Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

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Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit @ Cranbrook Art Museum

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On November 12, 2023

In Drawing, Paintings

An installation shot of Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit at the Cranbrook Art Museum, which will be up through March 3, 2024. (At left is Patrick Quarm’s Three Transitions.) Running through March 3, 2024 as well is LeRoy Foster: Solo Show. All images Courtesy Cranbrook Art Museum.

Two new exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum showcase the considerable talents of Detroit’s African-American portrait painters, both past and present. Both LeRoy Foster: Solo Show, and Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit will be up through March 3, 2024.

Skilled Labor is the larger of the two, and a complete stunner. The very first canvas you’ll see on entering this 20-painter group show is Mario Moore’s huge, undeniably sexy Thornton and Lucie Blackburn in Canaan – with a 21st-century Black couple in bathing suits lying on the Windsor waterfront at night, the Detroit skyline, part of it in flames, across the river.

Mario Moore, Thornton and Lucie Blackburn in Canaan, Oil on linen, 2022.

Chief curator Laura Mott organized this show with Moore,  a 2018 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and she loves “how he conflates history and time into one canvas.” In this case Moore’s employed contemporary Detroiters to portray the Blackburns, a couple who fled Kentucky slavery in 1833, ultimately making their way to Canada via Detroit and the Underground Railroad.

A bit like Kehinde Wiley, who inserts young, tattooed and dreadlocked Black guys into historical paintings of war heroes on rearing horses (Wiley turned one of those into a sculpture that now sits on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia), Moore recontextualizes and illuminates history by dropping it into a modern framework.

Be sure not to miss Moore’s other large piece, A Student’s Dream, in which the artist himself, staring straight out at the viewer, lies naked on a dissection table surrounded by white doctors – a reference both to Moore’s own brain surgery, and the medical profession’s callous use of Black bodies in decades past for scientific research.

Also grappling with history, though in more sweeping, allegorical fashion, is Hubert Massey’s graphite-on-paper sketch for Forging the Future, a visual explosion of perspective and movement. The resulting fresco now commands the lobby of the new Huntington Tower on Woodward Avenue, just north of Grand Circus Park.

Hubert Massey, Sketch for Forging the Future, Graphite on paper, 2022.

You’re probably familiar with Massey’s work, whether you realize it or not. Among many other Detroit projects, Massey painted the mural on the exterior wall of the College for Creative Studies parking structure at Brush and Frederick streets, and designed the colorful mosaic on the soaring, modernist Bagley Street pedestrian bridge that vaults over the freeway trench dividing Mexicantown.

In pulling together Skilled Labor, Mott said Moore was particularly interested in what he calls “anti-portraits,” depictions that depart from the standard template of subject facing the world. This show has any number of intriguing examples, including several in which the individual in the painting has her or his back turned to the viewer. Consider, for example, Menorah’s Volta: A Light That Speaks by Cranbrook Academy of  Art alum Conrad Egyir, a gorgeous portrait of a Ghanaian woman looking away from us, across a vast African valley.

Anti-portraiture emerges in different fashion with Bakpak Durden’s How they recall his hands, an oddly moving portrait of an African-American man operating the wheel of some machine. The most notable feature is there’s no head above the meticulously rendered work shirt – suggesting, perhaps, that Black men were typically valued for their labor, but not for themselves. Durden, a self-taught multidisciplinary Detroit artist, was the subject of a solo show, The Eye of Horus, at Cranbrook in November, 2022.

Bakpak Durden, How they recall his hands, Oil on etch steel, pine, 2023.

A similar motif emerges in Cailyn Dawson’s three portraits on display, two of which clearly feature the artist herself, and one other, the 2021 “Untitled,” that stars a headless figure wearing a trench coat and white shirt. Said Mott, who first discovered Dawson in a show at Ferndale’s M Contemporary gallery, “When Cailyn talks about her work, she talks about learning about herself. She paints to investigate herself.” Assuming, then, that the untitled trench coat is the artist, one could possibly speculate that its meaning lies in a sort of obliteration or enforced invisibility.

Dawson’s other works are equally enigmatic. In “Seeing Double,” the artist regards herself in a mirror, arms and hands visible in the foreground as well as in the reflection. The point of view almost seems to locate us in her body, with the exact same perspective that she’d have on herself. It’s both a bit disorienting and cool. Finally, in Spotlight the artist, who’s currently getting her MFA at New York City’s Hunter College, shields her eyes with one hand from a blinding light that casts a sharp shadow on the white wall behind her. As unexpected compositions go, this almost rises to the level of anti-portrait. As Mott notes, if this were from a photo series, such a squinting image is the one you’d likely toss. That’s no criticism; the very unexpectedness of her pose is what makes Spotlight so hard to look away from.

Cailyn Dawson, Spotlight, Acrylic on canvas, 2021.

Once you’ve made your way through Skilled Labor, which occupies the first, large gallery as you walk through the museum, do turn left into LeRoy Foster: Solo Show. Moore and Mott initially intended to select painters for Skilled Labor from both the 20th and 21st centuries, but ultimately decided it made more sense to focus on works produced in the last 10 years.

Inevitably, that meant letting go of any number of superb portraitists who are no longer with us. The one exception they made was with LeRoy Foster, born in 1925, whom they decided deserved his first-ever solo show in a museum, one supported financially by the City of Detroit’s Office of Arts, Culture and Entrepreneurship.

Foster, who graduated from the school at the old Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (predecessor to CCS) and probably studied at Cranbrook, is a fascinating and surprising Detroit character – an unapologetically gay, Black artist in an era when that was perilous on any number of levels. In addition, the Detroiter, who lived in an abandoned theater on Livernois Avenue, was a portraitist in an era, particularly the 1950s and 60s, that mostly disdained any figurative art – much less the sort of lush, physicality Foster had such a gift for.

A reporter from National Public Radio, Mott says, wanted to know why an artist of Foster’s astonishing talents wasn’t better known. Mott laughs. “A Black, queer artist in mid-20th Century doing high-Renaissance style portraits? That was the era of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. And here’s Foster, hanging out being completely himself, doing paintings the art world at the time would likely have regarded as old-fashioned.”

Foster may be best known for his mural inside the Frederick Douglass branch of the Detroit Public Library – or the one on display in this show, Renaissance City, that hung for years in the old Cass Tech High School, even after the school was abandoned in favor of a new building next door. A group of Cass art teachers, including Senghor Reid (who’s in Skilled Labor) rescued the mural.

Some time after this exhibition closes in early March, Renaissance City will be installed in the new Cass Tech.

LeRoy Foster, Renaissance City, Oil on canvas, 1978/1986.

This exhibition features 20 contemporary artists who have worked in Detroit over the last decade. These artists include Christopher Batten, Taurus Burns, Cydney Camp, Ijania Cortez, Cailyn Dawson, Bakpak Durden, Conrad Egyir, Jonathan Harris, Sydney G. James, Gregory Johnson, Richard Lewis, Hubert Massey, Mario Moore, Sabrina Nelson, Patrick Quarm, Joshua Rainer, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Senghor Reid, Rashaun Rucker, and Tylonn J. Sawyer.

Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit and LeRoy Foster: Solo Show will both be at the Cranbrook Art Museum through March 3, 2024.

 

Stan Natchez @ BBAC

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On March 16, 2023

In Drawing, Paintings, Printmaking, Video

Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center presents Stan Natchez, Brenda Kobs Russell, and Maria Balogna

Stan Natchez, BBAC, Install 3.2023

The BBAC opened its three galleries with new visual art exhibitions on March 10, 2023, presenting work by a Native American painter, Stan Natchez, a printmaker, Brenda Kobs Russell, and drawings by Maria Balogna.

Stan Natchez was born and raised in Los Angeles. Still, the indigenous artist now lives in New Mexico and brings his exhibit, Indian Without Reservation, to the BBAC with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest. By taking the philosophies and techniques of both modern life and the traditional Native American heritage, Natchez achieves a complex harmony in his work by using a distinctive Neo-Pop style. He says in his statement, “I paint the life I live, and so every painting, in some way, is a self-portrait. My art is about the way I respond. And that is my experience…my experience is my art…and art is my life.”

Stan Natchez, Monopoly, 58 x 58″ Mixed Media

Natchez talks about his influences, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, combined with artifacts from the Native American culture. They would be found in Monopoly, where he uses the popular board game as a compositional structure to combine the various corporate logos with Native figures and designs. (I know this writer has worked hard at eliminating the word Indian from my vocabulary to represent Native Americans, yet I find it ironic to see this in the title of this exhibition.)

Stan Natchez employs art appropriation in most of his work throughout the exhibition, where he uses pre-existing objects or images as an artistic strategy, intentionally borrowing, copying, and image transfer is a practice that is traced back to Cubism, Dada, and, more recently, Pop Art.

Stan Natchez, Medicine Crow Living in Two Worlds, 48 x 36″ Mixed Media

Medicine Crow comes from a warrior of the Crow tribe. He was a “reservation chief,” concerned with helping the Crow tribe “learn to live in the ways of the white man” as soon and as efficiently as possible. The subject for this painting is taken from an original black-and-white photograph. The crow symbolism represents messages from dreams or the sub-conscience, and the object he holds is a group of feathers attached to a wooden handle and is used in a variety of ceremonies. Natchez brings the three primary colors across the face to draw attention to the reservation chief.

Stan Natchez, Traveling Through Time, 48 x 66″, Mixed Media

Natchez travels across time, mixing the images of Picasso, Matisse, Marilyn Monroe, Piet Mondrian, and a section of the painting Guernica juxtaposed with several Crow tribal leaders. He is mixing famous western images with Native American icons across time, creating a grid that compares and contrasts. By doing this, he places his people on par with world-recognizable images.

Stan Natchez, Guernica to Wounded Knee, 48 x 66″ Mixed Media

Part of this painting includes features of Guernica, the large 1937 oil painting by artist Pablo Picasso. Natchez spans time with imagery from events at Wounded Knee. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. The painting here was made earlier in 2012 and then was sold and duplicated at a later date.

Stan Natchez earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern Colorado and his M.F.A. at Arizona State University. In addition to being a nationally known artist, Natchez has distinguished himself as a teacher, dancer, editorial advisor, and legal advocate for the Native American community.

 

Brenda Kobs Russell: Familiar Rhythms

Brenda Kobs Russell, Sequence, Etching Collage

Brenda Kobs Russell is a locally based artist whose work reflects an ongoing investigation connecting her inner life to natural phenomena. Given her time in school, you could look to the abstract influences of Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, or Paul Klee. During the 1920s, geometric abstraction manifested itself as the underlying principle of the Art Deco style, which propagated the broad use of geometric forms to influence abstraction. For example, Sequence is an etching with touches of white gouache, making it a monoprint that has been popular among printmakers recently.

She says, “As a whole, my work serves as a record, mapping an interior investigation of my surroundings and a practice of abstracting the familiar. I am interested in the congruities between organic cycles of transformation and artistic process, particularly how an image evolves through the erosion of an etching plate and is further translated by ink into paper.”

Russell is an art educator, having taught students across a wide range of ages and abilities in private schools, art centers, and as a lecturer on the faculties of Oakland University and Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan. She earned her B.F.A. at Michigan State University (1983) and her M.F.A. at Cranbrook Academy of Art (1985).

 

Maria Balogna: by His stripes

Maria Balogna, Darkness to Light III, Ink on Paper

“The Cost. The Wounds. The Enormity. Symbolic themes run throughout this collection of small drawings that outwardly express the salvific work of The Suffering Servant [ reference: Isaiah 53 ].” The abstract drawings of Maria Balogna contain undertones of Christianity without the weight of literary imagery.

The exhibitions will run through April 20, 2023.

The BBAC is open to the public. Masks are strongly recommended.

