Look Into My Eyes

The Leopard showed up at the Museum of Modern Art last week to catch up on what's new and happening, but it ended up feeling more like a wedding: Something old, something new, something borrowed; something blue.

I was prompted to drop by because of the ads I'd seen circulating around the city advertising a major exhibit of the photography of the great Henri Cartier-Bresson.  On my way to that exhibit though, there was a also a sizable show of Picasso lithographs & etchings which I hungrily devoured.
In stark contrast to that exhibit was the performance artist Marina Abramovic. You may have heard about her. She's the one who sits motionless in silence swathed in some kind of cloak sitting in a chair at the center of a large room. There's another chair facing hers, and visitors are invited to sit opposite the artist. The purpose, one presumes, is to make some kind of connection.
This is Ms. Abramovic's art.

The Leopard, as always, had his handy-dandy sketch book at the ready. I quickly scrawled a sketch of this striking-looking woman. I would have liked to have participated in the performance, but apparently folks have to wait as long as a full day to get face to face with this controversial artist.

Some people, I guess, have real time to burn.

The Great Frazetta (1928 - 2010)

The Leopard has many artistic heroes: John Singer Sargent, Picasso, Hopper, Wyeth, Basquiat and many, many others, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that chief among them is the brilliant painter Frank Frazetta. Frank began his career as a comic book artist, then as assistant to the great cartoonist Al Capp on Li'l Abner and as an illustrator of science fiction and fantasy paperback book covers for characters like Tarzan and most famously, Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian. Frank's beautiful covers were so successful in the marketplace that he eventually would come to create the covers first, and then writers were assigned to come up with the novels!

From a very young age - around fifteen, I appreciated his wonderful color palette,  the amazing power and movement of his images and the sexiness of his figures, especially the thick, fleshy allure of his women.

Frank was not exactly politically correct. His depiction of blacks and Asians were mostly derogatory and his women were there for the sexual pleasure of the muscular heroes and the fanboys like myself who bought every magazine, calendar and book where his images were reproduced.   But Frank was a product of his time, having grown up in Brooklyn in the late twenties a child prodigy who was also a scrappy neighborhood kid who played backlot baseball and was good enough to be once considered by the majors.

Frazetta's work to me was so remarkably advanced that I knew even as a child I would never come close to matching his talent.  But he became the measurement with which I compared all others. and despite an army of imitators over the years, I have yet to see his match in fantasy art.