Tag: Fine Arts

Using glass to tell the story, Australian Aboriginal artist Yhonnie Scarce confronts the ominous history of her people and the role of colonization. She conveys a fragile legacy of violence and oppression through personal memories and abstract representation in works such as “The Day We Went Away,” a found suitcase filled with blown glass. On Friday, she will be on hand to discuss her work at the opening of “What They Wanted.”

Friday 9/14. Free, 5:30pm. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, 400 Worrell Dr. 244-0234.

“Jean Hélion: Reality and Abstraction,” currently on view at UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art presents a small, yet rich collection of this under-appreciated artist’s work. The eight paintings and numerous works on paper are both handsome works of art and revealing souvenirs from Hélion’s artistic journey “through and then away from abstract art.”

Curated by Matthew Affron, associate professor, McIntire Department of Art, the exhibition provides an excellent showcase of [French artist, Jean] Hélion’s strong compositional sense. Whether working in oil on canvas, or watercolor, charcoal, and ink on paper, his abstract shapes have real authority. In his oils, Hélion uses alternating flat areas of color with volumetric modeling that recalls the work of Fernand Léger. Deftly arranged on the picture plane, these shapes achieve Hélion’s ideal of “a surface fully organized and optically integrated.” This compositional skill continues in Hélion’s representational work where the unexpected placement of figures and objects in space adds drama and interest. Hélion uses a striking combination of cool and warm tones in his paintings. His works on paper rely on strong lines with subtle smudges and washes of watercolor and gouache.

In 1939 Hélion began to move toward the representational, focusing on three subjects: the human head, still life on tables and street scenes. The Fralin show has three superb examples: a wonderful side view of a man in a boater and red tie, “Study 214;” a dynamic table and umbrella “Still Life with Umbrella,” boasting bold black outlines; and “Study 194,” a small visually charged scene of three men.

Hélion lived a most interesting life. Born in Normandy in 1904, he moved to Paris as a young man to work as an architectural draughtsman. He turned his hand to painting reputedly after being inspired by the Poussins and de Champaignes he saw in the Louvre. His father was a pharmacist and Hélion had initially studied chemistry, intending to follow in his footsteps. Both architecture and science seem to play a role in his abstractions, which veer between bold orthogonal shapes and more fluid biomorphic ones.

In 1926, Hélion was introduced to Cubism by Uruguayan artist, Joaquín Torres García, and the following year his work was included in the Salon des Indépendants. He would soon move beyond Cubism to embrace pure abstraction, becoming a leading proponent of nonobjective painting, active in Art Concret along with Theo van Doesburg, and Abstraction-Création, with Jean Arp.

Hélion was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, which included Josef Albers and Willem de Kooning. He first traveled to the United States in 1932 where he exhibited his work and acted for a time as an intermediary between galleries, artists, and collectors. He married Richmond, Virginia native, Jean Blair, and divided his time between a farm in Rockbridge Baths, New York, and Paris.

In 1940, Hélion returned to France to fight the Nazis, abandoning his plan to become a U.S. citizen. His account of being captured, held as a prisoner of war, and eventual escape, They Shall Not Have Me, was a bestseller. It’s unclear what happened to his first marriage, but he met Pegeen Vail Guggenheim (Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter) in New York in 1943, and they married in 1946 and moved to France where Hélion would remain for the rest of his life.

Hélion’s continued transition into a figurative style angered many in the art world, including his art patron mother-in-law. But it seems that Hélion had found his voice: Though I only had a monograph to go by, his graphically strong paintings from the ’40s and ’50s featuring everyday themes are full of energy, expression, and even joyousness. Hélion dabbled briefly in a more fully realized representational and painterly style in the ’50s before embracing, in his later years, a lyrical figurative-abstract hybrid.

“Jean Hélion: Reality and Abstraction”/Through December 16/UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art 

When John Whitehead drew the monsters and violent scenes from his imagination as a child, his teachers deemed his demonic drawings as “bad” and would snatch the offending doodles from his notebook, ball them up and toss them in the waste can.  “I was always going to the principal’s office because of my drawings,” Whitehead notes.

Now that he is a grown-up civil liberties attorney, he gives himself permission to paint out his feelings despite anyone else’s opinions. The first formal showing of a collection of his work, “Instant Karma,” is happening now through October 25th at the Firefish gallery.

There are two distinct styles represented in the exhibit; colorful water colors (his more recent medium) depicting everything from blood dripping flowers to a peace sign and a more sophisticated set of expressionist portraits in oil. Whitehead produces about 60 water color paintings at his “studio” (his kitchen table) annually, manipulating the water color paints by using little water to manufacture an effect closer to the look of oil paintings. Then there is the glitter. “It gives it three dimensional depth and some of them actually glow in the dark,” says Whitehead. The use of glitter in Whitehead’s in addition to dimension, gives a childlike quality that mocks the ever present sinister element in each painting. The renderings are sophomoric but the concepts are clearly grappling with bigger issues. “Its my human rights message,” says Whitehead. “My whole life I’ve just been trying to get people to think.”

Whitehead’s percentage of the proceeds from the show all go to The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit he heads to provide free legal services to people who are fighting for their civil liberties.

“Instant Karma” runs through October 25th at Firefish Gallery, 108 2nd St. NW, Charlottesville.  More information at www.firefishgallery.net.

Friday’s opening of “Picasso, Lydia and Friends,”  features the work of Anne Chesnut, Dean Dass, David Summers, Rosemarie Fiore, Russ Warren, Sanda Iliescu, Lydia Gasman and last but not least, Picasso. The exhibition heralds the advent of the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies under the leadership of Lyn Bolen Warren and Victoria Beck Newman. Gasman was a beloved professor, teaching first at Vassar College and the University of Haifa before coming to UVA where she taught art history for two decades. Upon her death, Gasman left her papers to Warren and Newman who had been doctoral students of hers.

In addition to caring for and organizing Gasman’s work (160 boxes in all), the archives intend to publish Gasman’s seminal dissertation, “Magic, Mystery, and Love in Picasso, 1928-1938: Picasso and the Surrealist Poets,” which though influential and oft-quoted by every prominent Picasso scholar, has never been published. A densely packed examination of what Picasso read, his writings and his psyche, the dissertation, which was reviewed in “The New York Review of Books” by none other than John Richardson (Picasso’s preeminent biographer) and given a contract by Yale University Press, the work transformed Picasso scholarship. The archives also want to re-publish Gasman’s second book: “War and the Cosmos in Picasso’s Texts, 1936-40.” They also plan to offer fellowships to Picasso scholars as well as lectures and symposia.

Recently incorporated as a non-profit foundation (the archives’ board of directors includes, in addition to Warren and Newman, Richardson, David Summers–William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Art History at UVA  and Gasman’s former husband and lifelong friend, Daniel Gasman. Last spring, the archives assisted curators at the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in New York with sourcing materials among the Gasman papers pertaining to a Picasso exhibit.  An essay about Gasman’s invaluable contribution to the field of Picasso scholarship written by Richardson and illustrated with examples of her notes and drawings was included in the exhibition catalogue.

Romanian by birth, Gasman was a highly acclaimed social realist painter, with degrees from the University of Bucharest and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest. She arrived in America from Israel in 1961. Although she would continue to paint throughout her life, she switched her focus to art history, attending Columbia University in the late ’60s. After years of exhaustive research, she finally received her doctorate in 1981.

Rejecting the Clement Greenberg style formalistic approach, Gasman was after a deeper exploration of underlying meanings and looked beyond Picasso’s formal expression to his language of symbolism, the decoding of which became her life’s work. It’s clear she was on the right track. Picasso himself said of painting: “It is not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires.”

A collaboration between visual artist Rob Tarbell and composer Douglas Boyce, “Bird-like Things in Things Like Trees” was conceived two summers ago during an artist residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Auvillar, France. While there, both men became captivated by a distinctive birdsong. Their unsuccessful quest to identify the bird became a kind of metaphor for their situation as strangers in a foreign land trying to figure out what people were saying and how to navigate an unfamiliar landscape.

Tarbell had initially intended to continue the lyrical smoke paintings he’s known for, but became ill and couldn’t do them. The most he could manage were small colored ink drawings. He would begin working after Skyping with his pregnant wife back in Charlottesville, likening his artistic transformation to a kind of Couvade Syndrome (sympathetic pregnancy). His work came with a newfound freedom, and though he didn’t know they would have a girl, he used plenty of pink ink. The drawings showcase Tarbell’s assurance with form, gesture, and composition. His colors are vibrant and inventive in their pairings, and it’s clear he’s reveling in color after years of working with smoke.

Tarbell is clearly interested in space. In his large pieces, he layers ink-tinged polyester several inches above Mylar (imparting a hard candy luster) to create pieces that seem to hover in space. Light is an integral part of the work, and he uses it to play with foreground and background: It passes through the translucent ink, staining the polyester surface to hit the Mylar below, which reflects it back onto the surface in patterns that echo the ink image on top. To underscore this expansion outward from two-dimensionality, Tarbell jettisons the rectilinear picture plane for more unconventional amorphous shapes.

Both opaque and translucent, with surfaces that recall the Mylar, his glass horns reference gramophone horns (a café in Auvillar put a gramophone outside each day to play, providing a soundtrack to the VCCA fellows’ experience), which, as Tarbell says, “give sound a visual presence,” tying in nicely with his collaboration with Boyce. “Obscura Horn: I Woke Up in a Camera Obscura” refers to the serendipitous camera obscura created by a hole in the wall of Tarbell’s room. “I awoke from a nap to find a real time movie of cars driving by, people walking, the bridge, trees, sky, and clouds clearly projected on the ceiling and on two walls above and around me,” he said. “‘Obscura Horn’ parallels that phenomenon. One horn brings the outside scene (the cloud) in and sends it through the wall, out through the other horn and onto the ceiling.

Derived from the songs and flights of the Auvillarian birds, Douglas Boyce’s composition—in reality an interlocking network of compositions—is intentionally enigmatic and fragmented. “Speculative ornithology” is how he describes “Bird-like Things in Things Like Trees.” In a larger sense, the piece is about conjecture and reality: How do we make sense of a world in which we only have access to its fragments.I was particularly taken with Tarbell’s most recent work “Volée et Brûlée” (a reference to a spate of car thefts and burnings occurring in France in 2010), small abstract paintings that reintroduce smoke. These are both graceful and substantive. Some are cut in two with exposed edges painted an arresting fluorescent orange. Tarbell uses the same paint on the backs and sides of the frames to produce a glowing aura.

“Bird-like Things in Things Like Trees” (presented in conjunction with the 2012 Wintergreen “Innovation” Summer Music Festival) is an ambitious piece, displaying the inventive nature of artists who take something ordinary like a bird song, pursue it in various ways, and arrive at interesting, existential responses. A live performance of Boyce’s piece, featuring Harmo-
nious Blacksmith, will occur on Friday, July 13 during the opening reception.