When I first heard the High Museum was organizing an exhibition called “The Art of Golf,” my reaction was: Good grief. What's next? “The Art of Puppies”?
But I resolved to see it with an open mind: After all, the High's first partnership with the National Galleries of Scotland brought us “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting.”
Alas, “The Art of Golf” is as silly as I feared. If you love golf and want to learn its history, you will enjoy this show. If you want to see important art presented in an illuminating context, visit the Wieland Pavilion.
Golf, or so it seems from this parade of minor works by major artists and portraits of important golf figures, has not been a source of inspiration in the history of art. Even the centerpiece, Charles Lees' 1847 “The Golfers” -- though carefully conceived, to judge from the lovely studies Lees made of each character -- is hardly a great artwork.
Harold Edgerton's compelling photographs of Atlanta great Bobby Jones' golf swing notwithstanding, you know the theme's a stretch when a tiny Rembrandt etching, “The Ringball Player,” is included because it was once incorrectly thought to be about golf. Don't ask about the Snoopy cartoons.
The general glorification of golf -- apart from a reference to segregated golf courses -- strikes a PR-ish tone. Surely, there's a contemporary artist out there who has made work about, say, the ecological issues surrounding golf courses. The highlighting of clubhouse portraits of Jones contributes to the uneasy feeling that the show is more about appealing to a particular audience than bringing “the world's greatest works to Atlanta,” to quote director Michael Shapiro.
Don't paint me the snob. Art can be accessible and good, as the High's “The Allure of the Automobile” so entertainingly proved. This show belongs in a golf museum, not an art museum. It's a shame to waste time, money and real estate on such a flimsy curatorial premise.
"Bill Traylor"
Numbed as we are by high-tech sensory assaults, it's affirming to be reminded that an image drawn on a ratty piece of cardboard with pencil and poster paint can still knock your socks off. Prepare to go barefoot at the High Museum's exhibition of Bill Traylor's drawings.
The artist distilled his memories of plantation years and observations of the vibrant streets of Dark Town, an African-American enclave in Montgomery, into silhouettes that so brim with vitality they seem to jump off the page.
Now revered as one of the country's most important self-taught artists, the former slave and sometimes homeless Alabama man, who died in1949, would likely have disappeared into oblivion had not Montgomery artist Charles Shannon championed and saved his work. In the early '80s, just as the artist's star was rising on a wave of interest in self-taught art, a perspicacious Peter Morrin, the High's first modern and contemporary art curator, acquired from Shannon 30 of the High's 35-piece collection, the largest in the world.
Coupled with the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art's 30 drawings, they offer an unusual opportunity to explore Traylor's oeuvre. Traylor's drawings are deceptively simple. Combining visual acuity and a remarkably sensitive line, he limned figures of surprising specificity. Though hardly naturalistic, his farm animals evoke their essence, or, as one of my art history professors would have said, the pigness of pig, the turkeyness of turkey.
Traylor was similarly sensitive to details of the dress, gait and gestures of human figures. One doesn't need to hear the conversation in a drawing of a man and a woman in an argument; their gesticulations tell the story.
Repeating themes transect the broad categories -- people, animals and constructions -- by which curator Susan Crawley organized the show. Leisure, for instance. A strange construction turns out to be a diving platform that he enjoyed on the plantation during time off. Scenes of drinkers and carousing recur.
This man had a hard life. It says something about his spirit that even when he was sleeping in a funeral home, he filled his work with his joie de vivre.
Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic of www.ArtsCriticATL.com.
Reviews
“The Art of Golf.” Through June 24.
“Bill Traylor: Drawings From the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.” Through May 13.
$18; $15, students and seniors; $11, children 6-17; free for children 5 and under and members. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.
The bottom line: One hit and one double-bogey.
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