Not a review: Wheeler at Zwirner

The title states that this is not a review, in the sense that I try to communicate my personal experience of a gallery event in Chelsea rather than discussing the work which I will let speak for itself.

I have a problem with a panel with 3 white guys even if one has a charming Italian accent, I know I'm being dogmatic, but it does feel terribly déjà vu. I was incapable of listening to anything Germano Celant said, maybe it's his accent, and he is likely to have said some very interesting things, he is the guy who coined the term "Arte povera" and who heads the Prada Foundation in Milano - maybe he is better with the written word. He does have a most charming name too, a whole story could be imagined around that name!

Doug Wheeler was more arresting. He stuck me as being the interesting case of a man who was shy to start with in life. Had he chosen another path, he would have had to overcome it. But he has become a famous artist, and  this allows for every idiosyncrasy of the personality. The artist is sold "as is" :with the understanding he is not able, nor expected to conform, and his failings are his qualities as they are linked to his creativity.

Wheeler, 81, has a handsome mane of long white hair. Its always a fun exercise to imagine a man with his long hair trimmed short. And I thought, imagine, imagine this doctor's son had had a career in a corporation. Or had started his own business of medical supplies. He might have had to beat the shyness out of his system, as is expected of what one calls a real man, of a breadwinner. And I can see his face shorn of hair, he would have had to compact into something showing power and control his spread out sitting position that is a self conscious attempt at appearing relaxed, and why not, It is a very different person yet the divergence in these paths might have been caused by something seemingly benign, like a bit of bullying by a cousin or an over demanding father.

My impression is that Wheeler knows the show business. He's been there for a while now. He probably doesn't really like it but it's the ransom of celebrity, and he'll play along, which is fair enough. He tells his stories, gamely. Does he tell these stories repeatedly? You would think, from their content's relationship to his artistic path, but if he has told them before, it's not obvious from the fresh, convincing delivery he achieves. He's a good story teller. He recalls his father the surgeon flying his small plane to remote areas in Arizona. Scary landings on high streets when there was no runway. His father would say: see that patch of the sky over there that's particularly blue? Don't go there. They're turbulences. John Wayne! In fact, minimalism has something macho about it. For a start, there is a certain arrogance in asserting that a very simple piece is a worthy art work just because the artist says so. Nothing soft or intricate or empathic about minimalism or conceptual art, these qualities typically needing figurative art or complex abstraction.

He tells of his father letting him fly the plane. Of the  landscapes seen from above, of the different

experience of the world. Of wanting to communicate his sensory experience of the world to others. 

He speaks simply, he is humble, he often seeks the gaze of his wife in the audience, the Hollywood producer Bridget Johnson, and mentions her by name. He also refers to another man in the audience by name, maybe to break the mythology of the famous artist on stage addressing the anonymous reverential audience, which is sympathique.

But still he is there, and he speaks, filling his expected role. The Zwirner son, Lucas, moderates. He's the picture of the young golden boy, well to do, confident, educated, handsome. WASP. Does he know suffering? I guess everyone suffers at some point. It's not a criticism of Lucas. It's a genuine question. The people  I know personally that have been born into exceptional privilege do not strike me as happier than the average Josephine (the average woman informed me she prefers Josephine to Jane).

At the end of the show, people take selfies in the Infinity Room.

And this ... is definitely not a review.

Written and contributed - reluctantly - by  - -  Arabella von Arx

Arundathi Roy - the audience in the palm of her hands

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Author: Arundathi Roy

Book: Walking with the Comrades

The crowd chatted feverishly while waiting to be let into the auditorium. "Literary sensation!", "brimming with talent", "unique sense of vernacular" were the terms flying around the groups in the foyer. Ages ranging from 16 to 80, they were all educated New Yorkers who had rushed to be part of this literary communion. The doors to the large auditorium opened. Beautifully built of wood and lit as for a crowning ceremony, it held several hundreds of us. There was a rush through the doors, a run down towards for the first rows, a bit of push and shove which quieted down quite soon as we are civilized after all.

Chats, last minute cellphone check, laughs, changes of seat, no change of heart. At last the diminutive woman walked on stage, sat down, took a gulp of water and leant towards the microphone. She raised her eyes towards us, she raised her eyebrows. Not a whisper in the room, nor a cough, nor a scraping of throat or shoe. 

