Hans Hofmann, Combinable Wall I and II, 1961; oil on canvas; 84 1/2 x 112 inches.

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

For countless immigrants, the United States has been a place to reinvent themselves and acquire fresh identities. Yet the celebrated abstract painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), far from inventing a new persona when he left his native Germany, can be said to have revealed – or perhaps rediscovered – his true self in the New World.

Known best as an inspiring teacher before coming to America, he continued to teach in the U.S. and to codify the principles of his teaching in his writings, exerting considerable influence. The alumni of Hofmann’s Eighth Street school include such notable figures as Michael Goldberg, Alfred Jensen, Wolf Kahn, Lee Krasner, Robert de Niro Sr., Red Grooms, Paul Resika and many more. Hofmann’s lectures on art had a profound effect on some of the most significant members of the New York cultural scene; Arshile Gorky attended them and the critic Clement Greenberg always said that hearing Hofmann’s talks in 1938–39 was vital to the formation of his own uncompromising aesthetic. Yet engaged as Hofmann continued to be by teaching and writing after leaving Germany, and influential as his instruction and theories were, the most notable aspect of his American years was his refinding of his original identity, not as a teacher and theorist, but as a deeply engaged maker of art and a master manipulator of color.

As an aspiring young artist, Hofmann was able to paint full time, supported by a German patron, mostly in Paris, where he was exposed to French vanguard modernism during the heady early years of Fauvism and Cubism. World War I forced him to return to Munich, where, to support himself, he established the Hans Hofmann Schule für Bildende Kunst, in 1915. He would continue to teach until 1958. The school became known internationally, but it absorbed so much of Hofmann’s time and energy that in 1930, aged 50, when he accepted an American former student’s invitation to teach a summer course at the University of California, Berkeley, he had painted almost nothing for a decade and a half. Instead, he drew. Hofmann’s first U.S. exhibition, held at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, when he returned to teach at Berkeley, in 1931, was exclusively of drawings.

In 1932, when Hofmann came again to Berkeley, the deteriorating situation for progressive artists and intellectuals in Germany provoked his wife to urge him to stay in America. By the fall of 1933, he had settled in New York and reestablished his school, adding summer sessions in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1935. In Munich, Hofmann was primarily a teacher and a draftsman, but in the Eastern United States, he started painting regularly again. At first, he worked freely from perception, indoors and out, but he soon began to experiment and, eventually, developed the physically robust, brilliantly colored abstractions that established his reputation and cemented his association with the Abstract Expressionists. Greenberg called him “a virtuoso of invention.” “I hate to repeat myself,” the painter said. Hofmann made works of astonishing variety, crossing the boundaries between allusion and invention, reference and abstraction, in paintings ranging from the broadly invoked interiors, still lifes, and landscapes of his first American years, to eerie surrealizing “creatures,” minimal geometric abstractions, and finally, the bold confrontations of pulsating rectangles of thick paint—the acclaimed “Slabs”—and the orchestrations of free-floating, varied painterly gestures that characterized his last years.

Hofmann’s aesthetic was largely determined by his extended stays in Paris, between roughly 1904 and 1914. He had first hand experience of the formative years of Fauvism and Cubism and met some of the pioneers of these radical movements. It is difficult, however, to form an accurate opinion of just what he most responded to during this period since very little of his European, pre-American work has survived; everything he made in Paris was abandoned there, at the start of World War I, and apparently destroyed. The extant work suggests that Hofmann was cautious about assimilating the most radical ideas current in Paris during his sojourn, although he was friendly with Robert Delaunay and seems to have shared his interest in constructing recognizable images with Cubist-derived large color planes. Yet it is also clear from Hofmann’s writings that, apart from a persistent undercurrent of a mystical, rather Germanic sense of the spiritual in nature, his approach to teaching was profoundly informed by his pragmatic understanding of vanguard modernism. Becoming a teacher, although it compromised his studio time, forced Hofmann to articulate and build upon his understanding of the advanced art that first inspired him, in order to formulate clear theories of what a painting could be and communicate them to his students. His celebrated “push and pull” dictum—his insistence that every part of a painting participate in a dynamic relationship with every other part—could be described not only as a manifestation of his long-standing fascination with oppositions, but also as an intensified version of the way the transparent planes of Analytic Cubism pulse in relation to the surface of the canvas. The structure of Hofmann’s well-known Slab paintings of the 1960s, with their hovering rectangles, is similarly informed by the generous planes of Synthetic Cubism, while his life-long exploration of color as both a vehicle for emotion and means of creating space can be related to his admiration for the work of Henri Matisse.

Yet if the origins of Hofmann’s grasp of space-making and his sense of the emotional potency of color can be connected with his experience of the French avant garde, his unmistakable palette and equally unmistakable ways of handling paint forcibly remind us that he was a Northern European, specifically a German. Hofmann’s color—always intense, saturated, often acidic—along with his assertive paint application and urgent energy that characterizes even his most delicate works, seem to connect him to the painters associated with the German Expressionist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. Hofmann’s most important connection to these artists, apart from mere affinity, was with the work and theoretical writings of Wassily Kandinsky. Hofmann’s own writings bear witness to his sympathy with the Russian-born painter’s ideas about using abstract means to make spiritual qualities visible, absent the specific symbolic values Kandinsky attached to colors, shapes, and the direction of lines. Many of Hofmann’s most uninhibited, “loose” abstractions, with their soft-edged patches of intense color and whiplash drawing, appear informed by Kandinsky’s dynamic paintings from 1910–14—not surprisingly, since Hofmann owned several intimate Kandinsky works on paper of this type, which his wife brought to America when she joined her husband in 1939.

Once he was established in New York, Hofmann, even as a mature, formed painter, remained open to fresh ideas and built upon this firm foundation. The uncanny “creatures” who haunt his abstractions of the mid-1940s bear witness to a burgeoning interest in Surrealist principles of revealing the invisible, tapping into dreams and the collective unconscious as sources of imagery, rather than reporting on what could be seen. These new concerns may have been triggered by Hofmann’s coming into contact with Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock, in New York, but Jungian notions about the collective unconscious were pervasive among most of the city’s adventurous artists, at the time. Hofmann’s occasional references to mythology in his titles suggest that he, like so many of his colleagues, was also interested in the idea that all human beings shared an inner life of the unconscious mind, embodied by myth, that cut across cultures and through time. In addition, the suggestive, sinuous shapes in Hofmann’s paintings of this type have echoes of Joan Miró’s animated, evocative, but essentially abstract images, frequently exhibited works that pointed the way for many of the New York artists that Hofmann was associated with to explore Surrealist ideas without resorting to the high illusionism and literal approach of Ernst or Salvador Dali.

This rich combination of sources and stimuli, perhaps combined with a growing sense of security and purpose, as Hofmann became a presence in New York’s vanguard art world and World War II ended, provoked an extraordinary range of works from him. We can interpret this outpouring of invention as evidence that in America, the immigrant from Germany became wholly “Hofmann,” yet the diversity of his approaches can make it difficult to decide just who “Hofmann” was. The emphatic, confrontational Slab paintings suggest that he was primarily an exponent of unbridled color-based abstraction. But he could be described, with equal justification, as an expressionist, a neo-Cubist, a landscape painter, a master of still-life, and someone engaged by Surrealist ideas. This wide-rangingness could pose problems. Hofmann the teacher had the authority of relatively fresh information about European modernism, while his European origins and his direct experience of French vanguard art during his early years in Paris added to the intellectual weight and stellar reputation of his school. Hofmann the painter exhibited regularly at prestigious galleries and was the subject of museum shows, enthusiastically supported by such important (and different) critics as Greenberg and his rival Harold Rosenberg. Greenberg was an early admirer, acknowledging Hofmann’s preeminence as a teacher and theorist in a review of a 1945 exhibition, but also noting that the painter had “become a force to be reckoned with in the practice as well as in the interpretation of modern art.” Rosenberg, who often disagreed with Greenberg, here shared his opinion, praising Hofmann’s “inventiveness, vivacity, assurance and powers developed through more than half a century,” in a review of the artist’s Whitney retrospective in 1957. (A taste for Hofmann often cut across aesthetic differences; the critic Thomas B. Hess, who frequently took public exception to Greenberg’s views, was also a fan.)

But despite this acclaim, Hofmann the painter was less warmly received by his fellow artists than Hofmann the teacher. Hofmann’s belief in the importance of modernism allied him with the New York artists opposed to conventional approaches, particularly with the Abstract Expressionists, despite his being a generation older – he was a contemporary of Pablo Picasso. But more than one of his colleagues recalled that his work was “respected but not admired.” The chief difficulty was the absence of a signature image in Hofmann’s notably diverse work at a time when concentration on a single, characteristic motif was deemed to be an essential manifestation of an artist’s individuality and “authenticity.” Witness Mark Rothko’s floating rectangles, Adolph Gottlieb’s Bursts, Barnett Newman’s Zips. Hofmann’s insistence on exploring all the implications that arose in the course of working on his paintings, no matter what direction they took, led his colleagues to interpret the resulting range of his approaches as proof that he was illustrating theoretical possibilities, as a pedagogue, not expressing his personality, as an engaged artist. Only when Hofmann began to concentrate on the readily identifiable Slabs, with their thick rectangles, hovering above stains and pools of color, or stacked into frontal, unstable walls, was he fully accepted by his peers. His closing of his school, in 1958, aged 78, to devote himself fully to painting, seemed to support the evidence of the Slabs and emphasize the seriousness of his commitment.

Of course, Hofmann’s very refusal to restrict himself to a single path, his unstoppable curiosity about alternatives, and his remarkable inventiveness, like his vigorous touch and fierce, mouth-puckering “Northern” color, can be seen as declarations of a distinct personality as unmistakable as any signature image – in the manner of Walt Whitman’s celebrated lines “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Today, the variousness of Hofmann’s work is a plus rather than a problem. Present day artists often refuse to confine themselves to one approach and present day knowledgeable art lovers, rather than seeking readily identifiable signature images, value evidence of a multiplicity of pictorial ideas. Perhaps as a result, Hofmann’s reputation is has been rising steadily.

It seems time for a major retrospective that will allow us to take the full measure of this compelling, elusive artist. In the meantime, on view through June 16 at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany, “Hans Hofmann: Magnum Opus” is an ambitious survey of the painter’s American years, designed to reintroduce him to his German compatriots. (Full disclosure: William C. Agee and I were co-curators of the show.) And from June 5 through August 25, the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will exhibit “Hans Hofmann: Rectangles,” a study of the artist’s fascination with this essential geometric form, drawn from the museum’s splendid collection of Hofmann’s paintings. Respect has become much-deserved, whole-hearted admiration.

By Karen Wilkin

Thomas Day, Lounge, 1858, walnut with yellow pine (upholstery not original).

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

The curve of an ogee on the arm of a sofa. A serpentine newel at the end of a straitlaced staircase. Intricately carved paws, complete with claws, supporting a sewing stand. Little thumb-like projections sprouting from the armrests of a rocking chair. By these and other exuberant, sinuous signs, you can recognize the works of Thomas Day. But you won’t come across these gems of ante-bellum Southern furniture and architectural design in an antique shop or on the auction block. Until very recently, they were to be seen only in North Carolina museums or in situ in historic houses in that state, where the cabinetmaker worked for his whole professional life, from the 1820s until the eve of the Civil War. Now, through July 28, 36 major pieces by Day, as well as photographs of his architectural work, are on view at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, where the nation can get acquainted with the work of this innovative, imaginative designer. And in learning about Day’s craft, viewers will also learn about one of the country’s most unusual business success stories—for Day was an African-American, a free man who rose to become the most sought-after cabinetmaker in the South during the heyday of slavery.

Day’s life illustrates vividly many of the strange contradictions and ambiguities of the “Southern way of life” that prevailed before the Civil War. In an environment where most people of African descent were chattels and the few free blacks were treated with utter contempt, Day was accorded respect by the white community and amassed significant wealth and holdings of property—including 14 slaves of his own. Most unusually, he was addressed as “Mr. Day” rather than as “Tom,” worshipped with his family in a white Presbyterian church, and counted many business and political leaders among his clients and even friends. His skill, business acumen, integrity and respect for white cultural standards were important factors in establishing his status, but there was one other thing about Day that was indispensable: he was a man of mixed ancestry who looked almost—or perhaps more than almost—white. There are no surviving portraits of Day, but a photograph of his older brother John—a missionary to Liberia—taken around 1850 shows a man with fair skin and wavy brown hair, with no visible inheritance from his African forbears. In antebellum North Carolina, where one black ancestor within the past four generations defined someone as a “person of color,” shades of color still mattered. The fact that Day looked and acted like a white man made it easier for whites to accept him, not as an equal, of course, but as a near-equal—an uncomfortable situation that rankled Day and his family even as it allowed them to prosper. As a “free man of color” he would never cross the color line and would always live with a measure of fear born of insecurity, but he had one priceless advantage—access to elite white clients, without which all his skill and business ingenuity would have amounted to very little.

Born in 1801 near Petersburg, in southeastern Virginia, as a teenager Day migrated to North Carolina with his parents. The family settled in the town of Milton, in the Piedmont region, by 1821. The father, John Day Sr., was a cabinetmaker and taught his younger son to repair and make furniture. Thomas Day was lucky to be able to apprentice at home; in North Carolina, apprenticeship had been mandatory for free people of color since 1762, when the legislature passed a law stating that all “base-born” free children be “bound out” (sent away from home) until the age of 21 to learn a trade. The law on apprenticeship stipulated that a master had, in addition to providing room and board, to instruct his apprentice in the “art and mystery” of his trade. The word mystery, presumably, referred to trade secrets, but perhaps the prosaic legislators, in this moment of poetry, also instinctively recognized that the sources of creativity will always remain obscure. In any case, it’s something of a mystery just how an art as refined and individualistic as Day’s could have arisen in a rural environment where taste was relatively crude and certainly very derivative.

In fact, for that reason it’s hard even for experts to identify pieces from Day’s earliest period, the 1820s. At that time, North Carolinians wanted furniture that looked just like it was made in London, New York, or Philadelphia, in the neo-Greco-Roman “classical” style. Day, ever the astute businessman, had already learned to give the people what they wanted. Though he never stopped satisfying his customers, he soon gained enough confidence to give them what they wanted, yes, but then a little bit more. The earliest pieces than can be definitely attributed to Day are a pair of dining tables made for the planter and physician John Garland around 1835. They closely follow a design by the contemporary French-born Philadelphia cabinetmaker Anthony Quervelle, who in turn took his cue from an English artisan, George Smith, whose 1808 design manual provided the drawings. Day copied Quervelle but made the piece his own in several ways: He cleaned up the design by opting for less carving on the pedestal and base, and then personalized the paw feet by giving them claws and subtly incised lines to suggest fur.

One of Day’s hallmarks throughout his career, consistent despite stylistic evolution over the year, was an abiding sense of symmetry. That is interesting not only aesthetically but also from a cultural point of view. In their 2010 book Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color (University of North Carolina Press), Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll write, “The emphasis by Day on a symmetrical arrangement is quite the opposite of any asymmetry—the one quality most scholars find inherent within and attribute to the African American craft tradition.” (Marshall, who died in 2010, was a curator at the North Carolina Museum of History and laid the groundwork for the current Smithsonian show.) Regardless, in Marshall and Leimenstoll’s view, Day’s was no bleached epigone—“Day’s furniture,” they write, “is unique in its vernacular interpretation of nineteenth-century Anglo urban designs…As an artisan and master of his own shop, Day remained unconstrained by the dictates of tastemakers who worked in distant northern cities.”

As his career advanced, Day became bolder not only in his design conceptions but in his business ambitions. In 1827 he bought a lot on Milton’s main street and built a combined shop and house for himself there. During the 1840s he diversified his investments by buying farmland to cultivate tobacco, the very same crop that provided his clients with the wealth that enabled them to patronize hi shop. In 1848 Day bought the Union Tavern, a luxurious landmark building in Milton that he took over to house his operations and later enlarged considerably. By 1850 his shop ranked first in the state. He had black men, slave and free, working for him, as well as several whites. During the 1850s, Day automated some of his production, acquiring steam-driven machinery that made it possible to fabricate in large quantities pieces of architectural trim for interior detailing, as well as such furniture forms as required little detailing.

Architectural work became more and more central to Day’s enterprise in the 1840s and ’50s. in 1847, David Lowry Swain, president of the University of North Carolina and a former governor of the state, solicited bids to refinish the interiors of two library rooms and two debating halls on campus. Day’s bid was accepted, despite the fact that it was $100 higher than the other bidder’s. “For my justification to them [the other contractors] and to the Trustees,” Swain wrote to Day, “ I must rely upon the superior manner in which I expect you to execute the work. For the present you need not mention to anyone the amount which you are to receive.”

From the start Day was assertive in his design conception, insisting on a certain kind of chair design and seating arrangement for the debate halls that was at variance with what the university had in mind. “I think you will find it verry much more to your comfort and satisfaction with the Halls to have the floor raised & seats with comfortable Backs,” he wrote in his idiosyncratic spelling. “I will make them so as to sit verry Easy and to become in Every way the rooms as to Elegance and comfort more than in any way. Any thing if you please rather than chairs tumbling about on the rising floors.” The strong yet ingratiating tone is typical of Day’s approach to his clients, and in this case as in most others, it stood him in good stead. The project ran over time and over budget, but it was a success in the end, and Day remained in good standing with the university officials. Unfortunately, later renovations erased Day’s creation, which survive only in illustrations.

Day’s mature furniture designs, made after he had transcended the imitative phase, like his interior architectural elements, revel in curves, scrollwork, clever uses of positive and negative space, and colorful veneers. The one type of piece that Day is best known for, the so-called Day lounge, is an adaptation of a Grecian design popularized by Thomas Sheraton in England that was characterized by a partial back and one end being lower than the other. Day’s version, true to his conception of symmetry, had both ends the same height, but the sense of playing with space and the gentle curviness of the forms ensure that it is in no way plodding or plain. According to Marshall and Leimenstoller, this lounge is the one form whose design was unique to Day’s shop.

A pedestal bureau with looking glass made in 1855 for Gov. David Settle Reid epitomizes Day’s late, exuberant, self-confident style. He based the design on a drawing in John Hall’s popular manual The Cabinet Maker’s Assistant, published in Baltimore in 1840. He lightened Hall’s design by recessing the two pedestals and by adding a white marble slab to the front, creating a bright space in between two expanses of dark mahogany. He added curved decorative elements such as the frame around the mirror, which is held by outward-curving supports. The scrollwork is spontaneous-looking and gives an overall feeling of motion. Even when working from patterns such as Hall’s, and producing pieces in large quantities, Day took care to slightly vary the designs, so that each customer was getting something unique.

During the 1850s, Day’s shop was working literally at full steam, because the massive investment he had made required him to take on a great deal of work to make it pay. When he was at the height of his powers as a business owner and a creative artist, the Panic of 1857 hit Wall Street and the nation. Day had many debts, and as when the crisis caused them to be called in, he had to declare bankruptcy. A trustee—a white man—was placed in charge of his operations by the court, and the business was restructured and allowed to continue in operation. Nevertheless, many of Day’s best clients also had their wealth decimated and could no longer afford his products. After four years of this, Day died at the age of 60.

Day was in many ways an anomaly in his time, but he laid the foundation for the mechanized North Carolina cabinetmaking tradition that persists to this day. After the Civil War, the position of mixed-race North Carolinians became even more precarious, and the Day family found it impossible to continue in the business. Piece of Day furniture remained, however, as prized heirlooms among prominent families fallen on hard times. In 1941, Day’s great-grandson, William A. Robinson, visited some of these homes and gathered accounts of his ancestor’s relationships with the families. When Robinson tried to buy a piece from one owner, he was rebuffed with the firm statement, “We got to hold onto the past.”

El Anatsui, Earth’s Skin, 2007. Aluminum and copper wire.

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

In the hands of the right artist, materials can be deceiving and revealing at the same time. For years, I thought that the works of the African artist El Anatsui were made of textile—they have a sinewy, shimmering, supple quality about them, reacting to light and the movement of air in fascinating ways. You can envision yourself draped in one of them, just as Gustav Klimt’s enveloping, bejeweled patterns invite us to lose ourselves inside his paintings.

The viewer has to get up close to realize that Anatsui’s wall hangings are actually made of recycled bits of metal—from bottle caps to linotype plates—and attached to each other with copper wire. Once you know this, his delicate artistry is even more astounding.

No further proof is needed of his talent than the current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, “Gravity and Grace: the Monumental Works of El Anatsui,” which is happily up for a long run, through August 4.

These huge works, one of which is 36 feet long, envelop the museum’s rooms, particularly the vaulted rotunda outside the show’s main exhibition space. Some of them hold their own by hanging majestically, either from wires or on the wall. One particularly sly work, Drainpipe (2010), is like a set of Slinkies crawling around the floor in a corner of the museum that is normally empty. It’s a fascinating installation, in that it makes the viewer understand the space in a different way.

Anatsui, born in Ghana but a longtime resident of Nigeria, is now 69—and his career has been taking off ever since he entered senior-citizen territory. In 2007, his breathtaking installation at the Venice Biennale finally got the art world to focus on him. And he has quite a presence in New York this year, even beyond the Brooklyn show. He also has a huge sculpture, Broken Bridge II, on view along the High Line, the elevated park in Chelsea. And he shows regularly at Jack Shainman Gallery, right underneath the High Line.

When he stopped in New York to install Broken Bridge II, I had the chance to sit down with him explore the thought process behind his works.

A&A: Tell me about the Brooklyn show and how it got going.

EA: The Brooklyn show consists of what was originally created for a traveling show in Japan. The scale of the work is monumental, so it’s only for huge galleries or museums. It’s kind of a summary of all the things I’ve done so far.

A&A: Are you getting the bottle caps from the same places you always have?

EA: Yeah, from the same supplier. And even from the same drinker!

A&A: These piece are so big, what does that physically entail for you to make them?

EA: Well the process is a very laborious one, using so many assistants, ranging from 20 to 30. It’s a very free arrangement whereby people are free to come in at any time. Good days, we can have like 30, 35. Bad days, we can have 20. Good days happen when school is on holiday. A lot of them come in. We pay them.

A&A: People are thrilled to get to have this kind of work?

EA: Oh, yeah.

A&A: Do they know what they’re doing?

EA: I direct them to specific areas of the work, things they can accomplish. And I watch them.

A&A: How has your work changed over time?

EA: In the beginning there was only one format of joining the pieces. But now there is crumpling effect, because of the tiny rings joining them. They all create very different textures. And as time went on, the works went from being very opaque to now being very translucent. You can see through them.

A&A: Does that have a particular meaning for you?

EA: Well you don’t want to be opaque all the time, you want to also explore translucence. Transparency—it’s good that you engage it in your work.

A&A: Do you find yourself making any other changes as you go forward?

EA: The changes come when you don’t plan for them. We keep working, and by accident something shows up.

A&A: And you use chance in your work, since they are never hung the same way twice, correct?

EA: The interesting thing about my work is that while you may have seen them in one venue, in a different venue it would be different.

A&A: Does that make curators nervous?

EA: They have to develop courage. Curators are brought up to follow artists’ instructions on how to lay their work. I don’t give them instructions. I believe everyone has an artist in him; that’s something I learned from my school days. This belief that life itself is not something that is cut and fixed but is forever open to challenges and changes and chance. I want my artworks to replicate that kind of situation. That’s why they’re not fixed. They are loose, very loose.

A&A: Anything else tricky about this installation?

EA: Well, there is one piece that needs to be moving. So they have to do a special false wall for that and put fans inside the wall so they will be blowing. When the fans blow them, the things move.

A&A: Who are the artists you admire who are working in sculpture?

EA: Oh, so many. I don’t name names, I guess. I like works that tend to be spiritual. I love the human figure, but right after school I developed an interest in the abstract. There are more challenges than doing life studies. You know in art school, you paint nudes, you model—that didn’t look like it had much for me in it. And I think abstract work has more flexibility in interpretation.

A&A: Have you seen any new materials that you thought you’d want to work in? Have you been walking down the street and something caught your eye?

EA: The story of the bottle caps is just that I found a bag. I was looking for something else, but I found a curious black bag. I opened it, and saw it had these bottle caps, so I took it to my studio. Three or four months went by before the idea came that I could cut them open, stretch them, and stitch them together into a sheet. You know, I was looking for a form that is changeable, and a sheet is about the easiest malleable form when you’re talking about flexibility. I found the bigger they are the more effective they are as artworks.

A&A: Bigger is better in this case.

EA: Yes. It gives more scope.

A&A: But you don’t know what the next bottle caps are going to be?

EA: I don’t know what. It comes by accident. In the Brooklyn show, there are works made out of aluminum printing plates.

A&A: The Waste Paper Bags that you made from 2004 to 2010.

EA: I think they look good, and what attracted me is the fact that they carry a lot of information. I found I spent a lot of time reading what was on them.

A&A: What is the text on them?

EA: What struck me about the printing plates that I collected was that they were all obituary notices. We celebrate funerals there more than you do here. So there were these big notices. A huge number of the plates I collected were about obituaries. The interesting thing is the lifespan of the people they were reporting is very short—35, 45.

A&A: Sad, right?

EA: Yes. It’s not that we didn’t know that they died, but seeing it on printing plates is different. I turned them into a collection of huge wastepaper baskets, about six or seven of them.

A&A: What is the relationship between African textile and your work?

EA: Let me tell you two stories. Or two facts, rather. One: my father was a weaver. And so my brother who grew up around him, they wove as well. But I wasn’t interested in weaving. In art school we were introduced to all the techniques. The one that least attracted me was textiles. So my work is not about textiles—what I am doing is looking for a form that is changeable, which is not fixed. Which lends itself to so many types of handling. Early in my career I developed a loathing for the rigid form.

A&A: What does hold all of the metal pieces together?

EA: Copper wire, because it doesn’t rust. The bottle caps also are made from metal that doesn’t rust.

A&A: So the wire is the “warp,” as they call the structure of a tapestry, versus the weave, which is the visible picture?

EA: You can’t be talking about warp and weft here!

A&A: Noted. What kind of weaver was your dad?

EA: He wove what they call kente cloths. It is common in Ghana, and all over the Côte d’Ivoire. It’s a very famous kind of ceremonial textile that people wear. Originally it was for royalty only, but now everybody uses it.

A&A: It’s ironic that you hate textile but people sometimes think your work is textile. I sure did.

EA: It’s funny. You try to escape it, but it is following you.

By Ted Loos

Montblanc Imperial Dragon Limited Edition fountain pen, ballpoint and mechanical pencil set, sold at Swann, March 12, 2013, for $5,760.

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

Even—and maybe especially—in the present era of keyboards and virtual keyboards, writing with a fountain pen still has its appeal. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of a supple nib depositing a glistening streak of ink onto a creamy-smooth piece of paper, the supple lines indelibly marked, there to remain no matter what electronic catastrophes beset the world. The real aficionados prize a pen for its writing ability, but also for its aesthetic properties as an object, and in many cases for its historical value. Whether of mottled resin or precious metals inlaid with gems, fine fountain pens are keenly sought by collectors, on the auction block or in specialty shops.

The generally accepted date for the invention of this wonderful device is 1884, when Lewis Edson Waterman manufactured what dealer Ed Fingerman of the Fountain Pen Hospital in New York calls “the first successfully marketed fountain pen.” Fingerman, whose shop sells and repairs vintage and contemporary pens, explains that while there were fountain pens as early as the 1850s, there was trouble with the ink and they did not catch on with the public. The golden age of fountain pens went from around 1900 through the beginning of World War II, and it was during this time that the best nibs—with the greatest variety—were made. Collectors who are mainly interested in using their pens usually focus on the golden age. With the advent of the ball point in the 1940s, fountain pen use dwindled and the variety and quantity of pens being made fell off, although the major manufacturers like Waterman and Montblanc continued to make excellent products. The “serious advent” of vintage-pen collecting, says Fingerman, began in the 1970s, and grew during the ’80s, which saw the rise of pen shows where collectors could be meet, buy and trade.

Then, around 1992–93, a real transformation of the fountain-pen market occurred when pen companies “discovered the limited-edition marketplace,” says Fingerman. “That brought in a lot of people who had a collecting instinct. They fell in love, so to speak.” Since then, the limited-edition contemporary-pen sector has gotten stronger and stronger, to the extent that it now dominates the collectible pen market as a whole. Montblanc is the leader in this category—every year it comes out with new limited-edition pens in two series, the Writer series (issued each September) and the Patron of the Arts series (issued in March), and has been extremely successful in promoting these items. The first Writer pen was the Ernest Hemingway, and the first Patron of the Arts pen was the Lorenzo de’ Medici. Like their successors, they immediately sold out and became instant collectibles on the secondary market, selling for many times the original prices. Rick Propas, Swann’s consultant for pens and writing instruments, says, “Many of us refer to the period from the 1990s to the present, as second Golden Age.”

Montblanc limited editions feature elaborate designs, often pictorial, that symbolize the life or works of the subject, as well as super-deluxe materials like gold, platinum, lacquer, and precious stones. Some are so-called skeleton pens, which have open filigree work over a transparent barrel so you can see the inner workings. In the Fine and Vintage Writing Instruments sale at Swann Galleries in New York on March 12, Montblanc accounted for 19 out of the 20 top lots, and most of those were of recent make. A Lorenzo de’ Medici went for $3,600, and a Marcel Proust sold for $1,800. On the other hand, a non-commemorative Montblanc, the L139G model in plain black celluloid, from 1938, commanded $2,280. On February 23–24, Dallas–based Heritage Auctions sold a Montblanc Qing Dynasty Precious fountain pen, one of an edition of eight with black lacquer, diamonds and jade, for $22,500.

The new wave of collectors is definitely more concerned with the materials a pen is made of than with its writing abilities; in fact, Fingerman estimates, almost half never use them. Ivan Briggs, head of the pen department at Bonhams, says, “There’s a great gulf between collectors of limited editions and vintage. There’s very little overlap. Limited editions are largely a pastime of the very well-to-do, some of whom collect at least partly for the intrinsic value of the materials. These pens are intended to be admired and kept in new condition.” He notes that with the rise in the gold market, gold Montblancs have gone up and are currently selling for around $10,000–20,000.

“Vintage is a different marketplace altogether,” says Briggs, “with a quirky, individualistic aesthetic. These collectors are people who spend a lot of time shopping and looking around, on Ebay, at pen shows, flea markets. They’re not paying top dollar.” However, he adds, “some of the truly scarce vintage pens are coming to the attention of the limited-edition collectors. They’re looking for the most sought-after, rare and remarkable examples.”

Old pens tend to be much less flashy in appearance, and for the most part, the barrels and caps were made of ordinary, non-precious materials such as hard rubber or metal overlay. The hard rubber exteriors came in very few colors, sort of like a Model T Ford. Back in the early 20th century, you could have your pen in black, red, or black-and-red mottled. Black-and-green mottled exists but is extremely rare. With the introduction of celluloid in the 1920s, more and brighter colors became possible. As for metal overlays, they were usually in the Art Nouveau style from the 1890s through the ’teens. Overlay work done by the Heath company for Waterman is particularly prized, and while they made them for other pen brands, the Waterman commands three times the price of the closest competition.

Around 1910 pens started to get fancier, and, despite the general rule about contemporary versus vintage, the two most expensive, legendarily rare collectible examples are from this era—the Dunhill Namiki maki-e pen (decorated with a special Japanese lacquer) and the Parker “Aztec” pen (actually called the Awanyu model). Either of these could go for $100,000 if one happened to appear on the market in good condition. Maki-e pens were sort of a fad in among collectors in London a few years ago, according to Briggs, so most were snapped up and went off the market, at least for now. The concept for the Aztec was born when George S. Parker, the company’s owner, was traveling in New Mexico and was shown a three-legged Native American motif he called the “Emblem of Mystic Power.” Made between 1911 and 1916 in gold or silver with the emblem and Indian-chief faces sculpted in high relief, only four to six examples are thought to exist. It’s truly a holy grail of pen collecting. Another famous Parker is the “Pregnant Parker” of 1909, so called because of the gentle swell of the mother-of-pearl-embellished barrel. Briggs says, “It’s considered the most beautiful pen ever made.” In 2011 Bonhams sold one for $7,200.

Pen users are especially interested in nibs, which affect the kind of line the pen makes. More flexible nibs allow the writer to vary the thickness of the line by means of the pressure placed on the pen. “Vintage nibs are the killers in flexibility,” says Fingerman. “Some of them bend to a 90-degree angle. A lot of people today don’t even know what flexibility is.” He cites the Waterman “Pink” nib as particularly excellent. (“Pink” refers to a color-coding system, not to the color of the nib, which, like most, is made of gold and iridium.) A pen with this nib sells in the vicinity of $700 today, up from $300 several years ago. Some collectors will buy a particular nib they want, then look for a body to match it to. Some will get even more inventive. Propas says, “If you want the really responsive nib, you’re going to go one of two directions—a vintage pen, which had those kinds of nibs out of the box, or you’re going to take a modern nib and have it customized. Generally you reshape the very tip of the iridium on the nib or contour the shoulders or thickness. Every nib demands a different treatment to get the best from it, and there are people who do that.”

The feeling of writing with a high-grade pen is so pleasing that even the hard-core limited-edition collectors can’t resist. And if they’re rich enough, they don’t have to worry about wear and tear: “Even the most elaborate limited edition can still be written with,” says Propas. “I know many collectors who have two of a given model—one they are willing to use, and one that they set aside.”

Giosetta Fioroni, Ragazza TV (TV Girl), 1964, pencil and aluminum enamel on paper.

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

In 1959, Giosetta Fioroni began using aluminum paint as an expression of a sort of non-color. Fioroni, who aside from briefly living in Paris in the late ’50s spent the majority of her life in Rome (where she still lives today, at the age of 82), had become inspired by Yves Klein’s pervasive use of his now signature blue at a 1960 exhibition at Iris Clent Gallery in Paris. The choice to experiment with this metallic silver-colored paint led to a distinct series of work, the majority of which was made between 1963 and 1970 and depicted glamour shots of women—taken from newspaper clippings, fashion magazines, or Fioroni’s own drawings or photographs—in seemingly suspended shots as if caught in motion in an empty plane. “The presence of the silver paint recalls a photographic quality for me,” says Claire Gilman, the curator of “L’Argento,” an exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York, Fioroni’s first retrospective in North America (through June 2). “With the presence of the graphite lines, which are almost tremulous in a way, you can see how her hand was moving.”

The graphite pencil lines, creating very sparse borders, frames and details around the women’s faces, give the quality of a faraway scene, as if a photo editor had shot an image and was adding commentary to it. This is not to say that these images ever seem like drafts; in fact, instead, they seem to be putting forth a multi-layered illusion of perception and representation, in which the artist’s imagery seems to fade into the distance while at the same time confronting the viewer.

The Italian art historian and curator Gillo Dorfles, in his 1965 exhibition of Fioroni’s work, noted, “The fragile and barely traced drawing—nearly monochrome—in pale and evanescent colors, often in typographical ink, stands out against the canvas with the persuasiveness of film images that are alive despite being ‘celluloid’ but without running the risk of becoming either naturalist or clumsily symbolic. The repetition—at times insistent—of the same figure, of a silhouette, sometimes magnified or shrunken, sometimes overlapping, then like a cinematographic fade-out, feeding on nothing, truly has the effect of an ectoplasmic apparition in which we perceive an impalpable presence while recognizing in it improbability of danger.”

Dorfles’ analysis uses the vernacular of film criticism, which is almost the only language available for describing Fioroni’s work. Creating so soon after the fall of Fascism in Italy, Fioroni and her contemporaries, as well as the filmmakers of the era, were beginning to step back and use their critical abilities as artists to show the viewer the intricate details of life, which are so easily missed. In the catalogue for the exhibition, Gilman quotes Italo Calvino, who in The New York Review of Books in 1983 wrote, “The screen became a magnifying lens posed on the everyday world outside that we were obliged to fix on the thing in which our naked eye tended to glide without stopping.”

“Everyday imagery” seemed to be a pervasive theme for Fioroni, who prior to this series was making gestural abstractions, inspired in part by the work of Cy Twombly, and then a series of slightly pared-down ink and pastel drawings with various symbols—hearts, text, arrows, etc.—strewn throughout. Fioroni describes these as “a montage of symbols, almost geometric, that pertain to everyday life—the relentless, hysterical experience we have of the intermittent images that the city, the street, the trip, the cinema, the crowd, etc., constantly offer us.”

As her canvases became even more bare, their likeness to American Abstract Expressionism abates, and they seem more and more to enter into the realm of Pop. Italian Pop differed from that of the United States, mostly in terms of its awareness of subject. Gilman’s essay quotes Fioroni acknowledging this, saying that “1960 was a strange point of passage…A new scene was emerging in Rome involving a group of artists who were interested in pictorial reality after the Informal [the European variant on Abstract Expressionism]. There was undoubtedly the influence of American Pop but it was more distant than one might imagine…[the Roman scene] always preserved, due to [Rome’s] different historical background, a different relationship with the act of ‘making.’” Unlike the factory-made productions of Andy Warhol, whose art referencing mass-market items was quite literally made like mass-market items, Fioroni and her contemporaries wanted to draw attention to production by acknowledging it and then taking a step away from it. Again describing Fioroni’s pencil marks, Gilman notes, “She’s trying to show that everything is made, not just received.”

Fioroni, who met Plinio De Martiis, the owner of Galleria La Tartaruga around 1957 and had a long relationship with his gallery, was a member of the “School of the Piazza del Popolo.” Though Fioroni was the only female artist working among the intimate group of her peers, Gilman insists that her message was not necessarily feminist. “She was not trying to put forth some female sexuality, but instead, by wanting people to be careful and cognizant of the world, she acknowledged that these female faces were objects of desire, and she was forcing the viewer to look again and consider that further.”

The exhibition will also feature 20 of the silver landscape drawings made by Fioroni in the ’70s, drawings and her illustrations for books—which became her focus later in her career—and related ephemera. The three films she directed in 1967 will be screened in The Lab.

Lee Chun-yi, Immense Vista From the Perilous Peak, 2010

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

When Ai Weiwei smashed a 2,000-year-old piece of pottery to bits for a conceptual artwork called Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995/2009), his break with tradition epitomized an attitude toward the past that was, and still is, prevalent among contemporary Chinese artists. In the wake of the 1949 Communist revolution and the recent disaffection with that revolution, it’s very understandable that the past would seem like a dead hand holding back creativity. Nonetheless, a group of Chinese contemporary artists has been quietly pursuing a very different kind of engagement with their cultural inheritance. Painting delicately in ink on silk or specially prepared paper, they create landscapes and still lifes that remind the viewer of the classic works of the dynastic era. But these contemporary ink painters are no imitators, and the best of them combine reverence with relevance, enlarging their tradition with a distinctly contemporary sensibility.

Beijing-based artist Liu Dan, at age 60 one of the “old masters” of this school, paints rocks and trees, two of the key elements of classical Chinese landscape painting. But there’s a difference—Liu’s rocks take up the whole composition, and seen close-up they take on the otherworldly quality of another planet’s surface. His ultra-precise, tiny brushstrokes give his works an almost hyperreal appearance, and in contrast to traditional Chinese ink painting, he rarely adds texts to his paintings, preferring the austerity of the single image. Liu’s trees also tend to occur in isolation, not as part of densely wooded mountain landscapes. For example, his Old Cypress from the Forbidden City (2007), stands against a plain white background, and like many of the rocks it is cropped—the edge of the paper eliminates the bottom of the trunk. This effect increases the viewer’s sense that the natural object is abstracted from nature, another aesthetically contemporary element of today’s Chinese ink painting. In general, the works tend to be large-scale—some as much as 10 feet high—and black and white, although some of the artists use color rather sparingly.

Zeng Xiaojun (b. 1954) is known in particular for his trees. He suggests the landscape in which a tree is embedded with a few light, almost evanescent, strokes, but the tree itself is the focus, and the brush really goes to work there, weaving skeins of ink that depict the twisting of roots, the bunching together of leaves, the entanglements of branches. Zeng’s trees seem animated, like animals or perhaps spirits that have been metamorphosed into trees. Luo Jianwu (b. 1944) also paints trees; in Old Cypress at a Confucian Temple (2012), he turns a gaze of Albrecht Dürer-like intensity on the gnarled trunk, microscopically drilling into the intricacies of the bark, the patterns formed by the intertwining branches.

A younger artist, Lee Chun-yi (b. 1965), has developed a really radical technique of ink painting. After having mastered the brush, he gave it up entirely and now makes his paintings using a small, square piece of cork to ink in a grid of squares in order to form an image. He controls the lightness or darkness of each square by the number of times he stamps it, as well as by the amount of ink he puts on the cork. In his paintings, the grid is always visible as thin white lines underlying the image. Lee does landscapes, but his inspiration for the grid technique was the Han Dynasty stone stelae that first captured his imagination when he was a boy. The stelae—which aficionados copy using the technique of ink rubbing—are composed entirely of text, one Chinese character per hypothetical square in a grid. So in a way, Lee has transformed text into image.

Over the past five years or so, the combination of traditional elegance, refined technique and a certain contemporary aesthetic has propelled these painters from inky obscurity to Western art-world success. During New York’s Asia Week (March 14–28), Sotheby’s hosted a successful selling exhibition called “Shuimo/Water Ink: Contemporary Chinese Ink Paintings.” Last year, Michael Goedhuis, a London and New York–based dealer who has a particular interest in this field, curated a loan show, “Ink: The Art of China” at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The Museum of Fine Art Boston, which has long been the vanguard of Asian art collecting, mounted the first museum show of ink painting in the U.S., and the Metropolitan Museum is planning one for the near future.

Conor Mahony, president of the Chinese Porcelain Company in New York, which represents a number of contemporary ink painters, says, “The essence of Chinese contemporary art was thought to be oil painting in the style of the West. But ink painting was not meant for Westerners. Interestingly, though museums here have picked up on ink painting.” Carol Conover, owner of Kaikodo, a New York gallery that specializes in old and new Chinese ink paintings, reports that she has been successful in selling contemporary ink to American museums, but in her experience, Chinese buyers are less interested in contemporary ink painting than in the older works. “For me it’s mainly American collectors, not Chinese collectors,” she says. “For a while, ink painting was associated with being too old-fashioned, too associated with the Qing Dynasty, and it’s still struggling to become accepted in the Mainland.” However, she adds, the somewhat abstract quality of today’s ink painting may make it easier for younger Chinese to appreciate it. “The current generation understands abstraction,” says Conover. “When they see Chinese paintings, it’s not as alien to them as to their parents,” who were brought up on Maoist-era socialist realism.

