From the heyday of the Renaissance, through the Impressionist period and into the early 20th century, art was as much a competitive endeavor as a creative one.
In Italy during the 15th century, in a surprising upset against favored architect and artist Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti won one of the most influential art competitions of his time: the commission to design a set of bronze doors for the Florentine Baptistery. Ghiberti’s doors, the “Gates of Paradise,” as they came to be known, would serve as one of the key influences for later artists like Donatello and Michelangelo. (more…)
One of the world’s most successful theater managers quotes the astronomical sum required to mount a Broadway musical and then puffs contemplatively on his pipe. “Unless you hang on to the big sources of funds—the record companies, the movie people—you’re in terrible trouble. You need the fat cats, but the way this year has gone I don’t know how much longer they’re going to be around,” he says. “What worries me is the audience—the unions have been outrageous for years, but we’ve lost the in-between audience: we’ve lost the young people and we’ve been losing them for a long time.”
It’s not the most recent Broadway season that so worried this manager, the late Max Allentuck, but that of 1967-68, the one chronicled by William Goldman in his classic book The Season. (more…)
A recent New York Times article sheds light on a little-known mural in California, painted in the 1950s by Alfredo Santos, a prodigious young artist. Santos seems well versed in the visual vocabulary of the famous Mexican Muralists—Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Rivera painted on the walls of Mexico City’s Presidential Palace, a teeming history of Mexico in a bouquet of color. Santos, meanwhile, painted for a more captive audience: the inmates of grim San Quentin prison (above).
The Mexican muralists trumpeted socialism and revolution and eschewed art galleries to display their monumental frescoes. Santos, a prison inmate himself, couldn’t ply his trade in public with the aplomb of say, Diego Rivera, who was unafraid to paint rapacious conquistadors on the walls of the Mexican Presidential Palace or an ill-fated portrait of Lenin in the middle of New York City. (more…)
Not much of a gadget-head, I still appreciate the tech-savvy forays art museums are making to keep up with the times, especially in contrast to the old school ways such institutions often operate.
Last year the Loyola University Museum of Art hosted “Caravaggio: Una Mostra Impossibile!” The exhibition brought together paintings from top-tier museums, churches and private collections, and featured all of Caravaggio’s greatest hits. This otherwise impossible feat became a reality because the images featured in the show were not the actual paintings but hi-def photo reproductions of the works.
The Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, Germany, has opened its doors to the virtual world by creating a clone of the gallery and putting it online. All 750 masterworks in the museum’s holdings are on view around the clock.
The Baltimore Museum of Art is (rightly) banking on the fact that everyone has a cell phone. Touring the museum’s sculpture garden or latest show, you dial a number, enter a two-digit code and get a message from an artist confiding about the work in question or a curator expounding on a particular theme.
The Walters Art Museum is taking cell phone interactivity further in an upcoming exhibition, “Déjà vu: Revealing Repetition in French Masterpieces,” by allowing callers to leave a message at the beep. Interesting comments from visitors will eventually become part of the show’s audio tour.
Art is an exciting business. Harnessing the equally exciting technological advances that are cropping up every day could go a long way toward shaking off the dust that has settled on the museum-going experience.
The Getty Center unveiled the complete Fran and Ray Stark sculpture collection a few weeks ago in Los Angeles. The deal was inked in 2005, with several of the 28 works appearing around the Brentwood campus over the last year, serving as sneak peaks of the feature presentation to come. The late Ray Stark was the legendary movie producer behind such hits as Funny Girl.
The collection brings the Getty’s sculpture holdings firmly into the 20th century, with works by many of the well known: Maillol, Kelly, Noguchi, Lichtenstein, Moore, Giacometti and Calder. The new pieces give context to Martin Puryear’s That Profile, a modern work standing lone sentinel in the upper tram plaza for the last eight years. Now, by the time you reach the Puryear, you will have seen works by Frink and Moore in the lower Sculpture Garden, and will be on your way past the Maillol–beautifully placed on the grand staircase–as you start your visit. Other works appear on the Sculpture Terrace, and yet more have been incorporated into the Getty’s outdoor sculpture campaign, Irwin’s Central Garden. (more…)
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