Weekend Twenty Eight

(even the Neiman's is arty)

We have been eager to visit the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University since it re-opened in October. But first we stopped at Wellesley College to visit The Davis. The Davis Museum of Art traces its origins to the 1889 dedication of the first Art building on the Wellesley College campus, soon after the school began offering one of the first curricula of Art History in America. The current incarnation was built in 1993. It’s a terrific space with galleries filled with a mixture of periods, media, and styles reached by a series of Escheresque staircases.

The featured show is called Double Solitaire, a name given to an earlier exhibition of Art by surreal artists Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage. Tanguy used this same title for a show they did at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. It was the only other time they exhibited together. Photos were not allowed for the show, so here are a few pieces from this show I found online:

A LittleLater by Yves Tanguy, 1940

Tomorrow is Never, Kay Sage, 1955

Through Birds Through Fire But Not Through Glass, by Yves Tanguy, 1943

White Silence by Kay Sage, 1941

by Yves Tanguy

The Answer is No by Kay Sage, 1958

Yves and Kay were inseparable throughout their 15-year marriage, sharing adjoining studios in Woodbury, CT and communicating only in French until Tanguy’s untimely death in 1955.

The Answer Is No, was Kay's last painting. Five years later, still grieving and partially blinded by a botched cataract surgery, she shot herself in the heart. In a suicide note, she wrote, “The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called ‘I’m Waiting for You.’ I’ve come. Now he’s waiting for me again — I’m on my way.”

This show was organized by the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York, and The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.

There were also galleries for the permanent collection - and wonderful mixture of paintings and sculptures from different eras mixed with ancient artifacts. Here are a few, click HERE for some more.

top floor gallery

Portrait Romantique by Paul Cezanne, 1868-70

How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies) by Yinka Shonibare, 2006

And, of course, the ubiquitous Childe Hassam:

Street in Provincetown by Childe Hassam, 1904

We also found a few pieces of sculpture around campus:

Filigreed Line by Robert Irwin, 1979

another view

Wild Spot by Nancy Holt, 1980

unnamed sculpture 1

unnamed sculpture 2

There was a scandal recently when the President of Brandeis University in Waltham wanted to close the Rose Art Museum then sell the Art to finance the college. I won’t go into all the grim details, but there’s a new president, the museum has been renovated and reopened in October. The Rose is now celebrating its 50th Anniversary with a show called Art at the Origin: The Early 1960s.

The unassuming building offered much more space than we thought at first glance. We entered at the top level and walked down to additional galleries, as well as to the rear, where two more floors of exhibition space have been added. The show was chock full of work by the big name artists. But this was 1961 and the Rose’s initial collection was cutting edge contemporary: Lichtenstein, Rauchenburg, Warhol, Oldenburg, and more. Photos weren’t allowed anywhere in The Rose, here are shots I found online:

James Brooks’s Rodado, Will em de Kooning’s Untitled
Robert Rauschenberg’s Second Time Painting,
and Roy Lichtenstein’s Forget It! Forget Me

Ruth by Marisol

Blue White by Elsworth Kelly, 1962

Untitled by Willem de Kooning, 1961

Elegy to the Spanish Revolution No. 58, Robert Motherwell, 1957

Second Time Painting by Robert Rauschenberg, 1961

Nam June Paik's Charlotte Moorman II

Tray Meal by Claes Oldenburg, 1962

We had to squeeze past a fence and walk through some muddy areas to find these two sculptures to the side of the museum:

End Free Series XV by Alexander Liberman, 1966

Lily Pad IV by Michael Todd, 1972

These we found elsewhere on campus:

Pegasus, Birth of the Muses by Jacques Lipchitz

 Inspiration by Rita Blitt, 1993

Duality by David Bakalar, 1990

Afterward, we visited downtown Waltham to have lunch/dinner at Joe Sent Me. Clever menu. They were all out of Guinness but the other bar (The Raven) that served it also had an overpowering smell of cleaning stuff.