Art for Sale Page 2

By Sophie Gilbert

This month, a show opens at the National Portrait Gallery that required a little sleuthing. “Capital Portraits: Treasures From Washington Private Collections” runs through September 5, offering a glimpse at works that are rarely (if ever) seen by members of the public. Big names (Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, John Singer Sargent, Salvador Dalí) are on display, as well as smaller works of historical interest, such as a portrait of Alonzo J. Aden, one of the country’s first African-American art dealers. Free. See the National Portrait Gallery’s Web site for more details.

DC’s Kreeger Museum hosts an intriguing exhibition of drawings by American pop artist Tom Wesselmann April 8 through July 30. Wesselmann is primarily famous for his collages, but “Tom Wesselmann Draws” offers some insight into his artistic process, including his attempts to expand drawing beyond pencil and paper with his large-scale, sculptural studies. $10. Visit the Kreeger’s Web site for more information.

Opening April 10 in the National Gallery’s East Building is “Gabriel Metsu 1629-1677,” the first show in the U.S. ever solely dedicated to the Dutch genre painter. Presented in association with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the exhibition includes more than 30 works, depicting religious scenes, city landscapes, and portraits, and runs until July 24. Free. For more information, visit the National Gallery’s Web site.

The annual Nature’s Best Photography finalists go on display at the Museum of Natural History April 16 through September 25. Named after wildlife photographer Windland Smith Rice, the competition recognizes the best in nature photography, from both professionals and amateurs. Free. For more information, visit naturesbestphotograpy.com, or the Museum of Natural History’s Web site.

“Directions: Grazia Toderi” opens at the Hirshhorn Museum April 21. Toderi, an Italian artist based in Milan, creates large-scale video installations from satellite, military, and night-surveillance footage, altered to “visualize the infinite.” She compares her works, frequently recognized by the Venice Bienniale, to “frescoes of light.” Free. See the Hirshhorn’s Web site for more details.

When President and Mrs. Obama decorated the White House, they selected an artwork by Glenn Ligon, the New York artist whose retrospective is currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The 1992 canvas, borrowed from the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, is titled “Black Like Me #2,” and like a lot of Ligon’s work, it’s a painting with a racially charged text. This one’s a sentence pulled from the 1961 memoir “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who artificially darkened his skin to experience the segregated South as a black man. “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence” is stenciled in black letters across the top of the canvas, and repeats line after line until the words at the bottom dissolve into murky blackness.

Ligon, 50, is a Bronx-born African American who has devoted his career to making word-based art that elegizes his reflections on being gay and black in America.

Glenn Ligon: America” begins with expressionistically brushed oil paintings into which he scrawls phrases alluding to his homoerotic self-awakening. Then come series of word paintings with capital letters stenciled in black oil stick, some with coal dust and black backgrounds that render them more or less illegible. We are told they quote passages from Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and other writers, mainly African American. “I remember the very day that I became colored,” for example, is from an essay by Zora Neale Hurston.

More stenciled words, now in hot colors, recite racially loaded jokes by Richard Pryor. On another wall are Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs of black men accompanied by excerpts from critical and theoretical texts about the once-controversial series. Billie Holiday laments emanate faintly from packing crates that, according to the wall text, represent the way a slave once famously shipped himself to freedom.

Ligon’s most famous series, from 1993, adapts 19th-century runaway slave ads that substitute descriptions of himself supplied by friends: “Ran away, Glenn, a young black man twenty-eight years old, about five feet six inches high. Dressed in blue jeans. . . . ” In the Whitney’s Madison Avenue window is a neon sign Ligon recently made that reads, “Negro Sunshine,” an ambiguous phrase coined by Gertrude Stein.

In the past few decades, legions of visual artists have made paintings of words — canvases covered with dictionary definitions, synonyms, rebuses, jokes and admonitions. In general, they don’t do much for me. But Ligon’s lettered homages to writers amplify the borrowed words with a quivering sensitivity, and their repetition transforms the phrases into meditations on the plight of being black and gay in the United States.

Imagining himself as a runaway slave suggests a touching vault of imagination that — like Toni Morrison’s first-person slave novels — underlines the horror of the toxic erstwhile normalcy of slavery. The murmuring crates are a similarly doleful reminder of the lengths to which slaves sought freedom. And his reflections on the social perception of the black male, and on his own sexuality, add complexity to the artist’s examination of his identity.

These are grand themes hinging on the black and gay experience in America. Yet I have reservations about Ligon’s work. His technical range is severely limited, and for all the inarguable righteousness of his project, I cannot help but feel his work is overly self-referential, lacking the universality of great art.

Glenn Ligon: America Through June 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street. 212-570-3600. http://www.blogger.com/.

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914

This exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art meticulously chronicles Picasso’s daily progress as he put the guitar motif through its cubist paces in a profusion of drawings, collages and paintings. Scores of graphic works and paintings are bracketed by two groundbreaking sculptural constructions: a cut-paper guitar and a sheet-metal version, both of which belong to the museum.

The constructions were groundbreaking because they are the first sculptures made by combining components rather than by the traditional methods of carving, modeling or casting. They represent a kind of three-dimensional extension of cubist imagemaking.

Cubism holds such iconic status in the history of art because it was a wholly new approach to visual representation. Until then, artists represented objects as they appear to the eye as seen from one angle. Picasso represented things as they appear from multiple angles, and also as they are known to the mind, a combination of aspects — seen and intuited — that include what lies behind surfaces.

In other words, a cubist guitar is represented as an accumulation of its visual and material attributes — the pattern of the instrument’s wood, the curving silhouette of its side, the cylindrical recess of the sound hole, the vertical of its stringed fret board, the boxlike depth of its body. It was a rethinking of perception and epistemology expressed through innovative and often beautiful visual representation of mass and space.

It’s wonderful to have so many of the guitars together, but the curators are so involved with sequencing Picasso’s works that they never step back to articulate what was so innovative about cubism itself. That’s a problem because many viewers don’t understand what’s significant about these somewhat difficult works. But here’s a chance to look over Picasso’s shoulder as he writes that new artistic philosophy.

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914

Through June 6 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St. 212-708-9400. http://www.blogger.com/.

Three shows at the Met

The guitar theme continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an exhibition about stringed-instrument-making through the ages, with special attention to a family of luthiers from Italy who migrated to New York and continue to craft fine instruments today. Another show gathers together several versions of Cezanne’s paintings of peasants sitting around a table playing cards, as well as studies of the individual sitters.

In the Asian wing is furniture, decorative screens and architectural elements from a part of the Forbidden City in Beijing created by 18th-century emperor Qianlong as a retirement retreat. He never moved in, and the long-vacant buildings were only recently restored, prompting this traveling show of exquisite woodcarvings inlaid with mother-of-pearl and intricate enamels, paintings on glass, thrones and other luxury goods that illustrate the cost-is-no-object opulence of the powerful imperial court. Look for the recurring motifs of pine, plum blossoms and bamboo, three plants that flourish in winter and represent hope for the emperor’s productive life in retirement.

Guitar Heroes; Cezanne’s Card Players; The Emperor’s Private Paradise Through July 4, May 8 and May 1, respectively, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street. 212-535-7710. http://www.metmuseum.org/.

“Life is but a walking shadow,” wrote William Shakespeare in Macbeth. In film studies, we frequently consider the extreme contrast of light and dark, of noirish chiaroscuro designs that were born from the severe German expressionist lines. These are the “shadows” that highlight the pronounced differences between black and white, between coruscation and silhouette, between good and evil. The complex interplay between these two diametrically-opposing forces is one of the most essential technical elements of a film’s design, illuminating, reflecting and projecting the subconscious and highlighting implicit narrative themes in a visual language that aids the spectator’s understanding of the art as they read it. Nowhere is this essential cinematic contrast more apparent than upon the skins of characters in films about passing – a trope in which (usually female, usually biracial African American/Caucasian) pass for white, abandoning their black heritage and otherness to reap the benefits of whiteness. The light is the positive signifier, while the dark is the negative.

Until recently, this particular leitmotif was refracted bluntly in the way race dynamics were depicted in film in general. There were “black” films and “white” films, but rarely did any movie dare to highlight what life was like for any realistic scope of biracial characters who existed in true Jungian shadow-self, caught between these two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color, be marginalized and treated like dirt, or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage. This concept was, from post-Reconstruction through the ‘60s, a much-discussed, weighty social issue, evidenced in the presence of the passing narrative in black and white art of the time, and it was brought most to social awareness in cinematic depictions, many of which proved to be financial and critical successes.

While racial passing seems outdated by today’s standards, and the very thought of a black person needing to pass for white actually smacks of racism, this essay repositions the importance of passing as a genre by looking at four key Hollywood films from the early-‘30s through the late-‘50s: two versions of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl in 1934 and Douglas Sirk in 1959), Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), and Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957). We examine how race passing has become supplanted by other more socially acceptable sub-modes of the passing narrative (for example: the quintessential passing model now largely excludes race but focuses instead on gender and sexuality), but also how the distant ancestors of race passing can still somewhat insidiously found lurking unnamed in the world of contemporary film, from the extreme popularity of a biracial actress like Halle Berry (who has been nicknamed a “black Barbie” because of the way she conforms to standards of white female beauty) to the teasing, exoticized, and even sexually-festishized presence of the racially-ambiguous Mariah Carey in films such as Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001) and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009).

By the time the concept of passing —which playwright Ntzozake Shange calls “that which ‘they’ can’t ascertain on ‘their’ own” [“Introduction”, Passing, (2002): xi]—was first used as a primary plot in a film in director John M. Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934), it was evident that racial passing was becoming a gendered genre, mostly with female protagonists, as well as a quintessentially American phenomenon. Nella Larsen, one of only two non-white, American female novelists working during the Harlem Renaissance (Henderson, xix), and the most prominent author to deploy the racial passing convention in popular works such as Quicksand (1928) and the aptly-titled Passing (1929), made it a point to highlight the racial fluidity and cultural hybridity of people of biracial descent living abroad in the latter story. Centering on the lead characters of Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, Passing depicts the struggles of Kendry, a light-skinned black woman who passes for white full-time and is married to a white racist, and Redfield, the darker-skinned of the two who occasionally passes as a hobby while living a privileged bourgeois life with her physician husband, Brian.

Dr. Redfield longs to transplant the family to the multi-cultural Brazil where “he imagines color is of no import” [Shange, “Introduction”, Passing, (2002): xiv]. With a diverse population that draws from a hearty mixing of Portuguese, African, Eastern European and indigenous peoples, race – specifically racial ambiguity—isn’t really as big a problem in this society. The idea of a black person passing for white today in a place like Brazil, where ethnic diversity, multiraciality, and cultural hybridity are embraced, is nonsensical. Even in the United States, where people who are not white, moneyed, or heterosexual (or some variation) are almost always oppressed, the policing and privileging of skin tones varying like an chocolate silk ombre from espresso to caramel is a reality for dark-skinned people, who are marginalized, while the fairer-complexioned are praised as beautiful because of their ostensibly closer proximity to whiteness (American culture’s dominant idea of “beautiful”).

There was a celebratory mood at opening night of the African-American Shakespeare Co.’s new production of “Twelfth Night” last weekend.

It wasn’t just the high spirits radiating from the stage as the company performed Shakespeare’s rollicking comedy, there was a lot to celebrate offstage as well.

The company has weathered its share of ups and downs, but now boasts a new artistic director, a handsome new home in the Buriel Clay Theatre at the African-American Art and Culture Complex, a revitalized acting company and a rising profile throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

The combination of these elements is clearly working its magic — and fostering the company’s continuing mission of reimagining the classics for contemporary audiences. As artistic director, L. Peter Callender said in his preshow remarks, “African-American Shakespeare Co. is always in the black.”

Callender’s production, which brings the company’s 2010-11 season to an upbeat conclusion, serves that mission in nearly every particular.

The director sets Shakespeare’s comedy of shipwrecks, mistaken identities and blossoming love in 1940s San Francisco.

When the heroine, Viola (the lovely Renée Wilson), and her brother, Sebastian (an agile Romulo Torres), wash ashore, it’s to a jazz- and blues-fueled score written and performed by acclaimed composer Marcus Shelby.

Sets by Kemit Amenophis and costumes by Kristen Lowe recall the vibrant heyday of The City’s own Fillmore jazz district.

Callender directs at a snappy pace, and the cast is fully committed. Wilson’s Viola, who spends most of the play disguised as the page Cesario, weathers the pangs of first love with grace and wit.

Rebecca Frank’s Olivia registers her attraction to Cesario with a winning mix of elegance and sensuality. Matt Jones’ Orsino is aptly imperious as he delivers his opening speech, “If music be the food of love.”

The comedic scenes are broadly played by J. “Darryl” Williams’ expansive Toby Belch, Martin Grizzell’s foppish Andrew Aguecheek, Charles Branklyn’s jive-talking Feste and Chris Dewey’s crisply articulate Fabian.

Lauren Spencer adds spice as the mastermind Maria, and Armando McClain brings urgency to the role of Antonio. Erik Banks, Percival Arcibal and Unique Jenkins contribute in supporting roles, and Leslie Ivy joins Shelby in a couple of torchy songs.

If the pivotal scene in which the others entrap the servant Malvolio (Michael Uy Kelly) doesn’t quite deliver its customary sting, the play’s final moment of reconciliation is cause for jubilation.

Robert S. Duncanson was the first American landscape painter of African descent to gain international renown and occupies a critical position in the history of art. Widely celebrated for his landscape paintings, Duncanson began his career in the family trades of house painting and carpentry, before teaching himself art by painting portraits, genre scenes, and still-lifes. His success is remarkable as a “free colored person” who descended from generations of mulatto tradesmen, to graduate from skilled trades and participate in the Anglo-American art community. Duncanson’s turn to landscape as his subject was influenced by Thomas Cole in the late 1840s. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, then the largest and most prosperous city in the western United States, Duncanson became the cornerstone of the Ohio River Valley regional landscape painting school and, according to the Cincinnati Gazette declared that he “enjoyed the enviable reputation of being the best landscape painter in the West.” Duncanson achieved his artistic success despite the oppressive restrictions that Anglo-American society placed on him as an African-American, a “free colored person.” His paintings earned him international attention with especially high esteem bestowed on him by the art press in Canada and England. Canadians acknowledged Duncanson’s seminal role as “one of the earliest of our professional cultivators of the fine arts.” And, the critics of the London Art Journal praised him as possessing “the skill of a master,” whose paintings “may compete with any of the modern British school.” Duncanson adopted the style and metaphors of east coast landscape painting that depicted the “natural paradise” of the New World as a romantic symbol for the European settlers’ perceived covenant with God. But in so doing he also appropriated the art of landscape painting–both in subject and content–for African-American culture. In some of his paintings he subtly expressed the perspective of an African-American through his works. A careful reading of his landscapes, reveals how Duncanson expressed his particular perspective. The grandson of a freedman, Duncanson’s artistic ambitions and the content of his paintings epitomize W.E.B. Du Bois’ statement that “the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s son is the travail of souls.” Robert S. Duncanson: The Spiritual Striving of the Freeman’s Son is curated by Joseph D. Ketner. Ketner is the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art and the Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of a definitive book about the artist, The Emergence of the African-American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson 1821-1872. The catalogue for this exhibition will contain an essay by Ketner including new information on the artist and color illustrations of many new paintings discovered over the past fifteen years. “We are honored to have Joseph Ketner, the authority on this fascinating Hudson River School artist, curate our 8th annual exhibition,” said Elizabeth Jacks, Executive Director of the Thomas Cole Site. “The artist’s work, which can be found in the permanent collections of major museums across the country, stands alone in its beauty. What makes this exhibition even more powerful, however, is the fact that Duncanson achieved his success under the oppressive conditions of being a ‘free colored person’ in antebellum United States.” Robert S. Duncanson: The Spiritual Striving of the Freeman’s Son is on-view through October 30, 2011 Read More >>>>>