Summer Street

Summer Street, 1956
Grace Hartigan
oil on canvas
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Image from The New Yorker slideshow

A significant artist of the 20th century died this past November. She was part of a group of prominent women abstractionists in New York, though often pushed aside for members of the boy's club of the time, such as Pollock and de Kooning. Hartigan works, while for awhile wholly abstract began to incorporate representational imagery which threw her at one time supporter, Clement Greenberg, off her support. I need to spend some more time with Hartigan's work but I am very attracted to her use of shape and color and am interested in the representational imagery (reminiscent of Kandinksy but with more all over approach to filling the canvas). Richard Lacayo (who wrote a blog entry for time about Hartigan after her death) comments that he feels this painting is "crossing a line into kitsch" (pointing out the green striped melon). While I agree the melon stands out and doesn't add anything to the painting (it stands out as wholly identifiable unlike the more ambiguous nature of the rest of the painting) I would go so far as to applying kitsch to it. The comment is fascinating in that it falls straight into the argument Greenberg and many others had about the high level of purely abstract art. Work which provides instantly understandable and approachable subject matter and aims to please would fall into kitsch. I think that this greatly detracts from Hartigan's approach to paint and color.

I may come back with another Hartigan as comparison between her works will give me a greater understanding of her style but until then I'll say that I am particularly attracted to the lower half of the painting and will be seeing one of her works soon when I visit Buffalo as it is part of the exhibition I've been looking forward to that started out at the Jewish Museum in nyc, Action/Abstraction . Check the site out as it has a great collection of work from the period.

Also a great addition to the world of resources, the Smithsonian's online collection of oral histories, many which are transcribed.
Oral History

Line and Arabesque

The Piano Lesson, 1916
Henri Matisse
Oil on canvas, 8' 1/2" x 6' 11 3/4" (245.1 x 212.7 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. © 2008 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Museum of Modern Art, Find it Here.

One of my favorite paintings, one which I went looking for when I was at MoMA this past spring but alas it had been removed. This always makes me a little sad but then I am happy that other works are getting their chance to be loved and discovered as well. Museums have thousands of works in storage, many of which rarely if ever see the light of the upper floors, rotation of permanent collections is incredibly important to sustaining the excitement of art, even if you must sometimes miss your beloved.

I didn't start out as a Matisse fan but over the years the combination of figure and line, flat perspective, Cubism and Fauvism, color and grayscale draw me in more. In this work Matisse is combining both his own physical world with that of his art, from his son Pierre and what appears to be his female teacher but is an excerpt from another painting and his own bronze figure which graces his living room (see excerpt from MoMA publication) Depth does not draw a line between the view through the window to the outside, but an actual line delineates this perspective along with the arabesque curves of the iron balcony, echoing the music stand.