MoMA's Jacob Lawrence Show

The Museum of Modern Art did a wonderful job with the Jacob Lawrence One-Way Ticket show. They are presenting the entire 60 panels of The Migration Series, 1940-41 (made when Lawrence was 23). Shown in one room, the tempera drawings on hardboard panels are single-spaced in clockwise order, all in simple wood frames. Clearly modernist in style, they were conceived as a narrative at the very time that the New York art world was moving away from storytelling.

Harry Sternberg, Steel, 1937-38, oil on masonite, 24 x 48 inches

Born in Atlantic City, NJ, and raised in Harlem, New York City, Lawrence (1917-2000) researched his subject with the help of his future wife, the artist Gwendolyn Knight. He went into amazing detail in both the pictures and the captions, using the First World War as his jumping off point. He analyzed the recruitment by agents for factories -- especially steel mills, and the use of railroads for transportation but also source of jobs leading to one of the first Black labor unions -- the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in spite of opposition from the Pullman Company. The travels costs were usually paid by employers to be re-reimbursed from future pay envelopes.

Lawrence drew scenes that referenced lynching and law enforcement, as well as floods and insect infestations that had drastic effects on farming. He noted the North was NOT free of racism, and that women labors and Black professionals such as doctors were along the last to make the transition. He considered the emotional toll of families now in crowded urban conditions and the lonely relatives in small southern towns that they had left behind. Improved childhood education was an important motivation, but the anxiety of the children is nearly palpable. He even discussed, with touching sympathy, the plight of communities emptied of their labor forces. His own parents, from South Carolina and Virginia, were part of this great shift north that really ended only in the 1970s, so this saga was personal. In the hallway leading to the show there’s a timeline showing the increase of African Americans from tens of thousands in the teens to hundreds of thousands over just a few decades. Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and especially New York City, were the primary beneficiaries.

Lawrence achieved such mastery that while the works form a unified cycle, each individual piece can stand alone. The Migration Series was first shown by Edith Halpert at her Downtown Gallery, NYC, in 1942, and subsequently went on a two-year national tour. The Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection acquired half each. In what must have seemed like a flash, Lawrence’s career was established. In 1944, while in the Coast Guard, he had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art.

In this show dealing with the “Great Movement North” MoMA included related photographs with several of Arkansas and Tennessee by Ben Shahn, additional works by Lawrence and African-American colleagues, and an extensive collection of publications, largely books of the period with their amazing covers. Music and historical and sociological information enrich the experience as well.

Above is Harry Sternberg’s Steel, 1937-38. It just wasn’t in me to use his Southern Holiday. Even Lawrence wasn’t that literal.

Return to the WILLIAM BAZIOTES SURREALIST WATERCOLORS SHOW IN ALLENTOWN

There are only a few more weeks to see the William Baziotes show at the Allentown Art Museum, so we made a return visit.

Columbia Country Courthouse

Approaching Allentown from the northwest we visited Broomsburg, the Columbia County seat.  An impressive courthouse on Main Street was begun in 1848, has an 1868 addition, and a newer  front building and facade from 1980, designed by A. S. Wagner in classic Romanesque Revival brownstone. To the courthouse’s west there is a wonderful Art Deco building, with the name of The Farmers National Bank still visible. In the nineteenth century Bloomsburg went through iron ore mining and production and textile manufacturing. These industries apparently produced civic-minded citizens who wanted a town they could be proud of, with a fountain, civil war monument, and park-like avenues. The town planning and old houses are fascinating. On Market Street the (probably) biggest of the turn-of-the-century mansions looks down on the town from it’s centered and elevated site. 

Travelling from Bloomsburg to Allentown we went through the Lehigh Tunnel through Blue Mountain. It’s wonderful country with fabulous views of the Pocono Mountains with forests, small towns, and farmland.

William Baziotes, Yellow Bull's Head, 1936-39

                      
                     At the Allentown Art Museum, the William Baziotes Surrealist Watercolors show was as wonderful as ever. Seeing it a second time was revelatory! It was all so fresh and bright. But that made the lightening threating the swimmer more dangerous and the bulls’ heads more ferocious. 

The circus-themed amoebas were outdoing themselves, and the gritty roof tiles under the Sunbather practically sparkled. On view through August 23.

William Baziotes, Two Figures in Trapeze Act, 1936-39

Doylestown was our next stop. The Michener Art Museum was showing Iron and Coal, Petroleum and Steel: Industrial Art from the Steidle Collection (owned by Pennsylvania State University), on view through October 25. With the exception of Rockwell Kent and Henry Varnum Poor, most of these New Deal Era artists were unknown to me, including a new favorite, Molly Wheeler Wood Pitz. Using categories of Big Steel, The Worker, and King Cole, and including glass blowing and stone quarries, the curator, Kirsten Jensen allowed the grandeur of the subjects to speak for themselves. All the drama of blast furnaces and night-shift mining comes through, along with grim realities of the soot-coated houses and hardly conscious laborers. Definitely my kind of show.  Thank you Bill M.

Whistler and Roussel: Linked Visions

On Thursday, July 16 we visited the Art Institute of Chicago to see Whistler and Roussel: Linked Visions. The paintings, drawings, and especially the prints of friends James McNeill Whistler and Theodore Roussel are on view along with letters, menus, copper plates, and Roussel frames. This wide-ranging show also explores their relationships with colleagues Frank Duveneck, Francis Seymour Haden, Paul Cesar Hellue, Mortimer Mempes, Joseph Pennell, and Walter Sickert.

Curators Meg Hausberg and Victoria Sancho Lobis wrote in the on-line catalogue, “We hope that this exhibition will remind those who already admire James McNeill Whistler of his remarkable commitment to the art of printmaking, and at the same time, we aim to inspire new admiration for Theodore Roussel, whose quieter nature and preference for process over product has kept him well in the shadow of his more prolific and flamboyant peer.” It is a remarkable privilege to stand within reach of Whistler’s beautifully inked views of London or Venice and with Roussel’s intimate daily scenes, his progressive states and experiments, or his amazingly complex color compositions.

Link to on-line catalogue:https://publications.artic.edu/whistler/reader/linkedvisions/section/409

On the Front Lines

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On the last day we made it to the League’s On the Front Lines: Military Veterans at The Art Students League of New York.  

Julio Girona, Farmer and Soldier, 1940, lithograph

Besides the exhibition itself, curator Jillian Russo included the names of 3751 men and 174 women who served in the military and who either taught or studied at the League.  Julio Girona and Edward Laning are among them. 

Edward Laning, Conte Biancamano, 1949, ink drawing

The SS Conte Biancamano was an Italian ocean liner built in Scotland in 1925. In 1941 she was seized by the US Navy and used for military transport under the name USS Hermitage. In 1947 she was returned to the Italian Line; her last voyage was in 1960.

NEW MEXICO, JULY 2015

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Sunday, July 12, was the last day of #ArtSantaFe2015. We loved being there and had many wonderful visitors. We were especially pleased that works by #WilliamBaziotes, #IsabelBishop, #HowardDaum, #PeterGrippe, #HughMesibov, and #AngeloPinto, (east-coasters all) were noticed and admired. Seated Woman Drawing by #PeggyBacon was one of the hits.

Peggy Bacon, Seated Woman Drawing, 1930

 

Monday, July 13, we drove to the Puye Cliff Dwellings, a National Historic Landmark and ancestral home of todays’ Santa Clara Pueblo Native Americans. The site is run by the Pueblo; the guides are members as well. The mesa is volcanic tuff, a light, easily cut material that was also used to filter water for drinking. The hollowed out cave homes at the side of the steep cliff were used in winter as the stone held the heat of the sun through the night. At the top of the mesa there were window-less homes, one, two, or even three stories, that were entered by climbing a ladder one flight up and then down into the rooms, each about nine by nine feet. These long skinny “town homes” with neighbors on either side were built of the volcanic tuff and occupied by extended families. From about 900 AD to 1580, when there was a severe draught, as many as 1500 people lived there at a time. They communicated with other mesas through runners, but in emergencies used color-coded smoke signals as well. The cliffs were clearly defensive housing. The hand and footholds on the face of the cliff were strategic: life-savers if you knew the correct pattern or route -- a death trap if you didn’t.

Puye Cliff Dwellings

On Tuesday, July 14, we walked two trails at the Petroglyph National Monument, Albuquerque, NM. There are more than 20,000 prehistoric and historic Native American and Hispanic petroglyphs (images carved into rock) and pictographs (images painted onto the rock) in a park with a huge variety of trails. The basalt boulders along Albuquerque’s West Mesa were formed by volcanic eruptions as long as 150,000 years ago. They are dark brown close up but black from a distance; their surfaces range from grainy or pitted to smoothly iridescent. Thanks to a rainy spring and frequent thunderstorms there were green plants among the giant boulders – much more greenery than we expected. 

READING EAGLE's review of Allentown's WILLIAM BAZIOTES show.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - 11:55 AM

Life@ReadingEagle.com

Reading, PA

Art review: Reading son Baziotes' watercolors reflect an era

Sunday July 19, 2015 12:01 AM

By Ron Schira - Reading Eagle correspondent 

If you go

The Allentown Art Museum is at 31 N. Fifth St., Allentown. Call 610-432-4333 or visit www.allentownartmuseum.org for hours and additional information.

 

Baziotes, Yellow Creature on Tightrope, 1936-39

ALLENTOWN - "William Baziotes: Surrealist Watercolors," showing through Aug. 23 at the Allentown Art Museum Payne Hurd Gallery, is a collection of 24 small paintings discovered years after the artist's death in a box of his belongings. Dated between 1936 to 1939, they are reported to have rarely, if ever, been seen before.

Born in Pittsburgh and reared in Reading, Baziotes (1912-1963) moved to New York City in 1933, where he attended the National Academy of Design and then worked on the New Deal Projects sponsored by the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression.

During the late 1930s he met a number of artists, most importantly the Chilean emigre Roberto Matta Echaurren, who had introduced him to Surrealism. Shortly thereafter he joined with Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and other artists to found the emerging seminal movement of Abstract Expressionism. His first solo exhibition was, remarkably, in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery.

Although he did share the group's interest in primitive art and automatism, his work is associated more with European Surrealism, whose major proponents fled Europe to avoid the impending rise of Fascism and make New York City their new, albeit temporary, home. These paintings are expressive of that movement and plant the seeds for his later, more complex pieces.

Vertical, about 12 by 9 inches each, these dramatic images are spontaneous in their execution and elicit circus performers, figures on a beach, howling monsters and/or otherwise grotesque caricatures of inhumane existence.

The threat of war and the violence of the times found its release in these works and echo Picasso's screaming horse from Guernica and Miro's "Aid Spain" posters. Both of these artists have profoundly influenced these pieces, particularly his women on a beach from Picasso's Dinard period and two distorted bull heads.

For other examples, "Howling Creature" or "Yellow Creature" are screaming their hearts out at the sky, symbolically beseeching a higher power to intervene and stop the tyrannical cruelty of dictatorial regimes.

"Yellow Creature on a Tightrope" or "Dancing on a Ball" each express the state of precarious and dangerous balance the world was experiencing, just as "Funeral" evokes what become the true spoils of war.

I am impressed with how well these works held up against time, notably on paper, as the colors and surfaces appear next to unblemished. It also appears to me that they may have all been completed in one pass since they are so close in size, style and color scheme.

On loan from the Susan Teller Gallery in New York City, this impressive exhibition of Baziotes' early work offers insight toward understanding his enigmatic later work; the pieces are painted lightly but the subject matter is dark in a bold, tragicomic irony. Anybody interested in his art should see this show.

Contact Ron Schira: life@readingeagle.com.

- See more at: http://readingeagle.com/life/article/art-review-reading-son-baziotes-watercolors-reflect-an-era#sthash.ZO0LVD5y.dpuf

IN MEMORIAM: KITTY LEECH

 

Study for Self Portrait, 2005

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KITTY LEECH  (1957-2015)

 

On return from Santa Fe and Chicago we learned the tragic news that Kitty Leech died on Wednesday, July 15^th. Our relationship with Kitty (named for her grandmother, Katharine McCollum Gallagher) began in 1990 when we started to show the work of her grandfather, Michael J. Gallagher. Kitty and her sister Gwyneth were avid supporters of the work of their grandparents, their mother, Louise Leech, and each others work as well.

 

 

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Costume design for Sapiens, 1991, for the Amazon Chorus in By Jupiter.

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Leech was a draftsman, costume designer, illustrator, photographer, and teacher -- most recently at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department. She designed the costumes for the original production of Gross Indecency, The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, that debuted at the Minetta Lane Theater, NY, in 1997, and traveled to theaters in the USA and England, including the Gielgud Theatre in London's West End in 1999.

At the Gallery her work was featured in the exhibitions The Gallagher/Leech Family, 2001, the Family Business, 2005,  Day Job, 2009, and most recently Families/Cities SHIFT, 2013.

Costume design for Imprints on a Landscape, The Mining Project, 2008, a collaborative piece by the artist’s aunt, the choreographer Martha Wittman. The artist’s niece, Megan Wilson, is the female dancer in this drawing.

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Our condolences to her family; we are saddened by her untimely death and will always miss her.