Sebastiao Salgado, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC - Migrations

Sebastiao Salgado: Migrations
Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
June 29 - August 24, 2001

The Yancey Richardson Gallery presents an exhibition of work by the internationally renowned photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Coinciding with Sebastiao Salgado’s large-scale exhibition at the International Center of Photography, Migrations documents the seismic shift in human populations around the world. For this most recent project, Sebastiao Salgado photographed migrants, refugees and displaced persons over a seven year period in 40 countries. His work captures the late 20th century phenomenon of whole cultures being displaced. Sebastiao Salgado documents Latin American and Asian peasants abandoning rural poverty for the promise of the megacity. The work includes images of the Hutu escaping from Rwanda into Zaire, the Bosnia refugees fleeing the Balkan strife, and the assimilation of the Amazonian Yanomani Indians.

Sebastiao Salgado states, "People have always migrated, but something different is happening now. For me, this worldwide population upheaval represents a change of historic significance. We are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, produce, communicate, and travel. Most of the world's inhabitants are now urban. We have become one world: in distant corners of the globe, people are being displaced for essentially the same reasons."

Sebastiao Salgado was born in Brazil in 1944. He was educated in Brazil and later received a Ph. D in economics. He began working as a photojournalist in 1973 and later worked with the Magnum Photo Agency. Aperture published An Uncertain Grace in 1990 and Workers followed in 1993. He has been honored with several prestigious awards including Photographer of the Year by the International Center of Photography and received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. Most recently Sebastiao Salgado won the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography. He has been the subject of largescale solo exhibitions at major museums around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum for Photographic Arts in San Diego among others. 

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.yanceyrichardson.com

Les Galeries d' art contemporain en France

Le Département des Etudes et de la Prospective du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication publie Les galeries d'art contemporain en France. Portrait et enjeux dans un marché mondialisé. Cet ouvrage, réalisé par Françoise Benhamou, Nathalie Moureau et Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux, économistes et chercheurs à l'Université Paris I - Matisse - LES, est édité à La Documentation française. L'ouvrage résulte d'une étude quantitative et qualitative menée auprès des galeries françaises d'art contemporain. Il en dresse un portrait économique, révélant une situation fortement marquée par la crise du début des années 1990 et par la mondialisation du marché de l'art. L'enquête met en évidence dans ce contexte la fragilité des galeries et les difficultés qu'elles rencontrent pour assurer la promotion d'artistes encore peu connus, leur mission essentielle. Cet ouvrage s'interroge également sur le rôle des pouvoirs publics, tant en matière de réglementation que de soutien, sur les effets de leur action et la perception qu'en ont les acteurs. Il comble enfin un vide dans la connaissance du fonctionnement du marché de l'art contemporain, et pose la question du rôle et de l'avenir des galeries d'art contemporain dans un environnement en pleine mutation. L'étude s'ordonne en quatre chapitres - Les galeries d'art contemporain : des microentreprises très vulnérables - De nouvelles sources d'incertitude - Vers un marché oligopolistique ? - Nécessité et ambivalence du rôle des pouvoirs publics. Les galeries d'art contemporain en France. Portrait et enjeux dans un marché mondialisé Françoise Benhamou, Nathalie Moureau, Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux Département des Etudes et de la Prospective, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication La Documentation française 216 pages, 18 €

Trenton Doyle Hancock, James Cohan Gallery, NYC - The Legend is in Trouble

Trenton Doyle Hancock

The Legend is in Trouble

James Cohan Gallery, New York

June 21 - July 28, 2001

James Cohan Gallery presents the first New York solo show of Texas-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. This exhibition, titled The Legend is in Trouble, features four large-scale paintings as well as a series of drawings. Hancock's work unfolds as a rich autobiographical epic, which is both tragic and operatic.

Central to the mythology of Trenton Doyle Hancock's work is "Mound #1" also known as "The Legend," a half-human, half-tree mutant whose impending death is the subject of the latest chapter in Hancock's ongoing apocalyptic saga. The Mound is a passive bulging mass of fake black and white fur, and bubble gum pink acrylic paint whose innards of moundmeat are seething from his wounded body. The forces of veganism have overwhelmed him. Loid, Painter and Torpedo Boy, three alter egos in Trenton Doyle Hancock's mythology attempt to save both his physical and spiritual presence.

Three of the large-scale canvases are intentionally hung with the bottom edges draping the floor, creating a theatrical space in which the viewer is thrust into Hancock's drama. The two other critical aspects of Hancock's work are language and the landscape. Language serves to create an almost operatic score of rantings, mumblings and chants into the visual structure of the paintings. Nature has an animistic power in Trenton Doyle Hancock's world, the battle between good and evil takes place in his forests of utterances.

Trenton Doyle Hancock has received numerous awards including a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York and the Camille Hanks Cosby Fellowship for African-American Artists from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2000 Hancock was the youngest artist to be included in the Whitney Biennial in New York. Hancock's first solo museum exhibition will open in August 2001 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and will travel to The Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth in October 2001. Trenton Doyle Hancock is currently a Core Fellow at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is currently on view through June 24 in the exhibition Freestyle at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY

533 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.jamescohan.com

Konrad Kramer, Zabriskie Gallery, New York - Experimental Photography from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s

Konrad Kramer: Experimental Photography from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
June 18 - August 3, 2001

Zabriskie presents the first gallery exhibtion exclusively devoted to the photographic work of KONRAD CRAMER (1888-1963). Recognized primarily as a Modernist painter who synthesized prevailing Cubist theories with an American sensibility, Konrad Cramer is most known for pastoral canvases that were variants of abstraction and representation. His photographs retain this "indigenous" aesthetic. In silver prints dating from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, he experimented with various techniques and printing methods that resulted in luminous effects such as solarizations of still-lifes, nudes, and layered abstractions of recognizable objects.

Konrad Cramer was born in Wurtzburg, Germany and influenced early on by the Munich Expressionists, more commonly known as the "Blaue Reiter" (Blue Rider), the avant-garde group founded by Wassily Kandinsky. He began his distinguished career after moving to America in 1911, having married an American art student. 

By 1913, he had established himself with a pioneering series of abstract paintings, rendering in a loose, free-flowing style using oil, watercolor, and ink. After the first world war, his style evolved into a Cubist-derived aesthetic, combining the flat, multi-angled geometry of synthetic Cubism with old master techniques and classically-rescusitated theories such as Hambridge's neo-Greek formulations. His interest in photography was effected by his friendship with Alfred Stieglitz and other Modernists, in whose progressive circle he also traveled. 

After the disillusionment brought on by the Depression of the thirties, and with the advent of the handheld Leica camera in 1934, Konrad Cramer turned more seriously to photography. In the 1940s he took numerous exposures of nudes and still-lifes, capturing them in both a direct and manipulated manner - usually through tinting, photogram, and solarization. Some of Konrad Cramer's abstractions from the 1950s were produced by placing crumpling cellophane between two polaroid lenses, a mixture that imparted a layered and refracted quality to the images, breaking up space and relining planes to create a depth dimension, thus altering spatial perception and revisiting the Cubist aesthetic.

Having divided his time between Manhattan and Woodstock, it was at the latter where Konrad Cramer later founded and directed the Woodstock, New York Art Association and the Woodstock School of Painting. By combining the idyllic elements of a rural landscape with the urban vitality of New York City, he successfully fashioned an individualized view of the American experience. 

Zabriskie Gallery exclusively represents the estate of Konrad Cramer.

