Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Wayne Thiebaud, Neapolitan Meringue, 1986/1999, pastel over trial proof lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Warren Unna, Terry and Margaret Stent, and the Thiebaud Family, and museum purchase in honor of Nan Tucker McEvoy, 1999.80, © 1999, Paul Le Baron Thiebaud
Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the third in a series of special installations, celebrates the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists’ works on paper. These twenty-eight exceptional watercolors, charcoals, and drawings from the 1960s to the 1990s reveal the central importance of works on paper for American artists, both as studies for creations in other media and as finished works of art. Traditionally a more intimate form of expression than painting or sculpture, drawings often reveal greater spontaneity and experimentation. Even as works on paper become larger and more finished, competing in scale with easel paintings, they retain a sense of the artist’s hand, the immediacy of a thought made visible.
Description
Rarely seen works from the museum's permanent collection by artists such as Robert Arneson, Jennifer Bartlett, Will Barnet, Carolyn Brady, Paul Cadmus, Patricia Tobacco Forrester, Philip Guston, Luis Jiménez, Claes Oldenburg, and Wayne Thiebaud, are featured. Joann Moser, senior curator, selected the artworks in the exhibition.
Visiting Information
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Artists
Feeling Pushed captures Robert Arneson at an especially stressful moment in his life. Two years earlier, he had been diagnosed with cancer, possibly caused by the chemicals contained in his art materials.
Painter and printmaker, teacher at the Art Students League. Barnet's images of women and domestic scenes, distinctive in their emphasis on flat painting surfaces, are meditative in tone.
Jennifer Bartlett is the daughter of a pipeline engineer and a fashion illustrator. In the late 1950s she attended Mills College, an unconventional school in Oakland, California, that encouraged experimentation and discouraged textbooks.
Cadmus entered the school of the National Academy of Design at fifteen with the encouragement of his parents, both of whom were artists.
Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, in 1913 to Russian emigrés from Odessa. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1919. In 1925, he took a correspondence course in cartooning.
Born in Texas, lives in New Mexico. Sculptor, teacher whose large fiberglass figures capture the color and vigor of Hispanic-American women and men.
Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N.
Born in Mesa, Arizona, Wayne Thiebaud became one of the most well-known Pop artists in America. His iconic images of food may have stemmed from his beginnings as a freelance cartoonist in 1939.