Official behind-the-scenes blog of the Dallas Museum of Art
This week we celebrate a homecoming at the DMA. Frederic Church’s The Icebergs is now back on view after almost a year on tour with the exhibition The Civil War and American Art. Watch the painting’s journey from its travel crate back to the DMA’s American Art Galleries in the video below, and join us for our free lunchtime Gallery Talk at 12:15 p.m. on Wednesday, September 18, with DMA curator Sue Canterbury to welcome home The Icebergs!
Kimberly Daniell is the PR manager at the DMA.
We hope your Labor Day is less like this Jackson Pollock lithograph . . .
Jackson Pollock, Hayride, 1935-1936, lithograph, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Arthur Kramer, Sr., (c) Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
and more like this Lynn Lennon photograph.
Lynn Lennon, Beach Party, Dallas City Hall, 1984, gelatin silver print, Dallas Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Homer B. Jester Fund, (c) 1984 Lynn Lennon
The DMA is closed today, but you can enjoy free general admission every day during Museum hours (Tuesday-Sunday 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.; Thursday 11:00 a.m.-9:00 p.m.; third Fridays 11:00 a.m.-midnight).
This week the DMA unveiled the work Everything is Everything (2006) by the artist Koki Tanaka, which will be on view in the Concourse for the next five months.
The work of Koki Tanaka takes shape primarily as video and installation that explores the relationship between objects and actions. His videos record simple gestures performed with ordinary objects—a knife cutting vegetables, beer poured into a glass, the opening of an umbrella—in which seemingly “nothing happens.” Yet, through their repetitive composition and heightened attention to detail, Tanaka’s videos compel us to take notice of the mundane phenomena of daily life. Latent patterns and geometrical forms emerge out of Tanaka’s work, and otherwise ordinary objects are transformed, providing an epiphany of sorts from moments of everyday life.
Everything is Everything, 2006, eight-channel DVDs, color, sound, and materials in everyday use, installed at Taipei Biennial 2006 in Taipei Fine Arts Museum
(Image courtesy of the artist, Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo, and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou)
The eight-channel video installation Everything is Everything was first created for exhibition at the 2006 Taipei Biennial. For this work, the artist and two assistants spent a total of eight days recording their interactions and interventions with readily available items, including hangers, cups, towels, an air mattress, and toilet paper, all found around the city of Taipei. The physical properties of these objects were tested (a metal hanger is stretched to its breaking point) or their uses were expanded (a level placed on two table legs becomes an impromptu hurdle). Tanaka and his assistants experimented with these objects multiple times, both indoors and in public, and their exploits were compiled into eight distinct video loops ranging in length from 1:19 to 1:50 minutes. Tanaka’s tightly cropped framing of each scene often features the performers from the neck down or removes them from the shot altogether, thus focusing the viewer’s attention on the objects and the simple, repetitive acts being performed.
In her canonical text, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1981), art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss begins the book’s final chapter with a film by Richard Serra, Hand Catching Lead (1968), in which the artist’s disembodied hand tenaciously attempts to catch pieces of falling lead. Krauss reads Serra’s film as characteristic of minimalist sculpture in the way that it “exploit[s] a kind of found object for its possibilities as an element in a repetitive structure.” The repetitive nature of the actions in Everything is Everything, combined with the use of inexpensive, mass-produced materials, highlights an affinity Tanaka’s videos share with the logic of minimalist sculpture and process art of the 1960s. Similarly, Tanaka’s repetitive use of the objects in Everything is Everything alludes to Serra’s Verb List (1967–68), in which the artist listed eighty-four verbs such as “to roll . . . to crumple . . . to drop . . . to scatter” as a means to relate actions to “oneself, material, place, and process.” Tanaka’s object-oriented work is indebted to minimalism as well as to the legacies of Mono-ha and Arte Povera, as evidenced by a shared interest in exploring the physicality and formal qualities of quotidian objects through processes of encounter and repetition.
