Puerto Rico's loss is Nashville's gain this month as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents a special exhibit (through May 16; see www.fristcenter.org) called "Masterpieces of European Painting from El Museo de Arte Ponce." These gems - from a museum built in 1959 by collector (& co-founder of the Puerto Rican Pro-statehood Party), Luis Ferre - range from religious iconography circa 1350 to Lovis Corinth's 1910 Expressionist nude "Pregnant Woman."
Perhaps the most appealing artworks on display hang in the last two galleries, among a group of sumptuous paintings by members & adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were a loose affiliation of anti-academic artists, established in England in 1848 as part of an aesthetic quest for "truth to nature" & ideal beauty. Here is a brief survey of my favorite seven paintings in the entire exhibit:
* "Ysoude with the Love Philter" (oil/canvas, 1870) by Frederick Sandys (1832-1904). A portrait of a demure brown-eyed brunette (elsewhere named Isolde) in semi-profile holding a red rose. Based on the tragic Arthurian legend of a misdirected love-potion, a rich blue hue dominates the color-scheme of this eye-catching work in which symbolic flowers abound.
* "The Escape of a Heretic, 1559" (oil/canvas, 1857) by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-96). In this dramatic scene from the time of the Spanish Inquisition, somber brown tones pervade this depiction of 3 figures: (1) a nobleman/rescuer disguised as a monk aims a dagger at (2) a cowering bound priest/captor, while (3) a beautiful young woman in a robe, partially concealing a heretic's shirt complete with devil & flames, flees the cell with a startled expression. The oppressive interior is relieved by a glimpse of a tree through a tiny window in the background.
* "The School of Nature" (oil/wood panel, 1893) by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). This portrait, originally of Hunt's 16-year-old daughter Gladys, presents a seated beauty sketching on her red pad in a summer garden, a dog at her feet & a fountain behind her. It features a face repainted, for some unexplained reason, by another artist into that of a more mature woman. It remains an alluring, contemplative composition in which green & pink colors prevail.
* "Roman Widow (Dis Manibus)" (oil/canvas, 1874) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82). My favorite of the entire show, this painting offers a seductive yet aloof blue-eyed redhead (based on Rossetti's favorite model, Alexa Wilding) performing a funerary ritual with zither-like instruments beside her husband's cinerary urn. Gold, pink, auburn & green tones lend the portrait a vibrant sheen & a vitality that belies the morbid subject.
* The small Briar Rose series (oil/canvas, 1871-73), a triptych comprised of: (1) "The Prince Enters the Wood" (2) "The King & His Court" & (3) "The Sleeping Beauty" by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones(1833-98). This rather eerie trio of paintings, executed in Burne-Jones's semi-crude mystical style, presents a variety of figures sleeping in a forest, in a garlanded courtyard & in a bedchamber of slumbering beauties, respectively. Based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, as interpreted by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem "Day Dream" (1842), there is a hallucinatory quality to the series.
Asked why he hadn't - like most artists who tackled this popular subject - depicted the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, Burne-Jones replied: "I want it to stop with the princess asleep and to tell no more, to leave all the afterwards to the invention & imagination of people." Good words to live by in this era of comatose imagination.
Showing posts with label Frist Museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frist Museum. Show all posts
Monday, February 22, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Weird, wonderful guitarist charms Frist Museum audience
I heard a truly weird set Friday by experimental guitarist/composer John Danley on Friday evening in the glorious Grand Lobby of the Frist Museum, the re-purposed Art Deco building on Broadway, formerly Nashville's main post office. As I said to him during the break, "I don't know what's more impressive, your playin' or your talkin'. Either way, it's an irresistible combination." Here's why that artist (a term I don't use loosely) charmed me so.
Danley played entrancing instrumental pieces with percussive flair, picking notes & striking chords enhanced by occasional taps on his acoustic guitar. Sometimes he used only his hands & other times he employed a tool that he'd concocted out of a 3-inch housepainter's brush, a fingernail-file, a raised felt pad, Velcro & black electrical tape. The titles ("Logarithms," "Obscurantis," "Coriander," "Free Association," etc.) fit his idiosyncratic New Age style perfectly. It was like entering the mind of some idiot savant, a quirky genius uncannily attuned to the strange harmonies & melodies of the universe. All while playing a 6-string guitar with the down-to-earth skill of a master folk musician. The atmospheric sounds echoed off the granite & glass walls, gleaming floor & high-ceiling like urgent dispatches from the long-lost Telstar satellite.
Danley added to the sonic fun by treating his small audience to the weirdest, hippest & funniest stream-of-consciousness stage patter I've ever heard from a serious musician. One monologue focused on memories of his Irish Catholic grandfather, a man who moved from Kansas to Montgomery (Alabama) & alarmed his neighbors by lighting brushfires in the backyard, an individualist who drove a Ford "ANGER" (after the initial 'R' fell off its tailgate). Danley gently detoured our attention into discussions of Nashville trolleys & the DSM mental-illness diagnostic manual (where he hoped to find his obsession with Velcro as an official disease one day), existentialism, tossing out such terms as "Kottke-esque" (a dual homage to guitarist Leo Kottke & writer Franz Kafka) along the way. Citing a riff he'd stolen from Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, Danley added with deadpan understatement that "We don't need no education" was the state motto of Mississippi, Alabama & Louisiana. Ya gotta love a Southerner who tells it like it is. Maybe it helps to have some Russian Jewish ancestry, as the bemused Danley said he does.
Discussing his affinity for physics, Danley quipped: "If we didn't have quarks and gluons, we just wouldn't have a good weekend." Thanks in part to that dignified -- albeit eccentric -- musician, I had a very good weekend indeed. I tipped him without hesitation but, alas, did not have enough cash to buy a CD. (When I mentioned that I was a music blogger, he offered me one gratis, but I politely declined. Even artists have to buy groceries now & then.) Check out his website (www.johndanley.com) & hear why the weekly Nashville Scene selected him as "Best Guitar Hero" of 2002. He is also a regular contributor to a pair of excellent radio programs: NPR's All Things Considered & Public Radio International's To the Best of Our Knowledge, produced by Wisconsin Public Radio (shout out from a Badger in Dixie).
Danley played entrancing instrumental pieces with percussive flair, picking notes & striking chords enhanced by occasional taps on his acoustic guitar. Sometimes he used only his hands & other times he employed a tool that he'd concocted out of a 3-inch housepainter's brush, a fingernail-file, a raised felt pad, Velcro & black electrical tape. The titles ("Logarithms," "Obscurantis," "Coriander," "Free Association," etc.) fit his idiosyncratic New Age style perfectly. It was like entering the mind of some idiot savant, a quirky genius uncannily attuned to the strange harmonies & melodies of the universe. All while playing a 6-string guitar with the down-to-earth skill of a master folk musician. The atmospheric sounds echoed off the granite & glass walls, gleaming floor & high-ceiling like urgent dispatches from the long-lost Telstar satellite.
Danley added to the sonic fun by treating his small audience to the weirdest, hippest & funniest stream-of-consciousness stage patter I've ever heard from a serious musician. One monologue focused on memories of his Irish Catholic grandfather, a man who moved from Kansas to Montgomery (Alabama) & alarmed his neighbors by lighting brushfires in the backyard, an individualist who drove a Ford "ANGER" (after the initial 'R' fell off its tailgate). Danley gently detoured our attention into discussions of Nashville trolleys & the DSM mental-illness diagnostic manual (where he hoped to find his obsession with Velcro as an official disease one day), existentialism, tossing out such terms as "Kottke-esque" (a dual homage to guitarist Leo Kottke & writer Franz Kafka) along the way. Citing a riff he'd stolen from Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, Danley added with deadpan understatement that "We don't need no education" was the state motto of Mississippi, Alabama & Louisiana. Ya gotta love a Southerner who tells it like it is. Maybe it helps to have some Russian Jewish ancestry, as the bemused Danley said he does.
Discussing his affinity for physics, Danley quipped: "If we didn't have quarks and gluons, we just wouldn't have a good weekend." Thanks in part to that dignified -- albeit eccentric -- musician, I had a very good weekend indeed. I tipped him without hesitation but, alas, did not have enough cash to buy a CD. (When I mentioned that I was a music blogger, he offered me one gratis, but I politely declined. Even artists have to buy groceries now & then.) Check out his website (www.johndanley.com) & hear why the weekly Nashville Scene selected him as "Best Guitar Hero" of 2002. He is also a regular contributor to a pair of excellent radio programs: NPR's All Things Considered & Public Radio International's To the Best of Our Knowledge, produced by Wisconsin Public Radio (shout out from a Badger in Dixie).
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