Finally, life returns – art returns, and the combination of the two is glorious: A two-museum day in New York City.
With Covid restrictions lifting and my comfortability level elevated, it was time to restart museum visits. Just in time too, since most restrictions will soon be gone and the crowds will return. Oh, how I’ve missed all that New York City’s museums and galleries have to offer!
1 > The Jewish Museum | Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine
First stop was The Jewish Museums’s Modern Look exhibit. I reserved my ticket for the opening time block and nearly had the museum and the exhibit to myself. Heaven!
And that’s my review of the exhibit as well. Modern Look covers the golden age of editorial design from the 1930s to the 1950s. Over 150 works illustrate how the combination of superb art direction, photography and graphic design drove innovation in American magazines and influenced visual culture.
Many of the photographers and designers working in 1930s Weimar at the Bauhaus were Jewish. As the Nazis came to power, some came to the US where print media was flourishing – Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Life, among other titles, had huge circulations. These immigrants, in collaboration with some of the best creative teams at the magazines, injected avant-garde and modernist ideas.
Through photographers including Lillian Bassman, Lester Beall, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks and Irving Penn, and designers Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Liberman and Bradbury Thompson (some of my design heroes) – it's clear how both disciplines merged to create a new form in magazine design.
It was great to see the well-curated work explained with context and beautifully displayed. While not a deep dive into its theme, it was the perfect primer, an amuse-bouche, for those not familiar with the period, the artists and the work.
Click on the any of the images to expand the galleries.
Top row, L: A-D Magazine covers, various designer. Bottom row, L: Advance Guard of Advertising Artists exhibit announcement cover, designed by György Kepes hosted by Dr Robert Leslie at the A-D Gallery. Signed by Frank Barr, Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, Jean Carlu, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Matter, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Rand, and Ladislav Sutnar. R: Direction Magazine covers from 1939-1943 designed by Paul Rand.
Alexey Brodovitch's book, Ballet | Using elegant, manipulated images, Brodovitch evoked the movement of the pieces. Only 500 copies of the book were published in 1945 and were not for sale. Brodovitch distributed it himself to a chosen few.
Top row, L: Alexey Brodovitch's Portfolio Magazine, Spring 1951 issue, combines details of a Jackson Pollock painting into a graphic pattern. R: First gallery layouts display, Second row, R: Vogue shoe layouts, art direction Alexander Liberman, photography by Gordon Parks. Third row, R: Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Vogue's first female fashion photographer, hired by Alexander Liberman. Fourth row, L: Photographer Lillian Bassman moves to abstraction in a layout for Harper's Bazaar – art director Alexey Brodovitch warns, "This is very dangerous," in putting visual effect over material product. R: Junior Bazaar covers, various photographers with art direction by Brodovitch. Fifth row, R: Second gallery layout display. Sixth row, L: Scope Magazine cover designed by Will Burton; Westvaco Inspiration layouts designed by Bradbury Thompson. R; More Westvaco Inspiration by Thompson. Seventh row, R: By the 1950s, many photographers grew dissatisfied with editorial control and moved toward a more personal and graphic, visual sensibility.
Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine thru sunday/11 july 2021.
2 > The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Alice Neel: People Come First
Second stop was The Met's Alice Neel retrospective. In this huge and stunning retrospective, only a fraction of Neel’s complete catalog is on display, but it's more than enough to see that she was forever unapologetic in her vision. In 1950, she stated about her approach. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”
Born on the Main Line just outside Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel was a wild child for her time. Breaking norms for women by working after high school to pursue higher education in art, then marrying and moving to Cuba in 1925. Neel was driven and often said she had to create, even if at the expense of her family.
By 30, abandoned by her husband and child, Neel suffered her first of several nervous breakdowns. In many ways, she lived up to the tortured artist cliché although it didn’t show in her work. She was a prolific visual artist, a trailblazer, a fighter, and when knocked down, found a way to get up and move on.
I've always been a fan of Alice Neel and her work. Like the artist, the work is raw, blunt, truthful. Neel painted realism as she saw it – never a romantic naturalism – and exposed beauty, ugliness, joy, pain, and loss in her portraits and cityscapes.
I like to paint people who are in the rat race, suffering all the tension and damage that’s involved in that—under pressure, really, of city life and the awful struggle that goes on in the city. — From the 2007 documentary Alice Neel
Neel chose her subjects, those she tended to have deep connections with, and transferred the inner person to her canvas. They included the intellectuals she met in downtown New York and the avant-garde of Havana, along with mothers, children, artists, activists, neighbors and underground personalities.
The exhibit is curated by theme, not year. But there's still a clear line in the complexity and maturation of her style. She masterfully ends her story with her bold palette and heavy linear strokes.
Neel’s portraits of people, primarily women and children, are well known, so I documented some of the pieces that I hadn’t seen before or hadn’t known. There's a comprehensive primer of Neel’s work here. It’s worth a look for more information on her work or if you can’t get to the show. Enjoy!
Click on the any of the images to expand the gallery.
1: 'The Intellectual' from 1929, a satirical watercolor of a young Neel struggling with her creative ambitions and the demands of motherhood. 2: 1932 watercolor and cut paper of Neel's friend, author and editor 'Christopher Lazare' whom she dubbed "queen of the homosexuals." 3: Masses & Mainstream, April 1950 issue –'Relief Cut' illustration of a mother on welfare learning her benefits have been cut. 4: Neel's 'A Statement' published in 1960 in Alfred Leslie's The Hasty Papers, a publication on Beat literature. 5: In Mainstream's 1961 issue, Neel' contributed this drawing of sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. 6: 1976 '107th and Broadway' on NYC's Upper West Side – Neel's last home/studio. 7: 1978 'View from the Artist's Window' is a nearby building depicted in a more flat and modernist style. 8: 1984's 'Elizabeth in a Red Hat' is one of Neel's last paintings before her death – a portrait of her granddaughter using her bold and colorful style to project confidence in a post-feminist young women.
Opening image: After the Great Depression, Neel joined the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal program that provided artists with a regular income provided they complete one painting within a specific period of time. In 1936, she painted ‘Longshoremen Returning from Work.’ The scene shows a West 17th Street intersection – Neel’s neighborhood at the time.
Alice Neel: People Come First thru sunday/1 august 2021.
What's your "freedom" event? Have you visited any museums yet?
Photos and 'Ballet' animation: © 2021 Janet Giampietro
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