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).
The apparent plaintiveness and autobiographical transparency of Should Love Come First?, and its early prominence in the then unknown Rauschenberg oeuvre, felt intensified by its obliteration by the artist himself. If ever an artwork had a story worth sleuthing, I figured it was this one, even if it was just the story of its own production.
I immediately recognized that the instruments of his labor—brushes and a bucket of whitewash, used to brighten the walls of soot-filled homes—were often the stuff of racial satire and caricature in the nineteenth century. Was this a sympathetic portrayal of an African American or something much more complicated?
To anyone who had the temerity to press a nose against the picture, to sniff at or try to smell it, he gave a clear message. . . . Just below his signature and the painting’s date, Homer wrote in light-colored script, as if it were flotsam from a wreck: “At 12 feet from this picture/you can see it.”
I confess to a bit of a Diana fixation. . . . As a seasoned archer but a fledgling curator, I would jokingly remark that my preference would be to work for an art museum whose collection included an Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) sculpture of Diana.