Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

Take The High (Line) Road: Art CAN Be Fun

If one of her first projects is an indication, I like the way Cecilia Alemani, the new art curator at the High Line, thinks. Alemani joined the High Line last October, and in a Q&A she did for the park’s spring newsletter, she was answered a question about her plans this way:

As soon as I joined the High Line, people started asking me what my first  big bronze sculpture would be. I think it’s funny how people put art in silos, assuming that “public art” means monumental sculptures in corporate plazas and government buildings. To react to this, I decided to do a show of very tiny objects to debut in HIGH LINE COMMISSIONS. The show will be called Lilliput. It will be the High Line’s first group exhibition, with a series of miniature sculptures installed in peculiar places along the High Line.

She’s right; people do have certain expections — and sometimes the best way to create interest is to defy them. Alemandi is doing it in a way that doesn’t employ shock value, which is often the fallback position. I like that.

The High Line website has more about the show, which opened on Apr. 19 and continues for a year. It involves six artists — names and projects are here — who made and sited their pieces among the vegetation and along the pathways. For visitors, it’s an art treasure hunt.  “Throughout the different seasons, nature will embrace the sculptures, transforming their surroundings and acting as a backdrop in continuous flux,” Alemani says, looking forward to the way the art works will blend with, or not, the landscape over the course of the year.

The artists Alemani chose are all, but one, foreign-born, as is the curator. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.

They’re lucky: the  High Line is an incredible venue for exposure. Since it opened in June 2009, more than 7 million people have visited.

Photo Credit: Herakles by Oliver Laric, one of the artists in the exhibition, Courtesy of the High Line

 

Lasting Impression: World’s Fairs As Design Incubators

To hear the curators of “Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939” tell it, we have museums around the world to thank for preserving this slice of history. Otherwise, physical remains of these fairs are scant. And judging by the catalogue for the show, we are very lucky that they did. There’s a lot of eye candy, and there are even more items that made lasting impact, influencing future generations of designers and artists. Some, like the Thonet chair, a bentwood design by Michael Thonet, and Alvo Aalto’s Savoy vase, shown at the 1937 fair, are still in production.

The years between the 1851 “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations” at the Crystal Palace in London and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 were the glory years for design, as the 200 objects in this exhibit — most not seen publicly since before World War II — demonstrate. Manufacturers used fairs to show off, to stir up excitement about their wares and to spark consumption (in general, as well as for these objects specifically). Carlo Bugatt’s “cobra chair” made its debut at a fair, as did a rocking chair demonstrating the bentwood technique. Westerners didn’t use jade or onyx in jewelry until they saw it in a Chinese mask at a fair. And take a look at the silver rococco dressing table here, made by Gorham for the 1900 fair, and now in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. 

Catherine Futter, the Nelson-Atkins curator who began work on this exhibit 15 years ago, when she was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, says she and co-curator Jason Busch, of the Carnegie Museum of Art (where the show goes next), looked at thousands of objects, narrowing them down to the ones that really demonstrated innovation. In general, she said, “I want people to get a sense of what world’s fairs were like for debuting new technology and new styles all in one place. It was the world on a stage.”  

“This was where art meets industry,” she added. The exhibit stops when fairs became more about ideas and less about products.

The Nelson-Atkins is trying to make the show an experience, so visitors will see images of the fairs, hear period music, and have access to interactive elements that are supposed to provide virtual “hands-on” experiences — these things I have not seen, so I can’t really comment.  It also, emulating the function of world’s fairs as technology and style incubators, mounted a design contest for a temporary pavilion for the interative elements that has been constructed at the mseum grounds for the exhibition; it was won by a company called Generator Studio which used solar panels and will re-use all of the materials in other projects when the exhibition ends — you can see a rendering and more info here.

I have a short article with a bit more information (it’ll explain that papier mache piano above left, and shows an object illustrating the cross-cultural benefits of the fairs) in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

 And I’m happy to report is traveling beyond Kansas City and Pittsburgh to New Orleans and Charlotte, N.C., which is very good distribution nowaadays.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins (top) and the Carnegie Museum (bottom)

NYC’s Summer Of Monet Elicits Innovative Collaboration, Not Competition

Now this is a good idea — a collaboration between the New York Botanical Garden* and the Metropolitan Museum of Art* that I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted.

This summer belongs to Monet at the NYBG. Not only will it recreate Monet’s garden at Giverny inside the conservatory, but also it will, in the Rondina Gallery, mount an exhibition called “The Artist in the Garden” curated by Paul Hayes Tucker — a foremost Monet scholar. It will include, for the first time together, two rarely seen paintings by Monet – Irises from a private Swiss collection, at right, and The Artist’s Garden in Giverny, on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery. Also on view will be “his paint-encrusted wooden palette and an evocative array of historical photographs that show the artist creating and enjoying his garden.”

In the conservatory, visitors will encounter

…a façade of Monet’s house offer[ing] a glimpse of the artist’s view of his garden and the flowers that served as his muse for many of his most famous paintings. As visitors walk past the vine-covered pink walls with bright-green shutters, familiar to anyone who has seen the original in Giverny, their senses will be invigorated by the sights and scents of spring aubretias, bellflowers, and poppies, as well as masses of Dutch, German-bearded, Japanese, and Siberian irises, which Monet immortalized in his art.

A re-creation of Monet’s Grand Allée from his formal garden known as Clos Normand, or Norman enclosure, will include a path of rose-covered arches with beds of lush, colorful flowers lining both sides. A Japanese footbridge dressed with mauve and white Asian wisterias will extend over a picturesque pool, calling to mind Monet’s water garden, encircled with willow trees, bamboo groves, and flowering shrubs.

Read more of that part here, because what visitors will see changes in the summer and fall.

I wasn’t sure how art museums would react to this incursion. Sure, botanical gardens have been offering visitors art exhibits for years, but paintings? That’s a step further. Cultural institutions compete for visitors’ time as well as interests, after all.

But then today came the announcement from the NYBG about a new iPhone ap — NYBG IN BLOOM. It includes one element in collaboration with the Met:  “Paintings and Plants.”

 This special feature of the app enables visitors to virtually view select Monet paintings on display at the Met and link to the Met’s Web site for further information about them, complementing what visitors see at the Garden’s exhibition.

 That sounds terrific — a win-win. Read more here.

The NYBG’s fantastic-sounding summer of Monet begins on May 19 and runs through October 21.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the NYBG

*I consult to a foundation that supports both institutions.

(Re)discovering Simon Hantai, And A Possible Opportunity

If I’d come across the artist Simon Hantai before I went to TEFAF Maastricht this year, I don’t remember him. But one booth (Galerie Beres, I think) featured several works by him, and I was intrigued enough to take a couple of pictures so that I could remember to look him up upon my return (the top two photos here, and sorry about the fuzziness).   

It turned out that I didn’t really need the reminder, because within days, the National Gallery of Art announced the acquisition of Etude (1969) by Hantai, its first painting by him.

That sent me to his 2008 obit in The New York Times, which explained my deficiency (a bit). It described him as “a highly regarded, famously reclusive French painter whose work explored ideas of absence and silence,”  and elaborated:

In 1982, Mr. Hantaï represented France at the Venice Biennale. Later that year, he withdrew from view, in what he described as a reaction against the rampant commercialization of art and the state’s unwelcome involvement in the making of art. Retreating to his home in Paris, he rarely left the house and refused requests to exhibit his paintings. But over the next decade and a half, Mr. Hantaï quietly produced what many critics believe to be his finest work.

The obit continued, describing his invention of a process known as pliage: 

In 1960, Mr. Hantaï began to manipulate and crease his canvases before carefully brushing them with bright liquid color. Where most painters saw canvas as merely a surface to hold paint, Mr. Hantaï focused on its essential physical nature: it was a textile that could be folded, scrunched or tied before paint touched it.

The result, when his painted canvases were unfolded, was repeating patterns of jagged whiteness that could suggest ice crystals, geologic rifts or leaf forms. The paintings seemed punctuated by absence — a kind of visual silence — a telling motif for an artist who was an exile. Mr. Hantaï’s important folded paintings include the series “Mariales” (“Cloaks”), “Whites” and “Tabulas.”

And his red Etude, above right.

The NGA says that  the Pompidou Centre is working on a retrospective of Hantai’s work next year, which it expects “will bring him international attention.” Wouldn’t it be nice if that exhibit were coming to the U.S.? The Metropolitan Museum owns no works by Hantai, and the Modern, which owns two, has neither on view. Nothing comes up in a search at the Guggenheim, SF MoMA, LACMA, MFA-Boston, the Philadelphia Museum or the Art Institute of Chicago, either.

I wonder if it’s still possible for an American museum to ask for the Hantai. I’d certainly like to see more, and a simple request — even after an exhibit is on view — has been known to work before. At left, btw, is Blue Muen from 1967.

 Photo Credits: Etude, courtesy of NGA; Blue Meun, Courtesy of Paul Rodgers / 9W Gallery

 

 

MIT Promises To Put More Arts In ITS DNA

Leaving aside the List Visual Arts Center, we don’t usually think of the arts as foremost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But today it announced a forward-thinking inititative — a new Center for Art, Science & Technology — intended to propel MIT’s goal of integrating the arts into its curriculum and research. CAST, as it will be known, is “A joint initiative of the office of the Provost and the schools of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.” Evan Ziporyn, a music professor of Music, has been names as CAST’s inaugural director.

The Mellon Foundation provided $1.5 million in funds over four years for the center, which will be used to give

awards to faculty, researchers and curators seeking to develop cross-disciplinary courses, new research or exhibitions that span the arts, science and technology….supplement[s to]  MIT’s existing Visiting Artists program…to embed artists’ residencies in the curriculum and create a platform for collaboration with faculty, students and research staff in the development, display and performance of new and experimental artwork or technologies for artistic expression.  In addition, the grant will support the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the activities of the Center. 

MIT, meanwhile, has pledged to mount “a major, bi-annual international symposium on art, science and technology,” with the first set for the 2013-14 academic year.   CAST will be part of the Office of the Provost, which signals it as a priority, I think.

A year ago, MIT held “FAST, the Festival of Art, Science and Technology” as part of its 150th anniversary celebration, and published a report called “The Arts at MIT.” CAST builds on that. (There’s more in the press release here.)

All of this is great; my only worry is that $1.5 million may not go that far.

Other art things are happening at MIT, too. On May 3, the MIT Museum will open the1,650 sq. ft. Kurtz Gallery for Photography, whose first exhibition will show 75 photographs by Berenice Abbott, plus letters and documents — Photography and Science: An Essential Unity.

And on May 10, MIT plans to dedicate Ring Stone by Cai Guo-Qiang — a monumental white granite sculpture and his first public work for a university. (There’s another picture here.)

Consisting of twelve “individual, but indivisible links cut from a 39 1/2-foot-long single block of white granite” — and weighing about 14 metric tons — the piece will be accompanied by seven Japanese Black Pine trees, planted inside the rings and nearby. It will be positioned on the lawn of the MIT Sloan School of Management, observing the principles of Feng Shui. Cai Guo-Qiang will give the keynote speech at MIT’s China Forum the same day as the dedication.

I’m sure there’s much else going on at the List Center, too, under its new director, Paul Ha.

Photograph: Courtesy of MIT