Superbells. Supertunias. Superbenas. Super small. Super large. Super great. Super sucky. Super bloomer. Super fruiter. Super foliage. Super flowering. Super yields. Super disease resistance. Super narrow. Super broad. Super weeping. Super tall. Super short. Must be time for the Super Bowl.

Since this is Super Bowl XLVI weekend, let’s take a look at some plants from 46 years ago and today that received awards for excellence.

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Filed under: Horticulture

While flipping channels this past weekend, I stopped on a program on the  Indianapolis PBS affiliate WFYI called “From Naptown to Super City.” The documentary outlines Indianapolis’s progress from a city with a dying (if not, dead) downtown to the vibrant Super Bowl host city that it is this week. It’s a great program full of fascinating interviews, anecdotes, and images of this city. If you haven’t had a chance to see it and you live in Indy, the program will re-air on Saturday at 6 p.m.

One image from the documentary, in particular, caught my attention. It was of the National Sports Festival that was hosted in Indianapolis in 1982. I can’t find a copy of the image anywhere online so I’ll try to describe it to you (by the way, I have a VERY unreliable memory, so I might be remembering the details wrong…). Essentially, the image is of a stadium with a track, the stands are filled with fans and the infield is filled with athletes. In the center of the image stands 1, 2, and 3 from Robert Indiana’s Numbers. After doing a little research, (a.k.a. reading Richard McCoy’s blog from April 5), I discovered that they were used as backdrops to the gold, silver, and bronze medal platforms for the games.

The more I’ve thought about the image, the more I appreciate the connection to the current configuration of Numbers. We are currently displaying 4 & 6 in the Museum’s Welcome Center. 1, 2, 3, 4, & 6 now have a place in art history and sports history. Fingers crossed that 5, 7, 8, & 9 will have their chance one day, as well.

Robert Indiana, "Numbers," 1980-1983. Gift of Melvin Simon and Associates; 1988.241. © Morgan Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Indianapolis stands at the crossroads of the U.S., but now more than ever, it also stands at the crossroads of sports and art. The balance of the aesthetic and the athletic makes Indianapolis a vibrant host for the Super Bowl, but an even better home for the 1.7 million people that live in our Metro area.

Robert Indiana’s Numbers are just one of the many examples of art and sports intersecting in the Circle City this week. For a full list of all the fun cultural events organized in celebration of the Super Bowl, click here.

Filed under: Art, Local

After hearing the 2012 Super Bowl would be held in Indianapolis, we all were very excited!

Robert Indiana, "Numbers," 1980-1983. Gift of Melvin Simon and Associates; 1988.241. © Morgan Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The IMA is getting into the spirit by positioning 4 and 6 of Robert Indiana’s Numbers together on the 2nd floor, near the Welcome Desk. You can also check out one of the Super Cars (for the Carolina Panthers) near the entrance, outside the IMA’s retail store.

As Visitor Services Manager, I wanted to make sure we were prepared with as much information as possible for this huge event. One activity that we participated in was Super Service Training, which was set up to prepare our team with valuable tools and resources needed before the Super Bowl (and ensuing crowds) got underway.  We had an amazing time with our trainers! We played games, learned the history of the city, and absorbed valuable information that all customer service associates need to do their job at the highest level. After completing the training, all of us received our own “Super Service Pin” and certificate, pictured below. We will wear these with pride!

Come by and see us, and happy Super Bowl!

Filed under: IMA Staff

Joseph Mallord William Turner, "The Fifth Plague of Egypt," 1800. Gift in memory of Evan F. Lilly; 55.24.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) labeled J. M. W. Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800; IMA) “a total failure” in his magnum opus Modern Painters (1843-1860). Ruskin, who is often remembered as Turner’s greatest champion, delivered this harsh criticism on the grounds that the painting’s “awkward resemblances to Claude [Lorraine] testify the want of [Turner’s] usual forceful originality.” Modern Painters, a five volume polemic, held that Turner’s chief works shed the influence of the Old Masters, particularly Claude (ca. 1604-1682), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), whose visual formulas and adherence to naturalism held sway well into the nineteenth-century. Ruskin dismissed the artist’s early landscapes as derivative and, as a result, unconvincing. He continued his literary assault on the composition, stating: “…the pyramids look like brick-kilns, and the fire running along the ground bears a brotherly resemblance to the burning of manure.” Ruskin’s knowledge of the motif likely derived from the mezzotint after The Fifth Plague of Egypt, which was included in the Liber Studiorum (“Book of Studies,” published in 1808), and not the original painting. Nevertheless, the sentiments expressed in Modern Painters reflect Ruskin’s bias.

