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Category Archives: Italian Art
Abstraction as Child of History
Any working definition of abstraction that I am likely to come up with will be a description of my own paintings—that can hardly be avoided. Recent intense looking at Frank Stella has provoked some ideas, but his work is not … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, emergence, Frank Stella, illusion, knowledge, Linsley, nature, the inhuman, value
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Tiepolo today
As I said in the previous post, I don’t necessarily agree with Stella’s assessment that Tiepolo is more distanced and restrained than the great Renaissance ceiling painters. I have included a couple of Tiepolo ceilings on this blog. Stella probably … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, feeling, Frank Stella, Poussin, space, Tiepolo
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Stella and the Past
Stella reveals a lot about his ambitions in the following comments on ceiling painting: “Pietro da Cortona, Fra Pozzi and even Tiepolo met the challenges of architectural decoration in a more measured, distanced manner than their predecessors. They worked the … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, emptiness, Frank Stella, grids, place, space, Tiepolo
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Alighiero Boetti
A latecomer to Boetti’s work, I have no expertise in it. Right now I’m looking at this grid piece, “Niente da vedere niente da nascondere,” or “Nothing to see nothing to hide.” The title really adds something, and bears thought, … Continue reading
The Milliner’s Workshop
Maybe the most ambitious example of the interlacing style of cubism is this large piece by Picasso. That the labor represented is mimicked in the manner is interesting enough. But to show the potential of the interlacing method this piece … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, cubism, illusion, interlacing, labor, light, Pablo Picasso
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Plurimi
It’s worth it to spend more time on the comparison in the preceding post, which doesn’t need much commentary. Plurimi is a made-up name. Two views of the same piece, which has a crystalline quality—enclosing parts of the viewing space … Continue reading
Emilio Vedova
The Plurimi of Emilio Vedova are clear precursors of Stella’s relief paintings, and the differences between the two groups of work are revealing. Vedova’s works had an origin in sets for an opera by Luigi Nono that he had done … Continue reading
Pink and Blue
I remember Shep and I lying on our backs on the floor of the Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice, staring up at a large Tiepolo ceiling in cotton candy pink and baby blue. That work, which was utterly strange to me … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, color, Linsley, literature, shaped canvas, Shep Steiner, Tiepolo, watercolor
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Backstory Without End
Was just reading about the work of Paul Sietsema, and my thought was—this work has a lot of backstory. Of course there are different kinds of backstory. Sietsema seems to stick pretty close to painting, and to the history of … Continue reading
Shaped canvas 4
I’m happily surprised to find that this blog can be very productive for my work. I open my mouth to express what I believe, and find that I don’t believe it any more. I’ve been too doctrinaire about the organic … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, form, Frank Stella, grids, shaped canvas, Tiepolo
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A space within space
Thinking about ultimate literary reductions sends my mind, by an uncertain chain of associations, to a piece by Dean Hughes. Matthew Higgs did a show at the Or Gallery in Vancouver a few years ago that included a piece by … Continue reading
Fontana
Impeccable vulgarity.
Persistence of desire
Reduction in Fontana means eroticism without any idealization, a base genital sexuality. Just the facts and the elemental drive, which presumably has its own reasons and rhythms. But the following quote gives another perspective: “The final stage (the stage that … Continue reading
Formalism, conceptualism and the death of desire
At the conclusion of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Well-Beloved, the hero, a successful sculptor of the Alfred Gilbert type, loses all interest in art in his later years: “On another afternoon they went to the National Gallery, to test his … Continue reading
Pre-conceptualism
It’s hard to know exactly what people get from art; certainly their own testimony has to be taken with skepticism. But I’m contemplating the view that aesthetic pleasures, sensations, satisfactions, feelings—whatever they might be called, however they might be characterized—are … Continue reading
Baroque what?
Frank Stella’s brilliant book Working Space, one of the all time best things ever written by an artist, is fundamentally a meditation on the work of Caravaggio. It’s not about the relevance of Baroque art to the art of today, … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Frank Stella, space
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Times past
I have to apologize to my growing readership that personal matters have prevented me from posting lately. Actually, personal matters have kept me out of the studio, and the energy to write derives from the work. Still intend to discuss … Continue reading
Carla Accardi Part 2
Talking about unboundedness reminds me that my earlier post about Carla Accardi has a mistake. Her standing rolls of “Sicofoil” are not tubes, they are rolled up sheets, so they are not unbounded in the horizontal dimension, and they have … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Carla Accardi, space, transparency
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Marisa Merz Part 3
After the eruption of light into Gordon Matta-Clark’s “de-architecture,” and the surprising continuity of his work with cubism, I want to revisit Marisa Merz’s Scarpette and revise my claim in an earlier post that because they are woven they carry … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, light, literature, Marisa Merz
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Between Two Voids
To return to the quote from Italo Calvino in an earlier post, he further says “The writer, too, would like to make works like this, because he does not believe in the self, or if he does believe in it … Continue reading
The Outside
In 1975 Italo Calvino offered the following very interesting remarks on the work of Giulio Paolini: “It is not the relationship of the self to the world which these works seek to target: it is a relationship which is established … Continue reading
Marisa Merz Part 2
Merz’s Scarpette are loosely woven out of nylon. A weaving is a grid, and in an art context the allusion to the conventional pictorial support is unavoidable. That they are slippers is charming, comical and a little shivery. In the … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, grids, Marisa Merz, nature, space
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Carla Accardi
Accardi’s works on transparent plastic stand somewhere between Pollock’s glass paintings and Ingrid Calame’s sheets of Mylar that drape off the wall on to the floor. By using cylinders she doesn’t have to build supports and doesn’t have to rely … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged Carla Accardi, illusion, Jackson Pollock, space
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Marisa Merz
Marisa Merz, Living Sculpture, 1966 These works are made of thin curved sheets of aluminum nested inside each other. Sculptural spaces and sculptural masses built up of wafers. When I saw them at the Tate Modern Arte Povera show a … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Marisa Merz, space
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What’s old?
But also important is to identify older gestures that still speak today, unfinished initiatives and untapped resources, overlooked beginnings. Future posts will talk about some important artists of the last half century.
Posted in Current Affairs, Italian Art, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Carla Accardi, Marisa Merz
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