Indiana University Bloomington

IU Art Museum

Transcript

  "Indiana University Art Museum"  Diane Pelrine, Curator of African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian Art:  The IU Art Museum has one of the best  collections for a University Art Museum anywhere in the country  and our African and art from the South Pacific Islands collections  are among really the best in the world.  This is a drum from the Austral Islands,  and it's a drum that was no doubt used on ceremonial occasions.  You can see it's very tall, very thin and this is a drum style  that was used throughout Polynesia for important events like that.  It's carved from wood, which is not that unusual, but it also has on it coconut fiber,  or sennit braided fiber, and then perhaps the most unusual aspect of its materials is  that the top part, or tympanum, is made of shark skin.  But what makes the drum truly spectacular is the very intricate carving that is all  over the sounding chamber of the drum and also the stand on which it sits.  [ Music ]  Judy Stubbs, Curator of Asian Art:  If you want to come see some of our paintings and prints,  we're happy to pull them out.  One of the pieces I chose to talk about today is a painting  by two Chinese Zen Buddhist monks, one living in China and the other in Japan.  It's called "The Purity of the Moon" and dates to 1655.  It records the passing of the Dharma seat, or the authority of Buddhist law,  from one Chinese cleric to another and actually moving the location  of the Dharma seat from China to Japan in 1655.  It's probably my favorite piece of calligraphy in the collection.  [ Music ]  Nan Brewer, Curator of Works on Paper:  Works on paper are very vulnerable to light exposure,  so works generally don't stay up more  than three, six, or maybe even a year, six months to a year.  So, we do try to focus on various programs to let people know that they're up.  This work seemed like a wonderful example looking at the idea  of the femme fatale at the turn of the century.  It's called "The Sin" by Edvard Munch.  In this more famous example of this image is with this red, orange fiery color  and these green eyes that really allude to the serpent,  the snake in the Adam and Eve story,  and so she clearly becomes, again, this temptress.  [ Music ]  Jenny McComas, Curator of Western Art after 1800:  We also have quite a few extremely major works in our collection,  such as the Beckmann, our Picasso, this mural by Stewart Davis.  "The Portrait" is, as I mentioned, is by Max Beckmann,  one of the major German artists of the 20th century.  It's very characteristic of Beckmann's portrait style.  He tends to compress the space.  He creates a very claustrophobic sort of environment,  which lends a lot of psychological interest to the piece,  and his style is very angular.  He tends to use these black outlines to define his forms in the painting.  [ Music ]  Produced by Hillary Demmon. Photos by Chris Meyer and Hillary Demmon.