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

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890
The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
June 17 - September 9, 2001

Spontaneous, "unfinished," and seemingly painted before a fleeting scene, the works of the Impressionists were originally hailed and condemned as a radical challenge to art. The revolutionary import of these now-familiar paintings might be summed up by the title of the work that gave the movement its name-Impression: Sunrise by Claude Monet, shown in 1874 at what became known as the first Impressionist exhibition. Since then, hundreds (if not thousands) of exhibitions have been devoted to Impressionism and its principal figures--yet none has brought together the various paintings that might be called "Impressions."

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has assembled just these works--and taken a closer look at what was most daring about a revolutionary art movement--in the exhibition Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890. The exhibition presents 77 paintings by the artists most closely associated with Impressionism (Monet, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley); by notable precursors (Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Honoré Daumier, Théodore Rousseau); and by a major successor, Vincent van Gogh.

Organized by the Clark Art Institute in association with the National Gallery, London, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Impression has already been hailed as "a highly important show" by the International Herald Tribune. The exhibition is curated by Richard R. Brettell, a leading international scholar of early modern art, who is Professor of Aesthetic Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Brettell conceived the exhibition, wrote the catalogue (published by Yale University Press) and selected the works, which are drawn from more than fifty public and private collections in Europe and the United States, including the Clark's own renowned holdings.

"We have seen so many Impressionist paintings so many times that we have all but forgotten the risks that their makers took," notes Richard R. Brettell. "This exhibition proposes an experiment in looking, which focuses on the most radical but least-understood aspect of Impressionism: the evidence of the painter's hand, as seen in works that appear to be rapid transcriptions of shifting subjects. We bring together these works in the belief that the most benignly attractive movement in western painting deserves to retrieve a little of the oomph that it had in the 19th century."

"This exhibition includes many of the most beautiful and evocative 'Impressions' painted in France over three decades of the late 19th century," states Michael Conforti, Director of the Clark Art Institute. "But, more to the point, it returns our attention to the qualities in these paintings that were most vital, and to some most threatening. By re-examining these works in their technical as well as thematic dimensions, the exhibition recaptures an essential characteristic of Impressionist painting--the seductive charm of speed--and makes a fundamental new contribution to the study of this crucial movement."

What Is an "Impression"?

The "Impression," as defined by Brettell, was not necessarily painted quickly, but it was done in such a way as to look quick. Painted directly--worked on the canvas without preparatory processes or intermediate steps--these pictures boasted of the artist's spontaneity. They also suggested an accord between the time span represented in the picture and the time that the artist had spent painting. Among the most celebrated examples--on loan from The Art Institute of Chicago--is Manet's 1864 The Races at Longchamps, in which the rapid gestures of the painter's hand portray a horse race that rushes headlong at the viewer, and is finished in an instant.

As Richard R. Brettell points out, Manet courted "an aesthetic of beautiful gestures and elegant construction," which had its roots in the art of Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, van Dyck, Hals, Fragonard, and Delacroix. His canvases boast of a masterful fluency of hand. By contrast, the Impressionists who were Manet's followers were derided in their own time for the seeming awkwardness of their work. They "made paintings that strain to hold together in the midst of a virtual chaos of gestures," Richard R.Brettell says. "For Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Renoir, the beauty of the painted mark was not of primary importance. Rather, the urgency and sheer energy of its application were more important than elegance." This "aesthetic of the Impression" was soon taken up in extreme form by van Gogh, whose works have had "a unique ability to engender other powerful vanguard forms of action painting," from Fauvism to German Expressionism to the works of the New York School.

Tour and Catalogue

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890 was first exhibited at the National Gallery, London (November 2000-January 2001) and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (March-May 2001). The exhibition is presented in North America only at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

When first shown at the National Gallery, Impression was hailed by Richard Dorment of The Daily Telegraph as "the show of the year." Philip Hensher, writing in The Mail on Sunday, described Impression as "sublime," saying "it looks to me very much like the best Impressionist exhibition I have ever seen;" and Souren Melikian of The International Herald Tribune found Impression to be a "highly important show," offering a "drastically new approach to the understanding of Impressionism."

