For whatever reason, jazz has been on my mind recently, but this isn’t about the music
exactly. This is about visual art. Over the weekend, an exhibit
about jazz caught my eye.
Trouble is, The Jazz Century, which opened at the Center for Contemporary Culture in
Barcelona on July 22 (and is on view there till Oct. 18), isn’t coming to the U.S.
Curated by art critic Daniel Soutif, the exhibit premiered at the Mart museum in
Rovereto, Italy, then moved to the Musee du Quay Branly in Paris. Not a history exhibit, it’s described as “a chronological account of relations between jazz and the arts throughout the 20th century [that] shows us how the sound of jazz has nuanced all the other arts, from painting to photography and from the cinema to literature, not forgetting graphic design and cartoons.” Sculpture, too. And album covers, posters and sheet music.
Among the artists: Pollock, Picasso, Dubuffet, Bearden, Thompson, Warhol and many more.
Sounds delightful. Craig Winneker, writing in The Wall Street Journal in March, when the show was in Paris, concluded:
Like any great jazz piece, this show has so much going on at once you might need to play it a few times to catch all the nuances. But amid the flurry of notes, the beat is always there.
Three venues is the usual run, but this show belongs in the U.S.
Here’s a link to the WSJ piece; The Los Angeles Times also reviewed the Paris run here, and if you speak Spanish, you can get a glimpse here.
Photo Credits: Larry Rivers, Public and Private, 1983-84, top, Courtesy CCCB ; Thomas Hart Benton, Portrait of a Musician, 1949, bottom, Courtesy University of Missouri, Columbia.