art history

Jens Plum – painter

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Jens Plum (1926 – 2002 ) was born in Rochester, NY. He studied at Art School, Copenhagen, Denmark (1947-1949), at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI  (1952-1954; B.F.A.), and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI (1954-1956; MFA). He taught at the University of Detroit (1956-1963) and the Department of Arts, Michigan State University (1963-1991).

At  Wayne State University, Plum met Robert Wilbert, a major figure of Detroit’s creative art community. Milton Avery was another source of inspiration since, in the Fifties,  Avery’s paintings were sold at the Donald Morris Gallery in Detroit. In Florida, Plum took a workshop with Janet Fish. Traveling internationally with his wife, Plum visited the  Giorgio Morandi museum in Bologna Italy. Like Morandi, Plum had a number of artifacts that he rearranged for his still lifes.

Plums had numerous national and regional exhibitions and One-Person-Shows. His paintings are part of permanent collections, for example, at Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, MI and Wayne State University, Detroit, MI;


Together with his wife, Nancy Plum, Jens made a treasured contribution to the vibrant Lansing area art community.

The first and third picture shown here were captured by me with Nancy Plum’s permission in her late husband’s studio. The second picture came from a photo collection of Jens Plum’s paintings that Nancy made available to me.

art history

Nancy Plum, ceramicist

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Nancy Plum said: “I am  a studio potter who works in stoneware and porcelain. Making pots is a way of life for me, as I attempt to capture a spirit that lies beyond their function.”

Nancy Manes Plum (1932-2019) grew up in Providence, RI, and went to Antioch College, OH.  During a summer workshop at the Black Mountain College, NC (1953),  Peter Voulkos, Warren MacKenzie  and Daniel Rhodes  introduced her to ceramics which proved to be  formative to her career choice.

Until 1956, Plum studied ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art, MI with  Marguerite Wildenhain and Takakazu Takeuchi. In 1957, she spent a year at Mills College, CA on a teaching fellowship with Tony Prieto as her mentor.

The same year, she was awarded Fulbright fellowship which she declined and instead joined the faculty at the New Mexico Highlands University, Las Vegas, NM to teach ceramics and weaving.

In 1960, Plum went back to Michigan to join her husband, the painter Jens Plum, professor at Michigan State University. Nancy Plum  taught at pottery guilds, first in Ann Arbor and then in Lansing.

Nancy Plums’s  ceramics are part of permanent collections, for example,  at the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Mills College Gallery, Oakland, CA; Witte Museum, San Antonio, TX; St. Paul Gallery , St. Paul, MN. Plum had both One-Person  as well as Regional and National Exhibitions.

Nancy’s ceramics shown here are part of my own collection.

Nancy was a member of the vibrant artist community surrounding her. With her knowledge of the visual arts – ceramics, sculpture and painting – Nancy  had been a mentor to me.

Epitaph by Mark Chatterley:  I considered Nancy the treasure for the community. She was an elegant lady who transferred her personality into clay.

painting

Context

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In the mid-sixties of the last century, Gerhard Richter did photo-paintings using photographs of family. Now, half a century later, I felt the same urge to paint my family. In contrast to  Richter’s “hallmark blurred photographs”, with my science background, I still enjoy putting my motifs into focus. To add a context to a given photograph, a time or emotional context, I overlaid it with another image, a technique I learned doing scientific illustrations.

Woods Hole, 1969; 12-years-later, 2006 & 2018;  and Borkum, 1946; are oils on ACM covered with Belgian Linen, 8 x 10 inches. Banter Sea, 2007 and High Line 2019 are oils on wooden panels, 16 x 16 and 16 x 12, respectively.

 

art history

Hilma af Klint, symbolism

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Unlike yin-yang, the symbol of harmony between two opposites,  the picture shown here is lacking  obvious harmony. The left half, reminiscent of  sun and water or blue sky, does not captivate my eye.

By contrast, the dark half circle on the right with its light perimeter makes me think of a view through the Kuiper belt into the distant universe; 95% of the matter of the universe, dark energy & dark matter, not perceived by our senses; and neurons in our brains not utilized.

The next image shows the painting with its proper  orientation: The Swan, No 17. 1915; 150×150 cm by Hilma af Klint, a Swedish Painter (1862 – 1944). 

Other af Klint paintings, currently on exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC, also have a ‘soft’ right and a ‘more solid’ left half. Why does viewing the painting in its proper orientation make me feel uncomfortable while I love looking at it horizontally rotated?

 

 

undated self-portrait

Hilma af Klint studied at the Royal Academy of the Fine Arts in Stockholm. During her life, she  was known as painter of landscapes, portraits and botanical art.  

Privately, inspired by mysticism, she started painting ‘abstract art’ in 1906, novel for Europe and Russia but practiced in other parts of the world such as in Australia by Aborigines.

 

 

During the next two years, af Klint painted large organic forms and mandelas in which blue, yellow and pink/red stood for female, male and sensual/ spiritual love, respectively.  But in 1908, she stopped painting for four years. — After  her amorous affair with Dr. Helleday, she decided to remain single. She took care  of her mother who went blind. She gave up or changed her studio (different accounts).  During those dry 4 years, she met Rudolf Steiner, a theosophical colleague, who advised to hide her abstract art for the next 50 years.

From 1912 – 1915,  af Klint again painted abstract art but now in a more authoritative, geometric style. She executed “Paintings for the Temple’, a task commissioned by a spirit whom she called Amaliel. Other severely geometric paintings are the ‘transcendent’ swan series, among them the picture discussed at the beginning of this post.

Subsequently af Klint dedicated herself more fully to studying theosophy and anthroposophy.

1890                            2010

Later, after reading Goethe’s color theory,  af Klint painted with water-color, wet-on-wet, allowing the colors to flow into one another, very different from her earlier botanical paintings.

At the beginning of the 20th century esoteric spiritualism was also  practiced by Kandinsky (1866-1944), Malevich (1879-1935), and Mondrian (1872-1944), other painters of abstract art.

Emotional responses to colors. Different artist imbue colors with different symbolism. Interestingly, Hilma af Klint and Franz Marc (1880-1916) associated blue with their own gender and yellow with the opposite gender.

It is now reported that the 1906-7 Primordial Chaos series was done in collaboration with Anna Cassel, another artist from the group called the Five, founded by Hilma af Klint. Hilma af Klint sketched the outlines for the paintings and Anna Cassel was free to chose her colors to paint the shapes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

art history

Different hands, different spirits

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El Greco: Grand Inquisitor, 1600
A letter dropped by the Grand Inquisitor’s right hand
El Greco: Saint Jerome as Scholar, circa 1610
Max Beckmann: Old Actress, 1926

(1) “On 3 December 1599, Cardinal Nino de Guevara was appointed Grand Inquisitor of Spain. During his tenure as Grand Inquisitor, the Spanish Inquisition burned 240 heretics, plus 96 in effigy. 1,628 other individuals were found guilty and subjected to lesser penalties.”

(2) “The painting is notable for the novel way in which the artist synthesized the two aspects of Saint Jerome, the scholarly and the ascetic.”

(3) ” Beckmann was proud of this portrait, describing it as “great” and counting it among his “major works,” but he never identified the sitter. He referred to her only as “an old actress,” or “the old lady.”

In 2023, the following full size paintings were added to this post to compare the interactions of between the eyes and hands as is done in the newly added “What do your hands say about you?”

El Greco: Grand Inquisitor, 1600
El Greco: Saint Jerome as Scholar, circa 1610

Max Beckmann: Old Actress, 1926