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ARTICLE | Mark Rothko on How to Be an Artist
Famed Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko believed that art was a powerful form of communication. “The fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions,” he said in an interview in 1956. “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”
Through canvases of floating forms and glowing, suspended rectangles, Rothko sought to create a profound connection between artist, canvas, and viewer. What’s more, he asserted that his works not only expressed human emotion, but also stimulated psychological and emotional experiences in those who witnessed them. “Painting is not about an experience,” he told LIFE magazine in 1959. “It is an experience.”
While Rothko believed his paintings spoke for themselves—and routinely derided art critics who attempted to explain his practice with words—that didn’t stop him from developing his own theories about the power of art and the creative process. Throughout his career, from the late 1920s until his death in 1970, the New York–based painter amassed a body of writing and gave a number of interviews that reveal his views on how creativity can be unlocked and encouraged. Below, we highlight several of Rothko’s words of wisdom… read more.
SOURCE: Artsy
BIOGRAPHY | Peggy Guggenheim
Solomon R. Guggenheim’s niece, Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), was a self-described “art addict” who sought to distinguish herself from her business-oriented relatives and make her mark on the world through collecting and traveling in avant-garde circles. Peggy’s collections, galleries, and museum were all stamped with her distinct tastes and style.
Her singular career spanned the modern era, linking the Dada and Surrealist movements with Abstract Expressionism. She collected and championed artists from Vasily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock to Yves Tanguy, and made few distinctions between her business and private lives: her two marriages were to artists, Dadaist Laurence Vail and Surrealist Max Ernst, amid a string of liaisons and intrigues with the likes of Samuel Beckett and Constantin Brancusi.
Largely self-taught when it came to art, Peggy was guided by her interest in creativity and iconoclasm, and found her way to her métier through her personal connections in the avant-garde world after arriving in Paris in the 1920s. She moved in the same circles as Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, writer and artist Djuna Barnes, and painter Romaine Brooks; she was photographed by Man Ray and dressed by the legendary designer Paul Poiret.
It was not until she moved to London in the late 1930s, fleeing the Nazi occupation of the continent, that Peggy opened her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune. Around this time, Samuel Beckett told her that “one should be interested in art of one’s time,” which became one of her mottos and lent itself to the name of her celebrated second gallery, Art of This Century in New York. From Paris to London, she quickly amassed one of the most prominent collections of Cubist and Surrealist art, during a period when few others (including her uncle and Rebay) held these works in high regard. Her initial collection, acquired at a rate of one painting per day on frenzied trips to Paris during World War II, cost her only $40,000 for a group of works by Brancusi, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Ernst, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso, among others… read more here.
SOURCE: Guggenheim
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PEGGY GUGGENHEIM: CONFESSIONS OF AN ART ADDICT | MAY 22, 2020
MEET THE ARTISTS | THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Nerys Jones was born and educated in Mid Wales and studied at the Royal Scottish Academy and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. From 1994-2000, she was a company mezzo-soprano for English National Opera (ENO), where she sang many roles, including Cherubino, Hansel, Despina, Zerlina, and Mercedes,. She performed with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Early Music Consort, National Youth Orchestra of Wales, Grange Park Opera, Reisopera in Holland, Vlaamse Opera, Adelaide Festival, Opera Zuid and at La Fenice in Venice.
Since moving to Seattle in 2006, she has performed with numerous companies; Tacoma Opera as Marcellina (Marriage of Figaro), Count Orlovsky (Die Fledermaus) and most recently in the role of Female Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia. At Vashon Opera, the roles of Mother Jeanne (Dialogues of the Carmelites), Second Lady (Magic Flute), La Ciesca (Gianni Schicchi), and Madame Larina (Eugene Onegin), Puget Sound Concert Opera (as Prince Charmant in Cendrillion), University of Washington School of Music (as Euryclée in Pénélope), Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle Chamber Society, Northwest Philharmonia, and Northwest Sinfonietta.
Nerys has appeared in numerous Seattle Opera previews and earlier this year she made her main stage debut as Inez in Il Trovatore and will be returning in the 2019/20 season as Giovanna in Rigoletto. Also this past season Nerys joined Rimrock Opera for the US debut of the Welsh Opera Blodwen in Billings, Montana. Learn more about Nerys here.
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THE PHOTOGRAPHER | MARCH 20, 2020
ARTICLE | The #MeToo Moment: Art Inspired by the Reckoning
The first known feminist-art program in the United States was established in the fall of 1970 at the California Institute of the Arts. Judy Chicago (artist and educator) formed the art collective known as “Womanhouse” because, as she put it, “women artists were simply not taken seriously.”
Two decades later, the Guerrilla Girls forced attention to the fine art world’s gender and racial disparity with their gorilla masks and guerrilla-style stunts. (“Guerrilla Girls’ definition of a hypocrite?” read one poster. “An art collector who buys white male art at benefits for liberal causes, but never buys art by women or artists of color.”)
From Picasso’s Guernica — observed as a cry against the atrocities of the Spanish War — to the graffiti of the Arab Spring, social movements and injustice have long inspired art of all forms. The #MeToo Moment is no exception.
Explore works inspired by the #MeToo movement here.
SOURCE: The New York Times
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ARTICLE | How the #MeToo Movement Helped Make New Charges Against Jeffrey Epstein Possible
Federal prosecutors unveiled sex-trafficking charges against wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein on Monday (July 8, 2019), revisiting years-old allegations. But their announcement was quickly followed by questions about why prosecutors (led by then-U.S. Attorney, former-Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta) had treated Epstein leniently in the past and why it had taken so long to meaningfully target allegations of sexual misconduct that were long an open secret.
Victims’ advocates and legal experts say the #MeToo movement in the past two years has fueled cultural change, putting pressure on prosecutors to take action and creating public support for the sexual misconduct cases they pursue.
“While the charged conduct is from a number of years ago, it is still profoundly important to the many alleged victims, now young women,” Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference announcing the charges on Monday. “They deserve their day in court, and we are proud to be standing up for them by bringing this indictment.”
Berman declined to comment on what led his office to revisit the allegations now, but he said prosecutors were “assisted by some excellent investigative journalism” — an apparent reference to a November 2018 story by the Miami Herald that found 80 women who said they were sexually abused by Epstein from 2001 to 2006. It sparked a public outcry over Epstein’s lenient 2007 plea deal from Florida prosecutors, who allowed the billionaire to avoid federal criminal charges, plead guilty to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution, register as a sex offender and serve 13 months in jail while being allowed to work in his office six days per week… more.
SOURCE: TIME
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Truth and Consequences: #MeToo and the New Sexual Landscape | JUL 27