Architecture

Philip Johnson’s Glass House: Modern Architecture in Rolling Connecticut Hills

Set on a verdant 49 acre landscaped campus with 13 other structures, in an odd 20th Century way, Philip Johnson’s Glass House is a bit like the Sphynx. It is iconic, sublime and rather mysterious. Johnson’s Glass House may be one of the best known residential structures in not only the United States, but the world.

Philip Johnson’s Glass House, on the grounds of his estate, now open to the public, in New Canaan, CT

It is by any standard an architectural masterpiece. Aesthetically, materially, visually and even structurally, it is a building form of design importance. It touches various aesthetic and visual chords of anyone who sees it. The Glass House is Philip Johnson’s greatest achievement as an architect and as a lifelong creative professional. artes fine arts magazineMore

Georgian Art: The West’s Most Eastern Frontier

www.artesmagazine.com — Fresco from Gelati Monastery, Kutaisi, 13th c.

The Former Soviet Republic of Georgia is unique in every aspect – from its varied landscape ranging from the Caucasus Mountains, the coast of the Black Sea and the deserts on the border with Azerbaijan – to its art.

Georgia’s location makes the country a crossroads of cultures, from the Asiatic influence of the Persian and Ottoman Empires, its occupation under the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. While geographers are uncertain whether to categorise Georgia as Europe or Asia, the country’s culture is distinctly European. artes fine arts magazineMore

Made in California: Pasadena, Santa Barbara Museums Team for Regionalist Exhibit

An exhibition titled California Scene Paintings has just opened at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. For those of you that have not visited this downtown museum, the structure was designed and built specifically to show art. It has a modern architectural design with clean lines, high ceilings and an excellent lighting system which shows paintings very well.

From the beginning the idea for this exhibition was to select outstanding art, with the added interest of depicting scenes relevant to the understanding of California’s history, and especially its cultural history. While California Scene Paintings have been produced since the state began in 1850 and are still being produced today, this particular exhibition focuses on the period between 1930 and 1960. artes fine arts magazineMore

Philly’s New Barnes Foundation with Faithful Interpretation of Collector’s Vision

In July, 1929, months before the stock market crash that resulted in the Great Depression of the 1930s, Albert Coombs Barnes (January 2, 1872 – July 24, 1951), sold his company for some $6 million. He made a vast fortune on the manufacture and sale of the antiseptic drug Argyrol, used to treat gonorrhea. By his thirties, he was a millionaire which in today’s dollars would make him a billionaire. Not only did the timely sale provide him with liquidity, but following the introduction of antibiotics during the post WW II war era, his medicine would have been obsolete.

This allowed him to focus entirely on his great passion–acquisition of contemporary art.

Left: Giorgio de Chirico, Portrait of Albert Barnes (1926). This and all other works pictured are collection: The Barnes Foundation. artes fine arts magazineMore

Sacred Symbol of Armenian Church, National Identity Caught Up in Regional Politics

The Cross is arguably the most familiar symbol of Christianity, but nowhere is this iconography as crucial or culture-entrenched, as it is in Armenia. Wherever you go, thousands of khachkars, or Armenian cross-stones, pervade the mountainous conscience of the world’s oldest Christian nation, providing a rare glimpse into the art of spiritual expression and its modern desecration as a cause of strife with neighboring countries.

The medieval monk Thomas à Kempis, on the subject of the Cross, once remarked, “In the Cross is salvation; in the Cross is life; in the Cross is protection against our enemies; in the Cross is infusion of heavenly sweetness; in the Cross is strength of mind; in the Cross is joy of spirit; in the Cross is excellence of virtue; in the Cross is perfection of holiness….” artes fine arts magazineMore

Morning in the Treasure House: the Yale University Art Gallery Revised

When the doors to the treasure house are thrown open, discrimination is not a viable option. There is only the slow walk through its many chambers, the visitor stunned at the heaped up glories. And so it is with the Yale University Art Gallery, now reconfigured and expanded on a grand scale. It is a display of understandable, if ferocious, excess. This is, after all, a chance to drag a little less than everything out of the cabinets and storage lockers in which some objects have languished for decades. I myself have once seen, arranged like muskets in an armory, a long rank of 18th century Chippendale furniture pieces in a dimly lit Yale cellar.

Left: View of the Bela Lyon Pratt Gallery through the wrought iron gates in the Old Yale Art Gallery building (1928). The gallery houses the 100,000 piece coin and medal collection and study room. artes fine arts magazineMore

New Haven’s Yale University Art Gallery Re-Opens after Extensive Renovation

A recent tour of the newly expanded and renovated Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven Connecticut, has visitors treading on a little-noticed engraved marker inlayed in the stone floor of the Ancient Arts gallery. Cool winter light slants into the space from nearby Chapel Street, illuminating the inscription: ‘Col. JOHN TRUMBULL, Patriot and Artist, Friend and Aid (sic) of WASHINGTON, lies beside his wife beneath this GALLERY OF ART. Lebanon 1756 – New York 1843.’ Look on the back side of any hard-to-find two-dollar bill and you can find a representation of Trumbull’s famous 1817 masterpiece, The Declaration of Independence. Large-scale versions of several pieces from his Revolutionary War series found their way into Bullfinch-designed niches in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. a decade later, but the smaller studies were eventually donated by a dispirited Trumbull to Yale University, after discovering, late in his life, that the American public had little appetite for history paintings, especially for events and personalities so recently transpired.

Above: Reliquary Figure (Mbulu-Ngulu), Kota People, Africa (est. 19th c.). Gift of Charles Benenson `33. artes fine arts magazineMore

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters’ Tapestry Collection Rich with Symbolism

Man’s essential need for warmth and subsequent, very basic desire to express one’s individual presence in the world through creating art, were both well-served by ancient loom weaving and tapestry production. The form evolved originally from early methods of basket weaving, using as materials, linen, flax, wool and silk thread and yarn, instead of grasses and woods. The resulting fabrics’ function as roughly-hewn clothing, portable bedding, rugs and layers for makeshift home insulation (in everything from tents to castles), was soon equaled, and then overtaken, by its role as a medium for what some cultures, in certain eras, regarded as among the highest of art forms. artes fine arts magazine

Left: Tapestry, The Unicorn in Captivity, “Against a millefleur background, the unicorn lies in an enclosure, fastened by a chain to a pomegranate tree.” (early 16th century, Mllefleur Series Two) Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters. The pomegranate is the Christian symbol of hope for eternal life, renewed by its many seeds and blood-red fruit.

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: Winslow Homer, Weatherbeaten (1894). Portland Museum of Art. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson.

Ubiquitous Winslow Homer images of the surf-battered, rocky Maine coastline and pastoral scenes of American life in a simpler time, are so deeply embedded in our sense of national identity that we hardly ‘see’ them any longer. Too many posters of youths in fields and boats, stalwart, wind-swept women gazing out to sea, and gallant sailors reckoning with nature’s wrath have numbed us to the applied skill and visionary genius of Homer’s oeuvre. After a multi-year conservation/renovation process, the Portland Museum of Art has recently opened Homer’s carefully-restored Prout’s Neck studio, just twelve miles from the museum, itself, in Scarborough. To commemorate this important event, a concurrent exhibit features some of his best-known works—38 major oils, watercolors and etchings created during his tenure at the studio—during the last three decades of his life (1883-1910). Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, is on view through December 30, 2012. The Prout’s Neck Studio is a permanent part of the museums collection and is now available for tours. artes fine arts magazineMore

Early Modern Architectural Treasures in Former Soviet Republic, Georgia

When we think of the great art nouveau cities of Europe, images of Paris’s Metropolitan and Barcelona’s Gaudi-lined streets come to mind. Even high up in the Baltics, Riga has firmly established itself as one of Europe’s iconic art nouveau cities, with its own particular brand of modernism.

Yet there is one city that is nearly bypassed on each and every list, whose name has only started to be recognised by art nouveau aficionados – Tbilisi.

Above: Narikala Fortress, Tblisi, Georgia. Photo: G. Gaeser, 2011

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