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Senior New Zealand artist Max Gimblett and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett are gifting a major collection of the artist’s works on paper to the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation in support of the gallery’s development project – at a special event held at the Auckland Town Hall tomorrow. Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines says the gallery is greatly indebted to Max and Barbara for their exceptional generosity. I’m so pleased that this important body of work should be the first major gift to the gallery through its foundation. This gift consolidates and amplifies our Gimblett holdings in the most remarkable way, allowing us to represent this major artist in unparalleled depth, says Saines. Max Gimblett says he and Barbara are honoured to gift the works of art to the foundation to demonstrate their support of the development of the gallery’s main building. Barbara and I recognise the importance of a creative and healthy gallery. This gift shows our support for the role of the foundation in strengthening the gallery’s position as the leading art museum in New Zealand, says Gimblett. Gimblett, who has lived in the United States since the mid 1960s and exhibited widely in New Zealand and abroad, is gifting key works from the last 40 years of his artistic practice. Auckland Art Gallery’s curator of contemporary art, Natasha Conland worked closely with Gimblett at his studio in the Bowery, New York, to select the 51 works on paper that make up the gift. This collection captures the extraordinary range in Gimblett’s artistic temperament from his early portraiture to his achievements with abstract form and a long-standing exploration of Zen calligraphic technique. Most of all this collection reveals the artist’s extraordinary sensitivity to the very materials of art, especially ink, paper and pencil, says Conland. A number of key works from the gift will be included in the new collection displays that will be the feature of the newly developed main gallery building in late 2010. Gimblett contributed to the development of New Zealand painting through the exhibition of early abstractions and his much-admired quatrefoil-shaped paintings, which emerged in the early 1980s and now feature in most public collections in New Zealand. In recognition of his work with calligraphic form, Gimblett is included in a major group exhibition opening at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, American Art and the East opening in January, curated by Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art.
Charles Ethan Porter (c. 1847-1923) is under-recognized today but was revered in his own time by well-known contemporaries such as Henry Ossawa Tanner and Edmonia Lewis, who worked in a more popular, figurative tradition. His paintings are masterpieces of American still-life tradition. Porter, who began painting in the aftermath of the Civil War and worked well into the twentieth century, was celebrated in his day as a skillful colorist and was one of the first black artists to exhibit at New York’s National Academy of Design. This exhibition will feature dozens of Porter’s still lifes, landscapes and portraits, and introduce audiences to this shadowy painter who deftly combined the American luminist tradition with that of the French Barbizon school. Accompanied by a new scholarly publication, the exhibition will elucidate Porter’s skill and the unsettled biography of an artist whose brilliance is only now being inscribed into the annals of American art history. This exhibit is on view from April 2-June 29, 2008. Please go check it out before departing elsewhere. The Studio Museum of Harlem
Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury exhibit, which features painting, architecture, furniture design, decorative and graphic arts, film, and music that launched 1950s modernism in the United States, and established Los Angeles as a major American cultural center. With more than 150 objects on view, Birth of the Cool examines the dynamic community of artists who played a germinal role in the development of the iconic style of high modernism. Inspired by Miles Davis’s album Birth of the Cool, the exhibition captures an era in post-war Southern California when exploration in architecture, art, music and design coalesced to form a modern sensibility based on living well, said Philip Linhares, chief curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California. With roots in Bauhaus Germany, and inspired by European immigrant artists and architects and young American designers and avant-garde jazz musicians, the ‘cool’ aesthetic flourished in the LA landscape and climate. Wartime industrial innovations were adapted to peacetime use—steel, glass and concrete houses, and molded plastic and bent plywood furnishings. In the late 1930s and 1940s Hollywood provided employment and a safe haven for artists and intellectuals fleeing the war in Europe, who carried with them the tenets of international modernism. Attracted to the favorable climate, optimistic spirit, and relative prosperity of post-war Southern California, a disparate group of painters, filmmakers, designers, and musicians came from all over America to develop new strains of American modernism. The work of important modernist architects Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, and Craig Ellwood, among others, is examined in the context of their projects for Arts & Architecture’s Case Study House program. Their designs for residential dwellings are among the iconic mid-century architectural gems captured in Julius Shulman’s photographs (featured). Considered among the most influential American designers of the 20th century, Charles and Ray Eames exemplify the joining of American ideals of creativity, optimism, and hard work with the rigors of international modernism. The exhibit showcases early and rare examples of Eames furniture, films, and archival materials. It is accompanied by a 300-page illustrated book (published with Prestel Publishers, 2007), which provides a thorough reassessment of the era. Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art’s chief curator Elizabeth Armstrong. The exhibition continues through August 17 at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th Street, in Oakland. For more information, call 510-238-2200 or visit www.museumca.org.
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05/19/2008 
