Andrew Kennedy at Sara Meltzer's On View..., NYC

Andrew Kennedy
Sara Meltzer's On View..., New York
October 28 - December 4, 1999

Andrew Kennedy have his second solo show with Sara Meltzer's On View… Andrew Kennedy explores the relationship between formalism, minimalism and abstract expressionism as he continues to investigate the conventions of painting. His latest series literally reveals the construction of each work of art.

Created from a variety of materials, including: plywood, plaster, lead, printers' ink and bondo among others, Andrew Kennedy builds the pieces as a carpenter would. The rich monochromatic surfaces are built up layer-by-layer resulting in painted constructions of considerable depth. Untitled (no. 52) consists of 99 individually painted squares, each layered with varying hues of deep lustrous blues, which were then overpainted with white to create a blocked out geometric calendar-like surface.

Andrew Kennedy's sole plywood installation exists as a floor painting revealing the artist's continued interest in creating a dichotomy between the inherently rudimentary aspects of construction and carpentry coupled with the subtle nuances and expressive nature of sculpture. Kennedy's dedication to the materials he employs enables him to create sculptural and painterly works imbued with an ephemeral nature.

Andrew Kennedy was one of four artists included in Abstraction in Process II curated by Irving Sandler and Claudia Gould at Artists Space in 1998. He was also awarded an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School. He is a graduate of Cooper Union.

SARA MELTZER'S ON VIEW...
588 Broadway, Room 612, New York, NY 10012
www.sarameltzer.com

Richard Patterson, James Cohan Gallery, NYC - New Paintings

Richard Patterson: New Paintings

James Cohan Gallery, New York

October 22 - November 27, 1999

James Cohan Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by British painter Richard Patterson. This exhibition of recent work marks the artist's first solo show in New York and coincides with Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in which Richard Patterson is represented by four earlier paintings.

In this new body of work Richard Patterson transforms a small three-dimensional toy soldier into an action figure of heroic proportions. The process of the transformation is central to Richard Patterson's work. He begins with a toy soldier, layering the surface with paint thereby concealing and distorting its original form. After photographing the altered figure, in which he has manipulated both the scale and the focal point, Richard Patterson meticulously paints images which attain, in one critic's words, "hallucinatory clarity".

There is an inherent contradiction in Richard Patterson's painting. Employing a photorealistic style, they depict an abstraction. There exists a quality of "precise abstraction" that leaves one ambivalent about the figure's status in reality. While they are seductively painted, incorporating a lush palette, the figures verge on the grotesque. In Patterson's hands an innocent toy soldier mutates into a hauntingly surreal character.

Richard Patterson was born in Surrey, England in 1963. He attended Goldsmiths College in England and first came to the forefront of the British contemporary art scene in 1988, showing in the critically acclaimed exhibition Freeze. More recent exhibitions include: Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1997; About Vision, a touring exhibition of New British Painting at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art in 1996; ACE!, an exhibition of the collection of the British Arts Council organized in 1996; among others. His paintings are included in numerous private and public collections in the U.S. and Europe. Richard Patterson lives and works in London.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY

533 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.jamescohan.com

Postwar American and European Abstraction @ LACMA, LOs Angeles - Gestures: Postwar American and European Abstraction from the Permanent Collection

Gestures: Postwar American and European Abstraction from the Permanent Collection

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

October 10, 1999 - January 2, 2000

In conjunction with the first full-scale retrospective of major American painter Lee Krasner (1908–1984), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—LACMA—presents an exhibition that explores post World War II Abstract Expressionism in the United States and the concurrent movement of European art informel, also known as lyrical abstraction. It is the first large-scale exhibition of postwar abstraction completely drawn from LACMA's permanent collection. On opposite sides of the Atlantic, the two movements are both characterized by an extreme individualism and highly innovative form and content, making deliberate breaks with tradition. For the latter half of the twentieth century, European postwar art has been overshadowed in the U.S. by the dominating focus on abstraction expressionism. The end of the twentieth century provides a timely opportunity to reexamine these two movements in a single exhibition. Fifty paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures from the museum’s permanent collection trace the ideological and formal parallels and differences between art produced in the United States and Western Europe from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Abstract Expressionism and art informel emerged independently of one another in the mid-1940s and flourished during a redefining period. After World War II, the cultural environment in the United States was, by today’s standards, extremely nationalistic, and Abstract Expressionism was viewed by many artists, critics, and historians as evidence of America’s long-awaited supremacy in the field of modern art. By comparison, much of Western Europe lay in ruins and culturally fragmented, with many artists fleeing to America. In Europe, much of the success of art informel can be attributed to the fact that it was seen as a fundamental break with tradition and a viable response to the oppressive authoritarianism that had led to the war.

Artists working independently on either side of the Atlantic were responding to the same social and political events. They reacted to the horrors of fascism and the Holocaust; the atomic bomb revealed further dimensions of irrationality. Artists explored the disciplines of anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, and looked to Surrealism and the power of automatism as a means of more authentic, spontaneous expression.

Michel Tapié, the influential Parisian critic who coined the term art informel in1950, promoted the movement’s impulse towards gestural abstraction as a radical new beginning of "un autre," or "something else." In 1951, Tapié and artist Georges Mathieu organized a groundbreaking exhibition entitled Vehemences Confronteés (Opposing Forces). This was the first time that canvases by artists associated with art informel, such as Hans Hartung and Jean Riopelle, were shown with examples of Abstract Expressionism from the United States, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Almost fifty years later, the current exhibition reexamines the positions of Abstract Expressionism and art informel by showing significant works from LACMA’s permanent collection. This selection of well known as well as rarely seen, yet important works reveals relationships between the two movements. The dynamic black and white swaths of Franz Kline, the silent, saturated color fields of Mark Rothko, and the spontaneous gestural compositions of Jackson Pollock can be seen alongside the aggressive, sweeping lines of Hans Hartung, the bold black bands of Pierre Soulages, and a vibrant landscape by Nicolas de Staёl. The installation includes a selection of etchings from a portfolio never before displayed at LACMA, printed at Atelier 17, an internationally known graphic-arts workshop that attracted both United States and European artists.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Curator: Jill Martinez, curatorial assistant, modern and contemporary art at LACMA.

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.lacma.org

Lee Krasner, LACMA, Los Angeles - Retrospective Exhibition

Lee Krasner

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

October 10, 1999 - January 2, 2000

Lee Krasner, the first full-scale retrospective of the major American painter LEE KRASNER (1908–1984) since her death, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The traveling exhibition comprises sixty paintings, collages, and drawings on loan from major collections around the world. Together, these works—many of them not publicly exhibited in decades—present the complete trajectory of Lee Krasner’s work. Organized chronologically, the exhibition begins with the artist’s early figurative work of the 1930s and includes important examples from all phases of her career, including the magisterial series "Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See."

While Krasner was the only female painter associated with the first generation of the New York School, for many years she was known primarily as the wife and artistic follower of Jackson Pollock. This exhibition makes her critical contributions to Abstract Expressionism vividly clear, while demonstrating her ongoing artistic dialogue with a diverse range of artists, critics, and writers—including Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, among others—and showing that while she was in fact influenced by Pollock’s work, she clearly influenced him in turn. In embracing the work and ideas of others as a source of her own creativity, Krasner rejected the romantic and distinctly male Abstract Expressionist notion of the alienated individual as the wellspring of artistic expression. Her work thus brings an important feminist perspective to the discussion of Abstract Expressionism, affecting our views not only of her own painting, but of that of others as well.

Lee Krasner begins with a self-portrait painted in 1930. Created in order to fulfill a requirement of the conservative National Academy of Design, where Krasner was studying, the painting establishes many of the themes that would remain constant throughout her career. She depicts herself in the center of the picture, standing outdoors as she works on her canvas. The lush woods, fields, and wildflowers by which she is surrounded point to the artist’s lifelong interest in the fecundity of nature, while her central position alludes to her place as an integral part of it. Finally, Krasner’s powerful presence in the self-portrait, especially notable in her intense stare, points to the central role of the self, seen in relation to others, that informs so much of her work.

Works from the 1940s include eight examples of Krasner’s well-known "Little Image" series, initiated c. 1946-47 and continuing until 1950. While this series was influenced by Pollock’s "Sounds in the Grass" series, of 1946, and his drip paintings begun later that year, the small-scale "Little Image" paintings are far from imitations of Pollock’s work. Early works in the series, for example, such as Noon, of 1947, are painterly mosaics. This heavily impastoed work, in which the image seems to bleed off the edge of the canvas, is Krasner’s equivalent to Pollock’s Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance, of ca. 1946. In Krasner’s work, the strokes of paint simultaneously represent themselves and the artist’s creative process.

In the early 1950s, Krasner began ripping or cutting apart her own and Pollock’s works and recombining them into an important group of monumental collages. When these were exhibited in 1955, critic Clement Greenberg referred to the show as one of the most important exhibitions of the decade. The present exhibition includes five of these collages, including Bald Eagle and Bird Talk, both of 1955, which are salient examples of the dialogue with other artists that Krasner carried on in her work. The large-scale Bald Eagle, for example, which includes an eagle-like profile at its center, incorporates torn pieces of Pollock’s 1950s ink drawings. In Bird Talk, aspects of de Kooning’s style are evident, although the work is definitively Krasner’s, with her dissonant colors and personal iconography.

In 1956, just before leaving for Europe, Krasner painted Prophecy. The painting’s centralized male-female hybrid, consisting of three legs, two torsos, and several heads, is a powerful and complex image. An incised eye in the upper-right corner adds a mysterious sense of foreboding. (When Krasner received a call in Europe informing her of Pollock’s death, she returned to New York to find Prophecy still on the easel.)

Lee Krasner includes eight paintings from the major series known as the "Earth Green Series," begun soon after Pollock’s death in August 1956 and worked on until 1959. Birth, of 1956, was one of the first works that Krasner completed after Pollock died. Like Prophecy, this painting contains a menacing eye in the upper right, although here it is joined by several other eyes. Birth consists of large breasts and swelling shapes that evoke pregnancy and childbirth. Yet Lee Krasner clearly thought of these as violent, even dismembering events, for the body parts are fragmented and strewn across the canvas. Sun Woman II, painted the following year, has a significantly more positive view of fecundity than Birth. The painting’s red, rounded forms, while more abstract than in Birth, are in much greater harmony and are juxtaposed to natural-looking, green shapes.

After her mother’s death in 1959, Lee Krasner’s art changed radically. She limited her palette to blacks, whites, ochers, and browns to create the "Umber and White Series," which she also called "Night Journeys," because they were painted at night while she suffered from insomnia. The title of one of the paintings in the series, The Eye Is the First Circle, derives from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay "Circles," in which he discusses the need for humans to enlarge their sense of self and understanding of the universe. In fact, it was not until the painting—a large work marked by a seeming whirlwind of brushstrokes—was finished that Krasner noticed that many eyes peer out from the canvas.

Named for the earth goddess, Gaea (1966) is a large work that includes a weeping profile—which may signify Gaea—other female forms, and a large egg. It is painted in a dissonant combination of pinks, purples, and reds, but does not include the green that would be expected in a painting of this title. This powerful work combines the pain inherent in Birth with the chaotic feel of the "Night Journeys" works.

Palingenesis (1971) returns once again to the subject of fecundity. Named for the Greek word for rebirth, the painting, in reds, greens, ocher, and black, is more restrained than much of Krasner’s earlier work. Marked by sweeping rhythms and well-defined forms, it shows clear evidence of Lee Krasner’s familiarity with the cutouts of Matisse.

In 1976 Krasner again made a radical shift in her art. Inspired by a group of her early drawings, made while studying with Hans Hofmann in the 1930s, she embarked on the series that came to be known as "Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See," five examples of which are on view in the exhibition. Some of the charcoal on the old drawings—which had been left for decades in a barn on her Long Island property—had smudged, while other drawings had left reverse impressions on the paper that covered them. After reviewing the drawings, she chose the best ones for framing and used the remainder, including the reverse impressions, for collages. Yet unlike her earlier, monumental collages, the ones in this series are disjointed, with a dissonance between the codified look of the Hofmann-school drawings, or fragments of drawings, and the overall composition.

By using early drawings to create new works of art, and by emphasizing the disjunction between the drawings and the composition of which they are now a part, these superb and complex works, at once dense and fragmented, represent a critique of modernism and a belief that the past must be reviewed and reworked in new work. As such, they straddle both modernism and postmodernism. The titles of the works in "Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See," such as Imperative, Imperfect Subjunctive, and Present Conditional, attest to the importance of time in the series, and to the connection of art to language, which younger artists at the time were exploring as well.

The exhibition closes with three works from the last four years of Lee Krasner’s life. One of these, Between Two Appearances, of 1981, combines collages of dripped paint with representations of heads. By cutting the drips out of earlier works and commingling them with new painting, Krasner gives them the self-conscious quality of a quote, again incorporating an important element of postmodernism. And once again, she mixes the past and present to create a bold new work.

Les Krasner

Exhibition catalogue

Catalogue: Lee Krasner is accompanied by a catalogue that includes an extended text by Robert Hobbs, with ninety-two full-color and thirty-four black-and-white illustrations. Drawing on his ongoing research, as well as in-depth interviews with Krasner’s friends and associates, Hobbs offers a fresh look into the artist’s past, her personality, and her artistic contributions, drawing a rich picture of Lee Krasner and the context in which she worked. The 224-page volume is available in softcover for $29.95 at the LACMA museum shop. The hardcover edition, distributed internationally by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., is available for $49.50.

This exhibition was organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and was curated by Robert Hobbs. 

LACMA Coordinating Curator: Carol S. Eliel, curator of modern and contemporary art

After Los Angeles, the exhibition travels to the Des Moines Art Center (February 26–May 21, 2000) and the Akron Art Museum (June 10–August 27, 2000), before completing its tour at The Brooklyn Museum of Art (October 6, 2000–January 7, 2001).

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.lacma.org

Paul Cézanne et l'Art Moderne - Fondation Beyeler

Aucun artiste de la fin du 19e siècle n’a exercé une influence aussi marquée sur la peinture moderne que Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). La Fondation Beyeler a suivi ce thème passionnant d’une façon originale. Insérés dans une sélection de 37 peintures et 15 aquarelles de Cézanne, des oeuvres d’autres artistes de la Collection Beyeler, tels que Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Matisse, Giacometti, Rothko et Kelly sont directement confrontés aux œuvres du ”père de l’art moderne”. 

Cette exposition se place bien au sein des nombreuses expositions passées et futures consacrées à Cézanne, qui visent un nouveau sommet avec celles de Vienne et de Zurich placées sous la devise ”Vollendet - Unvollendet”. Le motif de cette exposition a été, en plus des cinq œuvres de Cézanne que détient la Fondation, un groupe de peintures externes, promises depuis longtemps. Une concentration thématique sur l’influence de Cézanne était aisée à concevoir, puisque, avec le portrait de la femme de Cézanne et la Femme en vert (Dora) de Picasso - Picasso doit avoir vu le tableau de Cézanne chez le marchand d’art Vollard - une grande analogie se trouvait déjà au sein de la Collection Beyeler. Il en résultait une intégration de l’exposition dans les locaux de la Collection, ce qui s’offrait de toute façon dans le courant des travaux d’agrandissement du musée. L’intégration de cette démonstration dans les tableaux de la Collection permet aussi de placer celle-ci sous un éclairage nouveau depuis l’ouverture du musée en automne 1997. 

On a pu développer une quinzaine de juxtapositions d’oeuvres de Cézanne avec celles de ces autres artistes de la Collection Beyeler - des confrontations qui n’ont pas besoin d’être justifiées par des relations théoriques, mais qui persuadent par la simple observation. L’arc s’étend des cubistes Braque et Picasso, qui appartiennent aux premiers admirateurs de l’esthétique de Cézanne et, passant par Klee, Léger, Mondrian et Giacometti, conduit vers les comparaisons surprenantes du Paysage bleu de Cézanne avec la composition tardive de Mark Rothko ou du Portrait du Gustave Geffroy de Cézanne avec le relief mural constructiviste d’Ellsworth Kelly. 

Les oeuvres de Cézanne, qui sont parvenues à Riehen grâce à des prêts généreux de collections privées et de grands musées, peuvent aussi être comprises comme exposition Cézanne originale, qui regroupe toute l’œuvre de 1866 à sa mort en 1906, avec tous les genres, qui vont des personnages au paysage, en passant par la nature morte et le portrait. Son œuvre de jeunesse constitue une introduction et témoigne de sa réflexion sur les œuvres d’artistes antérieurs, qu’il a pu abondamment observer au Louvre. Mais il a pu bénéficier de précieuses perspectives de la part de Camille Pissarro, qui lui enseigna l’”impressionisme”. Cependant, le Cézanne que nous connaissons commence en 1875, époque depuis laquelle la fonction d’une œuvre artistique n’est pas seulement de fournir une réplique de la réalité, mais de produire une réalité indépendante. L’ordre idéal de la nature est remplacé par l’ordre des éléments figuratifs. D’autres innovations qui sont indissolublement liées à son nom, sont par exemple la planéité de l’image ou la thématisation de la vision elle-même. Ce sont ces innovations qui ont valu au persévérant artiste provençal la haute considération de ses collègues. Ainsi Henri Matisse l’appelait-il ”le Bon Dieu de la peinture”. Ce sont aussi ses collègues qui achetèrent ses premières oeuvres et même son maître Pissarro en possédait une quinzaine. 

Dès 1900, c’est-à-dire après plus de trente ans de travail acharné, les innovations de Cézanne furent reprises par des artistes plus jeunes. Les fondements érigés par son œuvres pouvaient être utilisés très différemment, que ce soit par des transformations originales, soit par des développements, soit par suite de malentendus. Ce sont justement ces aspects que l’exposition étudie de façon exemplaire. 

Un programme varié de manifestations accompagne cette exposition et analyse les différents thèmes. En outre, des films sont continuellement diffusés sur la vie et l’oeuvre de Cézanne.

Fondation Beyerler - Exposition spéciale : Cézanne et l’Art Moderne

Avec des œuvres de Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Klee, Matisse, Mondrian, Giacometti, Rothko, de Kooning et Kelly

10 octobre 1999 - 9 janvier 2000 

Heures d’ouverture: du lundi à dimanche, de 10 à 18 heures, chaque mercredi jusqu’à 20 heures.
Fermé les 24 et 25 décembre 1999

Sol LeWitt: Concrete Block, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY

Sol LeWitt: Concrete Block
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY
October 10, 1999 - January 2, 2000

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents "Concrete Block," works by the American artist Sol LeWitt (b.1928), one of the main representatives of Minimalism and subsequently Conceptual art. Organized by P.S.1 director Alanna Heiss and P.S.1 senior curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this exhibition maps Sol LeWitt's art-making process, from preliminary drawings, followed by precisely crafted wooden models, to completed outdoor cinder block sculptures, with one work rising more than 21 feet high.

Throughout his artistic career, Sol LeWitt’s work has explored ways in which shapes and numbers can be arranged through repetition, variation, and permutation. His art is often comprised of simple grid-like geometric forms and open modular structures designed in infinite combinations. Sol LeWitt began to design models for outdoor public sculptures in the early 1980s. In 1985, the first cement "Cube" was built in a park in Basel. Since then, interpretations of these concrete block structures have been created in various locations around the world. Sol LeWitt: Concrete Block focuses on this particular body of work with completed structures designed specifically for P.S.1’s outdoor courtyard and exhibited alongside preliminary drawings and models in the museum’s second floor gallery.

P.S.1’s outdoor galleries will feature two new outdoor "monuments." These sculptures by Sol LeWitt, both entitled "Concrete Block," are made of 8" x 8" x 16" cinder blocks, a common, inexpensive building material. The larger structure, an irregular aggregation of towers made up of 563 cinder blocks, points to the shared grounds as well as the differences that exist between sculpture and architecture. A second structure, also made of cinder blocks, will be exhibited in the small outdoor gallery neighboring its larger counterpart. 

The second floor gallery is devoted to 17 wooden models surrounded by 60 drawings on the adjoining walls. The varying geometric configurations of these models highlight Sol LeWitt’s interest in excluding a rational system of order to determine the heights of his outdoor structures, and his preference to create a system that is balanced between the logical and illogical. Keeping with the basic principles of Conceptual art, this unraveling of the different stages of art-making shifts the viewer's attention from the sole contemplation of the finished work to a more complex understanding of the thought process that lies behind it.

In an attempt to both explore the history of LeWitt's public projects and to record his long-lasting relationship with P.S.1, the artist will recreate "Crayola Square," a Crayola crayon wall drawing originally created in 1971 at the Brooklyn Bridge Event. The event was organized by P.S.1 founder and current director Alanna Heiss, and was the inaugural exhibition for the organization, The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, known today as P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. "Crayola Square" is on view in the basement of P.S.1.

A major retrospective of Sol LeWitt’s work will open on February 18, 2000 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and travel to New York in November, 2000, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Elsewhere in New York, Sol Lewitt is currently showing drawings at Paula Cooper Gallery, and his wall-drawings have been included in the Museum of Modern Art’s "MoMA2000" exhibition (opening October 7) and in the second half of the Whitney’s "American Century" exhibition (open September 26).

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
www.ps1.org

Anne Desmet, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester - Towers and Transformations. A Retrospective Exhibition

Anne Desmet: Towers and Transformations
A Retrospective Exhibition
The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester
1 October - 28 November 1999

Anne Desmet is one of the most original talents in contemporary printmaking. Her wood engravings and collages show a unique imagination as well as an abundance of technical skill.

Central to her work is a vision of architecture, often depicted in minute detail. Anne Desmet attributes this partially to prolonged stays in hospital as a child when the artist passed the time making detailed pencil drawings of her surroundings. A year spent in Italy inspired the many prints featuring Roman and Italian buildings. The multi-layered aspect of Italian cities is shown with ancient ruins co-existing with the modern. Anne Desmet explores the themes of change, decay, and regeneration, with some of her subjects undergoing amazing transformations in a series of related images, like looking at a flickbook or a series of film stills.

Anne Desmet was born in Liverpool in 1964, and was a student at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford from 1983-86. Subsequently she studied at the Central School of Art and Design in London and held a scholarship at the British School in Rome.

The exhibition is touring the UK and was organised by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and supported by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and Southern Arts. An illustrated catalogue is available at Zwemmers, the Gallery Shop.

THE WHITWORTH ART GALLERY
The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6ER
www.whitworth.man.ac.uk

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

October 5, 1999 - January 9, 2000

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents an exhibition of 98 images by CARLETON WATKINS (1829-1916), America's greatest landscape photographer. Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is the first large-scale examination of an often under-recognized artist. The exhibition includes more than 85 mammoth prints, including work from his famous series of the pristine and then virtually unknown Yosemite Valley, as well as many other lyrical views of the American West.

At the height of his career, Carleton Watkins was a leader in his field. His photographs helped convince Abraham Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Bill in 1864 — a tacit recognition of the necessity of natural conservancy in a climate of rampant development, and an important precedent in establishing the present system of national parks. The photographs were exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exposition, where they were awarded a first-prize medal, and were later seen by Napoleon III. More than a century later, his images still create a visceral impact, effectively pulling the viewer into the scene by means of artistic devices such as radical framing, deep-space perspective, and intruding foreground objects — the same devices used contemporaneously by modernist painters such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.

The photographs in the exhibition are drawn from museum, corporate, and private collections throughout North America. In addition to Carleton Watkins's large-format prints, the exhibition includes several immense panoramic pictures — works made of large prints placed side-by-side to orchestrate a vast sweep of visual terrain — and many stereo views. Stereographs — two small photographs mounted together that, when placed in a special binocular view, give the illusion of three-dimensional depth — are displayed in the exhibition not only in original Victorian-era stereoscopes, but also and more extensively in a novel interactive computer presentation.

Born and raised in Oneonta, New York, Carleton Watkins settled in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, taking up the still-new medium of photography in the mid-1850s. On the East Coast, reports of the massive California landscape had taken on mythic proportions, and accounts of colossal mountains, giant trees, expansive deserts, and a vast ocean were considered improbable by many. Watkins himself was struck by the immensity of the Western landscape, and aspired to capture the vastness and grandeur of its space and scale. As confirmation of stories emerging from the West — and to help render comprehensible the size and proportions of the trees, rock formations, mountains, and waterfalls in his photographs — statistical measurements of these natural wonders often accompanied his images or were included in their titles.

In the early 1860s, Colonel John Frémont, the explorer who mapped the American West with his friend Kit Carson, enlisted Carleton Watkins to photograph his land and mines. It was this association with Frémont that first led Watkins to photograph Yosemite, resulting in some of his most famous work. Recognizing that the scale of the valley required exceptional preparations, Watkins had a cabinetmaker fashion a huge camera capable of holding negatives 18 by 22 inches in size. The resulting pictures were lush in detail, visually coherent, and psychologically compelling. By December 1862 the views were the talk of New York. There, and in San Francisco, they were displayed in galleries and collected by scientists, investors, mining engineers, homesteaders, and tourists.

"Watkins managed to capture the physical magnitude and visual textures of Yosemite with a grace and intelligence unsurpassed today," said Maria Morris Hambourg, who curated the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and is Curator in Charge of its Department of Photographs.

In 1867 the photographer traveled to Portland, Oregon, and up the Columbia River, making several images that have since become icons of Western landscape photography. Views such as Cape Horn near Celilo (1867) express the faith of Carleton Watkins's generation of Americans in the continuing westward advance of civilization. More than just an illustration of Manifest Destiny of the local railroad's route, it achieves an artful balance between the valley etched by the river and the railroad laid down alongside it, recognizing the providential harmony of nature and man in this particular place.

Through his childhood friend Collis Huntington, he became the unofficial photographer for the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads in the 1870s and 1880s and was allowed to travel free along their lines. As the rampant laying of railroad tracks penetrated the continent, Carleton Watkins aligned his photography with the changing perceptions the train brought to the landscape.

With increased competition and the economic crash of the mid 1870s, Carleton Watkins's financial fortunes turned. In the wake of his bankruptcy he spent long periods on assignment out of San Francisco, traveling to Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Agricultural assignments in Sonoma, the San Gabriel Valley, and Kern County resulted in such memorable images as Arbutus Menziesii Pursh (1872-78) and Late George Cling Peaches (ca. 1887-88), both of which document the thriving new industry made possible by irrigation farming in areas serviced by new rail lines.

He continued to expand the range of his activity in the 1880s, and his abstract vision found new, unconventional subjects for a broadening audience. One of his last commercial projects involved documenting the new dams and waterways of the Golden Gate and Golden Feather mines in Butte County, California, in 1891. For these final images he returned to his trademark mammoth camera and wet-plate negatives. One of the views stands out as a remarkable symbol of the intrepid Carleton Watkins: at the foreground of Gold Feather Mining Claim, No. 9 (1891), silhouetted by the bright sun, is the shadow of the photographer himself in a rare self-portrait with his giant camera.

Stereo Views: The 19th Century Meets the 21st

With the exception of photography itself, the most important and popular visual technology of the 19th century was the stereograph. Watkins made more images in stereo than in any other format, inventing pictures with spectacular three-dimensional effects. In the 1850s, stereo views were a widespread, inexpensive, mass-marketed form of entertainment, and a stereo viewer and basket of cards was to be found in every proper Victorian parlor. A selection of original stereo cards are displayed in the exhibition.

The Howard Gilman Gallery, the final room of the exhibition, also contains 12 computer viewing stations that utilize cutting-edge technologies — designed especially for this exhibition — to simulate the stereoscopic effect. The viewing stations provide access to approximately 200 stereo cards by Watkins, organized by year, subject matter, and region. Using special eyeglasses with liquid crystal lenses that synchronize with the computer via a transmitter, visitors see the selected images in three dimensions. The software interface for this unusual presentation was designed by the multimedia firm Perimetre Design using stereo-imaging technology developed by StereoGraphics, creators of the stereo-viewing system for the Mars Pathfinder, essentially employing 21st-century innovations to bring 19th-century images back to the broad public for whom they were originally created. Silicon Graphics 320 Visual Workstations and StereoGraphics CrystalEyes Eyeware were contributed for this exhibition.

Publication: Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is accompanied by a catalogue featuring over 100 tritone plates — including four gatefolds illustrating Watkins's rarely reproduced panoramas — and 20 duotone illustrations. An introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg, a scholarly essay by Douglas R. Nickel, Associate Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and biographical material by Peter E. Palmquist, an independent scholar and Watkins biographer, are included. The catalogue is available in softcover ($35) in the Metropolitan Museum's book shop. A hardcover edition ($60), copublished with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., is also available at US booksellers.

Exhibition itinerary: The exhibition originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and subsequent to its New York viewing will be shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from February 6 through April 30, 2000.

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and with special cooperation from the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception was curated by Douglas R. Nickel and Maria Morris Hambourg.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org