pt at large

Gallery Stroll at the Armenian Museum of America...Art, Culture, Eternity

Thursday, December 8, 2022

The Invitation

https://www.armenianmuseum.org/mission

The gallery stroll includes viewing  https://www.armenianmuseum.org/on-the-edge

The show is a coup for the museum.

 https://www.armenianmuseum.org/staff-trustees

Thursday, December 8, 2022

About a quarter of Watertown's 35,329 population are of Armenian descent. A large contingent showed up for the Gallery Stroll tonight.

Arrive at The Armenian Museum of America

Stroll...

Socialize...

Dr. Chuck Hajinian, Board of Trustees, who will address the gathering later...

The show is a coup for the Armenian Museum of America

Admire the art...The gallery includes a new installation, On The Edge.....

Permanent exhibits includes the work of internationally acclaimed photographer Yousuf Karsh...

Sample tasty savory and sweet food...

Before the program begins, I enjoy a conversation with Mary Hilt, who created "Who Today Remembers: Portraits of Armenian Genocide Survivors."

Welcome remarks by Executive Director Jason Sohigian

and President of Board of Trustees Michele M. Kolligian

The surprise of the night...museum trustee Dr. Chuck Hajinian presents to Michele Kolligian the shawl worn by her grandmother in her wedding in 1914.

It is a miracle that the shawl reappeared at all. After the event, Dr. Hajinian wrote

"The shawl had note : 'this shawl worn at Araxi Kolligian’s wedding 1914'. We found out the wedding took place Dec 8 th 1914- it was returned to her grandchildren Michele and Nancy Kolligian on Dec 8th 2022.  The shawl was consigned to the trash bin by an antiques dealer who did not recognize its value. It was rescued by Antiques dealer Paddy Nash. Dr Hajinian purchased this shawl and large lot from her. He then showed it all over the country as it is one of the finest knitted item he has ever seen. Finally it was time to be returned to the family."

Dr. Hajinian shows a photo of her grandparents as he presents the shawl to a stunned Michele. After collecting her emotions, Michele donates the heirloom shawl to the museum.

Art and Culture tonight for sure...Eternity will take a little longer.

Art, Culture, Eternity...

Goodnight...

WATERTOWN AND ARMENIANS...Google source

Grass roots start up of the Armenian Museum of America, from a church parish house in 1972 to a four story former bank in Watertown Square in 1988.

The museum has the largest collection of Armenian  artifacts in North America 

The third largest Armenian community in the United States is in Watertown, where between 7,000 and 8,000 Armenians account for about a quarter of the city's population. 

Watertown population was 35,329 in the 2020 census.

Massachusetts is home to the second largest population of Armenians in the country. About 30,000 people in the state are of Armenian descent.

These numbers beg the question...why Watertown? The answer...The Hood Rubber Company that  opened in Watertown in 1996...stay tuned for the story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Library_and_Museum_of_America

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Americans

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. (museum member)

 

The Harvard Art Museums: Three Museums in One Luminous Cloud of Culture and Scholarship

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 
March 5, 2019

A museum brazenly steals the show from it’s world class contents…

Wow…I stopped in my tracks. My feet were on the ground. I felt like I just walked into a transparent cumulous cloud.

That’s a likely universal reaction to a first timer’s foray into the Quincy Street entrance to the Harvard Art Museums. Every visitor I watched enter did the same thing – stood transfixed a few feet inside, eyes involuntarily trained upward, gazing to the glass vaulted ceiling five stories above.

A sunny day, blue sky looking like a freshly painted fresco visible through the pyramid of glass atop the five story structure, this moment is an affirmation of brilliant design. Rapture is not too strong a word to describe what I felt. When’s the last time you could say that upon entering a museum?

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/mission

The Harvard Art Museums are what happens when an institution thinks big, has the dough to shoot for the stars, and hires rpbw architect Renzo Piano, whose bloodlines channel Leonardo de Vinci, to imagine the form and function of a museum of the 21st century. https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/history-and-the-three-museums

Beginning in 2008, the university closed the ancient Fogg Museum (1895) and the staid Busch-Reisinger Museum behind it and took a bold step that reinterpreted what a museum's purpose could be. For the next 6 years, a chunk of the block between Quincy Street and Prescott Street was a construction site; entire walls were removed, cranes resembling prehistoric birds hovered and built a glass nest three stories high high over the Fogg Museum. The 1991 building that had housed the Busch-Reisinger Museum, located right behind the Fogg, was demolished. The Quincy Street exterior facade remains untouched. The Prescott Street entrance looks as different as the two sides of a coin. The inside…well, it was reassembled with the inter-connectedness of a Rubik's cube.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/11/01/with-opening-expanded-harvard-art-museums-complex-patience-rewarded/DGhCKlNLxmBqwlvB3ZatMK/story.html

The Harvard Art Museums are the equivalent of a world-class teaching hospital. Its patients are historic artifacts and priceless art from a millennium or so. Its doctors are directors, curators, and faculty. Its interns are students and scholars from around the world who preserve and document and study the collection in their care.

Areas for study, preservation, scholarly work and teaching surround the atrium on the top three floors - all visible through glass doors with huge glass panes admitting from outside. On any given day, the space looks like an inside out beehive, students, scholars and conservators visible as they work in offices on the perimeter of the glorious atrium. The building has loads of 21st century green technology but none of it can match the generative smack of natural light that imbues the glass bubble with the sense that its floating in an architectural amniotic fluid filled with creative ions that charge the animate and inanimate forms inside.

The Harvard Art Museums (Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, Sackler) each have their own philosophies and guiding principles. Miraculously, they retain their identities, bonded together by the diffusion of natural light and visitor friendly flow design and signage.

One of my favorite museums, the Fogg fell off my radar when it closed in 2008. Eleven years later, I felt like Rip Van Winkle when I strolled inside after such a long hiatus. I came to the museum to see the Bauhaus Show that my architect friends and scholars wanted to see. The Bauhaus Show was mesmerizing but honest to goodness, in this first visit, the design and architecture of the Harvard Art Museums were the stars of the show.

Photos...

The original brick exterior structure of The Fogg Museum remains intact. The glass pyramid centered across the top of the structure is visible in the first photograph.

Toggle through the photos...

Harvard Museums Quincy Street Entrance

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Natural Light controlled by shades, blinds

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The blinds and shades are in a constant state of flux according to the needs of the researchers, students, scholars in the offices that surround the atrium on the third and fourth floors.

Luminous multi-purpose interior

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Harvard Art Museums Prescott Street Entrance

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The old Busch-Reisinger Museum was demolished and replaced by the addition to the museum with an entrance on Prescott Street. Note the brick exterior to the Fogg Museum behind the newer cement and steel addition.

No detail left without natural light, even the Gift Shop...

Harvard Art Museums Gift Shop

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Terrific guide to help plan your visit...

Visit the tiny Jenny's Cafe, eat in a  cozy seating area or saunter out find a table in the original atrium under the pyramid of glass five stories above.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Trombones and Temptations: The Whitney Center for the Arts

Trombones and Temptations: The Whitney Center for the Arts
42 Wendell Avenue
Pittsfield, MA
April 2, 2016
3:10 PM

Who the hell is that man with the trombone and why’s he standing in the portico of that building, I say to myself as I look for a parking space on Wendell Avenue. I’m delivering my tax return papers to the accountant I’ve known since my days in Pittsfield, my home town.

I’m twenty minutes early. I park the car.

First surprise: Aha…it’s actually a mannequin holding that shiny brass trombone and by then I’ve seen the sign announcing The Whitney Center for the Arts.

So here I am nodding hello to the trombone man and walking into an Italian Villa style mansion built in 1865. Crystal chandeliers cast a warm glow on three sumptuous Grier Horner paintings in the foyer. French yellow ochre walls, burnished wood crown moldings and parquet flooring, replete with a deep jade painted ceiling are an enticing point of entry.

Gallery W, the larger of The Whitney's two galleries, off the right side of the foyer is well-illuminated, the artwork strategically hung to give proportional space for viewers to enjoy groupings or individual work.

This month’s exhibit is entitled “Temptations.” The subject matter loosely lives up to the title. Paul Graubard leads the parade with a puckish sense of humor in his collages and oil paintings of frolicsome figures. With spring in the air, a little nudity, expressed with levity and exuberance, probably resonates in our DNA. With “Eat, Drink, Be Merry,” his quirky mixed media drawing on black background (photo below), he’s created his own Garden of Eden with familiar earthly enticements.

Julian Grey’s two seductive black and white photos will be an intriguing surprise when you check out his web site.

Tom McGill’s “push and pull” looks like a tour de force of that combine subject matter and treatment that stir his pot. The 77”x49” piece is actually 24 12”x12” panels, all created with acrylic and enamel on un-stretched canvas and hung together on grommets. My guess is that this collection could be rearranged in any random order and still pack a punch.

Twenty minutes has zipped by in a flash.

“We present chamber music programs, cabaret nights, opera nights, both with food and beverage service, theater events, and a new art exhibit every month,” Gallery director Leo Mazzeo says as I walk out the door.

"The Whit" is a little gem with facets that sparkle with energy and purpose. It appears to have figured out a way to engage the community with a broad range of visual and performing arts, a vibrant example of the re-energized arts/culture scene in Pittsfield.

Pittsfield has been staging a renaissance. Twenty years ago, a drive up the main drag, North Street, was depressing. Boarded up store fronts and a general sense of seediness had overtaken what was a bustling commercial district before GE pulled out of town in the mid 2000s. Honestly, I thought it was a death spiral and that I’d stop chirping about the fact I spent the first part of my life anchored here.

The esteemed Barrington Theater Company bought a dilapidated movie theater and set up camp in 2005. It seems to have been an elixir that revived the city. A raft of playhouses, museums and theaters followed suit.

3:30 PM. Time to cross the street to another re-purposed building on Wendell Avenue, my CPA’s office. If the arts scene in Pittsfield continues its growth, it’s going to need more than one lone trombone player to herald its ascension.

PHOTOS AND CAPTIONS

The mansion built in 1865 on Wendell Avenue is part of the Park Square Historic District in Pittsfield, MA. Michael Melle suited up the Trombone Man.

The main gallery in this enterprising arts center - the creatively leveraged space is perfect for exhibits, cabaret seating with tables (with catered food!), theater style seating for plays and readings and yes, Opera Night! The arts center is way ahead of the curve by multi-purposing the space to increase its audience, contributor, and client base.

 

Works by Tom McGill, Paul Graubard, Julian Grey on the theme of "Temptations".

 
Work by Graubard and McGill.

"The artists participating in 'Temptations' include Nayana Glazier, Paul Graubard, Julian Grey, Tom McGill, Sara Farrell Okamura, Joan Rooks, and Karen Schiltz.  Glazier, Okamura, and Schiltz have work in the larger Gallery W space only.  Rooks has work in the smaller Colt Gallery room only.  Graubard, Grey, and McGill have work in both rooms," Leo Mazzeo tells me in an email after my brief visit.

Glazier is from Athol, MA, Graubard, Rooks, and Schiltz are from Pittsfield.  Grey and McGill are from North Adams, MA,  McGill is from Hudson, NY.

The Colt Gallery, a smaller gallery across the foyer from the Gallery W (visible through doorway) contains the rest of the "Temptations" offerings. Joan Rooks painted the linoleum tiles here and in the W Gallery.


Multi purpose main gallery, versatile setting for classic and contemporary music, staged readings, lectures, and vocal music.

iPhotos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Fuse Visual Arts Review: Photographer Gordon Parks — Return to Fort Scott

As appears in April 25, 2015 edition of The Arts Fuse

http://artsfuse.org/126600/fuse-visual-arts-review-photographer-gordon-parks-return-to-fort-scott/

and in www.ptatlarge.typepad.com on March 10, 2015

http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2015/03/gordon-parks-back-to-fort-scott-timely-photo-exhibit.html#comments

Gordon Parks: Back To Fort Scott, Timely Photo Exhibit

Gordon Parks (1912-2006)
"Back to Fort Scott"
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
January 17, 2015 – September 13, 2015
Robert and Jane Burke Gallery (Gallery 335)
March 3, 2015

Gordon Parks may not have had a plan when the Life Magazine photographer was assigned to visit his hometown in Fort Scott, Kansas. The first stirrings of desegregation were roiling in the South, a low indistinct rumbling quietly unsettling a way of life largely undisturbed since the Civil War. Parks felt it underfoot. Was there evidence of hope for his classmates that racial oppression could or would be overcome?

The magazine’s first black photojournalist had been hired two years before. His colleagues? Names that adorn coffee table glossies… Margaret Bourke-White, Andreas Feininger, Alfred Eisenstat, Cecil Beaton, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, to name a few. Like them, Parks had an eye for content and composition. It was his life experience that separated him most distinctly from his colleagues.

“Back To Fort Scott,” a potent little exhibition of meticulously printed black and white photographs, is like an artsy, retro speed bump between adjacent galleries featuring big, bold modern art, colorful and expansive. The forty two photographs hung on the walls of the modest Robert and Jane Burke Gallery on the third level, the images mostly 8 x 10 inches in size require close observation.

Parks assignment was to take the temperature of the effect of school segregation in the south. Born and raised in Fort Scott, Parks had his own history. He reconnected with ten of the twelve of his ninth grade classmates with whom he graduated from same all-black Plaza Elementary School in 1927 and hadn’t seen since.

The very first photo in the exhibit - a middle-aged white man in farmer overalls stands at a train crossing in the middle of town, a speculative look on his creased face as he surveys the photographer. The "STOP" sign held in his hand is a perfect metaphor for Fort Scott, Kansas and the South in the 1950s. The hard lines of segregation are as deeply embedded here as those steel railroad tracks running through the middle of town. Parks the photojournalist had to be aware of the significance of the sign and the subject of desegregation.

Slowly walk around the four walls of the small gallery. Without reading one word of the background notes that accompany each print, you discover what he decided to say as Parks presents the subjects of his photographs.

Parks was slyly political. He knew the power and stature of Life Magazine and that white readers had little person-to-person interaction action with their black counterparts. He intended to present them in a portrait of “negro” life never seen before in a popular national publication.

His photos of couples and families were taken with backgrounds of front doors, front porches or living rooms, all signs of middle class stature. It's safe to say that white Americans hadn't seen this treatment of black society before. As a matter of fact, if you substitute white for black skin color, you have a documentary scrapbook review of white middle class America in the heartland.

The take-away: We are in our own homes; we are husbands, wives, children, and elders; we have jobs; we enjoy leisure time; we are proud folks with middle class ideals; we dress well; we have aspirations; we are black.

As was the Life Magazine protocol, Parks took notes about their jobs and wages. Most of the photos are untitled but accompanied by information gathered by Parks.

This is 1950, mind you. Life Magazine was the first all photographic news magazine. It sold more than 13 million copies a week at one point in a 40-year span in which it dominated the market. The audience was middle class America…white America.

Parks met and photographed Louella Russell, the only classmate still living in Fort Scott, and her husband and teenage daughter. He roamed the town, shooting photos of friends (including a few white residents) and being reminded of the strict segregation of the day as he photographed a young black couple in standing under the marquee of a segregated movie theater and a baseball game at a local park. Parks recalls sitting in the “buzzard's roost” in the back upper reaches of the theater, the only place "negroes" were permitted to sit. His photo of a baseball game shows two black girls standing in what is the ‘colored’ section at the edge of the bleachers.

 

The whereabouts of his other classmates corresponded with The Great Migration from the south and Parks hopped on trains to look them up in Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago.

Parks reconnected with the white residents he remembered as young boys and girls. He'd been in a fist fight on the school playground with Lyle Myrick (leaning in doorway of his father's garage) that ended up in a draw, a handshake, and a friendship. He found a disillusioned and dejected Mazel Morgan living in a Chicago tenement with her ill tempered husband. As a bridge to connect with Life Magazine's white audience, he photographed some of the white workers in town.

Race is a flashpoint today. Another police shooting of a black man or boy is photographed and videotaped nearly every week. The kinds of violence felt by Gordon Parks and his former classmates were social in the form of deeply rooted segregation and bigotry. Parks was determined not to have them totally defined by it. He used images as his means of expression like another visionary man, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would use words a decade later.

Did these photographs make a difference? We’ll never know. According to the magazine, the project was stalled by the outbreak of the Korean War and in 1951 by news of President Harry Truman’s firing of Douglas McArthur.

"Back To Fort Scott" is not a dusty relic with no relevance for us today. Americans of all races are awash daily in media coverage of racial disturbances and violence. The dense coverage tends to make us feel as polarized and segregated, riven apart, as the races in Scott, Kansas in 1950. This potent little exhibition emphatically shows us how similar we are in our aspirations, all of us in the family of humanity.

Photos taken in the Robert and Jane Burke Gallery by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

J.M.W. Turner and The Sea: An Eccentric Loner Charts His Own Course

J.M.W. Turner
Turner & the Sea
Peabody Essex Museum, Peabody, MA
On view May 31, 2014 to September 1, 2014

“By George, this kid can really paint!” many British critics said when they viewed the wild scene of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s early oil painting  'Fishermen at Sea' (1796). Son of a working class barber and a wig maker, his elevation into salons was an unlikely ascent. He began drawing when he was 11, was producing such promising watercolor sketches for architectural firms that he entered the Royal Academy of Art at 14 and was accepted into the academy as a member a year later. And there he was blowing the socks off stuffy English critics at the tender age of 21.

Turner is dead and gone but his sheer brilliance as an artist is blowing the socks off audiences at the Peabody Essex Museum’s “Turner and The Sea.” The show’s a whopper - over 100 works from oils to watercolors, prints and sketches from the beginning to the end of J.M.W. Turner’s fifty years of work.

Turner was an inveterate traveler. He found inspiration along the coastlines of England, traveled widely in Europe, sketching impulsively everywhere he went. He had insatiable curiosity (Turner absorbed Goethe’s theory of light and darkness and depicted their relationship in a number of his paintings, including Light and Colour: Goethe's Theory – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis). and studied the work of classic painters in the Louvre.

Turner could do it all.

(A Venetian cityscape by J.M.W. Turner, “Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore.” 1834 (Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum)

If he felt like it, he could render scenes from romantic subjects with classical, biblical, literary sources, landscapes, and ships and ship rigging with great fidelity. For most of his career, that wasn’t what interested him. Most of the artwork here displays his specialty, maritime scenes, the way he conjured them, from British primacy during the Age of Sail to the birth of the era of steam power by the mid 1800s.

If you’ve ever spent a week at the ocean’s edge or traveled by boat, you know that the sea provides endless scenes of beauty, power, color, and light. Turner spent his life combining those elements with his vision of how we mortals fit into its vicissitudes.

To show just how far from the beaten path Turner’s conceptions of maritime art were from his peers, the exhibit includes work by his contemporaries.  His peers, including John Constable and Americans Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, have solid technical skills, producing great realistic renditions of ships, harbors, seascapes and the like.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave” (1831-1832) Photo: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

By contrast, Turner’s work became looser, less constructed, and way more visceral. With his swirling brush technique and indistinct evocation of subject matter, he painted what he wanted you to feel. Others painted what they want you to see.

"I did not paint... to be understood. I wished to show what such a scene was like," Turner said. An eccentric loner, first rate showman and keen competitor, he was an Impressionist before the term was created later in the 1800s. His treatment of ominous ocean waves, breakers, and sea foam puts him in a class by himself. You could see it coming from his that first oil painting in 1796.

The J.M.W. Turner exhibition is spread over six rooms on the second level is divided into seven thematic sections:

The seven explanatory panels for each section are useful but an exhibit of this size deserves more information for the spectators. No headsets with background information are offered. The one tour I followed with a docent did little more than echo what was written in the explanatory panels in each room (other docents may or may not be more prepared).

There were a couple of iPads in several rooms but considering the huge interest in the show, not nearly sufficient for those of us accustomed to headsets or larger computer stations to enhance the experience. No photography (even with no flash) is allowed in the exhibit.

Turner’s treatment of sunlight, rain, and fog, especially during storms, is astonishing. Several of his paintings at the sunset of his career are atmospheric impressions. And I felt them.

Snowstorm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth 1842; Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm

Pay attention to the items in the glass cases in the exhibit. Turner’s notebook sketches show his desire to capture mood by experimenting with watercolors. By the end of his career, Turner had churned out 300 oil paintings and 20,000 sketches and watercolors, including 300 sketchbooks. This exhibit contains less than 0.005% of his output! The man lived and breathed his art.

If you visit, here are several websites to read or bookmark in your iPhone.
Peabody Essex Museum press release
http://www.pem.org/press/press_release/265-pem_presents_turner_the_sea

Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe at his best…
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/06/14/turner-maritime-impressions-flood-senses-salem/ypya2SnIL8oRZ9LUDsXO9O/story.html

and of course, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._W._Turner

 

John Singer Sargent: The invisible gallery experience

John Singer Sargent Watercolors
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
October 13, 2013 - January 20, 2014
Ann and Graham Gund Galleryå

More than meets the eye...
All it took was one question to Anthony, a staff member patrolling the exhibit to be sure no one uses flash photography or gets too close to the artwork.

“How many paintings here?” I ask.
“97 paintings in 11 rooms,” he answers.
“The room felt different last time I was here,” says I.

“The room is reduced to rubble after each exhibit, the temporary walls that have been erected are torn down, moldings and all,” says Anthony.

“You mean they actually build walls inside this room?” I ask.

Happy for an audience, he goes on to say that designers and curators figure out the best way lay out the collection of art, factor in traffic patterns, viewing angles, specific location for each piece of art, illumination, informational panels, and the identifying labels for each painting. They choose how to sequence the art either chronologically of thematically.

Electricians, carpenters, and painters roll up their sleeves and get to work. Using tracks built into the ceiling, they hang walls, install ceiling moldings, and frame doors through which the traffic will flow. He points out the superstructures in the ceiling from which the temporary walls have been hung.

 

The curators and designers decide on a color scheme, colors for each room that complement whatever art is inside it. We’re talking people who are into detail. They even select door and ceiling moldings, and things I'm not even aware of yet...pretty impressive.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall watching all this happen. It would be great behind the scenes video for patrons to see, add another layer of appreciation of how the exhibit grows from a vision to a reality.

Voila! One empty, huge, rectangular space with all the allure of a warehouse space is transformed into an arresting visual experience.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

John Singer Sargent: Brilliant Command of Watercolor Painting

John Singer Sargent Watercolors
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
October 13, 2013 - January 20, 2014
Ann and Graham Gund Gallery

11 rooms, 97 works of art...

The huge rectangular Gund Gallery space has been divided into 11 rooms, thematically divided to showcase Sargent's wide ranging interests and spectacular skill at jolting the viewer with a sense of 'right now' freshness. Most widely known for his huge oil portraits, this exhibit explodes with scores of the brilliant, compact watercolors he painted in the last twenty years of his life.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925): inquisitive mind, creative urges. Sargent was the leading portrait artist for the last twenty years of the 1800s, his customers being wealthy American and British families. The canvasses were large format oil color paintings, classic compositions that displayed his mastery of color. He rendered a sense of mystery in his subject's faces. His "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" at the MFA Boston is a prime example. By 1900, he'd tired of the limitations of oil painting and looked to watercolors to extend his creative reach.

An avid traveler, it wasn't enough to witness moments in life, he became dedicated committing them to paper with his collection of brushes, crayons, paint trays. His way of relaxing was to work. Was he driven or was this just the way he breathed in the life around him? If he were an essayist or poet, his work wouldn’t have been as widely appreciated. You can’t walk into a gallery and get a visual sense of Thoreau’s descriptions of Walden Pond. Sargent’s watercolors hit you right between the eyes.

Born to American parents in Italy, the world was his playground. As he traveled through Spain, Portugal, Greece, Switzerland, Italy, Syria, Palestine in the early 1900s, he left a wake of brightly colored landscapes, architectural views, and figure drawings. His days of working indoors were done. He was the early 20th century version of blogger, recording impressions of every place he visited. He worked quickly. Sometimes he could capture a scene with a sense of completion, sometimes his watercolors had a looser sketchy appearance. What connected them was his deft use of translucent and opaque watercolors and the subtle way he could suggest movement. Sargent could make sunlight dance.

It must have taken him weeks or months to complete the massive oil portraits of the late 1800s. Give him a few hours in sunny Venice and he might have been able to complete a doozy.

"Venice: Under the Rialto Bridge" Translucent watercolor, touches of opaque watercolor,graphite underdrawing 1909  It features some of Sargent's trademark treatments of sun and shadow, along with a kinetic sense of movement and distinctive elements of Venetian architecture. My favorite watercolor in the show. You'll find your own favorites.

A close up shows Sargent's fine brush strokes and mastery of allowing the watercolor to bleed into wet linen paper to suggest shapes.

"The Bridge of Sighs" 1904  Sargent's use of opaque and translucent watercolors, graphite and red-pigmented underdrawing are visible to the discerning eye in lots of  his compositions. You have to be  observant to see some of the underdrawing on many of the watercolors.
"Gondoliers' Siesta" 1902 Watercolor with ink. What gives lots of his work such a sense of immediacy is where he sets up to paint. It looks like he painted this from another gondola on the water a few feet away.

"Bedouins"  Opaque and translucent watercolor 1905 Sargent visited "The Ottoman Levant" (Jerusalem, Beirut, parts of present day Syria), probably due to his fascination with the area after reading "Travels in Arabia Deserta" in 1888. He really piled on the opaque watercolors to make them pop against the pale sky.

"In Switzerland" Translucent and opaque watercolor and graphite underdrawing  1905 Sargent enjoyed painting pictures of figures in repose. To my mind, anyone who can paint a foreshortened composition this successfully is a genius.

"Simplon Pass: Reading" Opaque and translucent watercolors, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1911 To most observers, this portrait that Sargent carefully orchestrated (see photo) is the star of the show. My bet is that this is the one that gets you in the door but you'll find others that appeal to you even more.

"A Tramp" Translucent watercolor and touches of opaque watercolor 1904 This is an astonishing portrait using watercolor. The man's face has great detail and the rest is far sketchier. The shades of blues, greens,  browns and blacks frame the man's face brilliantly.

"White Ships" Majorca. Translucent and opaque watercolor, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1908 Sargent used a clear wax on the right side of the larger boat to repel the blue watercolor washes and create white highlights. You can almost feel the sun on your back as you view the boats from a little skiff bobbing on the water nearby.

"Carrara: A Quarry" Translucent and opaque watercolor, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1911
"Carrara: A Quarry II" Translucent watercolor, touches of opaque watercolor, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1911

Any artist who can make quarries an interesting subject has my vote. Sargent reveled in capturing sunlight in its infinite variations.

"Simplon Pass: The Lesson" Translucent watercolor, touches of opaque watercolor, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1911 The artist's sister Emily at work: this is probably a clue  about how Sargent himself worked - brush clenched between teeth, other brushes and paint in tin paint trays in his lap, fierce concentration on his face.

"An Artist In His Studio" oil on canvas, 1904 Pretty tricky a portrait including a landscape painting. Sargent loved painting whites, the white reflecting off the sheets is a classic technique, difficult to master and wonderful to see captured in oil or watercolor, which you see below.

"La Biancheria" Translucent watercolor, touches of opaque watercolor, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1910 As in most of the images here, my photos do not do justice to the original paintings. My jaw dropped when I saw this bravura scene of white sheets drying in sunlight, the whites framed by the nature's outdoor palette of greens, browns, orangey reds, and gray. The overall feel of the composition is quite impressionist.

"Genoa University" Translucent watercolor, touches of opaque watercolor, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1911 Sargent must have lived to capture sunlight with his brushes. You can almost see him dropping everything to set up easel, grab brushes and tubes of paint to spread the watercolors on paper before the golden afternoon sunlight vanishes. Try to count the gradations of sunlight from the whites on the columns to the deep honeys in the vault...I gave up.

"Venice:La Dogana" Translucent opaque watercolor, graphite underdrawing 1911 I can almost feel my neck craning upwards to see the statue of Fortune on the cupola of the customs house in Venice. Don't you marvel at how Sargent subtlely tints the white architecture with reflected pure blue sky.

"Daphne" Translucent watercolor, touches of opaque watercolor, wax resist, graphite underdrawing 1910 This artist never picks the easy way out. He manages to show a silhouette without losing detail in the white against white upper section and give the statue warmth and marble texture at the same time. And those llttle dabs of red, yellow, orange and blue in the foreground pull it all together. You'll see.

The exhibit is divided by themes represented in John Singer Sargent's  work: In Venice; Figures Lying Down; Oil or Watercolor; Portraits at Hand; Water Craft; At Work; In Villa Gardens; Sunlight on Stone; Bedouin Encounter.

This was one of the best shows of 2013. It ends January 20. Start the new year with a call to arms from a master Sargent!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Winslow Homer: The Complete American Artist

 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

I ask a friendly security guard if I could take photos. "Yes but no flash," she says. "What about a tripod with no flash? "She phones her boss. I would have to clear a time and date, security personnel would have to be with me while I shoot.I pull out my pen and begin to jot this info in my notebook. She hands me a stubby yellow pencil and grins. "No pens," she says, "a lot harder to remove ink than pencil." Such is the state of security-minded museums these days.

This building will close down on September 8. A partial collection of art from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute will be transferred to the nearby stone Hill Center at the end of September. Now under construction, the new Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is scheduled to open in July 2014. With lots of glass and reflective pools it promises to be quite special. The present structure will be home to the administrative offices and education center.

The exhibit "Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History"at the Sterling and Francine Art Institute is making history itself. Nearly 1000 people each Saturday and Sunday have crowded through the exhibit all summer. The George Inness exhibit on the same floor draws mainly on the coattails of Mr. Homer.

Nearly every casual museum junkie is familiar with Winslow Homer's iconic oil paintings inspired by the coast of Maine. This exhibit gives equal weight to Winslow Homer's less trumpeted skills in other medums. The show includes 11 paintings, 18 watercolors, and dozens of wood engravings, etchings, lithographs, and drawings.To put it plainly, the range of Homer's abilities are astonishing. He had talent, ambition, and the  energy to promote himself.  Once his career got rolling, Katie, bar the door.

Wood Engravings

The special exhibition gallery on the second floor has been partitioned into three sections. The walls have been painted a rich shade of brown, green, and cranberry to set the sections apart visually and give more oomph to Homer's art. The first room features a wall with row after row of engravings displayed shoulder to shoulder, text introducing the exhibit, and three sheet music covers designed by Homer as engravings.

The second room, "Wood Engravings As Fine Art," is a doozy. An entire wall, floor to ceiling, displays wood engravings labeled "Economics and Class," "Courtship," "Music and Dancing," "The Civil War,""Thanksgiving," "Leisure," "The Sea," "Women," "Work," and "School".

The engravings leave no doubt that they should be considered fine art - and that Homer's sense of curiosity was deep. Most of the engravings were created in the 1860s and 1870s. Many of them are rich with exquisite detail and subtle shadings from grays to black to white ("Snap tThe Whip" 1873). The range of subject matter may have been whipped up for commercial reasons but there was nothing mechanical about the renderings and each conveys a sense of movement, subtle or ebullient.

When he was charmed by how an engraving turned out, he'd make an oil painting or a watercolor version. The same might happen in reverse with an oil painting or watercolor. Five of the seven engravings on display turn up as oil paintings or watercolors later in the show. The engravings are miniature optical short stories. When he made one he liked, he'd create one for a different audience.

An egrossing wall covered with Homer's wood engravings;

  

 School themes; "Snap the Whip" 1873. You can sense movement, subtle or dynamic, in every one of these engravings, from the kid's energetic play to the schoolteacher's daydreaming out the window and her one student's pensive mood.

 
Homer was fascinated with the human dimension of the war, was more interested in the behind the lines aspects - (L) "Civil War Bivouac Fire On the Potomac" 1861 captures the sense of downtime between battles, card playing, Negros dancing and fiddling, pipe smoking soldiers, rows of tents against the night sky, a portrait of war behind the front lines.

(R) "Winter Quarters Inside Hunt" 1863 soldiers sleep, play cards, argue, sleep, utility items and backpacks in view "Thanksgiving in Camp" every edging invites you to look close always surprises with tiny details, a can on the ground, that you missed the first time around. You could lose an hour here finding surprises in each  etching/engraving.

 

"Thanksgiving in Camp" every edging invites you to look close always surprises with tiny details, the differences in soldiers' attire and attitude, a can on the ground, that you missed the first time around. You could lose an hour here finding surprises in each  etching/engraving. See the "click image to enlarge" button to see terrific image that shows even the tiniest of engraving marks.

No huge battle scenes for him, he wanted to show war in its personal dimension. "The Army of the Potomac - A Sharpshooter on Picket Duty" 1862 is a powerful statement that quietly expressed Homer's antipathy for these snipers, who were considered cold-blooded murderers even by many soldiers on the Union side.

From war to leisure, Homer took it all in.

