Setting the Table
New Director Ned Rifkin wants to bring more people to the feast that is the Blanton

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
October 2, 2009

What's a former undersecretary of art for the Smithsonian Institution doing running the Blanton Museum of Art? And how does one shift from the nation's capital to the Texas capital? That's what we wanted to know from Dr. Ned Rifkin, who in May was named successor to Jessie Otto Hite, who ran the Blanton for 15 years, and interim Director Ann Wilson. So the Chronicle spoke with Rifkin about returning both to the Lone Star State (he taught at the University of Texas in Arlington in the Seventies and directed the Menil Collection in Houston from 1999 to 2001) and to the classroom (his duties include a professorship in the Department of Art & Art History and advising President William Powers Jr. on matters of art), as well as his reasons for taking the Blanton post and his plans there. This Sunday, when the museum is adding a new feather in its cap of international renown with the opening of "Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece" (see "Putting It Together," below), it seemed especially fitting to run his answers.

Austin Chronicle: Looking back on your experiences at the Smithsonian, what happened there to shape the philosophy that you're bringing here?

Ned Rifkin: Well, one thing that's great about the Smithsonian is that America comes to the Smithsonian -- it's almost a theme park about American civics and history and art and science and so on. So people are hungry -- really, really hungry -- for seeing things, whether it's the ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore or Archie Bunker's chair or a Rothko painting. They really want to experience the real thing on some level, and they're willing to make the pilgrimage on the National Mall. So what I've learned from that is that -- it's like, if you put out good food, they'll eat. They'll really eat. And whether they're the students who have their one trip to Washington, D.C., for school or whether it's the grandparents bringing their grandchildren or the adults, they really understand the value of setting aside time to step into something that really illuminates and inspires. People used to come up to me wherever I was -- literally, in the world -- and say, "You work for the Smithsonian," and it was in this kind of reverential tone. It was not because I am the Smithsonian; it was what they experienced. What I learned was you can be meaningful to people on so many levels, and it starts with what you actually do on site, and it emanates from there. So what are the ways we can touch people? What are the ways we can become a state of mind as well as a place, a feeling, and I'll say a resource rather than an attraction, because I think people are very hungry for nourishment, more and more during these very difficult times that we're experiencing now.

AC: When you left the Smithsonian, you told The Washington Post that you were going to be very careful about what your next job was. So what was it that you saw in this job that made it feel like something different from what you had there?

NR: I don't know the quote you're referring to, but it does reflect fairly well that I had to think about what I wanted to do after being an undersecretary of the Smithsonian, which is a big deal. I realized that part of what I wanted was a more intimate and more educationally focused environment. And when this job came up, it seemed to offer me the opportunity to be both a teacher and learner and a leader, which are things that I value immensely. Leadership is something that I think has been highly questioned in our country and within the world. My view is that ultimately it's about your own values and how to extrude them through what you do into something meaningful, some sort of embodied practice. Teaching is where I started, and in a funny way I never left, because I always thought that the museum was an instrument for teaching. It was many other things, but it was certainly about enabling people to learn how to see actively. And it's not just about art. If you look at a portrait, maybe you'll think about looking at people differently. If you look at a landscape painting, you may perceive nature differently, and so on and so forth. I felt that maybe it was time to share [the experiences and skills that I've accumulated] in a meaningful way with people who are coming together as a community to learn.

So my feeling is that Austin, which has become an almost critical-mass place for creativity and culture, and the University of Texas, which has, over the decades I've known it, become one of the top universities in the country -- the convergence of those two things made me feel: I can learn, I can grow, and I can become more of who I am in this situation, and in so doing perhaps ignite somebody else's quest and really motivate [someone].

AC: Where did the resources of this museum fit into the appeal of the job for you? I'm thinking of the Suida-Manning collection, the Steinberg print collection, having two new buildings ....

NR: The resources, as I see it, have to do with people and not just the objects. While I was being interviewed as a candidate, I was meeting outstanding people who were clearly dedicated and devoted to the same values that I share, right up to the president and beyond him to the support system: the museum council people I would meet, the community collectors that I was able to get in touch with. With a new facility and acquisitions that have been made already, the Blanton has reached what I would call a threshold moment, and that really is attractive to me. It's brimming, and I want to be part of that. I want to be part of that team. I want to be a leader. A leader is not just somebody who's in charge; it's somebody who understands the energy and the potential of the people and the resources. And the university as a resource is so incredible. There are so many extraordinary people here, with not only collections but also knowledge and expertise, insights. It seems to me that the more we can cross-pollinate and collaborate, the richer the offerings will be. I think I said something about nourishing people. You know, there's a way to set the table, and when you set the table in a way that's attractive and put out really good food, it's gonna get eaten. The experience isn't just getting the nourishment; it's the pleasure of eating, the aroma -- all these things are part of the experience. There have to be hors d'oeuvres, and there has to be dessert, and the entrée is the building and the collections. But the rest of it is just as important, you know, including how you invite people and welcome them to your home for art.

