For several years late in the decade Andy Partridge was one of the most interesting/disturbing/exciting/innovative and talented songwriters/singers/guitarists in popular music. Songs such as "Dear God", "Merely a Man" and "Mayor of Simpleton" to name just a few kept power pop relevant in the days leading up to the grunge onslaught. Partridge's lyrics were brutally cynical and took on all comers from religion to politics to consumerism with a vitriol that seemed not quite consistent with his baby-faced, good boy looks.

After contract disputes led to the end of XTC following the stellar album "Nonsuch" Partridge became something of a musical vagabond which is what he remains to this day (XTC, says Partridge, is something he thinks of "in the past tense"). He lives a fairly secluded life with his long time gf Erica Wexler and is fond of creating his own board games.







Left:
Then: Andy Partridge late 80s
Now: Andy Partridge and GF Erica Wexler

After a long time away during which I've been helping my friend Rich Chambers with his film projects I've decided to get the 80s party back on track as best I can while working around shooting schedules and post production obligations.

So, without further ado...

What better way to conjure the glorious 80s than with the desperate lyrics of Roger Waters and perhaps the greatest guitar solo in the history of rock from David Gilmour. Yes, we're going to get this party re-started with "Comfortably Numb" from Pink Floyd's "The Wall"; a snarling dragon of a concept album if ever there was one. No need to remind me it was released in November '79 because it doesn't matter. This album laid down the tone for the decade to come.

The modern "blockbuster" art show has come and largely gone over the last 30 years. Sure there are occasional exceptions like the recent Leonardo show in London but for the most part the day when a new year meant at least one new retrospective by some titan of art are dead and gone, killed off by insurance companies.

But lets wind the clock back to the happier days of 1980 when the art blockbuster - as an entire generation of art lovers came to understand the term - was born. The event which gave birth to the new cultural phenomenon was the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective. This massive, thrilling, disturbing, enlightening and exuberant show took over MOMA from May 22 until September 16 of that year and was as much an eye opener for museums around the world as it was for lovers of modern art. Hundreds of thousands of patrons moved through MOMA's turnstiles and were rewarded with a comprehensive overview of one of the most widely known yet little understood artists who ever lived. The exhibition took over the entire museum, an unprecedented occurrence but a necessary one as nearly a thousand works were included in the show. Day after day lines stretched down West 53rd Street . Inside awaited room after room of paintings that changed the course of visual history.

From "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" to "Still Life with Chair Caning" to "The Three Musicians" to the to the mindblowing graphic work of the 1930s "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" prepared the ground and set the bar for blockbusters that followed and made the 1980s a golden age for art lovers.

Picasso - "Minotauromachy" 1935 - etching

Blade Runner, released in 1982, is one of the most influential sci-fi movies ever made and certainly an iconic 80s flick. Shortly after the film was released "The Blade Runner Sketchbook" - which compiled concept art for the film from Syd Mead, Mentor Huebner, Ridley Scott himself and others - was published as a companion piece, though it's print run wasn't remarkable and it disappeared from bookstore shelves pretty quickly.

Now, however, through the miracle of modern technology the entire book is available to view online; for free! Anyone who's a fan of this classic film will want to see this. The reproduction quality is generally excellent and the presentation first rate. If you love 80s films and Blade Runner in particular you owe it to yourself to take a look.

Here are a couple of samples from the online edition with a link after the pics to the full version.



View the entire online edition here.

He had been a mainstay of postwar British art but he was either unknown or largely ignored in the rest of the world. Until, that is, the 1987 retrospective of his work mounted by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington brought him front and center.

There was a figurative revival of sorts going on in the States during the 80s as the artworld took a step back from the brink it had been teetering on for over a decade. Artists like Eric Fischl and to a lesser extent Mark Tansey were nominal heads of this nascent flight back to quality. But it wasn't until the Hirshhorn's Freud retrospective that the movement had someone they could rally behind without hesitation. And they did. Not that a Fischl and a Freud had a lot in common beneath the surface (or on the surface for that matter), but the sheer authority of Freud's vision cleared a path for a new generation of painters in the realist tradition and showed that the expressive possibilities of the figure were far from either exhausted or irrelevant.

Within about a year following the '87 retrospective Freud went from "British portrait painter" to "the greatest living realist painter". Not a bad trick for a guy in his mid 60s at the time. Admirably he never succumbed to the temptation to believe his own press or wasted time basking in the spotlight. Instead, almost up to the time of his death in London on Wednesday he kept to his rigorous studio schedule and in doing so remained an example for countless younger artists.

A late self-portrait by Lucien Freud

Andy Warhol was afraid of doctors. He didn't trust them or like hospitals. Consequently when he entered New York Hospital in February 1987 for a routine gallbladder operation he did so reluctantly. And wouldn't you know it, his worst fears were realized. After a successful surgery he developed a sudden cardiac arrhythmia while recuperating and died in his sleep on Feb 22 1987. It was a strange event in that most people didn't know what to make of Andy Warhol while he was alive let alone how to react to news of his death. He seemed little more than that aloof celebrity hound always ready with a glib response to questions about his work, but on the other hand he seemed to help bring art back from the abyss of non-figurativism which had left so many members of the public out in the cultural cold. And he was famous, which by the 80s had become more important in and of itself to most people than what someone was actually famous FOR - a phenomenon promoted and in some ways invented by Warhol himself.

Regardless of what others thought of him though Andy was always looking forward and with his will he directed that the bulk of his estate go to fund the creation of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Since its inception the foundation has funded thousands of artists and art projects through direct grants. The Andy Warhol museum was also founded in his native Pittsburgh.

The Warhol Museum - Pittsburgh

On November 11, 1987 Sotheby's, New York auctioned off a previously little known work by the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. The painting was Irises and Van Gogh, when he was alive, never thought of the work as more than a sketch. Alan Bond, who had risen from virtually nothing to become one of the richest men in Australia (and who garnered international fame in 1983 by becoming the first non-American since 1841 to win the America's Cup) apparently held a much higher opinion of it and paid the then unheard of sum of 53.9 million dollars for the work, sending shockwaves through the art world.

His purchase touched off the era of the blockbuster art sale, and had a cascading effect few would have foreseen. If Irises was worth $54 million then how much was the much more famous "Starry Night" worth? If you were a museum that owned Starry Night how much did your insurance just increase by? If, in the past you were a private collector who might have been inclined to loan your Van Gogh out to this institution or that for scholarly retrospectives etc you now held it close to home for fear someone might steal it if you let it out of your sight. Or you simply sold it outright to some private collector from overseas for zillions of bucks and he treated it like any other big investment, locking it away in a vault somewhere.

Unfortunately the problems caused by the onset of the blockbuster auction have only become worse over the intervening years and there's no reason to think things won't continue to get crazier and crazier, with the big loser being, of course, the art loving public.

But back to Irises: There was only one problem with the auction of Irises and that was that Bond didn't have the money to back up his purchase. He wound up borrowing most of it from Sotheby's. As a result Sotheby's kept the painting as collateral against the money it had loaned Bond and the brazen Australian never even got to enjoy hanging the painting over his mantle.

Three years later the painting was re-sold by Sotheby's to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles where it hangs to this day.

For more about Van Gogh's life click here.

Van Gogh musem here.

New York Observer has a really interesting article that revisits the handful of artists who were making big waves in NYC during the 80s. A lot of them have just kind of faded into the background, (including a former teacher of mine, Eric Fischl), and not really been replaced by anyone new.

Read the full article here