New Picasso exhibition

Man o man, I wish I could fly over and see this exhibition!

First exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso's lifelong connections with Britain opens at Tate

LONDON.- In February 2012 Tate Britain will stage the first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain. Picasso and Modern British Art will examine Picasso’s evolving critical reputation here and British artists’ responses to his work. The exhibition will explore Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated.

Pablo Picasso originated many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century art. This exhibition will examine his enormous impact on British modernism, through seven exemplary figures for whom he proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. It will be presented in an essentially chronological order, with rooms documenting the exhibiting and collecting of Picasso’s art in Britain alternating with those showcasing individual British artists’ responses to his work. Picasso and Modern British Art will comprise over 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, including over 60 paintings by Picasso.

Picasso and Modern British Art will include key Cubist works such as Head of a Man with Moustache 1912 (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) which was seen in Britain before the First World War, when Cubism was first introduced to a British public through Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions. It will also include Picasso’s Man with a Clarinet 1911-12 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) and Weeping Woman 1937 (Tate), works which were acquired by the two most notable British collectors of Picasso, Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose, both of whom were to become intimately associated with the artist and his reputation.

While many British artists have responded to Picasso’s influence, those represented in this exhibition have been selected to illustrate both the variety and vitality of these responses over a period of more than seventy years. This is a rare opportunity to see such work alongside those works by Picasso that, in many cases, are documented as having made a particular impact on the artist concerned; in other cases, they have been chosen as excellent examples of a stylistic affinity between Picasso and the relevant British artist. For example, David Hockney is said to have visited Picasso’s major Tate exhibition (1960) eight times, starting a life-long obsession with the artist. A selection of various Hockney homages to Picasso will be shown. In addition Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 (Tate) will be compared with Picasso’s paintings based on figures on the beach at Dinard which first inspired Bacon to take up painting seriously.

The exhibition will look at the time Picasso spent in London in 1919 when he worked on the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev’s production of The Three-Cornered Hat. It will assess the significance of his political status in Britain, from the Guernica tour in 1938-9 to the artist’s appearance at the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield. The final section will also consider the artist’s post-war reputation, from the widespread hostility provoked by the 1945-6 V&A exhibition which re-ignited many of the fierce debates about modern art that first raged before the First World War, to the phenomenally successful survey of his career at the Tate in 1960.

After Tate Britain, the exhibition will tour to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Picasso and Modern British Art is devised by James Beechey with additional contributions from Professor Christopher Green (Courtauld) and Richard Humphreys. It is curated at Tate Britain by Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) & Head of Displays, Tate Britain, assisted by Helen Little, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain.

Image shown:

The Three Dancers 1925
Les Trois Danseuses

Pinacotheque de Paris Announces Alberto Giacometti and the Etruscans Exhibition

Figurine, 1958, bronze, 63 x 11,5 x 19,5 cm. Collection Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence. Photo: Claude Germain © Succession Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris 2011.

PARIS.- It is the most eventful exhibition of the fall, an exhibition that the specialists and art lovers of Giacometti, have been expecting for over fifty years. Giacometti’s attraction to the primitive figure was present very early on in the artist’s oeuvre. Etruscan art, which he first of all discovered in the Louvre, in the archeological department, where he went regularly, then during the exhibition on the Etruscans in 1955 in Paris, was, however, to produce in the artist a very meaningful turmoil, and made up one of the essential keys to the understanding of his best known and most powerful form of creation. The exhibition will be on view from September 16, 2011 through January 8, 2012 at the Pinacothèque de Paris.

No exhibition on the Etruscans has been shown in Paris since 1955. But it was precisely that show which enabled Giacometti to discover that extraordinary civilization, based on the economy of a seafaring people; a people of pirates according to the Greeks who regarded them as their chief rivals. That still strange and mysterious civilization was one of the most brilliant before Rome.

The Etruscans devised an outstanding art form, exceptional in its quality, richness and beauty, chiefly made up sculpted sarcophagi and of powerful warrior figures. They also developed a kind of very slender sculpted figure. It was such a shock for Giacometti that he wanted to go further in his quest and in his understanding of that people and its art.

For Giacometti the next step was to go to the Etruscans’ own land, in Tuscany. The journey to the centre of that world seems to have led him to Florence, to the archeological Museum, and then later on, to Vol¬terra, a city in Etruria, close to Pisa. There he discovered the emblematic figure of the Etruscan world, L’Ombre du soir (The Evening’s shadow). That work – that had not travelled to Paris in 1955 and which has never left Italy – is the Etruscans’ Mona Lisa. There exists a less striking version in the Louvre, that Giacometti already knew about for several years, but the one in Volterra provided a real shock for him.

A willowy figure, fine, powerful, mysterious, sensual, soulful and with an outstanding magnetic force, the Ombre du soir was a revelation. The artist was left speechless before that unique piece.

His work was totally overwhelmed: in order to prolong that discovery, Giacometti drew, painted and sculpted with reference to the Ombre du soir. None of the artist’s most famous figures, from the series of Femme de Venise to that of the Homme qui marche can be imagined, conceived without reference to the Ombre du soir.

It is that outstanding confrontation – which provides a new reading of Giacometti’s oeuvre – that the Pinacothèque de Paris is showing for the first time in Paris. The Ombre du soir shall be accompanied by more than one hundred and fifty Etruscan objects, exhibited alongside a unique group of about thirty sculptures, among the most famous by Giacometti.

The Collections of the Pinacothèque de Paris
« The Museum must not become a graveyard. » That sentence by Malraux is important because it expresses a fear which, unfortunately, has not been disavowed for years all over the world and not just in France.

Through that quote there exists a basic question, that of the work’s future once it has left the collector’s walls to enter the museum. Personally, for years now, I have never ceased to question myself as to the reason why the work of art dies, loses its life as soon as it is sanctuarized. Being lucky enough to see them in the collectors’ homes and being amazed by their splendor, I can never understand how, the moment I come across them years later in museums, they have lost that magic, that aura we find in the homes of those who loved them for so many years. Is that the fear Malraux wished to express, he who – an enlightened art lover – knew the collectors so well and was for a long time at the head of the French museums as Minister for Culture?

If we go back to the beginning, to the very essence of the work, to its initial function, we inevitably return to what the museum was in the very beginning: the curiosity cabinet. The place where the collected objects were stored and exhibited, i.e. the private museum put at the disposal of a chosen un public.

The idea was to renew to-day with everything the museum has lost of its essence and of its meaning, but this time by offering the secrets of the art lover’s cabinet to all our visitors. Transversality, as I often describe it, allows us to explain that all the artists from all times, of every culture and of all origins, make up a community out of the ordinary, but whose methods of thinking, of reflection and of approach are the same. The museum-sanctuary seems to have forgotten, by its ency¬clopedic approach, its chief role: to bring the works to life, gathered together and exchange a dialogue beyond the frontiers and periods, because, finally, they are all saying the same thing. They speak of beauty, of references, of convergences and of histories, and, above all, they summon up everything we hold in common. Thus you will notice that Tintoretto, Van Dyck, Reynolds or Bonnard represent the “worthies” in the same manner, be he French in the 19th century, Italian in the 16th, Flemish in the 17th or English in the 18th centuries. You will also note that Van Gogh painted interiors in the same fashion as Peter de Hooch or Delvaux, that Léger thought about and composed his still-lives in the same way that Heda painted a Vanity, that Brueghel, Daumier or Teniers had the same approach to popular festivities, and that landscapes by Hobbema or Courbet are constructed along the same lines. That Primitivism and the central placing of the body is the same from Rembrandt until Duchamp.

Marc Restellini, director of the Pinacothèque de Paris, provides us with his reflections on the part the museum must play at the heart of the city and of its period. Les Collections in the Pinacothèque are proof of his conclusions : about one hundred works, from the Primal Arts to the Moderns, gaze at each other, have a dialogue and query the pertinence of classification, of schools and of chapels, grouped together in thematic rooms: still-lives, Nativities, landscapes. The visitor is free to think about art in his own way: at the entrance to each room, a quote attracts his attention: « The private or religious feast, on the village square or in front of the cathedral; community living has always fascinated artists throughout the ages»; then it is up to the visitor to discover the correspondence between Utrillo’s La Cathédrale de Reims, La Danse de Mariage by Brueghel and Modigliani’s Hancka Zborowska . These paintings have come from all over the world, and they take over the spaces for various lengths of time; because Les Collections are not fixed, the deposit will increase and will live in accordance with the various and unusual hangings.

Crater with little columns. End 4th– early 3d century BC, terra cotta. Volterra, Etruscan museum Guarnacci © Photo : Arrigo Coppitz.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Presents George Herms: Xenophilia

George Herms, Xenophilia, 2011, collage, 22 x 28 in., courtesy of the artist, © George Herms. Photo: Brian Forrest.



LOS ANGELES, CA.- George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown) presents the work of legendary West Coast assemblage artist George Herms alongside the work of a younger generation of Los Angeles and New York artists, which is bringing new energy to the assemblage tradition. The exhibition features works from a circle of friends Herms found in Florence, as well as artists introduced to him by the exhibition curator, Neville Wakefield, including Rita Ackermann, Kathryn Andrews, Lizzi Bougatsos, Robert Branaman, Dan Colen, Leo Fitzpatrick, Elliott Hundley, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Ari Marcopoulos, Ryan McGinley, Melodie Mousset, Jack Pierson, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sterling Ruby, Agathe Snow, Ryan Trecartin, Kaari Upson, and Aaron Young. The exhibition is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) from July 10th through October 2nd, 2011.

Ever since he first started exhibiting in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, George Herms has been a central figure in the development of so-called West Coast aesthetic. Influenced by a beat generation more attuned to the musical nuance of the everyday than the modernist requiem to order, Herms's commitment to counterculture is expressed through his use of impoverished materials and his rejection of compositional devices in favor of loose associations of materials and ideas. The resulting assemblages blur the boundaries between art and life to make of each the other. Herms salvages elements from the trash heap of popular culture, combining them with words and phrases to create final entities that are neither pure thought, nor pure object—they are both prop and proposition. At times, Herms has been associated with landmarks of the developing L.A. art scene—Wallace Berman and Semina, Walter Hopps and the Ferus Gallery, Dennis Hopper and the film culture of Easy Rider—but his art has refused any singular identification. An advocate of all things free—spirit, material, and love—Herms is the spiritual godfather to an art of the unknown, forging something out of nothing, which continues to be a driving compulsion of artists today.

In 2008, Herms was invited to Florence by designer Adam Kimmel who was being celebrated by the fashion event organizer Pitti Imagine. It was there that he got to know and hang out with a generation of New York–based artists, including Lizzi Bougatsos, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Ryan McGinley, and Rita Ackermann, along with artists from a somewhat older generation, namely Ari Marcopoulos, and Jack Pierson. Herms’s predilection for privileging the found over the made and for using the raw materials around him as the stuff of his art immediately dovetailed with the raw, unfiltered, and anti-art-establishment tendencies of a group that came of age when ever-higher production values corresponded with auction records and spiritual bankruptcy. Like the open dialogue that fueled the Semina collaborations of Berman, Herms, Hopper, Edward Kienholz, and others, this is a group for whom the free trade of ideas and art blurs the boundaries, not just of authorship, but also of distinctions between art and the everyday.

George Herms: Xenophilia: (Love of the Unknown) embraces these tendencies. Exploring the notion of assemblage from both material and conceptual viewpoints, the exhibition displays Herms’s signature junk art of the past six decades and recent collages alongside the work of a group of much younger artists from both coasts. The presentation merges the New York School, which emerged out of the first decade of this century, with artists from a similar generation who are living and working in Herms’s hometown of Los Angeles. The opportunity to reconsider not just the centrality of Herms's role but also the spiritual and material legacy of his improvisational aesthetic is offered out of the chaos.

Norton Simon Museum Presents Vermeer's "Woman with a Lute," on Loan from the Metropolitan

Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–75), Woman with a Lute, ca. 1662–63. Oil on canvas.


PASADENA, CA.- The Norton Simon Museum presents the rare loan of Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman with a Lute,” ca. 1662–63, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One of about 36 known works by the Dutch master, five of which make their home at the Metropolitan Museum, the painting will be on view from July 8 through Sept. 26, 2011, providing audiences with the extraordinary opportunity to see a work by Vermeer on the West Coast. Its presentation at the Norton Simon Museum marks the painting’s first appearance in California.

The loan of “Woman with a Lute” comes as part of an agreement with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which borrowed the Simon’s Raphael painting “Madonna and Child with Book,” 1502–03, for the 2006 exhibition “Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece.” In return, the Norton Simon Museum was given the opportunity to host this remarkable painting.

“We are delighted to welcome Vermeer’s ‘Woman with a Lute’ to Southern California,” says Norton Simon Museum President Walter W. Timoshuk. “Vermeer’s works are housed in museums in Europe and the Northeastern United States exclusively, thus the painting’s installation at the Norton Simon Museum presents a unique and riveting art-viewing experience to our visitors.”

“Woman with a Lute” will be installed in the Norton Simon Museum’s 17th-century Dutch gallery, alongside the Museum’s significant collection of Rembrandt portraits and other genre paintings. During the three-month installation, the Museum will present a series of free public programs centered on the special loan. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

The Painting
Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675) is one of the world’s most venerated artists, yet he left behind only a few dozen paintings and no drawings or prints. One of Vermeer’s beloved “Pearl Pictures,” “Woman with a Lute” evokes expectation, longing, and perhaps even mindful restraint or temperance, all in a mere 20 x 18 inches. Objects familiar to viewers of Vermeer’s work, such as the remarkable pearl drop earring that catches the sunlight, the chair with lion-headed finials, the map of Europe and the yellow jacket trimmed in ermine, are carefully and precisely staged in this quiet interior scene. There is no doubt that the musician is the focal point here, and the large map, the imposing profiles of the lions’ heads and the signature-blue curtains on the leaded window all frame her face, and especially her eyes. Vermeer’s muted tones and gauze-like shadows capture a moment where we can imagine the music stopping long enough for this young woman to tune her instrument and perhaps catch the first glimpse of the object of her desire. The sheet music and the viola da gamba in the middle foreground hint at a pending duet, as does her look of longing and desire. The map of Europe, however, studded with sailing ships, may be a subtle suggestion that her wait, and the duet itself, may be somewhat delayed.

“Woman with a Lute” was in the collection of railroad developer Collis Potter Huntington, who bequeathed it and numerous other paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His second wife, Arabella, and her son, Archer, were both given life interest in the painting, but it was passed to the Metropolitan Museum in 1925, the year after Arabella’s death. Other paintings from a collection that she herself assembled now reside at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, which was erected by Arabella’s later husband, Henry Huntington, the nephew of Collis Potter.

San Diego Museum of Art Presents Great Spanish Masters from the Pérez Simón Collection

Salvador Dalí, The Ascension of Christ, 1958. Oil on canvas. Pérez Simón Collection.

SAN DIEGO, CA.- The San Diego Museum of Art is the only U.S. museum to show From El Greco to Dalí: Great Spanish Masters from the Pérez Simón Collection. This spectacular survey of Spanish art from the 16th century to the 1970s features 64 works drawn from one of the world’s finest private collections, on view from July 9 to November 6, 2011. From the golden age of Charles V and on through the modern period, this exhibition showcases such acclaimed masters of the Spanish school as El Greco, Ribera, Murillo, Goya, Sorolla, Picasso, Dalí and Miró.

Spanning five centuries, this selection of works by some of the world’s most celebrated artists illustrates a splendid chapter in the history of Spanish art. Visitors to the exhibition are also invited to discover dazzling artists little-known in the U.S., such as the Romantic Manuel Barrón y Carrillo, or the Modernist Romero de Torres.

This exhibition proposes new perspectives on the story of Spanish art, considered both thematically and historically. An outstanding selection of old master paintings underscore the importance of religious piety and royal patronage from the 16th to the 18th century, including Jusepe de Ribera’s sensational Saint Jerome, Bartolomé Murillo’s sublime Immaculate Conception, and Francisco de Goya’s masterful Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas. The struggle between tradition and modernity is considered from the late-18th to the 20th century, featuring six works by Salvador Dalí, among them his monumental Ascension of Christ, and the diptych Gala’s Christ, painted for his wife and muse in 1978. Monuments of painting, the masterpieces assembled for this exhibition are also a testament to a preeminent collector’s enduring passion.

A native of Asturias, Spain, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón has made Mexico City his home. It is also home to his collection, begun in the 1970s, which now ranks among the greatest in the world. From El Greco to Dalí: Great Spanish Masters from the Pérez Simón Collection, a choice selection from the outstanding works that comprise this stellar collection,premiered in Paris, at the Musée Jacquemart-André, before traveling to the Musée national des beaux-arts in Québec City.

Exhibition of Photographs from the Legendary Mexican Suitcase at Les Rencontres d'Arles

Robert Capa, (Exiled Republicans being marched down the beach to an internment camp, Le Barcarès, France), March 1939. Negative. © International Center of Photography / Magnum. Collection International Center of Photography.

ARLES.- The legendary Mexican Suitcase containing Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War negatives, considered lost since 1939, has recently been rediscovered and is exhibited here for the first time. The Suitcase is in fact three small boxes containing nearly 4,500 negatives, not only by Capa but also by his fellow photojournalists Chim (David Seymour) and Gerda Taro. These negatives span the course of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), through Chim’s in-depth coverage in 1936-37, Taro’s intrepid documentation until her death in battle in July 1937, and Capa’s incisive reportage until the last months of the conflict. Additionally, there are several rolls of film by Fred Stein showing mainly portraits of Taro, which after her death became inextricably linked to images of the war itself. Between 1936 and 1940, the negatives were passed from hand to hand for safekeeping, and ended up in Mexico City, where they resurfaced in 2007.



The Spanish Civil War broke out on July 19, 1936. In the broadest terms, the war was a military coup, led by General Francisco Franco and instigated to overthrow the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic, a coalition of leftists and centrists. From its inception, the civil war aroused the passions of those who saw Franco’s actions as the front line of a rising tide of fascism across Europe, as he received material support from Germany and Italy. Many leftist intellectuals and artists were committed to the antifascist struggle, and they provided vivid images and texts in support of the Republican cause for the international press.

The Mexican Suitcase negatives constitute an extraordinary window onto the vast output of these three photographers during this period: portraits, battle sequences, and the harrowing effects of the war on civilians. While some of this work was known through vintage prints and reproductions, the Mexican Suitcase negatives, seen here as enlarged modern contact sheets, show us for the first time the order in which the images were shot, as well as images that have never been seen before. This material not only provides a uniquely rich view of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that changed the course of European history, but also demonstrates how the work of three photojournalists laid the foundation for modern war photography.

Gerda Taro, (Crowd at the gate of the morgue after the air raid, Valencia), May 1937. Negative. © International Center of Photography. Collection International Center of Photography.

Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans Exhibits for the First Time in Spain at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga

MALAGA.- “Art is not derived from art. Art derives from reality.” Tuymans’s words constitute a statement of intent and a clear explanation of the nature of his work in which he aims to evoke and insinuate but in which it is the viewer’s responsibility to fill in the gaps that have been deliberately left there and to construct his or her own narrative. Tuymans is a committed artist and his work engages with events that have marked contemporary society despite the existence of a collective desire for amnesia that aims to forget or to distort these events within the context of a society that at times seems closer to the deceptive reality presented by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.

The CAC Málaga is presenting Retratos y vegetación, the first exhibition devoted to Luc Tuymans in Spain. It comprises a selection of 16 oil paintings of different sizes that reveal the technique that has made Tuymans a key reference point for a new generation of figurative artists for whom painting is the optimum means of expression, contrary to those who still consider it a conservative one that contradicts the heterogeneous nature of contemporary art. Fluid brushstrokes (Soldier, 1999), diffused lines (The Rumour, 2001) and muted colours (Singing Flowers, 2008) are used to envelop the figures in a tense silence in the manner of a metaphor for the fog that seems to shroud historical and collective memory on occasions.

Tuymans has focused on painting in his work since the mid-1980s. However, he abandoned this medium for a period in order to focus entirely on filmmaking. That passing phase left its mark on his subsequent output, which he has meticulously created through preparatory drawings, photographs, slides, stills from films and a wide range of techniques that have functioned to enrich his compositions.

For Fernando Francés, director of the CAC Málaga: “Many people have described Tuymans’s painting as pessimistic, perhaps due to the violent, crude force behind it, which he uses as a vehicle to dissect reality in a manner devoid of grandiloquence and moralising intent. It is clear that we are in the presence of one of the figures most admired by both established artists such as Alex Katz and by younger ones for whom Tuymans is now one of the legendary names of international painting.”

In Tuymans’s paintings ideas are not explicitly revealed but rather emerge through concealed allusions and indirect references. He offers us apparently innocuous images but ones charged with intensity, as a result of which they generate disquiet and disturb the viewer. Thus behind the imperturbable gaze of the figure in Secrets (1990) lies Albert Speer, architect of the Third Reich and armaments minister under the Nazi regime. The restrained way that Tuymans depicts Speer, with his eyes closed, encourages us to find out the secrets referred to in the title. Evidence (2005) depicts the unidentified victim of a Russian serial killer. The diffused brushwork and almost unrecognisable face reveal Tuymans’s aims of insinuating rather than showing and of referring to memory. Portrait (2000) refers to the photographs of dead people that are used to announce funerals in Belgium.

Luc Tuymans (born Mortsel, Belgium, 1958) is heir to the extensive northern European pictorial tradition and Jan van Eyck is one of the artists whom he most admires. Other artists particularly esteemed by Tuymans include Velázquez, El Greco and Zurbarán and their influence is evident in many of his works. Tuymans’s paintings have been exhibited in leading museums and art centres such as the MoMA, New York, Tate Modern, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.



Artwork shown: Secrets, 1990. Oil on canvas, 52×37cm; Within,
2001. Oil on Canvas, 223 x 243cm

Mayan

MEXICO CITY (AP).- A small, remote-controlled camera lowered into an early Mayan tomb in southern Mexico has revealed an apparently intact funeral chamber with offerings and red-painted wall murals, researchers said Thursday.

Footage of the approximately 1,500-year-old tomb at the Palenque archaeological site showed a series of nine figures depicted in black on a vivid, blood-red background. Archaeologists say the images from one of the earliest ruler's tombs found at Palenque will shed new light on the early years of the once-great city state.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History said archaeologists have known about the tomb since 1999, but have been unable to enter it because the pyramid standing above it is unstable and breaking into the chamber could damage the murals.

It said the floor appears to be covered with detritus and it is not immediately evident in the footage if the tomb contains recognizable remains. But archaeologist Martha Cuevas said the jade and shell fragments seen on the video are "part of a funerary costume."

The chamber was found in a heavily deteriorated pyramid complex known as the Southern Acropolis, in a jungle-covered area of Palenque not far from the Temple of Inscriptions, where the tomb of a later ruler, Pakal, was found in the 1950s.

While Pakal's tomb featured a famous and heavily carved sarcophagus, no such structure is seen in the footage of the tomb released Thursday. The institute said in a statement that "it is very probable that the fragmented bones are lying directly on the stones of the floor."

But Cuevas said the discovery shed new light on early rulers, and its proximity to other burial sites suggested the tomb may be part of a funerary complex.

"All this leads us to consider that the Southern Acropolis was used as a royal necropolis during that period," Cuevas said.

Susan Gillespie, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who was not involved in the project, said "this is an important find for Palenque and for understanding Early Classic Maya history and politics," in part because the later rulers who made the city-state larger tended to build atop their predecessors' temples and tombs, making it hard to get at them.

"Palenque was a relatively important western Maya capital in the Early Classic, but with the buildup during the time of Pakal and some of his successors, those accomplishments were buried and thus difficult to assess, buried literally by Late Classic structures atop Early Classic ones," Gillespie wrote.

The later rulers wrote almost obsessively about Palenque's history in long stone inscriptions, but Gillespie noted that "finding archaeological confirmation of the earlier kings has been extremely difficult."

The tomb's floor occupies about 5 square meters (yards), with a low, Mayan-arch roof of overlapping stones. Experts say it probably dates to between 431 and 550 A.D., and could contain the remains of K'uk' Bahlam I, the first ruler of the city-state.

The tomb's existence was revealed by a shaft found near the top of the ruined pyramid, leading downward. But it was too narrow to provide any kind of view of the chamber. In late April, researchers lowered the tiny two-inch-long camera into the tomb using the six-inch (15-cm) wide shaft.

While the general public had not seen images of the interior of the tomb, video of it was made after the chamber was detected in 1999, noted David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy.

The images had circulated among researchers and been posted on the internet, and Stuart said that some evidence suggests the tomb "is the burial of a noted female ruler of Palenque named Ix Yohl Ik'nal, based on the date and on the identities of ancestral figures painted on the walls."

"The female ruler is mentioned in a number of the historical texts of the site," Stuart wrote.

It would not be the first tomb of a female noble found at Palenque; in 1994 archaeologists found the tomb of a woman dubbed The Red Queen because of the red pigment covering her tomb. But it has never been established that she was a ruler of Palenque, and her tomb dates from a later period, between 600 and 700 A.D.

On A Day Like Today...

August 15, 1967.- René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist died today. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images.



His intended goal for his work was to challenge observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality and force viewers to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.


The Magritte Museum is the first museum dedicated to Belgian painter Rene Magritte, best known for his surrealism.

Images Shown;
The False Mirror
The Son of Man
This is Not a Pipe

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

This film will be screening in San Diego on September 10th and I can't wait to see the documentary. The documentary is based on footage not seen in 20 years and, from all reviews, it's fabulous and provides insight into this oft misunderstood artist. If you ever seen the film Basquiat this new piece should serve as a wonderful bookend. Anyway, I've already marked my calendar for the 10th.

Ohio's Butler Museum to Host Exhibition by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood

YOUNGSTOWN,OHIO - The Butler Institute of American Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, located at 524 Wick Avenue in Youngstown, will present Ronnie Wood: Paintings, Drawings and Prints beginning September 21st, 2010. This exhibition, accompanied by a full-color catalogue, will continue through November 21st.

Ronnie Wood is both a musician and an artist. His work as singer, guitarist and songwriter with The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and The Faces is well-known. Lesser-known is his ability as a visual artist. Wood has been painting and drawing since age twelve, even longer than he has been playing guitar. According to Butler Director, Dr. Louis Zona, “Ronnie Wood is a most accomplished painter whose work demonstrates a wonderful knowledge of the medium, outstanding technical abilities and an extraordinarily creative mind. The Butler is honored to host the artist’s first major American museum exhibition to showcase this remarkable talent.”

Ronnie Wood was born in Middlesex, England, and is from a musical and artistic family. Before beginning his musical career, he received formal art training at Ealing College of Art in London. As his musical career progressed, Wood continued painting and drawing. Throughout his dual-career he has also depicted the musicians with whom he plays, documented his world tours, and portrayed his recording sessions in vibrant action portraits. He also uses family and close friends, as well as the landscape, as subjects in his art work.

Over the years Wood’s work has been widely exhibited. In 1996, he had a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has had numerous solo shows in North and South America, in the Far East, and throughout Europe. Included in this Ronnie Wood exhibition, the first to be held at a US museum of art, are 30 paintings, 22 pen/pencil drawings, and 7 mixed media works. The show was organized by the Butler with assistance from Daniel Crosby and Danny Stern (SPS Lime Light Agency, Los Angeles and San Francisco) and Bernard Pratt (Pratt Studios, London),

The exhibition catalogue writers are Butler Director and Chief Curator Dr. Louis A. Zona, and David Shirey, Dean of the Graduate Program at Manhattan’s the School of Visual Arts, and former art critic for The New York Times. This exhibition by a well-known British artist is presented as a part of the Butler’s ongoing Influence on America Program, which features exhibitions of work by historic and contemporary artists who have been inspired by or whose work has been informed by American art.

First Comprehensive U.S. Museum Survey of Dennis Hopper Opens at MOCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), presents Dennis Hopper Double Standard, the first comprehensive survey exhibition of Dennis Hopper’s artistic career to be mounted by a North American museum, July 11 through September 26, 2010, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.

