: Works that have inspired or invoked other works will be examined
in "Second Sight: Originality, Duplicity, and the Object," a new
exhibition to be shown January 14 through April 10 at the Frances
Lehman Loeb Art Center.
Consider that museum exhibitions normally emphasize masterpieces:
objects, which through singular quality and renown, stand for
definitive transitions and chapters in the evolution of art.
Instead, "Second Sight" highlights artworks that have bridged the
evolution of art, by transmitting motifs, methods, styles,
genres, ideas, and traditions from one context to another.
Second Sight emerged from a larger initiative by Vassar's Frances
Lehman Loeb Art Center to exhibit rarely seen works from its vast
permanent collection. "We began pulling out objects that for one
reason or another do not 'fit' into canonical histories of art,"
explained Joel Smith, a curator at the Art Center. "As we
assembled the best of the pieces, we realized that as a group
they bring to life some of the central issues facing art
historians today, from the criteria for originality and the
appropriation of earlier images by later artists, to the
dissemination of ideas and motifs from one cultural setting to
another."
Even before the idea for Second Sight took shape, the curators
and the director spent months plumbing the vaults of the Art
Center for works across all media, geography, and history, from
the Middle Ages to the present. As a result the exhibit brings
together variant renditions and copy sketches, satires and
homages, authorized facsimiles and suspected forgeries, works of
problematic attribution, renderings in alternative media, modern
versions of classic themes, and postmodern reinventions of
modernist icons.
"An important story we tell in Second Sight is about the
constant, subtle amendments that occur in art over time,"
continued Smith. "The vehicles for our narrative are artworks
that refer in a variety of ways to other works. "
Andy Warhol's screen-print Jackie II, 1966; features enlarged
side-by-side copies of a press photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy
mourning at JFK's funeral, a nod to the numbing familiarity
induced by overexposure in the mass media. Alongside Warhol's
work is an anonymous snapshot of a television screen showing the
first lady during the live telecast of the funeral: a mourner's
private memorial, captured before the public moment's conversion
into pop-cultural cliché.
Two self-portraits in the exhibit by the American artist Milton
Bellin, one work painted and the other drawn, are remarkable for
a degree of finish - and of inch-for-inch agreement with each
other - where manual skill borders on mechanical precision.
Bellin's technique, in egg tempera on panel and ink and gouache
on paper respectively, was characterized by meticulous attention
to detail and perfection of surface.
Photographers, working in a medium widely regarded as inherently
mechanical, have employed diverse methods to avoid the taint of
art reproduction and to signal the status of their work as art in
itself. In "Second Sight" an Orientalist platinum-print of the
Thames River by Ernest Lamb is seen alongside one of its
aesthetic forebears, James McNeill Whistler's lithograph "Early
Morning, Battersea."
Among the satires in Second Sight is a seventeenth-century
Flemish bronze sculpture that lampoons the classical tragic group
know as the Laocoon; here, the lead figure, Bacchus, has been set
upon not by serpents but by mischievous angelic creatures, putti,
who are after his bowl of wine. In James Gillray's etching "Weird
Sisters: Ministers of Darkness, Minions of the Moon," 1791, Henry
Fuseli's image of the witches in Macbeth morphs into a trio of
Tory ministers. The moon they worship is a two-faced monarchy, a
smiling Queen on its sunny side and the King in the shadows.
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is located at the entrance
to the historic Vassar College campus. Admission to the Frances
Lehman Loeb Art Center is free. The Art Center is open to the
public Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday. 1 to
5 pm. For information, 845-437-5632 or visit
fllac.vassar.edu.
