Landscape Revisited

LANDSCAPE Revisited Muniz: “Pictures of Thread”

& Dickinson Highlights at Frieze Masters

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S c u lp t u r e AT D I C K I N S ON P r i v a t e Vi e w

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Frieze Masters Regent’s Park, London 17-20 October 2013 www.friezemasters.com

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CONTENTS 5.

Dickinson at Frieze masters A Note from the Directors

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Muniz: “pictures of thread” Molly Dorkin

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Interview with Muniz Heinrich zu Hohenlohe

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dickinson highlight s

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dickinson at Frieze masters Dickinson is delighted to present Landscape Revisited, which brings together a group of complementary works by Old and Modern Masters. This year marks Dickinson’s inaugural participation at Frieze Masters, and to celebrate the occasion we are showcasing landscape views by Claude Monet, John Constable and Claude Lorrain alongside contemporary reinterpretations of each by Vik Muniz. With Landscape Revisited, we hope to highlight the extent to which modern art inevitably reflects and relates to the work of the Old Masters, as well as to demonstrate the broad chronological range of quality artworks to be found at Dickinson.

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Muniz: “pictures of thread” “When you are doing something really new and impor tant, it always feels as though it has been done before.”

The contemporary Brazilian artist Vik Muniz (b. 1961) reinterprets famous works of art in new media and then photographs them for exhibition. While many artists attempt to deny the past in an effort to produce something that is wholly new, Muniz has realised that this “tabula rasa” state is fundamentally impossible to attain. Instead, he feels an artist must use the past as a starting point for his or her own original creations. For Muniz, the debt to that which has been done previously is not only undeniable but also valuable.

“To copy is to extend the symbolic value of an image by suffusing it with new technology, thus updating its rhetorical approach.” Not content with more traditional materials or methods of

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copying, Muniz chooses his medium to reflect his subject. He has executed series of works in media ranging from pins and needles to chocolate, caviar, and even diamonds.

For the “Pictures of Thread” series (19951999), Muniz turned his attention to great historic landscape paintings. According to Muniz, he has always been interested in the landscape, and in selecting images to copy he looked to seminal examples in the genre by artists like Hobbema, Claude, Poussin, Courbet, Constable and Monet. Originally, his intention was to reproduce these painted landscapes in the medium of bent wire, which he had used to create his previous series “Pictures of Wire”. However the landscape as

a subject did not lend itself as easily to that technique as had the simpler, single-object images of the “Wire” series – a roll of toilet paper, or a glass of whiskey and a burning cigarette. Muniz recalls the difficulty of that period: “Feeling stuck, I tried to think of the idea of the landscape as a sense of infinity, distance, compressed within a very thin surface of paint: an orchestration of textural surfaces capable of indicating successive perspective planes.”

These thoughts led him to happy memories of flying kites as a child in Brazil, spooling out seemingly endless lengths of thread until the kite was barely a speck in the distance, before reeling it back in again.

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Thus, the medium of thread already carried associations of distance and measurement for Muniz, qualities that were wholly suitable for images of the landscape. Muniz narrates his creative process: “While looking at an original image, I unwound thread onto a horizontal surface, sometimes manipulating and fixing the details with hairspray. I was interested in approaching perspective at its lowest threshold of interest. I made use of all the conventions of landscape perspectiverendering: overlapping, scale modulation, and diagonal perspective – building up the volume over the surface so the depth could be perceived in two ways simultaneously.”

In their completed forms, these “Pictures of Thread” resemble old etchings. The more complex works required up to 25,000 yards of thread and took up to three weeks to create.

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“ The original works had the look of old etchings, and the series became known as ‘Pictures of Thread’. The titles of the pieces are based on my record of how many yards of material were employed in their making.”

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“ The subject of landscape painting has always been of interest to me. Its close relation to abstraction and its curious technical development have inspired my work conceptually from the beginning.”

Claude Gellée, called CLAUDE LORRAIN (1604-1682) Landscape with Hagar and the Angel signed and dated: “CLAVDIO/.../1656” (lower right) oil on canvas 101.6 x 87.6 cm.

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Vik MUNIZ (b.1961) Landscape without Hagar and the Angel (after Claude Lorrain, from “Pictures of Thread”), 1996 Toned gelatin silver print 57.5 x 47.5 cm.

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The inspirations: Cl aude Lorrain John Cons ta b l e & C l a u d e M o n e t We are fortunate to exhibit here three great masterpieces by Claude, Constable and Monet, together with the works they inspired as part of the “Pictures of Thread” series.

Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel exists in at least three versions, painted during the height of Claude’s career. All three versions feature the prominent, inwardleaning tree in the centre right, as well as an arched bridge. These elements are repeated in Muniz’s interpretation Landscape without Hagar and the Angel (after Claude Lorrain), in which tightly coiled threads bunch together to mimic the clusters of foliage, and thin straight or whirling single threads imitate the reflections on the surface of the water.

Interestingly, Muniz has decided to eliminate the figures, transforming Claude’s biblical scene into a pure landscape.

John CONSTABLE (1776-1837) Helmingham Dell oil on canvas 71 x 92 cm.

Vik MUNIZ (b.1961) 11,000 Yards (The Helmingham Dell, after John Constable, from “Pictures of Thread”), 1999 Toned gelatin silver print 47.5 x 57.5 cm.

Muniz’s 11,000 Yards is an interpretation of Constable’s painting of Helmingham Dell, a woodland view with a bridge spanning a ravine at the centre of the composition. Like the Claude landscape, Helmingham Dell exists in several drawn as well as painted versions.

Constable was himself no stranger to copying: in one letter, he refers to painting a copy after a landscape by Ruysdael and one after the Claude Hagar (although not the present version; he copied the one then belonging to Sir George Beaumont, which is now in the National Gallery, London): “I have finished my copy from Ruysdael, all but the glazing, which cannot be done till the picture is dry.

It has been roasting in the sun these two or three days. To-morrow, I hope to go on with my copy from Sir George Beaumont’s little Claude (the “Hagar”)…indeed I find it necessary to fag at copying, some time yet to acquire execution.” Constable viewed copying as a means of improving technique, while for Muniz, working in an entirely different technique, the interest lay in the composition.

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“ To copy is to extend the symbolic value of an image by suf fusing it with new technology, thus updating its rhetorical approach. Copying has been an extensive par t of my work as an ar tist, not only because of the constant feeling of debt I owe to ar tists before me, but also because of my firm belief in the nonrevolutionar y pattern of creativity.”

Claude MONET (1840-1926) L’Église de Varengeville; soleil couchant, 1882 signed and dated lower right Claude Monet 82 oil on canvas 65 x 81 cm.

L’Église de Varengeville; soleil couchant, 1883 signed lower left Claude Monet black crayon and scratchwork on gillot paper 30.5 x 42 cm.

Vik MUNIZ (b.1961) 9,000 Yards (Church on Hilltop at Varengeville, after Claude Monet, from “Pictures of Thread”), 1999 Toned gelatin silver print 47.5 x 57.5 cm.

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The third work by Muniz shown here is 9,000 Yards, a version of Monet’s L’Église de Varengeville; soleil couchant. Using the same technique of coiling and arranging lengths of thread, Muniz achieves an admirable reinterpretation of Monet’s great Impressionist landscape. His monochrome image stresses the associations between Monet’s original painting and the oriental woodblock printing that inspired him. It also calls to mind the bistre-wash plein-air studies made by Claude in preparation for his painted landscapes.

“ To copy is to use the past as a tool, an elevated base on which we can build the future. Even though ar t is mainly the product of obser vation of the present, it is impossible for an ar tist to work without taking into consideration what other ar tists before him did.” dickinson

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Q. & A.

VIK MUNIZ interview with Heinrich zu Hohenlohe

“It’s no harder drawing with thread than with a pencil or ink; you’re just choosing another agent or actor. The thing with using materials that are unusual or unor thodox is that it focuses a lot of attention on what you’re looking at. If I do this with ink, it’s just a copy of Corot; but if I remove it from the medium of painting, then it’s somehow, magical. You go through two types of recognition: of the painting and the way it is being rendered. It makes you highly conscious of the act of looking, the mechanics of seeing.”

H:

Vik, it is quite a coincidence that Dickinson is exhibiting three oil paintings from the 17th and 19th centuries at Frieze Masters which were not only copied by you, but were all in the series Pictures of Thread.

What attracted you to these pictures?

V:

My work developed very naturally from the most basic concepts of how one comes to represent something. I started with very simple lines, with wire, making very simple architectural objects with wire.

That technique developed as my interest developed in making more complex imagery.

I decided to do things with thread, but at that point the intention was to create images that were “multistable” images: you could see thread, you could see a landscape and in fact I created a few hurdles, so that would keep you from apprehending the imagery immediately or readily. So you would have to sort of figure out what that imagery was actually made of - how long, the size - you have to get a little bit into the process of how the imagery was made to figure out what you were looking at. When I started doing the thread pieces, one thing that occurred to me, and I think about the first thread pieces were made after I saw a Cliché Verre (An early form of reproducing images before the advent of photography: an image is either drawn or painted on a transparent surface, usually glass, and then printed onto light sensitive paper in a dark room. Most famously it was used by Camille Corot to obtain very realistic images of landscapes)

by Corot, “les songeurs”, which was the first one actually. First of all I tried to make this image with wire, which was the continuation of what I was doing before, but I thought of using something more malleable, more easy dickinson

but offered a different property, something physically more challenging. I started working with thread based on these Cliché Verre by Corot. The idea that I was working on an image from another artist – you know, before I was really trying to avoid the idea of working from another artist.

H:

So this is the first series where you used other artists’ work?

Vik MUNIZ (b.1961) Self Portrait “Pictures of Magazines”, 2003 Chromogenic print, 233 x 183 cm.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille COROT (1796-1875) Le Songeur, 1854 Cliché Verre, 14.8 x 19.3 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Vik MUNIZ (b.1961) 16,200 Yards (Le Songeur, after Corot, from “Pictures of Thread”) 1996 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

V: Yes, yes. Because I realised that if I was to make an image built up with layers of meaning, you know, maybe one way to increase the number of layers was to rely on already existing images. Because then you would not only get into the imagery that you have based your image from, but also you even get into the process of even another mind, of another time. So it is a continuation of the attention to the process

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“I have never seen one piece compared to the original, not side by side... None of these three thread pieces have been near their originals!“

that I was trying to convey. So you get into the process of even another artist - that inspired me to do that. But also images that were very important historically speaking, that have something to do with schemata, how pictorial knowledge gets transmitted from generation to generation, from period to period and so on - from movement to movement. I think I set out with Corot, because that picture was based on the Cliché Verre. The fact that Cliché Verre are objects and museums have a hard time classifying them: they don’t know if they place them in the print department of the museum or in the photo department. That made me think about other people who used preconceived imagery, images that presented some kind of pictorial paradigm. I went looking for that type of image. I remember at the same time copying a Gerhard Richter and then I would be doing a picture of a sculpture based on a drawing of an image that I found in a book that portrayed the picture of a painter and I actually did a picture based on a photograph that was inspired by another painting. That is why I did the “Apple Trees” based on Gerhard Richter.

H:

you?

You call your works “copies” don’t

V:

Yeah, it’s the idea of the creative copy, you know? Richter probably based that painting on the famous Rembrandt (etching).

The three apple trees, you know? (Rembrandt etching, Landscape with Trees, 1643). They had a similar composition.

In the case of Constable and Claude, there is extensive documentation of Constable’s admiration for Claude Lorrain. The Hagar picture is something that is described in one of his writings, when he was still finishing his Hagar picture. I was actually thinking about empathy, the idea of an artist trying to be another artist, trying to understand it, putting yourself in the artist’s place. And that is actually what I was doing, but I was looking at artists who had already done that. In the case of Constable describing his copy of Claude Lorrain’s Hagar picture. It was interesting to find out what he found interesting about the picture. It had probably nothing to do with the original motivation of the artist to paint a picture to start with. It was completely abstained by the way he saw the world when he was copying it. (Constable himself is an interesting artist when you 16.

come to see that he was best…) Painters like El Greco, they were best understood by the eyes of Modernists, and sometimes mistakenly so. Because a lot of his oil sketches sometimes are more admired than his more elaborate paintings. Because people are looking at them from the perspective of Impressionism, which is a mistake, a bad way to look at it, but it offers you a great opportunity to meditate on how art history gets perceived over the ages.

H: Was it important for you to see the original artwork in person? Or did you work from photographic reproductions?

V:

I started knowing about art from extremely bad reproductions in an encyclopaedia that I had at home. The encyclopaedia was so bad that you couldn’t tell if they were amazingly done drawings or really bad pictures, you know? When you see art with all the wrong colours and the scale, it’s an exercise when you see the real thing. Sometimes you get even disappointed by it, but you are very aware of the distance between one thing and the other. You know, seeing a reproduction and seeing the real artwork. What I have done, over the years, I have tried as much as I could to look as much at the real piece. But I start out looking at it on the Internet or in an art book. In the case of the Claude, I read about it and then I went looking for the piece and finally I saw it. I have seen versions of Hagar many, many times.

H: Have you ever placed your pictures alongside the original artworks before?

V: No, I have never seen one piece compared to the original, not side by side. It has happened in other occasions, the exercise of working with other artist’s imagery has led to exhibitions where they put one thing next to another for the sake of comparing but none of these pieces. None of these three thread pieces have been near their originals!

For instance the Constable, I have seen a version of the “Dell” I cannot remember if it is a museum in Buffalo or was it the Nelson Atkins? Something like that. I remember seeing it and then I worked on the piece. The funny thing is, he made versions of that work so I never quite know which one it is. One of the best versions I think is in the Nelson Atkins, it has a cow on it. But it is from the same vantage point, which is curious.

H:

Talking about cows, why do you modify some of your compositions and not others? For example in the Corot piece you leave the figure in the picture but in the Claude you remove Hagar and the Angel.

V: In the Corot painting the figure in the picture plays a compositional role, Hagar and the Angel was just an excuse for the painting to be made. I prefer to look at it as a composition. I also did the Poussin and removed the figures.

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H:

You use a very graphic technique to depict works of art by some of the great masters of colour. Did you feel colour might be distracting?

V: No, I was just being cowardly. I started using colour much later and it was just incidental colour, the colour of the material that I was using. The first time I was actually talking about colour was much later when I started doing the Pantone pieces. The only reason I felt comfortable with doing this was because I wasn’t really dealing with colour, I was dealing with numbers.

H:

For your Pictures of Thread you use up to 25,000 yards of thread – how large is the image that is eventually photographed and how long did it take you to make each of them?

V:

Oh, they are roughly 64 by 30 inches and they take a good week and half, two weeks to put together. Sometimes there is a lot of pushing and pulling. And sometimes

you go a way, and then it doesn’t work, and you have to pull out the thread and start again.

H:

Did you use assistants?

V:

No. I could not afford them!

H: I have one final question, which is not art related: the last time Brazil hosted the world cup in 1950, it lost in the final to Uruguay. Do you think Brazil can win this time?

V:

Oh, I hope so! Now we managed to win the bid to host the World Cup, it would be such a waste. But I don’t think it will be down to Uruguay. Because we beat them fair and square in the Confederation Cup. Looking at how the team is put together, they have a fair chance to win the title. Brazil has a good team!

H: Thank you very much and good luck next year!

Fernand LÉGER, Official Art Print for FIFA World Cup Gerhard RICHTER (b.1932) Apple Trees oil on canvas 67 x 92 cm.

Vik MUNIZ 4,000 Yards After Richter (Apple Trees, from “Pictures of Thread”) REMBRANDT van Rijn (1606-1669) The Three Trees, 1643 etching with drypoint and engraving Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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LEGE R

Étude pour les Disques, 1919

F ern a nd L É g er ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 5 5 ) S i g ned a nd d at ed lower ri g h t f. L É g e r / 1 9 oil on c a n va s 5 5 x 4 6 . cm . ( 2 1 2 / 3 x 1 8 in . )

P ro v en a nce

Mr. Tullio Ascarelli, Bologna & Sao Paulo, purchased from the Artist; and thence by descent.

L i t er at u re

G. Bauquier, Fernand Léger: Catalogue raisonné 1903-1919, Paris, 1989, no. 151(illustrated p.271) M. Vescovo, B. Hedel-Samson, Fernand Léger – l’oggetto e il suo contesto 1920-1940, Milan, 1996, no. 2, pp. 50-1.

E x h i b i t ed

Turin, Fondazione Palazzo Bricherasio, Fernand Léger – l’oggetto e il suo contesto 1920-1940, 27 Jan. – 15 April 1996, no. 2.

S O L D T O B E N e F I T A C H A R it A B L E F O U N D A T I O N Dickinson is offering Léger’s Étude pour Les Disques, 1919. Léger’s Disques paintings constitute the first great works of the artist’s so-called “Mechanical Period”, and take as their subject the metropolitan landscape. This painting constitutes and important step in Léger’s creative process, although it does not correspond exactly to any single on of the large-scale Disques canvases.

It is, therefore, of immense significance

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as part of the Artist’s original conception for one of his most iconic themes. Léger aspired to show the optimism, vibrancy, and excitement of a mechanical future, and his vividly-coloured, industrialised cityscape strikes a balance between pure abstraction and a wholly mimetic representation of postwar urban life. This painting has been in a Private Collection for over 60 Years will be sold to benefit a charitable foundation.

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Basquiat Basquiat’s monumental Blue Skies draws on a range of disparate influences including NeoExpressionism and, as a child from the streets, urban graffiti. His family’s roots lay in Haiti and the Ivory Coast, but his heart belonged to New York, firmly entrenched in the downtown artistic and musical scene of the early 1980s.

The mixed media of his oeuvre demonstrates his overwhelming urge to create in any context, as seen in this piece with the use of a multipanel format. While Basquiat was not known as a landscapist, his paintings are nevertheless about his environment, and represent his attempt to interpret the constantly-evolving physical and social landscape of New York City. The title Blue Skies reinforces this landscape element in the painting, while at the same time underscoring the grittiness of the scene by juxtaposing the small windows of sky against a darker, stained and cluttered urban terrain, which highlights the loneliness of the two characters represented. 1985 saw Basquiat begin to produce darker works, as he found himself caught up in a downward spiral of celebrity and drug addiction, which led to his premature death three years later.

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Blue Skies, 1985

J e a n - M ic h el BA S q u i at ( 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 8 8 ) a crylic a nd mi x ed medi a on wood 7 0 x 2 1 0 cm . ( 2 7 1 / 2 x 8 2 5 / 8 in . )

P ro v en a nce

Safdie Fine Art, 2008 Private Collection L i t er at u re

Prat, Jean-Louis and Richard Marshall, JeanMichel Basquiat, Galerie Enrico Navara, 1996, illustrated image in colour p.100 no. 4

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Giacometti Annette: Venise, 1960

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bernar venet Frieze Sculpture park 2013

Bernar Venet (b.1941) Three Indeterminate Lines, 1998 rolled steel, 262 x 283 x 422 cm.

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Design: Lara Pilkington Research: Molly Dorkin “Pictures of Thread” Images: Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Xippas, Paris Confidential: © Simon C. Dickinson Ltd. 2013 This brochure and the information therein is the property of Simon C. Dickinson Ltd.

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