BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (SAAM) -- Exhibit: Graphic Masters III

DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (SAAM) -- Exhibit: Graphic Masters III:

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Description of Pictures: Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the third in a series of special installations, celebrates the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists' works on paper. These twenty-eight exceptional watercolors, charcoals, and drawings from the 1960s to the 1990s reveal the central importance of works on paper for American artists, both as studies for creations in other media and as finished works of art. Traditionally a more intimate form of expression than painting or sculpture, drawings often reveal greater spontaneity and experimentation. Even as works on paper become larger and more finished, competing in scale with easel paintings, they retain a sense of the artist's hand, the immediacy of a thought made visible.
Rarely seen works from the museum's permanent collection by artists such as Robert Arneson, Jennifer Bartlett, Will Barnet, Carolyn Brady, Paul Cadmus, Patricia Tobacco Forrester, Philip Guston, Luis Jiménez, Claes Oldenburg, and Wayne Thiebaud, are featured. Joann Moser, senior curator, selected the artworks in the exhibition.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIPGGM_100522_005.JPG: Neapolitan Meringue 1986 and 1999 Wayne Thiebaud Wayne Thiebaud endows his subjects with joy and eloquence. He created Neapolitan Meringue in 1999 by drawing in pastel over a lithograph from 1986. He obliterated the lithographic lines under a dense layer of powdery pastel to transform a familiar composition into a sumptuous treat that simultaneously grows and reflects light.
2. SIPGGM_100522_017.JPG: Study for Self-Portrait 1982-1983 Will Barnet Will Barnet has relied heavily on his family as models. In Study for Self-Portrait, the painting on the easel shows his wife, Elena, and their cat, cradled on her shoulder as if it were a child. Relationships -- between people, between man and animal, between man's interior and exterior selves, between art and nature -- have been the pivotal concern in his art. Here, in addition to his relationship with his wife and cat, he emphasizes his identity as an artist. Seated solidly in the foreground, Barnet holds his paintbrush prominently in front of his chest.
3. SIPGGM_100522_023.JPG: Lemur 1995 Jody Mussoff Lemur strangely juxtaposes a woman and an exotic animal. There are no clues with which to construct the narrative of their relationship. Mussoff's drawings are not portraits, but composite figures created from fragments of different women she encounters in such ordinary places as a Metro train in Washington, DC where she lives and works. She admits, "I think of them as myself."
4. SIPGGM_100522_038.JPG: Inner City 1981 Peter Milton Peter Milton makes drawings as a first step in creating etchings. In 1980 and 1981, he began to work exclusively with graphite on drafting film. He appreciated the distinctive responsiveness and sensitivity of this medium. Around this time, Milton began to introduce erotic themes into his work. A combination of photographic realism, soft ethereal fantasy, and filmlike theatrics, Inner City invites the viewer into an unexpected world of sensual nudes, mythical half-human/half-animal creatures, and Victorian urbanites.
5. SIPGGM_100522_041.JPG: Hats #2 1988 John Wilde The figure in Hats #2 at first resembles a court jester donning a pointed hate, but further examination reveals the provocative juxtaposition of a nude, frequently a symbol of life, with a skull, a common symbol of death. Wilde often explored death's certainty in his work and believed the sex, death, and art were intimately related.
6. SIPGGM_100522_048.JPG: Feeling Pushed 1977 Robert Arneson Feeling Pushed captures Robert Arneson at an especially stressful moment in his life. Two years earlier,. he had been diagnosed with cancer, possibly caused by the chemicals contained in his art materials. Despite this serious threat to his health, Arneson injects humor, even vulgarity, into his self-portrait. His face pushes up against a piece of transparent glass that flattens his nose into a piggish snout, while his wild hair and wrinkled features express a state of mind filled with tension and anxiety.
7. SIPGGM_100522_055.JPG: Preliminary Sketch for Subway Symphony 1973 Paul Cadmus A longtime subway rider himself, Cadmus transformed the everyday experience of commuting into a living inferno, with figures of every shape, size, class, and ethnic group crammed together in their underground journey. For this microcosm of the larger New York melting pot, Cadmus explained how he chose his models: "Ugliness. Ugliness rules there. I will leave out the mediocre, the inbetweens. To distill and altar of essence I must select only the perfect petals, the most hellish." Yet this vision of social hideousness recalls the artistic tradition of finding redeeming value in ugliness. Cadmus exaggerated his subjects with wit and empathy and captured the individuality of each figure.
8. SIPGGM_100522_062.JPG: Hovering 1976 Philip Guston In Hovering, Guston contemplates the nature of creativity, its sources, pitfalls, contradictions, and endurance. The large, bulbous head is the artist, while the faceless, vertical head at his side is his wife, Musa, literally his muse. The clock with numbers refers to the passage of time, while the watch face without numbers suggests immortality.
9. SIPGGM_100522_070.JPG: Inverted Letter Q 1973 Claes Oldenburg Claes Oldenburg noted the important role the Hollywood sign played in creating Los Angeles's mystique while visiting the city in 1963. Inspired by this idea of letters as monuments in the landscape, Oldenburg began to experiment with these everyday "objects" by removing them from their normal alphabetic context. In Inverted Letter Q, Oldenburg overturns the q, because as he said, "a q with its tail buried wouldn't be a q at all." Upside down and plunked on the ground, Oldenburg has transformed the q from an alphabet character into a fleshy, bulbous, bodylike form.