Best known for his work in film, Hopper produced an oeuvre of remarkable breadth that blurs the boundaries between art, film, and popular culture. The exhibition will trace the evolution of Hopper’s artistic output and feature more than 200 works spanning his prolific 60-year career in a range of media, including an early painting from 1955; photographs, sculpture, and assemblages from the 1960s; paintings from the 1980s and ’90s; graffiti-inspired wall constructions and large-scale billboard paintings from the 2000s; his most recent sculptures; and film installations. The title of the exhibition is taken from Hopper’s iconic 1961 photograph of the two Standard Oil signs seen through an automobile windshield at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, and North Doheny Drive on historic Route 66 in Los Angeles. The image was reproduced on the invitation for Ed Ruscha’s second solo exhibition at Ferus Gallery in 1964. Dennis Hopper Double Standard is curated by Julian Schnabel, whose work has been inspired by Hopper’s fusion of art and film.

“Dennis Hopper’s work has been a springboard for the work of many artists and filmmakers of a younger generation,” comments MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch. “His fusion of artistic media has become an inspiration for the new artistic generation who often draw on performance and film as well as painting, sculpture, and photography in the creation of their work.”

Julian Schnabel calls Hopper, “a painter without a brush,” articulating a visual statement that is “beyond language.” Schnabel speaks about how Hopper “made film into art,” and describes how he “takes the viewer on a high risk journey with him, working without a safety net.”

Hopper prefigured the union of art, life, and popular culture that characterizes much of the art of the 21st century. He was a creative connector, introducing and collaborating with artists, actors, writers, and musicians for nearly six decades. His works made in the 1960s capture the quintessential pop imagery that symbolizes Los Angeles during that time. “L.A was Pop,” Hopper recalled, talking about that period, “L.A. was the billboards. L.A. was the automobile culture. L.A. was the movie stars and L.A. was the whole idea of what ‘Pop’ was about.” Ahead of his time in bringing the art of the street into the gallery, Hopper’s work also constructs a dialogue between abstract expressionist painting and graffiti and gang signs from Los Angeles street culture.

Dennis Hopper Double Standard assembles key selections and bodies of work examining the artist’s creative development with a focus on artworks made between 1961 and present day, as many of Hopper’s earlier paintings were destroyed in his studio by the 1961 Bel Air fire. The exhibition will be organized in several sections reflecting the cyclical and serial nature of the artist’s work. The layout will bring together various groupings of work emphasizing Hopper’s interest in Duchampian appropriation of common objects and the dialogue between pop and progressive culture. It will also highlight the ways in which Hopper has utilized a range of styles—from abstraction, the ready-made, and pop art to conceptual and performance art—to further his investigation into the “return to the real.”

The first portion of the exhibition will include a comprehensive selection of sculpture and assemblages as well as photographs documenting the progressive, changing culture of the time and the pop-art scene in both Los Angeles and New York from the 1960s. The second section will feature a series of paintings from the 1980s and ’90s inspired by graffiti-covered walls and the urban Los Angeles landscape. This segment also incorporates Hopper’s set-like wall constructions. Hopper’s monumental billboard paintings from the 2000s, which borrow images from his earlier life and work, and more recent series of abstract landscape photographs will also be included in the exhibition. In the final section, a series of film installations highlighting Hopper’s career as a director and actor will be presented.

Fred Hoffman, who has a long association with Dennis Hopper, is the curatorial consultant for Dennis Hopper Double Standard. The museum thanks Tony Shafrazi and Tony Shafrazi Gallery for their dedicated collaboration in realizing the exhibition.

For nearly six decades, Dennis Hopper (b. 1936, Dodge City, Kansas; d. 2010, Los Angeles) was at the center of the Los Angeles creative community. He had a prolific career working in film, photography, as a painter, and as a sculptor. He directed numerous films including Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971), and Colors (1988), and acted in many more including Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Giant (1956), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Apocalypse Now (1979), Blue Velvet (1986), Speed (1994), and Basquiat (1996).

Hopper has been celebrated in monographic and group exhibitions around the world including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; MAK Vienna: Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and most recently the Cinémathèque Française, Paris, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne.

Princeton Museum Announces Gauguin Woodblock Prints Exhibition

The Princeton University Art Museum will launch its fall 2010 season with an exhibition it is originating, Gauguin's Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints (September 25, 2010—January 2, 2011), the first comprehensive look at this pivotal woodcut series.

Gauguin's Paradise Remembered posits a new way of understanding a key body of work within the artist's career, and by extension a new way of understanding this vital post-Impressionist artist. The exhibition presents 32 works that concentrate on the pivotal series of 10 revolutionary woodcuts produced by Paul Gauguin (1848—1903) in Paris during the winter and spring of 1894, following his first voyage to Tahiti, where he hoped to live simply and draw inspiration from what he saw as the island's exotic native culture. Although the artist was disappointed by the rapidly Westernizing community he encountered, his works from this period nonetheless celebrate the myth of an untainted Polynesian idyll. Gauguin had originally intended his woodcuts to be illustrations for a manuscript he had written in the form of a largely fictionalized journal entitled Noa Noa (Fragrant Scent). Based on his idealized experiences in the South Seas, the book traced his self-styled transformation from a civilized European into one deeply immersed in the ancient spiritual life of Oceania. Self-consciously primitive in style, printed and colored by hand, Gauguin's Noa Noa woodcuts crystallize important themes and compositions from his Tahitian works, enjoying a widespread notoriety in Gauguin's lifetime and surviving today as both his printmaking masterpiece and as one of the most innovative print series produced in the 19th century.

In Gauguin's time, the Noa Noa woodcuts were celebrated as a true combination of printmaking, drawing and sculpture. Gauguin's Paradise Remembered explores the full range of inventive techniques of these prints through a selection of works from a number of prestigious American museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jointly organized by Calvin Brown, associate curator of prints and drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum, and Alastair Wright, university lecturer in the history of art at St. John's College, Oxford, the exhibition was inspired by the Art Museum's recent purchase of an early proof of L'Univers est créé (The Universe Is Created), one of the most enigmatic of the Noa Noa woodcuts. Central to the exhibition are an investigation of Gauguin's artistic process, a rare presentation of all 10 Noa Noa woodcuts, as printed and hand colored by Gauguin, and a broader contextualization of Gauguin's work that reveals how the artist's experimental printmaking became central to his unique artistic vision. Gauguin's Paradise Remembered addresses both the artist's representation of Tahiti in the woodcut medium and the impact these evocative works had on his artistic practice, to illustrate how the woodcut form offered Gauguin the ideal medium to depict a paradise whose real attraction lay in its remaining always unattainable, never quite within reach.



Images Shown:
Eve ("The Nightmare"), 1899–1900. Recto: Traced monotype transfer drawing in black printer's ink, ochre ink, and liquid solvent on cream wove paper, 64.2 x 48.9 cm.

Auti te pape (Women at the River) from the Noa Noa suite, 1894. Woodcut printed from one block in orange and black, respectively, over yellow, pink, orange, blue, and green on laminated cream Japanese paper, sheet trimmed to block: 20.3 x 35.3 cm.

Klee at SFMOMA

From August 7, 2010, through January 16, 2011, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will showcase the exhibition Prints by Paul Klee (1946). Organized by John Zarobell, SFMOMA assistant curator, collections, exhibitions, and commissions, the exhibition features 21 works.

SFMOMA has had a longstanding commitment to the art of Paul Klee over its 75-year history. This exhibition re-creates a show of prints by the Swiss-born modernist held at the museum in 1946. At that time, Klee's work was little known outside of Europe; the exhibition was perceived as highly original, and the works seem no less fresh or innovative more than six decades later. The prints demonstrate how Klee, like many German Expressionist artists of the early 20th century, experimented with etching, drypoint, and lithography techniques in order to advance his exploration of pictorial symbolism.

Klee (1879–1940), born in Münchenbuchsee, just north of Bern, Switzerland's capital, grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. Ultimately he opted to study art and in 1900 trained with neoclassicist Franz von Stuck at the Munich Academy, where he first met painter Vasily Kandinsky. As was standard academic practice, his training included anatomy lessons and life drawing from the nude; he later spent seven months touring Italy, where he was exposed to early Christian and Byzantine art. In 1906 he married pianist Lili Stumpf and settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art; their only child, Felix, was born there the following year. Klee's friendship with Kandinsky prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group pivotal to the development of abstract art. Later, at the invitation of founder Walter Gropius, Klee taught at the esteemed Bauhaus from 1920 to 1931; in 1931 he accepted a position at the Dusseldorf Academy, but was soon dismissed by the Nazis, who included 17 of his works in their infamous exhibition of "degenerate art," Entartete Kunst, in 1937. After a move to Switzerland in 1933, Klee developed the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, marked by a pathological thickening and hardening of the skin; he died from its complications in 1940.

Images Shown:

A Spirit Serves a Small Breakfast, Angel Brings the Desired, 1920; lithograph with watercolor.

Der Verliebte (Man in Love), 1923; print; color lithograph, 10 13/16 x 7 1/2 inches

Getty Museum Explores the Tradition of Socially Concerned Reportage

In the decades following World War II, an independently minded and critically engaged form of photography began to gather momentum. Situated between journalism and art, its practitioners created extended photographic essays that delved deeply into topics of social concern and presented distinct personal visions of the world. On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, June 29 – November 14, 2010, Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties looks in depth at projects by a selection of the most vital photographers who have contributed to the development of this documentary approach. Passionately committed to their subjects, these photographers have captured both meditative and searing images, from the deep south in the civil rights era to the war in Iraq in 2006. Their powerful visual reports, often published extensively as books, explore aspects of life that are sometimes difficult and troubling but are worthy of attention.

“This exhibition focuses on the tradition of socially engaged photographic essays since the 1960s,” explains Brett Abbott, associate curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition. “Working beyond traditional media outlets, these photographers have authored evocative bodies of work that transcend the realm of traditional photojournalism.”

Engaged Observers is structured around suites of photographs from the following projects: “Girl Culture” by Lauren Greenfield, “The Mennonites” by Larry Towell, “Streetwise” by Mary Ellen Mark, “Black in White America” by Leonard Freed, “Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979” by Susan Meiselas, “Vietnam Inc.” by Philip Jones Griffiths, “The Sacrifice” by James Nachtwey, “Migrations: Humanity in Transition” by Sebastião Salgado, and “Minamata” by W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith.

Although one does not always associate style with photojournalism, where objectivity and neutrality are traditionally valued, aesthetics have been an important consideration for all of the photographers represented in the exhibition. One of the strengths of this tradition has been its ability to harness artistic decisions in reporting on the world. Meiselas chose color film for her Nicaragua project because she felt it better conveyed the spirit of the revolution as she experienced it. Salgado noted that the solemn beauty so characteristic of his approach is important in conjuring a persistent grace among his migrant subjects, allowing him to present them in a dignified way while calling attention to their plight. Nachtwey used tight framing of messy conglomerations of tubes, instruments, and arms in The Sacrifice as a way of conjuring the atmosphere of controlled chaos that he experienced in trauma centers in Iraq. In this kind of work, subject and style, message and delivery, are deliberately intertwined.

All of the photographers in this exhibition use a series of images to address conceptual issues. For instance, Freed was concerned with bridging cultural divides to engender support of basic civil rights, while Griffiths denounced violent commercialization; Salgado pointed to the effects of globalization, while the Smiths addressed the related issue of industrial pollution; Meiselas engaged and countered the fragmented process by which we receive news and understand history, while Towell challenged the meaning of “newsworthy” and explored, as did Greenfield, how cultural values affect life; Nachtwey found the human toll of war unacceptable, and Mark, the idea of homeless street kids in one of the wealthiest nations in the world.

Many of the photographers have published books to further convey their socially engaged messages. Books allow for a greater depth of reporting than magazine articles since their length can be tailored to the needs of a particular project. And because they can be read in private, books are conducive to extended contemplation and the slow absorption of ideas, both of which are important to understanding projects that are broad in scope and have layers of meaning that, in many cases, were developed over the course of years. Moreover, they provide photographers authorial control over the presentation of their work. Each artist has the ability to decide how pictures are captioned and with what information.

A final section of the exhibition is devoted to tracing the origins of the documentary photography tradition, touching on American Civil War photographs by Alexander Gardner, turn-of-the-century activism by Lewis Hine, Depression-era photography, and photojournalism in pre-World War II picture magazines. This section also looks closely at the formation of Magnum Photos. Founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Besson, and several other photographers, Magnum provided a new platform for an independent documentary approach to photojournalism and became one of the world’s most prestigious photographic organizations. Magnum was structured to allow its members to pursue stories of their own choosing, spend as much time as they wanted on a particular topic, and be as involved as they desired in the editing, captioning, and publication of their work. The organization was meant to harness commercial assignments as a base from which to pursue independent work, and the concept has given rise to generations of independent photographers, including many of those in Engaged Observers.

Image Shown:
Leonard Freed, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1965. Gelatin silver print, 34.8 x 26.1 cm

LACMA Presents John Baldessari

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, the most extensive retrospective to date of Los Angeles-based artist John Baldessari (b. 1931), on view June 27 to September 12, 2010.

Organized by LACMA in association with Tate Modern, the exhibition will bring together more than 150 works and examine the principal concerns of Baldessari, who is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today. LACMA’s presentation will be the only West Coast showing and feature the greatest number of works of any venue on the show’s major international tour.

“Pure Beauty will be a revelation to many, even those who are familiar with Baldessari, as it features many of the artist’s lesser-known works,” says Leslie Jones, LACMA associate curator of prints and drawings. “The exhibition will explore Baldessari’s lifelong interest in language and mass media culture, which seems increasingly relevant—-even imperative-—in an era of information and image proliferation.”






Based in Los Angeles since 1970, Baldessari is one of the most influential artists of his generation. His text and image paintings from the mid-1960s are widely recognized as among the earliest examples of conceptual art, while his 1980s photo compositions derived from film stills rank as pivotal to the development of appropriation art and other practices that address the social and cultural impact of mass culture. His continuing interest in language, both written and visual, has been at the forefront of both his work and teaching, through which, for more than thirty years, he has nurtured and influenced succeeding generations of artists, including David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger among others.

With humor and irony, Baldessari dissects the ideas underlying artistic practice and questions the historically accepted rules of how to make art. The combination of photography, painting, and references to film has become one of the key elements in his work.

Beginning with his little-known paintings from the early 1960s, the exhibition features the landmark photo and text works from 1966-68, photocompositions derived from films stills of the 1980s, irregularly shaped and over-painted works of the 1990s, as well as video and artist books. The show concludes with his most recent work, which includes a special multimedia installation conceived for the retrospective.


In the 1960s, Baldessari notably painted statements derived from contemporary art theory and instructional manuals onto canvas. These early major works, such as Wrong (1966–68, LACMA) and Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell (1966–68), will be on view.


In 1970 Baldessari cremated nearly all the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966. Cremation Project was both a public renunciation of painting and the beginning of Baldessari’s more documentary, hands-off approach to art making, in which he used photography and video to record acts and events. His strategies embraced chance and accident, and included gameplaying, as in Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Carrots (1971), or seemingly pointless tasks, as in The Artist Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club (1972–73). During the ‘70s, Baldessari also began to use cinematic tools of the script and storyboard as means to restructure conventional notions of narrative.

Beginning in the early 1980s, cinematic references become even more apparent with the artist’s use of found film stills that he cropped and enlarged to create photo-compositions. Abandoning the standard rectangular canvas or photographic format, Baldessari constructs irregularly shaped compositions from film stills, creating provocative juxtapositions. According to the artist: “I think of the images that I use as units, like words might be units, and I construct similarly to a good poet, where I’m trying to get a certain kind of syntax, a certain explosion, a meaning when these units collage, building up an architecture of meaning, so to speak.”

Baldessari’s work of the past two decades has continued to explore the relationship between imagery and language, as in the Goya Series (1997), as well as the social and cultural impact of mass media imagery, through his ongoing use of altered film stills and other photographic imagery.

Recently the artist has added dimension to his works, employing raised and recessed surfaces, as well as more color, which enhances the allusion to painting. Of particular note is Brain-Cloud (2009)—made specially for the exhibition—a multimedia installation involving photography, cast sculpture, and video that occupies an entire gallery and concludes the show.



John Baldessari: Pure Beauty is curated by Leslie Jones, associate curator of prints and drawings, LACMA, and Jessica Morgan, curator of contemporary art, Tate Modern, and assisted by Kerryn Greenberg, assistant curator, Tate Modern. Prior to LACMA’s presentation, the exhibition was on view at Tate Modern (October 13, 2009–January 20, 2010) and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (February 11–April 25, 2010). Following its showing at LACMA, Pure Beauty will conclude its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (October 20, 2010–January 9, 2011). The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with essays by major writers, curators, art historians, and former students of Baldessari.

Born in National City, California, in 1931, John Baldessari is undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of our time. His long-term exploration of language and image coupled with his inquisitive approach to art-making has expanded the parameters of what we consider art.

In 1966 he began taking photos in a working class suburb of his hometown, National City. The pictures were intentionally non-spectacular and mundane. As an antithesis to Pop art, Baldessari adopted an anti-heroic attitude by documenting ingenious actions instead of monumentalising his subjects. The photos were enlarged and transferred onto canvas, and then commercial sign painters painted equally prosaic texts identifying each site. These photo and text pieces created new meanings and tensions between images and words and marked a pivotal turning point in Baldessari's artistic trajectory.

He later went one step further by dropping imagery all together from his canvases, leaving only texts appropriated from varied sources, which he sometimes manipulated. 'I sought to use language not as a visual element but something to read. That is, a notebook entry about painting could replace the painting... I was attempting to make something that didn't emanate art signals.' The concept of authorship was further addressed in the Commissioned Paintings (1969) series in which Baldessari hired amateur artists to produce paintings of photographs of a hand pointing at something ordinary. The inspiration for the series came from a criticism that said that Conceptual art was nothing more than pointing.

Teaching has always been a significant and integral part of Baldessari's life. In 1970 he was offered a position at the renowned California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) where he taught alongside influential contemporaries such as John Cage and Nam June Paik. Being exposed to their work and their respective mediums, music and video, made a significant impression on Baldessari. Music brought about the notion of temporality, which is reflected in his work through the use of multiple photos in a time sequence manner, as in Artist Hitting Various Objects with Golf Club (1972–73). With the introduction of the Sony Portapak, Baldessari naturally experimented with the new medium. Initially made for his students, such videos as I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971) and I Am Making Art (1971) have become some of the artist's most iconic video pieces.

Having moved to Los Angeles, the proximity of Hollywood also found its way into Baldessari's work. He adopted the work processes of the film-making industry as themes in works such as Story with 24 Versions (1974) and Scenario: Story Board (1972–73) where plots are sketched out scene by scene. Baldessari also appropriated imagery from film stills, which he found in local shops and meticulously categorised by content for inspiration and use in his works. Simultaneously, the pieces he created began to take on a larger scale, using the photographs as building blocks to suggest narratives. In Kiss/Panic (1984) there is a provocative juxtaposition of a couple kissing, with a seemingly chaotic crowd scene below, surrounded by photos of pointing guns.

By the mid-1980s coloured dots began appearing on the faces of the characters in the found photographs. Baldessari discovered that obliterating the face gave even more anonymity to the subjects and therefore forced the viewer to focus on other aspects of the image to make sense of the scene. Bloody Sundae (1987) consists of two distinct scenes with the subjects composed in the form of an ice-cream dessert. On top, two men attack a third beside a stack of paintings, while beneath them a couple lounge decadently on a bed. All five faces are covered with coloured circles. The violence of the upper image coupled with the suggestive title, hints at a pending raid on the couple's room.

In later works the signature coloured dots usurp the rest of the person, flattening the image and creating an abstraction of the human form. The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall Building/Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building (2003) has three such figures in compromising situations; however the filled-in silhouettes somehow attribute humour to what would be a dangerous scene.

Baldessari revisits his ongoing interests in the parts of the body that identify visual sensitivity in the series Noses and Ears (2006–7) and Arms and Legs (2007–8), in which these parts are isolated while other details of the body and environment are coloured in or omitted, leaving viewers the bare minimum to interpret the work. In his most recent series Furrowed Eyebrows and Raised Foreheads (2009), the artist continues his exploration of human expression through fragmentations.

“Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection” at SFMOMA

The first public presentation of the celebrated Fisher Collection, one of the world's foremostprivate collections of contemporary art, will be presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from June 25 through September 19, 2010. SFMOMA recently announced an unprecedented partnership with Doris and the late Donald Fisher, founders of the Gap, to provide a home at the museum for their outstanding collection of more than 1,100 works, most of which have never been displayed publicly. This sweeping exhibition, entitled Calder to Warhol: Introducing The Fisher Collection, will offer an extraordinary preview of the depth, breadth, and quality of the Fisher holdings, with iconic works by Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Sam Francis, Philip Guston, Anselm Kiefer, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Wayne Thiebaud, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and many others. It will also serve as the centerpiece of SFMOMA's yearlong 75th anniversary celebration and exhibition series in 2010, entitled 75 Years of Looking Forward.


Organized by Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, Calder to Warhol: Introducing The Fisher Collection will provide a window into the vast collection assembled by the Fishers over more than four decades. The entire fourth and fifth floors of the museum, including the Rooftop Garden, will showcase approximately 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, and video—a distillation of the Fisher Collection that aims to reveal not only its scope but also its core attributes. The collection is particularly distinguished for its concentration of works by Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. Unlike most private collections, it includes extensive groupings of seminal pieces by these 20th-century masters and traces their creative evolution through entire bodies of work.




