Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Banksy's 'Exit' Reveals Street Art Secrets ... Sort Of

I'm assuming when they talk about "street art" what they are really talking about is vandalism - people covering beautiful buildings, as well as anything that can and can't move, with their pathetic scrawls that certainly don't deserve to be legitimized by calling it "art" - street or otherwise.

NPR: Banksy's 'Exit' Reveals Street Art Secrets ... Sort Of
In Exit Through the Gift Shop, reclusive street artist Banksy tells the story of Thierry Guetta, a videographer who sets out to capture the world of street art. Through a series of unlikely events, the filmmaker becomes the subject — and a street artist, himself.

The film, nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary category, has confused reviewers and movie-goers alike, who doubt its authenticity.

Banksy does not give interviews, so producer Jaimie D'Cruz joins NPR's Lynn Neary on his behalf. "Thierry," explains D'Cruz, "was obsessed by filming everything in his path." Guetta was related to a street artist, and through that connection he became embedded in the graffiti world. It's "a world populated almost exclusively by furtive men, working illegally and at night."

Guetta became a well-known personality in the underground scene, "a world without any personalities," and served as a diarist for the movement. He parlayed his access, built on his reputation for trustworthiness, into meeting "the prize, which was the street artist Banksy — the uber-anonymous person in a world full of anonymous people."

The subjects Guetta cast his camera on believed he was using the footage for a documentary, but that may never have been the case. Rather, Guetta seemed to use the story as a cover to further access to a world he found exhilarating. Guetta began creating his own street art, under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash.

Web Resources
See The Trailer For 'Exit Through The Gift Shop'
"Thierry wanted to be a part of this world," says D'Cruz. "We're talking about a married man in his 40s, a father of three, not the typical street artist guerrilla. And I think Thierry got quite a lot of satisfaction out of being out on the rooftops in various cities around the world, being out all night and having the excitement and the thrills of being part of this illicit world."

But Banksy found Guetta's story more intriguing than his own, so he took over the documentary and switched its focus ... or so the story goes. Some believe Banksy invented Guetta's story, and that it's more of a creative movie than a documentary.

D'Cruz dismisses the suspicion. "The truth is, the film is really a true story of something extraordinary that happened," he says. "We wouldn't be able to create something as extraordinary as the rise of Thierry Guetta ... We didn't have the intent, we didn't have the inclination to do that, to kind of stage a prank on the world."

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Art improves students’ mental health

MNDaily: Art improves students’ mental health
Boynton is using an art exhibit to raise awareness of eating disorders.

Some patients with eating disorders are finding solace in an unlikely place: visual art.

“Art gives them a nonverbal approach to communicate the difficulties that they’re struggling with,” said Nicola Demonte, health educator and art therapist at Park Nicollet Melrose Institute.

As part of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, Boynton Health Service will host a reception Wednesday for “Reflections: Healing Eating Disorders Through Art.”

The exhibit, Demonte said, reflects “what people are experiencing with eating disorders.”

In all, it will include more than 20 pieces by anonymous Melrose Institute patients with eating disorders and a painting by a University of Minnesota student artist.

Architecture sophomore Beau Sinchai’s painting was chosen from a pool of University students by a panel of representatives from Boynton, the Melrose Institute and University student group Active Minds.

Alice Johnson, senior coordinator of Active Minds, said she hopes the event will lessen the stigma associated with eating disorders and raise the discourse about mental health illness.

“We really want to connect students with the resources that are there on campus and have people be open enough to access them,” Johnson said.

Jon Hallberg will host Hippocrates Café afterward, a combination of drama, literature and music to spark conversation and understanding of eating disorders, Boynton Mental Health Clinic Director Gary Christenson said.

Boynton Mental Health Clinic offers group therapy for students with eating disorders, in addition to eating disorder assessments and medical and nutritional consultations.

Boynton sometimes refers patients to the Melrose Institute or The Emily Program, both of which offer services specifically for those with eating disorders.

Demonte, who is the curator of the exhibit, engages his patients in art therapy, a hands-on process he developed there about two years ago, which he said has a positive physiological effect.

It’s common for eating disorder patients to say, “I feel really relaxed right now” when they participate in art therapy, Demonte said.

Sinchai uses her artwork to fight stress too. She said she feels like many people don’t realize the impact art can have.

“I feel like art has been overlooked,” Sinchai said.

Of 2,612 randomly surveyed students at the University, 4.8 percent of women and 0.5 percent of men reported being diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia in their lifetime, according to the 2010 College Student Health Survey, but that may not accurately represent the number of students with body image concern and eating disorder behavior.

“We suspect there are more students dealing with an eating disorder than reported on the survey,” Christenson said.

He also said the diagnostic system may have “set the threshold too high” for anorexia or bulimia. The most common eating disorder, “not otherwise specified,” he said, is diagnosed in students who fall short of one or two criteria for anorexia or bulimia.

“That doesn’t mean they don’t actually have an issue,” Christenson said.

Demonte said studies show 4.5 to 18 percent of women and 0.4 percent of men have a history of bulimia by their first year in college , but many students’ eating disorder behavior, initiated by busy schedules, irregular eating habits and compulsory exercise issues, “flies under the radar.”

Edmund de Unger, Islamic Art Collector, Is Dead at 92

New York Times: Edmund de Unger, Islamic Art Collector, Is Dead at 92.

Edmund de Unger, whose childhood fascination with Oriental rugs and “The Arabian Nights” led him to amass one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Islamic art, died on Jan. 25 at his home in Ham, Surrey, England. He was 92.

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Edmund de Unger in 1998.

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His death was confirmed by his son Richard.

Mr. de Unger, a Hungarian who made his fortune as a property developer in London in the 1960s, followed his instincts and enthusiasms in accumulating priceless objects from nearly every period of Islamic art and a geographical area extending from the Mediterranean to India.

The Keir Collection, named after the house he once occupied in Wimbledon, included painted miniatures, metalwork, ceramics, carpets and textiles. It was documented in four scholarly catalogs he commissioned in the 1970s and a fifth catalog, on Islamic painting and book art, published in 1988.

Mr. de Unger was resourceful and idiosyncratic. If an important work did not interest him, he passed it by. If his interest was aroused, he pounced.

One rainy day in Paris he stepped into a secondhand bookstore for shelter and, to his astonishment, saw a manuscript from the Mongol Jalayirid dynasty, which ruled western Iraq and Persia in the 14th century. He disguised the book by grouping it with four books of no particular value, haggled a bit with the dealer and walked out the door with a bargain masterpiece.

The Keir Collection included rarities like early Coptic and Arabic textile art of the 5th to 10th centuries, early Islamic to late Medieval Egyptian manuscript art, painted Fatimid ceramics from the 10th to 12th centuries and extremely rare Fatimid rock-crystal vessels.

“Collecting is in a way like hunting, in that not only does one derive aesthetic pleasure from the objects collected, but the actual pursuit of them is also pleasurable,” Mr. de Unger wrote in the catalog for an exhibition of works from his collection at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin in 2007. “Every piece I have acquired has a tale to tell, and each acquisition has been the result of either a sudden passion or a slowly growing affection.”

Odon Robert Antal de Unger was born on Aug. 6, 1918, in Budapest. He developed an interest in carpets at age 6 when his father, a keen collector, warned him not to step on a valuable Transylvanian rug. His curiosity aroused, he began visiting museums and sales rooms with his father.

At 14, on a Boy Scout cycling tour in Romania, he showed the sharp eye and predatory instinct that would serve him well in later life. While visiting a church he found himself attracted by a carpet despite its poor condition — the priest had recently torn off part of it to bandage the leg of a parishioner. He offered to buy a replacement in exchange for what he recognized as a 16th-century Turkish rug. He still owned it 60 years later, when its value was estimated at $50,000.

Mr. de Unger studied economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, law at the University of Budapest and history at Hertford College, Oxford. But as war threatened, he returned to Hungary.

He sheltered 22 Jews in his apartment during the battle of Budapest, one of whom, Eva Spicht, became his first wife. She died in 1959.

After the war he restored the Astoria, a once-grand Budapest hotel, which he ran until it was nationalized by the Communists. He was arrested several times before being allowed to emigrate in 1948.

After entering Britain in 1949 as a manservant, he studied for the English bar and took a post in the Colonial Service, which sent him as a Crown Counsel to Ghana, then known as the Gold Coast. On side trips to Egypt, he developed a fascination with Coptic and Islamic art.

In the early 1960s he returned to London, where he began developing property and collected carpets with such gusto that a crisis loomed. “The end came when I observed every carpet on the floor was covered by at least two other layers,” he wrote. “I realized that it could not go on.”

It was then that he began collecting Islamic art in earnest. He started with ceramics, devoting special attention to lusterware: pottery with an iridescent glaze produced in Mesopotamia beginning in the 9th century.

He soon gravitated to Islamic pottery from the so-called missing period of 1350 to 1550, a historic blank that he was determined to fill in to support his thesis that Islamic pottery developed continuously from its beginnings through the Safavid period of the 16th to the early 18th century.

He then concentrated on Persian miniatures and metalware and eventually extended his reach to non-Islamic art, notably French and Italian textiles from the 15th to 18th centuries. In the early 1970s, he acquired a superb collection of medieval European enamelware from the Swiss couple Ernst and Martha Kofler-Truniger.

In 1997 he put the enamelware up for auction. Sotheby’s New York, which conducted the sale, estimated that the last great collection of medieval art still in private hands would bring in $25 million but, in one of the great art-sale disasters of the decade, managed to ring up a mere $5.5 million.

In June 2009, Mr. de Unger signed an agreement to lend the works from his collection on a long-term basis to the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The catalog for the 2007 Berlin show was published by the University of Chicago Press as “A Collector’s Fortune: Islamic Art From the Collection of Edmund de Unger.”

In addition to his son Richard, of London, he is survived by his wife, Elizabeth; another son, Glen, also of London; and four grandchildren.

Friday, February 18, 2011

News: The art visionary

Miami Herald: The art visionary
Painter and professor Darby Bannard, a leader in the 1960s minimalist movement, wowed Warhol and art critics the world over with his abstract work. Now 76, Bannard, a professor of art at the University of Miami, hopes to inspire the next wave of artists

By Howard Cohen
hcohen@MiamiHerald.com
Countless people collected pop artist Andy Warhol — one collector paid $100 million for Warhol’s 1963 canvas, Eight Elvises.

But the celebrated Warhol once focused his attention on Darby Bannard, a leader in the 1960s Minimalist art movement. Bannard, now a University of Miami art professor who has guided many graduate students toward careers in art, will never forget the strange man with the snow white hair who bought some of his paintings.

“I told him, ‘Oh, Andy, it’s great that you like my paintings.’ ”

Warhol’s response wasn’t quite what Bannard, then a young Princeton grad, expected.

“Oh, I just bought them for investment,” Warhol told him.

So much for 15 minutes of fame. No matter, Bannard has had decades.

“He was such a geek anyway,” Bannard, 76, laughs in his studio on the second floor of a UM art building near the baseball stadium.

The space is Bannard’s retreat, a large room with paint-flecked cement floors, an old desk and a couple of tattered hard back chairs tucked away in a corner.

Bannard isn’t here to sit. Instead, he escapes upstairs for three hours every evening to paint after teaching class. Large canvas abstract paintings in various degrees of completion rest against one wall, splashed and scratched with vivid colors, while a huge white canvas lies flush on the floor awaiting the artist’s imagination and deft touch.

More than 400 bottles of paint, along with brushes and boxes of memorabilia, including a stash of his beloved old 45-rpm records of classic soul, share space in Bannard’s studio.

“I come into this place and all of the bull---- stays out, like a film coming off me,” Bannard said. “It’s work making art, an awful lot of anxiety and pressure to get it right and self-criticism built into it. I can’t live without it. I paint and paint because I love it and when I don’t paint — every year I take a couple months off — I get very cranky.”

Art lovers can see the result of his passion, along with paintings from six of his past and present graduate students who form the core of The Miami School program, at the Center for Visual Communication in Northwest Miami. The exhibit runs through March 8.

The exhibit is new but it’s built on living history — Bannard’s — though he’s reluctant to take too many bows.

“It’s a very good show of abstract painters and they are all students of mine, so it was easy to put a show like that together, but I never thought of myself as ‘I’m the leader’ kind of thing,” he said. “In 20 years I’ve had so many graduate students who have gone out there and become very good exhibiting painters all over the country. In Miami, they are teaching at all the schools and working at museums. I feel there’s a certain pervasiveness I can lay claim to but I don’t want to get into a big ego thing.”

Others can sing Bannard’s praises.

“He directs you to where you could potentially be,” said graduate student Brian Gefen, 28 who will complete his studies this semester with Bannard and then move to New York to pursue a painting career. “He’s very good about looking at your painting and seeing what it could be potentially.”

George Bethea, one of Bannard’s graduate students 20 years ago, now operates a studio in South Miami and still visits Bannard every 10 days or so to work on projects together. Bethea, 50, will also exhibit at the Abstract Miami show.

“He has a great eye that could look at your painting without projecting any criteria of how it should be, but to look at the painting and recognize its quality. For the past 20 years we’ve developed a close friendship. I go to his studio when he finishes his paintings and we’ll crop them.”

Bannard has come a long way from the days of youth when he blew up a friend in his New Jersey basement — and, no, not on canvas.

The memory of that experiment still makes the professor laugh.

“When I was young, I was very into science. I had my own lab in our cellar and did traditional things like make things blow up, which stopped when I blew up one of my friends. It didn’t really hurt him but it took his hair and eyebrows off. His parents and my father got upset. Dad was all confused. He didn’t know what was harmful and what wasn’t and had to question every time I made a purchase. ‘Is this going to blow up?’ Then I went away to school and ran into real physics and, whew, that’s too much work. I want to play. The art thing took over.”

Bannard discovered he had talent early.

“As a kid, I was sort of a prodigy. When I was 6, I was drawing realistic pictures of birds. We lived on this big farm and I’d go find birds and draw them. I was very intense about that. I’ve written all my life about art.”

Bannard, who champions technique and craft above all else, has had some 300 pieces published about art over the years and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1968.

“Without craft, you can’t have expression. It stops right there. When I went to Princeton my father told me I should be a lawyer because I could always out argue him. I went to the LSAT and saw all these guys I didn’t care for and I said, ‘No!’ I’m going to New York and will be a starving artist.”

Bannard would soon make his move pay off as he spearheaded, along with Frank Stella, the Minimalism movement in the late 1950s.

“He was very prescient. He seems to anticipate minimalism. Early on, when he was at Princeton, he was friendly with Michael Fried and Frank Stella,’’ said Karen Wilkin, a curator and art critic. “These are people who helped change what our conceptions of what abstract art can be and Darby was very much a part of that.”

Piri Halasz, author of A Memoir of Creativity: Abstract Painting, Politics and the Media, 1956-2008 (iUniverse; $40) also remembers a “trailblazer who anticipated the whole Minimalist movement of the ‘60s” when, as arts writer for Time, she featured Western Air III, one of his oil paintings, in the Feb. 7, 1969 issue of the magazine.

“I came to be friendly with Darby in the ‘70s and followed his career,’’ Halasz said. “He’s a wonderful painter and a great teacher. He started a whole little school in Miami of artists who see things the way he does and who make beautiful paintings,” she said from New York.

After 20 years at UM, Bannard, a father of two grown sons, has adjusted to the world of academia.

“I didn’t know a section from a credit,” he joked about his first day on campus.

Now, he wants to help the next generation of Bannards find their place in the art world.

“I know how to tell them, ‘This is good, do this, do that’ without being dictatorial. The better students are always willing to try anything. They want to make art their life and when you get a student who is really talented it’s a real joy. I suffer for them when they don’t do well,” he laughs.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Ottawa, CA: Van Gogh exhibit arrives in 2012

Van Gogh exhibit arrives in 2012
The biggest Van Gogh exhibition to come to this country in more than 20 years will arrive at the National Gallery of Canada in 2012, says a fundraising letter sent to gallery donors.

The show will include dozens of works by the storied master. It will open at the National Gallery in Ottawa next summer, though no specific date has yet been announced. Typically the gallery's big summer shows run from June through October.

"The gallery will host Vincent Van Gogh: Up Close in 2012, the first major project devoted to the Dutch artist by a Canadian institution in two decades," says the fundraising letter, dated Jan. 24 and received by many donors last week.

Beatrix, queen of the Netherlands, will be royal patron for the exhibition, though it is not yet clear if the Dutch queen will visit Ottawa.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is co-organizer of the exhibition with the National Gallery and, according to the museum's website, Van Gogh: Up Close will be seen first in that city between Feb. 1 to May 6, 2012.

"In 1886, while living in Paris, Vincent van Gogh dramatically altered his manner of painting landscapes and still lifes. By experimenting with depth of field and focus and using shifting perspectives, he produced some of the most radical and original works of his career," it says on the Philadelphia museum's website.

"The exhibition explores the reasons and means by which van Gogh ... made these innovative changes to his painting style.

"The first exhibition devoted to this unexplored aspect of the artist's work, Van Gogh: Up Close will present some 45 paintings borrowed from collections around the world."

The show will total 50 to 60 pieces. Which paintings will be in the exhibition remains to be seen, but it's a safe bet that the National Gallery's own Van Gogh masterpiece, the 1889 painting Iris, will play a big role. Iris is a crowd favourite and is possibly the single most valuable piece of art in the gallery's collection. A similar Van Gogh painting of irises from the same year sold in 1987 for more than $50 million U.S., and could sell for more than double that amount today.

Van Gogh had an enormous influence over the art of the 20th century, but barely sold a painting before he died at age 37, impoverished and insane, in 1890.

Van Gogh's Brown Period

Boston.com (opinion piece) Van Gogh's Brown Period

Vincent Van Gogh's paintings of sunflowers, made in the late 1880s, are widely known for their vibrant yellow color. Van Gogh used a new kind of paint, "chrome yellow," to achieve that now-iconic vibrancy - and curators around the world have watched in mystified dismay as the yellow color has faded to brown over the course of the last century. Now, the Journal of Analytical Chemistry reports that chemists have figured out why: in the presence of sunlight, the chromium in the yellow paint reacts with the white pigment Van Gogh used to lighten it, turning the yellow brown. To stop the reaction, the paintings may have to be treated like medieval tapestries, and stored in cooler, darker galleries.

Van Gogh's sunflower paintings are about the life cycle: they show, gathered in the same vase, both bright yellow sunflowers in the prime of life, and drooping, withered ones in its twilight. That's why some of the sunflowers are brown already - and why the vividness of the yellow is especially important. And the paintings are about memory, too: Van Gogh painted them in France, partly to remind himself of home, and made the first painting to decorate the guest room where his friend Paul Gaugain would come to stay in Arles. So the paintings already testify to the passage of time and to the inevitability of aging, even as they try to capture the beauty that's also inherent in those transformations.

It's definitely sad that the paintings are fading, but you can't deny that it's weirdly appropriate, too: The sun is fading the painted sunflowers, just as it faded the real ones. Japanese artists, of course, have a term for what's happening to Van Gogh's sunflowers - wabi-sabi, or the humble kind of beauty that happens through, and even expresses, the natural flow of time. After all, Van Gogh's sunflowers aren't getting older in an arbitrary or unnatural way - they're not covered with grime or getting chipped and scratched. Instead, they're growing older in a way that intensifies and even embodies what they're all about. In a way, the paintings are becoming more themselves. They might be diminished in one dimension, but they're only getting richer in another.