Truman Capote, New York, 1948/Morgan Library & Museum
The great American photographer Irving Penn has died. Penn, who was 92, was one of the towering figures of American photography, a master of fashion photography, portraiture and lusciously detailed still life. Along with the late Richard Avedon he was the king of a certain kind of supremely lustrous American magazine photography in the decades after World War II.
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Mourning, Carrie Mae Weems, 2008/© Carrie Mae Weems
After five years the PBS series Art: 21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century is still the most enjoyable attempt to show a TV audience what contemporary artists do. It's just about the only one, at least the only multi-part series, though there's always the occasional documentary on cable and sometimes even a mini-festival of art docs. The series starts its fifth season tonight at 10 PM. I caught an early look at the first two of its four hour-long episodes, which feature some pretty notable names — William Kentridge, Carrie Mae Weems, Doris Salcedo, Jeff Koons and Mary Heilmann, to name a few.
Gee, did I just put Kentridge and Koons in the same sentence? No surprise — they're not in the same episode.
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Last week I blogged pretty continually about The Art of the Steal, the new documentary about the long, sad struggle over moving the collection of the Barnes Foundation from its home in Merion, Pa. to downtown Philadelphia, a struggle which is pretty much over.
The first set of renderings for what will be the new home of the Barnes on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, will be reviewed by the Philadelphia Art Commission on Friday. They were made public in advance on Monday night, but only after several requests were filed under the Freedom of Information Act.
Inga Saffron, the architecture critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, has a first look, including a slide show here.
Okay, after all the text-heavy posting of last week, a rambling picture-heavy post today. I was in Chicago two weeks ago to appear on a panel and to catch up on developments since my last visit in May. One of those developments was the completion of two temporary pavilions in Chicago's big outdoor showroom, Millennium Park. One is by Ben Berkel's Amsterdam-based firm UNStudio...
UNStudio Pavilion, Millenium Park, Chicago, 2009/all photos: Lacayo
...the other from the London-based firm of Zaha Hadid...
Zaha Hadid Pavilion, Millenium Park, Chicago, 2009
So I went over to take a look.
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A U.S. infantryman enters a wooded area in the Tangi Valley/Adam Ferguson — VII Mentor for TIME
We did something a little different with this week's issue of Time. We devoted the cover package almost entirely to a photo essay, pictures of a single U.S. infantry company operating in a place called the Tangi Valley in Afghanistan. The photographer is Adam Ferguson, who has been to Afghanistan repeatedly as part of a project to record the day to day lives of ordinary American soldiers. Last month he went there on assignment from Time to spend a few weeks with the 102 men of Apache company. He came back with some pretty extraordinary pictures. To help readers get their bearings, I kicked in a brief introductory text.
With President Obama expected to make a decision some time in the next few weeks about whether to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, there's going to be a lot of debate about the direction of American policy there. (For what it's worth, I haven't made up my own mind.) Pictures aren't going to decide that debate and they shouldn't. They're rarely very useful as a means of analysis, they speak to a different part of the brain. But they bring a kind of information to the table that words can't convey.
There's a slide show of Ferguson's pictures here. Recommended viewing.
Again! But after the five-part extravaganza posting of the past few days, you could probably use a break.
Back Friday.
On to the last chapter of the Barnes saga in The Art of the Steal, wherein the trap snaps shut. As I said at the beginning of this five-part blogging opus — by all means, when it goes into theatrical release next spring, go see The Art of the Steal. Just don't go looking for a happy ending.
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Okay, yet one more look at Don Argott's new documentary, The Art of the Steal — which will go into commercial release next spring — and how the Barnes mess is wrapping up.
By the end of the tumultuous era of Barnes president Richard Glanton, with its big multi-city tour of Barnes paintings — money in! — and its big costly lawsuits — whoops, money out — the Barnes was ripe for the picking. The time was right to realize the longstanding ambition by various people and institutions in Philadelphia — you could say generations of them — to pry the Barnes out of Merion and bring it to downtown Philadelphia.
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Let's get back again to Don Argott's The Art of the Steal, the new documentary about the sad fate of the Barnes collection.
The beginning of the end for the Barnes can probably be dated to the arrival of Richard H. Glanton, a big personality with big ambitions for the Barnes and himself, not necessarily in that order.
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Okay, back to Don Argott's new documentary, The Art of the Steal, which has its New York premiere Tuesday night at the New York Film festival.
By the 1920s Barnes was spending much of his time writing about art. His theories, with their almost exclusive focus on formal relations within and among pictures, weren't taken very seriously then and still aren't, but they continue to determine how and where the art at the Barnes is hung. He had also come to think of himself as an educator. Eventually there would be an art school on the grounds of the Barnes — a number of former students and teachers appear in Argott's film to take us through the story. Though outsiders could visit the Barnes by appointment, Barnes regarded his collection as a teaching resource for the school, not a public gallery. And that was that. He ran the place with an iron fist and generally refused access even to scholars and critics wishing to study the paintings. Even Kenneth Clark was once turned away.
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