Word as Image Exhibition @ Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena - Organized by Alex Kaczenski

Word as Image

Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

Through February 5, 2024

Liubov Popova (Russian, 1889–1924)

The Traveler, 1915

Oil on canvas

56 x 41-1/2 in. (142.2 x 105.4 cm)

Norton Simon Art Foundation

Llyn Foulkes (American, b. 1934)

Skull Rock, 1983

Oil on wood panel

20-3/8 x 20 in. (51.8 x 50.8 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Kati Breckenridge, Ph.D

The Norton Simon Museum presents Word as Image, an exhibition showcasing 20th-century artists who experimented with letters, words and symbols as visual motifs. Culled from the Museum’s collection, the objects on view offer humorous and thought-provoking encounters between pictorial and linguistic modes of expression. Artists whose work is in the exhibition include Pablo Picasso, Liubov Popova, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Llyn Foulkes, Robert Heinecken, Rafael Canogar, William Gropper, Ynez Johnston and others.

At the beginning of the 20th century, words appeared as elements in avant-garde compositions, where they were used to break down distinctions between art and daily life. In Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with Bottle of Marc (1911), splintered lines and shapes reinvent the genre of trompe l’oeil still-life. Only the legible letters “E,” “vie” and “Marc” prompt the viewer to perceive the central object, a bottle of brandy, and recognize the composition as a café scene. In Liubov Popova’s Cubo-Futurist painting The Traveler (1915), snippets of Russian words like журналы (zhurnaly), meaning journals, and II кл, meaning second class, evoke a train’s physical environment. Partial bits of text parallel the fragmented appearance of Cubist and Futurist abstraction while capturing the dynamism of early 20th-century modernity. 

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931–2006)

Recto/Verso, 1/5, 1988

Silver dye bleach photogram

Image: 10-1/4 x 6-7/8 in. (26 x 17.5 cm); Sheet: 20 x 16 in.

(50.8 x 40.6 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Darryl Curran

© The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago

As the century progressed, Pop and Conceptual artists responded critically to their social and cultural climates by inventing visual forms, sometimes co-opting contemporary cityscapes full of billboards and graffiti-covered walls. Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha evoked Los Angeles through prints of monumental architectural letters, as both considered the city’s signage part of its essential identity. Similarly, Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup series (the Museum’s edition is dated 1968) appropriates the visual language of mass production and typographic design to blur the distinction between fine art and advertisement. Language also serves as an inside joke for many works in the exhibition, like Robert Heinecken’s photogram Recto/Verso, 1/5 (1988), which offers a critique of fashion magazines and beauty standards. Here a single legible headline, “A Neutral Presence,” ironically accompanies a distorted image of reversed text and superimposed women’s bodies, thereby interrupting the passive consumption of mass media.

Rafael Canogar (Spanish, b. 1935)

The Earth 14, 1969

Lithograph

30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Anonymous Gift

© Rafael Canogar

John Cage (American, 1912–1992)

Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, 1969

Silkscreens (8) on plexiglass set in a wooden base,

edition 39 of 125

14-3/8 x 20-1/8 x 10-5/8 in. (36.5 x 51.1 x 27.0 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mrs. Judith Thomas, 1970

© John Cage Trust

The exhibition features artworks that engage linguistic and art historical themes simultaneously. In Arthur Secunda’s kaleidoscopic lithograph Cathedral Voices (1969), inspired by Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen cathedral, intentionally illegible letters conjure the acoustic and optical experiences that one may have inside a religious building. John Cage, in his own nod to art of the recent past—Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel (1969), an homage to the great conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp—collaborated with printers, researchers and a graphic designer. The resulting sheets of Plexiglas are printed with fragmented letters that appear to float and fall in a kind of three-dimensional typographic symphony. Designed so that it could be reassembled to create new visual compositions, it likewise uses words and letters as a means of interrogating the creative process.

William Gropper (American, 1897–1977)

Untitled (Unfinished Symphony I), 1967

Lithograph

18 x 14 in. (45.72 x 35.56 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Anonymous Gift

© Estate of William Gropper

Ynez Johnston (American, 1920–2019)

Travels of the Sage Narada: The Other World, 1958

Color etching with poem by John Berry

19 x 15-3/4 in. (48.3 x 40.0 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. Robert A. Rowan

© Ynez Johnston Berry

Spanning the comical to the political to the conceptual, Word as Image calls our attention to how we are constantly “reading the image” in and out of museum spaces. Many of the artworks express ambivalence about the meaning and legibility of the text contained within, emphasizing instead the formal appearance of letters or numbers. As such, artists challenge us to consider language and image anew, by positioning words as an essential part of visual culture.

Word as Image is organized by Alex Kaczenski, the Museum’s graduate intern for the 2022-23 academic year. It is on view in the Museum’s Focus Gallery on the main level.

NORTON SIMON MUSEUM

411 West Colorado Boulevard

Pasadena, California 91105

www.nortonsimon.org

WORD AS IMAGE @ NORTON SIMON MUSEUM / AUGUST 11, 2023 – FEBRUARY 5, 2024

Amazonski @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - A selection of works by women artists of the Russian Avant-Garde

AMAZONSKI
Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich
June 8 - September 8, 2019

Galerie Gmurzynska presents “AMAZONKI,” a selection of works by women artists of the Russian Avant-Garde. With this project, Galerie Gmurzynska consolidates one of its main programmatic lines, dedicated since its origins in 1965 to women artists – a pioneering approach for that time.

After putting together several solo shows on women artists, Krystyna Gmurzynska organized the acclaimed exhibition “Women Artists of the Russian Avant-Garde” in 1979, the first ever exhibition to concentrate on the women of the Russian Avant-Garde. More recently, the Malaga branch of the State Russian Museum hosted the well-received show “Graphic works by Russian Women Artists from the collection of Krystyna Gmurzynska,” still on view until September 2019.

The exhibition in Zurich features some of the most remarkable women artists of the Russian Avant-Garde such as Maria and Xenia Ender, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and Varvara Stepanova. The selection of works includes both visual and applied forms of art, from graphic works and theater designs to decorative projects. 

“AMAZONKI” is the Russian word for the mythological “Amazons,” and it was first applied to the female Russian Avant-Garde artists by the Cubo-futurist poet Benedikt Livshits, who described them as “real Amazons, Scythian riders.” An iconic exhibition, entitled “Amazons of the Russian Avant-Garde” was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1999-2001, to which Krystyna Gmurzynska was invited as the only non-institutional private lender in recognition of her famed 1979 exhibition “Women Artists of the Russian Avant-Garde.”

The work of these pioneering women artists was extremely influential in the world of the Avant-Garde and was highly significant in defining modernism as a whole. There was a remarkable boom in women’s creativity in early-20th century Russia, where the rapid modernization of society changed the status of the female artist and marked the beginning of women’s integration into cultural areas that were formerly the preserve of men only. Never before in the history of Western art had women played such an important role in the formation of new art movements or the redefining and reconfiguration of cultural spaces. 

Their influence can be clearly seen throughout the 20th Century. “AMAZONKI” thus continues with a separate exhibition of the preeminent female artist of Russian origin in the US: Louise Nevelson.

Though the “Amazons” were distinguished by their tremendous energy and a great force of will, they at no time constituted a single, uniform group formed through a common support of “feminist” ideas. Possessing a bright talent, each offered her own vision and direction to the development of Avant-Garde art, playing a vital role in larger artistic circles, where they were as individualistic, productive and exceptional as their male colleagues such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov and Alexander Rodchenko.

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA
Paradeplatz 2, Talstrasse 37, Zurich
www.gmurzynska.com

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism in the Ludwig Collection, Cologne

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism in the Ludwig Collection - Project series on the Russian Avant-Garde Part 2 
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
5 February - 22 August 2010 - 20 February 2011

After the exhibition “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Cubo-Futurism and the Rise of Modernism in Russia” Museum Ludwig continued its project series on the Russian avant-garde with a cabinet exhibition of its Malevich collection. This is one of the largest collections worldwide of KASIMIR MALEVICH’s work and was exhibited for the first time in nearly twenty years. The approximately fifty graphic works, four paintings and one sculpture from all periods of his work afforded viewers an insight into the artist's development from figurative art to abstraction and back again to figuration. As part of the exhibition preparations, museum restorers subjected the four paintings to an art-technological examination. Ten suprematist works by artists from Kasimir Malevitch’s circle, Ekaterina Bugrova, Ivan Kliun, Nina Kogan, Liubov Popova, Kliment Redko, Nikolai Suetin and Ilya Chashnik, complements the exhibition and demonstrate Kasimir Malevich’s influence on his contemporaries.

The concept of Suprematism denotes both abstract composition using pure shapes as well as Malevich’s own theory of pure abstraction in art; for him, this implies “everything that goes beyond what has to this date been created in art”.

The focal point of this exhibition was the presentation of the two paintings from his Suprematist period, “Supremus No. 38” from 1916 and “Suprematist Composition” from 1915. The latter underwent substantial restoration for the exhibition and both paintings were subjected to an art-technological examination. The findings were comprehensively documented as part of the exhibition.

On the basis of the results of the examinations carried out (UV, infrared, X-ray) and based upon the history of the paintings (exhibitions; change of owner; earlier restoration measures), the state of preservation of the paintings as they are today, and also how they were created, were rendered visible. From detailed close-ups, the viewers learn how to spot certain traits of painting technique like, for example, surface structures and brush strokes – but also the impact restoration can have on the appearance of the paintings. In preparation the exhibition, also numerous works on paper by Kasimir Malevich were restored.

Like the paintings in the collection, the drawings by Kasimir Malevich too stem from various periods of his work, from his beginnings around 1903 to his famous invention and development of (abstract) Suprematism all the way to his return to figuration. This change of course in his later work has only recently become the subject of art historical research. The extensive Ludwig Collection is ideally suited to the exploration of abstraction as well as figuration. The exhibition gave a better undertanding of the development of Malevich’s work. The confrontation of his early concrete works with his later ones makes a unique comparison possible.

With over 800 works, the Museum Ludwig is home to one of the world’s largest collections of the Russian avant-garde. In May 2009, a series of exhibitions started which highlights new aspects of the collection and its main emphases. The series goes hand in hand with intensive research into the techniques used in the works, the picture frames and the dates.

Curator of the series is Katia Baudin, the deputy director of Museum Ludwig, with Emily Joyce Evans acting as assistant curator. Petra Mandt worked on the art technological examinations and their documentation.

A catalogue which documents the complete findings of the art technological examinations and features further scholarly essays on Kasimir Malevich was published with the support of the Friends of the Wallraf Richartz Museum and the Museum Ludwig e.V.

Museum Ludwig Cologne
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Cologne - Germany
www.museum-ludwig.de