Painting Blind

The Rose Art Museum is hosting Rose Projects 1C: Painting Blind, an exhibit which highlights pieces by four visual artists­ Willem de Kooning, Maria Lassnig, Frank Auerbach and Georg Baselitz.

The paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures demonstrate each artist’s manipulation of touch and vision.The exhibit also emphasizes the artists’ rejection of the limiting conventions within abstract art and representation.

Frank Auerbach uses the idea of blindness to challenge the viewer’s other senses. He incorporates texture and harsh color schemes to draw one’s eyes closer to the canvas and prompt the viewer to analyze the idea of feeling rather than seeing. The method of combining texture and stroke thickness is seen in his famous painting, “J.Y.M Seated No. 1” (1966).

Unlike Auerbach, however, Lassnig took the idea of blindness literally by creating paintings with her eyes closed. In “Figur mit blauem Hals (Figure with blue Throat)” (1961), Lassnig captures the feeling of having a body rather than displaying the aesthetics of it. Her work focuses on the aspects of the physical world that are most difficult to depict. In her diary, a quote that is noted in the wall post, Lassnig mentions that “the only things that are truly real are the feelings that occur within [her] physical shell.”

In comparison to Lassnig, de Kooning utilizes the notion of blindness in a metaphorical manner. De Kooning interrupts the concept of space by distorting his drawings and placing them in unusual spots on the canvas.

Inspired by Kooning’s work, Baselitz took the element of freedom and incorporated it into a self-portrait. Not only did he manipulate the concept of space on the canvas, Baselitz also emphasized certain parts of his face by using different pressures on the paintbrush to create thick and slim strokes.

The artists in this project reveal the battle between abstraction and representation. Through their works, they inspire all viewers to live with tensions of unreconciled realities and to break beyond all confining spaces in order to discover the world for themselves.

—Vanessa Alamo 

Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler

Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler, an exhibit that spans the entire Lois Foster Gallery, encompasses many artists and a vast number of pieces.

The phrase “after and around” in the name of the exhibit is certainly not meant lightly—the pieces on view represent works from anyone who has ever had anything to do with artist Frankenthaler, who influenced or was connected to art movements related to her work in any way.

“The history of modernist painting is usually told either as a chain of male masters or a series of anonymous formal inventions,” reads the wall text at the entrance to the exhibit. So this exhibit attempts to imagine how conceptions of modernist painting might change if a woman—Frankenthaler—and her female colleagues, were highlighted as key figures in the movement.

Pretty Raw is broken up into five sections, each revolving around a theme. “A Debut” commences the exhibit, presenting works from the early 1950s by artists who were on view at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, one of the earliest modern galleries that opened in 1950. Frankenthaler’s own work makes up just a small fraction of the pieces shown in “A Debut,” as is true of all the sections in the exhibit.

In “A Debut,” Frankenthaler’s “Happy Birthday” is small but visually exciting. Created using plaster, oil and coffee grounds, the work is joyful and dark at once—making use of both vibrantly colored oil paint and blackened, rustic coffee grounds. The work perhaps suggests the bittersweet phenomenon of a birthday—jubilant and yet always suggesting mortality.

“Glimpse of the Garden” (1957) by Marie Menken is a video that focuses on small details of flowers and leaves. The isolated details of the plants resemble some of the abstract works in the exhibit. The note says that Menken initially showed paintings at Tibor de Nagy but eventually transitioned to film.

The next section, “Color Field,” is filled with vibrant, neon and rainbow-colored large canvases. The section, as the title suggests, exhibits Color Field artists—artists who use large-scale fields of color spreading across the canvas.

“Feminism” presents a diverse array of media highlighting the female experience. In the middle of the floor is what looks like a blue and gray rug. “Blue Haired Nirvana” (1997) turns out to be made of overlapping circles of dyed velvet.

Miriam Schapiro’s “Curtains” (1972) is a multi-media work created using both paint and fabric. The piece is kitschy and cute, and that seems to be the point. The note beside the piece states that it is part of a movement to bridge modernism and feminism in a way that openly celebrates decoration.

“The Men’s Room” is directly across the way. The visitor walks through a curtain of green and silver hanging beads to enter the exhibit. The curtain, “Untitled” (1994) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres separates the two distinctly different rooms. While “Feminism” was slightly cluttered with multiple works, many of them dull and pastel colors, “The Men’s Room” presents a sparser vision. The paintings lining the walls and the two pieces sitting in the middle of the room present a stoic contrast.

Finally, “Contemporary” presents very recent works of art that play and riff on the earlier modernist works. “Miniatures” (2011-2014) by Ulrike Müllers, for example, is a set of small necklaces—the pendants of which are small, square designs created with enamel on metal. The note says that Müller was trying to subvert the large-scale format of earlier modernists and make works that were more portable and personal.

The exhibit gave what it promised—insight into “after and around” artist Helen Frankenthaler. But in doing so, the exhibit drew very pertinent comparisons between different time periods, different media and themes in the works. 

—Emily Wishingrad

New Acquisitions

New Acquisitions in the Gerald S. and Sandra Feinberg Gallery strives to highlight African American artists who have historically been left out of the Abstract Art conversation. The exhibit showcases six works—all by African-American artists—that the Rose Art Museum has acquired during the past 18 months. 

New Acquisitions holds a few very recognizable pieces for any viewer who has visited the Rose in the past couple years. The exhibit features Mark Bradford’s “Father You Have Murdered Me” (2012) from last semester’s exhibit in the same gallery: Mark Bradford: Sea Monsters. It also features Jack Whitten’s “The Pariah Way” (1973) from fall 2013’s exhibit Light Years: Jack Whitten, 1971 to 1973 and “Self Portrait #23” (1973) by Alvin Loving, also on view in the fall of 2013 in the Mildred S. Lee Gallery. 

One of the pieces in the exhibit, Howardena Pindell’s “Untitled #18” (1977), looks like a giant slice of confetti cake from far away. The yellowy-white canvas is spotted with tiny specks of color. Looking closer, the spots come into focus and resemble paper hole-punches. In the note next to the piece, Pindell describes her inspiration. She recalls that as a child, when she would go with her father to a root beer stand in southern Ohio or northern Kentucky, there would be red circles on the bottom of the cups to mark the ones designated for use by a person of color. “I see that as the reason I have been obsessed with the circle, using it in a way that would be positive instead of negative,” she writes. 

Melvin Edwards has two pieces on view—“Nigerian Diamond” (1978) and “Loving Spiral” (2005), both made out of welded steel. The pieces pop out of the white wall on which they are mounted, starkly contrasting the wall with their deep, burnt tones of brown. The works are created of many different objects, welded together to create very complex and multifaceted pieces. Individual objects are visible—such as nails in “Nigerian Diamond”—but the pieces seem cohesive as well as deconstructed. 

Although it features just a few works, New Acquisitions is very compelling, showing a diverse set of works but, more importantly, bringing these extremely talented artists into the conversation. 

—Emily Wishingrad

Collection in Focus

The Rose Art Museum’s new Collection in Focus profiles artist Jennie C. Jones’ work, and Jones partnered with the museum in the creation of the exhibit. 

The central piece of the exhibit is Jones’ “Decrescendo with Ledger Tone” (2014),  which is accompanied by pieces from the Rose’s collection that fit the theme of music and jazz. “Decrescendo with Ledger Tone” (2014) consists of a black acoustic absorber panel layered over two black canvases. The panel and the bottom canvas are separated by a horizontal pink stripe. 

Decrescendo is an Italian word meaning decreasing; in music, the term is used to denote moments when the sound should gradually reduce in loudness and volume. Jones’ piece manipulates acoustics so that the closer a person is to the work, the quieter their voice sounds. 

In the description accompanying the exhibit, a quote from Jones describes the relationship between her work and the pieces from the Rose’s collection. “The pieces selected from the Rose’s collection were chosen mainly from a formalist standpoint: color, spatial tension, proportion and weight are all factors that unite the group,” she writes. Jones elaborated: “These works are punctuated with photographs of prominent American musicians, an addendum that weaves a narrative into these otherwise abstract relationships.” 

This statement references Carl Van Vechten’s photos of W.C. Handy, a musician known as the “father of the blues,” and of Dizzy Gillespie, a trumpeter who helped popularize bebop jazz in the 1940s. The photos are titled “W.C. Handy, July 17, 1941” and “Dizzy Gillespie, December 2, 1955,” respectively. Both photos feature the men holding trumpets, poised to play their songs. 

Vechten’s photos of the two musicians form a border for a large abstract painting, “Rising” (1962) by Adolph Gottlieb. Black splotches streak the bottom of the oil on canvas painting, covering a large bronze rectangle and a red circle at top of the canvas. 

Despite the centrality of the painting, Jones’s “Decrescendo with Ledger Tone” (2014) is by far the most exciting of the works. In her artist talk this week at Brandeis, Jones said that her work seeks to combine  sound and visual arts, which the exhibit certainly accomplished.

 —Brooke Granovsky