article

Is it Art? In London You Can Ask the Police

Victoria Z. Alexander

Recently we have witnessed one of the most chilling events in recent art history as Directors of the Tate Modern in Britain pulled Richard Prince’s Spiritual America (which includes a nude image of 10 year old Brooke Shields) from the Pop-Life Exhibition. The original image is a photograph taken by Gary Gross which Prince appropriated for his work because he thought it captured some troubling aspects of contemporary society. Do you think it is child pornography? Until the Tate show it hung unproblematically in galleries and museums around the world for almost three decades. After a visit from London’s Metropolitan Police (Obscene Publications Unit) the work was pulled from the Pop-Life show because police told the Tate administration that it might break obscenity laws. more...

article

The Authentic Women and Girls of Balthus

Victoria Z. Alexander

Georgette is about thirteen years old. She is arranged by the painter in a most confident pose illuminated by baroque sunlight. This painting is, as much as any other, the kind that is often selected to label its maker Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rolla, 1908-2001), a pedophile at worst, or a pornographer at best. There is no evidence to suggest that Balthus was a pedophile or acted as a predator towards young women. Such thoughts inhabit only the imaginations of people who look at young girls very differently than did Balthus. more...

article

Helmut Newton: Reclaiming The Female Nude Photograph From Pornography

Victoria Z. Alexander

Over the past forty years Helmut Newton (1920-2004) has come to be considered as one of the world’s leading and most influential makers of visionary images. At the time of his death the photographic medium was in his debt as it is to only a few brilliant photographers in history. He specialized in fashion images, female nudes, and portraits. His work was widely published in magazines such as Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, der Spiegel, and Stern. There have been over 100 exhibitions of his work since 1975, he was awarded the Medallion d’Or by France for his work, and a museum dedicated to that work has been opened in Berlin (2004). more...

article

The Persistence of the Architectural Ideas of Louis I. Kahn

Victoria Z. Alexander

Louis I. Kahn was one of the most important brakes on the International Style of modernism in the middle years of the twentieth century. Against this architecture of speed Kahn addressed the slower side of modernity and without him we might well have missed something vital. The intelligence of Kahn’s architecture, itself a treasure trove of historical forms, has survived into our posthistorical age of speed – which is now the age of the screen (Virilio). While architecture has pressed on into an era of new materials, forms, and seemingly unprecedented possibility, many architects have not forgotten the more significant architectural lessons of Kahn. more...

article

Are We Placing A Narrow Frame Around Photography’s First Century?

Victoria Z. Alexander

Those interested in the history of photography who managed to be in New York this past summer were treated to an exhibition of magnificent images taken by thirteen photographic “stars” from the medium’s first century. The show (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), “Framing A Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940” was curated by the MET’s Malcolm McDaniel. It included between 10 and 16 images from thirteen photographers (Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray, Carleton E. Watkins, Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Marville, Eugene Atjet, Edouard Baldus, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, and Walker Evans). With some justification the show was greeted with applause from critics and the press. more...

article

From a Fractured World to a Quest for Inhuman Purity

The Photography and Painting of Wols

Victoria Z. Alexander

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951), known to the world after 1937 as “Wols”, produced an enigmatic body of photographic well work before participating in the development of an important post war movement in painting often referred to as “gestural abstraction” or art informel (see Bois, 1997:138). In this essay I wish to examine both the photography and painting of Wols and explain why, in my view, despite some consistency of vision, Wols’s paintings are not concerned with rendering the world more enigmatic, as are his photographs. I argue that his painting becomes rather, a search for a way of visualizing the inhuman (following the end of World War II). Indeed, it may be what led Wols to give up photography for painting. The motive behind his post-war paintings is then quite different from that behind his pre-war photography. more...

article

Not everything is as it appears

A review of FOTO: Modernity in Central Europe – 1918-1945

Victoria Z. Alexander

Each year I attend about twenty major art and photography exhibitions in Europe and elsewhere. FOTO is a traveling exhibition [Washington’s National Gallery, New York’s Guggenheim (where I saw it), Milwaukee, and Edinburgh]. It examines photography in Central Europe (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland) from the end of WWI to the end of WWII. It is a thought provoking show which is replicated in an superb exhibition catalogue containing over 250 images. On display at the Guggenheim (a thoroughly awful place to view anything except Frank Lloyd Wright’s arrogance), were 170 photographs by more than 100 photographers divided into eight sections. more...

art agenda

A Surreal Kiss Goodbye: Exhibitions We Won't Be Seeing in 2010

Victoria Z. Alexander

Twice in the history of capitalism the virtual market and the real market have come into contact ñ 1929 and today. Art and capital have had a long and sometimes tendentious relationship. The current economic crisis brought on by bankers and investors (who were apparently unable to take anything from the speculative collapse of 1929), will take its toll on museums over the next year and perhaps longer more...