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Home , Andrew Wyeth, Frederic Remington, Grant Wood, Mary Cassatt, Norman Rockwell, Sandy Skoglund

6th Grade Owensville Community School – Visual Department

This Outline the Property of:

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I. b. February 24, 1836, MA. Homer, a naturalist painter, is considered by many to be one of America's greatest 19th-century artists. Homer was almost entirely self-taught as a painter. Early in his career he sought work as a magazine illustrator, but during the (1861-1865) he depicted scenes of soldiers and their battlefields. Later in his career, after taking up a solitary existence on the coast of , he produced some of his finest masterpieces. His subject matter centered on nature, particularly the sea and its fishermen, often emphasizing the human struggle with the forces of nature. Homer died in Prout's Neck, Maine, on September 29, 1910.

II. Mary Cassatt b. 1844, Allegheny City, . In 1861, Mary Cassatt began to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in , but proclaimed her independence by leaving in 1866 to paint in . By 1872, after studying in the major museums of Europe, her style began to mature, and she settled in . While in Paris, her work attracted the attention of the famous French painter , who invited her to exhibit with his fellow Impressionists. Portrayals of and children became her theme. Her portraits were not commissioned. Instead, she often used members of her own family as subjects. France awarded her the Legion of Honor in 1904. With the loss of her sight, she was no longer able to paint after 1914. Mary Cassatt died in 1926.

III. b. Canton, , 1861. Frederic Remington was educated at the Students League in . He is famous for his lively scenes of the Wild West in paint and bronze. During the Spanish-American War, Remington served as a war correspondent and artist. His work is admired for its forthright and unsentimental naturalism. His and often displayed an amazing energy and sense of movement. Remington was also the author and illustrator of several books about the West. Frederic Remington died in 1909.

IV. b. Nyack, New York, July 22, 1882. Hopper was one of his generation's finest representatives of the realist tradition of American scene painting. Between 1906 and 1910 he made several trips to Europe but remained unaffected by such new developments in European art as and . After 1908, Hopper lived and worked in New York City. In his paintings, Hopper depicted the loneliness, isolation, and lack of variety of the daily life of small-town America through his compositions of solitary figures in cold offices, desolate houses, or hotel rooms, or through his bare, unsentimental rural and city . His work contains a strong sense of geometry using vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines and shapes. Edward Hopper died on May 15, 1967.

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V. Georgia O'Keeffe b. Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887. O'Keeffe is famous for the purity and clarity of her still-life compositions. She studied at the school of the Art Institute of and at the Art Students League of New York. She taught art in from 1913 to 1918.O'Keeffe is best known for her large paintings of flowers and desert scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. A number of her paintings have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings in particular, in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising. Georgia O'Keeffe died in 1986.

VI. Thomas Hart Benton b. Neosha, MO., April 15, 1889. Benton was born into a political family. He was named after his great –uncle, Missouri’s first U.S. Senator. Tom’s father was a member of the House of Representatives, and dismissed his son’s as “scribbling and daydreaming.” It was Tom’s who encouraged his interest in art. His paintings with simplified, exaggerated shapes, overlapping forms, and rhythmic compositions with bright colors were meant to give people hope as the country tried to dig out of the . Many Americans identified with the farmers, construction workers, housewives, and office workers in his paintings. His artistic style, with its emphasis on local culture came to be known as . Benton died at work in his studio, brush in hand, on January 19, 1975.

VII. Grant Wood b. Anamosa, , Feb. 13, 1891. Wood, known as a Regionalist, won popular and critical acclaim for his elegant, meticulously composed canvases. He expressed strong Midwestern themes in a stylized form of . He was strongly influenced by the van Eyck brothers during his four visits to Europe. His most famous work, “”, caused a sensation when exhibited at the . The hard, cold realism of this work and the honest, direct, earthy quality of its subject were unusual in American art. The painting portrays a farmer-preacher and his daughter in front of their farmhouse, but Wood actually used his sister, Nan, and his dentist, B.H. McKeeby, as models. It is a telling portrait of the serious and hard-working rural dwellers of the Midwest. An image of another of his paintings is depicted on the 2004 Iowa State Quarter. Can you name the painting? Wood helped found the near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great promoter of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic. Grant Wood died on Feb. 12, 1942, on the eve of his 51st birthday and at the peak of his fame.

VIII. b. New York City, Feb. 3, 1894. Rockwell is America’s most famous and popular illustrator. His name is synonymous with his realistic, colorful and frequently humorous views of Middle America. In 1917 he sold his first cover to, The Saturday Evening Post, for which in the next 17 years he illustrated a total of 317 magazine covers. From 1926 to 1976 Rockwell illustrated the official Boy Scout Calendar. Rockwell was a careful craftsman with an ability to represent detail realistically. The subjects of most of his are taken from everyday family and small-town life and are often treated with a touch of humor. During his long career, he was commissioned to paint the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest peacetime award. Rockwell died November 8, 1978 of emphysema at age 84 in Stockbridge, .

Page 2 IX. Alexander Calder b. Philadelphia, PA, July 22, 1898. Alexander Calder was an American sculptor most famous for inventing the mobile. In addition to mobile and stabile , Calder also created paintings, lithographs, and even designed carpets. Calder came from a family of sculptors, with both his father Alexander Stirling Calder and grandfather, the Scottish-born sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, sharing the same name. His mother, Nanette was a painter. Although his parents encouraged his creativity as a child, they discouraged their children from becoming artists, knowing that it was an uncertain and financially difficult career. Having decided to become an artist, Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League. In 1928 Calder had his first solo show in New York. He spent much of the next decade crossing the Atlantic to give shows in Europe as well as in America. On one transatlantic steamer, he met his wife Louisa James. They married in 1931. After a long and productive career, Calder died on November 11, 1976.

X. Jackson Pollock b. Cody, Wyoming, Jan. 28, 1912. Pollock was the central figure of the Abstract Expressionist . In 1930 he traveled to New York were he studied under Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock relied on the unconscious mind to stimulate his art. He perfected new techniques of application, including dripping paint from cans and pouring and hurling paint onto flat canvases placed on the floor of his studio. These paintings would often take weeks of alternating periods of contemplation and painting to finish. After his death in an automobile accident on Aug. 11, 1956, he came to be recognized as one of the great influences on American art, having opened new boundaries of texture, line and expression.

XI. b. Chadds Ford, PA, July 12, 1917. Andrew Wyeth received his artistic training from his father, artist N.C. Wyeth who is best known for his illustrations for the novels Treasure Island and . Andrew Wyeth's brother, Nathaniel C. Wyeth, invented the plastic soda pop bottle. Andrew presented his first one-man show in New York City in 1937. The subject matter of his paintings comes almost entirely from two localities, the Brandy Wine Valley around Chadds Ford and the area near his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Wyeth paints in both watercolor and tempera. His technique is precise and detailed. Most of Wyeth’s most well known paintings are in egg tempera, which allows him to attain the greatest possible degree of precision. Wyeth was the first painter to receive the Presidential Freedom Award. Today, Wyeth's major works sell for in excess of one million dollars from private dealers and at auction. Andrew Wyeth died January 16, 2009.

XII. Roy Lichtenstein b. New York City, October 27, 1923. Lichtenstein is a artist well known for his painted enlargements of commonplace comic strips. Lichtenstein taught at State University. His studies were interrupted by a three year stint in the army during World War II. His first one-man show was held in New York City in 1962. The entire collection was bought by influential collectors of the time before the show even opened. Finally making enough money to live from his painting, he stopped teaching in the same year. His comic-strip paintings humorously transpose the simplified violence and sentimentality of popular culture into huge, almost abstract images. Brilliant colors outlined in deep black lines contributed to the intense visual impact. His interest in the comic-strip cartoon as an art theme probably began with a painting of Mickey Mouse in 1960 that he did in fun for his children. His painting, Torpedo...Los!, sold at Christie's Auction House in New York City for $5.5 million in 1989, a record sum at the time. Lichtenstein is one of only three artists to have attracted such huge sums for art by a living artist. Roy Lichtenstein died of pneumonia on September 29, 1997 at New York University Medical Center. Page 3

XIII. b. Augusta, Georgia, May 15, 1930. Johns’ became famous for his images of: the American , in it’s familiar and unfamiliar colors; the of the United States; letters and numbers; and the target. Johns often emphasized surface texture by using the encaustic method, where hot wax is mixed with the paint pigments. Many Pop Art artists emulated his depiction of common, everyday objects. In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York paid over twenty million dollars for Johns' painting, White Flag. Jasper Johns guest-starred on an episode of the popular TV show, , as himself. In the episode, Homer Simpson accidentally becomes an artist, and Johns attends one of his exhibitions.

XIV. b. Monroe, Washington, July 5, 1940, Close is best known as a photorealistic painter. Most of his works are very large portraits based on photographs. Early in his career his tools included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was a black and white enlargement of his face he made in over four months in 1968. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic. In 1988, Close had a spinal artery collapse, on the day he was to give a speech at an art awards ceremony. He felt ill beforehand, gave his speech, and then painfully went to a hospital across the street. A few hours later he was a quadriplegic. Close continued to paint with a brush held between his teeth, creating mini-portraits in grid squares created by an assistant. From a distance, these squares appear as a single, unified image. Eventually Close managed to recover some movement in his arm and now paints with a brush strapped to his hand.

XV. Sandy Skoglund b. Weymouth, Massachusetts, September 11, 1946. Sandy Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist. Skoglund creates surrealistic images by building elaborate sets, furnishing them with carefully selected colored furniture and other objects, a process of which takes her months to complete. Finally, she photographs the set, complete with actors. These images are characterized by an overwhelming amount of one object and either bright, contrasting colors or a monochromatic color scheme. One of her most-known photographs, entitled Radioactive Cats, features green-painted clay cats running amuck in a gray kitchen. In this image, an older man sits in a chair with his back facing the camera while his elderly wife looks into a refrigerator that is the same color as the walls. Another image, Fox Games has a similar feel to Radioactive Cats and is also widely recognized. A third and oft-recognized piece features numerous fish hovering above people in bed late at night and is called Revenge of the Goldfish.

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ART HISTORY 15 AMERICAN ARTISTS

Page 5 Identification Key

1. The Boating Party Mary Cassatt

2. Autumn Rhythm Jackson Pollock

3. Target with Four Faces Jasper Johns

4. Cradling Wheat Thomas Hart Benton

5. Christina’s World Andrew Wyeth

6. Homecoming G.I. Norman Rockwell

7. with Hair Ribbon Roy Lichtenstein

8. Revenge of the Goldfish Sandy Skoglund

9. Nighthawks Edward Hopper

10. Phillip Glass Chuck Close

11. A Dash for the Timber Frederic Remington

12. American Gothic Grant Wood

13. Summer Days Georgia O’Keeffe

14. The Lifeline Winslow Homer

15. Untitled Mobile Alexander Calder

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