10. SIPGGM_100522_076.JPG: Oiran and Mirror, from the AIDS Series 1988 Masami Teraoka In 1986, Teraoka met an old friend who had become infected with AIDS as a result of a blood transfusion, and who had a newborn baby. Teraoka sought to draw attention to the social issues raised by this modern plague. By imitating the traditional style of Ukiyo-e, the "floating world" of nineteenth-century Japanese painting and woodblock prints, he transformed the anxiety of contemporary life into a kind of Kabuki theater.
11. SIPGGM_100522_083.JPG: Study for Swimmers Atlanta: Seaweed and Study for Swimmers Atlanta: Rock 1979 Jennifer Bartlett Swimmers Atlanta is a nine-painting mural commissioned for a federal court lobby in Atlanta, Georgia. To prefer for this ambitious commission, Jennifer Bartlett made watercolor studies, such as Seaweed and Rock, for each painting. She then transferred these drawings freehand to much larger surfaces to complete the final mural. Bartlett evolves different phenomena an ocean swimmer might encounter: icebergs, eels, whirlpools, buoys, flares, rocks, boats, bottles and seaweed. Swimmers and ocean waters are recurring themes for Bartlett, who grew up near the ocean's edge on a peninsula in Long Beach, California. Her symbol of the human presence is a simple, featureless eclipse. Each composition has two parts, often in direct opposition to each other, such as day/night, rain/sun, or choppy/smooth water.
12. SIPGGM_100522_096.JPG: Arytystic Pairanoiya 1978 Gladys Nilsson Gladys Nilsson's watercolor defies easy interpretation. "Arytystic sounds like artistic, suggesting that one of the two large, female figures represents the artist herself, embraced by a single male figure. While "Pairanoiya" calls our attention to the pairs of figures throughout the composition, it also refers to the mental state of paranoia. The artist's wordplay and exaggerated humor are typical of the Chicago-based group the Hairy Who, with which she is associated.
13. SIPGGM_100522_136.JPG: Still Life with Cat 1966 Saul Steinberg Steinberg elevated comic illustration to a fine art as a cartoonist whose drawings regularly appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The cat's deadpan human profile perhaps refers to the artist himself. The mock writing in the drawing is illegible, offering no explanation of the enigmatic imagery.
14. SIPGGM_100522_151.JPG: Clearing 1986 Patricia Tobacco Forrester The natural world is Patricia Tobacco Forrester's studio: "No preliminary drawings, no photographs are ever involved... I sit on the ground using a cardboard box to lift my paper and tilt is slightly toward me." She considers her work to be a direct conversation with nature. Forrester enlarges the vegetation and accentuates certain features, such as the scarring of the tree trunks. Although this subject looks exotic, the artist actually painted it in Rock Creek Park near her home in Washington, DC. The large scale and intense color of the landscape look more like a Central American jungle than an urban green space.
15. SIPGGM_100522_162.JPG: Drawing XVII 1974 Roy De Forest Unfettered imagination is at the Day-Glo heart of Roy De Forest's complex and whimsical compositions. "One of the most important things to me as an artist is the discovery of what is possible... Drawing and even painting are much closer to the very human activity of making a mess or making mud pies than they are to learning to draw or paint. You have some color, you have some charcoal... what kinds of castles can you make?"
16. SIPGGM_100522_183.JPG: August Breakfast/Maine 1997 Carolyn Brady Carolyn Brady arranged this still life composition in her studio on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. She photographed the arrangement, projected the image onto a large sheet of paper, and made a faint, quick pencil sketch of it. As she painted the forms with transparent watercolors, she continually referred to a large color photograph, and she incorporated distortions of focus introduced by the camera lens into her final work. The foreground focus is crisp, while the background is soft.
17. SIPGGM_100522_201.JPG: Untitled (Bathroom) 1961 Peter Saul Early in his career, Peter Saul abandoned abstract expressionism in favor of vulgar and violent figuration. He lived in Paris from 1958 to 1972 and reacted against the refinement and pretension of the art world both in Europe and the United States. He adopted the stance of an intellectual outsider and provocateur, drawing and painting ordinary objects in his apartment -- iceboxes, bathroom fixtures, food, knives -- with carefree abandon. In this drawing, body parts and blood-colored water, depicted with cartoonlike spontaneity, create a mood of slapstick violence that characterized much of his later work.
18. SIPGGM_100522_208.JPG: Expulsion 1980 Nancy Wolf Expulsion expresses Wolf's convert with the inhuman scale of architecture in the modern city. She believes that many contemporary buildings destroy communities and do not meet people's psychological needs. In this drawing, Wolf features the Citigroup Center in New York City. Looming heavy in the middle of the composition, the modern aluminum skyscraper overwhelms the pedestrians below. At the base of the building, Wolf added a Viennese sculptural landmark in memory of St. Peter's Church, which was demolished in order to make room for the tower.
19. SIPGGM_100522_225.JPG: "Patty Ann" Rodeo Queen 1971 Luis Jimenez Jimenez worked in his father's neon sign shop in El Paso, Texas, and became a master at distilling the spirit of Western culture into bold, colorful images. I found the Rodeo Queens humorous. If you ever actually watch as those Rodeo Queens ride past the judges, they rub up and down in the saddle and they have this Rodeo Queen stance where they're tucking in their shirts and pitching their chests out. They're a kind of icon in the West."
20. SIPGGM_100522_236.JPG: October Meeting 1984 John Himmelfarb John Himmelfarb considers his art "my attempt to write the grand story of the human experience, but it turns out it is really my story." The woods in rural Winfield, Illinois, where he grew up, provided the inspiration for a series of drawings and paintings titled "meetings." October Meeting recalls his childhood experience of getting lost in the woods. Overwhelmed by vegetation, the disoriented boy imagines ogres peering through the falling leaves and shifting shadows. Lips and hair become leaves; eyes and ears become tree knots.
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