The nation has a new, big-league art museum-Kansas City’s just-completed Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, which will open today with a rare collection of Georgia O’Keeffe’s 28 watercolors known as her Texas “Canyon Suite.”
The Missouri museum will display the greatly varied body of work, which includes representational as well as abstract pieces, and shares most a sense of the artist’s excitement. There are Southwestern landscapes foretelling the great New Mexico paintings to come, a female nude, an abstract portrait, a train moving through the night.
Exuberant, dramatic and spontaneous-completed while O’Keeffe was head of the art department of West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, Texas, from 1916-1918-these early works were not intended as a series, but were so named and certainly belong in their own compartment of the artist’s long career and life’s work. They are interesting also as examples of her personal experimentation and exploration, done before O’Keeffe fell under the domination of her later lover and husband, New York arts impresario Alfred Stieglitz.
Displayed with these 28 pictures, which were given to O’Keeffe’s close friend and student Tim Reid, will be a 1924 oil painting by O’Keeffe of a red chestnut tree and a 1936 one of yellow jonquils-plus three photographs by Stieglitz that include a portrait of O’Keeffe.
The new 23,200-square-foot concrete, steel and glass facility is the first museum solely devoted to contemporary art in the city and is an adjunct of the Kansas City Art Institute, 4415 Warwick Blvd., Kansas City, Mo.; 816-561-4852. The $6 million building and the museum’s core collection are the gifts of its namesakes, R. Crosby and Bebe Kemper.
`Royal Tombs of Sipan’
One of the great lost civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, that of the Moche people of pre-Inca Peru, is revealed in extraordinary splendor in a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York called the “Royal Tombs of Sipan.”
Inhabiting fertile valleys east of the Andes from about A.D. 100 to 800, the Moche were a remarkably sophisticated people, accomplished at ceramics, jewelry making and textiles, and active traders with other early South American civilizations. Led largely by warrior priests, the Moche had a system of nobility and complicated religious rituals, but no written language.
As the elaborate depictions borne by the ornamental objects in this exhibition illustrate, the Moche were fierce warriors who practiced an elaborate ritual sacrifice of their prisoners. These unfortunates were paraded before the victors, their throats were cut, their blood was drunk by priests and attendants, and then their bodies were cut up into pieces, which were taken away as trophies. Yet, for all this delight in brutality, the Moche produced some of the most exquisite gold, silver and copper art objects known to pre-Columbian America.
The Moche vanished in the late 8th Century following a ruinous succession of earthquakes, droughts and floods, and their lands were taken over by the Incas. The sudden appearance of a number of Moche objects on the world art market in the late 1980s led archeologists and Peruvian police authorities to believe that otherwise undiscovered tombs were being looted. Following the trail of stolen treasures to an area of small, eroded pyramids near the village of Sipan, they commenced a 1987-1989 excavation that yielded some of the great finds of the century.
The Moche show is part of the museum’s 125th anniversary celebration, which continues through December 1995.
The American Museum of Natural History is at Central Park West and 79th Street in New York City; 212-769-5000.
Joseph Stella exhibit
There is still a little time to catch the Whitney Museum’s expansive and mesmerizing Joseph Stella show, featuring some 200 works by the Italian immigrant artist whose masterful draftsmanship, vivid and airy coloring, and fantasizing vision made him one of the great names of 20th-Century American painting.
His Brooklyn Bridge paintings and ethereal portraits of Marcel Duchamp and Kathleen Millay are among the highlights of this show, which closes Oct. 9.
The Whitney is at 945 Madison Ave. in New York City; 212-570-3676.
On squids and spiders
Washington D.C.’s National Museum of Natural History has two new creepy creature exhibitions coming up: “In Search of Giant Squids,” which is on indefinite display, features an actual (dead) giant squid-Taningia danae, also known as the “world’s largest flasher”-that was caught 100 miles east of Cape Cod three years ago; and “Spiders!” through Jan. 2, 1995.
The latter exhibition, providing examples of live, mounted and facsimile spiders of virtually every size and species, tells you everything you wanted to know about spider reality and myth-and a lot you might prefer not to know, such as the blood-chilling facts related in the exhibits devoted to the black widow and other potentially lethal varieties.
But “Spiders!” also has a number of hands-on, interactive installations that children will find hard to resist, including one that enables them to “feel” what sort of prey is coming their way by sensing the vibrations of the strings of a web. A small adjoining theater continuously shows one of the very best, if brief, horror movies ever made. Called “Victims of Venom,” the six-minute film is presented in the manner of a commercial horror flick, and features scenes of spiders luring, entrapping and devouring their unsuspecting prey. Snatch, yum.
Part of the Smithsonian Institution complex, the National Museum of Natural History is on the Mall at Constitution Avenue and 9th Street; 202-357-2700.
Weston’s `epic’ photographs
Through Oct. 23, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is showing “Weston’s Weston: California and the West”-a collection of 120 pictures that legendary photographer Edward Weston took on wide-ranging travels through the Pacific Northwest, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, and which he called “an epic series of photographs.”
With a simple box camera, this extraordinary artist could render towering seas into visions of immobile sculpture and transform simple fruits and vegetables into highly erotic images.
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is at 465 Huntington Ave.; 617-267-9300.
Low Countries panorama
From Oct. 13 to Jan. 15, 1995, Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts will be showing 50 Dutch and Flemish master drawings from the collection of the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, England. Including works by Anthony Van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens, this show embraces a panorama of 15th- to 17th-Century art of the Low Countries when they were in their fullest artistic flower.
Also at the Montreal museum, Oct. 13 to Dec. 11, is a 105-work show that captures the entire production of French artist Jacques Villon-landscapes, portraits, newspaper illustrations, belle epoque figurative art and cubist pieces-in print form.
Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts is at 1380 Sherbrooke St. West; 514-285-1600.
