The Art Scene

Exhibitions, Installations, and Unveilings

Contemplating the Void

At The Guggenheim Museum in New York City Through April 28.
Above: Anish Kapoor, Ascension (Red), 2009, Digital print.
©Anish Kapoor

Edward Weston, Life Work

At The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa. through May 30, 2010.
Below: Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30, 1930, Gelatin silver print, Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.

Naked Guggenheim
The Building as Subject

by Stuart Mitchner

The home that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened to the public at 2 p.m. on October 21, 1959, six months after the architect’s death. In our last issue, the emphasis was on the art inside the building. Now the focus of the continuing 50th anniversary is on the iconic structure itself, which from now until March 10 can be seen in the raw, totally nude, “as you’ve never seen it.” This chance to view the storied interior au naturel is due to the nature of Tino Sehgal’s exhibition. For Sehgal the art is about social interaction and lived experience in which museumgoers step inside the artwork, becoming, in effect, figures on the canvas that in this case is represented by the spiraling ramps of the famous rotunda itself, which has been cleared of art objects for the first time in the museum’s history. Think of it as a guided tour of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. At the bottom of the ramp, a child greets you; at the top a senior citizen. And along the way, the famous walls that for 50 years have been laden with art will be bare.

The focus remains on the building, however, in another 50th anniversary event, this one featuring artists, architects, and designers who were invited to imagine their dream interventions in the rotunda. Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, which will be on view through April 28, highlights renderings of these visionary projects in a salon-style installation that will emphasize the range of the proposals received from a widely varied group of artists, designers, and architects, among them Anish Kapoor, whose solo exhibit, Memory, will be in one of the adjacent galleries through March 28.

On view through May 12 in a side gallery, Paris and the Avant-Garde: Modern Masters from the Guggenheim Collection features some 30 paintings by Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy, among others.

For information about times, admission, and related events, phone: (212) 423-3500; the box office number is (212) 423 3587, or email: boxoffice@guggenheim.org.

LOCAL MUSEUMS

Firestone Library on the Princeton University campus. The Author’s Portrait: ‘O, Could He But Have Drawne His Wit,’ an exhibit of 100 portraits of poets, novelists and essayists pulled from the holdings of the University’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, will be on view through July 5.

Grounds for Sculpture. Focus on Sculpture 2010, an annual juried exhibition of amateur photographers whose work has sculpture as its subject matter, will be in the Education Gallery of the Seward Johnson Center for the Arts. The Toad Hall Shop & Gallery is presenting Image and Form, the Artwork of Albert Paley and Andrea Baldeck. On view in the Domestic Arts Building will be works by glass artist, Flo Perkins, celebrated for her representations of everyday objects in glass. All exhibitions are open through April 18. Visit www.groundsforsculpture.org for admission information and directions.

The James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 South Pine Street in Doylestown. Edward Weston: Life Work, a major travelling exhibition featuring the American photographer, is on view through March 28 in the Museum’s new Paton/Smith/Della Penna-Fernberger Galleries. This exhibit of more than a hundred prints features a selection of vintage photographs from all phases of Weston’s five-decade career, from his first nude in 1909 to his final landscape made near his home at Point Lobos, California, in 1948. Previously unknown masterpieces are interspersed with well-known signature images, including landscapes, figure work, portraits of prominent artistic and literary figures, and the famous studies of green peppers and other natural forms.

Weston began his career as a studio photographer working in the soft-focus mode known as Pictorialism, and ended as the quintessential Modernist practitioner of sharp-focus “straight” photography. His career thus reflects the evolution of photography in the first half of the twentieth century. According to artist and cultural critic Merle Armitage, “At precisely the same time that Frank Lloyd Wright uttered the then-blasphemous words that ‘the machine is no less, rather more, an artist’s tool, if only he would do himself the honor of learning to use it,’ another American artist was finding in a machine the medium through which he would help us to become aware of the beauty and the significance of the commonplace. That man was Edward Weston.” In Contemporary Folklore, which is in the Fred Beans Gallery through May 30, four regional artists delve into both collective and personal narratives to create sculptures that retell new histories. For further information, visit www.michenermuseum.org.

The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street on the College Avenue campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick. The Zimmerli will be staying open from 6 to 9 p.m. on the first Wednesday of every month. Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes de Maroc, in the Voorhees Special Exhibition Galleries through June 6, includes 17 large scale photographs selected from the artist’s most recent series. Four Perspectives Through the Lens: Soviet Art Photography in the 1970s-80s is in The Lower Dodge Gallery through March 28. How We Live Now: Picturing Everyday Life in Children’s Book Illustrations is in The Roger Duvoisin Gallery through May 23. For information about hours and admission fees, visit www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu.

Morven Museum & Garden, 55 Stockton Street in Princeton. Rocks & Dinos! showcases a series of paintings by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins depicting different geological eras that were installed in Princeton University’s Nassau Hall in the late 1870s. The exhibition will run through spring 2010. Museum hours are Wednesdays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. The admission fee is $4 for seniors and students, and $5 for adults. Onsite parking is free.

The Princeton University Art Museum on the Princeton University campus. From February 25 to 28, Artistic Realization Technologies (A.R.T.) exhibits works by artists with physical disabilities (see the article in this issue). Artist as Image, which features self-portraits and depictions of other artists by nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists from Goya to Warhol, is on view through May 16. More information available at artmuseum.princeton.edu.

The Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie Mansion. “Utility and Artistry: Works of the Stangl and Fulper Potteries” is on view through May 2. www.ellarslie.org.

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