Lynda Benglis – American Artist

Lynda Benglis at Le Consortium

Today’s post concludes a sequence of three consecutive posts dedicated to female American artists (poets are artists).

Lynda Benglis: Roberta (1974)

Sculpture, enamel, sculpmetal and tinsel on aluminium screeing and foil
Primary Insc: not signed, not dated.
79.1 h x 89.1 w x 41.3 d cm

Lynda Benglis is an American artist, mainly sculptor with Greek blood. Her father’s family was Greek in origin and she still has family on the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo.

She was born in Louisiana in 1941 and after graduating from college moved to New York in 1964.

Christopher Knight writes in Los Angeles Times:

“When she arrived in New York shortly after, in the mid-1960s, art’s purity police were out in full force, busily patrolling what artists shouldn’t do when making paintings and mustn’t do when making sculptures.

If you sense a collision coming, take a bow. Benglis, after surveying Manhattan’s art landscape, did the only reasonable thing. In the face of its ponderous penitential virtue, she brought Mardi Gras to Soho.

The fiesta was undertaken neither lightly nor at random. Ambitious, she looked hard at the local art that had come before, from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Much of it was great; still, it’s always helpful to know how we get to where we are.

She looked at Jackson Pollock’s skeins of dripped paint and at Helen Frankenthaler’s big puddles of stained color. Barnett Newman’s zip-lines — those ambiguous vertical bars of color dividing fields of painted light and darkness — came under scrutiny. So did more recent work: Carl Andre’s checkerboards of metal plates that turned the floor into an artistic pedestal for people, Donald Judd’s orderly sculptural subdivisions of space and Richard Serra’s molten lead splashed into studio corners — all of them sculptures directly challenging the postwar primacy of painting. “

Lynda Benglis: Smile (1974) cast bronze

Benglis has a powerful sense of humour, which she manifested gloriously in her 1974 advert in Artforum magazine.

Hilarie Sheets comments in her New York Times article:

“She (Benglis) lampooned both the machismo of the art world and the way artists were expected to promote themselves in a market-driven system by exposing herself, with a dildo between her legs, in a 1974 Artforum advertisement that she paid for, earning her as many fans as detractors.”

Lynda Benglis: Phantom

Arttatler offer the followng insight into Benglis’ work:

“Benglis’s best-known works question the rigors of Modernism and Minimalism by merging material, form, and content; bringing color back into sculpture; and taking painting off the wall. These works include her richly layered wax paintings and poured latex and polyurethane foam sculptures of the late 1960s and early ’70s; innovative videos, installations, and “knots” from the 1970s; metalized, pleated wall pieces of the 1980s and 1990s; and pieces in a variety of other mediums, such as glass, ceramics, photography, or cast polyurethane, as in the case of the monumental The Graces (2003-05)”

Lynda Benglis: The Graces

In her 2010 interview to the “frieze”, Benglis talked to Marina Cashdan about her art and work in a comprehensive way. I copy here one of the questions and the answer:

“MC: Is Robert Pincus-Witten’s term for your work, ‘the frozen gesture’, a misnomer, because your work feels more like it’s living, an act as opposed to a confined object?
Lynda Benglis: Well ‘the frozen gesture’ was something that I think both Yves Klein and Franz Kline had done. Symbolically, Klein jumped out the window: he was involved with gesture, process (his ‘women brushes’ painting with their bodies) and the symbolic (sponges soaked with his paint on monochromatic blue canvases). Kline took the gesture and made it iconographic. Frank Stella said that Kline was one of his favourite artists, so I think Stella himself took the canvas, the stretcher bars, and turned them on their side to make them painted objects, as did other artists who were using materials and geometry. They were presenting something that was, in a way, rebellious and sometimes simplistic, and it was called Minimalism. I saw that and understood it in the context of where art could go, but for me it was a statement that seemed very rococo. It was way out on a limb. I felt that art had to have more content, a multiplicity of meaning and associations. And even many of those so-called Minimal artists broke out of their own self-created mould! ”

Lynda Benglis at Le Consortium

On the occasion of her first major retrospective in the UK, Benglis talked to “The Guardian’s” Laura Barnett, and concluded as follows:

“You can say, ‘Is there the influence of Greece?’ or ‘Do these works look like the sea?’ Those things are all there, but there are many other associations. I think all good art is really abstract. That’s how it transcends cultural differences. That’s how it speaks to us.”

Lynda Benglis: Untitled

Thomas Schutte – German, Sculptor and Draughtsman

Thomas Schütte © Jörg Koopmann, May 2009

I first saw works by Schutte in 1999, when he exhibited in the Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens, Greece. What impressed me back then were the aluminum figures “Great Spirits”.

Thomas Schutte: Grosse Geister - Great Spirits - No 9 and 14, 1998, Photo courtesy of Bernier/Eliades Gallery

Some 13 years ago, the press release of Bernier/Eliades Gallery read like this:

‘THOMAS SCHÜTTE

January 16 – February 25, 1999

Thomas Schtutte was born in 1954, in Oldenburg,Germany. He lives and works in Dϋsseldorf.

“One of the most important German artists working in the late 20th century, Thomas Schütte’s installations, sculptures, models, drawings and watercolours can take many, often contradictory guises.

His art looks utilitarian, offering shelter, sustenance and companionship, yet delivers false promises and alien worlds: a museum that incinerates art; potatoes made of bronze; or the artist’s own ‘audience’, consisting of wooden stand-ins or metallic figures assembled before his work. Like Gulliver wandering through a Swiftian world of shifting scales, the viewer is immersed in a series of theatrum mundi, poetic yet dysfunctional utopias which alternate between the private and the public, the romantic and the sceptical.

The artist deploys a vivid spectrum of colours and a range of materials to revision the basic constituents – natural, cultural and political – of everyday life whilst exploring fundamental questions about the artist and society.”

(Thomas Schütte, Phaidon)

The exhibition will last until February 25, 1999.’

Thomas Schutte: Gross Geister, Palazzo Grassi, Venice

I met one of the great spirits again in Venice in late 2011, in Palazzo Grassi. The photo below is shaken and obscure, but it is better than nothing. The sculpture is enveloped by Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog.

The photo was taken under distress, as in spite of the fact that there was no reasonably priced catalogue, the policy of the Palazzo is not to allow photographs. I protest!

“The Grosse Geister came to life through the formation and molding of long strands of wax, which were 
then cast in aluminum. This explains their anti-monumental appearance: they are both robotic and organic, futuristic and absurd. The “great minds” referred to in this work’s title are contained in reflective aluminum shells, which passively absorb the shadows and forms of their environment. Despite their monumental size, they seem elastic, ready to move about the space as soon as the viewer looks away. This blending of contradictory elements results in these comic somewhat mischievous sculptures, through which Schütte gives mass and presence to vaporous beings.” (Source: Palazzo Grassi)

Thomas Schutte: Grosse Geister, Kunstplatz Graben, Wien, 2011

While I was in Venice, other great spirits were installed in Kunstplatz Graben, in Vienna. This time, they are black and look menacing. The neutral curiosity of the alumunium is replaced by the threatening black shining surface.

I quote from the October 2009 issue of “frieze” magazin’s review of the Thomas Schutte exhibition in Munich’s Haus der Kunst:

‘Schütte’s ‘Große Geister’ series stalked the entrance to the show, foreshadowing the exhibition’s partial focus on the figure and the artist’s ambivalent relationship to it. Melty, molten and reflective, these aluminium figures evince both menace and levity: part Darth Vader, part Pillsbury Doughboy. Outsized, they put the viewer at a disadvantage, an auspicious start to Schütte’s lecture on power relations. ‘

I have two comments on the Great Spirits:

• The name chosen: we do not have a person, or a creature even. We have an entity that cannot be grasped by our senses, it is a Spirit.
• The entity is a cross between the human form and a robot, although the Michelin Man also comes to mind (or SPirit?) for parts of the body.

Thomas Schutte: Efficiency Men, Punta della Dogana, Venice

Next meeting with Schutte’s work was in Punta della Dogana, in Venice yet again. This time I met with the “Efficiency Men”.

“These works explore states of conflict, isolation, disillusionment, despair and vulnerability, which are also echoed in his Efficiency Men(2005), spectral figures made out of thin steel spirals, wrapped in heavy blankets from which emerge three disquieting colored silicone faces. Grotesque masks of corrupt contemporary society, the three figures advance in space like prisoners in chains engaged in a forced patrol.”  

(Source: In praise of Doubt)

Thomas Schutte: Four Sisters in Bath, 1989, Tate Gallery

Before concluding, let us take a bath with the four sisters, let the water cleanse us and our Minds, Great and Small, silver and black, and lets hope that we get out of the sight of the Efficincy Men.

P.S. I thank Tate Gallery for inspiring me to add “… and draughtsman” to the title of this post.

Donatello’s “The Penitent Mary Magdalene”

Following the trail I started with Titian’s “Pieta”, today I go a few years back to meet another Genius and Master, Donatello.

Donatello's statue outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

As I read in PBS’s web site:

“Donatello was not a popular person, but in his sculptures he managed to capture life itself. Every look and gesture was rich in humanity and personality. He was known to mutter “speak, damn you, speak!” at his figures as he worked.

In 1434, following his triumph over the enemies of the Medici, Cosimo requested a special commission from his friend. A statue of an Old Testament hero, symbolizing triumph against the odds. Donatello’s bronze “David” broke all the rules.

Donatello: Davis, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Firenze

A playful, sensuous, and androgynous hero, “David” was the first life-size nude to be cast in bronze since Classical times.

In the 1450s Donatello began work on a terrifying statue, the most vivid of his career. The “Penitent Mary Magdalen”, carved for the baptistry of Florence, is an eloquent vision of fear and decay, perhaps brought on by the realization of Donatello’s own mortality.”

( The material of the previous paragraphs comes from the web site of USA’s Public Broadcasting Service, PBS.)

Donatello: The Penitent Mary Magdalene, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Firenze

From David to Mary Magdalen. It is a path of life.

Mary Magdalene has been the subject of many paintings and sculptures.

Titian: The Repentant Mary Magdalen

Titian has painted a portrait of Mary, which is in the Gallery of Palazzo Pitti, a few hundred meters away from Donatello’s sculpture, which is in the Duomo Museum of Florence.

What a contrast between Titian and Donatello’s interpretation! Is it only Titian portraying Mary as a young woman, repentant or not?

El Greco: Mary Magdalene in penitence

Not really. Look at El Greco’s interpretation. Mary is young, very young, beautiful, with long hair that envelopes her body.

Donatello: The Penitent Mary Magdalen (detail)

The hair is the only common element between Titian’s and El Greco’s paintings and Donatello’s sculpture.

Donatello: The Penitent Mary Magdalen (detail)

Donatello wanted Mary to be an old woman. A woman approaching the end of her life.

Donatello: The Penitent Mary Magdalen (detail)

A woman whose face is pierced by the bones, whose eyes inhabit open dark holes, whose mouth is almost toothless.

Donatello: The Penitent Mary Magdalen (detail)

Her hands are almost forming a prayer pair, but not so.  It is as if she was going to pray but she changed her mind as the hands were coming together, but not touching yet.

Donatello: The Penitent Mary Magdalen (detail)

The aging woman is standing firmly on her feet. As disconcerting her hace and overall condition may be, she is standing with confidence and without any weakness. She is almost “relaxed” when it comes to her feet.

This in my view is the key to “reading” the work. Reading the body.

Donatello: The Penitent Mary Magdalen (detail)

As the eye travels from the face to the torso, the hands and then to the feet, the ambivalence of the artist manifests itself in a comprehensive way.

This ambivalence is the distinctive feature of the work, a feature that differentiates Donatello’s interpretation from Titian’s and El Greco’s.

In both paintings, Mary is a person wiht a clear attitude and stance in life. Repentant in Titian’s painting, full of devotion in El Greco’s.

But in Donatello’s sculpture, Mary may be skinny and appearing in a state of departure from the worldly affairs, but at the same time she is not fully wholy absorbed by her devotion or repentance. Her body language expresses ambivalence and the coexistence of the worldly stuff with the heavenly. This is what I find amazing in this work. Donatello either consciously or subconsciously is a Modern Master in this work, as he depicts Mary in the state of inner conflict, in the state of Being and Being Not.

What Donatello may have started as a work that would portray his fear of Death, his anguish of getting old, was transformed in the creative process to a work that is full of Life, as Life is ambivalence and contradiction and conflict.