Toppled Twombly

Robert Boyd

Devon Britt-Darby posted the following comment on Facebook today: "The Menil Collection's reinstallation of its modern and contemporary galleries is earth-shatteringly amazing. I don't think they've ever looked that good." He wrote this about an hour ago. Twenty minutes ago, as I write this, something or someone caused a Cy Twombly sculpture, Untitled (1954), to fall over. John Hovig was there and texted me this: "Just 5m ago someone knocked over the old cy twombly sculpture in the newly-rearranged modern gallery. I think someone fell. I heard it, loud crash, but didn't see it. But I see it lying on the ground." He took this photo of the damage. It don't look good.


Cy Twombly, untitled, 1954 (on the floor in the background). Photo by John Hovig.

The Best (and Worst) of 2011 -- The Houston Art Community Fails to Reach a Consensus (part 2)

by Robert Boyd

This is continued from part 1. The shows/events listed below are everything that got one vote from the 14 respondents to my poll.

Howard Sherman, Apocalyptic Wallpaper at McMurtrey. This show actually got two votes, but one was from Howard Sherman himself! I approve of an artist having high self-esteem, but thought it wouldn't be right to count that toward the total. Mark Flood also liked this show.

Alex Jones' protest against the Federal Reserve bank on Allen Pkwy. This odd entry on the list came from Mark Flood: "Maybe not art but I loved [the] Alex Jones led a protest against the Federal Reserve bank on Allen Pkwy., sorta connected with occupy."

Ancestors of the Lake: Art of Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay, New Guinea at the Menil. Mark Flood wrote, "I also loved [the Menil's] Ancestors of the Lake: Art of Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. It makes me sound like a Menil groupie but believe me I'm not."


Ana Serrano, House of Beauty installation view, mixed media, 2011

Ana Serrano's Salon of Beauty at Rice Gallery. An anonymous respondent said, "I love to be totally immersed in an artist's world. This was spectacular! I wish I could visit it still."

BOX of Curiosities PODA Project by various Box 13 artists. This was one of the choices of an anonymous respondent.


Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time at MFAH. This color-saturated show was one of Devon Britt-Darby's favorites.


CounterCrawl flyer

CounterCrawl. A bicycling trip through various art studios struck a chord which performance artist Carrie Schneider.

The Cy Twombly Gallery shortly after his death. One of the most moving responses I got to my poll wass this one by painter/collagist/crochetist Stephanie Toppin: "To take an extremely personal take on this that I have not really told or blogged to anyone about, I did the very typical artist thing and visited the Cy Twombly gallery after he died. He is a part of the realm of painters that mak[es] me fall in love with not art, but paint. The relationship to canvas is what I could gawk at, spending hours away. I don't know what I really went for, but I had to go to satisfy the itch of not going. I wanted to think about art now that moved me like this. I felt scared. This year has been a personal rollercoaster for me and art has always been my safe place. For the first time, life seemed marked. I am not afraid of death, I am afraid of artist's death, of an art death. It actually hurts me to type this. Maybe I always felt that his painting lived, the possibility of more, and with his death they truly stopped. All of it became history. This is all there is.

"I know it is dramatic. I wish I was better at communicating a feeling that I can hardly contain. I've been thinking about it for days. I just wanted to tell you, it doesn't matter if you post this. I wish there was a show that shined above this for me.

"Art seems so fast now, there are so many pop up shows and work around every corner. I applaud the energy, I think it helps the public know and understand arts contribution to the culture of the city. I guess I am romantic. I want more slow art. I will have to stew on that."


Dennis Harper, iPageant, performance with paper props, 2011

iPageant, Dennis Harper & friends at the Joanna. An anonymous respondent wrote, "I was really disappointed with Nancy Douthey's performance, and I wish there was more time spent on the game show portion of the exhibition, but this was great." (Personally, I liked Douthey's performance, but I agree the game show should have kept going--hopefully they will restage it sometime.)

The Devon Britt-Darby saga. Emily Sloan voted for "Devon Britt-Darby's life, art, religion, sexcapades!"


Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein at CAMH. And speaking of Devon Britt-Darby, this is one of his top choices of the year.


Emily Peacock, MeeMee and Me, C Print, 2010

Emily Peacock. One anonymous correspondent wrote voted for "anything Emily Peacock does," which raises a point--there are artists that you see here and there who may not have a solo exhibit, but the sum of their work makes a big impact. I can see that effect with Peacock's photography.

Francis Giampietro & Jeremy DePrez, The Power of Negative Feedback at Lawndale. This two-man show garnered a vote from one of my anonymous respondents.

(Because I've reached the limit on the number of characters I can have in my "tags", I'm going to contiunue this in part 3--and part 4 and part 5. Onward!)

The Weight of 630 Years of Tradition

by Robert Boyd

In 1422, Jan van Eyck, the first great Flemish oil painter, started drawing a salary in the Hague as a painter. From then until the death of Rubens in 1640, Flemish painters were among the best, with Italian artists as their primary competition for greatest-in-the-world status. The tradition of Dutch painting continued through the late 17th and 18th centuries, but those painters are little known outside the Netherlands. The artists from the Dutch Invasion exhibit who spoke at Box 13 on Saturday nonetheless expressed the tradition of Dutch painting as a continuity--particularly painting education, which they implied was quite rigorous. It's hard to know from this show alone whether painting is particularly important within the context of contemporary Dutch art, but if they are at all representative of Dutch art, painting must be a strong current there.

I discussed the Box 13 exhibit in an earlier post. Last Thursday, the second half of the show opened in the Williams Tower gallery.


Christina Bittremieux, untitled, oil on canvas, 2007

Christina Bittrmieux spoke of her work's relationship with landscape. The images are apparently based on real places, even though in the process of being painted, they become quite abstract.One of her subjects is highway exchanges. I don't know if this is one of those piece, but it looks like it could be.


Hans de Bruijn, Monet/Doppelganger, oil on canvas, 2008

Hans de Bruijn seems to carry the weight of his painterly ancestors heaviest. He spoke, for example, of having fallen in love with Mark Rothko's paintings when he was 16 (he is 52 now). He said that ever since he was 17, he had wanted to see the Rothko Chapel, and having built it up in his mind for so many decades, he was disappointed. (A common reaction.) He said those big dark canvases didn't admit him, unlike other Rothko paintings which invite the viewer into the space Rothko has created. De Bruijn considers Rothko a kind of landscape painter--hence his portrait of Rothko on a beach. He then went over to the Cy Twombly gallery without such time-forged expectations and found it overwhelming. (Also a common reaction--Jim Woodring described a similar reaction when he saw them.)


Hans de Bruijn, The Anatomy Lesson (detail), oil on canvas, 2008

Looking at photos of the paintings taken from a distance, it's hard to see just how thick the impasto is on de Bruijn's painting. He really uses the gooey quality of paint as a substance in his paintings.



Anna Bolten

Anna Bolten is the youngest artist of the group. Her paintings are based on photos and usually combine more than one image in a single painting. Something I didn't really notice until she pointed it out is that many of the images are based on photos taken from moving cars or trains. That gives them a slightly blurred look, and they tend to be paired with images taken from a stationary position. The effect is subtle, but visible.


Maarten Demmink, aka Demiak

Demiak's work at Williams Tower included some paintings. In my earlier review, I referred to his work as "painterly" (even though it is composed of photos of carefully created tableaux), and he confirmed that his origins as an artist was as a painter. He spoke of his teenage infatuation with the blues which evolved into a lifelong interest in the deep South (and Louisiana, especially). In fact, while his colleagues are making a pilgrimage to Marfa this week, he and his wife were heading off in the other direction to Lafayette and New Orleans. I mentioned to him that the cypress knees and trees in his photos were utterly gigantic compared to the real things. He didn't apologize--these photos weren't an attempt to create a documentary realism. His Louisiana was a fantastic land, a personal myth. I wonder if seeing the real Louisiana will change his work at all?

Cy Twombly

I’ve never been a fan of Cy Twombly, an artist who almost dares you to like his work. Some of his paintings are not unlike the bored scribbles of a manager trapped in a very dull meeting. I mean, except for the scale and the media, there is no difference. I just couldn’t see this as meaningful expression—I couldn’t see the intelligence behind it.

So I avoided the Menil’s Twombly gallery for years until today. And I was surprised. While there were plenty of perplexing scribble paintings, there were some that had real presence.

One was an untitled suite of nine paintings, mostly green, black, grey and white. He would tend to put the green and black in one area and the grey and white beneath it and to the side. The effect was an illusionistic effect (unintentional?) of dense greenery coming right up to the edge of a lake on an overcast day. I was filled with emotion seeing this. There had been a piece on Monet’s letters in NPR the other day, which made me think about Monet, which made me think about Giverny and the water lily paintings. One thing about these paintings was how rich in color they were. Twombly creates something similar with a far more limited palette.

Then I thought of Theft by Peter Carey. Carey has Butcher Bones describe his new paintings as abstract with slabs of super-rich pthalo green, and seeing these Twombly paintings made that image return. It’s as if Carey had seen them and used their memory to create Bones’ paintings.

I wish I could find an image of one of these paintings to post. I can't though--you'll just have to visit the gallery.