Wednesday, December 16, 2020 – The snow falls so lightly on the canvas’ of these artists

By admin

Janet E. Turner, Wintering Snow Geese, 1968, color linoleum cut and screenprint, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1973.21.2

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2020

OUR 237th  ISSUE

OF

FROM OUR ARCHIVES


SNOW AS A WORK OF ART

FROM THE SMITHSONIAN 
AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Everett Warner, Falling Snow, New York, 1922, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design, 1978.63

Isadore Weiner, Snow Shoveller, 1939, color lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Jean Nichols, 1974.38.31

Frank McClure, Snow on the Window, 1969, linoleum cut, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Frank McClure, 1970.108

Louis Lozowick, Snow Clearance, 1934, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Adele Lozowick, 1982.59.6, © 1934, Lee Lozowick

William B. Post, Path in the Snow, ca. 1897, platinum print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 1994.91.147

Fairfield Porter, Snow Landscape, ca. 1960-1965, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Arnold Elser, 1981.154.101

Fritz Scholder, Indian in the Snow, 1972, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Benjamin P. Nicolette, 1980.107

Howard Cook, Street in Snow (Houses in Snow) (Illustration for The Checkerboard), 1931, wood engraving on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Barbara Latham, 1980.122.145

• Carl W. Peters, Little Village, ca. 1930, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Carl W. Peters, 1984.77
• Carl William Peters loved to paint snow scenes because of the delicate effects of light on the frozen, white landscape. He never traveled far from his home in Fairport, New York, and this image probably shows a view of a town close to his studio. The bright sunshine suggests a cheerful scene of people walking along the snow-covered sidewalks. But Peters did not beautify the small rickety houses, which look like they would struggle to keep their occupants warm. In this way, he captured both the charm and the hardships of an older America that still existed in small country villages.

William H. Johnson, Snow Peaks and Blossoms, ca. 1935-1938, oil on burlap, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.938

Harry Shokler, Waterfront–Brooklyn, ca. 1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1964.1.121

Turkeys, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, 1958; oil on pressed wood; 16 x 24 inches; Promised Gift of the Kallir Family in Memory of Otto Kallir; © Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY

Leslie Umberger is the Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at SAAM.

Turkeys is a classic Grandma Moses painting depicting the annual Thanksgiving ritual of catching the holiday bird. Moses captures the cold November sky and an early snow, contrasted by the bright colors worn by both the poultry and the people. Moses gives an unusual amount of detail to the turkeys themselves, paying tribute to the noble bird that Ben Franklin called “a true original of North America.” Moses, a lifelong farm woman, understood the nature of growing crops and raising livestock, yet still pitied the poor turkey for being so widely regarded as delicious. Thanksgiving only became an official American holiday when Moses was a child, yet its role as a family-centric and gratitude-based holiday gave it a special place in her oeuvre.

Moses began painting when she was in her sixties, looking back to the rural ways of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her art became wildly popular after 1939, when the Museum of Modern Art acclaimed her as a “modern primitive,” a label that attached her to the developing American art world as much as it distanced her from it. In the 1940s and especially in the 1950s, her accessible style and subjects were viewed as both quintessentially American and the perfect antidote to a postwar modern art that felt cold and arcane.

The Marchbanks Calendar
December by Harry Cimino, n.d/
. We’ve just turned the last page on this year’s calendar and it’s time to count down the days remaining in 2008. To take a good look at the last month of the year, I’ve chosen December from Harry Cimino’s Marchbanks Calendar. The artist was born in Indiana in 1898 and died in New York in 1969. Not the longest life on record but certainly one that saw its share of changes, beginning while Queen Victoria was still in power, and ending when men were putting their footprints on the moon. Somewhere in between (as this woodcut is undated), Cimino crafted this image. From what I can gather, the work was likely done in the 1920s.

For me, it has that Currier and Ives feel of Americana deepened by the artist’s choice of color. The red is vital to the sky and the church windows, while the gray-blue of the horse and riders carries most of the action (though the horse’s hind legs seem to be lacking a certain rhythm). I like the woosh of the woman’s scarf and the almost opposite effect of the man’s blanket, which seems to be melting into the snow.

Cimino produced a calendar for the Marchbanks Company, and many of the illustrations are in American Art’s collection. I hope we can look at more because they create miniature worlds that capture a time and place. Cimino also created woodcuts for book illustrations that also endear . . . and endure.

WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

Can you identify this site?
Send you submission to 
ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM

TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY,
ONE DAY LATE

MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
Elevated #7 Flushing Line Train 
along Queens Blvd in 1917 at Rawson Street
Bill  Schimoler, Andy Sparberg and Nina Lublin were the first to have the answer.

SNOW IS COMING!!!

ENJOY THE ARTISTIC VERSIONS OF SLUSH-FREE WINTER PANORAMAS WITH NO ICE TO SLIP ON AND LOOSING YOUR SHOE IN A SNOWDRIFT.   WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY TO SLIDE DOWN THE HILLS SOUTH OF CORNELL TECH!!!

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)
Roosevelt Island Historical Society
unless otherwise indicated

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

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