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Standing Figure with African Masks, 2018
Claudette Johnson
Pastel and gouache on paper
In this work, Claudette Johnson depicts herself in an abstracted space with an array of African carvings. Although she adopts an assured pose, commanding and exceeding the full height of the paper, nothing is fixed in place. The work animates her complex identity as a Black European artist of Caribbean and African heritage. Creating new space for the presence of Black subjects has underpinned Johnson's art since the beginning of her career; this particular work has close connections, visually and thematically, to one of her major early drawings, And I Have My Own Business in This Skin.*
From the exhibition
Claudette Johnson: Presence
(September 2023 – January 2024)
A major exhibition of work by British artist Claudette Johnson (born 1959) is now open at The Courtauld Gallery.
A founding member of the Black British Arts Movement, Claudette Johnson is considered one of the most significant figurative artists of her generation. For over 30 years she has created large-scale drawings of Black women and men that are at once intimate and powerful.
Presenting a carefully selected group of major works from across her career, from key early drawings such as the arresting I Came to Dance, 1982, and And I Have My Own Business in This Skin, 1982, alongside recent and new works, this exhibition offers a compelling overview of Johnson’s pioneering career and artistic development.
It will consider how Johnson has directed her approach to representing her subjects over three decades, and how her practice is rooted in the art of the past with The Courtauld’s collection providing a rich context in which to see her work.
Working in a variety of media, ranging from monochrome works in dark pastel to vast sheets brightly coloured in vibrant gouache and watercolour, combined with dramatic use of pose, gaze, and scale, Johnson’s distinctive drawings of friends, relatives, and often herself seek, as the artist puts it, “to tell a different story about our presence in this country”.
This exhibition is the first monographic show of Claudette Johnson’s work at a major public gallery in London and is rooted in the ongoing research, teaching and activities in the field of Black and Diasporic British Art by Dorothy Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld..
[*The Courtauld]
Taken at The Courtauld
Using various pens, I used line and shape to examine negatives spaces in positive ways. This helped to further my understanding of objects as a whole.
El dj Di Abstracted en la Fiesta de 25º aniversario de la Universitat Jaume I de Castellón. Sala Opal, sábado 8 de octubre de 2016.
Foto: Carme Ripollès.
Crónica: www.nomepierdoniuna.net/la-uji-se-hace-oir-en-el-puerto-d...
abstracted blue color photograph of an 80s horror movie about a decayed old man with long white hair and hat who lives in a rotten phantom shack in the woods and collects teeth and bones, building a figure of sticks, and a possessed little boy, photorealistic, night, moonlight, unusual perspective, coming out of mirror, lightning, glowing aura, paul mccarthy, maldoror, dark blue color, art photography, creepy, dark, moody, atmospheric, avant garde, experimental, HQ, 4k
Constantin Brâncuși
Maiastra, c. 1911
Maiastra is among the first sculptures by Constantin Brancusi to address the abstracted form of a bird. The work is inspired by the legendary bird of Romanian folklore, the Pasarea maiastra (Master bird), a mythic creature known for its golden plumage and arresting song. Brancusi may also have been influenced by the Ballets Russes' production of L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird), based on the Russian version of a similar mythic bird; it premiered at the Théâtre National de l'Opera in Paris on June 25, 1910, with music by Igor Stravinsky.
Maiastra appears perched on its base, radiant in its golden color, its breast swelling and beak open as if about to sing. Brancusi stated about the pose, "I wanted to show the Maiastra as raising its head, but without putting any implications of pride, haughtiness or defiance into this gesture. That was the difficult problem and it is only after much hard work that I managed to incorporate this gesture into the motion of flight." The subtlety and refinement of Brancusi's sculptural language are seen in the treatment of the eyes, the arch of the neck, the slight turn of the head, and the highly polished reflective surface of the bronze, as well as the dialogue between organic and hard-edge surfaces and lines and between the materials and shapes of the sculpture, its base, and its pedestal.
Bird in Space, 1925
The top half of this abstract sculpture is made up of a vertical, elongated form carved from white marble that swells gently at the center and tapers to a point at either end. Near the bottom point, the form flares out slightly to make a tall, conical foot. This sits atop a base made of three stacked pieces that together are about the same height as the swelling form. First, just below the elongated form, a short cylinder sits on the center of a piece that would look like a plus sign if viewed from above. Both the cylinder and plus-sign are carved from cream-colored stone, so are a little darker than the whiter, swelling form above. The tall, dark brown wooden base below is carved in a shape like an angular hourglass.
Agnes E. Meyer, 1929
East Building, Upper Level — Gallery 415-C
A polished bronze, free-standing sculpture of an abstracted bird stands on a marble plinth set on a tall wood base. The bird form is created with an oblong, egg-shaped body. The head curves up like a hook and the end parts as if in a beak. The wings are tucked against the body. The bronze sculpture sits on a cream-white, tall marble cube. Shaped like an angular hourglass, the wood base is almost twice as high as the bronze sculpture and marble cube combined.
In his obsessive search for "the essence of the work," Brancusi's Maiastra series represents the first step in a journey that would continue in the Golden Bird (L'Oiseau d'or) series and be fully realized only in the Bird in Space series (two examples of which are in the National Gallery's collection). In each series, the subject of the bird becomes further refined, simplified, and reduced to its purest formal essentials. Poised between reality and abstraction, between the material and the transcendent, Maiastra perfectly embodies Brancusi's aspirations as an artist. In 1926 he wrote: "In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things."
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www.nga.gov/about/welcome-to-the-east-building.html
The East Building opened in 1978 in response to the changing needs of the National Gallery, mainly to house a growing collection of modern and contemporary art. The building itself is a modern masterpiece. The site's trapezoidal shape prompted architect I.M. Pei's dramatic approach: two interlocking spaces shaped like triangles provide room for a library, galleries, auditoriums, and administrative offices. Inside the ax-blade-like southwest corner, a colorful, 76-foot-long Alexander Calder mobile dominates the sunlight atrium. Visitors can view a dynamic 500-piece collection of photography, paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and media arts in thought-provoking chronological, thematic, and stylistic arrangements.
Highlights include galleries devoted to Mark Rothko's giant, glowing canvases; Barnett Newman's 14 stark black, gray, and white canvas paintings from The Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966; and several colorful and whimsical Alexander Calder mobiles and sculptures. You can't miss Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock, 2013, a tall blue rooster that appears to stand guard over the street and federal buildings from the roof terrace, which also offers views of the Capitol. The upper-level gallery showcases modern art from 1910 to 1980, including masterpieces by Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Sam Gilliam, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Ground-level galleries are devoted to American art from 1900 to 1950, including pieces by George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz. The concourse level is reserved for rotating special exhibitions.
The East Building Shop is on the concourse level, and the Terrace Café looks out over the atrium from the upper level.
www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/03/national-gallery-...
"The structure asks for its visitors to gradually make their way up from the bottom, moving from the Gallery’s earliest acquisitions like the paintings of French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard to its contemporary work, such as Janine Antoni’s much fussed over “Lick and Lather,” a series of busts composed of chocolate and soap. The bottom floors offer a more traditional viewing experience: small taupe-colored rooms leading to more small taupe-colored rooms. As one moves upward, however, the spaces open up, offering more dramatic and artful exhibition rooms. The largest single aspect of the I.M. Pei-designed building’s renovation has been the addition of a roof terrace flanked by a reimagination two of the three original “tower” rooms of Pei’s design.
On one side is a space dedicated to sculptor Alexander Calder, with gently spinning mobiles of all shapes and sizes delicately cascading from the ceiling. The subtle movements of the fine wire pieces mimic the effect of a slight breeze through wind chimes—it’s both relaxing and slightly mesmerizing, especially when we’re used to art that stands stock still. Delight is a relatively rare emotion to emerge in a museum, making it all the more compelling.
But it’s the tower space on the other side—a divided hexagonal room—that caused several visitors to gasp as I surveyed it. On one side of the division (the room you enter from the roof terrace) hang Barnett Newman’s fourteen “Stations of the Cross,” the human-sized renderings of secular suffering and pain conceived in conversation with the Bible story. Entirely black and white, with just a tinge of red in the final painting, the series wraps around the viewer, fully encapsulating you in the small but meaningful differentiations between paintings. Hung as a series, the paintings gain a narrative they might otherwise have lost.
The light edging around either side of the room’s division invite the viewer to move from Newman’s chiaroscuric works, which require you to move from painting to painting searching for the scene in each, to a mirror image of that space covered in Mark Rothko’s giant, glowing canvases, which require the viewer to step back and attempt to take in the sight of so much hazy, vivid color all at once. The dichotomy is stark, and yet the paintings all work together somehow, rather than one set repelling the other.
With light filtering through the glass ceiling above, the tower room does feel like a crescendo of sorts, but not in the way many museums’ most famous or valuable pieces often do. The room isn’t dedicated to ensuring that visitors snake their way into the belly of the museum, to first be captured and then let out through the gift shop. Instead, it’s a reminder that in a space dedicated to honoring the modern and the contemporary that the evolution of art remains just as integral as any singular Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol or Donald Judd aluminum box. There’s still a story in abstract art."
www.washingtonian.com/2016/09/28/national-gallery-art-eas...
Taken from Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility
[March-June 2015]
The Guggenheim (officially the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Founded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, it was renamed after it's founder's death in 1952.
The current building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and built in 1959.
Raoul Dufy - French, 1877 - 1953
Regatta at Cowes, 1934
East Building, Ground Level — Gallery 103-D
Abstracted sailboats are painted with triangles, squares, stripes, and streaks of mustard yellow, crimson red, mint green, black, and white against a field of vivid cobalt blue, which is the dominant color in this nearly square painting. The water is painted mostly with straight, parallel, horizontal strokes. V and W-shaped squiggles near the top center suggest sunlight glinting off the water at the horizon line, which comes about four-fifths of the way up the canvas. The sky is painted with longer horizontal strokes in shades of cobalt and baby blue. A triangular area of aqua along the right edge of the canvas could be shallow water or land. A double row of colorful square and rectangular nautical flags rise vertically up either side of a mast to left of center. Each is different: for instance, one has green and red stripes, another black and white checkers, while another is crossed with the Union Jack of the United Kingdom. White sails and other flags fill the water across the composition. The artist signed and dated the painting, along with the location, in the lower left corner: "Cowes 1934 Raoul Dufy.
___________________________________________
www.nga.gov/about/welcome-to-the-east-building.html
The East Building opened in 1978 in response to the changing needs of the National Gallery, mainly to house a growing collection of modern and contemporary art. The building itself is a modern masterpiece. The site's trapezoidal shape prompted architect I.M. Pei's dramatic approach: two interlocking spaces shaped like triangles provide room for a library, galleries, auditoriums, and administrative offices. Inside the ax-blade-like southwest corner, a colorful, 76-foot-long Alexander Calder mobile dominates the sunlight atrium. Visitors can view a dynamic 500-piece collection of photography, paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and media arts in thought-provoking chronological, thematic, and stylistic arrangements.
Highlights include galleries devoted to Mark Rothko's giant, glowing canvases; Barnett Newman's 14 stark black, gray, and white canvas paintings from The Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966; and several colorful and whimsical Alexander Calder mobiles and sculptures. You can't miss Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock, 2013, a tall blue rooster that appears to stand guard over the street and federal buildings from the roof terrace, which also offers views of the Capitol. The upper-level gallery showcases modern art from 1910 to 1980, including masterpieces by Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Sam Gilliam, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Ground-level galleries are devoted to American art from 1900 to 1950, including pieces by George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz. The concourse level is reserved for rotating special exhibitions.
The East Building Shop is on the concourse level, and the Terrace Café looks out over the atrium from the upper level.
www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/03/national-gallery-...
"The structure asks for its visitors to gradually make their way up from the bottom, moving from the Gallery’s earliest acquisitions like the paintings of French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard to its contemporary work, such as Janine Antoni’s much fussed over “Lick and Lather,” a series of busts composed of chocolate and soap. The bottom floors offer a more traditional viewing experience: small taupe-colored rooms leading to more small taupe-colored rooms. As one moves upward, however, the spaces open up, offering more dramatic and artful exhibition rooms. The largest single aspect of the I.M. Pei-designed building’s renovation has been the addition of a roof terrace flanked by a reimagination two of the three original “tower” rooms of Pei’s design.
On one side is a space dedicated to sculptor Alexander Calder, with gently spinning mobiles of all shapes and sizes delicately cascading from the ceiling. The subtle movements of the fine wire pieces mimic the effect of a slight breeze through wind chimes—it’s both relaxing and slightly mesmerizing, especially when we’re used to art that stands stock still. Delight is a relatively rare emotion to emerge in a museum, making it all the more compelling.
But it’s the tower space on the other side—a divided hexagonal room—that caused several visitors to gasp as I surveyed it. On one side of the division (the room you enter from the roof terrace) hang Barnett Newman’s fourteen “Stations of the Cross,” the human-sized renderings of secular suffering and pain conceived in conversation with the Bible story. Entirely black and white, with just a tinge of red in the final painting, the series wraps around the viewer, fully encapsulating you in the small but meaningful differentiations between paintings. Hung as a series, the paintings gain a narrative they might otherwise have lost.
The light edging around either side of the room’s division invite the viewer to move from Newman’s chiaroscuric works, which require you to move from painting to painting searching for the scene in each, to a mirror image of that space covered in Mark Rothko’s giant, glowing canvases, which require the viewer to step back and attempt to take in the sight of so much hazy, vivid color all at once. The dichotomy is stark, and yet the paintings all work together somehow, rather than one set repelling the other.
With light filtering through the glass ceiling above, the tower room does feel like a crescendo of sorts, but not in the way many museums’ most famous or valuable pieces often do. The room isn’t dedicated to ensuring that visitors snake their way into the belly of the museum, to first be captured and then let out through the gift shop. Instead, it’s a reminder that in a space dedicated to honoring the modern and the contemporary that the evolution of art remains just as integral as any singular Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol or Donald Judd aluminum box. There’s still a story in abstract art."
www.washingtonian.com/2016/09/28/national-gallery-art-eas...