Two Restorations

 

 “CONSERVATORS SHINE NEW LIGHT ON IRREPLACEABLE ART”
by Jared Bowen

[This segment was broadcast on PBS NewsHour [now PBS News Hour] on 26 December 2014.  A series of paintings created by Mark Rothko for Harvard University was thought irreparably damaged by years of sun exposure and removed from view.  Thirty-five years later, the paintings have returned, thanks to art historians and curators using digital projection, which offers viewers the appearance of restoration for works too fragile to touch. The segment was produced by Boston’s WGBH.] 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now: an art restoration breakthrough.

An international team of art historians and curators have developed a new technique to restore works of art without ever touching them. It’s being used for the first time on a Mark Rothko mural.

Jared Bowen from WGBH in Boston has this report.

JARED BOWEN: Even in 1960, it was a coup, when Harvard University landed Mark Rothko [1903-70; born in Dvinsk, Russian Empire, now part of Latvia] to paint a series of murals for its new penthouse dining room. Rothko was already considered one of the country’s greatest artist[s], and this was to be among his biggest commissions.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR, Senior Conservation Scientist, Harvard Art Museums: He really wanted you to be up close and surrounded by his work so that you could feel the — feel the painting.

JARED BOWEN: Rothko paint[ed] panels to envelop the space. They and the studies and sketches he produced in planning them are now on view in the newly renovated Harvard Art Museum’s first special exhibition [16 November 2014-26 July 2015, Special Exhibitions Gallery].

They were robustly read [red?], says curator Mary Schneider Enriquez.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ, Associate Curator, Harvard Art Museum: He had been focusing on these kind[s] of purples and crimson, as we like to say, of course, at Harvard. [Harvard’s school color is crimson and it is also the university’s frequent nickname.]

The ground of crimson or purple is then set off with these extraordinary contrasts of this red that is just incredible. As you look at any of his paintings, the play of color and contrast blending and then working against and with each other has always been essential to his work.

JARED BOWEN: The panels were officially installed in 1964, but were in steep competition with the room’s Harvard Yard views. The penthouse shades were rarely drawn and the light-sensitive murals suffered substantial damage.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: As the sun would traverse the sky, the paintings became faded, and in an uneven way because of the geometry of the room, so some parts were shadowed. Some parts received more sunlight. The paintings changed. And so what started off as a unified whole slowly drifted apart.

JARED BOWEN: By 1979, Harvard realized the murals were irreparably damaged and removed them from their dining room perch. And the series, one of only three ever painted by Rothko, was placed into storage and, aside from a few exhibitions, had largely disappeared from public view and memory.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: It’s been an extremely sad thing that this extraordinary work of art has not been included in the art history of Rothko. So it’s been a real priority for all of us to bring these works back to our — back to a place in which we can study them and recognize the achievement in th[ese] extraordinary paintings.

JARED BOWEN: Thirty-five years after removal, Rothko’s murals are once again on view, hung in the same configuration in a room with the same dimensions and against walls painted the same olive mustard Rothko himself chose.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: This really brings them back and puts them in the middle of his entire history in a major way.

JARED BOWEN: But they had to be hung without touching the canvasses, says conservation scientist Narayan Khandekar. It turns out Rothko mixed his own paint, which inadvertently left the canvases overly susceptible to ruin and far too fragile for physical touch-ups. [See my post “Conserving Modern Art,” 11 December 2018, on Rick On Theater.]

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: Rothko used this binding medium, glue-size, which is — gives a very porous surface. And if you put any kind of isolating varnish over that, it would saturate the paint. It would change the color relationships. Everything that we do as a conservation approach also has to be reversible.

JARED BOWEN: How to restore the Rothkos to their original glory without ever touching them? To achieve that, Harvard collaborated with art historians and conservation teams from MIT and the University of Basel in Switzerland. They devised a software program that replicates Rothko’s original paintings pixel by pixel, color by color.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: We were able to have access to an alternate panel that had been shipped up to Cambridge, but not installed, and which had unfaded sections on it, and were able to use those to make the final adjustments on the digital image of what the paintings looked like.

JARED BOWEN: The digital recreation is projected with nonthreatening low light onto the canvas.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: It’s about 2.07 million pixels. So, we have to calculate the color and the intensity for each of these pixels and then shine it in exactly the right spot.

The color that’s on the painting, plus the compensation image, gives the viewer the impression of what the paintings looked like in 1964. We’re very, very confident that we’re as close as can be for this project.

JARED BOWEN: The technology is a game-changer, museum officials say, but it also raises questions about whether conservation in the digital age fundamentally changes the art. Rothko’s color is back, but no longer by his own hand.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: One of the key questions is, where is the line between what is the original work of art and the art that has the projection system on it? I mean, have we changed what he has done? No, we haven’t changed his canvases.

JARED BOWEN: But they have changed the possibility that damaged masterpieces the world over can once again see the light of day with the elaborately configured light of a projector.

I’m Jared Bowen for the “NewsHour” in Boston.

[Jared Bowen is the Host and Executive Arts Editor at public media company GBH.  (GBH is the trade name of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a public broadcasting group based in Boston, Massachusetts, and some of its public media outlets)  

[He is host of the daily radio program/podcast The Culture Show, is a regular guest host on Boston Public Radio, and a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.  He’s also the moderator of the sold-out Boston Speakers Series at Symphony Hall.]

*  *  *  *
“HITCHCOCK’S FASCINATION WITH DANCE”
by Sarah Kaufman 

[Sarah Kaufman’s report on the restoration of Hitchcock’s first known directorial work on a feature film ran in the Washington Post on 4 August 2013 (sec. E [“Arts”]).]

Of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic obsessions, the moving body is one of the most remarkable. He lingered on bodies in motion with a choreographer’s eye to show us panic, passion and the fragile nature of sanity. Now, in a newly restored version of Hitchcock’s first film, a 1925 silent movie called “The Pleasure Garden,” we can see the roots of that fascination. It all started with dancers.

“The Pleasure Garden,” which will be screened Sunday [4 August 2013] at the National Gallery of Art, is a tale of greed, betrayal and murder centered on a pair of chorus girls. One remains a backup dancer but the other becomes a star, because she shows more leg. Their friendship frays as Jill [Carmelita Geraghty (1901-66)], the starlet, throws off her fiance to be a prince’s mistress, while hard-working, naive Patsy [Virginia Valli (1896-1968)] marries a schemer with loose morals and a looser grip on reality.

The action sweeps from London to Lake Como and on to Dakar, where Patsy finds herself in a battle for her life that had me holding my breath. I think I was gasping. And I was just watching a press screener on my computer, with no music. (The National Gallery will have live accompaniment [a new score was commissioned for the restoration by British composer Daniel Patrick Cohen (b. 1988)].)

Hitchcock [1899-1980], master of suspense — even in the infancy of his career.

On top of that, he delivers the sisterly camaraderie, ephemeral glamour, drudgery and creepiness of London’s nightclub scene — and the strong backbone surviving in it demands, as seen in the film’s plucky heroine — with verve and a surprising depth of insight.

“What every chorus girl knows,” reads one of the inter-titles, and next we see a dancer elbow-deep in soapsuds, washing her tights.

Yet it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the British filmmaker had a soft spot for dancers. Think of his nonverbal finesse, his precise and fluid way of blocking scenes and isolating gestures, as in a work of dance-theater. He put his actors in motion with a kinetic charge that was simple, direct and emotionally powerful — Cary Grant running for his life in “North by Northwest” [1959], and earlier in the film, striding down a hall in a way that told us what kind of man he was. And recall the dizzying grace of Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s slow-dance kiss in “Notorious” [1946] as the camera swirls around them.

