Jacobs Gallery Retrospective Redux

Students in ART 414 have been learning about modern art and are using works from artists associated with the Jacobs Gallery to make connections between art of the modern and contemporary eras. This assignment was planned and enacted in conjunction with the 10th Anniversary Celebration which kicks off this Friday, October 19th in the Dr. Donald L. and Dorothy Jacobs Gallery in the LRC. Please come join us as we mark this milestone in the gallery.

In the classroom over the past week, each student made a presentation about an artist represented in the collection, choosing to emphasize the visual, formal, contextual, or other parallels that may be drawn between artists from different decades, cultural contexts, and frameworks.

All of the presentations were vetted by their peers. The students selected two papers to post online. Actually, they were to choose a single paper/presentation, but the vote ended in a tie. Thus, both student works are excerpted here. You'll hear Senior digital art major Daniel Cantu II responding to the work of Matt Carone and Junior Art History major Lynsey Jordan responding to Dan Ludwig's works. Let us know what you think!

Senior digital art major Daniel Cantu made connections between Matt Carone's Smokers and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon writing that: "Just as large, Picasso’s painting looks similar to Carone’s modern painting, which could easily pass as a homage to Picasso’s work. Whether or not Carone purposely looked back at Picasso’s cubist painting, the similarities are strikingly noticeable. Both paintings include five figures who happen to be nude. But the style in which they are painted–cubist or surreal–depict the figures as nude, without showing nudity. This method creates abstract people who are not naked, but exist as they are."

 

Cantu continues, "Both artists aimed to portray these figures in their own way, and their subtle way of representing them in their abstract form helps them depict various moods without identifying a class of people. The abstract faces and bodies of Picasso’s figures do not indicate if they are beautiful or not, they are simply women. Carone’s abstract figures are also able to classify the smokers as they are without assigning them to a class or culture."

Cantu also made connections between the nude figures in these pieces and the wooden models used in art classes, particularly drawing. He pointed us to this work: “Wordbones,” The Sisyphus Syndrome, wooden figurine on stairs, 2010.

Junior art history major Lynsey Jordan made connections between Daniel Ludwig and several other artists. She wrote, "I found it very difficult to pin down an artist to compare Daniel Ludwig to because he is so diverse in style. From the 1980s to now, he has had a major focus on the human form, usually female, but in his most recent works, he focuses on the male and female. These recent works are very abstract, but use very realistic human forms with jarring colors and shifting shapes to make the overall effect a very strange and unsettling one. These human forms, again, have the style of the “old masters” such as Delacroix or Titian and have a great passion and drama to them."

Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Musée du Louvre. Image source: http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/death-sardanapalus

Daniel Ludwig, Raft, 2000s. Image source:  http://danielludwig.com/pages/paintings/recentpaintings/recentpaintings.html

In Memory: Dr. Donald L. Jacobs 1919-2011

It is with sadness that we learned on Thursday of the passing of Dr. Donald L. Jacobs, generous donor and friend of the Art Department and Art Galleries. As readers of this blog well know, Dr. Jacobs and his wife, Dottie, have shared their collection of fine art and artifacts with students of the college for more than a decade through site visits to their home and the installation of nearly 200 works in the newest building on campus, the Ensor Learning Resource Center.

The article above is excerpted from the Herald-Leader celebrates the opening of the collection in 2002. For the full article, see David Minton, “Georgetown Students Owe Much to Doctor.” Lexington Herald-Leader. 6 Oct. 2002-H1.

The Jacobs Gallery has enabled students to view works of fine art and objects first-hand, a key learning objective of the art department. Numerous class visits to the gallery have enabled students to directly observe modern and contemporary works of art in addition to 32 artifacts from world cultures, including ancient Greek vessels, two African masks and wood and figurines, Chinese porcelain bowls, Asian equestrian figures, ceramic pieces from Costa Rica, Peru, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Palestine, as well as transitional figures such as the Ushabti from the Ptolemaic period. In addition to art classes, many sections of this year's Foundations 111 course -- a required Freshman general education course -- utilized the Greek vessels in their study of the literature and culture of the ancients. This spring, Honors students sat beside the Kantheros, Lekythos, and miniature Skyphos while musing Homeric hymns to Dionysos and the wonders of Anacreontic verse. Students enrolled in the "Artistic Traditions of Asia" seminar, a Foundations 112 course, researched and presented material about the Asian artifacts and prints in our collection.

Over the past decade, students have come into direct contact with prize works of which no museum in the area can boast. But, equally important, students, faculty, and staff of the college have come to know Dr. and Mrs. Jacobs, generous benefactors but, also, caring, dear friends of the department who have opened our eyes to the wonders of collecting, to developing a passionate pursuit for art, and what it means to share one's passion with a broader community.

Prior to the establishment of the Gallery on campus, and, even, since, the Art Department has been fortunate to have an open invitation to bring students to the Jacobs' home to view art "in its natural state." Below, three photos from student visits to the Jacobs' home over the past few years.

Above: Summer 2008 field trip. Course: Old Masters, Young Geniuses.

Above: Fall 2006 "Modern Art" class visit.

Below: Fall 2005 Curatorial Studies class visit.

Friends of the gallery and department, please feel free to write a comment below as a testament to the ways in which you have been touched by the collection and the generosity of Dr. Donald L. and Dorothy Jacobs. All comments received by Thursday, April 21 will be printed and forwarded to the Jacobs family.

For more information on Dr. Jacobs (whom the students have affectionately called "Dr. J"), see the online obituary. In closing, I would like to suggest that David Minton had it all wrong, in the article above: it's not just the "Georgetown students" who "owe much to doctor" -- it's all of us. Thank you, Dr. Donald L. and Dorothy Jacobs!