AC: To me, it's been fascinating to watch how this particular institution has pushed itself to welcome people through less traditional means, such as the B Scene and the community programs with "Birth of the Cool." They've done so much to make that town/gown barrier porous and get people more excited about crossing back and forth.

NR: There are certain times when you say: "It's not either/or. It's both/and." There's no reason to have to perceive things as separated. I understand that historically there's been a sense that the university is somehow insular or boundaried, but I think art is the perfect vehicle for transcending it. I also think that in a day and age when people are communicating with each other at great distances and with great rapidity and speed, this is a place of coming together, of intersection, of fusion, and you need to become the town mall, the commons. You need to be the promenade, the place where socially people really want to go and be, not because it's trendy, but because it is so rich. Museums serve many different functions, and one of them is social gathering. And it's secular. It's not religious, but where it becomes like a church or a temple or a mosque is that there's something reverential and spiritual sometimes about being knocked out by a work of art. You know, it's hard to say what you think or feel. It's just incredible. And when you have that experience, it is like an epiphany. It is the realization that I am communicating with someone who's centuries old or far away or maybe around the corner but they're not right here except for that amazing thing, which is essentially the proxy for that person, standing in for that person, and you touch something and they touch something in you that becomes activated, animated. And so it's vital. It's vibrant. It's alive in a way that, you know, if you just roller-skate past it, it's not gonna happen. And you're not going to like everything, and in fact, if you go to a party, you don't like everybody at the party, but you have that one, extraordinary, deep conversation that makes that evening totally worthwhile. So we're talking about those kinds of experiences, ultimately.

Putting It Together

Dr. Xavier F. Salomon knew he was on to something, something big: the location of a lost section of a massive 16th century Italian altarpiece that had been hacked apart and sold in sections 220 years ago. Based on the three surviving fragments, it was clear that at one time, the Petrobelli altarpiece -- a 20-foot work commissioned from the Venetian master Paolo Veronese for the church of San Francisco at Lendinara, near Padua, Italy -- included a figure of St. Michael between the kneeling figures of Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli, the cousins who had commissioned the piece. Since at least the 1930s, though, scholars had assumed the figure was simply destroyed when the work was cut into pieces. But while Salomon had been in Lendinara doing research on the painting, the question of what had happened to the angel kept nagging at him, and he wondered if perhaps the head might have been preserved. Then, in London, where he serves as curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in the middle of the night it came to him: He'd seen the head of St. Michael in Austin. Touring Texas the year before, he had stopped by the Blanton Museum of Art to see the three works by Veronese that were part of its Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and baroque art. One of them was the head of St. Michael. Only no one knew it was St. Michael; it was listed in the collection only as Head of an Angel, which was what art historian William Suida thought it was when he acquired it in the 1930s. That's when Salomon e-mailed Jonathan Bober, the Blanton's curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings, and asked him to check the dimensions of the head of the angel and the character of canvas. If Salomon's hunch was right, he had solved a centuries-old mystery in Renaissance art. Bober gave him the data. They matched those of the Petrobelli altarpiece. To remove all doubt, Bober took Head of an Angel to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, which holds the upper section of the altarpiece, Dead Christ Supported by Angels. With an X-ray test and by positioning the Blanton's painting with the National Gallery's section, conservator Stephen Gritt was able to confirm Salomon's hypothesis.

This year, all four surviving fragments of the Petrobelli altarpiece were reunited for a special exhibition, "Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece." The show, which also includes X-rays of the sections of the altarpiece, first opened in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in February. This week, it opens at the Blanton for a four-month stay, its only showing in the United States.

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Arthouse
It takes a village to raise a city

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
October 2, 2009

Arthouse staffers weren't sure if people would actually show up for The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, a time-based installation/performance by Los Angeles artist Liz Glynn in which volunteers help build a model version of ancient Rome in a day. They needn't have worried. This is Austin, a city with DIY in its DNA, that loves to do and to make. And indeed, between midnight and midnight last Saturday, they came, they saw, they built. And at the end of the 24 hours, they trashed. Herewith, notes from that Day.

12:15am (741BC): Just a quarter-hour late meant missing the first dozen years of ancient Rome, including construction of the huts of Romulus and Remus. But I arrived in time to see volunteers paint the Tigris River across the Jones Center floor, where the seven Roman hills were marked out by name. A few simple buildings had been erected already, and among the 60 people present (and three dogs -- stand-ins for the she-wolf that suckled Rome's founders), many were kneeling on the concrete, industriously cutting cardboard to add more. By 1am, when I left, another 20 people had joined in, with Glynn distributing laminated cards describing specific buildings for them to re-create. They pillaged stacks of cardboard and wood leaning against one wall; grabbed box-cutters, rulers, and tape; and started working. Friday-night revelers on Congress Avenue paused before the plate-glass window to watch. The air was buzzing.

9am (318BC): What a difference 423 years makes. During my eight hours away, some two dozen structures had sprung up, along with a foot-tall cardboard wall encircling the city. With few surviving images of Rome's earliest buildings to guide them, some participants approached their assignments fancifully -- one had beer-bottle columns and a roof covered in lavender fur. Around 5am, the numbers had dwindled to 20 people (most from a high school Latin class from Houston), but now 80 strong, about a quarter of them younger than 12, were on hand building the Roman Republic. Here, the oval track of the Circus Maximus had been laid; there, a 5-foot-tall Colossus of Hercules set up, the flat cardboard suggesting a cheap standee for an old Steve Reeves sword-and-sandals movie.

4pm (AD23): The Republic has given way to the Empire, and the city has expanded almost to the edges of the gallery, bordered by a wall now knee-high. Stepping over it into the profusion of miniature temples offered the uncanny sensation of being Gulliver walking in Lilliput. Though the number of people was about the same as in the morning, the activity was much more intense. Fiddler Danny Levin serenaded the crowd, à la Nero, but these folks focused on building, and as this era's buildings are well-documented, the re-creations had grown more ambitious. The whine of power saws cut the air, blending nicely with Musique Concrete, William Meadows' electronic score, mixing music with tool sounds to mark concrete's widespread use after Rome's Great Fire. The scene was chaotic but a magnificent chaos born of creativity -- all these different hands working independently but toward a common goal, this ephemeral end of re-creating an ancient city hastily and with poor materials that will be destroyed at the day's end. Banners touting Latin phrases ring the space, and one in particular speaks to me: "By united efforts." That's how this Rome is getting built.

11:30pm (AD386): The city has grown into a zoning commissioner's nightmare, buildings jammed higgledy-piggledy with little room among them, styles running the gamut from crude grade-school history project to polished grad-school architectural model. Still, having watched them be built, it's hard not to feel that they're all of a piece: all made in this space by people working together, and whether slapdash or slick, all projecting the same spirit of play. Glynn looked as serene as she had all day, an eye of calm in this vortex of anarchic activity. As the 24 hours wound down, the crowd -- 100? 150? more? -- began to anticipate the moment when they could play Visigoths and sack the Eternal City. Once the Waco Girls got all thrashy and loud, they cut loose, stomping, kicking, trampling everything in sight. It took only about a minute for the glory that was Rome to be history.

But even as Rome was being deconstructed, talk of reconstruction was in the air: Arthouse's, that is. Executive Director Sue Graze announced that the Jones Center's long-awaited expansion would commence in October. The capital campaign netted $5 million of its $6 million goal, and Austin's Structura Inc. has been hired as contractor, so Arthouse is ready to make the plans by architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis -- creating new galleries, studios, a 90-seat community/screening room, a 5,500-square-foot rooftop space, and a new facade -- a reality. Expect a year of construction and a grand reopening in October 2010. For more information, visit www.arthousetexas.org.

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Arthouse
It takes a village to raise a city

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Sunday, October 4, 2009

It's exquisitely beautiful on its own, the painting of a rosy-cheeked, curly-haired angel draped in a saffron robe with a greenish-gold sash. It's small -- just a touch more than 16 inches by 12 inches. But it holds its own as the work of Italian Renaissance master artist Paolo Veronese. Even when compared with the other 250 paintings that arrived at the University of Texas' Blanton Museum of Art in 1998 as part of the Suida-Manning Collection of Old Master art, the petite canvas beckons with its beauty.

