Exhibitions

Lucky me, I was invited to go to the Glass House — Philip Johnson’s home in New Canaan, Ct. — on Saturday for its Summer Party. The house was completed in 1949, and has been open to the public since 2007 from May to November (advance registration/tickets required). It’s often sold out, I was told by several other party-goers.

On a beautiful sunny, not-too-hot day like Saturday, it was well-worth the visit, not just to see where Johnson lived and his architectural concept for the house, but also for the outbuildings made as art galleries, the folly in the artificial lake and the 49-acre grounds — a meadow, lawn, trails, etc.

This year, the Glass House has commissioned its first site-specific work and, rather appropriately, it chose Fujiko Nakaya, who is known for her fog sculptures. Here the idea was to wrap the Glass House in dense mist, which disperses differently according to the wind, and essentially blot out the trademark transparency of the house — the “magic” — for 10 or 15 minutes each time the sculpture is turned on.

The piece is called Veil.

The pictures here give a sense, starting above left with one I found on the web, taken at night. It was probably a calm night, because that’s not what I saw.

My own pictures are also posted here, at right and below.

At the bottom here is the view from inside the house.

Veil certainly got everyone’s attention, and judging by what I overheard and observed, everyone was charmed. Rather like Christo’s Gates in Central Park, Veil put a smile on people’s faces.

We’ve certainly had exhibitions focusing on beauty in contemporary art before, but not one (that I know of) subtitled anything like A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting. I thought it was an interesting premise, worth looking at.

The exhibition, at and organized by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, opened on June 11. Beauty Reigns was curated by René Paul Barilleaux, the museum’s chief curator and curator of art after 1945. He chose thirteen “emerging and mid-career abstract painters whose art is characterized in whole or part by high-key color, obsessive layering of surface imagery, use of overall and repeated patterns, stylized motifs, fragments of representation, and a tension between melancholy and the sublime.”

The 13 are Jose Alvarez D.O.P.A; Kamrooz Aram; Charles Burwell; Annette Davidek; Fausto Fernandez; Nancy Lorenz; Ryan McGinness; Beatriz Milhazes; Jiha Moon; Paul Henry Ramirez; Rex Ray; Rosalyn Schwartz; and Susan Chrysler White. Some I’ve heard of, some not.

Barilleaux says their work exudes “exoticism, exuberance, and optimism.”  That’s  nice for a change. I didn’t see much of that at the Whitney biennial, and although one can find beautiful works at many of the best and most respected art fairs, people don’t talk much about it. At least not in those terms. “Beauty” is a put-down to some. 

It’s hard to judge an exhibit from afar; you really have to see works in person. But I can’t get to the McNay, so I did look at the works on the web and in the catalogue.

From that, I think the exhibit, which runs until Aug. 17, provides some luscious works of art. I’ve posted two here, Love is What You Make it Out to Be, a collage by Fernandez, above right, and We Came from the Stars, a mixed-media assemblage that the McNay has acquired, above left.

As I’ve alluded, Beauty Reigns confronts a problem with contemporary art. Whereas some people flock to it, in love with the new, almost instinctively and unquestionably sure about its merits, another group — which I would guess is considerably larger — has trouble dealing with most contemporary art. Much is not lovely to look at, while also being difficult to understand, to draw any meaning from. The “my kid can do that” response applies to much abstract art. Both groups tend to disdain each other.

But Barilleaux, quoted in the San Antonio Current, explains himself and his goal here:  

I wanted people to experience art that was optimistic and uplifting. This is baroque art with a small ‘b,’ so it’s not imitating work of the Baroque period in the 17th and early 18th centuries, but it is theatrical and beautiful, maybe even over-the-top and a little obsessive. This is an exhibit designed to give viewers visual pleasure, though all of these artists have different ideas about what beauty is.”

Later, in the same piece, Dan R. Goddard, a former art critic for the San Antonio Express-News (whose own critical response to the exhibit is behind a paywall, alas), writes:

Barilleaux acknowledges that those who buy into the idea that anything beautiful can’t be serious may be tempted to dismiss many of the works in “Beauty Reigns” as wallpaper. However, he adds, “that may just show how limited we are by what we think wallpaper should be.” 

Goddard’s article contains much more background about some artists in the show, including some interviews. Read it here.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum

For all the chatter that American museums do  not give enough respect to folk art, we do so more than some countries — Britain, for example. “When the Royal Academy was established in 1769, it made a point of declaring that “no needlework, artificial flowers, cut paper, shell work, or any such baubles should be admitted” within its elite precincts,” according to The Guardian. Until today, there has never  been a “significant exhibition of British folk art at a major institution,” the Tate itself says in a press release.

But the Tate Britain is now making up for that with the opening of a show called simply British Folk Art. It puts on display nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, textiles and other objects, gathered from all over the country. By the Tate’s own admission:

…in Britain the [folk art] genre remains elusive. Rarely considered in the context of art history, ‘folk art’ has been viewed as part of social history or folklore studies. This show unites an extraordinary selection of objects, exploring the threshold between art and artefact and challenging perceptions of ’high art’. British Folk Art includes surprising and diverse examples of British folk art, from rustic leather Toby jugs to brightly coloured ships’ figureheads. The imposing larger than life-size thatched figure of King Alfred created by master thatcher, Jesse Maycock, in 1960 is one of the exhibition’s highlights. Others include maritime embroidery by fisherman John Craske; an intricately designed pin cushion made by wounded soldiers during the Crimean war; and shop signs in the shape of over-sized pocket watches and giant shoes.

There’s also a “sculpture of a cockerel, made out of mutton bones by French POWs during the Napoleonic wars.” That’s at right. Curating this show wasn’t exactly easy. An article last month in The Guardian described it this way:

…Every time [co-curator Martin] Myrone ventured out socially during the genesis of the exhibition he found himself fielding a barrage of questions: “Will you be including tattoos, traveller art, my nan’s knitting?” Instead of attempting answers, Myrone and his colleagues Ruth Kenny and Jeff McMillan embarked on a country-wide rummage in museum vaults for objects that had already been labelled as “folk” by local curators. In practice, this often meant items that had arrived decades earlier that no one had ever quite known what to do with: a sporting print, a weather vane, a horse vertebra that has been painted to look like – of all things – the Methodist preacher John Wesley. The curators also rifled the Tate’s own store-cupboard for items that appeared not to fit into the canonical categories by which we normally make sense of “art” (even the Tate has acquired its fair share of oddities over the decades).

They ended up, I think and from afar, established folk art’s legitimacy and challenging some misconceptions. E.g., says The Guardian:

…The curators are also keen to smudge any easy ideas about which sex did what in the making of vernacular art. Some of the finest needlework in the show was produced by the butchest of men. Between 1850 and 1910 recuperating soldiers were encouraged to cut up old serge and twill uniforms to make bright patchworks. Hardly an occupation for the faint of heart or fingers: the thickness and weight of the cloth meant that piercing and sewing the quilts became the equivalent of an energetic route march. That’s why the government promoted the practice as a way of drawing soldiers away from liquor and dice. In 1875 the monthly periodical The British Workman published an article quoting a soldier who took up quilting when he gave up drink: “I must be employed, or I shall get into mischief.” One of his patchwork quilts runs to over 28,000 pieces.

You can see a few of these objects at the Tate link above and read more at The Guardian link.