Baroque Sensibilities at Long Beach Museum of Art

     Hello, this is Jonah and I am sharing my experience upon visiting the latest exhibtion at Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA). LBMA is nestled upon a hill that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and was once a summer home for a rich elite named Elizabeth Anderson. The house has sinced been bought by the city of Long Beach and converted into a quaint museum in the 50's. The museum can only house limited amount of art works compared to the other museums within Los Angeles county, but it can be assumed that they took advantage of this situation by housing some exquisite pieces. The spaces for the exhibition are very modern with red accented partitions to act as a disruption to the white paint that overwhelms the rest of the premises; this also mimics the ubiquitous use of red pigment on most of the artist's pieces. The red accent partition also gives the area of the exhibition a very clean look to lessen the distraction that may take away the attention of the audience from the art pieces.

Spaces of the exhibition at LBMA.

Self Portrait, 2012

Oil on linen

Anonymous loan

Reference: Gustave Courbet (1819 - 1877)

Artist's Studio-A Real Allegory of Seven Years in My 

Artistic and Moral Life, 1855

     The current exhibition at LBMA is entitled Baroque Sensibilities by American painter Sherrie Wolf. The pieces are composed of oil paintings whose subjects are various still lives while referencing on post-Renaissance art pieces. The paintings after the Renaissance period had varied in styles and themes, which includes Baroque, but what had still remained on all these post-Renaissance paintings are the illusion of realistic depiction of the subjects.
     Sherrie Wolf's technique blends seamlessly with the paintings whom she used as references, her brush strokes and transition are smooth, the chiaroscuro and colors are on point in relation with her references. While it is genial to incorporate still life with previous classical works, I rather find her pieces to be disrupting the referenced subject. Her still lives are almost always on the foreground, almost completely dismissing the classical paintings as mere backgrounds, though I am not certain if this was her intention. The exception to this observation is her work entitled Parrot Tulip and Odalisque, 2012. Wolf savourly painted the odalisque from the work of Ingres with no fault, and she incorporated the tulip as her still life towards the bottom of the format as if it has been modeled along with the odalisque when Ingres was painting concubine.
Her pieces readily take me back to the idea that realistic depiction is the goal. Sure, Le Grande Odalisque, upon further observation, does not equate to a real woman's body, and it was not Ingres' intention to depict a real one(the piece was made during the Romantic period, where exoticism and emotional heights were the goals). However, you can still notice the subtle changes of the shadows and highlights on her to depict a gorgeous skin tone, and the contours depict a very believable curves on her body. 
         

Parrot Tulip and Odalisque, 2012

Oil on linen

Courtesy of the artist and Laura Russo Gallery

Reference: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

Le Grande Odalisque, 1814

 Despite the disruptions, I still appreciate Sherrie Wolf's works; she has proven that a truly beautiful piece of art can be improved upon. She exactly did that in her own way by adding her own still life subject without losing the credibility of the olden paintings.