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Rain or Shine


Inclement Weather Our traveling exhibition Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens today at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa.

Modernism & Abstraction showcases sixty-nine rarely lent major paintings and sculptures that parallel developments in modern life over the twentieth century.

Today's artwork Inclement Weather reflects artist Grace Hartigan's view that "we are living a very fragmented life … like being on a very fast train and getting glimpses of things in strange scales as you pass by. … You see the corner of a house or you see a bird fly by, and it's all fragmented. Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos."

Source: Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Grace Hartigan, born 1922, Inclement Weather, 1970, acrylic, 78 1/4 x 88 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection.