The painting at the top of this post is Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (8-117) (2009) from the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. When the Albright acquired the painting in 2011, Modern Art Notes editor Tyler Green engaged in something every critic loves to do: He tried to figure where the painting had come from, what artists and objects were floating through the artist’s head at about the time he made the painting.
(Of course, art rarely works this way. Artists rarely have fixed references, just mental storehouses of hundreds of images and ideas. Whatever. Is a fun game to play.)
On this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, Nozkowski and Green talked about some of the works that inform Nozkowski’s painting, and the Albright painting in particular. Among the works Nozkowski and Green discussed are these:
- Master of the Castello Nativity, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1450s. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (This painting was formerly attributed to Paolo Uccello.);
- Martin Puryear, Brunhilde, 1998-2000. (Puryear and Nozkowski are near-neighbors in upstate New York..); and
- Pierre Bonnard, Garden (detail), ca. 1935. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Listen to the program: Download the Nozkowski show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See more images of works discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Rebecca Rabinow. She’s one of the three co-curators of “Matisse: In Pursuit of Pure Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition, which demonstrates how Matisse often worked through an idea in two separate paintings, is on view at the Metropolitan through March 17.
This is a detail from 1899’s Still Life with Compote with Fruit, one of the two earliest paintings in the show. It reveals Matisse, who was still relatively new to art, working through Cezanne and trying to make a Matisse. It’s hung with a similar 1899 painting now in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device or to listen in your browser, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS.
To see more images of art discussed on this week’s show, click through to the Met’s excellent web pages on the Matisse show. Almost every painting in the show is available here.
Image: Matisse, Still Life with Compote and Fruit, 1899. Collection of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis.
The second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is curator/historian Mia Fineman, who talks about her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
The show goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here, or you will be able to once the Met’s website is back online. In the wake of Sandy, it’s down.) The exhibition is accompanied by one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
A common use of manipulated photography — almost from the start — has been propaganda such as this. Mikhail Rozulevich used over 300 pictures in the Soviet state archive to make this image, which was installed in trains throughout Leningrad.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Mikhail Rozulevich, The Reality of Our Plan is Active People (detail), 1858. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is curator/historian Mia Fineman, who talks about her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
The show goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here.) The exhibition is accompanied by one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
Photographic manipulation fascinated artists: According to Fineman, postcards such as this one fascinated the surrealist artists and poets. Paul Eluard amassed a large collection of fantasy postcards.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Unknown, Untitled [Couple with Figure of Cupid] (detail), 1910s. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two art historians: David Anfam on Clyfford Still and Mia Fineman on her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
Anfam is one of the leading scholars of abstract expressionism and has compiled the catalogue raisonnes of Mark Rothko and Conrad Marca-Relli. He’s the adjunct curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, where he has worked with director Dean Sobel on the museum’s installations. The CSM is currently showing selections from its collection along side “Vincent/Clyfford,” an installation that demonstrates how Still looked closely at van Gogh. The museum has also just published “Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum,” which features a major essay by Anfam on Still’s life and work. (Amazon offers the book for $25 off.)
Fineman a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her new show, “Faking It, Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here.) The exhibition is accompanied by a terrific book, one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Unknown American, Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders (detail), ca. 1930. Collection of the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.
Whenever Iran is in the news, I think of Shirin Neshat’s work.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new galleries of Islamic art have received lots of attention, but don’t miss a concurrent, small exhibition of Iranian contemporary art from the Met’s permanent collection. It’s on view through September 3. Among the exhibited artists is Shirin Neshat, who was the guest on Episode No. 11 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Among the topics Neshat and I discussed on the program were the passion she feels for her homeland even though she’s lived in the United States for over three decades, the challenges of making art that will be both seen and understood in two divergent cultures, the U.S. and Iran, and how Persian poetry has informed her work.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, RSS. See images Neshat and I discussed on the show.
Image: Shirin Neshat, Ramin from the series “Masses,” 2012.
The art: Eugene Atget, Eclipse, 1911.
The news: “A Ring of Fire: The 2012 Annular Eclipse” on The Big Picture from TheAtlantic.com.
The source: Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art curator Keith Davis on his exhibition “Timothy H. O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs,” which is on view in Kansas City through September 2. O’Sullivan is one of the pioneers of American photography and took many of his most important pictures while exploring and chronicling the West with Clarence King. Don’t miss the exhibition catalogue, which is one of this year’s top books on American art.
This remarkable picture features a group of Shoshone. Note that O’Sullivan (and perhaps survey leader Clarence King) have posed the Shoshone with an American flag, a reference to the American conquest of Western lands and tribes. Note also O’Sullivan himself — or at least his shadow — in the lower-left. A 2,500-pixel-wide version with much more detail is available here, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website. It’s well-worth the click!
On the first segment of this week’s program, I talk with James Rondeau, the head of the contemporary art department at the Art Institute of Chicago, talking about his new Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. Rondeau co-organized the exhibition with Sheena Wagstaff, the head of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition is the first career-length survey of Lichtenstein’s art and the first retrospective of the artist in 18 years.
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. Click here to see images of art discussed on the show.
Image: Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Shoshoni, 1867-72. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo., Library of Congress, Washington and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (from which this image comes).
The art: Edouard Manet, Design for the poster and cover of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, translated/published by Stephane Mallarme, 1875.
The news: “Pop Culture’s Undying Edgar Allan Poe Obsession,” by Scott Meslow for TheAtlantic.com.
The source: Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Click here for more from Manet’s ‘The Raven.’
