Photos By Gail
In the early 1970s, Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985) began enthusiastically making collages. Octopus’s Garden (1971) is among the largest and most spectacular of those. This work depicts a fantastical underwater landscape, complete with calcified coral forms, trails of bubbles, and cut-out reproductions of peacock feathers.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Meret Oppenheim, Octopus’s Garden
Photos By Gail
Wadsworth Jarrell’s Revolutionary (Angela Davis) (1971) is one of the most recognized paintings associated with the Black Arts Movement, a cultural manifestation of the Black Power Movement. Artists of this movement sought to create uplifting images that called upon Black people to harness their collective power.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Wadsworth A. Jarrell, Revolutionary (Angela Davis)
Photo by Gail
Chuck Close is known as much for his detailed representation of the human face as he is for his subsequent deconstruction of it. Close uses head-on portraits as his templates, exploring portraiture and his subjects through a variety of drawing and painterly techniques, as well as through printmaking, tapestry and photography. John (1971–72) one of Close’s earliest paintings, is described as photo-realist. Indeed, Close refers to photographs to create his artworks, employing their inconsistencies perspective as much as their verisimilitude.
Here, the sharp detail of the rim of the subject’s glasses contrasts with the blurred soft focus of his shoulders and the back of his hair, as it likely did in the original photograph. But instead of using mechanical means to transfer his images onto canvas, Close works entirely from sight to achieve the intensely animate detail, sectioning off the reference photographs into grids and transferring each piece by hand onto is monumental canvases,
Photographed at The Broad in Los Angeles, CA.
Hard Sweetness (1971) is one of Joan Snyder’s Stroke paintings, a series in which abstract imagery and mark-making register personal and political struggles and decisions. Snyder began making art in the late 1960s, a time when men dominated the art world. Her sensibility and style were inspired by feminism, music, Expressionism, and her own life experience, as well as dislike of the distilled macho aesthetics of Minimalism.
Hard Sweetness uses strokes of paint in soft stains, loose washes, and thicker scumbling ( applying a very thin coat of opaque paint to give a softer or duller effect) to create rhythmic, almost musical passages of color across the canvas. As the title of this work suggests, Snyder blurs the distinction between the senses of sight, taste and perhaps even sound and smell. Like her contemporary Eva Hesse, she balances a feminine palette with a muscular formal complexity.
Photographed in the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.
All Photos By Gail
Elvis Presley, who had a passion for both cars and guns, shot this Pantera with his personal firearm during a temperamental outburst, losing patience when the car would not start. The two bullet holes on the steering wheel rim and one in the floor pan were never repaired and today serve as reminders of his occasional fits of rage. Continue reading 1971 De Tomaso Pantera Owned By Elvis Presley