Last Call: Francesca Woodman at the Guggenheim, closing June 13

Francesca Woodman, Guggenheim Museum, 
March 16-June 13, 2012

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, 

Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. 

Gelatin silver print, 13.3 x 13.3 cm. 

© George and Betty Woodman,

 courtesy George and Betty Woodman

One of this season's most important exhibitions is about to close: the first survey of Francesca Woodman photographs in New York since the first traveling retrospective in 1986-88, presented at Hunter College in NY, Wellesley in Massachusetts, University of California at Irvine and Krannet Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois.  

Review of Chasing Aphrodite: The Getty Mess Sparks a Summer Sizzler

(originally published in Venice Magazine, July-August 2011, and posted on Chasing Aphrodite Facebook page)

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2011)

How would Gustave Flaubert update his Madame Bovary in 2011?  Perhaps, he would recast her as an ambitious art history student, eager to please and aching to get away from a boring working-class life just outside of Boston (Newburyport, to be precise).  Let’s say this updated Emma Bovary completes her degree at NYU and continues on to Harvard for a Ph.D. program but drops out when she meets an older, well-off cardiologist, looking for a trophy wife.

Now this contemporary Emma Bovary first seeks upward mobility through her marriage, just like her nineteenth-century counterpart, and spends far in excess of what her husband’s prenup lifestyle considered reasonable  – just like Flaubert’s Emma who hitched her wagon to a lowly country physician.  Dissatisfied and frustrated, our contemporary Madame Bovary takes $50,000 out of the join bank account to put a down-payment on her own condominium.  No suicide for this desperate housewife.  She got herself a Honda CVCC (surprisingly, not a Porsche) and rode out of the marriage into a heterosexually gay-divorcée sunlight.

Then what? 

Where in the world is Beth Gersh-Nesic? One year later . . . .

Copy of Victorious Youth, Fano, Italy, overlooking the Adriatic Sea.

Photo: Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, June 8, 2011

One year ago Shelley Esaak posted the question "Where in the World is Beth Gersh-Nesic?" on her About.com: Art History website.   Where was I indeed?   In Fano, Italy, on a press junket that met with President Gian Mario Spacca, right in front of a copy of Atlete di Fano (Victorious Youth),* pictured above.  Here is the story:

One Hot Body – The Getty’s Victorious Youth (aka Atleta di Fano)

In 1977, the Getty Museum bought Victorious Youth for $3.95 million. Now Italy wants it back. An assortment of international journalists were invited to the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan on June 7, 2011 to listen to President Gian Mario Spacca, the governor of the Marche Region, plead his case for the return of the statue to Fano, located on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, in the heart of the Marche.  On May 3, 2012  the Italy courts ordered the return of this ancient sculpture - pronto. http://chasingaphrodite.com/2012/05/04/the-gettys-bronze-italian-court-upholds-order-to-seize-a-getty-masterpiece/

Unknown                                                   The sculpture before it was cleaned
Greek, 300 - 100 B.C.
Bronze
59 5/8 x 27 9/16 x 11 in.
77.AB.30

Here’s  the backstory . . . .

Last Call - Steins Collect at the Met, closing June 3

The Steins in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus, ca. 1905, 

From left, Leo Stein, Allan Stein, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Ehrman, Sarah Stein, Michael Stein

Bancroft Library, Berkeley

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde,  February  28-June 3, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The poet/critic  André Salmon wrote in his memoir L’air de la Butte (1945): “When we went to poor Rousseau’s home, we dressed as carefully as when we were invited to visit the high society couturier and arts patron Paul Poiret. We dressed even better than when we went to see the Steins, the brother and sister millionaires who came from San Francisco, posed as transatlantic bohemians and lived near the Luxembourg Gardens. On those evenings on the rue de Fleurus, in a study adorned by [Picasso’s] excellent Saltimbanque Period canvases and in a boudoir studded, like stars, with little Renoirs, an ordinary suit from the wardrobe would do.”* 

According to John Richardson, in his second volume of Picasso’s biography,  Gertrude Stein was as capable of following a conversation in French as the artists were capable of following her writings in English – that is, not very well.

Last Call - Yorgo Alexopoulos: Transmigrations, through April 5

If you are like me this week, you have no time to stroll through Chelsea for unexpected wonders.  You have to cook and clean and great ready for the holidays - or maybe not.  Maybe you are going to be a guest.  Congratulations - you are in luck.  Now hurry, please, to Cristin Tierney's gallery for the last day of "Yorgo Alexopoulos: Transmigrations," a wondrous video installation packed with images from photos, drawings, paintings and video on 24 flat-screen monitors.  Inspired by Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody, a 987-enamel plate installation from 1976 (perhaps one of her best known works), Alexopoulos brings a new dynamic to the grid aesthetic.  Here his quick succession of images plunge us into worlds that touch on nature, fantasy and the beyond - a sort of digital meets spiritual.  We float, we fly, we soar through innumerable realms of visual splendor.