Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

Result #1

s Master of the Horse, 1902. "The Modern Man, a conspicuous absence in these catalogs, is treated with what the representative of the realms of culture, literature, and politics could only have hoped for—an apology for having passed to an inferior, amateur status. While I was trying to be thoughtful and a proper artist, and to give myself a fighting chance of doing something valuable with this gap, I felt as though I was being ignored, or, worse, the artist. Of course, the response was overwhelming: there were questions and criticisms. One could read the vitriol in the responses to the show—comments such as, How is this time different from the last time the exhibition was at this site?—but, in other words, questions of autonomy, of being part of the present, of the politics of the present, were addressed elsewhere. These ranged from the nostalgic (i.e., What about the hotel curtains?) to the frightening (If this is the end of the world, better bring someone to the museum to see if things are really as bad as they might first appear.) To allow this kind of reaction, one must not forget that the art of the present can be criticized as a secondary position in a fragmented world—as something one can only have a relationship with and can only accept in the old-fashioned sense, but not as something one can simply participate in. Once it is understood that these are prefigures of the distant future, it becomes clear that the central question raised by the show is whether the future can be found in art.

Result #2

in the 1930s—a twelve-foot-high canvas of a dying caveman holding a lantern and a snake, a wacko-house painting, and some depictions of black magic—like a modern-day ancestor or a fairy-tale villain. Like their fellow artists, they are also interested in mythic and allegorical traditions and in the relationship between nature and culture, between fantasy and reality. Some artists, like Duchamp and Picasso, are probably best represented in the show with pictures, although Picassos Portrait of Egon Schiele (Portrait of Egon Schiele), 1928, belongs in the constellation of works from the late 40s and 50s.Portrait of Egon Schiele: The New Art from France (in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Arts) will travel to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 6–October 18; Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 2, 1999–January 4, 2000.Rochelle Goldberg-Cohen is an associate professor of art history at Columbia University, New York.

Result #3

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, originally exhibited in New York in 1964, was the first work the artist exhibited in his native town, and an important one in the development of the current Bauhaus approach. The stunning appearance of such early Bauhaus artists as Raoul Dufrê and Le Corbusier led to a fascination with artistic artifacts that eventually coalesced into modern art. Rather than a theme, the exhibition is about the artist as a work of art. This opens the door to a host of questions: Why is van Gogh and his contemporaries relevant today? Is it possible that this symposium, with its national and international themes, should be viewed as an international event? (Vincent van Gogh, Complete Works [1932–45], 1965.) The interest of this show is therefore in how contemporary art has changed and how the past has come to be understood. There is no great distance from van Goghs works, nor is there a great gulf between his work and that of young contemporary artists. In fact, the Dutch artist van Lieshout should be considered as the epitome of a modern artist: the modern artist. Indeed, van Goghs intellectual and technical achievements are, as the Dutch architect Bruno de Meijer has written, a function of his position in the contemporary art world. Van Gogh and his contemporaries, as Jean-Louis Miró puts it in the catalogue, are concerned with methods of creating architecture. Today, in the era of the new architecture, van Goghs work is no longer about the construction of structures—that is, about the revolution of architecture as such. Rather, it is about the revolutionary possibility of architecture: to be founded on a shared, maturing process.A significant aspect of van Goghs work today is its relationship to architectural space, which is constantly reshaped by the artist. Van Goghs concept of architecture has been transformed by the emergence of new artistic languages such as performance and film.

Result #4

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, ca. 1905–1915 (not included here)—reminds us that art and life are not separate but are inextricably linked. Bloated and stroked with chocolate, spermatozoa, and silk, its knuckles hint at gonads, which are also flourishes and other traces of existence. The poem in the front gallery is a meagre, insouciant form of music with quills and allusion to the sweetly glandular voice of the child-poet. It is as though the music were simply held up by a pantswaist, or perhaps a childs saxophone. The words, with the faces of Goya and Napoleon he wore at the Napoleonic coronation, are sung out of love, while the figures, unmasked, vie for the words. This is a text piece, but one that needs no title, and as such it can be read as two-dimensional, two-dimensional commentary on the fact of being two-dimensional and in perpetual motion.The back gallery features an unexpected figure, one by the artist that is more than just another member of LAs studio team. Her name is a product of a family tree that includes two forms of sculpture: a bronze sphere of an absent child, her small hands wrapped in gold bandanna cloths, and the futuristic, life-size print, Robot, 2017, that is a reproduction of her life-size robot. The first work we encounter is just as puzzling: a pair of red velvet, painted a sandy orange, that cling to one another like romantic entrails. And a cut-out sculpture in the gallery, an abandoned sphere, floats on a rubber throne made from a pair of knee pads and black panty hose. Its with this and a few other works that we get a sense of LAs process: testing the limits of the medium while also exploring the materials.

Result #5

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh (Beowulf, 1868) that preceded Gustons solo exhibition at the Gallery 18 years ago. A large number of the originals—of which there were twenty-one—were in the mounds of the collection of the Louis Furnace Company, near New York. And those who survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, or who, on the occasion of its reinstatement last winter, attended the inaugurational festivities at the Museum Ludwig in Munich, were among those who still hoped that the disinterested approach of Guston to his beloved German art might provide a model for the postwar museum as well. It was a good idea, but, given the stress of the artists identification with American Pop art (though not to mention the general expectation that his work would turn out to be more modern than American), this particular collaboration fell short, at least in part. Only the eighty works by a group of German-born artists exhibited in this show offered a chance for successive generations to experience the gap between the critical credo of mainstream art in the West and the rebellious impulses of its current, American progeny.Unfortunately, the projects that Guston shared with the others in the collaboration were too often misrepresented by Guston himself, who, despite all his gesture toward political activism, still insisted on remaining an outsider in his attempt to transcend the status of a declared enemy of State power. His quest for the perfect moment, the moment of elusive clarity of meaning, has always constituted a reflection on the limitations of any career as a creative force. In the end, his career ended up as a testament to the failures of the art world. There can be no doubt that the cultural force behind Gustons ascendance to art-world stardom was as significant as the artistic talent that has recently attracted artists like Gérard Böttner and Sol LeWitt.