Art Roundup: A Stein is a rose; radical cameras

Fans of Gertrude Stein, make your pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, an immersive introduction to the prophetic taste of Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael and her sister-in-law, Sarah. Picasso, Renoir, Manet...all of that's fine, but what really lifted me were the images of the writer herself--photos, paintings, sculpture infused with her presence and the energy of how she was perceived by her contemporaries. The Steins Collect opens to the public on Tuesday, February 28 and runs through June 3. For information, click here.

Detail, Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906
Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met will also host a Gallery Workshop on Art and Writing: Making Creative Connections, led by Claire E. Moore, assistant Museum educator on Friday, March 30, at 6:30pm.

Explore the synergies between the artists and writers who were part of famed collector Gertrude Stein's Paris as you listen to inspiring literary excerpts, view works in the exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, and respond through writing.

At the Met's Carson Family Hall, Uris Center for Education. Fee: $35. For more information or to purchase tickets, click here.

Also highly recommended:

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 at The Jewish Museum, an exhibition of documentary photography-- most often treating social issues and conditions--that can surprise and inspire today's viewers by its fine aesthetic vision. The Radical Camera continues through March 25. For complete information, click here.

David Goldblatt’s South Africa

David Goldblatt’s South Africa Photos at Jewish Museum

by Holland Cotter, The New York Times, July 1, 2010

Moving-Static-Moving Figures: The Legendary Nevelson

Make time this summer to see The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing A Legend at The Jewish Museum, now through September 16.

Vigorous motion within static form; textures smooth and rough; objects found and constructed, natural and woman-made; open enclosures and recessed shelters; formidably massive and intimately inviting; matte color, gleaming and shaded; verticality and voluptuous curvature; severity and whimsy; repetition and singularity; rhythmic and arrhythmic; black, white, antique gold, transparent. All of it suggesting the body. So much dancing in this body of work!

I cherished my time with it.

"...moving through the third dimension to the fourth and beyond...through matter to spirit." -- Louise Nevelson