A Great American Artist ~ A Great American Story
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe
April 27th, 2019
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Tag: painting
Joan Miró || Birth of the World
“You and all my writer friends have given me much help and improved my understanding of many things,” Joan Miró told the French poet Michel Leiris in the summer of 1924, writing from his family’s farm in Montroig, a small village nestled between the mountains and the sea in his native Catalonia. The next year, Miró’s intense engagement with poetry, the creative process, and material experimentation inspired him to paint The Birth of the World.
In this signature work, Miró covered the ground of the oversize canvas by applying paint in an astonishing variety of ways that recall poetic chance procedures. He then added a series of pictographic signs that seem less painted than drawn, transforming the broken syntax, constellated space, and dreamlike imagery of avant-garde poetry into a radiantly imaginative and highly inventive form of painting. He would later describe this work as “a sort of genesis,” and his Surrealist poet friends titled it The Birth of the World. [source: MoMA]
The exhibition ran between February-June 2019 and featured artwork from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of Miró’s works, which is one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world. However, the most comprehensive selection of Miró’s oeuvre actually on view has to be that of the Fundació Joan Miró, in Barcelona, a dedicated space created by Joan Miró himself with the idea of making art accessible to all.
MoMA, New York City
April 4th, 2019
The Art of pairing Smartness with Goodness
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
March 22nd, 2019
Double Take
Four Ladies by Thomas Dewing; with added shine in gold gilded frames, or frameless in all their plain glory.
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Thomas Dewing (1851-1938)
Frames designed by Stanford White (1853-1906)
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
March 21st, 2019
Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes
The largest US museum survey of this pioneering artist to date, Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes featured more than thirty large-scale paintings that revealed the artist’s considerable influence in the field of contemporary art.
One of the most inventive artists working today, von Heyl has earned international acclaim for continually rethinking the possibilities of contemporary painting. Her cerebral yet deeply visceral artworks upend longstanding assumptions about composition, beauty, and narrative. Drawing inspiration from a vast and surprising array of sources—including literature, pop culture, metaphysics, and personal history—von Heyl creates paintings that are seemingly familiar yet impossible to classify, offering, in her words, “a new image that stands for itself as fact.”
In studios in New York and Marfa, Texas, von Heyl combines a rigorous, process-based practice that demands each painting develop through the act of painting itself. The spellbinding results invite viewers to explore a unique visual language that is both exuberant and insistent.
Snake Eyes ran at The Hirshhorn from November 2018 to April 2019.
March 18th, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern – part III
Actor’s Mask, 1924
Oil on canvas mounted on board
Wedding in South Street, 1937
Oil on canvas
Leaf Children, 1940
Oil on canvas
The Lovers, 1946
Gouache and ink on paper-faced board
Head of Autumn (Study for Hide-and-Seek), 1941
Watercolour and pencil on paper
House by the Railroad, 1925
Oil on canvas
Willis Avenue Bridge, 1940
Gouache on paper on board
Woman, 1928
Oil on canvas
The Lovers, 1946 (detail)
Gouache and ink on paper-faced board
Hide-and-Seek, 1940-1942
Oil on canvas
Man in the Open Air, c. 1915
Bronze
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern – part I
Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 1950
Oil on canvas
Kirstein sat for this portrait while he was in London for a New York City Ballet performance at Covent Garden and to organize the exhibition Symbolic Realism in American Painting: 1940-1950 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Portrait of a Woman, 1949
Oil on canvas
George Platt Lynes, 1935
Coloured ink on paper
Lincoln Kirstein, c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Costume designs for the ballet Pocahontas, c. 1936
Costume design for the ballet Billy the Kid, 1938
“I have a live eye,” proclaimed Lincoln Kirstein, signaling his wide-ranging vision. Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern explored this polymath’s sweeping contributions to American cultural life in the 1930s and ’40s. Best known for cofounding New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet with George Balanchine, Kirstein (1907–1996), a writer, critic, curator, impresario, and tastemaker, was also a key figure in MoMA’s early history. With his prescient belief in the role of dance within the museum, his championing of figuration in the face of prevailing abstraction, and his position at the center of a New York network of queer artists, intimates, and collaborators, Kirstein’s impact remains profoundly resonant today. [source: MoMA]
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
For a minute there, I lost myself…
Sleepers II, 1959
Tempera on wood panel
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
By All Means: Time travel @ The Morgan
Travelling in time and space in just a few steps, from gallery to gallery, at The Morgan; when three fantastic exhibitions ran simultaneously through May 2019.
