Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
Jacob Lawrence’s War Series describes first-hand the sense of regimentation, community, and displacement that the artist experienced during his service in the United States Coast Guard during World War II. Lawrence served his first year in St. Augustine, Florida, in a racially segregated regiment where he was first given the rank of Steward’s Mate, the only one available to black Americans at the time. He befriended a commander who shared his interest in art, however, and he went on to serve in an integrated regiment as Coast Guard Artist, documenting the war in Italy, England, Egypt, and India. Those works are lost, but in 1946 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to paint the War Series. The fourteen panels of the series present a narrative which progresses from Shipping Out to Victory. In the panels, Lawrence adopted the silhouetted figures, prominent eyes, and simplified, overlapping profiles that are typical of Egyptian wall painting. And like the ancient painters, he transformed groups of figures into surface patterns, eschewing modeling and perspective in favor of the immediacy of bold, abstracted forms. In their alternation between vertical and horizontal formats, single figures and groups, and intense action and contemplation, the fourteen panels of the War Series testify to Lawrence’s belief that one cannot “tell a story in a single painting.” [Museum Card]
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In the early 1950s, John Brack adopted the urban Melbourne environment as his subject, recording the shops, bars and workplaces of the city with an ironic edge. This painting is among the most iconic of this period. Here, Brack depicts Melbourne’s financial centre hub at the end of the working day, uniformly dressed office-workers stream homeward. Inspired by his own experience employed by a city-based insurance company, Brack points to the enduring presence of the individual by personalising each figure, despite the formal repetition and universally muted palette enchancing the over-arching sense of drudgery of nine-to-five office life. (Museum Card)
1955 — Collins St., 5 P.M. Oil paint on canvas. Expressionism style. John Brack (1920-1999). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.
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From the museum entry:
“Against a dark background of slender tree trunks, a woman in pale clothing stands facing us. Her wide eyes, loose hair and open bodice tell us of what has happened. With her hands high on her head, her posture is expressive of despair, but also of power and victory. In the lower left quarter of the picture sits a man with his back turned to the woman. He is withdrawn and holds his hands dejectedly to his head. The only contact between the two after what has just happened in the sombre woods is through her long, red hair.”
Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
1919 — Full Moon. Oil on Canvas. Expressionism style. Paul Klee (1879 – 1940). Stangel Gallery, Munich, Germany.
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1988 — The Family. Oil on Canvas. Expressionism style. Paula Rego (1935 – ).
NJBiblio 