The View from Here

GATHER `ROUND

Sandro Botticelli, ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate’ (1489-90). Uffizi, Florence

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

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.

ICA 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.

‘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.

D.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.

ICA 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.

Broadway’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.

Washington’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.

THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY in Washington, DC, has opened “1898: U.S. IMPERIAL VISIONS AND REVISIONS.” The museum describes this as the first major Smithsonian exhibition to examine the U.S. intervention in Cuba, and the nation’s expansion into Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. As such, it marks the 125th anniversary of the U.S. acquiring overseas territories and its emergence as a world power.