"I am not surprised Fox has censored Picasso�s breasts. It is absurd and creepy to blur out the bosoms of his Women of Algiers..."

"... in a report on the painting that set a new world record this week. But it is not completely impossible to understand, because if you were a puritan or a fundamentalist or just hated women�s bodies, Picasso�s breasts are the kind of breasts you might find shocking.... Picasso�s breasts are just black circles with big dots for nipples. It is a measure of his genius that he can convey all the roundness, fullness and touchability of a breast using this graffiti-like shorthand. There are four pairs of breasts in Women of Algiers (Version O) by my count � painted in various stages of cartoonish crudity... It is a cliche to see Picasso as a misogynist whose lust for women was aggressive and patriarchal... Who hates women � Picasso who painted all those breasts, or the TV station that smeared them out?"

That's from The Guardian, scoring political points off cartoonish breasts in a painting that you'd think conservatives would want to show because it was just so darned expensive this last time it was sold and even though it knows very well that it was just some local station that was afraid someone would complain. Objections could have come from lefties as well as righties. The Guardian admits, as it must, that Picasso was a big old aggressive misogynist.

Anyway, maybe it works over in England to say "Picasso's breasts," when you only want us to think of the women's breasts that he painted, but the American mind � mine, anyway � goes straight to moobs. And Picasso is a man who often posed for pictures shirtless. I went looking for a good picture to illustrate this and I found a whole page titled "A lot of pictures of Pablo Picasso without his shirt on." I picked this one:



It's been a good year for Picasso and a good year generally for shirtless men. Mitt Romney appeared shirtless the other day (in some boxing match, but who cares?, the big deal was that he was shirtless). And images of Martin O'Malley without a shirt are continually popping up as if to say look what I can do that Hillary can't.

"I would like to talk about �Sleeping Beauty� and �Swan Lake,� about my battements and my handsome partners..."

"But whichever way I look at my childhood, it all revolves around politics and Stalin�s terror," wrote the great ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who has died at the age of 89.

Her father was shot to death in 1938 in Stalin�s purges. (Ms. Plisetskaya learned the date of his death only in 1989.) Her mother was arrested and sent to a labor camp with her infant son, then exiled to Kazakhstan....

Ms. Plisetskaya was... restricted by the Bolshoi�s rigid Soviet guidelines on choreography, which viewed the very movement of dance through the prism of ideology, yet she was able to infuse stultified, literal movements with much deeper meaning....

�I danced all of classical ballet and dreamed of something new,� she said. �In my time, it was impossible.�

I'd like to hear more specifically how ballet movements could be thought to contain political ideology. I once met a woman in Madison who had learned a difficult craft that produced a type of ordinary object � a lovely version of something quite utilitarian. She expressed anguish in not yet having found a way to make these objects political. I said I thought that loading politics into art tended to make bad art. I dreamed of interesting conversations in Madison. Many years later, I started this blog.

ADDED: I don't like tag proliferation, so I'm using my "merging politics and showbiz" for this. It seems wrong to call ballet "showbiz," but think about it. Why is it wrong? It isn't!

Ah, but I remember I also have an "art and politics" tag. I remember that tag as I think of the conversation with the Madison artisan. Why did those crafted objects prompt me to think "art" when ballet did not? Because I thought of art school.

"For all the righteous concern people expressed about the welfare of my children, what most of them failed to understand was that taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering."

"When I stepped behind the camera and my kids stepped in front of it, I was a photographer and they were actors, and we were making a photograph together. And in a similar vein, many people mistook the photographs for reality or attributed qualities to my children (one letter-�writer called them 'mean') based on the way they looked in the pictures. The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph. Even the children understood this distinction...."

Writes Sally Mann, whose very arty photographs of her (sometimes naked) children were published to much elite acclaim in 1992 and � simultaneously � intense criticism as �manipulative,� �sick,� �twisted,� �vulgar� � in part because of what Mann calls the "cosmically bad timing" of coinciding with the controversy about Robert Mapplethorpe�s photographs. Mapplethorpe had "included images of children along with sadomasochistic and homoerotic imagery," and: "Into this turbulent climate, I had put forth my family pictures."

