“Color: humiliated, defeated, prepares its revenge over the long years.”

Yves Klein

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

Devil’s Dyes

Since 1903, the Crayola crayon company has had an evolving array of nomenclatures, from Granny Smith Apple, Asparagus and Cerulean, to Apricot, Pink Sherbert and Canary. In 1962, Crayola’s apt but disturbing color ‘Flesh’ was renamed into ‘Peach’ – in response to horrified complaints.

Today, in a world full of plentiful artificial dyes, it is harder to truly appreciate the mysterious business that once was the world of color. But, back in the day, color was full of great secrets, prohibitions and tragic histories. The ghosts of pigments past are a lurid expose of suffering, murder and tragedy. A few examples for each hue will suffice.

John D’Agostino, Euclydian Abyss, 2010.

In 1609, Henry IV of France imposed the death penalty on the use of Indigo, the “deceitful and injurious dye.” Of course, many colors were originally made from crops in the colonies that relied on forced human labor and slavery. Protestant Black, the well known color of the Puritans, was banned when the British did not have access to the Spanish’s colonies of logwood dyeing plantations. Perhaps the cruelest of the colors was the incredibly poisonous Lead White, whose notorious toxicity did not sway artists from use. Carmine Red, used for cardinal’s frocks and young ladies’ lips, was literally made of blood – from the crushing of the white insect the Cochineal beetle, a secret which the Spanish jealously guarded for years. Stradivari, the master violin maker – made a special orange varnish – Tiger Varnish – that to this day is still unknown, perhaps the reason why his instruments play so beautifully.

Scheele’s Green, invented in the late 18th century, replaced all older green pigments. It became popular for use with wallpaper, brightening the rooms of many schoolchildren. Unfortunately, it was made from arsenic. In the 19th century it was used as a food dye for sweets, by the 1930′s, it was recognized as a poison and insecticide. Many speculate that Napolean himself may have been sickened by it when in exile in the luxurious green rooms of St. Helena.

Tyrian (Royal) Purple suggested the height of luxury, wealth and prestige. To extract this color, every toga required the deaths of thousands of shellfish, leading to the extinction of certain species of the murex. Eventually the Byzantine emperors banned the common people from wearing purple, and so the saying goes, “born in purple.” Bone Black was made from the scraps of the slaughterhouse – cattle or lamb thighs mostly. And what was really in Egyptian Brown or ‘Mummy Brown’ one must wonder, although we do know the Egyptians wrapped their mummies in canvas. It’s not a terrible leap to imagine that at some time in human history remains may have provided for an excellent hue. And so perhaps we should all be giving our pigments a proper burial, just in case.

“Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things.”

– Rilke

John D’Agostino, Lunar Synthesis, 2010.

 

When the straight line tells the truth, color tells beautiful lies. So thought Yves Klein: dreamer, alchemist, performance artist and painter. A self-described proprietor of color, Klein claimed that his first work of art was made when he ‘appropriated’ blue straight out of the sky. As an artist who worked in intense color fields for years, Yves felt that color was unappreciated – forgotten, ignored, and rarely used to its fullest powers. Whereas the line, on the other hand, got too much credit. The line, he said, cuts through space as a ‘tourist’ – it is always in transit. The line ‘expresses’ itself by dividing and separating, making limits. But color, Klein thought, is open, a true inhabitant of space. If the line cuts space, then color impregnates space. It is space. And so this was Yves’ revenge, the domain of color. To make works where color predominated, and reigned supreme. As he said:

“Through color, I experience a feeling of complete identification with space, I am truly free…”

Jean Luc Marion described this kind of experience, this “rising of invus,” as a saturated phenomenon: an extra-dimensional kind of space. By overwhelming our ability to represent or categorize what we are seeing, a saturated phenomena has the ability to create atmosphere and presence. As he describes, “the artwork becomes a unique locus in which time, space, and the horizontal field of vision are compressed into a confined arena.” Scientifically speaking, the eye can only distinguish the wavelengths between 0.00038 and 0.00075 millimeters, barely scratching the surface. And yet, these little differences are everything. With a myriad of nuances, color calls attention to surface while also colliding with deep space. Its being is in infinity. Colors overwhelm us, envelop us, invade us.

In the dark – when it is even more strange – is when color really gets interesting. Many a color is re-discovered in the dark. Colors on the verge are particularly dangerous, for they are not quite the same. Never one color, but many. Colors at the ends of the spectrum move and shift. They are on the threshold of existence. Perhaps this is why many of Yves Klein’s colors, including the one he named for himself – International Klein Blue, verge occasionally just towards the dark of the spectrum. They confound, confuse – and delight. The mystery and power of color – as he reminds us – is to be marginalized, ignored, and forgotten at our own peril.

Close your eyes. Now rub them. Even with no light whatsoever – strange colors appear out of the darkness. No wonder then a child might ask his mother: “What is it that I see when my eyes are closed?” In the dark lies the forgotten colors of the crayola box. What names we must invent for the impossible colors to come, still remains to be discovered.   • This text first appeared as part of the paper The Abyss Gazes Also: The Pains and Pleasures of Seeing in the Dark by John D’Agostino, 2012.
View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

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Hans Memling, Tommaso di Folco Portinari, Maria Portinari, 1470.

Kasimir Malevich, Room for the last Futurist Exhibition, 1915.

Installation View of Wolfgang Tillmans at The Museum of Modern Art, Winter 2013.

Installation view of Summit & Flower and Skeleton & Flesh, new diptych works by John D’Agostino from Empire of Glass.

As any sommelier (wine expert), fromager (cheese), itamae (sushi), curator, poet, or even DJ will tell you, the art of complement & contrast – or, rather, the pairing of independent component parts – is a delicate and demanding one.

For the past few years I have been especially intrigued in this art of pairing. Particularly in the realm of the fine arts, the art of sequencing and installation is perhaps in a bit of a Renaissance right now, as novel and unique installation concepts come to the fore. One of the best contemporary practitioners is perhaps Wolfgang Tillmans, and his novel use of floating space and form (see left).

Installation view of new works by John D’Agostino from Empire of Glass.

Although perhaps a little less common or as dynamic in the past, many different artists through the years have sought to enhance the power of their works by installing them in sequence, such as Kasimir Malevich’s Room for the Last Futurist Exhibition from 1915. Some of Malevich’s works have been re-installed in sequence at MoMA, currently in the Inventing Abstraction exhibition, on view through April 15, 2013.

The history of the diptych is a compelling one. Originally, many paired works were religious, and hinged together like a book. The 15th and 16th centuries in the Netherlands were perhaps a high point in classic diptych works. This pair of masterful Hans Memling portraits above which look so enticing together, were in fact originally part of a Triptych.

Of Coral Bones, 2012. Triptych: 24×30″ + 77×60″ + 44×44″

The art of pairing brings dynamic and unsuspected combinations into action. Symbiosis, harmony & conflict occur. Works now engage in multivalent and multi-layered fashion.

John D’Agostino, Thunderclap of Halt, 2012. Triptych: 44×44” + 77×60” + 30×30”

John D’Agostino, The Hammer of Los, 2012. Ink on canvas: 4 panels of 112×60″

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Louis Comfort Tiffany, Autumn Landscape, 1923. The Metropolitan Museum, Engelhard Court.

The gated entrance to Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. Film still from Citizen Kane, 1941 by Orson Welles.

Remains of the Loggia of Laurelton Hall, ca. 1905, installed in The Metropolitan Museum’s Engelhard Court, NY.

Interior of Laurelton Hall, Living Room, ca. 1925.

The Real Xanadu: Laurelton Hall

In Citizen Kane (1941), Charles Foster Kane has a palatial private mountain estate called Xanadu. Described as containing the “Loot of the World” it had the art collections of 10 museums, a zoo, Venetian canal, and sprawling gardens. But it turns out that there might have existed a real life version in America: Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall.

Laurelton was a complete living artwork, with its own railway station, private beach, greenhouses, farm and chapel. Chock-a-block with the choicest artwork literally dripping from floor to ceiling, Laurelton Hall was Louis Comfort Tiffany’s dream manse that he built in Laurel Hollow, Long Island.  A 65+ room mansion complex on 600+ acres of land, the interiors were decorated with thousands of unique objects from around the world, including the very best works Tiffany himself handpicked from Tiffany Studios, works that had even won him international fame and gold medals.

No doubt, that if it still stood today, Laurelton would be a historic site and a permanent museum: the ultimate legacy of Tiffany’s ouvre. But the vagaries of fashionability would not be so kind, unfortunately. In its day, Laurelton became sort of the ultimate white elephant, a monument to supposedly another time’s kind of artwork, considered demode and passe.

 “Arabian night’s dreams vanish, at Laurelton a phantom has become reality, eternal.”

  – A visitor to Laurelton Hall.

Wisteria Transom Panel, c. 1910–20, From the Dining Room of Laurelton Hall, Long Island, New York. Wisteria. Charles Hosmer Morse Museum, FL.

The Central Hall, Courtyard & Fountain.

Color Autochrome, ca. 1914 of The Bathers by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Metropolitan Museum, NY. (destroyed).

The Bathers

Only one of the many masterpieces installed in Laurelton Hall, firefighters actually smashed through The Bathers to gain access to the living room during the fire that burnt Laurelton Hall down to the ground in 1957. This amazing early color photograph dated in the early teens hints at what must have been one of Tiffany’s most incredible palettes.

Entrance Hall of The White House, 1882.

Peter Waddell, The Grand Illumination, Sunset of the Gaslight Age, 1891. oil on canvas, White House Historical Association.

The White House Screen

One of the most legendary objects in The White House’s history is the colored glass screen by Tiffany that was located in the Entrance Hall. Commissioned by President Chester A. Arthur in 1885, it was removed on the orders of new President Teddy Roosevelt in 1902, who supposedly wanted it “smashed” into little pieces. Rumor has it that the tremendous lost screen was instead removed, auctioned off for $275, and eventually installed into the Belvedere Hotel in Maryland, which burnt to the ground in 1923. Some historians speculate President Roosevelt’s motivations in removing a national treasure might date back to his personal animosity to Tiffany, possibly inspired by the bitter litigation and dispute with the town of Oyster Bay during Tiffany’s acquisition of the property of Laurelton Hall, originally public picnic grounds and an old hotel of the same name.

Computer reconstruction of The Blue Room in The White House, circa 1886, Nest magazine, 2000.

Tiffany also redecorated and designed the Blue Room, the East Room and the Red Room in the White House at the time. The Blue Room, or Robin’s Egg Room — as it was sometimes called for its egg blue color – had ornaments in a hand-pressed paper, touched out in ivory, as well as Tiffany’s trademark lighting fixtures.

Favrile glass mosaic column, ca. 1905, Metropolitan Museum. One of a pair of mosaic columns originally flanking the entrance to Tiffany Studios.

Favrile glass over concrete: Fragment of the mosaic sign from The Tiffany Studios building, 347-355 Madison Avenue, NY.

Tiffany Studios

If Laurelton Hall might be the equivalent to something like Orson Welles’ Xanadu, then Tiffany Studios in today’s light might be almost equivalent to something like Edison’s studio, or perhaps Leonardo’s workshop, filled to the rafters with the inventory of decades of the finest handmade glass objects of all time.

Workmen at Tiffany Studios.

A five story building including workrooms and showrooms, Tiffany Studios held an unparalleled collection of original designs, samples, Favrile glass sheets and more, employing some of the finest workmen, designers, craftsmen and chemists. To this day, Favrile glass and works the likes of Tiffany Studios still cannot be authentically equaled, even with today’s technology.

Tiffany Studios showroom, ca. 1913.

Tiffany Studios was liquidated in 1933. More on this, and collector Vito D’Agostino’s rescue of works from Tiffany Studios that year, to come.

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“You just go on your nerve.”

-Frank O’Hara

John D’Agostino, Corinthians, 2010.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

John D’Agostino, Loadstone Virtue, 2010.

Dreams of A Dark Abyss

The dreams of a dark abyss are a chosen hardship, like a poem.

 To enter into such a place is to engage in a poetic kind of thinking. Because the clear demarcations and road signs are all gone, only an imaginative, strenuous and curious state of mind will suffice to traverse the way. An idea of rigor pervades all poetic thinking.

Rigor is a measure of a content’s quality. It is the experience of “hard things” that are engaging and rewarding. But it is more than just a question of simply challenging or difficult content. Rather, rigorous content is personally and emotionally challenging. So too is poetry.

Poetry, as a relentless, mutli-faceted and demanding medium, has much in common with the traditions of the visual arts, most especially that of abstraction. Both abstraction and poetry are complex, ambiguous and provocative. Both have high expectations, and impossible personal standards. In both, the subject learns to “read” the poem/picture as he experiences it. The learner accepts some responsibility for his learning, and he must work to understand it. To not only elaborate on the material’s ever present suggestions, but sometimes even to add his own content to it. To complete it.

Rigor mortis, literally translated, is the stiffness of the body after death. It signifies a kind of severity, an exhaustive, point of no return, if you will. Both poetry and abstraction are similarly severe and extreme forms of their respective domains. However, perhaps ‘rigor vitae’ may be more appropriate here, as both disclipines engage a re-vivifying and re-enegergizing state of mind. The reader/viewer accepts the challenge to decode and understand the mysterious work laid before him, and is more alive for the effort.

