The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has acquired a rare, intact Carleton Watkins album of the Sunny Slope farm and distillery. The album, which dates to the 1880s, includes 27 circular photographs that measure five inches in diameter on six-and-a-half-inch-square paper. Intact Watkins albums are rare, and a number of albums have been broken up in recent years. The Huntington album seems to be the only known intact album of Watkins’ circular prints.
“It’s so unusual, so rare,” Huntington photography curator Jennifer Watts said. “Basically through neglect there may be some Watkins albums that are still out there. I can’t think of another album like this that I’ve seen. There’s certainly never been an example here going back many decades.”
The album was just acquired for the Huntington Library by its photography curator, Watkins expert Jennifer A. Watts. In December, 2011, Watts came on Episode No. 8 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast to talk with Green about the last major event in Watkins scholarship: The publishing of a catalogue raisonne of Watkins’ mammoth-plate prints.
Read more: Today on Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green tells the story behind this album and details some of the reasons the pictures are fantastic.
Hear from Watts: Download Episode No. 8 of The MAN Podcast to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See images of works discussed on the show.
This is a detail from a sheet included in Carl Andre’s 1963 Historical References. This 8 1/2-by-11 sheet, from the collection of the Chinati Foundation and on view now in Marfa, Texas, addresses Eadweard Muybridge and the story of his killing of Harry Larkyns, the lover of Muybridge’s wife Flora. Today on Modern Art Notes, I tease out some of the links between Andre’s typed poems, his sculpture and Muybridge’s work.
Muybridge’s murder of Larkyns is at the center of Edward Ball’s new book, “The Inventor and the Tycoon.” It tells the story of the relationship between Muybridge and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, one of the Big Four who built the western half of the transcontinental railroad. Stanford famously commissioned Muybridge’s famous ‘animal locomotion’ pictures and stood by his man even as Muybridge faced that murder charge.
How to listen: Download the Ball show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball talking about his new book “The Inventor and the Tycoon.” The book tells the story of the relationship between photographer (and murderer) Eadweard Muybridge and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, one of the Big Four who built the western half of the transcontinental railroad. Stanford famously commissioned Muybridge’s famous ‘animal locomotion’ pictures and stood by his man even as Muybridge faced a murder charge. Ball’s book weaves together the story of their lives, their success and their eventual enmity into a rollicking-good narrative.
Ball won the National Book Award in 1998 for “Slaves in the Family,” which examine’s his family’s ownership of slaves in South Carolina.
On the second segment, David Maisel discusses his new book “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime,” which is just out from Steidl. An exhibition by the same title of Maisel’s work is on view at the University of Colorado Art Museum through May 11.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball talking about his new book “The Inventor and the Tycoon.” The book tells the story of the relationship between photographer (and murderer) Eadweard Muybridge and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, one of the Big Four who built the western half of the transcontinental railroad. Stanford famously commissioned Muybridge’s famous ‘animal locomotion’ pictures and stood by his man even as Muybridge faced a murder charge. Ball’s book weaves together the story of their lives, their success and their eventual enmity into a rollicking-good narrative.
Ball won the National Book Award in 1998 for “Slaves in the Family,” which examine’s his family’s ownership of slaves in South Carolina.
On the second segment, David Maisel discusses his new book “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime,” which is just out from Steidl. An exhibition by the same title of Maisel’s work is on view at the University of Colorado Art Museum through May 11.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights “Photography and the American Civil War” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Opening on Tuesday, April 2, the exhibition surveys photography of and related to the conflict, including battlefield daguerreotypes, post-battle scenes and intense pictures of the dead and wounded. The program’s lead guest is Jeff Rosenheim, the curator of the exhibition and the author of the excellent book that accompanies it. The exhibition will be on view through September 2.
Rosenheim is the curator in charge of the Met’s photography department. His primary focus is American photography: He facilitated the Met’s acquisitions of the complete archives of photographers Walker Evans in 1994 and Diane Arbus in 2007.
On the second segment, artist Dara Friedman discusses her video installation Dancer (2011), which is on view at the Hammer Museum through April 14. The piece celebrates movement and dance on the streets of Miami, revealing both the city’s residents and the city’s urban fabric. Hammer curator Anne Ellegood’s essay on Danceris available here. Dancer was previously exhibited at the Miami Art Museum and at the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh.
The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See images of art discussed on the program.
Image: Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This is the cover for the catalogue for “Photography and the American Civil War,” which opens Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Amazon offers the book for $32, about 35% off the cover price.
The book and show survey photography of and related to the war between the states, including battlefield daguerreotypes, post-battle scenes and intense pictures of the dead and wounded. Jeff Rosenheim, the curator of the exhibition and the author of the book that accompanies it, is the lead guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast.
The show isn’t up for a couple of days, but the book is out and it’s an absolute winner. While it’s plenty focused on the Civil War, readers will repeatedly find themselves thinking about how subjects and formats that emerged during the Civil War era are still a part of photography today.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See images of art discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights “Photography and the American Civil War” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Opening on Tuesday, April 2, the exhibition surveys photography of and related to the conflict, including battlefield daguerreotypes, post-battle scenes and intense pictures of the dead and wounded. The program’s lead guest is Jeff Rosenheim, the curator of the exhibition and the author of the excellent book that accompanies it. The exhibition will be on view through September 2.
Rosenheim is the curator in charge of the Met’s photography department. His primary focus is American photography: He facilitated the Met’s acquisitions of the complete archives of photographers Walker Evans in 1994 and Diane Arbus in 2007.
On the second segment, artist Dara Friedman discusses her video installation Dancer (2011), which is on view at the Hammer Museum through April 14. The piece celebrates movement and dance on the streets of Miami, revealing both the city’s residents and the city’s urban fabric. Hammer curator Anne Ellegood’s essay on Danceris available here. Dancer was previously exhibited at the Miami Art Museum and at the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh.
The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See images of art discussed on the program.
Image: Andrew Russell, Confederate Method of Destroying Rail Roads at McCloud Mill, Virginia, 1863. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
On the second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, Katherine Siegwarth discusses her new Amon Carter Museum exhibition “Big Pictures.” The exhibition goes back to the 1860s to demonstrate that size in photography pre-dates the ‘Big Germans’ and that photographers have almost always wanted to make their prints bigger. It opens on March 5 and runs through April 21. Siegwarth is the Carter’s Luce Curatorial Fellow for Photographs.
This is a 1864 Charles Leander Weed from the Amon Carter’s collection: The Vernal Fall, 350 Feet High. Yo-semite Valley, Mariposa County, Cal. Back in 1859, Weed had became the first photographer to visit Yosemite. While there, he took a series of 10-inch-by-14-inch pictures.
In 1861, Carleton Watkins became the second photographer to travel into Yosemite. Watkins’ pictures weight in at about 22-inches-by-18-inches, almost three times the size of Weed’s pictures, a factor that helped them become world-famous.
Sometime between Watkins’ first visit to Yosemite and 1864, Weed got himself a bigger camera and went back to the valley. This is one of the pictures he took on that later trip.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
On Modern Art Notes: A little story about the love a couple of artists have for hotel atriums. Features art from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, whose Andreas Gursky Atlanta (1996) is on view at the A-K now, and which is shown above.
The Sunday New York Times offered reviews of two major exhibitions about the Civil War: Edward Rothstein raved about the Library of Congress exhibition “The Civil War in America” and Holland Cotter was impressed with “The Civil War and American Art” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (The Yale University Press-published book that accompanies the SAAM show was my pick as the best art book of 2012.)
A couple of months ago, The Modern Art Notes Podcast featured Eleanor Jones Harvey, the curator of “The Civil War and American Art.” In fact, that show was entirely about the Civil War, as Jennifer A. Watts, the curator of the Huntington’s “A Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War” was my second guest.
Here’s an example of how the SAAM show illuminates what American artists were doing during the Civil War: To contemporary eyes, Frederic Church’s Cotopaxi (detail above) may not seem like a painting that’s about sectional conflict and the Civil War, but Harvey says that art lovers in the mid-19th-century were much more accustomed to looking at and for allegory than we are now. And in the vernacular of the day, tropical climates was a popular metaphor for the stormy, passionate American South.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of art discussed on the show.
