#americanart — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #americanart, aggregated by home.social.
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Crystal Bridges Announces Tiffany & Co. Exhibition
Crystal Bridges Announces New Tiffany & Co. Exhibition Crystal Bridges and Tif…
#France #FR #Europe #EU #Tiffany&Co. #Americanart #americanartwork #americanimagination #Artexhibitions #bentonville #Bentonvilleevents #brooch #co.exhibition #CrystalBridges #Flowers #gemstones #georgepauldingfarnham #jewelry #lvmh #museums #Nature #NatureAdorned #necklace #NorthwestArkansas #oct. #rock #theartistry #Tiffany
https://www.europesays.com/france/76637/ -
"Untitled," Minnie Evans, 1959.
Evans (1892-1987) was a self-taught Black folk artist who didn't begin drawing until she was in her 40s, working at the ticket booth at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, NC.
Inspired by her inner visions, her religious faith, her regard for her ancestors, and her surroundings, she created many intricate images of faces amid flowers and foliage. The faces could be her ancestors, or her version of spiritual guides, or something else altogether.
She once said that her flower paintings were her vision of heaven, dismissing the idea of heaven as white and full of clouds, but instead a joyous garden of rainbow colors.
Her work, which began in the 40s, was in many ways a forerunner to psychedelic art of the 60s and 70s; this would not have been out of place on the wall of a hippie's flat.
From the American Folk Art Museum, New York.
#Art #MinnieEvans #OutsiderArt #VisionaryArt #BlackArtists #WomenArtists #BlackHistory #WomensHistory #AmericanArt #FlowerFriday
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"Green Plums," Joseph Decker, c. 1885.
Born in Germany, Decker (1853-1924) came to the US with his family when he was 14. An apprentice house painter in Brooklyn, he had hopes of becoming a serious artist and started taking classes at the National Academy of Design.
At first, he painted mostly landscapes and genre scenes, but around 1885 began to focus more on still lifes of fruit and other organic material, that became what he would be known for.
Decker's style was unconventional for the time, and he never achieved great success as a painter. But he did work consistently, and now some believe he did illustrations for seed packets as well. His work fell from favor and his last years are poorly documented, except that he died penniless in a Brooklyn hospital. He and his work were forgotten for a while until critics called attention to him in 1949, at which point he was rediscovered to acclaim.
The near-photorealistic quality here is remarkable, especially as it's achieved through relaxed and practiced brushwork. An exceptional work, sadly not appreciated during the artist's life.
From the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
#Art #StillLife #JosephDecker #Plums #AmericanArt #Realism #Photorealism
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"Red and Orange Streak," Georgia O'Keeffe, 1919.
O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was a real pioneer of American modernism. She's best known for her flower paintings, which are almost overfamiliar and the subject of many a joke...but here we've got something different.
O'Keeffe moved to New York from Texas in 1919, and painted this soon after. She wrote that this was inspired by her nostalgia for the Texas plains, especially her fondness for watching lightning storms in the distance.
Here we've got a red band resembling mountains in the distance, and a orange/gold arc that could be lightning....it makes me think of lights in long-exposure photos that stretch into lines. But most say it's simply a creation of a mood, which I can also see.
From the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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https://www.moma.org/artists/5047-mark-rothko
Here's a story about about the visual arts in the mid 20th century USA , a story that I have often heard myself, told myself, and taught to others:
>> In the years following the Second World War, the socially conscious art that had developed under the auspices of the New Deal was cast aside under the pressure of the Cold War and liberal anticommunism, and its place an ostensibly apolitical art was promoted in association with asocial, formalist criteria of critical evaluation.<<
I don't think this story is wrong, but I have come to think of it as incomplete and thereby perhaps misleading.
The MOMA page linked here draws attention to one problem. Whatever archformalist Clement Greenberg might have said, artists like Rothko and Newman did not understand their own work in his narrow terms. To grasp these artists' work, one has to employ a humanist vocabulary of the tragic and the sublime, and employ that vocabulary not merely as a reference to "all over painting", but as a way of making sense of the content of that painting.
Unfortunately, this vocabulary of the transcendent was already being squeezed out in the New Deal years.
Within the modernism of the first three decades of the 20th century, two tendencies were at work: one advancing new visual practices as a way of transcending the crass materialism and obsolete illusionism of the 19th century (Kandinsky, Malevich, early Bauhaus), the other as challenging the separation of "art" from "life" (De Stijl, later Bauhaus, Soviet Constructivism) with the aim of making all art some kind of applied art while simultaneously debunking the "mystifying" language and socially exclusionary practices of the "fine" arts.
