#also Edwin is good at more geometrical art than abstract/natural art

[fellow-fandom-fruitifier]

As an artist I love the idea of Edwin and Charles being amazing at art but, here me out, Charles cannot draw for the (after)life of him. Does this stop him? NO! He literally doodles stick figures in crayon, but this is a super private part of himself (cause he’s insecure and doesn’t want others opinions). So the first time Edwin sees one is by complete accident and he's absolutely delighted. Like “Charles, is this us?” and he has that dimpled beaming smile and oh. Charles didn't have anything to worry about, huh?

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Two Cy Twombly Exhibitions Marry Myth and Sensual Abstraction

Cy Twombly “School of Athens” (1961) Oil, oil-based house paint, colored pencil and lead pencil on canvas, 190.3 x 200.5 cm (© Robert Bayer, Bildpunkt AG, Munchenstein)

PARIS — With a sloppy style of vacuous vicissitudes Cy Twombly reversed what the avant-gardes of the prewar era held as a given: the view of history as a burden. There is a marvelous sprightly loose, intuitive feel about Twombly’s operatic paintings that manages to merge mythic, classical intellectualism with a Dionysian sensual immoderation that verges on shit. By this playful amalgam of semiotics with scatology, Twombly redevises history painting into palimpsest poop.

High-brow works such as “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963), “Fifty Days at Iliam” (1978) and “Coronation of Sesostris” (2000) organize the relaxed Pompidou retrospective containing some 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs, mercifully hung in chronological order. It is cogently enthralling and spaciously mounted by Pompidou curator Jonas Storsve and Nicola del Roscio of the Cy Twombly Foundation. Sad to say, the show will not be travelling from Paris.

Cy Twombly “Untitled (Grottaferrata) III” (1957) Wax crayon and lead pencil on squared paper, 1 of 7 drawings: 21.6 x 29.9 cm (each) (© Galerie Karsten Greve, St. Moritz, Paris, Köln)

Born in Virginia in 1928, Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr. inherited the name Cy from his father — who pitched baseball for the Chicago White Sox and got his nickname after the legendary Cy Young. Following a trip to Paris and Morocco with Robert Rauschenberg, whom he met as a student and accompanied to Black Mountain College for the summer of 1951, Twombly expatriated to Rome in 1957, where he pressed further into his emulsified and rickety style. An uninhibited use of sallow colors is already evident in “Untitled (New York)” (1954) (that opens the show) and “Volubilis” (1953). “Volubilis” is named after the partly excavated Berber and Roman city in Morocco situated near the city of Meknes and commonly considered the capital of the ancient kingdom of Mauretania. The scratchy, scribbled dribbles that “Volubilis” employs owe a lot to a less solemn, that is, transgressive, approach to Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, Twombly’s work’s quintessence is Epicurean and festive in nature — and he never much conformed to AE’s angst ridden expressionism. Yet I felt something like twinges of existential doubt or futility while appreciating the spikey fertility of “Volubilis,” something Twombly most likely absorbed from his early passion for the transubstantiating drawings of Alberto Giacometti.

Cy Twombly “Veil of Orpheus” (1968) House paint, crayon,and graphite pencil on primed canvas 228.6 x 487.7 cm (© Cy Twombly Foundation)

From the same year, there is also a suite of seven child-like, wax crayon drawings that Twombly gave to his friend Betty Stokes, who was married to Venetian aristocrat Alvise Di Robilant and had just given birth to their first child in Grottaferrata (from where the drawings take their name). To make them, Twombly took liberties with the liberty that André Masson’s experiments with automatic drawing yielded in the 1920s. There is also a never-before-seen sweet suite of drawings he made in bed, in the dark at Grottaferrata, that feature repeated, spewing hump-forms suggestive of volcanic eruptions, like the one that buried Pompeii in ash.

The most accomplished post-AE paintings (resembling a bit, Arshile Gorky’s) are those that also engage with a haunting look of improvisational planned chance where chance operations are deliberately introduced into the creative process, such as the tantalizingly smudged “School of Athens” (1961), loopy and sensual “Dutch Interior” (1962) and the tasteful yet flamboyant “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” (1962). “School of Athens” and “Dutch Interior” are great examples of his almost convulsive, balm-encrusted paintings made between 1960 and 1962. This is when he created some of his hottest, most voluptuous paintings, in which churning male and female sexual body parts flutter and float through splatters and splurges that play off the thick, eggshell-whitish ground suggestive of foamy sea scum. Inspired in part by the midsummer Italian holiday of Ferragosto (rooted in an ancient Roman fertility festival) the sloppy, raunchy imagery in “School of Athens” is excessively goofy — congregating delicately scratched or scribbled shit messes against each other. Baboons might just as well have produced it.

Cy Twombly “Pan” (1975) Oil pastel and collage on paper, 148 x 100 cm, Cy Twombly Foundation (© Cy Twombly Foundation Archives, courtesy Nicola Del Roscio, photo by © Mimmo Capone)

Twombly does elegiac restraint very well too. This is abundantly apparent in the viscous paintings “Orpheus” (1979) and “Veil of Orpheus” (1968) at the Gagosian exhibition, a calm, whitish show of six large drawings and five paintings that riff on the archaic tale of Orpheus. The large painting “Orpheus” contains urgently curtailed marks that hint at the word Orpheus while refusing to move completely beyond gesture into actual readability. The same level of abstraction as applied to Greek myth is found in French composer Pierre Henry’s great musique concrète composition “The Veil of Orpheus” from 1953. With the audacious “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” at the Pompidou, we have before us a large, luxuriant canvas without the typical framed glass barrier so many other paintings here are burdened with. I guess that when these babies sell for around 70 million dollars a pop (as they do) the owners are willing to kill their surface sensuality a bit in the interests of safety. Anyway, “Achilles” conveys an immediate soft-hot, violent (or vigorous) sensual attractiveness — while also remaining curbed. The subject, a reference to Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad, is typical of Twombly’s playful interest in Mediterranean myth. His use of restrained pencil lines and two warm orgiastic marks in “Achilles,” akin to scrawled vandalism, compares favorably to Anselm Kiefer’s pious and heavy resurrections of epic battles and ancient myths that were also presented at the Pompidou not long ago, to less effect.

What distinguishes “Achilles” is its sliding signifiers — the way it correlates a gooey gestural present with an imperturbable, passive, classical past. It also has immediacy. Its seemingly unpremeditated gestures suggest the eternal presence of the now, because Twombly neither accepts the Greek classics as a perfunctory accumulation of events — succeeding one another in time — nor as a reservoir of fixed forms. Rather, especially in “The Vengeance of Achilles” (1962), he seems to have positioned self-possession on the tip of a bloody spearhead, piercing history with a slippery and alienated here-and-now present. At the same time, his slathering and slack markings, such as in “Dutch Interior,” suggest a willful regression into the infantile, so as to move the viewer closer to sensual instinctiveness. Yet the baby-playing-with-poop regression sensed in “School of Athens” is turned out as optimistic: it projects historical confidence at the same time, by piggy-backing on Raphael’s Italian Renaissance “The School of Athens” (1511) frescoes.

Cy Twombly, “Wilder Shores of Love” (1985) Oil-based house paint, oil (oil paint stick), colored pencil, lead pencil on wooden panel 140 x 120 cm (© Robert Bayer, Bildpunkt AG, Munchenstein)

Large scale synthesis of words and images and sophisticated soft lighting propel that confident feel in the fantastically installed “Fifty Days at Iliam” (1978), a ten-part painting cycle based on Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was especially moved by the carnal, crimson canvas “The Fire that Consumes All Before It” (1978). Anticipating neo-expressionism by allowing color to become dissociated from line, Twombly’s self-imposed blundering here is far more elegant and earnest than Julian Schnabel’s bombastic combinations of scribbled words and abstract marks would ever be.

As denigrated in Donald Judd’s art criticism, I found less successful the swarming, faux urgent “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963) cycle with its overripe and agitated crimson swirling brushstrokes sent hovering on a rather uniform gray ground. These works, devoted to the Roman emperor Commodus, who is remembered as a bloodthirsty ruler, were inspired by John F. Kennedy’s splattered brains when he was assassinated in Dallas. Though ersatz by comparison to “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus,” I don’t deny some collective force surviving in this series of presentations of bodily sensation in disarray, but the uniform vertical gray ground tends to kill it.

Turning his gestural AE materiality towards the Minimalism and Conceptualism that emerged around the world in the mid-1960s, Twombly created a series of taut, austere, muted paintings with energetic backgrounds of grey or black inscribed with simple geometric forms in distress or script-like loop-de-loops made with white wax crayon. These works, including the windswept “Night Watch” (1966), on loan from a private collection on the West Coast, strongly suggest Joseph Beuys’s scrawled blackboards (though they lack his social idealist (leftist) intent).

Cy Twombly “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” (1962) 259 x 302 cm, oil, lead pencil on canvas, collection Centre Pompidou, Paris (© Centre Pompidou / P.Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP)

White is the choice for Twombly’s sculpture assemblages that are grouped together so the Paris skyline enhances them. Even though Twombly was an early enthusiast of Kurt Schwitters’s collages, his assemblages are really not very good. Consisting of disparate found materials like wood, electrical plugs, cardboard boxes, scraps of metal and artificial flowers — and unified by a coat of white plaster — they are just too reminiscent of Picasso’s superior work in the medium. Though all his compositions straddle abstraction, Twombly is so much better, so much more richly psychic, when he stays within two-dimensional, collaged space so as to create unexpectedly affective territories where connections are made to be undone. This is evident in his rather juicy but minimalistic “Bacchanalia” (1977) cycle and particularly with the gratifying “Pan” (1975) collage. Probing the gap between sign and signified, it is a delighting feat of free association thrown up against a state of panic.

Like handwriting adorning a love letter, the title makes its way across the top half of “Wilder Shores of Love” (1985), a work alluding to the 1954 Lesley Blanch book of the same name. Thus Twombly evokes a kind of sentimental longing for other places and other times through a compost heap of past matter — now ready to sprout new forms.

Some may contest this, but for me, the Pompidou show slides unpropitiously downhill from there, as Twombly relies less and less on his emollient energetic mark making and more and more on letting gravity have its way with drooling liquid paint. This continues until finally, as with the limp loop-de-loop “Untitled (Bacchus)” (2005), the dripping drool becomes the sine qua none of old age and festive excess itself.

Well, at least it was a major whoop while it lasted.

Cy Twombly continues at the Centre Pompidou (Place Georges-Pompidou, 4th arrondissement, Paris, France) through April 24, and Cy Twombly: Orpheus continues at the Gagosian Gallery (4 Rue de Ponthieu, 8th arrondissement, Paris, France) through February 18.

The post Two Cy Twombly Exhibitions Marry Myth and Sensual Abstraction appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[kathleenseiber]

Average people can discern the beauty of math

Average Americans can assess mathematical arguments for beauty just as they can pieces of art or music, research finds.

The beauty they discerned about the math was not one-dimensional: Using nine criteria for beauty—such as elegance, intricacy, universality, etc.—300 people had better-than-chance agreement about the specific ways that four different mathematical proofs were beautiful.

This inquiry into the aesthetics of mathematics, published in Cognition, began when study coauthor and Yale University assistant professor of mathematics Stefan Steinerberger likened a proof he was teaching to a “really good Schubert sonata.”

“As it turns out, the Yale students who do math also do a statistically impressive amount of music,” says Steinerberger. “Three or four students came up to me afterwards and asked, ‘What did you mean by this?’ And I realized I had no idea what I meant, but it just sounded sort of right. So, I emailed the psych department.”

Psychology professor Woo-Kyoung Ahn replied to Steinerberger and, after further discussion, gave him the name of a psychology graduate student with whom she thought he would get along.

Enter Samuel G.B. Johnson, study coauthor and now assistant professor of marketing at the University of Bath School of Management, who was still completing his PhD in psychology at Yale when he connected with Steinerberger. Johnson studies reasoning and decision making. “A lot of my work is about how people evaluate different explanations and arguments for things,” he explains.

