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Heritage art: Museum to host two exhibits

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BY CHERYL BENTLEY

THE SUNCOAST NEWS

Published: October 25, 2008

Two upcoming exhibits at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art will not only give viewers the sensory experience of looking at fine art, but also provide them with an insight into the beginnings of modernist art.

"Color Woodblock Prints" and "Works on Paper by Henry McBride" will open at the museum on Sunday, Nov. 2.

The woodblock prints exhibit features 73 color prints by American and European artists who were influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, called "ukiyo-e." The prints were produced in Japan from the 17th through 20th centuries and were popular with Japan's prosperous merchant class.

They were introduced to the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and immediately began to influence Western artists. "The Impressionists were taken with their immediacy and color," said museum director Lynn Whitelaw. Avant-garde, Dadaist, and decorative artists were also affected by the prints.

Viewers can see the evolution of the prints in the West through the work of early artists such as Arthur Wesley Dow and later artists, including Margaret Jordan Patterson and Dow's student Edna Boies Hopkins.

The work of Gustave Baumann, one of the leading figures in the woodblock movement, is also shown. Bauman's work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Young artist Henry McBride also practiced his craft during the same period as the woodblock artists. The McBride exhibit features 31 works of watercolor, pen and ink and pen and wash by McBride on loan from the Henry McBride Foundation. When seen with the work of the woodblock print artists, they give a deeper understanding of the beginning of early modern art, Whitelaw noted.

McBride would later find his real flair was not in making art but criticizing it. "He became the premier critic of modernism," noted Whitelaw.

According to the Henry McBride Foundation Web site, "McBride moved easily between the world of daily journalism and that of the elite literary intelligentsia - between, in his case, The New York Sun, one of the outstanding newspapers of the day, and "The Dial," the distinguished American literary journal of the 1920s, where his editor was Marianne Moore and his fellow contributors often included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell."

The exhibit includes a piece by McBride's friend, French artist Marcel Duchamp, from McBride's collection of avant-garde art.

From 1915-23, the playful Duchamp fashioned "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)" with assorted materials including wire and dust. It was one of the first mixed media pieces. When the work was cracked in shipping, Duchamp is said to have exclaimed, "Now it is complete." The Leepa-Rattner will display a piece of the cracked work.

The exhibits will run through Jan. 4.

The museum will offer exhibit-related activities during the exhibits' runs, including a talk on woodblock prints by arts and crafts scholar Susan J. Montgomery, and a workshop on creating woodblock prints. Leepa-Rattner staff will also give a talk on McBride's importance in art.

For more details, visit www.spcollege.edu/museum>.

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