OIL PAINTINGS

"The Bridle Path" 1868 Homer's skill at contrasting colors, presenting delicate details that fix your gaze like an optical magnet, implied details in the foreground with less distinct but identifiable figures in the landscape background, expertly rendered hazy mountain in background, other riders above and below.

"The Last Goose at Yorktown" 1863  delicate brushstrokes, right down to the sunlight reflecting off the epaulets on the soldier's uniforms and the buckles on their boots.You can't fight too well if you're starved, Homer shows us the insane and occasional incongruity of war.

Oil paintings from private collections - the coast of Maine, halcyon scenes of the sea in repose, always a ship on the horizon"Saco Bay" 1896 ...coming or going?

The forbidding gray-green menacing rocky shore scene, "Summer Squall" 1904 with the lateen rigged fishing boat in the right corner with two fishermen, heeled hard over, thrashing its way home. The ominous rock outcroppings pummeled with spray in the foreground and mean lowering storm clouds add  tension to the composition and multiply the power of the surf pounding onto the rocks. The implacable force of nature is a fact to be endured by these barely seen fisherman who eke out a living in often perilous seas.

"Undertow" 1888 One of Homer's best known oil paintings

Etchings

Winslow Homer immersed himself in learning the process, then produced a handful of etchings between 1887 and 1889.

"Saved" 1889; "Eight Bells" 1887

Watercolors

The cranberry-colored walls are a fabulous background for four walls full of Winslow Homer watercolors.

 

My favorite – "Schooners At Anchor Key West" 1903 Here Homer is less concerned with detail but deftly suggests movement with his languid watercolor brush strokes, you can feel the moist air and a gentle breeze as the men in the rowboat approach the sloop. If you've never been to the Caribbean, this composition will take you there. If you've been there, the aquamarine color and sloops idly swinging at anchor will transport you there again.

"Beach Scene, Cullercoats" 1881 Homer executes great detail in the center then trails off into broader stokes in perimeters, the grouping of women in  the center is mysterious, once again Homer draws your eye to where he wants to go and invites you to interpret what is going on.

"The Eagle Nest" 1902 an astonishing volume of detail top to bottom in a watercolor composition, a moment in time, full of movement and energy.

 

"Perils of the Sea" 1881, 1888. An example of Homer treating the same subject in different mediums. One oil color, one etching. You can feel the sense of grief and anxiety. Two women are the central focus, fisherman below them in their sou'wester oil hats, a small detail that tells a ton of information.

Winslow Homer's art elicits a response, a common occurence in this fabulous collection of beautifully presented work.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Samurai! Armor of Beauty and Brutality

Samurai!”
Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
April 13- August 4, 2013
Ann and Graham Gund Gallery
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/samurai


Forget Ironman. The sight of a Samurai warrior would scare the bejaysus out of a peasant in feudal Japan. And if they happened to come along on horseback, peasants’ heart palpitations would be detectable with a seismograph.

By the 1700s the Samurai were more of an elite social class rather than warriors, their clout more political than lethal. The population may have been under their thumbs but nevertheless revered them as part of Japanese glorious history dating back to the 12th century.

The exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is stunning – a collection of over 100 artifacts spread imaginatively throughout the rooms of the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.

The exhibit has hit a nerve with Bostonians that a Renoir or Monet exhibit will never touch. Last Saturday, the gallery was packed with as diverse a crowd as I’ve ever seen at the MFA. I mean a veritable pageant of Asian, white, black, Hispanic visitors, ranging from whole families, to seniors and teenagers. You might see such diversity when a circus comes to town but in MFA? I don’t think so.


Actually, I had as much fun watching the visitors as taking in the handsomely displayed lacquered metal helmets, suits of intricately fabricated armor, weapons, horse armor (including stirrups, saddles, and metal masks and frontispieces to protect horses’ chests) used in warfare or later for ceremonial occasions.

We know that the improbably impenetrable cinema armor of Ironman and a host of action heroes and villains is fantasy. Back in the day, there was nothing fictional about a Samurai warrior. He meant business. And when he was done serving his feudal boss, there would be blood (or townspeople) running in the streets.

My guess is this is why the exhibit is so popular. The Samurai warriors were real, they lived and died for their masters.  Their armor preceded that of King Arthur and the fictional Knights of the Round Table. And their armor was breathtakingly beautiful, even if its wearers could be death machines to civilians or other opposing warriors. The paradox of the beauty and supreme craftsmanship of the armor and accouterments and the brutality its wearers could inflict is extraordinarily powerful.

The last room of the exhibit, with one platform of several Samurai warriors advancing and another platform of Samurai warriors approaching them on horseback will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.  Even after centuries of absence from Japanese society, the sight is totally intimidating.




























The exhibit is informative without being overwhelming.






Even the horse armor looks scary.

Of course there's plenty of merchandise to tempt you as you leave the gallery.

Photos by Paul A, Tamburello, Jr.

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.

+++++++++++

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 Boston,

Through Aug. 8, 2010

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.