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Charles White (American, 1918-1979) Birth of Spring, 1961 Charcoal drawing 63.33 Gift of the Childe Hassam Fund of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York

A Chicago native, Charles White was born in 1918, the son of working class parents. He participated in the “Chicago Renaissance,” a mid-western movement of the 1930s, 40s and 50s that, like the earlier “Harlem Renaissance,” was characterized by socially critical cultural expressions by African Americans. In the late 1940s White began to devote his attention to the creation of monumental finished drawings in charcoal, wash, and ink. His large drawings often took months to complete, and his imagery focused on the social and spiritual lives of African Americans.

The Birth of Spring was created in 1961, during the early years of the American Civil Rights movement. The woman’s somber face and weathered hands testify to a life of physical and emotional pain, yet she rises out of the darkness into the open space above. Historian Peter Clothier described the figure as an “ancestral presence” removed from time and place, “existing somewhere between America and Africa.” (MAA 2/06)

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Robert Natkin (American, b. 1930) Beyond the Sapphire and Sound, 1963 Oil on Canvas 63.34 Gift of Mr. David Dolnick

Born in Chicago, Robert Natkin traveled to New York City in the 1950s, where he moved in the same circles as the Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. While he claimed that he was more inspired by the color and lyricism of European modernists, such as Paul Klee, Emil Bonnard and Henri Matisse, Natkin adopted many of the intuitive working methods of his American contemporaries. His non- representational paintings are characterized by layers of texture and vibrant color. In 1991, Natkin compared his improvisational working methods to those of a jazz singer. “I feel like a scat artist,” he said, as he described his work on a monumental abstract mural for the lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Natkin is intrigued by the formal qualities of textiles, and he remembers a childhood dream in which he found himself enveloped in the weave of a Persian rug. His artworks often incorporate fabric patterns into their designs, and the artist sometimes presses rags, clothing and paper towels into the painted surfaces of his pictures. In Beyond the Sapphire and Sound, dots, cross-hatched lines, and layers of mesh patterns create a textile-like design infused with light and color. (MAA 1/06)

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Paul Jenkins (American, b. 1923) Phenomena Chinese Calendar, ca. 1962 Oil on canvas 67.70 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Werner Muensterberger

This painting is most closely related to the type of painting known as Color-Field. It emerged in the early 1960s as a reaction to the intense pathos of Abstract Expressionism (see Rivers' Drugstore which is related to both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art). Whereas Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists had aimed for a direct and unmediated expression of their inner selves by means of a dramatic and forceful application of paint, Color Field artists sought to exercise greater control and to create a cool, serene and relatively placid new aesthetic.

Helen Frankenthaler in 1953 and later Morris Louis, worked with a staining acrylic pigment poured onto unprimed, unstretched canvas to create soft, quiet veils of color. Though Jenkins works in oil pigment on primed canvas (canvas which is covered in a white undercoat), his work is visually related to that of Frankenthaler and Morris. His veils of magenta, purple and green are applied with a cloth rag which leaves a residue of subtle textural effects.

Jenkins was born in Kansas City and trained as an artist at both the Kansas City Art Institute and at the Art Students League in New York. About 1960, Jenkins began preceding the title of his paintings with the work "Phenomena," by which he means events, manifestations, and "the capture of ever-changing reality, both in the act of painting and in the final result." As to the often cryptic titles themselves, like Chinese Calendar, he has said: "In my painting I try to find the identity word that will secure an attitude towards the painting rather than provoke a visual object that the eyes will seek out." (MAA 12/95)

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Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889 - 1975) Portrait of a Musician, 1949 Casein ground and egg tempera on panel 67.136 Anonymous gift

Published: Handbook, no. 141

The term Regionalism has come to mean the portrayal of the American scene, consisting especially of rural views that recall the traditionalism and picturesqueness of American life. The movement originated in the 1930s, and its proponents believed in the superiority of representational" over "abstract" art. They believed that art should be accessible to the public in style and subject, and that this was best achieved through the depiction of recognizable, naturalistic forms. Following World War I, there was a revival of interest in purely American themes and a specifically American style. The country had become isolationist, and sought inspiration from within its own borders.

Several reasons have been suggested for this turn. Many had blamed the Europeans for the War which they felt Americans should not have had a part in, and there was a general dislike of European tendencies, including European art. As a result of the financial hardships of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the country became even more absorbed with its own problems as it was forced to cope with poverty, unemployment and the plight of mid- American farmers. While New York City was the national cultural center of these years, middle America fostered new kinds of artistic expressions. Writers such as Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson wrote movingly about the lifestyles of middle Americans. Painters rebelled against the elitism of an academic style and chose local subject matter--wheat harvests, cyclones, and gritty farm folk--as worthy of representation. Grant Wood, John Stuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton are the most famous of the Regionalist painters.

Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri and was the son of a Missouri congressman. As a child he taught himself to draw and received his first professional employment as a cartoonist for The Joplin American at age seventeen. He later received professional training in Chicago, Paris and New York, but returned to Missouri in the 1930s to paint images of daily life. He was active as a mural painter, and was commissioned to create several large murals such as those in the Missouri state capital in Jefferson City.

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Throughout his long career, Benton was fascinated by musicians as subjects of his paintings. He made on-the-spot sketches of musicians while they were playing, and then used these to create the finished painting in his studio. In this work, he captured the cool elegance of a Kansas City jazz player engrossed in his playing. Through the hazy background, Benton suggests a kind of melancholy blues tune. His exaggeration of the rhythmical contour of the figure is also suggestive of music and of the unity of musician and instrument. (MAA 8/03)

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Earl Kerkam (American, 1891-1965) Self Portrait No. 1, ca. 1957 Oil on masonite 68.424 Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Martin H. Stein

This work is an example of the Cubist style first formulated by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso around 1910. Painters since the Renaissance had thought of the picture as a bounded two-dimensional surface that acted as a window into an imaginary world behind that surface. Generally, three- dimensional objects were convincingly portrayed in one-point perspective (see Melone's Madonna and Child, for example) and with gradual shading from light to dark to create the illusion of roundness or solidity. Painters also used easily understood symbols or signs to guide viewers' eyes. Modern painters such as Braque and Picasso sought new ways to organize and present these symbols. Influenced in part by modern technologies-- the development of cinema, etc.--these artists gradually developed new systems of representation which merely suggested their subject matter, and it became a job for the minds and memories as well as the eyes of viewers to decode these signs.

As in the works of Braque and Picasso, Kerkam has broken up his image into separate fragments which suggest facial features: eyes, nose, and mouth. Light and shadow are not used to create convincing and coherent illusions of traditional three-dimensional space, but instead signal an "idea" of roundness or three-dimensionality. Lines drawn on the surface help organize the free-floating shards of color into a grid system that echoes the rectangular format of the picture itself. This helps call attention to the fact that the picture is just that, a painted object, rather than an imaginary scene behind the surface of the canvas. Such an emphasis on the literalness of the picture itself was later carried on in the work of the Minimalists (see Douglass Freed's Encasement).

Many artists create self-portraits. Rembrandt and Van Gogh, for example, left numerous such images that allow us to trace their evolving self-perceptions. It is possible to interpret Kerkam's Cubist Self Portrait No. 1 as a recognition of and an homage to his formal predecessors Braque and Picasso, and as a situating of his own place within the artistic legacy of modernism. (MAA 12/95)

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Larry Rivers (American, b. 1923) Drugstore, ca. 1960 Oil on canvas 69.106 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Small

For Larry Rivers, the process of painting, the painting's expressive potential and the depicted subject are of equal importance. This places his work at a very interesting juncture between the two seemingly opposing movements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Throughout the 1950s, Abstract Expressionists had created grand works which glorified individual artist's gestures as they were translated into expressive brush strokes. Though small in scale, the broad sweeps of pigment in Drugstore lend the work a grand monumentality, which relates it directly to the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic.

But the work is also connected to Pop Art--which was in part a reaction to the exalting of such abstract gesture, in that it is referential to culture outside the art world and the artist's own psyche. It is not purely a record of the artist's subjective feelings, but is an abstracted depiction of a cultural space, a drugstore. Through the incorporation of the brand name "KODAK," seen in reverse through the drugstore window, the artist expresses an interest in popular cultural phenomena. Pop artists believed that art should be accessible to a broad audience, and hoped to achieve this accessibility through depicting recognizable signs and symbols from popular culture. Such art came along at a time when mass advertising and television were taking a huge leap into American homes. By incorporating advertising images into their work, Pop artists like Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist recognized that the imagery of mass culture, rather than a direct encounter with nature, increasingly defined the norms of experience in the contemporary world. (MAA 12/05)

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Moses Soyer (American, 1899-1974) Dancer, ca. 1930 Oil on canvas 69.1008 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Small

Raised in an artistic and intellectual family, Moses Soyer studied art in New York at Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Modern School, where Robert Henri and George Bellows influenced him strongly. Henri and Bellows were part of the Ashcan School, a group of artists who specialized in scenes of gritty urban life. Perhaps because of this influence, both Moses Soyer and his twin brother Raphael became noted Social Realist artists, painting the lives of ordinary people during the Depression era and the later twentieth century.

For the most part, the brothers painted with a brushy quality that recalled the styles used by artists of the Ashcan School. Both Soyer brothers also sought to make statements about modern society by portraying workers engaged in everyday activities. After the Depression, Moses Soyer turned to other themes and began to paint ballet dancers, which became a predominant subject in his later art. Dancer is an early manifestation of Soyer’s interest in this theme, and the painting may be an oil sketch for a larger work. (MAA 8/03)

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Charles Demuth (American, 1883-1935) New England Landscape, No. 8: Mt. Monadnock, ca. 1912-1915 Oil on panel 76.3 Museum Purchase

Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Charles Demuth studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with the American Impressionist painter William Merrit Chase. In 1904 and again in 1907, Demuth traveled to Paris where he encountered the work of Post-Impressionist artists Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and others. He lived in France between 1912 and 1914 and was undoubtedly influenced by Fauvist painters such as André Derain and Henri Matisse as well as by the Cubists.

With New England Landscape No. 8: Mt Monadnock, Demuth brings a Fauve aesthetic to the United States. The artist heightens and exaggerates natural color: sunlight on the grass is painted bright yellow, brown leaves become orange, and gray clouds and shadows are rendered in bright blues and vivid violets. (MAA 3/09)

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Dwight W. Tryon (American, 1849-1925) Spring Evening – Sunset, 1910 Oil on mahogany panel 77.237 Bess Schooling Memorial Gift

Dwight W. Tryon is considered a major proponent of the American Tonalist movement. Artists associated with this style, such as George Inness and Thomas Dewing, were concerned with the poetic evocation of nostalgia and reverie in landscape. Tones of single colors dominate their works, which often picture the natural world enveloped in a misty atmospheric haze.

Tryon trained in Paris between 1876 and 1879. In France he encountered the landscape paintings of the Barbizon artists, especially admiring the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. In the 1880s, when he returned to the United States, Tryon began to suggest atmospheric effects through subtle variations of color tones. By 1910, the artist was working with a pale palette of colors, and works like Spring Evening – Sunset suggest an awareness of the innovations of the Impressionists in both Europe and America. (MAA 8/03)

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Adja Yunkers (American, 1900-1987) Aegean V, 1967 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78.229 Gift of Mr. W. James Lopp II

Adja Yunkers’ Aegean V is an example of Minimalism, a style popular in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Artists working in this style often painted large canvases with simple fields of color and concentrated on formalist relationships between colors, lines, shapes and textures.

Born in Riga, Latvia, Yunkers began his artistic training at the Art Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was influenced by the Russian Constructivists Malevich and Lissitzky. After the Russian Revolution made it impossible for him to continue his studies in St. Petersburg, Yunkers found his way to Dresden, where he maintained a studio in the early 1920s. His time in Germany was marked by frequent travel, and many of his paintings are based on his experiences around the world. In 1947, shortly after his studio, most of his works, and all of his possessions burned in a devastating fire, Yunkers immigrated to the United States.

Yunkers’ Aegean series was made after a trip to Greece and was inspired by the bright blues and whites of the Mediterranean landscape. The series consists of eight works, both prints and paintings. The white-on-white collage of this canvas interacts playfully with the band of blue pigment, subtly drawing attention to the intricacies of the outline. (MAA 8/03)

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Manuel Espinoza (Venezuelan, b. 1937) Gran Ofrenda de los Pajaros [Great Offering to the Birds], 1975 Oil on canvas 78.235 Gift of Mr. W. James Lopp II

Espinoza'a Great Offering reflects the influence of Abstract Expressionism (see also Jenkins' Drug Store). It is composed of bold gestural strokes, which are expressive of both the inner world of the artist and the work's frenzied subject matter. The overlapping of forms and the suggestion of shadows, while not intended to construct a fully three- dimensional, illusionistic space, do create a sense of depth that contributes to the works powerful formal presence.

In the past, the work of Latin American artists such as Espinoza, was often undervalued and seen as derivative of European and North American modernist innovations. Certainly, artists working in other parts of the world were influenced by these developments. But Latin American artists have also frequently incorporated elements of native tradition into their work, often imbuing it with a powerful spiritual aspect. As Espinoza's title suggests, this work may refer to ancient cultic ritual. The pedestal-like central form and bright red color are suggestive of blood and sacrificial rites. Light seems to emanate from behind the pedestal form, perhaps symbolizing the power of the Great Offering. (MAA 12/95)

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Victor Vasarely (Hungarian 1908-1997) Uzok, 1952 Oil on canvas 81.54 Gift of Mary C. Hazard in honor of Leland Hazard

Vasarely is known as the founder of the Op Art movement which blossomed for a short period in the 1960s in Europe and the United States. Op is short for optical art. Op paintings are always abstract and are connected with the notion of optical illusions. Their static, two- dimensional surfaces are intended to create the illusion of movement. Vasarely had originally planned a career in medicine but gave it up in order to join the Budapest Bauhaus in 1929. The Bauhaus was a school based on Constructivist ideas, meaning that it was made up of avant-garde artists who took a rational and scientific approach toward art and design. There Vasarely became acquainted with the theories of abstract art. In 1930 he settled in Paris and worked in advertising and commercial art and later began to translate natural shapes into simplified geometric signs in his paintings. His interest in perspective led him to investigate pictorial space not as a two-dimensional entity, but rather as a three-dimensional one, resulting in the execution of pictorial experiments with optical illusion and perception. Vasarely worked with what he termed his "planetary folklore," an alphabet of around thirty colors and geometric form which he combined in infinite ways. He believed that in order to make art more integrated with society, the type of the solitary, "genius" artist--one who created unique, precious objects--should give way to the conceptualist artist, whose designs could be reproduced and widely disseminated through mechanical processes.

Op Art was first widely recognized in 1964, just prior to a Museum of Modern Art exhibition titled "The Responsive Eye." Many critics were not impressed. One complained that Op could have been achieved using objects "taken from the diagrams of Gestalt psychologists [i.e., that it was not art at all]," and dismissed it as "perceptual gimmickry." Because it was so grounded in illusionism (the major premise of art since the Renaissance), it was believed by some to be a step backward from the modern mode of vision (based purely on the expression of the internal rather than external world) first explored by the Abstract Expressionists and followed in the work of the Color Field painters (see Jenkins' Phenomena Chinese Calendar). Much like Pop Art (see Rivers' Drug Store), however, Op became an instant success with the media and the public. The use of flickering patterns and shrill color contrasts proved very appealing to most viewers. (MAA 12/95)

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Newell Convers Wyeth (American, 1882-1945) The Battle of Westport, October 23, 1864, Study for a mural in the Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City, Missouri, ca. 1921 Oil with pencil and charcoal on canvas 87.30 Transferred from University Business Office

Newel Convers (“N.C.”) Wyeth was born in Needham Massachusetts in 1882. He is one of the most important painter-illustrators of the first half of the twentieth century, and the patriarch of a family of artists that includes his painter son, Andrew Wyeth. The elder Wyeth specialized in book illustrations as well as large scale mural paintings.

This painting is a study for a lunette decorating the Missouri State Capitol building in Jefferson City. The Capitol Decoration Commission asked Wyeth to paint two murals representing Civil War battles in Missouri. Because both the North and South received strong support in the state during the conflict, Wyeth was asked to paint a Confederate victory (The Battle of Wilson’s Creek), and a Union triumph (The Battle of Westport).

The decisive Battle of Westport took place towards the end of the Civil War. The Confederates made a desperate cavalry charge in an attempt to overtake Union batteries positioned along a ridge near Kansas City. Union forces met the charge and the seven hour cavalry fight was one of the fiercest battles of the war. The battle is sometimes called the “Gettysburg of West.” Northern forces were victorious, and it was the last major Civil War battle in Missouri. (MAA 2/2005)

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Douglass Freed (American, b. 1944) Encasement (Six Panel L Structure in Blue and Gold, Balankanche), 1983 Oil on canvas, multi-paneled structure 91.336 Gift of the Artist

The term Minimalism is used to describe a kind of art that aims to reduce painting and sculpture to its essentials. Minimalism first appeared in the 1960s and was the first art movement of international significance pioneered exclusively by American-born artists. Like the Abstract Expressionists (see Rivers' Drugstore), artists working in this tradition create works that are not representational. Minimalist artists carry abstraction to an extreme, however, and focus on the bare-bones of geometric abstraction. The style dominated the art of the late 1960s just as Abstract Expressionism had dominated the art of the 1950s (see Rivers' Drugstore and Jenkins' Phenomena Chinese Calendar)--and as no single style would do in the 1970s, when artists worked in a wide variety of eclectic styles.

Minimalist painting, like Freed's, eliminates representational imagery and illusionistic pictorial space in favor of a single unified image, often composed of smaller parts arranged in a grid-like pattern. Despite the tendency toward mathematically regular compositions, Minimalist painting varies widely. It may be monochromatic, or multi-pigmented, as in the case of Freed's work. In either case, the intention is to reduce painting to its simplest components. As in Color- Field painting, to which Minimalism is closely related (see Jenkins' Phenomena Chinese Calendar), color itself may become the subject.

Freed also makes use of "shaped canvases." Paintings, as we know, are typically rectangular (though paintings on panels of various shapes were popular in Europe during the Renaissance, as in the Student of Benozzo's Processional Cross, and Melone's Madonna and Child). The term shaped canvas was first used to describe the "notched" paintings of Minimalist artists like Frank Stella, exhibited in New York in 1960. In these paintings, symmetrically arranged pinstripes echoed the unconventional shape of the stretched canvas support, though in Freed's work, there is not such a rigid correspondence between the shapes of the canvases and the painting of their surfaces. Freed often combines several canvases to form a larger whole, as in Encasement, a bit like a large puzzle. This form also faintly echoes that of medieval polypytch altarpieces (see Flight Into Egypt, for example). (MAA 12/95)

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Jörg Schmeisser (German, b. Stolp, Pomerania, 1942) Zustande II, 1984 Etching 92.6.1-7 Museum Purchase

Born in Stolp, Pomerania in 1942, Jörg Schmeisser studied studio art at the Fine Arts Academy in Hamburg, Germany, and the Kyoto City Fine Art University in Japan, with an emphasis in drawing and printmaking. He currently holds a position as Head of the Printmaking Workshop at the Canberra School of Art in Australia. Starting in 1965, Schmeisser spent nine summers in Greece and Israel as a draftsman for the University of Missouri archaeological excavations, which were headed by the Weinbergs.

Jörg Schmeisser generally starts with a visual or 92.6.1 emotional experience, and his prints stress the importance of craftsmanship during the creative process. He usually finds inspiration for subject matter in his extensive travels, including the summers spent working for the Weinbergs on University of Missouri expeditions. Denounced at times for not including socially conscious themes in his artwork, Schmeisser chooses to communicate affection for his subjects, rather than anger or criticism. (MAA 2/05)

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Romare Bearden (American, 1913-1988) Conjunction, 1979 Color lithograph 92.81 Museum Purchase

Romare Bearden grew up in New York City’s Harlem, where he met many of the cultural leaders of the Harlem Renaissance as a child. In the 1930s he studied art at New York University and the Art Students League. Bearden also spent time in Paris, where he was influenced by European modernism and abstraction. In the 1960s Bearden became interested in representing African- American themes in his art. He became famous for his painted collages made up of photostats and cut paper, which represent black people in ambiguous times and spaces.

Conjunction and Bearden’s other color lithographs of the 1970s reflect the artist’s lifelong aesthetic interest in the culture of the Caribbean, where he and his wife Nanette had a home. The bright colors and patterns are distinctly modern, while at the same time they recall the decorative traditions of the West Indian islands and Africa. (MAA 8/03)

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Romare Bearden (American, 1913-1988) Three Women, 1979 Color lithograph 92.82 Museum Purchase

Romare Bearden grew up in New York City’s Harlem, where he met many of the cultural leaders of the Harlem Renaissance as a child. In the 1930s he studied art at New York University and the Art Students League. Bearden also spent time in Paris, where he was influenced by European modernism and abstraction. In the 1960s Bearden became interested in representing African-American themes in his art. He became famous for his painted collages made up of photostats and cut paper, which represent black people in ambiguous times and spaces.

Later in his life, Bearden said that his imagery was related to the musical traditions of blues and jazz. His paintings, collages and prints can be compared to musical improvisations in which memories of colors, textures and sounds are mixed together to create compelling works of art. Three Women and Bearden’s other color lithographs of the 1970s use color and shape to draw on this musical interest, while at the same time, they recall the decorative traditions of the West Indian islands and Africa. (MAA 8/03)

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Romare Bearden (American, 1913-1988) Pilate, 1979 Color lithograph 92.83 Museum Purchase

Romare Bearden grew up in New York City’s Harlem, where he met many of the cultural leaders of the Harlem Renaissance as a child. In the 1930s he studied art at New York University and the Art Students League. Bearden also spent time in Paris, where he was influenced by European modernism and abstraction. In the 1960s Bearden became interested in representing African-American themes in his art. He became famous for his painted collages made up of photostats and cut paper, which represent black people in ambiguous times and spaces.

Pilate and Bearden’s other color lithographs of the 1970s reflect the artist’s aesthetic interest in African culture. Bearden expresses this interest through simplified forms inspired by African art and the Synthetic Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Stuart Davis. “I work out of a response and need to redefine the image of man in terms of the Negro experience I know best,” Bearden said of his work. The Caribbean culture depicted in this print provides another aspect of the African experience. (MAA 8/03)

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Romare Bearden (American, 1913-1988) Firebirds, 1979 Lithograph 92.84 Museum Purchase

The art of African-American artist Romare Bearden is derived from European modernism, African tribal forms, Byzantine mosaics, and Chinese calligraphy. In the 1960s he achieved acclaim with the development of his photomontages which addressed African-American political and social themes, genre, street scenes, and jazz musicians. Bearden's art cuts across color boundaries, yet testifies to its cultural heritage. He translated well-known collages into monoprints and graphic works seeking to make his imagery more accessible.

Firebirds is now on view in Isms and Others in the Twentieth Century. Executed in 1979, this work exemplifies Bearden's style. Bold, flat areas of color create a collage effect that recalls African cloth. Bearden said, "In my work, if anything, I seek connections so that my paintings can't be only what they appear to represent. People in a baptism in a Virginia stream are linked to John the Baptist, to ancient purification, and to their African heritage. I feel this continuation of ritual gives a dimension to the works so that the works are something other than mere designs." Romare Bearden: The Human Condition, New York: 1991) Firebirds may be associated with the phoenix, the bird of Egypt thought to be tied to the sun-god. According to legend, the phoenix lived for 500 years. It laid an egg in its nest, set it on fire, and out of the ashes, a new phoenix was born. This relates to ideas about rebirth and resurrection of the dead, and to both pagan and Christian beliefs. (MAA 12/95)

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Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Lime Persian Single with Vermilion Lip Wrap, 1993 Glass 94.1 Gift of Museum Associates, Members’ Choice

Dale Chihuly studied sculpture and interior design at the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Rhode Island School of Design. He also learned glassblowing techniques in Murano, Italy, an important international center of glass production. The popularity of Chihuly’s work has helped to blur the lines between fine art and craft. His works are celebrated for their vibrant color, fluid shapes, and the fragility of their blown glass forms.

In his studio in Seattle, Chihuly draws or paints a sketch of each work, then (with the help of his assistants), blows molten glass into shapes to match his original drawings. Lime Persian Single with Vermilion Lip Wrap is part of Chihuly’s Persian series, which consists of glass sculptures that are smaller and more intensely decorated than the artist’s earlier works. (MAA 7/04)

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Ed Paschke (American, 1939-2004) Kiss I, 1996 Oil on linen 97.17 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Ed Paschke studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s, where he was influenced by Pop Art and by the works of nineteenth- and twentieth- century artists such as Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso. His paintings contain imagery from the popular culture and explore themes of aggression and physical incongruity in modern life. Paschke often used lurid neon color combinations as part of his anti-aesthetic approach.

In the 1980s, Paschke incorporated electronic media into the creation of many of his works. The use of computer-generated images allowed him to explore technology’s impact on human life. He wrote: “Increased worldwide connections through cyberspace and international multiculturalism have improved communication and enhanced our lives on many levels. It is ironic that these same factors have increased our sense of isolation and detachment. . . . My paintings explore these issues through metaphor and the juxtaposition of symbols.”

Kiss I exemplifies Paschke’s style and subject matter. Disembodied heads appear in many of his paintings, signifying the relationships and voids that exist between individuals in the modern world. Paschke’s use of patterning and bright colors calls to mind imagery from the internet and the mass media, while the repetition of motifs forces us to question the nature of individuality. (MAA 12/04)

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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) Owl Vase, between 1947 and 1963 Earthenware 99.1 Gift of Kate Ellen Rogers

Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso settled in Paris in 1900, eventually becoming one of the twentieth century’s most innovative and influential modernists. As one of the inventors of Cubism, Picasso often abstracted natural forms, radically simplifying observable reality. In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, he adopted an abstract style in which he depicted objects in nature as a witty series of simple lines, shapes and geometric forms.

Picasso began to produce ceramics at the Madoura studio in Vallauris, France, in 1947. His interest in this traditional art form reflected his Mediterranean heritage and allowed him to experiment creatively with slips, glazes, and wheel-thrown pottery forms. Playful shapes characterize Picasso’s ceramic creations, and his output in Vallauris was quite prolific. With the help of assistants, he completed more than one thousand pieces in his first year at the studio.

The owl became a common motif in Picasso’s art beginning in 1946. It appears in prints and drawings from this time period as well as in his ceramics. The Owl Vase is made up of a variety of pottery forms; the main body was created in one piece on the wheel, while the base and the tail were made as separate sections and then joined to the body. (MAA 8/03)

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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) Fish Platter, between 1947 and 1963 Earthenware 99.2 Gift of Kate Ellen Rogers

As a child growing up in Málaga, Spain, a city founded in pre-Roman times by the Phoenicians, Picasso became familiar with the forms and styles of ancient pottery. He continued to express an interest in ancient forms when he set up the Madoura ceramics studio in Vallauris, France in 1947. Because of its mineral-rich soil, Vallauris had been an important center for the production of pottery since the time of Roman colonization. Picasso’s presence there in the 1950s and 60s helped to revive the town’s flagging ceramics industry, which had been damaged by the introduction of metal cookware after World War I.

With the Fish Platter, Picasso modernizes a common Greek serving dish, often decorated with fish. Picasso, however, subverted the original purpose of the fish platter by treating the fish as a three-dimensional object in relief rather than as a motif to be painted or incised on the platter’s surface. Picasso’s modern version of the fish platter was made in a mold and is glazed with oxide pigments to produce the blues and greens. (MAA 8/03)

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Nam June Paik (Korean, 1932-2006) Anten-nalope, 1996 Multi-media assemblage 2000.2 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Nam June Paik grew up in Seoul, Korea, moving to Tokyo in 1950 during the Korean War. After studying philosophy and music in Germany, he became involved in the Fluxus movement of the 1960s with George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys, John Cage and others. Members of Fluxus organized “performances” that blurred the lines between art, theatre, music and vaudeville. Following the lead of Marcel Duchamp and the Dada artists of the 1910s and 20s, these avant-garde performers placed objects, animals and people in unusual contexts and allowed their movements, actions and reactions to contribute to the meaning of the works.

In the 1960s, Paik’s experience with Fluxus inspired him to become a pioneer of video art. For him, the kinetic television screen was one of the twentieth century’s most universal and enduring icons. For five decades, Paik has been celebrated for his television sculptures and installations.

Anten-nalope is part of a series of animal sculptures Paik designed in the 1990s. The assemblage is made from television cabinets, a vintage phonograph horn, an antique telephone mouthpiece and other components. Paik was inspired by Neolithic cave paintings of animals, and the Anten-nalope encourages viewers to contemplate their relationship with nature in a technological age. Today many people are more familiar with animals on a video screen than they are with actual living creatures. (MAA 8/03)

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Charles Rosen (American, 1878-1950) Coastal Landscape, 1908 Oil on canvas 2001.9 Transferred from Business Services, MU

Charles Rosen’s Coastal Landscape is an excellent example of American Impressionism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, American artists such as John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam encountered Impressionist paintings in Europe and brought the style back to the United States. Like the French Impressionists, they painted out-of-doors, picturing the ordinary in nature rather than the picturesque. They painted with loose brushstrokes and bright colors, attempting to represent the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere in their artworks.

Rosen belongs to the second generation of American Impressionists. Born in Reagantown, Pennsylvania, he studied illustration at the National Academy of Design, but soon became interested in Impressionist painting. He studied with William Merritt Chase and Frank DuMond at the New York School of Art, and in 1903 he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he became well known for his snowscapes, seascapes and industrial river scenes.

Coastal Landscape is typical of Rosen’s early work, reflecting the influence of Chase and DuMond with its loose brushstrokes and unsentimental evocation of the commonplace in the natural world. (MAA 9/2003)

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Grace Hartigan (American, 1922- 2008) The Gallow Ball, 1950 Oil and newspaper on canvas (2002.27) Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Grace Hartigan’s The Gallow Ball exemplifies the American Abstract Expressionist style of the 1940s and 50s. The leaders of this movement, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, often abstracted or abandoned subject matter in order to focus viewers’ attention on expressive and energetic form. Influenced by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, many Abstract Expressionists wanted their works to reflect unconscious energies through the gestural act of painting. Artists applied pigment with bold brush strokes and sometimes dripped or poured paint directly onto their canvases.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Grace Hartigan belongs to the second generation of Abstract Expressionists associated with the New York School. Although trained as a mechanical engineer, she began her career as a painter in the 1940s and was influenced by de Kooning and Pollock. She also admired the expressive paintings of the Spanish masters Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya.

As one of her earliest works, The Gallow Ball reflects Hartigan’s interest in both the warm, dark palette of the Spanish masters and the highly gestural style of the first-generation of Abstract Expressionists. She also incorporated newspaper collage into the painting, a technique first employed by early modernists such as Pablo Picasso. (MAA 3/09)

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Sharon Jacques (American, b. 1956) The Collector, 1999 Acrylic on unstretched canvas 2004.53 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

As an artist living in New York in the 1980’s, Sharon Jacques actively exhibited her artwork while working as an educator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Her paintings and installations encourage the viewer to think about the individual’s relationship with images in museum settings.

The Collector depicts an anonymous collector’s face at the very center of the canvas, intruding upon a geometric pattern of blacks, whites, and grays. She is placed at eye-level with viewers, encouraging them to participate in a mirror-like exchange of gazes. Paint is applied in transparent glazes so that the collector’s face merges with the field. We look at her as she stares back at us.

The artist describes what she hopes to accomplish in this painting with the following words: “I was interested in conveying the notion that as we perceive, we project. In this case we see a quite literal projection of self (the collector’s self) into the work.”

Jacques designs her unstretched canvases to be pinned to the wall, encouraging viewers to consider how the presentation of museum objects affects our interpretation of them. (MAA 10/04)

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Daniel Garber (American, 1880–1958) River Bank, 1910 Oil on canvas 2004.86 Transferred from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Administrative Services

Daniel Garber is one of many early twentieth-century American painters inspired by the nineteenth-century French impressionist style. Like his European predecessors, the Pennsylvania painter was interested in representing transient effects of light and atmosphere in the landscape. River Bank probably depicts a scene near Garber’s home in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. The broken color and tapestry-like quality of the image suggest the effects of flickering light across the water and river- bank. Garber preferred to paint outdoors, and his plein air paintings are characterized by a fresh, spontaneous style and vibrant color.

Until his death in 1958, Garber continued to produce his luminous landscapes, although by the 1930s his impressionist style was regarded as old fashioned by critics. (MAA 1/2006)

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Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928-2011) Rambles, 1987 Lithograph and etching in colors 92.75 Gift of Museum Associates

Helen Frankenthaler’s first solo exhibition was at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, in 1959, and since that time she has been one of the most highly respected abstract expressionists artists. She made her first lithograph (discounting a few student exercises) in 1961, and has completed a large body of work equal in beauty and significance to her painted canvases. Fluid spontaneity, gestural immediacy, and sumptuous surfaces that seem magically to emerge from the support (whether canvas or paper) are all qualities associated with Frankenthaler’s art. The artist explains, “Since I am essentially a painter, I never feel that work in another medium is a matter of reproducing what is on canvas. Rather it is my translation of my image in a new vocabulary.” Frankenthaler’s images stem from her fascination with accident and control, surface complexity and open spaces, painterliness and calligraphic forms. (MAA nd)

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Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954) Illustrations for Ulysses, by James Joyce, 1935 The Claypso Episode Aeolus, Cave of Winds The Cyclops The Episode of Nausicaa The Circe Episode Symbolic Landscape of Ithaka Etching 92.79.1-6 Gift of Museum Associates

The Limited Editions Club of New York commissioned Henri 92.79.1 Matisse to illustrate James Joyce’s Ulysses. He produced a suite of six soft-ground etchings for an edition for 1,500 books, which were signed by the artists. Special Collections of University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries holds copy number 1078. The Museum’s prints comprise a companion portfolio edition, signed and numbered 5/150. (MAA nd)

92.79.2 92.79.3 92.79.4 92.79.5 92.79.6

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Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930) Good Time Charley, 1972 Color lithograph 80.206 Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts

Jasper Johns – painter, printmaker, and sculptor – is an outstanding figure in post-1945 art. He began in Abstract Expressionists mode, but after meeting Robert Rauschenberg and the composer John Cage, his approach altered radically. Johns is often seen as the father of Pop art and a forerunner of Conceptual art. His works feature a mesh of verbal and visual contradictions that raise questions about artistic preconceptions.

