Man Ray in The Hague

Man Ray - "Unconcerned But Not Indifferent"
Fotomuseum Den Haag
January 17-April 19, 2009
Curators Noriko Fuku and John Jacob.
Other venues: Berlin (2008) and Paris (2008).
Catalogue available.

The Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent exhibition comprises drawings, photos, paintings and sculptures from the Man Ray Trust collection in Long Island, New York. The Man Ray Trust collection has never gone on show before. In juxtaposing Man Ray’s artistic works, tools, documents, objects and pictures which gave the artist his inspiration, the exhibition creates a distinctive setting allowing visitors to experience and enjoy his wide-ranging artistic work.

The Man Ray Trust collection
After his death in 1976 Man Ray’s estate passed into the hands of his wife, Juliet, who was joined by her brothers in setting up the Man Ray Trust to preserve and promote the artist’s legacy. Part of the estate was donated to the French national museums, while the trust selected artworks, objects, documents and personal items for the American collection designed to provide a comprehensive overview of Man Ray’s creative period spanning over 60 years.

The trust has so far catalogued over 2,000 works and confirmed their authenticity. However, research work into all the facets of the collection has not yet been completed. Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent is the first exhibition to provide a comprehensive insight into the collection. The unique feature of the trust’s collection is that it encompasses items from all Man Ray’s creative periods, including little-known early works, documents from his private life, sketches for large-scale works and their documentation as well as numerous masterpieces. As was stated in an article about the trust in the magazine ArtNews in June 2002, the collection is “perfect”.

The exhibition
The inscription on Man Ray’s gravestone Unconcerned But Not Indifferent was chosen as the title of the exhibition. Comprising over 300 exhibits, it is the first of its kind to relate Man Ray’s artistic works to the objects and images from which he derived his inspiration – his bowler hat and walking stick, items from the shelves of his studio in Rue de Ferou in Paris, his collection of erotic photographs and the objects he used for the camera-less photographic technique he called ‘rayography’.

Profiting from the abundance of material available in the Man Ray Trust, the exhibition looks at the development of numerous motifs from sketches up to the masterpiece and shows the occasional use Man Ray made of photographic material for paintings and works of graphic art. The exhibition also gives visitors an opportunity to form a picture of Man Ray’s life and his creative processes. Among the objects on display are personal items, such as pieces of jewellery that Man Ray made for his wife Juliet, private letters, drawings and manuscripts, including two early drafts of Man Ray’s autobiography, a formula for photographic chemicals and a patent application for a magnetic chess set. Also on show are documents never exhibited before, which Man Ray used as source material for his paintings and prints, as well as proofs containing comments Man Ray made for himself and his printers. These exhibits are assigned to the finished works to which they refer, thus offering a new insight into Ray’s life and artistic work.

The Unconcerned But Not Indifferent exhibition has been arranged in accordance with Man Ray’s four creative periods: New York (1890–1921), Paris (1921–1940), Los Angeles (1940–1951) and Paris (1950–1976). It begins with New York and a collection of proofs from Man Ray’s personal card files, in which he kept a record of his early works. These card files, the originals of which were stolen from Man Ray’s studio after his death and have never reappeared, were the subject of considerable controversy and have never been exhibited before. Wherever possible they are assigned to the works they document. Among the items on display from Man Ray’s years in Paris are the records of his own works and those of other artists, including Duchamp, Picasso, Miro and Leger, as well as a little book of Rousseau’s work that he produced. It was through Rousseau’s work that Man Ray learned to become a photographer, thus enabling him to gain entry to the Paris art world in the 1920s. Most of these works are likewise unknown.

Text Credits: The Berliner Festspiele, Berlin.
Image Credits: Poster of the exhibition “Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent” (Design: Steenbrink Vormgeving, Berlin).

Futurismo 100

ROVERETO
Futurismo 100: Illuminations
Avant-gardes compared. Italy, Germany, Russia
Mart
17 January 2009 to 7 June 2009
Curated by Ester Coen.

One hundred years after the publication of the Futurist manifesto, the innovative force of the highly important art movement launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 has lost none of its power. The Mart celebrates the centenary of Italy’s leading avant-garde movement by taking a fresh look at it in an exhibition curated by Ester Coen, reconstructing its development within the historical context of the early 20th century.

VENICE
Astrazioni
Museo Correr
5 June to 4 October 2009.

MILAN
Simultaneità
Palazzo Reale
15 October 2009 to 25 January 2010
Curated by Ester Coen.

The last of the cycle of art exhibitions concludes the centenary celebrations of Futurism with a tribute to Umberto Boccioni. With Umberto Boccioni as the point of reference, Simultaneita' compares a sequence of Futurist works by Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo to avant-garde European sculpture of the same period, exploring some of the most significant stages of the movement. On display at Simultaneita' are collections from the Tate in London, Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, including Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacob Epstein, Jacques Lipchitz, Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo and Vladimir Tatlin.

ROME
Futurismo
Scuderie del Quirinale
20 February to 24 May 2009.

Starting with the early Futurist period, the exhibition offers works from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to weave a path around a central core - the reconstruction of the 1912 Futurist exhibition held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris.

Futurism in Paris

Le Futurisme à Paris
Une avant-garde explosive
Centre Georges Pompidou
October 15, 2008 - January 26, 2009
The exhibition will travel to Rome and London
Press Release [pdf]

Catalogue: Le Futurisme à Paris: Une avant-garde explosive / ed. by Didier Ottinger (Forthcoming 2008)
ISBN 9782844263599

To mark the centenary of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, the Centre Pompidou presents 'Le Futurisme à Paris – une avant-garde explosive'.

Futurism, the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century, celebrated technical progress, the energy of crowds, and the hectic activity of modern cities. In place of the balance and stability inherited from classical models, it wished to substitute modern vigorousness, dynamism and speed that disintegrate forms.

The Centre Pompidou has made the re-interpretation of the principal movements in the history of art in the 20th century one of the key directions of its new strategy for temporary exhibitions. In this framework, the exhibition's ambition is to re-assess the place and the status of Futurism, a fundamental source of modern art, and to examine its impact on the French avant-garde, Cubism, inviting viewers to make a fresh analysis of the relations between these two movements through more than 200 works and documents.

All the Futurist painters, as well as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Félix Del Marle, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Frantisek Kupka, Fernand Léger, Kasimir Malévitch, Jean Metzinger, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso and Ardengo Soffici are the protagonists of this dialogue whose echo was international in scope, as Futurist concepts became a source of inspiration for numerous artists, from London to Moscow. Decidedly optimistic about the future, Futurism invented a new relationship between man and the modern world based on unconditional faith in mankind's prospects. By focusing on the Futurist adventure, the Centre Pompidou is realizing its primary ambition: to show how the creative vision of artists shapes the thinking, action and perception of each epoch.

DADA at MoMA

Exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY
May 21–July 28, 2008
The exhibition was organized by Michelle Elligott, Museum Archivist
More about the exhibition.

To coincide with the launch of the Museum's ambitious publication Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, the ninth volume of MoMA's Studies in Modern Art series, this exhibition provides an overview of the Museum's long and rich history of collecting, documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting works of the Dada era. This display of original documents, letters, floor plans, installation photographs, and oral history commentary highlights landmark exhibitions at MoMA; addresses significant Dada acquisitions, key donors, and innovative film programs and scholarship at the Museum throughout the years; and documents the evolution of the installation of Dada works in the Museum's collection.

Catalogue
Dada in the Collection features some seventy works in various mediums—including books, collages, drawings, films, paintings, and reliefs—presented in large-scale reproductions and accompanied by in depth, object-focused entries by an interdepartmental group of the Museum's curators.
Catalyzed by the major Dada exhibition that appeared in 2005 and 2006 in Paris and Washington, D.C. and at MoMA, the book benefits from new scholarship generated by the extraordinary opportunity the exhibitions created for an international community of scholars to examine the Museum's objects beside those on loan from other institutions. This is the ninth volume of Studies in Modern Art, the Museum's publication series devoted to scholarly research on its collection. Includes 242 illustrations.

Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Edited by Anne Umland and Adrian Sudhalter, with Scott Gerson
ISBN 9780870706684
Published in 2008
Pages 352.

Surrealism and Situtationism

Surréalistes et situationnistes, vies parallèles
"Histoire et documents"
Jérôme Duwa. Préface de Christophe Bourseiller
Editions Dilecta : Paris 2008
237 pp.

André Breton and Guy Debord never met. It seems indeed that both were mutually exclusive, so to speak.in the sense that Breton and surrealism were said to belong to the past, which World War II had just erased, so that everything had to start from scratch again. But such ahasty judgment on surrealism has to be reconsidered in a spirit which refuses to settle old scores. Was the reason, then, a fundamental divergence or a profound, secret likeness hidden behind superficial rivalry? A detailed history of the up and down relationships between the Paris and Brussels surrealists on the one hand, and Guy Debord and the Situationnists on the other, remained to be written so as to understand one of the mainsprings of the construction of the Situationnist identity. This essay, which includes an anthology of declarations and pamphlets,a dozen illustrations and texts by Jean-Louis Bédouin, André Breton, Claude Courtot, Adrien Dax, Guy Debord, Tom Gutt, Simon Hantaï, Gérard Legrand, Marcel Mariën, Benjamin Péret, José Pierre, Jean Schuster, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem and Joseph Wolman, helps follow the tumultuous course of those parallel lives.

Breaking the Rules

The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 - 1937
British Library, London
9 November 2007 - 30 March 2008

Mainly through the medium of print, 'Breaking the Rules' throws new light on Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism and other movements; on the artists who changed the face of modern culture for ever; and on the cities that experienced their work, from Brussels to Budapest, Vienna to Vitebsk.

Star items include Marinetti's futurist experiment with words, type and visual text, Zang Tumb Tuum; the Burliuk Brothers' Tango with Cows; and the notebooks and corrected proofs of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

In addition to browsing books, manifestos, flyers, posters and even album covers, you can see remarkable films and listen to rare historic recordings.

The exhibition came quite late to my attention. I visited London this weekend and found the announcement in a bookshop. If you have the opportunity to see it: do it! It is worth while.

A fine catalogue is available.

The exhibition (and catalogue) is reviewed by Antoine Capet for The Art Tribune (March 2008) and by Mick Herron for Bookdealer No. 1790 (March 2008).

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia

The Moment Art Changed for Ever
21 February – 26 May 2008
Tate Modern, London

Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia were at the cutting edge of art in the first half of the twentieth century, and made a lasting impression on modern and contemporary art. Duchamp invented the concept of the ‘readymade’: presenting an everyday object as an artwork, Man Ray pioneered avant-garde photographic and film techniques and Picabia’s use of kitsch, popular or low-brow imagery in his paintings undermined artistic conventions.

Their shared outlook on life and art, with a taste for jokes, irony and the erotic, forged a friendship that provided support and inspiration. At the heart of the Dada movement and moving in the same artistic circles, they discussed ideas and collaborated, echoing and responding to each other’s works. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia explores their affinities and parallels, uncovering a shared approach to questioning the nature of art.