Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Explaining Delacroix, Continued

The Delacroix exhibition at the National Gallery in London that I mentioned in my last post was also on view here in the U.S., at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, under the title Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh.  Yesterday, I learned from Patrick Noon, who curated the show there, that the MIA, too, had a video–but it’s just not easy to find on the MIA website.

Fantin-Latour_Homage_to_DelacroixNoon said:

I and two videographers on staff spent four days in Paris shooting the murals in the National Assembly, to which no one ever has access, Saint-Sulpice, and the Louvre. We also visited the Musee Delacroix and gardens and the Dalou memorial in the Luxembourg Gardens. Close to 30 hours of video then reduced to 14 minutes with narration. I felt strongly that such representation was essential for an American audience to fully appreciate the artist’s entire attainment even if the visitors were not experiencing the actual works in situ.

Here is the link; you’ll find the video halfway down the page.

Noon told me that the video in Minneapolis was “intended to be part of the installation, so not a web video per se.” It was online during the show, too, but it’s not easy to find on the website. Even with these directions, I didn’t get it right away:

Exhibitions
Past Exhibitions
DelacroixExhibition Preview (first tab)
Half way down on the page
I didn’t see the tabs right away.

The exhibition ended in Minneapolis on January 10, and Noon said that “Of the 1000 people surveyed as they left the exhibition nearly 90% claimed it was invaluable in understanding the thesis of the exhibition.” That’s a really great result.

On that same web page, at the bottom, I found another interesting didactic.

PNT160493_DelacroixInfoGraphic-large

For someone like me, who will not be able to see this exhibition, these efforts are very cool! At top I have posted Fantin Latour’s Homage to Delacroix.

 

“We All Paint in Delacroix’s Language”

Paul Cezanne said that. He also said that Delacroix’s palette was “the most beautiful” in France.

eugene-delacroix-leon-riesenerThat headline is the end of a short video made by the National Gallery in London; that sentence is the pitch to it. Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art is currently on view at the NG, and one aspect of Delacroix’s impact on other artists and modern art stems from his theories on color.

So the NG asked Professor Paul Smith to made a video and explores Delacroix’s theories on color and how his approach had a profound influence on the artists associated with the rise of modern art. You can see it here.

It’s a good, no-frills video and I wonder if it would resonate here in the U.S. Yet I found it, and other NG videos to be more informative than some here in the U.S. Here, for example, is the introduction to the exhibition and here’s a “tour” of it.

That’s Delacroix in a portrait by Léon Riesener at right.

 

 

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:

AT1

 

AT3

 

AT2

 

AT4

 

AT5

 

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

 

Who Said That? Artistic Inspirations

I happened to be in Florida recently, where I visited the Norton Museum of Art, where there’s a lot going on. Just now I want to mention one delightful little touch. Along the staircases between the first and the third floors, the Norton has posted short quotations from artists. I wish I had take a picture, but I didn’t. But I did like five quotes there well enough to write them down. Can you guess who said them before peeking at the answers below?

Here they are:

“I go to work as others rush to see their mistresses.”

“I hope with all my heart that there will be painting in heaven.”

“If I think, everything is lost.”

“It would be beyond me to agree with the critics.”

“Color is my daylong obsession and torment.”

Norton_MoA

 

I watched as people who used the stairs stopped to read and, often, to remark or to chuckle.

Here are the answers, top to bottom: Delacroix, Corot, Cezanne, Whistler, Monet

 

Obama Finally Replaces Librarian of Congress

It took more than six years, but President Obama got his way today, appointing the first African-American as Librarian of Congress: Carla D. Hayden, head of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore’s public library. I should say “nominating, because with this Congress and this President, who know what will happen.

CarlaHaydenI first suggested that the LOC’s librarian James Billington, then 80, would be eased out back in 2009. My sources in Washington for that also tipped me to Hayden’s likely appointment.

But Billington has his friends and they contributed money to the LOC. He survived reports of mismanagement, including one issued a year ago by the GAO, as reported by the Washington Post:

The result of a year-long investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the report reveals a work environment lacking central oversight and faults Librarian of Congress James H. Billington for ignoring repeated calls to hire a chief information officer, as required by law….

“There’s nobody running the ship,” said retired inspector general Karl Schornagel, who worked with Billington for almost 13 years until retiring in 2014. “There’s a lot of individual parties doing their own thing.”

Billington finally retired at the age of 86 last year.

And Obama has kept steady on his goal of making a historical appointment. As I recall, not everyone was happy her either, but that’s Washington for you.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Baltimore Sun