WENDELL CASTLE'S ART

WENDELL CASTLE’S ART

by Joan K. Yanni

Caligari Clock

 The art of Wendell Castle has long been a favorite of Gallery visitors and staff. Some of his art is always on view: the Suggestion Box, for example, and the Caligari clock.(1967) Recently his Music Rack (1964) was chosen to be part of the new exhibit, Crafting Modernism. In its place now is Table with Tablecloth, one of Castle’s signature trompe l’oeil works, with both table and tablecloth carved of wood. The clock attracts attention immediately. It is located where the Vanden Brul Pavilion opens into the Forman Gallery. It can’t be missed: it is 92 1/2 inches tall and made of curly cherry veneer, ebony and gold-plated brass. It is painted a vivid blue. How does the clock run? It contains a special West German weight-driven movement that strikes every quarter hour. Three small holes in the back near the top permit winding and setting. Other pieces by Castle in the same area of the Gallery include a walnut Suggestion Box, created in 1972 when Castle was producing furniture in natural, organic forms using a lamination technique. Suggestion Box is tree-like, with a natural wood color and grain. Commissioned by the Gallery, it is a combination of desk and ballot box and includes holders for a pen or pencil and specially-made suggestion cards as well as a slot in which Gallery visitors may insert their suggestions. A tiny hole underneath the front of the top permits the insertion of a nail-like key which, with a push, will open the top to expose the suggestions. For almost 50 years Castle’s work has inspired viewers to look at furniture in a new way. Superbly crafted and often filled with a sense of whimsy, his recent pieces reinterpret ideas about function, form, line, color and mass. His work stands in the worlds of furniture, sculpture and design simultaneously. He is often credited with being the father of the art furniture movement. Wendell Castle was born in Kansas in 1932. In 1958 he received an undergraduate degree in industrial February, March 2012 Page 3 design and in 1961 a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture, both from the University of Kansas. He came to the RIT furniture design department in 1962 and taught there in the RIT School for American Craftsmen until 1969. He stopped making furniture for a time in 1969 and concentrated on large, fiberglass sculpture, two examples of which can be seen near Rochester's Chamber of Commerce and at Marine Midland Bank. In 1970 he moved to SUNY Brockport, then returned to RIT in 1984 as tenured professor and artist-in-residence, a position in which Castle gives critiques and lectures, represents RIT nationally, and continues to create. More than two decades ago Ron Netsky, in an article in "Upstate Magazine” said that Castle’s reputation, “established early and bolstered by every new series he creates, has earned him that greatest of commodities, a license to create whatever he wants, knowing there will be a market for his work." His designs have gone from the organic, to the trompe l'oeil, to the whimsical and classical. In 1980 he opened the Wendell Castle School in Scottsville, NY. His bold and experimental works can be found in the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Art Institute of Chicago. Castle is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including three honorary doctoral degrees, the 1994 “Visionaries of the American Craft Movement,” sponsored by the American Craft Museum, a 1997 Gold Medal from the American Craft council, and the Modernism Design Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2007. His studio is in a renovated bean mill in Scottsville; there he designs and makes drawings which are converted into wood by his staff. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, McGraw Hill Dictionary of Art, Curatorial archives.

AFTER GRANT WOOD (AMERICAN GOTHIC) by DEVORAH SPERBER

AFTER GRANT WOOD (American Gothic) by Devorah Sperber

By Kitty Jospe

  What do we look for in a work of art? Devorah Sperber provides a novel way of       viewing and thinking with her installation entitled After Grant Wood (American     Gothic) 3 (commissioned by the Memorial Art Gallery with partial funding from

Coats and Clark.) It is one of a vast series of famous paintings she has recreated with spools of thread, suspended upside down, accompanied with a viewing tool which allows an identifiable miniature view of the work right side up.

 Some of you will remember her work After Vermeer in the 2006 exhibit, Extreme Materials, where the raw color of thread (translated by digital pixels to each spool) becomes a recognizable scene, seen through the acrylic spheres. Her Artist’s Statement acknowledges that there is no one truth or reality: “I am interested in the link between art and technology, how the eyes prioritize, and reality as a subjective experience vs. an absolute truth. As a visual artist, I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic, than the act of seeing--how the human brain makes sense of the visual world.” -- Devorah Sperber, 2005 (2) Her witty titles, such as Manuf®actured, and a sample of the titles of her solo exhibits, give a sense of her artistic vision: Bifocal, Mirror Universe, Threads of Perception, Iconic Visions, A Sense of Déjà Vu, Clin d’oeil au Louvre, Seeing Things, Pixilated. Group exhibit titles titillate curiosity about how our eye and brain interpret visual stimuli: Brain: the inside story; Eye Spy: playing with perception; Up cycling: recuperating past lives; Beyond Appearances. Sperber first started with painting-like recreations, created by computer-based, color-chartered printouts. This led to exploring a range of materials from faceted beads, Swarovski crystals, and chenille pipe cleaners (to recreate a shag-rug replica of paintings). But why stop there! 18,000 Letraset marker caps arranged on flexible canvas create “Lie like a Rug”(3) where an oriental rug looks crumpled without the viewing tool, and perfectly flat with it. Sperber’s current installation complements the 63rd Rochester Finger Lakes Exhibition. Both shows dare us to suspend belief, and engage us with surprises. Where do you usually find a spool of thread, and how do you use it? By taking 4,392 spools of thread (1 ¾ inches high), suspended on a steel ball chain and hanging apparatus, conventional ideas are challenged by a visual game of spool art which form an upside-down mosaic of a well-known portrait. Most of the visitors who pause in front of this large piece seem to enjoy the puzzle to the eye. It is both within our grasp and not, where rationally, the viewer can imagine the precision of arranging the colors, and yet, intuitively, there is a primitive response to color and form. Just as art has seen many revolutions which challenge traditional and academic ideas about harmony in composition, Sperber takes us to a wild side of the imagination. The imagery is derived from digital photographs that she manipulates and translates into "low-tech" pixels. This labor-intensive work calls to mind the work of Chuck Close, who challenges the boundaries of traditional print making, breaking down a portrait into mini-pictures as discrete and independent September 2011 Page 3 The title (After Grant Wood (American Gothic 3) speaks to both the literal and figurative aspects of this painting, executed by Grant Wood in 1930. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the figures in American Gothic have become cultural icons and subject of parody. A booklet near our Sperber installation gives some examples of ways the painting of a dour-faced farmer, his equally grim-faced wife have been the subject of caricature. Not only are faces subject to parody, such as substituting those of President and Mrs.Obama, but also the architecture of the house or clothing, for instance by military fatigues. We can see the power of image and how it enters into our cultural consciousness, whether as advertising gimmick or artist’s wish to shake and change our consciousness. Such art raises the question of what we seek to satisfy our personal as well as culturally-formed sense of aesthetics. Biography Devorah Sperber was born in 1961 and raised in Detroit, Michigan until the age of ten, when she moved to Denver, Colorado. From 1979 to 1981, she attended the Art Institute of Colorado, Denver, and in 1987, she received her BA from Regis University, Colorado. Shortly after graduation, Sperber was asked to include her figurative stone sculptures and related bronze castings in a national exhibition on the Holocaust victim Anne Frank, which helped in the emergence of her career. Although she is based in New York City, her extensive list of exhibits spans the US, Puerto Rico, and international venues such as Paris. (5). I hope you will enjoy consulting her many works by checking on the websites below. There is a powerful assertive force in these astonishing installations that energizes, inspires, refreshes a fragmented part of ourselves, restoring a sense of being part of a connected whole. to further appreciate the variety of thread spool works from 1999 to present, consult: (1) http://www.devorahsperber.com/thread_works_index_html_an d_2x2s/index.html and http://www.devorahsperber.com/installation_views.htm (2) http://www.devorahsperber.com/thread_works_index_htm l_and_2x2s/wood3.html (3) Lie like a rug: http://www.devorahsperber.com/rug_html_pages/index.html http://www.devorahsperber.com/reviews_articles/nytimes_kato nah_10_05.htm Review of "Over + Over," Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York, 2005) (4) VW Bus: Shower Power, 2001. http://www.devorahsperber.com/vw_html_pages/index.html (5) photo from March 2011 at the Grand Palais: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amandenoye/5576659945/ (6) http://kidspace.massmoca.org/exhibitions/archive/sperber/ (general article from 2008, and view of the Last Supper) Earlier Works: http://www.devorahsperber.com/more_preview.html WHAT’S UP WHERE: ART

PORTRAIT OF A VENETIAN PATRICIAN

Venetian Patrician

PORTRAIT OF A VENETIAN PATRICIAN

JACOPO TINTORETTO (1518-1594)

(Text and Picture Copyright in 1977 by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester which is not responsible for this publication.)

The letter “M” which is seen on a shield displaying half a crest permits the assumption that the name of the sitter is Marcello, possibly Jacopo Marcello, a member of the magistrature but not a procurator ( as has been proposed), and one of those responsible for the redecoration of the Great Council Hall after the fire of 1577.The older authorities gave this portrait to Jacopo Tintoretto, and the first to challenge this attribution was Paola Rossi, who ascribes it to the artist’s son Domenico and relates it the portrait of Giovanni Paola Contarini  in the Accademia , Venice (no. 1012) which was recorded by Boschini as being by Domenico when in the Procuratia de Supra. However, John H. Maxon considers it to be by Jacopo, dating from ca. 1550 and that the background and possibly the materials might be by an assistant. (68.97)

PORTRAIT OF A BOY OF THE BRACCIFORTE FAMILY

PORTRAIT OF A BOY OF THE BRACCIFORTE FAMILY

Niccolo dell’Abbate, Italian, ca. 1512-1571

(Text and Picture Copyright, 1977 by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester which is not responsible for this publication.)

Girolama Mazzola Bedoli

Susan E. Schilling pointed out that the gilded metal identifies the family of the sitter and that the allegorical winged figure with two long thin trumpets—a symbol of France—is a motif used by the artist on at least one other occasion is a design for a room decoration in France. The portrait was painted in Bologna, where the artist worked from 1547 to 1552. (76.13)

THE JUDGEMENT OF THE EMPEROR OTHO III OF SAXONY

Franco-Flemish, ca 1495

(Text and Picture Copyright in 1977 by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester which is not responsible for this publication.)

The Judgement of the Emperor Otho

The tapestry shows the Emperor Otho of Saxony judging his Queen, who is confronted by the widow of a count she had put to death because he had refrained from responding from her advances. This popular 12^th century is related in the Pantheon by Godfrey of Viterbo, who served as chaplain to three Emperors. He states: “She (the Queen) fell desperately in love with a young count near Modena and promptly declared to him her feelings, for she was in such matters more inclined to ask others than to wait for others to ask her. The Count was as virtuous as he was handsome, and repelled all her offers. The Empress complained to her husband that the count had made love to her and Otho as a credulous man promptly had the alleged culprit’s head cut off! Godfrey of Viterbo continues by saying that the Empress was burned to death by Otho’s orders. These events took place about the end of the 10^th Century. (30.1)

PORTRAITS OF JOHANNES IV AND SIGISMUND

                                    PORTRAITS OF JOHANNES IV AND SIGISMUND, DUKES OF BAVARIA

GERMAN, SWABIAN, CA. 1470

THE VERSO CONTAINS VERSES IN GERMAN AND LATIN

From a manuscript, “Reim-Chronic”

(Text and Picture Copyright in 1977 by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester which is not responsible for this publication.)

               

Portraits of Bavarian Princes

The identity of the figures is established by the names inscribed above each prince and by their shield of alliances. They were the sons of Albrecht III, Duke of Bavaria, whose will they were entrusted to share the government. After Johannes’s death of the plague in 1463, Sigismund (1439-1501) continued to rule to 1467. Further details about the historical background are contained in the full entry in the catalogue, Master Drawings & Prints, William H. Schab Gallery.

Three drawings from the same album, which was broken up in 1935, are in the Print Room, Berlin-Dahlem, and are related to a partially preserved fresco cycle which used to decorate the residence of the Bavarian princes in Munich and of which the remains are in the Bayerische Nationalmuseum. The Frescoes are by the Master of the Polling Panels. (75.128).

ARITHMETIC AND ASTRONOMY

ARITHMETIC AND ASTRONOMY (28.457)

This tapestry is part of a large tapestry representing the Seven Liberal Arts, which, it has been suggested served as added decoration on feast days in the Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria, Novella, Florence. The same allegorical occur there in the frescoes of the left wall by Andrea de Firenze. In the tapestry the figure of Astronomy is accompanied by Ptolemy and that of Arithmetic by Archimedes. On the latter’s robe are woven, “KHYN,” the name of the designer, from a family of famous tapestry weavers of Tournai. Another fragment, Geometry, probably from the same tapestry, is in the collection of the Grand Lodge Library and Museum of Freemasons’ Hall, London. The border on the Memori al Art Gallery tapestry is a later edition. 

ARITHMETIC AND ASTRONOMY

Flemish, Tournai, ca. 1400

(Text and Picture Copyright in 1977 by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester which is not responsible for this publication.)

THE ANNUNCIATION TO ZACHARIAH

Master of the Urbino Coronation

The Annunciation to Zachariah (43.3)

(Text and  Picture Copyright 1977 by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester which is not responsible for this publication.)

The Annunciation to Zachariah

This detached fresco is believed to have been originally in the church of S. Lucia, Fabriano. The subject, taken from the first chapter of Luke, presents the vision of the aged Zachariah as he officiates at the altar of incense and learns from the angel Gabriel that his wife, Elizabeth, although “well stricken in years,” is to bear a son, John, who will “make ready a people” for the Lord. The crowds, who “waited….and marveled,” are at the right, dressed in the 14^th century Florentine style, the middle figure wearing the painted turban of a Jew. The kneeling figure at the left is probably the donor of the panel.

Zeri  was the first to attribute this picture to the Master of the Urbino Coronation, a master re-constructed by Mario Salmi in 1932. Zeri connected it with companion frescoes, Crucifixion in the Museum of fine Arts, Boston and The Birth of John the Baptist Galleria Nazionale, Rome.

NY-USER-RA REJOINED

by Betsy Brayer

“One plus one equals one,” read the eye-catching headline.

NY-USER-RA

The Gallery’s involvement began in 1942 with the purchase of an eleven-inch-high portrait bust from the estate of Vladimir Gregorievitch Simkhovitch, professor of economic history at Columbia University.  The Aswan-granite figure had been broken at the elbow with the right arm bent above the break line and holding a mace. Assumed to be from a larger statue, it had been found by Simkhovitch’s expedition to the Temple of Amun at Karnak in   1922.

The scholarly sleuth who put the king back together again was Egyptologist Bernard V. Bothmer, curator of ancient art at the Brooklyn Museum, who had been “on this case.” as she put it, for twenty years.  While lecturing in Rochester in 1952, Bothmer stopped by the Gallery and “noticed in the small Egyptian collection the head and shoulders from a royal sculpture which appeared to date from the Old Kingdom. “At that time,” Bothmer wrote in 1974, “I jotted down a summary description of the piece and, as had long been my habit, noted not only the customary measurements but the dimensions of the break as well.: He also photographed the bust from all four sides and then forgot about it for eighteen years. “As so often happens with one’s notes, not much was done with them.”  However, in those 1952 notes, Bothmer observed the sculpture’s remarkable similarity to the head of a complete statue of Ny-user-ra in Cairo.” Several years later, Bothmer saw another related royal bust on view in the Musée National at Beirut, and fifteen years after that, in 1970, he had the chance to study and measure it closely. Then a footnote in Vandier’s Manual beginning “Le Musée du Caire possede une seconde statue de Nioussere” caught Bothmer’s eye, and soon he was rummaging through the vast uncataloged storerooms of the Cairo Museum.

Vandier and then Bothmer had found a headless torso “representing the king, standing, in the position of marching” languishing in Cairo. Legrain had originally discovered it in 1904 in the cave of Karnak.  The chief historical value of the Cairo torso is a small cartouche on the base identifying Ny-user-ra, an obscure pharaoh who ruled circa 2370-2360 BCE.

The Cairo base did not match the Beirut find; but then “a light clicked.” On the basis of the position of the arms, Bothmer reasoned that it might fit the Rochester bust. Old notes, measurements, and photographs strengthened his surmise. He had a case of the Cairo base made and shipped to the Brooklyn Museum where the borrowed Rochester original was waiting.  Soon he was on the phone to Harris

Prior, director, and Isabel Herdle, curator, with the grand news, “It fits!”

The attempt to ship the plaster case of the bust to Cairo was trickier, running afoul of complex Egyptian import regulations. Taking no chances, Bothmer packed the Ny-user-ra cast as “research material” and flew to Cairo himself. The two pieces were put together during a ceremony in the office of Dr. Henri Riad, director of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.

Cairo’s two halves were on view in 1980 with labels written in French, English and Arabic.  Part of each label reads: “Upper part a copy from an original displayed in the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester USA.” Only the words “Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester USA” are in English in all three labels.

Ny-user-ra himself may have been obscure, but obscure can mean rare, and the sculpture is one of the few existing pieces that can be positively ascribed to the period in Egyptian history known as the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Kings   wielding a mace with bulbous head---symbol of royal power---are common in Egyptian painting and relief. According to Bothmer only two sculptures of the king carrying his mace are known, both in repose and both from the Old Kingdom.  One is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the other is “The Rochester-Cairo statue of Ny-user-ra.” The empty but clenched left fist is rare and puzzling, too, Bothmer says.

Bothmer and Vandier both theorized that the red granite statue was made at Thebes, brought to Karnak, and separated in antiquity.  It was either broken during a war, as was the fate of many antique statues, or it was tossed out of the Temple of Amun by priests on a housekeeping binge.

Despite the priests’ contempt and the unfinished ears, the carving on the face is fine, Bothmer said, with eyebrow and eyelids well executed. “While the face of the (unbroken) seated statue (of Ny-user-ra) in Cairo has a brooding, almost sullen expression, the Rochester king appears to be direct, forceful, and somewhat haughty,” Bothmer said in 1980.

One plus one equals one,” Bothmer concluded.

Sources: Interview with Bernard Bothmer, 1988.  Interview with the director of the Cairo Museum, ca. 1980. Curatorial files, including articles in the New York Times and Time magazine                                                                 

Editor’s note: Docent Brayer is the author of Magnum Opus and the biography George Eastman, the latter to be issued in :paperback in honor of the 100^th anniversary of  Eastman.

THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL REVISITED

Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery

 

THE HUSDON RIVER SCHOOL REVISITED

by Libby Clay

Favorite tour stops among docents are at Asher B. Durand’s Genesee Oaks

 and Thomas Cole’s Landscape Composition: Italian Scenery.

Genesee Oaks

These artists represent, of course, the Hudson River School of painters, artists who recorded both idyllic and dramatic scenery in New York State--the White Mountains, the Berkshires and the Adirondacks--and established the tradition of a national landscape art.

The Hudson River, New York

Further down the corridor, across from the Lockhart Gallery, hang two works by another Hudson River Schooler, Jasper Francis Cropsey. Hung one above the other are The Hudson River, New York (73.39) and Chenango River, New York (73.40)

Chenango River, New York

. They are the same size, and both were painted in 1858, leading one to wonder if they were part of a series. Their small size (10 3/8 x 16 7/8 inches) would make an ideal grouping.

Also on view is American Harvesting, after a Painting by Jasper Cropsey (77.196),

American Harvesting

a  painting  of a print which, in turn, was a copy of a painting by Cropsey--prints were a means of bringing artworks to the general public. This work gives an idea of what the artist’s larger paintings were like: full of color and detail and very American..

Correspondence found in the curatorial files zeroes in on The Hudson River and makes the title (and the location) more specific. In the right foreground can be seen the ruins of a building, probably Fort Putnam, built in 1779 high above the United StatesMilitary Academy at West Point. The view of the river would then be looking north toward Newburgh, with Constitution Island to the right. During the Revolutionary War, a great chain was stretched across the Hudson from West Point to ConstitutionIsland to prevent the British from sailing farther up the river. Some of the enormous links from the chain are preserved at Trophy Point at West Point, and the view of the Hudson from there is very similar to that in Cropsey’s painting.

The location of Chenango River (the area near Binghamton, New York) has also been challenged, the objection being that the area is not as rugged as Cropsey paints it. Although the Hudson River School artists sketched out-of-doors and on site, they were not above embellishing when they felt their painting needed  more drama.  After all, they were painting for a public with a taste for romantic landscapes.

Jasper Francis Cropsey had an interesting career. He was of Dutch-Huguenot stock, born February 18, 1823, in Staten Island, New York. His schooling was sporadic and limited to what the neighborhood could provide. In his teens he was apprenticed to an architect; by age twenty he was a practicing architect. He also began to paint, secretly at first, rising at dawn to work until breakfast, then putting in a full day’s work before painting again until night. His landscapes were very much influenced by the works of Thomas Cole and by Cole’s almost mystical reverence for the American wilderness.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  

In 1847 Cropsey and his wife Maria went to Europe for a year. There he settled with a group of American and European painters and saw firsthand the work of European landscape painters, both contemporary and academic. He himself did no painting there, but he executed numerous sketches which he then turned into paintings when he returned to America.

In 1856 he returned to Europe with Maria and their two daughters. They settled in England for a seven-year sojourn, and he became a close friend of the writer and art critic John Ruskin. Cropsey had brought America with him in the form of his sketches, and he developed oil paintings from them. The best of them, Autumn--on the Hudson River was exhibited in the London Exhibition of 1862. (It is now in the National Gallery in Washington.) The British were astonished by the painting, and could not believe that the full brilliance of American autumn was other than the artist’s fantasy. Cropsey placed a pressed autumn leaf from America next to the painting as proof of his realism. (Maria Cropsey had spent the crossing pressing American leaves and flowers into a book.) Queen Victoria bestowed a medal on him for his services with the American Commission of the great London Exposition.

The American Civil War brought Cropsey home again, and he immediately went to the battlefields with an artist’s ammunition: paint and brush. He also continued his architectural career, designing stations and platforms for the Sixth Avenue Elevated train platforms in New York City, and executing a design for a five-story, multi-family house long before apartment houses were built in America. He also designed private homes, including his own, “Aladdin,” at Warwick, New York.

Jasper Cropsey, though not as well known as Cole and Durand, carried on their tradition of the romantic landscape. His vivid colors, sometimes almost brash, reflected his love of the land and also the profound changes in ideas and ideals that took place in America from the middle decades of the 19^th century to the Civil War:

                1. Regarding the natural world, the feeling changed from a desire to conquer it, as on the frontier, to living in harmony with nature, enjoying it, and respecting it as an expression of God’s grandeur or purpose.

                2. A new outlook emerged on man’s place in the cosmos, and a new notion of what makes up a good life, including the idea that life is a pilgrimage, a voyage.

Eventually American landscape paintings became, by their very nature, somewhat repetitious, and public demand for  them waned. Cropsey lamented the diminishing wilderness as much as the diminishing demand. He sold “Aladdin” and bought a more modest home at Hastings-on-Hudson. He died in 1900, known particularly for his autumn scenes.

His great-granddaughters have turned his home and studio into a Cropsey memorial and center for scholarly and artistic study. It is open by appointment.

Source: Curatorial files; article by M. Therese Southgate, MD, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, October 7, 1998; John K. Howat:The Hudson River and its Painters, Viking Press.

HILDEGARDE IN ART

Hildegarde Lasell

HILDEGARDE IN ART

By Joan K yanni

A recently-acquired painting of a young teen-aged girl now welcomes visitors to the 19^th century European gallery. The painting is by Ralph Peacock (1865-1946), a British artist who specialized in children’s portraits. The girl is Hildegarde Lasell (2005.16) who was a luminous 14-year-old when the portrait was painted on a visit to Europe with her parents.

The striking painting was donated to the Gallery in 2005 by Dr. and Mrs. Michael L. Watson. The Watsons have been staunch friends and patrons of the Memorial Art Gallery since Emily Sibley Watson founded the Gallery in memory of a son, James Averell, who died of cholera at the age of 26. A son of Mrs. Watson’s second marriage, James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Hildegarde were married in 1916. Watson, Jr. would become well known in the Rochester art community and in the art world at large for his literary and film endeavors. After the marriage, Hildegarde also became a dynamic force in the community. An actress, singer, writer, and historic preservationist, she counted e e cummings and Marianne Moore among her friends.

MAG has two other portraits of Hildegarde: a photograph by Man Ray and a portrait statuette by Gaston Lachaise. The statuette, Hildegarde Lasell Watson (67.11), is probably most familiar to docents, since it has been recently on view in the sculpture pavilion. The unusual sculpture, about 15½ inches tall, is the figure of a woman in a bouffant gown with a tight-fitting bodice and a long, full skirt. The right leg steps forward confidently; the left is hidden in the billowing skirt. Awareness, intelligence and refinement are depicted in the figure. It has been cast in bronze, with the bodice and skirt nickel-plated, a startling and original composition. Lachaise also executed a larger version of the figure in clay or plaster, as surviving photographs show.

Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935) was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker. He attended the Ếcole des Beaux Arts, worked with Rene Lalique, and exhibited regularly at the Salon. Soon he rebelled against the academic tradition and joined the avant garde circle active at the turn of the century. In 1906 emigrated to the United States, which he described as “the most favorable place to develop as a creative artist”. Though he worked as a traditional apprentice for artist such as Paul Manship, the works he produced in his free time were unorthodox. Critics liked his work, but it never found favor with the public, and financial difficulties tormented his career. The patronage of several local families—the Watsons, the Iselins and Charlotte Whitney Allen--helped him survive, since he was never able to keep track of money. He seemed fixated on sculpting the ideal Standing Woman--a powerful presence exuding sex and mystery. She stands in a classic stance, large and voluptuous, but standing lightly on her toes. The face is often that of his beloved wife Isabel.

Hildegarde Lasell Watson

Lachaise probably met Watson through Harvard University connections, since Lachaise’s stepson Edward, e e Cummings and Watson were at Harvard together. The relationship continued when Watson and his friend Schofield Thayer, who were Ex-Harvard Monthly editors with money and the desire to educate the American public about the arts, purchased a 75 percent share of a monthly magazine called The Dial in order to re-create it as a vehicle for publishing the best writing and art of their time.

With Watson and Thayer at its helm the magazine was committed to reviewing significant books, theatre, and music, and reproducing some new works of art. The first printing of  T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was included, as well as writings of Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, e e cummings and Marianne Moore. They were joined by critics such as W. B Yates, D. H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos and George Santayana. Reproductions of art works by Cézanne, Demuth, Stuart Davis, William Gropper, Gauguin, O’Keeffe, Picasso and Lachaise made the publication unique. Lachaise enjoyed 23 full-page articles as well as four full-size essays. His full-length figure of Hildegarde was published in it, as was his bronze head of James Sibley Watson, Jr. (90.3), both in the MAG collection. Under Watson and Thayer The Dial operated for nine and one-half years, through the July, 1929 issue.

Though it is a fascinating work, Man Ray’s Hildegarde Watson (82.46) is not as familiar to docents as is Lachaise’s bronze figure. Because it is a photograph and subject to fading, the work cannot be on view for long periods of time. Ray’s photograph presents a portrait from the late 1920’s: a fashionably dressed woman wearing long beads and a large hat sits looking out of the picture, her left arm leaning on a table and her chin resting on her right hand. A second look will tell the viewer that the hand is that of a mannequin and that the Surrealist photographer must be Man Ray.

Man Ray (1890-1976), was born in this country but moved to Paris in 1921. He became the most influential American associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. A painter by training, he became friends with such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Andre Breton, working in Paris in the 1920’s. In 1921 photography was his means of making a living: it was a solution for a frustrated painter who couldn’t sell his work. “I would have a gangster if I’d had the physique and the courage,” he said in an interview in the New York Times.  In 1930 he wrote a pamphlet stating, “Photography is not art”, adding that “what I can’t paint I photograph.”

Regardless of his attitude toward photography, his creativity came through his photographs. In typical Surrealist fashion, the inclusion of the mannequin arm in what is otherwise a straightforward society portrait of Hildegarde is mean to disturb and disorient the viewer—one of the aims of the Surrealist artists. It should be no surprise that Hildegarde Watson would be photographed by the man Jean Cocteau called “the poet of the dark room.”

Sibley (as Watson Jr. was known) and Hildegarde had two children, Michael and Jeanne. The family still continues their generous patronage of MAG.

^{Source: Curatorial file}

FRUIT, FLOWERS AND INSECTS; RACHEL RUYSCH

Floral Still Life

FRUIT, FLOWERS AND INSECTS:

RACHEL RUYSCH

By Joan K Yanni

Rachel Ruysch, the painter of Floral Still Life (82.9), was the best flower painter of her day and probably the greatest female painter before the second half of the 18^th century.  MAG’s painting, done in 1686, is one of the artist’s earliest known paintings.

Ruysch was born in Amsterdam in 1664 to highly distinguished parents.  Her mother, Maria Post, was the daughter of Pieter Post, a renowned architect, and her father, Anthony Frederick Ruysch, was a professor of anatomy and botany as well as an amateur painter. Her father collected scientific specimens--shells, fossils, insects, skeletons, minerals and rare plants. Rachel helped him with the dissections and mounting necessary for his collection and often painted backgrounds for his displays.

Rachel’s talent was discovered early, and when she was fifteen, she was apprenticed to Willem van Aelst, a versatile still life artist who specialized in fruit and flower paintings. This arrangement in itself was unusual. At this time it was not the custom for a woman, let alone a young girl, to be apprenticed to a male painter unless he was a relative. Luckily Rachel’s parents’ enlightened attitude helped get her the best possible training. As would be expected, her early work shows the influence of van Aelst.

Ruysch’s first dated works are from 1682, when she was only 18. One is a study of insects and a thistle plant in a landscape; the other is a painting of flowers, apples and quinces hanging together in a bunch.  She began to use contrasting scenes of dark woodlands and brilliant flowers in her works almost from the start. A work from 1685, Still Life with Flowers and Insects in a Landscape, uses a shady landscape setting as background for an impressive collection of flowers, vegetation, rocks and reptiles, all perfectly detailed.

This practice of combining dark and light shows her knowledge of and appreciation for the work of Otto Marseus van Schriek, a painter of the time whose specialty was a blend of dark settings contrasted with exotic flora and fauna.  Flower painting had fallen out of favor after the collapse of Holland’s tulip market in the 1630s; van Schriek’s nature paintings were a way of reintroducing pictures of flowers--but not tulips. Ruysch sometimes used elements of van Schriek’s paintings, rearranged and put into her own settings. Our Floral Still Life is one of about a dozen still lifes in nature painted early in her career. Technically, these are not flower paintings, but woodland still lifes.                                                                                    

Most of her early works differ drastically from the conventional flower painting of flowers in a vase in the center of a composition. She has avoided the vase and instead places plants in a dark, outdoor setting inhabited by insects, reptiles, and amphibians. The setting in Floral Still Life is entirely artificial, though details are realistically presented. The

                       

Spot lighted roses, lilies, iris, morning glories, opium poppies and mushrooms, for example, are painted with the same precision lavished on the trunk of the old tree from which they appear to grow. Although some of the plants pictured grow in or near water, the blooms are not indigenous to this environment. There are no tulips in the composition.

In 1693 Rachel married Juriaen Pool, a portrait painter.  The two had ten children, and it is remarkable that, despite her domestic responsibilities, she continued to paint. She and her husband entered the Hague Painters’ Guild together in 1701.  During her years in the Guild, Ruysch honed her skills and developed a style of her own, showing her technical virtuosity.  She highlighted vivid flowers in a natural setting, emphasizing the contrast between the grotesque and the beautiful in nature. When she used vases, they contained blossoms from every growing season as well as exotic flowers she must have seen only in Amsterdam’s botanical gardens where her father was supervisor.

Ruysch gained international recognition around 1708 when she and her husband were appointed court painters to the elector palatine, Johann Wilhelm, in Düsseldorf. The elector bought all of the paintings she produced during her eight years in his court, and sent two of them as a gift to his father-in-law, Cosimo III de’ Medici of Tuscany. These paintings are now in the Uffizi in Florence. After the elector died, Ruysch returned with her family to Amsterdam. She continued to paint until the age of eighty-three, two years before her death.

The flowers in MAG’s Floral Still Life are arranged in an

S-curve at the right of the canvas.  They seem to be growing out of a dead tree; a large rock anchors the tree trunk. Elements in the painting can be seen as vanitas references, reflecting the idea of memento mori, the transience of life: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return.” The morning glories and opium poppies, standing next to each other, symbolize night and day; the lizards, toads, and half-eaten toadstools symbolize death. The butterflies in the composition reflect the resurrected soul.  However, the usual representations of death are absent: the skull, hour glass, candle, or goldfinch (which feeds on thistles and represents the crown of thorns in the Crucifixion) are lacking, suggesting that Ruysch was not interested primarily in vanitas. Rather, she chose blooms in an outdoor setting because she was familiar with nature and the creatures in it.  These she pictured with an accuracy that must have come from her work with her father.                  

Ruysch achieved an international reputation in her lifetime, but interest in her works did not decline after her death. Her works brought high prices when she was alive and they remain sought-after today.

Source: Susan Dodge-Peters, ed., Memorial Art Gallery, An Introduction to the Collection; Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists 1550-1950; Marianne Berardi, “The Nature Pieces of Rachel Ruysch,” Porticus, vol. X-XI 19 87-1988

NB: Paintings by van Aelst and van Schriek will be in the upcoming Natura Morta exhibit coming to MAG from April 1 to May 27.

HUBERT ROBERT, MASTER OF RUINS

Figures Amidst Ruins

HUBERT ROBERT, MASTER OF RUINS

by Joan K. Yanni

Hubert Robert, painter of MAG’s Figures Amidst Ruins (63.14), was one of the most prolific and admired painters in 18^th-century France. His fascination with ruins led to the development of the architectural landscape in French painting.

Early landscapes were merely backgrounds for historical and religious scenes, such as those painted by Renaissance artists. Gradually the landscapes grew in size and importance, and eventually became subjects in themselves, such as in the paintings of van Ruisdale in Holland, Constable and Turner in England, and Claude Lorraine in France.  The popularity of landscapes increased until, when the French Academy classified the genres of art in the 17^th century, they were placed fourth out of five categories in order of importance. (The categories were, from highest to least in importance, history, religious and mythological paintings; genre scenes or scenes of everyday life; portraits; landscapes; and still lifes. Some sources list landscapes last, but they were always popular.)

Hubert Robert was born in 1733 to an official in the service of the Marquis de Stainville in Paris. His father’s position insured an excellent education for his son: Robert attended the College de Navarre, where he studied ancient history and literature as well as Latin. Against his parents’ wishes, he also studied drawing under the sculptor Rene Michel Slodtz. Here he learned perspective and developed his interest in architecture.

In 1754 Robert traveled to Rome with the Comte de Stainville, the son of the Marquis, who had been appointed French Ambassador to the Vatican. The Comte’s influence was helpful in getting Robert admitted to the French Academy in Rome, even though he had not previously studied at the Academy in Paris and had bypassed the Prix de Rome competition. Robert was to remain in Rome for the next 11 years. His passion for architecture could already be seen in his work here, where he painted the classical architecture for which Rome is known, often in ruins, in a landscape setting.

At the French Academy in Rome Robert studied under the artist Giovanni Paolo Panini, during which time he met classmate and lifelong friend Jean-Honoré Fragonard.  Always sociable, Robert also befriended Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose workshop was located near the Academy, and they often sketched buildings and ruins together.

Robert’s expanding social network provided him with the opportunity to view historic places firsthand. In 1760 the Abbé Saint-Non brought Robert and Fragonard to Naples, and the three visited Herculaneum and Pompeii. They also traveled to the abandoned Villa d’Este in Tivoli, where the ambassador to the Vatican from Malta had arranged for them to stay.  On these trips, Robert and Fragonard sketched continually together. Though their styles were similar, their subject matter was not. Whereas Fragonard was interested in society at play, Robert was fascinated by romantic ruins.

Robert returned permanently to Paris in 1765, and the following year, in an usual honor, was named an associate and a full member of the Academy is in the same session. Images of classical ruins were very popular by then and Robert exhibited at the Salon every year from 1766 until 1798. His paintings incorporated the antique architectural elements he had sketched during his stay in Italy, sometimes turning them into imaginative fantasies. Populated with lively figures, these works presented an appealing combination of silent monuments and busy contemporary life.

At the height of his career in the 1770s and 1780s, Robert was given commissions from royal patrons as well as wealthy private citizens. Louis XVI was an admirer as was Catherine the Great of Russia. In fact, one of the largest collections of his work is in the Hermitage.

During the Revolution in France Robert was arrested by the Jacobins and spent a year in prison, but obviously had access to canvas and paint since he completed more than fifty paintings as well as watercolors and drawings. After his release in 1794 he became curator of the Louvre, where he remained until Napoleon took control of the museum in 1802. Still actively painting, he died in 1808. His friend, the artist Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, recorded that he died brush in hand as he prepared to go out to dinner.

MAG’s painting, executed around 1775, shows a partial view of a ruined circular temple filling the height of the canvas on the right side.  The classical structure with Corinthian columns is based on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. There is no pastoral landscape in this painting.  Instead, architecture stretches across the canvas. The perspective in the scene recedes abruptly, implying vast distance.

The triumphal arches are based on the design of the Arch of Constantine, but they have been squared three-dimensionally and form pavilions. Between them part of a pediment is visible, suggesting a temple overlooking an imagined Forum. Various sculptural figures are placed at the corners of the arches. A river or canal leads from the segment of land in the foreground to the first arch. An Egyptian lion fountain can barely be seen in the shadows at lower left.

Robert has scattered figures throughout this scene, walking among the columns, looking out behind the railings, sitting on the fragments of ruins in the foreground, and bathing and doing laundry where the steps descend into the water.

His loose painterly technique has sometimes been criticized as too facile, especially because of his prodigious output, but his reputation as one of France’s most revered painter of architectural landscapes is secure.                                           

Source:  Steven D. Borys, The Splendor of Ruins in French Landscape Painting, catalog of the exhibition; Grove Encyclopedia

SOLIMENA'S JUDITH

The Triumph of Judith

SOLIMENA’S JUDITH

by Susan Nurse

The reinstallation of the Fountain Court after the installation of the 18^th-century Italian Organ has brought works from the Baroque Period together, including our Francesco Solimena, The Triumph of Judith (77.109).  The painting, full of the drama of subject matter and the use of chiaroscuro and undulating forms is very representative of Baroque style.  So who are the figures in this dramatic painting?  Is that a woman holding a man’s severed head in the center of this work of art?  No wonder she has everyone’s attention.

This is Judith, the female heroine from the apocryphal “Book of Judith.”  Her story is extraordinary, and has the makings of a great source for visual images. We are seeing the end of the story. Judith has charmed the Assyrian general Holofernes, been admitted to his tent, and got him drunk. Then comes her triumph over the enemy of her town, the Assyrians, through the murder of Holofernes.  This apocryphal tale is of a Jewish widow who, with the help of God, slays the general by decapitating him with his own sword, thereby saving her own town of Bethulia and the entire state of Israel.  The word Bethulia, in Hebrew, is understood to mean house of the Lord, that is, the Temple, while the name Judith alludes to the Jewish people as a whole.  The moralistic message is of obedience to God's law and unwavering faith, unlike the town elders who offered to surrender the town.

Her story had been used in medieval times, usually depicted in narratives, and like other Old Testament figures, Judith and her triumph over Holofernes was interpreted as a pre-figuration of Mary. 

It was during the Counter Reformation that the heroism of Judith took on a new importance.  Holofernes had to die because as a Gentile, he had attempted to force the Jews to disobey the one true God.  Judith's fatal blow was done for the greater glory of this God, a deed highly meaningful to the resurgence of the Catholic Church over the heresy of Protestantism. 

It should not be surprising, looking at Solimina's work here, that his early training was in the elaborate ceiling frescos done by his mentor, Luca Giordano.  (Note that The Entombment by  Giordano hangs next to the Solimena in the Fountain Court).  Notice how, in the painting, we seem to be climbing a steep hill or stairway, looking up to see Judith with Holofernes's head held in triumph against the sky.  Regardless of the turmoil and the bodies swirling around her, Judith stands in a dramatic gesture, allowing us to focus on her and her prize. 

Solimena lived from 1657-1747 and brought great fame to the Naples area during his lifetime.  Arriving in the city in 1674, Solimena at 17 was seen as a prodigy.  His early work showed his preference for the flowing robes and gestures of the

painterly style with complex spatial arrangements that resulted from his father’s training.  It was Solimena’s introduction to

Giordano that brought a new solidity of forms and an increase in contrasts of light and shadow that are reflected in his mature work, including our Judith.  Another influence on Solimena was his trip to Rome in 1700.  His exposure to Guido Reni brought more classicized elements to his work.

                                                

These changes in style can be seen in Solimena’s most monumental work, the ceiling fresco in San Domenico Maggiore, Triumph of the Dominican Order of 1709. The Madonna points to St. Dominic, with a gesture clearly derivative of Giordano’s 1704 Triumph of Judith (fresco Chapel of the Treasury in the Certosa di S. Martino, Naples).  This gesture introduces the Saint to the Holy Trinity, while the Virtues and angels drive out heretics, who literally fall towards the viewer.  The hand of the Madonna is a focal point, just as is Judith’s hand in our picture, painted less than 20 years later.

Solimena used hands throughout our work to express surprise and wonder at the amazing spectacle before them: Judith, the widow of Bethuli, has returned to the town with the head of the Assyrian general!!  Solimena emphasized Judith's heroism by depicting her as an ordinary woman, not overly strong.  In this way, he emphasized the core of the story, that the hand of God must have helped her accomplish such an amazing feat. 

Solimena has created a variety of people who look up to Judith, both literally and figuratively, setting her off as a universal heroic figure.  Young and old, male and female, with different races represented, all swirl around the base of our painting, their gestures and movement further emphasized by the movement of the drapery of their clothes.   Even the elders, who had been willing to surrender the town, are awe- struck with the event that has taken place. They can no longer deny that a lone woman has done what they were unable to do. Through faith in God, she saved the town and Israel itself. The proof is before them.

Solimena did four other versions of this same story, one of which is now in Gemaldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  That work, dated 1730, is more derivative of his ceiling works.  But while ceiling size helped to dissipate a large number of figures, the number of figures in a work  similar in size to our own painting makes the painting appear  somewhat cluttered.  In MAG’s painting Judith is not accentuated to the degree necessary to understand the significance of her act of courage and the drama of the moment.

This painting is representative of the power of the Baroque style at the hands of a Neapolitan master, Francesco Solimena, and the representation of Judith as a heroic figure.

Sources- Curatorial files; Carmen Bambach “A Taste for Angels: Neapolitan Painting in North America, 1650-1750”; Stocker, Margarita, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture, Yale University Press, 1998.

Susan Nurse is MAG’s Visual Resources Coordinator