Good Time Charley is based on John’s 1961 painting (encaustic on canvas and found objects) in the collection of the artist. The image of the ruler was photographically transferred from the painting. The title of the painting was derived from the inscription on the slivered drinking cup that Johns had attached to the ruler- a device used in the “making” of the painting. Typically, the contextual imagery remains esoteric. (MAA nd)

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Jerry Kearns (American, b. 1943) American Noir (from the portfolio “10: Artist as Catalyst), 1992 Serigraph 97.16.7 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Appropriation is a common strategy in postmodern art, and often the original sources are not credited. On the back of this image, however, Kearns indicates the “genealogy” of American Noir: Frederick E. Church 1856 John Singleton Copley 1778 Jonny Craig 1954 New York Times 1990

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Harriet Frishmuth (American, 1880-1980) Joy of the Waters, ca. 1917 Bronze L-713 Lent by Virginia W. Crawford

Harriet Frishmuth is best known for her animated sculptures of dancing women, which were often used as fountain and garden statuary in the early twentieth century. Although a native of Philadelphia, Frishmuth spent most of her childhood traveling and attending school in Western Europe. When she was in her twenties she studied for a brief period under Auguste Rodin in Paris, then returned to the United States and studied with several other sculptors, including Gutzon Borglum at the Art Students League. Unlike many other women sculptors of her time, Frishmuth was able to make anatomical studies from actual human bodies, which she saw during her weekly visits to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

Joy of the Waters is one of Frishmuth’s most popular pieces, and she made versions of the statue in two different sizes. This piece is a cast of the smaller version, which was released in an edition of forty-five. It features the sculptor’s favorite model, a famous dancer of the 1920s named Desha. The pose reportedly stemmed from Frishmuth’s request for the model to imagine cold water shooting up through the floor onto her bare feet. The influence of Art Nouveau is apparent here in the exuberant pose, windswept hair, and the long, flowing lines of the body. (MAA 8/2003)

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938) Portrait of Gerti, 1911 Oil on canvas L-833 Lent by the St. Louis Art Museum Bequest of Sam J. Levin and Audrey L. Levin

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a leading member of Die Brücke (The Bridge), the German Expressionist painters’ group formed in 1905 in Dresden. Die Brücke was organized to promote the ideals of modernism among German artists. Instead of convincingly portraying the natural world, the group saw art as a form of self- expression. They valued the creative process itself, calling it a “bridge” between the private individual and the outside world.

Kirchner’s use of color was highly influenced by Matisse and the French Fauves, who were known for bright, wild, and heightened colors in their paintings. He also admired the “primitive” art of Africa and other tribal societies. These influences can be seen in the Portrait of Gerti, where Kirchner portrays the sitter’s face as a schematized mask and represents highlights and shadows on the model’s skin with tones of bright red, green and blue.

Although this painting is dated 1907, Kirchner is known to have pre-dated some of his paintings in order to make his work (and German modernism in general) appear more avant- garde in relation to French modernism. Scholars believe Portrait of Gerti actually dates to around 1911, representing a transition between Kirchner’s Dresden period (characterized by broad, flat areas of color), and his more gestural and expressive Berlin period. (MAA 8/2003)

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David Ligare (American, b. 1945) Dido in Resolve, 1989 Oil on Canvas 89.6 Gift of the MU Student Fee Capital Improvements Committee

David Ligare is a California based artist who was commissioned to create a contemporary classical painting for the Museum of Art and Archaeology to serve as a link between the ancient and modern objects in the Museum’s collection. Ligare’s painting represents an episode from the Aeneid by the Roman author Vergil.

According to the story, Dido, Queen of the North African coastal city of Carthage, met the Trojan prince Aeneas when he stopped in Carthage after the end of the Trojan War. Aeneas fell in love with the queen, and the two spent the following winter together. Later, Mercury, the messenger of the gods, visited Aeneas and urged him to travel to Italy to found a new Troy (which later became the Roman Empire). Choosing not to disobey the gods, Aeneas departed and abandoned Dido. Distraught over her lost love, the queen built an enormous pyre to burn all of Aeneas’ leftover possessions. Ligare pictures Dido in her palace as Aeneas’ ships depart Carthage. As smoke from the pyre rises in the background, the queen resolves to end her life. Dido eventually threw her own body onto the pyre, cursing Aeneas as she committed suicide.

Ligare makes visual references to archaeological objects in the painting, representing, for example, a classical lamp similar to those found in the Museum’s collection. The artist also shows Dido seated in profile, a position that recalls the traditional poses of deceased figures in ancient Greek funerary monuments. Ligare’s frame, moreover, resembles the structures that surround these ancient monuments. These funerary references allow the artist to foreshadow Dido’s death with the formal elements of the painting. (MAA nd)

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Alphonse Maria Mucha, (Czechoslovakian, 1960-1939) La Peinture (Painting), 1989 Colored Lithograph on silk 77.401 Gift in memory of L. and G.E.B.

As a painter, graphic artists and designer, Alphonse Mucha was one of the leading exponents of Art Nouveau. From his humble beginning as a scene painter in Vienna, Mucha quickly advanced to the Munich Academy (1885) and two years later to the academies Julian and Colarossi in Paris. Although his fame is based on his association with Paris, where he was popularly taken to be a Hungarian, Mucha was an ardent Czech and Slav patriot. He decorated the Burgomaster’s room in the Prague Municipal Hall, designed a window in Prague Cathedral and the first Czechoslovak stamps and banknotes. He worked on his series of vast paintings, The Slav Epic during the 1910s and 1920s. Some were shown in the U.S.A., but they are now in storage in Czechoslovakia.

On New Year’s Day in 1895, Mucha received instant fame for his poster Gisomonda for Sarah Bernhardt, with whom he enjoyed a six-year collaborative contract designing posters, sets, and costumes. Mucha is best known for his poster designs, characterized by luxurious, flowing lines, and light, clear colors. Dated 1898, the rare Painting is part of The Arts suite including Poetry, Dance, and Music. It is a twelve-color lithograph (i.e. twelve stones) with gold and silver printed on stain-weave silk. (MAA nd)

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Claes Oldenburg (American, b. Sweden, 1929) Spoon Pier, 1975 Color aquatint and etching 79.80 Gift of Graduate Student Association, MU

Claes Oldenburg, a printmaker, performance artists, sculptor, and writer, has been acclaimed as one of the founders of Pop art. The family of the artists moves from Sweden to Chicago in 1936 following the father’s appointment to the consulship there. Except for four years of study (1946-1950) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, during which time he decided to pursue a career in art, Chicago remained Oldenburg’s home until his move to New York in 1956. Within two years of this move, Oldenburg had become part of a group of artists who challenged the tenets of Abstract Expressionism.

The subject matter of Oldenburg’s work in the early 1960s, such as The Store (1961-1962) involved commodities of our materialist culture. By the mid-1960s, Oldenburg turned his attention toward designing projects for imaginary outdoor monuments-eventually producing some of his propositions (including the Shuttlecocks on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City). Oldenburg’s commitment to a democratic art available to all led him in the late 1960s to experiments with printmaking and with the production of sculptural commissions, in part to escape what he considered the commercial manipulation of his work by the art market.

Spoon Pier is one of Oldenburg’s fanciful proposals for a public monument, wavering between the probable and the impossible - a challenge to our typical pattern of perceiving objects. (MAA nd)

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Richard Pettibone (American, b. 1938) Penzoil Eleven, 1963 Wood, glass, paper, plastic, paint 65.11 Gift of the Howard Lipman Foundation

Penxoil Eleven exemplifies the criteria for pop art as listed by Richard Hamilton, one of the leaders of the movement:

Popular (designed for a mass audience) Transient (short-term solution) Low-cost Mass-produced Young (aimed at youth) Witty Sexy Gimmicky Glamorous Big Business

(MAA nd)

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David J. Schwarz (American, b. 1952) Blown Glass Form (From the series, Z-Axis, Other Facets,) 1984 Glass 84.80 Gift of Museum Associates

David Schwarz has combined in his work the art of drawing and the applied science of glass technology. He studied both disciplines in the state of Washington, where he continues to work today. From 1979 to 1982, Schwarz taught glassmaking at the summer program of the Pilchuck Glass School at Stanwood, Washington. He has exhibited his work extensively since 1980; his art included in such notable collections as the Corning Museum of Glass and the Pilchuck Glass School. Of his work, David Schwarz has written the following:

The “Z-Axis, Other Facets” series represents my interest in dealing with architectonic drawings existing in an environment devoid of gravity. The glass form offers a specific atmosphere which causes the light to be diffused and reflected, illuminating the drawings, which give them life…My glass forms are atmosphere for my structures. Because glass is transparent, I can overlap my drawings, using the existing background for a focal point. Since each plane exists in a different place in actual space, it sets up a depth of field, enhancing these illusions of depth. Translucency illuminates the drawings while optics bend and distort distance and clarity. Facets provide a confused optical phenomenon that tricks the eye into seeing objects reduced in size and act as windows allowing the viewer a visual point of entry. As one moves around the piece, the images move, giving them life. The images increase, decrease and bend, distorting distance and reality.

(MAA nd)

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Andres Serrano (American, b. 1950) Red River #10, 1992 Serigraph 97.16.11 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Andres Serrano began his career by exploring Catholicism as an arena in which the body and are converge-and in so doing his work became known to the general public through the scandal caused by Piss Christ, 1987. Bodily fluids, especially blood, milk and urine, continue to be a focal point in Serrano’s mature oeuvre in so far as they are strongly coded as human symbols, laden with meaning and taboo. There are social prohibitions both against treating blood as a simple hue, and against its spillage, therefore the abstract form of Red River #10 seems incapable of containing the content.

In 1993, Serrano Stated: “I am drawn to subjects that border on the unacceptable because I lived an unacceptable life for so long.” This “unacceptable life” apparently began soon after his birth, in 1950, when he was abandoned by his father, a merchant marine that had three other families living in his native Honduras. Brought up in the predominantly Italian Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by an African Cuban mother who did not speak English, and who was hospitalized on a number of occasions for psychosis, Serrano quickly learned the meaning of being both marginalized and emotionally on his own. Perhaps because of difficulties in his life, Serrano found the Metropolitan Museum of Art a safe haven during his youth; there, he spent hours looking at Renaissance paintings. His attraction to these religious works may have strengthened his involvement in the Catholic Church and contributed to his decision to be confirmed when he was thirteen. Despite his subsequent separation from the Church, which began soon after confirmation, Serrano has not renounced his Christian beliefs. Indeed, much of his work involves a conjunction between the scared and the profane. (MAA nd)

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Frank Stella (American, b. 1936) Puerto Rican Blue Pigeon, 1977 Lithograph and serigraph 80.210 Purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts

Frank Stella attended Phillips Academy and then Princeton University (1954-1958), where he studied history and painting under William Seitz and Stephen Greene. In New York during the winter of 1958, the artists began his series of black paintings based on symmetrical and concentric geometries. By 1960, Stella had pioneered the use of shaped canvases. What distinguished Stella’s work of the 1960s, especially in relation to the Abstract Expressionist painting that preceded it, was its cool, “impersonal” look: its straight lines and immaculate surfaces, and its total refusal to indulge in “handwriting” or autographic gestures of any sort. This was painting that kept its emotions tightly buttoned.

What we see in the work of the 1970s, which includes Puerto Rican Blue Pigeon as part of the Exotic Birds series, is a conscious return to expression and gesture. Visually, the work contains gorgeous color and details with expressionist handling. The result is a flamboyant decorative abstraction contained by the parameters of the grid-it is both an inspired analysis of the art that has preceded it and a way of winning new territory in art.

Puerto Rican Blue Pigeon is a 52 color combination screenprint and lithograph hand- printed from 14 hand-cut screens, 8 photo screens and 30 hand-drawn lithographic aluminum plates. The impression is signed and numbered in pencil by the artists and bears the chopmark of the workshop in the lower right margin. (MAA nd)

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Victor Brauner (Romanian, 1903-1966) Self-Portrait, 1923 Oil on paper 84.8 Gift of Saul and Gladys Weinberg

Victor Brauner was born in Piatra Neamtz, Romania in 1903, and his family moved to Vienna in 1912. He was brought up in an atmosphere of spiritualism (with which his father was obsessed), and attended Evangelistic School in Brailam from 1916-1918. He also attended the school of Fine Arts, Bucharest briefly in 1921.

In 1924, Brauner produced his first automatiques and became closely affiliated with the Surrealist movement. Indeed, after visiting Paris in 1930, Brauner settled there permanently in 1932 and was introduced to leading French Surrealists by Yves Tanguy. His best known works were shown in Surrealist exhibitions and often depict iconic images of monsters with human and animal attributes.

Before Victor Brauner became associated in the public’s mind with the Surrealist movement, he was identified with the German Expressionist Ernst Kirchner, Erich Heckel and at times with Max Beckmann. In is Self-Portrait from 1923, Brauner uses Expressionists techniques, including distortion of form, but also hints at the inward-looking focus of Surrealism. (MAA nd)

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Irving Kriesberg (American, b. 1919) Oh, Joy! (Tokyo), 1985 Oil on canvas 2007.36 Anonymous Gift

Kriesberg has been a figurative expressionist painter since the early 1950s, when he fell under the influence of the abstract expressionists in New York City. In 1952 he showed with Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still in an important exhibition of fifteen American artists at the Museum of Modern Art. The gestural paint handling of artists like Franz Kline, in particular, had a lasting effect on his art.

Featuring the odd combination of a gorilla and an owl, Kriesberg paints them in a cartoonish fashion, using Fauvist bright colors and expressive brushwork. The gorilla’s massive head on the right of the composition floats disembodied from his hand, which supports the gigantic owl in front of him. While the claws and outspread wings of the owl appear intimidating, the gorilla shows no fear, putting his head right next to the agitated bird.

The disturbing effect of the large shapes, bizarre pairing, and frenzy of color and strokes appear to have been born from the artist’s unconscious. At the same time, the composition is a childlike and intimate vision created from a rainbow of colors meant to delight. There is an innocent appreciation for nature in all of its forms. (MAA nd)

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Beulah Ecton Woodard (American, 1895 – 1955) Maudelle, ca. 1937-38 Terracotta painted brown, with white and green glaze 2007.40 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Woodard's Maudelle is a masterpiece of realistic portraiture achieved through incisive modeling and detailed description of the sitter’s features, braided hair, and colorful earrings. Her dramatic beauty combined with the medium of terracotta (unglazed brownish-red earthenware) gives the bust a potent presence. Created without the use of drawings or sculptural models, the fired clay reveals traces of the artist’s touch, which adds to the vitality and forceful immediacy of the portrait.

Beulah Ecton Woodard was an African-American artist and her art primarily concentrated on the portrayal of Africans and African-Americans, often from an ethnographic and anthropologic perspective. She worked in a variety of media including terracotta, bronze, wood, and papier-mâché.

The primary purpose of art was to educate, according to Woodard. She wanted to teach African-Americans to take pride in their African heritage, as she worked to establish an independent African-American identity for black Americans. She thus avoided abstraction as she sought to realistically portray her subjects. This bust of Maudelle shows her straightforward and easily understandable approach to art. Woodard was the first African- American artist to show at the Los Angeles County Museum with her solo exhibition in 1935, and she organized the Los Angeles Negro Art Association in 1937. Sadly, Woodard died at the height of her career, before an exhibition of her work in Germany.

The sitter, Maudelle Bass Weston (1908-1989), was a well-known African-American concert dancer and professional model. In 1940, she danced with the American Ballet Theater in Agnes de Mille’s ballet Black Ritual, and in the 1950s she appeared with the dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus. As a model, she posed for numerous artists including Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, and Weegee. (MAA 03/09)

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Bernard Buffet (French, 1928 – 1999) Travesti, 1951 Watercolor on paper, varnished and mounted to canvas 69.103 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Small

A French painter, illustrator and printmaker, Buffet studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1943. By 1945 he decided to devote himself to a career in painting and moved to Massy-Palaiseau, to the south of Paris. Gaining early public recognition, he exhibited annually in Paris beginning in 1949.

Buffet’s early works convey the melancholic atmosphere that lingered in Europe after World War II (1939–45), as evidenced by the gloomy expression of the figure depicted in Travesti. The man’s cheerless face contrasts markedly with the vivacity of his hat and clothing, which appear to be inspired by the traditional costume of the Spanish matador.

While hardly cutting edge, the image displays a sense of modernity thanks to the hatching and simplified stylization. The angst-ridden figure also resonates with the philosophy of Existentialism especially prevalent at that time. Popularized by Sartre (1905–80) in his 1943 existentialist treatise Being and Nothingness, this philosophy emphasized the individual person as a free agent, whose development takes place through personal choices in a hostile and often unfathomable universe.

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Jennifer McCurdy (American, b. 1955) Wave Vessel, 2007 Porcelain 2008.174 Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Arthur F. Furman

Jennifer McCurdy is a process-oriented artist, who has been a potter since the age of sixteen. She works primarily in porcelain due to its smoothness and starkness, which she correlates to bleached bones or white beach rocks. McCurdy concentrates on throwing the most dynamic and perfect shape each time she sits at her wheel, and she carves the patterns to add energy and counterpoint. Like her other works, Wave Vessel was hand thrown on a wheel and then altered and carved by the artist when the porcelain was leather hard. She then fires her piece to cone 10. Inspired by nature’s cycles, she produces graceful, flowing forms and intricately pierced designs. (MAA 01/2012)

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Keith Crown (American, b. 1918) The Museum of Art and Archaeology and Overview, 1993 Watercolor on paper 93.3 Commissioned by the Museum from the artist

Keith Crown was born in 1918 in Keokuk, Iowa. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, earning his BFA in 1946. Drafted into the army in 1941, he served in the Pacific during World War II and was awarded the bronze star. When he returned from combat, Crown became a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Southern California. He retired in 1983 and later moved to Columbia, Missouri, where he still resides.

The Museum of Art and Archaeology and Overview is an unusual example of a monumental watercolor. The composition is made up of two large sheets of paper: on the left is the profile of Pickard Hall, filled with examples of art from the Museum’s collection; on the right is the landscape around the quadrangle. Crown represents several views simultaneously in order to portray the temporal experience of seeing the Museum and its surroundings.

When the Museum acquired the mural, Crown informed the staff that the painting could be displayed either horizontally or vertically. When hung vertically, viewers focus attention on Crown’s depiction of the Museum and its contents. When hung horizontally, viewers concentrate on the spectacular landscapes. This is the first time that the painting has been displayed with a horizontal orientation. (MAA 4/2008)

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Keith Crown (American, b. 1918) Side Street – Columbia, 1982 93.7 Watercolor Gift of Patricia Dahlman

Keith Crown studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After serving in the South Pacific during World War II, he began teaching drawing and painting at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he lived for the next thirty-eight years. The artist is noted for his brilliantly colored watercolors, with their unique perspective on the natural world. Crown’s paintings often feature abstract, highly personalized approaches to his subject matter.

The artist has lived and worked in Columbia, Missouri since 1983. In Side Street- Columbia, he visualizes the city’s skyline amidst washes of heightened color and abstract reflections. The trees, steeple and houses merge to create an impression of the character and features of a typical street in a Missouri town. (MAA 7/2004)

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Willie Cole (American, b. 1955) Man, Spirit, Mask, 1999 Mixed media on paper: photo etching, woodcut, serigraph, scorching, embossing, hand coloring, and hand painting with lemon juice 2000.6 a, b, c Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

In the 1990s, Willie Cole developed a national reputation with his sculptures and assemblages made out of commonplace objects. While these creations came out of the tradition of Dada sculpture pioneered by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Cole brought a poetic self-awareness of his ethnicity to his work. In his hands, household objects become haunting and symbolic representations of the heritage of black people in Africa and America.

In the mid-1990s Cole began to make prints that reflected his interest in re- appropriating everyday objects. One of the most persistent themes in his work is the household steam iron. Cole has said that the steam iron is, for him, powerfully symbolic. Its shape calls to mind African masks, and its function reflects the domestic servitude experienced by many African Americans. Cole feels that objects have a memory and a history of their own and that irons embody the souls of their users. (MAA 7/2007)

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Ida Applebroog (American, b. 1929) Untitled, 1992 (from 10, Artist as Catalyst, A Portfolio to Benefit the Alternative Museum) Serigraph in 11 colors on Lenox paper 97.16.3 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Ida Applebroog attended the Art Institute of Chicago and received an honorary doctorate from the New School/Parsons School of Design. Although viewers are limited to one example here, exhibitions of Applebroog’s work usually create an installation-like environment. Her paintings and graphic works are stacked and dispersed around the entire space, making it impossible for viewers to evade their thought-provoking subject matter. She mostly utilizes painting and printmaking but has also experimented with sculpture, filmmaking, and animation.

Applebroog uses heavy lines and cartoon-like figures to convey social commentary about—but not limited to—gender identity, desensitization toward violence, and the tension between personal autonomy and political intrusion into our daily lives. Her work, however, denies a simple reading. Here, Applebroog combines an enlarged central figure (seemingly a woman but whose gender is actually ambiguous) above three identical images of a woman exposing her body. While the images suggest that the identities of women are subjugated by others’ perceptions of their bodies, the exact theme is complex and remains indeterminate. (MAA 7/2007)

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Nancy Spero (American, b. 1926) Sacred and Profane II, 1996 Paint, appliqué, and woodblock prints on silk 2001.2 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund and Gift of the Student Fee Capital Improvements Committee

An ardently feminist artist, Nancy Spero works in many media, from installation art to object-based art to printmaking, both traditional and experimental. The depiction of the female form is one that has occupied her (maybe even preoccupied her) for a long time. A political activist, Spero began her career by depicting images of women as victims. Recently, she has portrayed them as figures of vitality, strength, and sassiness. She also explores the objectification of women, particularly how male artists depict the female form. She makes art that is freed from this “male gaze,” and thus created specifically for other women.

Measuring 45 feet in length and 29 inches in height, Sacred and Profane II is a double- sided banner made by sewing together numerous multi-colored sections of silk. The colors include white, turquoise, royal blue, orange, lavender, brown, red, navy blue, and burgundy. The top and bottom edges of the banner have purple-colored trim. Spero also stitched small, purple-colored suspension loops along the entire length of the banner for suspension. The banner is decorated with painted, appliquéd, and printed imagery representing women from both Western and Eastern cultures. Spero applied the imagery by building up the surface with inking, stamping, and collage techniques. In this rebellious work, she refused to utilize traditional art modes, like composition and the “hierarchical” ordering of space, which emancipates her female characters.

Spero’s work lacks a vital center area or story line, which adds to the defiant nature of the banner because it emphasizes femininity and the role of women in general. The female imagery includes figures of Egyptian musicians and arched figures of the Egyptian goddess Nut (the goddess of the sky and all heavenly bodies and a symbol of resurrection and rebirth); the Greek goddess Nike (the winged goddess who personified triumph and victory) and other Greco-Roman inspired figures; gorgons heads and full-bodied gorgons (Greek mythological creatures with sharp fangs and hair of living, venomous snakes); crouching female figures with sexual devices; seated Buddhist figures and heads; seated Japanese musicians; women standing in contemporary male attire; an ominous standing figure wearing a cape; a Pre- Columbian statuette; a nude running woman; a praying mantis standing in a defensive pose (praying mantids practice sexual cannibalism; the female eats the male after copulation); three- headed snakes accompanied by contemporary women; and a woman dressed in black leather lingerie. The female figures empower women and emphasize women’s roles in religious beliefs and the arts, various stereotypes of women throughout history, and female sexuality and fetishism. (MAA 9/2007)

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Chuck Close (American, b. 1940) Phil/BAM, 1991 Woven silk tapestry 98.18 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

Wisconsin-born artist Chuck Close received his MFA from Yale University in 1964. For three decades, Chuck Close has investigated representations of the human face, and most of his works are large-scale portraits based on photographs. To create his intimate portraits, he places a grid over a photograph, as well as a canvas, and then transfers the image cell by cell from the photo to the canvas. Throughout his career, he has played with notions of perception, scale, structure, realism, and abstraction.

The tapestry displayed here features Philip Glass (b. 1937), a renowned contemporary American composer. Close first began making representations of Glass in 1969, and since then he has created over twenty versions of ‘Phil’ in various media. Many are prints, and others are part of editions numbering as many as sixty. Phil/BAM juxtaposes a mass-produced, computer-driven weaving process with a lifelike, imperfect portrait of Glass, which emphasizes his individuality and humanity. ‘BAM’ in the title refers to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the famous composer frequently performs.

Chuck Close developed an international reputation at the end of the 1960s for his monumental photorealist portraits. Viewers often find these pictures disturbing because of their unnatural proportions. Close magnifies the imperfections of his models on a grotesquely large scale. Normally we confront our fellow human beings eye-to-eye and face-to face, overlooking nose hairs, sizable pores and unsightly wrinkles. When a face is over ten-times life size, we can no longer relate to it as we would a living human. The size objectifies and depersonalizes the image causing it to become intimidating.

Phil/BAM is based on Close’s 1969 portrait of the composer Philip Glass (now in the Whitney Museum of Art, New York City). After a spinal blood clot left Close a quadriplegic in 1988, the artist explored new media and image-making strategies. Phil/BAM was made by feeding an image of Close’s original Phil into a computer programmed to create a woven reproduction of the artwork.

The Rugal Silk Tapestry Company in China produced an edition of seventy-five silk copies of Phil/BAM signed and supervised by Chuck Close. The computer-produced weave of the tapestry mimics a printed dot matrix and enhances the mechanical, impersonal quality of the image. (MAA 7/2007)

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Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1987) Crazy, Crazy, Crazy Minerva from Memories of Surrealism, 1971 Etching and lithograph 79.111.14 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Small

Salvador Dali, possibly the most famous Surrealist painter, was born in Spain in 1904. During the late 1920s in Paris, he became associated with the Surrealist circle, a group of avant-garde writers, artists and intellectuals, who were influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Similar to Freud’s psychoanalytical theories, Surrealists were interested in bringing out unconscious human desires and exploring the inner- workings of the human mind.

In 1971 Dali produced his Memories of Surrealism portfolio, which consists of twelve etchings and lithographs. These prints present a typical Dalian hodgepodge of bizarre and dream-like imagery. Dali’s “Crazy, Crazy, Crazy Minerva” features the Roman goddess Minerva. Adapted from the Greek goddess Athena, Minerva was the daughter of Jupiter (Zeus) and also the virgin goddess of wisdom, warriors, poetry, medicine, commerce, and crafts, as well as the inventor of music. Here Dali presents a Surrealist rendition of her image. The owls flanking Minerva’s head connect her to her Greek counterpart Athena, whose symbol/attribute was an owl, which represented wisdom. (MAA 7/2007)

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Jörg Schmeisser (German, b. Stolp, Pomerania, 1942) Enter the Forbidden City, Beijing, 1981 Etching 92.5 Gift of the artist in honor of Gladys and Saul Weinberg

Jörg Schmeisser is an internationally known printmaker who studied in Hamburg, Germany, and Kyoto, Japan. Schmeisser is a master of difficult graphic techniques, and Enter the Forbidden City, Beijing is an example of the complex process of color viscosity printing. Using this method, Schmeisser pulled color impressions from a single etching plate. Oil based inks of differing viscosities were applied to the plate, and their varying consistencies allowed the artist to control the distribution of the color. In viscosity printing, the plates can be worked and reworked using different color combinations.

Schmeisser’s subject matter for this print is the architecture and artifacts of the Forbidden City, or Zijin Cheng, which was the Chinese Imperial palace from the mid-Ming Dynasty (1420–1644) until the end of the Qing Dynasty (the early twentieth century), when it ceased to be the political center of China. Anyone who entered or left the palace first needed permission from the emperor, and thus the name originated from this rule. The palace complex is located in the middle of Beijing and now houses the Palace Museum. Today, the sight is most commonly known as Gugong, meaning the Former Palace. (MAA 7/2007)

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Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945) Der Agitationsredner (The Agitator), 1926 Lithograph 74.11 Museum Purchase

Käthe Kollwitz was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, where she grew up in a deeply religious environment. In 1919 she was the first woman to be elected to the Berlin Academy of Art. While working at the Berlin Academy, she explored lithography and woodcutting, and these became her primary media later in life. During the 1930s, when the Nazi party rose to power, she was forced to resign her position at the Academy because they considered the content and style of her work offensive.

Several life circumstances profoundly influenced Kollwitz’s work. She lived through three major wars, including the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, in which she lost her youngest son, and World War II, in which she lost a grandson. In addition, her husband was a doctor at a clinic that provided medical care to the poor, and thus she was exposed to the consequences of poverty. Most of her work features heavy, poignant subject matter related to war, protest, tragedy, death and sadness. In Der Agitationsredner, or The Agitator, Kollwitz has imbued a sense of despair by emphasizing her central figure’s emaciated body, open mouth, and grasping hand gesture. Her title, combined with the haunting figure that stands before a crowd, suggests that this man’s desperation has turned him into an activist for social justice. (MAA 7/2007)

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Frederick Oakes Sylvester (American, 1869–1915) The Mississippi at Elsah, 1903 Oil on canvas 86.65 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. George Schriever

Known as the painter and poet of the Mississippi River, Sylvester was not himself a Missourian. Born in 1869 in Brockton, Massachusetts, Sylvester moved to St. Louis in 1892 to teach painting and drawing at Central High School.

In 1902 Sylvester purchased a small summer cottage near Elsah, Illinois. One year later, he painted this view of the river not far from Elsah looking toward Missouri. He once commented: “The love of the sea, the lakes, the waters, is in my blood.” The Mississippi became his muse, and he created his own personal vision of nature with it.

The Mississippi at Elsah is one of the finest of his paintings of this river. Viewing the world as the Impressionists did, he saw things in terms of lights, shadows, colors, and color relations. His observations of changing light and atmosphere, however, are modified by the limited palette, soft painterly strokes, and subjective approach of Tonalism. While representing a specific place in time, this monumental riverscape approaches nature in a contemplative manner that is more about the mood felt by the artist than the specific details of the river and land. (MAA 10/2010)

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Tom Huck (American, b. 1971) The Crossing Guard (from the folio Two Weeks in August: 14 Rural Absurdities), 1999 Woodcut 99.4.6 Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund

A native of rural southeastern Missouri, Huck satirizes the lifestyle of his hometown of Potosi in this print, as he recounts one of the local legends he heard as a youth.

In the words of the artist: “While a nearby prison prepared a cell for a recently convicted ‘undesirable’ type, the decision was made to house this fella in the county jail for a night. He escaped, made his way to the local Catholic Church, and stole a few of the priest’s Easter vestments. Our hero then made his way down to the main intersection of town and began directing the morning traffic, occasionally throwing a blessing or two to a few bewildered drivers.”

Dressed in priestly vestments and a feathered headdress reminiscent of a halo, the “Crossing Guard” guides school children safely across the intersection as various locals watch the spectacle. Using bold black and white lines, Huck creates a complex and dense narrative composition, which harks back to the masterly woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Capturing the attention of the artist at the age of thirteen, Huck considers Dürer to be the king of printmakers and “the sole reason why he cuts wood.” (MAA 8/2008)

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Ernest Trova (American, 1927-2009) Abstract Variation No. 5, 1977 Painted Cor-Ten steel 86.27 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Adam Aronson

Ernest Trova, who lived and worked in St. Louis, considered the red- orange and black painted sculpture entitled Abstract Variation No. 5, to be among his most important pieces. Fabricated from plates of heavy Cor-Ten steel, the shapes of the sculpture—flat and curved, straight and angled—create an interplay of solids and voids that are further enhanced when light and shadow dance over the piece. The black color was originally a very deep midnight blue, but the effects of weathering have now turned it black.

Ernest Trova was best known for his earlier work, the Falling Man series. In 1972, Trova began working with more non-representational, geometric forms and in a larger scale. He was widely acknowledged as a leading sculptor during the 1960s and early 1970s. Trova also designed furniture and in 1978 he introduced his “2:30 chair”. More of Trova’s work can be seen at Laumeier Park in St. Louis, were his sculptures are on display.

Works by this internationally prominent sculptor are in collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the Tate Gallery in London.

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Olga de Amaral (Colombian, b. Bogota, 1932) Glyph VII, 2003 Canvas, kaolin, and acrylic paint 2009.655 Gift of Mr. Mark Landrum

Olga de Amaral is a Colombian textile artist, though her works usually involve a mixture of media. She began her career in the 1960s career in the 1960s and was one of the first textile artists to expand the medium of textiles from its traditional two-dimensional format to three-dimensional abstract forms. She typically uses canvas, kaolin, gesso, paint, as well as precious metals and fibers to transform two- dimensional textiles into sculptures. She often combines special elements to create architectural tapestries using woven elements of linen painted with gesso and earth-toned pigments, sometimes including gold or silver leaf. Her technique includes overlapping, weaving and twisting strands of these fibers to create shimmering tapestries.

Her work entitled Glyph VII is comprised of numerous rectangular textile pieces stitched together into an overall vertical form. Rows of these pieces run diagonally across the work, slowly curving as they come to the bottom. These repetitive fish scale-like elements were painted on the upper two-thirds with an underlayer of red and overpainted with gray, tan, yellowish-green, and light blue. On the lower third, Amaral applied a thick coating of kaolin that she then painted a mottled burnt orange. Just above this orange section is a circular form with more densely packed scales.

Amaral has exhibited her work at numerous prominent institutions including the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco’s De Young Museum.

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