June 23, 2016
The Farnsworth specializes in American artists, with an emphasis on celebrating Maine’s role in American art. We viewed several exhibits.
Koichiro Kurita was born in Manchuria and educated in Japan. He was a commercial photographer who was so moved by reading Thoreau’s Walden that he decided to devote his photography to nature. He uses a monochromatic, platinum palladium, albumen and salt processes. A video showed him and his wife wheeling a wagon with a large-format camera to a site and capturing a scene in the few minutes when the light was just what he was looking for. We had visited some of the places in the photographs.
We found the next exhibit, “Pushing Boundaries: Dine, Graves, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Rosenquist–Collaborations with Donald Saff”, to be less interesting. Saff was a print-maker in the 1960s who has encouraged prominent artists to produce works that were mixtures of painting, drawing, print-making and sculpture. Notes accompanying the works explained the negotiation process used but many times the result seemed more coincidental than deliberate.
These accidents contrasted greatly with the deliberation shown in selections Andrew Wyeth’s work. He would complete a study that looked like a finished product, only to redo it with different lighting, background, or other details. The Wyeth Center also included works by N. C. Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth as well as archival material such as newspaper and magazine articles about the Wyeths.
We enjoyed our visit to this museum. A visit to its site http://www.farnsworthmuseum.org/current-exhibitions will provide pictures.
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