Yet another reason to visit Williamstown, Mass. this summer: The Prendergast In Italy exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art, which I mentioned here in passing several weeks ago, was
unveiled this weekend. I drove up for the opening on Friday.

Disclosure: I am a lender of a small, very atypical work in the exhibition — the first and probably the last time that will occur. At the dinner for lenders, I was seated among the curators — Nancy Mowll Mathews, the chief organizer of the exhibition; Elizabeth Kennedy, Curator of Collection at the Terra Foundation, WCMA’s intellectual and financial partner on the show; and Susan Davidson, senior curator of the Guggenheim, which will put the show on view in Venice, but not New York anymore. We gossiped about American art, among other things.

But back to the show, which has more than 60 views of Venice, Rome, Siena, and Capri, as well as various sketchbooks, letters, and photographs. They are beautifully colorful, mostly, and far more varied than you’d imagine.

[Read more…] about Take A Trip to Italy, Or At Least to Williamstown, With Prendergast

When I learned that the George Eastman House was mounting an exhibition of photographs
by actress Jessica Lange, I thought “Oh, no, yet another case of a celebrity getting attention for mediocre work just to attract attention.” Think of all those actors and actresses (Katie Holmes in All My Sons, P. Diddy/Sean Combs in Raisin In the Sun) who get stage roles on Broadway simply because they’ll attract crowds. And we won’t even discuss book contracts.

But while I haven’t seen the show — 50 Photographs by Jessica Lange opens tomorrow — I’m reserving judgment, for now, on whether this is celebrity fever. There are signs that it isn’t.

Lange, it turns out, studied photography at the University of Minnesota and made documentary films before becoming an actress. She began shooting photographs in the early ’90s, when her partner Sam Shepard brought home a Leica. Her work was published last year in a book, 50 Photographs by Jessica Lange. Her photographs have also been reviewed in Aperture. “Jessica’s photographs very much reflect her personality,” the magazine said in 2007. “They are delicate but powerful…loving, warm, and extremely poetic.” And she has collected black-and-white photography for more than 20 years.

Still, it gives me pause that 50 Photographs was “originally organized” by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. The gallery doesn’t list Jessica Lange on its website as one of its artists, but… The Eastman House bills the show as “the first major museum exhibition” of her work.

[Read more…] about Jessica Lange Gets A Photography Show at the Eastman House — Is This Celebrity Fever?

Don’t you love academic kerfuffles? In June, I wrote here about the “Enduring Questions” grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grants were all about $25,000, and they went to professors developing undergraduate courses on such weighty matters as “what is happiness?”, “what is the meaning of life?” and “what are the dangers of individualism?” The goal was to promote critical thinking. Twenty courses were chosen as winners, involving a wide range of academic disciplines.

Philosophers, in turns out, were stunned — and hurt. Those enduring questions are their territory. Inside Higher Ed reported (here) on the controversy, explaining how philosophers felt:

One source of friction was the grant description’s use of the world “pre-disciplinary,” which it defined as, “questions to which no discipline or field can lay an exclusive claim. In many cases they predate the formation of the academic disciplines themselves.” This remark, [Ben] Bradley [a philosophy professor at Syracuse University] notes in his blog post, seems to ignore the very existence of philosophy.

And here’s a bit more:

John Powell, professor of philosophy at Humboldt State University, stated in an e-mail that he sees the framing of the questions in the grant application as evidence that NEH is looking for professors to teach philosophy without the philosophical context.

“The questions are so clearly mostly old chestnut philosophy problems that they seem evidence that NEH staff don’t know what philosophy is,” he stated.

As it happens, the NEH refined its grant guidelines for the next round (applications due Sept. 15), but not in any way that would solve philosophers’ problems with the program.

Here’s a suggestion: they should propose a course on “why history?” or, better yet, “what is art?”

 

Cezanne hardly ever lacks for attention, but this may be his year — especially with regard to
his influence. Following the fabulous Cezanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which I wrote about here), the Montclair Museum of Art will open an exhibition on Sept. 13 called Cezanne and American Modernism.

The museum says it’s the first show to “examine fully the influence of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) upon modern American artists from 1907 to 1930.” It will explore the critical way American artists and critics helped establish Cezanne’s reputation as the “definitive bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the modern art movements of the 20th century.”

This is a big deal for Montclair — self-proclaimed as the most ambitious show in its 95-year
history.

The exhibit includes 131 works, including 18 by Cezanne, plus paintings, works on paper, photographs, and archival documents of Oscar Bluemner, John Marin, Paul Strand, Paul Outerbridge, Man Ray, the list goes on…. After Montclair, the exhibit will travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Phoenix Art Museum.

The show will recreate part of various Cezanne shows in the U.S. — the Armory Show in 1913, exhibitions at Stieglitz’s gallery 291 in 1910 and 1911, among them. Yale University Press will publish the hefty catalogue, the work of 23 scholars.

It seemed like a good time to pose Five Questions to Gail Stavitsky, Chief Curator at Montclair, the modernism expert who led the curatorial team for the show.

[Read more…] about Having Triumphed in Philadelphia, Cezanne Moves to Montclair

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice has been on view at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston,* since mid-March, and reviewed with high praise elsewhere. But I was able to go to Boston to see it for myself just this week, so I’ll simply concur with any and all of that praise. It’s a lush, revealing exhibit, not to be missed if you can get to the MFA before Aug. 16, when the show closes and moves to the Louvre.

As Holland Cotter said in his review, the exhibition consist of “56 grand to celestial paintings — no filler here, not an ounce of fat.” But as he also wrote:

You can pretty much kiss goodbye, at least for now, the prospect of more exhibitions like “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice.”…Transatlantic loans of the kind that make this show the breathtaker it is are a big drain on strapped museum budgets. Boston was lucky to partner with the Louvre on this project, but such masterpiece gatherings are likely to be rare in years to come.

I hadn’t read Holland’s review until after I saw the exhibit. Nonetheless, while I walked around it, studying the pictures, I couldn’t help but think that, if exhibits do have to contract, Titian, Tintoretto, Venonese also proves a model for the future. (Perhaps I was still thinking about the coming one-woman La Velata exhibit, which I wrote about here over the weekend.)

Within Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, there are several smaller, less grand but no less satisfying exhibits — two in particular are spectacular.

[Read more…] about Venetians in Boston, A Model Show in Many Ways