Hammer Museum

Robert Rauschenberg created Minutiae as a stage set for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's premiere of a dance by the same name. Composed of paint, collage elements, found objects, and fabric, Minutiae featured open construction that allowed dancers to interact both in and around the sculpture. Rauschenberg's first freestanding combine, Minutiae initiated the artist’s ten-year collaboration with the dance company and instigated his own emerging sculpture practice. The final segment of our #LeapLookLearn Periscope series explores this work—so tune in tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. to learn more! 

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 closes this Sunday. Robert Rauschenberg, Minutiae, 1954 (1974 replica). Oil, paper, fabric, newspaper, wood, metal, plastic, mirror, and string on wood structure. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection, Gift of Jay F. Eckland, the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, Agnes Gund, Russell Cowles and Josine Peters, the Hayes Fund of HRK Foundation, Dorothy Lichtenstein, MAHADH Fund of HRK Foundation, Goodale Family Foundation, Marion Stroud Swingle, David Teiger, Kathleen Fluegel, Barbara G. Pine, and the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2011. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

R. Buckminster Fuller invited Emerson Woelffer, along with several other faculty members from the Institute of Design in Chicago, to spend the summer of 1949 teaching painting at Black Mountain College. In this work, a group of loosely depicted personages appear to link arms and shift their gazes in ways that form an elaborate circle. In addition to the high-keyed palette's evocation of pleasure and happiness, Last Internment is notable for the way in which it combines biomorphic figuration with allover composition, seemingly brokering an arrangement of European and American modernism.

Emerson Woelffer, Last Internment, 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas. Courtesy of Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles.

In honor of Cy Twombly’s birthday today, this week’s #NotOnView selection is one of the artist’s sketches from our collection. However, you can see some of Twombly’s art currently on view in our Black Mountain College exhibition.

Cy Twombly, Sketches, 1967 (published 1975). Etching on handmade paper. 12 1/4 x 8 7/8 in. (31.1 x 22.5 cm). Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum.

Anni Albers emphasized a return to the foundational principles of textile construction. Her students learned to draft and read weave patterns, tie knots, calculate the vertical (warp) and horizontal (weft) threads of the loom, dress the loom, analyze color relationships, and weave. 

The vertical black rectangles in With Verticals appear to float on the warm red ground, reiterating the rectilinear structure of the loom's warp and weft threads. The textile also recalls the foundational collage exercises in color and design that Albers would have done at the Bauhaus and that her husband, Josef Albers integrated into the visual arts program at Black Mountain College.

Anni Albers, With Verticals, 1946. Cotton and linen. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Our Black Mountain College programming continues this weekend with a "leap before you look" inspired cannonball contest in the courtyard's temporary pool!

Hazel-Frieda Larsen first came to Black Mountain College in 1944 to attend the first Summer Art Institute and then returned in 1945, staying for nine years altogether, first as a student and then as a teacher of photography. Her photographs are some of the most exquisite documents and works of art made at the college. 

While Archer gained recognition for her photographs and was included in 5 Women Photographers, a 1950 group show at the Museum of Modern Art, she stopped exhibiting her work after the college closed in 1957 and committed herself to education.

Hazel Larsen Archer, Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn and Robert Rauschenberg, ca. 1952. Gelatin silver print. 6 1/4 x 9 ¼ inches. Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center.

Josef and Anni Albers visited the archeological site Tenayuca in 1937, and Albers took numerous photographs of the massive Aztec temple that sits at its center. The temple is adorned with stone serpents with a spiraling form that likely inspired the main motif of his painting Tenayuca.

The composition also appears to hover or float, which replicates the sense of space present in photographs Albers took from the top of the pyramid looking down. Tenayuca illustrates the artist's interest in how perceptual experiences of three dimensions might be translated into two dimensions.

Josef Albers, Tenayuca, 1943. Oil on Masonite. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Purchase with the aid of funds from Mr. and Mrs. Richard N. Holdman and Madeleine Haas Russel.

Ruth Asawa arrived at Black Mountain College in 1946 and during her three years there she would develop a method of weaving wire first learned from Mexican craftspeople on a trip to Toluca, Mexico. In this hanging sculpture now on view, Asawa deployed wire to exploit its tactile, linear, and sculptural effects. The result is an exemplary Black Mountain object—modest, human scale, low-tech, and profoundly handmade. 

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (5. 272), c. 1955. Copper and iron wire. Private collection.

Now on view: the first comprehensive museum exhibition in the United States about the experimental liberal arts college where influential artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Josef and Anni Albers, and Merce Cunningham studied and taught. 

Learn more about Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957: http://bit.ly/1MsnmDF