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| Art |
| A Visit to the Tate Modern |
| Huntley Dent |
July 9, 2008 |
Oh, that this rain would end! I dried my socks by stepping into the Tate Britain this afternoon. The museum collection is divided into three parts – the glorious, the dull, and the querulous. The glorious, all those luminescent Turner paintings, went on tour this year, so the mobs aren’t in attendance. The management left a few strays lingering in various galleries (like the sublimely bucolic Golden Bough and a Venetian water scene where only an outlined gondola betrays that Turner wasn’t painting a celestial city), and these left-behinds glow like yellow sapphires. The dull part of the Tate consists of traditional British paintings, large rooms hung double-decker style with portraits of horse-faced lords and their pale, powdered ladies. I have to squint to read the labels, so it’s work to separate the Reynolds, Gainsboroughs, and Van Dycks from the acreage of peerage that surrounds them. If I sound captious, it’s because the third portion of the Tate Britain, devoted to modern art, exasperated me.  |
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| Rockwell Kent and the Cape Cinema Mural |
| Lucy Vivante |
July 5, 2008 |
| Part of the Cape Cinema’s appeal comes from the high contrast between outside and in. The church-like exterior is patterned after the nearby town of Centerville's Congregational Church. The murals you might expect inside–of a Puritan religious gathering or colonists working–are instead of exuberant figures dancing across the ceiling. Within the space of a few feet, just by crossing the lobby, we travel from stern New England to lush Art Deco. |
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Pollock Matters, edited by Ellen G. Landau & Claude Cernuschi.
Published : Chestnut Hill, MA : McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College ; [Chicago] : Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2007. |
| Michael Miller |
June 9, 2008 |
| This is the second part of my review of the exhibition Pollock Matters [click here to read Part I], which I promised back in December of last year as a separate discussion of the catalogue. If the flow of events has not permitted me to fulfill my promise until now, I shan’t apologize too abjectly, because the catalogue is of permanent value—as much to art historians as to the scientists of art—and during the intervening period our appreciation of Pollock has since been enriched by an added dimension. His drips and spatters have made their entry into the fashion world, paraded on the most fashionable sidewalks on garments of all kinds for both sexes: shirts, tank tops, dresses, and shoes. While Pollock’s drip paintings were made as the most quintessentially unique of unique artworks, characteristic motifs are now made into the most quintessentially multiple of multiples, mass-produced designer clothes: the distinguishing criterion of these articles is not the quality of workmanship or quality of design applied to an individual, bespoke example, but the uniformly recognizable distinction of a brand name. The purchaser, in wearing them, surrenders a certain portion of his or her individuality in order to assume, by being branded in this way, an extra-personal distinction, not the mark of Pollock, the artist who “invented” the design, but that of the late Yves St. Laurent and others, who borrowed it. In this the borrowing is a more potent gesture than creation. Some fashion-conscious people, either through thrift or through mischievousness, have gone a step further, dripping their own patterns on to blank garments, co-opting the brand distinction by re-borrowing it and restoring some of their individuality and some of the hand-made craft of art—which is apparently legal, since these drip motifs cannot or have not been copyrighted. Doesn’t the Pollock-Krasner Foundation have anything to say about this?
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| Hoosac River Lights, April 26, 2008 |
| Photo Gallery by Joanna Gabler and Michael Miller |
May 22, 2008 |
Ralph Brill, of the Brill Gallery, initiated the Hoosac River Lights - an outdoor artistic lighting project that drew crowds of thousands to its Inaugural Event on the evening of April 26, 2008. The Hoosac River Lights Project celebrated the Hoosac River and brought it back into people's consciousness. Over time it might become an annual City of North Adams Event lasting several days. Once a dynamic river that powered the old textile and shoe mills in the region the Hoosac was placed in a concrete channel in the 1950s to prevent costly flood damages. Today, the Hoosac River remains largely unnoticed as it winds its way through the center of North Adams. |
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| Joanna Gabler, painter, Nature Transfigured, at the Latchis Theater, Brattleboro...and Ancient Greece |
| Michael Miller |
December 20, 2007 |
| In December the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro will be showing recent abstract works by Joanna Gabler. This selection of paintings has its origin in Nature, and her reflection in Joanna's spiritual life.
In her mediative art Gabler strives to present the magical and transformational realm of invisible energies which form nature and whole universe around us. Though invisible to unprepared eyes, these forces or currents of energy are experience by everybody and influence very deeply our emotions, feeling and thinking. Using Joanna's work as a gateway we can enter into the realm of the forces within the nature to understand ourselves, our relation to them, our place in the world and to realize that the forces outside us are the same energies which work in our bodies and psyche. We come back from that that journey enriched, with a deeper understanding that there is only one world and that we are one with it.
