Isa Genzken: The Umbrellas in Service of Art

I don't believe I had heard of Isa Genzken until I read Peter Schjeldahl's article "VIEWS FROM THE EDGE: An Isa Genzken retrospective" in the New Yorker issue of December 2, 2013, discussing the MOMA retrospective. Thus, I did not know of her artistic involvement with umbrellas until I read Schjeldahl's description of her paternal grandfather:

Karl Genzken. A doctor and a committed Nazi, he was the head of the medical office of the S.S. and oversaw experiments on concentration-camp inmates; he was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, and died in 1957, three years after being released from prison. According to Der Spiegel, the artist “hinted to” a friend about a childhood visit to her grandfather in prison, where she saw an open umbrella in his cell. Whether that relates to the frequent use of umbrellas in her work seems moot. It’s like Genzken to tantalize with inklings of particular import, which slip away when you try to parse them. . . .

So, that got me searching for these umbrellas. And they certainly are there! Here sre images of just a few of them: 

In a 2012 review of  her exhibition at the Hauser and Wirth gallery, we are told of how one would enter and encounter:

the startling presence of an enormous unopened garden umbrella [coupled] with a precarious jumble of posters, mannequin heads and modernist furniture. The presence of such a bizarre amalgamation of found objects creates a tangible tension, as each fragment appears to hold a certain significance that can be considered individually as well as part of a whole. The umbrella for example, in its folded and useless state, hangs inanimate. There is a sinister parallel with that of a hanged body, while the non-functioning designer furniture also lays useless on the floor. These sought-after and fashionable items have been rendered obsolete in their installation, allowing for an interesting commentary on the function of consumer driven, hyper-chic possessions in our lives.

It is harder to come up with some substantive meaning to it all, however. Some reviewers don't have much respect for umbrellas after all: In Der Spiegel, there is reference to how she "creates beauty from ugly things, even wheelchairs and shabby umbrellas." However, in "9/11 and the Literature of Terror," one work of hers is described [have not found am image to post] certainly suggests that she can use the umbrella in a powerful message:

resonated with themes of 'architecture, power and terror'. To the rear of the plinth on which her materials were assembled, Genzken placed an upturned print of Kurt Hulion's f nous photograph Grand Central Station (l(f'i4). tipped onto its side through ninety degrees, then superimposed on a perforated mesh screen vs tapping the plinth. A sinister figure imposing itself on the right-hand foreground posed ¦Mtwririgly over other figures prone on the plinth. Heaped around the bodies uas an array of found-object motifs suggesting shelter or protection abruptK withdrawn - shoes lost or discarded, a hat, tiny dolls, the umbrella that dominated the piece, its stalk rising out of the amamblage. its metal spokes twisted out of shape, the protet Live dome of the umbrella destroyed by a sudden gust, an explosive blast

 This conceit of the lost protective power of the umbrella is powerful art indeed.

Gere Gallagher: Painting the Everyday with Umbrellas

Gere Gallagher’s Umbrella Series; acrylic on canvas, completed the Silo Gallery's vision for nurturing New Talent, Emerging and more Established visual artists. Gere has studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Student’s League. She has been involved in workshops led by Peter Seltzer, Hugh O’Donnell, Wolf Kahn and Eric Aho and is presently in the much respected Critique with Barbara Grossman.

So what is it about umbrellas for this artist? According to her own web gallery:

I work with the figure to create an environment. She is in everyday situations, sometimes urban, sometimes local. Protected at times by the shield of an umbrella, to think, to ponder, or to pause at being in the moment. The color and application of paint reveals the process which I hope coincides with the essence of my meaning. These are invented paintings, not intended to be portraits, but the gestures and movements are inspired by my muse.

To see more of her umbrella series, click here.

Judith Hoffberg: A Friend of Umbrellas

Even though I have only been doing this blog seriously for a month or so, it seems a shame that it is only now that I have come across someone who had been a real friend of umbrellas--Judith Hoffberg. Although she died this past January, for almost 30 years, through her work on artists' books in her print and then online journal "Umbrella," she also raised the stature of umbrellas. In her poignant last Editor's Note, she wrote:

Obsessed with umbrellas and parasols, it allowed me to create a huge collection of “umbrelliana” which has overwhelmed both my domestic and storage settings. I learned more about textiles, fashion, kitsch, marketing, performance art, multicultural innovations with the object umbrella, encountering artists who used the image to intrigue me as well as to whet my appetite. It has been an easy image to collect in paper ephemera as well as almost 200 three-dimensional umbrella objects. From a tiny Chinese lace umbrella to a 19th century silk parasol, from 333 antiquarian books to countless artifacts, the collection has grown over the past 30 years.

