Chazen Museum begins semester with exhibitions

The newly renamed Chazen Museum of Art (formerly the Elvehjem) offers three exhibitions to welcome fall.

• “With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940-1965” follows the careers of a circle of friends convened in Madison (often at the university), Milwaukee and Chicago. About 104 works plus archival drawings, letters, scrapbooks, photographs and more by Gertrude Abercrombie, Silvia Fein, Marshall Glasier, Dudley Huppler, Karl Priebe and John Wilde comprise the first-ever study of this close-knit pack of American post-war modernists. On view on Brittingham Galleries VI and VII through Sunday, Sept. 18.
• “Old Masters from the Permanent Collection” shows off the Chazen’s collection of drawings from 16th, 17th and 18th century Italy, the Netherlands, France and England. Visit this exhibition in the museum’s Mayer Gallery through Sunday, Oct. 9.
• Artist Peter Gourfain’s 1976-81 large wooden sculpture “Roundabout” and the bronze-paneled “Fate of the Earth Doors” (1997) will be on exhibition in and around Paige Court through Sunday, July 16.

Gourfain made “Roundabout” from yellow pine floor joists salvaged from a Philadelphia factory. He intended to carve reliefs into the wood structure, but he abandoned that plan in midstream when he developed an allergy to wood dust, and instead completed the reliefs in terracotta clay. “Earth Doors” depicts the destructive relationship that humans have with the earth, an issue of great importance, Gourfain says.

All Chazen exhibitions are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the museum at 263-2248