Time To Stretch Your Canvass
Thursday usually means a collection of Dark Sky Magazine literary recommendations. Today, however, we’ve decided to turn our attention toward the fine(r) arts. You see, words have strained our eyes in the last few days. It’s time we enjoyed some less straining work. Not that today’s flurry is for the light of heart. On the contrary, we look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s brooding drawings, Irving Penn’s seductive nudes, Rubens’ baroque diplomacy, Kandinsky’s origins and the ongoing debate of what, exactly, constitutes art. Find out below the jump. – Andrew Geer
– Half a century after Philip Johnson acidly proclaimed Frank Lloyd Wright “the greatest architect of the nineteenth century,” a new traveling retrospective makes the case for Wright’s relevance to the twenty-first. “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, explores Wright’s expression of interior spaces on his buildings’ exteriors, as in the perfect example of the Guggenheim’s concrete coil. With a generation of architects modeling building shapes with functionally coded blocks of blue foam, external form is once again understood as an outgrowth of “program,” even if today this is more a representational tactic than, as for Wright, the realization of “organic” principles. — Frank Lloyd Wright in ArtForum
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– One day in the winter of 1947, Irving Penn, a promising young photographer, walked away from a dressing room full of slender, beautiful models and boarded a plane for Haiti. He was not unhappy with his job at Vogue, but he felt the need for some “real women in real circumstances,” as opposed to those “skinny girls with self-starved looks.” — Irving Penn in ARTnews
– Today, Peter Paul Rubens is best remembered as the Old Master with a penchant for fleshy, pink nudes and baroque grandiosity. These perceptions suggest a man of unchecked libertinism, but Rubens was in fact a man of controlled appetites, with a modest disposition and a reputation for tact and discretion. Almost inevitably, given his proximity to monarchs and statesmen across Europe, he was conscripted into political service as a covert diplomat and spy; his artistic work could always provide cover for his clandestine activities. — Peter Paul Rubens in The Wall Street Journal
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– Every twenty years or so since 1945, a retrospective of Vasily Kandinsky has appeared at the Guggenheim Museum. This latest installment, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the museum, is truly a major event, an assembly of 99 of the artist’s most significant canvases (from 1907 to 1942) and 66 works on paper, selected from the three largest collections of Kandinsky on the planet—the Guggenheim itself, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich—an unprecedented joint project for these three institutions. — Kandinsky in The Brooklyn Rail
– Since the emergence of the pop art movement and the rise of conceptual art, the circular debate about what constitutes art has become ever-more tedious and difficult to resolve. But, arguably, most artists at the very least wish to challenge their audiences – intellectually, emotionally or aesthetically. After all, art is not just another form of interior design. — Determining Art in Spiked
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