The most exciting thing we’ve got going online this week is the re-launch of our Exhibition Index. The original index (below, left) has been online for some time, but had been limited to a listing format linking to basic pages on our Library server. With the recent launch of our Collection online, the time seemed right to grab this exhibition data and migrate it fully into the online Collection.
The re-launch (above, right) allows this resource the same features as our Collection including a more visual layout, community-driven comments and Posse favs—yay! I get to favorite Click!. Some records may seem a little sparse at times—especially for the older exhibitions dating back to the 1840’s where we don’t always have photos or complete dates, but we will be working with Angie Park in our Archives Department to scan and OCR historical press releases. Over the next several months, we hope to add these to exhibition records to fill-out information and give some additional context.
In addition to the exhibitions, we have a few new features going into the collection this week. Related audio and video can now be embedded right into the collection interface (example). We’ve just implemented a way to add related links to display on any object record (example). Lastly, we’ve established a method to display gallery label copy on records (example), which provides some nice context for objects (thank you Francesca & Erin). While none of these additions are earth-shattering, all three allow us to maximize the time and effort that went into existing content and integrate all of these elements we’ve been working on for a long time.
Now for a quick update on the state of tagging (a.k.a., our Posse is awesome). The collection has been live for roughly two months and in that time we’ve seen a lot of participation. In looking at the 3,772 records with images, 76% of those objects have been tagged by Posse, while another 19% have been tagged anonymously. At this point, only 5% of our records online (again, those with images) have no tags. In terms of tagging sources, we’ve seen:
7,498 tags contributed by Posse using the collection interface
3,821 tags contributed by anonymous taggers using the collection interface
The quality of the tagging has been impressive—I’d suggest browsing the top tagger profiles to see what I’m talking about. We’ve received some great feedback worth noting, so take a look at the comments on this record and this one for examples of various conversations surrounding tagging issues.
In planning our spots for Channel 13, we faced the challenge of choosing two particularly engaging paintings from among the many works on view objects in our American Art galleries. We often select groups of works for inclusion in the tours we give to students and adult visitors, but there is usually some sort of thread—historical, thematic, or artistic—that links them together. In choosing single works, we think more about which objects have come to represent the entire collection. And in the case of the Museum’s pre-1945 American paintings, two works instantly come to mind. Each has come to represent the American art collection, even though one was acquired in 1846, and the other entered the collection more than one hundred years later . . . .
Francis Guy’s “Winter Scene” was painted about 1819, and made its exhibition debut in Manhattan in 1820. Viewers were bowled over to see such a remarkably accurate “portrait” of a locale that was familiar to many of them. Guy had painted this townscape of Brooklyn’s one-time center from the vantage point of his rented rooms on Front Street, and he included actual physical features of the place as well as the likenesses of many of the area’s most prominent inhabitants. In shaping the scene, he probably intended to contrast the old-fashioned barnyard that occupies the center of the image, with more the stylish residences of the more affluent residents at the far left of the scene—the latter component sadly was lost when the painting was damaged in a fire in 1881, and the left-hand edge was cut away.
The Brooklyn Museum’s predecessor, the Brooklyn Institute, held a series of important art exhibitions, featuring hundreds of works, in the 1840s, and Guy’s “Winter Scene” was prominently exhibited in two of them. Among the visitors who marveled at the picture was the young Walt Whitman, then the vocal editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and an active advocate for the arts in Brooklyn. In his review of the 1846 exhibition, Whitman called attention to the work’s power to suggest to present and future viewers how rapidly and completely this once rural village had changed: “. . . few things will be able to bring before the next race the fact how rapidly Brooklyn has ‘went’ in the progress of improvement, more fully than this well-delineated picture.” Whitman’s comments and a number of popular prints based on the painting guaranteed its public profile. Interestingly enough, when the new Brooklyn Museum building was opened to the public in 1897, “Winter Scene” once again occupied a prominent position, although not in the primary galleries of American and European paintings on the fifth floor; the early American portraits, and what were described as American “landscapes of great historical value,” were installed near the entryway on the third floor. The segregation of what was considered at the time to be “antiquarian” material from “contemporary” turn-of-the-century art was typical of many young American art institutions. Even after Brooklyn dedicated separate American art galleries in 1907, the “historical” works were exhibited separately from the modern American paintings.
Today, a wide array of the Museum’s American paintings is on view in the American galleries, grouped in a sequence of themes rather than by strict chronology. Guy’s “Winter Scene” is the focal object in our introductory gallery, which is entirely Brooklyn-centric. In reorganizing these galleries in 2001, our goal was to use this space to introduce viewers to the art-life that has existed in Brooklyn for centuries. Every object in this space has something to do with Brooklyn—Brooklyn as a longtime center of manufacturing, of creative expression, and of collecting, and Brooklyn as subject. A broad spectrum of New Yorkers, and visitors from much farther afield, still marvel at Guy’s townscape, as they consider how vastly different the Brooklyn environment is today.
Over the course of the 20th century, American collectors and museums became increasingly more interested in collecting 18th and 19th-century American art. Brooklyn was among the leaders in this direction in the teens, when the Museum actively purchased and exhibited colonial and Federal era portraits. American landscape painting surprisingly lagged in the revival of interest in pre-Modern American art. It was not until the 1930s that a germ of interest began to develop—in part out of a renewed Nativism in the Depression era, and a concerted effort to establish the independence of American art from European influence. Interest in Hudson River School landscapes grew steadily during the mid-20th century; most of the museum’s best Hudson River pictures were purchased during this period, beginning in the 1950s. The collecting market was most dramatically boosted, however, by the build-up toward and the celebration of the American Bicentennial of 1976. It was in 1976 that the Brooklyn Museum purchased its monumental Bierstadt painting, “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie”. Since entering the Museum’s collection, this painting has captured the interest and imaginations of thousands of visitors to the museum, owing to the impact of its size, and the dramatic nature of the artist’s portrayal of the American West. Bierstadt based it on his own expedition to the Colorado Rockies in 1863, and conceived the final canvas as a blockbuster that would introduce the remote western landscape that few individuals had experienced into the consciousness of largely urban audiences in America and Europe.That a painting as large and well-publicized as this one fell off the radar screen by the early 20th century had to do in part with the fact that it was purchased immediately by the Englishman Thomas William Kennard, a civil engineer who had presided over the building of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway in the United States. At the outset of the revival of interest in 19th -century American landscape art, preference was given to artists who were considered to have been less reliant on European landscape models. Since Bierstadt was associated so closely with the German Dusseldorf school, his work initially lagged in popularity. By the 1970s, however, when art historians began to revalue work by foreign-trained Americans, Bierstadt’s reputation was gradually revived.”Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie” remained officially “unlocated” for almost ninety years—even reported by some sources to have been destroyed by fire. After Kennard’s death in 1896, it entered the inventory of a London dealer and resurfaced only in 1974. Today, Bierstadt’s grand canvas speaks to innumerable viewers who are captivated the artist’s vision of the West despite their own broader familiarity with the region it recorded. Most people gravitate toward this painting even while understanding the hyperbole of Bierstadt’s composition—a composite of various landscape elements in a super-sized view, animated by theatrical atmospheric and light effects. The painting still conveys the natural force and resources that were directly associated throughout the late-nineteenth century with the might and rising potential that the United States would bring to bear on the world stage. For contemporary viewers, it also presents a nostalgic vision of an unspoiled place, just as Guy’s “Winter Scene” allows us to time travel nearly two hundred years into the past.
It is the power of both of these pictures to make us pause and look that has made them among the popular favorites on view in “American Identities: A New Look“.
The catalogue for the show Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions draws our attention to how Jesper Just uses a variety of popular songs in his films, from the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” to Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” Those pop tunes are prominently featured in two of the films shown in the exhibition: Bliss and Heaven and The Lonely Villa.
There is, however, another episode in Just’s treatment of music, this one involving the rarified world of grand opera. His early film The Man Who Strayed (2002) consists almost entirely of a sparse restaging of Violetta’s death scene from the end of Verdi’s La Traviata. And surprisingly, this could be Just’s most widely seen film, largely because it’s available online at Artnode and has been bootlegged on YouTube (below) and elsewhere.
In The Man Who Strayed, what are we to make of a classical-music drama so remote from the torch songs, ballads, and Top Forty hits heard in many of Just’s other films? Why does he take us to the opera?
It’s useful to remember that Verdi’s 1853 masterpiece is only one of numerous adaptations of the story of Marguerite Gautier (called Violetta in Verdi), first told in the novel The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias) by Alexandre Dumas, fils, published in 1848. Stage adaptations of the Dumas novel about a tubercular courtesan of the Parisian demimonde subsequently became vehicles for stars from Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse to Tallulah Bankhead and, later on, Isabelle Adjani. On film, the property served Greta Garbo well in her MGM Camille (1936), directed by George Cukor, as it has many other actresses (or, as we now say in our gender-neutral way, “actors”).
The story has become a touchstone, in recent times, of gay-themed drama, in which it has been frequently retold. The 1973 play Camille: A Travesty on La Dame aux camélias, written by—and starring, in drag—the late, great Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, is in some ways the most important neo-Traviata: a full-fledged cross-dressing remake in modern colloquial language, its denouement capped by a memorably tragicomic eulogy spoken over the deceased heroine: “Much will be forgiven you, for you have loved much. Toodle-loo, Marguerite.” Adding a further layer of reference, a decade later Ludlam would play the lead role in his Galas: A Modern Tragedy (1983), about a thinly disguised diva named Maria Galas, a renowned Violetta and Norma, whose stage career ends bitterly, as does her affair with a Greek tycoon. Others have pursued the Violetta/Camille story as well: in Terrence McNally’s 1989 play The Lisbon Traviata, the two affectionately satirized opera-fanatic principals, Mendy and Stephen, briefly act out lines or vignettes from their favorite Maria Callas records (epitomized by the pirate LPs of her celebrated performance in Lisbon) as comments on their own unsatisfactory love lives: to them, the way she abandoned herself to the role of the doomed heroine becomes a template for how destiny inexorably undoes the life of the heart. The chapter “The Callas Cult” in Wayne Koestenbaum’s book The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993) points to the broader implications of such self-identification with Callas’s Violetta: remarking on fatalistic views of the late soprano, who died aged only 53, Koestenbaum writes, “Untimely death assists her legend and connects her to themes that have shadowed gay culture: premature mortality, evanescence, solitude.”
The Violetta/Camille trope thus inevitably carries a lot of baggage. Yet despite an array of precedents and analogues, The Man Who Strayed puts its own distinctive twist on this familiar nineteenth-century story.
For one thing, The Man Who Strayed tells the story in a relentlessly anti-glamorous way. Its barren urban setting, perhaps recalling the cruising zones in certain Fassbinder films, consists of little more than rough pavement under a concrete overpass, seen in unforgiving daylight, with none of the lush, shadowy, film-noir atmosphere of other Just productions.
Another deglamorizing feature of the film, unusual elsewhere in Just’s body of work and in La Traviata retellings: both protagonists are decidedly middle-aged. As his characters, Just puts before us two frankly unlovely guys, both with considerable mileage on them, rather than a somewhat older individual infatuated with a much younger person as seen in the relationship between Verdi’s Violetta and the boyish Alfredo or in several of Just’s other films.
Even as it casts a cold eye on its urban streetscape and its aging actors, the film also drags Verdi’s soaring music back down to earth. The two men mime and sing along to the end of La Traviata’s final act, from the lines “Più a me t’appressa, ascolta, amato Alfredo” (”Come closer and listen, Alfredo my beloved”) to the last cries of “È spenta!” (”She is dead!”) and “O mio dolor!” (”Oh, my grief!”), one of them singing the role of Violetta and the other, Alfredo. We watch with growing discomfort as the rasping, untrained voices of the two men, sometimes resorting to quavering falsetto, sometimes almost shouting, heedlessly take on the high-flying demands of Verdi’s arching melodies. As would-be opera singers, the two of them strain heroically, and fail desperately.
Yet it is precisely the way their distressing vocal performances, at first unaccompanied, are mercifully lifted aloft by the entrance of a professional recording of the opera—welling up, after a while, on the soundtrack—that carries the two men from harsh urban grit to some transcendent realm of human tenderness and utter heartbreak. For there’s no denying the emotional power of the travesty we’re witnessing, as surging waves of melody break over the street-level action. It may come as something of a revelation that the death of one graying, badly dressed, middle-aged man in the arms of another can be as poignant, as tragic, as Violetta’s dying in the embrace of ardent young Alfredo. But the outpouring of lyrical music makes it so. Singing along with the prerecorded opera that surrounds the couple, Just’s expiring “Violetta” croons his love-death as a kind of karaoke Liebestod.
The two remarkable actors are Niels Weyde and Søren Steen. The brief scene played out between them, lasting little more than five minutes, can bring tears to our eyes even as it veers dangerously close to the ridiculous—a potently ambiguous state of affairs familiar in opera itself.
If you have been following the numerous blogs on this website you are aware that the Brooklyn Museum has organized an exhibition of Egyptian objects entitled To Live Forever which is now on tour. Among the objects in the show is a very special treasure from the Wilbour Library of Egyptology, a volume from the series entitled the “Description de l’Egypte”. Published in the early 19th century, these volumes are the product of Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt (1798-1801). The purpose of this monumental work, published between 1809 and 1822, was to describe and illustrate antiquities, plants, animals and contemporary life found in Egypt and the resulting volumes are an exquisite snapshot of life in Egypt in the nineteenth century. Here are two images from volume 2 of the folios focused on antiquities which illustrate specific objects as well as sites:
Thebes, Hypogees plate 56
Thebes, Qournah plate 43
It is fitting that a volume of the “Description” is part of an exhibition that reflects the eternal aspect of Egyptian life and certainly the ongoing interest in Egyptology. Throughout the text Egypt is repeatedly described as the birthplace of art and science. In the eyes of the French, successive periods of foreign domination had robbed Egyptian society of its former glory. Napoleon feared that soon nothing would be left and the “Description” was seen as a way of preserving, at least on paper, what could be found in Egypt when he and his troops were there. Although some monuments so beautifully described in the “Description” have not survived, many more have been preserved and restored no small part due to the interest in Egypt generated by the “Description” and similar publications that followed it.
Facebook upgraded the design of the user profiles and we knew some action would be required on our part to overhaul ArtShare along with it. We could only devote a few days to adjustments and this meant making some hard choices about what could be implemented at this stage and what would have to wait for a future round. So, what’s new? (more…)
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