Asia Leonardi Archives - Carl Kruse

The Beats – Driving Cross Country in Search of Eternity

by Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
[… ] with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
[… ] who drove cross-country seventy-two hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity [… ] who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus, to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose…”
Howl, by Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco 1955-56

Carl Kruse Arts Blog - Allen Ginsberg — *Allen Ginsberg*

The Beats concentrated particularly in San Francisco. The Californian revival had already begun after the Second World War, with the arrival of thousands of European refugees, and was shaping the beautiful city on its footprints, characterizing it as the American city less linked to local traditions.

In the unsettling wave of mass conformism accompanied by the economic boom beginning in the late 1940s, San Francisco opposed itself as an oasis of individualism, perhaps thanks to the Mediterranean and Mexican footprints, which had painted it with those characteristic features of the “laissez-faire,” of the “dolce far niente,” a peculiarity that would hardly be found in other American cities of the period. San Francisco thus built a reputation of the “easiest city in America, and was soon populated by avant-garde artists, old Dadaist anarchists, rebellious boys who had left their homes. In this context, was born, and strengthened the “Beat Generation,” an expression of the critic John Clellon Holmes, which was to indicate what we remember today as “burnt youth.” They were not illustrious writers supported by large publishing houses, but troubled boys who rejected the moral and social systems of bourgeois society, in search of discovery -of a full self, of real-life, of new methods to approach life. It almost seems from the moment Holmes called them Beat Generation, these guys started drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, writing poetry, hitchhiking around America.

Of course, this is not the first youth anti-bourgeois movement and perhaps Baudelaire’s drunkenness was not so different from Hemingway’s, even though their literary programs were certainly so. Both anti-bourgeois, they led a violent battle to overcome the conformism of the time and impose their aesthetic creed even before the moral one.

Bourgeois conformism flattens the personality, levels the souls, implicitly establishes the moral and social structures of the mass community, which becomes increasingly impersonal, anonymous, and flat. The boys feel suffocated, silenced in a “misunderstood” silence. Hence the need for expression, living experiences, through which to seek an autonomous reality, free from conventional norms. Their experiences tend to take over the extremes of personality, perhaps because in this very one they hope to find the moral key that will serve as a solution to the eternal problem of good and evil.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - group photo in Princeton — Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, and
Daniel Kramer backstage at McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, September, 1964.

To the Beat Generation belong, writers and poets, whose texts were negatively received by bourgeois and conformist critics, who, in the particular case of Allen Ginsberg, was described as “totally negative and unnecessarily obscene.” The violence with which the art of the Beat Generation has been welcomed is the same violence of the mass society that has led them to separate themselves from it.

The character of the American Beat Generation and their literary productions consists in their poetic proposals and experiences of a spiritual nature. Their way of acting was a reflection of the adolescent anxieties cultivated in bourgeois worldliness. The typical characters in Jack Kerouac’s books perform gestures whose families would pay handsomely for not seeing their children perform –watching them get drunk on alcohol and drugs, live as vagrants, piercing the sole of their shoes as they step on the accelerator, venting their energy, their anxiety for life, in an intensity that if taken out of context would seem unjustified. “We have to go and we don‘t have to stop until we get there.” “Where are we going?” “I don‘t know, but we have to go.“

To see it this way, it would seem that their need is to escape, but it is clear that in reality, it is a search. And it has been said that the most desperate drama of the Beat Generation was to find a transcendent reality in which to believe, such as to supplant a conformist middle-class life. They are not part of a movement: they have no prospects, they have no plan to reach, nor an eschatology to pursue. There is no future, there is no past, there is only an immanent present, inexplicable, that only liberation from space and time can temporarily overcome.

The means to do so may be physiological (such as orgasm), or mystical (such as visions), or passionate (such as jazz), or artificial (such as drugs). Only by this momentary overcoming can one arrive at a poetic reality, together with a reality of life.

“[…] and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes -Awww!-”
On the road, Jack Kerouac, 1957

In reality, the Beat Generation does not make a difference between religious and alcoholic exaltation, what matters is to feel freedom flow in them, independence, living and individual energy. They are extreme means, of course, but the children prefer to take the risk rather than face a stale, empty, meaningless, and perhaps ultimately worthless community life.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Kerouac — *Jack Kerouac*

Their tormented search for a new moral reality, new answers to the questions of the world, make them a generation of mystics and philosophers: some are Catholics, others are Buddhists, and everyone believes in God. When a journalist asked Kerouac to whom he prayed, he replied: “I pray to my dead brother, my father, Buddha, Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. I pray to these five people”.

The identity they seek is an identity based on faith, whatever faith maybe, but which must be attained by the realization (and therefore discovery) of their personality. They rely on themselves to find, in themselves, a trace of transcendent values that can guide them on an even shorter, faster, futile, and tormented journey of life. So when they asked Jack Kerouac, “It‘s been said that the Beat Generation is a generation looking for something. What are you looking for?” He said, “God. I want God to show me his face”.

==================
The Ars Lumens blog is curated by Carl Kruse. The homepage is here.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com.
Asia Leonoardi has written about Bowie’s Alter Ego, Pop Art, Frida Kahlo, Brunelleschi and Lost Architecture.
The blog’s last post announced a photo exhibit in Berlin by Adele Schwab.
If on Pinterest stop by and say hello.

Filippo Brunelleschi and his Dome

By Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), architect and engineer, sculptor and painter, is universally considered the pioneer of the Italian Renaissance and the creator of an approach to architecture that would dominate the European art scene, at least until the end of the 19th century. Through a passionate study of antiquity that brought him several times to Rome starting from 1402, he reacted to the anti-classicism of late Gothic architecture and artistic culture, referring consistently to the language of the ancients and proposing new design systems based on modular structures. The keystone of this cultural and technical turning point was the invention of the vanishing point perspective in which the great technological tradition of Tuscan architects and masters was combined with the new trends of scientific thought, all converging towards the ever-increasing use of mathematical tools in the study of reality.

By unifying all orthogonal lines towards a single vanishing point, the scientific rules were built to objectively measure the decrease in depth of bodies inserted in space. The Florentine artist was among the first to elaborate and use rules and numerical relationships in the architectural construction of space and figurative representation. And this, together with the effort to identify the geometric principles used to organize the reproduction and creation of space, was the basis of a return to antiquity.

Architecture was for Brunelleschi a tool for mathematical control of design. Classical architecture is understood as an example of the exact measurability of space, as a clear example of the concrete possibility of subjecting the whole substantial reality of architectural space to rigorous mathematical formulas.

With Brunelleschi, a new system of organization of the construction site and of construction work came about and the new social figure of the architect was born.

The architect was no longer a superintendent of works, endowed with equal dignity concerning workers to a large extent operating on an autonomous level concerning him, as was the case in the Middle Ages, but an intellectual, cultured, an updated figure, who conceived and prepared the project and the details of the building, to which the activity of the workers, artisans, and contractors engaged in the work had to be instructed.

It was the end of the ancient organization of building activity, which had supported and achieved the great Florentine, and more generally Tuscan urban expansion of the 12th and 13th centuries. In a new relationship with the client, the new artist, as was outlined in the Bruneschellian experience, was a well-defined figure in his individuality, who ventured into the field of artistic innovation with a new, freer and more secular spirit.

But the figure of Brunelleschi would still be unclear if we did not put him in his historical context, in his place, that is, in Florence at the height of its territorial expansion and closely linked to its republican institutions. In the first sixty years of the fifteenth century Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio and Beato Angelico, Donatello, Nanni di Banco, and Lorenzo Ghiberti, Paolo Uccello and Filippo Lippi, Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Della Robbia, and other artists lived and worked in Florence, all animated by the same effort of cultural transformation, all converging in outlining the contents of new art and a new artistic figure.

Why, we might ask, did this constellation of artists come together in Florence? The early Renaissance artists, like few other examples in history (and the comparison with the Athens of the 5th century BC, although abused, may be useful), was configured as the expression, in the work of artists, of a cultural renewal that affected the entire city.

Thus, the desire of the artists to revive the noble classical prototypes was linked to the fervor of literary and humanistic studies and above all to the investigation, the enhancement of the virtues of the ancients, to the awareness that they could relive – indeed, that they were living – in contemporary Florence.

The Search for Measures and Proportions: Inspiration From the Classic

The trip to Rome (between 1402 and 1404) with Donatello was decisive for the formation of Brunelleschi’s architectural ideas. While his friend was more interested in the still visible examples of ancient sculpture, Brunelleschi studied the proportion of buildings and construction techniques. From Rome he returned with the idea that the architect should invent the overall structure of the building in proportional terms: concentrate on those, as the value and beauty of the work depended on them, and abolish the superstructure of the decorative elements, so dear to Gothic architecture. The assumption of ancient orders served this purpose: to limit the structural and decorative uncertainty of the Gothic to a reduced and correlated case study, according to ancient rules. The distance between two columns, to give an example, does not determine the height of the pointed arch thrown above them but instead defines the height of a round arch that joins them and allows to proportion the measures of the base and those of the height of the arch. The column, the pillar, the pilaster, the entablature, the round arch were the indispensable ingredients of an architectural practice that had, as its primary purpose, the creation of modular structures and the geometric rationalization of the plans and elevations. This is the radical innovation of the architectural practice made by Brunelleschi, who gave concrete proof of it in the buildings, secular or ecclesiastical, entrusted to him by the Florentine public groups and, more rarely, also by some private clients.

The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.

Brunelleschi’s meditations on radial harmony developed during a long gestation resulting in one of his most daring and complex projects, the very symbol of the Florentine Renaissance and one of his best-known works in the world: the Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.

He was involved in it from 1417 until his death, through successive phases in which the various components of the colossal project were progressively developed: the huge converging caps raised in the void upwards, above the drum; the final lantern, keystone of the dome (completed around 1460, after the artist’s death); the dead stands, decorative elements but also buttresses of the formidable lateral thrusts caused by the large dome. Brunelleschi’s genius in this undertaking, as has been repeatedly noted, did not consist so much in the conception of the pointed arch shape of the dome, which was forced by objective requirements (for such dimensions it was not possible to think of using a hemispherical shape ), as in the ability to prepare the tools to complete the work (construction systems, machinery) and in the correct planning of the work phases.

Problems Posed by Construction.

The conclusion of the large apse tribune of Santa Maria del Fiore, by Arnolfo di Cambio (1367), and the subsequent erection of the massive octagonal drum (1413) with its four meter-thick walls, had left open the difficult problem of completing construction of the cathedral through an enormous dome, already foreseen by the original Arnolfian project. The opening that was intended to be covered by the dome, almost forty-two meters in diameter, was slightly smaller than the largest dome of antiquity, the Pantheon.

Following the competition launched at the Opera del Duomo in 1418, the construction of the dome was entrusted to Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, who were proclaimed winners after their joint a model of the project. The work began in 1420 and with that also disagreements between the two artists, and in 1426 Brunelleschi found himself with sole responsibility, something new for him, of the direction of the works.

The great innovation he introduced in the construction of the brick dome, supported by eight large white ribs, was the use of a load-bearing structure in every major phase of the work. The choice was a must: at this distance above the ground, it was not conceivable to use wooden reinforcements (ribs), as the traditional technique required.

Project and Organization of Works.

By adopting a double cap, internal and external, Brunelleschi simplified and strengthened the construction, placing the external one, parallel to the first, on twenty-four supports raised above the segments of the internal dome. The external dome was designed for practical and aesthetic purposes, to better protect the building from water, and to make it appear, as the work of the cathedral demanded, more magnificent and spacious.

It was up to Brunelleschi to think of the mechanical devices necessary to solve the complex problems of installation. For example, to lift the building material on the scaffolding he provided platforms for the workers; he even designed special boats for the transport of marble and bricks along the Arno. He designed every aspect of the dome covering, a first in the history of modern architecture, the position of sole manager.

Religious Significance and Earthly Significance.

After sixteen years of intense work, the dome was consecrated on 25 March 1436 by Pope Eugene IV. From a symbolic-religious point of view, it represented the triumphal crown of the Virgin to whom the Florentine cathedral was dedicated. But far more important was the earthly, social, and political significance of the work. Emblem of a city that had expanded its borders, the dome rose, with its expanded volume, over the roofs of the medieval city, detaching itself from the underlying body of the basilica, demonstrating a new way of considering history and space. Admired from afar, against the background of the hills that surround Florence, the dome, for the essentialness of its lines, for the visual effect induced by the contrast between the red brick of the caps and the white curvilinear ribs, becomes the pulsating center of a large urban system; dominating the entire region. The effect it had on his contemporaries must have been great because, as Alberti wrote, it seemed to “cover all the Tuscan peoples with its shadow”. It is a work still linked to the spirit of the Gothic because it is based on the calculation of structural forces in equilibrium, but the result of a new mentality as it redefines and re-proportioned the underlying building redesigns and subdues the surrounding area. However, it is a Renaissance work because, as the architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo wrote, it is the first “where the architect is not only a high-level consultant for a collective body of executors, but the only one responsible for the form, decoration, structure, and construction site organization”.

Construction Techniques of the Dome

The size of the dome that was to be built forced Brunelleschi to adopt new solutions to solve extremely difficult technical problems, also aggravated by the considerable height. The work was entrusted to him not because he had presented a particularly compellingly shaped dome model, but because he had provided a coherent work plan for its construction.

Brunelleschi found solutions to thousands of practical questions, capturing the wonder and admiration of his contemporaries. Vasari lists some of these measures: Brunelleschi had organized a lighting system for the stairs and corridors that run, at various levels, between the internal and external envelope of the dome and had placed the iron support points there to make it easier go up and walk through those tunnels; he had arranged the support points for the scaffolding of whoever, in the future, would have wanted to decorate the inner shell with paintings or mosaics, as in fact happened.

He had designed an elaborate rainwater drainage system; on the outside, he had even provided for “holes and several openings, so that the winds break, and the vapors together with earthquakes could not cause damage”. He went to the kilns to check that he was supplied with flawless bricks; he chose the stones one by one, making sure they weren’t cracked. He provided the stonecutters with models in wood and wax, and even carving them in turnips, in order to show them how the joints were to fix one stone to another. Nor could he overlook the problem of the organization of work. When the construction site gradually moved to higher altitudes, Vasari writes again, “workers lost a lot of time in going to dinner and drink, and they suffered great discomfort due to the heat of the day. It was therefore established by Filippo the order that taverns should have been opened in the dome with the kitchens, and wine should have been sold; and so no one would left work, except in the evening; which was to their convenience”. But the workers needed solid scaffolding to work safely at such high altitudes. At the beginning of the work, when the dome wall was still almost vertical, the scaffolding was supported by beams inserted into the wall, both inside and outside the building: but lastly, given the strong inclination of the masonry, he had to think of a different system. Filippo Brunelleschi designed a scaffolding suspended in the void, located in the center of the dome, probably supported by long beams on platforms fixed at lower altitudes. these platforms were also to serve as warehouses for materials and work tools. Brunelleschi had to take steps to lift the heavy bricks to the height of the installation.

He partly used traditional machines, derived from the construction practice of Gothic cathedrals, but he had to invent new ones, applying the multiplier system, invented for the manufacture of watches, which was able to increase the effectiveness of the strength of winches and pulleys. In such machines, the engine was driven by a couple of horses. By walking in circles, animals could rotate a vertical shaft. This, in turn, impressed it on a horizontal shaft from which the ropes that supported the loads, fixed at a height to pulleys, rolled and unwound. In this way bricks and stones could rise and fall through a difference in height of tens and tens of meters.

==============

Homepage: Carl Kruse
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Asia Leonardi focus on Maria Abramovic, Frida Kahlo and Forgotten Places.
Check out the other Carl Kruse blog at https://carlkruse.at
For those interested in green building construction find Carl Kruse at the USGBC here.

Marina Abramović, Grandmother of Performance Art

By Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

This story begins with a woman standing motionless in a room. Half-naked, a trickle of blood dribbles on her breasts, her eyes swollen with tears, and a gun is aimed at her while surrounded by a group of men. This is not the scene from a crime film, but one of Marina Abramović’s best known performances.

The performances of the Serbian artist make noise, scandalize, and are often frightening in their ability to dig into the darkest caverns of the self, playing on the border between life and death. Her works are cathartic rituals that push the viewer into the abysses of their soul and then bring them back to the surface, purified. Maybe better.

Everything has been said about her, for better or for worse. What is certain is that regardless of the judgments, Marina Abramović has revolutionized the world of performance art, making each of her works an event to be told to others, like an adventure, a journey into the depths of oneself.

Marina Abramović (Belgrade, 1946) is a Serbian artist, naturalized in the United States, and active artistically since the 1960s. She is famous for performances that explore the most instinctive (and often obscure) traits of the human soul. She defined herself as “Grandmother of Performance Art” to underline the revolutionary significance of her way of understanding artistic performance which, in her case, often involves the participation of the public, both mentally and physically.

Marina Abramović’s biography offers interesting insights right from the start. Her parents were partisans during the Second World War while her grandfather, a patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was even proclaimed a saint.

There are three key cities to tell her story: Belgrade, Amsterdam, and New York.

