2001 Exhibitions

Pirkle Jones: Sixty Years in Photography
December 8, 2001 - April 14, 2002

This exhibition, comprised of approximately eighty works, will be a retrospective of Jones’ sixty years in photography. In the late 1930s, he studied drawing and photography and, while still in high school, exhibited his photographs internationally at the Pictorial Salons. After serving in the Army from 1941 to 1946, he studied photography with Ansel Adams and Minor White at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute. Jones subsequently began teaching at the Institute and has, as of this fall, announced his retirement after instructing at the school for over 31 years.

Pirkle Jones counts among his colleagues some of the most renowned figures in 20th-century photography, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Dorothea Lange. In fact, he and Lange collaborated in 1956 to create Death of a Valley, and, in 1963, he worked with Adams on Story of a Winery. While he has drawn inspiration from those associations, Jones has remained true to his own vision. From his early camera-less images to his social documentation of the Black Panthers to his innovative nature studies, he has conveyed a unique and personal perspective. He was included in the exhibition Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography along with the other important modernists.

Unlike his colleagues, Jones has spent the majority of his career as a teacher. Had he spent as much time as Adams and others promoting his work, Pirkle Jones, too, would doubtless be as recognized a name. It is only fitting that Mr. Jones receive the retrospective due him: an exhibition which will establish his yet unheralded, although seminal, position in American landscape and social documentary photography.


Paperworks and From the Figure to the Body
November 11, 2001 - January 27, 2002

Two simultaneous exhibitions will showcase the recent and dynamic growth of the Museum's modern and contemporary collection. Organized by Modern and Contemporary Art Curator Diana du Pont, the exhibitions Paperworks and From the Figure to the Body: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture highlight recent acquisitions and important large-scale works in the Museum’s permanent collection.

Paperworks features a selection of large-scale prints, drawings, photographs, and installations that explore recent directions in contemporary works-on-paper. The exhibition addresses the increasing interest in works-on-paper in the post-1945 period and the related significance of scale. It demonstrates how artists have moved from working with the hand on conventionally sized paper to working with the body on a grand scale in order to create oversized sheets or compositions comprised of many individual parts.

Featured are three large installation pieces: Andy Warhol’s signature graphic work, his 1968 portfolio Flash- November 22, 1963, which the Museum has just acquired, will be shown in its entirety; in dialogue will be Xiaowen Chen’s Red Boys, also shown in its entirety; and Pauline Stella Sanchez’s mandala, g wiz. . POP. In addition the exhibition includes works by Robert Arneson, Gilles Barbier, David Hockney, Alex Katz, and James Rosenquist.

From the Figure to the Body: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture showcases a diverse range of works representing the vitality of twentieth-century figurative sculpture. Spanning the traditional medium of bronze to the new medium of video, the selections trace the significant 20th-century shifts in attitude toward representing human form. The dialogue generated by the sculptures exemplifies the importance of the linguistic change from “figure” to “body” when referring to this time-honored subject. Among the sculptors represented are: Isabel Barbuzza, Viola Frey, Aristide Maillol, Javier Marín, Alan Rath, Germain Richier, Judith Shea, Rufino Tamayo, and Ossip Zadkine.

In her 1989 work entitled Re-Designing My Library, Isabel Barbuzza transforms used books from her personal library into sculptural objects of clothing as a way of referring to the human body.

The French sculptor Aristide Maillol dedicated himself to the female nude. In this sense, his 1905 Study for Action in Chains is typical. However this work is unusual in that the female nude memorializes the nineteenth-century radical socialist hero, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who, for his active resistance against the bourgeois regime, spent thirty-six years in jail. The monument uses the female figure as a metaphor for the social and political struggles of the nineteenth century: though bound and constrained, she strives to break free of her restraints.

These exhibitions have been made possible through the generous support of Lord and Lady Ridley-Tree.


Destined for Hollywood: The Art of Dan Sayre Groesbeck
August 25 - November 25, 2001

A visitor to Cecil B. DeMille's office at Paramount Studios in the 1930s would have found the famed director's walls covered with sketches for films, many by Dan Sayre Groesbeck. The exhibition Destined for Hollywood: The Art of Dan Sayre Groesbeck, on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) from August 25 - November 25, 2001, presents more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and film visualizations by this self-taught artist whose extraordinary talent helped Hollywood greats such as DeMille envision their movies.

