798 District Blog

HAMBURG.- On May 11th, 2012 the Flo Peters Gallery will open an exhibition of contemporary Chinese artist Zheng Chongbin. In preparation for his first ever show in Europe, Zheng visited the gallery in order to get a feeling for the exhibition space. The internationally renowned artist will show thirteen of his latest abstract works.

Zheng was born in Shanghai in 1961 and studied at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou (today China Academy of Fine Arts). In 1989 he received a scholarship of the San Francisco Art Institute where he completed his studies in 1991 with a Master of Fine Arts. Due to his unique education, unusual in China at that time, his artwork combines the aesthetics of the East and the West by creating a synthesis of classical Chinese art and Western abstract painting. His huge success shows once more how traditional artistic techniques such as Asian ink drawing can be relevant to contemporary art.

The artist not only creates a „visual bridge“ between history and modernity by means of his expressive brush strokes with ink and acrylics on traditional xuan-paper and canvas. Having commuted between Shanghai and San Francisco, Zheng has also developed a very unique intercultural trademark which he calls his own. Abstract forms as well as a special mixture of ink, acrylics and wash conjure a formerly unknown depth into Zheng´s paintings and thus redefine the classic genre of ink painting.

Zheng Chongbin has had numerous solo exhibitions in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Shanghai and a museum show in the Shanghai Art Museum. Moreover his work has been recognized in various group shows and publications. An exhibition of Zheng’s work at the Saatchi Gallery London opens in June 2012.

Zheng Chongbin lives and works in San Francisco and Shanghai.

NEW YORK, (AP).- Archaeologists have found a small room in Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago.

The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Scientists already knew they must have been keeping such records at that time, but until now the oldest known examples dated from about 600 years later.

Astronomical records were key to the Mayan calendar, which has gotten some attention recently because of doomsday warnings that it predicts the end of the world this December. Experts say it makes no such prediction. The new finding provides a bit of backup: The calculations include a time span longer than 6,000 years that could extend well beyond 2012.

“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” observed Anthony Aveni of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., an expert on Mayan astronomy. “You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on.”

Aveni, along with William Saturno of Boston University and others, report the discovery in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

The room, a bit bigger than 6-feet square, is part of a large complex of Mayan ruins in the rain forest at Xultun in northeastern Guatemala. The walls also contain portraits of a seated king and some other figures, but it’s clear those have no connection to the astronomical writings, the scientists said.

One wall contains a calendar based on phases of the moon, covering about 13 years. The researchers said they think it might have been used to keep track of which deity was overseeing the moon at particular times.

Aveni said it would allow scribes to predict the appearance of a full moon years in advance, for example. Such record-keeping was key to Mayan astrology and rituals, and maybe would be used to advise the king on when to go to war or how good this year’s crops would be, he said.

“‘What you have here is astronomy driven by religion,” he said.

On an adjacent wall are numbers indicating four time spans from roughly 935 to 6,700 years. It’s not clear what they represent, but maybe the scribes were doing calculations that combined observations from important astronomical events like the movements of Mars, Venus and the moon, the researchers said.

Why bother to do that? Maybe the scribes were “geeks … who just got carried away with doing these kinds of computations and calculations, and probably did them far beyond the needs of ordinary society,” Aveni suggested.

Experts unconnected with the discovery said it was a significant advance.

“It’s really a wonderful surprise,” said Simon Martin, co-curator of an exhibit about the Mayan calendar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

While the results of the scribes’ work were known from carvings on monuments, “we’ve never really been able to identify a working space, or how they actually went about things,” Martin said.

The new work gives insight into that, he said, and the fact the room had a stone roof rather than thatching supports previous indications that the scribes enjoyed a high social standing.

“It’s a very important discovery. We’re only getting a glimpse of it” in the published paper, said John B. Carlson, director of the Center for Archaeoastronomy in College Park, Md.

“This is an intriguing start for this discovery.”

