When we were in San Francisco recently we did get away from
the museums for a short time because there was a photography exhibition that I
wanted to see. Neither Penelope nor I
were inspired by it and I actually apologized for dragging my wife away from the
museums. We were, however, in one of
those art gallery buildings where there are several galleries on every
floor. As we walked down the hall, I saw
a familiar name, The Fraenkel Gallery. I
knew about it for two reasons, one was our interest in photography and two that
they were members of the Art Dealers Association of America which Stiebel, Ltd.
also belonged to for many years.
We wandered in and had a very pleasant surprise. Maybe pleasant is the wrong word. We were confronted by a 25-foot long photograph
of the Last Supper, which looked like it had gone through all the sturm und
drang of the original event!
At first I could not quite figure out how the photographer,
Hiroshi Sugimoto, had manipulated the photograph to get that effect. It turned out that he had not done anything
but rather he let an act of god assist with his creation. If you need an assistant, not a bad one to
have!
It took 13 years to complete the image. Now you can ask the
obvious question, --why? We have heard of
painters who start work on a painting and come back to it years later to finish
or rework the picture but this is extremely rare for a photographer and all
they can usually do is manipulate the negative or digital image.
In this case, Sugimoto saw a life size reproduction of
Leonardo’s “Last Supper” made in wax at the Izu Museum in Japan and had taken a
photograph of it. This is not an exact
reproduction of Leonardo’s work. We do
not see Judas reaching for the bread at the same time as Christ is but we do
see looks of consternation and concern on the part of the apostles, each worrying about who among
them will betray their master.
He later
stored the huge
sheets of one of the edition of 5 in his basement in lower Manhattan. It is then that god played His hand. Hurricane Sandy hit. For the art world it was a disaster, works of
art stored just above and below ground were destroyed, not only in private
basements but galleries, warehouses
and museums, as well.
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo and went to school both
in Japan and the United States. He is
truly an international artist who is recognized all over the world. His bibliography would fill this blog 3 times
over. According to one blurb he manages
to blur the lines between photography, painting, installation art and even
architecture. I think that it is this
ability that allowed him to patiently watch his work change over many weeks as it slowly dried.
Instead of discarding the work Sugimoto looked at it and saw
that the flood damage gave the
picture a dimension it did not have before. He titled the transformed image “The Last Supper: Acts of God”. One could actually
now not just see a photographic reproduction of a reproduction in wax but could
somehow feel the tension and foreboding of what was about to happen in the
scene depicted.
Thanks to Rebecca Herman I have the formal picture of the
entire work,
and a detail of the center
figure, Christ.
Other details I took myself.
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