Baltimore Museum of Art: Australia and Oceania

 I don't care what museum you visit in the United States, I can say with some certainty that you will rarely be able to find any works of art reflective of the historical or cultural regions of Australia, Papau-New Guinea, New Zealand or any of the multitudinous island cultures across the Pacific Ocean (Oceania).  It's taken half a century just to elevate the art of Latin America, Native Americans and Africa.  Asia is the closest thing we have to an exception, and even then we're talking about the cultures of eastern Asia: Japan, China and Korea.  

We've been taught both explicitly, but more insidiously--implicitly--that non-European Art is not really Art.  It's craft.  It's decorative.  It can be pretty, but it's not the Mona Lisa.  And this is a damnable lie.  Because it doesn't need to be the Mona Lisa to be just as powerful, as mysterious, as deserving of veneration.  Like all art, Art is the expression of the human mind and heart to capture from this world a thing that transcends this world.

When you enter the ground floor of the BMA from the Annex (Main) entrance, the corridor to the right of the help desk leads you to an area where galleries of dedicated to the art of these lesser included folks.  The Asian Galleries features works from the aforementioned trio as well as South Central Asian nations like India, Iraq and Iran.  There are two areas of African art which have over the years morphed to include both 19th century traditional works along side of contemporary works.  But the first gallery contains works obtained from Australia and Oceania.  It's a humble offering, but honestly, outside of the Seattle Art Museum, one of the few attempts at displaying works from this region I've encountered.

LEFT

"Post in the Form of a Male Figure with a Fish and a Bird," Early 20th Century

Anonymous Artist, New Ireland Province, Papua-New Guinea

RIGHT

"Chief's Ceremonial Walking Stick," 20th Century

Anonymous Maori Artist, New Zealand

DETAIL:  "Maori Chief's Ceremonial Walking Stick"

"Chief's Funerary Figure (Uli)," 19th Century

Anonymous Mandak Artist, Latengai Island, Papua-New Guinea

"Breastplate (Civa Vonovono)," circa 1820-1850

Anonymous Tongan Artist, Fiji

"Storyboard Depicting Ademei And The Crocodile," 1950-1955

Ngiraibuuch Skedong, 1917 - circa 1989

Palau

Reflection:  The moment I saw this, I was struck by the crazy cartoonish nature of the images.  They felt like caricatures of enslaved African Americans.  The entire image was both other and oddly familiar.  Then I read the backstory.  Objects like this were created to memorialize major events in the life of a community and were displayed at structures you could call community centers.  The creation of these structures ended with the westernization of island culture, though existing community centers with their storyboards remained as they fell into disrepair and were abandoned.  Skedong revived this artform; however, he also incorporated aspects derived from his love of American Comic Books.   

Baltimore Museum of Art: Random Faves

 And six to grow on!  Some random discoveries, some beloved old friends.

"Moonlight On The Canal," 1856

Johan Barthold Jongkind, 1819 - 1891

"The Nineteenth Century," 1868

Frank Blackwell Mayer, 1810 - 1874

"Fields and Woods in Spring," 1894

Hugh Bolton Jones, 1848 - 1927

"Old City, I," 1912

Egon Schiele, 1890 - 1918

"The Drapery Maker," 1948

Haywood Bill Rivers, 1922 - 2001

"Artist In Greenland," 1935-1960

Rockwell Kent, 1882 - 1971

DETAIL: "Artist In Greenland"

Baltimore Museum of Art: The George A. Lucas Collection

 In an octagonal room just off of the central atrium toward the modern annex entrance, the Baltimore Museum of Art had installed a handful of works from the George A. Lucas Collection.  Lucas was an art dealer with ties to Baltimore who lived in Paris working as a broker of art for American clients.  Born in 1824, he spent most of the last half of the 19th century there, before returning to the United States and dying here in 1909.  The entirety of his collection came as a gift to the BMA in 1996 and included over 2,000 works!  This gallery contained 9 or 10.  Here are 4.

"Afterglow On The Banks Of The Nile," circa 1840-1848

Jean-Adrien Guignet, 1816 - 1854

DETAIL: "Afterglow On The Banks Of The Nile"

"Little Girl," circa 1850

Alfred Dehodencq, 1822 - 1882

"Portrait Of Joseph," circa 1850

Edouard Armand-Dumaresq, 1826 - 1895

"April Showers On Sunday Morning," circa 1880

Armand Charnay, 1844 - 1916

Baltimore Museum of Art: The Presence of Women

Having previously mentioned the concerted effort of the Baltimore Museum of Art to share a diverse and representative selection of works, allow me to share 5 paintings by women whose talents I would never have been aware of save for this egalitarian approach to ART.  The works span a life--70 years from 1884 to 1954.

"The New Model," circa 1884

Rosalie Lorraine Gill, 1867 - 1898

AMERICAN

We are in the intimate studio of William Merritt Chase, one of the most prolific, celebrated and sought after American impressionist artists of his era.  He not only painted, he also taught painting for many years at a school he initially christened the Chase School, but that when on to become the Parsons School of Design today.  He hobnobbed with some of the most successful artists of the turn of 20th Century, and among the thousands of his students over the years was one, Georgia O'Keeffe.  Somewhere in the milieu, Rosalie Loraine Gill showed up.  

She began her studies at age 12.  She went on to great success both in the United States where she exhibited at the The National Academy of Design and The Society of American Artists in 1884, AND at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.  By the early 1880's, she'd established a residence in Paris where she also found success with paintings shown in the Paris Salon in 1888, and the next year at the Exhibition Universelle in Paris.  

She split her time between New York, Paris and Baltimore where she'd established gallery agents.  In 1897 she married Rene Lara receiving the honorific "Countess of Chabau".  Less than four months later, on January 26, 1989, she died of unknown causes, and she was buried the next day

In consideration of the subject matter of the painting, it is an intriguing passing of the torch.  

"Theater Posters, Ikao, Japan," 1900

Lilla Cabot Perry, 1848 - 1933

AMERICAN

Full disclosure, I once had the tremendous honor of co-teaching an adult Bible Study with a distant cousin of Lydia "Lilla" Cabot Perry.  She knew her as a child.  Lilla was born into a Boston Brahman heritage and benefitted widely from the connections such a start in life offers.  She grew up knowing the company of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell--the later of which was a relative on her mother's side. 

Never in want of money, the death of her father opened up even more unfettered opportunities including studying in Paris where she developed a close friendship with Camille Pissarro.  Her career took her again and again to France, back to Japan and in the most exclusive circles in the United States.  At the time of her death, in 1933, she'd participated in nine prestigious exhibitions beginning with the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition.

"Peonies," circa 1918

Margrethe Jensen, 1876 - 1926

NORWEGIAN

Her death at 50 shocked the local art community of Oslo, of which, she had played an ever important roll in since her latter 30's.  Trained in the most prestigious art school of the era in Oslo, she eventually did what so many in her generation did.  She eloped to Paris in the late days of the 19th century.  What she did in Paris, with whom and to what outcome remain lost to history.  What we do know is that she returned to Oslo around the time of the start of the First World War.  

Among her contemporaries, Edvard Munch was probably the closest and most recognizable.  Though considered a prolific painter, "Peonies" is the only work by Jensen that is on display in a major museum of art.  At the Baltimore Museum of Art, the work is part of the seminal Cohen Collection.

"Michael Greenwood At Pett Rectory," 1950

Sylvia Sleigh, 1916 - 2010

WELSH-AMERICAN

After being born in Wales, she grew up to attend formal art training in London.  There she met her first husband, fellow artists, Michael Greenwood.  This painting is an example of her budding overt feminist approach to art.  By posing him on a couch in an "odalisque" manner.  The more she evolved, the more she expressed her reason d'etre in placing men in vulnerable and submissive poses.  This peaked in the 1970's-80's with a series of works derivative of classic compositions where nude women were replaced by nude men.

Her activism blossomed into support of many women's art collectives, and culminated in her own collecting of artworks created by women.  From philanthropy to patronage, Sleigh dedicated both her life and resources to elevating women in the arts.

"Neighbor's Pride," 1954

Helen Louise Beccard, 1903 - 1994
AMERICAN

Assignment:  I've told you about four amazing female artists nearly lost to history.  Discover this one on your own!  Do the Google thing if you care.  Tell me what you find and what resonates with you.

BMA: Benjamin West

 One of my favorite paintings at the Baltimore Museum of Art of this self-portrait of Benjamin West.  Long before I visited art museums, I collected stamps...

Baltimore Museum of Art: A Cultural Gem in Charm City

 I've had such a life in so many ways, and certainly ART has been one of them.  I have always had the ability to be creative.  As a child I quickly distinguished myself as one of the class artists.  Without a clue what to do with my life when I entered College I declared Art as my major.  It was not a good fit at all.  I ended up with a minor in Art, and that's fitting.  I confused art with mimicry.

I thought if I could draw something, or paint it to look like what it was, then I was making art.  Of course art is SO MUCH MORE.  Thankfully my inclination combined with so many acts of fate until I developed my understanding.  I've known real artists.  I've seen and enjoyed so much art.  I've learned about art as a continuum from cave paintings hidden beneath fields of lavender in southern France and hand outlines spat upon rock canyons in the outback of Australia to the most contemporary of artists.  

The years after college gave me opportunities few have to experience Exhibition Openings for many years at the National Gallery of Art, The MET in NYC, and even the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  A pair of shelves in my living room are squeezed tightly with dozens and dozens of exhibition catalogs. They represent the shows whose openings I attended (they always give you a free copy) and those I have traveled to see on my own.   I have been to many art museums so many times that I know my way around them as if they were part of my home.  It's always an opportunity for succor when I am exploring, making new connections, visiting old friends and discovering new ones.  

One of my favorite games is to enter a gallery with works from a certain period, but of which I am unfamiliar and then guess the artist!  It always ends in one of two ways.  I'm right!--who an ego boost.  Or, I'm wrong, BUT I have something entirely new to consider.  Let me give a couple examples from my visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art today.  In one gallery of works by American artists 1900 to 1950, I encountered a large oil painting of picnickers enjoying a Sunday afternoon from the vantage of an overlook of a river with steep hills on the opposite side.  The paints were rich, and on the darker side with a very strong presence of ultramarine blue.  I based my guess on the blue, because the subject wasn't anything like I'd seen this artist do before.  It was George Bellows, and I nailed it.  

In another gallery an image of seafood piled on the sand of a beach below cliffs.  Same time frame, and I thought Marsden Hartley--but it was Henri Matisse!!  Holy French Master, Batman!  And then I thought what are the connections between Hartley and Matisse?  Hmmm.  

I went to the BMA hoping to see the exhibition: "Amy Sherald: American Sublime"; however, I discovered at the front desk that it was sold out.  That it is sold out for the next couple of weeks.  How I wish the BMA would post this information on their Goddamned Website, but they don't.  Fortunately, the BMA has more than enough to occupy and justify a visit any day of the week.

So plan B--enjoy what is there.  Look for things you haven't spent time with before.  Make some new friends.  One of the things that the BMA does as well as any museum --they rotate their collections.  There are a couple of notable exceptions like their amazing Antioch mosaics, the heart of the Cone sisters collection, and the works in their sculpture garden, but go back after a year and you'll see new and different works in almost every gallery.

The other thing that they also excel at is featuring artists from neglected demographics.  Woman artists.  Artists of Color.  LGBTQIA+ artists.  They take their mission as a cultural institution for all the people of Baltimore very seriously.

My visit began and ended with this spectacular chandelier by Mexican artist Raul de Nieves that presided over the main entrance.  Titled "Beautiful Nightmare," juxtaposed against the whimsical monumental Stained Glass of the upper foyer, it was a sensory extravaganza.  

Baltimore Museum of Art: Derrel Ellis -- Regeneration

What a beautiful and poignant introduction to an artist whose life ended way too soon.  Ellis grew up in a home with a father who was an accomplished professional photographer.  He was well versed in the art of composition, contrast and emphasis.  Principles of design that no doubt informed his own personhood growing up gay in a home and a place when being homosexual meant being an outsider among outsiders.  In the exhibit, there's a place that speaks to the importance of his friends, of the family he created in place of the one he lost. Ellis died in 1992 of AIDS at the age of 33.  This is his first comprehensive exhibition.  

untitled (Couple Embracing)

c. 1980-1983

Watercolor and black roller ball pen on paper

untitled (Friends)

circa 1990

Brush and black ink, wash, and graphite on paper

untitled (Grandmother Lilian Ellis)

circa 1981-1985

Brush and black ink, wash, and graphite on paper

Self-Portrait after photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

1989

Brush and black ink and wash on paper

Baltimore Museum of Art: Omar Ba -- Political Animals

 One of the greatest things about the Baltimore Museum of Art is how it embraces its mission of bringing a full range of international and national contemporary artists to the public's attention.  Currently the works of Omar Ba and Darrell Ellis are featured in focus exhibitions.  

Ba is a Senegalese painter whose works reflect a limited palate and an intricate, intimate and engaging compositional style.  Many works at first glance appear to have elements of tatted lace and embroidery work suggesting the idea of quilting, of assemblage of repurposed components, a constructed community, a redemption.  When you read about the author's life and inspirations, you recognize aspects within the works reflecting the contemporary realities and controversies of life in a modern west African city like Dakar--issues inextricably tied to the larger world of international greed, exploitation and political power.  A corrupt and unjust world.  And yet, I was drawn to the tenderness and universal humanity expressed in the figures Ba nearly always builds this paintings around.  It seemed to suggest the resilience of the people, their ability to retain their dignity and transcend these circumstances beyond their control.  Like the proverbial onion, the more you peel one of Ba's paintings, the more you discover to wonder at.  

This is Ba's first solo exhibition at a major American Art Museum, it is hard to imagine that it will be his last.  These 15 works will be on exhibit into April of 2023.  

Compartment-aller simple 3 (One-Way Trip #3), 2022

Oil, acrylic, colored pencil, gel pen and white correction fluid on canvas

Baltimore Museum of Art: Coming Attractions: The John Waters' Collection

Visited the Baltimore Museum of Art today with friends.  One of the impetuses was a recent visit they had made from which my friend spoke of this special exhibition.  "Coming Attractions: The John Waters' Collection" is not only a tongue in cheek nod to the Baltimore icon's work in cinema, but a reminder that the works have all been bequeathed to the BMA upon his death.  

Among the works presented, the motif of the phallus is rather ... present...dominant...evident, swelling, throbbing, LARGE! throughout the works.  Once you see it, and it does not take a genius to see it!  You see it everywhere!  From something as pedestrian and innocuous as a coat hook, to the facile column of a child's stuffed toy.  As one of my friends agreed during a discussion of this, "The man loves his penises."

But what I loved most of all was that, works by artists like Andy Warhol and Peter Hujar notwithstanding, the collection features artists of little note in the wider world.  This brilliant artist in his right, chose works that he found delightful regardless of what anyone else thought of them.  And in time, the entirety of the collection tells a story that became immensely valuable.  Interestingly enough, the Baltimore Museum of Art has a track record of this sort of thing.  Their entire modern art wing is predicated on the collection of the Cone Sisters, who amassed a group of over 3,000 post impressionists European works when no one thought artists like Matisse and Gauguin would actually amount to much.

From the exhibit, "Coming Attractions: The John Waters Collection," selected works.

"Outtake from Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood," 1990

Mike Kelley

"Pink Thing," 2010

Brett Reichman

[I missed the appellation of this work...]

It reminded me of Kukla, from the seminal Chicago children's puppet show, "Kulka, Fran and Ollie".  I can't help by imagine the Mr. Waters also saw that as a child.  Who knows?  Art--it just connects dots of meaning when it's any good.

Baltimore Museum of Art: Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

Salman Toor is the other special exhibition at the BMA that I wanted to see. Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983. As a gay man, he didn't exactly find a ready audience for his ideas, let alone his art. The thing that I love about this particular exhibit is its immediacy. The artist painted several works specifically for this exhibition based on painting in the BMA's collection of 17th through 19th century European Art. In do so, Toor's intention is to turn the tables on the subject matter and create an alternate perspective on the composition that is not simply not European, but particularly South Asian and Queer. Now don't over-read into this. None of his work is particularly erotic, and if you think it is, then may respectfully suggest that this is a topic for you to discuss with your therapist! Yet, it is certain sexuality positive. And, yes, there is a difference.

A nice collection of his work can be found in a trio of galleries between the Cohen Sisters collection of post-impressionist masters and the contemporary art wing. Others that were painted specifically for the exhibition hang throughout the 17th-19th century European Art galleries in the company of the works they inspired.

One of the delightful things about the exhibition was the number of visitors, young folks mostly, of South Central Asian heritage.  Under-riding conversations was a palpable joy, a shared sense of pride in having Toor's works featured in this way.  In some cases they as much as said so to one another.  It was a good feeling.

Now, what struck me most about his work was the plethora of ways his work felt derivative of other artists.  Lots of other artists for all manner of diverse reasons.  I found myself seeing clear comparisons between his paintings and those of Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard, Edward Hopper, Philip Guston, Charles Burchfield, and George Bellows!  Now, I grant you that part of what Toor does is appropriate ideas, but I was overwhelmed by these connections even before I read the blurb about his process, inspirations and intentions.  

It's a very interesting show, and it only has two weeks left before it ends.

Dad and Son, 2020

This painting is evocative of so much!  The Madonna and Child motif rife in European art for centuries.  And such an air of tenderness, it's striking.  When examining the use of 'tally marks" to create depth and movement coupled with the compassionate treatment of the subject, I was immediately reminded of Van Gogh's early painting, especially the ones of the potato pickers.  

Back Lawn, 2021

The accompanying text associated the inspiration for this work to a painting by the Indian Mughal artists  (circa 1730 - 1750).  The painting is titled, "Krishna and the Gopis Play Hide-and-Seek".  Further the architecture of the building is based on the artist's childhood home.  In the Mughal tradition, garden scenes are common, and the inclusion of lover who are meeting clandestinely to frolic among the greenery is common.  

Now while this makes sense, for whatever reason, I was also taken to Edward Hopper's masterwork in the Chicago Art Institute "Nighthawk's Date".  The night scene was an illuminated "inner" area and the suggestion of a clandestine rendezvous.  

The Women, 2021

What strikes me about this painting is the title.  Clearly there are three women lounging on the bed.  A cursory glance might suggest that a young girls is standing before the dresser with its objects of feminine make-up averting her eyes from the mirror.  But look closer.  I don't think it's a girl at all.  I think it's a boy.

Cemetery with Dog, 2022

I defy you not to see the hidden language of sound in this work that is the hallmark of works by the artist Charles Burchfield.  Period. 

Pillow Fight, 2022

Baltimore Museum of Art: Oletha DeVane

There is an alcove in the upstairs facade off of the Levys' Foyer at the Baltimore Museum of Art that hosts a rotation of sculptural works. Oletha DeVane's obelisk sculpture "Saint for My City" resides there for now. It is meant as an homage to gun violence and its victims in Baltimore.