Category Archives: Art

Voisin and the Mullin Automotive Museum

A week or so ago, Malcolm Pearson and I went to see the Voisin show at the Mullin Automotive Museum. Actually, Automotive Museum is somewhat of a misnomer, it is really a museum of French cars and – really, almost exclusively – pre-World War II French cars, extreme Art Deco French cars. The Mullin Museum is in Oxnard, about five and half hours – without gas, pee, or food stops – out of our way, and there are not many people that I enjoy being with, besides Malcolm, that are also willing to get up early enough to leave San Jose at 6:30, drive to Oxnard, walk around the Mullin for three hours, and drive back to San Jose that same night. Even to see a brace of Voisins (17 Voisins might be more than a brace but they were bracing).

As an aside, Voisins are fine cars and seeing a group of them is interesting and great fun, but they are not great cars. Maybe a better way to put it is that they are great cars, but they were not great in the right direction. To my mind, they seem to be on the same level as Lancias (and, as somebody who has owned three Lancias, I mean that in the best possible way). Both Lancia and Voisin were trying to make – make is pretty weak sauce for the passion involved – great cars but both made engineering decisions that were both brilliant and wrong for the market. End aside.

One of the very nice things about this special show of Voisins is how they reflect the early history of the automobile. Because Voisin was an aircraft inventor and manufacturer – he first flew an airplane in 1906 and, because the Europeans didn’t know about or didn’t acknowledge, the Wright Brothers, he won a prize for the first controlled flight – the early cars were built using typical airplane construction techniques  (including aluminium rather than the more typical brass).


By 1938, when Voisin built the Avions C30S Coupe for the Paris Auto Salon of the same year, the cars were more mainstream – and not all personally designed by Gabriel Voisin himself – but still very distinctive and exquisitely made. Along the way, the company made some memorable cars that, in my humble opinion, would do honor to anybody’s livingroom as a piece of sculpture. In 1934, they built the black and yellow Avions Voisin C27 Grand Sport Cabriolet with a body designed by Giuseppe Figoni – before he joined forces with businessman Ovidio Flaschi, thereby creating Figoni & Falaschi that is, by far, the best name of any car-body design company, ever – and was sold to the Shah of Persia. In 1935, they built the Avions Voisin C27 Aerosport Coupe with a large sunroof.

In 1938, Voisin built the  Avions C30 Cabriolet with coachwork built by Dubos that was later requisitioned by an Nazi stationed in France (maybe the Nazi liked it because it was more sedate, even a little Germanic, compared to many of the other cars.

In 1935, Gabriel Voisin, himself, designed and built the C25 Aérodyne which was Voisin’s “car of the future”. It was hyper-expensive in the middle of the depression, improbably streamlined, featured an huge – powered – sunroof, and had the best Art Deco upholstery I have ever seen.

 

By almost any standard, it was a tour de force but it had a six cylinder, sleeve-valve, engine while Bugatti – out in the sticks in Molsheim – was building less expensive cars with with eight cylinder double overhead cam engines.

What I like about these cars is that they were built by individuals, artists. Idiosyncratic artists that often got lost in their art and held it dearer than making money or, even sometimes, making a good car. For years, Ferrari built very fast cars with V-12 engines designed by geniuses like  Gioacchino Colombo and Aurelio Lampredi and they didn’t have radiator fans which Ferrari considered – I don’t know exactly, undignified? too feminine? too ordinary? – unnecessary. The problem was that no radiator fan made these cars very hard to drive in the real world with actual traffic and traffic jams. When asked about this problem, Ferrari said that Nobody should drive a Ferrari in traffic, if there is a traffic jam, just pull over to an espresso bar and wait for traffic to clear. This is the same guy who – for years – refused to install disc brakes on his race cars because they were invented by the English. (I had a Ferrari Lusso – luxury in English – that didn’t have a radio or a glove box, or, even, a locking passenger door.)  Bugatti refused to install hydraulic brakes on his cars, preferring to keep mechanical brakes – with delicate cables and pulleys going every which way – long after everybody else had agreed that hydraulic were the only way to go.

To me, all this makes the cars more fun, more interesting, even if it makes them less of a transportation appliance and the French were and still are  the best -worst? – at idiosyncratic cars. Here are a couple more examples without further comment.

1939 Delahaye Type 165 Cabriolet with a Figoni et Falaschi designed body

1938 Dubonnet Hispano-Suiza H6C Xenia with a Jacques Saoutchik designed body

 

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On the hanging of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait

In the SF Chronicle, this morning, was an article with a second paragraph of All this raises a question about what may be the most anticipated ceremonial event yet to happen: the hanging of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait. The  paragraph brought up all sorts of resonating thoughts starting with What? They are hanging Schwarzenegger? Oh, his portrait. and ending with He was a pretty good governor considering the circumstances. In between, among other thoughts such as the National Portrait Gallery being my favorite museum in Washington, I noticed that the paragraph was only one sentence long which I was taught not to do – I don’t know for sure but it must have been before the sixth grade – surly, the Chrony should know better.

