Enfilade

Press release (4 October 2013) from D. Giles:

Linda S. Ferber, The Coast and the Sea: Marine and Maritime Art in America (London: D. Giles Limited, 2013), 104 pages, ISBN 978-1907804311, $30 / £20.

The Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Florida, 25 January — 9 March 2014
The Baker Museum of Art, Naples, Florida, 19 April — 6 July 2014
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, January — May 2015
The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut, 6 June — 13 September 2015
The New York State Museum, Albany, New York, 24 October 2015 — 22 February 2016

A Southeast Prospect of the City of New York, ca. 1756–61. Oil on canvas. 38 x 72 1/2 in. (96.5 x 184.2 cm). Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

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The Coast and the Sea: Marine and Maritime Art in America will be published by D Giles Limited, in association with the New-York Historical Society, in December 2013. It is an appealing and colourful volume which presents over 50 of the best marine paintings and artifacts from the New-York Historical Society’s impressive maritime art collection.

The works range in date from 1750 to 1940, and are by eminent marine artists like Thomas Birch, John Frederick Kensett, and Charlton T. Chapman. Highlights include large format canvasses of famous sea battles, ships at work, portraits of heroic sea captains, dashing naval officers like James Gordon Bennett Jr. and pioneering merchants, such as the aptly named Preserved Fish of New York, prominent in shipping in the early 19th century. There are also maritime themed objects such as an engraved whale’s tooth from the late 19th century, and a silver presentation urn commemorating acts of bravery from the War of 1812. An essay by curator Linda S. Ferber places the works within their wider historical and cultural narrative.

The works are then arranged thematically rather than by artist or period; there is for example a chapter on the Anglo-Dutch tradition in American marine art: the War of 1812 with its great sea battles and heroes and romantic and idealized visions of the sea. A section on the merchant marine and maritime trade features paintings of major trading posts in and around the Pearl River Delta, including Hong Kong; some of these paintings were by a group of Chinese artists working in the European style specifically for the export market. There are views of the Hudson River and the great Port of New York, as well as Gilded Age nostalgia for the great age of sail, with its clipper ships and majestic wind-jammers.

Linda S. Ferber is Senior Art Historian, the New-York Historical Society.

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Note (added 1 August 2014) — The original version of this posting included only the first two exhibition venues.

For anyone with Richard Wilson on the mind, he turns up in Tate Britain’s ruin exhibition, too.

Ruin Lust
Tate Britain, London, 4 March — 18 May 2014

Curated by Brian Dillon, Emma Chambers, and Amy Concannon

Richard Wilson, The Inner Temple after the Fire of 4 January 1737, oil on canvas, 1737 (Tate Britain). The picture records the devastation caused by a fire that destroyed Crown-Office Row in the Inner Temple. The group in the centre includes Frederick, Prince of Wales (in blue, wearing the Garter star), who had sent fifty soldiers to help the firemen and later came to inspect the scene himself. More information is available here»

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Ruin Lust, an exhibition at Tate Britain from 4 March 2014, offers a guide to the mournful, thrilling, comic and perverse uses of ruins in art from the eighteenth century to the present day. The exhibition is the widest-ranging on the subject to date and includes over 100 works by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, John Martin, Eduardo Paolozzi, Rachel Whiteread, and Tacita Dean.

The exhibition begins in the midst of the craze for ruins that overtook artists, writers and architects in the eighteenth century. J.M.W. Turner and John Constable were among those who toured Britain in search of ruins and picturesque landscapes, producing works such as Turner’s Tintern Abbey: The Crossing and Chancel, Looking towards the East Window 1794 and Constable’s Sketch for ‘Hadleigh Castle’ c.1828–29.

This ruinous heritage has been revisited—and sometimes mocked—by later artists such as Keith Arnatt, who photographed the juxtaposition of historic and modern elements at picturesque sites for his deadpan series A.O.N.B. (Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) 1982–84 and John Latham whose sculpture Five Sisters Bing 1976, which was part of a project to turn post-industrial shale heaps in Scotland into monuments. Classical ruins have a continued presence in the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and John Stezaker. In works such as Keith Coventry’s Heygate Estate 1995 and Rachel Whiteread’s Demolished—B: Clapton Park Estate 1996, which shows the demolition of Hackney tower blocks, we see Modernist architectural dreams destroyed.

The exhibition explores ruination through both the slow picturesque decay and abrupt apocalypse. John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum 1822 recreates historical disaster while Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander 1872 shows a ruined London. The cracked dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance was a scene partly realised during the Blitz.

Ruin Lust will include work provoked by the wars of the twentieth century, including Graham Sutherland’s Devastation series 1940–41, which depicts the aftermath of the Blitz and Jane and Louise Wilson’s 2006 photographs of the Nazis’ defensive Atlantic Wall. Paul Nash’s photographs of surreal fragments in the 1930s and 40s, or Jon Savage’s images of a desolate London in the late 1970s show how artists also view ruins as zones of pure potential, where the world must be rebuilt or reimagined.

The exhibition will include rooms devoted to Tacita Dean and Gerard Byrne. Dean’s nostalgic film installation Kodak 2006 explores the ruin of the image, as the technology of 16 mm film becomes obsolescent. In 1984 and Beyond 2005–07, Byrne reimagines a future that might have been. The installation presents a re-enactment of a discussion, published in Playboy in 1963, in which science fiction writers—including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke—speculate about what the world might be like in 1984.

This transhistorical exhibition is curated by writer and critic Brian Dillon; Emma Chambers, Curator of Modern British Art; and Amy Concannon, Assistant Curator of British Art, 1790–1850. It will be accompanied by a book and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

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From Tate Britain’s bookshop:

Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust: Artists’ Fascination with Ruins from Turner to the Present Day (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 64 pages, ISBN: 978-1849763011, £10 / $22.

Why are we fascinated by ruins? They recall the glory of dead civilisations and the certain end of our own. They stand as monuments to historic disasters, but also provoke dreams about futures born from destruction and decay. Ruins are bleak but alluring reminders of our vulnerable place in time and space. For centuries, ruins have attracted artists: among them J.M.W. Turner, Gustave Doré, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Patrick Caulf eld, Tacita Dean, and Jane and Louise Wilson. Ruin Lust explores the history of this obsession, from the art of the picturesque in the eighteenth century, through the wreckage of two world wars, to contemporary artists complex attitudes to the ruins of the recent past.

Brian Dillon is a novelist, critic, and curator who has explored many ancient and modern ruins and written widely on the history of ruination in art and culture. His books include: Objects in this Mirror: Essays; Sanctuary; In the Dark Room; and Ruins, an anthology of artists and critics reflections on ruination. He is UK editor of Cabinet magazine and reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art.