Ruskin’s opinion did not represent the general consensus among contemporary viewers.  The debut of The Fifth Plague of Egypt at the Royal Academy’s 1800 exhibition was met with the approval of art critics, who applauded the painting’s ability to elicit an intense emotional response from its audience. The aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), penned anonymously by the British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), informed the public’s taste for landscape painting. Burke argued that scenes of terror produced a stronger visceral reaction than the pleasure derived from beauty. Here, Turner uses monumental scale, a swirling vortex of clouds, and chiaroscuro to dramatic effect in his depiction of the seventh plague’s destructive hail and fire. (The public overlooked Turner’s mistitling of the subject.) Jerrold Ziff’s article “Turner and Poussin” (1963) discussed the resemblance between The Fifth Plague of Egypt and Poussin’s similarly tempestuous Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1650-51; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt), and he proposed that a version of this earlier composition may have served as a model for Turner’s work. In addition, Barry Venning (Turner; 2003) aptly observes that the painting’s debt to Poussin and Richard Wilson (ca. 1713-1782) would have been commonly understood. Contrary to Ruskin’s supposition, Claude was a less obvious source for this particular work because his landscapes typically convey tranquility. The success of a painting in an academic context hinged on its fulfillment of established criteria and not, as Ruskin would later advocate, on the originality of its execution.

Artistic considerations aside, The Fifth Plague of Egypt was cast in a somewhat unusual role as the subject of a Super Bowl bet. That fortuitous intervention of the power of American football transported this famous painting to Louisiana in late March 2010. Claude’s Ideal View of Tivoli (1644) hung alongside The Fifth Plague of Egypt at the New Orleans Museum of Art for three months. The short-term loan was the result of a wager proposed by arts blogger Tyler Green and encouraged by then directors Maxwell L. Anderson of the IMA and E. John Bullard of NOMA. Juxtaposing the two paintings offered viewers complementary aesthetic models of landscape painting – the Sublime (the Turner) and the Beautiful (the Claude) – as initially discussed by Greek literary critic Longinus (1^st century CE) and expanded upon by Burke in the eighteenth-century. Modern audiences were, thus, better equipped to appreciate the qualities noted by attendees of The Fifth Plague of Egypt’s 1800 exhibition.

This pairing also rebutted Ruskin’s critique by elucidating Turner’s reasons for emulating seventeenth-century landscapes. Turner was determined to elevate the category of landscape painting in the hierarchy of genres, which he achieved by reinterpreting the Old Masters and imbuing his own works with greater historical or literary detail. As a stipulation in Turner’s will, London’s National Gallery received the gift of his paintings Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815) and Sun Rising through Vapour (1807) on the condition that they hang in perpetuity next to Claude’s Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca (1648) and Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648), which are also historical landscapes. In my opinion, the outcome of the Super Bowl XLIV wager – a comparison of NOMA’s Ideal View of Tivoli, a pure landscape painting, and the IMA’s biblical Fifth Plague of Egypt – improves on Turner’s original plan.

Filed under: Art, The Collection

The African Queen (1951). United Artists/Photofest ©United Artists.

The African Queen (1951) is an interesting anomaly in film history.  An American director, with American stars, in a British film.  Director John Huston was under suspicion from the House Un-American Activities committee in the early 1950s, and as a result he moved to Ireland.  He set up a British film company and made several features before he returned to the US in the early 1960s.

This caused The African Queen to be in precarious position for many years.  The original negatives, in the old Technicolor three-strip format, were in storage in England.  It is quite expensive to reprint three-strip negatives on modern film, and that expense is compounded by the location of the materials.  There are only a few labs in the world that can reprint three-strip negatives today, and they are all located in the U.S.  The British owners usually would license the film to a particular distributor only for a limited time, which made it even less likely that new prints could be made.  Studio executives are hesitant to spend $100,000 reprinting a film that they are only leasing.

The last film prints of The African Queen were made in the United States for a reissue in 1967.  These prints were literally beaten to death through multiple screenings in drive-ins and grindhouses.  Projectionists routinely broke the film and spliced it back together carelessly, sometimes losing many frames in the process.  By the 1990s, there were only a few projectable prints left.  By 2000, the rights shifted to another studio, and those old prints were abandoned.

At this point, I have to step out of character.  Normally, I can report as an impartial observer, but as a film historian and collector, I personally became part of this story.  Since I have a reputation for being able to find difficult-to-obtain prints, I would frequently receive calls from repertory theaters asking for a copy of  The African Queen.  I didn’t have one–no one did–but I kept looking.

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Filed under: Film, The Toby