calendario eventi  :: 

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5/10/2011

Three exhibitions

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

October 6, 2011 - January 8, 2012

David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy

organized by Carol S. Eliel

David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy examines the abiding importance of geometric form in the work of American sculptor David Smith (1906-1965) from his earliest small works through the monumental late masterpieces that he created in the final years of his life. Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it debuted earlier this year, the exhibition brings together approximately 60 works, including the largest grouping of Smith’s Cubis and Zigs assembled in more than two decades. Cubes and Anarchy places these acknowledged masterpieces in context with Smith’s earlier works in an exhibition that includes sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs, many provided by the Estate of David Smith.
The show will be presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries, from October 6, 2011, through January 8, 2012.

David Smith has been widely heralded as one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century. His work has often been presented as a sculptural counterpart to that of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were his friends. As an innovator of welded sculpture, he produced a richly diverse body of work exemplified by his poetic assemblages of found objects and industrial materials. Most scholarship has viewed Smith’s career as developing in a linear fashion, from the European influences of Picasso and Cubism in the 1930s, to the surrealist, expressionist, and lyrical works of the 1940s and 1950s, and culminating with his large-scale, stainless-steel and boldly painted sculptures of the 1960s. The simplified geometry of Smith’s monumental late sculptures, the final works he produced before his untimely death in a car accident in 1965, are often seen as representing a distinct break from his earlier sculptures, which often radically reinterpreted the traditional themes of painting, such as landscape, the figure, and still-life. David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy, by focusing on geometry, revises the narrative of Smith’s aesthetic development and, for the first time, places his final works in context.

Beginning with the artist's late stainless-steel and painted steel sculptures, and ending with his earliest work from the 1930s, the exhibition’s installation traces the vital role that geometric abstraction played in his work in sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography, throughout his entire career.

The exhibition’s subtitle, “Cubes and Anarchy,” comes from a phrase Smith attributed to John Sloan, his teacher at the Art Students League in New York in the 1930s. For Smith, the phrase connoted the revolutionary power of geometric forms that had been heralded by the European abstract artists he most admired, in particular the Russian Constructivists, Kandinsky, and the Dutch De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian. Smith’s fusion of simple geometries with the techniques and materials of industrial fabrication freed him to explore a broad range of formal and expressive directions, including heightening the breakdown between drawing, painting, and sculpture. With wildly gestural surfaces of burnished stainless steel and powerfully vibrant painted steel, he united timeless form with the power and scale of modern life. In creating this synthesis, Smith redefined the aesthetics and ambitions of sculpture.

About the Artist
David Smith was born in Indiana in 1906. In 1926 he moved to New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League. In the early 1930s, as part of a small group of abstract artists in New York that formed around the Polish émigré artist, John Graham, he became friends with Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning. After establishing his studio in a foundry on the Brooklyn waterfront in the 1930s, Smith moved in 1940 to Bolton Landing, on Lake George, in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. He showed regularly in New York City beginning in 1938 and by the 1940s was championed, along with Jackson Pollock, by critic Clement Greenberg. Smith’s work was exhibited regularly at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and he was given a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957. His sculptures were exhibited not only across the United States, but internationally as well, including in the Venice Biennale (1958), the São Paulo Bienal (1959), Spoleto (1962), and Documenta (1964). His work in the early 1960s brought Smith to the forefront of international recognition. In 1965, he was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to serve on the National Council on the Arts. Smith died in an automobile accident in 1965, at the age of 59. A major survey of his work planned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and organized in consultation with Smith, was presented in 1965 as David Smith: A Memorial Exhibition. Retrospective exhibitions have since been held in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

Exhibition Support
David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy was organized by Carol S. Eliel for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition’s installation at Whitney Museum of American Art has been overseen by Barbara Haskell in association with Charles Ray. Following its presentation at the Whitney Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Major support for the Whitney’s presentation is provided by the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Lipman Family Foundation.

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October 6, 2011 - February 12, 2012

Real/Surreal

Organized by Whitney curator Carter Foster

The permeable boundary between the real and the imagined is the subject of Real/Surreal, opening this fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A close look at the interconnection between two of the strongest currents in twentieth-century American art, the exhibition includes eighty paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints made in the years before, during, and immediately after the Second World War by such artists as Paul Cadmus, Federico Castellón, Ralston Crawford, Mabel Dwight, Jared French, Louis Guglielmi, Edward Hopper, Man Ray, Kay Sage, George Tooker, Grant Wood, and Andrew Wyeth. Organized by Whitney curator Carter Foster, it opens on October 6.

An international movement in art and literature, Surrealism originated in Europe in the 1920s. Its practitioners tapped the subconscious mind to create fantastic, non-rational worlds. While some explored abstraction and used the subconscious to directly influence the formal structure of their work, others developed imagery with strong roots in traditional painting. This vein of Surrealism flourished most famously in the work of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, and influenced a host of artists in the United States. As the movement spread internationally and some of the major figures moved to this country in the upheavals of the War, its ideas became more diffuse and permeated both art and popular culture.

This exhibition, the second in a series of shows reexamining the Museum’s collection chronologically from its earliest days to the present, focuses on the tension and overlap between realism and Surrealism. Although the term “realism” has many facets, a basic connection to the observable world underlies all of them; the subversion of reality through the imagination and the subconscious lies at the heart of Surrealism. Surrealism was a liberating force which allowed for all manner of fantastic, unreal imagery, but it also greatly influenced how artists perceived and represented reality. Those who absorbed its ideas learned to invest objects and spaces with symbolic power, making them representative of psychic states, moods, and subconscious impulses. They favored narrative ambiguity over explicitness, intentionally allowing viewers to project their own subjectivity onto the work, so that the viewer’s imagination, and the artist’s, could intertwine.

Yet there are convergences in these different and even oppositional approaches to experience, and they encourage new ways of looking at the art of the twenties, thirties, and forties in America. For example, Edward Hopper, the artist most closely identified with the Whitney, is a painter whose own subjectivity and imagination are integral to his work. Many artists who developed imagery based on new and very specific, concrete conditions of industrial America were essentially interested in artificial worlds and presented these as distillations of reality. Even totally abstract painters such as Yves Tanguy depended on techniques developed from traditional realist art to render other worlds. By willfully distorting such techniques, Helen Lundeberg and Mabel Dwight could quietly undercut our sense of stability, while showing us recognizable and even mundane objects and settings.

Most of the artists on view were academically trained and had a full command of traditional painting and drawing techniques. Those directly connected to European Surrealism or strongly influenced by it used these techniques to subvert and alter the observable world. Harder to categorize are those whose work has certain qualities in common with Surrealism but who tinkered subtly with reality rather than dramatically changing it to expressive ends. Like the Surrealists, their strategies make the familiar unfamiliar, unsettling, or uncanny, and often involve manipulating the tools of representational art. Some, for example, distort spatial perspective by compressing or exaggerating it. They may crop or fragment what they depict, create strange juxtapositions of objects, or unusual shifts in scale; they may distill or accentuate normal qualities in their surroundings—light, shadow, materials, textures—so that these appear abnormal or weird.

Sigmund Freud, whose theories were seminal for Surrealism, described how the uncanny happens when “the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced,” a fitting description of much of the work in this exhibition.

Exhibition Support
Ongoing support for the permanent collection and major support for Real/Surreal is provided by Bank of America.

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October 6, 2011 - February 12, 2012

Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein

The exhibition is curated by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.

This fall, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein on view from October 6, 2011 to February 12, 2012. This cinematic triptych, the product of a partnership between Lichtenstein, Universal Studios, and Joel Freedman of Cinnamon Productions Inc., has been restored by the Whitney in close collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and is being shown in its entirety and in its original 35mm film format for the first time.

In 1968, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), one of the leaders of American Pop art, was invited by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to participate in their experimental Art and Technology program. Curated by Maurice Tuchman, the project placed artists from all over the world in residence with leading California-based industries, and exhibited the results of their collaborations. The artists included Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and others.

Lichtenstein spent two weeks in residence at Universal Studios in Los Angeles in February 1969. After touring Universal’s film laboratories and special effects facilities, he decided to make film loops of sky and water, projected on several screens in the gallery. The idea for the films relates directly to a group of kinetic landscape collages that he made in the mid-1960s, which used Rowlux--a prismatic plastic--alongside metal, mylar, vinyl, and motors or motorized rotating light tubes painted with several colored strips of gel paint to suggest moving water and light. Returning to New York, Lichtenstein filmed on Long Island, primarily in Montauk, working with independent filmmaker Joel Freedman. The resulting one-minute film loops collaged footage of the sea and a tropical fish tank with a static Benday-dot pattern and still images of a blue sky, clouds, and a seagull. The still and moving images are divided by a thick black line that echoes the comic-strip images of his paintings, and creates a horizon line that rocks back and forth. The heavy black horizon line and the endless repetition of Lichtenstein’s “moving pictures” produce a contradictory viewing experience, emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane while engaging the spectator in an ambient cinematic spectacle.

Lichtenstein hoped to make as many as fifteen film loops, but only three films were completed. Two were included in a showcase of Art and Technology collaborations in the U.S. Pavilion at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, and three were exhibited in the Art and Technology exhibition at LACMA in 1971 in 16mm format. Three Landscapes remains Lichtenstein’s first and only film.

About the Artist
A leading figure in twentieth-century American art, Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923. He studied at New York’s Art Students League in the summer of 1940 before enrolling at Ohio State University where he received his B.F.A. in 1946 and his M.F.A. in 1949. There, Lichtenstein began his career-long intrigues with ideas about visual perception, the odd signs and symbols of our modern culture, and an overarching desire to achieve compositional unity. In 1951, Lichtenstein had his first one-person show in New York. In 1962 he had his first solo show with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and soon became an internationally recognized leader of American Pop art with paintings using dramatically isolated images selected from serial war and romance comics and generic products, all depicted in primary colors and Benday dots, techniques and subjects borrowed from mass media. In the succeeding decade, he moved to Southampton, New York, and expanded his use of reproductions beyond advertising, postcard clichés, and comic books to encompass styles and movements in art history, architecture, and the decorative arts. In the 1980s, Lichtenstein returned to work in the city part-time, bringing with him an emphasis on expressive brushstrokes and artistic introspection. The decade also witnessed his completion of a number of public and private large-scale sculptural and painting projects. Lichtenstein’s investigations of illusionism, abstraction, serialization, stylization, and appropriation continued in every media in the 1990s. As a distinguished painter, sculptor, and printmaker he received numerous honorary degrees and international prizes. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1995. At age 73, he was investigating another new fabricated reality, so called “virtual paintings.” About to embark on a series of works based on Cézanne’s bathers, the artist’s explorations were cut short by his death from pneumonia in 1997. Two years later, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was established to advance the scholarship on his work.

Exhibition Support
Generous support for the conservation of this artwork is provided by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Significant support for this exhibition is provided by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Image: Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), Detail from Three Landscapes, 1970–71. Three-screen 35mm-film installation, color, silent; one minute (looped). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Press contact:
Stephen Soba, Molly Gross (212) 570-3633 pressoffice@whitney.org

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street New York, NY 10021
Museum hours are:
Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday.
General admission: $18. Full-time students and visitors ages 19–25 and 62 & over: $12. Visitors 18 & under and Whitney members: free.
Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6–9 p.m.

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