Story and All Photos By Gail
Jasper Johns’ Field Painting (1963 – 64) is one of many works the artist has made throughout his career that suggest tactile as well as visual interactions. Sometimes, as in the case of the hinged letters in this canvas and the dangling strings of his later Catenary series, the appended objects actually marked the painted surface.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Jasper Johns, Field Painting
Photo By Gail
O. (Osvaldo) Louis Guglielmi (1906 – 1956) described Terror In Brooklyn (1941), one of his best known works, as “a premonition of war and tragedy.” On a desolate Brooklyn street, three nuns are shown entrapped by life-size bell jar; they seem to cower in the presence of a bandaged pelvis that hangs, like a crucifix or relic, from a nearby building. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: O. Louis Guglielmi, Terror In Brooklyn
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In Montez Singing (1989), the cartoonish eyes and meandering nose from Picasso’s Straw Hat with Blue Leaves (1936), along with a pair of stylized lips, attach themselves to the edges of the painting, so that it becomes a face peering in on itself. At the right of the canvas, mitered corners suggest a frame that dissolves on the left, while wispy strokes at the sides might read as hair and the circles below as breasts.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Jasper Johns, Montez Singing
Photo By Gail
American Totem (1960) is one of a series of black-and-white paintings that Norman Lewis made which explore the emotional and psychic impact of the civil rights movement. Lewis, one of the few Black artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, created a form that evokes the infamous hooded Klansman, but the monolith is composed of a multitude of smaller forms resembling apparitions, skulls and masks.
Lewis’s work suggest that terror is both representable and abstract, conscious an unconscious, visible and hidden. The painting was made more than decade after Lewis’s first solo show at the Willard Gallery in New York in 1949, which had earned him considerable renown but neither the financial rewards nor exhibition opportunities if his peers.
Photographed in The Whitney Museum in NYC.
Photos By Gail
To make this quilt, Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936 – 2006) drew on many techniques developed by Black women quilters in the American South who blended West African textile traditions, European patterning, and individual improvisation in their art.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Rosie Lee Tompkins, Three Sixes