{"id":20,"date":"2017-01-26T05:38:56","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T05:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/?p=20"},"modified":"2017-01-28T20:42:37","modified_gmt":"2017-01-28T20:42:37","slug":"does-art-need-passion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/2017\/01\/26\/does-art-need-passion\/","title":{"rendered":"Does art need passion?"},"content":{"rendered":"

MoMA’s current exhibition “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde<\/a> is important and interesting (and enjoyable!) for several reasons. \u00a0The show reminds us that a great museum has rich holdings in some (not all) fields, enabling major exhibitions without loans. \u00a0 This is not just about being cost-effective (when have museums ever cared about that). \u00a0It’s also about plumbing the depth of collections to display works that may have been acquired primarily for the museum’s archival role, so now the public gets to see more than just signature works. \u00a0This rich MoMA assemblage also quietly celebrates some major donors (e.g., McCrory\/Riklis, Judith Rothschild Foundation), while providing an [unannounced] first NYC commemoration of the centennial of the Russian Revolution (I assume there will be others). \u00a0It’s also a show of manageable size (whew!). \u00a0And a wonderful followup to MoMA’s monumental (and exhausting!) 2013 exhibition “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I was especially struck by\u00a0set of Goncharova lino prints on the wall before entering the show; she fuses Cubist ideas with allusions to both Russian and Western iconographic ideas, and\u00a0makes us especially aware of how imaginatively she cuts the linoleum (was it a newish material in 1914?) to create active spatial effects. \u00a0Then we see her 1913 (0r 1911)\u00a0Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest<\/em> announcing (yet again) expressionist tendencies that would soon be declared null and void (as the exhibition continues). \u00a0(Did Jack Tworkov ever see this painting?) \u00a0Nearby a small Kandinsky watercolor (Improvisation<\/em>\u00a01914) is so delicious it’s in that special category of “don’t wrap it; I’ll eat it here!”<\/p>\n

The exhibition creates a sense of excitement as we watch these artists in their rejectionist mode, believing that they can somehow start from scratch to both re-imagine and create art anew. \u00a0Some of the works by familiar artists (Tatlin, Malevich) are almost icons of modernism, so it’s difficult to see them anew. \u00a0But the exhibition contextualizes the familiar with works I hadn’t seen before, which is one of its strengths. \u00a0Trying mightily to defy tradition, the most persuasive works still rely on conventional ideas such as space, color, form, balance<\/em> (or attempts at\u00a0denial of\u00a0their importance). \u00a0And this valiant fight against what came before (even worthy of a kind of high-school-poster diagram) ends up feeling amazingly sterile and lacking in emotion (if we get our “icons of art history” emotions out of the way). \u00a0There’s passion here — but it’s the passion of rebellion rather than aesthetic passion. \u00a0Evidently these guys are afraid to express feeling: that’s so yesterday.<\/p>\n

But oh, how that changes when they get excited by technology. \u00a0Passion re-enters with a vengeance for the adventure of exploring the possibilities of film. \u00a0Clearly the excitement of playing with new mediums involved a depth of feeling that overwhelms spare abstraction. \u00a0The gallery with the films (Eisenstein and more) makes this especially evident, as does the one with the Rodchenko photographs (definitely my favorite part of the show!). \u00a0Lots of passion here! \u00a0Along with subtlety in composition, focus, and printing. \u00a0Photography doesn’t get any better than this.<\/p>\n

The “passion” question stuck with me, so that this evening, at a Zankel Hall recital, I kept asking the same question. \u00a0Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello, and Alexander Melnikov, piano, gave technically astute performances. \u00a0But I wanted more. \u00a0A new piece by Yves Chauris (b. 1980), commissioned by Carnegie Hall, explored cello techniques (use and abuse of the instrument?) beyond anything I’ve ever heard, and it was sort of interesting, but also somewhat\u00a0bloodless and theoretical. \u00a0I kept thinking of Russian constructivism. \u00a0Beethoven’s A Major Sonata (one of my all-time loves) followed that and sounded a tad\u00a0antiseptic, despite the competence of the playing. \u00a0But after intermission things changed (do performers tipple in the Green Room?). \u00a0Anton Webern is still a stretch for me, but “Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano” (all of 3 minutes long!) was rich and romantic (and written in 1914, when that delicious Kandinsky watercolor was done) — and without pause they seguewayed right into Chopin’s G Minor Cello Sonata with a passion that was lacking in the first half of the concert, providing richly felt sounds. \u00a0It made me think of Jerry Lee Lewis and Kris Kristofferson: “Once More With Feeling.”<\/p>\n

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MoMA’s current exhibition “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde is important and interesting (and enjoyable!) for several reasons. \u00a0The show reminds us that a great museum has rich holdings in some (not all) fields, enabling major exhibitions without loans. \u00a0 This is not just about being cost-effective (when have museums ever cared … Continue reading “Does art need passion?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}