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title, published by Yale University Press in association with the Clark Art Institute. The 240-page book, illustrated by 115 images in color and 65 in black-and-white, features a text by Richard R. Brettell with individual chapters on the Impression in 1874; performative painting and the intellectual origins of the Impression; Manet and performative painting; Monet and the development of the Impression; Morisot, Renoir and the sketch aesthetic; Sisley and graphism; Degas and the Impression; Caillebotte and Pissarro; and van Gogh.

Impression and the Clark Art Institute

Richard R. Brettell developed the exhibition Impression and wrote the catalogue during a residency at the Clark Art Institute. As one of the first participants in the Clark's Visiting Scholars program (now called the Clark Fellows), he was at the Clark in summer 1997, giving a seminar on "Reading Individual Works of Art" and completing his work on the Oxford History of Modern Art. He has been a frequent participant in research and academic programs at the Clark.

The Clark Art Institute has drawn on both its strengths, as a museum and a research center, in organizing Impression. Over the past decade, the Clark has earned a reputation for developing exhibitions with both broad public appeal and a basis in challenging and original scholarship. Among them have been Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent; Drawn Into the Light: Jean-François Millet; Degas and the Little Dancer; and Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930. Many of these exhibitions, like Impression, incorporate important works from the Clark's renowned collection.

THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE
225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267
www.clarkart.edu

Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, Masterpieces at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

Renoir to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

1 June - 29 July 2001

The great names in modern French art, including Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Monet, Modigliani, Derain and Picasso, are showcased at their finest in Renoir to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.

This spectacular exhibition, comprising 81 paintings, is on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales before touring to the National Gallery of Victoria on Russell.

These are paintings from a legendary collection founded by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Guillaume, whose remarkable achievement was to persuade wealthy Parisians that avant-garde art was a highly desirable status symbol. He was the man who made collecting modern art the smart thing to do. Guillaume’s widow Domenica, who subsequently married mining tycoon Jean Walter, bequeathed the Walter Guillaume Collection to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris where it has been on view since 1984.

The collection perfectly evokes the era between the two World Wars, when there was a desire for an affirmative form of modern art that reconciled tradition with innovation, popular culture with a cosmopolitan sophistication, simplicity with opulence, pleasure with intellectual rigour.

Paul Guillaume’s collecting over a twenty year period from 1913 until his death in 1934 at the age of 42, reflects the tastes and the passion of the times – a wonderful survey of 50 years of early 20th century ‘great French painting’. Guillaume’s taste was adventurous – he was an early champion of African art, viewing its aesthetic qualities over ethnographic interests. He discovered and exhibited for the first time in Paris young and bold avant-garde artists such as de Chirico, Soutine, Utrillo and Modigliani, well ahead of their wider appeal, and acquired for his own collection some of Picasso’s, Matisse’s and Derain’s most daring paintings.

Paul Guillaume did not come from a wealthy and cultivated background, nor was he interested in simply supplying works of art for customer demand like other art dealers. Instead he actively promoted aspects of the artistic and cultural life of Paris, providing moral and material support to artists, interpreting the art of his time for his contemporaries. Guillaume was celebrated by the artists he supported – for instance in Modigliani’s portrait of him the words Novo pilota, or ‘new helmsman’ identify the sitter as being at the forefront of modern art.

Paul Guillaume’s will bequeathed the collection to the Louvre, but gave his widow Domenica complete ownership of the works during her lifetime and the ability to dispose of them as she saw fit. Although she continued to house the collection, she sold works to finance her second husband Jean Walter’s business interests. On Jean Walter’s death, the wealth he had amassed enabled her to add significantly to the Guillaume collection. Her legacy was to moderate the “primitivist” thrust of the collection, and to enrich it with more works by Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Sisley and Gauguin.

Paul Guillaume’s premature death prevented his dream of opening a museum of modern art from being realised. Domenica Guillaume-Walter honoured his intention by negotiating for their combined collection to be housed in the Tuileries Gardens in the Musée de l’Orangerie. These negotiations were only completed in 1963, with the state taking possession in 1977 following Domenica’s death. Jean Walter played no part in the development of the collection, although Domenica named it in honour of her two great loves.

Major renovations currently being undertaken at the Musee de l’Orangerie have enabled the tour of this exhibition.

Following viewing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Renoir to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris will tour to the National Gallery of Victoria on Russell, 10 August to 30 September 2001.

An exciting addition for visitors to the exhibition is the inclusion of three paintings from Claude Monet’s famous Water Lilies series, on loan from Galerie Larock-Granoff in Paris.

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH OF WALES

Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney

www.agnsw.com.au

Coílín Rush, Laura Buckley, Robbie O'Halloran, Bart O'Reilly, Alice Peillon, Tadhg McSweeney at Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Groupsix

Coílín Rush, Laura Buckley, Robbie O'Halloran, Bart O'Reilly, Alice Peillon, Tadhg McSweeney : Groupsix

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

29 May - 23 June 2001

The perennial call signalling the death of painting is constantly undermined by the raft of graduates from international Art colleges who persist in the exploration of that medium. Those young artists who choose ‘painting’, with all its limitations, associations and assumptions specifically interest the Rubicon Gallery. The six artists in this exhibition are in their early twenties and graduated or will graduate later this year from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin. They approached the gallery as a group, mindful of the rich tradition they have inherited, but determined not to be bound by it. These six artists are concerned with the hierarchical aspects of painting; subject matter, materials, presentation and meaning. All six artists agree that media images, the theory and practice of abstract formalism and an interest in the materiality of paint itself are their core concerns, yet their final images vary drastically.

Laura Buckley, from Galway, graduated with a first class honours degree in painting from NCAD last year. She is twenty four. Her work mediates between painting , sculpture and photography and combines accepted artist quality materials with non-art objects. Laura creates a series of relationships between these individual elements in her work and re-writes general perceptions of space, surface and ultimately of painting itself.

Tadhg McSweeney, born in Dublin is twenty two and will present for his degree in painting in mid-May this year. Tadhg explores surface, sometimes working from found objects (drawn to their shape, texture and surface quality) he scrapes back and adds to the under painting in search of images. Maps, machines and landscapes are implied and narratives often suggested, but the meaning of the image remains somewhat cryptic.

Originally from Waterford, Robbie O’Halloran, twenty six, achieved a first class honours Degree in painting from NCAD and is currently preparing for his Masters later this year. His interest is resolutely in issues of contemporary abstract painting. He is relentless and ruthless in editing his mark making, composition and palette to make an impression that addresses existing norms but is both innovative and challenging.

Bart O’Reilly is a twenty five year old artist from Dublin and a first class honours graduate from NCAD. He bases his work firmly on mass media images, (primarily moving and still projected segments from film and television). The content is significant but subverted and his subdued palette and treatment of surface creates further discord in our reading of the image. Finally he uses text, in the form of titles, to re-emphasise the subject or content and creates a conflict in our expectation from the final image.

Alice Peillon is from Dublin, she graduated with first class honours from NCAD and is twenty four years of age. Her images are carefully constructed combinations of shapes, patterns and colour. She extracts independent elements from a variety of sources; botanical drawings, fabric patterns and architecture which she then edits and re-deploys freely in her iridescent thickly painted surfaces.

Coílín Rush is a twenty four year old artist from Dublin and a graduate in painting from NCAD. His work deals with television as a metaphor for experience. He refers not only to the content of received material but also, to some degree to the surface quality of the transmitted image and thus explores the nature and context of our relationship with information.

On the whole this is an extremely satisfying survey of the painting practice of young artists and a validation for this gallery of the interest in the medium.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie