The Thinking Eye

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  Art of the Steal

  Posted: 16-April-2011, 11:09pm EDT by arthur

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  Located in Lower Merion Township, a suburb of Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation is one America?s great (if lesser known) collections of visual art. It was founded in 1922 by Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), a progressive albeit eccentric collector who raised himself from working-class origins through medical training and through his development and marketing of the antiseptic drug Argyrol. Housed in a distinctive building by French-American Beaux-Arts architect Paul Cret, the eclectic collection of fine and decorative artworks is best known for its Post-Impressionist and early Modernist paintings. It has formidable holdings by the likes of Jean-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Matisse once called it ?the only sane place to see art in America? while the philosopher John Dewey dedicated his classic 1934 book Art as Experience to Barnes ? his student and close friend. Wary of the spectacle and commercialism that he saw as defining art museums, Barnes conceived of his building and collection primarily as a school. He stipulated in his indenture for the Collection that it be kept intact inside the original building.

  
  

  It is this wish ? as well as the great artistic and historical integrity of the collection and its housing ? that has been violated by its current and recent trustees in their plans to move the Collection to a new home in downtown Philadelphia?s Museum District. Legally authorized in 2004, the move is currently well underway. Construction for the new building began in the fall of 2009 and should be completed this next winter. The original Barnes is to close down this July and is to reopen at the new location next year. The move has the support of many local players in politics and business, many of them seemingly more concerned with their own interests than with the integrity of the Barnes. The move have not gone uncontested: The Friends of The Barnes Foundation, a ?citizens? group,? continues to engage in legal challenges. Many in the art world have spoken out as well, among them the prominent local architect Robert Venturi ? who renovated the building back in the 90?s.

  
  

  This Sunday, at 2pm, Cornell?s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art will be offering a public screening of ?The Art of the Steal,? director Don Argott?s acclaimed 2009 documentary about the controversy. As indicated by the title, the film is an unashamedly biased polemic against the move. In the words of LA Times art critic Christopher Knight (one of its many interviewees) it ?is a riveting ? and tragic ? documentary film chronicling the gratuitous ruin of a school outside Philadelphia that houses an incomparable art collection. It's a classic story of destroying the village in order to save it.?

  
  

  Following the showing, there will be a panel discussion featuring Cornell English professor Jeremy Braddock, grad student and preservationist Nathaniel Guest and Barnes curator Martha Lucy. It promises to complicate the perspective offered by what some have claimed is an overly one-sided film. Lucy will also be giving a lecture the following Monday with the tantalizing title ?Why We Love to Hate Renoir.? It will be held at 5pm at the Ruth Woolsey Findley History of Art Gallery at Goldwin Smith Hall and will be followed by a reception. Both events are free and open to the public.

  
  

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  Decadia

  Posted: 13-January-2011, 12:17am EST by arthur

  A review of the Ink Shop's "Decadia" in this week's Tompkins Weekly. (I'd post it here in full but I had a lousy time with Blogger's text formatting last time around and am not eager to repeat the experience.) Or download the whole paper here (PDF). Go see the show before it closes after Saturday.
  
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  Trees and Other Ramifications

  Posted: 22-December-2010, 2:34am EST by arthur

  
  

  Mike Starn and Doug Starn
  Structure of Thought 15, 2001-05
  Inkjet print and mixed media
  Collection of the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas
  
  
  

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  In this week?s Tompkins Weekly (PDF):

  
  

  Branching, both as natural phenomenon and as cultural metaphor, is the subject of a current Johnson Museum show. ?Trees and Other Ramifications: Branches in Nature and Culture? comes from The Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas ? where it was organized by curator Stephen Goddard ? and has been supplemented with works from Cornell. Goddard specializes in works on paper and ?Trees,? mostly in black and white, has the same bias.

  
  

  Several images stand out for their raw beauty. Both Doug and Mike Starn?s large-scale inkjet photograph Structure of Thought 15 (2001-05) and Jacques Hnizdovsky?s modestly sized woodcut Copper Beech (1985) present flatly silhouetted monochromatic tree-forms. The elaborate material support of Structure is typical of the Starns?: a grid of waxed and varnished papers glued together and stretched over a frame. The warmly colored and translucent sheets make the tree(s) ghostly, free-floating. An intended analogy between branching and thinking is robustly embodied (other photographs in the series show neurons). In a related but distinct way, the detailed and impeccable line drawing in Beech conveys a sense of outward movement in tension with the static overall profile.
  

  
  

  Arboreal metaphors for lineage have a long history. Among many examples here is a diagrammatic Tree of Life (1860, lithograph and letterpress) by none other than Charles Darwin. This elegant piece of information design, the only illustration from his groundbreaking Origin of Species, diversifies upward in splitting dashed lines. Similarly, Ad Reinhardt?s polemical cartoon How to Look at Modern Art in America (1946, offset lithography) parodies Alfred Barr?s schematic attempt to chart the roots and branches of visual modernism with a more literally drawn tree. (A print by Darwin?s evolutionist colleague Ernst Haeckel is similarly literalist ? the stiff line drawing not among his more captivating images.)

  
  

  Treescape as pastoral endures, despite being closely tied in Western art with the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Although as subject as any genre to cliché (think of images on posters and calendars), the best work in this vein is difficult to deny. Numerous pieces here attest to this. The dense accumulation of fine hatchings that make up Franz Von Stuck?s (1890) etching Forellenweiher (Trout Pond) make up a shadowy space pierced by light coming from between trunks. The receding perspective of these trees ? reflected in the water ? penetrates an otherwise flat image. A pair of recent drypoints by Donald Resnick ? Shoreline (1997) and Woods/Morning (1998) is similarly atmospheric.
  

  
  

  But some of the most exciting work here takes the viewer into less familiar territories. One of these ?other ramifications? is a gelatin silver photograph by engineer-photographer Harold Edgerton, a close-up of the White of the Eye (taken 1979) showing a network of retinal arteries and veins. Camera blurring, particularly in the foreground, helps create a delightfully ambiguous space. (It also suggests a self-reflexive commentary on the nature of vision.) White has been provocatively paired with Tanaka Ryohei?s skillful and intricate etching Trees #3 (1974), an idiosyncratic orchard scene with exaggerated perspective. The dense overlapping of the knotted trunks and branches echoes Edgerton?s ocular vessels. (Augustus Knapp?s 19^th century wood engraving of a medicinal rhizome is also worth comparing.)

  
  

  Another pairing of ?others? is similarly fascinating, if more opposed in its approaches. Both images show plants as botanical specimens. Karl Blossfeldt?s (early twentieth century) gelatin silver Erygnium Bourgatii shows a starkly silhouetted leaf. The spiky form has the look and feel of Gothic architecture filtered through the artist?s characteristic detachment. William Sharp?s (1854) color lithograph illustration Lily Leaf, by contrast, is drawn with great detail. Featuring an overall dull reddish tone, it shows the underside of the leaf with an admirable eye for the plant?s intricate structure of ridges and branches.
  

  
  

  Elliott Erwitt?s gelatin silver Bearded Man with Tree, Venice, CA (taken 1979) makes a comical analogy between its two foreground ?figures.? A scruffy fellow and an also-bearded palm seem oblivious to one another. In the background: a gable with a row of windows, antennas, wires.

  
  

  It would have been interesting to see more three-dimensional work such as Cornell professor Jack Elliott and students? sculptural VanRose benches. Named after pioneering Cornell Home Economics professors Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose and crafted from the stump of a sugar maple recently cleared in an expansion of that college (now Human Ecology), the symmetrically arranged pair both preserves and enriches the natural beauty of the roots and trunk.

  
  

  Despite this eclecticism the overall sense conveyed by ?Trees? is one of traditionalism. It would have been good to see more offbeat and aggressively contemporary work with the visual presence of the Starns? or Edgerton. Still, this is an engaging show able to provoke hours of viewing and thought.
  

  
  

  ?Trees and Other Ramifications? remains on display at Cornell?s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art through January 2^nd.