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Willem de Kooning
(1904-1997)
Woman
1949-50
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Much of what we think of as American art has its roots in the history and culture of other places. Many Americans arrived here from other lands, and brought with them their languages, traditions and customs. Artists from the colonial era forward absorbed and reacted to influences and practices imported from older cultures. If anything might be said to define American art in broad terms, it is its eclectic sources. This flexibility and creativity continues into the present, defining ever-new art forms and providing audiences with new interpretive challenges, opportunities, and insights.
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Collection Highlights
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Henry Ossawa Tanner
(1859-1937)
Mary
c. 1908
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Born the son of a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner first studied art in Philadelphia where he was a favorite student of Thomas Eakins. In 1891 Tanner arrived in Paris to continue his art training, and discovered the art of James Whistler, among others. In his painting of Mary, Tanner emulates the pose of Whistler’s famous painting, Arrangement in Gray and Black (Whistler’s Mother), and also Whistler’s muted, tonal approach to color. Tanner used vaporous blue-grays to suppress detail and to imbue the image with spiritual atmosphere. In his life time, Tanner’s work was purchased by the French government and he won medal after medal at the French Salon. In the 1920s and 1930s, young African-American artists sought him out in France for advice. Romare Bearden, also represented in the Weatherspoon’s collection, called Tanner’s work, "vital and transcendent." |
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Elie Nadelman
(1885-1946)
Standing Female Nude
1907
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Born in Poland, Elie Nadelman came to America in 1914, already well known as a modernist. Nadelman was interested in all kinds of art—ancient, classical, primitive, folk and contemporary. He worked in a wide variety of media, including bronze, marble, wood, and plaster and was also a prolific and accomplished draftsman. In his Standing Female Nude, his interest in Greek art is combined with the smooth forms of dolls, which he avidly collected. It is this sophisticated blending of sources in Nadelman’s work that gives it a feeling of modernity.
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George Luks
(1866-1933)
Society Girl
c. 1920s
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George Luks was a member of an early-twentieth-century group of painters known as The Eight, led by Robert Henri (also in the Weatherspoon collection). Many members of The Eight were former newspaper men and well aware of contemporary life. Their work was criticized as belonging in an ash can (garbage), and they become known as the Ash Can School. George Luks, one of The Eight, presents a fashionable portrait in Society Girl. However, this portrait also betrays his debt to the past: he looked hard at the Spanish painter Diego Velásquez and the Dutch artist, Frans Hals, among others. Part of the meaning in Ash Can painting was intended to be the honesty derived from direct observation. Luks’s portrait, however, is not so simply interpreted: It is also about wealth, fashion and class structure in society. |
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John Marin
(1872-1953)
Lake George
1928
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Marin is unique in twentieth-century American art in that he chose for his primary media watercolor and etching, two traditionally modest processes that are often associated with preliminary studies. Marin’s main subject was the landscape in all its manifestations—urban, mountainous, or coastal. Marin believed that all creation—both natural and human—existed in a balance of opposing forces, be they gravitational, atmospheric, or spiritual. Cubism’s fragmented vocabulary served him very well as the means by which he could express this perceived dynamic balance. In the late summer or early autumn of 1928, on the return trip to New Jersey after his annual pilgrimage to Maine, Marin visited Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe in their country home at Lake George, New York, where Stieglitz was recovering from an illness. Lake George is among the pictures Marin executed there. |
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David Smith
(1906-1965)
Interior
1937
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Born in Decatur, Indiana, David Smith learned to work with metal while he was employed at the Studebaker automobile plant in South Bend. In 1926, he moved to New York City and attended the Art Students League. While there, artist John Graham (represented in the Weatherspoon collection) introduced him to the European vanguard. In the early 1930s, David Smith looked at the art of Pablo Picasso, Julio Gonzales and Alberto Giacometti as reproduced in magazines, and worked to convert their visual energy into three dimensions. In the process, he turned to welding techniques and was the first American sculptor to do so. In Interior, he captures in welded steel the linear adventurousness of Giacometti, suggests the dream-like strangeness of Surrealism, and recalls Picasso’s series of paintings and prints on the artist and model in the studio. |
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Willem de Kooning
(1904-1997)
Woman
1949-50
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European by birth and immersed in the history of painting, Willem de Kooning brought a refinement and grace to his work even when the image is a turbulent mass of brushstrokes and harsh colors. The "woman" was a significant aspect of de Kooning’s work and a subject he returned to time and time again, from the late 1940s onward. In his own words, ". . . the Woman had to do with the female painted through the ages . . . Painting the Woman is a thing in art that has been done over and over—the idol, Venus, the nude." The motif of the woman was a way of maintaining this tradition but it also provided a representational focus for de Kooning’s ongoing experiments with abstraction, a way of grounding his perceptual investigations. |
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