Willem de Kooning, Woman III (1953). Private Collection

 “The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”  —Willem de Kooning

They say that autumn is the time when the boundary between the living and the dead; worldly and other worldly; waking and dreaming; and the conscious and unconscious mind, is minimal. If so, the moment is right to look at Willem de Kooning’s layered retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Works are scraped, drawn, pastel filled and painted to elicit the passage of time, and in describing origins, merge the seen and unseen, and what no longer exists. In this space, the artist has poured himself throughout a lifetime of intertwining, which appears, like DNA in the final galleries. There can be no more graphic depiction of the intimate autobiographical workings of a man within his time…but also without time. artes fine arts magazine

W. de Kooning, Special Delivery (1946). Coll. Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Gallery, Wash., D.C.

DeKooning’s permeable works — figurative within abstractions, then abstractions at the end of his life that danced away like figures – lodge in the psyche. Once characterized as out of step with his contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionist of the New York School, de Kooning’s work conveys the sensation that everyone else was out of sync. His oeuvre was more personally exploratory, iconoclastic and multiple in approach than a movement. The art critic Thomas Hess wrote of de Kooning’s 1946 work, Special Delivery, “Shapes do not meet or overlap or rest apart as planes; rather there is a leap from shape to shape; the ‘passages’ look technically ‘impossible.’ This is a concept which comes from collage, where the eye moves from one material to another in similar impossible bounds. De Kooning often paints ‘jumps’ by putting a drawing into a work-in-progress, sometimes painting over it and then removing it, using it as a mask or template, sometimes leaving it in the picture.”

The most psychologically ambiguous works come midway through the exhibition in the seminal Women I, II, III series. Are they hostile? No. Are they kind? No. They resonate because they are the way that a woman can be. Never have I identified as closely with these paradoxes, or been clenched by as raw a visceral grip as through these paintings, whether viewing them for the first time, over twenty five years ago, for the duration of this show. Like the Archangel Michael, de Kooning’s Women carry the balance of heaven and hell, demon and goddess, both represented seductively in the schema of their personas.

(Left, near) Juan de la Abadia, St. Michael Weighing Souls(1490), Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunga, Barcelona, SP; (L,far) W. de Kooning, Woman with Bicycle (1952-53).

Of the Women series, de Kooning made references of a kind of transcendent influence: “First of all, I felt everything ought to have a mouth. Maybe it was like a pun…maybe it’s even sexual…I don’t know why I did it with the mouth. Maybe the grin. It’s rather like the Mesopotamian idols, you know. They always stand up straight looking to the sky with this smile, like they were just astonished about the forces of nature, you feel – not about the problems they had with one another.” The gaze is otherworldly.

Hess analyzed de Kooning’s works for their process and for their armature, particularly since in the case of the drawings Woman (Seated Woman I) and Untitled (Two Women), the narrative was essentially unfathomable. He said, “The vectors of the drawing seem to have become the parts of a giant watchworks which tick around the figure, hiding, revealing, then hiding her again as if she had become a part of time…perhaps some idea about the bending nature of space and time informs this image.”

W. de Kooning, Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother (c.1938).

The’ jump’, a visual and psychological synapse through the void, the convergence of space and time as well as its ‘bending’ all point to a non-linear universe by which de Kooning was compelled. In April of 1937, John Graham published an essay in, Magazine of Art, entitled; ‘Primitive Art and Picasso,’ where the artist and African sculpture were discussed in the context of Jungian psychoanalytic theory.  According to the chronology in John Elderfield’s brilliantly comprehensive exhibition catalog, de Kooning remembered borrowing this article from Jackson Pollock. That February Graham had published System and Dialectics in Art, which weighed the impact of Carl Jung’s theory of the unconscious relative to art. A materialized unconsciousness appeared early in de Kooning’s Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother (c. 1938). The personal unconscious and collective consciousness later collided and manifested themselves in de Kooning’s Women. A more gender ambivalent dialogue between animus and anima appeared in Figure (1944). Preceding depictions of Men examined the subject, together with what was felt. The emotional content was wrought by eroded or compounded layers that created an aura of the mystical feminine around the sitter. The effect is one of memory – simultaneously past and contemplated – that evolved in Men, then the Women, and finally became decomposed and deconstructed in the landscape abstractions.

W. de Kooning, Seated Figure (Classic Male), 1940.

Throughout this 200-work retrospective there are penetrating (early) and exhilarating (later) works. Undeniably, this is a landmark: it is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the artist’s entire oeuvre, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is its only venue. (de Kooning’s first one man exhibition, at Charles Egan Gallery, opened at the time of his forty-fourth birthday, so this delay is perhaps symmetrical.) Less subjective are the quantifications: approximately 16,000 square feet, or, the museum’s entire sixth floor gallery space is given over to de Kooning: A Retrospective. Among the artist’s most famous paintings, Pink Angels (1945), Excavation (1950) and the celebrated third Woman series are presented, together with breakthrough black and white compositions (1948-49), where one discovers that a line is not a line, but rather a Rorschach test.

Every period and medium with which the artist was engaged is present, including the largely unseen (no pun intended) theatrical back-drop, the 17-foot Labyrinth (1946). Equally unguarded and sweeping was Jerry Saltz’s seminal review in the September 20 issue of New York Magazine which he concluded by saying “I challenge any of them (the curators) to name one thing wrong with any work on view here. What we see, from beginning to end, is a cosmos unto itself, visual wisdom for the ages.”

W. de Kooning, Black Untitled (1948). Coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art

The show begins with the primordial soup of de Kooning’s early cosmos – the deep and dark amorphic oil on paper/cardboard mounted on wood compositions like Nightsquare (c. 1949) and Black Untitled (1948), which seem animated by ghostlike forces and which were informed by events such as seeing Merce Cunningham dance, evading the too literal metaphors of developing Surrealism, and experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima. These curvilinear works flourished with an expressionist infusion throughout the years. As witnessed by de Kooning’s academic representational still lifes that toy with volume and the figurative drawings that hint at alienation, de Kooning was always interested in more than meticulous rendering where he felt he would “loose his mind.” He alludes to dimensions beyond the seen, metaphysics, and a fascination with vortices of space. De Kooning said, “The stars I think about, if I could fly. I could reach in a few old fashioned days. But physicist’s stars I use as buttons, buttoning up curtains of emptiness. If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are – that’s all the space I need as a painter.” Stars as buttons summons the transcendent William Blake, whose power is revisited here.

W. de Kooning, Untitled XII (1982)

Once the viewer has penetrated the vast waves and oceans that constituted the artist’s unmediated mind, and is treated to the less seen, heavy and gnarled sculpture, an epiphany occurs. When one steps into the bright light of the late works – these accomplished while the artist was in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease – refine, rework and cultivate anew a lyricism to express the formless form, the unembodied volume, the definite indefinite. As de Kooning climbed closer to his own white light, the palette becomes sublimely light, innocent and pure, the lines uncomplicated and devoid of gravitas.

Tony Vaccaro, de Kooning painting in East Hampton, L.I. studio (1953)

Theodor Adorno, the writer on classical music had this to say about de Kooning’s final epoch: “The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves, it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witness to the finite powerlessness of the ‘I confronted with Being’ are its final work.” de Kooning moved toward the infinite metaphorically, in afterlife; during life it was a concept he channeled and which sustained him.

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer ©2011

The exhibition is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through January 9, 2012

www.moma.org

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Closing out the business day, the city’s workers would file out to swarm I-95, or head for the Amtrak station or DART stop, and report in again the next day. Wilmington was another city whose ebb and flow ran in twelve hour tides. Little by little, restaurants and bars have begun to reclaim the shoreline that is the downtown. And now, World Café Live has opened at the renovated Queen Theater on North Market Street, delivering world class music to these revitalized corridors.

One tip-off that Wilmington was destined to become a musical epicenter is the musicians who have lived below the radar here. Resident, David Bromberg performed resoundingly at the Light up the Queen Foundation benefit in 2010, while New Orleans native Trombone Shorty played outrageous saxophone on the roof of the nearby Shop Rite! The Peoples’ Festival held annually on the riverfront honors one time Wilmington resident Bob Marley. But nothing exactly prepares you for the full on architectural overhaul at the Queen Theater or the radiance of its performance stage. Once a repository for fetid rain water falling through its roof, and an aromatic blend of rubble, pigeon droppings and mold below, this thoughtful renovation has brilliantly revived the stylized ceiling medallions, three ten-by-ten foot frescoed murals, and ornately-gilded surrounds beside the organ pipes. The restoration process has also unearthed a fiercely burning, but dormant underground love from the Wilmington community.

Originally conceived in 1789 as the Indian Queen Hotel, and then operated as the luxurious Clayton House, the Queen Theater morphed into a movie palace in 1916. By April 1959, it shuttered its once-beloved doors, following a showing of House on Haunted Hill perhaps presciently, and remained dark for the next five decades. Enter Hal Real and his Real Entertainment Group, a dynamic consortium of music club developers who collaborated with WXPN radio station on its maiden enterprise, World Café Live, in Philadelphia. Seeing the possibilities with imperturbability required Wilmington based real estate developers Buccini/Pollin Group and city officials to join the initiative to restore the Queen Theater. With straight faces, a Spring 2011 opening date was announced in October of 2009 on the 45,000 square foot project.

The finished building comprises great paradox; predictably dramatic spaces – the proscenium stage – combined with textured balcony seating and open plan for approximately 900 persons. The acoustics, both structural and mechanically-enhanced, are precise, clear, yet luminous and effective in a variety of ranges. Witness the intense complexity of opening act, Sonny Landreth, on April 1, followed by the intimate and personal renditions of Ingrid Michaelson’s sold-out performance.

The Queen serves all.

Telescoping from the spectacular to the specific is also the hallmark of its interior configurations. Generous spaces create a sensory time sequence that satisfies both a taste for imposing public domains and an appreciation for surface detail. Many of the oldest paint layers have been conserved in their naturally eroding state and preserved into collage like patterns. The bars are eco-friendly strokes of genius. Reclaimed from other, funky locations, they highlight the knots of pine or diagonal herringbone one expects to find in a Pocono lodge, or a shack at the beach. This familiarity of time-worn material and the surprise casualness of natural wood in a beaux arts environment is a welcoming and warming touch. In this building of somewhat grand volume, one makes small discoveries; ancient movie projectors found with their film reels still in place, a whiplash of time and space.

One might desire a parallel alternative to the rich vibrancy of the stage: Upstairs Live now serves lunch, happy hour and dinner. Or, take a break to the smaller downstairs bar, pop into the palladium windowed Olympia Room – sometimes used for private parties – or the witty gift shop, and you will have changed the gestalt completely and primed yourself for the dance floor. The Queen’s relationship to the street outside is direct and harmonious, if what you crave is simply air. Another passerby may spontaneously stop in, provided the evening’s musical act has not already had its tickets swallowed up. Reservations are recommended.

Wilmington’s many banks now advertise in the sponsor pages of the Queen Theater’s program. They too understand the importance of continuity and re-invention. Projecting civic pride to the Light up the Queen Foundation – the ongoing non-profit that brings talent, illustriousness, and history to their home base – makes banks seem almost human again. A crowd gathers on the sidewalk outside the Queen’s doors at night. For Wilmington, whose motto is A Place to Be Somebody, those words may finally ring true.

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

World Café Life at:

The Queen Theater

500 North Market Street

Wilmington, DE 19801

Tel: 302 994 1400

www.queen.worldcafelive.com

www.lightupthequeen.org

Vince Fraser. Bling Pop (2006-2007), digital print. Courtesy of the artist.

When I was about 12 years old looking through some Playboy magazines purloined from my father’s closet, I studied imagery that resembled some of the postmodern feminist works found in the Ringling Museum exhibition Beyond Bling: Voices of Hip-Hop in Art. What submerged in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s during hippie years, feminist years, and corporate power years has re-emerged here looking fresher than before the days of bra-burning and women wearing neck ties. A cluster of elderly women gazing at Mickalene Thomas’s work, Naughty Girls (Need Love, too), 2009, inquired, “How do you think she got into that pose and remained that way long enough for a photograph, much less a painting?” If you have to ask… fine arts magazine

Sofia Maldonado, Concrete Jungle Divas (2010), Gold dust, acrylic paint, urethane. 36 x 84” each. Courtesy: Magnan Metz Gallery, NY.

The artist Sofia Maldonado goes so seamlessly into her characters that their depiction is both objectified and personified. What was once dysfunctional and hidden from view is embraced here, examined, and brought to life in figures that jump off the picture plane and into your consciousness faster that you can say faux leopard bikini. The question becomes not, why are these pictures on the wall? But, what took them so long to get there? 

Matthew McLendon, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, has balanced as compellingly the male imagery in the exhibition narrative. African American male portraiture by Kehinde Wiley, (Simon Georgel, 2006), lavish machismo with its underlying nod to the down-low and in-your-face materialism, to the squeamishly accurate and meticulously rendered photography of Vince Fraser, (Bling Pop, 2006-2007, above), gathers fleeting and nostalgic notions into a collective of gender bending identity. Virile, sensate men may not have been driven as far underground as Playboy bunnies once were, but they have burst forth just as flagrantly. Perhaps it was when Sean Combs put his fist in the air wearing a Nike sweat suit on Times Square that we could no longer look away. 

Michael Anderson, Black Music vs. Helvetica (2009). Courtesy: Claire Oliver, NY

Beyond Bling comprises ten international artists’ works in paint, collage, and photographic mediums that bear witness to the gods and goddesses of ghetto fabulousness, Asian enclaves and Latino cultures. Integration into the cultural mainstream is now substituted as being the cultural mainstream. The imagery signals more than the fusion of High/Low Art envisioned by the late and brilliant MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe; it goes past the de rigueur, pitch-perfect capture of cultural role models to encapsulate a contemporary compendium of what to wear on the red carpet. The cult of celebrity derived from pin-up princesses and princes may be the ultimate crossover anointing, but really the exhibition is non-tautalogical. It’s Why fight the feeling? First we have to go there – immerse, not step away – to evolve the dialogue as to where this moment takes us. 

Beyond Bling, a thoughtful installation in a museum known for its formidable Old Masters collection, (another assemblage of portraiture and mythologies, after all), imparts the power of Hip-Hop influenced art without intimidation. Once perceived as undermining or subversive, here the viewer revels in the art, an after effect of its displacement. The statement is, this is what it means to be alive in the multiplicity and diversity of the 21st century: Dr. McLendon made his opening remark simply: “This is the art of our time.” 

Gajin Fujita, Sky High (2007), Gold leaf, acrylic, spray paint, marker, Mean Streak on panel, Courtesy: LA Louver, Venice, CA

To mount an exhibition of art influenced by the street: graffiti –Gajin Fujita’s Sky High, where beauty and street script merge in Asian mural painting –skateboarding, break dancing, and the towering legacy of Hip-Hop – possibly the first return of linguistic concern concentrated in art since Beat poetry – means the walls are disappearing outside and the art, and the artists, are coming inside. (The extraordinarily resonant Sofia Maldonado will complete a one month residency at the Ringling Museum campus.) King Yo on the queen, yo! By Iona Rozeal Brown (2010), sums up this conflation of the ritualized and fetishized with what once was too precious and sterile – art – notes that art still serves to deify urban gods, and takes as its subject, life. In this way, Beyond Bling becomes a contemporary classic. 

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer 

On Exhibition from May 21-August 14, 2011 

John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida 

www.ringling.org

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Slung around the harbor and plaza side of the structure is a bulging swath of glass that cuts across the concrete mantel like a 3-D sash that terminates in geodesic knots, a nod to Teatro-Museo Dali in Figueres, Spain. Inside, this is the place to meet, a gathering spot for the photo op, perhaps the podium, or the bar, depending on the occasion. This cool windshield-like fixture admits as much light as it permits the gaze of the crowds to float outward onto the harbor, the airfield next door and the Verde Gris of Tampa Bay – a compelling vista.

Welcome to interior museum planning as of 1.11.11, when the Dali Museum opened: 68,000 square feet divided into public space, offices and last but not least, galleries. The Dali brand gift shop, where one arrives, is a surrealist chotztke paradise. Save for a greeter to point the way, one could wander there endlessly, perhaps taking a Catalonian bean soup and alighting in the adjacent open café for a glass of Rioja. If you remember why you came here, you may now buy your admission ticket.

With deference to Frank Lloyd Wright, you start at the top floor, awash in natural light. Ascending via elevator or a single helix stairwell – tight, when up and down visitors employ it simultaneously – one enters gallery spaces that may be cavernous or confined or both. The installation sweetly begins with the narrative of mega-benefactors A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who befriended Dali, and their first acquisition Daddy Longlegs of the Evening – Hope! Arranged chronologically, the early impressionist still life work, nudes, (particularly Femme Couche, 1928), as well as landscapes notable for their oyster white light, are installed in close quarters that suggest nothing more than a high ceilinged storage area.

In 1925, Dali read Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams which catapulted his imagination, style and subject matter in new directions. At this point, the gallery space likewise opens up. Un Chien Andalou, 1929, an absurdist film made with Luis Bunuel is projected large-scale onto one wall of a vast rectangular space. So enjoyable is the phenomenon of viewing video in situ, that one never wants to enter a small darkened place segmented behind a curtain again. Sculptural objects co-mingle, like Venus de Milo with Drawers, 1936, (having white fur knobs), extending the cathartic relief of Surrealist humor to previously unrealized dimensions.

Augured by the seminal Nature Morte Vivante (Still Life – Fast Moving), 1956 the next paintings gallery heralds several key works, including the oft reproduced Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln – Homage to Rothko (Second Version), 1976 – which is also the collection catalogue cover, (by Robert Lubar); and the image adorning, for example, a hotel corridor at the Hilton in Pinellas Park, Florida.

The hauntingly powerful works, Old Age Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages), 1940, through The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1 952-54 – here the iconic melting watches; and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, 1958-59 articulate Dali’s breadth of artistic concerns. But although there is breadth, there is not necessarily breathing. This installation does not permit the depth of perspective, the arc one of the peripheral walk, or the generosity of space that allowed one to absorb, much less luxuriate in, each work in the previous building. That generosity might now be called wasted space. Or perhaps, interest in this collection is simply greater than expected, and so one jostles for space.

The installation’s last progression – there are a total of over 2,100 phantasmagorical Dali holdings, so exhibitions revolve – is the “Nuclear Mysticism” period, the artist’s response to a perceived lack of spiritualism in Abstract Expressionism. (He felt a computer could generate a Mondrian or Pollock.) Monumental canvases like The Hallucinogenic Toreador, 1969-1970, which seems to hale Jim Dine’s Venuses, document the classicism, supernatural aura and transcendental concerns of Salvador Dali. What painter working today is consumed with reconciling the metaphysical with the political, scientific and the psychological?

Having broken early on from Andre Breton, Dali’s sweeping, alchemic worldview ultimately became self-referential, and simultaneously validated. When the artist consolidated his works in the Teatro-Museo Dali in 1974, diametrically opposed events unfolded: his beloved wife and muse Gala died; King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia became honorary patrons of The Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali; and Dali was honored with the Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III, the State’s highest award, all in 1982 – the same year the Salvador Dai Museum first opened in St. Petersburg Florida.

Beyond the kitsch, the caricature and the reputed 400 blank pieces of paper Dali signed – or because of it – this prolific artist’s oeuvre is accessible. Diverse mediums such as holograms, jewelry, film, sculpture, painting and works on paper, represents exactly what the artist sought—an amalgam, a holistic view and a way of seeing things. Take a look at the influence in fashion, personified by the apparition Daphne Guinness. Such creative whimsy filled the crowds on opening day at The Dali Museum, when a Dali impersonator and a Salsa band sizzled on the outdoor plaza with rhythm and beat beneath this latest signature piece. The ingrained dance steps of well-dressed patrons patterned the sunlight and suggested that it’s this composite that will likely succeed – and outstrip its predecessor – not solely as a museum with a great biographical collection, but as a fascinating cultural destination. Does the building become as iconic as the artist?

The artist and building converge into a seamless whole, a Dali universe. 40,000 visitors have toured the museum since it’s opening last month. One Saturday alone recorded 2,300 guests. With over a $1,000,000 in revenue since 1.11.11, this Dali Museum generated a quarter of the annual revenue above its previous location. Surrealism is getting real; its imagination and lofty ideals got packaged here with zest and panache, without the pretense, and coalesced into the intuitive experience one craves.

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

Sol LeWitt, Drawing 915.013

One hundred Sol LeWitt (American 1928-2007) floor-to-ceiling wall drawings are installed at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts in 27,000 square feet of public gallery space. As sweeping as the exhibition is, it describes a very private discourse on the subject of line traced through the artist’s mind directly onto the walls.

Over a thirty year span, LeWitt diagrammed his meditation on the potency and limitations of geometry. The eye reads along the legible calligraphy of an intensely obsessive study of arcs done in a muted palette on floor one of the exhibition. These give way to boldness and brightness upstairs. Released from the grip of the pristine, forms become dynamic. We see the dancing skirt of a trapezoid and references to urbanism in Mondrian-esque grids. It’s time to try geometry on acid, without the flashbacks or bummers. Animated abstractions, (Escher-like fragments blown up and squeezed through a tube in the Pixar lab), later became embedded sculptures and architectural structures in LeWitt’s hands. But throughout the artist’s dialogue with line, we never lose virtual eye contact; rather we are drawn into his personal process. fine arts magazine artwork

Sol LeWitt, Drawing 1185.011

This MASS MoCA/Yale University /Williams College of Art collaborative installation considers the over twelve hundred wall drawings LeWitt realized from 1968 to 2007, which the artist grouped into movements called ‘families’. An intimate conversation with the family members ensues. Each query unravels that member’s (circle, triangle, square) particular response and releases its potential in breathtaking swoops.

Now the eye is riveted and the pace accelerates. Adrenalized vision darts to the next modern construct, then suddenly flies out the window to a tactile and quiet brick arrangement of buildings around a courtyard outside. Refreshed, it settles on the eroding paint at the windowsill. The artist has been aware of your wanderings. When you visually re-enter the room, he has placed black and white drawings exploring recessive circles or fade out lines that confront you with infinity. This ebb and flow of integration and disintegration – of matter to non-matter – belies the surface clamor of the interior works.

By the time you reach floor three, colors have turned electric. The surfaces are smooth and sensational, as if the family has shown up in patent day-glow jumpsuits. An undulating wave is tricked out in a black spandex cat suit, alternating gloss and matte finishes.

Sol LeWitt, Drawing 880.002. All photos by Kevin Kennefick, courtesy MASS MoCA

Taken together, the installation itself constitutes a massive set up of shapes configured to hold the tension between viewer and the wall; a gigantic, powerful family portrait taken at a reunion that, over time, has turned wild. Entropy prevails as if, until the artist actually hung out with them for decades, he didn’t get down to play and they didn’t get the nicknames that nailed them perfectly. The anthropomorphizing of shape here is not sentimental, just familiar, allowing for parody and distortion of the fun-house variety. We absorb the complexity of the family narrative as time condenses the deceptive simplicity of line.

This exhibition resides at MASS MoCA for twenty-five years, when viewers may register LeWitt’s world. It is both linear and multi-dimensional, creating the context for Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Is this installation freeing or constraining? If the images are so perfect that we feel the need to escape them, then perhaps images evolve – Damien Hirst’s spin paintings – afterward. Or, perhaps we’ve become compulsive. Certain liberation is to be found in LeWitt’s close examination; the extraordinary depth and substantive satisfaction of getting to know something or someone well. You bring your own visceral response to the acclimation, acknowledging and exhilarating at the essential common ground between disparate family members.

by Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

Visit Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art at: www.massmoca.org

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“I don’t believe in control”, the artist said, in a parallel reference to baseball pitching, observing that you learn and train, and then make your best pitch; or, you generate ideas for a work and release them. If the pitcher actually aims, the batter knows where the ball is going and may hit it out of the park. Suspense and the unknown play a part in both a killer pitch and a successful art work for Kahn, who disdains the comfort zone. Smudges that occur once a pastel work is put back into a sketchpad become the markings of an ambiguous maker – chance.

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany; his family fled Nazi persecution when he was ten. Even now, he said he loves to paint the insides of forests, those of time spent in the German woods as a child. When queried as to why he chose barns as subjects, Kahn replied that architecturally they are simple and yet have grandeur. Those elements resonate for him and have only tangential reference to the barn as a symbol, as he puts it – like the Greek temple in classical times – of America’s golden age. And yet the barn also contains a sense of arrival and shelter, of safety and harboring, and it contains volumes of comings and goings, open space and undifferentiated light.

Master printmakers, Wolf Kahn and Anthony Kirk at the Kahn/Emily Mason exhibition, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT

Defined as one of the 20th century’s foremost colorists, Kahn reflected on the good color sense that he feels is innate and emanates easily from him. That which is too difficult, should probably not be pursued, he says. As for his extraordinary juxtapositions of hue, Kahn employs color as if a language that may at first sound foreign but to which one then acclimates. It is an eloquent lexicon he alone created which speaks to inner emotional pitches and constitutes them in us.

The artist spoke of the “inner anxieties” that must come out, that necessitate and energize art and propel an artist to make it. As individualized as this process may be, Kahn affirms interconnectedness – never being afraid to be influenced by someone else. Perhaps this includes the visual dialogue with the artist’s wife, Emily Mason, whose stunning aquatint monotypes conjoin his in the survey below.

“The art world is not a pleasant place right now”, he mused in response to advice he would give to an aspiring artist. In his closing repost, CCP executive director Anthony Kirk said, “But tonight, this was made a pleasant place by you, Wolf.” The exhibition continues until May 9, 2010 and includes an all-day Monotype Masters Class, May 8, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm, a full day workshop led by Wolf Kahn, with Lisa Mackie and Anthony Kirk.

© by Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

V. van Gogh, Sower at Sunset (1888)

 If you seek, without success, to diffuse the notion that art collectors historically secure trophy artworks without regard to underlying theory or cohesion, or if undeterred, you crave the sublime rush of particular examples by the most important 20th century European artists, or if your urge is simply to alleviate the chill of a nether gray day in Zurich, then you too will relish the E.G. Buhrle Collection on exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich through 16 May 2010. The experience is like warm butter on dry toast, a cradled sunbeam on an otherwise bland expanse of travertine, asphalt and concrete. 

Industrialist and Collector, E.G. BuhrleBombshells include four paintings by Vincent Van Gogh in experimental styles, (The Sower, 1888; Blossoming Chestnut Branches, 1890; the Bridges at Asnieres, 1887; and a late self-portrait.) Three monumental Water lilies by Claude Monet encase you in their mossy lushness, installed as if their own private glade. Interspersed throughout Old Master and Impressionist landscapes that play alchemically with light are disarmingly resonant portraits: the dappled, Little Irene by Auguste Renoir; the wild, Portrait of a Man by Franz Hals; the hyper realist, Hipplyte-Francois Devillers by J-A-D Ingres; and in an echo all its own, the full-length, Portrait of Madame Camus by Edgar Degas. American collectors like Albert Barnes in Philadelphia and Duncan Phillips in Washington, D.C. concurrently focused their collecting on prototypically modern French painting after the Impressionists: Emil Buhrle was simultaneously compelled to unearth their underpinnings. His diverse collection expounds upon one idea; that each work stands out as a heightened example or radicalized position of the artist’s perspective at the time. An artwork points the way backward and yet moves forward, becoming consciously pivotal, and setting off a chain of epiphanies in the viewer, no matter how seasoned. Edgar Degas, Portrait of Mme. Camus (1869)

 In the ‘short introduction’ to the collection, a term embraced by Hortense Anda Buhrle, the collector’s daughter, in her preface for the booklet accompanying the exhibition – complementing the three volume catalogue published in 2005 – Lucas Gloor explicates this neo-linear concept: “While Impressionism remained ‘the point of departure and leitmotif’ of Buhrle’s collection to the last, it is nonetheless revealing to observe the direction in which it developed…The idea of a historical development of art, which overcame the results of the past through constant progress and thus provided the prerequisites for the work of following generations, assumed an entirely new topical dimension after the Second World War. At this time, Abstraction appeared to be bringing art history ever closer to its professed objective, and retrospectively reassessed the achievements of the past. Hence, without extending his collection to include the art of the immediate present, Buhrle began to encircle its core with masterpieces in which tendencies of the historical avant-garde became palpable.” 

Upon sight of the Berlin National Gallery’s Impressionists works in 1913 – acquired against the opposition of Kaiser Wilhelm II – Emil Buhrle pinpointed his fixation. The works seized not only his imagination and his will to determine from where they had evolved and to where they would proliferate, but his ambition to possess the compass. 

Paul Gauguin, The Offering (1902)

 Despite that signal wish, the collector’s trajectory was not entirely pure, becoming overlaid with irreconcilable ambiguities that were historical, personal and institutional. Buhrle’s time, (1890-1956), was bracketed by two world wars, the second of which brought him scrutiny, a rhetorical state acquittal of his art purchases as good faith, then restitution – followed by repurchase of several seminal works. Economic forces within his own métier as an arms manufacturer supplying both the Allies and by Swiss warrant, the Germans, caused a disconcerting schizoid. Buhrle’s promised gift to the Kunsthaus Zurich materialized in the form of a new wing completed just after his death, an occasion that prompted not his slightest indication as to the dispensation of the collection. Charlotte, his widow and their children honored the notion of public exposure and created the Foundation E.G. Buhrle Collection in 1960. Adjacent to the Zurich home where Emil Buhrle had stored his works, the foundation was robbed in February, 2008 of four masterpieces – Paul Cezanne’s, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, Edgar Degas’, Count Lepic and his Daughters, Vincent Van Gogh’s, Blossoming Chestnut Branches and Claude Monet’s, Poppies Near Velheuil.  The latter two paintings seemed electrically charged, however unheralded their installation in the exhibition; the destiny of first two works remains, to the authorities, unknown. 

Yet even this world class level of intrigue cannot obscure the central impulse of the exhibition: that you will be moved, from one place in your head to another by its revelations; that there will be emotions – suppressed in the museum’s chambers – of elation, of seduction, of velvety touching tenderness, (Paul Gauguin’s, The Offering for example), of disturbance, profundity and delight. Until you are left with a buttery wonder at the magnitude of the Foundation E.G. Buhrle Collection Zurich, contemplating its metaphysical imprint, its shimmering beauty and its almost inconceivable evolution in this world, until it is time to return to the gray, cold day outside. 

© Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer 

Visit Collection Buhrle at www.kunsthaus.ch/en

A past catalogue montage , picturing the artist with her work and a Village Voice cover story from her early career.

Like her ooze paintings that were Happenings in the 1970’s – enacted at The Clocktower, where wanton ooze descended a spiral staircase, and at PS1, where orange and red urethane foam swept ladders in their wake and tumbled out of the windows – Marjorie Strider’s canvas works signal emotional release and fusion with their surroundings. In paintings that followed during the 1990’s, Strider delivered, through modeling paste, ceramic and acrylic, the excavated channels into which we shuttle our thoughts and feelings that involuntarily gush out and uncontained, are sent off the canvas edge by her “extensions.” Surface texture consists of hyper-brilliant helixes of concave paint that furrow through a built up terrain of dots, radiant hatch marks, and color amplitudes upon which objects–Egyptian and Buddhist cultural icons as well as roses, skulls, and Madonna are deposited, a detritus of time. 

Each of these investigations derails current attitudes about formalist approaches to painting, and reminds us more of exploded fruit – their serene and muted chaos photographed by Raymond Meier – or of Hedy Lamar’s nude scene in Ecstasy where she floats lavishly in outward spiraling pools of water, waves swirling in their own dark abysses and vortices, or simply of the big bang.  The works are modalities that accumulate and dissipate emotional content throughout their space. 

Marjorie Strider, large abstract, Marble Dust Series, (ca. 1992)

Marjorie Strider was educated in Kansas City Art Institute, and having come to New York in the 1960’s, met with exasperating non-receptivity until Arne Glimcher saw her work and gave her consecutive shows in 1965 and 1966.  Constructions of the fantasy female, mostly bikini clad women with protrusions made emphatic in acrylic paint and laminated pine on Masonite panels that measured 105” x 72” formed the installation entitled “The First International Girlie Show”.  The sculptured perfection of these inanimate women captured the  frozen sparkle of fetching eyes and glossed lips, sometimes parted to devour a sexually charged radish or strawberry.

From Pace Gallery onward, Strider took charge of her work producing outsized objects and figures that were decidedly in your face, asking about ephemeral views on how and where things should be—as tomato slices or orange sections progress toward you – and why.  Her work from the late 1990’s continued to encroach with mammoth oceanic swells that claim dislodged figures whose overwhelmed senses in Aria at Sea, (1997), and Lifeline (after Homer), (1997), are documented in remnant words – disassociated entities like Tears and Joy, Losses and Lines that wash up on the canvas.

Marjorie Strider, small abstract, Marble Dust Series, (ca. 1990)

But it’s Strider’s earlier abstractions – like Starry Night (1995), and Rosalia (1994), that focus on the raw essence of her meditation, distilled from other aesthetic concerns as a way of being and proceeding, and form the roadmap for work to come.  With text and figures removed, one glimpses the primordial stew that produced them.  Crystallized is the movement from points of departure to arrival and circulation, releasing waves of emotion contained therein, piercing and depositing them as part of the artist’s process.  The ricocheting channels that conduct their kinetic energy are then left exposed, as in some sense, are we. 

Today the artist is again revisiting glossy magazines and mining their hypertrophic sensibilities to construct inventions of female legs, torsos, and heads.  Protean and forceful, Marjorie Strider’s work has always dealt with iconic flotsam and jetsam, how it congeals and moves on, from entropy to disentropy.  The cryogenic-like freezing of woman’s youthful appearance through time is the extraordinary anomaly that still fascinates.  Her imagery consistently insinuates itself upon us; like the unrelenting ooze, the freed object, and the channeled energy, it is a hermeneutic self revelation that is both personal and social.

 © Diane Dewey, October, 2009

Marjorie Strider (American, b. 1934) emerged on the New York gallery scene in the mid-1960’s when her carved and painted wooden panels of 3-D girls in bikinis were initially shown in the Pace Gallery show entitled “The First International Girlie Show”, which also included paintings by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselman. The critic Sidney Tillim linked it to the contemporaneous show “Four Environments” at Sidney Janis, which included works by Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and George Segal. Of these, Strider was friendly with Roy Lichtenstein and the Oldenburgs, for whom she made a plaster cast of Patty Oldenburg’s breasts which was later acquired by Sol Lewitt. (A chocolate version of the cast was given to Claes.)

At the time, Abstract Expressionism was in full force; Strider chose instead to follow the color field painters like Mark Rothko, Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly and to augment it with three dimensionality she called “build outs” including huge sculptures of vegetables and fruit that formed her first solo show at Pace Gallery. In the seventies, Strider redirected the poured paint of Jackson Pollock and Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown (1969) into site specific installations of urethane foam called Ooze that took place at PS1 (Building Work, 1976), the Clock Tower (Blue Sky, 1976) and later at the Neuberger Museum (1999). By the 1990’s Strider synthesized parts, pours, and attachments formed the Marble Dust series, abstractions that were collaged, built up and painted on wood, combining her themes of flowers and iconic elements with formal explorations of thrust and intense color. Through each of these artistic periods, Strider’s work relives the vivid energy of the sixties and its monumental ambition in painting.

Marjorie Strider: Public Collections 

The Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York

The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut

Boca Raton Museum, Boca Raton, Florida

City University Graduate Center, New York

University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado

Danforth Museum, Framingham, Massachusetts

Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa

First National Bank, Seattle, Washington

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

New York University, New York

Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey

Santa Fe Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York

Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Vero Beach Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, Florida

The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Exhibition History:

 2007    Andre Zarre Gallery, New York City

2005    Big Fish Insiders Art Gallery Cornwall Bridge, CT.

2003    Flying Boat, New York City, Catalogue

2001    Truck work, Gardener, NY

1999    Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York, Catalogue

1998    Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida, “Sarasota Pour.” Outdoor installation (catalogue)

1997    237 West Broadway, New York, “Building Work: This Time,” outdoor installation

1995    Andre Zarre Gallery, New York, “Recent Paintings”

1993    Andre Zarre Gallery, New York

1988-9O   Finn Square, New York, “Sunflower Plaza,” outdoor installation

1986    Broadway Windows, New York University, New York

1984    Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, “Wall Sculpture and Drawings”

P.M. and Stein Gallery, New York, “Recent Sculpture U.S.A.”

1982    Myers Fine Art Gallery, State University of New York at Plattsburgh; Hillwood Art Gallery, C.W. Post Center, Long Island University, Greenvale, New

York; The Sculpture Center, New York; The College of Wooster,

Wooster, Ohio; The Alexandria Museum, Visual Art Center,, Alexandria,

Louisiana; The Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina; Joslyn Art

Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Museum of Art The University of

Arizona, Tucson; The McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas; Museum of Art,

The University of Oklahoma, Norman; Brainerd Art Gallery, State University of

New York at Potsdam; The Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of

Vermont, Burlington; Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania;

“Marjorie Strider: 10 Years, 1970-1980″ (catalogue), traveling through 1985

1978    Colby-Sawyer College, New London, New Hampshire

1976    The Clocktower, New York City University Graduate Center, New York

1974    Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “Strider:

            Sculpture and Drawings 1972-1974- (brochure) Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York

1973    Nancy Hoffinan Gallery, New york

1971    112 Greene Street, New york, “Building Work” (outdoor installation)

1968    Park College, Parksville, Missouri

1966    The Pace Gallery, New York

1965    The Pace Gallery, New York

Partial Bibliography:

• Alloway, Lawrence. Great Drawings of All Time: The Twentieth Century, Volume 2, New York: Shorewood/Talisman, 1981.
• Battock, Gregory., ed. Super Realism: A Critical Anthology, New York: Dutton, 1975
• Brentano, Robyn, ed. with Mark Savitt. 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street. New York: New York University Press, 1981
• Compton, Michael. Pop Art. London: Hamlyn, 1970
• Hess, Thomas B. and Elizabeth C. Baker, eds. Art and Sexual Politics. New York: MacMillan
• Hess, Thomas B. and Linda Nochlin, eds. Woman as Sex Object. New York: Newsweek, Inc., 1972
• Hunter, Sam. American Art of the 20th Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972
• Johnston, Jill. Marmalade Me. New York: Dutton, 1971
• Jones, V. W. Contemporary American Women Sculptors. Phoenix: Onyx Press, 1983
• Kirby, Michael. The Art of Time. New York: Dutton, 1969
• Kirby, Michael, ed. The New Theatre: Performance, Documentation. New York UniversityPress,1974
• Kultermann, Udo. The New Sculpture. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968
• Lippard, Lucy. Pop Art. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966
• Lippard, Lucy. From the Center, feminist essays on women’s art. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1976
• Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object. New York: Praeger, 1973
• Lippard, Lucy. The Pink Glass Swan, 1995.
• Padovano, Anthony. The Process of Sculpture. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1981
• Pierre, Jose. W. J. Stachan, trans. An Illustrated Dictionary of Pop Art. London: Eyre Methuen, 1977
• Pincus-Witten, Robert. Postminimalism. New York: Out of London Press, 1977
• Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors, A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991
• Semmel, Joan. A New Eros. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1977
• Sewall-Ruskin, Yvonne. High On Rebellion. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1998
• Soho Downtown Manhattan. Akademie der Kunste and Berliner Festwochen, 1976
• Stroud, Marion Boulton, ed. An Industrious Art, Innovation in Pattern and Print at the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia: The Fabric Workshop; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.
• Van Wagner, Judy Collischan. Lines of Vision, Drawings by Contemporary Women. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988
• Zelanski, Paul and Mary Pat Fisher. Shaping Space. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1987

 List of art critical essays and publication writings available.

Information graphics designer, Edward Tufte, experiments with shape, scale and texture in his exploration of the three-dimensional world

left: Airspace, aluminum, 16′, 2008

From Skewed Machine  (cast iron, 2007, right), a tractor rearing vertically upward and tilted on its hind corner, Edward Tufte’s sculpture exhibition – at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum June 13, 2009 to January 17, 2010 – liberates us. Shouldn’t a tracto r be on the ground? It’s our assumptions that are upended. As the piece gently decomposes on the lawn, shedding flakes of rusted iron like so many previously conceived notions, Tufte offers us an alternative to “way finding” as he calls it. In order to “see deeper” he abandons procedural artwork that suggests a formulaic response to our world.

Moreover, the works serve as components of an investigation by the artist at his laboratory situated among 145 acres of fields in Cheshire and Woodbury, Connecticut www.tufte.com. It is in this relative isolation that the works succeed in their de-isolationist perspective, incorporating weather, animal and plant life, and light to project joy, delight and integrity. It looks like this, a stainless steel sculpture punctured with a dot sequence on one side, creased to a carved undulating flap on the other, declares that art need not refer to another thing to be understood.

Escaping Flatland, stainless steel, 1997-2003

Tufte makes explicit his formal ideas about shape, scale, and texture in a body of work that includes 50 large scale sculpture installations, 70 table pieces, steel engravings and digital prints. A selection is set comfortably here outdoors and in. They enrich the allusion to a s acred void, as depicted by Paradoxes 1-17 and Three Cylinder Buddha. While grey clouds gather outside over the harboring openness of Larkin’s Twig, 32 feet of triangulated rusting steel, one is reminded that sculpture becomes the space within itself.

Millstone, milled steel, 12’, 2005. An 11,000 pound balanced form, swiveled on its axis by a child with ease.

Interaction with people and especially light, is part of the artist’s lexicon developed over four books  on analytic design and 32 years of Professorship at Princeton and Yale Universities. Tufte says, “Like dappled light, these anisotropic reflections appear everywhere once you know about them…they occur naturally in light from water waves, hair highlights, and metal surfaces – and artificially in computer simulations of real things.” Escaping Flatland embodies the thematic refusal to accept only computer screen and television generated knowledge. Watching a little girl push the rotating Millstone around its base, at 14,000 pounds of milled steel, is to vicariously experience a small but herculean triumph.

Conversations about fluidity from the known to the unknown object and from the intellectualized to the material run along endless lines of inquiry. Tong Bird of Paradise executed in steel, 20 feet high and in small scale, Tong Bird mobile, acts as a cipher from this world to the drifting imagination. Tufte cites Flaubert in his provocative catalogue essay, “I see … that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.” Nor in the exhibition Seeing Around, do they conform.

by Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

Read more about statistician/author/artist, Edward Tufte in: www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/tufte.html

View current and future events at the Aldrich Museum: www.aldrichart.org

 left: Charles Melin, Assumption of the Virgin, ca. 1630, o/c, Collection Museo de Arte de Ponce, Foundacion Luis A. Fwrre, Inc., Ponce, Peurto Rico

“All things human hang by a slender thread; and that which seemed to stand strong suddenly falls and sinks in ruin.” -Ovid

Rarely do we experience the extraordinary resonance of Old Master works in the context of a traveling museum exhibition. Their power and drama is often stripped by slick installations. But Masterpieces of European Painting from Museo de Arte de Ponce feels right at home in the hushed, if not spatially constrained galleries of the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT (from June 13 – September 6, 2009                  

Works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, (1472-1553), Peter Paul Rubens, (1577-1640), Francisco de Zurbaran, (1598-1664), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), Francisco Goya, (1746-1828), to the Academic work of Jean-Leon Gerome (1804-1924) and others, synchronize intellectually and physically with the space. As if a succession of worthy ancestors whose visages are enticingly lit, these 50 plus works span nearly 500 years of painting to reveal the tales of classical mythology, Biblical stories, Tennyson’s poetry and the minutiae of daily life.

Inspired by a European trip in 1950, Puerto Rican industrialist Luis Ferré acquired major examples of 14th through 20th c. Italian Baroque, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, French and – underrepresented here – British Schools of painting in a fevered period of collecting. Reubens specialist Julius Held, spurred Ferré’s connoisseurship, advising that: “The only thing that matters is that the picture – any picture, that is – is of high quality.” The result was the founding of the Museo de Arte de Ponce, designed by modernist, Edward Durrell Stone in 1962 and currently undergoing renovation.

James Tissot, In the Louvre (L'Esthetique), 1883-85 o/c, Collection Museo de Arte de Ponce, Fundacion Luis A. Ferre

 The collection bears emblematic European themes to the west. Works such as Philippe de Champaigne’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple, c. 1648, executed in preparation for a Parisian high alter, becomes an icon of religiosity. Raimundo de Madrazo Y Garreta’s late 19th c. painting Woman Seated in the Garden exudes a lushness that invites one to “stick their nose in it” as noted by Executive Director Peter C. Sutton, who brought the exhibition to the Bruce Museum for its only Northeast venue.           

Bruce Museum Executive Director, Peter Sutton (l) discusses the recent installation of paintings on loan from the Museo de Atre de Ponce, Puerto Rico, with ARTES contributor, Diane dewey and Assoc. Curator Richard Aste (r). In the background, Francesco Funni's Cephalis and Aurora, 1625

Curator Cheryl Hartup and Associate Curator Richard Aste have culled works that demand inquiry or allow legibility and demonstrate painting styles that range from exactitude to gestural. Readily accessible is Ruben’s Head of the Oldest of the Three Kings (The Greek Magus) ca. 1620, depicting Caspar’s reverie. Luminosity reverberates from his upturned hands cupping a lustrous bowl to iterations of silken hair that frame his face like rings around an alabaster stone dropped into an unfathomable sea.

Narratives that are removed by time, exemplified by Pompeo Batoni’s  Antiochus and Stratonice, and Francesco Furini’s Cephalus and Aurora force us to reach back into history. These ambassadors for Ovid’s message of transience in an un-ironic, florid, even frivolous time are enhanced here in a layering that is at once grounding and exhilarating

 Collector, Luis Ferré was said to be reminded by his advisor, Julius Held that, “Art is not acquired from one school or another; nor should a museum be dedicated to that purpose. A museum and its art is there for the centuries.” This portion of the Ponce collection, to be on view in just a handful of cities in the U.S., serves as an example of the timeless quality that beauty and lessons from the past have to teach us today.

by Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer