Perhaps Gertrude Stein would not make such disparaging remarks about her native Oakland, Ca., today, after the nineties migration of artists and hipsters priced out by the bulging tech bubble, but at the turn of the century Stein most certainly did not find Oakland to be the cultural Mecca for which she yearned. There was plenty of “there” – and everything besides – to be found in Paris, apparently, and so Gertrude and her brothers, Leo and Michael, the latter with his wife, Sarah, all joined the many American-in-Paris expats in 1903 and 1904. It was in Paris that Stein would meet her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, write many of her Modernist literary masterpieces and, in collaboration with her brothers, begin building one of the most impressive and influential art collections of the 20th century.
The Steins had a taste for the avant-garde, and collected what would become important works by such now-famous artists as Cézanne, Matisse, Picabia and Picasso, whose famous portrait of Stein hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were not only collectors, but avid promoters and even close friends with some of these artists. Gatherings of artists and writers at Michael and Sarah’s apartment led to their famous Saturday evening salons, and Gertrude and Alice’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus eventually became so frequented by admirers of their painting collection that they had to set specific visiting hours for their home-cum-museum so that Gertrude could write without interruption.
The Steins’s collections have been culled for an exhibit that will begin near their childhood home, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in May of 2011. After it finishes its run at SFMoMA from May 21 to September 6, 2011, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” will move to the Grand Palais, Paris (October 3, 2011, through January 20, 2012) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (February 21 through June 3, 2012). This exhibition incorporates new scholarship and highlights the various emphases of the three collections, Leo’s, Gertrude and Alice’s, and Michael and Sarah’s, and provides extensive archival materials documenting the historical importance of the family’s collection, including Michael and Sarah’s introduction of Matisse to American viewers on their move back to the Bay Area in 1935, the same year SFMoMA was founded.
Situated on Jackson Square in the French Quarter, the Louisiana State Museum has recently opened an exhibit that documents Louisianans’ survival of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as well as the science of hurricanes. "Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond,” in the words of museum director Sam Rykels, “documents the human struggle in the face of a natural disaster, incorporating everything from survivors' personal mementos to their thoughts and feelings. It documents how the recovery has brought about innovations — turning the region into a laboratory of new ideas.”
As Art Daily reports, “Galleries and connecting areas move visitors through four major presentations: New Orleans' relationship to storms; firsthand accounts of people and predicaments of survival they found themselves in; a forensics gallery exploring the paths Katrina and Hurricane Rita took that year and the science of how the levees failed; and a final section on recovery and the technologies emerging since to combat the destructive forces of nature.”
One of the biggest draws will undoubtedly be Fats Domino’s damaged baby grand piano, rescued from his 9th ward home. “Living with Hurricanes” includes many other displays as well, ones with less significance for rock ‘n’ roll history, but with more affective force. For instance, the collection includes the journal a man kept while trapped in his house during the storm, which he wrote with a felt marker on his walls, and a pair of jeans another man wore with his and his wife’s names and the name and number of the hotel to which she had evacuated while he stayed behind, so that she could be contacted in the event of his death.
The exhibition opened in October, and includes online galleries of Katrina photos and personal stories.
The weekend before last, the Georgia Museum of Art and the Lamar Dodd School of Art played host to the biennial Trecento Conference in Memory of Andrew Ladis. Scholars and enthusiasts of early Italian Renaissance and late Medieval art from around the world and the United States gathered at the art school to discuss a wide range of topics on the trecento period of Italian art history. Click here to view a full list of the presentations.
Marvin Trachtenberg, of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, opened the conference on Thursday evening with the 2010 Alfred Heber Holbrook Memorial Lecture. His topic, “Building-in-Time: Thinking and Making Architecture in the Premodern Era” was based on his newly published, similarly titled book, which explores the role of temporality in architectural theory and practice in 14th-century Italy.
Friday and Saturday were filled with presentations. Intern Joanna Reising especially enjoyed the presentation of a paper by Peter Scholz of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, “Creating Space and Constructing Identity: the Painted Architectures of Giusto de’ Menabuoi and Altichiero.” Joanna found the topic interesting in light of the research she’s been doing in our curatorial department:This lecture is important for our own research on our Giusto panels, which are part of a dismembered polyptych. Not only did the lecture give us a better idea of Giusto's style, but it also gave us a lead on reconstructing the polyptych: the altarpiece of the baptistry seen in the third slide of the lecture looks very similar to the reconstruction that I have done on our polyptych. This could give us a better idea of what the polyptych looked like before it was dismembered.Curator of education Carissa DiCindio found interest in a presentation by Cecilia Frosinini of Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro in Florence, entitled “New results on Giotto's panel paintings and wall paintings restoration at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure: the Ognissanti Crucifix and some preliminary remarks on the Peruzzi Chapel.” Said Carissa, “It was fascinating to see how the works of art are being restored, and the discoveries made through these restorations are very exciting.” She also noted that the highlight this year was knowing that the conference will now be named for Dr. Ladis, “because I cannot think about this event without thinking of his presence there.”
The relatively small size of the conference made it easy for seasoned international scholars and new graduate students alike to converse on their shared passion. To sustain the sense of community, participants were treated to dinner at local homes each night. Several visitors from Italy were complimentary of the food, particularly the Low Country Boil! For lunch, conference participants got a taste of today’s college dining experience at the Harris Commons dining hall, and coffee and tea breaks were delivered by local café Big City Bread. Toward the end of one break, a comment was overheard that could have been either “This is the best conference around,” or “the best coffee around….” Either way, we’ll take the compliment!
For Dale Couch, curator of decorative arts, last weekend was his first time attending the Trecento Conference. He provided this assessment that nicely sums up the weekend: “It was an enriching experience both to be around so much trecento art history, so many art historians, and such incredible diversity of languages and culture. The Trecento conference was a case study in a successful academic conference. I believe it brought something special to Athens.”
The 15th American International Fine Art Fair (AIFAF) will take place in February 2011 in Palm Beach, Fla. This annual event brings well-known international fine art and antique galleries together.
This year’s event “features international dealers representing disciplines of fine art from classical antiquity to contemporary, and the world’s finest collection of haute and period jewelry.” The vetting committee comprises top museum curators and experts. The schedule consists of exhibitions and daily activities, such as lectures, cocktail parties and social events.
Richard Green Fine Art, Hammer Galleries and Graff Diamonds are among the fair’s many participants. Highlights of the fair include a Renoir exhibition and works by Pablo Picasso, John Duncan Fergusson and Sir Alfred Munning.
David and Lee Ann Lester are the owners of International Fine Art Expositions (IFAE) and have organized the fair since 1997. The Lesters also established Art Miami and Artpalmbeach. Click here and here for more information about AIFAF 2011.
NPR is taking submissions to include in their upcoming series on the U.S. Postal Service. Check out this information from their Tumblr on how to enter your postage memories:
Have you ever received a letter or postcard in the mail that you keep close to your heart — a love letter, a postcard from abroad, a note from a dear relative, a reply to fan mail? NPR would like to hear from you.
Please share scans or photos of your postcard (front and back) or letter (and envelope, if you have it) and tell us your story. Upload your images to Flickr and tag them NPRPostal.
We will select some to accompany our upcoming series on the U.S. Postal Service.
RxArt, a nonprofit organization that puts fine art in health care facilities, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with a gala tonight in New York. The event will include a cocktail party, a contemporary art auction and music by guest DJs.
The Art Factory, a nonprofit arts education organization in Augusta, Ga., has been working with the Augusta Utilities Department on a three-phase project called “Art on the Wall.” This project has been covering the walls of the Highland Avenue Water Department with murals.
The first two phases have been completed. The wall on Highland Avenue (phase one) illustrates a mural of the Savannah River. In the second phase, six artists from the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) were chosen to create water-themed art for the wall on Wrightsboro Road.
Phase three is currently taking place at the wall on Iris Street and will include four murals. This section has been “a ‘Working Wall’ for students to discover the art of mural painting.” The artists for this wall are local teens from the Boys & Girls Clubs and other organizations. So far, the wall includes fish swimming in water around well-known Augusta locations, such as the Sacred Heart Cultural Center and Sconyers Bar-B-Que.
After the teens are finished with their murals, art students at Augusta State University will complete the project. Click here and here to see more photos of the “Art on the Wall” murals.
The Art Factory aims to “provide the children of the Augusta community with high quality fine arts educational experiences that also promote the development of positive life skills.” Click here to read more about the organization.
Got a taste for folk art?
This Saturday and Sunday, nearly 1,200 works of self-taught art will be auctioned off at the Slotin Folk Art Auction in Buford, Ga. Pieces include southern folk pottery, African American quilts and decorative arts, Appalachian art, American Indian pieces, art from the civil rights struggle, religious art, furniture, photography, industrial molds and antique and anonymous folk art.
The festival begins at 10 a.m. on Saturday and noon on Sunday at Historic Buford Hall, 112 E. Shadburn Ave., Buford, GA 30518.
For more information, please visit the event's website.
As UGA is nearing the end of the semester, Lamar Dodd students will be showcasing their work. Here are two upcoming events.
The opening reception for the advanced printmaking class show will take place tomorrow night from 6 to 8 p.m. at Walker’s Coffee Shop & Pub. The pieces will be on view at Walker’s through November.
Lynn Boland, Pierre Daura Curator of European Art at the Georgia Museum of Art and adjunct professor of art history at the University of Georgia, will lecture on Salvador Dalí and his connections to Surrealism at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
In “The Supreme Pleasure of Being Salvador Dalí: Hand-painted Dreams and Surrealism Nightmares,” Boland will speak about the Surrealist movement as well as an overview of Dalí’s art. He will cover Dalí’s relationship with other Surrealists and how they affected his later career.
The lecture will be held in the Hill Auditorium on Thursday, November 4th, at 7 PM.
Tickets are free but limited to 2 per person. They are available through the Woodruff Arts Center Box Office at 404-733-5000. Tickets to the Museum are sold separately.
Image from the Art Institute of Chicago
Yesterday, Marc Chagall’s America Windows were reinstalled at the Art Institute of Chicago. The panels of stained glass went unseen during five years of research and conservation treatment. According to the Art Institute, this work is “one of the most beloved treasures in [the museum’s] vast collection.”
The America Windows, originally dedicated in May 1977, were made in honor of Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902–1976) and celebrated the U.S. Bicentennial. Chagall visited Chicago in 1974 and learned that the Art Institute was planning a gallery in his honor for its expansion program. He then decided to design the windows especially for the Art Institute.
Chagall collaborated with French stained-glass artist Charles Marq to create the windows. Marq made 36 glass panels, and Chagall painted the glass using metallic oxide paints. The windows are more than 8 feet high and 30 feet wide with 12 different sections.
In May 2005, the windows were taken down during museum construction. “Curators and conservators were able to work extensively on the windows during these years to clean, examine, restore, and research Chagall’s masterpiece,” according to Art Daily. Click here to read more.
And now for a little movie trivia—Chagall’s windows made an appearance in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” during the characters’ trip to the museum.
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The exhibition, “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland” opened at the High Museum of Art this month on Saturday, October 16, and GMOA’s Board of Advisors viewed it yesterday while having their meeting in Atlanta.
Featuring 12 paintings and 13 drawings by artists of the time, the exhibition highlights the work of Venetian Renaissance master Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian.
Best known for his Diana series, Titian engages his masterful use of light and distinctive brushstroke to tell the story of the ancient Roman goddess. The exhibition features two of these famous paintings, “Diana and Actaeon” and “Diana and Callisto.” Both were painted between 1556 and 1559 for King Philip II of Spain and are part of a six-painting series.
“These really are two of the greatest paintings anywhere on the planet," said Michael Clarke, director of the National Galleries of Scotland.
In addition to four paintings by Titian (the Diana paintings are flanked by two smaller works), the exhibition also features several of his drawings. As Titian saw no value in drawings beyond rough drafts for his paintings, he made little effort to preserve them and very few survive today.
Many of the works evoke religious and mythological themes characteristic of the Venetian Golden Age, and several draw from stories in Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” a very popular theme at the time. The exhibition will be on display at the High Museum of Art until January 2.
The Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Chicago announced its experiment, "Month at the Museum", over the summer. One person would be chosen to live at MSI from October 20 to November 18. Applicants had to submit a video, photo, essay and application to be in the running.
More than 1,500 applications were received. Fewer than 20 semi-finalists went through phone interviews, leading to a smaller group for face-to-face interviews and an online vote. Kate McGroarty was introduced as the winner. McGroarty gets free roam of MSI 24/7 for a month—she gets to “eat and sleep science”—and, after her stay there, she gets $10,000.
McGroarty also gets an office and private sleeping quarters designed by CB2, catered meals and a technology package. She has 30 “Month at the Museum” t-shirts to wear. Each day, Kate uploads pictures and YouTube videos, writes blog posts and updates Facebook and Twitter to tell everyone about her experience.
Rob Gallas, MSI vice president and chief marketing officer, comments on the experiment:
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime, ultimate hands-on learning experience. We hear so often from guests that a single visit here changed their lives. We’re curious to find out what spending an entire month here can do. [Kate] will have full run of the Museum and will be free to go places and do things nobody has done before, like sleep in the U-505 submarine or 727 jet, or maybe lay back in the human-sized hamster wheel.
a Tornado Hit the House.” This is the title of the photograph that adorns the cover of Chris Verene’s “Famiy,” another art book from the fantastic Twin Palms Publishers. In these photographs, Verene documents the daily lives and trials of his extended family and neighbors over a quarter of a century. Kids with crossbows, babies on bare mattresses, and pregnant teens smoking in an empty kiddie pool populate these images, seemingly devoid of all self-consciousness. These are just people living their lives while trying to make ends meet in their economically depressed hometown of Galesburg, Ill.
These portraits are unapologetic and seem neither to condescend to their subjects nor to target them for criticism, instead attempting to present the reality of both their struggles and joys in its bare truth. While some of the photos may be mildly disturbing to our contemporary urban, and perhaps hypersensitive, sensibilities, as with the pregnant teenaged smoker, a certain dignity and honor in struggle perhaps emerges across the series as a whole, which presents the pathos of people doing their best to negotiate difficult circumstances and larger socio-economic forces than they can control. Aren’t we all?
Verene himself grew up in Galesburg, and then pursued his art education here in Georgia. He was a film studies and philosophy double major at Emory before receiving his MFA in studio art at Georgia State University. GMOA’s own collection includes his 1997 photograph “My Cousin Candi at her Wedding.”
Photos from the series are currently on exhibit at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, running through November 1.
“My Twin Cousin's Husband's Brother's Cousin's Cousins”
“Art News” has a wonderful article by Carly Berwick in its current issue on how artists are combining art-making and map-making into an innovative art form and mode of cultural critique. Variously termed radical cartography, experimental geography and counter cartography, this practice attracts artists, designers, cartographers and geographers who are interested in mapping the social, political and cultural contours of the world that are usually omitted from traditional maps. One example Berwick gives is of a collaboration produced by artist Mona Caron and cartographer Ben Pease titled “Monarchs and Queens” (2010), part of the exhibition and book project “Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas,” organized by writer Rebecca Solnit and featuring maps of San Francisco. The map features a drag queen in a butterfly-themed outfit and a flock of monarch butterflies fluttering about over a map of the city that charts the habitats of both butterflies and gay men. Endemic to the piece is the kind of reappropriation of language that the gay community has initiated with such terms as “queer,” the most common derogatory term in Spanish for a gay male being maricone, or “butterfly.” The book has been published by the University of California Press, and the exhibition continues at SF MoMA through December 11. A similar book and exhibition project is Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat’s 2008 book, “An Atlas of Radical Cartography,” which includes art works that have subsequently toured to such sites as MoMA P.S.1 in Queens. The article also discusses the cartographic activism of such groups as the Brooklyn-based Center for Urban Pedagogy and the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation. It’s well worth checking out.
