Tag: Fine Arts

Frederick and Lucy S. Herman began collecting drawings as college students, and over the ensuing 50 years amassed a considerable collection of more than 250 works on paper that showcase the myriad techniques and approaches within the field. Produced between the years 1530 and 1945, these drawings run the gamut. There are religious and genre scenes, portraiture, landscape and social satire. Visual interest seems to be the common thread linking them. Executed in chalk, pen and ink, gouache, or charcoal, some are informal sketches, others studies for paintings, and still others are stand-alone works of art.
UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art features a selection of drawings from the Herman’s sizeable collection curated by McIntire Department of Art’s Lawrence O. Goedde. Most of the works were donated to the museum in 2006-07 for the instruction of the University’s students. Working with the drawings has enabled art history students not only to examine original artworks, but also to gain an understanding of the role drawing plays in the creative process. Here, the research done by graduate and undergraduate students has resulted in important new discoveries pertaining to the attributions and subject matter. The collection should also naturally serve as a vital teaching tool for studio art students; how better to learn techniques than by seeing them so consummately employed?
Beginning with the elegant “Study for St. Kunigunda,” c. 1528-1532, attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger or his workshop, which depicts the courtly saint regarding a jeweled cross. It’s a wonderful record of 16th century fashion, beautifully drawn and highly detailed right down to the many rings that grace St. Kunigunda’s fingers. Nearby is “Young Man from the Rear, Holding a Distaff and Spindle,” Anonymous c. 1510-1550, a drawing that has been pounced (pierced along its lines) so that it can be readily transferred. This technique was used to place the outline of an image on a surface that would later be painted and also in woodcuts. Given the subject matter—the man’s lost his pants and carries two items (spindle and distaff) that were signs of women’s work, as well as evidence of his emasculation, one could imagine that it would be made for the latter purpose with multiple versions of this cautionary tale disseminated. However, according to the wall piece, no such prints exist.
Moving from bathos to pathos we come to the figure study for “And the Sea Gave up the Dead Which Were in It,” 1882-1884, by Frederic Leighton. Though it is a study, the placement of the three figures has the gravitas of a finished work and the tortuous rendering of the shrouds’ drapery seems to provide a metaphor for the tortured state of the souls.
Luca Cambiaso’s “The Arrest of Christ,” 1570-1575, is astonishing. The figures have a severe, modern quality and their movement—literally blown off their feet by the force of the energy emanating from the Christ figure (depicted by radiating lines) is unexpected. Across the room, Cambiaso’s “Two Figures” is more conventional, but as a quick study has an appealing immediacy and fluidity.
The “View of the Piazza San Marco,“ early 19th century, by Giacomo Guardi was evidently made for the tourist trade. It’s a charming little Venetian Valentine, a precise rendering of the piazza’s architecture with perfect little dots of paint describing the people walking about the square. Above, delicate clouds drift against a cerulean sky, smoke floats up from a chimney and on a rooftop one can spot clothes drying on a line. Delightful, small references to quotidian existence in this iconic place.
Claude Hoin’s “Portrait of a Man,” 1770-1790, is not only beautifully rendered, but is an extraordinarily sympathetic portrayal of an individual. It’s a fitting work from the Age (albeit the tail-end) of Enlightenment.
“The Four Disgracers: Icarus, Phaeton, Tantalus, and Ixion,” Anonymous c. 18th century is a heroic depiction of the masculine form. Seen from below, the figures seem to tumble down through space at us.
An unusual nocturnal scene, “Pastoral Landscape with a Peasant and his Flock at Night,” c. 1760-1771, by Philip James de Loutherbourg, features white chalk used with deftness to create the effect of moonlight. It’s a stylish, evocative piece.
For those familiar with Francois Boucher’s saccharine paintings, his “Farmyard Scene,” 1733-1766, is refreshingly down to earth, drawn with confidence, simplicity, and dash.
Other works of note include Tiepolo’s “Head of a Youth,” Tomas Ender’s “Study of Trees with Three Figures in a Landscape,” c. 1815, Carl Friedrich Schulz’s “Faust in his Study,” 1822, Caspar Johann Nepomuk Scheuren’s “Hermit Reading in a Mountain Valley,” c. 1840-1850, and Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem’s “Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal,” c. 1647.
“Traces of the Hand” presents a rich and varied survey of drawing, adeptly making the case that drawings have the power to give you a more intimate understanding of an artist than any other art form. It’s as Goedde says in his accompanying text: “In contrast to paintings and sculptures… drawings record the movements of the artist’s hand, and through these traces of the artist’s touch, we can decipher hand, eye, and imagination coordinating in the intensity of the creative moment itself.”

Through May 26 “Traces of the Hand: Master Drawings from the Collection of Frederick and Lucy S. Herman”/The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia

One’s first impression of Anne Chesnut’s exhibition “Art.i.facts” at Les Yeux du Monde gallery (through April 7) is of rich colors, bold images, and dramatic compositions. On closer inspection, one sees interesting juxtapositions of images and it becomes clear something deeper is happening here than just fetching artwork. Information is being conveyed on a particularly cerebral plane.

Chesnut, who received her MFA from Yale has supported her artistic career through her work as a highly-esteemed graphic designer and her images have a polished quality that owes much to design. While drawing “remains at the core of what guides and informs my art,” she loves letters and numbers and switching back and forth between fonts, which confirms a lively cross-pollination between avocation and vocation.

Some of Chesnut’s prints are stand-alone works; she also produces series that range in number from three to 63. These vary from the elegiac “What Remains: Bolivar,” focusing on the destruction of Hurricane Ike to the Bolivar Peninsula in Texas, to the constellations (where her dogs, both living and dead, are immortalized), samplers, quilts and the “Summer Dressed” series. Within each print Chesnut combines disparate images taken from the wealth of drawings, photographs, and graphic elements she has produced over time. She uses animals and birds, constellations, seashells, flowers, and typography (with often autobiographical connotations) to create visually rich and enigmatic works that run the gamut from the microscopic to the astronomical.

“The sources of imagery and meaning for these prints are drawn from personal experience. My surroundings supply imagery, and my graphic work analyzing word and image, has introduced additional forms, symbols, and references.” She also draws on a rich science-based iconography featuring botany, ornithology, entomology, genetics, and astronomy and adds dashes of whimsy and political commentaries into the mix.

Using both familiar and exotic, even arcane images, Chesnut connects them much like a poet connects words, playing with the symbolic and visual links between them, achieving a kind of symmetry that expresses an awareness of simultaneous dimensions. The images and their interplay have an immediate visual appeal while referencing other more intangible concepts. Chesnut starts with something simple like a number, or letter, and runs with it. For example, the number four leads to heart chambers, blood groups, the four points of the compass and ink colors. A rose is a photograph of a rose picked from her garden, but also an amusing Chesnut-designed emoticon and a Gothic rose window. Like Chinese boxes, her works keep opening up to reveal more and more. Gallery director Lyn Warren said, “It’s very easy to enter Anne’s prints from different points. You can come at them from the standpoint of subject, concept, or visually. The more you look, the more you see.”

Chesnut uses both actual and faux stitching to divide up the surface. The hand-sewn approach has a practical side, enabling her to produce larger compositions, not possible given the limitations of printer size. But on a more symbolic level, she is stitching together not only the physical pieces, but also metaphorically she’s stitching the different concepts together. In some works she achieves a quilt-like effect and she has a whole series of “Samplers” (a modern version of “women’s work” according to Chesnut), which gives her ample opportunity to play with letters and numbers—key elements in traditional samplers.

The digital process allows Chesnut to merge traditional techniques with new artistic approaches. Working in the graphic design field Chesnut was conversant with emerging digital technology early on, and became interested in using it “to explore and exploit properties not previously available.” From the beginning, she saw digital printing as a means to make new discoveries rather than as an expediter of tasks. Once archival liquid inks and paper could be used in digital printing, Chesnut embraced the medium wholeheartedly.

It’s an equalizer of sorts giving the same visual weight, sense of texture and depth to, say a photograph as a drawing. Here, the end result is sleek and smooth. Chesnut says she’s interested in creating works “that push at the edges of what is possible with new media and seek to redefine old processes. Each individual print is a digitally manipulated composite that mixes traditional media, my drawings, prints, and photos, with images and symbols I have rendered digitally to make something entirely new from the images, patterns, colors, and textures.”

I must confess I was a little leery when I read “digital prints” while researching this show, but Chesnut won me over with her imaginative and innovative use of the medium. Her expertise with print technology enabled her to see its potential early on, and her strong artistic background means she uses it in a most creative manner, producing work that is visually satisfying and laden with significance. “It is my hope that the final images composed of many elements—whether old or new, detailed or abstract, anecdotal or scientific—will engage the viewer to find their own narrative or reaction to the shared images and experiences, whether true or fictitious.”

Through April 7/“Art.i.facts”/Les Yeux du Monde

Allyson Mellberg and Jeremy Taylor are not only two of the best contemporary artists in Charlottesville—or anywhere else, for that matter—they’re also two of the sweetest and most thoughtful people you could meet. Their work draws from nature, cartooning, modern art, and the contemporary craft movement, and their carefully composed drawings, paintings, prints, and soft-sculptures depict a conflict between the natural world and the man-made. “Hareball,” is their most recent collaborative show.

Mellberg’s easily recognizable work is usually centered around drawings of androgynous, tomboy-ish girls; in “Hareball” they can be seen drowning in their own hair, with small mammals clinging to their faces, or vomiting mouthfuls of earthworms. Posed like portraits, they seem both blasé and somehow coy, despite their gross afflictions.

Taylor’s work is less stylistically consistent, occasionally incorporating geometrical patterns or a more cartoonish line, but much of his work draws from, and subverts, the history of natural illustration. In Taylor’s paintings and prints, deer, rabbits, and seabirds are involved in a range of violent or disturbing scenarios. A deer anxiously paws at its antlers with a hind leg, trying to dislodge clumps of honey. A pelican opens its beak to reveal a rotting human face. A realistically drawn deer is decapitated, and has a cartoon cloud emerging from its’ neck-stump.

Their larger subject is the natural world and the violence done to it by humans, but they avoid the bombastic tone of political or propagandistic imagery, opting for a more subtle and poetic approach. The overall tone is dismay, or resigned disappointment, rather than terror or distress.

There’s a deadpan humor that comes from the juxtaposition, which is subtle but effective. And although occasionally a shopper looking for a cute animal-printed tote bag will turn away in revulsion after taking a closer look, there’s much more to their art than a facile or juvenile mash-up of cute animals and violent imagery. Their delicate sensibilities give equal weight to the handsome and the gruesome, with significant overlap.

“It’s not just irony,” Taylor said. “ Both of us try to be sincere, and sensitive. I’m not sitting there thinking, ‘Deer are cute, deer are hip right now, so I’m going to draw deer,’ but it’s also not just a one-liner, like ‘zombie-apocalypse deer.’ It’s more nuanced.”

“In Jeremy’s work, all of his animals are really dignified,” Mellberg said. “Their eyes are really human. You identify with them beyond just seeing them as animals. The reason Jeremy uses the animals that he’s using isn’t because they’re cute, it’s because those animals are prey.”

“There are a couple of pieces where nature is retaliating,” Taylor said. “There are animals eating people, animals having revenge. I’m interested in putting yourself in the position of nature. In some ways there’s a lot of humor in that—like, you’d never see a deer with a human’s leg hanging out of it’s mouth in reality. That one’s actually kind of a reference to Robert Gober, with the legs coming out of the walls—I think Robert Gober’s work is funny. It’s also peculiar. There’s a lot of different emotions in there.”

Working closely over the past decade, Mellberg and Taylor have developed personalized, intertwining, ever-evolving networks of iconography. They share and exchange motifs, including strange growths, dark clouds, thick sludge, coral, and fungus. Their styles inform each other’s work, and it can take even their most dedicated followers a while to learn to distinguish between their individual pieces.

“We met in ’02 in grad school at UNC in Chapel Hill,” Mellberg said, “and we started making work together halfway through our first year.”

“We got married pretty soon after that,” Taylor said, “so we had to make our wedding invitations together, and everything from that point forward has been collaborative. We both have our own solo exhibitions—she’s had a really stellar solo career, showing at places like Galerie LJ in Paris, and Cinder’s in New York.”

“Our two-person shows are my favorite shows,” Mellberg said. “I know his work, I love it, and to able to walk around in it, through it, with my work is really cool. And we get to do bigger projects by working together.”

Self-conscious about the paradox of using synthetic materials to depict the natural world, and wary of the health hazards and environmental effects of paints, emulsions, and solvents, they began making their own inks and dyes. “We started growing pigments in our garden. We’re learning how to process them,” Taylor said. “It takes time to iron out the details, to learn how to get the consistency right.”

“When we first started making art, we knew the materials were unhealthy, but we weren’t really aware of any alternatives,” Mellberg said. “That’s why we’re writing a book about sustainable and non-toxic art materials—not just for our own work, but we’re educators too.” Both are art instructors at James Madison University, and Taylor also teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

Mellberg and Taylor’s homemade art supplies are available via their online Etsy shop, and their show “Hareball” is on display at The Honeycomb through the end of March.

Do you source art supplies from nature?  Post your answer below.

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

“Perhaps we aren’t being controversial enough,” Steve Taylor, the director of Second Street Gallery, joked during a recent interview after explaining that no one had walked out of a show in a huff recently.

Beneath the joke lay the inherent tension in Taylor’s job: Second Street’s mission for the past 40 years has been to bring contemporary art to the people at no cost. The task involves keeping a nonprofit board engaged and motivated, raising an operating budget, selecting exhibitions that appeal to the general public in a small Virginia city, and attracting the work of cutting edge artists from around the world without a huge budget and major art market as bait.

“We show work that you wouldn’t otherwise see,” Taylor explained. “Part of our job is not just to open eyes but to open minds. . . If somebody says, ‘I hate contemporary art,’ I’ll say, ‘Well what kind of art do you like and why?’ I’m not going to try to convince them to like something they don’t like . . . You can’t convince people to like things, but you can open their minds to the idea behind it.”

Second Street was founded as Central Virginia’s first artist-run alternative art space on February 11, 1973 by a group of artists and academics searching for a place to show their work where survival did not depend on making sales. The gallery, one of the longest surviving nonprofit organizations in the nation focused solely on the art and ideas of the time, has held 10 to 15 shows per year for the past four decades, approximately 500 exhibitions of painting, photography, and installations in total.

While the organization’s mission has remained remarkably stable over that period, the times they have a-changed. The gallery has moved three times, before finding a permanent home in 2003 at 115 Second St. where they now share a building created specifically for the gallery, and for fellow arts nonprofits Light House and Live Arts. Downtown has gone from a little-used sleepy corner of the city to its thriving cultural center. And the fashion sense of Second Street’s board of directors has, well, um, altered.

“When we look at the photograph of the founders of Second Street Gallery in 1973, it’s like they are dressed in period costume, and have just come from a Jefferson Airplane concert. Perhaps they have,” said Dean Dass, a local artist and an honorary board member at Second Street. “It is also like they have just come from a Vietnam War protest. Perhaps they have. The founding of Second Street Gallery in 1973 has to be seen as part of a worldwide movement of the creation of cooperatives and alternative spaces.”

As a UVA third year who has interned at another Downtown gallery, Chroma Projects, for the past three years, I have been actively involved in the Charlottesville art world since I arrived from Dallas. I found First Fridays during my first months of school and by last summer I had announced my intention to become an art curator, much to my parents’ chagrin. Whenever I want to feel close to the big city art scene I left behind, or when someone asks me about the local art scene, I usually direct them to Second Street, because it democratizes art. It knocks art off of its metaphoric, elevated pedestal, bringing world class exhibitions into an approachable, intimate space.

