Konrad Cramer, Ralston Crawford, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler - Zabriskie Gallery, New York

Six American Painters and the Photograph
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
January 30 - March 17, 2001

Zabriskie Gallery presents Six American Painters and the Photograph. The six are Konrad Cramer, Ralston Crawford, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler. Most recognized as prominent American Modernist painters in the former half of the century, these artists were also accomplished photographers in their own right. This exhibition includes not only the six artists' photographs, but also examples of their paintings, drawings, and graphic work.

Jack-of-all-trades Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) took up photography in 1912 as a means of livelihood, working for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Whether working with fabric, silver, glass, paint, or photography, the center of focus was always the everyday objects themselves, and their objective representation - beauty in the utility. Light was "the great designer" that extracted, through contrast, new possibilities of form. His photographs of country furniture, early Doylestown interiors, and industrial subjects such as the Ford Rouge plant, realign Cubist proportions with American heritage, suggesting a new dimension of modern art. 

Ralston Crawford (1906-1975), like Sheeler, was versatile in numerous media and worked in a mode of synthetic Cubism. He was born in Saint Catharines, Ontario, the only son of a ship captain. By way of water, he journeyed down the East coast to Latin America as a seaman for the United Fruit Company prior to settling in Buffalo, shortly after high school graduation. He began photographing in the mid thirties while traveling in Louisiana and Florida, where he encountered the factories, docks, shipyards, and cemetaries which were to thematically preoccupy his art over the next four decades. Crawford wrote that, for him, photography was an "extension" of his viewing - physical and inner - experience. As evidenced in his geometric abstractions, from industrial landscapes to bombed buildings, it was this discerning mediation of images that added dimension while bringing visual order to the temperamental and chaotic world outside. 

Another New Yorker, Ben Shahn (1898-1969), was an immigrant from a socialist Jewish family who fled czarist Russia in 1906, settling in Brooklyn in 1946. During and after the depression, Shahn's camera became a tool for his political activism and artistic practice. He engaged himself in a manner of work production that abandoned a European-inflected modernism in exchange for an American social realism, the intention of which was to effect social change. In his photographs, Shahn addressed issues such as unemployment, poverty, immigration, race and class reform. His range included pictures from group protests, to "private" activity on the sidewalks of midtown and lower Manhattan, as well as the rural Southern and Midwestern U.S. Though little recognized early on, Shahn's photographs nonetheless contributed greatly to the genre of documentary photography.

For Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992), getting hold of a camera was the beginning of another obsessive artform. As a child he had built a pinhole camera, which began his fascination with "points of light," the ephemeral, epiphanic light that suggested for him "a material awareness of spirit." Having lived through the second world war, his work was partly shaped by its aftermath of spiritual and physical uncertainty. Like Rothko and Hoffman, he related to art in a sacred manner through pure forms, primitive myths, and symbolism. His still-lifes of nature from the 1940s appear like scientific exposures of stars and flowers, while his multiple-exposed portraits are pictorialistic composites at once romantic and psychological. 

Good friends Konrad Cramer (1888-1963) and Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) were proponents of photographic experimentation, particularly with spatial possibilities of the light-drawn image. After successfully breaking away from the abstraction influenced by Cubism and the Blue Rider tones of Kandinsky, the former returned to representation and produced elegant solarizations, nudes, fractured still-lifes, and interior studies that reflected modern American imagery. Unto rural Woodstock environments he made fused application of Hambridge's neo-Greek formulations, old master techniques, and a Cubist-derived vocabulary, having subsequently turned to photography after the disillusionment of hard times in the 1930s. It was also at Woodstock in the 30s that Kuniyoshi abandoned his 8 x 10 frame camera, which he had used for commercial photography, for a new handheld. Having come to America in 1906 from Okayama, Japan, his story was one of a synthesis of European Modernism, Japanese art, and American folk art. Kuniyoshi's leisure photographs of Coney Island taken from the boardwalk were flattened picture planes that informed his paintings as they belied their Oriental influences.

With the advent of the practical Leica 35mm camera in 1935, the practice of taking photographs became a necessary "tool" for the advancement, but not usurpation of painting. At least, not at first. For all of these artists, the hierachy of mediums was superfluous in a time when photography was yet considered to be a fine art. In their eyes, painting and photography simply "accommodated" one another. As painters, these six American artists were greatly responsible for moving American art away from strict assimilation of styles, shifting modernism away from European sense and scenery to the vast urban, pastoral, and industrial landscapes which was America. As photographers, they were also pioneers of the silver print and harbingers of the camera's elevation to prominence in the art world.

ZABRISKIE GALLERY
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.zabriskiegallery.com

La Publicite Theorie Acteurs Methodes

Rubrique Livres > Etudes sur la publicité La Documentation française publie dans sa collection Les Etudes de La Documentation française un ouvrage intitulé La publicité. Théories, acteurs et méthodes sous la direction d'Eric Vernette. Omniprésente dans notre univers quotidien, la publicité représente bien souvent, sur le plan économique, 2 % du PIB des pays développés. Stratégie du désir et de la persuasion, elle fait autant appel à l'imaginaire, voire à l'irrationnel, qu'à la logique et au rationnel pour convaincre des consommateurs potentiels d'acheter des produits ou des services. L'ouvrage s'adresse notamment aux étudiants (premier et second cycles universitaires, école supérieure de commerce) et aux cadres d'entreprise. Mais il peut intéresser tous ceux qui souhaitent disposer d'une analyse rigoureuse et synthétique sur la publicité. Ce livre clarifie les différentes phases d'une campagne publicitaire abordées sous différents angles : théories de la communication publicitaire, connaissance des acteurs du marché, réflexion marketing préalable, création d'un message efficace, construction d'un media planning, grille d'évaluation d'une campagne. Illustré de nombreux exemples, de multiples schémas et encadrés, ce livre utilise un langage simple qui n'exclut pas la rigueur et la précision technique. Eric Vernette, qui a supervisé la rédaction de cet ouvrage collectif, est professeur à l'IAE-ESUG de l'Université de Toulouse I. La publicité. Théories, acteurs et méthodes Sous la direction d'Eric VERNETTE Collection Les Etudes de La Documentation française 256 pages, 19 €

Jean Poyer: Artist to the Court of Renaissance France, Exhibition at The Morgan Library, New York

Jean Poyer: Artist to the Court of Renaissance France

The Morgan Library, New York

January 25 - May 6, 2001 

The first one-man show in the United States devoted to the work of a manuscript illuminator, Jean Poyer: Artist to the Court of Renaissance France opens at the Morgan Library. Taking a novel approach to the traditional manuscript exhibition, Jean Poyer examines not only the artist's work but also his artistic roots, his contemporaries, and his competitors. Poyer, who lived in Tours, France, was active from at least 1483 until his death around 1503. He was a multitalented artist—illuminator, painter, draftsman, and designer of festivals—who worked for the courts of three successive French kings: Louis XI (r. 1461–83), Charles VIII (r. 1483–98), and Louis XII (r. 1498–1515).

Jean Poyer is drawn from objects at the Morgan Library, which has the world's largest collection of manuscripts illuminated by the artist, along with choice loans from this country and abroad. A highlight from the Library's collection is the superb Prayer Book of Anne de Bretagne, a manuscript that the French queen commissioned to teach her son the dauphin, Charles-Orland, his catechism. On loan from the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Briçonnet Book of Hours, which was commissioned by France's secretary of the treasury under Charles VIII, Guillaume Briçonnet, as a gift to his wife, is also particularly noteworthy.

Organized by Roger S. Wieck, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library, the exhibition explores Poyer's oeuvre through his early phase, his more mature styles, his workshop practices, and his influence. His mastery of perspective, subtle use of color and light, and convincing representation of the human figure show a break from the Late Gothic style. Influences of Renaissance paintings are noticeable: Jean Poyer traveled to Italy and experienced the works of artists such as Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) and Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516). Four smaller sections examine Late Gothic French illumination, the artist's predecessors, his contemporaries, and his peers and rivals. Throughout, the exhibition emphasizes connoisseurship, allowing the visitor to judge works attributed to Poyer and others.

Payment documents tell us that for Louis XI's queen, Charlotte of Savoy, Jean Poyer painted 1,031 coats of arms to be attached to the candles and torches used at her funeral. For Charles VIII he painted a schoolbook, a treatise on the Apostles' Creed, and his portrait (all three of which are in the exhibition). For Charles's queen, Anne de Bretagne, and their son the dauphin, he illuminated the special prayer book mentioned above. For Charles and Anne's ceremonial entry into Tours following their marriage, Poyer designed and supervised elaborate theatrical spectacles as part of the royal entertainment. For Louis XII, Poyer was in charge of the pageants that Tours was planning in 1498.

Jean Poyer was famous in his own time and immediately after his death. Sixteenth-century literary sources compare him, for example, to Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441). By the seventeenth century he was forgotten—as were many artists who were primarily illuminators and whose professional habit it was not to sign their work. Within the last twenty years a significant body of work has been attributed to Jean Poyer, based, somewhat circumstantially, on the fact that the art can be dated to the period of his activity as documented by payment records. One 1497 payment was for his illumination of a small Book of Hours for Anne de Bretagne. What is proposed to be the only surviving leaf from that hitherto lost commission is on view in the exhibition.

The artist's early period, in the 1480s, consists of only three known works, and they are all represented in the exhibition: the Briçonnet Hours, a tutorial volume made for King Charles VIII (on loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), and the Loches Triptych (in exact photographic reproduction). Though scarce, the work of this period reveals Jean Poyer's mastery of perspective, subtle use of color and light, and convincing representation of the human figure in space. His monumental approach is typical of the Renaissance and represents a break from the Late Gothic style of the previous generation of French illuminators. The defining difference is his firsthand experience of the works of Italian Renaissance painting.

Jean Poyer's mature period began in the 1490s and lasted until his death around 1503; during these years he was most productive and at the peak of his career. The artist's most impressive creations date from this period: the Prayer Book of Anne de Bretagne, the "Tilliot Hours," the Lallemant Missal, the "Hours of Henry VIII," and the controversial Petites Heures of Anne de Bretagne. Poyer began to use a lighter, more pastel palette, applying his colors with feathery, almost impressionistic, brushstrokes, as can be seen in the Prayer Book. His style was not stagnant, however, and many of the larger manuscripts of this mature period retain aspects of his earlier, more monumental manner. This is most evident in the "Hours of Henry VIII" and the Lallemant Missal.

Like many major artists of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Jean Poyer did not work alone but managed a workshop. Judging from the relatively few manuscripts they produced, however, his assistants were limited in number, for Poyer apparently hired only those illuminators capable of emulating his subtle style. Some manuscripts are entirely the work of assistants, while in other books Poyer would "drop in," painting part of a miniature and then allowing his helpers to complete the rest. It is not always easy to distinguish between the master's hand and an assistant's: connoisseurship is a highly vicissitudinous pursuit. The fascinating distinctions are seen in a large Book of Hours on loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a collaborative effort between Poyer and members of his shop, and a Psalter from the Bibliothèque Nationale, a creation of shop members alone.

Jean Poyer's death left an artistic power vacuum in Tours. His great rival in that city, Jean Bourdichon, expanded his own influence by stoking the production of his many (if at times indifferent) assistants. Poyer's atelier, meanwhile, collapsed with the loss of its leader. Some shop members, as well as other painters who refused to join Bourdichon's factory, decamped to Paris. Poyer's most capable assistant, referred to in the exhibition as the "pseudo-Poyer," worked in Paris till around 1520, though without huge success. The prolific Master of Morgan 85 used some of Poyer's models but had little of his flair. The influence of Poyer's subtle style was not extensive, and only one painter, the Master of Claude de France, can be considered his true artistic heir. The Hours of Jean Lallemant the Elder, on loan from the British Library in London, features the work of the "pseudo-Poyer." The Prayer Book of Claude de France, loaned by Mrs. Alexandre Rosenberg, is the eponymous work by this rare painter.

Predecessors, Peers, and Rivals

Manuscripts from the 1460s and 1470s illuminated by artists of the generation prior—both chronologically and stylistically—to Poyer are included in the exhibition. Active in various parts of northern France, all these illuminators painted in a Late Gothic style. Figures, often elegantly (if unrealistically) attenuated, occupy dollhouse spaces. Neither linear nor atmospheric perspective has been mastered. This is particularly notable in works painted by Maître François and the Master of the Échevinage de Rouen.

Jean Poyer's style, though markedly different from that of the previous generation, did not come out of nowhere. Illuminators working in his hometown of Tours in the 1460s and 1470s had certain stylistic penchants—such as their fondness for shades of lilac and plum—from which Poyer developed his own style. Most important was the presence in Tours of Jean Fouquet, fifteenth-century France's greatest painter, who opened French art to Italian influence. The exhibition includes the Hours of Jean Robertet, a rare work by Fouquet, and a Book of Hours by a Poyer predecessor known as the Master of Morgan 96.

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were busy times for French illuminators. This highly productive period was energized by increased literacy, a booming economy, and a market fueled by the competition between printed and hand-produced books. Poyer's contemporaries whose works are in the exhibition provide, with their varying styles, evidence of regional differences as well as testimony to the period's diverse range of taste. This section features the illumination of Georges Trubert, an artist working in Provence, and Jean Colombe, headquartered in Bourges.

Jean Poyer had many rivals but few peers. The Master of Jacques de Besançon worked for some of the same clients (such as King Charles VIII), but his broad style has none of Poyer's subtlety. Only Jean Bourdichon and the Master of Anne de Bretagne were Poyer's true artistic peers. As his direct competitor, Bourdichon was working in a similar style in the same town, at the same time, and often for the same patrons. A large Book of Hours with full-size paintings of flowers, for which Bourdichon was famous in his day, is included here. Also featured is the "Hours of Anne of Austria," so called because it was owned in the seventeenth century by that queen, wife of Louis XIII; the manuscript was illuminated by the Master of Anne de Bretagne, who also designed the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, now in the Cloisters, New York.

The exhibition is accompanied by two publications, both of which Mr. Wieck is the main author. The Hours of Henry VIII: A Renaissance Masterpiece by Jean Poyer, published by George Braziller in association with the Library, features reproductions of all fifty-five illuminations from that manuscript and a lengthy discussion of the artist's oeuvre ($60, hardcover; $29.95 softcover). The Prayer Book of Anne de Bretagne, published by Faksimile Verlag Luzern, is an exact re-creation of this precious catechism ($650, in leather case with a separate commentary volume included).

THE MORGAN LIBRARY 

225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

www.morganlibrary.org

Thomas Chimes, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Complete Circle

Thomas Chimes: Complete Circle

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

January 19 - February 24, 2001

Complete Circle presents the early and later work of noted artist THOMAS CHIMES: a series of metal box constructions from 1965-1973 paired with related new paintings. Thomas Chimes is best known for his portraits of fin-de-siecle literary figures painted on wood panels, which followed the box series and large-scale white portraits where the figures emerge from a glowing, mist-like background.

The intricate design of Thomas Chimes's metal boxes, with their inlaid drawings, precision gadgetry and murky peep holes are a witty and allusive synthesis of Surrealism, Art Deco, and Pop. Their sensuous curves are often paired with technical drawings and words resembling the caricatures and equations of his recent paintings.

Starting with the metal boxes, Thomas Chimes has identified with the work of the French Symbolist writer, Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), an originator of the Theater of the Absurd and a pivotal figure in the transition from Symbolism to modernism. Thomas Chimes always approaches Jarry in a conceptual vein; recent silhouettes and caricatures of Jarry are enclosed by a circle, symbolizing unity and a metaphysical aura. The paintings are small, less than a foot square, and their surfaces are subtly varied from a luminous near-white to a diffused, absorptive gray. Images and inscriptions in the paintings are built up, revised, and obscured from over twenty glazes of titantium white and Mars black paint.

Concurrent with the exhibit at Locks Gallery, Thomas Chimes has a retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland. His work is in museums across the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently exhibited a panel portrait, Portrait of Alfred Jarry from 1974.

Accompanying the exhibit is a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by David Cohen.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Chinese Photographer Rong Rong at Chambers Fine Art, New York

Rong Rong

Contemporary Photography From China

Chambers Fine Art, New York

January 23 - March 10, 2001

Chambers Fine Art presents twelve photographs by the Beijing artist and photographer Rong Rong. Many of Rong's photographs are staged in the ruins of urban Beijing, the remains of historic homes destroyed as developers forced families out in the early nineties to make way for modern buildings. Those who live in Beijing often visually tune these ruins out. They walk past them between the newer developments, treating them as urban blind spots.

In these empty lots with half destroyed homes, the once private dwelling spaces of families are now dilapidated and exposed for public viewing. The presence of a family is felt through their absence. The crumbling walls reinforce this feeling of absence. It is to these settings that Rong Rong adds torn photographs of movie stars and damaged posters of fashion models. Sometimes, the posters appear to have been left behind by former inhabitants, as if they where once part of the private home decor that is now made public. Other times, the effect is more like collage, where the insertion of a picture within a picture by the artist is very apparent. It's the juxtaposition of the images that provides tension to the art. The appearance of other photographs in these pictures of interior spaces turned inside out are like stand-ins for the human figure; it is their presence and relationship to their surroundings that suggest meaning.

On one level, the photographs appear to be a recording of a moment in history, like a photojournalist documentation of a scene witnessed. The gray tonalities of the black and white photograph with hand-dyed colors add to this historical effect. Li Xiantang, Beijing's most-renowned art critic, says Rong Rong's photographs "are both sad and optimistic, like a fairytale, he poeticizes reality. Rong Rong's pictures possess twisted beauty, they appear natural but contain a vivid contrast." 

CHAMBERS FINE ART

210 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001

www.chambersfineart.com

Deborah Oropallo: Material Handling, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

Deborah Oropallo: Material Handling

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

January 3 - February 24, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of new work by DEBORAH OROPALLO.

Colorful, life-size industrial containers and equipment fill the canvases of Deborah Oropallo's new series of paintings. Stacked metal drums and buckets with words such as "SALVAGE" painted across them are found at a chemical storage facility near to where Oropallo resides. There is an inherent contrast within the objects' unexpected beauty and structure, and the unknown substances which they contain. The underlying tension of elements of safety and survival combined with the formal aesthetic is a theme found in much of Deborah Oropallo's current and past work.

Deborah Oropallo uses a process in these paintings that she has not previously employed. She has taken digital photographs from which large Iris prints have been made, and then silkscreened over them to create textural, layered surfaces. She also uses silkscreening as a literal strategy to partially veil her imagery and offer the viewer a distanced glimpse through a screen. Unlike the previous body of work, the 2-dimensional objects in these canvases have profound volume and depth. Oropallo has a remarkable ability of transforming ordinary objects into visually resonant abstractions.

DEBORAH OROPALLO (b.1954, Hackensack, NJ) will have a traveling survey exhibition opening at the San Jose Museum of Art in October 2001, accompanied by a 120-page catalogue with essay by Jeff Kelley. Her work is currently featured in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Celebrating Modern Art: The Anderson Collection.  Deborah Oropallo received her M.A. and B.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been included in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, as well as the Corcoran Gallery of Art's 1993 Biennial Exhibition.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Adam Fuss, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - My Ghost

Adam Fuss: My Ghost

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

January 4 - March 3, 2001

My Ghost, an exhibition of work made by Adam Fuss over the last three years, is on view at Fraenkel Gallery. The exhibition is comprised of recent daguerreotypes and unique photograms made of little more than smoke and light.

As it has from the beginning, this new work by Adam Fuss deals with issues of life and death, birth, love and its loss. One gets the sense from Adam Fuss' work that he does not try to direct or manipulate these subjects which are, by their nature, ambiguous. Rather, he resolves himself to the their inherent mystery. This is largely accomplished through Fuss' photographic method which hinges on chance occurrence. In the case of his photograms which are on-view, the enigma of smoke is stilled and recorded directly on paper by a flash of light. These photographs each convey their subject in a different way; some with articulate edges and defined shapes, others with a hazy, translucent airiness.

Adam Fuss also recovers the 19th century daguerreotype process in his work. Using this form, which was largely used historically for portraiture, he portrays disparate subject matter, focusing on five main topics the body of a swan with wings extended, images of the poems of Tarkovsky (whose work has been of great import to Fuss), baptism dresses, butterflies, and self-portraits. Adam Fuss' daguerreotype work is illustrated in a recent monograph by the same name, My Ghost.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

Rembrandt at The British Museum, London

Rembrandt The Printmaker
The British Museum, London
25 January - 8 April 2001

Rembrandt was the most original printmaker of all time. In no less than 300 etchings he covered the full range of styles and subjects for which he is celebrated as a painter and draughtsman, including self-portraits, scenes from the Bible, vignettes of everyday life and character studies. The well-known Hundred Guilder Print, the Three Trees and the Three Crosses are among his most extraordinary creations. Famously experimental, he often reworked and scratched at his copper plates to improve and extend their expressive power. The results can look startlingly modern and continue to inspire artists today. 

Rembrandt's prints have been avidly collected since the day they were made and over the past two centuries the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have built up the greatest of all collections of these famous rarities. This major loan exhibition, the most ambitious display of Rembrandt's prints ever mounted, will present for the first time the highlights of both collections to provide a fully representative panorama of Rembrandt's achievements as a printmaker, from their beginnings in the second half of the 1620s until his death forty years later. Organised jointly with the Rijksmuseum and curated by leading authorities in current Rembrandt scholarship, the exhibition will show almost 200 impressions of these masterpieces of western art.

The exhibition is also the first to present the results of important new areas of research that have opened up in recent years, allowing us not only to follow the progress of Rembrandt's work on each etching, but also to determine when he revised the images. Many of his etchings can now be dated more exactly, and individual states of his prints are now precisely datable for the first time. The role played by Rembrandt's preparatory drawings and related oil-sketches, several of which are included from collections in Europe and America, is also now better understood. Providing an intimate glimpse into Rembrandt's working methods and a new understanding of his conception of his print oeuvre, these fresh insights will be presented to a wider public for the first time. 

A richly illustrated catalogue, Rembrandt the Printmaker, will accompany the exhibition, with 90 colour and 420 black-and-white illustrations (384pp.), by Erik Hinterding (University of Utrecht), Ger Luijten (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) and Martin Royalton-Kisch (British Museum), with contributions by Marijn Schapelhouman, Peter Schatborn (both Rijksmuseum) and Ernst van de Wetering (Head of the Rembrandt Research Project, Amsterdam). Exhibition Price £45 (hardback).

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Prints and Drawings Gallery
Museum's Website: www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk