The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 69, No. 22, Ed. 1 Friday, February 19, 1982 Page: 12 of 24
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y
Thresher/Fine Arts
Not just rocks and flowers, but all of da Vinci's world
Da Vinci Nature Studies
Museum of Fine Arts
Through April 4
me in disbelief until I finally
remembered—Leonardo. Ap-
parently it takes an aspirin* art
master's more obscure works to
the public. Titled Leonardo da
Vinci: Nature Studies From the
■ YrVi
• i f
>\ "e -
t * '<; *}*&'' i
fend on ink of on eld man in profile to his right.
s recently had a rather
frightening experience. I was
talking to a friend trying to express
my excitement over two new art
exhibit: both opening locally, both
showing the works of one of the
gre<tte;t artists of all time. "Who?"
she asked. I couldn't remember!
"uh .lhr old guy, ya know?...he
nad a beard...he painted the,
ah . Mona Lisa..." She stared at
major two years of art history to
forget the name of Leonardo da
Vinci. But I'd bet that there's not
one housewife, construction
worker, or fourth grader who
couldn't tell you something about
Da Vinci's works and reputation.
The new show at the Museum
of Fine Arts can do nothing but
add to that fine reputation, in
addition to bringing some of the
Theatre
f the rainbow is enuf
' or Colored Girls Who Have
Considered Suicide/ When the
Hainbow is Enuf
Daedalus Productions
February 25
Ntozake Shange's For Colored
Girls... will be performed at Rice
the 25th of Feb., in Hamman, with
the New York company Daedelus
productions. The play comes at an
especially relevant time for Rice,
because Shange will be the Andrew
Mellon Professor of English here
next spring semester The play
shows the lives of seven black
women ar.d how thev deal with the
problems of their situations, from
a younger girl's graduation from
high school to another's search for
a biack saint, to a woman's
rejection of her indifferent lover.
The play, climaxes as a ghetto
mother recalls the careless murder
of her two children and, at this
point, all the women reach out to
one another for comfort and
survival.
The play, through music, speech
and dance, brings in many
interweaving themes—jealousy,
friendship, childhood dreams, the
exhilaration of dancing. But these
all fade before the ultimate theme:
the black woman's capacity to
master great pain and betrayals
through courage and wit.
Since 1976, when she wrote For
Colored Girls, Shange has also
written A Photograph, a portrait
of an aspiring black photographer
whose treatment of the three
women in his life is reflected in the
play's subtitle—"A Study in
Cruelty". She has also to her credit
Spell no. 7, an evening in a bar
where black poets and writers
come to share their dreams and
work, and Mother Courage, an
a^^r.ation of Brecht's masterpiece
to black sensiblities.
—Deborah L. Knaff
APRIL 24
MCAT
Classes begin Tuesday
February 23, 6:00 pm
Call Days Evenings & Weekends
988-4700
7011
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#520
Houston, Tx.
77071
11617
N. Central Expraaaway
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call mi rati: aw-m uu
Royal Library at Windsor Castle,
the show is a generous sampling of
the artist's style and favorite
subjects. All the works are chalk or
ink on paper.
If the fact that these drawings
are five hundred years old doesn't
impress you, then just look at the
timeless beauty. Leonardo's most
distinct characteristic is his
delicate rendering of minute
details in his soft modeling or
chiaroscura. This talent most
obvious in his drawings—deep
darks and sharp highlights create a
sort of otherworldliness, as if
everything were made of wispy
cotton fiber drenched in a humid
mist. Even his rocks and hillsides
Events
seem to be subliming into the
atmosphere around them.
These drawings are essentially
doodles. They cover a large part of
Leonardo's life, starting with
flower sketches done at the age of
eighteen. At thirty he began "The
Notebook", an organized
collection of his thoughts and
sketches which he continued to
work on until his death in 1519.
Leonardo loved nature both for
its surface and its inner logic
(developing as Sir Kenneth Clark
said, "a sense of organic life, of
growth and decay, of the infinitely
small and the infinitely big"). But it
is important to realize that even his
most exquisitely detailed
anatomical renderings were
designed to be beautiful and to
help make him into a better
painter.
The subject matter of this
exhibit is not limited, as the title
might suggest, to rocks and
flowers. Leonardo's mind was so
energetic and diverse that an
exquisite study of a lily might be
found next to the design for a
catapault or a cathedral. In a way
the doodles represent, more than
any painting ever could, a
photograph of the artist's mind in
flight, jumping anxiously from one
thought to another. It is very easy
for me to feel close to Leonardo as
a man when I see such vivid
evidence of his intelligence and
curiousity.
This is an extraordinary exhibit,
both in content and in its availibity
to the Rice community in
conjunction with the exhibit at
Sewall Gallery. Even if you missed
Princess Margaret at the formal
opening last weekend, there are
still many special activities—films,
tours, lectures, etc.—planned for
the coming month and a half. The
gallery setup is somewhat
unusual—each .page is hung below
a tiny spotlight in the darkened
rooms to preserve the paper from
deterioration. The effect is more
like walking on the moon than
visiting a museum, but it is
necessary. Also necessary are the
inescapable crowds. On the day I
went, the parking across on
Bissonet looked like the back lot of
a Cadillac dealership with a half
dozen school buses thrown in, and
every panoa than wm haadai far
Sfo* of UKt
Leonardo. But don't let the people
discourage you from going. This is
a once in a lifetime opportunity,
and it only lasts until April fourth.
—Dan Borden
Modern art hurling into the Void
Yves Klein: A Retrospective
Rice Museum
Through May 2
Well. The new show at the Rice
Museum highlights Klein's
attempts to capture the Void in art.
Whether or not he succeeds at this
is not as important as why he wants
to. After all, art has to be about
something. It can't, by its own fact
of being, be about nothing at all.
On looking further at the pieces
in the exhibit, however, Klein's
works do seem to be about
something. They are about
performing, about the art of
creating art. The Rice Museum
displays photographs of Klein
working in his studio and at
exhibitions to supplement and
explain the works themselves. For
example, Klein has quite a few
paintings which he calls
anthropometries (literally the size
and measurement of the human
body). These are paintings which
he has created through the use of
"human paint brushes"; Klein used
nude women as his tools. He would
begin by painting the women's
bodies, after which they would roll
on the canvas and create the
anthropometries. The exhibit has a
series of photographs from a Paris
exhibition in 1960 where Klein
used three women to produce
several anthropometries,
accompanied by his Monotone-
Silence Symphony.
In addition to these body
paintings, Klein's work could be
divided into three basic types.
There are his monochrome works,
two sculptures, and his fire
paintings. The monochromes are,
predictably, small to medium sized
canvasses painted in one color,
predominantly a rich blue. Klein
experiments with texture in these
monochromes, adding in sand,
pebbles, and natural sponges to
(usually) dry pigment in synthetic
resin. He also uses layering
techniques, putting paper on fabric
onto board. In several pieces, he
has dispensed with the canvas
altogether and painted a series of
sponges mounted on metal rods
stuck into rocks.
These monochromes are also
painted in pink, yellow, peach, red,
and a whole series are .done in gold-
plated canvas. The colors are
brilliant but certainly the texture is
what is more interesting to look
at—solid color sheets really just
can't be that fascinating. The
surfaces of the monochromes
range from bubbling lava to stucco
to almost smooth to swirling to
metallic.
Two works stick out in the show
as not being related to any other
piece. Red Rain is a group of
eleven wood rods that have been
painted red and are hung in a
Caulderesque mobile formation.
The other, Planetary Reliefs, is a
white plaster and glass case with
four topographical maps inside of
it, all lit by blue lights (of course).
These isolated pieces are some of
the most successful at capturing
and containing empty space (what
Klein wanted to do), and it seems a
pity that he didn't do more work
along these lines. But perhaps
these pieces only work because
they are so different.
The last major group of
paintings is his "fire paintings."
Again, a set of photographs shows
Klein in the performance of
creating one of these works. He
stands several feet back from the
canvas and aims a blow torch at it,
while a fireman stands by to put
out any diasaster. After this, Klein
places another nude woman up
against the canvas and sprays paint
around her. Some of the colors in
these paintings are indeed
glorious, and whatever we can see
in them are haunting, images if not
of the Void itself then of that piece
of the Void which is usually called
hell.
At the back of the exhibit are
several very large blue and white
anthropometries which look half
like x-rays, half like Picasso
imitating African art. These are the
easiest paintings in the show to
look at, the only ones that capture
a sense a movement and establish a
relationship with the viewer.
Perhaps they are therefore failures
in Klein's view.
The show is well done. In
addition to the photographs
showing Klein at work, there is a
small room full of Klein
memorabilia, including his
favorite Tintin books. Klein's art is
very fairly shown: It is placed in the
exhibit so that each work appears
to exist in a small void of its own.
But there are serious problems
with this show, most seriously the
question of whether these
anthropometries, these mono-
chromes, are art at all, or are the
physical remains of a very
flamboyant performer. Of course,
such questions about the nature of
art must be answered by each of us
individually, and so it is silly of me
even to pose the question. All I can
say is that for myself, I am not
beckoned by what I see to follow
Klein into that void.
— Deborah /.. Knaff
The Rice Thresher, February 19, 1982, page 12
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Grob, Jay. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 69, No. 22, Ed. 1 Friday, February 19, 1982, newspaper, February 19, 1982; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245494/m1/12/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.