Philadelphia Story: Gary Wills on Thomas Eakins May 5, 2008

Thomas Eakins's study for a second round of images of the Rush workshop from the SAAM collection: William Rush's Model

What would you choose if someone were to ask you to pick an iconic work of art that spoke to you like no other? Apparently, when historian Gary Wills was asked to participate in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series, he knew immediately that he'd speak about Thomas Eakins's painting, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River. Wills took his listeners on a tour of Eakins's life and works, with a concentration on his homage to Rush, who is considered one of the first great American sculptors.

"I saw a Thomas Eakins exhibit in the 1970s and that started it," Wills said when I asked how he first became acquainted with this image, "This one seemed to be one of Eakins's most personal." There are more famous works by Eakins, notably his paintings of sculling on the Schuylkill River, or those depicting medical procedures. But it was this image that spoke to Wills who, as a historian, was perhaps attracted to the painting's narrative layers that he set out to uncover. 

The story of Eakins and Rush is very much a Philadelphia story. They came from different backgrounds: Rush was the son of a craftsman who was apprenticed in his father's shop. Eakins came from a more privileged background and was supported by his father. Rush became one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where Eakins would later study.

In the painting, Rush is sculpting the model in wood (it would then be painted white to suggest marble). Her chaperone sits to her right, apparently doing what chaperones do—which is to be present and not present at the same time. The model's clothing covers a Chippendale chair that belonged to Eakins, while Rush works in the background. Each character has a job to do; it's kind of a play without words.

Eakins created this image in 1876, when the country was celebrating its one-hundredth birthday. Inspired by centennial fervor, critics had elevated William Rush into the role of America's sculptor; there's even a hint of that patriotism in the model's red, white, and blue clothing. About ten years after painting this work, Eakins ran into some serious trouble with the board of the Academy of Fine Arts due in part to his use of nude models in his drawing classes, in part to his practice of photographing the models (as well as himself) in the nude.  Eakins was fired. Defiant as ever, Eakins created a new version of Rush's workshop in 1908, this time with the nude model facing the viewer. He turned the model around, shocked his viewers, and brought his art into the twentieth century.

• Thomas Eakins, William Rush, Gary Wills, Philadelphia Museum of Art, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

In this Case: Walt Whitman April 25, 2008

In This Case is a series of periodic posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.

Paul Wayland Bartlett's Walt Whitman

April may be the cruelest month, if you believe T. S. Eliot. But it's  also National Poetry Month, which may bring down the cruelty level by a notch or two. For me, Walt Whitman is the gold standard of American poets. In the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, he takes the bronze. That is, there's a bronze medal on view modeled by beaux-arts sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett between 1887 and 1889.  (Bartlett is represented by thirty or so works of art at SAAM. In the Luce Center you can also see the bust version of his work Poetry; in another version her full-length figure graces the  facade of the New York Public Library.)

Whitman placed himself "out there" with the people, not shying away from experience or confrontation.  His poems in Leaves of Grass are almost boasts and billboards for a new type of American verse. His lines flow  with the grace of sermons. He immortalized President Lincoln with his great poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." He wasn't afraid  of rolling up his sleeves and, during the Civil War, tended to wounded and dying soldiers who were brought to the Patent Office Building when it was turned into a make-shift hospital. Whitman walked here. I try to remember that each time I walk through the museum.

In Bartlett's depiction one of Whitman's eyes appears larger than the other, as if he has given you an all-knowing wink. That feeling—as if he has just let you in on the biggest secret in the world—is exactly how I feel each time I revisit his poetry and find something new about the poet, the world, and ultimately, myself.

• Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Walt Whitman, Paul Wayland Bartlett,
  National Poetry Month, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

SAAM Launches Photography Podcast April 15, 2008

William Christenberry's Green Warehouse—Newbern, Alabama

We just launched a new podcast in our museum series about our photography collection and exhibitions here at SAAM. The American landscape has always been a rich subject for photography. Our photography curator, Toby Jurovics, talks about the work of two of his favorite landscape photographers in  SAAM's collections, Lee Friedlander and William Christenberry. In addition Jurovics discusses the "deadpan" dog photographs of William Wegman while conservator Kate Maynor talks about how the museum protects photographs while on exhibition. And finally we take a look at a recent installation here called We the People.

Download the mp3 or grab the podcast at iTunes (with images to go with).

• Photography, Podcast, Lee Friedlander, William Christenberry, Art Conservation,
  Smithsonian American Art Museum

Robert Storr: Make New Friends, but Keep the Old April 11, 2008

"Contemporary art," says Robert Storr, "is simply the most recent of modern art and modern art is an ongoing phenomenon." That line from a recent lecture on museums and collecting modern and contemporary art delivered by Storr, the artist, critic, curator, and instructor, caught my attention. Though it was given in a fairly matter-of-fact way, that line struck me as not so obviously true.

Storr mentioned a 60 Minutes program Morley Safer once wrote, in which he decried contemporary artists (contemporary for the time) like Robert Ryman while he heaped praise on Miró. Miró, of course, was a pivotal member of the band of surrealists who were considered at one point to be a threat to the national order so plausible that Congress held sessions discussing the option of banning art-world "-isms." Storr's point is that controversial contemporary artists soon become our familiar standby favorites. Exposure makes ideas more accessible over time: in that regard, contemporary art becomes modern art.

A side note for clarity's sake: contemporary art never becomes Modernist art. That period in art, which roughly covers the late nineteenth century through mid-twentieth century, concluded when Postmodern artists, critics, and theorists began responding to and summarizing the radical discoveries from the Modernist era. Because Postmodernism introduced new difficulties in moving forward with a linear, progressive understanding of schools and styles in art, the work that has been made roughly since 1970 has been called "contemporary" whereas work that preceded that time is called "modern." These broader categories have no bearing on the more advanced critical/academic notions of Modern and Postmodern; when Storr says that all art made since late nineteenth century realist painting is modern art, he does not mean that all the art is Modernist.

Going back to Storr's broad distinction, I don't think that we should accept that modern or contemporary art loses its power over time, even if reactionary responses fade away or new ideas become more accessible. Marcel Duchamp's provocative work—his readymades; The Fountain; his appropriation of Leonardo's Mona Lisa for his own L.H.O.O.Q.—is still worth grappling with, for artists, critics, and viewers in this day and time.

In other respects, there are useful distinctions to make between "modern" and "contemporary" art—and it depends in no small part on who is making the distinctions. Critics once held painting to be a "higher" medium, up to and including the Modernist era. But today, critics would take a dim view of that opinion (or any hierarchy of genres). Conservators and curators might note the great expansion of techniques that new media have introduced: video and installation—and their applications in contemporary art—have expanded art's potential beyond the plastic arts. Museums have had to cope: collecting contemporary art means adjusting to work that may by design flout the restrictions of an art museum. (Like what? The examples are too many to count. From earth rooms to hotel rooms, new venues and formats for art reveal that one of the first-order functions of contemporary art is the critique of contemporary art. That couldn't be said necessarily of Modernist art.)

As art has moved beyond the canvas—into the realms of concept, critique, and more—it has changed the entire industry associated with visual art. The shift from modern to contemporary seems like more than an arbitrary division in time. In broad terms, it describes a watershed expansion in art's possibilities and roles, from one set of broad rules to another. Pinpointing that divide, however, is trickier. Up close—that is, describing art on a case-by-case level—the division between "modern" and "contemporary" is ambiguous. Is it best to use a crude cut-off (say, that all works made from 1970 to the present fall under "contemporary")? Or is there a work or group of works that crystallizes the moment between modern and contemporary?

• Robert Storr, 60 Minutes, Modern Art, Contemporary Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Art of Contemporary Jewelry: Symposium on April 12 April 10, 2008

Claus Bury, German, born 1946, Ring, 1970, Gold and perspex acrylic, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Helen Williams Drutt Collection, museum purchase with funds provided by the Mary Kathryn Lynch Kurtz Charitable Lead Trust, 2002.3661, © Claus Bury

"Don't call me a collector," Helen Williams Drutt said recently to an audience at the Renwick Gallery who came to view the exhibition Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, "I consider myself an educator." But everywhere you turned in the gallery, you could see the dazzling and unexpected results of Drutt's more than forty years spent acquiring contemporary and modern jewelry. Wearable art has been Drutt's passion, beginning with her response to the resurgence of the craft movement in America right after World War II. Living in Philadelphia, Drutt had her finger on the pulse of the new, tracking emerging artists and new ideas both within and outside the city. "The resurgence began to produce works of art that had the same credibility as painting, as sculpture, as architecture, and even more than photography at that time. Artists were also beginning to enter into the educational system. Suddenly Philadelphia's college and universities began to engage major craftsmen in their art departments and works began to flood into the city," Drutt added. Drutt was on the cusp of the new movement in art jewelry and took an active role in promoting and sustaining it. She became a force not only in Philadelphia and this country, but also in the burgeoning movement that began to reach out to artists from Europe and elsewhere, who, in turn, influenced artists here.

On Saturday, April 12, from 10:00 am to 12:30 p.m., join Drutt and four internationally renowned artists who have worked with her in the past—Americans Robin Kranitzky and Kim Overstreet, Australian Robert Baines and German Claus Bury—for A Grand Passion: Global Perspectives on Contemporary Art Jewelry. The artists work in various media and produce works of astounding beauty and variety, from the real to the surreal, and everything in between.

The symposium is co-sponsored by the James Renwick Alliance, is free and open to the public; no registration is required. It will be held in the McEvoy Auditorium at SAAM (8th and F Streets NW).

• Helen Williams Drutt, Jewelry, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum