Hol Art Books

Author-extraordinaire Amy Whitaker is on the final leg of her national book tour for Museum Legs. For those of you in Pittsburgh or anywhere near it, Amy will be giving a lecture and book signing at the Warhol tomorrow night at 7pm. Amy's spent the better part of two and a half months driving an enormous loop around the country, and though the trip itself is almost over you can catch up and follow along on her blog, where it's still joyfully only early October and she's only in Arkansas.

As much as about museums, Museum Legs is also Amy's exploration of, and paean to, creativity in everyday life. Her tour was no different. Much more than a standard issue slog from bookstore to bookstore, Amy also visited schools, museums, foundations, and corporate headquarters (including Google) and spoke as much about her unique vision of the creative, art-full world as she did about the specifics of the words on the page. I wish I could have been there throughout, but as a publisher and of course one of Amy's biggest fans, it's a joy even to watch (or at least read) from afar.

It's come to be one of life's great ironies that the more interesting things are going on with Hol, the less time or energy I have to post about them. Looking over my postings here and on Twitter for the past many months, you can pretty easily map my current state of mind. Not by what I wrote about, but by the times I failed to write at all.

I've been in Los Angeles for the past week, so it may be the agreeable weather and endless culture talking, but starting Monday (back in Tucson) I'm turning over a new leaf and will do my best to more regularly share the comings and doings at Hol. Especially when things get interesting! See you then.

Huge congratulations to Hol team member Tina A. Kover for winning a $12,500 NEA translation grant to work with us on the first English translation of the De Goncourt's 19th-century art novel, Manette Salomon! Read more about the book and download a sample of the translation here. Tina also recently translated "The Dance of Shiva" by Auguste Rodin, which is available in Hol Art Books' fall 2009 catalog and will be reprinted in Venus.

Great job Tina, it's well deserved!

In her upcoming book, Museum Legs, author Amy Whitaker cites E. L. Konigsburg's classic children's book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and calls it "Hands down, the best book ever written about art museums, a children’s classic that repays rereading—inventive and perceptively witty."

The books is about two children who decide to run away from home, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the museum they sleep in the beds on display, they take a bath in the fountain, and they become very interested in a sculpture that may or may not be by the great Italian artist, Michelangelo.

Growing-up, I managed to miss reading the book but couldn't resist reading it now. And indeed, it's a treat.

Another friend sent me the Met's family guide devoted to The Mixed-Up Files, which starts, "Here at the Museum, we get questions about all sorts of things. Some of the most frequently asked questions are about the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E. L. Konigsburg." (Find the guide on the museum's family guides web page, or download the PDF here, 900KB.) It even includes Konigsburg's own account of how she came up with the idea for the story.

[I'm no longer in New York, but I fell woefully behind so am continuing my At the Met series of posts this week.]

Today at the Met, I had books on the brain again. So, I started with Alexandra Lapierre's recent novel, Artemisia, which I found in the Met shop. The book is a fictionalization of the life of 17th-century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi, "the most famous woman painter of the seventeenth century".

From that book, a quick search of the Met's collection database turned up this painting:

"Esther before Ahasuerus", Alexandra Lapierre. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Image in hand, I started wandering the galleries in the direction I thought 17th-century Italian paintings should be. I must say, this kind of visual, roughly art-historical search was particularly satisfying, especially once I found the painting. It hangs in a far gallery in the back. As a matter of fact, it's right outside the Francis Bacon exhibition. Meaning, I'd passed through the gallery at least three times in the last week and never even noticed this seven by nine foot painting.

Perhaps for good reason. The wall label declares it as on of Gentileschi's more ambitious paintings, but conspicuously stops short of saying it's also one of her most successful. And they're right, it's not all that terrific a painting. The handling of the fabrics and embroideries are notable but, the overall composition is lacking and the handling of the main figures is rather unconvincing and inconsistent.

Looking beyond the main action of the work though, Gentileschi has a wonderful moment in her handling of the woman at the far left, who's catching the fainting Esther. The way this woman's face is painted, the coloring hidden in the shadow of Esther's neck, her face pressed in, whispering, urging forward in words and action -- very nicely done.

Standing in the gallery, in front of this painting, I kept thinking about the many things that can bring us to a particular work of art. Perhaps we were passing through the gallery and found some moment within it that grabbed our attention. Maybe we had some art historical background and knew that the painter was "the most famous woman painter of the seventeenth century". Or maybe we were one of the thousands of readers who first found the painter in a book.

Update on Monday, August 3, 2009 at 07:49AM by Hol Art Books

 

For further reading about Artemisia Gentileschi, check out Susan Vreeland's novel The Passion of Artemisia, or for the more academically inclined, The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, edited by Mieke Bal.

Looking at and writing about random work of art was starting to feel a little too self-indulgent, so today at the Met, I decided to bring it back to books.

One of the current exhibitions is Francis Bacon, and as it happens, there are a number of notable books on the artist: Michael Peppiatt's biography of the artist, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma; the collected writings and interviews Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, also by Peppiatt; and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze.

The exhibition was nice, just about the right size to get a good sense of the artist's work without exhausting it, or yourself. The works were well hung, the gallery walls cleanly painted, and of course there was the ubiquitous wall text and wall labels.

Not including archival materials, there were 65 works in the exhibition, 52 of which had wall labels. The shortest was around 36 words, and the longest around 108. All together there were some 3,564 words on the 52 wall labels alone. Add to that some 1,576 words of wall text explaining the overarching theme/era of each gallery and you have more than 5,000 words of exhibition text. Equivalent to the first three chapters of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

I don't know when we came to the idea that an art exhibition should include so much text to read, and include it in a way that makes it physically difficult to read. Standing on your feet for an hour or two among crowds of people, small text adhered vertically to a wall at or below chest level... If we evaluate this as a reading experience, rather than an exhibition one, this design is a massive failure. Yet we persist.

As a visitor to the Bacon show, I was looking for words to put to these paintings to help me process and understand them. But because of the length of the exhibition texts and the negative experience of reading them, I was missing a lot of what was offered there and was left searching. And anyway, I didn't want to spend my time in the exhibition reading, I wanted to spend it looking. Offer something to help me engage with the works in front of me. Get me so interested in the work that by the last room of the exhibition, I want to buy one of the dozen books on the artist and read more. Maybe, just maybe, I'll even then come back to the exhibition another time, after having spent days (not just the minutes or hours I would have gotten in the show) reading about the work.

So, if the new mission of exhibition texts is to engage rather than to inform, what would they look like? Well, what if instead of three paragraphs of didactic exhibition text, the Met opened the exhibition as Deleuze opened his book?:

"Francis Bacon's painting is of a very special violence"

In fact, there's more to gain from the summary of single chapter from Deleuze's book than in the thousands of words offered on the exhibition labels:

"Man and animal — The zone of indiscernibility — Flesh and bone: the meat descends from the bone — Pity — Head, face, and meat"

Or what if, instead of telling me Bacon was inspired by T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and the work of Frederico Garcia Lorca, the labels simply quoted from the poets themselves? Or, as Peppiatt does in Studies for a Portrait, quoted Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness?:

"I saw him open his mouth wide — it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him."

Or, again as Peppiatt, why not quote the artist himself?:

"[Bacon] talked famously about wanting his pictures 'to look as if a human being had passed between them, lie a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence,' and his hope that he would one day be able to paint the mouth as Monet painted a sunset."

"'What I really like,' he once said, 'are phrases that cut me.'"

To me, these short, well-written, evocative texts give me a better grounding and more to think about than thousands and thousands of words of exhibition texts do.