Art Babble is a terrific site that promises to get even better, and probably rapidly.

Art Babble, the tagline for which is “Play Art Loud”, aggregates art related videos from a variety of sources, most notably museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Arts & Design, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Norman Rockwell Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Van Gogh Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; along with Public TV station KQED.

For the most part these seem to be high end, professionally made videos that delve into a variety of art subjects. I’ve only had chance to watch one full video so far, and perhaps I got lucky, but I found it fascinating, illuminating and nicely erudite without being stuffy or overly technical.

Research in progress: Van Gogh and contemporaries (images above), from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is a short in which a restorer from the museum examines a painting by Van Gogh and a painting by Monet side by side, utilizing a range of approaches, from naked eye to microscope to x-ray to ultraviolet, and explores similarities in their painting technique, the use of broken color and the choice to allow the ground to show through the brushstrokes to add to the color and texture of the painting.

if the other videos are of this quality, I’ll be looking for a lot of spare moments to return to the site.

You can view the list of videos by topic (”Channels”), by artist, by series or by the participating institution.

Wikipedia Loves Art is a combination photography contest and scavenger hunt with the intention of illustrating articles on the free encyclopedia with photographs of specific art objects from participating museums, taken by the contestants and released under a Creative Commons License.

There are participating museums in 5 states in the Northeastern US, as well as in Tennessee, Texas, Hawaii and California, and in the UK at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

According to Wikipedia:

“The project is coordinated by the Brooklyn Museum, with the participation of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Taft Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum. In all, there are 15 different museums and cultural institutions participating.”

Individuals or teams (up to ten people) register for participation at various museums and then shoot photographs (according to the rules of each individual museum, usually no flash, no tripods, and only from the permanent collection) of items that fit themes on a “Goal List”. These include themes suited to various galleries of the museum’s collections and a general topic of Valentine’s, the overall theme of the event.

Usually the photographer takes at least two photographs of an object, one to tag it with a note held up next to the object with the Goal List tag and object information, and another high quality image (or several) for potential use in the Wikipedia articles.

The contest takes place during the entire month of February, 2009 (hence the Valentine’s theme), and although the prizes are modest, such as tours of particular collections given by their curators, the contest sounds like a lot of fun for art lovers and photographers. You can go on your own or participate in a planned event with other photographers or groups.

The photographs get uploaded to the Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr Group, which also has notices of particular meet-ups (Brooklyn Museum today) and links to Goal Lists and registration.

The page also contains the shooting guidelines for each museum, the overall qualifications and the notice that eligible photographs must be released under the correct Creative Commons License. These guidelines are also on the main Wikipedia article along with links to individual Wikipedia pages about the participating institutions, which also often have their own pages devoted to the event.

Photographs will be selected from the entries and appropriate choices, judged for quality and appropriateness, will be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles, with credit to the photographer.

Even for those of us not participating, it should be interesting to watch the results at they are posted in the Flicker Group. Those currently posted are mostly from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and seem to be largely of sculpture and historic artifacts, but the event has just started.

They are also of mixed quality, some people are better photographers than others, and low light photography with a hand held camera is not that easy (having a camera with “Image Stabilzation” is helpful). The Smithsonian is probably the only museum that allows flash photographs of two dimensional artwork (though they really shouldn’t).

The event should yield some interesting results. I’m particularly looking forward to the posting of at least a few high-resolution photographs of paintings, like the Pissarro in the image above, top (larger version here, click “Original” at top for high-resolution version). I just can’t get enough of those.

The Wikipedia Loves Art combination photography contest and scavenger hunt runs through the end of February, 2009.

Even after that it should be worthwhile looking through the Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr Group.

[Via Eye Level]

Buried somewhere in the membership pages on the web sites of many small art museums and cultural centers in the U.S. and Canada, usually somewhere halfway down the page of museum membership levels, is a little perk that can sometimes make a higher level museum membership into a great deal.

