Violinist 1902 Oil on canvas

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Violinist 1902 Oil on canvas"

Dustin Lane
6 years ago
Views:

1 John George Brown Scraping a Deerskin 1904 Purchased with funds from the Art Collectors Council Scraping a Deerskin demonstrates J. G. Brown s interest in the craft of painting. He rendered the weathered barn and tools in precise detail and created a balanced geometric composition based on the vertical and horizontal components of the barn and the diagonal wood beam that supports the deer hide as the tanner scrapes it clean of hair and debris, a process known as scudding. The light-filled landscape visible through the open barn window reflects the influence of the impressionistic style popular in the United States and Europe at this time. Executed late in his life, Scraping a Deerskin is part of a series of paintings Brown created of old men working in traditional handicrafts. The tanner appears to be a self-portrait of Brown, suggesting that the artist strongly identified with his subject. Alson Skinner Clark Violinist 1902 Gift of Alson Clark Jr Influenced by Alson Clark s study with the American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler in Paris, Violinist is an exercise in color, shape, mass, and line. Clark tilted the floor upward, disregarding the rules of perspective, so that it becomes a sloped expanse of color. The violinist provides a vertical element that anchors the intersection of the planes of the walls and floor, balancing the composition. Clark used just a few colors with similar values to unify the painting tonally. This painting marked a breakthrough for Clark when it became the first of his works accepted to the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris in For Clark, a young art student, exhibiting at the Salon meant that he had begun to achieve success as a painter.

2 Maurice Brazil Prendergast Park Scene (Holiday) ca Maurice Prendergast adapted the subject matter and techniques of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, which he encountered in Paris, into a unique and personal style. Using jewel-like colors, Prendergast created lyrical scenes of urban parks that resemble tapestries. He reduced the illusion of depth in his paintings by distributing areas of unmodulated color throughout the composition, outlining objects, and using distinct brushstrokes arranged uniformly on the surface of the canvas. The lack of shadows and the generalized figures also contribute to the flat appearance of the scene. Prendergast participated in two groundbreaking exhibitions that helped introduce America to modern art: the 1908 exhibition of The Eight and the 1913 Armory Show, both in New York City. The year after the Armory Show, Prendergast moved from his native Massachusetts to New York, where he and friends, including Arthur B. Davies, Alfred Maurer, and Max Weber, became the first generation of American Modernists. William James Glackens Chateau -Thierry 1906 Sketch for Chateau -Thierry 1906 Oil on panel Gifts of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Chateau -Thierry displays Glackens s personal variation on the French Impressionists interests in color, atmosphere, and scenes of middle-class leisure. The painting resulted from a trip Glackens took to the village of Chateau -Thierry, located on the Marne River, while honeymooning in France. The man and woman in bathing costumes crossing the sunlit path in the middleground are Glackens and his wife Edith, while the figure in red swim trunks who is about to dive into the water is Glackens s friend and fellow artist Alfred Maurer (see his Woman in Interior in this room, and Red Table Top Still Life and Head in room 4). Glackens s ability to capture the rich pageant of life along the river stemmed from his early career as a Philadelphia newspaper illustrator, which trained him to draw scenes quickly. Glackens made few changes when translating his small, lively sketch into the larger, finished painting. He removed a flagpole and flag that appear in the center of the sketch, perhaps thinking that they cluttered the composition.

3 Alfred Henry Maurer Woman in Interior Between 1897 and 1904, Alfred Maurer painted elegant figure studies and captivating scenes of urban life. As did many of his figure paintings from this time, Woman in Interior depicts a solitary woman wearing an elaborate, voluminous dress. She is in front of a plain background, the wall decorated only with a small medallion and the corner of a frame. The painting reflects Maurer s interest in James Abbott McNeill Whistler s use of harmonious color schemes and artfully arranged forms. Both artists poetic, evocative studies are less about the subject s identity than they are about the nature of painting itself. Artists influenced by Whistler s experimental arrangements and harmonies, including Maurer, Frederick Frieseke, and Julian Alden Weir, treated the human figure as they would an element of a still life: as a source of the shapes, colors, and textures that made up the composition. Frederick Carl Frieseke Woman Seated in a Garden Frederick Frieseke depicted women relaxing outdoors throughout his career. He believed that by painting the same subject again and again he could better concentrate on capturing the true effects of color and light. Influenced by the French Impressionists, who favored a bright palette, Frieseke painted the shadows on the terrace and the tall tree in the background using blues and lavenders, rather than shades of gray or black. Frieseke s use of intense, almost arbitrary colors shows his affinity with the Post-Impressionists Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard. Frieseke painted this scene in Giverny, France, where he spent summers from 1906 to Giverny was home to a lively artists colony that included the Americans Theodore Robinson and Guy Rose as well as the Frenchman Claude Monet. This painting depicts Frieseke s wife, Sadie, reading in the garden. The green wicker chair, kimono, and parasol appear in several paintings by Frieseke and other Americans who visited Giverny.

4 William Merritt Chase The Inner Studio, Tenth Street In 1878, after returning to the United States from artistic study in Europe, William Merritt Chase rented a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. This building, by architect Richard Morris Hunt, opened in 1858 and consisted of 25 studios arranged around a central gallery. Chase decorated his studio with collections of art and exotic bric-a-brac that served as subject matter for his paintings and created a luxurious environment for entertaining patrons and potential clients. Chase s Tenth Street studio is the setting for this painting, which represents an artist surrounded by props and holding a palette in his left hand. He is shown working on a canvas that has already been placed in a frame, a conceit that was common when representing of artists in their studios at the time. The loose brushwork featured in the painting suggests the style of Impressionism, which came to characterize Chase s later work. Julian Alden Weir The Orchid ca. 1891, revised 1899 and possibly The Orchid combines Julian Alden Weir s interests in Impressionism and in 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints. The heavy, broken brushwork demonstrates the influence of Impressionism, while the asymmetry of the composition with most of its visual weight on the right and the closeness of the figure to the picture plane are devices common in Japanese prints. Rich and varied textiles, including the lace dress and patterned throw, provide an air of genteel refinement to the somewhat melancholy scene of a young woman gazing at an orchid. The irregular surface texture and awkward handling of the figure s hands result from Weir reworking the composition at least once. X-rays show that the original subject of the painting was an older woman, perhaps Weir s wife Anna, reading a letter. Anna s death in 1892 may have caused him to alter it, or Weir may simply have been dissatisfied with the first painting.

5 John Frederick Peto The Full Shelf ca John Frederick Peto, like his contemporary William Harnett (whose After the Hunt hangs to the left), is acclaimed for his trompe l oeil still lifes, paintings so painstakingly rendered that they strike the viewer as reality itself. Peto favored tattered objects, such as the dented tankard, worn leather book, and well-used pipe in The Full Shelf. These dilapidated items, the somber palette, and the deep shadows give this work a melancholy quality, emphasized by his inclusion of the snuffed-out candle and matches, symbols of the transience of life. The precarious placement of the candle on the matchbook and the discarded but still glowing pipe add to this feeling of ephemerality. Peto started his painting career in Philadelphia, where he lived until the late 1880s. The still life s newspaper carries the date 1891, suggesting that he made this painting after 1889, when he moved to New Jersey. There he sold his paintings at the local drugstore to friends and local businesses.

Americans in Paris: The French Connection from the Wichita Art Museum Collection December 16, 2017 June 17, 2018

Americans in Paris: The French Connection from the Wichita Art Museum Collection December 16, 2017 June 17, 2018 Intro Panel When today we look for American art, we find it mainly in Paris. When we find