Childe Hassam at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh - Prints and Drawings from the Collection

Childe Hassam: Prints and Drawings from the Collection 

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

October 4, 2003 - February 8, 2004

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935), the best-known American painter in the Impressionist style, began his artistic career in his native Boston, working first as a wood-engraver, then as an illustrator, and eventually established himself as a painter of city life. Childe Hassam began to paint in the Impressionist style after he visited Paris between 1887 and 1889. In his paintings, he portrayed life in urban America, primarily his winter home of New York City, and the country landscapes of New England, where he spent his summers. Although Childe Hassam did not consider himself an Impressionist, his paintings and drawings are as filled with color and sunlight as the works of the French painters who inspired him.

In 1915, Childe Hassam took up printmaking–first etching and later lithography. Over the course of his career, Childe Hassam produced some 375 etchings and 42 lithographs. His earliest prints reflect his interest in the effect of light on objects in the landscape. As he achieved technical mastery as a printmaker, his approach became bolder and more decorative. He exploited the inherent contrast between black ink and white paper to emphasize light and shadow.

Linda Batis, associate curator of fine arts, said "The drawings on view in the exhibition reveal Hassam's natural affinity for the graphic arts as a way to explore color and pictorial structure. They provide insight into a fundamental fact about Hassam's work. He drew and painted what he saw before him."

Childe Hassam enjoyed a long relationship with Carnegie Museum of Art and John Beatty, the museum's first director. Between 1896 and 1935, Childe Hassam exhibited more than 90 paintings at several Carnegie Internationals, the museum's recurring exhibition of contemporary art. He served on the exhibition's Jury of Award in 1903, 1904, and 1910, the year he was also honored with a solo exhibition of paintings. With the purchase of Fifth Avenue in Winter in 1900, Carnegie Museum became the first American museum to acquire one of Childe Hassam's paintings. In 1907, John Beatty purchased 30 drawings from the artist, one of the largest such groups in any museum collection. The etchings and lithographs on view are from a group of 60 prints donated to the museum by the artist's widow in 1940 in recognition of the close relationship between Childe Hassam and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Childe Hassam: Prints and Drawings from the Collection includes 72 drawings, etchings and paintings. Many of the drawings on view were studies for some of Childe Hassam's most notable paintings. Replicas of some of these are on view alongside the drawings to give visitors a sense of the correlation between the study and the final work. Correspondence between Childe Hassam and John Beatty, which reveals a friendship based on mutual enthusiasm for art, are also on view as part of the exhibition.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

www.cmoa.org

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969 at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

October 12, 2002 – January 12, 2003

The early photographs of Mel Bochner (b. 1940) are on view in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Gallery. Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969 showcases 34 important, little-known works that demonstrate Mel Bochner’s role during the formative years of the Conceptual art movement.

Mel Bochner, a Pittsburgh native and graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, is best known for installations and paintings that probe the abstract concept of measurement. In the late 1960s, Mel Bochner, like other Conceptual artists, turned away from self-expression, choosing instead to explore organized systems of thought, such as language and mathematics, through artistic practices that used minimal aesthetics.

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969 reveals the artist’s contributions to Conceptualism by highlighting the importance of his photography in the movement’s development. For Mel Bochner, photography was well suited to exploring the abstract ideas and systems behind artistic practice, which interested him more than focusing on the representation of objects.

Mel Bochner’s photographs treat a variety of subjects, investigating a range of artistic phenomena such as perspective, color, scale, and language. A number of pieces in the exhibition record Bochner’s experimentation working outside standard photographic formats, including several multi-panel and large-format works that the artist cut and manipulated. When installed several inches from a wall, these works produce an effect that blurs the distinction between two-dimensional media and sculpture.

Some pieces in the exhibition deal with mathematical ideas. 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams (1966) depicts a numerical sequence, emphasizing the whole, as well as showing the incremental changes in its creation. To do this, Mel Bochner built and photographed a series of stacked wooden blocks, emphasizing the mathematical principle of the arrangement step-by-step.

Works like Surface Dis/Tension (1968) delve into the depiction of perspective. Beginning with a photograph of a grid, Mel Bochner soaked the print and peeled away the image-bearing surace, allowing it to wrinkle while drying. He then photographed the image of the grid as it appeared on this crumpled membrane. Next, Mel Bochner made positive and negative prints of the distorted grid on the same piece of paper, simultaneously revealing the original perspective as well as its altered form.

Other works probe how presentation affects perception. H-2 (1966–67), for example, minimizes the difference between sculpture and photography. The piece is a gelatin silver print of stacked wooden blocks in a cruciform arrangement, cut in silhouette and mounted on Masonite. When viewed head-on, the work gives the illusion of depth. Viewed obliquely, the third dimension disappears. This mutability hints at Bochner’s awareness of art’s power to bridge, as well as widen, the gap between object and representation.

According to exhibition curator Scott Rothkopf, “People often think that Conceptual art is hard to understand, and that it doesn’t offer the viewers a lot visually. Bochner, however, cared very much that his photographs be as interesting to look at as they are to think about.”

The 185-page exhibition catalogue Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969, by Scott Rothkopf, includes an essay by Elisabeth Sussman and 40 color plates, as well as 119 black-and-white illustrations. The catalogue, published by Yale University Press in conjunction with Harvard University Museums, is available in the Carnegie Museum of Art Store.

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–69 was organized by Scott Rothkopf for the Harvard University Art Museums.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA

www.cmoa.org

Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Forum: Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley 

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh 

February 20 - May 9, 1999 

Carnegie Museum of Art presents Forum: Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley, an exhibition of sculpture, photographs, and paintings organized by Contemporary Art Curatorial Assistant Alyson Baker. The works in this exhibition share a common visual language, one of human colonization from the fringes of the city to the furthest reaches of suburbia. 

Artists Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, and John Wesley use a contemporary visual vocabulary that they set within a Minimalist framework that is concisely and meticulously constructed to describe the space, both physical and psychic, between the urban and rural landscapes. Unlike Minimalism, where art is reduced to its essentials, these artists bring psychological and social messages to their work, and inject their compositions with metaphorical meaning and implied narrative. They draw from the real material of the everyday world as the source for their objects and images, and their work feels immediately familiar. Robert Grosvenor’s Untitled (1997), a stone and concrete wall-like sculpture that is over 30 feet long supports two lawn balls and an arrangement in steel that appears to be a fallen television antenna. John Wesley’s painting New Work (1990) silhouettes, from a view out the window of a home too close to the airport, three jet planes looming large as they pass through the sky. Andreas Gursky’s crystalline photographs show us the worlds of recreational, residential, and industrial zones at the city’s edge.

Born in New York City in 1937, Robert Grosvenor studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Ecole Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs in France and the Universitá di Perugia in Italy. He began exhibiting his work in the early 1960s during the formative years of Minimalism and was included in exhibitions that defined the movement alongside artists like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, whose works have come to exemplify that art style.

Robert Grosvenor evolved away from the ideologies of pure Minimalism towards a more expressive visual language that is grounded in the real world. His sculptures are often arranged as abstract, geometric compositions imbued with complex metaphorical content. John Wesley was born in Los Angeles in 1928. His paintings have been exhibited extensively since the early 1960s, when he was identified with the first group of Pop artists. Since then, his work has been included in many survey exhibitions of Pop Art, with important recent solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Although John Wesley shares with Pop Art a flat, graphic presentation derived from commercial and mass market sources, his concerns have always been far more private and introspective, examining icons of middle-class America to find their emotional and psychological centers.

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1955 and was a student of the influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy. He had his first one-person show in 1987 and has since exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Andreas Gursky produces photographs that are fully conceived before the images are transcribed onto film. The subjects are not found, but are purposefully sought out. Although the photographs have the appearance, at times, of quickly executed snapshots, they are preceded by careful observation and are carefully composed and constructed. Viewed from a distance, they often have an overall form that appears minimal, monochromatic and simply structured. When viewed closely, however, the detail and sharpness of his images reveal a complex accumulation of individual parts.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

www.cmoa.org

CoBrA paintings at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

CoBrA paintings 

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

October 29, 1998 - February 14, 1999

Out of the devastation of World War II, a drive towards liberated subjectivity in the figurative styles of Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon influenced American and European art. In 1948, European artists Karel Appel, Cornelis van Beverloo (known as Corneille), and George Constant established the "Experimental Group," seeking new forms of elemental expression. Through contacts with similar northern European groups, this movement evolved into the international expressionist group CoBrA.

The CoBrA Group - comprised of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam - existed for only a few years, from 1948 to 1950, but some of the artists who become known through the group continued to achieve international acclaim. These included Appel, Corneille, Constant, Asger Jorn, Constant A. Nieuwenhuys and Pierre Alechinsky. Their unifying stylistic bond was a free, organic expressiveness in paint handling and an emphasis on imagery defined in the individual imagination.

Over the three years of its existence, the founding members and their collaborators produced ten issues of a journal entitled CoBrA and numerous exhibitions. Their efforts instigated artistic exchanges that aimed to provide organization to the loose affiliation of northern European artists.

CoBrA artists had roots in surrealist automatism, Freudian psychology and existentialism. With the French artist Dubuffet, whom CoBrA members knew and admired, they also shared an interest in anonymous, untutored art and in the everyday experience of the common man.

The exhibition celebrates the 1958 founding of the Fellows, which was organized originally as a support group to assist the museum's collecting efforts.

Dozens of important works of art have been purchased for the collection by the Fellows Fund, including works by Carl-Henning Pedersen, Alfred Jensen, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Philip Pearlstein, John Sloan, Anselm Keifer and Andy Warhol. These works are on display as part of the exhibition.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA

www.cmoa.org