Seeing Differently: Bruce Davidson and Horace Pippin

The Phillips Collection engages with local voices by asking community members to write labels in response to works in the collection. Read some here on the blog and also in the galleries of Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century. How do these perspectives help you see differently? What would you write about these artworks?

Bruce Davidson, Large Family in Kitchen (East 100th Street series), between 1966 and 1968, Gelatin silver print, 11 in x 14 in., Gift from the Collection of Michael and Joyce Axelrod, Mill Valley, California, 2013

Not knowing anything about this piece when I initially viewed it, I was immediately struck by a sense of place and connection among a family who appears to be striving for formality in front of the camera. I was first struck by the objects. In the small kitchen, everything seems to have its place. Even the ceiling seems to gleam. Only then did I start to be drawn to the faces—placing each one in what I think is their role and age. Though the photo transports you to a different time, it is ageless, from the teenager at the back who is removed and somewhat sullen, longing for independence, to the apparent Daddy’s girl, refusing to leave his side.

Later, I read a bit more about the artist, Bruce Davidson, and the critique of how his work reflected Harlem—some feeling too negatively, others feeling too positively. What I appreciate is how Davidson places himself in the work. Though you can’t see him, everyone else is looking at his lens. They are aware of his presence and impact on their existence for that moment. It brings an authenticity that doesn’t center the artist but doesn’t ignore him. He is not a fly on the wall, but rather a disruptor, truthfully acknowledging his role in creating the moment.

—Anika Kwinana, Manager, National Partnerships at The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Centennial Community Advisory Group Member

Horace Pippin "Domino Players" 1943, Oil on composition board, 12 3/4 x 22 in.; Acquired 1943

Horace Pippin, Domino Players, 1943, Oil on composition board, 12 3/4 x 22 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1943

Dominoes is synonymous with macaroni and cheese, peach cobbler, and candied yams. Guaranteed to find its way at most traditional gatherings, alongside trash-talking, and a good game of spades. If you were smart, you sat next to grandma and watched her play, over time, memorizing her moves. She had mastered the game. Nothing written down, the oral traditional is strong. Some call it an old folks games. I call it a rite of passage.

—Sunny Sumter, Executive Director, DC Jazz Festival

 

Alexander Calder: Great Yellow Sun 

A Phillips Collection Fellow in the Field: Ariana Kaye, The Phillips Collection Sherman Fairchild Fellow 2020-2021, on Alexander Calder

The Phillips Collection has four works in the collection by American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976): Only, Only Bird (1951), Hollow Egg (1939), Untitled (1948), and Red Polygons (c. 1950). Recently, I visited a retrospective of Calder’s work at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition is titled Great Yellow Sun after a gouache drawing of the same name by Calder from 1973. At this exhibition I had the opportunity to learn more about Calder’s entire oeuvre and expand on the knowledge I gained about Calder’s works that are in The Phillips Collection.

Alexander Calder, Great Yellow Sun, 1973, gouache and ink on paper, 74.6×109.5 cm

The title of the exhibition reflects the emphasis on an overlooked aspect of Calder’s production, his gouache paintings. This is an art form that he began experimenting with in 1940 and stand on their own—not preparation drawings for his famous kinetic sculptures, but artworks in their own right. The gouache works provide a painterly compliment to his three-dimensional ones and show us that through his work, what is on the page comes to life and becomes flat again. His act of creating gouaches was his “morning exercise” as he walked across the street from his house in Saché, France, to a building he bought and called his “gaucherie,” where he experimented with his paints.

Ariana Kaye at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Calder was trained as an engineer, awakening his interest in making art that incorporated movement. His first attempt at moving art was a circus, where he created different small sculptures that could flip and turn like acrobats titled Cirque Calder. He then turned to make his famous “mobiles,” a term that artist Marcel Duchamp gave to his works when he visited Calder’s studio in 1931, referencing their mobile quality: they move as the wind does, creating different imaginative shapes in space as light hits a mobile and creates shadows. At first, his mobiles had representational shapes, but then became more abstract. The shadows and movements of the sculptures create unique and imaginative characters, such as the fish skeleton I see when I look at Red Polygons. The abstract shapes both in his sculptures and in his gouaches are usually painted in primary colors, reminiscent of the geometric primary colors seen in paintings by Piet Mondrian. The primary colors are indeed a reference to Mondrian, who was a longtime friend of Calder’s.

The sun in Great Yellow Sun refers to another one of Calder’s interests, the solar system. His sculptural works also remind me of the three dimensional diagrams that children have in their classrooms to learn about the rotation of the planets in space. In the text for the exhibition written by curators Ronili Lustig Steinmentz and Shahar Molco, they mention exactly that, that Calder’s work “can be seen as an exploration of energetic forces that combine aesthetics and the fourth dimension with scientific knowledge of physics, mathematics, and mechanics.” When Calder himself was asked how he makes his art, he also emphasizes a scientific artistic process, that his art is created “out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great universe.”

Exhibition view, Alexander Calder: Great Yellow Sun, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Calder’s interest in science, movement, primary colors, and the universe all come together to make dynamic works of art that all kinds of people can find various points of connection to. They are playful, childlike, and dreamlike while also representing the keystones of modernism—straight lines, no clear narrative, and elementary colors.

Exhibition view, Alexander Calder: Great Yellow Sun, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Seeing Differently: Kenzo Okada and Nara Park

The Phillips Collection engages with local voices by asking community members to write labels in response to works in the collection. Read some here on the blog and also in the galleries of Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century. How do these perspectives help you see differently? What would you write about these artworks?

Kenzo Okada, Footsteps, 1954, Oil on canvas, 60 3/8 x 69 7/8 in.., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1956

Ethereal Forms

Kenzo Okada, who moved to New York City from Japan in 1950, became a part of the historical Abstract Expressionist scene where artists like Okada’s friend, Mark Rothko, had made their names. Okada, like Rothko, used experimental techniques to produce delicately intricate paintings like Footsteps and Number 2. Though Okada was no longer in Japan, his home country still occupied his thoughts, and its influence on his artistic process was apparent. In Footsteps, we see a gracefulness and fluidity that perhaps owes itself to Okada being influenced by Zen Buddhism, which centers on ideas of freedom from attachments and transience of form.

Benjamin Plant, Junior, University of Maryland, Studio Art Major

Nara Park, Disillusioned I, 2017, Plastic laminate and monofilament, 105 x 13 1/2 x 13 1/2 in., The Phillips Collection, Contemporaries Acquisition Fund, 2018

Sculpture artist Nara Park delves into our relationship with the space in which we live and the traces of human impact we leave behind once we are gone. By exploring concepts on the preservation of meaning and memory through her work, Park transforms synthetic materials into objects resembling stone to create monuments. The structures she creates act like vessels that hold onto the fleeting moments of the past as well as the essence of the lives of people who have passed away. This ruin-like column serves as a placeholder for memories, creating a physical presence for the ephemeral. The hollow and shattered nature of the piece, however, denotes the void that was left behind in their place, leaving a mere remnant of what once was.

Milan Warner, Senior, University of Maryland, Studio Art Major