Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park, No. 6, 1968
Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum features forty-three key paintings and sculptures by thirty-one of the most celebrated artists who came to maturity in the 1950s.
Description
Through three broadly-conceived themes that span two decades of creative genius —"Significant Gestures," "Optics and Order" and "New Images of Man"—Modern Masters examines the complex and heterogeneous nature of American abstract art in the mid-twentieth century. Featured artists include Jim Dine, David Driskell, Sam Francis, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson, Anne Truitt and Esteban Vicente.
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Credit
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is grateful to our generous contributors for their support of Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment Fund provided support for the publication. The C. F. Foundation in Atlanta supports the museum's traveling exhibition program Treasures to Go. Members of the Smithsonian Council for American Art contribute to the museum's national programs.
Artists
Jim Dine studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School, earning a BFA at Ohio University in 1957.
Of the West Coast artists that Martha Jackson brought to New York, certainly the most celebrated and ultimately the most successful was a painter whose reputation was well established in Europe before Americans paid him much heed.
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.
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. A German American, Hofmann was a leading Abstract Expressionist painter and was considered to be one of the greatest twentieth century teachers.
Painter, Abstract Expressionist. Early in his career, Kline painted landscapes, street scenes and portraits. His mature style was abstract, distinctive for its broad, highly charged black strokes on a white ground.
Born in Russia, brought to Maine in 1905, lived in New York City starting in 1920. Internationally famous artist who created striking assemblages of found wooden forms, and sculptures in steel, aluminum, Plexiglass, and other materials.
Anne Truitt was a psychology major at Bryn Mawr College, received her BA degree in 1943 and subsequently worked as a psychologist in Boston.
