November 24, 1957 - World-famous Mexican painter influenced by Cézanne, an active communist, and a husband of Frida Kahlo, died in 1957. Rivera's large wall works in fresco established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with works by Orozco, Siqueiros, and others. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, New York City. His 1931 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was their second. Rivera paintings are exhibited by many of the greatest museums. When his patron discovered in 1933 that Rivera had painted a portrait of Lenin in the mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center, Nelson Rockefeller angrily insisted the figure be painted out. Rivera refused and Rockefeller fired him and destroyed the unfinished work. Rivera was a notorious womanizer who had fathered at least two illegitimate children by two different women: Angeline Beloff gave birth toa son, Diego (1916-1918); Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska gave birth to a daughter in 1918. He married his first wife, Guadalupe Marín, in June 1922, with whom he had two daughters. He was still married when he met art student Frida Kahlo. They married on August 21, 1929; he was 42, she was 22. Their mutual infidelities and his violent temper led to divorce in 1939, but they re-married December 8, 1940 in San Francisco. After Kahlo's death, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946, on July 29, 1955. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 22, 1988 - Considered the most important Mexican architect of the 20th century died on this date. In 1980, he became the second winner of the Pritzker Prize. His house and studio, built in 1948 in Mexico City, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. Barragán created an architectural language that combined modernism with the colonial and pre-hispanic architecture of Mexico. He was greatly influenced by the European modernism of his time; however, he was also deeply influenced by his visit to the Alhambra in Spain and, most of all, by the vernacular architecture of Mexican villages and gardens. While his geometric volumes were very purist through the use of perfect planes and volumes, he also incorporated natural materials such as cobble stone and wood. His use of light and water are quite unique, as can be seen in many of his residential interiors and fountain features. The typical, tall (3.5m [12ft.] or more) coloured walls, whichhe borrowed and modified from traditional Mexican building, became his trademark. He situated many of his designs amidst natural backdrops, such as lava rock outcrops and groves of trees. His understanding of aesthetics allowed him to design urban landmarks as well as furniture and gardens. Although the number of works he completed is not great, they have allowed him to become an influential figure in the world of landscape and architectural design, as well as object design. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 23, 1883 - in Zapotlán el Grande (now Ciudad Guzmán), Jalisco. He was a famous Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, and others. Orozco was the most complex of the Mexican muralists, fond of the theme of human suffering, and less realistic than fascinated by machines Rivera. Mostly influenced by Symbolism, he was also a genre painter and lithographer. Between 1922 and 1948, Orozco painted murals in Mexico City, Orizaba, Claremont, California, New York City, Hanover, New Hampshire, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Jiquilpan, Michoacán. His drawing and paintings are exhibited by the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, and the Orozco Workshop-Museum in Guadalajara. With Diego Rivera, he was a leader of the Mexican Mural maccaroni. An important distinction he had from Rivera was his critical view of the Mexican Revolution. While Diego was abold, optimistic figure, touting the glory of the revolution, Orozco was less comfortable with the bloody toll the social movement was taking. Orozco is known as one of the "Big Three" muralists along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. All three artists, as well as the painter Rufino Tamayo, originated in Mexico, experimented with fresco on large walls, and elevated their art of mural in fresco to the world-fame class known as Mexican Mural Renaissance. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 21, 1898 - Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.) Magritte pulled the same stunt in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself: we cannot smoke tobacco with a picture of a pipe. His work showed in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992. Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 20, 2006 - Altman died at age 81 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. According to his production company in New York, Sandcastle 5 Productions, he died of complications from leukemia. He was an American film director known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his work with an Academy Honorary Award. His films MASH and Nashville have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. 1969 when he was offered the script for MASH, which had previously been rejected by dozens of other directors. Altman directed the film, and it was a huge success, both with critics and at the box office. It was Altman's highest grossing film. Altman's career took firm hold with the success of MASH, and he followed it with other critical breakthroughs such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1974), and Nashville (1975), which made the distinctive, experimental "Altman style" well known. As a director, Altman favored stories showing the interrelationships between several characters; he stated that he was more interested in character motivation than in intricate plots. As such, he tended to sketch out only a basic plot for the film, referring to the screenplay as a "blueprint" for action, and allowed his actors to improvise dialogue. This is one of the reasons Altman was known as an "actor's director," a reputation that helped him work with large casts of well-known actors. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 19,1798 - The Rijksmuseum (State Museum) is a Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, located on the Museumplein. The museum is dedicated to arts, crafts, and history. It has a large collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and a substantial collection of Asian art. The museum was founded in 1800 in The Hague to exhibit the collections of the Dutch stadtholders. It was inspired by French example. By then it was known as the National Art Gallery (Dutch: Nationale Kunst-Gallerij). In 1808 the museum moved to Amsterdam on the orders of king Louis Napoleon, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. The paintings owned by that city, such as The Night Watch by Rembrandt, became part of the collection. In 1863 there was a design contest for a new building for the Rijksmuseum, but none of the submissions was considered to be of sufficient quality. Pierre Cuypers also participated in the contest and his submission reached the second place. In 1876 a new contest was held and this time Pierre Cuypers won. The design was a combination of gothic and renaissance elements. The construction began on October 1, 1876. On both the inside and the outside, the building was richly decorated with references to Dutch art history. Another contest was held for these decorations. The winners were B. van Hove and J.F. Vermeylen for the sculptures, G. Sturm for the tile tableaus and painting and W.F. Dixon for the stained glass. The museum was opened at its new location on July 13, 1885. The front of the museum is located at the Stadhouderskade, but on the other side it has a prominent position on the Museumplein, nowadays among the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 18, 1976 - He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Pennsylvania, in South Philadelphia, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. While appreciation for Man Ray’s work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since. In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as "his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance art and conceptual art" and saying "Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'" — Man Ray’s stated guiding principles — "unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would." The film shown here was made by Man ray in 1926. He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner Man Ray died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.
November 17, 1904 - Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles. He was a prominent Japanese -American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known widely for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold. Among his furniture work was his collaboration with the Herman Miller company in 1948 when he joined with George Nelson, Paul László and Charles Eames to produce a catalog containing what is often considered to be the most influential body of modern furniture. His work lives on around the world and at the The Noguchi Museum in New York City. Following the suicide of his friend Arshile Gorky and a failed romantic relationship with Nayantara Pandit, the niece of Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru, Noguchi applied for a Bollingen Fellowship to travel the world, proposing to study public space as research for a book about the "environment of leisure." In the ensuing years he gained in prominence and acclaim, leaving his large-scale works in many of the world's major cities. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 16, 1943 - He was born in New York City, New York (according to his professional biography). With two writing credits to his name (the science fiction film Silent Running and the second Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force), Cimino moved up to directing when his spec script, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, was purchased by Clint Eastwood's production company, Malpaso, with Eastwood originally slated to direct it himself. However, Cimino convinced him to allow him to direct the film, which became a solid box office success at the time, and which enjoys a minor cult status today. With the success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Cimino was able to secure a stellar cast and freedom from studio interference for his second film, The Deer Hunter (1978). The picture became a massive critical and commercial success, and won a number of Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture. On the basis of this track record, he was given free rein by United Artists for his next film, Heaven's Gate (1980). The film came in several times over budget; the result not only was a financial disaster that nearly bankrupted the studio, but Heaven's Gate became the lightning rod for the industry perception of the out-of-control state of Hollywood at that time. The film marked the end of the so-called New Hollywood era. Transamerica Corporation, the owner of United Artists, lost confidence in the film company and its management. Transamerica soon sold the company. Heaven's Gate was such a devastating box office and critical bomb that public perception of Cimino's work was almost irretrievably tainted in its wake; none of his subsequent films achieved popular or critical success. In 1984, after being unable to finalize a deal with director Herbert Ross, surprisingly, Paramount Pictures offered the job of directing Footloose to Cimino. According to screenwriter Dean Pitchford[1], Cimino was at the helm of Footloose for four months, making more and more extravagant demands in terms of set construction and overall production. Finally, Paramount realized that it potentially had another Heaven's Gate on its hands. Paramount fired Cimino and finalized the deal with Herbert Ross to direct the picture, as had originally been intended. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 15, 1887 - O'Keeffe was born in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She is typically associated with the American Southwest and particularly New Mexico where she settled late in life. O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors, and she often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York, and in the 1940s, and she was given two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and another in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman. She was also awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, the first by the College of William and Mary in 1938, and in the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work. Georgia became increasingly frail in her late 90's and moved to Santa Fe where she would die on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. Per her instructions, she was cremated the next day. Juan Hamilton walked to the top of the Pedernal Mountain and scattered her ashes to the wind...over her beloved "faraway". (www.wikipedia.org)
November 14, 1840 - Monet was born on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. During the early 1880's Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings. In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel in 1891. He later produced series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, poplars, the Houses of Parliament, mornings on the Seine, and the water-lilies on his property at Giverny. Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own garden in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine.Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus, only about fifty people attended the ceremony. (www.wikipedia.org)
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The Unfinished Print- “When Is a Work of Art Complete?”
NEW YORK. NY.-For the first time in its history, The Frick Collection will host a major special exhibition this summer, beginning on June 2 and continuing through August 15, that is devoted solely to prints and the process of printmaking. This special presentation poses questions that have preoccupied artists, critics, and collectors for centuries: “When is a work of art complete?” and “When do further additions detract from the desired result?” These issues have a particular history in the graphic arts, where images are developed in stages and often distributed at various points in their making. This exhibition will address the complex issue of “finish” in art through the presentation of more than sixty print impressions in varying degrees of completion. Featured artists, European masters from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, include Albrecht Dürer, Hendrik Goltzius, Parmigianino, Anthony van Dyck, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, August Rodin, Félix Bracquemond, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, and Jacques Villon. In the process of printmaking, an artist will normally take proof impressions as he makes changes to his plate. These proof states, as will be apparent through many groupings in the exhibition, can establish an exact record of the image in the process of its development. The exhibition is organized by Peter Parshall, Curator of Old Master Prints for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., for the National Lending Service of that institution, where a version was on view in 2001. The majority of the prints come from the National Gallery of Art, with additional sheets from the Frick as well as several from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Epstein Family Collection. Presentation of the exhibition in New York is coordinated by the Frick’s Curator Susan Grace Galassi and is made possible, in part, by Angelo, Gordon & Co., L.P.; the Fellows of The Frick Collection; and anonymous donors. The Unfinished Print travels to the Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main (October 7, 2004, through January 2, 2005).
Comments Guest Curator Peter Parshall, “Although the interpretive problem posed by the incomplete work of art is familiar to art historians, it is a topic very little treated in the history of prints.” Susan Grace Galassi adds, “The Frick Collection is very pleased to present this fascinating ensemble of extremely rare proof states to a New York audience. The exhibition invites the viewer to look over the artist’s shoulder as an image develops through various states, and to sample the richness and variety of the European printmaking tradition. This show will appeal to printmakers, connoisseurs, and students alike.”
Rare Survivals Begin to Tell the History
The Unfinished Print will begin downstairs in the Special Exhibition Galleries with several landmark examples from the Renaissance, a period from which very few genuine working proofs survive. Among them is a print from the workshop of Andrea Mantegna, Virgin and Child in a Grotto, which is one of several known impressions made from a plate that was never completed. Its early printing and distribution may have been inspired by the great value placed on any trace of invention left by this artist. We require a very different explanation for the many surviving impressions of Albrecht Dürer’s trial etching The Desperate Man, a work that seems in every respect a wild experiment with a newly acquired technique. Although Dürer may well have preserved some impressions for instruction in the workshop, it was most likely his evolving cult status as an artist that resulted in the continued circulation of such unconventional designs.
Around 1600, the more complex history of the unfinished print begins to unfold, most notably in the work of Hendrik Goltzius. A case in point is his Massacre of the Innocents––probably the remaining half of a composition envisioned at twice the scale. Perhaps the other plate was severely damaged, deterring further investment of time, or perhaps Goltzius felt the composition too eccentric and bewildering to complete. Nevertheless, impressions from the abandoned plate were taken and distributed within a generation of his death. Visitors will see, with Anthony van Dyck’s Self-Portrait of 1629/30, an example of the likely first case of an unfinished print being intentionally distributed under the authorization of the artist himself. The spare image of this magnificent head positioned high on the plate was probably etched by van Dyck shortly before his departure for England to initiate his portrait series of famous men known as the Iconography. The exhibition contains an impression of this early state, in the holdings of the Frick, which will be juxtaposed with a later version reworked substantially c. 1645 by Jacob Neeffs for the title page of the Iconography. Neeffs completed the original plate by creating the backdrop of cloud-filled sky, transforming the previously disembodied head into a sculptural bust. Despite Neeffs’s radical alteration of the work, a certain reverence for the artist’s hand preserved even the trace of an accident, apparent in the presence in both states of an unintentional mark made by van Dyck across the mustache.
Rembrandt as Printmaking Innovator
With fourteen sheets in the exhibition that span several decades of his work––including several seldom-shown sheets from the Frick’s own holdings—Rembrandt is particularly well represented. The process of artistic creation obsessed him, and he explored it extensively through etchings that seem no more than random sketches, through often radically differing states, and through a range of printmaking techniques. Evidence suggests that most of the sheets included in the exhibition were printed during his own lifetime, implying that Rembrandt regarded them as worthy of distribution and serious consideration. Among the examples on view is the early unsigned work, Old Man Shading His Eyes with His Hand. The summary indications of pose and background make clear that the artist foresaw a more complete image. However, the intense focus of the figure suggests that he stopped short because he had accomplished the essential in what he set out to do. In The Artist Drawing from the Model, Rembrandt presents himself in the workshop drawing his muse, a classical Venus. In essence, the image is an allegory of art, both celebrating and questioning the act of rendering. Also on view is a revealing pairing of the second and last states from one of the most prized series in Rembrandt’s graphic output, Christ Presented to the People. In the second state, an elaborate architectural superstructure frames a motley crowd that constitutes one of the finest passages of draftsmanship in Rembrandt’s art. Over time the artist substantially reworked the plate, excising this entire section, and through seven documented changes created a strange and shocking image that has yet to be satisfactorily explained. For Rembrandt, a sequence of states was a way of developing an idea, and sometimes it was also a means of generating a series of independent resolutions. Occasionally, this development seems coherent and organic and at other times dramatic and revolutionary.
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Explorations
In the eighteenth century, such attention to the traces of artistic process fell out of favor in the academies of art. At the same time, prints gained wider acceptance as objects for display in domestic settings and for collecting in albums. While printmaking in France was predominantly seen as a medium of reproduction, the question of finish still entered in, for example, as it pertains to an ambitious enterprise known as the Recueil Jullienne. This compendium of prints was commissioned by Jean de Jullienne after drawings and paintings by Watteau, and it consisted of plates created in three stages: first etched fully across the plate, then greatly enhanced in detail with an obliquely pointed engraver’s tool called a burin, and finally completed with text below the image. Featured in the exhibition is a pair of impressions by Charles-Nicolas Cochin I, both taken from plates for La Mariée de Village (The Village Bride), but showing considerable differences from one state to another. Collectors at the time placed special value on the vaporous qualities of the etched state, which would have been distributed in limited number for refined connoisseurs. The deepening and darkening effects contributed by the burin transform the final image into one that quite closely reproduces the original painting on which it was based. In contrast to the refined rococo sensibility expressed in these works is the later melancholic oeuvre of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose capricci and architectural fantasies can be seen in certain respects as harbingers of romanticism. Comparisons between early and late states from the famous Carceri (prisons) series show the effects of his rethinking through added architectural elements, deepened lines, burnished out areas, and variable inking. Visitors will be able to evaluate these changes as they affect the rationality and stability of Piranesi’s compositions.
The revitalization of etching in the nineteenth century took its cue from Rembrandt and sometimes drew the medium into the deepest realms of the personal. This is demonstrated in a remarkable sequence of states from Charles Meryon’s etching Le Pont-au-Change, Paris, three of which are featured. This view of the Palais du Justice and the adjacent bridge occupied the artist between 1854 and 1861, during which time he began to show evidence of psychosis. Meryon’s cryptic reworkings of the plate became an intimate and increasingly unsettled record of his own tortured state of mind. Elsewhere we see Rembrandt’s influence on nineteenth-century portraiture (for example, Rodin’s Victor Hugo, De Face). Meanwhile, the invention of new techniques such as lithography and photography renewed the printmakers’ infatuation with technical process and initiated a highly innovative period of experimentation.
With the development of modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century, the emphasis on process, fascination with technical experimentation, and openness to accidental effects came to the fore in printmaking, and increased value was placed upon transformation and variation on a theme. Edgar Degas was among the greatest innovators of the period, and he is represented by five impressions in the exhibition. In 1879 he embarked on a complex etching based on an earlier pastel, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery. In a process that ran through at least nine states, he recycled the original figures and manipulated them by folding and tracing in order to create new variations. Degas also participated in the revival of the monotype, a technique dating back at least two hundred years that involves inking a flat surface and using various means to rub away the wet oily pigment to realize an image. Two rare examples of monotypes by Degas are shown, including Woman Reading (Liseuse) of c. 1885. In focusing on the immediate effects he could achieve in monotype, Degas came to embrace the aesthetic of the unfinished and the pictorial fragment, essential constituents of his modernity. Paul Gauguin also developed the monotype in very original ways that furthered his investigation of a “primitive” aesthetic. Featured in the exhibition is a major work of about 1902, Two Marquesans, made at the culmination of Gauguin’s career. This sheet includes an exquisite drawing of two Polynesian women and on the reverse the monotype he made from it.
Four impressions of Madonna by the Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch will be featured in the Cabinet Gallery. These large and powerful prints are among the artist’s most enigmatic interpretations of the femme fatale, the ubiquitous fin-de-siècle figure that was so central to his art (see illustration on page one). Between 1895 and 1902, Munch made subtle alterations to the drawing on Madonna’s original stone and added additional stones for color, resulting in six different states. As Munch’s absorption with the image intensified, he experimented with a wide range of visual, iconographic, and emotional effects, adding color and texture, and at one point masking out the border to alter the composition’s focus. With these and other examples in this final exhibition gallery, visitors will see how, by the turn of the twentieth century, the issue of resolution in printmaking had been taken to its farthest reaches––the work of art in a perpetual state of “becoming.”
Illustrated Publication
An illustrated publication is available for $35.00 (softcover) and $65.00 (hardcover). It contains three essays by Peter Parshall, Stacey Sell, and Judith Brodie examining the unfinished work of art in the context of printmaking over the course of four centuries. This catalogue (100 pages) is available through the Museum Shop of The Frick Collection, the institution’s website (www.frick.org), or by calling (212) 288-0700.
Free Public Lecture on Wednesday, June 9, 2004, 6 pm
Guest curator Peter Parshall delivers a lecture titled Revisions and Resolutions in the History of Printmaking in which he will examine the evolving phenomenon of the unfinished print and its general significance for the aesthetics of the medium. There is no charge for this lecture, and seating is limited.
