Sylvia Sleigh, a graceful painter

I went to see Sylvia Sleigh recently in New York.  I republish the following article I posted.

Sylvia Sleigh is in her 92nd year and still looking and sounding well. I meet her at her studio in a brownstone on West 20th where she has lived for over 40 years.

With her thick long hair and make up, it is hard to accept her age except for her decreasing height and tendency to tire easily. We settle on a large sofa in the back of the gracious living room, surrounded by the paintings, many of them male nudes that remind you of how hard it is sometimes, to be a woman artist.

I was reminded of Sleigh's work recently in Turps Bananas, a magazine produced by London artist Marcus Harvey, which focuses on artists writing about other artists. Ellen Altfest, an artist whose work I have long admired, is a fan of Sylvia Sleigh's - not surprising when you look at Sleighs works of men, often unclothed, and lovingly and meticulously observed.

Sleigh was married to British critic Lawrence Alloway and left England with him in 1961 for America. She herself had trained at the Brighton College of Art, long before it became a university.

Sleigh painted Alloway well over 60 times, she tells me. When people questioned whether he liked her work, she would say simply - "he must have as he let me paint him again and again." She attributes her lack of recognition to the fact that she was a woman who chose to paint male nudes, something that is still faintly controversial today.

Her muse, Paul Rosano, a large man with an afro hair style was a musician who was not good at getting himself out there. He was one of her favorite sitters and she seems to have mourned his moving out of the city in search of cheaper housing.

It is also easy to lump Sleigh's work with the work of Philip Pearlstein and Alice Neel, but there are palpable differences here. Pearlstein's obsessive replications of the body are meticulous depictions of flesh in a way that differs greatly from the more romantic depictions of Sleigh. Neel's works, often almost caricature like, are also far distant from this vision.

Sleigh's most ambitious works to date, "Invitation to a Voyage" are a group of fourteen panels which together form a 70 foot long work depicting a picnic. The place, an embankment overlooking the island in the Hudson on which eccentric millionaire Frank Bannerman built his castle to house the excess of his military armaments business. Sleigh, like many of us, first saw this strange place from the windows of an Amtrak Train and arranged a picnic on the cutting overlooking it. She invited her friends and in a particularly poignant scene we see her being helped up by a dashing Alloway. Towards the end of the work, the landscape fades into a quasi abstraction, un-peopled and alone - perhaps an allusion to Alloway's death.

The series, named after a work by Watteau, took her an amazing 22 years to finish. I am a sloth, she says but also she admits that she did not paint for ages after Alloway's death. She looks sad when I say you were mourning. In contrast to this melancholy mood the works are washed with flat sunshine these works now in the Hudson Museum in Yonkers, a place I must make a pilgrimage to someday.

Sleigh is not always good - in fact - she could be down right bad and that is what makes the work so interesting.

Massimo Bartolini by the seaside

I spend a quiet weekend in Pietrasanta and Forte dei Marme staring at the sea and on Monday set out for Cecina, a seaside town up the coast from Livorno.  I am supposed to meet the artist Massimo Bartolini in a bar called,  I hope symbolically,  La Dolce Vita and arrive in a larger town than I was expecting.  Many bars but none with that name and I am almost about to give up and phone Massimo when I spy a pregnant woman waiting  by the side of the road.  She says in Italian and sign language that  she can’t give me directions but as it is near the hospital where she is going for her check up- and can she get in?- and before I know it she is in the car and leading the way through tortuous roundabouts . 

I had met Massimo in London and then fell in love with a work by him in Basel last May.  It was called organ and was a work which had a formal structure, a large construction of building scaffolding, the twist was that it was being played, like an old fashioned music box.  The lugubrious notes filled the large hall of art statements – permeating the mood of the happy art buyers.

When I phone Massimo to tell him I have arrived bang on time and in the right place - he has the grace to be surprised and grateful.  He says he chooses to live here as few people venture to find him and we travel up a road to an industrial estate where he has had his studio for nine years. 

That is another fact of life- studios are no longer glam turret rooms or usually not- there are a few of those but often in the least glam parts of town.  Often they are metal sheds close to manufacturing works and with few amenities near by.

There is little art to see her as Massimo gets his work fabricated elsewhere but there are a recent series of paintings he has been working on which are as many Italian works obsessed with materiality- in this case a special paint that changes colours as you walk around and are opalescent and seemingly effortless.  He then coats them with oil which spots up like dew.   It all sounds prosaic – you have to see it to get the full effect.

We settle down to talk and within minutes are tussling about the definition of originality and coming out of other artists.   I quote my favorite John Baldessari line – ‘all art comes from art’ and Massimo agrees but says he personally prefers to find out that his work owes something to other people after he has made the art not before.

We share many likes, in particular Francis Alys,  Cildo Merieles and Felix Gonzales Torres as well as Gordon Matta Clark but he admits that often they are badly presented.  He points out to me how Joseph Beuys is often shown on huge plinths that destroy the works intent. 

We talk about the Felix Gonzalez Torres sculpture in front of the pavilion in Venice- and how wrong it was.  Felix would never have done that piece in white marble – it was not his material – it would have been shiny turquoise plastic surely.  We are turning him into a different artist.

We have a really good laugh about various artists before homing into an intense conversation about John Cage.

Recently I have come to believe that Cage is the most important artist – if you define important by how influential an artist is on other artist. Massimo pulls out a CD of Cage’s compositions to prove this is certainly true in his case. He tells me that the sound I heard in Basel was a Cage composition and related the story of the work he did at the beginning of his career to was also set to another  Cage work, Music for Marcel Duchamp.  It was about an angel who takes her wings off to take a bath and the devil removes them and holds them as ransom saying she will have to dance to get them back.  Just the idea of this piece makes me ache to see it.

Off to the most  delicious lunch in a bar like osteria near his studio. Riso de mare- yum yum yum yum yum yum and squid but I wish I had chosen cake and all too soon it is time to go whizzing back up the motorway to Pietrasanta to see and go to the airport and and and and and .

Kiki Smith

Elie Nadelman in MoMA garden

I am in Italy to interview legendary artist Kiki Smith.  She is late arriving and we skip the niceties and we start to talk.  Today her long curly grey hair is freely flowing and she is dressed in somber tones of gray and black but her skin has the signature tattoos in turquoise that indicate this is no middle aged middle class woman.   I have a long and strange history of Kiki.  Over 20 years before I had assigned a review to a self-proclaimed misogynist writer when I was the editor of Modern Painters.  He had reviewed her show at Pace Gallery with such viciousness that I had received a call banning forever all my writers from entering Pace or ever being offered help.  Time had moved on and I was with a friend painter Sam Messer who asked me out to a dinner with ‘friends’.  Much to my horror, his friends consisted of Kiki and her than partner. I sat there hoping to be incognito for much of the dinner until she leaned forward and said in her strangely girlish voice ‘ I know who you are and I forgive you’.  I have never formally spoken to her since but seen her at private views and waved to her.  Over the years I have thought back to that review and realised how horrible it was and how painful it must have been.  Written from the perspective that it is behaviour that should be assessed in artists and that there are givens in the right material to use as well as the given that there has never been a great woman artist I sit embarrassed even in thought.

Kiki in Colle di Val d'Elsa

When she arrives I say hello and remind her of our history,  She is very late and before we even really begin to talk we are whisked off,  descending from the hill town on the corkscrew roads and Kiki says I will make you an amulet to Mario and you to she say to me in the backseat, glad I am not in the front.  The presentation is outdoors in front of the converted arches that contain her styilised girls as she calls them.  Relating clearly to Pre Rennaisance idols and as she tells me to Elie Nadelman, an artist I had not heard of since I played near his large work in the MoMA sculpture garden as a child.

We end up sitting in a beautiful converted theatre watching the documentary made about her and her work a few years ago.  Kiki admits she can’t stand watching herself but there is no option so we settle down to an hour of Kiki.  Watching her relentlessly working and thinking gives an insight into how the brain of an artist works.  I am touched by her endless repetitive model making and drawing and also her determination to make things right, this line is too sharp, that colour is too pink, move the silver girl on the bed, look at the embroidery and that moment of epiphany where she stands by a clothes line in Venice, fingering a beautiful table cloth saying that I want to make prints with this material.  It is materials that obviously attract her and it is clear that the materials of this quilt will appear at some later date. 

There are also a series of flower drawings that look anything but pretty.  She says in the same tone, ‘I made this from blood, I went to the doctor and had it drawn’ and does not seem to realise the painful visions that this immediately recalls. 

It is now pissing with rain and I hitch a ride back into town and go to bed with cold pizza and a film. I cannot go to dinner and then walk home through this downpour.   I arrive at 9 am in the square near the gallery and already the tourists are pouring into the town.  I spy Kiki sitting at a table with a bottle of black nail polish doing touch ups.  We settle down to our chat and then all too soon she is off and there is that surreal moment of spying one of the most important Chinese artists in the world, Cai Guo Qiang in town and then it is all onwards.

Lunch is in Bel Soggiorno with a view to die for.  It is a buffet of deliciousness and in my present state I want to scoop some up for later but leave it all behind.  Sob gulp.  There is risotto which is so delicious I want to marry it.

Wei Wei sad

Wei Wei at the opening

I am officially heartbroken.  The best thing that I have seen for a long time and definitely during Frieze week, Ai Wei Wei’s poetic sunflower seed installation has been shut down forever.  Or at least the interactive and for him important part of the installation where the viewer gets to walk or I should say crunch through the million and a half hand painted sunflower seeds at the Tate Turbine Hall. 

When I arrived at the press view I went up to hug the always slightly inscrutable Wei Wei.  I said how wonderful the sound was and he said he felt it was very much part of the work, the experience of the viewer listening to both themselves and others.  Watching people scrunching through and listening to the sound gave another and important dimension to the already layered work.

I asked if the seeds were salty as they had the powdery look of the seeds, and were so realistic that you wanted to instantly pop them into your mouth, something that I think several small children probably did while they were being photographed by the ravenous press.  His response a slightly puzzled no?  I don’t think he sees how real the piece is.  Is it about sharing, hunger, the hand, making, Chinese-ness, zen gardens, beaches, feeling, listening.  All these and many more.

He himself says, ‘I only made three or four and they were no good.’  In answer to my question as to why he chose this image his response was that as every artist I make a choice as to the moment when I am making the work, and this was the choice I made at this moment.  Wei Wei has been working in this town for some time now,  a town which was famous for making porcelaine.  He admits that the work has been so successful that he has to think of another to make in this place.  He pays the workers a little more than a basic wage and they have come to depend on himself.  Another burden for this artist who carries too many already.  Thank heavens he has wide shoulders!

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds

At the Tate Modern on Monday, interviewed by Sky News about Ai Weiwei's installation:
Sky's Lucy Mcdonald, who was at the unveiling of the installation, said: "It works on lots of different levels because you can hear them crunching, feel them and obviously you can see them as well." Art critic Karen Wright is a big fan of the work and claims it is "about generosity". She told Sky News: "This is about Weiwei giving something to people, and he is like that, when you meet him, he's a truly spiritual man and a tough man. "He's put up with a lot in his life. He grew up on a work camp in China with his father, a famous poet who was incarcerated, and he has learnt from that to be generous to people rather than mean." She added: "They bring this eastern quality of a kind of magic carpet to the Tate - it's very much like a Zen garden."

San Gimignano

Caption here for this picture

Caption here for this picture

Many years ago I was strolling through the hill town of San Gimignano when I entered what appeared to be a small gallery. Expecting the same tourist tat of the other shops in towns, painted bowls with the craggy towers in profile I found myself confronted with the work of French artist Daniel Buren. That started a love affair with this strange gallery run by three Italian men, Lorenzo, Maurizio and Mario, all different in looks and spirit but all filled with a passion for contemporary art. It is why I have chosen to come here this weekend for the inauguration of Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang in Val Di Colle d’Else a small hill town near by, a large installation by African artist Pascale Tayou and a work by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto.

What I love about Continua is the variety of spaces it allows the artist. It is an old theatre that has been brought and converted but every space every basement has been excavated and opened into a rabbit warren of spaces.

Pistoletto has installed a simple mirrored obelisk in a basement space where previously I had seen an installation by Subdoh Gupta. a work which had firmly convinced me that Gupta was indeed a world-class artist with his cascade of tail pots falling from the rocks in the space.

Pistoletto’s obelisk fits exactly, revealing the paradoxically lofty and claustrophobic space of the basement. It is an area calling for enlivening and this work does it perfectly. The viewer confronted with themselves and the rocks of the space simultaneously. It is like the magical ship in the bottle, how and why enter into the equation and the work is better for it.

The rest of the space has been taken over by an exuberant, over the top display by Belgian based, Cameroon born Pascal Tayou. I have visited him before in Belgium, writing about his work for the American magazine Art and Auction, prior to the last Venice Biennale where he showed in Daniel Birnbaum’s Arsenale space.

Pascale never conforms to space nit spills over in his determination and this is no exception. He has turned the downstairs floor into a party space, filling it with tables and chairs and the totems that have long been his more identifiable work. These made out of various materials, here crystal and pins and feathers and other accumulated materials are grouped in figures.

There are new works as well. Towering works made of wood, flattened in a surrealistic way reminiscent of the work of Magritte, the artist of his chosen home. ON the walls a continuation of his explorations of collages made with pins and corkboard. Here he has also made more traditional collages, which he calls ghost colonialism, named after the figures that seem to be in negative.

There are photographs of himself, dressed in African costumes in performative poses, experiments which Continua enables, no I say encourages. Not all the pieces are equally good but what I like to see is a new sense of confidence. There is an energy here that is palpable but with the experimentation is a new growth as well.

I sit in the garden surrounded y the mirrored tombstones of Algerian born artist, Kader Attia reminiscent of PIstoletto inside, not only in his materials but in his referenece to monuments and death also reflecting the garden of the gallery reading and waiting to speak with American artist Kiki Smith. I see Pistoletto arrive to be taken around the space by Lorenzo, the long haired glamour boy of the gallery. He and PIstoletto sit posed on an angle poise looking at Pascal’s tower totem made of colourful cooking pots, reflecting both Pistoletto’s obelisk and the work I had previously seen of Subdoh Gupta.

