Visual Arts

Georgetowner • October 24, 2013

In the catalogue for the exhibition “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” a photograph shows the painter at the opening of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Gallatin Collection in 1943. Age 62 at the time, Léger stands in front of his 1919 masterpiece, “The City.” He looks like a working-class Frenchman, a veteran of World War I, who has carefully parted his hair, combed his moustache, and put on his best jacket and tie for the occasion.

Fernand Léger was such a man, but he was also one of the most sophisticated artists of his generation—and it was quite a generation. Born in 1881, he was less than two years younger than Matisse and about nine months older than Picasso.

We are far less familiar with Léger than with these 20th-century superstars. Fewer examples of his work are owned by American museums and retrospectives are rare (the last, at MoMA, was in 1998). But this is also because, trained as an architect and designer, much of Léger’s artistic activity extended beyond easel painting to mural painting, sculpture, set and costume design, and even filmmaking.

Curated by Anna Vallye, the Philadelphia exhibition centers on this range of activity, much of it collaborative, in the Paris of the 1920s. Parts of the show, which runs through January 5, evoke the urban vibrancy of the Machine Age that inspired Léger and his colleagues.

At the entrance, on a large screen, is a captivating—if gray and grainy—two-minute trip up the Eiffel Tower, filmed by Thomas Edison and James White in 1900 at the Paris Exposition Universelle. This is one of half a dozen films playing continuously in the exhibition, several with modernist soundtracks.

One, the landmark “Ballet Mécanique of 1924,” is a 16-minute experimental film co-directed by Léger and American filmmaker Dudley Murphy, accompanied by a score by another American, George Antheil, for percussion, pianos, player pianos, propellers, electric bells, and a siren. The images, in rapid alternation and succession, include smiling lips, a peasant woman climbing stairs carrying a sack, parrots, automobiles seeming to run over the viewer, and kitchenware in motion.

Those who have visited the Ballets Russes exhibition at the National Gallery will find a sidebar in the Philadelphia show, as Léger designed sets and costumes for Ballets Suédois (Swedish). An abstract backdrop designed by Léger for that troupe’s 1922 production of “Skating Rink”—inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Rink”—dominates the rear wall.

But the centerpiece of the exhibition, though it comes early on, is “The City,” on view along with three good-size oil studies. Nearly ten feet wide and seven and a half feet high, “The City” demonstrates a mastery of color and composition that is hard to grasp. You could imagine it being cut up to make eight great, mostly abstract paintings, or more, except that it is seamless, a thrilling and beautiful whole.

Other paintings on view have this quality of being somehow both challenging and beautiful, including, “Disks of 1918,” “Mechanical Elements of 1924,” “Composition of 1923-27” and the extraordinary post-Cubist café scene “Composition with Hand and Hats of 1927.” There are also works by artists such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Lissitzky, Man Ray, Metzinger, Mondrian, and Murphy (his wonderful, very “American Razor”).

The only reference to Léger’s later career is the seven-part “Study for a Cinematic Mural of 1938-39,” a commission for Rockefeller Center that was never carried out. Though the informality of these works is partly due to their being studies on cardboard, they also have a Rousseau-like vitality, incorporating an almost cartoon-like Statue of Liberty. They remind us of another artist from Normandy, Raoul Dufy, and of Léger’s importance as a precursor of the Pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s [gallery ids="118757,118761" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • September 25, 2013

Walking through “Fusion,” the recent exhibit of modern Latin American paintings at the Art Museum of the Americas, art historian and exhibit curator Adriana Ospina spoke to me about rice.

“In the United States, Cuba and South America, we consume a lot of it,” she said. “Rice in the Americas grew through the influence of Asian immigration in the 19th and twentieth centuries, and now it is just a part of us. No one talks about it, but that cultural influence is always present.”

After centuries of human migration throughout the world, history has long proven that the cross-pollination of coinciding cultures is basically inevitable. When two groups come together, they react by forming a new group built from their combined history and experience. Call it symbiosis, call it obvious, call it anything, but this occurrence is in many ways the engine behind a profusion of anthropological and historical knowledge.

Perhaps most obviously apparent in language, food and religion, this active cultural evolution bubbles beneath the surface of our everyday lives. There are infinite examples around the world, from the consumption of Indian tea in England, to the ever broadening and diversifying reach of the Catholic Church in South America, to the heavy influence of European justice systems on the United States Constitution.

With a focus on Latin American art during the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, Fusion traces Asian migration to the Americas through art, generating a dialogue on cultural diversity by exploring its resonating effects on specific artists and their ancestors who relocated to the Americas from Japan, China, India and Indonesia. The exhibit enhances our perception of the complex and interwoven tapestry of modern Latin American and Caribbean societies, highlighting the exchange of ideas that this multiculturalism has generated.

In addition to (and aside from) the ambition of its social and cultural mission, it also functions strikingly as an exhibit based purely on the merit of its artistry. An audience can walk through admiring the paintings for their sheer aesthetic splendor, or take away a broader message of the rich and diverse societies of the Americas.

What is most interesting about the paintings on display in the exhibit is perhaps their conspicuous absence of political or social agenda. Many of these paintings are collegial equals of the more prominently known work of their day. The expansive canvases of Manabu Mabe (1924 – 1997), a renowned Japanese-born Brazilian painter, are truly on par with the groundbreaking work of the 1950s and ’60s. His paintings evoke the bravura brushwork of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and even Frank Auerbach, (with a surrealist tang of Dali or Miro), but with a unique expression that weaves a fluid and graceful line amid bursts of color and monochromatic backgrounds, which can be traced to Mabe’s practice of Japanese calligraphy.

Mabe, like many great artists (as a few mentioned above), was an immigrant, whose clash with multiple cultural institutions seems to have caused a creative eruption born from a natural inclination to codify environments and experiences. The difference is that Mabe is foremost considered as a Latin American artist in the European tradition, as opposed to an “artist,” unburdened by a genealogical addendum.
As Michele Greet, a Ph.D. in Modern Latin American Art, writes, “The tendency… has been to isolate Latin America as a geo-political entity in the conception of exhibitions, university courses, and scholarly texts… Studies of Latin American art thus tend to explain images produced in this region as motivated by a desire to promote an ‘authentic’ national or cultural identity and avoid in-depth consideration of migration, mixed racial heritage, and global interchange…”

She goes on to write that our understanding of this art is a “part of a global network of artists and ideas, rather than an isolated development,” for that is precisely what art in the modern era is. On the whole, modern art is not an overtly political vessel. It is a venue for exploration, analysis and interpretation that simultaneously sets us apart and brings us together. A work of art does not have to display a political message in order to incite cultural sentiment or political debate.

Communicating this idea so effectively is where Fusion ultimately succeeds. From the influence of Indonesian heritage on Surinamese-born artist Soeki Irodikromo (b. 1945), whose painting of an Indonesian dragon incorporates local motifs of the Surinamese jungle, to the faint connotation of Chinese ancestral veneration in the surreal lithographs of Cuban-born artist Wilfredo Lam (1902 – 1982), this exhibit shows us how our multifaceted pasts effect us as an undercurrent, influencing our lives without taking precedent over our personal progress and collective cultural evolution.

The Organization of American States, the parent organization of the AMA, has long upheld their mission to implement democracy, development, human rights and freedom of expression throughout the Americas, promoting the benefits of immigration and offering positive, enriching examples through community outreach, political discourse and, with the AMA, through art.

“Fusion,” as much as an art exhibit can, fulfills this mission.

And like the spread of rice throughout the Americas by way of Japan, most of us can agree that it is quite a good thing. [gallery ids="101461,152993" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner • September 19, 2013

The Georgetown galleries on Book Hill are one of the few true gallery clusters in the city. Along a few blocks of Wisconsin Avenue, audiences are surrounded by art, free to walk into galleries that call to them from their vibrant window displays. This group of galleries offers us a great variety of works to explore, from renowned glasswork to classic landscapes and the contemporary and avant-garde.

This Friday, Sept. 20, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., each of the six galleries will launch a fine art exhibit and host an evening stroll, welcoming the breezy autumn art season with the Fall Season Art Kick-off. Here?s a look at what?s happening on Book Hill. For more information on the Georgetown Galleries on Book Hill visit www.GeorgetownGalleries.com

**Heiner Contemporary**

Heiner Contemporary will present ?Rachel Farbiarz: Take Me With You,? an exhibition featuring new drawing, collage and installation by the DC-based artist. The exhibit, which will be on view through November 9, reflects Farbiarz?s interest in the personal, idiosyncratic resonances that course through shared public, historical and political events. Using various media, she explores subjects including formal apologies, migration, war and burial and investigates how the emotional reverberations of words, objects and ideas linger and mutate throughout generations. For more information visit www.HeinerContemporary.com

**Susan Calloway Fine Arts**

An outdoorsman who explored the wilderness in search of inspiration, Larry Chappelear (1945-2011) created paintings as a visual diary of his experiences. His landscape paintings contain intimate enclosures of nature and accomplish what many landscape painters before him have sought to do: achieve a compositional balance among form and open space, color and light. A collection of landscape and abstract works by Chappelear will be featured in the exhibition, ?Dynamic Spaces,? through October 19. For more information visit www.CallowayArt.com

**Maurine Littleton Gallery**

Maurine Littleton Gallery will host ?Glass Sculptures & Vitreographs,? an exhibition featuring three-dimensional glass works and prints by artists Dale Chihuly, Erwin Eisch, Richard Jolley, Harvey K. Littleton, and Therman Statom, through October 19. Vitreography is a printmaking process that uses glass plates instead of traditional materials such as metal, wood, or stone. Developed in the mid-1970s by Studio Glass Movement founder Harvey Littleton, vitreography has been opened up to a wide range of possibilities by artists working in sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Over one hundred artists, including those featured in this exhibition, have created more than seven hundred print editions at Littleton Studios. ?Glass Sculptures & Vitreographs? offers a unique opportunity to view sculptures and prints by master glass artists side by side, giving insight into their individual creative processes. For more information visit www.LittletonGallery.com.

**Addison/Ripley Fine Arts**

Addison/Ripley Fine Arts will feature ?John Borden Evans: Solitude,? an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper that explore the old farmhouses and surrounding rural area of North Garden, Virginia. Evans depicts rural landscapes and animals in his thickly painted works, creating texture through build up and scrape away techniques. Through October 26. For more information visit www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

**Neptune Fine Art**

Neptune Fine Art will host ?Objects of Desire? through October 26, an exhibit that celebrates contemporary artists and the extraordinary work they create. Featuring ten established artists, the exhibit is a tantalizing glimpse into the work of these respected artisans: William Adair, Raya Bodnarchuk, Jeff Chyatte, Will Clift, Tazuko Ichikawa, Elaine Langerman, Laurel Lukaszewski, Jimmy Miracle, Wendy Ross and Foon Sham. The exhibited works delve into a wide variety of media, reflecting each artist?s finely honed talent, producing exquisite sculpture, editions and drawings. Sculptures in steel, bronze, aluminum, wood, and wax; porcelain wall reliefs, and intricate silver point drawings combine to fill the gallery. Come by for a chance to meet the artists. For more information visit www.NeptuneFineArt.com.

**Robert Brown Gallery**

Robert Brown Gallery will exhibit the photographs of Roger Ballen, an award winning photographer who has been shooting in black and white film for nearly fifty years. Part of the last generation that grew up with the media, Ballen sees black and white as a very minimalist art form and unique from color photography in that it ?does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.? For more information visit www.RobertBrownGallery.com.

Ari Post • September 12, 2013

It is important to believe that something significant can be born out of us, because we ourselves are significant. We are an active part of our environment, and so we absorb and affect both its landscape and its ephemera. When we create something, even while fiddling absentmindedly with one odd distraction or another, we intuit the possibility for a greater conclusion to come of it, pulled out from the life which courses through us. To be really pedantic about it: Asserting the natural filter of consciousness is important to the pursuit of things like abstraction, which depends on the ability to communicate something that is inherently not communicable. A different way to think about it might be: Our heads are overloaded with great and often untellable stuff, and if we are lucky we will someday find a way to get it out in the open.

In a unique and refreshing manner, mixed media in art brings the artist’s misplaced ideas and subconscious thoughts together with the very objects and materials of their world. It goes beyond painting or sculpture, wherein an artist creates every shape, line and color to reach their conclusion. With mixed media the content already exists, waiting to be assembled. The art form is quite new, co-invented in the early 20th century by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. According to the Guggenheim Foundation, the glued-on patches of wood, cloth and other materials that they added to their canvases offered a new perspective when they “collided with the surface plane of the painting.” The practice was discovered by many artists to be a useful new manner of visual communication that interacts directly with the surrounding environment.

“Over Under Next, Experiments in Mixed Media, 1913 – Present,” an exhibition at the Hirshhorn through Sept. 8, explores this medium from its creation in the early 20th century through today, demonstrating how artists continue to deal with their rapidly expanding world in beautiful new ways.

The first room in the exhibit is a trove of delicate and forgotten artifacts of modern art—an appropriate tone to set the direction of the show. There is of course a Braque, a 1913 painting collage of a violin and sheet music, which resonates as the catalyst for the ensuing journey. There is also a large-scale 1959 work by Robert Rauschenberg, perhaps the most renowned mixed media artist of all time. His innovative “Combines” of the 1950s employed non-traditional materials and objects, from photomechanical reproductions, to cloth and metal on canvas.

These works bookend some smaller compositions by a handful of highly influential, if lesser known, artists of the early 20th century: Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Joseph Stella, Man Ray and George Grosz, among others.

Born in Germany in 1913, Schwitters incorporated refuse that he scavenged from the streets into paintings, collages and even poems. Merz, Schwitters’s one-man art movement, was rooted in a desire to create connections between all things, using printed ephemera, rubbish, and found materials. In “Milwaukee” (1937), his complex design combines elements of nonsense and chance from the Dada art movement with unusually strong design properties. Leaving Germany in 1937 due to the deteriorating political situation, his work was radical enough to earn censure as “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime.

World War II ends up playing a supporting role in this exhibition, as the political landscape and accompanying propaganda of the Nazi party became inescapable fodder for mid-century European and American artists. Höch and Grosz were German contemporaries of Schwitters and members of the Dada movement, who employed collages to respond to their country’s societal upheaval. Grosz’s brutally comic “Clock-Faced Woman” (1953), with its assemblage of human facial features forming a devastating frown on a clock face with pinup girl legs, is reminiscent of his savage caricatures and political cartoons of German political machinations.

Hans Richter’s heavily political “Stalingrad (Victory in the East)” (1943 – 1944) is a large-scale panoramic collage that functions as a timeline of the war. Richter used English newspaper clippings with headlines like, “Nazi Lines Ripped At Stalingrad Front,” arranged in a playful composition of organic shapes and primary colors that recalls Alexander Calder’s mobile structures. Calder’s work is in fact displayed alongside “Stalingrad.”

An entire room is devoted to the work of Joseph Cornell, whose modern cabinets of curiosity act like dreamy funnels for displaced memories, desires and histories. The myriad works are so rife with subject matter of bygone eras that they feel like the diagrammed mind of an Alzheimer’s patient whose old memories resurface to displace the ones it has lost, intermingling with the static of the present. One piece shows us a map of the equator lining a shadowbox, with miniature glass goblets holding pearls inside and metal rings hanging from the top. Like much of the show, this is a body of work that must be experienced to fully understand. But then that is the beauty of art, and the significance of mixed media. It exists nowhere but in its own time and space, offering us a chance to understand our world in ways that escape us at the tips of our tongues.

“Over Under Next” will be on display at the Hirshhorn through Sept. 8.
For more information, visit Hirshhorn.si.edu. [gallery ids="119177,119179" nav="thumbs"]

Nico Dodd •

We are lucky that lovers of the performing arts have so many venues to choose from, especially for outdoor concerts. Wolf Trap, in Vienna, Va, is special for its breadth of programming and sincerity of space. This year, the Wolf Trap Foundation has a new President and CEO. Arvind Manocha has spent the majority of his career with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl.

One of Wolf Trap’s distinguishing characteristics is that “it’s in the company of one,” Manocha said. “There is one national park for the performing arts. There are a lot of great national parks in this country obviously, hundreds if not thousands, but only one that was created expressly to celebrate and nurture the performing arts.”

Manocha grew up in northeast Ohio and graduated with honors from Cornell University. He went on to study literature at Cambridge University in England, where he was a Marshall scholar.

As an arts institution, Wolf Trap creates its season from every musical genre. At The Barns, a week of programming can include artists who play music as varied as zydeco to jazz to folk. Round that out with National Symphony Orchestra, the Wolf Trap Opera Company and musical theater productions, and persons have about any choice they could think of.

“To have a commitment to embracing music across a spectrum was, I think, very forward- minded of Mrs. Shouse and how this place was set up, and very much reflects the reality of how people consume music now,” said Manocha, reflecting upon the legacy of Wolf Trap founder Catherine Filene Shouse.

