2008 in Review

It's the last day of the year, time to take stock of the year gone by. What an exciting year it has been!

I created a number of artworks I'm proud of. I drove across and around the country with my wife, something I've wanted to do for many years. And I continued to immerse myself in painting and sculpture by visiting museums around the country and really enjoying many of the works I saw. I don't know which one to show on today's post, but I guess it will come to me before I finish the post. The museums I visited this year include:

• Barnes Foundation, Merion PA
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
• Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
• University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
• Delaware Art Museum
• Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Metropolitan Museum, New York
• Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Frick Museum, New York
• Neue Galerie, New York
• New York City Waterfalls (Olafur Eliasson)
• Dia Beacon, Beacon NY
• Mass MoCA, North Adams MA
• Bruce Museum, Greenwich CT
• Baltimore Art Museum
• Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art (Louis Comfort Tiffany collection), Winter Park FL
• Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park FL
• Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens, Winter Park FL
• National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
• Phillips Collection, Washington DC
• Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC
• Laguna Beach Museum of Art, CA
• Frederick R Weisman Foundation, Beverly Hills CA
• LA MOCA, Los Angeles CA
• Kimbell Art Museum, Ft Worth TX
• Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Ft Worth TX
• Dallas Museum of Art
• Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas TX
• Georgia O'Keefe Museum, Santa Fe NM
• LA County Museum of Art (LACMA)
• Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA
• Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA
• Denver Museum of Art (including preview of Clyfford Still Museum collection)
• Denver Contemporary Art Museum
• Whitney Museum of Western Art, Cody WY
• Sculpture Garden, Buffalo Bill Museum, Cody WY
• Frederick R Weisman Museum at U of MN, Minneapolis MN
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN
• Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
• Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Aside from creating art and visiting museums, I also read Hilary Spurling's extensive 2 volume biography of Henri Matisse which I thoroughly enjoyed, Matisse's essay Notes of a Painter, Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, an illuminating collection of essays and letters called Writings on Art - Mark Rothko, and The Writings of Robert Motherwell. And now I've embarked on John Richardson's 3 volume biography A Life of Picasso! I also read several national art magazines each month.

I've finally selected not one but two images to go with this post, both colorful although created 500 years apart, and both from the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft Worth TX, our first scheduled art museum stop on our cross country trip (I visited all the art museums from the Kimbell to the end of the list on our summer cross country trip). Fra Angelico's 1429-1430 small painting The Apostle Saint James the Greater Freeing the Magician Hermogenes, and a late Henri Matisse from 1946, Asia.

I didn't know I'd done so much this year! No wonder I feel like I've been busy. A review really is very valuable for appreciating all one has accomplished. I hope you've had a great year too. Thanks for reading my blog.

I wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year!

You can view some of my 3-D paintings and mixed media works on my website, www.jayrolfe.com/.

Pablo Picasso's "Boy Leading a Horse"

What else did Leo and Gertrude Stein hang in their apartment?

In 1906 they also acquired and hung the 7 feet tall Picasso, "Boy Leading a Horse." While not as avant garde as Matisse's two paintings featured in my most recent posts, it was not traditional. Leo Stein showed Picasso both Matisse's and Picasso's own paintings hanging in his apartment, encouraging a rivalry. When Picasso saw the three paintings side-by-side, Hilary Spurling in The Unknown Matisse says, "Picasso had been shaken by 'Woman in a Hat', and seriously perturbed by 'Le Bonheur de Vivre'." The rest, as they say, is history, art history!

Today Picasso's "Boy Leading a Horse" hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here's a link to the web page about it. http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79994

You can view some of my 3-D paintings at www.jayrolfe.com/.

Henri Matisse's "The Joy of Life"

Shortly after the 1905 Salon d'Automne at which he debuted "Woman in a Hat," featured in my most recent two posts, Matisse painted the large "Le Bonheur de Vivre" ("The Joy of Life") over the winter of 1905-1906. Rosa Arpino, an Italian woman who modelled for art schools in Paris, was the female model for all the female figures in the almost 6 feet by 8 feet painting.

"Le Bonheur de Vivre" was exhibited in April 1906 at the Salon d'Independants in Paris, and at the end of the exhibit on April 30, Leo Stein bought "Le Bonheur de Vivre." It's a beautiful painting, one I've seen many times at the Barnes Foundation in Merion PA. Although it hung in the living room of the Steins, it hangs above the landing of the staircase from the first to the second floor at the Barnes Foundation. It's interesting that there is a small circle of dancing women in "Le Bonheur de Vivre" and Matisse would produce "The Dancers" three years later in 1909 for Sergei Shchukin, the Moscow textile magnate, which was to hang in the staircase of his mansion. The second version of "The Dancers" now hangs above the staircase landing in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What's with all these staircase paintings?

So the Steins had Matisse's "Woman in a Hat" and Matisse's "Le Bonheur de Vivre" on their walls. What fabulous paintings to have hanging in your home, although in that day they were considered scandalous.

You can view some of my 3-D paintings at www.jayrolfe.com/.

Henri Matisse's "Woman in a Hat"

Henri Matisse's "Woman in a Hat", which was the subject of my post yesterday, was sold from its original showing at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris to some American collectors. Leo and Gertrude Stein, brother and sister, telegraphed Matisse of their desire to buy it. Leo was actually buying it for his brother and sister-in-law Michael and Sarah Stein.

"Woman in a Hat" is now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. You may see it on the museum's website. http://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/213

There is no substitute for seeing an original painting as opposed to a print. It's amazing the difference in reproductions. Today's image is taken from the SFMOMA website, while yesterday's image is from the Matisse biography, The Unknown Matisse.

You can see some of my 3-D paintings at www.jayrolfe.com/.

Matisse, Picasso, Steve Martin, and the Lapin Agile

Last weekend we saw a play written by American comedian Steve Martin at the Delaware Theatre Company called Picasso at the Lapin Agile. It's a fictional story of Picasso meeting Einstein at a local Parisian cafe in 1904, before either was famous. In the dialogue, Picasso took a few swipes at his rival Matisse. It was hilarious and we really enjoyed it.

I've been reading a two volume biography of Henri Matisse, who gave up law to be an artist, written by Hilary Spurling. Volume one is The Unknown Matisse, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908. Volume two is Matisse The Master, A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954.

After spending the summer of 1905 painting in Collioure on the French Mediterranean near the border with Spain, Matisse submitted several paintings the the Salon d'Automne in Paris, notably "Woman in a Hat" and "The Open Window, Collioure." Matisse and his experimental friends Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Manguin, and Camoin, had their paintings shown in what became known as the notorious room or gallery Salle VII. Spurling writes that while Matisse was inspecting the installation of the paintings before the opening with writer Louis Vauxcelles, "Vauxcelles noticed a couple of academic sculptures placed incongruously in the middle of Salle VII and made what became a famous wisecrack to Matisse: 'a Donatello among the wild beasts [fauves].'" Vauxcelles then published his quip in a magazine article and Matisse's group got its name, Fauves.

The critics had little good to say about the Fauves at the time of the Salon d'Automne. Spurling reports, "Even young artists eager to identify themselves with everything that was new and forward-looking found this latest work [Matisse's "Woman in a Hat"] hard to take. One of them was the writer Francis Carco, a friend of the twenty-four-year-old Pablo Picasso, whose reputation was already gaining ground in Montmartre in spite of the fact that hardly anyone had seen his work. Carco, hanging out at Picasso's local, the Lapin Agile, could make no sense at all of the Spaniard's pronouncements on modern art: 'And I was starting to ask myself if, in spite of his astonishing powers of persuasion, Picasso was not getting more pleasure from mystifying us than he was from actually painting, when the notorious "Woman in a Hat" [by Matisse] taught me more in an instant than all his [Picasso's] paradoxes.... there emanated from this singular work ... such an evidently conscious fixity of purpose that, after an interval of more than thirty years, I still have not forgotten it.'"

Spurling continues, "Certainly, the regulars at the Lapin Agile, like Francis Carco, were powerfully impressed. Picasso (who had not yet met Matisse) felt he had been decisively outflanked."

Well, Steve Martin knows his art history and was aware of Picasso's local cafe, the Lapin Agile. It seems that in 1904 Matisse, who was 35 and married, while Picasso was 24 and single, was more experimental and more of a leader of art movements than Picasso.

I find the interplay between Matisse and Picasso fascinating. You can view some of my 3-D paintings at www.jayrolfe.com/.