Standing Stones

I am somewhat of a longtime aficionado of standing stones sites and stone circles, and a new one has been found in the Amazon.

See it here, and see the amazing images from Scotland here.

It was in large part as a result of those photographs and what happened to some of them, that the Fraser Gallery was started in 1996.

On the Return of Art and Antiquities

You can't pick up a newspaper or visit an art blog these days without running into a story about some country suing an American museum or institution over the return of some artwork or antiquities which may have made their way to the US through either shady means or even forgotten formal agreements.

And now Bloomberg reports that the government of Peru plans to sue Yale University, over hundreds of artifacts taken from the ancient city of Machu Picchu nearly a century ago.

And this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back (or in this case the llama's back).

The artifacts made their way to the US through Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham. One side claims that the artifacts were on loan. Yale contends the artifacts were legally excavated and exported "in line with the practices of the time."

And if these artifacts were sent to the US through some agreement with the Peruvian government nearly a century ago, then Yale has a case for keeping them; otherwise -- in the event that the American archeologists simply found them, crated them and shipped them to the US - all on their own -- then today's courts may well rule in Peru's favor.

And that straw that may break the camel's back may also unlock Pandora's box (which Greece will soon be suing for).

First: let's get one thing clear: Nazi art loot should and must be returned to their original owners or descendants.

But for most of all the other demanding of artwork returns: where does it stop?

Because unless you have some official paperwork signed, stamped and approved (and recognized as valid) then...

Does every Roman artifact in museums around the world have to be returned to Italy? And do Italian museums have to return Roman antiquities that were made in other parts of the Roman Empire to the nations that now exist there? And Italy better start packing the 13 Egyptian obelisks that are all over Rome: Cairo is clearing out some spaces for them.

Every Greek vase back to Greece? But do Greek museums have to return Cypriot antiquities to Cyprus?

Does every mummy have to find its way back to Egypt?

That "official" cadaver of Christopher Columbus in the Havana Cathedral? Sorry... back to Spain; or is it Italy, or Portugal? All three of those nations currently claim him as a native son, although I suspect that the Grand Admiral's descendants, currently living in Spain, have first dibs on Chris' bones.

And the fake Columbus cadaver in the Seville Cathedral? Back to Genoa, even if it's fake (just in case).

After all, that fake Scottish Stone of Destiny has made its way back to Scotland (God only knows where the real one is), but there are probably hundreds of thousands of antiquities (if not millions) from all over the world disseminated... all over the world.

Our own Smithsonian has over 100,000 pre-Columbian antiquities in its inventory (most of which are not even on display). Do the ones that were created by pre-Columbian artisans from north and south of our border have to be returned to the countries that now exist there?

Unless these museums have a provenance with lots of country of origin stamps authorizing the removal of the antiquity, I'd be pretty nervous if I was one of those museums.

And even if you have such a paper, what's to stop today's version of a country's government from saying that they do not recognize the authority of their predecessors to allow the removal of a national treasure from their nation.

And where does it stop?

Frida Kahlo was essentially ignored by Mexico while she was alive, and yet decades after her death she was deified outside of Mexico, and eventually the government of Mexico made her works a national treasure and forbade the export of any of Kahlo's works from Mexico. I think that this is a good (if late) thing for Mexico and Mexicans.

But what's to stop a future Mexican government from demanding the return of any and all Frida Kahlos outside of Mexico back to her mother nation.

It would just be a case of this "return" trend being pushed a little more.

Personally, I think that from now on, when I visit foreign museums, I will be making a list of American Indian artifacts in those museums, and they better damned have a piece of paper somewhere full of stamps and signatures from the Sioux, or the Walla Walla, or the Cheyenne, or the Seminoles or the Oneida or whatever indigenous Native American nation that currenly lives in the USA created them.

Official export paperwork from the United States government is not valid, and will not be accepted, regardless of how many non-Indian Washington, DC officials have signed it.

Of course, that may also mean that every non-Indian museum in the USA itself, would have to return every Native American Indian artifact back to their tribes.

Makes my head hurt...

Catriona for Katrina

The fair Catriona Fraser has one of her spectacular infrared photographs from her "Seven Celtic Nations" project on auction with all proceeds to be donated to the The Southern Arts Federation's Emergency Relief Fund to assist arts organizations and artists residing in Gulf Coast communities most devastated by Hurricane Katrina.


Bid for "Balvenie Castle, Scotland" here.

---

Keegan for Katrina

The fair Candace Keegan has one of her sensual paintings up for auction at her website, with all proceeds going to the American Red Cross.


Bid for it here.

National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery is scheduled to reopen in July 2006, and emulating their namesakes in England and Scotland, they are now institutionalizing and sponsoring a major new national competition for painted and sculpture portraits: The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

One portrait completed since January 1, 2004 may be entered between June 1 and September 6, 2005. Winner will receive $25,000 commission to complete a portrait for the Gallery's collection. Smaller awards for other finalists. Entry fee is $25 for online entries and $35 for snail mail entries.

Up to 500 paper entry forms accompanied by slides of the portrait will be accepted. Submit one or two slides for a painting and up to four slides for a sculpture. A paper entry form must be requested via e-mail from portraitcompetition@npg.si.edu after May 15, 2005. The entry fee will be $35, payable by credit card, certified check, or money order.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006 will be judged in two stages. First, a panel of experts will use an online jurying system to select approximately 120 semifinalist works. The Gallery will then arrange to ship these paintings and sculptures to Washington, D.C., where the panel will meet again in early March of 2006 to select the 50-60 finalists. These works will be installed in the National Portrait Gallery’s newly renovated second-floor special exhibition galleries.

Details here. I think that it is a shame that only two genres (painting and sculpture) are being admitted to the competition. That decision leaves out the potential for the NPG to explore other rich and vibrant genres like printmaking, collage, photography, even video.

Insider's Hint: I know one of these jurors quite well, and at least in that juror's perspective, he/she will be looking for portraits that really "expand" the definition of portraiture. I will be really, really surprised if a "traditional" portrait is chosen; but I could be wrong.

Block that Quote

MAN has an interesting post on misused quotes in reference to Matisse.

Nothing to do with Matisse, or DC art, but the trouble with misused quotes is also one of my pet peeves, which in a Woody Allen moment, I was able to "fix" (in a very specific case) a few years ago on national television when I was a talking head in a TBS documentary called "Women of the Ink."

The documentary was about female tattoo artists, and I was the talking head discussing the ancient history of tattooing in European culture, specifically focused on the ancient Picts of current day Scotland.

For almost two centuries historians had debated the issue of tattoing among the Pictish kingdoms north of Hadrian's Wall in Roman Britain. A few lines from a poem by Claudian:

"Venit et extremis legio praetenta Britannis, Quae Scotto dat frena truci ferronque notatas Perlegit examines Picto moriente figuras"

Which means:

"This legion, set to guard the furthest Britons, curbs the savage Scot and studies the designs marked with iron on the face of the dying Pict"

Add a few more sparse descriptions (which are actually the first surviving mention of the Picts dating from 297 AD), in a poem praising the emperor Constantius Chlorus, by the Roman orator Eumenius. And then by just repeating the same partial quote over and over, historians get into a debate about tattoo or painted? What does "marked with iron mean?"

Even the name is confusing: Pict (Pictii) is actually probably a derrogatory nickname given by the Romans to their tattooed enemies; it could mean "Painted."

The ancient Greeks called them the "Pritanni" (which some people think is the origin of the word Britannic). Pritanni means "the People of the Designs" as does the word "Cruithnii," which is what the Gaelic Celts called them.