"At this momentous time in SFMOMA's history, we are not only celebrating 75 years of accomplishments and innovation, we're also looking forward to a new era of growth and community service that will be greatly enhanced by the museum's presentation of these outstanding works of art from the Fisher Collection," said SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra. "Our collaboration with the Fisher family will give visitors access to some of the finest modern and contemporary masterpieces, placing SFMOMA among the greatest museums for contemporary art and elevating the cultural profile of the city as a whole. As the first unveiling of Doris and Don's incredible gift to the city of San Francisco, this exhibition will introduce the public to an incomparable group of iconic works that will inspire and educate generations of visitors in the years to come."

"Since the 1980s, the Fishers have helped shape San Francisco into a national center for forward-thinking art collecting," says Garrels. "It is an honor to tell the personal story of their collection through this tremendous body of art, which was assembled with love and determination over more than 40 years. I'm thrilled to see how this work complements SFMOMA's own holdings."


The exhibition will be organized in sections, alternating concentrations of works from a single artist and groupings of works by others with shared perspectives. The presentation will also lend insight to the Fishers' collecting methodology, emphasizing the collection's unifying threads: its richness in American abstract art, its strengths in contemporary German painting and photography, its deep concentrations of work by the artists they most admired, and a marked commitment to representing, whenever possible, the growth of each artist's work over time with key examples from every phase of their careers. This exhibition will be the first to convey these affinities and correspondences.


In the fifth-floor galleries, the presentation explores in-depth holdings of five artists in particular—Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, and Richard Serra, with large galleries devoted to numerous works by each. The Overlook Gallery will be devoted to minimalist art with works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd.


Half of the fourth-floor galleries will highlight the collection's esteemed holdings of abstract art, beginning with gestural paintings by Sam Francis, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. Early sculptures by Mark di Suvero and John Chamberlain will serve as counterpoints. Single galleries will be devoted to the paintings of Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly, as well as the later works of Philip Guston. Other galleries here will include paintings by Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Brice Marden, Robert Therrien, and sculptures by Martin Puryear.


The other half of the fourth floor will center on Pop and figurative art. Major groupings of Pop works by Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg will share a large gallery. Emphasizing a particular strength of the collection, two galleries feature the early and late paintings of Andy Warhol, with iconic pieces such as Triple Elvis (1962) and Silver Marlon (1963), and key works from the artist's Most Wanted Men series and later self-portraits.


In addition, two galleries will be dedicated to the work of Chuck Close, showcasing four of the artist's monumental portraits of other artists. Figurative works by David Hockney and Wayne Thiebaud will be shown together, as will groupings of photo-based works by John Baldessari, Sophie Calle, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, and Jeff Wall. Paintings by Richard Artschwager will be juxtaposed with Sigmar Polke, while the media arts galleries will present video installations by William Kentridge and Shirin Neshat. A final gallery features the paintings of Georg Baselitz, whose work the Fishers collected with great passion.

In the first completely new installation since the opening of SFMOMA's Rooftop Garden in May 2009, the outdoor space will display the Fisher Collection's strengths in large-scale sculpture, with works by Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Beverly Pepper, and Isamu Noguchi. Key pieces by British artists Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Barry Flanagan, Antony Gormley, and Richard Long will also be on view.

In conjunction with the exhibition, SFMOMA will publish a richly illustrated catalogue presenting highlights from the Fisher Collection. The book will also include an introductory essay by Gary Garrels and excerpts from a 2006 interview in which Don and Doris discuss their collection with Neal Benezra.

Upon completing an expansion of SFMOMA's facilities, the Fisher Collection will be presented in a dedicated new wing and will also be interwoven with works from SFMOMA's modern and contemporary holdings, enhancing SFMOMA's capacity to develop exhibitions and public programs in all areas of its collections—painting and sculpture, photography, architecture and design, and media arts.


Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
The Fishers started collecting art more than 40 years ago, aided early on only by Doris Fisher's college roommate, Peggy Walker, and their keen instincts. Their very first purchases included prints—often acquiring whole suites—which were used to furnish the walls of an office building for Gap, the retail company they cofounded in 1969. Soon, their passion grew and they began adding paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, and other media. The Fishers have never hired a curator or broker to procure pieces for their collection; rather, they prefer the excitement of discovering each piece themselves.


During the last four decades, the Fishers amassed a museum-quality collection. It includes more than 1,100 works by 185 artists created from 1928 to the present. The collection features work by American and European masters from movements including Pop art, figurative Art, Minimalism, abstraction, conceptualism, Photorealism, and Color-field painting.


The Fishers collected work in depth by significant artists with the aim of representing the entire span of their careers. The collection includes concentrations of work by Alexander Calder (45 works), Ellsworth Kelly (41 works), Roy Lichtenstein (24 works), Chuck Close (23 works), Gerhard Richter (23 works), Andy Warhol (21 works), Anselm Kiefer (16 works), Richard Serra (14 works), and Agnes Martin (11 works), to name a few.


Doris and Don Fisher
Don Fisher, who passed away in September of 2009, was one of SFMOMA's most ardent and generous supporters. He was a member of the SFMOMA Board of Trustees from 1983 to 2009 and served on several Board committees, most recently as Secretary/Treasurer. Doris Fisher has served for many years on SFMOMA's Education Committee. At the National Gallery in Washington D.C., she is a member of the Trustee Council and has served as co-chair of the Collector's Committee for ten years.


Images Shown (please note that some pieces may not be included with this exhibition):
Alexander Calder; Double Gong, 1953; painted metal and brass; 60 x 132 inches
Alexander Calder; Eighteen Numbered Black;1953; painted metal and brass; 110 by 140 by 110 inches
Dan Flavin;
Dan Flavin;
Gerhard Richter; Seestücke (Seascape), 1998; oil on canvas; 114 1/8 x 114 1/8 inches
Sam Francis; Middle Blue III, 1959; oil on canvas; 72 x 96 inches
Andy Warhol; Nine Multicolored Marilyns (Reversal Series), 1976-1986; acrylic and silkscreen on canvas; 54 x 41 3/8 inches
Gerhard Richter; Janus, 1983; oil on canvas; 98 1/2 x 118 1/4 inches
Phillip Guston; As It Goes, 1978; oil on canvas; 76 x 102 inches
Roy Lichtenstein; Reflections: Whaam!, 1990
Georg Baselitz; Akt Elke 2 (Nude Elke 2), 1976; oil on canvas;78 3/4 x 63 3/4 inches
Georg Baselitz; Male Nude (Self-Portrait),1973/74; oil on canvas; 78 3/4 x 66 9/16 inches
Anselm Keifer;
Ed Ruscha, Hollywood-is-a-Verb,1983; Dry pigment on paper, 29 x 23"Georg Baselitz; George Baselitz; Volk Ding Zero (Folk Art Zero), 2009; bronze patinated, oil; 119.3 x 46.1 x 47.2 inches
Tony Cragg; Bent of Mind,
Ed Ruscha; Standard Station,1966; Print, Screenprint, Sheet: 26 1/4 x 40 1/4 inches
Isamu Noguchi;