Whitney to Remove Gigantic Rose (Again)

Posted on May 28, 2013 by MsSusanB

Jay DeFeo working on what she then called The Death Rose, 1960. Photo: Bert Glinn. © Bert Glinn/Magnum Photos

It was hard enough to get it out of the apartment after she created it nearly 50 years ago. Get to The Whitney’s show Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective this week before the moving crews come back. The Rose, DeFeo’s legendary painting (or is it a sculpture?) is the focal point of this Bay Area artist’s exhibition.

Early in her career, DeFeo drew inspiration from prehistoric art, the cosmos, and terrestrial forces of nature. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she painstakingly built up the surfaces of her oil paintings, which often evoked geologic forces – slow, large-scale shifts of monumental proportion. (See the installation view of three of these works).

DeFeo was invited to show at MoMA in the historic, 1959 all-star show, Sixteen Americans, which included Rauchenberg, Johns, Kelly, Stella, de Kooning and Nevelson. She sent some of her 3D impasto works, but didn’t consider her largest piece, The Rose, quite finished. She became obsessed and spent six more years layering paint on the canvas. Listen to DeFeo herself talk about the difficulty in creating the 3D effects in The Rose in a drafty apartment in the late 1950s.

The Whitney removed the side panels of The Rose and used a two-ton gantry to get it as close to the wall as possible. Source: Whitney Museum. Photo: Paula Court.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t even get it out of her apartment, because the 3D surface she created ended up being too big to fit through the door and weighing…oh, about a ton. DeFeo had a small army of movers come upstairs to her apartment-studio, rip out the wall, and lower it to the street with a forklift. Watch and listen to Bruce Connor’s take on how it all came down in his interview with SFMoMA).

After that, The Rose went on display in California, but ultimately was installed as the showpiece of a conference room at the San Francisco Art Institute. For all the right reasons, temporary wall was built to conceal and protect it, but ultimately The Rose was hidden from view from 1979 until 1995, when the Whitney team unearthed it. Now, they own it.

Recently, the Whitney had the task of getting a truly monumental work out of storage, shipping it to the West Coast for the SF edition of the show, and bringing it back to New York.

Recently, The Rose arrived back at the Whitney from the show’s run at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It’s one of the most complicated pieces for the museum to ship, move, and install – just like the original transfer.

Click on this link and scroll down to find the Whitney’s photo show of what it took to get it up to the Fourth Floor. See how a crew of handlers got a one-ton work from the street to the gallery.

Get to the show before it closes June 2, and enjoy DeFeo’s jewelry, geology-inspired work, drawings, and never-before-seen photos of this Beat-era innovator.

Installation view at The Whitney. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

Monumental Impression of Fashion at the Met

Posted on May 20, 2013 by MsSusanB

Monet’s Women in the Garden (1866) from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris features impressions of fast-changing dappled sunlight and ladies’ fashions (e.g. the fad for soutache)

Monet’s Women in the Garden (1866) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris featuring impressions of fast-changing dappled sunlight and ladies’ fashions (e.g. the fad for soutache)

You can witness the collisions of the new crashing into the old in the Metropolitan Museum’s joyous show, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. Impressionism’s heaviest hitters (Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, and Morisot) are displayed alongside stunning 19^th Century dresses, suits, accessories, and underthings to prove a point — that incorporating the latest fashions was one of the cudgels that these rule-breakers used to facilitate their revolution in painting.

The show features paintings from three grand Impressionist collections (the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée d’Orsay), and includes breathtaking dresses from NYC’s fashion-collection superpowers – the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, FIT, and Museum of the City of New York.

The Met’s website explains the key themes of the show, but it’s no substitute for going through the galleries in person. Why? The tiny photos cannot do justice to the monumentality of these paintings, where scandalous 19^th-century fashionistas stormed the barricades of the French Salon, in large-format framed paintings normally reserved for staid, moralistic history paintings.

