We Americans may consider ours a classless society, but American culture belies our national myth of democratic equality. So does our fascination with dynasties and royalty, whether monarchic or capitalist. The Legion of Honor’s new treasure-trove exhibition, The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, coming after the inauguration of Charles III and the conclusion of the popular Succession television series (based on the Murdoch media empire), is thus timely and informative, an eye-popping spectacle of luxury goods—paintings, prints, ritual vestments, tapestries, vessels, and other artifacts. Created as state propaganda to legitimize an upstart dynasty, the artifacts still gratify the eye, while providing us moderns, half a millennium later, an object lesson in how power shaped and shapes official culture.
The Tudor Dynasty began in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field, with the defeat of the last of the York kings, crookback Richard III. That battle ended the Wars of the Roses (1455-87)—a power struggle between descendants of cons of the Plantagenet Edward II (1312-77): John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1340-99), his side symbolized by the white rose; and Edmund, Duke of York (1341-1402), his side symbolized by the red rose. Shakespeare’s history plays—Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI—detail the fratricidal conflict, with Richard III ’s villainy contrasting with the current enlightened patroness of the arts, Elizabeth I.
Henry Tudor (1457-1509), crowned Henry VII, was not in fact of the York line, but of the lowborn Welsh Tudors, one of whom had become the secret husband of the young widow of Henry V. Henry legitimized his reign as the de-facto head of the York side by marrying Elizabeth of York, and uniting the Lancastrian and York roses into the composite Tudor rose. Succeeding Henry (reigned 1485- 1509) were his son, Henry VIII (r. 1509–47), and then Henry VIII’s three children, Edward VI (r. 1547–53), Mary I (r. 1553–58), and Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603).
The exhibition, which originated at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, was curated by European art specialists Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker, and comes to San Francisco in a somewhat abbreviated form due to covid and insurance factors that came into play after 2020. While it is large, it is not exhaustingly so; furthermore, the show is laid out chronologically rather than thematically, one or two galleries per monarch, making it easy to negotiate without time-tripping mental gymnastics.
In the catalogue’s introductory essay, Cleland and Easter note the backwardness of English art at the time: “When it comes to the visual arts, the English have a long- standing tradition of national self-deprecation. Writing at the end of the Elizabethan era, Richard Haydock lamented that the art of painting ‘never attained to any great perfection amongst us.’ Almost two centuries later, Horace Walpole apologetically prefaced his Anecdotes of Painting in England by acknowledging that its ‘chief business . . . must be to celebrate the arts of a country which has produced so few good artists.’” The most accomplished paintings in the exhibition are Hans Holbein’s the Younger’s portraits of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife, in 1536-7; her son, the young Edward VII, as a regal two-year-old princeling, in 1538; and the young German nobleman and humanist, Hermann von Wedigh III, in 1532; all three are masterpieces of detailed observation and human sympathy. Mention should also be made of a 1540 full-length portrait of Henry by Holbein’s workshop, capturing the young monarch’s outsized personality, every inch a king, and Paolo Torrigiano’s 1510-15 polychromed terra cotta bust of John Fisher, the ascetic Bishop of Rochester, beheaded in 1535 for refusing to recognize Henry VIII as head of the Church of England, a tour de force of sympathetic realism.
The homegrown English talent, working from a more conceptual, decorative aesthetic, produced striking works as well: Nicholas Hilliard’s iconic, bejeweled 1576-8 portrait of Elizabeth I captures the Virgin Queen as national symbol; and George Gower’s earlier 1567 portrait portrays the young, fashionable (and supposedly marriageable) Elizabeth as a paragon of female virtue and fecundity.
Those who might enjoy a deep dive into English Renaissance culture—and the human stories behind the artifacts— can delve into the scholarly catalogue, which traces the myths and symbols of Catholic and Protestant culture in England and the Continent (from which a prosperous England imported the best artistic talent); the role of religion at this crucial period; and, as always, the role of strategic marriages between members of transactional ‘frenemy’ aristocratic families.
JOHN ROLOFF: Sentient Terrains
Anglim Trimble Gallery
Ecological concerns, once disparaged as the alarmism of elitist’ scientists, are now accepted as legitimate, as we edge closer to climatic tipping points. The Bay Area artist John Roloff has made environmentalism one of the cornerstones of his diverse art practice since the mid-1970s, when he finished his studies in art and geology and the University of California in Davis. “Ecology in an expanded frame,” i.e., an understanding of the interrelationship between human and natural processes. the “global metabolism,” has informed Roloff’s multifarious practice in sculpture, site-specific installations, and visionary conceptual works, which draw upon the fine-art ceramic tradition established in the Bay Area, its longtime political progressivism, and its aesthetic embrace of sociopolitical content(with and without overt polemics). The new show at Anglim Trimble, Sentient Terrains, showcases the artist’s considerable breadth and depth, even as it reminds us that late-Anthropocene-Era humans can no longer believe that dominating nature autocratically is our prime objective.
Modernist abstraction abandoned illusionism in order to create new realities arising from the relationships between shapes, forms and color. Conceptual art makes s similar claim on the viewer: to find meaning in material that may not be explicitly related, visually. This show, which is a kind of miniature museum retrospective, assembles four types of artwork: nine long vertical-format Meta-Site flags, digitally printed on satin; digital inkjet print assemblages and videos depicting various site studies and proposals, resembling scientific or architectural presentations; images on glass panels, set atop against wooden blocks, and leaning on the gallery walls; and ceramic sculptures set in long vitrines that depict wedges of seemingly excised landscapes, ruined and ravaged, but possibly regenerating.
If the exact content of the works is ambiguous to science or geology novices, the works are nonetheless visually compelling. The Meta-Site Flags, depicting the vascular facies between chemical substances— lava, orchid, chlorophyll, hemoglobin, hematite and ancient earth’s iron rain—have a heraldic banner look, due to the tall vertical format, with the elements grafted together by a spiky sawtooth cut suggestive of dovetail wood joinery. The site studies and proposals for the Great Valley Complex of California, a San Francisco Wharf Complex, and even the old Geary Street location of Gallery Paule Anglim (in 2001) situate specific regional locations within the wider context of vast natural forces and immense time scales. More immediately appealing are Roloff’s more pictorial works, including two large glass panels, both dated 1996-2023, bearing digitally printed black ad white images of historical or art-historical motifs .urban/Coal (Witness/Seance) conjoins and juxtaposes the face of a man in a red turban (by Jan Van Eyck?) with what appears to be semi-liquid coal slurry: carbon to carbon, dust to dust? Equally enigmatic and fascinating is Biotic Knight (Witness). featuring the full-sized image of a slenderly built knight in armor who, printed onto glass as he is, appears to hover in space, awaiting commands. Roloff’s geological tableaux—composed of ceramic, glass, silicone, and wood—are decidedly Romantic and surrealist evocations of blasted landscapes—and, with their shattered wedge shapes, fracture ship hulls. Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823-4)—also known as The Wreck of The Hesperus, or The Wreck of Hope, comes to mind as an artistic predecessor, but so do the war-torn landscapes of the English war artist, Paul Nash (especially Totes Meer, Dead Sea). Roloff’s Vector Ship: Vascular Sea sculptures, set within plexiglass boxes like relics or artifacts, depict fragmented forms—both architectural and biological/botanical/human—arrayed along exposed wedge-shaped ridges that are here and there bisected by glass shards, and half-buried by snow or ash that has been sprayed red or black by explosions. They depict the horror of war and desolation, as well as its terrible beauty, dramatically, without melodrama.
Amazing show documenting the industrial architecture of the 20th and late 19th century in Europe and US. The Beckers' architectural archaeology was embraced by Minimalists and Conceptualists, but stands on its own as extremely skilful and thorough documentation of a lost world never previously considered aesthetically. I was introduced to their work by Sol Lewitt's piece in Artforum (?) back in the 60s or 70s. Today I was particularly taken with the Pennsylvania "tipple" mineheads, shot between 1974 and 1978, ramshackle scaffoldings constructed ad hoc, as needed—"Form genom funktion"—by small groups of independent coal miners. Catalogue available. Show ends April 2!
AMALIA MESA-BAINS
Archaeology of Memory, Berkeley Art Museum
Emblems of the Decade: Borders, Rena Bransten Gallery
The Trumpian Confederacy may be censoring actual, factual history (AKA Biden-Marxist fake news), but the socially liberal art world has embraced the populist, multiracial history of the United States.
One of the pre-eminent artists involved in this paradigm shift is the Bay Area’s Amalia Mesa-Bains, who has championed Mexican identity and culture since the 1970s. and is the subject of a major retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and a related show—an installation and a set of digital collages on canvas— at San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery. These shows follow a suite of recent museum retrospectives by a quintet of distinguished artists of color: all with ties to the Bay Area: Ruth Asawa, Bernice Bing, Dewey Crumpler, Carlos Villa, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Mesa-Bains, an author, educator, and curator as well as an artist, works in a variety of forms, butt is best known for her multimedia installations. These theatrical assemblage environments conjoin old glamor photographs, postcards, toys, figurines, vintage furniture, shells, ceramic fragments, candles, crystals, mirrors, pearls, broken glass, draperies, gold leaf, dried leaves, rocks, sand, dried flower petals, branches and soil. ‘Voice-over’ quotations are inscribed over the imagery in collages, and in her installations, on the wall, or handwritten in the scattered materials on the floor.
These bricolage shrines to the dead—which commemorate strong-willed culture heroines like the seventeenth -century scholar-nun Sor Inès de la Cruz and the actress Dolores Del Rio—draw on the Mexican tradition of the ofrenda, a home altar created during the Day of the Dead to welcome the visiting souls of deceased family members. Photos of the dead honoree are displayed on the wall surrounded by crucifixes and images of the saints and the Virgin Mary; below, the ancestors’ favorite foods and drinks, along with candles, mirrors and yellow marigolds (cempazuchitl, a flower the Aztecs associated with death) complete the offerings. The Berkeley retrospective features almost sixty works from Mesa-Bains’ long career, including ofrenda along with shrines, altars, codices, and digital-collage prints. The wealth of information may seem daunting, but the artist’s homages are poetic and associational rather than literal and historic. I was particularly taken with the ghostly imagery that seems buried within the antique mirrors; the effect is achieved by abrading the silvering behind the glass surface and fixing the image of the saint or scholar in question so as to appear floating within the vaporous aperture: historical memory confronts the viewer like an apparition.
Mesa-Bains’ profusely decorated shrine installations center on items of antique furniture reflecting the artist’s studies of history, religion, culture, identity, and myth, which merge and collide, illuminating the conditions of the present.
A woman’s vanity or dressing table is the central focus of the anti-Freudian Venus Envy, Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End. In this examination of the virginal role model traditionally inculcated in adolescent Latinas. Surmounted by boudoir cloud of white satin ruching, the white table supports a clutter of artificial pearls, frame photos of young women, perfume bottles and Madonnas, with a suggestive seashell on the floor, but intimations of mortality intrude: a gold and silver skull peep from the half-opened drawers, and revealed in the mirror is the fearsome Aztec goddess Coatlicue, one of whose aspects, Cihuacōātl, "snake woman,” is associated with deaths in childbirth.
Sexual purity is again the subject in The Virgin’s Garden, featuring a hand-painted, moss-bedecked armoire or wardrobe, its half-open door revealing clothing and books inside. Inspired by a fifteenth-century German Renaissance painting, a copy of which is displayed nearby, the piece examines the hortus conclusus, or closed garden, the traditional emblem of female chastity—and especially of the Immaculate Conception— dating from the Song of Solomon: Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up…. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.
The liberating education of the female mind during eras of male repression is the subject of The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The seventeenth-century colonial-era Mexican nun and intellectual, who had educated herself in her own library, which came to include four thousand books, hosted a salon in her nunnery of for other learned women; wrote poetry and prose in Latin and Nahuatl on religion, love, feminism and the misogyny and hypocrisy of the dominant male order in a “philosophical satire” entitled Hombres Necios, Foolish Men; and was punished, predictably, for her transgressions by being forced to sell her beloved library and return to traditional duties, dying in 1695 at the age of forty-seven, of plague while tending to her Hieronymite Order sisters. (Octavio Paz postulates that entering a nunnery was the best option available for ambitious, independent women at that time.) Sor Inés’ imagined work table, adorned with books, lamps, musical scores, and manuscripts, is flanked by a small stand being an Aztec figurine, an oil painting of a bespectacled inquisitorial grandee; and a heavy leather-upholstered chair lighted by large candlesticks, all painted gold. Stands of hair lie on the seat of the chair, suggesting the punitive shearing of tresses, or even the pulling out of hair in despair. (A twin of this chair appears, in silver, in the artist’s show on the US-Mexico border at Rena Bransten.) In the mirror above the desk Sor Inés appear, among her books, beneath a radiating pattern of fracture lines in the glass. These cracks were due to an art mishandling error, but the artist, perhaps remembering Duchamp’s embrace of accident in the Large Glass, liked them for their suggestion of a radiant intelligence, albeit one silenced by social duress.
This short article provides only a small sample of Mesa-Bains’ work, which also includes codices and digital collages addressing, among other things, the friction at the US-Mexico border (also in the San Francisco gallery show) and the artist’s recovery from a serious car accident through traditional curandera treatments. Two large sculptures, however, require mention. Cihuateotl with Mirror in Private Landscapes and Public Territories depicts Mother Earth as a voluptuously curvy woman, perhaps a sister to those zaftig Neolithic Venuses, but here covered in moss inscribed with Aztec glyphs for fertility, reclining on a carpet of verdure, admiring herself in a large, ornate hand mirror. It’s an environmentalist/feminist take, of course, with perhaps a poke at property-as-theft rights, of traditional love goddesses inspecting themselves, with the pre-eminent version being Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus. A specific landscape, that of the Rio Grande, is the impetus behind What the River Gave to Me, the title of which must surely allude to Frida Kahlo’s elegiac 1939 painting, What the Water Gave Me. Mesa-Bains’s large sculpture reconstructs the river demarcating the border between the United States and Mexico as a luminous channel cutting through mountainous terrain carrying irregularly blue glass globes or bubbles, each bearing the name of a person who completed the perilous crossing, an illegal or undocumented alien now, but perhaps someday one of the “job creators” that we so fervently revere.
