Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

Yale Center Scores With “Of Green Leaf…”

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art entitled Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists’ Books and the Natural World. I pitched it because I think the whole category of artists’ books is too little known. But as it turned out, the exhibit isn’t strictly a show of artists’ books. It includes, as I write, “prints, drawings, collages, specimen books, field notes, cut-paper objects, photographs, video, sound and multimedia pieces as well as books—plus some 18th- and 19th-century microscopes” too. Some 300 of them, all told.

Of Green Leaf...They all, as the press release announced, look at ways “self-taught naturalists and artists recorded and observed the natural world around them from the sixteenth century to the present, examining the intersections of artistic and scientific interest.”

Here is my key conclusion:

“Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower” is instead an exuberant exploration of nature seen through the eyes of artists. A 1958 London Transport poster in the first gallery, portraying a boy, a girl and their dogs at the start of a country walk, embodies the show’s spirit: Casually dressed, they take the wide path through a forest to a blue-sky adventure. This is going to be fun.

And so it is, particularly in its first two-thirds.

After that, alas, the exhibition peters out a little, coming to something of an anticlimax. But it’s well worth viewing.

A couple of other tidbits:

  • The first half of the show’s title was taken from a poem published in a 1846 book called Twenty Lessons on British Mosses; Or First Steps to a Knowledge of that Beautiful Tribe of Plants, one of the best titles I’ve ever been amused by and so wonderfully British.
  • The catalogue was “designed to evoke an early naturalist’s field guide.” and it’s a charmer.

You can see more images here, including a Beetles Book, a Crow’s landscape and much more.

The Freer’s Whistler Connection Pays Off (Again)

800x442_The-Embankment1536LSYou art-lovers know that James McNeill Whistler did so much more than that portrait of his mother, but so many people do not. That’s why the exhibit at the Freer-Sackler* called An American in London: Whistler and the Thames,  is so necessary. It’s the first major exhibit of his works in the U.S. in about 20 years. Better yet, while I love his full-length portraits, which were on view in a special show at the Frick in 2008 along with etchings and pastels from his trip to Venice, the Freer show focuses on his moody, atmospheric river scenes. They were painted in the 1860s and ’70s, when Whistler began to title his works as “nocturns,” “arrangements,” and “symphonies.”

whistlere28094variations-in-violet-green-1871They are lovely, and I will cite Pink and Silver – Chelsea, the Embankment, at right, on loan from the Clark Art Institute; Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf, from the National Gallery of Art; Variations in Violet and Green: Chelsea, at left, from the Musee d’Orsay; and Nocturne, from the Art Institute of Chicago, as among my favorites.

The exhibit includes more than 80 works of art, including more than 20 paintings, and because the Freer owned many of the images, it created a video in-house as an experiment. Here’s the link to it. In it, among the other things I was reminded of is that Whistler suggested to Freer that he build his museum in Washington. It’s not as good, obviously, as seeing the exhibit, but it’s better than nothing if you can’t swing a trip to D.C. before Aug. 17.

Just for fun, you can compare that with the videos about the full-length portraits made by the Frick for its show in 2009 — available here.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Freer.

Mocking the Art World, But Not Too Seriously

IMAG0371In a week when Christie’s can and does sell almost $880 million worth of contemporary art in just two nights — with more to come (or go) at Sotheby’s and Phillips — I thought it was time for amusement, sarcastic as it may be.

IMAG0370Several days ago, The Daily Dot, an internet newspaper, brought us Here’s a hilarious gallery show for people who hate art. The article is about a work of fiction by one James Hannaham called “Card Tricks,” which he wrote “in the form of art gallery plaques,” as novelist Jennifer Egan wrote in Recommended Reading, an online fiction magazine that published “Card Tricks.” Here’s a link to her commentary on it. 

Hannaham’s piece consists of several “art works” with labels. There is, for example, Some Crazy Bullshit, which consists of two bits of torn notebook paper taped to a gallery wall, as at right, and the label, at left.

He also offers a found object called Planet, i.e., the earth, and Nothing, enclosed with those little corner tabs we used to use to place photographs in paper albums.

The exhibit, Egan writes, first appeared in a gallery on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and more recently, as The Daily Dot reports, at the James Cohan Gallery in Manhattan. There:

“I’ve noticed, in galleries, that literary people look at the art, and artists look right to the placard,” Hannaham told Egan in a live interview at the event. “They want context.”

I’ve found something a little different: collectors look at who owns the work.

You can see more of Hannaham’s works at both links.

And kudos to both galleries (and apparently one in Minneapolis)  for having a sense of humor about their business. Especially this week.

Tate’s Coming Show: Is There A U.S. Counterpart?

Next week, Tate Britain will open what could be an excellent exhibition built around the career and influence of Kenneth Clark (pictured). It makes me wonder if anyone here in the U.S. could qualify for such treatment.

NPG P1153; Kenneth Clark, Baron Clark by Bernard Lee ('Bern') SchwartzThe exhibition, titled Kenneth Clark – Looking for Civilisation, 

…explores the impact of art historian, public servant and broadcaster Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), widely seen as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century. The exhibition examines Clark’s role as a patron and collector, art historian, public servant and broadcaster, and celebrates his contribution to bringing art in the twentieth century to a more popular audience.

We perhaps know Clark best as the broadcaster and writer, but Tate is instead focusing on his activities in the 1930s and ’40s, when he was an important patron of contemporary artists there:

 grahambelllandscape…Using his own wealth to help artists, Clark would not only buy works from those he admired but also provide financial support to allow them to work freely, offered commissions, and worked to ensure artists’ works entered prestigious collections. Believing that a crisis in patronage had led artists to become too detached from the rest of society, Clark promoted a representational art that was both modern and rooted in tradition. The artists he favoured included the Bloomsbury Group, the painters of the Euston Road School, and leading figures Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland [his landscape at right].

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Clark’s private patronage became a state project when he instigated the War Artists Advisory Committee to employ artists to record the war. Through the commissioning of such iconic works as Moore’s Shelter Drawings and Sutherland’s and Piper’s images of the Blitz he ensured that the neo-Romantic spirit that those artists’ work embodied became the dominant art of the period.

I think it might be a difficult show to curate, though. The sample six pictures on the Tate website don’t give me more encouragement about the visual lure. Even so, it should be a wonderful historic exhibit, offering much to learn and think about.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Tate (bottom)

Who Won The 2013 Curatorial Awards?

The Association of Art Museum Curators met in Detroit last week — a show of support for the city and the Detroit Institute of Arts, as disclosed here last year — and handed out awards. They are always interesting, as recognition by one’s peers is the highest form of praise, and this year they are very interesting — none of the usual suspects won awards.

HopperStudyIn exhibitions, the top award, for museums with an operating budget of more than $20 million, went to Red, White + Bold: Masterworks of Navajo Design, 1840 – 1870, curated by Nancy J. Blomberg, of the Denver Art Museum. I didn’t see that show, but I previewed the museum’s SPUN suite of exhibitions for The New York Times (here) and spoke with Bromberg about it. Good choice, I think.

Here are the others:

In EXHIBITIONS:

Museums with an operating budget between $4-20M

First Place: Yoga: The Art of Transformation, curated by Debra Diamond, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington

Honorable Mention: Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Museums with an operating budget under $4M

First Place (TIE): An Errant Line: Ann Hamilton/Cynthia Schira, curated by Susan Earle, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; and Encounters: The Arts of Africa, curated by Allyson Purpura, Krannert Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

Honorable Mention: More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s, curated by Claire Schneider, Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

In EXHIBITION CATALOGUES, we’ll go from small to large…

Museums with an operating budget under $4M

First Place: The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation by Mary-Kay Lombino and Peter Buse, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Honorable Mention: Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George by Erin B. Coe, Gwendolyn Owens, and Bruce Robertson, The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York

Museums with an operating budget between $4–20M

First Place: Yoga: The Art of Transformation by Debra Diamond, et al., Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington

Honorable Mention: Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in The New York Chamber of Commerce, by Karl Kusserow, Elizabeth Blackmar, Paul Staiti, et al., Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey

 Museums with an operating budgets over $20M

First Place: Hopper Drawing by Carter E. Foster, Daniel S. Palmer, Nicholas Robbins, et al., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Honorable Mention (TIE): German Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350-1600 by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Joshua P. Waterman, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York AND Rauschenberg Research Project by Sarah Roberts, Nicholas Cullinan, Susan Davidson, et al., at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California.

And finally, in ARTICLES AND ESSAYS:

First Place: Charles Marville: Hidden in Plain Sight by Sarah Kennel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Honorable Mention: Delacroix and the Matter of Finish by Eik Kahng, Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Congratulations, all. I wish I had seen more of these exhibits.

Photo Credit: Hopper Study for Nighthawks, Courtesy of the Whitney Museum