Summer day dress worn by Madame Bartholomé in her husband’s painting In the Conservatory  (1880)  Source: Musée d'Orsay

Crisp summer day dress worn by Madame Bartholomé in her husband’s 1880 painting In the Conservatory. Source: Musée d’Orsay

The size, colors, and techniques are amazing, especially as the Impressionists moved outdoors just as new technology was encouraging lifestyle and fashion revolution. Steam-powered train lines were inventing the concept of the weekend getaway for City hipsters, so a lot of the paintings feature dappled sunlight with high-fashion young people lolling about in nature. (See the show’s highlights.)

The show’s curators shine the spotlight on how fashion, innovation, and the art world influenced one another: New aniline dyes allowed hot pink, bold color-blocking and vivid hues for extravagant skirts and dressing gowns. New fabric-finishing technology enabled super-white cotton fabric to be crafted into diaphanous, desirable, but high-maintenance dresses and gowns for the first time in fashion history.

The Met scatters mass media throughout the galleries, just to demonstrate fashion’s democratization during 1850-1890. New printing technology enabled trendy fashion magazines to be consumed by the masses. New-fangled duplication techniques revolutionized the studio photograph by inventing the eight-image carte-de-visite – a paper-based way to market your “celebrity” self and show off your fashion chops long 150 years before Facebook and YouTube.

Silk and ivory French parasol (1860-69) from Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Met (Source: gift of Mrs. William Ashbaugh)

Pop-art pink velvet, boleros with pompoms, lace parasols, Worth gowns, kid gloves, top hats, corsets, hat shop girls, high-end boutiques, and Cezanne’s surprising oil painting based on a fashion-magazine layout. Which part of this show is the best?

Go before May 29, when the show decamps for Chicago for its June 26 opening.

Early Birds Meet Lavish Flock at NY Historical

Posted on May 18, 2013 by MsSusanB

JJ Audubon’s Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Study for Havell, pl. 66 (c. 1825–26) Source: NYHS

In a week where Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is captivating audiences with grand, lavish cinematography and color, take a moment to check out the 18^th century’s competition — an immersive-media extravaganza conceived and marketed by artist-entrepreneur JJ Audubon. It’s so big that the New-York Historical Society had to break it into three parts. Rush to see Audubon’s Aviary: Part I of the Complete Flock.

NYHS owns just about every watercolor that JJA ever did for the gigantic engraved folio that he sold to celebrity clients back in the 1820s and 1830s. He created watercolors of every bird in America (474), made the images life size for maximum visual impact, had them engraved by UK superstar Robert Havell, Jr., structured a unique package to appeal to high-end collectors, embarked on a road show, and sold subscriptions to his IMAX-sized The Birds of America.

NYHS kicks off its trilogy by presenting Audubon’s original watercolors in the order in which they were engraved and filling an adjacent gallery with the artist’s earliest work. The exhibition reveals how this self-taught artist developed his remarkable skill with pastels, a pin board, and a cut-and-paste approach. Take a look at the on-line gallery.

JJ Audubon painted them before they went extinct: Carolina Parakeet: Study for Havell, pl. 26, (c. 1825). Source: NYHS

A nice touch is the collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who provides us with recordings of the birds – both on a free audio device in the gallery and here on line.

If you can’t get to the show, peruse the “early birds” stories and highlights in this fascinating PDF by Roberta Olson from the journal Master Drawings, where you’ll learn some behind-the-scenes dish on JJA and see his headshot. Scrolling through, you’ll also see some of his earliest paintings, which were only discovered in the La Rochelle Museum of Natural History in France in 1995.

In the PDF, you’ll also read about how he was inspired by Mr. Peale’s museum in Philadelphia early in his career, ended up painting some crazy Golden Pheasants (now residing at Harvard) that were once presented to George Washington by Lafayette as a gift from the King of France (Figures 18 and 19), observe nearly identical reworked paintings (starting at Figure 34), and see the grid system he used for reference on his pin board (secrets revealed).

