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Draw On

The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, acquired by MOMA in 2005, is a collection of over 2,500 contemporary works on paper. Through a selection of more than three hundred works, this first comprehensive presentation  surveys the various methods and materials within the styles of gestural and geometric abstraction, representation and figuration, and systems-based and conceptual drawings.

 The exhibition brings together historical works by Lee Bontecou and Joseph Beuys; Minimalist and Conceptual works by Donald Judd and Hanne Darboven; detailed narrative drawings by Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin; collages by Amelie von Wulffen, Mona Hatoum, Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Olowska; and large-scale installations by Nate Lowman and Ján Mancuska, to name just a few.

Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection

Drawing: Marcel van Eeden

Audio slideshow: Art and politics in China

As China marks the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, Katie Hill, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Art at the University of Westminster in London, looks at how art has moved from the realm of propaganda to the international marketplace.

via: BBC

'The Last Days of Pompeii in LA'

 Lily Simonson and Catherine Wagley, contributers to art:21 Blog -- have a new bi-weekly dispatch about art in Los Angeles.  

For our first dispatch from the LA art world, we visited the exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, on view at LACMA until October 4. The show features sculptures, paintings, and tapestries that adorned the private villas of the Roman elite, and is accompanied by Eleanor Antin’s The Last Days of Pompeii (Season 2), a project that brings ancient decadence to SoCal. Thoughts about aged culture, contemporary art and the City of Angels prompted the following conversation:

Catherine Wagley: Here in LA, even authentic antiquity feels like faux antiquity. That’s why I avoid shows like Pompeii. I feel so limited as a viewer–I have no concept of Pompeii as a place that occupied a past era; instead, when I look at the artifacts on exhibit, I start thinking about decorations on the Getty’s fountains. But I actually enjoyed the LACMA show because it addresses this very conundrum.

Lily Simonson: Yes, there is virtually no history embodied anywhere in Los Angeles, and that is very unsettling. My neighborhood in Hollywood is overrun by European tourists taking pictures of the Walk of Fame and trying to get to the Hollywood Sign. Is that our Eiffel Tower? Yikes! Our history is all about cultural production and artifice, so everything begins to seem inauthentic or reproducible.

Anyway, I agree that LACMA gracefully embraced the incongruity of a show like this in Los Angeles, especially by juxtaposing the exhibition with Antin’s Pompeii series. In fact, the Antin piece at once underscored this cultural “mismatch” while highlighting the parallels between the opulent Hollywood Empire and the dangerously extravagant Romans. I’ve been thinking about the inclusion of the Art21-like video that documented Antin’s process making the Pompeii photographs. It made the work feel like a Hollywood production.

Read more here

Ruiko Yoshida: "Harlem Black Angels"

Ruiko Yoshida's photographs of Harlem in the early 1970s brilliantly capture various aspects of the culture and the times, showing a side of the U.S. that she felt her Japanese contemporaries knew little about. In the process she created a compelling work that offers an incisive critique of racial hierarchies in the U.S. that, despite its deeply felt humanism, is missing from Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street. 

link: Harlem Black Angels

"The Americans"

Sadness seems to trickle through the 83 photographs in Robert Frank's classic 1959 book, “The Americans,” his disturbed and mournful song-of-the-road portrait of a new homeland and the subject of a 50th-anniversary exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Once rejected for its pessimism, now sanctified for its political prescience, the book distills heartache, anger, fear, loneliness and occasional joy into a brew that has changed flavor with time but stayed potent. You may not know exactly what you’re imbibing when you pick up “The Americans” for the first time, or when you visit the Met show, but a few pictures in, and you’re hooked.

via: America Captured in a Flash By Holland Cotter The New York Times

"The Unknown Hipster"

Born French (naturally), Unknown Hipster moved to New York to become a painter, a poet, or anything (within reason) art world related. All that can be said is that Unknown frequently appears at fashionable and cultural events without being necessarily on the list.

Poster Boy

The Small Stakes design studio, produces crisp nuanced posters for many innovative and diverse musicians.

Historic Rhode Island Theater Designed by Stanford White to Reopen

The stage has been dark and the curtains closed at the Newport Casino Theatre for more than 20 years, but little imagination can conjure up images of Will Rogers spinning a monologue here or Orson Welles or Oscar Wilde entertaining the crowd.

The building was designed by Stanford White, a New York architect for the rich and glamorous whose murder by a girlfriend's jealous husband became a tabloid sensation, and contributed to the glimmering landscape that made Newport a popular summer resort for affluent industrialists and their families during America's Gilded Age.

Now after years of vacancy and deterioration, the building — owned by the International Tennis Hall of Fame and located at the Newport Casino complex — is being revived through a roughly $4.5 million facelift that will return it to a functioning theater.

This fall, workers will install heating, air conditioning and new electrical systems, make the building handicapped accessible, restore the exterior and touch up other signs of structural defects that led the building to close in 1987. The theater is expected to reopen as soon as next summer.

The theater, built in 1880, occupies prime Newport real estate on the grounds of the Newport Casino, a National Historic Landmark home to the tennis hall of fame and the traditional venue for the opening night performances of the city's heralded folk and jazz festivals. It lays claim to being the first — and only remaining example — of Stanford White's theater architecture.

An architect responsible for Fifth Avenue mansions, the palatial Rosecliff property in Newport and one of the original incarnations of Madison Square Garden, White also occupied high-society circles around the turn of the 20th century.

Evelyn Nisbet, an actress and model who became one of White's lovers as a teenager, famously recounted swinging nude for him on a red velvet swing he had installed. She went on to marry Harry Thaw, who shot White at close range in 1906 during a rooftop performance at the old Madison Square Garden. Thaw's first trial ended with a hung jury, and he was later acquitted by reason of insanity.

Read more here

Roman Imperial Painting

The Scuderie del Quirinale, from September 24 2009 until January 17 2010, will showcase Roman 

Imperial Painting: frescoes, portraits on wood and on glass, decorations and landscapes from patrician domus, as well as popular houses and shops from the most important archaeological sites and museums in the world.

From landscapes to still life, from stage décor to street painting, and from portraits to mythological subjects revisited by the Roman mind, this exhibition Pittura Romana. I colori dell'Impero (Painting in Ancient Rome. The Colors of Empire) will address all of the themes popular in Roman painting between the first century C.E. and late antiquity. 

It will consist of five separate sections, with such intriguing titles as: "Deceptive Walls: Denying Space", "Light and Shade", "Ancient Pinacothèques", "The City Speaks: Indoors and Out" and "From the Rediscovery of the Domus Aurea to the Grotesque".

The exhibition will feature perfectly reconstructed rooms with their frescoes and even a columbarium, to do full justice to the strength and liveliness of Roman painting and to its astonishing skill in highlighting both the real and the whimsical aspects of ancient Roman society, thus putting paid once and for all to the tale of Roman painting's total and passive dependency on the legacy of Classical Greece.

On Line

The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480–1650, at the RISD Museum of Art, explores the art of engraving and its transformations during the European Renaissance. Showcasing works by Albrecht Dürer to virtuoso specialists such as Agostino Carracci, the exhibition demonstrates how engravers learned from one another and pushed their art to remarkable technical heights. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to observe the rapid visual evolution of one of Europe’s first reproducible art forms.