This summer, Carnegie Museum of Art will be presenting the third installment of the 2-Minute Film Festival.  The festival is always one of our favorite events, bringing in crowds of people to the museum’s outdoor Sculpture Court  to see how much creativity can be fit into 120 seconds.  This year’s theme, in keeping with the upcoming International, is “At Play,” and in addition to the outdoor screening we will be offering a number of playful activities as a part of our monthly Culture Club series, giving each visitor the opportunity to make their own short film.  The event will take place on Thursday, July 18, so mark your calendars!

You are invited to submit your most creative, most innovative, briefest video engaging in some way with the notion of play to the 2MFF.  Each selected entry will eligible for People’s Choice and Juror’s Choice prizes, and for the first time this year, films chosen for the festival screening will also be made available on the 2MFF website, where visitors will be able to vote for their favorite prior to the event. The deadline for submissions is Friday, June 21, 2013.

If you can’t wait until July to watch some short films, we will be making promotional  6-second videos for the event and posting them on Vine.  Be sure to follow us, and submit your own Vine using hashtag #2MFF.

Philip Leers, Senior Research Associate
Time-Based Media Collection, Carnegie Museum of Art

From today’s perspective, George Sauter’s The Bridal Morning is only one among innumerable paintings showing a female nude. It depicts a standing female from behind who is being assisted by two other women as she gets dressed for her wedding. But in 1909 the public response to the work was greatly divided. The painting, which received second prize at the Carnegie Institute in the 1909 exhibition, aroused a huge controversy ranging from praise to condemnation.

This controversy was not limited to Pittsburgh. Newspapers from the time confirm a lively debate being waged nationwide and even abroad. According to the reports, thousands traveled to see the painting. American Art News gave an account of more than 29,000 people who visited the galleries during the first two days—crowds must have poured in a steady stream. Up to 5,000 people at a time were estimated in the first days of the exhibition. Two weeks later, admissions had passed 50,000 and finally reached 105,000 until the closing at the end of June. The International—then called the Annual Exhibition—was declared the most successful exhibition in America and was dubbed the “Only American Salon” in the press.

It is reported that people were mostly attracted to get a glimpse of the bride, but ultimately spent many hours in and around the museum. A remarkable article in the Pittsburgh Leader newspaper on May 11 gives a humorous account of the renowned clergyman Charles Henry Parkhurst visiting the exhibition. This New York reformer was supposed to be shocked by the content of the picture, but he simply passed by. Questioned about his thoughts he answered: “Huh—her mother ought to take her home.” The press covered the controversy wryly, even recommending several extraordinary coverings for the bride.

Sauter himself responded with a letter to John W. Beatty, then Director of the Carnegie Institute, which was reprinted in Pittsburgh’s Bulletin on June 1:

From newspaper sent to me, I gather that there is a grave misunderstanding in the mind of the public in Pittsburg as to the meaning of the picture. By this time you will know much more about it than I do. [...] “The Bridal Morning” is a symbolic picture; it has nothing to do with an individual ceremony in this or any other country or of any particular period. It is universal and intended to embody an idea expressed through form and color. It represents the morning of joy, sorrow and anxiety in the life of a woman. The day when she enters into her real mission in life to become the mother of a race. [...] It is the morning of life ― springtime. The future of the bride is full of hope and promise ― suggested by the joyous coloring and sunlight.

Prior to Sauter’s painting, the news reports on the International were predominantly moderate reviews concerning the selection of paintings, and they typically covered the formalities of the opening ceremonies, visiting celebrities, and records of the speeches. The first time an individual work came into focus, Gaston La Touche’s The Bath in 1907, was also the result of its nude subject. But the agitation surrounding The Bridal Morning was exceptional during the first decades of the exhibition.

Art historian Albert Boime stated in his article “George Sauter and the Bridal Morning“ (The American Art Journal) that the attention given the painting in the United States was even comparable to Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, shown during the 1863 Salon des refusés in Paris. But Boime also noted that “the painting could hardly have been indicted as a subversive aesthetic experiment in 1909,” like the Manet. Boime investigated the unanticipated response to the picture and asserted that a “profound sadness and breathtaking stillness” pervades the work. Along with remarkable illumination, the painting also reveals a “highly original symbolic approach.” Boime situated the public’s irritation somewhere in between this unexpected combination of allegory and modernity. Though Sauter insists this is a sanctified wedding scene, for many viewers the melancholy tone of the image could convey tragedy.

George Sauter, who is widely unknown today, was born in Rettenbach, Germany, in 1866. He moved to London in 1889 where he married Lilian Galsworthy and was introduced to a circle of British artists including James McNeill Whistler, James Guthrie, and others. He participated in establishing the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, for which he served as Honorary Secretary during Whistler’s Presidency (1898–1903). Although Sauter never became a British citizen, he became known as a British painter. He painted portraits and landscapes, working largely in oil on canvas, and also produced lithographs. Having maintained his German citizenship, he was interned during WW I and later repatriated to Germany, where he died in 1937.

Nicola Schroeder is a German art historian currently living in Pittsburgh and working on the archive of the Carnegie International.

The Carnegie Museum of Art shares a massive building with both the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Library. One of my favorite things to do is to walk through the art museum’s massive Hall of Architecture and use my employee badge to open a small dark door in the back corner and then suddenly appear in the middle of a bustling public library. A few steps away, nestled in a cozy corner of the very user-friendly first floor, is the Zine Collection. There are always teenagers and others reading the zines. I love encountering these DIY, subversive, weird, brilliant little publications in the middle of the library. The collection is overseen by Jude Vachon, who does all sorts of good things with zines and art around town. Here’s a nice piece she wrote for the Post-Gazette about the library.

Next time you’re at the museum, don’t miss the zines next door.

Are we the only art museum in the world building a playground? Maybe, maybe not, but hey, it started as a wild idea or serious joke (or both) and now kids play out there! We are still puzzled that it happened. I know that you know that it isn’t enough to just have an idea. It needed the thing itself—the Lozziwurm as invented in 1972 by Swiss artist and designer Yvan Pestalozzi. Which isn’t enough either.

It needed Lynn Zelevansky, our visionary director, and the great enthusiasm of Marilyn Russell, our chair and curator for education, and the generosity of Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, co-chairs of the Friends of the 2013 Carnegie International. But it needed even more than that, it needed the women and men on the ground, Rob Thompson of Terra Design Studio, the crew from Plantscape Inc. and from Technique Architectural Products, and Knoepfel Kunststoffe in Switzerland; it needed Carnegie Museum’s of Art John Lyon, Jeff Lovett, Hannah Silbert, Tony Young, and super MC of organization Sarah Minnaert. Still not enough though—because what’s a play sculpture without children? Well, they came, saw, and conquered it. Last Saturday, hundreds of them! And yes, this is part of The Playground Project of the 2013 Carnegie International opening on October 4, 5, and 6, 2013.

The jawbone of a Nicaraguan pig, scissors touched by Kim Il-Sung, a cat staring at you from a Lawrenceville window…. just a taste of the many inspirations shared by presenting artists at the SIX x ATE: Vegetable event last Monday. The SIX x ATE series is an ongoing themed dinner and lecture event promoting a more interdisciplinary arts community in Pittsburgh. The series began in the summer of 2012 at the 2013 Carnegie International apartment before moving to other sites, including the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Bar Marco. For each dinner, six artists and one cuisinier are asked to present work on a theme. The artists present for a few minutes throughout the night, as guests (a mixture of arts professionals and others connected to the theme) enjoy tasty treats, meet new people, and share ideas.

Monday’s event featured the artists of CSA PGH: Kim Beck, David Bernabo, Lenka Clayton, William Earl Kofmehl III, Alexi Morrissey, and Ed Panar. The CSA PGH project is based on the model created by Minneapolis’ Springboard for the Arts and is supported by the Sprout Fund and Fractured Atlas. Similar to the boxes of fruit and vegetables that one might get from a local farm as an agricultural CSA, the CSA PGH will create “shares” of art to feed the public’s cultural appetite. Each artist will create 50 editions, which will be packaged into 50 shares for the public. These will go on sale April 30th on www.CSAPGH.com, where you can also find more information about the project and the artists.

Guests of SIX x ATE: Vegetable also had a special treat from Tina, Daniel, and Dan. Their dramatic reading of the 2013 Carnegie International press release with visualization provided by Pinterest moved the audience to tears, or at least chuckles.

For more information on SIX x ATE or to subscribe to the mailing list, visit www.caseywhat.com.

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Casey Droege was raised by two artists and a mime. Their incessant side hustles, ranging from chimney sweep to insurance sales, created the time management monster/slightly organized tornado that is Casey. And while her mother made it clear to her that she should go into computers, she now lives and works as an artist using language to objectify the subjective.

(Photos: Heather Mull)

Check this, wherever you are! Tim Abdellah’s blog on “music from Moroccan cassettes that is, to the best of my knowledge, not available outside of Morocco. It is shared here to spread the appreciation of Moroccan music and artists.”

2013 Carnegie International October 5, 2013–March 16, 2014 carnegieinternational.org

Ei Arakawa/Henning Bohl, Phyllida Barlow, Yael Bartana, Sadie Benning, Bidoun Library, The Collection, Nicole Eisenman, Lara Favaretto, Vincent Fecteau, Rodney Graham, Guo Fengyi, Wade Guyton, Rokni Haerizadeh, He An, Amar Kanwar, Dinh Q. Lê, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Sarah Lucas, Tobias Madison, Zanele Muholi, Paulina Olowska, The Playground Project, Pedro Reyes, Kamran Shirdel, Gabriel Sierra, Taryn Simon, Frances Stark, Joel Sternfeld, Mladen Stilinović, Zoe Strauss, Henry Taylor, Tezuka Architects, Transformazium, Erika Verzutti, Joseph Yoakum. More information

Tumblr — Pinterest — Carnegie Museum of Art

Chris Beauregard, 2013 (Photo: Travis Snyder)

Brandon Boan, 2013 (Photo: Jason Cohn)

Apartment Event #11: Chris Beauregard and Brandon Boan

Recently the 2013 Carnegie International apartment hosted an evening of experimentation by Chris Beauregard and Brandon Boan. Both artists are know in Pittsburgh primarily as sculptors; Boan for his contribution to the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial of curious casts exploring interstitial spaces and detritus found in the basement of the Carnegie Museum of Art, and Beauregard for his 2012 solo show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, which presented carefully rendered yet violently toned objects intertwining themes of Italian Futurism, Gialo, and Cult Cinema. Recently Beauregard and Boan have been attending to the intersections between object making and performance, and their new work for this event presented two different approaches to sculptural gestures of accumulation.

Entering the apartment visitors were met by Boan, dapper in a three-piece suit and wielding an enormous old CU-5 Polaroid camera, originally used for forensic and fingerprint photography. Boan politely asked that each person through the door present their teeth for documentation, and the resulting polaroids were beamed on to the 44th street-facing windows using an opaque projector. Any American with dental insurance (or without, as is more often the case) can attest to the fact that showing one’s teeth is not the same as smiling. This became ever more apparent over the course of the evening as the accumulating grins came to resemble a manically held group rictus and Boan’s collection revealed itself to be a sinister study of social nicety; mobile vulgus.

In the kitchen, Chris Beauregard worked over a small high-powered stove, cooking up batches of sugar, corn syrup, and red food dye; a mixture that, when heated to extreme temperatures becomes glass candy, and also happens to be the same recipe commonly used to make fake blood in films (a fact that he has employed in past work, such as Bloody Axis, 2012). In a gesture recalling Richard Serra’s early lead toss works, once the blood/candy had reached a temperature of 320 degrees Fahrenheit, Beauregard used a large steel ladle to hurl it into a bucket of ice cold water, where it instantly hardened. The resulting forms were gingerly removed from the bucket and placed on a light table to be admired and sampled by visitors. These organically vulgar, delicately filigreed compositions of freeze-framed blood splatter captured  the explosive moment in a film when the squib (a small explosive pouched used to simulate gunshot wounds) is deployed.

Apartment Event #12: Mark Dion and Columbia University MFAs

Another recent apartment event brought together MFA students from both Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and New York’s Columbia University for an evening of pizza, beer, and artist presentations. The Columbians had come to town on a field trip with their mentor Mark Dion—an alumnus of the 99/00 Carnegie International and a resident of southeastern Pennsylvania, where he and his family make their home at Mildred’s Lane, a “contemporary art complex(ity)” in the upper Delaware River Valley. The next morning, after a few church sales and a hearty breakfast at the Quiet Storm, we took a tour of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. Dion was eager to show his mentees the unique institutional model that houses such distinct elements as a collection of gems and minerals under the same roof as a gallery of Renaissance painting. What a gem!

During some archival research for the upcoming re-installation of the International’s collection, I came across an unlabeled black-and-white photograph (top). After some some further digging it became apparent that the picture represents a highlight in the early history of both the exhibition and Major League Baseball. The photo features a huge painted billboard which bears an image of Pittsburgh Pirates fans packed into the stands at Exposition Park and is flanked by two inscriptions: PRESIDENT TAFT APPLAUDING WAGNER’S TWO-BAGGER MAY 29, 1909 and WELCOME MR. PRESIDENT FOUNDER’S DAY MAY 2, 1910. The painting on the board was a reproduction of a photo taken by Frank Bingaman first published in the Pittsburgh Press on May 30, 1909. The related article, “Taft Has Jolly Time at Ball Game but Upsets Plans,” detailed how William Howard Taft (an avid baseball fan) was “the first U.S. President to attend a Major League baseball game at a location other than Washington.” The game also gave Taft the chance to witness the legendary play of Pirate Honus Wagner, “The Flying Dutchman.” The Pirates lost this game 3–8 to the Chicago Cubs, but ultimately won the World Series later that year (thanks in large part to Wagner’s .339 batting average for the season).

President Taft remained in Pittsburgh for two days. Besides attending the Pirates game, he participated in the initiation of Memorial Fountain in Arsenal Park and visited the Allegheny County Club, confirmed by several photographs in the museum’s archives (below).

Just one year later, President Taft returned to Pittsburgh and again attended a Pirates game, which the Pirates won this time 5–2 against the Cubs on May 2, 1910. According to the press, Taft’s visit to Forbes Field was part of a tight schedule the President had to complete during his two-day stay in Pittsburgh. An article in the Pittsburgh Press read “Great Preparations Made to Entertain Head of Nation.” On the morning of May 2, 1910, thousands must have lined the streets in Oakland to catch a glimpse of the President residing in the Schenley Hotel and leaving for the Carnegie Music Hall later on. President Taft attended the museum’s Founder’s Day celebration, which coincided with the opening of the Annual Exhibition (now known as the Carnegie International). He gave a speech and officially opened the fourteenth International.

The following day the Pittsburgh Press article “President Gives Talk about Art“ described the atmosphere and decorations in the Carnegie Music Hall for the event and featured a summary of the President’s speech. The small annual booklet that typically contains the Founder’s Day summary included a report on the occurrences and a reproduction of the entire address. Here is an excerpt:

“The contrast necessarily impresses itself on one’s mind of  the enormous material development and progress of Pittsburgh on the one hand, with the smoke and the fire that indicate the great industries on every hand, and then the esthetic side of the community, that is shown and encouraged in this great temple of art, of music, and of learning….In the old countries the people—the common people—love art and music, and therefore, those who have the control of the government do not hesitate to use the proceeds of taxes to encourage those tastes, and to give the pleasure that music and art give to those people….In Europe you cannot help being impressed with the love of art of the common people. And while we may be pardoned in our first hundred years for not having spread wider that love because of the difficulties we had to encounter in settling this country and in making it prosperous in a material way, we certainly cannot as a people escape from severe condemnation if in the next hundred years we do not make great progress, great strides in the matter of the love of art, and its cultivation on every hand.”

In more recent news, Taft has recently been elected to join the Washington Nationals’ “Racing Presidents” Mascots.

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Nicola Schroeder is a German art historian currently living in Pittsburgh and working on the archive of the Carnegie International.

Also check this article about the Lawrencville Talks in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette