"Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth, and ye ever need to know".
Keats' urn was wrong, of course. Believe it or not, a quite relevant beauty exists outside and independent of VERITAS, some of it captured in art galleries and museums. Assuming an earth bigger and more well-rounded than exams and the Yard, bounded by something farther than med school, one "needs to know about it". Sodedicated to the aforementioned pot, Art of the Week.
Cambridge
At Harvard, there's disappointingly little to look at , for those who've already been through the University's permanent collections at the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger. Neither musuem has gotten any new exhibits together yet, this fall. Instead, you can look at pictures of Pusey Library in Gund Hall's "Books and Buildings" exhibit puzzle out Eudoxia Woodward's geometric flowers and name in the basement of 17 Quincy Street, or if really desperate, count the days till Hanukkah vacation on the Jewish calendars up Widener's stairs...
Cambridge's galleries are putting together a few things. Art-Asia, which lent some pleasant Japanese prints to Baker Library, has Tatsuko Shimoka's pottery at the gallery, 49 Palmer St. and BAAK, on Church St., opens an exhibit of the recent paintings and sculpture of Albert Alcalay (who teaches VES 10 and 20a) on Oct. 1.
Down Mass Ave. at the Big Computer: Chris Sproat: Made in Hayden Hayden Gallery, MIT, through Oct. 2.
In the womb of the Hayden Gallery sprout the constructions of sculptor Chris Sproat. Boston-made himself, Sproat has illuminated spaces around here with his light sculptures for the last six years. Always avant the garde, and one of the first artists to exhibit at Boston's then new Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), he was back there this past summer as part of "The Skowhegan School, 1946-1976". Summer and "skowhegan" are, sadly, over, but there are still a couple of days to catch the last bright glimmers of Sproat's work. Hurry.
Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, the only (unintentionally) piece of neo-Egyptian architecture in Boston, has mummies and much more buried in its cavernous complexity. Unless you're like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who would never go into the British Museum because she was afraid the mummies would rise from the dead and get her, the MFA is a good place to dig for exhibits. These days, the best finds are Anamorphoses (through November 29, more on that next week) and Printmaking in Germany, 1880-1975.
A collection of recent masterworks, the show is huge in scope. Beginning with Edvard Munch, the Norwegian whose eye for wood's texture and potential color (take a look at "Moonlight") taught pattern and mood to his followers, the exhibit includes the expressionists--works like Erich Keckel's "Two Men at Table" inscribed somberly and portentously "To Dostoevsky" --and winds up through the Bauhaus. The four Bauhaus portfolois (1921-1923) get Klee, and Feininger in, too.
All of the prints impress: Emil Nolde, in particular, unfailingly achieves those surprising effects in the medium which prove a master. His three boat prints capture the slap of water in pitching black and white blocks and swirls; his Danish girl amazes with the sensuality of her red hair, rendered in what is merely a mass of scratches.
History evinces itself in the chronological arrangement: the ominous shadows behind the always-smiling caricatures of the Weimar period tell a good deal about what it was like to make prints in Germany during the last century. But the show's sweep creates problems. The gems it contains seem to lack a setting. Go look at this as though turning pages of the books from which most of these came,--and turn slowly.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, located at 955 Boylston St., in a most unlikely-looking brick contraption--formerly a police station, but it's hard to imagine the building housing law-and-order, either--hosts consistently worthwhile shows. This week is no exception: Marie Cosindas: Polaroid Photographs, 1960-1976 at the ICA through Oct. 10
Ansel Adams told Cosindas that even when she took photos in black and white, she was thinking in color. The ICA's collection of her recent thoughts in Polacolor prove Adams right.
As a former designer and illustrator, Cosindas knows how color moves. The still lifes on show, assemblages of dools, flowers, cloth, objects belie their name. A series like "Asparagus" makes evident the potency of what seems a simple green stalk, and the fertility of Cosidas' imagination.
People can also be objects--and one of the fascinations of these pictures is the way they reduce dancers, puppetteers, and personalities to dolls, porcelain and bright. Cosindas' trip to Greece in 1960 started her career as a creative photographer, but she has come a long way from the conception of drama that "Greek Lady, 1959" shows. Her recent portraits have left black and white tragedy for what seems a puppet stage. Her precisely-composed arrangements disconcert. A personage like Vionnet may be thought of in terms of pure design, color, fashion and grooming, but it somehow reduces Imogen Cunningham to see her elfed in this very miniature lens. Ezra Pound's hands, large and blurred between his knees in front of the camera, couldn't be frozen.
knees in front of the camera, couldn't be frozen.
The best of the Newbury Street three-dimensional paintings will soon be superceded by a retrospective of Max Beckmann's prints (opening Oct. 2), and Graphics I and II, where Calder's print series "The Unfinished Revolution" remains til Oct. 18. print series "The Unfinished Revolution" remains till Oct. 18.
Calder never will stand still. Despite the fact that these cavorting creatures were conceived" for the ubiquitous Bicentennial, Calder has infused into their red, white and blue a lime and magenta which is unmistakeably his. If only this was the Spirit of 1976.
