Joint art gallery show highlights climate action-inspired works by IU Northwest professors
Indiana University Northwest School of the Arts is pleased to announce an exhibition entitled Regeneration now through December 7, 2023, in the School of the Arts Gallery, Arts & Sciences Building (3415 Broadway Avenue, 2nd Floor Gary, Ind.).
Regeneration is a joint show featuring woodcuts and drawings by Madeline Winter and Corey Hagelberg, studio art professors at IU Northwest.
The titular theme for the show refers to the natural processes of our ecosystem and the steps that human beings can take to support restoration and minimize waste.
These practices are a shared interest between Hagelberg and Winter and the show highlights the two artist’s individual approaches to climate action.
Winter’s work explores a shift in her life perspective, how she has made intentional choices to “take care of what [she finds] precious”.
Hagelberg summarizes the personal approach in his woodcuts: “I want viewers to see my struggle as I grapple with difficult subject matter…As the climate crisis deepens, my passion moves less towards self-expression and more towards finding functional ways to connect art and climate action.”
In addition to Hagelberg’s woodcuttings and Winter’s drawings, the show features a collaborative piece, Carbon in Every Available Corner. This installation is made entirely of Biochar, the remnants of controlled, low emissions fires that is returned to soil. This supply is the output of a forest Hagelberg built for 12 years.
Corey Hagelberg is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher. He is co-founder and director of the Calumet Artist Residency (CAR), whose mission is to connect people, art and nature. For the last 15 years, his work has highlighted the relationship between the human and natural world, but has increasingly addressed issues of food justice, community growing spaces and permaculture as it relates to creating regenerative cities and local economies and designing a livable planet. He lives and works in Gary, Ind.
Madeline Winter is a visual artist and educator from Chicago. She received her BFA in painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in painting from IU Bloomington. Her paintings and drawings explore the challenges as well as the optimism required to be curious about life following a life-changing medical diagnosis and difficult recovery. These works explore the connection to the natural world and the intersection of science and magic. Works include objects, totems and imagery that asks the viewer to determine the significance based on their own personal experiences. Elements of humor and abstraction speak to the surreal experience of embracing mortality with joy and wonder. Bright, highly chromatic colors reflect the buoyancy of hope while solidly rendered paintings and drawings emphasize the connection to the present. Winter has shown work in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and throughout Indiana. She has held residencies in Barcelona, Chicago and Indiana.
Regeneration is on view in the Arts & Sciences Gallery through December 7, with an artists’ talk at 1 p.m. on November 22. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday noon to 5 p.m.
Open Window, Collioure, 1905
Matisse’s Open Window, Collioure is an icon of early modernism. A small but explosive work, it is celebrated as one of the most important early paintings of the so-called fauve school, a group of artists, including André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Braque, that emerged in 1904. Fauve paintings are distinguished by a startling palette of saturated, unmixed colors and broad brushstrokes. The effect is one of spontaneity, although the works reveal a calculated assimilation of techniques from postimpressionism and neo-impressionism. Open Window represents the very inception of the new manner in Matisse’s art. [1] It was painted in Collioure, a small town on the Mediterranean coast of France to which Matisse traveled with Derain in the summer of 1905.
Open Window was exhibited at the landmark Salon d’automne of 1905, where Matisse and other fauve painters were greeted with critical skepticism and public disdain. The “fauve” (savage beast) label itself originated in the art critic Louis Vauxcelles’ newspaper review of the exhibition. Vauxcelles, who reproached Matisse for the diminishing coherence of form in his work, praised the artist as “one of the most robustly gifted of today’s painters”; his use of the term “fauves,” which appears twice, is actually ambiguous: it alludes both to Matisse’s fellow painters in Salle VII of the Salon and to the insensitive public, who scorned Matisse’s work. Nonetheless, the press was soon referring to Salle VII as a cage aux fauves (cage of wild beasts), and, by 1906, this had become an accepted epithet for Matisse, Derain, and his fellow painters. [2]
The lyrical beauty of Open Window belies the optical and conceptual complexity of the work, in which conventional representation is subordinated throughout by other pictorial concerns. During the time when this work was painted, Derain wrote that even the shadows in Collioure were a “whole world of clarity and luminosity.” [3] Matisse courts the maximum intensity of color, essentially eschewing chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark that creates an illusion of volume and spatial depth. Instead, the interior wall surrounding the window is equally divided into broad areas of blue-green and fuchsia, a contrast that is derived from the complementary opposition of green and red on the color wheel (this contrast recurs in the flowerpots at the bottom of the picture). Virtually the same, almost abstract, color relationship occurs in the background of Matisse’s The Woman with the Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), also from this period. Further, Open Window also contains a dazzling variety of brushstrokes, from long blended marks to short, staccato touches. Matisse represented each area of the image—the interior of the room, the window itself, the balcony, the harbor view—with a distinctly different handling of the brush, creating an overall surface effect of pulsating cross-rhythms. Finally, the composition of the work is a series of frames within frames: the wall contains the window; the window frames the middle ground; and the balcony crops the landscape.
Comparing a painting to a window has been a conventional trope in art theory since the Renaissance. In making this comparison the very subject of a picture that is only cryptically representational (by the standards of the day), Matisse allowed Open Window, Collioure to epitomize a new direction in modern art, one in which paintings develop an increasing autonomy from the things they depict. The open window (and the painting-window metaphor) would subsequently become a central motif in Matisse’s oeuvre.
(Text by Jeffrey Weiss, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)
Notes
1. For a lengthy discussion of this painting and its historical context, see Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art 1868-1918 (Ithaca and London, 1986), 125, 127-129, 132, 134.2. Roger Benjamin, “Fauves in the Landscape of Criticism: Metaphor and Scandal at the Salon,” in Judi Freeman, ed., The Fauve Landscape [exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art] (Los Angeles, 1990), 252.3. André Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck (Paris, 1955), 154.
Inscription
lower right: Henri Matisse
(Galerie Druet, Paris). Pieter Van der Velde [1848-1922], Le Havre, 1906; probably given to his son-in-law, General Réquin, Paris, 1915-1918. Private collection, Paris, in 1949;[1] purchased jointly by (Carstairs Gallery, New York) and (Sidney Janis Gallery, New York);[2] sold 6 August 1952 to Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, New York;[3] gift 1998 to NGA.
[1] The painting was reproduced with this credit line in Georges Dethuit, Les Fauves, Geneva, 1949: 37.
[2] According to a letter of 22 June 1952 from John Rewald to John Hay Whitney, urging Whitney to purchase the painting (copy in NGA curatorial files).
[3] Acquisition date according to Whitney records, copies in NGA curatorial files.
Associated Names
1905 Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1905, no. 715. 1906 Henri Matisse, Galerie Druet, Paris, 1906, no. 41, as La fenêtre ouverte. 1952 Les Fauves, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Toronto, 1952-1953, no. 95, repro. 1953 5 Years of Janis: 5th Anniversary Exhibition, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1953, no. 31, repro. 1955 Paintings from Private Collections, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955, unnumbered catalogue. 1956 Rétrospective Henri Matisse, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1956, no. 15. 1959 Triumph der Farbe: Die Europäischen Fauves, Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, Switzerland; Orangerie des Schlosses Charlottenburg, Berlin, 1959, no. 2, repro. 1960 The John Hay Whitney Collection, Tate Gallery, London, 1960-1961, no. 37, repro. 1968 Matisse, Hayward Gallery, London, 1968, no. 34, repro. 1970 Henri Matisse, Grand Palais, Paris, 1970, no. 60, repro. 1976 The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and Its Affinities, Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1976, unnumbered catalogue, repro. 1978 Aspects of Twentieth-Century Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1978-1979, no. 36, repro. 1980 Post-Impressionism: Cross Currents in European and American Painting 1880-1906, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980, no. 156, repro. 1983 The John Hay Whitney Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1983, no. 50, repro. 1992 Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1992-1993, no. 61, repro. 1993 Henri Matisse 1904-1917, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1993, no. 19, repro. 1998 Gifts to the Nation from Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998-1999, no catalogue. 2000 Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000-2001, unnumbered catalogue, repro. 2004 Fauve Painting from the Permanent Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2004-2005, no catalogue. 2005 Henri Matisse: Figur Farbe Raum [Henri Matisse: Figure Couleur Espace], Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2006-2006, shown only in Basel, unnumbered cat., repro. (Basel/French cat.), fig. 15 (Basel/German cat.). 2012 The Ecstasy of Colour — Munch, Matisse, and Expressionism, Museum Folkwang Essen, 2012-2013. 2013 Matisse and the Fauves, Albertina, Vienna, 2013-2014, no. 27, repro. 2014 Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky, Kunsthaus Zürich; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, 2014-2015, no. 150, pl. 110 (shown only in Los Angeles). 2014 Loan to display with permanent collection, The Phillips Collection, Washington, 2014-2015, no catalogue. 2014 Matisse and Friends: Selected Masterworks from the National Gallery of Art, Denver Art Museum, 2014-2015, no catalogue. 2015 Collection Conversations: The Chrysler and the National Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, 2015, no catalogue.
1949 Duthuit, Georges. Les Fauves: Braque, Derain, Van Dongen, Dufy, Friesz, Manguin, Marquet, Matisse, Puy, Vlaminck. Geneva, 1949: repro. 37. 1954 Diehl, Gaston and Agnes Humbert. Henri Matisse. Paris, 1954:33, repro. no. 24. 1956 Rewald, John. “French Paintings in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney.” The Connoisseur 134, no. 552 (April 1956):138, repro. 1962 Crespelle, Jean-Paul. Les Fauves. Neuchâtel, 1962:7. 1969 Russell, John. The World of Matisse 1869-1954. New York, 1969: 60, repro. 61. 1971 Aragon, Louis. Henri Matisse, roman. 2 vols. 1971:1:140, repro. no. XVI. 1971 Orienti, Sandra. Matisse. London, New York, Sydney, and Toronto:1971. 20. 1973 Jacobus, John. Henri Matisse. New York, 1973: 110, repro. no. 13. 1978 Edlerfield, John. The Cut-Outs of Henri Matisse. New York, 1978: 15-16, repro. no. 13. 1979 Gowing, Lawrence. Matisse. New York and Toronto, 1979: 51, repro. no. 33. 1982 Schneider, Pierre, Massimo Carra and Xavier Deryng. Tout l’oeuvre peint de Matisse 1904-1928. 1982:no. 40, repro. 1983 Jacobus, John. Henri Matisse. New York, 1983: 69, repro. 70. 1984 Watkins, Nicholas. Matisse. London, 1984: 63, repro. 61. 1987 Guillard, Jacqueline and Maurice. Matisse: Le rythme et la ligne. Paris and New York, 1987: repro. no. 17. 1991 Neret, Gilles. Matisse. 1991:35, repro. 29. 1992 Schneider, Pierre. Matisse. 1992: 220-222, repro. 221. 1993 Labaume, Vincent. Matisse. 1993: repro. no. 38. 1994 Milner, Frank. Henri Matisse. 1994: repro. 40. 2004 Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 414-415, no. 345, color repro. 2009 Gariff, David, Eric Denker, and Dennis P. Weller. The World’s Most Influential Painters and the Artists They Inspired. Hauppauge, NY, 2009: 150, color repro.
