Posted 11/10/05 by Robert

Man with Laurels by John Singer Sargent

LACMA PermanentCollaboration

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Man Wearing Laurels, 1874-1880, oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 13 3/16 in., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mary D. Keeler Bequest, Photo © 2005 Museum Associates/LACMA. By Austen Bailley, Assistant Curator, American Art START in the Ganz Gallery on the Plaza Level of the Ahmanson where you will find LACMA's collection of late nineteenth-century American paintings.

Sargent's Man with Laurels (c. 1874-1880) immediately attracts with its richly contrasting lights and darks casting across the torso of a young man. The male model posing for Sargent gazes off dreamily, and the laurel wreath resting on his glossy, tousled hair serves to temper the sensual with the classical. Sargent would have painted this work specifically to explore in paint the aesthetic effects of strong light and deep shadow on hair, muscle, and skin. Look closely to see the strokes and dabs of white pigment added to the man's curls to give the hair a lustrous appearance and to the red lips to accentuate their fullness.Sargent captured the sensuous effects of light, the body, and oil paint itself, using highly visible brushwork. This painterly technique produces a distinct and vivid sketch aesthetic, one favored by nineteenth-century American artists trained in Europe.

Learn more about our permanent collection by visiting LACMA's Collections Online!Ê

I'd appreciate your BlogThoughts, questions & email address — Robert Kissig

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Posted 10/05/05 by Robert

Pioneering Modern Painting: CŽzanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 — October 20, 2005 through January 16, 2006

From MOMA to LACMA: A Story of Artistic Collaboration

The exhibition focuses on the years 1865Ð85 when CŽzanne and Pissarro worked closely with each other, often painting literally side by side. LACMA is the only West Coast venue for the exhibition, which will open in New York on June 26, 2005 and will travel to Los Angeles and to the Musee DÕOrsay in Paris.

Los Angeles, June 9, 2005 Ð The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will present Pioneering Modern Painting: CŽzanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 from October 20, 2005 Ð January 16, 2006. Organized by the artistÕs great-grandson Joachim Pissarro, a curator of painting and sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition focuses on the years 1865Ð85 when CŽzanne and Pissarro worked closely with each other, often painting literally side by side. LACMA is the only West Coast venue for the exhibition, which will open in New York on June 26, 2005 and will travel to Los Angeles and to the Musee DÕOrsay in Paris.

Pioneering Modern Painting: CŽzanne and Pissarro 1865Ð1885 offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine the parallel creative paths of these two artists, both through their common choices of subject matter and through their intense exploration of new pictorial processes. Camille Pissarro and Paul CŽzanne worked together intermittently from the moment they met at the Suisse Art School in 1861 until 1885. The exhibition reveals how modernism developed through acts of exchange and discussion as the artists painted together in Pontoise and Auvers in FranceÕs Oise River Valley. The presentation features an insightful collection of landscapes, still lifes, and portraitsÑincluding many that depict exactly the same motif and that are reunited for the first time since they were created.

We feel these artists still have something to tell us, said Joachim Pissarro. This show is breaking the solitary model of the artist as a hero in his ivory tower who had no relationship to his peers. ItÕs trying to bring them to a much more human level, looking at how they function and their dialogues with each other.

The exhibition explores such subject areas as each artistÕs portraits of the other and their self-portraits; an unapologetic interest in very common, earthly subject matters; the similarities and distinctions in the extraordinary itineraries that both artists took together and at separate intervals; and an exploration of how this artistic collaboration defines an important and little-studied facet in the development of modernism.

The collaboration between Pissarro and CŽzanne will invite the viewers to question the relevance of the traditional art historical labels used to ÔdefineÕ each artistÕs position: Pissarro as the arch-impressionist and CŽzanne as the pioneering post-impressionist, said LACMA Chief Curator of European Painting and Sculpture Patrice Marandel. This exhibition produces revealing sets of works by both artists that illustrate the very intense engagement each artist had in the otherÕs works. Ê

I'd appreciate your BlogThoughts, questions & email address — Robert Kissig

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Posted 9/27/05 by Robert

DEACON'S POND, SONOMA, CA

The end of summer, I spent the week on Deacon's Pond in Kenwood, Sonoma, California. This is my dear friends home, one I've been welcomed into for twenty five years. The gazebo on the shore he built for his daughter's wedding; a marvelous summer gathering in the middle of wine country. We built a raft out of fifty-gallon oil drums for diving and lazy sunning in the middle of the pond. Rowing around to the overgrown grottos along the far shore in the old skiff, gave us an opportunity to catch a bass or two for the plate. Easy going fishing, nothing hurried. It was summer on Deacon's Pond and life stood still. — Robert

I'd appreciate your BlogThoughts, questions & email address — Robert Kissig

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