Japan Pavilion Photos: Keizo Kioku
Japan Pavilion Photos: Keizo Kioku
Koki Tanaka was born in Tochigi, Japan, in 1975, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan, in 2005 and has since been the subject of solo exhibitions at UC Irvine University Art Gallery (2012), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010), and the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum (2012), the Yokohama Triennale (2011), and Making is Thinking at the Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011). Most recently, Tanaka was selected to represent Japan in the 55th Venice Biennale, for which he received a special mention.
Gabriel Ritter is The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m looking forward to the start of a new school year later this month. The DMA’s galleries have been quiet during the “school day” without the sounds of docents, teachers, and students deep in conversation about works of art. I thought it might be fun to celebrate back-to-school time with a DMA tribute to the “three Rs.”
Reading
Pierre Bonnard often used his nieces and nephews as models for his paintings. Bonnard was also fascinated by education, and in this painting he shows his nephews Charles and Jean Terrasse reading at a table. It’s easy to imagine that these two children are completing their homework assignments before going to bed. It certainly looks as if one of the boys is more interested in his reading than the other—a scene that is probably familiar to many parents and teachers.
Pierre Bonnard, Interior: The Terrasse Children, 1899, oil on paper board panel, Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection
Writing
Charles Rohlfs’ Swinging Writing Desk was one of the trademarks of his artistic furniture style. The desk rests on a footed platform and spins on a series of small wheels. The interior of the desk is divided into small compartments—perfect for storing pencils, pens, and any other supplies you might need. I don’t think I would mind doing homework if I had such a beautiful desk to use.
Desk (Model #500), Charles Rohlfs, Charles Rohlfs Workshop, c. 1899-1901, white oak with iron hardware, Dallas Museum of Art, anonymous gift
Arithmetic
The name khipu comes from a Quechua word meaning “knot,” a fitting name as khipu are made up of many strands of knotted fibers. It is not known what the knots signify, but it is thought that they represent a numerical record. Numbers may be indicated by the size and position of each knot on its cord.
Fragmentary khipu with two main cords and top and subsidiary and tertiary cords, Inca, Late Horizon, c. 1476-1534, cotton, plant fiber, and indigo dye, Dallas Museum of Art, the Nora and John Wise Collection, bequest of John Wise
September 16 is the official start date for student programs at the DMA, but we’re currently taking reservations for Museum visits and Go van Gogh outreach programs. Scheduling information can be found online. If you are an educator, we hope you’ll consider bringing your students to the Museum this year. I hope they’ll be as excited as this student was to visit the DMA!
Student jumping off of a school bus at the DMA.
Shannon Karol is Manager of Docent and Teacher Programs at the DMA.
With multiple days of triple-digit temps, we are feeling the heat right with you. So we pooled together works in the collection that really make a splash. Take a refreshing dip into our DMA waters below, find even more on our Pinterest page, and stop by the Museum to escape the heat. We keep it a cool 72 degrees inside; the AC’s even included in free general admission.
Kimberly Daniell is the Public Relations Manager at the DMA and Hayley Dyer is the Audience Relations Coordinator for Programming
After many years at the Museum’s Ross Avenue Entrance, Rufino Tamayo’s iconic mural El Hombre (Man) is returning to the Atrium, where it was first hung when the Museum’s Hamon Building opened in 1993.
Rufino Tamayo’s El Hombre (Man) being de-installed from the Ross Avenue Entrance (left) and the rehanging in the Atrium (right).
Tamayo, born of Zapotec heritage in Oaxaca, Mexico, was one of the most prominent Mexican artists of the mid-1900s, and a contemporary of Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco. His mural has long been viewed as one of the DMA’s most important works. The tumultuous story behind it, however, inspires further appreciation.
Rufino Tamayo at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1950s. Dallas Museum of Art Archives
Rufino Tamayo was a good friend of Stanley Marcus, then the president of the Dallas Art Association. In 1951, while on a trip to Amarillo, Tamayo and his wife, Olga, planned to drive to Dallas to visit the Marcus family, letting them know that they would arrive at 5:30 that evening. At 10:30 that night the Tamayos finally arrived, looking disheveled and disillusioned. When Marcus asked them about the delay, Tamayo told him about a car accident they were involved in, in which a local from Amarillo driving a pickup truck ran into them from behind. When the police arrived, it was determined that Tamayo was at fault for the accident, despite his claims and that the evidence suggested otherwise. Because of this unsettling experience, Tamayo told Marcus he would never produce art for the United States. By coincidence, Marcus had for some time wanted to secure Mexican art for the Museum to showcase the significant cultural contributions of the country’s artists, and he offered to commission a large-scale mural from Tamayo. Despite the Museum having only enough funds to pay one-third the normal price of his work, Tamayo accepted the commission as “a real gift of the heart from Mr. Tamayo to the museum.” He chose to focus his subject on the aspirations and potential of mankind.
Rufino Tamayo at work, 1950s. Dallas Museum of Art Archives
When Tamayo completed El Hombre in the summer of 1952, he briefly showed it in Mexico City before shipping it by train to Dallas. Months later, however, the painting still had not arrived at the Museum. The search for the missing mural went on for over a year, when finally the stationmaster from a train station on the Mexico-Texas border called Marcus to inform him that they had found a large package addressed to him. The boxcar that the package had been traveling in had been shunted off the track on a spur, and had been sitting out in the elements all year*. Fortunately, when the mural finally arrived in Dallas in September 1953, it was found to be in surprisingly good condition, and El Hombre was put in a place of honor so that every visitor to the Museum would see Tamayo’s depiction of Mexican culture.
El Hombre (Man), which comprises three panels, in transit to its new home.
DMA staff vacuuming the Atrium wall in preparation for Tamayo’s painting.
This week, on its journey down the Concourse to the Atrium, Tamayo’s El Hombre traveled much more safely this time around. Be sure to stop by the Atrium on your next visit to see this iconic work for free.
El Hombre (Man) in the DMA Atrium
* [update August 2017] The source of this story is an oral history with Stanley Marcus, interviewed by Director Jay Gates October 27, 1994. However, documentation of the arrival of El Hombre at the Museum shows that the painting was only delayed by three and a half weeks, likely by flooding in areas along the railway. El Hombre was shown in Mexico City in August 1953, shipped from Mexico on August 17, 1953 and arrived in Dallas on September 9, 1953.
Jasmine Shevell is the Exhibitions & Publications Intern at the DMA.
In celebration of the Fourth of July, we thought it might be fun to spotlight some of the great American artworks in our collection that have been created in the 237 years since our nation’s founding.
Rembrandt Peale, George Washington, c. 1850, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, The Karl and Esther Hoblitzelle Collection, gift of the Hoblitzelle Foundation
What better way to start than with the Father of Our Country? This portrait, completed fifty-one years after Washington’s death, was created by an artist who had met George Washington on several occasions. His first encounter with the president occurred when Rembrandt Peale was just seventeen years old. He painted a portrait of the president that would serve as the inspiration for countless additional portraits over the years. Peale shows Washington in his later years, perhaps reflecting back on his time as a surveyor, general, and president. When you visit the galleries, you might compare this painting with Jean-Antoine Houdon’s bust of George Washington, which is located right around the corner. Which one do you think is a more accurate likeness?
Crawford Riddell, Bedstead, c. 1844, Brazilian rosewood, tulip poplar, yellow pine, and polychromed textile, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of three anonymous donors, Friends of the Decorative Arts Fund, General Acquisitions Fund, Discretionary Decorative Arts Fund, and the Boshell Family Foundation
It’s impossible to lead a tour through our galleries without stopping at the Gothic bedstead. As beautiful as this work of art is, I think its history is even more fascinating. This bed was commissioned by a group of Whig party supporters who were convinced that Henry Clay was finally going to win an election and become President of the United States. Unfortunately for those eager supporters, Clay lost the 1844 election to James K. Polk, and the bed never made its way into the White House. It’s always fun to hear from our visitors who they think might have slept in a bed this grand.
Thomas Moran, An Indian Paradise (Green River, Wyoming), 1911, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American artists headed West to explore new territories in the United States. Many of them were captivated by the natural beauty of the landscape—especially areas like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite Parks. These artists began to think of such awe-inspiring locations as our cathedrals and monuments. By capturing their beauty and grandeur on canvas, they celebrated the landscapes that make our country unique. What natural wonders are your favorite American landscapes?
Our collection provides many wonderful primary sources that relate to key events in American history. We hope that you’ll come visit them in person on July 4—the DMA will be open (with FREE general admission) from 11:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.
Shannon Karol is the Manager of Docent and Teacher Programs at the DMA.
You may have heard that we recently reattributed a Baroque sculpture in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection to the artist Giovanni Bonazza. Here’s an interview with Olivier Meslay, associate director of curatorial affairs at the DMA, explaining how he discovered the true artist of Reclining Nymph:
For additional information on the sculpture and its reattribution, you can read the full press release here or see the work up close, and for free, on view in The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection on Level 3.
In honor of Thomas Sully’s birthday on June 19, we sat down with William Keyse Rudolph, the DMA’s former Associate Curator of American Art. Now the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Dudley J. Godfrey, Jr. Curator of American Art and Decorative Arts, William is currently organizing a retrospective exhibition of the artist. Sully (1783–1872) was born into a theatrical family in England but made a career in America, capturing in paint many of the leading actors and actresses of the time. The exhibition will feature many of these portraits as well as his “fancy pictures”–paintings made for mass appeal, with literary, artistic, and/or imaginary subjects. While at the DMA, William acquired Cinderella at the Kitchen Fire for the collection; the painting will be featured in the traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue.
Thomas Sully, Cinderella at the Kitchen Fire, 1843, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the Pauline Allen Gill Foundation
1. You were quoted in Art and Antiques magazine as saying that the DMA’s Cinderella at the Kitchen Fire took your breath away the first time you saw it. Why is this? Why do you consider this work Sully’s “finest fancy picture”?
For one thing, the picture is bigger than you expect. It’s nearly four feet by five feet. It was hanging on the wall of an art dealer’s office, surrounded by books, clutter, papers–and it just jumped out at me, even with all that distraction. It’s a beautifully painted, delicate picture, full of all sorts of grays and pinks that never reproduce well, but that are knock-out in person. And to be honest, it has this great big wonderful orange and white cat frolicking with Cinderella almost right at front and center. At that time, I had an orange and white cat, so the die was cast. I had to love it! And to be fair, former DMA director Jack Lane’s first words upon seeing an image of the painting were “Look at that cat!” He’s a cat person, too. We were also very fortunate that Mrs. Pauline Gill Sullivan, who had been a great benefactor of the DMA, saw the painting when we brought it to the Museum on approval and very graciously agreed to fund its acquisition. Besides having her own fine collection of European and American art, Mrs. Sullivan had a wonderful track record of making acquisitions available to the Museum, such as the commanding 18th-century portrait by Ralph Earl and a really dreamy late 19th-century Frank Duveneck painting of a woman in a red hat, so I was grateful that she responded so well to a big fairytale scene, which was out of her comfort zone in terms of the artist, size, and subject matter.
2. Did you have an interest in Sully and his paintings prior to this acquisition?
Yes. I had lived, worked, and gone to graduate school in Philadelphia for ten years before coming to the DMA, so I was well aware of Sully. He is so closely linked with the city of Philadelphia, where he worked for about sixty years, that it is almost impossible to spend time in Philly and not run into his work in virtually every cultural institution, from museums to libraries and hospitals.
3. How does it make you feel knowing that a key acquisition you made while working at the DMA will now be featured in Milwaukee’s exhibition and catalogue? Was it difficult to leave Cinderella behind?
I am, of course, thrilled! Cinderella at the Kitchen Fire actually gave birth to the show. After I acquired the work, my colleague Carol Eaton Soltis (a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and I began to talk about why this work was so interesting, which led to us proposing a show at the DMA that examined Sully’s total career: portraits as well as fancy pictures like this one. That show, which we began working on in 2005, was originally scheduled for 2009-2010 but ultimately didn’t happen due to timing and other issues. So we are really happy that years later the idea for the show was able to travel with me to Milwaukee and can now finally be seen here and then at the San Antonio Museum of Art. And yes, it was very difficult to leave Cinderella behind. You never, ever forget your first acquisition, and she was mine. I have missed her every day since I left the DMA, and I’m ridiculously excited to have her back with me for a brief time. If you ask gallery attendants at the DMA who remember me, they will tell you I used to go talk to her in the galleries. So my team here has been warned about that! I will probably burst into tears when she comes out of her crate and I see her again.
4. Since Sully also specialized in portraiture, is there any evidence that the figure of Cinderella was based on a real person?
Carol Soltis and I are convinced that the model for Sully was his daughter Rosalie, who posed for many of his works, several of which will also be in the show. She was a very talented painter herself, who died young.
5. Cinderella was painted when Sully was 60 years old. In your opinion, did it bring him the success and attention he hoped for in his later years? Did it help him attract new clients?
Yes and no. Sully hoped to sell the painting much faster than he did. He exhibited it several times in the Northeast and it was made into an engraving, but it took a few years to actually sell to a collector. One of the fascinating stories of this exhibition is how the fancy pictures like Cinderella functioned for Sully as a way to try to counteract the effects of economic crises on the portraiture market. Works like Cinderella were attempts to keep himself in front of the public, which he hoped would both result in sales of the subject pictures and remind clients that he could still turn it on when he wanted to.
6. A later version of Cinderella was (at least at one time) in the collection of Thomas Sully, Jr., of Naples, Florida. Is he a descendant of the painter? Did you ever track down this painting and will it be part of the exhibition and/or catalogue?
He is a descendant. I’ve seen an old reproduction of this picture, and I actually suspect it was the work of one of Sully’s grown children, whom he trained as artists. For that reason, I’ve never really worried about tracing it, as the DMA has the best one. What I’d be curious to see someday is another version of Cinderella done later that apparently shows her with the fairy godmother, but that one is completely obscure and only listed in Sully’s register. If anyone knows where it is, I would love to see it!
7. Do you know yet which works in the exhibition will be installed near the DMA’s Cinderella?
I don’t know exactly where the painting will go in the gallery, but it will be part of a section devoted to Sully’s fancy pictures. So she will live near an amazing picture of Little Nell Asleep in the Curiosity Shop from the Free Library of Philadelphia, which is based on Charles Dickens; and a gigantic, dramatic painting based on a scene from the early American novel The Pilot by James Fenimore Cooper that we’re borrowing from the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. All three of them will be stunning together, and all were painted around the same time.
Thomas Sully: Painted Performance will be on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum October 11, 2013-January 5, 2014, and then at the San Antonio Museum of Art February 7-May 11, 2014. I hope some of the DMA’s visitors who love this painting will come see the show in one of these places to help celebrate this important painter and this really beautiful picture that the DMA family has been so quick to adopt as a favorite. And thank you to Sue Canterbury, Maxwell L. Anderson, and all the DMA family for making her available for loan.
Reagan Duplisea is the Associate Registrar, Exhibitions at the DMA.
The DMA’s galleries house art from around the world, and each work has a story. Olivier Meslay, the Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, shares insight about the recent acquisition Erminia and the Shepherds, by Guillaume Guillon Lethière. After you learn about the artist and the history of the painting, visit the work on Level 2 for free!