Mounted Golden Pheasants once owned by George Washington were early JJA subjects. Source: Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology

Interior Design Goes Medieval Avant-Garde at National Gallery

Posted on May 9, 2013 by MsSusanB

An avant-garde 1890s tapestry by Morris & Co., Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and John Henry Dearle (designers), The Arming and Departure of the Knights of the Round Table on the Quest for the Holy Grail. Collection of Jimmy Page, courtesy of Paul Reeves, London

How did a secret society of artists in the 19^th century turn into one of the most beloved interior design trends of the modern era? That story is the most surprising part of the exhibition (closing May 19) at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900.

Organized by the Tate (and originally titled Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde), the show introduces us to the PR Brotherhood (founded 1848), whose oil paintings and writings looked to the Middle Ages, myths, and legends of ancient literature for the spirituality that they felt was missing from modern, rapidly industrializing life.

Early collaboration by Rossetti and Morris, The Arming of a Knight chair, 1856 – 1857, painted pine, leather, and nails. Source: Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.

Early collaboration by Rossetti and Morris, The Arming of a Knight chair, 1856 – 1857, painted pine, leather, and nails from the Delaware Art Museum,.

Dante Rosetti, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and others took inspiration from meticulous observation of nature, sensual textiles replicated in their paintings, and ethereal muses in medieval robes, which they often painted on location in leafy, natural settings.

In 1859, Rosetti painted a cupboard as a wedding gift for Morris. It wasn’t long before these pals ran with the inspiration — constructing medieval-inspired furniture and decorating it with similar mystical medieval images and experimenting with mixed media (images + poetry) on tiles, tables, and other creations made by hand.

For all the beautiful painting in the National Gallery’s show, the most startling room is the one that showcases the fact that the painters took it one step further by creating chairs, tapestries, tables, and textiles for forward-looking couples who wanted to live the 360-degree experience. In the 1860s, Morris & Co. was the go-to interior design shop for medieval-style avant-garde furnishings. They singlehandedly drove the stained-glass revival in Victorian architecture.

In 1873, Morris & Co. went international, selling wallpaper in Boston. Soon, American retailers in most major cities were carrying the hand-blocked or woven wall coverings and textiles.

Block-printed cotton designed by Morris (printed 1884-1917) from The Baltimore Museum of Art

Ever the advocate of the handmade, Morris was passionate about the relationship of decorative arts to the modernist movement. During Oscar Wilde’s US speaking tour in 1882, his lectures about Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the nobility of hand-crafted work spread the trend in hand-crafted interior design in America.

Today, just about every museum shop carries William Morris-inspired something-or-others. Here’s the Tate’s video about the 17^th century carved oak bed that Morris himself used in the 1890s. It’s all about the hand-made approach to the bedding textiles – a modern-medieval collaboration between his designer daughter, Mary, and wife, Jane.

Hats off to the Tate and National Gallery for presenting avant-garde design in a new light. Check out the rest of the Tate’s PR videos, including the one with Karen Elson on the topic of model as muse, then and now.

NYC Museum Videos Receive 49 Million Views on Social Media

Posted on May 6, 2013 by MsSusanB

The Japan Society’s popular Japanese language series

After reposting so many museum videos here, we wondered how much video museums were producing, what social media they were using, and who had the most viewership and followers. We counted, and found that the museums, zoos, and botanic gardens around New York have racked up 48.8 million views on their public YouTube channels since 2007.

The volume of activity on was so significant that we couldn’t help documenting it and packaging the rankings into a report, NYC Museums: 2013 Video and Social Media Rankings.

Museum folks may want to purchase the full 48-page report to see how their organization stacks up, but here are some of our key findings:

As of year-end 2012, NYC museums with the highest number of all-time YouTube channel views were the Paley Center, American Museum of Natural History, and Japan Society. Paley merges its NYC and LA feeds, and it’s 33M all-time video views are mostly from TV celebrity show panels in LA. So if we’re really looking at the museum programming champs in NYC, it would be AMNH (15M), Japan Society (7M), and MoMA (6M).

The Top NYC Museum Video of 2012 — an AMNH Science Bulletin Whales Give Dolphins a Lift

The top NYC museum viral video of all time is The Known Universe video produced by AMNH for the Rubin Museum’s 2009 show, Visions of the Cosmos – 11M views and still growing. The video was generated from the Hayden Planetarium’s data set.

In 2012, another AMNH video, Whales Give Dolphins a Lift, went viral with 2M views. The AMNH has an active video-production team supplying content to its Science Bulletin walls inside the museum. Hats off to them for making a winning wordless video out of a few still photographs from field scientists in Hawaii, simple titles, and tranquil music.

The popularity of Japan Society’s language lessons are driving the numbers on their channel. Who can resist clicking through all the 2-minute lessons in their Waku Waku Japanese series with Konomi?

Asia Society’s Top NYC Museum Music Video of 2012

The top 2012 NYC museum music video was produced by the Asia Society, Arif Lohar and Friends: Jugni Ji!. Who knew that the finale to a Sufi pop legend’s concert on Park Avenue one year ago would rack up over half a million views?

The top star featured in a 2012 NYC museum exhibition video was a piece of 18th century mechanical furniture displayed at the Metropolitan. Viewership of The Roentgens’ Berlin Secretary Cabinet grew from 182,000 views at year-end 2012 to 1.6 million today. Can anyone explain how mechanical furniture received 25 times the viewership of the Met’s video walk-through of its blockbuster McQueen show, Savage Beauty?

The NYC museums using the greatest range of social media and video channels are The Jewish Museum and the Rubin. One of the best under-the-radar NYC museum Flickr sites was the historical archive of Wall Street documents and treasures posted by the Museum of American Finance.

All the video and social media rankings 63 museums are in the report. Click here to see what’s included and make a purchase from our Its News To You Reports shop.

OK, here it is: the all-time top NYC museum video from 2009:

Morgan Deconstructs Degas’s 19th c. Cirque-du-Soleil Experience

Posted on May 4, 2013 by MsSusanB

Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879. Oil on canvas. Source: National Gallery © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

Long before Cirque du Soleil began selling $180 seats to eight shows in Las Vegas or Floating Kabarette came to Brooklyn, high society and avant-garde crowds were flocking to extravagant theaters on Montmartre in Paris to see the finest aerialists from Europe.

The Morgan Library’s exquisite micro-show, Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando, documents the meticulous work of Mr. Degas to portray the magic, daring, and wonder inside a 2,000-seat arena where he experienced the artistry of one of the must-see acts of 1879 – a mixed-race German aerialist who hung from a trapeze clenching an apparatus in her teeth from which she dangled a firing cannon.

As in the Met’s blockbuster show, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (which also features a circus-themed painting in its last gallery), the Morgan makes the case that Degas selected this subject because was associated with the height of fashion (along with café concerts and racetracks). Although this particular work was the only circus image Degas would ever paint, just tackling the dazzle and glamour of Miss La La dangling 70 feet in the air (before the cannon stunt) showed that he was capturing what was “happening” among high society and artsy types in their “modern” life.

A vibrant pastel study of the artist by Mr. Degas. Source: Tate, London/Art Resource, NY

Although we can marvel at how well Degas captured this fleeting moment, the Morgan lays bare that this work was planned in meticulous detail. They’ve displayed preparatory works, sketchbooks, and even architectural drawings of the theatre’s interior that Degas created to work out the feeling, look, composition, and setting for this spectacular work. As Degas said, “No art was less spontaneous than mine.”

If you love Impressionism and theatricality, get over to the Morgan to enjoy the mechanics behind the creative process and flip through the digital version of our artist’s sketchbook (which was to fragile to be sent from France) right inside the colorful upstairs gallery.

Visit Mr. Degas and Ms. La La before May 12, when they leave for the Continent. (Sorry, no video, but here’s a photo of the star herself.)

Photograph of the artist, Miss La La (c. 1880). Albumen silver print. Source: Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University

FIT’s Fashion Tech Timeline

Posted on May 1, 2013 by MsSusanB

Black velvet evening dress by Charles James (c. 1955) with a zipper inserted along that diagonal seam

Black velvet evening dress by Charles James (c. 1955) with a 3-ft. zipper inserted along that diagonal seam

Once you see the clothes in FIT’s Fashion and Technology exhibition inside a technology context, you’ll start making the connections at other shows all over town.

Exhibit A right inside the entrance – a seamless nylon-powder dress and bag made from CAD software and a 3D printer by Freedom of Choice in 2005 is a mesh wonder that is made by the same process as Amanda Levete’s woven Fruit Bowl in MoMA’s current Applied Design show.

Take the brilliant purple British day dress that FIT displays as an example of the revolution in color that occurred in the 1860s as analine dyes began to be used for the first time in commercial cloth manufacture. The Metropolitan Museum showcases the same point (except surrounded by Manet and Monet masterpieces) in its blockbuster time-series Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity. (Reference Camille.)

The 1860s color revolution due to analine dyes in commercial fabrics

Outstanding achievement award invention + application at the FIT show: invention of the zipper in 1913 and the stunning accomplishment of Charles James, who inserted a three-foot-long zipper into a spectacular gown in a hidden seam on the bias (see left).

In Fashion and Technology, FIT makes brilliant use of its own stellar collection to chronicle the changes in technology that revolutionized fashion, from the advent of the Spinning Jenny in 1764 to the world’s first programmable T-shirt (see below).

For fans of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, here’s what technology mattered:

1764 – cotton replaces wool and linen as the go-to fabric (thanks, Spinning Jenny)

1780s – machine-knit textiles (200 years before double-knits)

1801 – Jacquard looms create complex patterns by using punch cards (up to 10,000, so take that Univac!)

1846 – sewing machines eliminate tedious hand stitching for the interiors of gowns

Pierre Cardin, dress, fuchsia “Cardine” textile with molded 3D shapes, 1968, Gift of Lauren Bacall.

1856 – analine dyes bring about a color revolution to ladies’ fashions (go, hot pink!)

1857 – chain-stitch sewing machine

1860s – more color complexity with roller-printed fabrics

1880s – collapsible bustles let ladies sit down

1882 – celluloid used to imitate ivory and tortoiseshell for accessories

Check out the excellent exhibition timeline interactive to see these breakthroughs and what happened in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

As promised, here’s the video of the world’s first programmable T-shirt:

Fluffy AMNH Animal Superstars Win Webby

Posted on April 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

Steve Quinn, diorama master

Steve Quinn couldn’t send them to the L’Oreal Paris hair and make-up room like Tim Gunn does on Project Runway. They’re just too big, too famous, and too fragile. We’re talking about the furry animals that populate the 43 dioramas on Floor 1 of the American Museum of Natural History’s in the Hall of North American Mammals.

So how do you buff, puff, make up, color, groom, blow dry, restore eyelashes, color brows, and repair noses on New York superstars that have been in the (literal) spotlight since the early 1940s? That’s the subject of AMNH’s YouTube sensation, Restoring Dioramas in Hall of North American Mammals – a 16-show reality series that won a prestigious Webby Award earlier this month. Download the North American Mammal app (with before and after looks at the enhanced fur).

No more “demon” eye in the baby Mountain Goat, who is surrounded by thousands of flowers refurbished by AMNH volunteers

Steve Quinn leads a team of accomplished artists to, well, perform makeovers on the animals, plants, and background paintings that reside inside some of the most famous 3D attractions inside the AMNH. Steve told us that the first step was to update the decades-old lighting inside each case with state-of-the-art illumination that would inflict much less damage on the mammal coiffures.

His team engineered wooden platforms that extended into each scene so that leaf-turning and snow repair could occur with minimal disruption to the diorama floor. If you watch the 4-minute videos, you’ll see how they fixed a bison’s nose, put whiskers on cougars, restored the grass on the Great Plains, and restored the jackrabbit’s ears. The runaway hit of the series is Updating the “Moon Shadow” in the Wolf Diorama. With over 8,000 views, it’s not going to knock Dr. Neil off the AMNH charts any time soon, but Steve’s magical artistry is something to savor.

Go to the AMNH YouTube channel and scroll down to find the North American Mammal diorama series, depicting Steve and his crew at work. Check out this series trailer:

Just before Steve retired the other week, he gave us a special Night at the Museum, walking around and visiting his favorite dioramas after the visitors left.

Steve, you’re a total rock star. Thanks for all your spectacular work at AMNH over the years, and congratulations on the Webby.

Elvis has left the building.

Surrealists Get Out Pencils and Scissors at The Morgan

Posted on April 21, 2013 by MsSusanB

César Moro’s Adorée au grand air (1935). Source: The Getty Research Institute.

Automatic drawing, games, rubbings, collage, and dreams are all chronicled in the spectacular Drawing Surrealism show closing today at The Morgan. It’s an encyclopedia of what you can do with a scissors and pencil and demonstrates that these forms of play were critical to the most famous Surrealist works by superstars Ernst, Dali, Masson, and their European colleagues.

Some of the off-the-wall creations born out of the Surrealist’s drawing games eventually made their way into big-time oil paintings. The curators also contend that the monochrome grey-scale of some famous paintings is actually a tribute to the importance they attached to charcoal and pencil media.

The show, co-organized with the LA County Museum of Art, is the first time that Surrealist drawings have been the subject of an exhibition, and curators make quite the case for drawing technology transfer by showing us how these techniques (especially collage) spread to the rest of the world.

Man Ray’s Safety Pin (1936). Ink and pencil on paper. Source: MoMA. © 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

One of the genuine revelations is the work and importance of César Moro, a Parisian-trained Peruvian who brought Surrealism to Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

You can’t help but be struck by the forerunners of Pop: Man Ray’s Safety Pin sure looks like a precursor to Claes Oldenburg’s 1970s Clothespin, and there’s no question about the influence of Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1940s Surrealist-influenced collages: He and Richard Hamilton invented Pop Art in Britiain.

When the show was installed at LACMA, several contemporary artists were asked to create Surrealist-inspired works. Listen as Alexandra Grant, Mark Licari, and Stas Orlovski show and tell how European mind-and-hand games of the 1930s inspire work today:

Get Out into the Fresh Air (in Italy and France)

Posted on April 15, 2013 by MsSusanB

Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny’s Edge of a Wood (1850). Oil on canvas done northeast of Paris. The flattening technique was developed with his hiking companion, Corot.

There’s nothing like stepping out into the fresh air to get a little perspective – exactly the view taken by the group of landscape painters featured in the Met’s exhibition, The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785-1850, on display in the Lehman Wing for a few more days.

Most of them feature Italian or French landscapes, and you’ll be surprised to know these tranquil, beautiful visions of nature were considered a little bit radical at the time. Apparently, there once was a time when painters didn’t travel beyond the studio, and certainly did not work outdoors.

Installation view of The Gate to the Temple of Luxor (1836) by La Bouëre. After Napolean invaded Egypt, the exotic Middle East became all the rage. The missing obelisk ended up in the Place de la Concorde.

The artists in this collection (gifted to the Met 10 years ago by Mr. Whitney) literally went on the road, took to the hills, and created spectacularly perfect outdoor oils to record a bit of the exotic, wild, and ruined visions they experienced. And it all happened long before Monet went outside to serialize his haystacks.

If you’ve ever wanted to take a Grand Tour of the wonders of Europe and the Middle East, now is your chance. Check out the Met’s online gallery of these works, and enter the mountains, hillsides, parks, ruins, and vistas with new 18^th and 19^th century friends.

If you have some time, you can listen to the Met’s curator, Asher Miller, discuss how adventure travel inspired a generation of painters to break the rules.

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