The Modern Art Notes Podcast

The second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Gary Simmons. He is the subject of a “Focus” exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that’s on view at the museum through March 14.

This is a detail of MAMFW’s installation of Simmons’ Subtlety of a Train Wreck (1998, detail). This is only the second time the site-specific work has been realized. On this week’s MAN Podcast, Simmons explains why.

How to listen to the show: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. See more images of Simmons’ art discussed on the show.

The second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Gary Simmons. He is the subject of a “Focus” exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that’s on view at the museum through March 14.

Simmons also fulfilled a commission for Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Titled Blue Field Explosions (2009, detail above), the work evokes violence of an indeterminate nature. Perhaps it references football, or a cartoon… or something more awful. It’s among the works Simmons and host Tyler Green talked about on this week’s program.

The second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Gary Simmons. He is the subject of a “Focus” exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that’s on view at the museum through March 14.

Simmons’ work typically deals with American history, race and class through paintings and installations that emphasize movement and memory. The Fort Worth show includes only the second installation of one of Simmons’ most significant works, Subtlety of a Train Wreck (1998). Included are two of Simmons’ paintings of drive-in theaters, which we typically remember with warm nostalgia — forgetting that most were whites-only. 

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features photographer and essayist Leo Rubinfien, who curated the Garry Winogrand retrospective opening this weekend at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Winogrand’s pictures, typically taken with a hand-held camera, are classics of the street-photography genre that dominated American photography in the 1950s and ’60s. They captured American prosperity, the flight to the suburbs, the tumult of the Vietnam era and the retreat of Americans into a kind of self-interested hedonism in the 1970s and early ’80s.

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features photographer and essayist Leo Rubinfien, who curated the Garry Winogrand retrospective opening this weekend at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Winogrand’s pictures, typically taken with a hand-held camera, are classics of the street-photography genre that dominated American photography in the 1950s and ’60s. They captured American prosperity, the flight to the suburbs, the tumult of the Vietnam era and the retreat of Americans into a kind of self-interested hedonism in the 1970s and early ’80s.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is the only U.S. venue for the exhibition “Lucian Freud: Portraits,” which originated at the National Portrait Gallery in London. 

Episode No. 39 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast focused on Freud: My guests were Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, a friend of Freud’s who has written several books on his work, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth chief curator Michael Auping, who helped organize the exhibition and who conducted the last interviews with Freud before his death last year. (Smee and I opened our conversation by discussing art and museums in Boston and New England, and his new e-book, titled “Frame by Frame.”)

To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program here.

Image: Lucian Freud, Nude with Leg Up (Leigh Bowery), 1992. Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington.

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights artist Lucian Freud, whose paintings are the subject of a major exhibition that originated at the National Portrait Gallery in London and which is now at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Titled “Lucian Freud: Portraits,” the exhibition is on view at MAMFW through October 28.

My guests are Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, a friend of Freud’s who has written several books on his work, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth chief curator Michael Auping, who helped organize the exhibition and who conducted the last interviews with Freud before his death last year. Smee and I also discuss art and museums in Boston and New England, and his new e-book, titled “Frame by Frame.”

Both Auping and Smee talk with me about how Freud exists outside the usual modernist narrative… but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t occasionally fit right in (albeit over half-a-century late). Take this painting, Standing by the Rags (1988-89), in which Freud flattens space in a manner that recalls an early modernist master. Is Freud’s model lying down? Or is she standing?

To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program here.

Image: Lucian Freud, Standing by the Rags, 1988-89. Collection of Tate, London.

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights artist Lucian Freud, whose paintings are the subject of a major exhibition that originated at the National Portrait Gallery in London and which is now at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Titled “Lucian Freud: Portraits,” the exhibition is on view at MAMFW through October 28.

My guests are Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, a friend of Freud’s who has written several books on his work, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth chief curator Michael Auping, who helped organize the exhibition and who conducted the last interviews with Freud before his death last year. Smee and I also discuss art and museums in Boston and New England, and his new e-book, titled “Frame by Frame.”

To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of art discussed on the program here.

Image: Lucian Freud, Sunny Morning-Eight Legs, 1952. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Larger JPEG here.