The Modern Art Notes Podcast

London’s Tate Modern has a good collection of Larry Bell sculptures, six works in all. Three are on view at the museum now.

The Tate’s Bells include  the 1967 untitled cube above. The Tate Modern also has a superb 1971 Bell floor piece, a fine example of a group of works which are rarely exhibited. (The only museum in America that regularly exhibits Bell’s floor-mounted works is the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Its piece dates to the late 1980s.) 

No American artist of his generation is more overdue for a retrospective examination than Bell. He was host Tyler Green’s guest on Episode No. 12 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. Green and Bell discussed the early days of what became known as the light-and-space movement, Bell’s early career in New York and the great floor-mounted pieces. 

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This is a Little Sun, a small solar-powered lamp designed to provide indoor light in off-the-grid locations, especially third-world countries where power may be intermittent or unavailable. It was conceived and designed by artist Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Ottesen and is priced in such a manner that when affluent Americans and Europeans purchase Little Sun, it helps make it available at about half the price in off-the-grid locations.

Also: Check out the Little Sun Tumblr! And pick one up here for $25. The Tate Modern recently featured Little Sun in this exhibition.

Eliasson is my guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast. Among the subjects we discuss is his Little Sun project. An exhibition of Eliasson’s newest photographs — featuring his ancestral homeland of Iceland — opens next week at Chelsea’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Also, Taschen has just published a new edition of “Studio Olafur Eliasson,” a 532-page ‘encylopedia’ of Eliasson’s studio practice. (It’s available on Amazon for $25, a 40 percent discount.)

Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.

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?

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

Painter Charline von Heyl is having one heckuva 2012: She’s the subject of simultaneous American and European mid-career surveys. The U.S. show is now at the Institute of Contemporary Boston; the European show was organized by the Tate Liverpool, where it recently closed, and opens at the Kunsthalle Nuremberg next month. (And just for good measure: One of my favorite von Heyls, Happy End (2005, above, click to expand), is currently on view at SFMOMA.)

Von Heyl was on Episode Two of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. She was a terrific guest: Artists will particularly enjoy hearing how von Heyl works through ideas, blank canvases and day-to-day life in the studio.

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Image: Charline von Heyl, Happy End, 2005. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It’s Roy Lichtenstein week at the Art Institute of Chicago — and on The Modern Art Notes Podcast! This week’s program features James Rondeau, the head of the contemporary art department at the Art Institute of Chicago, talking about his new Lichtenstein retrospective. Rondeau co-organized the exhibition with Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Sheena Wagstaff. The exhibition is the first career-length survey of Lichtenstein’s art and the first retrospective of the artist in 18 years.

To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. Click here to see images of art discussed on the show.

Image: Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam! (detail), 1963. Collection of Tate, London. Click here to see the full image.