calendario eventi  :: 

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24/9/2014

Three exhibitions

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil
September 26, 2014 through January 25, 2015

New York, NY, August 25, 2014 — Cy Twombly‘s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) is considered a pivotal work in the career of one of the most important artists to emerge in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. Yet, due to its size—close to thirty-three feet in length—this highlight of his celebrated “grey-ground” period is rarely shown and has not been exhibited in New York in nearly thirty years. Beginning September 26, Treatise on the Veil and a selection of related drawings will go on view at the Morgan Library & Museum, in a collaboration with Houston’s Menil Collection, which owns the works and organized the exhibition. The show will run through January 25, 2015.

Executed in Rome in 1970, Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) was inspired by a musical composition and explores Twombly’s fascination with time, space, and movement. White lines running across the work’s grey surface suggest, in the artist’s words, “a time line without time.” The twelve drawings in the exhibition—which combine pencil, crayon, collage, tape, measurements, and other inscriptions—offer an intriguing window into the artist's creative process. Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) was last exhibited in New York in 1985 at DIA. “We are pleased to present this fascinating exploration of one of Cy Twombly’s signature works from a period of notable change in his art,” said Peggy Fogelman, acting director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “This show represents an ongoing partnership between the Morgan and the Menil Collection, under the auspices of the Morgan’s Drawing Institute, an initiative aimed at fostering scholarship and innovative exhibition programming related to the drawings field.”

Treatise on the Veil

In 1968, Twombly created a large, multipanel painting entitled Treatise on the Veil (now in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne). Two years later, he revisited the subject in a series of drawings that led to the execution of a second painting of the same title.

The related drawings are not so much preliminary studies as records of the artist’s meditation on time, sequence, and space. In most of them five or six vertical strips of paper are covered to varying degrees with energetically applied wax crayon, recalling the panels of the painting’s first version. They are arranged in a lateral progression from left to right. Scrawled inscriptions and traces of tearing, folding, and erasing reveal the physical engagement of the artist and endow these sheets with a singular, emotional presence. In the exhibition the drawings are presented in the presumed chronological order in which they were created, based on dates and numbers Twombly inscribed on them.

The two Treatise paintings are hallmarks of Twombly’s “grey-ground” period, which ran from 1966 to the early 1970s. In a 1967 exhibition at New York's Leo Castelli Gallery, the artist set aside his trademark splashes of Mediterranean color, opting instead for lines of white crayon over flat grey house paint.

For the next five years, these paintings offered a more calculated and controlled alternative to the sporadic, painterly compositions of his earlier style. Although some of the grey-ground paintings are highly lyrical with their flurry of curves spilling from left to right as in a handwriting exercise, others, more sober, have been linked to the contemporary development of Minimalism. Taken as whole, the “grey-ground” paintings display a pared down aesthetic at odds with the profusion and exuberance that characterized Twombly‘s work in the early 1960s.

Sources of Inspiration

According to Twombly, both versions of Treatise on the Veil were inspired by a musical piece by French composer Pierre Henry (b.1927), a pioneer of musique concrète, a type of music that incorporates non-instrumental sounds recorded on magnetic tape and manipulated. Henry’s 1953 piece, entitled The Veil of Orpheus, features the recording of cloth being torn—a prolonged, seemingly unending sound that impressed Twombly for its embodiment of the concept of duration.

Henry’s composition evoked the journey of Orpheus to the underworld to rescue his wife, Eurydice. The composer used the recording of tearing fabric to reference the moment at which Orpheus loses his bride forever by transgressing the gods’ command and gazing upon her before leaving Hades. The reference to mythological poet and musician Orpheus would have appealed to Twombly’s love of classical culture.

Another source mentioned by Twombly is an unidentified photograph of a veiled woman walking by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), an early practitioner of recording human movement through stop-action photography. In Muybridge’s pictures, figures appeared in front of a numbered white grid upon which each move could be registered, offering a fascinating new way to look at movement in time and space. Such concerns were central to Twombly in the Treatise series.

Cy Twombly

Twombly (1928–2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia. He studied at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, New York's Art Students League, and Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Early travels to Spain, North Africa, and Italy fueled his interest in Mediterranean culture. In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he lived most of his life. Inspired by the gestural style of the Abstract Expressionists, he developed a rich repertoire of marks, scrawls, scribbles, doodles, and scratches that functioned both as expressive marks and cultural symbols. His fascination with classical antiquity and the Renaissance, evident in many inscriptions and references, nourished an imagery linking personal experience to myth and history. One of his last projects, in 2010, was the painted ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre, which houses Roman antiquities.

