jancie.creaney

Beyond the Block: The Public Art of Romare Bearden

A virtual conversation on Romare Bearden’s public art featuring today’s leading voices in the field.

Tuesday, June 13, 2023 at 1:00 PM ET

This June, the WPI hosted a conversation dedicated to the lesser-studied sphere of Romare Bearden’s art making: his public art. In his later career, he translated his iconic collage making practice into larger-than-life ceramic, mosaic and painted murals displayed in salient communal spaces around New York, Charlotte, Baltimore and more. Oftentimes, these works served as an initial meeting ground, introducing Bearden to the general public.

In this conversation featuring renowned public art specialists Tania Duvergne (Public Art for Public Schools, NYC School Construction Authority) and Larissa Trinder (New York City Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine), and curator and cultural historian TK Smith (Barnes Foundation), we will explore the ways in which different facets of society, beyond the art world, interacted with Bearden, and in turn, how he offered access to the visual art to the larger public.

Tania Duvergne is the Director of Public Art for Public Schools at the NYC School Construction Authority. Public Art for Public Schools is the only program dedicated specifically to schools in the country. Duvergne has held this position since 2010 and has overseen the installation of over 180 permanent artworks in schools throughout the five boroughs. Prior to her work at Public Art for Public Schools, she worked extensively as a curator, writer, editor and public art administrator for non-profit art organizations across the country, including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, the San Diego Museum of Art, inSITE, San Diego/Tijuana, and Artists Space, NY. She holds a bachelor’s degree in art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree in art history from the Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Larissa Trinder is the Assistant Vice President for NYC Health+ Hospitals Arts in Medicine department, responsible for the stewardship, exhibition strategy, conservation and curation of the health system’s collection of more than 7000 works of art, the largest such collection in New York City, many dating back to the 1930’s. In addition, she oversees the creation and implementation of evidenced based programs for patients, staff and the community that utilize the arts as a tool in healing.

Previously, Trinder worked at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Virginia as the Director of Principal Giving and established the hospital’s Creative Art Policy that integrated the arts and cultural programs into the hospital system. She has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

TK Smith is a Philadelphia-based curator, writer, and cultural historian. His writing has been published in Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and ART PAPERS. Currently, Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware. Read his recent book review on Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination here at Brooklyn Rail.

_{Romare Bearden, Untitled, 1973. Located at P.S. 811 – 1434 Longfellow Avenue, Bronx, New York}

Between the Two: Art and Sexuality in 1960s New York

Webinar Series

In June 2023, the WPI hosted Between the Two: Art and Sexuality in 1960s New York, a webinar series exploring gender, sexuality, and eroticism in the art of early 1960s New York, with a particular focus on ideas and artists circulating around Pop, Performance, and Neo-Dada. The series began from the thesis that the exploration of gender and sexuality was not simply a secondary theme, but a constitutive element of artistic development during this period. Moreover, it expanded on recent scholarship that explores queer, trans, and feminist perspectives in the art of the period and in the art historical approaches to it.

_{Female smoker with outlined knuckles, c. 1975, undated; Tom Wesselmann Papers , The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.}

Past:

Delinquency, Deviancy, and their Queer Refashionings in Art of the 1960s — with David J. Getsy

Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET

Homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s U.S. could be discussed in public and in popular culture, but only if it was cast as a crime or as deviant. Whether as moralizing tales of social outcasts or as high-profile obscenity trials, queer themes filtered into public discourses through these negative stereotypes. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Anger, and Nancy Grossman appropriated such characters as the delinquent or the biker as a means to figure queerness. This talk will provide an overview of some key moments of queer visibility—in the form of the criminal—in art of the 1960s.

David J. Getsy is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He has published eight books, including Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale University Press, 2015/2023), Queer (MIT Press, 2016), and most recently Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

_{Nancy Grossman, Ali Stoker, 1966–67. Repurposed black leather jackets and other mixed media, 37 1/2 x 49 1/2 x 8 in. (94 x 125.7 x 20.3 cm)}

“E.G. [Evening Gown] Orgy”: Jack Smith And Abstract Gender in the 1960s — with Joshua Lubin-Levy

Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET

The scandal surrounding Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures (1963), with its overt display of naked bodies writhing in ecstasy and agony, marks a turning point in the history of 1960s sexual liberation—one that often overshadows the artistic experimentation at the core of Smith’s practice. This talk will look to the live performance work that predates Smith’s renowned film (still banned in New York State) in order to consider the entanglements and abstractions between art, gender, and embodiment swirling in the early part of the 1960s.

Joshua Lubin-Levy is a scholar, dramaturg, and curator, currently working on a monograph on the photography and performance work of Jack Smith. He is the Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal, and a Curatorial Research Associate with the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received his doctorate from the Department of Performance Studies, New York University.

_{Jack Smith, Untitled photograph, c. 1958–61. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels}

Erotic Art and Feminism in the 1960s — with Rachel Middleman

Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET

In 1960s New York, erotic art was a broad, popular category that included everything from Pop art to abstract sculpture. The elasticity of the term “erotic” created a space in which women, later associated with the feminist art movement of the 1970s, publicly confronted stereotypes of gender and expressed their ideas about sexuality. This talk will explore the sexual politics of erotic art across diverse media and the ways that women artists sought to reshape the sexist conventions of “the nude” and upend the presumed objectivity of formalism.

Rachel Middleman is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. She is the author of Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2018). She has published in Art Journal, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, and Woman’s Art Journal and contributed to edited volumes and exhibition catalogues, including Academics, Artists, and Museums: 21^st-Century Partnerships (2018), Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West (2019); In the Cut: The Male Body in Feminist Art (2019); Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (2021); Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game (2021);and Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021). She is executor of artist Anita Steckel’s estate and recently curated Anita Steckel: The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics (2022) with Richard Meyer at the Stanford Art Gallery.

_{Martha Edelheit, Female Flesh Wall, 1964-65, oil on canvas, three panels, 80 x 195 in. © Martha Edelheit, collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art.}

Marisol: Destabilizing Doubles and the Erotics of Sameness — with Cathleen Chaffee

Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET

As Minimalist sculptors in the 1960s encoded their references to the human form in an abstract language, Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016) used figurative Pop sculpture to treat with absurdity or skepticism the stability of signs by which people are seen as gendered. At the same time, her drawings of the 1960s and 1970s manifested wide-ranging and nonconforming body forms and gender expressions. Through an examination of works featuring in the upcoming exhibition and catalogue Marisol: A Retrospective, this talk contextualizes the artist’s disruptive approach to the figuration of subjectivity, sexuality, and gender.

_{Credit to Jeff Mace for Buffalo AKG Art Museum}

Cathleen Chaffee is Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where she has organized exhibitions with artists including  Christine Sun Kim, Eric N. Mack, Jacob Kassay, Tamar Guimarães, Anthony McCall, Erin Shirreff, Joe Bradley, and Ellie Ga, as well as historical and thematic projects including Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective; Shade: Clyfford Still/Mark Bradford; Looking at Tomorrow: Light and Language from The Panza Collection, 1967–1990; and Overtime: The Art of Work. She co-organized Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, a collateral event at the 59th Venice Biennale. Chaffee previously held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Chaffee holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is currently preparing traveling retrospectives dedicated to Stanley Whitney (opening at the Buffalo AKG in Spring 2024) and Marisol: A Retrospective, opening at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in October 2023.

_{Marisol, Bicycle Race, 1962. Wood, paint, graphite, cast plaster, cast metal, and plastic. Overall: 66 1/2 x 56 in. (168.91 x 142.24 cm). Abrams Family Collection.}

Gonzalès Oral Histories

The Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s Eva Gonzalès Oral History Series explores the life and legacy of Impressionist-era painter, Eva Gonzalès, through interviews with scholars, collectors, and collaborators. These accounts are a companion to the forthcoming Gonzalès Digital Catalogue Raisonné, offering significant insight into the artist’s personal and professional life.

French Transcript

English Transcript

Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu is a French art historian specializing in late 19th-century and early 20th-century French painting. While working on the catalogue raisonné of Henri Manguin, she met Jacques de Mons, with whom she published a catalogue raisonné of Eva Gonzalès’s works in 1990. Sainsaulieu’s interview gives fascinating insight into her personal background with the art and architecture that informs her research, as well as detailed historical context for Gonzalès’ life, works, and contemporary significance.

KEYWORDS: Eva Gonzalès, Théodore Géricault, Henri Manguin, Charles Joshua Chaplin, Édouard Manet, Jacques de Mons, Reims Cathedral, Berthe Morisot, French Impressionism, archival research, droit moral, catalogue raisonnés

Léon Monet, frère de l’artiste et collectionneur

Un webinaire avec Géraldine Lefebvre

Lundi 22 mai 2023 à 18h CET / 12pm ET

This webinar was presented in French.

Léon Monet (1836-1917), le frère oublié de Claude (1840-1926), est à la fois chimiste en couleurs, industriel rouennais et collectionneur. Léon Monet joua un rôle décisif dans la carrière de l’artiste. En 1872, au moment où celui-ci, de retour au Havre, peint Impression, soleil levant, Léon fonde la Société industrielle de Rouen et décide d’apporter un soutien actif à son frère et ses amis impressionnistes. Ce sont les prémices de la constitution d’une remarquable collection d’art moderne. L’exposition réunit une centaine d’œuvres, parmi lesquelles des peintures et des dessins de Monet, Sisley, Pissarro et Renoir, mais aussi des livres de couleurs, des échantillons de tissus, des estampes japonaises, des documents d’archives et de nombreuses photographies de famille. Le portrait énergique que Claude Monet fait de son frère aîné en 1874, témoignage vibrant de l’affection profonde qui unit les deux frères, y est présenté pour la toute première fois. L’exposition inscrit définitivement Léon Monet dans la biographie de Claude et montre l’intérêt partagé des deux frères pour la couleur. Au terme de trois années de recherche, un ouvrage scientifique et collectif a été édité à cette occasion et inclut le répertoire complet et inédit de la collection Léon Monet.

Géraldine Lefebvre est la commissaire de l’exposition Léon Monet, frère de l’artiste et collectionneur au musée du Luxembourg du 15 mars au 16 juillet 2023. Elle nous fait découvrir un aspect inédit de l’histoire de l’art en partageant ses découvertes sur Léon Monet, le frère oublié de Claude Monet. Nous plongerons dans l’univers de cette figure méconnue de l’Impressionnisme.

Géraldine Lefebvre est diplômée de l’École du Louvre et docteure en Histoire de l’art. Elle a assuré le commissariat de plusieurs expositions dont Léon Monet. Frère de l’artiste et collectionneur au musée du Luxembourg à Paris (jusqu’au 16 juillet 2023), Monet-Auburtin, à l’occasion des 10 ans du musée des impressionnismes de Giverny (2019) et Le Cercle de l’art moderne, collectionneurs d’avant-garde au Havre (2012-2013). En 2014, elle a participé, en collaboration avec le musée Marmottan-Monet, à Paris et un astrophysicien américain, aux travaux de recherche qui ont permis la localisation et la datation du chef-d’œuvre de Claude Monet “Impression, soleil levant”.

En 2016, Géraldine Lefebvre a dirigé la publication d’un ouvrage intitulé Monet au Havre. Les années décisives, avec les contributions de spécialistes internationaux de Monet (Hazan). Elle a contribué à de nombreux catalogues d’exposition dont les plus récents Monet/Boudin (Madrid, musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2018) et Monet. Impression Sunrise (Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, 2019), François Depeaux. Collectionneur des impressionnistes, (Rouen, musée des beaux-Arts, 2020), Monet Reflexion (Milan, Palazzo Real, 2021), Monet/Rothko (Giverny, musée des Impressionnismes, 2022). Elle travaille aujourd’hui sur le catalogue des dessins de Claude Monet et collabore à l’exposition « Paris 1874 : The Impressionnist Moment » qui se tiendra au musée d’Orsay à Paris et à la National Gallery de Washington en 2024.

_{Claude Monet, Portrait de Léon Monet, 1874, oil on canvas © Private Collection}

_{Claude Monet, La Plage de Sainte-Adresse, 1864, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan.}

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Still Lifes

The Wildenstein Plattner Institute is pleased to announce its forthcoming publication, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Still Lifes, which will serve as the first installment of the WPI’s forthcoming Renoir catalogue raisonné. This major endeavor will feature over 900 works on canvas, many of which have been examined by the Renoir Committee since its founding in 2003.

If you would like to submit works to the Renoir Committee for possible inclusion in this forthcoming publication, please do so via our webportal.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Oranges, bananes et tasse de thé, 1908, oil on canvas. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, *Nature morte au melon, amandes et figues,* 1882, oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Claude Monet: The Revised and Updated Catalogue Raisonné; The Pastels

The Wildenstein Plattner Institute is pleased to announce its forthcoming publication, Claude Monet: The Revised and Updated Catalogue Raisonné; The Pastels. This digital catalogue raisonné, which we anticipate releasing on our website later this year, will include newly-discovered works and critical texts by Dr. Géraldine Lefebvre, as well as updates and amendments to the original catalogue raisonné by Daniel Wildenstein.

The Pastels marks the first installment of the WPI’s project to revise and update the entirety of Wildenstein’s landmark Monet Catalogue raisonné. Since that resource was last published in 1996, new information on Monet’s artworks has come to light that significantly informs the scholarship on the artist.

Accordingly, WPI’s Monet Committee will review the oeuvre, and will update the provenance, exhibition histories, and bibliographic references of those artworks submitted for committee review.

If you would like to submit works to the Monet Committee for possible inclusion in this forthcoming publication, please do so via our webportal.