Image: Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi (detail), 1862. Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Since we’re talking about the Civil War on the show today, I thought I’d take the opportunity to point you in the direction of one of my favorite short essays in recent memory. A few years back, Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic took a trip to Virginia with his family to visit Civil War battlefields. His blog posts about that trip are remarkable. Especially the final one. It grabs you from the first sentence: “By Saturday, Virginia was overwhelming.” A Virginian myself, I find myself rereading the piece with some regularity, and I’m always amazed at the emotional immediacy and resonance Coates brings to his writing about the Civil War.:
I love the lore of the Wilderness. Early in the fight the Union had pushed the Confederates all the way back to Lee’s headquarters. Lee stood up, about to lead the counter-charge himself, until a division of Texans held him down, “Go back General Lee!” they yelled. I think that is so beautiful, the complete disregard for logic, and personal safety. Still I see it through a cracked glass. It’s like reading a lush love story about a man and a woman, who do not like you.
Read all his Virginia posts here and here and here and here.
Above is a photograph from one of my favorite photographers (and fellow Virginian) Sally Mann. In 2004, as part of her “What Remains” project, Mann took photographs of the battlefield of “Antietam”. 23,000 men were dead, wounded or missing at the end of the day on September 17, 1861 near Sharpsburg, Maryland, making it the single bloodiest day in American history. Mann’s photographs are haunting and evocative of that horror. To heighten the connection between past and present, Mann printed the photographs using the 19th-century methods used by Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, among others.
- Nell
On this day in 1869, photographer Arnold Genthe was born in Berlin. Genthe emigrated to San Francisco in 1895, where he taught himself the art of photography. He is best known for capturing the 1906 earthquake, though ironically it destroyed his studio, equipment, and many of his photographs.
Image: Arnold Genthe, “Untitled, from The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire,” 1906.More photographs by Arnold Genthe:
Arnold Genthe, Untitled, 1906.
Arnold Genthe, Looking up Market Street towards Twin Peaks, 1906
Arnold Genthe, Untitled, 1906
Can this microscopic detail from Jackson Pollock’s landmark painting Mural (1943) help support (or counter) the story that Pollock painted Mural, a painting that’s roughly eight feet-by-twenty feet, in a single day? Yes, maybe.
The second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast continues our series on the Getty’s conservation of Mural. Tom Learner, a Getty Conservation Institute senior scientist and the head of the GCI’s modern and contemporary art research initiative, tells us about the latest work on Mural, how the Getty may address the painting’s rather pronounced sag and explains how this detail — blown up 400 times from actual size — might help solve the mystery.
Download this week’s program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of art discussed on the show. Also, check out and ‘like’ our new Facebook page!
Image: Paint sample via Getty Conservation Institute. Cross-section sample of crimsonpaint viewed under normal light. The twowhite ground layers (composed of zinc white and lead white respectively) can be seen at the base of the sample. The red paint is applied over a stroke of green-brown paint which must not have been dry when the red was applied: the two paints have comingled, wet-in-wet, to some degree.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two new exhibitions that look at American art and the Civil War: “The Civil War and American Art” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “A Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War” at the Huntington.
My first guest is SAAM curator Eleanor Jones Harvey. In both her book and exhibition she explores how painted representations of African-Americans changed during the course of the Civil War, from stereotyped caricature to human. The big reason: Artists, like other Northerners, met African-Americans and worked/fought alongside them for the first time. No American artist of his time painted more gripping images of African-American life than Eastman Johnson,
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of art discussed on the show. Also, check out and ‘like’ our new Facebook page!
Image: Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862 (detail), 1862. Collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two new exhibitions that look at American art and the Civil War: “The Civil War and American Art” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “A Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War” at the Huntington.
While the SAAM show mostly focuses on painting, and while the Huntington show almost entirely features photography, there are photographs of the aftermath of Civil War battles in both shows. This picture, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg (detail above, click to expand), was taken by Timothy O’Sullivan in July, 1863 in what was likely a former wheat or corn field (hence the picture’s title). It’s one of the most famous battlefield pictures of the war. The Chrysler Museum has a great print of the picture and it’s available in high-resolution here. Huntington curator Jenny Watts and I discuss why these images were so remarkable, and how they were seen and received by 19th-century audiences.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of art discussed on the show. Also, check out and ‘like’ our new Facebook page!
Image: Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death (detail), July, 1863. Collection of the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va.
