The Drutt Report

(September 18, 2022) Yvonne was apioneer artist who helped transform the concept of woven textile objects from something hanging on a wall like painting to works that engage the space around them, interact with their environment, and could be recomposed in endless permutations according to a specific location, taking an approach that was inspired by Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House (1956). A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art, she designed textiles early in her career for Louis Kahn and Anne Tyng that resonated with the work of Anni Albers. A founding member of the…

(September 5, 2022) @isaacjulien exhibition at the Barnes Foundation”Once Again…(Statues Never Die)” is one of the most beautiful, thoughtful, moving, and intelligent projects I have ever seen, not just by him, but by anyone. Maybe it is because it’s staged in my birthplace in a museum I have seen transformed from a stuffy relic into the most dynamic place in Philadelphia for engaging and diverse programming that I felt so attached to it. But it is isaac’s ongoing engagement with issues of difference that have become so polemical in daily life and this time…

Villa Eckbo, Oslo Monday, May 2, 2022, 12.30–15.00 In a short but intense life, Norwegian artist Thorvald Hellesen has created a unique oeuvre. Although he is considered Norway’s first cubist, his works have remained largely unknown. It was during his stays in Paris in the early 1910s that Hellesen first encountered Cubism. Here he became part of La Section d’Or, a group of artists who further developed the Cubist revolution of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, placing more emphasis on the use of color and new perspectives. Many of the most of these…

(December 16, 2020) We need Charlie Chaplin now more than ever. 100 years ago, as the modern world was trying to rebuild in the wake of its first World War, straining under the weight of migration of disenfranchised people seeking a better life, and limping through its first global pandemic, Chaplin brought a rare combination of pathos, empathy, and humor through his self-effacing character, The Tramp. He showed the shame of poverty offset by the right to dignity and respect that even the most destitute deserved. He dealt with issues of family separation,…

(December 14, 2020) Olaf Skoogfors was one of a handful of metalsmiths who transformedcontemporary jewelry in 1960s America into the most dynamic and innovative of all crafts practices. Born Olaf Jansson in Sweden, the family name changed to Skoogfors (forest stream) when they emigrated to the US in 1945. He studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (later PCA @universityofthearts) before his graduate work at School for the American Craftsman in Rochester, where he worked with Hans Christensen, Ronald H. Pearson, Jack Prip, and Svetozar & Ruth Radakovich. These myriad influences led to…

(December 12, 2020) Anne d’Harnoncourt was one of America’s great curators of 20th C art as well as one of its pioneering museum directors. The only child of Rene d’Harnoncourt, MoMA’s visionary director from 1949-67, she was destined to dramatically impact the world she was raised in. As a curatorial assistant at the Philadelphia Museum, she helped oversee the in stallation of Etant Donneé (1968), Duchamp’s last and most enigmatic work of art. This forged an unlikely bond between the towering, courtly d’Harnoncourt, whose voice was a dead ringer for Julia Childs’, and…

(December 11, 2020) Rudolf Staffel (1911-2002) was one of America’s greatest ceramists. Despite his broad representation in museum and private collections around the world, his place in history has not adequately been adduced. A gentle, soft-spoken man, he was notoriously modest to the point of self-effacing, sheepishly accepting of the praise heaped upon him by students, collectors, and museum professionals. A native of San Antonio, TX, his works of the 1930s are classic mid-century examples of glazed stoneware and earthenware wheel-thrown forms. In the 1940s, he studied painting with Hans Hoffman, whose “push/pull”…

(December 9, 2020) El Lissitzky was not a Constructivist. His signature abstract compositions—Prouns—were what he termed the “interchange station between painting and architecture.” Inherently Constructivist in sentiment and design, Prouns were actually an outgrowth of Malevich’s Suprematism, who became EL’s mentor in 1919, displacing Chagall as head of the People’s Art School. In Malevich, he had found an artist who shared a passion for modernism steeped in principles of metaphysics and spirituality. But Malevich’s ideas were Orthodox in origin, especially in advocating for “sensations of feeling” in abstraction, much as Orthodoxy encouraged believers…

(December 5, 2020) James. J. Rorimer, was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (@metmuseum) from 1955-66. Hired straight out of college, he spent his entire career there, first as an assistant in the department of Decorative Arts rising quickly to become Curator of Medieval Art in 1934. Rorimer used his new role to realize his mentor Joseph Breck's dream: the planning and construction of the Cloisters, the museum’s new medieval extension in Fort Tryon Park. It opened in 1938 and Rorimer was named its curator, becoming its chief fundraiser and visionary. Most…

(December 5, 2020) Constructivism is understood as many things, chiefly as a sober approach to art and design with an industrial aesthetic. But its origins in Russia were complex. In 1914, before the concept had a name, Vladimir Tatlin created his Counter-reliefs, inspired by Cubism. Made from remnants of wire, wood, cardboard and glass, these objects spanned the corners of two walls, flouting all bourgeois notions of art. Malevich liberated painting from representation; his arch-rival Tatlin outdid him by rendering easel painting obsolete. His 1919 Monument to the Third International cemented his leadership…