Over 300 smaller, “regional” museums, most of them art museums or similar cultural institutions, have made agreements to offer reciprocal membership privileges to the members of other participating museums through the North American Reciprocal Museum Program (NARM).

If, like me, you’re an inveterate museum goer, and if, like me, you’ve discovered the treasures to be found in small regional art museums in the U.S., this can be a terrific deal, particularly if the museum you get your membership from does not ask for too high a membership level for access to the reciprocal agreement status.

There is a list of participating museums on the Greenville Museum site, that is linked to the sites of the other museums. You can find a museum you might be inclined to join and check out their membership pages for details on their required membership level for the “perk” of the NARM sticker on your membership card.

You don’t have to join a museum in your area, most museums will gladly accept members from other states (particularly these days), and the price of the membership level varies widely. Some ask over $300, others considerably less.

Each museum also usually has a brief description of the program and it’s benefits (and also usually offer additional membership benefits at the level required). Many of them offer a downloadable PDF of the participating museum list.

The best deal I’ve found is at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa, a museum I’m inclined to be a member of anyway. They only ask for a $100 “Donor Level” membership to get the NARM sticker added to your membership card.

You can look over the list of participating museums, calculate how often you’re likely to visit some of them, and see if the cost is worth it. For me it pays for itself a couple of times over, as there are a number of museums that I visit in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and New York that are on the list. If you’re in an area where travel to other regional museums is more difficult, it may not be as viable.

The reciprocal membership includes basic membership admission and gift shop discount privileges at the participating museums.

You may want to check the notes at the bottom of the list, however, as there are a few restrictions between certain museums (usually in the same area).

I like museum memberships anyway. They not only help support the museums and give you benefits like members’ previews and bookstore discounts, but they give you a sense of freedom about visiting frequently and dropping in on a whim, without reservations about spending enough time to make the cost of admission worthwhile.

Add to that the impetus to explore other museums on the list that are within reach or available when you travel, and you have a terrific bit of inspiration in your pocket in the form of the NARM sticker on your museum membership card.

(Image above, left to right: Brandywine River Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Sackler Gallery, Baltimore Art Museum, Montclair Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, Newark Museum, Laguna Art Museum.)

Those who have been reading Lines and Colors for a while will know that I have a particular fondness for many of the late 19th, early 20th Century painters referred to as “American Impressionists”. (I put the phrase in quotes because I doubt the painters ever referred to themselves in those terms.)

The Phillips Collection is a museum collection in Washington, D.C. that has strengths in that time period in both modern and Impressionist works from Europe and America.

A selection of American Impressionist paintings from the collection has been arranged into a traveling exhibit, and is currently on view as the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

The Oklahoma City Museum has an online feature that displays some of the paintings in the exhibit, with a voice over narration about the works and the artists.

The Phillips Collection site has a Timeline of American Art, and a list of American Art in the collection that you can view alphabetically with an image of each work.

In many cases, like Childe Hassam’s beautiful painting of Washington Arch, Spring (image above), there is a more extensive feature and a Zoomable version of the image (also see my post on Childe Hassam).

In addition to Hassam, the exhibit includes works by Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twatchman, Julian Alden Weir, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Helen Turner and Gifford Beal. I was pleased to see that some of the “Pennsylvania Impressionists” were included, like William Lathrop, John Folinsbee and Robert Spencer. There is also at least one piece by George Inness, though he was not an Impressionist painter.

American Impressionism from the Phillips Collection is on view at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art until January 18, 2009.

The exhibit will then travel to the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach Florida from March 13 to April 15, 2009; and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe from June 5 to September 13, 2009.

There is a 192 page book accompanying the exhibit, American Impressionists: Painters of Light and the Modern Landscape by Susan Behrends Frank, though it doesn’t seem to be in stock from Amazon; it should be available at the exhibit in all of the locations.

[Via Art Knowledge News]

There’s a tendency to think of landscape painting as primarily a summer activity, or at least one of diminished interest in the Winter, both because of the inconvenience of painting in the cold, and the expectation of less color in the winter landscape.

