"Daumier: Art for the Masses"

Jean-Honore Daumier, (French 1808-1879), Les Etrangers a Paris, n.d. Lithograph, 8 1/2 x 7 inches.

Art Daily recently featured the Birmingham Museum of Art and its exhibition "Daumier: Art for the Masses," a collection of 169 lithographs produced by artist, painter and sculptor Jean-Honore Daumier.

Daumier was one of France's most popular and influential artists. As a printmaker, he produced over 4,000 lithographs. His illustrations, most of which were published in popular daily newspapers, expressed his satirical take on French politics, society and culture.

Of the lithographs on display in the Birmingham Museum of Art's Jemison Galleries, 14 remain intact in the original newspapers they were printed, while the other prints were cut out long ago to be appreciated as stand-alone works.

"Art for the Masses" will run through Dec. 31.

Click here for more information on this exhibition.

Guitars

Art Daily has an article this morning about the new exhibition open at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, "Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914."

The exhibition . . . takes as its point of departure two works given to The Museum of Modern Art by Pablo Picasso in the early 1970s: Guitar, assembled from cardboard, paper, wire, glue, and string in 1912, and a second version made of sheet metal in 1914. Unexpectedly humble in subject and unprecedented in mode of execution, the two Guitar constructions resembled no artwork ever seen before. Within Picasso's long career they bracket a remarkably brief yet intensely generative period of material and structural experimentation.

But did you know the Georgia Museum of Art has one of Picasso's guitar drawings on its wall right now? It won't be up for more than about three months, due to the fragile nature of works on paper, but if you come see us soon, it's on display in the H. Randolph Holder Gallery, devoted to works of European art.

GMOA in the News

In case y'all missed our front-page appearance this weekend in the Athens Banner-Herald, here's the link to the fabulous article Lee Shearer wrote about the museum's impending reopening.

We also showed up in Art Daily, with an article on the reopening events, and snagged a big award from the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), the release for which is showing up around the Internet.

David Buckingham in New Orleans

Artist David Buckingham will present his first solo show, “I Speak As I Please,” in New Orleans at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery on October 2.

Buckingham, a New Orleans native living in Los Angeles, creates his sculptures using colorful, battered metal reclaimed from racecars, school buses, trucks and other discarded items found in the High Mojave Desert. His experience as a professional writer is reflected in his incorporation of phrases and movie quotes.

Buckingham also draws heavily from his memories of New Orleans. With this exhibition, according to Art Daily, he will “explore the profound effect that growing up in the city can have on both its citizens and on those whom —for various misfortunes —it has lost.”

iPhone Apps

Art Daily has an article this morning about MOMA's new iPhone app, which can be downloaded for free here. GMOA is working on its own iPhone app, which will incorporate elements of a tour, but we're impressed with the features of MOMA's, such as the ability to snap a picture of a work of art and send it as a postcard to a friend. GMOA obviously doesn't have 32,000 works of art, but we hope our app will be fun and useful to you.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Displays Student Work

This summer, 70 New York City public school students will get to see their own work on display in one of the world’s largest art galleries. For the third consecutive year, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is displaying exceptional works of art by students ages four through 20 in the juried exhibition P.S. Art 2010: Celebrating the Creative Spirit of NYC Kids.

P.S. Art is a collaborative program formed by the New York City Department of Education and Studio in a School Association, Inc. The program hosts a competition every year in search of exceptional works of art from students from all walks of life. The 70 pieces were selected from 800 submissions citywide, and include works from students with special needs, those in advanced placement art courses and everything in between.

Museum Director Thomas P. Campbell comments on the museums participation in the project.

"We are very pleased to play a role in bringing student achievement into public view through P.S. Art 2010 and supporting the continuity of artistic creativity, from the earliest objects in our own collections to works produced today, such as those now on view by these young New York City public school students.”

The exhibit opened on June 8 and will remain on view until August 8. For more information, click here.

GMOA in the News

Art Daily ran a piece yesterday on the AAMD museums participating in International Museums Day next month (May 18), of which GMOA is one and receives a mention. Remember, we're offering a shop discount online that day of 20% on your order. Enter the code MUSEUMDAY at checkout to receive it. Click here to browse the shop's offerings.

Blogging the Restoration

We read this story in Art Daily a while ago about the restoration of Vincent Van Gogh's painting "The Bedroom," which is being blogged about regularly, but we hate to link to a blog until it has at least a couple of posts up. By this point, there's plenty to read on the site, which is amusingly titled "Bedroom secrets," from discussion of the preliminary examination of the painting to sources on it (previous versions, a letter Van Gogh wrote about it to his brother Theo) to consideration of the most frequently used materials in painting. It's a neat way to approach a highly technical subject.

GMOA in the News

Hey, we were in Art Daily over the weekend for the exhibition "University of Georgia Turns 225." The press release was also picked up by Fine Art News and Aria.

UGA alums

This morning's Art Daily brought news of an exhibition in New York by talented UGA alum of the Lamar Dodd School of Art Ian Ingram, who has continued working on the large-scale self-portrait drawings he has been doing since the age of 16 and did while in school here. We remember going to a reception of his work in the large gallery just down the hall from our current offices. The exhibition is at Barry Friedman Gallery and is accompanied by a catalogue. Congrats, Ian!

GMOA in the News

Sunday's Art Daily included a story about GMOA's publication of the "Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South" that we hope will lead to more press for the three big volumes and has already picked up some, as in this post from The History Blog that says it's worth every penny! All Art News picked it up, too. (Update: Here are two more iterations of the story, from Georgia Art Exchange and Daily Fashion News.)

The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer is publicizing the upcoming Nash Boney lecture March 31, and our Gregory Gillespie exhibition from 1999, for which the catalogue is out of print, garners a mention on Forum Gallery's Web site. GMOA is also mentioned in a story in the Athens Banner-Herald on artist Claire Clements, who has several pieces in our Sea Grant collection.

Shoes!

We certainly try not to live up to all feminine stereotypes here at GMOA, but the fact is a lot of us are ladies, and we were just talking about shoes this morning. Come to find out, today's Art Daily references an exhibition on heels and platform shoes, "On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels," at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. We didn't even know there was a shoe museum. The array of shoes included in the exhibition includes some that we suspect even our own Friends president Paige Carmichael, famed locally for her commitment to outrageously high and awesome shoes, might not be able to walk in. At least not without assistance...

Beverly Pepper

According to Art Daily, Marlborough Gallery, in Chelsea, is about to open a show of Beverly Pepper's small sculptures. Click around on its site for a preview of sorts of one exhibition with which GMOA hopes to open the new building.

GMOA in the News

GMOA's receipt of a Luce Grant made today's Art Daily!

Refreshing

Going through our back email issues of Art Daily, we saw this article about the redesign of the Toledo Museum of Art's Web site, as part of a larger rebranding that institution is undergoing. Some things Toledo incorporated in its new design are online class registration, a Web calendar powered by Google, a redesigned newsroom with downloadable press releases and more, links to Facebook and Twitter and an online museum store. We've already incorporated some of these into our site, especially the last three, but we're about to kick our Web site redesign into high gear. We didn't get any responses the last time we asked this question, but here goes again: what would you like to see incorporated into GMOA's new Web site. We clearly plan to streamline the design, and we're working on adding a searchable collections database, including searchable databases for the archives associated with the Daura Center and more. Plus we plan to add RSS feeds to the calendar. What else would be helpful? Or pretty?

Exhibitions Elsewhere

Today's Art Daily covers an upcoming exhibition at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia that focuses on female Pop Artists. As with many widely studied art movements, woman participants have been underrepresented and remain relatively obscure. The exhibition's official page highlights a few more, with images.

We're also intrigued by the spring 2010 installation Christian Boltanski plans for the Park Avenue Armory. We can't really picture it, but it seems bold and interesting.

Disposal = Failure?

One article from Art Daily that we've meant to blog about for a while is this one on artist Michael Landy's new project, "Art Bin." Landy is accepting applications for work to be displayed in the South London Gallery and then to be disposed of. The project has its own site, which doesn't contain many more details than the article (e.g., will the works just be piled on the floor? The emphasis on the cubic space of the gallery would suggest so). As the article puts it, "Over the course of the six-week exhibition the enormous 600m³ bin will gradually fill up as people discard their art works in it, ultimately creating, in Michael Landy’s words, 'a monument to creative failure.'" But is failure the only reason to dispose of art? And what does Landy mean by "failure"? Artists, even relatively popular ones, know that much of the work they create fails to sell, and storage space is always limited. Failure to retail a work of art is indeed failure in a sense, but is that what Landy's talking about?

GMOA in the News

We got out our press release on the Fifth Henry D. Green Symposium of the Decorative Arts last week, and it ran in Art Daily on Saturday, where you may have missed it. Here's the link!

Art in the News

We don't know if you remember to read Art Daily on the weekends, but if you don't, you may have missed the interesting juxtaposition of two news stories, one about Pope Benedict's meeting with contemporary artists, at which he encouraged them not to forsake spirituality in their work, and the other about oft-controversial artist Tracey Emin, who just received this year's ACE Award for Art in a Religious Context. Art and Christianity Enquiry for her work "For You," a pink neon sign that resembles handwriting and reads "I felt you and I knew you loved me." Emin created the sculpture for Liverpool Cathedral. It just makes you wonder how the pope and Emin would get along...

Storage Solutions

Art Daily has an interesting (although brief) article up today about some new approaches to long-term storage solutions for works of art that MFA-Houston and Rice University came up with together. Pictured above, the storage is transparent, which allows curators, registrars, etc., to view the work in question; it is modular (the pieces assemble like Tinkertoys); it is endlessly reusable; and it doesn't gas off in the way that wooden crates can, making it potentially better for the art it holds. The first thing that sprang to our mind, though, is that it won't serve for travel, for security reasons, and we asked some of our registrars and preparators for their views on its other advantages and disadvantages. Responses appear below:

It doesn't seem very weatherproof. It seems impossible to have any moisture barrier . . . but interesting to say the least.

What a great project for the students and how cool is the end product? Very. Cost would be my concern . . . wood is cheap. Those materials look expensive; however, in the long run it may be cost effective because they probably will last forever. As a registrar I have packed many a piece with the recent transition, but I think the preparators are really the folks who would either build them or order them and understand the logistics of fitting works into crates a bit more than I do. I'm certainly open to the idea if we can find the funds some day.

Interesting. The article never really said what materials they used. I like the idea for long-term storage, but not so much for transportation. I think for transportation you really don't want anyone to see what you're shipping. But I like the idea of tinker-toy-like parts that can be put together or taken apart and re-used. If the materials are appropriate for long-term storage it might be a nice idea for items that we box in storage. I wonder how heavy the materials are?

Very interesting article and research. My first thoughts are that the prototype is too large for the sculpture. It would take a lot of acid-free material to shore up the object to be used for shipping purposes and the waterproofing issues that Todd mentioned. The design seems more suited for long-term storage; however, size and weight may be an issue for space and shelving units. Reusable and flexible construction is a plus!

Any other thoughts, museum employees, patrons, readers, etc.?