Architecture

?A Stunning Exhibition (and Quagmire) at The Mattress Factory,“Factory Installed 2019”

The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh is internationally acclaimed for showcasing some of the most innovative and divergent selections of installation art in the United States. Its co-founders, the late Barbara Luderowski and Michael Olijnyk, very early recognized the importance of Installation art that celebrates a shift in focus from object-hood and what art visually represents to what site-specific work could communicate about a place while providing unique experiences for viewers. Since 1977, this institution has given over 600 artists the opportunity to experiment, take risks, and explore the creative process while engaging with the community through its residency program.

Sculptor, Patrick Dougherty and ‘A Passing Fancy’ in Falmouth, MA?

Patrick Dougherty is motivated to work with stick materials because of increased massive urbanization and the destruction of forests all over the United States. Knowing that sticks have been a foundation for human survival across cultures and throughout time –being used for building shelters, ladders, and tools for hunting in addition to keeping warm and cooking—he finds them a universal material for his work. Since the early 1980s Dougherty has been fabricating huge environmental installations that he calls Stickworks. The majority of his large, quirky and temporary pieces take approximately three weeks to construct and each monumental sculpture is distinctly unique. Prior to starting a work he takes time getting to know the milieu in which it will be created, oft visiting the place several times prior to its actual construction. The installation’s final shape results from Dougherty’s observations about the overall locale, the interaction of the volunteers in the community who help build the work, as well as the specificity of the site where it is erected.

?Washington’s Freer Gallery with Whistler’s Watercolors: a Rare Look

Gilded Age industrialist Charles Lang Freer met artist James McNeill Whistler in London in 1890. Whistler was an American expatriate artist who had reinvented himself in the previous decade after suffering a serious fallout with his chief patron, Frederick Leyland, over Whistler’s resplendent but over-the-top design for Leyland’s “Peacock Room.”

The Peacock Room, designed by James McNeill Whistler for shipping magnate Frederick Leyland in 1876

Book Review: Walter Gropius, Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus

Award-winning author and critic Fiona MacCarthy is out to change wrong-headed perceptions of Walter Gropius in her biography. And she succeeds.

His first (and angry) wife Alma Mahler, also Gustav’s first wife, described Walter Gropius bitterly and unflatteringly in her memoir on their combative marriage. Evelyn Waugh satires him in his novel Decline and Fall as the stiff and doctrinaire Otto Silenus. In his book Bauhaus to Our House, author Tom Wolfe uses him as a human swizzle stick in a sour cocktail raised to modernist architecture as little more than soulless functionalism. Frank Lloyd Wright admirers championed the latter’s “nature” inspired approach to design over Gropius’ purely rational and functional use of glass and steel. For them, Wright was warmly organic; Gropius was dismissed as all angles, coolly geometric. Over the years, he was often described by architectural critics and historians as humorless. However, in truth, though certainly ‘Germanic courtly’ in demeanor, Gropius could be quite charismatic and socially adroit.

Thankfully, award-winning author and critic Fiona MacCarthy is out to change wrong-headed perceptions in her biography. And she succeeds in challenging too long held notions that Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, one of the fathers of modern architecture, was austere, cold, and withdrawn. Rather than giving us a portrait of a mechanical architectural rationalist, she underscores Gropius’ humanity, and how that inspired his visionary philosophy as well as the consummate aesthetic courage he showed in through an extremely volatile, even dangerous, political age.

The Smithsonian’s Freer/Sackler Museum has opened a stunning exhibition that showcases the Empresses of China’s long-lived Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). A collaboration with the Peabody Museum and Beijing’s Palace Museum, “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City” is intended to address the neglected history of these women: the press release argues that “male officials who wrote Qing court history recorded very little” about the Empresses’ activities, and this exhibit is meant to tell the little known stories of how these women lived and how they influenced politics and international diplomacy.

Above, left: Empress Dowager Chongqing at the Age of Eighty, Ignatius Sichelbarth (Ai Qimeng, 1708–1780), Yi Lantai
(act. ca. 1748–86), and Wang Ruxue (act. 18th century) China, Beijing, Qianlong period (1736–95), 1771 Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
Palace Museum, Gu6453 © The Palace Museum.More

A Creative Camelot: The Bauhaus and Harvard University

This inspiring show celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Bauhaus.

Founded shortly after World War I in Germany, the Bauhaus was the most famous and influential avant-garde art and design school in the 20th Century. Its artists, architects, designers craftpersons and students generated a creative, all-encompassing conversation about the nature of architecture, art and design in the modern era. Over the course of its relatively short, 14-year history, Bauhaus was at first located at Weimar, then Dessau, and finally Berlin (closed by order of Nazi Party, 1932).

Above, left: The Gropius House, c. 1937-8. Photo: Mark Favermann

George Shaw, “Ash Wednesday: 7.00am,” 2004–5, Humbrol enamel on board, Private Collection, courtesy of the artist and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London, © George Shaw 2018.

In his complex exhibition “A Corner of a Foreign Field, realist English painter George Shaw undertakes a time traveling odyssey to investigate the flourishing forested environs and the remains of Tile Hill, the post war council estate in England where he grew up. From 1996 to 2018, Shaw produced 70 paintings, prints, sketchbooks and 60 drawings that poignantly capture, in a “before” and “after” sequel, images of what a relatively short time ago was a vibrant neighborhood as it atrophies from neglect. The show is subdivided into ten themes that evolve through the course of the exhibition: there is “Recording a World,” “Landmarks and Memorials,” “Graffiti and Abstraction,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “The End of Time,” to name but a few. The artist blends references to art history, personal memory, popular culture and 70s political realities to create a convincing amalgam of visual art whose reminiscent energy can be viscerally felt.More

Lunch with Georgia O’Keeffe (at the New York Botanical Garden)

New York Botanical Gardens, Enid A. Haupt Conservatory

The most magical ‘back to nature’ attraction for out-of-town-tourists, as well as native dwellers, is New York’s City’s Botanical Garden, situated in the Bronx. With over 250 acres, containing unique tropical and desert habitats, rose and rock gardens, a lily pond filled with goldfish that come to the surface to talk to you, the county’s largest Victorian-era glass house, and miles of lushly planted paths to both walk or tram, this National Historic Landmark preserve is a wonderful way to spend a glorious day. And most astonishing is a 50 acre old-growth forest of massive maples, oaks, and chestnuts that has stood, blessedly so, unmoved since the American Revolution. I might add for those that love to shop and eat, there are two eateries, two picnic areas if you prefer to bring your own lunch which I and three friends did, and a wonder-filled gift shop, offering Botanical Garden-raised plants of all kinds for sale. One of those is currently gracing my living room.More

Conserving Cultural Heritage—the Tangible and Intangible

Columbia’s Cartagena, is a 500-year old urban jewel in the Caribbean. But climate change and rising sea levels threaten its heritage.

Urban planning is the formulating of a strategy for design and regulation of the uses of space in a city, town, or metropolitan region. The profession focuses on the physical form, economic functions, and social impacts of the urban environment, as well as on the specific location of different activities within the city space. Urban planning draws on engineering, architecture, and landscape architecture, as well as economic, social, and political concerns. Thus it is a technical profession that depends on political will and public participation — in order for it to succeed development must be regulated.More

Washington’s Hillwood Museum: ‘Fabergé Rediscovered’

Why do people collect? What drives someone’s passion? Collectors are a fascinating species, perpetually both hunting-and-gathering and then showcasing their accumulated treasures.

Left: Catherine the Great, 1914, Fabergé Easter Egg.

Businesswoman and philanthropist Marjorie Merriwether Post is a prime example of a highly-dedicated collector. When her father C.W. Post, founder of the Postum Cereal Company, died in 1914, Marjorie became one of the wealthiest women in the world. She lived in New York City and began collecting to furnish her vast Fifth Avenue apartment, focusing on fine and decorative arts. She was an early patron of Cartier when he opened his business in Manhattan, and she became interested in Russian Imperial art when she began meeting emigres fleeing Russia after the 1917 revolution. According to Malcolm Forbes, Mrs. Post “pioneered Faberge collecting” (Malcolm Forbes, 7/30/1973, quoted in Fabergé Rediscovered catalogue, p. 163).More