Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

The National Gallery: Blazing More New Trails

Last year about this time, I praised the National Gallery in London for creating and publicizing an “Angel Trail” of artworks in its galleries that include portrayals of angels–for the Christmas season.

This year, I’m back to share the news that Christmas 2016 has prompted the creation of “The Star Trail.” The NG pitch:”Stargaze with us this Christmas.”

startrail

The NG create videos that take visitors on the trail: so far, there are four for “The Star Trail,” posted on the National Gallery’s YouTube channel.

Join National Gallery curators and experts as they discuss different representations of stars throughout the history of Western European art. Journey from the Renaissance to the night skies of the Impressionists through this one element: the star. New episodes weekly.

duccio-virgin-child-saints-dominic-aurea-ng566-r-two-thirdsSo far a short trailer and three short videos have been posted, featuring curators and experts not only from the National Gallery but also from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. They discuss the stars in paintings, like Duccio’s Virgin Mary (at left) and Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way (below). They explain the depiction of instruments in paintings like Holbein’s Ambassadors. They venture into the archives for a look at stars in books and manuscripts.

At the end of each video, they list the names of the artworks that were cited and the artists.

I think these trails are brilliant, and I don’t understand why other museums haven’t followed the NG here. Of course, I know that many museums have specialized tours, but these trails can offer the opportunity to expose the collection and make links among various portrayals of one subject in a very inviting way.

You can print out some NG trails from its website; they are useful even if you can’t visit the National Gallery.

tintoretto

 

Happy Thanksgiving

There’s a painting for everything, and while some people conjure up Norman Rockwell on Thanksgiving, I lead toward the Dutch masters, like Jan Davidsz de Heem. Below is his Still-Life with Flowers and Fruit from the 1660s. I hope you are enjoying family, friends and an even better feast today.

I’ll be away for the next couple of weeks, back online in mid-December. While I’m away, there should be–space permitting–a review by me  in The Wall Street Journal of an excellent exhibition.

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Kenneth Clark’s Response to Crisis

During World War II, in London’s bleak days, Kenneth Clark acted, as the review of his biography by James Stourton in today’s New York Times reminds us.

Clark recognized that in dark times there is a yearning for serious art, music and literature.

rokebyvenusMany people now feel that we as a nation are going through dark days as well–no matter where you stand politically, it’s hard to reconcile our national values with the increased incidents of hate that have been occurring around the country this year. It doesn’t compare with World War II, but I am wondering if–without getting political–our cultural institutions might be involved in a healing process.

It would be an opportunity to demonstrate that so-called elite culture is not elite at all. The BBC, the Stourton writes, had “not understood the mood of the nation, and believed that people wanted nothing but light music.”

But Clark felt otherwise:

Bereft at how emergency orders had shut down so much of the cultural life in London, he began to open the now-empty and echoing National Gallery for a vastly popular series of noontime concerts.

The BBC took notice and began to broadcast them.

Furthermore, since the National Gallery’s artworks had been shipped out of town, to safety in Wales,

Clark elected to take one master painting at a time out of storage, and to show each selection in a series of exhibitions titled “Picture of the Month.” Nearly 40,000 people came to see Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus.”

Can our museums today be part of the solution? Have they misread the situation, like the BBC, offering exhibitions that divide rather than unite? Can they think of ways to bring us together?

These questions are worth pondering–and, after some deep thought, perhaps some action.

 

 

 

Comes the Revolution!

Don’t let that word “revolution” scare you this tense Election Day. I’m not talking about the USA. I’m referring to the wonderful exhibition now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. It’s a massive show–more than 280 works by 70 artists, filling several galleries.

Tamayo's "Lion and Horse"
Tamayo’s “Lion and Horse”

And it’s more than good, as I write in a review that is published today in The Wall Street Journal, Fight for Creative Culture: Political upheavals paralleled bursts of artistic progesss.

The museum says that the last time a museum organized such a sweeping show of Mexican modernism was 1943, and then, too, it played the role of a benign Hernán Cortés, revealing “uncharted territory” to the established orders. But, as the show documents. Mexican modernists played an important role in the development of international modernism. We know it, maybe, but we don’t know it well, and we don’t know too many names beyond the big five–Rivera, Kahlo, Tamayo, Orozco and Siqueiros.

Paint the Revolution shows them off very well, and adds many more to their ranks. I wish I could have dropped more names into the review. I mentioned eight other Mexicans (if the link above does not work, try this one, which will), plus a few Americans who worked in Mexico. But if I had had more room, I certainly would have cited Dr. Atl, especially for his wonderful self-portrait; Angel Zarraga, for Cubist works including the funny “Monkey Painter”; Roberto Montenegro–for several works; Adolfo Best Maugerd, for his self-portrait and “The Powdered Woman,” among others; and many more.

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Saturnino Herrán’s “The Offering”

The entire photography section is terrific, a small but splendid array, a mix of Mexicans and foreigners who moved there, that shows the range of modernism and that is, lead exhibition curator Matthew Affron said, a microcosm of the entire exhibition.

Affron, the museum’s Curator of Modern Art, headed a team that included Mark A. Castro, assistant curator of European Painting, Dafne Cruz Porchini, a postdoctoral researcher at Colegio de México, Mexico City; and Renato González Mello, Director of the Institute for Aesthetic Investigation, National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Kahlo's "The Suicide of Dorothy Hale"
Kahlo’s “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale”

There are a lot of memorable artworks in this show and many good or interesting works, too. I’m posting some of each (you can decide for yourselves).

 

 

 

Rivera's "Dance in Tehuantepec"
Rivera’s “Dance in Tehuantepec”
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Martínez’s “Poverty Vendors”
Zarraga's "Monkey Painter"
Zarraga’s “Monkey Painter”
Dr. Atl's "Self-Portrait with Popocatepetl"
Dr. Atl’s “Self-Portrait with Popocatepetl”

And many more. The museum has a slide show of several other pictures here.

Artificial Intelligence Invades The Museum and Art Worlds

“It’s a massively ambitious project.” That is Tony Guillan, a multimedia producer for the Tate museum, in the U.K, speaking. Guillan manages the IK PRize, which the Tate Britain has awarded for the last few years to projects that use digital technology in an innovative way to promote the exploration of art at the Tate Britain or on the Tate website.

He’s speaking of this year’s winner, called Recognition. Have a look–it may not look like that much, but it uses artificial intelligence, and A.I. is just starting to be used in the art world.

I write about this in The New York Times this weekend, in an article headlined Artificial Intelligence As a Bridge Between Art and Reality, and I invite you to read the details there. It’s a little gimmicky, you’ll see, but I think it is the best winner so far.

But here’s how I describe the winner in my article:

It features a program that continuously screens about 1,000 news photographs a day, supplied by Reuters, and tries to match them with 30,000 British artworks in the Tate’s database, based on similarities in faces, objects, theme and composition….

…People can watch the “Recognition” process online: Images in the database rotate past a photo and are given scores, according to the four variables. When a match is made, the pairing is saved in an online gallery and displayed at Tate Britain. Since it began Sept. 2, the program has been twinning images at a rate of one to three an hour. By the time it ends on Nov. 27, “we expect 2,000 to 3,000 matches,” Mr. Guillan said.

A sample, which shows eunuchs applying make-up before Raksha Bandhan festival celebrations in a red light area in Mumbai, India, 17 August 2016, matched with Sir Peter Lely’s Two Ladies of the Lake Family c.1660, Tate is below:

ik_prize_match_1

The website is a little confusing at first, but give it a try and you’ll figure it out. And you can’t figure out the puzzling matches, you can go one layer deeper in the website for an explanation. Matches may still seem strange, but Guillan told me, “When you work with AI, it’s unpredictable by nature. The exciting thing is that you are creating something that works autonomously.”

thenextrembrandt-ledeI asked Guillan if, beneath this project, the project was suggesting that photographers are influenced, perhaps unconsciously, by art that they have seen, or that there is a universal or common conception of what makes a good picture? He said, “not specifically, no.” But, as we spoke, we agreed that the project raises the question about representation. “When we look at a painting,” he said. “we’re aware that it’s a construction; it has a point of view. But when we look at a news photograph, we treat it as a mimetic, a false reality. We don’t think about it as being a construct, but it is.”

Microsoft was a sponsor of the prize this year, and will be again. For it, according to Eric Horvitz, director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, WA., “It’s a great way for Microsoft to communicate that we’re democratizing AI.” So stay tuned for other A.I. tool coming from Microsoft.

There are other A.I. projects in the arts. “The Next Rembrandt” is one. It asks, “Can the great Master be brought back to life to create one more painting?” I found that website confusing too. But here’s a link to a YouTube video on the project. It explains how the project uses data to forecast the next painting Rembrandt would have made. It’s at right here.

I find it a little scary. And as for fakes, well…that could be an issue down the road.