3rd of May

Pierre Bonnard, Ker‐Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard, Venice, 1899.

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Elizabeth Easton, the curator of “Snapshot: Painters and Photography: Bonnard to Vuillard.” The exhibition, organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is on view at the Phillips through May 6. The Yale University Press-published catalogue is top-notch.

The exhibition spotlights six artists – Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Henri Evenepoel, Henri Riviere and George Hendrik Breitner – and examines how their use of the hand-held Kodak camera, which was introduced in 1888, informed their work. Even more interesting: The exhibitions hows how their painting informed the pictures they took.

Easton was the first elected president of the Association of Art Msueum Curators, the co-founder and director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership and the former chair of European painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum.

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Easton and I discuss:

How the Kodak worked and how that impacted the pictures the artists took with it;

How rarely the artists seemed to use their cameras to explore one of the most traditional subjects in art: the nude;

Whether the Kodak helped artists explore new pictoral territory, or whether it simply reinforced extant interests; and

Why, despite taking thousands and thousands of photographs, none of the six artists in the show ever exhibited a single photograph during their lifetimes.

In the program’s second segment, I talk with painter Anne Appleby, one of the top colorists in American art. An exhibition of Appleby’s most recent paintings is on view at New York’s Danese gallery through March 10. Appleby’s work is in the collections of many museums, including SFMOMA, the Albright-Knox and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. This week’s program was edited by Wilson Butterworth.