The Armand Hammer Collection

Ugh, A Day at the Museum??? 

Exhibit #3: The Armand Hammer Collection

Day: 5-10-2012

Location: Armand Hammer Museum

Hello once again blog readers! Last time your eager eyes grazed through the computer screen, I pushed you into the elusive rabbit hole of Surrealist Art at the LACMA. Now I know I promised to bring you guys back into the real world with French realism, but after visiting the Armand Hammer Collection at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, I decided to delve more broadly into the dynamic and varied art movements that hit France during the second half of the 19th century: Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. 

After hopelessly meandering around the Hammer for about 15 minutes trying to locate the exhibit and traversing through several sketchy emergency exit stairways (The Hammer Museum was under some renovation and closed off almost all of its pathways),  I finally entered the small exhibit, adorned richly with paintings by some of the most renowned French, Dutch, and Flemish masters. Hanging on the Hammer’s rich maroon and coffee colored walls were various works by Van Gogh, Degas, Fragonard, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gauguin, Daumier, and of course, Monet. All these extremely talented and avant-garde artists helped pave the way for expressionism, abstraction, and modernism. The Armand Hammer Collection is a permanent installment at the museum, that will forever amaze and revitalize many museum-goers with its vibrant splashes of colors and masterful, playful brushwork.

Well, you guys know the cue! Take out your notepads because here comes yet another brief art history lecture about mid-late 19th century French Art!

Emerging out of the steaming backdrop of rapidly industrializing and empirical France was Realism, a movement directly influenced by the philosophy of positivism. Developed by French Philosopher and Enlightenment thinker Auguste Comte, many aspiring positivists advocated for a purely empirical approach of nature and society, an approach based solely on keen observation and rendering of human activity. Since scientific laws governed 19th century France, fueled by philosophies of manifest destiny and rationalism, realist artists argued that only the objects and events of one’s own time and what current French citizens can witness for themselves, were “real.” Rather than wasting their time conveying the spiritual and sublime nature of mythology and antiquity, realist artists such as Gustave Courbet, Jean Francois Millet, and Honore Daumier focused their attention on depicting experiences and sights of everyday, contemporary life. The tangible, the mundane, and the dirty and smog filled industrial world was the sole subject of many realist paintings, loosely orchestrated with short and slashy brushwork that revealed the inner mechanisms of a society dissolving under the contemporary anxieties of rapid, fast-paced society.

The realist visions of contemporary French society gave way to an even more stylized art movement that dropped empirical philosophies of a tangible, progressive, and stable industrial world in favor of an emphasis on the fleeting, impermanent, and intangible aspects of fast-pace Parisian society; a constantly shifting reality of color, compositions, and feeling. Thus impressionism was born from the chaos that was an urbanized Paris, a movement that sought to capture a fleeting moment of Parisian life, not in the absolutely fixed, precise sense of a Realist painting, but by conveying the elusiveness and impermanence of images. The speed and spontaneity of many Impressionists brush strokes actively strive to render society ever-shifting and unstable, whisked under the smoke of work-shifts. The use of tiny dabs of color all melt and blur together to create smooth tonal gradations. The compositions of many Impressionists paintings are also spontaneous, figures rush through the wise boulevards of Paris, some half emerge and disappear as the artist rapidly pens a sketch of his shifting setting. Claude Monet, Renoir, and Camille Pissarro are some excellent Impressionist artists that used artifice to capture bustling French society, opening the doors towards more abstraction and modification of society in art during the 20th century.

Just when Impressionism was gaining international acclaim, not subject to accusations of crudeness and sketchiness, some painters started to feel like many Impressionists neglected the formal and fundamental elements of painting and lost the ability to accurately use line, pattern, form, and color to depict a period of emotional and phycological turmoil and anxiety. By 1880, many artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin were more systematically examining the potential of form, line, and color to explore the expressive capabilities of art. Bolder color and flatter forms became the norm of many Post-impressionist paintings, striving to intensify the main message of the painting, paintings that were usually an accurate expression of an artist’s feelings about contemporary society. Dissolving, unmodulated color along with hard contours were some of the suggestive aspects of Post-Impressionist art that was meant to strike a chord in many viewers. Paintings by artists such as Gaugin were not quick impressions of society, they were deep and engrossing reflections of his personal outlook on society and the different moods that linger along the atmosphere.

These three movements gave birth to some of art history’s most dynamic, and emotionally wrenching pieces of art, filled with various moods and textures that pulls the viewer through the different stages of Parisian thought in the 19th century. The Armand Hammer exhibit displays all these mindsets in just three little rooms, taking the viewer on a journey through the various visions of progressive French artists. 

Let’s start with a realist painting shall we? Jean Francois Millet’s Peasants Resting (1866) is a piece that just screams French Realism. Imbued with immaculate sincerity of observation and detail while still appearing etched and artistically rendered, Millet’s pastel drawing recording the hackneyed and exhausting toils of the dwindling French Peasantry, is an accurate and heartfelt reflection of tangible and contemporary French society. Millet’s soft and delicate figures seem to have just squatted down on the lush green grass, exhausted from their sowing and plowing. Bound to their perpetual and cyclical daily agricultural tasks, Millet rendered his contemporaneous figures with tons of tender dignity, enlivening the mundane. His sketchy use of the pastel add an air of artifice and democracy to his paintings, letting the imperfections and shaky anxieties of life show through the deteriorating French agricultural landscape. Millet’s realist works are memorable for their poignant glorification of tangible everyday life, imbuing the “real” with the splendor and reverence it deserves. 

Moving away from the sanctified, spiritual silence of Millet’s realist paintings, Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre: Mardi-Gras is an extreme example of Impressionist art, a scintillating canvas of thousands upon thousands of dabs, dots, and slashes that wonderfully melt into a Parisian parade. In his fantastic attempt to capture the fleeting, crowed charge of rapidly industrializing Parisian society, Pissarro fantastically implemented the beautiful, wide, and grand avenues of Paris’s boulevards as the setting of his fluttering canvas. Crowds of people melt into tiny textures dots of pristinely dabbed color, whose woven patterns become more distinct as you slowly pull yourself closer to the painting. Twittering tree branches lock arms with the slashed apartment buildings rendered in accurate perspective as forms continue to dissolve and blur into the distance. A sea of greens, yellows, and oranges slowly approaches the viewer as the blur of the parade rapidly accelerates through Paris’s extensive streets. Every citizen is tangled in the twirling crowd as streams of merriment permeate the city streets, perpetually clocked into the circadian rhythm of work and sleep. This is the first colossal impressionist painting that I have encountered that truly implements a rich tapestry of texture and color to weave an unstable impression of city life. Pissarro’s engrossing and wonderfully shifting French landscape is a truly progressive canvas that directly inspired many German and Abstract Expressionists that followed in his footsteps in creating canvases pierced with orchestrated color and brushstroke.

Finally, we get to a Post-Impressionist painting by Paul Gauguin. Paul Gauguin’s

Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1889) is a canvas filled with soft, unmodulated color and the serenity of Brittany, France, a quaint isolated town unspoiled by industrialization and built upon the foundations and culture of ancient Celtic folkways. Gauguin sharply departs from the shifting Parisian cityscape in favor of the silent and pious lifestyles of the Brittany peasantry, whose hearts and souls occupy a different niche, religiosity and austerity. In his painting, Gauguin is yet again kindly greeted by a Brittany local, whose figure gently emerges from the edge of his canvas. This daily ritual is ever-sanctified by Gauguin’s expressive use of flat, unmodulated planes of colors to accentuate the haggard, abrasive, but homely fields of Brittany. Guaguin implements the expressive powers of patterned planes of color to convey his dour love and reverence for the town’s simple inhabitants, pure and untainted by the aggressive shifting and instability of city life. Gauguin appears ever cemented to the lush landscapes of Brittany, not a hint of rapid action can be seen in the peasant women’s smooth and controlled movement. 

From the quaint rest of the hard working contemporary peasants, to rushing and parading mobs of the bourgeois, and then back to the grounded and awe-inspiring untainted lives of the pious separated from contemporaneous life, the Armand Hammer collection encapsulates the lives and journeys of those living in a shifting world. Without these people, and the painters that immortalized their lives, mindsets, souls and spirits, modern society would never be blessed with its incredible conveniences and luxuries. 

Well folks, it has been an absolute pleasure taking you on a journey through the art history world. I hope I have introduced to many of you, the wonders many fine art museums have to offer. The stories canvases tell, the reactions they elicit, and the infinite amount of interpretations hidden beneath their rich surfaces are all things that should attract any human being to an exhibit. All I’m asking of people is to sincerely look closer into the paintings in front of them, and open up their minds, hearts, and souls to the infinite meanings they hold. 

Comments are appreciated! 

In Wonderland

Ugh, A Day at the Museum??? 

Exhibit #2: In Wonderland  

Day: 5-3-2012

Location: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

Hello again blog reader! Last time we met, I ventured into the world of fashion photography at the Herb Ritts: L.A. Style exhibit at the Getty Center. It was at the Getty where I lead you through the dynamic and optically intriguing world of photography, and its abilities to mesmerize the mind with its astounding abilities to intertwine optical truth and artifice. 

Well, I am pleased to announce that this blog is going to head into an even more mesmerizing direction as we plummet down the rabbit hole, into an illusory wonderland of surrealist art, penned by the delicate and serpentine hands of the world’s most graceful and imaginative female surrealist artists. 

In Wonderland is an unreal exhibit, a gorgeous carousel of poignant and introspective canvases that encapsulate the trails, thoughts, and emotions of many female artists during the 1930’s-1970’s in both the United States and Mexico. To be honest, as a young women living in a world where females are gaining loads of momentum in all aspects of modern day society, I was never really interested in the ideals and manifestos that encapsulate the feminist movement. In Wonderland, while not solely conveying a strong feminist message (which is what I expected going into the exhibit), was an engrossing exhibit that pulled every museum-goer into the pathos infused spirits of women torn, broken, and isolated. I was also shocked to just find myself enjoying the purely fantastic visions of the infantile world, meticulously rendered on many canvases. The female artist's attention to detail, similar to many Flemish renaissance male artists, is extremely scrupulous and heartfelt. But before we delve into detail regarding some resonating paintings at the exhibit, let us learn a bit about the surrealist and feminist art movements that exploded in both the United States and Mexico during the 1920’s up to the 1960’s. 

Surrealism, an art movement that emerged out of the momentum of the Dada movement in 1924, was determined to escape the expressionist renderings of the brutal, war-manifested industrial world in the early 20th century and delve instead into the illustrious and intangible world of the unconscious. Drawing their inspirations from the rising notions of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, many Surrealists aimed to delve into the inner mechanisms of the psyche, exploring the enigmatic and mysterious world of dream and fantasy. The subconscious experience was to be intertwined and incorporated into outer reality. Many new artistic mechanisms were thus implemented to simulate the world of the unconscious for a greater audience. 

Giorgio De Chirico, a metaphysical artist whose work is considered more of a precursor of Surrealist art, painted highly ambiguous and menacing cityscapes that delve into the realm of the surreal. I chose to talk about De Chirico because of his powerful ability to extract emotion and response from images that transcend the physical, images that implement light, void, distortion, and shadow to instill discomfort and fear in its engrossed viewers. In his painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914, De Chirico implements long shadows that pierce the late afternoon pavements of a empty cityscape to depict a scene of intense suspense and foreboding. A shadow of an innocent carefree child is just feet away from colliding with a mysterious and menacing shadow of a male figure, looming at the end of an elongated alleyway. De Chiricos' shadows and elongated spaces that warp reality disquiet the viewer, perplexed by the location they are plopped inside. The eerie modes and sharp incongruities in his paintings inspired many surrealists to paint worlds that rouse intrigue and confusion. 

Paul Klee, a painter who explored the realms of surrealist painting using simplified and child-like forms, was also renowned for his abilities to touch deep into the mysterious dream world. In his painting Twittering Machine, 1922, Klee sought ways to touch base into the deeper and intangible realm of humanity through primitive shapes and symbols. His image implements rudimentary, simple shapes and forms to imbue his paintings with lyrical undertones, inviting the viewer to come closer and decipher the whimsy mechanisms and shapes. The viewer is encouraged to find their own meaning in the mysterious and juvenile world, unique interpretation is what adds to the painting's complexity. The many stories and meanings that surround Klee’s work is what makes them so dynamic and complex, even though what is presented in front of us is so simple. 

The communicative, provocative, and intriguing nature of Surrealist art is what inspired many feminist artists in the 1960’s and 1970’s to use art as a way to investigate the issues of gender and sexual orientation. Implementing many forms of media to replicate and project the “male gaze” onto a wider audience, many feminist artists passionately exposed how society has always viewed women, as sexual objects and commercial matrons. In Cindy Sherman’s, Untitled Film Still #35, 1979, Sherman stars in a self-directed series of photographs that reproduce a highly generic and stereotypical image of the modern-day female, socially confined to her duties: to tend to the house, and her husband. Sherman constructs her own petty identity of a vain and self-absorbed housewife in a sardonic image meant to simulate the “male gaze,” bringing her audience face-to-face to a highly commercialized and artificial state of mind and beauty.

Now that we have gained some knowledge about the Surrealist and Feminist art movement, shall we delve deeper into the exhibit? 


WARNING: the following paintings might be just too awesome for your minds to grasp.

When I entered the cement plastered halls of the exhibit, I truly felt like I was falling through a deep, industrial rabbit hole, away from the LA traffic, smog, and sun and into a wonderland of surreal masterpieces. LACMA kept the exhibit looking clean, streamlined, and simple, the walls accentuating the complexity of the paintings hanging on them. But why should an art exhibit that draws focus on the feminine soul be covered with flowers, pastel colors, and delicate tracery? Here, the wonderland transcends stereotypes and expectations, the eerie nodes of surrealism are strewn across the confining gray walls, studded with images that evoke daydreams and visions. 

One of the most horrifying, but riveting paintings at the exhibit is Frida Kahlo’s The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1939. Commissioned by the late actress’ friends to paint a remembrance portrait after her devastating suicide, Kahlo implemented her surrealist aesthetic and her knack for depicting poignant and unrelenting depictions of the pain of human existence to paint an unyielding account of the Hale’s suicide. Mortified by the gruesome and bloody subject matter, Hale’s socialite friend had the painting stored away, where no one can experience the breathtaking visual obituary. It was not until decades later when greater audiences were able to view the painting,  allotted the chance to be sucked into this graphic and poignant account of a national tragedy. Hale’s suicide is systematically mapped out in front of the viewing audience: first her small, frail body stands at the edge of a skyscraper, followed by her ever graceful fall enveloped by cushioning clouds, then finally her body limply strewn across the bloody New York pavement. Kahlo incredibly depicts how the pressures of socialite society and the loss of luxury living, can take a toll on a wonderful beauty. Socially confined to her beauty as the only thing modern society will ever appreciate, Hale’s physiologically deteriorated spirit takes a supple leap of faith, her inner pain strewn across the sky and the pavement for all to see. 

Another painting that particularly struck me mainly because of its wit and satire was Gertrude Abercrombie’s Courtship. A staunch commentary on the predatory nature of flirting and courtship, Abercrombie blatantly lampoons romantic pursuit by depicting a innocent young women under gun point of a suave, masked criminal, there to rob her of her freedom and innocence. The misty shore, which is supposed to be veiled with the light and intoxicating breezes of mutual attraction, is transformed into an eerie and surreal dali-esque oceanside, inhabited by awkward elongated figures arrested in a menacing gray sky. The murky tones convey the arresting confines of a typical relationship, where a female is perpetually held hostage by an overbearing male partner. The viewer is powerfully exposed to the desolate and hopeless world of a woman, who holds no power in courtship ritual, left to surrender to the social confines of society. 

Left to their thoughts throughout most of their lives, it was an absolute pleasure delving into the powerful and expressive minds of many female surrealist artists, eager to expose the world to their inner struggles and feelings, always veiled underneath an apron and curling rolls. In Wonderland is a powerful and fun exhibit that is just filled with paintings that you can just fall into. The female spirit is finally allowed to openly display herself in front of wider audience, uncensored and genuine. 

Unfortunately, by the time I post this blog, the exhibit will have left LACMA, off to mesmerize other places with its magnificence. But I hope that I have at least satisfied your thirst for female surrealist art, or maybe coaxed you into the tantalizing world of the surreal. 

Well, that is all for now folks, tune in for my last installment of my blog when I step out of the twilight zone, and into the concrete and powerful world of realism at the Armand Hammer Museum.

Herb Ritts: L.A. Style

Ugh, A Day at the Museum??? 

Exhibit #1: Herb Ritts: L.A. Style 

Day: 4-27-2012

Location: The Getty Center, Los Angeles 

Introduction: Hello bored internet surfers! If you happened to stumble upon my blog, or just love to meander through various blog sites to uncover some treasures, welcome to Ugh, A Day at the Museum???. The purpose of my hopefully fun and stimulating blog is to introduce many youngsters to the wonders of art and the stories these hung canvases and frames have to tell. To reach my goal, I shall implement my AP Art History knowledge, my fancy SAT vocabulary, and my decent blogger charisma to guide readers through my perilous journeys through three museum exhibits in the greater Los Angeles area. My entries will offer humorous and anecdotal, as well educational information about the various exhibits I will be visiting. From Surrealism to Photography, all of my blog readers will gain an enhanced and developed perspective towards how to approach museum exhibits, and of course, the art hanging on their shiny and curated walls. You will love art history and museum going, I guarantee it! 

Let’s start with Herb Ritts shall we? Perched atop the beautiful Bel-Air mountains, just far enough to escape from the smoggy fumes and jagged sounds of the 405 freeway, lies the Getty Center, a pseudo-anciet citadel of limestone, studded with sculptures, paintings, photographs, and gardens that will make any art lover swoon with pleasure and excitement. The Getty Center was my first destination in my list of art institutions to pay a visit to and explore an interesting exhibit they offered: Herb Ritts, L.A. Style. After exiting the german-tourist infused tram up the canyon, I ventured up the Getty’s numerous shallow limestone steps to my final destination, the West pavilion of photography. 

Going into the exhibit, I really did not know what to expect, my wonderful art history teacher from last year recommended that I pay a visit to the Herb Ritts exhibit, setting me off on my journey with an idea of what to expect: fashion photography. Judging from their gimmick photo of a women wearing a flowing designer dress (seen to the left), I expected to see numerous of skinny models pouting and awkwardly arching,  Italian chiffon fabric strewn across their bodies. Boy, was I wrong! 


Herb Ritts: L.A. Style was actually a mesmerizing and intoxicating span of dynamic nudes, contortions, shadows, values, and textures, flowing pristinely across black and white walls, elegantly composing an amazing portfolio belonging to a photography virtuoso: Mr. Herb Ritts.

Before I get too emotional and engrossed, I think some short background information about Herb Ritts and his stylistic as well as technical endeavors in photography might be helpful, as well as a crash course on the development of photography as a commercial and fine art.

Herb Ritts’ (1952–2002) distinctive aesthetic fashioned himself as one of the top commercial and fine art photographers in the late 1970’s and 80’s. Implementing the bright and perpetual California sun, as well as other distinctive facets of life in Los Angeles, Ritts intimate black and white portraiture, and his fresh and innovative approach to fashion and the nude, built up his reputation as one of America’s and the world’s top fashion photographers and portraitists. His bold photographs, pierced with dynamic contrasts, imaginative forms, and exquisite movement, helped to bridge the gap between the fine arts and the commercial and raise photography to a high and imaginative scale. 

However, photography was not always considered as an imaginative and creative medium for artists. Since photography’s novel emergence in 1839, many of the world’s first photographer’s strove to find ways to accurately capture the rapidly industrious and ever-changing world around them. Loius-Jaques-Mande-Daguerre and his invention of the daguerrotype enabled many artists and thirsty enlightenment thinkers during the early 19th century to capture accurate images of their subjects. However many photographers, who wanted to transcend the camera’s ability to simply capture and reproduce an optical image, sought ways to imbue their photographs with artistic and poignant qualities, incorporating artifice and sentiment into their modern medium. 

Simple photographs of historical events became ever poignant in Timothy O’Sullivan’s A Harvest of Death, July 1863. Using the modern and accessible camera to quickly and accurately capture a civil war field strung with bodies, O’Sullivan revolutionized photography’s powers in communications and archiving, bringing many audience face-to-face with the brutalities of war in his unsparing accounts of military life and sacrifice. A simple reportage of events is transformed into a powerful and stylistic canvas of powerful emotion. O’Sullivan used the camera’s flexible easels and portability to render his subjects in innovative angles, using a unique focal point to place the audience on ground level, accompanied by the littered corpses strewn across the desecrated battle-field. 

Movement always posed a challenge to many painters. However with photography, the successive stages of movement and the dynamism of motion can be easily and masterfully captured, seen in Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse Galloping, 1878. Details that were once too quick for the eye to capture are fantastically displayed in a succession of amazing photographs that realistically and stylistically record the fundamentals of motion, actively pulling the viewer through a horse’s every step and stretch on its race towards victory. 

Julia Margaret Cameron, used photography to poignantly and tenderly produce soft and mystical character studies of many well-known fictional and historical figures in the late 19th century. In her mystical photograph Ophelia, Study No. 2, 1867, Cameron played with focus to add and blurry and ethereal tone to her photographs, incorporating artifice to transform a simple photograph of a young women into fine art. It’s also not surprising that later in the 20th century, photography moved towards abstraction, paralleling modernists developments in other media. Edward Weston’s, Nude, 1925 is an innovative and simplistic approach to the modern nude. Only choosing to capture a small segment of the soft and lyrical body, the nude’s soft curves and angles compose an abstract landscape of smooth tissue and skeletal form, positioning his photography on the same fine-arts status along with many modernists and surrealists paintings of the time. 

Phew! Now that you know the basic fundamentals and history of photography. Let us implement our new-found knowledge to evaluate and investigate Herb’s exhibit shall we?

The exhibit was sub-divided into three categories of Herb’s renowned work: fashion photography, the nude, and celebrity portraits. All of these rooms were filled with dozens of amazing photographs that implement both creative abstraction, dynamic motion, and tender portraiture. L.A. Style was truly a comprehensive display of how all these elements of fine art photography can merge into an innovating and invigorating exposition of imagination. 

Wrapped Torso, Los Angeles, 1989 is a beautiful fashion photograph that implements a wide range of matte tones to reveal and conceal a body in a dynamic fashion, immortalizing the Issey Miyake gown in a sea of perpetual folds and curves. Adopting a ballet-like pose and surrounded by a simple, dark backdrop, the model gracefully strides forward in a dress that almost melts into her contours, accentuating the gown’s form fitting qualities in a pose that is both novel, fluid, and artistic. The perpetuating folds in the delicate fabric mimic beautifully delineated brushstrokes, flowing smoothly through a modern-day Nike of Samothrace, a goddess of optimal Hellenistic theatricality. The gap between the commercial and fine-arts in masterfully bridged in Ritts’ incredible fashion photograph. 

Lighting is the star of Ritts’ incredible nude Man with Chain, Los Angeles, 1985. Ritts’ model here is transformed into a work of Baroque sculpted beauty as various nodes of darks and lights strike his body in a dynamic force. A chain vividly warps around his torso, juxtaposing man and machine in one fluid delineation. This guy blew me away in the exhibit, a fabulous example of how the absence of color draws tonal range and texture into focus, presenting a nude of Bernini standards (yea, that great). The drama of the tenebrism and the elegant s-shaped curve of the body is breath-taking and engrossing, I was honestly staring at this picture for a good seven minutes in the exhibit, but it was worth the weird stares and “creeper” comments. 

This photograph of Johnny Depp in 1990 at the wake of his Tim Burton career was my favorite of all of Ritts' celebrity portraits, mainly because of Depp's menacing and playful glance and the smooth shine and glide of his iconic scissor hands. While not exactly as tender as Cameron’s Ophelia, Ritts’ character study of the rising, quirky and imaginative star is just so genuine and great. I mean look at it, how can you not love this guy? 

In all, the Herb Ritts’ L.A. style at the Getty was an amazing and informative exhibit that really helped me reexamine my opinion of photography as an innovative and imaginative form of fine art. Besides their rude security guard’s harsh rebukes regarding photography (none is allowed by the way, for future reference), I strongly recommend paying a visit to the Getty before the exhibit ends in August 26th 2012. 

Well, thats all for now guys!!! Tune in next week when I visit In Wonderland, a women surrealist exhibit at the LACMA! Happy Blog Surfing!