Past Present: conversations across time, February 22 - May 17, 2015



 
CURATOR’S NOTES:

IMAGINE a conversation between artists -- one a 21st Century world-weary, contemporary artist; and the other, a Renaissance Master of the 16th Century.  What would they have to say to each other?  Would this be a dialogue, a lesson, an argument?

PAST PRESENT establishes conversations between contemporary artists and the Allentown Art Museum’s Samuel H. Kress Collection.  Art is  always part of a larger conversation between artists and cultures, crossing time and place.  The art of the past from all cultures has a direct influence on the creation of art in the present.   Regardless of different styles and technologies, art can remain fresh through the ongoing discovery of looking.

NINE ARTISTS working individually or collectively were invited to study the Kress collection and select a specific painting from it.  These contemporary artists have created new works that exist in conversation with their Kress selection.  In many cases these contemporary artists use very different tools, techniques and technologies than the Kress masters, but each has identified a common interest that they share with the artists of the past.   The new work and the old masterpiece are hung together to foster more conversation with each other and you, the viewer.  Although art always exists within its time and reflects the concerns and ideas of its day, this exhibition demonstrates that there is much to be gained from a conversation with the past. 

The paintings from the Kress Collection used in this exhibition are a few of the many masterpieces given to the Allentown Art Museum by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1960.  These works were part of Samuel Kress’s important collection of European Old Masters that graced his Fifth Avenue penthouse in Manhattan.  The Samuel H. Kress Foundation donated his collection to the National Gallery and ninety other institutions including the Allentown Art Museum.


GUEST CURATOR The Third Barn is an experimental studio portal and curatorial project in an unspecified location.  Pat Badt and Scott Sherk,  Professors of Art at Cedar Crest College and Muhlenberg College, respectively, have collaborated on several large-scale installations and independently curated exhibitions on sound, painting, and sculpture.




Past Present: Conversations Across Time 
by Stephen Maine


Countless artists have reinvigorated their studio activity through a speculative engagement with art of centuries past. Examples abound: Pablo Picasso’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek sculpture radiates from his work of the 1930s; Willem de Kooning looked back to Ingres, among many others; Piero della Francesca was a touchstone for both Giorgio de Chirico and Philip Guston. The list is endless, because the practice is self-perpetuating; Ingres revered Raphael’s clarity, while de Kooning’s Ingres-inspired, linear approach to distorting human anatomy and space prompted innumerable mid-20th-century painters to embrace expressive figuration. Though the interpretation of documents from a cultural tradition is commonly considered the province of the translator, historian or critic, it is also a fundamental function of the artist’s creative imagination.


The curatorial premise of “Past Present: Conversations Across Time” recognizes this impulse to come to grips with the historical record. It is realized through the Samuel H. Kress Memorial Collection at the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, one of eighteen regional museums that benefited from Mr. Kress’s decision to disburse much of his extraordinary collection of Renaissance art across the US. The value of this gift is enormous, in part because it facilitates an intimate contact between working artists and significant examples of the European heritage.


Curators Pat Badt and Scott Sherk asked the participating artists to review the Allentown Art Museum’s Kress Collection, and to respond to a particular work. The nature of these responses varies widely but each in its own way reflects aspects of the process by which artists assimilate their understanding of historical artworks. This may or may not have anything to do with the work’s original significance; as the painter Thomas Nozkowski has noted, time easily obscures the artist’s intentions:


The longer you look, the stranger all the artist’s choices appear. We don’t really know what was meant. But what you do get is a believable machine that is capable of running independently of its intended meaning. The logic of the structures of the painting may remind a viewer of an order that he senses in the visual world.[1]


What matters is that the work is somehow legible. A hermeneutical response unravels and extrapolates for the audience some aspect of the viewing experience, even while respecting the original work’s essential inscrutability.


In pursuit of this elaboration, the contemporary artists in “Past Present” engage various strategies. Alison Hall enters a Trecento Crucifixion from Rimini by way of the pattern adorning the gold leaf treatment of the painting’s ground, which reiterates the panel’s surface even as it dematerializes its position in pictorial space. For Jonsara Ruth and Loretta Di Cintio, architecture and light are central; the Giovanni del Biondo panel prompts them to reimagine its “golden interior landscape” as another mystic interior, a space of contemplation such as the convent cell the painting might have originally adorned.


The circumstances of viewing also intrigue Gregory Coates, whose source painting, by a follower of Giovanni Bellini, is a sacra conversazione among the Virgin and Child, a donor, and a female saint. In imitation of this intimate group, Coates recontextualizes the work in a living-room setting, where it inhabits the same space as the accouterments of relaxed conversation. Paulo Uccello also depicts non-contemporaries in his Madonna and Child with Saint Francis, an effect that collapses time; Pinkney Herbert gently satirizes this conventional pictorial fiction of “time travel” within a painting by combining the technologies of oil painting and digital printing. A pair of Dutch portraits from 1625 provides Creighton Michael with a point of departure for a meditation on drawing as a mode of response, analysis, and the generation of new meaning.

The nonhierarchical organization of Sanford Wurmfeld’s painting is akin to the “density of information” he has noted in Canaletto’s panoramic pictures, such as the 1740 View of Piazza San Marco, Venice, and as such it is the visual equivalent of our “primary experience” of our surroundings.[2] Pat Badt and Scott Sherk also consider perception in relation to subject matter, in a multimedia installation, pegged to an altarpiece by a follower of Leonardo, that brings into play the tactility of that painting’s abundant drapery, the varied angles of the onlookers’ gazes, even the sound of the angel’s lute.



The instantaneous online availability of images of artworks from all periods and a great many places is, on balance, a boon for contemporary artists. A consequence, however, is that art history then collapses, not just temporally into a continuously present moment, but also spatially, into a backlit, computer-screen-sized template. Iconography—whether two- or three-dimensional, abstract or referential—and style inevitably displace other, more experiential aspects of the work, such as its scale, surface and tactility; the behaviors of light and sound the object (or installation) engenders; and its relation to the enclosing architecture or surrounding landscape.

“Past Present” insists on the primacy of these experiential components of looking at pictures. In this exhibition, we do not confront postmodernist “pastiche,” the arbitrary aping of historical manners and modes. The participating artists experience history as more than merely a repository of stylistic options ripe for the quoting. They are engaged with their chosen sources on a corporeal, even visceral level—the level on which perception fully occurs.

The critic Harold Bloom refers to “poetic misprision” in describing the creative misreading of prior texts that incubates a poet’s individuality, identity, voice.[3] Of course, an artist can happily and productively work away without any awareness of or investment in tradition. But when native curiosity—or a curator’s invitation—draws an artist to scrutinize and reinterpret a predecessor’s visual language, the resulting conversation can both stretch customary creative boundaries and help to refine, within those boundaries, a creative self.




[1] David Ryan, Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Artists. New York: Routledge, 2002.  Quotation is from “Thomas Nozkowski: In Conversation,” p. 182.

[2] Sanford Wurmfeld, “Canaletto: Maps and Panoramas.” Privately distributed.


[3] Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
 













 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

David Mickenberg

Priscilla Payne Hurd President and CEO



Every museum struggles to make collections relevant to new audiences, to bridge the gaps between time, intention and production.   The phenomena of the Kress Collection affords opportunities to ask questions, seek new perspectives, and observe the art of the past with new eyes and fresh thoughts.  Past/Present gives us the ability to bridge that divide, to see the works entrusted to the museum in new light and through a lens of contemporary creativity and thought. We owe a debt to both Pat Badt and Scott Sherk, the curators of The Third Barn, for allowing the museum a rare opportunity.  In proposing this exhibition, in working throughout this past year on the numerous possibilities that bringing the nine artists of Past/Present together creates, both have allowed many to look at the old master painting in the collection with fresh insight and experience the art of today in an ever fascinating series of perspectives.  There is no greater gift to a museum than to extend the boundaries of thought while giving access to new ideas.  It is a pleasure to be able to present their work both as curators and as artists.



The Museum wishes to recognize and thank all of the artists in Past Present.  They have been extraordinary in responding to the challenge of conversing with, and responding to, individual works in the collection and sharing their ideas and works with a broad community. Their trust in the museum, for presenting their works to a broad community is cherished by all.



No exhibition would be possible without the excellence and expertise of the museum’s staff.  All museum practice is a collaborative effort on the part of many.  Without Bev Hoover, Steve Gamler, Sofia Bakis and Kim Tanzos, Past/Present would not have been designed, installed and accessible with such finesse and beauty.   Maureen Connolly, Tom Edge, Janet Egbert, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Don Gunn, Missy Hartney,  Rhonda Mark Hudak, Joe Kimock and the entire Office of Security, Lalaine Little, Julia Marsh, Elaine Mehalakes, John Pepper, Chris Potash, Linda Schmoyer, Irene Smith,  and Sharon Yurkanin, have all worked tirelessly to make Past/Present a reality.



It is often necessary to augment the expertise of the staff to ensure opportunities to expand upon the museum experience.  The museum wishes to recognize the work of Aria Mickenberg who produced the introductory videos on each of the artists in Past/Present.  Her work has made the works in the exhibition more accessible to all and has given a “pre-visit” voice to all of the artists. 



As with all exhibitions at the Allentown Art Museum Past/Present has been supported by numerous friends and patrons who have ensured our continued excellence and growth. Past/Present has been funded through the generosity of the Audrey & Bernard Berman Fund, the Leon C. & June W. Holt Endowment Fund, The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Office of the Provost, Muhlenberg College and the Muhlenberg College Art Department, Cedar Crest College, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Members and Trustees of the Museum.













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