Their Incredible Thoughts In Art

Columbia Museum of Art Chandelier

Hey Gang, yesterday we had a few hours free so we visited the Columbia Museum of Art to check out the current exhibits.  We really love being members of the museum since it gives us the opportunity to periodically spend an hour or two just becoming immersed in the beauty that resides in our capitol city.  As you enter the museum the first thing that greets you is something we have talked about in the past - a chandelier created by Dale Chihuly during the period 2009-2010.  For those of you who hang out with us on our visits to the corners of our country you might recall a visit we took to Seattle a while back.  In fact if you look over on the right side of our blog page you will see one of the 'slide shows' entitled "Chihuly: Garden and Glass".  It shows a number of photos we took when we visited Dale's gallery in Seattle and they are stunning.  Well - the post we did at that time bragged on the Chihuly chandelier that hangs in the entry foyer of the Columbia Museum of Art.  But - at that time I don't think I included a picture of the work.  Well - here it is!!  It is an amazing creation and is the first permanent exhibit of his work in South Carolina.  It is fourteen feet long and eleven feet wide - and - six feet deep.  (The 'shoulders' of the work are wider than they are deep.)  It consists of nearly eight hundred individual pieces - but only about eleven different shapes.  But there is a specific reason I wanted to highlight this work today.  Think back to some of the visits we took to Brookgreen Gardens and the spectacular sculptures we saw there.  Many were quite old but looked as if they had just been completed.  Others were very recent but had the look of old works by ancient masters.  The point was - art is absolutely timeless!!  Dale Chihuly is only a couple of years older than I am but his status as a master of glass transcends the years and invokes the spirit of glasswork that lives and breathes in Venice today.  And ... remarkably - there was another chandelier on display during our visit that underscores the very point we were making.  It is a work created by Antonio Salviati some time between 1880 and 1890.  Now, I apologize for the quality of the photograph, folks, but believe me, it does not do the work justice.  Salviati's chandelier is absolutely stunning and when you are standing there in front of the piece it looks as if it were just made!!!  It is incredibly fresh, modern and technologically innovative.  Mr. Chihuly would be very proud to share exhibit space with this beautiful work.  Clearly he and Sr. Salviati were brothers in spirit!!  But our experiences during this visit were filled with the same kind of juxtaposition.  We saw young artists whose work displayed a timelessness that was breathtaking - shown in immediate proximity to other pieces that were older in years but just as refreshingly modern.  Take a look at these three.  The first (on the left) Is a blown glass vase by a young American, Brian Becher, who was only twenty-six years old when he created the piece.  I know the detail is not very distinct in the photo but, believe me, it is astonishing.  The second one (to the right) is by Massimiliano (Max) Pagnin and is a Tesserae glass vase created in 2001 when Max was thirty-six years old.  I tried to blow up a portion of the vase (left) so you could see the amazing detail he achieved in the vase.  I have no idea how he did what he did but it is truly beautiful.  The third one is the one that establishes 'the rule.'  It is an exquisitely beautiful, yet simple, piece of glazed stoneware by Harrison Macintosh created in 1980 - around the time Becher (above) was born and when Pagnin was only fifteen years old.  Yet - all three artists are related by art in the same neurological 'connectedness' as Siamese twins.  There is not enough time in our days to do justice to all of the exquisite works of art we spent time with today so our post will not be extensive.  Instead, we will look at just a few works and the principles of art they embody for the time period in which they were created.  I apologize for the brevity of the visit - because this is such a fabulous place in which to experience the beauty of art.  I really hope that if you ever get to visit our capitol city, Columbia, you will take the time to visit the Museum of Art (as well as our other fabulous museums here) and see, for yourself, the marvelous exhibits we have.  I included a painting of Thomas Sumter here here because we visited his memorial on one of our past trips and talked about his contributions to South Carolina.  Nicknamed the "Carolina Gamecock" for his fighting style and his energy, Sumter was one of the most brilliant Generals of the Revolutionary War and the last to die.  His nickname is shared by the athletic teams of the University of South Carolina.   Two of the other paintings I included were significant to me because of the unique symbolism they contained.  The first (the tryptich on the right by Giovanni di Marco Dal Ponte sometime around 1426) has an icon of St. Michael on the left (the namesake of the church we attend), St. George on the right (Linda and I were honored to receive the St. George Award when we were involved in Scouting.)  The center portion of the piece shows the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child flanked by St. Stephen (the other church we love to attend in beautiful Ridgeway) and St. Lawrence (we have been very involved in the ministry at St. Lawrence Place in Columbia in the past.)  So it seemed quite propitious to have this beautiful work as one of the first ones in the current exhibit we were visiting.  One of the others we were particularly pleased to see was the work on the right, a round painting called a "tondo" by Mariotto Albertinelli (we think) done some time between 1474 and 1515.  (Around the time Columbus was 'discovering' us!!)  What I really liked about this piece was the symbolism present in just about everything in the painting.  First - it is a shape that was used when presenting a painting to a new mother and is illustrative of the "High Renaissance" style.  The presence of St. John (right) and St. Francis (left), two of my favorites, makes the painting special but in this work the pomegranite shown at the botton (see blow-up on the left) of the painting symbolizes the church and it's flock while the finch shown drinking from the baptismal bowl symbolizes the redemption of the soul of man and the passion of Christ.  It is absolutely amazing what you can see when you look at these old works closely.  I won't wear your eyes out any more, gang, so we'll close this visit out for now.  We're gearing up for more trips and we'll be giving more details in the next week or so.  Until then, hang in there with us.  See ya.