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

NEW YORK (AP).- Andy Warhol’s “Double Elvis” sold for $37 million and works by Roy Lichtenstein and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei broke their own records at Sotheby’s contemporary art sale on Wednesday.

Lichtenstein’s “Sleeping Girl,” depicting a woman with closed eyes and flowing blond hair, fetched $44,882,500; Weiwei’s 1-ton, handmade porcelain “Sunflower Seeds” brought $782,500.

Another major work on the auction block — Francis Bacon’s “Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror” — sold for $44,882,500. The buyers’ names for each of the four pieces were not released.

The sale came on the heels of art auction history. Last week, the auction house sold Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” for $119.9 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

“The reason for these record-breaking sales is, quite simply, the quality of material on show,” said Michael Frahm, a contemporary art adviser at the London-based Frahm Ltd. “The key is quality.”

Warhol’s “Double Elvis (Ferus Type),” a silver silkscreen image of Elvis Presley depicted as a cowboy, fetched $37,042,500. It had been expected to sell for $30 million to $50 million. The auction house said it was the first “Double Elvis” to appear on the market since 1995. Warhol produced a series of 22 images of Elvis. Nine are in museum collections.

The rock and roll heartthrob is shown armed and shooting from the hip, a shadowy Elvis figure faintly visible in the background. It was offered for sale by a private American collector, who acquired it in 1977.

The record for a Warhol is $71.7 million for his “Green Car Crash — Green Burning Car I,” sold at Christie’s in 2007.

Lichtenstein’s “Sleeping Girl,” was one of a series of sexy comic book-inspired images created by the artist in the 1960s, the work was exhibited only once — at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1989-90. It was sold by the estate of Los Angeles collectors and philanthropists Beatrice and Phillip Gersh, who were the founding members of MOCA.

His “I Can See the Whole Room! … and There’s Nobody in it!” held the previous auction record for the artist. It sold for $43.2 million at Christie’s in November.

Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds” is one of an edition of 10 and was accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist. The ceramic seeds, which can be arranged in a myriad of shapes, were the subject of a Tate Modern exhibit in 2010. The previous Weiwei auction record was $657,000 for his “Chandelier,” set at Sotheby’s in 2007.

The work is fraught with symbolism. Sunflowers are at once a Chinese street snack and also an emblem adopted by Mao Zedong.

“The works by Ai Weiwei and Francis Bacon are hot for different reasons,” said Lisa Fischman, director of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. “One is electrified by the artist’s political provocations, and the other by the frisson of sexual mystery.”

Bacon’s “Figure Writing,” which depicts the artist and his partner, George Dyer, writing at a table, was included in a 1977 Paris exhibition alongside “Triptych,” a 1976 work by the artist that sold for $86.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2008. It held the record for any contemporary artwork at auction until Tuesday night when Mark Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow” claimed that title when it sold at Christie’s for $86.8 million.

It had been in the same private collection for more than 30 years.

The “Elvis” silkscreen was exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963, the year it was created. The auction catalog described the work, based on a movie publicity photo, as “the deification of a contemporary warrior-saint, the towering, pre-eminent idol bearing a deadly weapon as if protecting the mythical world of celebrity itself.”

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Online: http://www.sothebys.com

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

NEW YORK (AP).- An iconic painting by French artist Yves Klein created with water, a blowtorch and two models has sold at a New York City auction for $36.4 million.

Christie’s auction house said “FC 1″ set an auction record for the artist Tuesday night. The painting was sold to a buyer who wishes to remain anonymous, Christie’s said.

The painting was executed a few weeks before the artist’s death in 1962 at age 34 and is considered to be his masterpiece. It was offered for sale by an anonymous Swiss collector.

The previous Klein record was for his “MG 9,” which sold for $23.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2008.

Klein invited the media to observe the creation of “FC 1,” which was videotaped and featured in a documentary on the artist titled “La Revolution Bleue.”

It shows Klein dousing two models with water as they press their bodies against a fire-resistant board. As they step away, he points a blowtorch at the surface, and the moistened areas resist scorching.

The models then coat their bodies with paint and again press themselves against the flame-licked board, leaving impressions of their breasts and thighs. Klein then applies blue and splashes of pink pigment around the silhouettes.

The painting “embodies Klein’s obsession with the irreconcilable concept of presence and absence, life and death,” said Loic Gouzer, Christie’s post-war and contemporary art specialist.

It has been included in major museum retrospectives of the artist, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Among other highlights at the sale was Mark Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow,” which had been in the collection of the late philanthropist David Pincus of Philadelphia and for years on loan at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It sold for $86.8 million, a record for the artist.

Christie’s said it was the most important Rothko to come on the market since 2007 when “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)” from the David Rockefeller collection sold for $72.8 million, the previous record.

Prices include the buyer’s premium.

NEW YORK, NY.- The spring 2012 exhibition organized by The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations. The exhibition, on view from May 10 through August 19, 2012 (preceded on May 7 by The Costume Institute Gala Benefit), explores the striking affinities between these two Italian designers from different eras. Inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s satirical “Impossible Interviews” for Vanity Fair in the 1930s, curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton orchestrate conversations between these iconic women to suggest new readings of the designers’ most innovative work.

“Given the role Surrealism and other art movements play in the designs of both Schiaparelli and Prada, it seems only fitting that their inventive creations be explored here at the Met,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Schiaparelli’s collaborations with Dalí and Cocteau as well as Prada’s Fondazione Prada push art and fashion ever closer, in a direct, synergistic, and culturally redefining relationship.”

To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, the Museum’s Costume Institute Benefit takes place on Monday, May 7, 2012. For the first time in its history, red carpet arrivals will be live streamed from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on metmuseum.org, amazon.com/fashion, and vogue.com. The evening’s Honorary Chair is Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. Co-Chairs are actress Carey Mulligan, designer Miuccia Prada, and Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue. This fundraising event is The Costume Institute’s main source of annual funding for exhibitions, acquisitions, and capital improvements.

The exhibition is organized by Harold Koda, Curator in Charge, and Andrew Bolton, Curator, both of the Met’s Costume Institute. Film director, screenwriter, and producer Baz Luhrmann is the exhibition’s creative consultant, and has created a series of filmed elements for the exhibition. The production design for the films is by Luhrmann’s longtime collaborator, Catherine Martin. The exhibition design is realized by Nathan Crowley, who serves as production designer (he was creative consultant for the Met’s exhibitions Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity). All mannequin head treatments and masks are designed by Guido Palau.

The Exhibition

In the galleries, iconic ensembles by Schiaparelli and Prada are presented alongside short videos of simulated conversations between the two designers directed by Luhrmann, focusing on how the women explore similar themes in their work through very different approaches.

“Juxtaposing the work of Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada allows us to explore how the past enlightens the present and how the present enlivens the past,” said Koda.

“The connection of the historic to the modern highlights the affinities as well as the variances between two women who constantly subverted contemporary notions of taste, beauty, and glamour,” added Bolton.

The exhibition, in the Metropolitan Museum’s first-floor special exhibition galleries, features approximately 100 designs and 40 accessories by Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, and by Miuccia Prada from the late 1980s to the present, drawn from The Costume Institute’s collection and the Prada Archive, as well as other institutions and private collections. Eight short videos created by Luhrmann, in which Prada talks with Schiaparelli, who is played by actress Judy Davis, animate the entry gallery and the seven themed sections of the exhibition and provide the thread that connects the objects. In the films, “Schiap” and Prada are seated at a dining table in dialogue that has been created using paraphrased excerpts from Schiaparelli’s autobiography, Shocking Life, and Prada’s filmed remarks. Visitors will have the impression of eavesdropping on a fantastical meeting of two great fashion minds.

The section of the exhibition entitled “Waist Up/Waist Down” looks at Schiaparelli’s use of decorative detailing as a response to restaurant dressing in the heyday of 1930s café society, while showing Prada’s below-the-waist focus as a symbolic expression of modernity and femininity. An accessories subsection of this gallery called “Neck Up/Knees Down” showcases Schiaparelli’s hats and Prada’s footwear. “Ugly Chic” reveals how both women subvert ideals of beauty and glamour by playing with good and bad taste through color, prints, and textiles.

“Hard Chic” explores the influence of uniforms and menswear to promote a minimal aesthetic that is intended to both deny and enhance femininity. “Naïf Chic” focuses on Schiaparelli and Prada’s adoption of a girlish sensibility to subvert expectations of age-appropriate dressing. “Classical Body” explores the designers’ engagement with antiquity through the gaze of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. “Exotic Body” touches on the influence of Eastern cultures through fabrics such as lamé, and silhouettes such as saris and sarongs.

“Surreal Body,” in the final gallery, illustrates how both women affect contemporary images of the female body through Surrealistic practices such as displacement, playing with scale, and blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, natural and artificial.

Schiaparelli, who worked in Paris from the 1920s until her house closed in 1954, was associated closely with the Surrealist movement and created such iconic pieces as the ‘tear’ dress, the ‘shoe’ hat, and the ‘bug’ necklace. Prada, who holds a degree in political science, took over her family’s Milan-based business in 1978, and focuses on fashion that reflects the eclectic nature of Postmodernism.

NEW YORK, NY.- On 9 May 2012 Sotheby’s May sale of Contemporary Art will showcase exceptionally rare and important works spanning the past six decades. The cover lot of the sale is Roy Lichtenstein’s Sleeping Girl from 1964 one of the high-points of the artist’s comic book inspired paintings and an icon of Post-War American art (est. $30/40 million). The auction also features Double Elvis [Ferus Type] by Andy Warhol, a painting that epitomizes the artist’s obsessions with fame, stardom, and the public image (est. $30/50 million) one of the most powerful and sophisticated paintings by Francis Bacon – Figure Writing Reflected In Mirror (est. $30/40 million), Untitled (New York City), one of the most important works by the American master Cy Twombly to have appeared at auction (est. $15/20 million).

Sleeping Girl

The beautiful women of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book series are not only one of the most instantly recognizable icons of the Pop Art movement but continue the long, rich tradition of artists’ celebrations of the sleeping female form. Paintings from this series are featured in the collections of major institutions throughout the world such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sleeping Girl has not appeared on the market since it was purchased by noted West Coast collectors and philanthropists Beatrice and Phillip Gersh, from the Ferus Gallery in 1964. The painting is the highpoint of Lichtenstein’s most acclaimed and sustained body of work, painted between 1961 and 1965, and stands out as the clear masterpiece among the single figure, square-format paintings of women from 1964, with a perfect harmony of size, composition and color.

Double Elvis [Ferus Type]

Double Elvis [Ferus Type] from 1963 is a seminal piece from the iconic series devoted to the singer and actor that was first seen at the Ferus gallery in Los Angeles that same year. The celebrities of Warhol’s portraits – Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Elvis Presley among others – were presented as glamorous and powerful icons whose image was imprinted on the public consciousness. Warhol’s signature style, coupled with the instantly recognizable faces of his subjects creates a blurred boundary between artist and sitter. Of the 22 works in the Elvis series, nine are in museum collections with others in highly distinguished private collections and this is the first Double Elvis to appear on the market since 1995.

Figure Writing Reflected In Mirror

The extraordinary 1976 painting Figure Writing Reflected In Mirror incorporates some of Francis Bacon’s most important themes and iconography, synchronizing the essence of his life and art. Figure Writing Reflected In Mirror was included in the legendary 1977 exhibition at Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, where it was shown alongside Triptych, 1976, which holds the record price for any work of Contemporary Art at auction. The present owners purchased the painting at that exhibition and it has not appeared on the market since.

Untitled (New York City)

Cy Twombly’s 1970 masterpiece Untitled (New York City) is one of the high points of the artist’s career and a superb example of the backboard paintings. In 1966, Twombly abandoned the use of color that had defined so much of his previous output to embark on a cycle of matte grey works including Untitled (New York City) that became a discourse of mood and movement. The present painting evokes the liberal movement of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings while the low pressure all-over energy is similar to Jasper John’s grey paintings. Six horizontal bands that are at once typographical and illegible cover the entire canvas, avoiding any central composition or specific subject matter.

Pop Art

One of the most indisputably iconic images of Pop Art on a astounding scale, Andy Warhol’s immense Ten-Foot Flowers from 1967 is a further highlight of the sale (est. $9/12 million). Composed upon a canvas nearly one hundred square feet in size, this painting was conceived specifically for the artist’s first retrospective exhibition in Europe, held at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 1968. It is one of just eleven Flower paintings created in this ten-by-ten foot format and reflects the degree to which Warhol had honed and refined the screen-printing process by this stage in his career.

The Contemporary Art from the Estate of Theodore J. Forstmann will be led by Roy Lichtenstein’s Sailboats III, an interpretation of a theme that has been explored by artists for centuries (est. $6/8 million). In this and other series the artist worked on in the early and mid-1970s, he looked to the Cubists as well as more traditional paintings for inspiration. Sailboats III is one of the most evolved works from this series, and stands as a seminal composition of movement, geometry and color.

Recent Contemporary Art

Abstraktes Bild 768-2 by Gerhard Richter from 1992 was acquired by the present owners from the artist’s London gallery in 1995 and has been off the market since (est. $8/10 million). A triumphant act of painting, Abstraktes Bild 768-2 epitomizes the mature achievement that is Richter’s abstraction. It is a remarkable example of the artist’s bravura technique, standing out as one of Richter’s most impressive contributions to his continued investigation into the nature of process. This towering work delivers a breathtakingly symphonic and enveloping field of primary color. The incontestably beautiful Wolken (Clouds) is a further Richter highlight in the sale (est. $5/7 million).

Aluminum Girl by Charles Ray took no fewer than eight years to produce and its appearance at auction is a momentous event (est. $4/6 million). Ray has continually reinterpreted Contemporary sculpture from his early performance works of the 1970s to the figurative works of the 1990s. The creation of Aluminum Girl marked a further shift to an idealized depiction of a woman that was influenced by Renaissance sculpture.

Ring from 1981 is a striking self-portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat which portrays the artist as a warrior poised for battle in the boxing ring, his arrow raised and ready to strike (est. $4/6 million). The work which comes from the Forstmann Collection offers a rare insight into the mind of one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed yet tormented artists.

Other highlights in this section of the sale include Untitled (W38), one of the instantly recognizable Word paintings by Christopher Wool (est. $4/6 million), and Black Like Me #1 a 1992 work by Glenn Ligon (est. $600/800,000).

Abstract Expressionism

Arshile Gorky’s Khorkom, also from the Forstmann Collection stands at the crossroads of European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism, having been painted during a time when the artist was looking to memories of his childhood in Armenia to inform his works (est. $3/4 million). The Surrealist movement that was gaining traction in New York in the 1930s was a major influence, and helped the artist to develop his individual style of painting. Traces of Cubism also can be seen in Gorky’s paintings from the 1930s, including the present work.

The sale also includes a number of works by Willem de Kooning. Untitled from 1951 comes from a period in which the artist was gaining increasing recognition with his first solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery, participation in the 1950 Venice Biennale and museum purchase of Woman I (est. $4/6 million). Woman On A Sign II from 1967 is from a series of languid and graceful depictions of Women that the artist painted after his move to East Hampton, the flowing brushwork and warm palette clearly contrasting with the aggressive figures from the previous decade (est. $3/4 million). Untitled from 1970-1974 was also painted after de Kooning moved from Manhattan to Long Island and, like many paintings from this period, reflects his new-found closeness to nature (est. $5.5/7.5 million).

NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art showcases some of the finest and most celebrated prints ever produced in China in the special exhibition The Printed Image in China, 8th-21st Century. The more than 130 works on view have been drawn from the full range of the Chinese print collection at the British Museum—one of the most comprehensive such collections outside Asia. The exhibition surveys the evolution of the art of Chinese printing, from the time of its inception around the early eighth century through its burgeoning as an artistic medium in the 17th century and its continued vitality as a medium for both popular culture and political commentary in the 20th century. Works on view include Buddhist prints from the Silk Road, the earliest example of multiple block color printing, striking anti-war images from the Modern Woodcut Movement, and contemporary prints by acclaimed artists. As the first exhibition of this scope to survey the Chinese print, it offers the visitor an opportunity to glimpse China’s past from a fresh perspective.

Printing on paper is believed to have been invented in China around 700 A.D., establishing China as the country with the longest history of printing in the world. Organized in roughly chronological order, the exhibition explores various aspects of Chinese pictorial printmaking including production techniques, aesthetic principles, and cultural context.

Highlights of the exhibition include a woodblock image of Avalokiteshvara from the ninth century that was recovered from the desert oasis of Dunhuang. Depicting the deity of infinite compassion, it is a rare example of a printed text and image with hand-tinted color. The image is framed by dark blue mounts, also printed, that make the piece resemble a hanging scroll. The first picture collection in China to be printed in color is a deluxe set of books dating to around 1633 called the Ten Bamboo Studio Collection. The British Museum edition is one of the earliest versions known. A unique feature of the exhibition are popular prints, such as Flower Basket, that can be dated with certainty to before 1750 because they were collected by the British Museum’s founder Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). The exhibition also includes politically charged works created by artists of the Modern Woodcut Movement. Among them is a powerful image executed by a leader of the group, Li Hua (1907-1994), entitled Struggle (1947) from his series Raging Tide; it exemplifies the iconic images Li created to bring about a more democratic China. The exhibition also includes Struggle on the Front Line (1974); created toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, this print highlights the “Red Chinese” communist party’s insistence on ever greater demonstrations of loyalty—the caption reads “The Furnace Fire is Even Redder.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, a series of education programs will be offered, including gallery talks; a special Met Escapes hands-on printmaking workshop for visitors suffering from dementia and their care partners; and a lecture on May 11 by Clarissa von Spee, curator of Chinese and Central Asian collections, Department of Asia, The British Museum, on the collection and its history.

PHILADELPHIA (AP).- If the world ends on Dec. 21, 2012 — as some believe the Maya predicted — that leaves plenty of opportunity to see a new exhibit that examines the civilization’s ancient kingdoms, intricate calendar systems and current culture.

Experts at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia apparently give little credence to the apocalypse myth, considering the show runs through early 2013. But they say the legend, which has been perpetuated in pop culture through disaster movies and sensational tabloid headlines, offers a chance to engage people about ancient and modern Maya society.

“Maya 2012: Lords of Time” features artifacts excavated from the historic Maya ruins of Copan in Honduras, including burial jewelry, food vessels and ceramic figures. Honduras President Porfirio Lobo Sosa is scheduled to cut the ribbon when the exhibit opens on Saturday.

The show also uses interactive displays to explain the culture’s glyph writing and sophisticated timetables. The upshot is that while it’s human nature to seek ancient insight into the current world, people should not interpret the Maya calendar as predicting a cataclysmic event.

“It’s just a turn of a cycle,” said curator Loa Traxler.

Regarded as one of the world’s greatest early societies, the Maya lived for centuries in parts of Mexico and Central America. Many of their iconic pyramids and other city remnants still stand in places like Copan, where 16 Maya kings ruled for about 400 years.

As early astronomers, the Maya devised various types of calendars by observing celestial movements. Their “Long Count” calendar begins in 3114 B.C. and marks time in roughly 394-year periods known as baktuns. Thirteen was a sacred number for the Maya, and some scholars believe the 13th baktun ends on Dec. 21, 2012.

Penn Museum experts say it ends Dec. 23, but that then another calendar cycle will begin — not Armageddon.

Traxler said while it’s hard to trace the origin of the apocalypse prophecy, she described it as “a conflation of a lot of different ideas,” including Aztec lore, Judeo-Christian end-of-days rhetoric and millennial hype. (Remember Y2K?)

Honduran officials don’t seem concerned. Norma Cerrato, minister counselor of legal affairs for the country’s U.S. embassy, said during a recent exhibit preview that she hopes it encourages people to visit the actual ruins. The show includes replicas of large stone carvings too delicate or unwieldy to leave Copan, designated a world heritage site by the United Nations’ cultural agency.

“Regardless of what some may say about the December 2012 phenomenon, the people of Honduras are certain that this year provides us a unique opportunity to share a part of our history and culture with the world,” Cerrato said.

Mexico, too, has designed a tourism campaign around the 2012 date. It’s expected to bring an extra 12 million visitors to the country, possibly boosting tourism revenue by $14.6 billion, according to officials there.

Though the last independent Maya city was conquered by the Spanish in 1697, Traxler said about 7 million people currently identify as Maya. The exhibit ends with translated video interviews with a half-dozen Maya, some of whom are bemused by the hype.

Jose Huchim Herrera, a Yucatec Maya and archaeologist, said in a video that anyone talking about a 2012 catastrophe is clearly an outsider.

“The Maya say nothing,” he said. “The Maya are very peaceful. They are not worried.”

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

NEW YORK, NY.- Sperone Westwater presents Artists Including Me, a solo exhibition by William Wegman of recent postcard paintings that feature imagery from secondhand souvenirs, imaginary landscapes, and art about art. This is the artist’s fifth solo show at the gallery.

Mounting found postcards from his vast personal collection onto wooden panels, Wegman enhances and embellishes a detail from one card and seamlessly connects it to the next with rich painterly strokes. He weaves in and out of each found image to create unique and dreamlike environments and ecosystems. Countries, epochs, and cultures collide, and the joys of exploration and travel are evident.

In the painting Artists Including Me (2012), Wegman depicts a museum storage space with works from time periods and movements ranging from Medieval to Pop Art to the present, including one of the artist’s own Weimaraner Polaroid photographs. In his major four-panel postcard painting I Kandinsky (2012), the artist explores figuration and abstraction through vivid colors, lines, curves, and a planar composition, as if in an homage to Kandinsky. In Location Vacation (2011), the central figures are reproduced from adjacent vintage postcards, evoking a sense of world travel with references to popular destinations.

Present in Wegman’s work is a smart, gently subversive humor that adds a transformative dimension to what can first appear to be a simple visual statement. Curator Joan Simon has described the artist’s oeuvre:

In his person and personas, Wegman is the artist who takes familiar things into new territories of context and meaning through relentless work, a good bit of dreaming, and some strange and contrarian reversals. […] He works between daily pragmatic realities and out-of-time reveries that come from the most unexpected places.

This summer, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art will also present William Wegman: Hello Nature, a major survey of over 100 Maine-inspired works by Wegman in various media. The exhibition will be on view from 13 July through 21 October 2012 and will be accompanied by an extensive illustrated catalogue Hello Nature: How to Draw, Paint, Cook and Find Your Way by William Wegman.

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943, Wegman received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work has been exhibited extensively both in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1982); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988); Whitney Museum of American Art (1992); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001); and The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002). The traveling retrospective William Wegman: Funney/Strange was recently held at the Brooklyn Museum; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2006-2007).

NEW YORK, NY.- Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong celebrates the sixty-year career of Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010), one of China’s most significant and admired twentieth century artists. This first-ever major retrospective, organized in collaboration with the Shanghai Art Museum, traces the artist’s development in the medium of ink painting from the mid-1970s through 2004. Exhibition works represent Wu’s radical individual approach that integrates European modernism and abstract expressionism with traditional Chinese ink painting.

Wu lived in tumultuous times; persecuted during the Cultural Revolution at a time when western art was decried, he was forced to abandon painting and he destroyed most of his works in oil. However, he persevered, continuing to paint and draw even when he was sent to the countryside for hard labor and reeducation.

“Wu Guanzhong is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century,” says Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum Director and Senior Vice President of Global Arts and Culture Programs. “He revitalized and reinvigorated Chinese traditional ink painting at a time when most artists were turning to western art for inspiration. We are grateful to the Shanghai Art Museum for collaborating with us on this exhibition, which celebrates his legacy as a modern master who pushes the boundaries of our understanding of how a traditional medium like ink can be made new for a new century.”

Born in 1919 in Jiangsu Province, Wu Guanzhong enrolled in the acclaimed Hangzhou Art School (today’s China Academy of Art in Hangzhou) in 1936. At the age of 27, he left to study in Paris at the École National Supérieure des BeauxArts, where he studiedwestern painting traditions and methodologies. After three profoundly influential years, he chose to return to China for patriotic reasons, to teach at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Painting in oil, he developed an original style that combined both traditional Chinese ink painting and western techniques of watercolor and oil painting, and became a mentor to a new generation of Chinese painters.

However, his paintings, which were influenced by both western art and formalism rather than the then accepted style of Social Realism, along with his writings soon led to trouble with the authorities. As the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Wu destroyed most of his works before the Red Guards searched his house and confiscated his properties. Wu was still heavily persecuted during the revolution as a bourgeois formalist and was forbidden to paint, write or teach for two years. He was sent to the remote rural countryside and subjected to reeducation through hard labor. Yet in spite of harsh living conditions, he continued to paint whenever he could, and eventually was allowed to teach an oil painting class for the army in Hebei province.

Finally in 1973, his living conditions began to improve when Premier Zhou Enlai commissioned him to paint a large mural in a Beijing hotel. Wu was reunited with his family, and also around this time, began to paint in ink. His resulting ink painting “Chongqing the Riverside City” launched a new stage of his career in a country now more receptive to his ideas. Somewhat ironically, Wu went against the tide in returning to ink at a time when many of his students, most born in the 1950s, became greatly interested in European and American oil painting and, they adopted subjects and compositions of Western European art and experimented in styles as diverse as surrealism and expressionism.

In 1978, at age 59, he had his first solo show since his return to China in 1950, which traveled throughout the country. He continued to paint in ink, creating landscapes distinguished by their expressive line and unusual application of color. In 1985, an exhibition of his latest works was shown at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, followed by a solo exhibition at the British Museum in 1992. Late in his life, he traveled widely throughout China and other parts of Asia, as well as to Europe, to attend a series of his solo exhibitions and to give lectures on those occasions. His prolific career as a writer on his philosophy of art has produced numerous monographic publications in various languages. Wu died in Beijing in 2010 at the age of ninety.

Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong is organized thematically into three sections that evoke Wu’s approach to the medium of ink and account for distinct genres of his practice. Landscape, the first, emphasizes the ink and wash painting tradition while showing the departure from tradition that some of his work represents, for example, in the random use of color. The section comprises paintings from the late 1980s and 1990s, representing views of high altitude mountains in vertical format, or expansive horizontal landscapes, in which he used ink to create an effect of flatness, in contrast to the traditional effect of depth and vitality.

The second theme in the exhibition is Architecture. Where traditional ink paintings emphasized the grandeur and majesty of the natural environment over small-scale pavilions or other architectural elements, Wu’s paintings depict rural yet grand homes and towns and emphasize a constructed, manmade environment.

The final section of the exhibition is Abstraction, representing Wu’s later period in which his landscapes became more abstracted. Most of these works are from after 1990 and show an intention to represent states of being, emotions, and concepts over more realistic representation. For example, rather than showing birds-eye or long-view perspectives usually associated with ink landscape paintings, the works provide a closer view as if the viewer is fully immersed in the environment.

Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong is curated by Chiu and Lu Huan, Curator, Shanghai Art Museum.