Belgrade is her homeland, where she took her first steps in the world of art, attending the Academy of Fine Arts from 1965 to 1972; Amsterdam is the city where she met the German artist Ulay, a fundamental partner in her creative activity and life; finally, New York, the city of consecration, where the artist still resides today.

But what is performance art?

Performance art is an exhibition consisting of an artist who presents themself in front of an audience and creates something unique. The term that defines this new art form was born in the 1960’s and places the event at the center of the whole performance: this art intends to live a unique experience that the artist shares with their audience.

Hic et Nunc: this is how performative art can be defined. “Here and now”, an event that must be fully enjoyed at the moment, its aspects, meanings, and sensations must be grasped before these vanish at the end of the performance.

Performance art is not just the work that speaks to the public, it is a dialogue that is established between the performer and the audience. It can involve multiple disciplines and can also be improvised or studied in every detail, enjoyed through media or live. The fact is that without an audience this form of art would lose much of its deepest meaning.

The artist’s own body is often the bridge between artistic experimentation and the public. The performative turn makes contemporary art an event, a social, ritual, and spectacular act; in this relational art, the experience of the world becomes embodiment, not only mental but above all physical. The body becomes a canvas, testimony, and artistic medium. The importance of the body in performance art is such that it deserves a definition in itself: when we talk about performance art we are also talking about body art, art through the body, and of the body.

Among the most famous works by Marina Abramović is the series of performances entitled Rhythm or the series Freeing The Body, Freeing The Memory, Freeing The Voice, performed in the 1970s.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Marina Abramovic 1

In particular, the Rhythm series was striking for the violence that the artist inflicted on herself, bringing her body to the extreme physical limit. Emblematic is the case of the performance Rhythm 5 (1975) during which Abramović risked her life.

The artist stretched out in the center of a five-pointed wooden star, positioned in the center of a room which was then set on fire. In this prison of fire, however, the air soon became unbreathable, so much so that Abramovic passed out, though luckily, bystanders noticed the problem and helped the artist escape.

However, the performance Rhythm 0, held in Naples in 1974, aroused even more of a stir. Here the artist stood in the center of a room where various objects were present (knives, feathers, ropes, scissors, even a gun) and explained to the spectators that for six hours she would remain motionless as an object and everyone could do with that body what they wanted. With impunity.

After a couple of hours of hesitation, the spectators began to rage on the artist, in a violent and uncontrolled way: they cut her clothes, shredded her skin with a razor blade, pointed the gun at her. At that point other spectators intervened and a heated discussion arose that almost led to blows.

The performance, all in all, had worked. It had shown the worst of human beings who, if sure of impunity, risk giving vent to the worst sadistic fantasies. However, Abramović’s work ended with faint hope. Someone, in the end, had opposed that senseless violence.

In Amstrerdam in 1976 Marina Abramović met the German performer Uwe Laysiepen (aka “Ulay”). A profound artistic and sentimental union was born immediately.

The series of works made in pairs is called Relations works: complex and disturbing performances, functional to explore the physical and psychic limits of human resistance and the theme of the man-woman relationship.

Their intentions are described in the Art Vital manifesto: “Living art: no fixed abode, permanent movement, direct contact, local relationship, self-selection, overcoming limits, risk-taking, energy in motion, no evidence, no set end, no replication, extended vulnerability, exposure to chance, primary reactions “.

The first performances that are conceived early in their relationship are physically extreme. In “AAA-AAA”, “Relation in time” and “Breathing in / Breathing out” the two artists make visible the sufferings, contradictions and needs of the couple bond: they present themselves as an androgynous being, capable of containing male and female energies simultaneously.

In the first performance, “AAA-AAA”, they sit opposite each other, emitting a monotonous sound that becomes more and more intense as the minutes pass, until it turns into a scream and one of the two gives up exhausted.

In the second performance, “Relation in Time”, made in Bologna, the artists influenced by Asian meditation practices sit back to back with their hair tied tightly together for sixteen long hours. The public is allowed to watch the last hour when overwhelmed by fatigue, the two begin to let themselves go physically.

“Breathing in / Breathing out” reaches an even higher level of suggestion: Abramovic and Ulay close their mouths with each other, plug their nostrils with cigarette filters and breathe the air expelled from the other for 17 minutes. until they collapse to the ground practically poisoned by the carbon dioxide emitted by the other.

In June 1977, in the midst of the sexual revolution, Abramovic and Ulay created “Imponderabilia” at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna. The performance is still part of the collective imagination due to the audacity and intelligence shown through the execution of a simple and impactful gesture. They position themselves opposite each other at the entrance to the Gallery, completely naked, thus forcing the public to pass between their bodies. The exhibition puts a strain on the Italian visitors, forcing them to deal with feelings such as shame and modesty, in a historic moment of transition from a puritanical society to a more sexually free and uninhibited one.

“Rest Energy” then raises the degree of difficulty of their artistic experimentation to the point of making them risk their safety: showing the public that the strength of their art lies in living it to the extreme, in order to create a fracture in the sensitivity of the beholder. The two place a bow between them: the arrow is pointed at Abramovic’s heart while Ulay pulls the string back. The center of gravity of the two is abandoned, only the arch keeps them standing. The microphones record the heartbeats and the labored breathing of both: her life is at the mercy of the balance that is created between them: a slight failure could kill her. The performance lasts four interminable minutes, in which they manage to represent the concepts of time and trust in a single gesture.

Abramovic and Ulay shared twelve years, loving and working together. In a recent television interview, she confessed that the last three years of the relationship were horrible: betrayals, misunderstandings, accusations. The more their fame grew, the more the couple’s relationship deteriorated. Ulay could not stand celebrity, while Abramovic manages to regulate it and benefit from it to make her ideas known.

In 1988 they decide to leave each other in their own way: a painful and private decision is transformed once again into an artistic act and a suggestive gesture for every couple who have decided to put an end to a great love. Their latest performance is “The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk”. The last epic act of a love that tried to make itself intelligible to everyone, so much so that it reached the degree of universality and of total sharing. With an action reminiscent of the one that inaugurated the beginning of their history, to honor the end, they choose the Great Wall of China. Walking each from the two opposite ends of the Wall, they decide to meet halfway after ninety days and end, with great emotion, their story.

Marina Abramovic and Ulay from that moment will no longer have contact for 23 years, until, on the occasion of the performance organized by her at the MOMA in New York entitled “The Artist is Present,” which forces her to remain seated for seven hours a day at a table with one empty chair in front of her, and anyone can sit down and watch her in silence for two minutes. To everyone’s surprise, one of the visitors is Ulay.

Unexpectedly, there is her old partner in art and life sitting n that chair, giving life to a moving moment: a performance in the performance – extemporaneous, unrepeatable – which, born in the age of social networks, will be subject to destiny of sharing by reaching the widest possible audience.

“I am half, he is half and together we are one,” Marina Abramovic said of herself and Ulay. Over the years, many critics and detractors have accused them of not having made true art, but however you view it, it cannot be denied that their works have created suggestions whose effects still reverberate in the eyes and conscience of those who decide to see their performances. Together they investigated the strength of an instant, the precariousness of the couple’s relationship, with its poisons and inexplicable balances and demonstrated the instability of the concept of time, giving in their way an essential contribution to human expression.

=============
The Carl Kruse Art Blog – Homepage.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Asia Leonardi include exposes of Frida Kahlo, Charlotte Salomon, and Jackson Pollock.
Her last article focused on Pop and Optical art.
Some old Carl Kruse ramblings about the world are found on Foursquare,

From Pop + Optical Art to the Rejection of the Artistic Object – the 1960’s.

by Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

It will be inevitable, in this article, to feel a certain sense of unease and difficulty in orienting oneself in front of works that are very different from each other a few years later. You will find all and the opposite of everything. In the past it was easier when faced with a painting, a sculpture, an architecture, to establish the period, to propose a probable dating, because the spirit of the time (what marks an age in itself and determines a taste) resisted longer, it stretched out, without encountering serious obstacles, for decades. Yet the speed of societal and cultural change is reflected in the speed and change in art. The spirit of the times today has certainly not ceased to act; but its range of action no longer differs over decades but over every handful of years, because the changes are more rapid than in the past.

From the end of the fifties the reaction to the informal, to its desecrating and nihilistic fury, passed through different experiences, somehow opposed, such as “Optical Art” and “Pop Art”. Optical art (mostly known with its abbreviated term op art) includes those artistic manifestations interested in the analysis of perceptual and kinetic phenomena. In this context, the artists created, on the one hand, works with their own movement, on the other works that, thanks to a study of perceptual tricks, create different visual effects according to the movements of the viewer, thus soliciting his participation.

