Blog @ the Nelson-Atkins

I know it is the last day of March but I recently discovered that March is Celebrate Youth Art Month.

My daughter's art teacher sent home a flyer with some suggestions on how to celebrate which include ideas such as drawing outdoors, learning calligraphy and taking a trip to a local museum.

It made me think about how much art has meant to me. I still remember the day in 5th grade when a woman came to talk to my class about art. She had a print of Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. I was hooked.

From that day on, I would check out books from the library about art and artists, specifically French Impressionists. I took any opportunity to read more about artists as subjects for research papers or writing assignments. My high school French teacher still remembers an essay I wrote about Claude Monet. In college, I studied art history and was thrilled to discover Chinese and Japanese art.

Just this morning I read a blog about the artist Cy Twombly. I find his work interesting but it has never been that exciting to me. As I read the blog, I appreciated looking at his work from someone else's perspective, someone who has a great appreciation for it. I realized that even though I don't love Twombly's work I love learning about it.

I will never be an artist, I know that. I also know that thanks to my elementary school art teacher, I certainly have a great appreciation for art.

Today is the last day for one of the Mueum's longtime volunteers. Her name is Maxine Thompson and she has been a volunteer since 1996 and a Museum member for more than 20 years.

Maxine lives about 50 miles outside of Kansas City and has continued to make the drive on a regular basis to volunteer at the Museum. She has served in many capacities from holiday gift wrapping to special events. Her enjoyment of the Museum, our visitors and the staff members is evident to everyone who comes into contact with Maxine.

For special events Maxine would add a touch of whimsy by dressing up such as the beautiful red Chinese style dress she wore for Chinese New Year. One of my favorite stories about our volunteers features Maxine doing what she does best.

Maxine recently turned 80 and decided it’s time to change how she supports the Museum. Today is her last day in Coat Check and the last day she’ll have a regularly scheduled volunteer role. She’ll continue to help with special events and to prepare classroom materials at home.

I'm glad she will still be connected to the Museum but we will all miss her smiling face and cheerful hello.

Over the weekend, something exciting happened at the Nelson-Atkins. After months of anticipation, the new exhibition From the Land of the Taj Mahal: Paintings for India’s Mughal Emperors in the Chester Beatty Library opened to the public. Last week I got a behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibition led by the Museum’s new Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, Kimberly Masteller, and I was blown away by the quality of these paintings and calligraphies.

A phrase you will see in the exhibition is “beauty is in the details,” a completely appropriate description of nearly 80 works of art commissioned by the Mughal emperors of 17th-century India. The paintings are on a small scale, almost miniature, but they show in perfect detail images of the emperors’ life at court, the Indian landscape, and folklore traditions.

Every room (there are six!) follows a different theme, and the rich red, purple, and green walls bring out the vivid, shimmering tones of the art. It’s really impossible to describe how beautiful and bright these pieces are, in part because the Mughal imperial painters were using materials we rarely get to see today.

Real gold dust, ground lapis lazuli, and even an occasional pearl make their way into paintings made for rulers like Shah Jahan, who also commissioned the much larger but equally opulent Taj Mahal. The yellow dye seen in many of the paintings was even made using the urine of cows fed only mango leaves!

The natural ingredients in the Mughal artists’s media transfer especially well to images of the natural world and the landscape, which was clearly glorified by emperors who pictured heaven as a lush garden. One of my favorite paintings in the entire exhibition is a relatively simple one that features a single animal. A Mountain Sheep shows just that, a sheep standing on a rocky cliff in front of a glorious red sunset. Still, the sheep does have a gold necklace, so we know its life as a royal animal couldn’t have been too hard.

These paintings have traveled all the way from the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, and they’re only here for a few weeks until the exhibition closes on June 14. Since the paintings are rarely on public display and might not travel again for decades, be sure to see them here while you can!

The American Art galleries have been under construction for months, but last week I was lucky to get a sneak preview of these stunning works of art before they go on display to the public again in mid-April. As I listened to our curators make final decisions about where objects will go and watched our installation staff install each piece, I became more and more excited about the opening.

I was thrilled to revisit old favorites from the collection, like Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising From the Sea—A Deception and Charles Sheeler’s Conference No. 1. These paintings were completed more than a century apart from one another—the collection spans from the 17th century through World War II—but they are both wonderful examples of specific moments in American art and culture.

The freshly-painted walls throughout the galleries help bring out the rich colors and details of these and other works. The curators have carefully chosen a palette that reflects the history behind them. One curator told me that when many of these paintings were originally displayed, they would have been hung on colored walls rather than the white gallery walls we usually see.

My favorite part about the new galleries is the seamless integration of pieces of decorative art. Finely-crafted furniture, detailed vases, elaborate clocks—adorn many rooms. These pieces add three-dimensional texture and vibrancy to the galleries and interact with the paintings to enhance both collections. Walking around, I easily imagined connections between these decorative pieces and the paintings that gave me a better understanding of their social and historical contexts.

The new galleries are incredible, and I really hated to leave even after I wandered around every room. I’m planning to visit again as soon as they re-open on April 22, and I hope to report back even more after another look!

As spring approaches I was reminded of one of the Museum's most intriguing works of art. It is actually a set of four marble slabs that hang in the Chinese furniture gallery on the second floor.

The set is called the Four Seasons. The “images” on each piece are actually the natural pattern of a cross section of a specific type of marble from southern China. The appearance of rolling fog and clouds across green hills on this one represents spring.

The other three all contain the same type of patterns that indicate winter, summer and fall. I highly recommend a trip to Gallery 202 to see them all together.

With close to 100 photographs, there is a lot to see in the new exhibition The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year, New York, 1949-1950. I was struck by how many different moments and different kinds of people Page chose to include in his work. Together, all of these moments show the many possibilities of the city’s dark corners and bustling intersections.

The exhibition website points out that “in recording the city so intently, Page had a larger goal in mind: to suggest nothing less than the emotional tenor of life at that time and place.” Because of Page’s work during this one year, we get to look back at a sliver of life in post-World War II New York. Lots of the photographs feature icons of the late 1940s and early 1950s—shiny Cadillacs, fashionable clothing, tongue-in-cheek advertisements. Page makes each image more meaningful by capturing how men and women interacted with these objects in their everyday lives.

I was especially interested in the ways Page shows that the city can speak to its inhabitants. Several of the photographs have graffiti or billboards in them. In one photograph, a movie usher stands in front of an advertisement featuring a beautiful blonde woman. It appears as if the woman in the ad is looking at the man, but he is oblivious. Rather than showing someone staring at the ad, Page turns the tables and shows us that the city can observe us even as we observe it.

This exhibition reveals Page’s talent for showing us familiar images in a whole new way. When you visit, let us know which images stand out to you!

Jodi wrote last week about the deinstallation and conservation treatment of Henry Moore's bronze sculpture Upright Motive. I visited the objects conservation lab at the Museum today to check in on the sculpture.

Robert, our Conservation Intern, led me into the spray booth, a small room where objects are treated. Even though Moore's sculpture is huge, the first thing I saw was a glittering collection of silver from our Decorative Arts collection. Robert said he had been polishing the silver for weeks, but it's finally ready to go on display and probably won't need treatment again for another 10 years!

It was a little sad to see Moore's sculpture away from its natural habitat in the Kansas City Sculpture Park, but Robert explained to me all the work he would be putting into it over the next several weeks. Many of the sculptures outside are protected by a coating called Incralac and another coating of wax. The Incralac can stand up to the environment for years, but eventually it wears away and leaves the art open to corrosion.

Using organic solvents, Robert will remove the Incralac and thoroughly clean the sculpture before applying a new protective coating. Natural oxidation has transformed the copper tone of the sculpture into a beautiful dark green, but small patches of the sculpture have turned an unpleasant teal color (like a really old penny). Robert's work will return these areas to their former color.

There's one big challenge, though. The sculpture weighs 1200 lbs., and Robert has to figure out a way to roll it over safely so he can clean every side! I can only lift about 50 lbs, or I'd offer to help.

I took a break from the office last week to enjoy the beautiful weather in the Kansas City Sculpture Park. All over, there were people eating, sketching, playing with their dogs, and taking naps.

Most people enjoy the rolling grass of the central lawn, but today I decided to take the path that wraps around the Bloch Building. First I came upon Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculpture Three Bowls. The label says von Rydingsvard works without models or drawings, instead letting the piece develop organically as she creates it. The label also compares this work to a group of rocky cliffs, and it struck me after reading this how well the sculpture seems to fit into the landscape and trees of the garden.

If you’re looking for a little privacy, the grassy spaces between each of the five glass lenses of the building are wonderful nooks for a picnic or reading. Here you can see pieces like Tony Cragg’s Ferryman and Turbo while looking out over the rest of the Sculpture Park below.

The weather forecast is warm and sunny this week, so come out and enjoy the art and the outdoors. If it rains, you can always go inside and see our newest exhibition, The Photographs of Homer Page.