painting
In October 2018, I took a research trip to the Fonds Roland Barthes at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. I had just started writing a book on Barthes, and I wanted to learn more about the amateur painting and doodling that flits through Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: for example, an early drawing in marker whose pleasure and stupidity Barthes comments on in the lower left corner
In May 1929, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held an exhibition of German paintings under the banner of “Neue Sachlichkeit,” based on Gustav Hartlaub’s seminal 1925 show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim of the same title. The Amsterdam leg of the tour exhibited many of the same artists included in the original program. Well-known painters such as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Carl Mense, and George Schrimpf hung alongside several other artists who did not appear in the Mannheim iteration, including Franz Radziwill, Christian Schad, and Carl Grossberg.
Major advances in modernist poetics have long occurred through contact with experiments in the visual and plastic arts: one need only think of the “cubist” poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein, of the New York School’s links to Abstract Expressionism, or, most recently, of conceptual writing’s regular citation of Brion Gysin’s claim that “writing is fifty years behind painting." Poets would find their community amongst artists; but also, the poetics itself would emerge out of critical engagement with the work of the poets’ artist peers: adapting compositional practices and techniques; adopting conceptual vocabularies. At times, this leads to intermedia experiment (Calligrammes, collage, concrete work); at others, to a renewed focus on the medium–specificity of poetry: both the peculiar possibilities of language as material and resource for art–making, and the repertoire of techniques and conventions through which this material is deployed.
“Well this exhibition feels a little too timely,” my colleague Clare Davies posted to Facebook during a November 21, 2016 visit to Art et liberté: Rupture, guerre et surréalisme en Egypte (1938-1948) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The exhibit—a major contribution to contemporary
In 2011, the Japanese government designated Yasuda Yukihiko’s Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no jin, 1940-41) as an Important Cultural Property (Jūyō bunkazai). The left half of the painting, which portrays Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159-1189), a famous warrior from the Kamakura period (1185-1333), was initially produced and exhibited in 1940 as The Arrival of Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune sanchaku). The right half, which depicts Yoshitsune’s older brother Yoritomo (1147-1199), was added later, and the artist then titled the completed work Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no jin). The finished painting, executed in ink on two paper folding screens, shows the much-desired reunion between the two men before their battle against the rival Heike clan.