PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writersâ Prize, the Rogers Writersâ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radioâs Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a childrenâs book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor Generalâs History Award and was inducted into Canadaâs Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called âHistorical In(ter)ventions,â altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of âbooknessâ and explore the question âWhat does it mean to write history?â.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writersâ Prize, the Rogers Writersâ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radioâs Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a childrenâs book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor Generalâs History Award and was inducted into Canadaâs Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called âHistorical In(ter)ventions,â altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of âbooknessâ and explore the question âWhat does it mean to write history?â.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

The Sacred Mountain (Parahi Te Marae)

1892

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)

This painting of a marae, or Tahitian sacred enclosure, was created on Paul Gauguin’s first trip to Tahiti. The artist’s title—Parahi Te Marae (There Dwells the Temple)—suggests that it represents an actual or at least a representative Polynesian religious site, but the setting is instead a fanciful creation of Gauguin. By the time of his visit, most marae were in ruins, and he constructed this scene from diverse sources and objects. An idol similar to the monolithic statues, or mo‘ais, of Easter Island, more than two thousand miles east of Tahiti, stands alone on a volcanic hill, while the fence enclosing the sacred space is decorated with skulls and fretwork patterns inspired by diminutive tooth and shell ear ornaments worn on the Marquesas Islands, nearly nine hundred miles west. The unabashed appropriation of these objects for his own purposes is indicative of Gauguin’s fascination with mystery and mythmaking.

*

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA), originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, opened in a into its permanent home on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwestern end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in 1928. The main building's Greek Revival design was the product of collaboration of the architectural firms of Horace Trumbauer and Zantzinger, Borie and Medary, but mostly credited to two architects in Trumbauer's firm--Howell Lewis Shay for the building's plan and massing, and Julian Abele, the first African American to graduate from University of Pennsylvania's Department of Architecture, for the detail work and perspective drawings. The museum houses more than 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin, spread across more than 200 galleries spanning 2,000 years.

In 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was ranked #24 on the AIA 150 America's Favorite Architecture list.

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In

Paimpont forest, also known as Brocéliande, is in the French commune of Paimpont, near the city of Rennes in Brittany. As Brocéliande it had a reputation in the Medieval imagination as a place of magic and mystery. It is the setting of a number of adventures in Arthurian legend, notably Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, and locals claim the tree in which the Lady of the Lake supposedly imprisoned Merlin can still be seen today. Other legendary places said to lie within the forest include the Val sans Retour, the tomb of Merlin, the Fountain of Youth, and Hotié de Vivianne (castle of the Lady of the Lake). The medieval chronicler Wace visited the forest but left disappointed:

"...I went there in search of marvels; I saw the forest and the land and looked for marvels, but found none. I came back as a fool and went as a fool. I went as a fool and came back as a fool. I sought foolishness and considered myself a fool."

For those living close to Paimpont, the Arthurian legend is very strong. Many names in the legend can be translated into Breton or French, for example the name Lancelot translates as "wanderer" or "vagabond" in Breton. There is also a strong influence from the Druids, and all around Brittany are standing stones or alignments, the most famous of which are nearby at Carnac; a group of the alignments at Kerlescan are nicknamed "the soldiers of Arthur."

Paimpont is a forest of broadleaf trees, oaks and beeches mainly, with areas of conifers either inside after clear-felling or on the periphery as transition with the moor, for example towards the west in the sector of Tréhorenteuc and the Val-sans-Retour (= Valley of no Return) which was devastated by several fires in particular in 1976, a year of great drought. It occupies mainly the territory of the commune of Paimpont, but extends to bordering communes, mainly Guer and Beignon in the south, Saint-Péran in the northeast, and Concoret in north. The forest of Paimpont is the largest remnant of an ancient forest occupying Argoat, the interior region of Brittany. It was more often called the forest of Brécélien, but its ancient character and other qualities underlined by many authors decided on its name of "forest of Brocéliande," tallying of the adventures of the legend of the Round Table. This flattering designation was reinforced by the birth of the Pays de Brocéliande at the end of the 20th century, an institution intended to facilitate the development of the communes of the west of the département.

The relative altitude of the forested massif contributes to give it a climate close to the oceanic climate of the coasts of Finistere. This mode, where west and south-west winds carry of clouds and regular rain supports the vegetation, dominates. The surplus of water feeds the many brooks occupying the bottoms of small valleys before flowing into the river Aff, then the Vilaine, to the area around Redon in the south of the department. The highest point is at 256 m in the western part called Haute forêt. Altitude decreases regularly while offering viewpoints towards the department of Morbihan; viewpoints which one finds the equivalents in the north on the commune of Mauron, port of the Côtes-d'Armor. It is not far from there that the Paimpont Biological Station of the University of Rennes 1, built in 1966 and 1967, dominates the lake of Chatenay. The varied forest and its surroundings constitute a framework favorable to many training courses in which the Rennes 1 biology students as well as foreign researchers take part. These buildings can accommodate approximately 70 people, and researchers work all the year on subjects generally very far away from the local biotope such as behavior of primates, represented by Cercopithecus, whose cries are familiar for the area but surprising to the walker little accustomed to this exotic fauna. The first researchers lengthily studied the ecology of the Armorican moors, the grounds, and the hydrology.

The forest belongs mainly to owners who maintain it and exploit it for timber and hunting; only in the north-eastern part, a small part (10%) is "domanial" and is managed by the National Forestry Commission. This situation prevents freedom of movement in the forest even with the access to the borough and its pond. The owners, however, signed a convention authorizing, from April 1 to the end of September, the use of some hiking trails in the forest. Among the responsibilities of the forest guards are watching for behaviors that threaten the forest, its flora, and its fauna. For example, behaviors that pose the risk of fire, and those that endanger the game, like dogs running loose. The gathering of mushrooms is not absolutely prohibited, but it is only tolerated near the approved trails. Because of its importance before the French Revolution, the forest was the responsibility of a royal jurisdiction called the National Forestry Commission, as the traditional jurisdictions of the seigneurs did not occupying itself with forest management. The wood was excessively exploited for the power supply of the charcoal blast furnaces for the nearby industry, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries; the assignment of the trees of first choice to the navy was a marginal role.

An extract of the files of the correctional court of Montfort:

"Having left the forging mills of Paimpont on Monday morning, he passed by the workshop of the carpenter who was far away from the forging mills but in the middle of the forest, he drank there with Julien Auffray his cousin and foreman of the carpenters." (Foreman of the carpenters and sawyers on contract to the naval yards elsewhere). Auffray interrogation, 1826.

The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the legends that concern the Celtic and legendary history of Great Britain, especially those focused on King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The 12th century French poet Jean Bodel created the name in the following lines of his epic Chanson de Saisnes:

Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant,

De France et de Bretaigne, et de Rome la grant.

The name distinguishes and relates the Matter of Britain from the mythological themes taken from classical antiquity, the "matter of Rome", and the tales of the paladins of Charlemagne and their wars with the Moors and Saracens, which constituted the "matter of France". While Arthur is the chief subject of the Matter of Britain, other lesser-known legendary history of Great Britain, including the stories of Brutus of Britain, Old King Cole, King Lear, and Gogmagog, is also included in the Matter of Britain: see Legendary Kings of the Britons.

Legendary history of Britain

It could be said that the legendary history of Britain was created in part to form a body of patriotic myth for the island. Several agendas thus can be seen in this body of literature.

The Historia Britonum, the earliest known source of the story of Brutus of Britain, may have been devised to create a distinguished genealogy for a number of Welsh princes in the 9th century. Traditionally attributed to Nennius, its actual compiler is unknown; it exists in several recensions. This tale went on to achieve greater currency because its inventor linked Brutus to the diaspora of heroes that followed the Trojan War, and thus provided raw material which later mythographers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Michael Drayton, and John Milton could draw upon, linking the settlement of Britain to the heroic age of Greek literature, for their several and diverse literary purposes. As such, this material could be used for patriotic mythmaking just as Virgil linked the mythical founding of Rome to the Trojan War in The Æneid. Geoffrey of Monmouth also introduced the fanciful claim that the Trinovantes, reported by Tacitus as dwelling in the area of London, had a name he interpreted as Troi-novant, "New Troy".

More speculative claims link Celtic mythology with several of the rulers and incidents compiled by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniæ. It has been suggested, for instance, that Leir of Britain, who later became Shakespeare's King Lear, was originally the Welsh sea-god Llŷr (see also the Irish sea-god Lir). Various Celtic deities have been identified with characters from Arthurian literature as well: Morgan le Fay was often thought to have originally been the Welsh goddess Modron (cf. the Irish goddess Mórrígan). Many of these identifications come from the speculative comparative religion of the late 19th century, and have been questioned in more recent years.

William Shakespeare seems to have been deeply interested in the legendary history of Britain, and to have been familiar with some of its more obscure byways. Shakespeare's plays contain several tales relating to these legendary kings, such as King Lear and Cymbeline. It has been suggested that Shakespeare's Welsh schoolmaster Thomas Jenkins introduced him to this material, and perhaps directed him to read Geoffrey of Monmouth[citation needed]. These tales also figure in Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which also appears in Shakespeare's sources for Macbeth. A Welsh schoolmaster appears as the character Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Other early authors also drew from the early Arthurian and pseudo-historical sources of the Matter of Britain. The Scots, for instance, formulated a mythical history in the Picts and the Dál Riata royal lines. While they do eventually become factual lines, unlike those of Geoffrey, their origins are vague and often incorporate both aspects of mythical British history and mythical Irish history. The story of Gabhran especially incorporates elements of both those histories.

The Arthurian cycle

"Parsifal before the Castle of the Grail" - inspired by Richard Wagner's Opera Parsifal - painted in Weimar Germany 1928 by Hans Werner Schmidt (1859-1950)

The Arthurian literary cycle is the best known part of the Matter of Britain. It has succeeded largely because it tells two interlocking stories that have intrigued many later authors. One concerns Camelot, usually envisioned as a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of Arthur and Sir Lancelot. The other concerns the quests of the various knights to achieve the Holy Grail; some succeed (Galahad, Percival), and others fail (Lancelot).

The medieval tale of Arthur and his knights is full of Christian themes; those themes involve the destruction of human plans for virtue by the moral failures of their characters, and the quest for an important Christian relic. Finally, the relationships between the characters invited treatment in the tradition of courtly love, such as Lancelot and Guinevere, or Tristan and Iseult. In more recent years, the trend has been to attempt to link the tales of King Arthur and his knights with Celtic mythology, usually in highly romanticized, early twentieth century reconstructed versions.

Additionally, it is possible to read the Arthurian literature in general, and that concerned with the Grail tradition in particular, as an allegory of human development and spiritual growth (a theme explored by mythologist Joseph Campbell amongst others).

Sources wikipedia

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writersâ Prize, the Rogers Writersâ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radioâs Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a childrenâs book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor Generalâs History Award and was inducted into Canadaâs Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called âHistorical In(ter)ventions,â altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of âbooknessâ and explore the question âWhat does it mean to write history?â.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

Ramandu’s Table / A flamboyance of 1,000 flamingoes wade in the Pear-Shaped Basin near the Chimes Tower / Ramandu’s Table interprets the mythmaking of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia through the whimsy of that American icon, the pink flamingo, designed by Don Featherstone in 1957. Munro cleverly evokes Lewis’s story of the old man who is visited by a flock of white birds every morning as he sings the dawn into existence. Munro’s white flamingos, inspired by Don Featherstone, are a nod to the creativity of the man who redefined the suburban landscape in 20th century America.

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In(ter)ventions,’ altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of ‘bookness’ and explore the question “What does it mean to write history?”.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In(ter)ventions,’ altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of ‘bookness’ and explore the question “What does it mean to write history?”.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In(ter)ventions,’ altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of ‘bookness’ and explore the question “What does it mean to write history?”.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

Paimpont forest, also known as Brocéliande, is in the French commune of Paimpont, near the city of Rennes in Brittany. As Brocéliande it had a reputation in the Medieval imagination as a place of magic and mystery. It is the setting of a number of adventures in Arthurian legend, notably Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, and locals claim the tree in which the Lady of the Lake supposedly imprisoned Merlin can still be seen today. Other legendary places said to lie within the forest include the Val sans Retour, the tomb of Merlin, the Fountain of Youth, and Hotié de Vivianne (castle of the Lady of the Lake). The medieval chronicler Wace visited the forest but left disappointed:

"...I went there in search of marvels; I saw the forest and the land and looked for marvels, but found none. I came back as a fool and went as a fool. I went as a fool and came back as a fool. I sought foolishness and considered myself a fool."

For those living close to Paimpont, the Arthurian legend is very strong. Many names in the legend can be translated into Breton or French, for example the name Lancelot translates as "wanderer" or "vagabond" in Breton. There is also a strong influence from the Druids, and all around Brittany are standing stones or alignments, the most famous of which are nearby at Carnac; a group of the alignments at Kerlescan are nicknamed "the soldiers of Arthur."

Paimpont is a forest of broadleaf trees, oaks and beeches mainly, with areas of conifers either inside after clear-felling or on the periphery as transition with the moor, for example towards the west in the sector of Tréhorenteuc and the Val-sans-Retour (= Valley of no Return) which was devastated by several fires in particular in 1976, a year of great drought. It occupies mainly the territory of the commune of Paimpont, but extends to bordering communes, mainly Guer and Beignon in the south, Saint-Péran in the northeast, and Concoret in north. The forest of Paimpont is the largest remnant of an ancient forest occupying Argoat, the interior region of Brittany. It was more often called the forest of Brécélien, but its ancient character and other qualities underlined by many authors decided on its name of "forest of Brocéliande," tallying of the adventures of the legend of the Round Table. This flattering designation was reinforced by the birth of the Pays de Brocéliande at the end of the 20th century, an institution intended to facilitate the development of the communes of the west of the département.

The relative altitude of the forested massif contributes to give it a climate close to the oceanic climate of the coasts of Finistere. This mode, where west and south-west winds carry of clouds and regular rain supports the vegetation, dominates. The surplus of water feeds the many brooks occupying the bottoms of small valleys before flowing into the river Aff, then the Vilaine, to the area around Redon in the south of the department. The highest point is at 256 m in the western part called Haute forêt. Altitude decreases regularly while offering viewpoints towards the department of Morbihan; viewpoints which one finds the equivalents in the north on the commune of Mauron, port of the Côtes-d'Armor. It is not far from there that the Paimpont Biological Station of the University of Rennes 1, built in 1966 and 1967, dominates the lake of Chatenay. The varied forest and its surroundings constitute a framework favorable to many training courses in which the Rennes 1 biology students as well as foreign researchers take part. These buildings can accommodate approximately 70 people, and researchers work all the year on subjects generally very far away from the local biotope such as behavior of primates, represented by Cercopithecus, whose cries are familiar for the area but surprising to the walker little accustomed to this exotic fauna. The first researchers lengthily studied the ecology of the Armorican moors, the grounds, and the hydrology.

The forest belongs mainly to owners who maintain it and exploit it for timber and hunting; only in the north-eastern part, a small part (10%) is "domanial" and is managed by the National Forestry Commission. This situation prevents freedom of movement in the forest even with the access to the borough and its pond. The owners, however, signed a convention authorizing, from April 1 to the end of September, the use of some hiking trails in the forest. Among the responsibilities of the forest guards are watching for behaviors that threaten the forest, its flora, and its fauna. For example, behaviors that pose the risk of fire, and those that endanger the game, like dogs running loose. The gathering of mushrooms is not absolutely prohibited, but it is only tolerated near the approved trails. Because of its importance before the French Revolution, the forest was the responsibility of a royal jurisdiction called the National Forestry Commission, as the traditional jurisdictions of the seigneurs did not occupying itself with forest management. The wood was excessively exploited for the power supply of the charcoal blast furnaces for the nearby industry, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries; the assignment of the trees of first choice to the navy was a marginal role.

An extract of the files of the correctional court of Montfort:

"Having left the forging mills of Paimpont on Monday morning, he passed by the workshop of the carpenter who was far away from the forging mills but in the middle of the forest, he drank there with Julien Auffray his cousin and foreman of the carpenters." (Foreman of the carpenters and sawyers on contract to the naval yards elsewhere). Auffray interrogation, 1826.

The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the legends that concern the Celtic and legendary history of Great Britain, especially those focused on King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The 12th century French poet Jean Bodel created the name in the following lines of his epic Chanson de Saisnes:

Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant,

De France et de Bretaigne, et de Rome la grant.

The name distinguishes and relates the Matter of Britain from the mythological themes taken from classical antiquity, the "matter of Rome", and the tales of the paladins of Charlemagne and their wars with the Moors and Saracens, which constituted the "matter of France". While Arthur is the chief subject of the Matter of Britain, other lesser-known legendary history of Great Britain, including the stories of Brutus of Britain, Old King Cole, King Lear, and Gogmagog, is also included in the Matter of Britain: see Legendary Kings of the Britons.

Legendary history of Britain

It could be said that the legendary history of Britain was created in part to form a body of patriotic myth for the island. Several agendas thus can be seen in this body of literature.

The Historia Britonum, the earliest known source of the story of Brutus of Britain, may have been devised to create a distinguished genealogy for a number of Welsh princes in the 9th century. Traditionally attributed to Nennius, its actual compiler is unknown; it exists in several recensions. This tale went on to achieve greater currency because its inventor linked Brutus to the diaspora of heroes that followed the Trojan War, and thus provided raw material which later mythographers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Michael Drayton, and John Milton could draw upon, linking the settlement of Britain to the heroic age of Greek literature, for their several and diverse literary purposes. As such, this material could be used for patriotic mythmaking just as Virgil linked the mythical founding of Rome to the Trojan War in The Æneid. Geoffrey of Monmouth also introduced the fanciful claim that the Trinovantes, reported by Tacitus as dwelling in the area of London, had a name he interpreted as Troi-novant, "New Troy".

More speculative claims link Celtic mythology with several of the rulers and incidents compiled by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniæ. It has been suggested, for instance, that Leir of Britain, who later became Shakespeare's King Lear, was originally the Welsh sea-god Llŷr (see also the Irish sea-god Lir). Various Celtic deities have been identified with characters from Arthurian literature as well: Morgan le Fay was often thought to have originally been the Welsh goddess Modron (cf. the Irish goddess Mórrígan). Many of these identifications come from the speculative comparative religion of the late 19th century, and have been questioned in more recent years.

William Shakespeare seems to have been deeply interested in the legendary history of Britain, and to have been familiar with some of its more obscure byways. Shakespeare's plays contain several tales relating to these legendary kings, such as King Lear and Cymbeline. It has been suggested that Shakespeare's Welsh schoolmaster Thomas Jenkins introduced him to this material, and perhaps directed him to read Geoffrey of Monmouth[citation needed]. These tales also figure in Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which also appears in Shakespeare's sources for Macbeth. A Welsh schoolmaster appears as the character Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Other early authors also drew from the early Arthurian and pseudo-historical sources of the Matter of Britain. The Scots, for instance, formulated a mythical history in the Picts and the Dál Riata royal lines. While they do eventually become factual lines, unlike those of Geoffrey, their origins are vague and often incorporate both aspects of mythical British history and mythical Irish history. The story of Gabhran especially incorporates elements of both those histories.

The Arthurian cycle

"Parsifal before the Castle of the Grail" - inspired by Richard Wagner's Opera Parsifal - painted in Weimar Germany 1928 by Hans Werner Schmidt (1859-1950)

The Arthurian literary cycle is the best known part of the Matter of Britain. It has succeeded largely because it tells two interlocking stories that have intrigued many later authors. One concerns Camelot, usually envisioned as a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of Arthur and Sir Lancelot. The other concerns the quests of the various knights to achieve the Holy Grail; some succeed (Galahad, Percival), and others fail (Lancelot).

The medieval tale of Arthur and his knights is full of Christian themes; those themes involve the destruction of human plans for virtue by the moral failures of their characters, and the quest for an important Christian relic. Finally, the relationships between the characters invited treatment in the tradition of courtly love, such as Lancelot and Guinevere, or Tristan and Iseult. In more recent years, the trend has been to attempt to link the tales of King Arthur and his knights with Celtic mythology, usually in highly romanticized, early twentieth century reconstructed versions.

Additionally, it is possible to read the Arthurian literature in general, and that concerned with the Grail tradition in particular, as an allegory of human development and spiritual growth (a theme explored by mythologist Joseph Campbell amongst others).

Sources wikipedia

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In(ter)ventions,’ altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of ‘bookness’ and explore the question “What does it mean to write history?”.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

Paimpont forest, also known as Brocéliande, is in the French commune of Paimpont, near the city of Rennes in Brittany. As Brocéliande it had a reputation in the Medieval imagination as a place of magic and mystery. It is the setting of a number of adventures in Arthurian legend, notably Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, and locals claim the tree in which the Lady of the Lake supposedly imprisoned Merlin can still be seen today. Other legendary places said to lie within the forest include the Val sans Retour, the tomb of Merlin, the Fountain of Youth, and Hotié de Vivianne (castle of the Lady of the Lake). The medieval chronicler Wace visited the forest but left disappointed:

"...I went there in search of marvels; I saw the forest and the land and looked for marvels, but found none. I came back as a fool and went as a fool. I went as a fool and came back as a fool. I sought foolishness and considered myself a fool."

For those living close to Paimpont, the Arthurian legend is very strong. Many names in the legend can be translated into Breton or French, for example the name Lancelot translates as "wanderer" or "vagabond" in Breton. There is also a strong influence from the Druids, and all around Brittany are standing stones or alignments, the most famous of which are nearby at Carnac; a group of the alignments at Kerlescan are nicknamed "the soldiers of Arthur."

Paimpont is a forest of broadleaf trees, oaks and beeches mainly, with areas of conifers either inside after clear-felling or on the periphery as transition with the moor, for example towards the west in the sector of Tréhorenteuc and the Val-sans-Retour (= Valley of no Return) which was devastated by several fires in particular in 1976, a year of great drought. It occupies mainly the territory of the commune of Paimpont, but extends to bordering communes, mainly Guer and Beignon in the south, Saint-Péran in the northeast, and Concoret in north. The forest of Paimpont is the largest remnant of an ancient forest occupying Argoat, the interior region of Brittany. It was more often called the forest of Brécélien, but its ancient character and other qualities underlined by many authors decided on its name of "forest of Brocéliande," tallying of the adventures of the legend of the Round Table. This flattering designation was reinforced by the birth of the Pays de Brocéliande at the end of the 20th century, an institution intended to facilitate the development of the communes of the west of the département.

The relative altitude of the forested massif contributes to give it a climate close to the oceanic climate of the coasts of Finistere. This mode, where west and south-west winds carry of clouds and regular rain supports the vegetation, dominates. The surplus of water feeds the many brooks occupying the bottoms of small valleys before flowing into the river Aff, then the Vilaine, to the area around Redon in the south of the department. The highest point is at 256 m in the western part called Haute forêt. Altitude decreases regularly while offering viewpoints towards the department of Morbihan; viewpoints which one finds the equivalents in the north on the commune of Mauron, port of the Côtes-d'Armor. It is not far from there that the Paimpont Biological Station of the University of Rennes 1, built in 1966 and 1967, dominates the lake of Chatenay. The varied forest and its surroundings constitute a framework favorable to many training courses in which the Rennes 1 biology students as well as foreign researchers take part. These buildings can accommodate approximately 70 people, and researchers work all the year on subjects generally very far away from the local biotope such as behavior of primates, represented by Cercopithecus, whose cries are familiar for the area but surprising to the walker little accustomed to this exotic fauna. The first researchers lengthily studied the ecology of the Armorican moors, the grounds, and the hydrology.

The forest belongs mainly to owners who maintain it and exploit it for timber and hunting; only in the north-eastern part, a small part (10%) is "domanial" and is managed by the National Forestry Commission. This situation prevents freedom of movement in the forest even with the access to the borough and its pond. The owners, however, signed a convention authorizing, from April 1 to the end of September, the use of some hiking trails in the forest. Among the responsibilities of the forest guards are watching for behaviors that threaten the forest, its flora, and its fauna. For example, behaviors that pose the risk of fire, and those that endanger the game, like dogs running loose. The gathering of mushrooms is not absolutely prohibited, but it is only tolerated near the approved trails. Because of its importance before the French Revolution, the forest was the responsibility of a royal jurisdiction called the National Forestry Commission, as the traditional jurisdictions of the seigneurs did not occupying itself with forest management. The wood was excessively exploited for the power supply of the charcoal blast furnaces for the nearby industry, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries; the assignment of the trees of first choice to the navy was a marginal role.

An extract of the files of the correctional court of Montfort:

"Having left the forging mills of Paimpont on Monday morning, he passed by the workshop of the carpenter who was far away from the forging mills but in the middle of the forest, he drank there with Julien Auffray his cousin and foreman of the carpenters." (Foreman of the carpenters and sawyers on contract to the naval yards elsewhere). Auffray interrogation, 1826.

The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the legends that concern the Celtic and legendary history of Great Britain, especially those focused on King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The 12th century French poet Jean Bodel created the name in the following lines of his epic Chanson de Saisnes:

Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant,

De France et de Bretaigne, et de Rome la grant.

The name distinguishes and relates the Matter of Britain from the mythological themes taken from classical antiquity, the "matter of Rome", and the tales of the paladins of Charlemagne and their wars with the Moors and Saracens, which constituted the "matter of France". While Arthur is the chief subject of the Matter of Britain, other lesser-known legendary history of Great Britain, including the stories of Brutus of Britain, Old King Cole, King Lear, and Gogmagog, is also included in the Matter of Britain: see Legendary Kings of the Britons.

Legendary history of Britain

It could be said that the legendary history of Britain was created in part to form a body of patriotic myth for the island. Several agendas thus can be seen in this body of literature.

The Historia Britonum, the earliest known source of the story of Brutus of Britain, may have been devised to create a distinguished genealogy for a number of Welsh princes in the 9th century. Traditionally attributed to Nennius, its actual compiler is unknown; it exists in several recensions. This tale went on to achieve greater currency because its inventor linked Brutus to the diaspora of heroes that followed the Trojan War, and thus provided raw material which later mythographers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Michael Drayton, and John Milton could draw upon, linking the settlement of Britain to the heroic age of Greek literature, for their several and diverse literary purposes. As such, this material could be used for patriotic mythmaking just as Virgil linked the mythical founding of Rome to the Trojan War in The Æneid. Geoffrey of Monmouth also introduced the fanciful claim that the Trinovantes, reported by Tacitus as dwelling in the area of London, had a name he interpreted as Troi-novant, "New Troy".

More speculative claims link Celtic mythology with several of the rulers and incidents compiled by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniæ. It has been suggested, for instance, that Leir of Britain, who later became Shakespeare's King Lear, was originally the Welsh sea-god Llŷr (see also the Irish sea-god Lir). Various Celtic deities have been identified with characters from Arthurian literature as well: Morgan le Fay was often thought to have originally been the Welsh goddess Modron (cf. the Irish goddess Mórrígan). Many of these identifications come from the speculative comparative religion of the late 19th century, and have been questioned in more recent years.

William Shakespeare seems to have been deeply interested in the legendary history of Britain, and to have been familiar with some of its more obscure byways. Shakespeare's plays contain several tales relating to these legendary kings, such as King Lear and Cymbeline. It has been suggested that Shakespeare's Welsh schoolmaster Thomas Jenkins introduced him to this material, and perhaps directed him to read Geoffrey of Monmouth[citation needed]. These tales also figure in Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which also appears in Shakespeare's sources for Macbeth. A Welsh schoolmaster appears as the character Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Other early authors also drew from the early Arthurian and pseudo-historical sources of the Matter of Britain. The Scots, for instance, formulated a mythical history in the Picts and the Dál Riata royal lines. While they do eventually become factual lines, unlike those of Geoffrey, their origins are vague and often incorporate both aspects of mythical British history and mythical Irish history. The story of Gabhran especially incorporates elements of both those histories.

The Arthurian cycle

"Parsifal before the Castle of the Grail" - inspired by Richard Wagner's Opera Parsifal - painted in Weimar Germany 1928 by Hans Werner Schmidt (1859-1950)

The Arthurian literary cycle is the best known part of the Matter of Britain. It has succeeded largely because it tells two interlocking stories that have intrigued many later authors. One concerns Camelot, usually envisioned as a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of Arthur and Sir Lancelot. The other concerns the quests of the various knights to achieve the Holy Grail; some succeed (Galahad, Percival), and others fail (Lancelot).

The medieval tale of Arthur and his knights is full of Christian themes; those themes involve the destruction of human plans for virtue by the moral failures of their characters, and the quest for an important Christian relic. Finally, the relationships between the characters invited treatment in the tradition of courtly love, such as Lancelot and Guinevere, or Tristan and Iseult. In more recent years, the trend has been to attempt to link the tales of King Arthur and his knights with Celtic mythology, usually in highly romanticized, early twentieth century reconstructed versions.

Additionally, it is possible to read the Arthurian literature in general, and that concerned with the Grail tradition in particular, as an allegory of human development and spiritual growth (a theme explored by mythologist Joseph Campbell amongst others).

Sources wikipedia

Ava Jhamin For

SL Renaissance Festival

VIKI

"Gaia Gown Pink"

MYTHMAKER

"Floor Harp"

The forrest was calling me.....

The animals wanted music...

The beautiful Viki Gaia Gown I paired with the Mythmake Floor Harp and it was serenity.

Both exclusives at Renfest 2023.

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Ren%20Fest%201/201/112/23

Paimpont forest, also known as Brocéliande, is in the French commune of Paimpont, near the city of Rennes in Brittany. As Brocéliande it had a reputation in the Medieval imagination as a place of magic and mystery. It is the setting of a number of adventures in Arthurian legend, notably Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, and locals claim the tree in which the Lady of the Lake supposedly imprisoned Merlin can still be seen today. Other legendary places said to lie within the forest include the Val sans Retour, the tomb of Merlin, the Fountain of Youth, and Hotié de Vivianne (castle of the Lady of the Lake). The medieval chronicler Wace visited the forest but left disappointed:

"...I went there in search of marvels; I saw the forest and the land and looked for marvels, but found none. I came back as a fool and went as a fool. I went as a fool and came back as a fool. I sought foolishness and considered myself a fool."

For those living close to Paimpont, the Arthurian legend is very strong. Many names in the legend can be translated into Breton or French, for example the name Lancelot translates as "wanderer" or "vagabond" in Breton. There is also a strong influence from the Druids, and all around Brittany are standing stones or alignments, the most famous of which are nearby at Carnac; a group of the alignments at Kerlescan are nicknamed "the soldiers of Arthur."

Paimpont is a forest of broadleaf trees, oaks and beeches mainly, with areas of conifers either inside after clear-felling or on the periphery as transition with the moor, for example towards the west in the sector of Tréhorenteuc and the Val-sans-Retour (= Valley of no Return) which was devastated by several fires in particular in 1976, a year of great drought. It occupies mainly the territory of the commune of Paimpont, but extends to bordering communes, mainly Guer and Beignon in the south, Saint-Péran in the northeast, and Concoret in north. The forest of Paimpont is the largest remnant of an ancient forest occupying Argoat, the interior region of Brittany. It was more often called the forest of Brécélien, but its ancient character and other qualities underlined by many authors decided on its name of "forest of Brocéliande," tallying of the adventures of the legend of the Round Table. This flattering designation was reinforced by the birth of the Pays de Brocéliande at the end of the 20th century, an institution intended to facilitate the development of the communes of the west of the département.

The relative altitude of the forested massif contributes to give it a climate close to the oceanic climate of the coasts of Finistere. This mode, where west and south-west winds carry of clouds and regular rain supports the vegetation, dominates. The surplus of water feeds the many brooks occupying the bottoms of small valleys before flowing into the river Aff, then the Vilaine, to the area around Redon in the south of the department. The highest point is at 256 m in the western part called Haute forêt. Altitude decreases regularly while offering viewpoints towards the department of Morbihan; viewpoints which one finds the equivalents in the north on the commune of Mauron, port of the Côtes-d'Armor. It is not far from there that the Paimpont Biological Station of the University of Rennes 1, built in 1966 and 1967, dominates the lake of Chatenay. The varied forest and its surroundings constitute a framework favorable to many training courses in which the Rennes 1 biology students as well as foreign researchers take part. These buildings can accommodate approximately 70 people, and researchers work all the year on subjects generally very far away from the local biotope such as behavior of primates, represented by Cercopithecus, whose cries are familiar for the area but surprising to the walker little accustomed to this exotic fauna. The first researchers lengthily studied the ecology of the Armorican moors, the grounds, and the hydrology.

The forest belongs mainly to owners who maintain it and exploit it for timber and hunting; only in the north-eastern part, a small part (10%) is "domanial" and is managed by the National Forestry Commission. This situation prevents freedom of movement in the forest even with the access to the borough and its pond. The owners, however, signed a convention authorizing, from April 1 to the end of September, the use of some hiking trails in the forest. Among the responsibilities of the forest guards are watching for behaviors that threaten the forest, its flora, and its fauna. For example, behaviors that pose the risk of fire, and those that endanger the game, like dogs running loose. The gathering of mushrooms is not absolutely prohibited, but it is only tolerated near the approved trails. Because of its importance before the French Revolution, the forest was the responsibility of a royal jurisdiction called the National Forestry Commission, as the traditional jurisdictions of the seigneurs did not occupying itself with forest management. The wood was excessively exploited for the power supply of the charcoal blast furnaces for the nearby industry, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries; the assignment of the trees of first choice to the navy was a marginal role.

An extract of the files of the correctional court of Montfort:

"Having left the forging mills of Paimpont on Monday morning, he passed by the workshop of the carpenter who was far away from the forging mills but in the middle of the forest, he drank there with Julien Auffray his cousin and foreman of the carpenters." (Foreman of the carpenters and sawyers on contract to the naval yards elsewhere). Auffray interrogation, 1826.

The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the legends that concern the Celtic and legendary history of Great Britain, especially those focused on King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The 12th century French poet Jean Bodel created the name in the following lines of his epic Chanson de Saisnes:

Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant,

De France et de Bretaigne, et de Rome la grant.

The name distinguishes and relates the Matter of Britain from the mythological themes taken from classical antiquity, the "matter of Rome", and the tales of the paladins of Charlemagne and their wars with the Moors and Saracens, which constituted the "matter of France". While Arthur is the chief subject of the Matter of Britain, other lesser-known legendary history of Great Britain, including the stories of Brutus of Britain, Old King Cole, King Lear, and Gogmagog, is also included in the Matter of Britain: see Legendary Kings of the Britons.

Legendary history of Britain

It could be said that the legendary history of Britain was created in part to form a body of patriotic myth for the island. Several agendas thus can be seen in this body of literature.

The Historia Britonum, the earliest known source of the story of Brutus of Britain, may have been devised to create a distinguished genealogy for a number of Welsh princes in the 9th century. Traditionally attributed to Nennius, its actual compiler is unknown; it exists in several recensions. This tale went on to achieve greater currency because its inventor linked Brutus to the diaspora of heroes that followed the Trojan War, and thus provided raw material which later mythographers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Michael Drayton, and John Milton could draw upon, linking the settlement of Britain to the heroic age of Greek literature, for their several and diverse literary purposes. As such, this material could be used for patriotic mythmaking just as Virgil linked the mythical founding of Rome to the Trojan War in The Æneid. Geoffrey of Monmouth also introduced the fanciful claim that the Trinovantes, reported by Tacitus as dwelling in the area of London, had a name he interpreted as Troi-novant, "New Troy".

More speculative claims link Celtic mythology with several of the rulers and incidents compiled by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniæ. It has been suggested, for instance, that Leir of Britain, who later became Shakespeare's King Lear, was originally the Welsh sea-god Llŷr (see also the Irish sea-god Lir). Various Celtic deities have been identified with characters from Arthurian literature as well: Morgan le Fay was often thought to have originally been the Welsh goddess Modron (cf. the Irish goddess Mórrígan). Many of these identifications come from the speculative comparative religion of the late 19th century, and have been questioned in more recent years.

William Shakespeare seems to have been deeply interested in the legendary history of Britain, and to have been familiar with some of its more obscure byways. Shakespeare's plays contain several tales relating to these legendary kings, such as King Lear and Cymbeline. It has been suggested that Shakespeare's Welsh schoolmaster Thomas Jenkins introduced him to this material, and perhaps directed him to read Geoffrey of Monmouth[citation needed]. These tales also figure in Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which also appears in Shakespeare's sources for Macbeth. A Welsh schoolmaster appears as the character Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Other early authors also drew from the early Arthurian and pseudo-historical sources of the Matter of Britain. The Scots, for instance, formulated a mythical history in the Picts and the Dál Riata royal lines. While they do eventually become factual lines, unlike those of Geoffrey, their origins are vague and often incorporate both aspects of mythical British history and mythical Irish history. The story of Gabhran especially incorporates elements of both those histories.

The Arthurian cycle

"Parsifal before the Castle of the Grail" - inspired by Richard Wagner's Opera Parsifal - painted in Weimar Germany 1928 by Hans Werner Schmidt (1859-1950)

The Arthurian literary cycle is the best known part of the Matter of Britain. It has succeeded largely because it tells two interlocking stories that have intrigued many later authors. One concerns Camelot, usually envisioned as a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of Arthur and Sir Lancelot. The other concerns the quests of the various knights to achieve the Holy Grail; some succeed (Galahad, Percival), and others fail (Lancelot).

The medieval tale of Arthur and his knights is full of Christian themes; those themes involve the destruction of human plans for virtue by the moral failures of their characters, and the quest for an important Christian relic. Finally, the relationships between the characters invited treatment in the tradition of courtly love, such as Lancelot and Guinevere, or Tristan and Iseult. In more recent years, the trend has been to attempt to link the tales of King Arthur and his knights with Celtic mythology, usually in highly romanticized, early twentieth century reconstructed versions.

Additionally, it is possible to read the Arthurian literature in general, and that concerned with the Grail tradition in particular, as an allegory of human development and spiritual growth (a theme explored by mythologist Joseph Campbell amongst others).

Sources wikipedia

General Baubou and the Mambo - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writersâ Prize, the Rogers Writersâ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radioâs Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a childrenâs book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor Generalâs History Award and was inducted into Canadaâs Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called âHistorical In(ter)ventions,â altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of âbooknessâ and explore the question âWhat does it mean to write history?â.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

Ramandu’s Table / A flamboyance of 1,000 flamingoes wade in the Pear-Shaped Basin near the Chimes Tower / Ramandu’s Table interprets the mythmaking of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia through the whimsy of that American icon, the pink flamingo, designed by Don Featherstone in 1957. Munro cleverly evokes Lewis’s story of the old man who is visited by a flock of white birds every morning as he sings the dawn into existence. Munro’s white flamingos, inspired by Don Featherstone, are a nod to the creativity of the man who redefined the suburban landscape in 20th century America.

General Baubou and the Mambo - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In(ter)ventions,’ altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of ‘bookness’ and explore the question “What does it mean to write history?”.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writersâ Prize, the Rogers Writersâ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radioâs Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a childrenâs book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor Generalâs History Award and was inducted into Canadaâs Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called âHistorical In(ter)ventions,â altered history books that challenge codex forms and the ideas and ideologies inscribed in them. She transforms old texts and sculpts new ones to illustrate the omissions and absences in historical meta-narratives. The works highlight the hands of the artist-historian in re/writing the text as they push the physical and geographical boundaries of âbooknessâ and explore the question âWhat does it mean to write history?â.

Gibson teaches writing, visual communication and new media courses in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Speaker(s)

Lawrence Hill & Chantal Gibson

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In

PHOTO-716

Project Name: Dean's Lecture on Information & Society: Lawrence Hill

LIB - Library

Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: Lawrence Hill

About the speakers

Lawrence Hill is the author of ten books, including The Illegal and The Book of Negroes, winner of various awards including The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in the United States and Canada. He is currently writing a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in 1942-43, and is working on a children’s book, and has sold the screen rights for television miniseries adaptation of The Illegal for Conquering Lion Pictures.

Lawrence Hill holds honorary doctorates from seven Canadian universities. In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, received the Governor General’s History Award and was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In 2016, his novel The Illegal won CBC Canada Reads after a spirited defense by Olympian and philanthropist Clara Hughes. The Illegal was longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was shortlisted in 2016 for the NAACP Image Award (for fiction) and the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award. In 2016, Hill (along with co-writer Clement Virgo) won the best writing award from the Canadian Screen Awards for the TV miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes, which won CSA awards in eleven categories. In 2016, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2017, Hill received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Chantal Gibson is a mixed media artist interested in the cultural (re)production of knowledge. Mythmaking and border crossings are major themes in works called ‘Historical In

4me4you visits the PACE Gallery which featured the artist Robert Nava - "Thunderbolt Disco".

Robert Nava has dedicated his practice to developing a unique cast of characters that occupy his paintings. Nava draws from a diverse array of visual and conceptual sources.

"I wanted to return to my childhood interest. I wanted to see these fabled creatures in my studio. I'm interested in a new new kind of mythmaking, even though there are no real stories behind them yet".

Nava's metamorphic creatures are bold and imposing as they fill the canvas and blend into one another, opening a window to Nava's inner world of imagination.

Nava's practice is drawing, a daily ritual for the artist. From sketches he translates his creatures onto canvas in his signature combination of acrylic and grease pencil.

SEE MORE:

WEBSITE:

www.pacegallery.com/welcome-our-new-home-london/

INSTAGRAM:

www.instagram.com/robertnava7/?hl=en

4me4you visits the PACE Gallery which featured the artist Robert Nava - "Thunderbolt Disco".

Robert Nava has dedicated his practice to developing a unique cast of characters that occupy his paintings. Nava draws from a diverse array of visual and conceptual sources.

"I wanted to return to my childhood interest. I wanted to see these fabled creatures in my studio. I'm interested in a new new kind of mythmaking, even though there are no real stories behind them yet".

Nava's metamorphic creatures are bold and imposing as they fill the canvas and blend into one another, opening a window to Nava's inner world of imagination.

Nava's practice is drawing, a daily ritual for the artist. From sketches he translates his creatures onto canvas in his signature combination of acrylic and grease pencil.

SEE MORE:

WEBSITE:

www.pacegallery.com/welcome-our-new-home-london/

INSTAGRAM:

www.instagram.com/robertnava7/?hl=en

Waiting on the orders of Southern fried rabbit.

4me4you visits the PACE Gallery which featured the artist Robert Nava - "Thunderbolt Disco".

Robert Nava has dedicated his practice to developing a unique cast of characters that occupy his paintings. Nava draws from a diverse array of visual and conceptual sources.

"I wanted to return to my childhood interest. I wanted to see these fabled creatures in my studio. I'm interested in a new new kind of mythmaking, even though there are no real stories behind them yet".

Nava's metamorphic creatures are bold and imposing as they fill the canvas and blend into one another, opening a window to Nava's inner world of imagination.

Nava's practice is drawing, a daily ritual for the artist. From sketches he translates his creatures onto canvas in his signature combination of acrylic and grease pencil.

SEE MORE:

WEBSITE:

www.pacegallery.com/welcome-our-new-home-london/

INSTAGRAM:

www.instagram.com/robertnava7/?hl=en

West himself encouraged listeners to believe that the painting emerged out of his own youthful imagination. Toward the end of his life, as Susan Rather has demonstrated, West collaborated with his biographer, John Galt, to create the myth of a youth "instructed by nature" and "acquiring art artlessly." West's account of the origins of The 'Death of Socrates' participates in this mythmaking. As Galt recounts the story, William Henry, a Lancaster gunsmith with whom West lodged, "read to him" about the death of Socrates from "the English translation of Plutarch." The "affecting story ... wrought upon the imagination of West, and induced him to make a drawing," which Henry saw and "requested" that West "paint it." When West needed a model for "the slave who presented the poison," Henry sent for one of his workmen. "The appearance of the young man, whose arms and breast were naked, instantaneously convinced the Artist that he had only to look into nature for the models which would impart grace and energy to his delineation of forms." Galt was not the first person West impressed with this tale that links 'The Death of Socrates' to his discovery that an artist need only to look into nature. In 1807 a young American, Nicholas Biddle, recorded in his diary a conversation with West that closely anticipates Galt's story. West told Biddle that Henry "suggested to West the death of Socrates which they were reading together. Henry made one of his workmen stand up that West might design his fine nervous arm, and it was from this that 'W' took the disposition to copy nature."

SIFF 2018, Photo by Myrto Tzima

Friday July 20 / Mythmaking

Komito Beach

4me4you visits the PACE Gallery which featured the artist Robert Nava - "Thunderbolt Disco".

Robert Nava has dedicated his practice to developing a unique cast of characters that occupy his paintings. Nava draws from a diverse array of visual and conceptual sources.

"I wanted to return to my childhood interest. I wanted to see these fabled creatures in my studio. I'm interested in a new new kind of mythmaking, even though there are no real stories behind them yet".

Nava's metamorphic creatures are bold and imposing as they fill the canvas and blend into one another, opening a window to Nava's inner world of imagination.

Nava's practice is drawing, a daily ritual for the artist. From sketches he translates his creatures onto canvas in his signature combination of acrylic and grease pencil.

SEE MORE:

WEBSITE:

www.pacegallery.com/welcome-our-new-home-london/

INSTAGRAM:

www.instagram.com/robertnava7/?hl=en

A YOUNG WOMAN - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

Chez La Gorzan Dire - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

Chez La Gorzan Dire - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

A YOUNG WOMAN - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

General Baubou and the Mambo - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

General Baubou and the Mambo - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

General Baubou and the Mambo - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

Naturalism

I thought sketching a human is rather appropriate because at our level of development, there seems to be much more to life than simply surviving. Relating to naturalism described in the article in the NY Times, I was especially interested in how philosophy explored our lives and what it might entail other than the simple recognition that physical science can account for everything in this world. This quote from the article captured my attention, “Physical science could never explain anything with a purpose, whether it be human thought or a flower’s bending toward the sun. That would have made everything special about living things — and especially us — safe from a purely scientific understanding. It would have kept questions about humanity the preserve of religion, mythmaking and the humanities.” I think it is common for people to fear or reject what they cannot comprehend; a survival instinct if you will, that greatly diminishes the chance to explore new knowledge in my opinion. Philosophy, the route to explain how life works amongst all the uncertainty, should gain traction with naturalism as a different approach in looking at life. It is important to recognize the fallibility in all things, and that while us humans may be the most intelligent species on this planet, we are often the unwise ones, yielding to arrogance and not to humility.

General Baubou and the Mambo - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

Chez La Gorzan Dire - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

SIFF 2018, Photo by Myrto Tzima

Friday July 20 / Mythmaking

Komito Beach

Chez La Gorzan Dire - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

Chez La Gorzan Dire - (by 1948)

Hector Hyppolite, Haitian, b. Saint-Marc, 1894–1948

Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948) was a Haitian painter. Born in Saint-Marc, Hyppolite was a third generation Vodou priest, or houngan. He also made shoes and painted houses before taking up fine art painting, which he did untrained. Hyppolite spent five years outside of Haiti from 1915-1920. His travels abroad included trips to New York and Cuba. Although he later claimed those years had been spent in Africa, such as Dahomey and Ethiopia, scholars regard that as more likely an instance of promotional myth-making than factual.

haitianartsociety.org/hyppolite-hector-1894-1948

If Hector Hyppolite is the best-known Haitian painter, it is largely due to his discovery by the French Surrealist André Breton, who wrote of “the thrill of pleasure” he experienced on seeing a painting of Hyppolite’s at the Centre d’art, Port-au-Prince, in December 1945. Initially unaware of the painting’s subject, despite the fact that it obviously represented the crowning of the Virgin Mary by 14 angels, Breton valued Hyppolite as the “first ever to record actual voodoo scenes and divinities.” Uninterested in religious syncretism, which he dismissed as “a polite relationship with Christianity,” he pronounced Hyppolite an outsider visionary who “was the guardian of a secret.” In so doing, Breton had invented Haitian naive painting. In 1976, following in Breton’s footsteps, the writer and former French minister of culture André Malraux met the painters of the Saint Soleil School, whom he pronounced “guardians of secrets” in the tradition of Hyppolite.

Hyppolite died three years after Breton “discovered” him, and his life remains largely a mystery. There is no evidence that he was a vodou priest, which Breton seems to have deduced from a photograph of him brandishing an acon, a sacred rattle to which only houngans normally had access. Breton believed, furthermore, that Hyppolite had undergone a secret initiation during a seven-year stay in Dahomey, which is highly unlikely.

While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.

www.moma.org/artists/2790

--------------------------------------------------

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through April 20, 2025.

"The Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town. You’ll rarely see a run of masterpieces to match an art history textbook like you’ll find at the National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn doesn’t trumpet the work of its namesake founder, the way that the Phillips Collection builds exhibitions around the vision of Duncan Phillips. And the Hirshhorn isn’t a crystal-cool stage for a handful of elite artists, a la Glenstone.

No doubt, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has a collection that can stand up to any of them. His gift to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 comprised almost 6,000 paintings and sculptures by the 19th and 20th centuries’ most vital artists — a figure that doubled with a bequest of his remaining works upon his death in 1981.

But rarely is very much of it on view. Especially over the past decade or so, the museum has learned to love its Gordon Bunshaft-designed building, mounting ambitious installations that sometimes take up an entire minor arc of the Brutalist doughnut.

So the museum’s 50th anniversary this year is an opportunity to step back and see the collection in its original light. A chance to look back on the collection’s most important pictures, perhaps a moment to highlight new scholarship in art history or achievements in conservation. But the Hirshhorn’s not like other museums in town — and for its 50th birthday, the museum is throwing a bash.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is a delightful romp through the permanent collection, featuring a gobsmacking number of artworks. The first of three planned anniversary exhibitions, this one focuses on modernism in all its lights, exploring the period through a truly maximalist presentation of paintings and sculpture. Better than a greatest-hits exhibition, “Revolutions” remixes the museum’s best B-sides and rarities, while still making a case about the long 20th century in art.

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Curated by the Hirshhorn’s Marina Isgro and Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” is chockablock with artworks. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings — with the odd photograph thrown in, and a plan to rotate some artworks — trace the flow of ideas from early modernism to the postwar era. That’s a ton of work: For comparison, when the museum mounted a collection show in 2016, it included some 75 pieces.

The first gallery alone showcases a couple dozen works, including a salon-style hang of portraits by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The show is chronological-ish, with contemporary works (like Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress”) sprinkled throughout to break the very light logic of the show’s organization. The rooms have themes, but these are subordinate to the show’s overall flow, which focuses on pairings and dialogues. Artworks wink at one another from across decades and continents, like the geometric Lakota beadwork painting by Dyani White Hawk from 2022 hanging amid constructivist compositions by László Moholy-Nagy and Nadia Léger originally made a century earlier.

Contemporary selections such as Boafo and White Hawk emphasize and sometimes upend ideas in the collection. They’re just infrequent enough in “Revolutions” that they pop like exclamation points. Loie Hollowell’s three-dimensional painting “Boob Wheel” (2019) is an abstraction of the figure rooted in the artist’s own pregnancy, adding a maternal element (and a shade of sex) to the gallery. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “Literacy Lab” (2019), a multimedia piece that looks like three different drawings for an “exquisite corpse” — in fact, it’s just a single composition — holds its own alongside two cubist paintings by Picasso.

While it’s a busy painting show, sculpture takes center stage in “Revolutions,” part of a concerted effort to put more shine on the museum’s sculptural holdings, including the magnificent bronzes in the sculpture garden (currently undergoing a renovation). For the exhibit, the Hirshhorn has revived the light well, a vintage solution for displaying sculpture by placing works on an elevated podium under even, suspended lighting. These retro displays put a spotlight on works by Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and more — smaller sculptures that are easy to overlook in any setting. One of the most magical groupings in the show is a wall-size vitrine that features delicate suprematist marionettes by Aleksandra Exster, futurist flower sculptures by Giacomo Balla and a peerless dada painting by Sonia Delaunay.

Isgro and Johnson find a few chances within the permanent collection to rattle long-standing dogma in art history: for example, by hanging a 1945 painting by the mercurial and long-overlooked artist Janet Sobel that predates the remarkably similar 1949 piece by Jackson Pollock nearby. Throughout the show, the curators elevate marginalized voices without being pedantic about it. Mid-century works by Haitian artists Rigaud Benoit, Hector Hyppolite and Castera Bazile occupy the same kind of space as Willem de Kooning.

In some ways, the Hirshhorn of “Revolutions” is the one I want to visit over and over. There is far too much great work from the 20th century locked away in the vaults of collections like this one. Fernand Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) should never be put out of sight. And why condemn Balla’s futurist flowers to wither in the dark? Yet dynamic new artworks such as Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #4” (2021) and Flora Yukhnovich’s “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022), shown in context with the entire collection, make the case that the central ideas animating the 20th century still have juice. History never ends and all that, but Isgro and Johnson are pressing a more specific point, that the Hirshhorn museum continues to trace the loops and echoes of the many modernisms Joseph Hirshhorn followed from the start.

Maybe the most surprising moment comes at the very beginning. Looking at the Boafo-Sargent pairing by the entrance, to the right and almost behind the viewer stands Constantin Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” (1924). A Futurist Manifesto-grade sculpture with this mega-wattage would normally hold pride of place in any collection. Here, it’s presented in an ambiguous position: possibly an anchor, possibly an afterthought. It’s as if to say the museum is still investigating what the 20th century means and how the pieces fit together, a project with no end in sight.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/10/hirshhorn-revo...

SIFF 2018, Photo by Myrto Tzima

Friday July 20 / Mythmaking

Komito Beach