Louis Kahn @ San Diego Museum of Art: The Power of Architecture

Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture
The San Diego Museum of Art
November 5, 2016 - January 31, 2017

The San Diego Museum of Art welcomes Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, the first retrospective of the American architect’s work in two decades. The exhibition presents over 200 objects related to Louis Kahn’s selected buildings and projects in the form of architectural models, plans, original drawings, photographs, films and more.

The late Louis Kahn is regarded as one of the leading architects of the 20th century. With complex spatial compositions and a mastery of light, Kahn created buildings of dignified beauty and powerful universal symbolism, believing buildings should be monumental and spiritually inspiring. Among his most famous architectural works are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX; and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Louis Kahn was an esteemed lecturer and professor at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania for many years; however, he did not experience his international breakthrough as an architect until he was nearly 60 years old, as his early work in the 1940s and ’50s was devoted to residential building and urban planning. After serving as the Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1950 and visiting ancient buildings in Italy, Greece, India and Egypt, Kahn developed his own international style. This marked a turning point in his career, and from 1960 onward he became renowned for his institutional structures: museums, laboratories, sacred edifices, a university and a legislative building. The Salk Institute, opened in 1963, is considered a modern architectural masterpiece, designed to “create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso,” as instructed by Jonas Salk, the founder of the research institute.

The exhibition begins with an extensive biographical section that displays films, personal documents and drawings to introduce visitors to Kahn’s life and work, and is followed by six thematic areas that illustrate the evolution of his work over time. Numerous sketches, study models, and archival images show the design process and building history of Kahn’s most important projects. Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture is the first time Kahn’s architectural work is enriched with a selection of watercolors, pastels and charcoal drawings created during his world travels, which document his skill as an artist and illustrator.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity to showcase the power of architecture as an art form through this immersive exhibition on Louis Kahn,” said Roxana Velásquez, Maruja Baldwin Executive Director of The San Diego Museum of Art. “We’re honored to share Louis Kahn’s artistic vision and his design process behind his many masterpieces, including the Salk Institute—a San Diego landmark regarded as one of the most inspirational works of architecture in the world.”

At The San Diego Museum of Art, Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture will be accompanied by Shape, Shadow, and Space: Photographs of the Salk Institute, an exhibition of architectural photography from students of the Woodbury University School of Architecture. The Museum will also present a symposium on Saturday, November 5, 2016, featuring Ariel Plotek, Associate Curator of Modern Art, The San Diego Museum of Art; Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review and author of the forthcoming biography, You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (due in spring 2017); and William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. The Museum will also screen the film My Architect, A Son’s Journey, presented by the director and Kahn’s son, Nathaniel Kahn.

An exhibition of the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, in collaboration with the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania and the New Institute, Netherlands, Louis Kahn. The Power of Architecture is globally sponsored by Swarovski and has been organized in San Diego by Dr. Ariel Plotek, Associate Curator of Modern Art at The San Diego Museum of Art.

The San Diego Museum of Art
1450 El Prado
Balboa Park, San Diego, CA
www.sdmart.org

Robert Irwin, Ernesto Neto & Judith Barry @ MCASD, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California

Robert Irwin, Ernesto Neto, Judith Barry
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
November 20, 2015 - February 21, 2016

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) will present three large-scale works from its permanent collection by artists Robert Irwin, Ernesto Neto, and Judith Barry at its downtown location from November 20, 2015 through February 21, 2016. The installations will fill each gallery with immersive artworks that engage viewer’s experience of physical space, light, and sound.

Robert Irwin: Light and Space

Light itself focuses and diffuses our gaze in Irwin’s environmental light installation Light and Space (2007). The piece creates a dialogue between solid architecture and empty space mediated by electric light—three forms of matter at different accelerations. Driven by an attention to phenomenological experience rather than illusion, Irwin’s work is an inquiry into the nature of perception.  Irwin’s early examinations into the nexus between what is seen and perceived with the senses, in addition to the physical conditions of a site, helped to define the aesthetics and issues of the West Coast Light and Space movement in the late 1960s. In this work—developed during Irwin’s residency in MCASD’s Robert Caplan Artist-in-Residence Studio—he uses fluorescent light tubes alone as the main triggers of a mass-less, enveloping perceptual setting. The specific objects utilized in the installation serve as a passive platform that facilitates the transformation of energy and triggers a phenomenal, visual experience. Resisting the need to jump to quick conclusions, Light and Space creates a response of pure attention and engagement.

Robert Irwin: Light and Space is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Institutional support of MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund.

Judith Barry: Voice Off

An artist and writer who trained in architecture, Judith Barry creates experiential video works in which the viewer plays an integral role. These innovative installations often explore the relationship between physical space and psychological space—and how these spaces shape us as subjects. Presented at MCASD for the first time, Voice Off (1998-99) is a two-channel video and sound installation in which videos are projected onto each side of a wall dividing the gallery. As viewers and participants, we must navigate the two spaces through a passageway in the projection. On one side, a frustrated writer grows distracted by noises and voices that he hears—figments of his imagination, perhaps. Increasingly distraught, he obsessively tries to locate the source of these sounds. On the other side, figures appear in an ambiguous, dream-like realm inhabited by a succession of characters who sing, tell stories, and enact various social scenarios. Each video suggests various manifestations of the voice—interior or exterior, sung or spoken, expressive or silenced. Taken as a whole, this multi-layered installation dramatizes complex aural and vocal cues, exploring how sound might be visualized, and how it, in turn, shapes our experience of physical space.

Judith Barry: Voice Off is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Institutional support of MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund.

Ernesto Neto: Mother body emotional densities, for alive temple time baby son

Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s monumental site-specific commission for MCASD, first presented in 2007, features immense organic forms, fashioned from suspended, translucent Lycra fabric filled with spices such as annetto, cloves, and turmeric. The installation suggests the microscopic landscape of the body at a macroscopic scale. Neto's installations contain a strong social component and an aspect of whimsy that purposefully combine architectural, sculptural, and atmospheric effects to create a specific visual and physical experience. As the viewer moves through both the gallery and the piece, they are surrounded by soft membranes and bathed in diffused light streaming down from the clearstory windows of the gallery through the translucent material. Developed in response to the light-filled, open-trellised architecture of the exhibition space, the work stands suspended between architectural and bodily space, creating a strong physical relationship with the viewer that must be experienced rather than merely seen.

Ernesto Neto is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Institutional support of MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund.

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD)
www.mcasd.org

Monumental Works by El Anatsui @ MCASD - Gravity and Grace

Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui 

MCASD, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA

March 5 - June 28, 2015

El Anatsui’s artworks embody a wide array of artistic techniques and aesthetic traditions, as well as layers of cultural meaning. Tapping into personal experience—his upbringing and education in Ghana, teaching and art making in Ghana and Nigeria, and his global travels—he creates art that represents ideas specific to his life and environment yet also speaks to universal themes of human connection and change.

Gravity and Grace features Anatsui's signature hangings composed of discarded liquor bottle caps, milk tin lids, and aluminum printing plates. Anatsui uses copper wire to connect countless units of cut and folded metal into massive expanses. The frugality of the materials and this patchwork technique suggest the mass consumption habits that his accumulations evidence, and counter the opulence of the finished objects. Whether hanging from the ceiling or on the wall, Anatsui’s works are refigured and draped anew each time they are installed. Malleable and shimmering, they bridge painting and sculpture, taking on a different form with every installation. He wishes for his art to remain fluid, reflecting the ever-changing nature of life. The exhibition's 11 metal objects, along with Anastui's wall reliefs of reclaimed wood and works on paper, will fill MCASD Downtown’s 10,000-square feet of gallery space, with the largest piece spanning 35 feet.

Embracing the African ethos of repurposing used items, Anatsui places a deep value on the human imprint that each object bears. Liquor bottle caps retain an especially potent history, not only for the hands that have touched them but as a symbolic connecting point between Africa, Europe, and the United States, owing to the key role of liquor in the colonization of West Africa and the slave trade.

Anatsui’s recent body of work has an African point of view yet cannot be culturally or geographically pinned down. His alchemical transformations connect with viewers through scale, pattern, light, and texture that, like the micro-history contained within each bottle cap, together leave a spiritual imprint on the mind.

Born in 1944 in Anyako, Ghana, Anatsui has maintained a complex relationship with traditional African art throughout his more than 40-year artistic career. Raised by a Presbyterian minister uncle, Anatsui was oriented from an early age toward Western religious ideals and modes of learning. Anatsui’s education at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana (1965-69) focused on Western art and history, since the institution continued to operate under the British education model during Ghana’s post-colonial transition.

As a result, Anatsui gained much of his knowledge of African art through direct observation of indigenous artists and independent research. While teaching art in Winneba, Ghana in the late 1960s, he studied the techniques of traditional weavers, carvers, drummers, and musicians, whose visual and musical representation of abstract concepts attracted him. Particularly inspired by Akan Adinkra cloth, Anatsui has cited the Adinkra symbol Sankofa, the notion of “looking back and picking up,” as a key concept in his practice. Though his metal wall hangings have been associated with Kente cloth, the artist does not claim it as a direct source stating, “I think that cloth has been maybe an unconscious influence.”

Leaving Ghana in 1975 to teach art at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka was an important catalyst for Anatsui. He states, “If I had lived in Ghana, my mind wouldn’t have roamed, therefore I wouldn’t have expanded my experiences.” In Nigeria, as in Ghana, Anatsui engaged with a variety of local, pre-colonial art forms. During this time, he solidified the core principles of his artistic practice: learn from local artists, use found materials, consider location and environment, embrace the metaphoric potential of artworks.

Anatsui’s art career flourished in Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s, where he was highly respected for his innovative use of materials and metaphors rooted in the history of Africa. After participating in an exhibition of African artists in the 1990 Venice Biennale, Anatsui was recognized by critics and scholars around the world. Discovering a sack of discarded bottle caps in 1999 initiated a new chapter in Anatsui’s career that catapulted him onto the global contemporary art stage. In 2010, after 35 years of teaching at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Anatsui retired to focus on his studio work.

“I’ve been to Venice four times now, twice as exhibitor and twice as a visitor. When I first went, twenty years ago, I was cast in the light of an ‘African artist,’ whereas in 2007, I was just another artist. The constraining label of being an artist from somewhere else had disappeared…. The world is beginning to realize that artists are just artists; not ‘European artists,’ not ‘African,’ nor ‘American.’ Art is not the preserve of any one particular people, it’s something that happens around the whole world.” —El Anatsui, 2011

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO

www.mcasd.org

Fazal Sheikh, Beloved Daughters, Photos Exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego

Beloved Daughters unites two projects by photographer and activist Fazal Sheikh. Both projects were created over a span of two decades, and focus on women from two specific communities in India. The first project, Moksha (Heaven), portrays the northern Indian city of Vrindavan, where dispossessed widows go to devote themselves to Krishna and seek moksha: final release from the cycle of death and rebirth. Sheikh's next project, Ladli (Beloved Daughter) portrays the lives of girls and young women in a society where, despite progressive laws, their human, civil, and economic rights are routinely suppressed. The two projects combined in this powerful exhibition provide intimate and revealing portraits of the faces and words of the old and young -- widows of great age, mothers and their children -- that paint an eloquent picture of women's prospects in modern India, a nation of 1.1 billion people. Sheikh pairs intense camera portraits with testimony from his subjects, offering a voice to those who would otherwise remain anonymous, conveying stories that are both eye-opening and thought-provoking. "Beloved Daughters is in keeping with Fazal Sheikh's other photographic projects," states Carol McCusker, MoPA's Curator of Photography. "With this body of work, however, he takes us deeper into his commitment to under-represented communities. His calm, empathetic vision enhances our understanding, also given depth by the women's voices through writing." 

About Fazal Sheikh Fazal Sheikh uses photography to create sustained portraits of communities around the world, addressing people’s beliefs and traditions, as well as the political and economic problems of particular communities. Since the early 1990s, Fazal Sheikh has focused attention on the experiences of people displaced from their homelands by a variety of causes. After photographing refugees from conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique and Rwanda, he traveled to northern Pakistan to encounter Afghans exiled by power struggles between the Taliban and the Mujahedeen. More recent projects have taken him to Brazil, Cuba and Mexico. When Moksha was published in 2005, Fazal Sheikh was awarded both a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Award. He immediately returned to India and undertook the work that became Ladli. The two projects were shown for the first time at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris in the summer of 2007. Fazal Sheikh was born in New York City in 1965 and graduated from Princeton University in 1987. 

MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 

1649 El Prado - San Diego, CA 92101 

 October 10, 2009 - January 31, 2010 

About The Museum of Photographic Arts

Lise Sarfati - Immaculate (2006-2007)

The serie Immaculate took place in California, inside Catholic educational establishments for girls. The different high schools have been carefully chosen by the artist. She looked for places surrounded by the ‘Garden of Eden’ and she found it in Monterey, Sierra Madre, Alhambra and San Diego. The student girls photographed have decided of their attitude and expression. They are still in the garden of the school, just before returning home. The idea of “the fence” is central in this serie, referring to the enclosed garden of Middle Age. Lise Sarfati breaks the idyllic vision, when she captured the adolescent girls giving way to herself on the lawn of their school. Book published by Schirmer Mosel in Spring 2009, text by Thomas Weski.

Grew up in France, Lise Sarfati lives in Paris. She obtained a master’s degree in Russian studies from the Sorbonne. She was the official photographer of the Academy des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Sarfati moved to Russia and photographed there for ten years. She received grants from both the Fiacre and Villa Medicis. She received the Prix Niepce in Paris and the Infinity award of International Center of Photography in New York for her work.

Related Post : Lise Sarfati Exhibition in Italy [08-2008]

Hokusai Katsushika, San Diego Museum of Art - The Living Line: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings by Hokusai

The Living Line: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings by Hokusai 

San Diego Museum of Art 

May 24 - August 3, 2003 

This exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art demonstrates the genius of Japan's most celebrated and prolific artist, Hokusai Katsushika (1760-1849). The Living Line: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings by Hokusai presents a fine selection of 22 original drawings and paintings from the collection of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena alongside a selection of 37 prints from SDMA's collection.

A master of the brush and a skilled draftsman, Hokusai was an extremely versatile artist producing over 30,000 sketches, paintings, and print designs during his lifetime. The adopted son of a mirror maker, he was born in Edo (modern-day Tokyo). He apprenticed as a woodblock engraver at the age of fourteen, a training rare for Japanese artists at the time, but one which proved invaluable to him later.

By the age of eighteen, Hokusai was already designing kabuki actor prints with celebrated artist, Shunsho Katsukawa (1726-1793). During this time, he became associated with the ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") school of painting, which was renowned for capturing scenes of everyday life in a realistic way. For the next twenty years, Hokusai designed ukiyo-e prints, book illustrations, and fine, limited-edition color prints known as surimono. Towards the end of his long life, he concentrated his artistic efforts on painting, signing many of his works Gakyo rojin, "Old Man Mad-with-Painting."

Fascinated by all types of painting, Hokusai studied Chinese and Western painting techniques, including vanishing-point perspective. After 1820, he began to produce his most famous series of woodblock prints: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1829-1833) and the Waterfalls series (1831-1832). Selections from both series are presented in this exhibition in addition to pages from Hokusai's One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834-1835), a three-volume collection of monochrome prints. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji marked the beginning of Hokusai's courtship of the great mountain; One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (undertaken immediately thereafter) testifies to his ambitious effort to capture Fuji from every significant vantage point and every telling context.

Although Hokusai Katsushika would go on to achieve international fame through his woodcuts, the original drawings and paintings from the Pacific Asia Museum included in this exhibition provide a rare, intimate, and immediate look at this artist's versatile hand, the source of some of the most recognizable and moving images of the people and landscapes of Japan.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA

www.sdmart.org

José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934 at San Diego Museum of Art

José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934

San Diego Museum of Art

March 9 - May 19, 2002

The San Diego Museum of Art is the opening venue for a comprehensive, internationally touring exhibition of works by the important Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, the first major exhibition in the United States of Orozco in more than forty years. José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934 explores the extensive body of work Orozco produced during an extended stay in the United States. The exhibition is organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, in collaboration with the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, the two other venues on the tour's schedule. Featuring more than 120 paintings, prints, drawings, watercolors, and preparatory studies for murals, all showcasing Orozco's revolutionary artistic vision, it is the first major exhibition to focus on his time in the United States.

"The Museum is delighted to be able to present such a significant exhibition of works by Orozco who, along with Diego Rivera, Frida Khalo, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, is counted among the most important Mexican artists of the twentieth century. With San Diego's proximity to the border, this exhibition is the perfect opportunity to build upon the Mexican-American cultural exchange Orozco and his contemporaries established some seventy-five years ago," says the San Diego Museum of Art's executive director, Don Bacigalupi.

The development of this exhibition has brought together Mexican, British, and American scholars who have made a special study of twentieth-century Mexican art and of the artistic and cultural relations between the two nations. The result is a comprehensive survey of José Clemente Orozco's work of this period, never before assembled in a single exhibition. José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934 explores the transformations in Orozco's subjects, style, and working methods, and the charged cultural climate in which he created such a diverse body of work. The exhibition also chronicles his experiences as a cultural émigré and his attempts to negotiate the complex network of art patronage in the United States. It is curated by Renato González Mello, professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and former curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, and Diane Miliotes, research curator at the Hood Museum of Art.

Beginning in 1927 José Clemente Orozco spent seven years in the United States. These years coincided with unprecedented cultural exchange between Mexico and the United States. During this time, in addition to his important murals at Pomona College, Claremont, California; the New School for Social Research, New York; and Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Orozco created a substantial body of work in other media. Viewed as a whole, his work from this period sheds light on the artist's complex creative and political development and provides an illuminating case study on the influence of Mexican visual artists in the United States.

José Clemente Orozco's contemporaries Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros also visited the United States in these years, but their stays were brief. Traveling north from Mexico to seek new patrons for their mural commissions, these three artists all confronted an unfamiliar culture and a modernity that at once attracted and repelled them. Orozco's works, including his mural commissions in the United States, were deeply affected by these experiences. His murals brought him the international recognition that he desired, and when he returned to Mexico in 1934, he did so with a strong reputation and new mural commissions in his homeland.

The works in the exhibition show the significant impact living in the United States had on José Clemente Orozco's art, resulting, first and foremost, in the production of a new and extensive body of work that covered a broader range of subjects than the artist had treated before. During this period, he continued to focus on the intellectual and social issues that had long been his central concern, but he no longer treated them exclusively in terms of Mexican subject matter. Thus visitors see alongside his paintings and drawings of the people and landscape of his native country—e.g., Colinas Mexicanas (1930) or Desfile zapatista (1931)-representations of the modern American metropolis: its skyscrapers and bridges, its workers, and those who lost their jobs during the Great Depression.

