#museum of new americans

[oncanvas]

Central Park and the Plaza, William Anderson Coffin, 1917-18

Oil on canvas 24 ¼ x 29 ¼ in. (61.6 x 74.3 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, USA

[lionofchaeronea]

Moorish Prince (aka Head of an Algerian), Elizabeth Nourse, 1897

[uwmspeccoll]

Milestone Monday

The Morse Dry Dock Dial, 1921

New York Movie, 1939

Houses of Squam Light, 1923

Interior, 1925

Self Portrait, 1904

Cape Ann Granite, 1928

Night Windows, 1928

Jo Painting, 1936

Nighthawks, 1942

Cape Cod Morning, 1950

July 22nd marks the birthday of American realist painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Born in Nyack, New York, Hopper took to art at a young age exploring shadows and shapes through charcoal drawings. By age ten, he started to sign and date his work and, with his parents' encouragement, spent his teen years delving into watercolor and oil painting. Declaring his professional interest in art, Hopper attended the New York School of Art and went on to become a renowned figure in American Realism.  

Like many before him, Hopper started his career in commercial illustration to pay the bills but by the late twenties he was supporting himself through showing and selling his paintings. Hopper’s work explores architectural American environments and intimate rural scenes through a lens of solitude. The dramatic moods of his paintings are created through his expertise in capturing light and shadow to convey the subtilties of human experience.  

In celebration of the day, we’re sharing Edward Hopper: a catalogue raisonné published in 1995 by Whitney Museum of American Art and edited by art historian Gail Levin (b. 1948). The three-volume catalog is a definitive work on Hopper featuring essays on the artist and hundreds of plates encompassing the entire scope of his career. Scholars will delight at the publication’s inclusion of bibliographic details including provenance and exhibition histories attributed to most pieces.  

Read other Milestone Monday posts here.

– Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern

[amnhnyc]

🎄Explore the Origami Tree and The Secret World of Elephants during your next trip to the Museum!

[arthistoryanimalia]

For #WorldHoneyBeeDay 🍯🐝:

Perfume Bottle, c.1893Designed by Paulding Farnham (USA, 1859-1927) for Tiffany & Co.

Gold, agate, yellow sapphires, demantoid garnets, red garnets, amethyst

3 5/8 x 1 7/8 x 1 7/8 in., 212.9 Grams (9.2 x 4.8 x 4.8 cm, 6.845 Troy Ounces)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 65.143

“The agate body of this perfume bottle was carved to resemble honeycomb, while the gold and silver ornament depicting bees and honeysuckle flowers continues the theme. Originally, a conical yellow sapphire adorned the top of the lid. The report by the French ministry of commerce on Tiffany’s display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago highlighted this bottle as a particularly fine and original example of the firm’s oeuvre.”

[henk-heijmans]

Le Bistro or The Wine Shop, 1909, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City - by Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967), American

[garadinervi]

Angela Y. Davis, January 26, 1944 / 2024

(image: from A Political Biography of Angela Davis, New York Committee to Free Angela Davis, New York, NY, 1972. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.)

[kyouka-supremacy]

(˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)

[clairity-org]

Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956, Oil and paper on canvas, 2/17/24 #whitneymuseum by Sharon Mollerus

[kecobe]

Subway, New York Louis Stettner (American; 1922–2016) 1946 (printed 1980s) Gelatin silver print SFMOMA, San Francisco, California

[artsandculture]

Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) 🎨 Andy Warhol 🏛️ The Museum of Modern Art 📍 New York City, United States

Andy Warhol famously appropriated familiar images from consumer culture and mass media, among them celebrity and tabloid news photographs, comic strips, and, in this work, the widely consumed canned soup made by the Campbell’s Soup Company. When he first exhibited Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962, the canvases were displayed together on shelves, like products in a grocery aisle. At the time, Campbell’s sold 32 soup varieties; each one of Warhol’s 32 canvases corresponds to a different flavor. (The first flavor the company introduced, in 1897, was tomato).

Though Campbell’s Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which Warhol was inspired, its canvases are hand-painted, and the fleur de lys pattern ringing each can’s bottom edge is hand-stamped. Warhol mimicked the repetition and uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety. Warhol said of Campbell’s soup, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.”

Towards the end of 1962, shortly after he completed Campbell’s Soup Cans, Warhol turned to the photo-silkscreen process. A printmaking technique originally invented for commercial use, it would become his signature medium and link his art making methods more closely to those of advertisements. “I don’t think art should be only for the select few,” he claimed, “I think it should be for the mass of the American people.”

[oncanvas]

Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, Beulah Bettersworth, 1934

Oil on canvas 30 ⅛ x 24 ¼ in. (76.5 x 61.5 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, USA

[lionofchaeronea]

Morning Sun, Edward Hopper, 1952

[uwmspeccoll]

Spotlight: Faith Ringgold

92-year-old Faith Ringgold is arguably one of the most consequential African American artists of her generation, well-known for her paintings, mixed-media sculpture, performance work, and especially for her narrative quilts. A year ago, February 17, 2022, the New Museum in New York opened the retrospective exhibition “Faith Ringgold: American People,” the most comprehensive survey to date of the work of Faith Ringgold, whose groundbreaking art and political activism span more than sixty years.

These images are from the catalog of that exhibition, also titled Faith Ringgold: American People, edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari and published in New York by Phaidon Press in 2022. The catalog features 11 essays by prominent writers and an interview with the artist, and covers work from all periods of Ringgold’s career, including her early civil rights-era figurative paintings, her graphic political protest posters, and her signature experimental story quilts.

Click or tap on the images for more detail.

The Flag is Bleeding #2: The American Collection #6, 1997. Acrylic on canvas with painted and pieced fabric. 76 x 79.5 in.

View more Black History Month posts.

[amnhnyc]

The Museum’s Origami Tree opens to visitors today—come get into the holiday spirit! The theme of this year’s 13-ft (4-m) tree is Proboscideans on Parade, featuring garlands and origami models inspired by the new exhibition The Secret World of Elephants. It’s adorned with more than 1,000 origami models, including wooly mammoths and iconic Museum exhibits like the Blue Whale and Tyrannosaurus rex.

Produced in partnership with OrigamiUSA, the tree is delightfully decorated with hand-folded paper models created by local, national, and international origami artists.

Photo: Alvaro Keding / © AMNH

[arthistoryanimalia]

For #InternationalRabbitDay 🐰:

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (British-American, 1819–1905)

#Rabbits on a Log, 1897

Oil on canvas, 10 x 12 in. (25.4 x 30.8 cm)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1979.490.7