Last week, I wrote about the shifting American taste in modern art at the middle of the twentieth century. I’d like to revisit that subject again this week, prompted by my research on one of the most famous—and, in her…
Recently, while conducting research on the painter Elizabeth Murray (herself worthy of a future blog post), I came across an interesting anecdote. In 1994 Kirk Varnedoe, the Museum of Modern Art’s Chief Curator of Painting, asked Murray to curate an…
Flashback to December, and I am looking out the window at a sheet of ice, deposited in my corner of the Blue Ridge by the December Nor’easter that is rapidly dumping huge amounts of snow on various parts of the…
I was inspired to write this post after enjoying a recent CFAM Work of the Week: Derricks at Night by the American printmaker Martin Lewis. In her introduction of the print Curator Gisela Carbonell relates Lewis’s relationship with the work…
This week I have been considering Black Squall at Gibraltar, a recent addition to the collection. Its maker, James E. Buttersworth, is one of those artists, like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who was prolific and comfortably successful in his own time,…
I have long wanted to discuss the related disciplines of art conservation and technical art history on this blog but hadn’t found the right angle until now. In part, that’s because I haven’t been able to travel to look at…
In the last entry of this blog, I wrote about the American painter Wolf Kahn, whom the art historian Barbara Novak regarded as perfectly blending the American landscape tradition with the formal innovations of Abstract Expressionism.1 In this post I…
Lost (for me at least) amid all the tumult of March, when the first wave of COVID-19-related shutdowns were cascading across the country, was the March 15 death at age 92 of the painter Wolf Kahn. Having just completed my…
Today I would like to consider two photographs by American photographers, The Red Man by Gertrude Käsebier and Ziletta by F. Holland Day. The two images are remarkably similar, presenting close-up, cropped depictions of the human face. Both photos, reproduced…
The art world is no stranger to controversy. Recently, a number of major museums on both sides of the Atlantic have decided to postpone a major retrospective of the work of the American painter Philip Guston, citing the necessity for…
In my research into the CFAM American collection, I have been moving more-or-less alphabetically by century, with occasional detours to consider specific objects and themes that interest me. That means my day-to-day experience is somewhat eclectic, jumping around in terms…
Back in June, I wrote about Jacob Lawrence’s silkscreen practice, relating it to his long-running immersion in Black life and history. At the time, I wanted to write about the other work by Lawrence in the collection, Harlem Scene (The…
In July you may have seen me deliver a Collections Conversations talk on one of my favorite objects in the collection, Shoshone Indians Rocky Mountains, an 1859 oil sketch by the American painter Albert Bierstadt. In it, I talked about…
As I have written this blog, I have tended to highlight recent scholarship that sheds new light on artists on the collection, or on interesting connections between and among artists and works. Sometimes, however, I find myself simply stopping to…
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the African American abstract painter Sam Gilliam and his sometimes uneasy relationship with the artistic style of Black activists in the 1960s and 1970s. This week, I ran into some of the same…
