DC -- Corcoran Gallery of Art -- American Galleries:
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CORCUS_131025_019.JPG: Pride of Place
Following the Revolutionary War, American artistic activity expanded expanded rapidly as painters and sculptors endeavored to forge an identity for their young nation. They provided exhibitions and patrons with images of the country's heroes and ordinary people as well as its brief history and promising future. Nearly every work celebrated place by depicting the unique bucolic landscape, significant historical events, or the inhabitants of rural areas and growing cities.
Picturesque locales like the Hudson River Valley attracted aspiring painters such as Thomas Cole and his followers, including his student Frederic Edwin Church. Albert Bierstadt preferred to depict the American West, while other artists took their skills further afield.
Often eschewing strict geographical transcription, artists carefully crafted scenes informed by ideas of location and identify (and often, their imagination) as travelers explored and settled the shifting frontier. These works helped inspire a national enthusiasm for landscape painting, which soon came to be seen as distinctly American.
Genre scenes -- paintings of everyday life depicting ordinary people -- also became popular. Often moralizing in nature, many expressed the egalitarian ideals espoused by Andrew Jackson (U.S. president from 1829 to 1837): hard work, the importance of family life, and civic responsibility.
CORCUS_131025_021.JPG: Why Are the Paintings Hung This Way?
The paintings in this gallery are displayed in the "Salon" style common to exhibitions in nineteenth-century American in order to further convey this installation's emphasis on place and context. The style takes its name from the annual and long-running Paris Salon, begun in 1725, in which paintings were hung just below eyelevel all the way up to the ceiling. Other exhibitions of academic art, often held as renowned art schools such as the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the National Academy of Design in New York City, featured similar installations.
The Paris Salons featured thousands of works and attracted an even greater number of visitors, sometimes 50,000 in a single day. A successful showing at such exhibitions was a seal of approval for an artist, making his other work desirable to the growing ranks of private collectors. Artists petitioned the hanging committee for optimal placement "on the line," or at eye level. After the exhibition opened, artists complained if their works were "skyed," or hung too high.
CORCUS_131025_148.JPG: Going Places:
As the nineteenth century progressed, American artists sought new places to experience and depict, gradually becoming more interconnected with each other and with the world beyond. Dramatic changes in communication, transportation, and other types of technology, in addition to a belief in Manifest Destiny -- the notion that Americans were divinely chosen to expand across the continent -- enabled rapid expansion westward.
Louis Daguerre's 1839 introduction of the daguerreotype in Paris led to the proliferation of photography in art, science, and commerce. Later that year, Samuel F.B. Morse met Daguerre and soon afterward opened a daguerreotype studio in America. In 1847, he received his patent for the telegraph, which instantly transmitted messages over great distance. In 1841 the American portrait painted John Goffe Rand invented the squeezable metal paint tube, which eventually replaced pig bladders and glass syringes giving painters far greater freedom to travel and easily record their impressions. They were soon able to eschew overland travel for journeys on the transcontinental railroad, which opened in the 1860s. Improved steamship technology allowed artists to travel overseas to study and visit acclaimed art collections and exhibitions. Together, these changes facilitated the exploration of national identity and place, as well as the experience of locales beyond America's borders.
CORCUS_131025_410.JPG: The Lure of Paris:
When Albert Bierstadt exhibited the Corcoran's Last of the Buffalo in 1889 in Paris, he joined an increasing number of American artists who looked across the Atlantic for fresh opportunities following the Civil War. The French capital's architecture, gardens, and above all its great number of art academies, exhibitions, and practicing artists inspired many to take advantage of the increased ease of steamship travel in the late 1800s.
Diverse artists trained in Parisian academies. Upon returning to the United States, many utilized somber palettes to meticulously render genre scenes, highly individualized portraits, and landscapes. These dynamic, engaging compositions frequently featured the increasingly urban, ethnically diverse populace that emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
Many painters traveled by train to the French countryside. Some worked near the great French master Claude Monet in his picturesque Giverny surroundings, where they embraced the bright, loosely brushed style of Impressionism. These artists of airy landscapes and views of leisure-class women became important conduits of the new style to their stateside contemporaries. Gilded Age magnates frequently collected these tranquil antidotes to the stresses of turbulent modern life.
CORCUS_131025_451.JPG: Horace Bonham
Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit, 1879
CORCUS_131025_463.JPG: David Norslup
Negro Boys on the Quayside, c 1865
CORCUS_131025_466.JPG: Louis Moeller
The Disagreement, by 1893
CORCUS_131025_473.JPG: New York in the New Century
Around the turn of the twentieth century, many American artists chose rapidly changing New York City as their subject. Painting and sculpting lively scenes of affluent urban dwellers and poor immigrants, cafe society and the debauched Bowery, these artists embraced their surroundings in a variety of different styles.
The American Impressionists, who reached their apogee of achievement in the 1890s, immersed themselves in the distinctive locales of modern life. During the following two decades, they were eclipsed by a group of younger artists called The Eight who worked in a daring, realist style. Responding to the dramatic changes wrought by increasing industrialization and immigration, these painters favored bold and brash scenes often set in the city's poorer neighborhoods. A younger generation of realists, the Fourteenth Street School, found inspiration in the working-class neighborhoods around Union Square.
Impressionists and Realists were not the only artists to portray modern New York. While controversial urban problems were seldom subjects for art, a few painters working in a highly detailed academic style rendered moralizing narratives addressing immigration issues and labor unrest.
CORCUS_131025_476.JPG: John George Brown
The Longshoreman's Noon, 1879
CORCUS_131025_496.JPG: Charles Ulrich
In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden, 1884
CORCUS_131025_505.JPG: Eastman Johnson
The Toilet, 1873
CORCUS_131025_517.JPG: Robert Henri
Indian Girl in White Blanket, 1917
CORCUS_131025_522.JPG: Raphael Soyer
A Railroad Station Waiting Room, c 1940
CORCUS_131025_537.JPG: George Wesley Bellows
Forty-two Kids, 1907
CORCUS_131025_555.JPG: John Sloan
Yeats at Petitpas', 1910 -- c. 1914
CORCUS_131025_562.JPG: Jerome Myers
Life on the East Side, 1931
CORCUS_131025_569.JPG: Guy Pene du Bois
Pierrot Tired, c 1929
CORCUS_131025_574.JPG: Childe Hassam
The New York Window, 1912
CORCUS_131025_581.JPG: Charles Sheeler
Dahlias and Asters, 1912
CORCUS_131025_587.JPG: John R. Grabach
Waterfront -- New York, c 1923
CORCUS_131025_593.JPG: Ernest Lawson
Boathouse, Winter, Harlem River, c 1916
CORCUS_131025_599.JPG: Abastenia St. Leger Eberle
Girl Seated
Girl Standing
Sea Treasures
modeled 1911, cast after 1913
CORCUS_131025_605.JPG: Isabel Bishop
Two Girls Outdoors, 1944
CORCUS_131025_612.JPG: Robert Henri
John Sloan, 1904
CORCUS_131025_636.JPG: Thomas Hart Benton
Martha's Vineyard, c 1925
CORCUS_131025_650.JPG: Max Weber
The Visit, 1917
CORCUS_131025_660.JPG: Aaron Douglas
Into Bondage, 1936
CORCUS_131025_672.JPG: Beyond Borders
In the years just prior to World War I, American artists became increasingly aware of European avant-garde movements, including Cubism, Fauvism, Dada, and Surrealism. They visited exhibitions at home and abroad -- such as the International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913, better known as the Armory Show -- and studied reproductions and criticism in the press. Their exposure to the work of artists like Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse inverted established relationships between place and American art during the interwar years. This gradually erased any one geographic center of training or subject matter for American painters and sculptors.
The inherent hybridity of the 2011 sculpture Girl on Globe II by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare explores cultural identity in a global world; this is emphasized by its installation in the eighteenth-century Salon Dore in the next gallery. Shonibare's work exemplifies the permeable borders that characterize contemporary art where there is, effectively, no longer one definitive place, nationality, or center of the art world for artists to study, depict, and embrace.
You are invited to further reflect upon the theme of place as you continue your journey through the Corcoran's collection. Post-war American painters and sculpture, as well as photographs, are on view in the upstairs galleries.
CORCUS_131025_675.JPG: Rockwell Kent
Adirondacks, 1928/1930
CORCUS_131025_682.JPG: Edward Hopper
Ground Swell, 1939
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2013 photos: Equipment this year: I mostly used my Fuji XS-1 camera but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000 and Nikon D600.
Trips this year:
three Civil War Trust conferences (Memphis, TN, Jackson, MS [to which I added a week to to visit sites in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee], and Richmond, VA), and
my 8th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including sites in Nevada and California).
Ego Strokes: Aviva Kempner used my photo of her as her author photo in Larry Ruttman's "American Jews & America's Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball" book.
Number of photos taken this year: just over 570,000.
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