Marking the First Anniversary of the Notre Dame de Paris Fire

Chizuru Morii Kaplan, Parisian Rooftops III, 60 x 52 inches (Private Collection)

April 15, 2020 marks the first anniversary of the tragic fire that destroyed much of Notre Dame de Paris Today, in light of the Covid-19 lockdown, progress to restore this beloved cathedral in the City of Light has halted. The days of optimism for a swift recovery seem to belong to another era. Here is an update reported in December 2019 and a video of the Great Bell ringing to mark this occasion during an even greater tragedy throughout the world. 

Chizuru Morii Kaplan, Flying Buttresses, Paris, 29 x 41 inches (Private Collection)

Several weeks ago, I published a digital exhibition of Chizuru Morii Kaplan's extraordinary watercolor paintings of Notre Dame in Bonjour Paris (February 24, 2020). Please take a moment to study Ms. Morii Kaplan's work and read her moving statement.  Her memory joined recollections contributed by fellow BP staff writers, published last April.

May you be in good health and filled with hope as we all unite with the world to combat the spread of the Coronavirus.

Thank you for staying home.

Thank you for checking in with neighbors, friends and relatives. 

Thank you for supporting our medical staff, delivery people, supermarket staff, pharmacies, and food services preparing meals for everyone.  

And if you or a loved one is working on the frontlines--thank you so very much!. We salute your courage.

Take care,

Beth

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and owner

New York Arts Exchange

www.nyarts-exchange.com 

Spring Greetings: A Libra Super Moon, Passover and Eastertide

Touched With Fire, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 54"

"My work for many years has been partly a tool of self transformation. The single disc paintings are very much evidence of a higher level of  integration." - Lester Rapaport

The Full Super Moon in Libra portents endings, releasing the past, and entering into new, fresh beginnings.  There is no doubt, whether you follow astrology or the daily news, that we already entered the new path suddenly and unexpectedly.  What each of us decides to do on this new path is personal.  However, this path begs us to choose fellowship and selflessness. We need each other.  May you find this challenging period in confinement a fruitful pause, a moment to cherish the blessings we each have, and a time dedicated to reaching out to your family, friends and community, while physically separated by the enforced "shelter in place."

For my part, I believe that art is soothing, affirming and hopeful.  So here, on this blog for the New York Arts Exchange, I will present a few digital exhibitions and art history essays to lift your spirits and, hopefully, help you move along your new path, wherever it takes you.

Today, I am introducing Lester Rapaport: Toward a Spiritual Beyond, in honor of the Full Pink Super Moon in Libra and our quest for spiritual awakening amid the painful losses and hardships visited upon us because of Covid-19.

En-lightened, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 54"

"Born in 1947, I became a child of the 60s’ very messy counterculture, which, in my twenties, gave me an easy opportunity for extended experimentation with consciousness-expanding plants and chemicals. Eastern philosophy became important to many of us in that counterculture, often because of such experimentation. Since those heady days, all the phases of my professional artistic development have been concerned with higher and deeper levels of awareness, and my work has always reflected my emotional spiritual journey.". - Lester Rapaport

Yesterday Tomorrow, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 54"

"The world is always with us, and even the purest, the most reductive, the most spiritually driven of abstract artists reflect their time, if only by speaking the particular symbolic languages of their era. The pioneer non-objective painters of the modern era, from Kandinsky and Mondrian to Hilma af Klint, very deliberately articulated their inner visions, driven as they were by a Victorian propriety and mystic faith in science. The abstract expressionists hewed to a more reactive gesture, a theatrical sweep that existentially conflated personal and public turmoil. Today, in the face of ecological doom and the loss of faith in institutional integrity, abstract art often seems empty and exhausted; but its most vital practitioners serve as exemplars not of ennui and despair but of forthrightness and rigor. The recent paintings of Lester Rapaport manifest such clarity and honesty. They come from deep inside the artist, but they speak to the world around him with both anger and charm, fright and resolution, loss and rediscovery." - Peter Frank, Lester Rapaport: Meditations in an Emergency,  November 2018

Affirmation, acrylic on canvas, 54 x  84"

"The now-decades-long gradual surrender of our mid-20th-century national belief in a new, science-informed, ever-more-reciprocal common future - to a science-ignorant, future-blind, other-hating fear of change, does continue. But so does the increasing protest in support of fairness, honesty, decency, and an economy that respects what the natural environment is showing us. I, however, have returned to simply sharing, as best I can, the kind of truth and beauty I see and feel throughout our seven-hundred-year-old, socially evolving western painting tradition, by expressing my personal spiritual journey in acrylic paint on canvas." - Lester Rapaport

Waking Up For Leontyne Price, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 84”

"In 2016 I received a diagnosis of prostate cancer. I was advised, convincingly, to take the mainstream medical approach of radiation therapy, and thanks to our contemporary science, I’m now cancer-free. (What a charged phrase that is.) But I also, simultaneously, adopted a complementary alternative approach – a new, very strict anti-cancer diet, plus a daily supplements program and a vigorous exercise regimen – all for the rest of my life. And it turns out that the alternative approach has brought a wonderful new clarity to my awareness, and joy in my physical being. These are interesting times."

Waking Up Waking Up, acrylic on canvas,  54 x 84”

Education:

1963-67 Hunter College, B. F. A.
1967 William Graff Scholarship for graduate study
1967-69 Hunter Graduate School, M. A. Program

Solo Exhibitions:

2019          David Richard Gallery, NYC

2016          Art Mora Gallery Ridgefield Park, N.J.

2014          Weil Cornel Medical offices, New York City

2010          Paris Health Club, New York City

2009          Paris Health Club, New York City

2007          Paris Health Club, New York City

2004          Verlaine, New York City

1996          Planet Thai, Brooklyn, New York

1987          Wiesner Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

1983          Westbroadway Gallery, New York, New York

1982          Westbroadway Gallery, New York, New York

1981          Westbroadway Gallery, New York, New York

1973          Pollock Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Recent Group Shows

• 2018 Carter Burden Gallery, NYC, NY
• 2018 Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
• 2017 Anthony Philip Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
• 2017 Gallery Giordano, Brooklyn, NY
• 2016 Art Mora Gallery, NYC, NY
• 2016 Carter Burden Gallery, NYC, NY
• 2016 Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
• 2015 Newark School of the Arts, Newark, NJ
• 2015 Two person show at Carter Burden Gallery, NYC
• 2015 Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
• 2014 Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
• 2013 Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
• 2012 Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
• 2011 Rush Gallery, NYC
• 2010 Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Wishing you a healthy and peaceful Passover and Easter -
Beth

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.
Director and owner
New York Arts Exchange

Last Call - Francis Naumann Fine Art closing on February 28 with Marcel Duchamp Portraits

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

Francis Naumann Fine Art will close its gallery space at the end of the day on Friday, February 28, 2020.  The absence of FNFA will be greatly felt among his fans and the art history community which has relished the exceptional curation of historically important figures in art and their appropriators.  In this spirit, the current exhibition Depicting Marcel Duchamp: Portraits of Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy is pitch perfect for our fond farewell.

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

In the gallery's own words:

“Depicting Duchamp: Portraits of Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy opens at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art on January 10, 2020. As the title suggests, the show will consist of portraits of Marcel Duchamp and/or the artist in the guise of his female alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy. Many were made in Duchamp’s lifetime, but countless portraits have been made of the artist in the years since his death.  Indeed, a number were made by contemporary artists specially for inclusion in this show.

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

Marcel Duchamp’s reputation as an artistic iconoclast—combined with his legendary good

looks, genial character and accessibility—have made him the subject of countless portraits.

Indeed, if we combine the number of portraits made by his contemporaries with those made posthumously, Duchamp has been depicted more often than any other major artist of the modern era. Works of art are generally comprehended only visually (“retinal” in Duchamp’s terminology), and are, therefore, subject to evolving changes in taste.  The ideas Duchamp introduced avoid fluctuations of style by inhabiting the mind, thereby forcing an intense and rigorous engagement with the process of thought. As a result, artists render him as a physical presence, for to this day, his ideas continue to affect the way we think about art and the art-making process.

