Review: Douglas Breault at Carole Calo Gallery

Photography, grief, and memory are linked. Joan Didion, in her autobiographical chronicle The Year of Magical Thinking shares the advice that in order to get over the death of a family member one must “let them become the photograph on the table”. For photographer and mixed media artist Douglas Breault, his art practice often centers on the elegiac, and beyond that on the mournful quality of memory that can embed itself in the photographic image. A solo exhibition of Breault’s photo-based work at Stonehill College’s Carole Calo Gallery allows viewers to experience the artist’s immersive use of photography to probe these potent themes in ways that are beautiful and deeply affecting.

Breault’s exhibition, evocatively titled who decides where a roof ends, includes straightforward photographs exhibited alongside works that blur the bounds of photography, sculpture, and assemblage. In addition to photographs, Breault employs found objects: a whistle, a pane of glass, a clamp, a block of wood with a nail jutting out. The sum of all these parts is a collection that probes ideas of home, memory, grief, and the ways in which vision and remembrance are shaped.

One of the through lines in Breault’s work is light, both in specific forms - like a lamp or a flame - and the general light which acts as the foundational tool in all photography. The lights in Breault’s work feel like demarcation points but also hint at the ephemeral nature of all things. Times change, passages occur, lights are snuffed out. Much of Breault’s art is connected to his own experience of familial grief and the expressive and poetic elements of his visual work have a magnetic quality for others with similar experiences.

Breault describes his exploration of loss in his statement by saying, “My curiosity questions the limitations of a photograph to accurately depict a life, contemplating how an image can be unfolded or obscured to describe a person or place that is paradoxically missing.”

Breault is one of the most promising photographic practitioners in the Northeast. In addition to his work as an artist, he is also the Exhibitions Director at Gallery 263 in Cambridge and has also taught art at area colleges, including at Bridgewater State University, Babson College, Holyoke Community College, and the Rhode Island School of Design. He earned his BA from Bridgewater State and his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. I previously interviewed Doug for my Fine Art Insights podcast, and he also exhibited work in the exhibition Housewarming at my Project Space in Providence.

For emerging artists studying art at Stonehill, and for those who are able to visit Breault’s show at the Carole Calo Gallery, his work offers an exciting alternative to the staid and static interpretations that photographers regularly present. In a world full of images, often consumed through cold screens as social media content, the engaging and inventive way in which Breault manipulates photography to make it real and present merits recognition. His photographs go beyond the expected and break out of the frame to become something entirely new.

Breault’s solo exhibition at Stonehill College is one of the best shows to see right now in New England and offers a chance to fundamentally change the way viewers read photography.

Douglas Breault’s exhibition, who decides where a roof ends, continues through January 26, 2024 in the Carole Calo Gallery at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Learn more about Breault’s work at his website www.douglasbreault.com, or follow his studio work on Instagram at @dug_bro. Click on the images below for expanded installation views.

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Review: Impressionism Explored at Worcester Art Museum

Impressionism remains one of the most revered movements in Western art history. The soft focus paintings of Monet continue to hold sway with contemporary audiences sheerly through their unbridled beauty. The divergent influences and aftereffects of the Impressionist movement are less well-known by audiences but are no less worthy of exploration. In a current exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum, some of the complex realities of this art historical moment are explored, resulting in new insights that go beyond a popular aesthetic.

The entrance to the exhibition is a wall-spanning tribute to the Worcester Art Museum’s prized Monet Waterlilies.

Fronters of Impressionism, curated by Claire C. Whitner and Erin Corrales-Diaz, aims to unpack the nuances of artmaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On view through June 25, the show probes the world as it was when Impressionism arrived and shares works produced by concurrently occurring artistic movements. The narrative the exhibition unfolds will give many museum visitors their first broad readings of a period that is often characterized in the popular imagination as being dominated by the likes of Renoir or Cassatt.

The exhibition of course has fine examples of European paintings like Claude Monet’s 1908 Waterlilies, which was purchased by WAM within just a couple years of its creation. This is the kind of image that springs to mind when the term Impressionism is raised. But alongside Monet, the exhibition also contextualizes movements like the Barbizon School or later Pointellist creations and does an excellent job of illustrating how artists outside of Europe digested and influenced the avant-garde ideas of the Impressionist vanguard.

Corot’s A Fisherman on the Banks of the Pond, created between 1865-70, is a prototypical Barbzon artwork, and the type that would inspire generations of American landscape painters.

Works by Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833-1917) are featured in the exhibition, highlighting an artist who was intimately involved in the zeitgeist of the turn of the century and who had friendships with peers like Pissarro. In a small painting from 1864, Oller y Cestero captures his friend Paul Cézanne painting out of doors, documenting one of the more important strategies of boundary-breaking artists in the nineteenth century. Where the powerful French Academy of Fine Arts demanded that polished artworks be produced in the studio, young artists rejected this and painted “finished” works en plein air, giving life to a tradition that continues today.

Both a product and document of the Impressionism moment, Francisco Oller y Cestero’s painting of his friend Cézanne depicts the technique behind the avant-garde plein air painters.

Artists of the United States also make up a sizable component of the show. A fine example by landscapist Edward Mitchell Bannister is shown alongside portraits by John Singer Sargent and Cecilia Beaux. One of the best paintings in the show is by fellow American Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862-1938). Titled The Venetian Blind and produced in 1898, the painting was another early acquisition by WAM and has been owned by the museum since 1904. A award-winning work in its day, Tarbell’s figure is bathed in diffused golden light and interior elements like the titular shades bear his distinctive and painterly hand. It is at once a romantic and modern image, hinting at European precedents while tackling a contemporary subject in a novel way.

One of the exhibitions most interesting pieces, Edmund Tarbell’s The Venetian Blind, produced in 1898, presages the type of figurative artwork that has only recently returned to vogue in the twenty-first century.

Through the show, viewers will be able to follow the influences of Impressionism through to their various conclusions. The reality is that the ways in which these intrepid artists shaped the works made by ensuing generations are hard to define. But Frontiers of Impressionism provides a great sampler, and in doing so promises to encourage visitors to find new connections between individual artists, discrete schools, and varying periods.

Towards the end of the exhibition, some of the more radical offspring of the changing art world are shown. A vivid and lush Paul Signac painting from 1896 shows off a technicolor Pointellist technique. Capturing the Golfe Juan in the South of France, the image of a pink horizon over the seaside is scintillating and celebratory. Nearby, Georges Braque’s Olive Trees from 1907 tackles another landscape subject with similar zeal. While Signac’s coastal scene is a coalescence of painted dots, Braque’s tree is a disintegration of limbs executed in utterly unnatural tones. Looking at it, the thrilling modernisms of the twentieth century that owe so much to their nineteenth century predecessors can be seen and felt in the distance.

Georges Bracque’s 1907 Olive Trees heralds the excitement of forthcoming modernisms that would define art in the twentieth century.

Frontiers of Impressionism is on view now through June 25, 2023 at the Worcester Art Museum. After the exhibition concludes in Worcester it will travel to the Tampa Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Art, and other venues. Learn more about the exhibition and plan your visit while it is on view in New England at www.worcesterart.org.

Balance, Tension, and The Art of Robert Rohm

It is easy to misread sculpture as a static medium, or as one dedicated to inward-looking stillness. Great art, though, can upend such preconceived notions of its genre. One of the best regarded Baroque sculptures, Bernini’s David, for instance, is known for its remarkable torsion. Building up in the subject’s taut body, the drama inherent in tension and expected release is the key to this great work. In Down to Earth, a career-spanning survey of work by twentieth century sculptor Robert Rohm (1934-2013) another artist’s relationship with notions of tension, balance, and even motion is explored in depth. On view through April 25, 2021, at The WaterFire Arts Center in Providence, it includes selections from a diverse oeuvre created over four decades. A remarkable exhibition, it shows off the artist’s use of quotidien elements to create transcendent sculptural forms.

Down to Earth at The WaterFire Arts Center opens with a kinetic wood sculpture.

Rohm, a longtime professor at The University of Rhode Island, was an maker steeped in craft, an educator with a giving character, and an artist unparalleled in his capacity to examine structure through unassuming materials. Whereas predecessors like Bernini sculpted in marble, Rohm preferred rope, lead, encaustic, wood, and rebar. These components are used and reused, resulting in cohesive ties binding the far flung aesthetics of differing bodies of work.

The earliest objects in the exhibition were produced in the heady days of 1960’s conceptualism. The show opens with a rough hewn kinetic work in wood and moves into Rohm’s notable rope sculptures. The enormous rope work, Untitled May 16th, 1969, engages an entire wall but is constructed of simple Manila rope. Exhibited at The Whitney Museum alongside the likes of Carl Andre and Eva Hesse, the piece consists of a sixteen foot tall by twenty-two foot wide grid of two foot squares. Nailed to the wall, the work is based on the interplay between construction and disruption. When Rohm released several of the identical knots from their nails on the wall, the overwhelming grid began to give way and to dive into the viewer’s space. In Down to Earth, viewers see a reconstruction of this work executed to the exacting standards of the artist. This activation of the artist’s original intent is an essential element of conceptual art.

In later works, Rohm explored familiar figurative forms made up of materials like rebar and encaustic. This series is spookily fleshy and corporeal. In one piece, Untitled (Large Cascade), from 1996, a massive hand balances on a lone finger as its iridescent blue surface disintegrates into the sketchy contours of digits shaped in metal mesh. Hands and fingers are a reappearing motif in this group, as are shapely torsos and mantle-like forms empty of bodies. Limbs flexed and tense, or still and resolute shoulders, or a cupped palm, are all fashioned out of elements which could be procured from the hardware store. Rohm was able to play with material, with form, with the tensions between subject and object, in ways that reward the viewer who takes the time to look closely.

A view of Untitled (Large Cascade) in Down to Earth at The WaterFire Arts Center.

A grouping of tables, described in exhibition text as “Platonic work benches”, shows off Rohm’s taste for material as well as his wry sense of humor. Leaden wheels and sleigh runners serve as feet on two such tables, while another is ankle deep in metal buckets. Overhead, shop lights dangle to illuminate mysterious objects. The  whole series is a sampler of sketches in the type of craftsmanship Rohm enjoyed. These benches are strangely personified, totemic, and even altarlike. In one table, the viewer is invited to look through a glass surface into a void below which is shaped in the outline of a basilica or cathedral. Architectural forms undergird crafted objects. The hard lines of this series counterbalance the soft and amorphous edges of other sculptures on view.

Almost a quarter of the space is dedicated to a series of columns, all using rebar in one form or another. In this group, objects within cages seem to defy gravity, with the hand-formed metal canopies being the only thing to stop encaustic balloons from floating away into the cavernous space above them. These works are all about verticality, but also are almost leaden in their weighty footings. They are also largely transparent, with voids between rebar acting as windows onto still other sculptures beyond. Both solid and punctured, they are firmly clung to the ground but aspire to be aloft. The sense of the totemic object found in Rohm’s tables might be noticed here as well, as might a sense of the ceremonial.

Rohm’s production was singular, but while early works correlate to those of co-exhibitors like Andre and Hesse, some later objects reflect the sensitivity for materials more common in a different contemporary like Martin Puryear. Rohm and Puryear overlapped for a period and the warmly tactile quality found in Rohm’s work can also be seen in Puryear’s. Finding such stylistic connections between divergent artists is one of the delights of this exhibition.

Rohm was in command of an array of sculptural techniques, but also made enviable drawings. Throughout the exhibition, there is a smattering of works on paper by the artist which are nearly as obsessively textured as the surfaces of his encaustic-covered forms. Recurring objects like pianos, lightbulbs, or the jagged map of Rhode Island appear in these two dimensional pieces. They are lively and colorful. In two-dimensions, they express the same knack for specificity and exactitude that one sees in the artist’s three-dimensional work.

To close out the exhibition, a separate gallery features stage sets the artist created as well as intricate and beautiful maquettes. Rohm used these as the basis for many of his projects, some of which are on view in the exhibition. These tiny alter egos are so fantastically detailed that they could be mistaken for their full size counterparts. Here, macabre subject matter works itself out. Little gibbeted and dismembered figures that recall Goya are examples of such imagery. In another maquette, a window looks onto a winch, where a coiled rope appears on the verge of snapping. Another small sculpture features an electric chair. The tension in these small works is as intense as that in the full scale objects nearby.

The last gallery of the exhibition is lined with maquettes and features stage sets created by Rohm.

As one exits the show, there is a drawing on view Rohm made in the days before he passed away. In this diminutive work, a forest of brown trees parts to reveal a sliver of sky, which transitions through tones of blue. Depending on how it is read, it could either be a scene of dawn breaking or evening falling. This type of tension or ambiguity is poetic, and beautiful, and is present throughout much of the work on view. 

This is a rich and varied exhibition, and one which serves as a necessary primer for Rohm’s significant production over a lifetime. From the 1960’s into the 2000’s, it charts his skillful craftsmanship of core materials and his sensibility for design, balance, and tension in many wonderful forms. 

Down to Earth: Robert Rohm Sculpture, 1963-2013 will run March 24 – April 25, 2021. The exhibit is free for all, donations encouraged. The WaterFire Arts Center hours are: Wednesday – Sunday, 10:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m, Thursday 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. In following Rhode Island’s COVID-19 protocols, all visitors are required to self-screen before entering the WaterFire Arts Center and practice safety rules: keeping a 6’ distance from others and wear a mask at all times. For more information, visit www.waterfire.org.

Below, explore a slideshow of my photographs of my favorite details from the exhibition.

Destination: The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

It had been about a year since my last museum visit, until this past weekend when I made a visit to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Founded in 1842, and open to the public since 1844, the Wadsworth is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the country. It has strong holdings in American art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as in European paintings. It was the first museum in the United States to buy a painting by Caravaggio. His St. Francis in Ecstasy remains a major draw. The Wadsworth is not just a particularly good smaller museum, but also a worthy destination for a reintroduction to the world of museums in the time of Covid-19. 

At an hour and a half, the drive from Providence to Hartford is a picturesque one. The route linking the capital cities of Connecticut and Rhode Island runs through kind of small and charming towns for which New England is renowned. At certain points the roadside becomes thickly dotted with fine Federal houses bedecked in Doric-columned porches. Occasionally, a ramshackle red barn is silhouetted against the backdrop of a rolling hill as the road curves through the shallow valleys of Eastern Connecticut. The snow of the last few weeks is still clinging to the roofs of houses, and barns, and general stores, whose eves are lined with perfect icicles. In a parallel universe, the whole scene doubtlessly lives on the lid of a cookie tin in some grandmother’s cupboard. When I arrive at Hartford, the city emerges almost as a surprise, startling me out of the idyll at the end of this country road.

The Wadsworth is situated in the shadow of the Travelers Insurance Tower in the heart of the city’s downtown. Comprised of five interconnected structures in varying styles, the museum is a labyrinthine collection of galleries, each with its own distinct personality. In 2015, the facility reopened after a multi-year renovation effort, which added thousands of square feet of exhibition space and saw the reinstallation of swaths of the museum’s collection. The result remains, some five years on, an impressive feat of reimagination. The Wadsworth, which has a collection in the range of 50,000 objects, is a museum of diverse and beautiful spaces, which are rarely at odds with each other. 

As of this writing, the museum is offering free admission to all guests, and is organizing visits with timed ticketed slots. Upon my arrival over the weekend, temperatures were taken and visitors were instructed to follow the paths laid out by directional arrows on the floors of the galleries. At certain points, specific paintings were paired with vinyl dots adhered to the floor to indicate where visitors should stand to look at a work whilst also maintaining social distance. Most of the museum-goers I encountered were considerate and well behaved, with Wadsworth staff providing courteous assistance and direction. As a first experience of museum life in this unusual time, the museum’s policies felt well thought out and geared toward visitor safety. It was reassuring of the potential for cultural life to return to something we all might recognize in the coming months.

The Wadsworth’s 1842 entrance is defined by its imposing Gothic tracery and rooftop crenellation. In the background, The Travelers Insurance Tower looms. Photo by the author.

Walking through the Helen and Harry Gray Court, the museum’s original building and grand main entrance, one is immediately entranced by Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing Number 793 C, a massive mural that encompasses the space and draws the eye up a storey. From there, arrows guide visitors into contemporary galleries, which were in between exhibitions on my visit, and through to The Avery Memorial. Constructed in 1934 and billed as the first museum wing built in the International Style in the nation, this space exhibits an array of objects and is dedicated to dealer, collector, and museum donor Samuel P. Avery. Around a central court surmounted by a gracious skylight, its three floors of galleries feature three-quarter-height walls, which are punctuated by Juliet balconies that look down onto a central fountain. It is a light-filled and buoyant and unusual assemblage of exhibition spaces, featuring a strong collection of work. One standout is a particularly stunning Georgia O’Keeffe painting dating to 1929. The subject is the brilliant night sky of New Mexico seen through the sinuous limbs of a ponderosa pine.

Georgia O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree, 1929, Oil on canvas, 31 x 40 inches, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1981.23

For the Valentine’s Day Weekend, the museum hired a harpist who played contemporary classics while I milled through a gallery filled with treasures from the Hudson River School. Getting lost in the incandescent horizon of a Thomas Cole while strains of Elton John’s Your Song filter through the gallery is the type of surreal experience that can only be had in real life in a museum, and I was grateful for it. Later, while I examined the museum’s ruminative Caravaggio of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, echoes of applause could be heard for the musical performance concluding galleries away. 

At the heart of the intimate but rambling museum, the Morgan Great Hall holds an impressive salon style installation of European paintings. This is the prototypical art museum one imagines as emerging out of central casting, and gives viewers a sense of the substantiality of the permanent collection. Smaller galleries that circumscribe this space and others hold more specific treasures including a jewel-like portrait of an angel by Fra Angelico. Upstairs, paintings by the likes of Delacroix, Ingres, Rousseau, Monet and van Gogh illuminate later moments in art making. Another particular bright spot is William Holman Hunt’s dazzling interpretation of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shallott”.

William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, c. 1888–1905, Oil on canvas, 74 x 57 inches, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1961.470

A number of laudable temporary exhibitions are currently on view at the museum. One show highlights the rhythmic paintings of the Iranian-born artist Ali Banisadr, which draw their compositions in part from the phenomenon of synesthesia. Another exhibition focuses on the ancient inspirations that shaped the Art Deco sculptures of Paul Manship, whose work will be recognized by anyone who has visited the artist’s famous Prometheus at Rockefeller Center in New York. Nearby, the museum’s Amistad Center for Art and Culture shares engaging works that in the museum’s description “document the experience, expressions, and history of people of African American heritage”.

A day trip to the Wadsworth is always a delight and it is always worth the beautiful drive. Particularly now, as many of us are just beginning to cautiously dip our toes back into the types of experiences we once foolishly took for granted, a visit to a museum of such digestible scope and scale is a renewing experience. One of my favorite, if overused, quotes is John Keats’s assertion that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. The Wadsworth’s collection is indeed a joy – and one which is more compelling now than ever.

To learn more about the Wadsworth, visit their website at www.thewadsworth.org. 

Note: Current guidelines in the State of Connecticut permit visitors from only Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey to visit without quarantining. Be sure to apprise yourself of the most up to date health guidelines before planning your visit and be sure to act responsibly when making such a trip.

Netflix’s “The Dig” and What History Owes to Art

The author Donna Tartt concluded her 2013 novel The Goldfinch with a line that captures the feelings of most anyone who loves art and history. It is so good that it should really be the raison d'être for any self-respecting art historian. 

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.” 

Netflix’s new film The Dig captures the feeling conveyed in the concluding lines of Tartt’s novel in cinematic form and plumbs the interconnectedness of art, history, and meaning. It is a beautiful and multi-layered exploration of the power of art to act as a historical through line; one which binds all of us to all of our predecessors and one which connects us to those we love. It also hints at the debt that spirituality owes to art and the way in which art and design can materialize ceremony, religion, and even the after life.

The Dig, which premiered on January 29 and was directed by Simon Stone, is based on the novel of the same name by the English writer John Preston. The story is a creative retelling of the events surrounding the discovery of the famed Sutton Hoo hoard by landowner Edith Pretty, played by Carey Mulligan, and amateur archaeologist Basil Brown, played by Ralph Fiennes. The veracity of the film’s depiction of the events that took place in the Suffolk countryside in the lead up the Second World War is somewhat in question. Artistic license has inflected both the book and the subsequent film with details that did not actually take place, but which marble the story with the kinds of romance and conflict necessary to a book or film that might engage with audiences broader than say, the archaeology department at your local university. 

Thankfully, as someone with next to no significant knowledge of archeology, I watched the film with just enough inexpertness to find it enjoyable rather than infuriating. Watching it, too, was a poignant reminder of why art matters to our understandings of history and how art and objects are essential to narrating long forgotten events. In the movie, a widowed landowner with an interest in archaeology hires a journeyman “excavator” to open up ancient burial mounds that swell in fields nearby to her country house. What ensues is an archaeological and art historical discovery that will change the understanding of British history, and unearth a fabulous collection of armor and jewelry buried with an anonymous warrior king.

Within the context of this discovery, the film sets up characters to have probing moments of self-realization. It tugs at the heartstrings, occasionally veering perilously close to saccharine but mostly staying in its lane. The professional archaeologists in the movie meditate on how the finds will change history. The landowner Edith Pretty, herself dealing with a secret health condition, considers her own mortality and the nature of graves such as those being excavated. Brown, her trusty excavator, sidelined by museum professionals, worries about whether his contributions to the project will be remembered. Meanwhile, a fictional cousin of the protagonist makes the unsubtle observation that photographs he is taking of the dig will fix those moments in time, drawing a direct connection between the artistry dating to the 600s with the technology of the twentieth century.

The interlaid storylines of professional aspirations, personal passions, and intermingling desires form a tightly woven story exploring the facets of how culturally significant material like art and design can change how history is written and told. The Dig also explores the conflicts between professionals and amateurs and questions where great artistic finds should reside. Additionally, it considers the issue of “legacy” from multiple fronts. The legacy art leaves to history. The legacy historians leave to the ages. The legacy that love leaves with those around us. 

The objects found by an untrained local “excavator” and a laywoman who reads Howard Carter’s account of opening King Tut’s tomb for leisure are some of the most significant in archaeology and in art history. In particular, the remarkably detailed pieces of goldsmithery procured from the burial mounds shaped new understandings of the history of art in East Anglia and beyond. The interwoven ribbons of Celtic design that mark the surfaces of these pieces are as tightly knit as the new film about their discovery.

Some eight decades on, the art objects found at Sutton Hoo are still inspiring new generations of visitors at the British Museum, where an entire gallery is dedicated to their exhibition and preservation. Netflix’s The Dig, dramatizes the exhumation of these important pieces of art and does so with an emotive lilt that makes archaeological finds seem as thrilling and romantic as anything can be. So, like the work of an archaeologist, an art historian, or a curator, the film becomes a kind of time capsule containing the wisdom of one pinpoint in history. It is, of course, an imperfect piece of history though, because it sacrifices some truths in the service of movie-making. But, it is a movie after all, and one that will move you.

Overall, The Dig is a rich story, which explores important themes and dusts off the world of archaeology with a dose of Hollywood magic. It will remind those who, in the words of Donna Tartt, “love beautiful things and look out for them” why they do what they do and might convince others to do the same.

Both the film and Tartt’s book assert, rightly, that art is a gift to history. A gold and garnet Sutton Hoo shoulder clasp, a 1930’s photograph, a film dating to the year 2021 can all do the same thing. They can tell the stories of the past to both contemporaries and to those who come after. In doing so, all art can deepen our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our collective history. And it can do so in deeply beautiful and resonant ways that will remain as treasures to be found again and again by new generations long after we are gone.

One of the exquisite gold shoulder clasps found at Sutton Hoo, now in the collection of The British Museum.

The Genius of Beyoncé and Jay-Z at the Louvre

A detail from The Carters' Apeshit music video directed by Ricky Saiz, 2018

On Saturday, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released a surprise new album, Everything is Love, on Tidal the streaming service they co-own. The first music video for the album accompanies the single Apeshit and was released under the duo's co-moniker The Carters. The video was filmed entirely at the Louvre and was directed by Ricky Saiz, who previously collaborated with Beyoncé on the video for her track Yoncé. The new video, shared with unwitting fans via Instagram on Saturday afternoon, has over seven million views as of this writing (a little more than 24 hours after release). It features Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the empty Louvre Museum; perhaps the greatest bastion of so-called "high culture", and also the center of the predominantly white and male tradition of Western Art. The Apeshit video is stunningly styled, choreographed, and filmed. And it is also highly conceptual. It takes part in an ongoing tradition of celebrities engaging with high art, it places the uniquely American art form of rap on the same level with European masterpieces, and it corrects the lack of diversity that is often taken for granted in cultural institutions, not only in the Old World, but in the New as well.

The video opens with a cinematic shot of a black figure with angel wings standing guard outside the Louvre by night; bells chiming in the distance. It then transitions inside the museum with lavishly gilt interiors appropriate to a former palace and details of fine European paintings. In the next scene Beyoncé and Jay-Z are pictured dramatically standing alongside La Jaconde, The Mona Lisa. Jay-Z wears a pale teal suit with a gold medallion, Beyoncé is in a pink silk smoking jacket, richly accessorized with diamonds. They are presented one-to-one with the best known portrait in Western Art, equaling it in regality. The scene is also a reference to their viral photo shoot at the Museum in 2014, in which they also took a photo alongside Da Vinci's most famous painting. In both scenes they are compared directly to their painted co-star. They, like she, stare out at the viewer. They too, are iconic. And The Carters, like The Mona Lisa, are celebrities with far reaching influence.

George Clooney, a la Yayoi Kusama, W Magazine, 2013

Other celebrities, too, have engaged with the art world. The painter Will Cotton was the artistic director for Katy Perry's California Gurls music video in 2010. George Clooney was styled by the Japanese conceptual artist Yayoi Kusama for a W Magazine spread in 2013. John Currin was commissioned to paint a portrait of Jennifer Lawrence for the cover of Vogue's 125th Anniversary Issue in 2017. Louis Vuitton created a line of bags designed with Jeff Koons that feature paintings by Rubens, Monet, and others. The list goes on. Celebrities and luxury brands regularly utilize blue chip artists in their own projects both to establish their cultural bona fides and also to raise the cachet of their own brands. In the case of The Carters, the hallowed halls of the Louvre and the paintings within it become not a sales pitch, but rather a backdrop for an effective performance about culture and race that undermines traditional assumptions about art, the vagueries of high versus low culture, and the institutions that broker mass interpretations of these topics.

Whereas the media of the artworks presented in the video are sculptures and oils, the media of the performers are hip-hop and dance. The uniqueness of hip-hop, rap, and their associated dance styles can be traced back to their foundations in The Bronx of the 1970's, and other mostly African-American enclaves in cities throughout the United States. The Carters' merging of this American musical tradition with the Parisian art establishment is reminiscent in so many ways of Jazz Age ex-patriotism, when American-American Jazz singer, dancer, and performer Josephine Baker rose to spectacular popularity in the Paris of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are interested in the unique history of African-American performers in France, and engage with that story in the video. Like Baker, their cultural prominence abroad has been achieved not through the avenues of the establishment but through a mass popularity built on the currency of their own work. Lyrics in Apeshit directly reference their popularity and success:

I can't believe we made it (this is what we made, made)
This is what we're thankful for (this is what we thank, thank)
I can't believe we made it (this a different angle)
Have you ever seen the crowd goin' apeshit? Rah!

This popularity comes from a broad and diverse fan-base, which has already raised ecstatic support for their new album and the Apeshit video. Throughout the already viral video, the iconic American music duo is presented as equal to not only The Mona Lisa, but also to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Egyptian Pharonic sculpture. Beyoncé and Jay-Z perform as art historical subjects with the same gravitas afforded to the works of art they reference. Dancers perform too, alongside Beyoncé in front of works from the academic canon of art history, including Jacques Louis David's The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine, while Jay-Z raps in front of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. The mostly white faces of art history are contrasted with contemporary African-American artists. Rigid paintings by dead painters are challenged and redefined by rap and the ecstatic movement of individuals who are very much alive. And importantly, this redefinition is undertaken utilizing African-American music and choreography, with a cast made up of people of color. People who have been mostly left out of institutions like the Louvre, as evidenced by the artworks scanned in the video, claim their rightful place in the cultural pantheon.

Beyoncé (center) accompanied by dancers, performs in front of Jacques-Louis David's monumental painting The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine, 1807

Through performance in the Louvre and amongst works deemed "important" by the art establishment The Carters remind the viewer of their own cultural import, which comes not institutionally but communally. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are clearly and unarguably cultural leaders in their own right, and have been for some time. They have millions of followers around the world and, in a reference to the current political climate, they note that they fill stadiums as successfully as the NFL. So the Apeshit video is more of a statement of fact than anything else. These artists are as recognizable and as recognized as The Mona Lisa. They are as successful and as respected in music as painters like David or Da Vinci have been in the visual arts. The video shows though that The Carters share in the kind of creative "genius" formerly associated with white, male, European artists. Although it was produced commercially to promote their music, and does not fit the mold that has been set out for a work of high art, The Carters' Apeshit tells a compelling story and helps to reframe popular visions of culture and cultural institutions.

The video concludes with Beyoncé and Jay-Z in front of The Mona Lisa again. The two, who are previously pictured in the same spot facing the audience, slowly turn to regard each other and then the turn away from the audience to look at famous painting. The point is clear: two uniquely American celebrities considering an iconically European celebrity and thinking about her and their roles in the history of visual culture. In the video, audiences are enjoined not only to reflect on the status of great art or great celebrities within the mass culture, but to reconsider who is deserving of their status and who might have been left out of the popular story and history of art.

Vivacious Shapes: Justine Hill's Paintings at Denny Gallery

Justine Hill (b. 1985) is a Brooklyn-based painter who, in her own words, "collages different ways of making marks to accomplish a desired texture, color, or opacity for each form. Most marks are made from paint, crayon, pencil or pastel. The final painting is simply a composite of these varied marks and based on their formation can behave as animated creature or moving environments."

Hill's current solo exhibition, Freestanding, on view at Denny Gallery on New York's Lower East Side, shows off the range of her considerable technical capabilities and the breadth of her vision. Her lively and vibrant paintings are made up of shaped, canvas-covered panels. Layers of texture and color are built up within each shaped form, which are assembled together to create complete objects. The formal elements of each unit in Hill's paintings bounce off one another, resulting in a rich and varied interplay within, without, and between her cutout panels. The work is also full of energy; producing the occasional hallucinatory vibration. Hill's paintings are, in short, exciting.

To paraphrase Denny Gallery's description of the show, the objective of Hill's exhibition is to explore how her paintings can reassert themselves in space, reacquire their background, and become “freestanding”. The show succeeds in every regard. Through her considerate use of line, color, layer, and texture, Hill transforms the viewer's understanding of her shaped supports. In some instances, the painted surface underscores a preconceived notion about the form below. In others, the surface seemingly rebels against its own panel. Hill's work keeps the audience guessing, and the details of her paintings are transfixing.

The strengths of Hill's work are in the rigorous thinking that underpins them. She explores and re-explores the potentials and drawbacks of shape, of line, of content. Her marks are at once practiced and improvisational, but always very purposeful. By utilizing traditional formal elements of construction in novel ways and by undermining or second-guessing their usefulness, the artist engages with the history of the artform. In her work Hill interrogates the very medium of painting to dazzling effect.

Hill earned her BA at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been featured in four previous solo exhibitions at Galerie Protégé, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, and Denny Gallery in New York, as well as at Blueshift Project in Miami. Her work has been widely reviewed including mentions in Artsy, ArtNet, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, and The Huffington Post. Her work is in numerous private collections and was recently acquired by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Her extensive CV, and her excellent current solo exhibition at Denny Gallery are indicative of her well-deserved status as a rising star of contemporary painting.

Freestanding is on view through March 6, 2018 at Denny Gallery.

Dwarf Set and Cyclops, by Justine Hill

Bookend 3, by Justine Hill

Encountering The Divine: Fra Angelico at the Gardner Museum

Fra Angelico (born Guido di Pietro, c.1395 - 1455) was described by Vasari in his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori as "an excellent painter and illuminator, and ... a perfect monk". Vasari also lauded the Angelic Friar's surprising piety in the face of his immense artistic talents. Angelico ably captured the Catholic imagination of the Early Renaissance with his unusually sensitive and humanistic depictions of normally distant saints. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's current exhibition on the artist provides an incredible opportunity to see a series of Angelico's gold-drenched reliquaries, which invite viewers to look deeply and intimately at revelatory and beatific scenes.

On view at the Gardner Museum in Boston February 22 - May 20, Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth is an excellent show featuring stunning pieces. It is described by the Museum thus: 

Heaven on Earth reunites the Gardner's magnificent Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin, acquired by Isabella in 1899 and the first Fra Angelico to reach the United States, with its three companions from the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Conceived as a set of jewel-like reliquaries for the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, they tell the story of the Virgin Mary's life. This exhibition invites you to explore Fra Angelico's ground-breaking narrative art, marvel at his peerless creativity, and immerse yourself in the material splendor of his craftsmanship.

The exhibition lives up to its promise, bringing together companion artworks that are rarely seen outside of their home at the Museo di San Marco in Florence. The reliquaries are presented in an ecclesiastically-inspired architectural setting constructed within the Museum's rotating exhibitions gallery. This context serves the practical purpose of highlighting the relatively small works within the Gardner's relatively large exhibition space. It also reminds viewers of the original intent of the pieces, which were housed at the Dominican Friars' Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and were meant for quite a personal kind of devotion.

Fra Angelico (c. 1395 - 1455), Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin, tempera with oil glazes and gold on panel, 1424-1434, 24 5/16"x15 1/16", Collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA

The works on view are full of lively interactions between God and his holy courtiers. These are underscored by Angelico's eye for the humanity of his subjects, which gives them a vitality remarkable for the time. Each reliquary is also imbued with a sense of humor. Looking closely one can find a waiting angel with hands on hips, or St. Peter looking over his shoulder at the viewer. There are a few moments in which saintly observers of heavenly sights turn to the on-looker and invite them closer into the scene, fulfilling their traditional intercessory role.

In 1899, when Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased Angelico's Assumption and Dormition of The Virgin (1424-1434) it was the first piece by the artist to come to the United States. Gardner and her contemporaries were no doubt drawn to Angelico's work due to his technical virtuosity and the timeless beauty of his paintings. In bringing this stunning object to Boston, Gardner added to her own esteem as a collector with a refined eye. She also set the stage for viewers to encounter Fra Angelico's vision of the divine.

This exhibition is a rare and wonderful opportunity not only to see the Gardner's Angelico reunited with its peer reliquaries from Florence, but also to see these works in relation to the Gardner Museum's extensive and eclectic holdings. By viewing Gardner's collection in her original "Fenway Court" and carefully looking at the works in Heaven on Earth, visitors will not only gain an understanding of the connoisseurship that compelled Isabella to buy her Fra Angelico. They will come away with a sense of the deep faith and spirituality that drove the artist to create it in the first place.