Also on view, images such as Mannikins (1931), Aquella noche (1930), and Los muertos (1931) demonstrate the artist's awareness of and engagement with contemporary art in Europe and the United States. In addition, the exhibition includes a number of preparatory drawings for the three murals he executed in the United States, providing remarkable insight into José Clemente Orozco's working method and his development of the murals from initial conception to the final product. Finally, another important aspect of Orozco's work included in the exhibition are the striking lithographs he created in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his first works in this medium.

After its presentation at the San Diego Museum of Art (March 9 to May 19, 2002), José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934, travels to the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire (June 8 to December 15, 2002) and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (January 25 to April 13, 2003). The exhibition itinerary allows visitors to view the exhibition in conjunction with nearby Orozco murals in southern California, New Hampshire, and Mexico City.

A fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, available in both English and Spanish editions, accompanies the exhibition. It features essays by a multinational group of art historians including Dawn Ades, Alicia Azuela, Jacquelynn Baas, Karen Cordero, Rita Eder, Renato González Mello, Diane Miliotes, James Oles, Francisco Reyes Palma, and Victor Sorell.

This exhibition is organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA

www.sdmart.org

The Rival of Painting: The Lithographs of Albert Belleroche at San Diego Museum of Art

The Rival of Painting: The Lithographs of Albert Belleroche

San Diego Museum of Art

February 24 - May 27, 2001

As part of the San Diego Museum of Art's 75th anniversary celebration, a special exhibition of lithographs by turn-of-the-century French printmaker Albert Belleroche (1864-1944) will showcase some never before exhibited works from the Museum's extensive holdings of this master printmaker's art. Heralded by both his contemporary critics and modern art historians, Albert Belleroche's experimental work was at the forefront of the renaissance of lithography, which began to emerge as an independent art form during the artist's lifetime.

Steven Kern, the Museum's curator of European art, has selected forty examples from the 129 Belleroche lithographs owned by the Museum for The Rival of Painting. "The variety of works chosen for the exhibition reveal the entire scope of Albert Belleroche's experimental approach to the medium of lithography. These prints document the process of lithography's transformation from a predominantly commercial medium, to one of self expression in the hands of one of its most innovative practitioners" explains Don Bacigalupi, the Museum's executive director.

Albert Belleroche lithographs: The Collection

With the exception of only two works, all of the Belleroche lithographs in the Museum's holdings were acquired through the generous donations of museum trustee George C. Kenney II, his wife Olga Kitsakos-Kenney, and their daughter Elizabeth. The Kenneys are among a generation of younger collectors and supporters of the Museum and, at twelve years of age, Elizabeth is the youngest donor of a work of art to the collection on record. All nine lithographs recently donated by Elizabeth will form part of the exhibition.

According to Bacigalupi, "The Kenneys are to be commended for making such a remarkable portion of their personal art collection accessible to the community through their generous and continuing donations to our institution. The Museum is now the largest repository of Belleroche's art in North America, rivaling such esteemed collections as those of the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the British Museum in London."

San Diego residents, the Kenneys are active art collectors, with a special interest in European art. They have donated works of art to museums and art galleries throughout the country. In addition to the Belleroche lithographs, the Kenneys have also given the Museum two paintings by Belleroche, nine etchings by Rembrandt's student Ferdinand Bol as well as many other works on paper by old master and 20th century artists.

Albert Belleroche and the Parisian Art World

Albert Belleroche was born in Swansea, Wales in 1864 to a family of French aristocrats who had fled the persecution of Hugeunot Protestants by the French crown in the late 17th century. Wealthy and international, having spent most of his childhood in Paris, Belleroche was able to focus on his own artistic exploration throughout his lifetime, particularly in lithography, without the hindrance of commercial interest or the desire or need for critical acclaim.

Beginning his artistic career in Paris in 1882, Albert Belleroche was well acquainted with the leading figures and trends in the fin-de-siècle art world. He first studied briefly with that city's premier portrait painter, Carolus-Duran, and subsequently grew friendly with Duran's former star pupil, American expatriate John Singer Sargent (who is featured in the concurrently running exhibition, American Impressionists Abroad and at Home). The two of them traveled together and shared studios.

During that same period, Albert Belleroche encountered fellow aristocrat Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was born the same year as Belleroche. The two of them shared a passion for drawing as well as for the models that inspired them. Lili, for example, was made famous by Lautrec, though she posed more frequently with Belleroche, and she and Belleroche eventually became lovers.

Albert Belleroche and his Critics

Although he first trained and worked as a painter, it was as a lithographer that Belleroche excelled. His work in lithography was recognized by both his fellow artists and by critics, this in spite of Belleroche's lack of pursuit of critical acclaim. "Belleroche holds a premiere position in the current renaissance of lithography," wrote Claude Roger-Marx in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1908. Roger-Marx, the great turn-of-the-century French critic who had previously championed the Impressionists, continued in his article, "No one... has equaled Belleroche's technique or his understanding of lithography."

Frank Brangwyn, fellow artist and friend of Belleroche, wrote in 1935, "As a lithographic artist, [Belleroche] stands alone. No modern can touch him either in his knowledge or in the quality to be got out of the stone. No one else has succeeded in making lithography the rival of painting."

And finally, a year before Albert Belleroche's death in 1944, noted art historian and print expert at the British Museum, Arthur Hind, provided this assessment of the printmaker's career: "In sensitive draughtsmanship, in variety of handling and in understanding of the possibilities of the medium, his work in lithography is among the greatest achievements [of the medium] since its discovery."

Albert Belleroche and Lithography

Lithography was in fact "discovered" or rather invented in 1796. The technique is based on the principle that oil and water repel one another and consists of printing an image drawn on the surface of a specially prepared stone surface with a greasy material. Because of its durability as a print medium-unlike in etching or engraving where the metal plates wear causing the image quality to degrade-huge editions of prints were possible, making lithography well suited to the world of commerce and industry. Consequently, its artistic application focused at first on the reproduction of paintings and drawings as illustrations for journals and other publications, with the actual printing carried out by trained technicians in commercial studios.

Albert Belleroche was at the forefront of the renaissance of lithography, when artists began to stretch the medium beyond the limits of creativity and technical production as defined by commerce. He drew and brushed directly on the stone, making full use of its grain and finish, varying strokes and touches to maximize effects of tone and modeling. He pulled his own impressions from his own press, sometimes a unique image, other times in editions as small as only two or three. He experimented with different inks and colors, sometimes grinding his own pigments. An avid collector of antique paper stock, he varied effect with sheets of different tones and weights.

With involvement in every stage of the creation of his art, Albert Belleroche challenged the traditional definition of a lithograph and its relation to the other arts. Belleroche, with his lithographs, did indeed rival painting and the selection of forty of his works in this exhibition represent the breadth of Belleroche's technique.

EXHIBITION CURATOR

Steven Kern, the Museum's curator of European art, is the exhibition's curator. Since joining the San Diego Museum of Art in 1997, Kern has overseen new thematic reinstallations of the Museum's permanent collection of old master paintings and of late 19th century European art. He has also coordinated the local presentations of major touring exhibitions including Monet: The Late Paintings of Giverny (1998) and Palace of Gold and Light: Treasures from the Topkapi, Istanbul (2000).

Prior to his arrival at SDMA, Kern was curator of paintings for nearly nine years at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Prior to that position, he was curator of European art and exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts and George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, MA. Kern holds a Master's degree in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and bachelors degrees in French Language and Literature and Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

PUBLICATION

A full color, fully illustrated catalogue, published by the San Diego Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes an introductory essay by exhibition curator Steven Kern, which discusses Albert Belleroche's experimental work within the context of the fin-de-siècle art world and the history of lithography. 64 pages, 40 color plates, 6 color illustrations, 9 x 12 inches. Softcover $25.00.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA

www.sdmart.org