100 Paintings/100 Years:1915–2015

One painting per year, in chronological order, representing the span of a hundred years. From Malevich’s Red Square to furniture sculpture by John Armleder with stops along the way for Vija Celmins, Stanley Whitney, Sadie Benning, and Albert Oehlen, writer and curator Bob Nickas traces a century of painting as a matter of free association. 

The audience will trace and imagine the narrative as the story unfolds, since its telling accounts for the various "rugs being pulled out from under" in the span of a hundred years' time: from the monochrome—which is not necessarily the refusal of an image—and the readymade, to the first world war, Dada and dis-figuration, the Jazz age, antagonisms towards the market, the stock market crash of 1929, regionalism, degenerate art, Grandma Moses, visionaries, action painting, the optical unconscious, destruction in art, the painting as surrogate, schizophrenia and art's split personality, repetition and difference, strategies of parody and appropriation, the subject of time and collective memory: "time is thin around the cause and dense around the effect." Along the way Andrew Wyeth meets Patty Hearst—and that only brings us to 1975.

Following the lecture, the audience is invited to join Reto Thüring, curator of contemporary art, for a tour of Albert Oehlen: Woods Near Oehle. 

Free; tickets recommended. Reserve tickets at engage.clevelandart.org or by calling the Ticket Center at (216) 421-7350.