Smart subscribers to The Modern Art Notes Podcast on Tumblr are doubtless already following Cave to Canvas, but if you’re not, today’s a good day to start: CtC’s artist for the day is painter and print-maker Terry Winters.
Every day Winters looks more and more like the most important painter of his generation. The biggest trend in painting over the last decade or two is ‘systems painting,’ the tendency of painters to investigate networks and the relationships between information or objects in their paintings. Think Julie Mehretu, Franz Ackermann, Matthew Ritchie for examples. Winters is the godfather of systems painting.
Terry Winters was my guest on Episode No. 16 of The MAN Podcast. We went geeky on his work, his sources, his prints and his notebooks, which were exhibited for the first time by Matthew Marks Gallery earlier this year.
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Image: Terry Winters, Untitled (detail), 2001. Collection of The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, Calif.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Caravaggio biographer and art historian Helen Langdon.
The Kimbell Art Museum and the Yale University Press have just published “Caravaggio’s Cardsharps: Trickery and Illusion,” a smart, richly illustrated 74-page book on the great Caravaggio in the Kimbell’s collection. Priced at $17, it’s an absolute steal.
One of the subjects Langdon and I discuss on this week’s show is how Caravaggio’s Cardsharps created a century-long burst of paintings of cards and dice players. Langdon and I agreed that the top Caravaggisti is Valentin de Boulogne, a Frenchman who traveled to Rome to see Caravaggio’s work and to work in fellow Frenchman Simon Vouet’s workshop in Rome. Valentin made at least two paintings of card players, including this superb painting from the 1620s in Dresden (detail above), which Langdon and I discussed on the program.
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 Caravaggio biographer and art historian Helen Langdon.
The Kimbell Art Museum and the Yale University Press have just published “Caravaggio’s Cardsharps: Trickery and Illusion,” a smart, richly illustrated 74-page book on the great Caravaggio in the Kimbell’s collection. Priced at $17, it’s an absolute steal.
One of the subjects Langdon and I discuss on this week’s show is how Caravaggio’s Cardsharps created a century-long burst of paintings of cards and dice players. One of the best of the bunch is in the Kimbell’s own collection: Georges de la Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (ca. 1630-34, detail above).
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. Also, check out and ‘like’ our Facebook page. See images of artworks discussed on the show.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Caravaggio biographer and art historian Helen Langdon.
The Kimbell Art Museum and the Yale University Press have just published “Caravaggio’s Cardsharps: Trickery and Illusion,” a smart, richly illustrated 74-page book on the great Caravaggio in the Kimbell’s collection. Priced at $17, it’s an absolute steal.
A scholar of the Italian Baroque and particularly of Rome, Langdon’s 1998 “Caravaggio: A Life” is considered one of the best and most important of the many Caravaggio biographies.
The second segment features Ahmed Alsoudani, an Iraqi-American painter whose work is on view now as part of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Matrix series. His first American museum exhibition, it’s on view through January 6, 2013. Last year Alsoudani was featured in three separate exhibitions at and during the Venice Biennale: including the Pavilion of Iraq, the Pan-Arab world’s show and a show at the Pinault Collection.
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With the commercial art world headed to Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellite fairs this week, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami is showing off Weeping Moon, a Mark Handforth sculpture installed on the museum’s building.
Handforth was my guest on Episode No. 11 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast on the occasion of his MOCA North Miami survey exhibition, “Mark Handforth: Rolling Stop.” His work has been exhibited all over the world, including at the MCA Chicago and before that at the Hirshhorn, the Whitney, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer, in New York’s Central Park and in France, Norway, Ireland and Switzerland. A Brit who came to the United States and immediately found himself awed by our urban and freeway infrastructures, his work is big, often funny, and is thoroughly informed by an outsider’s experience of America.
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Sophie Calle. This is our weekly ‘SoundCloud post.’ If you’re a SoundCloud user, follow The MAN Podcast there and never miss a show!
Calle’s work is featured in the new exhibition “The Progress of Love,” a three-venue collaborative project now on view at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. The exhibition is now on view at all three venues. For closing dates at the various venues, see the exhibition website. The catalogue was published by the Yale University Press.
The Pulitzer’s section of the exhibition includes Calle’s Take Care of Yourself (2007), an installation that was first exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The piece documents how 107 women responded to a break-up letter Calle received from her lover via email.
In addition, Siglio Press has published Calle’s “The Address Book,” the first time the book has been published in its entirety in English. The artwork dates back to 1983 when it was published in Paris’ Liberation newspaper and consists of Calle’s documenting her experiences contacting the people in a lost address book she found on a Parisian street. Amazon offers the book for $20, a $10 discount.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. Also, check out and ‘like’ our Facebook page. See images of artworks discussed on the show.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Sophie Calle.
Calle’s work is featured in the new exhibition “The Progress of Love,” a three-venue collaborative project now on view at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. The exhibition is now on view at all three venues. For closing dates at the various venues, see the exhibition website. The catalogue was published by the Yale University Press.
The Pulitzer’s section of the exhibition includes Calle’s Take Care of Yourself (2007), an installation that was first exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The piece documents how 107 women responded to a break-up letter Calle received from her lover via email. This is the first time Take Care of Yourself has been shown in an American museum.
In addition, Siglio Press has published Calle’s “The Address Book,” the first time the book has been published in its entirety in English. The artwork dates back to 1983 when it was published in Paris’ Liberation newspaper and consists of Calle’s documenting her experiences contacting the people in a lost address book she found on a Parisian street. Amazon offers the book for $20, a $10 discount.
On the second segment, Walters Art Museum curator Joaneath Spicer talks about her new show “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” which is on view in Baltimore through Jan. 21, 2013. The exhibition documents the increasing presence of Africans in European art from around 1400 through the 16th century. The website the Walters has put together for the show is particularly good. The exhibition’s excellent catalogue is not available via the usual online sources; it’s $25 at the Walters’ own store.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. Also, check out and ‘like’ our Facebook page. See images of artworks discussed on the show.
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.
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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 Gregory Crewdson.
He is the subject of a new documentary, “Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters.” The film documents the process and production Crewdson requires to make his work, especially his “Beneath the Roses” series of pictures, which were shot in Western Massachusetts. “Brief Encounters” was produced and directed by Ben Shapiro and is playing in selected cities. It’s playing at New York’s Lincoln Center, in Seattle and at several locations in south Florida. It opens in wider release throughout December and January.
Special bonus collaboration this week!: See Crewdson’s work all day on one of my favorite Tumblrs, Cave to Canvas! If you aren’t following CtC, now is a good time to start.
On the second segment, The MAN Podcast continues its series on the Getty’s conservation of Jackson Pollock’s landmark 1943 painting Mural. This week 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 and what scientists are beginning to discover about how Pollock made his breakthrough painting. The first segment in the series is here.
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Image: Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Ophelia) (detail) from the “Beneath the Roses” series, 2006.
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,
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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 is the first week Martha Rosler’s “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art. The garage sale — yes, it really is a garage sale! — is open for business in the museum’s cavernous atrium through November 30.
MoMA has put up a fun website for the show, complete with a webcam of commerce in action. And don’t miss Rosler’s ‘artist’s newspaper’ for the show!
Rosler was the guest on Episode No. 27 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, an episode that was taped in front of a live audience at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe via iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. See images of art Rosler and I discussed.
Image: Martha Rosler’s Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA.
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.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two new exhibitions that look at American art and the Civil War.
First, in “The Civil War and American Art,” which opens tomorrow 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. Her show examines how artists bent traditional American landscape painting into a response to the war, how artists experienced the war first-hand and how one artist’s time in uniform led to what seems to be the only known paintings of a militarily occupied American city. 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.
On the second segment, Huntington curator Jennifer Watts talks about her new show, “A Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War,” an exhibition of more than 200 pictures and other objects from the Huntington’s famed Civil War-related collections. The exhibition is chock full of still-shocking battlefield pictures, rare pictures of Southern troops and of black troops and remarkable photographs of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train. Many of them are available on the Huntington’s exhibition website.
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Image: Frederic Church, Our Banner in the Sky (detail), 1861.
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 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.
Do you recognize this picture? If you saw this more famous image first, you’d recognize the picture here as being the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi on the Pacific Ocean island of Iwo Jima. One of the things Tucker tells us on this week’s MAN Podcast is that she and her team found images that conclusively document that Joe Rosenthal’s iconic picture of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima is legit, not staged. You can see more images from Iwo Jima here. In the exhibition catalogue Tucker details the history behind how the images — and the moment — were made.
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Image: Bob Campbell, USMC, American, 1910–1968, Flag Raising at Iwo Jima — Installing Large Flag on Mt. Suribachi, February 23, 1945. Collection of the MFA Houston.
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.
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Image: Olafur Eliasson, Iceland (detail), 2012.
