‘GORDON PARKS : CAMERA PORTRAITS’ AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, WASH., D.C.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has recently opened an exhibition celebrating the art of Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the most distinguished photographers of the 20th century. In the heyday of large-format magazines, Parks created photo essays that regularly appeared in LIFE, EBONY, VOGUE, and GLAMOUR. In 1949, LIFE hired him as the first African American on its staff, a position he held until 1972.
Left: Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941, gelatin silver print, Purchased as the Gift of Alan and Marsha Paller, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Andreessen via the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Raj and Indra Nooyi, Mitchell P. Rales, David M. Rubenstein, and Darren Walker in honor of Sharon Percy Rockefeller , 2021.61.1
The National Gallery’s exhibition “Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits” was inspired by Parks’ 1948 book, CAMERA PORTRAITS; THE TECHNIQUES AND PRINCIPLES OF DOCUMENTARY PORTRAITURE. Here, he urged photographers to move portrait photography out of the controlled environment of a studioand instead to use a documentary approach that situated subjects where they lived and worked. For himself, Parks strongly believed that documentary photographers had a “moral obligation” to absorb their subjects’ lives-and-times in order to convey a semblance of “truthful” imagery. (NGA Press Release)More
GATHER `ROUND
LIKE A LATE 15TH CENTURY VERSION OF A GROUP SELFIE, seven fresh young faces crowd into a rondo viewfinder to immortalize a shared moment. But, not to be misinterpreted as a casual contemporary scene, here the ageless message is unmistakable. In this painting Madonna of the Pomegranate (Uffizi, Florence), by Italian Renaissance artist, Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni dei Filipepi (1445–1510), better known as Sandro Botticelli, he makes it easy to identify the figures on canvas. Central to the composition, the largest of the figures is the Virgin Mary draped in costly lapis lazuli and crimson garb and surrounded in this carefully composed, symmetrical composition by six winged angels—three to each side. Under a radiating, golden glow emanating from the heavens they come bearing lilies and garlands of roses —symbols of purity and innocence—for both mother and child. The generously proportioned Christ Child rests weightlessly in his mother’s arms, as each gingerly touches a pomegranate—the central motif in the scene. The careful choice of the preposition of, not with a pomegranate, alerts the viewer to the artist’s belief in the anthropomorphized relationship between the figure of the Virgin, her God-Child and their connection to the human condition, as symbolized by the fruit of this lowly deciduous shrub.
Asheville Art Museum “Beyond the Lens: Photorealism and Painting”
Asheville Art Museum “Beyond the Lens: Photorealist Perspectives on Looking, Seeing, and Painting”
Through February 5, 2024.
THE ART. DEALER LOUIS K. MEISEL formulated the word “Photorealism” in 1969 to define artists whose art depended on photographs that typically projected onto the canvas letting the image be simulated with exacting precision and exactness. Oft the artist used an airbrush,that was specifically designed to retouch photographs, so to intensify the accuracy of the picture. The term first appeared in print the following year for the Whitney Museum’s exhibition “Twenty-two Realists.” The Photorealism movement coincided with Conceptual Art, Pop Art and Minimalism. Photorealist artists along with some makers of Pop art reestablished the importance of process, deliberate planning and exacting brushwork over that of extemporization and automatism.
Above, left: Don Jacot, Monkey Business, 2014, oil on canvas, 16×12 ¼”. Collection of Louis K. and Susan Pear Meisel. ©Don Jacot
MoreBook Review: Mark Rothko ‘Paintings on Paper’
MARK ROTHKO: PAINTINGS ON PAPER by Adam Greenhalgh (Yale University Press, 200 pages). This is a catalogue for an exhibition that is currently at The National Gallery of Art, Washington (through March 31, 2024) and will then move into The National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo (May 16 through September 22, 2024).
Left: Cover illustration for Mark Rothko exhibition catalogue
Greehalgh’s book is a revelatory exploration of Mark Rothko’s paintings on paper that transforms our understanding of a preeminent twentieth-century artist.
Following the world-wide chaos, devastation, and human suffering of the Great Depression and World War II, artists started to paint in a challengingly abstract way. Abstract Expressionism was among the movements that explored this new form of visual articulation, which were united in wanting to tear down or deconstruct figurative imagery. The idea was to come up with something pictorially unique; art itself became the object — it was not intended to be a representation of something or someplace, but of color and emotion.
Painter Mark Rothko (1903–1970) is now acclaimed for his often towering abstract paintings on canvas. His luminous artworks convey experiences of joy, despair, ecstasy, and tragedy. These paintings also undoubtedly reflected Rothko’s personal demons, particularly his frequent bouts of self-destructive depression. He is best known as an artist who specialized in immersive canvases; few are aware that Rothko completed more than 1,000 paintings on paper over the course of his career. And that he did not consider these pieces to be preliminary studies, but finished paintings.
Right: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1959. ©KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL AND CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO/COLLECTION OF KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL
In this beautifully illustrated volume, National Gallery of Art curator and art historian Adam Greenhalgh argues that these ‘ephemeral’ works played an important role in Rothko’s aesthetic development and explains how they contributed to his reputation and acceptance. The result is a fresh appreciation of an under-recognized facet of the artist’s creativity. Ranging from his early figurative subjects and surrealist sketches to his better known soft-edged, feathered rectangular colored clouds floating on rectangle fields (the latter often realized at monumental scale), these pictures revise and reshape what we have thought was Rothko’s artistic mission.
Bringing together nearly one hundred rarely displayed examples, Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper accompanies the first major exhibition in forty years dedicated to Rothko’s works on paper. The book and the show offer a splendid opportunity to look, with new eyes, at this artist’s shimmering, radiant, and distinctively personal, painterly statements.
By Mark Favermann, Contributing Writer
article courtesy of Art.org
Washington, DC’s Connersmith Gallery: “Reunion”
“REUNION’ WAS A GEMOF AN EXHIBITION at the CONNERSMITH Gallery in Washington, DC. Although this was a small show comprised of only eleven paintings, it represented a stellar exhibit displaying museum quality work seldom or never exhibited publicly. Several of the paintings come from the estate of Vincent Melzac and others are in private collections from the Washington DC area including work by Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring and Hilda Shapiro Thorpe.
MoreD.C.’s Katzen Art Center- “Lost Europe: On the Edge of Memories”
THE UKRANIAN EXHIBITION Lost Europe: On the Edge of Memories was curated by Milena Kalinovska. It presented 75 black and white documentary photographs that survey rural Ukrainian life between 1991, the year of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and 2018. These photographs capture a simpler but disappearing world, accelerated by the barbarian war presently being raged by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The works were created by three Czech photographers, Karel Cudlín, Jan Dobrovský, and Martin Wágner, who spent their adulthood in the devastated societal, political, and economic scene of Eastern European countries under Soviet-led communism. They provide viewers with a close look into the world of rustic Ukraine and its people. After the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991, the photographers observed and recorded the transformation of the every day life in the Ukraine countryside.
MoreICA Watershed, Boston, Maravilla: ‘Mariposa Relámpago’
GUADALUPE MARAVILLA’S EXHIBITION, Mariposa Relámpago at Boston’s ICA Watershed was a dazzling arrangement of imaginative work. The exhibit centered on his personal journey of migration when he came to the United States as an 8-year-old fleeing the civil war in El Salvador. Several years earlier his parents escaped to the United States when in 1984, Guadalupe Maravilla was notified that a network of coyotes would guide him through El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to Tijuana, Mexico to eventually reunite with his family in the USA. The arduous, physical journey took more than two months. Maravilla and other children were part of the first wave of undocumented youth to come to the US as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. Although he emigrated when he was only eight, he didn’t become a US citizen until he was twenty-six.
MoreWashington’s National Gallery of Art presents DOROTHEA LANGE: SEEING PEOPLE
BEST KNOWN FOR HER ICONIC documentary photographs of Depression America, Dorothea Lange is being celebrated in a new exhibition this Fall at the National Gallery of Art. DOROTHEA LANGE: SEEING PEOPLE is focused on her photographs as portraiture, with the intention of conveying “the critical role she played in the development of documentary photography, and her advocacy of photography as a vehicle for social change.”(Lange Press Release, and catalogue, p. 13.)
MoreNYC’s Tenri Cultural Institute with Sobin Park: Pictograph to Sign
Tenri Cultural Institute presents Sobin Park: Pictograph to Sign, an exhibition of recent monumental multi-paneled pencil and powder works on paper, curated by Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos. Among these works there is also a huge framed compilation of multiple sheets with small drawings mingled with lines of text. This body of work spans the years from 2021 to 2023 when Park experienced personal isolation of the strict Covid lockdown in China which was enforced to its final end in 2023. Korean-born Sobin Park lives and works in Beijing, China, returning to Korea to visit family. One of the most dominant traits of her art is the tremendous energy she instills into the enormous charged formats conflated with her personal style of mark-making. This endows the traditional symbolic narrative form of her works with a post-modern edge. Her feminine style of touch is delicate due to the graphite material, yet powerful, organic and creative; there is nothing manufactured or pre-processed about it. She does not insert photography or digital imagery into her harmonious formats.
MoreAlma Thomas: An Artist for Our Times at D.c.’s American Art Museum
IN THE MID-1960S, when America’s streets were filled with anti-war protesters, Civil Rights marchers, and demands for Black Power, Alma Thomas had just retired from teaching and was launching her career as a full-time painter. Ignoring pressure from Black activists, she refused to be type-cast as a race artist, and instead painted canvases of vibrant colors that expressed her exuberant spirit. What a presence she must’ve been in the classroom!
More‘The Rock & Roll Man’: Dancing in the Aisles at Off-Broadway’s New World Stages Theatre
OK, SO THEY WEREN’T EXACTLY DANCING in the aisles at the New World Stages Theatre the night that I attended The Rock & Roll Man. Forget that I said that. What the audience was doing to show their love for everything that was flashing before their eyes during the musical’s fast-paced two act wonder-filled 2 hours and 20 minutes was hooting, hollering, whistling, laughing, clapping, snapping their fingers, gyrating in their seats and most surprising of all shedding nostalgic tears of joy, all of this while basking in the glorious glow of Rock & Roll.
One would think that the target audience for this musical, which features the life and times of American Alan Freed (1923-1965), the American who promoted large mixed-race acts which helped spread the importance of rock and roll music throughout North America and beyond, would be the grey-headed seniors like myself.
MoreD.C.’s Public Library, “Back to the Future”shows da Vinci’s Notebooks; Museum of American History with Buckminster Fuller’s Dome
SPECULATING ABOUT THE FUTURE is an endlessly fascinating pursuit. In his 1895 novel THE TIME MACHINE, H.G. Wells set his story at the dawn of an apocalyptic new age of modernity. Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie METROPOLIS portrayed a futuristic city where a highly-cultured utopia merrily squatted on top of a bleak underworld of workers. On a much lighter note, Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 sci-fi comedy film BACK TO THE FUTURE inserted a teenager in a time-traveling DeLorean car and sent him back 30 years to 1955 to make sure his future parents would fall in love (to thereby produce him!), and then return him to his 1985 present. In August, an Olivier-award winning musical based on BACK TO THE FUTURE will open at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre.
MoreICA Exhibit, Watershed, Boston: Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago
GUADALUPE MARAVILLA’S EXHIBITION Mariposa Relámpago at Boston’s ICA Watershed is a dazzling arrangement of imaginative work. The exhibit centers on his personal journey of migration when he came to the United States as an 8-year-old fleeing the civil war in El Salvador. Several years earlier his parents escaped to the United States when in 1984, Guadalupe Maravilla was notified that a network of coyotes would guide him through El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to Tijuana, Mexico to eventually reunite with his family in the USA. The arduous, physical journey took more than two months. Maravilla and other children were part of the first wave of undocumented youth to come to the US as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. Although he emigrated when he was only eight, he didn’t become a US citizen until he was twenty-six.
MoreBroadway’s’Bad Cinderella’: a Latina Cinderella, Her Crazy-Ass Stepmother and Two Black Princes
LITTLE DID ANDREW LLOYD WEBER KNOW when he saddled his most recent musical with the ill-chosen name Bad Cinderella that he was handing theater critics here in New York a cudgel with which to beat his latest Broadway production to a pulp. And beat it they did, savagely so, to the point of forcing it to close at the Imperial Theatre on June 4, 2023 after only 33 previews, 85 regular performances, with a loss rumored to be in the neighborhood of $19 million dollars. I might add, more or less, this same play, a retooled feminist version of the Cinderella fairytale then named solely Cinderella, opened at Gillian Lynne Theatre in London’s West End to mostly warm reviews after several pandemic-related stops and starts on June 25, 2021.
MoreWashington’s Hillwood Museum: “Reflections in a Collector’s Eye”
“COLLECTING” IS PART OF our DNA. From earliest times, we have collected food, clothing, and shelter to survive. But once those basics are met, we look around and find something new and glitzy to make our hearts beat faster. Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) was a preeminent 20th century collector. She grew up in wealth and turned that into a megafortune as CEO of General Foods, notably embracing the new idea of “frozen foods” in the 1920s. With her fortune secured, she next decided to build a life that would make her happy.
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