American Painting Research Articles

John Davis. Review of "Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger" by Justin Wolff.

John Davis. Review of "Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger" by Justin Wolff.

Transatlantic Cultural Politics in the late 1950s: the Leaders and Specialists Grant Program

Using recently declassified US State Department documents from the Leaders and Specialists Grant Program (LSGP), this article examines American Abstract Expressionism's success in Western Europe within the context of Euro‐American foreign policy, and specifically the promotion of the European Union in the late 1950s. Our current understanding of the politics of Abstract Expressionism tends to assume that Europeans were passive in the face of American cultural expansion, as well as to overlook the specific policy objectives that may have been pursued by the individuals and governments involved in the international cultural exchanges which yielded the exhibitions Jackson Pollock 1912–1956 and The New American Painting, which are widely held to mark the emergence of a world‐class American culture. This article argues that the success of these shows was in fact the result of the efforts of European and American cultural figures involved in the LSGP, an educational exchange programme administered by the State Department and working through the pro‐American European Movement to promote gesture painting as an Atlanticist cultural practice.

Transatlantic Cultural Politics in the late 1950s: the Leaders and Specialists Grant Program

Using recently declassified US State Department documents from the Leaders and Specialists Grant Program (LSGP), this article examines American Abstract Expressionism's success in Western Europe within the context of Euro‐American foreign policy, and specifically the promotion of the European Union in the late 1950s. Our current understanding of the politics of Abstract Expressionism tends to assume that Europeans were passive in the face of American cultural expansion, as well as to overlook the specific policy objectives that may have been pursued by the individuals and governments involved in the international cultural exchanges which yielded the exhibitions Jackson Pollock 1912–1956 and The New American Painting, which are widely held to mark the emergence of a world‐class American culture. This article argues that the success of these shows was in fact the result of the efforts of European and American cultural figures involved in the LSGP, an educational exchange programme administered by the State Department and working through the pro‐American European Movement to promote gesture painting as an Atlanticist cultural practice.

Strindberg & The Visual Arts

August Strindberg (1849‐1912) is one of those artists whose image persistently overshadows our perception of his work. The Strindberg as he “really is” keeps eluding us behind the personae assumed by or projected on this ever-antagonizing figure. Paradoxically, all his life, the writer, dramatist, visual artist Strindberg sought for nothing but the true image amidst the multitude of false copies and elusive doubles. Strindberg is known primarily as a dramatist, even though throughout his carrier he was preoccupied with the exploration of every imaginable media and discipline. We are just beginning to discover that his contributions to how we understand ourselves and how we conceive of the theatre today are far more complex and significant than it has been suspected. He was not only a novelist and a poet as well as a dramatist, but also an amateur painter, photographer, natural scientist, archaeologist, and occultist, just to mention a few of his oftentimes obsessive interests he actively pursued. What provides the common denominator to Strindberg’s diverse activities, is the restless drive to seek out yet unexplored territories and to experiment with the newest media of his time, a drive that stemmed from the need to find adequate expression to his ever-changing perception of an elusive reality and his sense of split and fragmented consciousness in a crumbling and metamorphosing culture. In an essay from 1994, written in French, entitled “Sensations detraquees” (“Deranged Sensations”), Strindberg voices his transitional sense of himself and the world around him in an attempt to re-define both, as he perceives the pieces sliding apart producing distorted images and fragmentary reflections.

Richard Caton Woodville: American painter, artful dodger

INTRODUCTION: Woodville's Resemblances 7 CHAPTER ONE: Those Scorned Facts 17 CHAPTER TWO: Homing Devises 53 CHAPTER THREE: Here and There: The Mexican War 95 CHAPTER FOUR: Cornered 135 NOTES 176 CHRONOLOGY 195 BIBLIOGRAPHY 196 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 203 INDEX 204 PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS 208

Fixing the world: Jewish American painters in the twentieth century

Fixing the world: Jewish American painters in the twentieth century

Deceptions and illusions: five centuries of trompe l'oeil painting

Trompe l'oeil (French for fool or deceive the eye), is a genre dating back to antiquity that has fascinated both painters and viewers from the Renaissance to the present day. Both witty and serious, it describes paintings that imitate natural appearances so convincingly that viewers momentarily mistake the objects for the real thing. The moment of deception, however, is brief. Uncertainty over what is real and what is illusion is soon replaced by amusement at having been tricked and admiration for the artist's ingenuity and skill. This book explores the fascinating art of trompe l'oeil in more than 100 European and American paintings ranging in date from the 15th through the 20th centuries. Organised thematically, the volume begins with works of art inspired by ancient prototypes and with paintings by early Renaissance artists whose close observation of nature was a prerequisite for eye-deceiving illusionism. It then presents the principal subjects of trompe l'oeil artists, beginning with images of letters, prints, dollar bills and other essentially flat objects that appear to rest on the picture surface, and then moves to three-dimensional illusions in which objects appear to project or recede from the picture plane, blurring the boundary between real and fictitious space. An epilogue illustrates the legacy of the art of trompe l'oeil for 20th-century artists. Five enlightening essays by experts in European and American art and the science of seeing examine the phenomenon and persistence of trompe l'oeil over the centuries.

Museo Without Walls

Chicano Now: American Expressions at Museo Americano, San Antonio, Texas, Dec. 15, 2001 to April 15, 2002; at the Smithsonian Institution Arts and Industries Building, Washington, D.C., Sept. 27, 2002 to Jan. 5, 2003; at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Feb. 1, 2003 to May 18, 2003. http://www.chicano-art-life.com/index.html. In the Museo Americano's exhibit brochure, actor/comedian Cheech Marin—the guiding personality behind Chicano Now: American Expressions and its companion visual art exhibit, Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge—describes the effort as "a collaboration among performers, graphic artists, designers, writers, musicians, and scholars. Chicano Now is a rip-roaring party, and everyone's invited." 1 Marin's three-decades-long career has seen him dramatically transform his public persona from stoner icon in the comedy team Cheech and Chong to the decidedly more sober role of TV sleuth on "Nash Bridges." Along the way, Marin wrote, directed, or performed in dozens of films, television shows, and albums; more significantly for Chicano Now, he has emerged as the world's foremost collector of Chicana and Chicano visual art. As he describes in a recent interview, Marin discovered Chicano art at the Latino Theatre Lab in Los Angeles, where a number of visual artists could be found working on [End Page 89] sets and milling about with actors. 2 The Chicano Now exhibit, presented by Target department stores and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and DaimlerChrysler, draws from Marin's own personal collection of memorabilia, and it includes the work of several of his close friends and associates. The exhibit brochure goes so far as to list among its credits, "Cheech Marin, Visionary." The brochure more conventionally credits producer BBH, Inc., content developer Peter Radetsky, and associate exhibit developer Joseph Gonzalez. 3 Originally slated for a premiere at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Chicano Now premiered instead at Museo Americano, the newly minted affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. Museo Americano is a privately funded institution; the SBC Foundation provided the lead gift, a grant of $2 million over four years. (As a Smithsonian Institution affiliate, Museo Americano will have periodic access to the Smithsonian's notoriously slim holdings in Latino cultural history.) Sam Gorena, Interim Director of Museo Americano, identifies two primary reasons that Chicano Now premiered there. First, "the Museo is the only Latino museum in the country that's focusing on art, culture, and history," he told me in a recent telephone interview. Second, the exhibit producer, BBH, wanted to debut the show in its home city, San Antonio. 4 The Museo Americano's temporary exhibition space (its permanent facilities at the historic Alameda Complex will not open until early 2004) resides in an abandoned art deco building that was formerly home to the Kress Department Store (fig. 1), less than two blocks from San Antonio's best known landmark, the Alamo. Each day, thousands of Alamo tourists stroll from "the cradle of Texas liberty," across Alamo Plaza, and past the Ripley's Believe It or Not and Plaza Theater of Wax on their way to the generously air-conditioned Buckhorn Saloon and Museum. There, they might pause for a cold one and a chance to tour the Hall of Horns, the Hall of Feathers, the Hall of Fins, and the Texas Wax Museum. My guess is that very few Alamo tourists made it across the street to the Chicano Now exhibit, but many busloads of children were driven to the location, where they joined those adults who also decided to drop by. During the exhibit's four-month stay in San Antonio, a total of 5,755 persons took in Chicano Now, including some 1,886 students on fifty-six organized tours, according to Laura S. Augilar, outreach coordinator for Museo Americano. 5 During each of my three weekday visits, Chicano Now was abuzz with student activity. Two weekend visits were somewhat [End Page 90] [Begin Page 92] less crowded, and visitors at these times primarily consisted of...

Representation and Aesthetics in Paleo-Art: An Interview with John Gurche

Augusta, Josef, and Burian, Zdenek 1960 Prehistoric Man. London: Paul Hamlyn. Boime, Albert 1986 The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bowditch, Nancy Douglas 1970 George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter. Peterborough, NH: Noone House. Czerkas, Sylvia Massey, and Donald F. Glut 1982 Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Cavemen: The Art of Charles R. Knight. New York: E. P. Dutton. Gombrich, E. H. 1969 Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gould, Stephen Jay 1995 Ladders and Cones: Constraining Evolution by Canonical Icons. In Hidden Histories of Science. Robert B. Silvers, ed. Pp. 37-67. New York: New York Review. Milner, Richard 1990 The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for Its Origins. New York: Facts on File. Morgan, Joan B. 1983 The Indian Paintings of George de Forest Brush. American ArtJournal Spring:60-73. Nemerov, Alex 1991 Doing the Old America; The Image of the American West, 1880-1920. In The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920. William H. Truettner, ed. Pp. 285-343. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Rudwick, Martin S. J. 1992 Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weinberg, H. Barbara 1991 The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers. New York: Abbeville Press.

The most difficult journey: the Poindexter Collections of American paintings

The most difficult journey: the Poindexter Collections of American paintings

Blasting the Historical Continuum: Stories of my Grandmother

My grandmother was born in Antwerp in 1902. Her father, an over-enthusiastic amateur painter, died of chrome poisoning when she was eleven. During the First World War she and her mother, brother, and two sisters became war refugees. They fled to neutral Holland and eventually settled in Rotterdam, where my grandmother was lucky enough to find a job at a stylish department store. Here, in the course of the 1920s, she also met a commercial traveller from Germany named Hermann Kasten. Hermann decided to put a stop to his wanderings and set up his own business in raw cotton. The couple married and had two children, my father Carl/Kelly (1931) and Gisela (1936).

New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934

This work analyzes the experiences and works of six African American artists who lived and worked in Paris during the Jazz Age: sculptors Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage, and painters Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, Archibald J. Motley, Jr. and Albert Alexander Smith. These artists exhibited the works they created in Paris at prestigious salons in France and in the United States, winning fellowships, grants, and awards. Theresa Leininger-Miller argues that it was study abroad that won these artists critical acclaim, establishing their reputations as some of the most significant leaders of the new Negro Movement in the visual arts. She begins her study with a history of the debut of African American artists in Paris, 1803-1914, then provides readers with profiles of each of the six artists from their birth through the end of their time abroad. Finally, Leininger-Miller examines patterns and differences in these individuals' backgrounds and development, their patronage in the United States and France, their shared experiences abroad, and the impact their study in Paris had on the rest of their careers.

Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?

The Civil War generated hundreds of history paintings. Yet, as this essay argues, painters failed to create any iconic, lasting images of the Civil War using the conventions of grand manner history painting, despite the expectations of many that they would and should. This essay first examines the terms by which I am evaluating this failure, then moves on to a consideration of the American history painting tradition. I next examine several history paintings of Civil War scenes in light of this tradition and argue that their “failure” to capture the meaning and essence of the war resulted from a breakdown of the narrative conventions of history painting. Finally, I glance briefly at Winslow Homer’s Civil War scenes, arguably the only ones which have become canonical, and suggest that the success of these images comes from their abandonment of old conventions and the invention of new ones.

A brief history of art and science

In an interview in 1950 the American painter Jackson Pollock was asked about his unconventional and sometimes controversial approach to art. “Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in,” Pollock replied. “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.” The modern artist, he continued, needed new techniques to express an inner world – to express “the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating”.

American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. David B. Warren , Michael K. Brown , Elizabeth Ann Coleman , Emily Ballew Neff

<i>American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection</i>. David B. Warren , Michael K. Brown , Elizabeth Ann Coleman , Emily Ballew Neff

Ornament and abstraction: the dialogue between non-Western, modern and contemporary art

The importance of ornament in the emergence and development of abstract art has long been underestimated. Pioneers like Kandinsky and Mondrian looked upon it as a sin in which abstraction should not indulge. Ornament, with its history dating back thousands of years in all world cultures, was secreted in the development of modern nineteenth-century painting, but surreptitiously began to influence abstract art as a formal and methodical element. This book is an in-depth study of this major theme in twentieth-century art history. The catalogue features four artists who help to highlight the role of ornament in the history of art: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse and Frank Stella. The study begins with the innovative pictorial conception of Philipp Otto Runge, whose early nineteenth-century paintings featured the last genuine form in the history of ornament, the arabesque. The arabesque was influential in Symbolism (Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin) and Jugendstil (Henry van de Velde, Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann), and on painting's move towards abstraction (Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Adolf Hoelzel). It is argued that this resulted, on the one hand, in a non-figurative, geometric structure of lines (Mondrian), and on the other, in the swirls of Matisse and Jackson Pollock. Side by side with the royal way of Cubism, arabesque abstraction therefore opens up a second doorway to the world of non-figurative art. In addition to this line of enquiry, the authors examine theoretical findings on the theme of ornament, and what it reveals about the relation between abstraction and figurative art (Malevich, Kandinsky, Paul Klee). Significant influences also result from modern artists' preoccupation with exotic ornamentation found in distant cultures: Matisse & the Orient and Oceania, Ad Reinhardt & Asian culture, or American painting & pre-Columbian ornament (Josef Albers, Barnett Newman). In also considering Minimalism, new media, digital technology, the Renaissance and the Rococo, the book celebrates the impact of ornament on abstract art, as well as showcasing a remarkable array of masterpieces.

Alice Neel's Portraits of Mother Work

The American painter Alice Neel (1900-1984), who is best known for her riveting portraits of public figures, also created a rich and remarkable range of images of mother work from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. Transgressing, parodying, and critiquing the Madonna and child genre and the social construct of mother as it shifted over most of the twentieth century, Neel consistently made the experiences of mothers, the interrelationship of mother and child, and familial relationships the subjects of her work. These images of mother work also included class and race analyses of mothering and family. They included a degenerate Madonna, macabre surrealistic images of babies, her daughter-in-law as a first-time mother anxiously holding her squirming infant, a breastfeeding Haitian mother and her disabled child, many intimate portraits of Neel's own children and grandchildren, families from her neighborhood in New York's El Barrio and from the primarily white art world.

Painting for Money

Early in his career, Winslow Homer eschewed commissions, choosing instead to put his faith in and direct his efforts toward the growing speculative market for American paintings. Denying himself the income from patrons, he worked tirelessly to manage his artistic production for maximum gain through a matrix of venues: galleries, academies, clubs, and expositions. His efforts to sell his work have trickled down to our experience of it. Homer consistently reworked or cropped paintings that proved difficult to sell, leaving visible traces of his marketing process. These traces are as visible as his creative and formal processes and remain inseparable from them.

Discover Art Treasures Rocky Never Dreamed of

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Information on Host City and Meeting HighlightsFull AccessDiscover Art Treasures Rocky Never Dreamed ofKen HausmanKen HausmanSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:15 Feb 2002https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.37.4.0022The Philadelphia Museum of Art overlooks the grand Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The parkway is called a “bit of Paris in Philadelphia” because of its many cultural attractions. (Photo: Top Kat)To art lovers, it borders on scandal. It seems that millions of people know one of the world’s great art museums more for its front steps than for the wondrous collection of works to which those steps lead.For visitors who climb those steps during APA’s annual meeting in May, however, memories of the eye-popping art works should certainly supplant those of Sylvester Stallone triumphantly running up those now-famous steps in the film “Rocky.”Perched on a hill a few blocks from Center City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art appears to be a Greek or Roman temple. It is, in fact, the third-largest art museum in the United States and boasts comprehensive collections of paintings, sculpture, and crafts that cover every era from the third century B.C. to the late 20th century.Among the museum’s more than 300,000 works are noteworthy collections of East Asian art, paintings by European Renaissance masters, and Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces. It houses an especially impressive collection of American art, crafts, and domestic objects, including dozens of examples from Philadelphia’s proud tradition of creating beautiful silver pieces.Pennsylvania HeritageThe museum also reflects its Pennsylvania heritage, displaying rooms full of fine examples of Amish and Quaker furniture and household objects. In addition, it has accumulated one of the largest collections of works by Philadelphia native son Thomas Eakins, many of which are on display in the galleries devoted to 19th-century American painting. The American galleries feature several period rooms that display paintings and decorative objects in a way designed to highlight the cultural links between Europe and 18th-century America.Fans of the Impressionists and the artists they inspired will enjoy the many paintings by Cézanne, including his famous “Bathers,” Matisse, and Gauguin. Marcel Duchamp’s once-scandalous painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” is also a jewel in the museum’s permanent collection of 20th-century art, though it probably has lost the power to shock viewers as it did when it went on display in 1913. Picasso and Braque are also represented in the museum’s galleries.Modern ArtModern-art devotees as well as people who are still trying to make sense of the genre will be able to experience a special exhibit of the works of one of modern art’s leading lights, artist Barnett Newman. The museum has brought together more than 100 of his paintings and traces Newman’s evolution from his 1940s surrealistic drawings through his minimalist “vertical stripe” phase to the pioneering shaped canvases of his later years. Newman, who was born to immigrant parents in 1905 and died in 1970, was a major figure in New York’s modern-art circles in the 1950s, along with his friends Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Clyfford Still.Commenting on Newman’s significance, curator Ann Temkin stated, “At the turn of the millennium, no member of his generation remains more significant than Barnett Newman, and we are proud to be presenting a comprehensive view of this remarkable artist’s life’s work.”Asian ArtThe museum also houses multiple galleries of Asian art treasures, which include a Japanese ceremonial teahouse, a palace hall from China, and a vast collection of Oriental rugs, along with exquisite pieces of ceramic, lacquerware, and furniture.Oh, and why not just give in to the urge. Make like Rocky and run up those 99 famous steps. It will make for a memorable photograph.The Philadelphia Museum of Art is located at 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with evening hours on Wednesday and Friday. Admission is $10 for adults, with a $7 charge for visitors aged 13 to 18 and 62 and older. Children aged 12 and younger are admitted without charge. Free guided tours are given on the hour from 10 a.m. through 3 p.m. More information is available on the Web at www.philamuseum.com. ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

A Note on the Early Use of Dammar Varnish

Dammar varnish was introduced into Europe and America during the nineteenth century, but the chronology of its use in various countries is still imperfectly understood. New information from unpublished manuscripts shows that dammar was used by painters in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century—one American painter wrote that dammar was ‘much used in the United States’ in 1851—and by 1860 it was available from at least three American colormen. The use of dammar may have been more widespread in the United States at this time than it was in Britain, perhaps because of connections between German and American painters.