PIstoletto waves before they re-enter the space, to sort out the lighting of the obelisk. I sit there watching Pascal hustling back and forth at one point with a saw and a ladder where he proceeds to saw off a large portion of one of the trees that is currently shading my table. It is nice to watch the industriousness from a distance, a reminder that behind the finished opening is a hive of activity, with worker bees, here in the form of young people in the universal outfit of paint spattered jeans and tee shirts interspersed with other workers in more official outfits.

Kiki arrives and we start to talk, her long curly grey hair is freely flowing today, she is dressed in tones of gray and black but her skin has the signature tattoos in turquoise that indicate this is no middle aged middle class woman. . I have a long and strange history of Kiki. Over 20 years before I had assigned a review when I was the editor of Modern Painters to a writer self-proclaimed misogynist. He had reviewed her show at Pace Gallery with such viciousness that I had received a call banning all my writers from entering Pace or ever being offered help. Time had moved on and I was with a friend Sam Messer who asked me out to a dinner with ‘friends’. Much to my horror, his friends consisted of Kiki and her than partner an artist??. I sat there hoping to be incognito for much of the dinner until she leaned forward and said in her strangely girlish voice ‘ I know who you are and I forgive you’. I have never formally spoken to her since but seen her at private views and waved to her. Over the years I have thought back to that review and realised how horrible it was and how painful it must have been. Written from the perspective that it is behaviour that should be assessed in artists and that there are givens in the right material to use as well as the given that there has never been a great woman artist I sit embarrassed even in thought.

More than the Kiki review I blush with embarrassment to remember the review I also carried of Picasso as a ‘bad man’ who could not therefore make good art!!!! So trivial and so stupid. I recount this to Kiki later and we laugh together. ‘Kiki says simply, Picasso was a genius, who used all materials and was not afraid.’ A mantra that I would equally apply to her.

When she arrives I say hello and remind her of our history, She is very late as there have been problems with the installation in the nearby town and Kiki is nothing if not professional. We settle in and before we even get going Mario arrives to sweep us up and take her to the opening. The mayor is coming and we must be there before him. We sit descending the hill town on the corkscrew roads and Kiki says I will make you an amulet to Mario and you to she say to me in the backseat, glad I am not in the front. The site is an unprepossessing one. ON a hillside park under the arches of a bridge which bisects the town of Coll di val d’elsa. It is four simple arches which Cai has co- opted as a venue for his temporary museums. We sit through the obligatory speeches before Kiki says I am thrilled to be here and especially under a bridge named for St Francis as he is the patron saint of animals and I love nature and animals. It is simple and touching and draws attention to the beautiful reeds that have grown up in profusion behind the bridge. and now we will watch a movie. The movie is a long walk to the other side of town and we meander along looking at the beauty of the street, lined with crystal shops, as this is a centre of glass making.

We end up in a beautiful converted theatre surrounded with opulent boxes. Kiki admits she can not stand watching herself but there is no option so we settle down to an hour of Kiki. Watching her relentlessly working and thinking gives an insight into how the brain of an artist processes space. I am touched by her endless repetitive making and also her determination to make thinks right, this line is too sharp, that colour is too pink, move the silver girl on the bed, look at the embroidery and that moment of epiphany where she stands by a clothes line in Venice, fingering a beautiful table cloth saying that I want to make prints with this material it will be beautiful. It is materials that obviously attract her and it is clear that the materials of this quilt will appear at some later date.

There are also a series of beautiful flower drawings that look anything but pretty. She says in the same tone, I made this from blood, I went to the doctor and had it drawn and does not seem to realise the painful visions that this immediately recalls.

The movie ends and it is back to the slippery slope, which is now running with water. Kiki has created rainbow lighting for her little girls, who had previously been in Japan in a forest collecting wood in another iteration of Cai’s temporary museums. Here the ceiling is hung with glass beakers one of which she has donated to the local contemporary museum. I hold one surprised at its fragility, while Lorcan O’Neill Kiki’s Roman dealer comments on how it appears similar to a dildo. Trust Lorcan I fear.

Pissing with rain and I hitch a ride back into town and go to bed with cold pizza and a film. I cannot go to dinner and then walk home through pissing rain. I know my limitations after all is said and done. Besides that it is Kiki in the morning to finish our conversation. I arrive at 9 in the square near the gallery and already the tourists are pouring into the town. I spy Kiki sitting at a table with a bottle of black nail polish doing touch ups. We settle down to our chat and then all too soon she is off and there is that surreal moment of spying one of the most important Chinese artists in the world in town and then it is all onwards.

Lunch is in Bel Soggiorno with a view to die for. It is a buffet of deliciousness and in my present state I want to scoop some up for later but leave it all behind. Sob gulp. There is risotto which is so delicious I want to marry it etc.