Eye Level

Picture This: Albert Paley's Portal Gates

Mandy — 2009-11-06T09:18:12-05:00

Left: the museum's David DeAnna, contract art handler Jorge Herrera, and Justin Chambers move the right gate into place. Right: Herrera, DeAnna, and Jerry Hovanec finish the installation.

Our exhibitions' team was up and at ‘em early on October 27 to unpack and reinstall sculptor Albert Paley’s Portal Gates at the museum's Renwick Gallery. For the past two years, the beloved pieces were off-site as part of Albert Paley: Portals & Gates, an exhibition organized by the University Museums, Iowa State University. Commissioned by the Renwick Gallery in 1974 to adorn the entrance to the gallery's shop, where they stood for many years, the Portal Gates marked a turning point in the young goldsmith's career. I don’t think I'm exaggerating to say that this masterpiece of ironsmithing was greatly missed!

On the left, the museum’s art handlers use a winch, or mechanical lift, to hoist the 1,200-pound gates, made of forged steel, brass, copper, and bronze. On the right, they carefully place the gates in an alcove built by our own Jim Baxter. The process took several hours, since the handlers had to be meticulous, so as not to damage the pieces or the floor, the walls, and themselves! We at the Smithsonian American Art Museum are happy to present the gates once more to the public and hope that you’ll stop to see them soon!

Albert Paley, Renwick Gallery, Installing Art, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Dave Hickey and the State of the Arts

Howard — 2009-11-04T14:35:31-05:00

"My ten millionth grandfather was Jonathan Edwards," critic Dave Hickey told us last week as part of the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series at American Art. He added, "But I'm not going to give you any of that." What he did give us, instead, was a thought-provoking hour on the nature of contemporary art in America and how ideals of art and the artist in society were shaped centuries ago. From the Roman Republic to the Florentine Renaissance to the downtown New York art world that emerged after World War II, Hickey riffed on the themes of paganism, materialism, commerce, success, and mediocrity.

Hickey is upset and concerned that in American democracy the average becomes the paradigm, and he used the example of an everyman fiddling with his iPhone in the mall. Institutions in America such as museums, foundations, and the government all level things off because what they know is how to make a democracy. "Americans can make great art, literature, and music, but American institutions cannot help at all in this," said Hickey. The majority has never created exceptional art. It has always been the minority "working in the backwash of his own work" that creates great art. Hickey even called in James Madison for backup and quoted the founding father as saying, "Genius is an accident, mediocrity is a fact."

The art world in America was formed by people who did not create a celebration of America but a refuge from it. What people created in those downtown lofts was a victory over rectitude. If you look at Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd, and Jasper Johns, you somehow become human in a way. Or, as Hickey put it, "American art is the cure for the malaise of statistical disembodied life we live here in America. . . . Works of art in their idiosyncrasy and outrageousness have the ability to rescue us from that world if we want to be rescued."

"Why don't we let the art world be what it is, which is a cure for America," Hickey said near the end of his talk, before taking questions from members of the audience.

Join us on November 18th for our third Clarice Smith Lecture when Linda Nochlin will present "Consider the Difference: American Women Artists from Cassatt to Contemporary."

Dave Hickey, Donald Judd, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Clarice Smith, American Art,
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Discovering 1934: The Stories Behind the Paintings

Howard — 2009-10-30T13:30:00-04:00

John Cunning's Manhattan Skyline

"What kind of highway signs did they have in Minnesota in 1934?" was just one of the questions Ann Prentice Wagner, guest curator of the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, needed to answer to place the paintings in context. "I was asking and answering questions of the kind that I hadn't had previously," Wagner told an enthusiastic audience who attended her lecture the other night at American Art.

Berenice Abbott's Brooklyn Bridge, Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn, from the series Changing New York

The exhibition marks the seventh-fifth anniversary of the Public Works of Art Project, a short-lived New Deal program that began in December 1933 and shut its doors the following June. (The Federal Works Project—same idea, different program--began in 1935 and ended in 1943.) Artists were employed to create artworks that would adorn public buildings and received weekly paychecks to help keep them going during the Great Depression. In December 1933, thousands of artists became workers. They were free to riff on the theme of "the American Scene."

What's amazing to me is that artists joined the ranks of everyday workers, and their efforts were valued, and helping them was considered vital to reviving the nation's soul. "Artists were proud to be American workers, practical workers who produced something valuable for the country," Wagner said. "America could have lost a generation of artists, a grim prospect."

And what did they produce? Mostly scenes of American life in the city as well as in the countryside. You get Manhattan but you also get Minnesota. "They were showing you where they came from and where they worked. They were showing you what they knew best," added Wagner.

But they didn't just document, they often reinterpreted the scene. They were artists first. With the help of Berenice Abbott's black-and-white photographs taken in the mid-1930s in New York, for example, Wagner was able to show the actual setting for John Cunning's Manhattan Skyline. Not only did Cunning remove some coffee-factory signs from the sides of the warehouses and replace them with red brick, he also moved the Brooklyn Bridge to better fit his composition. Cunning, indeed!

In April 1934, five hundred works from the Public Works of Art Project were displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in an event hosted by President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Government agencies could choose artworks for their buildings. The Roosevelts chose thirty-two paintings for the White House, seven of which are on view in the exhibition, including the New York scene Christopher Street, Greenwich Village by Beulah Bettersworth. The current exhibition at American Art runs through January 3, 2010, followed by a national tour.

Ann Wagner, 1934, The Federal Works Project, Public Works of Art Project, Corcoran Gallery of Art,
American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Halloween 2009: Goblin Lanterns by Helen Hyde

Howard — 2009-10-30T09:27:54-04:00

Goblin Lanterns by Helen Hyde

For the ghostly and ghoulish among you, I found Helen Hyde's Goblin Lanterns of 1906. The artist, born in New York in 1868, moved with her family to San Francisco two years later, where her father prospered in a business associated with the gold rush. Educated at Wellesley and the California School of Design, she found her inspiration in Japan and moved there in 1899. A woodblock printmaker, she considered Tokyo her home, and Japanese women and children were her frequent subjects. Later, she became disillusioned with the encroaching industrialization and westernization in her adopted homeland and returned to California in 1914.

Goblin Lanterns may not be the scariest print on the block, so to speak, but I like it for its drama, energy, and storytelling. The young child hurries on a dark path in the woods, carrying a rice-paper lantern, which lights this evening scene. The traditional footwear, or geta, do not look like they were made for a quick getaway. The dark goblins in the trees appear as if they have come out of a Japanese folk tale, with branches ready to entrap. You can see woodblock prints like these evolving into the genre of manga in the middle of the twentieth century and then further into anime. More than one hundred years ago, Hyde, an outsider, made traditional Japanese art her own.

Halloween, Helen Hyde, Goblins, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

In Memoriam (with a Personal Story): Ruth Duckworth

Mandy — 2009-10-23T09:35:43-04:00

A Ruth Duckworth sculpture adorns my bookcase.

Earlier this week I was saddened to read in an email that sculptor Ruth Duckworth had passed away at ninety on October 18th. We are frequently confronted with obituaries of artists that signify the end of an era. Just this year we’ve lost Andrew Wyeth, Merce Cunningham, Michael Jackson, and Irving Penn, among others. But Ruth held special significance for me, because I had planned several public programs to highlight her retrospective at the museum’s Renwick Gallery in 2006.

In September of that year, we listened with wonder as Ruth spoke to a standing-room-only crowd to open her exhibition. She outlined her journey from her childhood in Nazi Germany to her studio in a converted pickle factory in Chicago. She was dignified, intelligent, humorous, and amazingly intuitive. It was apparent that Ruth’s work resonated with everyone present. I was determined also to reach younger eyes and minds with my playfully dubbed, “Kids’ Clay Day,” which was scheduled for a Saturday in early October.

But as with most highly anticipated events, things never turn out how we expect them to. After some miscues that morning, I was a bit disheveled when the public began to trickle in. It was all I could do to muster a wan smile and offer the young visitors a nontoxic synthetic molding medium. Then I barely survived the tour to familiarize the kids with the exhibition, so they could mimic the artist’s forms with their own “clay.” I was about to consider the program a complete wash when I heard voices in the adjacent gallery and peeked around the corner to see an unannounced Ruth Duckworth and friends heading straight toward me.

She shuffled around the exhibition partition and with childlike delight uttered, “Oooh! What do we have here?” She dutifully picked up the spongy mass and began to knead it into one of her signature totemic figures. She marveled at the consistency of the medium and the multitude of colors with which she had to work before proudly presenting her creation to me with the bravado of a little girl who had made her first paper snowflake.

I’m pretty sure my mouth was agape as she walked away, leaving her gift in my hand and erasing all residual angst from my harried morning. I’m also certain that none of the kids understood that the artist herself had just passed through quietly and humbly. Sometimes I think I may have imagined the whole thing. So I’ve kept the “warm fuzzy” to myself, and still feel blessed every time I look at the miniature Duckworth original on my bookcase. We will miss you, Ruth!

Ruth Duckworth, Sculpture, Renwick Gallery, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum