I took off an afternoon to visit a friend in Minneapolis and, because I had some time to kill, I spent a couple hours at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA). There was road construction and I reached the MIA by driving (inadvertently) the wrong way on a couple of one-way streets. I have been going to the Art Institute all my life, at least four or five times a year, and so it was humiliating to be careening down busy one-ways in the teeth of traffic honking and flashing lights at me. At the museum, I discovered that my membership had lapsed and so I renewed, an expensive proposition because I donate significant money, by my standards, to the MIA. The clueless kid at the information kiosk offered me tickets to the two shows on offer -- an exhibition of Japanese textiles and a small collection of Van Gogh landscapes loaned by the Amsterdam museum dedicated to the Dutch artist's work and supplementing the MIA's painting of an olive grove that has been one of the highlights of the collection as long as I can recall coming to the place. I've never been much of a fan of Van Gogh -- movies about him have spoiled my appreciation of his paintings -- and, so, I don't think I would have traveled to see this show. Similarly, the idea of looking at Japanese kimonos or rain-coats doesn't appeal to me and so I can't imagine that I would have ventured into this exhibition if the kid hadn't foisted timed tickets on me for both shows, the least he could do given the sum of money that I had just left with the Institute via credit card. "Do you want to see the Van Gogh and Japanese clothes?" the kid asked. "Why not?" I said.
Prejudice is always perilous and, in fact, the exhibition of Japanese fabrics and garments was excellent, a very interesting and inspiring show that I highly recommend. Contrary to my expectations, the exhibit was fascinating and exotic.. (I suppose I should clarify that my prejudice was based on what I thought I would find interesting; apparently, the range of my interests is a little broader than I thought.) The show is called "Dressed by Nature" and explores how the Japanese use natural resource to create fabrics across an archipelago of islands that stretches from Arctic Circle to tropical regions close to the equator. The first couple rooms featured garments made in Siberia's Sakhalin Islands, the people living there apparently culturally similar to the Ainu who reside in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. These garments were sheer amber-colored assemblages contrived from fish-skin stretched taut and stitched together. The show incorporates objects and images beyond the rather spooky-looking, butterfly- or angel-shaped forms of the garments, stretched tight and hanging sans head, san legs, sans feet like abstract art against the gallery walls -- there are banners, headdresses, bed coverings, raincoats and a variety of beautiful colored woodblock prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai, and the ferocious Yoshitoshi; the prints were of very high-quality and comprised an estimable mini-exhibition on their own. Some of the objects were made for ritual purposes: there were large banners made to be flown at Shinto festivals and some strange-looking wedge-shaped things with weedy fringes of fabric said to shoes for the dead made by the Ainu -- dead people's feet must be different from my feet because I had trouble interpreting these enigmatic artifacts as any kind of shoe at all. The garments which are more interesting than I thought, are an example of abstractions avant le lettre, that is abstraction before abstraction, and many of these textiles were very beautiful. There was a display of firefighter's garments, black leather vests and shorts marked with official-looking seals and with hooded Ninja-style assassin head-gear. These things were presented against a wall on which one of Yoshitoshi's prints of a huge fire burning on a bridge is projected together with a palimpsest of prancing, dancing orange flames -- it was corny, I thought, but effective enough and people entering the gallery with the ninja suits and the big fire blazing on the wall audibly gasped. (Some fascinating prints showed scenes from a Kabuki play about a young woman who set a fire intentionally to destroy her beloved's house so that he would have to live with her in a temple where she and her father had sought refuge after one of the periodic blazes that decimated old Edo. Of course, she was caught, confessed she had committed arson for love, and was executed at age 17 for her crime. Another firefighter is shown surrounded by raging fires. He's drawn a blade and is about to commit hara kiri -- we know this because he's wrapped the hilt of his sword in paper so he won't lose his grip on the blade as he eviscerates himself. A big banner depicts a warlike and burly demon-queller -- the figure has huge bulging eyes and a forehead knotted with ferocious muscle and his beard and hair are a soft blur around his face, the whiskers portrayed in a silky sfumato that you want to reach out and touch. (In fact, a lot of these fabrics seemed to invite you to touch them -- it is a very tactile show.) Other ritual garments showed octopi and sea creatures. On one garment, a sinewy carp is swimming up through rapids called the Dragon Gate in the Yellow River -- if the carp overcomes the current and passes through the Dragon gate, according to legend the creature becomes a dragon. Some of the garments from Okinawa, in Japan's far south, were made from light banana fiber -- apparently, a kind of inedible banana is grown on Okinawa and its fibers processed to make fabric. A excellent Hokusai print shows a sea-side village with walls and houses rough-hewn from big rocks, a kind of Inca town with little stairsteps descending from the terraces on which the place is built to lagoons around the jetties and small islands on which the village with its banana plantation is erected.. It's sunset as shown by a shapely pink mountain in the background and a canoe lazes in the canal below the groves of banana palms. Japanese travel-gear is very light -- some Japanese raincoats made 200 years ago are actually fashioned from paper. A conical hat for use in snow is also simultaneously funny, endearing, and stylish.
