine any actual collaboration with Kanye West in the future?
Yes, I can. As a matter of fact, we spoke of that.

Did he offer any kind of compensation?
No, I wouldn't have taken it. That would have cheapened the entire endeavor. Believe me, when I saw him, when they revealed this to me, it was a gift. The gift was not the gift of celebrity; the gift was that what I did had strains of ideas, of information in it, that he was able to access and redevelop and realize into a different kind of image. It was a communication of artists. Believe me, I get so many questions now — "Did he pay for you? He'd better be buying a painting" — and I'm saying, this is ridiculous. If art is always created in the service of the almighty dollar, we're really in trouble.

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The dining room for Wolvesmouth: Taxa, a pop-up dining experience as art installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary location.

Many chefs think of themselves as artists in the kitchen. Craig Thornton has taken it to another level: For the past five months, he's been serving up multi-course meals as part of a room-size installation at the prestigious Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Thornton, 34, is a cult figure in LA's booming food scene. And for this pop-up dining experiment, he whipped up a rococo menu. A typical dish — if typical is a word that even applies — might be a mélange of grilled rib-eye, creamed kimchi, beef tongue, Asian pear and crispy shallot arrayed under a surprisingly purple, squid-ink dumpling skin.



Chef Craig Thornton, 34, is something of a cult figure in LA's food scene.

That was just one of nine elaborate dishes served within MOCA's Geffen Contemporary location, in what looked like the set of a dystopian Disney film — a space replete with taxidermied deer, wolves and peacocks arranged in a forest of cherry trees, some of them burnt. Wolvesmouth: Taxa, as this unorthodox eating experience was called, just closed after a five-month residency. It was the most recent iteration of a roving restaurant that Thornton has run for years — sometimes in warehouses, sometimes in apartments and usually with more amenities.
"We're cooking in the middle of a museum with no running water," Thornton said ruefully during a recent dinner. "I mean, we have to know how much water we're using." (The answer: 75 to 85 gallons per night.)



Thornton's menu for Wolvesmouth: Taxa featured nine elaborate dishes. A typical dish might be a mélange of grilled rib-eye, creamed kimchi, beef tongue, Asian pear and crispy shallot arrayed under a surprisingly purple, squid-ink dumpling skin.

It's funny to think that for the past several months, Thornton — a chef behind some of the most coveted reservations in Los Angeles — has had to finish each night lugging and emptying gallons of water into a tiny painters' sink in the back of the museum.

Ordinarily, dining on Thornton's carefully curated meals means months of languishing on waitlists. But at MOCA — two seatings a night, three days a week — Angeleno foodies could pay $225 for a multisensory experience in which art and food were intended to be one seamless experience. For example, one massive sculpture, a 2,000-pound iceberg sculpted from Styrofoam, was planned to complement a dish of chili-seasoned shrimp — "the spice being this kind of metaphor for heat melting glaciers," Thornton explained.

Along with silverware and napkins, diners were furnished with a manifesto of sorts that laid out the chef's thoughts about greed, nature and decay. They were urged to contemplate what it means to consume, and to discuss those thoughts with each other and with the staff busily plating their dinners. Nearby, a sculpture depicts an oil spill and the taxidermied animals are depicted struggling in the muck.



Diners were urged to contemplate what it means to consume. Near their dinner table, a sculpture depicts an oil spill — the taxidermied animals are depicted struggling in the muck.

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The Chalice of Love

Mystery of Sleep. "Time is fluid. It's not fixed, rigid, like we like to think, and while we sleep, we lose our perception of time," says Dmitry Piterman, who amassed this collection of Dalí's work.



Woman Aflame

Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí spent much of the 1940s in the U.S., avoiding World War II and its aftermath. He was a well-known fixture on the art scene in Monterey, Calif. — and that's where the largest collection of Dalí's work on the West Coast is now open to the public.
A week before opening day, everything was still in bubble wrap. But Dmitry Piterman knew where each piece was. The Ukrainian-born real estate developer has collected more than 570 etchings, lithographs, sculptures and tapestries, and he can speak with intimate detail about all of it, while ripping open one bubble-wrapped lithograph after another.



"Some of the brushes he used had only one hair," Piterman says. "So imagine the meticulousness with which he painted and created his art. That's when jokester Dalí kind of disappeared. But burning giraffes and elephants on their frail little legs, all that is part of his work and part of kind of the provoking Dalí."

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A gold flower-and-myrtle-leaf wreath, thought to have belonged to one of Alexander the Great's stepmothers, is now on display at the National Geographic Museum.

The news out of Greece in the past several years has been pretty bad. An ongoing economic crisis has resulted in an unemployment rate that's hovering around 25 percent — currently, there's a major exodus of young, educated Greeks. And more than a million refugees and migrants have poured into the country in the past year and a half. So what is the Greek government doing in response? For one thing, it's sent a big art exhibition to Washington, D.C.

The show, which opened in June and runs through early October, is called "The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great." It's a survey of 5,000 years of Greek art and artifacts. Most of the items have never left their homeland before. This stop in Washington is the last on a tour that also included the Field Museum and two stops in Canada: at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, near Ottowa, and the Pointe-à-Callière Montréal Archeology and History Complex in Montreal.

"We wanted, in the beginning of the economic crisis in Greece, to show really what Greece is, and really what Greeks are," says Maria Vlazaki. Vlazaki is the secretary general of Greece's Ministry of Culture and Sports. She's also an archaeologist, and she is one of the curators of this show; some of her finds are on display in "The Greeks."

Vlazaki has been planning this exhibition since 2010 — not long after the global financial meltdown began.

She points out the Greek government lends items all the time, and the National Geographic Museum originally suggested that they work together on an exhibition of ancient Greek artifacts. But she is also very straightforward about one of the reasons that this show of more than 500 objects is touring the U.S. right now: She wants to inspire tourists.



Three figurines from the Cycladic islands, which are roughly 5,000 years old, are on display at the National Geographic Museum.

"They see so many masterpieces and also things of daily life, that I think they will be very interested to visit Greece, because they will see how Western civilization has been inspired by Greece," says Vlazaki.

Among the oldest items on display are mysterious, angular little figurines from roughly five thousand years ago, from the Cycladic islands.
"It looks like modern art," says archaeologist and National Geographic Fellow Fred Hiebert. Hiebert is the co-curator of "The Greeks," and he says that he is still stunned by how willing the Greek museums and archaeological sites were to lend out some of their most valuable treasures.

Hiebert and Vlazaki lead me through the show. "We're coming to a section here which is from a site museum that I never, ever thought we would ever borrow from," he explains, "because it's the royal burials of the kings of northern Greece at the time of Philip the Great and Alexander the Great."

We're standing by a case that contains a finely wrought wreath made of dozens of tiny, very delicate and detailed flowers and myrtle leaves, cut from thin sheets of gold. It was thought to be made for Queen Meda, one of Alexander the Great's stepmothers.
"When we were putting this in the case," he says, "it glimmered and jiggled with every slight breeze. It's absolutely the most amazing piece of work I've ever seen."

But will visitors who see these treasures then want to go to Greece on vacation? Could the show even help foreigners reframe their perceptions about this struggling country?




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A Jan Davidsz de Heem still life with ham, lobster and fruit, circa 1653

The table is set for dinner. Small cooked crabs and shrimp are laid out on the thick wooden tabletop next to succulent figs, grapes, pears and types of produce you can't even name. There's a citrus with a long coiling peel draped around it, and an entire roast of some animal's leg that's been cut down the middle — so you can see the thick layer of fat running around the edge. Just for good measure, a red lobster and ornate goblet of wine stand on a pedestal above it.

If this meal were laid out in 2016, you'd get out your phone and Instagram a perfectly filtered photo before digging in, #foodporn. But in the 1600s, when famous still life artist Jan Davidsz de Heem was eating, people showed off their meals with paintings instead.

A new study by Cornell's Food and Brand Lab found that capturing and showing off decadent and expensive meals is a decidedly old-fashioned practice. Brian Wansink, author of Slim by Design, and Andrew Weislogel, a curator at Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art, studied 140 paintings of "family meals" from 1500 to 2000 and found that the majority of foods depicted were not part of the average fare. Some of the most likely foods to appear were shellfish, ham and artichoke. For the common classes during the time these paintings were made, Wansink says, more likely items to eat would have been chicken, bread and the odd foraged fruit.

People don't usually Instagram frozen foods they put in the microwave. Instead, the most successful #foodporn is often an item the photographer laboriously made in the kitchen or found in either an expensive or out-of-the-way restaurant. A recent top #foodporn on Instagram is a photo of seven elaborately decorated eclairs. In the caption the food blogger behind @dialaskitchen compares the Toronto-made pastries to some found a couple years ago, "while at L'atellier de l'éclair in Paris."

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Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874 – 1939)
The Hour of Tea

Those sunset photos look awesome! I love the way the colors blend.

A wealthy American living in Paris, Romaine Brooks had the freedom to paint whatever and however she wanted. Don't let her sober, 1923 Self-Portrait fool you — Smithsonian curator Virginia Mecklenburg says in the 1910s and 1920s, Brooks and her circle of friends had plenty of fun in Paris.

Twentieth century painter Romaine Brooks introduces herself in a 1923 self-portrait: She wears a narrowly cut, long, black riding jacket with a white blouse. She has short, cropped hair and her eyes are shadowed by a black high hat. There's the slightest smudge of maybe pink on her lips — otherwise the whole portrait is black and various shades of gray.

An American who lived in Paris, Brooks conveys loneliness, strength and vulnerability, says Joe Lucchesi, consulting curator an exhibit of Brooks' work at the Smithsonian — "a kind of care-worn but very strong presence all combined in one."

Brooks painted androgynous women and depicted nudes so melancholy they'd make Renoir's pinky ladies weep. She left most of her work to the American Art Museum, where her work is currently on view.
The women she paints share a severe palette and a certain mood. In their man-tailored jackets, their aesthetic sensibilities, their intense love relationships, Brooks' women moved in the artistic circles of 1920s Paris. Poets, novelists, socialites, photographers and painters, they were fashionable and rich. Their money helped insulate them from social constraints of their day.

In Brooks' case, money freed her to paint whatever and however she wanted — the unconventional, androgynous women, the limited, gloomy palette — and to ignore what her Big Guy contemporaries were doing — Picasso and Matisse, whose vivid and revolutionary canvases filled the homes of Gertrude Stein and family.

"She really painted as though Picasso and Matisse didn't exist," Lucchesi says.

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