pt at large

Clemens Kalischer and Norman Rockwell: Two creators, poles apart

An epic month-long re-organization of my files unearthed several unpublished posts from ancient times…like this one from February 2005

Berkshire Weekend, Stockbridge, MA
Clemens Kalischer and Norman Rockwell: Two creators, poles apart

How does an artist find art and present it? Two creators, one a renowned photographer, the other a celebrated artist, couldn’t be farther apart in their views. Both men were driven use their art to tell stories, both strove to say something about the human condition. In a recent trip to Stockbridge, MA, pt at large visited the studio of Clemens Kalischer and the Norman Rockwell Museum (then located on Main Street, a short walk from Kalischer's Image Gallery) and was struck by the conceptual gulf between these men.

In my youthful roamings through Stockbridge, I had often admired the black and white photographs of Clemens Kalischer, not realizing that the man had contributed to Edward Steichen’s acclaimed “The Family of Man” in 1955 and had photographed for Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, and was a freelance photographer for the New York Times. In a recent trip to Stockbridge, The Adventurer, not having the prose to put this politely, was surprised that Kalischer was not only alive (at 85) but sitting behind the desk in the same gallery he’s maintained for nearly half a century. And talkative. Sort of.

The burning question one wants to ask an artist is "Why do you make these pictures, what do you want to tell us?" I asked him but Kalischer just doesn’t want to play Q and A.
Q. “What did you want to convey with this photo?”
A. “I find a subject that appeals to me and I take a picture.”

Q. “Well, are you aiming to make a comment on poverty, or war, or a vanishing way of life?”
A. “That’s up to the viewer to answer,”  he replies. “I don’t want to tell the viewer what  to think. If I were to write titles to my photos, I’d be leading the viewer to make conclusions. I want viewers to make their own conclusions.”

I tried asking the question in several other clever ways and still the same  response. “When I feel moved to take a picture, I frame it and shoot it. It’s up to others to judge it.”

He certainly had a feel for it, even though he wouldn’t wax poetic about it. His visions of people, places, and history resonated universally; his work is included in the Library of Congress’ “Masters of Photographers” collection.

Norman Rockwell, on the other hand, wanted the public to understand his art and did everything he could to align our perceptions with his. The Adventurer’s visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum, built in Stockbridge in 1993, revealed an artist who had no trouble taking control of his art and the message he delivered from the 1920s to the 1960s. His illustrations were a fixture on covers of Look, The Saturday Evening Post, and Time Magazines.

“I do ordinary people in everyday situations . . .  And I find that I can fit most anything into that frame, even fairly big ideas.” Themes of kindness, tolerance, democracy, and freedom recur in his paintings, which are often awash in gentle humor, compassion, or admiration.  Many of his images, The Four Freedoms, for example, are iconic visions of mid twentieth century America.

A man of social conscience, Rockwell didn't shy away from using his art to comment on the war in Viet Nam or the bloody violence in the South where young members of SNCC were murdered, martyred in the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. Rockwell prepared for his paintings meticulously. He chose the models, selected the clothes, coached the expressions, thought out the backgrounds of each painting. He photographed the scene then painted it and repainted it until that everyday situation  represented something about his view of the American psyche.

There you have it: two artists, one who telegraphs his intentions without pretense, one who sends it untitled into the world. Both had a passion for creating, commenting, and connecting with the world. Both are acknowledged for their art.

Does it matter how we create our art? We each have a palette with which we shape our worlds and create our futures. Some of us are the Rockwell designers, thinking ahead, planning methodically, and transparently communicating our visions. Some of us are Kalischers, seeing opportunities, taking our shots, and letting others find the value in what we do. Either way, pt at large admires those who fill their frames with ideas that matter to them.

 

Bauhaus to Bartley’s Burger Cottage

An epic month-long re-organization of my files unearthed several unpublished posts from ancient times…like this one from January 5, 2005

Bauhaus to Bartley’s Burger Cottage, my aesthetic and gustatory senses are overloaded. Today’s pt at large adventure covered three square blocks of Harvard Square that house treasures of art history and one award-winning college hangout that’s in no danger of being put out of business by some upstart yuppie establishment selling concept coffee and croissant confections.

I don’t recommend this concentrated tour for those without sufficient random access memory to hold, categorize, and analyze mammoth amounts of color, shape, text and texture. My three hour tour was the equivalent of a three credit college course in art history. Images, bits of information, historical data, impressions, conversations with informed docents are spilling out from the edges of my brain like the lettuce on the Bartley’s Best Gourmet char grilled hamburger I ordered for lunch (that hamburger, seven ounces of choice ground beef, ground daily, could be the subject of an essay all by itself).

My first tour began with a 12:15 pm “Art Encounter” in one of the Fogg Art Museum’s modern art rooms. A museum docent, a middle aged woman with specious opinions about art, parked us in front of wall sized James Brooks painting titled ‘Triptych’. We five observers shared our interpretations of Brook’s painting. Being merciful, I’ll spare you the details of our musings but the painting is actually fun to look at.

Muted primary colors, a sort of settled organic composition which had a recognizable flow and was a counterpoint to the other abstract impressionist paintings in the room which were much more rigid, geometric, and linear.  I didn’t know that artists could be anal as well as organic; there was alot of primary colored left brained painting by Morris Louis and Ken Noland. The paint surface makes a difference. Pollock, de Kooning, Klein, and these guys discovered that unsized canvas absorbs paint, affecting the visual result. Hans Hoffman, who painted in NYC and Provincetown, a precursor of these painters, was one of the first to use unsized canvas.

After thirty minutes of this, I was becoming aesthetically inebriated. I succumbed to a huge Jackson Pollock (1902-1950) piece that was framed in the doorway leading to the next gallery.  The mixed media piece about 3’ wide, 10’ high, on canvas stapled onto black ground and framed in simple black was a gorgeous implosion of spattered, dripped, caked paint. Who knew black and beige could be so elegant?

Total trivia: acrylic paint was discovered in 1957.

I ricocheted from the Fogg to the Busch Reisinger right next door, where I bumped into another docent. This lady knew the history of German abstract impressionism like guys from South Boston know the names and batting averages of every Red Sox player for the last century.

This next paragraph is my memory of her spiel. Germans may be evolved in design and mechanics but they were slow on the uptake of European impressionism. Manet got that ball rolling in 1863 with his painting subject matter. The Germany psyche was not ready to indulge in color rhapsodies like French. They needed to have a social component to their new art, depict angst and social concerns more consciously than the French.

German painters arrived in Paris in about 1888, though, and began to catch up.  Louis Corinth’s painting, a big canvas portrait of sculptor Friederich, 1904, shows brush strokes, classic pose, the man being the controller of his art, implied by the small sculpture he holds in his hand. Note the interplay of light on the man’s back, his strength, dignity, and Roman nose.

Parked next to this is Corinth’s painting of Salome looking at the head of St John the Baptist, the Salome theme familiar to many Germans from the Straus opera. The left side of the painting has the traditional Madonna arc, but the middle is pure budding Salome, teen aged and nubile, luminous pink nippled breasts, full red lips...and a power to be reckoned with.

“Now you will look at me John,” she says as she reaches into the basket holding his just severed head and opens his closed eyelid. Some interpret this as a comment on the movement of women’s rights in Germany at the time (divorce laws were being loosened). I am personally relieved that the women’s movement in America featured bra burning as opposed to beheading in order to make a point.

Max Bechmann was an impressive German painter, writer, shaker and mover. His self-portrait, assured, standing in full formal attire, implies an artist’s importance in society. His broad brush strokes show the classic observer. The composition flows left to right from opaque to full light. Is this a comment on the nature of the society he observes?

Around the corner and I see the influence of Walter Gropius. In the late 1920s, early thirties, he early founded the Bauhaus movement which spread to architecture, furniture, painting. He was the Henry Ford of art, wanted to make art and aesthetics, an elevated sense of design, more available to the common person, a departure from the strong baroque influences earlier in the century.
The chrome and canvas Breuer chair on display there could be mass produced.
You can see its offspring in modern furniture stores today.

Ah, and there’s a painting by Feininger, who, I discovered, was a boy wonder musician who abandoned music in favor of art, which overwhelmed him when he traveled to Europe to study music.

At this point, my brain cells were close to melting with information overload. It was time to visit Bartley’s Gourmet Burger Cottage on Mass Ave across from the ‘yard’. At 1:30 pm on January 5, 2005, I tasted a hamburger that ascended the heights of hamburger heaven. It is the measure by which I will assess ground sirloin for the rest of time. I will create a paean to that establishment in another edition of pt at large.

Fortified with red meat, I walked two blocks to the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Target: Marks of Enlightenment, Traces of Devotion: Japanese calligraphy. The main surprise of this exhibit is the demonstration of how Japanese calligraphy evolved during the centuries from extremely disciplined to free flowing and artistic.

I conclude with a poem from the exhibit, complementing the inclement day I ventured out, an aesthete amongst the snowflakes.

Muso Soseki 1275-1351, Japan

From heaven fall icy petals;
In the sky not a spot of blue remains.
A dusting of jade covers the ground
And buries the blue mountains.
The sun rises over the mountain peak,
The chill pierces my bones.
Silence prevails.

The Copley Society: Big Value with Holiday Small Works 2011

The vibe on Newbury Street is like no other place in Boston. Walk two blocks and you'll overhear at least three languages and see a dozen fashion statements from footwear to hairstyles. It's great preparation for entering the Holiday Small Works 2011 show at The Copley Society. It looks like Santa's sleigh tipped over and spilled hundreds of pieces of compact artwork that his elves gleefully hung on the gallery's walls. Purchasing one won't break the bank but will get you interested in making return visits to this low-key, high quality gallery.

The Copley Society
158 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116

Tuesday - Saturday 11-6 | Sunday 12-5 | Monday by appointment

(617) 536-5049

Email info@copleysociety.org

Holiday Small Works 2011 Exhibition
November 17 - December 24

At age 134, the venerable Copley Society of art could be excused for behaving like the Dowager Queen of Newbury Street. The society, created by the first graduating class of The Museum of Fine Arts School in 1879, has the breeding of a Boston Brahmin debutante. In the dawning century of social media, the dowager has upgraded from a parasol to an iPhone.

A Thoroughly Modern Millie, she’s downloaded a ton of apps on her smartphone. Her eyebrows arch ever so slightly when she spies a QR mobile code icon in the Copley Society’s front window (square image bottom left). She pauses, retrieves her iPhone from her Coach handbag, swipes open the QR app and takes a photo of the bar code.

Before you can say Henry Cabot Lodge, she’s connected to the Co/So web page that displays every piece of art in the gallery’ annual Holiday Small Works 2011 Show.

“Splendid,” she smiles to herself. She’s found the perfect place to fill her friend’s Christmas stockings. Dowager, no. Digerati, yes.

Luckily for the rest of us, we don’t need to have a trust fund to afford what lies inside the Copley Society's Holiday Small Works Show. Scores of the 450 pieces in the exhibition are in the $150 - $350 range. Modestly sized and priced, they’re the closest thing you’ll ever experience as an “impulse buy” in a bona fide art gallery.

Each of the society’s 330 current members could submit as many as five works. Several of the 450 artworks that were submitted were sold right off the walls on opening night. “I certainly hope the pattern continues in the northward trend,” Suzan Redgate, Executive Director of the Copley Society, said last week. (“We’re up to 85!” she wrote in an email on December 7.)

The cozy upper and lower galleries are loaded with watercolors, oils on canvas or linen, acrylics on Masonite, graphite on paper, archival pigment prints, platinum prints, mixed media, and hand colored etchings in styles from traditional to contemporary. If L. L. Bean were in the art business, it would feel like this, filled with the kinds of stuff you didn’t know you wanted until you saw it.

“We realize that plowing through the show can be an overwhelming experience so we try to hang the pieces by themes: architectural, marine, Boston, landscape, still life, abstract, and figurative. There's a lot to absorb.”

In lesser hands the result could resemble a garage sale. Ms. Redgate and her staff somehow manage to keep the exhibit fresh and balanced as pieces are sold, giving each little collection on the walls room to breathe.

Artwork is displayed on upper and lower galleries...a feast for the eyes

“Having the entire exhibit posted online is an enormous draw for our regular customers and newcomers as well,” Ms. Redgate said. Customers have been known to walk into the gallery, send an iPhoto or the gallery’s web site to a spouse and ask, “How about this one for the hallway by the front door?” Ca-chinnng.

Art may be a commodity but even in a pinched economy, purchasing a little piece of art that touches your heart like a puppy in the pet store window can make you feel good every time you look at it.

Internet savvy Redgate and her staff checked Google analytics and found there were more annual hits on their web site in November than December. The result? A convergence of art and science. “We realized that people were beginning their Christmas art shopping in November and wanted to maximize our exposure so this year we opened the show on November 17th.”

“Over the years, people have been drawn to favorite artists and will look to collect some of their art at these shows.  Ellen Granter, Jim Kubiatowicz, and Ralph Bush fall into that category. Another emerging favorite is Beatrice Dauge, whose style of painting with a palette knife appeals to buyers.”

The faves have stiff competition. Of the 100 applications received each year, the Copley Society admits 25 to 30 new members, whose work is juried and accepted by a credentialed membership committee. Exhibiting and selling work in this prestigious gallery is one huge perk.

Between the 15 to 20 exhibits the gallery hosts every year, including solo exhibitions, thematic group shows, juried competitions, and fundraising events, both the newbies and the veterans have a chance to rocket into an art collector’s stratosphere.

The Copley Society of Art, known more recently as Co|So, is the oldest non-profit art association in the United States, with a history dating back to 1879. One of its earliest members was John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) who became one of the most successful portrait painters of his time.

From Executive Director Suzan Redgate right down the line to Gallery Coordinator Alicia LaTores, Media Coordinator Sarah Adams and a handful of student interns, the gallery staff is warm, friendly, and engaging. Especially important to first time visitors, they acknowledge you when you walk in the door, might ask what you like or think of the show in an entirely laid-back way that’s interest-driven.

They want you to be comfortable. They want you to come back. And if you come back with the notion to buy some art, so much the better.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Upstairs gallery

QR barcode displayed in front window. QR Code reader app (third row right)

 
Downstairs gallery

“Aphrodite and the Gods of Love”: A Scholarly Appreciation of the Earthy Love Deity

"Aphrodite and The Gods of Love"

The curators of the MFA scoured the museum's vast collection of Greek art and artifacts and borrowed a few from Italy to assemble this comprehensive exhibit that considers the social, cultural, and religious effect Aphrodite has had on western art since the eighth century BC. The display doesn't have the  warm and fleshy impact of "Degas and The Nude," now on display in the museum's Art of The Americas Wing, but it does make a powerful statement showing the long shadow Aphrodite, her Roman counterpart Venus, and their extended families cast over the region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Narratives of love, lust, revenge, murder, infidelities, seductions, feuds? Regional versions of Aphrodite were in the middle of them.

Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
October 9, 2011 - February 5, 2012

NOTE:
Wednesdays after 4 pm, admission is by voluntary contribution (suggested donation $22. pt at large says support the arts, pay what it's worth to you. And...your General Admission ticket includes one free repeat visit within 10 days!) 

Maybe we can blame our fascination with the Kardashians on Aphrodite. Aphrodite and her Roman counterpart Venus had the effect of an explicit reality show on cultures around the Mediterranean since the legend of Aphrodite was created in the eighth century BC. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition "Aphrodite and The Gods of Love" shows that the ancients had a good appetite for sexual drama.

If you think Kim’s marriage to Kris created a stir, think about the fact that when a sculptor in Turkey got around to carving a statue of an entirely nude Aphrodite in the fourth century BC it was, according to the label in the MFA, the “first monumental female nude in western art history.” The western world of art was changed forever.

Until the third century AD, images of Aphrodite and Venus were created for public and private consumption alike. One of the artifacts of Aphrodite on display in the museum’s Torf Gallery was displayed centuries ago in the garden of a Greek baker. You want juicy gossip? Aphrodite was the daytime soap opera for Mediterranean cultures for centuries. She coupled lustily, occasionally deviously, with mortals and immortals alike providing us with Eros (Cupid), with Ares, Hermaphrodite, with Hermes, Priapos, god of garden fertility, with Dionysus, Zeus or Adonis, take your pick.  Then there was Phobos, the god of panic, Pothos, the god of sexual longing and her mortal son Aeneas, who founded Rome. She was Ms. Flagrante Delecto for centuries. The MFA exhibit explores her legend with the prurient curiosity of a highbrow TMZ.

The collection of about 160 marble sculptures, painted vases, mosaics, gems, statuettes made of terracotta and precious metals, traces Aphrodite’s history from her conception in a foamy sea in the Near East all around the Mediterranean region to Italy and Rome. Most of the artwork is from the MFA world-class collection. The rest are on loan from Rome and Naples. Every artifact and sculpture is labeled and connected to others in the same display.

Aphrodite had a brand that would make the Kardashians drool.  One of the biggest surprises is that earrings, medallions, and pendants with Aphrodite’s image were worn as accessories in ancient times. J Lo, LeBron James, Lady Gaga and a ton of other quite mortal celebrities have Aphrodite to thank for the idea of product endorsements. After Aphrodite was created, we didn’t break her mold. We commercialized it.

Aphrodite’s vibrant image has retained her sensual allure for centuries. We have Aphrodite to acknowledge or blame for our obsession with youth and beauty. In real life, we know that beauty is evanescent and every perfectly proportioned, long legged model in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue will some day be replaced by a younger model. Aphrodite never aged. We will.

The universal emotions of love and lust and the magic or destruction they can unleash are embodied in our fascination with Aphrodite and brilliantly chronicled in “Aphrodite and the Gods of Love.” Every observer, no matter what age, has a common denominator with the all too human aspect of this captivating Greek goddess.

Photos courtesy of MFA website

 

"Degas and The Nude": An Artist's Obsession With The Female Form

“Degas and The Nude”

Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115

October 9, 2011 - February 5, 2012

NOTE: Wednesday nights after 4 pm, admission is by voluntary contribution (suggested donation $22. And...your General Admission ticket includes one free repeat visit within 10 days!)

For an artist who never married and became a recluse in his later years after 1890, Edgar Degas saw more naked feminine derrières and bosoms than most lucky Frenchman would see in a lifetime. Nearly 1/5 of his 1200 paintings were of nude or semi nude women. While most men might have hormonal urges on their minds when lounging about in saloons, dance halls, and brothels, Degas was intrigued with depicting ballerinas, prostitutes, and other working women whom he befriended, in their sitting rooms, toilettes, and bedrooms in moments arguably more intimate than their couplings with men.

“Degas and the Nude,” combines the formidable holdings of The Musée d’Orsay in Paris with the robust collection of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The exhibition includes paintings, etchings, pastels, drawings, mono-prints, and sculpture.

The basement, no other polite way of phrasing it, of the MFA’s new Wing of the America’s seems an unlikely location to hang such a heralded exhibition. No natural light penetrates the gallery, perhaps to protect the pigments and dyes and inks on the artwork. The whispers of spectators in the serpentine traffic that winds its way through the show and the subdued lighting evoke a spirit of veneration as viewers pause thoughtfully in front of each painting.  The hush inside turns the exhibit into the Chapel of Edgar Degas.

The show’s shrewd setup is designed to fit into six viewing spaces: “The Classical Body: Degas’s Beginnings;” The Body In Peril;” “The Body Exploited;” “The Body Observed;” “The Body Exhibited;” and “Bodies In Motion.” Each section is introduced by printed panels explaining the room’s theme. The reward of the combining the Orsay (a third of the exhibits contents) and MFA holdings is the inclusion of dozens of Degas’s preliminary sketches, mono-prints or charcoal drawings for many of his works.

The first section of the exhibit shows Degas’s first paintings in the early 1860s. He was aspiring to become a historical painter and employed austere classic compositions and metaphorical themes - the kind of artwork you read about in Art 101 texts and walk right past with a cursory glance in other MFA galleries. His transformation from Neo-Classic to Impressionist is a testament to the artistic upheavals going on in Paris in the late 1800s.

One of the benefits of his early art education is that Degas was a deliberate worker, a work ethic derived from his training in classic art schools in the mid-1800s in which he was required to copy classic art works. Dozens of his monotypes and paintings are accompanied by drawings, sketches or etchings that preceded the final product and show Degas’s endless sense of inventiveness and artistic curiosity.

Degas’s talent is reminiscent of neo-classic Jean-August-Dominique Ingres and romanticist Eugene Delacroix. But while Degas could match their muscular approach to color and drawing, the works that made him a major Impressionist painter are more visceral and play with light and composition more freely. While Ingres and Delacroix were informative, Degas was evocative. Degas painted from his heart.

Edgar Degas was the chronicler of the quiet moments women spent well out of view of the men in their lives. The fleshy paintings and monotypes that make up the bulk of the exhibit focuses on these. Degas rarely painted his female subject’s faces. The female face and its expression would have derailed his intention to capture the simple grace, the universal mystique, of an everyday moment.

Well, mostly. The room “The Body Exploited,” is Degas in tabloid mode. He slips into a bawdy documentary style showing naked or semi-naked prostitutes in unguarded moments, pleasuring themselves, cleaning up after a business call, or indolently lounging around during inevitable lulls in the hours of the day. But even these mono-prints are more in the spirit of chronicling than titillating.

For most of the pictures in the exhibit, he preferred to paint views from the side or back, his subjects toweling off after a bath, combing hair or appraising herself in a mirror. You can almost smell the soap, the body odor, and the damp towels in the instants he captures. Time after time, you become aware of Degas’s classic sense of composition, his palette of richly muted colors, and his insistence on portraying ordinary female figures.

Maybe depictions of these unguarded private moments of solitude and reflection resonate with us because we’ve lived them ourselves. Maybe we just like looking at images of naked women. And I’m endlessly grateful that Edgar Degas’s obsession with female nakedness resulted in beauty that was more than skin deep.

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Gallery note: The multimedia guide , an iPhone type device, is worh the five buck rental charge.

"The multimedia guide for the exhibition includes video of pastel and printmaking techniques, plus perspectives from a figure model, a pastel artist, and others. With extensive commentary by George T. M. Shackelford, chair, Art of Europe and Arthur K. Solomon Curator of Modern Art at the MFA, the guide is narrated by Amanda Palmer, singer/songwriter and formerly of The Dresden Dolls."

"Degas and The Nude" will be shown at the Musee d'Orsay from March 13- July 1, 2012.

Modernist Photography 1910-1950: American Images in Black and White

Museum of Fine Arts Boston
October 5, 2010
Gallery 335
Wing of the Americas, Third Level

Modernist Photography 1910-1950

Nothing like a tiny room full of stunning black-and-white photographs to jam the brakes on your parade through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts new Wing of the Americas. To walk unexpectedly into this gallery of gelatin silver prints is like driving straight into a gravel pit from the smooth surface of a superhighway.

You've been dazzled by the saturated colors and oversized canvases of abstract and representational 20th-century art in the surrounding galleries and whoosh, you’re surrounded by forty 8 x 10 inch black-and-white photographs. They practically beg you to stand close and peer inside. Combined they’d fit into one of the frames of a painting in the next gallery.

The 19th century French impressionists and the Cubist movement of the early 1900s had blown away the doors of what people considered traditional art. The American artists in this exhibit raucously raced through those open thresholds to show that the young medium of photography had a seat at the table.

Photographers in the first half of the century were pushing the technical boundaries of their cameras and the horizons of their imaginations to produce portraits, nudes, close-ups, and abstract compositions. Subject matter from the aesthetic to the mundane held interest for them – shapes of architectural, human and natural form, subtle social commentary and random compositions that capture the swing of America’s hips at the dawn of a new century.

Their palette ranged from lustrous blacks to Arctic whites with 1000 shades of gray in between.

The quartet of miniature prints by Karl Straus 1886-1983 has the feel of atmospheric 19th-century etchings, 20th century homage to the bygone century.

Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge 1911 (R)

Morris Engel’s (1918–2005) crisp print titled “Comics New York City 1949” captures a lovely moment in time - the total innocence of a boy sitting on the curb, engrossed in the comic book held tightly in his hands. The comic book was a far more compelling way for kids to practice reading in every format from Classic Comic Books (Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, The Red Badge of Courage, Romeo and Juliet, for starters) to science fiction, mystery, westerns and yes, Archie and Veronica. I read them all…but I digress.

Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) was as adept with oil paint as he was with photographic paper. His oil painting, one of two color pieces in the exhibit, “Bleeder Stack River Rouge Ford Plant 1927,” (R) is paired with his photograph “Pulverizer Building 1927” showing his fascination with the geometric architecture and shapes of an emerging industrial America and is a subtle link to the American paintings in adjacent galleries.

Margaret Bourke White’s “The American Way of Life 1937” is a show-stopper.   African-Americans in a 1937 breadline stand under a giant billboard proclaiming “World’s Highest Standard of Living… There’s no way like the American Way.” Who would have guessed this photo could strike such a visceral chord today.

No exhibit of 20th-century photography would be complete without compositions of the female form by Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976). Weston's nearly abstract shape of “Nude 1935” and Cunningham’s “Alta on the beach” are two classics.
The pairings of photographs are often playful. Ansel Adams’s (1902-1984) composition of the soft petals of a rose juxtaposed with Edward Weston's nude are an unusual pair and totally congruous.

Gordon Parks (1912–2006), widely acclaimed for his fashion photography, had a keen eye for social commentary.  His “Outside Liberty Theater 19th if the” is a stark reminder of urban segregation in not-so-long-ago mid-20th century America.

"Coffee Shop,Railway Station, Indianapolis, 1956", by Robert Frank (b 1926) captures the sense of personal isolation in urban America much the same way as Edward Hopper, whose work hangs in another gallery.

Much of the photography in this intimate space was created during the same period as the bigger than life abstract works in the galleries in the adjoining rooms by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and realist paintings by Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and George Bellows and dozens of others.

With that context, it makes total sense that the photographs in the “Modernist Photography 1910-1950” exhibit represent similar disparate artistic visions. Gallery 335 is a terrific point of entry to lay the groundwork for viewing the rest of the third level’s 20th century art through the mid-1970s.

Photographs taken by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. in Gallery 335

Berenice Abbott (1998-1991) Gasoline Station from the series Changing New York, 1935 

Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) Sunbath,Alta on the beach, 1925-1930

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) Dorothy True, 1919

 

 

MFA Boston: Modernist Photography 1910–1950

"Modernist Photography 1910–1950"
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
November 20, 2010-July 3, 2011
Art of the Americas, Gallery 335

The ink was still drying on post impressionist art when the so-called Modernist era in American photography emerged in the first decade of the 20th century. "Modernist Photography 1910–1950", is a potent little collection of work by American photographers who blazed a trail that influenced nearly every photographer who followed them well into the mid 1900s.

The exhibit is dominated by photographs by three giants of American photography: Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Paul Strand (1890-1976), and Edward Steichen (1879-1973) and complemented by photographs of Edward Weston (1886-1958), Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), and Ansel Adams (1902-1984) and other photographers less well known but part of the wave that ricocheted off the innovations these artists pioneered.

Alfred Stieglitz was the first champion of photography as fine art. Between 1908 and 1946, he opened three galleries in New York City that exhibited beautifully printed photographs and contemporary pieces of art, often avant-garde, in other mediums.

The large view finder cameras used by Stieglitz, Strand, Steichen and their contemporaries became a tool that not so much competed but complemented work done with the easels and palettes used by European and American artists who preceded them and were their contemporaries. The three main elements of the exhibit are portraits and nudes, still life and close-up, and still life and abstraction.

Most of the photos are tightly cropped, hardly a landscape to be found, forcing us to find the universal in a very tight compact space arranged by the photographer. The still lifes and many of the nudes float lightly on the frontier of abstract art, suggesting rather than representing familiar shapes.

The photographic prints vary in tonality, grain structure, focus, crispness, and concentration or diffusion of light. The predominantly silver gelatin prints are gorgeously, meticulously, developed.  The juxtaposition of techniques along the four walls of the exhibit often offers stark contrast between the intentions or styles of the photographers as they either find their niche or push the envelope from the norms of the day.

The fact that the images are in black, white and infinite shades of gray deepens a sense of perception in viewers accustomed to rich color and enriches the feeling of being transported to a seminal period of American photography.

A quartet of prints by Strand, Stieglitz, and Steichen reveals their impact on each other’s artistry. Steichen’s close-cropped sepia toned portrait of his future wife “Dana 1923”, mysterious, pensive, was likely inspired by Paul Strand’s enigmatic composition “Rebecca, New York, 1920”. Both Stieglitz and Strand were influenced by the portraits Alfred Stieglitz had begun making of his wife Georgia O'Keeffe in 1918 (Georgia O'Keeffe, A Portrait, 1918). All three men used their wives for photographic inspiration for years.

Edward Weston’s iconic “Nude, 1936”, of his future wife Charis Wilson, a vision of sunlight and shadow in a California cabin doorway captures an aesthetic at once feminine and abstract. A brilliant juxtaposition to Weston’s print is Arthur Siegel’s “Photogram, 1948”, which, with the squint of an eye, could easily be a similar composition and subject as if imagined by Pablo Picasso.

These artists were forever expanding their sensibilities. Strand’s “Vermont Church 1944” is an exceedingly crisp and spare composition heralding his burgeoning interest in New England architecture, landscape, and later, the faces of its rural inhabitants. 

Charles Sheeler’s gelatin silver print “Buggy, Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1915-1917)”, captures an ordinary object in the shadows of a Bucks County barn. Like many of the photographs in the exhibit, it causes the viewer to shift back and forth from representational and abstract ways of admiring it.

Wright Morris’s “Abandoned House, 1941” feels like a Larry McMurtry novel in stark black and white. The sense of desolation and weight of history in the snow crusted plains of Nebraska sets off a series of questions in the viewer’s mind: what happened here?

In an age of rapid change, the visual impact of this precious exhibit is like speeding from a superhighway onto a roadway packed with deep gravel, a swift but gentle deceleration that makes us wonder how the 20th century can feel like such a long, long time ago.

In a hundred years, what will an exhibit entitled “Modernist Photography 2010–2050” look like? Will there still be museums to host it? Will our artifacts be digital or carbon based? And what will matter to the people who live in that future time.

In the meantime, a visit to this exhibit, tucked between the sparkling, light drenched exhibition spaces in the Museum of Fine Arts new Art of the Americas wing, is the perfect spot to see the classic roots of American photography.

Paul Strand’s enigmatic composition “Rebecca, New York, 1920” (left), Edward Steichen’s close-cropped sepia toned portrait of his future wife “Dana 1923” (center), Alfred Stieglitz "Georgia O'Keeffe, A Portrait, 1918" (right).

Dana, Georgia...
   

Edward Weston, "Nude 1936", Arthur Siegel’s “Photogram, 1948” - brilliant idea to hang these near each other.

Georgia O'Keeffe, a sensual oil on canvas mounted on masonite

 
Edward Weston's visions of linear and round forms


 
Charles Sheeler's crisp, focused "Champion Spark Plug" 1920s, Alfred Steiglitz's velvety "Pear and Apple" 1919

Wright Morris’s “Abandoned House, 1941”

Edward Steichen, "Dana, 1923"

 
Alfred Stieglitz "House and Grape Leaves" 1934, Paul Strand "Church, Vermont" 1944. Both men found beauty in everyday architecture and the human face and form.

Charles Sheeler, “Buggy, Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1915-1917)”, a great mix of representational and abstract art
NOTE: with so much ambient light, there are unavoidable reflections on the glass that covers the prints. I took the photos with no flash, as per museum rules. The slower shutter speeds plus hand held camera  make extraordinarily crisp prints seem fuzzy (less noticeable on grainy photos in the exhibit).

 

Couch Potatoes in Triplicate Plus One

triiibe meets pt at large
Friday Evening. May 28, 2010
Gallery Kayafas Open House
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA

Couch Potatoes (more like hot tamales) in Triplicate Plus One

Identical triplets Sara, Kelly, and Alicia Caslio (L to R,  the same order as in photo above) were the "Couch Potatoes in Residence" tonight as they greeted scores of friends, admirers, and adventurous gallery-hoppers at the Gallery Kayafas’s Open House on the evening of May 28 (the last weekend of the show). pt at large caught up with the trio to get some face time, in triplicate, of course.

Award-winning photographer Cary Wolinsky, who shot the photos for this exhibit, commented positively on the "focus" and "perceptive" quality of pt at large's  review of the show. Wolinsky's son, videographer Yari Wolinsky, who has chronicled some of triiibe's performance art, and Rick Kyle co-owner of 5000K Color Studios, were also on hand.

In collaboration with the triiiibe-sters and Wolinsky, Mr. Kyle added, with luminous skill, “the finishing 5% of perfection to the prints,” Cary Wolinsky said tonight.

Kyle took me for a brief tutorial walk through the gallery and explained his role in the collaborative process - scanning Wolinsky's original "raw" photographs, creating files to hold the huge size of the scanned photographs, and using Photoshop and other tools to emphasize color or manipulate objects. His unerring instinct for color composition and object placement imbues the photographs with an uncanny depth that borders on the third dimension.

Keep this triiibe on your radar screen for future exhibits and performance art.

Photos courtesy of an innocent bystander

Triiibe at Gallery Kayafas: A Real Trip(lettt)

TRIIIBE
At: Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA
Through May 17, 2010
www.gallerykayafas.com


Whether you’re scratching your head and saying, “Whaaaat?” in amazement or smiling at the fun these people are having, you’ll be glad you came to Gallery Kayafas to explore the photography show “Triiibe.”
 
 Those three “i”s in the title refer to identical triplets Alicia, Kelly, and Sara Casilio who love to use their astonishing identicality to mess you up - and they succeed. When they dress the same in “Paint By Number”, your eyes dart from one face to the other to the other trying to find a tiny mark, mole, set of lips, anything, that will differentiate one from the others. You wonder- can they possibly be as identical on the inside as they appear on the surface?
 
In “Compatibility Quiz,” another of the 16 gorgeous color photographs in the show, the three don’t try to disguise their faces but wear different colored wigs and dress up like a party girl, a librarian, and a hipster, all leaning against a barroom counter. Before you realize it, you assign certain cultural values and assumptions to them based on their appearance. You’ve fallen right into their clutches. 
 
Whether these chameleons choose to camouflage themselves or confound us with their mirror images, they’re not just into trompe l’oeil compositions.
 
Photographs titled “Right to Life,” “Abstinence Eve,” “Black and White,”  “Equal Opportunity,” and “Homeland” have a point of view that’s more in the form of a thesis than a slogan. These performance artists aren’t flame-throwers. They tap you on the shoulder and say, “What’s your position on this?”
 
So when you see “Black and White,” a photo of a pregnant woman partially covered by a white sheet being observed by Supreme Court justices, the looks on the siblings’ three faces tells the narrative. In “Homeland,” a father and mother pose with a photo of a son in military garb in a framed picture on the wall behind them. White bread America - or not?
 
  Their use of wigs, clothing, and make-up deconstructs their gender and personal identity and adds an insidious voyeuristic aspect to each photograph. Substitute three non-related women for Alicia, Kelly, and Sara and the statement evaporates.

Every photo is a triple take. Are we looking at identical sisters or are we looking at the women and men they’re posing as and what’s their point? The show produces an interactive ping pong effect in your head as, in spite of yourself, you try to figure out who’s who and what they’re up to. Their point? They’re still themselves as they pose to be others. Aren’t we all the same under our own skins, they seem to be asking.

A series of four photographs titled “Shelf-Life” is goofy and playful. Their heads appear disembodied, protruding from holes on a shelf, and for all the world look like alabaster sculptures on display.  In “Shelf-Life #4 ” it looks like they’ve emptied their prop closet and scattered beads, eyeglasses, wigs, handbags and scarves on and around their heads. “Shelf-Life #1” looks like the shelf after a great sale. Nothing left except their alabaster heads in subtle repose.

The large format photographs nearly step right out of their custom frames. Lush color, precisely detailed, they maximize the photogenic triplet's flesh tones, facial contours and body language. There’s a wondrous collaborative relationship between photographer and sisters.
 
Cary Wolinsky really gets what the Casilios are up to. A renowned photojournalist since he began with the Boston Globe in 1968, Cary Wolinsky’s photo essays have been published by National Geographic, The Smithsonian, and Natural History magazines. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and other prestigious institutions have collected his fine art prints.

He first saw them as they pulled off a piece of guerilla theater at Massachusetts College of Art (their 2001 alma mater) in 2005. He’d just left his gig at National Geographic. Their stunt was the spark that ignited the formation of their collaborative group “Triiibe” in 2006.

Note the couch, same as one in photo

This is a family production on both sides of the camera. Cary Wolinsky’s son Yari, a freelance filmmaker, has made videos of the performance artists in action. They’re not part of the show but they demonstrate the triplets power to leverage their identical appearances to make their own political points. Click on page 3 of the Gallery link on Triiibe’s website to find his stunning "Bailouts and Bonuses" video of the sisters on Wall Street. Cary Wolinsky's wife Babs Emmel is often called upon for artistic advice and clothing management.

“Their sense of humor is disarming as they engage you with the issues they want to focus on,” gallery owner Arlette Kayafas says.

From the concept to the content, this show is a real trip, as in triplet.

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.

 
 

Jess T. Dugan's Exhibit "Coupled" Tells, Doesn't Ask

“Coupled”
Polaroid Images by Jess Dugan
Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA 02118
Opened March 5, 2010


Jess T. Dugan’s photography exhibit at Gallery Kayafas isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but hey, what else is new.  Depending on your tastes, that might be the case for several of the other shows opening at various galleries at 450 Harrison Avenue this week.

Titled “Coupled,” Dugan’s show turns gender identity upside down, or at the very least, sideways.

The way Dugan describes it, what the individuals that form each couple have in common is “ some connection to a female identity. For some of them that meant they were both female-identified; for some of them that meant they were transgender-identified in one way or another - male to female or female to male. Everyone in the project has some type of queer identity and some connection to a female identity.”

Newbury Street may not be ready for this show but gallery owner Arlette Kayafas got past the subject matter that’s a challenging draw for a gallery audience generally perceived as heterosexual.

“It’s remarkable to think how young she is and the quality of her work. I feel fortunate to present this show. I presented a collection of black and white photographs of her family and friends in 2009. This is the first show of its kind in Massachusetts.”

Dugan has a BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and in 2010 earned a Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies, with a concentration in Museum Studies from Harvard University. She graduated with distinction and departmental honors.

Gender ambiguity extends to Dugan. She identifies herself as  “a queer variant - not as trans but existing in an in-between space.” She’s active in LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender) and Trans-sexual communities and is totally comfortable within them.

(Personal note. I’ve known Jess’s mother for about ten years and met Jess, now 24, when she was a teenager coming to grips with her sexuality. Make no mistake about it, these transitions take guts to navigate. Jess uses her talent to document and celebrate people who happen to be lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgendered.)

“People trust Jess will portray them in a non-judgmental way,” Kayafas says, “she’s so comfortable with herself that her subjects feel at ease with her.”

That’s a good thing for her subjects. Feeling at ease with a 20 x 24 Polaroid camera (one of only five in the world) almost eight feet high with a bellows that stretched out five feet could have been intimidating. Waiting for the bank of six strobe lights to illuminate the room with the intensity of “the big bang” might have been like waiting in line to get on roller coaster.

Dugan’s set up is brilliant. She asked the couples to look directly into the camera with a neutral expression. Something remarkable happened. They let go. What you see is not only the positive image of the Polaroid photograph but also an intimate image that seems to bore into their souls. Vulnerable, brave, loving, friendly, bonded, they clearly trusted Dugan to tell their story.

Each of the 19 photos is the same size (22x26 inches), hung with the same framing, the same distance from one another. The rich burgundy background she uses for every photo imbues them the aura of warmth that seems an extension of the connection between each couple.

"These are one of a kind photographs. It isn't possible to manipulate the image with the Polaroid process," Ms. Kayafas says.  The images will be sold as a set, not individually.

"There are plans to photograph the originals with a 4x5 camera, scan the images, and print them 14x20 inches with a high quality Epson printer that uses ground up paint for color," she says.

Dugan’s work is quietly political. She’s not a bomb thrower. No matter what your response might be to these couples on the street, viewing them in the gallery’s quiet luminous space gives you the chance to see them on their own terms. The portraits reflect on the fact that the couples represent one of humanity’s most persistent manifestations - two people connected emotionally and spiritually to one another.

After a while I stopped sorting out who is who gender-wise and began to look at the pairs as a couple of people. I speculated how they connected emotionally and about their brave ongoing journeys. In the comfort of the gallery, it felt liberating to contemplate life choices that are so different from my own hetero culture. These are painful, sometimes dangerous choices. They’re also life affirming.

Today’s news stories about same-sex marriage and “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military remind me that these issues are ever closer to mainstream culture. Jess Dugan’s portraits represent part of a narrative unspooling in every city and town in America as individuals search their psyches and emerge as the person they were born to become.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Toulouse-Lautrec at Boston MFA: Disappointing Dollop

CAFÉ AND CABARET: Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris
At: Museum of Fine Arts, through Aug. 8. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

Look, the guy died from alcoholism and syphilis. It took him 36 short years to burn his candle down to the wick. But what a tall, brilliant flame was cast by such a diminutive, bedeviled artist.

Henri Raymond Marie de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa (1864-1901) was a misfit from birth, born with a congenital deformity that stunted his growth (to a height of about 4 1/2 feet), disfigured his legs, and gave him a world of pain. Absinthe took care of the pain. Hanging out with dance hall girls and prostitutes took care of more worldly needs. And gave him colorful subjects to fill his canvases and posters during Paris’s “belle epoch,” the giddy final decade of the 19th century.
 
 The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is currently hosting a canapé of an exhibit that barely does justice to Henri’s talent. France has produced a ton of world-class artists. Few of them had the bold signature style of Toulouse-Lautrec. His lithographs captured the racy seediness, the earthy debauchery, of one of Paris’s most bohemian districts, Monmartre.
 
In a subculture of eccentric artists, dancers, writers, poets, prostitutes, and showgirls, Henri’s dwarfish appearance and prodigious artistic output was a match. Talented and alienated, he would never fit into the aristocratic society into which he was born. Give him a brothel or a dance hall, voilà, he was in his element - and could document it with an unerring eye to skewer and romanticize at the same time.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s signature works were the commercial lithographs he created for the Moulin Rouge and other popular nightclubs and performers in Monmartre, Using flat colors similar to those on Japanese woodblock prints that were popular in salons at the time, his posters often featured one or two main figures, slightly caricatured with the subjects’ mannerisms or attire, and emblazoned with text he designed to add wallop to the piece.
 
There are only two of these in this petite exhibit in one of the museum’s hallway. “Aristide Bruant in his Cabaret,” (1893 lithograph printed before the lettering and background details were added) gives you a whiff of his genius. A solitary small 1891 oil and mixed media painting,"At the Cafe La Mie," gives one the idea of his style.

With a title of “Café and Cabaret: Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris,” you expect more than a scanty appetizer. ( A review in a Boston newspaper gave the impression of a much larger presence of the artist's work.) Half a dozen smaller examples of his work just don’t do justice to the artist. Toulouse-Lautrec created an estimated 737 canvases, 275 watercolors, 363 prints and posters, and 5,084 drawings. Why, then, devote one measly hallway to his output?

Credit the museum’s curators for including several oils and lithographs done by his contemporaries in the exhibit that by comparison underscore the uniqueness of Toulouse-Lautrec’s art. It’s a shame the Museum of Fine Arts gives Henri such short shrift.

Photos by Paul Tamburello- handheld camera, no flash, available light, somewhat fuzzy, my apologies, Henri... I wish I could say it  was the absinthe.

Harry Callahan Exhibit at MFA Makes Your Day

 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
617-267-9300
Boston
Herb Ritts Gallery
Harry Callahan: American Photographer
November 21, 2009-July 3, 2010

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) was a major figure in 20th century photography. The tidy little retrospective of his work at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts shows why.

Of all the “ists” you can apply to Harry Callahan’s photographic style, formalist floats to the top of the list. Whether his subject was his wife Eleanor, landscapes, architecture, nature, or inventive darkroom technique, the results are a combination of a dispassionate eye and an unerring sense of composition.

The exhibition of 43 photographs spanning Callahan’s long career does a great job of highlighting the breadth of his interests and the brilliance with which he pursued them. Pretty good for a guy who began taking pictures when he was a shipping clerk in the late 1930s.

The photos are grouped according to Callahan’s interests named above. Several architectural color photographs appear almost banal compared to Callahan’s work in black and white.

Callahan’s darkroom sensibilities are apparent. Glance around the gallery and you’ll see plenty of prints using high contrast paper. Others are deeply toned photos, grays and blacks, almost gothic with the paucity of light emitted from them. A series of close-ups or Eleanor is followed by a grouping of her as a speck of light in a nocturnal shot or a reclining figure in a sprawling field.

The nude studies of his wife Eleanor have an air of detachment about them, as if he were more interested in composition than flesh. Eleanor’s body was wonderfully mature and un-sylph like. The way he prints the nudes of her force you look at them as abstractions or designs. His overexposed 1953 composition of her on a rumpled sheet, if rendered in oil paint could easily be classic Goya. Her complete comfort in front of the lens hints at the trust built in a 60-year marriage.

His willingness to try new techniques (double exposures, sometimes printing a pinup from a girlie magazine over an austere landscape or building, and use of a flashlight to produce effects on his prints in the darkroom) endeared him to students of Rhode Island School of Design where he taught from 1961 to 1976.

We are awash in a world of color. Callahan's photographs show us how much can be achieved with just two: black, white, and the tones of gray in between.

Photos taken MFA
gallery by Paul Tamburello: hand held camera, no flash, shaky hands, lots of reflection from ambient light splashed all over the glass on the frame, give viewer an approximation of Callahan's work.

Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920 by Augustus Frederick Sherman

The first big wave of immigrants arrived in America between 1847 and 1860. A larger wave of immigrants from a larger range of countries sailed to America between the late 1800s and 1920. Most of them passed through Ellis Island, New York City. The exhibit of Augustus Frederick Sherman's "Ellis Island Portraits," reminds us that America is still a melting pot. Once again foreign languages and foreign looking clothing are heard and seen in our markets and shopping malls. Once again America is on the rocky road toward assimilation.

"Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920" by Augustus Frederick Sherman
October 11- April 26, 2009
National Heritage Museum
33 Marrett Road/Route 2A
Lexington, MA

If you live in an urban area of any size, you’ve certainly noticed the appearance of people who don’t look “American.” They don’t speak English with fluency and they certainly didn’t buy their wardrobe from Target or Sears. It’s still a bit of a shock to see a woman wearing a head scarf and a strange looking dress who is packing your groceries at the market or collecting your money when you drive past the toll booth at a parking garage. And what about the turbans and clothes worn by some of the men who drive the taxis?

By the middle of the twentieth century the people’s attire and language seemed as homogenized as the milk in the dairy case. In the past decade, though, we’re returning to the delicatessen style look and feel that exploded in the early 20th century. In the beginning, it can feel disorienting and bring on a touch of xenophobia, even in the most liberal-minded.

Just around the time I’m beginning to feel snippy about who these foreigners are, what their religious affiliations and cultural habits are, and who invited them here anyway, I drive to The National Heritage Museum in Lexington, MA. One New York minute after I’m walking through the “Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920 by Augustus Frederick Sherman” exhibit, I’m am jolted by the fact that if I’d been me at that time I would have been feeling a bit of condescension about my great-grandfathers Giovanni Sciutto of Genoa and Salvatore Tamburello of Palermo who entered through New York in the early 1900s.

Alfred Stieglitz's photo (not in exhibit): The Steerage, 1907, courtesy of Getty Museum

In Ellis Island’s peak year of 1907, more than 1,000,000 foreigners were processed for entry into America. An earlier wave in the 1800s was French and German. This second wave was mostly Catholics and Jews from Eastern Europe as well as Italians, Greeks, Dutch and Irish. They came for the usual reasons: poverty, persecution, and politics.

Travelers in First Class were processed aboard ship. Those in third class and in steerage passed through Ellis Island. In its heyday, the island could process 5000 people a day and send them off into America. Many headed west. To this day, their descendants populate Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and other areas of the heartland.

And boy oh boy their clothing advertised their heritage like a walking billboard. In Sweden, a maiden’s apron, and blouse could tell you her social status and hometown. The young girl wearing the white blouse and apron with horizontal stripes identifies her as an unmarried female from Ruttvik, a farming town on Lake Siljan in Sweden. Who needed Facebook to know that? You can still see apron patterns like this in Minnesota and South Dakota, but don’t make any assumptions about her marital status from them.

The photographer whose eye captured the immigrants in their raw “just off the boat” state was Augustus Frederick Sherman. An accomplished photographer, he was chief clerk with the Immigration Division at Ellis Island between 1906 and 1921. He had access to the 20% of immigrants who were temporarily detained for health, paperwork, or political background. Most made it through, 2% were deported.

Sherman clicked the shutter when he saw a tilt of the head, a hesitant or proud gaze, a certain bearing of the body, which revealed the person inside the elaborate national costume or unusual clothing.

Photo courtesy of National Heritage Museum web site

Women from the Netherlands wear headgear you might have seen in a Pieter Bruegel painting. Sherman’s photos bring us Romanian shepherds in tunics and boots, Bavarian men in lederhosen, a Syrian family in black embroidered shawls and coats. There is a young Albanian woman who would have been mistaken for a hippie if she wandered into Haight-Ashbury in 1968, and a regal Guadaloupe woman wearing a pillbox hat and flowing dress.

This was us at the dawn of the twentieth century, mostly folk and peasant stock. The pride in where they were coming from had not yet been eroded by taunts or prejudices that certainly would follow them until they had assimilated and become “us,” the citizens who built roads and populated factories and who fought for and died for the country that they now call home. Historians believe that more than 40% of us are descendants of these immigrants.

Look around. Some day these “foreigners” wearing funny clothes and speaking strange languages will be in the Chamber of Commerce and holding office in our city halls. They will don a military uniform with a red, white, and blue emblem on the sleeve. They will be proud of their roots but will be as much a part of our history as those whose portraits line the walls in the gallery at The National Heritage Museum.

They will be our fellow Americans.

Close Up: Big photos reveal little

"Close Up", images by Martin Schoeller
February 15 - April 15, 2007

The Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Road
Winchester, MA 01890
781-729-1158
Tuesday - Thursday: 11AM - 5PM
Friday: 11AM - 4PM
Saturday and Sunday: Noon - 4PM
Admission $5 Adults, Seniors $2 Students and Members FREE
Thursday admission FREE

For celebrity junkies and even commoners like ptatlarge, gazing at the faces of the famous is endlessly fascinating. Martin Schoeller’s nineteen head shots of actors, athletes, rockers, and politicians is a visual feast. The exhibit fills walls of the modest gallery inside the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.

The portraits are huge, some as large as 3 feet by 4 feet (Angelina Jolie) and none smaller than 2 feet by 3 feet. They’re brilliantly printed studio "head shots", softly lit, but tightly focused in an extremely narrow focal plane. Schoeller zeroes in on the eyes and anything within that plane - cheeks, lips, mouth. All else - tip of the nose or ears are not in focus. With enlargement on this scale, you’d think we could see a hint of what makes the subject tick or wonder about the curl of a lip, an arch of the brow, a glint in the eye or a concerto involving all three.

Not so. The face of every subject is a deadpan, void of expression. Why? If he wants us to construct our own stories, as he professes, why not make us ask the reason for that smirk, or the furrowed brow, or the frown?

He presents us with masks.

Some with luminous skin, others with faint or deeply etched lines around mouths and eyes, like rings on a tree, suggesting the age of the subject. That’s as close a hint we have as to their humanity. Perhaps that’s what Schoeller wants, to strip them of their trappings of power or success and present only their naked faces, well known but with the same pores and lines as we have on our own.

Unfortunately, we want more. We’re probably more like the pilot fish that attach themselves to our most magnificent mammals, the whales, and let the whales take them places they could never reach by themselves.

Schoeller appears to be similar to his onetime boss Annie Leibovitz. He has strong opinions about his methods and how his photos are presented. “The number and identities of his photos were a mystery to us until the day before we got them,” the Griffin curator said. He insisted on arranging the sequence of the photos and even the height from which they’d be mounted from the floor, she said. An artist is entitled to that.

The scale of the photographs and their extraordinarily saturated color printing are truly impressive. But for all the technical virtuosity, they were all hauntingly similar. Schoeller’s aim is to have us create our own stories for his faces. Sadly, most of us prefer the stories we read in People Magazine.

Subjects:
Angelina  Jolie, Magic Johnson, Frankie Velella, Donald Rumsfeld, Marilyn Manson, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Jack Nicholson, Cindy Sherman, John McEnroe, Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, André Aggaziz, Piwa Ndogo, Thomas, Jackson, Lance Armstrong, Joe Mosner, Tammy Faye Bakker

For more about Martin Schoeller, click
http://mediastorm.org/0002.htm

Griffin Museum of Photography
http://www.griffinmuseum.org

Copley Society "Shades of Frost", Cool for Collectors of All Stripes

The Copley Society of Art
158 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 / 617-536-5049
Tues - Sat 11 - 6, Sun - Mon 12 - 5
“Co/So Artists A to Z: Shades of Frost”
Lower Gallery, January 18 - March 10, 2007

The Copley Society of Art is a little oasis of accessible, affordable visual art in the midst of the priciest, toniest street in Boston. It’s the only gallery on Newbury Street where the collector has a chance to purchase artwork that won’t require taking out a second mortgage on the house.

The lower level of the two-tiered gallery is the place to start. Many of the approximately 500 artists who make up the society launch their careers down there. Of the 300 artists who apply for membership each year, only 30 are admitted. Consider the fact that their work passed through this firewall as a sort of provenance. The review committee here has high standards.

Each member may contribute three works to the society’s quarterly exhibitions, some of which are juried, some not. The current show, “Co/So Artists A to Z: Shades of Frost,” is not juried and is full of oils, pastels, watercolors, acrylics, photographs, monotypes, drypoints, gouache, and collages. This tapas approach is a great way for neophytes to develop their taste in art and veterans to capture the work of an artist they think might skyrocket into the firmament. Everybody wins.

Elisabeth Pearl's trio are 4 1/4 x 4 1/4, $165 each, oil on panel

Good things come in small packages - pieces are limited to 100 square inches. The walls are covered with lively contrasts in color, texture, theme, and imaginations. The relatively few pieces that are abstract are not so challenging that they defy comprehension.

Richard W. Field, 'Robbie’s Towing', $1200, acrylic, 9 x 12

Art lines the walls and is stacked in display boxes on the floor. As soon as a piece is sold, another takes its place. Once in a while, Assistant Gallery Manager Katherine Millet will move pieces around “If the space begins to look a little tired.”

Best of Show: Dianne Panarelli Miller, “Sidewalk Café”,  oil, 12x9, $650

The prices range from $200 to $1700. Don’t panic. Only a handful runs more than a grand. At least half are less than $500, with scores of pieces falling between $250 and $400. The price tag of “Best of Show” was $650 (see photo). And all the art is framed. Collectors know full well that it can easily cost $100 to frame an acquisition.

One of the most endearing features of the gallery is how comfortable a visitor feels asking questions about the art on the walls. They’ve developed the non-snooty knack for answering questions from curious visitors into an art form. 

The Copley Society’s web page features photos of some of the  “A -Z” artwork http://copleysociety.org/home.html
 

The Copley Society, A Co/So Treat on Newbury Street

Copley Society of Art
158 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 / 617-536-5049
Tues - Sat 11 - 6, Sun - Mon 12 - 5
“Here and Abroad” October 19 - November 25
“Holiday Small Works 2006” November 9 - December 23

In this era of makeovers, we can excuse the Copley Society of Art for renaming itself the oh so au courante moniker of Co/So. Luckily for us, the society’s tastes are firmly anchored in the traditions of representational art that have been its general focus since its inception in 1877. ptatlarge says “luckily” not out of antipathy for non-representational forms of art but out of relief for not having to rent a headset to comprehend the artwork assembled on the walls of this intimate two level gallery on Newbury Street.

The upper gallery’s juried exhibition - “Here and Abroad”-  is easy on the eyes and the lower gallery’s  “Holiday Small Works 2006” is easy on the pocket book. Around 200 of the society’s 550 members submitted work for “Here and Abroad.” The jury chose 18 pieces representing 16 members whose work they believed best captured the theme: “Display a strong sense of place and, with their vividness, are able to transport the viewer to destinations far and wide.”

All the pieces succeed technically. The piece that earned the ptatlarge prize was Carol Monacelli’s Petit fer a Cheval, an oil painting, (40”h x 30”w). The slightly subdued palette, the postures of the two waiters in mid-conversation, the distinct European grounding of the tavern, are vivid. One can almost hear the clatter of plates, clinking of glasses, the shreds of conversation, and spot that one couple at the table in the corner who’ve provoked such pensive speculation from the two garcons. If the limit on your credit card is $10,000, exercise your plastic and take the painting home.

The annual “Holiday Small Works 2006”is a wild west of small pieces. Traditional, representational, whimsical, and abstract images in the usual mediums are mounted chock a block on the walls of the lower level. Every Co/So member could submit three pieces to this non-juried show and boy, did they ever. Scores of them are mounted on the walls and hundreds of them are piled in a small mountain in the gallery’s corner floor. The prices here aren’t scary and range from $100 to $600.

Most pieces are small enough to carry out the door under your arm. “This is a “cash and carry business” says the gallerista, as she wraps a piece for a customer.  It’s a unique opportunity to score a little gem for that wall in the hallway or space in the house you’ve been wanting to gussy up.

See the collection of all 18 oils, watercolors, pastels, and photos at http://www.copleysociety.org/Here_and_Abroad_06_online.htm

 

American Watercolors, Small wonders at the Fogg Museum

American Watercolors and Pastels 1875-1950
Fogg Museum, Harvard University
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA
Monday - Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Sunday 1:00 p.m. - 5 p.m.
April 8 - June 25, 2006
http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/exhibitions/fogg/americanwatercolors.html

There are several reasons to catch this show. First, the art is immensely accessible. Remember the term “representational art”?  You don’t need an audiotape to “get it”. Next, you can contemplate what you’ve seen while sitting at tables scattered under the Fogg’s three-story replica of an Italian Renaissance courtyard based on a 16th century façade from Montepulciano, Italy.

And, oh, it ends Sunday.

The fifty-two works were executed by some of the heavyweights of the past. You’ll nod your head as you recognize the work of John Singer Sargent (4), Winslow Homer (9), Edward Hopper (3), and James McNeil Whistler (8), And you might wonder why museums don’t show more of the work of John LaFarge and William Merritt Chase.   

This is a “Goldilocks” show, just right in size. The fifty-two works, spread in three small rooms in the street level Straus Gallery, include landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and even a few abstracts. The image sizes are roughly from letter size to 18 x 24 inches. Within half an hour, the ardent gallerista can wander through all three rooms a couple times then stand in front of favorites. There’s no conga line of visitors snaking through the gallery.

Taken as a whole, the exhibit is a tone poem to a bygone era. They were all painted between 1875 and 1950, considered the “Golden Age” of the medium. Yes there are many bright, frothy images that come to mind when one thinks “watercolor” but the show’s power stems from how the painters expanded the medium. Read the bite sized notes accompanying the artists’ work and you’ll see how their watercolors were often charged with gouache, tempera, and ink. These artists were pushing the envelope of their craft.

Walk into the room with the nine Homers and you’ll be drawn to several he painted with a rich blend of opacity and transparent wash. His robust watercolors capture the deep shade under forest canopies or at river’s edge and don’t rely exclusively on watercolor to achieve their punch.

See the exhibit this rainy weekend. That Italianate courtyard in the Fogg’s foyer has a roof over it.

A few ptatlarge  faves:

John LaFarge, “Chinese Pi Thong”, 1870, described at the time as “a rich square of eye delighting color”… still is. (photo below)
Winslow Homer, “Pike, Lake St. John", 1897
James McNeil Whistler, “Sailboat and Fourth of July Fireworks”, 1880
William Merritt Chase, “Self Portrait”, 1884 (photo below)

David Hockney Portraits:MFA Boston

“david hockney portraits”
February 26 - May 14, 2006
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Gund Gallery
Tickets complimentary for MFA members; non members $22.00

Yes, I was late to the party. Not what one would expect of a culture junkie, possibly one of your beacons of whatshappeningnow. But cheer up. What with a mid-spring monsoon forecast to blanket Massachusetts for the next five days, visiting the David Hockney Portraits exhibit (closes May 14) at the MFA Boston is an ideal Plan B.

This exhibit is a ray of sunshine. The guy is into people. His inherent instinct for design and structure give the viewer a comfortable platform to see into his work and his subjects.

Hockney has painted friends, colleagues, lovers, business associates, and, over about a thirty year period, his mother. His subjects advance in age, and the artist’s style subtlety evolves as he migrates between acrylics, oils, watercolor, collage, etching, and photography. His style is recognizable, iconic and versatile.

The show is a visual diary of Hockney’s life. His portraits of couples seem straightforward but, linger in front of them and questions surface. Why are they standing apart? What is that look on their faces? Posture? Is this a couple or two strangers?

The highlights of any exhibit have less to do with the work than the viewer (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”) A memorable part of the exhibit for ptatlarge was the “headshots” he’s painted throughout his career. One series done in 1997 contains a dozen 11 x 14 inch brilliantly colored collection of friends, mounted in a stunning array of 6 over 6. The brushstrokes, treatment of facial contours, and saturated edge-to-edge color are pure Hockney.

A riveting series of four paintings, about 11 x 14 inches, portrays his mother in final years of her life. He uses the same colors in each but tones the values down successively and synchronously as his mother comes closer and closer to passing away. The combination of his painting her face less distinctly and the descending color values is gripping….and far more loving than morbid. You can feel him saying, “Farewell, Mother,” as the color and vitality fade from her life.

Speaking of color, the aquamarines and azures that became embedded in the portraiture in his California period (60s, 70s) will stop you in your tracks. Short of a walk on a beach in the Virgin Islands, they’re the most arresting renditions of those colors you’re likely to see. Stand in the middle of the Gund Gallery and you’ll be surrounded by art that is totally informed by vibrant color of Hockney’s oil paintings, some of which are wall sized, and the restless curiousity that's led him to create in so many mediums.

Hockney, born in Yorkshire, England, in 1937, has been painting since he was a teenager in the 1950s. The MFA exhibit consolidates Hockney’s portraiture. Google around and you will discover Hockney’s astonishing range.

After leaving this exhibit, I guarantee that the next time you look in a mirror, you’ll wonder what David would have seen in your face and how he would have painted it.

Hockney frequently quoted a Chinese master: “Painting draws on three things - the hand, the eye, and the heart.” This exhibit draws on a fourth: an audience to appreciate them.

Tip: spend the five bucks to listen to the Audio Guide.

http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=638
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hockney/hockney.clark-percy.jpg

Drama of Scale

Drama of Scale
Art exhibit organized by Mixit Print Studio
Regis College, Carney Gallery 781-768-7070
235 Wellesley Street, Weston, MA
Monday - Friday 10 a.m - 4 p.m. through April 20, 2006

Just the drive from an urban environment onto a soon-to-be-leafy campus of a small New England college campus is a spring tonic. The “Drama of Scale” exhibit at Regis College’s Carney Gallery might be upstaged by the annual drama Mother Nature is staging outside but it certainly puts you in the mood to shove the winter boots to the back recesses of your closet.

The Mixit Print Studio in Somerville organized this exhibit and nineteen of the artists who rent space there are represented. Artists went about evoking the theme of the show, Drama of Scale, with a variety of media and a wide range of formats. What is big and what is small becomes relative.

Occasionally a print would strike your fancy the same way the first glimpse of a crocus pushing its head up through a still monochromatic garden delights us after months of being starved for color in the landscape. That’s the way Ilana Manolson’s monotypes “Macro Moment I” and “Macro Moment II” struck me.

If none of the artwork appeals to you, just walk out the door. Mother Nature’s got her own show going and she really knows a thing or two about scale. The whitish pink buds on the Magnolia tree just outside the gallery are a good start.

Photo: Pansies waiting to be transplanted onto a campus garden

Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light

“Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light”
A traveling exhibition featuring the large-format, richly detailed images of distinguished landscape photographer Robert Turner.
Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (617) 495-3045
Through March 26, 2006.

Going to a photography exhibit like “Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light” makes me feel like I spend days with my eyes wide open but see nothing. I don’t have to drive 40,000 miles a year in a pickup truck like Turner does to find places to photograph. I don’t have to surf weather service web sites like he does to find storms that I think will produce ideal light conditions in which to take pictures. But I do have to pay more attention to the quality of light around me. A walk through 43 of Turner's images on display at the venerable Harvard Museum of Natural History is a good reason to see why.

You can practically hear Pete Seeger singing “This land is your land, this land is my land…” as you gape at Turner’s large format photographs taken in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the canyons of the Colorado Plateau, and the forests of Maine.

Turner is a poet with a camera. His credo is simple. “I want to create individual pieces of art that will endure well and create uplift for people. I want to show the value of wild places, and the feeling of awe, peace, drama, that an interaction with the environment can stimulate.”

Like the 19th century world-class English landscape painter JMW Turner (no relation), he’s fascinated with the quality of light. Unlike his predecessor, who treated light romantically, Robert Turner faithfully reproduces the light he captures on his 4x5 inch transparencies, then meticulously prints them.

The results are jaw-dropping operas on the chromatic scale of light. Storms produce the intense color and soft light that are Turner’s Holy Grail. For the series in Utah, Turner zeroed in on the weather service web site and watched the progression of storms across the country. When he found one that he liked and could get to in a day and a half, he jumped in his truck and drove there. And waited for moments “at the edge of a storm, after a rain, in the afterglow of sunset - when light upon the land intensifies color to almost magical proportions. The effect is other-worldly and profoundly evocative.”

“Storm Over The Green River”, Canyonlands National Park (attached), Utah, is a stunning example of one of those moments. Turner found a spot he liked and waited. He was hunkered down with a garbage bag over him and his camera when a shaft of light moved over the park’s terrain and spilled onto a spot that portrayed a nearly surreal moment of peace in that wild place. The colors in his images are so rich that you can practically feel the early morning mist evaporating from your skin or smell the musk of decaying ferns underfoot in a mountain pass.

Photo courtesy of Robert Turner's web site

Turner’s art is his pulpit. He’s preaching especially to city dwellers, those of us whose idea of wilderness is a walk on the nearest Audubon Trail. He intends that his permanent images of “rare places in a rare light” awaken an appreciation of nature’s grandeur and the need for us to conserve it. If the Wilderness Society had membership forms outside the exhibit, their membership would soar as people filed out of Turner’s exhibit.

Is there something in the American culture that values communing with nature as a solitary experience? If Henry Thoreau had a camera, he’d probably take photos like this. There are no people in Turner’s photographs. In his mind, we viewers provide the human presence and peering into Turner’s images, the viewer can easily feel not only solitary but also diminutive in scale. Think about the everyday beauty around us the next time you see a magic moment in a shaft of morning light. And think about ways to keep images like Turner’s a part of our wilderness environment for a long time to come.

IN the meantime, “Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light” is an opportunity to commune with nature without having to drive a day and a half in a truck to see the action.

http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/exhibitions/index.html
http://www.robertturnerphoto.com/default.htm

Ansel Adams: Man With A Vision at MFA Boston

Notes from MFA: Ansel Adams 1902-1984
Adams pursued photography from the 1920s to the 1970s.
“No matter how sophisticated you are, a large granite mountain cannot be denied. It speaks to the very core of your being.” AA
“No matter how sophisticated you are, a blonde with cute legs cannot be denied. She speaks to the very core of your being.” PT

AA began his career by making soft focus photos, “pictorialism”. In 1927 he made his first photos of Yosemite. Naturally reflective and inner directed, he was determined to develop a personal credo that would be the lodestone to direct his chosen career in photography. He read works of Emerson, Whitman, and Edward Carpenter to guide his spiritual awakening as he walked into the remote and massive regions in the pristine West.

In 1927, he marched himself up Half Dome’s 13.600 feet with 30 pounds of camera equipment strapped to his broad shoulders with the aim of photographing not what it looked like in reality but “how it felt.” That must have represented a “born again” moment for Adams as a photographer, as he was baptized not in the waters of the kingdom but in its highlands, bluffs and buttes from which he peered at eternity.

Early in his career, he began the f64 club with fellow photographers with goal of composing images with great detail and wide range of tones black to white.
He first began using a red filter to enhance imaging of textures and deepen the color of the skies.

 A trained pianist as a young man, he called the negative the “score” and the print the “performance”. He referred to his work as “painting with light” and achieved this by using darkroom techniques of “dodging and burning”. Adams refined his intuition over time by his technique of “visualizations”, a pictorial sense of the image he intended to create after squeezing the camera’s shutter. His work, whether of majestic peaks and cloud formations or blades of grass growing in front of charred tree trunks, lifts a veil for the viewer. These subjects, grand and petite, are within out sight every day. If we take a moment, we too can see eternity etched in a grain of sand, or a formation of lenticular clouds.

One of Adam’s favorite quotes: Chance favors the prepared mind.”
I'm sure that applies to pilots as well.

Adams was fascinated by the cloud formations that loomed over the mountains.
Paul Strand, a fellow photographer, said, “There is a certain valid moment for every cloud." I wonder if the same applies to us humans.

Some personal favorites of the show:
Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite, 1944
Winter Sunrise Sierra Nevada from Lone Pines, CA 1944
Grass and Reflections, Lyell Fork of Merced River, Yosemite, 1944
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 11/1/1941

NOTE 
MFA members may go to the Morse Room and ask to see Ansel Adams prints individually, without the glass covering them. There is said to be an astonishing amount of texture and color gradation visible without the glass being over the print.

http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424136486/ansel-adams-winter-sunrise-sierra-nevada-from-lone-pine-ca-1944.html

Herb Greene: Brief encounters with the Dead

Herb Greene: Brief encounters with the Dead
Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA 02118
Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 am - 5:30 pm
www.galleryKayafas.com

No, this isn’t a midnight cinema tribute to Lon Chaney or other masters of the macabre. It’s a black and white photographic love fest at the Gallery Kayafas featuring formal and candids of Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, and a few other luminaries who shot across the musical and cultural firmament in the revolutionary meteor shower known as the sixties.

Herb Greene, whose career began as a staff photographer for a San Francisco department store, had a passion for folk music. Giving in to the heady mixture of sounds akin to those of Pan, the archetypal piper, Greene followed his ears to the streets, eventually ending up at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco photographing the boys who would become “The Grateful Dead”. He gained their trust and snapped photos of them for thirty years. Many of these photos are on display at the Gallery Kayafas in the “SoWa” arcade at 450 Harrison Avenue.

One of Greene’s earliest photos of Garcia reveal him as a pimply faced teenager with doe-like eyes and no hint of the bearded icon he’d soon become. Looking now at the photos of musicians whose music is embedded in the DNA that was our youth, did any of us know where we were headed? And could any of us guess how surprised, perhaps alarmed, we’d feel that age has overtaken us? In the reflection of the glass covering those prints, we can see the faces of the adults we’ve become.

Documented in beautifully developed black and white platinum prints, Greene presents us with flower children dressed in pegged pants, flowing cotton skirts, or nothing at all. Gallery owner Kayafas says, “Kids too young to drive and people using walkers have come to see this show.” Greene’s other photos show Carlos Santana, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Led Zeppelin. Somehow, sex, drugs, and rock and roll seemed so innocent in the sixties, a decade in which we believed ourselves immortal. I wonder if young music enthusiasts will feel the same way about the music of today when their AARP cards arrive.
And the beat goes on…

Harvard Square Art: Three for free, Part 3

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

THREE
• “Red”, a juried show sponsored by the Cambridge Art Association,
University Place, 124 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Monday - Friday 9 A.M. - 6 P.M., Saturday 9 A.M. - 1 P.M.
November 18, 2005 - January 19, 2006
www.cambridgeart.org

PART THREE

A few steps into the lobby of University Place and you get the idea that Santa made a low level pass over the place, shook out a huge mixed bag of art - oils, watercolor, collage, etchings, sculpture, painted furniture - and ordered his elfsquad to assemble it all in the central lobby and main corridor.

The show is titled “Red: It's more than just a color: a metaphor, feeling, idea, or hue” And, glory be, the content is a healthy counterpoint to the four far-out pieces inside the Carpenter Center. Here is a show that the amateur art lover can comprehend without the aid of drugs or alcohol.

As promised, each piece has a component that suggests or contains red. pt @ large did a quicktime march through the nearly 100 artists represented then retraced his steps to linger with favorites. With this much variety, there’s something everyone might want to find under his or her Christmas tree or Chanukah bush this holiday season. Remember, artist’s need to shop, too. The pieces are all for sale.

Some items that buzzed my credit card included:
• Fiedlerworks, an oil painting by Patrick Anderson
• Pekin Opera, a solar etching by Christiane Corcelle-Lippeveld
• Junction, an oil painting by Greg Thielker
• Bo and Mischia, a Fuji print by Paul Weiner
• Grief and Emma, an oil by Donna Pomponeo

If you insist, there are dozens of stores that will gladly take your money as you forage through and make your holiday purchases. But these “Three for Free” exhibits are free to visit and either challenging or comforting on the eyes. Merry Whatever!

Harvard Square Art: Three for free, Part 2

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

TWO
• Lumen Eclipse, an outdoor video installation set over the Information Booth next to entrance to the T in the epicenter of Harvard Square
Daily 5 A.M. - 1 A.M.
www.lumeneclipse.com

PART TWO
Videos are becoming the oxygen that feeds our mass culture. Video screens have popped up on iPods, at the checkout counter at the supermarkets, at your health club, and on cell phones. So why not erect a couple of monitors atop the Information kiosk a few yards from the Out of Town News stand? And load them with a confection of three short videos you can watch while you finish your latte and drink in the original people watching carnival that plays live every hour of the day in the pit leading to the stairs of the Harvard Square T.

pt @ large assumes you’re hip enough not to be thinking how civic minded of Cambridge to present entertainment to the 53,000 people who walk by the booth every day. We’re talking commerce here. The videos are sandwiched between advertisements for a slew of businesses with a short sashay from the two monitors. If pt @ large were paranoid, he’d wonder if said establishments had a surveillance camera trained on the kiosk that tracked viewers right into their doors after being sucked in by the advertising.

The three videos are pleasant little potpourri of animation and reality: one allegory, one paean to sisters everywhere, and one riff on a modern day Alice in Wonderland tale. On the outside chance you’d prefer to see these videos without having panhandlers asking you to contribute to their housing or sustenance needs, you can view them (the videos, I mean) at www.lumeneclipse.com

OK, now that you’ve taken a breather, it’s on to the third stop of the “Three for Free” tour.

Harvard Square Art: Three for free. Part 1

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

ONE
• Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
October 15, 2005 - April 16, 2006
http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu

TWO
• Lumen Eclipse, an outdoor video installation set over the Information Booth next to entrance to the T in the epicenter of Harvard Square
Daily 5 A.M. - 1 A.M.
www.lumeneclipse.com

THREE
. "Red", a juried show sponsored by the Cambridge Art Association,
University Place, 124 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Monday - Friday 9 A.M. - 6 P.M., Saturday 9 A.M. - 1 P.M.
November 18, 2005 - January 19, 2006
www.cambridgeart.org

The retail stores in Harvard Square may have become a look-alike patchwork of national franchises but the artwork in the neighborhood is just as eclectic, unique, or opaquely incomprehensible as ever.

pt @ large recently spent a couple of hours sampling three exhibits within a bit more than a three minute walk from the Out of Town News kiosk, the square’s epicenter. The free exhibits ranged from the abstract to the whimsical to what most mortal galleristas would quantify as something they’d recognize as ‘art’. By sheer dumb luck, the order in which I visited them proved restorative to my sense of aesthetics and faith in the world of art.

PART ONE
Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts

The leading edge of art revolves around a different sun than most of what you’d find in the halls of the MFA. Like life, art is always in a state of flux, change is a necessary ingredient for growth, and the results are not always comforting. Ergo, we can employ viewing modern art as practice for dealing with life’s complexities and curves. Hey, it’s cheaper than a fifty-minute visit with your favorite therapist.

Most mortals enter exhibits of modern abstract art at their peril. We’re confronted with representational art with grotesque subject matter; or paintings with no discernable subject matter; or use of experimental or “found” materials; clusters of wires, metals, stones, or paper maché that resemble, well, piles of wires, metals, stones or paper maché.

The muse that fired the artist’s imagination is often mute when it comes to whispering meaning and intent into our ears as we gape and wonder, “what is this and why is it here?” Turning to the gallery’s guide for elucidation is a descent into a cave with a cerebral echo chamber in which curators speak in tongues as they labor to explain the voice of the muse to bewildered visitors (more on this below).

pt @ large, always game for a view of art at the edges, visited the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center. The four artists represented are Cai Guo-Qiang (Chinese, b. 1957); Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929); Sol Lewitt (American, b. 1928); Fred Tomaselli (American, b. 1956).

Guo-Qiang considers the Atomic bomb to be the iconic image of the 20th century. His “The Century with Mushroom Clouds” gets him in touch with his inner Feng Shui and his Chinese hometown’s reputation as the gunpowder capital of the world. His concept is to balance Feng Shui, the optimal flow of energy to a structure, with the deadly flow of energy produced by the A bomb. Guo-Qiang covers an 18’ by 10’ parchment paper with scores of mushroom cloud images he’s made by burning the surface of the parchment paper with gunpowder. The clouds he burned have a similar mushroom shape but differing sizes and gradations of blacks and grays. Whether an optimal flow of energy was achieved is unanswerable by this writer although I do think it was mounted auspiciously on the west wall.

What makes the piece resonate beyond one dimension is Guo-Qiang’s black and white video installation of 1940’s A bomb tests in Nevada. Even sixty years later, watching the bomb’s thunderous impact, the gargantuan upheaval of a piece of the planet into the stem of that mushroom cloud inspires awe, fear, and despair over the deadly force we introduced that day. Part of the clip shows a regiment of army grunts kneeling miles away from the original ground zero. The rush of wind and dust that, like a wave whooshes past them and then rushes back toward the blast, actually rocks them back and forth. The scene of the soldiers in the foreground dwarfed by the mushroom cloud darkening the sky in the distance stirs a gut feeling of how we’ve become the servant of what we created. The unsettling question Guo-Qiang’s work inspires is, “Can we protect ourselves against ourselves?”

“Accretions II, 1967”, by Yayoi Kusama, is a 3’ by 6’ oil on canvas. What has been accreted are hundreds of tiny white dollops of white over a deep rose base. If you let yourself gaze at it with your third eye, it takes you far into the cosmos as you imagine speeding past stars and into space at hyperspeed.

Sol Lewitt’s “Four-Part Geometric Structure” is a set of twenty individual white painted structures placed on five gray painted wood panels. pt @ large imagines the geometric shapes might be the focus for a field trip for a high school geometry class.

Fred Tomaselli’s “Guilty, 2005”, an inkjet digital print that superimposes a color design over a New York Times page one headline, is an artistic jab at the greed that brought down Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski.

The Carpenter Center is at the ivied edge of Harvard Yard, right next door to the Fogg Museum, Harvard's oldest art museum, that covers the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. The Carpenter Center’s sunlit lobby with several small tables lined in front of a huge plate glass window, offers a great view of ivy league pageantry - professors, students, tourists, and UPS trucks as they make their daily rounds. And a good place to relax before heading to the middle of Harvard Square, the second destination for the day's artistic trifecta.

But wait. The lobby is also the place to contemplate one of the most prodigiously rarified versions of “art speak” that pt @ large has encountered: the small brochure that accompanies the exhibit.

Describing the exhibit, associate curator Linda Norden writes, “The title ‘Quantum Grids’ with an emphasis on the quantum, refers to just one of the ideas the juxtaposition of these four works proposes formally and conceptually: if the word “grid” usually conjures an image and implies a desire to contain and order, “quantum” is often inseparable from “leap” and the ungraspable range that “leap” would describe.”

Oh, I see.

The centuries old proverb “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is nowhere as valuable as in an exhibit like this. You just have to lighten up, not try too hard, and let your random access memory take charge. Surprisingly, Norden seems to echo that when she concludes her explanation of the exhibit by saying, “Each of the artworks here invokes the grid less as container than as counterpoint, as a mechanism through which to imagine the irrepressible, irrational, and incomprehensible human behaviors that define our moment.”

I pondered that all the way to Harvard Square.

DreamingNow: eight mixed media installations

DreamingNow: an exhibition of eight mixed media installations
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
January 27 – April 24, 2005
February 16, 2005

Installation artists have a knack for stretching the borders of what one might consider ‘art’. In other words, it’s quite possible to feel like a damned fool while taking an excursion through their creations.

The main conceit at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum’s current exhibition seems accessible enough: use dreams, usually considered quite private, to make comments about the political, cultural, and social world surrounding us. The artists’ intent has been to stimulate us to see that our dreams have as much to do with the world around us as within us. So far, so good.

When I read the show’s introduction, however, I began to think about Alice’s slippery ride down the rabbit hole. “Withdrawn from an entirely privatized arena and made public, the diverse dream metaphors in DreamingNow shed light on contemporary issues of transnationality, globalization, the distribution of political power, consumer and popular culture, the media, hierarchies of social structures, and gender politics. They also explore the capacity of art as a rich terrain where new links and imaginative thoughts can be mediated, discussed, and tested.” Raise your hand if you followed that.

Without reading the artist’s explanations accompanying the installations, I would have needed mind-altering drugs to guess the metaphorical intent to convey a social or political message. “History of the Main Complaint”, William Kentridge’s five minute animated film on post Apartheid South Africa is an example. There was something violent and troubling going on in the corporate white male’s dream life, symbolic images floated about. Was he passively acceptant, emotionally paralyzed, or part of the problem. Short of ESP, there was no way I could have interpreted the artist’s explanation of his piece.

The Dream Bed installation is the sleeper of the show. The artist Marina Abramovic created a bed in which participants can sign up to sleep in for an hour and consent to record their dream experiences in a log which becomes part of the exhibit. Sure enough, when I entered the softly blue-lit room, there was a man lying in the special zip up “dream suit” for his one hour Big Sleep. I felt like a voyeur as I tiptoed around the room looking at the Dream Bed and the guest dreamer and became part of the installation in spite of myself, wondering what he was dreaming and what I might have dreamt if I’d been in his suit. And did I mention the magnets embedded in the ‘dream suit’, the crystal pillow, and that the wooden sided "bed" looks alarmingly like a coffin? Her statement offers an imaginative explanation.

After the exhibit travels the world for ten years, Abramovic will collect the dream records into a ‘dream library’ that will become “ a barometer of the political and social issues of our time.” I don’t trust the accuracy of self-selecting socio-political barometers but am impressed by Abramovic’s artistic hubris and her sense of scale. I just might return for an hour and to sacrifice myself and my dream world to art.

Ever play cat’s cradle? The entire second level of the Rose Museum and the stairway leading down to it is one massive, spider webby, black yarn cat’s cradle-like installation engulfing fourteen beds. Being the performance artist she is, Chiharu Shiota may occasionally be found sleeping in one of the beds. Depending on your point of view, the encapsulated beds and the dreams we have on them can be cocoon like structures protected from the outer world or prey captured by one tyrannical man eating spider (I cribbed some of this from the artist's statement, part of which actually made sense to me). For the life of me I can’t fathom her notion of how “dreams challenge the western concept of identity” but could, without the pretension I often need to practice in museums, actually grasp her idea of a collective unconscious swirling around the universe. Who knows, maybe there’s a master weaver at work up there somewhere. He’s a bit spastic but that’s the subject for another day.

I could make some guesses about two of the other installations, “falling bodies blanket me” and “Dream” that seemed plausible until I read the artist’s explanatory text. How do they dream this stuff up?

This exhibit is a great opportunity to experience one of art’s classic conundrums: the viewer’s reactive interpretation versus the artist’s intent. How much of the personal can be conveyed as universal?

I don’t know about the “art-speak” notions of “transnationality, globalization, or the distribution of political power”, but The Adventurer will admit that the visit offered him alternate constructs for thinking about his dreams. As with most exhibits featuring installations, this one has its hits and misses and seemed both accessible and dense. But then again, so is our own dream life.

The Art of Japanese Calligraphy

pt at large
The Art of Japanese Calligraphy: 6 PM lecture at Harvard University’s Sackler Museum
February 11, 2005
The lecture coincided with an exhibit entitled “Marks of Enlightenment, Traces of Devotion: Japanese Calligraphy and Painting from the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection” on display until April, 2005.

I know next to nothing about Japanese calligraphy other than the fact that reminds me of abstract impressionism and is often associated with Zen Buddhism. Based on this lecture and the accompanying exhibition at the Sackler, I would say that by following the development of Japanese calligraphy, one could trace the development of religion, history, and culture in Japan.

The exhibit is from the collection of a remarkable pair of Harvard professors, Sylvan Barnet and William Burto, who began acquiring art in the 1960s, and spans the 8th through the 20th centuries. The show aims to offer “an introduction to the religious, literary, and calligraphic traditions of Japan” with “special emphasis on sumptuous, painstakingly rendered Buddhist scriptures and powerful examples of monochrome Zen calligraphy that dazzle viewers with their elegance, simplicity, and expressive force.” It works.

The key to making this exhibit understandable for neophytes like me is the series of informative panel texts (see addendum below) that lead the viewer through the development of calligraphy as a communication and art form in Japan. Without those panels, The Adventurer would have been lost soul as he tried to make sense of early Buddhist scriptures from the 7th to 13th centuries, Japanese poetry which includes text and images, casual writings in the form of diaries and letters writings, portraits called “ink traces” by noted Zen priests, and modern works including a four panel folding screen titled ‘Dragon Knows Dragon’. And who knew that Japanese calligraphy descended from Chinese pictograms and characters of the 6th century?

That boldly brushed, saffron and black colored screen in the last room of the chronologically ordered exhibit stopped me in my tracks. It would be right at home with the abstract impressionist paintings in Harvard’s Fogg Museum right across the street or the Museum of Modern Art.

In a moment of enlightenment that might have pleased Buddha, I sensed the evolution of Japan’s calligraphic styles when I remembered trying to read the original handwriting on the Declaration of Independence, thinking how old fashioned it seemed. The styles of Japanese calligraphy, English and American handwriting, even my own penmanship have continually evolved over time. A perfect lesson for this grasshopper: accept impermanence, embrace change, grow.

Link: http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/exhibitions/sackler/marks_of_enlightenment.html

George Bernard Shaw: Poet, Playwright, Naked Tree Trimmer

PT’s Excellent Adventure: February 10, 2005
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) exhibit at Burns Library, Boston College, MA

Any man who dies by falling from a ladder, naked, from a tree he’s trimming gets my vote. That George Bernard Shaw was 94 when he was engaged in this endeavor makes me consider putting him on a pedestal (possibly surrounded by a net).

The Adventurer’s visit to a small exhibit at Boston College’s Burns Library gave him an inkling of the immensity of Shaw’s literary and social career. Entitled “Mr. Shaw’s time is filled up for months to  come”, the contents of several glass showcases show the verity of this statement.

The man was a full force writer, journalist, opinionated public speaker, music critic, and intellectual gadfly. He didnt have much of a formal education and yet by the early 1930s, he compiled a thirty volume set of work he’d penned. Not bad for a Dublin lad whose career started as a reader for the British Library.

He began writing plays at age 37 and for the rest of his life didn’t shut up from commenting on world events, literary news, health, and economics. He married an Irish heiress in 1898 and stayed married to her for 45 years. By 1923, he’d already written Arms and the Man, Candida, The Devil’s Disciple, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession, some of which today continue being required reading for English majors. I will confess, as a recovering English major, that the intellectually laced plays were a taxing read.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his play St. Joan in 1923.

He seemed to enjoy heaving literary, cultural, and political hand grenades. As a member of the Fabian Society, he championed socialism. He was a teetotaler and abstained from consuming alcohol and tobacco and preferred water, barley water, Instant Postum (egad), ginger beer, milk, and cocoa. He had strange ideas about clothing and health. He believed that wearing wool right under your skin promoted good breathing and had special woolen vestments made for him.

He certainly lived a healthy life style. He just should have stayed out of trees.