All Photos By Gail
The Ruxton is one of the rarest and most unique automobiles of the Classic Era, combining innovative front-wheel-drive engineering with bold, avant-garde styling. Today, nearly three-quarters of all cars sold are front-wheel-drive, but during the late 1920s and early 1930s this drive layout was a foreign concept to most, except for a limited number of engineers and racing drivers.
Continue reading Eye On Design: 1930 Ruxton Front Drive Sedan
Photo By Gail
Raymond C. Yard (1885 – 1964) is considered to be one of the great Art Deco jewelers. After mastering the art of jewelry making at Marcus & Co., Yard opened his own shop at 607 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in 1922. Between 1928 and 1933 he created a series of charming Rabbit Brooches, each of which differs slightly, featuring fine details of gold, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. That the Rabbit Waiter brooch (1930) serves alcoholic drinks during Prohibition adds a certain humor to the whimsy, which would have appealed to Yard’s high-society clientele.
Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
A powerful rendering by the artist in her twenties, this picture was made with a practical purpose; it was painted as a reception piece for admission to the life-drawing course at the National Academy of Design. While Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984) is best known for the personal style that she developed within the movement of Abstract Expressionism in the 19540s, this self portrait (c. 1930) is a rare example of her early work, using the thick brushwork and high color of the Impressionists and Realists of the previous generation. Strikingly, Krasner depicts herself at work in nature. She eyes the viewer, who stands on the spot where, presumably, a mirror hangs on a tree. Her expression and strong handling of light and shade evoke the resolve of a young woman rising to the challenge of her artistic vocation.
Photographed in the Jewish Museum in NYC.
Photo By Gail
Premiering at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 1930, Grant Wood’s American Gothic captivated the public’s imagination and catapulted Wood into the national spotlight overnight. The painting depicts a couple — modeled on Wood’s sister, Nan, and his Dentist — who stand in front of a Midwestern house. The house is notable for its lone “gothic” window, a typical feature of the then-popular Carpenter Gothic style of architecture, in which gothic elements are used in otherwise simple, modern wood structures.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: American Gothic By Grant Wood
Photo By Gail
During the 1930s, Stuart Davis, who criticized Thomas Hart Benton’s self-consciously American art as inherently xenophobic, and [referred to] the elongated figures in his paintings as dehumanizing caricatures, was one of Benton’s most vocal adversaries. Even so, their art intersected in many ways. Painted in 1930, Jefferson Market depicts the public space and surrounding structures along Sixth Avenue between 10th and Christopher Streets, only two blocks south of the New School’s headquarters. Davis compressed symbols of urban infrastructure into spatially complex, collage-like painting. The looming shadow of a taller skyscraper in the background portends New York’s continual urban transformation, a theme that Benton engaged in the City Building panel of America Today.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in NYC.