Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Philip Guston, "Shoes," 1972, oil on panel Life got away from me, and so I've not been able to blog it down. So here's catch-up. March 15 evening: GH and I attended a Singapore get-together at P and A's home. I was expecting an informal potluck event, but that showed how out of touch I am with my Singapore friends. A is Singapore's ambassdaor to the UN, and so lived in appropriately well-appointed circumstances. A man took our jackets, another tended to the bar. Yet another took away our dishes after we were done feasting on the buffet dinner. Fortunately P and A were a very down-to-earth couple. Unlike some of the suits there, A was wearing just shirtsleeves. They soon made us feel welcomed. I had not seen P for years, and was pleased to see that she has not changed in appearance or manners, at least not at first re-acquaintance. I met a woman who works for one of the UN bodies, and her husband who teaches management studies at Columbia. There was...

I have not seen all that many photographic exhibitions (Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Stephen Shore, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, James Bidgood spring to mind) but William Eggleston : Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 struck me as the best I have ever seen. It was consistently eye-pleasing, thought-provoking, and heart-warming; it was also very funny in places. Refusing to rank or exclude objects from his democratic field of vision, Eggleston trains his camera everywhere, making what the exhibition justifiably calls "indelible images" out of common things.  I remember a green-tiled bathroom, with a green bathtub. Though a little moldy between the tiles in the corner, the bathroom glows of cleaning. A light coming into the bathroom creates a chapel-like arch above the green tiles, and the bathtub becomes a baptismal pool. A man in his fifties sits on a bed covered in a rubber sheet. He is balding, and he stares vacantly into the air ...

Neo Rauch sounds like a new art movement, which is almost true since a loosely-organized German school has arisen around this Leipzig artist (b. 1960), according to the curatorial note. The paintings, specially done for this Met exhibition, mix Surrealist and social realist images. I found the paintings hard to appreciate because most of the time I felt I was trying to read code without a key. I did like a few of the paintings. "Hunter's Room," with its cartoon figures in a social realist setting, reminded me of Otto Dix and fellow German expressionists. "The Next Move" struck me as humorous in its juxtaposition of the artists thinking about their next projects, and the seduction in bed behind them. I also looked in at " Hidden in Plain Sight : Contemporary Photographs from the Permanent Collection." Jean-Marc Bustamante elevates a newstand in a narrow alley into an image of great formal beauty, full of light and shade. I saw William Eggleston's w...