Quite to the contrary, many painters and illustrators found great subjects in winter’s different range of colors and subjects, and some took particular delight in images of winter; and illustrators of course have a long tradition of portraying the Christmas holiday.

For those in the area of southeastern Pennsylvania, there is a small but delightful show at the Brandywine River Museum of works from the permanent collection showcasing winter scenes and images of Christmas, that runs until january 11, 2009.

The show includes prints by cartoonist Thomas Nast, who was in many was responsible for the image of St. Nicholas as a bearded, pipe smoking fellow with a sack of toys over his shoulder; as well as N.C. Wyeth’s colorful take on Kris Kringle (above, left) which owes more to J.C. Leyendecker’s interpretation of the Jolly One (see my post on Illustrators Visions of Santa Claus).

N.C. Wyeth is nicely represented by several of his lesser known landscape paintings, and these are complimented by large, infrequently seen works in the Brandywine’s collection by Pennsylvania Impressionists Elmer Schofield and Edward Redfield.

The show’s mix of illustration and gallery art includes prints by Winslow Homer and paintings by Ashcan School painter Everett Shinn, as well as illustrations by F.O.C. Darley, Frank X. Leyendecker (J.C. Leyendecker’s underappreciated brother), Maxfield Parrish and Jessie Wilcox Smith.

Visitors to the museum can supplement their enjoyment of the show’s theme with other relevant pieces on view in other galleries, like Howard Pyle’s wintertime historical illustrations, N.C. Wyeth’s beautiful winter-themed illustrations for The Black Arrow (above, right) and son Andrew Wyeth’s winter scenes of the Brandywine Valley.

For those not in the area, you might follow some of the links above, as well as looking into paintings by American artists who loved to paint in winter, like Edward Redfield and Fern Coppage (see my post on Fern Coppedge and George Gardner Symons, as well as my recent post on John F. Carlson).

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that I have a particular fondness for painters at the edges of French Impressionism, both in terms of precursors to the Impressionist style and a range of other painters who were influenced by that style but took it in somewhat different directions, most notably the painters who are labeled “American Impressionists”.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to take in a new exhibition at The Newark Museum in New Jersey that showcases works in all three categories.

Paths to Impressionism, French and American Landscape Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum opens with one of Monet’s paintings of waterlillies and features paintings from Impressionist precursors in the Barbizon School and other early exponents of en plein air landscape painting, like Camile Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Constant Troyon, Julien Dupre, Eugene Boudin (who was directly influential on Claude Monet) and Georges Michel, who was one of the first French landscape painters to make a regular practice of painting on location.

The show then moves into American painters influenced by the Barbizon school, like Joseph H. Greenwood, Jervis McEntee, John Francis Murphy and Dwight Williem Tyron. A highlight is a series of stunning small landscapes (and a few larger ones) by George Inness, who grew up in Newark and later settled in nearby Montclair, New Jersey.

As you progress through the exhibit it then presents you with a few paintings by French Impressionists, notably Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro (also here); and it moves into a gallery of American Impressionist painters for a grand finale that includes a number of striking paintings by Childe Hassam, a beautiful Sargent landscape and a small jewel by Luther Van Gorden.

It’s a beautiful show, and while not large by blockbuster museum exhibit standards, is complete enough within itself to give a very nice overview of the influences leading to and away from the nexus of artistic styles known as Impressionism.

The exhibit is nicely complimented by another exhibit at the Newark Museum called Small by Sublime: Intimate Views by Durand, Bierstadt and Inness, featuring works from the Hudson River School and Tonalist movement in the U.S; and for those like me who are visiting the Newark Museum for the first time, can be supplemented with a number of pieces to be found in the permanent collection, including landscapes by Childe Hassam and one of my favorites by Pennsylvania Impressionist Daniel Garber.

