Kehinde Wiley @ Santa Barbara Museum of Art - Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan

Kehinde Wiley: Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Through October 13, 2019

KEHINDE WILEY

Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, 2015

Oil on canvas

Collection of Dennis and Jeanne Masel

Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

© 2019 Kehinde Wiley

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) presents of a major work by Kehinde Wiley that appears as part of the Museum’s innovative series of public exhibitions, Park Projects. The painting, a large equestrian portrait fashioned after an early 17th-century painting by Dutch master Anthony van Dyck, is on view in the Museum’s Park Entrance space.

Kehinde Wiley has become internationally recognized for his examinations of the aestheticizing of power and masculinity through the time-worn genre of portraiture. This major painting, titled Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, is an extension of the artist’s Rumors of War series, which takes the form of historic equestrian portraiture. In Wiley’s hands, this established genre expands in scale to over nine feet in each dimension, and explodes in color with a revelry of bold and bright hues.

For this series, and in much of his work, Kehinde Wiley cast his subjects from young black men he met on the street, mostly from New York. During this process, he invites the individuals to his studio, asks them to choose a painting from art history textbooks, photographs them in that pose—in their own clothing—and then paints them. In this way, Kehinde Wiley subverts the tradition of portraying European nobleman in positions of power by depicting contemporary black men in the same poses. Addressing the politics of race and authority in art, Kehinde Wiley’s work points to the lack of representation of people of color in the history of Western painting, while also challenging present-day portrayals of masculinity.

ANTHONY VAN DYCK

Equestrian portrait of Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignan, ca. 1634-35

Oil on canvas

Collection of Sabauda Gallery, Turin, Italy

The painting on view was inspired by a 1634–1635 equestrian portrait by Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck and depicts Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, an Italian military commander. Painted in a style of relaxed elegance and ease, the portrait attributes a noble status to the subject through artistic tropes used to convey glory, wealth, and prestige. Naming the work after the original source, Kehinde Wiley’s Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation. Painting his subject larger-than-life and isolated against a colorful floral background, Kehinde Wiley emphasizes the dignity and nobility of his model.

KEHINDE WILEY

President Barack Obama, 2017

Oil on canvas

Collection of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

© 2019 Kehinde Wiley

In 2018, Kehinde Wiley became the first African American artist to paint an official US Presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Former US President Barack Obama selected Wiley for this honor. In 2015, Wiley was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, titled A New Republic, which traveled to six venues including the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; the Phoenix Museum of Art, Arizona; and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.

KEHINDE WILEY was born in Los Angeles, California and is based in New York. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Shortly after, he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Denver Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART
1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA
www.sbma.net

Picasso and Braque: The cubist experiment, 1919-1912. Kimbell Art Museum, Texas, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
Through August 21, 2011 

Santa Barbara Museum of Art 
September 17, 2011 - January 8, 2012

PICASSO AND BRAQUE: THE CUBIST EXPERIMENT, 1910-1912  is the first exhibition to unite many of the paintings and nearly all of the prints created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque during these two exhilarating years of their artistic dialogue, is now on view at the Kimbell Art Museum . “This small-scale exhibition examines a brief moment with huge implications for the history of art,” commented Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “This show is the first to focus exclusively on this landmark period of intense productivity and adventure for Picasso and Braque.” This international loan exhibition is organized by the SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART and the KIMBELL ART MUSEUM and has its debut in Fort Worth. 

During the years 1910 through 1912, these two great masters invented a new style that took the basics of traditional European art—modeling in light and shade to suggest roundedness, perspective lines to suggest space, indeed the very idea of making a recognizable description of the real world—and toyed with them irreverently. 

“These are beautiful, enigmatic, playful works of art. They’re like conversations in the artist’s studio or favorite café, not to be hurried,” remarked Malcolm Warner, deputy director at the Kimbell Art Museum. “We hope our visitors will take the time to savor them.” Following up on hints they found in the work of Paul Cézanne, and brimming with youthful bravado, Picasso and Braque created pictorial puzzles, comprehensible to a point but full of false leads and contradictions. Viewers pick up a few clues—a figure, a pipe, a moustache, a bottle, a glass, a musical instrument, a newspaper, a playing card—and these start to suggest a reality in three dimensions. The impression is that of a fast, modern world, with glimpses of models, friends, and the paraphernalia of drinking and smoking. But things never fully add up, either in detail or as a whole—and deliberately so. Teasingly elusive, the image is a construction of forms and signs that the artist has put together in a spirit of parody and play. The pleasure for the viewer is to let go of all normal expectations and enter into the game, which is an endlessly intriguing one. 

More than any avant-garde artists before them, Picasso and Braque called into question conventional ideas about art as the imitation of reality. They collaborated so closely and like-mindedly (“roped together like mountain climbers,” in Braque’s own phrase) that their works of this period are sometimes difficult to tell apart. Their radical experiment in picture-making, which came to be known as Analytic Cubism, has been as far-reaching in its implications for art as the theories of Einstein for science.

This choice, intimately scaled exhibition, featuring 16 paintings and 20 etchings and drypoints, was conceived and organized by Eik Kahng, chief curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, in partnership with the Kimbell and Mr. Warner. The Kimbell is a natural collaborator on the project since the Museum’s collection includes an outstanding example of the work of each artist from the Analytic Cubist period, Picasso’s Man with a Pipe and Braque’s Girl with a Cross, both painted in 1911. 

In the exhibition these appear among paintings from a number of other distinguished collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Tate in London, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and the Robert B. and Mercedes H. Eichholz Collection. The etchings and drypoints are selected from several sources, most notably the extraordinary holdings of Cubist prints in the Melamed Family Collection.

Not surprisingly in light of its importance in the history of art, Cubism has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions. Some of them have been dauntingly large, especially given the amount of time each of these highly complicated works demands of the viewer. The guiding principle of the present exhibition is that less can be more. It offers the kind of small, carefully calibrated selection that invites the viewer to spend time exploring each work in detail. 

The inclusion of a good number of etchings and drypoints ensures that printmaking emerges with a proper sense of its importance to Picasso and Braque at this moment in their careers. Other themes suggested by the exhibition and discussed in the accompanying catalogue include the role of format, especially the use of oval-shaped canvases. What part does this play in the Cubists’ pictorial game? How do the visual push and pull of the oval format differ from those of the rectangle or square? How did the artists intend their oval compositions to be framed? 

This last question is especially relevant to the Kimbell’s Picasso, an oval canvas that has been lined and framed as a rectangle. In an essay in the catalogue, Kimbell conservators Claire Barry and Bart Devolder present the discovery that this painting appears in an early photograph of the artist’s studio—as a work in progress, much different from its final form, but clearly on an oval stretcher. This, along with results of their research into the materials and techniques of the Cubists, will also be presented in a special section of the exhibition. 

For the past year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art has been working with California-based MegaVision to capture spectral images of select works in the exhibition. The quality of spectral imaging surpasses that of normal professional photography. Thanks to recent advances in the technology of LEDs (light-emitting diodes), RGB (red, green, and blue) filters have been removed from behind the lens and replaced with LED-produced RGB light, which is aimed directly onto the object that is being photographed. Beyond the visible spectrum, spectral imaging allows options for ultraviolet and infrared, which can reveal features invisible to the human eye. The elimination of the filters in the optical path allows for a higher-quality image, greater accuracy of color, and, especially important in the art world, a huge reduction of harmful light.

The spectral imaging created by MegaVision will be incorporated into interactive software that will allow visitors and online users to manipulate and study works with a level of detail and precision never before possible for museum audiences.  Produced in partnership with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, this cutting-edge visual technology introduces new ways to look at and understand the processes, relationships, and stylistic developments of this important movement. Hand-held, touch-screen computers will provide mobility and interactive media content to exhibition visitors.  For the first time in a museum setting, every visitor will have the opportunity to sit in front of an actual painting by Picasso or Braque and independently zoom in on the smallest brush strokes and specks of color. This is just an example of the many explorations that this program will make available to visitors.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

The exhibition catalogue includes essays by some of today’s most talented scholars in the field: Eik Kahng, Charles Palermo, Harry Cooper, Annie Bourneuf, Christine Poggi, Claire Barry, and Bart Devolder. It is distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, and is available in the Museum Shop in hardcover ($30).

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912 is on view at the Kimbell Art Museum since May 29 through August 21, 2011, and at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from September 17, 2011, through January 8, 2012. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. 

Kimbell Art Museum

3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX 76107

Kimbellmuseum.org

iCubist: iPad application to delve more deeply into Cubism

Visitors to the upcoming Kimbell Art Museum exhibition Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 will be able to use a specially created iPad application to delve more deeply into Cubism.

"Advances in digital imaging and the convenience of an iPad provide new ways to look at and understand the processes, relationships, and stylistic developments of the revolutionary art form now known as Analytic Cubism," commented Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. "I'm thrilled that the Kimbell is able to provide this unique opportunity to Museum visitors."

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell have been working with MegaVision, a digital-imaging company based in California, to capture spectral images of select pieces in the exhibition. The quality of spectral imaging surpasses that of normal professional photography, and it allows options for ultraviolet and infrared, which can reveal features invisible to the human eye.

Affectionately titled iCubist, the app was designed specifically for the Picasso and Braque exhibition. It will showcase the spectral images along with three other original activities and will be made available exclusively to exhibition visitors, free of charge, on 40 preloaded iPads.

The iCubist activities allow users to:

View and study works with a level of detail and precision never before possible for museum audiences. Users will have the ability to manipulate a succession of digitized spectral images that show the artworks at different light frequencies (ultraviolet and infrared), revealing the most minute details. Such fascinating views of the paintings uncover important decisions made by the artists in developing their compositions.

Deconstruct a Cubist composition and attempt to put it back together. By rebuilding these composite reproductions, visitors learn first-hand about the intellectual and creative processes employed by Picasso and Braque in their paintings. The physical act of moving visual elements emphasizes compositional choices made by the artists to create, for example, a sense of balance or movement. It also highlights recognizable elements and describes their significance.

Compare digital reproductions of paintings by the featured artists, Picasso and Braque, by clicking on markers that pop up to explain key aspects of their individual styles. This interactive activity will help visitors exercise connoisseurship to distinguish between the artists' hands, despite their close similarity during the Cubist years.

Explore the history of Cubism by means of an illustrated timeline that includes vintage photography of the artists and their friends and reproductions of key works of art.

The iCubist app was designed and produced by REZA ALI for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum. 

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas 

www.kimbellart.org