Zooming into Fall with Lectures, Online Articles and Museum Appointment Info

 

Vincent van Gogh, Tree Roots, 1890

Dear friends of the New York Arts Exchange,

September is here with the promise of refreshing autumn breezes. And yet, confusion still reigns over the New York area as we continue to grapple with the Covid-19 pandemic.  Whom do we trust?  Where should we go without concern for our health?  Should I make an appointment with a museum or wait a bit until the museums test their new procedures?  

I prefer prudence and will continue to Zoom my classes at Mercy College and at other venues this fall.  

Here is Beth's Fall Schedule on Zoom.  Click on the titles to find the website and register with the specific organization.

Wednesday, September 23rd at 7 pm: "Vincent van Gogh's Auvers Period: Considering the Latest Revelations."  Hosted on Zoom by the Greenwich Arts Council

Free for Members of GAC; $15 for non-members.  Register through the GAC

Tuesday, October 13th at 10 am: "Three Important Contemporary Black Artists: Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley and Yinka Shonibare."  Hosted by Learning in Retirement. 

Fee: $5.  Register through LIR.

Wednesday, October 21st at 7 pm: "Recycled and Refashioned: The Art of Ruby Silvious." Hosted by the Greenwich Arts Coucil.  This is an interview with Ruby Silvious with plenty of time for a Q and A.  Mark your calendars - not to be missed! 

Free to member of the GAC. $15 for non-members.  Register through the GAC

Thursday, November 12th at 7 pm: "Andy Warhol and the Pop Revolution." Hosted by Byram Shubert Library, Greenwich, CT.  Free.  Register through BSL.

James Tissot, Seaside (Portrait of Kathleen Kelly NewtonP, 1878

People often ask: What are you up to these days?  Well, I am ashamed to admit, I didn't "Marie Kondo-ize" my house, as I promised myself back in March  Instead I wrote articles on art, because this is my #1 passion.  Here are a few examples on the New York Arts Exchange blog: Lester Rapaport, Fereshteh Priou, Chizuru Morii Kaplan, and Ruby Silvious.

Jacqueline Marval, Les Odalisques, 1903

Here are my articles in Bonjour Paris articles since April 2020:

"The Marvelous Madame Marval: A Woman Artist Among the Fauves," April 7, 2020.

"Museum Musing for the Mother's Day in France: A Quiz," June 3, 2020.

"Man Ray's Muse and Model Adrienne Fidelin: An Interview with Wendy Grossman," July 6, 2020.

"Vincent van Gogh: The Last Painting in Auvers-sur-Oise," August 10, 2020.

"James Tissot: The Painter of 19th Century Modern Life," August 25, 2020.

And finally, museums are beginning to open again.

You have to make appointments, which at first seems strange until you discover that you don't miss navigating through the midday mobs.

Here are the websites for reservations in NYC:

Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://engage.metmuseum.org/admissions/tickets/

Museum of Modern Art: https://buy.acmeticketing.com/orders/198/calendar?eventId=5ef36ac25eeba32ee256c78d&cart 

Whitney Museum of American Art: https://visit.whitney.org/ga/ticketing.aspx?node_id=540044#/step1

New York Historical Society: https://tickets.nyhistory.org/?date=2020-9-11

Museum of the City of New York: https://35948.blackbaudhosting.com/35948/page.aspx?pid=196&tab=2&txobjid=ed762206-14a8-4ff2-b199-f89d6eaa8cf9

NB:

El Museo del Barrio has posted guidelines, but does not require reservations:

https://www.elmuseo.org/visitor-guidelines/

Farther afield:

Hudson River Museum, Yonkers: https://www.hrm.org/plan-your-visit/

Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah: https://katonahmuseum.simpletix.com/e/55816?aff=HomePageLink

Il Magazzino, Cold Springs: https://www.magazzino.art/booking

Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT: https://brucemuseum.org/site/visit_us_detail/admission_reservations

Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY: https://stormking.org/visit/

Best wishes for your Labor Day Weekend,

Beth

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and owner

New York Arts Exchange

www.nyarts-exchange.com

nyarts.exchange@verizon.net 

Bonjour Adrienne Fidelin, Man Ray's Muse and Model, and Beth's First Museum Quiz

Dear Friends,

Bonjour Paris recently relaunched its website with a beautiful new look - refreshed and ready for the reopening of museums and other "non-essential" activities. Please support Bonjour Paris, the insider's guide to la vie française by signing up for the weekly newsletter today -  Merci beaucoup! 

My latest article in BP:

Photo from Roland Penrose, Portrait of Picasso, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971, page 64.

