Dali House

Unless you read Russian, Alex Andreev may be destined to be one of those modern artists who thrives on cyber-fame, but on the strength of his images alone.

Someone, most likely the busy webmaster at the photo factory EnglishRussia.com, posted a pile of Andreev’s pictures and they went viral, but unfortunately no one’s been able or willing to produce more information about the artist or his technique.

Andreev’s very clever website is packed with creativity in several genres, but it’s resolutely in Russian, and who’s going to trust the online translators to tackle Russian when they can barely manage French?

The image titles are given in English at least, but not all of the images seen elsewhere are represented. So for now, all I know is that the title of the piece above is “Private Party”, and that Andreev does acknowledge a debt to Magritte.

Francis Picabia’s “Monster”, from 1946.

The Chamba in Nigeria and Cameroon kept masks like this one well away from the village when not in use. The spirit depicted — and those who carried and wore the mask — were believed to lurk in the bush, ready to bring violence.

Modern art’s fascination early in the last century with so-called primitive art chagrined Salvador Dali to the tweezer-tips of his moustache. He was appalled that Picasso and the cubists and, worse, his fellow surrealists André Breton, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, could derive inspiration from “savage” artisans.

But he must have recognised the parallel. In their anguished and grotesque imagery, the surrealists in particular were evoking the same monsters of the subconscious that tribal shaman recruited for their ends.

At any rate, it’s a shame he couldn’t at least appreciate the fundamental beauty of the traditional craftsmanship of Africa, Oceania and the aboriginal Americas, whose face masks are as expressive as anything in modern art, as Modigliani well knew, being able to improve on them only by cocking an eyebrow here and there.

The only problem in absorbing this influence, I think, is the matter of ownership.

A Bamileke helmet mask from Cameroon, today valued at about €15,000, represents a buffalo, an animal embodying power and courage and thus aligned with the tribe’s chief.

I’m not aware of any major controversy today over the sale of antique African carvings. The current debate seems more about the market for the “craft guns” that are used in Africa’s inter-tribal conflicts.

There are quite righteous grumblings from Southeast Asia about foreigners making off with venerable sculptures, but you don’t hear about Africans objecting to the resale of 18th-century masks at the big auction houses in Paris and New York. These masks were scooped up in the thousands by rampaging colonists who history continues to excuse en masse as “explorers”.

To be fair, of course there was an educational factor, with many of the masks and other artifacts finding their place in First World museums, the better to share the culture of faraway places. These were, however, the minority of the purloined items.

A Kanak mask on the left from New Caledonia (€50,000 to €80,000), usually used in rituals mourning the death of chiefs. Representing the chief himself, it has long hair, since it was forbidden to cut one’s hair during the period of transition from life to death.

At its side is a Lu bo bie elephant mask of the Kran tribe in Liberia (€18,000). with perforations in the resin at the ends of the eyes in which seeds were fixed. Villagers who broke the law or refused to pay a debt faced this visage with the threat that if restitution wasn’t forthcoming, the elephant would destroy his house.

I own a bronze Buddha head I picked up for a couple of dollars in Cambodia, and although it’s not remotely antique — they’re mass-cast in huge quantities for tourists — I can’t control some winces of guilt.

It was the same with a large face mask I bought in Jamaica. The carver probably lacquered it the week previous, ready for the local straw market, but you still feel like you’re absconding with a chunk of sovereign culture. See the rest.

Bangkok has loads of galleries to keeps the country’s artists busy, and I see a lot of stuff I like, but Waiyawut Promrut made me sit bolt upright, and he’s fresh out of art school.

The recent graduate of Silpakorn University is presenting these paintings and others in “re/vivre” from April 20 to May 10 at ArtGorillas, a gallery at the Lido in Siam Square that specialises in new talent.

Waiyawut Promrut, say the Gorillas, is going for a “revival of Renaissance art in the modern era, where lives evolve in perplexing ways”.

It also says his reinterpretation of masterpieces like Vemeer’s “The Milkmaid”, Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat” and Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare”, among others, “convey his own chaotic survival idea”.

A bunch of curator-speak, really, but to Waiyawut, well done on the use of frogs and octopi in a style realistic enough to amuse Señor Dali. Excellent deployment, also, of flamingoes, greyhounds and many, many rats and goats. See the rest.

The title of this post isn’t a cast-off allusion to Alice in Wonderland. It refers to seeing “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, Hieronymus Bosch’s most famous painting, almost literally in a mirror.

I’ve had a fresh and stunning encounter with Bosch, and he turns out to be quite unlike the artist I first encountered at the same time as everyone else, I suppose — in high school. For this revelatory second chance, full credit goes to Rolf Gross, a retired physicist in California and a fellow member of the Google Earth Community.

Rolf has spent years studying Bosch, and his startling hypothesis slammed him into an academic wall. Having published an historical “Georgian novel” called “Konrad and Alexandra”, Rolf wanted to write a scholarly thesis on Bosch.

“I do see and know many things about Bosch that the arch-conservative German and Dutch art historians cannot see or say,” Rolf told me by email. “I tried to peddle this Bosch paper to various professional journals and received a belligerent letter from a reviewer at the University of Bonn threatening to ostracise me among the publishers.”

Shunned, Rolf turned his paper into a novella in 2005, “The Life and Times of Hieronymus Bosch”, which you can read in full on his website, and he’s condensed his hypothesis into a nevertheless elaborate post on Google Earth, which can be downloaded here. Both of these are truly remarkable works, the latter fully illustrated with Bosch’s art.

For me, seeing the paintings again was quite startling. There were more of them than I’d seen before, and Rolf points out numerous details while explaining the very rational reasons why Bosch was depicting such seemingly hallucinatory scenes.

But what got him into trouble at the gates of the ivory tower was his conclusion that Bosch, revered in more recent times as a Christian moralist, not only had a Jewish adviser, as suggested decades ago by German art historian Wilhelm Fraenger (to catcalls from academia), his adviser was a student of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, the founders of Christian Neoplatonic humanism in Florence.

Bosch was early on considered either a heretic or a buffoon attempting to titillate. Only in the 20th century was he embraced as orthodox religious, a late-mediaeval proselytiser given to metaphors and puns yet bound to the New Testament.

But Rolf swims against the modern current, insisting that this presumed portrayer of Christian tales was in fact illustrating the worldview of his Jewish mentors, even if he certainly took liberties. See the rest.

“Heavy Head” by Frank Kortan

I really do have to get out more. I have this tendency to think of surrealism in the past tense, at full boil in the 1930s, simmering on into the ’70s, and finally going cold with Dali’s death in 1989. In fact, of course, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of artists still exploring the subconscious and coming back with extraordinary new artefacts.

Beinart, which last appeared at Dali House in July 2007, has released “Metamorphosis 2″, its second coffee-table collection of surreal, fantastic and visionary art, on sale here for $50.

This is “Monkey and Eagle” by Tiffany Bozic, who offers “largely autobiographical” transformations of living organisms she’s seen in remote regions and at the California Academy of Sciences.

Among the works by 50 artists, there’s a tendency to anthromorphism, lots of geek portraits, plenty of baroque details, the inescapable appeal of classicism. The overall impression is much more Bosch than Dali.

It doesn’t always work — there’s a great many monsters, ample blood, too many cats, and some of the pieces are a little too cartoonish. But looks at the marvels on this page. I have to thank Beinart’s Meg Woodsworth once again for bringing the book to my attention.

The book bends in the direction of HR Giger, the Swiss heavyweight of “fantastic realism”, who’s been exhibiting since 1966 and became famous when his “biomechanical dreamscapes” became posters and album covers. That gives him a deserved edge over the mostly younger other artists featured.

Above, “The Spell I”, and below, “Landscape XVIII”.

See the rest.