The second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features art historian Jonathan Fineberg talking about his new book “A Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson,” which was just published by the University of California Press. The book examines Arneson’s life and career, from his early work which was informed by pop art, Peter Voulkos and a dark sense of humor, to his use of his own image as a kind of ground on which ideas and narratives could play out. SFMOMA acquired one of Arneson’s most important works, Portrait of George, a memorial bust of assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone, last year. This is Arneson’s No Pain (1991), also from SFMOMA’s collection.
This lead segment is with Katharina Grosse. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas just opened “Wunderblock,” an indoor/outdoor exhibition of new Grosses. It’s on view through September 1. The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is at about the halfway point of a year-long presentation of a towering work it commissioned from Grosse, “Third Man Begins Digging Through Her Pockets.” That work will be up through the end of the year.
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. Special thanks to Anna Brooke and the team at the Hirshhorn library for their help.
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Wangechi Mutu. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is currently showing “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” the first mid-career survey of Mutu’s work. Curated by the Nasher’s Trevor Schoonmaker, the exhibition is on view through July 21. On May 23 the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney will debut a concurrent (but obviously different) Mutu survey. It will be up through August 14.
Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, schooled in Wales and New York and lives in Brooklyn. Her work, which began as mostly collage-based but has evolved to include sculpture and room-sized installations. The winner of the 2010 Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year,” Mutu has been featured in solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Pace, the Miami Art Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, the Art Gallery of Ontario and more.
This is a detail from Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies (2005) from the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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 Kemper Art Museum curator and Washington University professor Karen Butler. Her exhibition “Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945” is at the Kemper through April 21. Phillips Collection curator Renée Maurer co-organized the show. Its handsome catalogue was published by Prestel.
The exhibition offers the first detailed look at Braque’s still-life painting in the years leading up to and through World War II, a period during which questions of painting and daily life were inextricably wrapped up in politics and resistance. Somehow the Kemper exhibition is the first Braque show of any kind in the United States in 16 years.
This is a detail from a 1936 Braque still-life in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that’s in Butler’s exhibition. It’s a terrific example of Braque’s late style, in which Braque paints space in multiple depths and from multiple angles.
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 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…)
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Carrie Mae Weems. A new retrospective exhibition of Weems’s work titled, “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,” opened last week at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
This week the show is again collaborating with the must-follow Tumblr Cave to Canvas. To see lots more Weemses throughout the day, be sure to check out CtC!
On the second segment, I talk with Aimee Levitt, a staff writer at the Riverfront Times, an alt-weekly in St. Louis. A couple of weeks ago Levitt wrote this fantastic story about outsider artist Edward Deeds and how he and his work have been re-discovered. Click here for the RFT’s terrific gallery of dozens of Deedses.
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Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990. Promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago, collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The second episode of The Modern Art Notes Podcast featured one of the top painters working in the United States: German-born artist Charline von Heyl. She and I talked on the occasion of her first mid-career survey, which was then on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
Her work is on view now at two American museums: This piece, Bluntschli (2005) is in “Phantom Limb: Approaches to Painting Today” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and her fantastic Happy End (2005) is on view in a permanent collection installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A European survey of von Heyl’s career is now at Germany’s Kunsthalle Nuremberg.
If you love painting, you’ll love the von Heyl show. Download the show directly to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, RSS. See images discussed on the show.
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.
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Image: Barry McGee, Untitled, 2009. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The art: Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting (Three Panel), 1951.
The news: Earlier today the NCAA announced significant sanctions against Penn State University related to the Sandusky child abuse scandal. One of the penalties was the vacating of program wins from 1998-2011, prompting Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel to tweet: “In 2010 Penn State played Ohio State in a game both sides have now vacated.”
The source: 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.
