Tag Archives: Edgar Degas

THE ARMORY SHOW AT 100: MODERN ART AND REVOLUTION

Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” oil on canvas, 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection)

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th St.)
Daily through February 23, $18 (pay-as-you-wish Friday 6:00 – 8:00)
212-873-3400
www.armory.nyhistory.org

It was a seminal moment in the way contemporary art was introduced to the American public. “New York will never be the same again,” Arthur B. Davies said, while Walt Kuhn proclaimed, “We will show New York something they never dreamed of.” On February 17, 2013, the Armory Show opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave. and Twenty-Sixth St.; organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which was headed by Davies, the show brought the European avant-garde to the America public. The New-York Historical Society is celebrating the transformative event’s centennial with “The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution,” a wide-ranging exhibition that includes approximately one hundred works from the original presentation, by such innovative and influential European artists as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Edvard Munch in addition to such American painters and sculptors as Childe Hassam, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, James McNeill Whistler, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Sloan, and Charles R. Sheeler. “The Armory Show at 100” delves into the fascinating behind-the-scenes battles between Davies, Kuhn, J. Alden Weir, Walter Pach, Guy Pène du Bois, and the National Academy through quotes, postcards, and letters that detail the controversial selection process and purpose of the show while also placing it firmly within the context of the sociopolitical climate and evolving culture (including literature and film) of early-twentieth-century New York City as WWI loomed on the horizon.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, “Pastoral Study,” oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, 1897 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Many of the works on view, arranged thematically in clever ways, are simply sensational: Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” Matisse’s “Blue Nude,” “The Red Studio,” and “Goldfish and Sculpture,” van Gogh’s “Mountains at Saint-Rémy” and “La salle de danse à Arles,” Redon’s “Silence,” Bellows’s “Circus,” Ryder’s “Pastoral Study,” Eugène Delacroix’s “Christ on the Lake of Genesareth,” Degas’s “After the Bath,” Munch’s “Madonna,” Charles Henry White’s “The Condemned Tenement,” and Francis Picabia’s “The Procession, Seville.” The free audioguide adds additional insight to the lasting importance of “The Armory Show,” while the catalog features thirty-one essays, with contributions from curators Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt along with Leon Botstein, Avis Berman, Barbara Haskell, Francis M. Naumann, Casey Nelson Blake, and others. “Criticism, both for and against modern art in the exhibition — now considered one of the most important art exhibitions ever mounted in the United States — was impassioned, and it seemed as if everyone from the most seasoned collector or established artist to the uninitiated viewer had an opinion,” Kushner writes in her piece, “A Century of the Armory Show: Modernism and Myth.” The thoughtful, well-organized show continues through February 23, with timed tickets available in advance, which is definitely the way to go to avoid the lines. As a bonus, the New-York Historical Society will be open on Monday, February 17. (Next month, the Armory Show comes back to town, running March 6-9 at Piers 92 and 94 as part of Armory Arts Week, but it’s nothing like its namesake.)

DEGAS, MISS LA LA, AND THE CIRQUE FERNANDO

Edgar Degas, “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando,” oil on canvas, 1879, (© National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY)

Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Through May 12, $10-$15
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org

The arrival of Edgar Degas’s lovely 1879 painting “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” on these shores is reason enough to cheer. But curator Linda Wolk-Simon has taken the canvas, on loan from the National Gallery in London, and made it the focus of the wonderful exhibit “Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando,” continuing at the Morgan Library through May 12. Shown at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1879, the painting depicts popular circus performer Miss La La suspended in midair, her teeth clenched on a rope. The Prussian-born Miss La La, who was also known as the Black Venus and La Femme Cannon, among other nicknames, is like an angel rising to the heavens, her angled limbs and white boots and costume echoing the big top’s unique architectural structure, something that Degas actually struggled to re-create. The lines and colors of the rope, the windows, the arches, the dress, and her body come together in spectacular fashion, albeit with a gentleness that was probably not apparent at the live performance itself, which Degas attended several times. No other circus or audience members are shown; it is as if the viewer is experiencing a private show performed only for them. Degas chose to paint this act instead of another of Miss La La’s highly touted tricks, in which she uses her teeth to hold up a cannon weighing more than 150 pounds while it fires away, perhaps because this one is more elegant and spiritual. Hanging in the middle of the far wall on the second floor of the Morgan, the painting is surrounded by preparatory sketches, books, posters, letters, and related works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henry-Gabriel Ibels, and Tiepolo that place Degas’s masterpiece in historical context while also revealing his fascinating creative process. It all comes together in a kind of artistic three-ring circus, highlighted by a dynamic centerpiece that deservedly rises to the top.

THE STEINS COLLECT: MATISSE, PICASSO, AND THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Tisch Galleries, second floor
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 3, $25
212-570-3949
www.metmuseum.org

Like last year’s “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore” exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the Met’s “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” does an extraordinary job revealing the fascinating life of a family dedicated to the love of art. In the first decade of the twentieth century, siblings Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein, along with Michael’s wife, Sarah, moved to Paris, where they became entranced by the work of such artists as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, and Edgar Degas. Although not wealthy, the upper-middle-class Steins had some extra money from the family’s old clothing business and real estate holdings, so they decided to spend whatever they could on up-and-coming artists whose work they could afford. Soon they were showing off paintings by the relatively little-known Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, hosting Saturday salons, and counting among their friends Claribel and Etta Cone, art dealer Ambroise Vollard, art historian Bernard Berenson, and such artists as Henri Manguin and Picasso and Matisse, whom they famously introduced to each other in 1905-6. The Met exhibit ranges from works that are known to have directly influenced the Steins to want to start collecting art to the many paintings that ended up hanging on their walls, complete with photographs and a site-specific video projection that shows exactly where they were hung in their Paris apartments. Leo, at one time an aspiring artist, and Gertrude, who became a famous and controversial writer, wrote often about their adventures in the art world, so the accompanying text is filled with delightful quotes that display the likes and dislikes of the siblings. “All our recent accessions are unfortunately by people you never heard of so there’s no use trying to describe them,” Leo Stein wrote in 1905, “except that one of those out of the salon [Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’] made everybody laugh except a few who got mad about it and two other pictures are by a young Spaniard named Picasso whom I consider a genius of very great magnitude.”

But Leo grew unhappy later on with the direction Picasso was taking, at the same time that he was not thrilled with Gertrude’s growing relationship with Alice B. Toklas. “Both [Picasso] & Gertrude are using their intellects, which they ain’t got, to do what would need the finest critical tact, which they ain’t got neither,” he wrote in 1913, “and they are in my belief turning out the most go’almighty rubbish that is to be found.” In the 1930s, Gertrude admitted, “It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the uneasiness once felt when one first looked at all these pictures on the walls.” And what pictures they are hanging on the walls of the Met in a smartly curated display, highlighted by Matisse’s revolutionary “Woman with a Hat,” Picasso’s justly famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, Cézanne’s “Bathers,” and three versions of “La Coiffure” by Manguin, Matisse, and Picasso. The exhibition also includes Jo Davidson’s sculpture of Gertrude Stein (another cast of which sits in Bryant Park), family photographs, a painting by Leo Stein and drawings by Sarah Stein, a clip from the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, home movies of Sarah and Michael Stein at their villa designed by Le Corbusier, and Gertrude’s handwritten will. In conjunction with “The Steins Collect,” the Met will be screening a series of related films, including Perry Miller Adato’s Paris the Luminous Years on May 29 at 2:00 and Jill Godmilow and Linda Bassett’s Waiting for the Moon, about the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Toklas, on May 31 at 2:00.

SHERRIE LEVINE: MAYHEM

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 29, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

Walking through Sherrie Levine’s expansive “Mayhem” at the Whitney, one is overcome by a warm feeling of familiarity that is enhanced upon further examination of the unique conceptual world the American artist has created. For more than thirty years, the Pennsylvania-born Levine has been exploring ideas of ownership, gender, class, authenticity, and the creative process itself through painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. By reappropriating, repurposing, and recontextualizing existing imagery, often through dramatic acts of repetition, Levine brings up questions of artistic reproduction, art history, and how time and place influence perception. Taking works by Edgar Degas, Alfred Stieglitz, Piet Mondrian, Walker Evans, Marcel Duchamp, Gustave Courbet, Constantin Brancusi, and many others, Levine breathes new life into them, bringing them into the modern age and offering new ways to see them while wholly making them her own. For “After Walker Evans 1-22,” Levine photographed seminal WPA pictures taken by Evans and arranged them in a grid on the wall. For “Fountain (Madonna),” she cast a bronze urinal, combining Duchamp with Brancusi, and placed it in a vitrine to emphasize its artistic value. For the “Melt Down” series, Levine used a computer program to reproduce works by Mondrian, Monet, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, turned each into a monochromatic color field, and then filled canvases with that new color. In “La Fortune (After Man Ray),” she took a billiard table out of Man Ray’s “La Fortune” surrealist painting, creating four life-size replicas and placing them in a room, turning the Whitney into a pool hall. And in “Newborns,” Levine re-created a pair of Brancusi’s “Newborn” sculptures, one in black, one in white, and placed each on a grand piano, based on how she saw a Brancusi sculpture displayed in a photograph of a British collector’s home, bringing the private sphere into the public. “Mayhem” is not arranged as a chronological retrospective; instead, it forms a fascinating journey through the mind of an artist who lays bare the process behind her conceptual work, creating a very different kind of “group show” by a single artist.

As a bonus, you can find Man Ray’s original 1938 “La Fortune” painting in the current “Real/Surreal” exhibit (through February 12), the second in the Whitney’s ongoing reexamination of its permanent collection as it prepares for its eventual move downtown. The exhibition also features works by Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, George Tooker, George C. Ault, Louis Guglielmi, Rockwell Kent, Charles Sheeler, Yves Tanguy, and others depicting scenes that are not quite as realistic as they might initially appear. Also at the Whitney right now are “Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein” (through February 12) and “Aleksandr Mir: The Seduction of Galileo Galilei” (February 19), in which the Polish-born Swedish and American artist attempts to reconstruct Galileo’s gravity experiments by building a tower with tires.