Steinerberger says Johnson understood immediately how to design an experiment to test his question of whether we share the same aesthetic sensibilities about math that we do about other modalities, i.e. art and music, and if this would hold true for an average person, not just a career mathematician like himself.

“I had some diffuse notion about this, but Sam immediately got it,” says Steinerberger. “It was a match made in heaven.”

Four proofs, four paintings, four sonatas

For the study, they chose four each of mathematical arguments, landscape paintings, and piano sonatas. Because the similarities between math and music have long been noted, Johnson explains, they also wanted to test people using another aesthetic modality—art in this case—to see if there’s something more universal about the way we judge aesthetics.

One of the four mathematical arguments used in the study, as the participants saw it. (Credit: Yale)

Johnson divided the study into three parts. The first task required a sample of individuals to match the four math proofs to the four landscape paintings based on how aesthetically similar they found them; the second required a different sample to do the same but instead comparing the proofs to sonatas; and the third required another unique sample of people to independently rate, on a scale of zero to ten, each of the four artworks and mathematical arguments along nine different criteria plus an overall score for beauty.

They derived these criteria from “A Mathematician’s Apology,” a 1940 essay by famous mathematician G.H. Hardy, which discusses mathematical beauty. The researchers’ nine dimensions elaborated from Hardy’s six were: seriousness, universality, profundity, novelty, clarity, simplicity, elegance, intricacy, and sophistication.

When Steinerberger and Johnson analyzed the ratings given by participants in part three, they found that for both the artworks and math arguments a high rating for elegance was most likely to predict a high rating for beauty.

The final step was to calculate the “similarity scores” for the participants in group three, which revealed how aesthetically similar they considered each proof and painting were to each other based on the separate beauty criteria. They then compared these scores to the results from the first group of participants, who were asked to simply match proofs with paintings based on their own intuitive sense of aesthetic similarity—much like Steinerberger’s initial analogy of the proof to a “good Schubert sonata.”

The beauty of math

When the results came in, Steinerberger and Johnson were surprised but pleased. They were able to take the similarity scores from participants in the third task to predict how the participants would behave in the first task. Participants in the third group agreed about which arguments were elegant and which paintings were elegant while, likewise, participants in the first group tended to match the argument the third group rated as most elegant with the painting they’d rated most elegant.

Laypeople not only had similar intuitions about the beauty of math as they did about the beauty of art but also had similar intuitions about beauty as each other. In other words, there was consensus about what makes something beautiful, regardless of modality.

“I’d like to see our study done again but with different pieces of music, different proofs, different artwork,” says Steinerberger. “We demonstrated this phenomenon, but we don’t know the limits of it. Where does it stop existing? Does it have to be classical music? Do the paintings have to be of the natural world, which is highly aesthetic?”

Math education

While quick to point out that they are not education scholars, both Steinerberger and Johnson see eventual implications of this research for math education, especially at the secondary school level.

“There might be opportunities to make the more abstract, more formal aspects of mathematics more accessible and more exciting to students at that age,” says Johnson, “And that might be useful in terms of encouraging more people to enter the field of mathematics.”

“I think if you understand what people consider beautiful in math, then it could give insight into how people understand math in the first place and how they process it,” adds Steinerberger. “There’s also the human implication of the question: How are we actually thinking about things as human beings? I think we have an obligation to collaborate with psychologists on this.”

For the study, the mathematical arguments they used were the sum of an infinite geometric series, Gauss’ summation trick for positive integers, the Pigeonhole principle, and a geometric proof of a Faulhaber formula.

The piano sonatas were Schubert’s “Moment Musical No. 4, D 780 (Op. 94)” [perf. David Fray]; Bach’s “Fugue from Toccata in E Minor (BWV 914)” [perf. Glenn Gould]; Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations (Op. 120)” [perf. Grigory Sokolov]; and Shostakovich’s “Prelude in D-flat major (Op.87 No. 15)” [perf. Adrian Brendle].

The landscape paintings were Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California by Albert Bierstadt; A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie by Albert Bierstadt; The Hay Wain by John Constable; and The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church.

Source: Yale University

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