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Akio Takamori

2010-03-03T12:36:00Z

Akio Takamori, a gifted and innovative American ceramic artist, exhibited two groups of large sculptures in fired clay, painted with underglazes, at Barry Friedman Ltd. in New York City this fall. The artist quoted iconic figures from art history in clever, poignant and formally inventive ways. The first group evoked the character of Alice, the archetypal girlchild, curious and adventurous, sculpted as a plump Velázquez Infanta with a precociously critical sidelong glance. In the second group, this girl’s head topped a young woman’s body quoted from Roman statuary, a torso of Venus, with trimmed-off or missing arms. The figures are meant to represent the same young woman, before and after puberty. Rather than implying that every plump, overdressed little girl may develop into a goddess, they embody a more complex and fertile set of ideas about femininity, sexuality and art. All the figures have the round, enlarged heads, bulbous coiffures, and the swiftly brushed, dripping polychrome of Tang dynasty ceramic figures. The Alice costumes have brightly colored or strongly contrasting rows of braid, lace and ruffles, and some of the Venuses are draped with light strokes of white. There is a more remarkable and unsettling use of polychrome in the unnaturally red-stained “rosy” cheeks painted on all the faces, with a thin underglaze that has been allowed to leave collar- or hem-long drips. These run down the chests and bellies of the nude Venuses like bloodstains.

Takamori, born in Japan in 1950, was introduced to the paintings of Velázquez, Goya and Breughel in his father’s art books and to some of the grislier facts of life and sexuality in his father’s medical clinic, where patients came for treatment of venereal diseases and the effects of nuclear bombings. He studied modernist industrial design in art school and then became apprenticed to a family-run traditional Japanese folk art pottery. Moving to the United States to study, he received an M.F.A. from Alfred University and has won many awards. Takamori is now Professor of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle. In Takamori’s art, figures from art history pop up like hedgehogs and flamingos in an Alice in Wonderland game of croquet, but are assimilated into play with an easy assurance. He has worked before with images of willful, omnipotent and potentially dangerous Queens and Duchesses from Goya and Velázquez. Here he portrays them as giant children, conflating the Red Queen with Alice. The figures are massive, with heavy lobes of dark hair that balance the volumes of their skirts and sleeves, but there is a lighthearted magic in the interplay of sculpting and painting, of painted form over abstract modeled form. In Alice (2009), the girl’s proportions suggest both a Velázquez dwarf and Tenniel’s illustrations, with their enlarged heads. The solid form of Alice’s ruff is made delicate with painted folds. Her crossed bare feet behind her and her clasped hands in front are painted over simple oval, convex areas, and the result is deeply satisfying and delightful. In her face, modeling and painting sometimes work together to exaggerate the forms of lips and nostrils, where deep folds are reinforced with dark lines. Sometimes paint alone carries the expression, as in the eyes, which are painted over simple mounds. The faces are subtle, quizzical and watchful, and seem wonderfully alive.

Akio Takamori, Venus and Island IV, 2009
Courtesy Barry Friedman Ltd., New York City

The figures of Venus have more subdued expressions. Their Japanese features, with whitened foreheads and red-stained cheeks, sit oddly on truncated torsos of the type of the Esquiline Venus or her sister in the Louvre, a pubescent girl’s body with small, high breasts and a thick waist, following geometric proportions. Their pale buff clay is not perfectly smooth, and the grog and the uneven surface mimic the dimples and slight slump of flesh. Takamori has created a suggestive and refreshing synergy from Japanese erotic woodcuts, the swollen oval shapes of body and hair in Tang figures and the cool eroticism of the classical Venus.

Each Venus is paired with another sculpture, a cloud or an island wrapped in clouds. Greek islands go with Greek goddesses, rising from thigh-high water, although to these figures they are the size of toy islands or Chinese scholar’s rocks. These islands wear playful collars or hats of cloud, and some lie curled close like pets. In Venus and Island II (2008), her island wears its painted rockfall and foliage patterns like a printed kimono, and seems to exhale its cloud. Her head is the most plausibly fitted to its torso, and the torso is most exactly quoted from the classical original. She glances down as if to watch her island steaming away. In Venus and Island IV (2009), the island is clearly a scholar’s rock, ringed with its traditional ripples, and a narrower version of these rippling lines indicates her drapery. She is also Buddha-like, standing straight with parted legs on a blackened pedestal. Her cheek paint runs down her chest and around her one exposed breast. The armlessness that Takamori takes from his broken antique inspirations is more shocking here, in an otherwise complete figure. Takamori’s interpretation of transparent classical drapery is interesting. It’s not unlike the shallow rivulets of Aphrodite’s wet gown from the Ludovisi Throne (fifth century B.C.), in Rome’s Palazzo Altemps, but his drapery is painted onto the skin, rendered as the trails or signatures of stroking caresses. On several of the Venus figures, faint vertical stains of white follow their forms as gravity dictates, even continuing onto the pedestal.

Takamori’s girls are more powerful than his women. His girls wear the robes of power and have arms and legs. His women live in their heads on top of defenseless bodies that must be worshipped but cannot be used, and these large heads give their bodies the proportions of childhood, not even adolescence. Insofar as these Venuses are sculptures of statues, of existing objects, their bodies are not vulnerable. If these are sculptures of living women, they are ultimately more frightening than anything in Wonderland. Yet in their meek serenity, accompanied by Oriental islands or wreathed in clouds, they evoke an ancient and mysterious erotic power. If we compare Takamori’s variations on the Venus torso to Jim Dine’s enormous green bronze enlargements of crude souvenir versions of the Venus de Milo, on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, we see how sensitively Takamori has translated a classical Greek form. He works from a confident personal connection to the timeless cult of Venus and the cultural resonance of the character of Alice to make sculptures that seem alive. His figures are charming, thought-provoking and formally satisfying new contributions to contemporary figurative sculpture.

Barry Friedman Ltd., 515 West 26th Street, New York, New York 10001. Telephone (212) 239-8600. On the web at www.barryfriedmanltd.com

American Arts Quarterly, Volume 27, number 1.

The Ghiberti Doors mira arte fabricatum

2009-03-13T17:51:00Z

I
Coming on a door you turn the knob
to let its musty secrets out to air,
but here you stand amazed at a bronze pair
suspended in the Tuscan sunlight. You touch

and talk of them as if old doors were such
unmoving things an architect could declare
they are but fragments of a building where
a wall opens or a corner gathers dust.

Doors’ discoveries can be sensational—
perhaps a royal adulteress caught unaware,
a boy’s face pressed to her black hair,
watched by a maid who has a master key.

Here the font by holy alchemy
opens into four concentric spheres
while underneath the gilt entablature
art hangs mutely like an occasional

verse inscribed on a small child’s silver cup;
Venus floats forgotten on the sacred air,
and the love you dreamed of, like Augustine’s pear,
is taken, tasted, and made up.

                            II
Imagine the gilt pure gold, liars like Jacob
leaning out for air, the obedient hounds
quick for the hunt, no man caring which brother robs
or what the women think who fill the background;
down front, showing the motion of her mind,
Eve right-hands God for the body of mankind.

Tote up the civil gains from then to now,
add alphabets and ships, calculate
the shape of space, the distance to the moon,
the circumference of law, the annual rate
        deserts die and land turns into sea;
        bless the remaining days of earth’s orange eye.

As a bookkeeper rubs out wrong figures, for the nonce
the scholars of Florence have scoured time’s defacement
of saints’ miraculous hopes and people’s impatience
that like dirt from the hands of history had overladen
        Moses in Egypt, the shimmering kingdom of David,
        Solomon’s justice, and cost Samson his head.

These little men and women in shining bronze
carry on their lives as if there were no end,
blind Isaac pretends to see, and God with a beard
stands tall like a working man. His story bends
        around the earth like light around the sun,
        splitting the air and blacking the space it burns.

“The Ghiberti Doors” as first published in The Sewanee Review.

“The Ghiberti Doors” was first published in The Sewanee Review.

Greg Hedberg

2008-11-24T04:36:00Z

A Conversation with Greg Hedberg podcast

Martha Mayer Erlebacher

2008-08-17T05:16:00Z

Martha Mayer Erlebacher talks about her career as a figurative artist with James McElhinney.

Full Essay

2007-05-26T10:00:00Z

Beauty: The Great Debate

Beauty is like a tree. It has many branches but one central trunk—there are many cultural variations of taste, tradition, and idiom, but one vital human appetite for beauty and one culturally universal collection of human aesthetic aptitudes. Likewise, there are many artforms—painting, sculpture, music, poetry, storytelling, dramatic mimesis, dance, architecture, and so on—but one mysterious quality of transforming loveliness, of affecting presence, that they all share. Beauty is like a tree in another respect, too. It is something deeply rooted in the soil of our origins in the natural world, something which if cut off from its roots will die—but also something which continues to grow and put out new flowers, fruits and seeds every season. The new forms it takes, according to the cultures that cultivate it and according to the historical and technological environment of each new period, draw their sap and life from the ancient sources they tap, and are tested by time according to how well they serve the life of the whole tree.

Everywhere people are demanding a return to beauty as a basic value of culture. This renewed interest in beauty may be one of the central motifs of our new century. We believe that it is time to revive the debate on the meaning and nature of beauty. This debate must include not only aesthetic philosophers and theorists, but also artists themselves, and perhaps most important, the actual public audience for beauty. The topic has an ancient and universal appeal among human beings of all periods and parts of the world. Ancient and traditional and tribal societies have always maintained strong unifying canons of artistic excellence and appreciation of natural loveliness. In the West, there has been a distinguished history of speculation about what beauty is.

For the Greek poet Pindar, beauty was exemplified by the bodies of Greek athletes as they contended in the Olympic Games. For him, following the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, beauty was a harmony that arose out of tension perfectly balanced: the muscles of the winning athlete pulling against one another in supreme effort, the posts and beams of a fine building whose very tendency to fall and break apart was cunningly contrived to lock them strongly together, the magic of music in which a local disharmony served the greater perfection of the completed melody. As Heraclitus put it, “the tension of the bow is the same as the tension of the lyre.”

Plato felt in all earthly beauty a kind of pull or yearning toward some never-realized but glorious inner pattern, an eternal “Form” of which any material loveliness was but a copy or approximation. This insight might be described today as an intuitive understanding of the “strange attractors” that contemporary chaos theorists see as underlying complex generative processes. But Plato located the Forms—that were not only beautiful, but good and true as well—in an eternal and timeless realm, beyond the world and beyond change. Aristotle saw beauty as part of the perfection towards which all changing things strove in their growth and development, the final cause of each being’s movement, drawing it toward its own proper self. Plotinus saw beauty as a divine property, to which artists when inspired sometimes saw a secret path.

The medieval theologian Aquinas saw human artists as junior co-creators, infused by God’s grace. But Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas all drew a strong line between art and nature, contending that the divine could create, nature could beget, but human art could only make, and that the artificial was the domain of the human. There were iconoclasts, dissenters and questioners, too, who wondered if human and natural beauty might not distract us into idolatry and turn us away from the deeper beauty of the divine. But all agreed that the divine was good, and that beauty too was good, though it should not compete with the beauty of God.

Renaissance artists and philosophers questioned the distinction between art and nature, and imagined that human artists might “grow into another nature. . . a golden” one, as Philip Sidney put it, making humans into even greater sharers of God’s creative work. Later, American thinkers such as Jonathan Edwards and Henry David Thoreau saw the divine beauty in nature itself. Kant and Schiller in the eighteenth century, and Huizinga in the twentieth, saw beauty as the superabundant playfulness of nature and culture, their transcendence over the deterministic force of necessity and eventual decline that the science of their day claimed must rule over the physical universe.

In other parts of the world, aesthetics as rich and subtle as those of the West emerged at the same time. Indian theories of beauty concerned the immanence of the divine in the world. Chinese theories emphasized balance in both nature and society, seeing every aspect of the world resonating with every other—when the mandate of heaven was being properly served—in an elaborate series of correspondences based on the five Chinese elements. Japanese aesthetics is epitomized in their term “wabi-sabi,” which means the loveliness of something that is rustic, worn down, slightly asymmetrical yet deeply harmonious. Touching and evocative, this quality in a Zen way reminds us of both the transience of the moment and its eternal presence in the all-consciousness of being. African aesthetics traditionally cultivated a beauty of spiritual potency, the overwhelming affecting presence of a Dogon funerary mask or Benin bronze. Native Americans saw beauty as a hollow pipe, given us by nature, through which the uncanny and transforming wind of the divine might blow.

In the twentieth century, in the West, new theories emerged that often clashed with these pan-human philosophies—all of which had postulated beauty as some kind of valuable encounter among the natural, the human, and the divine. Some modernists equated beauty with functionality: “form is function.” The word aesthetic came to replace the old “corny” word beautiful, and artists intended to shock and convert and indoctrinate rather than to charm. Postmodernists have tended to dismiss beauty altogether, as a neo-Freudian sublimation of the drive to enjoy, consume, possess and dominate, or as the ideology of a ruling power elite designed to suppress racial, economic, sexual or political inferiors. But some contemporary postmodernists have sensed the human need for beauty and have resurrected the word, placing their own spin on it as a kind of sexual frisson attendant upon the rearrangement or destruction of our expectations—like the pleasure of boys in destroying somebody’s sandcastle.

Many who talk about beauty today confine themselves to a single art-form, ignoring the connections with others. Or they limit their scope to the arts in general, neglecting the deep relevance of the arts to culture as a whole—and the profound importance of arts to the health of the culture. We consider the arts in their wider context, as of central importance in the civic, spiritual, and moral life of civilization.

We believe that it is time for the debate to be renewed, especially in the light of new scientific data about our ancient human past, out of which the arts emerged, and about the neurophysiology of the beauty experience. These results oddly seem to confirm much of the ancient wisdom about beauty.

—Frederick Turner

History of Beauty

2007-05-26T09:43:00Z

Beauty: The Great Debate

ON BEAUTY

2007-04-19T19:44:00Z

The renewed interest in beauty may be one of the central motifs of our new century. The topic has an ancient and universal appeal among human beings of all periods and parts of the world. Ancient and traditional and tribal societies have always maintained strong unifying canons of artistic excellence and appreciation of natural loveliness.

David Dewey

2005-08-15T19:31:00Z

David Dewey’s exhibition of large watercolors, at the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York City in June, signaled an important contribution to an American tradition that explores the visual possibilities of the northeast coast. Clearly an admirer of Luminist painter John Frederick Kensett (1816–72), Dewey often paints in and around Newport, Rhode Island, a favorite Kensett locale, and is a master of atmospheric color. Dewey’s serene edge-of-the water views have an expansive sweep, and like the Luminists, he dispenses with framing devices such as the Claudean coulisse. At the same time, he has learned the lessons of twentieth-century modernists such as Mark Rothko, as in the horizontal bands of featureless color in one of his more austere images, Sky and Sea: Daybreak (2005). His deep contemplation of the infinite simplicity of this perennial subject also suggests the absorbing photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Dewey sometimes acknowledges human presence explicitly, for example in beach buildings, a paved road or the tiny craft of Sole Mooring (2004), which hovers on the surface of a rainbow sea beneath a rose sky, like an observer at the edge of a mist-shrouded abyss in a Caspar David Friedrich painting.

David Dewey, Sachuest Beach, 2003
Courtesy Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York City

Dewey, who has been exhibiting since the mid-1970s, started as a plein-air painter, but now works in the studio, relying on memory and preparatory studies for his highly distilled images. The locations he selects are inhabited, even domesticated, but no figures appear. Day’s End (2005) is unusual in focusing on a dead-on-straight view of a white wood house that nearly fills the picture frame. Nature seems excluded, and yet the light is still there, dividing the sunlit upper half of the façade from the shadow below and reflecting in two of the upper-register windows. The sense of loneliness suggests Edward Hopper, but the geometry seems almost Platonic. More characteristic is Sachuest Beach (2003). Dewey arranges a number of classic shorescape incidents—tufts of grass, a sandy spit, the white curl of a wave, a boat moored almost out of sight behind a dune—in a striking formal composition. The lower third of the image is carved into bold shapes by a combination of straight and curved lines, while the upper section melts into ombre-shaded sky. Dewey’s skies are typically undisturbed by clouds; it’s one of the aspects of his work that moves it towards abstraction. The way the artist achieves a poise between abstraction and representation is exemplified by Winter Harbor (2005), a large watercolor (36 7/8×57 inches) where the horizon line swelling into a low headland gives us just enough topographical information to orient us. There are no signs of commercial or recreational activity. The formal drama centers on the way the relatively opaque layer of blue water at the bottom plays against the diaphanous veils of the sky. Abstraction tends to isolate color from the prismatic effects of phenomenal light. Dewey never lets us forget that the sky color in Winter Harbor—an almost greenish blue descending to bruised peach at the horizon line—is saturated light. Dewey’s work appears in numerous public and private collections, including the Newport Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art. Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, 37 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019. Telephone (212) 593-3757. bernarduccimeisel.com

Originally printed in American Arts Quarterly, Volume 22, number 3.