A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). Directed by Max Reinhardt. Shown from left: Mickey Rooney, Olivia de Havilland. Photographer; Mickey Marigold. Warner Bros./Photofest. © Warner Bros.

This Friday, June 26, we’ll be celebrating the summer solstice by projecting Max Reinhardt’s 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 9pm in our courtyard. Doors open at 7pm.

Since it doesn’t get dark outside until 9pm, we’ll be entertaining our guests for the first two hours in a variety of ways. The most exciting of which, to me, is a reunion of the performers from the Pulitzer’s now finished series: Staging Old Masters: Former Prisoners Perform at the Pulitzer.

Select scenes, such as the St. Sebastian, Self-Portrait with an Easel, and As You Like It – Shepherd & Shepherdess, will be performed in our courtyard throughout the night. These performances were originally done in front of specific artworks in our galleries, but by moving them outdoors, we hope to accomodate a bigger audience than was allowed indoors. In addition to these skits, we’ll be serving free refreshments and as usual, our Old Masters exhibition will be on view for the duration of the evening.

Are you excited to come? Have you circled the date and time in red marker in your calendar? Are you waiting with baited breath? I am too, but never fear, Friday will be here soon enough!

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1. 1

This event is free and open to the public, so bring your friends!

As Visitor Services Manager, I had many roles before, during, and after each performance, but my favorite one was holding the doors open at the beginning of each performance. It was at this moment I could smile and participate with my loudest “boya, boya, yo!”–joining in the procession of actors’ chant and smiling with each performer as they entered the door. 

My least favorite part of Staging Old Masters was the more logistical budgeting of space, for safety and viewing purposes, and the unfortunate turning away of many individuals who wished to see the skits but arrived after the allotted 35 audience members.

Sometimes they were strangers; sometimes family of the performers; maybe just curious people seeing the hub-bub as they walked to the Fox, but the heartbreak of turning them away was the same each time. I did my best to be the friendliest and clearest in my explanation as to why they couldn’t enter the building–but unfortunately, I can still recall many long faces. 

Each time we experiment with innovative programming at the Pulitzer, there’s a learning curve. About the time Staging Old Masters ended, I feel like I had learned the best ways to keep the gallery occupation size appropriate for safety and to make those people allowed in have the best possible viewing experience.

The shows’ production  took skillful coordination between different behind-the-scenes departments at the Pulitzer, and I think we can be proud of the outcome.

And if you were one of those people I had to turn away, you have another chance to see Staging Old Masters skits next Friday, when they’re performed in our courtyard. Since it will be outside, there won’t be a limit to the audience size. You can read more about the event next week from Lauren.

We recently extended our Old Masters exhibition through October 3rd.  Most of the works will remain on view, with the exception of the drawings in the Lower Gallery which will be going back home to Harvard.  In their place we’re installing photographs by Thomas Struth, on view beginning June 24th.  In the meantime, here’s why our director, Matthias Waschek, decided these works made sense within the context of this exhibition:

“The displacement of artworks can take place in the dimension of space and in that of time. We have chosen to “dis-”place Old Masters from the context of the Saint Louis Art Museum and Harvard Art Museum. But even before being acquired by these two collections, the paintings were within different contexts as well. The Pulitzer installation looks both towards the history of presentation in a pre-electrical world and towards a reconciliation of the old and the contemporary.

In my mind, Thomas Struth also confronts the old and the new. In contrast to the modernity of the visitors with their clothes, glasses and cameras, stands the “oldness” of the paintings. Seen optimistically, these works have an eternal value, and the reactions of the visitors transcend the time into which they were born. Seen pessimistically, the paintings look like dinosaurs or fossils, and the awe, curiosity, and sometimes the stressed expression on their faces show how little the visitors have in common with the world of the old masters.

Artworks need viewers. We hope that the the presentation of art at the Pulitzer invites the viewers to look afresh. Struth is an excellent fit for this exhibition, as he makes us view along with other modern viewers.”

We can’t officially announce which photos will be on view yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as we can!

The talks I went to ranged from the Public Relations aspects, finance, volunteer services, etc.  I covered multiple topics and found out more than I probably ever need to know on running a museum.  I also learned about wonderful experimental programs being developed at museums around the United States.  In fact the theme of experimentation was wound throughout the conference and I found myself feeling like the Pulitzer isn’t the only Laboratory in the world.  

It wasn’t all seriousness though–there were museums a plenty to visit! The Mütter, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art were all wonderful and made me have those great moments that only art provides for me.  Each is a very different type of institution and each shows a very different type of art or artifact–but each is reliant upon ideas and viewers to witness them. 

In a full wall at the PMA, I discovered the brother to one of the current paintings at the Pulitzer.  St. Sebastian, off his tree stump and being healed by St. Irene, opened my eyes to the rest of the story presented on our walls.  Art is a dialogue and museums are necessary to house the story. It was a wonderful treat to hear so many other stories and ways of making them available. 

St. Sebastian cured by St. Irene, by Luca Giordano at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, by Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Pope, Edward W. Forbes and Paul J. Sachs, 1924.31, Photo by Imaging Department, President and Fellows of Harvard College

In Bob’s post “Day 1 of Alzheimer’s Program: I Doubt It’s Too Late,” Bob briefly introduced Let’s Look: Making Connections at the Pulitzer, a program designed for people with early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Carol North, Director of the Metro Theater Company, and JoAnn Sanditz, a docent at the St. Louis Art Museum, led the fourth meeting of the workshop this Monday afternoon. The session covered basics of sculpture and portraiture, while interweaving exercises in teamwork. Most significant about this week was that it was the first time the participants met with their “art buddies,” third, fourth, and fifth grade students from Cole Elementary School.

The activities began with creating a sculpture out of wooden blocks:

If you want to learn more about Let’s Look and what happened on Monday, please visit the Let’s Look blog, where we will continue to post the program’s progress along with videos and photos.

“Having the opportunity to participate in the French Project is great! I not only get to know more about art but also am involved with this great foundation. Before taking this course (we take this as a class during our January intersession at Lindenwood), I had never heard of the Pulitzer Foundation and now, I have the chance to be part of it, even though it is just for a short time. It has been a great opportunity to practice my French. I feel very blessed for having this opportunity and I wish I could do this again.”

“I appreciate the digital mock-ups for the Old Masters Installation & the exhibit itself. However, I would like to know why? It seems rather anti-Pulitzer to mount an Old Masters exhibit at an art museum where the building itself is a masterpiece of modern architecture. I am an art professional, have taught many students about modern and contemporary art and have a background in western art. We see references to, merges with and criticism about Old Master artworks, but I cannot recall placing OM in Modernity & Post-Modernity- one complementing the other, juxtaposing, or offering a fresh, new view on OM. This upcoming exhibit does not seem to complement nor extend past Pulitzer exhibits. Please explain. Thanks.”

Here’s Matthias’s reply:

Although the Pulitzer’s main focus is Modernism, we have a track record of showing artworks from other periods and cultures, as demonstrated in our exhibition Exploring Ando’s Space: Art and the Spiritual. Those who had a chance to see it remember juxtapositions of Asmat Ancestor Poles from Papua New Guinea with Kelly’s Blue Black, Durer’s Apocalypse with Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios and Pierre Raymond’s 16th century enamels with Beckmann’s Christ and the Adulterous Women. The installations shots are archived on our web catalogue (click here).

However, as opposed to a Kunsthalle where everything can be on view, our exhibitions are co-determined by the building. The exhibition Water was inspired by our watercourt, Portrait/Homage/Embodiment was inspired by two Serra works that were already reacting to the building (Joplin and Joe), etc.

The upcoming exhibition, Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer, is based on a fewideas relating to the Ando building. The building lets in different degrees of natural light, which corresponds to the way these works were originally viewed. The specific placement of the artworks transforms the modernist galleries into abstracted dark Roman side-chapels from the 16th century, light princely galleries from the 18th, obscured medieval churches, and so on.

Due to construction on both of their buildings, the opportunity came up to show Old Masters from the collections of the Harvard Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum.  The Pulitzer is both a laboratory and a sanctuary, and this was a chance to explore what Ando’s architecture can do to revitalize this legacy.  It allows us to think about a mutually beneficial relationship between the contemporary and the old, which might be of interest for future expansions for museums in the country and beyond.

I disagree that Modernism and the legacy of Old Masters cannot interact. On the contrary, a lot of attempts have been made to reconcile both. Particularly in the 1960s, various initiatives were presented to ‘re-actualize’ Old Masters via contemporary architecture. The two most prominent examples are the Goulbenkian’s brutalism-building in Lisbon and Scarpa’s addition to the Museo del Castelvecchio in Verona. In the first case, works were isolated in such a way that 18th century cabinets, 16th century paintings or Egyptian funeral gifts alike could be enjoyed and studied for their material and formal qualities, in the second case the use of concrete highlighted the medieval stonework – even translated it into modernity – and therefore contextualized the Old Master paintings in a old/new language. The Libon example might appear dated to our postmodern eyes, the Verona example is likely to still “work”, as it is about contextualization and not its opposite. So, in a way, Scarpa is the big master behind our thinking of Old Masters at the Pulitzer.

One of the challenges in this process was, on top of getting the dimensions and scale correct, to get the perspectives right. We employed the good old (as in Italian Renaissance old) system of the vantage point. We took the top and bottom line of the wall in question and continued to draw the lines of the walls until the two lines met together. That is the vantage point. So in this process, the top and the bottom line of the paintings have to converge on the same vantage point. Then, a lot of guess work has to be made, as the foreshortening of the paintings is easier guessed than calculated. Another aspect of the exhibition, the tilting of some of the larger paintings, wasn’t factored in, as that was too complicated to do for our purposes.