Library Culture Picks by Mike Duffy: May 2019

The dazzling brilliance of Vincent Van Gogh surrounds you in the truly 21st Century immersive experience of art, light, music and color Van Gogh, Starry Night at the Atelier des Lumières in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. This is a high definition, huge format experience of moving images—images which move around you and which move you. This stark former industrial building bursts and bristles in a thoroughly captivating, enjoyable and entirely novel presentation of the innovative work of a genius which can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

From the dark domestic interior of The Potato Eaters (1885) to the intense golden-yellows of wheat fields and sunflowers, more than 500 works by Van Gogh are magnified and pass over, under and around you. Entire paintings or just small details fill 30 foot high walls, float across hundreds of feet of wall space and carpet the floor under you. It is amazing that the scaling up of the artworks does not blur detail; in fact, you can see the length of brushstrokes, the thickness of the paint, even the ridges made by the paintbrushes. This is reproduction unlike any prior printed or projected format.

The well known intensity of the life and work of Van Gogh (1853-1890) comes through in portraits, interiors, outdoor scenes and self-portraits accompanied by an amazingly varied soundtrack: classical music along with jazz and pop from artists as different as Vivaldi and Miles Davis or Nina Simone and Brahms mixed by and including original works by composer Luca Longobardi. The range of sounds matches the images which span the Van Gogh’s career from the dreary Netherlands to sun-filled San-Rémy-de-Province and Arles, then finally to the Auvers-sur-Oise. Iris, sunflowers and cypress splash across the walls mixing with portraits of neighbors and, especially, self-portraits displaying the styles which developed over the brief, ten year career of the iconic troubled artistic soul.

In more than 35,000 square feet, 140 projectors and 50 speakers bring alive the creative genius of artistic director Gianfranco Iannuzzi, director Renato Gatto, and director and videographer Massimiliano Siccardi rendering the wondrous works of Van Gogh in monumental scale. Across time, changing technologies have provided different, enriching experiences of art to larger and more varied audiences and Van Gogh, Starry Night uses digital / electronic technologies to provide a new experience of art and music. Sound and light shows which flash spotlights on ruins in Mexico or Rome and wondrous contemporary digital displays such as that at the cathedral in Rouen are surpassed not just in scale but also in conception and execution at the Ateliers des Lumières.

Van Gogh, Starry Night offers an experience for art lovers, experience seekers, the curious and the digital generation who look, listen, walk around, sit on the floor or stairs. (Note: there are almost no seats.) People enter and leave at any point during the continuous show, which includes, additionally, Dreamed Japan by Studio Danny Rose, a short digital image experience of the floating world of Japanese prints, whose vibrant colors and dreamlike images influenced Van Gogh and his contemporaries. In a separate, smaller room there is also Verse by Thomas Vanz, a mystical, mysterious presentation of stars, the cosmos, astrophysics and music. Light, sound, color and music now fill this 180-year-old foundry with the pleasant, refreshing joy of sunlight and starry nights.

Calder—Picasso Why is this pairing of 20th Century artists so surprising? Both were born in the 19th century to artistic families, they worked in the same era, often in the same place — Paris, both used interesting and different materials, both became experimenters, both changed the way people thought of art. While the curator says that the exhibition highlights their similarities and differences, it is the similarities which provide much of the unexpected pleasure at the Musée Picasso Paris. So much creativity, so much daring and so much fun is on display mostly through sculpture, but there are also paintings, drawings and prints which add to our understanding and appreciation of these revolutionaries, and all of this brings to the fore their amazing similarities in challenging and defying expectations about figurative and abstract sculpture. This is truly an exhibition filled with surprises and filled with joy.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) added vitality and dynamism to the representation of the human form which, while the mainstay of sculptors, had often been static. Think of classical sculptures, majestic and solid (Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David) or of muscular, massive Romantic figures such as The Thinker by Rodin, then look at the spare Medusa (around 1930) by Calder. Walk around and view this bit of wire hanging from the ceiling from all sides for a complete experience. If this is sculpture, then it is something different, new, an amazing feat of work with bent and twisted wire and mostly empty space. The acrobats by both Calder (sculpture) and Picasso (drawing) show that the fascination of these early 20th Century artists, like that of their contemporaries in physics, music, painting, was with movement and music. Could you capture that fascination in what had been such a solid, even stolid, form as sculpture? The light, fun, figurative pieces — Josephine Baker dancing, Hercules fighting a lion, a graceful athlete throwing (putting) the shot, and a crouching baseball player, for example — show that we have moved into a different concept of sculpting.

Both Picasso and Calder use empty space, the void, what is not there may be as important as the materials in defining both figures and abstractions—along with movement and positioning to present ideas and emotions, to celebrate the physicality of materials, to display serious joking. Head of a bull (1942) by Picasso, a bicycle handlebar and seat hanging on the wall, as well as the series of prints of a bull which become increasingly abstract by subtracting details show first playfulness, then the ability to see better, perhaps, with fewer lines and less shading, the underlying reality of the animal. The final, simplified drawing of the bull, done in one line, could have been a study for a Calder wire sculpture while the 1930 drawing Circles and Signs. III presents circles, solid and squiggly lines which could easily have been the plan for a Calder mobile. Additionally, pieces by Calder mounted on walls or hanging from the ceilings play with shadows and lighting to demonstrate that there is not just one view or one way to enjoy or engage with the works. His three mobiles (mobiles, the word had to be invented to describe Calder’s innovation) hanging in the main stairwell and its upper floor lobbies are given a magnificent setting in which you can enjoy these large pieces from each floor and from the stairway. Such works evolve with your changing vantage point and with the movement of daylight through the windows, shadows being part of the dynamic nature of Calder’s work.

Over long careers, both Calder and Picasso painted and sculpted in many media and in varying modern styles (although no one approaches Picasso’s range). One surprise: Calder’s phase of heavy, very solid wooden sculptures. Another surprise: modern, abstract paintings by Calder with brightly colored shapes floating across the canvas. In the room with three Picasso sculptures of bathers in the center, don’t miss the simplified geometry of several 1940’s Picasso standing nudes drawn with brightly colored pencils, the Calder oil painting Impartial Forms (1946), and Calder’s Bifurcated Tower (1950), certainly as Cubist as any of Robert Delaunay’s paintings of an angled Eiffel Tower.

Freedom is the legacy of Calder and Picasso. Picasso’s daring overthrowing of convention in presenting the simultaneous, multiple views of Cubism and Calder’s use of metal, from thin wire, to suspended planes, to large, standing sheets, in black or bright colors, showed the way for contemporaries and generations which followed to be free in conceiving what sculpture could be. Think of the Americans Richard Serra (b.1939) (large scale, stark metal works) and Frank Stella (b.1936) (brightly colored metal works hanging from the wall), the French-American Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) (very large metal representational sculptures), the Brit Henry Moore (1898-1986) (curvaceous, smooth, metal figures and abstractions) whose debt to Calder or Picasso is evident.

There is great seriousness in the approaches of Picasso and Calder to their work and, at the same time, often great lightness and evident enjoyment. During this exhibition it was easy to think, “Sculptors just wanna have fun,” and fun is a large part of the enjoyment of Calder—Picasso now at the Musée Picasso Paris.