"Picasso to Pollock: Modern Masterworks from the Eskenazi Museum of Art" is a must-view at the Speed Art Museum.

Louisville's Speed Art Museum encourages non-flash photography, and I might have taken dozens of photos during our visit on Saturday afternoon. There are highlights aplenty throughout the museum, but in the end I took only two photos, opting to concentrate on the reasons why we came to the museum in the first place.

The first of two is a sketch of bar flies, a topic to which I'm curiously drawn. Unfortunately, I neglected to record the artist's name.

The second (at top) is by the American artist Abraham Rattner (1893–1978). The Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University provides this explanation.

online/highlights/view/entries/456">Place of Darkness, 1943

Rattner was a leading exponent of the figurative expressionist style that emerged in American art during the 1940s. Taking cues from German Expressionism, this work’s heavy black outlines and crowded composition recall the work of artists such as Max Beckmann. Reports of the Holocaust began appearing in the United States in 1942 and 1943 (especially in the Yiddish press), and it is tempting to see this painting as an allegory of the genocide. Rattner, whose parents had fled Russian anti-Semitism in the 1890s, later referred to this painting’s “apocalyptic content” and described its grotesque figures as sinners.

I can't say enough about the current Picasso to Pollock exhibition at the Speed, and highly recommend it.

PICASSO TO POLLOCK: MODERN MASTERWORKS FROM THE ESKENAZI MUSEUM OF ART AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY

June 16, 2018 – January 13, 2019
Location: North Building, Third Floor

Picasso to Pollock: Modern Masterworks from the Eskenazi Museum of Art showcases the impressive early 20th-century art collection owned by the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. It covers the breadth of nearly every major artistic movement that occurred between the years 1900 and 1950 in Europe and America. During this period, traditional notions and expectations about making art were completely upended as artists explored radical new approaches to color, form, and content. Boundaries were pushed via revolutionary new ways of thinking, expressed through such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, German Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism.

The exhibition serves as a basic primer in early 20th century modern Western art. Gallery themes include Wars and Revolution, Abstraction, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, Expressionism, and Urban Life, with emphasis on the creative process and artistic experimentation, especially as the century progressed. Featured artists include Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gabriele Münter, Egon Schiele, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Kay Sage, Paul Klee, Diego Rivera, and Jackson Pollock.

The exhibition is the first in a series of collaborations and collection exchanges between the Speed Art Museum and the Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University.

Speaking of art, kindly allow me this addendum.

I wore my green Pints&union t-shirt yesterday, and while at the art museum, three separate persons stopped me to compliment the t-shirt design ... and two of them were museum employees.

That has to make pub owner Joe Phillips feel very good, indeed. Here's the shirt, which is available for purchase at Pints&union (114 E. Market St, New Albany).

Carnegie Center: "Artists Aberlyn, Rebeka Sweetland, and Katy Traughber share work that embodies the sanctuary they create for one another as women makers."

Aberlyn, Rebeka Sweetland and Katy Traughber are the artists, and as a self-interested confession, Katy was engaged by Joe Phillips to coordinate the decor on the first floor of Pints&union. In fact, the Green Mouse thinks there'll be an after party at Pints&union following the reception. 

SPAWNING GROUNDS
August 3 – September 22, 2018

Friday, August 3, 2018
Members-Only Curator & Artists Talk | 5:30 PM
Public Reception | 6:00 – 8:00 PM

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me.’” –Feminist Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984

Inspired by the Audre Lorde quote above, artists Aberlyn, Rebeka Sweetland, and Katy Traughber share work that embodies the sanctuary they create for one another as women makers. The artists feel the Lorde quote also reflects their individual works both in a cerebral and physical sense.

“The conversations we were able to have based on this idea were really powerful. There is something very nurturing and yet fleshly… and the tension between the two also reflects the energy of our pieces.” –Katy Traughber

Bolshie art, and how El Lissitzky got under my skin, though I couldn't afford to keep him there.

El Lissitzky.

My curiosity was aroused when I saw the name of Lazar Markovich Lissitzky. For a while in 2008, his "Lenin Tribune" (above; a Constructivist moving speaker's podium) was a big influence in my thinking about the design for Bank Street Brewhouse.

That's because I was determined to illustrate that when almost every other entrepreneur wants to be in a "historic" building, I'd take the modern one.

Little came of all this, as we had plenty of other bills to pay. But it was a damned fine fantasy while it lasted.

Reds, whites and truths: A century after the Russian revolution, a showcase of its art (The Economist)

At the Royal Academy, a sinister history lurks beyond the frame

ALTHOUGH it marks the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the true inspiration for the Royal Academy’s new exhibition is 1932. In that year, a vast retrospective entitled “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic” took place in the Russian State Museum in Leningrad. Curated by Nikolai Punin, an avant-garde luminary, it was meant to be the zenith of the radical artistic current that had been growing in Russia for decades. Instead, it was a swansong. Within years, many of the thousands of paintings featured would disappear into hidden store cupboards, trampled beneath the inescapable march of state-backed socialist realism. Punin himself, accused of “anti-Soviet activity”, was to die, starving, in a desolate gulag north of the Arctic Circle.

“Revolution: 1917-1932” covers the same 15 years as Punin’s show. The period has suffered some neglect. The myth goes that in the years after the Bolshevik revolution, bland socialist realism stomped on the avant-garde. In fact, after the revolution but before Stalinism tightened its grip on culture, there was a frenzied gasp of creative brilliance. Artistic, technological and political innovations clashed and co-existed. Kazimir Malevich turned the geometry of suprematism to figurative portraits of peasant farmers. Pavel Filonov would use the kaleidoscope fragments of his “formula” paintings to depict tractor factories. Buildings designed by El Lissitzky riffed on the crooked perspectives of photo-montage, and on the uncompromising functionality of industrial machinery.

On the artist Paul Nash.

Here and below, courtesy of The Guardian.

Back in May, I offhandedly mentioned watching a documentary about Paul Nash. It's narrated by Andrew Graham-Dixon.

In the years preceding 1914, David Bomberg, Walter Sickert and Paul Nash set out to paint a new world, but, as the century unfolded, found themselves working in the rubble.

On 25th May 1917, war artist Paul Nash climbed out of his trench to sketch the battlefields of Flanders near Ypres. So focused was he on his work he tripped and fell back into the trench, breaking his ribs. Stretchered back to England, Nash missed his regiment going over the top at the Battle of Passchendaele. His regiment was wiped out.

The episode links:

• 1/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War
• 2/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War
• 3/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War
• 4/4 Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War (Ep1) - British Art At War

Nash also came up in another Graham-Dixon documentary: The painter Edward Burra never told anybody anything. 

I'm an untutored rube who completely lacks artistic aptitude, but I know what fascinates me. After all, a little bit of autodidact never hurt anyone.

From English woodlands to war: the pioneering paintings of Paul Nash, by Paul Laity (The Guardian)

Nash lost his heart to the English countryside – and his illusions in two world wars. A major retrospective coming to Tate Britain gives a more complete picture of a modern master.

 ... While critics have recognised this engagement with modernism, many have preferred to dwell on Nash as a painter with a personal response to landscape, and to emphasise that his version of continental experimentalism was thoroughly domesticated. Several of the newspaper reviews of the last major Nash exhibition, at Tate Liverpool in 2003, were typical in suggesting that he is best seen as part of an English tradition, that his efforts at surrealism are clunky (a Betjemanesque version of Magritte), and that the cubism he practised was merely a decorative, salon variety. His interest in abstraction and surrealism was not at his core, it has been argued, and such borrowed styles conflicted with his native gift.

The exhibition about to open at Tate Britain challenges this head on. With over 160 works (the biggest show since the 1975 Tate retrospective), it is large enough to accommodate any interpretation of Nash, but it underlines his importance as a pioneering figure of the British avant garde. Here he is not only a romantic individual communing with the land, but a highly varied artist at the centre of networks of experimental creators. According to the curator Emma Chambers, the goal “is not simply to move consideration of his art beyond the war work, but also to show aspects of his work beyond landscape. In the 1930s, still life, surrealism, found objects are all areas that Nash explored, and this is also a moment when he expanded his use of media into photography, collage and assemblage.” The effect is to round out a major artist and make him even more beguiling.