View allAll Photos Tagged existential
Photography by Shay Rowan at the first performance.
Come for the music, stay for the existential crisis.
"As irreverent as it is poignant" (Australian Arts Review), this classical cello recital plays out like a piece of performance art run by a masterly jester blurring artistry, humanity, and insanity. Featuring Suite Number One in G Major by JS Bach and personal comedic pieces crafted in Idiot classes, Karen fuses in a healthy dose of pathos tackling identity, expectations, and success through the eyes of a fool.
Winner - Tour Ready Award San Diego Fringe
Winner - Best of the Broadwater encore at Hollywood Fringe
Winner - Weekly Judges Pick in Spoken Word and Storytelling at Sydney Fringe
Nominee - Best Overall in Spoken Word and Storytelling at Sydney Fringe
Top Ten Theatre pick by Stage Raw Los Angeles
★★★★ - Sydney Arts Guide
★★★★ "comic timing as impeccable as her playing" Everything Theatre UK, London
★★★★ - The Alternative Gig Guide, Melbourne
SOLD OUT Run at Vancouver Fringe
Tickets greatermanchesterfringe.co.uk/events/delusions-and-grandeur/
Photography by Shay Rowan at the first performance.
Come for the music, stay for the existential crisis.
"As irreverent as it is poignant" (Australian Arts Review), this classical cello recital plays out like a piece of performance art run by a masterly jester blurring artistry, humanity, and insanity. Featuring Suite Number One in G Major by JS Bach and personal comedic pieces crafted in Idiot classes, Karen fuses in a healthy dose of pathos tackling identity, expectations, and success through the eyes of a fool.
Winner - Tour Ready Award San Diego Fringe
Winner - Best of the Broadwater encore at Hollywood Fringe
Winner - Weekly Judges Pick in Spoken Word and Storytelling at Sydney Fringe
Nominee - Best Overall in Spoken Word and Storytelling at Sydney Fringe
Top Ten Theatre pick by Stage Raw Los Angeles
★★★★ - Sydney Arts Guide
★★★★ "comic timing as impeccable as her playing" Everything Theatre UK, London
★★★★ - The Alternative Gig Guide, Melbourne
SOLD OUT Run at Vancouver Fringe
Tickets greatermanchesterfringe.co.uk/events/delusions-and-grandeur/
George Tooker,
Laundress, 1952, oil on Masonite, 23 1⁄2 x 24 in.
The Schoen Collection: Magic Realism
Magic realism, a relatively neglected school of American painting, probed the disquieting truths beneath the surface of modern life.
By John Dorfman
“For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law and that realism is the criminal,” wrote the art historian Linda Nochlin in the early 1970s. At that time, abstraction had already lost some of its dominance, but the point was and still is sound. With the rise of Pop, representation had begun its return to the art world, but of the multiple modes of representational art that have come into being since then, few can be considered “realism.” And with the widespread use of photography and other machine-generated imagery in mixed media, it has become possible, even easy, to engage in figurative or representational art without using the traditional techniques of realist painting at all. So in that sense, realist painters remain outsiders even if they are no longer outlaws. In the mid-20th century, when abstraction was at its high tide in America, to be a realist was a brave and existential choice, and the artists who took that path are, to this day, relatively obscure and left out of the grand evolutionary narrative of modern art.
One particular group of these artistic criminals is currently getting renewed attention in an important and ambitious exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia.“Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism,” on view through June 13, brings together a selection of works by mostly less-known artists, spanning the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, making the case that a special way of seeing and depicting the modern world took hold in this country during those decades. Even if it never became a dominant mode, it was persuasive and pervasive enough to constitute a school, albeit one with no formal affiliations and often no direct connection between the artists. Some knew each other well and even worked together, while others lived in different parts of the country and worked utterly independently. In short, what the curators of the Georgia exhibition call “magic realism” was not a cenacle but a zeitgeist, albeit of a somewhat subterranean type. And as the subtitle of the show indicates, this artistic phenomenon raises some important questions about realism itself. If we are in the realm of mystery and imagination—one that was first charted in this country by Edgar Allan Poe—how can this be realism? The answer is that one’s definition of realism depends on one’s definition of reality itself.
The paintings and drawings on view in “Extra Ordinary,” disparate though they may be, share certain characteristics—precise technique with sharp rendering, an eerie or lonely quality, a sense of silence or even airlessness, and a greater or lesser degree of grotesqueness. The works have affinities with other 20th-century movements in the U.S. and Europe, such as New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) Precisionism, Surrealism, and the American Scene. The comparison with Surrealism is perhaps the closest and most tempting, although most of the artists did not see themselves as being Surrealists. While some of the paintings in the exhibition could be interpreted as depicting dreams, magical realism achieves its magical effects without resort to the oneiric symbolism and distortions of Surrealism. Rather than Dalí, it is de Chirico, with his eerie, empty piazzas, who seems like the progenitor of these artists. The world in their works is basically the real world, seen with eyes shaped by the anxiety, alienation, disquiet, and bewilderment of modern existence.
“Extra Ordinary” takes as its point of departure an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, “American Realists and Magic Realists.” Curated by Alfred Barr, Dorothy Miller, and Lincoln Kirstein and pulled together in haste at the height of World War II, it drew attention to a type of art that even then was being condemned by critics such as Clement Greenberg, who in his influential 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch had placed all contemporary realism in the latter category. Greenberg also accused MoMA of “eclecticism” for its willingness to admit figurative art, even of a non-realistic kind, to the ranks of modern art and for mounting exhibitions such as this one and the earlier “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” (1936). The 1943 show is credited with coining the term “magic realism,” at least as it pertains to visual art (rather than the Latin American literary movement), and the magic in the paintings is of a decidedly non-traditional variety—less a matter of lore and legend than an ability to see beneath the surfaces of things, to draw attention to the weirdness of ordinary life.
For some of the artists in the 1943 and 2021 exhibitions alike, what lay beneath was a forbidden sexuality. Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker, who were friends, lovers, and collaborators with each other, shared a fascination with Italian Renaissance aesthetics and the archaic, demanding egg tempera technique, and the curators of the Georgia exhibition suggest that their abiding love of realist traditions had a great deal to do with their homosexuality. While straight artists could abandon representation for the disembodied realm of abstraction, gay artists felt the need to hold on to the body and its sensual possibilities in art, because full and honest expression of their desires and identity was denied them in life.
Cadmus’ The Playground (1948), a startlingly frank and feral portrayal of sexuality—both gay and straight—in a public place, sets the tone for this hiding-in-plain-sight school. French’s Music (1943), while it engages in a heightened depiction of the male body, has a symbolic, otherworldly quality that marks the artist’s “interest in man’s inner reality.” As for Tooker, he specialized in using imagery drawn from everyday life to convey the anomie of modern existence. In Laundress (1952), he blends social realism with magic realism—although it should be noted that he disliked the latter term and resisted inclusion in the category—in portraying a Black woman and three children on the roof of a New York building. The laundry hanging to dry behind them forms a screen or backdrop that suggests Renaissance drapery as well as the 19th-century American artist Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (circa 1822), a mischievous work in which the titular character does not appear because she is almost entirely hidden by a hanging white cloth. The timelessness and even serenity of Laundress points to Tooker’s concern with human universals that transcend time and place.
Many of the magic realist works concentrate on the American townscape, and in these one can see debts both to Charles Sheeler and to Giorgio de Chirico. George Ault’s Black Night: Russell’s Corners (1943) delivers a Precisionist-worthy view of a red barn and a white stable at a bend in a rural road, a scene from the town of Woodstock, N.Y., where he lived, that he returned to several times in his work. Typically for the artist, it is shown at night, with the darkness held at bay by the light cast by a single street lamp. These modernist nocturnes were a speciality of Ault’s and the eruption of light into darkness creates an eerie effect. Ault was plagued by family tragedy and mental illness, and his brand of magic realism portrays anxiety and depression not internally but externally, by showing the world as seen through saddened, troubled eyes.
The little-known Z. Vanessa Helder also used a Precisionist style to achieve uncanny effects. Her watercolor Pettit Carriage House (1942) is both this-worldly and otherworldly by virtue of its extreme crispness of detail, colors that are both muted and slightly garish, and total absence of people. Although she was based on the West Coast, in Spokane, Wash., and Los Angeles, her Carriage House could easily serve as an illustration for an H.P. Lovecraft story of horror in rural New England. Thomas Fransioli’s Rain in Charleston (1951) depicts a real street in the historic South Carolina city, with identifiable buildings, but the way he depicts it qualifies it for inclusion in the category of magic realism. Here the magic lies in the storm clouds and the reflections off the rain-slicked street, and in the near-total lack of human presence. Again, there is the sense of the macabre without there being anything specifically macabre being shown, as if something were about to happen. In O. Louis Guglielmi’s Tenements (1939), the cityscape is a locus of horror in a more explicit way. Again, the scene is unpeopled, and the street in front of the buildings is strewn with coffins, which appear to be made of bricks as well. The implication, fortified by the funeral wreath that surrounds one of the buildings, is that the tenements themselves are coffins; Guglielmi, who grew up in such a place, ought to know. Stuart Davis admired Guglielmi, who he said “produced many paintings within the framework of familiar images that have the unfamiliarity of life.” Despite the apparent grimness of many of his paintings, Guglielmi said, “My attitude towards painting today is to be clear, to be saturated with hope, to give the people a reason to live out the débris of our years.”
One of the earliest works in “Extra Ordinary” resonates especially strongly today. Henry Billings’ egg tempera The Arrest (1936) is a wrenching depiction of police brutality and dehumanization in which uniformed officers and unidentified others in civilian clothes pile on to a suspect of whom hardly anything can be seen except his legs and waist. His head is completely hidden in the scrum, perhaps being fatally harmed. Despite the violence of the encounter, there is something strangely static about it, and the faces that are visible are basically expressionless. The background to the scene has that de Chirico-esque aspect that one sees so often in magic realist paintings. Here, the Classical architecture, viewed incompletely, suggests a courthouse and a public monument, ironically presiding over this purported restoration of public order. As we see in our own time and place, reality can seem unreal when it is most immediate and painful.
Magic realism, a relatively neglected school of American painting, probed the disquieting truths beneath the surface of modern life.
By John Dorfman
“For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law and that realism is the criminal,” wrote the art historian Linda Nochlin in the early 1970s. At that time, abstraction had already lost some of its dominance, but the point was and still is sound. With the rise of Pop, representation had begun its return to the art world, but of the multiple modes of representational art that have come into being since then, few can be considered “realism.” And with the widespread use of photography and other machine-generated imagery in mixed media, it has become possible, even easy, to engage in figurative or representational art without using the traditional techniques of realist painting at all. So in that sense, realist painters remain outsiders even if they are no longer outlaws. In the mid-20th century, when abstraction was at its high tide in America, to be a realist was a brave and existential choice, and the artists who took that path are, to this day, relatively obscure and left out of the grand evolutionary narrative of modern art.
George Tooker, Laundress, 1952, oil on Masonite, 23 1⁄2 x 24 in.
The Schoen Collection: Magic Realism
One particular group of these artistic criminals is currently getting renewed attention in an important and ambitious exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia.“Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism,” on view through June 13, brings together a selection of works by mostly less-known artists, spanning the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, making the case that a special way of seeing and depicting the modern world took hold in this country during those decades. Even if it never became a dominant mode, it was persuasive and pervasive enough to constitute a school, albeit one with no formal affiliations and often no direct connection between the artists. Some knew each other well and even worked together, while others lived in different parts of the country and worked utterly independently. In short, what the curators of the Georgia exhibition call “magic realism” was not a cenacle but a zeitgeist, albeit of a somewhat subterranean type. And as the subtitle of the show indicates, this artistic phenomenon raises some important questions about realism itself. If we are in the realm of mystery and imagination—one that was first charted in this country by Edgar Allan Poe—how can this be realism? The answer is that one’s definition of realism depends on one’s definition of reality itself.
The paintings and drawings on view in “Extra Ordinary,” disparate though they may be, share certain characteristics—precise technique with sharp rendering, an eerie or lonely quality, a sense of silence or even airlessness, and a greater or lesser degree of grotesqueness. The works have affinities with other 20th-century movements in the U.S. and Europe, such as New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) Precisionism, Surrealism, and the American Scene. The comparison with Surrealism is perhaps the closest and most tempting, although most of the artists did not see themselves as being Surrealists. While some of the paintings in the exhibition could be interpreted as depicting dreams, magical realism achieves its magical effects without resort to the oneiric symbolism and distortions of Surrealism. Rather than Dalí, it is de Chirico, with his eerie, empty piazzas, who seems like the progenitor of these artists. The world in their works is basically the real world, seen with eyes shaped by the anxiety, alienation, disquiet, and bewilderment of modern existence.
“Extra Ordinary” takes as its point of departure an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, “American Realists and Magic Realists.” Curated by Alfred Barr, Dorothy Miller, and Lincoln Kirstein and pulled together in haste at the height of World War II, it drew attention to a type of art that even then was being condemned by critics such as Clement Greenberg, who in his influential 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch had placed all contemporary realism in the latter category. Greenberg also accused MoMA of “eclecticism” for its willingness to admit figurative art, even of a non-realistic kind, to the ranks of modern art and for mounting exhibitions such as this one and the earlier “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” (1936). The 1943 show is credited with coining the term “magic realism,” at least as it pertains to visual art (rather than the Latin American literary movement), and the magic in the paintings is of a decidedly non-traditional variety—less a matter of lore and legend than an ability to see beneath the surfaces of things, to draw attention to the weirdness of ordinary life.
Peter Blume, Study for South of Scranton, 1930, oil on canvas, 28 x 20 in.
Vero Beach Museum of Art, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Athena Society, 2017.2 © 2020 The Educational Alliance, Inc. / Estate of Peter Blume / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
For some of the artists in the 1943 and 2021 exhibitions alike, what lay beneath was a forbidden sexuality. Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker, who were friends, lovers, and collaborators with each other, shared a fascination with Italian Renaissance aesthetics and the archaic, demanding egg tempera technique, and the curators of the Georgia exhibition suggest that their abiding love of realist traditions had a great deal to do with their homosexuality. While straight artists could abandon representation for the disembodied realm of abstraction, gay artists felt the need to hold on to the body and its sensual possibilities in art, because full and honest expression of their desires and identity was denied them in life.
Cadmus’ The Playground (1948), a startlingly frank and feral portrayal of sexuality—both gay and straight—in a public place, sets the tone for this hiding-in-plain-sight school. French’s Music (1943), while it engages in a heightened depiction of the male body, has a symbolic, otherworldly quality that marks the artist’s “interest in man’s inner reality.” As for Tooker, he specialized in using imagery drawn from everyday life to convey the anomie of modern existence. In Laundress (1952), he blends social realism with magic realism—although it should be noted that he disliked the latter term and resisted inclusion in the category—in portraying a Black woman and three children on the roof of a New York building. The laundry hanging to dry behind them forms a screen or backdrop that suggests Renaissance drapery as well as the 19th-century American artist Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (circa 1822), a mischievous work in which the titular character does not appear because she is almost entirely hidden by a hanging white cloth. The timelessness and even serenity of Laundress points to Tooker’s concern with human universals that transcend time and place.
Many of the magic realist works concentrate on the American townscape, and in these one can see debts both to Charles Sheeler and to Giorgio de Chirico. George Ault’s Black Night: Russell’s Corners (1943) delivers a Precisionist-worthy view of a red barn and a white stable at a bend in a rural road, a scene from the town of Woodstock, N.Y., where he lived, that he returned to several times in his work. Typically for the artist, it is shown at night, with the darkness held at bay by the light cast by a single street lamp. These modernist nocturnes were a speciality of Ault’s and the eruption of light into darkness creates an eerie effect. Ault was plagued by family tragedy and mental illness, and his brand of magic realism portrays anxiety and depression not internally but externally, by showing the world as seen through saddened, troubled eyes.
The little-known Z. Vanessa Helder also used a Precisionist style to achieve uncanny effects. Her watercolor Pettit Carriage House (1942) is both this-worldly and otherworldly by virtue of its extreme crispness of detail, colors that are both muted and slightly garish, and total absence of people. Although she was based on the West Coast, in Spokane, Wash., and Los Angeles, her Carriage House could easily serve as an illustration for an H.P. Lovecraft story of horror in rural New England. Thomas Fransioli’s Rain in Charleston (1951) depicts a real street in the historic South Carolina city, with identifiable buildings, but the way he depicts it qualifies it for inclusion in the category of magic realism. Here the magic lies in the storm clouds and the reflections off the rain-slicked street, and in the near-total lack of human presence. Again, there is the sense of the macabre without there being anything specifically macabre being shown, as if something were about to happen. In O. Louis Guglielmi’s Tenements (1939), the cityscape is a locus of horror in a more explicit way. Again, the scene is unpeopled, and the street in front of the buildings is strewn with coffins, which appear to be made of bricks as well. The implication, fortified by the funeral wreath that surrounds one of the buildings, is that the tenements themselves are coffins; Guglielmi, who grew up in such a place, ought to know. Stuart Davis admired Guglielmi, who he said “produced many paintings within the framework of familiar images that have the unfamiliarity of life.” Despite the apparent grimness of many of his paintings, Guglielmi said, “My attitude towards painting today is to be clear, to be saturated with hope, to give the people a reason to live out the débris of our years.”
Henry Billings, The Arrest, 1936, egg tempera on hardboard panel, 23 5⁄8 x 31 5⁄8 in.
The Schoen Collection: Magic Realism; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia
One of the earliest works in “Extra Ordinary” resonates especially strongly today. Henry Billings’ egg tempera The Arrest (1936) is a wrenching depiction of police brutality and dehumanization in which uniformed officers and unidentified others in civilian clothes pile on to a suspect of whom hardly anything can be seen except his legs and waist. His head is completely hidden in the scrum, perhaps being fatally harmed. Despite the violence of the encounter, there is something strangely static about it, and the faces that are visible are basically expressionless. The background to the scene has that de Chirico-esque aspect that one sees so often in magic realist paintings. Here, the Classical architecture, viewed incompletely, suggests a courthouse and a public monument, ironically presiding over this purported restoration of public order. As we see in our own time and place, reality can seem unreal when it is most immediate and painful.
_____________________________________________
for previous visits to the Mint Museum:
www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720319066582
www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720322920982/
_____________________________________________
The Mint Museum is the largest visual arts institution in Charlotte and holds the largest public collection of Charlotte-born artist Romare Bearden's work.
The American Art collection comprises approximately 900 works created between the late 1700s and circa 1945. It includes portraiture of the Federal era, 19th century landscapes, and paintings from the group known as "The Eight" (Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur Bowen Davies). Additional highlights in this area include works by John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, and Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Sanford Gifford.
The Art of the Ancient Americas collection includes roughly 2,000 objects from more than 40 cultures, spanning more than 4,500 years. The collection includes body adornments, tools, ceramic vessels, sculpture, textiles, and metal ornaments.
There are about 2,230 objects in the Mint's collection of Contemporary Art. These include the Bearden collection and other works on paper, contemporary sculpture, and photography from circa 1945 to the present.
The Mint's Decorative Arts collection, considered one of the finest in the country, centers on its holdings in ceramics. Containing more than 12,000 objects from 2000 B.C. to 1950 A.D., the collection includes a wide variety of ancient Chinese ceramics, 18th century European and English wares, American art pottery, and North Carolina pottery. The Mint has the largest and most comprehensive collection of North Carolina pottery in the nation. Its collection of North Carolina pottery comprises some 2,200 objects, dating from the 1700s.
The museum's Delhom collection, given to the Mint in 1966, contains 2,000 pieces of historic pottery and porcelain, as well as pre-Columbian pieces that are more than 4,500 years old.
Almost 10,000 items of men's, women's, and children's fashions from the early 18th century to present-day haute couture are included in the museum's collection of Historic Costume and Fashionable Dress, which approaches fashion as an art form.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint_Museum
.
Existential Crisis (Version I) by Scott Eagle on display at the Wellington B Gray Gallery on Friday, Oct. 19, 2012. (Aileen Devlin/The Daily Reflector)
This is a pencil study for a larger painting that I have yet to finish. I believe it is about 30" by 22" but it might be slightly larger or smaller. I am sorry about the poor quality of the photo but one would need to see it up close to decide to purchase it anyway. The price could be decided after viewing the piece up close. I am thinking about 400.00 dollars but as I said a person would need to see it up close or maybe someday I can get a better photograph made of it.
Puscifer
at The Greek Theatre
Los Angeles, CA
June 12, 2022
All photos © Kaley Nelson Photography - www.KaleyNelson.com
now the existential dilemma: keep the saucers connected or detach into a kind of space station above?
12:00 pm - 12:50 pm
Hotel Jerome Ballroom
Tristan Harris
Interviewer: Charles Duhigg
Property of the Aspen Institute / Photo Credit: Ian Wagreich
Penny Wong, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Commonwealth of Australia, addresses the plenary segment of the High-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly on the theme "Addressing the threats posed by sea level rise". The General Assembly adopted draft resolution A/78/L.35 on holding a High-Level plenary meeting on addressing the existential threats posed by sea-level rise.
This meeting focused on building common understanding, mobilizing political leadership, and promoting multisectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration and international cooperation towards addressing the threats posed by sea-level rise. The purpose of the meeting aimed to deliver action-oriented solutions for affected States and frontline communities and enhancing action on sea-level rise.
UN Photo/Laura Jarriel
25 September 2024
New York, United States of America
Photo # UN71066813
One of my existential walks through White Clay Creek State Park in Delaware. A gloomy, overcast, December day. Wet rotting leaves cushioning my steps, surrounded by moss and fungus.
12:00 pm - 12:50 pm
Hotel Jerome Ballroom
Tristan Harris
Interviewer: Charles Duhigg
Property of the Aspen Institute / Photo Credit: Ian Wagreich
GOC
Existential threats
Amycom
Massive temporary cate
Travel restrictions for men
Total air travel suspension
Frequent blackouts
Curfews
Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State of the United States of America, addresses the plenary segment of the High-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly on the theme "Addressing the threats posed by sea level rise". The General Assembly adopted draft resolution A/78/L.35 on holding a High-Level plenary meeting on addressing the existential threats posed by sea-level rise.
This meeting focused on building common understanding, mobilizing political leadership, and promoting multisectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration and international cooperation towards addressing the threats posed by sea-level rise. The purpose of the meeting aimed to deliver action-oriented solutions for affected States and frontline communities and enhancing action on sea-level rise.
UN Photo/Laura Jarriel
25 September 2024
New York, United States of America
Photo # UN71066805
Sometimes I think way to much, usually when I'm supposed to sleep. My mind will start drifting into some existential question like; what is consciousness, what is nothingness like, what is death like or what is life. Questions without answers (at least in my present alive state, I assume I'll find out about the death-question eventually). I end up feeling uncomfortable, slightly scared and by then it's impossible to fall a sleep.
K.P. Sharma Oli, Prime Minister of Nepal, addresses the plenary segment of the High-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly on the theme "Addressing the threats posed by sea level rise". The General Assembly adopted draft resolution A/78/L.35 on holding a High-Level plenary meeting on addressing the existential threats posed by sea-level rise.
This meeting focused on building common understanding, mobilizing political leadership, and promoting multisectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration and international cooperation towards addressing the threats posed by sea-level rise. The purpose of the meeting aimed to deliver action-oriented solutions for affected States and frontline communities and enhancing action on sea-level rise.
UN Photo/Laura Jarriel
25 September 2024
New York, United States of America
Photo # UN71066812
George Tooker,
Laundress, 1952, oil on Masonite, 23 1⁄2 x 24 in.
The Schoen Collection: Magic Realism
Magic realism, a relatively neglected school of American painting, probed the disquieting truths beneath the surface of modern life.
By John Dorfman
“For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law and that realism is the criminal,” wrote the art historian Linda Nochlin in the early 1970s. At that time, abstraction had already lost some of its dominance, but the point was and still is sound. With the rise of Pop, representation had begun its return to the art world, but of the multiple modes of representational art that have come into being since then, few can be considered “realism.” And with the widespread use of photography and other machine-generated imagery in mixed media, it has become possible, even easy, to engage in figurative or representational art without using the traditional techniques of realist painting at all. So in that sense, realist painters remain outsiders even if they are no longer outlaws. In the mid-20th century, when abstraction was at its high tide in America, to be a realist was a brave and existential choice, and the artists who took that path are, to this day, relatively obscure and left out of the grand evolutionary narrative of modern art.
One particular group of these artistic criminals is currently getting renewed attention in an important and ambitious exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia.“Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism,” on view through June 13, brings together a selection of works by mostly less-known artists, spanning the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, making the case that a special way of seeing and depicting the modern world took hold in this country during those decades. Even if it never became a dominant mode, it was persuasive and pervasive enough to constitute a school, albeit one with no formal affiliations and often no direct connection between the artists. Some knew each other well and even worked together, while others lived in different parts of the country and worked utterly independently. In short, what the curators of the Georgia exhibition call “magic realism” was not a cenacle but a zeitgeist, albeit of a somewhat subterranean type. And as the subtitle of the show indicates, this artistic phenomenon raises some important questions about realism itself. If we are in the realm of mystery and imagination—one that was first charted in this country by Edgar Allan Poe—how can this be realism? The answer is that one’s definition of realism depends on one’s definition of reality itself.
The paintings and drawings on view in “Extra Ordinary,” disparate though they may be, share certain characteristics—precise technique with sharp rendering, an eerie or lonely quality, a sense of silence or even airlessness, and a greater or lesser degree of grotesqueness. The works have affinities with other 20th-century movements in the U.S. and Europe, such as New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) Precisionism, Surrealism, and the American Scene. The comparison with Surrealism is perhaps the closest and most tempting, although most of the artists did not see themselves as being Surrealists. While some of the paintings in the exhibition could be interpreted as depicting dreams, magical realism achieves its magical effects without resort to the oneiric symbolism and distortions of Surrealism. Rather than Dalí, it is de Chirico, with his eerie, empty piazzas, who seems like the progenitor of these artists. The world in their works is basically the real world, seen with eyes shaped by the anxiety, alienation, disquiet, and bewilderment of modern existence.
“Extra Ordinary” takes as its point of departure an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, “American Realists and Magic Realists.” Curated by Alfred Barr, Dorothy Miller, and Lincoln Kirstein and pulled together in haste at the height of World War II, it drew attention to a type of art that even then was being condemned by critics such as Clement Greenberg, who in his influential 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch had placed all contemporary realism in the latter category. Greenberg also accused MoMA of “eclecticism” for its willingness to admit figurative art, even of a non-realistic kind, to the ranks of modern art and for mounting exhibitions such as this one and the earlier “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” (1936). The 1943 show is credited with coining the term “magic realism,” at least as it pertains to visual art (rather than the Latin American literary movement), and the magic in the paintings is of a decidedly non-traditional variety—less a matter of lore and legend than an ability to see beneath the surfaces of things, to draw attention to the weirdness of ordinary life.
For some of the artists in the 1943 and 2021 exhibitions alike, what lay beneath was a forbidden sexuality. Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker, who were friends, lovers, and collaborators with each other, shared a fascination with Italian Renaissance aesthetics and the archaic, demanding egg tempera technique, and the curators of the Georgia exhibition suggest that their abiding love of realist traditions had a great deal to do with their homosexuality. While straight artists could abandon representation for the disembodied realm of abstraction, gay artists felt the need to hold on to the body and its sensual possibilities in art, because full and honest expression of their desires and identity was denied them in life.
Cadmus’ The Playground (1948), a startlingly frank and feral portrayal of sexuality—both gay and straight—in a public place, sets the tone for this hiding-in-plain-sight school. French’s Music (1943), while it engages in a heightened depiction of the male body, has a symbolic, otherworldly quality that marks the artist’s “interest in man’s inner reality.” As for Tooker, he specialized in using imagery drawn from everyday life to convey the anomie of modern existence. In Laundress (1952), he blends social realism with magic realism—although it should be noted that he disliked the latter term and resisted inclusion in the category—in portraying a Black woman and three children on the roof of a New York building. The laundry hanging to dry behind them forms a screen or backdrop that suggests Renaissance drapery as well as the 19th-century American artist Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (circa 1822), a mischievous work in which the titular character does not appear because she is almost entirely hidden by a hanging white cloth. The timelessness and even serenity of Laundress points to Tooker’s concern with human universals that transcend time and place.
Many of the magic realist works concentrate on the American townscape, and in these one can see debts both to Charles Sheeler and to Giorgio de Chirico. George Ault’s Black Night: Russell’s Corners (1943) delivers a Precisionist-worthy view of a red barn and a white stable at a bend in a rural road, a scene from the town of Woodstock, N.Y., where he lived, that he returned to several times in his work. Typically for the artist, it is shown at night, with the darkness held at bay by the light cast by a single street lamp. These modernist nocturnes were a speciality of Ault’s and the eruption of light into darkness creates an eerie effect. Ault was plagued by family tragedy and mental illness, and his brand of magic realism portrays anxiety and depression not internally but externally, by showing the world as seen through saddened, troubled eyes.
The little-known Z. Vanessa Helder also used a Precisionist style to achieve uncanny effects. Her watercolor Pettit Carriage House (1942) is both this-worldly and otherworldly by virtue of its extreme crispness of detail, colors that are both muted and slightly garish, and total absence of people. Although she was based on the West Coast, in Spokane, Wash., and Los Angeles, her Carriage House could easily serve as an illustration for an H.P. Lovecraft story of horror in rural New England. Thomas Fransioli’s Rain in Charleston (1951) depicts a real street in the historic South Carolina city, with identifiable buildings, but the way he depicts it qualifies it for inclusion in the category of magic realism. Here the magic lies in the storm clouds and the reflections off the rain-slicked street, and in the near-total lack of human presence. Again, there is the sense of the macabre without there being anything specifically macabre being shown, as if something were about to happen. In O. Louis Guglielmi’s Tenements (1939), the cityscape is a locus of horror in a more explicit way. Again, the scene is unpeopled, and the street in front of the buildings is strewn with coffins, which appear to be made of bricks as well. The implication, fortified by the funeral wreath that surrounds one of the buildings, is that the tenements themselves are coffins; Guglielmi, who grew up in such a place, ought to know. Stuart Davis admired Guglielmi, who he said “produced many paintings within the framework of familiar images that have the unfamiliarity of life.” Despite the apparent grimness of many of his paintings, Guglielmi said, “My attitude towards painting today is to be clear, to be saturated with hope, to give the people a reason to live out the débris of our years.”
One of the earliest works in “Extra Ordinary” resonates especially strongly today. Henry Billings’ egg tempera The Arrest (1936) is a wrenching depiction of police brutality and dehumanization in which uniformed officers and unidentified others in civilian clothes pile on to a suspect of whom hardly anything can be seen except his legs and waist. His head is completely hidden in the scrum, perhaps being fatally harmed. Despite the violence of the encounter, there is something strangely static about it, and the faces that are visible are basically expressionless. The background to the scene has that de Chirico-esque aspect that one sees so often in magic realist paintings. Here, the Classical architecture, viewed incompletely, suggests a courthouse and a public monument, ironically presiding over this purported restoration of public order. As we see in our own time and place, reality can seem unreal when it is most immediate and painful.
Magic realism, a relatively neglected school of American painting, probed the disquieting truths beneath the surface of modern life.
By John Dorfman
“For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law and that realism is the criminal,” wrote the art historian Linda Nochlin in the early 1970s. At that time, abstraction had already lost some of its dominance, but the point was and still is sound. With the rise of Pop, representation had begun its return to the art world, but of the multiple modes of representational art that have come into being since then, few can be considered “realism.” And with the widespread use of photography and other machine-generated imagery in mixed media, it has become possible, even easy, to engage in figurative or representational art without using the traditional techniques of realist painting at all. So in that sense, realist painters remain outsiders even if they are no longer outlaws. In the mid-20th century, when abstraction was at its high tide in America, to be a realist was a brave and existential choice, and the artists who took that path are, to this day, relatively obscure and left out of the grand evolutionary narrative of modern art.
George Tooker, Laundress, 1952, oil on Masonite, 23 1⁄2 x 24 in.
The Schoen Collection: Magic Realism
One particular group of these artistic criminals is currently getting renewed attention in an important and ambitious exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia.“Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism,” on view through June 13, brings together a selection of works by mostly less-known artists, spanning the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, making the case that a special way of seeing and depicting the modern world took hold in this country during those decades. Even if it never became a dominant mode, it was persuasive and pervasive enough to constitute a school, albeit one with no formal affiliations and often no direct connection between the artists. Some knew each other well and even worked together, while others lived in different parts of the country and worked utterly independently. In short, what the curators of the Georgia exhibition call “magic realism” was not a cenacle but a zeitgeist, albeit of a somewhat subterranean type. And as the subtitle of the show indicates, this artistic phenomenon raises some important questions about realism itself. If we are in the realm of mystery and imagination—one that was first charted in this country by Edgar Allan Poe—how can this be realism? The answer is that one’s definition of realism depends on one’s definition of reality itself.
The paintings and drawings on view in “Extra Ordinary,” disparate though they may be, share certain characteristics—precise technique with sharp rendering, an eerie or lonely quality, a sense of silence or even airlessness, and a greater or lesser degree of grotesqueness. The works have affinities with other 20th-century movements in the U.S. and Europe, such as New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) Precisionism, Surrealism, and the American Scene. The comparison with Surrealism is perhaps the closest and most tempting, although most of the artists did not see themselves as being Surrealists. While some of the paintings in the exhibition could be interpreted as depicting dreams, magical realism achieves its magical effects without resort to the oneiric symbolism and distortions of Surrealism. Rather than Dalí, it is de Chirico, with his eerie, empty piazzas, who seems like the progenitor of these artists. The world in their works is basically the real world, seen with eyes shaped by the anxiety, alienation, disquiet, and bewilderment of modern existence.
“Extra Ordinary” takes as its point of departure an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, “American Realists and Magic Realists.” Curated by Alfred Barr, Dorothy Miller, and Lincoln Kirstein and pulled together in haste at the height of World War II, it drew attention to a type of art that even then was being condemned by critics such as Clement Greenberg, who in his influential 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch had placed all contemporary realism in the latter category. Greenberg also accused MoMA of “eclecticism” for its willingness to admit figurative art, even of a non-realistic kind, to the ranks of modern art and for mounting exhibitions such as this one and the earlier “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” (1936). The 1943 show is credited with coining the term “magic realism,” at least as it pertains to visual art (rather than the Latin American literary movement), and the magic in the paintings is of a decidedly non-traditional variety—less a matter of lore and legend than an ability to see beneath the surfaces of things, to draw attention to the weirdness of ordinary life.
Peter Blume, Study for South of Scranton, 1930, oil on canvas, 28 x 20 in.
Vero Beach Museum of Art, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Athena Society, 2017.2 © 2020 The Educational Alliance, Inc. / Estate of Peter Blume / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
For some of the artists in the 1943 and 2021 exhibitions alike, what lay beneath was a forbidden sexuality. Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker, who were friends, lovers, and collaborators with each other, shared a fascination with Italian Renaissance aesthetics and the archaic, demanding egg tempera technique, and the curators of the Georgia exhibition suggest that their abiding love of realist traditions had a great deal to do with their homosexuality. While straight artists could abandon representation for the disembodied realm of abstraction, gay artists felt the need to hold on to the body and its sensual possibilities in art, because full and honest expression of their desires and identity was denied them in life.
Cadmus’ The Playground (1948), a startlingly frank and feral portrayal of sexuality—both gay and straight—in a public place, sets the tone for this hiding-in-plain-sight school. French’s Music (1943), while it engages in a heightened depiction of the male body, has a symbolic, otherworldly quality that marks the artist’s “interest in man’s inner reality.” As for Tooker, he specialized in using imagery drawn from everyday life to convey the anomie of modern existence. In Laundress (1952), he blends social realism with magic realism—although it should be noted that he disliked the latter term and resisted inclusion in the category—in portraying a Black woman and three children on the roof of a New York building. The laundry hanging to dry behind them forms a screen or backdrop that suggests Renaissance drapery as well as the 19th-century American artist Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (circa 1822), a mischievous work in which the titular character does not appear because she is almost entirely hidden by a hanging white cloth. The timelessness and even serenity of Laundress points to Tooker’s concern with human universals that transcend time and place.
Many of the magic realist works concentrate on the American townscape, and in these one can see debts both to Charles Sheeler and to Giorgio de Chirico. George Ault’s Black Night: Russell’s Corners (1943) delivers a Precisionist-worthy view of a red barn and a white stable at a bend in a rural road, a scene from the town of Woodstock, N.Y., where he lived, that he returned to several times in his work. Typically for the artist, it is shown at night, with the darkness held at bay by the light cast by a single street lamp. These modernist nocturnes were a speciality of Ault’s and the eruption of light into darkness creates an eerie effect. Ault was plagued by family tragedy and mental illness, and his brand of magic realism portrays anxiety and depression not internally but externally, by showing the world as seen through saddened, troubled eyes.
The little-known Z. Vanessa Helder also used a Precisionist style to achieve uncanny effects. Her watercolor Pettit Carriage House (1942) is both this-worldly and otherworldly by virtue of its extreme crispness of detail, colors that are both muted and slightly garish, and total absence of people. Although she was based on the West Coast, in Spokane, Wash., and Los Angeles, her Carriage House could easily serve as an illustration for an H.P. Lovecraft story of horror in rural New England. Thomas Fransioli’s Rain in Charleston (1951) depicts a real street in the historic South Carolina city, with identifiable buildings, but the way he depicts it qualifies it for inclusion in the category of magic realism. Here the magic lies in the storm clouds and the reflections off the rain-slicked street, and in the near-total lack of human presence. Again, there is the sense of the macabre without there being anything specifically macabre being shown, as if something were about to happen. In O. Louis Guglielmi’s Tenements (1939), the cityscape is a locus of horror in a more explicit way. Again, the scene is unpeopled, and the street in front of the buildings is strewn with coffins, which appear to be made of bricks as well. The implication, fortified by the funeral wreath that surrounds one of the buildings, is that the tenements themselves are coffins; Guglielmi, who grew up in such a place, ought to know. Stuart Davis admired Guglielmi, who he said “produced many paintings within the framework of familiar images that have the unfamiliarity of life.” Despite the apparent grimness of many of his paintings, Guglielmi said, “My attitude towards painting today is to be clear, to be saturated with hope, to give the people a reason to live out the débris of our years.”
Henry Billings, The Arrest, 1936, egg tempera on hardboard panel, 23 5⁄8 x 31 5⁄8 in.
The Schoen Collection: Magic Realism; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia
One of the earliest works in “Extra Ordinary” resonates especially strongly today. Henry Billings’ egg tempera The Arrest (1936) is a wrenching depiction of police brutality and dehumanization in which uniformed officers and unidentified others in civilian clothes pile on to a suspect of whom hardly anything can be seen except his legs and waist. His head is completely hidden in the scrum, perhaps being fatally harmed. Despite the violence of the encounter, there is something strangely static about it, and the faces that are visible are basically expressionless. The background to the scene has that de Chirico-esque aspect that one sees so often in magic realist paintings. Here, the Classical architecture, viewed incompletely, suggests a courthouse and a public monument, ironically presiding over this purported restoration of public order. As we see in our own time and place, reality can seem unreal when it is most immediate and painful.
_____________________________________________
for previous visits to the Mint Museum:
www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720319066582
www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720322920982/
_____________________________________________
The Mint Museum is the largest visual arts institution in Charlotte and holds the largest public collection of Charlotte-born artist Romare Bearden's work.
The American Art collection comprises approximately 900 works created between the late 1700s and circa 1945. It includes portraiture of the Federal era, 19th century landscapes, and paintings from the group known as "The Eight" (Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur Bowen Davies). Additional highlights in this area include works by John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, and Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Sanford Gifford.
The Art of the Ancient Americas collection includes roughly 2,000 objects from more than 40 cultures, spanning more than 4,500 years. The collection includes body adornments, tools, ceramic vessels, sculpture, textiles, and metal ornaments.
There are about 2,230 objects in the Mint's collection of Contemporary Art. These include the Bearden collection and other works on paper, contemporary sculpture, and photography from circa 1945 to the present.
The Mint's Decorative Arts collection, considered one of the finest in the country, centers on its holdings in ceramics. Containing more than 12,000 objects from 2000 B.C. to 1950 A.D., the collection includes a wide variety of ancient Chinese ceramics, 18th century European and English wares, American art pottery, and North Carolina pottery. The Mint has the largest and most comprehensive collection of North Carolina pottery in the nation. Its collection of North Carolina pottery comprises some 2,200 objects, dating from the 1700s.
The museum's Delhom collection, given to the Mint in 1966, contains 2,000 pieces of historic pottery and porcelain, as well as pre-Columbian pieces that are more than 4,500 years old.
Almost 10,000 items of men's, women's, and children's fashions from the early 18th century to present-day haute couture are included in the museum's collection of Historic Costume and Fashionable Dress, which approaches fashion as an art form.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint_Museum
.
C/O Berlin is opening SHOOT! . Existential Photography tonight at 7 p.m. at the Postfuhramt, Oranienburgerstrasse 35/36.
You are all cordially invited to join us and find out about the peculiar fascination of fairground shooting galleries: making a target of one’s own ego, or—for the price of a picture—succumbing to the temptation of staging a duel with yourself as the opponent.
C/O Berlin, 4.Februar 2011
Ausstellung
SHOOT! . Fotografie existentiell
5. Februar bis 27. März 2011
Eröffnung Freitag, 4. Februar 2011, 19 Uhr
Fiamē Naomi Mata'afa, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Independent State of Samoa, addresses the plenary segment of the High-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly on the theme "Addressing the threats posed by sea level rise". The General Assembly adopted draft resolution A/78/L.35 on holding a High-Level plenary meeting on addressing the existential threats posed by sea-level rise.
This meeting focused on building common understanding, mobilizing political leadership, and promoting multisectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration and international cooperation towards addressing the threats posed by sea-level rise. The purpose of the meeting aimed to deliver action-oriented solutions for affected States and frontline communities and enhancing action on sea-level rise.
UN Photo/Laura Jarriel
25 September 2024
New York, United States of America
Photo # UN71066703
A representative of the Republic of Zimbabwe addresses the opening and plenary segment of the High-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly on the theme "Addressing the threats posed by sea level rise". The General Assembly adopted draft resolution A/78/L.35 on holding a High-Level plenary meeting on addressing the existential threats posed by sea-level rise.
This meeting focused on building common understanding, mobilizing political leadership, and promoting multisectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration and international cooperation towards addressing the threats posed by sea-level rise. The purpose of the meeting aimed to deliver action-oriented solutions for affected States and frontline communities and enhancing action on sea-level rise.
UN Photo/Laura Jarriel
25 September 2024
New York, United States of America
Photo # UN71067128