Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

The Spirit of Alma Thomas — UPDATED

Talk about a life: Alma Thomas was born in Georgia in the 1890s, one of the most vicious decades of the Jim Crow South. She told a reporter in 1972 that when she was young, blacks like her could not enter museums. Yet that year she became the first African-American woman to be honored with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

72_58_thomasa_1140But it wasn’t her biography that drew me, and that draws others nowadays, to Alma Thomas. It’s her exuberant art–something she took seriously only after she retired from teach art to middle-schoolers at the age of 69.

In fact, one of the most memorable works I noticed when the Whitney opened downtown last year was her “Mars Dust,” which had been purchased from the 1972 show but, in recent years at least, kept in storage. I had heard of Thomas, but I’m not sure I had ever seen her works in person until then.

So when a press release arrived saying that the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore was giving her a show, I quickly pitched a review to The Wall Street Journal,  which published it today. You can read it here (and see a different painting of hers).

Before she died, Thomas gave or bequeathed many works to the American Art Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, so take a look at those works.

I love many of her works–though not all–and another thing I love about her is her flair for titles–especially when so many artists cop out and slap “Untitled” on their work. Not Thomas. Her titles are as imaginatively engaging as her art. There’s “Snoopy See Earth Wrapped in Sunset,” “Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers,” “White Roses Sing and Sing,” “Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish” and many more like that.

What a charmer.

More good news:  you can see the exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem this summer if you cannot make the trip to Saratoga Springs.

UPDATE: I have retrieved some installation shots from my phone to share:

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Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Whitney Museum (top) and me.

 

Becoming An Art Convert In Spain–And Why

P5210850Earlier this year, I made an art pilgrimage to Valladolid, the home of Spain’s National Museum of Sculpture. So much Spanish Renaissance and Baroque sculpture resides and stays in Spain, sometimes because it can’t leave and sometimes because there is no demand to borrow it, and I had felt remiss in not having seen enough Spanish Old Master Sculpture.

I particularly wanted to see Juan de Juni’s The Burial of Christ, which I had proposed for the Masterpiece column that runs every Saturday in The Wall Street Journal. It was an easy sell. And my piece, headlined A Tableau Animated by Grief, ran this past weekend.

But among the public, I think Spanish Renaissance and Baroque art is a hard sell. It’s too religious, too unflinching for these secular times, some say. I didn’t like all the blood either. But, as I wrote in the Masterpiece column, I am now a convert. Just take a look at what Juni’s ensemble, six figures surrounding the dead Christ (detail above), looks like. It is spectacular. (You can see two additional close-ups here.)

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The museum in Valladolid was a real treat because it tells a long and beautiful story, and–best of all–it tells it in a way that allows comparison among artists. You can easily contrast Juni (c. 1507–1577) with the other major sculptor of this era, Alonso Berruguete (1488–1561). Berrugete is represented there by a massive, multi-section altarpiece, one fragment of which I have posted here at right.

As it turned out, the WSJ had already published a Masterpiece column on a sculpture called The Sacrifice of Isaac in 2014. You can read that article and see the piece here.

But that was all right with me. In Valladolid, I realized that I had chosen the right guy. While I was there, I spoke with the museum’s subdirector, Manuel Arias Martínez, about the two. He had pointed out their similarities and their differences. Berruguete, he said, was a painter as well as a sculptor and had worked quickly in a refined, elegant Mannerist style. Juni, purely a sculptor, slowly and carefully carved his pieces in a more detailed, more realistic style.

Then he said the best line: “Berruguete’s sculptures are to see. Juni’s are to pray.” True—overall—but I think Juni’s The Burial of Christ surely does double duty.

At the museum, Berruguete’s art takes up a long gallery and more on the ground floor. Upstairs, after a couple of small galleries, Juni’s sits at the end of a long, beautifully carved set of choir stalls. Here’s what that looks like:

 

Juni had carved a similar version of the burial for the Segovia cathedral, so naturally I also went there to see what that looked like. For one, it has some of the outer structure of the sculpture that, in Valladolid, has been lost. It’s also, obviously, more of a relief than a sculpture.

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And just for your comparison, here are two more entombment scenes that I saw in Spain–nice but not Juni.

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The Broad Museum Answers Back

Several days ago, I asked here if any other art museums in the U.S. were spending as much money buying art as the Crystal Bridges Museum. I had added up the announced purchases over the past year or so by Crystal Bridges and it came to more than $150 million.

Robert-Longo-Untitled-Fer-010I could think of only the Broad, which hasn’t opened yet, as a contender. This morning, I received an email from the Broad announcing “more than 50 new artworks added to the Broad collection in anticipation of the September 20 opening.”

But I still think CB is spending more. That’s because:

Most of the additions to the 2,000-work Broad collection built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad are artworks that were acquired within a year of the artist producing them, reflecting the museum’s commitment to build a dynamic collection of the most comprehensive and current contemporary art.

Interestingly, though, the names at the top of the release are all well-known. They include Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami (with “the largest painting in the Broad collection”), John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool and Damien Hirst, a 1954 combine by Robert Rauschenberg and three sculptures by Cy Twombly. Less-known Goshka Macuga and Ella Kruglyanskaya were also cited.

