Last week when I read the NY times article about the discovery of the 45,000 year old cave drawings I was reminded of the Zhou Brothers.
Let us now consider
- Cave paintings
- Abstract Expressionism
- The Zhou Brothers
- corporate suits in the Chicago Loop
It’s interesting to speculate about the species of mammal depicted in this cave 45,000 years ago, but it’s the hand that captivates us, isn’t it. It’s unimaginably far in the past and yet here it is, so immediate.
We’ve been fascinated by cave drawings since 1940, when eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat and his friends roamed through the woods in the Dordogne region in France, noticed a hole in the ground and crawled in. They discovered a cave that came to be called the Lascaux Cave and turned out to have hundreds of drawings made about 17,000 years ago.
By the late 1940’s Abstract Expressionism was in full swing in New York. In my readings I have never come across any artist working between 1940 and 1965 who claimed kinship with these ancestors that laid their hands on the rock wall, filled their cheeks with paint and blew. But the kinship is there, literally, in the sense that we are all descended from those ancients who left their hand prints on cave walls. To claim aesthetic kinship, however, would take a heavy hand on the Ouija board. Our Western aesthetic comes, not from cave paintings, but from the ancient Greeks, 500-400 BC.
Modernism is a rejection of these classical ideals. In the 1940’s, as Harold Rosenberg said, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Abstract Expressionism is characterized by gesture, brushstroke and action.
These are passages from DeKooning paintings to illustrate gesture, brushstroke and action:
Introducing the Zhou Brothers. The two Zhou brothers, born 1952 and 1957, emigrated from China to Chicago in 1986 and quickly became rich and famous. They work as a doubles team in attacking a canvas. A small painting can be a mere 4 x 4 feet. But large is what they are known for, like this:
I have not seen this particular painting, but I have seen one of their large paintings in the lobby of a Chicago sky scraper. How large? Large, sky-scraper-lobby-large.
The corporate finance guy who forked out the money for that large Zhou Brothers painting must have peered deeply into the corporate CEO’s soul, if you’ll allow that word in this context. Art buying at that scale is a gamble. My theory is that two mythologies converged in the CEO’s soul: the all-American sentimentality for things antique and that all-American can-do individualism. That would be, respectively, Neanderthal cave painting and Abstract Expressionism. The Zhou Brothers figured this out, just like that.
Next time I’m in Chicago I will find that Zhou Brothers painting and linger in the lobby to interview the people who walk through there every day. Just one question, excuse me, sir, what do you see in this painting, what jumps out at you, what do like best here, has your view of this painting changed over the years, what style of painting would you call this, what does it remind you of… sir? Sir?
This video shows the Zhou Brothers at the White House where their painting referencing American presidents is given to a Chinese official. In talking about the painting, they present themselves as manufacturers and calculating salesmen. The dimensions of the painting are 68 x 86. This is important, they tell us, because these are lucky numbers in Chinese culture. Also 86 is the country code! The red line in the painting symbolizes “spirit and the hope for the future of the US.”
Really? You’re painting in the 21st century, seducing us with this whiff of Abstract Expressionism and all the while you’re stuck in the symbolism of color, the kitsch belief in lucky numbers and the business of flattering politicians?
About cave paintings:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/science/cave-painting-indonesia.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting#Europe
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-04-02-9504020372-story.html
Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (1877 – 1961)
Lewis-Williams, David. The Mind in the Cave, 2002
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 
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