Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, 1768 “American art did not exist until 1945.” Thus, in what can certainly be described as a “sweeping generalization”, one of my art professors consigned a legion of artists to fine art purgatory. And, in one of the most egregious lapses of critical thinking in my adult life, I [...]
Category Archives: Art History
Roadtrip
March 3, 2011, 6:23 am
It was a remarkable afternoon. In the balmy temperatures of a Thursday in the midst of February – a sixty degree day not a week after we had endured cold in which the daily high did not rise above minus eight- I stood in one of the galleries at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, [...]
Native son
February 8, 2011, 8:26 am
“…it is the complex, flesh and blood man who has been removed from sight, while his all-too-familiar imagery has remained uncannily resistant to change. If we are to summon Grant Wood from behind that darkened Gothic window, we will see this painting— and all his remarkable work—- deepen before our eyes.” – R. Tripp Evans, [...]
Talk in the M.U.D. with Dean Dunkel /October 22
October 21, 2009, 6:17 pm
“Talk in the M.U.D.” started this fall to explore, quite simply, why artists care about the things that they do, and why we should- or shouldn’t care. It’s free and open to the public. Pit-fired stoneware vessels, Dean Dunkel Trying to wrestle the mythic, transformative “power of art” to the ground in casual conversational terms [...]
Impressionism…and Sharon Burns-Knutson
August 20, 2009, 7:39 am
“Impressionism as a technique devoted to capturing the effects of light out of doors is exemplified most purely in the painting of Claude Monet, who forced it to its limits, and then beyond.” John Canaday Recognizing the stylistic differences amongst the painters who since 1874 when they were first ridiculed by critics as “Impressionists”, was [...]