The gallery is a place where people can interact, view, question, and experience the art and ideas of our moment without the pressure to buy something and without looking over your shoulder at an NYU grad student with French eyeglass frames. It isn’t even 10′ from a bus stop on Water Street.

A local artist in his own right (painter and photographer), a member of McGuffey Art Center, and a past board member of Second Street, Taylor knows the mission of his gallery is to instigate a conversation, not to make money. And, in some ways, he feels the best way to gauge his performance is to look at the faces of the people who see his exhibitions. Nonplussed? No good. Wide-eyed? Right on.

“Well I love a show with technical bravado and ones that catch you off guard and make you think. I think that’s what we do. Hopefully we are a bit of a visual feast when we can be. But, when we can be visual for the soul, that is when we do our best work,” he said.

Take the Daniel Canogar show “Reboot,” which exhibited in March of 2012. Second Street volunteers had to clean up after the gallery’s annual family day, which saw 350 people in the space; take down a previous exhibition; and transform the place into a light-proof box to showcase the Spanish artist’s magical installations of light projected over ghostly forms created from 70 pounds of multicolored computer wires, purchased and scrounged locally.

The results were worth the 460 hours of volunteer time logged during the monumental six-day effort, since visitation doubled from a monthly average of 600 to close to 1,200 people. It also attracted strong financial support from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and a host of individual donors.

Children and adults viewed the Canogar show on various intellectual levels. “It was like a magic garden for them talking about fairies and fireflies. And later, we had a group of older men talking about chaos theory and brain synapses,” Taylor said.

Not every show is a smash hit, though, and some are openly disliked.

“We don’t shy away from that. Not everyone is going to love every show. I don’t love every show. Some shows are more easy to access,” Taylor said.

Anne Slaughter, an early board member at Second Street and a founding member of the McGuffey Art Center, attended the gallery’s opening night, a proper vantage point from which to evaluate the success of an idea she watched evolve into a pillar of the arts community she loves.

“It has survived some very lean times financially. A lot of galleries close. But it has maintained its quality. It has always maintained its national character,” she said. “It’s quite an accomplishment.”

Dream category

If you thought the Oscars were out of reach, think again. The Virginia Film Festival is offering a chance to get in the running for your own Oscar prize. The glitz, the glam, and an abundance of Hollywood-inspired dishes crafted by Glass Haus Kitchen come out at this year’s fourth annual Oscar Experience: Charlottesville. The night features raffle prizes, a silent auction, and of course the star-studded competition in high-def. So be sure to don your best celebrity look, because the paparazzi are ruthless on that red carpet.

Sunday 2/24 $45, 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.

The butterfly of “Becoming the Butterfly,” The Fralin Museum’s current exhibition of etchings and lithographs by James Abbott McNeill Whistler refers to the stylized butterfly that Whistler used to sign his work and the exhibition. Curated by Emilie Johnson, the show provides a succinct yet effective window into Whistler’s evolution as an artist. This is the first of two shows at the museum focusing on the American 19th century master’s prints (through April 28). The second (opening April 30), will feature portraits.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, Whistler began studying art when he was 9 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father, an eminent civil engineer, was employed by the Moscow-St. Petersburg Railway. Following the death of his father when Whistler was 15, the family returned to America.

While attending his father’s alma mater, West Point, Whistler was an indifferent student in all but drawing and did so badly in chemistry, that he was eventually dismissed. Thereafter, he worked for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in the drawing department, where he learned etching.

In 1855, Whistler went to Paris to study with Charles-Gabriel Gleyre. He became friends with Gustave Courbet, Manet, and Degas, and was exposed to Japanese art as it was just coming onto the radar screens of Western artists. This particular aesthetic, with its conservative palette, flattened space, and overall restraint, would prove to have a profound influence on his later work. In 1859, Whistler moved to England where he remained, for the most part, until his death in 1903.

Eight Whistler etchings are exhibited at The Fralin, together with three by artists who influenced him: Rembrandt, Charles Meryon, and Seymour Haden. His prints from 1858-59 are models of precise, unsentimental reportage.

The woman seated in the field, a parasol half shading her face from “En Plein Soleil” (1858), reveals the influence of his realist friend, Courbet. It also provides a wonderful example of Whistler’s dexterity of line: the tightly controlled hatches that describe the woman give way to free strokes rendering her surroundings.

In his pastoral “Landscape with Horses” of 1859, one can spot on the image’s edge a worker installing telegraph cable—a potent aside referencing the birth of modern technology. It’s easy to imagine Oliver Twist or Gaffer Hexam wandering around the landscape featured in “Thames Police” (1859), a detailed view of London’s riverbank before Victorian urban renewal transformed it.

Over time, Whistler became interested in conveying mood rather than direct narrative, using variations of tone to accomplish this. The title of his most famous painting, colloquially known as “Whistler’s Mother,” is actually “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” (1871). This new direction is apparent in his painterly lithotints from the 1870s. Here, the use of tusche (an oily black liquid) washes applied directly onto the lithographic stone enabled him to modulate tonal effects with sumptuous results as in the quintessentially Whistler “Nocturne” of 1878, an evocative scene of boatmen in punt-like craft, shimmering river and far shore with reflections, steam, light, shadow, and haze adding atmosphere and tranquil beauty to the composition. Whistler cleverly used blue paper, markedly enhancing the work’s crepuscular effect.

A brilliant artist, Whistler was also a larger than life figure, variously described as arrogant and abrasive. The famous 1885 William Merritt Chase portrait of him seems to capture his confrontational insouciance perfectly with his provocative pose, wild hair and imperious gaze. As his monocle and cane attest, he was flamboyant in both dress and personality. His relationships with critics were notoriously acrimonious.

In 1877, John Ruskin’s essay “Truth to Nature” famously attacked Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” saying he had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler, whose personal credo was “art for art’s sake,” would have none of that and so sued Ruskin for libel. Though Whistler triumphed, it was a Pyrrhic victory: awarded a farthing’s damages, he was financially ruined by court costs and the scandal-related decline in sales. He spent the following year in Venice, working on a commission for the Fine Arts Society. The resulting 12 etchings helped repair his image and he eventually regained his financial footing and reputation.

Though he may come across as difficult, Whistler’s only real fault was he knew his own worth and would brook no criticism from detractors who didn’t understand him. While Whistler was building the very foundation of the modern movement, the critics who bedeviled him were bogged down in the Victorian miasma of their own narrow view.

It’s the age-old story of the genius way ahead of his time. Whistler was a vanguard out there on the frontier of art with an approach so revolutionary as to be incomprehensible to most contemporaries. In his words: “Art should be independent of all claptrap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

This weekend, UVA’s French department will show a selection of recent French films at various locations around town. The festival is aimed at both casual filmgoers and academics, and the organizers hope to draw French-speaking and subtitle-reading viewers. Speakers from the University will present the films and offer their own perspectives on the screenings and their subjects.

The series is an outgrowth of a program from past years, which was sponsored by the French-American Cultural Exchange (FACE). “It was an annual event for five years, funded by FACE, with the provision that they wouldn’t provide any funding for three years after that,” explained Hannah Holtzman, one of the series’ organizers. “The idea was that we would go out into the community and get involved and build these other relationships so that it could be self-sustaining. So it’s really forced us to do that, which has been great. All the locations around town have been really gracious. Milli Joe is donating Belgian waffles. We also have a bunch of undergraduate volunteers, students from one of the undergraduate film courses, who made a little promo video. It’s been fun to see who’s interested. People have been getting involved in whatever way they want to get involved.”

“We began by working from a list of 50 or so films, provided by FACE, and narrowing it down from there,” Holtzman added. “The films are all recent. The oldest one is from 2009. We wanted a variety. There’s two documentaries, a couple of comedies, and a historical drama.” The list includes Ismaél Ferroukhi’s Free Men, Philippe Le Guay’s The Women on the 6th Floor, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno, and Mona Achache’s The Hedgehog. All the screenings are free and open to the public, and each will have English subtitles.

“Free Men is interesting, because it’s a World War II movie, but it’s got a different twist to it,” said Liz Groff, another of the festival’s organizers. “It’s about Jewish-Arab relations in Paris at the time of the occupation, so we have someone coming from the Middle Eastern studies department to talk about it.”

“The Women on the 6th Floor is cute, it’s a fun comedy,” Groff said. “It takes place in the ’50s, after the Spanish Revolution. It’s about Spanish and Portuguese maids. One of the speakers who’s going to come had written about this era in France, about the immigration of Spanish and Portuguese workers as maids. They had their own community, and [the film depicts] the contrast between the sixth floor where the maids live, and the aristocrats in the rest of the building. The guy who lives downstairs gets involved with one of them. He’s bridging the gap between the classes.”

Inferno is an interesting case. Though the film is from 2009, it is the result and remains of an uncompleted film from 1963, originally directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the acclaimed director known for classic thrillers like The Wages of Fear and Diabolique. “It was actually so hot in Paris that year that they had to stop filming, and then Clouzot died,” Groff said. So it’s a documentary about the making of that film, and Clouzot’s footage is in there as well.”
“That’s one that’s not available yet,” Holtzman said. “I’m excited to have the chance to see it. Some of the other ones are streaming on Netflix and things like that.”

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is another documentary, one with even older roots. The 2010 film by prolific and provocative German director Werner Herzog, was originally filmed in 3D and depicts a series of 34,000-year-old cave paintings, which are the earliest instances of manmade art (by a significant margin). Herzog’s film also details the process of gaining access to the cave, which is tightly restricted by the French government due to fears about preservation. Only a few dozen people have ever been inside it. The film is a fascinating and valuable document, enlivened by Herzog’s trademark wry commentary and occasional wild conjecture.

One of the most appealing aspects of the festival is the attempt to invite members of the wider community in addition to academics. Often, film and arts events are open to the public, but aren’t widely promoted outside of Grounds, or even outside of a specific department.

“The French department is large for a French department, but it’s small in the context of the University,” Holtzman said. “So one of the goals [of the festival] is to make connections within the University, with people from other departments who have similar interests. But it’s also an effort to bridge the gap between the University and the community a little bit.”

“So many people in Charlottesville are interested in French, are interested in film, or are Francophiles,” Groff said. “We wanted everyone to come. There’s a lot of these little things that go on, little film groups at the University, but nobody else ever hears about it. But everybody loves film, so we wanted to get everyone who loves film together.”

UVA’s French film festival runs from February 21-24, at City Council Chambers, the Nau Auditorium, and the Jefferson-
Madison Regional Library. A full schedule can be found at pages.shanti.virginia.edu/UVA_French_Film_Festival.

What is the best foreign film you’ve seen recently? Tell us about it at c-ville.com/arts.

Mother necessity

Great art is a representation of what really drives human beings. So what bigger motivator for human endeavors than sex? To further examine this quality of human nature, FIREFISH Gallery presents “SIN: An Exploration of Eroticism Through Art.” The show aims not only to arouse the senses, but also to interpret and celebrate human sexuality in the physical form through sculpture, paintings, drawings, and photography, examining sexuality as not only an indulgence but a necessity.

Through 3/6 Free, FIREFISH Gallery, 108 Second St. NW. 984-1777.

Mate call

In an exploration of love’s famed hardiness, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection is hosting a Valentine’s Day Tour of Aboriginal expressions of love and romance. Exhibits include possum fur skirts, a wooden seagull head with feathered strings, a love story about seven sisters and the man who pursues them becoming stars in the night sky—all rich examples of the desire to share our life with another.

Thursday 2/14 $10, 4:30pm. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, 400 Worrell Dr. 244-0234.