Artists’ notebooks at the Fogg, issues of extinction at the Gardner, and ‘Photographing Great Horses’ at the Fitchburg
By RANDI HOPKINS | July 19, 2006
George Grosz, Dead Mouse in a Trap |
Art — like music, physics, literature, dance, and other creative pursuits — rarely springs forth from the imagination in its final form. Ideas pop up, thoughts come to mind, and the artist reaches for pencil and notebook to set something down in its rawest form, to remember it, to start playing around with it. Bruce Chatwin was famously attached to his moleskin-covered notebooks and Mont Blanc fountain pens, the young Keith Haring filled sketchbooks with logos of bands including the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, and Woody Guthrie committed not only lyrics but also cartoons, watercolors, and pen-and-ink drawings to his journals. Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum has nearly 150 artists’ sketchbooks in its collection ranging from the 18th century to the 1990s, but these fragile volumes — curved from transport in artists’ back pockets, weak where pages have been torn out — are rarely put on view, so with more than 70 sketchbooks and 45 drawings, “Under Cover: Artists’ Sketchbooks,” which opens at the Fogg on August 1, provides an uncommon chance to peek at preliminary drawings and notes by the likes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, John Singer Sargent, George Grosz, and Henry Moore. Intact sketchbooks will be shown open to a particular page, alongside drawings that the Fogg acquired after they had been removed from their original books. Intrigued by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s “Henrik Håkansson: Cyanopsitta spixii Case Study #001,” which is up through September 17? Haven’t seen it yet? On July 26, Scott Edwards, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and curator of ornithology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, gives a noontime talk in the Gardner’s special exhibition gallery about the Spix’s macaw, a species on the brink of extinction. A rare 19th-century specimen of this bird, on loan from Harvard, is at the heart of Håkansson’s compelling exhibition.
Over the past decade, Robert Sargent Fay has often photographed people and places associated with the arts, such as the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in Nelson, New Hampshire, and Ken Burns and his Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire. His work also reflects his interest in history, the American West, and the extraordinary beauty he finds in horses. “Kindred Spirits: The Intimate Photographs of Robert Sargent Fay,” at the Fitchburg Art Museum through September 10, features some 40 works, and on August 3, Fay presents the workshop “Adventures in Photographing Great Horses,” in which he’ll talk about horses who left a lasting impression on him and offer tips on photographing equines and other animals. Bring your own brown-bag lunch and think good thoughts about Barbaro.
“Under Cover: Artists’ Sketchbooks” at Fogg Art Museum, 32 Quincy St, Cambridge | August 1–October 22 | 617.495.9400 or www.artmuseums.harvard.edu | “Noontime Talk: Scott Edwards” at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway, Boston | July 26 at noon | 617.566.1401 or www.isgm.org | “Kindred Spirits: The Intimate Photographs of Robert Sargent Fay” at Fitchburg Art Museum, Merriam Parkway, Fitchburg | through September 10 | “Adventures in Photographing Great Horses” August 3: 12:15-1:15 pm | 978.345.4207 or www.fitchburgartmuseum.org
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Bookworms, Don’t leave me this way, Now on tape, More 
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“Under Cover” is one of those lucid, edifying shows the Harvard museums excel at.
- Don’t leave me this way
Leaves lead a wild life, and each leaf’s physical structure reflects both its individual biography — revealing the pathways, for example, of insects that have eaten their way across a leaf’s surface.
- Now on tape
Spending a rainy Saturday night curled up in front of Dodgeball or the first season of Six Feet Under is great and all, but what if you want to find Michael Auder’s “Polaroid Cocaine,” a five-minute, 1993 video montage of images that “dwell on the themes of death, destruction, and desire,” accompanied by cabaret music?
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The same early-20th-century Vienna that eventually produced Freud, Schoenberg, and Wittgenstein was also the site of a renaissance in arts and crafts.
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Art mixes it up with history and politics, peers closely at electronic surveillance, worries about its own usefulness, traipses down the fashion runway, and brings cool stuff back from China and Puerto Rico in exhibitions opening this fall.
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Poor Abraham Lincoln.
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You’re one of us now.
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Art this fall grapples with issues like gender and journalism, personal space and human survival, and what to have for lunch.
- Erwartung . . .
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA music director James Levine will be back in February to continue his survey of Beethoven and Schoenberg with Metropolitan Opera diva Deborah Voigt in Beethoven’s “Ah! perfido” and Schoenberg’s Erwartung (“Awaiting”), along with Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Eighth Symphony (Symphony Hall, February 1-3).
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Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Science and Technology, Harvard University, The Grateful Dead, More
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