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Shimamoto Shozo (Japanese, born 1928), Untitled, 1961, Oil and sand on canvas, Roland Gibson Gallery: Gift of Noriko Yamamoto and Dr. Fred Prince.

Spencer Museum of Art
The University of Kansas
1301 Mississippi Street
Lawrence
785-864-4710
Kress Gallery
Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s
March 1-May 18, 2008

Resounding Spirit traces pioneering abstract art practice of Japanese artists from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, a period characterized by innovation and growing awareness of international currents in the art world. Abstract painting — one of the most significant artistic movements of the 20th century — was a worldwide phenomenon. At the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan in 1952, Japanese artists became avid participants in avant-garde movements around the world, often creating Japanese manifestations. Groups of artists such as Gutai (embodiment) not only flouted previously held notions of art, but transgressed conventional ideas of practice. For instance, Gutai artist Shiraga Kazuo abandoned the brush, producing painting using only bare hands and feet. Ideas closely associated with abstract expressionism, practiced by New York artists like de Kooning and Pollock, inspired a rethinking of traditional calligraphy which engendered the gestural, illegible paintings known as “abstracted calligraphy.”

This exhibition features more than 50 paintings and works on paper, including internationally respected members of Gutai; New-York based artists such as Kenzo Okada, known for his subdued tones and drifting forms; and representative artwork from other well-known international movements such as Art informel, Fluxus, Op, and Pop art. Complementing the exhibition is an installation of a variety of postwar Japanese prints and ceramics in Spencer's Asia Gallery, and the Central Court features Western art selections from the controversial 1960s, all drawn from the Spencer collection. Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s was organized by Gibson Gallery, SUNY Potsdam, New York. Kris Ercums, SMA Curator of Asian Art, is coordinating Resounding Spirit for the Spencer, and organizing the complementary Asia Gallery exhibition. Lara Kuykendall, European and American Art intern, is organizing the display in the Central Court.

Spencer Museum
of Art
The University
of Kansas
1301 Mississippi Street
Lawrence
785-864-4710
Central Court
Make a Mark:
Art of the 1960s
March 1-
June 1, 2008

Drawn from the Spencer’s permanent collection, Make a Mark: Art of the 1960s shows the many approaches to color, form, gesture, and layering that occupied artists in this pivotal decade. All of these artistic traits owe a debt to earlier 20th-century modernism, from Kandinsky’s vibrant abstractions to Picasso’s collages and Jackson Pollock’s dripping. Artists like Grace Hartigan and Sam Francis continued to allow the spontaneous process introduced earlier in the century to influence their colorful results. Yet, during the 1960s the modernist tendencies toward personal expression and originality were often called into question as the skepticism of postmodernism began to ferment. Op artists like Richard Anuszkiewicz and Jesús Rafael Soto carefully calculated their compositions to prompt disorientating visual and spatial experiences for the viewer, while Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and others strove for coolness and objectivity in their techniques and forms. However, even when the process of mark-making is reduced to impersonal painted stripes or abstract layering of colors to form a screen-printed portrait, the conceptual presence of the creator still registers. Whether working in Op, Pop, Minimalist or Expressionist modes, 1960s artists continued to “make marks” in their art and in culture at large that have resonated ever since.

This exhibition is organized by Spencer Museum of Art European and American Art Intern Lara Kuykendall in conjunction with the exhibition Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s.

Sam Francis (1923-1994, born San Mateo, California; died Santa Monica, California, active United States), untitled, Detail, 1964, Color lithograph, Gift of W.M. Ittmann Jr., 1964.0004.

Hagiwara Hideo (1913-2007, born Kofu, Yamanashi; active Japan), Somme Day, 1959, Color woodcut,Anonymous gift, 1982.0401.

Spencer Museum
of Art
The University
of Kansas
1301 Mississippi Street
Lawrence
785-864-4710
Asian Gallery
Japan
Re-imagined / Post-war Art
March 6-
June 1, 2008

Many Japanese in the wake of World War II turned to a deep examination of Japanese history, tradition and society as both a means for self-critique and cultural regeneration. This “re-imagining” of Japan during the postwar period took on many forms. Some artists sought to celebrate the “Japanese spirit,” depicting it in fresh, contemporary idioms as a way of granting it universal appeal. For others remembering the past was part of a critical investigation of Japanese society. New developments in the international art scene like Pop and conceptualism offered other Japanese artists a fresh means of approaching society through art. Presenting many never-before exhibited prints and ceramics from the Spencer’s collection, Japan Re-imagined / Post-war Art explores the multiple ways in which Japanese artists during the later half of the twentieth century negotiated issues like culture, memory, time and space.

This exhibition is organized by Kris Ercums, Asian art curator, in conjunction with the exhibition Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s.

Ikeda Masuo (1934-1997, born Manchuria, China; died Tokyo, Japan), Untitled, 1968 color lithograph, Museum purchase: State funds, 1972.0267.

Spencer Museum of Art
The University of Kansas
1301 Mississippi Street
Lawrence
785-864-4710
South Balcony Gallery
El Lissitzky:
Futurist Portfolios
February 2 - May 18, 2008

The influential Russian abstract painter, designer, teacher and graphic artist, El (Lazar) Morduchovitch Lissitzky (1890-1941) was the first of his generation to visualize a new radical geometry of space and movement that blurred the boundaries of architecture, painting, and typography.

This exhibition features two complete sets of El Lissitzky’s futuristic portfolios commissioned by the Kestner Society in 1923, 20 prints in all. His Proun (the Latin acronym for “design for the confirmation of the new”) portfolio was intended as a prototype for future mechanical and architectural designs while Victory over the Sun commemorates Kasimir Malevich’s 1913 futurist opera of the same name. Among the greatest achievements in the graphic arts of the 20th century, these portfolios served to establish Lissitzky’s reputation as a master of modern design.

Between 1923 and 1928, El Lissitzky transformed his Prouns into a three dimensional experience, building so-called “abstract rooms.” Lissitzky’s visionary designs for wall-sized abstractions will inspire the design and installation of a Proun room at each venue of the exhibition. Thanks to the careful study and interpretation of contemporary artist Hideyo Okamura, who will paint and construct his designs on site, visitors will be able to experience the gravity-defying sensation of El Lissitzky’s geometric shapes and linear vectors wrapping around corners and launching to the ceiling.

Lissitzky was born on November 23, 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 km southeast of Smolensk, former Russian Empire. During his childhood, he lived and studied in the city of Vitebsk, now part of Belarus, and later spent 10 years in Smolensk living with his grandparents and attending the Smolensk Grammar School. Always expressing an interest and talent in drawing, he started to receive instruction at the age of 13 from Jehuda Pen, a local Jewish artist, and by the time he was 15 began teaching students himself. In 1909, he applied to an art academy in Petersburg, but was rejected. While he passed the entrance exam and was qualified, the law under the Tsarist regime only allowed a limited number of Jewish students to attend Russian schools and universities.

Like many other Jews living in the Russian Empire at the time, Lissitzky went to study in Germany. He left the Russian Empire the same year to study architecture and engineering at a Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. During the summer of 1912, Lissitzky, in his own words, "wandered through Europe", spending time in Paris and covering 1200 km on foot in Italy, teaching himself about fine art and sketching architecture and landscapes that interested him.[3] In the same year, some of his pieces were included for the first time in an exhibit by the St. Petersburg Artists Union; a notable first step for Lissitzky. He remained in Germany until the outbreak of World War I, when he was forced to return home along with many of his countrymen, including other expatriate artists born in the former Russian Empire, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall. He was heavily influenced by Vladimir Tatlin and his discovery of Constructivism.

After the war, he went to Moscow and attended the Polytechnic Institute of Riga, which had been evacuated to Moscow because of the war. He received an architectural diploma from the school and immediately started assistant work at various architectural firms. During this work, he took an active and passionate interest in Jewish culture that, after the downfall of the openly anti-semitic Tsarist regime, was flourishing and experiencing a renaissance at the time. The new Provisional Government repealed a decree that prohibited the printing of Hebrew letters and that barred Jews from citizenship. Thus Lissitzky soon devoted himself to Jewish art, exhibiting works by local Jewish artists, traveling to Mahilyow to study the traditional architecture and ornaments of old synagogues, and illustrating many Yiddish children's books. These books were Lissitzky's first major foray in book design, a field that he would greatly innovate during his career.

His first designs appeared in the 1917 book Sihas hulin: Eyne fun di geshikhten (An Everyday Conversation), where he incorporated Hebrew letters with a distinctly Art nouveau flair. His next book was a visual retelling of the traditional Jewish Passover song Had gadya (One Goat), in which Lissitzky showcased a typographic device that he would often return to in later designs. In the book, Lissitzky integrated letters with images through a system of color coding that matched the color of the characters in the story with the word referring to them. In the designs for the final page (pictured right), Lissitzky depicts the mighty "hand of God" slaying the angel of death, who wears the tsar's crown. This representation links the redemption of the Jews with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. Visual representations of the hand of God would recur in numerous pieces throughout his entire career, most notably with his 1925 photomontage self-portrait The Constructor, which prominently featured the hand.

El Lissitzky: Futurist Portfolios is organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Georgy Zelma (1906-1984, born Tashkent, Turkistan, present-day Uzbekistan, died Moscow, Soviet Union, present-day Russia), Gorky Park, Detail, 1931, from a portfolio of 29 original photographs, Gelatin silver print, printed 1997, Spencer Museum of Art, Gift of David T. and Linda E. Peters, 2005.0198.12.

Boris Ignatovich (1899-1976-born Loutzk, Russia, died Moscow, Soviet Union, present-day Russia), Dynamo, Detail, 1930, from Soviet Avant-garde, gelatin silver print, printed 1999, Spencer Museum of Art, Gift of David Tate Peters, 2004.0203.12.

Spencer
Museum of Art
University
of Kansas
1301 Mississippi
North Balcony
Reframing Society: Russian Constructivist Photography
February 2-
May 18, 2008

Following the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, Constructivism emerged from within the Russian avant-garde both as an artistic practice and as a term expressing a belief in the birth of a new relationship between the artist and society. In their formally innovative photographs incorporating high or low vantage points, oblique angles, and dramatic diagonal compositions Alexander Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, and Georgy Zelma strove to revolutionize their countryman’s visual thinking. These photographers managed to capture through their lenses a changing way of life in the post-revolutionary era. This exhibition of photographs, selected from the Spencer’s permanent collection, seeks to explore how the Constructivist movement — armed with the mission of reinventing Russian society — successfully created images that were strongly rooted in design while reflecting the distinctive characteristics of Soviet life.

The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appeared as a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Alexei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, which was printed in 1922. Constructivism was a post-First World War outgrowth of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the “corner-counter reliefs” of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself would be coined by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular approach to their work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich. The teaching basis for the new movement was laid by The Commissariat of Enlightenment (or Narkompros) the Bolshevik government's cultural and educational ministry headed by Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky who suppressed the old Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1918. IZO, the Commissariat's artistic bureau was run during the Russian Civil War mainly by Futurists, who published the journal Art of the Commune. The focus for Constructivism in Moscow was VKhUTEMAS, the school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that teaching at the school was focused more on political and ideological discussion than art-making. Despite this, Gabo himself designed a radio transmitter in 1920 (and would submit a design to the Palace of the Soviets competition in 1930).

Constructivism as theory and practice derived itself from a series of debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920-22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. Initially the Constructivists worked on three-dimensional constructions as a first step to participation in industry: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed these three dimensional compositions, by Rodchenko, Stepanova, Karl Ioganson and the Stenberg Brothers. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts.

This exhibition is organized by Spencer Museum of Art Photography Intern Ellen Raimond in conjunction with the exhibition El Lissitzky: Futurist Portfolios.