Exhibitions

You will recall the hubbub created in London (and elsewhere) by the Young British Artists in the late 1980s and ’90s–led by Damien Hirst and including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Fiona Rae, and Steve Park, among others, they rebelled against the art world’s customs. Their 19th Century counterparts were, of course, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. They too spurned art of their times, but instead of looking forward they looked back to the Old masters for inspiration.

What’s new about that? Nothing, really, except that for the first time a museum–the Legion of Honor of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco–has in a major way lined up works by Pre-Raphaelites with works by Old Masters like Botticelli, van Eyck, Memling, Veronese and Raphael himself.

It’s a well-done show, which I reviewed in a piece published in today’s Wall Street Journal, headlined Truth and Beauty…Understanding a Complex Aesthetic. But to me, the point of the show is not the literal comparisons between works, which are many, but rather the many contradictions and paradoxes in the gospel espoused by the Brotherhood. Here’s the key excerpt:

Intent on creating something novel, they nevertheless looked back to myth and medieval literature for subject matter or sometimes simply invented nostalgic scenes, filling their paintings with symbols and hoping they would be read like books. They believed in observing nature but sometimes depicted it in unnatural colors and flattened surfaces. In tune with their name, they sought to return to the practices of artists who preceded Raphael (1483-1520), but they actually esteemed him, giving him a place on their list of “Immortals” along with Michelangelo, Fra Angelico and Leonardo da Vinci. It was the saccharine, postured images of Raphael’s followers that riled the Brotherhood, yet they sometimes made sweet, overripe paintings themselves; and they eventually came to emulate the lush, stirring works of many Italians who came after Raphael, like Veronese.

I don’t know how the YBAs will fare in the years to come, but the PRB, we know, are kind of niche artists today. Some people love them; most people who call themselves art aficionados don’t love them–many actively dislike them. There’s probably a lesson there about looking backward to make something new–that’s rarely done in a way that lasts. It wasn’t long after the PRB formed that French artists staged their own rebellion against the academy, but they came up with Impressionism, and later Fauvism, and Cubism, and…well, you know how that story continues.

The PRB, I think, ended up influencing the world of design more than the world of art.

Once again, under the influence of Max Hollein–former FAMSF director and soon-to-be Met director–the Legion of Honor has created a “digital story” about the exhibition that is meant to be read before attending, but certainly can be read after or by those who are not able to go to the show. Here’s the link.(I hope the Met, which already has many excellent digital offerings, will start creating something similar for its many special exhibitions.)

If you’re curious, there’s an “in-depth” portion of the museum’s website also devoted to the exhibition (with more pictures). The WSJ has more paintings on its website too. Above right is Millais’s Mariana and at left is a somewhat strange but intriguing work by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope called Robin of Modern Times, from the collection of Gordon and Ann Getty. Below is Stanhope’s Love and the Maiden.

So you think you know Spanish art? You’ve been to the Prado and the Hispanic Society, etc., etc. and you’re pretty familiar with it. Unless, of course, you are a real expert in the Spanish art, an exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art should suggest otherwise.

To cel­e­brate San An­to­nio’s found­ing 300 years ago as a north­ern ad­min­is­tra­tive out­post of New Spain, the San An­to­nio Mu­seum of Art recently opened an exhibition called “Spain: 500 Years of Spanish Painting from the Museums of Madrid.” The goal: exposed the glory of Spanish painting to residents of a city whose art mu­se­ums lack a col­lec­tion of his­tor­i­cal Span­ish art.

Katie Lu­ber, the mu­se­um’s di­rec­tor, and William Rudolph, its chief cu­ra­tor, went to Spain hoping  to bor­row art from the reign of Fer­di­nand and Is­abella all the way to 20th century mod­ernism. They wangled 34 paintings and they borrowed nine more from U.S.museums.

As I wrote in a review for The Wall Street Journal published last week:

What were they think­ing? No list that small—from de­vo­tional works, por­traits and still lifes to genre paint­ings and land­scapes—could ful­fill the am­bi­tion of that ti­tle. Yet with paint­ings by mas­ters like Goya, El Greco and Pi­casso, this re­mark­able show gives San An­to­ni­ans a strong fla­vor of Spain’s artis­tic tra­di­tions and man­ages, more­over, to show­case su­perb works by sev­eral painters who are lit­tle known any­where in the U.S.

You can read more about my thoughts on the show on the WSJ website (search for my name) or on my website, to which I link on this page.

But for me, the best part of the show was not great works from the main museums; rather, it was lesser-known works from lesser-known museums—such as the Museum of Romanticism, which owns Luis de Madrazo y Kuntz’s wonderful ‘The Young Marchioness of Roncali’ and ‘Alfonsito Cabral with a Puro’ by his father, Manuel Cabral y Aguado Bejarado.

Both are pasted here.

I’ve also pasted a few more art works from the show below by, from top to bottom, Antonio Maria Esquivel, an unknown 15th Century Hispano-Flemish artist, Juan de Peralta, Juan de Nalda, Ramon Casas I Carbo and Picasso. Wonderful, aren’t they?

Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color, now on view, is exactly the kind of exhibition I expect and like to see from the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum–which, frankly, came as a bit of a surprise. Since the Cooper Hewitt reopened in 2014 after a three-year renovation,  it has been a bit of a disappointment to me. Too much technology that didn’t work, too much attention to interactivity rather than on design objects, too much play for my tastes. That said, it was popular, at least at first.

But I did not give up on the Cooper Hewitt and Saturated was reason enough by description to bring me back. It’s all drawn from permanent collections of the Smithsonian–and that’s a good thing. The Cooper Hewitt, part of the Smithsonian, has many worthy objects in its collection, far more than can be displayed in its limited space (In 2016, it launched a digital database of more than 200,000 objects.) and some are getting a good showing in this exhibit. Even more important, the other source of material for Saturated is the Smithsonian Libraries system, a network of 21 libraries. Together, they own more than two million books, 40,000 of which are “rare,” plus 10,000 manuscripts. (More information is here on the Fact Sheet.) It claims to be the world’s largest library system.

But back to Saturated, which attempts to “reveal how designers apply the theories of the world’s greatest color thinkers to bring order and excitement to the visual world,” and how “color perception has captivated artists, designers, scientists and philosophers.” The museum sets up this “elusive, subjective complex phenomenon” with these words:

Color is an objective, quantifiable, physical phenomenon, the reflection of certain wavelengths of light off the surface of different materials. But color is also a subjective, personal experience, different for every person and deeply intertwined with language and memory.

I reviewed this short history of color in 190 objects for The Wall Street Journal in a piece headlined Vibrant From Any Angle and published last week (while I was away). I found the exhibit to be enlightening and visually engaging, with objects dating from the 3rd to 5th Century B.C. to 2014, from a cobalt blue flask created in Syria to a 1704 book by Isaac Newton to an ’80s Joffrey Ballet poster to Peony, a wall hanging made by a digital printer and a Shimmer table made possible by nanotechnology.

You can read my review here or on my personal website. And, here are two fascinating tidbits I could not squeeze into the review:

• In 1856, William Henry Perkin “accidentally created the first synthetic dye from coal tar” –at age 18. He was searching for a treatment for malaria but instead got a brilliant purple dye; it caused the color industry to “explode,” because previously color came from insects, animals, plants, minerals, and other natural sources.
• And there’s a book, Theoretical and Practical Treatise of Textile Printing, which George Seurat cited as influential in the development of pointillism.

You just never the impact of what you do.

So go see Saturated if you’re in NYC.

Photos: Matt Flynn © Smithsonian Institution