January 2009: SIMON HANTAÏ (1922- 2008) – ART AND THE COLLAPSE OF MARKETS“The art market is the greatest danger that modern art has had to face. Back in the early days, society contested and rejected the values of modern art, which made the situation of artists difficult. Now it pretends to support them by creating this market where money decides what art gets made. Our only defense is to refuse to participate. If I get involved with them, I’ll be finished. We cannot join on these terms. We have to stand outside.”
Sim.... September 2008: Simon Hantaï Is Dead At 85Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) was an artist of legendary reclusion. He nonetheless holds a central position in the international contemporary art world, and major status in the Centre Georges Pompidou's account of post-World War II art.
As commentators, beginning with André Breton, have pointed out over the years, Hantaï was a fiercely independent artist, motivated above all by an ethical reflection on art. Throughout his career he insisted on the aesthetic primacy of art over its c.... May 2008: THE GENOCIDAL MADNESS OF IDEALISM In February, 1948, NBC television first broadcast the Nightly News. This year is its sixtieth anniversary.
In the same year of 1948 the generation of artists who would come to be known as ‘Abstract Expressionists’, after long years of searching for their artistic identity, and already middle-aged, finally broke through to their mature, original vision of modern art.
Beginning less than ten years later, a .... December 2006: SIMON HANTAÏ IN AMERICA - CARTER RATCLIFF The paradoxical brilliance of Carter Ratcliff's text 'Simon Hantaï in America' lies in its title. Simon Hantaï, the Hungarian-born, Paris-based artist whose career spans the second half of the twentieth century, has never in fact been in America. Yet, as Ratcliff reveals, in a more significant sense than mere personal, physical presence, Hantaï’s painting is inseparable from contemporary American art, from Abstract Expressionism to the.... December 2005: THE AESTHETIC AND THE ANAESTHETIC"I shy away from the word 'creation' (…) I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. (…) I doubt its value deep down."
Marcel Duchamp.
"History is a nightmare from which we are trying to wake up."
James Joyce.
I was down in Miami and talking to this collector who remembered the old days. That would be the sixties. Back then, there were critical author.... September 2004: ROBERT SMITHSON & MARCEL DUCHAMP It is interesting how Robert Smithson’s critical writings gain increasing recognition and yet there is no genuine discussion of his ideas in the contemporary art world. One explanation may be that, though the force and brilliance of Smithson’s mind cannot be denied, the actual positions he adopted are way out of line with so many of the most dearly held assumptions of contemporary art.
This thought comes forcefully to mind when scanning .... June 2003: ART OR CRIME? - THE CASE FOR GRAFFITI
Graffiti, coming as it does from the street scene, never successfully took hold in the fine art world. Certain galleries have presented it, especially back in the ‘80’s, but the question as to whether it could really be considered fine art seems to remain like a shadow hanging over it.
On the other side of this divide, as I learned conversing with a group of young ‘writers&r.... September 2002: WHAT IS THE STATE OF ART CRITICISM TODAY? With regard to this question, it was fortunate that 2002 was the year of Barnett Newman’s retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tate Gallery London , curated by Ann Temkin. Newman developed an exceptional body of writing along with his paintings and had very definite views on what criticism should be. He distinguished between two types that he defined respectively as, on the one hand, ‘the creative’ and, on the other, ‘the scholarly .... September 2001
THERE HAS BEEN A PREVAILING SENSE SINCE THE TRAGIC EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, THAT EVERYTHING IS CHANGED.
This has been felt in the art world, as everywhere else. The sense has been accompanied by anxiety. Of course, people wonder whether the market for art will be seriously impaired, but, more importantly perhaps, they also worry as to whether art is relevant at such a time, whether faced with such circumstances it has anything to say?
&.... Georges Bataille and Modern Art
October 2000
"Objects are phantoms of the mind, as false as angels."-Robert Smithson
"Ever get the feeling you're being cheated?"-John Lydon
We have heard it frequently repeated in recent years that the cycles of ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ art have run their course and that it is time, with the arrival of a new millennium, for a reassessment of the past. Yet this reassessment is slow to emerge.
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GALLERY PUBLICATIONSSimon Hantaï & Andy Warhol - The Fate of Modern Art in the Post-Second World War Era
© 2010 Paul Rodgers / 9W Peter Sacks: Paintings by Louis MenandPeter Sacks’s recent work raises important questions about cultural history, about painting, and about the place of art in contemporary life. © 2009 Paul Rodgers / 9W, New York Lucinda Devlin: A Modern Artist for the Post Modernist World, 2007Lucinda Devlin is an artist with an extraordinary relevance for recent debates on contemporary art and culture. © 2007 Paul Rodgers / 9W Gallery Hantaï in America by Carter Ratcliff, 2006"In Europe, Simon Hantaï has long been recognized as a major painter. In the United States, he is nearly unknown. This is odd (...)" © 2006 Paul Rodgers / 9W Gallery
3000° ed. Paul Rodgers, 2002The contemporary influence of the Smithson/ Serra nexus through George Bataille's solar lense. Post-face by Eugenine Tsai © 2002 Paul Rodgers / 9W Gallery Living with the New AestheticFrom the vantage point of December 1999, we can say that the twentieth century gave itself over, mind and body, to a fascination with the forces of negation. (...) © 2000 Paul Rodgers / 9W Gallery JACKSON POLLOCK'S INFLUENCE on Contemporary Art - Simon Hantaï & Robert Smithson.Simon Hantaï, in conversation with this writer, has declared that for him Pollock’s decisive act was to bring the canvas down onto the floor, evoking a transition from the perpendicular to the horizontal axis, which reverses Freud’s schema of transcendence from the state of Nature to cultural life. (...) ©1999 Paul Rodgers Click here for the Complete Text Click for more about Hantaï's Life & Work Georges Bataille: The Status of LiteratureThe writings of Georges Bataille did not attract wide and certainly not international attention during his life-time, as did those of other important French thinkers of his generation.(...) ©1981 Paul Rodgers
The Subject of Art by Paul Rodgers, 1981"Mallarme was perhaps the first to articulate the direction of the modern world when he wrote: 'Everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy.' The question of Art's relationship to Politics centres on the problem of Criticism. If Art is to play the new role expected of it, it must deliver up its Sense, but Art resists sublimation in the Idea." (...) © 1981 Paul Rodgers Abstract Expressionism, or The Subject of the ArtistAt the beginning of the last quarter of the twentieth century, the idea of the avant-garde, which has provided the dynamo for a kind of... © 1979 Paul Rodgers / 9W Gallery |
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