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To wrap up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, an altarpiece by Pietro in Pieve has its own Gothic architecture, with the main panel supporting a seeming church tower, and the gold background could almost pass for sky. Ambrogio takes one inside, his three-tiered household as three acts in a domestic drama. He gives people the run of the streets.

With Martini’s Orsini Polyptich, the cast moves every which way in the shallow space below the cross. They spill out from the city’s gates. Their gestures and props create a near chaos of competing pagans and worshippers.

The protagonists have a greater freedom and responsibility as well. Mary can draw back or look up from the angel of the Annunciation, her prayer book fallen aside. Martini’s Saint John has unkempt blond hair and clasped hands, at once youthful and reserved. His Pontius Pilate may be winning the argument with Jesus. More often, his bust-length saints glower, much as for Cimabue decades before in Florence. Miracles have becomes matters of fact.

Technique has a greater variety as well. Ambrogio sketches on plaster in sinopia, the earth pigment often used for the preliminary layer that a fresco will efface. Its faint outlines have survived, though, like the first thoughts of an artist today. He also plays with gold leaf as at once background, a tooled halo, and jewelry for Mary herself. So much for the Virgin’s modesty. The red of simulated marble for Pietro could pass for blood.

By 1350, all four artists and their rivals were dead. Still, the black plague was about to set in, taking perhaps a third of the population. Historians have long seen it as bringing a premature end to the Renaissance’s cautious or daring beginning. Art after Giotto in Florence will look dour and disheartened as well. It can only look back. Whether Siena ever could look ahead must remain up for debate.

The curators have a lot to reconstruct and far to travel. It shows in their affiliations alone—Stephan Wolohojian of the Met, Laura Llewellyn of London’s National Gallery, and Caroline Campbell of Ireland’s National Gallery, with Joanna Cannon of the Courtauld Institute in London. They were bound to open with the Met’s Stoclet Madonna, and they were bound to describe it in glowing terms. Mostly, though, they supply a convincing back and forth between context and the four leading artists. They also pause for large works and works in series. One need never get lost in the maze of dark walls.

They do not, though, include contact with Florence or classicism. Nicola Pisano, who worked between Florence and Pisa shortly before, was closer than those here to ancient Rome and its influence. His sculpture looks ahead to Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, Donatello, and Michelangelo in the next century. The show does stop in Assisi, but with no indication that Giotto may have worked there, and in Arezzo, but with no mention of Piero della Francesca and his frescoes there yet to come. A comparison could have added context, just as in paired slides in a lecture. The Met, though, has a case to make, a case for Siena.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, against that background, the show can afford to stick to a small but significant circle of artists. Duccio had an heir in Simone Martini, a student.

Two other likely students, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, kept separate workshops but stayed close in style and everything else. The Met speculates that two of their panels once hung together as a diptych. (It cannot point to hinge marks or external evidence.) It ends with Martini to bring the story back to its source.

Duccio has his hand everywhere. Whenever a man at the cross raises a lance without piercing the side of Jesus, he quotes Duccio and the artist’s love of crowds. In fact, pretty much any genre quotes Duccio on account of a single altarpiece, the Maestà, commissioned in 1303, with close to fifty panels. It takes its name, meaning majesty or triumph, from the largest panel, front and center, of an enthroned Madonna. The ranks of angels to either side do little but add color, like the rhythms of a song celebrating her glory. One can practically hear it.

One cannot hear much else. Losers do not write history, but artists and poets do, and they had begun to erase Siena from Renaissance history before its work ended. Dante wrote of how Cimabue in Florence, who had his own Maestà in 1280, once held the field but is now eclipsed by Giotto. (No wonder he was in Purgatory for the sin of pride.) Years later, Vasari, himself a Renaissance painter, began his Lives with just those two artists. Sometime around Vasari’s birth in 1511, the dismantling of Duccio’s altarpiece had already begun.

The Met reconstructs it anyway, with photographs and wall text for its front and back. It also brings together one side of the entire predella, or supporting bottom row. That may not sound impressive, but it extends the length of a wall, and it shows Duccio as an able story-teller. A predella often constructs a narrative, and this one is about the ministry of Jesus—with miracles subordinate to a commanding life. Duccio builds a story by relating one figure to another and both to a city very much like Siena. It creates a cumulative picture of a rocky landscape and farmland just outside formidable city walls.

In a panel from the Frick Collection, the devil tempts Jesus with the seven cities of the world. The black devil looks rather like a bearded Richard Nixon, and Jesus looks relaxed and impassive. Each city has its own size and design, but all crisp and candy-colored. Duccio just cannot individuate his actors all that much, and he has no room for city streets. No one really loves or suffers, and no one plays an obvious part. He does, though, have his temptations. It will take the remaining artists to have more.

Their approach is startling. Pietro Lorenzetti depicts the Crucifixion on a shaped panel with an irregular base, where a skull rests on green earth. It has an illusion of depth that brings death home while introducing painting to landscape. A more conventional panel from his brother gives the infant Jesus a fuller body and dark eyes. He looks away from his mother’s breast, coy and aware. There may be a human world after all in scripture and Sienna—and I continue next time with more on Duccio’s fellow artists.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, the Met has been building a case for Siena since 2004, when it spent $45 million on a Madonna and Child by Duccio. It was all but asking for controversy, as the surest route to publicity, and got it.

The New York Times wondered at the price for a painting “no bigger than a sheet of typing paper.” A professor at Columbia, James H. Beck, called it a forgery. Today the Met boasts more than ever of its treasure, and it stands apart as prologue to the exhibition. It has an intimacy and delicacy long associated with Duccio, and its very size indicates a painting not for churches, but for private devotion. One can still see the marks of candle flames on its bottom edge.

So, at any rate, the Met says, but a new era really does begin with Duccio di Buoninsegna in Siena and Giotto in Florence. Duccio’s infant Jesus reaches up to his mother, affirming his, Mary’s and a believer’s reverence and affection. In another Madonna, the child takes hold of a golden veil, extending it to the right. It has become a token of royal grandeur. It all takes place just behind the illusion of a carved-wood parapet, setting Jesus and Mary into a space at once yours, too, and theirs alone. That establishes intimacy, too.

True, Beck finds the gesture so badly painted as to rule out the work’s authenticity, the arm a mere stump. He also finds the parapet without precedent for at least another hundred years. Still, it is a wonder that anything survives as more than a stump when the entire surface is cracked, peeling, and overcleaned. And maybe, just maybe, the parapet is an innovation. As it is, there is no clear precedent for Duccio himself. He may have studied in France, Florence, or anywhere at all.

It is just the kind of dispute that has told against Siena for ever so long. It and Florence are little more than an hour apart by car, by much the same route that a trader took back then, but they could be a lifetime apart. Oh, and did I mention Giotto along with Duccio? Western art history often compares the two—in order to introduce the Renaissance in Florence. Lectures show their work on two screens, the better to explain the greatness of Giotto. And Duccio has nothing of his solid, almost columnar human forms, real spaces, and human personalities, filled with fear and love.

Not that the comparison means to write off Duccio as the last stand of medieval art—the art that Giotto surpassed. It means only to distinguish two artists and two paths to what was then the future. Still, a class may never mention Siena again. The Met is out to change that. It has a habit of throwing its weight around on behalf of new narratives and new attributions. For once, though, its expertise and arrogance may pay off.

It connects Tuscany to broader trends in Europe. It includes sculpture from Italy and France, much of it more delicate, intricate, and fully modeled than Sienese painting. It includes manuscript illumination in France by Jean Pucelle and later the Limbourg brothers. And the influence ran both ways. It has an aside for textiles, at least one of which appears in the background to a painting. That trade route was also the Silk Road—and I continue next time with Duccio’s place in history.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Can this be the Dark Ages? Europe in 1300 was bursting with art and light.

Gothic architecture had soared into the light and brought it into the cathedral. In the quiet confines of books and illuminated manuscripts, rtists were beginning to picture medieval life as never before. Philosophy, a school called Scholasticism, had blessed intellectual inquiry. It positively demanded a return to classical times and the rigor of Aristotle—in the service, of course, of true belief. And so much more was to come, if, that is, one knew where to look. How about, say, to Tuscany?

A weak pope was facing greater challenges, even as trade routes to the East brought new goods, new ideas, and a new prosperity. And a key route, connecting France and Italy, ran right through Tuscany—in particular, though Siena. Local princes were showing their strength, and Siena was styling itself a republic dedicated to the Virgin. It also held off its chief rival, Florence, in war earning the right to try. The Renaissance was not so very far off after all, and the Met looks beyond Florence for its origins. It is “Siena: The Rise of Painting,” through January 26, and it will be my subject all this week, with an extra post tomorrow for Siena’s place in Europe and now the Met.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

From the start, Thomas Schütte was destined to be the next big thing, and he delivers big things as well. Now if only the little things mattered along the way. For conceptual art that keeps you thinking, turn instead to Rodney Graham. And I work this together with a recent report on Graham and another class clown, KAWS and the KAWS collection, as a longer review and my latest upload. Is Graham, too, just clowning around? I am not so sure, but first to Schütte.

One can hear the expectations in his titles—Large Wall, Large Wallpapers, Large Spirit, Father State, and Mother Earth. One can see it in his care to recycle his themes often enough to spread the word. One can hear it words, traced on the wall above the entrance to his exhibition at MoMA, through January 18. Alles in Ordnung, he writes in simulated jet trails, perhaps on his way to an international career. “All Is in Order,” which is only fair when all is in his hands. Once inside, things can only get bigger.

That large wall simulates a brick wall, interrupted by another wide passage between rooms, in simulated bricks akin to dozens of monochrome paintings. Just before it, the twelve and a half foot bronze of the father state faces visitors with an ample robe and impassive smile. Trust me, it says, but do not even think to get past me. Born in 1954, Schütte lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a larger state, with grand new construction and memorials to match. The artist has no patience for such politics, power grabs, and platitudes, but he matches them in every way. It is what makes his work conceptual but reassuringly material.

Schütte has not had nearly the presence in New York that he has found with European fairs and collectors. Even close followers of contemporary art may be surprised to find him in the museum’s largest exhibition space. His large work and frequent repetition make a visit quick and easy all the same. Works appear in no obvious order, least of all chronological, which is only fair. The greatest number date from close to when his expectations began. He painted and sculpted his own grave in 1981, with a death date of 1996, because he gave himself fifteen years to make it big, and that’s that.

He came up just when art was taking on its own new expectations, which could easily have excluded him, but Schütte caught on and made it his subject. For the curators, Paulina Pobocha with Caitlin Chaisson, art was seeing the decline of Minimalism and a surge of conceptual art, but plain old realism was just too appealing for him to pass up. Perhaps, but he could never let go of anything. He studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf with Gerhard Richter and a stellar cast, including Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth. Richter could have shown him how the lushest of paintings, abstract or representational, could pose intellectual puzzles. Struth showed how the art of museums could pose the same questions, Gursky how large projects could remake the human landscape.

He was fine all along with Minimalism, but it had to be at least halfway conceptual. He paints with a single color on swatches of fabric or plaster, and his wallpaper has delicate verticals that recall Daniel Buren, but with an overlay of stains and brush marks. He starts with more strictly conceptual art, but it has to be skillful as well. He gives himself a day apiece and no more for self-portraits, just as he gave himself fifteen years to succeed. He sketches Valium, like Andy Warhol with a heavier dose of anxiety and irony. Don’t worry, and for god’s sake be happy.

Still, he built his reputation on sculpture. Genzken had shown how portrait busts can look makeshift and sloppy, and Schütte fashions a man lost at sea from oozing polyester and clay. Almost immediately, though, busts acquire a fine polish in ceramics or bronze. Most are of women, with their heads down in a vain search for comfort and rest. Some are men, as Strangers or Jerks. Both are an assault on the pretensions of public sculpture.

Schütte is less well known for full-length figures like Father State and Mother Earth, but they, too, can look grand while refusing to play the hero. Some have a silvery finish on comic-strip body armor or bulging muscles, but in poses that all but shout torment. The busts can rest on pedestals or shipping crates. He has much the same love-hate relationship with architecture old and new, including models of museums and mansions that will never be built. A concrete cylinder could be a bomb shelter, but then it emits dog yelps like another kind of shelter entirely.

From realism and public works to conceptual puzzles and Modernism’s last gasp, Schütte is showing off. Long after his self-portraits, his real subject is himself. He obsesses over it, with no end of sketches and prints. Take what pleasure you like in oversized slices of watermelon as Melonely, and do not take too seriously the hints of melancholy and loneliness. Do take seriously or comically an artist at home and in his studio, with a clothes closet, a rack for socks, miniature easels, and pitifully small collectors. It is not easy being a great artist, but Schütte will do, he promises, whatever it takes.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

What better way to welcome the new year than with my least favorite show of the past one? And it is not quite gone. Ring out the old as best you can.

Could KAWS be a serious collector? Your answer may depend on whether you accept him as a serious artist. I am not so sure, but the Drawing Center is counting on it, through January 19, with the KAWS collection.

To be sure, his work is an assault on the whole idea of seriousness, in or out of art. His cast of characters, from the Simpsons to the Michelin Man, is always smiling. He can hardly restrain a smile himself with his second museum appearance in barely three years. Yet he is a collector, of thousands of pieces in an eclectic mix of art-world regulars and the comics. If you cannot tell the difference, that could be the point, and mainstream critics are eating it up. The KAWS collection searches for art high and low, in more than one sense, but its heart is in the comics and the comedy.

Right on the way in, to both sides of the entrance, KAWS includes colorful evil creatures out of an epic battle and reserved faces bearing the subtitle Original. But then you know not to look at either evil or claims for originality without smiling. Postmodernists questioning the “originality of the avant-garde” and post-Siri-alists can only agree. The collection includes self-taught artists like Adolf Wölfli along with street artists like FUTURA 2000, but then no one, however naïve, is immune to convention. What counts as outsider art anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.

KAWS himself (in real life, whatever that means, Brian Donnelly) began with graffiti and graduated to commerce. The highlight of his Brooklyn retrospective may well have been the gift shop, and the show was an exercise in branding for the museum as much as him. Even now, passing his huge cartoon Companions in the museum lobby, in polished wood, I cannot eradicate the pit in my stomach. The Drawing Center has only a modest lobby gift shop (with its own merchandise, not his), but it has succumbed to commercialism all the same. That still, though, leaves the real question: can it keep you smiling and get you thinking?

The results are mixed. KAWS could make Banksy, with his own museum just two blocks away, a model of self-sacrifice and Jeff Koons a model of integrity. And the layout can keep one guessing or get one giving up. The collection fills the entire Drawing Center in no obvious order, by theme or anything else. Three sections identify artists and titles only on plastic cards, and even those take an effort to find. Who needs artists anyway?

Taken differently, though, they create their own context for art. Two of the three resemble the living rooms and study centers favored by museums today. Works there hang on the wall and occupy platforms much like furniture, including robotic sculpture. And artists do cross over into the mainstream, including Joyce Pensato, Lee Lozano, and Willem de Kooning. Each has the fierceness of the artist’s own battles between forces of darkness and light. They leave open what to call demonic, sophisticated, or funny.

Too much else does not. R. Crumb has his usual high anxiety, and Peter Saul gets to misspell KILL, but you know their routine cold. Is there still something special about popular culture, alienation, or art? Just wait for the next installment in the series. KAWS is smart enough and dedicated enough to keep them coming. And for goodness sake keep smiling.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.