Exhibitions 2004 at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art

PLEASE NOTE: All exhibition descriptions are excerpts from Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art's quarterly newsletter, L'Artiste.	Past Exhibition Highlights
	2009 2008	2007 2006	2005 2004	2003 2002
2004 January 18 - February 8 Markissia Billiris Oriental Pastel, 3 in. x 4 in. Laura Von Stetina Chance Encounter Transparent watercolor4 1/2 in. x 4 1/4 in.	North and South Galleries 29th Annual International Miniature Art Society The Miniature Art Society of Florida (MASF) was founded in 1974 by Bede Zel Angle, a graduate of the University of Florida in Fine Arts. In April of 1975, Angle was instrumental in organizing the first invitational Miniature Art Show comprised of selections from more than 80 miniaturists from 28 states displaying 250 pieces of art. The tradition of holding an annual competition has been well received over the years and draws participants from the United States and many foreign countries. This year the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art is pleased to be hosting the 29^th Annual International Miniature Art Society Exhibition. Miniature art has been a cause for fascination throughout the ages. Ancient Greeks adorned their walls with small murals, monks in the Middle Ages embellished manuscripts with delicate illuminations and Elizabethan England was famous for its portrait miniatures on vellum and ivory carried in pockets or lockets. Miniature art traveled to America experiencing a Golden Age between 1750 and 1850. The advent of photography in the mid-1800’s led to the near death of miniature art but there was a Revival Period between 1890 and 1940 and another resurgence during the last quarter of the 20^th century. Today miniature art is created in a variety of media and explores limitless subjects and styles including portraits. Size and clarity are two important aspects of miniature art. Angle was one of the early proponents of the “one sixth guide” to miniature art – artists are encouraged to paint subjects no larger than one sixth of their natural size. This guideline is widely accepted today although modifications can be made where very tiny subjects or abstracts are concerned. Miniature art must be able to withstand scrutiny under magnification as well. Although artists from all over the world have contributed works to the 29^th Annual International Miniature Art Society Exhibition several are from the Tampa Bay area. Octavio Perez, a professor at the Ringling School of Art and Design and one of this year’s judges, was a 2003 award winner with his piece, Ivory Reflections. Laura Von Stetina of Pinellas Park was a 2003 award winner with her piece, Chance Encounter, which was purchased for the MASF’s permanent collection. The Greenwich Press recently published Mewingham Manor, a book illustrated by Laura Von Stetina. Markissia Billiris of Tarpon Springs was a 2001, 2002 and 2003 award winner. Her piece, At the Vanity, was also purchased for the MASF permanent collection. Markissia was a donor at the Museum’s 2003 For the Love of Art silent auction.
February 22 - April 18 John Dos Passos (American, 1896 – 1970) Fisherman Watercolor on paper Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggins Circulated by International Arts & Artists, Washington, D.C. John Dos Passos (American, 1896 – 1970) Glaciers Watercolor on paper Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggins Circulated by International Arts & Artists, Washington, D.C.	North and South Galleries The Art of Jon Dos Passos In fifty years American writer John Dos Passos (1896 – 1970) wrote forty-two literary works and created over four hundred pieces of art, providing a panoramic social history of the world he knew. This exhibition presents sixty-four colorful watercolors and six pieces of dust jacket art that depict his extensive travels and adventures during the early 20^th century. Works that portray Dos Passos’ desire to capture the spirit and times in which he lived are highlighted. International Arts & Artists, a non-profit arts service organization dedicated to promoting excellence in the arts, in conjunction with Lucy Dos Passos Coggin, John Dos Passos’ daughter, organized The Art of John Dos Passos. The exhibition opened at the Queens Borough Library in New York in January 2001 and has since traveled to the Bayly Museum of Art at the University of Virginia and to the University of Richmond. The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art is please to exhibit this important collection in the Tampa Bay area. John Dos Passos was born in Chicago, Illinois is 1896 and was raised in Europe by his mother. He graduated from Harvard University in 1916 with a degree in English. He traveled to Spain to study art and architecture and became an avid sketcher during the war years working in pencil, colored pencil and watercolor while serving in a volunteer ambulance corps. Dos Passos’ first major art exhibition was in New York at the National Art Club in 1922. He later exhibited at the Whitney Studio Club, in group shows of the Salons of America at the Anderson Galleries and the R.C.A. Building in Rockefeller Center. He participated in the artists communities in New York and Paris and was acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Russian émigré Natalia Gontcharova, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, e.e. cummings, Diego Rivera and Abraham Rattner. John Dos Passos wrote the foreword to the catalog for Rattner’s first one man show in the United States at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1936. An excerpt reads, “The great tradition of painting is built out of the chances painters have taken in the past with shapes and colors. Abraham Rattner is a painter who takes chances. He has come back from Paris intoxicated with shapes and colors instead of with the dogma of Cubism or Surrealism or Post-Expressionism.” Dos Passos collaborated with Rattner for the magazine Verve in the 1930s and purchased Rattner’s Le Bistrot in 1938. Dos Passos first achieved critical and popular recognition as a writer for his antiwar novel, Three Soldiers written in 1921. Manhattan Transfer, written in 1925, portrayed a panoramic view of life in New York City between 1890 and 1925 and was an immense success. This powerful novel determined the style of the best of his later works using fragments of popular songs, news headlines, stream-of-consciousness monologues and naturalistic fragments from the lives of many unrelated characters. Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy used the same style and expanded his panorama to encompass the entire nation. The Trilogy consists of The 42^nd Parallel, 1930; 1919, 1932; and The Big Money, 1936. The trilogy depicts the growth of American materialism from the 1890s to the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

May 2 - May 30 Albert Marquet (French, 1875-1947) Musée d'Art Modern exhibition poster from October 9 - December 19, 1948 Dino Kotopoulis (American, b. 1932) Picasso Art Cat, 2004 Painted metal	North and South Galleries Vintage Paris Exhibition Posters: 1947-1950 Since the days of Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard in the late 19^th century, French artists have taken great pride in designing their own exhibition posters. Collectors who have grown to admire their striking quality, color and design have coveted these posters. Vintage Paris Exhibition Posters: 1947 – 1950 is an exhibition of such posters. It is a portion of a collection of 91 limited edition posters assembled in 1950 for an exhibition entitled Paris Exhibition Posters. Heinze Berggruen, a curator for the San Francisco Museum of Art (now known as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), assembled the original collection. Between 1950 and 1951, The American Federation of Arts circulated the exhibition to seven art institutions around the country – including the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the J. B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville. An exhibition guide accompanied the exhibiton with an introduction by Heinz Berggruen and essay by Denys Sutton, a British art critic and member of the UNESCO Secretariat in Paris at the time. The complete collection of Paris Exhibition Posters was last shown at the Carpenter Art Galleries at Dartmouth College in July 1951. The works were then offered for sale in New York City and Abraham Rattner purchased 32 of the 91 posters. They remained in his estate until they were “discovered” during the summer of 2003 by volunteers in the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art archives. Interactive Gallery *Art Cats by Dino Kotopoulis* Several whimsical metal sculptures by Safety Harbor, Florida artist Dino Kotopoulis will be in the Interactive Gallery. Art Cats include Calder, Degas, Monet, Picasso, Pollock and Van Gogh. This is Dino’s third showing at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art. You may remember seeing Big Cat last summer – he was on the Museum terrace wearing a hula skirt. And during the Holiday Fest, Big Cat, Christmas Tree Cat and Cat on Springs were members of the whimsical holiday sculpture walk wearing a winter scarf – they were the Three Little Kittens who Lost Their Mittens!
June 13 - July 25 Marilú Eustachio (Italian, 1934) Untitled, 1995 Diptych, screen prints/hand painted, 40" x 26" each	North and South Galleries Transiti Italiani: Prints by Marilú Eustachio, Oliviero Rainaldi and Cloti Ricciardi from the Mitchell Collection Transiti Italiani: Prints by Marilú Eustacio, Oliviero Rainaldi and Cloti Ricciardi is an exhibition of 33 screen-prints by three renowned Italian artists invited to the United States to create portfolios in the Berghoff-Cowden Editions, Inc. collaborative workshop in Tampa, Florida. The artists spent some weeks in Tampa creating a series of prints. The print process was a different media for each of the artists and they shared the task of communicating their ideas using it. Each artist approached the process differently creating large, ethereal or symbolic works relecting Italian post-Modernist aesthetics. All works are from the Mitchell Collection. Painter Marilú Eustachio translated the spontaneous and gestural approach of her drawings and paintings in to the print medium. Human interaction is the foundation of her work – she is most concerned with one theme, the human face. For Oliviero Rainaldi, a painter of large-format monochrome images, forming the appropriate hue and the correct proportion was the main concern. His prints are based on a series of paintings and represent one theme, the human figure on a monochrome ground. Cloti Ricciardi, who started as an abstract painter, usually builds sculptural installations in a three dimensional space using materials such as glass, steel, resin and water. She focused on the meaning of the materials she imported into her prints. After being defeated and devastated during World War II, Italy underwent a renaissance in the field of design. Within fifteen years it rose to usurp the leadership of Western design producing major designers, manufacturers, critical milieu and the retailing system that set the pace for Modern design in the second half of the 20^th century. A grouping of Italian modernist furniture from the Jim Mitchell, Jr. Collection is being shown to enhance the print collection.
August 29 - October 24 Auguste Herbin (French, 1882-1960) Rouge (Red), 1946 Gouache on paper, 13 x 17 in. On loan from Galerie Lauhumière, Paris Auguste Herbin (French, 1882-1960) Synchromie en Noir (Synchromy in Black), 1941 Oil on canvas, 21 x 28 in. On loan from Galerie Lauhumière, Paris	South Gallery Auguste Herbin: A Retrospective and North Gallery Homage to Herbin: A Selection of Contemporary Geometric Artists The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art is pleased to present two exhibitions focusing on the French painter Auguste Herbin (1882 – 1960). Both exhibitions are circulated from Galerie Lahumière, a private Parisian collection, owned by Madame Anne Lahumière, who is currently the largest Herbin collector. The first exhibition includes a retrospective of 20 Herbin works from 1918 – 1949. The second exhibition includes works by six contemporary European geometric artists who celebrate the influence of Herbin: Nicholas Bodde, Jean Dubreuil, Renaud Jacquier-Stajnowicz, Jean Legros, Yves Popet and André Stempfel. Auguste Herbin was born in Quiévy, France. He studied drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lille, from 1898 to 1901. After settling in Paris he was initially influenced by impressionism and post-impressionism and then by cubism. In Montparnasse he met the famous art collector Wilhelm Uhde (one of the first buyer’s of Pablo Picasso) and the dealer Clovis Sagot. He spent several years working in fauvism and synthetic cubism, along with Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris at the Bateau Lavoir studios. In 1931 Herbin founded the Abstraction-Créations movement with Georges Vantongerloo, Jean Arp and others. Later influences on Herbin included Kasimir Malevich (a pioneer of geometric abstract art along with Piet Mondrian), Le Corbusier and the color theories of 19^th century German poet Johann Wolfgang Goëthe. In 1949 Herbin published Non-figurative Non-objective Art in which he outlined a system of correspondences between colors, forms, notes of music, letters of the alphabet and psychological impact called alphabet plastique. He encouraged artists to reduce subject matter to geometric shapes and to emphasize color as an expressive force. Not only can Herbin’s paintings be read but they can also be heard as every letter also has one or more musical tones. Herbin is considered to be a major contributor to the literature on optical illusion and the psychological impact of color. He inspired and influenced the hard-edge artists of the 1970s who strove for flat-painted surfaces, smooth texture and intense color contrasts. His work is included in museum collections around the world including the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Georges Pompidou Center, Paris; and the Stedelijik Museum, Amsterdam.
November 7 - January 2, 2005 Ilya Kabanov (Russian, b. 1933) Composition (detail), 1968 Colored pencil on paper, 8 1/8 x 11 3/8 in. On loan from the Kolodzei Collection Tatiana Levitskala (Russian, b. 1944) In Ruins, 1995 Enamel on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in. On loan from the Kolodzei Collection	North and South Galleries Finding Freedom: Forty Years of Soviet and Russian Art The Finding Freedom: Forty Years of Soviet and Russian Art is a selection of art from the Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art that emerged, survived and flourished over the past forty years The exhibition includes one or two pieces of Soviet and Russian non-conformist (unofficial) art per year chronicling the post-Stalinist era to the present. The collector, Tatiana Kolodzei, was exposed to works by artists including Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky and Pavel Filonov from the age of seventeen. Seeing their art shaped her outlook for the rest of her life and inspired her to help non-conformist artists who were not being supported by the State. Tatiana organized personal exhibitions and in turn, was given works of art by many of the artists who appreciated her assistance. Before coming to the United States, Tatiana lived with her daughter Natalia in a tiny two room apartment – one of which was jammed to the ceiling with art. Cabinets and drawers overflowed with works on paper, files and documents. Tatiana was known as godmother to the non-conformist artists. She introduced the artists to foreign visitors who became acquainted with them and their work. The gifted art became the basis for the collection which is now of great historical and artistic value; the collection is comprised of several thousand works of art representing more than 300 artists from the former Soviet Union. The exhibition chronicles four decades of Russian and Soviet non-conformist art from the post-Stalinist era to the present. The exhibition progresses through stages in chronological order: artists from the 1960s and 1970s who worked during the time of Nikita Khrushchev’s thaw, a second group who emerged during the 1970s and 1980s and a third group who worked during the birth of the free and democratic Russia from the 1980s until the present. Sixty works by twenty-five artists including painting, sculpture, prints, fabric arts and mixed media in an eclectic mix of artistic styles are in the exhibition. Artists from Krushchev’s time include Oleg Vassiliev, Hya Kabakov, Anatolii Zverev, Dimitri Plavinsky and Eduard Shteinberg. Natalia Nesterova and Olga Bulgakova represent the second group, who worked during the 1970s and 1980s. The third group who became known during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev includes Tatiana Antoshina and Farid Bogdalov.