Impressionist Line Ends at Frick

Posted on June 12, 2013 by MsSusanB

Toulouse-Lautrec, The Jockey, 1899. Color-printed lithograph on cream wove paper

Toulouse-Lautrec, The Jockey, 1899. Color-printed lithograph on cream paper

If you’re already nostalgic for the grand Impressionist show that ended at The Met, you can still find your favorites filling the Frick’s two downstairs galleries and the room next to the gift shop. While the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts) was undergoing renovation, the Frick borrowed some of their finest works on paper for the gem-of-a-show, The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec: Drawings and Prints from the Clark.

If you loved seeing Al Hirschfeld apply his pen and ink to paper in our last post, you will delight in perusing how lines by Degas, Manet, Lautrec, and Gaugin created a profitable niche in the rapidly expanding art market at the 19th century’s end. (By the way, Hirschfeld fans, who knew that Monet drew crazy caricatures to support himself early in his career? Claude’s Man with a Snuff Box looks like it was drawn in the 1950s…not the 1850s!)

Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss Loïe Fuller (1893), Lithograph printed touched with gold and silver powder. Source: Clark Art Institute

Although a few politically charged works are in the show (like Manet’s 1874 print of the Commune uprising The Barricade), the majority are masterworks of portraiture, everyday life, cafes, and modern entertainments like horseracing, circuses, and boulevard promenades. Some of our favorites are Degas’s sketches of horses in motion and Lautrec’s circus-themed sketches that he drew from memory while in rehab.

If you can’t get to the show, the Frick web site allows you to peruse all of these works in detail (with the curator’s descriptions) by decade, by artist, or by the order in which they’re hung in the exhibition.

For sheer theatricality and delight, Lautrec takes the cake in this show, as shown in the images here. The hand-painted 1896 Lumiere Brothers film below shows silk-clad modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller making the moves that inspired Lautrec to create dozens of experimental lithographs (sprinkled in gold and silver powder, no less!) of her abstractionist performances.

Yes, it’s all about the line.

If you have time, watch the video of the co-curator’s lecture about Impressionist line and how sketches, watercolors, woodcuts, lithographs, pastels, and improvised etchings created a revolution in affordable art.

Toulouse-Lautrec, The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, 1892. Color-printed lithograph

Tony Week Pilgrimage to NYPL

Posted on June 8, 2013 by MsSusanB

Al's studio at New York Public Library of the Performing Arts

Al watches over his studio at NYPL for the Performing Arts

Tony favorite Kinky Boots is playing at the Hirschfeld, but as you contemplate the number of awards it will pick up Sunday night, walk over to the entrance of NYPL at Lincoln Center to pay tribute to Al himself. Peek through the window of NYPL for the Performing Arts to see the nook where every Broadway star since the 1920s had their portrait done –the studio of Al Hirschfeld, the man who immortalized them all.

Look through the window and you’ll see his drawing table, lamp, and the cozy, cushioned barber chair where he perched day after day, recording entertainment history over the decades with his unmistakable whimsical flair and line. The Lincoln Center library is a fitting home for Al’s studio furniture, since he consulted the NYPL theater archives for a lot of his work.

Liza in Minnelli On Minnelli (1999), one of more than 20 portraits Al did of her. In color for The New York Times. Source: Library of Congress.

Liza in Minnelli On Minnelli (1999), one of more than 20 portraits Al did of her. Source: Library of Congress.

It’s hard to believe that Hirschfeld first began drawing celebrity caricatures in the 1920s, and continued his illustrious career for the next eighty years. Click on this link to his dealer’s site (Margo Feiden) to scroll through all the plays and musicals he’s covered, documenting the quirks, panache, and performances of everyone from Fanny Brice to Martin Short.

You can click through the “time table” of Al’s work at the gallery site, or in the Timeline of the Hirschfeld Foundation’s website. Every drawing after 1948 was done from a cushioned barber chair in which he could swivel to his heart’s content. Initially, he found it on the Bowery for $3.00, but the one you’ll see in the Performing Arts library entrance is the replacement (the original just wore out), which he bought in 1993 from a barber shop in the Chrysler Building.

