Artist to Artist
The work of the artist is often thought of as solitary. We picture the painter confronting a blank canvas alone, studio door figuratively shut. Yet few artists thrive in a social vacuum. Even those who prefer to work in private will seek out other artists for myriad reasons: mentorship and inspiration, practical assistance, a sense of solidarity or shared purpose. Artists are often each other’s first and most important audience, providing vital support before critics, curators, and collectors arrive on a scene. Two artists caring about one another’s work is fundamental to the creation of any art “world,” large or small.
Description
Assembled from the museum's extensive twentieth-century holdings, Artist to Artist features a rotating group of eight pairings. Artists currently featured in the galleries are George Tooker and Paul Cadmus, Kenjiro Nomura and Kamekichi Tokita, Frank O'Hara and Grace Hartigan, Tadashi Sato and Satoru Abe, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Bumpei Usui, Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, T.C. Cannon and Fritz Scholder, and Alma Thomas and Felrath Hines. Each pairing represents two figures whose trajectories intersected at a creatively crucial moment, whether as student and teacher, professional allies, a couple, or ardently close friends. Based in common goals or shared life experience, the personal interactions represented by these works helped shape and sustain American art.
Within this exhibition is "New on View," an ongoing series of installations that place recently acquired artworks—both gifts and museum purchases—in dialogue with works already in SAAM's collection. Previous pairings included Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Cornell, Loïs Mailou Jones and Elizabeth Catlett, Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff, Miguel Luciano and Juan Sánchez, Hisako Hibi and Matsusaburo George Hibi, and Ray Yoshida and Christina Ramberg.
Melissa Ho, curator of twentieth-century art, organized the exhibition.
Visiting Information
Online Gallery
Artists
An American scene painter who, along with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, was a leading regionalist painter of the 1930s.
Cadmus entered the school of the National Academy of Design at fifteen with the encouragement of his parents, both of whom were artists.
A premier assemblagist who elevated the box to a major art form, Joseph Cornell also was an accomplished collagist and filmmaker, and one of America's most innovative artists. When his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. John A.
Grace Hartigan grew up in New Jersey, where she married the boy next door after graduating from high school. She saw the 1935 film Call of the Wild and decided on a whim to move to Alaska with her new husband.
Painter. Hines studied design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., and his paintings—in the tradition of the De Stijl movement—often contain strong design elements.
Painter and photographer of art. His languid women in repose from the 1930s are significant, but he also painted still lifes and landscapes.
Miguel Luciano's Pure Plantainum (2006) is a precious object. The question is, what makes it so?
Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Jackson Pollock's work defined America's artistic coming of age. Born in Cody, Wyoming, he first studied art in 1925 in Los Angeles, where he developed an interest in sculpture.
Painter. He studied with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League and later with Paul Cadmus. To achieve his haunting scenes of urban isolation and mechanization, Tooker employs the Renaissance egg termpera technique.
