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

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

Paul Gauguin, "Still Life with Profile of Laval," (1886). Samuel Josefowitz Collection of the School of Pont-Aven, through the generosity of Lilly Endowment Inc., the Josefowitz Family, Mr. and Mrs. James M. Cornelius, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard J. Betley, Lori and Dan Efroymson, and other Friends of the Museum. 1998.167

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) presented a painting to his friend and colleague Charles Laval (1862-1894) in 1887. The work, Still Life with Profile of Laval (1886), reinvigorates the longstanding European tradition of painters exchanging Freundschaftsbilder – pictures that demonstrate friendship and, often, artistic allegiance. Yet, in the article “Japan as Primitivistic Utopia: Van Gogh’s Japonisme Portraits” (1984), Tsukasa Kōdera credited van Gogh (1853-1890) with resuscitating this practice in 1888, a year after Gauguin’s gift to Laval. Van Gogh imagined Japanese artists living and working in a fraternal community, which he sought to emulate. He envisioned developing a similar artists’ cooperative in Arles, his new home and a place he called the “atelier du Midi.” Kōdera cites correspondence between Gauguin and the Dutch artist (specifically, a letter [now lost] dated September 1888) as evidence that van Gogh proposed a portrait exchange to foster the Gemeinschaft (sense of community) between himself and fellow artists Gauguin, Laval, and Émile Bernard (1868-1941). However, Van Gogh’s role as progenitor of the modern Freundschaftsbild is debatable. His inspiration to exchange portraits was derived from a false impression that Japanese artists participated in the same activity. According to Kōdera, Self-Portrait: Les Misérables (1888; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) represents Gauguin’s first contribution to the genre. Van Gogh reciprocated the gesture with his Self-Portrait as Bonze (1888; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, Cambridge, MA).

Paul Gauguin, "Self-Portrait with Portrait of Bernard (Self-Portrait: Les Misérables)," 1888. Oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Vincent van Gogh, "Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin (Self-Portrait as Bonze)," 1888. Oil on canvas, 59.5 x 48.3 cm. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.

These portraits, which are rendered in new artistic idioms, announce the painters’ collective denial of naturalism and simultaneous entrée into the international Symbolist movement. Interestingly, Still Life with Profile of Laval (1886), which predates van Gogh’s request to swap portraits and Gauguin’s rejection of Impressionism, has not yet been discussed in these terms.

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Filed under: Art, The Collection

Over 100 pieces of American Indian art – including ritual objects, pottery, basketry and textiles – give our newest exhibition Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection a diverse and informative angle. The IMA’s access to these works is amazing in and of itself, but upon looking deeper into the variety of art featured in the Clowes Special Exhibition Gallery, it’s clear these pieces are more than just fun to look at.

The American Indian tradition is most immediately recognizable by its elaborate clothing and textiles; bright colors, rich textures, intricate patterns, soft feathers, complex beadwork, glimmering shells, painterly embroidery, and countless other materials define their clothing tradition. American Indian clothing has actually become a bit of a trend as of late – “Navajo” patterns and prints dominate stores like Urban Outfitters, which has recently come under fire for falsely identifying their clothes as such. Clothing, jewelry, and accessories in imitation-Indian styles were deemed “distasteful” and “racially demeaning,” and while that was most likely not the intention, it makes you wonder why the Urban Outfitters buyers were so careless about what they were selling.  They didn’t know an authentic print from a fake, but how could they? Along with this new “trend” comes an equally prevalent lack of education about American Indian traditions, which is why collections like the Thaws’ are so necessary.

The fashion news enthusiast in me was drawn first to the clothing and textiles in the exhibition; I was fascinated to see the original patterns and techniques American Indians created. I was uninformed about… well, everything beyond what I learned in elementary school.  None of my high school courses embraced the subject, nor did I ever realize I was missing out on vital information.

I decided textiles would be my starting point.

The difference between authentic American Indian textiles and the imitations we see in boutiques is context.  Girls today wear “Navajo” patterns because they’re cute and colorful; American Indians wore them to tell a story. Each piece has meaning – often about spirituality, family, and even animals.  Take the seal gut parka for example: Eskimo hunters wore these to protect themselves from wind and rain, but they let the parkas themselves emphasize their respect for the animal. Women carefully cleaned and blew air into the guts, then made the tubes opaque by freeze-drying them. Then they stitched V-shaped patterns to represent harpoon heads, wolves’ teeth, and mountains.

Hunters also wore hunting coats which covered the entire body and were often constructed of caribou skin. While at first it doesn’t seem particularly striking, the coat is rich with spiritual symbolism: the elaborate painted decorations were meant to honor the spirits of the caribou as well as bring success in the hunt. The triangular gusset in the back symbolizes the magical mountain from which the caribou left to surrender to the hunters.  The other patterns on the coat represent dreams, which wives interpreted and stitched into a design.

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Filed under: Art, Exhibitions

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is issuing a call for proposals for a summer 2012 six-week residency on Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island within the IMA’s 100 Acres. Graduate and undergraduate students, as well as emerging professionals in the fields of art, design, architecture and performing arts are encouraged to apply to customize and reside on the Island.

Anchored in the 35-acre lake within 100 Acres, Indianapolis Island is a habitable “off-the-grid” structure accessible by rowboat. The 2012 residency will be the third to take place there. During the artwork’s inaugural summer in 2010, Herron School of Art and Design students Jessica Dunn and Michael Runge activated the installation with their project Give and Take, which consisted of a series of visitor interactions based on a system of exchange. The 2011 island resident was Katherine Ball, a student of Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice MFA program. Over the course of her residency, titled No Swimming, Ball initiated a series of ecological interventions in the lake and engaged a local audience through a series of public programs centered on the topic of water.

At about twenty feet in diameter, the Island serves as an experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary human beings. Residents collaborate with Zittel by adapting and modifying the structure according to their individual needs. The project blends elements of environmental art, sculpture, design and performance in a unique way, offering a challenging and experimental forum for exploring ideas about individualism and self-sufficiency.

If you’d like to be the 2012 Indianapolis Island resident, visit www.imamuseum.org/islandresidency for more information, including photos and renderings of the structure and to learn how to apply. Proposals are due Friday, January 13, 2012.

If you’d feel more at ease watching the residency unfold from the 100 Acres lake shore or online, stay tuned to the IMA’s blog in spring 2012 to find out who will be the next person to call Indianapolis Island home.

Filed under: Art, Art and Nature Park, Contemporary