So, pay tribute to Broadway’s most beloved artist. And before we post about the Impressionist Line show at the Frick, why not watch a 20^th century master of line make his mark so you can imagine all the creativity that emanated from the table you see in the window. The clip from The Line King, uploaded to YouTube by Al’s grandson, documents the legend drawing a caricature of Paul Newman as he appeared in Our Town.

Enter House of Memory at The Customs House

Posted on June 3, 2013 by MsSusanB

Detail of Dad’s House, (2012). Horse hair, feathers, cotton cloth, Photo by Clarissa Rose Pepper.

Detail of Dad’s House (2012). Installation with horse hair, feathers, cotton cloth, Photo by Clarissa Rose Pepper.

What do you remember about where you grew up? About your family when you were young? C. Maxx Stevens, an artist of the Seminole/Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, answers these questions for herself (and us) in the evocative show, House of Memory, in its final weeks at the Customs House at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Stevens, currently teaching art at University of Colorado-Boulder, scrounges around in junk stores and yard sales out west to find the ephemeral materials for her installations – slightly transparent gauze made into hoop-skirt structures and large multimedia recreations of 1950s homes with floating scrims. Can you see through the haze?

The experience of walking around the show takes you back to corners of Stevens’ memory growing up in a multitribal community of Plainview, Kansas, just outside Wichita. It may not be like your own experience, but the stuff she weaves, scatters, and constructs will cause you to tap into your own memories.

Three Graces (2004) installation. Source: Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis

Three Graces (2004) mixed-media installation. Source: Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis

The first gallery with The Three Graces is a tribute to her relationships with her sisters, and a must-see for lovers of fabrics, textiles, and interwoven mixed media.

The second gallery has several installation that resemble mini-stage sets that trigger memories through scattered photos, altered clothing, suspended objects, horse hair, garden stakes, and evocative combinations of other props – Dad’s House, Mum’s House, Sister’s House, Four Directions House, and House of Transitions.

Detail of Cultural Landscape installation of 1950s houses (2012). Photo: Clarissa Rose Pepper

Cultural Landscape is an immersive installation with tiny illuminated homes (found in thrift stores), scrims, and multimedia that “remembers” the 1950s streets of her suburban Kansas community.

The Smithsonian chose to publish black-and-white photos of the installations, which we’re using here. It’s kind of fitting…not quite of-the-moment and a little back-in-time feeling.

Want to reflect more about your own childhood home, your grandparents, and your neighborhood? Take a trip down to the Customs House before June 16, and let Stevens take you on that journey.

NMAI is making the leap into downloadable digital media with this show, so go to the iTunes U store, type in “NMAI-NY” and download the app, which contains an audio guide for this show. If you’d prefer to read about Stevens and her work, download the PDF.

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

War Ends at NY Historical

Posted on May 26, 2013 by MsSusanB

Join the crowds for two more days to pay tribute to NYC’s Greatest Generation at the revealing, reflective exhibition, WWII & NYC created by the New-York Historical Society. If you can’t get there in person, take a look at the synopsis here, but in the galleries there are surprises at every turn. The slideshow gives you a glimpse.

Right inside, you’ll find a line-up of people checking out a portion of the actual 1938 Cyclotron, a kind-of atom smasher that physicists at Columbia University were using confirm nuclear fission. It’s also surprising to see an interactive map of where “The Manhattan Project” was actually located in Manhattan. At Fifth Avenue and 29^th Street, the Army had 300 people on the 22^nd Floor of 261 Fifth sourcing materials for the first atom bomb. Other teams were working in the Woolworth Building and at 270 Broadway.

People also cluster around the interactive map of New York’s harbor, which explains how all those interesting-looking, now quiet big buildings, forts, and warehouses along the shore were once alive with 3.3 million active duty service men and women headed for Europe and North Africa. Take this video tour and see it then and now:

And the show would not be complete without a in-depth look at the activities of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the rise of Rosie the Riveter. Watch this video to experience what it was like from a woman who lived it:

The show includes stories about how Tito Puente, Jacob Lawrence, filmmaker Francis Lee, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maiden Form, Nabisco, and countless other New York people and companies joined in to the war effort. Check out additional videos expertly produced by NYHS on line. You’ll never look at these City streets or harbor the same way again.

Liberace Sparkles at Time Warner

Posted on May 25, 2013 by MsSusanB

Dazzling rhinestones and teardrop crystals are providing the antidote to a rainy summer weekend inside the Time Warner Center, where HBO has installed Liberace’s piano, signature suits, and a tower of champagne to celebrate of the debut of the Michael-Douglas-as-Liberace pic Behind the Candelabra.

Up the escalators on the Third Floor, crowds were swimming through glitter Nirvana – Lee’s head-to-toe glamour looks: white cravats, bejeweled lapels, matching boots with rhinestone-studded heels, and the all-important cuff, which framed those flying ring-encrusted hands.

Enjoy it all in the Flickr gallery, because it’s all about the details. Besides, there’s no more Liberace Museum to visit in Vegas, so this is your chance to check out a bit of his million-dollar legacy.

Branding for the HBO film was everywhere, featuring giant pictures of Matt Damon and Michael D, but people mostly hovered about the glass cases to see look after look loaned by the barely-surviving Liberace Foundation.

There were no capes in sight, but plenty of fur-trimmed boots, beaded fringe, and a giant Swarovski crystal. Downstairs throngs were circling Lee’s rhinestone Duesenberg and admiring the bling on the Baldwin.

Check out the HBO movie, but run over to Time Warner to see (for real) what made this man a show business legend. Open 9am to 9pm through May 27.

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

Crowds See Luxury on Vintage Rail Cars at Grand Central

Posted on May 13, 2013 by MsSusanB

The red carpet is back at Grand Central, right where it belongs: leading visitors down Tracks 34 and 35 to the door of the 1947 observation car of the 20^th Century Limited and to fifteen other vintage sleeper, dining, and lounge cars that once traveled the New York Central rails and other lines all over the United States between the 1920s and 1950s.

An unexpected treat was being greeted by former “Century Girl” Joan Jennings Scalfani, who politely posed for photos with admirers and talked about the 1960s when she represented the brand to celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Bess and Harry Truman, Ernest Hemingway, and Lena Horne.

Joan Jennings Scalfani, a former “Century Girl”, at the Parade of Trains

Besides the streamlined 20^th Century observation car, we visited the leather lounge of the 1923 Kitchi Gammi Club (Pennsylvania Railroad), the 1949 Babbling Brook observation car (New York Central), and the refurbished Broadway Limited baggage car that has transformed into a luxurious private-dining experience, Dover Harbor.

All sixteen cars were brought to New York for the Parade of Trains in honor of GCT’s 100 anniversary – the largest convergence of private rail cars ever assembled at one time in the City.

Small crews of people serve up meals and make guests comfortable whenever the rail cars are booked for parties, getaways, and dinners. Rail clubs, crews, and owners welcomed us in every car we visited, including the fully stocked barbershop aboard the Overland Trail, which once ran on the Southern Pacific.

Due to the crowds, not everyone who came to Grand Central was able to walk through the halls of long-distance travel history, so we’re providing a closer look at the luxury, design, and history on our Flickr feed.

Front of the streamlined Hickory Creek sleeper-observation lounge car (1947) for the 20th Century Limited.

To accommodate the overflow crowds who weren’t able to make it onto Metro-North Tracks 34 and 35 before the afternoon cut-off time, MTA provided a train made up of three vintage subway cars, which shuttled between Times Square and Grand Central – the 1948 R-12 car that was still equipped with wicker seats and whirring fans, the red 1950 IRT R-15 (the first subway to be air conditioned) with its iconic “portholes” in the doors, and the R33-S “World’s Fair” car which took visitors to the 1963 fair in style.

Dining aboard the Babbling Brook (1949)

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.

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