The Art of Golf

[Chilli Dipper]

Here's something I figure a few of you reading this forum would be interested in...

I went with my family to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta for my mom's birthday last week. While the current headlining exhibition there features works on loan from MoMA in New York, I noticed a separate wing of the museum being prepared for another show that will be opening on February 5: The Art of Golf.

Quote:

Organized by the High Museum of Art and the National Galleries of Scotland, The Art of Golf explores how European and American artists have depicted the royal and ancient game for more than four centuries.

From the seventeenth-century landscapes of Hendrick Avercamp to Andy Warhol's portrait of Jack Nicklaus, artists have approached golf from a diverse range of perspectives. In Scotland—the birthplace of the modern game—Charles Lees presented his masterpiece The Golfers in a heroic scale usually reserved for history painting, while in the United States, impressionistic landscapes by Childe Hassam and James McNeill Whistler underscored the relationship between golf, modern ideas about recreation, and genteel manners. Photographer Harold Edgerton dissected the game from a methodical, technological perspective, paralleling the revolution in equipment design and innovations in golf instruction, and Norman Rockwell's illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post poked gentle fun at the foibles experienced by a new generation of middle-class golfers. Finally, native Atlantan Robert Tyre "Bobby" Jones, Jr., was one of the game's most beloved players and deserves credit for popularizing the game on both sides of the Atlantic. Jones was a favored subject for artists throughout most of the twentieth century, having served as a bridge between the United States and Scotland—an ambassador, of sorts, beloved by both countries for his dedication, integrity, and love for the game.

The Art of Golf brings together extraordinary, rare, and even whimsical works of art to celebrate what Jones called "a game of considerable passion."

Anyway, the show will be featuring many artworks from the collection of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, and also "the largest collection of Bobby Jones portraits ever assembled." (Keep in mind on that second part: Jones lived in Atlanta his whole life, and was part of the upper-crust society which would include a lot of art patrons holding onto paintings of him some eighty years down the line.) After viewing ends in Atlanta, it will be moving to other cities through the end of 2013.

[jamo]

That website looks awesome, I'll have to check it out if they go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

[WWBDD]

The Warhol is very cool.

Name these athletes.