Jul 092025
 

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, his thriller starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, issues of power, control, obsession, and identity loom large over the mysterious plot.  Stewart plays Scottie, a former San Francisco detective who retired when a traumatic incident left him with a debilitating fear of heights and vertigo. He is hired as a private investigator to follow an acquaintance’s wife, Madeline, played by Kim Novak, who has recently been acting strangely.

Shot in Technicolor, Hitchcock uses the vivid colors to represent the characters. Below, a hotel sign fills the room with an eerie green light, and Scottie’s head floats in red within a dream sequence that includes colorful animation.

There are also several recurring motifs throughout the film. One of the strongest is the various spirals present throughout the film- the tree rings, Madeline’s hair and the hair of the woman in the painting, and the staircase in the mission.  Of course, spirals can be dizzying, and when someone is feeling overwhelmed by their thoughts it is often referred to as “spiraling”- which Scottie is doing as the film progresses. They can also represent the cyclical nature of time.

Madeline and Scottie among the Redwood trees in Muir Woods

Madeline points to two lines marking her life.

Northern California is the backdrop and the scenes in and around San Francisco in the 1950s are stunning.

Vertigo received mixed reviews at the time of its release, but is now considered one of the best films ever made. Through his unique personal vision, Hitchcock created a world to get lost in, with new things to notice on each revisit. The film can also serve as a reminder to struggling artists to stay true to their own ideas- sometimes it takes time for a work to gain appreciation.

Apr 242025
 

“I Like How the Left Side Modulates Up”, 1989, acrylic on canvas (from the “Hitchcock” series)

“Apollo, 617”, 1982, acrylic on canvas

Sundaram Tagore Gallery is currently showing the paintings of the late Robert Natkin for the exhibition A Better Place. The colorful abstract works are from the several series he produced during his lifetime.

Natkin used his artwork to explore different concepts and influences, many of which are listed in the press release below and in the information provided alongside several of the artworks.

“The Beloved (Field Mouse)”, 1969, acrylic on linen

Here, for example, is the information provided for the painting above, from his Field Mouse series-

Natkin explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the “Field Mouse” series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, with which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resemble microscopic views of teeming organisms. For him, they were complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.

And the Days Are Not Full Enough

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
Ezra Pound

More from the gallery’s press release-

Robert Natkin is internationally recognized as an unsurpassed colorist and for the beauty of his large-scale abstract canvases. He was represented by blue-chip New York gallerists Elinor Poindexter in the 1960s and André Emmerich in the 1970s. Today, his work is in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Born to a poor and unhappy Russian-Jewish family in Chicago during the Great Depression, Natkin would transcend his traumatic upbringing, often finding refuge in the color and splendor of the movies, charting an industrious course through public art education and briefly co-founding a gallery, to become one of the foremost American abstract colorist painters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. His paintings are life-affirming, sensual celebrations of visual delight, of glorious Hollywood Technicolor, of fascinating surface effects, enticing layers, and sunny outlooks.

Natkin’s painterly journey can be seen through its distinct and loosely phased series as he accumulated years of psychotherapy and read and looked voraciously. They reveal his drive for redemption not just through introspection, but by consistently forging new stylistic syntheses.

FEATURED SERIES

The vigorous, gestural brushwork of Natkin’s early abstractions reflects the seismic impact of the Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, whose work he encountered in an article about Abstract Expressionism in Life magazine in 1949. Natkin also found inspiration in French artists Matisse and Bonnard, among others in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied from 1948–1952.

In 1957, Natkin married the painter Judith Dolnick and together they founded the Wells Street Gallery in downtown Chicago, exhibiting cooperatively with a group of young contemporaries who similarly explored free-form abstraction, including the sculptor John Chamberlain, Ann Mattingly, Gerald van de Wiele and friend Ernest Dieringer. Wells Street Gallery made its cultural mark but was commercially unsuccessful, closing two years later, whereupon Natkin and Dolnick moved to New York.

In New York, Natkin’s vigorously abstract paintings took on more rectilinear qualities, decisively so with his Apollo series, characterized by loose vertical bands of color. The series began in the early 1960s under the inspiration of Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, based on a sculptural fragment in the Louvre, with its final imperative: “You have to change your life.” Named after the Greek god of the sun, the arts and healing, the Apollos established for Natkin the purpose of his art as a means of transformation for self and society.

The Apollo series was long-lived, spanning the 1960s and revived in the mid-1970s. The later instances incorporated Natkin’s distinctive technique of applying acrylic paint with a sponge covered in cloths of various textures, which he discovered in 1971. At his Dolnick’s suggestion, Natkin made a painting on a dishcloth because she had seen him make little paintings on handkerchiefs to give to friends, and then came up with the idea of effectively printing from it. The technique increased his productivity and transformed his aesthetic.

The pointillistic, gauzy effect of this technique came into its own in the more muted, diaphanous visions of the Bath series, so named for the English city where Natkin was to have an exhibition. The subtle, atmospheric nature of the Bath paintings are akin to his earlier Intimate Lighting series, which ran through much of the 1970s, and were described by British art critic Peter Fuller as possessing hints of portraiture in their central focus and inspired by Cubism in the clearly applied blocks of sponge-and-cloth-painting.

Natkin’s Straight Edge and Step paintings emerged from a period in the mid-1960s when he was preparing to teach a course on color at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and read Josef Albers’ theories on its interaction. They also channel the modernist architecture of his native Chicago, his love of jazz singers Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and the dynamic grid-pattern streets of New York.

He explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the Field Mouse series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, by which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resembled microscopic views of teeming organisms and organelles. For him, they were also complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a more romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.

In 1977, Natkin produced the Bern series, named for the Swiss capital where the Klee Foundation is located and where Natkin spent many hours among Paul Klee’s works. In this series, he uses more sharply delineated shapes against expansive fields of intense color. Perhaps the boldest colors and shapes appear in the 1980s in the Hitchcock series, an homage to the great director and the movie-theater origins of his artistic journey. Hitchcock’s interest in psychoanalytic themes where dark secrets often drive the narrative, and his charging of the carefully crafted scenery and props with menacing symbolism appealed to Natkin.

Robert Natkin died in 2010 after several years of declining health. Over the course of his career, he demonstrated a remarkable capability of spanning beauty and ugliness in his art, though he dedicated his prime to the struggle of the former over the latter, to the Apollonian ascendancy of light over darkness.

In Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a 1982 documentary by award-winning filmmaker Mike Dibb, Natkin says, “In one sense, I want to be superhuman, but in another sense, I feel I’m barely an animal. And it’s a practice that I think if I don’t always maintain, juggle both these kinds of reality, I could then very easily be done in by the very kind of reparation that I use to make myself and that I hope will help the rest of the world to become a better place. I want to become a better place! Not a person: I want to become a better place, because as a person, I’m going to be gone in—I don’t know—ten minutes or ten years, but I want to become a better place.”

This exhibition closes 4/26/25.

 

Jan 162020
 

GUPPY- Cactus Dreams

Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (1/16-1/19/20)-

Thursday

Artist Suné Woods is speaking at Hammer Museum

Automatic and L.A. Takedown are opening for Mr. Elevator at The Echo

LA based experimental vocalist and contemporary composer Odeya Nini will be speaking at The Broad as part of their series The Logic of Poetry and Dreams (free but reserve ticket)

Crywolf is performing an acoustic set at Moroccan Lounge with Emilie Brandt

 

Friday

The Aero Theatre is hosting their 15th Annual shorts program with a focus on female directors- which includes a discussion with several of the filmmakers to follow the screenings

The Egyptian Theatre is showing the film Freaked with a discussion to follow with directors Alex Winter and Tom Stern as well as co-writer Tim Burns, composer Kevin Kiner; production designer Catherine Hardwicke; special effects artists Steve Johnson, Tony Gardner and Bill Corso; actors John Hawkes and Lee Arenberg; and Henry Rollins and Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers.

Steve Gunn is playing at Zebulon with Olgaa opening

Hieroglyphics are performing at Catch One

Patio are playing at The Hi Hat with Cheekface opening

 

 

Saturday

GUPPY are playing at The Factory with Sun Kin and Sankaran

The Women’s March returns to downtown LA for it’s 4th Annual event

Multimedia performance artist Miwa Matreyek returns to REDCAT with her latest work Infinitely Yours (also on Thursday and Friday)

Photographer Mark Steinmetz will be signing his book Summer Camp at Arcana Books

Brandon Coleman is performing at Moroccan Lounge

 

Saturday and Sunday

The Getty is hosting Sounds of L.A. 2020 with the band 3MA, made up of three African stringed-instrument virtuosi.

 

Sunday

Gal Pal are playing at Zebulon with Shaki and Gold Cage

Pasadena Comic Con is taking place at the Pasadena Convention Center

Aero Theatre is showing a Noah Baumbach double feature- The Squid and The Whale and Kicking and Screaming

The Egyptian Theatre is showing the Hitchcock classic Rear Window

The Flashbulb is performing at El Cid with Chihsuan Yang opening

May 102018
 

ScHoolboy Q- John Muir

Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (5/10-5/13/18)-

Thursday

Hammer Museum has a free screening of the short film Eve, by Susan Bay Nimoy, with a discussion to follow

American Pleasure Club (fka Teen Suicide) are playing at The Hi Hat with Special Explosion and Wreck and Reference opening

Khalid is playing at the Greek Theatre with PrettyMuch opening

CalArts Writers Showcase is hosting a free reading series featuring its graduating Creative Writing MFAs at REDCAT

Doja Cat is playing at The Echo with StarBoi3 and L8loomer opening

Erika Wennerstrom (of Heartless Bastards) is playing at the Bootleg Theater

Friday

There are still some seats left for The Championship Tour at The Forum featuring Kendrick Lamar, SZA, ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, SiR, and Lance SkiiiWalker (also Thursday)

There’s a screening of the Hitchcock classic Rear Window at Vista Theatre

Or you can check out Hitchcock’s Psycho as well as the non-Hitchcock sequels Psycho II and Psycho III for the triple feature at the Aero Theatre

RuPaul’s DragCon begins today and runs until Sunday

Born Ruffians are playing at the Teragram Ballroom with Little Junior opening

Liam Gallagher is playing with Richard Ashcroft at the Greek Theatre

Saturday

Photographer John Divola will be in conversation with Getty Museum Department of Photographs curator Amanda Maddox at Arcana Books followed by a book signing

Artist Charles Gaines and curator Connie Butler are giving a free walk-through of the Mark Bradford exhibition at Hauser & Wirth

BoldPas: An Art Takeover is a free one day art event in Pasadena with 13 large scale installations in the historic alleyways, live painters, art activities, and more

EatSeeHear’s outdoor movie at LA State Historic Park this week is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Hit Bargain are playing at Rec Center with Media Jeweler, Moira Scar, and Fucked Forever

Hovvdy are playing at The Hi Hat with Lomelda and Diners opening

Sunday

Curator Connie Butler is leading a walk-through of the exhibition of video art Unspeakable: Atlas, Kruger, Walker at Hammer Museum

Celebrate Mother’s Day 2018 with the double feature of Grey Gardens and Mommy Dearest at the Egyptian Theatre

The Telescopes, LSD & The Search For God, No Sun, and Snowball II are playing Part Time Punks 13th Anniversary show at the Echoplex

Pllush are opening for Editors at The Belasco

Emmy Award winner Debbie Allen is giving free dance outdoor lessons at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

Aug 282014
 

Ty Segall- “Manipulator” Album Teaser

Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (8/28-9/1)-

Thursday-Sunday

Ty Segall is playing four sold out shows at the Echo (but there may be tickets at the door) to promote his just released album, Manipulatorhttp://www.theecho.com/event/602873-ty-segall-los-angeles/

It’s the last weekend of the Griffith Park Shakespeare Festival. Thursday and Friday, it’s Taming of the Shrew. Saturday and Sunday, it’s Twelfth Nighthttp://www.iscla.org/griffith-park-festival/

Thursday

Lee “Scratch” Perry is playing the Santa Monica Pier (free)- http://tcs.dola.com/event/2014/08/28/lee-scratch-perry

Mission of Burma is playing with GRMLN at the Roxy- http://www.theroxy.com/event/541569-mission-burma-west-hollywood/

Friday through Monday

Los Angeles County Fair begins (running until 9/28)-http://www.lacountyfair.com/

Saturday

Skate and Create opens at Flower Pepper Gallery in Pasadena. Over forty well known street artists created skateboards for the show- http://www.flower-pepper.com/portfolios/exhibits-events/?cpt_item=skate-create

Saturday and Sunday

Made in America Festival in Grand Park- tons of artists including Kendrick Lamar, Imagine Dragons, Juanes, Weezer, Cypress Hill, Chance the Rapper and more- http://a.madeinamericafest.com/landing/

Sunday

Los Angeles Plays Itself, a 3 hour film compilation of clips of movies filmed in LA, is playing at the Aero. The director, Thom Andersen, will discuss it afterwards and present an additional film- http://www.americancinemathequecalendar.com/content/los-angeles-plays-itself-9

The Big Picture: Hitchcock at the Hollywood Bowl– scores from Hitchcock’s famous films are played live while scenes play on a screen in the background- http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tickets/big-picture-hitchcock/2014-08-31

Burger presents: OFF!, along with a bunch of other bands including Cherry Glazerr and Lovely Bad Things at Los Globos- http://www.clublosglobos.com/event/625573-burger-off-los-angeles/

All weekend (including Labor Day)

Cinefamily and Everything is Terrible present a weekend’s worth  of programming for Everything Is Festival: Fifth Dimension– including an art opening, movie premieres (one with live score performed by YACHT), found footage compilations and more- http://www.cinefamily.org/films/everything-is-festival-the-5th-dimension/