At The Dawn Of A New Age

 Early 20th Century American Modernism at the Whitney Museum in New York City.  On exhibit are works produced between 1900 and 1930.  

“progressive initiatives heralded cultural shifts by challenging existing social and economic norms … many American artists adopted the new and experimental over the traditional, rejecting realism in favor of art that gave precedence to emotional experience and harmonious design.”

Charles Shaw 1892-1974, NYC, painter, poet (1200 published poems), writer for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair studied at Yale, Columbia (architecture), and the Art Students League.  Connected by birth to the Woolworth family fortune he was orphaned at 3 and raised with his twin brother by an Uncle.  He served as a lieutenant in the First World War but never saw action and never married, no children. He is known for ‘Geometric Biomorphic Abstraction’.  At the Whitney: 

“Self Portrait”

Marsden Hartley, 1877 Lewiston, Maine , 1943, Ellsworth Maine, artist, poet, essayist, and fiction writer, Cleveland School of Art, NY School of Art under William Merritt Chase and the NationalAcademy of Design. He traveled to Europe for the first time in 1912 and in Paris met Gertrude Stein and the avant-garde.  In 1913 he traveled to Berlin met Kandinsky and the Prussian Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg who died in the First World War.

He never addressed his sexuality and is represented in the exhibit with 

“Portrait of a German Officer”

the Iron Cross, Flag of Bavaria, military emblems, fragments of the Royal Guard’s Uniform and a chessboard create an abstract portrait with the golden #24; symbolic perhaps of Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, dead at the age of 24.

Chiura Obama, Okayama, Japan 1885, Berkeley, Ca. 1975.  “He worked to fuse sumi-e’s fluid brushwork, a reverence for nature based in Zen Buddhism and the three dimensional perspective of Western art.”

Untitled (Lakeshore) 1920-1929

Pamela Colman Smith, 1878 London, England, 1951, Bude, England, artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist best known for illustrating the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, and over 20 books, wrote two books on Jamaican folklore (she lived in Jamaica for awhile), edited two magazines and ran the Green Leaf Press, focused on woman writers.  She had a studio in London in 1901, an open house for artists, authors, actors.  Arthur Ransome describes an evening there in his 1907 ‘Bohemia in London’. It was probably at her salon where W.B.Yeats introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to the study and practice of occult Hermeticism and metaphysics. Here is her watercolor from 1903, 

“The Wave”

Elie Nadelman, 1882 Warsaw, Poland, 1946, Riverdale, Bronx, New York, 

‘Spring’, 1911

Leo Stein was an early supporter and owned one of his cubist portraits.

Nadelman moved to New York, married Viola Flannery, a wealthy heiress, in 1920.  They settled in Riverdale and collected thousands of pieces of folk art which they displayed in their Museum of Folk art in Riverdale.  The New York Historical Society eventually bought the collection of over 15,000 pieces.  Viola’s wealth vanished in the 1929 crash; the art world lost interest in Ellie’s efforts and he packed much of it away in his attic where it disintegrated.  Some other pieces were destroyed by workmen sent to remodel his studio.  His reputation has grown since 1948 when MoMA exhibited this work:

‘Man in the Open Air’

There are 60 works by 48 Artists in this Exhibition.  This is a sampling, my takeaway after one visit.

Did the Greeks have a name for it?

Is there another culture with so much to say and show about the dark character of its people as the Irish.  There’s no Ivanhoe, El CID,  throughout Joyce, Yeats, or Jonathan Swift.  No great stories of heroism, or leadership.  No “Gladiator” movie for the Irish.  

There have been a number of attempts to describe that Irish character, such as, charming, witty, warm, quick tempered, and egotistical.  After seeing “ The Banshee of Inisherin” I’d say the Irish love music, have a sense of justice, resist change, are stubborn, ambitious and will seek revenge.  

Also after seeing “The Banshees” I recognize our society today as full of those characteristics as the Irish of Inisherin.  Mr. McDonough has recreated our own time on this isolated island with its ridicule of niceness.  The Banshee is the one who cries out the impending death and with all the talk of our democracy dying “The Banshee of Inisherin”  is McDonough’s outline.  How we’re doing it.

Loved the movie.  It’s typical McDonough funny and gruesome.

Also liked “Amsterdam”  which I will have to see again when it streams.

“Armageddon Time”, a very personal movie.  Reminded me of a number of other stories such as Tom Sawyer but not as entertaining.  Too personal?

Lately

 I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see ‘Ancient Sculpture in Color’ and ‘In America, a Lexicon in Fashion.’

They, the restorers of classic sculptures, have discovered a way of exposing paint on the sculptures of antiquity and have used that knowledge to paint some of the sculptures which are now on view at the Met:

And fashion:

I spent a week at Angela’s in Brewster and one day we took a ride across Putnam County to Cold Spring where we visited Magazzino, Italian Art Museum in which we got to see Piero Gilardi, who looks like someone I used to know.  I’ve seen at MoMA.  

He creates carpets: Tappeto-Natura 

And other Artists of the Modern Movement in Italy called Arte Povera.

Michelangelo Pistoleto:

‘Alamo ed Eva’, Silkscreen  print on polished stainless steel and the cloths he used to polish the stainless steel become the Italian flag … Arte Povera.

And more flags outside with clouds that reminded me of calligraphy:

Other artists: Janis Kounellis, Senza titolo

Giovanni Anselmo, Il panorama fin verso oltremare

Mario Metz, ‘Igloo con vortice’ and ‘Turbina’:

And the Broadway show Moulin Rouge which won the Tony Award for best musical and has no original music.  A spectacular spectacle very much in the style of the movie by Baz Luhrmann who had nothing to do with the show except to inspire it,

Tired, yes but still manageing to  get out and move.
 

Yesterday

 I was riding the elevator in my building and an elderly woman I haven’t seen in years, after seeing my medication/caused bruised arm, asked if I was okay.  With my best smile I said :”I’m still here”.  She said “me too.”  Then out of the blue she added: “ We bought a building in Greenpoint”.  

A building that was formally a Greek Church.  “We” referred to her group.  I didn’t get the name but it is a group of Basque immigrants.  She is Basque, hence “we” bought a building.  She talked about being a Basque as we both walked out onto the street, cane next to cane.  Franco is not popular with the Basque.  I would have guessed as much but not that Guernica is in the Basque region.  It is called the Basque region because the name of the area translated is “ where basque is spoken”.

Did I mention Boise, Idaho? 

Tired confused ditzy with these med changes.  Now back on 5 mg of prednisone.  

Anyway: Amelia, that’s the name of my new friend, told me the Basque Museum is in Boise, Idaho.  It’s an old farmhouse, converted to a boarding house: that used to board shepherds from the region where basque is spoken.  It is preserved as it was in the 19th Century.  First, the region where basque is spoken is in both France and Spain.  Amelia says the French don’t think so but the basques are in France too.  Second, the shepherds obviously didn’t have much.  All that is at the museum is what belonged to the boardinghouse owner, not a Basque. 

Maybe that building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, previously a Greek Church, will grow into something beyond Franco and Guernica and Basque shepherds’ rooming house.

She turned left to go to Rite Aide for a spray (she found a roach) and I went straight towards the market.  We smiled and waved our canes goodbye.

Ditzy.  “Yesterday”, happened 2 weeks ago.

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 Winslow Homer, 1836-1910, exhibit 

CROSSCURRENTS: 

“ close study of his art reveals a lifelong preoccupation with conflict and uncertainty as well as persistent concern with race and the environment.” 

The exhibit contains 88 oils and watercolors.  Quotes are from the exhibit.

The Cotton Pickers, 1876

“It’s title and the women’s portrayal suggest a post slavery economy in which little has changed for many”.

A Visit from the Old Mistress, 1876

“ A powerful evocation of lingering conflict and trauma with women and slavery at its center.”

Dressing for the Carnival, 1877

War and Reconstruction:

Homer was working as a popular illustrator in Boston for Harpers Weekly when they sent him to the front lines of Virginia with the Union Army.  

‘Sharpshooter’ and ‘Prisoner from the Front’ “establish his reputation as a painter of pathos.”

Sharpshooter, 1866

Prisoners from the Front, 1866

Waterside:  

“These seemingly lighthearted works intimate darker themes, foreshadowing the artist’s growing preoccupation with the risks involved in maritime life.”

Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide)

Eagle head, closer look, 1870

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) closer look, 1873-76

Breezing Up

An Adirondack Lake, 1870

Along the Gulf Stream: 

“Epic conflict between humankind and nature … developed over 20 years … references complex social and political issues, including the legacy of slavery and imperialism in the wake of the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War.”

“The centerpiece of the exhibit … a painting that reveals his lifelong engagement with charged subjects of race, geopolitics and the environment.”

The Gulf Stream, 1899

Diamond Shoal, 1905

“The junction of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current. Feared by sailors as the graveyard of the Atlantic.”

Northeaster, 1895-1901

Maine Coast,1896

Winter Coast, 1890

Winter Coast

Woods at Prout’s Neck, 1887

Perils of the Sea, 1881

Along the Gulf Stream

Waiting

Undertow, 1886

Lost on the Grand Banks, 1885

Rescue, 1887

Homer spent many winters in the Bahamas and believed his watercolors would be his legacy. “Ads promoted the healthful benefits of tropical paradise and Homer also suggests the exclusion of Black Islanders from Bahamian Society.”

Shark Fishing, 1885

Rest, 1885

A Garden in Nassau

Sponge Fishermen, 1885

After the Hurricane, 1895

Oranges, 1885

Last pieces

Right and Left, 1909 (duck hunting)

Right and Left, closer look

Fox Hunt, 1893 “predator becomes prey”




The iconic 

Snap the Whip, 1872