Over kunst en tentoonstellingen die ik bezoek. Van Louise Bourgeois tot Chris Killip fotografie. Persoonlijke kijk op hedendaagse en klassieke kunst.
A History of Pictures, by Hockney and Gayford
In the format of a semi-dialog, David Hockney and Martin Gayford in A History of Pictures discuss the history and various aspects of picture-making.
Beautifully illustrated.
The most interesting thing is that Hockney seems not to have a very high regard for photography.
“… I question photography. A lot of people don’t, they accept the world looks like a photograph.
“But colour photography couldn’t get tones like those [Vermeer] as is has to rely on the dyes or printing ink. Those aren’t like paint, and never will be.”
“… I don’t know whether photography is an art. Some photographers considered themselves artists, and some didn’t
… Good photography does require intelligence and imagination but a lot of it is very mechanical.”
Vermeer, Caravaggio, Degas, Delacroix, a few of the painters mentioned in the book that used photographic techniques for their paintings.
“Photography came out of painting and as far as I can see that’s where it is returning.”
Hellen van Meene in Huis Marseille
Panoramas of death. Strange coffins with almost dead bodies. Grandchildren stand mourning alienated next to the coffin. A dog too. In the film, a cat in the polder that doesn’t seem to want to be photographed and disappears from view. The panorama that does not want to be a panorama because it is upright. A dress blows in front of the coffin, which has been placed on a touching pair of yellow bricks so that it stays upright.
Surely the best is the image of nothing, or of what was.
In the other half of Huis Marseille show Koos Breukels photographs of his son. Can’t stop thinking: what a brat.
Figuring
Maria Popova announced her book, Figuring. First time in my life I have pre-ordered a book. It is arriving in February 2019. Maria Popova is the creator of one of the world’s best blogs: Brain Pickings.
Bechers in Huis Marseille: Becher to Gursky
The station is enormously crowded. Looking over heads as we descend the escalator. Maybe normal for a Saturday afternoon, maybe extra busy because of the beautiful weather.
We take the streetcar to avoid the crowds in Damrak. At the Keizersgracht, we leave the streetcar, and I walk the wrong way, as it is pre-programmed towards FOAM, but for Huis Marseille, we must of course go the other way.
At Huis Marseille we are overtaken by three people who are busily discussing their way into the museum before us. One of them turns out to be the speaker for a lecture at Huis Marseille that afternoon: Stefan Gronert. He wrote The Düsseldorf School of Photography.
But we haven’t come for the lecture (which is held in an overly warm room on the second floor of the House). In the halls hang the works of the Bechers’ students – in the room near the reception, several works by the Bechers themselves. The down-to-earth documentary style appeals to me very much, but I find the larger formats of students such as Gursky and Struth even more telling, with their overwhelming detail.
The Bechers’ new business acumen, with its almost scientific slant, has been an inspiration for the younger generation of photographers hanging here. The industrial landscapes of Gursky and the church interiors of Struth: vacation photo of church attendance on steroids, Ruff with experimental night shots, library landscapes of Candida Höfer, Hütte’s empty cityscapes and landscapes portraying a lonely civilization. I find the works of the younger (I think) generation Sasse, Nieweg and Clement less powerful.
We walk back through the city. At the Athenaeum, we go inside, but the excess is overwhelming, back along the Jordaan and another terrace.