However, there is even a longer discussion in a mail interview with her from 1995-1996, which I republish alongside the image she chose as her final image Natalia Kohen's "Closed Umbrella":

Well, since the name of my business became Umbrella Associates in 1978, thanks to a suggestion from Joan Hugo, as we were sitting in an airport in San Jose waiting for our late plane to Los Angeles after the First Artists' Publication Fair in San Jose in 1977. I had just resigned from the position of Executive Secretary of the Art Libraries Society of North America, which I had founded, and as we were sitting, Joan, a noted librarian and my co-curator in the Artwords & Bookworks exhibition, asked what I would be doing next; I hadn't the faintest idea at the time, but she had been thinking about it, and told me she had done some research. She had discovered that there was once a periodical called Parasol edited by Ricky de Marco, but it was not extant. Then she had looked through the entire list of periodicals and could not find any other periodical called "Umbrella", and so she thought I should start a business as a consultant, called Umbrella Associates, and publish a newsletter called Umbrella, and so I did.

A strong interest in umbrellas had never occurred to me -- except for one print which I had bought in 1966 in Washington, DC which I have in my office. But since my interest in mail art had been growing at the same time I founded my business, I decided that the symbol of umbrella had potential as a logo, an indentifying icon, and perhaps a way for me to send mail art around the world with that image. After learning that my friend Kurt de Gooyer had become curator of a Museum of Photography on the University of California, Riverside campus, he was involved in a group called Art Spies, and he thought it would be a good thing to have a mail art show in his museum, and so I announced to the world that the theme of the show was "Umbrellas" and having contacted just about everyone I knew from the mail art world, I started receiving lots of mail art, actual found umbrellas, etc. With over 400 entries, I began to see the potential for a collection. As an archivist, it was easy to organize this material in notebooks, and so it began. Now I have over 60 volumes of paper ephemera about umbrellas, including handmade postcards and broadsides, advertisements, articles about umbrellas, newspaper photos, photographs both black and white and color, antique postcards and advertising ephemera, and much more.

The collection has grown largely due to my many trips around the world including Australia and New Zealand, and continental Europe. I buy postcards of Umbrellas wherever I go and some summers I came back with 250 postcards of umbrella images. Then, too, I take pictures of Umbrellas wherever I see them, including inside shots and outside shots. So if I cannot buy an item, I take a picture of it. Many artists send me things, including jewelry, clothing, paper items, postcards, etc. As a result, I have learned to live with some of the material but until this year, I have had to store the collection, except for 1984, when I showed the collection as Umbrelliana in the Bumbereshoot Festival in Seattle, Washington, which is held every year on the first weekend of September. I filled 4000 square feet of space, and there still was much material at home. Now the collection has increased a great deal more, but now I live with most of it, having decorated my new apartment with umbrellas everywhere -- in the kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, office, and everywhere else. It is a universal well known item, whether it be protection against the sun (parasol) or protection against the rain (umbrella), and so I even have taken that name on the internet.

Gerhard Richter Painting "Woman with Umbrella" at National Portrait Gallery

In this painting, the umbrella is folded, not opened. This seems to be a much rarer image--especially for one where the woman is holding the umbrella.

According to Martin Newman in the Mirror, In "Woman with Umbrella" (1964) [part of a series of paintings from press photos of John F. Kennedy’s assassination], Richter "consciously presents Jacqueline Kennedy as an anonymous woman in the street. Her face concealed by her hand conveys a horror amplified by the razor like horizontal paint strokes. But the portrait is not recognisably Jackie and the meaning of this moment is taken out of its real setting, to deliberately stymie any reading of it."

Richard Bonnet's take in the Telegraph on the painting:"In one hand [Kennedy] carries an umbrella, with the other she covers her mouth, as though to stop herself from crying out. By using feathery brushstrokes to blur the original image, Richter allows us to imagine that rain has blurred the camera lens, or else that we are looking at the photograph through our own tears. By giving the painting a neutral title, Woman with an Umbrella, Richter turns a real woman photographed at a certain moment in her life into a universal image of insupportable grief."

At the National Portrait Gallery until May 31.

Banksy Katrina Painting Part of Urban Art Auction

As part of Bonham's sale of Urban Art, "Nola Pink" by Banksy is being auctioned off. It shows "a girl being rained upon beneath an umbrella. It was painted to commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina."

Remember Your Lost Umbrella? Someone Paid $$$ (£££) For It!

Well, at least that is what BBC News has reported about a recent auction:

A rare Faberge umbrella which lay undiscovered for years in a house in Devon has sold for £17,500.

The umbrella was with some old walking canes which were given to the unnamed owner by her mother-in-law when she moved home.

According to Martin McIlroy of the auction house:

The Faberge parasol handle was enamelled, gold, bowenite and rose diamond mounted. The pale green bowenite ball above a collar decorated with translucent pink guilloche enamel with applied gold wreaths of laurel and between rose-diamond set bands. Stamped with workmaster Michail Perchin, St Petersburg marks.