Art-Museum Trash Talk

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January 29, 2010, 2:14 pm

Super Bowl Wager Provokes Art-Museum Trash Talk

It’s not only mayors and inveterate gamblers who place bets on the Super Bowl — art museums do, too. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art have placed a friendly wager on the outcome of the big game on Feb. 7: if the New Orleans Saints win, the Indianapolis museum will send “The Fifth Plague of Egypt” — that is, the landscape from its collection painted by J.M.W. Turner in 1800 — to the New Orleans museum, which gets to hang it for three months. If the Indianapolis Colts prevail, the New Orleans institution will send the painting “Ideal View of Tivoli,” a 1644 work by Claude Lorrain, to Indianapolis for three months. The Times-Picayune said the bet was instigated by Tyler Green, who writes the Modern Art Notes blog for artsjournal.com, and who helped egg on some tongue-in-cheek trash talk between the museums’ directors. When John Bullard, the New Orleans museum director, offered to wager a valuable Renoir, his Indianapolis counterpart, Maxwell Anderson, dismissed it as a “sentimental blancmange”; Mr. Bullard replied: “I am amused that Renoir is too sweet for Indianapolis. Does this mean that those Indiana corn farmers have simpler tastes?”

El Greco in . . . Greece

The stunning 1983 discovery of the signature of Domenikos Theotokopoulos on an exquisite Byzantine icon dramatically enlarged our knowledge of the enigmatic painter far better known as El Greco (1541-1614). This small egg tempera on wood panel depicting the Dormition of the Virgin has long been owned by the archdiocese of the Greek island of Syros but was rarely seen. It had suffered passages of overpainting and minor abrasions, and these were delicately removed or restored in the wake of its new acclaim. Yet even with some of its decorative surface effaced, it bears the markings of what would be El Greco's richly synthetic career. The panel follows the traditional, stylized format of the popular Byzantine subject, and embodies the deeply emotive character of Greek icon painting as a whole. But it reflects as well a burgeoning interest in the depiction of real space and of animated, sculptural figures, and so suggests the artist's early exposure to the naturalistic painting of Italy even before he sailed from his native Crete for Venice around 1567.

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The Onassis Cultural Center in New York

Hudson River Homecoming

The majestic paintings of the 19th-century Hudson River School enjoy tremendous popularity today because of their Romantic and often highly dramatic depiction of nature. America's first national school of landscape painting, it was essentially founded by the English-born Thomas Cole (1801-1848), who regarded America as "the new Eden" and painted it as such. Cole produced many of his visionary, panoramic landscapes and architectural fantasies as allegories of human experience, often imbuing them with religious overtones in tune with the public spirit of his time.

Thomas Cole, 'Scene From "The Last of the Mohicans"' (1827).

His mantle was worn with increased sophistication by his pupil Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), by the Düsseldorf-trained Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and by such contemporaries as Asher Durand (1796-1886), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) and John Frederick Kensett (1816-72). Moreover, the school's Romantic urge to glorify the serene wonders of nature—with its mountains veiled in mist and scenery often bathed in the glowing light of dawn or sunset—influenced the somewhat younger group of landscape painters known as the Luminists and served as a springboard for a later generation of artists including George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder and, of course, Winslow Homer.

 Surprisingly, one of the finest and earliest collections of the Hudson River School is maintained not along the Hudson, but on the banks of the Connecticut River at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Founded in 1842, and housed partly in its original castellated building designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the nation's oldest public art museum. Its riches include important old masters, a magisterial representation of 19th- and 20th-century masterpieces and a vast collection of important decorative arts.


Hudson River school : masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Q 758.1 K 

A music ?

A fellow librarian wanted help in finding the Schoenberg orchestration of the the Brahms Piano Quartet #1.
Brahms, Johannes, 1833-1897.
Piano quartet in G minor, op. 25 [sound recording (CD)] / Brahms-Schoenberg.
New York, N.Y. : Vox Allegretto, p1995.

Capeman

A patron came over to the Information Desk and asked for the music to the Broadway show that Paul Simon wrote. Had to Google it: The Capeman. The 1997 show featured Marc Anthony as the young Salvador Agron, and Ruben Blades as the older Salvador Agron. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet, wrote the book with Simon. The story is of a young Puerto Rican kid who joins a gang, and on his way to a rumble, mistakenly stabs to death two kids who were not members of the other gang.

Frankie and Lady

On the ride upstate, after crossing the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge heading north, passed by Saint Raymond's Cemetery. That is where Lady Day, Billie Holiday, is buried. Once in Chichester, I did some searching, and came upon others buried in that same cemetery. AMong the known names are Frankie Lymon, Hilton Ruiz, and Mary Mallon aka Typhoid Mary.

Caillebotte

New book. Painting is entitled Oarsmen rowing on the Yerres, 1877.

The Floor Scrapers is one of his magnificent paintings. There is, of course, a website: http://www.gustavcaillebotte.org/. Back on 18 November 2008 I made an entry on Caillebotte.

Not many pretty pictures

AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen

Muhammed Muheisen caught a demonstrator dressed as Santa Claus hurling stones at Israeli police in 2008.

Santa did not forget to put on his kaffiyeh.

For a small country, Israel, alas, generates a lot of news. A consequence is that Israelis are news junkies dependent on all media, including print. And great photojournalists such as Micha Bar-Am and David Rubinger are as well known to them as Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith were to Americans 60 years ago. For the past seven years the country has celebrated its photojournalists with "Local Testimony," a monthlong exhibition in Tel Aviv of the best photographs and photo essays taken during the preceding year and submitted to the juried competition. This year roughly 7,600 pictures taken by 300 photographers were submitted. The eighth iteration of "Local Testimony" is at the Eretz Israel Museum, a more appropriate venue than its former sites.



This year 300 pictures are up, divided into 10 categories: News, Politics, Portraits, Daily Life, Society and Community, Religion and Faith, Life Style, Nature and Environment, Culture and Arts, and Sports. Three prizes are awarded in each category for both the best single pictures and the best series. Additionally, there is a heterogeneous division called Curator's Choice. There is a long tradition of photography in Israel, with schools in several cities, the Open Museum of Photography in Tel-Hai, as well as two schools of photography now on the West Bank, so it is not surprising the pictures are technically sophisticated. The turmoil and vitality of the country ensure there is interesting content.

The Chameleon Days of Dick Hyman