Stephanie Chadwick

Francis Picabia’s Bobinage (Bobbin, Winding or Coil) is a pencil and ink work produced on gouache-painted paper between 1921–1922. The free-floating forms in this piece appear, at first glance, to be studies in geometric abstraction. Yet, they, and the work’s title, make both semiotic and real-world references. The admixture of perspectives is notable, for it retains traces of the Cubist visual language that motivated Picabia and his peers as well as the imagery of the early twentieth-century technical diagrams that, as has been demonstrated by scholars, inspired his work. Examining Coil and other of Picabia’s artworks in tandem with the scholarship that has investigated these influences, this article explores the artist’s engagement with the very issue of representation. Through this investigation, this paper considers the ways in which Picabia’s work alludes to gender in a manner that privileges masculinity yet calls attention to the destabilizing effects of modernity—and modern representations—on notions about gender and, even, what it means to be human. Contextualized thusly, Coil represents not an abstract divergence but rather a continuation of the artist’s technical, gender, and, one could say, even cyborg investigations, revealing his engagement with new and innovative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and depicting modern experience.

Taking the painting Be I by famous American Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman as a starting point, this paper explores relationships between Mohandas K. Gandhi’s aesthetic life and an emerging aesthetic of nonviolence in the post WWII era. A nonviolent aesthetic is considered in the painting and in relation to two key photographs featured in the exhibition “Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence” at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas from October 3, 2014 – February 1, 2015: Margaret Bourke-White’s now iconic photograph of Gandhi Spinning and an anonymous photograph of Gandhi’s Earthly Belongings published in a 1954 book by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1954.

<jats:p>A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing to Dada in Zurich and Barcelona. Picabia was a car enthusiast who embraced modernity, viewing the machine as a form expressive of the modern spirit from which he drew a new and revolutionary artistic idiom. Picabia also drew upon the tenets of the Puteaux Group and, upon arriving in New York to exhibit at the Armory Show in 1913, was lauded as a leading Cubist. He worked for a time in Orphic Cubism, a blend of Cubist, Futurist, and Fauvist themes and techniques to which he added ''abstracted'' industrial and biomorphic forms. Although he maintained an interest in the figure, Picabia is known primarily for his early dialogue with abstraction and his development of a quasi-machine aesthetic. He looked to industrial diagrams for artistic inspiration and, upon returning to New York in 1915, during a period of involvement with photographer and modern arts patron Alfred Stieglitz's famous 291 Gallery and journal, produced the famous Mechanomorph series. Depicting Stieglitz and his entourage as bizarre, seemingly dysfunctional, industrial forms, Picabia's Mechanomorphs shaped the visual vocabulary of New York, and later Paris, Dada. Picabia's ironic stance in relation to art and culture has prompted scholars to interpret his conflation of human and machine parts as also playful punning of morality, sexuality, and blind faith in technology.</jats:p>

Pointillism is a technique developed by Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat (1859–1891) whereby paint is meticulously applied in small daubs or dots. Interested in color and optical theories, the Neo-Impressionists (Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille Pissaro, and other artists) applied Pointillist daubs (rather than more sweeping Impressionist brushstrokes) in conjunction with a closely related process known as Divisionism. With the goal of creating well-crafted harmonies of contrasts, the points of paint were applied, in analogous and complementary clusters, over gradated fields of local colors (such as green for grass) to form mutually enhancing fields of complementary hues. Using these techniques, unmixed (or divided) points of pigment were applied with the idea that the colors would blend in the eyes and minds of the viewer. Although this optical blending does not fully occur, these techniques produce a sense of vibrancy as the viewer’s eyes attempt to synthesize the multi-colore...

One of the most prolific and influential artists of the twentieth century, Jean Dubuffet has featured in a multitude of exhibitions and catalogues. Yet he remains one of the most misunderstood—and least interrogated—postwar French artists. Celebrating Art Brut (the art of ostensible outsiders) while posing as an outsider himself, Dubuffet mingled with the great artists, writers, and theorists, of his day and developed an elaborate and nuanced stream of conceptual resources to reconfigure painting and reframe anticultural discourses. This book reexamines Dubuffet’s art through the lens of these portraits (a veritable who’s who of the Parisian art and intellectual scene) in tandem with his writings and the art and writings of his Surrealist sitters. Investigating Dubuffet’s painting as bricolage, this book reveals his reliance upon an anticulture culture and the appropriation of motifs from Surrealism to the South Pacific to explore the themes of multivalence, performativity, and multifaceted identity.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/jean-dubuffet-bricoleur-9781501349454/

Art as Living Practice introduces a variety of artistic media and processes, provides insights into their histories, and explores how and why artists work as they do. Exploring connections between local and global art, this collaborative textbook highlights canonical artworks while investigating art on campus and in the regional Southeast Texas community.

A link to the talk "Art History in the Making: Art in the Age of Coronavirus" at the Lamar University Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement website, May 2020.

https://www.lamar.edu/blogs/ctle/2020/05/art%20history%20in%20the%20making%20art%20in%20the%20age%20of%20coronavirus%20with%20stephanie%20chadwick.html

A link to a video of the Taste of the Arts gallery talk for the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET) "Gulf Coast Lore and Lure" exhibition,  August 2019.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKS8Iq239cM&list=PLGPu3_kslWnNYBH1W_5PNHHZzRgpgkSp3&index=3

A link to  a video of the brief introduction to "Sensuality, Spirituality, and Yoga in the Art of India,”  a  collaborative talk with Dr. Anjali Kanojia, India Studies Director and Instructor, University of Houston held by the Lamar University Department of Art & Design, Oct. 2018.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=550085952099479