I know it’s a corny play on a popular movie title.\u00a0 I just couldn’t leave it alone.<\/p>\n
Thursday nights at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) are free to the public courtesy of the Shell Oil Corporation (you know –\u00a0that big evil oil company).\u00a0 Another good thing about Thursdays is that the museum is open until 9 pm (again, thanks to Shell, evil corporation that it is).\u00a0 My Digital Art professor told me about the Heinrich Kuhn exhibit currently at the museum.\u00a0 Well, thinking that the price of admission (free) was perfect, I thought it would be a nice way for my and my wife to break the monotony of mid-week life.\u00a0 So, off to the MFAH we went.<\/p>\n
The first exhibit we visited was the Carlos Cruz-Diez exhibit.\u00a0 For those of you not familiar, Cruz-Diez has spent his life studying color perception and translating that to his art.\u00a0 The exhibit progresses from his early experiments with color in the late 1950’s all the way to his sophisticated physichromies of today.\u00a0 Much of his work is centered around the changing perceptions of color and shape as we move from one point to another.\u00a0 During the progression you can see the increasing sophistication of his work.\u00a0 Along the way we see shapes added.\u00a0 Shimmers are soon added.\u00a0 Then we see shimmering shapes.\u00a0 Then there are light plays as the vertical lines in the piece are not of equal widths throughout.\u00a0 Then there are plays on the orientation of lines.\u00a0\u00a0 They all add up to amazing effects on a piece as you move from one side to another as you view the work.\u00a0 The MFAH has one of his chromosaturation pieces where individual rooms are bathed in colored light.\u00a0 Each room is a different color, and it’s amazing how the color changes are quite abrupt.\u00a0 It’s hard to imagine how he came to this work, but he definitely challenges the viewer’s individual perceptions on color.\u00a0 I personally have never seen anything quite like it before.<\/p>\n
The second exhibit I visited was the Heinrich Kuhn exhibit, entitled, “The Perfect Photograph.”\u00a0The works on display are (mostly) Kuhn’s work from just before the turn of the century to just after the start of World War I.\u00a0 One thing I found interested was the fact that there were no silver gelatin prints present.\u00a0 All of the prints were made using an “alternative” process.\u00a0 Mostly there were gum bichromates, platinum prints, oil transfers, and combinations thereof.\u00a0 There were a few other processes present, but these aforementioned made up the bulk of the pieces.\u00a0 The thing that really caught my eye were the gum bichromate prints.\u00a0 Some of these prints were, what I would guess, around 2′ x 2.5′.\u00a0 Keep in mind that the gum bichromate process is a contact process.\u00a0 What this means is that the negatives have to be the same size as the final print.\u00a0 How on earth, in the absence of an electric enlarger, make negatives this size?!\u00a0 Unless his camera took negatives this size (which is doubtful given just given the size of the lens necessary to cast that large an image circle), I just can’t figure out how he did it.\u00a0 I did by the book they had on sale in the museum retail shop, but I have yet to crack it open.\u00a0 Hopefully it will reveal his secret.\u00a0 I’ll keep you posted on that.<\/p>\n
As for the pictures themselves, they were pretty amazing.\u00a0 The skill shown, especially where gum bichromate is concerned, is definitely that of a master.\u00a0 Some of the pictures on display would definitely look quite ordinary and uninteresting with the cold precision of a modern digital SLR, but the alternative processes give them a life that, at times, seems otherworldly.\u00a0 The roughness of the watercolor paper (modern photographic paper is basically watercolor paper coated with light sensitive silver salts) is counteracted by the soft edges on the subjects themselves.\u00a0 There are landscapes, portraits, nudes, and scenes in the collection.\u00a0 Around the turn of the 20th Century photography was considered by many as a mechanical endeavor.\u00a0 This was also an image that some photographic societies wished to maintain – John Pouncy, the “father” of the gum bichromate process, was sharply criticized by the London Royal Photographic Society for his work because they felt it crossed too much into the world of art for it to be considered a photograph.\u00a0 Kuhn’s work (along with others of his time such as Eduoard Steichen) seems to mark a turning point to where photography started to receive consideration as an artitistic medium.<\/p>\n
The final exhibit I visited was the Neoclassical collection.\u00a0 The MFAH currently has on loan some masterpieces of the Neoclassical era from museums all over the world, including the Louvre in Paris.\u00a0 I won’t bore you with the ones that I really liked because many of these are very familiar to us, whether we know them or not.\u00a0 One thing to keep in mind, however, is that nothing compares to seeing a work of art when the actual piece is in front of your eyes.\u00a0 Pictures in a book or a on a computer screen are not the same.\u00a0 Such masterpieces as Oath of the Horatii <\/em>by Jacque-Louis David and Ernst Matthai’s Venus<\/em>take on a whole new life.\u00a0 I said I wasn’t going to bore you with my favorite, but this is an obscure piece and it really seemed to strike me.\u00a0 It is by John Flaxman and it is called St. Ethelburga\u00a0With Her Chaplain, St. Paulinas of Rochester, Bringing Christianity to Northumbria<\/em>. The piece is done in pen and ink with gray wash.\u00a0 The drawing is of four figures walking from right to left through a forest.\u00a0 The forest itself is gray but the figures walking are pure white outline (the whole piece is outline, but the gray wash adds texture and feeling to the forest).\u00a0 The figures seem to be glowing, as if having come just short of divinity while still in the mortal realm.\u00a0 The piece itself is very haunting (and I would guess it was part of the inspiration for the cover of the Beatles album Abbey Road<\/em>.\u00a0 Alas, I have yet to find an electronic reproduction anywhere to show you, but I am still searching.\u00a0 Plus, I want a print for myself.<\/p>\n Thus ended an evening at the museum.\u00a0 There are some new exhibits starting soon and I am going to make sure to get down to those.\u00a0 Well, it is officially Sunday morning now and I do need to get some sleep.\u00a0 Have a good night, everyone, and be sure to visit the links below to see some of the things I was talking about.\u00a0 Take care.<\/p>\n Carlos Cruz-Diez Website<\/a> I know it’s a corny play on a popular movie title.\u00a0 I just couldn’t leave it alone. Thursday nights at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) are free to the public courtesy of the Shell Oil Corporation (you know –\u00a0that big evil oil company).\u00a0 Another good thing about Thursdays is that the museum is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMuseum of Fine Arts Houston<\/a>\u00a0(from here you can get to the three exhibits mentioned above to see some of the key pieces)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"