Photographed by Beth S. Gersh-Nesic

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the art historian Wendy A. Grossman about her fascinating article on Adrienne Fidelin, the little-known muse and model who lived with Surrealist  American artist Man Ray for about 5 years (1935-1940).  The photograph above records the tight-knit group of Surrealists vacationing during the summer of 1937, hosted by the gallerist Marie Cuttoli (now the subject of an exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia) and her husband Senator Paul Cuttoli. Note that Adrienne Fidelin, sitting on the extreme left, was identified as "a friend," as if the author did not know her.  That was far from the truth.  Adrienne Fidelin, known as Ady to Penrose et al., came from her birthplace Guadeloupe to Paris as young teenager, following the deaths of her parents. Dr. Grossman's essay about Ady, who was also the first black model to grace an American high fashion magazine, Harper's Bazaar, asserts that Picasso's painting Woman Seated Against Yellow and Pink II (1937) is based on her likeness. Indeed, we might consider this a Surrealist "portrait" in the same vein as other portraits from this period. In her Bonjour Paris interview Dr. Grossman described how she researched a person who became "invisible even in plain sight."

Claude Monet, Impression: Le Havre, 1872

Also in Bonjour Paris, my first museum quiz!  

Do you remember where you can see Claude Monet's Impression: Le Havre, the great namesake of the Impressionist movement?  Is it in the Musée d'Orsay or Musée Marmotton?  Test your memory of where to find Paris' best known works of art right here.

Bonne chance - et bon weekend,

Beth

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and owner

New York Arts Exchange

www.nyarts-exchange.com 

Last Call: Picasso's Women at Gagosian through June 29, 2019

Dora Maar Heats Up New York and Paris in Picasso’s Women at Gagosian Madison Avenue and Centre Pompidou

By Beth Gersh-Nesic -

 

Jun 27, 2019

 

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Tête de femme, 1963 © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Patrick Goetlin, Courtesy Gagosian

According to the gallery notes for Gagosian’s current Picasso exhibition, the late great art historian Leo Steinberg claimed that the famous Spanish artist (and infamous Lothario) did not paint a woman “as she presents herself to the world, but how she feels inside.”

Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress from 1935-1942, told her close friend, the writer James Lord: “All his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picasso’s, not one is Dora Maar.” (James Lord, Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir, 1993, p. 123).

Buste de femme (Dora Maar), 1940. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo: Erich Koyama
Courtesy Gagosian

Whom do you want to believe: the male art historian or the artist’s mistress and model? I choose to believe Dora. The evidence is clear in the current exhibition Picasso’s Women: Fernande to Jacqueline, A Tribute to Sir John Richardson, on view in Gagosian’s 980 Madison Avenue gallery, New York, from May 3- June 29, 2019.  Comprised of 36 paintings, drawings and sculptures from mostly private collections, the exhibition came about through a “partnership with members of the Picasso family” to honor the memory of their close friend and colleague, British art historian Sir John Richardson, who passed away on March 12, 2019. Sir John’s magna opus A Life of Picasso, volumes 1-3 (the fourth will be published posthumously), based much of its contents on Picasso’s mistresses’ memoirs and oral accounts, which the gallery notes insist “attests to the central role and influence of many women in Picasso’s life.”

Le rêve (Marie-Thérèse), 1932. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library, Courtesy Gagosian

Richardson, Gagosian’s main curator for Picasso exhibitions, probably considered creating an exhibition about several Picasso women at one time or another during his long career (Richard died at 95 years old). Of the six shows he organized, two were dedicated to specific relationships: Marie-Thérèse Walther (begun in 1927 and lasting until the artist’s death in 1973; Marie-Thérèse committed suicide on October 20, 1977, five days before Picasso would have been 96) and Françoise Gilot (1943-53).  Read more on Bonjour Paris

Keep Cool!

Beth

aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director, NY Arts Exchange, LLC

@BethNewYork on Twitter

"Posing Modernity" Expanded to "Le Modèle Noir" at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)

Study for a the woman in Slave Market in Cairo, ca. 1872

Oil on canvas, 48 × 38 cm

Private Collection

© Photo courtoisie Galerie Jean-François Heim – Bâle

Another French Revolution has taken Paris by storm in, of all places, the elegant Musée d’Orsay, a tourists’ favorite because of its enormous collection of great nineteenth-century masterpieces, from academic to avant-garde, from Thomas Couture’s lascivious Decadence of the Romans (1847) to Boleslas Biegas’s brooding proto-Cubist Sphinx (1902). The best known among “the Moderns” Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) shook the foundations of traditional French “received ideas” for art at the Salon of 1865 and continues to challenge our “received ideas” 154 years later, this time through the eyes of an American curator, Dr. Denise Murrell, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Wallach Art Gallery on Columbia University’s new Manhattanville, situated near the Hudson River side of Harlem. 

Edouard Manet (1832-1883)

Olympia, 1863

First exhibited in the Salon de 1865

Oil on canvas, 130.5 X 191 cm

Paris, Musée d’Orsay, RF 644

Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Dr. Murrell’s doctoral dissertation on Manet’s model Laure became the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today on view at the Wallach Art Gallery from October 24, 2018 through February 10, 2019.  Through her beautifully organized selections of art and documentation, she invited “the viewer to reconsider Olympia as a painting that is about two women, one black and one white, who are both essential to achieving a full understanding of this work. . . [because] our understanding of Western modern art cannot be complete without taking into account the vital role of the black female figure, from Laure of Manet to her legacy for successive generations of artists.” Posing Modernity grew from 140 objects to over 300 in the Musée d’Orsay’s Le Modèle Noire de Géricault à Matisse [The Black Model from Géricault to Matisse], including 73 paintings, 81 photographs, 17 sculptures, 60 prints and drawings, 1 photographic installation, and 70 auxiliary documentation (books, magazines, posters, letters, etc.) that populate several galleries.   The New York show started in the mid-19^th century and ended with post-modern art.  The Paris show starts in the late 18^th century and ends with Glenn Ligon’s Some Black French People/Des Parisiens Noirs (2019), a work especially created for the cavernous great hall in the middle of the Musée d’Orsay.

Read more on Bonjour Paris -https://bonjourparis.com 

Best wishes for the weekend,
Beth New York

aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.
Director and owner
New York Arts Exchange LLC
and
staff writer, Bonjour Paris

A Tribute to Notre Dame de Paris - Our Lady of Paris

Last January I visited Paris to review the Cubism show at Centre Pompidou and meet with my André Salmon colleagues to share our work. The trip was exhilarating and festive, especially around Notre Dame, still dressed in its holiday best for Christmas. This year's Crèche display was created in 2017 by Alain Deymier (the village) and Jean-Marie Fontanille (the manger). Here you see 15 meters of Provençal houses, shops, farms, and an inn arranged around the central theme, the Holy Family with shepherds and the 3 Magi, all in astonishing detail. Enchanting. 

The manger in the 2019 Crèche

The village in the 2019 Crèche.

A view of the Crèche

A few days later, I decided to find that camera shot of Notre Dame in the distance which takes place in the new season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (on Amazon Prime). If you saw the series already, you may remember the scene where Midge Maisel's parents dance in front of an outdoor café in Paris with Notre Dame in the background. I couldn't imagine how the director found a place unobstructed by trees. So I just walked along the Quai de Montbello and the Quai de la Tournelle, looking backward as I sauntered on, all the way to Quai Saint-Bernard, and the Institut du Monde Arab (World Arab Institute). There, I turned toward the Pont de Sully and saw a path by the bridge leading to the banks of the Seine. I followed this inclined terrain down to the Port de la Tournelle along the right bank of the Seine. Lo and behold: a flat empty space came into view with an unobstructed view of Notre Dame. My quest had been fulfilled.  Abe and Rose Weissman must have danced here. 

Notre Dame from Port de la Tournelle

For more reminiscences of Notre Dame, please click on our "Homage to Notre Dame de Paris" in Bonjour Paris and Christopher Knight's historical perspective in the Los Angeles Times.

Standing in the narthex facing the altar

On the ambulatory behind the altar

A view of the ambulatory on the east side

From the crossing facing the Rose Window

A model in the a chapel off the ambulatory

International holiday greetings outside Notre Dame

Notre Dame facing the altar, April 16, 2019

Our hearts are with you, France, as we too mourn the devastation of this symbol of beauty, faith and spiritual transcendence. Contributions to the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris can be made through Friends of Notre Dame

With love and friendship -

New York Arts Exchange

Last Call: Modigliani at the Jewish Museum, NY through February 4th

Modigliani Unmasked closes on Sunday, February 4th.  My review of the show was published today in Bonjour Paris.  Hopefully, you have visited this excellent exhibition already.  You have one more day to study these exquisite drawings from the private collection of Dr. Paul Alexandre.  From there, it is a treat and privilege to run to the Met for the Michelangelo drawing exhibition, closing next weekend (Yikes, already!), wherein you can see the influence of the Renaissance master on this 20th century modernist.  (I'll send out another notice for this show during the week.)

If you visit the Modigliani show today or tomorrow, you will also be able to see the wonderful exhibition of clothing Veiling Meaning: Fashioning Jewish Dress from the Collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, on through March 18th.  Also, their new installation of highlights from the permanent collection, Scenes from a Collection, is now on view. 

Amedeo Modigliani, c. 1913.

Image provided by PVDE/Bridgeman Images, New York

Sorry to say the Groundhog saw his shadow - six more weeks of winter :(

I hope you are using this dreary weather to unleash your creative spirit at home, in your studio, at an art school, or through private lessons with professional artists.  I will send out information about opportunities you may not know about through the usual channels.  So  - stay tuned.

Best wishes for the weekend,

Beth

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and owner

New York Arts Exchange, LLC

www.nyarts-exchange.com