MFA Exhibit- Henry Art Gallery

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle was the first public art museum in the state, opening in 1927. I enjoy visiting there because it usually has challenging contemporary work. The annual Masters of Fine Arts exhibit is usually especially good. Spring graduates show one or two pieces of work that represents their best effort. Pieces are selected by the students, with their thesis committees.

Stupidly however, the gallery does not allow amateur photography, so I am unable to show what the exhibit was like, and not even able to associate the artists their work. I am unable to properly acknowledge this remarkable display of creativity. This is a pet peeve. Who is damaged by amateur photography at art exhibits? Nobody benefits. It is a stupid rule.

Anyway, about 20 artists presented their work, most of it “installations” or sculpture. There was very little traditional paint on canvas. I wonder if everything has finally been said in two dimensions. I don’t believe it, but it certainly does seem strange that only about 2 out of 20 newly minted artists would think that their best work was in painting. Perhaps that reflects a bias of the faculty at UW.

One of the most memorable pieces was a white, human-sized, human-shaped figure made of cotton batting. It looked sort of like a huge voodoo doll, horizontal, “face” down, suspended from a ceiling panel by several wires which were differentially lengthened and shortened by a set of motors above. This caused the figure to slowly writhe as if in agony as it rose and fell. There seemed to be no pattern to its movements and there was no sound except that of the motors. This was all in a darkened room, making the scene sinister, suggestive of death, mummies, or torture perhaps. Behind the figure was a shattered glass wall, onto which was projected a play of light from behind. The light from behind was reflected from a mirror mounted on the wall, reflecting a projected film clip of the cotton figure rising and falling. The film clip did not seem to be related to the actual motion of the figure. I got the impression I was looking at the ghostly spirit of the cotton figure on the other side of the life and death division. Or maybe its memories. I don’t know. It didn’t obviously mean anything. But it was haunting.

A large installation on the floor of one room showed cedar blocks about 4 inches long and a half inch high, stacked irregularly up to a couple of feet high, in various organic rising and falling shapes, especially cylinders. It was slightly reminiscent of Maya Lin's work. From the center of the cylinders emerged something like blue fingers with white tips; I think they were clay. The whole thing gave me an underwater feeling, as if I were looking at a strange coral reef with blue anemones. Nothing moved, but I still had the impression that everything was undulating.

One large sculpture, in clay or fiberglass, had three figures that were half woolly sheep and half young boy, like mythical figures. They were detailed and life-like, and disturbing. The boys’ spines curved back to meet the body of the sheep just in front of the animals’ front legs. The children were young, clean, with expressive faces and big blue eyes. One was lying down, the other two just looking around, curious. They were mythical figures that didn’t really remind me of any particular myth or mythological creatures. That made them connected to realism as much as mythology and gave them shock value.

Another interesting exhibit was a set of thousands of pins stuck into a white wall. On the end of each pin was a clover leaf shape made of paper, actually cut from pages of a German history book. The flowers near the center of the display were yellowed and the ones right at the center were almost brown, as if the paper had aged, but the net effect of the whole presentation was that there was a large brown stain on the wall. Some of these “plants” extended out onto the floor, and some around the corner onto the next wall. There was also a brown dressmaker’s mannequin wearing a sort of scarf made of wire twisted into loops containing more of those yellow and brown pages from the history book. Many of its petals had fallen to the floor so it looked derelict. Was this supposed to be a political comment about Germany. A stain on German history? A formerly glorious history that has become dry, lifeless, derelict? I don’t know. It was an impressive display though, well-conceived and executed.

One other remarkable piece I remember (without any pictures!) had an organic feel to it despite being made out of thousands upon thousands of white, plastic flex-straws. Those are the drinking straws that have an accordion folded segment that allows them to be bent 90 degrees. Individual straws and bundles of two and three of them were bound by white plastic cable-ties to form a brachiating network that grew out of the wall horizontally, narrowed into a roughly cylindrical area about 3 feet from the wall, then expanded again for another 3 feet to fill a 6 foot square, red window frame. This horizontal structure is suspended from the ceiling on invisible nylon wires. If you look from the front, through the red window frame, you can see all the way through the open, somewhat geometric structure, which seems only slightly denser than the air around it. The overall effect though was like some kind of white ivy on a building, something that had grown aggressively out of the wall onto the window. This organic, plant-like impression was all the more remarkable for being achieved with plastic straws.

Nearly all the presentations were very “organic,” and by that I mean they had natural forms, shapes, and materials, generally soft materials. I saw very few right angles, few “hard” materials like glass and steel, no neon, no mechanical gadgets, no words or numbers. Everything seemed to come from nature or to reference natural forms and motions in some way. Again I have to wonder why this would be a universal among 20 graduating artists? Are they all drinking the same kool-aid? Doesn’t it seem like at least one of them would prefer to work in polished stainless steel, or do something geometric? Perhaps it is the zeitgeist. Frank Gehry comes to mind in architecture. I am not tuned into contemporary art well enough to know what the young people are thinking these days. But from this exhibit, it seems like the young people are all thinking dangerously alike.

Degas in Portland

The Portland, Oregon Art Museum has a terrific exhibition of work by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Forain until May 11, 2008. There are 110 pieces in the show, themed around ballet dancers in Paris in the late 1800’s.

The Degas pieces are spectacular. These are from his later work, after he “specialized” in dancers. The painted and drawn ballerinas are charming, bright and colorful, “easy on the eyes.” He certainly understood the female figure of that day, which is different from today’s. Professional dancers today who looked like Degas’ healthy specimens would be considered “beefy.” If you go to see pretty ballerina pictures you won’t be disappointed.

But I think most of these paintings are not about ballerinas at all. They are about the empty space that the dancers define. The ballerinas are just a device used for the difficult job of depicting three-dimensional space, empty space, on a two dimensional surface. How can that be done? It is quite a puzzle and Degas solved it, and it is amazing to see how.

His works are arranged chronologically and one can detect a period in the early 1870’s where he seems to have discovered the secret of depicting empty space. There is one piece in particular, Musicians in the Orchestra of 1872, that announces what is to come. We look over the heads of the dark, silhouetted musicians to the dancers some 50 feet away, with nothing between the musicians and the dancers but air. How do we know there is 50 feet of empty space there? I’m not sure, but it’s there. Size constancy is one cue for depth, but that wouldn't seem to be sufficient. There is no linear perspective and in fact the dancers are in front of an ostensibly flat stage curtain. So where does the 50 feet of space come from? I don’t know. It’s a miracle of painting.

Next to that piece are some paintings from a little later, by which time he had clearly caught on to the technique of painting bold, vivid emptiness. I don’t remember which piece was next, and I don’t think it was The Ballet Rehearsal of 1873, shown here, but it was something like that, where at least one third of the canvas depicts nothing but thin air. How does he make that empty space so real, so palpable? Again I can’t say exactly how it's done, but see for yourself. And talk about bold! A picture with "nothing" filling over half the scene? How could you even think of that?

There are about a half dozen ballerina bronzes, which Degas did only in wax and somebody else cast them after he died. The point of them, I believe, is, like the paintings, to show empty space. How can you sculpt empty space? It’s amazing to see how it’s done as you walk around these small sculpltures (no more than 18" high).

Whoever curated the Degas collection surely must have understood the “empty space” theme, but oddly, there is not a hint of it on any of the printed legends accompanying the works. I never use the auditory guides in museums, as their inanity just makes me want to scream, but it is possible that the empty space theme is mentioned on those devices.

I was most impressed by Degas. But I also greatly enjoyed the few posters, paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec. I like the colors and the composition, and his technique of exaggeration, such as by putting the dancer’s leg up so high that you wonder if it is connected to her body, as in this poster, which was on display at the PAM.

I was less enamored by the Forain work. He seemed to be more of an illustrator and I read that he was at one time a political cartoonist, and his drawings and paintings have both a cartoony look and the sociopolitical “message” of an editorialist. Many scenes show a sleazy fatcat producer fawning over a young ballerina. Apparently, in the late 1800’s Paris dance scene, girls had to find a financial “sponsor” to support their dance career, and it is obvious from Forain’s drawings that the older men were interested in more than just philanthropy. The women’s plight is tragic and depressing and I have to say it was an emotional downer to look at all these scenes, however handsomely they are drawn.

The rest of the PAM is worth a look too. Their permanent collection is strong in works of the last two centuries and in 20th century sculpture. The PAM is one of my three favorite art museums in the western U.S. (with Seattle and Tucson). Find PAM at http://www.portlandartmuseum.org/