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The Johnson Space Center |
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The McGovern Centennial Gardens |
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Return to the Index Page for our Trip to Houston |
The whole point of our trip down here to Houston this week is to visit the Van Gogh exhibit at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. And that's why we're staying at the Hotel ZaZa- because it is literally across the street from that museum.
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We are here, as are most museum visitors, simply to see, contemplate, and admire the works of art on display (and, of course, to attend the Van Gogh exhibit). Of the time we spent in the museum's two main buildings, about half that time was spent in the Van Gogh exhibition. It is the other half of that time that I want to describe on this particular album page. I'll save a tour of the Van Gogh exhibit for a subsequent page.
The newer of the museum's two main downtown buildings- the Audrey Jones Beck Building- is across the street north of the Hotel ZaZa. Opened to the public in 2000, the Beck Building was designed by Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate and a respected Spanish architect of tremendous range. The museum Trustees elected to name the building after Audrey Jones Beck in honor of the large collection she had donated to the museum several decades prior. This was the building where the Van Gogh Exhibit was located, and where we also spent a good deal of time looking at other artwork.
Across Main Street to the west (and connected to the Beck Building by an underground tunnel) is the Caroline Wiess Law Building– the original neo-classical building was designed in phases by architect William Ward Watkin. The original building and additional east and west wings were built in 1924-1926. Air conditioning and another new wing were added in 1953, and two subsequent additions designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were built in 1958 and 1974. This section of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston campus is the only Mies-designed museum in the United States. These buildings house the museum's collections of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artworks, Oceanic art, Asian art, Indonesian gold artifacts, and Pre-Columbian and sub-Saharan African artworks (including the world's largest collection of African gold art).
Our Tour of the Beck Pavilion
After the Van Gogh exhibit, we had some lunch in the Beck Pavilion cafe and then just walked through some of the galleries in that building. We didn't attempt any exhaustive walk through the museum, but just wandered here and there. I took photographs of some of the artwork (which includes not only paintings but also furniture, ceramics, and sculpture) that I or someone else found interesting, as well as some photographs of our group.
I thought about putting the artwork photos in a slideshow, but in this case I'm going to use the "click on the thumbnail" technique, as you might only want to see selected pictures. I am also going to make the thumbnails a bit larger so that even if you don't click on one to bring up the full-size image you can still see what it looked like. And one note- with only one exception (one picture that turned out way too fuzzy), all the pictures here are our own photographs. I have cropped out the frames and straightened the images as need be, but we did pretty well, considering that flash photography was prohibited.
There were three galleries devoted to American art, and that's where I started. As an introduction to each group of works, I'll begin with my photograph of the introductory plaque for each gallery.
American Art: 1700 - 1820
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Portrait of George Thomas John Nugent
(c. 1790-92, oil on canvas)
This painting is a rare example of a portrait of a child by Gilbert Stuart, who became one of America's most renowned portrait painters. Stuart left America in 1775 to study painting in London, but his decadent lifestyle forced him to flee to Dublin in 1787 to avoid creditors. There he painted the young George Thomas John Nugent, later the 8th Earl of Westmeath. The boy is depicted standing in a landscape, touching a handkerchief and ball to the head of a dog. He is perhaps training the dog for hunting with a scent trail. Upon his return to America in 1793, Stuart quickly became known as the "Father of American Portraiture" for his ability to capture a sitter's essence. He left a legacy of over a thousand portraits of notable sitters including Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams.
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High Chest of Drawers
(c. 1760, mahogany, chestnut, southern yellow pint, eastern white pine, and yellow poplar)
In the preface of his 1754 publication The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, the English furniture designer and maker Thomas Chippendale noted, "of all the Arts which are either improved for ornamented by Architecture, that of cabinet-making is not only the most useful and ornamental, but capable of receiving as great Assistance from it as any whatever." Chippendale's advice informs the design of this stately high chest, with its thoughtful proportions and imposing architecural elements, including the cornice and scrolled pediment. It exhibits bold outlines and minimal surface treatment, which were hallmarks of furniture made in Rhode Island.
John Singleton Copley American, 1738-1815
Portrait of Mrs. Paul Richard |
Gilbert Stuart American, 1755-1828
Portrait of Robert Livingston (b. 1733) A start student of Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart developed his reputation as a prominent portraitist first in London before solidifying this position with his iconic images of George Washingto later in the century in America. While in London, he catered to his wealthy English and American patrons with a fashionable studio and home. Stuart's personal finances could not keep up with his stylish lifestyle, and he found himself seriously in debt. In 1787 he fled London and his creditors for Dublin, where he remained for five eyars until his return to America. Painted during his residency in Ireland, this portrait of Robert Livingston is emblematic of Stuart's portraiture style. Livingston is depicted with an intense yet engaging expression as he stares directly out at the viewer. The powerful image is further enhanced by Stuart's masterful and characteristic fluid brushwork, best seen in the skillful application of white in the neckcloth of the sitter. |
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Portrait of Samuel Pemberton
(1734, oil on canvas)
Painted by the Scottish-born John Smibert, the first major art celebrity in the American colonies, this portrait portrays 11-year-old Samuel Pemberton as a bewigged gentleman in a soft gray suit, proudly erect with an alert expression on his face, his large eyes enhanced by exquisitely rendered eyelashes. A great deal of attention and care has been lavished on painting the ruffle, the braid and buttons of the coat and vest, and the graceful swirls of the wig- all expensive items that connoted the wealthy, aristocratic status of this Boston youth. Samuel Pemberton belonged to a wealthy family that made its fortune in real estate and the merchant trade. He graduated from Harvard and explored the ministry before taking over his father's business. Later, he entered public life as a justice of the peace and became a prominent member of the political group the Sons of Liberty.
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Portrait of a Naval Officer
(c. 1749, oil on canvas)
Like John Smibert in Boston, the English painter John Wollaston rose to immediate success among the wealthy and fashionable set in colonial New York. His Subjects' oval, half-lidded eyes and delicate, upturned mouths are characteristics associated with traditional English portraiture of the period, which was brought to the colonies through him and other artists such as Joseph Blackburn. Though the sitter remains unidentified, his distinction as a naval officer is apparent given the details of his uniform, embroidered with delicate yet stately silver thread, as well as the ships visible on the horizon in the left background. Though at one time thought to be Admiral Augustus Keppel, who distinguished himself in the Royal Navy during the North American campaign of the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years' War) and who was a Whig supporter during the early days of the American Revolution, the details of the uniform, including the blue lapels and white cuffs, reveal the rank of the sitter as a captain. Such a ranking would have been inferior to Keppel's ranking at the time, thus making it an unlikely portrait of him.
American Art: The 19th Century
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Girl with a Horse
(1892, oil on canvas)
Although Edmund Tarbell was famous for his scenes of the lives of society women, many of his most effective aintings feature members of his family and their hobbies. In this work, Tarbell's wife, Emeline, poses with a horse along a tree-lined path. Tarbell's family worked closely with horses- his son, also named Edmund, trained and showed horses professionally. The artist developed his Impressionist style in Paris, studying at the Academie Julian, and traveled throughout Europe to sketch and refine his work. Combining plein air painting with more academic traditions, Tarbell influenced a generation of students during his 20-year teaching career in Boston and Washington, D.C.
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Sunrise in Syria
(1873, oil on canvas)
A second-generation Hudson River School landscape artist, and the only pupil of painter Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church combined a fidelity to nature with a sense of the potential of American progress. Although he frequently portrayed the New England landscape Church undertook several trips to South America, Europe, and the Middle East, and applied his style to these foreign views. In this work, Church captures the immense scale of the ancient Greco-Roman temple and the medieval fortification jutting from the rocky landscape. The crumbling ruins have been reclaimed by nature and dwarf the small figures in the foreground.
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Recognition: North and South
(1865, oil on canvas)
In this work, a wounded Confederate soldier has just discovered the body of his dead Union brother, whom he cradles. The landscape echoes the contrast of life and death represented by the two figures, with a lush, gree forest appearing behind the Confederate soldier and a decaying tree stump hovering above the mortally wounded brother. This powerful painting captures the sorrow of the Civil War (1861-65), one of the darkest chapters in the history of the United States. Neither man in this work wins, an idea that would have resonated with Americans who, around the time this painting was produced, had endured four years of death and destruction and were searching for meaning in the unprecedented carnage.
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Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears (Sarah Choate Sears)
(1899, oil on canvas)
This portrait represents John Singer Sargent's lifelong friend Sarah Sears (nee Choate, 1858-1935), a photographer and patron of the arts in Boston. Her alert pose, intense gaze, and upper-body posture contrast with the seemingly relaxed position of her lower body, demonstrating how Sargent seemed to capture, as one critic wrote, "the nervous tension of the age." Sargent's stunning surface displays of paint connoted elegance and dash, and helped make him the portraitist of choce for the English aristocracy and the American upper class at the turn of the century.
There was an entire section of one of the American galleries devoted to the museum's collection of artwork by Frederic Remington. I like his work very much, and I photographed almost all the works on display.
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The Mier Expedition: The Drawing of the Black Bean
(Prisoners Drawing Their Beans)
(1896, oil on canvas)
This event occurred in 1843, when Texas was a republic. The Mexican army had captured a group of Texans during a border dispute. Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna sentenced all of the prisoners to death, but in response to political pressure he reduced the sentence to one in ten prisoners. Each man drew a bean to determine his fate: a white bean meant the prisoner would live, a black bean meant he would be shot. The painting focuses attention on the prisoner reaching his hand into a jar but gives no clue as to its deciding color.
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Fight for the Waterhole
(1903, oil on canvas)
Here, five gunmen positioned along the edge of a waterhole are engaged in battle with Plains Indians on horseback. Frederic Remington tips the bird's-eye perspective so that the viewer looks down and across the scorched desert plain. The foreboding landscape thus transforms into a powerful element of the unfolding drama. A large shadow on the right side of the waterhole ominously signifies the ever-present threat of death looming in the Western territories during the Indian Wars, and in a more general sense, the passing of the West itself.
Frederic Remington American, 1861-1909
The Scout
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Frederic Remington American, 1861-1909
A New Year on the Cimarron In this painting, the landscape is the seemingly endless unfolding space of a riverbed. Frederic Remington abruptly crops the riverbed in both directions to indicate distance. He also uses an exaggerated and eerie combination of lavender and yellow-green to suggest the distinctive colors he encountered in the West and to establish a mood of contemplation for the frontiersman.
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Aiding a Comrade
(1889-1890, oil on canvas)
Here, Frederic Remington creates tension by suspending the action at its climax. As the riders and horses rush headlong into the viewer's space, the fate of the fallen rider is unclear. Remington's original title for this painting was Past All Surgery, a euphemism for hopelessness, suggesting that the central figure is doomed to be killed by the pursuing Plains Indians. While the facial expressions of the riders appear calm, the rearing heads and flared nostrils o fthe horses convey the horror of the scene.
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The Herd Boy
(c. 1905, oil on canvas)
Here, as in many of REmington's works, the horse carries the emotional weight of the scene. The animal's emaciated haunches, drooping head, and gray-lined, half-cosed eyelids suggest the immediate struggle of the Native American boy and his people, fighting to survive the harsh winter. The landscape also plays an important role. Much of the canvas is given over to a thick, snowy nothingness that sets off the plight of the boy and helps to evoke an image of a "vanishing race."
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The Call for Help (At Bay)
(c. 1908, oil on canvas)
At firt glance, the subject of this painting is difficult to decipher. Much in the same way one's eyes adjust to darkness, forms and patterns begin to emerge out of the gloom, an dthree startled horses threatened by two wolves (or coyotes) come to light. The evocative modd and supernatural quality of this painting and others like it made the WEst look like a timeless dream world- more a state of mind than an actual place. Because of this quality, Remington's nocturnes, or paintings of nighttime scenes, are among his greatest artistic achievements.
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A July Morning
(1899, oil on canvas)
Born into a strict Quaker family in Philadelphia, Daniel Ridgway Knight began his career at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before leaving for Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After a stint in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War, Knight quickly returned to France, taking up permanent residence in Poissy, and found a mentor in the French painter Ernest Meissonnier. Knight's interest in French peasants, often captured during a pause in their work and surrounded by the lush landscape, earned him honors at home and abroad, including gold medals in Paris and Munich in the 1880s.
American Art: Early American Modernism
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Nevada Falls, Yosemite
(1913, oil on canvas)
In 1871, Thomas Moran joined an expedition to Yellowstone, sketching scenery that would inspire his most well-known works of art and bring new views of the American West to the public in the East. Moran's paintings of the canyons, cliffs, and waterfalls in places like Yellowstone and Yosemite inspired critics to declare him "The Dean of American Landscape Painting," and the engravings and lithographs ensured a wide audience for his scenes. His work also drew the attention of members of the U.S. Congress, who, impressed with the beauty and scale of these places, established the National Park Protection Act in 1872.
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The Rendezvous
(c. 1915-20, oil on canvas)
Walter Ufer traveled to Taos, New Mexico, for the first time in 1914 and soon after became an active member of the Taos Society of Artists, an artists' colony founded to promote the unique topography and culture of the Southwest. In Rendezvous, Ufer filled over half the composition with an expansive Southwest sky using his characteristic bright, vivid palette. In the foreground, three Taos Pueblo people stand clustered together wearing traditional dress. Not lon gafter American tourism had nearly reduced the Pueblo tribes to touristic curiosities, Ufer worked hard not to romanticize his figures, but rather to portray them with dignity and respect for their culture.
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Passing By
(c. 1924, oil on canvas)
Shimmering with golden autumnal light, this painting depicts three Taos Pueblo Indians passing by as if in a timeless procession, set against a tapestry-like backdrop of aspen trees. Exhibited in the 1924 Venice Biennale and the winner of the gold medal in the 1926 exhibition at New York's National Academy of Design, Passing By is among the finest paintings produced by Taos Society artist E. Martin Hennings. The Taos Society of Artists was the first art colony established west of the Mississippi River. Followin gthe development of railroad travel and tourism in the Southwest, artists rushed there to embrace the Pueblo culture and the dramatic colors and topography of the desert region.
Thomas Hart Benton American, 1889-1975
Haystack In this scene of farmers at work, the thythmic swirls of paint and lyrical movement of the workers make farm life appear pastoral. Referred to as a Regionalist, Thomas Hart Benton believed that the subjects of American artists should come from the nation's heartland. The themes here- man working in harmony with nature, and the landscape as a source of bounty and sustenance- present an idealized view of the actual hardships that farmers endured during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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Jackson Pollock American, 1912-1956
Man with Hand Plow This painting exemplifies Pollock's early association with the American REgionalist, Thomas Hart Benton, with whom Pollock studied in the early 1930s. This farming image was influenced by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of Benton, represented nearby in Haystack. Pollock recalled, "My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on." And yet, long after Pollock eliminated the elements of social realism from his work, the lyrical, rhythmic style and dynamism that he learned from Benton remained.
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Calero (Antonio Banos)
(1908, oil on canvas)
Believing that the artist must also be a force for social reform, Robert Henri developed a technically adventurous style that was nonetheless grounded in realism. With bold brushwork and pure color, he painted dramatic but un-idealized portraits of ordinary people. Henri made several trips to Spain where he became fascinated with bullfighting. This dashing portrait depicts the picador Antonio Banos. Whereas the matador personifies the glamour and heroism of the bullfighting ritual, the picador plays only a supporting role: his job is to goad the bull.
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American Motherhood
(1922, oil on canvas)
The mother-and-child theme was a favorite of Charles W. Hawthorne, who updates and secularizes the representation of the Madonna and Christ child, an image with a long art-historical tradition. The mother wears a simply designed velvet dress, whose rich color was dubbed "Hawthorne red" by the artist's contemporaries. The figures, linked by gentle touches and by very similar piercing blue eyes, are seated before a background described by the shadows of New England fishing boats.
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Tango
(c. 1918-24, cherry wood and gesso)
Tango, a playful sculpture of a couple engaged in that seductive dance, demonstrates Elie Nadelman's interest in subjects from the world of entertainment rendered in simplified forms, elegant curves, and countercurves. Using the humble medium of cherry wood, Nadelman painted and rubbed the wood to create an aged, roughened surface resembling the witty folk art sculptures of his adopted country, the United States. Of Tango and Nadelman's other dance subjects, Lincoln Kirstein, a founder of New York City Ballet, noted: "Dance-forms have marked epochs since antiquity....[By 1914] the Tango had become another dancing-madness like the medieval choreomania which pranced after the Black Death. Now, one danced in spite of machine guns, tanks, gas masks, or on account of them."
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Bear Glacier, Alaska
(1919, oil on canvas)
Rockwell Kent painted this majestic scene of Alaska during a journey there in the summer of 1918. In Bear Glacier, Alaska, Kent depicts the largest glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park. He was enraptured by Alaska, and by this glacier especially, seeing it as a visual metaphor for eternity and a spiritual touchstone. This shoreline composition has a rhythmic, poetic sensibility visualized in three painted bands representing the sea, mountain, and sky.
Georgia O'Keeffe American, 1887-1986
Spring Tree No. 11 |
Peter Blume American, born Russia, 1906-1992
Study for Parade |
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Grey Lines with Black, Blue, and Yellow
(c. 1923, oil on canvas)
Georgia O'Keeffe was among the first American painters to embrace pure abstraction. In part inspired by the vanguard artists who gathered around Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery, her work was also shaped by the maverick educator Arthur Wesley Dow, with whom she studied at Teachers College in 1914. Dow's principles of composition drew upon a wide range of cources, from architectural decoration and Japanese woodblock prints to forms found in nature. Dow declared: :Study of composition of Line, Mass and Color leads to appreciation of all forms of art and of the beauty of nature. Drawing of natural objects then becomes a language of expression." Grey Lines with Black, Blue, and Yellow demonstrates O'Keeffe's mature command of this "language of expression." The precisely delineated, undulating folds and the organic, three-dimensional forms create an image of potent ambiguity, suggestive of both nature and the infinite.
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Arm Organization
(1914, oil on canvas)
Stanton Macdonald-Wright arrived in Paris from his native California in 1907; at 17, he was determined to become an artist, and he soon immersed himself in the avant-garde salons of the Cubist painters. In 1911 Macdonald-Wright met another American, Morgan Russell, who shared his fascination with the scientific properties of painting, as well as his admiration of Pablo Picasso and Robert Delaunay. Together Macdonald-Wright and Russell issued the Synchromist manifesto in 1913, proclaiming that the transcendental nature of music could also be achieved by color harmonies. Arm Organization exemplified Wright's prismatic use of color in accord with Synchromist principles. While at first glance the composition appears to be purely abstract, the color discs are based on the pattern created by a torso's musculature, most probably inspired by Michelangelo's Dying Slave, a sculpture Macdonald-Wright often sketched while studying at the Louvre.
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Abstraction
(c. 1914, oil on paperboard, mounted on panel)
In Abstraction, Marsden Hartley uses pure, unixed color to create a triangular arrangement of shapes- disks, stripes, and curves. These forms convey a sense of monumentality and permanence, intensified by their vibrating colors. Although the painting is abstract, the image seems to be inspired by "real" objects that fascinated Hartley, such as mountains and the German military regalia that he had encountered during a trip to Berlin.
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Excursion into Philosophy
(1959, oil on canvas)
In this work, Hopper isolates a man and woman in a sparingly decorated room, lacking personal effects and suggesting a hotel room. The man stares at an abstract patch of light on the floor while a partially dressed woman lies beside him. She is perhaps his lover. Hopper reduces the picture's details to the bare essentials in order to focus the viewer's attention upon the stark loneliness of the scene. The two people are together, yet also isolated from each other. At first glance, Hopper's paintings like this one depict seemingly mundane everyday subjects, but they often encompass an underlying subtext that is deeply complex and psychological. Hopper's wife, Jo, described Excursion into Philosophy to a friend as he was painting it, as: "Man staring a spot of sunlight on floor and scandalous background. Did he kill her? Can't tell yet."
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Gloucester Harbor
(1938, oil on canvas, mounted on panel)
Stuart Davis fragments the elements that make up this harbor scene in Massachusetts- sea, boats, piers, buoys, tackle, and flag- and represents them with patterns of bright color arranged to convey a lively rhythm. Davis, in fact, conceived of compositions such as this one in terms of the staccato pulse of American jazz.
Other Artworks
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Virgin and Child
(c. 1450-70, glazed terra cotta)
A charming tenderness- seen here in the interaction between the Virgin and Christ child- in relatively small-scale works in terra cotta is the characteristic of Luca della Robbia's work for which he is best known today. In his lifetime, he was highly respected for his sculptures in marble and bronze as well, and ran an enormous workshop. His contemporary, the architect and author Leon Battista Alberti praised della Robbia, comparing him to the sculptors Donatello and Lorenzo Ghiberti, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, and the painter Massacio.
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Scenes of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ
(1541, oil on double-sided panel)
This panel was probably the central part of a relatively small, freestanding altarpiece, which could also be viewed from the rear. The monochromatic reverse of the panel shows, from left to right: the Flagellation; Christ before Pilate; the Crowning with Thorns and the Mocking of Christ; the Road to Calvary as the focus of the image; and the two thieves taken to Calvary. On the obverse, the dramatic Resurrection is featured in the center; minor scenes the follow the REsurrection are, from left to right: Christ appearing to his Mother and Saint John; Christ appearing to the Holy Women; Christ on the Road to Emmaus; and the "Noli Me Tangere," in which Christ appears to Mary Magdalene but does not allow her to touch him. The Crucifixion is not depicted and may have appeared as a sculpture above the painting.
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Fruit Market
(c. 1630, oil on canvas)
Exceptional in its grand scale, this painting offered the artist the opportunity to depict not only a variety of fruits, but also flowers, dead fowl, and intricate woven baskets. Strong contrasts of light and dark, as well as a low viewpoint, make the objects project forcefully into the viewer's space. The fly on the melon at left adds to the illusion of reality.
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The Rape of Europa
(1644, oil on canvas)
The subject of this painting was popularized by the ancient Roman poet Ovid in his metamorphoses, written at the turn of the first century. In ancient mythology, Jupiter fell in love with Europa, a beautiful Phoenician princess, and, disguising himself as a white bull, came to where she played by the seashore with her attendants. Seduced by the animal's pleasant appearance, Europa bestowed a garland of flowers upon him and climbed on his back. Jupiter then plunged suddenly into the sea and abducted the pricess to the Island of Crete.
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Hercules Killing the Centaur Nessus
(c. 1700, oil on canvas)
This painting represents a story from the life of the Greek hero Hercules, in which Hercules and his bride Dejanira are offered help to cross a river by the centaur Nessus. After carrying Dejanira across, Nessus attempts to rape her, but Hercules comes to his bride's rescue. According to the myth, Hercules shot Nessus with a poisoned arrow, but here Sebastiano Ricci has armed Hercules with his traditional club, deriving the pose of his hero from a well-known painting of Hercules and the Hydra by Guido Reni (which is now in the Musee du Louvre in Paris).
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Antonio Francesco Peruzzini
Italian, 1646/47-1724
Worshippers at a Shrine in a Mountainous Landscape
(c. 1716-17, oil on canvas)
The works of Genoese artist Alessandro Magnasco are marked by a bravura painting technique scarcely matched in his time. Forms are suggested rather than defined, and drips and flicks of paint attest to the energy with which he created his paintings. Magnasco's subject matter is also unusual: the paintings are peopled by elongated figures, often monks, pilgrims, and peasants, engaged in sometimes enigmatic activities. Here, peasants led by a monk or hermit kneel around a strange altar, upon which rest a skull, two candles, and a column topped by a cross. Magnasco often collaborated with landscape and architecture specialists, and the wild and mountainous setting in this work was painted by Antonio Francesco Peruzzini.
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Last Supper
(probably 1720s, oil on canvas)
Sebastiano Ricci's composition focuses on the central figures of Christ and John the Evangelist and portrays Christ's blessing of the bread, the crucial moment of the Last Supper, with considerable drama. Yet, in a manner typical of Venetian painting since the 15th century, Ricci adds details to elaborate the biblical text, such as the woman with the basket of laundry at the left and the dog licking a plate, prominently placed in the foreground.
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View of the Dogana and S. Maria della Salute, Venice
(c. 1740, oil on canvas)
View paintings, or vedute, were expansive scenes of famous monuments and sights that every tourist encountered. The genre reached its greatest expression in 18th-century Venice, with artists such as Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, and the short-lived Michele Marieschi. Works such as this view of one of the most recognizable churches in Venice were prized by both Venetians and visitors to the city, especially those from Great Britain.
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Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness
(1761, oil on canvas)
Anton Raphael Mengs was one of the most well-known artists in Europe in his time, and he was as famous for his artistic theories as for his paintings. Mengs was a leader in the growing Neoclassical movement, which, fueled by the excavations of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, looked to antiquity for inspiration. Saint John the Baptist exemplifies classical principles of clarity, beauty, and grandeur.
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Don Vicente Isabel Osorio de Moscoso y Alvarez de Toledo, Conde de Trastamara
(c. 1787-88, oil on canvas)
In this painting, ten-year-old Don Vicente Isabel Osorio de Moscoso y Alvarez de Toledo y Gonzaga appears against a plain background in a suit of golden-brown silk, composed of a cutaway jacket, knee-length breeches with jeweled buckles, and a buttoned waistcoat into which he has inserted his right hand. He is wearing a wig, or his natural hair has been curled, powdered, and pulled back into a ponytail tied with a black ribbon. He holds a tricorne hat under his left arm, and rests the fingers of his left hand on the hilt of a small sword at his waist. He wears white stockings and black leather pumps. A jabot and cuffs of frothy lace complete the outfit. On the left, a pet dog clamors for attention at his feet.
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Portrait Bust of John Paul Jones (1747-1792)
(modeled 1780, cast 1787-89, plaster with terracotta paint)
John Paul Jones was the most distinguished and popular naval hero of the American Revolution. Following the war, he traveled to Paris, where he was widely celebrated and was asked to join a Masonic lodge. The lodge commissioned Jean-Antoine Houdon, the foremost French sculptor, to make a portrait bust of the young American hero. Jones was so pleased with the bust that he ordered a number of replicas, like this one, for his illustrious friends and countrymen, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.
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Ballerina, a Bay Mare Belonging to the Earl of Clarendon, in a Landscape at the Grove, near Waxford, Hertfordshire
(1801, oil on canvas)
George Stubbs was recognized as one of the most gifted painters of horses during his lifetime. (Although he seems to have been challenged when it came to naming his works.) His sensitivity for the animals' physical beauty and their spirit was so extraordinary that many proud owners commissioned true portraits of their steeds. Here, the sleek, beautifully-groomed bay mare "Ballerina" is standing in the foreground of an idyllic English landscape. As in many other pictures of horses, Stubbs has included the owner's country seat- in this case, the Earl of Clarendon's imposing house in Hertfordshire- in the background.
(The Loyd Seapiece) (1808, oil on canvas) |
Turner was perhaps the pre-eminent landscape painter of his day, acclaimed as the greatest and most universal of British painters. This painting shows the view southeast from the great naval and merchant shipping anchorage at the confluence of the rivers Thames and Medway, where the estuary is six miles wide. Turner would have observed the scene from a boat riding low in the choppy water, probably one similar to the fishing boat that he depicts in the right foreground of the painting. On the left, the sun rises majestically, throwing a glittering path across the waves and silhouetting the rigging of an old man-of-war used as a guard ship; on the right, the shoreline of the Dentish town of Sheerness is visible. The troughs and peaks of the sea- terrifyingly immediate from this low viewpoint- are echoed in the eddies of the clouds, which are alive with turbulence.
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A Bull Fight
(1853, oil on canvas)
This painting of two bulls fighting, with a cow looking on from a safe distance and a small dog barking anxiously, has become a Houston favorite. The artist, a renowned animal painter who repeated this successful composition several times, submitted this version to the famous Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855. Having studied the Louvre's rich collection of Dutch 17th-century animal paintings, Bracassat here displays not only his mastery of this genre, but also allows the scene to be understood as a metaphor of human behavior.
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Empress Eugenie
(1854, oil on canvas)
When the young Spanish Countess Eugenie de Montijo married Napoleon III in 1853, one of the most beautiful and elegant women acceded to the French throne. Keenly aware of the role that her predecessors had played, she emulated the most fashionable of all queens ever to have occupied the throne, Marie Antoinette. Franz Winterhalter's success as a portraitist of the crowned heads of Europe reached its zenith during the Second Empire thanks to the patronage of Empress Eugenie and the French court.
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The Great Oaks of Old Bas-Breau
(1864, oil on canvas)
Theodore Rousseau was the leader of the Barbizon group of painters, named after a small village in the forest of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris. These artists gathered regularly to paint scenes of rural France in a naturalistic style, as opposed to idealized images of Italy, which had been the subject of traditional French landscape painting for 200 years. Here Rousseau portrays a grove of gigantic, aged oak trees near Barbizon, their wild branches and gnarled limbs stretching up toward the turquoise sky.
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The Gust of Wind
(c. 1865, oil on canvas)
Courbet's largest canvas devoted solely to landscape, was commissioned to decorate a room in a grand Parisian house. The artist was probably asked to paint a storm, and he approached the task with ferocious energy. The site is likely located in the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, but the addition of the hills in the background transpose this landscape into a fantasy. Adopting striking greens, russets, blues, ochres, and umbers, Courbet's expressive and forceful handling of paint anticipates stylistic developments of the 20th century.
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The Elder Sister
(1869, oil on canvas)
Among the most successful professional painters of his time, William Bouguereau was the prized product of the official French art system. A graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome, and a member of the French Academy, he was also a great favorite on the art market. Bouguereau's smooth pain application, diligent attention to detail, balanced composition, and appealing subject matter made paintings like this one irresistible to all but the young avant-garde painters of the time, for whom Bouguereau was an artistic anathema.
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Still Life with Bouquet
(1871, oil on canvas)
This work is a resume, in the form of a still life, of the artistic influences on Pierre-Auguste REnoir's early career. The print depicted hanging on the wall is an etching by the leader of early Impressionism, Edouard Manet, of a painting in the Louvre by the 17th-century realist painter Diego Velazquez. The print, along with the objects arrayed on the table- the bouquet of roses wrapped in crisp florist's paper, the Asian fan and vase, and the leather-bound books- strike a tone of fashionable modernity.
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Mademoiselle Boissiere Knitting
(1877, oil on canvas)
Caillebotte regularly painted scenes of family life. Here he pictures his father's homely sister-in-law in a room filled with beautiful textures and patterns of marquetry, wallpaper, and chintz. Because he was independently wealthy, Caillebotte was not compelled to sell his paintings. His work was relatively unknown until recent decades, when a renewed appreciation of his work returned him to the fold of celebrated Impressionists.
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Portrait of Emile Bernard
(c. 1889, oil on canvas)
Notice the exposed canvas areas lined with tacking holes and the unusual slanted composition of this portrait of the artist Emile Bernard by his friend Schuffenecker. This painting was originally placed in paneling on a stairwell in one of the inns at Pont-Aven. Many of the public buildings in Pont-Aven were decorated by artists.
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Jeanne Pissarro
(1895, oil on canvas)
This portrait of camille Pissarro's fourteen-year-old daughter shows van Rysselberghe's ability to express a personal feeling for his sitter while applying the systematic brush strokes of Pointillism. Much more than the other Pointillists, he was devoted to portraiture.
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Woman Writing in an Interior
(1904, oil on board)
In this intriguing study of light, Vallotton depicts the interior of a Parisian apartment lit by a window and by a bright poster affixed to the face of the building opposite. A woman sits writing at a desk, surrounded by paintings. Two of Vallotton's own works are displayed on the back wall.
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Reclining Nude
(1905, oil on canvas)
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The Turning Road, L'Estaque
(1906, oil on canvas)
In this masterpiece, Andre Derain's color, glowing in flat-patterned shapes or exploding into sprays of broken brush strokes, is intended more to be expressive of the artist's feelings than descriptive of the particular landscape. The curving road, the tree trunks and branches, and the choreographed forms of villagers all sway to an integrated rhythm. The harmonious composition controls the brilliant, vibrant colors.
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The Saint-Martin Canal
(1906, oil on canvas)
When Fauvism shocked the art world at the Salon d'Automne in 1905, Georges Braque was profoundly impressed by the freedom of composition and flamboyant color of that radical style. Although this painting of a commercial waterway in Paris bears a resemblance to Impressionist works, the artist's use of vibrant color is drawn directly from the Fauves.
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Landscape at Valmondois
(c. 1912, oil on canvas)
This brooding, geometrical composition, in which the dark and somber colors were applied in great sweeps of paint, reveals the influence of Paul Cezanne. Vlaminck's admiration for Cezanne's work caused a dramatic change in his own painting style. His work became more linear, and gone were the bold vibrant Fauve colors of his earlier paintings.
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Sketch 160A
(1912, oil on canvas)
Vasily Kandinsky expected voewers to respond emotionally and spiritually to works like this one. The carefully nuanced colors and quizzical lines and marks are intended to enact a vibration in the viewer's soul. Though he would soon practice what he referred to as "pure abstraction," in this painting Kandinsky has not completely broken from the natural world: the attentive viewer will locate a bird, a horse and rider, and mysterious organic forms.
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Leopold Zborowski
(1916, oil on canvas)
Modigliani painted several portraits of Leopold Zborowski, a Polish poet who met the artist in their bohemian Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse. Moved by the beauty of Modigliani's work, Zborowski committed himself to Modliglianai's career, supporting the artist financially even though Zborowski himself was poor. When Zborowski died, he was so deeply in debt that his widow was forced to sell his entire Modigliani collection- including this painting.
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Terrace in the Garden near Lake Wannsee towards Northwest
(1916, oil on canvas)
For more than 20 years, Max Liebermann, the leading German Impressionist, devoted himself to capturing the beauties of his garden on Lake Wannsee just outside Berlin. Much like Claude Monet at Giverny, Liebermann explored his garden from every angle, but the terrace with its strict geometric design was his favorite motif. The heavy impasto used to depict the blue and yellow flower beds stands in marked contrast to the open brushwork of the delicate flowering bushes in the background.
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The Corn Poppy
(c. 1919, oil on canvas)
The model for this painting was a female figure of "La Folle Epoque"- the "flapper days" in Paris. Named for the sitter's brilliant red hat, the work was instantly popular and has been reproduced in many forms. Van Dongen's portraits of women portray an intense sensuality, suggestive of the decadent lifestyle of the "smart set" during this lively period between the world wars.
(1920, oil on canvas) |
Although not a primary innovator among the Cubist avant-garde, Fernand Leger was foremost among the artists who helped popularize the movement. Fascinated by the colors and rhythms of the modern city, Leger moved confidently towards pure abstraction in his early paintings. However, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he was called up for military service, and his experience of trench warfare profoundly reshaped the direction of his art. He later recalled, "I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight. It was the magic of light on the white metal. That's all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912-1913." "Man with a Cane" demonstrates how Leger continued to play with abstract forms during his return to more recognizable subjects. It is part of an extended series of paintings that capture the Jazz Age ehythms of postwar Paris, the largest of which is The City (1919), now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Four years later Leger literally set his compositions in motion with Ballet Mechanique (Mechanical Ballet) (1924), a film that includes a sequence with a cut-out cartoon figure of Charlie Chaplin, the greatest "man with a cane" of the 20th century.
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Painting (Circus)
(1927, oil on canvas)
Joan Miro arrived in Paris from his native Spain in 1920, and he was among the first painters to join the Surrealist group in 1924. The Surrealists's use of dreams as a source of crativity had an immediate appeal to the young artist, and over the following decade he combined such techniques as automatism with free association to create what he called "dream paintings" o funcommon beauty. However, Miro never gave up control of his canvases, explaining, "The first stage is free, unconscious...[but] the second stage is carefully calculated." Like many members of the Paris avant-garde, Miro was also fascinated by the circus, and he painted a number of circus-themed paintings in the mid-1920s that suggest rather than depict the playful antics of this popular form of entertainment. Painting (Circus) possesses the sense of reverie typical of his dream paintings: form seeem to be stripped of narrative meaning and float in deep blue space, suggestive of an indefinite state of twilight. Yet, for Miro, a triangle could also signify the pointed cap of a jester and a dotted line the path of a trotting horse.
(1938, oil on canvas) |
Henri Matisse began work on this monumental decoration on November 16, 1938, and completed it less than three weeks later. He chose his favorite models, Lydia Delectorskaya and her friend Helene Galitzine, to pose for the four female figures seen here, three of whom listen dreaily to the performer standing at lower right. Reflecting the captivating effect of the music, the quartet's bodies are defined with sweeping arabesques and graceful, unrestrained lines. Matisse freely used blocks of background color to set off each figure and to emphasize the complementary rhythms in the overall composition. The unusual shape and frame of the painting reflects its original purpose. It was commissioned by oil heir Nelson A. Rockefeller for his glamorous New York City apartment, created by the architect Wallace K. Harrison and decored by Jean-Michel Frank. Describing this project, Rockefeller boasted that Harrison had "designed two fireplaces in the living room with space for two great murals around them, and our friends Henri Matisse and Fernand Leger accepted commissions to undertake the murals. Matisse did the mural in Paris from full-scale drawings of the fireplace." Matisse adapted his composition masterfully to this challenge, with one of the figures languidly draped across what would have been the original fireplace mantel. Here is a closeup of this figure.
(1962, oil on canvas) |
This painting portrays Picasso's second wife, Jacqueline Roque. It is part of an extended series of works that document both Picasso's fascination with the creative process and the constant metamorphosis of Roque's image during their many years together.
Woman with a Large Hat is rendered with vivid colors and bold lines that set up a strong fisual rhythm across the canvas. Picasso also employs the compositional devices he first used in his early Cubist work of the 1910s, creating a tension between frontal and profile views and between flat patterns and the strong, sensual presence of his beloved model.
That's quite a selection of artwork from the Beck Pavilion at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, but of course you haven't yet seen the works from the actual Van Gogh exhibit that we saw earlier; those will appear on their own page coming up. I always find it interesting to not only photograph the artworks but also their descriptions, so that I can review them later at my leisure. I hope that you found them interesting as well. Prudence did photograph some other works that she liked, but didn't also photograph their descriptions, so I am simply including them below. As above, just click on a thumbnail to see the larger image.
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In the Caroline Wiess Law Building
Towards the end of the same day that we went through the Van Gogh exhibit, we had occasion to stop in to the other main downtown building of the Museum of Fine Arts- the Law Pavilion. As it turned out, there was an underground tunnel from the Beck Galleries over to this building, so we decided to take the tunnel over to see what it was like.
As it turned out, we only walked through the first floor space, and stopped on the mezzanine to see one of the temporary exhibits that was advertised with placards on the first floor. On the first floor, there was a large open area with a screen and a few rows of benches on which patrons could sit to watch the film playing on the screen. The film was an odd one- no narration, hardly any sound at all, and seemingly unrelated to any of the artwork on display elsewhere.
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(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls) |
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There was an exhibit that we saw advertised on the main floor, so we went upstairs to have a look at it:
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As it turned out, the artist is a photographer, but one who uses techniques long out of favor, but the results of which are undeniably quite beautiful. Here are two of her works:
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Fought 10 miles north of Richmond the capital of the Confederacy, in the spring of 1864, the sprawling Battle of Cold Harbor "was not war," as Confederate General Evander Law observed, "it was murder." Mann conveyed the horrific nature of the battle not only by allowing the picture to fade into darkness at the edges but also through the horizontal streaks (probably caused by dust on the collodion negative) that fly like bullets across it.
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We enjoyed our time in both buildings of the Museum of Fine Arts a very great deal, and we thank Prudence very, very much for bringing us to Houston to experience not only the museum itself, but also the Van Gogh exhibit.
You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.
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The Johnson Space Center |
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The McGovern Centennial Gardens |
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Return to the Index Page for our Trip to Houston |
