We don’t usually post things that aren’t related to something going on here at the museum. But the New York Review of Books retweeted this simply magical little movie made by bookstore owners in Toronto. No matter how cool your iPad case is, it can’t inspire this kind of magical adoration.
The exhibition catalogue for Degas's Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint published by The Phillips Collection
In the Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint exhibition catalogue, Phillips Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone details Degas’s intricate process behind his late masterpiece:
“Having begun by observing the dancer from the outside, he ends his life’s work internalizing his chosen vehicle of expression to such a point that it becomes the bearer of his own physical and psychological being. In Dancers at the Barre, Degas, the old master and old man, distorts and exaggerates his subject, attenuating their limbs and twisting their bodies into an extreme expression of rigor and dedication of the discipline that made their art a perfect metaphor for his own.”
The catalogue also presents Head of Conservation Elizabeth Steele’s fascinating discoveries from the painting’s recent conservation. National Gallery of Art object conservators Shelley Sturman and Daphne Barbour discuss Degas’s sculptures, and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon reflects on Degas in the context of ballet today.
Full-color reproductions of all 30 works in the exhibition are accompanied by images of related works, notes from the technical analysis of additional works by Degas in the Phillips Collection, and a detailed chronology of the artist’s life. Read all about the impressionist master’s complex exploration of the figure and devotion to dance.
For the ballet lover on your list, a special “Degas Holiday Package” including a pair of tickets to the exhibition and one copy of the catalogue (hardcover, 148 pages) to take home is now available for a special rate of $60 ($54 for Phillips members) online and at the Phillips admissions desk.
A group of Florida migrants on their way home to Cranberry, New Jersey, to pick potatoes, near Shawboro, North Carolina, July 1940. Photo courtesy of Jack Delano. Farm Security Administration, Prints & Photographs Division, The Library of Congress.
Had the Great Migration never happened, the world may have never known the talents of Toni Morrison, Miles Davis, August Wilson, or Michael Jackson. All of these artists were, directly and indirectly, the product of the Great Migration: a mass exodus of over six million African Americans from the American South to the North that took place from approximately 1916 to 1930. Can you imagine a world without their artistic contributions?
This was one of the most salient points that Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson made in her October 27 lecture at The Phillips Collection on her book The Warmth of Other Suns. The book, which took her over ten years to research, follows the true stories of three individuals who made the journey from the South to the North. Ms. Wilkerson’s novel, praised as one of the top ten books of the year in 2010 by the New York Times Book Review, humanizes the same story that Jacob Lawrence tells in his 1941 work The Migration Series.
Isabel Wilkerson at The Phillips Collection on October 27, 2011. Photo: James R. Brantley
Hearing Ms. Wilkerson speak was electrifying. An eloquent, poised, and beautiful woman, she radiated an intense yet measured passion for her subject. She praised the courage and determination of those who made the journey from South to North, citing the insurmountable odds they faced when leaving the familiar behind and venturing into the unknown. I got the sense that Ms. Wilkerson, humble and compassionate, is a person who is deeply moved by humanity’s capacity to be extraordinary; she recognizes the understated strength that these individuals perpetuated in the face of adversity. I felt this way when she movingly concluded her talk by saying that the migrants were able to accomplish what Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could not: the migrants not only found better opportunities, they also freed their spirits, their talents, and in doing so, effectively liberated themselves.
Amanda Jiron-Murphy, In-Gallery Interpretation and Public Programs Coordinator