Reading the short article – all articles are short in the Chrony – I noticed that Schwarzenegger’s picture was done by Gottfried Helnwein ( I used was because, apparently, the picture is already finished, if not hung, and done because the artist is a photographer and a water color and mixed media painter and I have no idea of the medium of this portrait). Gottfried Helnwein is not an artist that I know, but I feel I should after reading his Selected Collections page which includes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the State Russian Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution, among many, many, others. I also read that Schwarzenegger had a picture by Helnwein, in his Governor’s office, of the Mojave and he has a photograph? watercolor? of Death Valley on his website, so I am predisposed to like this guy already.

His portraits – as shown below -look to be even more interesting.

California does have a long – if very narrow – history of interesting Governor’s portraits including this Portrait of Jerry Brown as a Young Man (sorry).

It is possible that I have now joined the legions in Sacramento who agree that the hanging of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait is one of the most anticipated ceremonial events yet to happen. OK, that may be overstating it, but I am curious. (Oh, the portrait at the top was done by Andrew Wyeth and Brown’s portrait was by California artist Don Bachardy).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Awesome people hanging out together

Every year – for the last several years, at least – Time Magazine posts a list of what they consider to be the best blogs for that year (they do seem to change every year, so, I assume, they are really the best blogs of the year that haven’t been mentioned before). Either, way – best blog or best unmentioned blog – the list often has some previously hidden gem. This year, one of those gems is a blog called Awesome people hanging out together. The combinations are often surprising and sometimes shocking. Here are a couple of examples with their labels from the blog. Check it out.

The Digerati: Front, left to right: Eric Schmidt, CEO Google; Unknown; Steve Westly, former eBay executive; Steve Jobs, CEO Apple; Barack Obama, President, USA; Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook; Unknown. Back, right to left: Dick Costello, CEO Twitter; Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo; John Hennesy, President, Stanford; Reed Hastings, CEO Netflix; Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle; John Doerr, Partner, Kliener Perkins Caulfield & Byers; John Chambers, CEO Cisco Systems, Unknown, Art Levinson, CEO Genetech.

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite

Al Pacino and Christopher Walken

Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong and Neil Gaiman

 

 

 

Reflections

Last Sunday, Michele went to the annual National Bioneers Conference and we agreed to meet at the end of the day at the Tracy Taylor Grubbs Open Studio.

One of the things that is fun about going to the same Open Studio over a period of years is watching how the artist changes. Sure, sometimes they don’t change and sometimes they change all over the place at random, but, every once in awhile, the change is growth. It is like you – in this case, I – can see the artist try to solve the same, intellectual? metaphysical? problem in a variety of ways, getting closer – but, like Zeno’s paradox – never getting there because the search is really the endpoint.

I first saw this in a Jasper Johns show at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at Marine’s Memorial – more accurately, it was pointed out to me on a tour put on by the  Stanford Art Department – and it seems to me this is what Tracy is doing. I have heard her talk about impermanence as a condition that interests her and, while I don’t want to speak for her, that seems to be central in what I saw last weekend (especially in her lovely iceberg paintings).

She also had on display some lovely little square images made by smoke that seemed to almost be frozen impermanence.

While Michele went to Bioneers, I took BART into The City and spent the later afternoon taking pictures of reflections.

I thought that a series of building reflections printed as small squares similar to Tracy’s smoke squares would be fun. But, sitting here, I think that these reflections reflect – sorry – my interest in what is reality vs. the distortion of reality as my projection. I see a scene – oaks and rolling, golden, hills on Highway 120 by Oakdale come to mind – and photograph it. Only when I look at the image, back home on my monitor, do I notice the power lines and towers, the dead, dry grass. What I saw is not what was there. Building reflections offer a similar distortion; the reflection on a building – so prominent in my mind’s eye – is often overwhelmed by the building I almost didn’t see.

With all that preamble, here are several reflections.

And a final picture from Southern California where the hold on reality may not be as strong.

 

 

 

 

 

Restoring Street Art

 


I am sort of fascinated with informal street art – graffiti, if that makes you happier – I like the pictures, but I like the lettering even better. I am convinced that the lettering is a throw back to Mayan Glyphs.

About a week ago, Ed Dieden called to tell me to bring my camera with me to lunch, he had found a great vain of street art in Oakland.

By the time we got there, however, the art had been defaced. I have seen this on alot of Mayan sites, also. Somebody comes along later and trashes the art, presumable to show dominance. With street art, all it takes is a spray-painted line drawn through the art, sort of like keying a nice car.

OK, “restoring Street Art” is way too grandiose a term. But with street art, or any digital photograph, the photographer has an astounding amount of after-shot-control using Lightroom and Photoshop. I have talked to lots of photographers who frown on post shutter manipulation but I am not one of them. Ansel Adams – one of the demiGods of photography – retouched both his negatives and prints taking the tradition of post shutter manipulation back almost 100 years (and I am sure he was not the first).

My own standards – using the word standards in the most grandiose way possible – is having the final picture most closely represent what it felt like being there (I guess, by that criteria, I should accent the white defacing lines because, once I noticed them, they became very obtrusive but, at first, I didn’t notice them and they do detract from the art). I have no desire to Photoshop batman running through a wall although I have no problem with other people doing that. Here are a couple of shots, cleaned-up.