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Artist Alex Katz has created important art works in the style of modern realism. His paintings and prints explore light, landscape, time, fashion, and human relationships. Katz’s trademark techniques include: pouncing (perforating a drawing and dusting it with chalk to transfer an image to canvas); using billboard-scale canvasses, and painting in strong flat colors. These techniques showcase composition, scale, light (natural and artificial) and the ephemeral nature of moments in time. His works appear deceptively minimal, and yet they contain a blunt and aggressive beauty.
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Berenice Abbott was born in Ohio in 1898; she lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, New York, and Maine, where she lived until the end of her life in 1991. She is best known for the photographs she made in the 1930s when she was working for the Federal Art Project. During the Great Depression, the government supported many artists who were out of work. Photographers, painters, and writers all recorded typical American life by documenting the daily activities of people throughout the country.
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Charles Knoll was born in Germany, but he immigrated to the United States and worked as an artist in New York City in the 1880s. Not much more is know about him. After he made this painting, he vanished. He may have gone back to Germany. Knoll is called a folk artist because he probably taught himself to paint rather than learning to make art in a school.
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Claes Oldenburg is well known for his large scale sculptures and for being a leader in the Pop art movement. Oldenburg radically changed the size of ordinary objects and used unexpected materials in making them. Have you ever seen a spoon with a cherry the size of a three-story building? He made a sculpture like this to be used in the outside garden fountain in Minneapolis!
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Folk Art is a term used to describe works created by people with little or no formal training as artists. In other words, folk art is the work of ordinary people. In the 1800s, items like weathervanes, pottery, or blankets served utilitarian purposes. Sometimes folk art was created solely for decorative purposes. Regularly, however, these works were created to celebrate and commemorate ordinary peoples’ lives.
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Fred Wilson is an artist born in the Bronx, New York in 1954. Wilson's work examines, questions, and takes apart the traditional way we display art and artifacts in the museums. For instance, he will sometimes put things in a museum that you would not expect to find there. By making art from non-traditional objects, he shows viewers that art and artifacts can mean different things in different places.
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Georgia O'Keeffe was born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin and died at the age of 98. As one of the few female painters to gain recognition in a field dominated by men, she played a major role in American art. Mostly known for her abstract paintings of flowers, rocks, shells and animal bones, the second retrospective of her work in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art was the first for a woman artist. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, dedicated to her work, opened in 1997 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917 and moved to Harlem, New York when he was 13 years old. He first studied art at the Utopia Children's House, a community daycare center that he went to after school. He worked in a very personal manner, creating modernist, abstract views of everyday life as well as epic narratives of the history and social realities of the black community. His historic series "Migration of the Negro," 1941, became the first work by a black artist to be part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1946 to 1998, Lawrence made paintings based on the theme of builders. Lawrence said, Building is a symbol of progress, a symbol of hope." He usually painted with just a few colors, believing that fewer colors could make a stronger work.
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Joan Whitney Payson (1903-1975) had many interests, which she followed with great enthusiasm. She was a sports fan, a supporter of health care and medical science, and a patron of the arts. Her passion for art led her to create a wonderful personal collection which adorned her homes in New York, Florida, and Maine. Mrs. Payson's taste was discerning and varied. Although she favored Impressionist paintings, she also collected a range of works from 18-century portraits to mid-20th-century landscapes. She surrounded herself and her family with art that appealed to her personally—art that she enjoyed living with. It was from this collection that the works which are now at the Portland Museum were chosen. The Joan Whitney Payson Collection is regularly on loan to Colby College for one academic semester every two years. It should be noted that occasionally one or two of the works are traveling and are not on view for that semester.
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Paul Manship was attending Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, when he dropped out to pursue a career as an artist. He planned to be a painter but became a sculptor instead when he found he was color-blind. Manship was only twenty-three when he was awarded a fellowship to study art at the American Academy in Rome. It was there that he discovered the archaic and classical Greek sculpture that would influence his art for the rest of his career.
This bronze sculpture depicts the Greek myth of Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting and animals.
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Myths were an inspiration for the art of the ancient Greeks, and they played a part in their daily lives. Examples are found in their architecture, sculpture, painting, pottery, metalwork, jewelry, weaving, and embroidery.
This cup was made in the late sixth to early fifth century and depicts “The Return of Hephaestus.” The myth of Hephaestus’s triumphant return to Olympus can be traced at least as far back as Alcaeus, the early sixth-century B.C.E. Greek lyric poet. Throughout the Archaic and Classical eras, that myth was a popular theme in vase painting.
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A portrait can tell you a lot about a person. Embedded in each portrait are clues about the subject’s background: their class, their hobbies, their personality, and whatever else the artist chooses to portray or the sitter requests be transmitted. For this reason, portraits are among the most personal works of art, carefully constructed representations of a chosen subject, advertisements of who they are. One can act as a detective in looking at a portrait, searching to see what can be uncovered about a person’s life and personality.
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The 1800’s was a time of rapid growth for the nation. There was a great push for western expansion. The nation offered the promise of a vast western frontier as a place for a fresh start. Settlers traveled west looking for this new prosperity and Native Americans were caught in a fight to save their traditional culture and lands.
European-American artists responded to this period of western expansion by creating works with different perspectives on western expansion and Native Americans. Some artists displayed their struggle, others proposed a more idealistic view.
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