So I actually went and researched the source and text of some of the original documents which mentioned the Picts and discovered that the quotes were but a small part, and once expanded not only confirmed that the Picts were tattooed, but described the process (they used sharp iron tools (needles?) and a natural plant-based ink called woad, which is apparently (in some forms) highly hallucenic by the way... sort of a very strong PCP type drug).

Most of the misquotes were taken from books 9 and 14 of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (560-636).

In the Chronica de Origine Antiquorum Pictorum (The Pictish Chronicle), an otherwise confusing text, he writes:

"Picti propria lingua nomen habent a picto corpore; eo quod, aculeis ferreis cum atramento, variarum figurarum sti(n)gmate annotantur."

Which means:

"The Picts take their name in their own tongue from their painted bodies; this is because, using sharp iron tools and ink, they are marked by tattoos of various shapes."

Painted and tattooed!

When I bring this up to a very smug historian in the "Women of the Ink" documentary, you can actually see his proper British jaw drop.

Gallery Openings

Tonight is the 3rd Thursday gallery crawl around the 7th street corridor. From 6-8PM in most places. Especially interesting seems Carolina Sardi: Over/Under, curated by Rody Douzoglou at Flashpoint. Also Numark Gallery has Shimon Attie: The History of Another, which is well-worth the visit tonight.

Tomorrow, it's the turn of the Canal Square Galleries in Georgetown, as we will all have our new shows opening or extended hours and the openings will be catered by our Canal neighbor, the Sea Catch Restaurant. Elsewhere in Georgetown, Addison Ripley will have the wonderfully busy watercolors of Patricia Tobacco Forrester.

Especially interesting in the Canal Square Galleries is MOCA's Erotic Art Show, a jumble of dozens of artists exploring the moist avenues of erotica.

We will have the brilliant photographs of Lida Moser. This is probably our most important photography show of the year.

Opening tomorrow night and through April 13, 2005, our Fraser Gallery in Georgetown will be hosting the first ever Washington, DC solo exhibition of legendary American photographer Lida Moser, who now lives in retirement in nearby Rockville, Maryland.

This 85-year-old photographer is not only one of the most respected American photographers of the 20th century, but also a pioneer in the field of photojournalism. Her photography is currently in the middle of a revival and rediscovery, and has sold as high as $4,000 in recent Christie's auctions and continues to be collected by both museums and private collectors worldwide. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, Moser has produced a body of works consisting of thousands of photographs and photographic assemblages that defy categorization and genre or label assignment.

Additionally, Canadian television is currently in the process of filming a documentary about her life; the second in the last few years, and Moser’s work is now in the collection of many museums worldwide.

A well-known figure in the New York art scene of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,a portrait of Lida Moser by American painter Alice Neel hangs in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Neel painted a total of four Moser portraits over her lifetime, and I believe that one of them will be included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts' "Alice Neel's Women" coming to Washington, DC this October.

Lida Moser's photographic career started as a student and studio assistant in 1947 in Berenice Abbott's studio in New York City, where she became an active member of the New York Photo League. She then worked for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Look and many other magazines throughout the next few decades, and traveled extensively throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

In 1950 Vogue, and (and subsequently Look magazine) assigned Lida Moser to carry out an illustrated report on Canada, from one ocean to another. When she arrived at the Windsor station in Montreal, in June of that same year, she met by chance, Paul Gouin, then a Cultural Advisor to Duplessis government. This chance meeting led Moser to change her all-Canada assignment for one centered around Quebec.

Armed with her camera and guided by the research done by the Abbot Felix-Antoine Savard, the folklorist Luc Lacourcière and accompanied by Paul Gouin, Lida Moser then discovers and photographs a traditional Quebec, which was still little touched by modern civilization and the coming urbanization of the region. Decades later, a major exhibition of those photographs at the McCord Museum of Canadian History became the museum’s most popular exhibit ever.