The exhibition Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil was shown at the Menil in 2009. Prior to that, the monumental painting was included in the exhibition Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, organized by Tate Modern in 2008, and also shown in Bilbao and Rome.

Public Programs

Gallery Talk Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern & Contemporary Drawings Gallery talks are free with museum admission.
No tickets or reservations are necessary.
Friday, November 7, 6:30 PM

Concert JACK QUARTET
This concert by the dynamic JACK Quartet coincides with the exhibition Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil and will feature a selection of contemporary composer Matthias Pintscher’s Studies for Treatise on the Veil (2004-2009) written in response to Twombly’s painting. New arrangements of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for string quartet will be performed with Pintscher’s works. The one-hour concert will take place in the exhibition gallery.
Tickets: $30; $20 for Members. Seating is limited
Thursday, November 20, 7 and 9 PM

Organization and Sponsorship
Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil is organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, with the Morgan Library & Museum.The exhibition is curated by Michelle White, Curator, the Menil Collection, Houston under the auspices of the Menil Drawing Institute and curated at the Morgan Library and Museum by Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings. It is a program of the Drawing Institute at the Morgan Library & Museum, with additional generous support provided by an anonymous gift; the Gagosian Gallery; the Ricciardi Family Exhibition Fund; and Nancy Schwartz. At the Menil Collection, this exhibition was realized through the generous support of Janie C. Lee and David B. Warren; the Taub Foundation in memory of Ben Taub, Henry J. N. Taub, and Carol J. Taub; Ann and Mathew Wolf; Nina and Michael Zilkha; and the City of Houston.

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The Untamed Landscape: Théodore Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon
September 26, 2014 through January 18, 2015

New York, NY, September 2, 2014—Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) was the leading figure of a group of nineteenth-century French artists who chose the wooded landscape of the Forest of Fontainebleau as their subject and would forever be known to art history as the Barbizon School. Decades before Impressionism, Rousseau and his peers developed new ways to observe, draw, and paint the natural world in studies made directly from nature and composed landscape pictures intended for exhibition. Deeply Romantic in approach, the work of Rousseau ultimately added an important chapter to the history of landscape art, and elements of the Barbizon School style were then reconfigured and transformed by the next generations of great French artists: the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Beginning September 26, the Morgan Library & Museum will present a groundbreaking exhibition devoted to Rousseau’s drawings and oil sketches—the first ever at a major U.S. museum—that sheds new light on his techniques and unique perspectives on landscape imagery. The Untamed Landscape: Théodore Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon will run through January 18, 2015.

Rousseau has not been the subject of a major retrospective since a 1967 exhibition at the Musée du Louvre. Many museums display examples of his finished paintings, yet the artist’s drawings and early oil studies are far less familiar. Comprising more than sixty works from public and private collections, including the Morgan and collections in the north eastern United States, this exhibition will trace the artist’s path to Barbizon, from his early oil sketches in the Ile-de- France and Normandy to his mature drawings in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Rousseau's works on paper—some bucolic and evocative of a simpler, pre-industrial age; others brooding, moody, and redolent of the haunting majesty of the natural world—are both appealing and instructive. Collectively, they highlight his important contribution to the shifting conception of landscape in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

"Théodore Rousseau occupies an important and influential place in the development of French landscape art," said Peggy Fogelman, acting director of the Morgan Library & Museum. "His was a vision of nature pure and largely unsullied by man, and his works incorporate deeply Romantic themes and moods. Throughout his career, Rousseau experimented dramatically with changing light and atmospheric conditions—effects that would become vitally important in the work of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who followed him."

Théodore Rousseau
Théodore Rousseau was born in 1812 in Paris, and he studied under Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond (1795–1875), a history painter, and Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832), a neoclassical painter. In his seminal biography of the artist, the critic Alfred Sensier presented Rousseau as a figure closely bound to nature, a frequent traveler around the remote areas of France, and a man who had exceptional insight into the natural world. A prolific draftsman, he produced around twelve hundred drawings over the course of his career in a range of media, including graphite, Conté crayon, watercolor, and pastel. Rousseau’s sketches and drawings reveal an artist obsessed with studying every aspect of nature, from close-up details to broader atmospheric effects.

Variety and Experimentation
During the course of Rousseau’s career his pictorial strategy changed dramatically. Due to repeated rejections by the Paris Salon jury from 1836 to 1841 and voluntary abstention from the annual exhibition until 1849, he maintained his status and income by producing large compositions for wealthy patrons, some of whom had very specific ideas about the formalities and proper execution of landscape painting. Despite such constrictions, Rousseau employed a wide range of techniques to produce work that depicted diverse geography, times of day, and varying atmospheric conditions.

From around the mid-1830s, perhaps corresponding with his first rejections from the Salon, Rousseau began to devise more evolutionary procedures for preparing a landscape painting, in which the final work developed from an initial sketch, or ébauche, that contained at least the major elements of the complete composition. A study for the artist’s massive, unfinished The Forest in Winter at Sunset is an example of Rousseau combining different kinds of drawing and painting media in a preparatory work, and belongs to a large set of studies and sketches for the final painting, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The earliest preparatory drawings were executed on small sheets, probably from a sketchbook and possibly outdoors, and establish the main elements of composition. They include his dramatic use of trees, both vertical and bending, and the figure of the tiny wood gatherer.

Early Career
The Untamed Landscape traces Rousseau’s career, beginning with his earliest works, open-air studies of sites in the environs of Paris. He painted most of these while he was a teenager, studying informally with Rémond and Lethière. After a failed attempt to compete for the Academy’s Prix de Rome in landscape, Rousseau embarked on a six-month voyage to Auvergne, a sparsely populated region of volcanic mountains in central France. With its soaring, bold profiles, hollowed-out valleys, and deep, desolate perspectives, this geologically remarkable region had a profound effect on the young landscape painter. He returned to Paris with numerous oil studies that vividly captured the rugged character of the terrain with startling points of view, vigorous brushwork, and a bold approach to color and light that impressed the Romantic art world in Paris. After the 1831 Salon, Rousseau embarked on a trip to Normandy and returned the following year. His trips to Normandy followed in the footsteps of English masters of watercolor, such as J. M. W. Turner and Richard Parkes Bonington, whose spontaneous renditions of the dramatic atmosphere of the Normandy coast, and of picturesque port towns and fishing villages, inspired many French painters of the time.

The Forest of Fontainebleau
Rousseau was most closely associated with the Forest of Fontainebleau and the village of Barbizon, where he began to work in the 1830s and later settled around 1847. The forest’s woods, ancient trees, rocky plateaus and gorges provided a stunning variety of subjects for the artist and his contemporaries, including Camille Corot, Jules Dupré, and Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña. They shared an overarching commitment to create a ‘school of nature’ opposed to the conventional school of the Academy. The term ‘Barbizon school’ was coined later in the century, though their formal aims and procedures varied.

In keeping with nineteenth-century ideas about nature as a special site of subjective feeling, Rousseau’s representations of trees and woods are rich in metaphors for imaginative projection and poetic association. “I also heard the voices of the trees,” Rousseau told his biographer. “The surprises of their movements, their variety of forms, and their singular attraction toward the light suddenly revealed to me the language of the forest. This entire world of flora lived as mutes whose signs I divined and whose passions I discovered.”

The Forest of Fontainebleau was tied to notions about nature as a wild, unchanging realm—at the same time that industrialization wrought many changes in it as in so many other parts of the French countryside. Rousseau’s Fontainebleau is remote country, untouched by the contemporary realities of modern industry and tourism. Stone quarrying, tree harvesting, planting of new species, and the creation of trails and signage for increasing numbers of visitors profoundly changed the physical fabric and rural economy of Fontainebleau and bordering areas. Rousseau was involved in efforts to create artistic preserves that would protect some of the oldest and most beautiful sites from these initiatives. The forest in most of Rousseau’s paintings and drawings is an ancient, static place, transformed only by the seasons and the shifting light of dawn to dusk. His inhabitants—wood gatherers, cowherds, and fishermen—are engaged in traditional activities that leave nature undisturbed.

Rousseau and Impressionism The enormous popularity of Impressionism has much to do with the relative neglect of Rousseau’s work and that of the Barbizon School in general. Impressionism’s fresh color, apparent directness of perception and execution, and detached attitude toward its subjects proved more compelling to twentieth- century viewers and critics than did Romantic notions of natural landscape. Yet, Rousseau’s work stands at a pivotal moment.

Despite his pantheistic regard of nature, it is notable that this sentiment held the imagination of no less a nineteenth-century icon than Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). As he wrote in 1889: “This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big. [...] Rousseau ha[s] depicted just that, expressing all that it has of intimacy, all that vast peace and majesty, but adding as well a feeling so individual, so heartbreaking.” Nevertheless, van Gogh, as if aware that this landscape of immensity and feeling went against the grain of fin-de-siècle detachment, added, “I have no aversion to that sort of emotion.” Rousseau’s preoccupation with capturing multiple iterations of nature and his fascination with changing light is an undeniable precursor to Impressionism.

Further, if Rousseau’s studies of Auvergne and Normandy represent the apex of the golden age of the open-air oil study, then his late works on paper mark the beginning of the independent, finished drawing, sometimes with added color, as an item of special interest in nineteenth-century French art. The idea of drawing as a complete and final statement on paper attained added importance over the course of the century.

Public Programs

Lecture Théodore Rousseau’s Landscape and the Sense of Place
Rousseau was a leading figure in the development of naturalist landscape in nineteenth-century France. Amy Kurlander, independent art historian and guest curator of the exhibition The Untamed Landscape: Théodore Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon, will explore the different ways in which Rousseau understood and represented specific places such as Normandy, Auvergne, and the Forest of Fontainebleau, in the course of his career. This program is co-organized by the Morgan Drawing Institute and supported by the Franklin Jasper Walls Lecture Fund. Free with museum admission. Advanced reservation suggested. Wednesday, September 17, Noon

Gallery Talk The Untamed Landscape: Théodore Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon
Giada Damen, Moore Curatorial Fellow, Drawings and Prints
Gallery talks are free with museum admission.
No tickets or reservations are necessary.
Friday, November 14, 6:30 PM

Organization and Sponsorship
The Untamed Landscape: Théodore Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon is organized by the Morgan Library & Museum. The exhibition is guest-curated by Amy Kurlander, an independent art historian, and coordinated by Jennifer Tonkovich, the Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan. This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of Karen B. Cohen, with additional support from the Estate of Alex Gordon and Mr. and Mrs.
Clement C. Moore II. The catalogue is underwritten by the Franklin Jasper Walls Lecture Fund.

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From Here to Here: Richard McGuire Makes a Book
September 25 through November 9, 2014

New York, NY, September 5, 2014 — In 1989 Raw magazine published a black-and- white comic strip titled “Here” that was quickly recognized as a game-changer in the art of graphic narrative. Richard McGuire’s thirty-six- frame strip is set in an ordinary living room, but it leaps freely through time, remixing history to produce encounters between past, present, and future inhabitants of the site. To mark the Fall 2014 publication of “Here” as an all-new, full-color graphic novel, the Morgan will premiere the first edition of the book and explore the evolution of this contemporary classic and the distinctive working method of the artist. From Here to Here: Richard McGuire Makes a Book opens on September 25 and runs through November 9, 2014.

“Here is a moving meditation on history and memory and the collapsing of time,” said Peggy Fogelman, acting director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “The original drawings and source material in the exhibition offer visitors a fascinating look at Richard McGuire’s wholly unique creative process. We are especially pleased to present the show in conjunction with the much-anticipated publication of the graphic novel.”

“Here” in 1989
In the mid-1980s, McGuire attended a series of lectures on the history of comics by Art Spiegelman at the School of Visual Arts. Inspired by a subsequent cartooning class assignment— and by moving into an old Manhattan apartment, where he still lives today—he conceived an idea for a strip. Set in an ordinary room, its panels would be split down the center: history would move backward on the left side of each frame and forward on the right. Later, when a friend showed McGuire the new Windows operating system, he dropped his split screen idea for a looser approach in which year-labeled “windows” of time would float freely into each frame of action. Though the viewpoint in “Here” remains fixed on one corner of a living room, time in the story is boundless and elastic. Populating the room with multiple frames of action, dating from the ancient past to the distant future, McGuire conjures narratives, dialogues, and streams of association that unite moments divided by years and centuries. McGuire worked for eight months on “Here,” furnishing it with props and figures derived from his family’s photographs and the picture collection of the New York Public Library. It was published as a six-page feature in Raw in 1989.

“Here” in 2014
During the 1990s, McGuire became a creator of children’s books, toys, and covers for The New Yorker magazine. Meanwhile the public fortunes of comics shifted dramatically. In 1992 Art Spiegelman’s Maus became the first graphic novel awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Eight years later Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth won wide critical acclaim, and McGuire signed a contract with Pantheon Books to expand “Here” into a 300-page graphic novel. In 2009, as a fellow at The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, McGuire reconceived “Here” as a full-length novel. To set the action in (more or less) his childhood home in New Jersey, he researched the site’s recent and ancient history. He also began working in color. Most importantly, he expanded the picture area so that the living room would fill each spread of the book, thus placing readers inside the frame of action. The exhibition combines original drawings for the strip and the novel with source photographs and sketchbooks that afford glimpses into McGuire’s creative process. Also featured are books that provided him with inspiration. McGuire recalls finding Tadanori Yokoo’s Waterfall Rapture, a book of thousands of waterfall postcards, and realizing that one strong idea—the persistence of a single pictorial moment, without start or end—could provide the basis for an entire book. In Evidence, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s influential book of photographs pulled from public and corporate archives, the absence of words compels each viewer to formulate links and connect the images from start to end of the book.

“Nothing Lasts”
“If Here is about one thing,” McGuire remarks, “it’s that nothing lasts, whatever it is or however permanent it seems.” Now Here itself has come to reflect its creator’s changing perspectives over time. The comic strip, completed when McGuire was in his early thirties, uses the spare visual language of the strip medium to put all of history on a shared, largely humorous plane. In Here the book, finished twenty-five years later, the stage of action has grown wider, the palette of colors and emotions more nuanced, as its author ponders the relationship between memory and history and the lasting pleasures of living in the moment.

Richard McGuire
Richard McGuire is an artist, designer, filmmaker, and a founding member of the band Liquid Liquid. His books for children include Night Becomes Day and The Orange Book. His art appears frequently in The New Yorker and The New York Times, among other publications.

Public Programs

Artist Talk
On This Site
In Richard McGuire’s graphic narrative Here, one corner of a living room in New Jersey becomes the point of intersection among events from the past and future.
McGuire will be joined in conversation by Michael Benson, author of Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, and Matt Knutzen, the Geospatial Librarian at The New York Public Library. The program is co- organized with the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Tuesday, September 30, 6:30 PM
Tickets: $15; $10 for Members; Free for students with valid ID

For Kids Smithsonian Museum Day
As part of Smithsonian Magazine’s Annual Museum Day, visit the Morgan for free on September 27. To coincide with the exhibition From Here to Here:
Richard McGuire Makes a Book, professional comic artist and educator Maggie Siegle-Berele will lead a drop-in comic workshop with live costumed models.
Children will learn the fundamentals of comic composition and will produce a short comic strip to tell their own story. Appropriate for ages 6 and up, as well as teenagers. This workshop is limited to families with children.
Saturday, September 27, 2-5 PM
Free with museum admission or Smithsonian Museum Day ticket.
Smithsonian Museum Day tickets can be printed here:
smithsonianmag.com/museumday

Workshop Ink on Panel: Comics Art 101
This adult workshop offers a chance at hands-on exploration of visual storytelling. With comic artist, illustrator, and Arts Students League Instructor Steven Walker, participants will learn the language of comics and reflect on the best ways to convey a story by using various illustration techniques.
Friday, November 7, 6-9 PM
Tickets: $20; $15 Members

Gallery Talk From Here to Here: Richard McGuire Makes a Book
Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head, Photography Gallery talks are free with museum admission.
No tickets or reservations are necessary.
Friday, October 10, 6:30 PM

Organization and Sponsorship
From Here to Here: Richard McGuire Makes a Book is the second exhibition organized by Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and department head of the Morgan’s recently established Department of Photography.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Morgan and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. It is made possible through the support of the J. W. Kieckhefer Foundation.

The programs of the Morgan Library & Museum are made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The Morgan Library & Museum
The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Today, more than a century after its founding in 1906, the Morgan serves as a museum, independent research library, music venue, architectural landmark, and historic site. In October 2010, the Morgan completed the first-ever restoration of its original McKim building, Pierpont Morgan’s private library, and the core of the institution. In tandem with the 2006 expansion project by architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan now provides visitors unprecedented access to its world-renowned collections of drawings, literary and historical manuscripts, musical scores, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, printed books, photography, and ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets.

Image: Cy Twombly, Untitled (1970). Grey-ground, Period, The Menil Collection, Houston, Gift of the artist ©Cy Twombly Foundation

Press Contact
Michelle Perlin
212.590.0311, mperlin@themorgan.org

Press Preview: Thursday, September 25, 10-11:30 AM

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