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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