And Arundathi Roy started. She started, and she didn't stop. She started and she didn't let go. Telling us about tribal people being beaten, poisoned, arrested, women being raped, their land being raped. Constantly on the move to escape persecution. Undernourished, under educated, under cared for, families dispersed, belongings null. 

These people in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Lalgarh have the great misfortune of having their lands sitting on profitable minerals and metals. Where they lived close to nature and far from what is called civilization, large companies have arrived with equipment to dig up the earth and pollute the waters, the airs, the soil. They burn villages, they bring elephants to trample the forest, they scatter babool seeds to make the soil barren.

She had an educated audience that exercise a certain power through belonging to a privilege society, and they needed to know. This was not a literary salon where minds get stroked thanks to highbrow exchanges and eclectic language. This was about the world out there, politics, humans, pain, injustice, ugly holes dug in the earth.

At last she was done. The audience, awed, was a different group of people that had walked into that auditorium an hour before. The moderator announced that the renowned author would now sign books. A long line of people formed from the top of the stairs of the auditorium all the way to the desk she was sitting at. She had asked for our time, for our ears, for our conscience. And now she returned the favour in full. She signed at length everyone's book, talking, smiling, indefatigable, this was the woman who had walked for months through the jungles. She let people take photographs. A young couple was keen on Roy holding their 2 year old in her arms for a snapshot. The 2 year old was uncooperative. Roy waited patiently for the child to be convinced they would all treasure the memento forever, and that an ice cream would be obtained on the way out. Finally the snapshot was taken, the couple ecstatic, and Roy turned graciously to respond to the next request.

Outside the auditorium, people made a beeline for the bookselling stalls, in a much more sober mood now, and purchased Walking With The Comrades, a convincing and commendable work.

National Geographic has a very different approach to the subject. They call Arundathi Roy's "comrades" killers who stand in the way of development.

Down To Earth begs to differ from National Geographic, with hard facts and statistics.

Amnesty also condemns the violations of human rights and the breach of Indian law in the mining regions.

Written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

The 10 most underrated women writers

Writer Grace Paley

1. Grace Paley (1922-2007)

American. She’s like an older sister to me. I read her audacious writing, and I think, wow, she was so intrepid! Robert Kaplan posts quotes and excerpts from writers on facebook, and that’s how I discovered her writing. Chance. She didn’t get half the recognition and awards she deserved, and is in danger of slipping into oblivion. Help! Rescue her unique work!

What to read: her short stories. All of them: they're fun and mind blowing and very much grounded in NYC.

Why she should be read: Tone. Freedom of expression. Time capsule. Originality.

French woman writer Violette Leduc

  2. Violette Leduc (1907-1972)

This French writer was mentored by Simone de Beauvoir. The latter was a good writer too, particularly her memoirs, but not underrated. De Beauvoir, and Sartre too, behaved most shabbily at times toward their intellectual competition. But de Beauvoir paid a publishing house to forward secretly Violette Leduc a monthly allowance that allowed her to write. Most elegant. Leduc’s writing was modern in its rawness and authenticity. Totally underrated.

Why she should be read: she was a groundbreaker, her work is unflinching in describing herself and others. There is no need to make allowance when you read her, as you might for mid 20^th century writer.

What to read: La Bâtarde, no doubt. This memoir tells of her origins (she was the illegitimate daughter of a maid and an aristocrat), of her love affairs with both men and women, of her life during WWII when she was a black market operator: fascinating! Raw. Authentic. Compelling.

Swedish woman writer Selma Lagerloff

3. Selma Lagerloff (1858-1940): 

I always feel bad for people who died in the early 1940s: imagine the picture of Europe they took to the grave. She was a lesbian as was Yourcenar. Marriage, and child rearing, had typically not allowed women to develop their creativity. Successful creative women in the 19^th century and 20^th century were usually not marriedL George Sand, George Eliott, the Brontës, some were even crippled like painter Schjerfbeck.

Lagerloff was the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize (hum, she was Swedish), but is now mostly overlooked.

Why she should be read: her work is of a bold, romantic streak, without any sentimentality: a treat to devour under or over the covers.

What to read: Difficult to recommend something, as she wrote in a whole range of genders. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a great book to read to children.  I loved her Löwenskold series, which is more realistic than some of her gothic or fantasy works.

  

French woman writer Marguerite Yourcenar.

4. Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987)

Marguerite Yourcenar won a Nobel Prize yet she is not as read as she could be, maybe because work is often historical fiction but she eschews the traps of the genre. She is admired by a number of writers for her rich prose and for the drama of her work. 

Why: a beautiful stylist, and a great story teller.

What to read: Memoirs of Hadrian (Hadrian wrote an autobiography that has been lost, Yourcenar imagined what it might have been), Coup de Grâce (romantic novella about a dramatic triangle) is a great book gift for a woman in her twenties.

Anecdotal: She had a 40 year relationship with literary scholar Grace Frick. They lived together on an island in Maine.

5. Jamaica Kincaid: born 1949 in Antigua. Alive and kicking.

Writer Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid is a writer who is getting quite a bit of recognition. But that’s not good enough, because she is great, there is not a word that needs to be thrown away in her writing. She will only stop being underrated and scratched from this list when she gets the Nobel Prize.

Why she should be read: there is an undercurrent of passion, in the sense of Christ’s passion, in her work. Her prose is spare and powerful.

What to read: I love The Autobiography of My Mother (great title too), but Lucy is her most famous work.

6. Carson McCullers 1917-1967

Carson McCullers

She married a man also called McCullers who also wrote and drank. Then they divorced. Then they married again. Without ever having to alter her name in her documents. She lived at a time when a lot of creative people did not live long: Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Bowles (should she be included in this list?), Albert Camus. She had a funny, sweet face. Her style is supposed to be Southern Gothic. I don’t know, I think she’s just a good writer. Her characters are memorable, they touch the heart without sentimentality. She’s underrated because they don’t read her in high schools when it would be most appropriate content, I rest my case.

Why: great characters that will stay with you. Psychological insight. Depiction of Southern society.

What: Member of the Wedding. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is awesome too, written when she was 23.

Chinese American writer Pearl Buck

7. Pearl Buck (1892-1973) 

She led a fascinating life, being born the child of missionaries in China. She loved China, the Chinese people and peasantry which she described in her works. She was an activist against racism and sexism. The Good Earth was the second-best-selling novel of the 20th century, outsold only by "Gone With the Wind: the two best selling novels are works by women! The people voted!

Why she should be read: great story teller, amazing insights into China at the beginning of the 20^th century.

What to read: Any of the Chinese novels, such as The Good Earth. A great read for teenagers too. I positively loved her memoir, Fighting Angel, about her father, a tender and honest portrait of a stiff Baptist missionary with some redemptive traits. Apparently her portray of her mother, The Exile, is also very good.

Anecdotal: when she was old, she got involved with a shady character, some kind of swindler who squandered most of her fortune. A sad and grotesque endgame for a remarkable woman.

8. Elsa Morante - 1912-1985 –

Italian writer Elsa Morante

You read right, Morante not Ferrante. In my opinion the better writer. A powerhouse of a writer. It’s so inspiring to read explosive works by women who lived when the consensus was that women were weak creatures that could only decorate vases. Women such as Ferrante and Lagerloff and the Brontës, of course, paid no heed to these superstitions, thankfully for us. It should also remind us creators how important it is to go it alone, without worrying about trends and opinions.

She was quite successful during her life. Some of her works were translated into English. However, modern Italian does not always translate well into English, the tone is drastically different. She expressed reservations with some of her translations. She was married to Alberto Moravia, the legendary Roman writer, whose writings also do not translate well into English.

Why she should be read: epic, visionary writer

What to read: don’t, it’s too sad. Ok, if you must: La Storia. The story of an Italian woman and her little boy born from a rape by a German soldier. Mythic. Poignant. Unforgettable. 
The title is often not translated because it is not translatable. La Storia means both “story” and “history”:. Same in French with “histoire”.

9. Jetta Carleton - (1913-1999) - 

Jetta Carleton

Her novel The Moonflower Vine was a success when it was published. Then she didn’t write for another 30 years. Reasons are suggested, she married (not a good idea for women creators in the 20^th century!), she was busy founding a publishing house, but that did poorly. Maybe success was difficult for her to handle? It can be traumatic! Her second, and last novel, The Back Alleys of Spring, was written just before she was disabled by a stroke in the 1990s. It was eventually published posthumously in 2012.

Speaking of which, she’s quite the ghost writer, she died in 1999 but went on a tour in 2012...

Ursula K. Le Guin - 1929-2018 -

My count was 9 underrated women writers, and I could not narrow on anyone else: the Brontës got their due, George Eliott, George Sand have the fame they deserve (easier with a man’s first name, obviously), Marguerite Duras was an ace at self promotion, Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize. A bunch of writers could certainly do with more attention, but it’s not crying out loud: Doris Lessing, Patricia Highsmith (probably more highly regarded outside the US) the best crime writer ever, Françoise Sagan, Nathalie Sarraute, Astrid Lindgren, Sigrid Undset, Goliarda Sapienza, and most likely a whole beautiful array of writers from Asia and African and Latin America we wish we were reading (speak up in comments below!!).

Anyway, I asked around, and thought I would include this writer in the list who I have never read. A science fiction writer, she seems to gather suffrages around her writing, and is working in a genre that has been dominated by men. Time to give her a try.

Why: people say so.

What: The Left Hand of Darkness, according to Harold Bloom.

ሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖ

♛ After I posted about the 10 most underrated women artists, readers suggested I post about women musicians, which I felt I was not qualified to do, but am hoping someone else does. But I thought I would enjoy gathering a list of the most underrated women writers. My findings? Women writers have not been as systematically pushed out from the public eye as artists. Most intriguing!

Why? It would be very interesting to investigate this phenomenon in depth, and someone should. Right now, I would venture that there is an immediacy about books as media. No one worries about the original manuscript, the work is the words, its physical support does not matter so much. It’s a consumer good, and if it sells, it sells. The two most successful novels in the US 20^th century were written by women: Gone is the Wind, and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck (see above) Paintings need to be presented in institutions that have been run by men. Museum still show an overwhelming majority of works by white men. Art works have to be reproduced in a costly process to be spread to a larger audience. To become a good writer, writers often recommend reading extensively: that was fairly easy for educated women in the 19^th century. All a writer needs is paper, a pen and ... talent! To become a good artist, techniques need to be learned, supplies need to be accessible and affordable.

Women writers often published under men’s pen names in the 19^th century, which was not the case for women artists who did not experience that need then, or earlier, in the 17^th or 18^th century. The suppression of women artists’ work mostly happened in the 19^th century, once their painting craft became Art with a capital A and was institutionalized via museums, and the founding of art history and theory. Novels were necessary fodder for the 19^th century publications, which needed serials to hook its readership. These publications were not run by an academic establishment, they were profit making companies who didn’t care whether the content was written by a woman or a serial killer or a lemur, as long as it was successful. The 20^th century might have been relatively less egalitarian as serialization disappeared and novels became literature, flanked with literary criticism and theory. Just as painters, women writers who were successful in their lifetime have often been evinced from cultural memory: Pearl Buck, Selma Lagerloff, Jetta Carleton, Violette Leduc, etc.

♛ Two of the books, Hadrian’s Memoirs and La Storia, above are selections of the 100 best books selected by authors such as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. It’s a very interesting list though a bit biased (well, the writers doing the selecting must have felt obliged to pick each other)! 

♛ I tried to use photos of women writers at different times of their life, to give a sample of role models for aspiring writers, young and not so young.

written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

Hilma af Klint's exhibit Paintings for the Future: successful, popular and ... late!

Hilma af Klint's exhibition Paintings for the Future has been a sensation. It's the most successful exhibition at he Guggenheim ever: 600,000 visitors. I don't have much to add to the general conversation. I have just a few pondering thoughts:
Why is her work so popular?
Is it sad that fame came too late?
Would it have changed the course of Modern Art?
Where was the work since she died in 1944?
How much money is the work worth?

Thought: Why is her work so popular?

 I love her work. So does everybody else, it seems. The atmosphere at the Guggenheim was festive, the public diverse, colorful. Nothing rarefied about this crowd, and how pleasant that is. What is the secret to its success? The work might be inspired by spirits, it breathes life and energy and joy and curiosity. It's spectacular. It's harmonious often. We have also seen similar works, Delaunay, Klee, Kandisnsky, Miro, so that the works' form is not shocking to us as it would have been to Klint's contemporaries.

Thought: Is it sad that fame came too late?

I wondered whether it is sad that she was not celebrated during her lifetime, as is the case for Kahlo and O'Keefe who would have very much enjoyed the fame their work attracts now. It probably was not so important to Hilma af Klint who had a spiritual approach to creating. But she must have thought the spirits had something to communicate to the world through her paintings. Rudolf Steiner, the theosophy guru, ordered her not to show her work for 50 years. Which is probably how long it took until her first works were shown to the world.

Her work would not have been understood nor welcomed by her contemporaries. See van Gogh, see Gauguin, or Seurat. The critics would have laughed. But her peer might have been struck by her audacity.

Thought: Would it have changed the course of Modern Art?

She was the first Western artist to paint abstractions. Had they been seen at least by contemporary artists, her work might have changed the course of Modern Art. Put it on a faster track. The first abstractions were not painted until about 10 years later, and they tended to be more timid than hers. Her work also demonstrates an astounding variety. Below landscapes by Kandinsky (on the left) and by Malevich (on the right) both painted around 1906: they were looking for abstraction but had not found it yet!

Thought: I wish I had been the one to discover the trove!

I day dream: imagine opening the door to a barn and coming upon these superlative paintings! Breathtaking moment. Well, it's actually pretty much how it happened. When she died in 1944, she requested that her work not be shown for another 20 years. Hence the title of the show, Paintings for the Future is particularly apt. She left her 1000+ paintings, her texts, her notebooks to her nephew, Eric af Klint, an admiral in the navy. His reaction, according to his son Johan? "he was horrified". He probably felt this legacy of crazy paintings by his crazy old aunt was a curse more than anything else. It was stored in fact in a barn until the farmer asked them to move it out.

Thought: What is the future of the Paintings for the Future?

Her nephew Eric af Klint started a foundation in her name in 1972 which is worthy, considering he did not appreciate it, but just to preserved her work, without exhibiting it. According to her will, her work could have been shown from 1964, andit took another 20 years before it was first exhibited internationally at the 1986 Los Angeles show "The Spiritual in Art". MOMA did not include any of her work in its 2012 show "Inventing Abstraction". Apparently, they alleged as the reason that she did not define her work as art, - despite the fact that she went to art school and was trained as an artist. Occultism worries the establishment.
But in primary schools all over, children will be doing Hilma af Klint art projects. And young women scholars will write their thesis on her work for their art history degree!

Thought: how much money is the work worth?
The future of the work is uncertain. Not a single one has been sold yet, quite an incredible fact in regards to the monetization of the art world. Her work is in the position of a young, virginal girl, bare foot in her white night gown. Who will pay the most to wed her? Once a work or two has been sold, the fee paid for it will determine her place in the hierarchy of art economics. Will it be 10MYO, say like a Paul Signac or 100MYO, like a Modigliani? There is talk of the Foundation selling some of her work, and they are likely to go for a pretty penny, given the popularity of the show which will pay its money back for Museums. The fees would be used by the foundation to fund research into the artist and her work, assures Patrick O'Neill, the chairwoman of the Foundation. As there are more than 1000 paintings, that means that bundle of works left in a barn would be worth maybe half a billion dollars. An ironical lot of money for work by a woman who struggled financially through her life. But same story as van Gogh or Seurat, naturally. Now Robert Longo lives on the fat of the land with works that fetch 500K+, and where will they be in 100 years? 

Thought: Influences

I could not find information, and the exhibition shares none, about what art and artists she was exposed to. It's clear from her early work that she was familiar with contemporary painters,whether local ones or French: Monet, Manet. She was certainly influenced by science aesthetics as in the elegant scientific plate which she drew (see below) to sustain herself.
She is known to have traveled to Italy and to Switzerland. Did she see exhibitions there? Did she travel elsewhere?

I am glad she has found us and that we have found her.

written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

The Lehman Trilogy: An ode to patriarchy, Judaism and capitalism

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I’ll keep it short, here is my take on that trilogy of patriarchy, Judaism and capitalism:

Patriarchy: the story of a family is told through three men and their descendants. This is the story of the American Dream: three hard working brothers, clever, zealous, with strong moral values, come to America and make it big: first selling cloth, then shoes, then banking, then investments. The perfect curve. 

Three men, three male actors: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Ben Miles. No women. From time to time, one of the actors plays a woman, a fiancée or a lover here and there, with the kind of obvious comedy that had already Greek audiences laughing in 500BC. Women, as far as Sam Mendes, the director, and the producers of this play are concerned, play such a minor role in a family dynasty that they are not worth representing.

It would have been much more interesting, and would have made a point, if the Lehmann brothers had been played by women actors, just as Caryl Churchill had in Cloud 9, a play in which men were played by women, and whites by blacks, and vice versa. But women playing men do not draw the laughs that the reverse cross gender acting does, just as women nowadays can dress as men (they look stylish!) without anyone blinking, when a man in a dress (they look ridiculous!) is a “crossdresser”.  

The set includes a revolving stage. Beware of revolving stages, they usually flag a production that is going to favor brassiness over reflection and creativity, except if handled by Robert Lepage. A sofa on stage is also a flag, this one usually guaranteeing a production that will not take any risks creatively. The various sides of the revolving stage were not really differentiated, so it did not serve the purpose of offering different sets for different scenes. On the other hand, the revolving did bring to mind effectively the passing of time. There were other good choices: no period costumes and accessories, and a stunning stage, empty but for the revolving gizmo, and very large (there’s plenty of room at the Armory) with a projection of live images on the curved back wall. Pretty spectacular. 
The content is not scripted into scenes, little dialogue takes place. That can make for a new interesting take on the theatrical form, but did not salvage this propaganda piece from turning into pantomime.

 Judaism

That’s the least objectionable of the three institutions which are promoted in the play. Judaism has generated a rich culture, and produced great thinkers (Marx! Beniamin! Arendt!), writers (so many: Proust! Roth! Singer! Cohen - several! Krauss!), and numerous other creators in the arts and science.

Moral values are presented in the play as arising from the brothers’ commitment to Judaism. This is propaganda for a religion, and I resent the promotion of any religion. Let people choose their religion and spare us its praise. In fact, historically, moral values have not been linked to religious bigotry, some religions having a worse track record than others, such as Christianity. The majority of the population in Israel is committed to Judaism, and that has not prevented the country from accumulating a shameful human rights record.

As it happens, and as the Washington Post pointed out, the immigrant Lehmann brothers’ moral values did not prevent them from owning slaves, at a time when objections were being expressed loudly across the Western world. The American dream has been built on the backs of ethnic minorities.

The author, Stefano Massini, is Jewish. I don’t find that exactly surprising. He wrote a play about Anna Politkovskaja, the woman journalist who was victim of Putin’s dictatorship. Seems like a worthy endeavor. Another play has not come to the USA: it’s called “Credo in unsolodio”, translated as “I believe in onlyonegod”, and is an indictment of Muslim terrorism. Given the bias in "The Lehman Trilogy", I fear Islam might not get a fair portrayal by Massini. Will the Armory bring that work to New York too? For the sake of peace in the world and in our city, how about not?

Capitalism

By the second interval, I had had enough.  We are told about the brothers financing railways (progress!), King Kong (culture!), but very little about the ills of the capitalist system: its false dreams, its false promises of happiness through possession of goods, its turning of human beings into efficient little working machines. 

I was waiting with trepidation to see how 2008 would be pictured: an apocalyptic armageddon, right? Terribly disappointing. The cast dances a frenzied twist through the 90s, convincingly. Just as in the 20s, it seemed like there was no end to miraculous speculations. Then the play fizzles into nothing much. Certainly nothing on the hyperbolic scale of the 00s mortgage scandal. The brothers did not respect shiva anymore, so they lost their company. No moral indictment of the criminals that brought about the crashing of an economy, and much hardship to the common people: loss of jobs, home repossessions. I don’t see how you can tell the story of the Lehman family and their company without alluding to the hardships caused by the greed and irresponsibility of the banking and investment world.

The New York Times raved. I enjoyed looking at Adam Godley's face and ears, they are seriously extraordinary, unlike the production.

written and published  - - by Arabella Hutter von Arx

10 Women Artists That Are Vastly Underrated

Calla Lillies by O'Keefe

In the list of the 100 most expensive art work sold, the first work by a woman is in 100th place (maybe they cheated a little and dropped a few male artworks to sneak in one woman, Georgia O'Keefe, and spare our feelings). This stresses how much women's work has been suppressed and underrated. I believed for the longest time that women had created very little art work throughout the centuries, because they were discouraged to do so, did not have access to instruction nor to adequate equipment.

As I researched the project The Thread where I use the art work of women to illustrate women's condition through History, I realized that many more women created than I expected. Some were famous in their time such as Sofonisba Anguissola and Giovanna Garzoni. It was later that their work was systematically excluded from museums and art history books. I have enjoyed many wonderful, underrated artists's works. Here are some my favorite works, the ones that also should sell for hundreds of millions of dollars if any work of art should sell for that kind of money. Absent from the list are the most famous women artists whose work also should be in the 100 most expensive list, but who are not as underrated: Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Marina Abramovic. This is also a list concerned mostly with Western Art. We would need a more knowledgable art historian, and a much, much longer list for all the women creators from the rest of the world.

1. Giovanna Garzoni - Still Life. It amazes me that in the middle of the Renaissance, where the tendency was to shut women up (yes, women had more legal rights in the Middle Ages - they were not yet persecuted as witches which started in the Renaissance), the sexual innuendo in the work of Garzoni went completely unnoticed and uncensored. Artemisia Gentileschi could be pretty explicit too. See the violent birth scene disguised as Judith cutting Holoferne's head, or Mary Magdalene enjoying an orgasm thanks to her skulled lover. Giovanna Garzoni was called Chaste Garzoni during her lifetime, but in my opinion, she was familiar with a man's aroused private parts as evidenced by the beans above, gently swollen with life: life that is, life that might be. Neither vertically erect nor martial, it's a very different image from the aggressive phallus men artists have favored. Her open figs and melons are quite juicy too.

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Transgressions, Nalini Malani

2. Nalini Malani: (B 1946) - Remembering Mad Meg. There are many contemporary women artists who deserve a larger spot in the limelight, and that includes Malani who is bigger than life.  Her work is big, her referential is big, her soul is huge. Consequently, the work she produces, bewitching, is an enchantment. Malani has addressed the feminine condition extensively, but not exclusively. This is what she has to say about her piece: 'Mad Meg was a character in a Breugel painting, which is in Antwerp now. It’s not a very large painting; it’s about 75 centimeters high by about a meter wide. You see this figure, this woman who almost looks like an androgynous figure striding across a landscape of completely perverted things around her, for example, there is an egg-like humanoid eating through his anus. It’s almost like she is seeing all of this and somehow wants to put things right but then she is considered the deviant.' I find it very touching that she goes and salvages a female character from a European Renaissance painting.

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3. Sofonisba Anguissola: Her work is outstanding, it's difficult to choose one piece. She made stunningly beautiful portraits of women. In fact, she often explores the relationship between men and women, the female condition: a girl looks at her reading brother with an ambiguous expression: resentment? In Portrait of the Artist's Family, featured, her sister Minerva looks at the bond between her brother and her father, who seems only interested in the boy, and turns his back to her. The dog is the only one looking at the artist, asking her to bear witness to the injustice.
Anguissola is finely getting her due, with Lavinia Fontana, with an exhibition at the Prado in Madrid.

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4. Berthe Morisot might be considered famous enough to be excluded from this list. However, quite famous is not good enough. She should be the star because her work is amongst the very best there is: bold, gutsy not too say ballsy, big, passionate, sensual, daring, there is nothing "feminine" about it but her attachment to representing women, girls, and often mothers and daughters. She painted extensively her daughter Julie who was born from her marriage to Manet's younger brother Eugène. She merged impressionism and expressionism in work that is unrivaled in its exuberance.

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5. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an African American sculptor who studied at RISD and spent 12 years in Paris when that city was attracting African American luminaries where she nearly died of hunger, literally, while sculpting. She might be the most underrated of the women in this list. She was talented, expressive, brilliant, but her work got her very little recognition, and still to this day is acknowledged by a handful of art historians or African American scholars. She exhibited during her mid career, the Whitney purchased the Congolaise above, a piece of utmost delicateness and elegance, and she taught art. But later, her career petered out, and she ended up working as a maid. Makes me mad.

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6. Helen Schjerfbeck: An honest self portrait by painter Helen Schjerfbeck, prolific despite suffering from bad health. She could be a bit scattered, she tried all sorts of styles, and was very adventurous in her experiments. She had an original and reflective approach to womanhood. She was Finnish, at a time when a number of talented, inventive women painters worked: Elin Danielson-Gambogi and Ellen Thesleff. She is also to enjoy, finally, a large retrospective at the Royal Academy in London.

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7. Paula Modersohn-Becker: Selfportrait at 6th Wedding Anniversary is a paradoxical painting: she had left her husband to commit to her art, and was not, at least physically, pregnant. She eventually went back to her husband, and died following the birth of their daughter. Her last word is supposed to have been: "Shade". Shame. Yes, what a shame for her, for all of us. She would have been one of the major painters of the 20th Century. During her short life, she was prolific: her work, clearly inspired by Gauguin, incorporated Northern European naive styles. She also tended to frame her subjects very closely, giving them a mythic presence. I miss her deeply.

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8. Belkis Ayon: I'm at a loss to discuss her work, either it would take pages and pages of thinking and analyzing and scrutinizing, or there is only need to look at the work. But here are words that seem apt: extremely mystical, extremely original, extremely beautiful, extremely inventive. She was Cuban and died way too young in mysterious circumstances, as did Ana Mendieta who could be included in this list too. Both are supposed to have committed suicide, and both might have been murdered. 

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9. Leonor Fini, Leonor Carrington, Remedios Varos: that's three, but it was too difficult to choose amongst these superlative surrealists. This print was produced to promote a production of Tristan and Isolde at the Met in NYC. I prefer to call it "Two Women". It can be looked at as the epitome of dualism. Is it one woman or two? One sees, the other dreams. One comes out at the viewer, the other one invites the viewer into her self. Only their faces are quite distinct, their bodies might be merged even if the indication of a shoulder seems to locate the closed eyed in front, the open eyed protecting from behind. The technique, so skilled when we consider Fini was never formally trained, brings to mind Michelangelo, and creates an impression of translucence, as if we are looking at spirits.

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10. Marie-Gabrielle Capet  had to be in this list with this vibrant self portrait painted at the age of 22. How confident and bold she looks. Later, she seems more demure, alas, maybe she got the message that confidence was an unseemly attitude for a woman. She was a devoted student of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, also underrated, who taught other women (see her self portrait with two students including Marie-Gabrielle). Their studio must have been a lot of fun, and tender and warm too.

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The suppression of these women's work is unfair to the artists who were actually often more prominent in their life time then now. The institutionalization of art, through the creation of museums and art schools, the institution of art history, has been most prejudicial to women, and other minorities. In the Renaissance, when they wanted a good portrait, patrons did not mind so much the gender of the craft person as long as the painter had talent and could make a good likeness. But when it came to immortality, women were eliminated from memory. 

The suppression of these works has also been unfair to the public, particularly women. Many of these artists depicted their peer, not as objects but as subjects. They presented an interpretation of what it means to be a woman. Women have been deprived of this legacy, of this interpretative mirror of themselves while they have been assailed by images of women reduced to sexually available bodies, or to sexless saints.

Finally....  Most of art works by women artists are anonymous: sacred texts illuminations by nuns, embroideries, the magnificent tapestries from the Renaissance, quilts, pottery, dolls, not to mention the many women who worked in their father or brother or husband's workshop, unnamed and unrecognized. And now, the latest findings posit that even the Lascaux cave paintings were created by prehistoric women, and did they have talent!

written and published by  - -  Arabella Hutter von Arx