Victor Vasarely; Op Art

With these interests, op artists grafted an aversion to any romantic individualism into a line of research connected with the rigorous scientific spirit through groups such as the German Group Zero, the Swiss Kalte Kunst, the French Group de Recherche d’Art Visuel, the Yugoslavian Nove Tendencije.

In the context of op and kinetic art, the production of multiple works designed by the artist but made according to industrial procedures in smaller series of copies, often numbered and signed, began. The artist’s intervention is limited to the design phase: one understands how the multiple is placed side by side and often confused with industrial design, and how it also risks lending itself easily to commercial operations and mystifications.

With the so-called pop art (short for popular art) the artist’s interest turned to the world of consumerism, to the Babelic profusion of objects imposed on a daily basis by the system of production and advertising: it’s therefore obvious that this trend would mainly develop in the United States. By isolating the product of daily use, decontextualizing it, transforming it into an idol, a totem, a fetish, pop art alluded to the depersonalization of a world dominated by the profit of things, and ironically celebrated the triumph of goods and launched a cry of alarm.

Artists such as Robert Raushenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein demonstrated their discomfort by reproducing the most usual objects or images favored by the mass media, sometimes with meticulous, hyper-realistic technique, or by remaking them in natural or hyperbolic dimensions, or by using the objects themselves. In 1964 the pop artists were presented, with great success, in the U.S. pavilion of the Venice Biennale: it was the decisive push for the start of a short but intense pop season throughout Europe.

The second half of the sixties, in the whirlwind succession of fashions, saw the affirmation of minimal art (sometimes labeled “Primary Structures”, from the title of a 1966 New York exhibition), not without ties to pop art. The term “minimal” refers to the fact that artists of this trend minimize the complications of form, and aspire to elementary forms using simple and non-traditional materials (concrete, iron, steel, wood, aluminum, plexiglas, etc). This is how often large-scale works of geometric evidence are born,consisting of isolated or repeated modules, with the intention of involving the surrounding space in some way.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Primary Structures, New York

Primary Structures, exhibition 1966, New York

The artists of minimal art, pugnacious opponents of the com-modifiable object and in search of elementary volumes (almost in an attempt to trace the origin of forms) were already close to conceptualism, a trend (the term was used for the first time by Sol LeWitt in 1967) which, having abandoned any intention of representation, will make reflection on art prevail and will underline the phase of planning over actual realization. But conceptualism is a phenomenon with rather vague outlines and it is really difficult to frame, given that from time to time poor art, land art,visual poetry, those forms of spectacularization of art represented by happenings and performances. Poor art, however, well underlines the predominant trend in the late sixties, namely the rejection of the traditional artistic object.

Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings”, 1960, New York

One of the reasons that underlie many experiences of recent years has been the anxiety of renewal at all costs (we could also define it as a revival of the spirit of the avantgarde), the rejection of everything that even remotely resembles “already done”. This novelty race combined with a spirit of revolt, distraction, profanation in the sixties and seventies. The artists have reached insurmountable limits: they have applied the label of artistry to practically everything, they have exhibited themselves in the halls of museums, they have even really hurt themselves. The protest against the traditional system of arts has been radical, and often a reaction to the commodification of works; however, we must warn that the market has been able to seize seemingly elusive experiences, by putting into circulation, for example, photographs or recordings of performances, body art events, land art and so on.

Of course, many experiences imbued with such a strong radical spirit have had the merit of demythologizing the aura that surrounded the work of art, but at the same time, a large part of the public has pulled back, unable to understand or even in horror.

In the artistic events after 1945, it must be said, the tools of expression have multiplied, from cinema to video-tapes to electronic instruments and now NFTs, resulting from the most advanced technology, and the artist has seen an increase in her possibilities of manipulation and intervention, able to fully realize demiurgic wishes. Numerous operators were active with very different means: the case of Andy Warhol teaches, with his decisive contribution to the development of underground cinema.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1967; New York, collection of Leo Castelli

Andy Warhol’s position is highly critical of mass media-induced distortion. The artist works on sensational images, the faces made famous by the news (Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy), the photographs of a disastrous fire, of a spectacular car accident. The media repeatedly propose the same images to us, manipulate them, deform them, and Warhol thus renders them, almost unrecognizable, insisted on some detail, half-erased for the rest. They are the same fragments of reality that are offered to us every day by newspapers, television, cinema, but which no longer have the power to strike us, they leave us indifferent (and very soon reality itself does not arouse different reactions in us).

============
The blog home page is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Asia Leonardi include those on Frida Kahlo, Charlotte Salomon, More on Action Painting, and Jackson Pollock.

Frida Kahlo: Flowers Are Born From Mud

by Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

On 6 July 1907 in Mexico City, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon was born to German parents who emigrated from Hungary. She claimed to be born in 1910, with the Revolution, with a new Mexico.

Frida Kahlo is a revolution. An artistic revolution, a revolution of thought, an overwhelming hymn to life that is born with every lively stroke of color; some approached her to surrealism, but Frida was the first to break away from this definition: “I have always painted my reality, not my dreams.” Pure energy, a living fire and an intoxicating passion, Frida Kahlo looks like a character straight out of the pen of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, small, proud, survivor of polio at six, and of a terrible car accident at eighteen that will leave her invalid, the art of Frida is born from her survival instinct. She dyes her pains with color, transforms them into beauty.

“I paint flowers to keep them from dying.”

A strong, tenacious woman, a fighter: Frida is a disarming and full throttle scream, born from the awareness that you can always survive pain and that you must have the courage to be who you are, and to love yourself beyond the limits of your body. Frida paints herself crudely, in front of a mirror she observes and depicts her naked suffering with bright colors, the labor of her body, with pride, her eyes are always pointed, straight and motionless, giving the impression of probing the soul of the beholder. Facing a portrait of her, we are almost inclined to lower our heads, in front of the majesty of her figure, tense, suffering, proud.

“I lived from art, I lived from love.” A life between suffering and passion.

At the age of six Frida falls ill with polio: her right foot and leg remain deformed, so much so that Frida hides them first with pants and then with long Mexican skirts. So, if when she is little she is nicknamed by other children “Frida Pata de Palo” (wooden leg), when she grows up she will be admired for her exotic appearance.

In 1922, at the age of 18, Frida enrolled in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City intending to become a doctor. During this period Frida is part of the “Cachucas”, a group of students who support socialist ideas of the Minister of Education, Vasconcelos, calling for school reforms; she also shows interest in the visual arts but has not yet thought of pursuing an artistic career.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Frida Kahlo Self Portrait — The very first self-portrait: Self-portrait in a Velvet dress, 1926, Frida Kahlo

On September 17, 1935, the bus bound for Coyoacàn, on which Frida Kahlo had boarded with her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez, to go home after school, collided with a tram.

“I got on the bus with Alejandro… Shortly after the Sun train bus of the Xochimilco line collided… it was a strange collision; not violent, but deaf, slow, and massacred everyone. Me more than others. It is false to say that it makes us shocked, false to say that we cry. I didn’t shed any tears. The impact dragged us forward and the handrail went through me like the sword goes through the bull. “

Frida remains between the metal rods of the tram. The handrail breaks and goes over her from side to side. Alejandro picks her up and notices that Frida has a piece planted in her body. A man puts his knee on Frida’s body and takes out the piece of metal.

The first serious diagnosis comes one year after the accident: fractures of the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, three fractures of the pelvis, eleven fractures of the right foot, dislocation of the left elbow, deep wound in the abdomen, produced by an entered iron bar from the right hip. Acute peritonitis, the patient is prescribed to wear a plaster corset for 9 months, and complete rest for at least 2 months after discharge from the hospital.

“For many years my father kept a box of oil paints, a couple of brushes in an old glass and a palette … during the period when I had to stay in bed for a long time I took advantage of the opportunity and I asked my father to give them to me … My mother had an easel prepared, to be applied to my bed, because the plaster bust did not allow me to stand up straight. So I began to paint my first picture.”

Frida’s mother, Matilda, transforms Frida’s bed into a canopy and mounts a huge mirror on it, that Frida, immobilized, can at least see herself.

Thus are born those self-portraits that remind us of her, with her eyes dominated by dark eyebrows, particularly marked, which join the root of the nose like bird’s wings: “I paint myself because I spend a lot of time alone and because I am the subject that I know best.”

With these representations, Frida breaks the taboos relating to the body and female sexuality. Diego Rivera, her future husband, will say of her: “the first woman in the history of art to have faced with absolute and inexorable frankness, in a ruthless but at the same time calm way, those general and particular issues that exclusively concern women.”

As the months passed, Frida devotes herself with growing awareness to painting. She advances slowly, produces in small doses and small formats: what her health allows her to do: “my paintings are painted well, not lightly but with patience. My painting carries within itself the message of pain. “

Only towards the end of 1927 did Frida recover enough to be able to lead a normal life despite the pain caused by the various braces, and the scars left by the operations.

In 1928 Frida joins a group of artists and intellectuals who support independent Mexican art, far from academicism and linked to the popular expression: Mexicanism, which is expressed in mural painting, particularly encouraged by the state, almost certainly for the purpose of sharing national history with a large illiterate mass.

For her part, Frida creates her own figurative language to express ideas and feelings; the world contained in Frida’s works refers above all to Mexican popular art and pre-Columbian culture; there are, in fact, popular votive images, depictions of martyrs and Christian saints, anchored in the faith of the people; moreover, in the self-portraits, Frida is almost always represented in country clothes or with Indian costume.

In early 1928, German Del Campo, one of her friends from the student movement, introduces her to a group of young people gathered around the Cuban communist Julio Antonio Nella, who is in exile in Mexico and who has an affair with the photographer Tina Modotti. It was Tina herself who introduced Frida to Diego Rivera: a very famous painter and muralist, even though the two had already met in 1923, while Diego was working in the Bolivar amphitheater. Of that meeting Diego remembers this girl … “she had a dignity and self-assurance that was completely unusual and a strange fire danced in her eyes.”

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Frida and diego — Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

When Frida meets Diego for the second time, he is a heavy, gigantic man, Frida teases him by calling him “elephant”: he has already been married twice and has four children.

On 21 Agust 1929 they get married. She is 22, he is almost 43.

Due to the pelvic malformation caused by her accident, Frida is unable to carry out her pregnancies, and so, three months after the wedding, Frida has to have an abortion. In November 1930, Frida and Diego moved to the United States for four years for artistic and political reasons. In Detroit, Frida becomes pregnant for the second time, but the triple fracture of the acinus hinders the correct position of the baby. However, Frida decides to keep the baby, despite her poor physical condition and the risk. However, on July 4th she lost this baby to a miscarriage.

In 1934 they return to Mexico, Frida is forced to have an abortion for the third time and separates from Diego who, in the meantime, had had several adventures with other women, including Frida’s sister, Cristina.

Frida begins to have relationships with other men and other women and to be active politically. During the 1936 Spanish Civil War, Frida commits herself remotely to the defense of the Spanish Republic, organizing meetings, writing letters, collecting necessities, clothes, and medicines to send to the front.

In 1937, she hosted in her Casa Azul, Lev and Natalija Trotsky, who had been traveling since 1929, expelled from the Soviet Union.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Frida Red — Tree of Hope, 1946, Frida Kahlo

In the 1940s, Frida’s fame was so great that her works were requested for almost all group exhibitions held in Mexico.

In 1943 she was called to teach at the new art school: the Esmeralda. Frida, for health reasons, is soon forced to give lessons in her home. Her methods are unorthodox: “Muchachos, locked up here, at school, we can’t do anything. Let’s go out into the street, let’s paint the life of the street.” Her students remember her “the only help she gave us was to stimulate us … she didn’t say anything about the way we had to paint or about the style, like the master Diego did … She taught us above all the love for people, she made us love popular art “.

In 1950 Frida underwent seven spinal operations and spent nine months in the hospital. After 1951, due to pain, she was no longer able to work except by resorting to painkillers: perhaps this is why her brushstroke is softer, less accurate, the color thicker and the execution of details more imprecise.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Frida and hammer and sickle

In 1953, at her first solo exhibition, set up by her photographer friend Lola Alvarez Bravo, she participated lying on a bed, the doctors practically forbade her to get up. It was Diego who had the idea of carrying the large bed, drinking, and singing with a large audience. In August of the same year, the doctors decided to amputate her right leg.

Frida is destroyed, withdrawn into herself, reflects, and writes in her diary a phrase born from this period that becomes famous: “Pies. para que los quiero, si tengo alas pa’ volar.” (“Feet. why do I want them, if I have wings to fly?”)

In 1954 she fell ill with pneumonia. During her convalescence, on July 2, she participates in a demonstration against the U.S. intervention in Guatemala, holding a sign with the symbol of a dove carrying a message of peace. Frida died of a pulmonary embolism on the night of July 13, in her Casa Azul, seven days after her forty-seventh birthday. The night before she died, with the words “I feel that I will leave you soon,” she gave Diego a ring, which was to be her gift for him on their upcoming Twenty-fifth anniversary.

=================

The blog home page is at https://carlkruse.net

Former articles by Asia Leonardi include those on Simonetta Vespucci, Charlotte Salomon, and Jackson Pollock.

The blog’s last post was “Are Memes Art?“

Carl Kruse has an account on Behance.

Movements of the Soul Translated into Ceramic: Manon de Vlieger

Interview by Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Amsterdam is the motherland of artists. Among its streets, its bridges, and its canals, a century-old history reverberates, interwoven on the concepts of tolerance, resistance to authoritarian domains, spontaneous expression, freedom. It is for this reason that this city offers a combination of the most sophisticated creative emergencies and the most avant-garde ones, making it a safe place where the most varied, the most interesting artistic profiles are invented and re-invented, full of creative expression. This is the city of Manon de Vlieger, a young woman who enjoys expressing her spiritual dimension through ceramics. Since graduating with honors from the Artemis Academy in Amsterdam, Manon has had a great interest in materials, shapes, and colors. Her approach to design and her love for trend influences is instinctive and endless. Her creative fury, when working as an interior designer and consultant, strives to embrace the identity, history, and values expressed by the person in front of her; when instead Manon carves out time for herself, she gives life and matter to her passion and lets the movements of her soul translate into the creation of ceramics. I had the immense pleasure of speaking with Manon, and of hearing her story and her message.

When did you start this activity? And where do you get your inspiration from?

I started in 2015. I worked for a fashion brand but I found the job too meaningless for me. I quit and began making ceramics as an exploration for myself; to learn new crafts and processes. Though to be honest this has always interested me. Ceramics is slow living. Impossible to hurry the clay as it takes time to give it form, let it dry, fire, trim, glaze and one last time into the oven. Slow living.

My inspiration comes from little things, art, cooking, furniture, history,
photography, etc. Layers inspire me, in nature or on a picture, even in textile I can find some inspiration for my work.

I imagine that it gives a sense of tranquility, like an immersion in a peaceful dimension where each movement is natural, but I think that you have also to concentrate on the shape that you want to give to your work. What do you feel
when you’re alone with your creativity?

Most of the time I feel free, this is my happy place. I can create without focusing and concentrating (after 5 years) so my hands and mind are flowing together, and out of this duet comes my work.

I see that you are an interior designer. How do you combine all these activities? Is pottery an activity of your free time?

Pottery is my passion project, I create it in my free time. In my work as an interior designer, my pottery inspires me. And the other way around. When I’m busy with my work and I do not feel at ease you can see it in my pottery work. So sometimes it’s hard to combine both passions. Pottery will always be my passion and not my work. I need to feel free to create so I don’t want to be dependent on what I sell.

My last question is: do you perceive the time you dedicate to pottery as a time in which you’re working, or as a time that you give all to yourself?

I create it for myself. I love to work with clay, every piece passes my hands multiple times. No vase is the same and no bowl is perfect. Every plate or cup has its own energy. I think my ceramic work wouldn’t be so charming if it felt like work. I think I would make it too perfect if that were the case and I love the fact that my work is a bit wabi-sabi. Every piece unique.

Manon’s words are sweet and full of meaning: expressions of her artistic soul, just like her works in ceramics. An expression of life matured in movements and shapes, which becomes concrete through the touch of her fingers. I am sure that Manon has so much to tell, that she will make her life a work of art, slowly, just like modeling a cup, a plate, a vase. A training ground for the serenity of the human soul.

=============
Carl Kruse Art Blog Homepage: https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Asia Leonardi include exposes of Simonetta Vespucci, Charlotte Salomon, and Steve McCurry.
Carl Kruse on Youtube.

Simonetta Vespucci: Venus of the Renaissance

By Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

In the church of Florence of San Salvatore Ognissanti, where the secular exponents of her family are exhibited, rests today the beautiful Simonetta Vespucci in her secular sleep. But there was a time when the prodigious beauty was the inspiring muse of major Renaissance artists, such as Piero Cosimo, Verrocchio, Filippo Lippi, and one of the great interpreters of the Renaissance, Sandro Filipepi, known as Botticelli. The face of the lady was the most famous of the fifteenth century, reproduced in countless prints and on postcards depicting Renaissance masterpieces. Simonetta Vespucci was defined by her contemporaries as the “Living Venus.”

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Boticelli 2 — Ritratto di Giovane donna, Botticelli, 1475-1480 Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Boticelli 1 — Ritratto di Dama, Botticelli, 1475-1480, Städel Museum

Simonetta was born in Genoa (or Porto Venere) in the year 1453, from the noble family of Cattaneo, in decline after the fall of Constantinople, the city to which they had linked their trade. She was only 16 when she married Marco Vespucci, an acquaintance that came to her through her mother’s family, more precisely from the lord of Piombino, Iacopo III Altopiano. Marco Vespucci came from a
line of Florentine bankers, to which the well-known Amerigo belonged, the one who gave his name to America. It is known that at the time the marriage between the exponents of the wealthy classes did not contemplate the importance of feelings and was essentially a suitable contract for consolidating assets and alliances (remember, in this case, the sweet letters written by Eloisa
to her Abelard, three centuries earlier, which described marriage as captivity, and adultery alone as the principle of true love), the testimonies of the time attest that the groom was sincerely in love with Simonetta. The union of the two young people, due to the importance of the families involved, had a wide resonance and was celebrated in the presence of the Doge of Genoa and the
local aristocracy.

When Simonetta and Marco moved to Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent had just come to power. Under his enlightened government, and thanks to the skillful use of patronage as an instrument of political propaganda, Florence experienced a splendid cultural flowering. Theater of amazing encounters, crossed by minds such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico Della Mirandola, great painters such as Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, souls all close to the Medici, who became the protagonists of an unrepeatable artistic season that remains, in many respects, unmatched throughout history.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Simonetta Painting #3 — Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Cleopatra, Pietro di Cosimo, 1480 Musée Condé of Chantilly

In this scenario, Simonetta made her first entry into the city of Florence. Under the excellent relations between their families, Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano welcomed the couple in the Palazzo Medici in Via Larga (which currently bears the name of via Cavour, in Florence) and organized a sumptuous feast in their honor in the villa of Carreggi. From that moment on, the couple continued to animate court life in a crescendo of sumptuous parties, rich banquets, and joyful pastimes.

Simonetta’s adolescence, meanwhile, had turned into splendid beauty, giving her a slender body with a pale complexion, large, clear eyes that illuminated her face framed by wavy blond hair. At the time, all the most prominent young people in Florence were conquered by her grace, first of all, Lorenzo’s younger brother, Giuliano, who in the meantime, with great probability, became her lover.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Boticelli - 4 — Ritratto di giovane donna, Botticelli, Galleria Palatina, Florence, 1475

In 1475, Giuliano, bedecked in dazzling silver armor studded with precious stones, and a helmet designed by Verrocchio, won, in Piazza Santa Croce, the knightly tournament that sealed the peace agreement made by Lorenzo the Magnificent with the other Italian powers. The palio for which the contenders were disputing was a flag, perhaps painted by Botticelli, in which Simonetta, crowned queen of the tournament, appears in the guise of Athena, with her feet resting on a burning olive branch, on which a scroll is placed with the French motto “La Sans Par” (“the incomparable”). The entire composition referred to the theme of courtly love, a great passion for medieval troubadours, for which
the beloved woman was considered sublime and unattainable. The event went down in history as the “Julian Tournament,” since it was a worldly event of great public visibility, celebrated with praise by many of the intellectuals of the time. In Angelo Poliziano’s “Stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici” Simonetta appears decorated with these verses:

She is white, and her dress is white / But even
with roses and painted flowers and grass: / The
ringed crin of the golden head / Descends into
the humbly proud forehead.

In the opera, unfinished due to the death of the protagonist on the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, Poliziano sings of Giuliano’s love for Simonetta. The life of the young de Medici is abruptly interrupted, and the end of the beloved woman is no different, even though she seemed to wear a beauty immune from all pains and difficulties: the plague, chose to take her away on April 26, 1476, when she was still 23 years old.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Painting - #5 — Venus and Mars, Botticelli, 1483, National Gallery

Lorenzo learned about his friend’s condition while he was staying in Pisa, and asked to be constantly informed of her health through an exchange of letters with her father-in-law, Piero. He even went so far as to send his doctor to the Vespuccis for a consultation. It was his agent, Sforza Bettini, who told him the news of the young woman’s death, who inspired the four sonnets at the opening of his work, entitled “Comment on my Sonnets,” to the Magnifico.
In the notes to the sonnets, taking a cue from the description of Beatrice in Dante’s Vita Nova, Lorenzo imagined that he had received the inspiration to compose the work one night, after having observed a bright star, which could only be the soul of the young Simonetta ascendeding to heaven to enrich the firmament.

O clear star that with your rays / Remove the
light from your nearby stars, / Why do you shine
much more than your costume? / Why do you
still want to contend with Febo? / Perhaps and
beautiful eyes, which have been taken away from
us / by Cruel death, which by now assumes too
much, / You have welcomed in you: adorned
with their divinity, / his beautiful chariot you
can ask Phoebus. / Or this, new star that you
are, / That adorns the sky with new splendor, /
Called hear, god, and our vows: / Lever of your
splendor so far, / That in the eyes, they have
eternal weeping zeal, / With no offense glad you
show yourself.

No less moved was the tone in which Bernardo Pulci recalled the uncovered funeral granted to the beautiful Vespucci:

But perhaps that still alive in the world is the one
/ then that seen by us was, after the end, / in the
coffin even more beautiful.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Portrait of Medici — Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici, Botticelli, 1478-80, Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin

A stunning honor for those times, reserved by law for knights only. Simonetta’s death was also wept by Girolamo Beniveni, by Naldo Naldi in two epigrams, and by Francesco Nursio Veronese in a poem. But what made the charming lady immortal was painting above all else, although, in all probability, she never posed for a painting. For a lady of her rank to pose would have been judged contrary to decency and social conventions; it was only in the sixteenth century that it became more common for high-bourgeois women to be portrayed by an artist. Vasari in the “Vite dei piú eccellenti pittori, scultori e archittettori” (“Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects”) writes of how two portraits were preserved in the wardrobe of Duke Cosimo I, one of which, he recalls, “it is said that was the one in love with Giuliano de ‘Medici” executed by Botticelli. But was the young woman in question Simonetta, or was she another woman loved by the handsome Giuliano?

Academics still dispute today on the identification of the portrait cited by the Arezzo man: was it perhaps the “Portrait of a Lady” from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, that of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, or the “Portrait of a Young Woman” from the Palatine Gallery in Florence?

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Birth of Venus by Boticelli — The Birth of Venus, Botticelli, 1485-1486, Uffizi Gallery

Although some critics speak more of a search for idealized beauty rather than a muse in flesh and blood, it is not difficult to recognize the similarity in many of Botticelli’s female portraits, which supports the hypothesis of the existence of an inspiring model. It is therefore believed that it is the beautiful Simonetta Vespucci who is depicted, half-naked, in the guise of the goddess Aphrodite in the “Birth of Venus” — an allegory of Love understood as the driving force of Nature; it is necessary to mention the last verse of Dante Alighieri’s Paradise: l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle (“the love that moves the sun and the other stars)” — in “Spring” as the goddess Flora, and as Venus in the painting “Venus and Mars,” now preserved in the National London Gallery.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Spring by Boticelli — Spring, Botticelli, 1477-1482, Uffizi Gallery

Botticelli’s obsession with Simonetta’s face, even after her death, made her an archetype of beauty with a refined and elegant air, eternalized in a timeless place, and which still today makes us associate her face with aesthetic canons of the Renaissance. If beauty, expressive purity, and formal balance are the most immediately recognizable figures of Botticelli’s art, it must be borne in mind that they still represent only a first level of interpretation of his masterpieces. The second implies a complex system of allegorical references, which refer to the Neoplatonic idea of the possibility of rising from the material world to the contemplation of the divine through beauty and spiritual love. A sophisticated symbolism is also present in the works of Piero di Cosimo, who imagined Simonetta in the guise of a topless Cleopatra caught just before the fatal bite in the painting, now in the Musée Condé in the Castle of Chantilly, accomplished in 1480, years after her disappearance.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - The Education of Pan - Lost in fire in Germany — The Education of Pan, Luca Signorelli, 1490; destroyed in the Flakturm Friedrichshain’s fire in Berlin of May 1945. Flakturms were heavily fortified German Anti-aircraft towers built during World War II.

A posthumous portrait — the author, in the year of the young woman’s death, was just a teenager — and perhaps posthumous also the marble bust of the National Gallery of Art attributed to Verrocchio and many other representations, including the lost painting “The Education of Pan” by Luca Signorelli of 1490, which all testify to the emergence of a sort of cult of Simonetta in the art world in the last decades of the fifteenth century.

