Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 30) LSU Museum of Art celebrates 50 years Exhibitions featuring Rodin sculptures and contemporary Louisiana artists fill 2009 The LSU Museum of Art will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2009. The museum and its collections were established through a gift in 1959 from an anonymous donor who wished to support an institution that would illustrate British and Continental influences on early American art and culture in the South. Then known as the Anglo-American Art Museum, the facility opened in 1962 in the Memorial Tower on LSU's Baton Rouge campus. The museum's significant collection of American and British portraiture, furniture, and decorative arts grew from this foundation. Over the next 30 years, the collection grew by leaps and bounds. Beginning in the late 1960s, the focus expanded to Louisiana and Southern decorative arts. The museum amassed Louisiana paintings, furniture, silverware, and Newcomb pottery and crafts, as well as American and European decorative work. On March 5, 2005, the Museum opened in a world-class art facility in downtown Baton Rouge, the Shaw Center for the Arts. To commemorate the LSU Museum of Art’s 50th anniversary, objects from the permanent collection have been assembled in an PROM IRIS AND B. GERALD ION, CANTOR FOUNDAT A RT ISED G UM OF IFT TO THE exhibition titled Representations: NORTH CAROLINA MUSE Constructing Identity from Hogarth to MySpace. Representations re-figures portraits from the permanent collection to explore the issue of representation and meaning in art from traditional portraiture to contemporary personifications. Visitors are asked to consider how they would want to be represented, whether through an accurate likeness or objects that are important to them or ideals they espouse. They will be invited to post their “portraits” or “representations” in the exhibition through the internet vehicle MySpace. Throughout 2009, the LSU Museum of Art will commemorate its past and celebrate its future through a series of exhibitions: I On January 25, 2009, the LSU Museum of Art unveiled Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. This remarkable exhibition celebrates the prolific career of legendary French artist Auguste Rodin, featuring 63 original bronze sculptures from his most famous I projects including The Gates of Hell, Monument to the Burghers of Calais and Monument to Balzac. The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of photographs, works on paper, The Thinker by Auguste Rodin, modeled 1880, reduced 1903. and the film Rodin: the Gates of Hell which explores both the creative and technical process of Rodin’s work. This three-month exhibition, closing April 19, highlights Rodin’s most ambitious work, The Gates of Hell, which consumed almost 40 years of the sculptor’s life. Rodin exhibited many of the individual figures from the project as independent sculptures, including his two most indelible images, The Thinker (1880) and The Kiss (188182). Other sculptures in the exhibition include the emotionally charged figures from The Burghers of Calais (1884–88), the Monument to Balzac (circa 1897) and the Monument to Victor Hugo (circa 1897–1900). I Reunion: James Burke, Ed Pramuk and Robert Warrens (May 21–August 9) features the works of these three contemporary Louisiana artists. When the United States emerged as an economic and political power in the 20th century, it also became central to the international art scene. In 1949, Jackson Pollock appeared in Life magazine, signaling a shift whereby New York became the art standard against which all other art would be measured. During this time, many artists flocked to New York, but three artists in particular chose to make their marks in Louisiana. James Burke, Edward Pramuk and Robert Warrens, each from northern states, chose to take their place in art history in Baton Rouge. Reunion highlights works from these artists’ tenure at LSU and includes some of their more recent creations. Burke and Pramuk arrived at the Louisiana State University School of Art in 1965; Warrens arrived two years later. They taught painting, drawing, printmaking and design throughout much of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Their works range in size and medium, but assuredly define each era with an accurate attention to current art trends. They are some of the most influential figures behind contemporary painting in Louisiana over the past four decades, and they continue to create in Southern Louisiana. Gabriel Laderman: Unconventional Realist (September 4–October 25) will feature the work of this New York painter, an early and important exponent of the Figurative revival of the 1950s and 30 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009
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