Egypt on Route 66

A nugget from KPCC's local news coverage that I thought might supplement our vast knowledge of ancient Egyptian art: Egyptian artifacts exhibit makes exclusive appearance in Southland by Steven Cuevas.

Just FYI, I believe the transcript of the interview between Cuevas and Eva Kirsch, the curator responsible for the exhibit at the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum at Cal State San Bernardino, got confused with the material of which the beads in the world's oldest dress are made. It's our old friend faience, like the famous blue hippo, not "ionz."

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at The Brooklyn Museum

About thirteen years ago I was working on my senior thesis or something and spent a lot of time thinking about feminist visual art. Didn't really understand anything. Just spent a lot of time thinking about it. One piece that I read about but didn't really get was The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I finally had the chance to see The Dinner Party during my trip to The Brooklyn Museum to see Gilbert & George. In fact, on my way out of Gilbert & George I saw a sign that said something about Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party with an arrow pointing down a hallway and I thought, "Not THAT Judy Chicago. Not THAT Dinner Party." And I just had to follow the arrow.

The Brooklyn Museum's website has a VERY thorough section on The Dinner Party including a virtual tour of each place setting with quite possibly more information than you would EVER want to know about each and every one. Also, perhaps more directly relevant to our endeavor, it includes readable reproductions of the Heritage Panels segment of the The Dinner Party, some of which describe female artists from a number of historical periods.

I suspect we'll get to feminist art eventually in Stokstad's Art History. And maybe we can take some time then to try to wrap our collective brains around The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.

TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity & Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas

If you'd like to read my review of the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian through December 28, 2008, and Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas at the Textile Museum through March 8, 2009, please click here.

Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum

One highlight of my east coast tour was a visit to the Brooklyn Museum expressly to see the Gilbert & George exhibit.

Jeffrey Yamaguchi of 52 Projects has some great pictures from Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum. Additionally, on the Brooklyn Museum's website there is a video of Tim Marlow interviewing Gilbert & George at Target First Saturday on October 4, 2008. There is also a video of a conversation with the artists Gilbert & George and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008.

To the extent I knew anything about Gilbert & George before walking into this exhibit, I thought of them as well-dressed performance artists. They call themselves living sculptures. In the center of the first room of the exhibition display cases house ephemera from their early, what I'll call performance pieces. At the beginning and in the middle of the exhibition there are videos of their singing sculptures and other performances. So to some extent, they are performance artists.

Gilbert & George designed the installation at the Brooklyn Museum, responding to the architectural layout of the galleries. The presentation in not chronological. Often their series are designed around the space that they will be first exhibited. Here the series are, for the most part, not shown together. So what is the governing principle behind the design of the installation? While I navigated the first room, before I had even read that the artists had designed the installation, I suspected that the design was intended to guide the viewer around in a very specific pattern. Around the outside walls was the series The Nature of Our Looking. Around the interior walls were a number of postcard collages. In the center was a circle of display cases. The labels on the ephemera in the display cases were not in standard museum order - left to right, all facing the same side of the case, as close to the object it described as possible, as close to the edge of the case as possible. Instead the arrangement of the labels and the narrative of the labels - there was always a clear starting point - forced the viewer to move around the cases is a specific direction which varied for each case. Once I recognized this, I started to wonder if the objects in the case were the art at all, or if the dance of viewer around the cases was the art. In their interview with Tim Marlow they confirmed my suspicions. In designing the installation they were concerned with how the viewer comes into the room and how they move through. They intended to guide the viewer through.

Having been exposed to Andy Warhol's work in film school, I questioned whether their manifesto-like declarations about art, that art should be democratic, have subject matter, meaning, have a moral character and the idea of "Art for All," are sincere. To illustrate their idea of Art for All, they described coming into a gallery the day after their exhibition opened only to find the gallery owner looking quite unwell. When asked why the long face he replied that the woman who comes to clean the gallery loved their exhibition.

Can two people who describe themselves not as a collaboration, but as one artist be serious? Can an artist who describes everything they do as sculpture when nothing they do fits within the traditional definition of sculpture be anything but ironic? When asked at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008, whether they were influenced by Andy Warhol they responded,

Andy Warhol and Pop Art in general was a celebration of consumerism. We want to be a celebration of humanism.

