Sunday, November 18, 2012

Royal Excess Of Kings and Queens

'Royal Treasures From the Louvre' review

Kenneth Baker

Updated 7:34 p.m., Friday, November 16, 2012

Jewel-encrusted shell-shaped cup circa 1650.
Photo: Daniel Arnaudet / SF

"Royal Treasures From the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette," which opens last Saturday at the Legion of Honor, brings into view an array of decorative art objects that have seldom, if ever, left France.

The exhibition serves as "a kind of prologue, an overture," Louvre director Henri Loyrette said in conversation, to a five-year programming agreement between France's greatest museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

"Royal Treasures" and the long-term agreement arose, Loyrette said, from discussions with John Buchanan (1953-2011), when he was director of the Fine Arts Museums.

"When you do a big exhibition, it's almost always a one-shot," Loyrette said. "A few curators work a lot together for a long time, and that's it. It's not long lasting and not very significant for the institutions themselves. It's more interesting to have this process on a regular basis, which involves all the staff, not only the artistic questions, but education and publications, all that makes a museum today. ... So we had this idea of a five-year partnership."

Refurbishment of the Louvre's 18th century decorative arts galleries occasioned the substantial loans that "Royal Treasures" entailed. But the five-year agreement between the Paris and San Francisco institutions will mean modest projects at first.

The two already planned involve bringing together companion works by single artists owned by the respective museums: paintings by the British Romantic John Martin (1789-1854) and portrait sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828).

Anticipating public curiosity about the possible loan of Louvre's greatest hits by artists such as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Jacques-Louis David, Loyrette said, "We hope to go through various techniques and departments over time. In the far future, we will have a large exhibition. But we have just begun to discuss it."

"Royal Treasures From the Louvre" will have its constituency, but that does not include me.

I am as much in awe as anyone of the feats of craftsmanship presented here with unexceptionable stagecraft. Consider the 1756 "Figure of a Naiad," with its porcelain figurine stranded beside a gilt-bronze palm tree on the gilt-bronze island of a base. As fantasy landscape sculpture, as well as a product of expert collaborators, the "Naiad" is hard to top.

Plenty of other things here, including the stone-inlaid "Mosaic Tabletop With Emblems of Louis XIV" that serves as one of the exhibition's signature images, will have jaws dropping.

But is yet another "treasures" exhibition the best use of a city museum's straitened resources? The question ought to reverberate though museum culture today. "Royal Treasures" and its ilk on the exhibition front reduce museum-going to the higher window shopping: No, you couldn't afford this - though today's robber barons could - but why, apart from the sting of injustice, should you care?

"Royal Treasures" tries gingerly to make the case that Louis XVI, who lost his head to history in 1793, had more public-spirited bones in his body than his executioners credited. He, after all, first established what became the Musée du Louvre as a public exhibition space.

But the excesses of pre-modernist courtly taste play poorly in postmodernist retrospect. (Startlingly, Marie-Antoinette looks like a minimalist of her day in the account of her affinities given here.)

"Royal Treasures" might seem to have anticipated a Romney presidency, had it not been planned years earlier. Instead, it merely rekindles the Reaganite vision of private wealth and public squalor that has polluted not just politics but also American imagination for decades.

Royal Treasures From the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette: Decorative arts. Through March 17. Legion of Honor. Lincoln Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600. www.legionofhonor.famsf.org.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle's art critic. E-mail: kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Norman Rockwell Exhibitiion at Crocker Art Museum

American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell, Triple Self-Portrait, 1959. Oil on canvas, 44 1/2 x 34 1/3 in. Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1960. ©1960 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN. From the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum.NOVEMBER 10, 2012 – FEBRUARY 3, 2013

This exhibition celebrates the full range of Norman Rockwell's artwork, including rarely circulated works from the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Included in the presentation are original oil paintings of some of his most famous illustrations, drawings, war bond posters, and numerous covers that Rockwell created forThe Saturday Evening Post over nearly five decades. In addition to the artworks on view, personal correspondence and archival photographs offer insight into the life of one of the country's most beloved illustrators.

Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

American Chronicles has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Masterpieces Program.

Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This exhibition is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Masterpieces Program; the Henry Luce Foundation; Curtis Publishing Company; Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Company; and the Stockman Family Foundation.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

I See Beauty In This Life

'I See Beauty' - Rural California photos

ART

Patricia Yollin

Published 12:59 p.m., Wednesday, November 7, 2012 S.F. Chronicle

A young man gathers mulberry leaves on a silk farm in 1907. "Miss Wool California" of 1968 poses with a sheep. Forty-three years later, cowboys warm up at a rodeo in Salinas.

These people come alive in a new exhibition at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, titled "I See Beauty in This Life: A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California." Their images are among 150 or so pictures that show a side of the state that is little known and rarely seen.

"We're happy to buy our oranges from Esparto (Yolo County), but nobody even knows where it is," said writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton.

The exhibition she created represents a new direction for the 141-year-old nonprofit, inaugurating a "Curating California" program that invites accomplished state residents, such as Hamilton, to delve into the vast holdings of the historical society.

"What we really want to do is bring the collection out of the storage area," said Jessica Hough, managing curator of exhibitions. "We send somebody in and see what stimulates them."

Hamilton spent six months exploring the archives, which contain about 500,000 photographs, and a sister collection with 23,000 more images housed at the University of Southern California. The historical pictures she selected date back to a shot of a flour mill in 1880. She also included 24 large color photos she took last year - traveling 10,000 miles around the state - for her "Real Rural" multimedia project.

"When you picture rural California in your head, some very familiar images come up," Hamilton said. "The Central Valley and that landscape, maybe the timberlands in the far north or the deserts in the south. But those images are pretty limited."

Haggin Museum Docent Council