 |
| Yearning to get in? Bernardi Roig's light sculpture Acteón (2005), detail. Photo by C. G. Wagner |
 |
| Roig's The Man of the Light (2005) illuminates the trek upstairs in the Phillips's grand stairwell. Photo via The Phillips Collection. |
During my visit, I tried to spend a little more time looking at the art, noticing and noting. For example, there was a bit of damage at the bottom of Orange and Red on Red (1957), one of the four large canvases in the Rothko Room, which I never noticed before.
In the D.C.-Baltimore room, I loved the collection of like-themed circles and colors with Thomas Downing's Grid 31 (1970) and Blue Spell (1964) with Gene Davis's Untitled (1971) tall vertical rainbow board and the LED installation of concentric colored squares by Leo Villareal, Scramble (2011), which I'd advise you not to stare at. It'll burn your retinas out.
It was Blue Spell that kept me a bit more spellbound, a piece that would seem somewhat monochromatic if examined from afar (or from a book), but upon closer inspection reveals the surface texture of the canvas and the subtle shadings of the acrylic paint. When you can see this evidence of the process, you are in the same room with the artist.
 |
| Blue Spell, 1964, by Thomas Downing (1928-1985). Photo by giveawayboy, Flickr, Creative Commons |
But in that room there was one "Which thing here is not like the others" piece in Morris Louis's Seal (1959), a blue-black-ivory swash of formless abstraction departing from the neat geometries of Downing, Davis, and Villareal.
Upstairs was a tribute to art collector Anita Reiner, to whom Duncan Phillips once said, "Young lady, you always have to meet new art half way." She apparently didn't think much of the Rothkos.
I especially loved two pieces glancing across the room from each other with complementary compositions of groups of people: Shilpa Gupta's untitled archival print showing schoolboys lined up along a shore, each imposing a "see," "hear," or "speak no evil" gesture on the boy in front of him; and Shirin Neshat's Soliloquy Series (Veiled Women in Three Arches) (1999), another group but not posed, expressing a more natural, quiet but disquieting feeling. With the boys, I felt the story was imposed on them. I would like to know more about both groups, but I was disappointed not to get more caption information, which was hard to find (the captions were grouped on one panel and positioned in the archway entrance to the gallery) and hard to read once you could find them (eye-test small print).
Finally, upstairs were the Neo-Impressionists, those pointillists (and others) who break moments down to study their creation by light and shadow. Here is where you really need to be in the same room with the art works to appreciate them. As I said, I'm usually all about the souvenir exhibition book so I can keep my art experiences alive. But the sample book left in one of the galleries here was a real eye-opener.
I stopped in front of the mesmerizing Jan Toorop landscape, Broek in Waterland (1889), with its pattern of light and dark, aqua and amber, a twilight sky casting the figures in the foreground into quiet silhouettes. But the plate for this painting in the exhibition catalog didn't come close to matching the live canvas. The book flattened, muddied, and muddled the colors into almost a sepia tone. I held the book up to the light, right below the canvas; another couple in the gallery saw and had the same complaint--no match. In fact, even this image from the Web doesn't adequately capture the canvas in the room, although the figures are sightly more distinct.
 |
| Broek in Waterland (1889), Jan Toorop (Dutch, 1858-1928). Image via Wikiart.org |
All this is a gentle note to self, Self: Go visit art. You know Paul Klee always makes you smile.
 |
| Young Moe (1938) by Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879-1940). Image via The Phillips Collection. |
Love, hosaa
Meeting art (old and new) half way.
No comments:
Post a Comment