They're images appear in almost every piece of photographic work. But they insist that the works are not self-portraits. Rather, to paraphrase their interview with Tim Marlow, they are visual letters to the viewer - Gilbert & George speaking to the viewer. They are the subject of all of their thoughts. They take what is in their brains and show it on the wall.

We have no plan when we go to the studio in the morning. However we are that day, that is how the pictures will be. Ours are all coming from the inside. We're always looking for the moral dimension of the subject matter. It has to have a human moral issue.

They strive for human, moral subject matter in response to the abstraction that was prevalent in the art world when they began in 1968 and is still going strong today. Like my friend Mary, they're not into Rothko, what Mary calls my stripes.

But Gilbert & George are not without formal structures. Their largest, both figuratively and literally, contribution to the art world is multiple series of large scale photographic works. The vast majority of their works consist of photographs in thin black frames tiled next to other photographs in thin black frames. This results in the appearance of a black grid. Gilbert & George explain this structure as purely the result of their means of production. They started in a small studio with no money. The only way they could make larger works was to make a big picture out of small fragments. Also that was the only way they could transport such large works. But once the grid came into being it came to control the composition slightly.

That slight discipline gives us a good way to make a controlled design.

Their works are almost uniformly based on symmetry and reflections. When they say the grid came to control the composition slightly, I feel they must be making a radical understatement. Between the ability to print multiple images inherent in the photographic or computer graphic media and the repetitive structure of the grid, their pictures have very quilt-like qualities.

I saw Gilbert & George after I saw the Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum. Both address the idea of collecting the uncollectable. In the first room of the Gilbert & George exhibit the display cases full of ephemera from their early performance work reminded me of Hamish Fulton's works in the Panza Collection. Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. Similarly, the invitation to Gilbert & George's dinner is not the art. The dinner is the art. But what we have left after the dinner is this collection of invitations and menus. How is that any less abstract than Frank Stella's stripes? How is that any more accessible to all?

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Supplemental Reading

My friend Jennifer, who's a professor of comparative literature and specializes in ancient Greek stuff, recommended the following books to supplement our studies of art stuff:

• The Tomb of Agamemnon (Wonders of the World) by Cathy Gere
  
• Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jane Marie Todd

The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum

On a last minute whim I stopped by my favorite museum on The Mall in Washington, D.C., The Hirshhorn Museum. Lucky I did because the current exhibit, The Panza Collection, is stunning. As usual, the exhibit is free, and it runs through January 11, 2009.

In The Panza Collection exhibit the Hirshhorn displays thrity-nine examples of Conceptual, Minimal, Light and Space, and Environmental art which the museum recently acquired from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The Hirshhorn has put together a PDF checklist of all the works. The pieces that most moved me were the Conceptual works which favored ideas over the creation of unique objects. In other words, pieces that really push the viewer to question the very idea of art.

For example, Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. I got into a conversation with a super-awesome interpretive guide about this. If I went on a walk with Hamish Fulton, would I be observing art? Arguably the art is his subjective perception of the walk, so I could observe him subjectively perceiving, but is that any closer than viewing a picture he takes on the same walk and labels? Another Fulton piece in the collection is Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985. Basically, he drew a little circle on a piece of paper and the "art" is Fulton's permission to reproduce that however the owner chooses. The Hirshhorn decided to use paint and vinyl lettering on an entire wall.

Fulton's Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985 is in the same conceptual vein as Lawrence Weiner's works. According to the brochure,

Lawrence Weiner's artwork has consisted solely of what he calls "statements": words, clauses, and phrases that may be realized in any format (written or spoken), in any context, by anyone--or not at all.

When it acquired A rubber ball thrown on the sea, Cat. No. 146, 1969, from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo The Hirshhorn received a card on which Lawrence Weiner granted the bearer permission to reproduce the words, "A rubber ball thrown on the sea" however they chose. Again, my super-awesome Interpretive Guide and I discussed the intellectual property rights issues surrounding works like this.

A rubber ball thrown on the sea

Did I just steal a piece of art from The Hirshhorn? You can ask Lawrence Weiner December 11th at 7 p.m. in the Hirshhorn's Ring Auditorium.

Douglas Huebler typed letters explaining the process and that the letter was part of "the form of the art." In the letter accompanying Duration Piece #12 Venice, California--Plum Island (Newbury Port), Massachusetts, 1969, Huebler claimed to have transferred sand from a beach in Venice, California, to a beach in Plum Island, Massachusetts, and vice versa. Moreover, he would do so every ten years, though the purchaser of the artwork is financially responsible for all future sand transfers. The letter goes with a picture of darker sand on lighter sand and a picture of lighter sand on darker sand. This in and of itself is amusing. And when I read the letter, I fully believed that Huebler had been to both of those places and transferred the sand just as his letter explained. Then I read the brochure,

Already well-regarded as a sculptor by 1968, Douglas Huebler rejected three-dimensional object-making and began to create pieces comprising snapshots that "picture" the commonplace, often absurd, actions described in the accompanying captions. His work suggests how language can override photography's supposed ability to capture reality and thus ultimately determine our understanding of both events and the images that represent them.

So is transferring sand from a beach in California to a beach in Massachusetts "absurd"? Was I totally gullible to believe the letter? Was the sand in the picture even at a beach? Were Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera, such as charred tape recordings of rare birds, in Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego which I talked about previously, real? Is anything depicted in art "real"? Does it matter? Does realness make art any more or less genuine?

I plan to recreate Jan Dibbets' Flood Tide, 1969, a series of photographs of the tide washing away a mark in sand, at Hilton Head on Thanksgiving.

Continuing my obsession with museum signage, the signage in The Panza Collection was rather large, yellow vinyl letters on the wall. The first few pieces in the exhibit consist of vinyl letters on the wall. This confuses the art and the signage. This was at the request of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. In fact, he actually requested that the letters be even bigger. Curator Evelyn Hankins wanted to use traditional signage: black lettering on white cards attached to the wall and eventually compromised by reducing the size of the vinyl lettering.

If someone could do me a huge favor and go to the Gallery Talk on Friday, January 9th at 12:30 p.m. when Curator Evelyn Hankins will discuss the idea of collecting the uncollectible with Curatorial Research Associate Ryan Hill, I would greatly appreciate a full transcription. Just head to the Hirshhorn Museum Information Desk at 12:30 p.m., January 9th. Thank you!

P.S. The picture at the top of this post is one I took of the brochure cover which depicts Robert Barry's Steel Disc Suspended 1/8 in. Above Floor, 1967.

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Pompeii and the Roman Villa at the National Gallery of Art

My friend Mary and I, the last remaining members of the Art History Reading Group (a.k.a. A(rg)H) had the opportunity to tour the exhibit Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibit is free and runs through March 22, 2009.

If you're reading along in the second edition of Marilyn Stokstad's Art History, this exhibit was particularly relevant to pages 203 through 211 in the chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art.

The exhibition is organized into three sections: Roman houses and villas, Romans' interest in all things Greek, and the influence of ancient Rome on European art after the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii in the 18th century.

In the chapters we've read so far (through chapter 6 Etruscan Art and Roman Art), Stokstad spends a lot more time on architecture than I expected. In her chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art she dedicates half the chapter exclusively to architecture. The first part of the Pompeii exhibit ties in nicely with Stokstad's coverage of architecture in ancient Rome in general and her specific coverage of Pompeii.

The houses covered in Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples do not overlap with the houses Stokstad covers. Stokstad covers the House of the Silver Wedding, the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, the House of Julia Feliz, the House of the Vettii, the House of Pansa, and the Villa of the Mysteries. Pompeii and the Roman Villa includes works from the House of the Golden Bracelet, the House of the Centenary, the House of the Tragic Poet, the House of Gaius Cornelius Rufus, the House of the Menander, the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus, and the House of Gaius Julius Polybius as well as some houses in neighboring Herculaneum. To supplement the map on page 204 of Stokstad, I've found a map, posted by Dr. John R. Hoaglund, that shows the location of most of these houses.

Stokstad opens her discussion of The Roman City and Home by stating:

Despite their urbanity, Romans liked to portray themselves as simple country folk who had never lost their love of nature. The middle classes enjoyed their townhome gardens, wealthy city dwellers maintained rural estates, and Roman emperors had country villas that were both functioning farms and places of recreation. Wealthy Romans even brought nature indoors by commissioning artists to paint landscapes on the interior walls of their homes.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa recognizes that same theme. One of the most spectacular artifacts in the exhibit is a fresco of a Garden scene from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii created sometime between the 1st century B.C.E. and the 1st century C.E. According to the brochure,

The painted gardens visually expanded small ones, as in the so-called House of the Golden Bracelet where frescoes of flowering shrubs, birds, and fountains adjoined the real garden behind the house.

The architecture of the houses reflected the Roman's love of nature by locating the the most private domestic areas around the peristyle garden.

Another striking artifact in the Pompeii and the Roman Villa exhibit was the recreation of a dining room "or triclinia — so called because they contained three couches on which diners reclined while eating," from Moregine, south of Pompeii. The most striking feature of this triclina are the frescoed walls depicting "the god Apollo, patron of the liberal arts, flanked by the muses." These muses appear on a background of brilliant, deep red that was very popular with Roman painters and is now known as "Pompeian red", according to Stokstad who describes its use in the background of fig. 6-34, Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), detail of a wall painting in the Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii, c. 50 BCE. According to the Discovery Guide for the exhibit, green and blue were among the most expensive pigment while yellow and red were the most popular. Like fig. 6-37, Detail of a wall painting in the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, Pompeii, mid-1st century CE, the fresco in the triclinia is divided into panels bordered with painted architectural moldings. Unlike the way the figures interact with one another and the architectural details painted in Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), the figures in the fresco in the triclinia do not interact with the architectural details. Instead individual figures float in the middle of the brightly colored background. This arrangement, a figure in the center of a large blank background usually framed by trompe l'oeil architectural details, became known as a "floating maenad."

The muses depicted in the fresco in the triclinia are one example of the Romans' interest in Greek mythology. Like Stokstad, a significant portion of the exhibit was dedicated to the Romans' interest in Greek art, history, and mythology. Specifically with regard to Pompeii the connection between Roman and Greek culture is particularly strong as Pompeii was a former Greek colony, as noted in the brochure for Pompeii and the Roman Villa. Roman art adopted the style of classical and pre-classical Greek art. Roman art depicted Greek subjects, like Plato, Alexander the Great, Homer, The Trojan War, and Theseus Fighting the Centaurs. Roman art patrons imported Greek artists and Greek materials, particularly stone.

A Roman twist on Greek art that I found particularly interesting is the move from public spaces to private spaces. Specifically the brochure noted,

In Greece statues of gods and goddesses were set up in sanctuaries and public places, but in Pompeii a sculpture of Artemis (no. 102), goddess of the hunt, was installed in a colonnade around a domestic garden; formerly public art became private.

Would Greeks have painted Apollo and the Muses around their personal dining room? Or would that have reduced the divine to the merely decorative?

Also like Stokstad, the exhibit drew connections between Greek pieces and Roman pieces to demonstrate what aspects of Greek art ancient Romans adopted. Like the inclusion of works by other contemporaneous portrait artists in the Bernini show at the Getty, I found this comparative approach very helpful.

I was not blown away by the exhibit's coverage of the 18th century reception of the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii. Perhaps it drew a parallel between the Romans at Pompeii in the 1st century obsessed with all things Greek, buying reproductions of Greek art to decorate their homes, to the Western Europeans of the 18th century obsessed with all things Pompeian, buying reproduction of Roman art to decorate their homes. Something about this section reduced all of the exhibit to a cycle of consumption. The fact it opened onto a gift shop probably didn't help any.

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Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

While I was in San Diego last weekend I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown (1100 & 1001 Kettner Blvd - right next to the train station). My in-laws had gone to the branch of the museum in La Jolla earlier in the week (700 Prospect St). Downtown there was a special exhibit called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. It showcased works created by artists who had participated in residencies at world heritage sites around the world.

From MCASD's website:

Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet is a pioneering artist residency and collaborative exhibition project that, for the first time on this scale, uses contemporary art to investigate the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. This collaborative multi-year exhibition project sent eight leading artists to eight UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences in these diverse cultural and natural regions.

If I had to pick a favorite it would be Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's film of the Mistubishi saltworks. The movement of the camera, the stillness of the landscape, and the invasion of the trucks stunned. He also made a montage of MacBeth card shots, which help in color correcting film, which is something that I'm currently a little obsessed with. It wasn't the biggest message of the collection, but the films certainly stood on their own as art.

I would probably have dug the performance of Ann Hamilton's piece, but the installation of ephemera from the performance combined with audio and video both used in and of the performance didn't have the impact that I imagine the performance itself had. Trying to recreate the urgency of performance in an installation is tricky. There was an exhibit as part of New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch at the Austin Museum of Art - Downtown during SxSW 2008 that was basically a karaoke machine of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speech in Washington, D.C. When visitors picked up the microphone and performed the speech, it was really quite moving. I wonder if something to that effect couldn't have helped this piece. There was a script of the performance on a stand. How many steps is it from a script on a stand to a karaoke machine?

Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera were definitely the most compelling pieces in the show. Particularly a piece which was basically a glass curio cabinet filled with frames containing typed stories about specific Lazarus species. If you think about museum signage like I think about museum signage this piece was particularly interesting in that it was a display of museum signage - these framed cards could easily be attached to a wall next to a photo or display or, apropos San Diego, a zoo enclosure. But in this piece the labels are the objects on display. Makes me want to collect museum labels.

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More Color Theory

I finally finished Exercise 1.4 in The New Munsell(R) Student Color Set. The exercise basically asks you to complete the book by filling in the blanks on the color charts with colored chips. I've blogged about Munsell's color theory before elsewhere. I've also blogged about my specific experience assembling the color charts, back when I'd finished only the first three out of ten. Click here to see a new post in which I share my pictures of the completed charts with a few observations.

The Euphronios Krater

In discussing my previous questions with an outside expert, i.e., my mother-in-law, she recalled an interesting bit of news about the Euphronios krater, on p. 136 of the second edition of Stokstad's Art History, fig. 5-28. The krater is captioned in the book as Euphronios (painter) and Euxitheos (potter). Death of Sarpedon. c. 515 BCE. Red-figure decoration on a calyx krater. Ceramic, height of crater 18" (45.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She emailed me an article from the New York Times about the Metropolitan Museum of Art returning the krater to Italy as the Met had apparently acquired the krater from grave robbers in the 1970s. Click here to see the Wikipedia article about the krater which includes links to another New York Times article as well as other sources. Notably, the Wiki's links to the Met's collection database and a description of the piece at the Met's site are broken. A search of the Met's collection database for the piece yields no results.

P.S. I went ahead and edited the wikipedia entry to delete the out of date links to the Met and add the link to the New York Times article my mil sent me.

What is a Cult Statue?

Having posed the question of what a cult statue is in a previous post, I did what any blogger should have done: googled it.

The only clear answer I could find was from Answers.com, which defines a cult statue thusly:

Image of a divinity that served in antiquity as a focal-point for worship and cult rituals. Most cult statues were housed in temples or shrines, although outdoor worship of images is also attested. Although aniconic worship (i.e. of a non-anthropomorphic symbol of a deity such as a rock or pillar) is known in Near Eastern, Greek and Roman cults, most deities by the late 2nd millennium BC were worshiped in an anthropomorphic form and were, as such, earthly substitutes or humanized manifestations of the presence of a deity.

So my tentative answers to my own questions are:
In the description of the Parthenon on pp. 147-153 the author repeatedly refers to the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon as a cult statue. For a specific example see the last paragraph on p. 150. In this context "cult" differentiates between statutes that were not the focal point for worship and cult rituals and a statue that was worshiped. A cult statue is not materially different from another statue of the same subject, but its function was different. I'm guessing there could be a statue of Athena which was not the focus of worship or cult rituals, in which case it would depict the same subject matter as the cult statue of Athena inside the Parthenon, but it would not be a cult statue.

What do you think?

Who is the A.D. Painter?

Having posed the question of who the A.D. Painter is in a previous post, I did what any blogger should have done: googled it.

Searching for Stokstad and "A.D. Painter" led me to a funky website from Prentice Hall. By funky I mean when I try to load it a bunch of errors about missing images fill my screen. But once I closed all of those I got to a one line clue: "Women at a Fountain House, A.D. Painter." You might recall this piece from p. 135, fig. 5-27, where it is attributed to the Priam Painter. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which holds this piece credits it to the Priam Painter as well. They also have a really awesome search engine which allows you to search their collection and provides you with awesome information about each piece. Click here to see the MFA's entry on Women at a Fountain House. Be sure to scroll to the bottom and check out the five different photographs of the piece.

So the answers to my own questions are:
In the section on vase painting, which is pp. 132-137 in the second edition, the A.D. Painter is the Priam Painter. On p. 136 where the author writes that the A.D. Painter created a perfectly balanced composition of verticals and horizontals that take the shape of the vessel into account the author is referring to figure 5-27, Women at a Fountain House.

It's All Greek to Me

I've recently conquered the Greeks. In other words, I've finally finished chapter 5 in the second edition of Stokstad's Art History. But I'm left with two unresolved questions.

First, in the section on vase painting, which is pp. 132-137 in the second edition, who is the A.D. Painter? Is it the Priam Painter? On p. 136 the author writes that the A.D. Painter created a perfectly balanced composition of verticals and horizontals that take the shape of the vessel into account. Does that match the author's description of figure 5-27 or figure 5-26?

Second, in the description of the Parthenon on pp. 147-153 the author repeatedly refers to the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon as a cult statue. For a specific example see the last paragraph on p. 150. What does "cult" mean in this context? Is a cult statue different from another statue of the same subject?

Name That Art

The New York Times Arts section has been running a weekly series showing details of pieces of art at a New York museum and challenging readers to guess what artwork each is from. An earlier week highlighted animals. This week's theme is pattern. Lots of quilt inspiring goodness.

Bernini at the Getty

Last Thursday my friend Mary and I, the last remaining members of the Art History Reading Group (a.k.a. A(rg)H), went to the Bernini exhibition at the Getty Center. The above picture is not in the Bernini exhibit, where photos were not allowed. Rather it is of Mary thanking J. Paul Getty's bust in the Museum Entrance Hall. I attempted to capture her "lips . . . parted as if hanging slack or caught in mid-utterance, an effect that Bernini would repeat, to dynamic effect, many times."

When I returned home on Friday, what did I spy in the New York Times but a review of that very show. What a small world!
The NY Times review describes the exhibit "[a]s the largest show yet of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s portraits," which I find surprising. It wasn't a huge show. Maybe my art exhibit stamina has increased what with all my A(rg)H training. The upper level of the Getty's Exhibitions Pavilion is not a huge space. But it did have a lot of busts on podiums, so that probably fits more works into a small space than if they were all large scale paintings. And the ample signage did note the many times when works appearing together constituted a first of some kind.

Speaking of ample signage, the curators did a great job connecting works to one another in terms of subject matter or style. This was true not only in the Bernini exhibit, but throughout the Getty. I found this incredibly helpful both in keeping my attention and in improving my understanding of all of the pieces.

If you're going with small children or the easily bored or on a potentially awkward first date, consider these two scavenger hunts to keep you or the person you may or may not love paying attention. First, sculpting eyeballs is challenging. Sometimes, they're just blank spheres. But not always. One could ask the big questions like why did the artist choose to make this bust's eyes one way and another another? But one might have more fun if one ask the question, why does one bust CLEARLY have a smiley face in each eyeball? Why does one bust CLEARLY have a Mickey Mouse head in each eyeball?

Second, button, button, who carved the button. Most of the busts are of mucky mucks in the Catholic church, so they're usually in uniform. One would think Bernini outsourced that part of the manufacturing process, like those portraits where clearly the heads were painted by a completely different person than the rest of painting. But according to the signage he didn't. Moreover, he seemed to take a VERY realistic approach to the buttons on the vestments. For example, the bust of Scipione Borghese, "a cardinal with intimate links to the Vatican," which the New York Times describes thusly.

If any of Bernini’s portraits can be said to convey affection, the one of Scipione does. Or maybe it’s just a sense of relaxation. He presents his old friend as he saw him — corpulent, loquacious, hat tipped back, lips pursed in a quip — but also as he envisioned him: the rock-solid source of stability he had been for a young artist making his way. And this blend of realism and idealism, of fleeting impressions and monumentality, instantly expanded the possibilities of sculptural portraiture.

So corpulent that the buttons on his vestments are practically bursting. It's a big tent and he's even bursting the buttons of that?!? Other clerics missed a button, or haven't mended a button whose thread is clearly loose. We didn't have time for a full survey of eyeballs or buttons, so we'd appreciate it if someone, preferably a field trip of small children, did so and shared the data.

Continuing the theme of connections (and segues apparently), instead of just having works by Bernini, the show included a number of works by contemporaneous artists to great effect. At first I thought, "Dude, I came here for Bernini, why am I looking at stuff by Anthony van Dyck, Alessandro Algardi, or Giuliano Finelli?" But then the signage compared and contrasted Bernini's work with these other artists' works in a way that made me understand Bernini better than I would have in their absence. In fact, this has now convinced me that all "solo" shows should include such supplementary material. As I haven't quite wrapped my brain around portraiture in sculpture, the fact that the first few rooms were particularly heavy on the non-Bernini painted portraits of the same sitters in the Bernini busts was very much appreciated. Similarly, the collection of Bernini's sketches was very helpful to understanding his focus on "kinetic emotionalism," which is harder to see in the hyper-static medium of stone or bronze.

The exhibition took the time to explain the medium of stone more so than any other exhibit I've seen anywhere. There was a whole room, granted a small one, dedicated to the craft behind sculpting marble. It included a piece of marble to which various techniques had been applied and the tools used with captions explaining how and why. It also included a video showing real craftsmen plying their trade. How many times have I seen a sign next to a piece of art which says the piece is an exemplar of a particular technique and yet gives me no insight as to what that technique entails and what makes this a virtuoso? Would that every art museum dedicated a section to technique. It would make better art appreciators of us all.

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Color Theory

This is a cross-post from my other, more frequently posted to, blog. But I think it's also relevant here. And certainly one of the reasons I've gotten so far into color theory is trying to broaden my vocabulary to describe art. It's not just about quilting.

If you are interested in color theory and enjoy jigsaw puzzles where all the shapes are the same, you might like The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.).1 Robin Edmundson first introduced me to the wonders of The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) at a Bloomington Quilters Guild meeting where she lectured on color in the textile arts. To put it on the spectrum of books on color theory, The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) is more accessible than Josef Albers' Interaction of Color (though it is fun and I would definitely recommend it for advanced students of color or once you've got this Munsell (R) thing down pat). The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) is more technical than Deb Menz's Color Works: The Crafter's Guide to Color, another great resource recommended by Robin Edmundson (hey, Mary, it covers knitting and yarn related stuff too!).2 If you're not ready to dive in with two feet, if the sticker shock on the Munsell (R) is a bit much, or you want to keep your focus on crafts and not be distracted by references to painting or other studio arts, Deb Menz's Color Works might be the way to go. But if you think "color tetrads, duh," then maybe you need to move on to the Munsell (R) or the Albers.

The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) is one tool to help you understand color. Now, there's a certain approach to color that would look at this and scoff, "There are so many colors in the rainbow. Use every one!" Well, yes, but what if you use every one and still think it looks like poo? OR what if you're trying to play with color in a different way, perhaps pushing yourself beyond, "this looks pretty with that"? Not that "this looks pretty with that" isn't a perfectly viable approach to color. It certainly is. But if you're looking for a means of expanding your color vocabulary or you seek a more systematic approach to color, The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) might just be for you.

One of the most fun aspects of The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) is the charts. At the end of the first chapter one of the exercises is to apply the color chips to the color charts. Yes, your book comes incomplete. You get to fill in the blanks. Handily they provide little packets labeled by hue (see the first picture at the top of this post). Inside a packet is a tiny book of color chips in that hue (see picture at left). Now, The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) is designed for undergraduate art students, so the instructions are for the most part extremely detailed and need no supplement.

However, for those of us playing along at home, without a professor or classmates to double check our work or to suggest work-arounds, I thought I might provide a little more detail about the process I used to complete my color charts. The book recommends some pretty impressive adhesive options which are not readily available, so I tested an alternative: Scotch Restickable Glue Stick. I found it at Staples or some Staples analog. If you apply one coat, let that dry a little (maybe 30 seconds), then apply a second coat, let that dry a little (maybe 30 seconds), it basically turns anything paper into a Post-It Note. The restickability is important in this application because in later exercises you move the chips around, which would be hard if they were permanently stuck to a chart. But before you go transforming all of your color chips into Post-It chips, read on.

As instructed, I first completed my Hue Value/Chroma chart, which appears at left. This chart is handy on a number of levels, not the least of which is using the red row, which illustrates chroma, as a starting point when arranging the 5R (a.k.a. red) chart. Additionally, its handy color wheel helps you pick out which of the chips in any packet is the highest chroma hue. Finally, you can line your lowest chroma chips up along the value chips on the Hue Value/Chroma chart to figure out your first column, as shown on the left side of the third picture from the top.

To double check that your colors are in the correct order on your hue chart you can use the front and back pages, which are medium gray, to isolate each row and each column. By isolating a column you can check the value progression within that chroma and any chip from a different chroma would stand out. By isolating a row you can check the chroma progression within that value and any chip from a different value would stand out. And using the medium gray paper helps you to see the value of each chip compared to the adjacent chip rather than compared to a pure white background.

Before getting all glue crazy, label the back of your chips with the chart they belong to and whatever other information you have that might help you get it back where it belongs when it inevitably becomes misplaced. For example, in the picture to the left you can see the backs of all the chips from the 5R chart. Know how I can tell? In the bottom right corner I wrote "5R" on each and every one with a black ball point pen. The closest chip in the picture belongs in the sixth row in the second column of the 5R chart. Know how I can tell? In the top left corner I wrote "6/2" which in Munsell (R) notation means it has a value of six and a chroma of two. Once you've labeled all your chips for one chart, go ahead and apply your restickable adhesive of choice and apply them to the chart.

This is my completed 5R (a.k.a. red) chart. The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) doesn't specify the order in which you should complete the hue charts, but please allow me to make two suggestions. First, as I stated above, the Hue Value/Chroma chart is handy because its row illustrating chroma is the 4/ row of the Hue 5R chart. So if you do the 5R chart second after the Hue Value/Chroma chart you can just match your chips to that row and you've got one row in order and you know exactly which row it belongs in. This seems like no big deal, but it really is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that are all the same size when you tip out 30 of these chips. So if you've got seven of those chips pinned down, the rest fall into place more easily. Second, I would recommend completing the hue charts in order around the color wheel. I found that, particularly in the lowest chroma column, the chips for the adjacent hues, like from red to red-purple, almost matched exactly, which reinforces the importance of labeling your chips, but also makes arranging the chips easier than if you hopped around the color wheel, say from red to blue-green.

1. I linked to Amazon solely because they have lots of information and reviews about the book. Presently The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) appears to be out of stock. Moreover, I received my copy from Amazon and the 3-ring binder was broken. They were quite prompt with a replacement, but that binder was also broken in exactly the same way, so I suspect either Amazon is storing them poorly or Fairchild is manufacturing them poorly. This would be no big deal if it weren't for the fact that the size of the pages and the spacing of the holes for the binder rings appears to be unique to The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set, or at least very rare. I have resorted to placing each page into an 81/2x11" page protector and placing them in a standard 3-ring binder. This actually seems like a perfectly good plan for the sheets to which I have affixed color chips, so the chips won't wander far if they become unaffixed. But for the 73 pieces of paper which comprise the 138 pages of text and 4 pages of color plates, it seems to be a bit much.(back)

2. Robin Edmundson also recommended Johannes Itten's Color Star, which is a particular type of color wheel as far as I could tell, and Color by Accident by Ann Johnston, which focuses particularly on dyeing. I briefly perused both of these after the guild lecture and settled on Deb Menz's Color Works as my "if I can't persuade anyone to buy The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set (2nd ed.) for my birthday, this will do nicely" choice. But if you're into dyeing, I think Color by Accident might be preferable to Color Works.(back)

P.S. This post is dedicated to my brother Bob, who gave me The New Munsell (R) Student Color Set despite its outrageous price tag. I love you, man.

Blog Roll

So I figure if we're not blogging about Art History, at least we can read other people's blogs about Art History. So here are a few:

• Art History Today
• Art Knowledge News
• Art News Blog
• Eye Level the blog of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art