Ximena Rodriguez Bradford

In an article of 1999 Nathalie Heinich proposes considering contemporary art as a “genre” with specific characteristics, and as distinct from modern as well as classical art. When she returned to this issue 15 years later, the heated debate on contemporary art had still not burned itself out; on the contrary, the flames had been fanned by the explosion of prices and the sensationalization of the art displayed in the most revered institutions. Rather than a genre, the author ventures, contemporary art has now introduced a new paradigm. According to the meaning attributed to the term by epistemologist Thomas Kuhn, the imposition of a new paradigm engenders a violent break with the past and the redefinition of the norms governing a human activity. In the field of artistic practices this has upset the system of values that determine what can legitimately be considered art. Beauty andspiritual expression – required by previous paradigms – are no longer the order of the day and have given way to the tendency to overstep limits, always moving the horizon of the possible a little farther away. A “regime of uniqueness” is now in force, which, on principle, privileges anything that is innovative. Heinich traces the stages of this revolution, starting with the prize awarded to Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennale and the fierce reactions it caused. She describes the effects of this on the mechanisms of the art world, showing how it has changed the criteria governing the production and circulation of works, the status of the artist and the role of intermediaries and institutions. Hers is an outsider’s viewpoint: as a sociologist she conducts a rigorous and impartial investigation, filled with anecdotes that become valuable analytical tools. The aim is not to supply ammunition to the prosecution or defence in the trial of contemporary art, but to state the facts. Only by registering the paradigm shift is it possible to get the obsolete categories out of the way and to approach  contemporary art with the desire to understand, rather than approve or deprecate it.

In September of 1988, a young Nathalie Heinich went to see Harald Szeemann in his studio in Monte Verità. She interviewed him, seeking confirmation of her feeling that the figure of the curator increasingly resembled that of the artist. And who better to tell her than Harald Szeemann, whose thirty years of curating exhibitions brought forth an approach all his own?Once the youngest-ever Director of the Kunsthalle Bern, Szeemann was also the General Secretary of documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), but he attained mythical status with the ground-breaking “When Attitudes Become Form”, a cathartic 1969 exhibition that broke with the past, in search of a new aesthetic. Among curators-creators, Szeemann is a “case apart”, thanks to an inimitable style that, found far from the beaten path, always heeded his own instincts, shifting the focus from the official value of a given work to an almost sentimental relationship with the artist and the materials on exhibit. A curator-creator must rely on his or her sixth sense, on private obsessions, focussing not on career advancement but on subjects that they, and they alone, can address.In defending his or her uniquely personal outlook, the curator moulds the contents of each exhibition, as well as the logical link between one exhibition and another, establishing a magnum opus which increasingly resembles one large, personal work driven by an intimate necessity, fuelled by the scenarios of a biographical arc, and not simply by chance or the dictates of an institutional program.

On coming face to face with Matisse’s scandalous Le Bonheur de vivre in 1906, Sergei Shchukin found himself shivering uncontrollably. The scion of an illustrious Muscovite family, Shchukin was a consummate collector of great experience at the age of just over fifty. After reviving the fortunes of his father’s textile business, he had spent a decade visiting Paris to gaze upon the avant-garde paintings exhibited there, the works by Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh whose glowing colours were to adorn the walls of the Trubetskoy Palace. In 1906, Shchukin recognized the wave of emotion that overwhelmed him whenever he felt that a work had to be his from the very first moment. This was the start of a close and fruitful relationship with Matisse that led to the creation of masterpieces like La Danse and La Musique, and marked the peak of Shchukin’s farsighted vision, as epitomized by his remark to the artist: “The public may be against you but the future is on your side.” A few years later, his new guest was none other than Picasso, initially greeted with all due circumspection but ultimately coming to dominate Shchukin’s already splendid body of works. The peerless collection thus built up was opened to the public on a regular basis before its confiscation by the state after the Revolution of 1917. On beholding that explosion of colours, the young Russian artists underwent a cultural shock equalled only by the passion to emulate those glowing canvases that was to inspire the works of future generations. In relating the life of the man and the patron of the arts, the authors necessarily also retrace the destinies of his four brothers, Nikolai, Piotr, Dmitri and Ivan, and the crucial part they played. Epitomizing the different aspect of patronage, they all helped with their collections to enrich the holdings of Russia’s museums. Together with them, Sergei Shchukin was the leading figure in a family saga interwoven with the stormy history of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century and with the artistic revolution that turned Europe upside-down in the same period.

“He smiles and all the wrinkled skin of his face smiles, too. In a strange way. It’s not only his eyes that laugh, so does his forehead.  His whole person has the grey colouring of his studio. Perhaps in sympathy he has taken on the colour of the dust.” With these words, Jean Genet – one of his favourite models – described Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor whose indomitable character was sculpted onto his face by his troubled years and obsessive work. Besides, the activity in the studio on rue Hippolyte-Maindron was intense. Those who entered witnessed Giacometti working incessantly on his figures, relentlessly destroying and reconstructing them in a grueling pursuit of perfection, a tormented oscillation between an ideal to aspire to and aborted attempts, a back and forth of doubts and second thoughts. Just seconds ago he was laughing; now he turns to the sculpture-in-progress and, intoxicated by the contact of his hands with the mass of clay, completely ignores those around him. Born in 1901 in Borgonovo, Alberto spent his childhood in the rugged regions of Switzerland. His father initiated him into art at a very young age and followed his career step by step, providing encouragement and support. In 1922, Giacometti moved to Paris, where he began under the mentorship of Antoine Bourdelle and Zadkine but soon moved on – likewise briefly – to Breton’s Surrealism and Cubism. His rebellious spirit, which underlay all his explorations and rapid passage through the avant-garde movements, fated him to a solitary path on the fringes of the art world, despite his regular encounters with the most celebrated intellectuals of the time in the cafés of Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter. Under the spell of primitive art, he moved towards a more synthetic, disorienting representation, creating a host of figures forever advancing with an unsteady step, thanks to whom he achieved fame on the international art scene. “Never let myself be influenced by anything,” he wrote in a notebook. Indeed, Giacometti belongs to a timeless time, a quality of the most authentic essence of art.

Just as there are noses with a prodigious sense of smell, enabling them to invent perfumes, so there are eyes able to reveal the authorship of a painting. If an expert eye takes just a few moments to identify the artist behind a work that has remained in the shadows for centuries, it is because long years of training have made it possible to isolate details that are worth more than a fingerprint. However, intuition and acquired knowledge are not always enough to flush out a masterpiece.The most sensational discoveries often take place thanks to a completely fortuitous event. For example, someone’s eyes might just alight upon a Christ on a cross hanging up in a gallery visited by chance, just at the moment that a ray of light illuminates the nails – recognizable out of thousands because of their polished shine – revealing a work by Bronzino that has been searched for over the centuries and given up for lost. Epilogues such as this tell us a lot about an activity that closely resembles that of the detective. On the trail of lost paintings, connoisseurs rely upon a network of informers, striving to put the pieces of the puzzle together, clue by clue. Their gaze does not linger upon poor restoration, overly casual earlier attributions and the proliferation of fakes, but becomes immersed in the life of the paintings. If they only saw images and were not sensitive enough to enter into them, they would never understand them. Philippe Costamagna, a member of this scant group of experts called upon to authenticate anonymous canvases in every corner of the world, reveals the tricks and pitfalls of a profession permanently poised between the need for scientific stringency and the gratifications offered by dealers and collectors, who are often blinded by personal interests. An account that combines private memoirs, reflections on the tools of the trade, interesting historical facts and succulent anecdotes regarding the affairs of certain illustrious predecessors of the calibre of Berenson, Longhi and Zeri: three radically different men and personalities, whose extraordinary photo archives have trained generations of scholars and who have left their mark on the mysterious art of attribution, each with their own eccentricities.

Every phenomenon is the material trace of the invisible forces that generated it, the inseparable fusion of content and form, of internal and external elements. This is how such painting should be understood, a form of painting freed from figurative intentions, which aspires to embody sensations, emotions and passions: in a word, the intimate essence of life. This was the sense of the revolution brought about at the dawn of the last century by Kandinsky, the founder of abstract painting. It is the subject examined in this essay by Michel Henry, whose ideas on phenomenology all hinge on the theme of life, the life that the “pioneer of pioneers” aimed to represent pictorially in his pulsating invisibility. It was no longer a question of “abstracting from” some element of the visible world, nor of grasping an external appearance already constituted to give it back in the form of a more or less mimetic image. The challenge was to bring to light something that did not previously exist except in a secret dimension. But if the art of painting, by his own definition, is display of the visible that is shown in shapes and colours, how can it give shape to a reality hidden from view? Based on an analysis of the theoretical literature that has accompanied the development of Kandinsky’s abstract art and which provides an excellent route to understanding his work, Henry shows how the artist separates colour and line from the constraints of the visible form: every line is the product of a force, every colour is linked to an affective tone, an inner sonority. If we are essentially force and affect, then lines and colours allow our deepest inner self to emerge.   Rather than underpinning a simple art movement, Kandinsky’s abstraction therefore reveals to us the profound truth of art, which to a certain extent is all abstract, freed from having to stick to the external world. Grasping the principles of this revolution is equivalent to understanding that art is the highest expression of the potency of life and, ultimately, its most exemplary objectivization.

