HUDSON  ART  WALK, Columbia County, NEW YORK 

Two hours north of Manhattan is a wonderful landscape: The Hudson Valley. The train runs north hugging the Hudson River all the way to the small town of Hudson. It's one of the most beautiful trips in America. 

Hudson was an important port in the 18th & 19th C with wealthy folk, sea merchants & great architecture. Then came economic decline. From 1980 antique dealers gradually took over the long main street and revitalised the whole place. Now art galleries also flourish: 27 according to the Hudson guide. Many are poor. Only a few are serious.
For the last 18 years the Annual Arts Walk has enlivened things, with all, (or most) of the shop windows - plumbers, electricians, food shops, bookshops, men's outfitters - displaying art. Pictures everywhere. The gallerist Carrie Haddad, organised things well.
But things aint what they they used to be! This year is very disappointing. Windows full of chairs, lamps, antiques, cheese, ..... mid-century modern. Little art. Bad art.

But there is always light if one looks. Award winning sculptor GILLIAN JAGGER is showing memorable new work at the Davis Gallery, art@johndavisgallery.com    At 83, she has a long successful career behind her, and is Prof Emeritus of Pratt. A year ago she visited the Eyzies Caves of southern France. These prehistoric cave carvings from 17,000 years ago have inspired the current work: wonderful huge expressive drawings of animals struggling, rolling, fighting for breath, fighting for life, and one massive 3D hanging animal sculpture created from wire. "I am trying to find the life in what is decay & death.. Life & death are meshed," she says. "I want the beauty of what I saw. I have to be true to my feeling."

Jagger, who was born in the UK, (daughter of renowned war sculptor Charles Jagger ) lives a rural life among her beloved horses and cattle. Few artists get animal anatomy right. Jagger does. She knows her creatures inside out and captures their spirit with a surprising ease and economy of line. Something that only a lifetime's experience makes possible.

For more Gillian see https://vimeo.com/71546097 by Whirlwind Creative.

GEORGE  RICKEY  SCULPTURE  at Marlborough Gallery, New York.

Rickey grew up in Helensburgh, Scotland. His bedroom looked over the Clyde estuary, and he learned about engineering, wind, spin and tension from the local blacksmith, Clydeside engineering and from sailing. "I'm glad I had a Scottish education in my baggage," he told me back in 1982. Thirty years ago I was lucky to be able to give him his 75 b-day party in my house in Glasgow. His wife and 2 sons were there too. Now son Philip takes care of the estate. 

Rickey showed with Staempfli Gallery in New York and Gimples in London, then was for 30 years with Maxwell Davidson Gallery, before Marlborough. He turned to sculpture late, aged 43. This show of 18 small and 9 large stainless steel sculptures benefit from Marlborough's terrace overlooking 57th St. There circles turn gently - a big piece can take half a minute to swing from side to side - and his famous blades weave and dodge in the slightest breeze: movement with the bare minimum - classic, elegant airborne continuous kinetics like no other. Rickey's pieces have a unique, distinctive genius. marlborough gallery new york

This morning I opened a packet from curators at the Rickey Estate. It contained 2 pieces written by George, one from 1956 from Art & Artist.  Rickey's is the best voice about his art. He writes so well.

"My work must have air. Outdoors the air is never quite still, the direction changes, the breeze is, for the most part, silent. Outdoor space requires large pieces and outdoor wind strong ones. They must not only survive, but behave properly in a 40 or 50-mile-an-hour wind. The weight of rain will make a difference, not to mention snow and ice. I must watch a piece outdoors for months before I can be sure of it. In moving it gives to the wind, like a sailing ship.  ....... One becomes an artist against prudence; one needs, in addition to talent and energy, a lot of luck. I have been lucky. .. David Smith gave me my first and only welding lesson and the sound advice to be extravagant with materials. ..My concern  is with Movement itself. My technology is borrowed from crafts and industry. It has more in common with clocks than with sculpture. The materials are simple: stainless-steel sheet, rods, bars, angles, pipe; lead for counterweights."

"I will drill and bend and file and solder but I will think of the African mask-maker or the faces of Van der Weyden ... I intended to become an engineer as my father had been. Though brought up in Scotland,  I expected to follow in his footsteps at M.I.T. But a surfeit of calculus and advanced algebra revolted me just in time. .. The first real artist I saw was Bill (William) Hayter. He was stooping over an enormous canvas .... 

  

MATISSE at Marlborough Gallery, New York 

Eighty fabulous prints spanning 50 years 1900 to 1950, make this a MUSEUM quality show! It took 3 years to assemble. Many come from Matisse Family Collections including his grandson. Prices $20,000-80,000+ each.  

An economy of line is the memorable aspect of his work. How did Matisse say so much with so little? Lithography was especially suited to his art & many lithos are similar to his drawings because they ARE drawings - a crayon on stone or transfer paper. Exotic, sensuous nude odalisques posing amid patterned curtains, cushions, rugs, fabrics, are among the most beautiful.

The show starts with a self-portrait drypoint from 1900 (loaned from MoMA) and is followed by etchings, aquatints, linocuts and, late in life, colourful pochoirs (stencils to u & me.)
ALL the images are of women. Not one male. My husband visited Matisse in Paris in 1951 and, confident as he is, dressed in blue shirt,  orange, blue and black tie, to go with a salt and pepper suit. All ready to pose and be painted. It didn't work! Wrong sex!
The show, serious & scholarly, organised by Tara Reddi, travels to London & Madrid. www.marlboroughgallery.com

Friday Frivolity 

BANKSY is at large in Manhattan in what he calls his 1 month Manhattan "artist-in-residency"! 

The now famous black silhouette stencils appear and disappear in a matter of hours. Where? That's the trick. No-one knows. Pop up art. First one of a dog pissing on an iconic NY hydrant. Now u see it; now u don't. Each graffiti is accompanied by a phone number. Call and u get an ironic description plus great upbeat music. www.banksy.co.uk  "All I ever wanted was a shoulder to crayon," he says. Good fun. 

You may think private views are all about the pictures. Not so. A recent trend to the young and rich has pushed - Christies for example - into private views which start at 9pm and go till midnight, when all sensible folk are in bed! Really it's all about shoes and bags - as u can see here. Another trend is for THICK invitation cards. I mean THICK CARD solid enough to be a brick. Gagosian started it - now Pace and dominique levy  are following. A bad idea. Save that tree I say.

The last trend is the After Party - usual standard admission fee 300- 500 dollars. 

                                                                  sotheby's   shoes

In Chelsea Pace is showing white on white paintings by Robert Ryman who came to NYC in the 1950s to play jazz, and worked as a guard for years at MoMA. His 2010 multi-panel piece is titled "No Title Required."
PS. The links to my comments box and guest book are not working, so please do send any nice comments to me at Facebook and nasty ones to mail@birdsinmybeard.com. Thanks. 

BENCH AS SCULPTURE / SCULPTURE as PUBLIC ART 

New York City is an extraordinary place - especially when the sky is blue, & the sun shines with no humidity. But we all need somewhere to SIT. 

Museums and art galleries are the worst. Nowadays no old fashioned polished wood Victorian seats for the old or pregnant. Why not? 

But BROADWAY, now an urban idyll of greenery in the Fashion District, (between 5th and 9th Ave, and from 34 to 42nd St), has acquired 5 new benches!  on Broadway from 36th to 41st Street. Made of heather-coloured slate from Vermont by sculptor Del Geist,  delgeist.com/sculpture.html  ‎it's organic, natural & alive. The honed surface is smooth as silk; the edges rough cut. The geometry is in the stainless steel base. (Lyle Welding.) 

There are to be more benches within the next few months so look out for them, and sit. And hustle for more seats in art galleries too. If we all ask, they will find a way to provide them. 

Geist at the Taran Quarry in Poultney, Vermont working on the bench sculpture.

 www.fashioncenter.com

BALTHUS & INDIANA.  Which to tell you about first??

For 2 weeks in NYC there is an important exhibition opening event every day - sometimes 2 or 3,  plus the Christies & Sotherby auctions plus performances, art book fairs, art fairs, United Nations causing traffic standstill. Where to start?! So I will entice u with 2 images, both well known but one perhaps the most iconic, famous image of the 1960s - 

                                                            Indiana's Love from 1966
"Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees." —Robert Indiana, 

                                                                         Balthus

ROBERT INDIANA IS AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM & BALTHUS IS AT THE MET. http://metmuseum.org

INDIANA, born the same year as Warhol, is that most American of Pop artists. Inspired by highway signs, pinball machines, roadside neon and flashing slot machines, his big, bold. hard edged, colourful graphics are mesmerising. 

This is the largest ever show of his work. I wrote about Indiana's 2004 show, "Peace Paintings" for the Financial Times, financial times . Politics often inspire his work, in this instance the Iraq war produced a heartfelt cry WHY OH WHY in strident hues around a CND logo. The last oil there was HOWL, SHRIEK, SHOUT, SCREAM FOR PEACE. Nothing changes. He is still a master of of eye-catching mottos & slogans.

Sadly the show lacks any drawings or note books, which I am told by Simon Salama-Caro who is doing Indiana's catalogue raisonne, are beautiful. But the 100 works here - many large 8 ft paintings and lots of little known obelisk totem sculpture, fill an entire floor with vibrant 60s Pop style colour, design and stencilled lettering:  HUG EAT SIN DIE.  And of course LOVE with its slanted O, an image ubiquitous from millions of mugs, key rings, T shirts, even doormats.

Whitney Indiana installation 

Big surprise is the number of vertical wooden columns or herms and constructions of wood n' metal which start early - in 1959. Lacking cash for paint & canvas he began collecting old metal wheels and rubbish from the NY warehouses being demolish for Wall St's expansion. He said he made "The Lost into Found. Junk into Art. Neglected into Wanted. Unloved into Loved." He was soon putting short everyday words onto these via found stencils. At this time text like this was unprecedented, and says Barbara, "Audacious."

PS. For Scots - Indiana learnt to set metal printing type at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1950s. 

Director Adam Weinberg & eminent curator Barbara Haskell

                                   Simon Salama-Caro, director of the Indiana catalogue Raisonne

Back in Scotland it's  Open Doors day in Edinburgh - http://www.doorsopendays.org.uk. 127 places. Take advantage. I will report on Glasgow's events later. 

PARK AVENUE ARMORY and Lauren Flanigan

This huge one block square 1880s historic building had been grossly neglected for many years. Used for Art Fairs embellished with Picassos and 6 ft high floral arrangements it looked OK till u went to leave yr coat. In the cloakrooms the plaster peeled, leaks leaked and damp & dust covered the walls.

Named among the World's 100 Most Endangered Sites, by 2007 this central NYC edifice was being transformed via a $200m "revitalization." Already the vast 55,000 sq ft central hall has seen multimedia art events by Ann Hamilton, Boltanski & a memorable huge video environment by Ikeda, (Japanese artist not Ikea!) plus Merce Cunningham Dance, NY Philharmonic, next comes The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic,  http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org, premiered at Manchester's Festival 2011, and Kenneth Branagh's staging of Macbeth.

I wish there was more art and less performance but given the size of the space... see my big piece on the Armory in State magazine www.state-media.com for 2011.

http://armoryonpark.org

This week a 15 million dollar gift has restored one of the famous American Aesthetic style period rooms, which will be used for recitals, and maybe art installations. (The Tiffany room is already done.)  For Europeans it's not much to shout about but in the US it's architecturally important. With its 19th century proportions, the room has great acoustics - proved on Thursday by the wonderful award winning Lauren Flanigan who sang newly discovered Kurt Weill songs. She has performed with the Met Opera, La Scala & Glyndebourne etc etc & can do jazz, opera and anything u care to name.  I don't even like opera - but she was entrancing.

The room looked OK too! Architects are Herzog & de Meuron. herzog de meuron nyc They hope the main space will become  the NY equivalent of Tate's Turbine Hall. 

My bad pix of Lauren and her pianist Ricky Gordon - but better than nothing.  http://armoryonpark.org  http://state-media.com   http://armoryonpark.org