art conservation

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

Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment” at Maryland’s Glenstone Museum

Mitchell Rales, the science and technology billionaire, and his art historian-wife, Emily Wei Rales, are co-founders and directors of Glenstone Museum (left). The Rales foresee Glenstone Museum as being the “21st century version of New York’s Frick Collection.” The founders aim “to create a seamless integration of art, architecture, and landscape and make it available free of charge to all who wish to visit.” It initially opened in 2006 with a 30,000-square-foot pavilion designed by the late New York architect Charles Gwathmey. The newest pavilion by Thomas Phifer and Partners will open in October 2018, adding 50,000 square feet of new indoor display space to the 9,000 square feet of existing exhibit space, known as the Gallery. Glenstone will become one of the largest private museums in the world, comprised of an arrival hall, entry pavilion, bookstore and two cafés along with 130 acres of designed landscape with newly installed outdoor sculptures.More

A Kind of Portrait: “Scenes from the Collection” at the Jewish Museum, NY

In January, the Jewish Museum in New York opened a major new exhibition, “Scenes from the Collection.” In a series of linked galleries, the Museum presents elements of its distinguished collection, aspiring to draw out “the many strands of Jewish tradition, spirituality, and history brought into expression through artistic creativity” and to create “a mirror of Jewish identities and a guide for the formation of new ones.” In effect, as the exhibition text notes, “Scenes” might be considered “a kind of self-portrait of the Jewish Museum.”

Left, above: View of the “Constellations” Gallery. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum, NY.More

Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel: The Jew Who Sculpted Confederate Monuments

Author’s Note: The ultimately fatal “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia began on Friday night, August 11, 2017 at the Rotunda, the iconic building at the heart of the University of Virginia campus. The ralliers were there to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park named for him in downtown Charlottesville. The protesters gathered under a statue of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s outsized ?gure stands on an inverted Liberty Bell at the Rotunda’s entrance. Milling at Jefferson’s feet, the protesters shouted neo-Nazi and white supremacist slogans like “Blood and Soil!” “White Lives Matter!” and, in a pointed reference to removing Lee’s monument, “You/Jews will not replace us.” Most likely, not one of them knew that a Jew sculpted that Jefferson image (left). That Jew was Moses Jacob Ezekiel—the very same Jew who sculpted the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Confederate Memorial is one of the tallest and most elaborate structures in Arlington National Cemetery. Erected in 1914, nearly a half-century after the war Civil War ended, the monument was designed and executed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, an expatriate, gay, American Jewish southerner. The Confederate Memorial is one of several monuments Ezekiel executed glorifying the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. The full corpus of Ezekiel’s work reflects his identity as an artist, a southerner, and a Jew.More

A Match Made: Jim St Clair at New York’s Waterfront Museum

The Waterfront Museum is located afloat, on the waterfront in Red Hook, NY, aboard the landmark-designated, Lehigh Valley Barge #79.

For the past twenty years the Waterfront Museum, which floats on the edge of New York Harbor about a mile south east of the Statue of Liberty, has featured numerous exhibitions that concern our waterways and coastline. The current exhibition, Derelicts: Oil Paintings by Jim St. Clair, is thanks to the film, theater and television production designer, Dean Taucher who met the museum’s president, David Sharps, and quickly organized the exhibition matching St. Clair’s gritty and highly tactile paintings with this unique and wonderful institution.More

Footprints in History: Penn Museum with New Middle East Galleries Exhibit

Clay paving brick, walls of Ur-Nammu (c. 2500 BCE). 37.5 cm sq, 9.5 cm deep. Credit: British Museum/University Museum Expedition to Ur, Iraq, 1926.

“Without the city, there can be no civilization” ~Ibn Khaldun, 14^th–century, CE philosopher and historian

If ever there were clear evidence of the adage that ‘past is prologue,’ it can surely be found in the newly installed Middle East galleries exhibit at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Extraordinary artifacts dating back up to 5,000 years Before the Common Era (BCE) are displayed in ways that build on the narrative of an expanding culture, sited principally in the once water and sun-drenched Fertile Crescent (likely site of the Biblical Garden of Eden)—and today’s Iran, Iraq, portions of Syria and Turkey. The preservation of artifacts and the ways in which they can represent the story of everyday life in a Bronze Age community, and thus through five millennia, to their emergence as elegant, highly-organized urban societies is breathtaking and spellbinding. Curatorial excellence, wedded with extraordinary scholarship were the keys to bringing this exhibition to life—and life’s presence can be felt and seen in what is placed on dynamic interactive display here.More

‘Cézanne Portraits’ at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Paul Cézanne, Self-Portrait (1883-1887), 44 × 36 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The landmark exhibition Cézanne Portraits is a collaborative endeavor co-organized by London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC— for this, the final stop of its tour. Even though modified to some extent, due to loan restrictions, it reveals a remarkable selection of portrayals, disclosing the distinct qualities of this extraordinary artist, a forerunner to Cubism whose work became the essence for abstract art of the 20th century. Both Matisse and Picasso have said that Cézanne “is the father of us all.” Yet Cézanne stands alone between his Impressionist and Post-Impressionist peers for his deep respect for the art of the past. Throughout his career Cézanne continuously went to the Louvre to consult the Old Masters.More

Two Cheers for the Revolution: Telling Difficult Stories at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution

This exterior view of MOAR is about as inviting as its stolid massing gets. The architecture conceals rather than reveals the building’s subject. All photos courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution.

The United States was birthed in resistance, rebellion, and war. The story of the American Revolution, repeated, refined, and simplified over many generations, has become an iconic element of our national fable: our patriot “ancestors” resisted the tyranny of the greatest empire of its day, preserved American liberties, and established a novel kind of egalitarian republic. The catch-phrases of “the times that try men’s souls”–“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “all men are created equal,” and “the consent of the governed”–still resonate in our political and cultural discourse. And yet the story of the Revolution is complex and messy, full of sharp elbows and glaring contradictions, including the persistence of slavery, the dispossession of Native Americans, tensions within the states, among the states, and between state and federal governments, and a tendency to advantage our elites over our masses. If ever there was a difficult, challenging story to tell, it is the story of our Revolution and its impact on subsequent generations, right up to the contemporary moment. In a sense, the story of the American Revolution, which is also the story of our first civil war, has always been contested and fraught.More

Editor’s Letter: July, 2017

“We must first look, before we can see.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Left: Isamu Noguchi, Mother and Child (1944-1947), Onyx, 19 3/8 × 12 3/4 × 8 5/8″. Noguchi Museum, NY.

On Being Taught Not to Fly

Another essay by art and theater critic, world traveler and ARTES contributing editor, Edward Rubin…

It wasn’t until I visited the Doge’s Palace in Venice (below, left and right [detail]) and came face to face with “Paradise,” Tintoretto’s large painting that hangs majestically in the Ducal Hall that I discovered that Tintoretto was still alive. Here he was, some 400 years later, looking down at me looking up at him. I didn’t have to read the painting’s label which no doubt listed the artist’s name, the title of the painting, and the date it was executed. I didn’t have time. I was pulled right past the words into the heart of the matter. Communication was instantaneous. I knew immediately that this seething mass of humanity, posing as saints and angels on canvas, all 23 by 72 feet of it, was transmogrified flesh…Tintoretto’s. More

Roman Ruins: Update on a Once Great Beauty

On a recent sunny September afternoon, I stood on one of the hills of Rome with a group of Italians, looking across the brown Tiber (below) to the old orange buildings of Trastevere. A bright green bird, maybe some sort of parrot, swooped over the river toward a row of darker green umbrella pines. Modern Rome has few birds, except for sparrows and pigeons, and precious little quiet, so we stood for a while and drank it in.More