Everyday Luxury: Chinese Silks of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)

November 10, 2007 - February 17, 2008

As time continues to pass and globalization continues to homogenize the world, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art illustrates the influential role the distinct characteristics of Chinese fashion and culture played during a frenzy of foreign trade over 100 years ago - just as it does today.  Showcasing more than 90 selections from the Museum’s collection of Chinese costumes and textiles covering a span of nearly 300 years, this exhibition comprises official "dragon robes," women’s dress, theatrical garments, interior furnishings, and related accessories.  The exhibition also explores the imagery, forms, techniques, and functions of these wide-ranging textiles in the context of their cultural background. 

Reflected in the quality and diversity of techniques, functions, styles, and decorative motifs, the Museum’s collection of Chinese textiles is considered one of the finest on the West Coast.  Everyday Luxury provides an unprecedented viewing of approximately half of the objects in this collection, many of which have never been exhibited together.

The Qing dynasty, China’s last period of imperial rule, was a time when the country was not governed by native Chinese, but by the Manchu, a nomadic group originating from the northeastern part of the country.  This melding of native and foreign cultures is evident in the dynamic transformation and experimentation of textile arts.  During the 19^th century, increasing demands from the West for luxury goods, including tea and ceramics, also spurred an expansion of textile production.  The majority of the works in this exhibition, and SBMA’s collection in general, were created in the late 18^th and 19^th century.  Most were collected throughout America and Europe, with some heirlooms passed down directly from family members who traveled to China in the end of 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  With many items in the collection fashioned from sumptuous fabrics and embellished with extraordinary designs – woven entirely with gold-wrapped thread in some cases – it is not difficult to imagine that these were the garments of China’s most elite population.

The exhibition highlights the height of fashion and opulence more than 200 years ago, including many rich and colorful examples of the official dress, commonly known as "dragon robes," and more informal garments such as women’s robes, jackets, vests and skirts, and fine examples of accessories, including shoes, hair ornaments, purses, and hats, along with dramatic theatrical garments.  Many of these garments are exquisitely woven with tapestry, satin, brocade, gauze, damask, and velvet techniques, many with fine embroidered embellishments.

The apparel is accented by some especially rare items including a spectacular dragon robe of woven peacock feathers– the only other known example resides in the Palace Museum in Beijing.  Also on view are a number of yellow dragon robes accented with the twelve-symbols of authority, indicating that they were only worn by members of the imperial family, if not by the emperor and empress themselves.

In addition to the items that dressed the elite, the exhibition also includes fabrics that donned the upscale household, including chair and cushion covers, table and wall hangings, bed valences, and temple banners.

One golden thread that is profoundly woven throughout the variety of these items is the shared visual language of decoration; this language, deeply rooted in China’s long history of ornamentation, reflects both cosmology and cultural values.  Decorative themes and auspicious symbols drawn from nature, folk beliefs, Buddhism, and Daoism convey good wishes, longevity, great wealth, abundant food, and fertility.  As a system of visual communication, it was understood by all classes.

These reminders of such an ancient and engrained symbolism, the exquisite workmanship, and sumptuous quality of silk are major reasons these items remain, even today, such an attraction to a relatively young, Western audience.  SBMA’s collection of Chinese textiles is a direct result of the generosity of collectors with such fascination and discriminating taste spanning the Museum’s 65 year history.  Eighteen robes and textiles from Mrs. Stewart were among the first gifts at the Museum’s inception in 1941.  Consequent gifts from Mrs. Lockwood de Forest, F. Bailey Vanderhoef, Jr., the Hone family, and Beverley Jackson have contributed to the exceptional quality, richness, and diversity of the collection today.  Most significant was the gift of over 120 Chinese costumes and textiles by Ralph and Mary Hays in 1989.

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Laurette and David Nitka, Schultz Charitable Trust Fund in Memory of George L. Schultz, Susie and Hubert Vos, Lady Ridley-Tree, and Joyce H. Bryan, with additional support from an anonymous donor.

Identities

November 3, 2007 - August 31, 2008

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art highlights its collection of contemporary art from Asia, Europe, and the Americas and explores the theme of identity as both a collective consciousness and individual reflection.  The aptly-named Identities exhibition includes approximately 25 works, some very large in scale, dating from 1981 to 2003, and represents a broad range of media, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photography.

The artists featured in this presentation use the visual arts to express personal feelings and broader perceptions about racial, sexual, and cultural identity.  A compelling example of the exploration of cultural association is the painting A Third World, 1993, by Chinese émigré artist Hung Liu.  In this self-portrait, Liu addresses the conflict between two radically different ideologies—capitalism and communism.  Clashing worldviews dramatize the profound ramifications of relocation on personal and cultural identity.  The gold-leaf third eye, which symbolizes the inner world in Eastern thought, is in the shape of San Francisco as it was first mapped. "San Francisco" has been translated in Chinese as "old gold mountain," and it is used in this case to suggest San Francisco’s status as a main destination for Chinese immigrants.  By contrast, the subject dons a red scarf and Mao button representing Communist China. 

A more macro view of national identity is represented by the work of Nelson Leirner which is based on an original collage of stickers of Minnie and Mickey Mouse and Day of the Dead skeletons shaped to mimic the continental outline of the Americas.  From a series entitled Right You Are If You Think You Are, Leirner’s fusion of mass culture icons with elements of high modernism, primary colors, for example, communicates the complexity and diversity of the Americas.  His painting reminds us of the simple but profound idea that the one’s interpretation of the Americas depends on one’s context. 

The exhibition also turns an eye inward for a more personal view of racial identity with sculpture by Alison Saar.  Often larger-than-life size, her rough-hewn figures, carved with a chainsaw, blend the monumentality and strength of Michelangelo’s stone-bound slaves with the expressive power of African sculpture.  Her work tends to simultaneously acknowledge the example of American assemblage and the rich tradition of African and African-American sculpture first learned from her mother, the artist Bettye Saar.

Saar’s Terra Firma, represented in the Identities exhibition, presents a prone figure depicting urban poverty and homelessness.  At the margins of society, this mute and faceless person lies below our sight line.  The earthen colors and distinct patterns of the pants resemble African textiles while the use of nails may allude to Kongo power figures, which release energy each time a nail is driven into them.  The metal sheathing on the body is made up of the tin roofs collected from urban demolition sites.  From the nails to the tin, each of Saar’s strategic artistic elements come together to address African-American experience in the contemporary United States, proving how the human body is a powerful site for the exploration of personal and collective identity.

Other highlights of the exhibition include Carrie Mae Weems’ works from the Ain’t Jokin’ series, Black Woman with Chicken, 1986, and Black Man with Watermelon, 1987, addressing common historical racial stereotypes, while Catherine Opie’s photograph of a transgendered individual calls into question conventional perceptions about sexual identity. 

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Jill and John C. Bishop, Jr. and SBMA Friends of Contemporary Art.

Listen to Lines in Black and White, a musical tribute to the Oliver Gagliani exhibition.

Oliver Gagliani: Scores of Abstraction

October 13, 2007 - January 13, 2008

Continuing a series of exhibitions devoted to California photographers, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art presents a presentation of the work of Oliver Gagliani, whose work has attained a legendary presence among other working artists through the decades.  Known for the virtuosity of his elegant black and white prints, this exhibition of approximately 25 prints, mostly taken in Yosemite and the gold country, focuses not on the vast grandeur of the place, but rather on the intimate and abstract patterns created by such subject matter as patched and mended tents.  His subject, in the end, is light which he believed "reveals the inner life of the object."

The generations of photographers born between 1915 and 1950, as Gagliani was, were in one of two camps.   Either they learned photography through formal education in schools like Chicago’s Institute of Design or the Rochester Institute of Technology, or they learned by doing, serving photographic internships in the military, on newspapers and magazines, in hospitals, and science labs.   Gagliani was of the latter group.  While initially trained as a violinist, he started photographing in the Army in 1942 and then studied under Minor White and Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts in 1946.  He primarily worked in black and white, but he was also a pioneer in experimental color work. 

During this time, creative photography received little attention and respect.   Those who followed the artistic call could certainly not expect fame and fortune, but could only be satisfied to aspire to the status of a "photographer’s photographer."  This lasted until the so-called "photo boom" of the late 1960s through the middle 70s, when an intense explosion of popular interest for photography occurred.  Previously obscure historical figures were resuscitated, major, older living figures at last received their due, and the likes of Ansel Adams seemed to be elevated to the status of deity. 

But, when the economy began to collapse, the bottom began to be cut out of the market for mid-career artists in photography.   Buyers were now looking for images that were much brasher and glitzier, something brand-new and sexy.   Enter Carleton Watkins, David Hockney, and the Starn Twins; exit Gagliani and many of his peers.

Till his death in 2003, Gagliani stayed true to the poetics of the medium, which he explored in single images, most of them small and monochromatic, and made close to home as well as on countless trips to Italy.  He masterfully used the range of interpretive nuance that the silver print offers, crafting a deep, rich, resonant, complex variety of imagined spaces. 

Often Gagliani’s works seem to represent a theatrical stage.  At others times they offer entry into a dense, tonally nuanced spirit world of indeterminate geography highlighting small fragments of the world – stains, scraps, peeling paint, and patchwork – all isolated and contemplated, then interpreted through exposure and printing.  Ansel Adams once said of Gagliani’s work, "[His] photography is both thoughtful and lyrical and personally perceptive.... His work is a most refreshing reminder of the inherent beauty of the world and the continuing miracle of creative vision."

Oliver Gagliani’s work has been displayed in exhibitions in museums, universities, and galleries around the world, including those in New York, Oakland, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara, as well as Italy and Japan.  In addition, he regularly taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, and Stanford University.

A Gift for Santa Barbara: The Dwight and Winifred Vedder Collection

April 28, 2007 - January 13, 2008

Noted as one of the most significant gifts of art given to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in its 66-year history, the recent contribution by Dwight and Winifred Vedder will be unveiled this exciting exhibition.  The assemblage of 13 significant works represents French, British, and American artists from the late 19^th to mid 20^th centuries.

The collection includes works by such notable Impressionist artists as Mary Cassatt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Armand Guillaumin, and Berthe Morisot, but also includes two works by self-taught artists, Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses and Helen Bradley.   The intermingling of genres within the collection not only reflects Mr. and Mrs. Vedder’s self-described "eclectic" tastes, but also illustrates the wide scope that gave them the most pleasure. 

The addition of this collection plays a significant role in the growth of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s permanent collection.   Phillip Johnston, SBMA Director, states, "Amazingly, before this generous gift, the Museum never owned a Renoir.   Now we have two.  The same holds true for paintings by Mary Cassatt."  Other firsts added to the Museum’s collection through the Vedder Collection are paintings by Helen Bradley, Armand Guillaumin, and Victoria Dubourg Fantin-Latour.

Dwight and Winifred began collecting in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the help of art dealer and friend, Louis Stern, of Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles.  Throughout the years, the Vedders continued to receive counsel from Louis Stern and through his guidance their collection grew.  

The decision to give such a significant collection now was primarily brought about by a change of residence by Mrs. Vedder – but also by a deep philanthropic philosophy.   She notes, "We both [my husband and myself] had the same philosophy – you should give back to what gives to you."   For her and her late husband, it was art that gave them joy. 

This exhibition has been made possible through the generosity of Vicki and Patrick Stone and Mrs. Edward E. Stepanek.

Picture Stories: The Art of Europe and the Americas

Through a fresh, innovative model to museum practice, established during Art of the Americas: Latin America and the United States, 1800 to Now! in 2004, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art tells compelling stories of ideas and beliefs, tradition and innovation, the human body, and the power of place through the reinstallation of its permanent collection in Picture Stories: The Art of Europe and the Americas .  Featuring approximately 150 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculpture, ranging from the age of discovery and colonization to the present global and digital era, this new installation reveals likenesses while giving equal emphasis to the powerfully different meanings that works of similar form and subject may have depending on their place of origin and the time they were created. 

Curated by Diana C. du Pont, SBMA Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, this presentation builds on the foundation of a new model for the interpretation and display of museum collections developed by SBMA.   Art of the Americas was the first major permanent collection exhibition to feature together, with some considerable depth and scope, Latin American and United States art from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries.  Picture Stories expands this model by adding the art of Europe and broadening the artistic time period covered in this rich and varied installation, which spans over six centuries and presents intriguing juxtapositions that encourage fresh interpretations. 

This new reinstallation offers an extensive sampling of artwork that makes up the Museum’s permanent collection, which tells a host of different stories through thematic sections and coherent passages, as opposed to an overall unifying narrative.   The stories emerge through the careful and innovative groupings of artwork, spurring discussions between likely, and sometimes unlikely, characters.

In addition to freely combining media and crossing time and regional boundaries, Picture Stories aims to enhance the viewer experience by using color and lighting to create an atmosphere. Custom-made furniture is strategically placed to allow visitors an opportunity to pause and ponder. 

Soft hues highlighted with satin gloss stripes, reminiscent of rich fabric wallpaper, transform the Preston Morton Gallery into the interior of a French salon.  Within this gallery, paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, some presented in a salon style configuration, showcase the breadth of figurative art.  Featuring both historic and contemporary art, the reinstallation traces significant changes in attitude toward representing the human form.  The story of the body in motion in contrast to the body in repose is told through Marius Jean Antonin Mercié’s sculpture, Gloria Victis, after 1874, and Edward Weston’s photograph, Nude , 1936.

The Ridley-Tree Gallery presents a constellation of rural and urban landscapes that demonstrate how landscape surpassed history painting as a major genre in the nineteenth century, culminating with a remarkable suite of French Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley.  SBMA boasts one of the largest holdings of works by Monet of any Museum in California. 

The story of landscapes also illustrates the changes in society from a rural to an urban culture and the emergence of new heroes, as represented by images of the worker, such as in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Les Bles murs (The Ripened Wheat), 1884, and of new roles, as represented by images of women, highlighted by Berthe Morisot’s View of Paris from the Trocadero , 1871-72.

With the advent of photography in 1839, landscape soon became as popular a subject for photographers as it was for painters.   In the United States, painters and photographers alike braved great physical risks in order to capture the majesty of nature.  These awe-inspiring images of unspoiled wilderness and unlimited resources came to shape a young country’s national and cultural identity.  This is most poignantly illustrated through a strikingly similar pose of the majestic North Dome in Yosemite National Park by Thomas Hill’s painting, North Dome from Bridge , 1870s-1880s, and William Henry Jackson’s untitled photograph from the early 1870s.

Also in the Ridley-Tree Gallery, a section of abstract works carry the narrative begun with modern Impressionist painting to its logical conclusion, isolating and emphasizing the fundamental building blocks of painting and sculpture—color, form, line, and texture— in order to heighten visual experience. For example, in Hans Hofmann’s Simplex Munditis , 1962, blocks of vivid color are suspended in a planar field and arranged in a patchwork design. Their placement and juxtaposition create a dynamic sense of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface.   The artist viewed this "push-pull" effect as a metaphor of the forces and counterforces at work in the universe.

Moving to the Campbell, Gould, and Sterling Morton East and West galleries, groupings demonstrate artistic expressions of religious and spiritual ideas and beliefs, from realistic descriptions of Christ and the Virgin Mary to abstract mediations on the invisible and the otherworldly.

Nineteenth-century New Mexican retablos, juxtaposed with Russian icons from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, emphasize how the drive to reproduce another dimension can also arise from popular, material culture rather than a formally trained, academic setting.

Italian and Spanish Baroque religious painting create a narrative of religious inspiration, power, and dominance in seventeenth-century Europe.  A suite of etchings by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt Van Rijn illustrate stories from The Bible and are early examples of the printed image, demonstrating how printmaking played a key role in disseminating art to a larger public.

Many may ask why the more traditional presentation of a collection with works organized chronologically or clustered in geographic sections needs to be changed at all?   The answer is not simply for the sake of change, but to reacquaint the public with a significant permanent collection.  It is also to encourage fresh interpretations through a sense of surprise, and acknowledgement of similarities, but also critical differences in art, shaped by related, yet diverse, histories.

This exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of the Cheeryble Foundation and an anonymous donor.

Made in Santa Barbara: Contemporary Photographs

July 1 - October 7, 2007

Santa Barbara’s reputation as a photographic community began after the war when both the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Brooks Institute of Photography opened their doors in the 1940s.  More than sixty years later, photography exhibitions remain an integral part of SBMA’s program.  The Museum continues this tradition with Made in Santa Barbara.  This exhibition follows in the footsteps of the 1994 presentation of Santa Barbara Connection, which highlighted the works of 10 local photographers.  This current presentation, however, is the largest undertaking of this kind to date, consisting of more than 100 images made by 45 Santa Barbara-based photographers.

The exhibition represents a melding of permanent collection works and images on loan by individual photographers — all of whom had lived in the Santa Barbara community for an extended period of time or who are presently residing here.  The resulting exhibition represents approximately 18 months of preparation and more than 30 studio visits by SBMA Curator of Photography, Karen Sinsheimer and co-curator Rita Ferri.  In regard to this exploratory period, Sinsheimer notes, "We selected those pieces to be included in the exhibition based on the strength of the work.  After the final selection process, we found it interesting and exciting that the combination of the works from individual photographers and those works pulled from our permanent collection naturally proliferated into distinct themes for the exhibition."

The imagery of these groupings moves from classic genre, such as landscape, portraiture and still life, to altered landscapes, both urban and rural, to documentary works of war and protest and on to new media and a site-specific installation.

While the majority of the works are from a contemporary time period - 1960s to the present - included are some more classic examples, such as that of Jesse Alexander, who was raised in Santa Barbara in the 1930s and 40s, and whose photographs capture such scenes as the early days of race car driving.

The exhibition would not be complete without featuring the works of long-time Santa Barbara photography icons and supporters, such as the recently-departed Kathleen Barrows, who had a solo exhibition of her work entitled Flora at SBMA in 2004.  Resident of Santa Barbara since 1996, Ms. Barrows was a Founding Board Member of the Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel, California and hosted artist-in-residence programs for such renowned photographers as Paul Caponigro and Lucien Clergue.  Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her photographs are in the permanent collection of SBMA and private collections worldwide.

Through its broad scale and scope, Made in Santa Barbara provides an ideal opportunity to appreciate and celebrate the wealth of talent that has given Santa Barbara its reputation as an important photographic community.

Made in Santa Barbara is co-curated by Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Rita Ferri, Visual Arts Coordinator and Curator of Collections for the County of Santa Barbara.  The presentation will be accompanied by a publication, which will include a reproduction photograph and statement by each artist included in the exhibition.

This exhibition was made possible through the generosity of:  Santa Barbara Bank & Trust; SBMA PhotoFutures; Dana and Albert R. Broccoli Charitable Foundation; The Charles and Mildred Bloom Fund; Daniel Greenberg, Susan Steinhauser, and the Greenberg Foundation; Jill and John C. Bishop, Jr.; Eric Skipsey; Susan Bower; and Roberta and Stan Fishman.

Ansel Adams over Time: Recent Photographic Acquisitions

April 7 - June 24, 2007

This exhibition ranges from early, delicate prints of the 1920s, to elegant images of the Grand Tetons and the Sierra Nevadas originally made in the 1940s, to a heroic mural-size photograph of ranchland in Petaluma from the early 1950s.  All images on view are from the Museum’s permanent collection, including several recent acquisitions.

Adams once said, "A photograph is usually looked at — seldom looked into."   But this intimate exhibition encourages its audience to carefully look into each of the photographs and to evaluate Adams’ changing vision over the course of his eighty-two years.  The oldest prints in the exhibition date from Adams’ very early days as a career photographer.

An exhibition of Adams’ images is especially fitting here as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art was at the forefront of recognizing his talent, presenting a solo exhibition of his work in 1946 — right around the time he founded the department of photography at the California School of Fine Arts (known today as the San Francisco Art Institute) and secured the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships.   In that same year, Adams captured images of Santa Barbara such as Refugio Beach, a work found in this exhibition.

The more recent prints of the 1970s — of images initially taken in the 1940s — are some of Adams’ most iconic, including The Tetons and Snake River and Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California.   These are brilliant culminations to a long career which nearly single-handedly popularized photography as an art form among the twentieth-century general public. 

The exhibition also includes several of illustrations of Adams’ enduring affection for Yosemite.   From his first visit with his family as a young boy of fourteen to his final years, the grandiosity and beauty of this national park remained forever an inspiration.   These images have, over time, come to define for the American and the international public what Yosemite is and what wilderness should be.  During the Great Depression and World War II, Adams was criticized by some for merely taking "pretty pictures" rather than documenting social and political troubles, but many others saw his compelling contribution to society in the beauty of the images he created.  In effect, he reminded unemployed and penniless Depression-era Americans of better days to come and of the beauty of the surrounding landscape; he reminded World War II-era Americans of what our nation was fighting for and the land to which our young men were dreaming of coming home.

Click here for more information on the 2006 Summer Mural Project dedicated to the work of Rufino Tamayo, Homage to Tamayo: Faces and Facets

Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted

February 17 - May 28, 2007

The first major U.S. exhibition in 28 years of the works of acclaimed Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted makes its worldwide debut at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA).  The internationally traveling exhibition features spectacular paintings from private and institutional collections all over the world, including canvases that have not been on public view for decades.     Following its presentation at SBMA, its lead organizer, Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted will travel to the Miami Art Museum and then to the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

The extraordinary exhibition of more than 100 paintings—created during a prolific seven decade career in Mexico City, New York, and Paris—seeks not only to present a careful selection of Tamayo’s finest works, but also to offer a contemporary reinterpretation of this world-renowned artist.   An icon of modern Mexican art, Tamayo was called the "The Fourth Great One" and was inducted into Mexico’s "national pantheon" alongside Los Tres Grandes (The Three Great Ones) of Mexican Muralism, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Far and wide, his extraordinary paintings conjure familiar images of Mexico, its colors, textures, and centuries of indigenous and hybrid culture, perhaps most picturesquely, and stereotypically, epitomized by the country’s traditional marketplaces brimming with exotic flowers, tropical fruit, and native folk art. The lushness and materiality of Tamayo’s signature canvases readily encourage such an imagining and, as a result, have indelibly marked the artist as a formalist, a painter primarily interested in pure line, form, and color. While he has been contextualized among them, he has been most often considered a discordant counterpoint to Los Tres Grandes, whose ambition was Social Realism, in which aesthetics was wrought by politics. The persistent view of Tamayo as an ardent advocate of formalism, or arte puro (pure art), has impeded a fuller appreciation of the artist as well as his painting.  Tamayo aims to offer new readings of this widely recognized and respected, but also controversial painter.

The exhibition provides viewers with a window onto the painter’s many geographic and creative trajectories.  It traces Tamayo’s artistic evolution from his earliest paintings—impressionistic landscapes and Picasso-esque portraits—to his last works, meditations on his own mortality. As a retrospective, Tamayo presents the artist’s contributions to Mexican and international modernism by exploring the various paths he traveled to shape the ways in which he successfully negotiated both an aesthetic dialogue and a career between Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Beyond a retrospective, Tamayo revisits the story of Mexican modernism through the artist’s paintings, portraying a much richer panorama of visual expressions and debates than customarily understood.

The carefully selected paintings are organized in a loose chronological sequence in order to emphasize thematic interpretation.  The early period (1920-the late 1930s) addresses Tamayo’s adoption of the various "isms" of European modern art and proceeds to demonstrate how he transformed these vanguard sources by way of still lifes, images of women, nudes, portraits of children and family, and genre scenes of indigenous subjects.  These striking works show how Tamayo appropriated imagery, incorporated modernist strategies of collage and advertising, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, ventured to make political observations.

By 1940, Tamayo had established the definitive form of abstract figuration that made him one of the most celebrated painters of the twentieth century.  His fully mature period (1940-to the mid 1960s) is represented by a dramatic range of figurative works, from telling self-portraits to eerie phantoms.  This section, the largest of the show, examines Tamayo’s fusion modernism through a series of themes that confirm the breadth and depth of his visual thinking.  The subjects of man; woman; nature; man and woman representing the universal; animal; and human hybrids were all treated in this manner to address a full range of emotion. Love and hate, joy and despair, aggression and reconciliation, all found pictorial expression in the artist’s mature work that is on view.

The exhibition culminates with a selection of Tamayo’s best late paintings.   In his work from roughly 1968 on, Tamayo left behind his searing and searching pictures of the 1940s and 1950s.  Besides their message of universal humanism and their tour-de-force ability to show that modern painting is still capable of arresting the eye, this sampling demonstrates how Tamayo addressed a reality that cannot be sentimentalized: death. These pictures do not treat its actuality but rather the process of reflecting on a life lived and anticipating what is to come. They poignantly speak to the artist’s own sense of mortality, showing an increasing physical weakness but also a defiant resistance to that inevitability.

Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted is organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in collaboration with the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, through the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, and the Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, AC. It is curated by Diana C. du Pont, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, with Juan Carlos Pereda, Curator of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo.

The exhibition and accompanying publication have been made possible through the generous support of Larry and Astrid Hammett, Houston and Anne Harte, Jon B. and Lillian Lovelace, Eli and Leatrice Luria, Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree, The Challenge Fund, The Cheeryble Foundation, The Grace Jones Richardson Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and an anonymous donor.

An Unobserved Life:  Folk Photography by Joe Schwartz 

January 13 - April 1, 2007

This exhibition is comprised of thirty black-and-white photographs candidly revealing the urban soul of such cities as New York and Los Angeles ranging from the 1930s through the 1970s.   JoeSchwartz, a self-described "folk photographer," depicts the everyday lives of the ordinary and economically dispossessed people wherever he has encountered them—at bus stops, beaches, sidewalks, and playgrounds. 

A current resident of Atascadero, California, Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1913 and grew up in the Kingsboro housing project.  He was schooled in photography on the streets of Depression-era New York and shot his work from the perspective of the economically dispossessed "folks" who would figure prominently in his life’s work.  Schwartz’s sensitivity to intolerance was heightened when his family relocated to Los Angeles.  As a Jew and a New Yorker, Schwartz was ostracized by many of his Southern California schoolmates.  This further moved him to identify with other "outsiders" and minorities and to explore how racially distinct communities come together to make up a city’s urban landscape.

As a young man, in the mid-1930s, Schwartz discovered the power of photography to increase public awareness of economic inequities.  Through his participation in the newly formed Photo League—a group of influential photographers that included Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Weegee and Alfred Eisenstadt—Schwartz sought to establish an innovative style of socially-minded documentary photography.  This compassionate approach to his subjects has been the hallmark of Schwartz’s career as an artist.

Although societal norms during this time may have dictated otherwise, a majority of Schwartz’ work depicts the camaraderie between children and adults, working and playing harmoniously together.  At a time when racial segregation, from schools, to restaurants, to public restrooms, was enforced, Schwartz was witness to scenes where skin color is upstaged by a true accepting exchange. 

Popular success came late for Schwartz.   In fact, he never made a living as a photographer but rather as a lithographer in New York and Los Angeles.  Though well-known within the photographic community, Schwartz wasn't "discovered" until the release of his book, Folk Photography: Poems I've Never Written in 2000. 

The New Modern: Pre- and Post-War Japanese Photography

January 13 - April 1, 2007

With the Western Pacific Rim remaining an important area of focus within the world of photography, this exhibition, derived from 21 prints of SBMA’s growing permanent collection of photographic works, showcases several leading Japanese artists who were primarily active in pre- and post-war Japan.  Spanning more than 70 years, from the early 1920s to mid 1990s, the photographs provide a view of Japanese culture before and after the effects of World War II and a progression in style, from the high-art of pictorialism to the avant-garde of surrealism.

The exhibition begins with a look at pre-war photography with pictorialist techniques reflecting the inward-looking culture of Japan’s society before the war.  These earlier images, though pleasant and appealing, seem to place a kind of hazy film between the viewer and the object. 

The exhibition takes a dramatic turn with the post-World War II images, distinctive in their raw, exposed, and dark character.  In these prints, the post-war photographers present an insider’s view of the state of Japan after the devastation of the war and the atomic bomb drops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while at the same time underscoring the effects that industrialization, urbanization, and the American occupation had on this once insular society. 

Concurrently during this time period, Japanese photographers also began to explore the western idea of surrealism, though from an eastern perspective.  Unlike the high art style of pictorialism, surrealism attempted to express the workings of the subconscious, typically characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.

Based on Freudian psychology, surrealism was to lead to an understanding of the "blueprint of thought."  However, in Japan, Freudian psychology was not widely practiced or understood, so Japanese photographers mainly drew inspiration from haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry.  In this sense, the Japanese artists were a kind of second-generation reaction to the initial experimentation of the Westerners, but their unique interpretation produced inspiring results.