EASTERN TIME ZONE Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention The Jewish Museum ORGANIZING CURATOR: Mason Klein DESCRIPTION: Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, the artist known as Man Ray (1890–1976) revealed multiple artistic identities over the course of his career—New York Dadaist, Parisian Surrealist, international portraitist, and fashion photographer––and produced important works as a photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer, and maker of objects. Alias Man Ray considers how the artist’s life and career were shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience and his lifelong evasion of his past.As an exploration of the artist’s deliberate cultural ambiguity, which allowed him to become the first American artist to be accepted by the Paris avant garde, this book examines the dynamic connection between Man Ray’s working-class origins, his assimilation, the evolution of his art, and his willful construction of his own artistic persona, as evidenced in a series of subtle, encrypted self-references throughout the artist’s career. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/manray IMAGE: Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective Philadelphia Museum of Art ORGANIZING CURATORS: Michael Taylor, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art DESCRIPTION: Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (about 1902–1948), a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art. This exhibition, which includes about 178 works of art, surveys Gorky’s entire career from the early 1920s until his death by suicide in 1948. The retrospective includes paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings—some of which are being shown for the first time—and reveals Gorky’s development as an artist and the evolution of his singular visual vocabulary and mature painting style. The highlight of the exhibition is a series of “creation chambers,” based on the artist’s description of his studio in Union Square, New York, in which some of Gorky’s most powerful and best-known paintings are being shown alongside their related studies and preparatory drawings. Benefiting from new biographical information that has come to light in recent years, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will present a critical reassessment of this key figure in modern art. This comprehensive retrospective is the first full-scale survey of Gorky’s work in nearly thirty years, thus providing a new generation of viewers with the opportunity to see this complex, influential, and deeply moving body of work. Organizers Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. OTHER VENUES: Philadelphia Museum of Art • October 21, 2009 - January 10, 2010 Tate Modern, London • February - May 2010 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles • June - Fall 2010 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/337.html Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity The Museum of Modern Art ORGANIZING CURATORS: Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll DESCRIPTION: Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity is The Museum of Modern Art’s first comprehensive treatment of the subject since the famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938. Pulling together over 400 works from public and private collections, many of which have never before been seen in the United States, the exhibition offers a new generational perspective on this most influential school. Offering a counterpoint to the way that “Bauhaus” has often been used as a shorthand term for international modernism unmoored from any particular moment, the exhibition presents the Bauhaus not as a style but a school, exploring its diverse and rich output over the full fourteen years of its history that coincides with the tumultuous tenure of the Weimar Republic. In looking across this historical sweep, the curators examine the multiple and shifting ways in which faculty and students addressed the question of how to make art relevant to a new modern culture of technological media, mass production and expanding consumerism. In both selection and installation, they focus in particular on the way the school’s innovative structure‚ placing fine art, design and architecture in dialogue with one another‚ resulted both in the sharing of formal and conceptual ideas across media, and the creation of new hybrid, intermedia forms. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/bauhaus/ list of related programs: http://moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/303#related_events IMAGE: The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480-1650 Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design ORGANIZING CURATORS: Emily J. Peters, Curator. Andrew Stein Raftery, Consulting Curator. DESCRIPTION: Objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy, Renaissance engravings communicate a unique visual language made up entirely of lines. The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480–1650 explores the art of engraving and its dynamic transformations during the European Renaissance. Showcasing works by the most outstanding masters, from great innovators such as Albrecht Dürer to virtuoso specialists such as Agostino Carracci, the exhibition demonstrates how engravers learned from one another and pushed their art to astonishing technical heights. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to observe the rapid visual evolution of one of Europe’s first reproducible art forms. OTHER VENUES: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston (venue date April 2010) ADDITIONAL: Special Exhibition Interactive. http://www.risdmuseum.org/thebrilliantline/ Cézanne and Beyond The Philadelphia Museum of Art ORGANIZING CURATORS: Joseph Rishel, The Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Painting before 1900, and Senior Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection and the Rodin Museum, Michael Taylor, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, Carlos Basuald, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art, Katherine Sachs, Adjunct Curator. DESCRIPTION: Paul Cézanne’s posthumous retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 was a watershed event in the history of art. The immediate impact of this large presentation of his work on the young artists of Paris was profound. Its ramifications on successive generations down to the present are still in effect. This exhibition features forty paintings and twenty watercolors and drawings by Cézanne, displayed alongside works by several artists for whom Cézanne has been a central inspiration and whose work reflects, both visually and poetically, Cézanne’s extraordinary legacy. Based on the remarkable resources of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, both in its holdings of major works by Cézanne and in its large collections of early modernist works—thanks to A. E. Gallatin and Louise and Walter Arensberg—this show is a unique occasion to experience the continuing impact of this influential painter. Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ORGANIZING CURATOR: William Stover DESCRIPTION: Technology has rendered music more accessible and pervasive than ever before. MP3 players are omnipresent; every cell phone can make a statement about the owner's musical taste. Music is everywhere, and in the process has become both more public and more private. We all travel through life with our own soundtrack—sometimes others can hear it; sometimes it's ours alone. Visual artists, however, have been inspired by music throughout history. They have responded by transforming something that is arguably intangible, into visual, physical form. "Seeing Songs" presents an eclectic mix of work—mainly from the Museum's collections—that draws on music as inspiration, focusing on abstract as well as representational art and connections to musical forms as varied as classical, jazz, and pop. From lyrical works on paper by Wassily Kandinsky and a painting by Stuart Davis that depicts music as gesture and improvisation, to recent videos by Gillian Wearing and Candice Breitz that explore the relationship between pop stars and their fans, this exhibition brings together an international group of artists in whose work we see songs. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=8387 Discoveries in Detail: Jacques Le Moyne and Theodor DeBry The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens ORGANIZING CURATORS: Holly Keris DESCRIPTION: The extraordinary career of Huguenot artist Jacques Le Moyne (c. 1533 – 1588) has only relatively recently been studied. Discoveries in Detail, an exhibition with four components, not only highlighted two important facets of this artist’s career, it also illuminated contemporary connections to his work. First, the full series of engravings from Theodor DeBry’s A Brief History of Those Things Which Befell the French in Florida (1591) showed illustrations based on Le Moyne’s work at Fort Caroline, in Jacksonville, Florida, just a few miles from the Museum. Le Moyne, the first European artist to travel to North America, came to Florida in 1564 as the French expedition’s official cartographer and artist. While the others were charged with the establishment of a Huguenot colony at Fort Caroline, Le Moyne was charged with documenting the customs of the Timucua, the native inhabitants of the North Florida area, as well as local flora and fauna. After Le Moyne returned to Europe, he pursued a career as a botanical artist, and is credited with introducing aesthetic