EXHIBITION GALLERY HOURS: Monday-Thursday 9 am-5 pm, Friday & Saturday, 9am-4 pm

Luxe @ David Klein Gallery Birmingham

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On January 13, 2023

In Drawing, Installation, Sculpture

Mary-Ann Monforton, Luxe, installation, David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend St., Birmingham MI

The breathless hype, the eye-watering price tags, the manufactured scarcity—we all recognize the strategies that the makers of designer goods use to promote luxury items. But Detroit artist Mary-Ann Monforton is having none of that. In her first solo exhibition at David Klein Gallery in the upscale Detroit suburb of Birmingham, she presents Luxe, a collection of 10 slightly oversized, comic replicas of well-known luxury brands that are both an homage and a send-up of late capitalist getting and having.

Monforton knows plenty about the world of red velvet ropes and status objects. Though she grew up in the Detroit area, her professional life has been centered in New York’s gallery and club scene, where she has lived several simultaneous lifetimes as a music promoter, art curator, visual artist and cultural media publisher. She has rubbed shoulders with late 20th and early 21st-century arts stars in her prolific and varied career–Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean Michel Basquiat, among others–and occasionally has collected their work.

Mary-Ann Monforton, Hermes Birkin, 2022, wire mesh, plaster gauze, paint, 24.5” x 17” x 4”

Now that she is back in her hometown, Monforton is prepared to share a few thoughts on the pretensions inherent in the easily recognizable signifiers of status. Sharped-eyed but not unkind, her observations take the form of wonky and slyly ironic designer bags and shoes made of humble materials that loosely imitate prestigious consumer commodities.

The artworks in Luxe are installed in David Klein’s middle gallery, now painted blushy pink in a kind of shorthand nod to a high-end boutique.  Artful silver wire stars hang from the ceiling and overhead a handmade imitation of a fancy chandelier casts a fictive glow on the bags and shoes below. Effortlessly holding the center of the space is an oversized replica of the iconic Hermes Birkin bag, in coral “ostrich,” for the fashionable giantess. Said giantess might also be interested in Monforton’s golden Valentino Garavani slipper with its pointy toe and (literally) spikey heel.  The chic send-up of the Manolo Blahnik open-toe stiletto is likewise a winner in the Brobdingnagian fashion department.   My personal favorite, though, is the improbably elegant black Louboutin Ballerina Ultimate, which manages to be both larger-than-life and dainty.

Mary-Ann Monforton, Valentino Garavani, 2022, wire mesh, plaster gauze, steel spike, string, paint, 11” x 6” x 17″

Monforton has some fun with the surface textures, colors and patterns of her fashionable facsimiles.  On her Louis Vuitton “Speedy” bandouliere, she subverts the well-known, militantly regular Louis Vuitton surface pattern, exploding it into an irregular constellation scattered across the satchel’s surface–less elegant perhaps, but more expressive. The intertwined C’s on her Chanel Bucket bag are both instantly recognizable and hilariously awry.   The materials that she references, lizard, ostrich, crocodile and precious metals–now rendered in plaster, wire mesh, and the odd metal spike–gleefully poke fun at the pretensions of the originals.

There is a kind of liveliness in these objects. They are imbued with character and seem ready to dance and move. Unlike the highly finished, larger-than-life sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, to which Monforton’s work is sometimes compared, these friendly avatars of luxury are approachable and relatable.  In some ineffable way, they are human.

Mary-Ann Monforton, Louis Vuitton “Speedy” 2022, wire mesh, plaster gauze, paint, 14” x 5” x 9”

In addition to the three-dimensional artworks in Luxe, Monforton has created a series of drawings of her designer creations in pencil, pastel and paint on paper. Rather than preparatory drawings, the nine renderings were created after the fact in a kind of object portraiture that captures the soul of each subject, as any good portrait should.  The drawing of a Chanel Bucket bag and Louboutin Ballerina Ultimate high heel, paired in imaginary conversation, make a harmonious comic duet. A drawing of a pair of Louboutin leopard peep-toe platforms surrounded by stars, like the other drawings, reveals the affection of the artist for the objects she has birthed.  These animated images invite an immediate association to Andy Warhol’s 1955 drawings of fashion shoes, though the comparison is only glancing; Warhol’s shoes seem conventional and rather deadpan when compared to Monforton’s lively representations.

Mary-Ann Monforton, Louboutin Ballerina Ultimate, 2022, wire mesh, plaster gauze, paint, 12” x 5” x 9”

The artist’s history as a collector prepares her uniquely for her explorations into how we assign value to objects. In her artist’s statement, Monforton is clear about her aims: “These objects explore the psychology of fame, fortune, mega-wealth, and privileged consumption.” She continues, “The broader concepts of ascribing value to things is played out in this line of luxury goods that defy perfection and are rife with failure and humor.” The imperfect simulacra on display probe human preoccupations with social prestige and how it is related to craft and economy.

In Luxe, Mary-Ann Monforton combines her childlike joy in the making of a thing with a very adult moral framework that proposes the exchange of one set of values for another. She suggests a more humane ethic that privileges vulnerability and emotional expressiveness over materialistic status-seeking, perhaps a good new year’s resolution for 2023.

Mary-Ann Monforton, Chanel Bucket and Louboutin Ballerina Ultimate,2022, paint, pencil, pastel on paper, 18” x 24”

Luxe is on view at David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend St., Birmingham, Michigan, through February 4, 2023.

Todd Weinstein @ Janice Charach Gallery

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On October 31, 2022

In Ceramic, Drawing, Paintings, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture, Video

Todd Weinstein’s Stories of Influence: In Search of One’s Own Voice is at the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield, Michigan through Dec. 7.

Install image, Stories of Influence: In Search of One’s Own Voice is at the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield, Michigan. 2022

Photographer Todd Weinstein’s Stories of Influence: In Search of One’s Own Voice is a high-concept show that employs a delightful gimmick – Weinstein pairs 68 of his photos with a corresponding image from one of his numerous mentors, teachers and friends, and then mats and frames the two together. It’s a career retrospective with punch, and will be up at the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield’s Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit through Dec. 7, 2022.

A commercial and artistic shutterbug who grew up in Oak Park, Weinstein had a gift as a youngster for talking his way into jobs with great photographers, some of whose influence he honors with this exhibition. He got an early start after dropping out of the old School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies), and approaching legendary auto photographer Dick James to ask if he needed an assistant. “How about third-assistant?” James responded. No fool he, Weinstein grabbed the chance.

Like so many young artists in the 1970s, he ultimately left Detroit in the 1970s to make his way in New York’s hurly-burly, and, as it happens, thoroughly succeeded. Weinstein’s got a thriving photography and multi-visual practice, and lives in one of Brooklyn’s handsomest old rowhouse neighborhoods, Boerum Hill.

Among other virtues, Weinstein appears to have an admirable gift for gratitude. The idea of pairing one of his photos with that of an esteemed teacher, mentor or friend as a way of paying tribute struck him when he was in Paris several years ago. Weinstein brought it up with Charach director Natalie Balazovich, and she was immediately enthusiastic, finding it refreshing and new. “Todd’s essentially saying ‘This is why I’m where I’m at,” she said, “’because of these people.’” She added, “I like that the show dives into almost a taboo subject – sharing the things that pushed him to become who he is, and showcasing them.”

Todd Weinstein, Two Lady’s, New York City, NY, c. 1973; Mel Dixon, 19th Street Studio, New York City, NY, c. 1970.

A professional who helped Weinstein in his early New York days, when he was sleeping on a friend’s floor for eight months, was commercial photographer Mel Dixon. One of the first Black fashion photographers to go out on his own some 50 years ago, Dixon had a glittering background – he’d worked with photo greats Avedon and Hero. He offered Weinstein his first job in the big city, working in the studio on commercial and advertising projects.

“Mel gave me the chance,” Weinstein said. “We shot luggage, brides. All that kind of stuff.” He wasn’t really that interested in studio work, but it gave him the opportunity to earn a living while exploring other paths for his future.

The image Dixon contributed to the show is a black-and-white study of a girl. Her shoulders and face are completely dark, while her broad, white hat catches all the light in the frame. It’s elegant, high-class, high-fashion photography.

In his artist’s statement, Weinstein notes that in pairing images he relied on the structures of jazz – employing a sort of visual syncopation, as it were. You clearly see that in his rejoinder, the 1973 Two Lady’s, New York City, NY. It, too, is a fashion study — this time of two models facing away from us, one lithe and Black, the other short and white. Both are wearing headdresses that fall like curtains down to their shoulders. The white girl has a hand on the other’s back, which prompts her to twist her head around in apparent rapture.

Todd Weinstein, Brooklyn Bridge, New York, NY, c. 1980s; Bob Day, Manhattan Bridge, New York, NY, 1980.

Another significant mentor was painter and photographer Bob Day. The two went into business together on Manhattan’s East 17th Street half a century ago, “back when you could get a 6,000-square-foot studio for like $300 a month,” Weinstein said. Day’s 1980 image, Manhattan Bridge, NY, NY, is a powerfully compressed telephoto shot. Day frames the very top of the Manhattan Bridge, a lush blue-green, sharply etched essay in cross-bracing around a central gothic arch. Looming in the near distance – unrealistically large, thanks to the powerful lens — is a gray and gold Empire State Building seen through the bridge’s vertical suspension wires. It lends immensely satisfying balance to the drama of the bridge crown in both shape and color.

By contrast, Weinstein’s Brooklyn Bridge, NY, NY is grittier. A close shot of a taxicab takes up most of the frame, the vehicle’s “Off Duty” crown lit and glowing. The aesthetic is ordinary and everyday — even the Brooklyn Bridge rising in the distance looks a little dull. All the print’s visual power, which is considerable, comes from the illuminated “Off Duty” sign that, alone out of the entire shot, glows with a warm light, and whose shape echoes the tops of the two bridges.

Julian Teachworth, Untitled, 1997; Todd Weinstein, Little Ninja, Brooklyn, NY, 1973.

Not all of the images contributed by mentors are photos. In one, Weinstein pairs his picture of what looks like a collapsed, rainbow-striped mylar balloon on the street with painter Julian Teachworth’s amusing and gorgeous abstract of many colors, an untitled work from 1997. Here Weinstein riffs on the similarity in colors and the loopy geometry present in both. “I photographed all of Julian’s paintings,” Weinstein said. “He’s an incredible painter, mentor and spirit.”

There’s something undeniably spiritual about the twinned images by Weinstein and the great photographer of the Civil Rights movement, Dan Budnik. The latter’s photo, ‘Do-Right Rogers’ on the Selma to Montgomery March, March, 1965 is a classic of the genre, and one that Weinstein says he recalls from childhood. A skinny, African-American youngster marches down an endless dirt road, carrying a pole with a large American flag that’s unfurled in all its red, white and blue glory. The association of deep patriotism with individuals who still had to fight a for their rights is palpably moving.

Todd Weinstein, Mural, Detroit, 2019; Dan Budnik, ‘Do-Right Rogers’ on the Selma to Montgomery March, March 1965.

For his part, Weinstein gives us a black-and-white mural in Detroit on a brick wall honoring the late Daisy Elizabeth Elliott, a champion of Black rights who died in 2015. The quote next to her portrait, in which she cites her willingness to die in the fight for civil rights, is powerful and unexpected – a bit like this show.

Todd Weinstein, Cloud over Manhattan, New York, NY, 2008.

Stories of Influence: In Search of One’s Own Voice is at the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield through Dec. 7.

Vincent van Gogh @ DIA 

By

On October 13, 2022

In Drawing, Paintings, Printmaking

The Detroit Institute of Arts presents Van Gogh in America

Installation image, Van Gogh in America, Detroit Institute of Arts, 2022

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) presents a landmark exhibition, Van Gogh in America, that features 74 works of art that opened on October 2, 2022, and will run through January 22, 2023. The DIA celebrates being the first museum in the country to purchase a painting by Vincent van Gogh in 1921. The work, Self-Portrait (1887), was purchased at a New York auction by Ralph Booth, then the President of the City of Detroit Art Commission. There are nine galleries of artwork, and the exhibition includes a section of Van Gogh’s contemporaries, including Paul  Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Joseph Stella.

Self-Portrait, Oil on board mounted to wood, 13 x 10″ Detroit Institute of Arts, 1887

Van Gogh painted more than forty self-portraits and loved to scrutinize his features which, unlike those of the 17th century, might be considered disturbing or unattractive. That, in itself, could not be more introspective. Van Gogh could not find or pay for models, so he used his image reflected in a mirror to create an extensive collection of variations of himself: An indication of his introverted nature.

 

Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 13″, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, 1887

The director of the DIA, Salvador Salort-Pons, says, “One hundred years after the DIA made the bold decision to purchase a van Gogh painting, we are honored to present Van Gogh in America. This unique exhibition includes numerous works that are rarely on public view in the United States and tells the story – for the first time – of how Van Gogh took shape in the hearts and minds of Americans during the last century.”

The works of Van Gogh and his images are ubiquitous in the United States, the Western world, and beyond. There was the novel by Irving Stone, Lust for Life (1934), followed by Vincente Minnelli’s film adaptation, starring Kirk Douglas, which shaped the artist’s popularity. In the mid-1970s, Leonard Nimoy starred in a one-person play called Vincent that he’d adapted from the play Van Gogh by Phillip Stephens. That set the stage for the songs by Don McClean’s Vincent and  Starry, Starry Night, and numerous films and theater presentations like Loving Vincent, the world’s first hand-painted, animated feature film, in 2017. Recently there has been the Immersive Van Gogh, a light show based on his imagery, and I would be remiss if I did not mention the book cover of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages was printed from the image of the painting Starry, Starry Night. And these mentions are only a few of the different ways Van Gogh’s work has been used artistically in our culture.

For readers of this review, an easy way to explore the life of Vincent van Gogh is this video produced by the Van Gogh Museum.  It may set the stage.

Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum –   4:50 Minutes

When Van Gogh lived and worked in Paris for two years, he made friends with many artists who were part of the new impressionism that differed from the highly respected artists of the Hague School, sometimes known as the Barbizon School, working exclusively in the tradition of realism.

One of his favorite painters was the French artist Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), who featured peasants and rural settings in the countryside. The common themes were waterways, seascapes with boats, windmills, and canals. Millet’s work may have lingered in his mind, but along came this small stroke of paint with variations of color that would come to dominate many of the spaces in his compositions. Clearly, Van Gogh wanted to use color for its expressive value rather than make faithful replicas of the images received by the eye in realism.

It took six years and a team of professionals to create this exhibition. Scheduled to open earlier in 2020, that opening was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This exhibition is part of the Bonnie Ann Larson Modern European Artist Series. The curatorial effort was led by Dr. Jill Shaw, Head of the James Duffy Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Rebecca A. Boylan and Thomas W. Sidlik of European Art, 1850–1970 at the DIA. In her statement, Dr. Shaw says, “Van Gogh in America examines the landmark moments and trajectory of the artist becoming fully integrated within the American collective imagination, even though he never set foot in the United States.”

Van Gogh’s Chair, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 28″, The National Gallery London, 1888.

The DIA exhibition of these 74 works of art opens with The Chair as a welcoming image to the show’s first gallery. Painted in December of 1888, when the relationship between Gauguin and Van Gogh had become strained, Van Gogh paints two chairs, the second being Gauguin’s, as his dream of sharing a studio with his close friend was rapidly disintegrating. Van Gogh’s simple chair sits empty, absent of its owner, and is an infinitely lonely image. It is an extraordinary instance of propelling a most familiar object beyond the realm of still life so that it comes to represent the artist himself.

The Bedroom, Oil on Canvas, 29 x 36″, Art Institute of Chicago, 1889.

Van Gogh painted this interior three times while he stayed in the Yellow House in Arles, France, as he was particularly pleased with the bedroom where he had a bed, a small table, and two chairs. This moment marked the first time the artist had a home of his own.

He wrote to his brother, Theo, “It amused me enormously doing this bare interior. With a simplicity à la Seurat. In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green. I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones.”

Portrait of Postman Roulin, 32 x 25”,  Oil on Canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1888.

Van Gogh painted Joseph Roulin and his family several times each, and the painting here is the second version painted in early August 1888. There were at least seven portraits of Roulin, as he befriended not only the man but his entire family. He found affordability in the work of the Roulin family, for which he made several images of each person. In exchange, Van Gogh gave the Roulins one painting for each family member. One cannot imagine how the strokes of color in his beard appealed to van Gogh and this relatively new application of oil paint. The painting was acquired in 1935 by Edsel and Eleanor Ford as a gift to the DIA.

Fishing Boats on the Beach at les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Oil on Canvas, 25 x 32, Van Gogh Museum.

It was in February of 1888 that Van Gogh was living in Arles and would take excursions to Provence and the village of Les Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer.  Van Gogh would have liked to have made this painting on the beach, but the fishermen would put out to sea every morning, so he would make his drawings early and finish the painting in his apartment studio. In doing so, he could control his choice of color to his liking, using primary color juxtaposed with secondary color in the boat composition.

Starry Night (Starry Night Over the Rhone), Oil on Canvas, 28 x 36″, Musee d’ Orsay, 1888.

The DIA takes the visitor out of the exhibition with Starry Night Over the Rhone, which is just what this review will do. Just a two-minute walk from the Yellow House, painted in 1988, the subject is the night light and its effects on the river Rhone. The view from the east turn in the river towards the western shore of rocks is where Arles was built. After spending his days in the sunny fields of flowers and crops, the idea of painting at night must have intrigued Van Gogh. Here the gas lights from the town are complemented by the formation of the stars. Van Gogh writes to his brother Theo, “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.” As it turns out, The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in western art.

On March 17, 1901, 71 of Van Gogh’s paintings were displayed at a show in Paris, and his fame grew enormously. Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Johanna, had collected as many of Van Gogh’s paintings as she could but discovered that many had been destroyed or lost as Van Gogh’s mother had thrown away crates full of his art. His mother lived long enough to see her son hailed as an artistic genius.

Today, Vincent van Gogh is considered one of the greatest artists in human history.

I would like to distinguish between experiencing all the places one sees the remnants of Van Gogh’s artwork versus observing the original artwork up close in the DIA. That is one of the purposes of the museum. Educators and researchers refer to this experience as being in the presence of a “primary source.” Primary sources are what remains from the past. Aside from human memory and the unrecorded passing down of information from generation to generation, experiencing original paintings are the only way current generations can hope to understand what an authentic Van Gogh painting looks and, more importantly, feels like. In my later years, and over time, I have seen Vincent van Gogh paintings in various museums, but I never saw 74 artworks in one place. From so much that was written about him, Vincent van Gogh was a fragile and sensitive man burdened with poor health. As an artist, he became an instant soul mate to many. He was dependent and vulnerable but always willing to make himself available to his audience.

Take advantage of this opportunity to spend quality time at the Detroit Institute of Arts and join family and friends to view this extraordinary exhibition Van Gogh in America.

Installation image Van Gogh in America, Detroit Institute of Arts

Van Gogh in America celebrates the DIA’s status as the first public museum in the United States to purchase a painting by Vincent van Gogh, his Self-Portrait (1887). On the 100th anniversary of its acquisition, experience 74 authentic Van Gogh works from around the world and discover the fascinating story of America’s introduction to this iconic artist in an exhibition only at the DIA.

A full-length, illustrated catalog with essays by the exhibition curator and Van Gogh scholars will accompany the exhibition. The Detroit Institute of Arts is the exclusive venue for this exhibition.

Tickets are $7-$29 for adults; discounted prices are for residents in Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties. The DIA exhibition Van Gogh in America will run through January 22, 2022

 

 

 

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