(When in the Newark Museum’s permanent collection, be prepared to be assaulted at least once by the museum’s poorly implemented proximity alarms, that hoot and screech long after you’ve removed your nose from the painting, giving you no indication of how close is too close, and leaving the poor guards to exasperatedly ask someone to move back every few minutes. Somebody at the museum needs to re-think this — mark the floor and/or set the alarms to cease as soon as the offending nose is back far enough from the painting. Fortunately, this only seems to be in place in the permanent collection, and doesn’t mar your enjoyment of the featured exhibit.)

Paths to Impressionism was organized by the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 2004, and traveled to The Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, and possibly other regional museums, before it’s current run in Newark (the page devoted to the exhibition on the Worcester Art Museum site is not up-to-date with the exhibition’s schedule). I don’t know where, if anywhere, it goes from here.

Paths to Impressionism, French and American Landscape Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum is at the Newark Museum until January 4, 2009. There is a catalog accompanying the exhibiton.

(Image above: Julien Dupre, Luther Van Gorden, George Inness, John Singer Sargent, Camille Pissarro, Childe Hassam)

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where I had the privilege of studying as a painting major, is the oldest art school in the United States. Modeled after the academic schools of Europe, it has a long tradition of training American artists and a correspondingly long history of collecting American art for its associated museum.

The school and museum share a web site, which has just been completely redesigned and rearranged, and it is now much easier to browse the museum’s extraordinary collection. The collection is particularly rich in beautiful 19th Century paintings.

You can search for individual artists, view their paintings, sculpture or works on paper separately, or view all works together. You can also simply browse the collection as a whole by the same criteria, a delightful exercise that will lead you to unexpected treasures. In addition you can browse by artist, medium or period.

My one complaint (as usual) is the size of the images. There are larger versions associated with most of the works, and though adequate for getting a feeling for the work, still much smaller than they need to be for real appreciation. Hopefully that will be supplemented with additional images or some kind of image zooming feature in the future.

In the meanwhile, once you find a piece you like, you can search the web for additional images or information on that artist (here’s a great new visual search engine, SearchMe, that has an interface like the Mac “Cover Flow” system used on their new OS and on the iPhone/iPod Touch, and makes visual browsing more efficient).

Even better, of course, if you have the option, is to visit the Academy here in Philadelphia, where they always have a superb selection form the permanent collection on display in the beautiful Furness building.

(Images above: Cecilia Beaux, George Inness, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, John White Alexander, Charles Courtney Curran, John Sloan. Links are to my previous posts on those artists.)

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, New York and Boston were major centers of American Impressionism. These were American artists who had traveled to Europe and encountered the French Impressionists and their daring new approach to painting, or had been impressed by their work in exhibits mounted in the U.S., and incorporated some of their techniques into heir own uniquely American approach to painting.

This influence was less evident here in Philadelphia, the third major East Coast art center of the time, perhaps because of the traditional values emphasized by the dominant figure of Thomas Eakins and his followers at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Instead, New Hope, Pennsylvania, a small town in nearby Bucks County, became the focal point for the group painters who are now known as the Pennsylvania Impressionists, as I mentioned in my article on New Hope, PA and Lambertville, NJ from last year.

For these painters, New Hope and the surrounding area became their own Giverny, their artist colony on the river, akin to the American Impressionist centers in Cos Cobb and Old Lyme Connecticut (see my post on Impressionist Giverny: American Painters in France, 1885-1915).

The James A. Michener Art Museum, in Doylestown, which has one of the most important collections of Pennsylvania Impressionist works, has mounted an exhibit in their smaller satellite museum in New Hope called Art and the River.

The exhibit focuses on interpretations of the Delaware River and related waterways in the area of the New Hope colony and features works from a number of the major figures of Pennsylvania Impressionism, including Daniel Garber, Edward Redfield, William Lathrop, Harry Leith-Ross, George Sotter and Fern Coppedge, as well as some less well known artists like Kenneth Newmaker (see my previous posts about Daniel Garber and Fern Coppedge).

The exhibit also features work from the New Hope modernist painters from the 1930’s and a selection of contemporary Bucks County artists like Paul Matthews, Daniel Anthonisen, Jan Lipes and Robert Beck and several others.

The museum has a page and press release about the exhibit, but they contain few images. The Michener does have a long list of articles about Bucks County Artists, with four of five images for each. Unfortunately, these are rather small. You can supplement them with somewhat larger images from commercial print supplier Encore Editions, which has a fairly large catalog of Pennsylvania Impressionists. I’ve linked to a few highlights below, and I plan to feature many of these artists in more detail in future posts.

I’ll also mention an excellent and beautiful book, Pennsylvania Impressionism, edited by Brian H. Peterson, who is Senior Curator at the Michener. There is also a large and beautiful, though perhaps less scholarly definitive book, New Hope for American Art, published by Jim’s of Lambertville, a local gallery that specializes in Pennsylvania Impressionist works, and written by the gallery’s owner, Jim Alterman. The gallery is a co-sponsor of the Art and the River exhibit. I had a chance to stop by the gallery on this visit, and was duly impressed with their selection of Pennsylvania Impressionist artists.

Though the exhibit is not large, it’s extensive enough to give a nice cross section of some of the Pennsylvania Impressionists, as well as some contemporary painters who have found a connection, and source of inspiration, in the same place on the river.

Art and the River at James A. Michener Art Museum runs until until October 5, 2008.

(Image above: Edward Redfield, Harry Leith-Ross, Daniel Garber, Kenneth Newmaker)

Contrary to to the dreary picture that Hollywood and popular culture sometimes like to paint of tortured, misunderstood loners living lives of desperation “for the sake of their art”, artists are usually quite social, and often like to congregate with other artists, particularly those who share their viewpoints on artistic direction.

This seems to have been particularly true about artists who paint en plein air (i.e. outdoors), whose commonality often calls them to live in the same communities, forming artist “colonies”. These were usually in rural areas that allowed the artists to paint the countryside and still have access to a major city to sell their work. You can see most of them developing as the result of one artist discovering a particularly good spot and spreading the word (”You must come and look! The light is wonderful and the tavern owner extends credit!”)

This practice of like minded artists leaving the city for village life was evident in Barbizon, not far from Paris, where the progenitors of French Impressionism gathered to paint in the Forest of Fontainbleau. One of them, Caude Monet, would later in his life settle in a small village on the other side of Paris called Giverny, along the banks of the Seine. The force of his personality and his remarkable skills as a painter would eventually form the nucleus of a colony there

The colony at Giverny was notable also for its transient residents, artists like John Singer Sargent who would come to see the great painter and his milieu. American artists in particular seemed attracted to Giverny, as the passion for painting in the Impressionist style spread through the East Coast art centers of Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

These artists would return impressed not only with the painting styles of their French counterparts, but with the idyllic situation of art colony village life outside the cities, and would soon form their own versions.

This happened across Europe; and in the U.S., Artists from Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts bought farms in New Hope, on the edge of the Delaware River; those from Boston and New York found ideal settings in places like Shinnecock, New York and in Cos Cob and Old Lyme Connecticut. Eventually, a number of artists would travel west to the newly accessible territory of California, starting the California school of plein air painting in places like Carmel and Laguna Beach.

Old Lyme, Connecticut would retain strong ties to Giverny, with many artists, including Willard Metcalf, staying for long periods in both places. Old Lyme sometimes gets tagged as the “American Giverny” and the Florence Griswold boardinghouse there, where many of the artists congregated, is now a museum.

When I visited Giverny in 2002, both to see they beautiful countryside along the Seine, and the house and gardens of Monet, which have been restored to a beautiful approximation of their original state based on photographs and his own paintings, I was surprised to find a small museum devoted to American Art in the heart of French Impressioninst territory, the Musée d’art Américain (the link is to the English version of the site, French and other languages are accessible at the lower right of the page).

That museum, which is administered by the Terra Fondation for American Art, currently has an exhibition of over 50 of the works from its collection on exhibit at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

The exhibition features work by John Leslie Breck, Frederick MacMonnies, Theodore Robinson, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Lilla Cabot Perry, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Dawson-Dawson Watkins, and Will H. Low, and includes the painting above, The Wedding March, by Theodore Robinson, which shows the close ties of Old Lyme to Giverny in the wedding of American artist Theodore Butler to Monet’s stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé.

Unfortunately, the Florence Griswold Museum doesn’t have much in the way of images on their site (and the search feature for their own collection seems to be having problems), but the Terra Foundation has a nicely searchable collection online and features zoomable images. The Terra Collection includes a number of paintings on extended loan to the Art Institute of Chicago as well as other exhibitions.

The exhibit, Impressionist Giverny: American Painters in France, 1885-1915, runs until July 27, 2008, and will then move to Albany, New York to the Albany Institute of History and Art form August 23 to January 3, 2009.

[Link via Art Knowledge News]

I’ve written before in the course of other posts about the pleasures, and treasures, to be found in small art museums.

By small, I mean compared to the large museums we associate with major metropolitan areas. These smaller museums are sometimes in those same cities, but more often are in smaller cities or towns.

I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting the Montclair Museum in Montclair, New Jersey, about 30 miles outside of New York (correction: 17 miles, see this post’s comments).

Most small museums, and many larger ones, have their origin as the collection of an individual. In this case museum co-founder William T. Evans started the ball rolling with a donation of 36 paintings to the Municipal Art Commission of Montclair in 1909. The museum has a short history on its web site that is a textbook case in how art museums like this are established.

The museum’s collection now includes pieces by John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase (above, lower right), Edmund Tarbell, J. Alden Weir and Thomas Eakins (above, top right); as well as strong pieces from the Hudson River School, represented by Thomas Cole, Jasper Cropsey and a particularly striking work by Ashser B. Durand, Early Morning at Cold Spring (image above, top left).

I was impressed in the latter painting, not only by Durand’s skill at rendering large scale subjects, filling them with lush detail and moving your eye around the canvas as if on a guided tour, but also by the contrast between his detailed passages, areas of suggested detail and other areas in which he confidently executed large shapes with broad, painterly brushstrokes. After having recently seen large scale landscapes by Corot and other painters of the Barbizon School, I couldn’t help by draw comparisons.

The museum also has items from Surrealism (Man Ray’s hilarious Indestructible Object), Modernism, Abstract Expressionism and 20th century works by African-American artists.

The real star of the collection, though, is a dedicated gallery containing nine works by Montclair’s native son, George Inness, who not only settled in Montclair, but painted many of his well known works there.

The paintings in the collection cover a good range of the artist’s career and life and are arranged around the gallery chronologically. You can follow his progress from his early 20’s (at which point he looked more like a junior member of the Hudson River School than his mature self), through a developing period in which he was obviously highly skilled and accomplished at handling large scale, complex landscapes in a straightforward and painterly manner, deftly handling intricate detail in the process (Delaware Water Gap, image above, bottom left), to the more recognizable paintings of his mid and later career, in which he exhibited the stylized rendering he is noted for (the only style of Inness painting I have encountered in other museums.) The paintings continue up to just a couple of years before Inness’ death, in which his images dissolve into a poetic haze of tonalist color, and what appear to be indistinct smears of color at close range magically transform into representational images at a distance.

This is a remarkable little gallery of his work, and if you appreciate Inness, is worth a visit to the museum on its own. Combined with the museum’s other treasures, it’s a noteworthy destination if you’re in the New York area.

Another sharp contrast between museums like this and the huge scale museums in major cities is the comfortable atmosphere and warm personal approach. We met a few members of the museum staff and one of the new volunteers, and found them charming, friendly and obviously proud of the treasures their museum had to offer.