Rebecca Nemser

CITIZENS, Simon Schama’s wonderful new book about the French Revo­lution, is espe­cially fasci­nating to people who care about Art, because it is in many ways a book about the power of images to transform the world.

Anselm Kiefer uses the language of modern art to rewrite the kind of grandiose nineteenth-century history painting that modern art rejected. He paints a raging elegy for the failure of reason and civi­lization to overcome the evil that is part of human nature. Yet for Kiefer, only the magic of art can build some­thing beau­tiful out of the wreck of reason and the failure of history.

JESSECA FERGUSON’s construc­tions often contain old post­cards, which seem to have been sent from places that have long since disap­peared. Lost, ruined, or forgotten, they have left behind only pale and ghostly traces. Enshrined in little boxes, like the bones of saints in medieval reli­quaries, her work cele­brates the some­times mirac­ulous power of memory to transform the pain and complexity of real life into the stuff of dreams, and art.

New England is now the center of an extra­or­dinary flour­ishing of tradi­tional crafts, espe­cially furniture, because some very talented artists have turned to crafts as a way out of the cynical and cerebral “endgame” that so much contem­porary art is playing today.

Artists look at animals: the romantic fantasy animal, the prim­itive art animal, the hidden drives animal, the whim­sical animal, the elemental animal, and other mythical beasts. As Walt Whitman wrote,
“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.”

ROBERT FERRANDINI’s early work featured flying saucers and monsters, imagery drawn from a 1950’s childhood spent watching science-fiction movies like When Worlds Collide and The Thing. In his new paintings of imag­inary land­scapes and seascapes, he has come to some kind of terms with his past and is ready to move on. His spaceship has finally landed in a world of his own making.

“His hands were terribly deformed. Rheumatism had cracked the joints, bending the thumb toward the palm and the other fingers toward the wrist. Visitors who weren’t used to it couldn’t take their eyes off this muti­lation. Their reaction, which they didn’t dare express, was: ‘It’s not possible. With those hands, he can’t paint these pictures. There’s a mystery!’ The mystery was Renoir himself.”

Jean-Francois MILLET saw a timeless beauty and sadness in life, in evenings dark and filled with color. “What I know of happiness is the quiet, the silence, that you can savor so deli­ciously, either in the forests, or in the fields,” he wrote.

Drawings as a picture making, story telling, dream machine. Drawings that dance, stretch, yearn, arch, and glide across the page. The plea­sures of looking emerge here not from what is observed but from how it is rendered; not the image but the artifice.

HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON used the colors of the earth like paint, and handled stones and trees with a giant’s strength and a sculptor’s grace. The poetry of his archi­tecture makes the stones sing.

In MICHAEL MAZUR’s hands, the Monotype was the perfect form to convey the multi­plicity of life in the natural world. The clearest, most lucid flowers are surrounded by a paler aura of other flowers, other summers, other inter­pre­ta­tions — a riot of reeds and flowers, organic growth, confusion, and decay. Revenants of images repeat like ghostly, half-remembered things.

Yet there is exhil­a­ration in the terror, the vertig­inous fall. These speedy, violent fantasies of destruction and chaos are tenderly, beau­ti­fully described. The drawings in graphite and linseed oil – the oil used wonder­fully as color – and the swirls of paint in eerie sea greens or fiery reds compose a balanced, painterly surface. The language of abstraction pulls us upward, as the images plunge us into the abyss.

False masks of plastic beauty are among its moving targets. Desperate to survive the glis­sando of the word processor and the deadly lull of ordinary life, it rips to pieces the world’s fabric and its skin and puts it back together, obses­sively recre­ating from scraps and scrawls and marks and images the objects of its desire and its rage.

As a very young man, OTTO PIENE saw the sky reflected in a sea at long last calm: “The feeling of being reborn has never left me.” Out of this rebirth came “a love for the sky, the desire to point at it, to show how beau­tiful it is, how it makes us live and feel alive.”

Artists and scien­tists. working in neon, laser, steam, smoke, video, pyrotechnics, film, inflated and flying sculpture, and other celestial navi­ga­tions, cele­brate the sky as a medium of expression, trans­mission, and space.

Red Sea shells and polished stones from the pyramid tomb of Queen Khensa — “great of charm, great of praise, possessor of grace, sweet of love” — and other trea­sures from KUSH, Lost Kingdom of the Nile. A medi­tation on Art, Time, and the ancient river.

LE CORBUSIER created his own myth through the organic gener­ation of forms. His genius constantly renewed itself, pulling new phenomena into the orbit of his thought and recre­ating them in the purified, monu­mental yet human forms of his architecture.

The surface of a FLORA NATAPOFF painting is a place where battles have been fought, cities and temples built up and brought down, and on which there has been a wrestling with angels. The means of expression are abstract – marks on paper and scraps of paper that must always hold their own. But the energy to work comes from looking at some­thing that moves her.

THE DIAL was a literary magazine that published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as well as repro­duc­tions of artworks collected by Schofield Thayer, a Henry Jamesian char­acter who went abroad in search of old knowledge and new art.

Each rectangle is like a picture of a picture, moving through a series of trans­for­ma­tions. The tremulous drawings are like jottings, hiero­glyphics, messages in bottles, unreadable post­cards, ideas coming into being, the first appear­ances of the not-yet-visible, the impal­pable images taking form before our eyes.

FRANCES HAMILTON has refash­ioned much-loved images, memories, and dream­strans­forming them into a fully re-imagined universe. It is this trans­for­mation – the serious, difficult task of art – that gives her work its power to enchant.

For a twentieth-century audience brought up on abstraction, INGRES’s greatness, his fasci­nation, lies in the abstract qual­ities of his line, its restless, obsessive movement across the page. Ingres’ line has power, grace, life; it’s bril­liant, dramatic, neurotic, even perverse. He told his students, “Drawing is every­thing; it is all of Art.”

A woman sits thinking, resting her head on her hand in a room filled with flowers and fruit. The room seems charged with meaning, filled with her extra­or­dinary presence. For GABRIELE MUNTER, art was not about appear­ances, but about real­ities lying behind appear­ances. Abstraction was a way of seeing into the heart of things.

CLAUDE LE LORRAIN depicts the moment just before trans­fig­u­ration — the moment just before women turn into goddesses, or girls turn into swans, or life turns into art. His light is dusk and twilight — the darkling light that washes the physical world in unearthly beauty and fills the heart with an intox­i­cating sense of possibility.

In 1979, an 11th century Persian poem with 50,000 rhyming couplets, illu­mi­nated by tiny paintings in exquisite colors made from crushed jewels and insects’ wings, inspired my first story about art. For the next 20 years, I wrote, published, and broadcast hundreds of Stories about Art in Boston and beyond. This is how it all began.