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.

Twombly’s color palette, in his last exhibition at Gagosian restrained to a suite of blazing, saturated reds on canvas, is here remarkably varied. On one wall are two paintings that pit orange blooms (here burnt almost to red, there swirled with bubble gum pink) against a minty celadon ground. The gallery’s longest wall is hung with three paintings with backgrounds of bright yellow, their blossoms ranging from Twombly’s long-favored burgundy — a merlot spiked with blood — to red orange. The middle one of these three is the star, with blooms that seem to flash and whirl, shaded to have the dimensional sulci and gyri of a human cerebrum.

In the exhibition catalogue essay, historian and critic Robert Pincus-Witten describes the translated Japanese haikus inscribed on some of the paintings as examples of Twombly’s unique brand of “flirtatious iconography.” The artist has a way of toying with literary and historical references, such as Kusunoki Masatsura, the 14th-century samurai and poet whose death inspired the peony haikus, so that they are suggestive, not oppressive.

While appearing hastily written (Roland Barthes once said that Twombly seems to write with his fingertips), the words that appear in these works are carefully chosen for their ability to excel at sensory games: “quiver,” “kikaku,” “spilling out yesterday’s rain,” “from the heart of the peony a drunken bee.” These words invite you to decipher their meanings, all the while resisting interpretation. Meanwhile, their murmuring resonates in your ear and their scribbles in your hand. You can’t help but roll them around on your tongue.

For Pincus-Witten, peonies are “impeccably Japanese in association,” but it’s tempting to look to China, where the peony has an even longer history and where the flower was first bred. The Chinese word for peony is mutan, a name that contains the word for cinnabar (tan), the medicine of immortality. Like the work of Twombly, they are true originals, impossible to forget.

Recently, I met Marc Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based painter who exuberantly contradicts most narrative art with its emphasis on drama and desire. An “urban landscape” and figurative painter, he depicts neither striking vistas nor compelling characters. Instead, he focuses on gas stations, super markets, and shopping malls—those urban and suburban shelters for transitory souls. The paintings appear photo-realistic. But Trujillo mediates them by changing spaces, lighting, surfaces, characters, and gestures, all in service to his vision and the mood he wishes to convey. In these banal places, he notes, most people are thinking of where they’re going, not where they are in the present. “I like to paint purgatories,” he says, “rather than destination points like the Grand Canyon. I draw from the middle ground of experience. Extremes play into sentimentality.”

Trujillo also remains remarkably interested in narrative—or at least the inversion of our traditional notions of drama. He cites Peter Brueghel’s “Fall of Icarus” (c.1558) as a visualization of his storytelling philosophy. In the Greek myth, Icarus crashes into the sea after the sun melts his homemade wax wings. But in the bustling scene Brueghel painted, Icarus is just a small, incidental splash. With gentle wit, Brueghel seems to say that the story doesn’t really matter.

However Trujillo does play with the idea of storytelling in much of his work, and he has had a gallery show called “Seeing & Reading” with Chris Ware, his good friend and a prodigious comic-book artist and writer. Notably, Ware makes a cameo in one of Trujillo’s Wendy’s fast food restaurant paintings—a witty homage to Ware’s high school employer.

But where Ware simplifies his forms almost into hieroglyphics to keep the flow of the story moving, Trujillo deliberately muffles that flow by his intense rendering of details except in the signage. In his paintings, most of the text is obscured. We wile away in Trujillo’s eerily beautiful, familiar spaces—the mercury vapor lights of gas stations, the cement floors of mass shopping centers, and passing buses, presumably going nowhere.

In an age of abstraction and synthetic pop art, RB Kitaj re-vitalized narrative, figurative painting. He died last week at age 74.

Like many great artists, Kitaj endured public acclaim and charged disdain. His 1994 retrospective at London’s Tate Modern was panned in a stormy critical concert. Kitaj, an ardent reader and writer, included explanatory texts with each of his paintings—presumably circumventing the critics, much to their understandable yet misguided ire.

Working primarily during an age of abstraction, Kitaj and his paintings defy easy categorization. Though known as a British pop artist, Kitaj was in truth an American; a British expatriate, he was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. No matter his nationality, later in life Kitaj keenly allied himself with his Jewish faith, even embracing the stereotype of the “wandering Jew” from Anti-Semitic folklore.

Ever restless, Kitaj made for an unlikely modern art hero. He willfully ignored “art for art’s sake,” the reigning Abstract Expressionist doctrine; in thought and act, he referenced a realm far richer than glib pop, often alluding to existential literature and philosophy in his lyrical, figurative compositions. Using line even in his painterly works, critics claimed he could at once draw with the facility of Edgar Degas, and paint with the shimmering, multi-faceted style of Paul Cezanne.

His compositions seem almost cubist, with their figures and landscapes unmoored from ordinary constraints, geographic and temporal—a fitting feeling for an artist who, however embraced, viewed the world through the fragmented lens of an exile. This kaleidoscopic approach seems akin to collage; the collaged effect and Kitaj’s fresh, expressive use of color perhaps led to the unfortunate “pop artist” misnomer.

Critics may also want to re-consider Kitaj’s experimental technique of including texts with his paintings. Such texts may dampen the wordless mystery of art, but they also complement the paintings well, expressing the vividness of the artist’s vision in a distinctive voice. At his 1994 Tate retrospective, Kitaj gives the last word on his art, composed amidst the tumult of our times: “It is, perhaps, an original concept, to treat one’s art as something which not only replaces the inertia of despair, which may be common enough, but to press art into a fiction which sustains an undying love.”

(The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin) courtesy of the collection of Mrs. Susan Lloyd, New York)

Check out Tuesday’s NY Times for the amazing story of a woman who found a stolen Rufino Tamayo in an Upper West Side trash pile. I enjoyed Gawker.com’s take on her story.

Like other (alleged) finders of priceless artwork, Elizabeth Gibson could be termed a tad … eccentric.

I recently attended a lecture by Denyse Thomasos, a young and highly regarded painter based in New York City. The lecture reminded me how fine art greatly benefits from context. Too often we see the work of an artist out of context, scattered like puzzle pieces across vast distances. No wonder so many of us find contemporary art
mystifying.

Unlike novelists, most artists present their ideas to large audiences in excerpt. There’s simply not enough room on a gallery’s white walls. Often, gallery-goers remain in the dark regarding an artist’s studio practices. They can’t decipher a simplified yet precise visual language, honed through so many drawings and paintings, countless and unseen.

In her lecture, Thomasos masterfully explained how she developed her abstract paintings, cage-like grids in earth colors. Painted deftly on monumental canvases, her compositions suggest places of habitation.

While most abstract artists willfully cut tethers from the mundane world, Thomasos seeks to find home again through her art. Born in Trinidad to a family of African and Asian descent, Thomasos told a very moving story about her early childhood in the West Indies, how her father sought only the best for his children. An esteemed high school principal, he wanted his children educated within the British system. He found the right educational model in Canada, and he moved his family to Toronto.

Yet Thomasos’s father struggled to find his footing in cold Canadian terrain. Like many immigrants, he sacrificed the privileges of his more settled life in Trinidad for the lasting benefit of his children.

Though abstract, much of Thomasos’s art is deeply personal, honoring her father while at the same time attempting to define home in a culture of displacement. Deliberately, she wanders, taking pictures of buildings and homes in China, Vietnam, India and West Africa.

The cage-like forms that suggest buildings also suggest slavery and the middle passage; the roots of Thomasos’s art run deeper than one or two generations. She composes entire paintings out of lines, and she suggests that the slash of the line memorializes the labor of the sugar-cane cutter. Studio assistants mix her paint colors, and she asks them to mix the paint into the color of mud and dirt: the raw stuff of home on a canvas, hanging on a white wall.

(Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art)

Many critics decried the rise of the multiple or editioned artwork in the 1960s as a sign that the purity of art was lost. Harold Rosenberg was no fan. Clement Greenberg, preoccupied with the notion of art for art’s sake, was most vehement in his denunciation, applying the German word kitsch to what he saw as art tainted by consumerism.

He was an egotistical grouch, but who can blame him? The man saw the birth and culmination of America’s most eminent art movement—abstract expressionism—and guided (some would say a little too forcefully) the career of Jackson Pollock.

But he couldn’t hold back the wave of artists who turned the slur of kitsch into a badge of honor. For Joseph Beuys, making works—or “vehicles” of communication, as he called them—that had numerous manifestations was one of the most powerful acts he could engage in as an artist. Andy Warhol took a more overtly opportunistic view of serial art, but elevated the status of multiplicities with his silk screens. Claes Oldenburg is another artist who has usurped the nature of the “fabricated object” and reappropriated it as art. His most recent offering was a cardboard pretzel that came in six varieties.

And now the banner of the multiple has been taken up by another wave of artists. Kiki Smith has made porcelain sculptures that would make a nice conversation piece when displayed at home on a bookcase or coffee table. Cindy Sherman created a Madame de Pompadour-themed tea service in 1990. Just last year Zaha Hadid made a sculpture in multiple to accompany a Guggenheim design show. Jeff Koons shrunk his well-known balloon-dog sculpture way down and offered it up as a kitschy collectible. Jenny Holzer inked golf balls with poetically obscure slogans.

It’s only a matter of time before Damien Hirst jumps on the bandwagon and turns his Natural History series into bookends.

As fall looms, incoming college freshmen might consider warming their cold dorm room walls with a reproduction of the painting I and the Village by Marc Chagall. For any lonely soul who has ever missed home, this painting from 1911 will reverberate with warm lyricism.

Chagall painted this evocation of self and home in France, far from his chilly childhood village in Russia, and he filled his fractured picture with otherworldly details—a pearly-eyed, green-faced man holding a bouquet; a sympathetic sheep creature; an upside-down floating violinist.

Yet the picture remains tethered to the sensual world too. Vignettes include a peasant in traditional garb trudging uphill, scythe in hand, and a woman kneeling to milk a goat. I can see the onion domes and humble homes of the Russian village in the background, and I first thought Chagall might be the green-faced man, until I noticed the beaded cross necklace—Chagall was Jewish. 
So where is Chagall in his self-portrait? Even though the painting is titled I and the Village, Chagall doesn’t seem to make a cameo, in the tradition of painters like Rembrandt, the woolly-haired one in blue, and Jacopo Pontormo—seen here smiling wistfully, stage right in a biblical deposition scene.

All of these images illuminate a world living only in memory and emotion. Chagall seems to say that at the end of the night, we have only our memories. In today’s world, it’s common to leave home in search of knowledge and enlightenment. But, gently, Chagall reminds us that we are much more than just our solitary selves. We are also the places we call home, however far away.

A couple of days ago, I interviewed artist Douglas Tharalson at his home and studio, a 2.5-acre ranch in Agoura tucked away in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Agoura is near Malibu and several other overdeveloped pieces of California coast. Tharalson got in early and cheap on the land he now owns, and now he’s happily inspired by the mountain views and open space where he has worked there as a painter and sculptor for the past 20 years.
I asked him why he paints in a throwback cubist style, and he told me it’s his homage to the cubist artiste’s lifestyle. “I’ve always been attracted to the lifestyle even more than the art,” he says. He imagines Picasso, Gris, Braque and others lived as real bohemians while inventing cubism, and their legendary time in Montmartre is what attracted him to painting in the first place.

Tharalson says Jean Varda and Jirayr Zorthian were mentors from a generation ago who carried out the “lifestyle.” The two artists worked in California their entire adult lives and both were known as free spirits. Varda lived on an old ferryboat off the coast of Sausalito, and Zorthian lived on a 45-acre ranch in Altadena.

When Zorthian died in 2004, an archivist who had interviewed him for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art wrote, “I came to recognize that he was one of the few among us who was truly interesting.” The two are remembered for the way they lived as much as for the art they left behind.

Now 59, Tharalson thinks that’s a goal an artist ought to work toward, no matter what his medium is.

When smooth-talking Danny Ocean (George Clooney) strides into the gleaming office of Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) in Ocean’s Thirteen, the scene must instantly and wordlessly convey Benedict’s position as the reigning king of Vegas casinos—and therefore the only person who can bail Ocean and his ever growing crew out of their latest high-stakes snafu.

This is Vegas, land of illusions, so a slick, spacious office and a sharply tailored linen suit offer no guarantees. But there it is, hovering over Benedict’s desk like a framed diploma, that unmistakable mark of a modern-day mogul: a large, gold-flecked painting by Gustav Klimt.

In the film, Benedict is the boss of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, so the producers went right to the source. They filmed the scene in the real-life office of Terry Lanni, the chairman and CEO of MGM Mirage, the company that owns the Bellagio and favors art nouveau flourishes. In 2000, the MGM Grand underwent an $85 million remodeling that included redesigning a number of suites based on Klimt prints.

Klimt’s fin-de-siècle decadence is championed by powerful executives worldwide, not just in Vegas. In June of 2006, cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder paid a staggering $135 million for Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (pictured above) for New York’s Neue Galerie. “This is our Mona Lisa,” Lauder told Fortune last fall. Once ambassador to Austria, Lauder became enamored with Klimt as a teenager, when he learned German in order to read the only available books about the artist.

Given Lauder’s status as one of the world’s preeminent Klimt fans (Klimtomanics?), it comes as a surprise that the French house of Guerlain—and not Estee Lauder—is behind the new limited edition fragrance created as a tribute to Klimt. Nuit d’Amour, which the company describes as “floral, powdery, and woody,” is inspired by the artist’s Lady with Hat and Feather Boa (1909).

And what better way to celebrate the 145th anniversary of Klimt’s birth on July 14th? Packaged in a Baccarat crystal flacon that is nestled inside a bronze-lacquered wooden case, Nuit d’Amour is the perfect gift for the Klimtomaniac who has everything. Priced at $2,600 per bottle, it’s surely selling briskly in Vegas.

Word association games can be fun. When we think of the word “Audubon,” we associate it with birds. And birds make us think of flying, freedom and nature. The National Audubon Society, dedicated to the conservation of ecosystems, was named after John James Audubon (1785-1851), the naturalist and prolific artist of Birds of America. Audubon’s masterpiece consisted of 435 life-size prints—owls, parrots and ivory-billed woodpeckers, to name a few.

Yet Audubon’s artistic career did not take flight until he reached the age of 34. At that time, Audubon languished in debtor’s prison, his business selling dry goods in the frontier of Kentucky no longer prosperous. Drawing and painting birds—up until then a hobby—became Audubon’s best chance for financial freedom. 
Encouraged and supported by Lucy, his wife, Audubon trooped into the woods with little more than a hunting rifle and his artist materials. He brought back a collection of exquisitely detailed bird pictures and sailed to England, where they were published and met with acclaim across Europe. In an age of colonialism and exploration, Audubon brought birds once hidden in undiscovered forests to the public eye.

But Walton Ford, a contemporary American artist, makes more subversive associations with Audubon. He notes that Audubon hunted most of the birds so that he could draw them. The winged innocence of watercolor belies the reality of bloodied birds. For Ford, this becomes a metaphor for how we have confronted and degraded nature.

Ford becomes Audubon’s sinister doppelganger, painting just like him but making us feel unsettled. Take “Nila,” his life-size watercolor of a staggering Indian elephant. Birds whorl about the beleaguered beast, perch on its tusks and collide against its thick, wrinkled skin. A few birds even get crushed under the elephant’s foot—a politically loaded image that never would have appeared in Birds of America and its presentation of an undisturbed natural world.

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is temporarily closed as it completes a giant project to renovate, expand and re-hang its galleries. Some works of art that won’t be moved are the iconic Diego Rivera frescoes that depict the colorful mix of people, machines and brute force that built The Motor City.

But the famous works won’t be left out of the museum’s massive makeover. When the DIA reopens on November 23, the murals will be joined by a new work by contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, who has been commissioned to create a large-scale mural that will pose a counterpoint to those of Rivera.

Mehretu (above, in front of Rivera’s murals) is a native of Ethiopia who was raised in Michigan. She is known for her complex abstractions, which incorporate graphic elements borrowed from architecture and calligraphy. Her style is El Lissitzky on LSD. Like Zaha Hadid, Mehretu excels at a whirling Constructivism that is better suited for 22nd-century Reykjavik than Vitebsk circa 1917.
Mehretu’s new mural will be the highlight of “City Sitings,” a larger exhibition of the artist’s work that will be on view from November 23 through the spring of next year. No word on whether Mehretu will prowl the city for inspiration, as Rivera did before beginning his work in 1931, or if her work will spark similar controversy. When Rivera’s murals were revealed to the public in March of 1933, angry Detroiters voiced their grievances in an indignation meeting that took “Senor Rivera” to task for his use of “Communist motifs” and one city councilman called them “a travesty on the spirit of Detroit.”

Meanwhile, Rivera found that Detroit agreed with him. He took home a hefty paycheck from project underwriter Edsel Ford and working through the summer in heat that climbed to 120 degrees, he lost over 100 pounds in the 11 months it took him to complete the murals.

One family vacation long ago, I trudged through Disney World and its fake Moroccan city of Marrakesh, debating the true lyrics of The Jetson’s theme song with my sister. “It’s Jane is nice!” I cried. My sister, ever rational, replied, “No, it’s Jane, his wife. And his boy, Elroy.” Deep down, I knew I was wrong, but my childhood pride wouldn’t relent.

Thanks to Google, I don’t think obscure arguments last as long today. Who was President Calvin Coolidge’s wife? Within seconds, anyone can download the answer: Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge. What’s the capital of the former Upper Volta? Everybody knows it’s Ouagadougou. Who has the world’s longest mustache? Let’s see—a hirsute Turkish fellow, Mohammed Rashid. To tap into a collective consciousness, nobody needs to be Buddha, meditating beneath a fig tree. All of life exists in an electric, invisible Web, available on computer screens and portable devices. 
Sadly, the Internet has become a spoiler for the imagination. Perhaps that’s why my mind keeps wandering back to artwork from more naïve times, such as those very early Italian artists who depicted Jesus roaming a Tuscan hill town.

It’s scary to think what a later, less naïve artist like Albrecht Durer would have done with today’s access to so many images and resources. His famed woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros, circa 1515, seems uncannily accurate considering he never saw a rhinoceros.
Durer’s woodcut began as a living, captive Indian rhinoceros, shipped to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1515 as a royal gift. The rhino then boarded a ship to Italy to visit with the Pope. But the rhino came to a tragic and fabled end, drowning in a shipwreck before reaching Italian shores.

Undeterred, Durer based his woodcut rhino off written descriptions, a sketch and a well-grounded faith in his sharp imagination. Of course, if you’ve never seen a rhino before, just type “rhino” into Google.

Everyone wants a piece of Bacon these days—the late Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon, that is. In February, the artist’s Study for Portrait II (1956) sold at Christie’s for £14 million ($27.5 million), an all-time high for the artist and the second highest price for a postwar work of art at auction.

That’s great news for one of Bacon’s old drinking buddies. Thirty years ago, electrician Mac Robertson took home three trash bags worth of stuff from the artist’s studio and put them in his attic for safekeeping. Bacon was about to dump the items—which included portraits, photographs, notebooks and letters—after becoming enraged that workmen had disturbed his studio (pictured above is Bacon’s studio in its naturally chaotic state, circa 1975). “It’s yours—take what you want,” Bacon reportedly told Robertson, now 75.
On April 24th, the 15th anniversary of Bacon’s death, the 45 lots of “The Robertson Collection of Items from the Studio of Francis Bacon” will be auctioned by Ewbank Auctioneers. Among the lots are three oil portraits, three sketches of dogs and four spooky, mutilated portraits in which Bacon hacked holes where the faces should be. Also included in the sale are letters to and from Bacon, his personal papers and photographs. eBay is now accepted absentee bids.

Meanwhile, Sotheby’s should soon push the auction record for Bacon’s work even higher. The auction house has just announced that they will offer Bacon’s Study from Innocent X (1962) in their contemporary evening sale on May 15. The painting, which has never appeared at auction before, is expected to go for more than $30 million.

The work (above, right) comes from an important series of paintings by the artist that he based on Diego Velasquez’s 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X (above, left), which Bacon called “one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made.” Bacon claimed never to have seen the original Velasquez, which is at Rome’s Galleria Doria Pamphilj, relying on a reproduction.

And the other inspiration for this work? The iconic image of a screaming, bloody nurse from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. “Images also help me find and realize ideas,” Bacon once said. “I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.”

Master painters once called still life painting natura morte—dead nature. Yet even old still life paintings are livelier than you might think. Peer closely at this 16th century Dutch painting, a vase of flowers, and you might spy a bug perched on a wilting petal or leaf. Such paintings seem to whisper to us: Just as these soft petals wither into claws and die, so we all go.

Sunny Italy yielded a livelier batch of botanical artists. The famed Renaissance man Leone Battista Alberti once advised artists and garden planners alike: “In your hands lays hidden the idea of a new nature.” 
Wealthy family gardens hosted this new nature—fruits, vegetables, and flowers from the world over. 16th century gardens were so rich, Giuseppe Arcimboldo could paint royal portraits entirely out of their pickings. While other emperors begged for busts of timeless marble, Arcimboldo painted his patron Emperor Maximilian II as Spring—a vest of green herbs; a collar of bright white flowers; a rosy bouquet for a face.

His son, Rudolf II, seems weirdly more distinguished—he’s painted in the wine tones of Autumn—a stern neck of root vegetables; a bulbous pear nose; hair, a mini-vineyard of juicy grapes. Such paintings seem presciently surreal. It’s no surprise they inspired Salvador Dali.

Bartolomeo Bimbi, 17th Century court painter to the Medici, produced more conventional still life paintings. Bimbi memorializes the fleeting stuff of his patrons’ gardens—pears and other fruits. Yet in his large oil paintings, Bimbi also wanders into the bizarre. Set beneath a gloomy sky, Monstrous Cauliflower And Horseradish portrays a horseradish that seems eerily naked, fetal and blanched of color. In fact, Bimbi notes the “birth dates” of his vegetables directly on his paintings—vegetables that probably rotted by the time he finished painting them. Even today, it’s wondrously strange to see how Arcimboldo and Bimbi can make a still life seem so moving.

With all of the bad news in the world today—terrorism, melting ice caps, bird flu—it seems only reasonable that some artists might construct alternate worlds from their imagination. Yet such artists don’t always have to become dreamy escapists, monks or minimalists. Instead, they might confront popular fears literally, by darkening their constructed worlds with emissaries of the ominous.

Though many think of the Renaissance as an optimistic age, it too was plagued by war and natural calamity. Giotto, the Early Renaissance fresco painter, painted a stage-set Italian hill-town haunted by winged demons. Later, an aging Leonardo created rhapsodic maelstroms. His journals show billowing and flowing storms that swallowed cities and land. Though he begins with a naturalist’s eye for wind and water, soon the drawings seem visionary, even apocalyptic. Leonardo seems to sweep away any notion of humankind’s rebirth in storms of black chalk. 
Such profundity of imagination surfaced again in last year’s exhibit by the Whitney Museum, “Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing.” One of its artists, Julie Mehretu, creates billboard-sized drawings that remind the viewer of Leonardo’s apocalyptic drawings. First, she traces projections of architectural plans and grids with ink pen onto plastic sheets mounted on canvas. Next, she overlays swirling, explosive lines and washes. The viewer feels Godlike, viewing a vast, fragmented landscape of buildings threatened by a frenetic force of nature—in this case, the artist’s own hand. Just as in times past, even fantastic worlds suffer from the storms of daily life.