Current & Coming |
Multiple modernisms on exhibit in New York
November 23, 2009 | Early twentieth—century modernism-particularly that of Austria and Germany—seems to be all over New York this fall, with two exhibitions at the Guggenheim—Kandinsky, and Gabriel Munter and Vasily Kandisnky 1902-14: A life in Photographs—one at the Museum of Modern Art—Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, and yet another at the Neue Galerie: From Klimt to Klee: Masterworks from the Serge Sebarsky Collection, which displays paintings and works on paper by seminal modernists including Kokoschka, Beckmann, and Kirchner. The works on view at the Neue Galerie are taken exclusively from the collection of the museum's founder, Serge Sabarsky, who, Austrian himself, became a leading advocate and collector of Austrian and German art in the United States in the mid-twentieth century-a time when modernism was perceived as a uniquely French phenomenon.
Current & Coming |
William Blake at the Morgan Library
September 17, 2009 | For the first time in nearly a decade the Morgan Library has organized an exhibition devoted solely to the perpetually inspired British romantic watercolor painter, poet, and engraver William Blake. William Blake's World: "A New Heaven Is Begun," which is on view through January 3, 2010, brings together more than 100 examples of Blake's own illuminated texts, engravings, and poetry with a handful of works by several of his contemporaries, such as Henri Fuseli and John Linell, the latter one of Blake's closest followers.
Familiar works on view include a plain text version of Blake's "Poetical Sketches" as well as two engraved versions of "The Tyger": one with color added and the other without. However, one of the largest, most detailed, and eye-catching works in the exhibition is America: A Prophecy, an eighteen-page illustrated p
oem, in which text, image, fiction, and history, share a symbiotic relationship. Pierpont Morgan purchased this copy of America, which originally belonged to Blake's contemporary the portrait painter George Rodney, from the London bookdealer Quaritch in 1909.
Conceived and printed in 1793—just as the counter revolution in Europe was beginning to intensify—America was the first in Blake's Continental Prophecies series that also includes Europe: A Prophecy, and The Song of Los (Africa and Asia). In America, made in defiance of an act passed by Parliament against "divers, wicked, and seditious writings," Blake interprets events from the American Revolution, most importantly the Boston Massacre, into which he weaves his own mythical and moral characters as well as to Biblical references. Specifically, Blake's malevolent character Orc appears before Thomas Paine as a deceptive messiah claiming to be the serpent in paradise and calling for the destruction of the Ten Commandments. The poem ends with the thirteen colonies renouncing their allegiance to Britain, thus ending on an optimistic note foretelling of the spread of American ideas.
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Pickle Dish, American China Manufactory (Bonnin and Morris), Philadelphia, 1771-72. Soft-paste porcelain with lead glaze; height 4 3/16, width 4 1/2
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