Iggy Pop- The Passenger (Live in Paris in 1991)
Happy Birthday to music legend Iggy Pop, who turns 79 today! He most recently performed (shirtless, of course) at Coachella, leaving the stage theatrically in a coffin. His set included his popular solo hits, like The Passenger (which he sings in the above video), as well as a few from his time with The Stooges.
Below he reads Dylan Thomas‘s poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, a performance included on his 2019 album, Free.
“Berthe Morisot with a Muff”, c. 1871–72, Oil on canvas
Last week was Berthe Morisot‘s birthday and today it is her friend, brother-in-law, and fellow Impressionist, Édouard Manet‘s birthday. He was born on January 23rd, in 1832, and painted the portrait of her pictured above. It is part of the Cleveland Museum of Art‘s permanent collection.
From the museum about this work–
This painting depicts Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who met Édouard Manet at the Musée du Louvre in Paris in 1868. This portrait vibrates with vitality. Morisot wears a coat and stylish hat from which wisps of her dark hair escape. Manet’s wide brushstrokes and cross-hatchings evoke the sketchy quality of Morisot’s own paintings, likely Manet’s nod to his subject’s identity as an artist.
He made nine portraits of her in oil, watercolor, lithography, and etching during 1868–74. Initially artistic colleagues and friends, they became family in December 1874 when Morisot married Manet’s younger brother, Eugène.
The painting is currently on loan to San Francisco’s de Young museum for their current exhibition Manet & Morisot, on view until 3/1. Organized by Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art, the show will move to Cleveland on 3/29/26, and will run until July 5th.
About Manet & Morisot from the Cleveland Museum of Art–
Manet & Morisot is the first ever major exhibition dedicated to the artistic exchange between Édouard Manet, often referred to as the father of modern painting, and Berthe Morisot, the only woman among the founding members of the Impressionist movement. Unfolding over a period of roughly 15 years, between 1868 and 1883, theirs was perhaps the closest relationship between any two members of the Impressionist circle. As friends and colleagues—by turns collaborative and competitive—they collected one another’s work. Morisot posed for some of Manet’s most compelling portraits, several of which will be on view in the first gallery of the exhibition. When she married Manet’s younger brother, their professional connection deepened into a familial bond.
Thirty-six paintings and six drawings and prints borrowed from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe reveal the evolution of a singular friendship between two groundbreaking artists. Visitors will see beach and garden scenes made en plein air (out-of-doors) that demonstrate how Manet borrowed individual motifs and compositional ideas directly from Morisot. Portraits of fashionable Parisian women of the 1880s by the two artists show their different perspectives; Manet’s paintings were inspired by admiration and erotic interest while Morisot’s were informed by lived experience. The exhibition closes with a self-portrait by Morisot painted when she was in her mid-40s, revealing her perception of herself as a professional artist.
Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot was born today, January 14th, in 1841. She was part of a circle of artists that made up the Parisian avant-garde, including Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Édouard Manet (she married his younger brother).
The oil painting pictured above, Reading (La Lecture), 1888, is on view at Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in Florida.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born today, December 22nd, in 1960. The painting above, Untitled (1981) is currently on view at The Broad in Los Angeles.
From the museum about this work-
Many of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings are in some way autobiographical, and Untitled may be considered a form of self-portraiture. The skull here exists somewhere between life and death. The eyes are listless, the face is sunken in, and the head looks lobotomized and subdued. Yet there are wild colors and spirited marks that suggest a surfeit of internal activity. Developing his own personal iconography, in this early work Basquiat both alludes to modernist appropriation of African masks and employs the mask as a means of exploring identity. Basquiat labored over this painting for months — evident in the worked surface and imagery — while most of his pieces were completed with bursts of energy over just a few days. The intensity of the painting, which was presented at his debut solo gallery exhibition in New York City, may also represent Basquiat’s anxieties surrounding the pressures of becoming a commercially successful artist.
In the video below (also from The Broad) LeVar Burton discusses the work and its possible connection to Basquiat’s childhood and family.
“Allegory of Winter”, 1948, Goache and paper
“The Juggler (The Magician)”, 1956, Oil and inlaid mother of pearl on board
Surrealist artist Remedios Varo was born on December 16th, 1908, in Spain. Throughout her life, she was a part of avant-garde circles— first in her homeland, and later in Paris and Mexico. She and several other intellectuals and artists fled to Mexico during World War II, where they were given asylum and citizenship. It was there that she would create the majority of her best-known works.
Varo’s paintings are filled with symbolism and mystical imagery. They also often reference her own experiences creating art. While Allegory of Winter (first image) is currently in a private collection, The Juggler (The Magician) can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art.
From MoMa about the work-
This painting’s titular juggler (or magician) stands on the platform of a carnivalesque cart filled with fantastical objects and animals. He performs before seemingly identical figures robed in a single gray cloak. To produce this composition, Varo worked in the manner of early Renaissance masters: she transposed preparatory drawings onto a gesso-primed panel, which had been scratched to give the surface variation. She also deployed decalcomania, a technique favored by the Surrealists in which materials such as paper or aluminum foil are pressed onto wet paint to transfer a pattern that may then be embellished. This textured effect can be seen in the magician’s garments and in the background trees.
Artist, writer and professional wrestler Rosalyn Drexler, born on November 25, 1926, sadly passed away in September of this year. In addition to her famous artworks, she also wrote several novels and won Obie awards for her plays.
The painting above, Marilyn Pursued by Death, 1963, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
From the museum about the work-
Rosalyn Drexler’s work often explores the dark backstories of postwar media culture and gender roles. She frequently clipped subjects from printed materials-here, a news photograph of Marilyn Monroe fleeing the paparazzi with her bodyguard in tow-enlarged and collaged them onto canvas, and then painted over the image. In the artist’s words, her source images were “hidden but present, like a disturbing memory.” On the day this source photograph was taken in 1956, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were to announce their upcoming marriage; in the frenzy to cover the event, a car carrying reporters crashed, killing at least one member of the press.
Auguste Rodin‘s The Thinker was originally conceived to be a part of The Gates of Hell, his sculptural group depicting a scene from Dante Alighieri‘s Inferno, but several larger bronze versions were created later. This version was installed outside the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1917. It is one of less than ten created under Rodin’s supervision.
This particular version of The Thinker also has an interesting history. In 1970, a pipe bomb was planted at the base of the statue and the resulting explosion damaged the work. The perpetrators remain a mystery to this day.
The Solitude-Funnel, 1921, was created by Suzanne Duchamp, who was born today, October 20th in 1889.
From the Museum of Modern Art about the work-
In Solitude-Funnel (1921), one of the last works that Duchamp made in the context of Dada in Paris, she combined fields of pigment with cut-out circles of metallic foil in a composition that juxtaposes painted and collaged geometric forms with a puzzling inscription. The thin, black lines emanating from the black circle at the center resemble the funnel described in the title, or the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
Her first comprehensive solo exhibition ever is currently on view at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt until 1/11/26.
Abstract expressionist artist Mark di Suvero‘s sculpture Declaration (pictured above) is located on the Venice Beach Boardwalk in Los Angeles. It was installed in 2001 to commemorate the Venice Art Walk’s 22nd year and in support of the Venice Family Clinic, a local organization that provides quality health care to those in need. Di Suvero turned 92 today, 9/18.
Although he is well known for his large sculptures, he is also a painter. Some of these works were shown in 2019 at L.A. Louver in Los Angeles along with some of his smaller sculptures (pictured below).
From the L.A. Louver press release about the paintings-
A selection of brilliant abstract paintings by the artist accompanies the sculptures. Like the sculptures, his paintings are never still. Created with dazzling colors in dense layers of linear and freeform gestures, they project a swirling sensation akin to the twirling movement in his three-dimensional works. Accented with phosphorescent paints, the works luminesce and reverberate even in the absence of light (and are especially dazzling when activated by black lights installed throughout the gallery space). “The heart of art is the search for form that is electrifying, that gives life to our vision,” explains di Suvero. “This is the language of emotion. Anesthetic is to kill feeling. Aesthetic is the opposite, aesthetic is feeling. The thing that is most important is the dream, the vision for what doesn’t exist that could exist.”
It was recently announced that L.A. Louver will be closing their Venice Beach space, but in happier news they will be donating the gallery’s complete archive and library to The Huntington in San Marino, California.
Born today, 9/12, artist Robert Irwin used light and space in his work as a way to create an experience for the observer. He started out as a painter but later became well known for his site-specific installations and architectural and outdoor projects- including the central garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (pictured below) and his work for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
The works above are from his 2020 exhibition, Unlights, at Pace Gallery in New York.
About that show from Pace-
Irwin’s new works are composed from unlit six-foot fluorescent lights mounted to fixtures and installed in vertical rows directly on the wall. The glass tubes are covered in layers of opulently colored translucent gels and thin strips of electrical tape, allowing the reflective surfaces of unlit glass and anodized aluminum to interact with ambient illumination in the surrounding space and produce shifting patterns of shadow and chromatic tonality. Reflecting his recent turn toward the perceptual possibilities of unlit bulbs, Irwin’s new body of work expands the range of possibilities for how we experience sensations of rhythm, pulsation, expansion and intensity, while continuing the artist’s long-standing interest in registering the immediacy of our own presence in space.
Expanding from his breakthrough disc paintings of the late 1960s, Irwin’s new works effectively dissolve the perceived border between object and environment, focusing the viewer’s consciousness on the act of perception. Each light fixture in Irwin’s sculptures contains one or two unlit bulbs—or no bulb at all—while alternating gaps of “empty” wall are painted in subtle shades of gray, producing a sense of uncertainty about what is tactile and what is merely optical. As the shadowed, painted and reflected intervals of space reverberate in the viewer’s visual field, the wall itself enters the composition, destabilizing any sense of figure and ground. To encounter Irwin’s sculptures is thus to allow oneself to be caught in a ceaseless oscillation between flatness and volume, transparency and opacity, solidity and atmosphere.
In Irwin’s art, the object functions as a kind of score for orchestrating “the continual development and extension of humans’ potential to perceive the world.” Although unlit, the bulbs in these new sculptures are therefore never “off.” Their optically rich surfaces serve as energetic loci for heightening the sensory possibilities of the human body. In their chromatic complexity, the works convey an almost painterly quality, recalling Irwin’s origins as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s. Suggesting a rhythmic, minimal composition of repeated linear elements, the works also evoke his innovative line paintings of the early 1960s, which involve us physically and perceptually in an open-ended, immersive and transitory experience of seeing.
Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in contemporary art, Irwin is closely associated with the Light and Space movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and he has continued to live and work in Southern California for his entire career. He first used fluorescent lights as substrates for producing what he has called a “conditional art” in the 1970s, often in combination with architectural scrims and other spatial interventions. In the 1990s he introduced colored gels to the fluorescent tubes to alter the chromaticism of the light, and, over the past decade, began isolating the bulbs and fixtures as sculptural objects in their own right. In returning to the use of solely ambient light, Irwin’s new sculptures embody the culmination of seven decades of rigorous experimentation.
“Everything in the world is ultimately conditional,” Irwin has observed. “There is nothing that’s transcended or infinite or whatever you want to call it. Everything acts within a set of conditions.” Like all of Irwin’s works, his new sculptures respond differently to the conditions of each specific environment in which they are installed, attuning our senses to a given context and making possible an intuitive and incidental experience of seeing that resists rational or conceptual explanation. “It’s not about answers,” the artist once remarked, but rather about the act of questioning: “It’s the constant pursuit of the possibilities of what art is.”
Getty Center, Los Angeles
Below is one of his earlier paintings Untitled, 1964-6, which was on view at Palm Springs Art Museum for the 2024 exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990.
From the museum about the work-
Although this work appears to have a monochromatic white surface from afar, a matrix of thousands of painted dots becomes visible from a closer vantage point. Irwin aimed to highlight the visual effects of color interaction by juxtaposing light green and lavender, complementary colors across from each other on a color wheel. The canvas’s outwardly bowed supports and the increasing density of dots towards the painting’s center further heighten the viewer’s perceptual experience of the work.
The documentary Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling, does an excellent job detailing his life, art, and the philosophy behind his work. It is well worth a watch and inspiring to watch him still at work in Marfa at 87. He passed away in 2023 at the age of 95.