DeMille had discovered the artist's remarkable talent for 'visualizing' a dramatic scene and setting it down in detailed sketches and drawings while working on his epic film The Ten Commandments (1923). By 1926 DeMille was using Groesbeck's sketches of costumes and characters for the casting of Volga Boatman. This artistic collaboration is reflected in the great romantic, Biblical, and historical films made by DeMille over the next 20 years--King of Kings, The Buccaneer, Union Pacific, Reap the Wild Wind, Unconquered, Samson and Delilah--in the thousands of drawings and watercolors done by the prolific Groesbeck.


Focus on the Figure: Southern California Painters 1850-1950
August 11 - November 11, 2001

The significance of the figure as a subject and inspiration for southern California artists has been under-recognized in exhibitions and art-historical publications. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art's exhibition Focus on the Figure: Southern California Painters (1850-1950), curated by Gloria Rexford Martin and accompanied by an illustrated, eight-page catalogue, examines this relatively neglected aspect of California art. The first to focus exclusively on the figure in paintings of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, this seminal exhibition explores the efforts by figurative artists to achieve acceptance in the Southland. Thirty-nine works selected from local private and public collections highlight the progress of a century of figurative painters beginning with the earliest professional painter to open a portrait studio and continuing through to the rise of the early Modernists and Regionalists.

Different historical and cultural, geographical and climatic conditions have shaped the south's distinctive development of figuration. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, portraiture was the principal legacy of figurative art in the fledgling artistic colonies of the region. Southern California painters never completely abandoned the portrait or the portrayal of the human form in its diverse pictorial configurations but, in the late 1800s, various circumstances resulted in figural compositions being temporarily eclipsed by landscape art. The promotion of landscape painting by artists, organizations, institutions, and critics abetted by the pressures of the marketplace continued into the early decades of the new century. The nude posed a particularly provocative problem, for conservative currents opposed depicting the undraped body in art. Nevertheless, figurative painters did persevere. Under the influence of academic training and the advance of Impressionism, Modernism, as well as regionalism, figuration once again emerged as a primary theme in the art in the 1930s.

The advent of abstraction together with other aesthetic trends following World War II precipitated a retreat from both landscape and figuration. These events in turn led to a disregard for the formative period of representational California art. A renewed interest in representation occurred in the late 1970s, yet until recently, curators and collectors alike have concentrated chiefly on California's landscape painting heritage. Thus the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's exhibit will take this opportunity to focus on the figure represented in the work of thirty-three southern California artists spanning one hundred years.


Every Picture a Story:
American Illustration from the Collection of the Delaware Art Museum.
July 14-October 14, 2001

Before movies and television dominated our visual culture, illustrations in books and magazines played a critical role in shaping the minds and imaginations of broad audiences. This summer the Santa Barbara Museum of Art presents the special exhibition Every Picture a Story: American Illustration from the Delaware Art Museum, on view July 14-October 14, 2001. Every Picture a Story features over 80 works by the great artists of American illustration, tracing the evolution of this art form, considered "the most American of American art." The Delaware Art Museum, whose collection of original drawings for books and magazines covers more than 140 years of American art history, has organized this major exhibition.

Often referred to as "The Golden Age of American Illustration," this era begins in the 1880s, when illustration became an important feature of periodicals, and continues until the early 1930s, when the motion picture became firmly established as the preferred form of popular entertainment. As illustration developed, talented artists elevated the stature of illustrators and their profession to the world of art. The artists represented in Every Picture a Story were the leaders in the field of illustration at the turn-of-the century. Included are Howard Pyle, who set the standard for illustrations of historical romance and adventure (Robinson Crusoe, Kidnapped etc…) and his contemporaries Edwin Austin Abbey, Arthur B. Frost, Edwin H. Blashfield, Howard Chandler Christy, Joseph C. Leyendecker, and Charles Dana Gibson. Pyle's distinguished students, including the famed N. C. Wyeth, Gayle Hoskins, Jessie Willcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Frank Schoonover are also represented with important examples of their work.
 

Poetic Natures
June 9 - September 23, 2001

Poetic Natures is the most recent offering in an ongoing series of thematic exhibitions highlighting the Museum’s evolving collection of modern and contemporary art. Featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs made over the last thirty years, this presentation gathers together a broad selection of works by a diverse group of artists possessing an instinct for the natural. It explores evocative, rather than literal, interpretations of nature by local, national and international artists of today and represents a variety of artistic directions from narration to abstraction.

If the earliest and latest works in the show--recent acquisitions by the California painter and printmaker Charles Arnoldi and the London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor--derive from the modernist idea of abstract form, they each redefine this concept in terms of new ideas in art of the last several decades. Arnoldi’s Untitled "stick painting" of 1971 is informed by Process Art, a movement of the mid 1960s-early 1970s which, as its name suggests, focused on the act of making art rather than on the final result. An open, linear network fashioned from the piecing together of twigs gathered during walks in the countryside and fragments of processed wood acquired from the lumberyard, the painting reflects this influence of time-based, action-oriented art. An organic sphere cast in stainless steel and then highly polished, Kapoor’s Turning the World Inside Out, 1995, is, likewise, a reinvention of modernist abstraction. Forged from Kapoor’s synthesis of his Indian roots with his Western European education, this allusive orb draws inspiration from the sculptural example of Constantin Brancusi, yet it recasts his signature simplicity in terms of Kapoor’s own cultural identity, signifying a trend that has marked contemporary art since the1980s.

From the abstract and the figurative to the spiritual and the fanciful, the works in Poetic Natures all contribute to the longstanding artistic debate between nature and culture. They participate in this ongoing dialogue about natural phenomena and its intervention by humankind but make it relevant for today.


Photograhic Odysseys: Gifts from the Arthur and Yolanda Steinman and Bruce and Nancy Berman Collections
May 5 - August 12, 2001

Drawn from recent gifts of photography to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the special exhibition "Photographic Odysseys" presents a fascinating cross-section of modernist and contemporary work that pays tribute to the collecting skill and generosity of the donors. Substantial gifts in the mid 1980s from Arthur and Yolanda Steinman, as well as a recent gift from Arthur Steinman, have helped form the core collection of photographic work at the museum. Totaling over six hundred prints, these gifts represent a virtual who's-who of significant photographers in the last century. For the exhibition, a selection of stunning prints by such notables as Andre Kertesz, Ruth Bernhard, Arnold Newman, and Ralph Gibson will be presented.

The Steinmans' passion for landscape and the vernacular, as well as social documentary, portraiture, and surrealism, have provided focus areas for the museum's rapidly growing collection. Adding considerable depth and variety to the museum's holdings in landscape photography, the 1998 gift by Bruce and Nancy Berman features contemporary work that is often contemplative in character. In addition, their gift has helped to reinforce other thematic areas, notably California and Latin America, which have been taking shape in the development of the museum's collection. Works by photographers such as Robert Dawson, Karen Halverson, and Richard Ross will be on display.

Due in large part to the Steinman and Berman gifts, the photography collection at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is emerging as one of the major repositories of twentieth-century photography in southern California


Gordon Kenneth Grant: A Retrospective Revisited
Emmons Gallery
5/13 - 8/5/01

Gordon Kenneth Grant was a mural painter, silver craftsman and the nephew of the well-known marine painter, Gordon Hope Grant. Gordon Kenneth took his early training at the school of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Santa Barbara. He is an elusive and mysterious artist who died from a bizarre accident, shooting himself with a miniature cannon. During his brief career, Grant completed a number of Works Progress Administration murals. He apparently worked with Jerome Jewett on murals for the City Hall in the Bronx, as an assistant to Albert Herter on six murals for Wellesley College, and most notably, completed a cycle of murals depicting the agriculture and industry of Ventura County in the Ventura Post Office in 1937.

Grant was an authority of Southwest Indians, which became a common theme throughout his work. Donald Bear once wrote of an exhibition of Grant's work:

Outstanding in the show are the decorative studies in secco of various dances of the Indians of the Pueblo country....based on careful research and thorough observation of the dancers through which the artist shows ardent enthusiasm and understanding for the meaning of the religious aesthetic of the Indian of the American Southwest.

Grant employed the same careful attention to his other figural works, seen in his rhythmical grouping of farm-workers in Harvest of 1939. The figures are depicted with a solid monumentality, and seem to work with a dance-like cadence that echoes the rhythmic cycles of nature.

Unfortunately, Grant only lived to the age of 31, and shortly after his death the newly opened Santa Barbara Museum of Art commemorated his work through a retrospective exhibition. Gordon Kenneth Grant Revisited is an installation commemorating the sixtieth year of this retrospective.
 

From the Sun King to the Royal Twilight: Painting in Eighteenth-Century France from the Musee de Picardie, Amiens
April 21 - June 17, 2001

The collection of eighteenth-century painting at the Musée de Picardie, Amiens, is notable for its numerous royal commissions and for a donation of over two hundred and fifty paintings made in the 1890s by the Lavalard brothers--two avid collectors of works from the French classical age. The approximately eighty paintings selected for From the Sun King to the Royal Twilight will provide a rich overview of French painting from the end of the reign of Louis XIV to the fall of the French monarchy in the mid-nineteenth century. The exhibition will highlight the pictorial variations within the established genres of history and religious painting, landscape, portraiture, and still life. Over the course of the eighteenth century, artists began to receive commissions not only from the court, but also from the bourgeoisie. This shift is reflected in the work, which moved away from the official, and at times heavily historical, subjects so highly prized under the Sun King toward an elegant intimate, and more imaginative rendering of these same subjects.

In order to place the works in a historical context, the exhibition will be organized chronologically and divided into three sections, introduced by portraits of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI, respectively. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an introductory essay by Mattieu Pinette, chief curator at the Musée de Picardie, Amiens, on the revival of collecting eighteenth-century painting in the nineteenth century, as exemplified by the Lavalard brothers; and a foreword by Pierre Rosenberg, director at the Musée du Louvre. Additional guest authors will explore questions of attribution and iconography and examine the shift in patronage--translated into a change in taste--from the court to the bourgeoisie. The essays will also place the works within a social and historical context by examining the economic and political circumstances that helped formulate royal taste. An exploration of the major genres--still life, landscape, and mythological subjects--that developed during the reign of Louis XIV through the fall of the French monarchy will provide readers with an understanding of the social undercurrents of the eighteenth century that shaped artistic subjects and patronage.

Altered Landscapes
February 10 - May 6, 2001

Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, Altered Landscapes presents the work of contemporary photographers engaged in documenting residential, industrial, and agricultural encroachment upon the natural terrains of California. Adopting new perspectives and stylistic devices in response to this subject matter, the photographers in the exhibition examine the intersections and fluctuating boundaries of the man-made and the natural. As a region that clings to an Edenic image while undergoing a startlingly rapid transformation from development, California is, not surprisingly, the subject of intense photographic scrutiny. The images assembled here, a counterpoint to the views of pristine wilderness found in the Dual Visions exhibition currently on view in McCormick Gallery, reveal a variety of stylistic and conceptual approaches that landscape photographers have taken in the late twentieth century. One common tendency is to focus the camera downward at the ground and eliminate the familiar horizon line. Another is to draw attention to the variety of ways in which we may experience the landscape. Perhaps most striking is the general absence of people or activity. Acting in many ways like contemporary archeologists, the photographers in this exhibition adopt a seemingly dispassionate type of observation, carefully examining the physical evidence of human interaction with nature. Behind this neutral façade however, irony and dry wit often lurk. As viewers, we are left to ponder the features that constitute newly constructed environments. Often the focus is on those things that indiscriminately cut across, or are laid upon, the natural landscape -- fences, highways, parking lots, tract housing. However, underlying this subject matter is a consistent preoccupation with the picturesque, achieved through such photographic means as composition, print quality, and formal arrangement. Thus, these images resonate with a tangible tension, not merely between the man-made and the natural, but between external reality and the photographic image. Emerging as uneasy and surrealistic visions, they hover between banal familiarity and unexpected beauty.

Master Drawings from the Collection of Alfred Moir
February 17 - April 22, 2001

This selection of seventy-six drawings from the collection of Alfred Moir is comprised of works from the 16th through the 18th centuries. Fifty-nine Italian drawings represent Moir's main area of interest and include major sheets by Stefano della Bella, Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, Salvator Rosa, and Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo among others. The balance of the ex-hibition includes French, Dutch, German, English, Russian, and Spanish works, providing a survey of important artists as well as an excellent variety of drawing technique, ranging from preparatory sketches to highly finished works. The exhibition is accompanied by a compre-hensive catalogue by Dr. Richard Campbell and Dr. Jane Satkowski. It has been organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and will travel to at least three other venues before concluding in Santa Barbara.

Women's Board Acquisitions: Celebrating 50 Years
February 17 - April 22, 2001

Since its founding in 1951, the Women's Board has generously supported the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in many ways. The exhibition Women's Board Acquisitions: Celebrating 50 Years, on view February 17 - April 22, 2001 demonstrates how gifts from the Women's Board have enhanced many areas of the Museum's collections, from Old Master prints and drawings to 20th-century paintings and prints as well as Asian paintings and sculptures.

Two important acquisitions are highlights of this exhibition: an enamel overmantel by English artist Alexander Fisher and a remarkable series of progressive proofs and finished etching by James Tissot. Other features of the exhibition are Old Master works by Jacques Callot, Albrecht Dürer, and Taddeo Zuccaro, photographs by the American pictorialist photographer Anne Brigman, an important oil painting by the 20th-century English artist Percy Wyndham Lewis, and contemporary works by Christo and Kenneth Price.

"This exhibition celebrates the generosity of a remarkable group of dedicated women," said SBMA Chief Curator Robert Henning. "In addition to the works of art they have donated, the Women's Board has also made contributions to building projects and gallery renovations; they have sponsored numerous exhibitions and a major contemporary art commission in honor of the Museum's 50th anniversary. We're delighted to salute all of their accomplishments as they celebrate their own 50th anniversary."

The exhibition, coinciding with the Museum's 60th anniversary, is presented in conjunction With the Help of Our Friends: European Drawings of the 19th Century Acquired Since 1976 (February 17 - April 22, 2001), another exhibition celebrating the generosity of Museum donors; and Master Drawings from the Collection of Alfred Moir (February 17 - April 22, 2001), a selection of over 70 works drawn from the private collection of the local collector and art historian.

With the Help of Our Friends: European Drawings of the 19th Century Acquired Since 1976
February 17 - April 22, 2001

The special exhibition With The Help of our Friends: A Selection of 19th-Century European Drawings Acquired Since 1976, on view February 17 - April 22, 2001, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art celebrates the generosity of the Museum's friends. The exhibition features 46 of the more than 100 European drawings acquired by the Museum since the 1976 publication of the catalogue European Drawings in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

As the exhibition title indicates, a majority of the drawings have been given to the Museum by its friends. Many donors, most notably the late Margaret Mallory, have enriched the Museum with gifts of works on paper which compliment the nucleus of the collection provided by Wright S. Ludington in the Museum's early years. Highlights of the exhibition are a very early conte crayon sketch by Picasso; works by Jean-Francois Millet, Eugene Boudin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; watercolors by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and Eugène Delacroix, and a pen and ink English caricaturist George Cruikshank.

"The variety and quality of the Museum's collection of 19th-century European drawings is remarkable," said Consulting Curator Alfred Moir. "I've been able to choose among portraits, landscapes, genre and still-life, allegory and fantasy, history and caricature; among the rich and the poor, the stylish and the ordinary; the serious, the frivolous and the witty; not much of the sacred, but a satisfying wealth of the profane."

The exhibition is presented in conjunction with Women's Board Acquisitions: Celebrating 50 Years (February 17 - April 22, 2001), another exhibition celebrating the generosity of Museum donors; and Master Drawings from the Collection of Alfred Moir (February 17 - April 22, 2001), a selection of over 70 works drawn from the private collection of the local collector and art historian.