The greatest artist in the world

Ben Lewis

Guillermo Kuitca, Mozart-Da Ponte I (1995), oil, pastel and graphite on canvas: “a visual drama running from the stalls to the upper circle…”

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Some great artists achieve fame and fortune early in their careers, like Picasso or Jackson Pollock. Others labour in poverty, recognised only after their death, like Modigliani. But there is a third story—of artists who are widely-known, highly regarded and whose work is even expensive from a relatively early point in their career, but whose reputation is, at some point, radically revised upwards. They move, so to speak, from the top 100, into the top 20. Francis Bacon, for example, has long been seen as an important British painter—and a good painting would have cost you £1-3m a decade ago—but it is only in the last five years that he has become one of the greatest postwar painters, with price-tags to match Rothko and Pollock. Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein are similar artists who have shot up the pecking order during the contemporary art boom of the last decade.

Every time the art market booms, another handful of artists get this warp factor nine treatment and I believe I have a candidate for the next boom—the 49-year-old Guillermo Kuitca. He is Argentina’s leading painter. His work was displayed prominently at the 2007 Venice Biennale by its director Robert Storr. He is represented in the US and Europe by heavy-hitting commercial galleries—yet he is little known outside certain collecting circles. This year he is the subject of a magnificent travelling retrospective—Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008—organised by three of America’s major institutions, the Miami Art Museum (until 17th January), the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, New York (from 19th February to 30th May) and the Hirshhorn in Washington DC (from 21st October to 16th January 2011). It is the artist’s first survey show in the US in 15 years.

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Who’s afraid of the avant-garde?

Philip Ball

Looking at Rothko: no harder to “see” than wallpaper

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Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen
By David Stubbs (Zero Books, £9.99)

The writer Joe Queenan caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music last year by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) “35 minutes of non-stop torture,” Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano” and Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling.” “A hundred years after Schoenberg,” he wrote, “the public still doesn’t like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.”

Inevitably, Queenan was lambasted as a reactionary philistine. Performances of “modern” works like this were well attended, his critics said. And while Queenan took pains to distance himself from the conservative concertgoers who demand a steady diet of Mozart and Brahms, his comments were denounced as the same old clichés. Yet clichés become clichés for a reason. It’s true that these challenging works will find audiences in London’s highbrow venues, but the fact remains that Stockhausen and Penderecki, whose works are now as old as “Rock Around the Clock,” have not been assimilated into the classical canon in the way that Ravel and Stravinsky have. When someone like Queenan has earnestly tried and failed to appreciate this “new” music, it’s fair to ask what the problem is.

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