Bilbao Diary 2: Lost in the Funhouse

Visitors to Bilbao soon become aware of its greatest cultural asset: Frank Gehry’s architectural marvel, the Guggenheim Bilbao. Near the end of the long taxi ride from the airport, the car suddenly drops down into the town and this stupendous building dominates the cityscape. Opened in 1997, I’m visiting it in its ten-year anniversary, an event celebrated by a mammoth exhibition devoted to American art from the 18th century to the present. Alternatively, if you’re approaching the museum on foot along the river, you can’t help noticing another great cultural landmark, Louise Bourgeoise’s ‘Maman’, a large arachnid sculpture that seems to stand guard over the rear entrance to the museum. Less threatening, but larger is Jeff Koon’s Puppy near the main entrance to the museum, a wire sculpture covered with plants that I’m sure must have raised the eyebrows of many a Basque citizen when it was installed in the Guggenheim Bilbao’s inaugural year. Actually there were protests of a more concrete and vehement nature when the museum opened for business in 1997. Before I went to Bilbao I dipped into a volume of essays, Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim and discovered that a guard was blown up by ETA, the Basque separatist organization in 1997; this explains why there are a lot of armed security guards in evidence within the museum.

Fortified by Spanish cuisine and coffee I ventured into the bowels of this futuristic behemoth, expectant of seeing some breathtaking sights. There are impressive artifacts and installations within the building, but if you are not convinced by modern and conceptual art, you’re probably best walking round the building assimilating the whole experience of a different and exciting display space rather than getting to grips with the art inside. On the ground floor you’ll find a mixed bag of art works. One of the first things on view is Jenny Holzer’s ‘Installation for Bilbao’, a construct of LED sign columns streaming such messages as “I SCAN YOU”. My impression was of a cross between Wall Street and the Matrix, although these columns are red not green like the ticker tape effect in the film. Standing inside Holzer’s installation is more effective: it’s like taking a neon bath; you’re bathed in the warm glow of the descending columns. Next to this are rooms containing art by the likes of Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel. Schnabel likes to think of himself as an exponent of the neo-baroque, although there was little of that on display here, just his crockery paintings. I wonder how many plates have been smashed in the service of fuelling Schnabel’s aesthetic fantasies. As for Koons, he’s another artist suffering from the symptoms of neo-baroque folie de grandeur. On the same floor you are invited to make a fantastic voyage into the swirling sculpture of Richard Serra’s ‘The Matter of Time’ which is impressive, even more so from above. Walking through canyons of steel snaking through a room the size of an aircraft hanger is bound to bring on intimations of mortality. The monolithic is usually associated with the divine, not the manageable and small-scale piece of art residing in a corner of the gallery. Does Richard Serra worship the god of small things? I think not.

On the second floor, you are treated to a minimalist room, mainly Donald Judd- give me Brancusi any time- and a large overview of American painting from the days of elegance to our age of anxiety. I started with John Singleton Copley’s portraits –not his best- and then worked through the great sublime vistas of Albert Bierstadt towards excellent examples of New York abstract expressionism. It’s a long time since I saw Pollock’s ‘The Moon Woman’ in the Peggy Guggenheim collection Venice, so it was pleasing to see it here, along with Rothko, and various others. Their art still holds up well against the empty gestures of Franz Kline and the inchoate meanderings of Willem de Kooning, also in evidence here. The whole museum currently doubles as this gargantuan ‘Art and the USA’ show, thus another room on the same floor has Pop Art, represented here by a sampling of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist. I have to confess that I quite prefer Rosenquist over Warhol: I like the immediacy of such paintings as ‘Swimmer in the Econo-Mist’ which seems to be swept up in a vortex of scattered objects and vivid colour. I don’t dislike Warhol, but what was on display here didn’t really fill me with admiration: prints of electric chairs, flowers and celebrities whose iconography deluded faddish art historians claim is the history painting of the 20th century.

Upstairs was the least captivating of all: an exhibition of insipid photographs showing homunculi in various poses- not easily engaged with at all. I also found a video of a Basque artist looping his utterance of some Spanish word with ideological overtones quite banal. His shrieks ululated throughout the museum making one feel an acute sense of disquiet and mild resentment at being distracted from the art that merited one’s attention. I would rather put up with Matthew Barney’s impenetrable video cycle on the 2nd floor than this piece of irritating agit-prop at the top of the building.

There was a lot of good art on display in the Guggenheim Bilbao, though some of it left me cold. Still, individual taste aside, the problem that Guggenheim Bilbao face is how do they compete with the building itself; how can the permanent collection surpass the architectural vision of Frank Gehry that created the so-called “Bilbao effect.”. This specific concern appears in the preface to the BG’s guidebook where the phrase “no museum is defined by its architecture” is written Yet, I wouldn’t mind betting that for most visitors, both actual and virtual, it is precisely the structure that is identified with the museum and not the exhibits within it, with the notable exception of Bourgeoise’s spider sculpture.

Bilbao Diary 1: Poussin and Nature

I’ve taken a breather from the blog for the best part of a month, but I felt that I had to write about last week’s expedition to Bilbao in Spain to see the Poussin show: Poussin and Nature, curated by the Louvre’s Pierre Rosenberg.

Bilbao isn’t a very inspiring place to visit, especially in the wintertime: difficult to get a beverage or something stronger in the afternoon, and if you want to eat dinner in the early evening- forget it! You’d have to bribe or arm wrestle a waiter to get a table between 7.00 and 9.00 pm. Situated amongst the mountains in the Basque country, the industrial town enjoys an oceanic climate which roughly translated means that it isn’t as warm as most of Spain. Still, I didn’t come to Bilbao to grouse about the amenities or the climate; I came to see Poussin, so onwards and upwards.

The exhibition is currently being held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Bilbao, an institution that boasts impressive holdings, on which I’ll write another day. You enter Poussin and Nature through a door to the right of the main entrance on the ground floor. I have to say that what struck me immediately was the inclusion of two Poussin paintings that were unfamiliar to me, and I was tempted initially to dismiss them as copies after lost paintings. However, I’m now coming round to thinking that the ‘Apollo and Daphne’, of 1626 and the ‘Pan, Midas and Shepherd’ of slightly later may be autograph. I’m at an immense disadvantage here, as I didn’t take notes en route because I naturally assumed that I’d buy a catalogue on the way out. No dice! I refused to pay 135 Euros or nearly £95 for a paperback catalogue written mainly in Spanish. However, I digress.

Most of the landscape paintings hung in this exhibition were familiar to me through actual visits or illustrations in publications. It was wonderful to study such canvases as the ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’, or ‘Cupid Tugs Pan’s Beard’ (left) as the catalogue has it. You never really experience Poussin properly until you stand in front of his creations and drink in his genius. Apart from the early mythologies or subject-less paintings set in landscape there were good examples of his monumental landscape period when the poetic view of nature is replaced by a more rigid and geometrical organization. I can’t remember which one of the Phocion pictures was present here- probably the Liverpool ‘Burial of Phocion’ (1648) (right) in which the Athenian general’s remains are returned to a plot of earth in the shade of presiding trees. It was interesting to compare the clouds and vegetation in the Liverpool painting with a similar composition on the other side of the room whose title, date and location, time, tiredness and too much Spanish wine has wiped from my mind. However, I do recall that the quotations of sarcophagi and tombs in that painting were too detailed for Poussin: he likes to cover his tracks where sources are concerned. No, I would challenge Rosenberg’s claim that this painting is by Poussin alone- more a collaboration between him and his French compatriot Jean Le Maire. This is intriguing and exciting because it’s yet another canvas that I haven’t seen. Le Maire and Poussin certainly worked together in the early Roman period on such trail blazing paintings as the ‘Plague of Ashdod’, but does this prove that their partnership lasted well into the 1640s?

Halfway through the exhibition, the visitor encounters the graphic area of the show: the drawings after nature. My eyes lit up at my first physical encounter with the beautiful sheet owned by the Uffizi of the Aventine in Rome; it is almost soaked in light, an effect recalling Félibien’s comments supposedly inspired by standing behind Poussin as he sketched the antiquities of Rome in the sunlight. Equally impressive is the drawing of St Mary of Egypt and St Zosimus in nature (left), a sheet that I’ve held in my hands at Windsor, as I was inclined to tell the guard who rebuked me for getting too close to the art. Still, they’re only doing their job, bless them. I was more put out at the inclusion of a group of drawings which betrayed alien hands, not Poussin’s own at all. Some of these drawings were exhibited by Konrad Oberhuber in his controversial though excellent show at Fort Worth in 1988. I also recall that some of these drawings were shown in a loan exhibition hosted by the Ashmolean, Oxford between 1990-1; I was not convinced of their authenticity then and am still not persuaded that they are autograph. Such drawings as ‘A View with S. Giorgio in Velabro, Rome’ just don’t fit into the picture of Poussin’s development as far as I’m concerned. To be fair to Rosenberg, he has put a note on the wall saying that some of these drawings have been disputed, but why then not ‘attributed to Poussin’, rather than give the impression that they’re drawn by the master himself? For all that, the public, very small at Bilbao –about 5 people in the gallery beside me- and in New York – travels there next Feb- will have been given a rare chance to familiarize themselves with Poussin’s graphic technique.

Returning to the paintings, there is much to admire in the latter stages of the exhibition. It was fitting that a painting owned by the Prado, ‘Landscape with St Jerome’ (right) should be included in the Spanish leg of Poussin and Nature. Standing before it I was reminded of Poussin’s ability to render light on rock or the fleeciness of a tree against the sky. And if you want an excellent example of how Poussin can paint different trees, then check out Montreal’s ‘Landscape with a Man Chased by a Serpent’, a canvas much written on by me in my doctoral dissertation. There I argued that this painting might have been influenced by the neo-Augustinianism of the seventeenth- century, something that this show and perhaps Poussin scholarship in general doesn’t seem interested in. I got a brief look at the catalogue before leaving the building, but apart from a few references to the Flight into Egypt, there seemed to be hardly anything about the relationship between Christianity and nature. True, in the exhibition we do have ‘Hagar and the Angel’ and two splendid canvases from the Seasons (Spring and Autumn), but wouldn’t the show have benefited from some of those paintings Poussin did of those Holy Families in a natural setting. The closest we come to this- no small compensation- is the Louvre’s Finding of Moses (left) which caused Chantelou to be jealous of its owner, Pointel.

This can only be a summary of the Bilbao show based upon fragmented recollections hindered by the absence of a catalogue and the limitations of memory, but my overriding impression was very positive. For God’s sake, there hasn’t been a Poussin exhibition on this scale since the big shows of the 1990s. Walking around this exhibition made me very conscious of that and how this exhibition- especially when it transfers to New York- MUST mark a new phase of Poussin scholarship. Yes, there are minor omissions and problems of connoisseurship, but despite this Rosenberg is to be congratulated on an excellent and long overdue show. I can’t wait to see it again in New York next year when doubtless I’ll have even more to say!