This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features the new Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibition “War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath.” Anne Wilkes Tucker, the show’s co-curator (along with MFAH’s Will Michaels and Natalie Zelt) joins me to discuss the exhibition and the related 600-page book from the MFAH and the Yale University Press.
The show, which opens this weekend and runs through February 3, includes almost 500 objects, images by more than 280 photographers on six continents, all of it covering 165 years of war. The exhibition and catalogue are presented thematically, with sections on war-related topics such as recruitment, training, daily routine, patrol, the wait, the fight itself, leisure time and more.
This, as you might have guessed, is a photograph from the section of the show that addresses how soldiers spend the long down-time between battles or armed confrontations. It’s a detail from a snapshot taken by a soldier at a USO show in around 1942. The performer is Hollywood starlet Carole Landis, who would seem to have given the boys a thrill. A GI in a, er, forward row seems to have caught the critical moment. See the entire image here. (The MFAH show is full of images not just by artists and photojournalists, but by the troops themselves. Iconic war images come from lots of places…)
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images discussed on this week’s show. Also, check out — and ‘like’ — our new Facebook page!
Image: Unknown photographer, Untitled (detail) [Carole Landis, USO Show, South Pacific Area], c. 1942. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
This is a detail from a great untitled 1957 Clyfford Still painting in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Before the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum last year, SFMOMA and the Albright-Knox had the two greatest troves of Still’s paintings thanks to substantial gifts from Still himself.
SFMOMA has done a nice job of putting its Stills online. The Albright’s Stills are online too, but as smaller JPEGs.
Still is the subject of the first segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, on which I speak with one of the world’s top abstract expressionism scholars: David Anfam. In recent years Anfam has been working with the Still Museum on its collections and installations. He is also the author of the catalogue raisonnes of Mark Rothko’s paintings and Conrad Marca-Relli. 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.)
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.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features one of Europe’s best-known and most admired artists: Olafur Eliasson. Awesome bonus: Eliasson’s work is featured all day today on must-follow Tumblr Cave to Canvas.
An exhibition of Eliasson’s newest photographs — featuring his ancestral homeland of Iceland — opens next week at Chelsea’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Also, Taschen has just published a new edition of “Studio Olafur Eliasson,” a 532-page ‘encylopedia’ of Eliasson’s studio practice. (It’s available on Amazon for $25, a 40 percent discount.)
Eliasson is one of the world’s most famous artists. His projects include The Weather Project, a 2003 installation at the Tate Modern and “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson,” a 2007-08 retrospective that was curated by Madeline Grynsztejn for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The show traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York and its PS1 satellite as well as to the MCA Chicago and the Dallas Museum of Art. A full (and long) list of Eliasson’s exhibitions and projects is available at his excellent website. Learn more about his Little Sun project here.
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: Olafur Eliasson, One-way Colour Tunnel, 2007.
If I had to pick the twentieth-century European artist to whom American art historians and art museums should pay more attention, I’d pick Italian physician Alberto Burri. (Yes, physician. Burri was an MD!) Burri has been important to lots of American artists of the post-war era, from Lee Bontecou to Mark Bradford.
On this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Paul Schimmel, the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the curator of the new MOCA exhibition “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962.” The show is accompanied by a fascinating catalogue. One of the artists about whom we talk the most is Burri, including details of Burri’s experiences in the United States as a prisoner of war during World War II.
Schimmel’s exhibition examines the way artists responded to the unprecedented killing and destruction of World War II by (often) literally attacking the picture plane. The show, which features 26 artists (but only three Americans) charts the way artists used abstraction to respond to a post-atomic world, and in so doing offers an alternate history about post-abstract expressionism abstract art.
I don’t mean to suggest that Burri is wholly absent from American art museum collections: MoMA has a nice one, the Art Institute of Chicago has three and the Kemper Museum at Washington University in St. Louis has a couple as well. The one pictured here, Bianco (detail above, full here, 1952), is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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.
As I noted here, when we lost Margaret Kilgallen, we lost one of our best synthesizers of the American West and its history, particularly its visual traditions.
When an artist dies young, it’s hard to know whether they’d already made their important work, or if they were still on the ascent with greater things ahead. In the case of Margaret Kilgallen, I think she was just beginning to make her best work when she died in 2001 from breast cancer after forgoing chemotherapy so that she could bring a child, daughter Asha, to term. At her death, Kilgallen was just 33.
The institutional art world embraced Kilgallen and her funky-smart mix of street art, typography and mural-painting early on: She was featured on the first season of art21 and in a 2005 retrospective organized by Eungie Joo and Clara Kim for Los Angeles’ REDCAT gallery.
Recently the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — Kilgallen’s hometown museum — acquired its first major Kilgallen: A huge, 11-foot-by-26-foot painting, pictured above. It’s tremendous.
More about SFMOMA’s new Kilgallen:
- I wrote about the painting on Modern Art Notes, where I broke down the art, artists and history Kilgallen mined for this piece.
- Kilgallen’s widower, Barry McGee, is my guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast. Near the end of our conversation we talked about what he learned from his wife and about SFMOMA’s acquisition. Don’t miss it: Download the show directly to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, RSS. See images discussed on the show.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Barry McGee, whose mid-career survey is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through December 9.
Several years ago McGee began to make gallery installations that extended out from museum walls and into the surrounding space. McGee calls them “boils” and is quite fond of the way that imply accumulation, bulk and a kind of build-up of transgression. We talked about his “boils” on this week’s show, including this installation McGee created for the 2008 Carnegie International and this piece that SFMOMA acquired in 2009.
McGee emerged over 20 years ago as a precocious tagger named ‘Twist’ who left graffiti throughout the Bay Area. He took his visual language not so much from art history, but from other graffiti artists, comic books, traditional hobo markings and more, and used it all to take aim at the ownership of public space and the mostly corporate advertising that was increasingly filling that space in booming 1990s San Francisco.
Now after finishing with ‘Twist,’ McGee has emerged as an important figure in street-driven art. The BAM survey of McGee’s career was curated by director Lawrence Rinder and assistant curator Dena Beard. The show is open through December 9.
Special request:The MAN Podcast is conducting its 2012 listener survey. If you could spend 3-5 minutes filling it out, it will make the show better and it will help keep the show free. Thanks much, I really appreciate it.
Download the show directly to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, RSS. See images discussed on the show.
Image: Barry McGee, Untitled, 2009. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Barbara Kruger, whose most recent commission, Belief + Doubt, is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. (The work officially opens on August 20, but it is visible now.)
Kruger was the subject of a 1999 retrospective at MOCA, an exhibition that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her installation at — and actually on — the Italian Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale helped earn her the Biennale’s lifetime achievement award. The most recent major monograph on Kruger’s work was published in 2010 by Rizzoli.
To download the program directly, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can see images of artworks discussed on the program here.
Image: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (I’m Just Looking) (detail), 1987. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Barbara Kruger, whose most recent commission, Belief + Doubt, is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. (The work officially opens on August 20, but it is visible now.)
Kruger was the subject of a 1999 retrospective at MOCA, an exhibition that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her installation at — and actually on — the Italian Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale helped earn her the Biennale’s lifetime achievement award. The most recent major monograph on Kruger’s work was published in 2010 by Rizzoli.
To download the program directly, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can see images of artworks discussed on the program here.
Image: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (I’m Just Looking) (detail), 1987. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights a new exhibition at New York’s apexart titled “The Permanent Way.” The show looks at the continuing impact of the railroads on the way American artists look at landscape. The exhibition is on view through July 28.
My guests are Brian Sholis, who curated the show, and Mark Ruwedel, a photographer who is included in the exhibition and whose “Westward the Course of Empire” series spotlighted the continuing physical presence of the railroad in the West. Sholis’s essay for “The Permanent Way” is available (for free) here.
This picture of Ruwedel’s, Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul and Pacific #17 is not in “The Permanent Way,” but is on view now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in the museum’s third-floor, permanent collection photography galleries. Ruwedel and I discuss images such as this one on this week’s program, including where the heck the railroad tracks — which would have run across the top of these bridge supports — disappeared to. (You can see a larger version of the picture here and more of Ruwedel’s work in SFMOMA’s collection here.)
When Ruwedel and I discuss this picture on the program, he explains the origins of his attraction to 19th-century railway cuts and how they helped instigate his interest in the series that would become “Westward the Course of Empire.”
Ruwedel is a California-based photographer whose work frequently examines the ways in which Americans have impacted the land in the American West. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and more. The book related to the project discussed on this week’s show,“Westward the Course of Empire,” was published in 2008 by the Yale University Press.
To download the program directly to your PC or mobile device, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can see images of the artworks discussed on this week’s program here.
The art: Teresita Fernandez, Fire, 2005.
The news: “The Fires This Time,” by Timothy Egan for the New York Times.
The source: Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
By some odd quirk of art purchase-and-distribution, Richard Diebenkorn’s great Ocean Park paintings are pretty evenly scattered around America. Only two art museums have more than one: the Milwaukee Art Museum has two and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art effectively has four. Throughout the day I’ll be sharing Ocean Parks from SFMOMA’s collection, including this stunner, Ocean Park #67 (1973, click to expand). To see more images of the Ocean Park works discussed on the show, click here.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is all about Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, which is surveyed in a major exhibition that is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. First, exhibition curator Sarah Bancroft talks about how the work came to be and what makes it great; next, conservator Ana Alba discusses her new research into the Ocean Park series — and why some of the paintings from certain parts of the series are having condition issues.
Alba is a conservation fellow in modern paintings at the National Gallery of Art. She started her work on Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings while at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden when she was a paintings conservation intern. In May she presented her research on the Ocean Park series at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works’s annual conference in Albuquerque.
To download the program directly, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. To see lots of images of the works discussed on the show, click here.
By some odd quirk of art purchase-and-distribution, Richard Diebenkorn’s great Ocean Park paintings are pretty evenly scattered around America. Only two art museums have more than one: the Milwaukee Art Museum has two and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art effectively has four. Throughout the day I’ll be sharing Ocean Parks from SFMOMA’s collection, including this stunner, Ocean Park #54 (1972, click to expand). To see more images of the Ocean Park works discussed on the show, click here.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is all about Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, which is surveyed in a major exhibition that is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. First, exhibition curator Sarah Bancroft talks about how the work came to be and what makes it great; next, conservator Ana Alba discusses her new research into the Ocean Park series — and why some of the paintings from certain parts of the series are having condition issues.
Alba is a conservation fellow in modern paintings at the National Gallery of Art. She started her work on Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings while at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden when she was a paintings conservation intern. In May she presented her research on the Ocean Park series at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works’s annual conference in Albuquerque.
To download the program directly, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. To see lots of images of the works discussed on the show, click here.
The art: Deborah Luster, Ebony Ellis from the “One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana” project, 1998.
The news: “How Louisiana Became the World’s Prison Capital,” on NPR’s Fresh Air.
The source: Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. More information at DeborahLuster.com.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas. An exhibition of Thomas’s recent paintings, “Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe,” is on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through August 19.
Thomas’s work is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Photographer Marco Breuer, whose latest work is on view now at Chelsea’s Von Lintel Gallery, is the second guest. Breuer’s manipulations of photographic paper create fantastic, often surprising abstractions.
His most recent museum exhibition was last year’s“Marco Breuer: Line of Sight,” which was organized by Julian Cox at the de Young in San Francisco.His work is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, MoMA, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Harvard Art Museums and SFMOMA.
To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. To subscribe to To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. Images of artworks discussed on the program are here.
Image: Mickalene Thomas, Sista Sista Lady Blue, 2007. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The last stop of the Wexner-organized Mark Bradford survey is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the show has just over a month left to run. On the occasion of the show’s arrival in San Francisco, I talked with Bradford on The Modern Art Notes Podcast. I think it’s one of the very best episodes of the show yet: Bradford opened up about his life and work in strikingly personal, even emotional ways. Don’t miss it.
Click here to download the show directly to your PC/mobile device. Click here to access The MAN Podcast in iTunes, where the Bradford show is Episode No. 19. Click here to see images of works discussed on the program.
Image: Mark Bradford, Scorched Earth, 2006.
