Rebecca Nemser

CITIZENS, Simon Schama’s won­der­ful new book about the French Rev­o­lu­tion, is espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing to peo­ple who care about Art, because it is in many ways a book about the pow­er of images to trans­form the world. 

Anselm Kiefer uses the lan­guage of mod­ern art to rewrite the kind of grandiose nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry paint­ing that mod­ern art reject­ed. He paints a rag­ing ele­gy for the fail­ure of rea­son and civ­i­liza­tion to over­come the evil that is part of human nature. Yet for Kiefer, only the mag­ic of art can build some­thing beau­ti­ful out of the wreck of rea­son and the fail­ure of history. 

JESSECA FER­GU­SON’s con­struc­tions often con­tain old post­cards, which seem to have been sent from places that have long since dis­ap­peared. Lost, ruined, or for­got­ten, they have left behind only pale and ghost­ly traces. Enshrined in lit­tle box­es, like the bones of saints in medieval reli­quar­ies, her work cel­e­brates the some­times mirac­u­lous pow­er of mem­o­ry to trans­form the pain and com­plex­i­ty of real life into the stuff of dreams, and art.

New Eng­land is now the cen­ter of an extra­or­di­nary flour­ish­ing of tra­di­tion­al crafts, espe­cial­ly fur­ni­ture, because some very tal­ent­ed artists have turned to crafts as a way out of the cyn­i­cal and cere­bral “endgame” that so much con­tem­po­rary art is play­ing today. 

Artists look at ani­mals: the roman­tic fan­ta­sy ani­mal, the prim­i­tive art ani­mal, the hid­den dri­ves ani­mal, the whim­si­cal ani­mal, the ele­men­tal ani­mal, and oth­er myth­i­cal beasts. As Walt Whit­man wrote,
“I think I could turn and live with ani­mals, they are so placid and self contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.”

ROBERT FERRANDINI’s ear­ly work fea­tured fly­ing saucers and mon­sters, imagery drawn from a 1950’s child­hood spent watch­ing sci­ence-fic­tion movies like When Worlds Col­lide and The Thing. In his new paint­ings of imag­i­nary land­scapes and seascapes, he has come to some kind of terms with his past and is ready to move on. His space­ship has final­ly land­ed in a world of his own making.

“His hands were ter­ri­bly deformed. Rheuma­tism had cracked the joints, bend­ing the thumb toward the palm and the oth­er fin­gers toward the wrist. Vis­i­tors who weren’t used to it couldn’t take their eyes off this muti­la­tion. Their reac­tion, which they didn’t dare express, was: ‘It’s not pos­si­ble. With those hands, he can’t paint these pic­tures. There’s a mystery!’ The mys­tery was Renoir himself.”

Jean-Fran­cois MILLET saw a time­less beau­ty and sad­ness in life, in evenings dark and filled with col­or. “What I know of hap­pi­ness is the qui­et, the silence, that you can savor so deli­cious­ly, either in the forests, or in the fields,” he wrote.

Draw­ings as a pic­ture mak­ing, sto­ry telling, dream machine. Draw­ings that dance, stretch, yearn, arch, and glide across the page. The plea­sures of look­ing emerge here not from what is observed but from how it is ren­dered; not the image but the artifice. 

HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON used the col­ors of the earth like paint, and han­dled stones and trees with a giant’s strength and a sculptor’s grace. The poet­ry of his archi­tec­ture makes the stones sing. 

In MICHAEL MAZUR’s hands, the Mono­type was the per­fect form to con­vey the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of life in the nat­ur­al world. The clear­est, most lucid flow­ers are sur­round­ed by a paler aura of oth­er flow­ers, oth­er sum­mers, oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions — a riot of reeds and flow­ers, organ­ic growth, con­fu­sion, and decay. Revenants of images repeat like ghost­ly, half-remem­bered things.

Yet there is exhil­a­ra­tion in the ter­ror, the ver­tig­i­nous fall. These speedy, vio­lent fan­tasies of destruc­tion and chaos are ten­der­ly, beau­ti­ful­ly described. The draw­ings in graphite and lin­seed oil – the oil used won­der­ful­ly as col­or – and the swirls of paint in eerie sea greens or fiery reds com­pose a bal­anced, painter­ly sur­face. The lan­guage of abstrac­tion pulls us upward, as the images plunge us into the abyss.

False masks of plas­tic beau­ty are among its mov­ing tar­gets. Des­per­ate to sur­vive the glis­san­do of the word proces­sor and the dead­ly lull of ordi­nary life, it rips to pieces the world’s fab­ric and its skin and puts it back togeth­er, obses­sive­ly recre­at­ing from scraps and scrawls and marks and images the objects of its desire and its rage.

As a very young man, OTTO PIENE saw the sky reflect­ed in a sea at long last calm: “The feel­ing of being reborn has nev­er left me.” Out of this rebirth came “a love for the sky, the desire to point at it, to show how beau­ti­ful it is, how it makes us live and feel alive.”

Artists and sci­en­tists. work­ing in neon, laser, steam, smoke, video, pyrotech­nics, film, inflat­ed and fly­ing sculp­ture, and oth­er celes­tial nav­i­ga­tions, cel­e­brate the sky as a medi­um of expres­sion, trans­mis­sion, and space.

Red Sea shells and pol­ished stones from the pyra­mid tomb of Queen Khen­sa — “great of charm, great of praise, pos­ses­sor of grace, sweet of love” — and oth­er trea­sures from KUSH, Lost King­dom of the Nile. A med­i­ta­tion on Art, Time, and the ancient river.

LE CORBUSIER cre­at­ed his own myth through the organ­ic gen­er­a­tion of forms. His genius con­stant­ly renewed itself, pulling new phe­nom­e­na into the orbit of his thought and recre­at­ing them in the puri­fied, mon­u­men­tal yet human forms of his architecture.

The sur­face of a FLORA NATAPOFF paint­ing is a place where bat­tles have been fought, cities and tem­ples built up and brought down, and on which there has been a wrestling with angels. The means of expres­sion are abstract – marks on paper and scraps of paper that must always hold their own. But the ener­gy to work comes from look­ing at some­thing that moves her. 

THE DIAL was a lit­er­ary mag­a­zine that pub­lished T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Vir­ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dal­loway, as well as repro­duc­tions of art­works col­lect­ed by Schofield Thay­er, a Hen­ry Jame­sian char­ac­ter who went abroad in search of old knowl­edge and new art. 

Each rec­tan­gle is like a pic­ture of a pic­ture, mov­ing through a series of trans­for­ma­tions. The tremu­lous draw­ings are like jot­tings, hiero­glyph­ics, mes­sages in bot­tles, unread­able post­cards, ideas com­ing into being, the first appear­ances of the not-yet-vis­i­ble, the impal­pa­ble images tak­ing form before our eyes.

FRANCES HAMILTON has refash­ioned much-loved images, mem­o­ries, and dream­strans­form­ing them into a ful­ly re-imag­ined uni­verse. It is this trans­for­ma­tion – the seri­ous, dif­fi­cult task of art – that gives her work its pow­er to enchant.

For a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry audi­ence brought up on abstrac­tion, INGRES’s great­ness, his fas­ci­na­tion, lies in the abstract qual­i­ties of his line, its rest­less, obses­sive move­ment across the page. Ingres’ line has pow­er, grace, life; it’s bril­liant, dra­mat­ic, neu­rot­ic, even per­verse. He told his stu­dents, “Draw­ing is every­thing; it is all of Art.” 

A woman sits think­ing, rest­ing her head on her hand in a room filled with flow­ers and fruit. The room seems charged with mean­ing, filled with her extra­or­di­nary pres­ence. For GABRIELE MUNTER, art was not about appear­ances, but about real­i­ties lying behind appear­ances. Abstrac­tion was a way of see­ing into the heart of things.

CLAUDE LE LORRAIN depicts the moment just before trans­fig­u­ra­tion — the moment just before women turn into god­dess­es, or girls turn into swans, or life turns into art. His light is dusk and twi­light — the dark­ling light that wash­es the phys­i­cal world in unearth­ly beau­ty and fills the heart with an intox­i­cat­ing sense of possibility.

In 1979, an 11th cen­tu­ry Per­sian poem with 50,000 rhyming cou­plets, illu­mi­nat­ed by tiny paint­ings in exquis­ite col­ors made from crushed jew­els and insect­s’ wings, inspired my first sto­ry about art. For the next 20 years, I wrote, pub­lished, and broad­cast hun­dreds of Sto­ries about Art in Boston and beyond. This is how it all began.