The truth is that we do not know of any painting that has handed down the real features of Simonetta Vespucci to us. Similarly, no document has ever been found capable of proving that Simonetta posed for Botticelli, or at least ever appeared in one of his works. The most recent criticism has now dismantled these hypotheses, considering them a reflection of a true “cult” for Simonetta Vespucci which spread in the seventies and eighties of the fifteenth century in Florence and which exerted a considerable influence also on nineteenth and twentieth-century criticism. However, this does not mean that, at the time, there were no portraits inspired by the beautiful girl: in a letter sent by Simonetta’s father-in-law, Piero Vespucci, to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Giuliano de Medici, reference is made to an
image of Simonetta that would be given to Giuliano after the girl’s death. The fact that the portraits of Berlin and Frankfurt (excluding the unappealing lady of the Palatine) have a rather high degree of idealization and could lead to a lot of discussion about the possibility of hypothesizing that one of the two is the “image” mentioned by Piero Vespucci. But perhaps, as the art historian Stefan Weppelmann recently wrote in a catalog entry on the portrait of Berlin, “the question of whether the Berlin and Frankfurt paintings represent Simonetta Vespucci seems far less relevant than their possible role of literary images and, consequently, their intent to depict the humanistic formulation of the ideal of beauty.” Because in the end, observing these works, we see nothing but ideal women who transmit to us the canon of the beauty of fifteenth-century Florence: and it is certainly not a small thing! In many admirations, her character remains an enigma: no woman of the Renaissance was given so many awards by her contemporaries and, if we consider that she lived only seven years in Florence, this veneration appears even more exceptional. Perhaps the young Genoese woman could inspire many artists precisely because she was prematurely torn from life, granting art only the promise of eternal beauty, combined with inconsolable regret for her loss.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Church in Florence - Image — Intern of the Chuch of San Salvatore Ognissanti, Florence

Removed from the corrosive action of time, Simonetta survives idealized, eternalized forever in Botticelli’s masterpieces with her gentle features, in
which her large eyes veiled with melancholy stand out, emblematic of the angelic woman coveted by the Dolce Stil Novo. One last curiosity: the church of Ognissanti, in which the mortal remains of Simonetta Vespucci rest, also houses the remains of Sandro Botticelli who, according to legend, asked to be buried at the feet of his muse. The reality, however, was probably much less romantic, because both the Vespucci and the Filipepi had their family tombs in the same place of worship, both having lived in the same neighborhood.

==============

Carl Kruse Art Blog Homepage
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Asia Leonardi on the blog include an expose of the German painter Charlotte Salomon, Action Painting, and an interview with Berlin architect Andrea Liguori.
Find me also on TED.

Charlotte Salomon, the Painter Killed in Auschwitz between Life and Theater

By Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Charlotte Salomon, a Berlin Jewish artist, was one of the most original and pioneering female painters of the 1900s. Her work “Life? or Theater? ” condenses her artistic career: some eight hundred compositions that trace her artistic life; an innovative style that we could compare to the contemporary graphic novel in which painting, comics, cinema, and theater come together, transmitting moments of touching historical and personal drama with immediacy and lightness.

Who was Charlotte?

Charlotte was born in Berlin in 1917 to Jewish parents: her father Albert was a surgeon and a university professor and her mother, Franziska Grunwald, was a nurse. Her mother committed suicide by throwing herself out of a window when Charlotte was nine, but the girl was told her mother died of a serious illness. It was also kept silent that this was but the latest in a series of suicides among women of the family.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Leben oder Theater. Charlotte Salamon. — From the German, Leben = Life, Oder = Or, Theater = Theater

In 1933, following the newly enacted German racial laws, Charlotte’s maternal grandparents emigrated to Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, but her father,
with his new wife Paula Lindberg and Charlotte, resisted for some time as he was able to practice his profession. In these years, thanks to Paula, a renowned soprano, Charlotte was immersed in the world of music and art, so much so that in 1935 she was accepted being the only one hundred percent Jewish person at the National School of the Academy of Fine Berlin Arts. Here she learned traditional artistic techniques, while at the same time being exposed to modern works of art of the so-called “degenerate art”, which indelibly marks her style.

Over time, her life inevitably became marked by racial discrimination and limitations and on Crystal Night on November 9, 1938, Charlotte left Berlin to join her grandparents in France, while her father and his wife took refuge in Holland.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Image of Crstal Night in Berlin, Germany — Crystal Night

One night in September 1939 Charlotte prevented the suicide of her grandmother, who had fallen into depression over the ongoing events, and in this circumstance, the painter learned of the long history of family depression. This upset the artist so, it catapulted her into moments of anxiety and despair that led her to see art as a way of salvation. Starting to paint with tireless energy that in what, two years, 1940-1942, would become her great work: “Life? or Theater?”

The bound volumes amount to 800 and when added to the preparatory drawings and sketches become more than 1300. This work of art can be defined as total and coinciding with the very life of the artist who narrates her exile in France, her daily life including her first love, in a setting that can be defined as a proto-graphic novel. The episodes are divided into acts as in a Singspiel (Austrian-German musical theatrical genre) and give life to a musical novel of exuberant expressive power, in which each table makes its own story and at the same time asks for a layered and linked reading.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents — Charlotte Salomon With Her Grandparents

A series of tempera with sinuous captions, rhythmic, onomatopoeic, and torrential words, which create a dual game between sound and color, sucking the viewer and dragging him into a world in which space and time blend and alternate. The expressionist lexicon is bubbly, detailed, and with rich and warm colors that recall Matisse, details of the oneiric dimension that recall Chagall, scenes of strong exasperation typical of Munch’s painting.

Charlotte outlines each event with a typical feminine delicacy, in which the language, absolutely unprecedented at the time, varies according to the subject treated. The continuous stylistic metamorphosis is testified by hundreds of sheets that directly or metaphorically touch the salient experiences of the painter’s affective and cultural training: photography, crippled negative, still image, deformed illustration.

“Now I am a document, now irony, now oneiric metaphysics, now philosophical poetry.”

The staged memory is not immediate, it is the obscene private and public of the twentieth century treated and elaborated in words, images, and music, with characters, dialogues, fractures, changes of perspectives, temporal and spatial changes: a work that hybridizes codes and different languages.

Charlotte narrates the tangle between her personal story and the collective story and in both flows dramatic plots develop, creating a perfect symmetry between the catastrophic series of external circumstances and the inner tragedies of her personal life, improving a compositional tendency that tells events through trauma: pain is processed and not removed.

An alternation of real-life and Shakespearean staging, in which Charlotte recomposes the inner rupture given by the inexorable presence of death in her family history and at the same time in European history. Through the presence of Charlotte with her grandparents Gouache infinitely replicated masks or varied in shape, she can break the fatal chain of suicides, putting the whole of
history in the picture:

“When the measure of life is full, it is necessary to start again from the theater.”

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Charlotte Salomon - Stolperstein — The “Stolperstein” for Charlotte Salomon on Wielandstr 15 in Berlin – Charlottenburg, Germany. Stolperstein – meaning “stumbling block” — are placed on the ground in front of the former homes in Germany of people killed by the Nazi regime. The Stolpersteine project was conceived by artist Gunter Denmig.

Time passes, but the terrifying wind of racial persecution blows over Europe. In 1943 she was forced to hand over all her works to a friend, and in September she married Alexander Nagler, also a German refugee. But soon the couple is jailed. After her incarceration, news about her life becomes fragmented. She died at 26, a few months pregnant, after reaching Auschwitz, perhaps on the day of her arrival following the terrible train ride to the concentration camp.

The painter was forgotten for a long time, perhaps for being too avant-garde, until Willem Sandberg organized a first retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, followed by important international milestones, and not least the choice of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev who included her in 2012 in the Documenta exhibition in Kassel saying, as Joel Cahen (director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam) remembers, it was “her definitive entry into the world of modern art.”

Charlotte Salomon’s work, on the other hand, finds an Italian look for the first time with the publication and full translation of her “Vita? O Teatro?”, the illustrated volume with slipcase published by Castelvecchi Editore, which today remains an artistic and literary monument, almost a total work of art of a shocking force, a work that is intensely connected to today’s world, to the modalities of communication and relationships, based on images, sounds, and intuitive messages.

Perhaps the greatest book of the twentieth century.
As a work of visual art, it is a triumph. As a novel, it is a triumph.

– Jonathan Safram Foer

Charlotte Salomon – Self Portrait

=============

Carl Kruse Art Blog Homepage: https://carlkruse.net

Other writings by Asia Leonardi on Andrea Liguori, Francesca Woodman, Steve McCurry and Escher.

The blog’s last post focused on the Van Gogh’s “Chair.”

Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
And old Carl Kruse blog is here.

Andrea Liguori, a Wonderful Mind in Berlin

by Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Into the urban traffic of Berlin so many people are walking, with them come ideas from all over the world, sometimes changing the surrounding environment. This is the case of Andrea Liguori, an architect from Palermo who has now lived in Berlin for many years. I had a pleasant chat with Andrea, where he told me about his work, his love for architecture and painting.

What brought you to Berlin, Andrea?

“What brought me to Berlin? A girl; sometimes happens that love takes you around the world … sometimes you move for work, other times because you meet someone who moves something inside you. What I always point out is that it’s not so important how you got there but why you stayed there. In my case the reasons for staying were mainly the business aspect, Berlin is a beautiful reality, there is room for all: but also so much competition, and you have to
live with this. for an architect like me there is so much to do, and many possible niches… Here the field of architecture is very interesting because new construction sites are always opening, and Berlin has also an important role in the history of architecture, it was one of the headquarter’s of the Bauhaus.”

Carl Kruse Blog - Andrea Liguori - Wood House

Woodhouse by Andrea Liguori

How did you start your career?

“My very first experience was working in a studio in Palermo with two partners, an experience that I abandoned once I moved. Here I started working in the studio of an architect who spoke Italian, and it was useful for me to start learning German. Gradually I got to know the local reality, I built new acquaintances, and I started being able to do some more personal projects. Today I am a consultant for a studio, with which I design new buildings, such as hotels and apartments … but I also have my studio, where I take care of my projects, which mostly concern bars, restaurants, or small villas.”

And how do you divide yourself between the two activities?

“Since I am an external consultant, I can manage my time based on the importance of the projects I have. I work a lot, I often stay up late, I work on weekends, but all in all, when you find something you like it’s a hobby, and you feel like you never work. I’m not saying it’s exactly like that, because sometimes the tiredness is real, but I enjoy it. I never get bored because I like to differentiate. I’m also into furniture design. Me and a friend of mine have a company in Palermo, we design lamps, objects, we have also worked as
designers for Italian firms. In short, I have a holistic approach, I deal with a bit of everything that has to do with the world of drawing, design, architecture.”

Andrea Liguori – Hotel in Georgia

How do your ideas arise, and how do you put them into practice?

”With architecture, there is a study of reference manuals, while the creative process in design is more important and lighter. It comes from the experience as an individual when you go to a place or buy an object, you look at it, you
are interested, you think about possible changes …but the best ideas always
come in moments of leisure, of freedom, as the theory of creative idleness explains: when you are relaxed, maybe take a shower, an interesting idea comes to your mind more easily.”

How did you experience the lockdown? Was it a
period of greater creativity?

“When we are busy with everyday commitments there are many bureaucratic issues to complete, emails to write, accountants, lawyers, appointments to deal with. During the lockdown, all of this has slowed down a bit, I felt less pressure, and thus creativity increased. I have never been bored, thanks to my other passion that is painting… I paint with watercolors. Three or four years ago I also held a watercolor paintings exhibition in Palermo inspired by places in my city, and I keep painting to this day. I feel a little homesick now and then, but it relaxes me, I like the subject, and I continue to paint.”

Foro Italico in Palermo. Watercolor by Andrea Liguori

Was there a project that had left a mark on you, or that you particularly enjoyed doing?

“There is no more important project than others, everyone has their importance. Projects are a bit like children for an architect. I like traveling a lot, and I try to do projects all over the world, and those have a special flavor to me, even if it’s a smaller project. For example, at the moment I am working on the project of a large hotel here in Germany but I enjoyed doing a very small boutique in Miami, Florida last year because it was an opportunity to
discover a new world, a fun place … They are all projects born thanks to public relations, it is important in my opinion to convey your passion to others, you manage to involve them, and they call you and ask you for advice. Social networks also have their weight, with Instagram I share things that maybe don’t have much to do with my work but that give the idea of my vision of the world, of what I like to do, and maybe if there is someone who knows me
and sees himself in my posts he looks for me, calls me and the affinity is
born.”

Andrea is a fascinating man, with a firm and confident gaze; he knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. His university love continues to blossom day by day: he lives with his partner in his Berlin apartment. What struck me most about Andrea is the dedication and commitment he puts into his work, his delicacy in the choice of words, which reveals a brilliant creative intuition, typical of a successful architect. Transforming an idea into something real is what I admire most about architecture, and about art in general: Berlin’s urban planning is varied, always open to new construction sites, always new, always changing, ready to welcome those who, like Andrea, dare to put their personality into this wonderful city.

Carl Kruse Blog - Andrea Liguori - President of Italy

Andrea Liguori with Italian President Sergio Mattarella

==========

Homepage: Carl Kruse Art Blog
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other posts by Asia Leonardi are here, here and here.

Berlin related posts on the blog include the Boros Bunker art gallery and coverage of Berlin artist Yury Kharcehnko.
Carl Kruse is active in Berlin with the Ivy Circle.

Steve McCurry: Vulnerability Made Immortal

By Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Member of the Magnum, Steve McCurry graduated in 1974 in Cinematography and Theater from the University of Pennsylvania. He began work as a freelance photographer in the late 1970s, dispatching reports from India and Afghanistan, the countries with which his work is most identified. The turning point in his career happened in 1979, when he entered the Afghan areas controlled by the Mujahideen, shortly before the Russian invasion. He returned, crossing the border with rolls of film sewn between his clothes.
His color images, which combined the art of reporting, travel photography, and social investigation, have been published in countless publications, but Steve McCurry’s name remains particularly attached to National Geographic, of which he made the most famous cover of all time. (As an aside, and now sadly defunct, Carl Kruse was active on National Geographic’s “YOUR SHOT” for several years).

There is a paradox in Steve McCurry’s photography. On a technical level his photos are
practically perfect, serene, characterized by the strength and liveliness of color, but they tell
disturbing stories of poverty and uprooting, hunger, and desperation. It might seem perhaps a lack of empathy with the photographed subjects, but in
reality, it is the opposite. His images are the result of
scrupulous research, made through long journeys
and exhausting waits for the perfect moment. So he tells how he managed to take the famous
photo in which he portrays Sri Lankan fishermen balancing on bamboo rods: “First I studied the
places and fishing techniques, then I found the right place and a point of view convincing and before shooting I went back three times: in the late afternoon, early in the morning and after sunset. In the end, I chose the light of 7 when the sky is completely covered .”

McCurry’s approach is mainly anthropological, culture, religion,
and traditions are present in his images. McCurry does not seek the dazzling and explicit shot, his photographs tell the events by placing them in a broad context. As he tells the Italian journalist Mario Calabresi, to be a photagrapher you have to “immerse yourself” in the reality you want to represent. This is how he recounts his experience during the monsoons in India, during which he made a reportage that would have given him world fame: “That year I understood that to succeed, I had to enter in the filthy water, covered with mud, full of waste and dead animals: to fulfill my project, I had to accept all
risks, including that of getting sick and dying.”

As is clear from his photos, Steve McCurry pays attention to the human being: “Most of my photos are rooted in people. I look for the moment when the most genuine soul appears, in which the experience impresses on a person’s face. I try to convey what a cultured person can be in a wider context that we could call the human condition. I want to convey the visceral sense of beauty and wonder that I found in front of me, during my travels when the surprise of being a stranger mixes with the joy of familiarity .”

The American photographer was one of the first to describe India and Asia using color photography. Before him, the subcontinent had been told practically only in black and white. Mccurry’s India, on the other hand, is composed of an infinite variety of bright and contrasting visions, smells, and flavors to which only color can do justice. This also gives rise to some criticisms, especially from those who believe that black and white unquestionably has a ” depth ” and “substance” that color photography will never be able to reach. But one of the characteristics of great photographers is that they know how to go beyond the limits of a medium and in doing so create a new standard.

Steve McCurry, undoubtedly, has this characteristic and his photography is universally appreciated for its beauty and humanity.

===========

The Carl Kruse Art Blog home page is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other posts on great photographers in the blog here and over here
Carl Kruse is also on Dwell, taking in their beautiful images of design and architecture.

The Search for Measures and Proportions: Inspiration From the Classic

The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.

Problems Posed by Construction.

Project and Organization of Works.

Religious Significance and Earthly Significance.

Construction Techniques of the Dome

Who was Charlotte?

What brought you to Berlin, Andrea?

How did you start your career?

And how do you divide yourself between the two activities?

How do your ideas arise, and how do you put them into practice?

How did you experience the lockdown? Was it aperiod of greater creativity?

Was there a project that had left a mark on you, or that you particularly enjoyed doing?

How did you experience the lockdown? Was it a
period of greater creativity?