Friday, February 3, 2012
Visual Art
Installation View: To See as Artists See at The Frist
Posted
by Laura Hutson on
Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Yesterday I went to The Frist's media preview of their new exhibition,
To See as Artists See: American Art From the Phillips Collection, which opens tonight and remains on view through May 6. I wrote a little about the show
in this week's Scene, but yesterday's media preview was the first chance I'd had to really see just what had made its way from
The Phillips Collection to Nashville. It's a pretty broad selection — American art changed by leaps and bounds from the 1850s to 1960 — and there are close to 100 paintings (and a Calder!) in the exhibit.
I took a few photographs and tried to pay attention while the curator, Susan Frank, gave an abridged history of more than 100 years of American art. She's giving a lecture on the collection at The Frist's auditorium today at noon, so if you want to know more, you know where to go.
- Note the freakishly blue February sky
- The piece that Phillips started his collection with
- Rockwell Kent's "Burial of a Young Man" is spooky and made me think about how someone's death can feel like the end of the world
- Two paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe
- The colors of Augustus Vincent Tack's gorgeous "Aspiration" reminded me of Rodarte's Spring 2012 collection.
- Edward Hopper painting Phillips bought for $600
- "Plumes" by Walt Kuhn made me think of Annie Lennox
- Panels from Jacob Lawrence's "Migrations" series. Joe Nolan pointed out the wall tag that said that the Phillips Collection owns 30 out of this series — the odd numbered ones. The MoMA owns the evens.
- Another shot of the Jacob Lawrences. (I love him.)
- Alexander Calder is another favorite. Unfortunately my camera couldn't get a decent shot.
- "Blue Cafe" by Stuart Davis. A very French piece for an American art exhibit.
- Phillips Collection curator Susan Frank is explaining that Stuart Davis painted an eggbeater, an electric fan and a rubber glove for a year, and this painting was the end result of that process. At this point I decided that Cubism is probably connected to the advent of amphetamine use.
- "Native's Return," by Philip Guston. This was probably my favorite piece out of the entire collection. The bright colors overwhelmed by white paint reminded me of the Allison Schulnik "Mound" video that I posted last month.
Tags: Installation View, The Frist, To See as Artists See, The Phillips Collection, Susan Frank, Mark Rothko, Jacob Lawrence, Rodarte, Alexander Calder, Philip Guston
Comments (0)