Graphic Content: Graphic Art of German Expressionism at the MoMA

“Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth,” German artist Franz Marc once wrote. “All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.” When the German Expressionists searched for a way to get back to basics and recover for the present what they saw as the lost primitive passions of the past, they turned to printmaking and the graphic arts as the ideal medium. In German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art through July 11, 2011, the glory days of German Expressionism, both before and after World War I, live again. The content of these graphic works—life, love, war, peace—inspires, informs, and even offends, but never fails to touch something inside you with the “genuine” force Marc wrote about that “guarantees its truth.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Graphic Content."

[Image: Franz Marc. Riding School After Ridinger (Reitschule nach Ridinger). 1913. Woodcut. Composition: 10 9/16 x 11 3/4" (26.9 x 29.8 cm); sheet: 12 13/16 x 14 3/4" (32.5 x 37.5 cm). Publisher: unpublished. Printer: Maria Marc. Edition: One of an unknown number of posthumous impressions. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1940.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials for German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs through July 11, 2011.]

A Matter of Interpretation: Is All Art History Western Art History?

It’s human nature to try to understand something new by comparing it to something we already know. We always interpret the present based on past experience. But when we make that interpretation via comparison, are we being fair to the new experience, or the old one, for that matter? “Comparisons are like mercury,” writes art theorist James Elkins in his controversial new book, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, “the big blobs can be cut and divided into little droplets, but they can never be entirely dissolved away. Even the tiniest atomized droplets, which seem so isolated, can be virulent.” That virulence stems from each comparison containing “a microcosm of assumptions,” in this case about how we view Chinese art through the lens of Western art. In Elkins view, the use of Western examples to understand non-Western art, including Chinese art, does a disservice to both fields. Perhaps even worse, the very study of art history itself is incurably Western thanks to the infection of past practice. How then do we ever understand art beyond the Western tradition? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "A Matter of Interpretation."

[Image: Dong Qichang. Thatched Hall. 1597.]

[Many thanks to the University of Washington Press for providing me with a review copy of Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History by James Elkins, with a foreword by Jennifer Purtle.]

Selling Out: Should Museums Sell Art to Survive?

Desperate times call for desperate measures. But what happens when desperate times strike cultural institutions such as museums? The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (aka, Cimam) recently restated their opposition to museums taking the “nuclear option” of selling off works of art not to improve their collections but, instead, simply to keep operating financially. Others claim that in today’s lagging global economy we need leaner, meaner museums or risk having no museums at all. At the heart of this great “selling out” rests the question of who decides what is to be sold. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Selling Out."

Abstract Thoughts: “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction” at the Phillips Collection

"I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at,” Georgia O’Keeffe once said of her abstract works, “not copy it." Famous for her images of flowers, shells, animal bones, and other recognizable objects, O’Keeffe also ventured into the world of abstraction, often pushing the envelope of representation beyond the identifiable but still remaining tethered, however distantly, to the real world. Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction at the Phillips Collection explores just how undervalued O’Keeffe still is today as a groundbreaking figure in American abstract art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Abstract Thoughts."

[Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918. Oil on canvas, 35 x 29 1/8 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Emily Fisher Landau in honor of Tom Armstrong, 91.90 (CR 258). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins]



[Many thanks to the Phillips Collection for providing me with the image above and for a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, which runs through May 9, 2010.]