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

The first formal painted portrait of Marcel Duchamp was made in 1915 by Walter Pach (1883-1959), an artist best remembered today for having helped to organize the Armory Show of 1913. It was Pach who had selected many of the modernist works in that landmark exhibition, including Duchamp’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase. Consequently, he had done more to establish the artist’s reputation in the United States than any other single individual. In the painting, the artist wears a green shirt with a white collar and blue tie, and he is set against a modulated green backdrop that closely matches the color and texture of his shirt (green was Duchamp’s favorite color). Pach not only captured his sitter’s penetrating intelligence, but the delicate and attenuated features suggest an effeminate quality that the artist himself probably would not have denied, for with his invention of a female alter ego some years later, he would openly explore this aspect of his complex but ever-engaging personality.

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

The Pach portrait is the earliest dated work in the show, but it was followed by countless others made in the artist’s lifetime. Many photographs of Duchamp were taken over the years; see those by Denise Bellon (1938), Irving Penn (1948), Naomi Savage (1949), Victor Obsatz (1953), and Arnold Rosenberg (1958).  He was depicted countless times by various painters, sculptors and printmakers, beginning with an early torso by his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1910), plaster and bronze life casts by Ettore Salvatore (ca. 1945), sculptures by Reuben Nakian (1943), Isabelle Waldberg (1958), as well as to prints made by Man Ray (1971), Marcel Gromaire (1952), an etching by his sister Suzanne Duchamp (1953) and another by his eldest brother Jacques Villon (1956). 

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

By and far the most ambitious series to depict the life of Marcel Duchamp was undertaken by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris when they opened their inaugural exhibition in 1977—eleven years after the artist’s death—with a Duchamp retrospective.  To introduce this exhibition, they displayed a series of pictures illustrating the life of Marcel Duchamp painted by André Raffray (1925-2010), an artist who had earlier worked as an illustrator for the French cinema. Over a period of two years, he completed La Vie illustrée, twelve gouache panels that reconstruct major events in Duchamp’s life not otherwise recorded: from painting his first picture at age fifteen, to standing next to his Etant donnés in the last year of his life.

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

Curiously, the twelve panels in the series do not account for the eight years that Duchamp spent in New York from 1915 through 1923, arguably the most important and productive period of his life. The omission (likely a consequence of the Francophile nature of the enterprise), was rectified when Raffray was later commissioned by Francis M. Naumann to add a thirteenth panel to the series called Chez Arensberg (1984), depicting a typical soirée at the apartment of Louise and Walter Arensberg, Duchamp’s steadfast patrons during his years in New York.

"Depicting Marcel Duchamp," Francis Naumann Fine Art

Among the most engaging portraits of Duchamp are those done after his death, some by artists who are themselves today no longer living; see the works by Sarah Austin, Tom Chimes, Ray Johnson, Richard Hamilton.  Yet it is the younger contemporary artists who give us the sense that Duchamp is still living, his ideas as prescient today as they were when first introduced over 100 years ago, forever altering the very definition of art; see Michael Vannoy Adams, Stefan Banz, Carl Bates, Larissa Bates, Ray Beldner, Nancy Becker, Mike Bidlo, Brice Brown, Rob Brinker, Pablo Echaurren, TR Ericsson, Robert Forman, Kathleen Gilje, Elise Graham, Tom Hackney, Rudolf Herz, Jasper Johns, Don Joint, Pamela Joseph, Larry Kagan, Jane Kaplowitz, L. Brandon Krall, Cary Leibowitz, Christa Maiwald, Carlo Maria Mariani, Sophie Matisse, Jacques Moitoret, Yasumasa Morimura, Richard Pettibone, Jonathan Santlofer, Donald Shambroom, Tom Shannon, Mark Tansey, Douglas Vogel, Ai Weiwei, CK Wilde, Rob Wynne and Tetsuya Yamada."

So, run, flight or "beam up" to this landmark show. 

Thank you, Francis Naumann and Dana Martin, for 18 1/2 years of extraordinary exhibitions.

We will miss your presence at 24 West 57th Street.

Best wishes to you both-

Beth and your loyal fans from the New York Arts Exchange

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and owner

New York Arts Exchange

on Twitter @bethnewyork

Tea with Ruby! Paint with famous artist Ruby Silvious is coming to Manhattan for one night

Ruby Silvious's exhibition Recycled and Refashioned is now on view at the Albany Institute for History and Art, through July 7th.

Here is a rare opportunity to learn how to paint on tea bags and eggshells with Ruby in Manhattan:

Meet, Paint and Enjoy Afternoon Tea with Artist Ruby Silvious

Monday, March 2, 2020

6-8 pm

at N.Y. Cake

118 West 22nd Street, NYC

Hosted by the New York Women's Culinary Alliance

$45 members/$55 non-members

Register Here

What's on the menu?

ART + SAVORY GLOBAL BITES + DESSERT

Gather with Alliance members at N.Y.Cake to make your own artwork with recycle artist Ruby Silvious, on unusual canvases (did someone say teabags and eggshells?). 

The event will start with a demo by Ruby, followed by participants learning how to paint on used tea bags and the inside of cracked egg shells.

The  a substantial "Adult" Afternoon Tea complete with bubbly, wines, specialty teas/tisanes, and savory bites. Dessert will be decorated cupcakes by award-winning cake decorator and Alliance member Lisa Mansour,  co-owner of NY Cake and owner of NYC Cake Academy. 

Ruby will also be signing her new  coffee table book, Reclaimed Canvas: Reimagining the Familiar,  which members and guests can buy at the discounted price of $25 (Reg. $35)

And yes, there will be a raffle! Lucky attendees will go home with Ruby’s first book, 363 Days of Tea: A Visual Journal on Used Tea Bags; a framed original artwork from Ruby; or a gift certificate from NY Cake.

Menu

Savory Small Bites, in the tradition of Afternoon Tea 

(from Alliance member Lynn Bernstein of  allLYNNfoods)

Bubbly and wine

Tea + Tisane (from Alliance member Linda Villano of SerendipiTEA)

Mini Cupcakes (from Alliance member Lisa Mansour of NY Cake)

Tiered Servings Stands Sponsored by The Brooklyn Teacup

Ruby Silvious  is a recycle artist who is internationally recognized for her miniature paintings and collages on the used tea bag. She is the author of 363 Days of Tea: A Visual Journal on Used Teabags, and the newly released Reclaimed Canvas: Reimagining the Familiar. In her new book, Ruby wants viewers to keep an open mind and think beyond the boundaries of what they may 

consider traditional art.

Lisa Mansour is an Alliance member and award-winning, third-generation expert in cake decoration and the co- founder and the co-owner of NY Cake, the premier destination for baking and decorating supplies in New York City. Mansour is also the head of NY CAKE Academy, a hands-on cake decorating school, where she teaches classes on fondant, specialty cakes and seasonal topics for baking enthusiasts of all ages and skill levels.

Lynn Bernstein is an Alliance member, New York City chef, and a graduate of French Culinary Institute/ICC.  allLYNNfoods is her high-end boutique catering company serving NYC.  With her background as a fashion stylist and education as a graphic designer, Lynn  brings her sensibilities to your palate and to your party.

NYWCA members $45

non-memberes $55

Registration

Hurry - seats are filling fast!

Amedeo Modigliani - 100th Anniversary of his Death

Amedeo Modigliani (July 12, 1884 - January 24, 1920)

On January 24, 1920, the Jewish Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis in the Hôpital de la Charité.  His companion Jeanne Hébuterne (eight months pregnant) commited suicide by jumping out of a window at 3 a.m. on January 26, 1920.  Modigliani’s funeral on January 27th, was attended by a huge crowd at Père Lachaise, including Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, Moïse Kisling, André Salmon and his friends, who were then barred from Jeanne’s funeral by her parents. Not completely deterred, Salmon, Kisling, Modigliani’s dealer Léopold Zborowski, and their wives went to the little suburban cemetery in Bagneux to put a wreath of white flowers on her grave, after her father and brother left. In 1930 Jeanne is reburied next to Modigliani.

To learn more about Amedeo Modigliani's life and legacy, please visit the Modigliani Project's website and also click on my review of the Modigliani exhibitions in 2018, published in Bonjour Paris. 

Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of  Jeanne Hébuterne, 1918

(April 6, 1898-January 26, 1920)

From Peindre [Painting] by André Salmon:

Comme on boit un coup pour se mettre en train

Tu criais un chant du PARADIS ou du PURGATOIRE

Quitte, ayant bien crié, à t’en retourner boire;

Ah! j'entendrai toujours tes cris sur leurs silences,

Martyr dont le destin commence.

Nous avons une dernière fois trinqué avec Derain,

Ton album bleu comme un cahier de ciel était si lourd!

Ton corps pliait sous tes beaux habits de velours

Quelle ombre te mordait aux reins?

Et cette forme exquise que toujours tu peignais

Intacte a suivi ton essence où vont les morts, Modigliani,

Où les morts vont enfin vivre ce que valut la somme de leurs peines.


Le Dôme de Florence se mirait dans le Seine.

From Peindre [Painting] by André Salmon: 

Translated by Sandra Smith

While having a drink to get us going

You shouted out a song from PARADISE or PURGATORY

Then done, having sung so well, you got back to drinking

Ah! I will always hear your cries amid their silences,

Martyr whose destiny is just beginning.

We clinked glasses one last time with Derain,

Your album as blue as a notebook made of sky was so heavy!

Your body bending beneath your beautiful velvet clothes

What darkness gnawed at your insides?

And that exquisite form that you always painted

Has followed your essence, intact, to where the dead go, Modigliani

Where the dead can finally live out what all their pain was worth.

The Duomo in Florence reflected in the Seine.

Amedeo Modigliani's work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art


Best wishes for the weekend,
Beth

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.
Director and owner
New York Arts Exchange
www.nyarts-exchange.com
On Facebook
Twitter @BethNewYork

Beth's lecture on January 7th - Last Call for January and the Winter Holidays!

Félix Vallotton, La Paresse (Laziness), 1896

Greetings, Friends and Happy New Year!

Today is Three Kings Day, "Little Christmas" and Christmas Eve for members of the Christian Eastern Orthodox churches. Thank you, Hyperallergic, for providing the list and a great source to keep us up to date on art happenings and issues. If you haven't subscribed to Hyperallergic, yet, please make that your New Year's resolution.  Thank you, Hrag Vartanian, for a great online art magazine that is absolutely free!

Félix Vallotton's print, Laziness, is part of a wonderful exhibition of this Swiss artist's paintings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through January 26th.  The show is located in the Lehman Wing, so it's a small selection of his work - not too taxing for the weary.

Also, Vallotton and other non-French artists will be featured during my lecture at the Byram Shubert Library, Greenwich, CT on Tuesday, January 7th - that's tomorrow - at 5 pm.

The title is "When Modern Art Came to Paris: Immigration and Assimilation." The talk will highlight the great artists who came to Paris and contributed to modern art when this "City of Light" was the mecca for all aspiring artists. Those who stayed, the immigrants like Vallotton, belong to our concept of "French art."  Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delauney, and Amedeo Modigliani were other immigrants who established their careers in France and became part of the French avant-garde during their respective lifetimes.  On January 24, 2020, we honor the 100th anniversary of the  death of Modigliani. 

I hope you will be able to join us at the Byram Shubert Library at 5 pm - it's free and open to the public.

Other exhibitions that are closing:

Metropolitan Museum of Art: 

Vija Celmins, through January 12 (at the Met Breuer).

The Cloisters: The Colmar Treasures: A Medieval Jewish Legacy, through January 12.  

The Last Knight closed on January 5th - here is the exhibition page to view online.

Museum of Modern Art:

Michael Amitage, through January 20

Energy, through  January 26

Betye Saar: The Legends of a Black Girl's Window, closed January 4 - here is the exhibition page to view online.

Guggenheim Museum: 

Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, through January 12.

New Museum:

Hans Haacke: All Connected, through January 26

Morgan Library and Museum: 

John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal, through January 12

New York Historical Society:

Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere, through January 12

Katonah Museum of Art:

Abstract Expressionist Women of 9th Street Show, through January 26

Museum of Art and Design:

Vera Neumann (Vera scarves), through January 26

Anna Sui, through February 23

Wishing you a happy and healthy 2020 -

Beth

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and owner

New York Arts Exchange

www.nyarts-exchange.com 

On Twitter: @bethnewyork

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NYArts.Exchange/

Happy New Year! Happy New Decade!

Happy New Decade!

Wishing you peace, joy and plenty of art adventures in 2020!

The New York Arts Exchange