Manocha has a soft spot for design. In Los Angeles, he was a member of the advisory board of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and has served on multiple national design juries for the American Institute of Architects.

“I love architecture,” Manocha said. “You can go to a lot of soulless arenas that are designed to be hockey rinks that now have music in them, and patrons know that. They can tell when it’s not really intended for what it’s being used. When you come here, and you’re in a perfectly naturally beautiful spot with this amazing facility, it’s very clear that this was designed to be enjoyed as a concert venue.”

Driving up to the Filene Center, the wooden amphitheater rises from behind a hill. It has a striking presence on a clear winter’s day — or summer one, for that matter.

“It’s kind of monumental,” said Manocha, who succeeds another kind of Wolf Trap monument, Terre Jones.
Jones, who served as president and CEO of Wolf Trap for 17 years, is now president emeritus. He and his wife Polly moved to Santa Fe, N.M.

For such a multifaceted arts operation, a change of leadership could be a difficult change. Wolf Trap’s board chairman John Lee IV is happy with how things have progressed.

“I couldn’t think of anything to do over again,” said Lee, who has been on the board for four years and lives with his wife at the Watergate Apartments. “The whole thing’s been very seamless. The former CEO, Terre Jones, gave us a year’s notice. So, the transition of his leaving and Arvind’s coming in was as smooth as can be.”

The feeling is mutual for the crosscountry transplant. Manocha only arrived in Washington on Dec. 30, and his first day was Jan. 2.

“John is a great partner and turning into a great friend actually,” Manocha said. “He’s a wonderful person, who’s making this transition really smooth.”

In terms of the upcoming summer’s programming, Manocha is most excited for Colombian superstar Juanes.

“He is an unbelievable performer,” Manocha said. “He is one of the most important Latin artists of today. We also have the Wolf Trap debut of Josh Groban, who’s coming later in the summer.”

The photo here with Lee and Manocha were taken on a on a cold, breezy Wednesday. A few were taken in the seats of the amphitheater, and a few, not pictured, were taken on the Filene Center’s stage, the second largest in the country.

Admiring the architecture of the Filene Center from the stage, Lee commented about Manocha’s personal box up in the balcony.
“There’ll be time for that,” Manocha. “On a warmer day.” ?

Alison Schafer •

Two weeks before show time, the Environmental Film Festival’s office on 31st Street NW is a place of quiet chaos. The festival begins March 12, and its small staff is working on details, logistics, and last-minute decisions. The festival’s staff is only ten people, but the numbers they generate are big: 190 films, 75 different venues, 111 world premiers and thousands of patrons.

Late on a recent Wednesday afternoon, questions flew around the office. “Do you know when he’s flying in?” asked Peter O’Brien, the festival’s executive director, about a presenter. “And how about the launch party,” Chris Head asked Georgina Horsey, “When do we send out the invitations? Now?” Someone else asked about the social media push. Will the launch party invitation go on Facebook, Twitter or just email?

The theme of this year’s festival are rivers in human lives. One film, Lost Rivers, is about the hidden veins of water underneath major cities. Another traces the Rhine from its source in Switzerland through Europe to the North Sea. Where the Yellowstone Goes will answer that question, and another film looks at the perils facing the mighty Amazon.

For Washingtonians, the festival offers a look at the city’s own rivers. For those who spend time on the Potomac, Potomac: A River Runs Through Us highlights Washingtonians’ ties to the river that is the source of our drinking water. Festival-goers can explore the Anacostia via a series of stories from and about people that river.

Back on 31st Street, however, are the people who make the films run on time. Without them and their long days, the river of films, events, and presentations would dry up. Right now, the planning is in full swing. “What if we run out of food for the party?” someone asks. Meanwhile, Helen Strong, who does PR for the festival, wonders aloud if she can get Lisa Jackson, the former head of the EPA, to do a quick TV interview after a film. “My mind is blown by the amount of work the people in this room do,” says Rana Koll-Mandel, pecking away at her computer.

There is reason for so much concern. Last year, they did run out of food at the launch party. “We had enough planned,” explains Peter O’Brien, “but someone didn’t show up with it.” It all worked out fine–they had plenty of wine at the party, and plenty of films at the festival.