The poetic image revels in its illusory nature. It exults in the impossible. A poetry of the impossible is a release from the constriction of normal things, an attempt to smash through the construction of the literal world. The poet’s use of words is quite different, just as the artist’s use of his imagery is different. The words are the same, the paint or ink or charcoal may be the same, but their values are different. Poeticization changes the value of well known things. They become musicalized, irretrievably transformed. The poet loves his words for their strangeness and mystery, not just for their obvious meanings.

The phenomenon of the poetic image is the phenomena of freedom. Excercise is often described as “rigorous,” and perhaps this is apt, since the rigorous image is similarly an excercise of the imagination. Mental muscles are flexed, stretched and tested. Freedom is not merely given, it must be exercised. Great images are often a blend of memory and legend. They have a history, and a pre-history. Poetic imagery engages this history, by summoning and evoking the history of images within each viewer, who must rely on the entire wealth of his mental records just to make sense of it.

Poetry, in guise as either word or image, retains a greater competition of surprises than perhaps any other discipline. It implies the decision to change the function of language, just as abstraction seeks to change the function of the literal, representational or identifiable image. What is found in either realm is that which is often passed over in daily life: the miraculous, the unknown, the undreamt of.

In the dead linen in cupboards

I seek the supernatural

- Joseph Rouffange

John D’Agostino, Entropy’s Blade, 2010.

Poetic images revel in Chinese whispers and communication breakdowns. What gets lost in the translation from person to person is often the most interesting. Imposing new meanings, misusing words, or using them for other purposes, maybe even cross purposes – is the metier of poetry. It sees the world as an iceberg: there is more below the surface of the water than above. These are not words or pictures, but maybe, ghosts.

Gaston Bachelard felt that the poetic image has a dynamic uniquely its own. That it is fundamentally variational. To read or see the poetic is to daydream. As J.P. Jouve called it, “thought enamored of the unknown.” All of Bachelard’s work, and not just his seminal The Poetics of Spaces, is in fact an eloquent and daring defense of poetry itself, which has had its many detractors, and may never win popularity contests. Surrealist Andre Breton called this animosity to the poetic the “hate of the marvelous” – arguing that the hostility towards such works was motivated more by fear and misunderstanding than by righteous contempt. This text first appeared as part of the paper The Abyss Gazes Also: The Pains and Pleasures of Seeing in the Dark by John D’Agostino, 2012.
View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here. Daydreaming is important. It is not just lazyness. It is sophisticated, three dimensional investigation. What the poet does is essentially create a trap for dreamers. As for me, Bachelard says, “I let myself be caught.”   •

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Skeleton & Flesh (2012)

New Works from Empire of Glass

John D’Agostino, Spring Torrents, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, The Hammer of Los, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, Summit & Flower, 2012 (in progress). Diptych: approx. 60×96″

Works currently in progress for 2012′s body of work include a number of new sizes, including diptych, triptych, square and more.

For more information on these new works, please contact the artist or visit:

www.EmpireofGlass.com

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WORDS BY:   John D’Agostino
WORKS:    www.EmpireofGlass.com
One of America’s most acclaimed artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) embraced virtually every artistic medium, from stained glass windows, lamps and mosaics, to pottery, metalwork, interiors and enamels.
 

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Fish Panel, ca. 1906. Provenance: Vito D’Agostino

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Gould Landscape Window, 1910. Provenance: Miss Helen Gould, Vito D’Agostino.

Tiffany asked why so many of us made such little use of our eyes, and why we so obstinately refrained from using color in architecture, clothing and elsewhere, when nature so clearly indicated its mastership. He referred to this as the “sovereign importance of color” – and set out to rectify the situation in a relentless “quest for beauty.”

The elder son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the famed Tiffany and Company jewelry store, the young Louis began his career as a painter, working under George Inness (1825–1894). Early notable designs of his included the redecoration of The White House for President Chester A. Arthur in 1881. At the World’s Fair in 1893 in Chicago, over a million visitors waited in line to see his ornate Byzantine Chapel, and at the Paris Universal 1900, Tiffany won the grand prize, a gold medal, and the Légion d’honneur. Internationally recognized as one of the greatest forces of Art Nouveau, Tiffany’s work would still fall completely out of fashion by the 1920’s.

Tiffany used the medium of glass to challenge the pre-eminence of painting. In glass, Tiffany found a medium of endless possibilities that expressed his love of light and color. He felt that no painting could capture its brilliance, at one point creating stained glass windows based on well known artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec to prove the point home. He could suggest a myriad of natural surfaces, from hard stone, primal magma and volcanic rock, to the sensuous, iridescent surfaces of winged creatures like butterflies, dragonflies and peacocks. Claiming a palette of some 5000 colors, Tiffany had an incredible array of different kinds of favrile glass to work with, from lava (volcanic) glass, to cypriote glass, to drapery glass and ripple glass, just to name a few.

Tiffany began experimenting with glass about 1875 in Brooklyn. He was inspired by ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian glass, that, when dug up hundreds of years later, were imbued with an incredible iridescent quality, due to the ores and oxides of the earth seeping in. Frustrated with the limited palette of the glass of the time, he turned to making his own opalescent glass, with the colors fused inside in molten form. This was in stark contrast to the predominant method since the Middle Ages, which was the staining of colorless glass. Using a witch’s brew of secret recipes including metallic oxides, chromium, silver, gold and even uranium, Tiffany called his trademark glass favrile, after the Old English word fabrile (hand-wrought), a signification meant to reflect the hand-made quality of his glass. It cannot be duplicated even today. Quite simply, it is the finest glass ever made.

  “Infinite, endless labor makes the masterpiece. Color is to the eye as music is to the ear.”
-Louis Comfort Tiffany

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

An eccentric, autocratic perfectionist, Tiffany was notorious for walking down the production lines of Tiffany Studios with his cane, smashing anything he found to be unacceptable. Stories exist of craftsman actually scurrying to hide works from him in the fear that he would destroy them. “Mother Nature is the best designer” he said, and he set out to summon up the kingdom of nature, in all its glory. Using sophisticated abstract forms derived from nature as the material for his Art Nouveau motifs, historians like Robert Koch would later dub him the grandfather of Abstract Expressionism, a narrative confirmed by my father, artist John E. D’Agostino (born 1941), whose original inspiration for the abstract was not any of the expected originators of the movement, but Tiffany himself.

While Tiffany’s work would suffer from the vagaries of taste and fashion, the uniqueness of his oeuvre today is unquestionable. Perhaps the lowest moment was in 1936, when salvage dealers were smashing Tiffany’s celebrated lamps against the curbs, just so they could melt down the intricate bronze and lead frames holding the glass for scrap metal. For the artists of Art Nouveau, the lotus, a motif Tiffany would use again and again, appropriately, symbolized rebirth. For art lovers like my grandfather Vito D’Agostino, it was just a matter of time. Tiffany’s reputation would plummet from international renown to obscurity and disfavor, but only to rise yet even stronger once again.    •

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WORDS BY:     John D’Agostino
WORKS:      www.EmpireofGlass.com

  “The sun is God.”   – J.M.W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard The Dead & Dying, 1840. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

Take Turner’s The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840). The picture is a maelstrom of blood, light, retribution and redemption. The picture was inspired by the real horrors of the slave trade, and would became a rallying cry for the abolitionist movement. Slave ship captains would throw men, women and children overboard to waiting sharks when the ship’s human cargo was dying faster than anticipated. They were insured for “losses at sea” but not “dead on arrival.” Turner’s vision is a horrific tour de force of visual havoc: chained legs and arms flailing in a watery deluge of bloody light and apocalypse. Turner’s critic and main champion, John Ruskin eventually sold the painting. He said it was just too painful to look at every day in his dining room.

Not quite gentlemanly British art, this was. Some artists, like Delacroix, disapproved of Turner’s methods: his filthy hands and dirty fingernails (one which he kept long on purpose to paint with like a “claw”), that bore the marks of a painter who quite literally was unafraid to wallow in the muck. One story goes that a young apprentice who came to Turner was cruelly turned away, when his lily-white, clean hands were demanded for inspection. “You’re no artist!” Turner angrily proclaimed.

Turner’s scenes were not so much scenes, as much as regions of the imagination. Light was his chief protagonist, no longer relegated to being some bit player in the chorus. His figures, in contrast, were often puny little creatures, engulfed in it all. The originator, the sun, was for Turner, the living core of all of nature. Passersby were often frightened by how Turner would stare endlessly into the sun, fearing for his eyesight. Didn’t it hurt? No, he said, not any more than like looking into a candle. As the apocryphal story goes, Turner’s dying words on his deathbed were: “The sun is god.”

Turner realized that the sublime was a verb, as in, to sublime – to elevate, to raise upward. His imagery does not come from the eye. It comes from inside the eye.

Painting from behind the eyeball, as it were.  •

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