A Saturday Stroll Down Main Street part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post, A Saturday Stroll Down Main Street part 1. I visited Lawndale and headed south. Once you are at Lawndale, the MFAH is just a few blocks away. My intent was to look at everything but I ran out of steam after going through the Kinder building, where the MFAH houses its modernist and contemporary artwork.

I don’t envy the task that the curators had in arranging the Kinder. I guess they could have tried to organize the work chronologically or via place of origin—these are simplistic ways to think about art, but I often think in these terms. This Russian painter versus that English one. The MFAH does this a little bit, putting their impressive collection of Latin American modernism in one set of galleries, and when you go through those galleries, it makes sense. You get the idea that different art scenes in different Latin American countries responded to the challenges of modernism in different ways, even though a lot of it can be lumped into the category of “concrete” art. Concrete art was a school of abstraction that emphasized a strict, geometric approach to abstract art. The godfathers of the movement were European—Theo van Doesberg and Max Bill—but Latin American artists picked up the ball and ran with it, with each country having its own approach. It is tempting to think that the way that Brazilian concrete art differs from Venezuelan concrete art reflects an essential cultural difference between the countries. I suppose such an argument could be made, but we are not talking about large movements. If a few artists get together in Montevideo and start producing a style of art, it is not Uruguay that causes the art to be what it is—it is the interactions of this small group of artists, all of whom know each other. The case of Uruguayan art is especially interesting.

Joaquín Torres-García was a Uruguayan artist who studied in Europe and became enamored of constructivist visual ideas. He was very energetic and had a gift for leadership. Once he moved back to Uruguay in 1931 (he was well over 50 when he did), he made a huge impact. He published magazines, an autobiographical novel called Historia de mi vida, and started a Bauhaus-like school called Taller Torres Garcia. As a consequence of the force of his personality and excellence of his painting, a lot of the concrete art from Uruguay ends up resembling Torres-García’s.

If I had to characterize Torres-Garcia, I would say abstract, symbolic, cosmic, and contradictorily hand-made. You can see his brush-strokes in his painting. His design is rigorously abstract, but has a hand-writerly style.

Another concrete artist, or better yet, a neo-concrete artist was Lygia Clark from Brazil.

It is not uncommon for descriptive words for artistic movements to be applied to very different forms of art. So Donald Judd, Steve Reich and Raymond Carver are all “minimalists” despite producing work that is effectively unrelated to one another’s. In Brazil, there was a school of concrete poets, notably João Cabral de Melo Neto. And Melo Neto influenced Brazilian pop musicians—for example “Bat Macumba” by Gil Gilberto and “Júlia / Moreno” by Caetano Veloso. The various Brazilian art movements thus leaked into popular culture—just as they do everywhere. This is part of the problem with an art museum—there is often no way for a viewer to experience the cultural environment that produced the art she is looking at. (Not to mention the economic and political environment.)

The weirdest work by a Latin American artist I saw on Saturday was La Ciudad Hydroespacial by Gyula Kosice, an Argentine artist born in Czechoslovakia in 1924. When I show you photos of this work, it would be reasonable to say that it has nothing to do with the concrete art of Torres-Garcia or Clark. But it does, with its own Argentine twist. Kosice was one of the founders of Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, an organization of pioneering Argentine concrete artists. But Argentine art has a cosmic strain running through some of it—see the work of my favorite Argentine visual artist, Xul Solar. And Kosice took that cosmic turn and using plexiglass built the Hydrospacial City.

The MFAH took a gallery where they could have hung dozens of paintings and built Kosice’s work a truly cosmic home. Kosice seems like a minor artist to me, but I loved immersing myself into his ciudad.

The other galleries are mostly arranged thematically, although there is a large gallery with artwork we would call modernist. It’s where the Picassos and Matisses are. Let’s look at a few pieces from that gallery.

I love this bizarre tableau by Edward Hopper. An anxious, depressed man sitting on a bed next to a pantsless woman. It could almost be a magazine ad for Hims.

The Forest Bess paintings are so small that one could easily miss them. I’ve written about Bess many times in the past and have produced a zine collecting my various writings about him, which I would like you all to order!

As I was complaining about above, we often don’t get much of an idea about the artistic milieu that artists came out of, but this vitrine with a book by Langston Hughes illustrated by Jacob Lawrence does, at least, connect the poet and the painter in one work. (There was another illustrated Hughes book in the vitrine with a great drawing by Miguel Covarubbias, but I couldn’t get a good photograph of it.)

I have always loved this 1915 self-portrait by German-American artist Lyonel Feininger. Feininger started off as a cartoonist in Germany and France (and did some astonishing comic strips for the Chicago Tribune, The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World) before evolving a style that combined cubism and expressionism.

I’ve always loved Stuart Davis’s colorful, jangly paintings.

Saul Steinberg was born in Romania, became a cartoonist in Italy, fled after Italy introduced anti-semitic laws, and ended up in New York, where he somehow straddled the world of fine art (he married abstract painter Hedda Sterne, also born in Romania) and the magazine illustration world, producing cartoons and covers for The New Yorker.

Modernism took a sharp left turn with artists like Robert Rauschenberg. Sor Aqua (Venetia) is his 1973 homage to that magic, floating city.

I’ve always liked John Chamberlain’s crushed sheet metal sculptures, especially ones like Old Anson Impact (1973). I like how it looks like a crumpled piece of paper thrown in a corner. Chamberlain always disavowed any connection between his art and car crashes, but car crashes are such a universal American experience, I don’t see how one can avoid making that connection.

Après modernism, le deluge. While modernism isn’t a style of visual art, once it more-or-less ran out of steam, artists got freaky.

Some kept on doing paintings and painting-like works, like this gigantic Anselm Kieffer called Himmlisches Jerusalem. But given that it was made lead, salt, and silver leaf, Kieffer is not a traditional painter.

Los Carpinteros are a pair of artists from Cuba. Here they have recreated a Communist era monument from Croatia with black legos.

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist who is best know for making portraits out of material (like chocolate sauce) and photographing them. There was a very entertaining documentary about Muniz called Waste Land that I wrote about over a decade ago.

Muniz is more than capable of producing a conceptual joke.

Another jokester is Sandy Skoglund. I know some photographers see her as a stunt artist, and I understand that—but I found this photo quite amusing.

Also on the funny scale is this picture of museum-goers by Red Grooms.

Ed Pashke was a Chicago painter who specialized in in electric paintings of Chicago’s demimonde.

Robert Gober can always disturb his viewers. Making sculptures of pustule-ridden children’s limbs is, without a doubt, the act of an artistic edgelord.

In addition to art qua art, the MFAH has a large collection of furniture and objects to show off modern design.

Javier Mariscal is a Spanish cartoonist, animator and designer. He designed this drinks cart for the Memphis Group. I’ve been following Mariscal’s work as a cartoonist since the mid-80s and still follow him on Instagram. Lately he has been putting up drawings he made of Havana.

These Pillola lamps were designed by Cesare Maria Casati and C. Emanuele Ponzio. They seem like perfect 60s artifact; one can imagine reading Valley of the Dolls by their light.

But one of the best things about the Kinder is that the MFAH has finally pulled some of their artworks by Texas artists. They only have a small percentage of their inventory of Texas artists up at any given time, but with the Kinder, they are showing much more.

We already saw two Forrest Bess paintings. But we also have some work by the last generation of Houston artists, like Dorothy Hood.

I think of John Biggers work terms paintings, drawings, and prints, It’s nice to see his three dimensional work.

James Drake combines coal and a charcoal drawing in Juárez/El Paso (boxcar) to memorialize a terrible incident in 1987 in which 18 undocumented Mexican men suffocated in a boxcar near El Paso.

I was very impressed by Deborah Roberts solo exhibit at The Contemporary Austin. It seems like yesterday, but it was 2021. The pandemic has compressed my personal history. . .

César Augusto Martínez brings the aesthetic of the Chicano into the museum with Bato con Sunglasses. I remember the first time I saw the word “bato”—it was in a Love & Rockets comic by Jaime Hernandez, probably around 1985.

Who among us Houstonians has forgotten the NBA finals of 1986. Certainly not Jesse Lott who portrays the Rockets playing the Celtics here in Basketball Players. The figures include Larry Bird and Hakeem Olajuwon.

John Alexander’s lithograph feels curiously contemporary.

Liz Ward’s art often employs maps.

These are actually two soft sculptures by Margarita Cabrera.

This giant sculpture by Mel Chin has a specific political meaning, but I wonder what will happen to it—and much of Chin’s work—when this historical moment has passed.

Rachel Hecker combines a slick, commercial style with both eroticism and cartoons in a way that feels extremely American.

Rick Lowe is best known for work that is, in a sense, immaterial. Project Row Houses has been described as a social sculpture. It must please the MFAH to be able to hang a physical artwork by one of our more prominent artists.

This tiny abstraction is by Robin Utterback. I started writing this blog om 2009, and Robin Utterback was stabbed to death in 2007—I wish I had gotten to meet him before he died.

Terrell James is one of a relatively small number of Houston-are painters still doing gestural abstraction.

I’ll close with one of my favorite Houston artists, Tierney Malone. I want to apologize for the bad photo—it was impossible to get a shot without the reflection in the glass—you can see a ghostly image of me in the reflection. His work is redolent of history and jazz.

On my way back home from the museum, I looked in on Devin Borden Gallery and Diverse Works, but neither was open.