Calendar

Adam Gopnik, the award-winning New Yorker essayist and best-selling author, will discuss issues raised by his most recent book, Angels and Ages, which celebrates the bicentenary of a memorable day in human history. On February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. These two great thinkers helped shape the modern world, a world increasingly governed by reason, argument and observation. They invented a new way to express that philosophy: the liberal voice we now use both in public and in private. With wit, eloquence and insight, Adam Gopnik offers a meditation on how that voice resonates in contemporary culture.

Drawing Friends: Hedda Sterne Portraits on Paper
May 1 - July 25, 2009

Hedda Sterne (born 1910) is the only surviving member of “The Irascibles,” avant-garde painters whose group photograph famously appeared in LIFE magazine in 1951. In spite of her identification with that nucleus of America’s most eminent generation of abstract artists, which included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell—Sterne was the only woman pictured among them—she did not devote herself exclusively to abstraction.

Throughout her life, until declining eyesight ended her productivity in 2004, Sterne made numerous portrait drawings of herself, family, friends and acquaintances. This exhibition, organized by guest curator Patterson Sims, a freelance curator and writer and former director of the Montclair Art Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art curator, features 19 works on paper spanning more than 50 years. Most are being lent by the artist and her friends. Three are on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Beginning with a Surrealist self portrait from the late 1930s (left), which shows Sterne peeking seductively from behind a lacy veil against a background alive with spirits, the exhibition includes several studies of her husband, the artist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), as well as her fellow artists Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989), Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) and Vita Petersen (born 1915), art critics Dore Ashton (born 1928) and Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978), and others who were or are members of the eastern Long Island artists’ community.

Born in Romania, Sterne exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris on the eve of World War II. In 1941 she immigrated to New York, where she met fellow Romanian émigré Saul Steinberg, whom she married three years later. Although the couple separated in 1960, they never divorced and remained lifelong friends. For many years both she and Steinberg had homes and studios near the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, East Hampton.

Writing in Art News in 1966, the critic Lawrence Campbell marveled that, in spite of Sterne’s devotion to abstract painting, “she never broke a line of thread which runs to earliest childhood in Bucharest—a thread of drawing from life.” As she later recalled: “I spent my days drawing, years before I knew there was such a thing as art. I drew on any scrap of paper I could find.” Some of the portraits in the current exhibition are indeed on small scraps of paper, while a few are nearly life size; others are in a book filled with sketches of her visitors—a kind of pictorial guest register.

On Sunday, June 28, at 5 p.m. the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center will present a panel discussion, “Hedda Sterne: An Appreciation,” with guest curator Patterson Sims, art critic Dore Ashton (whose 1960 portrait is in the “Drawing Friends” exhibition) and art historian Sarah L. Eckhardt, who organized Sterne’s definitive retrospective exhibition at the University of Illinois’ Krannert Art Museum in Urbana-Champaign and a show of Sterne and Steinberg's work at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. The panel will be held at The Fireplace Project, a contemporary art gallery at 851 Springs-Fireplace Road, diagonally across from the Pollock-Krasner House. Admission is $5, or $4 for museum members. No advance reservations are required. Please call 631-324-4929 for further information.

“Under Each Other's Spell”: The Gutai Group and New York
July 30 - October 17

This exhibition examines the fruitful relationship that developed between the avant-garde Gutai Art Group, which was founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1954 and New York artists in the 1950s and 1960s. It draws in particular on material in the Pollock-Krasner House collection, and a group of paintings in the collection of Paul Jenkins, who was an artist in residence at the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka in 1964. The paintings were given to Jenkins in exchange for his own works as an act of friendship. As he recalled the time he and the Gutai artists spent together, Jenkins said that they were “under each others’ spell.”

In the group’s manifesto, its founder Jiró Yoshihara defined Gutai as truth to the material of which art is made, and lifting that material to spiritual heights. He singled out Jackson Pollock and the French painter Georges Mathieu as artists who “grapple with the material in a way which is completely appropriate to it,” and encouraged group members to emulate this approach. Their efforts were publicized in a journal, Gutai, of which 14 issues appeared from 1955-65.

The Gutai group was well aware of its distance from the art world’s centers, and used the postal system extensively to build their international network. These efforts resulted in their publication of some of Ray Johnson’s earliest moticos, and the inclusion of Gutai in Allan Kaprow’s 1966 book Assemblages, Environments and Happenings.Yoshihara collected art journals from around the world, and also sent copies of the Gutai journal to artists overseas, including Pollock. In 1956, when B.H. Friedman was helping Lee Krasner organize Pollock’s affairs, he came across issues 2 and 3 of the Gutai journal in Pollock’s library. Friedman wrote to the group, requesting a subscription and commenting, “I know these publications of yours must have been loved by Jackson, as they are concerned with the same kind of vision and reality with which he was.”

In addition to paintings by several Gutai members, including Yoshihara, Atsuko Tanaka, Shozo Shimamoto, Sadamasa Motonaga, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, the exhibition will include examples of the Gutai journal and other publications, works by New York artist who related strongly to Gutai, videos of Gutai exhibitions and performances in Japan, and photographs of American artists—including Jenkins, Alice Baber, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and John Cage—visiting the Gutai group in 1964. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with essays on the interaction between Gutai and New York artists by guest curator Ming Tiampo, Ph.D., assistant professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa, and on Jackson Pollock’s relationship to the Gutai group by Tetsuya Oshima, Ph.D., curator of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan.

September 4	Linda Stein, Running (2008) 2 min., Body-Swapping (2007) 5 min., and Jane Martin, Reveal (2008) 5 min. Using Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and North By Northwest as raw material, sculptor Linda Stein has fashioned a personal nightmare from her desire to escape. Her compulsion to run is also motivated by the World Trade Center disaster. In Body-Swapping, various people put on an artificial torso with sudden and surprising results. Painter Jane Martin's Reveal is provocative as well. Her startling images explore the interior psyche and the exterior natural landscape with lyricism and panache.
September 11	Maria Maciak, Here is No Insects (2008) 10 min., 7 Weeks to Pentacost (2005) 20 min., Deported for Damascus (2009) 6 min. Maria Maciak, a painter, uses many different forms to communicate the human condition, from an experimental dance performance to an installation featuring images of architectural shapes, to a documentary on Iraqi refugees living in Syria.
September 18	Michael Cardacino, To Deny What Is And To Explain What Is Not (2008) 3 min., Paris Hilton's Burning Thoughts (2008) 3 min., The Candidates March (2008) 3 min. Michael Cardacino has transplanted his photographic montages to video portraits of celebrities (like President Obama, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky), all taken from the TV or computer monitor. As a result, the images become "the movement of thought itself."
September 25	Philippe Cheng, On the Cusp (2008) 15 min. This documentary, directed by printmaker Philippe Cheng and co-produced by Kathy Engle, Toni Ross and Bastienne Schmidt, is an homage to President Obama and to the diverse women who supported him. But it's also about those who continue to dream their own "impossible dreams," regardless of race.