In April of 1967 the Heritage Gallery of Los Angeles published Images of Dignity, a monograph on the life and work of the great African American artist Charles White (1918-1979). I acquired a copy of the book just a year later when I was fifteen-years-old, the hardback volume providing one of my first insights into the works of White, American…
Those fortunate to see the latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, 1930s: The Making of “The New Man,” will not only have the opportunity to feast their eyes upon some of the greatest artworks of the 20th century – they will be given ample evidence of how artists once responded to calamity and social crisis. On view until…
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is the subject of a major retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, the last venue for a traveling exhibition that included stops at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Encompassing nearly 100 of the artist’s most notable prints and paintings, the exhibit features some of the artist’s most iconic…
February, 2008 marked the 100th anniversary of “The Eight Independent Painters” exhibition at New York’s MacBeth Gallery. The event changed the face of American art and established the country’s very first avant-garde art movement. The Eight broke the rules of convention by painting the realities of New York’s working poor instead of the lives and accomplishments of the well-to-do class,…
The modernist movement as it grew out of – or was associated with – the Art Students League of Los Angeles (ASL-LA), is the subject of a fascinating exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art – A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953. The exhibit presents over 100 works of art from students and…
I cannot recommend highly enough, Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950, the current exhibit at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Made up of 163 prints created by 82 artists during the first half of the 20th century, the show encapsulates American art as it was before the ascendancy of abstraction; an epoch when realism, meaning, compassion and technical…
Life long social realist painter, printmaker and activist, Pele deLappe (pronounced: “Peelee Dahlap”), died from a stroke on Monday, October 1st, 2007, at the age of 91. Ms. deLappe’s art captured the life and times of her native San Francisco during the depression years and beyond, but the universal themes addressed in her artworks also gave them an eternal quality….
Modernism: Designing A New World, 1914-1939, now showing at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., until July 29, 2007, was initially planned and exhibited by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. At the time of its premiere in the U.K., I wrote a short article in praise of the exhibition, but now that the show has reached the U.S.,…