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| Pollock Matters, exhibition, The McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, September 1-December 9, 2007: Part I |
| Michael Miller |
December 7, 2007 |
| Herbert Matter recalled that in 1942, when they first met over dinner, Jackson Pollock said to him, “It’s a really wonderful time to be living.” He added,“That gave us plenty to think about the rest of the evening.” I wonder how many people would say that today. For my part, after rehearsing a string of problems and miseries irrelevant to the present topic, the amazing exhibition, Pollock Matters, which closes this Sunday (December 9) at the McMullen Museum of Boston College, I would say that we take controversy too seriously. As the debates among the presidential candidates drivel on in equivocation, and the incumbent goes about his work of ruining the country, those Americans who are interested in one of their country’s greatest painters may ro may not find themselves sufficiently clear-headed to realize that this exhibition has been so much wrapped up in controversy, that few see its real issues or even care about them. It concerns the discovery of a cache of small experimental works, according to a label made by their owner, Herbert Matter, in 1958, the work of Jackson Pollock, and the collision of the discoverer, Matter’s son, Alex, with the blue-chip institution established by Pollock’s widow. Things might have turned out differently. However, as it is, the 26 paintings in question, according to a stipulation of the foundation, are segregated in a gallery of their own, separated from any accepted work by Pollock, and labelled without attribution. |
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| Alex Hartley, John Stezaker, William Blake: A Stroll through Some Edinburgh Galleries - Part II of a Series (Part I in Places) |
| Michael Miller |
December 1, 2007 |
| Richard Long has observed that the best and safest way to cross Dartmoor is to walk in a straight line, but in the city things are rarely so simple. Long’s important exhibition at The National Gallery of Modern Art was postponed to another day, and I shall postpone it to a review of its own, while I follow our ramblings southwards towards the Old City, seeking out addresses my friend had given me. As sophisticated and rational as Edinburgh may be, at least the New Town, certain prospects encourage one to think of it as a city of the earth. It is mostly built of stone, after all, as neatly chiselled as it may be. As you turn the corner around the façade of the new Parliament, Arthur’s Seat, an extinct volcano, appears ready to swallow it up...or is that only wishful thinking? The classical structures on Calton Hill, stone-built as they are, only draw attention to the chthonic presence of the eminence on which they stand. (Like Rome, Edinburgh has seven hills: Calton Hill, Castle Hill, Corstorphine Hill, Craiglockhart Hill, Braid Hills, Blackford Hill, Arthur’s Seat.) This theme, moreover, had its way of cropping up, not only in Richard Long, but in other exhibitions as well. |
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Richard Long - Walking and Marking - Part III of a Series
National Galleries of Scotland
30th June to 21st October 2007, Modern Art Galleries
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| Michael Miller |
December 1, 2007 |
| Setting off alone along the now familiar route down Henderson Row past a silent Academy, now in break, I savored a sense of purposefulness and anticipated my visit to the Richard Long show at the NGS Modern Galleries, their major exhibition of the year, open for the Festival, and an important one for Long as well. He hasn’t had an exhibition of this size in Britain in over fifteen years. I also relished another walk along the Water of Leith. Crossing unnecessarily over to elegant and brightly sunlit Dean Terrace, I crossed back at the bridge and descended into the path just before St. Bernard’s Well, a sulfurous source discovered in the mid-eighteenth century and decorously enclosed in a pump house designed by Alexander Naismyth, following the circular design of the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli, a favorite destination on the Grand Tour. A statue of Hygieia stands within ten Tuscan columns, a sober northern interpretation of the original’s Corinthian order. |
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| Two Remarkable Men: Konrad Oberhuber and Nicholas Hlobeczy |
| Michael Miller |
October 2, 2007 |
| Last month two remarkable men died, Konrad Oberhuber on September 12 and Nicholas Hlobeczy on the 14th. Since they both exercised a similar beneficent influence on the world through art—and on me personally, I think it fitting to honor them together. They were on the surface quite different. One was a prominent curator and art historian, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance and in the art of drawing; the other was a photographer and poet, vividly familiar and loved by those who knew him and his work.
Both spent a good part of their lives working in museums, Nick in the obscurity of the photo studio and darkroom, Konrad in the social, if not especially luminous world of graphics study rooms and galleries. Neither was entirely comfortable in the hierarchical, bureaucratic world of the museum.
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