Arrive Magazine - September/October, 2008

(Hartford) and Dale Chihuly (Providence).

Two other New York shows reflect the painful genius of Vincent van Gogh and the mysterious genius of the self-taught Mexican artist Martin Ramirez. In the 15 years before he died in 1963, Ramirez completed hundreds of intricately conceived drawings—some 140 were discovered just last year—all while he was confined in a California psychiatric hospital. His story reminds us that artistic inspiration comes in many forms, a lesson to be learned over and over again this fall.

The Smithsonian American
Art Museum
Washington, D.C.
“Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel
Adams: Natural Affinities”
Sept. 26–Jan. 4

Their mutual love of the American West is well documented. Lesser known is the sometimes rocky friendship that bound O’Keeffe and Adams professionally for more than half a century. Rocky, perhaps, because they could not have been less alike. Adams was as ebullient as O’Keeffe was standoffish. But in the 1920s and 1930s, both were championed by Alfred Stieglitz, the influential photographer and gallery owner who happened also to be O’Keeffe’s husband.

The Smithsonian exhibit features 40 paintings by O’Keeffe and 50 photographs by Adams, although Eleanor Jones Harvey, the museum’s chief curator, believes the real star of the show is the New Mexico landscape that furnished each with a constant muse.

“In a way,” Harvey says, “they sort of relocated American modernism out West.”

The exhibit explores how the now-iconic images that Adams and O’Keeffe produced helped inform and inspire each other’s work.

“The way they viewed clouds, the way they viewed the broad sweep of the landscapes, how they could use two different media to tap into the same ele-mental visual vocabulary,” Harvey says. “It’s almost as though they are literally sharing a conversation over time.”

Walters Art Museum

Baltimore

“Bedazzled: 5,000 Years of Jewelry” Oct. 19–Jan. 4

Nineteenth-century railroad magnate William Walters and his son, Henry, accumulated a 22,000-piece art collection featuring a 15th-century Koran, European paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, and a trove of jewelry touted as the largest such private collection in America.

Among the ancient artifacts in “ Bedazzled”: five animal-shaped pendants from Mesopotamia, and bracelets of gold, garnets, amethyst, pearls and emeralds taken from a tomb near Olbia on the northern coast of the Black Sea, in modern Ukraine.

“It’s truly amazing what they were capable of thousands of years ago,” says curator Sabine Albersmeier.

One highlight is a fairly recent purchase—a 9 1/2–inch brooch in the form of an iris, studded with 139 sapphires. Tiffany & Co. designed the piece for the 1900 Paris Exposition, and Henry Walters acquired it soon after.

“He was likely there,” Albersmeier says of the indefatigable collector, “and likely negotiated right away.”

left to right:

Dale Chihuly

Glass Forest #1, circa 1971 Museum of Contemporary Craft New York City

Magdalene Wilson (American, 1898-2001 Broken Star variation, 1925. Cotton, wool and silk, 97 x 79 inches. Collection of the Tinwood Alliance. Photo: Stephen Pitkin, Pitkin Studio, Rockford, Ill.