Current & Coming |
Editor's letter, November 2009
November 13, 2009 | Here is a point that had somehow eluded me until now: eighteenth-century American furniture—a John Townsend chest-on-chest, a Philadelphia tea table—was already bold, original, and world class while American painting was still struggling for stature and its own voice. 
This discrepancy dawned on me while reading Carrie Rebora Barratt and Barbara Weinberg's article in this issue about the stories American painters put on canvas to pump up the importance of their calling. Such anxieties seem peculiarly American. The chief business of the American people, one of our presidents memorably lamented, is business; the practical value of a high chest had an obvious appeal to a pragmatic Yankee patron while an oil on canvas was bound to be a harder sell, at least in the beginning.
A new country required something new, but how was the artist to balance the inescapable influence of Europe with the originality a republic seemed to require? The blast of fresh air that blows through John Single…» More
Current & Coming |
Winterthur Chic
November 13, 2009 | Although not typically associated with the trend-setting designs of the 20th century, today the Winterthur Museum in Deleware hosts its third annual design conference Chic It Up—which features a stellar roster of historians and curators, all giving talks on interior design from the 1940s. Among the speakers are: Donald Albrecht, curator at the Museum of the City of New York, on Dorothy Draper's Greenbrier—the West Virginia resort she decorated after World War II; architectural historian and author Pauline Metcalf on the glamorous style of Syrie Maugham; historian Maggie Lidz on H. Rodney Sharp and his Moorish-Venetian-Spanish house, the Hacienda; and Winterthur's J. Thomas Savage on DuPont's collaboration with architect Thomas Waterman. For those that can't make it to the conference, we offer the slideshow below with some outstanding interiors from these famed designers.
If you were able to attend, please leave a comment below!» More
Current & Coming |
Blockbuster shows in London and Paris
November 12, 2009 | Moctezuma
The British Museum inaugurates a fall blockbuster season with a sweeping exhibition on the last Aztec ruler.
Anticipating the 2010 bicentennial of Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, the British Museum completes its four-part series on great rulers with the first major show devoted to the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. That the museum has chosen to use the spelling Moctezuma, which more closely approximates the ruler's name in his native Nahuatl tongue, instead of the more familiar Montezuma, right away proclaims its intention to reach beneath hackneyed stereotypes.
Most radically, the exhibition and its catalogue challenge the widely held notion that the ruling lord (Huey Tlatoani), who had been elected to this semidivine status in 1502, and whose formidable military prowess allowed him to consolidate the Aztec state, complacently ceded his nation to the Spanish, for which betrayal his own people stoned him to death. Presented alongside depictions of this account, are two manuscript images of the 1560s attributed to Aztec artists in the service of the Spanish. They portray Moctezuma with a rope around his neck and shackled as he was led to be hung.
These dual representations open up more questions about this elusive personality than they answer, calling into question the "truth" of the accounts. This investigation into one of history's most enigmatic personalities presents an aesthetically stunning array of Aztec, colonial, and European objects and artworks, some newly excavated. A dramatic turquoise mask; a stone box bearing Moctezuma's name-glyph; his coronation stone; fragments of his palace; ceremonial weaponry, and elaborate works in gold illustrate the heights of Aztec craftsmanship. Enconchados (oil-on-panel paintings inlaid with mother-of-pearl) vividly depict Hernán Cortés's 1519 landing and conquest, while subsequent Aztec codices offer a native interpretation of these events. European portraits present a romanticized view of Moctezuma. Repurposed artifacts, such as an Aztec serpent sculpture later inverted to form a baptismal font, bear witness to the hybrid creations that arose from this cataclysmic clash of two cultures, as encapsulated in the biography of a single man.
Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler · British Museum, London · to January 24, 2010 · www.british museum.org
Maharajas
The Victoria and Albert Museum reexamines India's maharajas from the eighteenth century through the end of British occupation.
The Victoria and Albert Museum opens its fall show, Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts, on October 10, just days after London's auctions of Indian art (October 6 at Christie's and 7 at Sotheby's). The more than 250 objects on view include many first-time loans to the United Kingdom from India's royal collections: silver and gilded thrones, gem-encrusted weapons, sumptuous ceremonial paintings and portraits as well as, from the last years of British occupation, extravagant Indian commissions from Western firms such as Rolls Royce, Cartier, and Van Cleef and Arpels. Dripping magnificence, the show and its hefty catalogue nevertheless reach beneath the sparkle to present a new assessment of the evolution of Indian rule from the height of the maharajas' powers in the eighteenth century until the end of British occupation in 1947
The curators draw out the nuanced subcategories of rulers, whose powers fluctuated over time and across the Indian subcontinent. In particular, they reassess the period after the collapse of Mughal rule in 17
39 not as one merely of fragmentation and turmoil, but as an era in which powerful new states emerged. The glamorous Anglo-Indian aesthetic that developed as these rival entities gradually came under the authority of the English East India Company is studied as evidence of how India's rulers incorporated Western notions of hierarchy and ceremony into their own. Under outright British rule from 1876 to 1947, the last maharajas are examined as patrons whose lavish commissions often drove fashion in the West as much as in the East. This visually opulent exhibition offers up an insightful exploration of power and its manifestations in India.
Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts · Victoria and Albert Museum, London · October 10 through January 17, 2010 · www.vam.ac.uk
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Current & Coming |
Blocks of color
October 30, 2009 | One of the country's finest collections of American color woodcuts is now being featured in the exhibition Blocks of Color: American Woodcuts from the 1890s to the Present at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, through January 3, 2010.
The Zimmerli has one of the largest university print collections in the country and is particularly strong in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American color woodcuts, inspired by the British arts and crafts movement and Japanese ukiyo-e color prints, which its former director Phillip Dennis Cate began actively collecting in the 1970s and 1980s. The current exhibition of some one hundred objects, drawn primarily from the museum's collection and augmented by a few select loans, features rare examples by Arthur Wesley Dow and his contemporaries Helen Hyde and Bertha Lum, as well as a number of ambitious examples by members of the second generation of American woodcut printers—Helen Frankenthaler, Jim Dine, and Richard Diebenkorn, among others.
The exhibition also brings to light works by a number of lesser known artists such as Frances Gearhart and Edna Boies Hopkins, who spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the early twentieth century and helped to make the area a center for printmaking. Another revelation is the large-scale Classical Horse and Rider (1953) by the Chinese American artist Seong Moy, an intricately layered abstraction in which energetic sweeps of color are overlaid with forms suggesting Chinese calligraphy.
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Current & Coming |
The Art of the Samurai at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 29, 2009 | Selecting a single object from the myriad works on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's current exhibition Art of the Samurai (through January 10, 2010) presents a challenge. The exhibit, which Roberta Smith of the New York Times has called a "once-in-lifetime event for children, war buffs and connoisseurs of all ages, even garden-variety art lovers," includes more than two hundred masterworks—on loan from Japanese museums, shrines, and private collections, that include 34 National Treasures, 64 Important Cultural Properties, and six Important Art objects. It's the largest massing of such works ever to be displayed anywhere. Visitors to the exhibition are treated to a dynamic display that ranges from the tiny—an 18th-century copper and gold knife handle with guardian figures measuring only 1 3/8 inches long—to the magnificent—a 16th-century black-plated suit of armor with a massive deer-horn helmet.
Several cases are devoted to the art of the swordsmith—the minimalist unadorned steel blades, which date from the 5th to the 19th century, are often called the "spirit of the samurai." Counterbalancing them are fantastical helmets of the Edo period (1615-1868), ranging in form and design from a five-story pagoda to a praying mantis to a replica of Mount Fuji, each more impressive than the last. Nearly all of the works in the exhibit were made to be worn or carried an
d thus symbolize a special relationship to the owner and his body, so provenance is an important mark of distinction.
One such object is a breathtaking set of a saddle (kura) and pair of stirrups (abumi) from the collection of the Tokyo National Museum. Designated an Important Cultural Property, the set is believed to have been owned by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), whose name was recorded on an associated preparatory drawing. He was one of the most famous samurai in history, having risen from poverty to become one of the central daimyo (warlord) figures in the unification of Japan. The saddle (made from chestnut wood) and stirrups (iron with wooden inserts) were each decorated in the finest maki-e style of the Momoyama period. A reed motif is articulated in gold—with varying technical application of gold sheet, high-relief and thin lacquer—against a rich black lacquer background. Additionally, silver dewdrops have been applied to the reeds and gold edging around the saddle's pommel.
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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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