Hang around me and
you'll get your picture taken
if we go somewhere fun.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Guggenheim Discoveries
Self-Portrait (ca 1909-1910)
Gabriele Münter, an early 20th-century German artist drew me to the Guggenheim, not Carol Bove, whose toothpaste-reminiscent "Victoria" (2026) greets visitors at the entrance.
But I'll start with Bove, because the unique installation of her work flatters its abstraction, a style that doesn't usually appeal to me. She also serves on the board of the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, where I had just seen a terrific exhibition.
"Vase Face I/The Ascent to Heaven on a Dentist's Chair" (2022)
Is it sexist to attribute Bove's use of bright color to her gender? Stainless steel seems like such a "masc" medium otherwise, although in this context it feels much cooler than the fiery mills where brawny workers produce it.
"Peel's foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep" (2013)
Some of the work is so recent that Bove must have created it with the exhibit space in mind. Knowing the Guggenheim will display what you're creating: what could be more motivating? The Met gave her the same opportunity when it commissioned her sculpture for its facade.
"Sweet Charity" by Carol Bove (partial, 2026)
"Widdershins 81, 82, 87, and 88" (2026)
Bove's ouevre is quite varied.
Untitled (2016)
Shells and peacock feathers are among the natural materials that she occasionally incorporates into her work; fastidiousness characterizes their arrangement.
"The Foamy Saliva of a Horse" (partial, 2011)
Walking on this rug must induce self-consciousness.
"Untitled (The Middle Pillar)" (2007)
Although Bove, a California girl until she dropped out of high school in Berkeley, has spent her career working primarily in New York City, her art only occasionally betrays its origins, in this case the precise positioning of the stars at a specific place and time.
"The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 pm" (partial, 2007)
She also pays homage to one of my favorite '60s icons with a startling, barely-there portrait. Bove wasn't born until 1971, although she also used Playboy centerfolds as the basis for a series of equally faint paintings.
I can't believe I was completely unfamiliar with Gabriele Münter's Expressionist painting. Oh, wait, yes I can: she's a woman of an earlier century.
"Head of a Young Girl" (1908)
Münter, born in Berlin to wealthy parents who took her drawing talent seriously, credits Wassily Kandinsky--seen below at the far right, she's at the far left--for teaching her how to use a palette knife to unleash the creative energy that too often had been dissipated into painstaking brushstrokes. They were lovers for a decade, and briefly engaged before World War I intervened.
"After Tea II (Kandinsky with the Art Dealer Goltz at Ainmillerstraße 36, Munich" (1912)
Paul Gaugin clearly influenced Münter's use of bright color which seems more radical in Bavaria than the South Seas. With money she inherited from her parents--both of whom were deceased by the time she turned 21--she purchased a summer house in Murnau. She and Kandinsky lived and painted there together, decorating the place with their art, before he returned to Moscow and married another woman. She stopped painting for nearly a decade as a result of his betrayal.
"Lion Hunt" by Vasily Kandinsky (1911)
"Santa Francisca" by Vasily Kandinsky (1911)
Münter kept the house until her death in 1962 at the age of 85. During World War II, she successfully hid paintings by both artists from the Nazis who considered their art "degenerate."
"Sunset over Staffelsee" (1910)
"Boating" (1910)
"In the Salon" (1911)
Münter excels at capturing the simple pleasures of life, particularly in a domestic setting.
"Still Life on the Train (After Shopping)" by Gabriele Münter (1909-12)
"Future (Woman in Stockholm)" (1917)
Her work continued to evolve after she and Kandinsky parted ways.
It's hard to imagine a more perfect winter morning.
"Not for me," would be my typical response to a work by Robert Rauschenberg, barely giving it a glance. No longer. Maybe, like Stephen Sondheim, he's an acquired taste who requires patience and a bit more depth of perception than my idolatry of Andy Warhol demands. Both were gay, though Rauschenberg married to hide it. He and his wife divorced in 1953, the year of my birth, and he had relationships with both Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly before settling down with his former assistant for nearly 25 years. Maybe I should give them a second look, too.
Silkscreened images that Rauschenberg clipped from newspapers and magazines, as well as his own photos, comprise "Barge," a monochromatic canvas 32 feet long. It may very well be his visually rendered, nuclear-age equivalent of "My Favorite Things." The Sound of Music had opened on Broadway just a few years earlier.
Maybe I'm stretching the pop culture allusions a little thin, but this sculpture seems as if it could be a colorful riposte to the black-and-white Beatles album cover, released the year before.
But this 1968 lithograph is the work that really changed my tune, no doubt because autobiography has long been my thing with both an unpublished memoir, Homosaic, and this blog which Gemini, Google's artificial intelligence, this week described as "a staggering archive of cultural witness-bearing." AI certainly has mastered sycophancy; Rauschenberg, visual symbolism. It's hard to see in small reproduction--Autobiography is a floor-to-ceiling work--but the three panels are a personalized 20th century Rosetta Stone for anyone interested in the Texan-born artist who shares a hometown with Janis Joplin. There's his full-body X-ray and astrological chart at the top (he's a Libra); he uses his circularly printed CV, embedded with a childhood photo, as a kind of fingerprint; and at the bottom, the thirtysomething Rauschenberg is an aesthetic action figure, rollerskating from Port Arthur to New York City to perform in Pelican, propelled by parachute. He's truly a master of analog compression.
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Rauschenberg eventually began to incorporate other materials into his collaged works, including dishtowels.
"Cot" (1980)
He printed this image from "Easter Lake" (Galvanic Suite)--which I'm definitely adding to my bicycle collection--on galvanized steel in 1988.
(partial)
But his experimentation wasn't just a product of artistic restlessness. After learning that the chemicals he used for silkscreening were bad for the environment, he began exploring ink jet printing with soy and vegetable dyes as an alternative. He used this technique for "Bilbao Scraps [Anagram (A Pun)]" which features photos he took in the Spanish city when the Guggenheim mounted a retrospective of his work, a decade before his death.
Other Discoveries
Maybe I'd seen these paintings before, maybe I hadn't. This time they made an impression.
Say what you will about the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, but some great European art emerged from the wreckage of the revolutions and war mongering.
"Morning in the Village after Snowstorm" by Kazimir Malevich (1912)
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