A visit to the Rose Art Museum
July 19, 2021
by Phil Radoff
It isn’t as easy to visit Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum as it used to be. As of this writing, the Rose, like many other venues, requires advance, timed, on-line reservations, spaced at hour intervals. Once you sign up you can expect to receive a health questionnaire, and if you check the box signifying that you have a Brandeis account, you may find that your reservation request has been rejected because Brandeis has no record of your Covid-19 test. But persistence will out, and you will very likely be welcomed into the museum. You’ll find that it’s worth the effort.
Two exhibits are currently featured: re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum, a selection of works from the Rose’s permanent collection celebrating (as the name implies) the Rose’s 60th anniversary; and Frida Kahlo: POSE.
The Kahlo exhibit, which occupies a section of the Lois Foster wing on the Rose’s lower level, consists of a large group of photographs of the artist with accompanying biographical text, plus a smaller number of associated paintings, drawings, and prints. Co-curated by Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator, Gannit Ankori, PhD, the exhibit is organized into five sections: “posing; composing; exposing; queering, and self-fashioning.” The section titles offer clear indication of the focus of the exhibit which, as stated in Museum communications, is intended as an examination of “Kahlo’s complex identity as a path-breaking individual and artist.”
Kahlo suffered throughout her life from emotional and physical pain, which is often reflected in her work, particularly in her photographs. In the press release announcing the exhibit, Ankori and her co-curator, Circe Henestrosa, wrote: “Posing for photographs, not painting, was Frida Kahlo’s first form of self-expression. Her doting father, Wilhelm (Guillermo) Kahlo, was her first photographer. As soon as she could sit up, he cultivated her propensity to perform in front of the camera.” Frida apparently never thereafter met a camera for which she wouldn’t pose.
Once overshadowed by the paintings of her more widely recognized painter/husband, Diego Rivera, Kahlo’s work has enjoyed a growth in the esteem in which it is now held by critics and the public, thanks in large part to retrospective exhibitions during the 1970s and, perhaps most importantly, changing social mores. In today’s LBGTQ+ world, Kahlo, who famously said “I have broken many social norms,” is often an inspiration for those who came after.
The rest of the museum is dedicated to the Six Decades exhibit. Some of the pieces, especially in the Lower Rose, are contemporary works with a message, decrying racial, religious, or ethnic injustice. They tend to be long on social commentary and (dare I say it?) of less compelling artistic merit.
But throughout the museum the curators have included several of the Rose’s gems that have been displayed with some regularity over the years, like pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon-like Forget It and color-school artist Morris Lewis’s colorful stripes (see below), both in the Lois Foster Gallery; Robert Motherwell’s behemoth Elegy to the Spanish Republic in the Lower Rose; and abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning’s beautiful untitled abstract (also below), which occupies what is perhaps pride of place in the Fineberg Gallery on the left as you enter the museum. The de Kooning was the subject of an appreciation by the Rose’s Chief Preparator, Roy Dawes, in a 2018 issue of the Banner.
A fascinating piece by artist Fred Wilson in the Lois Foster Gallery comprises a group of glassy, tear-shaped objects mounted vertically on a large screen and several round pieces of the same texture and color on the floor in front of the screen (perhaps intended to represent fallen and flattened tears). If you’re looking closely at the tears on the screen and not paying much attention to where you’re walking, you run the risk of stepping on one of the flattened tears, which would no doubt elicit real tears from the guards.
To be sure, the Lois Foster Gallery also includes some curiosities by accomplished artists, like the Sam Gilliam and Jim Dine pieces (surely not among their more memorable efforts) and the enormous, floor-to-ceiling array of strips of cloth (see below), thickly painted in apparently haphazard fashion by Mark Bradford (what on earth was he thinking?), which the artist helpfully describes as the “detritus from another project.” And there is Andy Warhol’s too-often-seen (and always repellant) modified, enhanced, and enlarged photograph of a catastrophic automobile accident, complete with body parts.
There is, in short, something to love and something to hate for all viewers. You won’t want to miss it.