Real Estate Art #2

Robert Boyd

It's time for another voyeuristic look at other people's art collections, courtesy of the fine people at HAR.com. This time, we have a condo on Shepherd in River Oaks. I recognize a lot of the art, but I'm not going to spoil it (at least, not right away). If you can name the artists who made any of these pieces, let me know in the comments. After a while, I'll pipe up with what I know. But I will give one clue--this collector likes to buy local--many of the pieces here are by Houston area artists. Nice to see!

If you see a piece you think you recognize but can't quite tell, I suggest checking out the HAR listing--there are a lot more interior photos there. Oh, and if you like the condo, it's yours for a mere $2.475 million.

Because there are so many photos, I'm going to number them. If you want to identify one in the comments, please refer to the photo number.


photo 1

I think this is an entryway. Behind the gate, we have a mural. Then the gate itself is pretty interesting. And inside the gate there is a sculpture on a pedestal and a bunch of paintings of cats.


photo 2

Then there is this huge room with multiple artworks. From left to right is a colorful grid on the wall to the left, a colorful ladder-like piece, a pair of paintings and a sculpture, and four colorful bowl-like wall sculptures.


photo 3

The room keeps on going. Again from left to right, the bowl-like sculptures, another colorful transparent ladder, and two large corner pieces. We can see a little bit of what appears to be three paintings cut off on the right edge, and there is a glass object on the table.


photo 4

The room keeps on going though. There is a red and grey column/sculpture in the middle and what appears to be a boxy sculpture on the floor on the right.


photo 5

I won't try to address the things on the balcony, which we will see more clearly in the next photo. But again left to right, there is a pink sculpture under the TV, then three paintings that are two hard to really see, a sculpture of a dog, three chrome-plated wall pieces, a couple more paintings that are too hard to see, four round paintings and a red mobile.


photo 6

Then up in the balcony, there is a very large painting and a set of five colorful sculptures that look sort of like jacks.


photo 7

I can't tell much about the paintings on the staircase. Above them is another dog statue and two colorful dog-cows.


photo 8

The dog artist shows up again here, along with a glass sculpture on a pedestal in the corner.


photo 9

This is a bedroom, I suppose. At least it has a bed in it. Left to right, there is a very large, very colorful painting, then a stack of six paintings. To the left of the bed is an interesting grey abstract floor sculpture, then another fucking dog painting, and another mobile, consisting of cursive letters.


photo 10

And here are a couple of sculptures outside on a balcony.

And the astonishing thing is this is not by any stretch all the art in this condo. This homeowner's taste is not exactly mine--by a longshot--but there are definitely some pieces here that I like, and I like the way they have filled their home with a wide variety of artworks. And unlike a lot of collectors, therse don't seem to shy away from sculpture. Given the number of the pieces and the size of many of them, the owners must be prominent local collectors. According to HCAD, their names are Don and Christine Sanders. These names mean nothing to me though. However, I will hazard a guess that they buy a lot of art from McClain Gallery.

Like I said, I recognize some of this art. Do you? Let us know your guesses!

UPDATE:  We got some great guesses here and even more over on Facebook. Based on the collective knowledge of everyone, here's the art I can identify:

photo 1 - The mural is by Aaron Parazette, but no one had guesses for the other pieces.
photo 2 - The ladder piece is by Stephen Dean. The blue dog paintings and dog sculpture are by Rodrigue, and the discs are by Christian Eckart.
photo 3 - Another ladder piece by Stephen Dean and the corner pieces are also by Christain Eckhart.
photo 4 - It was suggested that the crinkly grey thing on the red column is by Nancy Rubins, and the big ring in the forground on the right is another Christian Eckart.
photo 5 - The silver pieces on the wall are by Christian Eckart, but no clue on the rest.
photo 6 - Of course, the large painting on the left is a James Rosenquist. The jacks-like sculptures on the right are by Ed Hendricks.
photo 7 - The two cows are by Rodrigue.
photo 8 - The painting in the foreground is by Rodrigue.
photo 9 - That's a big Peter Halley on the left, another Rodrigue above the bed, and a Joseph Havel hanging from the ceiling.
photo 10 - A pair of Ed Hendricks sculptures.

The Misuse of Kitsch: Michael Arcieri's Cold War Paintings

Robert Boyd

Michael Arcieri's new show at Avis Frank Gallery features a bunch of paintings of cold-war era imagery in canvases where three distinct images are arranged vertically.


Michael Arcieri, Bonneville Blast, 2012, oil on canvas, 48" x 45"



Michael Arcieri, New for Spring, 2012, oil on canvas, 48" x 45"

You will be forgiven if when you look at these paintings you are reminded of James Rosenquist--particularly I Love You in my Ford.

James Rosenquist, I Love You in my Ford, 1961, oil on canvas, 6'10¾" x 7'9½"

Michael Arcieri, Chaser, 2012, oil on canvas, 44" x 42"

Arcieri's Chaser will remind you of Rosenquist's F-111.

James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964-65, Oil on canvas and aluminum, 10' x 86'


James Rosenquist, F-111 (detail), 1964-65, Oil on canvas and aluminum, 10' x 86'

Michael Arcieri doesn't come off well in these comparisons. I Love You in My Ford related the all-American automobile to both sex and death, and in doing so spoke to its era of burgeoning highway expansion and the freedom promised by universal car ownership. Arcieri's images, by contrast, are a nostalgia trip. Their easy ironies might have been shocking if painted in 1961, but even then the juxtapositions would have seemed obvious and heavy-handed. Now, they are pointless. The Cold War ended--decisively--in 1989. Since then, the U.S. (and the world) have not faced an existential threat of war. This isn't to say we might not in the future. But as a subject of art, the Cold War has lost its urgency. Whereas, when Rosenquist painted F-111, every American above the age of 9 or so knew that nuclear war could erupt at any time, and if that happened, the nation, if not the world, would be obliterated.

In short, Arcieri's cold war paintings are trite and unoriginal. Arcieri is a skilled painter, but he employs those skills in this exhibit to make modestly clever works that have no urgency to them, no personal feeling. Comparing him to James Rosenquist, an artist captured the zeitgeist in a powerful and unexpected way, is unfair perhaps--but Arcieri brings the comparison on himself by blatantly copying the style that Rosenquist invented. It's a weird thing to say about an artist like Rosenquist who cultivated a distancing, mock-commercial-art style, but his work exudes authenticity; Arcieri's paintings are well-wrought but empty pastiches.


Michael Arcieri, Joe From the Bar, 1949, 2011, oil on canvas, 30" x 24"

In a separate gallery, Arcieri has a group of paintings, including Joe from the Bar, 1949, which look  paintings of freeze-frames from old movies shown on an old black-and-white television. But again, the strongest sensation one gets looking at these is of their profound unoriginality.


Gerhard Richter, Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi), 1965, oil on canvas, 87 cm x 50 cm

Again Arcieri is channeling another painter from the 60s--Gerhard Richter. And again, Arcieri falls far short. Joe From the Bar, 1949 is a banal film image. Onkel Rudi is, however, Richter's actual uncle. Rudi (Rudolf Schönfelder) was a Wermacht soldier and died in combat in World War II. Aside from the personal meaning of the image for Richter, it reflects the anguish that people of his generation felt acutely--that their parents and older relatives had all been Nazis. Like James Rosenquist's 60s paintings, Richter's employ a startlingly original idiom to tap into the spirit of his generation of Germans. Arcieri copies that idiom to make a banal but well-executed painting.

It's unreasonable to expect Arcieri to be as brilliant as Rosenquist and Richter, but he shouldn't paint like them if he doesn't want to be compared to them.  He can paint very well--he now needs to find his own direction and his own subject.

Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist

 Robert Boyd



Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist was one of the early pop artists. He has an almost perfect pop biography--midwestern boy, learns the fine art of painting billboards, moves to New York and wows the swells with his paintings of jet fighters and spaghetti. His new autobiography doesn't challenge this capsule biography, but it enriches it a lot.

I think for people my age and younger, the weird thing about Rosenquist's story was that he was a billboard painter. This is a profession that doesn't exist anymore, and one could be forgiven for being surprised that it ever existed. The idea that it was cost-effective to hire an artist to paint your billboard seems amazing today. But apparently it was common at one time. Rosenquist got his start painting billboards on the road in the midwest, including many in Minneapolis. These required a combination of sign-painting skills (he had to paint large display fonts) and more-or-less realistic painting. But beyond that was the skill of painting big--not being able to see the whole while you are painting, yet coming out of it with an intelligible image. Obviously this is a skill that mural painters have always had to master. On top of all this, he had to learn to paint it quick.

He had artistic ambitions beyond billboard painting, so he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. He continued to paint in New York, joining a billboard painter's union, painting bottles of booze on the sides of buildings all over Brooklyn. He made a good living doing this, and in Painting Below Zero, he never hints that he might have thought of this as a job without a future (as it most certainly was). His desire to leave billboard painting behind had everything to do with his artistic ambitions and nothing to do with the fact that billboard painting was about to go the way of the dodo.

His fine art painting in this period (the 50s) was abstract. He worshiped de Kooning and Franz Kline, and for serious contemporary artists of the time, that was what was in the air. But he also new that he wanted to make his own mark in his own style. But he started meeting a younger group of painters who in time would revolt against abstract expressionism. It started with Ray Johnson (who really seems like he was a "connector" in that world), and got to be friends with people like Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. When he was looking for loft space to paint, he met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. It was their work that showed Rosenquist a way out of Abstract Expressionism.

The interesting thing about Rosenquist was that he used his billboard experience extensively in his art. I'm not just talking about the large scale of his paintings and the "creamy" painting surface--although those are important. He wanted viewers to overwhelmed by the images, and to see them in fragmentary ways, like he did when he painted a billboard. Hence the overlapping, truncated images in his work. This is one reason why reproductions of his work are so inadequate--they make all the fragments instantly visable and comprehensible. A full-size Rosenquist painting is virtually impossible to see all at once, unless it's in a huge room. And that's intentional.

Ironically, he didn't even meet the two biggest pop artists, Warhol and Lichtenstein, until 1964. This reuse of banal imagery was just in the air. Rosenquist doesn't even quite see it that way--he always had an emotional connection with what he was painting. Obviously there was irony in his art, but that wasn't the main point. He loved the objects he painted (or hated them when he got around to painting F-111).

What I like about this kind of book is the description of the social scene in which the artist operated. How did people meet; how does a kid from Minneapolis find other artists? How do they entertain themselves (lots of drinking, apparently). Rosenquist is quite amusing in talking about the bars they hung in. It was OK to hang at the Cedar Tavern or Max's Kansas City, but if a bunch of painters showed up at Elaine's, they might end up getting booted. The centrality of drinking is kind of intense. I think it damaged a lot of creative people at that time--de Kooning certainly. And for an artist to "network" with his peers, he had to drink.

After Rosenquist moves away from New York, his life is a lot less interesting and more stable. He still has his friends (he was very close to Rauschenberg his whole life), but now he had a family and property and success. He still was doing big bold work. Now he is one of the survivors of his generation, and his memories are welcome. Painting Below Zero was a thoroughly entertaining book.