Smithsonian.com

In any cutthroat business, having talent or skill may bring about success, but they certainly don’t guarantee it. What has given so many artists an advantage is adaptability and not being wedded to one medium or mode. Like my financial advisor would say—if I had a financial advisor—diversifying is key to success.

Artists who have made waves in recent years are talented, sure, but they also know how to channel their artistic energy in several different arenas. Nowadays artists don’t stop with making a solitary object. Concepts that inspire an object are adapted to film-making and photography, or exploring the idea in a real-time performance, or mass-marketed as luxury goods or knick-knacks.

I was watching a cheesy arts “documentary” the other day and one up-and-comer’s work made an impression—or more specifically, the artist’s way of working. The objects themselves were completely forgettable, but the artist (a sculptor) took her work (made from ghastly globs of hyper-colored gelatin) from sitting in her studio to the screen of her computer in an animated film to the surface of a canvas, transferred there via digital printing.

It isn’t that success comes with this kind of adaptability, because in this case the work itself wasn’t particularly intriguing. But young artists aren’t just content to work one way, and expertise is no longer the prime goal. Many are infused with an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to dabble in different formats and to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Photo credit: illustration from The Nursery “Alice” by Lewis Carroll, 1890 (Wikipedia)

From the time we are kids, collaboration and teamwork are extolled as holy virtues, but that conditioning directly contradicts one of the truest foibles of human nature: it is hard to please yourself; harder still to please someone else.

Taking that into account, I’m puzzled by why working together has become a fairly commonplace practice in art. Certainly it is a modern phenomenon. I would dispute the assertion that a master with apprentices is a comparable historic precedence of two equals merging their artistic visions.

And the payoff of such a melding may seem indisputable—double the inspiration, creativity and energy; one has a partner to bolster oneself and an equally committed sounding board, editor and critic. Certainly there are plenty of duos that make this work—Gilbert & George; Jake and Dinos Chapman; and Christo and Jeanne-Claude are just a few.

But turn the lens just slightly and the fault line of such a partnership is glaringly obvious—twice the doubt, criticism and torpor; twice the interference and muddle-headedness. Moreover, splitting success and limelight in half isn’t that appealing a prospect. Clarity, expression and articulation—these rarely thrive as group endeavors. The way of the artist is akin to soul-searching. Such activities are usually most rewarding and effective when done solo.

Photo credit: Wikipedia, Umbrella Project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Japan (1991)

When do comic books mature into graphic novels? Both mediums rely on cartoons to tell universal stories. Cartoons omit the incidental detail of photography, and instead become open vessels into which readers pour in their memories and experiences. Comics guru Scott McCloud calls this act closure: We can understand only what we can feel, and we can truly feel only what we’ve experienced. Cartoons present a simplified, universal world and help us mediate this process of reading, empathizing and understanding.

Graphic novels speak to us with a subtle, equivocating voice rarely found in traditional comic books. Superheroes have left the stage, deferring to cartoon truth-tellers who gaze inward even as they reflect upon their culture. In graphic novels, characters convey essential truths by narrating subjective experiences, and we subconsciously place ourselves in a cartoon world. That’s why this medium so effectively take us into politicized, forbidden places, like those still whirring spokes on the so-called axis of evil, Iran and North Korea.

Persepolis, by Iranian ex-pat Marjane Satrapi, is a lyrical, funny yet political memoir of growing up in Iran during the fall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution; the protagonist, a young Satrapi, must adapt to the iron fist and the veil despite her family’s progressive inclinations. At the same time, her narrative covers the magic of childhood and the tumult of adolescence. The first volume of Persepolis shows Satrapi as a little girl, confusing God with an image of an impressive, white-bearded Karl Marx. The author of communism ironically communes with her during bedtime prayer. Later, she is sent away to Europe for high school, and we see the turmoil of adolescence through the lens of an exile—awkward parties, odd boyfriends and “enlightened” peers who seek to romanticize or caricature Satrapi’s mythic homeland.

