It’s been a while, I think, since painting was declared dead yet again —
witness, for example, reports coming from Art Basel earlier this week, where recent paintings by the likes of Neo Rauch were selling well (if at prices below last year’s). Museums are loaded with great contemporary painting exhibitions this summer — not just the Bacon retrospective at the Met or Cy Twombly at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This Saturday, June 20, the Phillips Collection in Washington opens one worth noting: Paint Made Flesh, curated by Mark Scala of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. It debuted there in January. The idea behind the show is this:
Paint Made Flesh presents paintings created in Europe and the United States since the 1950s in which a wide range of painterly effects suggest the carnal properties and cultural significance of human flesh and skin. As a revisionist study of post-World War II art, the exhibition offers a rejoinder to the modernist orthodoxies of the mid-to-late 20th century by contending that paint’s material properties make it well suited to convey metaphors of human vulnerability.
The show includes works by masters like Picasso, de Kooning, Bacon and Freud and work by contemporary artists like Jenny Saville (her Hyphen, 1999, is above), John Currin, Daniel Richter and Tony Bevan.
One reason I’m writing about this show (in fact, one reason I’m able to write about it, since I have not been to Nashville lately) is the material the Frist posted on its website about Paint Made Flesh, inviting people to learn about the exibition “before your visit.”
The Frist has posted a five-minute video of Scala talking about his show, with close-ups of about a dozen works (also available on YouTube here). In it, Scala explains why paint is an excellent medium for showing human vulnerability, pain, desire and fear of death.
The show’s short gallery guide is also online (here) and so is the audio tour (here). The Tennessean, which oddly removed its review of the show from its website, does allow access to a two-minute video it produced about the show — here’s that link. Warning: it, and the audio tour, take a while to load.
This is really important, if the recent National Endowment for the Arts report on arts participation is accurate. It said that more than 20 percent of adults who use the Internet viewing paintings, sculpture or photography online at least once a week.
That’s no substitute for visiting museums, but it’s better than nothing. The Frist got it right by suggesting that visitors to its website view its materials on Paint Made Flesh before their trips to the gallery.
By contrast, the Phillips doesn’t have much of anything about the show on its website, other than the announcement — at least not yet. After closing there on Sept. 13, the exhibition travels to the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, where it will be on view from Oct. 25 through Jan. 3, 2010. Again — not much on the site — but it’s still early for that run.
The challenge is extended.
Photo Credit: (top) Private Collection, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. © Jenny Saville; (bottom) Randall In Extremis, Alice Neel, 1960, Courtesy of the Phillips Collection.