[I seem to be on something of an art jag on Rick On Theater just now (“Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait” on 15 January; “Art New York 2018” on 13 May; “Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900-1960” on 12 June), so I thought I’d dig up some comments on past art shows that are too brief to post on their own (they were parts of longer reports mostly about theater) and collect them in a “Short Takes”—something I haven’t done in a long time now—and post them for a look back. (The dates on each section below are the dates I wrote the original report; they are not necessarily the dates of the exhibits or my visit. Multiple dates indicate I wrote the complete report in installments.) One of the following mini-reports is on Edward Hopper, an exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in 2008 and which I mentioned in my recent post on the Whitney Museum’s Where We Are. Another segment below is on the Barnes Collection when it was at its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania, before it moved to Philadelphia. I haven’t seen the collection since the move, so I don’t know if the lay-out duplicates the initial set-up, mandated by founder Albert C. Barnes, but that arrangement of the art was unique, to say the least, and I though it would be interesting to record my impressions of that peculiar display. ~Rick]
PIERRE BONNARD: EARLY AND LATE
9 & 12 January 2003
Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (22 September
2002-19 January 2003), is interesting, but less so than its size would
suggest. It’s a big show, installed on three floors of the gallery (two
flights of stairs to climb), and covers his paintings, etchings and prints,
posters and illustrations, sketches, and photos. That was part of the
interesting aspect—that this artist, who really began as a dilettante, explored
so many different forms of expression, including the very new technique of
photography. (The photos on display were all from around 1900—some
original prints and some new prints from old negatives.)
There were works from his earliest
days right through the end of his life, but the most interesting works for me
were his prints and etchings. These were mostly small—though there was a
wonderful three-panel screen (he did several screens, inspired, apparently, by
the Japanese practice) of scenes from the Paris street. Many of his
prints were no more than four colors—a practice he experimented with
frequently. Bonnard (1867-1947) was also one of the first “graphic
artists” and he got his professional start making advertising posters (for
champagne, for instance), some of which resemble the famous theater posters of Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec. He also did illustrations for books and was one of
the very first graphic artists to use text as part of the artwork—not just the
content, but the style. Bonnard’s paintings were pretty much the least
interesting part of this show.
* * * *
THE CUBIST PAINTINGS OF DIEGO RIVERA:
MEMORY, POLITICS, PLACE
11-13 May 2004
A small show, The Cubist
Paintings of Diego Rivera: Memory, Politics, Place, was at
the National Gallery of Art’s East Building (4 April-25 July 2004): an exhibit
of Diego Rivera’s cubist paintings. Rivera (1886-1957) went to Paris in
the 1920s to study contemporary art on a stipend from the government from his
home state in Mexico. He was in the circle that included Pablo Picasso, Georges
Braque, and Marcel Duchamps, and others, and he began trying out all the
current styles, including Cubism, for brief periods, trying to find his own
voice. None of these experiments lasted very long, and there weren’t many
cubist works in the show—and most of them were interesting only as curiosities
the way Picasso’s realistic works as a young artist are. They merely
contrast with the more identifiable works of the maturer artists—in Rivera’s
case, the murals and Mexican history and folklore he worked with for most of
his career.
* * * *
HENRI ROUSSEAU: JUNGLES IN PARIS
21-25 August 2006
On Wednesday, 16 August 2004, my mother and I went down to the East Building of the
National Gallery to see Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (16 July-15 October 2006). Rousseau (1844-1910) isn’t among my
favorite artists; in fact, I find his paintings curious without being
really compelling. After reading the Washington Post review,
however, I found him an interesting socio-artistic phenomenon. First, he
was unschooled as an artist. He was a weekend duffer, so to speak, until
he retired from his job as a customs clerk at 49—he was known in the art world
as Le Douanier (the customs agent)—when he took up painting full
time. His aim was to be accepted by the Paris art establishment,
which was committed to Realism, but he failed completely.
He was, however, embraced by the
avant garde, the upstart Impressionists and their literary confrères (Guillaume
Apollinaire; Alfred Jarry, who gave him his nickname). Picasso bought
several of Rousseau’s paintings, as did others among the new, young artists and
writers—whom Rousseau rejected. (He found Matisse’s work “horribly ugly.”)
The irony is too much. The fact seems to be that Rousseau really stumbled
onto his naïve style and bold forms—he was trying to paint Realism and didn’t
have the skill. By sheer coincidence, he was doing naturally what the
Impressionists were trying to do, and they had a fondness for “primitive”
art. They usually found this in far-off cultures like Africa, but in
Rousseau, they saw their very own, homegrown primitive. (All those jungle
paintings, which were his most popular and are his most recognizable
today, are the products of his imagination and his visits to natural history
museums and international exhibitions or from magazine illustrations.
Rousseau never left France, and rarely left Paris. His notion of the
jungle wasn’t close to accurate—or he took tremendous liberties—since he
combined images that don’t belong together, such as an American Indian fighting
with a gorilla—in the rain forests of, what? Illinois?)
The Post even poses a
provocative paradox: “Rousseau’s best paintings are undeniably great . . . .
But that begs the question of whether the man who made them was also a great
artist.” When he died penniless and was buried in a pauper’s grave,
Picasso and fellow artist Robert Delaunay paid for a better plot, Apollinaire
wrote a poem for the headstone, and sculptor Constantin Brancusi engraved
it. I don’t care much about his art, but Rousseau’s story is wonderful.
As part of the exhibit, the gallery
is displaying many of the sources of Rousseau’s fantasies—a stuffed lion
attacking an antelope from a natural history museum, illustrations in nature
magazines, and so on. Among these are two large bronze statues by
Emmanuel Frémiet (described in the Post as “a hack realist”). One
of them is called Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman (1887), and that’s just
what it depicts. It looks exactly like a scene from King Kong (except
that the woman is more Jane Russell than Fay Wray). The museum labels and
panels don’t say if this was in any way connected to the movie—say an
inspiration for it—but you have to wonder if someone like the screenwriter or
the director, whoever originally conceived of the movie, hadn’t seen the
sculpture. I mean, it’s just too exact.
* *
* *
A
VIEW TOWARD PARIS: THE LUCAS COLLECTION OF 19TH-CENTURY FRENCH ART
17 January 2007
Mom and I drove over to Charm City
(I don’t know, either) to see an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art and got
my cousin, who lives in Baltimore, to meet us there. The show, A View
Toward Paris: The Lucas Collection of 19th-Century French Art (1 October–31 December 2006), had
gotten an interesting review in the Washington Post and was going to
close on the last day of the year, so we went over on Thursday, 28 December
2006, on what turned out to be a beautiful afternoon.
George A. Lucas (1824-1909) was the
heir to a Baltimore papermaking fortune who made a trip to Paris in 1857 and
ended up staying 52 years, until his death. He became an
art collector, both for himself and as agent for others back in the U.S
(including Duncan Phillips, whose art became the basis for the Phillips
Collection in Washington; William and Henry Walters, who formed the Walters Art
Museum in Baltimore; and William Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Gallery of
Art in D.C.). Lucas was instrumental in bringing many of the
late-19th-century painters on the Paris art scene to the attention of American
collectors and critics. But he had one peculiarity in retrospect (though
it wouldn’t have seemed so at the time): he liked the art that everyone else
liked, including the contemporary critics—the mainstream art, not the
avant-garde work by the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists. As a
result, the works and artists he championed weren’t the ones that later went
down in art history as the greats of the era and have emerged as the icons of
modern art.
This isn’t to say Lucas collected
bad art or supported mediocre artists—they were the stars of their day, in
fact, and the point of the exhibit, in a way, is a reappreciation of these
neglected painters who are often totally unknown today—undeservedly so,
according to Post critic Blake Gopnik. (Gopnik points out that one
artist, August Molin, “doesn’t appear once in the 32,600 pages of the Grove
Dictionary of Art, and even a thorough Google search comes up with all of two
hits that have anything to do with him.” He suggests that “his impressive
walk-on part in the Lucas show will get some graduate student to dig deeper.”)
Since most of the works fall into the Realism and Romanticism categories—not my
favorite styles of painting—and only a few barely touch on the emerging
Impressionist challenge, the medium-sized show (200 works) became a little
repetitive for me, but there were certainly some charming pieces.
(Nothing for a Midnight Shopping Trip, though.)
What’s more, a number of the artists in the exhibit were the teachers of the emerging Impressionists or had been
influential on their development. In addition, the comparison of the
works in Lucas’s collection—he ended up with 300 paintings and almost 20,000
prints—with the more famous works of the late 19th century not only shows a
little of the development of the groundbreaking innovation that was
Impressionism but also raises your appreciation for those iconoclastic artists
and their work. (Impressionism is one of my favorite styles of
art.) It wasn’t a great art exhibit, and not to my mind as interesting as
the Picasso and American Art at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York City a few months ago (28 September 2006–28 January
2007), but it was more than pleasant, and had its virtues. (One
curiosity, because Lucas developed relationships with many of the artists whose
works he bought, was that some of the painters presented him with their
palettes—some just as they had been used for work and others with art added as
a lagniappe.)
Besides the art, Mom, my cousin, and
I had lunch in the museum restaurant. And, since we were in Baltimore, I
got to have crab cakes from an authentic Maryland kitchen! Unless
you’ve had crab cakes from within shouting distance of the Chesapeake, you
haven’t lived!! (If you’ve had them anywhere else, conversely, you
have no idea what you’re missing.)
* * * *
THE BARNES COLLECTION (Merion, Pennsylvania)
20 August/20 September/27 September 2007
[The Barnes
Collection reopened at its new building in Philadelphia on 19 May 2012.]
On my
return to New York City on Friday, 17 August 2007, after a visit with my mother
in Washington, Mom decided to accompany me so we could make a detour to Merion,
Pennsylvania, the suburb of Philadelphia where the Barnes Collection is located
(until they move to Philadelphia as they plan). In part because of the
way Albert C. Barnes set his foundation up and the restrictions he put on it in
his will, this is also a confusing collection—although the quality of the art
makes up some for the oddness of the display. (I won’t go into all the
peculiarities of the legal set-up—it’s been in the news for the past several
years as the board has sought permission to move from Merion into
Philadelphia—but he mandated that no painting could be moved, either on the
walls or from the building. This is why
the courts are involved in the proposed move, which the museum’s directors feel
is necessary to increase attendance and income in order to maintain the
collection.)
Barnes
(1872-1951), who became wealthy from a pharmaceutical invention he made in
the early 20th century, also became interested in art, especially modern art
(though he also has an extensive collection of African pieces) and began
collecting here and in Europe at the turn of the last century into the years
before WWII. Now, some guys who do that end up with awful pieces by some
of the most famous artists of the modern canon, but Barnes had excellent taste
and he has a beautiful collection of Monets, Cézannes, Prendergasts (both
brothers), Modiglianis, Lipschitzes (mostly sculptures), Klees, Picassos,
Rouaults, and so on.
But the
paintings are mounted on walls in no order or thematic arrangement
whatsoever, and they are hung from about waist height to about 10-12 feet off
the ground. (Mother said that when she first went there years ago, they
were hung all the way to the ceiling.) They’re not labeled (though the
artists’ last names are sometimes on the frames) so the only way to
identify the paintings (none of the sculptures or other objects—there are some
tapestries and a lot of furniture pieces—are identified at all) is to go to the
small placards placed in each room. These are a photograph of each wall
(or, when the wall is long and full of art, half the wall) with each picture
frame numbered. Below the photo of the wall layout is a list with
corresponding numbers that names the paintings, the artists, the dates, and the
media, like the wall labels on most other museums.
Since
there are at least four different layouts in each room, and there are several
copies of each placard, you have to shuffle through all of them to find the
wall you want to look at, then find the next one, and so on. Not only is
this an annoying task, it’s also time-consuming; the visit to each gallery
takes at least half again as long as it otherwise would. The
galleries—there are two floors of art; Barnes had 2500 pieces when he died in
1951—are also dimly lit and there are no lights on each painting. (This
is not a building converted from a residence or anything; it was built, albeit
in the ’20s, to be an art gallery.) As I said, if it weren’t for the
quality of the man’s art, the Barnes would be a monumentally frustrating place
to visit.
* * * *
EDWARD HOPPER
4
February 2008
(21 December 2007-4 January 2008)
[I quoted from these
comments in my report on the Whitney’s Where We Are.]
I’m
not really a fan of Edward Hopper, but I’ll
give a very brief (well, superficial anyway) run-down of the National Gallery exhibit
nonetheless. A fairly large show was at the East Building of the NGA on the Mall. We went down to see Edward Hopper
on Boxing Day, 26 December 2008, and
encountered a very long line snaking around the second floor of the East
Building. The line kept growing even as we stood debating whether we
should switch over to the West Building and give J. M. W. Turner a
try; but fortunately, it moved quickly and we spent a pleasant-enough afternoon
walking through the several galleries housing the 110 works of the
show.
Hopper (1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless. His
lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and
vacant. Even in the works with people, they are distant and
alone—unengaged. I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art,
but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic
experience. He was captivated by architecture and the way light and
shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from
different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to
capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an
aesthetic evocation.
Hopper painted at the same time
that many other American artists were turning away from figuration and
experimenting with abstraction and expressionism (and, er, Abstract Expressionism), but he fiercely resisted the shift and
became an icon among younger and later artists of figurative painting.
(Not surprisingly, I guess, I am a fan of abstract art; I know some
commentators—not necessarily art critics, however—see that movement as a
fraud on gullible viewers, arguably most famously the late Morley Safer’s “Yes
. . . but Is It Art?” segment on CBS’s 60
Minutes on 19 September 1993, but I’ve
always found the works exciting and moving, emotional and expressive.) So
I found the show, called simply Edward Hopper, pretty much just a
curiosity; there was nothing I wanted to come back for on a Midnight Shopping
Trip.
This doesn’t mean that I didn’t
learn anything, however. The earliest works in the exhibit were etchings;
I never knew Hopper did any kind of print work, and the 12 small etchings on
show here, though they all displayed the same focus on empty cityscapes
and lonely figures, were somehow more interesting to me than the later
large oils. (Hopper also painted watercolors in his early days.) I
will also add that there’s a strange kind of theatricality in Hopper’s paintings—not action or drama, but his interiors
especially look like stage sets, a kind of set designer’s rendering.
There’s
an implied plot in some of them. People sitting, essentially isolated
even in a group, in a diner, viewed from the street through a long expanse of
window (Nighthawks, 1942), make you wonder what might have just
happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark,
empty street. The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a
near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)—what’s she thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her vision? But
these are intellectual curiosities, not emotionally-engaging ones. A
Hopper play would likely be one in which people sit around speaking in low
tones—but only occasionally, leaving most of the play to silence.
[I mentioned in
passing a “Midnight Shopping Trip” above a couple of times. As regular ROTters will recall, this was my mother and my private
joke, used as a benchmark for art shows we liked, suggesting a return after
closing to pick up the pieces we liked.]
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