Smithsonian.com

One rainy Friday afternoon in 1964, a 24-year-old Richard Serra, then wrapping up his studies at Yale, hopped a train from New Haven to New York City. Upon arriving, he headed uptown, to an East 77th Street townhouse, where he first encountered the work of Cy Twombly. “They gnawed at me,” Serra has said of the paintings he saw that day at Leo Castelli’s gallery. “I couldn’t forget them.”

Forty-three years later, Twombly, now 79, remains a master of the unforgettable, creating ever larger and more exuberant paintings that gnaw at you even after you’ve scrutinized them from every angle and tried to memorize their colors. And so it is fitting that an exhibition of recent paintings by Twombly now on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York blooms with that most enduring, enigmatic, and temperamental of flowers: the peony.

Any gardener will tell you that the most important thing about planting peonies is selecting a site, ideally one that gets at least a half day of sun. Long-lived but initially slow to grow, peonies sulk if disturbed. Try to move them and they’ll punish you by not flowering for several years. Leave them alone and they’ll bloom forever.

The cultivation of artists can be just as tricky. In the history of art, there’s no easy place to put Twombly. Today he is typically lumped with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in a catch-all category of second wave Abstract Expressionism, but the label is an awkward fit. Site selection was critical for Twombly. A Virginia native who studied in Boston and New York before matriculating at Black Mountain College, he escaped the go-go New York art world in 1957 for a place in the sun — Rome — where he still lives for most of the year. There he managed to meld abstraction and antiquity, painting and drawing, lament and reverie.

Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery — sprawling, high-ceilinged, and impeccably finished — is an excellent venue to show off the ten paintings and single sculpture (all untitled and executed in 2007) that comprise “A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things.” The main room is ringed with the six large horizontal paintings on wooden panels, each measuring about eighteen feet wide by eight feet tall. Entering the rectangular space, the viewer is stunned by epic constellations of peony blooms that appear to bob, weave, and punch triumphantly through fields of pencil and wax crayon scribbles, handprints, and haikus scrawled in Twombly’s shaky cursive. Where stems should be flow layered trails of thin acrylic paint, downward drips that wash the panels in verticals as if attempting to tether the buoyant flowers to the foreground. (More…)

“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it,” wrote Vincent van Gogh. The non-profit artist workspace Dieu Donné does van Gogh one better, by putting the poetry in paper as well as on it.

“Per Square Foot,” the exhibition that inaugurated the paper-making studio’s new 7,000-square-foot workspace in New York City’s garment district and showcased the 178 works up for bid in its benefit auction tonight, revealed the myriad possibilities of paper– bleached, pigmented, molded, sewn, collaged, painted, salted, embossed, debossed, oil-stained, treated with urethane, inscribed with sumi ink, fashioned into a 72-inch chain, dusted with crushed pearls, infused with high-voltage electrostatically-charged carbon pigment or simply sketched upon with a pencil.

“While it is a benefit auction, it’s not just a bunch of donated C-prints,” says Peter Russo, Dieu Donné’s program manager. “It’s all brand new work created on paper that we produced here in the studio, so the work is made especially for the event.”

Among Russo’s favorite works is Dieu Donné Exploding Word Horse (above, right), a sculpture by Lesley Dill that transforms paper made at Dieu Donné and archival glue into a small horse from which bursts a veritable alphabet soup. The ten-inch-tall construction is inscribed “How ruthless are the gentle,” which only sounds like a Jenny Holzerism; it’s actually a line from an Emily Dickinson poem.

For Russo, Dill’s piece helps to explode some of the misconceptions about works created on or with paper. “When people think of paper, they typically think of flat, two-dimensional drawings, and we do things that are sculptural and incredibly vibrant,” he says.

“’Per Square Foot” echoes the literal dimensions of the works and the notion that adding square footage can positively impact the creative process,” notes Dona Warner, executive director of Dieu Donné. Most of the 61 works in tonight’s live auction are 12-by-12 inches, while the 117 silent auction works are smaller, most of them 5-by-7 inches.

The star-studded list of donating artists includes Polly Apfelbaum, Jim Hodges, William Kentridge and Kiki Smith, all of whom are among the approximately 500 artists that have collaborated with Dieu Donné over the years.

Meanwhile, the organization is reaping the benefits of added square footage in other ways, having moved in late August into its stunning new 7,000-square-foot headquarters designed by architect Stephen Yablon. The expansion will allow Dieu Donné to offer more studio time to artists and to expand its public programs, which include paper-making workshops for children and adults.

“In paper-making, as in most things, it is best to capitalize on the natural tendencies of the material, rather than fight against them,” says artist Kirsten Hassenfeld, a 2005-2006 Workspace Resident. “Paper is a very specific and particular material. It wants to do what it wants to do.”

On view through November 21 at the gallery at Dieu Donné is “Basic Divisions,” a solo show of work by Polly Apfelbaum.

What are art collectors to do when they’ve filled up their walls? Try the ceiling.

Chandeliers created by artists and designers are the buzz of the London Design Festival, which runs through September 25. The exhibition of lighting designs at Royal Festival Hall, the festival’s hub, was curated by the auction house Phillips de Pury and includes the work of Gaetano Pesce, Fredrikson Stallard and Michael Anastassiades.

Pesce’s Mediterraneo (above, left) has the buoyancy of a sea anemone. The chandelier’s phosphorescent effect is created by the LEDs that illuminate its 12,000 crystals in a shifting palette of cool tones. “Pandora,” designed by Stallard, is reminiscient of the exploded installations of artist E.V. Day. With the help of computer-controlled servo motors, his chandelier is continually broken apart and put back together again, a crystal Humpty Dumpty.

It’s no coincidence of course that the sponsor behind the exhibition (as well as of the entire festival) is Swarovski. The Austrian company that has made itself a difficult-to-pronounce household name as an upmarket Bedazzler is getting serious about chandeliers and recently announced that it will expand its chandelier design efforts into a wholesale division.

The new London-based division will be known as Crystal Palace, the name originally assigned to Swarovski’s limited-distribution chandelier collaborations with such artists, designers, and architects as Ron Arad; Hussein Chalayan; Diller, Scofidio & Renfro; everyone’s favorite designing brothers (Campana and Bouroullec); and Yves Behar (whose Morpheus, above right, premiered at the Salone Internazionale Del Mobile in April).

The company began its chandelier collaborations in 2002 as “a revolutionary concept aimed at reinventing and revitalizing the chandelier,” according to Swarovski. “Steeped in history and heritage, redolent of 18th century splendour and candlelit intrigue, the chandelier was frozen in time, undiscovered by the design community.”

Now the focus is bringing all that splendour and intrigue to a wider audience. According to a recent article in Women’s Wear Daily, prices will range from $3,000 for a Tord Boontje Mini Blossom chandelier to $1 million for a one-off piece by Pesce.

Is 2007 the year of the glass house?

Philip Johnson’s New Canaan stunner reopened to the public in April, and tours for this year promptly sold out (console yourself with a video tour and book now for 2008!). Frank Gehry has a cloud-like glass building in the works for Bernard Arnault and his Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation.

Meanwhile, a recent article in the New York Times featured Nicolai Ouroussoff’s sprawling feature on “The Best House in Paris,” Pierre Chareau’s 1932 Maison de Verre (pictured above), purchased last year and painstakingly restored by American financier Robert Rubin (who we learn enrolled in Columbia’s graduate school of architecture at age 48 and worked as a teaching assistant to architectural historian Kenneth Frampton).

“The house has been compared to a Surrealist artwork, a theater stage, and an operating room,” notes Ouroussoff, who concludes that it’s “above all, an exquisite machine.” And he should know, because he got to live there with his girlfriend for a few days this summer, fulfilling both a personal fantasy and that of a chorus of editors.

After Ouroussoff and friend get settled with the help of a housekeeper (“Light switches. Check. Bathrooms. Check. Where to hang our clothing. Check.”), we learn of the house’s Duchampian division into male and female realms, its elasticity, and the ability to transform the mood of the entire place with the flick of the outdoor floodlight switches. In short, it’s pretty much perfect: “the perfect balance between the need for companionship and solitude, a utopia of the senses.”

Phew. That was quite a summer.

Richard Serra’s massive sculptures tested the strength of the renovated floors at the Museum of Modern Art, while those of Frank Stella looked ready to float off the walls at New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery and spruced up the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Across the pond, calendrical coincidence made the summer a blockbuster for the world’s leading art fairs, with Art Basel in Switzerland, the 52nd Venice Biennale, Documenta XII (which takes place every five years) and Sculpture Projects Munster (held once a decade) opening within weeks of one another. (More…)