Située dans la beauté sauvage de Jackson Hole, dans le Wyoming, avec les parcs nationaux en toile de fond, Heather James Jackson a apporté des œuvres d'art et des services du plus haut calibre à l'Intermountain West depuis plus d'une décennie.

Répondant à la communauté unique qui fait de Jackson Hole une destination inégalée pour la culture américaine et le plein air, Heather James s'efforce de fournir une sélection inégalée d'œuvres d'art et de services de gants blancs pour les habitants et les visiteurs.

172, rue Center, Bureau 101
Boîte P.O. 3580
Jackson Hole, WY 83001, États-Unis
(307) 200-6090

Heures d'ouverture : Du lundi au samedi de 11 h à 18 h 

Expositions

Andy Warhol : Tout est beau
COURANT

Andy Warhol : Tout est beau

17 août 2023 - 29 février 2024
Herb Alpert : Les peintures de café
COURANT

Herb Alpert : Les peintures de café

22 décembre 2020 - 30 septembre 2023
Max Pellegrini : Silence et fantaisie
COURANT

Max Pellegrini : Silence et fantaisie

30 juillet 2020 - 30 septembre 2023
Claude Monet : un génie impressionniste
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Claude Monet : un génie impressionniste

18 août - 31 octobre 2022
L
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L'impressionnisme chez Heather James Fine Art

1er septembre - 31 octobre 2022
Jackson Hole - Les meilleurs travaux
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Jackson Hole - Les meilleurs travaux

15 septembre - 15 octobre 2022
Picasso - Gravures et œuvres sur papier
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Picasso - Gravures et œuvres sur papier

Du 1er septembre au 12 octobre 2022
Marc Chagall : La couleur de l
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Marc Chagall : La couleur de l'amour

8 septembre - 12 octobre 2022
Portraits : Du XIXe siècle à nos jours
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Portraits : Du XIXe siècle à nos jours

26 août 2020 - 30 avril 2021
Jackson Hole : Faits saillants de 1900 à aujourd
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Jackson Hole : Faits saillants de 1900 à aujourd'hui

1er novembre 2019 - 31 juillet 2020
Sam Francis : En vue dans le trou Jackson
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Sam Francis : En vue dans le trou Jackson

1er juillet au 15 octobre 2019
Edouard Hopper
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Edouard Hopper

1er juillet au 30 septembre 2019
Andy Warhol
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Andy Warhol

Du 16 juillet au 31 août 2019
David Levinthal
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David Levinthal

1 er 2018 - 31 janvier 2019
Herb Alpert: Une mélodie visuelle
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Herb Alpert: Une mélodie visuelle

1er août - 30 septembre 2018
Les peintures de Sir Winston Churchill
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Les peintures de Sir Winston Churchill

1er août - 16 septembre 2018
Elaine de Kooning
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Elaine de Kooning

1er juillet - 4 août 2018
Norman Rockwell : L
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Norman Rockwell : L'artiste au travail

30 juin - 30 septembre 2016
Max Pellegrini : Une exposition rétrospective
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Max Pellegrini : Une exposition rétrospective

27 novembre 2015 - 27 mars 2016
Earl Cunningham : Fauve américain
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Earl Cunningham : Fauve américain

8 septembre - 29 octobre 2011

OEUVRED-ŒUVRE SUR LA VUE

Le 15 mai 1886, le manifeste visuel d'un nouveau mouvement artistique a vu le jour lorsque Georges Seurat a dévoilé son œuvre phare, Un dimanche après-midi sur l'île de la Grande Jatte, à l'occasion de la huitième exposition impressionniste. Seurat peut se targuer d'être le premier "impressionniste scientifique", travaillant d'une manière qui sera connue sous le nom de pointillisme ou de divisionnisme. C'est cependant son ami et confident, Paul Signac, âgé de 24 ans, et leur dialogue constant qui ont conduit à une collaboration dans la compréhension de la physique de la lumière et de la couleur, et au style qui en a résulté. Signac était un peintre impressionniste sans formation, mais extrêmement talentueux, dont le tempérament était parfaitement adapté à la rigueur et à la discipline requises pour réaliser le travail laborieux et minutieux du pinceau et de la couleur. Signac assimile rapidement la technique. Il est également le témoin des deux années de travail ardu de Seurat, qui construit des myriades de couches de points de couleur non mélangés sur La Grande Jatte, une toile aux dimensions colossales. Ensemble, Signac, l'extraverti effronté, et Seurat, l'introverti secret, étaient sur le point de renverser le cours de l'impressionnisme et de changer le cours de l'art moderne.

PAUL SIGNAC

Cottonwood Tree (Near Abiquiu), New Mexico (1943) by celebrated American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is exemplary of the airier, more naturalistic style that the desert inspired in her. O’Keeffe had great affinity for the distinctive beauty of the Southwest, and made her home there among the spindly trees, dramatic vistas, and bleached animal skulls that she so frequently painted. O’Keeffe took up residence at Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch twelve miles outside of the village of Abiquiú in northern New Mexico and painted this cottonwood tree around there. The softer style befitting this subject is a departure from her bold architectural landscapes and jewel-toned flowers.<br><br>The cottonwood tree is abstracted into soft patches of verdant greens through which more delineated branches are seen, spiraling in space against pockets of blue sky. The modeling of the trunk and delicate energy in the leaves carry forward past experimentations with the regional trees of the Northeast that had captivated O’Keeffe years earlier: maples, chestnuts, cedars, and poplars, among others. Two dramatic canvases from 1924, Autumn Trees, The Maple and The Chestnut Grey, are early instances of lyrical and resolute centrality, respectively. As seen in these early tree paintings, O’Keeffe exaggerated the sensibility of her subject with color and form.<br><br>In her 1974 book, O’Keeffe explained: “The meaning of a word— to me— is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Color and shapes make a more definite statement than words.” Her exacting, expressive color intrigued. The Precisionist painter Charles Demuth described how, in O’Keeffe’s work, “each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow” (As quoted in C. Eldridge, Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1991, p. 33). As well, congruities between forms knit together her oeuvre. Subjects like hills and petals undulate alike, while antlers, trees, and tributaries correspond in their branching morphology.<br><br>The sinewy contours and gradated hues characteristic of O’Keeffe find an incredible range across decades of her tree paintings. In New Mexico, O’Keeffe returned to the cottonwood motif many times, and the seasonality of this desert tree inspired many forms. The vernal thrill of new growth was channeled into spiraling compositions like Spring Tree No.1 (1945). Then, cottonwood trees turned a vivid autumnal yellow provided a breathtaking compliment to the blue backdrop of Mount Pedernal. The ossified curves of Dead Cottonweed Tree (1943) contain dramatic pools of light and dark, providing a foil to the warm, breathing quality of this painting, Cottonwood Tree (Near Abiquiu). The aural quality of this feathered cottonwood compels a feeling guided by O’Keeffe’s use of form of color.

GÉORGIE O'KEEFFE

<br>In Diego Rivera’s portrait of Enriqueta Dávila, the artist asserts a Mexicanidad, a quality of Mexican-ness, in the work along with his strong feelings towards the sitter. Moreover, this painting is unique amongst his portraiture in its use of symbolism, giving us a strong if opaque picture of the relationship between artist and sitter.<br><br>Enriqueta, a descendent of the prominent Goldbaum family, was married to the theater entrepreneur, José María Dávila. The two were close friends with Rivera, and the artist initially requested to paint Enriqueta’s portrait. Enriqueta found the request unconventional and relented on the condition that Rivera paints her daughter, Enriqueta “Quetita”. Rivera captures the spirit of the mother through the use of duality in different sections of the painting, from the floorboards to her hands, and even the flowers. Why the split in the horizon of the floorboard? Why the prominent cross while Enriqueta’s family is Jewish? Even her pose is interesting, showcasing a woman in control of her own power, highlighted by her hand on her hip which Rivera referred to as a claw, further complicating our understanding of her stature.<br><br>This use of flowers, along with her “rebozo” or shawl, asserts a Mexican identity. Rivera was adept at including and centering flowers in his works which became a kind of signature device. The flowers show bromeliads and roselles; the former is epiphytic and the latter known as flor de jamaica and often used in hibiscus tea and aguas frescas. There is a tension then between these two flowers, emphasizing the complicated relationship between Enriqueta and Rivera. On the one hand, Rivera demonstrates both his and the sitter’s Mexican identity despite the foreign root of Enriqueta’s family but there may be more pointed meaning revealing Rivera’s feelings to the subject. The flowers, as they often do in still life paintings, may also refer to the fleeting nature of life and beauty. The portrait for her daughter shares some similarities from the use of shawl and flowers, but through simple changes in gestures and type and placement of flowers, Rivera illuminates a stronger personality in Enriqueta and a more dynamic relationship as filtered through his lens.<br><br>A closer examination of even her clothing reveals profound meaning. Instead of a dress more in line for a socialite, Rivera has Enriqueta in a regional dress from Jalisco, emphasizing both of their Mexican identities. On the other hand, her coral jewelry, repeated in the color of her shoes, hints at multiple meanings from foreignness and exoticism to protection and vitality. From Ancient Egypt to Classical Rome to today, coral has been used for jewelry and to have been believed to have properties both real and symbolic. Coral jewelry is seen in Renaissance paintings indicating the vitality and purity of woman or as a protective amulet for infants. It is also used as a reminder, when paired with the infant Jesus, of his future sacrifice. Diego’s use of coral recalls these Renaissance portraits, supported by the plain background of the painting and the ribbon indicating the maker and date similar to Old Master works.<br><br>When combined in the portrait of Enriqueta, we get a layered and tense building of symbolism. Rivera both emphasizes her Mexican identity but also her foreign roots. He symbolizes her beauty and vitality but look closely at half of her face and it is as if Rivera has painted his own features onto hers. The richness of symbolism hints at the complex relationship between artist and sitter.

RIVERA DIEGO

WILLEM DE KOONING - Femme dans une barque - huile sur papier couché sur masonite - 47 1/2 x 36 1/4 in.

WILLEM DE KOONING

Alexander Calder was a key figure in the development of abstract sculpture and is renowned for his groundbreaking work in kinetic art; he is one of the most influential artists of the Twentieth Century. "Prelude to Man-Eater" is a delicately balanced standing sculpture that responds to air currents, creating a constantly changing and dynamic visual experience.<br><br>Calder's Standing Mobiles were a result of his continuous experimentation with materials, form, and balance. This Standing Mobile is a historically significant prelude to a larger work commissioned in 1945 by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Prelude to Maneater" is designed to be viewed from multiple angles, encouraging viewers to walk around and interact with it.<br><br>The present work is a formal study for Man-Eater With Pennant (1945), part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work is also represented in "Sketches for Mobiles: Prelude to Man-Eater; Starfish; Octopus", which is in the permanent collection of the Harvard Fogg Museum.<br><br>Calder's mobiles and stabiles can be found in esteemed private collections and the collections of major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate Gallery in London among others.

ALEXANDRE CALDER

Between Île-de-France and Burgundy and on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest lies the medieval village of Moret-sur-Loing, established in the 12th century. When Alfred Sisley described its character to Monet in a letter dated 31 August 1881 as “a chocolate-box landscape…” he meant it as a memento of enticement; that its keep, the ramparts, the church, the fortified gates, and the ornate facades nestled along the river were, for a painter, a setting of unmatched charm. An ancient church, always the most striking townscape feature along the Seine Valley, would be a presence in Sisley’s townscape views as it was for Corot, and for Monet at Vétheuil. But unlike Monet whose thirty views of Rouen Cathedral were executed so he could trace the play of light and shadow across the cathedral façade and capture the ephemeral nature of moment-to-moment changes of light and atmosphere, Sisley set out to affirm the permanent nature of the church of Notre-Dame at Moret-sur-Loing.  Monet’s sole concern was air and light, and Sisley’s appears to be an homage keepsake. The painting exudes respect for the original architects and builders of a structure so impregnable and resolute, it stood then as it did in those medieval times, and which for us, stands today, as it will, for time immemorial.<br><br>Nevertheless, Sisley strived to show the changing appearance of the motif through a series of atmospheric changes. He gave the works titles such as “In Sunshine”, “Under Frost”, and “In Rain” and exhibited them as a group at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in 1894, factors that suggest he thought of them as serial interpretations. Nevertheless, unlike Monet’s work, l’église de Moret, le Soir reveals that Sisley chose to display the motif within a spatial context that accentuates its compositional attributes — the plunging perspective of the narrow street at left, the strong diagonal recession of the building lines as a counterbalance to the right, and the imposing weight of the stony building above the line of sight.

ALFRED SISLEY

Trained as a woodcarver, Emil Nolde was almost 30 years old before he made his first paintings. The early paintings resembled his drawings and woodcuts: grotesque figures with bold lines and strong contrasts. The style was new, and it inspired the nascent movement Die Brücke (The Bridge), whose members invited Nolde to join them in 1906.  But, it was not until the garden became his locus operandi by 1915 that he built upon his mastery of contrasting luminosities to focus on color as the supreme means of expression.  Later, Nolde claimed “color is strength, strength is life,” and he could not have better characterized why his flower paintings reinvigorate our perception of color.<br><br>Much of the strength of Nolde’s dramatic, Wagnerian-like color sensibilities is the effect of staging primary colors, such as the deep reds and golden yellows of Sonnenblumen, Abend II, against a somber palette. The contrast highlights and deepens the luminosity of the flowers, not just visually, but emotionally as well. In 1937, when Nolde’s art was rejected, confiscated, and defiled, his paintings were paraded as “degenerate art” throughout Nazi Germany in dimly lit galleries. Despite that treatment, Nolde’s status as a degenerate artist gave his art more breathing space because he seized the opportunity to produce more than 1,300 watercolors, which he called “unpainted pictures.” No novice in handling watercolor, his free-flowing style of painting had been a hallmark of his highly-charge, transparent washes since 1918. Sonnenblumen, Abend II, painted in 1944, is a rare wartime oil. He let his imagination run wild with this work, and his utilization of wet-on-wet techniques heightened the drama of each petal.<br><br>Nolde’s intense preoccupation with color and flowers, particularly sunflowers, reflects his continuing devotion to van Gogh.  He was aware of van Gogh as early as 1899 and, during the 1920s and early 1930s, visited several exhibitions of the Dutch artist’s work.  They shared a profound love of nature. Nolde’s dedication to expression and the symbolic use of color found fullness in the sunflower subject, and it became a personal symbol for him, as it did for Van Gogh.

EMIL NOLDE

When forty rural Sacramento Delta landscapes by Wayne Thiebaud were unveiled at a San Francisco gallery opening in November 1997, attendees were amazed by paintings they never anticipated. This new frontier betrayed neither Thiebaud’s mastery of confectionary-shop colors nor his impeccable eye for formal relationships. Rather, his admirers were shocked to learn that all but seven of these forty interpretations had been completed in just two years. As his son Paul recalled, “the refinements of my father’s artistic process were ever changing in a chameleon-like frenzy.” The new direction had proved an exhilarating experience, each painting an affirmation of Wayne Thiebaud’s impassioned response to the fields and levees of the local environment he dearly loved. <br><br>Viewed from the perspective of a bird or a plane, The Riverhouse is an agrarian tapestry conceived with a kaleidoscopic range of shapes and simple forms; fields striped with furrows or striated fans, deliriously colored parallelograms and trapezoids, an orchard garnished pizza-shaped wedge, and a boldly limned river, the lifeline of a thirsty California central valley largely dependent upon transported water.<br><br>The Riverhouse is a painting that ‘moves’ between seamlessly shifting planes of aerial mapping that recalls Richard Diebenkorn’s stroke of insight when he took his first commercial flight the spring of 1951, and those partitions engaging a more standard vanishing point perspective. Thiebaud explained his process as “orchestrating with as much variety and tempo as I can.” Brightly lit with a fauve-like intensity, The Riverhouse is a heady concoction of vibrant pigment and rich impasto; one that recalls his indebtedness to Pierre Bonnard whose color Thiebaud referred to as “a bucket full of hot coals and ice cubes.” Among his many other influences, the insertion of objects — often tiny — that defy a rational sense of scale that reflects his interest in Chinese landscape painting.<br><br>As always, his mastery as a painter recalls his titular pies and cakes with their bewitching rainbow-like halos and side-by-side colors of equal intensity but differing in hues to create the vibratory effect of an aura, what Thiebaud explained “denotes an attempt to develop as much energy and light and visual power as you can.” Thiebaud’s Sacramento Delta landscapes are an integral and important part of his oeuvre. Paintings such as The Riverhouse rival the best abstract art of the twentieth century. His good friend, Willem de Kooning thought so, too.

WAYNE THIEBAUD

Alexander Calder executed a surprising number of oil paintings during the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s. By this time, the shock of his 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio, where he was impressed not by the paintings but by the environment, had developed into an artistic language of Calder’s own. So, as Calder was painting The Cross in 1948, he was already on the cusp of international recognition and on his way to winning the XX VI Venice Biennale’s grand prize for sculpture in 1952. Working on his paintings in concert with his sculptural practice, Calder approached both mediums with the same formal language and mastery of shape and color.<br><br>Calder was deeply intrigued by the unseen forces that keep objects in motion. Taking this interest from sculpture to canvas, we see that Calder built a sense of torque within The Cross by shifting its planes and balance. Using these elements, he created implied motion suggesting that the figure is pressing forward or even descending from the skies above. The Cross’s determined momentum is further amplified by details such as the subject’s emphatically outstretched arms, the fist-like curlicue vector on the left, and the silhouetted serpentine figure.<br><br>Calder also adopts a strong thread of poetic abandon throughout The Cross’s surface. It resonates with his good friend Miró’s hieratic and distinctly personal visual language, but it is all Calder in the effective animation of this painting’s various elements. No artist has earned more poetic license than Calder, and throughout his career, the artist remained convivially flexible in his understanding of form and composition. He even welcomed the myriad interpretations of others, writing in 1951, “That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.”<br><br>Either way, it is important to remember that The Cross was painted shortly after the upheaval of the Second World War and to some appears to be a sobering reflection of the time. Most of all, The Cross proves that Alexander Calder loaded his brush first to work out ideas about form, structure, relationships in space, and most importantly, movement.

ALEXANDRE CALDER

Widely recognized as one of the most consequential artists of our time, Gerhard Richters career now rivals that of Picasso's in terms of productivity and genius. The multi-faceted subject matter, ranging from slightly out-of-focus photographic oil paintings to Kelly-esque grid paintings to his "squeegee" works, Richter never settles for repeating the same thought- but is constantly evolving his vision. Richter has been honored by significant retrospective exhibitions, including the pivotal 2002 show,  "Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting," at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  <br><br>"Abstraktes Bild 758-2" (1992) comes from a purely abstract period in Richter's work- where the message is conveyed using a truly physical painting style, where applied paint layers are distorted with a wooden "Squeegee" tool. Essentially, Richter is sculpting the layers of paint, revealing the underlayers and their unique color combinations; there is a degree of "art by chance". If the painting does not work, Richter will move on- a method pioneered by Jackson Pollock decades earlier.  <br><br>Richter is included in prominent museums and collections worldwide, including the Tate, London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

GERHARD RICHTER

Au début des années 1870, Winslow Homer a souvent peint des scènes de la vie à la campagne près d'un petit hameau agricole réputé depuis des générations pour ses remarquables champs de blé, situé entre la rivière Hudson et les Catskills, dans l'État de New York. Aujourd'hui, Hurley est bien plus célèbre pour avoir inspiré l'une des plus grandes œuvres d'Homer, Snap the Whip, peinte au cours de l'été 1872. Parmi les nombreuses autres peintures inspirées par la région, Girl Standing in the Wheatfield est riche en sentiments, mais sans sentimentalisme excessif. Elle est directement liée à une étude peinte en France en 1866 et intitulée In the Wheatfields (Dans les champs de blé), ainsi qu'à une autre étude peinte l'année suivante, après son retour en Amérique. Mais Homère aurait sans doute été le plus fier de celle-ci. Il s'agit d'un portrait, d'une étude de costume, d'une peinture de genre dans la grande tradition de la peinture pastorale européenne, et d'un tour de force atmosphérique dramatiquement rétro-éclairé, imprégné de la lumière de l'heure qui s'estompe rapidement, avec des notes lambda et fleuries et des touches d'épis de blé. En 1874, Homer a envoyé quatre tableaux à l'exposition de la National Academy of Design. L'une d'entre elles était intitulée "Girl". Ne serait-ce pas celle-ci ?

WINSLOW HOMER

When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, a grief-stricken Diego Rivera had her belongings locked away for fifteen years, and her personal effects remained sealed, undisturbed, and undocumented until 2004 when the small room in the home her father built in Coyoacán, Mexico was opened to the world. Among the many belongings revealed at Casa Azul were her clothes, jewelry, drawings, letters, documents, and more than 6,500 photographs (among them works by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Man Ray, and Nickolas Muray) as well as the most personal and ironically moving item: the orthopedic plaster corsets she turned into an extension of herself. These harsh clinical objects assaulted her free-spirited nature, yet they remain today as the most palpable reminders that as she suffered through unbearable pain — over thirty surgeries, batteries of tests, X-rays, spinal taps, blood transfusions, physical therapy and strong pain killing drugs, she was an absolute survivor, not a victim.<br><br>It was Frida’s father, Guillermo who gave her his box of paints and brushes as she was recovering from the bus accident that had shattered her spine. The devastation she suffered is shown in excruciating detail in her 1944 painting, The Broken Column. Yet the first canvas she painted upon was the most convenient one — the plaster cast bodice encasing her body. As she related, she had dreamed of becoming a doctor, yet “to combat the boredom and pain (and) without giving it any particular thought, I started painting.” Later, her mother asked a carpenter to fashion an easel “if that’s what you can call the special apparatus which could be fixed to my bed because the plaster cast didn’t allow me to sit up.” (Andrea Kettenmann, Frida Kahol: 1907-1954: Pain and Passion, Taschen, 1999, pg. 18)<br><br>On this particular corset, Kahlo painted a blood-red Hammer and Sickle, the symbolic configuration representing proletarian solidarity — a union between the peasantry and working-class expressing her lifelong political sympathies and below, a developing fetus entering perhaps its third trimester, a reminder of the still deeper insult of the accident, the one that added a layer of suffering and regret to Frida’s personal tragedy — her inability to bear children. Frida’s corsets hardened around her resolve as much as her body, but they also speak of her almost unbearable longing. They are ruminations on the power of creativity to heal as well as demonstrations of Frida Kahlo’s unbounded capacity for confronting the very bodily enclosures that imprisoned her, transforming them, taking them over as much as she could, and turning them into something beautiful and expressive.

KAHLO FRIDA

Emerging at the end of the Gilded Age, N.C. Wyeth was one of the most important American artists and illustrators. His paintings and illustrations brought life to classic literature from Treasure Island to The Boy’s King Arthur and more. He is most remembered for his ability to capture crucial moments in narratives, fleshing out just a few words into a visual representation of deep drama and tension. Patriarch of the Wyeth artistic dynasty which includes his son Andrew and grandson Jamie, his influence touched future illustrators and artists.<br><br>Perhaps his most important legacy is how he shaped American imagination – of America itself and of wild possibilities. Wyeth’s powerful paintings gave life to many of the stories America told of itself. His early paintings captured life of the American West and some of his most beloved illustrations were for novels such as The Last of the Mohicans or short stories like “Rip Van Winkle”. Despite this success, Wyeth struggled with the commercialism of illustrations and advertisements, seeking his work to be accepted as fine art. Throughout his career, he experimented with different styles shifting from Impressionism to Divisionism to Regionalism.<br><br>N.C. Wyeth produced over 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books. His illustrations for the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons were so popular they became known as Scribner’s Classics and remain in print to this day.<br><br>This quietly powerful painting of a Native American forms part of a quartet of paintings, inspired by and a metaphor for the four seasons. The paintings were used to illustrate George T. Marsh’s set of poems “The Moods”. Wyeth recognized that the series came at a crucial moment in his career in which the paintings go beyond realism to capture atmosphere and mood, an internal world of emotion made external. He even contemplated and attempted to write his own poems based on these paintings.<br> <br><br>Summer, Hush is a striking example of Wyeth pulling from his imagination and melding it with careful observation of nature. As noted in a letter to his mother, Wyeth combined the fictional subject with natural effects as in the sky. Native Americans were a subject he returned to numerous times; these paintings reflect not only Wyeth’s fascination but also of America. As observed by art historian Krstine Ronan, Wyeth was part of a larger dialogue that developed around Native Americans, cementing a general Native American culture in the imagination of the United States. Thus, the painting operates on numerous levels simultaneously. How do we relate to this painting and its conception of the four seasons? How do we interpret Wyeth’s depiction of a Native American? What role do Native Americans play in America’s imagination?<br><br>We must also not forget that these works were first used to illustrate the poems of George T. Marsh. Marsh, a poet born in New York who often also wrote of the Canadian wilderness, provides subtle evocations of the seasons hinted at in the series title “The Moods”. This painting was used alongside “Hush,” which ends:<br><br>Are they runes of summers perished<br><br>That the fisher hears –and ceases—<br><br>Or the voice of one he cherished.<br><br>Within these few lines, Wyeth gives us a thoughtful and restrained painting that stirs from within. The poem and the painting avoid obvious clichés to represent the seasons. They develop a profound interpretation filled with sensitivity.<br><br>These paintings were important to Wyeth who hoped that “they may suggest to some architect the idea that such decorations would be appropriate in a library or capitol or some public building.” Summer, Hush demonstrates Wyeth’s control of color and composition so that small touches such as the ripples of water or the towering cloud that envelopes the figure are in service to sketch out the feeling of summer and of the poem. Through exploring this rich and complex painting, we are better able to appreciate NC Wyeth as an artist and the role this specific painting plays in the context of art history.

N.C. WYETH

The frame of reference for Irish American Sean Scully’s signature blocks and stripes is vast. From Malevich’s central premise that geometry can provide the means for universal understanding to Rothko’s impassioned approach to color and rendering of the dramatic sublime, Scully learned how to condense the splendor of the natural world into simple modes of color, light, and composition. Born in Dublin in 1945 and London-raised, Scully was well-schooled in figurative drawing when he decided to catch the spirit of his lodestar, Henri Matisse, by visiting Morocco in 1969. He was captivated by the dazzling tessellated mosaics and richly dyed fabrics and began to paint grids and stipes of color. Subsequent adventures provided further inspiration as the play of intense light on the reflective surfaces of Mayan ruins and the ancient slabs of stone at Stonehenge brought the sensation of light, space, and geometric movement to Scully’s paintings. The ability to trace the impact of Scully’s travels throughout his paintings reaffirms the value of abstract art as a touchstone for real-life experience.<br><br><br>Painted in rich, deep hues and layered, nuanced surfaces, Grey Red is both poetic and full of muscular formalism. Scully appropriately refers to these elemental forms as ‘bricks,’ suggesting the formal calculations of an architect. As he explained, “these relationships that I see in the street doorways, in windows between buildings, and in the traces of structures that were once full of life, I take for my work. I use these colors and forms and put them together in a way that perhaps reminds you of something, though you’re not sure of that” (David Carrier, Sean Scully, 2004, pg. 98). His approach is organic, less formulaic; intuitive painter’s choices are layering one color upon another so that contrasting hues and colors vibrate with subliminal energy. Diebenkorn comes to mind in his pursuit of radiant light. But here, the radiant bands of terracotta red, gray, taupe, and black of Grey Red resonate with deep, smoldering energy and evoke far more affecting passion than you would think it could impart. As his good friend, Bono wrote, “Sean approaches the canvas like a kickboxer, a plasterer, a builder. The quality of painting screams of a life being lived.”

SEAN SCULLY (EN)

Le Portrait de Sylvie Lacombe, peint par Théo van Rysselberghe en 1906, est un chef-d'œuvre classique réalisé par l'un des portraitistes les plus raffinés et les plus cohérents de son époque. La couleur est harmonieuse, le pinceau vigoureux et adapté à sa tâche matérielle, son corps et son visage sont vrais et révélateurs. La personne représentée est la fille de son grand ami, le peintre Georges Lacombe, qui a partagé une association étroite avec Gauguin et a été membre des Nabis avec les artistes Bonnard, Denis et Vuillard, entre autres. Si nous connaissons aujourd'hui Sylvie Lacombe, c'est grâce à l'habileté de Van Rysselberghe à rendre les subtiles expressions du visage et, par une observation minutieuse et un souci du détail, à donner un aperçu de son monde intérieur. Il a choisi un regard direct, ses yeux vers les vôtres, une alliance inéluctable entre le sujet et le spectateur, quelle que soit notre relation physique avec le tableau. Van Rysselberghe avait largement abandonné la technique pointilliste lorsqu'il a peint ce portrait. Mais il a continué à appliquer les principes de la théorie des couleurs en utilisant des teintes de rouge - roses et mauves - contre des verts pour créer une palette harmonieuse et améliorée de couleurs complémentaires à laquelle il a ajouté un accent fort pour attirer le regard - un nœud rouge intensément saturé posé de manière asymétrique sur le côté de sa tête.

THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE

The Pop Art Movement is notable for its rewriting of Art History and the idea of what could be considered a work of art. Larry Rivers association with Pop-Art and the New York School set him aside as one of the great American painters of the Post-War period.  <br><br>In addition to being a visual artist, Larry Rivers was a jazz saxophonist who studied at the Juilliard School of Music from 1945-1946. This painting's subject echoes the artists' interest in Jazz and the musical scene in New York City, particularly Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side.  <br><br>“Untitled” (1958) is notable bas the same owner has held it since the work was acquired directly from the artist several decades ago. This work is from the apex of the artists' career in New York and could comfortably hang in a museum's permanent collection.

RIVIÈRES LARGES

Maître incontesté du mouvement néo-impressionniste belge en plein essor à partir de 1887, Théo van Rysselberghe a peint ce portrait de sa femme, Maria (née Monnom), au cours de la première décennie du XXe siècle. Après avoir subi l'influence du tonalisme de Whistler, de l'impressionnisme et du pointillisme de Seurat, il a perfectionné une compréhension très raffinée de la couleur et de ses résonances harmoniques, ainsi qu'un rendu méticuleux des éléments formels. Dessinateur exemplaire, les impressions optiques basées sur les interactions entre les couleurs sont restées l'une des principales préoccupations de Van Rysselberghe. Ici, de courtes touches de couleur ont remplacé les petits points d'un pointilliste, et la palette de couleurs n'est pas homogène et harmonieuse, comme le veut la réputation bien méritée de l'artiste. Au contraire, ce portrait fait progresser la théorie des couleurs d'une manière tout à fait différente. Son intérêt visuel repose sur les contrastes dynamiques de la coiffure argentée de sa femme, de sa robe couleur platine et du manteau de cheminée d'un blanc immaculé, le tout mis en scène dans l'éclat optique de l'environnement dominé par des rouges et des verts complémentaires. Il s'agit d'une démonstration visuellement stimulante d'un peintre qui a compris l'impact dynamique de cette combinaison de couleurs inhabituelle et qui a disposé le modèle avec un fort accent sur une diagonale et a exécuté la formule avec l'art et l'agilité d'un peintre en pleine possession de ses moyens picturaux.

THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE

The Pop Art movement elevated common, often commercial subjects- redefining them as Fine Art. James Rosenquist's work helped shape the trajectory of the Pop Art phenomenon, and he was one of the few artists from this group to live well into the 21st century. <br><br>"Where the Water Goes" (1988) is an oil painting on canvas related to a series of monumentally scaled pressed paper pulp pieces produced in partnership with master printer Kenneth Tyler. The series is based on collaged visual elements arranged on a monumental scale. <br><br>The works from the "Welcome to the Water Planet" series appear to share a celestial setting and could be inspired by the artist's knowledge of the space shuttle program of the 1980s. Rosenquist also demonstrated his fascination with modern technology in his early masterpiece F-111 (1964-65).

JAMES ROSENQUIST

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT - Sans titre (Anatomie de pigeon) - huile, mine de plomb et craie sur papier - 22 x 30 in.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

DAMIEN HIRST - Forgotten Thoughts - papillons et vernis ménager sur toile - 68 x 68 x 1 3/8 in. (point à point)

DAMIEN HIRST

PIERRE BONNARD - Soleil Couchant - huile sur toile - 14 1/2 x 22 1/2 in.

PIERRE BONNARD

JEAN ARP - Sculpture Mythique - bronze - 25 x 9 1/2 x 12 in.

JEAN ARP

A major figure in both the Abstract Expressionist and American Figurative Expressionist movements of the 1940s and 1950s, Elaine de Kooning's prolific output defied singular categorization. Her versatile styles explored the spectrum of realism to abstraction, resulting in a career characterized by intense expression and artistic boundary-pushing. A striking example of de Kooning's explosive creativity is Untitled (Totem Pole), an extremely rare sculptural painting by the artist that showcases her command of color. <br><br>She created this piece around 1960, the same period as her well-known bullfight paintings. She left New York in 1957 to begin teaching at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and from there would visit Ciudad Juárez, where she observed the bullfights that inspired her work. An avid traveler, de Kooning drew inspiration from various sources, resulting in a diverse and experimental body of work.

ELAINE DE KOONING

GEORGES ROUAULT - Carlotta - huile sur toile - 15 7/8 x 12 1/4 in.

GEORGES ROUAULT

ALFRED SISLEY - Vaches au paturage sur les bords de la Seine - pastel sur papier - 11 1/4 x 15 1/2 in.

ALFRED SISLEY

La réputation de Ruldof Bauer en tant que précurseur de l'abstraction non-objective est le plus souvent associée à celle de Wassily Kandinsky. Cette place sacrée parmi les plus grands artistes abstraits est bien méritée.  Mais, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, la place de Bauer dans l'histoire de l'art est inextricablement liée au contrat malheureux qu'il a signé avec Soloman R. Guggenheim, avec les conseils de son ancienne amante, Hilla Rebay.  Presto 10 a été créé en 1917 alors que Bauer était un habitué de la Galerie Der Sturm, la galerie berlinoise, et a probablement été exposé lors de l'une des expositions personnelles de l'artiste en 1917, 1918 et 1920. Il a probablement été exposé lors de l'une des expositions personnelles de l'artiste en 1917, 1918 et 1920. Il fait également partie des peintures choisies par Bauer et Hilla Rebay pour figurer dans l'exposition "Art of Tomorrow" de l'Exposition universelle de New York, qui a ouvert ses portes le 1er juin 1939. Elle figure dans le cinquième catalogue de la collection Solomon R. Guggenheim de peintures non-objectives.

RUDOLF BAUER

CAMILLE PISSARRO - Paysage avec batteuse a Montfoucault - pastel sur papier posé sur carton - 10 3/8 x 14 3/4 in.

PISSARRO CAMILLE

FERNANDO BOTERO - Autoretrato a la manera de Velázquez - sanguine et crayon sur carton - 60 1/2 x 47 1/2 in.

FERNANDO BOTERO

JOAN MIRO - L'Oiseau - bronze et parpaing - 23 7/8 x 20 x 16 1/8 in.

JOAN MIRO (EN)

GERARD CURTIS DELANO - Navajo Camp - huile sur panneau - 23 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.

GERARD CURTIS DELANO

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON - Untitled (From Election Eve) - épreuve au pigment d'archives - 32 1/2 x 48 1/4 in.

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON - Sans titre (Blue Car, From Dust Bells, Vol. 11) - épreuve au pigment d'archives - 31 1/2 x 48 in.

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON

Andy Warhol est synonyme de l'art américain de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. Il est connu pour ses portraits iconiques et ses produits de consommation, mêlant culture populaire et beaux-arts, redéfinissant ainsi ce que l'art pouvait être et la manière dont nous l'abordons. Si de nombreuses œuvres de Warhol ne représentent pas des personnes célèbres, ses représentations d'objets inanimés élèvent ses sujets à un niveau de célébrité. Warhol a représenté des chaussures pour la première fois au début de sa carrière, alors qu'il travaillait comme illustrateur de mode. Il est revenu à ce thème dans les années 1980, combinant sa fascination pour le consumérisme et le glamour. Dans son désir constant de fusionner la haute et la basse culture, Warhol a choisi de mettre en avant un objet aussi omniprésent que les chaussures. Le sujet peut dénoter la pauvreté ou la richesse, la fonction ou la mode. Warhol donne un aspect glamour à la pile de chaussures, en les recouvrant d'une patine de poussière de diamant brillante, brouillant encore plus le sens entre besoin utilitaire et pièce de style.

ANDY WARHOL (EN)

RODOLFO MORALES - Sans titre - huile sur toile - 37 1/4 x 39 1/4 in.

RODOLFO MORALES

ANDY WARHOL - Chaussures - sérigraphie en couleurs avec poussière de diamant sur Arches Aquarelle - 39 3/4 x 59 1/2 in.

ANDY WARHOL (EN)

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON - Untitled (From Democratic Forest) - épreuve au pigment d'archivage - 31 1/2 x 48 in.

WILLIAM B. EGGLESTON

ANSEL ADAMS - Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine - épreuve à la gélatine argentique - 18 3/4 x 22 3/4 in.

ANSEL ADAMS

EDGAR ALWIN PAYNE - Navajos au repos - huile sur toile - 19 1/2 x 23 1/2 in.

EDGAR ALWIN PAYNE

ANDY WARHOL - Voiture Ford - graphite sur papier - 11 1/2 x 15 3/4 in.

ANDY WARHOL (EN)

ANSEL ADAMS - Aspens, Northern New Mexico - épreuve à la gélatine argentique - 15 1/4 x 19 1/4 in.

ANSEL ADAMS

EDGAR ALWIN PAYNE - Bateaux vénitiens à Sotto Marino - huile sur panneau - 23 3/8 x 26 1/4 in.

EDGAR ALWIN PAYNE

ANDY WARHOL - Pepper Pot from Campbell's Soup - sérigraphie en couleurs - 35 x 23 in.

ANDY WARHOL (EN)

The essential and dramatic declaration “Let there be light” of Genesis is not so far removed from Mary Corse’s recollection of the moment in 1968 when the late afternoon sun electrified the reflective road markings of Malibu as she drove east. In an instant, the glowing asphalt markings provided the oracle she needed to realize she could ‘put light in the painting and not just make a picture of light’.  Using the same glass microbeads utilized by road maintenance services, she layers and embeds the prismatic material in bands and geometric configurations creating nuanced glimmering abstract fields which shift as the viewer moves in relationship to the work. Move to one side and dimness brightens to light. Walk back and forth and you might feel a rippling effect from its shimmering, prismatic effects.<br><br>A photographic image of a Mary Corse microsphere painting is not only a dull representation, but it also misses the point – it is experience dependent art that requires participation to ‘be’.  Of course, “Untitled” (1975) defies that one-point static perspective and instead, depends upon a real time, interactive art experience which heightens awareness of the body in space as the viewer experiences shifts of retinal stimulation, sensation and feeling. It is a rare bird.  Unusually petite at two-foot square, its design, geometry and color belie her earlier revelation that led to a devotion to her usual reductive palette. Instead, it is a bold statement in sequined color, its center field bounded at the corners by a sparkling red stepped motif that separates it from its starry night sky corner spandrels. It may not include a star motif, but it has the glamour and presence that belongs along Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

MARY CORSE

CARLOS LUNA - La Mia (1225 OC) - huile sur toile - 47 x 58 in.

CARLOS LUNA (EN)

OLAF WIEGHORST - Apaches - huile sur toile - 20 x 24 in.

OLAF WIEGHORST

HASSEL SMITH - 9000 et 9 Nuits - acrylique et graphite sur toile - 68 x 68 1/8 po.

ISSÉL SMITH

ROBERTO MATTA - L'epreuve - huile sur toile - 29 1/2 x 25 1/2 in.

ROBERTO MATTA (EN)

ROBERT NATKIN - Série Bern - acrylique sur toile - 48 x 53 in.

ROBERT NATKIN

ANDY WARHOL - Electric Chair - sérigraphie en couleurs sur papier tissé - 35 3/8 x 47 3/4 in.

ANDY WARHOL (EN)

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM - Le lit défait - épreuve à la gélatine argentique - 10 1/4 x 13 1/2 in.

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM

KIM DOUGLAS WIGGINS - Sans titre - huile sur toile - 35 1/2 x 35 1/2 in.

KIM DOUGLAS WIGGINS

KARL BENJAMIN - Sans titre (#13) - huile sur toile - 50 1/4 x 50 in.

KARL BENJAMIN (EN)

EDWARD WESTON - Charis, Santa Monica - épreuve à la gélatine argentique - 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.

EDWARD WESTON

KIM DOUGLAS WIGGINS - Sans titre - huile sur toile - 29 1/2 x 23 1/2 in.

KIM DOUGLAS WIGGINS

ANDY WARHOL - Cow, 1976 - sérigraphie sur papier peint - 42 7/8 x 27 7/8 in.

ANDY WARHOL (EN)

ANDY WARHOL - Jimmy Carter III - sérigraphie sur papier J. Green - 28 x 20 3/4 in.

ANDY WARHOL (EN)

Born in 1866 and trained at the National Academy of Design under William Merritt Chase, Parsons was among Santa Fe's earliest resident painters when he arrived in 1913. Parson had contracted tuberculosis the prior year, and the desert climate suited his health, but it was the intense desert light and its dramatic landscape that aroused his aesthetic sensibilities. An accomplished New York portraitist, he was thrilled to replace those former soft, dark tones with high-keyed hues that conveyed the warmth and color of the Southwest landscape. Parsons was not a modernist, but as curator of the newly established Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, he welcomed modernists, including Robert Henri, Stuart Davis, Marsden Harley, John Sloan, and others, to show at the museum. His stance brought a firestorm of condemnation leading to his dismissal in 1922. <br><br>Parsons painted the Grand Canyon on several occasions. Immortalized in paint by artists from Thomas Moran to the Taos founders and innumerable contemporary artists, Parsons' earliest known example, Morning in the Canyon, is dated 1916.

SHELDON ORRIN PARSONS

CARLOS LUNA - Sans titre - supports mixtes sur papier - 30 x 22 1/2 in.

CARLOS LUNA (EN)

KIM DOUGLAS WIGGINS - Sans titre - huile sur toile - 8 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.

KIM DOUGLAS WIGGINS

Aspevig est un Montanais né en 1951, dont le talent évident de peintre de paysages réalistes lui a valu une reconnaissance et des prix prestigieux, notamment le Frederick Remington Award et le Robert M. Lougheed Memorial Award décernés par le National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Ses peintures sont bien accueillies dans toutes les grandes maisons de vente aux enchères spécialisées dans l'art occidental et ont été vendues pour plus de 100 000 dollars. Largement autodidacte, Aspevig a adopté une approche variée des détails, des points de vue, des subtilités de la palette et de la composition. Il se délecte de la peinture en plein air et de "l'immédiateté de la présence dans le paysage, de l'absorption de son caractère unique, de la lumière, du terrain, de la coloration". Cette peinture, une vue profonde et resplendissante du Grand Canyon, est une grande peinture sur un petit panneau de toile, magnifiquement rendue, qui transmet la structure profonde de la terre et la merveille de ses étendues.

CLYDE ASPEVIG

En 1995, Duncan Martin a cessé d'enseigner à plein temps au Principia College Studio Art facility pour se consacrer à la peinture et a vécu au Nouveau-Mexique, en Arizona et au Colorado. Bien qu'il soit revenu plus tard en tant que professeur d'art et président du département d'art et d'histoire de l'art, il est aujourd'hui à la retraite et se consacre entièrement à la peinture de paysages en plein air. Martin commence généralement par de longs traits audacieux à l'aide d'un couteau à palette ou d'un pinceau, puis ajuste ses traits en les réduisant, en les contrôlant et en les détaillant davantage. Il continue à observer, à faire des évaluations visuelles et à apporter des touches finales progressives en utilisant les deux extrémités du pinceau. En tant que peintre, Martin s'intéresse à autre chose qu'à la création de peintures figuratives faciles. Il espère plutôt comprendre une vérité essentielle qui n'est pas nécessairement révélée dans ses détails physiques.

DUNCAN MARTIN

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Présente depuis près de 20 ans dans le secteur, Andrea est titulaire d'une licence en histoire de l'art avec une mineure en beaux-arts de l'université de Binghamton, NY, et d'un master en art moderne, connaissance et histoire du marché de l'art de Christie's Education, New York, NY. Elle apporte l'expertise de son expérience dans les musées et les maisons de vente aux enchères, ayant travaillé au Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art à Kansas City et chez Christie's à New York.

Depuis qu'elle a rejoint Heather James Fine Art en 2015, Andrea a assuré des envois et a contribué à la constitution de collections privées et muséales remarquables avec des artistes importants, parmi lesquels Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Norman Rockwell, Andrew Wyeth, Elaine de Kooning, Andy Warhol et Tom Wesselmann.

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ART POUR LES CARACTÉRISTIQUES

Cottonwood Tree (Near Abiquiu), New Mexico (1943) by celebrated American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is exemplary of the airier, more naturalistic style that the desert inspired in her. O’Keeffe had great affinity for the distinctive beauty of the Southwest, and made her home there among the spindly trees, dramatic vistas, and bleached animal skulls that she so frequently painted. O’Keeffe took up residence at Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch twelve miles outside of the village of Abiquiú in northern New Mexico and painted this cottonwood tree around there. The softer style befitting this subject is a departure from her bold architectural landscapes and jewel-toned flowers.<br><br>The cottonwood tree is abstracted into soft patches of verdant greens through which more delineated branches are seen, spiraling in space against pockets of blue sky. The modeling of the trunk and delicate energy in the leaves carry forward past experimentations with the regional trees of the Northeast that had captivated O’Keeffe years earlier: maples, chestnuts, cedars, and poplars, among others. Two dramatic canvases from 1924, Autumn Trees, The Maple and The Chestnut Grey, are early instances of lyrical and resolute centrality, respectively. As seen in these early tree paintings, O’Keeffe exaggerated the sensibility of her subject with color and form.<br><br>In her 1974 book, O’Keeffe explained: “The meaning of a word— to me— is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Color and shapes make a more definite statement than words.” Her exacting, expressive color intrigued. The Precisionist painter Charles Demuth described how, in O’Keeffe’s work, “each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow” (As quoted in C. Eldridge, Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1991, p. 33). As well, congruities between forms knit together her oeuvre. Subjects like hills and petals undulate alike, while antlers, trees, and tributaries correspond in their branching morphology.<br><br>The sinewy contours and gradated hues characteristic of O’Keeffe find an incredible range across decades of her tree paintings. In New Mexico, O’Keeffe returned to the cottonwood motif many times, and the seasonality of this desert tree inspired many forms. The vernal thrill of new growth was channeled into spiraling compositions like Spring Tree No.1 (1945). Then, cottonwood trees turned a vivid autumnal yellow provided a breathtaking compliment to the blue backdrop of Mount Pedernal. The ossified curves of Dead Cottonweed Tree (1943) contain dramatic pools of light and dark, providing a foil to the warm, breathing quality of this painting, Cottonwood Tree (Near Abiquiu). The aural quality of this feathered cottonwood compels a feeling guided by O’Keeffe’s use of form of color.

GÉORGIE O'KEEFFE

<br>In Diego Rivera’s portrait of Enriqueta Dávila, the artist asserts a Mexicanidad, a quality of Mexican-ness, in the work along with his strong feelings towards the sitter. Moreover, this painting is unique amongst his portraiture in its use of symbolism, giving us a strong if opaque picture of the relationship between artist and sitter.<br><br>Enriqueta, a descendent of the prominent Goldbaum family, was married to the theater entrepreneur, José María Dávila. The two were close friends with Rivera, and the artist initially requested to paint Enriqueta’s portrait. Enriqueta found the request unconventional and relented on the condition that Rivera paints her daughter, Enriqueta “Quetita”. Rivera captures the spirit of the mother through the use of duality in different sections of the painting, from the floorboards to her hands, and even the flowers. Why the split in the horizon of the floorboard? Why the prominent cross while Enriqueta’s family is Jewish? Even her pose is interesting, showcasing a woman in control of her own power, highlighted by her hand on her hip which Rivera referred to as a claw, further complicating our understanding of her stature.<br><br>This use of flowers, along with her “rebozo” or shawl, asserts a Mexican identity. Rivera was adept at including and centering flowers in his works which became a kind of signature device. The flowers show bromeliads and roselles; the former is epiphytic and the latter known as flor de jamaica and often used in hibiscus tea and aguas frescas. There is a tension then between these two flowers, emphasizing the complicated relationship between Enriqueta and Rivera. On the one hand, Rivera demonstrates both his and the sitter’s Mexican identity despite the foreign root of Enriqueta’s family but there may be more pointed meaning revealing Rivera’s feelings to the subject. The flowers, as they often do in still life paintings, may also refer to the fleeting nature of life and beauty. The portrait for her daughter shares some similarities from the use of shawl and flowers, but through simple changes in gestures and type and placement of flowers, Rivera illuminates a stronger personality in Enriqueta and a more dynamic relationship as filtered through his lens.<br><br>A closer examination of even her clothing reveals profound meaning. Instead of a dress more in line for a socialite, Rivera has Enriqueta in a regional dress from Jalisco, emphasizing both of their Mexican identities. On the other hand, her coral jewelry, repeated in the color of her shoes, hints at multiple meanings from foreignness and exoticism to protection and vitality. From Ancient Egypt to Classical Rome to today, coral has been used for jewelry and to have been believed to have properties both real and symbolic. Coral jewelry is seen in Renaissance paintings indicating the vitality and purity of woman or as a protective amulet for infants. It is also used as a reminder, when paired with the infant Jesus, of his future sacrifice. Diego’s use of coral recalls these Renaissance portraits, supported by the plain background of the painting and the ribbon indicating the maker and date similar to Old Master works.<br><br>When combined in the portrait of Enriqueta, we get a layered and tense building of symbolism. Rivera both emphasizes her Mexican identity but also her foreign roots. He symbolizes her beauty and vitality but look closely at half of her face and it is as if Rivera has painted his own features onto hers. The richness of symbolism hints at the complex relationship between artist and sitter.

RIVERA DIEGO

WILLEM DE KOONING - Femme dans une barque - huile sur papier couché sur masonite - 47 1/2 x 36 1/4 in.

WILLEM DE KOONING

Andrew Wyeth & N. C. Wyeth - Puritan Cod Fishers - huile sur toile - 108 1/2 x 157 1/2 in.

