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September 15, 2001-January 6, 2002
The Heinz Architectural Center
Architectural drawings have been recognized as singular works of art for centuries. Since the 15th century, when Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi invented the technique of perspective drawing to represent space, specific drawings have profoundly changed the way architects approach the design process. Today, architectural drawings function in several ways. They are essential steps or tools in the design process; but they also can be purely conceptual expressions or artistic achievements with no secondary purpose.
Perfect Acts of Architecture brings together the consummate achievements of five architects whose startling graphic explorations in the mid-1970s and '80s redefined the architectural drawing. During this time period, a sluggish world economy severely limited new construction. Lacking challenging commissions, many talented young architects became associated with universities or avant-garde intellectual circles. Unfettered by buildability concerns and inspired by literature, film theory, music, linguistics, and philosophy, they launched a radical--visionary--paper architecture. Even today, these works continue to challenge generally held notions about the nature and purpose of architectural drawing.
The works in this exhibition incorporate collage, narrative,film techniques, superimposed and simultaneous views, and varied media. As architectural graphics produced at the cusp of the digital revolution in architecture, they also mark the brilliant summation of drawing on paper, as the design process became electronic and generallty "paperless" in the following decade.
Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and Bernard Tschumi have garnered major international acclaim for their subsequent built works, and each has played a preeminent role in contemporary architecture. Their genius, however, was first expressed in these experimental drawings that address the meaning of architecture rather than its appearance.
Rem Koolhaas
Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972
Peter Eisenman
House VI Transformation Collages, 1976
Bernard Tschumi
The Manhattan Transcripts, 1976-81
Daniel Libeskind
Micromegas, 1978
Chamber Works, 1983
Thom Mayne (Morphosis Studio)
Sixth Street House, 1986-87
Kate Mantilini Restaurant, 1986
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September 15, 2001-February 24, 2002
Forum Gallery
Inscription, a multimedia installation by Pittsburgh artist Diane Samuels, evolved from her encounters several years ago with two individuals whose life stories touched her deeply. She began by making an audio recording of them as they told their stories and then transcribed parts of that material into handwritten texts. She fabricated a book of handmade paper, watermarking the pages with the full narratives. She inscribed the entire text onto small squares of glass, composing it letter by letter. Finally, she uses video and audio recordings to create additional layers through which the stories emerge.
Inscription is not the retelling of the beginning-to-end narratives recounted by these two people but, rather, the presentation of fragments from the lives of individuals, as filtered through Samuels as artist. The result evokes fleeting and elusive experience of seeing, touching, and hearing. Each viewer extracts a sense of these moments of the past, just as an archeologist gathers and arranges shards to garner a sense of history. Inscription is about memory, about the ways we grasp and lose and reshape the past, and about the private and communal elements of refiguring memory through storytelling.
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November 3, 2001-February 10, 2002
Heinz Galleries
When W. Eugene Smith drove to Pittsburgh in early March of 1955, he intended to attempt "the greatest of the impossible," an epic, kaleidoscopic study of a city that would lay bare the mores of America at mid-century and set new standards in the medium of photographic journalism. He was 36 years old and had recently resigned from his high-salaried job with Life magazine, where his World War II combat pictures and his groundbreaking photo-essays, along with his bitter battles for editorial control of his work, had made him a legend.
Smith went to Pittsburgh for a routine, freelance assignment to produce 100 photographs for Stefan Lorant's forthcoming book, Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. But, instead, Smith embarked on a personal odyssey that led him to make 17,000 pictures of the city over the better part of 1955 and on return trips in 1956 and 1957. Through the end of 1958, Smith worked obsessively, desperately, self-financed, making prints and experimenting with layouts of his essay. He believed he was putting together a magnum opus with no comparison in the history of photography, a work whose lyrical precedents he found in classic works of literature and music. In hindsight, it appears that deep frictions in Smith's professional and personal lives were fueling photographic ambitions of impossible proportions--ambitions that effectively ended his career in journalism (as publishers became wary of his reputation as a maverick) and entangled him fully in the impractical realm of art.
It was a twist of fate that Smith concentrated his greatest ambitions in Pittsburgh. Here the dreams of a brilliant, if sometimes quixotic picture maker who was wrestling with fundamental issues of human yearning, well being, and modern mythology, were matched with one of America's most important and arresting industrial cities at its zenith.
Smith never achieved his goals for the Pittsburgh essay, at least not for public viewing. On five occasions, however, between 1957 and 1971, Smith made selections of his Pittsburgh prints for exhibition or publication, and his selections form the basis for the selection of the193 master prints in this exhibition. This exhibition brings together the two finest collections of Smith's Pittsburgh photographs, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the W. Eugene Smith Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson.
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November 30, 2001-January 6, 2002
Hall of Architecture
A visit to the Carnegie Museum of Art's Neapolitan Presepio, one of the finest examples of its kind, has been a holiday tradition since 1957. Handmade between 1700 and 1830, the Presepio teems with lifelike figures and colorful details that recreate the Nativity within a vibrant and detailed panorama of 18th-century Italian village life. More than 100 superbly modeled human and angelic figures, along with animals, accessories, and architectural elements, cover a 250-square-foot area and create an unforgettable depiction as seen through the eyes of the Neapolitan artisans who lovingly created this masterpiece.
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December 15, 2001-June 2, 2002
Works on Paper Gallery
Treasure Hunt: Recent Acquisitions of Works on Paper presents 60 selected works from the more than 1600 drawings, prints, and photographs the museum has added to its collection in the last decade. On view are drawings, watercolors, and prints created before 1945 by such internationally renowned artists as Rembrandt, Gauguin, Picasso, Whistler, and Klimt. In addition, the exhibition includes a sampling from the museum's growing collection of photographs of Western Pennsylvania subjects, including images by Charles Teenie Harris, Clyde Hare, and Luke Swank.
The primary goal in building any collection is to recreate as complete a historical progression as circumstances (and finances) allow. Factors influencing the museum's collecting strategy are diverse. In some cases, the works were acquired to provide examples of a particular artistic style or period. For example, the lithographs Ansager (Radio Announcer) and Dlia golosa (For the Voice), both completed in 1923 by El Lissitzky, a proponent of the Russian avant-garde, represent an important movement that has had a limited presence in the museum's permanent collection.
The exhibition also features works that entered the collection as superb technical examples. Such works include: Pierre Bonnard's The Little Laundress (1896), one of the landmarks of 19th-century color lithography; William Pether's Philosopher Giving a Lecture on an Orrery (1768), a dramatic mezzotint with finely executed areas of light and shadow; and Israhel van Meckenem's painstakingly wrought portrait engraving Saint Peter and Saint Andrew (ca. 1480), which compellingly reveals the apostles' sanctity without diminishing their humanity or individuality.
Some works are by artists at pivotal stages of their careers, such as Head of a Bearded Man (1902) by Pablo Picasso, completed when the artist was in his early twenties. This realistic charcoal drawing, given to the museum by former director Leon Arkus, and his wife, Jane, was once in the private collection of Leo and Gertrude Stein. Contrasting with this very early Picasso, is an engraving from the artist's cubist period Man with a Guitar (1915). Although several works on view relate directly to paintings or sculptures already in the museum's collection, such as Frederic Church's drawing Iceberg in an Open Sea, others, such as Gauguin's woodcut Buddha, introduce an important artist previously unrepresented in the museum's collection.
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