Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

ICYMI: Matisse and American Art

No sooner had my review of the exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum titled Matisse and American Art run in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday than I was off, flying to another exhibition whose review you will see in the next several days, I hope.

But that early morning flight meant that I did not have the chance to post news of my review* and, more important, of the exhibition here. The Journal also, as it has recently, created a slide show of ten works in the exhibition.

Here are the nut grafs of my review:

…[In 1908] American artists weren’t laughing either, but for the opposite reason. They were admiring Matisse, studying with him, collecting him and drawing inspiration from him. And they have ever since, as “Matisse and American Art” at the Montclair Art Museum illustrates. With 19 works by Matisse and 44 by others, this enterprising exhibition extends the previously explored territory of Matisse’s influence on postwar painters like Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and, especially, Richard Diebenkorn backward to early modernist artists like Arthur Dove and forward to contemporary artists like Faith Ringgold.

Subtly and boldly, in homage, in spirit and in appropriation, the 34 Americans in this exhibition borrowed Matisse’s palette and images, learned from his compositional structures, adopted his fluid brushwork and adapted his themes to their purposes.
The list of those artists, in fact, was too long for this exhibition, but as I also noted, “As a supplement, the Montclair museum gathered 53 additional works from its permanent collection that relate to Matisse—by Alex Katz,Walt Kuhn, Nick Cave, Mickalene Thomas,Nancy Spero,William Baziotes and others—and installed them in its permanent collection galleries.”
I’ve seen that done at one or two other museums recently, and I applaud. While you have people looking at a subject, offer more to those who want to learn more–but the exhibition doesn’t get too large for those who don’t want too much.
I don’t have too much to add to my review–if I had had more space, I would have explained some connections. For example, Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriation of a Matisse gold fish bowl in a bronze sculpture works because Lichtenstein used different means–open spaces in the bronze and vertical blocks of yellow and white color–to create the light reflections off the glass bowl that Matisse created in paint.
But you’ll get that if you visit Montclair to see the exhibit, which was curated by Gail Stavitsky, a stalwart at Montclair and a very scholarly one too.
* If my review is blocked by a paywall, try Googling “A Modern Master and His Progeny.”
UPDATE: I forgot to include here a favorite example that had to be cut from my review because of my word-count limit: Kenneth Noland’s graceful abstraction, “Flares: Homage to Matisse” (1991), which embraces the palette in Matisse’s 1912 “Moroccan Landscape (Acanthus)”—which isn’t in the exhibition, alas, but is reproduced in the catalogue. Have a look below the credits.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Montclair Art Museum, from top to bottom, works by Matisse, Arthur Dove and Faith Ringgold

American Art Benefits: A Little Noticed $100 Million Gift

Everyone I know is reading more news these days–until they give up and decide to avoid news altogether. Either way, some good news in the art world is not getting enough attention.

Last week, for example a $100 million gift to Colby College Museum of Art came and went with barely any notice. Therefore, I’m putting it here, even I’m a few days late, too busy with other things.

It came from Peter and Paula Lunder, who had already given about $100 million in art and in funds to the Colby museum. This time, per the press release, the donation:

will add nearly 1,150 artworks to the museum’s collection and will launch the Lunder Institute for American Art, establishing Colby as the only liberal arts college with a world-class art museum and a global research center on American art.

…The gift includes paintings, sculptures, photography, and works on paper, dating from a 1501 engraving by Albrecht Dürer to a 2014 aquatint by Julie Mehretu, by more than 150 artists, including Mary Cassatt, Jasper Johns, Nina Katchadourian, Jacob Lawrence, Maya Lin, Joan Mitchell, Claes Oldenburg, Betye Saar, Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt van Rijn, Ai Weiwei, Fred Wilson, and James McNeill Whistler. The gift brings the total number of works given by Peter and Paula Lunder, longtime benefactors to the college and the museum, to more than 1,500—joining hundreds of pieces previously promised and given in 2007, valued at more than $100 million.

You can read more at the link above or at this article in the Portland Press Herald. Or this one in the Boston Globe.

Maine, as I have written here and in The Wall Street Journal before, is now critical to the story of American art. You have to visit the museums there.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Press Herald

 

More On That Revolutionary Art: Unscrolled

As I mentioned yesterday, the soon-to-open Museum of the American Revolution will hang a copy of Louis Charles-Auguste Couder’s Siege of Yorktown (1781). It hangs in the Hall of the Battles at Versailles. The copy, I’ve now learned–from an advance of a press release that will be issued on Friday–“is believed to have been painted by artist Henry LeGrand in Paris and exhibited in 1860 at the Chicago Art Union.”

The painting depicts Washington and Rochambeau giving orders at Yorktown, Virginia. Rochambeau played a major role in helping the Continental Army win the war. The two men stand in front of a marquee tent much like George Washington’s Headquarters Tent, one of the most iconic surviving artifacts of the Revolution, which also is featured in the Museum.

It’s a large work, 13-by-17 feet and 16-by-19 when framed.

The painting has been restored and the museum is installing it this week. I thought you might like to see some of the action. (Here’s a look at the original.)

There’s more: on the two walls flanking the LeGrand, the museum is hanging “two late-19th-century paintings by Harrington Fitzgerald, a Philadelphia newspaper editor and writer who took up painting and is believed to have studied with Thomas Eakins.” The Foraging Party depicts Washington and his troops at Valley Forge, while the opposite wall’s canvas is Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution

In Philadelphia: Revolutionary Art

In today’s New York Times, I wrote about the conservation and erection of George Washington’s surviving field headquarters tent. a fragile thing, as you may well imagine. It was published in the print edition under the clever headline Washington Plotted Here. Online, the headline is Where George Washington Slept (Perhaps Not Well).

That in itself says a little something about the world we live in–but it’s the topic I want to mention.

The new Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, which owns the tent, will use it as the centerpiece. Visitors will enter a dedicated theater, watch a 10-12 minute film about Washington’s leadership, and then see the tent revealed, dramatically: After the screen, a scrim and another layer rise, the tent comes into view behind shatter-resistant glass. Leaving their seats, people can press their noses up against the glass to see this national treasure.

In my article, I mentioned some of the other artifacts that will be on view:  Aside from those I mention in my article, they include personal items, letters and diaries from the revolutionary era, including a soldier’s wooden canteen “branded with “UStates” at a time when the phrase was merely an aspiration.”

There will also be some paintings. Perhaps the most interesting one, though, will be an exact replica of Louis Charles-Auguste Couder’s Siege of Yorktown (1781), showing Washington and Rochambeau. The original is in Versailles.

Details about the work will be announced this coming Friday, and you’ll be able to see it in person when the new museum opens on Apr. 19, the 242nd anniversary of “the shot heard ’round the world.”

Click on the link above for my article to see what the tent will look like at the museum. The one I’ve posted here gives a look at the tent outside in the snow.

The opening of this museum is particularly timely, as Carol Cadou, Mount Vernon’s Senior Vice President for Historic Preservation and Collections wrote to me in an email exchange:

At a time when we see conflicts across the globe, and when we see division in our country and others, it seems particularly relevant for a museum to address the principles and mission George Washington, the Continental Army, and their allies fought for so bravely, so admirably, and with unity.  The Museum of the American Revolution offers a great opportunity to make our nation’s early struggles relevant and meaningful to today’s audiences at a time when Americans need perspective and inspiration.

 

 

 

What Goes With Gouthiere?

Why Marivaux, n’est ce pas? A year ago, many of us had never heard of, or heard much about, Pierre Gouthiere, the master gilder many of whose works are now on display at the Frick Collection. But now we know him, at least a little. The exhibition, on view for another few weeks, presents clocks, vases, firedogs, wall lights, and mounts for Chinese porcelain and hardstone vases that he gilded–at the French court, for Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, called it a “rare and sumptuous” exhibition, and added:

This show is a study in ultra-refinement in which art, craft and invention collude in a burnished glow. It introduces a man who took a minor art to new heights in the last decadent decades of the ancien régime.

And now the Frick will make a new introduction–to a little-known (here) French eighteenth-century playwright named Pierre de Marivaux. His one-act play, The Constant Players, will be performed in the galleries.

This, to me, is totally appropriate for the Frick’s galleries–a situation in which the visual art will add to the theatrical art.

I sometimes find that museums, seeking broader audiences by putting entertainment in galleries, go too far astray from the art in the galleries. This is the opposite, I think–so good for the Frick.

From the release:

The most esteemed successor to the seventeenth-century playwright Molière, Marivaux’s innovative language reveals the close relationship between refined artistry and raw emotion.  The play is adapted and directed by Mériam Korichi with actors Joan Juliet Buck, Catherine Eaton, Adam Green, and Sophie Orloff; opera singers Clarissa Lyons (soprano), Ashley Kerr (soprano), Nicholas Martorano (baritone), and Alexander Swan (tenor); and pianist Gerald Martin Moore.

…The galleries of the museum will come to life as a period setting, with the actors moving between the Fragonard Room [above], the Dining Room, and Music Room—making for a completely unique experience. Additionally, Marivaux’s work is rarely translated or preformed in New York, allowing American audiences the opportunity to discover one of the most important French dramatists of the eighteenth century.

It’s the first time an entire play will be performed in the Frick’s galleries and it will happen twice, on Feb. 2 and Feb. 4, at 7:30 p.m.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Frick