Culture Fiend

Gauguin and Polynesia Tickets On Sale at SAM

A troublesome artist goes tropical in this winter’s biggest exhibit.

Posted by: Allison Williams on Nov 14, 2011 at 11:00AM 3 Comments

Paul Gauguin, Vahine no te Tiare (Tahitian Woman with a Flower), 1891, oil on canvas

Photo courtesy Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen/Seattle Art Museum

When painter Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti, what he found was his new muse. His work might ring a bell—bright colors, Tahitian women, the lush tropics. But what about the art that was already on his adopted island? Seattle Art Museum pairs native South Pacific pieces with the Frenchman’s best in the show Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise, opening February 9. This is gonna be a big one, folks, and tickets are on sale now.

Seattle is the only American stop for the show, which shows how Gauguin was influenced by Tahitian, Marquesan, and Maori works. The museum expects lines to be long; book now for events like In the Studio with Hotel 1000, a curator-led talk about the exhibit on February 15 (with free hors d’oeuvres!).

Gauguin was always a bit of a troublemaker, so no wonder that he supplemented his painting with wood and ceramic sculpture—"things that resist," says SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa. “He liked materials that push back,” she says. “He wanted to be contrary to pretty much everything. He needed to have conflict.” In Tahiti, Gauguin was charged with libel, fathered children with local mistresses, and died of syphilis—sounds like he got what he was looking for.

Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise is at Seattle Art Museum February 9–April 29.

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Tags: Seattle Art Museum, Ticket Alerts, Art Events, Art Exhibits

Examine the Beauty and Bounty of America at Seattle Art Museum

Just in time for the Fourth of July, 19th-century landscape paintings that show all our purple mountain majesties.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jun 30, 2011 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Image courtesy Howard Giske/Seattle Art Museum.

Albert Bierstadt, Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, 1870, oil on canvas, 52.5 × 82 in.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Image courtesy Howard Giske/Seattle Art Museum.

Albert Bierstadt, Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, 1870, oil on canvas, 52.5 × 82 in.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Image courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1878, oil on canvas, 20 × 30in. From a private collection.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Image courtesy Paul Macapia/Seattle Art Museum.

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Mount Rainier, Bay of Tacoma – Puget Sound, 1875, oil on canvas, 21 × 40 1/2 in.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Photo courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Carleton E. Watkins, Cape Horn, Columbia River, 1868. Albumen silver print, 19 1/4 × 14 1/2in. On loan from Henry Art Gallery: Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography
Collection.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Image courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Strohmeyer and Wyman, Nearly a Mile Straight Down and Only a Step, Yosemite from
Glacier Point, California, 1894 stereograph, albumen silver print. From a private collection.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Image courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Whiting Tennis, Bovine, 2006; lumber, found plywood and found objects and CD; 102 × 168 × 90 in. Gift of Greg Kucera Gallery, Inc.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Image courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Michael Brophy, Forest Room, 1999, oil on canvas, 79 × 93in. Mark Tobey Estate Fund.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Image courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Cameron Martin, Untitled, 2001, oil on canvas, 72 × 60 in. Gift of the ContemporaryArtProject, Seattle.

Anyone who’s driven down I-5 on a sunny day and seen Mount Rainier rise above the horizon knows the power of the Pacific Northwest landscape. But a new Seattle Art Museum exhibit examines the continent’s purple mountains majesty through the eyes of awestruck 19th-century artists experiencing the “Great West” for the first time: Sanford Gifford, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran among them. In Beauty and Bounty: American Art in the Age of Exploration, SAM’s American art curator Patricia Junker has gathered more than 120 landscape paintings and photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries—several from private collections that have rarely been seen in public.

Of note is a room dedicated to Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, a permanent piece in SAM’s collection that has been criticized for…well, not looking much like the Sound. Bierstadt never actually made it this far north during his travels, but his “dreamland” is well informed, Junker says, and the exhibit includes texts, photos, and artifacts that inspired the painter in 1870.

These are paintings for the poet as well as the journalist; some were drafted in order to lure settlers to California, while others had preservationist agendas. Gifford in particular was concerned about the destruction of forests—so much so that his close friend, logging millionaire James Pinchot, came to regret the environmental damage he’d done and named his son after the Hudson River School artist. Gifford Pinchot later went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service. Many of the works offer an “Edenic, peaceful” counterpoint to the wartime trauma of the 1860s, said Junker, while John Frederick Kensett’s Lake George (1865)—one of the East Coast pieces—offers a “kind of normalcy: something so simple and ordinary” as a picnic on the beach.

If you’re not a fan of 19th-century landscape paintings, there are some clever stereograph images—the original 3D—and mammoth plate images by pioneers of photography, including Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge, that are equally dynamic as the oil on canvas.

Paired with Beauty and Bounty is contemporary art exhibit Reclaimed: Nature and Place Through Contemporary Eyes, featuring 45 works that show the artist’s relationship with the natural environment. It’s hard to miss Whiting Tennis’s Bovine, a 14-foot-long ox-conestoga wagon hybrid, an allusion to migration West. View the slideshow above for more images from both exhibits.

Beauty and Bounty and Reclaimed are both on display June 30–Sept 11 at Seattle Art Museum.

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Tags: Visual Art, Seattle Art Museum, Art Exhibits

Your Ticket to 17 of the World’s Best Museums

Google digitizes artwork at the Tate, the Met, MoMA, Uffizi, and more.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Feb 08, 2011 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

Get up close to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus with Google’s Art Project.

This weekend, I did an art tour of Amsterdam…then Madrid, Florence, London, and New York. I put my nose up to Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, examining the brush strokes, then leaned back to take in the gracefulness of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. I didn’t wait in any lines, didn’t get on a single plane. And though it doesn’t replace the experience of seeing a masterpiece in person, Google’s new Art Project, launched last week, is an enthralling digital tour of 17 of the world’s best museums.

It’s hard not to geek out over this: Google has obtained access to museums like the Uffizi in Florence and the Tate in England (among many others—see below), and uses its street-view technology to let you “walk” through the galleries. You can take in the layout of the place and see how the artwork hangs, then zoom in on dozens of pieces at each museum. And I mean zoom. ‘On average there are 7 billion pixels’ per image, Amit Sood, leader of the Google Art Project, told The Washington Post. ‘This is a thousand times more than the average digital camera.’ Many of these museums already have digital images of their collections on their websites, but Google aggregates them all for the greatest, laziest art walk imaginable.

I was a little worried that my web prowling of the Palace of Versailles would detract from the first time I actually go there—diminish the power of the unknown. Then again, I can’t get up close to the artwork on the palace’s ceiling otherwise, unless I find a ladder and avoid getting thrown out of France. I think there’s room for both kinds of exploration.

Here’s the full list of museums on googleartproject.com:

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany
The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
Museum Kampa, Czech Republic
The National Gallery, London, England
Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Tate Britain, England
The Frick Collection, NYC
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Not included: the Louvre
When will we see some Seattle museums on this list?

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Tags: Visual Art, Art Exhibits, Free Museum

Iguana Girl vs. the Chick Lit Stereotypes

A Seattle publisher ventures into manga with tales of sci-fi romance, doomed princesses, and hideous heroines.

Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Sep 10, 2010 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Not your father’s comic books: Moto Hagio’s “Iguana Girl.”

This is too much of an event to ignore: Fantagraphics, Seattle’s eclectic and prolific comics publisher, which has revived everything from Popeye to Peanuts in archival editions, has just published its first volume of manga—the comics that may be Japan’s most popular and influential art form. Trouble is, just as Woody Allen can’t understand mime, I usually don’t get manga. The big Keane eyes and blandly androgynous, racially indeterminate features of the youthful characters (and nearly all the characters are youthful) creep me out before I even start reading.

Worse yet, this is shojo manga, comics for tween and teen girls, a demographic I fit like a walrus fits a fashion show. But these aren’t just any girl comics: A Drunken Dream and Other Stories ($24.99 from Fantagraphics Books) is a four-decade anthology of graphic short stories by Moto Hagio, the “founding mother” and premiere creator of shojo manga, who, the promo suggests, has raised an insipid pop genre to a serious art form.

Does Hagio’s work justify the hype? Her visual storytelling and graphic invention, by turns fluid, crisp, and stately, certainly do. The earlier stories in A Drunken Dream, from the 1970s and ‘80s, are the ones most bound in little-princess conventions; their sensitive, spontaneous young heroines are crushed by the cold, callous adult and teenaged worlds. The long title tale is a too-twee sci-fi romance. But the 1991 “Iguana Girl” is a heartbreaking fable of maternal rejection: a love-starved girl looks normal to everyone except herself and her mother, who see a hideous iguana. Another tale finds a trenchant ghoulish metaphor for sibling rivalry and symbiosis: conjoined twins, one an adored, beautiful simpleton literally sucking the life out of her withered, intelligent sister. These two and Moto’s other later stories do indeed raise manga to literature.
And their refreshingly hideous protagonists don’t even have Keane eyes.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories is the first volume in an anticipated manga series from Fantagraphics. After a start like this, I can’t wait to see more.

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Tags: Books & Talks, Fantagraphics Books, Comics, Art Exhibits, Manga

Collateral Damage: The Comic

Cartoonist Carol Tyler probes her family’s inner war wounds in words and pictures, and shares the results at Fantagraphics.

Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Sep 06, 2010 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

From A Good and Decent Man, the first volume of Carol Tyler’s You’ll Never Know graphic memoir. A show of art from the new second volume opens with a book signing this Saturday at Fantagraphics Books.

“Greatest Generation” hoopla will never seem the same after You’ll Never Know: Collateral Damage, book two in Carol Tyler’s sprightly but relentlessly honest “graphic memoir” (new from Fantagraphics, with an author reception this Saturday and a show of art from the book through October 6).

This volume both revisits and picks up from the first one, in which Tyler recounted the wartime adventures and ordeals of her father, a G.I. in the long slog to victory over Hitler. Dad’s the classic taciturn, can-do, don’t-want-to-talk-about-it WWII vet, drowning combat horrors and every other emotion in an unending bustle of activity. Decades later he starts looking back, prompted by a forgotten wound he now wants compensation for. This Rosebud leads Tyler to re-examine her own messy life and relationships—youthful neediness, neglected husband, rebellious, self-destructive daughter—and slavish but resentful devotion to her bullying dad. All lead back to a war that ended before she was born; this is the story of not just a family but a generation, or two or three. And all are told with a saving dash of humor.

Tyler’s form, a mix of scrapbook, diary, and cartoon panels, is likewise messy and eccentric, but it pays off in layered textures and viewpoints. Two famous precedents, Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, seem almost one-dimensional by comparison. What’s most unusual is Collateral Damage’s raw, diary-like sense of immediacy: It feels as though Tyler is sharing each discovery and deepening insight as it unfolds. Which just might be the case.

Carol Tyler, You’ll Never Know
Book signing and opening reception Saturday, September 11, 6-9pm
Exhibition continues through October 6.
Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery
1201 S. Vale Street, Georgetown

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Tags: Books & Talks, Fantagraphics Books, Comics, Art Exhibits