And yet no one suspected that the pretty little painting -- originally called "Head of an Angel" -- also would solve a 200-year-old art history mystery. Sure, scholars knew the angel painting was a fragment from a larger Veronese work, likely created at the height of the artist's career in the 1560s and a fine example of Veronese's use of a sumptuous color palette and precise draftsmanship.

But it took the sharp eye of a British scholar who visited the Blanton in 2006 to realize that the painting was actually the head of St. Michael, the central figure of the "Petrobelli Altarpiece," a massive major painting known to have been cut up and sold in pieces when the Northern Italian church for which it was created was destroyed in 1789. Three large pieces of the altarpiece painting wound up in museums in the United Kingdom and Canada. But where St. Michael went no one knew -- until X-rays confirmed that the Blanton's painting was indeed a part of the "Petrobelli Altarpiece."

Now, in a rare reconstruction, all four known pieces of the artwork are on view displayed together in one frame, much as if they were a whole again. Opening today, the exhibit "Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece" makes its only stop in the United States at the Blanton.

And it's likely this is the last chance to see the "Petrobelli Altarpiece" as it was conceived. When the exhibit closes, the fragments will go back to their respective homes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, which also hosted the exhibit, and to the National Gallery of Scotland.

The pretty little painting? It will stay in the Blanton, but with its new name, "Head of Saint Michael."

Finding St. Michael

Xavier Salomon found "Head of an Angel" beautiful. At the time based in New York and armed with a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, Salomon spent August 2006 making a tour of Texas museums, studying the Old Master and Baroque collections in Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Tops on Salomon's list was a stop at the Blanton for a few days with the Suida-Manning Collection. Assembled by two generations of art historians, the Suida-Manning Collection spans 14th- through 18th-century Italian, French and German art. UT paid $20 million in 1998 for the 250 paintings, 400 drawings and 20 sculptures, then considered the best collection of Old Master and Renaissance art to be in private hands. To be sure, the Suida-Manning Collection put the Blanton and UT on the map, literally drawing attention from around the world.

With an expertise in the work of Veronese, one of the giants of Venetian Renaissance painters, Salomon was struck by the little painting of the head of an angel. "It was remarkably beautiful -- it's a stunning picture," he said by phone from London. He took a few pictures of it, and that was that.

By 2007, Salomon was chief curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, England's first and oldest public art gallery, and he was working on a project that would bring the three known fragments of the "Petrobelli Altarpiece" together for an exhibit.

Around 1563, Veronese received a commission from cousins Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli to paint an altarpiece for their family chapel, one of 12 in the church of San Francesco, in Lendinara, near Verona. Wealthy landowners wanting both to impress their peers and to demonstrate their piety, the Petrobelli cousins had themselves painted into the painting, each watched over by their respective name saints (St. Anthony and St. Jerome), with St. Michael in the center. Crowning the images of saints and the Petrobellis is a scene of Christ's ascent to heaven.

"The Petrobellis were very rich, but very provincial in their taste," said Salomon. "What they wanted (in an altarpiece) was something they knew. (The 'Petrobelli Altarpiece') is absolutely standard in its composition. But it was the grandest (altarpiece painting) around, and it was painted by the leading artist of the time."

Measuring more than 16 feet tall, the painting shows Veronese at the height of his career, employing a vivid color palette and an expressive use of light. The altarpiece remained intact for more than two centuries.

Political and religious tumult in the late 18th century led to the destruction of the church of San Francesco. Around 1788, Venetian art dealer Pietro Concollo, with profits on his mind, cut the "Petrobelli Altarpiece" into pieces to be sold. Writing in 1795 of the dismemberment of the original painting, a local historian in Lendinara wrote, "It was sold in quarters, as one does with butcher's meat."

Eventually, portions of the altarpiece turned up in museums. The image of St. Anthony and Antonio Petrobelli entered the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland. The Dulwich Picture Gallery acquired the quarter showing St. Jerome and Girolamo Petrobelli. And the National Gallery of Canada purchased the top scene, which had become known as "The Dead Christ with Angels."

Still the question remained: What happened to the central figure of the giant painting? There certainly was evidence it once existed. The question kept coming up as Salomon moved forward with his project to reunite the existing fragments.

On a research trip to Lendinara, Salomon scoured the local historic churches and museums on the chance that the St. Michael figure had never left Italy. He turned up nothing. Back in London, Salomon spent hours pondering the details of the remaining three altarpiece fragments. Clearly, the hands of the missing central figure could be seen in two of the fragments. So could portions of the figure's robe. And, Salomon hypothesized, it was probably unlikely that a figure of St. Michael without hands would have been marketable when the painting was cut into pieces. Likely the very cutting up of the painting had damaged portions of it that were discarded. "Over the years, everybody had all along assumed that the figure of St. Michael must have remained intact," said Salomon. "But what if just the image of the figure's head had been preserved? Certainly a beautiful little painting of a blonde angel's head by Veronese would have been very sellable at the time."

With the existing altarpiece fragments so fresh in his mind, Salomon thought he just might have seen such a picture of a head of St. Michael. Somewhere, that is. "It was like trying to put a name to the face of a celebrity you just can't remember," he said. Then Salomon literally woke up in the middle of the night in late 2007 and realized, "I had seen it in Texas." He spent a sleepless night poring over his notes and pictures from Texas, sure he was on to something, then e-mailed Jonathan Bober, the Blanton's curator of prints, drawings and European paintings. "I wrote that I thought I possibly had discovered something that, if it was true, then it was it was potentially something very, very big."

Filling in the pieces

That works of art throughout history have been chopped up, badly altered, lost or misidentified is not news. But the reconstitution of an Italian masterpiece was.

Art historian William Suida, along with his daughter Bettina and son-in-law Robert Manning, amassed their impressive collection of Renaissance and Baroque art not by having unlimited financial resources, but because as scholars, they were able to acquire artwork that was often incompletely or even inaccurately identified from out-of-the-way dealers. Thus there's no record of where "Head of an Angel" was before Suida noted its addition to his collection in 1934, nor where Suida bought it or how much he paid for it. And that lack of history, or provenance, is not unusual. "Having a complete, uninterrupted provenance for an Old Master painting is rare," said Bober. "Even when the first three, much larger fragments of the 'Petrobelli Altarpiece' entered collections in England in the 19th century, nothing was known of their provenance."

Dimensions of the figure in "Head of an Angel" matched those in the known fragments. And the weave of the canvas on which it was painted looked like it matched the rest of the altarpiece as well. But before any announcement could be made, scientific proof was needed. Bober took "Head of an Angel" to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting underwent an infrared X-ray. The X-ray confirmed what Salomon and Bober had suspected: The canvas was a match.

"It's a little bit like there's a new masterpiece by Veronese in the world now," said Salomon.

Since the Suida-Manning Collection was acquired by UT, a considerable number of paintings have been properly attributed and better identified, Bober said. "In several cases, significant information about provenance has been added," said Bober. "I'm sure there are discoveries of all sort to come, although it will be difficult to match the impact and significance of this one."

For Salomon, the Austin showing of the Petrobelli is a bit bittersweet. Though he's thrilled that Texas will get to see its part of the art history mystery (the altarpiece was on exhibit in London and Ottawa earlier this year), it's unlikely the four parts of the massive painting will be seen together again. It's simply too complex an undertaking.

"This really is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. After 200 years, one of the largest, grandest Venetian altarpieces can be seen as it was originally conceived, and it's an absolutely beautiful work," said Salomon, who added that he'll spend more time with the Suida-Manning Collection when he visits Austin later this month to give a public lecture.

"Great art historical discoveries are always made by chance."

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Can't make it the White House? Try the Blanton

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 8, 2009

Can't snag an invite to the private areas of the White House where the Obamas have installed 45 works of art, a list of which was announced earlier this week?

Try the Blanton Museum of Art.

Though the Obamas culled their selections from national museums in Washington -- including the Smithsonian, the Hirschorn and the National Gallery of Art -- work by some of the same artists selected by the first family can be seen here in Austin at the Blanton Museum of Art. With a collection strong in contemporary and modern American art, the Blanton has works by Jasper Johns, Susan Rothenberg, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Ruscha, all of whom are represented now at the White House.

If they're any indication of cultural taste, the art that the Obamas chose -- with consultation from White House curator William Allman -- suggest a fairly more broad-ranging taste for art then we've seen in administrations past. The Obamas certainly seem to have a penchant for abstract modern and contemporary paintings.

On view now with the Blanton's permanent collection 'America/Americas' exhibit are a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, "Dawn's Presence - Two Columns," and an untitled 1943 painting by American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.

The Obamas also chose a painting by New York-based African American artist Glenn Ligon, whose conceptual works probe the contemporary African American experience. At the Blanton, you can take in Ligon's "Untitled (Hands/Stranger in the Village #1)," in which silkcreened text from James Baldwin's 1955 essay on racial discrimination, "Stranger in the Village," is covered in coal dust, its message obscured as if to suggest that the essay's meaning has been lost or forgotten over time.

Ligon told the Associate Press,that it was "intensely flattering" for the Obamas to want his painting to hang in their private spaces.

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Erin Curtis' vivid perspective
Architecture provides inspiration for artist's exhibit

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 15, 2009

Everything about Erin Curtis' solo show, 'Perspective Threshold,' now at Women & Their Work, is joyfully subversive.

Getting the boot? Two maxims of high modernism: 'less is more' and 'ornament is crime.'

'Says who?' Curtis' work declares.

And while modernist architectural icons figure as the subjects of her paintings - Eero Saarinen's 1955 General Motors Technical Center, for example - Curtis eschews the restrained modernist palette and goes for crazy, intense colors, her use of acrylic paint adding to the artificiality of the hues.

Curtis' paintings are giddy critiques. Yes, there's a cool modernist building somewhere in each of these paintings. But those buildings are not entirely legible, drowned out by a riot of ornament. Planes of busy patterning and vivid decoration - historically dismissed as characteristics of folk art or traditional women's art - disrupt the cool logic of three-point perspective. Nothing is fixed in place here and everything, especially the pictorial plane, is up for negotiation.

In one of the best recent uses of the sometimes awkward Women and Their Work gallery, Curtis moves her colorful critiques off the wall. Photographs of lush, green foliage are printed on immense swatches of billboard plastic fabric and draped overhead at the entrance to and in one corner of the exhibit. Nature - the plastic kind, that is - threatens to take over here.

And a playhouse-scale façade of a modernist house seems to bust out of one wall and invade several yards into the gallery. Step over the house's threshold and inside you'll see fake shadows painted on the interior wall, while cut-outs of Mies van der Rohe's iconic Barcelona chairs occupy the mini room. Nothing real in here.

Outside the mini house, a pair of mini pool chairs surround a mini pool of flat blue sheet plastic. The mini chairs have an ideal view of a mini billboard that sports 'Perspectivism,' a cityscape writ in Curtis' mishmash of flat planes and shapes that have been jiggered with a festive frenzy of stripes, flowers, diamonds and other patterns and thrown out of axonometric perspective.

Exuberant illusion undermines any expectations of order in Curtis' universe. So much for cool logic.

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Let the Arthouse renovations begin!

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 28, 2009

With a few ceremonial whacks of a sledgehammer against a wall, Arthouse officials along with Mayor Lee Leffingwell and former mayor Will Wynn kicked off the start of the major renovations on the Congress Avenue contemporary arts institutions.

The $6.6 million architecturally adventurous re-design of the building comes at time when many arts groups have scaled back on programs and future plans. But with $5 million already raised, the Arthouse expansion is on schedule. Re-opening is planned for fall 2010.

New York architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis forward-thinking design promises to be a smart update of the historic downtown building. Check out the project web site.

Phoro: A model of the Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis designs for Arthouse — with the multi-purpose roof amphiteatre — stands against a pile of debris leftover from the recent wildly popular '24 Roman Reconstruction Project,' artist Liz Glyn's participatory adventure that had the public building, and then destroying, a miniature version of ancient Rome.

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Poe exhibit sheds light on his dark world
'From Out That Shadow' is at UT's Ransom Center through Jan. 3

By Jeff Salamon
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Ransom Center is learning what Roger Corman and John Lennon figured out years ago: Though he died in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe's spirit continues to haunt us.

Perhaps because Poe has been taught, pretty much without interruption, in American public schools for decades, the author of "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and countless other poems and tales of the macabre is one of the few classic authors that Americans of very different generations have in common. That's why B-movie director Corman could have a string of hits with a series of cinematic Poe adaptations in the 1960s , and why Lennon, perhaps inspired by the example of a fellow persecuted artist, could sing the words, "Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe."

So perhaps it's no surprise that the Ransom Center's exhibit "From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe," which opened last month, has proved so popular. As of last week, more than 7,901 people had visited "From Out That Shadow," making it the Ransom Center's most popular literary exhibition to date.

Usually, when the Ransom opens a new exhibit, it offers a single Curator's Tour, in which the person who put the show together gives the public a guided look at the archival items on display. Typically, 75 or so people show up. Sometimes, an especially enthusiastic response might prompt the addition of a second Curator's Tour. The two tours already given by "From Out That Shadow's" co-curators, Molly Schwartzburg and Richard Oram, have been so well attended — each drew about 100 people — that a third has been added, scheduled for Dec. 10.

In the meantime, anyone can take an individual tour of this impressively creepy collection, which seems perfectly pitched to the Halloween season. Use our guide here and on page D6.

Poe's writing desk

Poe worked at this desk while employed from 1835-37 at the Southern Literary Messenger, a journal in Richmond, Va. Poe was in his 20s at the time, and during his stint there he developed a national reputation as an often harsh book critic. His tenure at the Messenger, however, was spotty - he often failed to show up for work on time or showed up drunk - and he was eventually fired.

The mortar-encrusted brick (not pictured) that currently sits upon the desk was recovered from the Messenger building after it was demolished in 1920 and belongs to the University of Virginia. The desk itself belongs to the Ransom Center. Exhibit co-curator Richard Oram calls it `the premier piece of furniture in the collection.'

Arthur Rackham's illustration of `The Fall of the House of Usher'

One of three very different interpretations of the opening lines of Poe's famous short story on view at the Ransom Center. (One of the others is by Robert Lawson, perhaps best known as the illustrator of the distinctly un-Poelike `Mr. Popper's Penguins.') Here, Rackham is working in a style that emphasizes the fairy-tale aspects rather than the gruesome cast of Poe's work.

Rackham's work is generously represented throughout the exhibit, and most of it - a drawing of charred bodies hanging from chains, for instance - is much more gruesome than this drawing.

`Rackham had a very good sense for illuminating states of terror,' Oram says. `His imagination was very much like Poe's.'

`Some of the Rackhams are so scary that we told our docents when we were training them that when they are touring young children's groups around, they should be sure to know where the scary Rackhams are so they could avoid them,' Schwartzburg says.

`But when they're touring the 12-year-old age group around, they should know where they are so they could seek them out. The 12-year-olds are really going to love those,' she says.

Jan. 4, 1848, letter from Poe to George Eveleth

The year before his death, Poe confided to a friend the pain he felt as his young wife lay dying of tuberculosis the year prior. `This letter is amazing because he describes the process and effect of her death in great detail and in extremely poetic language,' Schwartzburg says. `He seems to cope with her death by aestheticizing it.'

A representative passage: `I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity. I had indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can & do endure as becomes a man - it was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair which I could not longer have endured without the total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I receive a new but - oh God! how melancholy an existence!'

1845 edition of `The Raven and Other Poems' bound together with `Tales'

In this copy, Poe has substantially revised the ending of `The Gold Bug' in pencil in the margins after publication. Poe was an inveterate reviser, and the variety of editions of many of his works can cause confusion. When NPR's Isaiah Sheffer came to the Ransom Center last month to lead a staged reading of various Poe works, one of the actors downloaded Poe's poem `The Bells' from the Internet rather than use the text Sheffer had sent him. `It turns out he memorized a completely different version of the poem,' exhibit co-curator Molly Schwartzburg says.

The cover of `Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'

`I think it's significant that (Poe is) one of the most prominent and easily identifiable portraits on the front of "Sgt. Pepper's,"' Oram says. `And then Edgar Allan Poe also turns up in "I Am the Walrus," so I think John Lennon was very fond of Poe, quite clearly. And so again Poe remains a kind of counterculture figure, eternally youthful, eternally hip.'

Co-curator Molly Schwartzburg notes that a handful of `goth' girls attended a Curator's Tour - an unusual Ransom Center audience.

A brooch containing a lock of Poe's hair

`People get freaked out and interested by the fact that we have a lock of Poe's hair,' Schwartzburg says. `They find it a little terrifying and fascinating and they want to understand why people would give hair to each other. Of course it was very common in the 19th century.' In fact, the Ransom Center has a fairly extensive hair collection, including the locks of George Washington, Napoleon, Byron, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Marie Antoinette.

`Tamerlane'

A rare first edition of Poe's first book is an 1827 collection of `arch Romantic' poems credited to `A Bostonian' and published when Poe was 18. Only 50 copies were published, and only a dozen or so are said to have survived. Co-curator Richard Oram says the Ransom Center's copy is the best-preserved.

Can one give credence to Poe's claim that he wrote some of these poems when he was 14? `Poe tended to make up or inflate stories about his early life,' Oram acknowledges. But, he says, `No doubt he had a sense at an early age that he was different from other people.'

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Three questions with Will Klemm
Sometimes his best work is that which flows fastest, says Austin creator of glowing landscapes

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 29, 2009

A veteran of more than 40 solo exhibits around the country, Austin painter Will Klemm enchants with his luminous skyscapes and ethereal, glowing landscapes — paintings that stand as artistic forums on the play of light. His current exhibit at Wally Workman Gallery reveals the latest from this prolific artist.

American-Statesman: The paintings in your current exhibit represent a wide variety of landscapes — desert, meadow, seaside. From where do you source your landscapes, and do you paint from photos you take?

Will Klemm: My paintings come from both my travels and from my imagination. Lots of people asked me about this at the opening of this show. It seems to be about half and half. And yes, I do work from photographs of places I've visited. But even in that case, I often, though not always, depart quite radically from the captured image. As an artist you are free to literally move mountains, and I often do.

There are more than 100 paintings in the current show. Do you work fast or just a lot?

One of my best paintings this year — a man being thrown off of a rodeo bull — was done with a few strokes in less than a minute. I amazed even myself. But I've also labored over works for years, painting and repainting. The funny thing is that the art-viewing public seems to want to hear that I have put long hours into a piece, but I've found that my most successful work happens quickly, effortlessly and is the result of simply being in the flow. I took a workshop with artist Michael Workman a couple of years ago, and at the end of it he advised me, 'I think you work best when you work fast, but with thought.' Underlying all questions of speed, though, is the whole issue of constancy and work ethic, and I'll confess to having a pretty good work ethic and the ability to work through years of very disappointing results without giving up.

When you visit the Blanton Museum of Art, are there any works you always go see?

When I go to the Blanton — which I do often — I'm particularly drawn to the holdings of the Suida-Manning Collection, also (realist painter) Robert Henri's and (impressionist) William Merritt Chase's portraits and especially Raphael Soyer's painting of a room full of down-and-out men during the Depression. You would think I'd know the title of the Soyer piece since I've loved and visited it now for 20 years, but I always look at the painting and not the label.

Which brings me to a pet peeve: When I went to (the Blanton) to see the Petrobelli Altarpiece exhibit a couple of weeks ago, there were about 20 people in the room and yet every single one of them was reading the informational panels. Not a single person looked at the painting!

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'The Small Corners of Existence'
Gimme shelter

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
October 30, 2009

Photographers can quite literally change our perspective on the world. Depending on where they point their lenses, they can show us views of our surroundings that we've not seen before and get us thinking differently about the life we think we know.

Robert Shults is among that society of imagemakers, and with his solo exhibition "The Small Corners of Existence" – his first such show – he provides a series of uncommon, even unexpected perspectives on architectural elements in Austin that may have you reconsidering how you look at the buildings you pass daily. Shults shoots tightly composed sections of structures, focusing on vivid geometric textures and patterns in the elements of the design, the materials, and the shadows that play across the structures' surfaces. And frequently, he combines that focus with an unnatural tilt of angle, say, a roofline that we ordinarily see as horizontal or diagonal is shot as vertical. It pushes these already abstracted images further toward the abstract, and they work perfectly well that way, as artfully shaded, dense interplays of lines and forms, but they also push us toward seeing these spaces that we recognize as familiar – this library, this office tower, this fire escape – as suddenly and strangely unfamiliar. And when that happens and we're forced to examine these structures anew, we find that we can no longer take them for granted.

There was a time when Shults learned a deep and powerful lesson in not taking the buildings around him for granted. When the photographer came to Austin in 2001, he had no home and spent several months living on the streets. At that time, those structures around him that had their own primary purposes became for him physical, and in some cases spiritual, shelters, and he came to value them as such. Two years ago, when he was told he would lose his teaching job, Shults feared that he might have to return to the streets. But he put that anxiety to a useful purpose, going back to the spaces that had served to shelter him and recording them with his camera. The images become both his tribute to these spaces for protecting him and a means of showing others how these buildings serve their secondary and sometimes secret purpose for our brothers and sisters on the streets. In that way, "The Small Corners of Existence" is Shults using his art to give back, but he's giving back in a more tangible way with the exhibition as well. A portion of the proceeds from each print sold will be donated to Austin Resource Center for the Homeless.

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