From the comments there (at the NYT):

There is absolutely no question that Sally Mann is a photographic artist of great stature. There is also no question that were she not, she would have had her children taken from the home decades ago, and probably would have been jailed. If the father down the block from Mann took similar photos and made them public, he would have been thrown under the jail house. She was, and remains, ethically tone deaf - at best. To use one's children, who cannot possibly understand the ramifications of what they are doing, as one's subjects to create sexually charged images, is the grossest violation of the concept of informed consent. and is inexcusable.

The painter of the Chinese propaganda image "Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland" has become the Vatican's portrait artist.

The story of Shen Jiawei:

Shen was in his final year in high school when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, the 1966-1976 campaign to restore ideological purity to China�s anti-capitalist revolution. His hopes of attending art school dashed with the closure of China�s universities, Shen joined the Red Guards and then the People�s Liberation Army, fully embracing the communist spirit of the times. In the PLA, his self-taught artistic talents were recognized, and he became one of the legions of propaganda artists who glorified workers, farmers, and soldiers in the Socialist Realism style of Soviet propaganda.

In 1974, during a tour of duty in remote Heilongjiang Province, Shen painted his most famous work, �Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland,� featuring three soldiers guarding the Sino-Soviet border from a watchtower. The piece was included in a 1974 exhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing that was organized by Mao�s wife, who personally praised it.

Shen recalls, though, that when he eventually saw it hanging in the museum, he was stunned: The soldiers� faces had been altered to adhere to the regime�s standards for revolutionary art: Their faces were fatter and redder to make them appear more healthy and heroic.

With the more robust soldiers in place, the picture was reproduced and turned into propaganda posters and Shen shot to fame; in the 1970s and �80s, he was one of the best-known artists in China.

What are we to think of the Vatican's choice of this man? If Shen paints the Pope, is it propaganda? Of course, it's propaganda. All official portraiture is propaganda! To say it's not propaganda is propaganda.

Shen laughs and says, "I stopped my propaganda work in the 1970s.... Even Church commission work, this is part of normal artwork, part of commission, and part of history." Yes, normal artwork, commissioned by powerful institutions and individuals, is propaganda. Whether Pope Francis is a saint or a devil or somewhere in between, this is propaganda:



ADDED: All right, Mr. Shen, I'm ready for my portrait...

"The story that I�m trying to create for myself, just through my life, is I want to be the granddaddy of mean right-wing street art, guerrilla art."

"I want people to say five or 10 years from now, 'Yeah, that guy Sabo, he really influenced me.' ... I just want to cement that for myself."

"While the propaganda monuments that remained in prime locations continued to stir regular controversy, this controversy was never massive enough to actually lead to their demolition."

"That's how the supporters of the 'bridges symbols' even managed to list them as heritage, making the demolition harder. Opponents, unable to remove the sculptures, then attempted to 'put them into context' through 'additional features.' Some of them were temporary (e.g. a NATO flag overshadowing the Soviet army sculpture), others permanent (e.g. a plaque with information on the Soviet occupation), yet others never completed (e.g. a suggestion to put the statues in cages)."

From an article about the relocation of the �aliasis Bridge statues to Grutas Park � a place of exile for Soviet-era sculpture in Lithuania �which we were talking about last week, after the NYT did a story about living in Airbnb places in Europe that included photos of Americans enjoying themselves in the company of gigantic statues of Lenin and Stalin. That second link has a video about Grutas Park that shows the �aliasis Bridge statues and discusses the now-overruled decision to leave them in their prominent place on the 4 corners of the bridge.

I could understand the decision to leave them there, but I'm a stranger to the context. Sculpture that was designed for a particular site is partly destroyed when it is moved, even though it is otherwise preserved. If something is artistically good, but a remnant of an earlier time that the people who control the place now wish to reject completely, what should they do? The middle position is to move the sculpture out of its place of honor but otherwise to preserve it. Keep in mind the subject of Islamist extremists who have been sledgehammering ancient statues, which is what got me started talking about this subject.

What would you do with artistically good statues that you deeply disapprove of?

Completely destroy them.

Put them in a museum setting with labeling that explains the reason for disapproval.

Leave them on the site where they were designed to appear.

Make case by case decisions based on the site, the statue, and the reason for disapproval.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: There's also the question whether the site was designed for the sculpture. Are the 4 corners of �aliasis Bridge plinths or did the sculpture-supporting function arise in the mind of the invader?

A portrait of Bill Clinton that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery has a deliberate allusion to Monica Lewinsky's blue dress...

... according to the artist, Nelson Shanks.

�If you look at the left-hand side of it, there�s a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things,� the painter said.

�It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.�

That is, Bill Clinton posed for this artist, who nevertheless took it upon himself not just to subtly interpose an allusion to the Lewinsky scandal but also to tell the world that he did so.

Shanks claimed that the Clintons have been lobbying the National Portrait Gallery to remove it, but a gallery spokeswoman denied that to the Daily News. Clinton reportedly chose Shanks to paint the portrait back in 2001.

Oh! Clinton even chose him. Wow. Smacking your patron around. That must be an old portraiture game, right? Can anyone cite historical examples of this sort of thing?

ISIS endeavors to destroy the art of ancient Nineveh (AKA Mosul).

The efforts at destruction that you see at the beginning of this video are not as horrible as they look, for reasons that are explained half way through.

Watch out for the British expert who appears at 1:47. She thinks it's "pretty rotten for the people who actually live" in northern Iraq that so many of the original works of art have been transferred to Western museums � even as it's apparent that if those sculptures had been left in northern Iraq, they would now be sledgehammered to bits. Or does she � do we � think that if the artworks had been left in place, the history of Iraq would have played out on a different path, and the people who live there would have treasured and protected the world's artistic heritage? From the article at the link (to the British Channel 4 site):

The demolition squad of the Islamic State are following in the tradition of the Taliban who blew up the Buddhas at Bamyan, in Afghanistan, and the Malian jihadi group Ansar al Dine which destroyed mud tombs and ancient Islamic manuscripts in Timbuktu. They quote suras from the Koran that they say demand the destruction of idols and icons.

But iconoclasm isn't just a Salafi Islamic idea. In the 17th Century, puritans, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, destroyed Catholic holy objects and art in Britain.

"We pulled down two mighty great angells, with wings, and divers other angells . . . and about a hundred chirubims and angells," wrote William Dowsing, Cromwell's chief wrecker, after leading his henchmen into Peterhouse college chapel in Cambridge in December 1643.

Iconoclasm. If you're inclined to reach back into history, you will, perhaps, find it everywhere. From the Wikipedia article "Iconoclasm," here are "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":



And I can't look at that and not think about the statue of Saddam Hussein that our military tore down in Bagdhad in April 2003. And what of all those monumental statues of Vladimir Lenin that came in for destruction when the Soviet Union dissolved. Would you like to see them all removed?

I know there's at least one still standing, because the NYT, just a couple days ago, ran a story cooing over an aging American couple who are using Airbnb to live in various European cities and the slideshow features the man, dressed in shorts, like a child, and standing, like a child, knee-high to "this statue of Lenin in Lithuania." The hand of the smiling child-man reaches out to encircle the index finger of Soviet dictator. In another photo, the woman, in a short skirt, poses at the feet of a giant Stalin. This one too is "in Lithuania." We're told there's "a sculpture garden." Isn't that nice?

I need to do my own research to find out about "Grutas Park (unofficially known as Stalin's World...)... a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and an exposition of other Soviet ideological relics from the times of the Lithuanian SSR."

Founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Viliumas Malinauskas, the park is located near Druskininkai, about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southwest of Vilnius, Lithuania.... Its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial.... The park also contains playgrounds, a mini-zoo and cafes, all containing relics of the Soviet era. On special occasions actors stage re-enactments of various Soviet-sponsored festivals.

So there's an alternative to iconoclasm.