November 24, 1957 - World-famous Mexican painter influenced by Cézanne, an active communist, and a husband of Frida Kahlo, died in 1957. Rivera's large wall works in fresco established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with works by Orozco, Siqueiros, and others. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, New York City. His 1931 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was their second. Rivera paintings are exhibited by many of the greatest museums. When his patron discovered in 1933 that Rivera had painted a portrait of Lenin in the mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center, Nelson Rockefeller angrily insisted the figure be painted out. Rivera refused and Rockefeller fired him and destroyed the unfinished work. Rivera was a notorious womanizer who had fathered at least two illegitimate children by two different women: Angeline Beloff gave birth toa son, Diego (1916-1918); Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska gave birth to a daughter in 1918. He married his first wife, Guadalupe Marín, in June 1922, with whom he had two daughters. He was still married when he met art student Frida Kahlo. They married on August 21, 1929; he was 42, she was 22. Their mutual infidelities and his violent temper led to divorce in 1939, but they re-married December 8, 1940 in San Francisco. After Kahlo's death, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946, on July 29, 1955. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 22, 1988 - Considered the most important Mexican architect of the 20th century died on this date. In 1980, he became the second winner of the Pritzker Prize. His house and studio, built in 1948 in Mexico City, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. Barragán created an architectural language that combined modernism with the colonial and pre-hispanic architecture of Mexico. He was greatly influenced by the European modernism of his time; however, he was also deeply influenced by his visit to the Alhambra in Spain and, most of all, by the vernacular architecture of Mexican villages and gardens. While his geometric volumes were very purist through the use of perfect planes and volumes, he also incorporated natural materials such as cobble stone and wood. His use of light and water are quite unique, as can be seen in many of his residential interiors and fountain features. The typical, tall (3.5m [12ft.] or more) coloured walls, whichhe borrowed and modified from traditional Mexican building, became his trademark. He situated many of his designs amidst natural backdrops, such as lava rock outcrops and groves of trees. His understanding of aesthetics allowed him to design urban landmarks as well as furniture and gardens. Although the number of works he completed is not great, they have allowed him to become an influential figure in the world of landscape and architectural design, as well as object design. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 23, 1883 - in Zapotlán el Grande (now Ciudad Guzmán), Jalisco. He was a famous Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, and others. Orozco was the most complex of the Mexican muralists, fond of the theme of human suffering, and less realistic than fascinated by machines Rivera. Mostly influenced by Symbolism, he was also a genre painter and lithographer. Between 1922 and 1948, Orozco painted murals in Mexico City, Orizaba, Claremont, California, New York City, Hanover, New Hampshire, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Jiquilpan, Michoacán. His drawing and paintings are exhibited by the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, and the Orozco Workshop-Museum in Guadalajara. With Diego Rivera, he was a leader of the Mexican Mural maccaroni. An important distinction he had from Rivera was his critical view of the Mexican Revolution. While Diego was abold, optimistic figure, touting the glory of the revolution, Orozco was less comfortable with the bloody toll the social movement was taking. Orozco is known as one of the "Big Three" muralists along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. All three artists, as well as the painter Rufino Tamayo, originated in Mexico, experimented with fresco on large walls, and elevated their art of mural in fresco to the world-fame class known as Mexican Mural Renaissance. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 21, 1898 - Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.) Magritte pulled the same stunt in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself: we cannot smoke tobacco with a picture of a pipe. His work showed in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992. Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 20, 2006 - Altman died at age 81 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. According to his production company in New York, Sandcastle 5 Productions, he died of complications from leukemia. He was an American film director known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his work with an Academy Honorary Award. His films MASH and Nashville have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. 1969 when he was offered the script for MASH, which had previously been rejected by dozens of other directors. Altman directed the film, and it was a huge success, both with critics and at the box office. It was Altman's highest grossing film. Altman's career took firm hold with the success of MASH, and he followed it with other critical breakthroughs such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1974), and Nashville (1975), which made the distinctive, experimental "Altman style" well known. As a director, Altman favored stories showing the interrelationships between several characters; he stated that he was more interested in character motivation than in intricate plots. As such, he tended to sketch out only a basic plot for the film, referring to the screenplay as a "blueprint" for action, and allowed his actors to improvise dialogue. This is one of the reasons Altman was known as an "actor's director," a reputation that helped him work with large casts of well-known actors. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 19,1798 - The Rijksmuseum (State Museum) is a Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, located on the Museumplein. The museum is dedicated to arts, crafts, and history. It has a large collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and a substantial collection of Asian art. The museum was founded in 1800 in The Hague to exhibit the collections of the Dutch stadtholders. It was inspired by French example. By then it was known as the National Art Gallery (Dutch: Nationale Kunst-Gallerij). In 1808 the museum moved to Amsterdam on the orders of king Louis Napoleon, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. The paintings owned by that city, such as The Night Watch by Rembrandt, became part of the collection. In 1863 there was a design contest for a new building for the Rijksmuseum, but none of the submissions was considered to be of sufficient quality. Pierre Cuypers also participated in the contest and his submission reached the second place. In 1876 a new contest was held and this time Pierre Cuypers won. The design was a combination of gothic and renaissance elements. The construction began on October 1, 1876. On both the inside and the outside, the building was richly decorated with references to Dutch art history. Another contest was held for these decorations. The winners were B. van Hove and J.F. Vermeylen for the sculptures, G. Sturm for the tile tableaus and painting and W.F. Dixon for the stained glass. The museum was opened at its new location on July 13, 1885. The front of the museum is located at the Stadhouderskade, but on the other side it has a prominent position on the Museumplein, nowadays among the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 18, 1976 - He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Pennsylvania, in South Philadelphia, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. While appreciation for Man Ray’s work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since. In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as "his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance art and conceptual art" and saying "Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'" — Man Ray’s stated guiding principles — "unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would." The film shown here was made by Man ray in 1926. He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner Man Ray died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.
November 17, 1904 - Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles. He was a prominent Japanese -American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known widely for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold. Among his furniture work was his collaboration with the Herman Miller company in 1948 when he joined with George Nelson, Paul László and Charles Eames to produce a catalog containing what is often considered to be the most influential body of modern furniture. His work lives on around the world and at the The Noguchi Museum in New York City. Following the suicide of his friend Arshile Gorky and a failed romantic relationship with Nayantara Pandit, the niece of Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru, Noguchi applied for a Bollingen Fellowship to travel the world, proposing to study public space as research for a book about the "environment of leisure." In the ensuing years he gained in prominence and acclaim, leaving his large-scale works in many of the world's major cities. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 16, 1943 - He was born in New York City, New York (according to his professional biography). With two writing credits to his name (the science fiction film Silent Running and the second Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force), Cimino moved up to directing when his spec script, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, was purchased by Clint Eastwood's production company, Malpaso, with Eastwood originally slated to direct it himself. However, Cimino convinced him to allow him to direct the film, which became a solid box office success at the time, and which enjoys a minor cult status today. With the success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Cimino was able to secure a stellar cast and freedom from studio interference for his second film, The Deer Hunter (1978). The picture became a massive critical and commercial success, and won a number of Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture. On the basis of this track record, he was given free rein by United Artists for his next film, Heaven's Gate (1980). The film came in several times over budget; the result not only was a financial disaster that nearly bankrupted the studio, but Heaven's Gate became the lightning rod for the industry perception of the out-of-control state of Hollywood at that time. The film marked the end of the so-called New Hollywood era. Transamerica Corporation, the owner of United Artists, lost confidence in the film company and its management. Transamerica soon sold the company. Heaven's Gate was such a devastating box office and critical bomb that public perception of Cimino's work was almost irretrievably tainted in its wake; none of his subsequent films achieved popular or critical success. In 1984, after being unable to finalize a deal with director Herbert Ross, surprisingly, Paramount Pictures offered the job of directing Footloose to Cimino. According to screenwriter Dean Pitchford[1], Cimino was at the helm of Footloose for four months, making more and more extravagant demands in terms of set construction and overall production. Finally, Paramount realized that it potentially had another Heaven's Gate on its hands. Paramount fired Cimino and finalized the deal with Herbert Ross to direct the picture, as had originally been intended. (www.wikipedia.org)
November 15, 1887 - O'Keeffe was born in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She is typically associated with the American Southwest and particularly New Mexico where she settled late in life. O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors, and she often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York, and in the 1940s, and she was given two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and another in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman. She was also awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, the first by the College of William and Mary in 1938, and in the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work. Georgia became increasingly frail in her late 90's and moved to Santa Fe where she would die on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. Per her instructions, she was cremated the next day. Juan Hamilton walked to the top of the Pedernal Mountain and scattered her ashes to the wind...over her beloved "faraway". (www.wikipedia.org)
November 14, 1840 - Monet was born on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. During the early 1880's Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings. In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel in 1891. He later produced series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, poplars, the Houses of Parliament, mornings on the Seine, and the water-lilies on his property at Giverny. Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own garden in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine.Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus, only about fifty people attended the ceremony. (www.wikipedia.org)
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NEW YORK, N.Y.- From June 11 through September 19, 2004, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things. Co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Tate Modern, London, Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things is a highly selective view of Brancusi’s work, primarily emphasizing his carving and tendency toward abstraction. Bringing together more than thirty of Brancusi’s rare sculptures, this exhibition will capture the essential character of his art through an examination of his themes, use of series, and choice of materials. In addition, the New York presentation, which follows its extremely successful run in London, will be the first public showing of a recently discovered, major Brancusi sculpture Sleeping Muse. The exhibition fills three of the rotunda’s ramps and the High Gallery. This exhibition is sponsored by Deutsche Bank. Additional support is provided by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, said, "The Guggenheim has championed the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi for 50 years, and is fortunate to possess 11 key examples of his work. In 1955, while the artist was still alive, the Guggenheim mounted his first retrospective, in the museum’s temporary quarters in a townhouse at 1071 Fifth Avenue; this was followed in 1969 with another major Brancusi retrospective in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. Then as now, the Guggenheim’s spiral structure forms the perfect complement to the organic surfaces of Brancusi’s figures, evoking Brancusi’s own statement that ’architecture is inhabited sculpture.’"
"Deutsche Bank’s sponsorship of Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things celebrates our long-standing commitment to the arts and our continued partnership with the Guggenheim,’ said Gary S. Hattem, President, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. ’We are pleased to help bring such a special exhibition that will facilitate the first public viewing of a Sleeping Muse to New York City."
Brancusi was born in Romania in 1876 and studied in Bucharest. In 1904 he moved to Paris, where he was to spend more than fifty years and where, from the mid-1920s, he established his studio. He was encouraged by Auguste Rodin, but quickly broke away from the sculptural tradition that the elder artist represented. Rather than create a clay model and send the work out to a craftsman to enlarge, Brancusi was the first modern sculptor to carve works himself and to engage directly with the final material. In this regard, he was inspired by the examples of "primitive" art, including that of Africa and of ancient Europe, especially the Cycladic Islands, as well as the experiments of Paul Gauguin. He began a process of simplifying his figures to the point of abstraction in 1907; forms of great purity and balance resulted from this refinement. Brancusi died in Paris in 1957.
Brancusi’s serene, simplified sculptures are widely acknowledged as icons of Modernism. His choices of materials, including marble, limestone, bronze, and wood, and his individual expression through carving soon established him as a leading avant-garde artist. He was a close friend of both Amedeo Modigliani and Marcel Duchamp, and his work has inspired sculptors from Barbara Hepworth to Carl Andre and Donald Judd.
The majority of this presentation focuses on Brancusi’s carvings in stone and marble, offering an unusual glimpse into the artist’s working practice. The thematic organization of the exhibition highlights specific recurring motifs in series such as the Kiss, the Torso, Mademoiselle Pogany, and the Bird. Each series helps demonstrate Brancusi’s gradual process of reducing naturalistic subjects into forms teetering on the brink of abstraction.
The viewer is able to witness the cognitive process of reduction and refinement within a theme as the years, and as Brancusi’s style, progress. This evolution in the direction of abstraction is most evident in the series of torsos and of heads that lead to the Sleeping Muse theme. From the clear and realistic carving of Head of a Sleeping Child (ca. 1908), a shift can be seen toward an elongated form with cleaner lines and less depth of carving in Sleeping Muse I (1909–10). In 1911, Brancusi created Prometheus, a spherical, smooth shape with only a nose, ear, and fragment of neck as visual markers. For the extremely abstract Sculpture for the Blind and Beginning of the World (both ca. 1920), Brancusi returns to the ovoid shape of the Sleeping Muse, emptying out all features to create perfectly smooth and pure forms.
The exhibition also presents key examples of Brancusi’s independent wooden works—including his monumental King of Kings (ca. 1938) and Adam and Eve (1921), both from the Guggenheim’s collection. The wooden works demonstrate a different trajectory in Brancusi’s carving. Rather than focusing on the progression from realism to abstraction, the wooden pieces evoke the totemic and tribal and reference Brancusi’s response to African and Romanian folk cultures. These works most effectively incorporate the base into the artwork, using both the wooden sculpture and the base to create unified works of multiple components.
Recently Discovered Sleeping Muse -
The newly discovered Sleeping Muse III/IV, ca. 1917–18, will be exhibited publicly for the first time, at the Guggenheim. Until 1985, the official cataloguing of Brancusi’s oeuvre included two carved heads known as Sleeping Muse, one in marble, and one in alabaster. Then, a third muse in marble was discovered in an American private collection, identified as Sleeping Muse III and dated 1917–18.
In the year 2000, a fourth version was discovered in a European private collection. Both of the latter two pieces have been authenticated by Dr. Friedrich Teja Bach, author of the 1988 catalogue raisonné of Brancusi’s sculptures. Since there are many stylistic details that the two sculptures share, it is thought that Brancusi may have worked on both simultaneously, making it difficult to establish their precise sequence. Brancusi kept this recently discovered Sleeping Muse until the last years of his life, at which time he gave it to a young woman who was a frequent visitor to his studio, telling her it was unfinished. She kept the sculpture until 2003, at which time it passed into a private collection in the U.S. The Guggenheim exhibition will be the first time this piece will be shown publicly.
The exhibition was conceived by Carmen Giménez, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Director of the Museum Picasso in Málaga, and developed with Matthew Gale, Curator at Tate Modern, London. The installation is designed by Juan Ariño.
The 144-page catalogue, published by Tate Modern, reflects the intimacy and iconicity of the works in the exhibition. It includes essays by the curators, who elaborate the decisions behind the selection, as well as by selected specialists, who explore Brancusi’s life and work in more detail. Ms. Giménez situates the exhibition’s formal choices within Brancusi’s personal and artistic heritage, while Mr. Gale examines the artist’s stunning rise to success during the interwar period through a close look at his relationships with his Paris contemporaries. Also included are essays by Sanda Miller, Alexandra Parigoris, and Jon Wood, as well as an illustrated chronology, a bibliography, and a selection of writings and vintage photographs by the artist. The catalogue is available in soft cover for $25.00. Hardcover is also available to the trade through Harry N. Abrams Publishers for $40.00.
