Picasso’s 1937 painting of a curvaceous Lee Miller has not traveled with the exhibition of her photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to its present venue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That may be a blessing. Miller’s standing in 20th-century art has too long depended on her fashion-model looks and affiliations with the many illustrious men who portrayed or slept with her. (Man Ray did both.) The last thing her slender oeuvre needs at this stage of its rehabilitation is for her to be overshadowed by another towering male artist. [WSJ]
The next time you marvel – admiringly or not – at some oddity of contemporary art in a museum collection, know that it has probably passed through a cross fire of conversation among art professionals unheard by the public. Take installation artist Ann Hamilton’s piece “Indigo Blue” (1991), which the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired, reconstructed and exhibited in 2007. Originally made for a sculpture festival in Charleston, S.C., “Indigo Blue” consists of approximately 18,000 folded blue cotton work shirts and pants neatly stacked on a steel platform at the center of a room. [SFGate]
In the catalog of the terrific exhibition “From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig,” at the Jewish Museum, the artist’s daughter, Maggie Steig, recalls a game her father used to play with her: “What would you rather be?” Would you rather be a tree (sturdy, long-lived, a home for birds) or a flower (a short but exciting life, carried in weddings, pressed into books by princesses)? [NYT]
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