Tag: Marc Chagall

Museum Exhibitions

Joan Semmel’s simple truth

Contributed by David Carrier / Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art opens with a surprising juxtaposition of two drawings. One portrays Rubens’ handsome little son, the other Dürer’s aged mother. Of the latter Gombrich says: “His truthful study of careworn old age may give us a shock which makes us turn away from it – and yet, if we fight against our first repugnance we may be richly rewarded, for Dürer’s drawing in its tremendous sincerity is a great work.” Gombrich was, to be sure, a conceptually conservative art historian. But this declaration is a perfect introduction to the once iconoclastic Joan Semmel’s “In the Flesh,” now on view at the Jewish Museum.

Museum Exhibitions

Call it Orphism

Contributed by Adam Simon / At a Four Walls event in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, Erik Oppenheim, at that time a young artist, stood up and said, “I’m starting an art movement. Anyone who wants to join, meet me in the back after the show.” It was a hilarious and audacious gesture, in part because no one joins an art movement on a whim, like a list-serve or an exercise class, but also because there hadn’t been any artist-initiated movements for a very long time. They proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dada, and enjoyed something of a resurgence in the 1960s with Fluxus in the United States, Supports/Surfaces and Zero in Europe, and the Gutai Group in Japan. Most of what we consider movements were proclaimed by an outside observer, usually a critic or curator, looking to group artists who had similar concerns and made work that fit the designation. For the artists themselves to rally around a specific cause, even an aesthetic one, was not required.