Poppie Fields near Argenteuil by Claude Monet

Result #1

Poppie Fields near Argenteuil by Claude Monet and Louise-Jeanne Trockel, a former pupil of Valie Export (who also taught at the École de Paris). The latter work was part of the artists recent exhibit at the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, which included a collection of objects from the collection of the Théodore Géricault Museum in Paris and the Musée dArt Contemporain in Bologna. These are found objects from the first and second periods of modernism, which, in the early twentieth century, were seen as the art of the poor and the intellectuals. The most significant of these were the pencils, the blackboards, and the book-plates that would be used to create illustrations for printed texts, such as those of the Elements of Style, which were first published in 1899. Monet, who was not a member of the Académie National Délémentaire National dArt Contemporain, chose to use them to make the accompanying illustrations. The latter were to be hung on the wall as a kind of pendant, and were hung one above the other, as if the book-plates were a kind of study for the book itself. From this collection, the artist would make drawings on paper.The exhibition was divided into two sections. The first was called Monet, 1921–1925, which included a number of Monets and Monets of various kinds—a group of Monets dating from 1921–26. The last section of the show was called Monets, 1928–1930. This section included a large selection of sketches from the Monets of 1936–39, many of which were shown in the exhibition. The sketches were presented in a chronological order that made the artist seem to be a sculptor, not a painter. They were executed on the backs of metal rods that were mounted on the wall. The pencils that Monet used to make the drawings were displayed here as well.

Result #2

Poppie Fields near Argenteuil by Claude Monet, 1890, also suggested the need to hold onto a sense of continuity. The work in both works required that the viewer be present in order to identify what the work was about. But in Monets painting, the figure is never static—there is no horizon line, no background. It is always in the middle of an image that the viewer is moved, always in a state of flux. By contrast, in Poppies Fields we are in an instant, in a perpetual process of flux, always in an ongoing process of observation.In the first of the two galleries where the show was installed, I found myself staring at a painting by Antony Gormley. It was a charming and revealing work, but at the same time it was also surprising: Gormleys work is characterized by a kind of certainty about the nature of reality. He believes in the truth of appearances, but he also believes in the possibility of noticing things that do not exist in reality. In this exhibition, Gormley, in a single panel, showed us how Glimpers World of Forms could be seen in an instant. The two-part work consists of a thick, black-and-white ink drawing, one of the few Gormleys to date, of a cube. Gormleys world is a real-time window, in which the world we see is not only real but also moving. The drawing was based on a photo of a natural rock formation on the side of a mountain near Florence, Italy, a place known for its wind and volcanic activity. The drawing is made up of a series of still photographs taken from a camera mounted on the mountains topography. Gormleys colors are based on the colors of the rocks, the colors of the sky, and the colors of the sun. The sketch was then combined with a magnifying glass, which allowed the viewer to see the original drawing.

Result #3

was an important early study for the young German painter of the late twenties. While Monet is regarded as the greatest modernist painter of his generation, Pfeffer feels that the German masters most significant influence on his work is the idea of his friend, the young American artist, Georges Poussin. Poussin, too, was a collector of autographs of the young German artists work, and Pfeffer claims to have acquired the works of a number of artists from Poussin himself. Pfeffer also includes a number of rare early works by the German artists including the almost completely forgotten Beuys, Königs, and Schönberg. The shows most impressive work is a group of large, undated pieces of model airplane parts from the works of these artists, such as the one in which Poussin lays out his drawings of Pfeffer. The model airplane parts Pfeffer acquired from Poussin have been reassembled and restored and are now on display in the gallery. This group of pieces illustrates a remarkably effective way of approaching Pfeffers art, in that it reveals the quality and determination of the workman.

Result #4

Poppie Fields near Argenteuil by Claude Monet, 1916–17, to take just one example. With its emphasis on the mediums history and on the romantic underpinnings of modernism, Monet was the ultimate prelate of the contemporary painter. Yet, as Pollock, Nevelson, and todays greats of his generation were aware, the painting of Monets predecessors was not only not exclusively in line with the ideals of modernism but was actually a thoroughly racist abstraction. That is, the works painted by these modernists could be seen to echo the dehumanized experiences they had experienced in the hands of their masters. For example, in the 1920s and 30s, after the birth of her son, Nancy, in 1932, Roos handpicked the names of the Nazis who had massacred her family, a list that would later be reproduced as the catalog of her baby. And the kind of images that came out of Monets work were of his own family members. In this way, the grotesque side of Monets work is unmistakably in evidence in his contemporary work.This body of work, which is part of a current of recent exhibitions at the Academy of Fine Arts in New York, is not so much about modernism as it is about the reality of the present. In the present, what is left to imagination, to the imagination of the avant-garde, is the power of the violence that is experienced in the present. Pollocks works, for example, are not concerned with the brutality of the past but with the immediacy of the present. Similarly, Nevelson's early works are neither contemporary nor modernist in their idea of modernism. His works on paper, made in the early 30s, deal with the immediacy of the present moment. This immediacy is not so much a direct result of the violence committed against the people of the past but an emotional response to it.

Result #5

Poppie Fields near Argenteuil by Claude Monet (also from Paris), and Enrico Tullis unfinished canvases from the same year. These paintings are in no sense but an incomplete history of the broadening of the horizons of painting, which is at once more traditional and more recent. In the case of Tullis work, it was the turn of the 60s, when his work began to expand toward abstraction. The formal, panoramic range of his work—ranging from the linear and the painterly—has been continuously developed over the past two decades. His recent paintings are as vast as his earlier ones, and as complex as his earlier ones.In the early 60s, Tullis work seemed to be running counter to his earlier work. At the time, his most ambitious paintings were those with the most simple shapes: wide, flat canvases—in general, rectangular ones. For him, shapes were not only shapes but also forms for painting. In his early canvases, Tullis used them to express, in a very concrete way, his ideas about the relationship of surface to space, and how painting could be realized through the body of the world. In the late 60s, he began to expand the shapes, and he was already incorporating the formlessness of the body of the world in his paintings. The shapelessness was a very different form of the body of the world, and the body of the world was something very much like that of the painting, but more mysterious. It was a body of nature, and the shapelessness was the result of a sort of organic, instinctual impulse. This body of nature is mysterious, but at the same time it is filled with a life of its own, a quality that Tullis was able to discover in his formless nature. He discovered, in this formless nature, a unity that was at once organic and elemental.