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March Issue 2006
Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC, Offers 3 New Focus Gallery Installations
The Columbia Museum
of Art in Columbia, SC, offers three new Focus Gallery installations
including: Käthe Kollwitz Prints from the Ann Reynolds
and Thomas Kirschbaum Collection, on view in the Caroline
Guignard Focus Gallery 4, through Apr. 23, 2006; Ida Kohlmeyer:
Continuous Journey, on view in the South Trust Bank Gallery
Focus Gallery 1, through June 4, 2006; and Five Leaders, Six
Decades: Artwork by the Chairs of the University of South Carolina
Art Department, co-curated by Phil Dunn, on view in the NBSC
Focus Gallery 2 and BB&T Focus Gallery 3, through June 18,
2006.
Käthe Kollwitz Prints an installation of six lithographs
and etchings by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), loaned from the
collection of Ann Reynolds and Thomas Kirschbaum, was organized
to complement the Columbia Museum of Art's major exhibition, My
America: Art from The Jewish Museum Collection, 1900 1955.
The art of Kollwitz is often characterized as gripping, socially conscious, and filled with an emotional importance that transcends time and place. Her long life was lived during some of the most turbulent decades in Europe's history. Born in Moritzburg, Germany, Kollwitz lived through the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the devastating inflation and unemployment that followed in the wake of World War I, and also the horrors of World War II. Kollwitz lost her son in World War I and a grandson in World War II. Her personal suffering and concern for the plight of mankind, particularly the socially and economically downtrodden, became the major themes in her art.
Kollwitz's early passion was to become a painter, however she quickly realized that her talents lay not in the manipulation of color, but in the emotional expression of line. This was enforced when she was introduced to the work of Max Klinger, a printmaker whose images of social oppression and injustice were a revelation to her. Kollwitz's first series, Revolt of the Weavers was proposed for the gold medal at the Berlin Art Exhibition in 1898, but Kaiser Wilhelm II, referring to art of social content as "gutter art," vetoed the recommendation. Nonetheless, the series was purchased by the Dresden Museum and her next great series, The Peasant's War, representing a violent revolution of the peasantry in 16th century Germany, won Kollwitz the Villa Romana Prize.
The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in 1933 brought with it the oppression of dissenters in the fields of art and literature as well as politics. Kollwitz was forced to resign from the Berlin Academy of Art and to give up her studio and the directorship of the Masters Studio for Graphic Arts, a post she held since 1928. Galleries were forbidden to handle or display her work and eventually her work was consigned to museum basements and storage rooms along with other examples of "degeneracy" and non-Aryanism. Despite this, Kollwitz continued to work producing prints exploring lifelong themes of maternal suffering, self-expression, and social injustice.
Idalmeyer: Continuous Journey Koh is also being offered in conjunction with the major exhibition, My America: Art from The Jewish Museum Collection, 1900 1955. This focus gallery installation includes eight works by contemporary artist Kohlmeyer.
Kohlmeyer studied with the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, and he persuaded her to give up representational art in favor of the coloristic and gestural freedoms of abstraction, instilling in her a love of vibrant color and a belief that painting is a spiritual activity driven by an inner reality. It was this idea of personal symbolic communication along with her love of Mir, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Central- and Meso-American pictographs, which led Kohlmeyer to develop and explore her own vocabulary of symbols or "glyphs," which, she explains, are part of her artistic and visual vocabulary.
In 1957 Kohlmeyer met
Mark Rothko and became consumed by his broad, vibrant and simplified
areas of color encouraging transcendent meditation. Under the
influence of Rothko's Color-Field paintings, Kohlmeyer's
"glyphs" found themselves either floating in broad swathes
of gently transforming color, or compartmentalized within a checkerboard
of squares. By the mid-1980s, she began to explore the extension
of pictorial space to actual space by stacking her "glyphs"
in sculptural form.
The installation includes works from the Jerald Melberg Gallery
and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, the private collections
of Leona Sobel and Ethel Brody of Columbia, SC, and the Columbia
Museum of Art's permanent collection. The work in Focus Gallery
1 displays Kohlmeyer's individual talent and synthesis of influences
in a variety of forms from drawings to sculpture and exemplifies
the searching and personal nature of her art. As she herself describes
painting, "The painter is on a continual voyage through purgatory.
He dies and is reborn a thousand times during a day's work, and
so does the painting."
The final installation
is Five Leaders, Six Decades: Artwork by the Chairs of the
University of South Carolina Art Department, co-curated by
Phil Dunn. A total of 14 works by Edmund Yaghjian, John O'Neil,
John Benz, Bob Lyon and Phil Dunn paintings, sculptures
and photographs will be on view.
With no official department and a handful of art classes first
being offered beginning in 1925 at the University of South Carolina
(USC) in Flinn Hall (located behind the World War Memorial Building),
the USC Art Department has come a long way. It is for this reason
the Columbia Museum of Art is honoring the five chairs who have
led the department up to this point. The art department chairs
each contributed unique talents, focusing on different mediums
during his tenure. Edmund Yaghjian was a painter, John C. Benz's
focus was graphic design and art education, John O'Neil was a
painter and art educator, Bob Lyon is a sculptor, and Phillip
Dunn is a photographer and art educator.
Catherine Rembert and Katherine Heyward were the first two art instructors, and when the art department was made official in 1945, Edmund Yaghjian served as its first chair from 1945 until 1966. By 1968 the faculty of the art department grew from four to 10 full-time and eight part-time teachers who were all active artists. The curriculum expanded to include four degree programs: bachelors degrees in art education, studio art, art history and the Bachelor of Fine Arts.
For further information
check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at
803/799-2810 or at (www.columbiamuseum.org).
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