Palm Springs Art Museum In The News

[+ Lucky]

The Palm Springs Art Museum has an exhibit of work by Leon Polk Smith. The exhibit is featured in today's Wall Street Journal.

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The article is behind a paywall, so here is an excerpt:

In 1954, the American abstract painter Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996) saw some drawings of basketballs in a sports equipment catalog. “They were just line circles with a drawing of the seams on the covering of the ball,” he said. “I was fascinated by the space that was between these lines and felt bound to them and started immediately drawing some of my own, taking off from this space concept. . . . It was flat and the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does.”

Although the event didn’t signal Smith’s first brush with abstraction (he’d been painting nonrepresentationally since the 1940s), it epitomizes the relationship of the physical format (usually not a rectangle) to the pictorial composition that characterizes his work. This, essentially, is the subject of “Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962,” on view at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California through Aug. 28. (The show is an expanded version of “Leon Polk Smith: Big Form, Big Space,” that was at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.)

Born the eighth of nine children to part-Cherokee parents who had migrated from Tennessee to what was then the Chickasaw Indian Territory—a year later it became the state of Oklahoma—Smith spoke Cherokee at home. He worked on the family farm until, in his early 20s, he went off to school at Oklahoma State College. When he was a senior, he happened by an art classroom and peeked in through a partially open door. Smith asked the teacher if he could watch for a bit. He subsequently enrolled in a painting class and decided to major in art...

Untitled

“Untitled” (1953) is a superb little painting—a moving one, if you’re attuned to the beauties of geometric abstraction. The play of curved lines—both within the painting and in the format—the bang-bang but not overpowering use of red, and the way the gray above and below the painting’s midpoint prevents the work from becoming a mere emblem all display Smith’s appetite for nuance, a quality that sets him apart from a plethora of showier geometric abstractionists. “Red Blue Orange Ellipses” from eight years later shows Smith revisiting the tondo mode, working with three flat colors; but this time there’s no black and the abrupt chromatic shift is a little harder for a viewer to handle comfortably. Plus, there’s more than a bit of sexual allusion in the picture.

...The Palm Springs show is good, but whether by circumstance or design is spacious to a fault. Viewers more used to chockablock installation, multiple walls of explanatory texts, and—as is the wont of current painting exhibitions—billboard-size works might feel a little at sea. “Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962” is a respite from all that, and a chance to contemplate the modestly scaled and somewhat formative work of an excellent abstract painter.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/leon-polk-1945-1962-palm-springs-art-museum-abstract-art-gallery-of-living-art-new-york-university-brancusi-mondrian-ellsworth-kelly-jack-youngerman-robert-indiana-carmen-herrera-11653426666?mod=books_arts_lead_pos3

[foxy]

The Palm Springs Art Museum is a gem of a museum. I’ve always enjoyed their exhibits and that it does a little of everything. Art, science and just fun stuff. It’s a great way to spend a day. 

[mike carey]

Agree with other posters, I spent a very pleasant few hours wandering around the museum last time I was in Palm Springs.

[Peter Eater]

On 5/25/2022 at 9:12 AM, foxy said:

Art, science and just fun stuff.

Palm Springs Art Museum stopped doing science more than 15 years ago. (Used to be Palm Springs Desert Museum, with natural history and art.) All Art now.