Lee Bontecou at Princeton University Art Museum

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds
Princeton University Art Museum
June 28 - September 21, 2014

Although most celebrated for her forceful and influential sculptures, Lee Bontecou has employed drawing as a distinct and essential part of her creative practice since the dawn of her 50-year career. She has constantly forged a capacious and profoundly original way of making and seeing, her drawings acting as fantastic spatial reflections on how we understand our place in the world in the face of dramatic scientific and technological advances, environmental decline and geopolitical strife.

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds, the first museum exhibition devoted to Lee Bontecou’s drawings, presents approximately 45 works on paper loaned from such institutions as the Menil Collection, Museum of Modern Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, as well as from private collections. Spanning the artist’s drawing practice from 1958 to 2012, with images that either directly relate to her wall-mounted relief sculptures or are independent end products, the exhibition provides an entirely new perspective on Bontecou’s career and concerns. Drawn Worlds was premiered this year at the Menil Collection.

“This long overdue consideration of Lee Bontecou’s drawings is vital for anyone looking to better understand postwar American art,” said Princeton University Art Museum Director James Steward. “Her worldscapes merging elemental organic forms with machine-age aesthetics truly embody the artist’s anxiety, awe and ambivalence about contemporary life. As a body of work they are among the greatest, most singular artistic achievements of the past 50 years, and this exhibition affords us the rare opportunity to dive deeply into her exalted and very personal vision.”

LEE BONTECOU (born 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in New York) is known for her powerful sculptures of fiberglass, cloth and metal stretched over metal armatures. Trained at the Art Students League in New York, followed by a residency in Rome, Lee Bontecou first showed her work at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1960. Her reliefs were admired by Donald Judd, the minimal artist and iconoclast, among others. After many years of retreat from the art world—living and working in rural Pennsylvania—Lee Bontecou regained significant attention with a major museum retrospective that traveled across the United States in 2003–04. Previous exhibitions of Lee Bontecou’s work have paired drawings with her sculptures, but until now no museum exhibition has focused exclusively on her drawings.

Lee Bontecou’s complex yet accessible work has been consistently defined by the experimental nature of her technique and materials as well as by her surreal, otherworldly imagery. Her highly developed and far-reaching symbolic idiom features mysterious black holes, undulating biomorphic forms and explosive constructed geometries. According to Lee Bontecou, her project as an artist has been to encapsulate “as much of life as possible—no barriers—no boundaries—all freedom in every sense.”

The works on view in Drawn Worlds reveal Lee Bontecou’s use of soot, graphite, charcoal, pencil, ink and pastel, which the artist variously scraped, smeared, smudged or erased. Among other innovative techniques, Lee Bontecou has employed a state-of-the-art welding blowtorch to draw with soot on paper and canvas. Images that register as otherworldly fossilized landscapes contrast with shell-like forms, insects and the symmetrical decorativeness of flower drawings.

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds is curated by Menil Collection Curator Michelle White under the auspices of the Menil Drawing Institute and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring essays by White, Dore Ashton and Joan Banach about the artist and her drawing practice. Kelly Baum, Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, is coordinating the exhibition for Princeton.

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds is organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, where the exhibition was realized through the generous support of Louisa Stude Sarofim; the Brown Foundation, Inc.; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; Marilyn Oshman; Agnes Gund; and the City of Houston. The exhibition at Princeton has been made possible by generous support from the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art; the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Program Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; and the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Exhibitions Fund, with additional support from the Rita Allen Foundation.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM
Princeton, NJ 08544
www.artmuseum.princeton.edu

Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print at Princeton University Art Museum

Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print, Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Princeton University Art Museum
February 8 - June 8, 2014

Revered as one of the most emotionally powerful painters in modern art, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is also considered among the greatest printmakers of the modern period. Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print, Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York traces the artist’s process of translating his personal meditations on the anxieties of life, sexuality, and death into graphic form in arresting etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, often experimenting with the same image in more than one technique. The exhibition includes twenty-six Edvard Munch’s signature prints.

“The repercussions of Munch’s achievement—his incisive commentary on the psychological tolls of modern life—continue to be felt throughout visual art and culture,” said Museum Director James Steward. “This exhibition reminds us that it is in his prints that we may find most forcefully the raw, unfiltered emotion of his images.”

A poetic visionary and master of the idiom, Edvard Munch was influenced by the emotional insights of Vincent van Gogh as well as the vibrant color and symbolic forms of Paul Gauguin, whose Tahitian woodcuts provided inspiration for Munch’s innovative development as a printmaker. Yet while Gauguin’s woodcuts evoked an imagined Polynesian idyll, Munch turned his prophetic vision inward, capturing what he perceived to be universal experiences of modern life and often drawing from personal memories of his often tragic past. In this way, Munch might incarnate better than any other artist the tenets of Symbolism, a movement that argued that art must reject rational naturalism and move beyond physical reality to embrace the imagination, dreams, and freedom from artistic convention. Best known for his painting The Scream (1893), seen by many as the perfect embodiment of modern-day psychic distress, Munch was in turn instrumental to the development of early twentieth-century European Expressionism. His vividly haunting images have resonated for more than a century, growing more relevant to contemporary sensibilities.

Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print is organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Chief Curator Emerta Deborah Wey and Starr Figura, The Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Associate Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books. The exhibition is curated at Princeton by Calvin Brown, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM
Princeton, NJ 08544
www.artmuseum.princeton.edu

Thomas George: A Retrospective, Princeton University Art Museum

Thomas George: A Retrospective

Princeton University Art Museum

June 25 - September 11, 2005

In 2003, longtime Princeton resident Thomas George gave to the Princeton University Art Museum thirty-seven works spanning a fifty-year period so that people interested in his art might find a representative selection of it in one place. To celebrate this gift, which adds significantly to other works by Thomas George acquired previously, the museum presents the exhibition Thomas George: A Retrospective.

Consisting largely of selections from the permanent collection, together with two sketchbooks and a recent ink-and-wash drawing on loan from the artist, the exhibition covers a wide range of media and techniques. 

“The twenty-five works emphasize both change and continuity in George’s artistic development, and the integral role played by nature in his pursuit of a uniquely abstract language,” said Laura Giles, curator of prints and drawings, who organized the exhibition.

Born in New York City in 1918, Thomas George graduated from Dartmouth College in 1940, and served in the United States Navy in World War II, drawing terrain maps used in coastal invasions.  After the war he studied art in Paris and Florence on the G.I. Bill, a period represented in the exhibition by two portraits of Gino, a fellow student at the Art Academy in Florence.

Although Thomas George has continued with figurative drawings in his sketchbooks, his great interest has been landscape—mountains, sea, sky, trees, and gardens—which he has observed, described, and evoked in various locations throughout the world. 

In the mid-1950s he moved with his family to Japan to study traditional brush painting, a technique he subsequently adapted in his calligraphic views of the dramatic mountainous landscape of the Lofoten Islands, Norway, which he first visited in 1966, and of the limestone peaks of Guilin, China, where he spent five weeks in 1974 and 1976 (becoming one of the first Western artists permitted to work in mainland China after 1949).

Beginning in the late 1950s he had a series of one-man exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, where his abstract oil paintings reflect what Thomas George has described as “my goal to create a ‘new reality’ from what I see and feel.” 

In 1969 Thomas George moved to Princeton, where he has been particularly inspired by the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study. He made over one hundred pastels there between 1984 and 1996—always noting the time of day, usually early morning or early evening, as a record of the angle and color of the light.  Two of these pastels are in the exhibition, along with three earlier, shimmering examples from 1983, created in what George has described as his “color laboratories” (Monet’s garden at Giverny, and the Welsh garden of Bodnant), where he could teach himself to think and speak more fluently and expressively in color.

In a subsequent series of vibrant watercolors executed in 1998 in New Mexico, three of which are on view, Thomas George found the answer to uniting the two dominating impulses in his work—black-and-white, and color—in the strong lines, intense shadows, and spectacular hues of the mountains above Santa Fe.

Rounding out the exhibition is the recent Landscape, on loan from the artist. Executed in ink and wash, this expressive work belongs to an experimental series of largely abstract images that, in George’s words “is an assurance that life is worth living as long as there is still adventure.”

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure that includes an interview with the artist by the writer Richard Trenner and a checklist of the works on view.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM

www.artmuseum.princeton.edu

Useful Forms: Furniture by Charlotte Perriand - Exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum

Useful Forms: Furniture by Charlotte Perriand 

Princeton University Art Museum

April 2 - July 11, 2004 

French designer Charlotte Perriand is frequently named as one of the most important but overlooked modernist designers of the twentieth century.  The Princeton University Art Museum give the public a rare opportunity to view a selection of Perriand’s mid-century furniture designs in the exhibition Useful Forms: Furniture by Charlotte Perriand.

Although Charlotte Perriand has been the subject of major exhibitions in both France and England (at the Museé des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Design Museum in London), she has received virtually no exposure in American museums, and remains underrepresented in American museum collections.  The Princeton exhibition will be only the second in the United States to focus on her work, and the first to concentrate exclusively on Perriand’s mid-century designs created during the two decades following her employment in the studio of the architect Le Corbusier.

“Charlotte Perriand was an important designer who enjoyed a long and productive career,” notes Jennifer King, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, “but her later work is often overshadowed by her contributions to Le Corbusier’s atelier, where she collaborated on some of the most iconic chairs of the twentieth century.  This exhibition highlights Charlotte Perriand designs from the 1940s and 1950s—an extremely fruitful period during which she experimented with different materials and forms, and became concerned with issues of affordability.  Perriand thought good furniture design should be accessible to the average consumer, not just the wealthy elite.”

Useful Forms features six works, including the colorful shelving unit designed with the Ateliers Jean Prouvé for the dormitory of the Maison du Mexique of the Cité Universitaire, Paris, in 1952; a freeform desk from 1960; and a folding chaise-longue Charlotte Perriand designed during a trip to Japan in 1941. The exhibition also includes a rare library table designed in collaboration with Jean Prouvé and lighting designer André Salomon for the Maison de l’Etudiant in Paris. 

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure with an essay by Jennifer King, the guest curator.

“The exhibition coincides with a recent upsurge in attention to Perriand’s career, stemming from the long overdue publication of the first book-length monograph on Charlotte Perriand in English, Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living,” said Jennifer King. The book, edited by Columbia University Professor Mary McLeod, features scholarly essays by several Charlotte Perriand scholars including Princeton Professor of Art and Archaeology Esther da Costa Meyer.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM

www.artmuseum.princeton.edu

The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection at The Art Museum, Princeton University

The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection

The Art Museum, Princeton University

March 27 - June 27, 1999

The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, a landmark contribution to the understanding of Chinese calligraphy and civilization, is on view at The Art Museum, Princeton University.

The exhibition includes fifty-five major examples of Chinese calligraphy ranging in date from the third century to the modern period from the collection of John B. Elliott in The Art Museum, Princeton University, together with works on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Gest Oriental Library, Princeton University. The exhibition is also enriched by works on loan from the collections of Robert H. Ellsworth and the Richard Rosenblum family. Many of the works in the exhibition have never been published and will be on view for the first time.

Calligraphy, "the art of writing," played a formative role in Chinese civilization, where the past is treated as a source of cultural authority and legitimacy. Because the legacy of the past is transmitted through the written character, there is a personal and public reverence for writing, which accounts for calligraphy, more than painting, sculpture, or architecture, being the most venerated art form in China.

Arranged in three sections, the exhibition opens with an introduction to the origins of Chinese writing and the early formation of a public, monumental script style, in which oracle-bone writing and graphs cast in ritual bronze vessels are shown in relation to script types written in brush and ink on bamboo, silk, or paper.

The second section examines in chronological order four major stages in the development of Chinese calligraphy: the calligraphy of Wang Hsi-chih (A.D. 303-361), the most influential calligrapher in China, who elevated calligraphy to an art form and through whose influence calligraphy came to be seen as an embodiment of the mind and personality of the writer; a new, public monumental script style developed in the T’ang dynasty; the intimate, expressive calligraphy styles that emerged around scholar-artists in the Sung dynasty (960-1279); and a reformulation of a monumental calligraphy style in the Yüan dynasty (1279-1368).

The final section focuses on the calligraphy of the succeeding Ming (1368-1644) and Ch’ing (1644-1911) dynasties through the modern period, during which calligraphy styles ranged from innovative and highly idiosyncratic to a metamorphoses of past styles.

Motivated to form a collection for teaching, for the training of young scholars and the advancement of the understanding of a civilization and culture that meant so much to him, John B. Elliott, Class of 1951 of Princeton University, established one of the premier collections of Chinese calligraphy outside China. Wen C. Fong, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art History at Princeton, described the collection as "the only historically comprehensive selection of Chinese calligraphy outside China."

With John B. Elliott’s death on July 25, 1997, Princeton University lost a loyal alumnus. The impressive quality and scope of the collection is celebrated in the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue by Robert E. Harrist, Jr., and Wen C. Fong, with contributions by Qianshen Bai, Dora C.Y. Ching, Chuan-hsing Ho, Cary Y. Liu, Amy McNair, Zhixin Sun, and Jay Xu. The essays examine aspects of the culture of calligraphy from religious writing, the aesthetics of the strange or unusual, to the significance of stele, couplet, and letter formats. Introductory essays discuss the "four revolutions" in the history of calligraphy and the importance of reading calligraphy to its practice and appreciation.

The exhibition, organized by The Art Museum, will travel to the Seattle Art Museum, February 10 - May 7, 2000, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 15, 2000 - January 7, 2001.

Curators of the exhibition are Cary Y. Liu, associate curator of Asian art, The Art Museum, and guest curator, Robert E. Harrist, Jr., associate professor of art and archaeology, Columbia University, assisted by Dora C. Y. Ching, project coordinator.

THE ART MUSEUM, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

www.princeton.edu