One of the most profound of this group of artists is Tai Xiangzhou (b. 1968), who shows with the Chinese Porcelain Company and was in New York for Asia Week, where he sat down to speak (mainly through an interpreter) with Art & Antiques about his work and about the phenomenon of contemporary Chinese ink painting. “There are two types of contemporary art in China,” he says. “One type is the media-hype, market-yourself kind of art. The other type is pure art, from the artist’s soul. Over the last 100 years, art has been very much dictated by the government, but now that China is more open, artists are able to leave and become more globalized, to be in the second category and be true to themselves. When these latter artists can truly emerge, people will be able to tell what is true art and what is not, because you can feel it when you look at it.”

Tai is a student of Liu Dan, with whom he shares a fondness for painting scholar’s rocks—a type of naturally formed rock traditionally prized by Chinese literati for their contemplation-inducing properties and mounted and displayed as works of art. (Last year at Asia Week New York, Tai bought a scholar’s rock, which he has since made a painting of.) Since childhood, Tai had been an enthusiastic practitioner of calligraphy and had learned landscape painting, but before beginning to study with Liu in 2005, he had a successful career as a multimedia designer. He gave that up to dedicate himself to ink painting and the study of Chinese art history. While he calls Liu his “living teacher,” he also learns from long-dead masters by studying and internalizing their works. “The best Chinese landscape painting is from the Song Dynasty,” he says. “So for my landscape, I’ll study with a Song Dynasty master.” As for Liu Dan, he knew he wanted to study with him when he saw an astonishing painting Liu did, in colored and black ink, of a candle flame turning into smoke, rendered as a long scroll turned on its side, so that the smoke seems like a landscape.

Talking to Tai about his work, a cosmic quality enters the conversation. He points to two paintings from 2012, No. 3 Star of the Big Dipper and No. 4 of the Big Dipper in Blue. Each one depicts, with a scientifically precise gaze, not a scholar’s rock but a meteorite. Tai sees these objects, which dropped from outer space to earth, not as literal depictions of the constellation but as symbolic representations of it. Since meteorites are red hot when they arrive here, he painted No. 3 in an orangey-red ink; No. 4 is in blue, which stands, he says, for the cobalt content of the stone. The Big Dipper is symbolically important for Tai, because, he explains, “the Chinese character for ‘king’ comes from the shape of the Big Dipper. It shows the reciprocal relationship between heaven and earth. All art emerges from this relationship, this constant interaction.”

In fact, Tai believes that traditional Chinese landscape painting derives from observation of the sky. He has recently come out with a book (in Chinese only), whose title in English is Concept and Structure: The Study of Schema in Chinese Landscape Painting. In that elegantly designed volume, he relates Chinese star maps to landscape paintings. Diagrams illustrate the parallelisms between celestial projections and the ways in which landscape paintings were built up in panels as composites of many different views of the same scene. Wall carvings in archaic Chinese tombs depicted constellations arranged around the figure of the deceased. “They drew heaven around the dead body,” Tai says, “because when people died, they wanted to go back to the sky. So the Chinese landscape comes from the star map. Each mountain is a star; In China the outside comes inside.”

This mystical connection to the stars, ancient though it is, is very real for Tai. “A lot of Chinese people believe there are two components of your being—your physical body and your soul or spirit. There’s a star equivalent of each of us.” When he paints a landscape, he says, he is not doing an exact physical rendering of that landscape, he is painting its soul or inner being. Tai’s landscapes—of which the best are the 16 that make up his “Genesis” series—are dense and incredibly detailed, but somehow ethereal. Knowing that they are essentially imaginary or conceptual scenes makes them seem even more otherworldly. Really, they are depictions of the artist’s inner world, a world which is individual, yet shared with generations of his fellow Chinese ink painters.

“I don’t care what is contemporary and what is traditional,” he says. “If you make your art, that art will last beyond you and everything. Maybe this rock will disappear, but the painting will remain. You must pay attention to your life, and feel your work is true to yourself. If it is, it will last beyond us. Western culture and Eastern culture are becoming one, and the things that are actually authentic will be considered beautiful by all.”

Second-phase blanket, circa 1860s, made of raveled red cochineal, indigo blue, natural white and brown hand-spun

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

On June 19, 2012, at John Moran Auctioneers in Pasadena, Calif., a remarkable piece of woven wool, off-white with brown, blue and red stripes, sold for $1.8 million. It was a very rare early Navajo “chief’s blanket,” made around 1850 and consigned by a descendant of the Norwegian immigrant storekeeper in the Dakota Territory who got it in a trade in the 1870s. Since then, the blanket had remained in the man’s family, never shown publicly despite its historic importance and never even washed. As a result, its condition was excellent. Moran estimated it at $100,000–200,000, so the final price—the record for a Navajo blanket—came as a life-changing surprise to the consigner, who was by no means wealthy. Even to insiders in the world of Native American art, though, it was a lot of money; the previous record for a Navajo blanket, set at Sotheby’s New York in 1989, was $522,500. It was also the second-highest price ever paid at auction for any American Indian art object.

That a Navajo textile should attain such honors in the marketplace is fitting, considering that the tribe has one of the greatest weaving traditions in the Americas. But in many ways the blanket sold by Moran was atypical. If anything, it’s far less colorful and aesthetically sophisticated than most that are available today; it was expensive on account of being a once-in-a-lifetime rarity. It’s known as a “First Phase Chief’s Blanket,” referring to one of three stylistic periods or phases from around 1800 to 1868, when the Navajos returned to their homeland in the Four Corners region of northern New Mexico and Arizona from a five-year exile that decimated the population. Very few textiles survive from that era, and anything from before 1800 is almost certain to be nothing more fragments of cloth at this point, essentially an archaeological specimen.

Also, it was made by Navajos for Navajos—in fact, as apparel to be worn, though not by a chief because the Navajos have no chiefs. Most Navajo textiles, however, were made for outsiders, at first to be traded with other Indian tribes and white settlers, and later for the tourist and collector markets. One of the most interesting things about Navajo blankets and rugs is that, like several other very worthy “indigenous” art traditions around the world—notably Australian Aboriginal art, Canadian Inuit art and certain traditions of Mexican Indian silver—it was strongly influenced by whites and to some extent even instigated by them. Nonetheless, while meeting the demands of non-Indian America and thereby providing the tribe with much-needed income, Navajo weaving kept pace with changing times while staying true to Navajo traditions, aesthetics and ways of working (vertical-loom weaving using hand-spun thread). This quality of adaptability is particularly characteristic of the Navajo people (known in their own language as Diné), who over the centuries have always known how to borrow from their neighbors and change with the times without losing their identity.

The Navajo textiles that are available to collectors today fall into several categories. Around 1880, after the three “phases” of the so-called classic period (which added geometrical complexity to the designs by going from pure stripes to serrated forms and diamond shapes), the so-called “transitional period” began. This term refers to the transition from making blankets designed to be draped over the body as clothing to making rugs. Transitional-period weavers developed the famous “eyedazzler” design, a bold, almost hallucinogenic zigzag patterns that would become more widely used later on. The transitional period also saw the introduction of commercial, machine-spun yarns from the Eastern U.S., particularly those from Germantown, Pa. Previously the Navajo had spun yarn from the wool of the sheep they raised themselves. The industrial dyes in the Germantown yarns gave Navajo textiles a vividness of hue that they had never had before.

In the 1880s, the modern period of Navajo rugs began, and the influence of Anglo society intensified. That took place due to the rise of a new economic system on the reservation—the trading posts. White traders became the Indians’ connection to the outside world, selling them supplies, selling their weavings for them and in return providing them with credit. Since the traders had a canny sense of what their white customers wanted, they suggested to the Navajo various designs and color schemes that they felt would sell well. Some of the top traders were so influential in this way that they co-created so-called regional styles, named after their trading posts, such as Ganado, Crystal, Two Gray Hills, Teec Nos Pos and Wide Ruins.

Michael Smith, a Navajo textile specialist dealer in Santa Fe, N.M., points out that some of the trading post designs were influenced by the popularity of Oriental rugs in the U.S. at the time. “The traders played a big part, influencing and encouraging. The Navajos were very adaptable—if the traders wanted them to weave differently, well, they said, we’ll weave differently. The Pueblo Indians seemed to stop weaving, because they wouldn’t weave rugs. The Navajos went in the other direction and got incredibly good at it. It’s unreal—some of these weavers reached a level where they were masters of anything they wanted to do, especially Two Grey Hills and Teec Nos Pos.” The traders sold to tourists brought out to the Four Corners region by the expanding railroads, fired with a newfound appreciation of Western scenery and culture. But as Henry Monahan of Morning Star Gallery in Santa Fe points out, they also sold to collectors back east through catalogues, which offered the same design in various convenient sizes. The heyday of trading-post rugs lasted until just after World War II, when the local economy changed and the old patronage system of giving credit for the six months to a year it took to weave a rug gave way to the pawn-shop system.

Even though a First Phase ( or any phase, for that matter) blanket is likely to be out of reach, collectors today can acquire excellent examples of textiles from the 1880–1950 period at prices that are not at all stratospheric. Smith says that small rugs can start at a couple of thousand dollars and go up to around $20,000. Saddle blankets—the only type of blanket the Navajo kept making after the end of the wearing-blanket era—are small, too, but command something of a premium due to their special purpose. A larger rug from Teec Nos Pos or Two Gray Hills, 6 by 11 or 6 by 9 feet, would be between $25,000 and $30,000, while a 4 by 6 Teec Nos Pos would cost a little under $10,000.

According to Monahan, “You can find late-classic child’s blankets, and also dress halves, two panels of a garment, front and back. Those are kind of undervalued; you can get one panel for $20,000 or $25,000.” Germantown rugs, he says, are appealing to a “crossover clientele,” those who aren’t hard-core Native American enthusiasts but appreciate Navajo rugs as pure design. “Modern design and Americana collectors love the Germantowns,” he says. “They are really, really pleasing, and they have history. A lot are 19th-century, but you don’t have to spend $400,000 or $500,000. The good ones are like $30,000. At the end of the day, it’s all about the quality of the weaving. I had a 1930s Teec Nos Pos, and I can’t tell you how beautiful it was.”

A Goliath head, owned by Texas-based collectors Bruce and Julie Webb;

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

When cavemen first brought home animal skins as boast-worthy emblems of their hunting quests — which no doubt became symbols of their strength, prowess and social standing — conventional, trophy-object collecting was born. But it was with the first cave kids who lovingly preserved the most colorful beetle shells, the shiniest stones and the oddest-looking bones that something more unusual and daring was born. Call it eclectic collecting, a label that describes a special, hard-to-pin-down sensibility, a fascination with the most unlikely objects a person might ever find and cherish.

Fast-forward to the 16th century. As a recent exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club (an association of bibliophiles and graphic arts aficionados) pointed out, it was at that time, in Europe, that a certain kind of inquisitive collector began to create the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities — a vitrine, chest or entire room filled with such treasures as paintings and drawings, maps, plant specimens, shells and coral, coins and medals, ancient sculpture and tools, gems and minerals, gold and silver objects, and fossils. Nobles of the Medici and Hapsburg dynasties had them; so did Russia’s Peter the Great, portions of whose wide-ranging collections can still be found at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Today’s eclectic collectors have something in common with such curiosity gatherers of yore.

Fast-forward again. A few weeks ago, in North Carolina, I chatted with a pick-up truck driver who had kindly loaned me some tools for a quick, roadside repair. When our conversation turned to old tools and license plates, he said, “Got a minute? Come over to my place. I got something to show you.” Climbing a staircase that led up to a series of connecting lofts above his company’s offices, I was stunned to find room after room— a most unexpected, contemporary Wunderkammer— filled with Civil War cannon balls, bayonets, soldiers’ caps and rifles; antique Coca-Cola bottles; hundreds of electric-power cable insulators made of glass; original Elvis concert posters; display cases full of clown figurines; racks of Harley-Davidson logo t-shirts; G.I. Joe and Star Wars character dolls in their original packages; chests filled with blue glass, milk glass, cast iron utensils and old political-campaign buttons; and a set of printed cards bearing portraits and pronouncements of John Wayne (“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”).

Eclectic collectors are everywhere, but what distinguishes a so-called serious collector from a mere gatherer with unusual tastes? Mark Sloan, director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina and an eclectic collector himself, says there are the “curators,” meaning those who carefully select what they will keep, as well as more general collectors “for whom, if owning one example of something is good, owning 10,000 examples of the same thing is better.” Sloan also identifies what he calls “hoarders,” who “acquire all sorts of things indiscriminately,” and “accumulators,” who “tend to be builders of multiple collections at the same time, amassing large quantities of stuff.” Real collectors, of the conventional or the eclectic kind, Sloan says, are always discerning about their acquisitions. In Sloan’s own collection are such unique treasures as “red pointy things — an Afro comb, a starfish, spiky salt and pepper shakers; things related to hoaxes, like a Fiji mermaid sculpture that’s half-monkey, half-fish, with a mermaid’s tail, from a P.T. Barnum sideshow; and things that have been smashed by other things.” As a boy, Sloan collected snowballs until his mother, needing the freezer space, threw them out.

For many years, John Foster, a St. Louis-based graphic designer, has been acquiring fine examples of folk art, outsider art and vernacular photography (snapshots whose creators are unknown); he has also collected everyday or seemingly ordinary objects whose shapes and textures he savors the way some modern-art lovers appreciate pure form. Foster says, “For me to want to own something, it has to have a strong sense of design and an air of mystery regarding its purpose. I can make up my own stories about how it was intended to be used and who might have owned it before.” Among his treasures, Foster cites a group of eight knives that were hand-made by prison inmates from such materials as a hairbrush and a filed-down spoon; a pair of wooden drumsticks from 1932, with someone’s initials carved into them; a well-worn, circa 1930s catcher’s mitt; and a mid-1940s, white-plastic children’s toothbrush shaped like a pistol.

A selection of objects from the broader collection Foster and his wife, Teenuh, have assembled over the years was featured late last year in “Art Without Artists,” an exhibition at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. John Foster co-curated the show with the museum’s director, Roger Manley, a well-known specialist in folk art and outsider art in the South. “Objects that cross boundaries and collide with culture, objects that are not easily defined, objects with Surrealist overtones— these become my power objects,” Foster wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue. In organizing the show, Manley and Foster were inspired by early 20th-century modernism’s grandfather of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, who took industrially made objects, like a metal bottle-drying rack or a porcelain urinal, and displayed them in gallery settings as works of art. Through such acts of what postmodernist artists and critics reverently call “appropriation,” Duchamp in effect declared, “These objects are artworks because I, the artist, say they are.” In the spirit of such context-altering gestures, anything can have artistic qualities if one simply opens one’s eyes— and mind and heart— and recognizes them.

Manley, whose family moved several times when he was growing up, collected rocks or pieces of wood from each of the places where he had lived. “It was a way of taking a part of each place with me and charging those objects with very personal meaning,” he says. Today, among Manley’s own more unusual collections is a group of spent artillery shells decorated with pictures of women or circus scenes. As “Art Without Artists” demonstrated, he is interested in how viewers may impart aesthetic value to ordinary or unlikely objects, especially those that were not intentionally created as works of art.

Manley notes, “We’re constantly bombarded visually by so much stuff that when you pay attention to something you might otherwise overlook, suddenly there may be something about it that really stands out.” Manley’s observation echoes that of the influential avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–92), who famously urged listeners to pay attention to ordinary environmental sounds— honking cars, footsteps, buzzing bees— and allow them to be heard as music. In that same spirit, “Art Without Artists” presented firefighters’ respirator masks, a sawfish bill, red bricks with animal paw prints embedded in them, an ink-smudged letter-blotter sheet and a paint-chipped fireplace bellows as once-used useful objects whose auras, in an exhibition setting, could be felt as eloquent, elegant and full of soul.

“You can imbue an object with value depending on what you believe about it,” Manley notes. His concern is aesthetic, of course. Then there is the monetary value of, well, just about anything anyone might be willing to pay for and collect. Both Sloan and Foster note that, today, websites like eBay have made it possible for anyone to find out the value of just about anything, from old comic books to fine-art paintings. Collectors of the most unusual material, Sloan says, “usually don’t care about monetary value.” However, he adds, “When it comes to the aesthetic value I feel for what I collect, it’s off the charts.”

In her 2006 book In Flagrante Collecto (Abrams), the sculptor and retired New York University art professor Marilynn Gelfman Karp notes that “material culture’s most devalued objects” — like those that eclectic collectors most prize— have no “intrinsic value” and no “competitive collectorship to give them extrinsic value.” However, in her book Karp adds that, for collectors like herself (she has some 200 collections, she writes, of objects that “could be classified among the ‘unlovable’ or the ‘unloved’”), “rolling in riches of your own decree has its own special satisfaction.”

It certainly does for Harley Spiller, New York-based nonprofits arts administrator who collects Chinese-restaurant memorabilia (menus, chopsticks wrappers, paper lanterns, business cards), scissors, chocolate-bar wrappers, blue bottle caps, white plastic spoons and all kinds of information about chickens. He also collects furculae (wishbones) and is a corbatellist— a collector of drinking straws. “The purpose of a collection is to inspire learning,” says Spiller, whose father’s company, in Buffalo, New York, manufactured promotional items, including the lead weights embossed with various publications’ title logos that newsstand operators used to place atop stacks of newspapers and magazines to prevent them from blowing away. Spiller adds: “By amassing artifacts within a set of parameters, collectors build scaffolds from which new knowledge can be derived. I like to collect things that are overlooked or taken for granted and thus stand up tall for the low.”

In their own ways, eclectic collectors are cultural historians and anthropologists who find meaning and value in objects that, for them, are no less significant than shards of ancient pottery or the crown jewels of famous kings. Sometimes, like Bruce and Julie Webb, the proprietors of the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas, near Dallas, they are dealers, too. As teens, the Webbs met and found shared interests on the local punk music and skateboard scene. “I loved vintage clothes and didn’t think I was collecting them, but, in fact, I was,” Julie remembers, noting that Bruce, “who had grown up around collections, was already acquiring secret-society books and developing an interest in fraternal-lodge material.”

Bruce recalls, “My maternal grandparents were Assembly of God missionaries who had lived many years in India and, in the 1950s, moved to Texas, where I grew up. I remember all the Hindu-deity figurines, occult books and other unusual things they had brought back with them.” In 1991, the Webbs, whose interests had expanded to include a diverse range of works created by self-taught artists, opened a gallery; three years later they moved into their current, 10,000-square-foot space. In the course of their frequent travels, they were deeply moved by their encounter with the legendary American folk art collector Herbert W. Hemphill, Jr., a co-founder of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, who died in 1998. (With Julia Weissman, Hemphill co-authored the influential book Twentieth-century American Folk Art and Artists, which came out in 1974.) In the 1970s, Hemphill had dared to argue that folk art forms were still being produced by living artists, and that the term “folk art” in the U.S. should not refer only to certain kinds of objects that had been made in the New England region before 1900.

In their gallery, the Webbs show many of the same kinds of items they enthusiastically collect themselves, including resin clocks, tramp art, circus banners, memory jugs and what they call “killer oddball, kick-ass stuff.” They routinely set off on road trips around Texas, the South and the Midwest in search of unusual material. Julie says, “From Bert [Hemphill] we learned how exciting it could be to discover something that has just been lying there, forgotten or unknown, with a sense of mystery about it; sometimes we don’t know who made or owned something interesting that we’ve found, but that’s okay. Some things have their secret histories.”

The Brooklyn-based artist Scott Ogden, a good friend of the Webbs, collects outsider art and fraternal-lodge items; as a boy growing up in Oklahoma and Texas, he assembled a prized collection of rocks. Ogden says: “I enjoy every aspect of collecting. I love not knowing what I might come across at a flea market or art fair, or on eBay. When something amazing rears its head when you least expect it, it’s almost euphoric.” For Ogden, a collector’s “belief system, whatever it is,” can find itself “shattered when confronted with the unexpected.”

“Nothing makes for good decoration like good stuff,” writes interior designer Carey Maloney in his new book Stuff (Pointed Leaf Press). Maloney and his Cuban-born partner, the architect Hermes Mallea, run M(Group), a New York-based architecture and decoration company whose wealthy clients count on the imaginative duo to create stylish, comfortable living spaces and, often, to figure out attractive ways to display their collections of both conventional and unusual objects. What to do with all those aboriginal bark paintings, trophies and awards (including the occasional Oscar statuette), pagoda-shaped, blue-and-white porcelain tulip holders, and elaborately adorned English Regency cabinets? There are lessons in Stuff for eclectic collectors, and as Maloney told me, conversely, sometimes “stunning amounts of information” flow to him from client-collectors whose knowledge about what they own runs deep.

For collectors in an Internet-connected world, is anything still rare and different? “Our globalized culture means there are not many unknowns anymore,” Maloney observes. Still, when he encounters something familiar in an unexpected setting that sets aesthetic sparks flying, he knows it. He recalls that in New York last October, “Chinese Revolutionary art was hung at the International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show in a rug dealer’s booth. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw that.” Alas, somewhere far from Beijing, some eclectic collector probably already has amassed a definitive selection of Mao posters and banners proclaiming the triumphs of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Foster says: “I’ve collected things that were so far off the beaten path, but the crowd that’s doing this now is growing.” The Webbs, too, note that it’s becoming harder and harder to find the most unusual material. Bruce Webb says, “Television shows like American Pickers have taught people to appreciate— and put price tags on— all sorts of ordinary stuff that’s really kind of special.” Still, all of the collectors mentioned here agree that what they do with so much passion and determination is nothing if not an “addiction” or an “obsession,” and that they cannot not press on. Mark Sloan, who owns hundreds of 19th-century cabinet cards with sitters’ photos showing “a wide variety of extraordinary hairdos,” says “the hunt for a great item” is the most exciting aspect of collecting. Whatever a collector’s favorite category, he observes, “You’re only as good as the next great item that’s out of reach.”

In a memoir published in 1974, the British art historian Sir Kenneth Clark wrote that collectors “who long to possess things that have bewitched them…learn a great deal more about themselves from their possessions.” As they survey and savor their acquisitions, Clark noted, “they are surrounded by old friends.” In In Flagrante Collecto, Karp points out, “Collecting is an act of very personal commitment. It’s about erecting a bond between yourself and an object; it’s all about what you choose to be responsible for.” Some people like colonial American furniture. Or postage stamps. Or coins. Others, Karp observes, go for toy robots, butchers’ display tags (“Choice Mutton,” “Sheep’s Liver,” “Jellied Veal”) or airline motion-sickness bags.

Putting it plainly, Foster offers what might be dubbed the Eclectic Collector’s Creed. “I can look at any item in my collection,” he notes, “and say, ‘I appreciated it. I gave it love.’”

Gaspar Miguel de Berrío, Our Lady of Mount Carmel with Bishop Saints, 1764, oil on canvas.

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

As a schoolchild in Mexico more than 50 years ago, I was taught that the Spanish colonial era was a cultural wasteland—three repressive centuries sandwiched between the 1521 conquest of a glorious pre-Columbian civilization and a heroic struggle leading to independence in 1821. We had to memorize the names of all 11 Aztec emperors. Moctezuma, Cuitlahuac and Cuauhtemoc still trip off my tongue. But I don’t recall learning the identity of a single Spanish viceroy. The pyramids and figurines of pre-Hispanic cultures, along with the post-Revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, were hailed as true Mexican masterpieces. Colonial art was dismissed as religious propaganda and a mediocre derivative of European painting and sculpture.

That was then. In recent decades, Spanish colonial art has undergone a spectacular reappraisal, both aesthetically and politically. “The colonial period was viewed as a kind of Dark Ages,” says Ilona Katzew, head of the Latin American art department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and author of Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. “In the last 20 years or so, there has been a much more concerted effort to revive interest in colonial art.”

One of the impressive recent efforts to stoke that interest in the United States is the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s current exhibition of colonial art from Brazil and the vast territory encompassed by the Peruvian viceroyalty. Drawn mostly from the collection of Roberta and Richard Huber, former longtime residents of South America, the show, titled “Journeys to New Worlds,” is on view through May 19.

Nowadays, in Mexico and South America, the term “viceregal art” is replacing “colonial art” to subtly suggest that there was less cultural subordination to the mother country. “Viceregal art wasn’t a mere copy of Spanish art,” says Alfonso Miranda Márquez, director of the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, who then proceeds to guide me through a 90-minute tour of the highlights in the museum’s Mexican art collection from the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries.

The Soumaya was built and endowed by the world’s richest person, Carlos Slim, and named after his late wife. It displays a sizable portion of Slim’s 66,000-piece art hoard, including Old Masters, 19th-century European paintings and Modern Art, and one of the world’s largest collections of Auguste Rodin sculptures, along with impressive works from the viceregal period. The Soumaya has been criticized for its unoriginal internal architecture—it has a spiraling ramp like New York’s Guggenheim and an unattractive, mushroom-shaped exterior encased in gleaming aluminum. But the museum’s popularity is beyond dispute: Open every day of the week and free of charge, it has drawn 1.7 million visitors since its inauguration in March 2011.

Miranda begins the tour with one of the earliest landscapes done in the Americas, Paseo de la Viga con la Iglesia Iztacalco, a 1706 oil-on-canvas view of Mexico City’s great canal by Pedro Villegas. “We have here the viceroy and his wife showing off Mexico City as a New World Venice,” says Miranda. The snow-capped volcanoes and the Valley of Mexico rise in the background. Ancient forests invade the growing capital. As evidence that viceregal art need not cede pride of place to paintings from the mother country, the Villegas work is placed side by side with an anonymous 1670 landscape, View of the Royal Alcazar and the Segovia Bridge, that makes Madrid look like an open-pit mine.

One of the truly arresting works in the collection is a mixed-media sculpture of La Dolorosa, the Virgin of Sorrows, created by an anonymous 18th-century Guatemalan artist and his assistants. The Virgin’s body is carved of wood and covered in alternate layers of gold leaf and paint. Her face has been sculpted from alabaster. The lips and cheeks are painted. Her eyes are made of glass, and the lashes, taken from an animal—probably a calf—have been individually inserted. Silver teardrops glisten on her cheeks. The genre is known as estofado (Spanish for “quilted”). “It is probably the most complex artistic process of the viceregal era,” says Miranda.

Another masterpiece in the collection is Francisco Antonio Vallejo’s 1771 oil-on-copper plate Visión de San Juan en Patmos-Tenochtitlán. Saint John’s vision of the Virgin on the Greek island is transferred to the Aztec capital before it was conquered and renamed Mexico City. Mary is transmuted into the darker-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe, the apparition embraced by Mexico’s native population. And the Holy Trinity is depicted by actual figures, something that was forbidden to painters in Europe as sacrilegious. The Church allowed New World artists to paint the Trinity in human shapes because the concept of God existing simultaneously as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit was thought to be too confusing for the newly converted native Mexicans.

Some viceregal works blend pre-Columbian influences with the art of Spain. A startling example is a 15th-century obsidian mirror, honoring Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of darkness. The piece was painted over in oil in the 17th century with a scene from the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus and his disciples retreated for prayer the night before his arrest. “That’s what we Latin Americans are all about culturally—the foundation is pre-Hispanic and the overlay is European,” says Miranda.

Yet another superb example of this mestizo culture is a late 18th-century work by Francisco Javier Clavijero, San Isidro Labrador, in which the cape of Saint Isidore the Laborer is made by the Aztec featherwork technique, using the plumes of hummingbirds, swallows, ducks and the now extinct royal bluebird.

An artistic genre unique to the Mexican colonial era is the so-called nun’s shield or escudo de monja. These 18th-century zinc or copper plates, worn by a nun over the solar plexus to protect her from evil, were painted in oil with various invocations to the Virgin Mary and signed by some of the finest colonial artists, including Miguel Cabrera, Francisco Vallejo and José de Páez. Nuns were often buried with these shields, as well.

The Museo Nacional de Arte in the historic center of Mexico City is the empress dowager of colonial art museums. Housed since 1982 in a century-old neoclassical edifice that was originally built as the Ministry of Communications, the Museo Nacional de Arte lacks the deep pockets of the Slim-funded Museo Soumaya. To compensate, it charges a reasonable 37-peso ($3) admission and has sought to expand its audience with contemporary art exhibitions that sometimes take up space used by the permanent collection.

Nonetheless, there was an abundance of fine colonial art on view during a recent visit to the museum. One of the jewels in the collection is a 17th-century oil painting, Los Ermitaños San Pablo and San Antonio by Baltasar de Echave Ibía, depicting the two gaunt saints as cave-dwelling hermits, with an eerie blue-gray mountainous landscape in the background.

Even more impressive is the Virgen del Apocalipsis, a circa-1760 oil painting roughly 12 by 12 feet by Miguel Cabrera, perhaps the best-known Mexican colonial artist. In this work, the Virgin is besieged by demons and monsters. She is defended by angels led by the Archangel Michael who steps on a seven-headed dragon and is about to thrust his sword through the beast. The Virgin, with the Infant Jesus in her arms, rises toward God in heaven and looks down with a hint of contempt at her would-be tormentors.

The museum has a series of paintings under the rubric of “castas,” or castes, that illustrated the phenomenon of race mixing. The Spaniards began their colonial regime with the simplistic notion that they could preside over two separate peoples – Spanish and Indian. The importation of African slaves added a third distinct racial element. And the inevitable sexual mingling of the three groups created a kaleidoscopic caste system.

An 18th century “casta” painting by Francisco Clapera, De Indias Salen Mestizos (From Indians Come Mestizos), portrays an Indian woman and her extended family, her mestizo children and their Spanish father. The canvas also shows the professions, including farming, artisanry and simple commerce, that Indians and mestizos were allowed to pursue. The Spanish father is mounted on his horse—something not permitted to Indians—and is about to ride off, an indication that he is only an occasional visitor to the household.

The Philadelphia Museum’s exhibition, by focusing on South American colonial art, offers a difference perspective on Spanish colonial art than that provided by Mexico City’s museums. In an interview printed in the show’s catalogue, Roberta Huber remarks that South American colonial paintings “lack some of the polish of the works made in Mexico.” She goes on to suggest that the greater distance between the Peruvian viceroyalty and Spain somewhat lessened the mother country’s more overbearing influence on Mexican colonial painting.

This was especially true of the so-called Cuzco School of Peru, based in the former Inca capital and strongly influenced by the Quechua painter Diego Quispe Tito (1611–81). Like his works, the paintings of the Cuzco School focused almost exclusively on religious subjects, using predominantly reds, yellows and browns, with abundant gold leaf, and were marked by a lack of perspective.

Although there are no Quispe Titos in the Philadelphia Museum show, it does include several notable, anonymous 18th-century Cuzco paintings from the Hubers’ collection. Saint Michael the Archangel depicts the calmly determined archangel, dressed in rich blue, gold, red and green fabric, plunging his lance into a horned, beaked and furious-faced dragon writhing at his feet. A smaller oil painting, Guardian Angel, shows a large angel, elaborately robed in red, blue and gold, resting a hand on the head of a child, dressed in simple white. The flat landscape behind them is a lush green with pale-blue mountains.

Some of the more arresting works in the Philadelphia exhibition don’t quite fit into any category. Christ Child, an 18th-century polychrome wood carving that may or may not be Brazilian, shows a pudgy, curly blonde Infant Jesus with head inclined downwards, eyes closed in prayer, hands pressed together and a cloth draped across his lap. It was purchased by the Hubers in Buenos Aires in 1987.

Even more intriguing is a loan from the Brooklyn Museum of an 18th-century Bolivian Festival Hat, from the silver-boom city of Potosí. It is made of silver animals and religious symbols hammered in relief and set on velvet with glass beads and wire. Truly, a work of art unique to the colonies, with only the slightest nod towards the mother country.

Doug Rickard, #29.942566, New Orleans, LA, 2009

Featured Images: (Click to Enlarge)

We live in an age of image overload, from tumblr to Instagram to Google Images. If you spend any time online, it begins to feel like an incoherent sea of pictures, without rhyme or reason. But a number of contemporary photographers have dived into the massive pool of Web-based images to create bodies of work that stems from a sharp curatorial eye and an editorial impulse to create meaning out of chaos.

In his ongoing series A New American Picture, Doug Rickard has created a visual narrative about disenfranchised areas of the United States using images selected from Google Street Views. These are the pictures taken from the cameras on top of the fleet of Google cars continuously traveling the county. Rickard selects neighborhoods that he assumes might be socio-economically disadvantaged (Detroit, Baltimore, Camden, N.J.) and follows the Google car on his computer. When he sees an image he likes, he takes a photograph of it on his computer screen with a large-format camera.

There is a faded, painterly quality to these photographs, which have been likened, in their emptiness, to Edward Hopper paintings. But the series has also been situated squarely in the social documentary tradition of photography. The Village Voice dubbed Rickard, whose work appeared in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2011 exhibition, “the Google Riis” after the 19th-century social documentarian Jacob Riis. Yossi Milo, who represents Rickard, draws a line from his work back to such early street photographers as Walker Evans and Robert Frank. “He is using technology to his advantage,” says Milo, “to give a sense of what’s happening all over the country.” What’s happening is not good—a single soul in the desolate parking lot of a car wash in Dallas; four young men walking past an untended, overgrown cemetery in New Orleans—but the pictures themselves are eerie and persuasive.

Using the same technology, but to different ends, Jon Rafman captures strange and serendipitous moments around the world in his series 9 Eyes of Google Street Views. His photographs are uncanny and sometimes unexpectedly poetic: a stunning picture of the skeleton of a half-sunken boat in Norway, a tiger strolling across a parking lot in Boulder, Colo., and a baffling shot of a baby—alone—crawling on the sidewalk outside of a Gucci store in Taiwan. “I’m famous with tumblr kids; they’re my demographic,” the Montreal-based photographer told the London Independent last summer. With exhibitions in the last year at London’s Saatchi Gallery, L.A.’s M+B Gallery and the New Museum’s monthly First Look series, his demographic has definitely expanded.

Google Earth is the tool favored by Dutch artist Mishka Henner. Introduced in 2005, the satellite imagery provides aerial views of earth, but due to security concerns, many governments use blurring and pixelization to conceal certain areas in the images. The Dutch, surprisingly perhaps, were most strict in terms of digitally blotting out what they consider sensitive areas. In his Dutch Landscapes series, Henner captures these digitally altered images, in which the censorship is, at times, almost comical, since the blob-like polygons only draw more attention the area they’re hiding. But they also result in handsome, geometric abstractions that bring to mind Cubist paintings or works from the Dutch-born De Stijl movement, which emphasized pure abstraction. “Henner does what any documentary photographer does,” says Joanna Lehan, one of the curators of the ICP triennial, A Different Kind of Order, from May 17–September 8, which includes Henner’s work. “He investigates a place and tries to show us what a certain place and time looks like. It just so happens that the place he’s showing us is virtual space.”

The triennial also includes the work of South African photographer Mikhail Subotsky. As it happens, South Africa is the source of some of the most politically engaged but also visually arresting contemporary photography being produced. Subotsky teamed up with British artist Patrick Waterhouse to create the project Ponte City, which is in the triennial. A 54-story building in Johannesburg that has become a symbol of the city’s problems and the country’s post-apartheid struggles, Ponte City was built in 1976, when the surrounding neighborhood was largely white. But with the end of apartheid in 1994, many white residents fled the city for the suburbs. The building has changed hands several times and is now partly occupied and only partly renovated.

Subotsky and Waterhouse created three lightboxes that include photographs taken between 2008 and 2010 of every window, internal door, and television set in the building. The towering, vertical lightboxes, which move from geometric abstractions to information-rich imagery, depending on how closely you view them, echo the scale of the building itself. Though rooted in social documentary, the typologies bring to mind a colorful version of work by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their protégés.

A number of South African photographers have similar concerns about race and class, but they’ve approached the visual manifestation of those issues in different ways. The exuberant work of Robin Rhode, on view early this year at Lehmann Maupin, combines street performance, graffiti, drawing and photography. At once street smart and indebted to the history of conceptual art, Rhode’s photographs document frame-by-frame sketches, in soap or charcoal or paint on a wall, of a simple narrative: the arc of a baton as it twirls through the air, a small ship crisscrossing through a current, a bird making its way from perch to perch on a length of barbed wire.

The artist himself interacts with the drawings as they unfold in the photographs, and his work casts a wide net in terms of references, from South African traditions of storytelling and mural making to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, stop-action films, flip books, and street artists like Vito Acconci, whom Rhodes has cited as an early influence. Race and class are swept up into his work, but the issues take a back seat to gesture and a sort of whimsical grit.

South African photographer Zaneli Muholi engages much more directly with the politics of her country—in this case, discrimination against the gay and lesbian community. Her ongoing series Faces and Phases, on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery through April 6, includes black-and-white portraits, in the classical tradition, of South African lesbian and transgender subjects. Her quietly formal portraits recall August Sander but also Catherine Opie: Muholi’s subjects gaze directly, confidently, into the camera and out at the viewer, surely part of the politics of her work. “She sees this project as a way of mapping the community and giving voice and dignity to these individuals,” says Yancey Richardson. The American artist Mickalene Thomas included Muholi in a show she curated last summer for Richardson, and her work immediately garnered interest from curators and collectors. “For me, the work is about gender fluidity,” adds Richardson, “the idea that it’s not fixed and can exist across a spectrum.”

Zwelethu Mthethwa has long been known for his vivid, large-scale color photographs, and his series The Brave Ones also touches on gender fluidity. The series features portraits of young Zulu men who are members of the Nazareth Baptist Church near Mthethwa’s hometown of Durban, South Africa. As part of a ceremonial retreat, they dress in black or pink kilts, white blouses and headbands. The gender-bending aspects of these photographs are fascinating, but their visual abundance outshines anything else: the handsome young men in their confident poses, the brightly colored clothes, the lush landscapes. They are richly detailed and sumptuous images.

Portraiture is, of course, one of the primary threads running through this history of photography. There is something undeniably compelling about the human face, its expressiveness and enigmatic qualities. But some of the best portrait photography in recent memory, by Dutch photographer Charlotte Dumas, has focused not on people but on horses. As part of a commission by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Dumas made a series of tender, almost romantic, portraits of the U.S. army horses who pull the caissons carrying fallen soldiers’ caskets to Arlington National Cemetery. She took the photographs in the stables, after the horses had completed their jobs for the day and were resting, sometimes sleeping. “The horses are white, they’re shown falling asleep, and on a metaphorical level,” says dealer Julie Saul, who showed the work in early 2013, “there’s a deathlike quality to them, but also an angelic quality.”

Collectors can be skeptical of animal portraiture, and rightly so, since they can easily be sentimental or overly anthropomorphizing. But Dumas has a history of making portraits of working animals—rescue dogs after the September 11 attack, police horses in Amsterdam, racehorses in Palermo—that are inexplicably poetic and rich. “Her work is about the symbiotic relationship between man and animals, “says Saul, who first saw Dumas’s work about nine years ago and snapped up a photograph of a horse for herself. “There’s a particular quality to her work that is hard to describe, but it fits into the history of portraiture.”

Perhaps it has to do with the rich history of portrait painting in Holland and the influence of masters like Rembrandt and Vermeer, but the country produces great photographic portraitists. Rineke Dijkstra may be the best known, but her compatriot Hellen van Meene makes portraits of adolescents—and dogs, as it turns out—that are both wonderfully peculiar and steeped in the tradition of 17th-century portrait painting. Her recent body of work included intimate, psychologically rich photographs of introspective, semi-clothed young women and portraits of dogs, photographed on oriental carpets against richly colored backdrops, who seem, in contrast, quite sure of themselves. Her use of light gives the subjects both a softness and a richness found in the work of few other contemporary photographers.

Jill Greenberg, for instance, comes at portraiture from an entirely different place. Her photographs—whose subjects have included monkeys, bears and most recently horses—are staged and Photoshopped to achieve glamorous or humorously quirky expressions. She has said that if her pictures of monkeys and bears can be likened to celebrity portraiture, the horses are like supermodels, and indeed the beautiful specimen in Casey #4-50 seems to be eyeing us coyly from behind a well-coiffed forelock. “The Horse photographs are more formal,” says Brian Paul Clamp, owner of ClampArt, which showed her Horse series in the fall, “more like figure studies.”

Greenberg may be best known for a portrait series called End Times (a book of the work has just been published by T.F. Editores and Interactiva), which features highly detailed, large-scale portraits of toddlers crying. Greenberg, who has two children of her own, has said that the toddlers’ emotions reflected her own feelings of anger and helplessness regarding the war in Iraq and the general political tenor of the times, but they attracted their share of controversy. “Her work falls in line with the tradition of portraiture in photography—someone like Yousuf Karsh, even,” says Clamp, “but it’s portraiture that’s appropriate for this present moment. It’s definitely portraiture with a twist.”

That would certainly describe Frieke Janssen’s series Smoking Kids, on view at Catherine Edelman Gallery through May 4. Her staged, stylized and digitally manipulated photographs show young children—somewhere between the ages of four and nine—smoking. None of them are actually smoking, of course. They’re holding cheese sticks or chalk, and the images were digitally altered after the photographs were taken, but the subjects replicate to an uncanny degree the gestures of adult smokers, blowing smoke rings, holding the cigarette palm up in a casually feminine gesture.

Janssens was inspired, if that’s the right word, by a video that came out on YouTube several years ago showing an Indonesian toddler smoking one cigarette after another. Janssens’ series plays with the idea of the repugnance with which people viewed that YouTube video versus the glamorization of smoking generally. She dressed her subjects in clothing from time periods when smoking was particularly fashionable—the Mad Men era, or early Hollywood.

“This was the most irreverent, funny, disturbing, poignant work I had seen in a long time,” says Edelman, and despite its provocative subject matter, collectors seem to agree. Edelman took the work to Art Miami, she says, and collectors snapped the work up. Perhaps no surprise, because it’s just this sense of irreverence and experimentation that draws dealers to contemporary photography—knowing they can still be surprised and captivated by a new twist on a genre, a new way of looking at the world. Photography is still a young medium, and its boundaries are still changing and growing. The photographers who are pushing those boundaries are the ones to watch.