Tag: Marisol

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“Andy Warhol Portraits: Art and Irony” at AMUM

CREDIT: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

There’s a great story about Andy Warhol semi-crashing a party where the invited guests were all top-notch abstract expressionists. According to tradition, it was a heavily intellectual scene, and Warhol had arrived as the guest of his friend and colleague Marisol, who had broken into the New York art scene as an abstract expressionist but was moving more and more in the direction of Pop.

The deeply serious abstract artists were suspicious of Warhol and his paintings of soup cans and sculptural Brillo boxes. Painter Mark Rothko was allegedly overheard asking the host what might be done about the intrusion. And what could be done? After all, the profoundly superficial upstart had arrived with Marisol, a rare and extraordinarily gifted female presence in a notorious boys’ club.

In conjunction with Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper,” the Art Museum at the University of Memphis (AMUM) is exhibiting a collection of Andy Warhol portrait Polaroids, black-and-white photos, and silkscreen prints. “Andy Warhol Portraits: Art and Irony” looks at the New York scene through the lens of Warhol’s camera and contrasts those shots with portraits of American turmoil and tragedy.

“People always talk about how Warhol commodified things that hadn’t been commodified before,” says AMUM Director Leslie Luebbers. “Today we might say that he monetized these things. He turned them into money. Even a photograph of the Birmingham race riot. And a picture of Jackie Kennedy. He was able to monetize tragedy.”

The U of M’s exhibit was assembled both as an enhancement for Brooks’ show and to resonate with another AMUM show collecting images of the civil rights movement from the archives of the Memphis Press-Scimitar.

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“Akin” at Crosstown Arts

Last summer, New York art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné wrote in The Village Voice that folk art is merely the new fad in big-business art collecting and that folk artists have “precious little to say about our time’s most pressing issues.” Folk artists, wrote Viveros-Fauné are “Sunday painters, stitching septuagenarians, and religious cranks” who are usually “dead, mentally impaired, or can barely speak for themselves.”

Royal Robertson’s art piece in “Akin”

Viveros-Fauné’s so-called Sunday painters would probably include reclusive spiritualist Royal Robertson, a New Orleans-based artist who used tempera paint on wood or posterboard to make work about the end of days, as well as Memphian Joe Light, a self-taught painter and driftwood sculptor. Work by Robertson and Light and eight other folk artists is currently on display at Crosstown Arts Gallery as part of the show “Akin,” through July 6th.

“Akin,” curated by Southfork gallerist Lauren Kennedy, is meant as a companion show to the Brooks’ upcoming “Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper” exhibition. The works all come by way of the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas. The Web Gallery, according to its website, is interested in “painted or repaired objects, fraternal lodge items, carnival banners, tramp art, memory jugs, quilts, and just killer oddball stuff.”

Ike Morgan’s Mona Lisa

Like the work of the genre-bending sculptor Marisol, who often used a folkish style (despite her formal training), the works in “Akin” have range. There are oblique hubcap sculptures by Hawkins Bolden alongside Ike E. Morgan’s grotesque canvas paintings of George Washington. Kennedy says, “Looking at Marisol’s work, there was a quality that struck me the way folk art does. The materials and the way you can see her hand in the work … the work felt akin to a lot of folk and outsider art that I enjoy.”

“Folk art” is a loose category. Though it usually describes work by untrained or informally trained artists, it has also come to describe a style, the hallmarks of which are cheap or found materials, obsessive mark-making, and a disregard for formal perspective. Painters like Esther Pearl Watson, whose landscapes are featured in the show and often include sparkly UFOs and scrawled writing, are more D.I.Y than traditionally folk. The same is true of Fred Stonehouse, a featured surrealist painter who holds a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Stonehouse and Watson aren’t exactly outsider artists, but their work is in the folk canon, alongside Robertson’s rough drawings and Light’s Old Testament-inspired sculpture and painting.

