Posts Tagged ‘Norton Simon Museum’

When you have a new addition to any family, its only right that the newcomer is introduced with an appropriate amount of fanfare.  Everyone else should know who (or what) they’re looking at or interacting with and the newbie should feel nothing but welcomed.  So now that the Norton Simon Museum has newly acquired two important paintings into its collection, it’s time for the all-important (and all interesting) welcoming lecture.  This Saturday, April 10 at 4pm, Debra Burchett-Lere, the Director of the Sam Francis Foundation, will administer a lecture entitled “Sam Francis: The 1950s and the Basel Mural Paintings in Context.”

Sam Francis, a native Californian painter, is best known for his contemporary works that have been long likened to those of Mark Rothko.  He worked in California, Paris, and was, later in his life, inspired by the teachings of Zen Buddhism.  His Basel Mural III and Fragments 1 and 2 have made their way to their new home in Pasadena at the Norton Simon and will assuredly fit well within their new gang of paintings.  During the lecture, Burchett-Lere will discuss the man, his life and work in France, and the 1950s while leaving time, we’re sure for your questions.

Whether you’re already a fan of Sam Francis’ or just looking to add a new painter into your favorites, this lecture is the one to attend (especially for those who don’t love lectures).  Talk about a welcome wagon.

The “Sam Francis: The 1950s and the Basel Mural Paintings in Context” will be held at the Norton Simon Museum on Saturday, April 10 at 4pm.  For more information, please click here.

When most people think of portraiture, images of aristocracy adorned in their finest medieval robes atop a crackling grand fireplace in some remote European castle probably come to mind.  When I mention that I focused on 18th-19th Century portraiture in college, people look as if they’re about to fall asleep before I can finish the sentence.  But this past Saturday, I attended a lecture at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum presented by John Klein, Associate Professor from Washington University in St. Louis, that reminded me of the magnetism and presence of portraits. In his lecture, “Matisse, Picasso and Beyond: How Portraiture Survived Modernism,” he examined the means by which the art of human representation prevailed through an era defined by its antipathy to historical convention.  Through the study of modernist masters like Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti, Klein arrives at a universal truth: human beings will always and forever be obsessed with themselves, others, and how others perceive them.

“Damn Portraits!” began Professor Klein, quoting Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—an abrupt and honest exclamation that served as a perfect prelude to the difficult battle that portraiture was doomed to fight once the modern age descended on a timeless artistic tradition.  Ingres, like many artists of his time, despised portraiture.

He often complained that the overwhelming number of commissions from high society kept him from focusing on “more important” subject matter.  In the 19th Century, it seemed as if the only demographic that had an affinity for portraiture was the social elite.  When the 20th Century began, many creative figures decried the art form’s declining relevance.  Portraiture posed a series of difficult questions for the artist: How does one capture the complexity of human identity? How can an inner quality be expressed outwardly?  How can a still representation do justice to a personality trait that is defined by its movement? Modernism, says Klein, provided the platform that was so desperately needed: a movement that joined portraiture with the abstraction of the avant-garde.

Through an array of examples, Klein revealed how artists like Picasso and Matisse were uninterested with the centrality of the sitter, which historically would have been fundamental.  In works like Girl with Green Eyes (1908), Matisse blended his sitters into a decorative pattern where no single component of the painting could dominate.  Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (1906), on the other hand, showcases both the artist and the sitter, serving as a visual statement of the height and legitimacy of both Stein’s and Picasso’s careers. Klein taught the audience that through the execution of her face, as was common with many of Picasso’s portraits, the artist imposed a mask-like quality that hardly resembled Stein’s genuine appearance. The primitivization of her face is a symbolic and telling mark of the beginning of an important aesthetic shift.

After the First World War, artists became increasingly cynical of humanistic values, and rapid advances in photographic technology threatened representational portraiture.  Expressive abstraction began to take hold, providing the artist with infinite ways to communicate power, status and legitimacy—and the line between art and vulgarity became harder to define.  Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995) is an example of how modern portraiture could become a PR dream come true. Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, a woman convicted of murdering multiple innocent child victims, is comprised of tiny flesh colored hands, hands meant to represent those of the children that she murdered.

Portraiture’s many levels of expression, as in Myra, have the potential for endless symbolism and emotion.  I could feel the tension in the lecture hall when Myra came on screen, and I could see that the man next to me was trying to conceal his goose bumps.

Professor Klein’s lecture was most certainly a personal highlight of my many years of studying and appreciating portraiture. Regardless of one’s knowledge of art, he was able to communicate his subject with admirable passion and vigor.  Professor Klein carried the double-barreled theme of portraiture and its modernist survival from the turn of the 20th Century through the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was quite frankly one of the most fun Saturdays I’ve had in a while, and I don’t think I was alone.  The jam-packed lecture hall’s enthusiastic applause was proof enough that nobody was falling asleep before Klein could finish his sentences.

-By Brittany Krasner

The Norton Simon’s calendar of educational lectures will certainly expand your art related intellectual repertoire.  For more information on upcoming lectures, please visit their website.

In art history, there are only a few things you can count on.  We argue and debate everything from dating ancient Greek statues to the definition of post-modernism.  But the Norton Simon Museum shows that there is one thing you can count on: portraiture.

To accompany the installation of Jean-Augustine-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville, the Norton Simon Museum presents Gaze: Portraiture after Ingres.  Curated by Leah Lehmbeck, the exhibition contains close to 150 paintings, sculpture, and photographs from their collection.

The concept is simple, but the execution is quite rich and a great excuse for the Norton Simon to bring out great works from their inventory.  Starting from portraits that were directly influenced by Ingres in the early to mid-19th century, we see this genre develop from those academic, commissioned paintings of Ingres’s era to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work to the portraits of 20th century masters and eventually pure abstraction.

The exhibition succeeds using portraiture as a case study of not only the development of this genre, but also it delineates both the apparent and subtle stylistic changes in art of the past two hundred years.  It includes such artists as Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigiliani, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol among others.

Portraiture.  When light installations and performance art fail you, it’s one thing you can count on.

Gaze: Portraiture after Ingres at the Norton Simon Museum closes April 5th, 2010.  Click here for more info.

Image: Pablo Picasso, Woman with a Book, 1932;

The Norton Simon Foundation;

© 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I like to think that the most biggest, baddest people, such as ol’ Leroy Brown, tend to have the biggest, baddest hearts of gold. You know, those cranky folk who like to make your life a living hell (complete with unnecessary bossiness and general grumpiness), but manage to give you a rave review The Devil Wears Prada-style when your back is turned.  I wish all haters were that deceptive!It seems as if the Norton Simon Museum has a few of those devils turn good in their pocket.  In a small exhibition titled, Divine Demons: Wrathful Deities in Buddhist Art, we get to see a darker side of Buddhist iconography that will make you think twice before entering the exhibition space.  That is until you warm up to the idea that you are among friends.  All those familiar depictions of smiling, chubby Buddhas and peaceful bodhisattvas will be tucked away in another gallery.  Instead, their much tougher and scarier counterparts make way in the form of sculptures and paintings.

The Norton Simon describes these monstrous depictions as “demonic divine.”  They serve as protectors and guardians of the Buddhist faith and are often shown stomping on personified obstacles or holding weapons du jour.  So fair warning, think twice before you get on their bad side.

When was the last time you thought, “Oooooh, cute crown of skulls”?

Divine Demons: Wrathful Deities in Buddhist Art at the Norton Simon Museum closes March 8, 2010. Admission is free for everyone on the first Friday of every month from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm!

Image: Mahakala, 15th century, bronze with pigment.

It is shown courtesy of the Norton Simon Art Foundation.

At this point in the summer, most of the activities that attract me have lots to do with air conditioning.  The August heat definitely calls for a few hours of well-deserved indoor entertainment with the thermostat set to a cool 70 degrees (or below).  And it’s an added bonus when those events are free!  I highly recommend braving the outdoors (only as far as your car) and heading to the sweet, cool safety of the Norton Simon in Pasadena or Book Soup on Sunset Blvd.

Every other Friday night at the Norton Simon Museum, you are musically transported to another world – last time we told you about their free concerts, they were sending us to Spain.  This week, you’re off to pastoral France for a classical Baroque concert (think Provence, think Louis XIV).  Then on August 28, you’re headed inside the colorful inspirations of Picasso and Russian composer Alexander Scrabian with a performance of Scrabian’s 24 Preludes from Opus 11.  Okay, so these concerts are held in the garden, not beneath that coveted air conditioning vent, but the museum itself stays quite cool – plus by the time it starts at 7pm, you’ll be hankering for some fresh air!

Then, careen around Sunset Blvd. and into the parking lot for Book Soup to hear one of their many prized authors give you an earful (in the best possible sense) about their newest creations.  Tonight at 7pm, for example, you’ll see Laurie Sandell chat about her The Imposter’s Daughter, a True Memoir which chronicles her childhood growing up with a father who painted grandiose and fictitious pictures of his life to her and everyone around them.  Only later in life did she discover that he wasn’t who she thought he was at all.  On Saturday, August 15 at 5pm, head over again to see How to Break a Terrorist. Sunday afternoon at 4pm, you’ll listen to Maggie Anton discuss her book Rachel: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France, a story of a Jewish scholar’s daughter in France and the tumultuous, unpredictable events she endures.

All in all, staying cool in LA this month shouldn’t prove too difficult – and by “cool”, I mean both your temperature and your personality.  Who knew staying inside could be so interesting or productive?

The Norton Simon Museum concerts are held every other Friday evening at 7pm in their garden.  For more information, please click here.

Book Soup’s readings and author signings happen very often, so please call (310) 659-3110 or click here for more information and their calendar.

We hate the word “stay-cation.”  Trying to cover up the sad fact that many of us aren’t traveling much these days with a made-up word that sounds like the title of a children’s book isn’t working.  Having said that, wouldn’t you just love to at least feel like you’re sitting in an intimate concert hall in Spain listening to music and watching flamenco?  Well just in case you haven’t booked your ticket to Barcelona yet, the Norton Simon Museum in nearby Pasadena (no airport lines, no baggage claims) has a concert to suit you just fine.

Let’s get one thing straight right away: it’s free!  The “Summer Night in Spain” concert features flautist Salpy Kerkonian and harpist Andrea Puente playing classical music to which a flamenco dancer will do her thing.  Playing compositions from Enrique Granados, Jacques Ibert, Daniel Catan, and Arturo Marquez, this will be a night to remember.  For some, consider this a primer before heading off for the summer on your travels and for others, think of this as the closest a “stay-cation” will ever come to bringing you to Spain.  Now we just need to find you a local spot to run with the bulls.

The “Summer Night in Spain” concert is tomorrow evening, Friday July 24 at 7:00pm at the Norton Simon Museum.  For more information, please click here.