GERHARD RICHTER Painting After All By Sheena Wagstaff and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Illustrated. 269 pp. Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University. $50.
It was meant to be the final exhibition held at the Met Breuer — the Metropolitan Museum’s Brutalist-style satellite campus for modern and contemporary art since 2016, which was set to be turned over to the Frick Collection later this year. But almost immediately after the show opened on March 4, “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” like virtually every other cultural event in the world, was forced to close its doors. Thankfully, the coronavirus has not halted production of the visual books published to coincide with such art openings; no longer just gift shop purchases or collectors’ coffee-table adornments, these exhibition catalogs are now the only tickets we have. They can also be stirring exhibitions in their own right.
Richter’s “Ice,” 1981.Credit…Gerhard Richter
“Gerhard Richter” spans the contemporary German artist’s six-decade career, which has encompassed everything from drawn illustrations for “The Diary of Anne Frank” to large-scale glass installations, Abstract Expressionist paintings and those famous (distressed and distressing) photorealist paintings of 9/11.
One of Richter’s “Birkenau” paintings, 2014.Credit…Gerhard Richter
The second half of the book reproduces images, many of them full-page, of the works you’d have found on the Breuer’s walls. But it’s the essays in the book’s first half that provide the scholarly context and critique that museumgoers wouldn’t have found simply by reading wall plaques. Buchloh, an art history professor at Harvard, addresses the ethics of Richter’s 2014 “Birkenau” paintings and the artist’s career-long preoccupation with representing the Holocaust. The Met curator Brinda Kumar dissects decades’ worth of Richter’s landscapes, including a series called “Transformation” in which a snow-capped mountainscape becomes so abstracted it looks eerily like a sonogram. In his essay “In a Glass, Darkly,” Princeton’s Hal Foster names the “tension” in Richter’s 1967 “4 Panes of Glass,” “between what we know — there are four large identical rectangles in front of us — and what we perceive.” Through this dissonance, Foster argues, in an apt summary of Richter’s entire oeuvre, the artist “stages an almost Cartesian doubt about ‘our apprehension of reality.’”
MARKING TIME Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration By Nicole R. Fleetwood Illustrated. 323 pp. Harvard University. $39.95.
“The one thing I knew and understood while I was sitting on death row,” the Tennessee inmate Ndume Olatushani said in an interview after he was released: “Even though you’ve got me in this colorless environment, you can’t stop the color that was actually happening in my head.” Imprisoned for 27 years and sentenced to death, for a murder he didn’t commit, Olatushani had nowhere to turn but to art. A 1993 painting called “Winds of Change,” reproduced in Fleetwood’s book “Marking Time,” presents four black figures draped in vivid, jewel-toned fabrics looking out at an open expanse of lush green land, high above a calm blue river. “Through Olatushani’s use of color and depictions of free black people,” Fleetwood writes, “he created imaginary worlds and communities that sustained him during his incarceration.”
At the time when Tameca Cole completed “Locked in a Dark Calm,” from an Alabama prison in 2016, “I was so angry that I wanted to explode,” she said.Credit…Tameca Cole and Die Jim Crow
He wasn’t alone. Fleetwood, an American studies professor at Rutgers, has spent the better part of a decade studying the visual culture in and around American prisons. It’s an intimate project, motivated by her grief for friends and family members whom she’s watched slip in and out of the system since her childhood: “There has never been a time in my life when prison didn’t hover as a real and present threat over us.” But the stakes for this impressive book (and the corresponding, indefinitely postponed exhibit at MoMA PS1) are also political: This is a sociological investigation into prison art not just as an aesthetic category, but as part of “an abolitionist vision to end human caging.”
Fifteen feet tall and 40 feet wide, Jesse Krimes’s “Apokaluptein 16389067” (2010-13) is a collage made from found objects like prison bed sheets and cut-out ads from The Times.Credit…Jesse Krimes
That is, the beauty in these often painful images (like Muhammad al Ansi’s 2016 untitled painting of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who drowned as his family sought refuge across the Mediterranean) powerfully reclaims the visual idea of what it means to be imprisoned. Fleetwood seeks to revise the mainstream media narrative transmitted through “assaultive and dehumanizing images, such as ‘wanted’ posters, arrest photographs, crime-scene images and mug shots,” by letting us see the diverse array of “studio photos, handmade greeting cards, drawings and other pieces of art made by incarcerated people” that offer a story we on the outside have never really heard.
WRITING THE FUTURE Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation Edited by Liz Munsell and Greg Tate Illustrated. 200 pp. MFA Publications. $50.
If “Marking Time” explores art that looks inward, created from places of captivity both physical and mental, “Writing the Future” is about modes of self-expression — 1980s street art, music and fashion — that could only have taken place in public, as a collective, in freedom.
Basquiat’s 1983 acrylic and oil painting, “Hollywood Africans.”Credit…Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York
In recent years Jean-Michel Basquiat has made headlines for the untitled 1982 painting of a skull that sold for $110.5 million, the most money ever paid at auction for an American artwork. But the surroundings in which the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian immigrant father and a Puerto Rican mother worked, before his death of a heroin overdose at 27, were about as far from the world of Sotheby’s and billionaire collectors as one could imagine.
A Sony boombox spray-painted by the graffiti artist Futura, in 1983.Credit…Futura 2000 / Wave 5 Communications LLC
The companion book to a now-closed exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, “Writing the Future” traces Basquiat’s engagement with a downtown New York milieu, which included the likes of Keith Haring, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura and Lady Pink. This distinctive group protested racial and socioeconomic injustice through collaborative art forms like graffiti and hip-hop, for as the critic Carlo McCormick puts it in an essay here, they “could not be moved by something that did not make them move.” These were genres that were at the time excluded from the dominant (read: white) cultural conversation, and “caused the derelict canvas of the city to experience a renaissance of style.”
Some images in the book, like the two-page spreads of Basquiat’s post-graffiti oil-stick works, make the reader long for up-close contact with these imposing real-life canvases, 6 feet by 11 feet, that no printed page could ever approximate. But to leaf through this prodigy’s oeuvre intermingled with photos of what he called “just … you know, my friends and stuff”; of their tags brightening storefronts and subway cars, of the boomboxes and leather jackets and reference books they at once desecrated and elevated, is to hold in your hands the record of a place and a time and a togetherness we can only hope one day to experience again.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
In a case that has sent shockwaves through the Vancouver Island art community, a local art dealer has been charged with one count of fraud over $5,000. Calvin Lucyshyn, the former operator of the now-closed Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay, faces the charge after police seized hundreds of artworks, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, from various storage sites in the Greater Victoria area.
Alleged Fraud Scheme
Police allege that Lucyshyn had been taking valuable art from members of the public under the guise of appraising or consigning the pieces for sale, only to cut off all communication with the owners. This investigation began in April 2022, when police received a complaint from an individual who had provided four paintings to Lucyshyn, including three works by renowned British Columbia artist Emily Carr, and had not received any updates on their sale.
Further investigation by the Saanich Police Department revealed that this was not an isolated incident. Detectives found other alleged victims who had similar experiences with Winchester Galleries, leading police to execute search warrants at three separate storage locations across Greater Victoria.
Massive Seizure of Artworks
In what has become one of the largest art fraud investigations in recent Canadian history, authorities seized approximately 1,100 pieces of art, including more than 600 pieces from a storage site in Saanich, over 300 in Langford, and more than 100 in Oak Bay. Some of the more valuable pieces, according to police, were estimated to be worth $85,000 each.
Lucyshyn was arrested on April 21, 2022, but was later released from custody. In May 2024, a fraud charge was formally laid against him.
Artwork Returned, but Some Remain Unclaimed
In a statement released on Monday, the Saanich Police Department confirmed that 1,050 of the seized artworks have been returned to their rightful owners. However, several pieces remain unclaimed, and police continue their efforts to track down the owners of these works.
Court Proceedings Ongoing
The criminal charge against Lucyshyn has not yet been tested in court, and he has publicly stated his intention to defend himself against any pending allegations. His next court appearance is scheduled for September 10, 2024.
Impact on the Local Art Community
The news of Lucyshyn’s alleged fraud has deeply affected Vancouver Island’s art community, particularly collectors, galleries, and artists who may have been impacted by the gallery’s operations. With high-value pieces from artists like Emily Carr involved, the case underscores the vulnerabilities that can exist in art transactions.
For many art collectors, the investigation has raised concerns about the potential for fraud in the art world, particularly when it comes to dealing with private galleries and dealers. The seizure of such a vast collection of artworks has also led to questions about the management and oversight of valuable art pieces, as well as the importance of transparency and trust in the industry.
As the case continues to unfold in court, it will likely serve as a cautionary tale for collectors and galleries alike, highlighting the need for due diligence in the sale and appraisal of high-value artworks.
While much of the seized artwork has been returned, the full scale of the alleged fraud is still being unraveled. Lucyshyn’s upcoming court appearances will be closely watched, not only by the legal community but also by the wider art world, as it navigates the fallout from one of Canada’s most significant art fraud cases in recent memory.
Art collectors and individuals who believe they may have been affected by this case are encouraged to contact the Saanich Police Department to inquire about any unclaimed pieces. Additionally, the case serves as a reminder for anyone involved in high-value art transactions to work with reputable dealers and to keep thorough documentation of all transactions.
As with any investment, whether in art or other ventures, it is crucial to be cautious and informed. Art fraud can devastate personal collections and finances, but by taking steps to verify authenticity, provenance, and the reputation of dealers, collectors can help safeguard their valuable pieces.