She has also authored and been part of many books and publications on and about photography. She also wrote a series of "Camera View" articles on photography for The New York Times between 1974-81. Her work has been exhibited in many museums worldwide and is in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Archives, Ottawa, the National Galleries of Scotland, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, the Library of Congress, Les Archives Nationales du Quebec, Corcoran Gallery, Phillips Collection and many others. Moser was an active member of the Photo League and the New York School.

The Photo League was the seminal birth of American documentary photography. It was a group that was at times at school, an association and even a social club. Disbanded in 1951, the League promoted photojournalism with an aesthetic consciousness that reaches street photography to this day.

This will be her first solo exhibition in Washington, DC and it will run from March 18 through April 13, 2005.

An opening reception for Ms. Moser will be held tomorrow night, Friday, March 18, 2005 from 6-9PM as part of the third Friday openings in Georgetown. The reception is free and open to the public.

See ya there!

Lida Moser is Coming

Opening on March 18, 2005 and through April 13, 2005, our Fraser Gallery in Georgetown will be hosting the first ever Washington, DC solo exhibition of legendary American photographer Lida Moser, who now lives in retirement in nearby Rockville, Maryland.

This 85-year-old photographer is not only one of the most respected American photographers of the 20th century, but also a pioneer in the field of photojournalism. Her photography is currently in the middle of a revival and rediscovery, and has sold as high as $4,000 in recent Christie's auctions and continues to be collected by both museums and private collectors worldwide. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, Moser has produced a body of works consisting of thousands of photographs and photographic assemblages that defy categorization and genre or label assignment.

Additionally, Canadian television is currently in the process of filming a documentary about her life; the second in the last few years, and Moser’s work is now in the collection of many museums worldwide.

A well-known figure in the New York art scene of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,a portrait of Lida Moser by American painter Alice Neel hangs in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Neel painted a total of four Moser portraits over her lifetime, and I believe that one of them will be included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts' "Alice Neel's Women" coming to Washington, DC this October.

Lida Moser's photographic career started as a student and studio assistant in 1947 in Berenice Abbott's studio in New York City, where she became an active member of the New York Photo League. She then worked for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Look and many other magazines throughout the next few decades, and traveled extensively throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

In 1950 Vogue, and (and subsequently Look magazine) assigned Lida Moser to carry out an illustrated report on Canada, from one ocean to another. When she arrived at the Windsor station in Montreal, in June of that same year, she met by chance, Paul Gouin, then a Cultural Advisor to Duplessis government. This chance meeting led Moser to change her all-Canada assignment for one centered around Quebec.

Armed with her camera and guided by the research done by the Abbot Felix-Antoine Savard, the folklorist Luc Lacourcière and accompanied by Paul Gouin, Lida Moser then discovers and photographs a traditional Quebec, which was still little touched by modern civilization and the coming urbanization of the region. Decades later, a major exhibition of those photographs at the McCord Museum of Canadian History became the museum’s most popular exhibit ever.

She has also authored and been part of many books and publications on and about photography. She also wrote a series of "Camera View" articles on photography for The New York Times between 1974-81. Her work has been exhibited in many museums worldwide and is in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Archives, Ottawa, the National Galleries of Scotland, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, the Library of Congress, Les Archives Nationales du Quebec, Corcoran Gallery, Phillips Collection and many others. Moser was an active member of the Photo League and the New York School.

The Photo League was the seminal birth of American documentary photography. It was a group that was at times at school, an association and even a social club. Disbanded in 1951, the League promoted photojournalism with an aesthetic consciousness that reaches street photography to this day.

This will be her first solo exhibition in Washington, DC and it will run from March 18 through April 13, 2005.

An opening reception for Ms. Moser will be held on Friday, March 18, 2005 from 6-9PM as part of the third Friday openings in Georgetown. The reception is free and open to the public.

Tour de Clay

Geographically centered around the Greater Baltimore area, but featuring 878 artists, with 160 exhibits in 122 venues around the world, Tour de Clay is probably the largest visual arts multi-everything event ever held in the country, and it focuses and celebrates all forms of art in clay through a collaboration of artists from 47 states and Norway, Switzerland, Korea, Africa, Japan, Taiwan and Scotland, as well as participation by area galleries with exhibitions at more than 100 venues throughout the region, including DCAC and these other locations locally: Target Gallery, Ellipse Art Center, Scope Gallery and The 340 Space.

See all area locations here.

The exhibitions opened a couple of days ago and run through April 3, 2005.

Wall

Paul Richard, who used to be the Chief Art Critic for the WaPo (he retired a few years ago and was replaced by Blake Gopnik), still does the random freelance piece for the Post once in a while.

And a couple of days ago he wrote a really beautiful piece about the new Andy Goldsworthy sculpture "Roof" being built at the National Gallery of Art.

"Roof" is the largest work of art commissioned by the gallery in a quarter-century. Its designer is an art star who, unusual for art stars, is as much admired by the broad art public as he is by the pros. The English wallers he has hired to build his dry stone sculpture are more than mere assistants. "Roof" pays homage to their muscles, their steadfastness, their history. To watch them is to know that they are core to what it is."

I lived in Scotland between 1989-1992, and my home was a large farmhouse near the village of Brechin in Angus. The farmhouse had been built in 1681. It was called Little Keithock Farmhouse, and the dovecot next to it was even older by a couple of centuries, meriting an entry in the Scottish Ordnance Map as an "antiquity," not an easy thing in Europe's most ancient nation.


Anyway, the farmhouse (to the left is a drawing I did of it in 1990 or 1991) had a beautiful garden, which was surrounded by a tall stone wall.

One day, one of the trucks that used the dirt road that ran in front of the house, and led to the nearby potato and turnip fields, lost control, and slammed into the wall, destroying a couple of feet of wall.

A couple of days later, another truck dumped a small pile of new rocks, and soon afterwards an elderly gent showed up, and using nothing but a small hammer, began to rebuild the wall. He re-used the old rocks that had been disturbed by the accident, as well as some of the new ones.

Slowly but surely, over a few days, the wall was rebuilt before my eyes. When it was done, other than the fact that the moss on the stones had been re-arranged, it was impossible to tell that an accident had happened. A year later, the moss was back everywhere and no visual evidence that a chunk of the wall was "new" existed.

The current King Arthur movie apparently has a typical Hollywoodian butchering of fact and history in the introduction of a "new" Guenevere as a Pictish princess.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I keep running into people, who knowing my interest in Pictish history, keep telling me about Hollywood's first ever depiction of Pictish people on film.

The Picts were a real people and I have been working on a book about their singularly unique art for several years now (actually since 1989). Learn more about them at Pictish Nation.

Some of my drawings migrated from their designs are here, and more recent drawings visualizing their tattoos are here.

And having recently seen the spectacular Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the NGA, I've decided to contact the NGA and see if I can get someone interested in bringing - for the first time ever outside of Scotland - an exhibition of Pictish art and maybe even some of their sculptured stones to the US.

This is the kind of review that gets written, when elitists write the reviews.

Popularity doesn't always mean bad.

But when the critics and high art curators ignore an artist (as they have with this British self-taught ex-miner) and yet that artist nonetheless becomes famous, and rich, and then strikes huge auctions prizes at Sotheby's in the world of high art - the critics (now proven wrong by their own standards) have to spout theory and ignorance to desperately attempt to prove that they are still right.

Comparing Vettriano to Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin is perhaps the stupidest comparison that I have ever read and shows breathtaking ignorance of the power of the Saatchi PR machine to "create" those artists as opposed to a poor ex-miner from Scotland rising through the maze of modern art, while being ignored by the arts establishment, to become the best-selling artist in the world and now a secondary art market name to reckon with!

And so what if his paintintgs are overtly sexual, or overtly romantic, or overtly fill-in-the-blank.... perhaps he's been painted into a corner because there's no irony in his works, but just the honest brush of a working class, smoking, womanizer, hard drinking Scot who could give a fuck as to what an art critic thinks about his paintings.

By the way... the Vettriano painting that sold at Sotheby's for £744,800 (that's over $1.5 million) was sold by the artist in 1991 for a mere £3,000!

But don't cry for Jack, as apparently, the royalties from all the posters and postcards and other crap made from the painting earn him about half a million dollars a year!

Keep them cooking Jack!

In the last few years (since completely by accident I walked into his first-ever exhibition in Edinburgh, Scotland) I've been following the debate in Britain about the art of Scottish miner turned artist Jack Vettriano. In fact I've even penned a few articles on the subject myself.

Now The Guardian delivers a great must read as the story asks: Why Pop Art but not Popular Art?

Is this a good question to ask our own elitist museums? Witness the debates caused by the hugely successful tour of Norman Rockwell's works - even though it eventually led to Rockwell being "discovered" as an "artist" - rather than an "illustrator" - in our label-crazy art world.

But even yours truly is not sure that I am ready for Thomas Kinkade anywhere else but our local neighborhood mall.

Update: Another Jack Vettriano story here.

Local photographer in next Christie's Photography Auction:

Several vintage photographs by legendary photographer Lida Moser,
represented by us, will be offered at the next Christie's New York auction on Feb. 17, 2004.

In 2002, Moser's photos sold as high as $4,000 at Christie's.

Lida Moser, who currently lives in Rockville, Maryland and is in her late 80s, has a distinguised career that started as a student in 1947 in Berenice Abbott's studio. She then worked for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Look and many other magazines. She has also authored and been part of many books and publications on and about photography in the New York Times, New York Sunday Times, Amphoto Guide to Special Effects, Fun in Photography, Career Photography, Women See Men, Women of Vision, This Was the Photo League, and others. She also wrote a series of "Camera View" articles on photography for The New York Times between 1974-81.

In 1950 Vogue (and subsequently Look) assigned Lida Moser to carry out an illustrated report on Canada, from one ocean to another. When she arrived at the Windsor station in Montreal, in June of that same year, she met by chance, Paul Gouin, then a Cultural Advisor to the Duplessis government. This chance meeting leads the young woman to change her all-Canada assignment for one centered around Quebec.

Armed with her camera and guided by the research done by the Abbot Felix-Antoine Savard, the folklorist Luc Lacourcière and accompanied by Paul Gouin, Lida Moser then discovers and photographs a traditional Quebec, which was still little touched by modern civilization and the coming urbanization of the region.

A portrait of Lida Moser, by Alice Neel, currently hangs in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Several portraits of Alice Neel by Lida Moser are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Her work has been exhibited in many museums worldwide and is in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Archives, Ottawa, the National Galleries of Scotland, National Portait Gallery, Washington, DC, the Library of Congress, Les Archives Nationales du Quebec, and many others. Moser was a member of the Photo League and the New York School.

The Photo League was the seminal birth of American documentary photography. It was a group that was at times school, an association, and even a social photography club. Founded in 1936 and disbanded in 1951, the Photo League promoted photojournalism with an aesthetic consciousness and a social conscience that reaches photojournalism and street photography to this day.

Works by Moser can be seen online here. Buy Lida Moser now.

Tomorrow is the monthly Third Thursday extended hours at the 7th Street area downtown galleries.

And the next day, on Friday, will be opening night for the four Canal Square Galleries in Georgetown. It's also the opening of my show, which once again this year marries my interest in history with art. I am doing drawings focused on the unique imagery of the Pictish people of pre-Celtic Scotland. I have been writing a book on the history and art of this Dark Age nation and hope to finally get it finished in a year or so. See some of the drawings here and learn more about the Picts here.

Scottish watercolor

I wrote a while back about all the watercolors of Scotland that I did while I lived there from 1989-1992... these rarely show up on the secondary art market.

This one is a steal at the current starting bid! See it here.