In its 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Broad will install for its inaugural show about 250 works from the 2,050 or so it owns.

Some of the new highlights:

  • Mehretu’s Invisible Sun (algorithm 8, fable form), 2015, an ink-and-acrylic-on-canvas piece “currently on view at the Art Basel art fair in Switzerland.”
  • Robert Longo’s Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014), a charcoal drawing of the Ferguson, Mo. police line last year, after the shooting death of Michael Brown; pictured above.
  • Murakami’s 82-foot-long and 10-foot-high In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow.
  • Macuga’s Death of Marxism, Women of all Lands Unite, Suit for Tichý 4 and Suit for Tichý 5.
  • Kruglyanskaya’s Girl on a Hot Day, 2015.
  • Hirst’s Fear, 2002 (thousands of dead flies thickly encrusted in resin)
  • Wool’s Untitled, 2015, the 20th work by Wool added to the collection
  • John Currin’s Maenads, 2015
  • Ruscha’s BLISS BUCKET, 2010; JET BABY, 2011; PERIODS, 2013; WALL ROCKET, 2013; and HISTORY KIDS, 2013 (five lithographs)
  • Koons’s Hulk (Organ)
  • Baldessari’s Pictures & Scripts: Honey – what words come to mind?, 2015; Horizontal Men, 1984; plus a full set of screenprints from his 2012 Eight Soups series (bringing the collection’s Baldessari holdings to 40 works spanning nearly 50 years).
  • Twombly’s three sculptures brings the collection’s holdings in work by Twombly to 22.

More pictures are here.

Photo Credit: Petzel Gallery via The Guardian

What’s Up With The Met’s Lauder Center?

Rabinow-Rebecca-webThat was the question on my mind when I proposed a story on it for the annual New York Times special section on museums, which was part of today’s paper. The result is headlined A Gift That Could Rewrite Art History in the paper (it’s different–and too “newsy” a headline on the web–bt that’s journalism today. Interestingly, the Times usually shows the writer the print head, but not the web head).

In any case, here’s the link to the article.

The Lauder Research Center for Modern Art has an enviable $22 million endowment of its own and is headed by curator Rebecca Rabinow (pictured). I won’t go into the details of the center’s components here–they are all in the article. The most interesting thing for RCA readers will be to watch for results. One project in particular, in which a scholar named Verane Tasseau is trying to compile the inventory of Daniel Kahnweiler’s gallery and trace where those artworks went, has great potential to fulfill that headline.

In the meantime, you may want to peruse the Center’s microsite, which contains a lot of information and databases that are growing by the week.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

 

Why Otis Kaye?

OK-DJIA-VuLast week, The Wall Street Journal published my review of a little show up at the New Britain Museum of American Art: paintings by Otis Kaye. Kaye (1885-1974) is not very well known–in fact, that’s how I began my review. I commend the New Britain museum for taking the show, which was organized, oddly enough, by James M. Bradburne, the departing director of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

Bradburne had learned of Kaye when the Palazzo Strozzi presented Art and Illusion, a survey of trompe l’oeil from antiquity to the present, in 2009 (which I wrote about here).

The New Britain museum knew there’d be little or no name recognition, but no matter. In today’s environment and drive to get people in the door, it was taking a chance. Someone gave the exhibit a title that may, or may not, help: Otis Kaye: Money, Mystery, and Mastery. His subject was money.

Here’s a link to my review.

Kaye is an odd duck and but for his proficiency in painting he might be categorized as an outsider artist. He certainly didn’t mix in the art world and he painted mostly for himself.

OK-EasyComeAs it says in the catalogue:

…Kaye told and retold the story of his life in trompe l’oeil. Every work is filled with visual puns, one-liners, and clues to the events that marked—and often scarred—his life. For Kaye, each painting served as a comment, a moral statement, a catharsis, a reflection, and a reconstruction of a chaotic, capricious, and seemingly immoral world in which everything could be bought, sold, and lost in a continuing game of chance.

Museumgoers who typically speed through galleries spending a few seconds looking at a picture will miss Kaye’s genius. But, anecdotally, people seem to get that. While I was in New Britain I watched people spend several minutes with some of his paintings. I overheard comments like “All of these images seem to tell a story” and “there’s a lot in this painting.” It is true, too, that the public tends to like trompe l’oeil paintings; they are fun to view.

I describe some elements of a few paintings, including the two I’ve posted here (D’-JIA-VU? at top and Easy Come, Easy Go below), but there’s usually more in each and every one of the works. For example, in the comparatively simple Nickel Dime Securities (also described in the review), I had to leave out that a ticket he painted promises “ON THE LAST OF OCT. 1929 / $1.00 / NORMAN OIL CO / WILL PAY TO / THE BEARER / MAYBE IF WE / HAVE MONEY / $1.00 DOLLAR.” That date is two days after the ’29 crash on Wall Street.

You just have to keep looking.

Ok, Kaye is not a master artist. But he is a good one and should  be better known.

There’s another reason to like the NBMAA (which I’ve both criticized and praised in the past) and I’ll be back with pictures of that reason in the next day or so.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the New Britain Museum of American Art