International Fine Art Fair 2007

I visited an art fair of this scale for the first time on Sunday. The fair was held in the Park Avenue Armory, the interior of which reminded me more of a very plush officers' club than of any weapon stash.

The Impressionists and Post-impressionists were strongly represented at the fair: Pissaro, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vlaminck, Renoir, Sisley. There was a large cubist Picasso that I did not like very much. A lovely Copley half-portrait of a stiff-backed woman dressed and hooded in black, her eyes glittering out of a noble face. Several Roaul Duffys, with their sketch-like figures standing at the pier, or shouting from the spectator stands of a racecourse. The English painters represented at the fair were largely forgettable: too much fact and not enough vision. I also found myself losing interest in the Chagalls, which suffered from the reverse problem.

I really liked the Andrew Wyeth watercolors. One of a cush-saw standing in the center, in front of a clapboard house. The red flowers below the saw gave the sharptoothed machine a romantic tinge. Another painting was of a dormer window opened on top of a roof, below a sky about to rain. A third is a lovely landscape with the most delicate grasses along a river. I can't find any of these online, so here's one titled "Bradford House."



Wearing tee-shirt and jeans, I was probably under-dressed among the suited and tied, but that did not bother me. I guess that's the power of a buyer, even when this buyer has no power to buy anything.

Comments

James said…
I challenge you to write an ekphrasis poem . . . :D

Just an idea since it seemed his paintings moved you in one way or another.

(PS: re MaPo: I decided to stop at day 15, which is today. We're having exam in a few days and it proved to be too much. There appeared a few nice poems this month, though, so I'm glad I continued post-NaPo.)

Best,
James
8:27 AM
James said…
Oi. By the way, if you do write an ekphrasis poem, here's a link; http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetryworkshop/story/0,,1887575,00.html
8:36 AM
Jee Leong said…
Hi James,
I hate ekphrastic poems, with a very few exceptions like "Musee des Beaux Arts." Art about art is often just too precious for me.

Jee Leong
6:17 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more