O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador Williamstown. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Williamstown. Mostrar todas as postagens

sexta-feira, 11 de julho de 2014

Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts: ja fomos e voltaremos

Um must. No outono passado, Carmen Lícia saímos todo um fim de semana em direção ao norte apenas para cumprir um programa eminentemente cultural: ir a uma exposição especial sobre a obra de Georgia O'Keefe, em Glenns Falls, upperstate New York, perto do Lake George, justamente, e depois de volta ao sul, em direção às montanhas do Berkshire, para ver este instituto de arte, no noroeste de Massachusetts, que estava com uma exposição especial sobre Winslow Homer (mas toda a coleção de arte do museu é excepcional).
Voltaremos agora a Williamstown, para esta reinauguração.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida



ART REVIEW

A Place of Serene Excitement, Inside and Out

Clark Art Institute Reopens With New and Renovated Space



Slide Show | Clark Art Institute A look at renovations at the museum in Williamstown, Mass.
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — In a time of hubristic museum expansionism, the beloved if rather fusty Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute here has managed something distinctly surprising: It has gotten bigger andbetter.
To a great extent the Clark, which is known especially for its holdings in French Impressionism and 19th-century academic painting plus a handful of Renaissance masterpieces, has done this by doubling down, intensifying but also elaborating its founders’ mission: the individualistic contemplation of art within domestically scaled spaces in a pastoral setting. Sounds pretty soft, I guess. But now, it has been finely tempered into a sharp reprimand of several noxious museum trends, including giantism, spectacle and pandering to the public. At the least, it should give the most expansion-prone museum directors pause.
What has been achieved at the Clark is not without flaws. Nonetheless, Michael Conforti, its director of 20 years, and his trustees have fashioned their museum into a welcoming, comfortable place, where looking at art is the first order of business, environmental responsibility has become a lived commitment, and education is an increasingly multileveled project. The directors and trustees of every art museum in the country should schedule a visit to the Clark sooner rather than later. I am almost certain the experience would stimulate fresh thinking about what their own museums can be, regardless of size, location or architectural ambition.
The Clark has moved cautiously. Since adopting a master plan and enlisting the Japanese architect Tadao Ando in 2001 and adding the New York architect Annabelle Selldorf to the team in 2007, it has built two new Ando buildings and refurbished its two existing ones from the wall studs out (Ms. Selldorf’s purview). Working with Reed Hilderbrand, landscape architects from Cambridge, Mass., it has reconfigured its 140-acre campus, planting 1,000 trees, protecting wetlands and extending its elaborate network of footpaths. Also new are robust sustainability programs, including seven new geothermal wells to reduce heating costs.
Now, the master plan’s centerpiece is in place: Mr. Ando’s new, serene, low-slung Clark Center, opened on July 4 with an inaugural show, and it, too, is a gem. It is an exhibition of over 30 millenniums-old bronzes that are pinnacles of Chinese culture from the Shanghai Museum and rarely seen outside it.
But the exemplary redo by Ms. Selldorf also makes the original buildings and collections shine. For the first time, the Clark’s Winslow Homer paintings and its recently enriched holdings in George Inness works have their own gallery. And familiar masterpieces have been given a new power to stun, notably Piero della Francesca’s majestic “Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Angels,” the greatest example of this Renaissance artist’s work in this country and was seen at the Frick Collection last year.
You approach the new Clark Center along smooth walls of red granite that can feel a bit daunting. But a reward is imminent. The first thing you see through the museum’s new main entrance is the mesmerizing view of a broad terrace overlooking three stepped reflecting pools. (They cleverly disguise an elaborate water recycling system.) This breathtaking vista imposes a kind of Zen calm even before you know it, and announces the museum’s priorities. You are being slowed down, the better to contemplate art and nature.
The new Clark Center provides a climate-controlled loading dock, a bookstore and the museum’s first real cafe as well as 11,000 square feet for temporary exhibitions in three galleries. The smallest, overlooking a reflecting pool, holds “Cast for Eternity: Annual Ritual Bronzes From the Shanghai Museum.” Spanning the 18th to the first century B.C., these containers held food, wine or water during ritual ceremonies.
They offer a diversity unmatched by American museums, forming the best initiation into Chinese bronze you may ever see. Vividly encapsulating the evolution of different vessel forms and surface decorations, they exude a suave yet undeniable fierceness, and not just because so many of their shapes and patterns are based on animals.
On Aug. 2, an exhibition of Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture from the National Gallery of Art in Washington will open in the Clark Center’s other galleries, which are below grade but get some natural light from large window wells (though the larger gallery is marred by a diagonal wall).
Another part of the reopening celebration is “Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith,” a highly focused show of painted steel works from the early 1960s that are among Smith’s most colorful and abstract sculptures. It can be seen in the small galleries of the first Ando building, the Lunder Center at Stone Hill, which opened in 2008 and also houses the Williamstown Art Conservation Center.
As important as the new Ando buildings are, an equally big story is Ms. Selldorf’s transformations — one complete, one continuing — of the interiors of its two existing buildings, the 1955 neoclassical marble temple designed by the architect Daniel Deverell Perry, which houses the permanent collection, and the red granite Brutalist monster by Pietro Belluschi that was attached to the temple’s side in 1973 and whose reworking will be finished next spring. Called the Manton Research Center, it houses a large research library used by visiting scholars and students in the graduate program in art history co-sponsored by the Clark and Williams College.
From the new Clark Center an enclosed corridor leads visitors into a new glass-walled lobby for the temple. After one more set of doors, you’re inside the original Clark, now formally called the Museum Building, which looks pretty much as its founders envisioned it, only more so.
It has been subtly but extensively reworked, including lighting and environmental systems, with an additional 2,200 square feet of exhibition space derived from converted offices and preparation areas. Stairways have been removed, and doorways moved, added or merely implied: The long corridors that wrapped around the two central galleries — one for Impressionist, the other for academic painting — have been broken up with short walls that create an effective illusion of galleries.
Some wall colors — lavender for the large Impressionist gallery, deep purple for the academics — might be improved, and devoting two new galleries to the silver collection seems a bit of a waste. But a third gallery devoted to the Clarks’ collection of European porcelain is radiantly beautiful. This gallery offers the bonus of a knockout painting by Murillo — usually off view because of its large size — though its placement here is further proof that the silver galleries might be put to better use.
But there is really little to complain about. Degas’s bronze sculpture (with gauze tutu) “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” has its own small gallery, which intensifies its physical and psychic realism. Nearby hangs one of several new gifts, Odilon Redon’s poetic “Head of a Woman With a Vase of Flowers.”
Perhaps the best change of all is that it is possible to get deliriously lost in these galleries.
The 2015 reopening of the Manton Research Center should put a final feather in the Clark’s cap. This building will contain a gallery devoted to works on paper and its penthouse may become a restaurant overlooking the campus. But most promising of all, its central triple-height atrium will become a generous public reading room, where visitors can browse art magazines, books and catalogs, as well as online resources.
The research library will expand into this space in a novel manner: Ms. Selldorf plans to line its upper level with bookshelves — out of the public’s reach but very much on display — available for the time being only to staff, students and scholars on narrow walkways.
It is amazing to look up into this expanse, still full of scaffoldings, and realize that in many other museums it would serve as an event space. The idea that at the Clark, people cannot only read about art but also look upward to the means of further study seems little short of radical.

terça-feira, 13 de agosto de 2013

Passeios de fim de semana, 2: Winslow Homer em Williamstown, upperstate MA

Masterpieces by Winslow Homer on View at the Clark This Summer

‘Making Art, Making History’ to Showcase Almost 200 Works

Williamstown, MA—The greatest collection of works by Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910) assembled by one person since the artist’s death—and one of the leading collections of any art museum in the United States—will be featured this summer at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History explores the artist’s career with a special focus on his role in chronicling scenes of American life. The exhibition is complemented by the first complete catalogue of the Clark’s Homer collection, Winslow Homer: The Clark Collection, authored by Homer scholar and exhibition curator Marc Simpson. Simpson examines Sterling Clark’s decades-long pursuit of Homer’s works and his passion for creating what is now one of the most important collections of the artist’s work.  
“Sterling Clark considered Winslow Homer one of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century,” said Michael Conforti, director of the Clark, noting that Clark purchased his first Homer painting in 1915 at a time when he was living in Paris and focusing on purchasing Italian Renaissance art. “From that moment on, he maintained a passion for the artist throughout his collecting career, creating an archive so rich and varied that it provides us with a unique foundation upon which to build this consideration of the many sides of Winslow Homer.”
On view June 9 through September 8, 2013, Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making Historyshowcases some sixty oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings, as well as approximately 120 rarely seen wood engravings. Drawing upon the resources of the Clark’s own holdings of nearly 250 works by Homer (dating from 1857 to 1904), the exhibition provides a variety of distinctive perspectives on this important American artist.
“Our visitors will be immersed in Homer’s works, considering his aesthetic achievements in all media, as they examine the changing critical perspectives of his work over the last one hundred and fifty years,” Conforti said.
“Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History is first and foremost an opportunity to see and enjoy the achievement of this great artist,” said exhibition curator Marc Simpson. “It also explores how Homer's work inspires different stories—about him, his place in the art world, the impact of an expanding art market, and the quest for a national style.”
Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History presents the full range of the Clark’s Homer collection, including works on paper that are rarely on view due to their light-sensitive nature. In addition to works from the Clark, a selection of loaned works is also presented.
The paintings in the Clark collection are recognized as being among Homer’s finest and offer insight into Homer’s thematic and technical development throughout his career. The presentation ofUndertow (1886), along with six preparatory drawings accompanying it, gives an intimate look at the artist’s design process and offers insights into how Homer developed one of his most important figural works.
Among the best-known of the Clark paintings is Two Guides (1877), depicting two identifiable Adirondack guides in the wilderness. Another visitor favorite, West Point, Prout’s Neck (1900) was deemed by the artist in 1901 as “the best thing I have painted.” Panned by one New York critic who called it “simply the worst picture” in that year’s Society of American Artists exhibition, it is now considered by most art historians to be one of his greatest achievements.
The wood engravings included in the exhibition, designed by Homer for such periodicals as Harper’s Weekly and Appleton’s Journal, illustrate news of the day: the Civil War, the rise of various leisure activities, changing fashions, the shifting role of women in society. The transformation of some of these engravings from ephemera to valued artworks is evident throughout the galleries.
Although rarely shown, the Clark’s watercolors by Homer are among the most popular and appealing works in the collection; they help illustrate not only the collecting priorities of founder Sterling Clark, but also the rise of the status of watercolors in the American art world. Highlights include the simple but enigmatic Lemon (1876), the glowing but ominous Adirondack scene An October Day (1889), and the whimsical but powerfully abstract Fish and Butterflies (1900). The Clark’s watercolors are supplemented by Children on a Fence (1874) and Four Boys Bathing (1880) on loan from the Williams College Museum of Art, as well as four works on loan from a New York private collection, including a Key West scene of schooners at anchor.
A group of etchings, heliotypes, and chromolithographs by or after Homer reveals the methods in which the artist used to make his art more accessible to the collecting public. Among the high points of these is the etching Perils of the Sea (1887), which hangs beside the Clark’s watercolor of the same subject from 1881. The exhibition also features some of Homer’s illustrations of popular literature and poetry, including The Courtin’ by James Russell Lowell (1874). Another “marketing strategy” Homer developed was to work up drawings—generally seen as preparatory studies—into finished, saleable works. Two of these fully realized drawings, Fisher Girl with Net (1882) andSchooner at Anchor (1884), are included in the exhibition.
The exhibition is organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and is curated by Marc Simpson, associate director of the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.Winslow Homer: The Clark Collection will be published by the Clark and distributed by Yale University Press in conjunction with the exhibition. More than thirty entries in the catalogue discuss the role of individual works in Homer's oeuvre and their larger significance to the art world. An illustrated checklist provides information on titles, dates, and media for the entire collection.
Winslow Homer: The Clark Collection is a long overdue history of Sterling Clark’s rich collection of the artist’s works,” Conforti said. “Making Art, Making History celebrates this important achievement.”
About the Clark
Set amidst 140 acres in the Berkshires, the Clark is one of the few major art museums that also serves as a leading international center for research and scholarship. The Clark presents public and education programs and organizes groundbreaking exhibitions that advance new scholarship. The Clark’s research and academic programs include an international fellowship program and conferences. Together with Williams College, the Clark sponsors one of the nation’s leading master’s programs in art history.
The Clark is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The galleries are open Tuesday through Sunday from September through June (daily in July and August), 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free through June8, 2013; free year-round for Clark members, children 18 and younger, and students with valid ID; and $15 June 9, 2013 through September 8, 2013. For more information, call 413 458 2303 or visit clarkart.edu.