Most US New Deal Art, and the criticism and historiography that has valorized that art, has followed that second tendency within modernism . That's a healthy and understandable reaction to art as understood as something old to be purchased in Europe, packed up in crates, and then displayed in the USA by courtesy of billionaire businessmen.
Yet that "socially conscious" modernism all too often either misses or even suppresses the responses mentioned in the MOMA Rothko page.
We need to to ensure that the tragic, the sublime, and the mysterious do not become the exclusive property of the right, whether in the visual arts or the culture at large.
Forgive me -- all this is thinking on the go, conducted under the influence of three large glasses of Woodbridge Chardonnay, and possibly erroneous in many respects.
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Martha Rosler (b.1943)
Martha Rosler (b.1943) is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, site-specific and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. via W #PalianSHOW -
"Lady with a Bowl of Violets," Lilla Cabot Perry, c. 1910.
Lydia Cabot (1848-1933) was born into a Boston society family, and in her youth spent time with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, both family friends. Her family were passionate abolitionists during the Civil War and worked to protect runaway slaves.
After the war, she married linguist and academic Thomas Sergeant Perry, and then began her artistic training at the age of 36. She became a protegee of Claude Monet and friend of Camille Pissarro, and established herself as an American Impressionist.
Although she never had the fame other Impressionists had, she formulated her own version of it and helped stir up the staid Boston art community. Several years' residence in Japan, when her husband was teaching at a university there, also influenced her. She started going by her nickname, Lilla.
Here we have an unknown young woman, sitting serenely in a rich setting. We have part of a Japanese print and the bowl of violets present but carefully cropped off, a very Japanese choice. It's a lovely, serene picture, typical of her work.
From the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
#Art #LillaCabotPerry #Impressionism #WomenArtists #WomenInArt #Herstory #AmericanArt
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Andreas Andersen, the artist with Hendryk (presumably his boyfriend.) #Pride #GayPrideMonth #GayArt #AmericanArt #Scandinavian #art
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🧵 1/2
https://blanton.emuseum.com/objects/14537/dance-marathon
Although subtlety is not one of the virtues of Philip Evergood's 1934 "Dance Marathon", viewers today might well require an explanation of what dance marathons were in order to understand the picture.
Once the subject is clarified, the picture provides an excellent starting point for thinking about art and the Great Depression and the possibilities and problems of "political" art then and now.
"Dance Marathon" also offers a way into some important literature of the twenties and thirties, since a dance marathon is central to hardboiled writer Horace McCoy's 1935 novel "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?".
#DanceMarathon #PhilipEvergood #Art #USArt #AmericanArt #20thCenturyArt #1930s #GreatDepression #HoraceMcCoy #TheyShootHorsesDontThey #SocialRealism
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Guy reveals why the ‘old man praying’ painting you see may not be what it seems
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/prayer-painting-true-story-ex1/
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🧵 3/6
...but Nan Lurie's 1937 lithograph "Technological Improvements" offers a more critical understanding of industry, race, and place in the USA.
"New Deal Art" explains how the administration of the Federal Art Project Graphic Arts Division offered artists like Lurie a degree of freedom in exploiting the radical possibilities of the print as a medium.
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🧵 2/6
I appreciated the book providing not just a survey of the various federal agencies involved with art, but also an exploration of how these agencies' diverse priorities, institutional constraints, and convictions of their individual administrators could produce bodies of art more heterogeneous than that commonly imagined under the inaccurate label of "WPA art" .
For example, Harry Sternberg's 1939 "The Family, Industry, and Agriculture", a Section of Fine Arts sponsored US Post Office mural, might strike the viewer as typical New Deal Americana....
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🧵 1/6
I was sitting in an Austin Starbucks last weekend, absorbed in the recently published "New Deal Art: Culture and Crisis in the Great Depression" by John P. Murphy.
"Hello." A smiling man was standing by my table. "I'm the author of the book you're reading."
What a delightful coincidence! We sat together and chatted for a while about the book, the thirties, and the exhibition of American modernist art at the UT Blanton Museum where he was going to be giving a talk.
Even though I was already planning to post a few thoughts on the book, the chance meeting has provided me with additional impetus.
#NewDealArt #AmericanArt #NewDeal #ArtHistory #JohnPMurphy #Coincidence #USHistory #20thCenturyArt #1930s #ChanceMeeting
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"Untitled (Yellow House with Yellow Roses)," Matilda Browne, after 1918.
Browne (1869-1947) was an American Impressionist artist, and a noted member of the Old Lyme, CT artists' colony...in fact, the only female painter they took seriously.
She showed talent as a child, and luckily was a neighbor of Hudson School painter Thomas Moran, who taught the young Matilda and encouraged her gifts. By age 12 she had a painting accepted as part of an exhibit at the American Academy of Design.
She traveled Europe, where she learned from many significant painters, and returned to the US where she earned a reputation as a skilled artist of landscapes, animals, and florals. She also married author Frederick Van Wyck, and had a long and successful career.
Here's the house she lived in at Old Lyme, in the summer with the roses blooming...
Happy Flower Friday!
From a private collection.
#Art #MatildaBrowne #Impressionism #AmericanArt #WomenArtists #FlowerFriday
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Introduction to the Digital Collections of the Libraries and Archives of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
#DigitalCollections #Libraries #Archives #Museums #AmericanArt #LatinAmericanArt #ArtistBooks #Photography #Manuscripts #DecorativeArts
https://librariesarchives.mfah.org/digital/ -
"Moonlight Seascape, Gloucester Harbor," Mary Blood Mellen, c. 1870s.
Mellen (1819-86) was the major female member of the Hudson River School, a group of artists of the 19th century who specialized in sweeping Romantic-style landscapes of North America.
Born in Massachusetts, she learned to paint early on, but her marriage to the Universalist Rev. Mellen was a turning point. The couple became acquainted with Fitz Henry Lane, a great painter and teacher, and through him she developed her skill and talent.
New England, especially the coastal areas of Massachusetts and Maine, were her specialty, including a number of marine subjects. Most of her work is undated so we can only guess at when it was painted, but it is known she collaborated with Lane several times.
After her husband's death in 1866 she moved to Hartford, CT, supporting herself with her work, which was evidently popular. Her passing from typhoid generated a number of complimentary obits, praising her work.
From a private collection.
#Art #MaryBloodMellen #HudsonRiverSchool #AmericanArt #WomenArtists #Moonlight
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"View of Alpine" -- Moya del Pino -- oil on masonite -- 1940.
A US Post Office mural created for Alpine, TX, by Jose Moya del Pino ( 1891- 1969), a Spanish born artist who worked for most of his life in Bay area California.
#Art #Painting #JoseMoyadelPino #USArt #AmericanArt #NewDealArt #20thCenturyArt #PublicArt #PostOfficeMurals #Alpine #Texas #Masonite
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Jared French -- Cavalrymen Crossing a River -- 1939.
>> French's central mural for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia, is now displayed at the Lewis F. Powell Jr. United States Courthouse. "Life" magazine reported that French painted himself into the mural as the figure wearing suspenders.<<
I find it fascinating to see the implicit but powerful eroticism at work in a 1930s New Deal art commission.
Image: By Carol M. Highsmith - Library of Congress Catalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2010719844 -- Wikimedia Commons
#Art #JaredFrench #NewDeal #USArt #AmericanArt #Painting #1930s
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William H. Johnson
Blossoming Trees
1938
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#WilliamH.Johnson #landscape #Americanart #art #painting -
Edward Hicks, urodzony 4 kwietnia 1780 roku, był jednym z najważniejszych malarzy amerykańskich, związanym z ruchem kwakrów. Jego najsłynniejsze dzieło, cykl "Peaceable Kingdom", to nie tylko afirmacja pokoju i harmonii, ale także przykład amerykańskiego malarstwa naiwnego. Hicks doskonale łączył proste, wiejskie wizje z głębokimi ideami filozoficznymi. Jego prace nadal inspirują i zachęcają do refleksji. (fot. Wikipedia) #EdwardHicks #PeaceableKingdom #AmericanArt
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"Still-Life," Robert Duncanson, 1849.
Duncanson (c. 1821-72) was mostly known as a landscape artist of the Hudson River School (and the later, lesser known Ohio Valley School), and still lifes by him are few and far between.
He was the first Black American artist to achieve international renown, and was prominent in abolitionist circles, both in activism and to sell his work.
Self-taught, he first made a living painting portraits, but as his skill and technique grew, and he attracted patrons, he began to focus more on landscapes. He fled to Canada and the UK when the Civil War broke out, and returned to his beloved Cincinnati, Ohio (then an arts hub, called "the Athens of the West") in 1866. He developed dementia (or schizophrenia), possibly as a result of lead poisoning, and passed away in Detroit at the age of 51.
The Taft Museum in Cincinnati now has an artist-in-residence program for contemporary Black American artists in Duncanson's honor.
From the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
#Art #RobertDuncanson #AmericanArt #StillLife #BlackAmericanArtists #BlackHistory
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https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/newark-museum-aerial-map-mural-newark-nj/
Only two of the ten murals Arshile Gorky painted while working in the WPA Federal Arts Project for the Newark Airport Administration Building survive.
As has happened with a number of other New Deal artworks, the other eight have been lost or destroyed.
#Art #TwentiethCenturyArt #NewDeal #FederalArtsProject #FAP #WPA #WorksProgressAdministration #ArshileGorky #NewarkAirport #USArt #AmericanArt
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13 lutego przypada rocznica urodzin Granta Wooda (1891–1942), amerykańskiego malarza związanego z regionalizmem. Jego „American Gothic” to prawdopodobnie jedno z najbardziej znanych dzieł sztuki w USA. Wood portretował życie na Środkowym Zachodzie z ironią i dbałością o szczegół.
(fot. Wikipedia)
#GrantWood #AmericanArt #regionalizm #malarstwo -
It’s Been Called the ‘Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.’ Don’t Destroy It.
The rare #murals in the Cohen Federal Building celebrate vital American values of dignity and community. Now they could meet the same fate as the White House’s East Wing. Gift article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/arts/design/wilbur-cohen-building-murals-guston-shahn.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KFA.qFyn.wElOFv3eXH7I&smid=url-share
#NewDealArt #AmericanArt #ArtHistory #CulturalHeritage #CulturalPreservation #Modernism -
"Country Doctor (Night Call)," Horace Pippin, 1935.
I've talked about Pippin (1888-1946) before; he was a self-taught Black American artist who took up art as a sort of therapy after being injured in WWI. He painted scenes of everyday Black American life, and what he lacked in formal training, he made up for with passion, depth, a remarkable eye for design, and a flair for storytelling and depicting people's lives.
Here we have a scene in a wooded area in the midst of a snowstorm....but a man is slowly leading a horse, pulling a wagon, through the storm. It's not just a mere depiction of a winter scene, but a tribute to the resilience and dedication of a rural doctor, trudging through the storm to someone in need.
Pippin's most popular work are his depictions of Black life, many drawn from his childhood. He also did religious paintings and some historical paintings, mostly of his WWI experiences, but also a noted depiction of John Brown going to his execution, based on descriptions from his grandmother, who witnessed it. I find his work delightful.
From the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
#Art #HoracePippin #BlackArtists #Primitive #SelfTaught #OutsiderArt #BlackHistory #AmericanArt
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"Popocatepetl, Spirited Morning - Mexico," Marsden Hartley, 1932.
A born Down Easter, Hartley (1877-1943) started off with Maine landscapes, but then traveled to Europe in the early 20th century and discovered Cubism and Modernism in Paris and Berlin. He was tired of doing the same old thing and launched into a new phase of his career.
He traveled around a lot after WWI, including Europe and Mexico in the 30s, where he painted this landscape, inspired by Aztec and Maya lore and art.
He returned to Maine in the late 30s and focused then on local art, depicting the Maine landscape and its people in his own particular way.
He was also a writer, publishing poems, essays, and stories in various magazines, on such topics as art, Maine, and Nova Scotia, where he had close friends who gave him the stable, happy family he lacked as a child.
From the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
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"Milk - for summer thirst"
Ohio -- Federal Art Project -- 1940 Works Projects Administration -- Work Projects Administration Poster Collection (Library of Congress) -- POS - WPA - OH .01 .M562, no. 1 (C size) [P&P]
#Art #Poster #USArt #AmericanArt #WPA #FAP #WorksProjectsAdministration #WorksProgressAdministration #FederalArtProject #20thCenturyArt #NewDeal #Milk
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Enjoyed this Atlas Obscura article about America’s overlooked, forgotten and discarded Post Office murals from the Great Depression. Incredible public art.
“The murals boosted morale by celebrating local industry and historical events”
Every year murals are lost due to the closing or sale of post offices or just from negligence.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/post-office-murals
#Art #AmericanArt #PublicArt
