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18/5/2012

Ralph Eugene Meatyard / Rockwell Kent

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

On Friday, May 18, Admission Will Be Free To The Public At The Philadelphia Museum Of Art

Admission waived in celebration of International Museums Day

Philadelphia, PA—The Philadelphia Museum of Art will be free to the public on Friday, May 18 from 10:00 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. in celebration of the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) International Museum Day on Friday, May 18, 2012. All galleries will be open in both the main Museum building and the Perelman Building, showcasing more than 2,000 years of exceptional human creativity in masterpieces of painting, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts and architecture. This year’s theme of International Museum Day, which is dedicated to promoting the value of museums in society, will focus on the evolving role of museum is a changing world. In 2011, The Philadelphia Museum of Art joined with more than 100 other AAMD member museums across North America to participate in International Museum Day.

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks

May 19–August 5, 2012

Philadelphia, PA (March 2012)—A pioneering photographer who composed staged scenes for the camera, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) was an artist known and admired by a close circle of fellow photographers, writers, and scholars. His work throughout the late 1950s and 60s, which is the focus of this exhibition, incorporated the motifs of dolls and masks, foreshadowing his iconic 1972 project The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, and proving extremely influential for a future generation of photographers. Dolls and Masks features more than 40 photographs made between 1957 and 1968.

“Meatyard’s staged photographs put an uncanny spin on family snapshots,” observes Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Musem of Art. “The impact of his innovative content and visual approach can be seen in the work of acclaimed photographers as diverse as Emmet Gowin and Cindy Sherman, who have both cited Meatyard as an influence.”

Many of the works in the exhibition depict Meatyard’s wife, children and friends wearing masks that he purchased at five and dime stores or found at thrift stores and junkyards. Other photographs feature soiled and dismembered dolls. All the pictures are staged in rundown Victorian houses, cemeteries, and forests. Altering the people and dolls in his pictures so that no one or anything appears as expected, Meatyard played with type, age, and gender, exploring the contrasts between youth and maturity, childhood and mortality, intimacy and unknowability.

Most of the photographs are untitled; many depict his subjects wearing masks and posed in various settings, while in other images figures simply hold masks or pose next to them. Dolls in some instances take the place of humans, posed in their own constructed scenarios, while in other images, their heads float in a body of water or simply fill the pictorial field. Doll parts appear in numerous photographs, a severed arm across a piece of a broken door or held in the hand of a young boy. In a suite of seven photographs, Meatyard’s eldest son stands against a brick wall, wearing different masks in six of the pictures and posing maskless in a single one, his face obscured by the blur of motion.

In her catalogue essay, Elizabeth Siegel notes that “because of the disturbing juxtapositions of children with grotesque masks and abandoned or broken dolls,” Meatyard’s work is often interpreted as dark and macabre, but that in his few writings, interviews, and lectures, “we see a much more human impulse in his photographs, a pictorial and emotional framework in which the strange becomes familiar and the specific universal.”

The fully illustrated, 144-page catalogue is published by Radius Books, with essays by Siegel, the Art Institute of Chicago’s associate curator of photography, and historian of photography Eugenia Parry.

About Ralph Eugene Meatyard
An optician with a private optometry practice in Lexington, Kentucky, Meatyard made photographs mostly during weekends and holidays and the work he produced was for himself and the erudite group in which he circulated, including the writers Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton. Although his pictures have been noted for their remarkable surrealism, Meatyard worked outside of the photography mainstream, and was never aligned with any art movement, nor did he identify himself with any artistic group. Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 and joined the Lexington Camera Club in 1954, where fellow members Cranston Ritchie, a photographer, and the photography historian Van Deren Coke became important mentors. Two years later, Coke showed Meatyard’s work in an exhibition for the University of Kentucky and during the mid 1950s Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops run by renowned photographers Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White. In 1959, Meatyard had his first solo show at Tulane University.
This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Rockwell Ken - Voyager

An Artist’s Journey in Prints, Drawings, and Illustrated Books
(May 19–July 29, 2012)

Once famous among his contemporaries as an artist, author, adventurer, and political activist, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) left an enduring legacy as a printmaker and illustrator of books. His drawings and limited edition prints could transport viewers to far-away lands, bolster progressive causes, and prove effective both in advertising and book illustration. Rockwell Kent—Voyager surveys the artist’s achievements from 1907 to the 1950s, including the artist’s travel narratives, illustrations for literary classics, and advertising designs, as well as works that illuminate his commitment to leftist politics from World War I through the McCarthy era. With over 100 works on paper, the exhibition also features watercolors, pen and ink drawings, a sketchbook, and lithographic stone that open a window onto the artist’s creative process.

“Kent’s fortunes rose and fell most dramatically during his lifetime,” says Brooks Rich, the Dorothy J. del Bueno Curatorial Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “In the 1920s and 30s, when he achieved celebrity status, he was hailed as one of the most famous graphic artists in America. By the 1950s the artist’s reputation had suffered a decline, due in part to his support of controversial progressive causes and the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism in avant-garde art circles. Today, as his work attracts renewed interest, the rich collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art offer a fresh opportunity to reconsider the depth and complexity of his achievement.”

Drawn entirely from the holdings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition begins with early black and white illustrative work, including Youth Torn between Love and Desire (1916) and Domino Room (1916), produced for Vanity Fair, which shows society couples ballroom dancing (Kent’s self-portrait appears, Alfred Hitchcock-like, at bottom left). The artist’s work from the 1920s highlights images and books that emerged from travels to Alaska, Greenland, and Tierra del Fuego. Voyaging (Self Portrait) (1924)places the writer/illustrator amid windswept branches and before snowcapped mountains, reflecting a time when feats of famous explorers were regular features in weekly magazines and newsreels. Kent contributed to over 140 books, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1930), The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (1934), and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1936), all represented in this exhibition. Kent’s distinctive, sleek style of wood engraving is seen in Godspeed (1931–1932), one of 12 images used to advertise luxury motor yachts for the American Car and Foundry Company. These advertisements, which avoided text-heavy copy and adopted an Art Deco style relished by a fashionable clientele, were considered groundbreaking in their day. A life-long pacifist dedicated to socialist causes, the artist expressed his proletarian beliefs in Workers of the World Unite! (1937), a wood engraving of an idealized laborer wielding a shovel, and in the lithograph Wake Up America! (1945),a biting commentary on the state of democracy in America, showing a sleeping man next to an hourglass.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection of Rockwell Kent works on paper— largely formed by Carl Zigrosser, the founding curator of the Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings—is virtually unmatched in its depth and diversity. A complementary installation in the Museum’s Library Reading Room further explores the artist’s engagement with book culture and his relationship with Zigrosser.

About the artist: Born in Tarrytown, New York, in 1882, Rockwell Kent’s fortunes waxed and waned over a long and varied career which included travels to Greenland, South America, and Newfoundland. Profoundly influenced by transcendentalism, Kent was drawn to allegory and symbolism, frequently depicting human figures set against the rugged natural world. A life-long supporter of leftist politics, the artist was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, but refused to answer any questions. He was later denied a passport because of his alleged affiliation with the Communist Party, but took his fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the decision in 1958. Demonstrating support for American-Soviet relations, in 1960 Kent donated several hundred of his paintings and drawings to the Soviet Union, many of which can be seen today at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Image: Untitled, 1960s
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, American (1925-1972)
Gelatin silver print. Image sheet: 7 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.
© The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Press Officer
Kristina Garcia Wade (215) 684-7864 kristina.garcia@philamuseum.org

Press Preview: May 19th, 2012, 9 a.m. to noon, remarks at 10 a.m.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street - Philadelphia, PA 19130
Tuesday through Sunday: 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Friday evenings: Closed
General Admission:
Members: Free at all times
Adults: $16
Seniors (ages 65 & over): $14
Students (with valid ID): $12
Children (excluding groups)
ages 13–18: $12
ages 12 & under: Free

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