Even in this digital age the iconography of the American Southwest—the horizontal expanse of land and sky, the mammoth cloud formations, the sculpted buttes and wind-scrubbed mesas, the lone saguaros and cottonwoods—commands considerable evocative power. When the California-born artist Maynard Dixon first visited Arizona and New Mexico in 1900, he met his muse in that wild terrain.
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Golden Days
July 2009“Summer and its blossoms all winter in California.” Around the turn of the 20th century the United States Railroad Administration put slogans like this on thousands of travel posters, hoping to cash in on Americans’ desire to escape the cold, harsh winters of the Northeast and Midwest. But artists didn’t need slogans to entice them.
Continue reading...Today's Masters: The Maker
July 2009Jack Whitten is an artist visibly in love with paint. Over a 40-year career he has made luscious abstract works, at first in oil and later in acrylic. And yet he is quick to point out that he does not consider himself a painter but rather someone who makes artworks with paint.
Continue reading...In a Nutshell: One for the Road
July 2009The impulse to personalize a car is almost as old as the car itself. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, an English aristocrat, is credited with inventing the hood ornament, also known as the mascot, when he affixed a statue of St. Christopher to his 1899 Daimler.
Continue reading...Books: Hucksters and Housekeepers
July 2009The defining moment in the career of James Rorimer, the sixth director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fell on Nov. 9, 1965, when a blackout shut down the northeastern United States. With a loaded gun in hand, Rorimer patrolled his museum from dusk until dawn. He was, in the words of one associate, “a housekeeper extraordinaire,” an administrator safeguarding the past against an uncertain future.
Continue reading...Essay: The Winnerless Game
July 2009Among the few items remaining in Marcel Duchamp’s studio after he quit painting in 1914 was an unmounted coat rack that tripped him up whenever he passed. Rather than nailing it to the wall where it belonged, one day he fixed it to the floor and, declaring it a readymade, dubbed it Trébuchet.
Continue reading...Talking Pictures: Curatorial Logic
July 2009On June 27 the Cleveland Museum of Art officially opened its much-anticipated East Wing, the second of four stages in an ongoing $350 million expansion and renovation project, designed and supervised by the New York-based Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly.
Continue reading...Collecting: Textiles That Talk
July 2009“If you’re a modern art collector, you can squint your eyes and say, ‘Jasper Johns,’” says John Monsky. He’s referring to the array of antique American flags that festoon the walls of his Manhattan apartment. And it’s true: Flags make a strong graphic statement and have great Pop art appeal. But Monsky, who is general counsel at an investment firm and an avid history buff, is most excited by the stories woven into these pieces of cloth.
Continue reading...Collecting: Land of Enchantment
July 2009On Sept. 4, 1898, two young artists, Bert Geer Phillips and Ernest L. Blumenschein, were driving a horse and wagon from Denver to Mexico, in search of scenery to paint. They lost a wheel not far south of the Colorado border into New Mexico, and flipped a coin to see who would have to walk to the nearest town and replace it.
Continue reading...Exhibitions: Bright Forecast
July 2009In 1926, the year of his death, Claude Monet wrote, “The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.” The Impressionists were indebted to a long tradition of artists who went beyond the studio walls to sketch and paint outdoors.
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