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.
The picture at the top of this post was taken in 1983 by the second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast: David Maisel. It’s titled Wall of Ash, Walking to the Crater, Mount St. Helens.
On the program Maisel and host Tyler Green discussed the relationship between Maisel’s picture and Paul Cezanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence. The two examples of Cezannes here are both from 1902-06. The top one is at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; the one on the bottom is from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Maisel was on The MAN Podcast to discuss his beautiful 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.
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.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness.
This is a detail from one of Gohlke’s 1982 pictures of the area near Mount Saint Helens. It’s one of several pictures in which Gohlke presents a dramtically tilted landscape, a la Timothy O’Sullivan. On this week’s MAN Podcast, I asked Gohlke if he was consciously dipping into O’Sullivan’s bag of tricks, or if he was reflexively responding to the landscape he was in.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Frank Gohlke, Looking SW across Blowdown toward Valley of South Toutle River, 8 miles NW of Mount St. Helens, Washington (detail), 1982. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness.
In many of his pictures from Mount Saint Helens, Emmet Gowin engages the long history of abstraction in photography. See a larger version of the picture here.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Emmet Gowin, Ash Over New Snow, the South Flank of Mount Saint Helens, 1983.
In the wake of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980, Frank Gohlke made five trips to what was left of the mountain and the surrounding area. On each trip (in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1990) he took the same picture of the confluence of Pine Creek and the Lewis River. Each picture (which I’ve stacked above) is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Click on the year above to see that year’s picture at 2000 pixels wide.
Gohlke’s pictures don’t show only the impact of the volcano’s eruption, though the rapid push of ash through the area is evident in the first picture of the series: the gushing ashflow is what stripped the fallen tree of its bark some 30 feet up the tree, eventually toppling it. The pictures also show the forest being logged roughly concurrent with the eruption and its aftermath: The river bank in the second picture shows the remnants of a clear-cut, and in the fourth and fifth pictures you can see uniformly planted seedlings filling in.
Gohlke and I talked about this series of pictures at length on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, which also features artist Emmet Gowin. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show is on view through May 12.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness. Ash from the eruption was deposited on at least 11 states. In the months after the eruption, both Gowin and Gohlke traveled to Mount Saint Helens and gained access to the blast zone. Both men expected to photograph the power of the blast, but once their they both found that other components of the Mount Saint Helens story interested them as well.
Gowin first came to prominence in the 1970s with a series of pictures he took of his wife and family in southern Virginia. Later, and notably after his Mount Saint Helens pictures, he would turn his interest to the impact man has had on the American West. Gowin took to the air to photograph man-altered landscapes such as the Hanford Site, a mostly decommissioned nuclear production facility and Cold War test sites in Nevada. He’s been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions including in 1990 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Between 2002 and 2004 the Yale University Art Gallery organized “Changing the Earth” an exceptional show that examined Gowin’s interest in the ways Americans have massively changed the land.
Gohlke has long had an intense interest in the American landscape and in the relationship people have with place. His pictures have demonstrated the impact of massive forces on the landscape – he photographed the aftermath of a massively destructive tornado in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1979 and of course Mount Saint Helens – but his work has also examined our presence in quieter landscapes, such as the grain elevators in the upper Midwest. In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art and curator Peter Galassi devoted an exhibition to his Mount Saint Helens photographs.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device or to listen in your browser, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Emmet Gowin, Spirit Lake and Mount Saint Helens, 1983.
On the second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, we initiate a series of interviews about Richard Serra’s Shift (1971-72, at left), one of the most important earthworks. Shift is in King City, Ontario, where the province’s failure to grant it landmark status has left the work endangered by encroaching exurban development. (Remarkably, an Ontario preservation board recently ruled that Shift has no heritage value to the community.) Shift is the contemporary masterpiece under the greatest threat.
Our series of segments on Shift kicks off with Richard Serra himself. Serra has spoken sparingly about Shift in recent years, but when he was a guest on Episode No. 18 of The MAN Podcast he talked about it at length, particularly in terms of its close relationship to his concurrent Pulitzer Piece and how the work emerged out of conversations with Joan Jonas and Philip Glass. This week’s show features a re-air of the part of our conversation during which Serra discusses Shift, its history and its future.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the show.
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. What does a comet streaking across the sky have to do with the Civil War? In 1860, two comets flashed across American skies: One was visible only in the North, one was visible only in the South. (!!!) As was common at the time, Americans (be they Northern or Southern) took this as divine portent in favor of their arguments about slavery and Union. Artists such as Frederic Edwin Church, whose Meteor of 1860 is shown in detail here (full version), painted astrological events in reference to those beliefs. More on this week’s show!
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!
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two new exhibitions that look at American art and the Civil War.
The second guest is Huntington curator Jennifer Watts, who tells us about “A Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War,” her new exhibition of more than 200 pictures and other objects from the Huntington’s famed Civil War-related collections. This picture, of shallow graves barely covered by earth, is by Andrew J. Russell. It’s of Alexandria National Cemetery, the Union burial ground in Alexandria, Va., near where Arlington National Cemetery is now. Many of them are available in zoomable high-res on the Huntington’s exhibition website.
This week’s program also features “The Civil War and American Art,” which opens today at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey reveals how artists such as Winslow Homer, Sanford Gifford and Frederic Church, responded to the war in their work. The show’s catalogue, published by Yale University Press, is a smart, strikingly exciting page-turner, the best book about American art I’ve read all year.
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: Andrew J. Russell, Soldiers’ Burying Ground, Alexandria, Va., May 1863 (detail), 1863. Collection of The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.
Not long after artist Olafur Eliasson was on The Modern Art Notes Podcast, Sandy shut down his new show at Chelsea’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Earlier this week Bonakdar re-opened, so the Eliasson show is back on! This picture (shown here as a detail) is included in the show.
If you haven’t heard our program with Eliasson, you’re in for a treat. While Eliasson is an oft-interviewed artist, many of the topics we discussed on The MAN Podcast are far outside his usual Q&A repertoire, including details Eliasson shared about his relationship with his father and why it drove him to become an artist.
Download the Eliasson 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. And this just in: Like us on Facebook!
Image: Olafur Eliasson, Iceland (detail), 2012.
This picture shows the gated community in which Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave his infamous “47% speech.”
It’s a detail from a picture was taken by Magnum Photos member Zoe Strauss, who is traveling through Florida this month with fellow Magnum-ites Alec Soth and Alessandra Sanguinetti. They’re posting some of their work here on Tumblr, at Postcards From America. If you’re not following it, you should! (Here’s another of Strauss’s photos.)
On the occasion of Strauss’s mid-career survey at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she was the lead guest on Episode No. 10 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. Strauss’s appearance will make you laugh and cry — and you’ll understand why she and her camera see the things she’s seeing in Florida.
Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe via iTunes, RSS. See more images of the work Strauss and I discussed on the program.
Image: Zoe Strauss, Snakebird perched on duck decoy in the gated community where Mitt Romney gave his “47%” speech, Boca Raton, FL, 2012.
![Today is Columbus Day, but for how much longer? As you may know, there’s a nascent mini-movement afoot to re-name the holiday “Explorer’s Day” or “Exploration Day.” As an art guy, I fully support this idea, if only because there’s a lot more art about exploration in America than there is of, uh, Cristóbal Colón.
From Modern Art Notes, here’s one story — or is it two? — of art and exploration in the United States. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed typing it up.
Image: Edward Kern, Sunday Oct 29 1848 on the before crossing Smoky Hill For[k]. Smoky Hills in the Distance, 1848. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbkvrct9yO1qe0into1_1280.jpg)
Today is Columbus Day, but for how much longer? As you may know, there’s a nascent mini-movement afoot to re-name the holiday “Explorer’s Day” or “Exploration Day.” As an art guy, I fully support this idea, if only because there’s a lot more art about exploration in America than there is of, uh, Cristóbal Colón.
From Modern Art Notes, here’s one story — or is it two? — of art and exploration in the United States. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed typing it up.
Image: Edward Kern, Sunday Oct 29 1848 on the before crossing Smoky Hill For[k]. Smoky Hills in the Distance, 1848. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
It’s a full day of Brady on Cave to Canvas. Lots of remarkable pictures!
Mathew Brady, Bull Run, Virginia, c. 1860-65
For most of his career, Richard Misrach has been interested in showing man’s impact on the landscape of the American west. Typically his work starts with overpowering beauty, forces us to wonder, ‘What happened there?’ and can often lead to the viewer realizing that the beautiful thing is (or was) also destructive and damaging to the environment. Such as this case here, in Desert Fire #249 (1985, detail), in which an alfalfa field was intentionally set aflame, unleashing an enormous amount of air pollution on the surrounding desert.
This week’s MAN Podcast spotlights “Petrochemical America,” a new book byMisrach and landscape architect Kate Orff. The book examines the industrialized Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge, La., and New Oreleans. The region is infamous for its density of petrochemical plants and for high rates of disease, particularly cancer.
“Petrochemical America” features Misrach’s pictures, commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas, a series of narratives that establish a relationship between Misrach’s photographs, the region and man-made and ecological forces. An exhibition of Misrach’s and Orff’s work is on view now in the project room at Aperture’s New York gallery through October 6. Misrach’s ‘Cancer Alley’ pictures are on view at the High through October 7. (The book is also published by Aperture. Amazon lists it at $30 off.) This piece is part of Misrach’s ‘Desert Cantos’ series, selections from which are on view at New York’s Robert Mann Gallery through October 27.
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 program here.
Image: Richard Misrach, Desert Fire #249, 1985. Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Art Institute of Chicago.