By any means: Contemporary drawings from The Morgan
Speaker Drawing (22.06), 2006 – Pigment and spray fixative
This work is part of a series in which Vitiello explored the relationship between sound – his primary medium – and drawing. He placed pigment in a speaker that was embedded in a table, laying a sheet of paper on top. Vibrations from a synthesizer’s low-frequency oscillator moved the pigment from the speaker to the paper, creating an image that contrasted in its minimalism with the density of the aural event.
Untitled (folded paper drawing), 1971
Where R = Ryoanji (2R)/4-6/83, 1983
Graphite pencil
Cage often relied on chance to determine the forms of his works. The present sheet belongs to a series inspired by the Zen rock garden of the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, in which fifteen rocks are carefully arranged. The selection of stones, the number of tracings (here 30, as denoted by 2R, where R is equivalent to 15, the number of stones at the temple), their placement, and the number of pencils of different softness that he used (4) were determined by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination manual, by way of a computer simulation developed by Bell Labs in New York.
Old Museum (Interior_7), 2015
Laser toner
Although Cottrell uses a computer to make her work, she does not use a computer programme to determine composition but instead passes Japanese paper through a printer numerous times, each time changing or rearranging the shapes on the screen to generate dense, layered images.
Invention and Design: Early Italian Drawings
Metamorphosis of the Nymph Amymone, ca. 1500
Brush and brown, green-brown, and blue wash, pen and green-brown ink, and white opaque watercolour, over black chalk, on paper
Head of a Young Man, in Profile to the Right, 1490-1500
Black chalk, brown wash, and white opaque watercolour, on blue paper
Head of a Woman Crying Out, ca. 1509-11
Charcoal and black and white chalk, on two pieces of light brown paper joined vertically
Head of a Woman in Profile to the Right, ca. 1515
Black and white chalk, on two pieces of paper joined vertically; incised with stylus
Nude Man Standing Beside a High Pedestal, ca. 1515
Brush and black ink and brown wash, heightened with white opaque watercolour, over traces of black chalk, on blue paper faded to brown
Head of a Man Wearing a Cap, in Profile to the Left, ca. 1490-1500
Red, black, and white chalk
Head of a Young Man, Turned to the Left, Looking Downward, ca. 1490
Metalpoint, with white opaque watercolour, on pink prepared paper
Head of a Bearded Man in Profile to the Right and Head of a Youth Facing Left, ca. 1500
Red chalk
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth
The Tree of Amalion, [?1940s] – Coloured pencil, watercolour, silver paint, black in on grey paper
MS. Tolkien Drawings 88, fol. 1
”He was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different.”
This extract from Tolkien’s allegorical short story, ”Leaf by Niggle”, is a poignant expression of his own creative struggle as he sought to bring his works, both literary and academic, to completion. The story was written in the early 1940s as he worked fitfully on The Lord of the Rings, his Elvish languages and his wider legendarium, all of which seemed very far from completion. His perfectionism often resulted in numerous revisions and rewritings, whilst his interest in the minutiae led him down interesting but distracting side roads.
The only snapshot I could steal; so long were the lines, the guards had to usher Tolkien’s devotees, or the gallery would burst from overcrowding!
The Morgan Library
March 9th, 2019
The Young and Evil
From February through April 2019, David Zwirner presented The Young and Evil, a group exhibition featuring significant works from the first half of the twentieth century by Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Jensen Yow, and their circle.
Among them, some works by Pavel Tchelitchew, to which I was particularly drawn.
March 7th, 2019
