Two new sections have just been added to our website — School Programs and University Programs. Take a look! Right now, we have content online from our programs with Shaw Visual and Performing Arts School, St. Michael School (both with elementary-age students), and Washington University. These sections are still a work in progress, and in the coming weeks we’ll be adding content from our program with Saint Louis University and with Lindenwood University French students. We’ll also be continually adding new information, blog posts, photos, etc. from the programs already online.

Here’s a photo from one of the visits from Shaw students:

Here’s a photo from a recent Washington University student visit:

The students and teachers involved in these programs are fantastic, and their blog entries promise to be really interesting and entertaining. So check these sections often to find out what’s happening!

If some people are willing to follow a band around
for two hours of music each night, surely there are people willing to drive a
few hours for art, right? Well, that’s the thinking behing this post (the first
in a series?) suggesting a pilgrimage to some of the great art-filled
sites near St. Louis. Of course, if you’re driving around listening to mix
tapes, eating twizzlers, playing art history games, it’s not a pilgrimage…it’s
a road trip!

First stop: Iowa City, baby! The University of
Iowa Museum of Art has a fantastic collection. Possible top three

1. Henri Matisse’s Blue Interior with
Two Girls (1947). Matisse thought very highly of this painting.
This was actually the last painting shown in his Philadelphia retrospective of
1948–a show he helped organize.

2. Max Beckmann’s triptych Carnival
(1943). Beckmann finished nine great triptychs. This road trip
gives you two! In addition to Carnival (#6) the St. Louis Art
Museum has The Acrobats (#3).

3. Jackson Pollock’s Mural
(1943). Mural is only more incredible when you realize it was
painted in the same year as Carnival. That’s just crazy.

Because Iowa City is home to the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, it has a lot of good literary events and bookshops too. Just look at the
Workshop’s own reading schedule.
They’ve got James Galvin talking about Faulkner, people! Get in your car!

Getting there: US-40 W to US-21 N, which will become MO-27 N. Turn right
on exit at IA-1 N toward Iowa City/ Kalona, then left onto Riverside Drive. The
museum is 150 S. Riverside. Total time 4.5 hours.

Lately, we’ve been talking about starting a program of film screenings here at the Pulitzer, which would involve films that directly relate to the exhibition on view and provide opportunities to view movies that might not otherwise get shown. Today we walked around with a projectionist and discussed the various screening possibilities our building could provide. It turns out, there are lots!

To kick things off, we’re thinking about projecting a film outside in our courtyard on the concrete wall. It seems like there are a variety of options for this as well, and we’re going to be testing out different walls and parts of the courtyard in the coming weeks. This is something that MoMA is very familiar with but on a much grander scale — they projected eight large moving images on the outside walls of the museum for a full week. I was checking out NPR’s article on this project, if you’re interested take a look at it here, and check out the official site for the screening here. And if you had a chance to see this, I’d love to hear what it was like!

Art lovers often talk about making art pilgrimages,
like to the Barnes in Pennsylvania or, in Rachel’s case, to the Spiral
Jetty in Utah. But what do they do on the long drive out there? Well if
they’re real nerds, they might play this game, which is very addictive, I
promise you. Here’s how it works:

1. Think of two artists whose names are partly the
same

2. Put “versus” between their names

3. Immediately pick which one is best

So, possible match-ups include:

Frans Hals vs. Franz Kline

Georges Braque vs. George Caleb
Bingham

David Hammonds vs. Jacques Louis-David

…the list goes one and on (I know from
experience).

Originally I think the game comes from jazz
musicians. I saw the pianist Brad Mehldau describe it in an essay for Jazz
Times a while back. According to him, during set break, guys
would offer crazy match-ups as fast as possible, then someone else had to decide
who he preferred on the spot (Sonny Rollins vs. Sonny Stitt, etc.). Stating
your criteria for “best” or offering any explanation was forbidden. It was
supposed to be in the spirit of jazz, I guess: wild improvisation, thinking on
your feet, never looking back. Of course, the interesting thing about it,
Mehldau pointed out, is what happens when you do look back on it. The game
forces you to make distinctions, so when you reflect on it, you have to
acknowledge that even if you never formulate criteria for “best”–”you don’t
know art, but you know what you like”–you always have a particular
aesthetic.

Because the game is set up to force comparisons
between things you would never otherwise associate, you might say it’s sort of
surrealist. Could be. But it’s not that far off from a game I know Richard
Serra played with his students when he was a teacher at the SVA (and who, in
recent times, is farther from surrealism than Serra?). He describes it in an
interview in The Portraits Speak. He would take his class to the Met,
pick galleries to visit just based on their numbers, then have the students clap
in front of the works they liked best. I don’t have a copy of the book handy,
but I think Serra says something like, “Students don’t know the difference
between Bronzino and Parmigianino. The important thing is getting them to
make distinctions and to realize that distinctions matter.” If you saw his last
show of prints at the Sheldon, you know he is a jazz fan…

Eventually this game always declines into true
arbitrariness: Jackson Pollock vs. Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Rothko vs. Mark
Wahlberg. Still, it’s good while it lasts. For my part, I’m clapping for
Kline, Braque, and David. You?

For your Friday afternoon reading pleasure, here’s a fun post by Ed Winkelman — he challenged readers of his blog to an “art joke bumper sticker contest”. Click here to read his original challenge along with a few ideas to kick things off. Click here to read the list of submissions — some of them are pretty funny. Unfortunately, voting has already ended (click here to see the winner), but what would you have submitted? Any ideas? We’re trying to come up with a few here too — I’ll update if we think of anything good.

Here’s a totally unrelated link but a nice follow-up to Jen’s Warhol post yesterday. In conjunction with the Post-Dispatch’s review of “Factory Girl”, David Bonetti wrote a round-up of Warhols on view around town. Update: I just looked and can’t find it on the online version of the paper anymore, but here’s what he wrote!

——————

There has never been a better time to see Andy Warhol’s work in St. Louis.

— “I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy
Warhol,” a show at the Contemporary Art
Museum, offers more Warhols than have ever
been seen before in one place locally. Included are nine portraits of a grieving
Jackie Kennedy, a suite of camouflage prints, a flower painting, a rarely seen
oxidation painting and a wall full of early drawings, many homoerotic, as well
as a lobby full of the artist’s gently floating “Silver Clouds.”

— Next door at the Pulitzer Foundation for the
Arts, five portraits of “Frank B.” from Warhol’s controversial “Most
Wanted Men” series is on view in “Portrait/Homage/ Embodiment,” the museum’s
rewarding exploration of portraiture.

— And at the St. Louis Art Museum, a great “Liz” — that’s Elizabeth Taylor, to you —
is on view in the third-floor contemporary galleries.
——————

If you haven’t been to see any of these yet, it sounds like excellent weekend plans to me!

Eddie, who writes the Symphony’s fantastic blog, made a good point about tonight’s concert — it isn’t what you’d expect to hear on Valentine’s Day. In fact, it might be more of an Anti-Valentine’s concert. Lets just say it’s not exactly a lovey dovey program. It does, however, sound like it will be one of the most interesting concerts we’ve ever had — yesterday, I saw them set up huge gongs underneath Blue Black, and we hear there will also be a sound board and sound technician involved in both pieces. Plus, the last concert we had of Steve Reich’s work was one of my all-time favorites. For some more tidbits on tonight’s pieces, click here to read Eddie’s post about listening to the rehearsals at work.

So whether you’re anti or pro V-Day, this concert is shaping up as a not-to-be-missed experience.

If you read this blog frequently, you know that I’ve been writing quite a bit lately about our online concert section and how we’d like to include audio from live performances at the Pulitzer.

One museum which does this really well is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Their podcasts, called “The Concert”, feature recordings of live performances at the museum and can be downloaded for free every two weeks. The other day I came across this post on Geoff Edger’s blog for the Boston Globe — the Gardner podcasts have hit 100,000 downloads, and cracked the top 40 on iTunes! That’s really incredible. Click here for a great article on how successful the program has become.

Though our music will be streamed instead of downloaded, this is definitely inspiring as we continue to work on our own multimedia section. Right now, we’re acquiring the rights to some of the concerts we’ve already recorded — I’ll keep you posted!

A few posts ago I mentioned an upcoming concert at the Pulitzer that will feature musicians playing 20 crystal wine glasses. Well, things just got even more interesting when I found out what else will be “played”. In addition to glasses, George Crumb’s piece Black Angels “draws from an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs and maracas.”

Not only that, but I just listened to an interview with musician Peter Otto, who gives even more of a glimpse into the piece: “I get to do very strange things like everyone in the group. I get to whistle….we get to use things that are not even considered instruments like glass rods that were specially made for us and with which we hit the string, and we pluck with a paper clip, we have thimbles on our fingers at one point….”

If you want to hear the full interview, it’s now on our website (along with a few other interviews about the concert). If you’re curious what maracas, thimbles, and crystal glasses will sound like (as I am), come check it out for yourself next week.

This past Friday I was lucky enough to participate in a discussion about our current
exhibition with a number of people in the St. Louis area who have been engaged with
issues related to portraiture. It was an all day event and there were a lot of highlights (a summary will be posted on our website soon!), but there was one conversation around the four sculptures in the Lower Corridor that I found especially interesting. Had it happened before our visitor handouts were printed, the section devoted to those sculptures would probably look very different!

Prof. John Klein (author of Matisse Portraits) set the record straight: of the four sculptures in the Lower Corridor, which we have been calling “busts,” only one (Portrait of Georgette Dalou) properly qualifies for that designation. Why? Because each of the other three lacks a chest and shoulders (aka a bust)! Whoops! How did we miss that?

From there Prof. Klein went on to point out the importance of where and how each
head was cut off. In particular he dwelt on Lipchitz’s Gertrude Stein. Turns out the cut, which preserves more of the front of her neck than the back, evokes Antique medallions. And the lack of chest and shoulders? It might just be a pointed omission! One virtue of including a sitter’s bust is that it allows the artist to render her clothing and thereby indicate her status. Here, Prof. William E. Wallace added, it could be that Stein doesn’t need all that because her most important “attribute” is her brains. Sounds likely to me!

As promised, here’s Matt’s review of last night’s concert:

Listening to “Words and Music” last night, I was struck most powerfully by how
the sounds interacted with the space. A piece intended as a radio play
already brings up fascinating ideas of imagined space: where are these
characters located? What kind of creature is this Bob, who speaks in music?
How does he exist in space? Part of this disembodied imaginary space carried
over into the performance last night–the speakers playing Croak and Joe were
not visible on stage, and their voices emanated from speakers located at
various points around the audience. This allowed one to imagine them
anywhere and everywhere. Even my conjured-up image of Bob himself didn’t
seem confined to the actual stage where the actual musicians playing his
lines were located.The physical setup of the room enhanced this feeling.
The stage is at the bottom of a series of seating terraces, and the sounds
seemed to rise up like some sort of reverse slinky up a staircase. During
the two sprechstimme “arias” of the piece, the space seemed to
correspond uncannily with the musical action. These sections feature a
rising six-note scale, played out by different instrument groups not quite
in step with one another. Each group started on a note, and gradually
rose through the scale to the top, but the groups were staggered
in unpredictable ways on their upward journey. It was easy to imagine
the sound waves themselves replicating this journey, one terrace at a
time until they hit the larger chamber at the top of the room.

Another
strong correspondence I noticed involved a prominent musical theme in which
one instrument oscillated between two widely separated notes over a lush,
subtly evolving harmonic bed. Here my musical attention was on how each note
of this oscillation rubbed up against its counterpart as well as the soft
background chord. As I listened, I was struck by the similarity between this
sort of hearing and a way of seeing the giant Ellsworth Kelly sculpture above
the stage, the interface between the blue and black fields and the whitish
background of the wall. My own perceptual back-and-forth between seeing a
field now as figure, now as ground, seemed to be paced by Feldman’s
music.

There’s a lot more I could say here–the water channel to my right
as counterpart to the great masses of “vibrating stasis” (an apt
Feldmanism) that inhabit the soundscapes of the piece, the way the sounds and
the Ando concrete alike seem flat and perfect from a distance
but kaleidoscopic and unpredictable up close, and even the
paradoxically muffled yet amplified nature of the room’s acoustics going hand
in hand with a building at once massive and square but saturated by a
pervasive aura of haze and softness. I’m grateful that from now on this
piece will forever be intertwined with this place for me, and I look forward
to the next opportunity for such a musico-spatial experience (Reich and
Crumb, on Valentine’s Day no less!).(Matt)