Visit to the Pennsylvania Academy

I could tell you that last week we visited the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but that would not be entirely accurate. What we did do is visit the Albuquerque Museum, one of four venues for this traveling show from the Academy.

Though it is less than one percent of their collection in the exhibition called “Making American Artists: Stories from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1776-1976” it is, in fact, an overview of their collection installed chronologically in categories such as Portraits and Landscapes.

I must admit that American paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries are not my first love, but one can find gems in any collection. The Albuquerque Museum sometimes helps fund their shows by asking those interested to sponsor a picture from the show and we chose “The Peaceable Kingdom”. Between 1820 and 1849 the Quaker minister and painter Edward Hicks painted more than one hundred versions of which 62 are still known to exist. The allegory is from the biblical passage of Isaiah (11:6) “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” This small version was painted circa 1833.

One icon work from Philadelphia’s collection is Gilbert Stuart’s “George Washington (The Lansdowne Portrait) 1796. The life-sized portrait is known by the name of its first owner William Petty, the first Marquess of Lansdowne, a former British Prime Minister.

Another life-sized portrait in the show was a favorite of the curator in the family, my wife, is Charles Willson Peale’s “The Artist in His Museum” 1822. My wife finds his dramatic invitation to visit as he raises a curtain on his collection irresistible.

Painted when the artist was 81 it shows Peale not only as an artist but the scientist who organized and opened America’s first natural history and art museums in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

In Winslow Homer’s “Fox Hunt” 1893 the hunters are not people but crows forming a dark hovering mass above the struggling fox trying to get away in the deep Maine snow.

Though I find 19th-century American portraits boring this portrait by Thomas Hart Benton of “Aaron” 1941 has such personality that I would love to sit down next to this farmer and hear his story.

One of the things I enjoy about writing these missives is learning something new. In this case, that Jackson Pollock was a student of Benton.

What artist can you think of as more American than Andrew Wyeth? In 1948 he painted, arguably, his most famous painting, “Christina’s World”. The painting in this exhibition was painted in 1950 and I find it has that same atmosphere of being in one’s own world without the hustle and bustle of our everyday surroundings. I used to feel that way when I rode my bike through Central Park in Manhattan where I could ignore the chaos of the streets around me. The painting here is called “Young America”.

To see a small selection of images in a spacious installation but not covering an entire museum allows one to compare and contrast and more easily appreciate the images that capture your attention.

Art from War-Torn Ukraine

I cannot remember ever before seeing an exhibition that made me cry. But, so it was when I went to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. The current exhibition is called “Amidst cries from the Rubble: Art of Loss and Resilience”. It is a long but good title for a show that illustrates recent art from Ukraine, much of it created from the tools of war.

The curators for the show were Laura Mueller, Deputy Director of the museum, Sasha Samuels and Nina Medvinskaya. The latter did the translations and together with Sasha Samuels found the artists. Nina said that they kept in mind that the artwork featured Ukrainian folk art motifs.

I should start with the work of art that inspired our local newspaper’s weekly culture magazine to publish it on the cover. The work is by Roan Selivachov, a professional Icon painter, who started painting ammunitions boxes in 2014 with the last Russian invasion. As friends and volunteers bring more boxes back from the front the artist uses the sale of his work to provide funds for urgent military needs. He says, “It is a sort of soldier-artist symbiosis”.

Yaroslava Tkachuk applied ammunition casings to the traditional wedding garb in her painting “Woman”, 2023. The artist’s statement, “When I think of a woman, I imagine the space and energy around her. In the face of war, she acquires a newfound power to protect her children, her family, her home, her country, and all else that matters to her”.

Other poignant works using bullet casings are sculptures by Serhii Polubotko At the beginning of the full-scale invasion Polubotko worked with a blacksmith to construct defensive barriers. In his recent sculpture series “Glory to the Sunflower” he endeavors to transform materials of death into ones that affirm life. He explains “The sunflower a Ukrainian emblem, acquired a newfound meaning during the war. It has become a symbol of an unwavering, persevering, and determined nation”.

In the series “Wrapping Art-Art of Salvation” portrait photographer Marta Syrko has found her own way of supporting the cause. She has photographed a number of sculptures that have been wrapped to protect them from shrapnel and debris. This is of a 1983 sculpture by Volodymyr Semkiv.

The last image I will illustrate is a series of pendants by Volodymyr Balyberdin. He calls them “Memory of the Heart” and I see it as symbolic of hope. He has used bullet casings collected near the eastern town of Lzyum after its liberation, melting them down to combine with agate, carnelian, mother of pearl, lapis lazuli, obsidian, and jade in these jeweled pendants.

The exhibition’s introductory wall label contains a sentence that is so apt, ”Art is not merely an expression, but a lifeline – a means of making sense out of chaos”. The museum wanted to see the exhibition travel all over the world but unfortunately, they found because of the difficulties of even getting the works of art here, that this was going to be impossible. What an incredible loss that is.

Cars Reminiscent of My Past

Every year on the 4th of July in Santa Fe there is a tradition of Pancakes on the Plaza sponsored by the Rotary Club. There are literally lines that you can stand on for hours just to get a rather poor pancake flipped by volunteers including the Governor and Mayor. Like us most Santa Feans, we have done it once! But it is a nice family day.

Along with this tradition is a vintage car show where individuals bring their vehicles to park on a couple of streets around the Plaza. Exceptions to the vintage rule can be made for a truly exceptional car. This year the exception was a Tesla Cyber Truck. I have seen it around town but could not distinguish the front from the back when the truck bed was closed. In the show, it was shown open.

When I was in primary school in New York I was picked up by the school bus. Since I went to a small school they used several station wagons rather than yellow busses. Mine was number 9. Although it was far more luxurious, the 1948 Pontiac station wagon on display was reminiscent of the Woodie I was picked up and brought home in.

I have waxed nostalgic before about my Volkswagen Bug. The first, a used 1959 model, I replaced with a new one in 1962. The Bugs through those years were very much the same. I loved the manual drive with the stick on the floor which I miss to this day. They often fooled mechanics since the engine was in the back and the trunk was in the front. Not much room in there. One of the features that distinguished the vintages of the bugs was the size of the taillights which were extremely small to start with and then got larger over the years. On the 1963 Bug in this display,  the taillights were the next size up from the 1959 version.

Even though drive-in movies began with silent pictures they became ever more popular in the 50’s and 60’s with the baby boomers. By then there were speakers to hang on the window of your car to get the best sound effects. Also, young women would come around to take your food orders. The show had an illustration of this with a 1953 Buick Special fully equipped with a speaker and food tray.

Of course, every teenage kid has his dream car and for me the dream was to own a 1963 Triumph TR3 in British racing green. The closest car I could find in the show was a 1963 TR4, which was obviously larger and in fire engine red. But hey, I will take what I can get!

I did have some runner-ups such as this 1962 MGA 1600 MKII which also had the race car styling. Maybe that’s like comparing a BMW and a Mercedes today.

Then another car I greatly admired in the 1960’s was the Chevy Corvette whose first edition came out in 1953. It is still in production today with the same feeling in style. The example in the show was the 1987 version, which is old if you are younger than me, who finds 1990 to be yesterday!

I have mentioned the cars that caught my eye, but it was interesting to see that other viewers focused on different things. Many admired the engines, the style or the history and seemed excited by everyone else’s enthusiasm.

Art Accidents

A fact of life is that from time to time art is destroyed. Sometimes it is intentional as with the Nazi’s bonfires for what they considered degenerate art. Sometimes it is the result of war as in Ukraine. And, of course, there are natural disasters like floods and fires.

What I am looking at today is the destruction of art by stupid accidents… then again there are no smart ones. What brought this to mind was something you may have heard about recently. It was a six-foot-tall replica in wax of the Lincoln Memorial sculpture titled “40 ACRES: Camp Barker” (2024). It was to be installed at an elementary school in Washington D.C. which is on the site of a Civil War contraband camp where liberated slaves formed a community. The artist, also an art professor, is Sandy Williams IV. Though the artist was aware that the work would not last he did not expect it to melt so quickly with climate change. It has been suggested as a metaphor for the current state of the Union.

Last year at Art Wynwood, a contemporary art fair in Miami, Florida an older woman bumped into an acrylic stand for a version of Jeff Koons’ ceramic “Balloon Dog” that fell to the floor smashing into hundreds of pieces. As acrylic is a clear plastic, I see how this could happen, but it seems to me that the gallery could have better protected a very valuable artwork. Personally, I won’t miss it! Here is an image of the Dog in the installation and after its demise.

Having mentioned an incident where I was ambivalent about a work’s destruction, here is one involving a work by an artist I care very much about, Lucian Freud. The Guardian reported in April of 2000 that a crate containing a Freud still-life was delivered to Sotheby’s, London and placed in an area of disposable crates. Two workman crushed the crate without checking for contents, which happened to include that painting. I have not been able to identify the painting as no image has been published, but Sotheby’s played down its value as an early work.

Another unfortunate incident occurred at the Fitzwilliam museum when a 42-year-old man with loose shoelaces tripped down the stairs and knocked 3 important Kangxi vases (1662-1722) off their stand. Happily, the museum conservator, Penny Bendall, said she was well acquainted with hard past porcelain and did not think it would be a problem restoring them and when she had completed her work they went back on view.

In 2006 there was a story that made a lot of headlines. Real estate developer and major art collector, Steve Wynn, was showing off part of his collection to some illustrious friends including Nora Ephron, Luise Grunwald, and Barbara Walters. He had just made a deal to sell his Picasso, Le Reve (The Dream) - a portrait of Picasso's mistress Marie-Therese Walter, to hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. As he was telling his friends about its provenance his elbow accidently went into the painting creating a 2-inch tear in the canvas at the sitter’s elbow. The immediate result was that it wrecked his deal with Cohen but in 2013 when the restored painting came up at Christie's Cohen bought it for $155 million, which was more than he had offered in 2006.

My father gave me a softcover book called “A Child of Six Could Do It”. The book had cartoons and jokes about modern art. In this case, it was a child of 5 who didn’t create, but rather demolished a work. The artist R. Zhao created a Lego sculpture, valued at $15,000, of the Disney character, Nick Wilde. What would your small child do if he or she saw a big Lego figure? The children I know would touch, hit, or push it resulting in its destruction. Wouldn’t you expect that the exhibitors might have used something more than stanchions and a rope that a child could easily get under to protect it?

There are so many examples of accidents causing damage to works of art. Some are unavoidable but in others, with just a little bit of forethought could protect the art to survive another day.