“Citizen 941 _0042”
Photo by Ashley Thompson
The images from the “Citizen 941” project are of disenfranchised voters from Sarasota, FL and the surrounding area. The photographer, Ashley Thompson, is also a disenfranchised voter.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights “Manet: Portraying Life,” a new exhibition of Edouard Manet’s portraits opening Sunday at the Toledo Museum of Art. It is the first exhibition devoted to Manet’s portraiture. Toledo organized the exhibition in association with the Royal Academy in London, where it will travel next.
My guests are exhibition co-curator Lawrence Nichols, the senior curator of European and American painting and sculpture before 1900 at Toledo and Gary Tinterow, the former head of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and now the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. While at the Met, Tinterow was the curator of the 2002 exhibition “Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting.”
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of Manets discussed on the program.
On Modern Art Notes: Considering the GOP’s latest night of racist stereotyping (with some help from Carrie Mae Weems).
Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Black Man Holding Watermelon from “Ain’t Jokin’”, 1987-88.
Child labor still exists in many countries around the world. In India, the government has proposed new legislation that it says will address the country’s child labor problem, Amy Kazmin reported in The Washington Post last week.
“Cotton-Mill Worker, North Carolina,” 1908, Lewis W. Hine, The J. Paul Getty Museum
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features a rare conversation with Robert Adams.
One of Adams’s artist heroes is Dorothea Lange, the California-based photographer who made social inequality the subject of her life’s work. (Little-known fact: She started out as a society portraitist in post-World War I San Francisco.) Adams thinks Lange is perpetually underrated and that she was a photographer on par with Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan and other American greats. Adams and I talked about Lange, his admiration for her work and life, and her place in the firmament on this week’s program.
This picture exists in several versions, including this one at SFMOMA and in a quite different cropping at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Adams may be the greatest living American photographer. In the 1960s and 1970s he brought a new sensibility to photographing the most classic subject in American art, the land. By emphasizing man’s impact on Colorado and its suburbs in series such as “The New West” and “What We Bought,” Adams helped pioneer art that addressed our impact on the landscape and on the Earth. A major retrospective of his 46-year career is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. Titled “The Place We Live,” it’s on view through October 28.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. View images of artworks discussed on the show.
Image: Dorothea Lange, JR Butler, President of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Memphis, Tennessee, 1938. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights artist Lucian Freud, whose paintings are the subject of a major exhibition that originated at the National Portrait Gallery in London and which is now at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Titled “Lucian Freud: Portraits,” the exhibition is on view at MAMFW through October 28.
My guests are Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, a friend of Freud’s who has written several books on his work, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth chief curator Michael Auping, who helped organize the exhibition and who conducted the last interviews with Freud before his death last year. Smee and I also discuss art and museums in Boston and New England, and his new e-book, titled “Frame by Frame.”
Freud’s most famous late work is likely his 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, shown here.
To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program here.
Image: Lucian Freud, Queen Elizabeth II (detail), 2001. The Royal Collection, London.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights artist Lucian Freud, whose paintings are the subject of a major exhibition that originated at the National Portrait Gallery in London and which is now at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Titled “Lucian Freud: Portraits,” the exhibition is on view at MAMFW through October 28.
My guests are Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, a friend of Freud’s who has written several books on his work, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth chief curator Michael Auping, who helped organize the exhibition and who conducted the last interviews with Freud before his death last year. Smee and I also discuss art and museums in Boston and New England, and his new e-book, titled “Frame by Frame.”
Among the Freud portraits that Auping and I discuss is this one, a rather anti-erotic nude. Why is it so un-erotic? It’s Freud’s daughter, Rose.
To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program here.
Image: Lucian Freud, Rose, 1978-79.
I think you’ll really enjoy this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast. The show features new art history about Jan van Eyck, the greatest painter of the northern Renaissance. Click on the image to listen/download!
Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is devoted to Jan van Eyck, the greatest painter of the northern Renaissance. While van Eyck was the painter that Italians wanted to be — Giorgio Vasari famously and incorrectly wrote that van Eyck invented oil painting and Italian artists flocked north to see his work — he’s somewhat under-appreciated in the United States. (Perhaps that’s because the only major van Eyck in an American museum is this Annunciation at the National Gallery of Art. Click here to see it a larger version in NGA Images.)
This weeks’s program features two significant van Eyck-related events: A new revision of the most important English-language book on van Eyck, and the new “Closer to van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece” website, which makes one of the landmarks of Western art available to us in new ways.
Considering that van Eyck may be the greatest painter of the 15th-century, you might be surprised to learn that there’s only one English-language monograph on his art. Titled “Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism,” it was written by my first guest, Craig Harbison. The book, which was first published in 1991 and has now been revised and expanded to reflect new research on van Eyck’s work, is a wonderful read. It’s smart and detailed, but reads lightly. It’s a too-rare example of a top art historian willing to allow his sense of wonder at his subject’s work to infuse every page. (The book is published by London’s Reaktion Books and is distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press.)
This season’s second major van Eyck news is the creation of “Closer to van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece.” The website is remarkable for many reasons. First: It’s difficult to see the Ghent Altarpiece in any detail in person: Many of the panels are 15 feet off the ground, leaving them impossible to examine closely. Now anyone can examine high-resolution, digital versions of them in never-seen-before quality.
But the site is much more than that: Unlike popular macrophotography sites such as the Google Art Project, “Closer to van Eyck” offers four layers of technical documentation of the Ghent Altarpiece: The straightforward macrophotographic image, but also infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectography and x-ray images. All of the images are available without copyright, meaning that this one website will no doubt spawn piles of new research on the altarpiece and on both Hubert and Jan van Eyck. The web project was funded by The Getty Foundation and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. The three-part process of documenting the altarpiece and conserving it has been funded by the Getty, the Flemish government and the province of East Flanders.
My second guest, Ron Spronk, coordinated the “Closer to van Eyck” project. He is a an art historian and a specialist in the technical documentation of paintings. He teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and at Radboud University in the Netherlands. His previous projects have included “Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych” at the National Gallery of Art and “Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings,” at the Harvard Art Museums.
Among the elements of the Ghent Altarpiece we discuss are the “boob job” that one of the van Eycks clearly gave to Eve (see below) and how his documentation should help historians solve one of art history’s greatest mysteries: Which parts of the altarpiece were painted by Hubert van Eyck before he died, and which parts were painted by his brother Jan?
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program and see images of the art discussed on this week’s show here.
The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. For images of the works discussed on this week’s show, click through to the jump.
Richard Serra standing in Two Corner Cut: High Low (2012), a site-specific drawing he just created for The Menil Collection in Houston.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Richard Serra, our greatest living sculptor. A retrospective of his drawings has just opened at its originating institution, The Menil Collection. It will be on view through June 10. The exhibition was previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was organized by the Menil’s Michelle White and Bernice Rose, and SFMOMA’s Gary Garrels.
The Menil installation results in an exhibition that bears virtually no resemblance to the presentation at the Met. The spaces are more thoughtfully created to emphasize the physicality of the work and they’re better-lit. The show’s narrative is clearer. Just as great: Serra has created a site-specific drawing for the Menil, Two Corner Cut: High Low. White and Serra have installed it in the last gallery of the show — and to me it’s the best work there. It’s the rare, remarkable drawing that leaves a viewer feeling unsteady and disoriented.
On the program, Serra and I discuss:
- How the Met’s installation of the exhibition stacks up against the Menil’s presentation;
- The new, site-specific drawing installation he did for the Menil, Two Corner Cut: High Low;
- The role drawing played in Serra’s acceptance into Yale’s art school;
- The relationship between steel and Serra’s formative years in San Francisco;
- Why Serra thinks there’s a link between his landmark Pulitzer Piece and the first anti-Vietnam War newspaper editorial;
- The emotional responses that viewers have to his torqued ellipses and spirals, complete with special on-tape appearances by Kirk Varnedoe and Emily Rauh Pulitzer; and
- What happened when Richard Serra cut into one of Tadao Ando’s architectural models as he suggested a modification to an Ando design.
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program and see more images of artworks discussed on the podcast here.
The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. This week’s program was edited by Wilson Butterworth.
You can also stream the show from the MANPodcast.com post immediately below this one.
For International Women’s Day: Zoe Strauss, Daddy Tattoo, Philadelphia, 2004. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Philadelphia-based artist Zoe Strauss is an American treasure and a self-described lesbian anarchist. Strauss’s work is the subject of a ten-year survey, on view now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It’s been my pleasure to write about her over the years, and it was a special privilege to have her on The Modern Art Notes Podcast a few weeks ago. Please download or listen to that episode here.
Here’s some of my writing on Strauss:
- The artist who keeps office hours at her exhibition;
- Strauss, Philadelphia, and a museum’s ridiculous admissions price;
- My column for the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Modern Painters focuses on how little American artists have focused on our declining economic circumstances during and immediately after The Great Recession. The column features two artists who are an exception: Alec Soth and Strauss. Unfortunately, it’s not online.
- Strauss visits communities along the Gulf after the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A MAN Q&A: Part one, part two.
The art: Zoe Strauss, proof of a potential layout from her forthcoming book “On the Beach.” The project and book chronicle the aftermath of the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The proof is from 2011, the photographs are from 2010.
The news: “BP to Pay $7.8 Billion to Settle Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Lawsuit, Is It a Bad Deal for Gulf Residents?” on Democracy Now! radio.
The source: Zoe Strauss’s Flickr.
Nota bene: Strauss is currently the subject of this solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2010 she and I conducted this Q&A about her “On the Beach” project on Modern Art Notes: Part one, part two. She was also a guest on The Modern Art Notes Podcast earlier this year. She was a great guest. I guarantee you’ll love the program.
The art: Francis Bacon, Study After Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953.
The news: “Theocracy and its Discontents,” a look at Rick Santorum’s right-wing Christianist crusade by Timothy Egan for the New York Times.
The source: Collection of the Des Moines Art Center.
The art: Goya, The Marquesa de Pontejos, c. 1786. (The dog in the lower-right steals the painting…)
The news: “Pekingese Wins Best in Show at Westminster,” by Dashiell Bennett on TheAtlanticWire.com.
The source: Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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