art news & notes

National Art Education Association

Art News &NotesAuthor(s): Burt WassermanSource: Art Education, Vol. 17, No. 6 (Jun., 1964), pp. 26-30Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190588 .

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BURT WASSERMAN

At the Fair The relationships between fine

art and this year's World's Fair in New York City are loaded with all kind of controversy. Above all, the

question of whether the Fair with its carnival side-show atmosphere is the right place to exhibit art will have to be answered, in the final analysis, by individuals who will come and make their own

judgments. Two facts remain: the Fair itself will be studded with

many nuggets of significant art all over the lot, and New York

City's major museums are making a special effort to put on shows that are exceptionally qualitative and in some cases pertinent to the Fair in a timely or topical sort of

way.

Undoubtedly, the Fair's most noted work of art and certainly one of the greatest works of all time will be Michelangelo's Pieta -to be exhibited in the Fair's Vatican Pavilion for the first time outside of Saint Peter's Basilica of Rome.

Among other exhibitions, I would single out for particular notice the following:

The circular base of the Feder- al Pavilion will have an outdoor

display of sculpture selected for it by the Museum of Modern Art. An outdoor sculpture exhibition will also be featured in the New

Jersey Pavilion.

Florida will present a rotating art exhibit displaying both old masters and examples of contem-

porary art loaned by museums and private collectors. A special feature will be its large collection of preColumbian art.

The New York State Council on the Arts will sponsor the art exhibitions at the State Pavilion. "The River: People and Places" is a survey of 17th-19th century painting featuring the Hudson River country.

Exhibits from various museums and cultural institutions in New York City will be displayed in the

City's building. Among them will be a small sculpture collection from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, objects from the Museum of Primitive Art, a montage of 20th century art prepared by the

Guggenheim Museum, and im-

portant pieces from the Whitney Museum's permanent collection.

A committee of distinguished museum directors and curators has supervised the selection of 40

paintings to comprise a "Four Centuries of American Master-

Left, "Pieta" of Michelangelo being displayed in the Vatican pavilion, upper right, Eastman Kodak Company, lower right General Motors Futurama. ? 1962 New York World's Fair, 1964-1965 Corporation.

26 ART Education



pieces" exhibition in the Better

Living Center.

Bronzes, porcelains, jade, ancient calligraphy, and stone mon- sters from the Shengera, repre- senting 40 centuries of oriental

art, will be sent to the Fair by the

Republic of China. The United Arab Republic will display the most extensive collection of Egyp- tian treasures - including the Tutankhamen collection - ever sent to a foreign country.

Old masters from the Prado Museum - works by El Greco, Goya, and Velasquez-will be on

display in the Spanish Pavilion.

Supplementing this collection will be contemporary paintings by Dali, Picasso, and Miro.

A rotating art show in the American-Israel Pavilion will feature the works of Rembrandt, Chagall, and others who have

interpreted Jewish life in their

paintings. There will be primitive art in

African building, colored sand

portraits in the Belgian Village,

ancient art and sculpture in In- dia's Pavilion, and in the Philip- pine Pavilion the history of the islands will be told in paneled wood carvings.

The processes involved in block

printing will be demonstrated in the Japanese building and Indo- nesian artisans will show how

they work the ancient processes of batik printing and dyeing.

Of course, the pavilions them- selves will reflect projections of

contemporary architectural imagi- nations at work. Go see the Fair and make up your own mind about what is good, bad, or indif- ferent there.

In the Whitney During the run of the Fair, the

Whitney Museum in New York

City will be offering a show titled "Between the Fairs, 1939-1964."

Opening on June 23, it will con- sist of about 150 works by Ameri- can artists. Included will be some of the most compelling efforts

produced during a particularly fruitful period in American art.

Among the artists represented are: deKooning, Gorky, Hof-

mann, Hopper, Kline, Marin, Pollock, Tobey, and Calder.

More than two-thirds of the "Between the Fairs" exhibition will be lent from various private and public collections. About 50 works will be from the Whitney Museum's permanent collection, the largest holdings of 20th cen-

tury American art owned by any public institution.

The Museum also announced that plans were being made for another exhibition, "Young Amer-

ica-1965," to be held during the second summer of the World's Fair. This will present the works of American painters and sculptors of sound achievement but

yet relatively unknown to a national audience.

From the East Through the generous coopera-

tion of Iran, more than 700 mag-

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nificant works of art are being presented this month at the Na- tional Gallery of Art in Washing- ton, D.C. The exhibition will then make six week showings in the

following museums: Art Institute of Chicago; William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas

City; Museum of Fine Arts, Hous- ton; Cleveland Art Museum; Mu- seum of Fine Arts, Boston; Legion of Honor Museum, San Francis- co; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition, titled "7,000 Years of Iranian Art," will be the first exhibition in more than 20

years to display in the United States the great treasures from the part of the world formerly known as Persia, beginning in

prehistoric times and continuing until the early 19th century. A similar exhibition toured six

European capitals in 1961-1963. What gives the exhibition its

particular importance is the

presence of many hitherto virtu-

ally unknown pieces which have come to light only recently, such as the famous Hassanlu Gold Bowl of the 9th century B.C., which was discovered by the American archaeologist R. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania in 1958. This and more than 230 other objects of great rarity and

beauty, many of them in precious metals, were lent by the Archaeo-

logical Museum in Teheran.

They were selected by Dr. Rich- ard Ettinghausen, chief curator

of Near Eastern art ot the Freer

Gallery in Washington. More than 500 additional ob-

jects will come from the out-

standing private collections of Mohsene Foroughi, formerly dean of the Department of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran; all selected by Professor Roman Ghirshman, director of the French Archaeological Mission in Iran.

At Colonial Williamsburg "Rubbings from New England

Gravestones," a display of graphic renderings derived from sculp- tured headstones in New England burying grounds, will be at the

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection in Colonial Wil-

Left, Statuette of a bearded man with a shaved moustache, height 41/2", Third Century, B.C., Collection Mohsene Foroughi, Tehran, lower right, Drinking bowl of pure gold, Height 8", 9th Century, B.C., Archeological Museum, Tehran, upper right, Bird made of whitish-green glazed terracotta, height 153/4", 13th Century, Archeological Museum, Tehran. Exhibition: "7000 Years of Iranian Art" the Smithsonian Institution.

28 ART Education



liamsburg until June 30. This ex-

hibition, consisting of more than 50 examples of rubbings taken from stones dating between 1750 and 1800, will be the first in the South for artists Ann Parker and Avon Neal.

All in all, the artists have re- corded more than 2,000 stones in New England. The Connecti- cut River Valley, they found, was the most fruitful and distinc- tive area for beautiful headstones. In every case, the stonecutters used materials at hand, and in their current work, Miss Parker and Mr. Neal try to keep the feel of the stone.

In their New England project, Miss Parker and Mr. Neal used rice or mulberry paper securely fastened against the carved sur- faces. Silk pads saturated with

heavy-bodied inks are rubbed over it until the designs develop on the papers. This rubbing tech-

nique was evolved as a result of Miss Parker's efforts in Central America to photograph poorly located and inadequately lighted Mayan bas reliefs.

Due to weather and neglect, many early New England gravestones are disappearing. Both artists stress the importance of pre- serving this rich source of early American design and point out that their aim is to make their work available in strategic li- braries and places where it can be used.

Shows Worth Seeing-- Briefly Noted

Throughout June and until

July 1, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts is showing "Rodin Sculptures."

From June 4 to July 5, the 24th Annual Exhibition of Northwest Watercolors will be on view at the Seattle Art Museum.

Several galleries in New York City will stay open this summer because of the many visitors who will be attracted by the World's

Fair. At one of these galleries, The Panoras, one may see recent

graphic prints by Viggo Holm Madsen. Madsen's work is seen with growing frequency in na- tiohal exhibitions. His technique of making sectional woodcuts

(several colors from a block cut in sawn pieces are impressed on the paper simultaneously) was demonstrated at an Eastern Arts Association conference several

years ago. The show will run from June 29 to July 17.

"Prints and Arts of Japan" is

being shown at the North Caro- lina Museum of Art in Raleigh until August 30.

The Heckscher Museum of

Huntington, New York, has for several years achieved a bit of

notoriety for presenting annual

Long Island artists' shows sponsored by the Huntington Town-

ship Art League. Currently they are presenting "The Face of

America," an exhibition designed to show the diverse personalities of America's history as seen by great artists from colonial times to the present. The show closes on August 23.

Fair Views at the Metropolitan

This month, all summer, and on until October 18, the Metro-

politan Museum of Art is presenting "The World's Fairs-- Architecture of Fantasy" in the Auditorium Lounge on the first floor.

From London's famous Crystal Palace in 1851 to the New York Fair of 1939, the exhibit in New York City's biggest art show-

place makes a retrospective visit to some 16 international exposi- tions. More than 75 prints and photographs, including contemporary magazine illustrations, posters, sheet music covers, souve- nir booklets, and official guides, help to capture something of the character and spirit that made each fair unique.

The exhibition's emphasis is on the most arresting of all

characteristics, fair architecture- often revolutionary, more often

outlandish, and very rarely pre- dictable.

This quality of the unexpected was established by the first of the great exhibitions, that of 1851 held in Hyde Park, London. Its main building, the Crystal Pal- ace, was erected amazingly in 17 weeks. Nothing like it had been seen before.

French fairs were especially notable for their daring experi- ments in construction. The Palais de l'Industrie, for example, built for the first Paris exposition of 1855, stunned spectators with its illusion of opening up space in- stead of confining it.

The impulse to surpass what had been done before turned into

pure exhibitionism with the Paris

Exposition of 1889. The Eiffel Tower, soaring 1,000 feet into the sky, was greeted first as a vulgar assault on the city's skyline, and then as a breathless feat of sheer functionalism. Another tour de force of engineering, the Galerie des Machines, attained dimen- sions beyond anything yet at- tempted: 150 feet high and 375 feet across.

Fair architecture often aroused controversies. One of the most sensational of these was ignited by the World's Columbian Ex- hibition in Chicago in 1893. A kind of transcendental metropolis of the future was created on the shores of Lake Michigan. Neo- classical buildings covered in white plaster dotted the grounds. While most of the architects felt that their buildings would open up a new golden age of Ameri- can architecture, Louis Sullivan, whose Transportation Building was one of the lastingly important buildings there, bitterly predicted that the architectural damage wrought by the fair would last half a century. He was right. For the next 30 years, the eclectic neo-classical style dominated the American landscape.

The Panama-Pacific Exhibition

JUNE 1964 29



in San Francisco in 1915 produced an architecture with a

romantic, almost precious quality. It provoked the illusion of a great stage set, especially Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts, inspired by Piranesi's etchings of ancient Rome.

By the '30's the fashion had

changed. Sleek, clean forms re-

placed the old grotesques. The most impressive features of the 1939 New York World's Fair was

probably its stark geometric sym-

bols, the trylon and perisphere. The last picture in the Museum's exhibit is a dramatic photograph showing the ramp and its line of

figures, silhouetted high in the

sky as it arches into the perisphere. The fantasy, this time, is almost prophetically of the space age.

Dr. Burt Wasserman is an as- sociate professor of art at Glass- boro State College in Glassboro, New Jersey.

of the conference.-OAEA News- letter.

MAEA Spring Conference Featured at the Massachusetts

Art Education Association conference April 9 was a talk by Arthur Hoener, Head of the De-

partment of Design, Massachu- setts College of Art. Professor Hoener's topic was "Heightening Human Perception." Other high- lights included the annual luncheon and a demonstration by students of the Massachusetts Col-

lege of Art.

OAEA Newsletter Featured in the March 1964

Newsletter of the Ohio Art Edu- cation is the text of an address

by E. Paul Torrance entitled, "A Researcher's Views of Frontiers in Art Education," delivered at the November 1963 conference of the Ohio Art Education Asso- ciation.

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STATE ASSOCIATION NEWS WAEA High School Art Workshop

Scheduled for two one-week

periods this year, the WAEA

High School Art Workshop is still

showing the signs of growth that has characterized it ever since the WAEA assumed active sponsorship in 1961. This year two ses- sions of the workshop will be

held, the first, June 14-20, and the second, June 21-27, at the

University of Wisconsin Center in Wausau, Wisconsin. This is the fourth year of sponsorship on the part of the WAEA and the seventh annual workshop.

Director of the workshop this

year will be Richard Dahle of the

University of Wisconsin. Assisting him will be Gerald C. Henry of the Gifted Child Guidance Labo-

ratory of the University of Wis- consin. Staff includes Ernest Nico-

lette, Jack Olds, Kent Anderson, Rollin Jansky, Ronald Stokes, Earl Kittleson, Audrey Bartlett, and Professor James A. Schwal- bach. Visiting lecturers are Rob- ert Burkert, UWM, Milwaukee; Robert Eccles, Northland College,

Ashland: Ray Gloeckler, Univer- sity of Wisconsin, Madison; Verne

Schaffer, Beloit College; Jack Waldheim, industrial designer, Milwaukee; William Wentzler, architect, Milwaukee; Kurt Wild, Wisconsin State College at River Falls; Helmut Summ, UWM, Milwaukee; and Michael Kazar. president-elect of the WAEA.- WAEA Newsletter.

OAEA Holds Spring Conference

The spring OAEA Conference held March 19, 1964, at the

Lloyd Center in Portland featured two outstanding speakers: Pauline Johnson, Professor of Art

Education, University of Wash-

ington, Seattle, author of Creat-

ing with Paper, and Sister Noreen

Elizabeth, noted Oregon mosaic artist of Marylhurst College, Marylhurst, Oregon.

A special program including exhibits, lectures, slides, and demonstrations on paper sculpture, bookbinding, mosaics, and related activities was held with the luncheon in the Lloyd Center Auditorium. Helen Boelts and Austin Myers were co-chairmen

.... ...

Bucknell University's art de-

partment is molding a new kind of artist-the completely trained

printmaker.

Supervising this instruction is Marvin S. Lowe, assistant professor of art, who is a protege of the nation's most influential printmaker, Mauricio Lasansky. After four years at the University of Iowa under Lasansky's tutelage, Lowe is among a dozen of the artist's former students who head

graphic arts departments in well- known American universities and art industries.

Sculptors Tio Giambruni and Ofelia Arizmendi will conduct a three-week sculpture workshop July 19 to August 7 at Squaw Valley, California. Sponsored by University of California Exten- sion and the Department of Arts at the U.C. Berkeley campus, the

workshop is designed for students

30 ART .Education



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