Episode No. 69 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Karen Butler and Katherine Siegwarth.
Butler’s exhibition “Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945” is at the Kemper through April 21. Phillips Collection curator Renée Maurer co-organized the show. Its handsome catalogue was published by Prestel.
The exhibition offers the first detailed look at Braque’s still-life painting in the years leading up to and through World War II, a period during which questions of painting and daily life were inextricably wrapped up in politics and resistance. The Kemper exhibition is the first Braque show of any kind in the United States in 16 years.
Prior to joining the Kemper, Butler was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Matisse Studies at the Barnes Foundation. Along with Yve-Alain Bois and Claudine Grammont, she is the co-author of the forthcoming catalogue of the 59 Matisses in the Barnes’ collection.
On the second segment, Katherine Siegwarth discusses her exhibition “Big Pictures,” an exhibition that spotlights the long-standing importance of size to photographers. Siegwarth is the Carter’s Luce Curatorial Fellow for Photographs. The show goes back to the 1860s to demonstrate that size in photography pre-dates the ‘Big Germans’ and that photographers have almost always wanted to make their prints bigger. “Big Pictures” opens on March 5 and runs through April 21.
Air date: Feb. 28. 2013.

Georges Braque, Still Life with Fruit Dish, Bottle and Mandolin, 1930. Collection of Kunstsammlung Nordrheim-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.