Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

We are so happy that William and Elsie Peck could join us again this year. After a look around the site first thing Saturday morning (their first day), they had a chance to catch up with Jay van Rensselaer, the Johns Hopkins University Expedition’s photographer.

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Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872). Jonas Platt, 1828. Oil on canvas, 35 15/16 x 29 7/16 in. (91.3 x 74.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 85.23.

By the mid-1820s, Samuel F. B. Morse finally had achieved in his portraits a more fluid technique and mastery of high color rivaling the accomplishments of the then-elderly Gilbert Stuart. His portrait of Jonas Platt may be counted, along with his Benjamin Silliman, 1825 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), among his most sensitive and finely painted likenesses dating from this brief high point in his artistic career. Particularly in these works, Morse displayed a fluid realism and expressive immediacy that neither Stuart nor Thomas Sully achieved in their own highly fluid but more stylized manners.

Morse received commissions for two portraits of Judge Jonas Platt late in 1827, the year in which the exhibition of his The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825-26 (Art Commission, City of New York) at the National Academy of Design established him, for a brief time, as New York’s preeminent artist. Platt was by this time a highly successful New York attorney and politician. Son of one of the founders of Plattsburgh, New York, he had studied law and entered the New York offices of Richard Varick by 1790, when he also was admitted to the bar and married Helen Livingston (d. 1859) of Fishkill. Platt left New York City in 1791 to establish a country residence in Whitesboro, near Utica, and open a law office. He represented both Oneida and Onondaga Counties in the state legislature, and was a member of Congress from 1799 to 1800. Platt continued to pursue a political career as a state senator and, in 1810 (the year of his unsuccessful run against the incumbent governor Daniel Tompkins), he joined DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828) in promoting the passage of a bill proposing the construction of the Erie Canal. His motives no doubt included enhancing the value of their substantial landholdings and investments in the Oriskany Woolen Mills. He assumed a seat on the State Supreme Court in 1814, the year of a triumphant battle against the British in Plattsburgh. About 1826, Platt reestablished his New York residence and law practice, and remained in the city until 1829, when he retired to a large farm in Valcour, near Plattsburgh, where he died there in 1834.

One of numerous commissions that Morse garnered in the wake of his triumph with the Lafayette portrait, this likeness was commissioned by Moss Kent (1766-1838), a former member of Congress and Platt’s relation by marriage. During Morse’s discouraging 1823 visit to Albany in search of patronage, Moss Kent had been his only sitter; and later that year in New York City, Morse had painted a portrait of Chancellor James Kent (The New-York Historical Society), a powerful conservative in New York State politics, with which he had vainly hoped to establish his reputation in the city. While this prior contact alone made him a likely candidate to execute the Platt portrait, Kent’s choice must have been influenced as well by Morse’s own very active role in conservative New York politics. His ties were manifest not only in several recent commissions, including his 1826 portrait of Governor DeWitt Clinton, Platt’s old ally (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), but in Morse’s own writings. By 1827 he had begun to contribute articles to The New York Observer, a religious newspaper run by his brother Sidney; and that year he founded his own publication, The Journal of Commerce, in which he offered his views on morality and acceptable entertainments. Morse’s receipt of the Platt commission may also have been a legacy of his recently deceased father’s rigid Federalism, which earlier had won him the good graces of John Adams.

Platt, whose stature had risen with the lavishly celebrated opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, was another artistic and political feather in the artist’s cap. Morse depicted Platt as a decorous, calm, and cerebral man with attributes signifying his reliance on the written word. He finished the portrait by February 4, 1828, and exhibited it at the National Academy of Design annual that spring, when the heated controversy with the National Academy’s rival institution, the American Academy of Fine Arts, was at its height. It apparently was well received, judging from another letter from Morse to his mother in which he wrote, “[M]y portrait has obtained me, by exhibiting it, six portraits at least.”

The portrait of Jonas Platt is currently on view in the American Identities Galleries on the 5th floor. It can be found in the section entitled ‘From Colony to Nation.’ The portrait of John Adams is currently on view in the Luce Visible Storage/Study Center, hanging in painting bay 24.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

We all know this feeling, right? When you walk into an exhibition and there’s one work that really stops you in your tracks? On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, it happened to me at the Mattress Factory’s Inner and Outer Space exhibition. I was fascinated with a work by Mary Temple, a Brooklyn-based artist, that was installed on the MF’s 5th floor.

Installation view, courtesy Mattress Factory.

Every day, as Mary was reading the day’s news via various news sites on the internet, she would select a political figure to draw on a tabloid sized sheet of paper. Each day, she would scan the drawing, send to the MF where they would print and hang it in the gallery in a calendar style format on the walls. I spent a long time pouring over the walls of the exhibition space and left wanting to follow this project day-by-day, but knew that I wouldn’t be able to.

When Will and I first conceptualized the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed, this project of Mary’s was one of the first works that came to my mind. Could we figure out a way to bring this project into the feed and tweet each day with a link to the drawing? I knew that the MF show was closing in mid-January and wondered if a continuation could take place online for the 1stfans, so a quick call to Jeffrey at MF was in order and the next day I was e-mailing Mary (thanks, Jeff).

Mary Temple has been working on this series since 2007 and drawings are archived in stacks by month in flat files that reside in her Brooklyn studio.

This has been an incredibly fun collaboration for us on many levels. In reaching out to the artist, it was our chance to work with the MF and they’ve also given us some video footage of the process that will be up soon. For Mary, we developed a way to display the drawings in calendar-format, so the virtual presentation will mirror the layout in the gallery with an added Twitter twist. 1stfans will be able to follow day-by-day, then everyone will be able to see the work in our own galleries because we will be installing the work for one night only at the March 7th Target First Saturday. You can follow along by joining 1stfans and we hope to see you there!

I’ll leave you reading Mary’s own narrative about the work:

Mary Temple
Currency
2007-present

On September 24, 2007 the president of Iran spoke at Columbia University amid protests and much controversy. I found the event, coverage and images of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad compelling and made some drawings of him from various Web–based news sources. The drawings piqued my interest in him as a character—I wanted to know more about his history as well as Iran’s past. Drawing him expanded my thinking about world events. I’ve continued to make a drawing of a world leader every day since then. My goal in the beginning was simply to concentrate on one event each day—to try to grasp a minuscule portion of the barrage of information that surrounds each of us in a 24-hour news cycle. As the research and drawings accumulated, I found that the news events marked my own personal history as well as delineating a (biased) global event time line. In order to underscore that relationship, and the diaristic nature of the undertaking, I hung the drawings in a calendar format—7 day (columns) across, and 5 to 6 week (rows) down. I placed the drawings on the page according to my own feelings of optimism or pessimism regarding the day’s event, the higher on the page the greater my hope for world harmony.

Each evening I select a story and the character (a world leader), draw a portrait in pen and ink on a tabloid size sheet of paper, and record the event with an image caption at the bottom of the page. The drawing is then scanned and emailed to a museum. Every morning the museum staff receives my email scan, prints the portrait on a similar tabloid size sheet of handmade paper and hangs it in a gallery next to the previous day’s drawings in the calendar grid. Entire calendar years accumulate in this way.

The title, of the piece, Currency, most obviously references my desire and attempt to keep current of world events, to try to understand some of what is happening in the world. It also refers to something that fascinates me about an industry that trades in a product that is only valuable until the moment it is heard, at which time it instantly loses its value. Yesterday’s news is an artifact which no longer has currency or power as a trade worthy item. The title Currency also refers to the scale of the portraits themselves, which might evoke a bank note or dollar bill portrait, the image of power and money entwined.

Update 1/29/09:  Video posted to YouTube.

In addition to our original partners (Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, V&A) we’ve now been joined by Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Houston Museum of Natural Science, The Hunter Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New-York Historical Society, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Taft Museum of Art—in all, 17 16 institutions willing to help engage their community of photographers to help get the wiki folks what they need.

My own personal props have to go out to Victor over at MoMA, who wins the gold star for bending over backwards to figure out the best way they could participate and still ensure everything falls into the public domain. Victor, that’s dedication! CJN212, thanks for the legwork over there. I have to say from an organizer standpoint, I couldn’t be more thrilled about how many institutions took the leap work with us on what will hopefully become a massive cross-institution community collaboration!

Not so super-secret meetup for the Wikipedia NYC Chapter. Topic of discussion? You guessed it: Wikipedia Loves Art. Wiki peeps and guests including Denise and Hazel from the MET, Victor from MoMA and moi. Check out that awesome ceiling w/ globe lights at Columbia University.

In the next week, we’ve got a lot of work to do to get scavenger hunt lists published and many of us are making final preparations for meetups. All details, including the lists will be published to the Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr group, so keep an eye on things over there (and congrats to us for creating what might be the longest Flickr group description…ever). There’s even a discussion getting started about the best way to shoot in museums to avoid glare off cases while working with no flash, no tripod restrictions.

Now that we have institutions, we need photographers! Please help us spread the word. Remember, because of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s offer, there’s a way you can participate from almost anywhere in the United States even if your local museum is not on the participant list. Good luck everyone, we are looking forward to seeing your shots!

At the end of last season we covered the baked brick building north of the Sacred Lake with plastic and sand to protect it and its plastered surfaces while we were gone. Our first job on January 17, our first day of work, was to uncover the building again. (more…)