In Pyongyang, French-Canadian Guy Delisle arrives in the capital of communist North Korea as a subcontractor for a French animation company. Delisle covers a bleak two months in the eerily austere capital. Though the narration understandably lacks the personal touch of Satrapi, the storyboards—presented in a series of comic, understated vignettes—poignantly capture a cultish culture washed clean of imperfection and dissent. In cool black and white, we place ourselves in the monotonous grandeur of communist monuments, tremor at the spooky absence of disabled people and raise our eyebrows, along with Delisle, at the omnipresence of the pompadour-sporting dictator Kim Jong-Il and his departed father. Their twinned portraits adorn nearly every room Delisle encounters, except, notably, bathrooms.

The graphic novel medium works well here. Photographs too often present a documentary reality, which can’t help but highlight how different the reader’s world seems from the picture world. Yet in Delisle’s simple, almost childlike drawings, the once distant capital city of Pyongyang becomes a metaphor for repression and isolation—a place we have all visited from time to time.

One rainy Friday afternoon in 1964, a 24-year-old Richard Serra, then wrapping up his studies at Yale, hopped a train from New Haven to New York City. Upon arriving, he headed uptown, to an East 77th Street townhouse, where he first encountered the work of Cy Twombly. “They gnawed at me,” Serra has said of the paintings he saw that day at Leo Castelli’s gallery. “I couldn’t forget them.”

Forty-three years later, Twombly, now 79, remains a master of the unforgettable, creating ever larger and more exuberant paintings that gnaw at you even after you’ve scrutinized them from every angle and tried to memorize their colors. And so it is fitting that an exhibition of recent paintings by Twombly now on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York blooms with that most enduring, enigmatic, and temperamental of flowers: the peony.

Any gardener will tell you that the most important thing about planting peonies is selecting a site, ideally one that gets at least a half day of sun. Long-lived but initially slow to grow, peonies sulk if disturbed. Try to move them and they’ll punish you by not flowering for several years. Leave them alone and they’ll bloom forever.

The cultivation of artists can be just as tricky. In the history of art, there’s no easy place to put Twombly. Today he is typically lumped with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in a catch-all category of second wave Abstract Expressionism, but the label is an awkward fit. Site selection was critical for Twombly. A Virginia native who studied in Boston and New York before matriculating at Black Mountain College, he escaped the go-go New York art world in 1957 for a place in the sun — Rome — where he still lives for most of the year. There he managed to meld abstraction and antiquity, painting and drawing, lament and reverie.

Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery — sprawling, high-ceilinged, and impeccably finished — is an excellent venue to show off the ten paintings and single sculpture (all untitled and executed in 2007) that comprise “A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things.” The main room is ringed with the six large horizontal paintings on wooden panels, each measuring about eighteen feet wide by eight feet tall. Entering the rectangular space, the viewer is stunned by epic constellations of peony blooms that appear to bob, weave, and punch triumphantly through fields of pencil and wax crayon scribbles, handprints, and haikus scrawled in Twombly’s shaky cursive. Where stems should be flow layered trails of thin acrylic paint, downward drips that wash the panels in verticals as if attempting to tether the buoyant flowers to the foreground. (more…)

(Georgia O’Keefe, Ram’s Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, 1935)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote on historical and contemporary instances of art vandalism. Since then I haven’t been able to get the topic out of my head, but I’ve been thinking about these acts coming from another source entirely—the artists themselves.

Many artists pragmatically own up to the fact that destruction is an integral part of the creative process. Usually it is a matter of dissatisfaction with a project or concept or execution.

As a young artist, Georgia O’Keefe destroyed painting after painting because the end results featured another artist’s style foremost, and her own input was merely derivative. You have to wonder if O’Keefe would have been able to develop into the iconic and original artist we know her as today without the brusque treatment of her early work. She was searching to find herself as an artist and that can’t always be done while wearing kid gloves.

Destroying paintings and sculptures is also sometimes a damn-the-torpedoes response. Claude Monet went through several bouts of financial depression during his lifetime, but would often destroy his paintings rather than allow them to be seized by his creditors. Marsden Hartley worked during the heights of the Great Depression and during those rough years he was forced to destroy at least a hundred paintings because he could not pay the price to have them stored.

For Jean-Antoine Watteau, it was a sign of atonement. On his deathbed, he ordered many of his more salacious paintings to be destroyed as a way to clear his conscience. During the conflagrations that marked the reign of Girolamo Savonarola’s in 15th-century Florence, artist Fra Bartolommeo likewise destroyed many of his works, but then took his penance one step further by renouncing his art for six years.