American Art
Pre-Columbian ArtUnited States of America
PRE-COLUMBIAN ART
In 1967, Krannert Art Museum acquired a substantial number of ancient Peruvian art objects from the private collection of Fred Olsen of Guilford, Connecticut. The 625 pieces in this group represent all major art styles known from the various pre-Columbian cultures that flourished in Peru before European contact. Works range from the Chavin-inspired coastal culture of Cupisnique (c. 750 B.C.) to the highland cultures of Huari (c. 700-1100 A.D.) and Inca (c. 1400-1532). All works in this gallery were retrieved from tombs and should be interpreted as examples of funerary art, or objects that accompanied the deceased in their journey.
Gifts from a number of private individuals have made the acquisition of objects in the pre-Columbian collection possible.
Burial Mantle, Nasca (c. 100 BCE)
Peruvian, 2nd century BCE
Textile: wool needlework border with cotton weave
73" x 57"
Gift of Fred Olsen and the Art Acquisition Fund 1967-29-56
The art of weaving was of particular importance in pre-Columbian Peru and produced aesthetically outstanding pieces. In addition to three representative border fragments from the Paracas peninsula (c. 300-100 B.C.) one large burial shroud should be singled out. This exceptionally well preserved textile from Nasca (c. 100 B.C.) shows a monochrome cotton center. Around its borders have been positioned numerous needlework hummingbirds, most likely made of alpaca wool and created in a technique called needle-knitting, related to embroidery. The contrast between the sober central part of this mortuary textile and its colorful borders is masterful.
The ancient Peruvians considered the hummingbird a symbol of regeneration, possibly suggested by the behavior of this tiny bird. In the Andean mountains--the habitat of some kinds of hummingbirds--the nights are very chilly. The hummingbird sleeps at night, and to revive its energy, the hummingbird needs to be warmed by the rays of the sun. The ancient Peruvians interpreted this peculiar behavior as a resurrection of the bird, a rebirth to a new life.
Ceremonial drum, Nasca (c. 100 BCE)
Peruvian Ceramic: earthenware with black, orange, brown, and cream slip
18 3/4 x 15"
Gift of Fred Olsen and the Art Acquisition Fund 1967-29-110
Another notable Nasca work is a ceramic drum, shaped as a large bowl. A skin was originally drawn tightly over its opening. This piece is decorated with whippoorwill, which may have had a special ancient religious significance. The whippoorwill generally appears in the sky just before nightfall. Therefore, the bird seems to announce the darker side of life.
In ancient cultures, drums and other musical instruments were used at moments of transition, at important moments in the lives of human beings. They would be played at birth, at initiation, at weddings, and at one of the most important rites of passage, death itself. Perhaps this drum was used to announce the death of an important person and was subsequently buried with that person.
The drum recently underwent extensive conservation procedures that revealed new information about its original appearance.
Material analyses of this object are described in the Science in the Art Museum in the Explorer area.
Model Funeral Cortege (c. 1200-1450 CE)
Peruvian, Chimu-Chancay Metalwork: silver alloy
6 3/4" x 25" x 11"
Gift of Fred Olsen and the Art Acquisition Fund 1967-29-303
A Chimu-Chancay silver assemblage (c. 1200-1450 A.D.) is the most spectacular piece in this gallery and shows a funerary procession in surprising detail.
Two men carry an oval burial casket, followed by four men carrying an empty throne. The first three pallbearers are shown with rounded heads, while the other three are portrayed with rectangular heads and headdresses, possibly indicating a distinction in rank or dynastic affiliation. The transition from power to death is succinctly symbolized in this impressive work of art.
A precious example of Peruvian silversmithing, it is the only artifact of this kind in a museum outside Peru. The figures and their burdens were constructed from prefabricated sections of silver soldered together and then sewn to the cloth-covered reed mat that forms the base.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Cerney la Ville-French Farm (1867)
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
American, 19th century
Painting: oil on panel
10 9/16" x 18 1/16" unframed
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Merle J. Trees 1940-1-3
Among the most important artists in the relatively brief history of American art is Winslow Homer. His paintings of rural New England farms, the Adirondacks, and the Atlantic shoreline have become symbols of the American way of life. Homer was born in Boston in 1836, was largely self-taught, and began his artistic career as a lithographer. He first produced sheet music covers and later became an illustrator for Harper's Weekly. To travel and paint in France was the dream of many 19th-century American artists, and Homer painted this image of a small village not far from Paris during his ten-month French sojourn in 1867.
It is the only known painting from his trip. His unusual choice of a mahogany panel as a painting surface may have been inspired by French painters of the Barbizon school, some of whom were said to have painted door panels to pay their expenses at a country inn. Like the Barbizon painters, Homer gives us a prospect observed for its own interest, without prettifying sentiment. He lets the wide sky and the flat land alone enhance the geometric shapes of the farm buildings. The buildings, clustered along the horizon, contrast with the dynamic stream of clouds across the sky. The painting's largeness of vision belies its small size.
Snake Jug
Cornwall and Wallace Kirkpatrick (Anna Potteries)
American, 19th century Ceramic: glazed earthenware
12" h. x 10" diam.
Gift of the Department of Ceramic Engineering, University of Illinois 1980-5-54
Along the Ohio River in the nineteenth century, pottery making, using the available clay, was one of the local industries. Working at their pottery factory in Anna, Illinois, the Kirkpatrick brothers, Cornwall (1814-90) and Wallace (1828-96), produced utilitarian ceramics such as sewer pipes. They also made imaginatively decorated vessels for household use; even a chimney pot in their hands could become a whimsical sculpture.
The "little brown jug" where the whisky was kept was a controversial item in the American home during the temperance movement. This jug, like many a work of temperance propaganda, joins drink with images of snakes and devilish figures crawling in and out and over the whiskey jug -- moralizing, to be sure, but at the same time quite functional. Cornwall Kirkpatrick's humorous interpretation may also have drawn inspiration from snakes on one of the popular copies of Palissy ware displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.
Burnished blackware bowl (1925-1943)
Maria Martinez (1887-1980) and Santana Martinez (1897-1943)
American, 20th century
Ceramic: reduction-fired earthenware
4 1/6" x 4 1/2"
Bequest of the Estate of W. A. Neiswanger 1978-16-1
The making of distinctive decorated pottery in America was an art native to the Southwest, where some potters still follow a technology developed centuries before contact with the Europeans. In making this bowl, Maria Martinez (1887-1980) collaborated with her daughter-in-law, Santana. Their unglazed vessels use the natural properties of the clay; the blackening is achieved by controlling the flow of oxygen during firing, the same principle used by the ancient Greeks. The water-serpent motif, symbolizing rain, thanksgiving, and prayer for rain, combines abstract and traditional elements and is strikingly modern. Maria Martinez, a Tewa, lived at San Ildefonso Pueblo in north-central New Mexico and achieved international recognition for her outstanding work.
Romanesque Façade, 1949
Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974)
American, 20th century
Painting: oil on canvas
48" x 35-3/4"
Festival of Arts Purchase Fund 1951-6-2
Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) was born in New York, began study at the Art Students League in 1919, and two years later left for Paris to study art and travel throughout Europe. Returning to New York in 1923, he became part of an influential group of immigrant European and American artists who became known as `abstract expressionists' -- Rothko, Hofmann, de Kooning, Pollock, Kline. Romanesque Façade of 1948 is an example of Gottlieb's unique pictographs, characterized by the use of signs, symbols, calligraphics and hieroglyphics.Here rectangles, ovals and squares dominate the canvas, each individual image set within its own compartment and layered atop the other. Pictographs are "all-over" paintings, that is, there are no beginnings or ends and no distinct focal points.
The emphasis is on flatness, frontality and apparent abstraction, without the illusion of volume or space. Nevertheless, the title of the work refers to something quite literal, the front of a Romanesque church -- the architectural style dominant in the eleventh through twelfth centuries in Western Europe and characterized by massive stone blocks and a generally heavy appearance. In the center of Gottlieb's painting is a circle with orange dots that may be interpreted as a stained-glass rose window on the façade of such a structure. The artist has also indicated what seems to be the plan of the building. The directional arrow at the lower right may allude to a map, providing clues about how to enter the imaginary church and move through its aisles according to liturgical ritual.
Number 13, 1949
Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970)
American, 20th century
55-7/8" x 27-13/16
Gift of Walter Bareiss 1955-16-1
Born in Russia in 1903, Rothko immigrated to the United States in 1913, settling in Portland, Oregon, and studying at Yale University between 1921 and 1923. He moved to New York two years later and studied Cubism and Surrealism at the Art Student's League. His earliest exhibitions were in 1933 at the Contemporary Arts Gallery and the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum, and he was a founding member of a group of artists known as "The Ten" which exhibited annually from 1935 to 1940. In 1936 and 1937 he was involved in the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. His first important solo exhibition was at the Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century Gallery in 1945. From this point he was associated with the New York School and abstract expressionism, which included Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline.
Rothko's version of abstract expressionism, however, was much unlike Pollock's dramatic gestural drips. Instead he used color fields emerging from an undefined monochromatic ground, where tones echo one another and color values progress very subtly. In Number 13, adjacent rectangles of orange and purple and other irregular, blurred-edged rectangles and squares are set against a closely harmonizing background of pale yellow. These shapes appear to float evocatively over the surface, hovering in an ambiguously defined space. In terms of technique, Rothko used an unprimed canvas and directly stained the canvas fabric with many thin washes, paying close attention to the edges where the fields of color interact. The effect is one of light radiating from within the canvas itself, giving it an "all-over" translucent appearance. The still, shimmering veils of color prompt a calm, contemplative mood in the viewer. Unlike Pollock's Action Painting, there is no trace of the energetic, individual brush stroke, thus no trace of the artist's own presence.
Moon Animal, 1950
William Baziotes (1912 - 1963)
American, 20th century
Painting: oil on canvas
43" x 36-1/4"
Festival of Arts Purchase Fund 1951-6-1
The son of Greek immigrants, William Baziotes (1912-1963) was born in Philadelphia and later studied at the National Academy of Design in New York from 1933-36. In 1936 he was hired by the Works Progress Administration to teach art at the Queens Children's Museum. As a young artist in New York in the early 1940s, Baziotes was exposed to émigré European avant-garde art of the early 20th century and became particularly interested in Surrealist painting methods and, in particular, Surrealism's efforts at tapping the unconscious in the formation of images. During the 1940s, for instance, he spread color thinly across the canvas surface until an image -- automatically and accidentally -- suggested itself; he then developed and adjusted the painted surface slowly, while never moving into total abstraction. His subjects, as in Moon Animal, invoke the fantastic and dreamlike world of boundless, amoeboid creatures, while the surfaces of his canvases seem to emanate a softly glowing -- sometime eerie, always mysterious -- light, as if those subjects were suspended in some kind of gelatinous substance. Moon Animal received a purchase award in 1951 during the Festival of Contemporary Art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It is an outstanding example of the artist's late, mature period. The undulant contours of the strange biomorphic form rearing its head skyward is carefully integrated into an ominous and haunting landscape.
Looking at a Curve Ball in Cuernavaca, 1983
Karl Wirsum (b. 1939)
American, 20th century
Painting: acrylic on canvas 44 1/2" x 48 3/4"
Purchase, John Needles Chester Fund and Illinois Arts Council 1984-12-1
The art of Chicago artist Karl Wirsum (b. 1939) is centered on the figurative image, in order to retain structural likeness to the human body. His basic motifs are framed by his interests in the world of visual phenomena. It is the world of outsider art--the self-taught artist, the insane, the folk artist. It is a world filled with popular commercial images and products, especially toys, games, puppets, and dolls. These materials exerted a great influence on the Chicago Imagist artists, the group in which Wirsum evolved artistically and intellectually.
In this painting the baseball player, dressed in black, blends in with the black background, producing an overall impression of pictorial flatness. The Mexican setting, referred to in the title Looking at a Curve Ball in Cuernavaca, is reflected in the decoration of the baseball bat, which resembles a pre-Columbian flint, and in the markings on the athlete's costume, which are reminiscent of iconography of a pre-Spanish ballgame.