“The Pleasure Garden” was restored by the British Film Institute National Archive in a three-year project to refurbish the nine silent Hitchcock movies that still exist. Produced between 1925 and 1929, they suffered varying degrees of damage over the years. Now cleaned and pieced back to near-original form, the films have been on an international tour. “The Hitchcock 9” has been presented here by the AFI Silver Theatre [Silver Spring, Maryland] and the National Gallery. “The Pleasure Garden” is last in the series.

Of the nine, “The Pleasure Garden” has a double significance. It proves, astonishingly, that the seeds of many Hitchcockisms were planted at the start: his love of motion, but also his fondness for voyeurism, staircases, binoculars, ominous beverages and dirty jokes. Here, right off the bat, Hitchcock is Hitchcock, almost fully formed. At 26.

The very fact that we can marvel at the director’s early ease is a result of “The Pleasure Garden’s” second point of interest: This film was in the worst shape, and is now the crowning glory of the restoration project.

It is “the standout example of how restoration can affect the viewing of the film,” Kieron Webb, the BFI’s film conservation manager, said in a recent phone interview. The film had previously been known only in incomplete copies, with what appeared to be two different versions in circulation, Webb said, and both were missing footage. With the restoration, an extra 20 minutes was added. Missing bits of one section were found on a Dutch print; a lost scene was added from an original nitrate print preserved at Southern Methodist University [University Park, Texas]. The tints and tones were corrected to better match the setting and mood. Finally, the film was cleaned of dirt and mold, and scratches and tears were digitally repaired.

If you see “The Pleasure Garden,” though, you won’t be thinking about the hundreds of hours technicians spent sprucing it up. You’ll be making mental notes of the symbols and images that Hitchcock returned to later in his career. The film opens with a snaking line of dancers clattering down a spiral staircase (“Vertigo” [1958] alert!) into the bowels of the theater, taking us down to an underworld where it’s not artistry that counts, but how much skin you show.

Hitchcock may have been thinking of [Edgar] Degas [French Impressionist painter and sculptor; 1834-1917], whose top-hatted dandies peering at ballerinas didn’t have art on their minds either. The next scene is like something out of a Degas painting: A long tracking shot takes us across a row of finely dressed gentlemen in the audience leering at the dancers with predatory enthusiasm. One gent is peering through binoculars, and we see, “Rear Window”-style [1954], exactly the extent of the flesh he’s ogling.

At one point, Patsy is having tea, and the camera zooms in on her cup, where a couple of tea leaves are floating. It calls to mind that eerie glass of milk, glowing supernaturally in Cary Grant’s hand as he carried it up to Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion” [1941], and the frame-filling shot of the coffee cup that is poisoning Bergman in “Notorious.”

But what’s so special about the tea? Webb explains it’s a Britishism that would have resonated with audiences at the time. The leaves represent “an omen about a stranger approaching,” he said, and at that moment Patsy meets the handsome villain who will talk her into marrying him.

Thanks to the BFI’s restoration, we’re treated to a sly little shot pertaining to that marriage that had been lost. It was discovered at SMU, and it offers a telling bit of Hitchcock’s humor. Remember, this is a man who liked to punctuate a love scene with a bawdy punch line — the train entering a tunnel after a kiss in “North by Northwest,” fireworks exploding after a cuddle in “To Catch a Thief” [1955]. So as the pretty young dancer wakes up from her wedding night, beaming, the director gives us a close-up of a bitten apple.

Not subtle, but then again, kid Hitchcock was scarcely out of his teens.

[Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, author, journalist, and educator.  For more than 30 years, she has focused on the union of art and everyday living.  As the chief dance critic and senior arts writer of the Washington Post from 1996-2022, she wrote about the performing arts, pop culture, sports, science and personal expression.

[Kaufman’s work has been featured on national radio and television, including NBC News, CNBC, the PBS NewsHour, and On Point with Tom Ashbrook.  

[The screenplay for The Pleasure Garden was written by Eliot Stannard (1888-1944), based on the 1925 novel of the same name by Oliver Sandys (pseudonym of Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis; 1886-1964).  The movie was a British-German production, shot in Italy and Germany in 1925.  It was released briefly in the United Kingdom in 1926, but withdrawn and rereleased officially in 1927, becoming a huge hit.

[The restored Pleasure Garden, with the new score, has not been released on video due to a lack of funding to record it adequately.  Available DVD releases contain a poor quality and badly edited version of the film, and there are bootlegged copies on the market as well.  As of 2021, The Pleasure Garden has become the first Hitchcock film to enter the public domain.

[“The Hitchcock 9” restoration was started in 2012 and took three years to complete.  The other eight films were: Blackmail (1929), Champagne (1928), Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmer’s Wife (1927), The Lodger (1927), The Manxman (1929), and The Ring (1927).]

Art From Collections

 

[I’ve compiled another small collection of old art reports from my archive.  The first two reports below predate Rick On Theater and the third was never posted on the blog. 

[Though I may have added information to the original reports, such as life dates for significant people named in the account, I haven’t edited my comments from my initial write-up.

[A note pertinent to all these archival reports, both on theater and on art: the dates in the headings are the dates on which the reports were originally written; the dates on which I attended the events—the play or art exhibit—are in the text (if I kept a record of them at the time) and I’ve added the dates the events were scheduled at the theater or museum/gallery, also within the text.]

AN ARTIST’S ARTIST: JACOB KAINEN’S COLLECTION
National Gallery of Art, West Building
Washington, D.C.
9 & 12 Jan. 2003 

My mother and I went to the National Gallery of Art’s West Building to see An Artist’s Artist: Jacob Kainen’s Collection (22 September 2002-9 February 2003).  Kainen (1909-2001) was himself an artist, a painter, draftsman, and printmaker (I have a color etching and aquatint of his, Masquerade [1976], formerly part of my parents’ collection), but he was a curator (with the Division of Graphic Arts of the Smithsonian Institution’s United States National Museum—now the National Museum of American History) and an art scholar with several significant books to his name (The Etchings of Canaletto, 1967; John Baptist Jackson: 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut, 1962). 

This exhibit, consisting of 77 prints and 2 drawings, is of the art he owned, not the art he made—and he had exquisite taste.  (Mother and I judge an exhibit by the number of pieces we’d like to come back for on a midnight shopping trip.  Kainen, whom my folks knew somewhat in their art-gallery days [see “Gres Gallery,” posted on ROT on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018]—which is how they acquired the piece I now have—had a number we’d have liked to own!) 

Most of this collection, culled from more than 400 pieces which Kainen willed to the NGA, are etchings and prints—a special interest of his; he taught printmaking at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts (1945-1956)—and go back as far as Rembrandt (he owned only one) and the early Renaissance and up to the modern era. 

The collection includes many modern artists such as Alexander Calder (a favorite of mine, both for his sculpture and his prints, one of which I have in my living room, and, especially, his mobiles) and Joan Miró.  Kainen’s taste was obviously eclectic, but if similarity in taste is any criterion, he really knew his stuff! 

Artists have always collected the work of other artists and their collections often reveal a span of personal connections and aesthetic curiosity that are frequently far different from their own styles.  

Kainen’s private art collection included etchings by Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606-69), Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641), and Giovanni Canaletto (Italian. 1697-1768), to woodcuts by Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938), and Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867-1945).

There’s quite a contrast between Kainen’s own bold color abstractions and his favorite etchings such as the elegant images of 17th-century French painter Laurent de la Hyre (1606-56) or the detailed rustic landscapes of 19th-century British artist Samuel Palmer (1805-81).

Kainen’s strong political and aesthetic allegiances are apparent in his Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-79) lithographs, his American works from the 1930s, and his outstanding German Expressionist prints (the subject of an NGA exhibit in 1985-86, German Expressionist Prints from the Collection of Ruth and Jacob Kainen, and its published catalogue).  

Kainen’s experience in New York—where his family moved when he was 9 and where he studied art at the Art Students League and the Pratt Institute—in the thirties put him in touch with the New York School, from Louis Lozowick (Russian-born American painter and printmaker, 1892-1973) to John Graham (American painter, 1886-1961), to David Smith (American sculptor, 1906-65).

The interest in printmaking led to his admiration for the technical brilliance of Félix-Hilaire Buhot’s (French, 1847-98) views of city and shore.  One of his last collecting enthusiasms, and another of his most valued additions to the NGA collection, are great examples of American landscapes from the 19th-century etching revival: from the finesse of James Smillie (Scottish-born American, b. 1944) and the tonality of J. C. Nicoll (American, 1847-1918) to the grandeur of Thomas Moran (American, 1837-1926).

(There’s a museum in D.C., not far from my mom’s apartment, featuring another private collection of a wealthy Washingtonian named David Lloyd Kreeger (1909-90).  He’s the Kreeger of the Arena’s Kreeger Theater, the company’s proscenium house. 

(He had a very large art collection and some years ago, several years before he died, he built a big house on Foxhall Road—D.C.’s Sutton Place, in a way—that was intended to become a museum after his death.  The Kreeger Museum opened in 1994.

(My folks knew Kreeger, too, and we were invited to his new house soon after he built it—I was visiting at the time—and saw his collection before it was augmented and mediated by museum curators and others.  He had works by many famous artists, mainly from the mid-1800s through the Pablo Picassos, Piet Mondrians, and Amadeo Modiglianis, as well as later artists. 

(The problem was that he’d selected some of the worst examples of art these great artists made!  He knew artists; he didn’t really know art—or he had execrable taste, which is probably the same thing.  Kainen didn’t suffer from that deficiency.

(In an odd coincidence, another of Kreeger’s philanthropic endeavors was a gift to Rutgers University to renovate the Douglass College campus’s Little Theater.  As readers of Rick On Theater may know, I was a grad student at what is now the Mason Gross School of the Arts, then housed at Douglass, and I worked often at the Little; Kreeger was an undergraduate at Rutgers—probably at Rutgers College—in the ’20s.)

*  *  *  *

[The brief report below, on the Sackler exhibit Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, covers art that’s not precisely a private collection in the sense that the Meyerhoff, Kainen, and Dale collections are.  First of all, 10 of the 60 paintings on display were on loan from several other museum holdings and, second, the remaining 50 works are from the palace collection of the Maharaja of Marwar-Jodhpur, held by the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, a cultural institution and museum that publishes research on its collection and undertakes conservation programs. 

[In any event, virtually none of the art had ever been seen by the public since they were created before this exhibit was assembled and after its début at the Sackler Gallery, it toured several additional museums (Seattle Art Museum and the National Museum of India in New Delhi), including the British Museum in London.]

GARDEN AND COSMOS: THE ROYAL PAINTINGS OF JODHPUR
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.
9 January 2009 

On Saturday, 27 December 2008, my mother and I took the bus down to the Mall to check out the newly renovated National Museum of American History (“America’s Attic”) which reopened on 21 November after two-years of work. 

Unfortunately, the same idea struck all the tourists in town for the holidays, particularly since it was a gorgeous, sunny day in Washington: lines snaked out the entrance on Constitution Avenue and curved in both directions around the corners of the building. 

Having expended the energy to make the trip downtown (and because it was just too nice a day to simply give up and go back home), we decided to walk across the Mall and see what was “playing” at the Sackler Gallery, the underground Asian art museum next to the African art museum along Independence Avenue. 

The special exhibit was Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, a collection of 60 newly discovered paintings from the royal court of Marwar-Jodhpur (in the modern Indian state of Rajasthan).  More than 50 of the works presented in Garden and Cosmos were lent to the museum by His Highness Gaj Singh II (b. 1948), the Maharaja of Marwar-Jodhpur; the remaining 10 pieces, from the 1600s, were loaned by various other museum collections.

The focus of the show was on garden and cosmos leitmotifs, with an introductory gallery about the kingdom of Marwar-Jodhpur and the origins of its court painting traditions in the 17th century. 

The 60 paintings, almost none of which had never been exhibited before, are from the palace at Nagaur, once part of the princely state of Marwar-Jodhpur.  The collection reveals the garden aesthetics of 18th century Rajputana painters.  The court painting traditions in the kingdom of Marwar-Jodhpur originated in the 17th century.

The art was produced exclusively for the private enjoyment of the Marwar-Jodhpur maharajas; very few of the works on view in Garden and Cosmos have ever been published or seen by scholars since their creation centuries ago.

Though most of the works were exquisitely beautiful—many with the minute details of miniatures—the subjects did get repetitious and, though the collection spanned several centuries (13th to 19th), the painting style was essentially prescribed by the court atelier and masters and didn’t vary much. 

So we left the Sackler while it was still afternoon and walked down to the Hirschhorn’s Sculpture Garden.  (This is differentiated from the other garden across the Mall, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden at Constitution Avenue.)  We wandered around the meandering display, among David Smiths, Alexander Calders, Henry Moores, and Auguste Rodins.  And a Yoko Ono. 

The Ono piece is The Wish Tree for Washington, DC.  It’s a (real) Japanese dogwood tree on which people are invited to hang on a branch, a wish written on a piece of paper.

In the end, it took almost two hours to cover the outdoor exhibit, even though we’d both been there many times (though not for a while: it does change some from time to time—the Wish Tree was only installed in 2007, during the National Cherry Blossom Festival in April; see my report posted on 9 April 2012)—but on a nice day, even a winter’s day, it’s an extremely pleasurable way to while away some time. 

(We like to play a guessing game to see if we can identify the artists before we look at the labels.  I won’t reveal my score.)

*  *  *  *

FROM IMPRESSIONISM TO MODERNISM: 
THE CHESTER DALE COLLECTION
National Gallery of Art, West Building
Washington, D.C.
4 August 2010 

I went to Washington for a family event and I only stayed a few days, but my mother and I took the afternoon of Monday, 19 July 2010, to drive to the Mall to see From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection (31 January 2010-2 January 2012) at the National Gallery of Art’s West Building. 

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to own many of the world’s best paintings?  More than that, have you ever thought about living in a house where the walls are decorated with that art?  It’s almost unfathomable, but the thought comes to me whenever I see an exhibit of art that once belonged to one private collector.  (Recently, Mother and I took in the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff collection at the East Building last January.  See “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10),” 18 January 2010.) 

The closest I ever came was visiting David Lloyd Kreeger (see above), once a CEO of Geico, at his new house-cum-museum-to-be.  I don’t think that was a very good model for the experience of living with magnificent art, however: Kreeger’s collection, as I noted earlier, was often characterized as the worst examples of the work of some of the world’s best artists. 

Furthermore, the house he built, where I saw his collection, was more museum than home; except for the “private apartments” (as they used to call them in old palaces), it didn’t feel like anyone really lived there. 

The next closest I ever came was visiting the office of a friend’s father here in Manhattan.  The dad worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, and we’d gone to the offices to go to lunch with him.  The offices were decorated with art, which I noticed only subliminally at first—then I stopped to take a drink from a wall-mounted fountain.  I looked up from my drink and I was confronted, a few inches from my face, with a wonderful Picasso. 

It wasn’t a print or a copy, like you might expect in some corporate offices.  It was the genuine article!  Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79), who was still alive at the time, and his brothers had generously adorned the office walls with the family’s art.  Nobody lived at the office, of course, but all day long, my friend’s father and his co-workers got to be inspired by some of the best art in the West.

The Dales have gone most everyone else a step further, though.  In the NGA exhibit (81 French and American paintings) are five portraits of the couple—all painted by now-renowned artists.  Depending on which way you go through the show, you encounter them as either the first or the last things you see.

To the left of the entrance into the rest of the exhibit is a formal portrait of Chester Dale by George Bellows from 1922, a painting of him sitting at his desk looking over an art catalogue in 1945 by Diego Rivera, and a 1958 depiction of Mr. Dale by Salvador Dali in a style reminiscent of the artist’s Last Supper; to the right of the doorway, a portrait of Maud Dale by George Bellows from 1919 (which apparently the Dales didn’t like in its first version so they tracked Bellows down on vacation and made him redo it), and a 1935 Fernand Léger painting of Mrs. Dale posed like a Greek goddess in a blue dress. 

What must it be like to have your portrait painted by Diego Rivera or Salvador Dali?  I’m sure I’ll never know!

Well, that’s the kind of thing that went through my head when I walked into the first gallery of Impressionism to Modernism.  It didn’t hurt that this collection covers the period and styles that are my favorite in painting: the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.  And the Dales had lived with this art—though probably not all in one home. 

The show includes only some of the hundreds of paintings they owned and donated to the NGA over the years.  If you apply my usual criterion for judging an art show—whether I’d come back for a midnight shopping spree—I’d have had a hard time deciding what to take home under my jacket!

Impressionism to Modernism isn’t the normal kind of one-collector show.  The Meyerhoff collection, for instance, was a display of a significant portion of a single gift that had just been acquired by the NGA.  The artworks will become part of the NGA’s permanent collection, some to be displayed at the Meyerhoffs’ mansion in Phoenix, Maryland (the estate is the first remote site the NGA has ever administered), some among the Washington holdings. 

In other instances, the collections of one person or family go on tour from museum to museum, sometimes returning to a private venue and sometimes becoming the property of an institution as a bequest or donation.  The Dale art, however, is already part of the gallery holdings—the works have been on display somewhere in the West Building for 48 years or more. 

This was the first time they’ve been shown together in all that time because they’ve been part of various Impressionism and Modernism galleries throughout the museum.  The NGA had been able to assemble the paintings for this exhibit now because many of those galleries are under renovation; otherwise, removing them would have denuded the walls of many of the late-19th- and early-20th-century rooms where they had been hanging.

(Chester Dale began donating art to the NGA in 1941, four years after it was founded.  When he died in 1962, the bulk of his remaining collection—he donated to other museums, including New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art—was left to the NGA.) 

Though there are several American artists in the collection (George Bellows, Mary Cassatt), the Dales concentrated on the French painters (there are only seven sculptures in the Dale contributions to the NGA, none of which are in the current exhibit) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Chester Dale (1883-1962) was a stock broker on Wall Street with a reputation for aggressiveness and sharp elbows; the Washington Post called him “pugnacious.”  (He had begun as a runner at the NYSE when he was 15 and worked his way up to true mogul status.) 

He apparently bought his art the same way—and there were not a few museums, galleries, and other collectors who regretted going up against him when he went after something he wanted.  (No one said so, but I suspect that a few of the artists had the same sentiments about the man who was a patron in the years before they were world-famous painters.) 

Chester Dale married Agnes Maud Murray (1876-1953), the divorced wife of Frederick Thompson, a fellow art student, in April 1911 (the same month she divorced Thompson).  Maud Dale was trained as an artist (and later would write about art) and Chester Dale liked to say that it was her taste and his acquisitiveness that gave birth to the Dale art collection.  I wouldn’t know about that, of course, but I can say that someone in that family had magnificent taste in art. 

Chester unquestionably had the wherewithal to make the purchases (and the market savvy to know how to get the best prices), but if Maud was the tastemaker of the pair, then I go along with Karen Wilkin’s final remark in the Wall Street Journal: “The most appropriate comment, after walking through the installation, is simply ‘Thank you, Chester (and Maud) Dale.’” 

Their taste was conservative, staying away from the starkest of the artists’ later experiments (for example, Picasso’s Cubism), but I can’t fault her ultimate choices.  From his Rose Period, for instance, Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905) is not only one of my favorite Picassos, but one of my favorite paintings of all (maybe after several of van Gogh’s). 

I suppose it doesn’t hurt that the saltimbanques are actors (well, performers—they’re really buskers).  The harlequin figure is supposed to be a self-portrait of the artist, which makes the wonderful little scene all the neater as far as I’m concerned.  The WSJ suggested that it’s “like something out of Beckett.”  (That’d be Samuel, the great Absurdist playwright.)

I’d probably have enjoyed this show anyway, considering the period and styles it covers as I said, but there were a couple of lagniappes that added an additional fillip of delight.  Ordinarily the Dale art is displayed by artist and year, but Kimberly A. Jones, associate curator in the NGA department of French paintings, has arranged this exhibition in general themes, starting with a gallery of the Dales’ favorites. 

Here is a delightful little van Gogh that doesn’t look like any I’d ever seen before—a single female figure in a simple white shift and a yellow straw hat with a broad brim, apparently just strolling in a green field.  Girl in White (1890), painted the year the artist died, is tranquil and charming as compared to van Gogh’s usual fury and energy.  If I had to select one piece to take home from this show, Girl in White would be it.  But it’d be a hard choice. 

Also in this gallery is Modigliani’s Gypsy Woman with Baby (1919), one of the finest paintings of his I’ve seen: a serene-looking young woman sitting in a chair in a blue room, holding a swaddled infant in her lap.  She wears a sort of Mona Lisa smile, her dark hair short or pulled back, with one stray strand hanging down on the left side of her face. 

The following rooms focus on portraits of women, nudes and portraits of men, landscapes and city scenes, still lifes, and, at the end (just before the Dale portraits), what the NGA calls examples of “monumental modernity” and the Washington Post characterized as “blockbuster masterworks.”

One of the neatest little thrills is in the men’s portrait gallery.  To the left of the room’s entrance from the previous gallery is Chaim Soutine’s Portrait of a Boy (1928), a nice little painting of teenager in a bright red vest, his arms akimbo as if he’s showing off his new outfit.  A few frames farther along the same wall is another Modigliani portrait—Chaim Soutine (1917)!  

The Dales bought both paintings in 1929 and I have to imagine they bought them intentionally as a sort of pair.  (I wonder where they hung them in their house?  Were they next to each other, or looking at each other across a hall?)

There are other terrific paintings in this exhibit: the recognizable 1889 Self-Portrait by Paul Gauguin looking something like a character in a Fellini movie, Picasso’s The Tragedy (1903) from his Blue Period, Modigliani’s Nude on a Blue Cushion (1917), Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, West Façade and Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight (both 1894), and Georges Braque’s 1928 Still Life: The Table. 

If I even just listed the great paintings in this show, it’d be all 83 canvases and go on for pages.  Just among the select artists are special treasures for me.  The two Monet paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, for instance, are the epitome of Impressionism for me.  They aren’t my favorites of the genre (that would be a long list, too), but when I was little and first saw them, the idea that they were so ephemeral that if you stood too close, you couldn’t make out the image—that was what Impressionism meant.  Even today when I think of the genre, that’s the image I get. 

The Modiglianis—the Dales eventually owned 21 of his works, one of the best selections of Modiglianis ever amassed, and donated 13 of those to the NGA—hold another significance for me.  Maud Dale was a committed supporter of Modigliani’s work and she published one of the first studies on the artist, and he’s always been a painter I’ve liked.  But what makes his work so special to me is that Modigliani was a favorite artist of my father.  Whenever I see paintings by him, I can’t help but think how much Dad would love them.

Strange Art

 

[It seems I’ve been focusing on visual art on Rick On Theater over the past few weeks.  I started July off with a tribute to Sam Gilliam (posted on 2 July) and two weeks ago, I launched two-part profile of the pre-teen artist Andres Valencia (17 and 20 July).

[Over the years since I started the blog, I’ve raided my archive of pre-ROT reports on both theater and art.  Now I’ve reached back to the 2000s and put together a collection of vintage reports on art exhibits that focused on unusual, even peculiar art or artists.  For lack of a better descriptor, I’ve called the assemblage “Strange Art”—although, of course, strangeness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.]

DECEPTIONS AND ILLUSIONS: FIVE CENTURIES OF TROMPE L’OEIL PAINTING
National Gallery of Art, East Building
Washington, D.C.
9 & 12 January 2003 

Here’s my report on one of the art exhibits I saw while in Washington, D.C., over the year-end holidays of 2003.  On an art trip downtown, my mother and I went to the National Gallery of Art’s East Building to see two shows.  One was a Willem de Kooning (Dutch-born American, 1904-97), an exhibit on which I’m not going to comment here.  The other was unusual, but quite curious with respect to its theme.

After Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (29 September 2002-5 January 2003), which, as the title specifies, focused on the artist’s “figurative” drawings, we went upstairs to Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting (13 October 2002-2 March 2003).  Escaping Criticism (1874) by Pere Borrell del Caso (Spanish, 1835-1910), a painting of a boy climbing out of the frame of the painting, had been prominently featured in the New York Times as part of a review of this show (Holland Cotter, “Playing Tricks With Reality and Realism,” 11 October 2002). 

Actually, from my perspective (an unintended pun, as it turns out), that was the most interesting thing in the show.  It had an element of whimsy that seemed to be missing in all the other pieces (and this was a big show: 116 paintings, sculptures, books, prints, drawings, decorative arts, and one mosaic.) 

The concept behind the exhibit is that it presents examples from Roman times (several frescoes from Pompeii) through the 19th century of art intended to fool the viewers into thinking they’re looking at real objects, not paintings.  Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, was the guest curator and Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings at NGA, was coordinating curator

Some were remarkable as phenomena (not necessarily as art, you understand) because they were painted long before perspective was discovered; others used forced perspective—a favorite gimmick of the 18th century, as witness the stage settings of that era (that’s my insertion; it’s not in the exhibit—though there are some paintings that were for all intents and purposes little stage sets)—to fool the eye.  (That’s where my lame pun comes in, by the way.) 

The problem with the exhibit, for me at least, is that it’s repetitive and presents works as examples of an idea, not of good art.  The show’s divided into themes—fruit, insects, flowers, coming out of the frame (that’s where Escaping Criticism is), and so on—but the technique exemplified in each section is the same.  After a couple of themes, the idea was well established and everything became a repeat of what went before. 

Except for Escaping Criticism, none of the paintings themselves were particularly interesting, so after seeing the technique exemplified a couple dozen times, it was boring to me.  We rushed through the last several rooms of the show. 

(We were also pretty “arted out” from the de Kooning’s 65 works and the 20th-century exhibits we’d seen just before at An Artist’s Artist: Jacob Kainen’s Collection in the West Building [22 September 2002-9 February 2003; 77 prints and 2 drawings].  Unlike some culture-vultures, we go through an exhibit slowly, so it takes some time on our feet; one or two shows at a time is often all we can handle.)

[After I got home to New York, I loaded Escaping Criticism into my PC as the wallpaper for the desktop.  When properly sized, it looked as if the boy is climbing out of the monitor.  It gave me a chuckle every time I booted the computer up.  (My current wallpaper is Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, which I think is one of the most beautiful paintings ever created.)]

*  *  *  *
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ART OF THE CHILD
Phillips Collection
Washington, D.C.
21-25 August 2006 

[The art in this small exhibit isn’t really so strange—but the point of it seemed . . . well, odd.  It’s meant to examine drawings by children, looking at the issues of present and future giftedness.  “Do childhood works by artists reveal traces of their future genius?” asked Leslie Camhi in the New York Times.  “What can the drawings of gifted children teach the viewer about the relationship between art and society?”

[The exhibit catalog included reproductions of childhood work by other now-famous artists, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and the 8-year-old Joan Miró (1893-1983).  It also includes 17th-century drawings by the very young Louis, Dauphin of France (1601-43), the future King Louis XIII (reigned: 1610-43).]

On Thursday, 17 August 2006, Mother and I took a bus to the Phillips Collection near D.C.’s Dupont Circle to see Klee and America.  As an adjunct to the Paul Klee (Swiss-born German, 1879-1940) exhibit, in a gallery next door is a display called When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child (17 June-10 September 2006), one of the first museum exhibits, according to the New York Times, to look at children’s art from an aesthetic point of view. 

One of the curatorial points of Klee’s works is that he maintained a sort of childlike innocence in his pictures—not unlike Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910; see “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris” in “Short Takes: Some Art Shows,” 17 June 2018), though the source and result are quite different—and the nearby exhibit of Washington children’s artworks is an extension of this notion. 

When We Were Young juxtaposes three childhood drawings by Klee and one by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) with a work by the mature artist and with work by children from the private collections of Rudolf Arnheim and Victor Lowenfeld, the best-known writers on the subject of 20th-century American children's drawings, and Melody Klein, a well-known psychoanalyst of children.

The exhibit catalogue, edited by modern and contemporary art scholar Jonathan Fineberg, who curated the exhibition, addresses the psychological implications of the children’s art, as did a lot of the press coverage.  (The New York Times ran a heavily illustrated, two-page article on the exhibit in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday edition, “If a Little Genius Lives in the House, What's on the Fridge?” by Leslie Camhi, 18 June 2006.)

I’m not competent to comment on that, or even really to understand it, and I don’t feel comfortable commenting on the artistic content of the works on display.  [Sixteen years later, I seem to have shifted my position some when I wrote my profile of 10-year-old painter Valencia, but he was entering the professional field and selling his art for tens of thousands of dollars.  He was also appearing on television and sitting for published interviews.]

I’ll say here only that, aside from the three Klees and the Picasso, the children’s artworks shown in When We Were Young were by youngsters ranging in age from 3 to 5 and revealed various levels of skill and manual dexterity—as one might expect.  The level of perception concerning the works around them was universally astonishing.  [I felt the same way about Valencia’s work, but he was 10, which is quite different from 3-5, I think.]

The interesting thing in this exhibit, for me, is the presence of the several childhood drawings by the future greats.  One of the Klees, Woman With Parasol (1883-5), was one he did at around age five or so; the Picasso, Bullfight and Pigeons (1890), was from when he was about nine.  It astonishes me that these drawings still exist and that someone had them on hand to display!  It’s like someone knew they were going to grow up to be famous artists, so they kept these early pieces.

As I said, neither of these shows made all that much of an impression on me with respect to the art on display.  You can tell this is so because there are no paintings I wanted to come back for on a midnight shopping trip.  (I’m running out of wall space anyway.)

[This exhibit, though I saw it almost 16 years ago, came to mind recently while I was writing my profile of 10-year-old artist Andres Valencia.  I kept wondering, as I was reading and writing about the young painter, if there was any real correlation between the kind of attention he’s been drawing this summer and future success as an adult artist.  As the New York Times’ Leslie Camhi pondered, does the talent of a child artist predict future achievement?

[I also wondered if any of the baby geniuses of the past, such as Klee and Picasso spotlighted here, received the kind of excitement Valencia has been getting.  I suspect they might have if they had the kind of media—TV, Internet videos, and social media postings—that we have today, but since they didn’t, it took looking back at their youthful output after they reached the high level of acclaim as adults to see the nascent talent exhibited when they were children.]

*  *  *  *
DARK METROPOLIS: IRVING NORMAN’S SOCIAL SURREALISM
American University Museum, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
Washington, D.C.
29 November 2007 

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend of 2007 because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  (And we’ve just come out of a stagehands’ strike in New York that shut down most of Broadway since earlier this month.)

I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November, and on Saturday, my mother and I drove to the nearby American University Museum in the Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle, right near Mom’s apartment.

We went to see Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (6 November-30 December 2007; see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 26 November 2017), an exhibit of 79 paintings and drawings by the Colombian artist (b. 1932) of the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism (14 works on paper and 25 large canvases; 9 April-29 July 2006) was in the gallery below the Botero show in the AU museum, so we had a look. 

Norman (American, 1906-1989), a West Coast artist, used his art to inspire social reforms.  Born Isaac Noachowitz in Vilnius, Lithuania, the artist drew on his experience fighting fascism in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) to create highly detailed, monumental works that critique the inhumanity of war, the inequity of capitalism, and the tyranny of the elite. 

What he painted were depictions of a dystopia where capitalists essentially consume not only the products of the workers’ labor, but the workers themselves.  His canvases are like story boards for Tim Burton on acid.  George Romero with a social conscience. 

While Botero never intended to sell his Abu Ghraib works, collectors have bought—and, I assume, displayed—Norman’s dark, demented works; I don’t know how anyone could live with one of them on his walls.  (Reports are, unsurprisingly, that Norman didn’t sell well—but he did sell!)  They’re fascinating, however, and engrossing—the way a horrible auto accident is: you can’t stop looking at them, and searching for the minute details of societal disintegration in them. 

In a statement, Norman said, ”I try to go beyond illusion to tell the truth.”  Well, it’s his vision of the truth—the man had a horrific view of the world.  (“He scares people,” wrote a San Francisco critic.  That’s an understatement!) 

In his Washington Post review, Michael O’Sullivan, who encountered Norman’s work in 2001, wrote: “Life [in Norman’s art] is a nasty, brutish and short business from cradle to grave, interrupted only by bouts of unhealthy eating, joyless copulating and slavishly serving our corrupt masters.”  

On his blog, Lines and Colors, Charley Parker, an artist and illustrator (not the jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker), asserts that Norman’s art was “suppressed” by the “modernist art establishment” for a number of reasons, among them: “because it intentionally makes us uncomfortable” and “because his horrifically elegant tableaux of the landscape of suffering humanity, that expose how those with power dominate, manipulate, control and use those without, make those same powerful individuals uncomfortable and angry.”

In Meeting of the Elders (1977), bar charts hang like tapestries in a great hall where a cigar-smoking council emerges from stacks of gold coins atop human-skin rugs.  Norman’s Air Raid Shelter (1958-1977) resembles a nuclear reactor, with the people inside twisted into Guernica-like agony.  Even a topic as simple as rush hour is intensified to the point of anguish: dozens of cars become jail cells to the weary commuters of The Bridge (1946). 

Norman borrowed from religious imagery for his grand triptych, Human Condition (1980), and the towering (27' high) Crucifixion (1961-62), and from neoclassicism for his epic battle scenes, which look as though they could have taken place on the set of the movie Metropolis (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927). 

Perhaps the bleakest and most hard-hitting of Norman’s predictions is our era of cause célèbre in To Have and Have Not (Charity Gala) (1979), where futuristic models and socialites mingle and dance on a runway surrounded by the pockmarked and skeletal.  As one San Francisco critic wrote in 1970, “You may not like what he reveals.  You probably didn’t like what you read on the front page this morning.”  No newspaper story is as terrifying as Norman’s world, however.

*  *  *  *
JOHN DREYFUSS: INVENTIONS
The Sylvia Berlin Katzen Sculpture Garden, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
American University, Washington, D.C.
13 October 2009 

On Saturday, 26 September 2009, Mom and I drove over to the Katzen Arts Center at American University to have a look at John Dreyfuss: Inventions (8 September 2009-17 January 2010), an exhibit of six sculptures by this Washington artist.  (Mother had been an acquaintance of Dreyfuss’s parents and grandparents, though I didn’t know any of them; Dreyfuss [American, b. 1949] isn’t an artist I’d encountered before.) 

The outdoor exhibit in the Katzen’s sculpture garden (there’s another show of works for sale at Hemphill Fine Arts downtown) is of large-scale pieces evoking bones (one piece in front of the AU building housing the Art Center is a giant Vertebra) and “early tool shapes” in a study the Center’s brochure characterized as “examining the relationship between form, strength of materials and the harnessing of power.” 

For my dough—and thank God I didn’t have to expend any—this is close to Quatsch.  I was underwhelmed, to put it succinctly.  Of curiosity value, the manufacture of the sculptures was by a firm in Minneapolis, Alliant Techsystems, that calls itself “America’s largest supplier of commercial and military ammunition, a top manufacturer of satellite components and missile-defense systems” whose best customer is the army.  (The Hemphill exhibit includes a group of three “abstracted, truncated models of submarines,” collectively called Enigma [2009]—named for the World War II German encoding/decoding machine.)

ATK, as it calls itself, made the monumental sculptures from “composite materials,” presumably some of the same stuff out of which it makes post-modern weapons.  “Not the typical offerings at your local art store,” quipped Jessica Dawson in the Washington Post (“Sleek, Silent and Powerful,” 23 September 2009).  I’m not going to go into any more detail than this because, frankly, despite the oddity of their fabrication, I was unmoved.

[I posted an examination of the ideas of aesthetics philosopher Susanne Langer on art, beauty, and theater on 4 and 8 January 2010.  She had a few things to say about some of the kinds of art and artists on which I reported in the collection above.  For instance, Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions.  Where, then, does beauty enter the equation?

[Well, in a way, it doesn’t.  It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art.  “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criterion Langer applies to art when she considers beauty.  It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant.  In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so.  Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . .  Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them.  The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

[“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition.  In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty.

[The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work.

[I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings over 60 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive.

[When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it.  Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism.  We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in.  Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

[Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging.]

Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney

[On Sunday afternoon, 21 April 2019, my friend Diana and I went over to the Whitney Museum of American Art in the West Village just to see whatever was on show there.  We walked through a small exhibit of colorist paintings in Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s, an ongoing show that opened on 29 March 2019 and will close sometime in August.  Consisting of only two rooms in the Hurst Family Galleries on the eighth floor, it took so little time to cover that Diana and I decided to go down to the Robert W. Wilson Galleries and the Zelda Bloomberg Outdoor Gallery on the seventh floor to revisit Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960. 

[We’d seen this large show last year (see my write-up for Rick On Theater on 12 June 2018), so I won’t be writing another report, but there were over half a dozen Edward Hopper paintings on exhibit so I decided to post an old report from my archive from a 2007 visit to Edward Hopper at the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  On that trip to the Nation’s Capital, I also saw J. M. W. Turner at the NGA’s West Building, so I’m including that part of the 11-year-old report as well.

[I’ll also say a few words about Spilling Over at the Whitney at the end of the archival report on Hopper and Turner.]

EDWARD HOPPER & J. M. W. TURNER (National Gallery of Art, 2007/2008)

I was in Washington, D.C., several times since the fall of 2007.  I went down for Thanksgiving and then I returned for the year-end holidays and stayed for two weeks.  I did my now-usual Kosher Bus ride down on Friday, 21 December 2007, for a stay that would last until 4 January ’08.  While I was in D.C. the previous month, my mother and I had decided to try to see two art shows that sounded interesting and would still be running through the new year: Edward Hopper and J. M. W. Turner.

Now, I’m not really a fan of either Hopper or Turner, but I’ll give a very brief (well, superficial anyway) run-down of the two exhibits nonetheless.  Both fairly large shows were at the National Gallery of Art on the Mall.  We went down to see the Hopper on Boxing Day, 26 December, 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 the Turner show a try; but fortunately, it moved quickly and we spent a pleasant-enough afternoon walking through the several galleries housing the 94 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.  (Oddly, Turner had a similar obsession with light and also repainted the same scene—his were landscapes—multiple times.) 

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, but I’ve always found the works exciting and moving, emotional and expressive.) 

So I found the show, called simply Edward Hopper (16 September 2007-21 January 2008), 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?  (In my report on Where We Are at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I relate the “stories” of some other Hopper works that are in that show.) 

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.

In the Washington Post, remarking that NGA “understands what an odd duck it has on its hands,” Glenn Dixon labeled Hopper the “taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light” and a “voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary.”  Dixon observed, “It can’t have helped that his discomfort with the human form is palpable.  He would prove far less awkward handling architecture”; however, the WaPo writer found, “He was able to employ compositional stretches, subtle manipulations of reality, as psychological tricks.”  Commenting on those lonely scenes, Dixon called them “implication without incident, a kind of single-frame cinema that rebuffs drama but revels in mood.”  He asked, “What could be happening?”  Dixon’s interpretation?  “Nothing.  Isn’t that enough?”

“You must see it,” proclaimed Robert F. Bruner in the Post.  “His human figures remain imperfect,” cautioned Bruner.  “But what his brush strokes lack in detail, his paintings make up in mood.  Hopper’s special gift was to portray certain emotions of life in a big city, such as loneliness, detachment and introspection.”  He found that “the special impact of the exhibition came from a comment by a guide, halfway through the show: ‘If Hopper had been a better painter, he wouldn’t have been as good an artist.’  Think about that.”  The then-dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia asserted a remarkable analogy:

Business life is filled with lots of painters and fewer artists. The “painters” are the technicians, such as actuaries, time-and-motion efficiency experts, accountants who get the books to balance down to the last penny, logistics honchos who slim down your inventory, and derivatives analysts. . . .

However, the technical mind-set is too often focused on reporting data rather than creating knowledge (or, better yet, wisdom). . . .  Artists in business are visionaries, inventors, entrepreneurs and general managers, people who create something larger out of the assembly of resources.

 

On Artblog, art historian Andrea Kirsh agreed that Hopper had the “ability to people his works so as to suggest a narrative and create an emotional tension.”  Of what she called “Hopper’s narrative skill,” Kirsh said, “We sense that we are seeing a slice of a larger story and we project the rest of it onto the paintings, filling in past events or anticipating future ones.”  The Artblogger lamented, however, “I can’t say I gained an appreciation of Hopper’s paintwork, because for the most part it’s uninteresting, something that always disappointed me.”  Debating whether the artist was a Realist—my friend Diana says he’s an Abstract painter—Kirsh asserted, “Hopper gave us paintings that show things as we imagine them, or remember them.  Perhaps that counts as realism.”

David Yezzi of the New Criterion observed, “Edward Hopper’s paintings suffer from the same popular misconception that plagues the poems of Robert Frost: we feel that we know them.”  The New Criterion poetry editor went on: “The National Gallery’s Hopper retrospective . . . shows the painter as something more than a genial realist.  His attractive surfaces and inviting use of color notwithstanding, something darker and considerably lonelier, in a word, something more modern, haunts the shadows.” 

Hopper’s work has a self-assured continuity, from his lamp-lit nudes in stark bedrooms, to the sun-streaked lighthouses of Maine, to New York interiors glimpsed from an elevated train, to couples caught mid-scene in offices and restaurants.  All are situated in the (for Hopper) endlessly rewarding dynamic between vestigial and enigmatic narrative and the formal pleasures of form, color, and light as they inch toward abstraction. 

Yezzi cited Surrealist writer and poet André Breton as saying Hopper was “one of only a few American artists who could approach the dreamlike quality of Surrealism.” 

On DCist, Kate Mereand wrote, “The scenes are always striking: women at night, mostly alone, and then buildings, mostly in daylight.  Such is Edward Hopper’s art, finding voyeuristic fancy in two main types of subjects: ladies and places.”  Mereand found that “many of the . . . works . . . on display at the National Gallery of Art . . . portray the intense intimacy with which Hopper approached both flesh and brick alike.”  She characterized the painter’s work:

The somewhat photo-realistic quality of Hopper’s work blends more traditional and modern styles of art. The subjects are recognizable, bold, and at times intimate.  Whether it is thus milk-toast or middle-ground, art-lovers and haters of all kinds should be able to appreciate something that he offers.

She summed up by recommending that “you should see if for yourself.”

The next week, Mother and I traveled down to the Mall again to see J. M. W. Turner (1 October 2007-6 January 2008), a much easier show to get into, in the West Building.  Like Hopper, who was born 30 years after Turner died, the older painter was “fascinated with light,” noted Victoria Skelly of the Broad Street Review.  “Exploring the effects of light or the lack of it was a fruitful, lifelong focus for both men.” 

The problem I have with Turner (1775-1851) is that he’s essentially a 19th-century Romantic, a style for which I don’t have much feeling.  (I’m partial to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of the decades following, at the turn of that century.) 

In addition, Turner’s a landscapist, so his canvases are all wild nature, sea storms, crumbling ruins, and craggy precipices—all with no inhabitants.  So, from my perspective, he’s invoking a vision of the world which doesn’t really exist and in which no humans live.  This doesn’t grab me, despite the academic fact that he does it with a focused attention on the way the light—the sun, fire, lightning, moonlight, whatever—illuminates the scene. 

To me, this makes Turner a technical master, perhaps, but not an artist that speaks to me.  (His series on The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835, which he painted after actually viewing the event on 16 October the previous year, are a remarkable record of the loss—but they are illustrations of the historical destruction.) 

What did interest me, though, were the works at the end of the show (whose 146 canvases were arranged chronologically).  I never knew that Turner was apparently a transitional figure at the end of his career between the Romantics and the Impressionists: his late works, some of which were actually unfinished, are more intuitive interpretations of the subjects, less faithfully depicted.  It seemed to me, though none of the curatorial material bore me out on this (Jacqueline Trescott, however, did mentioned in a preview article in the Washington Post that Turner was “an important influence” on the Impressionists), that these late works were proto-Impressionism. 

The Washington Post’s Blake Gopnik declared, “Turner's greatness lies in his resisting, more than almost any artist you could name, any single notion of what great art might be.”  He added that the works in J. M. W. Turner “could almost be by half a dozen different artists—each busy breaking an entirely different set of rules.”  Gopnik then offered this conundrum: “If most great artists' surveys give something for everyone to like, the strong feeling in the Turner show is that there's something there for everyone, even his greatest admirers, to dislike.  There are radically incompatible ways of doing things scattered throughout the show.”  The Post art reviewer concluded, “Looking at Turner's pictures may have rather the same effect that visiting him had:  You never know quite where you stand, what oddness he'll throw at you next or whether to be impressed, appalled or flattered when he lets you watch him breaking rules.”

[Edward Hopper was organized by the NGA in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.  The curators are Carol Troyen, John Moore Cabot Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Franklin Kelly, senior curator, American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art; and Judith Barter, the Field-McCormick Chair of American Art at The Art Institute of Chicago.  The exhibit previously appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 6 May-19 August 2007, and will move on to the Art Institute of Chicago from 16 February–11 May 2008.

[J. M. W. Turner comprises 148 works organized by the NGA; the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with Tate Britain, London.  The curators are Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Dorothy Kosinski, senior curator of painting and sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with Ian Warrell, curator of 18th- and 19th-century British art, Tate Britain.  After Washington, the exhibit will go to the Dallas Museum of Art, from 10 February–18 May 2008, and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 24 June–21 September 2008.]

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SPILLING OVER: PAINTING COLOR IN THE 1960s (Whitney Museum of American Art)

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the West Village (for a brief discussion of the Whitney’s new building, see my report on the “Whitney Biennial 2017,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 June 2017) is an exhibition of paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s “that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception,” according to the museum’s website.  Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, Spilling Over includes works by Josef Albers (1888-1976), Emma Amos (b. 1938), Richard Anuszkiewicz (b. 1930), Frank Bowling (b. 1934), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Sam  Gilliam (b. 1933), Marcia Hafif (1929-2018), Carmen Herrera (b. 1915), Alex Katz (b. 1927), Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Morris Louis (1912-62), Alvin Loving (1935-2005), Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), Robert Reed (1938–2014), Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Frank Stella (b. 1936), Bob Thompson (1937-66), and Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935), among others. 

The exhibit’s title comes from a statement artist Bob Thompson made in 1966, shortly before his death at 28: “I paint many paintings that tell me slowly that I have something inside of me that is just bursting, twisting, sticking, spilling over to get out.  Out into souls and mouths and eyes that have never seen before.”  Organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant, the show opened in the Hurst Family Galleries on the museum’s eighth floor on 29 March and will run until August (no specific closing date is given).  On exhibit are 18 paintings, created between 1959 and 1972 that span Color Field works—including several Washington Color School pieces—to Op Art. 

As I’ve confessed before, I find the mid-century period the most interesting in American art, when our painting and sculpture really emerged from under the shadow of its European forbears and established itself as a force of its own.  (This was also the period when I was first introduced to modern art because it was when my parents became involved with the Gres Gallery in Washington; see my three-part account of this experience, posted on ROT on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018.)  Both this show and Where We Are, also at the Whitney, center on this era (though Where We Are does go back some decades further), which delighted me.

After Abstract Expressionism, a movement launched in the ’40s in which color was especially significant (the work of Mark Rothko, one of whose pieces, Four Darks in Red, 1958, is downstairs in Where We Are, is a good example of this), broke the ground for non-figurative and non-representational painting, artists invented Pop Art, Psychedelia, Op Art, and many other styles that used bold, bright colors, often in large swaths and washes of pigment.  For the Washington Color School, color was all painting was about—there was no point to their work except to create a joyful experience of color. 

Among the artists exhibited in Spilling Over are several on whom I’ve blogged before, including Sam Gilliam (“Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011), Morris Louis (15 February 2010), Kenneth Noland (passing mention in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin”); all three are or were members of the Washington School of Color (about which I blogged on 21 September 2014).  Gilliam is the only artist from this show whose work I own; my parents’ art collection (see “A Passion for Art,” 21 November 2017) contains three of his pieces.  Larry Rivers (1923-2002) is the only artist in the show who exhibited at Gres (1960, his first solo show outside New York City). 

During the period covered by Spilling Over, artists were experimenting with many aspects of art, finding new ways to communicate through painted canvases and new styles and materials to employ.  Paint, usually unmixed and otherwise unmuted, was dripped (famously by Jackson Pollock, who’s not represented in this exhibit), poured (Morris Louis’s Gamma Delta, 1959-60), and spattered.  It was applied with a palette knife instead of a brush (Norman Carton, another mid-century artist not in Spilling Over).  The canvases were unprimed so the pigments soaked in and stained the fabric (Louis, Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction, 1968) rather than coating the surface, giving the painting a translucent quality. 

Acrylic paint arrived on the art scene during the ’60s. bringing a vast new array of colors and hues, and many artists began experimenting with this new pigment and looking for other media with different properties to work with.  Art slipped its bonds and literally and figuratively spilled off the canvas and outside the frames.  The old, established forms and norms no longer applied.  It was no longer your grandfather’s art.

Of course, the whole society was experimenting, not just in painting and sculpture, but the other arts like film, design, literature and drama, music.  All the rules were being challenged and changed: gender, race, sexuality, language, dress, and politics.  Painting was only a visual manifestation of what was happening all over the culture.  The small selection of paintings in Spilling Over are a representation of that shift, but only a small corner of it. 

Among the most significant pieces in the show is Helen Frankenthaler’s Orange Mood (1966), an acrylic on canvas with large expanses of blue, yellow, mustard, and orange.  Frankenthaler had given an important boost to color painting when she introduced Louis and Noland, who’d come up to New York to visit her studio, to her work.  This so impressed the two men that they went back to Washington and immediately began applying what they’d learned.  Louis destroyed all his work up to that point and began working in this new way, essentially starting, with Noland and a few others who joined them, the Washington Color School, a branch of Color Filed painting based in the Nation’s Capital.  (Sam Gilliam, who came to D.C. from Mississippi in 1962, is a second generation of Washington Color artists.)

Orange Mood is entirely non-figurative, an example of what became the mantra of the WCS—making art that  communicates nothing but a delight in the experience of color—but in the same gallery is Thompson’s Triumph of Bacchus (1964).  A depiction of the Roman god of wine, it was inspired by Renaissance paintings of similar subjects—except that Thompson used bolder colors for his palette.  His choices of colors are also bold—yellow people. blue horses, a yellow ram—and the artist’s friend, saxophonist Steve Lacy, called Thompson “jazz himself,” pointing out that “the way he painted was like jazz—taking liberties with colors.” 

Getting off the elevator on the eighth floor, visitors to Spilling Over are greeted with three very revealing pieces, considering the curatorial point of the show.  One is Kenneth Noland’s New Day (1967), a canvas of acrylic stripes of many vibrant colors.  (Stripes were Noland’s signature form.)  As an introduction to an exhibit about paintings in color, New Day couldn’t be more appropriate.  And as the first WSC canvas a visitor encounters, it’s a perfect example of color as pure visual stimulus.

A second painting on the wall across from the elevator is Carmen Herrera’s Blanco y Verde (1959), an almost blank canvas in white and green, as its title bluntly tells you.  Most of the painting is white, with only a small triangle of green in the center, as if demonstrating how “color” can be reduced to a minimum and still stand out.  In a display of brightly hued paintings all in brilliant colors, an almost all-white canvas is noticed. 

Not unlike Robert Reed’s Plum Nellie, Sea Stone (1972), a purple-and-white painting that Reed considered a landscape.  Across the center of the canvas is a wide wash of deep purple, swirling and eddying like an abstract rushing stream.  But right in the middle of the purple field is a white rectangle, a geometrical blank space that draws the eye even though the dominant color is churning and spinning. 

What are possibly the most seemingly conventional and least conventional entries in the exhibit are near one another in the gallery.  Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction is a huge canvas that’s been stained with blue, green, blush, and maroon acrylic paint, diluted to the degree that it’s virtually transparent.  The canvas isn’t really hung, however—it’s frameless and formless, a practice Gilliam has used in many of his frequently-changing styles—but draped like some multi-colored bunting.  (Stained and draped or suspended fabric is also something this artist has done often over his career.  See my discussion of Close to Trees in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin.”)  Thomas Micchelli of Hyperallergic called Bow Form Construction a “fusion of painting and sculpture.”

Nearby is Alex Katz’s Edwin, Blue Series (1965), a portrait of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby (1903-83).  The portrait is painted on a bright blue background and both the background and the figure of Denby are flat and simplified.  Katz has cropped the side of the subject’s body on the viewer’s left as if some kind of door is blocking it and Denby is just exiting it.  If it weren’t for the flat, bright color of the background, Edwin, Blue Series could be a conventional—albeit Modernist, perhaps Expressionist—portrait.

I’d love to describe each of the paintings in Spilling Over, but even as small as this show is, that’s too much.  I’ve merely mentioned Louis’s Gamma Delta and I haven’t even done that with Emma Amos’s Baby (1966) and Kay WalkingStick’s April Contemplating May (1972), two artists who were new to me, and I regret that.  For a small show, Spilling Over was most interesting, but there’s just too much to cover here.