Happening in the South

By Temple Ligon

This weekend offers two opportunities in the visual arts, one here and one in Atlanta. The Atlanta event is, of course, the big deal, but if you can sit in on a lecture in Columbia this afternoon, Friday, and then run over to Atlanta’s High Museum on Saturday or Sunday, you got something.

Here in Columbia is a lecture on Andrew Jackson Downing, called by many as the Father of American Landscape Architecture. Others put that title on Frederick Law Olmstead, who gets credit for New York’s Central Park. Downing, however – who died in 1852 – was partnered with architect Calvert Vaux at the time of Downing’s death. Vaux teamed up with Olmstead immediately after Downing’s death to design New York’s Central Park. In other words, had it not been for Downing’s early death due to drowning at age 36, he would have been known for Central Park and all the other commissions that came to Vaux and his second partner Olmstead.

As Downing was described several years ago in The Atlantic Monthly:

“Anyone who has grown up in a suburban house, visited a cul-de-sac lined with ranch houses, or driven through Levittown has been touched by A. J. Downing. He was the creator of the American suburb—not its forms alone, but its philosophy. His illustrated pattern books, especially The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), created our modern image of the suburb: strongly individualized houses sitting on winding streets, picturesquely integrated with nature. At the core of Downing’s thought was a moral understanding of suburban life, and he should not be blamed for the McMansions that parody his precepts.”

At Atlanta’s High Museum there is an exhibition on the work of French painter Paul Cezanne, who was heading into cubism ahead of Picasso and Braque over a hundred years ago. Picasso, in fact, recognized Cezanne as “the father of us all.”

South Carolina’s Jasper Johns has also done well financially as a painter, so with his expanding personal wealth due to new paintings that sell in the millions, Johns collects art, and he says he is most proud of his Cezannes.

I was living in Houston in 1977 when New Orleans scored the King Tut exhibition while many Houstonians complained they lost out. Houston should have been that region’s temporary home to King Tut, they said. Instead, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts put on “Cezanne’s Late Work,” a fabulous exhibition for the serious set, people who really appreciated high art. Tut could stay on the Nile or the Mississippi as long as Houston got Cezanne, most of us agreed. It was a milestone for the Houston MFA.

Some of what was seen in Houston in 1977 can be seen in Atlanta, this weekend being the last opportunity.

While at the High, by the way, walk off the other current exhibitions and pieces of their permanent collection on display. By doing so you get a tour of some first-rate architecture by Richard Meier, who designed the main building, and by Renzo Piano, designer of the more recent expansion galleries. With what Meier accomplished at the High, he was hired to design the Getty Center in Malibu, California, the world’s richest art museum.

To attend the lecture on Andrew Jackson Downing, come to Still Hopes in Cayce this afternoon at 1:30, or to hear the same lecture later, come to 2225 Terrace Way at 6:00 tonight.