Objectivity, a display of photographs made in the last sixty years, is also interesting. The exhibit includes a number of pictures by Gordon Parks, a proof sheet of minute images by Diane Arbus and a few other images by well-known photographers. (There's a charming little picture made by August Sander to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of photography; it was made when Sanders was under house-arrest by the Nazis -- Sanders seems to be happily working in his lab to develop pictures.) The most fascinating things in the show are incidental: three fans for use in Black Baptist churches, one colorfully printed with an image of Martin Luther King Jr., two showing pious Black children with their large equally pious dogs praying over play tables of food; the fans are marked on the back with their sponsors -- a mortuary and the Hasty Dry Cleaning and Laundromat. Another vitrine holds souvenir photographs taken of rather hapless-looking diners at expensive restaurants -- the pictures are enclosed in sleeves showing The Flame in Duluth and several Las Vegas restaurants including The Sahara and the New Frontier, both proudly modernist buildings with belligerent cantilevered awnings over their entrances. In the seventies, Hills Brothers coffee was sold in three-pound tin containers printed mural-fashion with an image of Yosemite National Park taken by no less than Ansel Adams -- this is also a strange, even, puzzling artifact.
The Van Gogh exhibit is small, just four borrowed pictures and the MIA's own "Olive Trees". The olive grove pictures were made between September and November 1889 when Van Gogh was confined to a mental hospital. The MIA picture is clearly superior to the earlier iterations, larger, more colorful, and with the tree's foliage much more convincingly integrated with the contorted, pathetic-looking tree-trunks. (In earlier versions, the green foliage of leaves is sort of tacked on to to the top of the trunk like an ill-fitting hat.) The show isn't too interesting. A painting by Van Gogh of a wheat field demonstrates his use of violently garish impasto and the artist's execrable draftsmanship.
Finally, one of the pleasures of visiting the MIA is to see new acquisitions. The museum acquired in 2020 two baldachin columns, as spiral and polychrome as a barber's sign, these things mounted atop brutish-looking Romanesque lions (one of which clutches a shapeless lamb). The lions are crudely, if powerfully carved. They look like Aztec sculpture. (The columns are from Italy circa 1210 to1220.) In the room behind the columns, the small gallery containing the oldest European paintings in the museum, there is new and splendid acquisition, a big canvas showing St. Martin with a beggar, notable for its swaths of brilliant red cloak and the noble horse on which the Saint rides, a white pony with a mincing, dance-like step. This picture is from the about 1325; it shows the two figures standing in a stony desert where there are some spiky plants that look like agave. The image is supposed to represent a nocturnal encounter -- the sky is velvety blue marked with small fleur-de-lys signs representing stars.
Some new graphics acquired through collectors named Mersky are also worth a look: there's a mediocre Rauschenberg and some lurid prints, including a grotesque image of Madame Butterfly as an actual specimen of lepidoptera, that are clever and interesting, although probably not the sort of thing you'd want to look at more than a couple times. This small group of etchings and engravings is more about the taste of the collectors than anything else, but interesting, nonetheless.
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