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.
1938 — The Absinthe Drinker. Watercolor. Realism style. Albert Anker (1831-1910). Private collection.
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Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum, commissioned this portrait in 1916 from Robert Henri, leader of the urban realist painters who had shocked the New York art world barely a decade earlier with their images of ordinary people and commonplace city life. By 1916, Mrs. Whitney, a professional sculptor, had founded the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village, a lively center for the support and exhibition of new American art. When Henri’s portrait was finished, Mrs. Whitney’s husband, Harry Payne Whitney, refused to allow her to hang it in their opulent Fifth Avenue town house. He didn’t want his friends to see a picture of his wife, as he put it, “in pants.” Mrs. Whitney’s attire and self-possessed demeanor were highly unusual for a well-bred woman of her day. In this painting, Henri transformed the traditional genre of a recumbent female—usually a nude courtesan or the goddess Venus—into a portrait of the quintessential “modern” woman. The portrait hung in Whitney’s West 8th Street studio, which in 1931 became the first home of the Whitney Museum. [OBJECT LABEL]
1916 — Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Oil paint on canvas. American Realism style. Robert Henri (1865-1929). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA
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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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1919 — Harlequin with Guitar. Oil paint on canvas. Cubism style. Juan Gris (1887-1927). Private collection.
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Use the images posted in this feature for writing prompts, warm-up activities, drawing templates or as part of an artwork critique.
NJBiblio 