Search results for ""McMullen Museum of Art""

Cuban painter Rafael Soriano (1920–2015) was an acclaimed master of geometric abstraction and a global figure in the twentieth-century art world—his work resonated with such international artists of Latin American origin as Roberto Matta, Rufino Tamayo, and Wifredo Lam. As a result of the revolution in Cuba in 1959, Soriano left the country in 1962 for the United States. The effect of the Cuban revolution on his art as well as his aesthetics in general are the focus of this book, an unprecedented examination of his entire oeuvre. Featuring more than ninety paintings, pastels, and drawings, this bilingual English-Spanish catalog for an accompanying exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; the Long Beach Museum of Art; and the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University begins with a contextual analysis of Soriano’s relationship to the Cuban avant-garde and his position within the emerging mid-century modernists. Essays then trace his evolving styles, examining his work through the lens of surrealism and European and Latin American transnational aesthetics. The idea of exile and struggle is a leitmotif and is framed within questions of transcendence and spirituality. Taken together, the contributions suggest both Soriano’s rootedness in Latin America and his striving for universality. The most comprehensive exploration of Soriano’s work to date, Rafael Soriano: The Artist as Mystic deftly takes the idea of exile and struggle so prominent in the artist’s work and frames it within important questions of transcendence and spirituality. This book will be essential reading for anyone intrigued by Latin American and modern art.

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An examination of the balance between modernity and tradition in Cuba’s turn-of-the-century artistic evolution.The Lost Generation | La generación perdida accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. The modern artistic ceramic movement in Cuba, almost exclusively comprised of women artists (including Amelia Peláez, Mirta García Buch, and María Elena Jubrías), emerged toward the end of the 1940s and continued into the next decade. The ceramicists invited Cuba’s modernist protagonists, including René Portocarrero, Luis Martínez Pedro, and Wifredo Lam, to participate in designing ceramics at the Taller de Santiago de Las Vegas. The workshop thus became a locus for the fermentation of Cuban modernist expression. Juan Miguel Rodríguez de la Cruz, the workshop's proprietor, recognized the artistic value of the ceramicists’ production and he, along with the women he hired, encouraged collaboration with their male contemporaries. A symbiotic artistic practice grew in which the ceramicists introduced ideas and designs to the painters, whose fledgling attempts in ceramics took eventual flight. As the painters’ familiarity with the new medium grew, similar forms appeared in their two-dimensional renderings, which are now synonymous with Cuban modernism. During the post-Revolutionary period of 1959–85, the Taller became part of Cuba’s National Patrimony, continuing the tradition of producing serial and artistic pieces. As the Revolutionary regime wore on, the Taller’s importance waned, artists left Cuba, and independent workshops flourished. While the Taller de Santiago no longer boasts importance in artistic production today, it left an indelible mark on Cuban modernism. With essays by Cuban, American, and Cuban-American scholars, The Lost Generation | La generación perdida provides a background on the twentieth-century avant-garde movements in Cuba; delves into the narrative of an overlooked group of Cuban women ceramicists, assessing the implications of their work on modernism; and, finally, explores in depth the women artists of the third avant-garde generation (1949–58).

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The Simon Collection, housed in London and France, is the finest assemblage of modern Belgian art outside Belgium. Accompanying an exhibition held at Boston College's McMullen Museum, "A New Key" presents fifty-three works never before displayed in North America, including important paintings by Rene Magritte, James Ensor, Frits van den Berge, Paul Delvaux, and others. Full-color reproductions of the paintings are accompanied by seven essays that illuminate their significance and the distinctive contribution of Belgian art to the development of modernism. Addressing themes such as the rise of Freudian psychology, the influence of carnival, and the trauma of two world wars, "A New Key" forges a new understanding of Belgium's long-neglected role in the development of modern art.

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Since the Renaissance, art in Belgium and the Netherlands has been known for its innovations in realistic representation and its fluency in symbolism. New market forces and artistic concerns fueled the development of landscape as an independent genre in Belgium in the sixteenth century, and landscape emerged as a major focus for nineteenth-century realist and symbolist artists. Nature's Mirror, and the exhibition it accompanies, traces these landmark developments with a rich array of seldom-seen works. Nature's Mirror presents its collection of prints and drawings in chronological order, exploring the evolving dialogue between subjective experience and the external world from the Renaissance through the First World War. Essays by American and Belgian specialists examine artists within the regional, political, and industrial contexts that strongly influenced them. Featuring more than one hundred works, many from the leading private collection of Belgian art in America, the Hearn Family Trust, Nature's Mirror explores the evolution of Belgian art in this fruitful period with remarkable lucidity and detail.

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This beautifully illustrated volume presents new ways of thinking about the concept of "being Roman" - with a particular emphasis on the way people in the provinces and on the periphery of the empire reacted to the state of being a Roman subject. Accompanying an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery and the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, the book presents material that is both chronologically and geographically distant from imperial Rome, the better to characterize and understand local responses and identities within the provinces as they were expressed through material culture.

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Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University's Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area institutions, this catalog provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as a guide to its production, illumination, functions, and readership. Entries by eighty-five international experts document, discuss, and reproduce more than two hundred and sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little known before now. Beyond Words also explores the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste. Of broad appeal to scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike, this catalog documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ever to take place in North America.

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Legendary abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock (1912-56) is most famous for the frenetic, highly textured works created through his trademark "drip" technique in which he poured paint from its can directly onto the canvas. "Pollock Matters" explores, for the first time, the personal and artistic interrelationship between the notorious artist and noted Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter.Published to coincide with an exhibition at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art, "Pollock Matters" traces a close friendship that spanned almost two decades, beginning in 1936 when the men's future wives, painters Lee Krasner and Mercedes Carles, met after being sent to jail for protesting Works Progress Administration cutbacks. The friendship continued until Pollock's tragic death in an automobile accident in the summer of 1956.Featuring compelling visual and documentary evidence, including over 250 illustrations, this book demonstrates a critically important chain of influence between two creative individuals not addressed in previous studies of their respective careers. Pollock Matters reveals the crucial role that Herbert Matter's technical innovations played in helping to stimulate Pollock's radical artistic conception of "energy made visible." A previously unknown body of small drip paintings labeled by Matter as "Jackson experimentals" is presented here along with scientific analysis of the works. This volume will be essential reading for anyone seeking an enriched understanding of Jackson Pollock's life and work or the history of abstract painting.

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Published in conjunction with an exhibit at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, "Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression" includes nine essays from scholars representing a variety of disciplines. From themes of love, sexuality, gender and anxiety to comparisons with Ibsen and Kierkegaard, the catalogue explores the meanings of Munch's imagery, his sources in Symbolist art, and his legacy for German Expressionism within the context of his contemporaries' developments in psychology, literature, and philosophy. The volume includes many illustrations from rarely seen private collections and some that have never been exhibited before.

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No contemporary artist has succeeded so thoroughly in blending classical Chinese art and modern abstract art as Cao Jun, who has exhibited widely in China, as well as at the Louvre. Accompanying an exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, this volume presents the art of Cao Jun for the first time in the United States. Featuring the artist’s early wild animal paintings, to his landscapes, to recent explorations of space depicted abstractly, the book also showcases Cao Jun’s calligraphy and ceramics. Essays by Chinese and American scholars examine Cao Jun’s art, showing how it is deeply rooted in the experience of nature and how it portrays our place within nature. The essays demonstrate also the way in which Cao Jun’s art brings together classical Chinese painting with modern abstract forms akin to those of Western art. Yet Cao Jun’s art foregoes simply fusing these traditions; it employs the techniques of Chinese ink and brush painting and uses ink- and color-splashing to produce abstract forms.

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The rich history of the Indian Ocean has been much explored, though its present-day manifestations remain less studied. This catalog for an exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, curated by Prasannan Parthasarathi and Salim Currimjee, brings together essays that contextualize the work of six contemporary artists from the region. Through a variety of mediums and forms—including watercolors, videos, collages, sculptures, and photographs—Shiraz Bayjoo, Shilpa Gupta, Nicholas Hlobo, Wangechi Mutu, Penny Siopis, and Hajra Waheed grapple with the past, present, and future of the Indian Ocean.Indian Ocean Current provides interdisciplinary perspectives on the work of these six artists, with essays drawn from environmental studies, postcolonial studies, literature, and history. Contributors trace the connections that spanned the Indian Ocean, the movement of peoples, and the evolution of plural societies. From the mid-twentieth century, decolonization led to the creation of new nation-states, and hastily erected borders divided many. Today, the rising waters of the Indian Ocean, a consequence of climate change, strip these borders of their power. Indian Ocean Current opens up an artistic, historical, cultural, and political conversation about an area of the world famed for its cosmopolitanism but threatened by nationalism and global warming.

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