More additions to YOUR art collection @VMFA

Pieces ranging from the painted glass work of a Virginian painting professor to a photograph documenting the visual traditions of Indian Royalty have recently been added to your art collection at the VMFA. These pieces have been brought to you through the VMFA’s privately supported acquisition program.

Richard Roth, a painting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, began his career in the late 1960s when Minimalism and Conceptual Art predominated in the art world. Untitled (yellow corner) dates from that time and nods to the essential modernist form of the grid (Piet Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt, Sol LeWitt), while subjecting it to rotation, misalignment, and high-keyed color. In effect, Roth created a “maximalist” rather than minimalist painting—although one still within the bounds of hard-edged geometry.
— John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Lalla Essaydi’s photography explores the charged issue of veiling and revealing that surrounds Islamic women. The women in the series Les Femmes du Maroc are enveloped in Islamic calligraphy, inscribed in henna on their skin, robes, and surrounding interiors. The text entraps them yet recalls a form of decoration often applied in celebration or for good luck. As an evocative response to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), Essaydi’s image replaces a Western male perspective on “the Orient” with that of a Muslim female.
— John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Riverbank dates from Andre Lhote’s early connection with other French Cubists such as Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Leger. While the trees and sky are recognizable, the balance and harmony of the composition as a whole takes precedent over a naturalistic representation of the scene. A rhythmic dialogue between light and dark areas provides a unifying structure, while the undulating forms of the trees add a dynamic contrast.
— Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Assistant Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art

Beginning in the 1970s, English photographer Derry Moore photographed India over two decades. Typical of his work, this picture, while documentary, is also somewhat staged. It seems that both photographer and subjects—two seated traders and three attendants in the open courtyard of a traditional Rajasthani mansion—participate in dramatizing a scene that plays with visual traditions for picturing Indian royalty. The photograph’s painterly quality is enhanced by the murals that cover the courtyard’s walls.
— Dr. John Henry Rice, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter,
Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art