Andrew Wyeth & N. C. Wyeth

Having unwittingly inserted himself into the Pop Art conversation with his Great American Nude series, Tom Wesselmann spent the rest of his career explaining that his motivation was not to focus excessively on a subject matter or to generate social commentary but instead, to give form to what titillated him most as beautiful and exciting. His disembodied Mouth series of 1965 established that an image did not have to rely on extraneous elements to communicate meaning. But it was his follow-up performances with the Smoker series and its seductive, fetish allure that raised his standing among true sybarites everywhere. Apart from perceiving smoking as cool and chic, a painting such as Smoker #21 is the consummate celebration of Wesselmann’s abilities as a painter. Enticed by the undulating smoke, Wesselmann took great pains to accurately depict its sinuous movements and observe the momentary pauses that heightened his appreciation of its sensual nature. Like all of Wesselmann’s prodigious scaled artworks, Smoker #21 has the commanding presence of an altarpiece. It was produced during long hours in his impressive Manhattan studio in Cooper Square, and the result is one of sultry dynamism — evocative, sensual, alluring, sleek, luscious, and perhaps, even sinister — a painting that flaunts his graphic supremacy and potent realism varnished with his patented sex appeal flair.<br><br>Tom Wesselmann expanded upon the success of his Great American Nudes by focusing on singular features of his subjects and began painting his Mouth series in 1965. In 1967, Wesselmann’s friend Peggy Sarno paused for a cigarette while modeling for Wesselmann’s Mouth series, inspiring his Smoker paintings. The whisps of smoke were challenging to paint and required Wesselmann to utilize photographs as source material to capture the smoke’s ephemeral nature properly. The images here show Wesselmann photographing his friend, the screenwriter Danièle Thompson, as she posed for some of Wesselmann’s source images.

TOM WESSELMANN

Between Île-de-France and Burgundy and on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest lies the medieval village of Moret-sur-Loing, established in the 12th century. When Alfred Sisley described its character to Monet in a letter dated 31 August 1881 as “a chocolate-box landscape…” he meant it as a memento of enticement; that its keep, the ramparts, the church, the fortified gates, and the ornate facades nestled along the river were, for a painter, a setting of unmatched charm. An ancient church, always the most striking townscape feature along the Seine Valley, would be a presence in Sisley’s townscape views as it was for Corot, and for Monet at Vétheuil. But unlike Monet whose thirty views of Rouen Cathedral were executed so he could trace the play of light and shadow across the cathedral façade and capture the ephemeral nature of moment-to-moment changes of light and atmosphere, Sisley set out to affirm the permanent nature of the church of Notre-Dame at Moret-sur-Loing.  Monet’s sole concern was air and light, and Sisley’s appears to be an homage keepsake. The painting exudes respect for the original architects and builders of a structure so impregnable and resolute, it stood then as it did in those medieval times, and which for us, stands today, as it will, for time immemorial.<br><br>Nevertheless, Sisley strived to show the changing appearance of the motif through a series of atmospheric changes. He gave the works titles such as “In Sunshine”, “Under Frost”, and “In Rain” and exhibited them as a group at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in 1894, factors that suggest he thought of them as serial interpretations. Nevertheless, unlike Monet’s work, l’église de Moret, le Soir reveals that Sisley chose to display the motif within a spatial context that accentuates its compositional attributes — the plunging perspective of the narrow street at left, the strong diagonal recession of the building lines as a counterbalance to the right, and the imposing weight of the stony building above the line of sight.

ALFRED SISLEY

Trained as a woodcarver, Emil Nolde was almost 30 years old before he made his first paintings. The early paintings resembled his drawings and woodcuts: grotesque figures with bold lines and strong contrasts. The style was new, and it inspired the nascent movement Die Brücke (The Bridge), whose members invited Nolde to join them in 1906.  But, it was not until the garden became his locus operandi by 1915 that he built upon his mastery of contrasting luminosities to focus on color as the supreme means of expression.  Later, Nolde claimed “color is strength, strength is life,” and he could not have better characterized why his flower paintings reinvigorate our perception of color.<br><br>Much of the strength of Nolde’s dramatic, Wagnerian-like color sensibilities is the effect of staging primary colors, such as the deep reds and golden yellows of Sonnenblumen, Abend II, against a somber palette. The contrast highlights and deepens the luminosity of the flowers, not just visually, but emotionally as well. In 1937, when Nolde’s art was rejected, confiscated, and defiled, his paintings were paraded as “degenerate art” throughout Nazi Germany in dimly lit galleries. Despite that treatment, Nolde’s status as a degenerate artist gave his art more breathing space because he seized the opportunity to produce more than 1,300 watercolors, which he called “unpainted pictures.” No novice in handling watercolor, his free-flowing style of painting had been a hallmark of his highly-charge, transparent washes since 1918. Sonnenblumen, Abend II, painted in 1944, is a rare wartime oil. He let his imagination run wild with this work, and his utilization of wet-on-wet techniques heightened the drama of each petal.<br><br>Nolde’s intense preoccupation with color and flowers, particularly sunflowers, reflects his continuing devotion to van Gogh.  He was aware of van Gogh as early as 1899 and, during the 1920s and early 1930s, visited several exhibitions of the Dutch artist’s work.  They shared a profound love of nature. Nolde’s dedication to expression and the symbolic use of color found fullness in the sunflower subject, and it became a personal symbol for him, as it did for Van Gogh.

EMIL NOLDE

When forty rural Sacramento Delta landscapes by Wayne Thiebaud were unveiled at a San Francisco gallery opening in November 1997, attendees were amazed by paintings they never anticipated. This new frontier betrayed neither Thiebaud’s mastery of confectionary-shop colors nor his impeccable eye for formal relationships. Rather, his admirers were shocked to learn that all but seven of these forty interpretations had been completed in just two years. As his son Paul recalled, “the refinements of my father’s artistic process were ever changing in a chameleon-like frenzy.” The new direction had proved an exhilarating experience, each painting an affirmation of Wayne Thiebaud’s impassioned response to the fields and levees of the local environment he dearly loved. <br><br>Viewed from the perspective of a bird or a plane, The Riverhouse is an agrarian tapestry conceived with a kaleidoscopic range of shapes and simple forms; fields striped with furrows or striated fans, deliriously colored parallelograms and trapezoids, an orchard garnished pizza-shaped wedge, and a boldly limned river, the lifeline of a thirsty California central valley largely dependent upon transported water.<br><br>The Riverhouse is a painting that ‘moves’ between seamlessly shifting planes of aerial mapping that recalls Richard Diebenkorn’s stroke of insight when he took his first commercial flight the spring of 1951, and those partitions engaging a more standard vanishing point perspective. Thiebaud explained his process as “orchestrating with as much variety and tempo as I can.” Brightly lit with a fauve-like intensity, The Riverhouse is a heady concoction of vibrant pigment and rich impasto; one that recalls his indebtedness to Pierre Bonnard whose color Thiebaud referred to as “a bucket full of hot coals and ice cubes.” Among his many other influences, the insertion of objects — often tiny — that defy a rational sense of scale that reflects his interest in Chinese landscape painting.<br><br>As always, his mastery as a painter recalls his titular pies and cakes with their bewitching rainbow-like halos and side-by-side colors of equal intensity but differing in hues to create the vibratory effect of an aura, what Thiebaud explained “denotes an attempt to develop as much energy and light and visual power as you can.” Thiebaud’s Sacramento Delta landscapes are an integral and important part of his oeuvre. Paintings such as The Riverhouse rival the best abstract art of the twentieth century. His good friend, Willem de Kooning thought so, too.

WAYNE THIEBAUD

Alexander Calder executed a surprising number of oil paintings during the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s. By this time, the shock of his 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio, where he was impressed not by the paintings but by the environment, had developed into an artistic language of Calder’s own. So, as Calder was painting The Cross in 1948, he was already on the cusp of international recognition and on his way to winning the XX VI Venice Biennale’s grand prize for sculpture in 1952. Working on his paintings in concert with his sculptural practice, Calder approached both mediums with the same formal language and mastery of shape and color.<br><br>Calder was deeply intrigued by the unseen forces that keep objects in motion. Taking this interest from sculpture to canvas, we see that Calder built a sense of torque within The Cross by shifting its planes and balance. Using these elements, he created implied motion suggesting that the figure is pressing forward or even descending from the skies above. The Cross’s determined momentum is further amplified by details such as the subject’s emphatically outstretched arms, the fist-like curlicue vector on the left, and the silhouetted serpentine figure.<br><br>Calder also adopts a strong thread of poetic abandon throughout The Cross’s surface. It resonates with his good friend Miró’s hieratic and distinctly personal visual language, but it is all Calder in the effective animation of this painting’s various elements. No artist has earned more poetic license than Calder, and throughout his career, the artist remained convivially flexible in his understanding of form and composition. He even welcomed the myriad interpretations of others, writing in 1951, “That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.”<br><br>Either way, it is important to remember that The Cross was painted shortly after the upheaval of the Second World War and to some appears to be a sobering reflection of the time. Most of all, The Cross proves that Alexander Calder loaded his brush first to work out ideas about form, structure, relationships in space, and most importantly, movement.

ALEXANDRE CALDER

Au début des années 1870, Winslow Homer a souvent peint des scènes de la vie à la campagne près d'un petit hameau agricole réputé depuis des générations pour ses remarquables champs de blé, situé entre la rivière Hudson et les Catskills, dans l'État de New York. Aujourd'hui, Hurley est bien plus célèbre pour avoir inspiré l'une des plus grandes œuvres d'Homer, Snap the Whip, peinte au cours de l'été 1872. Parmi les nombreuses autres peintures inspirées par la région, Girl Standing in the Wheatfield est riche en sentiments, mais sans sentimentalisme excessif. Elle est directement liée à une étude peinte en France en 1866 et intitulée In the Wheatfields (Dans les champs de blé), ainsi qu'à une autre étude peinte l'année suivante, après son retour en Amérique. Mais Homère aurait sans doute été le plus fier de celle-ci. Il s'agit d'un portrait, d'une étude de costume, d'une peinture de genre dans la grande tradition de la peinture pastorale européenne, et d'un tour de force atmosphérique dramatiquement rétro-éclairé, imprégné de la lumière de l'heure qui s'estompe rapidement, avec des notes lambda et fleuries et des touches d'épis de blé. En 1874, Homer a envoyé quatre tableaux à l'exposition de la National Academy of Design. L'une d'entre elles était intitulée "Girl". Ne serait-ce pas celle-ci ?

WINSLOW HOMER

When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, a grief-stricken Diego Rivera had her belongings locked away for fifteen years, and her personal effects remained sealed, undisturbed, and undocumented until 2004 when the small room in the home her father built in Coyoacán, Mexico was opened to the world. Among the many belongings revealed at Casa Azul were her clothes, jewelry, drawings, letters, documents, and more than 6,500 photographs (among them works by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Man Ray, and Nickolas Muray) as well as the most personal and ironically moving item: the orthopedic plaster corsets she turned into an extension of herself. These harsh clinical objects assaulted her free-spirited nature, yet they remain today as the most palpable reminders that as she suffered through unbearable pain — over thirty surgeries, batteries of tests, X-rays, spinal taps, blood transfusions, physical therapy and strong pain killing drugs, she was an absolute survivor, not a victim.<br><br>It was Frida’s father, Guillermo who gave her his box of paints and brushes as she was recovering from the bus accident that had shattered her spine. The devastation she suffered is shown in excruciating detail in her 1944 painting, The Broken Column. Yet the first canvas she painted upon was the most convenient one — the plaster cast bodice encasing her body. As she related, she had dreamed of becoming a doctor, yet “to combat the boredom and pain (and) without giving it any particular thought, I started painting.” Later, her mother asked a carpenter to fashion an easel “if that’s what you can call the special apparatus which could be fixed to my bed because the plaster cast didn’t allow me to sit up.” (Andrea Kettenmann, Frida Kahol: 1907-1954: Pain and Passion, Taschen, 1999, pg. 18)<br><br>On this particular corset, Kahlo painted a blood-red Hammer and Sickle, the symbolic configuration representing proletarian solidarity — a union between the peasantry and working-class expressing her lifelong political sympathies and below, a developing fetus entering perhaps its third trimester, a reminder of the still deeper insult of the accident, the one that added a layer of suffering and regret to Frida’s personal tragedy — her inability to bear children. Frida’s corsets hardened around her resolve as much as her body, but they also speak of her almost unbearable longing. They are ruminations on the power of creativity to heal as well as demonstrations of Frida Kahlo’s unbounded capacity for confronting the very bodily enclosures that imprisoned her, transforming them, taking them over as much as she could, and turning them into something beautiful and expressive.

KAHLO FRIDA

Emerging at the end of the Gilded Age, N.C. Wyeth was one of the most important American artists and illustrators. His paintings and illustrations brought life to classic literature from Treasure Island to The Boy’s King Arthur and more. He is most remembered for his ability to capture crucial moments in narratives, fleshing out just a few words into a visual representation of deep drama and tension. Patriarch of the Wyeth artistic dynasty which includes his son Andrew and grandson Jamie, his influence touched future illustrators and artists.<br><br>Perhaps his most important legacy is how he shaped American imagination – of America itself and of wild possibilities. Wyeth’s powerful paintings gave life to many of the stories America told of itself. His early paintings captured life of the American West and some of his most beloved illustrations were for novels such as The Last of the Mohicans or short stories like “Rip Van Winkle”. Despite this success, Wyeth struggled with the commercialism of illustrations and advertisements, seeking his work to be accepted as fine art. Throughout his career, he experimented with different styles shifting from Impressionism to Divisionism to Regionalism.<br><br>N.C. Wyeth produced over 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books. His illustrations for the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons were so popular they became known as Scribner’s Classics and remain in print to this day.<br><br>This quietly powerful painting of a Native American forms part of a quartet of paintings, inspired by and a metaphor for the four seasons. The paintings were used to illustrate George T. Marsh’s set of poems “The Moods”. Wyeth recognized that the series came at a crucial moment in his career in which the paintings go beyond realism to capture atmosphere and mood, an internal world of emotion made external. He even contemplated and attempted to write his own poems based on these paintings.<br> <br><br>Summer, Hush is a striking example of Wyeth pulling from his imagination and melding it with careful observation of nature. As noted in a letter to his mother, Wyeth combined the fictional subject with natural effects as in the sky. Native Americans were a subject he returned to numerous times; these paintings reflect not only Wyeth’s fascination but also of America. As observed by art historian Krstine Ronan, Wyeth was part of a larger dialogue that developed around Native Americans, cementing a general Native American culture in the imagination of the United States. Thus, the painting operates on numerous levels simultaneously. How do we relate to this painting and its conception of the four seasons? How do we interpret Wyeth’s depiction of a Native American? What role do Native Americans play in America’s imagination?<br><br>We must also not forget that these works were first used to illustrate the poems of George T. Marsh. Marsh, a poet born in New York who often also wrote of the Canadian wilderness, provides subtle evocations of the seasons hinted at in the series title “The Moods”. This painting was used alongside “Hush,” which ends:<br><br>Are they runes of summers perished<br><br>That the fisher hears –and ceases—<br><br>Or the voice of one he cherished.<br><br>Within these few lines, Wyeth gives us a thoughtful and restrained painting that stirs from within. The poem and the painting avoid obvious clichés to represent the seasons. They develop a profound interpretation filled with sensitivity.<br><br>These paintings were important to Wyeth who hoped that “they may suggest to some architect the idea that such decorations would be appropriate in a library or capitol or some public building.” Summer, Hush demonstrates Wyeth’s control of color and composition so that small touches such as the ripples of water or the towering cloud that envelopes the figure are in service to sketch out the feeling of summer and of the poem. Through exploring this rich and complex painting, we are better able to appreciate NC Wyeth as an artist and the role this specific painting plays in the context of art history.

N.C. WYETH

Le monde de Marc Chagall ne peut être contenu ou limité par les étiquettes que nous lui attachons. C'est un monde d'images et de significations qui forment leur propre discours splendidement mystique. Les Mariés sous le baldaquin a été entrepris alors que l'artiste entrait dans sa 90e année, un homme qui avait connu la tragédie et le conflit, mais qui n'avait jamais oublié les moments de plaisir de la vie. Ici, les délices rêveurs d'un mariage dans un village russe, avec ses arrangements de participants bien rodés, nous sont présentés avec un esprit si joyeux et une innocence si gaie qu'il est impossible de résister à son charme. En utilisant une émulsion dorée combinant l'huile et la gouache opaque à base d'eau, la chaleur, le bonheur et l'optimisme du positivisme habituel de Chagall sont enveloppés d'un éclat lumineux suggérant l'influence des icônes religieuses à feuilles d'or ou de la peinture du début de la Renaissance qui cherchait à donner l'impression d'une lumière divine ou d'une illumination spirituelle. L'utilisation d'une combinaison d'huile et de gouache peut s'avérer difficile. Mais ici, dans Les Mariés sous le baldaquin, Chagall l'utilise pour donner à la scène une qualité d'un autre monde, presque comme si elle venait de se matérialiser à partir de l'œil de son esprit. La finesse de sa texture donne l'impression que la lumière émane de l'œuvre elle-même et confère une qualité spectrale aux personnages qui flottent dans le ciel.

MARC CHAGALL

The frame of reference for Irish American Sean Scully’s signature blocks and stripes is vast. From Malevich’s central premise that geometry can provide the means for universal understanding to Rothko’s impassioned approach to color and rendering of the dramatic sublime, Scully learned how to condense the splendor of the natural world into simple modes of color, light, and composition. Born in Dublin in 1945 and London-raised, Scully was well-schooled in figurative drawing when he decided to catch the spirit of his lodestar, Henri Matisse, by visiting Morocco in 1969. He was captivated by the dazzling tessellated mosaics and richly dyed fabrics and began to paint grids and stipes of color. Subsequent adventures provided further inspiration as the play of intense light on the reflective surfaces of Mayan ruins and the ancient slabs of stone at Stonehenge brought the sensation of light, space, and geometric movement to Scully’s paintings. The ability to trace the impact of Scully’s travels throughout his paintings reaffirms the value of abstract art as a touchstone for real-life experience.<br><br><br>Painted in rich, deep hues and layered, nuanced surfaces, Grey Red is both poetic and full of muscular formalism. Scully appropriately refers to these elemental forms as ‘bricks,’ suggesting the formal calculations of an architect. As he explained, “these relationships that I see in the street doorways, in windows between buildings, and in the traces of structures that were once full of life, I take for my work. I use these colors and forms and put them together in a way that perhaps reminds you of something, though you’re not sure of that” (David Carrier, Sean Scully, 2004, pg. 98). His approach is organic, less formulaic; intuitive painter’s choices are layering one color upon another so that contrasting hues and colors vibrate with subliminal energy. Diebenkorn comes to mind in his pursuit of radiant light. But here, the radiant bands of terracotta red, gray, taupe, and black of Grey Red resonate with deep, smoldering energy and evoke far more affecting passion than you would think it could impart. As his good friend, Bono wrote, “Sean approaches the canvas like a kickboxer, a plasterer, a builder. The quality of painting screams of a life being lived.”

SEAN SCULLY (EN)

Reflective surfaces have become a hallmark of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture. One of his most iconic public works, Cloud Gate, in Chicago is a celebration of a mirrored surface and form, reflecting back the environment and its occupants.<br><br>Connecting all of his themes is Kapoor’s use of immersivity. From large-scale installations to more intimate pieces, Kapoor seeks to subsume the viewer within a world of light and color. In doing so, Kapoor pushes the viewer to consider their own place – within society, within their personal relationships, within the larger cosmos. The work does not exist without that interaction of object and viewer.<br><br>Mirrors have had a long and potent history as a symbol. Think of Perseus using his shield as a mirror against Medusa, the mirror given to Jia Rui and the interaction of Granny Liu with the large mirror in Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone, or Alice falling through the looking glass. Mirrors are not just tools but imbued with symbols – warnings of carnal pleasure, totems of modernity, protectors, or devices to upend our own worldly perceptions. Kapoor’s series of mirrors continue this tradition, opening doorways to new insight within ourselves and beyond in the natural world.<br><br>In this piece, Kapoor pushes back against the inherent narcissism of mirrors – the desire to look at oneself. The pleats are more than an aesthetic choice. The folds obscure the viewer so that they see everything but themselves. And even in this, the world around the viewer becomes fractured and splintered. One must focus to make sense of the reflected surroundings. Like Alice in Wonderland, the world is on its head, and like Granny Liu, we confront this familiar object anew. Kapoor’s mirrors are never straightforward. Whether concave or tilted, this distortion expands our visual observations to provide interior insight into ourselves and the world.<br><br>This sculpture was made the same year as Kapoor’s triumphant Sky Cloud in New York. Cate McQuaid, art critic for the Boston Globe, notes that Halo “draws viewers like flies”, and “you may see others, but it’s hard to find yourself.” This physical manifestation points to the more figurative difficulty to look within, to know oneself.

ANISH KAPOOR

Tom Wesselmann will undoubtedly be remembered for associating his erotic themes with the colors of the American flag. But Wesselmann had considerable gifts as a draftsman, and the line was his principal preoccupation, first as a cartoonist and later as an ardent admirer of Matisse. That he also pioneered a method of turning drawings into laser-cut steel wall reliefs proved a revelation. He began to focus ever more on drawing for the sake of drawing, enchanted that the new medium could be lifted and held: “It really is like being able to pick up a delicate line drawing from the paper.”<br><br>The Steel Drawings caused both excitement and confusion in the art world. After acquiring one of the ground-breaking works in 1985, the Whitney Museum of American Art wrote Wesselmann wondering if it should be cataloged as a drawing or a sculpture. The work had caused such a stir that when Eric Fischl visited Wesselmann at his studio and saw steel-cut works for the first time, he remembered feeling jealous. He wanted to try it but dared not. It was clear: ‘Tom owned the technique completely.’<br><br>Wesselmann owed much of that technique to his year-long collaboration with metalwork fabricator Alfred Lippincott. Together, in 1984 they honed a method for cutting the steel with a laser that provided the precision he needed to show the spontaneity of his sketches. Wesselmann called it ‘the best year of my life’, elated at the results that he never fully achieved with aluminum that required each shape be hand-cut.  “I anticipated how exciting it would be for me to get a drawing back in steel. I could hold it in my hands. I could pick it up by the lines…it was so exciting…a kind of near ecstasy, anyway, but there’s really been something about the new work that grabbed me.”<br><br>Bedroom Brunette with Irises is a Steel Drawing masterwork that despite its uber-generous scale, utilizes tight cropping to provide an unimposing intimacy while maintaining a free and spontaneous quality. The figure’s outstretched arms and limbs and body intertwine with the petals and the interior elements providing a flowing investigative foray of black lines and white ‘drop out’ shapes provided by the wall. It recalls Matisse and any number of his reclining odalisque paintings. Wesselmann often tested monochromatic values to discover the extent to which color would transform his hybrid objects into newly developed Steel Drawing works and, in this case, continued with a color steel-cut version of the composition Bedroom Blonde with Irises (1987) and later still, in 1993 with a large-scale drawing in charcoal and pastel on paper.

TOM WESSELMANN

Shortly after arriving in Paris by April 1912, Marsden Hartley received an invitation. It had come from Gertrude Stein and what he saw at her 27 rue de Fleurus flat stunned him. Despite his presumptions and preparedness, “I had to get used to so much of everything all at once…a room full of staggering pictures, a room full of strangers and two remarkable looking women, Alice and Gertrude Stein…I went often I think after that on Saturday evenings — always thinking, in my reserved New England tone, ‘ how do people do things like that — let everyone in off the street to look at their pictures?… So one got to see a vast array of astounding pictures — all burning with life and new ideas — and as strange as the ideas seemed to be — all of them terrifically stimulating — a new kind of words for an old theme.” (Susan Elizabeth Ryan, The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, pg. 77)<br><br>The repeated visits had a profound effect. Later that year, Hartley was clearly disappointed when Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn chose two of his still-life paintings for the upcoming New York Armory show in February 1913. “He (Kuhn) speaks highly of them (but) I would not have chosen them myself chiefly because I am so interested at this time in the directly abstract things of the present. But Davies says that no American has done this kind of thing and they would (not) serve me and the exhibition best at this time.” (Correspondence, Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, early November 1912) A month later, he announced his departure from formal representationalism in “favor of intuitive abstraction…a variety of expression I find to be closest to my temperament and ideals. It is not like anything here. It is not like Picasso, it is not like Kandinsky, not like any cubism. For want of a better name, subliminal or cosmic cubism.” (Correspondence, Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, December 1912)<br><br>At the time, Hartley consumed Wassily Kandinsky’s recently published treatise Uber das Geistige in der Kunst (The Art of Spiritual Harmony) and Stieglitz followed the artist’s thoughts with great interest. For certain, they both embraced musical analogy as an opportunity for establishing a new visual language of abstraction. Their shared interest in the synergetic effects of music and art can be traced to at least 1909 when Hartley exhibited landscape paintings of Maine under titles such as “Songs of Autumn” and “Songs of Winter” at the 291 Gallery. The gravity of Hartley’s response to the treatise likely sparked Stieglitz’s determination to purchase Kandinsky’s seminal painting Improvisation no. 27 (Garden of Love II) at the Armory Show. As for Hartley, he announced to his niece his conviction that an aural/vision synesthetic pairing of art and music was a way forward for modern art. “Did you ever hear of anyone trying to paint music — or the equivalent of sound in color?…there is only one artist in Europe working on it (Wassily Kandinsky) and he is a pure theorist and his work is quite without feeling — whereas I work wholly from intuition and the subliminal.” (D. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, Washington, D.C., pg. 6)<br><br>In Paris, during 1912 and 1913 Hartley was inspired to create a series of six musically themed oil paintings, the first of which, Bach Preludes et Fugues, no. 1 (Musical Theme), incorporates strong Cubist elements as well as Kandinsky’s essential spirituality and synesthesia. Here, incorporating both elements seems particularly appropriate. Whereas Kandinsky’s concepts were inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition whereby no note could be reused until the other eleven had been played, Hartley chose Bach’s highly structured, rigorously controlled twenty-four Preludes and Fugues from his Well-Tempered Clavier, each of which establishes an absolute tonality. The towering grid of Bach Preludes et Fugues, no. 1 suggests the formal structure of an organ, its pipes ever-rising under a high, vaulted church ceiling to which Hartley extends an invitation to stand within the lower portion of the picture plane amongst the triangular and circular ‘sound tesserae’ and absorb its essential sonority and deeply reverberating sound. All of it is cast with gradients of color that conjures an impression of Cézanne’s conceptual approach rather than Picasso’s, Analytic Cubism. Yet Bach Preludes et Fugues, no. 1, in its entirety suggests the formal structural of Picasso’s Maisons à Horta (Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro), one of the many Picasso paintings Gertrude Stein owned and presumably staged in her residence on the many occasions he came to visit.

MARSDEN HARTLEY

Le Portrait de Sylvie Lacombe, peint par Théo van Rysselberghe en 1906, est un chef-d'œuvre classique réalisé par l'un des portraitistes les plus raffinés et les plus cohérents de son époque. La couleur est harmonieuse, le pinceau vigoureux et adapté à sa tâche matérielle, son corps et son visage sont vrais et révélateurs. La personne représentée est la fille de son grand ami, le peintre Georges Lacombe, qui a partagé une association étroite avec Gauguin et a été membre des Nabis avec les artistes Bonnard, Denis et Vuillard, entre autres. Si nous connaissons aujourd'hui Sylvie Lacombe, c'est grâce à l'habileté de Van Rysselberghe à rendre les subtiles expressions du visage et, par une observation minutieuse et un souci du détail, à donner un aperçu de son monde intérieur. Il a choisi un regard direct, ses yeux vers les vôtres, une alliance inéluctable entre le sujet et le spectateur, quelle que soit notre relation physique avec le tableau. Van Rysselberghe avait largement abandonné la technique pointilliste lorsqu'il a peint ce portrait. Mais il a continué à appliquer les principes de la théorie des couleurs en utilisant des teintes de rouge - roses et mauves - contre des verts pour créer une palette harmonieuse et améliorée de couleurs complémentaires à laquelle il a ajouté un accent fort pour attirer le regard - un nœud rouge intensément saturé posé de manière asymétrique sur le côté de sa tête.

THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE

Il n'est pas difficile de comprendre comment la brillante disposition en deux rangées de quatre lettres de Robert Indiana a pu contribuer à renforcer un mouvement au cours des années 1960. Il est né d'une exposition profondément ressentie à la religion et d'un ami et mentor, Ellsworth Kelly, dont le style dur et les couleurs sensuelles et non accentuées ont fait une impression durable. Mais comme Indiana l'a déclaré, c'est un moment de chance qui s'est produit lorsque "l'amour m'a mordu" et que le dessin lui est apparu net et précis. Indiana a bien sûr soumis le dessin à de nombreuses épreuves, puis le logo a commencé à apparaître un peu partout. Le message, qui se traduit le mieux par une sculpture, se trouve dans des villes du monde entier et a été traduit en plusieurs langues, notamment en italien, sous le nom de "Amor", dont le "O" est également incliné vers la droite. Mais au lieu d'être frappée par le pied du "L", cette version confère au "A" qui la surplombe un effet de vacillement magnifiquement mis en scène. Elle donne une impression nouvelle, mais non moins profonde, de l'amour et de sa nature émotionnellement chargée.  Dans les deux cas, le "O" incliné de Love confère de l'instabilité à un dessin par ailleurs stable, une projection profonde de la critique implicite d'Indiana de "la sentimentalité souvent creuse associée au mot, suggérant métaphoriquement un désir non partagé et une déception plutôt qu'une affection saccharine" (Robert Indiana's Best : A Mini Retrospective, New York Times, 24 mai 2018). La répétition, bien sûr, a la mauvaise habitude d'atténuer notre appréciation du génie de la simplicité et du design révolutionnaire. Tard dans sa vie, Indiana déplorait que "c'était une idée merveilleuse, mais aussi une terrible erreur. Elle est devenue trop populaire. Et il y a des gens qui n'aiment pas la popularité". Mais nous, habitants d'un monde en proie à la discorde et à la tourmente, nous vous remercions. "Love" et ses nombreuses versions nous rappellent avec force notre capacité à aimer, et c'est là notre meilleur espoir éternel d'un avenir meilleur.

ROBERT INDIANA (EN)

FRANK STELLA - The Musket - techniques mixtes sur aluminium - 74 1/2 x 77 1/2 x 33 in.

FRANK STELLA (EN)

SALOMON VAN RUYSDAEL - Paysage de dunes avec des personnages au repos et un couple à cheval, vue sur la cathédrale de Nimègue - huile sur toile - 26 1/2 x 41 1/2 in.

SALOMON VAN RUYSDAEL

JAN JOSEPHSZOON VAN GOYEN - Paysage de rivière avec un moulin à vent et une chapelle - huile sur panneau - 22 1/2 x 31 3/4 in.

JAN JOSEPHSZOON VAN GOYEN

JOAN MIRO - L'Oiseau - bronze et parpaing - 23 7/8 x 20 x 16 1/8 in.

JOAN MIRO (EN)

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