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 Cimetičre 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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James Surls, Cut Hand Hurt Eyes (detail), 1984-1988. Woodcut, printed in red and black ink. 73.5 x 37 in (186.7 x 94 cm). Collection Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Marilou and John Long.
HOUSTON, TEXAS.-The Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston presents James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997, on view through November 12, 2005. James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 will be the artist's first major scholarly exhibition in over twenty years and offers American audiences a rare opportunity to fully assess the depth and breadth of Surls' important contribution to the field of contemporary sculpture. James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 offers a survey of sculpture, wall works, drawings, and prints, focusing on a singular twenty-year period in the career of this remarkable artist. During this period, Surls' artwork and career come together in a compelling story that interweaves the unique aspects of a specific landscape, his personal story, and the tumultuous nature of art practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, into a mélange capable of reconciling counterculture utopianism and the rigor of post-minimalist sculptural approach.
James Surls makes art to embody the inherent dualities of natural forces-positive and negative, fluid and static, male and female. His work is simultaneously joyously optimistic and darkly expressionistic and his signature forms and images, such as diamond shapes, whirling vortexes, needles, knives, and houses, infuse highly personalized folk idioms with the aesthetics of high modernism. His forms are imbued with a visual poetry that arises from the dexterity with which he manipulates wood, steel, and bronze to craft simple, even homespun narratives into objects that are freighted with universal meaning.
Surls balances his creative process between structure and intuition. On the one hand, his compositional approach was forged from his education and professional instruction in studio art in undergraduate and graduate art school. On the other hand he believes in the invisible, underlying forms inherent in natural materials like wood or stone, his preferred materials.
As a student his work was largely abstract, drawn in part from the ordered chaos of Abstract Expressionism and the Surrealist notion of automatism, or as he says, "the 'just do it' mode of making." By the early 1970s, he began to take more control of the process, seeking to find the balance between his conscious artistic intentions and his more spontaneous, emotional approaches. Its was at this time that recognizable imagery-figures, houses, flowers-emerged as the dominant vocabulary of his work.
Wood is his signature material, and carving and cutting his preferred gesture. This is a natural outcome of his childhood. With his father a carpenter, Surls grew up sawing cedar logs for lumber, making wood beams for housing construction. He is as confident of his mastery of tools as he is with his artistic vision and his ability to see the possibilities trapped within natural materials. He speaks of "powerful forces waiting in the wood just to be released. But the other side of that is the powerful ability to read the possibility inherent to materials." The rest, he feels, is a direct process of sawing, carving, and whittling that brings the work to life. It is for that reason that his bronzes are cast from wood constructions as well. The duality of Surls's balancing act between logic and intuition is clearly illustrated when the intense physicality of his sculpture, executed over time in the social setting of his studio and the help of assistants is juxtaposed against the delicate, almost ephemeral nature of his drawings. Executed in solitude and in the spirit of automatic writing, they are intimate psychological blueprints to a particular state of mind.
In 1977 Surls acquired a large tract of land in Splendora, Texas where he built a spacious studio. The ensuing twenty years in which he worked there was a period of remarkable growth and development. These Splendora years were an especially productive period for him, a time when his art "exploded" in a rapid succession of artistic breakthroughs. Surls also views this period as his "romantic" period, because of the synergy between his artistic development and the east Texas landscape from which he took both raw materials and his intellectual inspiration.
No artist of his generation has had a greater impact upon the development of Texas as a locus of vibrant creativity than James Surls. Surls is a self-described "eternal optimist," and his infectious enthusiasm for all matters artistic made him a catalyst for a generation of young artists during these years. As an instructor and cultural impresario he encouraged artists, including Sharon Kopriva, Joseph Havel, Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing (The Art Guys), among others, to expand the boundaries of their social and aesthetic expressions. But Surls is not simply a regional artist. His unique blend of natural force and intellectual concepts places him securely within the international artistic circuit.
A native of East Texas (he was born in Terrell in 1943) Surls graduated from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville before achieving his Masters of Fine Arts at Cranbook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1969 he returned to Texas to teach sculpture at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, before coming to Houston in 1976 to teach sculpture at the University of Houston. In 1979 he was the driving force for the establishment of the Lawndale Annex, a thriving and vibrant alternative space that grew organically from a warehouse for student studios on the University campus into the Lawndale Art and Performance Center, largely through his entrepreneurial spirit. After leaving Lawndale and his teaching position at UH in 1982, Surls devoted himself full time to his studio practice and artistic vision for the growing compound in Splendora. Since 1998 he and his family have lived in Colorado.
The exhibition is organized by Blaffer Gallery's director Terrie Sultan and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Sultan and an interpretive essay be Eleanor Heartney, contributing editor to Art in America and the author of Postmodernism and Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads. Published and distributed by University of Texas Press, the catalogue also features a series of insightful interviews with key figures in the Houston art community, an exhibition history and bibliography.
James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 was made possible in part by generous support from an anonymous donor, the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, Houston Endowment Inc., Marilyn Oshman, Jane Blaffer Owen, and Carey C. Shuart.
Funding was also provided by Nancy C. Allen, Tim and Nancy Hanley, Ann and James Harithas, Claudia and David Hatcher, Molly Hipp and Ford Hubbard III, Sharon and Gus Kopriva, Nancy and Rob Martin, Karen and Eric Pulaski, Shirley and Don Rose, and Texas State Bank.
James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 is a fully-illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Terrie Sultan, director of Blaffer Gallery, and an interpretive essay be Eleanor Heartney, contributing editor to Art in America and the author of Postmodernism and Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads. Published and distributed by University of Texas Press, the catalogue also features a series of insightful interviews with key figures in the Houston art community, an exhibition history and bibliography. Price is $40. To purchase, please visit University of Texas press.
