At the Art of the Matter

                                        Each time I bring my cocker spaniel to the vet’s office I am mesmerized by an  MFA poster that shows a young woman wearing a plaid flannel bathrobe sitting with an Irish setter at her feet that hangs in the waiting room.     It, I discovered, is the work of Scott Prior whose combined technical ability and homespun subject matter I find uniquely appealing. Unfortunately, I’ve learned how infrequently the Northampton, Massachusetts-based Prior’s work is shown beyond local galleries. So, when I heard that Cape Cod’s Cahoon Museum of American Art had scheduled a Prior 5-decade retrospective for early spring 2021, I knew I had to make the trip.                The Cahoon Museum was once the home of Cape Cod folk artists, Martha and Ralph Cahoon. It is easy to imagine tha...

              In December 2018, the Getty Museum, an institution with seemingly bottomless pockets, paid 5.04 million dollars for a work entitled  Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25,  painted in 1912. (See earlier post.) If one were to guess what early 20 th century modern artist would fetch such a sum, names like Bonnard, Vuillard, and Ensor may come to mind. But, no,  Interior with an Easel   was painted by Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi . Who? Who indeed. For many the name Vilhelm  Hammershøi  is not a familiar one, but it may be in the future. If you’ve seen the movie  The Danish Girl,  you’ve already been exposed to his work thanks to the efforts of director Tom Hooper who insisted on using  Hammershøi  paintings as the basis for interior set design.  At this point, the question that logically arises is why is  Hammershøi , who died in 1916, just beginning to be recogni...

Lullaby  is a tempera on paper painting by Lois Bod-ge-tah Smoky, Kiowa. The date this painting was created is in question, as will be discussed, since the year of its origin is important to understanding the painting’s significance within Smoky’s body of work. At first glance, the work may be seen as a simple portrait of mother and child. However, through a closer inspection of this intriguing piece one can both understand   how it attracts the viewer’s attention and why it, unlike many of the works by Oklahoma’s Kiowa Five, including Smoky’s earlier pieces, compels the viewer to speculate upon the narrative which engendered its creation. In this painting, the combination of subject matter, technique, and presentation offer the viewer a more meaningful representation than The Five were taught to produce. Lullaby is comprised of two figures, a woman in profile and a child facing the viewer in a cradleboard. The two are connected by the woman’s upraised arms. In keeping wi...

                              Appeal to the Great Spirit,  Cyrus Dallin's equestrian statue which stands in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was originally cast in 1908—the midpoint of art’s Modern period although in style, it is more akin to the preceding Beaux-Arts era than to its own. However, it is its subject, a Native American in fervent prayer, that connects it to the early twentieth century and that, ultimately, has brought it under fire in the twenty-first. This is an examination of how the perception of this sculpture has evolved over time. Dallin was born in the Utah Territory in 1861. He grew up with children from the nearby Ute tribe as his playmates, learning to speak the Ute language and, at age eleven, attending the negotiations between federal government representatives and Chief Tabby Ta-Kwanah for the return of Ute tribal lands. His blossoming talent for sculpting...

Born in Westphalia in 1887, artist August Macke, despite his German-based training, was greatly influenced by the work of French Impressionists he found in books and galleries. The startling use of color by the Fauves was also evident by 1910 when he befriended Franz Marc, a founding member of  Der Blau Reider  (The Blue Rider), a group of German Expressionist artists who collaborated on exhibitions and publications. In the few intervening years between their first meeting and their deaths in World War I battles (Macke in 1914, Marc in 1916), the two would not only explore Expressionism but experiment with the possibilities of Cubism.  Macke often declared his desire to create a “paradise” in his paintings. In 1911,  Der Blau Rider  challenged its members to explore primitive art. Macke, who had never crossed the Atlantic, set his focus on the romantic view of the vanishing Native American, which was not only popular in the United States, but in Europe at the ti...

        This muted interior scene in which Hammershøi’s use of limited values, omitting extreme darks and lights, depicts a foreground room with a door open to reveal another room beyond. Although the scene is portrayed realistically, softened edges prevent our mistaking it for a photograph. Straight verticals, horizontals, and diagonals dominate the image. In the room closest to the viewer an easel stands near the window on the left with its canvas facing the wall behind it. A seascape, the gold frame of which is the strongest use of color in the painting, hangs on the same wall reinforcing a claim on the viewer’s attention to the left side of the image. What appears to be a card table is visible against the back wall of the farther room, unadorned and empty. The only curvilinear features in the image are found in the clouds of the seascape and incorporated in the architectural details along the ceiling edges.        ...

                      In the world of literature, the concept of ‘intertextuality’ is concerned with interrelationships between texts that are comprised of the written word. In this exhibit we explore the interrelationships among modern indigenous textile-based artworks in a global context. At the heart of all textiles lies weaving, a skill which, in general can be described as forming or constructing  something by interlacing threads, yarns, strips, etc. or even more broadly, as composing a connected whole by combining various elements or details. We will see how different indigenous artists choose to construct/weave their literal or figurative fabric—a fishing net, a shawl, or even paper lace—to convey meaning or draw the viewer’s attention to a concept. And how, for each artist, there is a harkening back to ancestral knowledge and the discovery of means to synthesize that knowledge for the modern world as art ...

              Born in Helsinki, Finland, Outi Pieski is a member of the Sami people who inhabit the Sapmi region within the current geo-political boundaries of Finland, Denmark, Norway and Russia.  She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki where she received an MFA in 2000.  Over the years her interests have broadened to include collage and installations. The natural surroundings of her northern homeland are often the subject of her art, and she pays homage to the Sami people through her use of traditional crafting methods and materials. Her work has been shown throughout Scandinavia, Europe and North America in both group and solo exhibitions and she has been commissioned to produce several pieces of public art within the Sapmi region. In recent years she has received both the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Award but the Finnish Cultural Foundation Grand Prize.  In 2017, when Pieski received the pres...