Watson’s paintings, particularly, unify “Akin.” Her 2012 painting Bail Bonds shows a small female figure walking in front of a storefront. Yellow balloons float to the sky, and a UFO hovers unobtrusively over a leafless tree. It is a barren scene in what looks like a warm, Texas winter. A notation at the top of the painting reads, “Dad is in Jail in Florida. He gets released the 29th. Mom is upset. He doesn’t know if he wants to come back or not.” There is something flexible and self-conscious about Bail Bonds. It is accessible like a comic but has the depth of a much-worked-over painting; perhaps Watson gave the work a folkish look to create this effect.

“Akin” does well by the “religious cranks” that Viveros-Fauné maligned. The critic’s wording is reactionary and rude, but he touches on something true: Folk artists could usually give a flip about big art world business, and so folk art has always been a weird bedfellow with the gallery scene. What is called for is more shows like “Akin” that embrace a broad and warm aspect of an important community of artists.

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The Brooks’ “The Eclectic Sixties”

CREDIT: courtesy Philip Pearlstein

courtesy Philip Pearlstein

Philip Pearlstein’s Female Model On Bed, Hands Behind Back

Of the roughly 9,000 works in the Brooks Museum collection, only about 3 percent are on display at any given time. Of that displayed 3 percent, fewer than half of those are delicate works on paper that are only allowed (by curatorial dictum) to see the light of day once a decade. A fraction of that fraction are contemporary and modern works on paper.

Courtesy Red Grooms / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Red Grooms’ Portrait Of Paul Suttman

With this circumstance in mind, you should really make a trip to see the masterful 1973 Philip Pearlstein drawing Female Model on Bed, Hands Behind Back, currently on display in the Brooks exhibition “The Eclectic Sixties.” It is not one of Pearlstein’s more famous works (the artist is better known for his mammoth and psychologically rigorous nude oil paintings), but it is a candid and beautiful example of what simple line work can do to describe the human body.

The Pearlstein drawing, along with other works in the “Sixties” exhibition, is on display through September as part of the Brooks’ summer focus on the decade. “The Eclectic Sixties” and another small show are intended as support for an important retrospective of the works of mid-century artist Marisol, set to open in June. Marisol’s work will dominate the museum’s lower galleries with “The Eclectic Sixties” operating as a descriptive entry-point to the retrospective.

Courtesy Estate of ted faiers

Ted Faiers’ Woman With Cat

“The Eclectic Sixties” is entirely comprised of works culled from the Brooks’ permanent collection, including a loosely brush-worked portrait of sculptor Paul Suttman by Red Grooms, a 1971 psychedelic bust of a woman holding a cat called Woman With Cat by Memphian Ted Faiers, and a neon Andy Warhol series, “Electric Chair.” There is a cool 1966 “photolithography concertina” — an accordian-style photo book — by Edward Ruscha titled Every Building on Sunset Strip.

Courtesy David Parrish

John Parrish’s The Eagle Has Landed

The exhibition is almost evenly divided between collage and assemblage-based works — the sort that might have been made from Alphabet City garbage and old Polaroids — and colorful pieces in the Pop Art canon. Most works are from the ’60s or early ’70s, though a few pieces are from much later and reflect a strong period influence. One of these later works, John Wesley’s 1998 Showgirls, is the purest Pop piece in the entire exhibition; it would be difficult to guess that it was painted 35 years after the peak of the style.

The inclusion of later works and the exhibition’s loose approach to hard genres (Pop! Op! Surrealism! Assemblage! et cetera) is refreshing. Too often, work from the period is curated with stiff reference to over-defined mid-century art movements or with reductive historical explanation about American counterculture and societal shifts. The Brooks exhibition sidesteps that. The works in the show feel intimate, left to their own devices.

Courtesy Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair

The Eagle Has Landed, a large photorealistic oil painting by John Parrish, is the poster-child for the exhibition, not only because it is dominant and flashy (it depicts a greaser with his motorcycle on the moon), but because it brings together many of the other works in the show — it is figurative, accessible, and very human but has a hard-edged chromatic coloration that seems advertising-inspired. The headspace of the painting also seems dead-on: a moon that is a fantasy landscape that is the desert, somewhere between Las Vegas and the stratosphere.

“The Eclectic Sixties” at the Brooks through September 21st.