The choice of Wyeth—not Pollock, not Warhol—to represent the kind of American art that the publishers wished to highlight in the magazines to their burgeoning [Taiwanese] readership, almost three decades after the end of WWII, was indeed curious. Why Wyeth, in the early 1970s?
I have looked at hundreds of colonial portraits, and the most intriguing figure that I have seen is unnamed, barely visible, only about five inches tall, and whose face is largely obscured. This figure is an African groom—who I can now argue is the first known representation of a person of African descent in a British North American painting.
In finding out more information about Banks’s life, might I somehow redress the bodily and archival violence that rendered her an unnamed figure in a museum display? Moreover, how could I tell Banks’s story—or, a story of racialized violence—without committing further violence in my own act of narration?
This research note reflects on the ways in which portraits function as complex indicators of racial, cultural, and regional identities and histories. It argues that the flexibility of meaning for such paintings lies not only with the artist and the sitter, but is equally shaped by audiences and historians.
The existence of these drawings among O’Keeffe’s papers raises a number of questions: first, why did [architect Peter van der Meulen] Smith create them in the first place? Second, how did they come to be in O’Keeffe’s possession? And third, did the drawings influence [Maria] Chabot’s design for the separate studio building at Abiquiu?
“Dams, roads, bridges, tunnels, storage buildings and various other useful structures comprise the bulk of the best visible things made in this century,” wrote Donald Judd in October 1964.
The pair of Portraitstudie images . . . suggest that international exchanges and collaborations were central to the development of photography well beyond the initial flurry of activity around 1839.
Why would Durand, who believed so strongly that the role of landscape was to turn viewers’ thoughts from human activities to the work of God, take on a subject such as Progress?
While organizing the 2017 permanent collection reinstallation at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Mythmaking and Truth-Telling: American and Regional Art, I made discoveries in the artist’s papers at the Archives of American Art that allow us to precisely date Miss Maude Adams, as “L’Aiglon” and to better contextualize the painting within the intellectual milieu of its creation.
Boarding a train toward an affluent suburb northeast of Madrid, I wondered what this journey would bring. I had been contacted a little over a year earlier by a person who claimed to have two paintings by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926).