Art History

I am currently a first-year graduate student at Columbia University’s Historic Preservation Program. The curriculum uses New York City as a laboratory for exploring a wide array of issues pertaining to the preservation of the built environment, such as research and documentation, city planning, structures and materials, architectural history and theory. I have already undertaken such projects as surveying and documenting the Dula family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, visiting and and writing a presentation on the Pieter Wyckoff House in Brooklyn (the oldest surviving Dutch house in New York State), and researching a loft building at 450-460 Park Avenue South and a rowhouse at 8 East 36th Street as part of a study area in Murray Hill. Additionally, I travelled to Buffalo to attend the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual conference, where I sat in on lectures regarding land banks and neighborhood conservation districts, and got to take tours of Buffalo’s architectural landmarks including Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building (1896) and Minoru Yamasaki’s M&T Bank (1967). Outside of school, I attended a committee meeting for Landmark West, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and read personal testimony at a public hearing at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in support of a proposed historic district. In Columbia’s program, I am learning, along with my colleagues, about how to assess a building or neighborhood’s significance as well as how the broad scope of preservation can be economically as well as culturally beneficial to society in the long term. I hope to continue focusing on neighborhood planning and community revitalization, and am pursuing a dual degree with Urban Planning.

Prof. Noah Chasin, Art History, participated in a panel discussion after the premier of the film “Urbanized” at the Toronto International Film Festival.

MAN ABOUT TOWN: November 2011

The winter art season in New York is in full swing, with more interesting exhibitions than any one person can see.  One major blockbuster is the vast survey of the career of William DeKooning at MoMA (through January 9).

Beginning with early realist works he made while a youth in Holland, it traces his path through 1930s flayed figures and still lifes, followed by the richly complicated black and white paintings of the post World War II years, to his most famous works, the Women of the mid 1950s, to his powerfully gestural landscapes.

DeKooning famously reworked his paintings constantly, scraping out, painting over, until the final product was a record of his painting processes.  He developed a unique style that combined the spatial ambiguities and geometries of Cubism with the spontaneous organic forms of biomorphic Surrealism. Almost every painting is layered with gestural strokes of paint that question their own power by being overlapped, partially erased, or otherwise canceled, and it takes a lot of time to thoroughly see a single painting, particularly if one also wants to think about the artist’s unusual sense of color.

The popular MoMA exhibition features 200 works spread out over 15,000 square feet.  How to see it all?  A friend of mine has visited the show 4 times and intends to return 4 more; he is a MoMA member so he takes advantage of the member’s privilege of entering the Museum at 9:30, an hour before it officially opens.  That’s one way.

But even spending an hour running through it when it’s crowded will give a strong sense of DeKooning’s amazing career as a painter, leaving one with an experience that is emotional, complex, rewarding, and perhaps unfinished—like his paintings.

In the near vicinity of MoMA there are some wonderful exhibitions that you can see without having to squeeze around someone to look at a painting like at the DeKooning  show.

Alexander Calder’s dozen sculptures, mostly mobiles, all from 1941, demonstrate the wonderful lightness and precise whimsy of the inventive sculptor at his best (Pace 32 East 57^th, through December 23).

Harvey Quaytman has a richly austere show of abstract paintings at David McKee (745 Fifth Avenue, through December 23). All are composed of rectangular forms in square canvases.  But Quayman, who died in 2002, was inventive with materials and highly sensitive to them.  He will put two whites next to each other and they differ because one has ground glass mixed into the pigment creating a color and texture that subtly contrasts with its neighbor.

These are set against chocolaty brown areas made of iron rust, or deep matte blues and blacks painted over warmer colors that are allowed to sparkle through in tiny highlights.

R.H. Quayman, one of the hottest painters on the art scene today, is his daughter (and a Bard alum), and although her paintings are very different you can see his legacy in her refined shades of white and gray, and her hyper sensitivity to the physical edges of her paintings.

Erica Lome, class of 2011, is a curatorial intern at the Museum of Arts and Design.  She is assisting in the development of a contemporary Japanese design show,  “Beauty in All Things,” and part of her responsibilities is to promote the works in the show through a weekly blog on the MAD website.  The show opens November 22nd.  She also reviews Japanese art shows in galleries and museums on her blog.  Please visit:
http://www.madblog.org/category/beauty-in-all-things/

Alexander Gray Associates seeks a general gallery intern prepared to commit to an intensive, hands-on, gallery training four month internship, beginning immediately.

For more information about the gallery visit:
http://www.alexandergray.com or contact [email protected] for more information about the internship and application process.

Works on paper by Alfred Kubin, Hugo Steiner-Prag and Sue Coe

From the collections of Susan Aberth and Tom Wolf

November 2-14, 2011
The Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library Vitrine Display Cases

Prof. Noah Chasin joined in a conversation at McNally-Jackson Books in NYC on the subject of Anthony Vidler’s recently published volume of essays, “The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays.”  More info:

http://archleague.org/2011/07/talking-booksthe-scenes-of-the-street-and-other-essays/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26872699@N08/sets/72157627140587698/detail/

Also, Noah Chasin is featured in Gary Hustwit’s new film, Urbanized, which just opened at the IFC Theater in NYC. It is the third in his design trilogy that also includes the cult favorites Helvetica and Objectified. Hustwit will be on campus to do a screening of the new film later in the semester. Check it out:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/movies/gary-hustwits-urbanized-review.htmlhttp://www.villagevoice.com/2011-10-26/film/urbanized-film-review/http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/2135649/review-urbanized
http://urbanizedfilm.com/

The Art History Faculty invites majors and prospective majors
to an Information Session:

THE ANNUAL MAJORS’ EVENT

Meet the art history professors, fellow majors and students, and hear about next semester’s courses!

Wednesday, October 26th,
6:00 pm
Faculty Dining Room

Refreshments served.
Please rsvp to Jeanette at x7158 or [email protected]

The Hudson River Maritime Museum is the only museum in New York State exclusively preserving the maritime history of the Hudson River. This includes the history of its tributaries, and the industries dependent on the river. The museum was founded in 1980 by members of the “Steamship Alexander Hamilton Society”, the National Maritime Historical Society, and local historians. The Museum is located in the Historic Rondout Waterfront at Kingston, NY, once the major port between New York City and Albany.

Four fantastic internship opportunities:
— Computer Design Intern
— Curatorial Intern
— Public Relations Intern
— Lighthouse Project Intern

For more information visit: http://www.hrmm.org/Index.html

Positions available for winter/spring semester. Email [email protected] for application details with title of internship position in subject line.

Per Kirkeby, Paintings, Michael Werner Gallery, 4 East 77^th St., through October 29.

Andy Warhol, Paintings of the 1970s, Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79^th St., through October 22.

Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21^st St., through October 22.

Roy Lichtenstein Entablatures, Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 West 21^st St., through October 22.

Doug Ohlsen, Panel Paintings from the 1960s, Washburn Gallery, 20 West 57^th St., through November 12.

Despite a strong sentiment in some sections of the art world against painting as an art form because it lends itself so conveniently to capitalist commerce, there are scads of painting shows all over New York City right now, highlighted by the Willem DeKooning retrospective at MoMA.  To name a few, you can see recent German Neo-Expressionism in Per Kirkeby’s large floral landscapes recalling Emil Nolde at Michael Werner Gallery, and Skarsedt Gallery is showing Andy Warhol’s works from the 1970s that include lesser known of the Pop master’s subjects but demonstrate his exuberant slinging around of acrylic paint in his later works, plus his brilliant color sensibility.For a more classic Warhol theme you can see over 20 of his silk-screened Elizabeth Taylor paintings at the Larry Gagosian Gallery on 21^st Street.

After the entry gallery with seven early works based on various photographs of the late actress, the main room features the famous Warhol image. As he did with Marilyn Monroe, the artist settled on one photograph of the actress’s smiling face and did color variations on it.  Several are just grainy black ink on a neutral background, and then a dozen in blazing color, her lips always crimson, her eye shadow always turquoise, her head set against a variety of color fields.

Other masters of the Pop generation on view downtown include Roy Lichtenstein with his entablature paintings, clever and gorgeous renderings of architectural moldings that are stunning in their efficient simplification (Paula Cooper Gallery).

They represent classic architectural details and are subtly humorous:  representations of walls that hang on the wall, their stretched out horizontal formats and bands of flat color gently satirize the contemporary stripe paintings of abstractionists like Kenneth Noland.

Across the street from the Lichtensteins you can glimpse a six-part panel painting from the mid 1960s by Doug Ohlsen in the window gallery of Grace Washburn, kind of an ad for his sleeper of a show at her uptown space at 20 West 57^th Street.  Ohlsen, who died earlier this year, shows pristine, hard-edged abstract paintings from the late 1960s.  Typically each work consists of four to six vertical panels with spaces between them.

All are monochrome, but several have a square or two of another color near the top or bottom edge.  Their rich hues, pinkish violet squares against an orange field for example, evoke Mark Rothko, but stiffened up.  With their abstract austerity, luscious color, and concern with incorporating the wall within their perimeters they relate to the paintings of Blinky Palermo now on view at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.  But given the vagaries and power structures of the art world, they are much less well known.