Artists

Hedda Sterne is not a name you hear very often, so I was pleased last spring when I learned that the Amon Carter Museum of American Art was giving her a solo exhibition. It would be a small one, and of lithographs, not paintings, but still I wanted to see it. We’re in a moment when female artists are getting a bit more museum exposure, and I wondered about her.

At one time Sterne was prominent–mostly, though, she was prominent now for having appeared in Life magazine’s photo of The Irascibles–the only woman among the artists in the photo, all of whom had signed a letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May, 1950. As she once explained, she arrived at the staged session late, after photographer Nina Leen had placed everyone, so Sterne was put up on a table, standing, on the right, sticking up “like a feather.” (Several others, male and female, had signed the letter, but were not in the photo.)

But, according to hearsay, Sterne was the only woman because she invited herself when her husband, Saul Steinberg, was called to be in the photo.

For more information about that letter–and the exhibition in question–you might read a fascinating account by Robert Beverly Hale, then associate curator of American Painting and Sculpture. It’s online on the Met’s website. Here’s an excerpt:

On May 20, 1950, an open letter signed by eighteen painters and ten sculptors was received by the Museum. It stated in substance that they “rejected the monster national exhibition” to be held at the Metropolitan, that the juries chosen were too conservative to admit a just proportion of advanced art. It called upon all the advanced artists in the country to boycott the exhibition.

This letter, which appeared on the front page of The New York Times, stirred up a spirited controversy. On June 12 the Museum received an open letter signed by seventy-five artists expressing confidence in the integrity of the juries appointed, saying that it seemed unfair to attack the juries before they had met and announced their verdicts.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note some artists who were in that exhibition: Ivan Albright, Andrew Wyeth, Everett Spruce and Mark Tobey are among them.

But back to Sterne: She later blamed the photo for causing her trouble with male artists, but she wanted the attention. Even though she hung around with the art crowd, including Duchamps and Mondrian at first and’, later, the guys at the Cedar Tavern, she still, early on, felt that she would be better off signing her work only with a “H,” to disguise her gender.

That soon ended, but there’s no question that her connection with Steinberg aided her.

For me, Sterne’s work is uneven. She experimented a lot–working in Surrealism, abstraction (both geometric and biomorphic), representation, portraiture. But she never developed a particular signature style or niche.

The works on view at the Amon Carter are from two series (plus four miscellaneous prints)–Metaphores and Metamorphoses and The Vertical Horizontals–that she made in 1967. I reviewed the exhibition for The Wall Street Journal, published in yesterday’s paper.

The prints are engaging, interesting–a window on her thinking, her working out process. But they didn’t leave me asking for more. I have seen her very good painting at the Tate, and a few others. The Met plans to put one of her paintings in Epic Abstraction, coming this fall–if it is the one in the museum’s permanent collection, I don’t believe it’s normally on view.

And so, despite this wide-ranging look at Sterne’s work, I had to conclude–for the show and for her in general:

“Hedda Sterne: Printed Variations” is a small, attractive show displaying themes that she also explored in painting. It leaves her where she will probably remain in art history, closer to the periphery than the center.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Nina Leen/Time Life Pictures Gallery/Getty Images (top right); Metaphores and Metamorphoses VII, bottom left, courtesy of The Hedda Sterne Foundation.

The Art Institute of Chicago’s major summer exhibition, John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age, is probably a crowd-pleaser–though I haven’t checked the numbers. Sargent is usually a big draw–I remember when, to cite one example, the show of his watercolors at the Brooklyn Museum outdrew a large show of El Anatsui, which was a surprise given Brooklyn’s predilection for contemporary art (in which, I’d say, El Anatsui is a rock star).

But Sargent has been exhibited so many times–except in Chicago, where decades had passed since his last exhibition. What to do that’s different? If you are Art Institute curator Annelise K. Madsen, you find a local angle. She decided to organize an exhibit of works by Sargent that had been exhibited in Chicago, owned by Chicagoans, or portrayed Chicagoans. It was a good idea, I thought.

Then she went a step further and married that with a narrative about the desire of locals to make Chicago’s cultural scene match its industrial prominence, and to set Sargent in that scene among his artist friends and rivals.

Not a bad idea, on first thought–though for me, it didn’t quite work. I was in Chicago several weeks ago to review it for The Wall Street Journal, and my piece was published in today’s print paper, headlined, Dazzling Art With a City Connection. 

It’s a good show, as I wrote:

With this exhibition arranged thematically rather than chronologically, visitors see Sargent in the round, one facet at a time. The need for a Chicago connection, however, prevents it from being a true retrospective, as many of his best paintings, like “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” (1885-86), have no such link and are thus absent.

That was still ok, as the exhibit is “full of visual pleasures.”  For me, the bigger issue was Madsen’s decision to add in works by Sargent’s friends and rivals.

…— Claude Monet, Giovanni Boldini, James McNeill Whistler, Anders Zorn, Dennis Miller Bunker and Walter Gay, among them. Hung both interspersed with Sargents and in a gallery of their own—constituting a third of the paintings on view—they often serve the Chicago-rising narrative, but seem like interlopers. The “Sargentesque” ones can be confusing. Less—or none—might have been more.

Maybe that is a real problem for all double-narrative exhibits. There aren’t that many to begin with. and maybe there’s a reason for that.

Let me be clear, though: the exhibit is still very much worth seeing–as the two works, Portrait of a Boy and The Loggia, Vizcaya, pasted here indicate, Up top is a picture I took of three ladies studying La Carmencita. Who could ask for more?

 

 

 

Poor Grant Wood. Seventy-years after his death, his work is widely known–thanks to American Gothic–but equally widely misunderstood, under-appreciated and, recalling the old insult to George W. Bush,misunderestimated. Wanda Corn tried to set the record straight in 1983, but if her excellent exhibition convinced some people–and I think it did–the effect didn’t last. That’s because, I believe, that Wood can’t shake the satirization of American Gothic.

So now comes Barbara Haskell, who with Sarah Humphreville has organized an even larger exploration of Wood’s oeuvre at the Whitney Museum of American Art, an exhibition called Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables. I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal in a piece published last Thursday, and I can only hope that this time minds will be changed for the long run. He is, as I wrote, “far more complicated than his reputation as the sentimental bard of an idealized rural life and an evangelist for a pure strain of American art allows.” And:

Rather, she asserts, Wood regularly infused his meticulously planned paintings with anxiety, alienation or, at least, ambiguity. As for his call for a distinctly American art, that was more a matter of subject than style. Wood himself emulated European artists in creating his works—but they were always about American people, scenes, values and identity.

Haskell gives plenty of evidence–about 120 works, including early decorative objects, early Impressionist works, drawings, book covers and paintings that span his entire career. But she also concedes that Wood created art that can be read straightforwardly, too–his silver works, murals, those illustrations and so on. They are simply visual delights. Many portraits have only a hint of melancholy, while some other paintings are laden with significant details that can be read as signs or messages.

That’s another plus for him, btw–his work can be read on many levels.

The 2010 biography of Wood by R. Tripp Evans, sees many signs of homosexuality in his works–which not something Haskell dealt much with, per se. She acknowledges that Wood’s art was influenced by his sexual repressed, closeted self, though. I don’t believe that Wood ever never acknowledged that he was gay–so her approach strikes me as reasonable. Read what you want! In Spring Turning, for example, Corn saw breasts; Haskell see buttocks, and so do I. But I do not see in the portrait of his sister, who is holding a chick and piece of fruit, a sign of anal sex, as some have.

Many things struck me as I examined this show–some I mention in the review and some only here. One thing was very, very clear, however–technically, Wood is a great painter. That’s not damning him with faint praise (read my review, please), but it is acknowledging something that has not often been mentioned about him.

You know what American Gothic looks like, so I am posting here three other paintings that I really like. From the top: Appraisal, Plaid Sweater and Young Corn. See many more at the Whitney.

 

 

The exhibition entitled Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism, which debuted recently at the Denver Art Museum, is long overdue. It has been ten years in the making, the brainchild of independent French curator Laurence Madeline, and it became a project of the American Federation of the Arts a few years after that.

The show includes about 80 paintings by 37 artists from 11 countries, all of whom worked in Paris at one time or another between 1850 and 1900. Yes, you know the names of Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Rosa Bonheur, Cecilia Beaux and a few others–but probably not many more. When I told a curator of 19th Century European art that I was going to the exhibit a few months back, he retorted that we already know the names of those worth knowing. Having now visited the exhibition, I disagree.

I reviewed the show for The Wall Street Journal, published my piece last week.

In that review, I wrote: