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.
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.
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.
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!
ALFRED UHRY’S MUSICAL PARADE, co-conceived by Hal Prince with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, is now playing to sell-out crowds and rave reviews, and back on Broadway after 25 years (for a limited run through Sunday, August 6) at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York City. A long time in coming, Parade took its first Broadway bow at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998 under the direction of Harold Prince where it won a Tony Award for best score and book. It ran for 39 previews and 84 regular performances.
In a major reworking in September of 2007, Parade, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford at the Donmar Warehouse in London, opened to positive reviews. As one critic noted, “the Donmar production establishes Parade as an ambitious, musically daring piece that deserves praise attempting to intertwine the political and the personal.”
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has just opened an exhibition co-organized with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, entitled The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeil Whistler. Featuring 60 paintings, drawings, and prints, the exhibition brings together nearly all of Whistler’s depictions of his longtime partner and model Joanna Hiffernan. The exhibit is curated by Margaret F. MacDonald, professor emerita of art History, University of Glasgow, in collaboration with Ann Dumas, curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, and Charles Brock, associate curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art. The curatorial intention, as the catalogue’s “Foreword” explains, is to delve into “the pair’s professional and personal relationship, the iconic works of art resulting from that relationship, and the influence and resonance of those works for artists into the twenty-first century.” The exhibition is the first to “fully acknowledge the role Hiffernan played in Whistler’s career and the first to consider their creations as collaborations.” (7)
James McNeill Whistler, Jo, 1861, drypoint on ivory laid paper sheet: 17 3/4 x 12 1/4″. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection. ID: 5158-080
Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, and went to West Point briefly before moving to Paris to study art. In 1859, he moved to London and soon met Joanna Hiffernan. Born in Limerick in 1839, she was among thousands of Irish who, devastated by the famine, had immigrated to London. She was working as an artist’s model when discovered by Whistler. He was overwhelmed, and in a letter to fellow artist Henri Fantin-Latour raved, “She has the most beautiful hair that you have ever seen! A red not golden but copper–as Venetian as a dream!” Hiffernan quickly became Whistler’s primary model and for several years was his domestic partner. She helped bring order to his chaotic personal affairs; in 1866, the artist recognized her importance by giving her power of attorney and making her the sole heir in his will.
Whistler and Hiffernan lived together in Rotherhithe, and in 1861 she began sitting for the portrait that became “The White Girl.” In this painting, she’s placed in front of a white damask curtain: wearing a white muslin dress, she holds a white lily in one hand and stands on a white animal skin rug. She has an enigmatic expression, and her long red hair cascades down her shoulders to blare against the portrait’s whiteness. Whistler submitted “The White Girl” to the Royal Academy for its annual exhibition in 1862, but lacking any moral message, the portrait caused only harrumphing. It was rejected both by the Academy and by the Salon in Paris, though in 1863 it was accepted by the Salon des Refuses, a protest exhibition organized by Gustave Courbet.
Whistler wanted “The White Girl” to proclaim his presence as an important artist. White paint was a notoriously difficult medium, and he created a seven-foot-high portrait in various shades of white to declare his fabulous mastery. As British artist Ian McKeever has written, Whistler’s use of white was meant to be impressive. The whites on his palette were “Flake White,” “Titaniaum White,” “Permanent White,” and “Zinc White”—all were “furtive, there but never quite there…shying away from whiteness, preferring the shadows….The painter works with the flat surface of colour, yet paradoxically desires…to give colour a full body.” In “The White Girl” Whistler used whites with a flourish, reveling in the textures he created. (Ian McKeever RA, “Whistler’s Whites: Creating Presence with a Pared Down Palette,” in Royal Academy Magazine 6 May 2022.)
Left: James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1861–1863, 1872, oil on canvas, overall: 83 7/8 x 42 1/2″. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Harris Whittemore Collection. ID: 5158-001
The bigness of the canvas also broadcast Whistler’s rejection of portraiture in the grand manner. “The White Girl” was not a major commission by an important patron, nor was Hiffernan a subject of high standing. Instead, as National Gallery co-curator Charles Brock explains in his catalogue essay, this portrait “was the freelance work of a struggling, insecure young painter without clear national identity–a rascal,” and the model was “a striking, red-haired woman, unidentified, and with little or no social standing.” (177)
“White paint was a notoriously difficult medium, and [Whistler] created a seven-foot-high portrait in various shades of white to declare his fabulous mastery.”
At the same time, Whistler was proclaiming his leadership in the Aesthetic Movement. Instead of art as a morality play, he helped publicize the concept of “art for art’s sake”—the idea that aesthetic values like brushwork and color were much more important than uplifiting narratives. As Elaine King has written, Whistler and other artists of the Aesthetic Movement “argued that the primary quality of a work of art resided in its beauty, which translated into its formal elements of line, shape, and color.” (Elaine A. King, “Whistler’s Mother,” in AMERICAN ICONS, 2006)
Whistler painted two more portraits of Hiffernan in white—one placed her standing by a fireplace holding a Japanese fan and glancing at her reflection in the mirror (1864); the other had her reclining on a sofa and staring straight at the viewer (1865). His passion for Asian art is evident in these works, and show how Whistler helped generate the late 19th century European vogue for Japaese and Chinese art. He also embraced the use of musical terminology to describe his works, believing that art, like music, provoked the senses and evoked feeling. He named his “white” paintings of Hiffernan “symphonies,” and–at the suggestion of his patron Frederick Leyland–later called his Thames-side paintings “Nocturnes.”
The “Woman in White” exhibition brings together all three white “symphonies” for the first time in the United States. The opening gallery showcases the National Gallery-owned “Symphony in White No.1: The White Girl” (1861-63), and unites it with the second and third of Whistler’s “Symphony in White” paintings. In addition to these visual “symphonies,” this section features Hiffernan in other settings, including the dockside “Wapping” (1860-64), and “Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks”(1864), where she’s dressed in a silk kimono and holds a Chinese vase.
In the second gallery, Whistler and Hiffernan are shown in etchings and drawings that convey their everyday life in the apartment where they lived, and in Whistler’s studio. Two notable works are the drypoints “Jo” (1861) and “Weary” (1863).
Gustave Courbet, Jo, the Irish Woman, c. 1866/1868, oil on canvas, unframed: 21 3/8 x 25″. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust) 32-30. ID: 5158-043
Whistler and Hiffernan joined Gustave Courbet on a working vacation in 1865, and Courbet convinced Hiffernan to pose for him as well. In addition to examples of her modeling for Courbet, the exhibition’s third gallery displays paintings of women dressed in white by other artists who were inspired by Whistler’s symphonies. Among the artists who chimed in on “The White Girl’s” popularity–and whose works are exhibited here–were John SInger Sargent, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais.
Along with paintings and other art works, the last gallery of the exhibition features letters and documents that portray the complex relationship between Whistler and Hiffernan. Whistler was an eccentric egoist and made his own rules. He was never monogamous, and in 1870 fathered a child with Louisa Fanny Hanson. Hiffernan, who no longer lived with Whistler, nevertheless raised the boy with her sister. Whistler’s son “Charlie” became the primary connection between the artist and his erstwhile muse until Hiffernan’s death of bronchitis in 1886.
The exhibition’s intention–to establish Joanna Hiffernan as Whistler’s creative collaborator–is hampered by the absence of evidence. Although she apparently drew and painted herself, none of her art survives. The exhibition press release argues that, despite the lack of records or proof of her own art, it is enough to invite visitors “to participate in covering Hiffernan’s humanity by considering the essential mystery of who she was.”
Right: James McNeill Whistler, Letter, Whistler to Fantin-Latour with sketch of “Symphony in White, No. 3”, August 16, 1865, pen and brown ink on cream laid paper, overall: 8 1/4 x 5 3/8 in”. Pennell-Whistler Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ID: 5158-084
This assumption indicates that the organizing museums are motivated by the current redefinition of a “muse’s significance.” The idea of a creative male artist and his passive female model is detritus from days when art-speak was dominated by “the male gaze.” Recent art history scholarship has focused on women’s importance, notably in such works as Margaret Gabriel’s NINTH STREET WOMEN (2018), and Ruth Millington’s MUSE: UNCOVERING THE HIDDEN FIGURES BEHIND ART HISTORY’S MASTERPIECES (2022). Millington describes how many “muses” were female artists themselves –Edouard Manet’s favorite muse Victorine Meurent showed her work at the Paris Salon; Picasso’s “muses” included Dora Maar and Francoise Gilot, both of whom were important artists. Maar introduced Picasso to black and white photography, and Gilot contributed to “Guernica.” Lee Miller sat for Man Ray, but was no passive muse to his male artistry–rather, she and Ray fueled each other’s creativity. Miller was an accomplished photographer in her own right, and became known especially for her World War II combat photography.
James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 3, 1865–1867, oil on canvas, overall: 20 1/16 x 30 1/8″. The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, Bridgeman Images. ID 5158-001.
What about Joanna Hiffernan? Was she an active artistic collaborator for Whistler? How do we judge her contribution? The evidence exists that she was a domestic partner whose beauty inspired his creativity for nearly twenty years, and this serves as the crux of the exhibition’s rationale to “foreground Hiffernan in relation to the making, reception, and cultural context of the many images of her.” (Catalogue, 9)
The organizing museums seek “to contribute to ongoing discussions concerning gender and identity in the history of art.” (ibid.) But unlike the roles played by such muse/artist/collaborators as Meurent, Maar, Gilot, or Miller, the evidence of Joanna Hiffernan’s creative participation is murky. Curator Charles Brock sums up why he believes showcasing Hiffernan is nevertheless worthwhile: “The exhibition and catalogue bring together all the works featuring Hiffernan and everything that is currently known about her while encouraging viewers to come to their own conclusions about the nature of her relationship to Whistler and who she was. Depending on how they understand the terms, some may see her as an active collaborator, others as a more distant muse, or something in between. This searching, elusive quality is in many was part and parcel of the works Hiffernan and Whistler created together.” (Brock to AH, 7/8/22)
After James McNeill Whistler, The Relief Fund in Lancashire, The Major’s Daughter, The Morning Before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and The Nun in “Count Burkhardt” (Once a Week), 1862, wood engraving; proofs, sheet: 8 3/4 x 22 9/16″. Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1922, 22.112.2-.5. ID: 5158-077.
The exhibition has wonderful art, and Joanna Hiffernan’s presence in Whistler’s life and art is undeniable. But was she Whistler’s creative collaborator? The National Gallery in Washington and London’s Royal Academy suggest that she was. The good news is that we’re learning more and more about such women—we’ve learned that Degas’ “Little Dancer” was 14-year-old Marie van Goethem, the daughter of a Belgian tailor and a laundress who was a student dancer in the Paris Opera Ballet. And thanks to this exhibition, more is known about Joanna Hiffernan. But a veil of mystery remains. Despite the models/muses/mistresses/children captured in his wake, Whistler remained surprisingly detached about real life connections. What mattered was the painting that appeared with his brushstrokes—the magic that happened when he pursued “art for art’s sake.”
By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor
THE WOMAN IN WHITE: Joanna Hiffernan and James MacNeil Whistler, will be at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., through October 3,2022. There is an accompanying catalogue of the same title edited by Margaret. F. MacDonald. www.nga.gov.
MCC Theater’s production of Which Way To The Stage running through Saturday, May 28, at Robert W. Wilson Theater Space at 511 West 52 nd Street in Manhattan, is one of the most enjoyable plays that I saw this season. Not only has the play been extended a week – my very hope while watching the play – but the audience, a heavy contingent of yeah-saying youngsters, many obviously actors most likely seduced by word-of-mouth, not only continued to clap after the actors left the stage, but gathered in the theater’s lobby to continue the conversation. And why not, as playwright Ana Nogueira, an actress herself, had just fed them the unvarnished story of life in the theater…the ups, and downs, and sideways.
THE MINUTE I SAW HIM IN THE WAITING ROOM I knew this wasn’t
going to be an easy case. Stefan was wearing sunglasses; he was slow to put
down his magazine. Trudging several paces behind me, he hesitated at the
threshold of my office, where he insisted that I choose which chair he should
sit in. He waited to be interviewed.
Virtually all of our leading contemporary repertory theaters
now include non-traditional experimental techniques in staging not only
original new work but also – even especially – to perform and reconsider
revivals of historic classics. Canada’s great Stratford Festival now regularly
gives us Shakespeare revivals with actors playing characters of the opposite
sex, six or seven actors performing plays written to have a cast of more than
30 characters, and realistic people and animals played by puppets. Understandably,
their audiences are sharply divided in response.
Stratford’s recent very popular and admired version of
Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” not only presented the required characters of
the two sets of twin-brother masters and servants who confuse everyone they
meet about which twin brother is which, but also cast women as male twins and
men as women in most of the main roles. The multiple mix-ups got much amused
approval; but I thought them to be just wrong and not confusing enough to have
fooled Helen Keller. But I have to admit that my local theater is currently
turning abstraction into a knockout punch.
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.
Ephraim Sykes, Jeremy Pope, Jawan M. Jackson, James Harkness, and Derrick Baskin in AIN’T TOO PROUD (all photos by Matthew Murphy)
There are few examples of jukebox musicals – a denigrating term if ever – that have blown me away. In fact, without over taxing my brain, Jersey Boys, which dramatizes the formation, success and eventual break-up of the 1960s rock ‘n’roll group The Four Seasons is the only jukebox musical of import that immediately comes to mind.
Directed by Des McAnuff, and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, Jersey Boys opened on Broadway at the August Wilson Theatre to rave reviews in November 2005. Winning four Tony Awards, one for Best Musical, after 4642 performances it closed in January 2017.More
