Weekend, February 13/14, 2021 – The illusion of the perfect woman

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BEST WISHES FOR LUNAR NEW YARD FROM THE MAIN STREET THEARTRE & DANCE ALLIANCE

286th Edition

FEBRUARY 13-14,  2021

LOVELY LADIES

FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Arthur F. Mathews, Spring Dance, ca. 1917, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David J. Carlson, 1982.126

Arthur Mathews led a group of progressive Californians who believed that fine art and design served the public good. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he and his wife, Lucia, also a designer, led the effort to rebuild the city’s fine public spaces. The pastoral scene in Spring Dance resembles civic-minded murals created for museums, libraries, and concert halls at the turn of the twentieth century. But Mathews had more on his mind than ancient Greece or Rome. His Arcadia is the luminous landscape of California, and the planes of color and the graceful postures of the dancers show the artist is looking across the Pacific to Japan. The ornate frame is a reproduction of the original. It repeats the colors in the painting, reflecting Mathews’s commitment to designing furniture, art, and architecture to create an aesthetic whole.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

• Robert Reid, The White Parasol, ca. 1907, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.57
• This painting shows Robert Reid’s young wife, Elizabeth Reeves, in the year of their wedding. Reid painted Elizabeth in a white gown surrounded by many different colored flowers to emphasize her flawless porcelain skin. Their marriage lasted only a few years, and here the delicate colors and idealized setting suggest the optimism of young love. Reid’s many paintings of girls immersed in nature emphasize the fragility and beauty of women, as if he equated them with the flowers, trees, and clouds.

Robert Reid, The Mirror, ca. 1910, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1911.2.4 American Impressionism emerged in the late 1880s when a generation of American artists studied abroad to absorb the new palette and compositions that were modernizing painting in France. Landscapes and domestic scenes by these American Impressionists are as wonderfully fresh and sparkling as those by their more familiar French counterparts. These artists, attracted to the light and color of painting outdoors, celebrate a modern view of life as America entered the twentieth century. Smithsonian American Art Museum: Commemorative Guide. Nashville, TN: Beckon Books, 2015.

John White Alexander, June, ca. 1911, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William Alexander, 1916.10.1

Robert Reid was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, into a family of New England clergymen. Schooled at the Philips Academy from 1880 to 1884, he was a student and teaching assistant at the Boston Museum School, an institution then known for its conservatism. He studied briefly at the Art Students League in New York then journeyed to Paris for three years of study at the Académie Julian. While in France, he worked with the colony of French and foreign artists at Etaples on the Normandy coast, painting peasant genre scenes of religious tone. Returning to New York he taught at the Art Students League and Cooper Union. After 1890 he seems to have been inundated with important mural commissions: the ​“White City” in Chicago, the Boston State House, the Library of Congress, and many private institutions. It was also at this time that his conversion to impressionist technique began to manifest itself. The Beaux Arts classical female nudes of his murals were now joined by easel paintings of loosely gowned maidens carefully posed in landscapes or sunlit gardens and rendered in vivid colors with slashing brushwork.

In 1897 he was inaugurated into the Ten American Painters, the youngest of that number, but affecting a dazzling palette that outshone the more somber tones of his colleagues. The decorative quality of his canvases prompted a major critic to dub him a ​“decorative Impressionist”; yet another called his work ​“sentimental” and ​“pretty,” all of which must have improved his sales in some markets. As Richard Boyle astringently remarks, ​“sentiment pervaded all the art world at that time. It was popular and it sold.”

A self-indulgent and vain man, social by nature and much given to gambling, in due course his expenses exceeded his income and he was impelled to retreat to Colorado Springs where he established an art academy and painted innumerable portraits to recoup his losses. In 1927 he suffered a stroke, but undaunted he learned to paint with his left hand. He died in a New York sanatorium at the age of sixty-seven.

Robert Reid studied at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and at Boston​’s Museum of Fine Arts. After further training in Paris, Reid moved to New York and established himself as a figure painter. He painted several murals and, in the early 1890s, won a commission to decorate the domes of the main building at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. His wedding to Elizabeth Reeves in 1907 was attended by many prominent artists, but their marriage lasted only nine years before she left him. Reid worked steadily until 1927, when he was partially disabled by a stroke and had to learn to paint with his left hand.

Laura Wheeler Waring, Portrait of Alma Thomas, ca. 1945, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Vincent Melzac 1977.121.

Alma Thomas

During the 1960s Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her. Her new palette and technique—considerably lighter and looser than in her earlier representational works and dark abstractions—reflected her long study of color theory and the watercolor medium.

As a black woman artist, Thomas encountered many barriers; she did not, however, turn to racial or feminist issues in her art, believing rather that the creative spirit is independent of race or gender. In Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after 1921, Thomas became identified with Morris Louis, Gene Davis, and other Color Field painters active in the area since the 1950s. Like them, she explored the power of color and form in luminous, contemplative paintings.

Alma Thomas began to paint seriously in 1960, when she retired from her thirty-eight year career as an art teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C. In the years that followed she would come to be regarded as a major painter of the Washington Color Field School.

Born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, Thomas was the eldest of four daughters. Her father worked in a church and her mother was a seamstress and homemaker. Thomas’s family was well respected in Columbus, and she and her sisters grew up in comfortable surroundings. The family lived in a large Victorian house high on a hill overlooking the town where Thomas spent her childhood observing the beauty and color of nature. In 1907, when Thomas was fifteen years old, her father moved the family to Washington, D.C. She enrolled in Howard University, and in 1924 became the first graduate of its newly formed art department. Thomas’s teacher and mentor, James V. Herring, granted her use of his private art library, from which she gained a thorough background in art history. A decade later, she earned a Master of Arts degree in education from Columbia University.

During the 1950s Thomas attended art classes at American University in Washington. She studied painting under Joe Summerford, Robert Gates, and Jacob Kainen, and developed an interest in color and abstract art. Throughout her teaching career she painted and exhibited academic still lifes and realistic paintings in group shows of African-American artists. Although her paintings were competent, they were never singled out for individual recognition.

Suffering from the pain of arthritis at the time of her retirement, she considered giving up painting. When Howard University offered to mount a retrospective of her work in 1966, however, she wanted to produce something new. From the window of her house she enjoyed watching the ever-changing patterns that light created on her trees and flower garden. So inspired, her new paintings passed through an expressionist period, followed by an abstract one, to finally a nonobjective phase. Many of Thomas’s late-career paintings were watercolors in which bold splashes of color and large areas of white paper combine to create remarkably fresh effects, often accented with brush strokes of India ink.

Although Thomas progressed to painting in acrylics on large canvases, she continued to produce many watercolors that were studies for her paintings. Thomas’s personalized mature style consisted of broad, mosaic-like patches of vibrant color applied in concentric circles or vertical stripes. Color was the basis of her painting, undeniably reflecting her life-long study of color theory as well as the influence of luminous, elegant abstract works by Washington-based Color Field painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis.

Thomas was in her eighth decade of life when she produced her most important works. Earliest to win acclaim was her series of Earth paintings—pure color abstractions of concentric circles that often suggest target paintings and stripes. Done in the late 1960s, these works bear references to rows and borders of flowers inspired by Washington’s famed azaleas and cherry blossoms. The titles of her paintings often reflect this influence. In these canvases, brilliant shades of green, pale and deep blue, violet, deep red, light red, orange, and yellow are offset by white areas of untouched raw canvas, suggesting jewel-like Byzantine mosaics.

In her last paintings, Thomas employed her characteristic short bars of color and impasto technique. The tones, however, became more subdued, and the formerly vertical and horizontal accents of Thomas’s brush strokes became more diverse in movement, and included diagonals, diamond shapes, and asymmetrical surface patterns. During the artist’s final years, the crippling effects of arthritis prevented her from painting as often as she wanted.

Alma Thomas never married, and lived in the same house her father bought in downtown Washington in 1907. The final years of her life brought awards and recognition. In 1972 she was honored with one-woman exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; that same year one of her paintings was selected for the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Before her death in 1978, Thomas had achieved national recognition as a major woman artist devoted to abstract painting.

Henry Wolf, John White Alexander, A Flower, 1905, wood engraving on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1973.130.214

Loïs Mailou Jones, Initiation, Liberia, 1983, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of the artist, 2006.24.7 Jones was especially sensitive to the rights and roles of women. For many years she felt forced to ship rather than deliver her work in person to exhibitions so museums would not reject them because they had been done by a black female artist. In Initiation, Liberia, she interpreted the Sande society initiation ritual. The swath of white paint across the young woman’s eyes indicates her role as an initiate. The mask partly obscures her distinctive personality but combined with the receding profiles at the left of her head, suggests continuity over generations that is implied by the ritual ceremony.

Henry Wolf, John White Alexander, The Quiet Hour, 1903, wood engraving on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1973.130.199

Julio Salgado, Quiero Mis Queerce, 2014, screenprint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Lichtenberg Family Foundation, 2020.37.6, © 2020, Julio Salgado

Roger Medearis,
Godly Susan, 1941, egg tempera on board
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Roger and Elizabeth Medearis, 1992.84
Roger Medearis completed this painting of his grandmother Susan Carns Medearis at the end of a three years’ study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute. Medearis used the sunporch of his father’s church as a makeshift studio to create detailed sketches of his grandmother, who had suffered a stroke several years earlier. His grandmother holds a lemon, whose sour taste she enjoyed, in her strong, still-vibrant left hand, contrasting the paralyzed right side of her body.

This portrait memorialized his beloved family matriarch. The title reflects Susan’s role as the daughter and granddaughter of Baptist ministers and the mother of three more. Born in the early days of the Civil War, her life spanned one of the most formative times in American history; she died only months after this portrait was finished. Roger Medearis completed this painting of his grandmother Susan Carns Medearis at the end of three years’ study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute. Medearis used the sunporch of his father’s church as a makeshift studio to create detailed sketches of his grandmother, who had suffered a stroke several years earlier.

He would wheel her up the ramp to the sunporch, where she often fell asleep while he worked. Medearis had her hold a lemon, whose sour taste she enjoyed, in her strong, still-vibrant left hand to contrast the paralyzed right side of her body. This portrait memorialized his beloved family matriarch. He titled the work Godly Susan because Susan Medearis was the daughter and granddaughter of two Baptist ministers and the mother of three more. Born in the early days of the Civil War, her life spanned one of the most formative times in American history; she died only months after this portrait was finished.

“I was 21 and my life was just beginning. She was 81—her life would soon be ending. That year, America entered [World War II] and nothing would ever be the same again!” The artist, quoted in American Art Museum curatorial file.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S WEEKEND
FROM THE MSTDA

WEEKEND PHOTO

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FRIDAY PHOTOS OF THE DAY

The top of the GE Building on Lexington Avenue
Robin Lynn and John Bacon got it right!

The General Electric Building (also known as 570 Lexington Avenue) is a skyscraper at the southwestern corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building, designed by Cross & Cross and completed in 1931, was known as the RCA Victor Building during its construction. The General Electric Building is sometimes known by its address to avoid confusion with 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which was once known as the GE Building.

570 Lexington Avenue contains a 50-floor, 640-foot-tall (200 m) stylized Gothic octagonal brick tower, with elaborate Art Deco decorations of lightning bolts showing the power of electricity. The tower is set back from the round-cornered base with elaborate masonry and architectural figural sculpture. The building was designed to blend with the low Byzantine dome of the adjacent St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue, with the same brick coloring and architectural terracotta decoration. The crown of the building, an example of Gothic tracery, is intended to represent electricity and radio waves. On the corner above the building’s main entrance is a clock with the cursive GE logo and a pair of disembodied silver arms holding bolts of electricity.

Plans for the building were announced in 1929, and it was completed two years later. The project was originally commissioned for RCA, then a subsidiary of General Electric (GE). RCA moved to 30 Rockefeller Plaza midway through construction, and 570 Lexington Avenue was conveyed to GE as part of an agreement in which RCA and GE split their properties. GE had its headquarters at 570 Lexington Avenue between 1933 and 1974, and retained ownership until 1993, when the building was donated to Columbia University. The building was extensively renovated by Ernest de Castro of the WCA Design Group in the 1990s. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1985 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.

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
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