10 February 1985: Jean-Michel Basquiat appears on the cover of the New York Times magazine, sitting in his studio in Great Jones Street. His stares idly into the lens while his hand grasps his brush like a weapon. His bare feet, resting on an overturned chair that looks like an animal carcass, are in sharp contrast to the formality of the Armani suit where you can just see the hem of his trousers streaked with paint. He is light years away from his early days when, having removed himself from the bourgeois indifference of his father and his mother’s psychic instability, he chose his path, the underground world of graffiti and new wave music, of clubs, but above all the walls of New York where he gave vent to the “80 per cent of anger” that fed his hunger for success. From the anonymity of SAMO – the label he adopted to brand the skin of a city still hostage to racism and urban decay – Jean-Michel went on, in just a few years, to co-sign paintings with Andy Warhol. Today he is the most famous black artist, the first to become internationally famous, a goal he really wanted to achieve and single-mindedly worked towards. But it quickly became a label he couldn’t shake off, in the gilded cage that the art establishment seemed to have put him in, from which not even his excesses and perhaps his last desperate attempt to escape – a return to his origins, to the African destination on the air ticket found in his pocket at the time of his premature death at 27 – would manage to save him. A contradictory temperament in a time of contradictions, Basquiat personally experienced a whirlwind of stimuli, a maelstrom of emotions that he then poured out onto his canvas and any other support to hand: words, images and sounds were magically recomposed into a new form that makes him one of the greatest visual poets of the 20th century.  

Visionaries, businessmen and daring adventurers who are mad about art and childishly keen on taking risks. The most intrepid dealers have always been obsessed with running to ground the Van Goghs of tomorrow. It drives them to tramp unfamiliar streets, rounding up studies and betting everything on painters who are either misunderstood or ahead of their times. In recent years, however, the forgery swindle that ruined Knoedler, one of the most respectable New York galleries, has revealed something rotten in a profession that could soon degenerate into vulgar speculation. Yann Kerlau recounts the meteoric rise and the vicissitudes of some of the most famous art hunters from the 19th century to the present day: from the first ardent supporter of the Impressionists, Théodore Duret, who championed Japonisme, to which Gauguin, Van Gogh and Monet were so indebted, to Paul Durand-Ruel, who opened the doors of the American market to the Refusés; from a first-class sales strategist such as the indolent Ambroise Vollard, to the wily Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who became Picasso’s dealer in spite of an unpromising start, and Peggy Guggenheim, the eccentric American heiress who tracked down the most avant-garde artists for her New York gallery with the help of first-rate advisers. He brings us up to the present day with a worn-out advertising executive, Charles Saatchi, who rose to the Olympian heights of art by turning the artist into a trademark, and a cynical self-made man, Larry Gagosian, who took the best in his stable to conquer a multinational empire, keeping one eye on his bank account and the other on the auction houses. Seven well-rounded portraits, each in his or her own way reflecting their own times.Seven variations on a trade which you need to have a nose for – not to find what is beautiful, but the precious gem that is hidden in every work of art. A phenomenal feat in which the excesses, passions and folly of the protagonists give the account of a heroic and romantic dimension.

The eccentric Baudelaire with a flamboyant black bow and an immaculate white shirt, the proud and inflexible gaze of the aged Victor Hugo and the magnetic appeal of Sarah Bernhardt in her twenties: there are few who do not know the photographic portraits of Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, more capable than anyone else at capturing the innermost soul of his contemporaries in Paris during the second half of the 19th century. From his birth under the Restoration to his death on the eve of the Great War, Nadar lived for nearly a century as a major public figure. This biography by Stéphanie de Saint Marc reveals the other faces of the great photographer, the embodiment of a “vital paradox with countless nuances”: the turbulent debut that shocked public opinion with the first, pioneering caricatures, contributing to the birth of popular, sensationalistic press; the sudden, rash decisions, as when he dropped everything one morning in March 1848 and marched off with the French army to help free Poland from the Russian invaders; the insatiable thirst for adventure that took him first into the heavens, photographing clouds from a hot-air balloon, and then down into the bowels of the earth, immortalizing the catacombs of Paris by means of artificial lighting; the happy-go-lucky character of a controversial artist who “was on close terms in five minutes and had eight thousand friends” but was at the same time introverted and incapable of balanced relations with those dearest to him. “Able to conquer the air like a bird, as strong as a bull, as agile as a fish at wriggling in anywhere, as mischievous as a monkey and as proudly independent as a stag”, Nadar was all these things together, the observer and interpreter of a modernity that owes him much more than is realized.

Museum S.p.a. is not a book on the Guggenheim Museum or indeed on museums in general but a pamphlet that reveals the perverse mechanisms of art through the example of a museum transformed into a multinational. The museum in question was the New York Guggenheim and its diabolic planner a man named Tom Krens. The formula was simple and wholly in line with the times. Art was a commodity like all the others and to be exploited as such for profit. The speculative bubble was on target once again. The coupling of art and business was now acceptable and the Guggenheim began to open branches all over the world. But can art be treated like a Big Mac or a packet of Corn Flakes? What are the consequences of this absurd plan after the outbreak of the world-wide economic crisis? Paul Werner worked at the New York Guggenheim for nine years and went through this epoch-making change on the inside. A specialist in contemporary art, he was suddenly required to be an expert on everything from Chinese and African art to Armani clothes, motorcycles and even Vaseline. This short, incandescent text takes the lid off that bizarre postmodern museum to reveal its internal dynamics, shedding completely unprecedented light on the path that museums – all museums – have ended up taking over the last twenty years, a slippery slope whose disastrous consequences are clear today. On these ashes, with great acumen and fierce passion, the author indicates a new and exciting path towards a future yet to be constructed.

Described by André Breton as the most intelligent man of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp has never ceased to wield great influence over contemporary art since his death in 1968. From Dada and Surrealism to Futurism and Cubism, his art is interwoven with the great artistic movements of the 20th century without ever being reducible to any one of them. If Picasso insistently presents the figure of the artist as demiurge, Duchamp personifies the contemporary artist through his invention of the ready-made and has been recognized since the 1960s as an undisputable source of inspiration by younger generations of artists. A great deal has been written about his work but far less about his life, which he led outside the current categories, not as an artist or anarchist but as an “anartist”, to use his own neologism. Detachment, elegance, the freedom of indifference and interpenetration of opposites as well as a constant assertion of laziness and physiological disdain for money were for him the original tools of an unprecedented stance with respect to the world and things: “I prefer living and breathing to working.” Duchamp’s frequent, caustic remarks on his life serve as a whole to delineate a personal economics (reduce needs in order to be truly free) and an authentic art of living. According to Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s finest work was his use of his time. Bernard Marcadé takes this view as his starting point in the deep conviction that detailed examination of the artist’s life will provide the best understanding of his art. By describing the ready-made as a sort of appointment, Duchamp himself suggests the importance of the events of everyday life in the conception of his works. The biographical elements in play – meetings, friendships, secrets, correspondence and love affairs – are not only anecdotal and marginal trimmings of the work but “biographemes” constituting its fundamental components.

Do you have to set the Louvre on fire to establish yourself as one of the masters of your time? In order to answer this provocative question, in the 1960s the art critic Pierre Schneider invited eleven celebrated artists of the day, including Giacometti, Miró, Chagall and Steinberg, to accompany him one at a time through the museum’s sumptuous rooms. None of them refused the invitation and the truth that emerged still holds today. Far from torturing artists, the Louvre casts a spell on them that does not fade over time. Neither discouraged nor uplifted but if anything beguiled by the abyss separating them from the giants that live there, artists alone are capable of addressing them and entering into a dialogue between equals. Schneider records their every comment and gesture, even their silences and alternating moods, outlining the direction of their thinking in a few lines. Then, at just the right moment, comes the insidious question. The answers, sometimes scathing and sometimes admiring but never deferential, reveal uncommon acumen and great intimacy also with artists of a very different nature. We thus find Chagall unforeseeably moved by Courbet (“a great poet”) and irritated with Ingres (“too polished”), Giacometti enamoured of the Tintoretto self-portrait (“the most magnificent head in the Louvre”), and Miró onomatopoeically entranced, whistling with admiration at African mosaics. The eye of each glides over the works to plumb their material depths, comment on their “chemistry” and finally decide how they have stood up over time. These fascinating walks are informed by a spirit of reconciliation between old and new that explodes any notion of the museum as a warehouse of obsolete objects with nothing to say to contemporaries. The Louvre appears to its eleven extraordinary guests as a book from which you learn to read, a gymnasium to build up your strength, a school to hone your vision, the ideal cemetery, a time machine that eliminates millennial gaps, a bridge between past and present and above all the place where it is possible to address the greatest things created since the beginning of time.