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Friday, September 8, 2023
Morgan Lehman Flat File Friday,
Thursday, September 7, 2023
Exhibition at The Met Examines How American Artists Responded to the Tumult of the 1930s
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Exhibition at The Met Examines How American Artists Responded to the Tumult of the 1930s
Exhibition at The Met Examines How American Artists Responded to the Tumult of the 1930s |
Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s features more than 100 works, from paintings, photographs, and decorative arts to fashion, film, and ephemera |
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–93, The Charles Z. Offin Gallery, Karen B. Cohen Gallery, and Harriette and Noel Levine Gallery
The 1930s was a decade of political and social upheaval in the United States, and the art and visual culture of the time reflected the unsettled environment. Americans searched for their cultural identity during the Great Depression, a period marked by divisive politics, threats to democracy, and intensified social activism, including a powerful labor movement. Featuring more than 100 works from The Met collection and several lenders, Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930sexplores how artists expressed political messages and ideologies through a range of media, from paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs to film, dance, decorative arts, fashion, and ephemera. Highlights include paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis; prints by Elizabeth Olds, Dox Thrash, and Riva Helfond; photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange; footage of Martha Graham’s dance Frontier; and more. The exhibition is on view September 7 through December 10, 2023.
The exhibition is made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and The Schiff Foundation.
"American artists witnessed astounding hardships in the 1930s and responded fervently," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. "As the nation confronts similar issues of political polarization and widening inequality today, this insightful exhibition serves as a poignant reminder of how artists then, like now, used their craft to connect with audiences, take action, and illuminate social ills. This presentation also brings to the fore women artists and artists of color who were often shut out of the mainstream art world."
Allison Rudnick, Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints, said: "While visual culture in the United States has always been suffused with ideology, cultural production in the 1930s is notable for representing an exceptional range of social and political messages. Every visual medium—from prints to film to fashion—played a role in transmitting these messages to millions of Americans. The works provide a unique framework for understanding a fraught and fascinating decade, one that mirrors today’s world in many ways."
Exhibition Overview
Organized thematically across three galleries, the exhibition provides an unprecedented overview of the sociopolitical landscape of the United States during the 1930s.
The dire unemployment situation during the Depression galvanized many Americans to take up communist and socialist causes. Protests, demonstrations, and strikes erupted across the country, and in response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration established the WPA, the Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Work Projects Administration). The exhibition’s first section, “Leftist Politics and Labor,” features the work of left-leaning artists who participated in the workers movement by joining artist unions and depicting laborers in their art, often using printmaking to broadcast their political beliefs to a large audience. Examples include Elizabeth Olds’s celebratory portrait of an ordinary worker, Miner Joe (The Met), and Charlie Chaplin’s parody of assembly-line work in his satirical film Modern Times. A watercolor by Dox Thrash offers a rare depiction of people of color organizing and participating in a 1930s labor strike (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), and Norman Lewis’s lithograph The Soup Kitchen (The Met) calls attention to the particularly damaging effects of the Depression on Black Americans and other marginalized groups. Artists also spread their ideological messages through illustrations in communist and socialist magazines, including Hugo Gellert’s, William Gropper’s, and Phil Bard’s contributions to New Masses.
Many who faced unprecedented hardship during the Depression found solace and a sense of belonging and pride in their American identity. The second section, "Cultural Nationalisms," reveals how the visual and material culture of the 1930s ultimately reflected nuanced and often conflicting stories about American identity. Some artists looked to the past, reviving historical American subjects, styles, and techniques, while others focused on the present by documenting the plight of those hit hardest by the economic downturn. Martha Graham romanticized the rural United States in her dance Frontier, while photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange reveal the harsh realities that tenant farmers faced during the Depression. Charles White sought to lay the groundwork for a more inclusive narrative of the nation’s history by bringing into focus the contributions of Black Americans, as seen in his graphite study of Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington (The Newark Museum of Art) for a larger mural composition. The prevailing interest in cultural nationalism was evident in the expanded market for Indigenous American art, such as Tonita Peña’s Pueblo Parrot Dance and Velino Shije Herrera’s Deer Hunters (both from National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
Even as the country weathered unprecedented financial strife, the United States became a world leader in technological and industrial innovation, as showcased in the third and final section, “The Promise of Progress.” The world’s fairs of the 1930s celebrated American exceptionalism and projected visions of a prosperous future. Millions of visitors experienced patriotic propaganda in exhibitions and at performances, and many more who did not attend were still exposed to it through posters, postcards, and other ephemera, such as Joseph Binder’s New York World’s Fair, The World of Tomorrow poster (Library of Congress). Augusta Savage’s 16-foot sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), one of the most popular attractions at the New York World’s Fair but destroyed after it closed, is represented in the exhibition by a small-scale replica (New-York Historical Society). The fields of graphic, industrial, and architectural design led the way in developing aesthetic movements that emphasized advancement and modernization. Examples of streamline—the most influential design trend to originate in the United States—include Norman Bel Geddes’s “Patriot” radio, Isamu Noguchi’s “Radio Nurse” baby monitor, and Gilbert Rohde’s electric clock (all from The Met).
The phrase “art for the millions” in the exhibition’s title comes from an unpublished 1936 national report on the WPA’s Federal Art Project. Essays by participating artists and administrators were ultimately published in 1973 in what became a well-known anthology of the same name.
Credits and Related Content
Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s is curated by Allison Rudnick, Associate Curator in The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, the catalogue is available for purchase from The Met Store.
The catalogue is made possible by the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund.
The Museum will offer a variety of related programs, including performances by dancers from the Martha Graham Dance Company, a Sight and Sound concert by conductor Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now, an Artists on Artworks event featuring Chase Hall, and more. Programming details are available on The Met website.
The exhibition is featured on The Met website, as well as on social media using the hashtag #ArtForTheMillions.
Wednesday, September 6, 2023
Jamie Forbes: The Sun Sets Quickly this Time of the Year & Caterpillars on The Milk Weed 9/6, 2023
 The Sun Sets Quickly this Time of the Year #1, Jamie Forbes©SunStormArtsPub.Inc. |
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| The Sun Sets Quickly this Time of the Year #2, Jamie Forbes©SunStormArtsPub.Inc. |
| Caterpillar on the Milk Weed#2, Jamie Forbes©SunStormArtsPub.Inc. |
#jamieforbesphotographt#fineartmagazine#fieartphotofun
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
Monday, September 4, 2023
Are you Traveling? Vixst Hoffman, Maler, Wallenberg Gallery in Nice . Catch :Fabrizio Arrieta: Interlude On view: September 2–October 14, 2023
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Gallery Wendi Norris exhibition:Time Warriors, Sept. 6-Oct.-7 , 2023,
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Wednesday, August 30, 2023
The Menil Collection to Present "Janet Sobel: All-Over"
The Menil Collection to Present Janet Sobel: All-Over
Houston museum devotes exhibition to the artist’s abstract paintings, brought together for the first time in sixty years
HOUSTON—August 30, 2023—The Menil Collection presents Janet Sobel: All-Over, featuring some thirty paintings and drawings made by artist Janet Sobel (1893–1968).On view exclusively at the Menil, February 23–August 11, 2024, the exhibition will explore Sobel’s work during her short-lived but meteoric rise to prominence as one of the first artists associated with Abstract Expressionism to pioneer a new approach to modern abstraction known as “all-over” painting.
The show will bring together significant loans from U.S. museums, private collections, and the artist’s family that reveal Sobel’s exceptionally inventive and influential approach to modern abstraction. Major loans from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Diego Museum of Art reunite six of the artist’s famous “all-over” paintings for the first time in sixty years.
Rebecca Rabinow, Director, The Menil Collection, said, “We are delighted to present the vibrant and innovative works of Janet Sobel. In late 2020, the Menil received the gift of four drawings and one painting from the artist’s grandson, Len Sobel, which became the impetus to create an exhibition dedicated to her abstract art. Over the course of our research, we became fascinated by the impact she made during her brief career, and we are glad to help her once again receive the recognition she so richly deserves.”
Sobel began to make art around 1940. She often turned to non-traditional supports, ranging from glass and tile to cardboard, envelopes, and book covers. To these, she would apply oil and enamel paints, the latter most likely harvested from her family’s costume jewelry-making business, occasionally mixing them with sand. One of Sobel’s most accomplished paintings, Milky Way, 1945, displays the range of experimental techniques that she developed in the 1940s. After dripping paint onto the canvas, she blew it with a pipette, marbled the wet colors together, and tipped the support to move the pigments across the surface. Other works in the show reveal Sobel’s development of other unorthodox methods: for instance, in one painting she used a ridged tool to carve deep, lined scoops into the paint surface.
Sobel also created numerous drawings during her career. In many of these, she applied bold, bright colors in crayon, ink, and pencil, embedding faces and human figures within overgrown floral motifs and linear patterns. A selection of works on paper further expands the exhibition by demonstrating her approach to this practice, with a series of parallel strokes that knit foreground and background together into dense, interlocking shapes.
After participating in several group shows in 1943, Sobel received her first solo show in 1944 at New York’s Puma Gallery. The exhibition was widely reviewed, and her work caught the eye of Peggy Guggenheim, the prominent dealer and collector. That fall, Guggenheim called Sobel “the best woman painter by far in America.” In the summer of 1945, a famed group show titled The Women opened at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. Sobel’s work was shown alongside Louise Bourgeois and Leonora Carrington. As Sobel’s work continued to attract attention and gain momentum, Guggenheim gave Sobel her second solo show in 1946.
In 1961, American art critic Clement Greenberg described Sobel’s technique as “the first really all-over effect that I had seen.” With the term “all-over,” he invoked a style of abstraction that was newly emergent in the 1940s, in which the composition extended from corner to corner and edge to edge, with no apparent center. However, Sobel’s role in the development of mid-century abstraction was soon written out of history books. This exhibition, the first to focus on Sobel’s highly accomplished and influential abstract paintings, seeks to restore the artist to her rightful place in art history.
Janet Sobel: All-Over is curated by Natalie Dupêcher, Associate Curator of Modern Art, The Menil Collection. The exhibition is organized with the support of the Sobel family.
About the Artist
Janet Sobel was born Jennie Olechovsky, in present-day Dnipro, Ukraine, in 1893. After her father was killed in one of the many pogroms, she emigrated with her mother and two siblings to the United States in 1908 and settled in New York. She began to paint around 1940, working out of her home in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. After her breakout success in the early and mid-1940s, Sobel relocated to Plainfield, New Jersey, with her family in 1947. Although she continued making art, particularly drawings, for the next twenty years, she largely disappeared from the public eye. Sobel received two more solo exhibitions, at a local art store and gallery, in 1957 and 1962.
About the Menil Collection
Philanthropists and art patrons John and Dominique de Menil established the Menil Foundation in 1954 to cultivate greater public understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, culture, religion, and philosophy. In 1987, the Menil Collection’s main museum building opened to the public. Today, the Menil Collection consists of a group of five art buildings and green spaces located within a residential neighborhood in central Houston. The Menil remains committed to its founders’ belief that art is essential to human experience and fosters direct personal encounters with works of art. The museum welcomes all visitors free of charge to its buildings and surrounding green spaces. menil.org
Funding
This exhibition is generously supported by Cindy and David Fitch; Caroline Huber; Susan and Francois de Menil; and the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
Image Captions
1. Janet Sobel, Milky Way, 1945. Enamel on canvas, 44 7/8 x 29 7/8" (114 x 75.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of the artist's family. © Janet Sobel. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
2. Janet Sobel, Untitled, ca. 1946–48. Enamel and sand on board, 17 5/16 × 14 in. (43.9 × 35.6 cm). The Menil Collection, Houston, Gift of Leonard Sobel and Family. © Janet Sobel. Photo: James Craven
Press Contacts
The Menil Collection
Jennifer Greene, Communications Manager
713-525-9477 / jgreene@menil.org
Polskin Arts
Tommy Napier, Senior Account Supervisor