ism of the week - week 6

Each week during our current exhibition, ...isms: Unlocking Art's Mysteries, we will post deeper insight into one of the paintings on view. Past the credit line, past the exhibition label, Assistant Curator Amanda Burdan shares her thoughts:

This image of a laborer was one of several portraits of working class men and women Walker Evans made on a trip to Cuba in 1933. Commissioned to photograph Machado-era Cuba for Carleton Beals’ book The Crime of Cuba, Evans went about his assignment without a specific political agenda. In later years he insisted he had not read the manuscript for the book prior to his trip and went with an open mind to photograph Cuba and its people as he experienced them. A mix of tight portraits, like this one, and scenes capturing both the streets of Havana and the surrounding villages, the resulting portfolio of thirty-one images has since become more widely known than the book they illustrated.

This assignment predates Evans’ work for the Farm Security Administration, but also foreshadows the kind of imagery he, and other so-called “information specialists” working for the United States government, would gather throughout the Depression. Evans’ respectful approach to this coal dock worker trained him for documenting the impoverished conditions of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in this country only a few years later. Evans allows the man’s tanned and leathery skin and bristly beard to narrate the story of the long hours he spent toiling in the Cuban summer sun. In many ways, he does the same in his later photographs of sharecroppers who appear hard-working and noble despite their tattered clothing and dirty faces.

Walker Evans
Dockworker, Havana, 1933

Gelatin silver print

Florence Griswold Museum

ism of the week - week 4

Each week during our current exhibition, ...isms: Unlocking Art's Mysteries, we will post deeper insight into one of the paintings on view. Past the credit line, past the exhibition label, Assistant Curator Amanda Burdan shares her thoughts:

Elmer MacRae’s Still Life with Magnolias is among the newest paintings in the Florence Griswold Museum’s collection. This modern looking painting may seem like a surprising choice for the collection given that MacRae is an important Impressionist from the Cos Cob art colony. He is, perhaps, even more important to the overall history of American art for the work he did as a member of the American Association of Painters and Sculptors, the group that organized and mounted the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show. That pivotal exhibition helped to introduce American audiences to a broad range of the modern styles coming out of Europe. MacRae submitted Impressionist styled works to that exhibition, but soon after came under the influence of the twentieth-century Europeans, updating his style.

This still life, painted two years after the Armory Show moves away from the sketch-like images of his Impressionist years, substituting in bold brush strokes to represent the vase, flowers, and especially the patterned background. MacRae takes a step toward Modernism with the abstract qualities of the work—a radical move for a young American at the time, but he may appear to our eyes to remain conservative in his choice of subject matter. In fact, Modernists like Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso embraced the simple still life as a vehicle for their more groundbreaking experiments in style.

Elmer Livingston MacRae (1875–1953)

Still Life with Magnolias, 1915

Oil on canvas
Florence Griswold Museum

Museum purchase

ism of the Week - week 2

Each week during our current exhibition, ...isms: Unlocking Art's Mysteries, we will post deeper insight into one of the paintings on view. Past the credit line, past the exhibition label, Assistant Curator Amanda Burdan shares her thoughts:

In the first week of our Winter Studies class we talked about the peculiar case of “Luminism,” an “ism” that was invented a century after the Luminist painters worked. One of the paintings in the Luminist section of the current exhibition is John F. Kensett’s Fort Dumpling, although this particular work, like many others in the exhibition, might have been comfortably situated in other sections of the exhibition. Kensett is typically known as a Hudson River School painter, creating landscapes that romanticized American scenery. Hudson River School artists were highly skilled technicians who rendered their paintings with a high degree of finish and detail. Other Hudson River School paintings appear in the “Romanticism” section of the exhibition.

The Luminist painters were noted for their somewhat “quieter” scenes that lacked the drama and bravado of the Hudson River School works. Luminists also painted with virtuoso brushwork and crystalline details, but their compositions frequently felt simplified, or even empty. Fort Dumpling gives us a vast expanse of sky and sea along with the silhouette of the hilltop fort. Although the nominal subject is the fort, the glowing sunset helps us understand how the Luminist movement acquired its name.

Kensett’s Fort Dumpling would have been equally at home in the “Historicism” section of the exhibition. The fort itself is an interesting landmark that stands at the entrance to Narragansett Bay in Jamestown, Rhode Island. A strategic location for control of the Bay, the fort was occupied by American, French, and British troops during the American Revolution. By the time Kensett painted it, nearly a hundred years after the British evacuated Newport, the site was a romantic reminder of the bygone Revolutionary era.

John Frederick Kensett (1818–1872)

Fort Dumpling, ca. 1871

Oil on canvas
Florence Griswold Museum

Gift of The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company

ism of the Week - week 1

Each week during our current exhibition, ...isms: Unlocking Art's Mysteries, we will post deeper insight into one of the paintings on view. Past the credit line, past the exhibition label, Assistant Curator Amanda Burdan shares her thoughts:

Stephen Howard’s painting Judge Marvin’s Barn draws attention to an ancient building in Lyme. The Marvin homestead was the subject of a feature article in the New London Day in 1937, shortly before Howard moved to Lyme, celebrating the many generations of Marvins who had lived there since it was built in 1788. Located on Nickerson Hill, the highest elevation in all of New London County, the farm was said to have been visited by President Andrew Jackson, who stopped to water his horses after crossing the Connecticut River on Ely’s ferry.

Although this painting appears in the exhibition in a section on Regionalism, the attention to a local historic property also shares some of the sensibilities of Historicism. By looking back from his twentieth century point of view, Howard suggests a nostalgia for a New England of the past, of which the Marvin farm was emblematic. Rather than rendering the barn as it might have looked in a bygone era, Howard’s realism offers a dilapidated structure and an ominous sky. The implied elegy for colonial days and agrarian ways was not uncommon for artists during the Great Depression.

Stephen Howard (1912–2010)

Judge Marvin’s Barn

Oil on canvas
Florence Griswold Museum

Gift of Mrs. Janet C. Davis in honor of the Centennial

Memories of a Memoir Class

This blog entry was written by Katherine Catalano of Old Lyme about her experience in the Memoir Class taught by Sue Levine and Lary Bloom last fall.

Read examples of students' work and learn about spring class at http://www.florencegriswoldmuseum.org/MemoirClass.php.

The Florence Griswold Museum was full of surprises this fall. While a fantasy birdhouse exhibit was in place on the grounds, a memoir writing class taught by local professionals Lary Bloom and Suzanne Levine was underway in one of the gracious side rooms in the museum.

I had taken a six week memoir writing class with Lary and Suzanne last spring at R.J.Julia’s in Madison. Like most scribblers, I had been writing for pleasure since the Dear Diary days of adolescence. Now, my friends seemed to enjoy the book and movie reviews I email them when I think they would enjoy something I read or saw. I write poems and short essays about experiences with family and observations of Nature.
I told myself that I didn’t care if anything I wrote was ever published, but that wasn’t true.

I was simply unsure if I had any real talent, and knew I needed professional guidance to know if I should even attempt to submit a piece for publication in a magazine or literary review that I liked.

That first course in Madison with Lary and Suzanne was encouraging. Some of my pieces were just flat, and some were riddled with adjectives and clever sentences stuck in just because I liked them. “Darlings,” is what Lary and Suzanne called the latter, and they gotta go.

Some of my pieces were pretty well received, but I felt I was just warming up in those six weeks, so when I saw that Lary and Suzanne were teaching the memoir class at the Florence Griswold Museum, I called immediately to sign on. This time for eight weeks. The work was more demanding. My confidence grew, and I saw myself beginning to get control of my writing and to understand the discipline of the “craft.” I was better able to stay within the word limits of the assignments on scene setting, character description, dialogue—all the aspects of good prose.

Reading my pieces to the class was the first test. The comments by my fellows were honest, and even the criticism was kind. If there was a look of “huh?” on anyone’s face I knew I’d missed the mark. One piece had them laughing out loud, though. Heady stuff.

We handed in our assignments each week to Lary and Suzanne for their close reading and critique. The following week we got them back with their assessment of the piece in general, and detailed suggestions for revision. Suzanne put little check marks on paragraphs she liked. I looked for those first.

I wrote a practice query letter to a publication I hoped would be interested in my work based on my persuasive introduction. My letter lavishly praised the publication, leaving little room on one page for anything about my submission. I’ll have to work on that.

I’ll have to work on everything, (Lary says he goes back to an article eleven times to keep polishing it), but I move forward now with confidence that I can and will submit my work for publication. Even a rejection would mean that some editor actually read it.

The criticism, pro or con, by teachers and fellow students was invaluable to my development as a writer, and I was sorry to see the class end.

My writing craft moved up a notch or two, and because this was a memoir class, fourteen strangers got to know each other pretty well in a short time.

As I looked around the room the last day, remembering the tragic, dramatic, beloved, and hilarious contributions of my fellows, I realized that there is no such thing as an ordinary life, not even my own.

Eaton and the Reverence of Nature

This post was written by Charles Clark, whose Charles Eaton painting, Evening Quiet, is featured in the current exhibition Connecticut Treasures: Works from Private Collections. The work is a promised bequest to the Museum. We thank him for sharing his thoughts with us!

For the last thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about Connecticut artists who were in their day famous but owing to shifts of taste became, or remain, obscure. Threats to Connecticut’s beautiful countryside drove me first to landscape painters like Charles Warren Eaton, but recently I’ve become interested in contemporary artists like Norman Ives, a graphic designer, painter, and printmaker, who worked with abstracted type forms, and who lived and worked in the New Haven area.

My great-grandparents were patrons of Eaton’s and all my relatives had his paintings and drawings hanging on their walls. This is how I first saw his work. From 1900 to about 1910, Eaton gained fame as the “Pine Tree Painter,” the sole artist to record the white pine forests that were so common across the Northeast at that time. These are the paintings he is best known for today.

When I was a boy, paintings like Evening Quiet, a good example of the pine tree genre, struck me for their mystery, their peacefulness, and their rich glow. They didn’t look like anything else, and as I learned more about Eaton, and wrote about him, I realized we were bound by a love of the New England landscape and an absolute reverence for trees (a critic once commented on the unvarying beauty of Eaton’s trees – whether he painted in Connecticut, or Belgium, or Italy, here was an artist who knew nature and whose landscapes are more than an assembling of natural forms.) That he read Emerson and Thoreau comes as no surprise.

As a little jest, but in truth, sincerely, I once told a friend that after a bad day, as a form of meditation, I’d “take little walks in these paintings.” Art not only amuses and pleases, and shocks, but can edify and even console. Rather than announce “look at me, aren’t I pretty,” paintings like Evening Quiet quietly establish a rapport with the viewer. They are antidotes to this noisy age, evidence that, upon reflection on the timeless beauty of nature, mankind can, with any luck, live a life of modesty.

"Red on Edge": Tell + Show Gallery Discussion

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

The Krieble Gallery was transformed into an experiential learning lab on Sunday, for the first in a series of gallery talks devoted to exploring Sewell Sillman's modernist approaches to the treatment of color, line, and time. In "Red on Edge", Amanda Burdan, the curator for the newly-opened Sewell Sillman exhibition Pushing Limits, gave an engaging lecture on how Sillman's artistic practices drew on the radical ideas behind modernist color theory. Attendees had the opportunity to see firsthand how these techniques influenced the art on display in the gallery, and even got a peek at works that are not a part of the exhibition.

The next interactive gallery discussion, titled "Reflecting on a Line," will be held on Sunday, March 7 at 2 p.m. Expect to discover some surprises hidden within the pages of Sillman's personal sketchbooks, which help tell the story of how he developed his unique drawing style!

Opening for Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits

What a wonderful start to the exhibition! Over 300 people attended the opening of Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits. The Museum was so fortunate to have Jim McNair and all the people who made the exhibition possible in one place. Read more about the exhibition...

Getting inside the mind of an artist

If you're curious about the creative process, a peek at an artist's personal sketchbooks (Sewell Sillman's are pictured at left) can be a guilty pleasure. But what about the problem-solving, and exploration of new techniques, that lie at the heart of that process? To answer those questions, the museum will be hosting a series of experiential art labs and gallery talks inspired by Sillman's own creative process, aimed at allowing participants to really dive in and gain an understanding of the techniques he applied over the course of his career. Using his own fine art portfolios and personal sketchbooks as hands-on inspiration, Tell & Show gallery talks will stimulate discussion about how he tackled the problems of color, line, and time. In addition, two series of art labs, one geared to children and the other to adults, will set up drawing and painting exercises as a way to play with the techniques Sillman himself used.

These Sunday activities are free with museum admission. Read more about them here, and then get your creative juices flowing with a visit to the exhibit and an afternoon of artistic exploration!

WNPRs Faith Middleton interviews Jeff Andersen

WNPRs Faith Middleton recently interviewed director Jeff Andersen about the Museum's current offerings and the exciting things to come...Check in on this continuing series about great things to see and do in Connecticut! Listen here.