Art as Experience: Podcasts

In a reprise of a popular episode from 2017, Sheila discusses the origin, history and use of pigments and other paint materials. Guest:  Peter Blake

Continuing to explore the theme of Gardens, Sheila and Tom explore how painters created gardens and painted them.  The experience of the gardens, passionately created and tended, and the experience of viewing the painted gardens, now in museums, are related.
Claude Monet, Stanley Spencer, and Gustave Klimt are the gardener-painters discussed, with a digression on the jaw-dropping prices set for Hunter Biden’s novice works, and another brief digression on Giorgio Morandi.

The East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has re-opened, and we visit the exhibitions of Lynda Benglis and Sarah Cain.

In honor of Pride Week, we discuss the paintings, career, and struggles of the American Modernist painter, Marsden Hartley (1877-1943).  We also examine Transcendentalism – the wild spiritual and artistic gift from Ralph Waldo Emerson – and its importance to Hartley’s life and to American art in general.

Art as Experience continues her exploration of the links between art, society, and gardens with a look at the tiny gardens that can be walked among in the cooperative community of Greenbelt MD, set up as part of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s New Deal.  The backstory of Greenbelt is a mirror of the political issues dividing us today.  Poems by Alice Oswald, Stanley Kunitz, Emily Dickinson, and D.H. Lawrence.

In a week where Sheila Blake is preparing her exhibition at the Foundry Gallery in Washington DC, we are updating a recording of an earlier show from May 2019, in which Tom and Sheila analyze the connections between gardens and art, with a special visit to the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Washington.

We visit again the great new modernist museum in Potomac Maryland, the Glenstone, and discuss the current retrospective exhibition of Faith Ringgold.

We visit the Phillips Collection, this country’s first modern art museum, which has reopened for its 100th anniversary with an exhibition highlighting the collection’s great diversity. After a year-long closing due to COVID precautions, the museum in Washington DC has reopened to visitors.  In addition to great modernist masters Cezanne, Bonnard, De Kooning, Rothko, etc., the exhibition showcases new acquisitions, highlighting works from their show, cut short last year, titled Riffs and Relations, which explored the work of African American artists in the Modernist tradition.

Our second show about artists who create in areas other than the one that has made them a name. Tom and Sheila discuss the paintings and practices of Anthony Dominick Benedetto (better known as Tony Bennett), Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. Sheila looks into the art training of President George Bush.

Sheila and Tom explore the professional, sexual, exploitative, inspirational, cooperative, and ambiguous relations between artists and their models, their lovers, wives, and allies. Discussed today are Pierre and Marthe Bonnard, August Rodin and Gwynn John, Picasso, Lucien Freud and Celia Paul, Francis Bacon and George Dyer, and Suzanne Valadon.

Today, program 101, we discuss artist couples who have been working side by side, in partnership.
We begin with two couples profiled in Intimate Collaborations, by Bibiana Obler:
Wassily Kandinsky & Gabrielle Münter and Hans Arp & Sophie Taeuber.
We then talk about mid-century American artist couples like Kienholz: Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz; Cristo and Jeanne-Claude; and Josef and Anni Albers.
Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Jane Kenyon.

Sheila and Tom discuss monuments dedicated to African Americans – especially those created by African American Artists, many in Washington DC: among them:
• The African American Civil War Memorial, with its sculpture titled The Spirit of Freedom, by Ed Hamilton,
• the Martin Luther King Memorial, in Washington DC, by Lei Yixin,
• Public Statues of Mary McLeod Bethune, Sojourner Truth (by Artis Lane), and A. Phillip Randolph and Frederick Douglass (both by Ed Dwight)
• Sculptures by Martin Puryear

A number of musicians, poets, and even politicians have seriously developed as visual artists, usually painters.  Today, Sheila and Tom discuss artists who straddle two worlds, such as poet Elizabeth Bishop, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet/novelist Henry Miller, and Winston Churchill. The poem, “The Moose”, by Elizabeth Bishop, is read.

Sheila and Tom explore the late careers of William Turner, Georgia O’Keefe, Joan Miró, Giorgio De Chirico, Ivan Albright, and Larry Poons.

Sheila examines the history of American Portraiture, from the early colonial self-taught limners, through the virtuosos of the late nineteenth century.  We focus on a family of portrait artists in Richmond, Virginia: Ellis Silvette and his children, and discuss Kehinde Wiley’s exciting and intriguing response to the Confederate monuments of that city.

In this program we discuss the late careers of artists whose work evolved into something different, something new, and something beautiful.  The artists discussed today are: Francisco Goya, Jasper Johns, Winslow Homer, Marc Chagall, Grandma Moses, and Louise Nevelson.
This is the third in a series of programs on this topic, while COVID minimizes our museum sorties.
Originally broadcast on WOWD-LP, Takoma Park, Dec 19, 2020.

Pierre Bonnard, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, Al Held, and Hokusai: these are the artists whose late careers are discussed today by Tom and Sheila.

Sheila and Tom discuss the the careers and late paintings of artists who painted to the ends of their long lives: Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Willem de Kooning, Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois.
Originally broadcast November21, 2020.

Tom and Sheila discuss the artist Philip Guston, his work, and the controversy – due to the images in his work of hooded klansmen – that has erupted from the postponement of a major Guston retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Tate Modern, London.
Originally broadcast November 7, 2020

The Art as Experience radio show returns to WOWD Takoma Radio after a haitus due to the COVID pandemic, and so does the podcast!  Sheila and Tom discuss the recent exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Degas at the Opera.
Degas does something here that artists don’t try to do anymore:  create a world.
Edgar Degas, in these paintings, creates the world of the Paris Opera in the 1870’s and 80’s: its audience, its subscribers, its stars and sets. You can experience the enchantment that’s created on the stage, and view, as a voyeur, the young female dancers – training, rehearsing, and performing. Hanging around in the wings, you also see the men who, as subscribers, get the privilege of becoming part of the scene – meeting, chatting up, and propositioning the girls: dressed in black, with top hats, their feet showing under the curtains.
What surprised us in the show was that Degas was really experimental.  There’s a wide range: from super-realistic to wildly abstract.  That stretching and experimenting is there for you to see, and so are the flaws.  This is a rich field to explore.
…. Originally broadcast October 24, 2020.
 

After their last program on the artist Pat Steir, currently on exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art, Sheila and Tom continue their discussion of the challenges facing women artists and the commercial strategy of “branding”.
Originally broadcast Mar 07, 2020.

We explore the current exhibition of American painter, Pat Steir, at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in Washington DC.  The exhibition is entitled Color Wheel, and consists of large paintings in a sequence of color combinations arrayed along the walls of the circular inner hallway.  Pat Steir uses chance processes, like John Cage, to produce complex vibrating colors in a monumental motif that recalls waterfalls.
 

We discuss the beautiful Romare Bearden exhibition at the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland College Park, and talk about his life and works.

On the occasion of six paintings by Sheila being included in a juried exhibition at the Strathmore Mansion, in Bethesda MD, Tom and Sheila decided to discuss juried shows in general, and also the specific exhibition, entitled, “Home”,  at the Strathmore Mansion through February 23.
https://www.strathmore.org/visual-arts/exhibitions/home
 
 

Sheila and Tom discuss the issue of appropriation in art.

Sheila and Tom discuss the American painter Edward Hopper. WOWD program manager Steve Hoffman joins them to talk about the current exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, entitled, Edward Hopper and the American Hotel.

Sheila and Tom visit the exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts:  Judy Chicago – The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction.  They discuss Chicago’s work, her history, her ambition, and her place in the art world as a feminist artist.

Tom and Sheila discuss the new painting that was discovered by Vuillard and Bonnard in their Nabi phase, around the turn of the twentieth century in Paris. The Phillips Collection, in Washington DC, is currently exhibiting their new bequest, the collection of Vicki and Roger Sant, featuring Vuillard and Bonnard, along with several other painters in their circle.

Verrocchio opened his workshop in Florence in the late 1560’s. He was a great master and the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci.  The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC exhibit, with fifty works from the Bargello and other museums, is the first-ever monographic exhibit of Verrocchio in the US.  So if you didn’t get to see the celebration of Verrocchio at the Bargello in Florence earlier this year, you can see his work here in Washington. Sheila and Tom introduce us to his greatness.

This is our last regularly-scheduled episode for WOWD-LP Takoma Park, although we may, from time to time, present a special unscheduled episode. After almost 150 shows, we decided to take a break and figure out where we’re going from here.  In this episode, Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the history of the show, and what we tried to accomplish: our ideas and strategies to arm our listeners for rich artistic experiences.

The National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, has mounted a small exhibition showing three sublime Vermeer paintings and three false Vermeers.
Our episode discusses:


* what makes Vermeer so good  (a little art criticism/theory)
* the scientific research done by the museum’s conservation department,
* how forgeries are made, marketed, and detected,
* and more.

Sargent, as revealed in Sargent and Spain, the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, gives us visions that are full of desire and celebration – both documentary and dreamlike.
John Singer Sargent was, in his day, one of the most celebrated artists in Europe; but his obituary in the London Times described him as the exemplar of an age that had passed. He’s always been easy to like, and for this reason, his reputation in the art world suffered for decades. But in our reassessment, we argue that in this post-modern age, there is no longer any hierarchy of genres or styles, and that Sargent deserves his renewed popularity, because he shows, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “the essential poem at the center of things”.

We explore the art of Robert Rauschenberg, the influence of John Cage, and two of Rauschenberg’s paintings, Factum 1 and Factum 2, currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in their current exhibition, Then Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900.
We find a lot of terrific information in a new book by Louis Menand – The Free World – and its story of the collaborations between Rauschenberg, Cage, and Merce Cunningham. 
Musical breaks by John Cage.

Hosts Sheila and Peter Blake visit the outsider/folk/self-taught art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum: We are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection.
This is perhaps our third show on folk art, and every time, we probe deeper into this rewarding art world.  Artists include Bil Traylor, Dan Miller, Judith Scott, and many others.
For images, go to the Smithsonian’s website:https://americanart.si.edu/exhibition/we-are-made-stories-robson    
or to our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.518741700250952&type=3

Sheila and Peter Blake use the current exhibition, The Double, Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900, at the East Wing of the National Gallery, to explore art over many decades, mixing famous masters with contemporary artists, all creating with some aspect of visual doubling, reversal, or the split or doubled self.

Sheila Blake and Peter Blake discuss portraiture as a art form, and the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the finalaists of the Outwin 20221 competition.
You can find images of the exhibition works here:
https://portraitcompetition.si.edu/exhibition/2022-outwin-boochever-portrait-competition/
 

With insights from our recent episode on postmodernism, we reprise our conversation about the Laurie Anderson exhibit currently at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in DC.  We draw out the connections between Anderson’s work and that of John Cage: even though their music is completely different, their ethical purposes are in alignment.

Sheila and Peter Blake discuss postmodernism in the visual arts and architecture: what it is, in plain terms, and how it followed from and differs from modernism.
Our facebook pages has pictures of what we’re talking about:

We’re posting a lightly edited rebroadcast of last year’s popular program on the American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley. Peter and Sheila are hosts, and take an excursion into discussions of Emerson and Transcedentalism.
Pictures of what we”re talking about…

We examine the practice of learning to draw, the advantages to non-professionals in learning to draw, and some tips.

Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) was a major American painter.  Sheila was a friend of his, beginning in art school in NYC.  Sheila and Tom recollect his life and his art.
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Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss the use of photography by painters.

The Baltimore Museum of Art has just put up a show curated by the guards.  The works repay long observation, as you might expect for the choices of the museum guards, who look at art for long periods of time.  Tom, Sheila and Peter visit the exhibition, and discuss several interesting issues brought up on the task of curation.

Joan Mitchell at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Sheila, Tom, and Peter discuss Abstract Expressionism.

We visit the new exhibition at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC:  Picasso: Painting the Blue Period.  We discuss the transition of Picasso, at the age of nineteen, from painting scenes of the Paris nightlife to the paintings known as the Blue Period, and then the Rose period.  We explore our thesis that Picasso was developing his technique in presenting strong images of people with presence, a presence that melded into the room with gestures that capture our fascinated attention.

Tom, Sheila, and Peter discuss the dark side of Picasso’s life, and give an introduction to his innovations in art, and how the revelations of Picasso’s treatment of women might influence our understanding of his art. Along the way,we touch on Georges Braque,  Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning.

We discuss several major Black visual artists from before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance (with a nod to philosopher Alain Locke): Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Charles White, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Amy Sherald.  Poems by Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes.

Our hosts, Sheila and Tom, with Peter Blake, visit Glenstone, discuss issues in contemporary art brought up by sculptures by Charles Ray, chalk drawings by Tacita Dean, large-scale photographs by Jeff Wall, and drawings by Vija Celmins.

After several visits to the Laurie Anderson Exhibit at the Hirschhorn Museum, in Washington DC, Sheila and Peter discuss this avant garde artist and her exhibit. Music by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful    is the title of the retrospective of Alma Thomas at the Phillips Collection, in Washington DC.  Sheila and Tom respond to her brilliant color-field paintings to explore the topic of color.  The exhibition at the Phillips traces her journey from semi-rural Georgia to Washington, DC, in 1907, then to become at age 81 the first Black woman given a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art .
 

Sheila, Tom, and guest Peter Blake discuss the David Driskell exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.  Driskell was a painter and the whirlwind center of energy and attention to established and emerging African American artists in the late Twentieth Century and into recent decades.

We interview local puppeteer, Rachel Gates.

Sheila and Tom discuss the Spanish painter, Juan Gris, a compatriot, contemporary, and rival of Picasso – on the occasion of a current exhibition of gorgeous cubist paintings by Gris at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Themes include cubism, modernism, John Dewey, color theory and more.

We have edited an earlier episode, from 2018, adding a new introduction to our show on Cezanne Portraits.  This episode adds to and reinforces the content on our last episode, also on Paul Cezanne, the master at the turn of the Twentieth Century.
Broadcast on WOWD-LP, Takoma Radio, 10/23/21

An exhibit of Paul Cezanne Drawings just closed at MOMA, in New York.  Our visit there occasioned this discussion of one of the great progenitors of modernism.  Sheila and Tom go inside the experience of viewing Cezanne, and give listeners a unique view of the experiences he provides, and the technical innovations in his drawing and painting.  Drawing again lightly on the writing of John Dewey, Sheila and Tom explicate just what Cezanne achieved.
Originally broadcast Oct 9, 2021

Sheila and Tom take on a special topic this week: Creativity.  Sheila begins with a discussion of John Dewey’s anti-hierarchical formulation of the art experience, which establishes a continuum between “high art” and the esthetic perceptions of everyday life, then analyzes how these experiences are created, arranged, and orchestrated in the individual viewer’s experience.  In doing so, Dewey moves the location of Art from the canvas on the wall to the experience of the viewer.  He establishes that the analysis of art should focus on the experience of the viewer.  Tom discusses the human need for creativity, with reference to Abraham Maslow’s theory of the Hierarchy of Needs.
Originally broadcast September 25, 2021

We visit Tudor Place in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC, the home for over two hundred years of descendants of Martha Washington.  The family retained this house over this entire period, through the Civil War, the gilded age, the Roaring Twenties, until the last owner deeded it to the foundation that now runs it as a museum.  The family, apparently, never threw anything out, so it is a treasure lode for objects of the past, both exquisite and utilitarian.  The museum is dedicated to telling the stories of the people who lived and worked there: the enslaved, the employed, and the elite of Washington DC.
Originally Broadcast Sep 11, 2021.

Before continuing in their series considering the relation between artists and their gardens, Tom and Sheila discuss the art of Chuck Close, who died last week.  They turn then to Emil Nolde, Charles Burchfield, and Odilon Redon.